by Kristin Boyce
Dissertation completed at The University of Chicago (August, 2010) under the direction of James Conant and Michael Kremer (co-chairs), Daniel Brudney, and Jonathan Lear.
When reading a great work of literature, it is not unusual to feel that something of philosophical importance is being... more
When reading a great work of literature, it is not unusual to feel that something of philosophical importance is being achieved. But it has often proved difficult to do justice to such a feeling from within an analytic philosophical framework. One source of this difficulty is that the analytic tradition has defined itself in part by distinguishing sharply between the “logical” (that which pertains to the expression and justification of truth-evaluable content) and the “psychological” (that which pertains to effects on the psychological faculties of a reader or viewer, especially the feelings and imagination). This has created an obstacle to the possibility of seeing literary works as vehicles of serious philosophical thought because the sort of force that literary works have for their readers has been associated with a “merely psychological” capacity to powerfully engage the feelings and imagination. In seeking to overcome this obstacle, many analytic philosophers have assumed that if a work of literature is philosophically significant, this must be because of what it contributes to the “logical” task of expressing or justifying a philosophical view of some sort. I call this the “natural analytic assumption”. I argue not only that this assumption is not compulsory but also that making it precludes the possibility of doing full justice to some of the very literary works that have struck many as most philosophically powerfully.
I make this argument by drawing on one central case study: the literary project of Henry James. I turn to James’s work in particular because his writings have already attracted the attention of a number of leading philosophers, many of whom make the natural analytic assumption. The first stage of my argument involves examining in some detail the work of four such interpreters: Daniel Brudney, Alice Crary, Martha Nussbaum and Robert Pippin. I bring out how the natural analytic assumption shapes—intentionally or unintentionally—their respective accounts of literature and argue that making this assumption cripples their capacity to do full justice to the philosophical significance of James’s work.
The second stage of the argument involves developing an alternative account of the philosophical significance of James’s work. I do this by building on the work of philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond who seek to account more adequately for the philosophical significance of the literary form of uncontroversially philosophical texts that are central for the analytic tradition, namely, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. These interpreters do not make the natural analytic assumption. Instead, some such interpreters argue that Wittgenstein’s work takes the unusual literary forms it does as part of his effort to inherit and more fully develop methods of elucidating confusion and illusion which had their beginnings in the work of another brilliant philosopher of form, albeit non-aesthetic form: Gottlob Frege. Frege develops a special form of representing thought which he conceives of as, in part, an aid to the philosopher in the task of “liberating the human spirit” from confusions and illusions of thought. The larger argument in the second half of the dissertation is that the literary forms of representation that James develops contribute in a similar way to the elucidations of what I call confusions and illusions of living. James himself suggests the comparison between illusions of thought and illusions of life. In the opening paragraphs of The Wings of the Dove, he compares the disintegration of a meaningful sentence into meaningless sounds or marks to the disintegration of the unity and progression of a meaningful life into a mere succession of disconnected movements. Many of his works are centrally preoccupied with the possibility that our lives can lapse into such meaningless successions. I argue that what is philosophically most powerful and distinctive about his works lies in the ways in which they can serve to exhibit a reader’s life to the reader herself so as to allow her to recognize when her living is breaking down in this way—when her living has, to follow James’s own way of speaking, lapsed into a mere “death-in-life”.
Given that the analytic tradition developed in part out of the possibilities opened by Frege’s brilliant self-consciousness about form, it is surprising that this tradition has underestimated as consistently as it has the philosophical potential of both aesthetic and non-aesthetic forms of representation. The dissertation argues that keeping in view the methodological underpinnings of Frege’s self-consciousness about the usefulness of his Begriffsschrift can help us think more adequately about what philosophical uses various aesthetic forms may have. Furthermore, it demonstrates that doing fuller justice to aesthetic forms of representation in this way affords an important opportunity to more fully to develop some of the analytic tradition’s own best possibilities. Although by Frege’s lights the clarification of confusion plays a merely secondary role in his overall project, such clarification is recognized by central figures of the analytic tradition, such as Carnap and Wittgenstein, as philosophical work of the first importance. One central dimension of the inheritance of Frege's work within the analytic tradition, especially in the hands of the later Wittgenstein, has been a gradual expansion of our appreciation of the diversity of forms of philosophical confusion there can be, along with an exploration of the correlative diversity of methods of clarification best suited to their treatment. The dissertation argues that, in effect, central aspects of the literary project of Henry James can bring into view possibilities for yet further stages in such a development.
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