The Reading Experience

Exhaling "Om"

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on why "eastern philosophy" never caught on among western philosophers:

. . .Partly because the idea of an eastern philosophy lay in the framing of it as the Other of western rationality. But a significant role has been played by Asians themselves, looking for self-expression in a Europeanised world. The leading eastern philosophers of the early to mid-20th century were men like S Radhakrishnan and DT Suzuki who, confronted with the powerful association of western philosophy with colonial dominance, argued that their cultures possessed unique insights absent in the west. In their different ways, Radhakrishnan with the Indian system of Advaita Vedanta and Suzuki with Zen Buddhism, argued that it was the greatness of the Asian philosophies that they went beyond the rationality of western philosophy. Eastern thought was not to be defined by its lack of what western philosophy had, but rather by its transcendence of it. Eastern philosophy was based on experience that mere reason could not capture; its insights came of practices like meditation, and pointed to what lay beyond language and thought. Radhakrishnan, in particular, was quite sophisticated in his knowledge of both Indian and western texts, but as the first Indian to hold a professorship (in eastern religions and ethics) at Oxford, he had to find some way of asserting the importance and originality of Indian philosophy that did not challenge the master narrative of western philosophy. Suzuki had the additional aim of justifying Japanese nationalism in ways that nevertheless took note of the power of the west. In the decades that followed, lesser figures, east and west, tended to recycle this view of the east as the place where philosophy was the west's anti-philosophy. When the 1960s counterculture emphasised this trend—Allen Ginsberg, for example, exhaling "om" and "shiva" in public performance of his poetry—it is small wonder that western philosophers, willing to take only such time as unscholarly books demanded, settled on the conclusion that eastern philosophy was just so much irrational twaddle.

He also offers this succinct explanation of the key features of eastern philosophy:

What then is Indian and Chinese philosophy, and what reason is there for studying it? The origins of philosophy in India and China lie in figures who were primarily interested in offering solutions to problems of existence. In India, the Upanishads sought to liberate human consciousness from its limitations and fragility. The Buddha and Mahavira, founders of Buddhism and Jainism respectively, diagnosed life as consisting in an intrinsic state of suffering, and offered therapeutic methods for coming to terms with and eventually mastering the root causes of that suffering. But none of these teachings was generally considered to constitute an assurance about an eventual state of religious grace. People had to ponder their meaning and significance—a state of inquiry that is philosophical, in that it seeks to analyse various puzzles about the ultimate nature of the world and offers a narrative to take us through it. In China, the baseline is Confucius, who sought to teach people the norms of civilised conduct through the observance of morally relevant rituals drawn from different cultural sources, at a time when China was still politically fragmented. All subsequent Chinese thinkers accept the need to understand and follow proper conduct, but they vary hugely on what that conduct is: among the Daoists, Laotze sees proper conduct as lying not in social ceremony, but in a life lived in coherence with natural forces and flows, while Zhuangzi suggests that there can be no account of proper conduct, merely lives of spontaneous and equipoised action. The determination of the way (Dao)—the path itself as well as the manner of walking it—orients Chinese philosophy.

Derrida

Seldom has an important thinker or writer been as thoroughly abused by those who professed to be his admirers than Jacques Derrida. Both his approach and his assumptions were, for a time at least, held up as the "next big thing" in literary theory, but, unfortunately, few who invoked his name really understand his approach or, ultimately, shared his assumptions. These feeders of the English Department publication maw allowed Derrida's name to be associated with all that was foolish and inane in the literary academy in the name of their own careerist ambitions, and when it became clearer and clearer that what Derrida had in mind didn't really fit well with the next next big thing in academic literary study--multiculturalism, cultural studies more broadly--they abandoned him like a snake his old and useless skin.

(Which makes this letter, signed by some of the very people responsible for helping to create the image of Derrida they're now decrying in the New York Times obiturary, disingenuous in the extreme.)

Although Derrida was very important to me when I was still a budding "literary scholar," I have delayed making any remarks upon his death until surveying some of the many other blog discussions the occasion has provoked. And indeed, some of these have produced comments much like those I would make myself.

Trent Walters, for example, emphasizes that Derrida is actually enjoyable to read. He's an adventurous (but disciplined) and often witty writer who only seems "difficult" or "obscure" if you're expecting him to do philosophy in the supposedly more rigorous style of Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, Derrida actually cared passionately about literature, something his more ideologically rigid followers finally couldn't tolerate, as Leonard Bast astutely points out: "I think that the people who cared most about politics, not literature, realized that Derrida was unnecessary and might even be an obstacle to their goals. Why go through the trouble of decoding him when you could be much more direct and simply rant against literature as an instrument of oppression?" And as In Favor of Thinking further observes: "What the right wing and the general media never seemed to understand, in characterizing all literary theory, and especially deconstruction, as the Evil Force of Chaos about to Destroy the Canon (remember the so-called Culture Wars?), was that in order to really understand Derrida's work, you had to be steeped in the Western literary and philosophical tradition."

Moreover, Derrida's critical method--and the method that could most efficaciously be adopted from his approach--was not all that radical, at least not in the way that too many of his acolytes wanted it to be. As Miriam Burstein quite correctly has it, deconstruction

In its applied American form. . .generally amounted to hyper-intensified close reading, a practice more amenable to discussions of metafiction than to feminism. Language was the big thing, not cultural criticism. Moreover, because it was in so many ways (again, in its applied American form) a souped-up New Criticism, deconstructionism tended to emphasize not the non-canonical but the very canonical indeed.

Derrida's goal was not to subvert the canonical--although neither was it to exalt it--but finally to illuminate a little further how we might actually read it. "Logocentrism" is not the tyranny of Reason, as so many of both Derrida's critics and his defenders would have us believe, but is the tendency to read texts, especially those philosophical and literary works reflexively assumed to be great, as if their authors were simply speaking to us, pronouncing on whatever subject the text is presumed to evoke. This is not even misreading but a refusal to read at all, and Derrida's project was to insist we attend to the text as a text--which might involve examining those elements that might otherwise seem "marginal," not quite the "point" at all. This was not an attempt to interpret a text in some idiosyncratic or inflammatory way--the usual criticism of Derrida was that he claimed a particular work to be "saying" the "opposite" of what it seemed to say--but to point out that in most cases we hadn't even yet begun the process of interpretation at all.

These criticisms of Derrida's work seem to me to behind Spurious's comment that he "avoided taking issue with [Derrida's] work because he was perpetually under attack from Analytic philosophers. This is my weakness: a kind of paranoia prevents me from being able to turn on those philosophers whose work, it seems to me, needs protecting. Whenever I read a book by Derrida I feel as though I have committed a great transgression, as though I had committed a crime (at the university I studied, Hegel was deemed unphilosophical; we were not allowed near Nietzsche, let alone Husserl. At that university we focused for the most part on texts published in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. Nothing older, nothing French or German, nothing ‘Continental’). Among Anglo-American philosophers, Derrida could not be taken seriously because his work slashed right at the heart of the Analytic assumptions about the goals of philosophy and the status of Reason. Younger philosophers like Lars Iyers had good reason to feel protective of their interest in Derrida's work.

But in the United States, Derrida clearly had the greatest influence in departments of literary study. There too, many people felt themselves to be committing "a great transgression" by reading and adapting Derrida to literary criticism and scholarship. The established forms of literary study were presumed to be rigid and authoritarian--"logocentric"--although for the most part they simply were not. If anything, New Criticism privileged an emotional, almost mystical response to literature, and the emphasis on close reading precisely encouraged the kind of open-ended interpretation Derrida championed. But, as LB points out, Derrida's writing was at first taken as some kind of politically liberatory gesture, and so the era of deconstruction and French theory began.

The great damage that was done both to literary study and to Derrida's reputation is perhaps summed up by Timothy Burke, who correctly notes the way in which during this era what came across most loudly was "the cry of all or nothing at all, that if communication could not be perfected, then there was no communication, if texts could not have a correct meaning, they meant everything, anything, nothing in particular." This was not, I hasten to add, what Derrida himself believed, but unfortunately what was most often represented as "Derridean" was indeed this sort of anti-intellectual nonsense (its anti-intellectualism disguised by much obscurantist theory-ese), the result of which, finally, was the complete loss of credibility on the part of academic literary study and, unfortunately, the labeling of Derrida as the obscurantist-in-chief. (I myself tried to use my own dissertation to show how Derrida's work could be used to elucidate actual works of literature, in my case, American metafiction, but very little of this kind of work was really done. Most academic criticism from that period done in the name of Derrida is now almost completely unreadable.)

Those who would like to know what Derrida was really all about should just read his books, particularly the earlier ones and especially Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. The best book about Derrida, bar none, is Christopher Norris's Derrida (1987), which portrays Derrida as the serious student of philosophy and literature--"my most constant interest," he once said, "coming before even my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward literature, toward that writing which is called literary"--that he was. Although Derrida had long before his death become passe in academic literature departments, what he has to offer to the appreciation of "that writing which is called literary" has barely begun to be understood.

Premises

God of the Machine asserts that in a previous post I have failed to state my "premise" in arguing that the "merely literary" ought to suffice in and of itself in our valuation of literature. I confess I don't really don't know what this means, although the crticism seems to be that I didn't engage in an adequate enough philosophical analysis of literary value before separating the literary from other possible values one might assign to works of literature. This is, however, the very sort of extra-literary endeavor I was arguing against in the first place. "Thinkers" of all kinds are always looking to pigeonhole literature as a phenomeon altogether compatible with their own disciplinary prejudices, resulting in assessments of literature that acknowledge its importance for all kinds of reasons, other than its actually being literature.

GOTM clearly doesn't accept that literature has "merely" literary value. He wants it to do moral work:

Consider two sets. The first consists of all people who believe the novelist is exempt from ethical matters on the grounds that he is "doing literature." The second consists of all people who believe the businessman is similarly exempt on the grounds that he is "doing business." How large do you suppose the intersection is?

This is such an utterly specious analogy that I almost think GOTM is kidding. If the novelist is not exempt from the businessman's charge to carry out his activities in an ethical way, this can only mean, given the terms of the comparison, that he should go about his own business in an upright way: do your own work and don't steal from others; don't hurt people (when real people are models) by portraying them unfairly; pay your typist a fair wage. Be nice to your agent. Thank your publisher. It certainly has nothing to do with the "ethical" content supposedly embodied in a work of fiction or with the ethical uses to which that work is so often subordinated.

After informing us that he himself is engaged in a project "aiming toward a universal maximization function, a formula for all biological entities, human beings not least" that "will explain, I hope, why people engage in art and a great deal else besides," GOTM allows that I might be on the right track in arguing that the "good" literature can do for us is on a "purely experiential level." GOTM could spare himself a great deal of toil in struggling through what he himself calls "tiresome philosophic shit" by simply accepting this as the most obvious and ultimately most useful consequence of seriously attending to works of literature and of art more broadly.

However, I will risk dispensing a little "philosophic shit" of my own in clarifying my position a little further. In Art as Experience, John Dewey writes:

The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest. In both, an act of abstraction, that is of extraction of what is significant, takes place. In both, there is comprehension in its literal signification--that is, a gathering together of details and particulars physically scattered into an experienced whole. There is work done on the part of the percipient as there is on the part of the artist. The one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work will not see or hear. His 'appreciation' will be a mixture of scraps of learning with conformity to norms of conventional admiration and with a confused, even if genuine, emotional excitation.

Later:

Literature thus presents evidence, more convincing perhaps than that offered by the other arts, that art is fine when it draws upon the material of other experiences and expresses their material in a medium which intensifies and clarifies its energy through the order that supervenes. The arts accomplish this result not by self-conscious intention but in the very operation of creating, by means of new objects, new modes of experience.

Later still:

The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic's office is to further this work, performed by the object of art. Obtrusion of his own approvals and condemnations, appraisals and ratings, is sign of failure to apprehend and perform the function of becoming a factor in the development of sincere personal experience. We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it.

Dewey's language is typically stilted in its awkward search for the suitably "philosophical" words to describe the "vital processes" exemplified by art and its appreciation, but the sense of his words is clear enough: Art is experience, experience doubly enhanced, when sincerely invoked the most transforming kind of experience we can have. This is my premise, upon which I stand quite comfortably.

Merely Literary

Not long ago I read a weblog post in which the blogger extolled the virtues of a recent critical book by declaring that it examined the fiction of a well-known postwar writer in ways that went beyond the "merely literary"--specifically that it examined the sociopolitical significance of that fiction. Just a few days later I came across the same phrase in a slightly different context; this time what was at stake in a particular writing strategy easily transcended the "merely literary."

Versions of this idea--that worthwhile or important writing must of course be characterized by qualities that elevate it above mere literary value--are to be found everywhere in discussions of books and writing in American publications (Leon Wieseltier's non-review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint in the NYTBR, for example, can be explained as Wieseltier's refusal to waste his time assessing the "merely literary" features of that book), but seldom is it stated as baldly as in these two instances. And it is quite likely that neither writer really thought that in speaking of literary value in this way they were necessarily denigrating literature or the literary--it's just that everyone understands there are more important tasks to fulfill in the act of writing, even in the act of writing fiction or poetry, than just to do it well or with some originality. Don't they?

Most often it is politics that is considered more important than the "merely literary," some kind of engagement with the "real world" that demonstrates the writer's concern for the problems of injustice or income distribution or international instability. Even writer's as universally acclaimed as, say, Philip Roth are frequently judged by these standards. Roth's best novel in the last decade and a half was easily Sabbath's Theater, but much more attention was given to his later trilogy, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, since they were more obviously about consequential subjects like politics and cultural history. Sabbath's Theater, a ferociously comic novel about--about what, an oversexed puppeteer?--was "merely literary." (Although not very decorously so.)

But it doesn't have to be attention to politics per se that justifies our taking a writer or book seriously. We just have to feel that the writer is reaching beyond the pages of a book to grapple with "issues," is "saying something" about the world, conveying ideas or stirring up emotions. As Ruth Franklin put it last year in a review in the NYTBR (I jotted this down in a little notebook because it seemed such a forthright statement of this point of view), "literature's most necessary task [is in] communicating the writer's thoughts about the world we live in." Presumably anything else a fiction writer or poet might be concerned with, such things as exploring the stylistic possibilities of language, formal invention, even just telling a story in a skillful way or making us laugh, is "merely literary." (Although why insist on calling that which does meet Franklin's criterion "literature"?)

And why would we as readers be interested in a writer's "thoughts about the world we live in" in the first place? Is there something about being a novelist or poet (or memoirist or essayist) that makes one's "thoughts" more significant than anyone else's? I hardly think so. And I don't really think most such writers want to be burdened with the role of "thinking" in this sense, anyway. They probably want to write well enough and in such a way as to attract a certain kind of reader, a reader who doesn't dismiss the "merely literary."

The September 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education contains this little item:

Storytelling has helped make human beings "a nicer species," says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, in a converstation [in the summer issue of Seeds] with Rebecca Goldstein, a visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity College and the author of several works of fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem. They discuss a variety of topics related to how science and art are grappling with "substantive questions.". . .

. . .Exposure to a wider range of stories has helped people empathize with groups they might otherwise have considered "subhuman," [Mr. Pinker] suggests. "Fiction can be a kind of moral technology."

Ms. Goldstein agrees that storytelling serves a moral purpose. "To be in the throes of a story, to have one's emotions provoked by another's story is not quite ethics, but it's kind of the shadowlife of ethics," she writes. "Storytelling is something that can awaken attentiveness, engagement, and empathy to a life that isn't one's own. And to be attentive, engaged, emphathetic. That is moral."

What an all-encompassing justification for writing and reading fiction. It makes us a "nicer species"! I'm not going to argue that fiction has no moral content, that it cannot provoke a kind of moral reflection in some readers. This is, in fact, a nice side effect of some works of literature. But can literature only be justified because it might lead to this kind of reflection? Must we reduce fiction to "a kind of moral technology"? Otherwise it is "merely literary"? (I'm actually a little surprised to see Rebecca Goldstein indulging in this kind of analysis. Some of her books strike me as nicely "literary" indeed, and they need not embody some "shadowlife of ethics" to be worth reading. As for storytelling as "something that can awaken attentiveness, engagement, and empathy to a life that isn't one's own": What would Goldstein make of Mickey Sabbath?)

I, for one, am quite content with the "merely literary." In fact, if I read a description of a particular book that emphasizes its political implications, its effectiveness in "communicating the writer's thoughts," the way in which it in effect functions as "moral technology," I'm probably going to run away from that book like a child fleeing an ogreish schoolmarm. The book and its author may want to do me good, but whatever benefits there are to be derived from it are going to be overshadowed by the pain involved. (Perhaps, however, I will come back to it later, after learning that the schoolmarm was the reviewer or critic, who really didn't know what she was talking about.) I may be among a dwindling number of readers who think that the "literary" has "substance" in and of itself, that the good it can do on a purely experiential level is reward enough. But to those who think that reading novels and stories and poems can be a worthy endeavor only if they point us to larger questions about politics or ethics, I can only ask: Why not just go talk about politics or discourse on morality or think big thoughts and leave literature alone? The rest of us will settle for our meager pleasures.

Postmodernism

In a comment on my recent post about "metafiction," Nick Kerkhoff (whose relatively new blog can be found here) wonders about the precise relationship between metafiction and postmodernism:

Meta-fiction does not seem to require a social understanding, for the self-reference is inherent to the story (am I right about that?). Whereas postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate. (If I could make an analogy to painting: any human in the world should possess the prerequisites to understand a Pollack (if they let themselves), and even though it's illusionary, most people who have seen a regular drawing before, should be able to understand the meta-tricks of MC Escher, but only a person immersed in our culture could understand the point of a enlarged Warhol soupcan (otherwise they'd be appreciating merely the original Campbell Soup-employed artist)).

In the post I had stated that metafiction was really the original movement in the contemporary arts to be called "postmodern." In fact, arguably the first substantive use of the term was by the literary critic Irving Howe in 1959 to describe a kind of postwar fiction that was, in Howe's view, clearly departing in its assumptions and methods from prewar modernism. (Howe and his fellow New York Critics always felt that this rupture was a mortal one, as most of them had first become prominent literary critics through their championing of high modernism.) Only later--in the 1970s and even 1980s--did "postmodernism" become the label for a broader cultural tendency that theorists of all kinds found convenient in their analyses of, variously, consumer capitalism, identity politics, and historical change, or for engaging in a certain kind of highly abstract "philosophical" debate. Postmodernism in literature, or in the arts more generally, in turn became merely illustrative examples that one could handily appeal to as embodiments of one's favored theory.

It is, I think, this version of postmodernism that Nick has in mind when he says that "postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate." Warhol's paintings, in this view, can be called postmodern because they "say" things to us about consumerism, about the fetishizing of objects or the artistic tastes of "elites," etc. One would indeed need to be "immersed in our culture" to get all this, but it is, of course, a central tenet of postmodernism-as-cultural-analysis that everyone is inescapably immersed in it, so the problem of interpretation is not acute.

Nick also asks "if metafiction could be labeled a piece, a subset, in the overall postmodern impulse." Indeed it could be, as long as we restricted our use of the term to mean the kind of literary postmodernism Howe was talking about and that later was applied to Barth and Coover, Barthelme and Pynchon. All of these writers were in one way or another responding to the challenge laid down by the high modernists, and in most cases they were trying to experiment further with the innovative techniques associated with modernism, not to overturn or abandon them. If "postmodern" can no longer be reclaimed from the school of cultural analysis I have described, however, I would rather discard it altogether, since I don't think metafiction, or experimental fiction more broadly, has much to do with that kind of politically-motivated criticism. Although it is certainly true that such fiction potentially has much to say about such things as the slipperiness of our notions of "identity" or the way in which stories are often used to give order to a chaotic reality in ways that are often more dangerous than the underlying chaos.

I prefer to think of metafiction as indeed existing outside the immediate requirements of "social understanding." That is, reading it, like reading any worthwhile fiction, is first of all a literary experience, not an experience in social criticism or cultural recognition. While there are some things about the "postmodern" critique of culture with which I agree, one of its most baneful conseqeunces is the way in which it has swept up what was postmodern fiction into its smothering arms and blocked our view of what this fiction is really like. It has little to do with Marx, or with Boudrillard, or with Jameson, or with any other so-called postmodern theorist. It has much more to do with Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett. Or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding.

Making Believe

John Holbo has recently posted two lengthy discussions of the concept of "fiction" as it would be understood using the tools of analytic philosophy. I am by no means well-read enough in analytic philosophy to assess these posts in technical terms, although I do think I know enough to follow along and perhaps make a few comments from a purely literary perspective.

Holbo is responding to a book that analyzes fiction as a "prop" readers use to engage in what this author wants to call "make-believe." Holbo believes that this view is too simplistic, reducing fiction to a device that prompts readers to create mental images, or that works to "prescribe imaginings." Holbo thinks that this simplistic view is especially infelicitous in describing our reading of novels, which do not provoke these kinds of "imaginings" in the same way that other, more explict games of make-believe do. As Holbo points out, reading a novel is not like playing with toy trucks.

It seems to me that Holbo is trying to say that works of literature have effects on us that cannot easily be accounted for by philosophical analysis. The words in a novel work differently than words in other contexts:

Now with regard to novels there is certainly at least a little something to the idea that, in at least some cases, there is at least something inessential about the prop, i.e. all the words - because the story is the thing, and any given story can be narrated any number of different ways. But indifference to the specifics of the narrative, i.e. all the words, is really not a standard attitude. You don't have to be much of a critic to care how a given story is told, i.e. to care about the prop itself, as well as what the prop makes us imagine (if it does make us imagine.)

I think this is exactly right, although, again, I couldn't provide an argument of my own that would satisfy most analytic philosophers. Part of the problem with approaching fiction from the vantage point of philosophy is that it excludes certain considerations that would otherwise help to explain what we in fact do enounter in reading fiction or poetry. (Although of course if these considerations were taken into account, the result would be literary criticism and not philosophy.) For example, I would argue that the novel, the literary category of "fiction" more generally, has developed less as a reaction among writers to the requirements of "story" per se than as a sequential reaction to what previous writers have done within the tradition of the novel or the short story as it is passed along from one cohort to the next. Sometimes this means thinking through the implications of narrative itself, sometimes ignoring story in order to concentrate on style or "stream of consciousness" or something else. In other words, most writers are at least as interested in what they can do with language itself as what they can do through telling stories.

A related problem is the need to collapse poetry and fiction (as Holbo does in an earlier post) into a single category of "imaginative" writing in which the arrangement of words works differently than in non-literary writing--it is less propositional, less laden with "information," etc., a difference that invokes the specific analysis of such writing as "fiction" in the first place. What is gained by looking at these modes through this fairly narrow philosophical lens (which is not at all neglible) is balanced by the loss of those other features of poetry and fiction that have appeal to us for other than their roles in the game of fiction-making or make-believe.

Perhaps the most significant drawback to considering "fiction" as more or less identical with "story" is identified by Holbo himself:

. . .The more paradigmatically story-like the representational content of a work, the more comfortable we are classing it as a work of fiction.

One exception: experimental literary works that strive to undermine narrative and story conventions – i.e. that willfully lack beginnings, middles and ends, characters, so forth – are usually quite easily classified as fiction (unless they seem to be turning into poems.) I take this ease of classification to be the result of a sort of grandfather-clause. Or maybe an Oedipus-like father-clause: if you are trying so hard to overthrow story, you must be story, ergo fiction. (A bit of a puzzle.)

I don't think this really is a puzzle. These kinds of experimental "fictions" are, in my view, precisely trying to undermine the reflexive association of fiction with story, although perhaps not completely enough that we would want to categorize it as something other than fiction. To this extent, "fiction" becomes simply a literary identifying mark, an acknowledgment of the tradition of prose writing from which it emerges, but no longer very helpfully describes what a work so designated does in terms of storytelling alone. But perhaps at this point as well such a work no longer lends itself very usefully to the kind of analysis a philosopher might want to do of the more ordinary understanding of the term.

Philosophy and Literature

Richard Rorty's essay on a new book by Richard Wolin that accuses modern philosophers of consorting with the worst sort of evildoers--the book essentially calls these philosophers bad people--raises some issues I have tried to deal with on this blog in connection with literature and that other blogs have discussed as well. These attacks on philosophers and writers come from both the right and the left, and what they have in common is an intolerance for the very kinds of ambiguity and contingency that philosophy and literature show to be inherent to our situation as the human beings we are.

Rorty is actually quite fair to Wolin in characterizing his otherwise familiar and tedious harangue:

Richard Wolin thinks that it is not as easy as all that to separate the conduct of a philosopher from the utility of his ideas, or his moral character from his teachings. A distinguished intellectual historian who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Wolin believes that the prevalence of "slack postmodernist relativism" is very dangerous. "The postmodern left," he says, "risks depriving democracy of valuable normative resources at an hour of extreme historical need." His book seeks to demonstrate that "at a certain point postmodernism's hostility towards 'reason' and 'truth' is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating." Many of the essays that make up the book focus on the dubious--and sometimes appalling--political stances adopted by eminent post-Nietzschean thinkers. Wolin argues that their political attitudes are closely bound up with their anti-foundationalist philosophical views.

His equally mild-mannered critique of this view is nevertheless withering:

Postmodernism, Wolin says, is "the rejection of the intellectual and cultural assumptions of modernity in the name of 'will to power' (Nietzsche), 'sovereignty' (Bataille), an 'other beginning' (Heidegger), 'différance' (Derrida) or a 'different economy of bodies and pleasures' (Foucault)." So one expects him to enumerate "the intellectual and cultural assumptions of modernity" and show why they should not be rejected. But Wolin seems to assume that his readers already know what these assumptions are, and are disposed to take rejection of them as a reductio ad absurdum of a philosopher's outlook.

A somewhat more trenchant version of Rorty's argument is offered at the weblog Enowning:

Humanists want the foundations of philosophy to demonstrate that humanism is right, that good is better than evil, democracy is the best, and so forth. Philosophers can find no such proofs, and so are attacked. Their thinking isn't debated, but instead these type of books amount to ad hominem attacks on their lifestyles, political choices, and so on. This one was a Nazi, that one into gay S&M, he seduced grad students, she was anti-semetic, the young were corrupted, and the other lied. All the while never advancing philosophical alternatives.

One might say something similar about an analagous hostility frequently expressed by a certain kind of traditionalist--in some cases they might also be identified as "humanists"--toward modern/postmodern literature: They want the conventional forms of literature to be eternally relevant and poets and novelists to pass on time-tested truths. When the poets and novelists say that this isn't their job, they are attacked for their "lifestyles," etc. This also occurs on the "postmodern left" when particular poets and novelists say things these "progressives" don't want them to say. The reasons why these writers have written what they have, created the forms or dramatized the concerns that interest them, are also seldom debated, just dismissed. It's much easier to depict such writers as irresponsible or depraved.

Rorty says that "Wolin has an easy time showing that fans of Nietzsche and Heidegger have said stupid and irresponsible things about democracy. But he does not do much to show that the stupidities follow from their philosophies, nor that those philosophies are untenable." As well, it's easy enough to point to "stupid and irresponsble things" some writers have said and done, but this in no way amounts to demonstrating the aesthetic shortcomings of what they've written. (Which is not to say the latter can't be done: I'm no fan of Ezra Pound, but this is because I believe the aesthetic shortcomings of much--not all--of his poetry can be demonstrated.) And to call what these writers do produce "radical" or "incoherent" or "confusing" may or may not be true, but most often these charges are once again just a way of calling them bad people.

Rorty concludes: "Nietzsche and Heidegger thought that once one rejected the Platonic claim to provide rational foundations for moral truth, all things would need to be made new. Culture would have to be reshaped. [William] James and [John] Dewey, by contrast, did not think that giving up the correspondence theory of truth was all that big a deal. They wanted to debunk it, and so help get rid of Platonist rationalism, but they did not think that doing so would make that much difference to our self-image or to our social practices. The superstructure, they thought, would still be in good shape even after we stopped worrying about the state of the foundations." I would suggest that writing poetry and fiction that doesn't buttress the "rational foundations [of] moral truth" or reinforce the old ways of doing things or repeat accepted slogans isn't going to bring down the cultural building, either. Perhaps there are some writers who fancy themselves as bringing it down, but they're not likely to succeed. Challenging or innovative literature doesn't work to make "all things" new; it just shows how the exercise of the literary imagination can always be made fresh, just as challenging ideas in philosophy help keep it invigorated. This may seem a modest enough accomplishment, but if we all just ackowledged that this enlivening of the imagination is really what literature (and philosophy) can do we'd be spared a lot of blather about the ways in which artists and philosophers betray civilization.

Confessions of an Aesthete

The latest burst of debate about the relationship between politics and art is wending its way around the literary blogosphere. (Perhaps the locus of the current debate is this post by Mark Sarvas--itself a well-expressed bit of reflection.) This is of course a highly charged subject, one that frequently applies a heavy jolt to those who touch it, since it quickly gets to the core assumptions many readers bring to the act of reading works of literature. Better in most cases not to question these assumptions too strongly, rather than risk embroiling literature in the very dispute over politics that I, for one, always want to avoid in the first place.

In the present round of commentary, however, one claim in particular requires some response. Scribbling Woman makes the following assertion:

. . .all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

My criticism is not directed primarily at the author of this passage. Unfortunately, she repeats what has become a mantra chanted incessantly by many current academic critics, an invocation of "politics" so all-encompassing as to make any disagreement with it almost literally impossible (anything you say is "political") and so final in its judgment as to safely keep anyone who wishes to study literature rather than its political exploitation decidedly in his/her marginal place.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the label of "aesthete," although I know it's meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be "aesthetic" has no political content at all. None. It's not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and aesthetics aren't the same thing. I have political views about politics and aesthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don't tell me that in refusing to do so I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They're all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.

This totalizing view of the scope of the political is itself finally just a choice, a preference for politics over art, a way of maintaining that politics is the most important subject with which a serious person ought to occupy him/herself. It's a view that's now pandemic in the academy. If we are all "political creatures who exist in the world," are we not also "sociological creatures," "historical creatures," "cultural creatures," "economic creatures"? Such abstractions are so cosmically extended as to be meaningless. And to say that politics is everything, of course, is ultimately to say that politics is nothing in particular. If by saying everyone is "political" we mean everyone has his/her interests all well and good, but this is not the way "political" is used in the argument that all art is political art.

Frequently various "thinkers" are here invoked as authorities who have supposedly "established" that politics pervades everything (Marx or Baudrillard or Althusser or whomever). I've read these writers too, and to the extent they say that art is always political they don't know what they're talking about. They trivialize art and politics alike, and collapsing the distinction between the two is actually a way of avoiding thinking. (Although it's often the uninformed distortions of these thinkers that are really to blame.) No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things (although most can't seem to understand why I don't), but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so.

There's nothing "Romantic" about my status as as aesthete. I think in fact that it's quite pragmatic. There's art and there's politics. "Political art" does exist, but it's not all art. Sometimes when we read works of literature we have an "aesthetic" experience, sometimes we can limit this experience to whatever political implications we can squeeze out of it. I think this latter is a very impoverished concept of reading, but I would. To say finally that all human endeavor is political (including the effort to create art) would be a pretty sad commentary on human potential, if it were true.

Preceding Essence

A review of Bernard Henri-Levy's Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (unfortunately featured at Arts & Letters Daily) that couldn't be more wrong about Sartre.

The reviewer, Brian C. Anderson, offers up this thesis: "What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms." Putting aside for the moment that Anderson's own account of Sartre's career belies this statement, Sartre was not "paradigmatic" of anything except his own thinking and writing. He's become a handy tool to use in bashing left-of-center thinkers, writers, and ideas (even just poor tepid liberalism), and this to a significant extent through his own mistakes: his later Marxist and Maoist phase was indeed "dodgy," his actions and statements frequently obnoxious and just plain stupid.

But his fiction up to the 1950s, as well as at least Being and Nothingness among his philosophical works, remain essential reading. Even Anderson admits to the value of this work, although his praise is grudging enough. (He is wrong to say that the fiction and drama of this earlier period should be read as "a description not of a permanent truth of man’s fate but of the predicament of a certain kind of modern man." These works precisely describe a "permanent truth of man's fate.") No one who reads Nausea shorn of the preexisting animus expressed by Anderson could say it does not remain a readable and affecting novel.

Moreover, the idea that Sartre's misguided politics were somehow an intrinsic feature of his philosophy is simply incorrect. There's nothing inherently leftist, much less Marxist, about existentialism. If there was, such concerted efforts to hold up Camus as a cold-warrior alternative to Sartre as have been made would not be possible. Nausea and Being and Nothingness were not the products of the "leftist mind." The review's biographical sketch of Sartre itself shows that his leftism was something Sartre came to embrace, not something latent in the earlier books. One could argue that Sartre willfully distorted these early ideas in order to justify his politics, but this was a weakness in the man, not in the ideas.

Anderson doesn't really bother to seriously critique Sartre's work, anyway. He contents himself with ad hominem attacks against both Sartre and Henri-Levy, along with a heavy barrage of adjectival bombast--"nihilistic,""nasty,""relativistic," "atheist." I'd be willing to bet that, despite the attempt by those like this reviewer to bury Sartre, his work will still be read well into the future and he will be considered an original thinker and important writer--both in philosophy and in literature. Perhaps Henri-Levy's biography will help to hasten this process, although one suspects that the possibility it might do so is one reason this review has appeared.

One of the things the review also points up is the inadequacy of using biographies of writers as a way of assessing that writer's body of work. Inevitably the focus of such reviews returns to the limitations and foibles of the man or woman in question, and the work becomes a way of exemplifying these "character" traits. Sartre may have been, at various times, maybe even most of the time, an unpleasant man, but this says nothing about the abiding merits of his best books.