On Literature and Ethics Michael Eskin Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia
Abstract This essay deals with the complex relationship between literature and ethics. More specifically, it inquires into and problematizes the conceptual ways in which such discursive distinctions as that between literature and moral philosophy have been upheld, as well as the assumptions and presuppositions underlying the ascription to literature of an ethically exemplary role. Accepting the methodological and conceptual challenges presented by some of the major philosophical and theoretical positions informing literature’s perception as ethically exemplary (from Aristotle to Jakobson and Derrida), this essay suggests a new theoretical framework for thinking about the enmeshment of literature and ethics, drawing especially on the works of Bakhtin and MacIntyre.
‘‘they cite poets as witnesses’’ Plato, Republic
I want to begin the following meditation on the ethical significance of literature and its relation to moral philosophy from the empirical recognition that what we have come to call literature has been credited, in the Western cultural context at least, with an ethical force ostensibly exceeding that of moral philosophy.1 Literature has been held to be capable of doing—in J. L. I would like to thank Kathrin Stengel, Harro Müller, Derek Attridge, and H. Martin Puchner for discussing this essay with me and reading and commenting on drafts. Work on this essay has been supported by a Chamberlain Fellowship and a Faculty Leave, both from Columbia University. . I use literature throughout in its most general, inclusive sense to refer to the ‘‘body of texts Poetics Today : (Winter ). Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.
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Austin’s ( []) terms—certain things ethical that moral philosophy would fall short of.2 This is not to deny the latter’s heuristic significance in ethical matters (nor its recourse to devices that have been said to be characteristic of literature, such as fiction, figural language, etc.); it is simply to foreground the fact that our moral education has not, fundamentally, been entrusted to ethics. Nursery rhymes, stories, plays, verbal and filmic narratives perused from early childhood have been supposed to ensure, more or less successfully, the formation of the variously conceived good person.3 My objective in this essay is threefold: () to raise the question of literature and the ethical with a view to () uncovering the theoretical impasses vitiating traditional accounts of their enmeshment and, subsequently, to () suggesting what I take to be a plausible explicatory frame for what we seem to have been taking for granted prior to and beyond any philosophical problematization, namely, that literature is capable of doing things ethical in an exemplary way. from Homer to the present that have come to be called ‘literature’’’ (Attridge : ). For critical discussions of the rise of the specifically modern notion of ‘‘literature’’ as an aesthetic category and institution, see Todorov ; Derrida : –; Eagleton : –. . Throughout this essay, I use—for the purpose of stylistic variation—ethics and moral philosophy as well as their adjectival cognates interchangeably. It should be contextually evident whether ‘‘ethical’’/‘‘moral’’ refers to philosophical argument or to pragmatic import. On a conceptual clarificatory note, I should stress that although ethics has been viewed as distinct from moral philosophy in the wake of Kant’s ( [/]: ) subsumption of ‘‘Moralphilosophie’’ under the more general head of ‘‘Ethik’’ (ibid.: ), the terms’ interchangeable use persists as before Kant’s distinction (cf., e.g., Banner ). My use of both terms follows, in particular, Cicero, who introduced (in De Fato) the neologism moralis and coined the technical term philosophia moralis to translate the Greek ton ēthikon: ‘‘because it pertains to [what] the Greeks call ēthos, we usually call this part of philosophy ‘on mores’ (character/custom/habit/usage); but it is suitable to call it, by way of expanding the Latin language, ‘moral (philosophy)’’’ (Cicero : ; my translation). Seneca (: ) and Quintilianus (–, esp. book :, book :–, book :, ) popularize Cicero’s linguistic innovation. Although Quintilianus already uses the term Ethice (ibid.: :, ), it is the fourthcentury Christian apologist Lactantius ( []: ) who first employs the term ethica as equivalent to philosophia moralis in his Divinae intitutiones (written between and ). By the fifth century, ethics or ethical philosophy and moral philosophy are used interchangeably and with no need for explanation or justification, as the following quote from Macrobius (: ) indicates: ‘‘Since there are three parts to philosophy in its entirety, moral, natural and rational, what else does that exaltation of virtues contain but the moral precepts of ethical philosophy?’’ (my translation). The German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff (–) cements the interchangeability of ‘‘ethics’’ and ‘‘moral philosophy’’ for the modern period in his monumental Philosophia moralis sive ethica (–, vols.). . On philosophy’s reliance on literature and literary devices, see, for instance, Wittgenstein : –; Derrida ; de Man ; Harries ; MacIntyre []: –, –, ; Nietzsche : –, –; Murdoch : –; Miller : –. Among the plethora of texts on the morally formative, educational function of literature, see, for instance, Augustine : –; Bruni ; Schiller a [], b []; MacIntyre []: .
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Rather than focusing, as has frequently been done, on the putative differences between literature and ethics, I want to look at them as parts of a continuum along which differences in mode and degree determine differences in ethical impetus. More specifically, I suggest that insofar as we take literature to be ethically significant in an exemplary way, we may want to start thinking about locating its ethical force not so much in its referential makeup and thematics—for reasons that I shall clarify—as in, among other things, what I would call, for lack of a better term, its discursivetransformational ‘‘capaciousness,’’ that is, in its ability to absorb and transform virtually any kind of discourse, including the discourse of ethics. After a brief historical sketch of the enmeshment of literature and ethics, I discuss some of the theoretical assumptions informing dominant accounts of literature’s ethical import. I then present a number of powerful criticisms of these assumptions, which necessitate a reassessment of the very notion of literature in its relation to ethics. In a final step, I want to suggest a framework for casting the question of literature and its relation to ethics in a productive new light while obviating, as I will endeavor to show, some of the difficulties posed by available takes on the subject—the impasses of what could summarily be called ‘‘textual essentialism’’ and ‘‘pragmatic contractualism’’ in particular. Literature and Ethics: A Historical Sketch
Since its appearance as a philosophical discipline on the scene of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition in ancient Greece, ethics has been, not surprisingly, enmeshed with literature. The subject which, according to Hegel (: ), Socrates ‘‘invented [and] added to . . . philosophy’’ continued to be informed by its (by no means exclusive) roots in its predecessor and ‘‘begetter’’ in matters of the discursive engagement with human life, interaction, and conduct, namely, poetry.4 Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylos, to name only a few, constituted a prephilosophical moral tradition which presumably provided Socrates, Plato, and their successors with the basic themes (and their paradigmatic artistic treatment) of what we have come to call ethics: how we ought to live and act so as to live a (variously conceived) good life.5 Whether as positive or negative instances of . Hegel follows Diogenes Laertius (: ), who credited Socrates with the introduction of ethics as a distinct philosophical field of inquiry: ‘‘Philosophy . . . in earlier times discoursed on one subject only, namely physics, then Socrates added the second subject, ethics [ton ēthikon], and Plato the third, dialectics.’’ See also Cooper . . See Murdoch []: –, esp. ; MacIntyre []: , , –; Nussbaum : –, : ; Kahn .
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virtue, character, interaction, and response or as dangerous seductions, the yarns spun by the poets, their protagonists’ situations, quandaries, decisions, words, and deeds served and continue to serve philosophers—witness the profuse recourse to literature on the part of contemporary moral philosophers of various colors—as touchstones for their theoretical reflections.6 If it is true that ‘‘before philosophy there was poetry’’ (Kahn : ), and if it is furthermore true that prior to the rise of ethics ‘‘the poets . . . were understood . . . to be the central ethical teachers and thinkers’’ (Nussbaum : ), then the very practice of literature must evince an ethical dimension. While the overall moral import of literature has certainly been implicitly and explicitly acknowledged and put to use through the ages as a matter of course—as is borne out by pedagogical and educational practices involving literature—the specific site and force of the ethical in the literary have been the subject of considerable debate among poets, critics, and philosophers, beginning with Plato’s and Aristotle’s pioneering meditations on these issues. Depending on the given author’s particular theoretical framework and approach, the ethical valence of literature (and art in general) has been located, for instance, in what could be roughly subsumed under the heads of its relation to truth, thematics, structure and uses of language, power to effect a change in perception, inherent appeal to responsibility, or capacity of discursive subversion.7 Literature has been ascribed the idiosyncratic, if . See Plato : –, esp. –; Aristotle : a–, b–a, b– a, a–b, : a, b, a–a; Augustine : –; Nussbaum : , : xiii; MacIntyre []: –, –; Rorty []: xiv, – ; McGinn : –; Levinas : , []: ; Jonas : , , , , . . I have in mind such approaches as could loosely be labeled ontological (e.g., Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer), psychological or affect- and cognition-based (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Bruni, Schiller, Nussbaum, McGinn), aestheticist (e.g., Kant, Wilde, Nabokov, de Man), emotive-pragmatic (e.g., Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Spitzer), poetic-linguistic (e.g., Shklovsky, Jakobson, Brodsky), phenomenological (e.g., Ingarden, Iser, Fish), or deconstructive (e.g., Derrida, de Man, Miller, Attridge, Levinas). I should stress that this is, of course, a very simplified, purely heuristic perspective on an exceedingly complex historical reality—the reception and assessment of art—in which all of the suggested approaches (and probably many more) mingle, overlap, interact, and constantly inform each other with shifting emphases. The select authors mentioned merely stake out the ‘‘sub-traditions’’ constituted by these approaches. See Plato : –, –; Hegel : –; Heidegger []: – , []; Gadamer ; Aristotle : a–, ; Bruni ; Schiller a [], b []; Nussbaum , ; McGinn : –; Kant []: , – ; Wilde []: ; Nabokov : –; Schleiermacher []; Dilthey []; Spitzer : –, –; Shklovsky []; Jakobson []; Brodsky : , , –, : –; Ingarden []; Iser a [], b []; Fish ; Derrida : –; Miller , ; Attridge , ; Levinas []: , , []: –. For helpful discussions of the history and notion of literature from an ethical perspective, see esp. Eaglestone : –; Nussbaum : –.
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variegated, ability to make us see, feel, and realize ‘‘certain truths about human life [that] can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the . . . artist [as opposed to] abstract theoretical discourse’’ (Nussbaum : ), to solicit the ‘‘supremely difficult ethical act of responding to . . . singularity and otherness’’ (Attridge : ).8 Aristotle, again
Notwithstanding their specificities and putative differences, the various accounts of the ethical valence of literature outlined above share certain assumptions about literature as a particular mode of discourse which are by no means unproblematic. Insofar as these assumptions can be shown to be, if not unfounded, at the very least (onto)logically contestable, the theoretical positions subtended by them, too, reveal themselves as equally contestable. Probably the most basic among these assumptions is the very acknowledgment of modes of discourse, that is, of the possibility somehow clearly to distinguish between literature and such other modes as philosophy (of which ethics is, of course, a branch). And it is precisely this basic distinction, which has relied on a particular view of language and its uses and on a particular anthropology or psychology hinging on the notion of mimesis—both paradigmatically articulated by Aristotle—that needs to be critically interrogated. In On Interpretation, Aristotle (: a–) makes an (onto)logical distinction between two modes of speech: ‘‘While every sentence [logos] has meaning [sēmantikos] . . . not all can be called propositions. We call propositions [apophantikos] those only that have truth or falsity in them. A prayer is, for instance, a sentence but neither has truth nor falsity. . . . Let us pass over all such, as their study more properly belongs to the province of rhetoric or poetry. We have in our present inquiry propositions [apophantikos] alone for our theme.’’ Aristotle then (ibid.: a–) specifies that a proposition can be either an ‘‘affirmation [kataphasis]’’ or a ‘‘negation [apophasis],’’ whereby ‘‘the presence of some other thing in a subject in time past or present or future’’ (ibid.: a–) is being affirmed or denied.9 Apophansis requires, Aristotle (ibid.: a–) emphasizes, the presence in a proposition of an ‘‘‘is,’ ‘was,’ or ‘will be’ . . . indicat[ing] a single fact [or] many.’’ The dis. See also Rorty []: xv–xvi, –; McGinn : –; Attridge : ; Miller : . In this essay, I do not deal with the specific differences between analytical (Anglo-American) and continental ethical theory and their respective engagements with literature, viewing both, rather, as complementary and mutually illuminating with regard to our attempts at understanding the ethical in its relation to the literary. . ‘‘We mean by affirmation a statement affirming one thing of another; we mean by negation a statement denying one thing of another’’ (Aristotle : a–).
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tinction between apophantic and nonapophantic discourse, which Aristotle clearly establishes on the basis of an utterance’s referential relation to reality and the world, is further elaborated in the Poetics (to which, among other things, the reader interested in nonapophantic discourse is referred in On Interpretation).10 Aristotle (: a) has in mind ‘‘poetry in general’’ and the specific genres of ‘‘epic and tragic poetry, as well as comedy [and] dithyramb . . . all, taken as a whole, kinds of mimesis’’ (ibid.: a–)— in short, what we have come to call ‘‘literature’’ 11—when he writes, in the famous ninth chapter of Poetics: ‘‘it is not the poet’s function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability and necessity’’ (ibid.: a–).12 Aristotle’s (onto)logical distinction between apophantic and nonapophantic speech, that is, assertive discourse aiming at propositional truth (e.g., philosophy, history) and nonassertive, nonpropositional discourse (e.g., literature) facilitated the common view—held by many a philosopher and poet alike—of philosophy and literature as ‘‘serious’’ or nonfictional and ‘‘nonserious’’ or fictional modes of discourse, respectively.13 While the former makes referential statements, the latter dispenses with direct propositionality and referentiality. Whatever the poets may say or state ‘‘in their works . . . they neither believe nor assert it as a fact, but only as a myth or fiction’’ (Boccaccio []: ). Aristotle’s conception of poetry as nonapophantic speech, popularized by Sir Philip Sidney ( []: )— ‘‘the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’’—does not seem to have lost its epistemological or poetological appeal; such recent notions as literature’s ‘‘pretended reference’’ (Searle : ) or ‘‘pseudoreference’’ (Genette : ) speak to the Stagirite’s continuous sway. . For discussions of Aristotle’s distinction between apophantic and nonapophantic speech in terms of referentiality and factuality, see Halliwell : –; Woodruff : –. . The passage also lists ‘‘most music for aulos and lyre’’ among ‘‘kinds of mimesis,’’ but in this essay I do not specifically address ‘‘music.’’ . Although poetry does not affirm anything about facts, states of affairs, or ‘‘actual events’’ the way history or philosophy in their own complex ways do, it can and indeed often does, as Aristotle (: b–) observes, ‘‘concern actual events.’’ . I should stress that Aristotle does not and could not possibly equate poetry with what we call ‘‘fiction’’—an essentialist notion alien to Aristotle’s poetics (and metaphysics). Aristotle merely notes that poetry does not make apophatic or kataphatic claims about the world and that it is mimesis. It is worth remembering that: () certain modes that Aristotle would categorize as nonapophantic have been interpreted as implying ‘‘fictionality’’ (see, for instance, Augustine : ; Frege : ; Russell : , ; Austin []: , , , , ); () rightly or wrongly, mimesis has frequently been taken to mean, and been translated as, ‘‘fiction’’ (see esp. Genette’s [: –] discussion of mimesis and its history; Hamburger []: –; Halliwell : –, ). For an insightful critique of translating mimesis as ‘‘fiction,’’ see Woodruff : esp. , , . On poetry’s relation to fact and ‘‘fiction’’ in Aristotle, see de Ste. Croix .
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Aristotle (: b–) drew an important conclusion from his insights into the manifold uses of language: because literature does not work apophantically, because it is neither bound by states of affairs or fact nor by the limits of logical truth, it can be, paradoxically, in its very concreteness—‘‘even though attaching names to agents’’—more universal than apophantic speech.14 Literature, Julia Kristeva (: ) writes in a passage representative of the continuous presence of Aristotle’s thought, ‘‘takes the most concrete signifieds, concretizes them to the utmost degree, and, simultaneously raises them to a level of universality which surpasses that of conceptual discourse. . . . The poetic signified . . . is simultaneously concrete and universal.’’ 15 In order to understand the ethical significance of what for the longest time has been taken to be literature’s particular ways of creating meaning, it is necessary to attend to one contextually pertinent aspect of Aristotle’s (: b–) anthropology or psychology, namely, the twofold stipulation that human beings are essentially mimetic beings and that mimesis is a source of pleasure and cognition: ‘‘It is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest understanding); and equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects.’’ 16 ‘‘Everyone,’’ Aristotle (: a) . See Aristotle : a–b. I am well aware that in general Aristotle reserves the domain of the ‘‘particular’’ to history (b)—which, for this very reason, is, to him, less universal than poetry. By ‘‘universal,’’ (ibid.) Aristotle means ‘‘the kinds of things which it suits a certain kind of person to say or do in terms of probability and necessity’’ (b–). On Aristotle’s notion of history, which I do not discuss here, see Louis ; de Ste. Croix ; on his notion of the universal in poetry, see Halliwell ; Rorty : ; Woodruff : . . Literature is more universal than ‘‘conceptual discourse,’’ Kristeva suggests, in the sense that its meanings and referents will have never ‘‘existed’’ or been ‘‘true’’ and more concrete in the sense that, precisely due to its fictional or imaginary status, its referents can be specified (situationally, epithetically, etc.) to a degree that the spatiotemporal confines of ‘‘reality’’ would presumably not allow for. Obviously, Kristeva’s notion of universality is only nominally related to Aristotle’s concept of the universal as hinging on probability, necessity, and the ‘‘unified design of the art-work’’ (Halliwell : ). On the notion of the ‘‘concrete universal’’ in literature, see, for instance, Wimsatt : ; Murdoch []: , ; Nussbaum : –, –, ; Attridge : . The ‘‘concrete universal’’ obviates the logical enmeshment of the general, the individual, and the particular, as analyzed by Hegel (: –, –, –, –, –, –). . I do not deal here with the vexed question of the meaning of mimesis, which is ‘‘as obscure in Aristotle as it is in other ancient authors’’ (Woodruff : ). It has been translated, for instance, as ‘‘fiction’’ (see note ), ‘‘imitation,’’ and ‘‘representation.’’ In the present context, it does not really matter what we take it to mean, as I am only interested in mimesis to the extent that it is predicated on Aristotle’s binary notion of speech (apophantic/nonapophantic) and to the extent that it has, on the basis of this notion, certain effects on the reader, listener, etc.
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explains, ‘‘when listening [or watching] imitations is thrown into a corresponding state.’’ Thus, tragedy’s ‘‘fearful and pitiable’’ (Aristotle : b) events find their responsive correlate in the audience’s ‘‘horror and pity’’ (ibid.: b) by dint of the complex interface between what Aristotle calls ‘‘fellow-feeling’’ and the perception of resemblance with or difference from ‘‘one like [or unlike] ourselves’’ (ibid.: b–a). In turn, the catharsis of fear and pity—achieved through the audience’s participation 17 in ‘‘imitations’’—is, as Aristotle (: a–b, : b–) emphasizes, ethically crucial: it facilitates the citizens’ virtuousness, allowing them to reenter the polis, as it were, free of those emotions and views that may turn out to be ethically-politically perilous.18 It is important to keep in mind at this point that art’s ethical-political effectiveness is based, according to Aristotle (: b), precisely on the fact that it takes its audience out of the domain of ‘‘actual events,’’ that its ‘‘events and names alike have been invented’’ (ibid.: b–) in the broad sense of not immediately relating to ‘‘facts,’’ that it is—to translate aesthetics into logic—nonapophantic. It is because we perceive what art gives us not as referentially tied to our immediate reality that we know it to be, and read it as, a nonapophantic kind of language;19 that ‘‘we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight [may be] painful to us’’ (ibid.: b– ; my emphasis) rather than avoiding or fleeing them; that literature can function, according to Aristotle, as the ethical medium par excellence, as ‘‘equipment for living’’ (Burke []). As the following representative statements suggest, much of contemporary moral philosophy and literary criticism continues to rely on a mediated version (through the likes of Boccaccio and Sidney) of Aristotle’s semiotics and poetics, taking it for granted that it is the fictional, nonapophantic, ‘‘nonserious’’ character of literature and its concurrent capacity to shortcircuit the universal and the particular that ultimately opens a space for the ethical closed to apophantic modes. ‘‘Literature,’’ Daniel Schwarz (: ) writes, ‘‘provides surrogate experiences for the reader, experiences that, . See Rorty : ; Nussbaum : . Interestingly, the audience’s response/participation could itself be perceived as a kind of ‘‘mimesis’’ in the second degree (if the ‘‘imitation’’ aspect of ‘‘mimesis’’ is valorized) of the events on stage. If, as Nussbaum (ibid.) suggests, ‘‘fellow-feeling’’ is predicated on our ‘‘identification’’ with the character(s) on stage, then the ‘‘recognition of who and what we are’’ (Rorty : ) that tragedy ‘‘at its best . . . brings’’ can be viewed as homologous to, a kind of ‘‘imitation’’ of, the anagnorisis experienced by the character(s) on stage. . On the inseverability of poetics, ethics, and politics in Aristotle, see Aristotle a– b, : b–a; Rorty : –; Davis : xiii–xviii. . Irrespective of whether or not we call and think of it as ‘‘fictional’’ in the common sense. On the reader’s/recipient’s perception of ‘‘literature’’ as nonapophantic, see esp. Halliwell : ; Genette : –; Fuhrmann .
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because they are embodied within artistically shaped ontologies, heighten our awareness of moral discriminations’’ (my emphasis); Martha Nussbaum (: ) suggests that literature ‘‘cultivate[s] our ability to see and care for particulars’’ while simultaneously catering to our ‘‘interest in the universal and in the universalizability of ethical judgments’’ (ibid.: ); and Colin McGinn (: ) observes that the ‘‘fictional work can make us see and feel good and evil in a way no philosophical treatise can—unless it takes on board what literary works achieve so well’’ (first emphasis mine).20 Pace Aristotle
But what if the apophansis/nonapophansis distinction cannot be sustained? It is precisely on the basis of a critique of the Aristotelian view of language that a critique of Aristotelian poetics and its subsequent versions can be and, in fact, has been mounted. Methodologically, the most powerful critique to be brought to bear on the strict Aristotelian separation of apophantic from nonapophantic speech and its corollaries for our understanding of the putative specificities of literature and its ethical significance is provided by structuralist linguistics and poetics. In particular, Roman Jakobson’s ( []: ) stipulation of the interface of six linguistic functions—emotive, referential, poetic, phatic, metalingual, and conative—operative in any utterance, discloses the (onto)logical impossibility of clearly distinguishing between apophantic and nonapophantic speech: Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find verbal messages that would fulfill only one function.The diversity [of genres of speech] lies not in a monopoly of some one of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function. But even though a set (Ein. Schwarz (an English professor), McGinn (an analytic philosopher), and Nussbaum (striding various disciplines) cover the spectrum of the current literature/ethics debate. For similar views, see also Rorty []: xvi, –; Booth . Even such deconstructivists as de Man ( []: –, , ) and Miller (: , , , –, ) base their approaches to literature on the stipulation of its fictional status (see below). While not all ‘‘fictions’’ may be literature, all literature is (treated as) ‘‘fictional.’’ Interestingly, the so-called ‘‘turn to ethics’’ (Garber et al. ) in parts of the humanities—literary studies in particular—has its counterpart in (moral) philosophy’s ‘‘turn to literature’’ (Antonaccio : ). For some works signaling the ‘‘turn to ethics’’ in literary studies, see New Literary History ; Miller ; Booth ; Siebers ; Eaglestone ; Buell ; Robbins ; Madison and Fairbairn ; Garber et al. ; Eskin ; Davis and Womack . For some works signaling the ‘‘turn to literature’’ in (moral) philosophy, see MacIntyre []; Elridge ; Rorty []; Nussbaum , ; Derrida ; Goldberg ; McGinn ; Kearney and Dooley .
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stellung) toward the referent . . .—briefly the so-called referential, ‘‘denotative,’’ ‘‘cognitive’’ function—is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account. (Ibid.: )
Given that all utterances are constituted by the interplay of all six linguistic functions, generic differences, Jakobson suggests, are not a matter of ontology or essence but of the degree of predominance. In other words, what distinguishes apophantic from nonapophantic speech is the place of the referential and poetic functions, respectively, in the hierarchy of functions. Thus, literature, according to Jakobson (ibid.: ), distinguishes itself from apophansis not on the basis of the presumed obliteration of referentiality but on the basis of the predominance in it of the poetic function, that is, by dint of its emphatic solicitation of a ‘‘set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake.’’ Concomitantly, every apophantic utterance is also informed by the literary or poetic: ‘‘Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent’’ (ibid.). Jakobson’s insights into the complex functioning of utterances continue to inform contemporary—especially deconstructive—attempts to get away from essentialist or (onto)logical approaches to questions of genre. Thus, Derrida’s (: ) observations that in literature ‘‘the ‘thetic’ naivety of the transcendent reading’’ (i.e., reading for reference) is suspended, that ‘‘without annulling either meaning or reference, [literature] does something with this resistance [to a transcendent reading] and negotiates the suspension of referential naivety, of thetic referentiality (not reference or the intentional relation in general)’’ (ibid.: ) rearticulate Jakobson’s insights within a poststructuralist frame. While disclosing the impossibility of essentially distinguishing between literature and nonliterature, Jakobson’s approach implicitly valorizes the intentional aspect of Aristotle’s psychological argument: How an utterance is received is, at bottom, a function of our ‘‘set’’ or ‘‘Einstellung’’ [lit., attitude, focus]—a term borrowed from Husserl— toward it.21 Derrida’s attention to ‘‘‘thetic’ naivety’’ and ‘‘the suspension . . . of thetic referentiality (not reference or the intentional relation in general)’’ equally points to the reader’s participation in the creation of those . Genette (: vii) rightly observes: ‘‘. . . the [poetic] function is intentional in nature . . .’’ On ‘‘Einstellung,’’ see Husserl : .
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discursive-referential boundaries that warrant the reception of a text as literature. In a way, then, the reception of literature as literature is ultimately a function of the reader’s consciousness (‘‘intentional relation’’), that is, the reader must assume such an attitude toward the text at hand so as to treat it—this being the positive version of the ‘‘suspension of referential naivety’’—as nonapophantic. The result of these structuralist and deconstructive critiques—the strongest and most serious to be brought to bear on Aristotelian semiotics—is that, in uncovering the (onto)logical and semiotic deficiencies of a strict separation between modes of speech, they nonetheless guarantee the continuous functioning of such separation by displacing it onto the level of psychology and pragmatics. It is, emphatically, an agreement or ‘‘contract’’ between reader and author/text—to the effect that the reader suspend ‘‘referential naivety’’—that now warrants the more or less smooth functioning of distinctions of discursive genres.22 Ironically, this brings us right back to Aristotle, who was very much aware of the necessity on the reader’s/audience’s part not to view the events depicted in literature as ‘‘actual events,’’ that is, precisely, to suspend ‘‘referential naivety.’’ What we wind up with is yet another kind of Aristotelianism, albeit an Aristotelianism without essence—as far as the (onto)logical makeup of the text itself is concerned. It would appear, then, that contemporary deconstructive critiques of the philosophy/literature opposition surreptitiously perpetuate this opposition in the guise of its displacement. Attempts to capture the ethical in the literary in terms of its ‘‘potential for unsettling philosophical categories [e.g., fiction/nonfiction, literature/nonliterature]—and with them, of course, a whole series of political and ethical [as well as poetological] positions’’ (Attridge : ), or in terms of the constitutive ‘‘possibility of [its] misreading and misinterpretation’’ (de Man []: ) due to its selfpresentation as fictional/figural 23 tacitly engage, while certainly complicating and renegotiating, precisely those Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian distinctions that have been uncovered as problematic, not to say untenable, namely, apophantic/nonapophantic, fiction/nonfiction.24 In other words, . See also Hamburger []: ; Hof : –. . ‘‘In the same manner that poetic lyric . . . proceeds to invent fictional emotions . . . the work of fiction invents fictional subjects to create the illusion of . . . reality . . . Fiction . . . knows and names itself as fiction’’ (de Man []: ). ‘‘This persistent naming,’’ de Man (ibid.) emphasizes, ‘‘is what we call literature.’’ . For further instances, see Derrida : , : –, : ; Miller , : , , , –, ; Booth : .
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insofar as an idiosyncratic ethical appeal is attributed to literature in excess of the inherently axiological—hence, ethical—nature of language as such,25 insofar as it is said somehow to solicit our special ‘‘respect [and] responsibility’’ (Attridge : ), this pretended, intentionally generated distinction is always already in place: a pragmatic agreement or contract—however tenuous or tacit—on the status of the text at hand subtends its particular force of moral appeal. J. Hillis Miller’s (: ) influential postulate of a ‘‘fundamental ‘I must’ ’’ issuing forth from a literary text already presupposes that we have agreed to view the text as literary. This is not to suggest that literature and its ethical dimension would be the figments of the ‘‘merely subjective or projective . . . caprice of each reader’’ (Derrida : ). But it is to suggest that, on deconstructive readings, literature and its ethical valence emerge, primarily, as the functions of our perception of certain texts as literary. And this, in turn, means that while denying literariness as a ‘‘natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text’’ (ibid.) and reinscribing it as an intentional category, the very question of what it is in a text that would ‘‘call for the literary reading’’ remains within Aristotelian parameters: we read a text as literature to the extent that we (are told to, agree on, have been taught to) interpret it as nonapophantic—on the basis of, as Derrida notes, ‘‘convention, institution, or history’’ (ibid.).26 A Modest Proposal
Leaving behind the maze of theoretical difficulties outlined above, I want to suggest a different approach to the plausibility of our continued acknowledgment that literature does something ethically in excess of moral philosophy. I should stress that I am not concerned with explicating how literature does what it does. I am merely interested in offering a theoretical backdrop—in no need of psychology or ontology—for our ascription to literature of an ethically exemplary performative function. Insofar as both literature and moral philosophy are concerned with the ethical, an inquiry into the specifically ethical significance of the former in relation to the latter ought to begin with the recognition of similarities . Insofar as language is, as Saussure (: –) points out, essentially enmeshed and imbued with value. See also Adorno : ; Enzensberger : . . Derrida (: ) locates the constitution of literature in the interface between ‘‘noetic act’’ and ‘‘noematic structure’’—between that creative, sense-bestowing mental dynamic that ‘‘forms . . . stuff into intentional mental experiences’’ (Husserl : ; my translation) and its ‘‘intentional correlates’’ (ibid.: ), that is, the actual ‘‘how of [a phenomenon’s] intentional appearance [in consciousness]’’ (Husserl : ; my translation). Accordingly, Derrida’s approach thus suggests, echoing Stanley Fish and others, literature’s functional dependence on the constituting subject or community of subjects.
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rather than differences—of points of intersection between the two.What do literature and moral philosophy have in common? Whatever else they may share, there are two traits in particular that are central to the present discussion: () both are fundamentally concerned with the variegated domain of what could be called, formulaically, ‘‘the human person in all of its relations, facets, and intricacies’’;27 () both are, as I shall presently explain, secondary speech genres. The first common trait speaks to the close practicalhistorical link between the two and is in no need of commentary.The second underwrites the thematic rapprochement between the two on discursive grounds. And it is only on the basis of both points in conjunction that the particular juxtaposition of literature and moral philosophy—as opposed to a number of other possible conceptual or discursive couplings (e.g., literature and science)—is warranted. What does this mean exactly? Let me begin with the notion of ‘‘speech genre,’’ which I use here following Mikhail Bakhtin and Alasdair MacIntyre. One of the central postulates of Bakhtin’s (: ) metalinguistics is that all utterances clothe themselves in ‘‘typical forms’’ or ‘‘speech genres,’’ which can in turn be divided into ‘‘primary (simple) and secondary (complex)’’ (ibid.).28 Primary speech genres, such as ‘‘responses in ordinary conversation or letters,’’ emerge in the ‘‘context of immediate verbal interaction’’ (ibid.) and are ‘‘closely dependent on all the factors of the [immediate] extraverbal context’’ (Voloshinov []: ) for their functioning; while secondary speech genres, such as ‘‘novels, plays, scientific treatises of all kinds, etc.’’ (Bakhtin : ) are relatively independent of their immediate contexts (Voloshinov []: ).29 Secondary speech genres are predicated on the ‘‘absorption and transformation’’ of both primary and secondary genres (Bakhtin : , ). This means that secondary speech genres are by definition metageneric, that is, they are utterances enclosing or encompassing utterances and, as such, utterances ‘‘about’’ utterances. A contextually relevant discursive connection can be established between literature and (moral) philosophy in light of MacIntyre’s ( []: ) observation that we ‘‘allocate [utterances] to genres’’ and that the ‘‘particu. See note above. I mean here simply that both ethics and literature in one way or another cannot avoid dealing with human agents as speaking, choosing, loving, hating (etc.) beings— whether directly or indirectly, that is, through the prism of one of the manifestations of the human (e.g., ‘‘language’’). . It will be remembered that metalinguistics is Bakhtin’s (: ) term for his approach to language through the prism of utterance. On the relation of Bakhtin’s metalinguistics to pragmatics, which I do not discuss here, see Eskin : , , . See also Morris ; Carnap . All translations from Bakhtin are mine. . See also Clark and Holquist : . I do not deal with issues of authorship in the Bakhtin circle.
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lar link between the context of utterance and the force of reason-giving which always holds in the case of expressions of personal preference or desire is severed in the case of moral and other evaluative utterances’’ (ibid.: ). Utterances of the ‘‘first kind,’’ MacIntyre (ibid.: ) stresses, ‘‘depend upon who utters them to whom . . . while utterances of the second kind are not similarly dependent . . . on the context of utterance.’’ MacIntyre’s specification of the language of moral philosophy in the same metalinguistic terms that Bakhtin uses to describe literature points to a similarity between the two discursive modes which relegates putative ontologicalreferential differentiations to a place of metalinguistic insignificance. MacIntyre (ibid.: –, –, ) suggests as much when he unmasks some of the central concepts of moral philosophy—such as ‘‘happiness,’’ ‘‘utility,’’ ‘‘natural and human rights,’’ and ‘‘goodness’’—as ‘‘moral fictions.’’ In other words, from a metalinguistic perspective, the apophantic/nonapophantic distinction is supervenient upon, posterior to the foregoing distinction between primary and secondary speech genres. Given that the problem of (immediate) reference is fundamentally a problem of an utterance’s relation to its extralinguistic context, to the ‘‘world’’—and this holds both for adequational and verificationist theories of reference and truth—any secondary utterance is structurally ‘‘fictional’’ insofar as it purports to be contextually independent; no strict ontological, referential distinction can be upheld between the ‘‘truth’’/‘‘untruth’’ of fiction and the ‘‘truth’’/‘‘untruth’’ of propositions falling into the realm of secondary speech genres, especially moral propositions. A metalinguistic approach, then, allows us to obviate the difficulties involved in attempting to distinguish modes of discourse (and their attendant ethical valence) on the basis of referential-ontological criteria. In fact, such binaries as fictional/nonfictional or apophantic/nonapophantic, far from being foundational, reveal themselves as the internal semantic effects, as it were, of particular kinds of utterance. In other words, apophansis would be the ‘‘fiction’’ of certain kinds of utterance (e.g., philosophical, scientific, historical), whereas fictionality would be the ‘‘fiction’’ of certain other kinds of utterance (e.g., literary), whereby ‘‘fiction’’ reveals itself as equivalent to ‘‘meaning’’ or ‘‘the semantic’’ in general.The impossibility of distinguishing between the two kinds ontologically comes clearly to the fore, for instance, in MacIntyre’s (ibid.: ) observation that the ‘‘first great enunciation of moral truth in Greek culture’’ occurred in the Iliad, that is, in literature! What a metalinguistic consideration of literature and moral philosophy yields, then, is the insight that insofar as both are ‘‘fictional’’—albeit in qualitatively different ways (and this is crucial)—they are indeed amenable
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to being mutually imbricated. And it is the specific subject of their ‘‘fictions’’—what I have referred to as the ‘‘human person in all of its relations, facets, and intricacies’’—which warrants in particular their marriage. So, if both are ‘‘fictions’’ and if both deal with the human person as a whole, what is the difference between them? And why would literature be capable of doing—to return to my empirical point of departure—certain things ethical in excess of moral philosophy? It is here that literature’s internal makeup, as it were, ought to come into play. By internal makeup I do not mean its uses of figures or its ‘‘fictionality’’ but its semiotic homology with language as such. Recourse to Émile Benveniste’s discussions of language will facilitate this final move in my ruminations. The semiotically most significant characteristic of language, according to Benveniste (: ), is that it is the ‘‘interpretant of all [other meaningcreating] systems, verbal and non-verbal.’’ Language is the sole medium in which other semiotic systems and media (e.g., music, painting, etc.) can be described, conceptually exposed and reflected, and made sense of. In other words, language is the most semiotically ‘‘capacious’’ medium. In analogy with Benveniste’s view of language’s ‘‘capaciousness,’’ we can say that, insofar as literature is said to be ethically exemplary, this is, fundamentally, due to its discursive ‘‘capaciousness’’: it can incorporate, encompass, embody, engage in live contexts, illuminate from innumerable perspectives, and thus transform—in short, interpret—the propositions, problems addressed, and ‘‘truths’’ attained in ethics. In a literary work, the philosophemes and speculations of a ‘‘Locke, Hume [and] Berekely’’ (Woolf []: ) acquire a linguistic and thematic concreteness and vividness, a depth and dimensionality which they could never possess without the words, ruminations, observations, thoughts, and deeds of a Mrs. Ramsay, a Mr. Ramsay, and a Charles Tansley, who, in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse ‘‘thought [Mr. Ramsay] the greatest metaphysician of the time’’ (ibid.: ). Whereas moral philosophy’s only ‘‘fiction’’ would be ‘‘moral truth,’’ the latter is merely one aspect or component—albeit a central one—of the manifold ‘‘truth’’ of the ‘‘fiction’’ of literature. In a way, then, literature could be viewed as ethics in the second degree, as ethics of ethics or criticism of ethics, as that discourse which literally interprets ethics. We have attained an unexpected insight: keeping in mind that the ‘‘interpretant’’ designates, according to Charles Sanders Peirce (from whom Benveniste borrows the term), what is ‘‘ordinarily called the meaning of the sign’’ (Peirce –, :), and that ‘‘meaning’’ for Peirce is merely yet another, ‘‘perhaps a more developed sign’’ (ibid.: :) translating the first, the relation between literature and ethics reveals itself, at the most
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basic level, as one of translation.30 Literature translates ethics into ‘‘perhaps a more developed [more ‘capacious,’ more universal and concrete] sign’’—into a medium and a context in which ‘‘philosophical conceptuality’’ (Attridge : ) is transformed, developed into something that can ‘‘make us see and feel . . . in a way no philosophical treatise can’’ (McGinn : ). And insofar as any discourse becomes meaningful by dint of translation (reading/interpretation), it is indeed justified to say that ‘‘literature . . . is a moment or structural possibility’’ (Attridge : ) of ethics in particular. In light of literature’s metalinguistic, thematic, and semiotic enmeshment with ethics, stipulated differences between the two discourses predicated on the fiction/nonfiction or apophansis/nonapophansis binaries reveal themselves as analytic disguises of their actual collusion and continuity. Because literature and ethics are so closely linked, because they constitute a discursive-semiotic continuum, they yield themselves to productive juxtaposition and interface. From Plato’s (e.g., Republic a–e) recourse to Homer to Levinas’s ( []: , , : ) invocation of Dostoevsky and Celan, literature has been philosophy’s haunting twin—its critic. In a semiotic sense, ethics needs literature—its metalinguistic and thematic sibling—to be fully integrated into the human and the social domain that it is ultimately concerned with. Isn’t it the ostensible ‘‘purposefulness without purpose’’ of art that integrates, as Kant ( []: /§) already suggested, philosophical conceptuality within the realm of the practical and the social? 31 Surely, this is only one side of the story, for it could equally be said that literature needs philosophy. After all, the invention of the latter must have been necessitated, in part at least, by certain intellectual and ethical needs that literature, notwithstanding (or precisely due to) its ‘‘capaciousness,’’ could presumably not fulfill: the need to rationally ‘‘rule and guide’’ (Nussbaum : ) the messiness of existence, to attempt to impose a certain kind of (epistemo)logical order and in a way master the unpredictability of life— the need, as Martha Nussbaum (ibid.) summarizes, to be saved ‘‘from living at the mercy of luck.’’ But this ought to be the subject of another essay.
. For Peirce’s numerous definitions and descriptions of the functioning of signs, see his Collected Papers (–), esp. vol. :, , , ; vol. :; vol. :; and vol. :. . Famously, Kant ( []: ) relied on his Critique of Judgment to integrate the conceptual architectonics of the Critique of Pure Reason with the practical postulates and implications of The Critique of Practical Reason.
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