For more than a quarter century, Philosophy and Literature has explored the dialogue between literary and philosophical studies. The journal offers a constant source of fresh, stimulating ideas in the aesthetics of literature, theory of criticism, philosophical interpretation of literature, and literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature challenges the cant and pretensions of academic priesthoods by publishing an assortment of lively, wide-ranging essays, notes, and reviews that are written in clear, jargon-free prose. In his regular column, editor Denis Dutton targets the fashions and inanities of contemporary intellectual life.
Vol. 31, no 2 (octobre 2007)
ARTICLES
Austin, Michael
The Influence of Anxiety and Literature's Panglossian Nose
Scheherazade may be the protagonist of The Thousand and One Nights, but her stories are the heroes. Her audience for these stories consists only of her sister and her husband, the great sultan Shahryar, who three years earlier had vowed to avenge his wife's infidelity by marrying a new woman each night and executing her the following morning. With the supply of virgins in the kingdom running short, Scheherazade forces her father, the royal vizier, to allow her to marry the Sultan, assuring him that she has a plan to end his bloody practice. Her plan is simple: every night, Scheherazade tells Shahryar a piece of a story. Many of these stories are overtly didactic, and some are even thinly veiled allegories of Shahryar's own situation, but Scheherazade aims to do more than simply rehabilitate the sultan with pedagogically sound morality tales. She weaves her stories together, often using multiple frames and levels of embedded narrative, to make sure that the night always ends in the middle of at least one story, and, each morning, the Sultan postpones his sentence of death one day so he can hear the conclusion. Scheherazade's gambit succeeds�with the Sultan and with...
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Farrell, John
The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero: Freud's Platonic Leonardo
Though the intellectual force of Freudian psychoanalysis grows weaker and weaker with time, its importance for the understanding of twentieth-century intellectual culture only increases. Freud made psychology a key ingredient in the century's conception of its own uniqueness and modernity. He claimed to initiate a decisive break with the past, but he also claimed to recover the past, indeed all of human behavior, on new, scientific grounds. What Freud proposed was not just a new way of thinking about psychology but a new psychology, one that would permit unprecedentedly intrepid investigation of the past and the unconscious sources of its ways of thinking. But whereas Freud hoped to give us a new psychology of knowledge, what he did was to reintroduce one of the oldest psychologies of knowledge in a moderately disguised form. I will attempt to show this and assess the implications through a close examination of Freud's treatment of Leonardo da Vinci, a man he considered one of the great forerunners of the modern intellect. Psychoanalysis is both a theory of the psyche and a scientific movement. Its dual nature makes it almost a unique element in the...
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Beecher, Donald
Suspense
Suspense is one of those workaday terms so integrated into the discussion of literature that definition would hardly seem necessary. It does receive pro forma entries in most literary handbooks, but never provokes more than a statement of the self-evident: that it is a "state of uncertainty, anticipation and curiosity as to the outcome of a story or play, or any kind of narrative in verse or prose," that such anticipations arise "particularly as they affect a character for whom one has sympathy," and that plot types vary in ways that affect the ethos of suspense: those situations in which the outcome is uncertain and readers are concerned with how they will be resolved, and those in which the outcome is inevitable and readers, in their fear, concentrate merely on knowing when the catastrophe will be complete. Indicatively, Roger Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms gives it a pass altogether. But even these generic representations of the concept must venture such quizzical terms as "state" and "sympathy," both of which are seen to inhere not in texts and narratives, but in spectators and readers. Suspense, then, must have two sides: that which is invested in the design of the story as an emotion prompt; and that which is a feature of mind. This...
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Beauchamp, Gorman
Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies: Human Nature in Utopia
Utopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature" if, as John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed. To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history." The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W.� D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and...
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Dougherty, Kathleen Poorman
Habituation and Character Change
The standard view regarding character traits is that they are habituated, stable dispositions that develop over time. This position is put forth in its most familiar form in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, where he outlines the development of character, arguing that one becomes virtuous or vicious through habituation of the corresponding sorts of actions. Thus, we become generous by performing generous actions, courageous by performing courageous actions, rash by performing rash actions, and so on for all the virtues and vices. He puts it most directly at 1103b, saying, "To sum it up in a single account: a state [of character] results from [the repetition of] similar activities." Concomitant with this understanding of the development of character traits is the claim that once developed, character traits are stable and do not change rapidly or without the requisite rehabituation. Once a person has learned to be generous or courageous, the assumption is that she will, barring unusual circumstances, remain that way, for rehabituation is difficult and probably rare at best. For the most part, this standard view of the development and entrenchment of character reflects our...
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Saunders, Judith P.
Male Reproductive Strategies in Sherwood Anderson's "The Untold Lie"
Singled out repeatedly as one of the finest stories in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, "The Untold Lie" (1919) has attracted surprisingly little sustained critical comment. Like all the stories in the Winesburg cycle, this one delineates a revelatory moment of inner turmoil. There is little outward action; conflict and suspense are generated chiefly in the interior of the protagonist's psyche, focusing on his ambivalence as husband and father. Readers become privy to "the buried life" of unacknowledged impulses and the "hidden truth" of repressed resentments, as Anderson's central characters struggle with the antithetical "choices available to the individual as biology works its will." A portrait of the male mind deliberating the relative advantages of alternative reproductive strategies, the story notably repays biosocial investigation. The theoretical framework, as well as the intellectual rationale, for undertaking biosocial investigation of literary texts has been explained ably by critics and aestheticians such as Joseph Carroll, Brett Cooke, Ellen Dissanayake, Robert Story, and others. Readers unfamiliar with the historical and...
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Tate, Margaret Watkins
Resources for Solitude: Proper Self-Sufficiency in Jane Austen
Despite their comic endings and Aristotelian fascination with character, Jane Austen's novels paint a troubling picture of the relationship between virtue and suffering. Aristotelian virtue theory insists that the virtues are necessary (though not sufficient) for flourishing. Yet the virtues broadly conceived as human excellences�of Austen's heroines seem to exacerbate threats to their well-being. If virtues are traits that are characteristic of good human beings, they ought to, it seems, benefit their possessors. Because virtue theory acknowledges the contingency in human life, the occasional case of a miserable virtuous person does not threaten the viability of virtue theory. But the relationship between serious threats to well-being and the virtues of Austen's heroines is not one of mere chance and is therefore more problematic. If the virtues not only fail to promote human flourishing but actually tend to destroy it, then it becomes difficult to see how they are the traits that fulfill human nature. Austen's novels reflect an overriding concern with a particular set of threats isolation, ennui, decline, and depression�that endanger the...
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Curzer, Howard J.
Abraham, the Faithless Moral Superhero
Why do we admire Abraham so much? The standard answer is that Abraham's faith in God is very great. Now in the context of Genesis, "faith in God" does not mean "belief in God's existence." Polytheism, not atheism, is the adversary in Genesis. Nor does "faith in God" mean "believing in order that we may come to understand God" or "believing because we cannot fully understand God" or "believing despite what we understand about God." To minimize anachronism and controversy I shall work with a minimalist reading of "faith in God," a meaning shared by all interpretations. On every plausible conception of faith, if Abraham has faith in God, then he trusts God's word. In Genesis "faith in God" means at least, "trusting that God will keep His promises." But Abraham does not display this sort of faith. I shall argue that Abraham actually displays a lack of trust in God throughout his whole life. To show this I shall review the events of Abraham's life, assessing his level of faith in God at each point. II Abraham leaves his father's house when God promises him numerous offspring (15:1�4). However contrary to the usual view, this is not evidence of extraordinary faith. People migrated a lot in the ancient...
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Quigley, Megan M.
Vengeful Vagueness in Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry James
In 1878, Charles Sanders Peirce closed the first section of "How to Make our Ideas Clear"�an article that William James later declared a "birth certificate of Pragmatism"�on a strangely anecdotal note. Using what would become known as the pragmatic method to demolish the notion of Grand Ideas ("Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects"), Peirce also included a lesson from an "old German story": Many a man has cherished for years some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some morning to find it gone, cleaned vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man. (WCSP, p. 261) The story of the fled Melusina (a half-woman, half-serpent who gives birth to monsters) acts ostensibly as a warning against the danger inherent in...
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Straus, Nina Pelikan
Grand Theory on Trial: Kafka, Derrida, and the Will to Power
The following pages offer evidence that in The Trial Kafka invents characters who deploy a Nietzschean-sourced language of deconstruction related to what we now call theory; that in "Before the Law" Kafka's priest deconstructs The Law to which K. is subjected, and that Kafka exposes the discursive devices by which laws can be deconstructed. Kafka's text then opens the way to another kind of deconstruction of that-which-is-already-deconstructed as performed by Jacques Derrida in his 1987 essay, "Before the Law." Although this claim may seem self-evident or rhetorically circular to some readers of Kafka and his commentators, it is the result of years of puzzlement concerning the impact of Grand Theory in American criticism. This puzzlement, often accompanied by antagonism, is shared by critics whose essays comprise Patia's and Corral's Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably Derrida's, by Tzetan Todorov, Thomas Nagel, M. H. Abrams, Kwame Anthony...
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CRITICAL DISCUSSIONS
Carroll, Noël
Art, Mind, and Intention
The relevance of intention to the philosophy of art was perhaps first made explicit by G.W.F. Hegel who, in his monumental The Philosophy of Fine Art, narrowed the domain of aesthetics to art on the grounds that the beauty that pertains to art is the product of mind. Though Hegel does not single out intention as the aspect of mind that impresses him, his definition of fine art in terms of that which possesses an aim that imbues the pertinent art with content makes it probable that what he is talking about is intention. Since Hegel's day, but maybe most especially in the last three decades, philosophers of art have relied upon the notion of intention to attempt to solve many of the recurring problems of their field, including not only issues involving art status, but those involving authorship, interpretation, and fictional truth, among others. In Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, Paisley Livingston has performed the very valuable service of corralling a substantial number of topics regarding the intersection of art and intention between the covers of one book. Although there are books devoted to...
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Landy, Joshua
Philosophy to the Rescue
For those of us who are still in love with literature, it is hard to know quite which way to react to the recent spate of books rushing gallantly to its defense. Should we literary folk be flattered and grateful that philosophers are lining up to lend us new resources with which to justify our activities, or horrified that we ourselves have become constitutionally incapable of doing so? Should we join the defenders of serious and passionate literary criticism in celebrating its rebirth, or worry that, unbeknownst to themselves, they are singing what will turn out to have been its requiem? To change the metaphor slightly, are the well-meaning eulogists preventing literary criticism from throwing itself off the bridge, or just shedding helpless tears over a slowly closing sea? One thing, at least, seems certain: whether successfully or not, literary criticism has indeed made every effort to commit suicide. (In their very different books, Frank B. Farrell and Mark William Roche both begin from this same...
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