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Double Vision
Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
By Tzachi Zamir Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
Chapter One
PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM IN THEORY
Acuckolded man yells at his unfaithful wife. She has just written a letter to her lover, which her husband has intercepted. The betrayed husband describes his own experience through a metaphor of authorship:
Thou trothless and unjust, what lines are these? Am I grown old, or is thy lust grown young, Or hath my love been so obscured in thee That others need to comment on my text? Is all my love forgot which held thee dear, Ay, dearer than the apple of mine eye? Is Guise's glory but a cloudy mist, In sight and judgment of thy lustful eye? (The Massacre at Paris, xv.23-30)
Imaging his wife as his text (which is only one of several possible readings of the line), turning her from possession into intellectual property, serves to color the meaning of gendered ownership. She becomes words-his words, his lines, his precious production. This constitutes not only an intriguing form of objectification but also of articulating erotic bonding. The beloved, likened to one's expressed language, is being fantasized as the lover's externalized and objectified thought, which is also disturbingly out of control. Beyond ownership or love, figuring cuckoldry in terms of a commented text imports texts into the world of erotic ownership. The alarming perception of one'stext being modified by another, noting its loose and prostitute-like nature, says something about the meaning of writing. Metatheatrical awareness deepens this dimension of the metaphor: this text, Marlowe's text, being sold to others to be changed and acted by them-Marlowe himself turning, as it were, into a cuckold forced to watch.
By saying that moments such as these exclamations of the Guise are pregnant with insights-insights about the meaning of erotic possessiveness, about relating to what one writes-we are registering an awareness of literature's capacity to awaken a realization, to inform, to create knowledge. Is this faith in literature's instructive power justified, or does this talk of insight perpetuate a misleading mirage? Does anything distinguish such knowledge, if it is one? Is it possible to strip away the literary dressing from what is credited as knowledge, or is the "medium" somehow necessary, and if so, why? Any examination of the relations between philosophy and literature requires facing these familiar questions. If the above literary excerpt informs, there must be something in the lines, in the configuration of the words, in the arrangement of the images, or the imagined or perceived vocalization of them, which is doing important and mysterious epistemic work.
Five features are needed for the epistemic (knowledge-yielding) linking of philosophy and literature. A complete account regarding literature's contributions to knowledge needs to: (I) elucidate how a literary work can support a general claim; (II) show what is uniquely gained by concentrating on such support-patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular; (III) clarify whether and how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge; (IV) maintain a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion; (V) achieve I-IV without ending up with what David Novitz has called "a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature." I shall postpone discussion of the connections between literature, epistemology, and morality until the next chapter.
Literary Language and Literary Experience
Many theories explain the ways by which literature yields knowledge. Some say that literature enables forming hypotheses, thereby creating beliefs-albeit not necessarily justified ones. Others argue that reading a literary work creates coherence in our beliefs by revealing possible discrepancies between our general convictions and detailed contexts. A third view is that a literary work can advance knowledge by functioning like an example or a prolonged thought-experiment in which conceptual insights are gained through engaging with the rich and complex contexts of lifelike occurrences. Others maintain that literature establishes knowledge not of the actual but of the possible. For the purpose of investigating the relevance of literature to philosophy such suggestions cannot suffice. At best, such accounts will show philosophers that rigorous philosophical reflection requires examples, thought-experiments, or a delineation of the possible, not that it needs literature. In order to convince philosophers that they need "literary" examples, or "literary" thought-experiments, it is necessary to delineate an epistemological gain stemming either from features peculiar to literary language or from the experience that literature creates.
The first option, appealing to aspects particular to literary language for the purpose of advancing knowledge, will fail. Oppositions that were employed in the past to articulate the distinctiveness of literary discourse (figurative/literal, particular/general, emotions/thoughts) are no longer generally accepted. One cannot then claim that emotional appeals, particular descriptions, or figurative constructions make for distinct, irreducible, and nonparaphrasable forms of knowing. A further obstacle is that, again, all these aspects are not essentially related to literature. An elaborate case for the importance of figurative language, for example, will merely succeed in proving to philosophers that they require figurative statements, not the rich, involving experience of the literary work. This rather underrated objection is also fatal to other suggestions as to how and why literature is philosophically relevant. Consider the suggestion that literature formulates in words what has hitherto been unexpressed or not fully described. Poetic articulation can thereby form or re-form a philosophical position. But descriptions of this sort require nothing as intense as involvement with literature. Citing or paraphrasing the appropriate sentences is enough. Appeals to literature's particularity lead to the same objection. Particular descriptions presuppose general assumptions. A uniquely particular mode of thought is thus an illusion. Besides that, particularity is not unique to literature.
Literary experience is our second option. Colin Falck writes that literature operates through tapping into "preconscious moods," thereby circumventing a more aware experience. Martha Nussbaum characterizes literary experience as one in which certain emotions are drawn out, emotions that constitute specific beliefs that cannot otherwise surface. Neoromantic accounts of reading experience stress the role of the imagination in belief formation. If the imagination plays a constitutive role in belief formation, we need to involve ourselves with the imaginative realm (literature). Empathic beliefs are another popular suggestion: literary reading experiences involve knowledge of what it will be like to "live through" the situation portrayed. Shared by all these suggestions is the objective to connect qualitative features of the literary reading experience (not the makeup of literary language) with cognition.
Qualitative uniqueness, however, cannot suffice. Claims do not turn into justified beliefs merely by being contemplated in an involved and emotionally attuned state. Powerful discovery never constitutes justification. The same holds for empathy. Knowing what it can be like to have a particular belief or what can make someone have that belief is not a justification for the belief itself. In fact, a recurring objection to claims on behalf of literature's moral import highlights the threat that empathy poses to a just moral assessment-the danger of developing a selective sense of justice. Empathic knowledge thus seems helpful only if literature's contribution to knowledge resides in the insights gained from it regarding processes of belief formation. But if justified beliefs are being sought, being empathic or nonempathic to the positions discussed is clearly insufficient.
Qualitatively oriented explanations, therefore, all relate to types of belief formation, to the unique ways in which literature creates beliefs, not to the assessment of those beliefs (whether or not these are the beliefs one ought to have). Formation and assessment of beliefs can be combined, and Nussbaum attempts to integrate them by asserting that some beliefs could not be assessed at all if one did not employ emotional, empathic, or imaginative processes that enable one to form them in the first place. Nussbaum's integration of formation and assessment is sound, but can be synthesized into a broader account, which I will now outline.
Literary Arguments
I propose a conception of rational justification that can accommodate the idea of literature as knowledge yielding. I begin with theories of argumentation that employ more than deductive or inductive inference patterns as rational means of establishing propositions. Aristotle's account of examples and enthymemes in his Rhetoric remains the fountainhead for such theories (although the idea is older). Aristotle argued that in some domains, what we take to be a credible source of knowledge is the reapplying of a principle that was successfully applied in another known case. Examples of this kind do not make for inductive inferences, but only for a "kind of induction" (I.ii.13). The notion of induction does not include learning from the local incidents that make up our lives and from which we reasonably establish many of our attitudes. Learning in such ways is a noninductive yet rational reapplication of a principle that emerged in a similar context. The principle in question is not a categorical "For all cases of type X, Y is the case" but is a Particular affirmative or negative judgment of the form: "For some cases of X, Y is the case".
At first, employing Aristotle's analysis in the context of the philosophy-literature question seems to simply lead back to the idea mentioned earlier: a view of the process of learning from fictional happenings as analogous to that of learning from examples. But Aristotle's rhetorical analysis allows for relocating the literature-as-example idea from being only a suggestion linking aesthetics with cognition to an argumentational move justified through rhetorical theory. This is not a terminological shift. Such relocation explains not only the plausibility of the move from one case to the other but also delineates the contingent logical status of some of the philosophical beliefs with which literature deals. For Aristotle, the need for rhetoric arises when discussing assumptions and beliefs that can be other than they are-claims that can be derived from premises that are usually not necessary but are "for the most part only generally true" (I.ii.14). Aristotle was of the opinion that most of our judgments are of such a contingent nature.
Placing literary examples, thought-experiments, arguments by analogy, or coherence-establishing mechanisms within the framework of a rhetorical theory of rationality makes it possible to deal with objections regarding the nonvalid nature of such kinds of argumentation. Drawing an inference from an example is not valid in the traditional sense: the impossibility of accepting a conjunction of the premises coupled with a negation of the conclusion. Accepting the need for nonvalid yet rational argumentation of this kind stems from the recognition that many of the beliefs relevant to philosophical reasoning are, for the most part, contingent. Identifying justification with logical necessity is an obvious fallacy. But when this mistake is recognized, the question then becomes how to argue for claims that are contingent in the sense of an inability to derive them formally or necessarily from other assumptions. Establishing nonarbitrary first truths leads to the same problem. Opting to choose argumentational principles that cannot accommodate such beliefs is to endorse a limited mode of philosophizing. Broadening the intellectual range to which philosophical methodology should be sensitive involves accepting means of argumentation that do not conclusively demonstrate a claim, but rather make it plausible, by supporting it to a certain degree. The connections surveyed above, which link the literary context and the beliefs it supports through identifying it with an example, with a delineation of the possible, etc., are such means.
Locating these moves within the context of a modern reconstruction of rhetorical theory or some other approach of informal reasoning enables the normative argument on behalf of literary belief formation to emerge: if we wish to sustain the belief that some domains of human experience can be rationally discussed and understood, and if we drop the idea that rationality in these domains can always take the shape of valid reasoning, then we should accept as sound (though not as conclusive proof ) the patterns of nondeductive reasoning that close engagement with literature can suggest. Forgoing the demand for validity need not imply dismissing rationality. As long as we maintain the identification of argumentation with a set of legitimate means for making beliefs plausible (rather than means for conclusive proof), literature can well be a form of argument. And since "rhetoric" does not here merely denote belief-formation but is a framework for the justification of beliefs, the beliefs that emerge are candidates for what one ought to accept. "Candidates" is my preferred term, since being presented with a good argument-literary or nonliterary-does not automatically guarantee actual acceptance. That can only emerge after considering other, possibly opposing, good arguments.
Linking philosophy and literature is thus not some closed endpoint but rather a method, a mode of philosophizing not necessarily limited to moral questions but potentially applicable whenever contingent claims or first truths need to be supported. Such broadening of the scope of linking philosophy and literature is one advantage of basing the conception not only on Aristotle's ethical writings, emphasized in Martha Nussbaum's neo-Aristotelian conceptualization, but also on his rhetoric. We can delineate four other gains. First, such a framework makes it possible to recognize that the patterns of argumentation so far suggested in the literature-examples, analogies, thought-experiments-are mostly nonvalid moves in the traditional sense. Second, it is possible to justify such moves as part of a theory of rationality. Third, recognizing the nature of the beliefs discussed in this way means that the claims in question are either contingent or first truths, or relate to some other content that can only be given limited support. Finally, we can specify an important limitation of this sort of inquiry: it is not philosophically justified when nonrhetorical means are available.
The Epistemological Role(s) of Literary Experiences
Yet it is possible to engage in rational nonvalid argument in numerous nonliterary ways. So far, the need for such argumentation merely shows that philosophers require nondeductive patterns of argument, not literature as such. Tying literature to rhetoric in this way explains the links between philosophical readings of literary works and legitimate belief assessment. The aesthetic context itself is still an unnecessary addition. How, then, does the experience of literature in particular add to the nonvalid yet rational move that is being made when we are learning from a literary text?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Double Vision by Tzachi Zamir Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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