Henry W. Pickford - Thinking With Tolstoy and Wittgenstein - Expression, Emotion, and Art-Northwestern University Press (2015)

Thinking with Tolstoy
and Wittgenstein
and Wittgenstein
Expression, Emotion, and Art
Henry W. Pickford
northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016.

All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pickford, Henry W., author.

Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein : expression, emotion, and art /
Henry W. Pickford.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0 -8101-3170-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0 -8101-3172-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0 -8101-3171-2 (ebook)
1. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828–1910—Criticism and interpretation. 2.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. 3. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title.
PG3410.P48 2015
891.73’3—dc23
2015029413
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Kuang-Yu
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Chapter 1
Meaning Skepticism in Derrida and Wittgenstein 9
Chapter 2
Tolstoy’s Crisis: Anna Karenina 29
Chapter 3
Tolstoy’s Expressivist Aesthetic Theory: What Is Art? 53
Chapter 4
Schopenhauer’s Shadow 71
Chapter 5
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and Consequences 87
Chapter 6
Reconstructing Tolstoy I: The Nature of Emotions 107
Chapter 7
Reconstructing Tolstoy II: The Morality of Emotions 125
Chapter 8
Reconstructing Tolstoy III: Expression in Art 137
Conclusion 151
Notes 155
Bibliography 205
Index 221
Acknowledgments
This book is in a way a record of my intellectual journey, at the way sta-

tions of which it was my great fortune to encounter people of outstanding
intellect, erudition, generosity, and integrity, several of whom have become
dear friends. As an undergraduate student at Dartmouth, I was introduced to
Tolstoy’s writings by Barry Scherr and to Wittgenstein’s thought by Robert
Fogelin. As a graduate student at Stanford, I was able to deepen my knowl-
edge of Russian nineteenth-century literature with William Mills Todd III,
who has continued to offer unstinting support of my work. As a graduate
student at Yale, I honed my analytic skills and explored contemporary phi-
losophy of language with Ken Gemes. As a graduate student at the University
of Pittsburgh I was privileged to study Wittgenstein and much more with
John McDowell: his influence on my thinking in this book is pervasive. As a
visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University I was able to try out
some ideas with Andrew Wachtel and Julia Borisova. As an assistant profes-
sor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I was able to develop my thoughts
about emotion and non-inferential knowledge with Robert Hanna.
Barry Scherr, William Mills Todd III, Timothy D. Sergay, and Robert Hanna
each read chapters and offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions. Some
initial lines of argument were published as an article in Tolstoy Studies Jour-
nal, whose editor, Michael Denner, provided very helpful suggestions. Earlier
versions of parts of this book were presented in talks given at the University
of Pittsburgh, New York University, Harvard University, Northwestern Uni-
versity, and at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature
Association; my thanks to these audiences. I am also grateful to two anony-
mous readers for the press, whose suggestions greatly improved the quality
of the book. It was the late Helen Tartar who recommended Northwestern
University Press and its fine editor Michael L. Levine to me for this project.
Helen’s commitment to innovative, interdisciplinary research in the humanities
sustained the aspirations of books like this one, and it was completed in her
remembrance.
The support of friends and colleagues has sustained me over the years of
this project: Daniel Brudney, Daniel DelliBovi, David Ferris, Gordon Finlay-
son, John Frazee, Josef Früchtl, Ken Gemes, Zilla Goodman, Anil Gupta, Ben
Hale, Robert Hanna, Johan Hartle, Karen Hawley, Saskia Hintz, Martin Jay,
Janis Kaufman, Kathy Kiloh, Michael G. Levine, Iain Macdonald, Ruth Mas,
John McDowell, Christoph Menke, David Pan, Larson Powell, Barry Scherr,
ix
x Acknowledgments
Jessica Schilling, Timothy D. Sergay, Kieran Setiya, Pam Shime, Martin Shus-
ter, R. Clifton Spargo, Sonja Sutton, Rochelle Tobias, William Mills Todd III,
Eric Walczak, Maureen Pickford, and the Ahrens family.
I would like to thank my new colleagues at Duke University for making me
feel so welcome: Stefani Engelstein, Susanne Freytag, Kata Gellen, Michael
Gillespie, Bryan Gilliam, Corinna Kahnke, Laura Lieber, Heidi Madden,
Jakob Norberg, Thomas Pfau, Margaret Swanson, Dorothy Thorpe-Turner,
and Ingeborg Walther. I am likewise grateful for the convivial support of
colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the
Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies.
and Wittgenstein
Introduction
There is much to be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing

about how a work of art conveys “a feeling.”
—Wittgenstein
One could call Schopenhauer a quite crude mind. I.e., he does

have refinement, but at a certain level this suddenly comes to
an end & he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts,
his finishes. . . . One might say of Schopenhauer: he never takes
stock of himself.
—Wittgenstein
1. While the novels of his antipodal doppelgänger Dostoevsky enjoyed pre-

eminence among philosophers inclined toward existentialism, Tolstoy’s
artistic prose and its unmatched psychological realism have often served as
true north for philosophers writing on the nature of mind, emotions, moral
psychology, and value theory.1 Indeed, one contemporary philosopher has
confessed of Anna Karenina that “some of us come away from the book
with the sense that there is at least as much to learn from Tolstoy about how
we should live as can be learnt from Aristotle or from Kant. If this is right,
philosophy will be poorer if philosophers stay away in their professional com-
partment and ignore Tolstoy and other novelists.”2 One philosopher who did
not ignore Tolstoy is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously admitted to having
read few thinkers: chiefly Frege, Russell, and Schopenhauer.3 Recent scholar-
ship has concluded that Tolstoy should be added to this narrow pantheon.
Ray Monk writes of the young Wittgenstein’s fascination with Tolstoy’s The
Gospel in Brief: “It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever
he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of it
by heart . . . ‘If you are acquainted with it,’ he later told a friend, ‘then you
cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.’ ”4 And several
memoirs by colleagues attest to his enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s later writings in
general, including the treatise What Is Art?, with some conclusions of which,
Engelmann reports, Wittgenstein said he agreed.5 While Tolstoy’s importance
for Wittgenstein has been acknowledged in the literature, most often that
importance is relegated to Wittgenstein’s supposed emulation of Tolstoy in
his personal life and outlook. Representative of this view is Davison, who
claims that “the root of Tolstoy’s appeal for Wittgenstein lies in an essential
3
4 Introduction
affinity of character and spirit which is reflected in some biographical simi-

larities,”6 such similarities including teaching in rural schools, forsaking
family fortunes for a life of simplicity, and so on. While these biographical
similarities are compelling (indeed, both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein are often
viewed as leading somewhat “saintly” lives),7 I think that Tolstoy’s artistic
and essayistic texts—his images, ideas, and thoughts—are far more deeply
implicated in Wittgenstein’s thought than has hitherto been acknowledged.8
In this book I endeavor to show how a certain line of reasoning in Wittgen-
stein can be seen to be responding to problems mooted in Tolstoy’s texts. In
so doing I will show how Wittgenstein can elucidate Tolstoy, help us under-
stand his theory of art and help us see how it ultimately fails. Moreover,
enlisting further philosophical insights by Wittgenstein, I will develop a revi-
sionary account of Tolstoy’s idea of aesthetic expression that, I hope, will
merit renewed consideration.
2. My reading of Tolstoy via Wittgenstein, however, also has a second aim.

“Deconstruction,” based on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, has pro-
foundly influenced literary theory and several generations of scholars in a
wide variety of fields. While some scholars have argued for apparent affini-
ties between Derrida’s semiological critique of meaning and Wittgenstein’s
(later) philosophy, I join others who see that Wittgenstein can offer a power-
ful rebuttal to deconstructive arguments for meaning skepticism.9 In the first
chapter I lay out how such a Wittgensteinian rebuttal might look, drawing
on its key move, the claim that there are instances of understanding that do
not require an act of interpretation qua justification. That claim recurs in Tol-
stoy’s later writings, literary and essayistic, and tracing it out in some detail in
subsequent chapters reveals new insights into some of Tolstoy’s best-known
writings: Anna Karenina, What Is Art?, and The Kreutzer Sonata. We will
also come to see how Tolstoy’s study of Schopenhauer’s philosophy raised
a problem for his conception of immediate understanding in his aesthetic
theory, and how, in trying to resolve it, he fell behind his own best insights.
This in turn suggests how a revised aesthetic theory, modified in accordance
with Wittgenstein’s philosophy including his implicit criticism of Tolstoy,
might be worth our renewed attention today. The final chapters of the book
draw on lessons learned in previous chapters in order to situate a modified
Tolstoyan aesthetic expressivism in the contexts of today’s vigorous debate in
philosophy of mind surrounding the philosophy of emotions in general and
of moral emotions in particular, and the equally lively debate in philosophical
aesthetics surrounding the nature of aesthetic expression.
3. This book is thus an extended essay and a reconstruction in several senses.

First, it is a rational reconstruction of Tolstoy’s thought, drawing on various
texts he wrote in his later years. My general claim here is not that I am posi-
tivistically re-creating what Tolstoy was thinking when he put pen to paper.
Introduction 5
Rather I am fashioning, from the materials of his texts and my understanding

of Wittgenstein, a rationally compelling account I believe his texts can sug-
gest to us. This endeavor in rational reconstruction is guided by the principle
of charity towards Tolstoy’s writings: trying to make sense out of them with
a view to the reasonableness, coherence, and consistency of their author.10
Second, the first chapter is a rational reconstruction of two arguments
by Derrida, which I lay alongside a similar argument by Saul Kripke in his
influential reading of central passages in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Inves-
tigations. By construing Derrida’s arguments in this context, I hope to bring
out how Wittgenstein offers a telling refutation to them. Admirers of Derrida
might claim that I have twisted the master to suit my purposes; my response
is to request the same principle of charity that I bring to my readings.
Lastly, if I can show how to revise Tolstoy’s aesthetic expressivism, then
such a revised aesthetic theory would constitute a qualified reconstruction of
Tolstoy in answer to Derrida-inspired deconstruction. Moreover, elaborating
that reconstruction in the light of Wittgensteinian perspectives in contem-
porary debates surrounding emotion and aesthetic expression enhances its
plausibility.
Plan of the Book
In chapter 1 I introduce the central line of inquiry through a critical pre-

sentation of what could be considered a platitude in contemporary literary
theory: that any act of understanding (of a text, of spoken words, of a per-
son) requires an act of interpretation qua justification. This platitude may
be called the interpretivist assumption. What often follows this assumption
is the conclusion of meaning skepticism, either in an epistemological vein
(we can never be certain of having correctly or conclusively understood an
expression’s determinate meaning) or a metaphysical vein (there is no such
thing as determinate meaning). I juxtapose arguments for this conclusion
by Saul Kripke in his reading of Wittgenstein and by Jacques Derrida, and
then show how their arguments for meaning skepticism can be construed
as versions of one horn of a general dilemma (whose other horn is meaning
Platonism) that issues once the interpretivist assumption has been made, by
way of an alternative reading of Wittgenstein indebted to John McDowell.
This alternative reading holds against the Cartesianism of the interpretivist
assumption that there are instances of understanding that are not acts of
interpretation, where one’s understanding is immediate, non-inferential, and
without recourse to what could be called a justification in any robust sense.
In chapter 2 I turn to Tolstoy at the time of his “spiritual crisis” and locate
a similar notion of immediate, non-interpretive understanding at work in
his novel Anna Karenina, specifically functioning within a larger frame of
his avatar Levin’s skepticism about the meaning of life. I here introduce a
6 Introduction
few thoughts from Wittgenstein in order to tease out how skepticism, under-
standing, and the will may be related in Tolstoy’s novel.
In chapter 3 I interpret Tolstoy’s major treatise on aesthetics, What Is Art?,
to show how he develops this notion of immediate understanding into a cen-
tral concept in his expressivist aesthetic theory: a successful work of art will
“infect” immediately and universally its recipients with a distinct “feeling,”
and a good work of art will convey the right types of feelings, namely those
that foster either Christian brotherhood or universal communion.
In chapter 4 I explore how Schopenhauer’s ethical and aesthetic theories
might inform Tolstoy’s later writings. In doing so I unfold what I call the
“Nietzschean threat” implicit in this model of ethico-aesthetic understand-
ing, based on an interpretation of Schopenhauer’s theory of the influence of
music together with his theory of action and moral psychology. I conclude
by showing how Tolstoy’s theory in What Is Art? appears to be susceptible
to this threat.
In chapter 5 I turn to the novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy wrote
concomitantly with What Is Art?. I read the novella as Tolstoy’s attempt to
work out precisely the Nietzschean danger, that is, as an obstacle to the ethi-
cal ambitions Tolstoy has for his aesthetic theory. Here again some thoughts
on ethics by Wittgenstein, themselves likely derived from his study of Scho-
penhauer, inform my discussion. I then return to the last chapter of What Is
Art? and suggest that it was added to the treatise in an attempt by Tolstoy to
avert the Nietzschean threat he had come to realize inhabited his aesthetic
theory and its ethical aspirations. In order to guarantee the ethical aims of his
aesthetic theory Tolstoy uses precisely the metaphor of rules as rails that he
had criticized so savagely in his earlier writings, and the same metaphor that
Wittgenstein famously uses to trope meaning Platonism. In so doing we see
that Tolstoy ultimately falls behind his own best insights.
The final three chapters outline a reconstruction of Tolstoy’s theory suf-
ficient to constitute a viable alternative to “interpretist” accounts of aesthetic
understanding that derive from Derridean principles. Such a reconstruction
must negotiate three areas of vigorous debate: current controversies in the
philosophy of emotions in general, and of moral emotions in particular,
and debates about the nature of aesthetic expression. Chapter 6 identifies
constraints on the ontology and epistemology of emotions from my earlier
interpretations of Tolstoy’s writings, and argues that a conception of central
emotions as sui generis states inseparably composed of cognitive, conative,
and affective (physiological, phenomenological and behavioral-dispositional)
dimensions best fulfills those constraints. This view of emotions is defended
against rival theories including non-cognitive “affect theory,” which rest on
causal accounts that cannot incorporate the intentionality and normativity
of moral emotions.
Chapter 7 extends the examination of emotions to specifically moral emo-
tions, and demonstrates that the amalgam account resolves a fundamental
Introduction 7
tension in metaethics between moral judgment as cognitive belief on the one

hand, and motivating desire on the other. The chapter also argues that a “sen-
sibility theory” of moral emotions best fulfills the epistemological constraint,
as opposed to a purely causal-dispositional account or an overly cognitive
inferentialist account. Lastly, the chapter provides an account of an individ-
ual’s development of the cognitive dimension of moral emotions sufficient to
explain how aesthetic experience might contribute to one’s moral upbringing.
Chapter 8 locates a version of the causal-normative distinction within
various theories in philosophical aesthetics surrounding the emotional
expressiveness of artworks. Surprisingly, these debates reproduce some of
the positions that were identified and evaluated in chapter 1 regarding mean-
ing skepticism, so that it is possible to discern a theoretical account of an
artwork’s expression of emotion that parallels the account given of mean-
ing and understanding at the outset of this study. In this way I intend to
show that Tolstoy’s theory, suitably reconstructed and developed, constitutes
a viable position within these debates today. The book’s conclusion unifies
the arguments of the previous chapters in order to offer just such an account
of aesthetic expressivism.
A Note on Texts, Translations, and Typographical Conventions
Whenever possible currently available English translations of the works dis-

cussed have been consulted and cited. English translations of Tolstoy’s works
have been checked against the Jubilee edition of his works,11 and those of
Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein against their respective collected works.12
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, and quotations of origi-
nal Russian are rendered in a modified Library of Congress transliteration
scheme.
In keeping with current philosophical conventions, reference to words will
be made using quotation marks, while concepts will be indicated by the use of
small caps. Thus “fear” refers to the word, while fear refers to the concept.
Chapter 1
Meaning Skepticism in Derrida and Wittgenstein
Something surprising, a paradox, is a paradox only in a

particular, as it were defective, surrounding. One needs to
complete this surrounding in such a way that what looked like
a paradox no longer seems one.
—Wittgenstein
In this chapter I shall lay out some lines of argument and positions sur-
rounding the question: what is it to understand or know the meaning of
an expression? Reconstructions of certain arguments by Derrida and Witt-
genstein regarding the role of interpretation in knowledge of meaning will
ultimately prove to be crucial. Once we understand the lineaments and layout
of thoughts in this region, we will better appreciate how Wittgenstein might
help us to understand and evaluate Tolstoy’s theory of aesthetic expression.
1. Suppose someone correctly understands the meaning of the expression

“Add 2.” Then such understanding naturally entails that, when that person
is demonstrating her understanding and has enumerated, for instance, “996,
998, 1000,” that she should next say, “1002,” and that any other expres-
sion, such as “1004” or “zebra,” would be an error, or a misapplication of
the rule underlying how one is to apply the concept or rule add2. That is,
it is natural to think that the understanding of “Add 2” has a normative
reach, extending forward to numerals in the enumeration which have not
yet, or perhaps ever, been actually spoken, and that to understand “Add 2”
entails that, if one understands the meaning, then one’s relevant behavior
must accord with the rule of that expression’s application. Such normativity
of meaning seems to be essential to what it means to grasp or understand
meaning. Our arithmetical example is clearly simply an illustration for a gen-
eral requirement on understanding meaning; one manifests an understanding
of “red,” for instance, when one judges correctly, of red things before one,
“this is red.” But the arithmetical example possesses the virtue of simplicity:
one’s behavior must accord only with the relevant understanding, whereas
in the case of a descriptive term like “red,” correct accord requires not only
9
10 Chapter 1
correctly understanding the meaning of the term, but also correctly perceiv-
ing the empirical world. (Compare someone who understands the meaning
of “red” in terms of inferential relations, so knows that “this is red all over”
is incompatible with “this is blue all over” and entails “this is colored,” and
so on, but who is color-blind and so cannot correctly identify red things.) So
the arithmetical example brings to the fore the general link between under-
standing meaning and behavior that is correct or incorrect in relation to the
meaning understood, that is, behavior that either does or does not accord
with the meaning grasped.1
2. This normative relation between the meaning understood and the rele-
vant behavior can be further specified by contrasting a merely descriptive
or causal relation. Understanding meaning cannot consist simply in the dis-
position to behave in ways that accord with the meaning, for in that case it
would be correct, rather than merely an anthropomorphizing indulgence, to
attribute understanding of “Add 2” to an electronic calculator. Clearly the
calculator can be described as performing addition, as tested by exercising its
disposition to causally produce the next number in the series when “Add 2”
is provided as input. But consider a case in which there is a glitch in the wir-
ing, and the calculator malfunctions, always an empirical possibility. To even
register that the machine is malfunctioning, one must already have the idea of
the correct performance, such that the actual, empirical, dispositional behav-
ior can be seen to diverge from this normatively correct, expected behavior.
In §§192–95 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces the
image of a super-rigid “machine-as-symbol” to capture this normative notion
that the future applications of a word are already somehow determined, “in
a mysterious sense—already present.” But he notes that this machine-as-
s ymbol is not any actual, empirical machine, for the latter could have moved
differently, whereas the former, as it were by normative stipulation, cannot:
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved dif-
ferently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in
the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual
machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question
to be empirically determined in advance, but they to be really—in
a mysterious sense—already present. And it is quite true: the move-
ment of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense
from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is
predetermined.2
Therefore the understanding of meaning cannot consist in actual disposi-

tional facts about one’s performance. A dispositional account of meaning
may provide a description of performance, but it cannot provide a justifi-
cation of performance, because a disposition is not something to which its
exercises can be said to accord or not to accord.3 The dispositional account

cannot accommodate the normativity of meaning. As Wittgenstein states in
§192, the dispositional account and the normative account constitute two
different pictures of meaning; we get the idea of a super-rigid machine “as
the result of the crossing of different pictures.” His most memorable image
of this crossing of different pictures occurs shortly thereafter, when he tropes
normative rules as rails:
Whence comes the idea that the beginning of a series is a visible sec-
tion of rails invisibly laid to infinity? Well, we might imagine rails
instead of a rule. And infinitely long rails corresponds to the unlim-
ited application of a rule.4
We shall have occasion to encounter this image again in Tolstoy’s later

writings.
3. At this point in the dialectic we have specified an essentially norma-

tive aspect of grasping the meaning of an expression, namely grasping the
normative reach of the expression, its correct application in appropriate
circumstances. We have also argued that this normative relation cannot be
captured by a purely causal or dispositional account of meaning, for such an
account presupposes a normative account in the assumption that the disposi-
tion is functioning correctly. And now one is tempted to claim that it must
be some kind of occurrent mental state in which meaning consists and which
accounts for how one’s behavior accords with the meaning. Thus I imagine
a red image and consult it to determine whether a given object before me is
red and thus warrants the predication “___ is red.” Or I imagine the series
of even integers up to the last numeral enumerated and imagine the next in
order to determine the proper answer to “Add 2.” Or I call up from memory
the correct rule for performing an addition (e.g., placing them in a column,
moving right to left, carrying digits as necessary, etc.) and use it to determine
the correct sum, and so on. The occurrent mental state then, be it image,
sensation, rule, or principle, constitutes a meaning fact, as it were, appeal
to which justifies one’s behavior as being in accord with the meaning of the
expression in question.
4. And at this point, according to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein, skepticism

seems unavoidable, for the skeptic asks: when you advert to the rule of addi-
tion to justify your response to “Add 2” as correct, hence to justify that “Add
2” means addition, how do you know to reach for the rule of addition rather
than some other rule, and moreover, a rule the application of which might
accord with the rule of addition in all actual cases of “Add 2” which you’ve
hitherto treated, but which diverges from the “Add 2” series in some future
case?5 For example, suppose another rule, call it quadd2, which, like the
12 Chapter 1
rule add2 for “Add 2,” produces a series of numbers, say: 2, 4, 6, 8, . . . and
so on, but which diverges at some point further along the series, a point past
which you have never in fact thought of the series. Thus in all your behavior
in response to the request “Add 2,” your answers have accorded with both
the rule add2 and the rule quadd2. And therefore it is always possible that
you have not understood the meaning of “Add 2,” since all along you took
it to mean quadd2 rather than add2. But this epistemic skepticism in turn
gives rise to metaphysical meaning skepticism.6 No matter what mental state
you invoke to justify your grasp of the meaning of an expression, it is always
possible to interpret that mental state differently in the future. McDowell’s
exposition is especially lucid here:
Whatever piece of mental furniture I cite, acquired by me as a result

of my training in arithmetic, it is open to the skeptic to point out
that my present performance keeps faith with it only on one inter-
pretation of it, and other interpretations are possible. So it cannot
constitute my understanding “plus” in such a way as to dictate the
answer I give. Such a state of understanding would require not just
the original item [in my mind] but also my having put the right inter-
pretation on it. But what could constitute my having put the right
interpretation on some mental item? And now the argument can evi-
dently be repeated.7
The upshot of this argument is what Kripke calls Wittgenstein’s “skeptical par-
adox”: there is no fact of the matter that could constitute my having attached
one rather than another meaning to “Add 2” or any other expression.8
5. There is a temptation to recoil from the skeptical paradox by asserting

that there is a regression-stopper, a “final interpretation” that constitutes and
justifies meaning, and lays down, objectively, the normative reach of mean-
ing. In The Blue Book Wittgenstein gives voice to this temptation: “What
one wants to say is: ‘Every sign is capable of interpretation; but the mean-
ing mustn’t be capable of interpretation. It is the last interpretation.’ ”9 And
in Philosophical Investigations §218, as we saw, Wittgenstein captures this
notion using the imagery of rules as rails, the image, for instance, of the arith-
metical series that accords with “Add 2” running out to infinity (2, 4, 6, 8,
and so on): “We might imagine rails instead of a rule. And infinitely long rails
correspond to the unlimited application of a rule.”10 Contemporary philo-
sophical parlance—for instance in mathematical realism—names this idea
of an independent, objective fact of meaning “meaning Platonism.”11 David
Pears provides a useful gloss: “The idea is that in all our operations with lan-
guage we are really running on fixed rails laid down in reality before we even
appeared on the scene. Attach a name to an object, and the intrinsic nature
of the object will immediately take over complete control and determine the
correct use of the name on later occasions.”12 On the one hand, it captures the
idea that there is an objectively correct normative standard of application of
an expression with which one must accord if one understands the expression
in question. On the other hand, it induces the skeptic to ask: how can such
an infinitely applicable meaning be present in one’s mind?
“But I don’t mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) deter-
mines the future use causally and as a matter of experience, but that
in a queer way, the use itself is already present.”—But of course it is,
“in some sense”! Really the only thing wrong with what you say is
the expression, “in a queer way.”13
The invocation of addition as a Platonic idea does not solve the skeptic’s
problem, for granted the objective existence of such an idea, the skeptic may
still inquire: how do you know that your mind has grasped that idea, that
particular rule? What constitutes your having grasped the Platonic idea add2
rather than the Platonic idea quadd2? Thus, Kripke concludes: “for Witt-
genstein, Platonism is largely an unhelpful evasion of the problem of how
our finite minds can give rules that are supposed to apply to an infinity of
cases. Platonic objects may be self-interpreting, or rather, they may need no
interpretation; but ultimately there must be some mental entity involved that
raises the sceptical problem.”14
6. It is this conception of meaning as meaning Platonism which constitutes

the target of Derrida’s recognizably “deconstructive” arguments. In Husserl’s
Logical Investigations, Derrida claims to uncover a tacit “metaphysical pre-
supposition”: “the original self-giving evidence, the present or presence of
sense to a full and primordial intuition” which he subsequently elaborates as
“self-presence in consciousness—where ‘consciousness’ means nothing other
than the possibility of self-presence of the present in the living present.”15 And
in “Différance” Derrida equates intentional meaning (vouloir-dire) with self-
a wareness in consciousness:
What does “consciousness” mean? Most often in the very form of

“meaning” [“vouloir-dire”], consciousness in all its modifications
is conceivable only as self-presence, a self-perception of presence.
And what holds for consciousness also holds here for what is called
subjective existence in general. Just as the category of subject is
not and never has been conceivable without reference to presence
as hupokeimenon or ousia, etc., so the subject as consciousness has
never been able to be evinced otherwise than as self-presence.16
In Limited, Inc., Derrida again locates his target in self-conscious intentional

meaning as determined by what he calls the positive values “of an exhaustively
14 Chapter 1
definable context, of a free consciousness present to the totality of the opera-

tion [that is, open-ended application], of an absolutely meaningful speech
[vouloir-dire] master of itself: the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field
whose organizing center remains intention.”17 And in Of Grammatology he
explicitly identifies Cartesianism as providing the basis for the idea that “the
determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjec-
tivity.”18 If to understand the meaning of a word is to know, in the Cartesian
sense of intentional self-consciousness, the normative reach of the word, its
correct usage in future applications, then Derrida’s target would appear to be
meaning Platonism transposed into a Cartesian model of self-consciousness.
That model holds that the contents of one’s mind are transparently avail-
able to introspection or “inner sense,” so that the inner, mental realm is one
of limpid self-knowledge, whereas across the Cartesian divide, knowledge
of the external world via “outer sense” is always susceptible to skeptical
doubt, since the deliverances of outer sense may be mistakenly identified, or
misinterpreted.19
7. We can reconstruct arguments from Derrida’s writings that target meaning

Platonism on either side of the Cartesian divide and that in both cases lead to
a skeptical paradox similar to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein.20 Derrida’s
arguments turn on “quasi-transcendental infrastructures,” to use Rudolphe
Gasché’s helpful term,21 which Derrida claims are both the conditions for the
possibility of meaning and the conditions for the impossibility of meaning,
where meaning is understood as meaning Platonism.
Quasi-transcendental infrastructure is Gasché’s general term for differ-
ential relations which constitute the possibility of signification, that is, for
a signifier to bear meaning. The classic locus for this way of thinking is
Saussurean linguistics, where the meaning-bearing property of a phoneme
is grounded in that phoneme’s being different from but related to other
phonemes that likewise thereby can bear meaning. Thus the phoneme /b/
in English is meaning-bearing because its differential relationships to other
phonemes such as /p/ are minimally necessary to ground the semantic differ-
ence in the words “bat” and “pat.” But the meaning-bearing possibility of /b/,
according to Saussure and Derrida, resides wholly in its systematic (struc-
tural) differentiation from other phonemes. Derrida’s move is to claim that
any potentially meaning-bearing entity—phoneme, word, concept—likewise
has as its condition of possibility its differential relationship to other poten-
tially meaning-bearing entities of its type:
In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing, the “graphic” signi-

fier refers to the phoneme through a web of many dimensions which
binds it, like all signifiers, to other written and oral signifiers, within
a “total” system open, let us say, to all possible investments of sense.
We must begin with the possibility of that total system. . . . Even
before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a

signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it, the concept
of the graphie [unit of a possible graphic system] implies the frame-
work of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems
of signification.22
The “trace”23 is therefore the condition of possibility for “the play of signify-
ing references that constitute language,” “that is to say the origin of meaning
in general.”24 Thus, whatever word (or concept) may be occurrently present
to consciousness, its conditions of possibility include its differential relation-
ships to other words (or concepts) not occurrently present to consciousness.
This understanding of the trace forms the basis of our first reconstructed
deconstructive argument, which attacks meaning Platonism within Cartesian
consciousness by arguing that such a conception of meaning could never be
wholly epistemically accessible to such a consciousness. Since a necessary
condition for signification is the given semantic item’s differential relation-
ship to other semantic items, those other items, although not present as the
intentional content of one’s self-awareness, are nonetheless somehow “pres-
ent” through their very relatedness to the given semantic item which is the
intentional content of one’s self-awareness. Thus there is always a “supple-
ment” or “remainder” that is not available to intentional consciousness and
yet is necessary for its determinate, meaningful content. Moreover, Derrida
claims that these differential relationships are themselves not intentional, not
“motivated,” and hence prior to while enabling of the purview of intentional
consciousness. Determinate differential relationships are made possible by
just this “possibility of the trace” or “arché-writing”: “Difference by itself
would be more ‘originary,’ but one would no longer be able to call it ‘origin’
or ‘ground,’ those notions belong essentially to the history of onto-theology
[which understands being as presence], to the system functioning as the effac-
ing of difference”;25 “it [arché-writing] is that very thing which cannot let
itself be reduced to the form of presence.”26 Differentiality as such, as the
condition for determinate differential relationships which themselves are
conditions for determinate signification, Derrida calls différance:
It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather,

before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which
produces difference. The (pure) trace is différance . . . Although it
does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plen-
titude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign
(signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation,
motor or sensory . . . [différance] founds the metaphysical opposition
between the sensible and the intelligible, between the signifier and
signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in
a sense, a writing, no derived “notation” would be possible; and the
16 Chapter 1
classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could

not arise. Of course, the positive sciences of signification can only
describe the work and the fact of différance, the determined differ-
ences and the determined presences that they make possible. There
cannot be a science of différance itself in its operation, as it is impos-
sible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of
a certain non-origin.27
The enabling but unmotivated operation of différance, anterior to intentional

consciousness, Derrida calls play: “One could call play the absence of the
transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruc-
tion of onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence. . . . The immotivation
of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state,
as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure.”28
This picture of the quasi- transcendental infrastructure as a necessary
condition for signification in general justifies Derrida’s next claim: that
intentional consciousness, understood in the Cartesian model as an occur-
rent mental state fully accessible to the subject, cannot bring to awareness
these differential relationships underlying the determinate meaning content
of intentional consciousness:
Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only

if each element that is said to be “present,” appearing on the stage of
presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark
of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark
of its relation to a future element. This trace relates no less to what
is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes
what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to
what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future consid-
ered as a modified present.29
The first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signified con-
cept is never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer
only to itself. Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in
a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other
concepts, by the systematic play of differences.30
We have to be more careful here, for the argument as it stands is enthymematic,

relying on a tacit assumption which Martin Stone has called the interpretivist
premise: that to understand any semantic item (word, concept, etc.) requires
interpreting it.31 That is, our argument works only so long as we assume that
to know or understand the intentional content (meaning) of one’s occurrent
mental state requires that one interpret that content as the (correct) mean-
ing. Since the content can never, by Derrida’s lights, be brought to complete
(“absolute”) self-presence in consciousness, it can never definitively be inter-

preted. Rather, différance ensures that once we try to interpret the semantic
item under our mind’s eye, we are liable to set off on a potentially infinite
quest for the determinate differential relationships, “the indefinite drift of
signs, as errance and change of scene, linking re-presentations one to another
without beginning or end.”32 Therefore we can never absolutely, fully, know
what we mean by any semantic item we entertain in consciousness, because
the quasi-transcendental infrastructures that are a necessary condition for
the possibility of meaning are likewise a condition for the impossibility of
meaning (where meaning is understood as full presence to consciousness of
determinate semantic content).33
We can now provide the reconstruction of this first deconstructive argu-
ment in more perspicuous form:
1. Assumption: to understand any semantic item (word, concept,
etc.) is to interpret it.
2. A necessary condition for signification is the semantic item’s dif-
ferential relationship to other semantic items.
3. The differential relationship between these items entails that
those other than the intentional content of consciousness are none-
theless “present” or implicated through their relatedness. Thus there
is always a “supplement” or “remainder” that is not immediately
available to intentional consciousness and yet is a necessary condi-
tion for it.
4. Therefore the supplement is a condition for both the possibility
and impossibility of meaning (determinate intentional content).
5. Therefore interpretation is interminable, since the requirement
of interpretation (premise 1) and the nature of meaning content
(premise 3) entails the possibility of unending “drift” or “deferral”
(différance).
6. Therefore there is no determinate meaning (skeptical paradox).34
8. This first reconstructed deconstructive argument is, however, liable to a

telling objection, namely that the argument operates with conceptual materi-
als that are not yet sufficient to speak of meaning, because these conceptual
materials do not include the notion of the normativity of meaning. Derrida
clearly asserts that at the level of différance and related infrastructures (mark,
trace, spacing, supplement, remainder, etc.), such relations are not motivated,
not bound by intentionality or any other normative constraint, and therefore
they operate at a level below, as it were, the “bedrock” at which justifications
for meaning come to an end: “If I have exhausted the justification I have
reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is
simply what I do.’ ”35 The idea of the objection is to concede that differential
relationships among semantic items are indeed necessary for meaning, but to
18 Chapter 1
deny that they are sufficient: the notion of meaning comes into the picture
only when the normative reach of the semantic item is taken on board, and
such normative reach in turn constrains the claimed-for infinite deferral of
sense. Since the possibility of such deferral does not allow the notion of error
or mistake to play a role, that possibility operates below the level at which
one can speak of meaning at all:
Someone asks me: What is the colour of this flower? I answer: “red.”—
Are you absolutely sure? Yes, absolutely sure! But may I not have
been deceived and called the wrong colour “red”? No. That certainty
with which I call the colour “red” is the rigidity of my measuring-rod,
it is the rigidity from which I start. When I give descriptions, that is
not to be brought into doubt. This simply characterizes what we call
describing.
(I may of course even here assume a slip of the tongue, but nothing
else.)
Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-

game. It characterizes what we call description.36
The sign “red” and the concept red are differentially distinct from related
semantic items, like the signs “led” and “bed” and the concepts blue and yel-
low, but those differential constitutive relationships operate below the level
of “rigidity”—normativity—that is definitive of meaning at all. Therefore the
contingency or potentially open-ended network of differential relationships
cannot ground meaning skepticism. An analogy may be helpful here. Con-
sider a flat surface composed of regular squares, alternately light and dark
colored, and a pile of variously shaped bits of wood. It is true that the squares
of the flat surface and bits of wood are in part individuated—repeatedly
recognizable—through their differences from other similarly typed entities.
But this differential relationship cannot constitute the basis for raising skep-
tical doubts about whether these entities constitute the determinate game of
chess, say, because a necessary feature of the game of chess—normative rules
about how chess should be played—are not yet in view. The identity of a
given bit of wood as a “bishop,” say, already imports the idea of normativity
(because “the bishop” is in part defined as that bit of wood that moves only
diagonally, or has a value of three points, etc.). Hence if the skeptic asks,
“Given that this bit of wood is individuated only in its differential contrast
to differently shaped other bits of wood, what justification can you provide
for claiming that it represents a bishop?”, one can respond that the skeptic
cannot use the term “bishop” without already presupposing the normative
notions (what constitutes a correct and incorrect move in chess, for example)
that answer his question: the bishop is that bit of wood that may move like
this but not like that. Likewise Derrida’s “semiological critique” of deter-
minate meaning as self-presence to consciousness cannot reach upward to
meaning, as it were, from the level at which the critique operates, because
the critique lacks the conceptual resources to speak of meaning: normativity.
If normativity—following according to the rule of an expression’s applica-
tion— is fundamental to meaning, then the differential relationships that
operate below this normative “bedrock” of meaning cannot yet be considered
meaningful, since they do not of themselves carry normative significance.
9. Although the first deconstructive argument fails to reach its conclusion of

meaning skepticism, a second deconstructive argument explicitly addresses
the normativity constraint inherent in the notion of meaning, in order to argue
for meaning skepticism. This argument can be reconstructed from Derrida’s
Limited, Inc., where he introduces another quasi-transcendental infrastruc-
ture, that of “iterability,” meant to syncopate the notions of repeatability and
alterity.37 Derrida claims that the meaning of an expression must be at once
identical, that is, repeatable across contexts, and different, that is, applicable
to new contexts, since each context is (ever so slightly, perhaps) different.
Therefore, when confronted with new circumstances, one must judge, that is,
interpret, whether the expression correctly applies to those circumstances, in
effect possibly extending the range of application of the item. Thus to know
what “red” means is in effect to be able to apply “red” correctly to novel red
things one encounters in future contexts. Thus the meaning of “red” and red
extends in an open-ended way to new circumstances of application in the
future. Because of the logical possibility of novel circumstances of applica-
tion, there can be no knowledge “of an exhaustively defined context, of a
free consciousness present to the totality of the operation, and of absolutely
meaningful speech [vouloir-dire].”38 Derrida explains:
Let us not forget that “iterability” does not signify simply . . . repeat-
ability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in
the singularity of the event, for instance, in this or that speech act. It
entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event,
concept and singularity. There is thus a reapplication (without trans-
parent self-reflection and without pure self-identity) of the principle
of iterability to a concept of iterability that is never pure. There is no
idealization without (identificatory) iterability; but for the same rea-
son, for reasons of (altering) iterability, there is no idealization that
keeps itself pure, safe from all contamination.39
Derrida inscribes within the structure of the expression representing a con-

cept the conditions of its “normative reach”: each application or recognition
of a concept’s use in principle necessarily requires the subject to interpret
the concept, to decide whether it falls under the rule of its application. The
20 Chapter 1
condition that makes it possible for a concept to apply in novel circumstances

is the same condition that makes the idea of a fixed, ideal meaning impossible.
In other words, the application of a concept in part determines its meaning;
since the former is in principle underdetermined vis-à-vis possible future cir-
cumstances, so too is the latter.40 Derrida analyzes this underdetermination
of meaning specifically in terms of the normativity of meaning: the meaning
of an expression being underdetermined entails the possibility of misapplica-
tion, error, or mistake. This has dire consequences only if we think of meaning
as “fixed” or “ideal”: that if one knows the meaning of an expression, then
one somehow already knows all the correct applications of the expression in
a potentially infinite number of infinitely variable circumstances. The conclu-
sion of meaning skepticism emerges from Derrida’s claim that error—hence
the elimination of fixed or ideal meaning— is “a necessary possibility”41
inscribed into the nature of the expression by its iterability. To treat error and
misunderstanding as only accidental, external to the expression’s use, is pre-
cisely to presuppose a metaphysical-normative idealization of meaning, of a
concept’s application reaching out to all of its possible circumstances. Hence
“the condition of the possibility of these effects [of meaning] is simultane-
ously . . . the condition of the impossibility of their rigorous purity,” which
succinctly names the deconstructive version of the skeptical paradox.42
We can understand the second reconstructed deconstructive argument as
follows:
1. Assumption: to understand an expression is to interpret it.
2. Any expression possesses the property of iterability: both
repeatable (capable of correct application) in new circumstances and
alterable (capable of misapplication or radically new interpretation).43
3. Therefore the necessary conditions of possibility for the mean-
ing of an expression are also the conditions for the impossibility
(error, misapplication) of the meaning of an expression. The risk of
misapplication and misunderstanding is a “necessary possibility” of
meaning.44
4. Therefore there can be no infallible and full (i.e., Cartesian)
understanding of intentional meaning.45
5. Therefore there is no determinate meaning (skeptical paradox).46
It is clear that once again Derrida’s target is the form of meaning Platonism
found in Husserl: full intentional self-presence of meaning, what he in Lim-
ited, Inc., calls “absolutely meaningful speech [vouloir-dire].”47 Wittgenstein’s
image of rules as rails is here rendered vulnerable, historical, contingent:
To account for a certain stability (by essence always provisional and

finite) is precisely not to speak of eternity or of absolute solidity; it
is to take into account a historicity, a nonnaturalness, of ethics, of
politics, or institutionality, etc. If recalling this is to put radically into
question the stability of contexts, then, yes, I do that. I say that there
is no stability that is absolute, eternal, intangible, natural, etc. But
that is implied in the very concept of stability. A stability is not an
immutability; it is by definition always destabilizable.48
In our first reconstructed deconstructive argument, we saw how Derrida

endeavored to show how within the Cartesian mind, meaning as intentional
self-consciousness is susceptible to the drift of différance, such that the Carte-
sian ego can never completely grasp the supposed meaning of an expression.
In this second argument Derrida offers a critique from the other side of the
Cartesian divide. The normative reach of an expression is in principle always,
as a “structural possibility,” vulnerable to misapplication, misunderstand-
ing, radical reinterpretation, and so on. This possibility of normative failure
exceeds the normative constraints of context, be they external (the circum-
stances of correct application can never be completely known or stated) or
internal (the possibilities of failure or reinterpretation exceed one’s inten-
tional meaning [vouloir-dire]). While according to Derrida the philosophical
tradition—including Austin in his theory of speech acts—relegates the possi-
bility of mishap to accidental, or marginal or parasitical cases, Derrida claims
that such possibility of mishap inheres in the very metaphysical structure of
any expression in virtue of the infrastructures discussed above:
In the description of the structure called “normal,” “normative,”

“central,” “ideal,” this possibility [of misunderstanding] must be inte-
grated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as
though it were a simple accident—marginal or parasitic.49
The relation of “mis” (misunderstanding, mis- interpreting, for

example) to that which is not “mis-,” is not at all that of a general
law to cases, but that of a general possibility inscribed in the structure
of positivity, of normality, or the “standard.” All that I recall is that
this structural possibility must be taken into account when describing
so-called ideal normality, or so-called just comprehension or interpre-
tation, and this possibility can be neither excluded nor opposed. An
entirely different logic is called for.50
Thus we can see that both of our reconstructed deconstructive arguments by

Derrida for the skeptical paradox of meaning rely on a Saussurean construal
of the “structure of the sign” together with the interpretivist assumption
that understanding a sign, or any semantic item, always requires an act of
interpretation.
10. Both Kripke and Derrida offer meaning-skeptical arguments that appear
to conclude in versions of a skeptical paradox, that is, that there is no such
22 Chapter 1
thing as determinate meaning, no fact of the matter as to what an expres-

sion means. We have also seen that their arguments commence from the
tacit assumption that understanding the meaning of an expression requires
interpreting the expression. We can now recast their thinking in the form of
a dilemma: an argument that leads to an alternative between two false or
undesirable conclusions.
Kripke’s Dilemma
1. Assumption: understanding an expression requires interpreting

the expression.
2. Problem: what fact constitutes my having given some expres-
sion (e.g., “plus”) an interpretation with which only certain uses of
it would conform?
3. First Horn of Dilemma = skeptical paradox. Any fact I identify
as indicative of my having given some expression a determinate inter-
pretation is itself susceptible to the skeptic’s query: couldn’t that fact
be interpreted differently? If so, what makes my interpretation the
right one? Result: regress of appeals to interpretation.
4. Second Horn of Dilemma = meaning Platonism. Understand-
ing an expression is possessing an interpretation that cannot in turn
be interpreted (a regression-stopper). The instruction one received in
learning the expression guarantees the future use one makes of it,
because to understand the expression is to know all its possible cor-
rect applications.
This presentation of Kripke’s thinking brings out how the skeptical paradox
and meaning Platonism are related, as possible responses to the problem gen-
erated by the skeptic once the assumption of understanding as interpretation
is taken on board.51
Derrida’s thinking also lends itself to presentation as a dilemma.
Derrida’s Dilemma
1. Assumption: understanding an expression requires interpreting

the expression.
2. Problem: any expression is part of a system of differential rela-
tionships with other expressions, and therefore in some sense refers
to these other expressions. So what fact constitutes my having given
the expression a determinate interpretation?
3. First Horn of Dilemma = skeptical paradox. The conditions
of possibility of an expression being determinately meaningful are
likewise conditions of impossibility of an expression’s having a deter-

minate meaning. Interpretation is potentially endless, and involves
the essential possibility of normative failure (misunderstanding).
4. Second Horn of Dilemma = meaning Platonism. Understand-
ing an expression is possessing an interpretation that cannot in
turn be interpreted (a regression-stopper), an “ideal unity” of the
expression’s meaning present to intentional consciousness (Husserl’s
Cartesianism).
Here too this presentation emphasizes how meaning skepticism and meaning
Platonism can be seen as two responses to the problem that emerges once we
assume that to understand an expression is to interpret it.
11. It will prove valuable later, in section 4 of chapter 8, to note here that
Kripke and Derrida diverge in their respective responses to the dilemma
outlined above. To the “scepticial paradox” he reads in Wittgenstein Kripke
offers what he calls a “sceptical solution.” It is a sceptical solution because it
“begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic’s negative assertions are unanswer-
able.”52 That is, Kripke’s solution accepts the metaphysical conclusion of the
“sceptical paradox,” that there is no such thing as a meaning fact, no truth-
c onditions for the meaning of an expression or the extension of a concept
for an individual; hence “the sceptical solution does not allow us to speak of
a single individual, considered by himself and in isolation, as ever meaning
anything. . . . Wittgenstein holds, with the sceptic, that there is no fact as to
whether I mean plus or quus [i.e., something like quadd2] . . . if we suppose
that facts, or truth conditions, are of the essence of meaningful assertion, it
will follow from the skeptical conclusion that assertions that anyone ever
means anything are meaningless.”53 Instead, to explain the normative reach
of an expression or concept, Kripke holds we should invoke a weaker notion
of justification or assertability conditions, roughly understood as the condi-
tions under which a community of speakers would accept a given assertion of
an expression or predication of a concept as acceptable. Kripke understands
these assertability conditions to be the “inclinations” of the community to
license or reject given utterances, and hence to accept or reject a potential
member of the community:
In fact, our actual community is (roughly) uniform in its practices

with respect to addition. Any individual who claims to have mastered
the concept of addition will be judged by the community to have
done so if his particular responses agree with those of the community
in enough cases, especially the simple ones. . . . An individual who
passes such tests is admitted into the community as an adder; an
individual who passes such tests in enough other cases is admitted
as a normal speaker of the language and member of the community.
24 Chapter 1
Those who deviate are corrected and told (usually as children) that
they have not grasped the concept of addition. One who is an incor-
rigible deviant in enough respects simply cannot participate in the life
of the community and in communication.54
This is a descriptive account of the communal recognition of meaning, and

it amounts to a communal form of the causal-dispositional account that
Kripke rejected in the case of an individual’s grasp of meaning. In effect,
the normativity of meaning is now equated to whatever the community is
inclined or disposed to accept; it is conceptually impossible, on this account,
for the community to be wrong about the meaning of an expression. The
position that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein—the view of “Kripkenstein,”
as it were—accepts metaphysical meaning skepticism and elevates the dis-
positional account from the context of the individual to the context of the
community; but just as a dispositional account fails to capture normativity
for an individual’s understanding of an expression, so too does the disposi-
tional account fail to capture normativity for a community’s understanding
of an expression.
Derrida, on the other hand, embraces metaphysical meaning skepticism
for its political potentialities. If meaning is fundamentally underdetermined,
if there is no meaning fact as to what rule of application a concept has, or
what the normative reach of an expression is, then it is always possible for
conventions and institutions to radically change or be changed, for them to
“invent” a new rule of application or alter the normative reach of an expres-
sion, for it is the “structural possibility” inscribed in the metaphysical nature
of the sign, as he writes in Limited, Inc.
12. Presenting Kripke’s and Derrida’s arguments in the form of a dilemma

focuses our attention on the assumption that gives rise to it, the assump-
tion that understanding an expression necessarily involves interpreting the
expression. It is this assumption which Wittgenstein interrogates in passages
like the following:
A rule stands there like a sign-post.—Does the sign-post leave no

doubt open about the way to go? Does it shew which direction I am
to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath
or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it;
whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one?—
And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones
or of chalk marks on the ground—is there only one way of interpret-
ing them?—So I can say, the sign-post does after all leave no room for
doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes
not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an
empirical one.55
In this passage Wittgenstein emphasizes precisely the questionable move

that both Kripke and Derrida make, that of isolating and hypostatizing the
semantic item (rule or expression) and then claiming that it has no intrinsic
determinate meaning, is liable to multiple interpretations, a conclusion to
which meaning Platonism can be seen to respond.56 But both positions—
meaning skepticism and meaning Platonism—issue from and in response to
the interpretivist assumption. Wittgenstein develops the point further along
in the Philosophical Investigations:
“But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? What-
ever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.”—That is
not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation still hangs in
the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.
Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.
“Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the
rule?”—Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule—say a
sign-post—got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is
there here?—Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to
this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it.
But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come
about that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-
sign really consists in. On the contrary; I have further indicated that
a person goes by the sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular
use of sign-posts, a custom.57
I take it that one of the things that Wittgenstein is doing here is objecting
to the move by Kripke and Derrida of abstracting an expression from the
practice in which it has normative significance and then, in the voice of the
skeptic, to demand an account of the expression’s normative significance
when so isolated. Wittgenstein’s response is that it is only in the context of
that very practice, custom, institution that one can speak of normative sig-
nificance in the first place:
To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of

chess, are customs (uses, institutions).
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To
understand a language means to be master of a technique.58
Wittgenstein is also careful to hold apart the historical-causal account of one’s

learning the technique from the normative account of the technique itself. Thus,
in response to the skeptical question “why should you follow the sign-post in
this way?” one is justified in providing a historical-casual account, namely,
“That is the way my parents taught me” as well as a normative account, namely,
“That is the correct way to follow signs around here (in our community).”59
26 Chapter 1
Moreover, Wittgenstein in §199 acknowledges that any interpretation of

an expression “still hangs in the air along with what it interprets,” and can-
not provide the kind of justification (“support”) demanded by the skeptic.
But rather than invoke a form of meaning Platonism which he has already
savaged, Wittgenstein diagnoses the problem as emerging from the tacit
assumption that to understand is to interpret:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a

rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with
the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord
with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And
so there would be neither accord nor conflict here [i.e., the skeptical
paradox].
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere
fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation
after another; as if each one contented us for a moment, until we
thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that
there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but
which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going
against it” in actual cases.
Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to the
rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term “interpreta-
tion” to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.60
Wittgenstein’s diagnosis acknowledges one kind of legitimate use of “inter-

pretation”: “the substitution of one expression of the rule for another,” where
the alternative expressions of the rule function at the same level, so to speak,
where the understanding of the rule is presupposed. Wittgenstein is chal-
lenging instead a notion of interpretation that as it were justifies or grounds
the understanding of the rule in the first place (elsewhere he speaks of it as
a “shadow” accompanying particular correct applications of the rule).61 At
this level, the level of bedrock, the interpretivist assumption is misplaced.62
13. The diagnoses of the dilemmas of Kripke and Derrida reveal their tacit
assumption of the interpretivist premise that understanding an expression
always requires the act of interpreting the expression. Adopting such an
assumption leads to the two horns of the dilemma: meaning skepticism and
meaning Platonism. Meaning skepticism draws the counterintuitive, para-
doxical conclusion that meaning is indeterminate: there is no fact of the
matter that justifies an expression’s having a determinate meaning. Meaning
Platonism halts the interpretive regress, but itself is stymied by an implicit
Cartesianism: either meaning Platonism exists in some transcendent, super-
natural world (Plato’s heaven of the Forms) in which case it seems impossible
to account for how we humans can grasp meanings (Kripke’s response to
meaning Platonism), or ex hypothesi the human mind possesses such “ideal

unities” but then confronts the “necessary possibility” that any actual utter-
ance, or application of the meaning-entity, is liable to circumstances of failure
(Derrida’s response to Husserl’s meaning Platonism).
Wittgenstein’s solution to meaning skepticism as adumbrated here is to
reject the interpretivist assumption, that is, to hold that there are cases of
understanding the meaning of an expression that are not acts of interpretation
or inference in the sense of justification. In this line of thought Wittgenstein
had an unlikely literary predecessor: Leo Tolstoy, who at the height of his
literary fame succumbed to a debilitating spiritual crisis prompted by radical
skepticism.
Chapter 2
Tolstoy’s Crisis: Anna Karenina
“I noticed that he was out of humor.” Is this a report about

his behavior or his state of mind? . . . Both; not side-by-side,
however, but about the one via the other.
—Wittgenstein
1. We have seen in the previous chapter how Cartesianism and interpretiv-

ism lie at the heart of the reconstructed meaning-skeptical dilemmas whose
horns are meaning Platonism (rules as rails) on the one hand, and the mean-
ing skeptical paradox (there is no determinate meaning) on the other. This
chapter will explore aspects of the problem of meaning skepticism as they
are broached in several texts from the later period of Tolstoy’s production,
that is, around the time of his “crisis,” the onset of which preceded by several
years his beginning to write Anna Karenina and which he presented to the
public in A Confession, and which scholars believe was at least in part trig-
gered by his reading of Schopenhauer.1 Tolstoy’s thought about meaning and
action, and their implications for aesthetic experience, developed throughout
his long writing life and were more often expressed in literary than discursive
works. Those thoughts, however, became more direct, and directly expressed,
during and after his “spiritual crisis.” For that reason, and because out of
this crisis emerged the work with which we are principally concerned, What
Is Art?, we shall consider works from the author’s “late” period, beginning
with Anna Karenina. While some scholars claim a full break between Anna
Karenina and Tolstoy’s later, overtly religious works, I shall trace certain
conceptual and lexical characteristics in his later writings to their ostensible
origin in Anna Karenina, and—in subsequent chapters—show how they are
developed more fully in later texts such as What Is Art? and The Kreutzer
Sonata.2
My general approach to Tolstoy’s writings of this period derives both from
the larger project of the book—to explore a set of problems common to him
and Wittgenstein in the context of a critique of Derrida’s meaning skepticism—
and from a hint offered by Tolstoy himself. In a letter (April 23–26, 1876)
to his friend Nikolai Strakhov, Tolstoy propounded his understanding of the
29
30 Chapter 2
unity and coherence of Anna Karenina, which was often perceived as consist-
ing of two unrelated plots (Anna and Vronsky on the one hand, Kitty and
Levin on the other) by its early critics.3 In his letter Tolstoy spoke of “inner
linkages” connecting scenes and chapters of the novel:
In everything, almost everything that I have written, I have been

guided by the need to collect thoughts that are linked between each
other in order to express myself, but each thought expressed sepa-
rately in words loses its meaning, is terribly coarsened, when it alone
is separated from its linkage. That very linkage is created not by
thought (it seems to me), but by something else, and to express the
essence of that linkage directly in words is impossible; it is possible
only indirectly, by describing images, actions, situations, in words.4
Several critics subsequently have explored this idea of “linkage” at the lin-
guistic, symbolic, thematic, biographical, and serial-compositional levels.5 I
here undertake something similar, exploring such linkages, ranging from the
lexical to the biographical levels, but across writings extending from Anna
Karenina to A Confession, Kreutzer Sonata, and What Is Art? to the late
tales. In his writings Tolstoy meditated and elaborated upon the same prob-
lems of existential importance to him, and so we find related topics, images,
and Denkfiguren (thought-figures) recurring in the writings from this late
period. A strand of an argument from What Is Art? will be embodied in a
character or plotline in Kreutzer Sonata; Levin’s solution to a problem will
tacitly be revisited in A Confession, and so on. Tracing out and articulating
these relationships will reveal more coherence and sustained consideration of
the problem of meaning skepticism by Tolstoy than his readers have hitherto
surmised.
2. Four years before Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina, he succumbed to

his infamous “spiritual crisis” on September 2, 1869, while traveling in the
town of Arzamas, and perhaps precipitated by his reading of Schopenhauer
that summer.6 He became overcome by dread, terror, and melancholy at the
prospect that life is in fact without meaning, and that all that awaited him
was a senseless death. He arguably suffered such doubts later in his life as
well, and certainly described the initial malaise in detail in his unfinished
story, “The Memoirs of a Madman,” which he began in 1884 and was pub-
lished posthumously in 1912; we shall consider a specific linkage with this
story later in the chapter. For now, it suffices to note that several aspects of
that crisis are thematically treated in Anna Karenina: the conclusion that
neither modern science nor unrevised church doctrine can provide a “guid-
ance for life”; skepticism regarding the “meaning of life” and concomitant
thoughts of suicide; the pernicious falsity of polite society; the relationship
between sex and procreation in marriage, and so on.
Tolstoy’s Crisis 31
One way of looking at the novel—one of the “inner linkages” of which

Tolstoy spoke—is as a comparative portrayal of individuals’ relationships to
social mores. Indeed, the novel traverses the Cartesian divide between inner
intentionality and outer behavior through implicitly comparative portraits of
characters’ interior mental lives—or lack thereof—and their outward social
behavior, conceived as habits, codes, norms, roles, rules, and, as we shall later
see, metaphorically as rails. For example, the narrator wryly describes the
behavior of the Scherbatskys abroad in native/foreign permutations of the
contingent relationship between inner attitude and outer behavior:
The prince and princess held completely opposite views on life

abroad. The princess found everything wonderful, and, despite her
firm position in Russian society, made efforts abroad to resemble a
European lady—which she was not, being a typical Russian lady—
and therefore had to pretend [pritvorialas’], which was somewhat
awkward for her. The prince, on the contrary, found everything for-
eign vile and European life a burden, and kept to his Russian habits
[privychki] and deliberately tried to show himself as less of a Euro-
pean than he really was.7
Both characters’ responses to European social mores involve forms of pre-

tense, denying one’s provenance in one case, exaggerating it in the other.
And such possible pretense is of course entailed by the presupposed Carte-
sian divide: that one’s mental states and motives may be completely divorced
from one’s observable behavior. Because the Scherbatskys’ attitudes presup-
pose such social codes as completely contingently related to people’s interior
mental states and motives, those attitudes also tacitly reinforce Cartesianism
rather than submitting it to critical scrutiny, as I will claim Tolstoy does. For
after all, the Scherbatskys are minor secondary characters in the novel, and
the narrator’s presentation of the inner and outer lives of the main protago-
nists, as we shall see, proffers several different accounts which qualify, if not
deny, the Cartesian divide.
3. We can start to explore this Cartesian territory through contrasting Tol-

stoy’s portrayal of his primary characters. The narrator first introduces
Oblonsky by way of his relationship to his moderately liberal newspaper:
Stepan Arkadyich subscribed to and read a liberal paper, not an

extreme one, but one with the tendency to which the majority held.
And though neither science, nor art, nor politics itself interested him,
he firmly held the same views on these subjects as the majority and
his paper did, and changed them only when the majority did, or,
rather, he did not change them, but they themselves changed imper-
ceptibly in him.
32 Chapter 2
Stepan Arkadyich chose neither his tendency nor his views, but
these tendencies and views came to him themselves, just as he did not
choose the shape of a hat or a frock coat, but bought those that were
in fashion. And for him, who lived in a certain society [obshchestve],
and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with
maturity, having views was as necessary [neobkhodimo] as having a
hat. If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to
the conservative one (also held to by many in his circle), it was not
because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but because it
more closely suited his manner of life [obraz zhizni]. The liberal party
said that everything was bad in Russia, and indeed Stepan Arkadyich
had many debts and decidedly too little money. . . .
And so the liberal tendency became a habit [privychkoi] with Ste-
pan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after
dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head. He read the lead-
ing article, which explained that in our time it was quite needless to
raise the cry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all the
conservative elements, and that it was the government’s duty to take
measures to crush the hydra of revolution; that, on the contrary, “in
our opinion, the danger lies not in the imaginary hydra of revolution,
but in a stubborn traditionalism that impedes progress,” and so on.8
The fluidity of Oblonsky’s character, derivative and expressive of the

momentary reigning social opinions, reaches a delicious irony in his habitu-
ally espousing the liberal condemnation of habitual thinking. His lack of an
interior life contrasts with Vronsky’s more deliberative relationship to social
custom and propriety, which nonetheless also functions within a structure of
external behavior and internal self:
In his soul he did not respect [his mother] and, without being aware
of it, did not love her, though by the notions of the circle in which he
lived, by his upbringing, he could not imagine to himself any other
relation to his mother than one obedient and deferential in the high-
est degree, and the more outwardly obedient and deferential he was,
the less he respected and loved her in his soul.9
It is precisely this structure of external, public behavior and internal, private

motivation that leads to the skeptical interpretive questions articulated in the
previous chapter. Moreover, outward behavior can exhibit a looping effect
on intentionality: the norms of polite society (svet) not only permitted but
encouraged Vronsky’s seduction of Anna:
He knew very well that in the eyes of Betsy and all society people
he ran no risk of being ridiculous. He knew very well that for those
people the role [rol’] of the unhappy lover of a young girl, or of a

free woman generally, might be ridiculous; but the role [rol’] of a
man who attached himself to a married woman and devoted his life
to involving her in adultery at all costs, had something beautiful and
grand about it and could never be ridiculous, and therefore, with a
proud and gay smile playing under his moustache, he lowered the
opera-glasses and looked at his cousin.10
Vronsky’s mother, on learning of his liaison [sviaz’], was pleased at

first—both because nothing, to her mind, gave the ultimate finish to
a brilliant young man as a connection [sviaz’] in high society, and
because Anna, whom she had liked so much, who had talked so much
about her son, was after all just like all other beautiful and decent
women, to Countess Vronsky’s mind.11
The imbrication of affair and polite society is reinforced at the lexical level:
social connections and adulterous affairs are both called “liaisons” [sviazi].12
And we can now see Vronsky’s affair with Anna as an inversion of the valences
of the external/internal structure: his problem is not the affair itself, whose
external behavioral codes are implicitly sanctioned by polite society (for a het-
erosexual male, at any rate), but in investing it with internal, private motivation.
Conversely, Anna’s husband Karenin allows himself to perceive only the
external behavior in his confrontation with her and demands of her only that
outward appearances be maintained:
Despite all he had seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow him-
self to think of his wife’s real situation. He saw only the external
signs. He saw that she had behaved improperly and considered it his
duty [svoim dolgom] to tell her so.
. . .
“But I demand that the outward conventions of propriety shall
be observed until”—his voice trembled—“until I take measures to
secure my honor and inform you of them.”13
Thus Tolstoy exposes the structure of external/internal by cycling through its

possible permutations in the men orbiting Anna, until they come to exchange
roles—or perhaps “jump tracks” would better accord with the imagery—
when Anna, on her sickbed, bids her husband to forgive Vronsky:
After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out

to the porch of the Karenins’ house and stopped, hardly remember-
ing where he was and where he had to go or drive. He felt himself
shamed, humiliated, guilty and deprived of any possibility of wash-
ing away his humiliation. He felt himself knocked off of the track
34 Chapter 2
[vybitym iz toi kolei] he had been following so proudly and easily till
then. All the habits and rules of his life [privychki i ustavy ego zhizni],
which had seemed so firm, suddenly turned out to be false and inap-
plicable. The deceived husband, who till then had seemed a pathetic
being, an accidental and somewhat comic hindrance to his happi-
ness, had suddenly been summoned by her and raised to an awesome
height, and on that height the husband appeared not wicked, not
false, not ludicrous, but kind, simple and majestic. Vronsky could not
but feel it. The roles [roli] had been suddenly exchanged. Vronsky felt
Karenin’s loftiness and his own abasement, Karenin’s rightness and
his own wrongness. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous
even in his grief, while he had been mean and petty in his deceit.14
With this realization Vronsky resolves to commit suicide, but after the failed
attempt falls back into his tracks, his “ruts”:
By this act he had washed himself, as it were, of the shame and humil-
iation he had felt previously. He could think calmly now of Alexei
Alexandrovich. He recognized all his magnanimity and no longer felt
himself humiliated. Besides, he fell back into the old rut of his life
[popal v prezhniuiu koleiu zhizni]. He saw the possibility of looking
people in the eye without shame and could live under the guidance of
his habits [rukovodstvuias’ svoimi privychkami].15
Here Tolstoy motivates the plot through a reversal of motivation in the

structure: rather than internal (intentional) belief driving external behavior,
it is rather a reappraisal of the external behavior (inversion of roles) that
drives intentionality (Vronsky’s shame and resulting resolve to kill himself).
Of course this structure of external/internal, social code/private intention-
ality is not new to Tolstoy: indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics
of the “society tale” genre of the 1820s and 1830s.16 But Tolstoy combines
the permutations this structure offers with realistic psychological descrip-
tions of the consciousness of characters such that both extremes emerge and
threaten autonomy: external roles, ruts, duties, customs devoid of inten-
tional meaning—Karenin’s fulfilling the requirements of officialdom—and
intentionality collapsed upon itself, unable to realize itself in any socially
recognized role—Karenina’s final journey to the train station.
Several of the terms used in Anna Karenina to refer to codified behavior—
koleia, doroga, reil’, and so on—either name or evoke railways, and readers
have long interpreted the role of rails in the novel in relation to Tolstoy’s criti-
cism of railways, itself echoed by Levin17, and which was widespread among
Russian cultural conservatives at the time.18 For our purposes the observation
by Gary Jahn is particularly apt: “several particular qualities of the ‘social’
are suggested by the use of the railroad as its sign . . . The social involves
rules and orderliness as suggested by the tracks along which the train must
run and in the mechanical (that is, also, logical) nature of the object.”19 Even
better, “rail” as social “rule” is in fact a figura etymologica: “rail” derives
via Middle English (“reyle, raile”) and Old French (“reille” [“iron rod”])
from Latin “regula” meaning “straight stick, rod, bar, pattern,” itself related
to “regere” (“to rule”) and “rex” (“king”), from which comes “rule.”20 The
connection between “rails” and “rules” is made explicit—together with the
Cartesian picture underwriting it—at one point in the novel, when the narra-
tor observes of Vronsky: “though the whole of Vronsky’s inner life was filled
with his passion, his external life rolled inalterably and irresistibly along the
former, habitual rails [po prezhnim, privychnym reil’sam] of social and regi-
mental connections [sviazi] and interests.”21
One of the two other metaphorical uses of “rails” in Tolstoy’s later writ-
ings (the last instance will be discussed in chapter 5) works within precisely
the same Cartesian structure. The first-person narrative “The Memoirs of
a Madman”22 (written in 1884, but published only posthumously in 1912)
strips the comic elements from Gogol’s 1835 tale of the same title and artis-
tically recapitulates the crisis that befell Tolstoy in Arzamas in 1869. The
narrator, a wealthy landowner like Tolstoy, suffers acute attacks of what
he calls “spiritual melancholy” (dukhovnaia toska): depression and mortal
dread because his skepticism leads him to fear that life is meaningless and
suicide the only reasonable response.23 Only praying seems to help him, and
eventually he comes to embrace the teachings of the Gospel and the lives of
the saints, and undergoes the revelation “that the peasants, like ourselves,
want to live, that they are human beings, our brothers, and sons of the Father
as the Gospels say.”24 This conversion to universal love and Christian piety
the narrator calls his “madness,” presumably because this is what his fellow
gentry landowners would term his conversion.25
But during the period after his first attack, which he quelled by praying
without truly believing his words, and with the fear of a relapse hanging over
him, he writes that “I had to live without stopping to think, and above all to
live in my habitual conditions. As a schoolboy repeats a lesson learnt by heart
without thinking, so I had to live to avoid falling under the power of that
awful melancholy.”26 He develops the description of his survival strategy:
I . . . continued to live as before, only with this difference, that I began
to pray and went to church. As before—it seemed to me, but now I
remember that it was not so—I lived on what had been previously
begun. I continued to roll along the rails already laid down by my for-
mer strength [prodolzhal katit’sia po prolozhennym prezhde reil’sam
prezhnei siloi], but I did not undertake anything new. And I took less
part in those things I had previously begun. Everything seemed dull
and I became pious. My wife noticed this and scolded and nagged me
on account of it. But my anguish did not recur at home.27
36 Chapter 2
Here, as with the earlier passage about Vronsky, external, fixed behavior is
divorced from internal intentional states. Tolstoy deftly portrays the gradual
conversion of the narrator in terms of his withdrawing his belief from one set
of external behaviors (acquisitive landowner, traditional husband) and even-
tually investing it in another set of external behaviors. In the tale this motion
is concretized by his first speaking his prayers without endorsing (believ-
ing in) them, to ultimately endorsing his prayers and certain religious texts,
where that endorsement amounts to the commitment to change his life. The
conceptual structure that allows the narrator’s internal self to alienate itself
from one set of outward behaviors and gradually find itself at home in a radi-
cally different set of outward behaviors is just the Cartesianism that invites
meaning skepticism. It is also the same conceptual structure that we encoun-
ter at the very outset of the tale, when the post-conversion narrator tells us
how he successfully evaded being certified as insane by a medical board:
They disputed and finally decided that I was not insane—but they
arrived at this decision only because during the examination I did my
utmost to restrain myself and not give myself away. I did not speak
out, because I am afraid of the lunatic asylum, where they would
prevent me from doing my mad work. So they came to the conclu-
sion that I am subject to hallucinations and something else, but am
of sound mind.
They came to that conclusion, but I myself know that I am mad.28
Skepticism about meaning issues from this kind of conceptual structure, the
structure that allows the narrator of the story to believe himself quite mad
(from the perspective of those who have not undergone the spiritual conver-
sion he has), while also believing he had successfully deceived the doctors
who examined him.
4. Besides exploring the ways in which outward behavior and internal mental
states can diverge and affect each other in Anna Karenina as we have seen,
Tolstoy deepens his analysis of Cartesianism in the novel by exploring ways
in which the Cartesian divide is surpassed, and it is these explorations that
move Tolstoy’s novel from the realm of society tale into something closer to
philosophy of mind and more properly Wittgensteinian concerns. I will show
how Tolstoy illustrates at least four different ways in which inner and outer,
mind and world are joined, thereby denying the absolutism of the Cartesian
divide, which itself is presupposed by interpretivism. Therefore, this aspect of
Anna Karenina prepares the way for Tolstoy’s larger claims in later texts to
the effect that aesthetic experience and understanding do not require inter-
pretation. We can helpfully subdivide the four ways in which mind and world
are joined along the following lines. In this section I will discuss two ways
in which inner state and outer behavior are of a piece, where the emphasis
is on the manifestation or expression of mental states. In the next section I

will examine the other two ways, where the emphasis is on the communica-
tion or intelligibility of one’s mental states by others. Common to all these
ways in which mental states or attitudes are manifested is the lack of will.
Tolstoy consistently presents these forms of anti-Cartesianism as will-less
expressions.
Let us once again turn to the very beginning of the novel, and the character
of Oblonsky, for our entry into this problematic. Oblonsky’s wife Dolly has
just found a note indicating his infidelity and confronted him:
What happened to him [Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky] at that moment

was what happens to people when they are unexpectedly caught in
something very shameful. He had not managed to prepare his face for
the position he found himself in with regard to his wife now that his
guilt had been revealed. Instead of being offended, of denying, justi-
fying, asking forgiveness, even remaining indifferent—any of which
would have been better than what he did!—his face quite involun-
tarily [sovershenno nevol’no] (“reflexes of the brain,” thought Stepan
Arkadyich, who liked physiology) smiled all at once its habitual, kind
and therefore stupid smile.
That stupid smile he could not forgive himself. Seeing that smile,
Dolly had winced as if from physical pain, burst with her typical
vehemence into a torrent of cruel words, and rushed from the room.
Since then she had refused to see her husband.29
This tragicomical scene owes much of its pathos to the drama playing across
the canvas of the married couple’s faces. Oblonsky’s habitual facial reac-
tion preempts, as it were, the formation of an intentional, purposive attitude
towards his wife. This can be considered the obverse of pretense and pretend-
ing, where a person’s outward behavior conceals her intentional state; both
possibilities turn on the Cartesian divide. But Oblonsky’s “stupid smile” is
not intentional: it is a physiological “reflex of the brain,” and occurs causally,
not intentionally, hence not normatively.30 Thus Oblonsky simultaneously
rebukes himself for not expressing what he should have expressed. More-
over, the narrator in turn explains Oblonsky’s involuntary action not simply
in terms of physical causation, but in terms of customs or habits, typical
of those who find themselves in such circumstances. The narrator likewise
explains Dolly’s action as habitual, as “her typical vehemence,” but then
metaphorically likens it to a physical-causal reaction: she “had winced as
if from physical pain.” There are thus two levels of involuntary expression
described in this brief scene: physical-causal expressions (i.e., wincing in
pain, reflexes of the brain) that are not susceptible to normative constraint,
and habitual-customary expressions which are susceptible to normative con-
straint. Involuntary actions, responses, expressions, in short, involuntary
38 Chapter 2
behavior is the genus, of which there are at least two species: physiological
reflexes (which occur according to causal-dispositional laws of nature), and
habitual behavior (which occur according to second nature, that is, the incul-
cation of cultural dispositions). Early in the novel Tolstoy establishes that
this problematic will also be essential for Levin, who on a visit to Moscow
observes his half-brother engaged in argument with a well-known professor
of philosophy:
The professor was engaged in heated polemics with the materialists.

Sergei Koznyshev had followed these polemics with interest and, after
reading the professor’s last article, had written him a letter with his
objections; he had reproached the professor with making rather large
concessions to the materialists. And the professor had come at once
to talk it over. The discussion was about a fashionable question: is
there a borderline between psychological and physiological phenom-
ena in human activity, and where does it lie?
. . .
Levin had come across the articles they were discussing in maga-
zines, and had read them, being interested in them as a development
of the bases of natural science, familiar to him from his studies at the
university, but he had never brought together these scientific conclu-
sions about the animal origin of man, about reflexes, biology and
sociology, with those questions about the meaning of life and death
which lately had been coming more and more often to his mind.
Listening to his brother’s conversation with the professor, he
noticed that they connected the scientific question with the inner,
spiritual ones, several times almost touched upon them, but that each
time they came close to what seemed to him the most important thing,
they hastily retreated and dug deeper into the realm of fine distinc-
tions, reservations, quotations, allusions, references to authorities,
and he had difficulty understanding what they were talking about.31
We shall see later that Levin discovers his own solution to this problematic,
but for now it suffices to establish the problematic—the delineation of the
borderline between the physical and the intentional in one’s mental life—and
Tolstoy’s exploration of it in terms of physical causation and habit formation.
There is a further distinction which Tolstoy draws, possibly in consideration
of his reading of Schopenhauer. It appears that Tolstoy countenances psycho-
p
hysical causation, in the sense that the unconscious or simply “excitement”
(volnenie) or “feeling” (chustvo) can express itself involuntarily as well, most
usually in contrast to “reason” (razum). Thus in part 6 of Anna Karenina,
Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka embark on the pretense of mushroom pick-
ing in order to fulfill society’s expectations that he shall propose to her, for
he had reasoned that she was a good match, and she had tacitly encouraged
such reasoning.32 Each knows what is expected, and yet each, involuntarily,
acts contrary to the expectations. Rather than maintaining the quiet decorum
social etiquette requires, to give the suitor the chance to broach an intimate
topic, Varenka “against her will, as if inadvertently [no protiv svoei voli, kak
budto nechaianno],” continues to talk about mushrooms. Likewise Sergei
“wanted to bring her back to her first words about her childhood; but, as
if against his will [kak by protiv voli svoei], after being silent for awhile, he
commented on her last word.” The scene continues:
He also repeated to himself the words in which he wished to express

his proposal; but instead of those words, by some unexpected
consideration that occurred to him [po kakomu-to neozhidanno
prishedshemu emu soobrasheniiu], he suddenly asked: “And what is
the difference between a white boletus and a birch boletus?”
Varenka’s lips trembled as she answered:
“There’s hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet.”
As soon as these words were spoken, both he and she under-
stood that the matter was ended, and that what was to have been
said would not be said, and their excitement [volnenie], which had
reached its highest point just before then, began to subside. . . .
Varenka was both hurt and ashamed, but at the same time she had
a sense of relief.
On returning home and going through the arguments, Sergei Iva-
novich found that his reasoning had been wrong [chto on rassuzhdal
nepravil’no]. He could not betray the memory of Marie [his child-
hood love who had died].33
In this subtle study of psychology, both parties are in fact relieved not to have
acted as their reason and conscious will had dictated, coming to recognize
their unconscious, will-less34 actions as in fact the authentic expressions of
their unconscious. In this case their self-interpretations prove to be short-
c ircuited by their actual expressions.35
5. We have sampled some instances where Tolstoy portrays a will-less expres-

sion of mental states which undercuts the Cartesian divide presupposed by
interpretivism: expressions that are physically caused (such as blushing, winc-
ing) and those that are habitual-cultural reactions. Such forms of involuntary
expression undercut the supposed gulf from the mental realm of intentional-
ity to the outer realm of observable behavior. Tolstoy likewise develops forms
of will-less expression from the other side of the putative divide: instances or
acts of immediate, will-less understanding of one character by another, and
I submit that these forms of immediate, non-inferential, and will-less under-
standing in Anna Karenina constitute the germination of thoughts that will
be more fully developed in What Is Art? (as we shall see in chapter 3).
40 Chapter 2
Indeed, I would claim that such instances constitute one of the major “link-
ages” of the novel, connecting the two narratives of Anna and Vronsky on the
one hand, and Kitty and Levin on the other, in an inverse relationship: for at
the outset of the novel Anna and Vronsky experience immediate, involuntary
mutual understanding, which subsequently deteriorates into misunderstand-
ing, skeptical doubt, and (failed) interpretation, and likewise initially Kitty
and Levin misread each other before eventually achieving that same immedi-
ate mutual understanding. This is how Tolstoy portrays the first encounter
between Anna and Vronsky:
In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained anima-
tion that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes
and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as
if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed
itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her
smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her eyes, but it shone
against her will in a barely noticeable smile.36
And when Anna and Vronsky meet again:
Each time he spoke to Anna, her eyes flashed with a joyful light and
a smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to be strug-
gling with herself to keep these signs of joy from showing, yet they
appeared on her face of themselves. “But what about him?” Kitty
looked at him and was horrified. What portrayed itself so clearly to
Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face, she also saw in him. . . .
And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw
that expression of lostness and obedience that had so struck her, like
the expression of an intelligent dog when it feels guilty.
Anna smiled, and her smile passed over to him. She lapsed into
thought, and he too would turn serious.37
And when Anna encounters Vronsky at the Moscow train station, “his first
words involuntarily told her just what he thought.”38 Tolstoy’s preferred
term for the immediate understanding of another’s mental state (feelings or
thoughts) is “communion” (obshchenie), and the verb describing the act of
such immediate (that is, non-interpreted, non-inferential), involuntary under-
standing is “to communicate itself” (soobshchat’sia). Here are some examples
from Anna and Vronsky.
His perception of her shame:
Shame at her spiritual nakedness weighed on her and communicated

itself to him.39
His perception of her horror at being ostracized from polite society:
“What happiness?” she said with loathing and horror, and her horror
involuntarily communicated itself to him. 40
But, precisely as their relationship deteriorates under the pressure of Anna’s

social ostracism, such involuntary “communications” begin to be misunder-
stood, misinterpreted.
Regarding news of her pregnancy:
But she was mistaken in thinking that he understood the significance

of the news as she, a woman, understood it. At this news he felt with
tenfold force an attack of that strange feeling of loathing for someone
that had been coming over him; but along with that he understood
that the crisis he desired had now come, that it was no longer pos-
sible to conceal it from her husband and in one way or another this
unnatural situation had to be broken up quickly. Besides that, her
excitement [volnenie] communicated itself physically to him.41
And Vronsky’s immediate perception of her anxiety (after her husband’s

denial of her petition for divorce), without however understanding the rea-
son or justification for it:
In her presence he had no will of his own: not knowing the reason for
her anxiety, he already felt that this same anxiety had involuntarily
communicated itself to him.42
Vronsky’s relationship to his steeplechase horse, Frou-Frou, prefigures the

fatal misunderstandings he will have with Anna, down to the lexical level:
To Vronsky at least it seems that she [the horse] understood every-

thing that he was feeling now as he looked at her. . . .
The horse’s excitement had communicated itself to Vronsky [Vol-
nenie loshadi soobshchilos’ i Vronskomu]; he felt the blood rushing
to his heart and, like the horse, he wanted to move, to bite; it was
both terrifying and joyful.43
Although Vronsky involuntarily and immediately understands Frou- Frou

as easily as he does Anna, he will commit a fatal error in anticipating the
horse’s movement during a jump and break its back with dire consequences.
An early symptom of fissures developing in Anna’s and Vronsky’s relation-
ship is the emerging necessity for them to interpret or “read” each other’s
expressions:
42 Chapter 2
But she was not listening to his words, she was reading his thoughts
in the expression of his face. She could not have known that his
expression reflected the first thought that occurred to him—that a
duel [with Karenin] was now inevitable. The thought of a duel had
never entered her head and therefore she explained the momentary
expression of sternness differently.44
This deterioration of mutual understanding finally leads to Anna’s having

to not only interpret, but guess the meaning of Vronsky’s outward behavior:
But the look that flashed in his eyes as he spoke those tender words
was not only the cold, angry look of a persecuted and embittered
man. She saw that look and correctly guessed its meaning.
“If it is like this, it is a disaster!” said the look. It was a momentary
impression, but she never forgot it.45
What these scenes suggest is, perhaps, that the failure of will-less immediate
understanding is not the result of but the condition for the Cartesian divide.
That is, something has to have gone wrong in our everyday concourse with
each other for internal intentional states and outward appearance to diverge
such that the specter of Cartesianism, and the interpretivism it entails, first
arises.
Tolstoy devotes more attention to describing scenes of immediate, invol-
untary understanding between Kitty and Levin that inversely parallel the
growing mistrust and misunderstandings—the incipient skepticism—between
Anna and Vronsky.46 Here too the verb of choice is “to communicate itself”
(soobshchat’sia):
She [Kitty] wrinkled her forehead, trying to understand. But as soon

as he [Levin] began to explain, she understood.
“I understand: you must find out what he’s arguing for, what he
loves, and then you can . . .”
She had fully divined and expressed his poorly expressed thought.
Levin smiled joyfully: so striking did he find the transition from
an intricate, verbose argument with his brother and Pestsov to his
laconic and clear, almost wordless, communication [soobshcheniiu]
of the most complex thoughts.47
The crowning scene of their immediate and will-less mutual understanding

occurs during their wedding ceremony. The church ceremony seems devoid
of meaning for Levin, and his mind becomes closed in on itself, disconnected
from the people and actions around him. Soon thereafter precisely Cartesian
skeptical doubts arise in his mind:
“But do I know her thoughts, her desires, her feelings?” some voice
suddenly whispered to him. The smile vanished from his face as he
fell to thinking. And suddenly a strange sensation came over him. He
was possessed by fear and doubt, doubt of everything.48
The salving response is not a reasoned argument that proves such doubts
unfounded, but rather the memory of her immediate understanding of his
mind: “She told him that she loved him because she thoroughly understood
him, that she knew what he must love and that all that he loved, all of it, was
good.”49 As the wedding ceremony continues, both Kitty and Levin become
confused and make errors in the rituals they are to follow. Although Kitty
cannot understand the words of the benediction, “a smile of joy, which invol-
untarily communicated itself to everyone who looked at her, shone on her
radiant face,” and:
Levin looked at her and was struck by the joyful glow of her face; and
the feeling [chuvstvo] involuntarily communicated itself [nevol’no
soobshchilos’] to him. He felt just as happy as she did. . . .
The spark of joy that flared up in Kitty seemed to have commu-
nicated itself to everyone in the church. To Levin it seemed that both
the priest and the deacon wanted to smile just as he did.50
The artificiality and obscurity of the church prayers elicit from both Kitty
and Levin the will to interpret them and frustrates that will, whereas the
happiness of Kitty is immediately involuntarily understood and shared by all
those who see her, without any need to interpret her appearance or behavior.
This is the third way in which the inner and outer of the Cartesian divide is
preempted, as it were; and it is, in nuce, the role that Tolstoy will attribute to
“genuine art” in What Is Art?, as we shall see in the next chapter.
In Anna Karenina, the form of immediate understanding and communica-
tion lexically marked by the verb “to communicate itself” (soobshchat’sia)
is implicitly contrasted to another verb, “to infect” (zarazhat’), which con-
stitutes the fourth and final way Cartesianism is denied in the novel, and
which will be developed into a fundamental aesthetic concept in What Is
Art?. Whereas “to communicate itself” seems restricted to cases where the
perceiver immediately understands and shares the mental state of the person
perceived, “to infect” refers to immediate social-physiological mimicry, either
exemplified by or likened to the infectiousness of a yawn or laughter:
And Betsy obviously tried to restrain herself but failed and burst into
the infectious laughter [tem zarazitel’nym smekhom] of people who
laugh rarely. “You’ll have to ask them,” she said through tears of
laughter.
44 Chapter 2
“No, you’re laughing,” said Anna, also involuntarily infected with

laughter [tozhe nevol’no zarazivshaiasia smekhom], “but I never
could understand it. I don’t understand the husband’s role in it.”51
And Levin saw that [the peasant] Yegor was also in a rapturous state
and intended to voice all his innermost feelings. “My life is so remark-
able. Ever since I was little, I . . .” he began, his eyes shining, obviously
infected [zarazivshis’] by Levin’s rapture, just as people get infected
by yawning [tak zhe kak liudi zarazhaiutsia zevotoi].52
And late in the novel, in part 6, “infectious laughter” becomes a virtual leit-
motif of the minor comic character Veslovsky, the young, fat, gregarious
nobleman accompanying Oblonsky who misfires his hunting rifle and chases
peasant girls:
Veslovsky began by being so naively upset and then laughed so good-

aturedly that it was impossible not to laugh with him.53
n
[Veslovsky] was sitting in the middle of the cottage, holding on with

both hands to a bench from which a soldier, the brother of the mis-
tress of the house, was pulling him by the slime-covered boots, and
laughing his infectiously gay laugh [smeialsia svoim zarazitel’no vese-
lym smekhom].54
Stepan Arkadyich was saying something about the girl’s freshness,

comparing it to a fresh, just-shelled nut, and Veslovsky, laughing his
infectious laugh [smeias’ svoim zarazitel’nym smekhom], repeated
something, probably what the muzhik had said to him.55
These uses of the verb “to infect” (zarazhat’) seem to signify simply a causal
relation: involuntary mimicry that may not transmit any meaning content at
all. That is, consider the paradigmatic cases of the “infectious” effect, yawn-
ing or laughing: the recipient may not think himself tired, or judge something
to be funny, but the effect comes off nonetheless. As a causal relation, infec-
tion occurs will-lessly not because the will to interpret has been stilled, but
simply because the will cannot be involved in the first place, the reaction
is involuntary, and there is no normative relation possible. “To infect,”
therefore, seems to be the reception counterpart to the involuntary causal-
physiological production we examined in the previous section: it occurs

regardless of one’s will, and is involuntary in that sense. But “to communicate
itself” (soobshchat’sia) seems reserved for a more complex relation, for in the
cases we have examined it occurs where one’s skeptical doubts, one’s will to
interpret, has not been elicited, although it could. And whereas “infection”
can come off in the absence of a particular mental state conveyed, what
“communicates itself” is a distinct mental state, often a feeling or excitement,
but also at times a thought or belief. And it appears that these distinct mental
states are liable to the normative constraint elaborated earlier. It is in prin-
ciple possible to be mistaken in what is communicated, or—as we saw with
Vronsky and Anna—to understand the feeling conveyed but not understand
its reason or motive. These distinctions will play an important role in our
reading of subsequent works by Tolstoy.
6. In Anna Karenina Levin, like Tolstoy, seeks salvation from the meta-
physical meaning skepticism attending the Cartesian structure. If his friends
described Tolstoy as “the greatest of skeptics,”56 we recall Levin confessing
on the eve of his wedding, “My chief sin is doubt. I doubt everything and
for the most part live in doubt.”57 Levin, who like Tolstoy “think[s] railways
[dorogi] are useless,”58 arrives, like Wittgenstein, at a “therapeutic solution”;
he overcomes his crisis by quieting his will to pose the skeptical question
after he experiences cases of understanding that do not require the step of
interpretation between external behavior and internal intentional state, cases
of immediate, will-less understanding, most famously when he and Kitty try
to perform the code that institutionally consecrates their bond to each other
during the wedding ceremony.
Unlike other characters in the novel, Levin embarks upon a wholly indi-
vidualistic and indeed nominalistic relationship to rules and roles. That
is, whereas other characters and their plotlines depend on the possibilities
afforded by the internal/external, mental state/behavior structure, Levin and
his plotline place the structure itself in question. Levin’s increasing skepti-
cism about the answers that nomological science and church doctrine offer
to life’s fundamental questions leads him finally both to reject codified roles
and espouse a self-reflexive nominalism:
“I see you are decidedly a reactionary.”

“Really, I’ve never thought about what I am. I am Konstantin
Levin, nothing more.”59
Levin’s nominalism is rooted in his knowledge of “life” (as Tolstoy and his
narrator would say) unconstrained by inappropriately applied universal laws
or principles.60 Thus in discussing “the peasants” (the collective noun narod)
with his brother Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, Levin is easily brought into self-
c ontradiction, which the narrator upholds as an indication of Levin’s actual
familiarity with peasants as individuals:
If Konstantin Levin has been asked whether he loved the peasantry,

he would have been quite at a loss to answer. He loved and did not
love the peasantry, as he did people in general.
46 Chapter 2
. . .
To say that he [Levin] knew them [the peasants] would be the
same for him as to say that he knew people. He constantly observed
and came to know all sorts of people, muzhik-people among them,
whom he considered good and interesting people, and continually
noticed new traits in them, changed his previous opinions and formed
new ones. Sergei Ivanovich did the contrary. Just as he loved and
praised country life in contrast to the life he did not love, so he loved
the peasantry in contrast to the class of people he did not love, and so
he knew the peasantry as something in contrast to people in general.
In his methodical mind certain forms of peasant life acquired a clear
shape, deduced in part from peasant life itself, but mainly from the
contrast. He never changed his opinion about the peasantry or his
sympathetic attitude towards them.
In the disagreements that occurred between the brothers during
their discussions of the peasantry, Sergei Ivanovich always defeated
his brother, precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite notions
about the peasantry, their character, properties and tastes; whereas
Konstantin Levin had no definite and unchanging notions, so that
in these arguments Konstantin was always caught contradicting
himself.61
Levin’s lack of “definite and unchanging” principles is accompanied by an

ability to empathize with a conversational opponent:
He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would

understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love
the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings
would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way
round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of
which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say
it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop
arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.62
In a related passage, where two zemstvo officials are trying to adjudicate

between two mutually contradictory rumors about the emperor’s position
on a certain issue, that ability is given a name, imagination: “Levin tried to
imagine a situation in which both utterances might have been made, and the
conversation on that subject ceased.”63
Levin’s imagination is inversely related to, and ultimately becomes his sal-
vational answer to, his skepticism. When he considers the then fashionable
materialist doctrines of behavior Levin finds himself asking not only about
their validity, but precisely about the relationship between those doctrines
and their espousers:
What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of peo-
ple of his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he
had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong
with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main
question [namely, “If I do not accept the answers that Christianity
gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?”
and to which science is silent], Levin was tormented by other ques-
tions: Are these people sincere [iskrenni]? Are they not pretending
[pritvoriaiutsia]?64
We can see Levin’s thoughts and actions here as anticipations of two

Wittgensteinian responses to metaphysical meaning skepticism. The first
Wittgensteinian response in Levin’s therapeutic solution lies in his inability
to imagine a sense for the skeptical question, let alone its solution. The thera-
peutic solution consists in the discovery that the doubt is nonsensical because
the logical form of the question is such that it is not clear what logically could
satisfy it. This kind of dissolution of skepticism runs throughout Wittgen-
stein’s writings, from early to late. In the Tractatus he writes:
6.51 Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when

it raises doubts where no question can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a ques-
tion only where an answer exists, and an answer only where
something can be said.65
Wittgenstein is making an implicit distinction between the feeling or mental

state of doubt and what might be called legitimate doubt, a doubt which admits
of the possibility of expression and hence possible resolution: “If a question
can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it” (Tractatus 6.5). That is, a
legitimate question will admit of a possible answer; the question itself will be
part of an articulate conceptual structure that also articulates what an answer
would look like, were there one. Such an answer may not be finitely decidable
(Q: How many grains of sand exist in the universe?) but we understand what
an answer satisfying that question would have to look like, because the ques-
tion “lives” within a language game that makes sense to us (counting discrete
physical entities). Wittgenstein, in the passage quoted above, also claims that
what can count as an answer is related to what can be said. If it cannot be said,
it is nonsense, in the Tractarian meaning of the term: a use of language that has
no conceptual purchase. Hence, if there is no possible answer to the skeptic’s
question—if we can’t imagine what a possible answer would look like—then
the question is nonsense: there is no response to it that could be either true or
false because the question makes no sense (Q: how many grains of sand are
pious?). In the final year of his life, after he had abandoned the logical meta-
physics of the Tractatus in favor of language games, Wittgenstein pondered
48 Chapter 2
the idealist’s skeptical “How do I know the external world exists” and G. E.
Moore’s practical response, as he waved his hands before his face: “Here is
one hand. And here is another.” Wittgenstein’s comment:
The idealist’s question would be something like: “What right have I

to doubt the existence of my hands?” . . . But someone who asks such
a question is overlooking the fact that a doubt about existence only
works in a language-game. Hence, we should first have to ask: what
would this doubt be like?, and we don’t understand this straight off.66
Robert Fogelin provides this illuminating gloss:
The difficulty with answering the skeptic’s challenge . . . is that the

reasons I give will never be any better than the claim that I am trying
to defend. It is part of the skeptic’s tactics to raise just such ques-
tions. But where doubt is wholly unrestricted, nothing can be cited to
resolve it. Here claims to know or doubt will be out of place, useless,
and thus, according to Wittgenstein, without meaning. We thus arrive
at the position that meaningful doubts can be raised, questions asked,
answers given, etc., only within the context of a language-game that
gives these activities substance. The guile of the skeptic is to ask ques-
tions and to force others to give answers to them outside the context
of a particular language-game. This, I believe, is Wittgenstein’s funda-
mental response to skepticism.67
The “fluidity” (tekuchest’), as Lydia Ginzburg describes it,68 of Levin’s char-

acter includes his propensity to try to imagine how propositions might make
sense. But precisely this ability delivers Levin from his skeptical crisis, for he
comes to see that the skeptic’s requests for the purpose of life or the mean-
ing of the good, posed as such, are nonsensical, for he cannot imagine what
a reasonable answer would even look like, and so he returns the question of
meaning to its proper place, the community within which it is given:
I sought an answer to my question. But the answer to my question

could not come from thought, which is incommensurable with the
question. The answer was given by life itself, in my knowledge of
what is good and what is bad. And I did not acquire that knowl-
edge through anything, it was given to me as it is to everyone, given
because I could not take it from anywhere.69
Levin’s skeptical doubt is not solved but dissolved by the realization that
there is nothing which could solve his doubt, that radical skeptical doubt in
fact makes no sense, is nonsensical, because it is unimaginable what sort of
reason or justification could answer it.
The second Wittgensteinian response to the skeptic likewise glosses Levin

here: to ask for ultimate grounds, final justifications of our language games
(e.g., Levin’s “what is the purpose of life?” and “what is good?”) is to step
out of the world we meaningfully share and to try to assume an impossible,
nonexistent “sideways on” vantage point upon it überhaupt.70 But, says Witt-
genstein, “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that
some propositions are exempt from doubt, are like hinges on which those
turn.”71 These hinges, our everyday, obvious commonplaces and practices are
the “bedrock” beneath which we cannot go, not because they are metaphysi-
cally sacrosanct, but simply because they are the basic contingencies that
constitute our communal practices. There is no adequate response to a ques-
tion like “why does a sign-post point that way rather than another way?”
other than “this is how it is with us.”72 We can question our common back-
ground beliefs and practices, but below the level of our shared sense of their
necessity, we will find no fixed points.73 This, I take it, is what Levin means
when he says that these things cannot be known through reason, but that
they are given. One can prepare oneself to accept what is given by endeavor-
ing to still one’s will to skepticism, which amounts to stilling one’s will to
interpret. Levin’s experience of will-less, immediate understanding of Kitty’s
joy is paralleled by his learning to work in concert with the peasant mowers
by extinguishing his thought and will:
Levin lost all awareness of time and had no idea whether it was late
or early. A change now began to take place in his work which gave
him enormous pleasure. In the midst of his work moments came to
him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and
in those moments his swath came out as even as [the peasant leader]
Titus’s. But as soon as he remembered what he was doing and started
trying to do better, he at once felt how hard the work was and the
swath came out badly. . . .
More and more often these moments of unconsciousness came,
when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The
scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments. . . .
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments
of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the
scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of
life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of
it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the
most blissful moments.74
Here Levin learns as it were the virtue of allowing his awareness, his conscious
thoughts and intentions, his will, to subside; without the self-awareness,
self-interpretation, his willful handling of the scythe, the actions of his body
merge with those of the peasants. In both cases—that of perceiving Kitty and
50 Chapter 2
that of joining the row of mowers—Levin must give up a will to interpret, to

infer, and simply accept what is given. Tolstoy perhaps signals Levin’s begin-
ning to let go of the skeptical stance entailed by the Cartesian picture by
resurrecting and revaluing the “linkage” in images—ruts, tracks, rails (liter-
ally “iron roads” in Russian)—hitherto used to trope the Cartesian divide
between mind and world:
Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he
should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he
constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who
decided which of two possible actions was better and which was
worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.
So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of know-
ing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by
this ignorance to such a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same
time firmly laying his own particular definite path [svoiu osobennuiu,
opredelenuiu dorogu] in life.75
7. These Wittgensteinian insights suggest a brief reconsideration of Tolstoy’s

“spiritual crisis” and his portrayal of it in his autobiographical text, A Con-
fession (1881), that is, that it be read as a particular instance of a more
general process, namely skeptical doubts about rules and roles and their
meaningfulness, as above. In the opening chapter of A Confession Tolstoy
relates how a man came to lose his faith because, when posed the skeptical
question of why he still practiced church rituals, he came to see that
where he had thought faith to be had long been an empty place [pus-
toe mesto] and that the words he spoke, the signs of the cross and
genuflections he made while standing in prayer are in essence mean-
ingless actions [bessmyslennie deistviia]. Having recognized their
meaninglessness, he could not continue them.76
And while Tolstoy offers a theological explanation for faith (faith gives an
infinite meaning to the finite existence of man), he also offers an observation
regarding “the poor, simple, uneducated people” (narod) which resonates
with Wittgenstein’s thought: “the superstitions of the believers of the labor-
ing people [narod] were connected with their lives to such a degree that it was
impossible to imagine [predstavit’ sebe] their lives without these beliefs; they
were a necessary condition of this way of life.”77 Tolstoy can give no rational
justification for these beliefs nor for their interconnectedness with the life
of these people, and for that reason he “found it easier to free myself from
the temptation of idle theorizing [prazdnoe umstvovanie].” This is, in effect,
again the therapeutic solution to the skeptical question, recognizing that the
question is nonsensical. A Confession concludes with a very Wittgensteinian
task: to “look and see,” to examine each of the church doctrines separately
and see whether it is meaningless,78 or whether it plays a substantive role in
his personal and communal life:
While listening to the church services I paused at each word and

whenever I could I gave it meaning. In the liturgy the most significant
words for me were: “Love one another in unity.” But further on I
ignored the words: “We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost,” because I could not understand them.79
I have no doubt that there is truth in the teachings, but I also have no
doubt that there is falsehood in them too, and that I must discover
what is true and what is false and separate one from the other. This is
what I have set out to do.80
In this chapter I have explored how Levin came to grips with the skeptical
crisis his creator underwent while writing the novel, and I have emphasized
certain “linkages” between characters, plotlines, and lexical forms organized
around lines of thought that anticipate Wittgenstein’s writings. In particular, I
located the phenomenon of will-less, immediate, non-inferential understand-
ing at work in the novel, a phenomenon that arguably contributes essentially
to Levin’s coming to terms with his skepticism. Tolstoy developed this phe-
nomenon into his sole criterion for distinguishing “genuine” art and the
means for instilling religious and ethical values in the recipients of “good”
art. It is to this remarkable aesthetic theory that we now turn.
Chapter 3
Tolstoy’s Expressivist Aesthetic Theory:

What Is Art?
Every great artist carries us away, infects us [steckt uns an].

Everything in us which has the same kind of capacity stirs,
and as we have an idea [Vorstellung] of greatness and a certain
disposition for it, we quite easily imagine that the same seed
is within us.
— G oethe
Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what

is present and at hand; it can never do more than bring to
the distinct, abstract knowledge of the faculty of reason the
inner nature of the world which expresses itself intelligibly to
everyone in the concrete, that is, as feeling.
— S chopenhauer
In the previous chapter we examined how Tolstoy, in the midst of his “spiri-
tual crisis,” was developing somewhat inchoately the thought of immediate,
involuntary understanding as a response to meaning skepticism, where such
a response was also Levin’s answer to skeptical doubts about the meaning
of life altogether. In this chapter I turn to Tolstoy’s subsequent develop-
ment of this line of thought into a complete aesthetic theory in his treatise
What Is Art?, which subtends his later writings. Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory
can be called expressivist, because it holds that an artwork conveys its sense
directly, without the requirement for interpretation in the sense of justifica-
tion or inferential warrant. Thus Tolstoy’s What Is Art? is the counterpart in
aesthetic theory to his anti-Cartesian, anti-interpretivist view of immediate
understanding that we explored in Anna Karenina.
1. When Tolstoy succumbed to his crisis, he came to see the novels for which
he was acclaimed, such as War and Peace, as “beautiful lies,”1 and his subse-
quent works mark a radical departure in his poetics. His late works—tales
53
54 Chapter 3
for children, parables, retellings of biblical and saints’ lives, in short, what
is conventionally called “wisdom literature”—eschews narrative, rhetorical,
and literary complexity in favor of minimalist narration, overt sentiment,
and moral didacticism. In one late proverb-tale, “Walk in the Light While
There is Light” (1893), Tolstoy depicted the kind of reading experience these
late works sought to create. The worldly first-century Roman Julius reads
an excerpt—reproduced at length by Tolstoy in the tale itself—of the early
Christian homiletic Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Immediately following
the excerpt the narrator continues:
Long before he had read the manuscript to the end, something hap-
pened to Julius that often occurs to people with a sincere desire for
truth who read a book, that is, someone else’s thoughts; it happened
that he entered with his soul into communion [obshchenie] with
him who had inspired them [the thoughts]. He continued reading,
anticipating what was coming, and not only was agreeing with the
thoughts in the book but seemed to be expressing them himself.
What happened to him was that ordinary phenomenon that goes
unnoticed by us but which is also a mysterious and important phe-
nomenon in life: that a so-called living person truly becomes alive
when he enters into communion, uniting as one with so-called dead
persons and living one life with them.
Julius’s soul united with him who had written and inspired these
thoughts, and after this concourse he looked back on himself, on his
life. And he himself, and his whole life appeared to him to be one
horrible mistake.2
This “allegory of reading” stands out because of all it leaves out: there seems
to be no interpretive step, no need for considered reflection on what the
words, sentences, narrative might mean, no need to justify one reading against
another. There is no risk of error, of misinterpretation, because, apparently,
there is no conceptual possibility of divergence either between the author’s
psychological states and their externalization in the written text, or in turn
between the written text and the reader’s understanding of it. Thus there is no
breach between intended meaning and understanding that threatens to widen
into a more radical skepticism about meaning altogether. This account of aes-
thetic experience, which Tolstoy will define and defend in What Is Art?, can
be called expressivist: on this account, the artwork immediately expresses or
manifests its meaning which, when things go well, is understood immediately
by its recipient. That is, in uncomplicated, default cases the meaning is not
something separable and independent, to which the text is related contin-
gently as for instance as an intermediary or evidence—precisely what would
allow the skeptical wedge to be driven between authorial intentionality, text,
and interpretation.
Tolstoy’s Expressivist Aesthetic Theory 55
Tolstoy’s theory has long been understood as a version of the expression

theory of art, a tradition that arose with romanticism, in which the concept
of expression usurps that of imitation.3 The theory in general is identified
with philosophies of art put forward by R. C. Collingwood, C. J. Ducasse,
John Dewey, and others. The central claim of this theory is that an artwork
should be understood as an expression of a psychological state, typically
but not necessarily that of the artwork’s creator. The psychological state
may be cognitive (e.g., a belief or concept: in the language of the tradition,
an “idea”) or non-cognitive (e.g., a feeling, mood, emotion, etc.), and the
means of expression may be indirect and hence require interpretation (e.g.,
a metaphor, symbol, image, or other rhetorical device). In this regard, then,
Tolstoy’s expressivism is a distinct species of the genus expression theory of
art, since his theory apparently holds that the psychological state expressed
in an artwork is an emotion, and that the expression is immediate, hence not
requiring interpretation qua justification.4 We will return to consider how
Tolstoy’s aesthetic expressivism, suitably modified in light of the argument of
this book, might be defended and thus constitute a viable expression theory
of art, in chapter 8. For now, all that my expressivism amounts to is the
claim that there is a mode of understanding signs in which the sign directly
manifests its meaning content, without the necessary recourse to an act of
interpretation: an act where a reason or ground or justification is sought in
taking the sign to have the meaning content it does. The event of communion
(obshchenie)—a freighted concept, to which I shall return later—enabling
the conveyance of thought and feeling, unencumbered by artifice or dis-
tracted by beauty, underlies the poetics of these late tales, and What Is Art?
is their theoretical justification. The essay rejects all European aesthetic the-
ories centered around the idea that art is defined as the representation or
manifestation of beauty, in favor of an expressivist account of art’s affective
influence.
While some champions of Tolstoy have declared that his treatise “rejects
the entire tradition of Western thought about literature and art,” such a judg-
ment implicitly and presumptively equates Western aesthetics—or indeed all
aesthetics—with theories of beauty, ignoring alternate (still Western) tradi-
tions within and against an aesthetics of beauty.5 One example of such an
alternative tradition would be that inaugurated by Longinus, the sublime.6
According to Longinus, the sublime is created by “intensity” (deinosis) rather
than elaborate expression or imagery: he criticizes Aeschylus for language
which is “turbid in formulation and confused in images rather than made of
intensity.”7 Longinus further defines the sublime as the intensity of an innate
“vehement and inspired passion” (8.1; compare 12.5) that inspires both
orator and audience. Lastly, whereas rhetoric aims at persuasion and vivid
description (1.4, 15.2), the sublime aims to “strike with passion, unhinge”
(ekpladzai) (12.5, 15.2) the audience, a potentially disturbing consequence we
will examine in Tolstoy in chapter 5. Longinian elements, including intensity,
56 Chapter 3
passion—“the transport and commotion of the soul” (20.2, ll.22–23)—and a

communal ecstatic effect of art also underwrite Tolstoy’s admittedly stylisti-
cally more modest theory of aesthetic affect. And equally important, these
elements have returned in aesthetic theories after Tolstoy that are equally
opposed to notions of beauty, representation, and interpretation, and whose
genealogy is traced—usually by their detractors—to “Nietzscheanism” or
“Dionysianism.”8 Examples might include Lyotard’s championing of art’s
“communicable libido,” its ability to release desire, over any misconceived
expectation that art is supposed to “communicate the meaning of something
to which it stands in a position of lack,” or Susan Sontag’s programmatic:
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”9 Tolstoy tries to con-
tain such tendencies toward what I shall call a “Nietzschean threat” within
his aesthetics. I shall turn to this danger in the next chapter, after we have
a clearer idea of Tolstoy’s expressivist aesthetic theory, for Tolstoy’s views
share the elements of the Longinian sublime outlined above, yet diverge from
that tradition in locating the communal effect of art not in great thoughts,
but in universal communitarian sentiment embedded in everyday life, for
“good art” for Tolstoy is “one of the conditions of human life,” bestowing
“spiritual nourishment” (dukhovnoe pytanie) in strict analogy to food pro-
viding physical nourishment.10 Such spiritual nourishment is embodied in
art of two kinds: “universal art” conveys “the simplest everyday feelings of
life, such as are accessible to everyone in the world,” and “religious art” con-
veys “feelings coming from a religious consciousness of man’s position in
the world with regard to God and his neighbor.”11 Tolstoy thus maintains
the eighteenth-century distinction between thought and sentiment espoused
by his two greatest philosophical influences, Rousseau and Schopenhauer:
for Tolstoy science communicates thoughts while art communicates feelings;
science forges unity among people via rational discourse, art via affective
sentiment.
2. Tolstoy presents his positive, normative theory of genuine art in two broad
steps.12 The first step is to define the activity of art as the conveyance of a feel-
ing from author to recipients, by which they are united. The organizing trope
of the effect of art as “a means of communion among people”13 is “infection”
(zarazhenie), which Tolstoy paronomastically plays off the word for “repre-
sentation” (izobrazhenie). He stipulates:
To call up in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having called it

up, to convey it by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, images,
expressed in words, so that others experience the same feeling—in
this consists the activity of art. Art is that human activity which con-
sists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external
signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by
those feelings and also experiencing them.14
We should allow ourselves, I think, to be taken aback by the image of “infec-

tion,” occurring as it does in a text written at a time when populations were
decimated by consumption, and written by an author who had lost two of
his three brothers to the disease.15 Moreover, the term also perhaps suggested
venereal disease; A. N. Wilson observes that Tolstoy’s father might have died
of syphilis, while during his son’s student days in Kazan “three years of sleep-
ing with prostitutes left Tolstoy infected with gonorrhea.”16 (I shall return to
this aspect in chapter 5.) Tolstoy’s metaphorical use of the term “infection”
before his crisis had been confined to its usual negative connotations. For
instance, in 1863, as his contribution to the bitter debate between the liberal
“men of the forties” (Turgenev, Herzen, etc.) and the radical “men of the
sixties” (Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, etc.) that ensued following publica-
tion of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (1862), Tolstoy wrote the play An
Infected Family which, like Turgenev’s novel, presented a generational con-
flict inflamed by the “infectious” infiltration by an outsider espousing ideas
reminiscent of Chernyshevsky’s radical novel What Is to Be Done?.
Returning to the treatise, we find that Tolstoy’s definition clearly is a prag-
matic one:17 the criterion of genuine art is infection of feeling, so whatever
factually proves to be infectious of a feeling—to be explored below—will
thereby qualify as a genuine artwork. Tolstoy does not shy away from the
consequence that objects not traditionally considered to be artworks, but
which belong to “the entire human activity that conveys feelings,” will now
be considered artworks:
The whole of human life is filled with works of art of various kinds,
from lullabies, jokes, mimicry, home decoration, clothing, utensils, to
church services and solemn processions. All this is the activity of art.18
The subsequent properties of art that Tolstoy delineates serve to explain art’s
infectiousness: the organic unity of form and content,19 the sincerity of the
author (sometimes Tolstoy speaks of the sincerity of the work, or of “sincere
[istinnoe] art”), the particularity and clarity of the feeling conveyed,20 and
so on. Those works that possess these properties to the highest degree will
most fulfill the criterion of universal infectiousness, which is likened, as it
was in Anna Karenina, to infectious laughter, tears, and yawns: “The tears,
the laughter of a Chinese will infect me in just the same way as the tears and
laughter of a Russian, as will painting and music, or a work of poetry if it
is translated into a language I understand.”21 In fact, here Tolstoy seems to
claim that universality of infectiousness is not only a necessary, but a suf-
ficient condition, for genuine art: “Great works of art are great only because
they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.”22
The examples of successful, infectious art that Tolstoy presents, often
in gleeful juxtaposition to famous but by his criterion failed works by
Beethoven, Balzac, Huysmans, Ibsen, and others, entail certain problems.
58 Chapter 3
Tolstoy’s examples include (1) peasant women singing a wedding song that
lifts his despondent mood;23 (2) an anonymous tale in a children’s magazine
of a mother’s love for her children which concludes with a proverb; (3) a
genre painting by the English painter Langley “depicting a wandering beggar
boy who has apparently been asked in by a woman who feels sorry for him”;
(4) and a shamanistic performance by a Siberian hunter-gatherer people, the
Vogul, depicting a bow hunter wounding a calf, who clings to its protective
mother, while the hunter prepares to strike again, so that “one hears deep
sighs and even weeping” in the audience.24 Certain technical problems sug-
gest themselves. Tolstoy repeatedly claims that the artist’s feeling is what is
conveyed,25 but it is possible that the first and fourth examples were not
in fact produced by a single artist, or that the process of composition was
extended over several people, or indeed even generations. This suggests that
there may not need to be a single feeling, a single mental state, as the causal
origin of the artwork: rather, the feeling conveyed may itself be a product,
rather than producer, of the artwork. Recent work in the expression theory
of art has sought to address this problem by postulating a persona manifested
by the expressive qualities of the artwork, such that this persona, and not
necessarily the factual artist (if there is one), is the locus of the mental state
expressed by the artwork.26
Tolstoy’s theory is liable to a different kind of scrutiny when one observes
that all the examples are specifically gendered along the lines of a mother-
child relation: the peasant women’s song celebrates an anticipated wedding
and new family, while the other three explicitly portray a motherly figure
caring for a child. Figures of motherly protectiveness and nurturing link up
with the network of analogies between art and nourishment remarked earlier.
In these mise-en-abîme examples, the individual artworks as it were them-
selves depict the overall role that Tolstoy ordains for genuine art, for those
in the upper classes who have lost the capacity to be infected “live without
the softening, fertilizing effect of art.”27 This network of images reaches its
culmination in an extended, Homeric simile in chapter 18, in which genuine
art is likened to a fertile wife and mother, while “counterfeit art, like a pros-
titute” produces “the corruption of man, the insatiability of pleasures, the
weakness of man’s spiritual force.”28 I shall return to examine the simile in
detail in chapter 5.
These examples are all the more problematic because at this stage in Tol-
stoy’s presentation of his theory, which I’ve called his first step, he explicitly
denies that the content of the feeling conveyed has any bearing on infectious-
ness as the criterion of genuine art. In his initial definition of art he writes:
“Feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and
very worthless, very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader, the
spectator, the listener, constitute the subject of art.”29 And as he nears the
conclusion of this first step in his presentation, he repeatedly maintains what
could be called the content-indifferentism of genuine art:
The stronger the infection, the better the art is as art, regardless of
its content—that is, independently of the worth of the feelings it
conveys.30
[Sincerity, particularity, clarity of the feeling] are the three conditions

the presence of which distinguishes art from artistic counterfeits and
at the same time determines the worth of any work of art regardless
of its content.31
Clearly artworks conveying feelings of misery, horror, loathing, murder-

ous (matricidal, infanticidal, say) rage and so on, could qualify as genuine
artworks as easily as the examples of pity, joy, and motherly succor. The
criterion of genuine art is for Tolstoy categorically amoral.
3. This brings us to Tolstoy’s second step in his exposition, in which he

provides criteria for the evaluation of the content of artworks, the specific
feelings they convey.32 Those criteria are explicitly ethical, and form a “link-
age” with Levin’s conversion during the ring- exchanging ceremony with
Kitty in Anna Karenina. Levin finds that it is Kitty’s attitude towards him
and the situation, rather than the words of the prayers, that is meaning-
ful. And on subsequent occasions Levin surprises himself in finding prayers
and oaths meaningful not independently of his attitude towards the words,
but precisely because of his attitude towards them. For instance, “during the
time of his wife’s confinement an extraordinary thing had happened to him.
He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying he
had believed. But that moment had passed, and he was unable to give any
place in his life to the state of mind he had been in then.” 33 Likewise, when
he is swearing allegiance to the Governor in church he is genuinely moved
by the experience.34 Levin utters words and performs rituals, but only on
certain occasions does he find them infused with significance; the outward
performance is unchanged, but his attitude towards the words, their audi-
ence, his actions and their effects, is completely different.35 In the final words
of the novel, Levin, having therapeutically stilled his skepticism about the
meaning of life by the realization that the doubt was, like the question, non-
sensical,36 concludes that it his precisely his attitude, not his reason, which
dissolves the doubt. Outwardly his behavior will appear unchanged, though
in actuality all has changed because now imbued with ethical significance
by his attitude: “I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason
[razumom] why I pray, and yet I will pray—but for my life now, my whole
life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only
not meaningless [bessmyslenna], as it was before, but has the indubitable
meaning of the good [nesomnennyi smysl dobra], which it is in my power to
put into it!”37 Wittgenstein comes to a similar conclusion at the end of the
Tractatus:
60 Chapter 3
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the
world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does
happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have
no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside
the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that
happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world,
since it if did it would itself be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
. . .
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it
can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts–not what
can be expressed by means of language.
In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether
different world. It must, so to speak, wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of
the unhappy man.
Values, like the Kantian “good will,” are not facts of the world, otherwise
they would be contingent, accidental, as are all empirical facts; and Levin too
insists that the good, what confers sense upon the world, exists independently
of whatever contingently might happen to him within the world. As Robert
Fogelin puts it: “Wittgenstein takes essentially the same approach [as Kant]
to problems of logic and problems of value. Neither concerns the merely
contingent; instead they concern necessary structures within which contin-
gency obtains. In the Kantian sense, both logic (6.13) and ethics (6.421) are
transcendental.”38
Tolstoy takes up this thought again when he turns to the task of distin-
guishing good and bad art in What Is Art?:
The appreciation of the merits of art— that is, of the feelings it

conveys—depends on people’s understanding of the meaning of life,
on what they see as good and evil in life. Good and evil in life are
determined by what are called religions.39
Tolstoy has a Rousseauistic Enlightenment story at hand, in which mankind

advances by developing better—that is, more beneficial to all mankind40—
feelings and sentiments which constitute an age’s “religious consciousness,”
a potentiality present in all the age’s people, but demonstrated in specific
leaders who express or manifest this advanced “meaning of life,”41 religious
consciousness as the awareness of good and evil. And, as we saw in Levin’s
conversion, in What Is Art? Tolstoy holds that the good is not determinable
by reason or thought, but is transcendental:
The good is the eternal, the highest aim of our life. No matter how we
understand the good, our life is nothing else than a striving towards
the good—that is, towards God.
The good is indeed a fundamental understanding [poniatie],42
which metaphysically constitutes the essence of our consciousness,
an understanding undefinable by reason.
The good is that which no one can define, but which defines every-
thing else.43
If we read this passage over the shoulder of Wittgenstein, we find a power-

ful theory. The meaning of life, the good, is a certain ethical attitude that
pervades one’s consciousness, that is, it is not something in the world, but
how one views the world, hence it transcendentally defines everything in the
world. This attitude is thus a feeling, not susceptible to reason or thought,
inexpressible in the language of natural science. The improvement of man-
kind thus depends not on rationality or reason, but rather on feeling, which
is disseminated by genuine, that is, infectious artworks. Thus “it is this reli-
gious consciousness that determines the worth of the feelings conveyed by
art,” “good art, conveying good feelings, and bad art, conveying wicked
feelings.”44
Tolstoy understands the religious consciousness of his age to be the Chris-
tian principles portrayed in the Gospels: “the consciousness of the fact that
our good, material and spiritual, individual and general, temporal and eter-
nal, consists in the brotherly life of all people, in our union of love with each
other.”45 The purpose of this religious consciousness is to unite all people,
and according to Tolstoy there are only two kinds of feelings capable of such
influence, and therefore there may be only two types of good art: religious
art, “which conveys feelings from a religious consciousness of man’s position
in the world with regard to God and his neighbor,” and universal art, “which
conveys the simplest everyday feelings of life, such as are accessible to every-
one in the world. Only these two kinds of art can be considered good art in
our time.”46
By its own logic and rhetorical organization, What Is Art? concludes
with chapter 19, a passionate manifesto announcing the impending art of
the future, when art will become “a means of transferring Christian reli-
gious consciousness from the realm of mind and reason to the realm of
feeling, thereby bring people closer, in practice, in life itself, to the per-
fection and unity indicated to them by religious consciousness.”47 That
Tolstoy, after working on the treatise for fifteen years, nonetheless felt com-
pelled to add a final chapter in an altogether different voice, is a topic for
chapter 5.
62 Chapter 3
4. Now that we have presented the rudiments of Tolstoy’s theory with some
helpful elaboration from Wittgenstein, let us turn to a critical examination of
Tolstoy’s views. An initial worry is whether all instances of the infection of
“feeling” via an artwork are liable to immediate, non-inferential understand-
ing, for recall that this is Tolstoy’s main point in the treatise. He has taken
the cases of immediate “communication” of feeling in Anna Karenina and
developed them into a full-blown normative theory of art. A likely worry
to be broached in our age of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” is whether
artworks necessarily require interpretation to be understood. And if that is
so, then meaning skepticism reappears, for how can one be sure one has the
proper, intended meaning (feeling), or that there even is a proper intended
meaning (feeling)?
Wittgenstein returned to this line of inquiry throughout his writings, from
his notebooks leading to the Tractatus up through the Philosophical Inves-
tigations and his later writings.48 Interpretation, justified inference, and the
skeptical questions it can spawn presuppose a distinction between some sort
of uninterpreted given on the one hand, and the interpretation or understand-
ing of that given after the act of interpretation, on the other.49 Wittgenstein
again and again explores experiences where such a distinction is not present.
Wittgenstein’s paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is our reaction to
a face:
“We see emotion.”—As opposed to what?—We do not see facial

contortions and make inferences from them (like a doctor framing
a diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately
as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other
description of the features.—Grief, one would like to say, is personi-
fied in the face.
This belongs to the concept of emotion.50
Here Wittgenstein is suggesting that perceptual experiences of emotion regu-

larly occur without the step of interpretation or inference, experiences where
understanding is immediate and where there is no separation between a given
(sense impression, sense datum, “raw sense data,” etc.) and its interpretation.
It is not the case that we see a particular face and then interpret its expres-
sion as being joyful or sad: rather we see directly a happy or a sad face. The
grammar of “a face having an expression” leads us astray; rather, according
to Wittgenstein, we should use the verb “express” transitively in such cases—
the face expresses joy or sadness—because the face and its expression are
not two separable elements requiring a mediating interpretation, but rather
one experience of immediate understanding.51 “My attitude towards him is
an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion [or belief] that he has a
soul”52–where an opinion would require justification–because “the face is the
soul of the body.”53
What Wittgenstein is denying here is a version of the Cartesian divide, here

between intransitive expressive qualities on the one hand, and a transitive
expression of a psychological state on the other or, as Alan Tormey puts it,
between a “ϕ expression” and an “expression of ϕ.” In the example that has
become canonical in the literature, a basset hound may have a “sad expres-
sion” but its face does not “express sadness,” since the basset hound is not
perpetually sad. However, the relation between expression and psychological
state expressed may be noncontingent in the case of human behavior, typically
in discourse about the “natural” expressions of such states. Tormey writes:
Wherever the relation is noncontingent, description of the behavior

as an expression cannot be given independently of the description of
the condition that is expressed. Part of what we mean by “desire” is
the disposition to act in particular ways, and such actions are expres-
sions of the desire. Hence part of what we mean by “desire” is the
disposition to initiate appropriately expressive behavior. Clearly then
if this is the case, the relation between a desire and its behavioral
expression is noncontingent, and any description of the behavior
which presents it as an expression is, to that extent, a function of the
description of the desire. Thus a description of behavior as expressive
of a particular desire is also a partial description of the desire.
This should help to explain, finally, why actions express, rather
than signify, intentions and desires. The concept of sign is inadequate
to describe a relation, such as that between intention and action or
desire and action in which the terms are noncontingently connected.
“Expression” is the only logically adequate term that we possess for
indicating a complex in which object-directed action and a noncon-
tingently related condition of the agent are present.54
And J. L. Austin has made a similar argument regarding the noncontingent
relation between certain behavior and the emotion of anger of which it is the
expression or manifestation:
There is a peculiar and intimate relationship between the emotion

and the natural manner of venting it, with which, having been angry
ourselves, we are acquainted. The ways in which anger is normally
manifested are natural to anger just as there are tones naturally
expressive of various emotions (indignation, &c.). There is not nor-
mally taken to be such a thing as “being angry” apart from any
impulse, however vague, to vent the anger in the natural way.55
Tormey and Austin thus argue for the normatively necessary relation between
human expressions and the psychological states, including emotions, that they
express. Because of this normatively necessary relation, inferential reasoning
64 Chapter 3
from “ϕ expression” to “expression of ϕ” is not warranted: rather, in normal

cases we see, non-inferentially, the emotion (manifested, expressed) in one’s
behavior, in one’s face. This is an epistemic corollary to the logic of the term
“expression” as opposed to “sign.”
Now one might counter that physiognomy and behavior is one thing,
literary or aesthetic understanding by way of signs is another. But Witt-
genstein demurs: there is not a single or essential (metaphysical) nature of
“understanding”—“For we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what
is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehen-
sive essence”—but rather a variety of phenomena and experiences, including
immediate noninterpretive understanding. Shortly after the passage cited
above he considers precisely this rejoinder:
What happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted,

but: I do no interpreting [Ich deute nicht]. I do not interpret, because I
feel at home [heimisch] in the present picture. When I interpret, I step
from one level of thought to another.56
Wittgenstein’s demurral comes not from denying the possibility of endless

interpretation, différance, and the like: it is not a denial of what Derrida calls
the “metaphysics of the sign.” Rather, Wittgenstein observes that very often we
do not set off on unending interpretive quests, because there is no desire—or
no skeptical itch—to do so. The passage, from late writings published post-
humously as Zettel, harkens back to a distinction Wittgenstein made decades
earlier in the Tractatus between signs and symbols by way of diagnosing a
fundamental confusion in our understanding of logic and language:
3.32 A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol.
3.321 So one and the same sign (written or spoken, etc.) can be com-
mon to two different symbols—in which case they will signify
in different ways.
3.322 Our use of the same sign to signify two different objects can
never indicate a common characteristic of the two, if we use
it with two different modes of signification. For the sign, of
course, is arbitrary. So we could choose two different signs
instead, and then what would be left in common on the signi-
fying side?
. . .
3.326 In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe

how it is used with a sense.
We have here a version of the “signpost” problem discussed in chapter 1.

The mere physical mark or sound is the “dead” sign; only its embeddedness
in a signifying practice or custom, where it is “used with a sense,” renders it
“alive,” as a symbol with a particular meaning and logical form. Mere signs
are “arbitrary,” and hence can in principle be used in any mode of symboliza-
tion and therefore “we cannot give a sign the wrong sense” (5.4732). That
is, the mere sign, isolated or abstracted from all modes of signification,57
bears no normative relation, no standard of correctness, and hence has no
meaning. We fall into philosophical confusion when we maintain the idea
of meaningfulness, and inquire what such an isolated sign means when it
is stripped of precisely that which confers meaning upon it: the mode of
signification that renders it a symbol. As Denis McManus writes: “we gener-
ate the illusion by disconnecting words from their customary use while at
the same time keeping that use at the back of our minds. In other words,
we treat these words simultaneously as signs and as symbols.”58 This is an
alternatively worded diagnosis of the Derridean arguments examined in
chapter 1.
In the passage quoted above from Zettel, Wittgenstein speaks of one’s
being at home with a symbol, that is, familiar with the mode of significa-
tion, the customary use, the practice, and implies that that familiarity must
be disrupted before the urge to interpret, to step from one level of thought
(thinking in the given mode of signification, say) to another (thinking about
possible modes of signification, perhaps). Wittgenstein is making an observa-
tion about our will, not the structure and play of the sign or the necessity of
interpretation. And it is this observation that links Wittgenstein to Tolstoy’s
What Is Art?, about which he is surely speaking in these two passages from
Culture and Value:
Tolstoy: the meaning (importance) of something lies in its being

something everyone can understand. That is both true & false. What
makes the object hard to understand—if it’s significant, important—is
not that you have to be instructed in abstruse matters in order to
understand it, but the antithesis between understanding the object &
what most people want [wollen] to see. Because of this precisely what
is most obvious may be what is most difficult to understand. It is not
a difficulty of the intellect [des Verstandes] but one for the will [des
Willens] that has to be overcome.
There is much that could be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing

that the work of art conveys “a feeling.”—And you really might call
it, if not the expression of a feeling, an expression of feeling, of a felt
expression. And you might say too that people who understand it to
that extent “resonate” with it, respond to it. You might say: The work
of art does not seek to convey something else, just itself. As, if I pay
66 Chapter 3
someone a visit, I don’t wish simply to produce such & such feelings
in him, but above all to pay him a visit, & naturally I also want to be
well received.59
Common to these two observations by Wittgenstein is his emphasis upon

suspending the deleterious effects of the will in order to understand a “thing”
or a “felt expression.” That is, when a recipient has the appropriate ethical
attitude, that is, when one is undisturbed by one’s will, then “you might say:
the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.” For Levin
in Anna Karenina, for Tolstoy in What Is Art?, as for Wittgenstein, immedi-
ate, non-interpretive understanding occurs because the will to interpret has
been stilled, no longer obstructing our immediate recognition of what is obvi-
ous in our everyday lives. Tolstoy’s expressivist aesthetics would then be an
analogue of this experience in the realm of art.
Returning to What Is Art?, we find that here too Tolstoy espouses a similar
view, namely that interpretation is superfluous, indeed inimical, in aesthetic
experience. Such immediate, will-less understanding, the merging (sliianie) of
author and reader of “true” (istinnoe) artworks occurs without the need for
interpretation:
If the work of art is good as art, then the feeling expressed by the art-
ist is conveyed to others, regardless of whether the work is moral or
immoral. If it is conveyed to others, they experience it, and experience
it, moreover, each in his own way, and all interpretation is superflu-
ous. If the work does not infect others, then no interpretation is going
to make it infectious. Artistic works cannot be interpreted. If it had
been possible for the artist to explain in words what he wished to say,
he would have said it in words. But he has said it with his art, because
it was impossible to convey the feeling he experienced in any other
way. The interpretation of a work of art in words proves only that the
interpreter is incapable of being infected by art. That is indeed so, and
strange as it may seem, it is the people least capable of being infected
by art who have always been critics.60
We shall return to this passage in chapter 5 in another regard, but here we

note the coincidence of Tolstoy and Wittgenstein regarding the immediate
understanding of feeling that can occur in aesthetic experience.
6. A second worry is less easy to dispel. In the previous chapter we attended

to the lexical distinction between “to infect” and “to communicate itself” in
Anna Karenina: although both verbs indicate immediate, involuntary expres-
sion, the former indicates a physiological, causal relation resulting in outward
mimicry, as in “infectious laughter” or “infectious yawning,” whereas the
latter seems to indicate an expression of meaning content that includes a
normative relation, that is, what is communicated may be misunderstood or

inadequately understood.61
Interestingly, the same distinction lexically marked in Anna Kare-
nina returns during the unfolding argument of What Is Art?, but here the
distinction is not marked between the two verbs “to infect” and “to com-
municate itself”: rather, it inhabits the meaning of “infection” (zarazhenie)
and “infectious feelings” as they are used throughout the treatise and indi-
cates a potential central tension, if not paradox, within Tolstoy’s aesthetic
theory.62 In fact, the semantic field “to communicate itself” (soobshchat’sia)
and its nominal relation “communion” (obshchenie)63—examined earlier in
Tolstoy’s late tale “Walk in the Light While There is Light”—is largely sup-
planted by the semantic field of infection in What Is Art?. In chapter 5 of
What Is Art? Tolstoy provides examples of “feeling” (chuvstvo) that seem to
run the spectrum from physiological stimulus to complex, acculturated, and
propositionally articulated mental states:
The simplest example: a man laughs, and another feels merry; he

weeps, and the man who hears this weeping feels sad; a man is excited,
annoyed, and another looking at him gets into the same state. With
his movements, the sounds of his voice, a man displays cheerfulness,
determination, or, on the contrary, dejection, calm—and this mood
[nastroenie] is transmitted [peredaetsia] to others. A man suffers,
expressing his suffering in moans and convulsions—and this suffering
is communicated to others; a man displays his feeling of admiration,
awe, fear, respect for certain objects, persons, phenomena—and other
people become infected, experience the same feelings of admiration,
awe, fear, respect for the same objects, persons or phenomena.
On this capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other
people, the activity of art is based.64
By this enumeration it becomes clear just how broad the scope of Tolstoy’s
notion of “feeling” actually is, extending from sensations, such as pain, to
cognitively articulated emotions, such as fear or admiration.65 Just what an
emotion is, and what qualifies as an emotion, is an ongoing pursuit among
philosophers and psychologists; I will present my own view of the matter in
greater detail in chapter 6, but here it is necessary to indicate the general ter-
rain by way of some fundamental distinctions. An emotion cannot be simply
equivalent to a sensation or feeling, since there are feelings—like an itch,
heartburn, a tickle, a hunger pang—that clearly are not emotions. Likewise
an emotion cannot be simply equivalent to a type of behavior or a behavioral
disposition, for at least two reasons. First, behavior is not as fine-grained as
emotions (there do not seem to be discrete forms of behavior individuating
regret, remorse, guilt, etc.). Second, behavior may be expressive of emotion,
but need not be (e.g., my solicitousness of your well-being may be expressive
68 Chapter 3
of my affection for you, or may simply reflect my sense of duty). And emotion
is not simply equivalent to physiological responses, because the latter do not
correspond one-to-one to the former (my face may redden due to embarrass-
ment, or due to indigestion).
The most important criterion used in the philosophical tradition to distin-
guish emotions on the one hand from feelings, sensations, or physiological
responses on the other, is that emotions have intentionality. A sensation like
pain or hunger is traditionally understood as a physically caused occurrent
mental state, whereas an emotion may be an occurrent mental state or a
mental disposition (that can manifest itself in mental states),66 but in either
case “emotions, unlike sensations, are essentially directed to objects. It is pos-
sible to be hungry without being hungry for anything in particular, as it is not
possible to be ashamed without being ashamed of anything in particular.”67
According to Anthony Kenny, who rehabilitates a scholastic distinction, emo-
tions can be categorized according to their formal, that is, intentional object.68
He defines formal object as follows: “The formal object of ϕing is the object
under that description which must apply to it if it is to be possible to ϕ it. If
only what is P can be ϕed, then ‘thing which is P’ gives the formal object of
ϕing.”69 For example, and with some simplification, the formal object of fear
is “thing which is dangerous.” The tradition further distinguishes between
emotions, which have formal or intentional objects, and moods, which either
have no such objects or have vague or diffused objects.70
Several consequences of this theory are noteworthy. First, the description
of a formal object of an emotion must contain reference to a cognitive state,
that is, something similar or equivalent to a belief. This cognitivist view of
emotions goes back to Aristotle, who defined anger as “a desire accompa-
nied by pain, for a conspicuous revenge for [dia] a conspicuous slight at the
hands of men who have no call to slight oneself or one’s friends” (Rhetoric
1378a30–32), and who defined fear as “a pain or disturbance due to imagin-
ing some destructive or painful evil in the future” (Rhetoric 1382a20–22),
before making further qualifications: the imagined pain must be great, its
onset imminent, and so on. If I am afraid, then it follows that I fear some
object that I believe to be dangerous to me, regardless of the truth of my
belief. Thus there is a cognitive aspect or dimension to emotions, and more-
over, a normative cognitive standard implicit in emotions: if I tell you that I
fear the chirping of cicadas, it is incumbent upon me to explain some feature
or property of that chirping which is dangerous; otherwise my fear is unrea-
sonable, irrational, or inappropriate. There is a great deal of controversy
regarding how exactly the cognitive dimension of emotion should be con-
ceived. Thus cognitivist or judgment theories characterize emotions in terms
of their associated propositional attitudes, explicit beliefs, and so on, and
therefore hold that emotions are subject to the same, or closely related, nor-
mative rational constraints as beliefs.71 Appraisal theorists by contrast hold
that not all emotions need involve propositional attitudes or explicit beliefs:
they may be non-propositional in content, unconscious, and irrational.72

Common to both views, however, is the claim that emotions involve some
evaluative dimension, and therefore are at least in principle subject to nor-
mative assessment of appropriateness, if not full-blown rationality. Because
sensations do not have formal objects, or at the very least because they lack
such an evaluative dimension, they are not susceptible to this normative con-
straint. Second, the formal object of an emotion may have different logical
forms. For instance, I may fear a property (canine aggressivity), an object
(my neighbor’s dog), or a state of affairs expressed as a proposition (that
my neighbor’s dog did not get its rabies test). Moreover, while some formal
objects refer to the natural world (as in the previous example), others are
deeply embedded in our second nature: cultural objects and practices. Thus
I may be ashamed of the color of my tie, or that I misused my salad fork at
a state dinner. Here the cognitive aspect involves beliefs not (only) about
the natural world, but about norms, etiquette, expectations, rules, and so
on. Third, the cause and the object of an emotion may not be identical. For
instance, if I hear scratching at my door, the cause of my fear is the scratching,
but the object of my fear is my (imagining of my) neighbor’s dog.
These distinctions between sensation and emotion have consequences for
our understanding of Tolstoy’s theory of infection. At one end of the spec-
trum, we may involuntarily wince in correspondence with another’s wincing
in pain, and feel discomfort. But how shall we know whether our sensation
of discomfort is pain, or irritation, or annoyance, and so on? Here Tolstoy’s
theory seems close to that of William James, who held that emotions are feel-
ings specifically caused by changes in one’s physiological condition: “we feel
sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,
and [it is] not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or
fearful, as the case may be.”73 Richard Wollheim has sought to reappraise
James’s theory, but finds that it must incorporate some kind of cognitivism:
“when feeling does tell us something about emotion, it does so, not unaided,
but against the background of ancillary or contextual belief. This being so,
we might expect, in the absence of such belief, to be ignorant of what the
emotion is, or, for that matter, what the feeling is like.”74 And, as we’ll see
in chapter 8, Jenefer Robinson’s sophisticated theory of emotional expres-
sion in art likewise requires what she calls “cognitive monitoring” of initial
physiological changes that occur in aesthetic experience. So even the cases of
physiological, causally induced mimicry such as laughing, crying, yawning,
must presuppose ancillary and contextual beliefs in order for the feeling to
be determinate: you laugh and I laugh, but are you laughing at something
because it is hilarious, or whimsical, or preposterous, or absurd, or are you
laughing out of joy, or exasperation? Only my beliefs about your beliefs and
desires will provide the normative constraints necessary to delimit the emo-
tion by in part supposing its intentional object: what the emotion is in part
derives from what it is about. And such cognitive-evaluative considerations
70 Chapter 3
obviously are essential to explaining complex, culturally mediated emotions

bearing specific formal objects such as fear of/that, awe before, respect for,
admiration of, pride, remorse, and so on. Indeed, one commentator con-
cludes: “In short, ‘feeling,’ as it is used in What Is Art? may include all human
experience, for it is not an entity or a list, however long, of entities, but rather
the subjective mode of regarding any entity. Thus Tolstoy’s concept of feeling
is extremely broad.”75 Tolstoy’s concept of feeling in fact cuts across the dis-
tinction between sensations that bear no necessary relation to a formal object
and are usually explained causally (e.g., itching, pain, etc.) and emotions that
do essentially bear a relation to a formal object, and hence essentially involve
a cognitive dimension (belief, judgment, evaluation, etc.) constrained by nor-
mative standards of adequacy or appropriateness.76
Tolstoy’s assimilation of art to affect—and, as we will see in chapter 5,
above all musical affect—in his model of infection thus involves a problem.
For infectious affect, understood as a causal or dispositional relation, does
not allow for the possibility of misunderstanding. But if by affect is under-
stood emotion, and if emotion involves a cognitive-evaluative dimension,
then such emotions, since they involve a formal object, or propositional con-
tent, or at the very least an evaluative appraisal, bear meaning. But meaning,
in turn, bears a normative relation: knowing the meaning or use of an expres-
sion requires that one be able to distinguish between correct and incorrect
uses of that expression; as we saw in chapter 1: that is constitutively part of
what it means to understand an expression at all. Indeed, the broad scope of
“feeling” in What Is Art? ignores the very difference between dispositional
affective reactions that are merely causal effects—sensations, physiological
reactions—on the one hand, and emotions involving beliefs or judgments or
evaluative appraisals containing cognitive content, that is, meaning content
which presupposes a normative relation of correctness, on the other. The
assimilation of meaning content, with its inherent normative relation, to the
causal-dispositional model of infection becomes most problematical in the
case of music.
Chapter 4
Schopenhauer’s Shadow
For rhythm and harmony penetrate deeply into the mind and
have a most powerful effect on it.
—Plato
All nuances of cheerfulness and serenity, the sallies, moods and

jubilations of the soul, the degrees of anxiety, misery, mourning,
lament, sorrow, grief, longing, etc., and lastly of awe, worship,
love, etc., become the peculiar sphere of musical expression.
—G. W. F. Hegel
The passions enjoy themselves by dint of music.

— Nietzsche
1. I have noted in passing Tolstoy’s occupation with the writings of Scho-

penhauer during his crisis and thereafter. Although the younger Tolstoy was
inspired by Fichte and Schelling,1 Tolstoy’s diaries and letters indicate that
while he was working out his aesthetics in What Is Art? and composing
Kreutzer Sonata he was wrestling with Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and that
he read all of the philosopher’s major works: The World as Will and Repre-
sentation, Parerga and Paralipomena, and The Two Fundamental Problems
of Ethics, the latter work comprised of the Prize Essay on the Freedom of the
Will and the Prize Essay on the Basis of Morality. In 1869 Tolstoy wrote to
the poet and translator of Schopenhauer into Russian, Afanasii Fet:
Do you know what this summer has been for me? A continuous
ecstasy over Schopenhauer and a series of mental pleasures such as I
have never before experienced. I ordered all his works and have read
and am reading them (as well as Kant’s). And certainly no student in
his course has learned and discovered so much as I have during this
summer. I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but at
present I am certain that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among
men. You said he somehow wrote something about philosophical
71
72 Chapter 4
matters. How something? This is all the world in an unbelievably

clear and beautiful reflection. I began to translate him . . . Reading
him I just cannot understand how his name can remain unknown.
There is only one explanation, namely, that—as so often repeated by
himself—there are none but idiots in this world.2
While in 1869 he thus wrote to Fet that “I am certain that Schopenhauer is

the greatest genius among men,”3 on August 16, 1889, he noted in his diary
that his philosophy is all “fluff and nonsense.”4 While scholars have traced
the influence of Schopenhauer’s thoughts on free will and causal determin-
ism in the epilogues of War and Peace,5 it appears that little attention has
been devoted to the possible presence of Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy
in What Is Art? and its trope of “infection.” But I shall argue that a consid-
eration of Schopenhauer’s thoughts on ethics and aesthetics, which Tolstoy
quite likely knew, entails what I shall call a “Nietzschean threat” for Tolstoy’s
aesthetic theory. But in order to understand the possible significance of Scho-
penhauer’s moral and aesthetic theories for Tolstoy, we must first outline the
philosopher’s general metaphysics and epistemology from which his specific
theories of ethics and art issue.
2. Schopenhauer works from a Kantian position regarding the transcendental

ideality of space and time, that is, that they are conditions of human (phenom-
enal) experience but not necessarily of objective (noumenal) reality or “the
thing-in-itself.” Since space and time, and the principle of causality relating
them, are transcendental forms of intuition and categories of the under-
standing respectively, they likewise condition the appearance of a plurality
of individuals as well; thus Schopenhauer calls the transcendental ideality
of space, time, and causality the principium individuationis. Individuation—
including individual wills and desires—is a characteristic of phenomenal
experience, not of the thing-in-itself. The epistemic subject experiences real-
ity as individuated objects that are perceived and known as representations:
mental images that result from sensory input conditioned by the transcen-
dental forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. Because
subjects of knowledge condition the possible structure of objects of knowl-
edge, as phenomena perceived as representations and interrelated causally,
we can have intersubjectively confirmable experiences of phenomenal reality,
although we cannot know the nature of noumenal reality via outer sense.
Schopenhauer departs from Kantian metaphysics and epistemology, however,
by reasoning a contrario regarding the thing-in-itself, noumenal reality, and
claiming that we have an awareness of it via inner sense:
On the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the rep-

resentation, we shall never get beyond the representation, i.e., the
phenomenon. We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we

shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature, and investi-
gate what they are in themselves, in other words, what they may be by
themselves. So far I agree with Kant. But now, as the counterpoise to
this truth, I have stressed that other truth that we are not merely the
knowing subject, but that we ourselves are also among those realities
or entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-
itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real
inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without.
It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as
if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be
taken by attack from without. Precisely as such, the thing-in-itself can
come into consciousness only quite directly, namely by it itself being
conscious of itself; to try to know it objectively is to desire something
contradictory.6
Whereas one can perceive one’s body and its mechanistic movements as sim-
ply representations of yet another individuated phenomenon, one can also
be aware of the inner nature of one’s own body by means of intentional
action and the experience of pleasure and pain. This inner nature, according
to Schopenhauer, in this way is revealed to be will (Wille). Thus one’s body
is given to one in two distinct ways: by perception as representation, condi-
tioned by the principium individuationis, and immediately, self-consciously
as will. Thus an intentional action is at once both a bodily movement subject
to causal explanation, and an act of will of which the agent is immediately
aware in self-consciousness. In intentional action the agent is aware of herself
not as representation, but as thing-in-itself, as “will.”7 Schopenhauer then
generalizes from the agent’s will as the inner sense of intentional action to
conclude that the will is the inner nature, the in-itself, of phenomena gener-
ally, the single striving, movement, force in all of nature, or as he expresses it:
the world of representations is the objectivity of the will, the will experienced
as an object of representation.8 The will can be expressed and experienced
at various grades or levels of objectification corresponding to how distinct
and complete the representation is, and Schopenhauer associates the various
grades of objectification of the will with Platonic Ideas: unchanging forms
of representation not subject to spatiotemporal existence, and hence onto-
logically closer to the inner nature of reality. When one adopts a will-less,
contemplative attitude and perceives the object represented to one divorced
from its spatiotemporal attributes and devoid of any causal relations in
which it stands to other objects, one becomes aware of the Idea embodied by
that object. The perceiving subject loses his individuality and becomes a pure,
will-less knowing subject of knowledge, no longer distinct from the universal
object of knowledge:
74 Chapter 4
The transition that is possible . . . from the common knowledge of

particular things to knowledge of the Idea takes place suddenly, since
knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will precisely by
the subject’s ceasing to be merely individual, and being now a pure
will-less subject of knowledge. Such a subject of knowledge no longer
follows relations in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason;
on the contrary, it rests in fixed contemplation of the object presented
to it out of its connexion with another other, and rises into this. . . .
We lose ourselves entirely in the object . . . we forget our individual-
ity, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror
of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed, without
anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the
perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since
the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of
perception. If, therefore, the object has to such an extent passed out
of all relation to something outside it, and the subject has passed out
of all relation to the will, what is thus known is no longer the indi-
vidual thing as such, but the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate
objectivity of the will at this grade.9
Schopenhauer holds aesthetic experience to be this privileged state of will-

less, dispassionate contemplation of the object qua Platonic Idea.10 Within
this metaphysical and epistemological framework Schopenhauer developed
intriguing and compelling theories of the nature of moral actions and the aes-
thetic experience of music, both grounded in a will-less awareness of feeling.
3. Schopenhauer’s views on ethics recur throughout book 4 of The World

as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819) but
are presented with greater clarity and concentration in his On the Basis of
Morality (Über die Grundlage der Moral, 1839), the sole entry to a prize
essay competition administered by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific
Studies, which nonetheless saw fit to pass over the submission. In the essay
Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s deontological moral theory because it fails to
convincingly account for the empirical roots of morality, most importantly
that of motivation for moral action. Schopenhauer had stressed the role of
egoism—the tendency to use one’s own will exclusively in self-regarding
actions—in explaining human motivation, and so the possibility and recog-
nized existence of ethical—genuinely other-regarding—action presented him
with a problem: to show how egoism is overcome in ethical action. He does so
by invoking the empirically observed common phenomenon of compassion
(Mitleid), arguing that the immediate empathetic participation (Teilnahme)
in another’s suffering—so that one experiences another’s suffering literally
as one’s own—moves one to act morally by overcoming one’s egoistic will.
The central passage, occurring in §16 of the essay, merits quotation at length:
Thus, how is it possible at all for another’s weal and woe [das Wohl
und Wehe] to become directly [unmittelbar]—that is, completely as
otherwise only my own weal and woe would move my will—my
motive, and this sometimes to such a degree that I more or less sub-
ordinate to them my own weal and woe, normally the sole source
of my motives? Obviously only through that other man’s becoming
the ultimate object [Zweck] of my will in the same way as I myself
otherwise am, and hence through my directly desiring [will] his weal
and not his woe just as immediately [unmittelbar] as I ordinarily do
only my own. But this necessarily presupposes that, in the case of his
woe as such, I suffer directly [geradezu mitleide] with him. I feel his
woe just as I ordinarily feel only my own; and, likewise, I directly
[unmittelbar] desire his weal in the same way I otherwise desire only
my own. But this requires that I am in some way identified with him
[mit ihm identificirt sei], in other words, that this entire difference
between me and everyone else, which is the very basis of my egoism,
is eliminated [or sublated, aufgehoben], to a certain extent at least.
Now, since I do not exist inside the other man’s skin, then only by
means of the knowledge [Erkenntnis] I have of him, that is, of the
presentation [Vorstellung] of him in my head, can I identify myself
with him to such an extent that my practical action [That] declares
that difference abolished [aufgehoben]. However, the process here
analyzed is not one that is dreamed or fancifully imagined [aus der
Luft gegriffener]; on the contrary, it is perfectly real and indeed by
no means infrequent. It is the everyday phenomenon of compassion
[Mitleid], of the immediate [unmittelbar] participation [or sympathy,
Theilnahme], independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in
the suffering [Leiden] of another, and thus in the prevention or elimi-
nation [Aufhebung] of it. For all satisfaction and all well-being and
happiness consist in this. It is simply and solely this compassion that
is the real basis of all voluntary justice and genuine love of humanity
[Menschenliebe]. Only insofar as an action has sprung from com-
passion does it have moral value; and every action resulting from
any other motives has none. As soon as this compassion is aroused,
the weal and woe of another are immediately [unmittelbar] next to
my heart in exactly the same way, although not always in the same
degree, as otherwise only my own are. Hence the difference between
him and me is now no longer absolute.11
Although the German “Mitleid” is commonly translated as “sympathy” or

“compassion,” Schopenhauer’s psychological concept differs importantly
from both sympathy and empathy (which entered English as the translation
of the German “Einfühlung”).12 While disagreement among psychologists
and philosophers remains, among several thinkers empathy is often taken to
76 Chapter 4
be some sort of relation of type-identity of feeling between two people: one

person participially imagines (imagines being that person) the thoughts, feel-
ings, and emotions of another, and thereby shares mental states of the same
sort. Sympathy, on the other hand, is the emotional capacity to recognize the
feelings of another, but need not be the experiencing of the same emotions.
If I sympathize with your suffering a migraine headache, I have feelings of
sympathy toward you, but do not suffer the pain of a migraine headache
myself.13
Schopenhauer’s concept of Mitleid, however, diverges from the common
understanding of empathy as well, for in his view, the emotional identifica-
tion with, and immediate empathetic participation in, the other occurs as
it were not above but below the operations of imagination and conscious
will. Against competing theories that suppose that one imagines the pains of
another as though they were one’s own, Schopenhauer counters:
This is by no means the case; on the contrary, at every moment we

remain clearly conscious that he is the sufferer, not we; and it is pre-
cisely in his person, not in ours, that we feel the suffering, to our grief
and sorrow. We suffer with him and hence in him [Wir leiden mit
ihm, also in ihm]; we feel his pain as his, and do not imagine that it
is ours.14
Schopenhauer does not ground the phenomenon of compassion in a cogni-

tive operation, such as observing the other’s suffering and imagining it were
my own, by analogical inference (that is, assuming that the other’s mind is
like mine, hence his experiences will be relevantly similar to mine). Instead he
claims that there is an immediate, non-inferential feeling or sensation of his
pain. It would thus appear that here, in the ethical realm, we are meeting the
same model of immediate, involuntary understanding that we saw in Anna
Karenina and What Is Art?.
So far in his explication, Schopenhauer has provided an empirical, psy-
chological, explanation for ethical action, by the “natural compassion that
is inborn and indestructible in everyone . . . [and is] the sole source of non-
e goistic actions.”15 But in the final section of his treatise, entitled “On the
Metaphysical Explanation of the Primary Ethical Phenomenon,” Schopen-
hauer argues that the psychological “foundation of ethics” in fact rests on
a transcendental grounding, whereby the principium individuationis that
constitutes the phenomenal world of representations is contrasted with the
underlying thing-in-
itself, the universal and monistic will. Therefore, the
experience of compassion in fact offers proof of and insight into the underly-
ing metaphysical unity of all nature:
Accordingly, if plurality and separateness belong only to the phe-

nomenon, and if it is one and the same essence that manifests itself
in all living things, then that conception that abolishes [aufheben]

the difference between ego and non-ego is not erroneous; but on the
contrary, the opposite conception must be. We find also this latter
conception is described by the Hindus as Māyā, i.e., illusion [Schein],
deception, phantasm, mirage. It is the former view which we found
to be the basis of the phenomenon of compassion; in fact, compas-
sion is the proper expression of that view. Accordingly, it would be
the metaphysical basis of ethics and consist in one individual’s again
recognizing in another his own self, his own true inner nature.16
The good character . . . lives in an external world that is homoge-

neous with his own true being. The others are not a non-ego for
him, but an “I once more.” His fundamental relation to everyone is,
therefore, friendly; he feels himself intimately akin [verwandt] to all
beings, immediately [unmittelbar] takes part [Theil nimmt] in their
weal and woe, and confidently assumes the same sympathy [Theil-
nahme] in them.17
Recall our discussion of Levin’s epiphany in Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy’s

claim in What Is Art? that “the good is indeed a fundamental understanding,
which metaphysically constitutes the essence of our consciousness, an under-
standing undefinable by reason . . . but which defines everything else,”18 which
I likened to Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus that value, like logic, is tran-
scendental, conditioning the possibility of any representation and knowledge
of phenomenal experience. What is common to Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and
the Tractarian Wittgenstein is here the idea that transcendentally, representa-
tion, and the incumbent need for interpretation, is an illusory and misleading
addendum to a fundamental immediate common understanding requiring no
interpretation. This metaphysical, rather than psychological or physiological,
explanation at least suggests a way to understand the continuity of Tolstoy’s
examples of immediate understanding, of which ethical and aesthetic experi-
ence appear to be two species.
4. But what the German metaphysician gave Tolstoy with one hand he took
back with the other, for Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory precisely identified a
tension between causal affect and normative meaning content, a distinction
that, we saw in the previous chapter, Tolstoy’s broad extension of “feelings”
fails to acknowledge. The continuum between the universal physiological
responses qua sensations and the complex, propositionally articulated and
possibly acculturated feelings qua emotions (“The tears, the laughter of a
Chinese will infect me in just the same way as the tears and laughter of a
Russian, as will painting and music, or a work of poetry if it is translated
into a language I understand”)19 does face a threat of rupture from another
direction. Recall that in What Is Art? Tolstoy claimed that:
78 Chapter 4
If the work of art is good as art, then the feeling expressed by the
artist is conveyed to others, regardless of whether the work is moral
or immoral. If it is conveyed to others, they experience it, and expe-
rience it, moreover, each in his own way, and all interpretation is
superfluous.20
The content indifferentism—including the moral indifferentism—of infectious

art implies what I shall call the “Nietzschean threat” to Tolstoy’s project. Its
primary locus is music. In §§5–6 and §§16–20 of the The Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music (Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik, 1871)
Nietzsche explicitly draws on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of music in formu-
lating the Dionysian “art-drive” (Kunsttrieb). In fact, in §1 Schopenhauer’s
principium individuationis, a.k.a. the “veil of Māyā,” the illusion of a plural-
ity of phenomena due to our exercise of the principle of sufficient reason,
serves as the criterion for Nietzsche’s first exposition of the two art-drives: the
Apolline aesthetics of beauty, plastic and imagistic arts, disinterested contem-
plation, with its existential analogue in sleep and dream, and the Dionysiac
aesthetics of rapture, the musical arts, communal absorption, with its exis-
tential analogue in ecstasy and intoxication (Rausch). In §§5–6 Nietzsche
presents a metaphysical interpretation of pre-tragic melic poetry (represented
by the poet Archilochus) that is in essence Schopenhauerian: “the lyric poet,
a Dionysiac artist, has become entirely at one with the primordial unity, with
its pain and contradiction, and he produces a copy [Abbild] of this primordial
unity as music, which has been described elsewhere, quite rightly, as a repeti-
tion of the world and a second copy of it.”21 This thought is then radicalized:
the poet is liberated from his individual will to become merely a medium
through which the ground of being makes its appearance (§5), which reaches
its logical telos in communal music bereft of individual creative will alto-
gether, that is, the folk song: “Indeed it ought to be possible to demonstrate
historically that every period which was rich in the production of folk songs
was agitated by Dionysiac currents, since these are always to be regarded
as the precondition of folk song and as the hidden ground from which it
springs” (§6).22 And in §16, after quoting extensively from §36 of The World
as Will and Representation, Nietzsche returns to Schopenhauer’s metaphys-
ics of music to vindicate the Dionysian element in tragedy. Music, unlike the
other arts, does not represent phenomena, but rather directly conveys the
metaphysical essence underlying those phenomena: “according to Schopen-
hauer, we understand music, the language of the Will, directly,” hence “only
the spirit of music allows us to understand why we feel joy at the destruction
of the individual. For individual instances of such destruction merely illustrate
the eternal phenomenon of Dionysiac art, which expresses the omnipotent
Will behind the principium individuationis, as it were, life going on eternally
beyond all appearance and despite all destruction.”23
Nietzsche’s analysis of the effects of music harkens back to §52 of The

World as Will and Representation, where Schopenhauer writes that music “is
such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is
so powerful,” before offering this account of its aesthetic effect:
As our world is nothing but the phenomenon or appearance of the

Ideas in plurality through entrance into the principium individuatio-
nis (the form of knowledge possible to the individual as such), music,
since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phe-
nomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could
still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said
of the other arts. Thus music is as immediate an objectification and
copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are,
the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of indi-
vidual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts,
namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectiv-
ity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so
very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other
arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the
essence.24
Thus music “expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world,

the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well
call the world embodied music as embodied will.”25 The singular metaphysi-
cal significance of music, its direct presentation of the will, explains why it
“is so powerful, and is so completely and profoundly understood by man in
his innermost being as an entirely universal language”; why it is “instantly
understood by everyone . . . [with] direct understanding.”26 Because music
is non-representational, appealing to neither actual objects (referents) or
abstract entities (Platonic Ideas), it is non-inferentially, immediately, and uni-
versally understood, and provides unique intuitive insight into the noumenal
essence underlying the illusion of phenomena transcendentally conditioned
by our cognitive faculties of sensibility and understanding. Music therefore is
the aesthetic counterpart to ethical compassion (Mitleid), which also is direct
understanding of the essential monism underlying the phenomenal existence
of individual wills; though Schopenhauer would cavil that this fundamental
level of metaphysics is prior to the distinction between ethics and aesthetics.
And precisely that lack of differentiation between ethical effect and aesthetic
affect represents a problem for Tolstoy.
5. The problem emerges concretely in Schopenhauer’s further description

in §52 of The World as Will and Representation of the nature of music’s
influence:
80 Chapter 4
Music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure,
this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or
peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace
of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essen-
tial nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives
for them. . . . Everywhere music expresses only the quintessence of
life and of its events, never these themselves, and therefore their dif-
ferences do not always influence it. It is just this universality that
belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinct-
ness, that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows.
. . .
The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats
past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is
so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that
it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely
without reality and remote from its pain.27
In order to understand Schopenhauer’s claim that music expresses emotions

“without the motives for them,” we need to understand at least the rudiments
of his theory of action and moral psychology. In contrast with volitional
theories, according to which my act of will or volition constitutes a distinct
mental state which then causes (or can cause) my action, a bodily movement,
Schopenhauer holds what can be called a “dual-aspect” theory of the will,
according to which my act of will is identical to my action, that is, my bodily
movement. Whereas the volitional theory maintains that there are two events
causally connected—the mental act of will on the one hand, and the resultant
action, the movement of one’s body on the other hand—a dual-aspect theory
claims that there is only one event known by two different means: inter-
nally by immediate, non-observational knowledge (I typically know what I’m
doing, or about to do, without having to observe myself), and externally by
observation of bodily movement.28 The physical movement and the willing in
this view are simply two aspects of a single event.29 Thus in Schopenhauer’s
view, volitional accounts erroneously infer from the duality of aspects (that
is, two different description-types of a single event) to a duality of events
causally mediated, whereas in fact there is only one event known in two dif-
ferent ways. It follows from this view, however, that acts of will cannot be the
cause of physical movement. Something else must cause the single event that
is known immediately to self-consciousness as will and known observation-
ally as bodily movement.
Schopenhauer works towards explicating the cause of willing by first
claiming that self-consciousness contains exclusively and exhaustively its
own willing; that is, the self is known only through immediate awareness of
its own willing. Self-consciousness contains not only discrete acts of the will,
but also what he calls manifestations of willing, which include “all desiring,
striving, wishing, longing, yearning, hoping, loving, rejoicing, exulting, and

the like, as well as the feeling of unwillingness or repugnance, detesting, flee-
ing, fearing, being angry, hating, mourning, suffering, in short, all affects and
passions.”30 Notice that, like the examples of “feeling” given by Tolstoy in
What Is Art?, these “manifestations of willing” run from sensations (suffer-
ing) to moods (unwillingness) and emotions (anger), through to complex,
syntactically articulated propositional attitude verbs (hoping for, rejoicing
that or in, wishing for, fleeing from, etc.). Schopenhauer explains the transi-
tion from manifestations of willing to an act of will by specifying how the
subject comes to relate these manifestations to objects and states of affairs
in the world:
When a human being wills, he wills something; his act of will is

always directed to an object, and is conceivable only in reference to
such. Now what is meant by willing something? This means that the
act of will, which is itself in the first instance only an object of self-
consciousness, arises on the occasion of something that belongs to
the consciousness of other things and thus is an object of the faculty
of cognition. In this connection such an object is called a motive and
is at the same time the material of the act of will, in that the latter is
directed to it, that is to say, aims at some change in it, and thus reacts
to it; its [the act of will’s] whole essence consists in this reaction.31
According to Schopenhauer, while self-consciousness contains exclusively

and exhaustively its own willing (that is, the self is known only through
immediate awareness of its own willing), it is only by means of the faculty
of cognition (Erkenntnis) that the external world is known by the subject, in
that “other things” are representations (Vorstellungen) of objective states of
affairs for the subject.32 The cognitive representation of a state of affairs is
what Schopenhauer means by “motive,” and motives are the causes of acts
of the will: “Motivation is merely causality which passes through cogni-
tion [Erkenntnis]: the intellect is the medium of motives, because it is the
highest grade of receptivity.”33 “Motivation is causality seen from within.”34
So motives—representations of objective states of affairs, including imagi-
natively or purposively conceived futural states of affairs—exert a causal
influence upon the will,35 and willing is the effect of the motive, a reaction
to it.
There is a final piece of Schopenhauer’s deterministic picture, for two peo-
ple in similar circumstances, with similar motives (cognitive representations
of objective states of affairs) can will and act differently, including ethically
differently. In his early work World as Will and Representation, Schopen-
hauer attributes the cause to the unfathomable nature of the metaphysical
will as expressed in a particular individual, and itself an inexplicable force
that reacts to the specific motives acting upon it:
82 Chapter 4
Motives do not determine a man’s character, but only the phenome-

non or appearance of that character, that is, the deeds and actions, the
external form of the course of his life, not its inner significance and
content. These proceed from the character which is the immediate
phenomenon of the will and is therefore groundless. That one man is
wicked and another good does not depend on motives and external
influences such as teaching and preaching; and in this sense the thing
is absolutely inexplicable. But whether a wicked man shows his wick-
edness in petty injustices, cowardly tricks, and low villainy, practiced
by him in the narrow sphere of his surroundings, or as a conqueror
oppresses nations, throws a world into misery and distress, and sheds
the blood of millions, this is the outward form of this phenomenon
or appearance, that which is inessential to it, and it depends on the
circumstances in which fate has placed him, on the surroundings,
on external influences, on motives. But his decision on these motives
can never be explained from them; it proceeds from the will, whose
phenomenon this man is.36
In his late text on the freedom of the will, Schopenhauer addresses the same
issue by elaborating on the notion of a person’s character, which causally
interacts with the motives to determine the person’s willing and acting:
Now just as this is the case with causes in the narrowest sense and
with stimuli, so too is it equally the case with motives; for in essence
motivation is not different from causality, but is only a form of
it, namely causality that passes through the medium of cognition.
Therefore here too the cause calls forth only the manifestation of a
force that cannot be reduced and consequently cannot be explained
any further. The force in question, which is called will, is known to
us not merely from without as are the other forces of nature, but also
from within and immediately by virtue of self-consciousness. Only on
the assumption that such a will is present and is of a definite quality
in a particular case are the causes directed to it, here called motives,
efficacious. This particularly and individually determined quality of
the will, by virtue of which the will’s reaction to the same motives
is different in each human being, constitutes what we call his char-
acter, and indeed his empirical [as opposed to Kantian intelligible]
character, since it is known not a priori but only through experience.
It determines first of all the mode of operation of the different kinds
of motives on the given human being. For it underlies all the effects
that are called forth by the motives, just as the universal forces of
nature underlie the effects that are produced by causes in the nar-
rowest sense, and the vital force underlies the effects of stimuli. Like
the forces of nature, this character is also original, unalterable, and
inexplicable. In animals it is different in every species; in the human

being it is different in every individual.37
We now have a sufficiently refined picture of Schopenhauer’s theory with

which to explain his understanding of the influence of music.38 Music offers
emotions, “manifestations of willing,” without however, the corresponding
motives, the cognitive representations of the objects and states of affairs
that would, presumably, be appropriate or commensurate with those emo-
tions, as their intentional objects.39 Moreover, since motivation is causality
through the medium of cognition, without motives acts of the will would not
be object-directed, would not be willings of anything. As Schopenhauer says,
music “speaks not of things, but simply of weal and woe as being for the will
the sole realities.”40 How these powerful “manifestations of willing” would
causally interact with the person’s will, therefore, would depend entirely on
whatever other motives are acting on the listener at the time in conjunction
with that person’s empirical character. And it is the person’s character that
constitutes the basis for judging the moral worth of that person’s actions:
It is owing to this truth [that once deceived by a person we no longer

trust them] that, when we wish to estimate the moral worth of an
action, we first try to reach certainty as to its motive; yet our praise
or blame is later directed not to the motive, but to the character that
allowed itself to be determined thereby, which is the second factor of
this deed and the only one inherent in the human being.41
Thus, according to Schopenhauer, music is “the most powerful of all the arts”
for it conveys powerful emotions “without the motives for them,” whereby
the missing motives would presumably include the reasons, purposes, jus-
tifications for those emotions: precisely the articulated representations and
attendant cognitive judgments we examined in our analysis of fear in chapter
3. “From its own resources, music is certainly able to express every movement
of the will, every feeling; but through the addition of the words, we receive
also their objects, the motives that give rise to that feeling.”42 Without these
cognitive contextualizations, the conveyed “manifestations of willing” will
interact with the fundamental ethical character of the listener and whatever
motives, cognitive representations, he or she is entertaining at the time. Thus
Schopenhauer writes: “Because music does not, like all other arts, exhibit the
Ideas or grades of the will’s objectification, but directly the will itself, we can
also explain that it acts directly on the will, i.e., the feelings, passions, and
emotions of the hearer, so that it quickly raises these or even alters them.”
This is the “Nietzschean threat” inherent in Schopenhauer’s theory.43 Tolstoy
presents an intimation of that threat in a short scene in Anna Karenina, in
which Levin attends a concert that includes in its program a contemporary
“fantasia” entitled King Lear on the Heath. Levin’s disorientation is described:
84 Chapter 4
But the longer he listened to the King Lear fantasia, the further he
felt from any possibility of forming some definite opinion for him-
self. The musical expression of feeling was ceaselessly beginning, as
if gathering itself up, but it fell apart at once into fragments of new
beginnings of musical expressions and sometimes into extremely
complex sounds, connected by nothing other than the mere whim of
the composer. But these fragments of musical expressions, good ones
on occasion, were unpleasant because they were totally unexpected
and in no way prepared for. Gaiety, sadness, despair, tenderness and
triumph appeared without justification, like a madman’s feelings.
And, just as with a madman, these feelings passed unexpectedly.44
It is only when his companion, Pestsov, reminds him of the text upon which
the fantasia is based (“You can’t follow without it”) that Levin reads the
program notes, which include the relevant Shakespearean verses in Rus-
sian translation, and thereby contextualizes the apparently disjointed series
of emotions triggered in him by the music. For without the characters and
narrative, there is, as the narrator above states, no “justification” for the cas-
cade of emotions, which without that normative contextualization are “like
a madman’s feelings.”45
6. In What Is Art? Tolstoy apparently grasps Schopenhauer’s metaphysics

of music, characterizing it in his discussion of Wagner and Beethoven as the
“mystical theory that music is the expression of the will—not particular
expression of the will at various stages of objectivization, but of its very
essence.”46 Yet he cannot dismiss it so easily, for Schopenhauer’s thought
inhabits passages of this essay implicitly as well. For instance, I would suggest
that Tolstoy acknowledges the influence of music noted by Schopenhauer
above early in What Is Art? when he insists that the term “beautiful” (kra-
sivyi) as understood by a “Russian man of the people [narod]” is limited
to visual aesthetic phenomena, whereas “good” (dobryi, khoroshii) extends
from ethics (many actions can be characterized in ethical terms) to non-
visual, that is, non-representational, aesthetic phenomena, principally
music:
In Russian an action [postupok] can be kind and good, or not-kind

[nedobryi] and not-good [nekhoroshii]; music can be pleasant [priiat-
naia] and good [khoroshaia] or unpleasant and not-good, but never
beautiful nor not-beautiful.
A man, horse, view, a movement [dvizhenie] may be beautiful, but
of actions [postupki], thoughts, character, music, we may say they are
good, if we like them very much, or not good, if we do not like them;
we can say “beautiful” only of what is pleasing to our sight.47
The fundamental difference between a movement (dvizhenie) and an action

(postupok) is the presence of the agent’s intentionality, his will,48 and we have
just seen how, according to Schopenhauer, an agent’s acts of will are in part
determined by his character, which in turn is the basis for his moral appraisal
by others. Why Tolstoy should place music alone of the arts in the same cat-
egory as action, a category often characterizable in ethical terms, receives its
best answer, I suggest, by considering Schopenhauer’s theory of music. Like
action, music must be contextualized into a semantic framework inherently
ethical, because otherwise its affect is “without motive,” and that represents
what I have called the “Nietzschean threat” lurking within Tolstoy’s theory
of infection. In the next chapter I shall explore how Tolstoy examined that
threat in the medium of a literary text.
Chapter 5
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and Consequences
The sublime as semblance has its own absurdity and contributes

to the neutralization of truth; this is the accusation of art in
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata.
—T. W. Adorno
Tolstoy confronts what I have called the “Nietzschean threat” obliquely in

the novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which he wrote concomitantly with What
Is Art?. In this chapter I offer a reading of the novella specifically from the
vantage point of the problematic I have been tracing out, and I draw once
again on Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the ethical attitude and will, in order
to interpret the protagonist, Pozdnyshev, as a dramatic realization of the
threat I developed in my reading of Schopenhauer. Tolstoy, I shall argue, tried
to answer that threat in the final chapter of What Is Art?, but that answer is
liable to a definitive criticism inspired by Wittgenstein.
1. The problematic of music, and the presence of Beethoven’s sonata, in fact

entered the novella relatively late in its genesis. The original, rather Dosto-
evskyan, plot was composed of Pozdnyshev’s confession of the murder of his
wife after finding explicit evidence of her betrayal, with ideological reflections
addressing women’s growing sexual liberation and Strindbergian anxieties
about paternity (the story ends with Pozdnyshev leaving the train compartment
with a young girl who may or may not be his daughter); only in later redactions
did Tolstoy advert to music.1 The canonical story of the novella’s development
refers to an evening recital of the Beethoven sonata that so impressed Tolstoy
that he proposed to the artist Repin, also in attendance, that they each com-
pose artworks inspired by the sonata; Tolstoy’s story would be read publicly
accompanied by Repin’s painting on stage.2 Against this biographical-genetic
interpretation I suggest a discursive-genetic explanation. Tolstoy was working
on What is Art? and Kreutzer Sonata simultaneously: indeed, his diary entries
alternate between the works literally day by day.3 Hence my suggestion is that
in Kreutzer Sonata Tolstoy developed in the literary medium a problem that
arose for him while working on his aesthetic philosophy in What Is Art?. That
87
88 Chapter 5
problem is the divorce between the ethical and aesthetic in immediate under-
standing, the modality of understanding which, according to Schopenhauer, is
characteristic of both ethical and aesthetic consciousness.
Earlier redactions of the art essay—all of which define art as infectious-
ness, with analogies to yawning and hypnotism—reveal Tolstoy concerned
with music’s unique status, among the arts, as defined by its lack of represen-
tational content, its potential to evoke distinct feelings, and its transience of
influence precluding the listener from understanding, explaining, or justifying
the feelings evoked. For instance, in “On What Is Called Art” (“O tom, chto
nazyvaetsia iskusstvom,” ca. 1896), he writes:
And in no other art form have people traveled so far in artificiality

[iskusstvennost’] as in music . . . The reason for this is that other
artforms may still somehow be explained [raz’iasnit’], but with music
this is impossible. It is literally an immediate thing [Ona priamo
neposredstvennoe delo]. And therefore, if a painting is senseless
[bessmyslenna] or incorrect, any viewer will judge it and explain its
deficiencies. It is the same situation with poetry. Any person can say
that this character, situation is expressed unnaturally or untruthfully;
only with music, almost with lyric poetry, it is impossible to deliber-
ate and debate [rassuzhdat’], it is impossible to say why it is good or
not good.
For this reason music (like lyric poetry), having fallen upon the
false path of arts of our time . . . entered into those terrible debris of
senselessness [bessmyslitsy] in which today it is located.
Music is an art that acts directly upon the feelings, and that is
why it would seem that in order to be an art, it should act upon the
feelings. Besides this, music is a transient art. The work is played and
finished; you cannot at will continue your impression, as you can
with a painting or a book. And that is why it would seem that a musi-
cal work, in order to be an art, must act on the feelings. And what
then? The majority of musical works in imitation of senseless works
of Beethoven are essentially a collection of sounds having interest for
those who have studied the fugue and counterpoint, but not evok-
ing any feeling in the usual listener; and musicians not only are not
embarrassed by this, but quietly assert that this proceeds from the
fact that the listener does not understand music.4
Because of these specific features of music as a form of art, Tolstoy concludes

that unlike discursive thought and verbal art, music is simply not accessible
to the question of intelligibility: to ask what a piece of music means is like
asking how much the color green weighs, it is simply nonsensical. Rather, the
logically appropriate question is whether a piece of music does or does not
infect listeners, whether they assimilate or appropriate it or not:
I began, as I said earlier, with music, with that very art form that
immediately always acts upon the feelings and in which it seems it is
impossible to talk about not understanding [neponimanie]. But in the
meantime least of all with music can one use the word “to understand,”
and this seems to have led to the idea that one has to understand
music. But what does it mean to understand music? Apparently the
word—understand—is here being used as a metaphor, in a figurative
sense. It is impossible to either understand or not understand music.
And this expression, apparently, only means that one can assimilate
[usvaivat’] music, that is, receive from it that which it gives, or not
receive it, just as, with a thought stated verbally, it can either be under-
stood or not understood. Thought can be explicated and made clear
by means of words. Music cannot be explicated and made clear, and
therefore it is impossible to say in the literal sense [v priamom smysle]
that music can be understood. Music can only infect or not infect.5
Finally, in the recollections of his conversations with Tolstoy about music,

A. B. Gol’denveizer emphasizes precisely the same point, namely that music
alone among the arts is non-representational, and draws the useful distinc-
tion between referent (predmet) and contents (soderzhanie):
If we exclude “program” music and music with words (this is no

longer pure musical art, but rather the blending in one artwork of
elements of various artforms), then a characteristic feature of music
is its “lack of referent” [“bezpredmetnost’ ”]. “Lack of referent,”
that is, the absence of concrete objects of representation [konkret-
nyx ob”ektov izobrazheniia], is often confused with the absence
of contents [soderzhaniia], and music is turned into merely a play
of sounds. But this is profoundly untrue: no other artform besides
music conveys [peredaet] with such force of influence and with such
immediacy [neposredstvennost’] intellectual and emotional contents,
experienced by the composer and expressed by him in sounds. . . .
The “contents” of a musical work most clearly and forcefully of all is
transmitted by the musical work itself, and has no need for any kind
of “interlinear notes” [“podstrochniki”].6
And in this context he notes: “Of the various attempts to explain music phil-
osophically, it seemed to Lev Nikolaevich that the most important was the
original views upon music of Schopenhauer, although he [Tolstoy] did not
think that he [Schopenhauer] really explained its essence.”7
What is the problem with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music for Tolstoy?
Precisely its lack of a referent, its nonsensicality; in a word, music evokes or
conveys affect without contextualizing discursive or narrative justification, as
we saw in the previous chapter. Schopenhauer writes:
90 Chapter 5
[Music] never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature,
the in-itself, of every phenomenon, the will itself. Therefore music
does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this
or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of
mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, peace of mind themselves,
to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any
accessories, and so also without the motives for them.8
Music is thus for Tolstoy the extreme case of the content-indifferentism of

aesthetic affect: that an artwork may successfully transmit (infect) its “def-
inite feeling” to its audience, but that that feeling will interact with each
recipient’s will and character, which in turn may be virtuous or vicious.
Music (other than communal forms like folk songs) is the extreme version
of this because, in Tolstoy’s understanding of Schopenhauer, it conveys affec-
tive contents (“manifestations of willing,” in Schopenhauer’s phrase) without
the normatively structured motives that would be appropriate for them; the
result is powerful affective forces set free in the recipient to interact with
whatever other motives and his character might be. This then is a sharpened
formulation of the “Nietzschean threat” discussed in the previous chapter.
2. In The Kreutzer Sonata, the figure of Pozdnyshev embodies this Nietzs-

chean danger, even when we take into account that he is narrating his own
encounter with the presto movement of Beethoven’s sonata, which he calls
“a fearful thing.” For he explicitly generalizes his observation to claims like
“music in general’s a fearful thing” and “yet this fearful medium is available
to anyone who cares to make use of it.”9 Pozdnyshev describes the effect of
music in similes of immediate cause and effect seemingly borrowed directly
from What Is Art?:
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off

into another state of being, one that isn’t my own: under the influ-
ence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don’t really feel,
of understanding things I don’t understand, being able to do things
I’m not able to do. I explain this by the circumstance that the effect
produced by music is similar to that produced by yawning or laugh-
ter: I may not be sleepy, but I yawn if I see someone else yawning; I
may have no reason for laughing, but I laugh if I see someone else
laughing.10
The continuity between feeling and action (“feeling things I don’t really feel”
to “being able to do things I’m not able to do”) suggests the Schopenhauerian
expanded conception of will as both manifestations of willing (emotions,
feelings, moods, sensations) and acts of will (actions) that we examined in
chapter 4. Moreover, Pozdnyshev likewise uses the same verb—slivat’sia—as
in What Is Art? to describe the “merging” of recipient and artist through the
conveyed feeling: “Music carries me instantly and directly into the state of
consciousness that was experienced by its composer. My soul merges [sli-
vaetsia] with his, and together with him I’m transported from one state of
consciousness into another.”11 Correspondingly in What Is Art? we read a
revised definition of “infection” as
the perceiver merges [slivaetsia] with the artist to such a degree that it
seems to him that the perceived object had been made, not by some-
one else, but by himself, and that everything expressed by the object
is exactly what he has long been wanting to express. The effect of the
true work of art is to abolish in the consciousness of the perceiver the
distinction between himself and the artist, and not only between him-
self and the artist, but also between himself and all who perceive the
same work of art. It is this liberation of the person from his isolation
from others, from his loneliness, this merging [sliianie] of the person
with others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and property
of art.12
That is, the universal infectiousness of art abrogates the principium indi-
viduationis equally loathed by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. But
whereas Nietzsche draws the conclusion from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics
of music that art is indifferent to morality, a conclusion that Tolstoy accepts
in his analytic division between what constitutes genuine art (infectiousness
of any distinct feeling) and what constitutes good, worthy art (genuine art
that infects morally good feelings), he cannot abide by this conclusion, and so
introduces the further step in his argument that only virtuous feelings—those
of “the good” and religious feeling—are most universal and most uniting of
mankind, hence most infectious, hence belong to true or most perfect works
of art (What Is Art?, chapter 16).
Yet the obvious counterexample to Tolstoy’s claim is—following Schopen-
hauer and Nietzsche—music, which is considered the most universal of arts.
And in fact Tolstoy implicitly concedes the point by differentiating two kinds
of feelings that can unite universally: those of religious (Christian) sentiment
that are embodied in “religious art’ ” and simple, everyday feelings accessible
to everyone, such as merriment, tenderness, and so on that are embodied in
“universal art.” Further, according to Tolstoy, religious art manifests itself
mainly in verbal art, while universal art manifests itself mainly in music.13
When Tolstoy comes to ask what contemporary music might fulfill this con-
dition of being universal art, he faults modern compositions not directly for
their immoral content but for their lack of content and exclusive emphasis
on technique: “Owing to a poverty of content, of feeling, the melodies of
modern composers are strikingly vapid.”14 Tolstoy, echoing Pozdnyshev vir-
tually verbatim, concludes that “in music, apart from marches and dances by
92 Chapter 5
various composers, which approximate to the demands of universal art, one

can point only to the folk songs of various peoples.”15
In fact Pozdnyshev—though with a difference, as we shall see—provides
some of the missing steps in What Is Art? on this point. Music infects the
listener with the feelings felt or recollected by the composer when she or
he wrote the piece. But for the composer those feelings were part of a more
or less rational, that is, consistent and coherent set of beliefs and desires
(i.e., Schopenhauerian motives and the composer’s underlying character) that
render those feelings meaningful, and in principle liable both to normative
standards (of consistency, coherence, appropriateness, etc.) and associated
action (acts of will). But the listener, according to Pozdnyshev, receives these
feelings without that context for understanding them, let alone evaluat-
ing them:
And that’s why that kind of music’s just an irritant— because it

doesn’t lead anywhere. A military band plays a march, say: the sol-
diers march in step, and the music’s done its work. An orchestra plays
a dance tune, I dance, and the music’s done its work. A Mass is sung, I
take communion, and once again the music’s done its work. But that
other kind of music’s just an irritation, an excitement, and the action
the excitement’s supposed to lead to simply isn’t there! That’s why
it’s such a fearful thing, why it sometimes has such a horrible effect.
. . .
Such pieces [as the “Kreutzer Sonata”] should be played only on
certain special, solemn, significant occasions when certain solemn
actions have to be performed, actions that correspond to the nature
of the music. It should be played, and as it’s played those actions
which it’s inspired with its significance should be performed. Oth-
erwise the generation of all that feeling and energy, which are quite
inappropriate to either the place or the occasion, and which aren’t
allowed any outlet, can’t have anything but a harmful effect. On me,
at any rate, that piece had the most shattering effect; I had the illu-
sion that I was discovering entirely new emotions, new possibilities
I’d known nothing of before then.16
Why is the effect so “shattering” on Pozdnyshev? If we understand this, we will

understand better the relationship between The Kreutzer Sonata and What
Is Art?. In fact, by his description of the immediate effect of the Beethoven
sonata—“my awareness of this new state of consciousness filled me with
joy”—one might be led to think the effect salutary. But we need, in a first
step, to consider Pozdnyshev’s experience of music against the background of
all we know about him, and then, in a second step, view our considerations
against the background of Tolstoy’s assertions in What Is Art?.
3. The tension between the causal (or “physiological”) and normative (or
“moral”) orders which we saw inhabiting Tolstoy’s understanding of aes-
thetic “infection” in Anna Karenina and What Is Art? is operative in Kreutzer
Sonata as well. One could characterize Pozdnyshev’s general, self-exculpatory
discursive strategy as that of materializing, or desublimating, the normative,
by which I mean that moral concepts and categories are unmasked through
materialist, physiological explanations. The greatest target of course is roman-
tic notions of love, which he redescribes in purely physiological vocabulary
of cause and effect. For him, love is lust: “every man experiences what you
call love each time he meets a pretty woman,”17 and debauchery promotes
(male) health.18 Moreover, the ideology of romantic love is a ruse played by
both partners: “she knows that our man’s lying when he goes on about lofty
emotions—all he wants is her body . . . what we live in is a sort of licensed
brothel. . . . As a rule, we may say that while short-term prostitutes are gen-
erally looked down upon, long-term prostitutes are treated with respect.”19
This general argumentation reaches an emphasis of sorts in chapter 5, when
Pozdnyshev describes his courting of a landowner’s daughter that evokes the
immediate understanding between Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenina: “it
seemed to me that she understood everything, all I was thinking and feel-
ing, and that all my thoughts and feelings were of the most exalted kind.”20
And, like Levin in the novel and Tolstoy himself, after they become engaged
he gives her his diary—the diary of a seducer.21 Pozdnyshev implies that at
the time he too believed the ideology but now—at the time of narration—he
unmasks his own earlier beliefs as mere physical attraction: “Yes, I was a
dirty pig [uzhasnaia svin’ia], and I thought I was an angel.”22 These revised
self-attributions indicate how reliant we are on Pozdnyshev’s narration and
how unreliable he is as a narrator.23 For the argument at hand it is important
to observe that he performs the same materialization on other normative
concepts, including music, “the most refined form of sexual lust.”24 Love is
not the expression of noble sentiments, but is redescribed physiologically as
the release or “safety valve” (spasitel’nyi klapan) of pent-up energy. Pozd-
nyshev’s discourse is laced with what could be called hydraulic imagery. For
instance, sex provides the safety valve for accumulated energy:
Every day each of us eats perhaps two pounds of meat, game and all
kinds of stimulating food and drink. Where does it all go? On sensual
[chustvennye] excesses. If we really do use it up in that way, the safety
valve is opened and everything is all right. If, on the other hand, we
close the safety valve, as I did mine from time to time, there immedi-
ately results a state of physical arousal which, channeled through the
prism of our artificial way of life, expresses itself as the purest form
of love, sometimes even as a platonic infatuation. I, too, fell in love
that way, like everyone else.25
94 Chapter 5
Moreover, sex represents for Pozdnyshev the single greatest impediment to

mankind collectively attaining higher moral goals, because “carnal love has
become a safety valve” dissipating those idealist energies.26 Sex as safety
valve both promotes physical health and hampers moral progress. And, Poz-
dnyshev describes his jealousy in similar imagery: “I was like an upturned
bottle from which the water won’t flow because it’s too full.”27 And lastly, as
we saw above, Pozdnyshev conceives of the causal effect of the contemporary
decontextualized music such as Beethoven’s sonata according to exactly the
same hydraulic model: it arouses energies without providing a (contextual-
ized) “outlet.”
For Pozdnyshev, thus, sex and art are both matters of physiology: cause
and effect, desire and pleasure, safety valves and outlets. Pozdnyshev in short
functions as an extreme spokesperson for those Tolstoy in What Is Art? calls
“aesthetic physiologists,” for whom art is “a form of play in which man
releases a surplus of stored-up energy,” rather than a “means of human com-
munion” by conveying feeling.28 Moreover, music is especially suited to such
a physiological conception of aesthetic response:
The substitution of effects for aesthetic feeling is especially noticeable

in musical art—an art peculiar in its direct physiological impact on
the nerves. Instead of using melody to convey the feelings experienced
by the composer, the new musician accumulates and interweaves
sounds, and by alternately intensifying and weakening them, pro-
duces a physiological effect on the public, which can be measured
by an apparatus specially designed for that purpose. And the public
mistakes this physiological effect for the effect of art.29
And in excoriating Wagner’s operas, Tolstoy in What Is Art?—like Pozdny-

shev in chapter 23 of Kreutzer Sonata—likens the effect of such music to
that of hypnosis, “drinking wine or smoking opium.”30 Such effects, includ-
ing “that certain vague and almost morbid excitement from the works of
Beethoven’s late period,” are then juxtaposed by Tolstoy to the conveyance of
a “definite feeling,” with “impressions received from Italian, Norwegian and
Russian folksongs, from Hungarian czardas, and other such simple, clear,
strong things.”31
4. In Pozdnyshev, Tolstoy presents a mouthpiece of the aesthetic physi-

ologists, but he does much more: he presents a detailed portrait of what
someone who exists maximally—if not exclusively—within the causal order
might look like, namely a person wholly given up to the impingements the
world exerts upon him, a man who wills his causal dependencies. He is a vir-
tual chain-smoker, “inhaling greedily,”32 a drinker of tea so strong it is “really
like beer,”33 possibly an opium addict,34 definitely a self-confessed fornicator
(bludnik), where “being a fornicator is a physical condition similar to that
of a morphine addict, an alcoholic or a smoker of opium.”35 Pozdnyshev

defines himself, and virtually his entire gender, by their chosen, that is, willed,
dependencies on physical stimulation: “men can’t survive without it. . . . Tell
a man he needs vodka, tobacco and opium, and all those things will become
necessities for him.”36 Richard Gustafson rightly emphasizes Pozdnyshev’s
addictions, but to my mind overemphasizes them all as “intoxications,”37
missing thereby the greatest of Pozdnyshev’s dependencies: jealousy.38 Tol-
stoy takes some care insinuating this into Pozdnyshev’s narrative. His first
mention of jealousy in fact reveals that it has bedeviled him even before he
was married: “the torments of jealousy reawoke in me: they continued to
plague me throughout the whole of my married life”;39 and later in his story
he refers to “similar attacks of jealousy I’d had previously.”40 Whereas his
first mention of the “beast” (zver’) refers to the purported mutual attrac-
tion between Trukhachevsky and his wife (whom in turn he will call “bitch”
[suka]),41 thereafter Pozdnyshev uses the term exclusively to refer to his own
jealousy. “The rabid beast of jealousy began to snarl in its kennel, trying to
get out, but I was afraid of that beast, and I hastily locked it up inside me”;42
“I was like a wild animal in a cage: at one moment I’d leap up and go to the
window, at another I’d pace stumblingly up and down, willing the train to
go faster”;43 “I gave free rein to my hatred—I became a beast, a savage and
cunning beast”;44 had he forgiven her then the next day “the beast of jealousy
would have taken possession of my heart for ever and torn it to shreds.”45
Pozdnyshev describes his state of mind just before he sets to murdering his
wife as: “I entered that state a wild animal knows, or the state that’s experi-
enced by a man who is under the influence of physical excitement at a time
of danger, and who acts precisely, unhurriedly, but without ever wasting a
moment, and with only one end in view.”46 And twice in describing the mur-
der itself he speaks of a “rabid frenzy” (beshenstvo) possessing him.47 In short
here too Pozdnyshev at least portrays himself as determined by causes some-
how different from himself. In one lapse he reverts to a musical metaphor
to describe the involuted causal agency which he strangely both concedes
and denies: to his wife’s frantic appeals he comments “the reply had to be in
keeping with the state of mind into which I’d brought myself [privel sebia]
which was inexorably rising to a crescendo and which could not but con-
tinue to rise. Rabid frenzy too has its laws.”48 Pozdnyshev is both agent and
victim of the causal laws—be they those of music or frenzied rage—at work
upon him. In his uncontrollable sounds and gesticulations, his addictions, his
jealousy and even his desperate need for a listener, Pozdnyshev manifests his
dependence upon and solicitation of the world’s impingements upon him,
his will to causal dependency. Indeed, Pozdnyshev tells his acquired confi-
dant that during his return journey from his country estate to confront his
wife and her suspected lover, the rhythm of the train so affected him that
under its influence he imagined again her adultery: “It was as though some
devil was inventing the most abominable notions and suggesting them to me
96 Chapter 5
against my will” but then adds, “I’d pace stumblingly up and down, willing
the train to go faster; but the carriage just went on shaking and vibrating all
its seats and windows, exactly as ours is doing now,” and indeed, as Pozdny-
shev recounts his story in the train carriage that he had voluntarily boarded
he becomes—again—more and more agitated.49 The same willed dependence
operates at the narratological level: Pozdnyshev’s unreliability as a narrator
is coupled with his desperate need for an addressee, a confessor, and he argu-
ably distends and retards, foreshadows and builds suspense for the traveling
companions that constitute his audience in order to hold them enthralled.
And Tolstoy keeps the nameless frame-narrator as transparent as possible so
that we perceive that need clearly. Indeed, the narrator who met Pozdnyshev
and is now recounting the latter’s story never tells us, the narrator’s audience,
of his reactions to Pozdnyshev’s tale.50
5. How are we to understand Pozdnyshev’s as it were willful dependence on

the world? I think once again Wittgenstein can be of assistance. In the Tracta-
tus he maintains that ethics, like logic, is transcendental. In her commentary
Cora Diamond has remarked:
Just as logic is not, for Wittgenstein, a particular subject, with its own
body of truths, but penetrates all thought, so ethics has no particular
subject matter; rather, an ethical spirit, an attitude to the world and
life, can penetrate any thought or talk. Wittgenstein . . . speaks of
two different as it were attitudes to the world as a whole; he refers to
them as that of the happy and that of the unhappy. The happy and
the unhappy as it were inhabit different worlds.
She suggests that “the ethical spirit is tied to living in acceptance that what
happens, happens, that one’s willing this rather than that is merely another
thing that happens and that one is in a sense ‘powerless.’ ” 51 Now one might
suppose that Pozdnyshev fulfills that condition, albeit in a strained sense,
because he appears to be so dependent on the impingements of the world; but
he wants and seeks out those impingements, and this betrays his immeasur-
able willful grasp upon the world, which becomes resentment and jealousy
when, as it must, the world fails to answer his will, the conditions he lays
down for it.52 I think Pozdnyshev means something like this when he admits
that his wife is “a mystery, just as she’s always been, just as she’ll always be. I
don’t know her. I only know her as an animal”53 and, ultimately:
What was really so horrible was that I felt I have a complete and
unalienable right to [his wife’s] body, as if it were my own, yet at the
same time I wasn’t the master of this body, that it didn’t belong to
me, that she could do anything with it whatever she pleased, and that
what she wanted to do with it wasn’t what I wanted.54
Wittgenstein, on Cora Diamond’s account, holds that an “evil will” is not

empirical in the sense that it is essentially determined as evil by what it wills
in particular; rather an evil will is one that has the attitude to the world of
issuing conditions upon it and when frustrated, bearing it resentment.55 This
would accord with what Schopenhauer held, as we saw in the previous chap-
ter: which particular actions issue from a vicious character depends on what
particular motives act upon that character. Because, on this account, evil and
an evil character are not a relation in the world of persons, objects, states
of affairs, and so on, but rather an attitude towards the world, Wittgenstein
states in the Tractatus:
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
I think Tolstoy in What Is Art?, like Levin after his conversion, is getting at
something very similar when he states that
the good is indeed a fundamental concept, which metaphysically [This

echoes Schopenhauer; Wittgenstein would say “transcendentally”] con-
stitutes the essence of our consciousness [“our attitude to the world”],
a concept undefinable by reason [“cannot be put into words”].
The good is that which no one can define, but which defines every-
thing else.56
Likewise Tolstoy implicitly claims that aesthetics, like ethics and logic for
Wittgenstein, is not restricted to beautiful objects in the world, but rather per-
vades one’s attitude to and involvement in the world, when Tolstoy expands
the meaning of genuine art as “the entire human activity that conveys feelings:
so that art in the broad sense pervades our entire life.”57 Furthermore, Tolstoy
can be seen to be identifying aesthetics and ethics in what could be called
their “attitude toward the world” when he grounds a person’s infection by
art in that person’s specific character, understood in terms Schopenhauer and
Wittgenstein would affirm: “the appreciation of the works of art—that is, of
the feelings it conveys—depends on people’s understanding of the meaning of
life, on what they see as good and evil in life.”58 And we recall that in report-
ing the hypnotic effects of the sonata, and of music in general, Pozdnyshev
was careful to qualify “for me, at any rate.”59
Pozdnyshev is just such an evil will in Wittgenstein’s account, and the
astute reader will perceive this, hear it from within, as it were, his story. Tol-
stoy, I suggest, intimates as much within the second epigraph to the novella:
“But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to
whom it is given” (Matt. 19:11). Quite similarly, in a letter to his friend and
publisher, Wittgenstein wrote that he regarded the Tractatus as a work of
98 Chapter 5
ethics, but that this most important part of his work cannot be expressed
discursively:
But now I am counting on you. And there it may be of some help to

you if I write you a few words about my book: since—I am quite sure
of that—you won’t get very much at all out of reading it. For, you
won’t understand it; its subject matter will appear entirely foreign to
you. But in reality it isn’t foreign to you, for the sense of the book
is an ethical one. I once wanted to include a sentence in the preface
which doesn’t in fact appear there now. But I am writing it to you
now because it might serve you as a key: For I wanted to write that
my work consists of two parts: the one you have in front of you and
all that I have not written. And just that second part is the important
one. Because the ethical is delimited by my book at it were from
within; and I am convinced that strictly it can only be delimited like
that. In short, I believed: Everything that many are blathering about
today, I settled by being silent about it. And that’s why this book,
unless I am very mistaken, says much that you yourself want to say,
but perhaps won’t see that it is said in it. I would now recommend
that you read the preface and the conclusion, since these express the
sense most immediately.60
The meaning of life understood as an ethical attitude cannot be “said”

because it is not something in or of the world, but rather an attitude towards
the world as such. Wittgenstein returned to this thought in a lecture on ethics
he gave in 1929:
I see now that these nonsensical expressions [“judgments of absolute

value” like the meaning of life, being absolutely safe, etc.] were not
nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but
that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do
with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond
significant language.61
If ethical statements, statements of “absolute” value, are nonsensical, then

the direct presentation of an ethical spirit or an ethical character will not
be understood: such an attitude to the world cannot be “said,” but only
“shown.” Consider these passages from chapter 7 of Tolstoy’s The Gospel
in Brief (1881), a work that Wittgenstein carried on his person for over
a year:
At another time, Jesus was speaking with the orthodox, and said to
them: “There can be no proofs of the truth of my teaching, as there
cannot be of the illumination of light. My teaching is the real light,
by which people tell what is good and what is bad, and therefore it
is impossible to prove my teaching; which itself proves everything.
Whoever shall follow me shall not be in darkness, but shall have life.
Life and enlightenment, which are one and the same.”
And Jesus said to them: “If your father were one with me, you would
love me, because I came forth from that Father. For I was not born
of myself. You are not children of the one Father with me, therefore
you do not understand my word; my understanding of life does not
find place with you.”
And yet a third time Jesus taught the people, he said: “Men surren-
der themselves to my teaching, not because I myself prove it. It is
impossible to prove the truth. The truth itself proves the rest. But
men surrender to my teaching, because there is no other than it; it is
known by men, and promises life.”62
Pozdnyshev’s narrative, I suggest, functions analogously to Wittgenstein’s

description of the Tractatus in his letter to his publisher. Gary Saul Morson
plausibly reads the novella as a sophisticated conjuration and subsequent
condemnation of the pre- conversion Tolstoy by the post- conversion Tol-
stoy, but solely for aesthetic reasons: “Tolstoy wants us to reject Tolstoy as
Tolstoy rejected Tolstoy. It follows that we can understand fictions like The
Kreutzer Sonata best if we treat them as anti-fictions. The Kreutzer Sonata
is a brilliantly contrived aesthetic masterpiece that teaches us to despise such
contrivance and mastery—and that is its duplicitous strategy.” But it is not
Tolstoy’s narrative art that is duplicitous, but rather Pozdnyshev’s addic-
tion to narrative—and to any listener—that is duplicitous. By keeping the
frame-narrator as invisible as possible Tolstoy allows Pozdnyshev as it were
to speak directly to the reader as needed addressee, but both the direct speech
and the described mannerisms of Pozdnyshev “show” what cannot be said:
the attitude of an evil character, in Wittgenstein’s sense.63
6. Morson is correct, however, to detect a gesture of self-abjuration in The

Kreutzer Sonata, of Tolstoy’s condemning (an earlier) Tolstoy, but this self-
condemnation—another “linkage”—is effectuated between The Kreutzer
Sonata and What Is Art?. The latter work, we recall, argues that beauty
“come[s] down to a certain sort of pleasure that we receive, meaning that
we recognize as beauty that which pleases us.”64 Aesthetic theories of the
beautiful—such as the “art for art’s sake movement” to which the young Tol-
stoy himself once subscribed—are rejected by the older Tolstoy because such
theories see art as a “means of pleasure” rather than “one of the conditions
of human life” and “spiritual nourishment.”65 The most extended—indeed,
Homeric—simile in What Is Art? elaborates upon this contrast in distinctly
100 Chapter 5
sexual imagery at the conclusion of chapter 18, beginning: “Terrible as it may

be to say it, what has happened to the art of our circle and time is the same
as happens with a woman who sells her feminine attractions, destined for
motherhood, for the pleasure of those who are tempted by such pleasures.”
“The art of our time and circle,” he asserts, “has become a whore,” using the
feminine form (bludnitsa) of the word Pozdnyshev uses to describe himself:
“fornicator” (bludnik).66 My schematic understanding of the simile, which is
developed by Tolstoy over the next several paragraphs, is as follows:
Genuine Art Tenor Vehicle
Effect new feeling new life
Result of action artwork child

(= conception)
Agent soul of artist mother/wife
Cause stored-up feeling love (not lust)
Counterfeit Art Tenor Vehicle
Effect pleasure [sexual addiction,

disease]
Result of action counterfeit art [pleasure]
Agent artisan whore
Cause money money
The values placed in brackets are not explicitly stated by Tolstoy, though they
can be inferred from the general semantics of the simile. They also, it may
be said, evoke the earlier life of Tolstoy himself, in Kazan and St. Petersburg,
during which time he, according to A. N. Wilson, contracted and received
treatment for a venereal disease.
There is some indication that Pozdnyshev, for whom music is “that most
refined form of sensual lust,” is a syphilitic. Here too he is unreliable. Early
on when castigating the ideology of “sex as healthy” he acknowledges the
existence and promulgation of a medical cure—“The danger of infection?
But that, too, is taken care of. Our solicitous government takes pains to see to
it.”67 But later, when he launches into a tirade against “the moral rot of mate-
rialism,” he contradicts himself: “and all that’s quite apart from the fact that
if they were to follow the doctors’ instructions regarding the infection they
say is rife everywhere and in everything, people would have to seek not union
but disunion; according to the doctors’ version of things, everyone ought to

keep apart from one another and never take the spray-syringe of phenol acid
(which they’ve found doesn’t have any effect anyway) out of their mouths.”68
Moreover, it is precisely the conflict between her “moral obligations of a
mother” and “her obligations as a wife” that make Pozdnyshev’s wife the
object of his rabid jealousy.
Here then, perhaps, we have a “linkage” connecting autobiographical ele-
ments from Tolstoy’s youth, reworked into an extended simile used to define
“counterfeit” art in contradistinction from “genuine” art, then literalized in
the character and plotline of Pozdnyshev. The young gallant author, adherent
to the art for art’s sake movement in his veneration of beauty as the instrument
of aesthetic pleasure and his veneration of women as the instruments of physi-
cal pleasure, is rejected by the older Tolstoy, who teases out the parallels in his
treatise on aesthetics and his novella on jealousy. Grounding both the rejected
aesthetics of beauty and rejected ethics of willful dependency is a notion of eth-
ical character that reaches back to Schopenhauer and forward to Wittgenstein.
7. But this story of conversion, confession, and self-abjuration, which we

have traced from Anna Karenina to the normative aesthetic theory of What
Is Art?, leads to a significant problem for Tolstoy, for—as he makes clear in
the later chapters of What Is Art?—he wants genuine artworks to trigger such
conversions in others, to instill and foster moral sensibility, religious values,
and universal feelings. Because music can be morally inert while still causing
a powerful feeling “without motive,” the normative meaning content of the
feeling conveyed will be determined by the recipient’s good or evil will, his
ethical attitude, which contextualizes the feeling. Thus, Schopenhauer’s view
implies that the effect of music, and perhaps other art forms, is determined by
rather than determining of the ethical outlook of the recipient. And we recall
that in reporting the “fearful . . . [and] horrible effect” of music in general,
Pozdnyshev was careful to qualify “for me, at any rate.” If an evil attitude or
will can thwart the will-less immediate understanding that Tolstoy advocates
in What Is Art?, he may feel the metaphysical pull to somehow guarantee the
universal transmission of those values he wants art to instill in people.
What Is Art? does not end with chapter 19, the passionate manifesto
announcing the coming genuine and morally good art of the future; instead
there is a final chapter, bearing the title “Conclusion” (it is the only chapter
of the book to have a chapter heading). At its outset Tolstoy tells of working
on the treatise for fifteen years, laying it aside in frustration and returning to
it repeatedly. The implication is that only with this chapter was Tolstoy able
to bring his treatise to a satisfying conclusion, but if that is true, such satisfac-
tion is achieved only by placing the entire argument of the previous nineteen
chapters in a greater framework, for in this final chapter Tolstoy expands
his enlightenment story of progressive religious consciousness and art to
include the role of science in the modern world, because “art has always been
102 Chapter 5
closely dependent” upon science.69 Whereas earlier in the treatise Tolstoy had
claimed that morally good art depends on and disseminates the contents of
the most advanced religious consciousness of the time, he now incorporates
science as a mediating link:
True science studies and introduces into human consciousness the

truths and the knowledge which are regarded as most important by
the people of a certain period and society. Art transfers these truths
from the realm of knowledge to the realm of feeling.
. . .
The degree of importance both of the feelings conveyed by art and
of the knowledge conveyed by science is determined for people by
the religious consciousness of the given time and society—that is, the
general understanding among people of that time and society of the
purpose of their life.70
The model Tolstoy presents now seems to be the following. Religious con-
sciousness, that is, beliefs about the purpose or meaning of life, fundamental
values (“the good”) and so on, still provides the criterion of importance, but
now to two “spiritual activities,”71 science and art. Therefore, for Tolstoy
science, like art in earlier chapters, will be evaluated according to how well
it follows the religious consciousness of the age. Unsurprisingly, Tolstoy has
as little sympathy for the science of his day as he does for its art. He divides
contemporary science into two areas. The first area, what we might call social
science (history, political economy, theology, philosophy) “is occupied pre-
dominantly with proving that the existing order of life is the very one which
ought to exist” and hence cannot advance the moral improvement of society.
The second area, what he calls “experimental science,” or what would today
be called pure science, is rejected because its practitioners “have invented a
theory of science for science’s sake, exactly like the theory of art for art’s sake”
which he had excoriated in earlier chapters.72 By the criterion of religious
consciousness, therefore, both these areas of science are false or counterfeit
because, like false art, they do not work for the benefit of people. “True
science” would “become a harmonious, organic whole with a definite and
reasonable purpose, understandable to all people—namely the introducing
into people’s consciousness of the truths that come from the religious con-
sciousness of our time.”73 Tolstoy’s claim, I take it, is that true science would
convey in discursive thought, as a kind of applied social science, knowledge
about society and the natural world necessary for implementing the values of
religious consciousness and universal brotherhood.
According to Tolstoy’s model, the feelings which art conveys themselves
depend on the science of the day and therefore, if the science is false or coun-
terfeit, so too will be the feelings. The first area of science—social sciences
legitimating the retrograde status quo—“calls up backward feelings which
have been outlived by mankind, feelings which in our time are bad and
exclusive,” while the other area—pure science—“occupied with the study
of subjects that by their very essence have no relation to human life, cannot
serve as the basis of art.”74 The dependency relation between art and science
diagnosed by Tolstoy in chapter 20 is a substantial departure from his earlier
chapters, in which discursive thought— knowledge and speech (rech’)—
apparently operated independently of feelings and art:
Art, together with speech, is a means of communication, and therefore

also of progress—that is, of mankind’s movement forward towards
perfection. . . . And just as in the evolution of knowledge—that is, the
forcing out and supplanting of mistaken and unnecessary knowledge
by truer and more necessary knowledge—so the evolution of feelings
takes place by means of art, replacing lower feelings, less kind and
less needed for the good of humanity, by kinder feelings, more needed
for that good.75
One possible explanation for Tolstoy’s reconceiving the relationship between

discursive thought and emotion is Schopenhauer’s theory of motives and
willing: ethical character is expressed by its causal interaction with emotions
(“manifestations of willing”) and motives (cognitive representations of the
world). If science constitutes the discursive body of cognitive representations
of the world, then it would follow that it would influence the causal interac-
tion of conveyed feelings and the character of an artwork’s recipient. And
therefore Tolstoy needs not only morally good artworks for his aesthetic edu-
cation of mankind, but the right science as well.
8. However, since the science of his time is on the “false path” (na lozhnom
puti), “the art of our time, in order to be art, must bypass science and make
its own path” (prokladyvat’ sebe put’), echoing the image of Levin’s nomi-
nalistic revelation in Anna Karenina.76 Drawing an analogy with the role of
church art, he reasons: “If through art there could be conveyed the customs
[obychai] of treating religious objects in a certain way, . . . then this same art
can evoke other customs, more closely corresponding to the religious con-
sciousness of our time.”77 That is, Tolstoy now advocates the creation of new
customs, practices, habits, through art: new contexts of significance within
which words and actions acquire normative content and meaning, as we saw
in chapter 1. Rather than the infection of a distinct feeling alone, which runs
the risk of the Nietzschean threat, art’s task now is to train its recipients in
new practices and customs, “not in reasoning but in life itself”:
Art should make it so that the feelings of brotherhood and love of

one’s neighbor, now accessible only to the best people of society,
become habitual feelings, an instinct for everyone. By calling up the
104 Chapter 5
feelings of brotherhood and love in people under imaginary condi-

tions, religious art will accustom people to experiencing the same
feelings in reality under the same conditions; it will lay in people’s
souls the rails [reil’sy] along which the life behavior of people brought
up by art will naturally [estestvenno] run.78
In one compacted sentence, on the verge of self-contradiction, he ushers back

in precisely the image—and the significations it has for him—that on my
reading he had endeavored so earnestly to prescind from his understanding
of ethics and aesthetics.79 Against the whims of causality art will lay down
the normative “rails” along which people’s behavior will henceforward run
“naturally.” Art will lay the rails of communal understanding along which
collective consciousness will find its semblance of “natural” community.
Only this way can infection ultimately be guaranteed.
Fifty years later Wittgenstein perhaps borrowed Tolstoy’s image to capture
the idealization of meaning Platonism, of the rule of the application of a con-
cept seen as rails extending into infinity: “Well, we might imagine rails instead
of a rule. And infinitely long rails correspond to the unlimited application of
a rule.”80 Wittgenstein here captures precisely the problem that confronted
Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein’s choice of metaphor, I suggest, indicates that he
recognized Tolstoy’s failed solution. One of the tensions within Wittgenstein’s
argument lies in whether knowing a concept necessarily entails having an
intentional content of each and every of its applications, of knowing pres-
ently all cases in which the concept’s application would be correct, which he
calls “rails extending into the future.” The pressure that leads to the fantasy
of rails extending into the future is the skeptical question of how one can be
certain that one does in fact possess the concept in question, that one does
understand its normative reach, that is, all its possible contexts of correct
usage. The analogous question in Tolstoy’s treatise is how we can be sure we
are the community we assume ourselves to be, such that we all will recognize,
respond to, and participate in the customs and practices that constitute our
communal consciousness, our being a community at all. In his Philosophical
Investigations Wittgenstein calls such a fantasy of infinite rails a “crossing of
different pictures of determination” (§191)—the confounding of a normative
with a causal relation. Wittgenstein’s rejection of the infinite rails as a fantasy
of metaphysical Platonism translates into a rejection of Tolstoy’s attempt to
make art the promissory placeholder of a communal understanding that is at
best always a contingent and ongoing but absolutely empirical achievement.
We have seen how Tolstoy’s proposed answer to the “Nietzschean threat”
he perceived in Schopenhauer’s philosophy—how an expressivist aesthetics
can convey distinct feelings—amounts to his slipping back into a form of
meaning Platonism, and confounding two orders of relations: the causal and
the normative.81 In the next three chapters I will suggest modifications to
Tolstoy’s theory, in the context of contemporary debates surrounding the
philosophy of emotions, the nature of moral emotions, and aesthetic expres-

sion. In this way I will show how a more sophisticated and yet more modest
version of Tolstoy’s theory, suitably reconstructed, is worthy of consideration
today. If Wittgenstein’s argument for immediate, non-interpretative under-
standing and against Derridean interpretivism makes sense, then the revisions
to Tolstoy’s theory of art elaborated in the next chapters will amount to an
argument against the universal validity of deconstructive literary theory. At
the very least it will fall to advocates of that theory to defend it against the
arguments and interpretations presented in this book.
Chapter 6
Reconstructing Tolstoy I: The Nature of Emotions
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

—Wittgenstein
We have seen that Tolstoy falls back into a metaphysical picture of mean-
ing Platonism, specifically regarding the normativity of emotions, in order
to guarantee the success of his moral-aesthetic program in the face of the
“Nietzschean threat” of decontextualized affect posed by Schopenhauer’s
theory of the emotional effects of music. And we have seen how the implicit
tension between a causal relation of “infectious” emotions and an intentional
relation of emotions, which in turn permits normativity, underwrites that
threat. Hence an adequate theory of emotions must precede the question of
how Tolstoy’s theory might be suitably modified in order to make it viable
as a theory of aesthetic expression. In what follows I sketch out just such
a theory dialectically, by in this chapter showing how it can resolve a ten-
sion between the causal and intentional relations that emerges within current
debates in the philosophy of emotions in general and, in the next chapter,
from a second tension that emerges in the discussion surrounding specifically
moral emotions and virtue theory. Both tensions arise from the Cartesianism
that was identified in chapter 1. We shall see that a proper account of moral
emotions resolves these tensions and sets the stage for a constructive account
of how artworks express and elicit emotions from audiences. This specific
theory of aesthetic expression will be shown in chapter 8 to answer the same
tension between causal and normative relations that bedevil rival accounts of
the expression of emotion in art, even in the “hard case” of absolute music.
Thus I will show how Tolstoy’s theory, suitably modified, offers a viable
expressivist alternative to the interpretivist aesthetic theories developed from
Derridean principles.
My account will take its cues from the constraints on a theory of moral
emotions that have emerged in the previous chapters of this study. A suc-
cessful account of moral emotions must meet the following conditions of
adequacy. First, ontologically an emotion—including a moral emotion—must
exhibit not only a causal relation, but also an intentional relation underlying
107
108 Chapter 6
normativity; that is, an account of emotion must include some kind of

correctness condition by which an emotional response can be fitting, appro-
priate, warranted, rational, or justified. The account of emotions provided in
this chapter fulfills this first condition. Second, also ontologically, an account
should acknowledge that Tolstoy speaks of two classes of morally important
emotions: universal feelings, and religious feelings, where it appears that uni-
versal feelings are morally relevant sentiments common to human nature,
while religious feelings are in some sense culturally established and individu-
ated moral emotions. Third, epistemologically, moral emotions must provide
some cognitive access to morally salient features of the world, such that this
knowledge is immediate or non-inferential. The account of moral emotions
and sensibility theory provided in the next chapter fulfills these second and
third conditions. Fourth, aesthetically, it must be possible for artworks to
elicit, inculcate, and develop moral emotions in their recipients. The account
of aesthetic expression provided in chapter 8 fulfills this fourth and final
condition. Thus these constraints orient the discussion and elaboration of the
account provided in the following chapters.
The dialectic of the following chapters proceeds through the construction
and resolution of a series of dilemmas in the specific philosophical topics rel-
evant to thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein about moral emotions and
their possible expression and transmission in art. First I construe the causal-
intentional tension in contemporary debates in the philosophy of emotion
in the form of a dilemma between non-cognitivist or “feeling” theories of
emotion on the one hand, and cognitivist or “judgment” theories of emo-
tion on the other. Then, turning to morality in chapter 7, I locate a second
but related dilemma in contemporary meta-ethics between moral judgment
as a kind of belief on the one hand, and as a kind of desire on the other.
These dilemmas arise from tacit Cartesian presuppositions that, once identi-
fied and set aside, permit alternative characterizations to come into view.
Characterizing central moral emotions as sui generis states inseparably com-
posed of conative and cognitive, and often physiological, phenomenological
and behavioral-dispositional aspects, resolves these dilemmas. Third, turn-
ing to the epistemology of moral emotions, I construct a dilemma between
objective and subjective theories of moral awareness and show how a “sensi-
bility theory,” which rests on key analogies and disanalogies with perceptual
knowledge, best resolves the dilemma. Fourth and finally, I offer an explana-
tory gloss on Tolstoy’s categories of “universal” and “religious” feelings in
the context of contemporary thinking about emotions and their development
into moral emotions through acculturation that sets the stage for chapter 8.
In that chapter, I consider aesthetic expression, and more specifically how an
artwork can elicit in its audience a determinate emotion. The result will be a
robust reconstructive account of how Tolstoy’s expressivism, suitably modi-
fied, constitutes a viable theory in light of today’s debates surrounding moral
emotions and aesthetic expression.
Reconstructing Tolstoy I 109
We should begin, however, with a hefty caveat regarding virtually any

theory of emotion, namely that the concept emotion does not lend itself to
necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather seems to function as a family
resemblance concept, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities in detail.”1
Thus our everyday concept of emotion extends from objectless moods (ela-
tion, depression, anxiety), through noncognitive, intentionless, involuntary
reflexes (the startle response has been defended as an emotion),2 to cognitive,
propositionally articulated, voluntary emotions (vengeful ambition for some-
thing because of someone, say); emotions that involve specific bodily states
(e.g., one’s hairs bristle with fear) and those that don’t (e.g., nostalgia). Some
emotions are conceived as occurrent states of short duration (e.g., explo-
sive rage), others as dispositional traits that can manifest occurrent states
(e.g., the emotional trait of jealousy); some emotions seem to combine both
occurrent states and dispositional traits in a complex, temporally extended
and stagewise segmented process, as in the stages of grief that may extend
over years or decades.3 Choice of criteria determines categorization, but that
choice is contested, so that often determinate definitions amount to stipula-
tions.4 Keeping in mind that our topic will eventually narrow to central moral
emotions and their transmission or inculcation through art, we shall draw on
those examples in elaborating our reconstruction.5 While thus acknowledg-
ing that there are emotions on the periphery of any theory, the tradition of
thinking about emotions has reliably delineated several aspects or dimen-
sions of an emotion. First, often an emotion has a distinctive phenomenology
or what-it-is-likeness: anger feels a certain way, distinct from how guilt or joy
feels. Second, such phenomenal characteristics can include the perception of
distinct physiological changes, only some of which may be perceptible to the
person; anger is accompanied by a “boiling of the blood,” Aristotle famously
says:6 one’s pulse perceptibly quickens, one’s capillaries imperceptibly open.
One might feel oneself flush red with shame or guilt, and so on. Third, most
emotions have intentionality: they are directed at or toward an object (real,
imagined, or remembered).7 One is frightened of the dog, or of the prospect
of a downturn in the market; one is angry at the person who jumps the line,
and so on. Fourth, often emotions involve a behavioral disposition, or an
“action readiness” tendency: a disposition to act a certain way.8 Thus when
frightened one adopts a “fight, freeze or flight” attitude, and when ashamed
one hangs one’s head, and so on. Lastly emotions tend to involve a cognitive
dimension: an evaluation or appraisal, or perhaps even a belief of some kind.
One is indignant at a person because one believes that she has wronged one
(or another) in some way; one is frightened of an object because one in some
sense appraises it as dangerous. More generally, we seem to be able to easily
categorize emotions as valenced, that is, positive or negative in regard to their
intentional objects, and usually we view the emotions as correspondingly
either pleasant or unpleasant.9
110 Chapter 6
1. Recall that in Anna Karenina, and later in What Is Art?, Tolstoy introduces
the term “to infect” with examples of what is now called emotional conta-
gion: one person laughs, and another person begins to laugh, and so on.10
These examples suggest that Tolstoy conceives of emotion in physiological
terms, such that sensing another person’s laughing as it were causally triggers
a physiological response in oneself. This tradition in emotion theory—often
called the non-cognitive or feeling theory of emotion—reaches back to Wil-
liam James and Curt Lange, Tolstoy’s contemporaries, and forward to current
neuroscientific studies and their partisan appropriation as “affect theory” by
some scholars in cultural studies, social and political theory. Therefore, con-
sidering the James-Lange theory of emotion, its current versions and their
shortcomings will prepare us for considering an equally one-sided response—
the so-called cognitivist theory of emotion—before our dialectic leads us to a
more promising conception of emotion in our reconstruction.
The James-Lange theory holds that emotions are feelings of patterned vari-
ations in one’s body: muscular, vascular, epidermal, respiratory, etc. changes,
but also facial expressions and behavioral dispositions.11 In his influential
article “What Is an Emotion?” (1884), William James argues that the bodily
changes that one is tempted to call the “expression” of an emotion in fact are
the primary constituent of the emotion:
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that

the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called
the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily
expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow
directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling
of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense
says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are
frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is
incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the
other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between,
and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we
tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry,
angry or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states follow-
ing on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form,
pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the
bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to
strike, but we would not actually feel afraid or angry.12
That is, the emotion was not originally a cognitive act— say, perceptual
construal, appraisal, or judgment—that then affected the body, but was origi-
nally a bodily, physiological state that was subsequently perceived or felt as
an emotion. Emotions are feelings, according to this theory, not cognitions.
Although at the outset of the article James specifies that “the only emotions
I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily
expression,” he generalizes his claim to the effect that “a purely disembodied
human emotion is a nonentity,” that is, that by definition all emotions are
bodily changes:
The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become,

that whatever moods, affections and passions I have are in very truth
constituted by, and made up of those bodily changes we ordinarily
call their expression or consequence; and the more it seems to me
that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded
from the life of the affectations, hard and tender alike, and drag out
an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form.13
The passage above presents James’s central argument for his claim that
emotions are perceived physiological changes, the so- called “abstraction
argument”: imagine undergoing a powerful emotion, and then subtract from
it every somatic sensation associated with that emotion; the result will not
be a state one would associate with that emotion; therefore emotions are felt
changes in the body. At the conclusion of the article James reconsiders the
“purely cerebral” emotions—moral, aesthetic and intellectual feelings—and
now, given his physiological constitution theory, concludes that such emo-
tions are not emotions at all:
Unless in them there actually be coupled with the intellectual feeling

a bodily reverberation of some kind, unless we actually laugh at the
neatness of the mechanical device, thrill at the justice of the act, or
tingle at the perfection of the musical form, our mental condition is
more allied to a judgment of right than to anything else. And such a
judgment is to be classed among awarenesses of truth: it is a cogni-
tive act.14
Thus on the James-Lange view, emotions are passive feelings of bodily changes
and are completely divorced from any cognitive acts of mind.15 By virtue of
the abstraction argument, James’s theory is a “feeling” theory of emotion, for
it holds that emotions are constituted completely of phenomenological felt
perceptions of physiological changes.
2. Pursuing one line of criticism of the James-Lange theory will lead to a

reconstructed notion of emotion that better serves the theory that I am devel-
oping from Tolstoy and Wittgenstein. The line of criticism I have in mind is
the observation that the feeling theory fails to attribute any intentionality
to emotions: on this theory emotions are not “about” or “directed toward”
anything; rather, they are internal perceptions of causal-dispositional effects
112 Chapter 6
of the body. But, as we saw in chapter 3, many of the examples of emotion

that Tolstoy provides in What Is Art?, and many emotions in general, are at
least partly comprised of intentional states, are directed toward, or are about,
something. Emotions such as admiration, fear, regret, love, and hate are
typically directed at certain objects, or classes of objects (real, imagined, or
remembered), whereas moods—elation, depression, and so on—are object-
less (or have everything as their object) and sensations—itchiness, pain, and
so on—have causes, not intentional objects. If emotions, unlike moods and
sensations, have intentional objects or properties, the James-Lange theory
appears unable to account for this dimension of emotions.
A possible response would be to claim that the cause of the Jamesian
emotion is what the emotion is about, and thus the intentionality relation of
emotions is vindicated. But while there are certainly cases where the cause
and the object of an emotion coincide (e.g., I was frightened by the snake in
the garden), this coincidence is empirical and contingent, not conceptual and
necessary. For example, suppose I mistake a garden hose for a snake; then the
cause of my fright is the garden hose, but the object of my fright is the imag-
ined snake. Wittgenstein makes clear the distinction we should uphold: “We
should distinguish between the object of fear and the cause of fear. Thus a
face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight), is not on that
account its cause, but—one might say—its target.”16 Anthony Kenny draws
the lesson from this passage and further examples that a person’s emotions
seem to involve that person’s knowledge or beliefs:
The distinction between the cause and the object of an emotion is

thus most easily made out by reference to the knowledge or beliefs of
the subject. Faced with any sentence describing the occurrence of an
emotion, of the form “A φed because p,” we must ask whether it is a
necessary condition of the truth of this sentence that A should know
or believe that p. If so, then the sentence contains an allusion to the
object of the emotion; if not, to its cause.17
Kenny and others have further distinguished between the various different
kinds of intentional object an emotion-type may possess: in the case of fear,
for example, an apparent object (this snake, imaginary or real), a formal object
(the property of dangerousness), and perhaps a deep object (the first particular
object that elicited fear from me, and that serves, consciously or unconsciously,
as the paradigm or precedent for the emotion-type).18 Moreover, philoso-
phers note that the formal object of an emotion’s intentional relation is also
required in order to individuate some emotions whose phenomenological and
physiological dimensions are either identical or very similar. Thus anger and
indignation may exhibit the same felt qualities, but will be distinguished based
on the nature of the formal object, since indignation seems to be directed at
violations of moral norms only, whereas anger’s formal object is broader.19
Lastly, the intentional relation of an emotion is also a normative relation, that

is, the formal object of an emotion provides correctness or justification condi-
tions for the emotion. My fear of the garden hose perceived to be a snake is
mistaken and unjustified: my fear response can correctly or incorrectly fit the
corresponding evaluative properties in the world—in this case, dangerousness.
This suggests that emotions have a mind-to-world direction of fit, like beliefs,
and that their correctness condition implies that there is a kind of objectivity
possessed by the evaluative properties to which they respond. I shall return to
this point in sections 2 and 3 of chapter 7.
Given the intentionality relation inherent in central emotions, we can
appraise the shortcomings of Tolstoy’s initial examples of infectious laughter
and crying. For what the conceptual analysis of emotion by Kenny reveals
is that such “emotional contagion” or unconscious mimicry, while perhaps
being physiologically type- identical (the same bodily or somatic states)
between infector and infectee, does not amount to the transfer of emotion,
because the response in the recipient is not directed toward anything, the
intentional relation is not instantiated. Likewise, we can return to Schopen-
hauer’s theory of music and see the danger inherent within the emotional
power of music is that such transfer of emotion does not include the inten-
tionality of that emotion, which renders it susceptible to recontextualization,
that is, to its being directed toward new intentional objects and motives.
Annette Baier unwittingly echoes Schopenhauer when she writes of music’s
inducing “degenerate emotions”:
But if emotions, to be emotions rather than moods, must have appar-

ent objects, and behind them deep objects, then what music produces
in us may not count as anything but degenerate emotions. For when
music makes us rejoice, there is nothing in particular about which we
are rejoicing (except the music itself), when it brings tears to our eyes,
it is not grief at some mentionable loss, when it arouses courage and
martial spirit, it is not the will to face any particular enemy or threat
that we feel. . . .
. . . Normally what dimly evokes the deep objects [of emotions]
are apparent objects, the current loved one or disgusting one. What
they may do is arouse the “precipitate of a reminiscence” [Freud’s
definition of emotion] by a shortcut—not via a current object, but
by a more direct revival of the memory of past loved ones or lost
ones, or of the general common features of such ones (the formal
object), without needing or providing us with any current focus of
that emotion. Musical emotions differ from ordinary emotions, that
is, in going straight to the depths of emotions. . . . A version of the
intentionality of emotions that makes place both for current apparent
objects, and for formal and deep objects (and so for a dim memory of
all the previously current apparent objects linked with a given deep
114 Chapter 6
object) allows us to recognize in the emotions music arouses both a

certain vagueness about its objects and a definite directedness.20
Baier’s conjecture regarding musical emotions thus both confirms the suppo-
sition that emotions have intentional objects while also providing an account
of how “musical emotions” seem to lack an apparent intentional object while
yet affecting listeners differently, depending on their characters in the sense
of specific “precipitates of a reminiscence.” Thus Baier’s account offers a dis-
tinctly Freudian construal of Schopenhauer’s picture of musical emotions.
3. A successor of the James- Lange view of emotion can be seen in the

contemporary “turn to affect,” which inherits the shortcomings of its
nineteenth-century ancestor.21 Drawing on work from cognitive and neuro-
science, “affect theorists” posit subliminal, autonomic affective responses to
one’s environment, occurring below the level of consciousness, cognition, and
judgment, from which two opposed “schools” can be distinguished. What
can be called Left Affectism views the potential for affective response below
the level of conscious judgment as an emancipatory, creative possibility for
escaping ideology, language, and psychoanalysis.22 Right Affectism, on the
other hand, views affective response, called “basic emotions” or “primitive
emotions,” as evolutionarily selected and constituting a universal, trans-
cultural and hard-wired uniformity.23 On this view emotions are causally
triggered neurophysiological events whose manifestations typically include
facial expressions, distinct bodily movements, and physiological changes.24
Both schools issue from the neuroscience of “affect programs” and its tenet
that affective responses are solely related causally to their triggering stimuli,
that is, independently of intentional states such as belief and desire. Thus
Paul Griffiths holds that basic emotions are “sources of motivation not inte-
grated into the system of beliefs or desires. The characteristic properties of
the affect program system states, their informational encapsulation and their
involuntary triggering, necessitate the introduction of a concept of mental
state separate from the concepts of belief and desire.”25 On this view, basic
emotions such as fear, disgust, joy, sadness, surprise, and so on are causally
triggered and in turn manifest autonomic, physiological responses (skin con-
ductance, hormone levels, heart rate, etc.), characteristic facial expressions
and behavioral dispositions (e.g., the “fight, freeze, or flight” response in the
case of fear). These affective program states and responses occur automati-
cally and more quickly than conscious cognition, and therefore constitute a
bodily “substrate” for emotions.26 One virtue of this view is that, because it
holds that emotions do not necessarily involve thought or evaluation, it can
easily countenance the commonsensical belief that non-human animals and
human infants, which lack propositionally articulated thought and linguistic
facility, nonetheless possess these “basic” emotions, understood to be inher-
ited instincts or innate dispositions.
As Ruth Leys has recently shown, the turn to affect, in both its Right
and Left orientations, holds that “affect is independent of signification and
meaning”:
Although at first sight the [Right Affectism] work of Tomkins—or

Ekman, or Damasio— might appear to be too reductive for the
purposes of those [Left Affectism] cultural theorists indebted to Del-
uezean ideas about affect, there is in fact a deep coherence between
the views of both groups. That coherence concerns precisely the sepa-
ration presumed to obtain between the affect system on the one hand
and intention or meaning or cognition on the other. For both the new
affect theorists and the neuroscientists from whom they variously
borrow—and transcending differences of philosophical background,
approach, and orientation—affect is a matter of autonomic responses
that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cog-
nition and to be rooted in the body. What the new affect theorists
and the neuroscientists share is a commitment to the idea that there
is a gap between the subject’s affects and its cognition or appraisal
of the affective situation or object, such that cognition or think-
ing comes “too late” for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings
to play the role in action and behavior usually accorded to them.
The result is that action and behavior are held to be determined by
affective dispositions that are independent of consciousness and the
mind’s control.27
How do brain/body states interact with traditionally mental events, pro-

cesses, and states such as beliefs, desires, decisions, and so on, that bear
an intentional relation to objects or situations? We can take Antonio
Damasio’s work on affect as a case in point, since recent commentators
on Tolstoy’s What Is Art? have adopted his theory and hence offered an
“affectivist” reading of Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory.28 According to Damasio,
in order to maintain homeostatic self-regulation of the living organism, the
brain generates “maps” of bodily states, and these mappings in turn gen-
erate higher-level cognitive activities such as beliefs and desires. Thus, for
instance, enzyme and hormone levels in the digestive system would trigger a
“hunger” map that will generate sensations of hunger, desire for food, and
strategic beliefs for obtaining food. Moreover, Damasio holds that while
some somatic mappings are biologically fixed, others are somewhat flexible,
so that specific body states can trigger conditioned or learned mappings,
which as “gut reactions” constitute impulses toward or against given behav-
ior. He writes: “In short, somatic markers are a special instance of feelings
generated from secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been
connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios.
When a somatic marker is juxtaposed to a particular future outcome the
116 Chapter 6
combination functions as an alarm bell. When a positive somatic marker

is juxtaposed instead it becomes a beacon of incentive.”29 The somatic
markers thus causally either reinforce or weaken specific behavioral dis-
positions, and in this way “guide” action. The literary scholar Douglas
Robinson summarizes Damasio’s theory as preface to his understanding of
Tolstoyan infection along these lines: through repeated instances of similar
homeostatic response we “build a self-regulatory regime around somatically
triggered impulses, around ‘somatic markers’ that channel stored (learned,
conditioned) behavioral patterns, through feelings into guided thought and
action. This is the core of Damasio’s somatic theory of human behavior:
the guidance of thought and action through learned or conditioned bodily
signals.”30
Damasio illustrates this general thesis about subpersonal bodily states
being subsequently mapped onto emotions and conscious thoughts and
desires by recounting the story of a patient who, when electrically stimulated
in a certain part of her brain, laughed uncontrollably:
The laughter was quite genuine, so much so that the observers

described it as contagious. It came entirely out of the blue— the
patient was not being shown or told anything funny, and was not
entertaining any thought that might lead to laughter. And yet, there
it was, entirely unmotivated but realistic laughter. Remarkably . . .
the laughter was followed “by a sensation of merriment or mirth” in
spite of its unmotivated nature. Just as interestingly, the cause of the
laughter was attributed to whichever object the patient was concen-
trating on at the time of the stimulation. For example, if the patient
was being shown a picture of a horse, she would say, “The horse
is funny.” On occasion the investigators themselves were deemed to
be an emotionally competent stimulus as when she concluded: “You
guys are just so funny . . . standing around.”31
Damasio concludes from such experiments that “emotion-related thoughts

only came after the emotion [bodily] began.”32 Thus Damasio adheres to the
Jamesian-Lange feeling theory of emotion.
Damasio further hypothesizes that the brain can simulate its own body
mappings via what he calls the “as-if body loop” mechanism: “mirror neu-
rons” represent the behavior one sees in another, and thereby trigger the
body-mapping function, such that the emotions and conscious mental states
associated with that behavior are themselves triggered.33 The behavior that
is mirrored may be seen, or narratively heard or read; in any case, the empa-
thetic reaction proceeds via one’s body imitating the other, and subsequently
consciously becoming aware of the associated emotion, thoughts, and desires.
Robinson calls this “somatic mimeticism,” and maps Damasio onto Tolstoy
to arrive at Robinson’s own interpretation of the “infectiousness” of art:
Tolstoy’s infection theory is objectivistic, quasiscientistic, based on the

assumption that a feeling exists in one body like a disease and some-
how makes the jump across the intervening space to another body,
where it burrows in and infects its new host. Damasio’s empathy the-
ory is constructivistic, based on the assumption that the new host is
the active party in the transaction, that we are constantly reaching out
to our world creatively and mimetically, seeking out stimuli, which we
then convert into something internally meaningful. It doesn’t really
matter where we find such stimuli—in novels and poems and plays,
in critical works, in oral narrations, in the embodied speaking of our
friends, in the pattern of a tapestry or a table arrangement, in the
sounds of cars in a city street, in the swaying of trees or the crash
of thunder—we convert it all, constructively, constitutively, into our
own somatic material, as we need it. Another boundary blurred by the
somatic theory is that between the spoken and written word; we can
distinguish them, obviously, but only by mapping a more analytical
layer of understanding onto our somatic mimeses.34
In this way, Robinson understands Tolstoy as a proto-Jamesian affect theorist

avant la lettre. While affect theory may coincide with Tolstoy’s view on the
emotional influence of art, that does not make the view true, for there are sev-
eral telling criticisms of affect theory and its neuroscientific underpinnings,
which in turn cast doubt upon the probity of the related reading of Tolstoy’s
aesthetic theory.
4. For the purposes of the present study, the chief criticism of Damasio-style
theories is that they conflate causal and normative relations, what Wittgen-
stein called the “crossing of different pictures” regarding the normativity of
meaning as a super-rigid machine, as we saw in chapter 5.35 A reliable causal
relation is not sufficient for meaning, or intentionality, and a fortiori for
normativity, since meaning qua intentionality is a normative relation. This
mistake was brought out by Kripke in his critique of causal-dispositional
theories of meaning, and is clearly committed by Damasio when he attributes
normative psychological predicates (thinking, deciding, choosing, guiding)
to causal mechanisms.36 The most sophisticated philosophical defense of the
James-Lange or “feeling” theory of emotions to date is by Jesse Prinz, who
offers what he terms an “embodied appraisal theory of the emotions” that
takes as its point of departure the James-Lange claim that emotions are feel-
ings or perceptions of bodily (or somatic) changes.37
Folk psychology (that is, how we talk about emotions) holds that emo-
tions are not merely causally induced somatic responses to the environment,
but that they moreover are meaningful, and subject to rational assessments of
correctness or appropriateness: my being afraid of a normal mouse is unwar-
ranted, or inappropriate, and, provided reasons for believing the mouse to
118 Chapter 6
be harmless, I should withhold my endorsement of my emotional response.

If I am angry at a colleague for a perceived offense, I should when que-
ried be able to provide a reason—that is, a justification or warrant—for my
anger. My emotional responses, at least in many central cases, are responses
to reasons, not simply causes. Prinz attempts to accommodate this aspect
of emotions—their meaningfulness, their intentionality and normativity—by
drawing on contemporary theories of mental representation that hold that a
mental state can represent by virtue of its causal relationship to the world.
According to informational semantics (Fred Dretske), psychosemantics (Jerry
Fodor), and biological semantics (Ruth Millikan) some type of mental state
or episode is reliably caused by a state in the world, and if the capacity to
have such mental states came about because they are reliably caused in that
way, then we may conclude that the mental state or episode represents or
indicates that state of the world. These various naturalistic theories claim
to reduce the intentionality and normativity of mental states to nomological
or teleological causal relations. Relying on these theories of representation,
Prinz holds that if a particular somatic perception reliably occurs under cer-
tain circumstances and was learned or evolved for that purpose, then that
perception represents, or is about, that situation. So for example, confronted
with a dangerous situation, one’s body undergoes certain vascular, muscu-
lar, circulatory, and respiratory changes that evolved in order to prepare the
body for fighting, freezing, or fleeing. Following Damasio, Prinz claims that
one’s mind has the ability to recognize this pattern of changes perceptually,
and to use that pattern to inform decisions about what to do next. Thus the
perception of the pattern of somatic changes is a representation of, is about,
danger. Following the work of Richard Lazarus, Prinz calls such fundamen-
tal organism- environment relationships that bear on well- being, such as
danger, loss, offense, and so on, “core relational themes.” On his “embodied
appraisal theory” then, core relational themes are represented by perceptions
of patterned somatic changes. The James-Lange “feeling” theory is vindicated
because, drawing on the causal theories of representation, causally induced
somatic responses can be shown to be about core relational themes. The
intentionality of emotions has been saved without recourse to reasons and
concepts that the cognitivist theories of emotion deploy.
But each of the causal theories of representation that Prinz invokes has
been shown either to presuppose intentionality and normativity or else fail
to demarcate semantic relations correctly. For instance, the utterance of the
word “cow” plausibly indicates (reliably causally co-varies with) the presence
of a cow, but it also indicates the presence of a horse on a dark night, or a 3D
plastic print of a cow, or a hallucination of a cow, or the projection of a cow-
image onto one’s retina, and thus if we take causal indication to be equivalent
to meaning, then “cow” means a potentially infinite disjunction of such causal
elicitors of the expression “cow” or concept cow in thought.38 Moreover,
taking reliable causal co-variance to equate to meaning proliferates meaning
beyond established practices: the presence of cows reliably causally co-varies

with the presence of flies, but cows do not mean flies, or vice versa.39 Natural-
ized semantic theories either fail to account adequately for the normativity
of meaning, for the fact that the use of an expression or concept can be
incorrect, or unwarranted, or they implicitly rely on semantic notions they
purportedly aim to explain.40 In his criticism of Prinz, John Deigh points out
that the perceived feelings of bodily alterations are said to “represent” or
“carry information”—that is, bear an intentional relation—about the world,
but this is a mere façon de parler, for the feelings are related merely to the
proximate cause of them, whatever that may be. Deigh illustrates his point
with an example of fear at a possible assailant:
Nothing in this relation of representation, however, implies that these

feelings [of fear] are directed at or toward any object in the world,
real or imagined. Nothing in the relation implies that they orient
you toward the threat you are facing. In particular, even though the
assailant is the object about which the feelings carry information in
the sense of “information” borrowed from the theory of perception,
nothing in the relation implies that the feelings are directed toward
him. For their carrying information about him just means that he,
being dangerous, is a reliable cause of such feelings, and his being a
reliable cause of the feelings implies nothing about the feelings being
directed at or toward him. Obviously nothing changes if the infor-
mation they carry about the object is erroneous, if for instance you
mistook a deliveryman with a cell phone for an assailant wielding a
knife. We have no more reason to regard the feelings in this case to be
directed at or toward their cause than we had in the case of correct
information. The feelings, in either case, represent danger exactly as
a sound made by an alarm that is part of a home security system rep-
resents a home invasion. Just as the alarm’s sound is not directed at
or toward whoever sets off the alarm, so the feelings are not directed
at or toward the assailant or anyone, like the deliveryman, mistaken
for one.41
That is, in this model the feelings of fear merely register the causal impact of
an object—any object—that reliably triggers that registering reaction. The
concept of error or mistake has no purchase here, and if we aver that the
causal mechanism is functioning correctly just in cases that it registers actual
dangers, then we have smuggled in our correctness condition in the notion of
proper or correct functioning. Thus Prinz summarizes his embodied appraisal
theory as follows:
In sum, we can explain how emotions represent concerns with-

out supposing that emotions are, contain, or essentially involve
120 Chapter 6
judgments. This conclusion falls out of Dretske’s theory of represen-

tation and others like it. Emotions represent things such as losses
and dangers because they are set up to be set off by such things.
They represent these things even if they have no constituent concepts
or ideas. Like the beep of a smoke detector, emotions can represent
without describing.42
But the smoke detector is a loaded example. It detects, registers, bears an

intentional relation towards smoke because it was designed (“set up”) to
do so. Its intentionality is derived from the intentionality of its design, the
purpose for which it was designed.43 Moreover, that such causal reliabilism
does not explain normativity is shown by the fact that we can take the smoke
detector to be so, to be directed at smoke, only by tacitly assuming that the
mechanism is functioning correctly: we impute the correctness condition to
the causal mechanism when we make that assumption, and then claim that
the mechanism itself fulfills the normative relation of correctness. Feelings
on Prinz’s model, like Damasio’s, can at best describe a causal relation or
association between object, feeling, and response, but they cannot explain
how a feeling on this model justifies or warrants the response, because the
feeling stands in no normative intentional relation to either the “correct”
object or the “correct” response. By resting his theory of emotions on the
unfulfilled promise of such causal theories of representation, Prinz’s somatic
theory of emotion for all its sophistication fails to adequately address the
causal-normative problem that Wittgenstein laid bare.
The causal-normative tension also underlies Leys’s charge that the
neo-Jamesian account of Damasio, Prinz, and others is a form of implicit
Cartesianism. First, she notes that several empirical criticisms have been
raised regarding the experimental setups and evidence adduced in support of
Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis and more generally in support of neu-
roscientific conclusions that attribute traditionally conscious and intentional
psychological activities like deciding, willing, and thinking to unconscious,
implicit, causal affective states and processes.44 Second, and more impor-
tantly for the present chapter, several conceptual criticisms have been lodged
against neuroscience’s attributing psychological— that is, intentional—
properties and relations to the body or parts of the body (e.g., the brain)
which amounts to a kind of “crypto-Cartesianism.” In other words, this line
of criticism by Leys and others charges these neuroscientists and theorists,
despite their espoused Spinozaist anti-dualism, with tacitly assuming a Car-
tesian dualism between mind and body/brain, between intentionally directed
mental state and causally operative bodily state:
Indeed, it is only by adopting a highly idealized or metaphysical pic-

ture of the mind as completely separate from the body and brain to
which it freely directs its intentions and decisions that they can reach
the skeptical conclusions they do . . . The mistake they make is to

idealize the mind by defining it as a purely disembodied conscious-
ness and then, when the artificial requirements of the experimental
setup appear to indicate that consciousness of the willing or intention
comes “too late” in the causal chain to account for the movements
under study, to conclude in dualist fashion that intentionality has no
place in the initiation of such movements and that therefore it must
be the brain which does all the thinking and feeling and moving for
us. (All the “willing,” so to speak.)45
That is, these thinkers—be they Left or Right Affectivists—surreptitiously

import intentionality and normativity into their descriptions of the causal
operations of bodily states (including those of the brain, amygdala, auto-
nomic nervous system, etc.). So, for instance, Damasio claims that “our
brains can often decide well, in seconds, or minutes, depending on the time
frame we set as appropriate for the goal we want to achieve, and if they
can do so, they must do the marvelous job with more than just pure rea-
son.”46 Paradoxically, then, in assigning higher-order cognitive functions like
decision-making to the body/brain, these theories reinstate the Cartesian
dualism between a spatiotemporal, causal-mechanical body and an exten-
sionless, physically transcendent, disembodied mind. And in chapter 1 we
have seen how Cartesianism underwrites one version of the dilemma between
causal and normative relations.
5. The standard response to the failure of feeling theories of emotion to

account for the intentional and normative relation is simply to jump the
Cartesian divide, as it were, and assimilate emotions to the model of belief,
as an evaluation or propositional judgment. While “pure” theories of this
sort claim that emotions are nothing but judgments, most cognitivist theo-
ries of emotion hold that emotions essentially involve a cognitive state of
judgment, thought, or appraisal, and thus hold that emotions are not mere
feelings or other non-cognitive states.47 Cognitivist theories reach back to
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which he defines several emotions with reference to
their having an inherent judgment about or toward something: anger “may
be defined as a desire accompanied by pain, for a conspicuous revenge for
[dia] a conspicuous slight at the hands of men who have no call to slight
oneself or one’s friends” (1378a30-32); fear “may be defined as a pain or
disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil in the future”
(1382a21–22); indignation “is pain caused by the sight of undeserved good
fortune” (1387a9); envy “is pain at the sight of such good fortune . . . we feel
it towards our equals; not with the idea of getting something for ourselves,
but because the other people have it. We shall feel it if we have, or think we
have, equals; and by ‘equals’ I mean equals in birth, relationship, age, disposi-
tion, distinction, or wealth” (1387b23–26).48 In this general cognitivist view,
122 Chapter 6
emotions are felt responses to, or otherwise include, some kind of norma-
tively assessable representation of one’s environment.49 For example, one’s
experiencing fear essentially involves one’s judging or evaluating that one
is being threatened by something dangerous. So I fear the dog because of its
sharp teeth, growling, and stance. Hence these theories easily accommodate
the normative, intentional relation of emotions that the feeling theories could
not, for beliefs are directed at and ratified by the world (mind-to-world direc-
tion of fit) and bear a correctness relation to their objects. So my unwarranted
or unjustified fear at the garden hose is a cognitive (rather than purely affec-
tive) state essentially involving my mistaken belief or appraisal that there is a
dangerous snake under foot.50 A more moderate cognitivist approach holds
that the beliefs involved are not epistemic beliefs regarding facts of the world,
but rather evaluative or axiological beliefs or construals that apprehend the
world evaluatively. So my fear of the dog is an appropriate response to the
evaluative property or value of dangerousness that I as it were perceive in the
dog. Thus emotions can be individuated by means of the particular evalua-
tive property to which they respond (the dangerous for fear, the admirable
for admiration, the contemptible for contempt, etc.), and these evaluative
properties constitute the formal objects of emotions, providing them with
correctness and justification conditions.
6. There are two central objections to the cognitivist theory of emotions, and
they amount to the compound claim that an evaluative belief, judgment, or
construal is neither necessary nor sufficient for an emotion. The first part of
the objection is that emotions do not necessarily imply evaluative beliefs.
There are cases where one has an emotional response despite having a belief
that does not warrant, or even contradicts, the emotion. Thus, one example
provided by Kant to illustrate the dynamic sublime is that we will be gripped
by fear when standing on a precipice even though we know that we are safely
and fixedly on firm ground.51 Likewise many people have a “fear of flying”
despite their conscious acknowledgment that flying is statistically quite safe.52
On the cognitivist view, it seems that we have contradictory propositional
beliefs, but in these situations, phenomenologically, it does not seem to the
subjects that they are merely holding contradictory beliefs; rather, it seems
that the bodily or phenomenological or behavioral-dispositional response is
of a different kind than the calm, reflective belief that undermines the reason
for the affective response.53 Even more strongly, if evaluative beliefs are a
component of emotions, it would seem that having an emotion necessarily
requires having the relevant evaluative concepts that are deployed in the eval-
uative beliefs. But we generally think that non-human animals and human
infants exhibit emotional responses without having the relevant conceptual
repertoire. So it seems that in cases of non-human animals and human infants
concept possession and cognitive belief are not necessary for emotions, as the
cognitivist theory would seem to imply.54 (We shall attempt to answer this
objection in section 4 of chapter 7, when we consider a developmental theory

of emotional acquisition and education).
Conversely (the second part of the objection), and running James’s
“abstraction argument” as it were in reverse, it seems possible to have the
relevant kind of evaluative belief without having the corresponding affective
state: in some cases the beliefs can leave us emotionally unmoved. The cogni-
tivist view seems to ignore the fact that in many cases emotions have specific
physiological reactions, action readiness tendencies, and a typical phenom-
enology, a certain way they feel. This would suggest that having an evaluative
belief, judgment or construal is not sufficient for having the corresponding
emotional response.
We have therefore arrived at a dilemma of sorts in our survey of traditional
theories of emotion. On the one hand, in assimilating emotions to bodily,
affective states, feeling theories capture the phenomenology, physiology, and
action readiness dimensions of emotions, but because of their reliance on
a causal relation between inciting state of affairs and responding emotion,
these theories fail to do justice to the intentionality—and correctness and
justification conditions—of many emotions. On the other hand, in assimi-
lating emotions to mental, epistemic, or doxastic states, cognitivist theories
of emotion capture the intentionality relation, and correctness and justifica-
tion conditions of emotions, but fail to do justice to the phenomenology,
physiology, and action readiness dimensions of emotions, and seem to over-
intellectualize emotions so that they are unavailable to non-human animals
and human infants. This dilemma issues from the crypto-Cartesianism, the
rigid divide between mental and bodily states, identified above.
The Wittgensteinian alternative to this crypto- Cartesianism is to
embrace a holistic understanding of psychological concepts, including emo-
tion concepts, as including mental representations, phenomenological and
physiological qualities, and behavioral dispositions. Peter Hacker, who has
energetically deployed this Wittgensteinian picture against neuroscientific
affect theory, quotes the Philosophical Investigations: “It comes to this: only
of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human
being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is con-
scious or unconscious.”55 This is the alternative to Cartesianism because “[it]
was a characteristic feature of Cartesian dualism to ascribe psychological
predicates to the mind, and only derivatively to the human being . . . But the
predicates which dualists ascribe to the immaterial mind, the third generation
of brain neuroscientists [e.g., LeDoux, Damasio, etc.] applied unreflectively
to the brain instead.”56 The Wittgensteinian alternative holds that psycholog-
ical predicates should be applied to the whole human being, and not merely
to either side of the Cartesian divide: for example, it is only the whole human
being who can be said to be in pain, neither (casually-mechanically, materially)
her hand, or her afferent nerves, or her subcortical pathways, nor (norma-
tively, immaterially) her mind, the insulated introspectable theater of her
124 Chapter 6
self-awareness. The continuum of mental and physical, of sensations, beliefs,

thoughts, intentions, desires on the one side, and action readiness, behav-
ioral dispositions, and action on the other constitutes the holistic domain
of psychological predicate ascriptions.57 That is, in this view at least central
emotions such as fear, anger, guilt, pride, and so on should be conceived as sui
generis states intrinsically involving a cognitive dimension (which includes
intentionality and hence a normativity relation), a conative dimension (which
includes specific desires and aversions), often a distinctive phenomenology
(what it feels like), action readiness tendencies, and distinctive physiological
changes (facial expressions, events in the autonomic nervous system, etc.).
This conception of emotion contrasts with what Peter Goldie laments as
“add-on” theories, whereby one state (typically either the cognitive/conative
dimensions or the affective, that is, the bodily dimensions) is taken to be
the essence of an emotion and the other dimensions are merely aggregated
contingently to distinguish the emotional state from a non-emotional state.58
Instead, in this view all dimensions relate intrinsically and essentially to the
emotion, so that an emotion cannot be analyzed or reduced to fundamentally
merely a specific kind of belief, desire, or affective state.
We have seen that Tolstoy’s insight, in anticipation of Wittgenstein, is to
countenance the possibility of an episode of understanding that does not
epistemologically rely on an act of inference. A causal theory of the repre-
sentational function of mental states would provide an account of such an
episode if it were construed as merely the immediate elicitation of an affec-
tive state, but we have just seen that the most prevalent causal theory of
emotions, the James-Lange theory and its contemporary versions by Dama-
sio and Prinz, fails to account for the intentionality and normativity that
characterizes the cognitive dimension—whether specified as belief, judgment,
construal, or appraisal—of emotional mental states: the gulf between a natu-
ralistic, causal order and an intentional, normative order seems unbridgeable.
And one might characterize this impasse as yet another version, or conse-
quence, of an implicit Cartesianism: the mind, home to intentionality and
normativity, falls short of the natural world, conceived as the home of the
causal order. And we have seen that Wittgenstein offers an alternative view,
on which psychological predicates, including emotion ascriptions, are to be
applied holistically, to both the body and mind of creatures we acknowledge
to be enough like us as to warrant such ascriptions. When we turn to the
sphere of morality proper, we shall find that this insight affords a resolution
of yet another dilemma that arises from a tacit Cartesianism.
Chapter 7
Reconstructing Tolstoy II: The Morality of Emotions
How am I filled with pity for this man? How does it come out
what the object of my pity is? (Pity, one might say, is a form of
conviction that someone else is in pain.)
—Wittgenstein
In the previous chapter I showed how a conception of central emotions as sui

generis states, irreducibly involving cognitive, conative, and affective (physio-
logical, phenomenological, action readiness) aspects can resolve the dilemma
between causal and intentional relations that arises in current debates on
emotion. If we turn to morality, we find a related version of the dilemma out-
lined earlier, and in this chapter I argue for a similar conception of specifically
moral emotions, whereby I define moral emotions as non-controversially as
possible, as emotions that arise, and respond to, morally relevant situations.1
I then present a further, distinctively epistemological dilemma in meta-ethics,
that between moral objectivity and moral subjectivity, and show that it can
be resolved by adopting a sensibility theory, which rests on certain analogies
between moral-emotional responsiveness and the perception of secondary
qualities like colors, and which is consistent with Tolstoy’s picture of the
immediate, non-inferential understanding of emotions in aesthetic experience.
Lastly, considering a recent version of sensibility theory, neo-sentimentalism,
equips us to explain Tolstoy’s distinction between “universal feelings” and
“religious feelings” and how they might be related in Tolstoy’s picture of
aesthetic-moral education.
1. What Michael Smith has termed “the moral problem” is a certain dilemma
that arises from the standard picture of human psychology, which has come
to be called “the Humean picture of motivation.” On the standard picture,
there are two main kinds of psychological state:
On the one hand there are beliefs, states that purport to represent the
way the world is. Since our beliefs purport to represent the world,
they are assessable in terms of truth and falsehood, depending on
125
126 Chapter 7
whether or not they succeed in representing the way the world is [that
is, the direction of fit is mind-to-world]. And on the other hand there
are desires, states that represent how the world is to be. Desires are
unlike beliefs in that they do not even purport to represent the way
the world is [that is, the direction of fit is world-to-mind, as one tries
to change the world to accord with one’s desires]. These are therefore
not assessable in terms of truth and falsehood. Hume concludes that
belief and desire are therefore distinct existences: that is, that we can
always pull belief and desire apart, at least modally. For any belief
and desire pair that we imagine, we can always imagine someone
having the desire but lacking the belief, and vice versa.2
So according to the standard picture there are two kinds of psychological

state—beliefs and desires—that are completely distinct from each other. And
these two psychological states seem to map onto two completely distinct fea-
tures of morality as understood by our ordinary moral practice. On the one
hand, we seem to think that moral questions have correct answers that are
made correct by objective moral facts; hence we engage in moral argument
and reasoning. Smith calls this the “objectivity of moral judgment.” On the
other hand, we also think that moral judgment has practical implications,
that if we judge that an action A is morally required, that in itself gives us
a motivation to do A; that is, moral judgment (and practical judgment in
general) seems to exhibit motivational internalism: making a moral judgment
seems to be internally related to having a reason, a motive, to do the corre-
sponding action.3 Smith calls this the “practicality of moral judgment.” The
“moral problem” is that the objectivity feature suggests that moral judgment
is a form of belief, a cognitive state, while the practicality feature suggests that
moral judgment is a form of desire, a conative state. Smith summarizes, claim-
ing this is the “central organizing problem in contemporary meta-ethics”:
But the problem is that ordinary moral practice suggests that moral
judgments have two features that pull in quite opposite directions
from each other. The objectivity of moral judgment suggests that
there are moral facts, wholly determined by circumstances, and that
our moral judgments express our beliefs about what these facts are.
This enables us to make good sense of moral argument, and the like,
but it leaves it entirely mysterious how or why having a moral view
is supposed to have special links with what we are motivated to do.
And the practicality of moral judgment suggests just the opposite,
that our moral judgments express our desires. While this enables us to
make good sense of the link between having a moral view and being
motivated, it leaves it entirely mysterious what a moral argument is
supposed to be an argument about; the sense in which morality is
supposed to be objective.4
Reconstructing Tolstoy II 127
That is, if moral judgment tracks moral facts and states of affairs, it would
be a kind of belief, and would be motivationally inert. If moral judgment
exhibits motivational internalism, it would seem to be a kind of desire, and
would lose all claim to evaluative objectivity. This is the dilemma between
cognitivism and non-cognitivism in meta-ethics, and it parallels the dilemma
between cognitivist and non-cognitivist (or “feeling”) theories of emotions.
Smith despairs that “what is required to make sense of a moral judgment is
a strange sort of fact about the universe: a fact whose recognition necessar-
ily impacts upon our desires,” for that sort of fact would avoid the dilemma
between cognitivism and non-cognitivism in meta-ethics, as it would avoid
the parallel dilemma in theories of emotions.5
But we have seen that a conception of emotions as intrinsically involv-
ing cognitive, conative, and affective dimensions delivers just the strange
sort of fact Smith is looking for, and if we define specifically moral emo-
tions as emotional responses to morally salient situations, we can resolve
the meta-ethical dilemma (the “moral problem”), because emotions include
the cognitive judgment or appraisal or construal required by the “objectiv-
ity of moral judgment” and the conative dimension—say, action readiness
as a kind of motivational internalism— required by the “practicality of
moral judgment.” Emotional responsiveness to the evaluative features of a
situation, action, or person’s character is at once both a cognitive way of
perceiving features of the world and a conative way of caring about and
being moved by them. As Linda Zagzebski aptly describes it, “to appreciate
is not just to understand, but to feel the force of that which is appreciated.”6
Because the appreciation of a morally salient situation is an expression of a
moral emotion, and emotions are intrinsically motivating, moral-emotional
responsiveness is both a cognitive state and a conative state that is intrin-
sically motivating.7 That is, on this theory a moral emotion is “a unitary
psychic state that is both cognitive and affective, where the cognitive and
affective aspects are not separable states. . . . When I see something as rude,
I feel offended at the offensive features of the situation, and those features
cannot be fully described independently of their quality as intentional objects
[rather than merely triggering causes] of the feeling of offense.”8 Because
my sense of being offended is directed at the offending features, it bears
an intentional relation to those features as its intentional object, and that
intentional relation entails the correctness condition, the possibility of
being mistaken, and the logical space for adducing reasons as justification
for my feeling. And because my sense of being offended is also an affective
state, it is intrinsically motivating, that is, it gives rise to action readi-
ness tendencies. In this view, emotions are states that affectively perceive
their intentional objects as falling under “thick concepts” that inseparably
include descriptive and evaluative aspects.9 Zagzebski summarizes her view
that “emotion is a kind of value perception that feels a characteristic way”
as follows:
128 Chapter 7
Since my [moral] judgment expresses an emotion, it expresses an

intrinsically motivating state. And since the judgment also asserts
that some person, object, or state of affairs falls under the thick
concept [like rude or pitiful] that applies to the intentional object
of that emotion, it is propositional in form, is about the intentional
object of the emotion, and I am in the cognitive state of taking the
intentional object to fall under the thick concept. If it does fall under
that concept, the judgment is true; if not, it is false. Hence judgments
like “That is rude” or “She is pitiful” are both cognitive and intrinsi-
cally motivating when these judgments are expressions of emotions.10
Because emotions are unitary psychological states essentially containing

cognitive, conative and affective aspects, it is not possible to see a situation
as rude without being in the emotional state of feeling offended, and one
expresses that emotion by asserting a proposition like “That is rude.”
2. This conception of moral emotional responsiveness as a metaphorical kind

of perception of value goes back to Aristotle’s characterization of the phroni-
mos, the person of practical wisdom and virtue, as the person who is skilled
in perceiving immediately—without inference or invocation of explicit rules
or principles—what is to be done in a particular situation with “the eye of the
soul,”11 and it is this account that best fulfills Tolstoy’s epistemological crite-
rion of immediate, non-inferential understanding. Here too the construction
of a dilemma—this time between moral objectivity and moral subjectivity—
can dialectically reveal the virtues of the preferred account, called sensibility
theory, which rests on a distinctive understanding of the analogy between
moral-emotional response and the perception of Lockean secondary proper-
ties such as colors.12 On the one hand, moral responses to situations are not
to be conceived along the lines of the perception of primary qualities (phys-
ical properties like shape). Such an analogy with primary qualities would
easily explain moral objectivity in terms of a strong realism about values,
since in this view a value, just like the shape of an object, is independent of
how we perceive it. But this realist view renders the perception of value into
a mysterious sixth sense of ethical intuitionism, so that the “primary-quality
model turns the epistemology of value into mere mystification.”13 On the
other hand, colors are not merely projections of our subjective states, like
hallucinations, which would be an anti-realist view regarding color and, by
analogy, value. Rather, according to Locke, colors are real but essentially rela-
tional, since they are powers to cause sensations in us. Likewise, the analogy
suggests, our emotional responses are not wholly internal and subjective, but
are reliably elicited by situations we confront. So our emotional responses,
just as our color responses, are not merely erroneous projections of our inner
sentiments upon the world.14 Rather, sensibility theory takes the analogy of
value to secondary quality to entail an internal realism: there are facts of
the matter regarding values, but they are mind-dependent facts.15 That is,
sensibility theory explicates the analogy with the perception of color along
the following lines. For an object to be green is for it to be disposed to pres-
ent a green appearance to normal human beings under suitable conditions.
However, the greenness of the object is not reducible to the microphysical
properties that elicit such an appearance; on the contrary, this view takes
colors to depend essentially on their appearances. The dispositions or powers
to elicit color responses in humans are on the one hand located in the world,
but on the other they are constituted and individuated by the subjective states
they elicit in humans. Hence colors are taken to be “response-dependent”
properties.16 To ascribe greenness to an object is to ascribe the property of
eliciting a green appearance in normal humans under suitable conditions.17
Likewise, to ascribe cruelty to a person’s action is to ascribe to the action the
property of eliciting in normal humans under suitable conditions a response
of moral disapproval of the action (“that is cruel”) and a moral-emotional
response: the perception of the cruel action disposes an observer to feel moral
indignation or outrage at the agent and compassion or sympathy with the
victim of such action. As David Wiggins writes: “we grasp the sense of a
[value predicate] by acquiring a sensibility all parties to which respond in a
particular way to certain particular features in what they notice in any given
act, person, or situation.”18
This internal-realist picture of evaluative properties, on the analogy with
secondary qualities, permits the possibility of error and mistake (something
looks green, but in fact is not [the lighting conditions are not standard];
something appears to be cruel, but in fact is not [it’s a game]), and so includes
a correctness condition. Just as colors exhibit a degree of independence from
subjective responses (a degree that allows for error or ignorance, without
the mind-independence being as absolute as it is with primary qualities), so
too evaluative properties demonstrate a degree of independence: one can be
wrong about judging an action cruel or kind. The correctness condition is
given substance in the account of colors by spelling out the constituents of
“standard conditions” (e.g., no lights with colored filters attached) and “nor-
mal humans” (e.g., not color-blind).19
The establishment of a correctness condition moves the account from one
of a causal relation of response-elicitation to include a normative relation:
values do not merely dispose us, as a matter of fact, to respond with moral
feelings, but ought to elicit those responses. This step therefore brings up
the first disanalogy with perception, for colors can be conceived as disposi-
tions to elicit certain subjective experiences without any essential normative
relation. Thus McDowell writes: “The disanalogy . . . is that a virtue (say)
is conceived to be not merely such as to elicit the appropriate ‘attitude’ (as
a color is merely such as to cause the appropriate experiences), but rather
such as to merit it.”20 The virtuous person’s moral perception of a situation,
in this view, includes the person’s appreciating, or appraising the situation,
130 Chapter 7
and hence is a cognitive state, a state involving an intentional object (in this
case, the evaluative properties of the situation at hand) that is seen as mor-
ally salient.21 Moreover, in our everyday moral practice we disagree with each
other regarding the evaluations of actions, persons, and situations (real or
literary), offering reasons and counter-reasons to justify our moral-emotional
response. We try to get each other to “see things this way,” to perceive the
moral salience of a situation as we do. And it is a commonplace thought
that our moral responsiveness can be trained, improved, expanded through
education, arts, travel, and so on. As we mature we learn the fine-grained
distinctions between, say, guilt, shame, regret, and remorse. McDowell con-
cludes that these everyday practices and commonplace beliefs commit us to
the reality of values, not as first-natural primary qualities, but rather as “sec-
ond nature,” what Hegel called Sittlichkeit: cultural norms, values, justifying
reasons and practices constituting an “objective ideal” world for its mem-
bers.22 And of course the second disanalogy to perception lies in the fact that
moral responses exhibit motivational internalism in that they are at least dis-
positionally intrinsically motivating: to evaluate or “see” an action as cruel
is to be moved to moral disapproval of the action and compassion with the
person who was affected by it.23
3. Note that this conception of moral emotions as a unitary state of cognitive,

conative, and affective dimensions and the related sensibility theory already
fits two of the Tolstoyan conditions of adequacy we identified at the outset of
chapter 6. In this view moral emotions ontologically have an intentional rela-
tion to the evaluative response-dependent properties they detect and hence
they sustain a correctness or justification condition. And because sensibility
theory conceives the awareness of the morally salient features of a situation
on the analogy of perception, epistemologically this awareness is immediate
and non-inferential, in that it provides immediate fallible knowledge without
inferential justification. The virtuous person sees the other’s behavior as rude,
or as cruel; she does not draw an inference, but understands the morally
salient features immediately.24
The epistemological analogy with perception includes a further respect
beyond that of immediate, non-inferential knowledge: emotional sensibility,
like perceptual acuity, can be improved as a skill through training and habitu-
ation. Many philosophers distinguish between propositional knowledge (or
“knowing-that”) and non-propositional knowledge manifested in skills and
abilities (or “knowing-how”). For instance, a chess master can “see” the next
move in a game, even if she cannot formulate that knowledge in terms of
propositionally articulated beliefs or rules. Perceptual locutions express this
know-how, skill, or ability: one comes to “see” what is to be done. Similarly,
becoming habituated to a practice can be seen as acquiring a skill or ability,
as McDowell notes: “if one cannot formulate what someone has come to
know when he cottons on to a practice, say one of concept-application, it
is natural to say that he has seen something.”25 The skills model suggests a
similar line of reasoning regarding the perceptual analogy of moral emotions:
the possession of a moral sensibility at once allows one to see what to do
and motivates one to do it. The virtuous person is the person whose moral-
e motional responses are appropriately attuned to the situation such that they
act in the morally appropriate way. So a kind person sees what is required in
a given concrete situation and is motivated to do it, without explicit reflec-
tion on codes, norms, or rules.
An integral aspect of this account of moral emotions is that one’s respon-
siveness to ethical situations will not be a matter of universal, objective
rules, but rather of one’s moral upbringing as a process of habituation. As
McDowell writes, “In moral upbringing what one learns is not to behave in
conformity with rules of conduct, but to see situations in a special light, as
constituting reasons for acting.”26 The special way of seeing characteristic
of the virtuous person more closely resembles a skill than a set of beliefs. To
have a skill—the sensibility that is characteristic of virtue—is at once to have
the ability to see what to do and the motivation to do it.27 Just as one can
be trained up to be sensitive to the phonemes of one’s native language, or to
be sensitive to finely grained facial expressions conveying surprise, fear, or
astonishment, so too the virtuous person is habituated to perceive evaluative
properties of actions, persons, and situations. The more cognitively sharp-
ened emotional responses are also rationally revisable. If emotional responses
reveal evaluative features of the world as second nature, what about conflict-
ing second natures? McDowell responds:
Any second nature of the relevant kind, not just virtue, will seem to
its possessor to open his eyes to reasons for acting. What is distinctive
about virtue, in the Aristotelian view, is that the reasons a virtuous
person takes himself to discern really are reasons; a virtuous person
gets this kind of thing right.28
This may seem hopelessly epistemologically self-serving in the age of multi-

culturalism, but what McDowell is denying is the possibility of an external,
non-subjective grounding for justifying when an emotional response discerns
a genuine reason for acting: “the necessary scrutiny does not involve step-
ping outside the point of view constituted by an ethical sensibility”; instead,
the genuineness of the reasons to act discerned by our sensibility is “vindi-
cated from within the relevant way of thinking.”29 Given the skill aspect of
moral responsiveness, one way such revision or improvement can occur is
by means of an expert who can, through training and habituation, improve
the moral-perceptual skill of the novice, who will help her “see by feeling”
(that is, emotionally respond in an appropriate or fitting way) the right
thing to do in a given situation. Artworks as extolled by Tolstoy can func-
tion as such experts, habituating people to ethical knowledge (in the sense
132 Chapter 7
of knowing what to do and being moved to do it) by describing persons,

actions, and situations in an affect-laden language (verbal, visual, or musical)
that both elicits emotional responses and calibrates those responses with fine-
grained descriptions of the morally salient features of the person, action, or
situation.
Thus the skills model makes plausible the sensibility theorist’s claim that
evaluative aspects in general, and moral aspects in particular, of the world can
be seen by feeling, in the sense that they are rendered salient by the emotional
response manifest in a particular sensibility. The upshot of this account is that
moral emotions are sui generis, neither simply cognitive states (beliefs, judg-
ments, construals, appraisals, etc.) nor simply conative states (desires), but
irreducible unitary states including cognition, motivation (action readiness
tendenies), and often phenomenology and distinctive physiological states,
events and processes. And this correlates to what they respond to and track
in the world, for values too are “primitive, sui generis, incurably anthropo-
centric, and as unmysterious as any properties will ever be to us.”30
4. There remains one other ontological constraint on moral emotions from

our discussion of Tolstoy in earlier chapters. Recall that Tolstoy advocates
two types of art that are distinguished by the different types of feelings they
convey or inculcate: “universal art” conveys “the simplest everyday feelings
of life, such as are accessible to everyone in the world,” and “religious art”
conveys “feelings coming from a religious consciousness of man’s position
in the world with regard to God and his neighbor.”31 Universal feelings thus
seem to be moral emotions common to human nature, while religious feelings
are in some sense culturally specific moral emotions trained and habitu-
ated as second nature.32 While our exposition of sensibility theory seems to
explicate how religious feelings might work, since one can be trained and
habituated in the skill of their responsive recognition, what about univer-
sal feelings? A recent variant of sensibility theory called sentimentalism
(“neo-sentimentalism” would be more accurate) is promising in this context.
Sentimentalist theories hold that the appraisal and appreciation of evaluative
features depends not on moral responsiveness understood as an inculcated
second nature, but rather, invoking David Hume, “depends on some inter-
nal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the species.”33
These universal feelings are in this view sentiments that are constituents of
human nature, which nowadays are called basic or anthropologically uni-
versal emotions. It is an open question whether such emotions exist, how
many exist, how they are individuated, whether non-human animals have
them, and so on, but for our purposes we can state that there appears to be
general consensus that such sentiments include at least the following: happi-
ness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.34 Like second-natural moral
emotions, these sentiments are response-dependent on their corresponding
evaluative features (e.g., fear is response-dependent on the dangerous, etc.)
but are not culturally constructed because anchored in anthropologically

universal sensitivities.35 Response-dependent evaluative properties provide a
common subject matter that does not preclude normative disputes about the
instantiation of those properties on specific occasions. That is, the common
shared evaluative response of fear and its dependence relation with the dan-
gerous (fear-eliciting evaluative property) provides the agreement in meaning
required for genuine disagreement about whether one should feel fear at a
particular situation, that is, whether the particular situation is a reason to feel
fear, whether the common sentiment of fear is fitting or appropriate to the
particular situation.36 It is therefore plausible that Tolstoy’s “universal feel-
ings” can be interpreted as some subset of these sentiments.37
Moreover, it is also plausible that at least some moral emotions themselves
are associated with, and possibly developed from, these basic emotions or
sentiments. For instance, moral resentment as anger at another whom one
believes has wronged one38 might be a more cognitively developed, or reticu-
lated form of the basic emotion of simple anger (elicited by the frustration
of a desire); indignation might be yet another.39 Thus as an infant matures,
it is inculcated with propositionally articulated judgments and concepts like
resentment and indignation and wrong, which enrich the cognitive and
conative dimensions of the basic emotion of anger. And concomitantly the
child learns more reticulated patterns of response-eliciting features, and cor-
respondingly reticulated patterns of emotional response. Unlike the simple
eliciting factor for the basic emotion of sadness (elicited by the perceived loss
of something or someone dear to one), these developed and subtle patterns in
turn are enriched into further refinements of concept, response, and behav-
ior, as for instance when one learns to differentiate regret and remorse
from guilt. John Deigh has suggested that one’s sentimental education in
part consists in these basic emotional responses being trained up to include
a normative relation. The infant who is innately disposed to react with dis-
gust to milk gone bad is habituated to extend that emotional response to,
say, morally disgusting behavior, like perfidy.40 One of the virtues of this
developmental theory is that it can answer the chief objection to cognitiv-
ist theories of emotion (discussed in the previous chapter), for it grants that
non-human animals and human infants possess emotions (namely, some or
all of the “basic” ones) but also can account for the development among
mature humans of more refined moral emotions. And this account dove-
tails nicely with Tolstoy’s emphasis on general or universal emotions: pity,
compassion, motherly succor all appear to be more closely related to uni-
versal “basic emotions” than do, say, more reticulated emotions such as
righteous indignation, social status embarrassment, and so on. This general
developmental view, that pan-cultural, physiological “basic” emotions or
“affect program” emotions can form the basis for more acculturated specifi-
cally “moral” emotions, reaches back to Aristotle’s virtue theory, as Myles
Burnyeat suggests:
134 Chapter 7
Being a human being [the well-brought up young person] has the

physiologically based appetites as well. The object of these is, of
course, pleasure . . . , but they can be modified and trained to become
desires for the proper enjoyment of bodily pleasures; this . . . is what
is involved in acquiring the virtue of temperance. There are also
instinctive reactions like fear to be trained into the virtue of courage.
In a human being these feelings cannot be eliminated; therefore, they
have to be trained.41
Jesse Prinz advocates a similar, albeit cultural- historical rather than

individual-aretaic, account of the development of distinctly moral emotions
from non-moral emotions, and offers one just-so genealogical account along
those lines:
Imagine that certain behaviors cause emotions that are not yet specific
to the moral domain. An act of cruelty might cause anger on the part
of the victim, and sympathy among others. The perpetrator may be
ostracized, criticized, and punished. This may cause the perpetrator
to feel sad. If these responses are stable, then cruelty is governed by a
kind of rule. The rule consists in the fact that cruelty is discouraged
as a result of these emotional responses. The emotions guarantee a
predictable pattern of behavior. Cruelty is less likely to occur, and
when it does, certain emotions and corresponding behaviors will fol-
low. After this pattern is established, the emotions that once had no
moral significance take on new meaning. Sadness is not just a generic
loss-response, but a feeling associated with violating a rule. Anger is
not a generic response to a threat, but a feeling directed at rule viola-
tors. Guilt and righteous anger are born. At the very moment these
emotions are born, the rule takes on new meaning. It is now a rule
enforced by moral emotions. It is a moral rule.42
Such an account might offer independent explanation for Tolstoy’s bifurca-

tion of moral emotions into universal feelings and religious feelings, for we
can understand the two categories as occupying opposite ends of an ontoge-
netically developmental spectrum from non-moral universal basic emotions
on one side to culturally, religiously specific emotions on the other. “Univer-
sal feelings” would be those emotions that are as it were minimally morally
modulated forms of non-moral basic emotions: for example, happiness that
has been minimally modulated with a sense of expectation (on the way to
becoming full-blown moral obligation), as for instance Tolstoy’s example of
motherly succor developing into another of his examples, a stranger’s dis-
tress eliciting aid. That after his crisis Tolstoy dedicated himself to writing
children’s tales and parables would be relevant here as well. At the other
extreme would be feelings that are maximally modulated with institutionally
or culturally specific moral cognitive and conative aspects, such as Christian

selflessness, righteous indignation, guilt, and so on. These “thick concepts”
include an evaluative attitude and specification in terms of moral conduct
(transgressions or obligations), which in turn incorporate more elaborate
narrative considerations in these concepts’ application conditions. Righteous
indignation at someone’s reneging on a promise in turn requires understand-
ing the practice of promising, and so on. Such “narrative density” in turn
suggests that the inculcation and habituation of these “religious feelings”
require more elaborate storytelling than does that of “universal feelings.”
This ontological account of the nature of moral emotions along the
spectrum from universal feelings to religious feelings, together with the epis-
temological account of moral responsiveness as a version of sensibility theory,
provides the reconstruction required to understand the content of Tolstoy’s
claim regarding the kinds of emotions that an artwork communicates or with
which it infects an audience. It is to that aesthetic claim of an artwork’s
capacity to express and elicit emotions that we now turn.
Chapter 8
Reconstructing Tolstoy III: Expression in Art
Art is a kind of expression. Good art is complete expression.

—Wittgenstein
A theme, not less than a face, wears an expression.

—Wittgenstein
Having outlined an understanding of emotions in general, and then of moral

emotions in particular, that fulfills the ontological and epistemological con-
straints that arose in the earlier chapters of this study, I turn now to the topic
of an artwork’s expression or elicitation of such emotions and, perhaps sur-
prisingly, find similar tensions between the causal and normative relations in
the area of philosophical aesthetics often termed “aesthetic expressivism.”1
As with the earlier discussion of emotions, caveats must be made here
as well. First, some theorists rightly caution against overgeneralization and
abstraction in the discussions of art, even within a single aesthetic medium
or genre (such as instrumental music), and suggest that aesthetic experience
will vary with artwork, audience, and occasion.2 Such particularist caution-
ary reminders mean that any theoretical position is liable to empirical (dis)
confirmation unless carefully qualified. Second, several theorists claim that
the emotions expressed or elicited by artworks are in some sense not genuine
or full-fledged emotions, because they lack the motivational states or “action
readiness” tendencies on the one hand, or often lack intentional objects on
the other, all of which constitute integral components of emotions.3 These
reductive accounts of emotion by philosophers of aesthetics parallel the “add-
o
n” theories of emotion put forward by philosophers of emotion, and they
can be answered in similar fashion. We shall see that the construal of emotion
as merely causally elicited feelings parallels the “feeling” theories of emotion
discussed in chapter 6 and underlying the “Nietzschean threat” Tolstoy found
in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art. Regarding the lack of behavioral action
in one’s emotional response to art, recall that the motivational state accom-
panying a genuine emotion is conceived as an “action readiness” disposition.
Just as a motivational state qua disposition can be suppressed, overridden, or
137
138 Chapter 8
silenced by another motivational or cognitive state (one might have the dispo-
sition to lash out when angered, but one usually does not), one’s knowing that
one is undergoing an aesthetic experience “contextually checks,” as it were,
the action readiness disposition’s actualization. In what follows therefore, it
is assumed that the emotions elicited or expressed by art are of the same type
of emotion outlined and defended in the previous two chapters.
1. Clearly artistic works that represent moral emotions (e.g, by naming or

describing the moral emotions felt by literary or dramatic characters), or
represent morally salient characters or actions (e.g., by describing such char-
acters and actions in evaluative language or suggesting moral salience in the
use of evaluatively connotative imagery) can habituate and train the audi-
ence in the skillful perception of and emotional responsiveness to morally
salient situations, and the broadly “Aristotelian” tradition in literary criticism
elaborates and at times advocates how such morally affective reading can
and should occur. For instance, in a programmatic article Martha Nussbaum
writes:
The Aristotelian conception [of virtue theory] contains a view of

learning to support the claims of literature. For teaching and learn-
ing, here, do not simply involve the learning of rules and principles.
A large part of learning takes place in the experience of the concrete.
This experiential learning, in turn, requires the cultivation of per-
ception and responsiveness: the ability to read a situation, singling
out what is relevant for thought and action. This active task is not a
technique; one learns it by guidance rather than by formula. [Henry]
James plausibly suggests that novels exemplify and offer such learn-
ing: exemplify it in the efforts of the characters and the author,
engender it in the reader by setting up a similarly complex activity.4
Much of Tolstoy’s psychologically realist fiction, like this tradition’s favorite

modern example, the works of Henry James, would just as clearly illustrate
the tenets of this way of reading: the audience reads, hears, and imagines
literary characters and the moral situations, choices, and consequences they
confront, and thereby is trained and habituated in skilled moral responsive-
ness along the lines outlined in the previous chapter. However, were this the
whole story, Tolstoy’s theory would be far less provocative, for he seems to be
championing the inculcation, transmission, and elicitation of morally worth-
while emotions regardless of genre, indeed, regardless of whether the art
forms in question are representational or not. Therefore, in this final chapter
I turn to the “hard case” of the non-representational art form of instrumen-
tal music and argue that even here—in what Wittgenstein called “the most
sophisticated art of all”5—Tolstoy’s theory of moral-emotionally expressive
art can be vindicated.
Reconstructing Tolstoy III 139
2. Modern philosophical work on the relation between art and emotion has
focused on “pure” or “absolute” music, that is, instrumental music unaccom-
panied by text, title, or program, because this music offers the “hard case” of
an art form that does not represent anything (as do pictorial and narrative art
forms), including emotions, and yet can and regularly does express emotions:
it seems undeniable that instrumental music manifests and engenders emo-
tions in listeners. Understanding and explaining how pure music relates to
emotions is presumably logically prior to understanding and explaining how
“mixed” or “impure” art forms relate to emotion; so, philosophers of music
reason, providing a philosophical account of the emotional expressiveness
of pure music must precede more complicated accounts of mixed art forms.6
The problem can be stated easily: we experience music as expressive of emo-
tion, as when we say that a funeral march is sad; yet music is not sentient, and
not the kind of thing that can experience an emotion to which it gives expres-
sion. So what is required is an account of music’s emotional expressiveness.7
Theorists seem agreed that minimally what is at issue is a certain experi-
ence, that the claim that a piece or passage of music is sad in effect is the
claim that the experience of hearing it has a certain affective (phenomeno-
logical, perhaps also physiological and behavioral) characteristic to which
an emotion term like “sad” refers. As in our earlier discussion, here too emo-
tion terms refer to response-dependent concepts or properties: to claim that
the music is sad is minimally to claim that understanding listeners typically
undergo the emotion of sadness when experiencing the music. And we must
add a slight qualification: we can speak of emotional responses to art as
empathetic responses, as when the audience feels sad because the music is
sad, or as sympathetic responses, as when the audience feels pity for the sad-
ness of a fictional character, or even as antipathetic responses, as when the
audience is irritated by a surprising occurrence of aesthetic harmony, say;
in the interests of clarity and simplicity I ignore these complications in my
discussion of musical expressiveness and emotional response in this chapter.
3. In his overview of theories of emotional responses to pure music, Jerrold

Levinson helpfully divides the field into two approaches, the general contours
of which will be familiar to readers of chapter 6. Levinson suggests that
there are two different sorts of mechanisms responsible for the elicitation of
emotions in listeners. The first case, the “sensory, or cognitively unmediated
route,” refers to music’s “power to induce sensations, feelings and even moods
by virtue of its basic musical properties, virtually without any interpreta-
tion or construal on the listener’s part. Particular timbres, rhythms, intervals,
dynamics, and tempi exemplify this power most clearly. Such properties need
only be registered to have their effect, at least for an auditor acclimatized to
a given musical culture.”8
The most common theory in the literature explicating this “cognitively
unmediated route” is a causal- dispositional account, called the “arousal
140 Chapter 8
theory” of art. This theory accounts for the emotional response by citing its
cause: to invoke the common toy example, sad music is music that causes the
emotion of sadness in its listeners. The expressive property or properties of
sad music consists of its dispositional properties to induce an experience of
sadness in appropriate listeners.9 For instance, in her recent and sophisticated
version of arousal theory, Jenefer Robinson writes that “expressive qualities
are qualities that can be grasped through the emotions that they arouse.”10
Thus the order of explanation proceeds from effect to cause: the emotions
aroused in the listener are taken to be indications of the expressive qualities
of the music, understood as dispositions to reliably cause just those emotions.
Such emotions “alert listeners to what is expressed in the music”11 because
the aroused emotions are constitutive of the musical expressiveness. Thus the
fundamental claim of the arousal theory is that music has certain properties
that cause certain emotional responses, and the resulting experience (of the
music and of the emotions) is constitutive of musical expression.
Readers of this study will recognize the arousal theory as a version of
the causal-dispositional account of meaning discussed in chapter 1, but here
transposed into philosophical aesthetics. It inherits the same problems.12
If the expressive qualities of a passage of music are just whatever causally
induces an emotional response, the theory must first accommodate “devi-
ant causal chains.” If an obviously joyful piece of music causes me to be sad
because of idiosyncratic associations (say, because my dog died when I first
heard that music), it would follow that the music is in fact sad. And statisti-
cal generalizations will not suffice: suppose the majority of the people have
a similar association (say, because they learned of the 9/11 attacks while that
music was playing on the radio); nonetheless we would think it normatively
false that the music has sad expressive qualities. Relatedly, a mere causal
conjunction does not suffice for the conclusion desired. If I stumble on a
tree root, which arouses irritation in me, it does not follow that the tree root
expresses irritation or has an expressive property of irritation.13 The causal
relation is not sufficient because it omits an intentional relation: if what is
aroused is an emotion, rather than a mere sensation, it must be directed
toward or about something, must have an intentional object or intentional
property. And it is that intentional relation that provides the rationality and
intelligibility of our emotional response. If our emotional response is merely
causal, it is pointless to ask whether it makes sense for us to respond to the
sounds in the way that we do, whether our emotional response is right or
appropriate or fits the expressive character of the music, and we take the
presence of the correct emotional response to be indicative of understanding
the music.14
Robinson’s sophisticated version of the arousal theory tries to accom-
modate the necessity of an intentional relation and correctness conditions
through a temporalized and compartmentalized division of labor, as it were,
in what she calls the “Jazzercise” effect of musical expression:
How can happy music make people happy, and calm music calm
people down? The answer in a nutshell is that music with a happy,
sad, calm, or restless character causes physiological changes, motor
activity, and action tendencies, that are experienced as happiness,
sadness, serenity, or restlessness. These states are emotional rather
than merely physiological states in that they bring in their wake not
only characteristic subjective feelings but also characteristic cognitive
activity: people have a tendency to view the world in characteristic
ways. However, although the world gets “regestalted,” so that we are
more inclined to take a certain point of view on things or view the
world in a certain way, there is no affective appraisal of some particu-
lar event or situation (and certainly no “cognitive object” of emotion)
that sets off the emotion process. The points of view we take tend to
be global [that is, moods]: we view ourselves and the world in general
in a positive or negative, reassuring or uncertain way.15
This account strongly recalls the James-Lange “feeling” theory of emotions:

music causes “affective” (physiological, phenomenological, behavioral-
dispositional) changes in the listener which, however, conduce merely to
a general point of view or mood, but not yet an emotion.16 Subsequent
“cognitive monitoring” includes one’s labeling the affective state, in effect
individuating it into one emotion rather than another (recall from our dis-
cussion in chapter 6 that “affective” changes are not sufficient to individuate
emotions: excitement, rapture, and anger all share basic physiological traits):
“In short, emotion begins in bodily changes which in turn induce a mood
and make us readier to get into some emotional state. Which emotional state
we get into is the result of interpreting our bodily state by reference to the
context in which we find ourselves.” She concludes her book with a gener-
alization of this conclusion that invokes Tolstoy’s famous metaphor: “The
Jazzercise effect is a quite general capacity of music—whether Brahms, rock,
or folk music—to ‘infect’ us with a mood by a kind of contagion or motor
mimicry. Music evokes moods by means of effecting autonomic changes,
motor activity, and action tendencies, so as to put listeners into a mood state,
a state in which they more readily ascribe emotions to themselves. Different
listeners label their states by reference to different contexts, and that is one
big reason why different people say they feel somewhat different emotional
states in response to the very same music.”17 That is, because the affective
feeling caused by an expressive passage of music is underdetermined qua
emotion, because it lacks the intentional relation inherent in the cognitive
dimension of emotions, which emotion the mood state is resolved into by
“cognitive monitoring” will essentially depend on contextual factors, includ-
ing presumably the character of the listener.18 She also accepts the unwelcome
consequence of her theory, namely that since any cognition, intentional rela-
tion, or correctness condition comes far downstream in the experience, that it
142 Chapter 8
makes no sense to ascribe a specific emotion to the expressiveness of music.19

Music is at most the causal trigger of a diffuse affective psychological state,
the potential individuation of which into a specific emotion-type depends on
the context of the listener, not on any properties of the music. Thus Robin-
son’s theory restates and radicalizes the “Nietzschean threat” we identified
in chapter 5.
4. In answer to these and other shortcomings of the various versions of non-

cognitivist arousal theory, some philosophers opt for the second category of
Levinson’s twofold division, the “perceptual-imaginative, or cognitively medi-
ated route.” In addition to presenting sonic features, this group of theories
holds that “music offers the appearance of human emotion, or of persons out-
wardly manifesting emotional states . . . , the degrees of resemblance between
the shape of the music and the behaviors through which emotions are com-
monly expressed in life will have something . . . to do with our being disposed
to hear music in such ways . . . It is the perceptual-imaginative aspect, mani-
fested in our disposition to hear emotion or emotion expression in music,
that is surely primarily responsible for the complex, more robustly emotional
responses to music.”20 There are several major varieties of perceptual-
imaginative, cognitivist theories of musical expression. Critically evaluating
them will lead us to a position reminiscent of the argumentation in chapter 1.
One strand of cognitivist theories can be termed inferentialist, in that they
hold that the expressiveness of a passage of music is arrived at through the
listener’s drawing an inference to the best explanation, where the inference
results in the ascription of a psychological state to the imagined utterer of the
passage, or to the imagined protagonist as determined by an overall inter-
pretation of the work, or a best hypothesis by the listener regarding the state
of mind the composer intended the listener to hear in the passage.21 The
common objection brought against these theories is that they falsify the epis-
temology of the listener’s emotional response: she does not take the musical
properties, or her experience of them, as evidence for inferring or judging
that the music is emotional; rather, she perceives (hears) the emotion in the
music or hears the music as expressive. The analogy with perceptual knowl-
edge is perspicuous here: one does not infer from one’s experience that an
apple is red, say; rather, one sees the redness in it, or perceives it as red. The
perceptual knowledge is immediate and non-inferential. The transition from
a perception as of a sad passage of music or as of a red apple to the belief
that the passage is sad or that the apple is red, is justified without the need
of any inference. If asked why one has such a belief, the justification is some-
thing like “because I hear (or see) that it is” or “because I know what sadness
sounds like (or what red looks like).”22
A second, and more promising, strand of cognitivist theories is the “resem-
blance theory,” advanced and vigorously defended by Stephen Davies.23
According to Davies, emotion predicates are used primarily to refer to felt
emotional states, and are used secondarily, but literally, to describe appear-
ances in persons (“she looks sad”), non-human animals (“the basset hound
looks sad”), natural objects (“the willow looks sad”), and works of art
(“that musical passage sounds sad”). In this secondary usage, emotion predi-
cates describe “emotion characteristics in appearance,” and these constitute
musical expressiveness: “the expressiveness of music consists in its present-
ing emotion characteristics in its appearance . . . Emotion characteristics in
appearance are attributed without regard to the feelings or thoughts of that
to which they are predicated. These expressive appearances are not emotions
that are felt, take objects, involve desires or beliefs—they are not occurrent
emotions at all. They are emergent properties of the things to which they are
attributed.”24 Thus conceived, this musical expressiveness “depends mainly
on a resemblance we perceive between the dynamic character of music and
human movement, gait, bearing, or carriage.” The resemblance is thus cross-
modal, for Davies believes that “the likeness between music and the voice is
slight.”25 Thus the principal claim of the resemblance theory is that emotions
“are heard in music as belonging to it, just as appearances of emotion are
present in the bearing, gait, or deportment of our fellow humans and other
creatures.”26 Whereas Davies holds that the chief respect in which properties
of a passage of music can be said to cross-modally resemble properties of
human expressiveness is movement (e.g., we experience the slowness of music
as resembling the slowness of a person’s gait), Paul Boghossian advocates a
more inclusive form of the theory, which allows resemblance between sound
and voice as well: “A passage P is expressive of E just in case P sounds the
way a person would sound who was expressing E vocally, or sounds the way
a person would look who was expressing E gesturally.”27 Boghossian’s formu-
lation is helpful also because it clearly is a metaphysical claim regarding the
nature of musical expressiveness conceived as a kind of response-dependent
property. Davies by contrast sometimes seems to be making this claim, but
sometimes seems to slip into an epistemological claim, as when he writes
that the listener has “an experience of resemblance between the music and
the realm of human emotion.”28 If Davies is here claiming that the listener
experiences and recognizes a resemblance, and based on that recognition,
responds emotionally, then we have an inferentialist account once again,
which is problematic, as we saw above. So it is better to understand Davies
to be claiming that the emotional response is immediate and non-inferential,
but that upon reflection the listener can adduce a resemblance relation as
that which partially constitutes the content of her perception. The perceptual
analogy would be something along the lines of a person responding to the
question of why the apple is red by invoking its resemblance to a fire engine.
Thus this explanation can provide the rationality and intelligibility for our
emotional responses to music that we found goes unexplained in the causal-
d
ispositional accounts, without having to incorporate inferential reasoning
into our account.
144 Chapter 8
Jerrold Levinson has raised the following metaphysical objection to

Davies’s resemblance theory:
[The theory is] a matter, when a passage displays an emotion character-

istic in its medium of sound sequences, of an appearance similar to that
presented by a person in some state. But since everything is similar to
everything else to some degree, the issue then becomes one of how sim-
ilar such an appearance must be to one presented by human behavior
in order to constitute an emotion-characteristic-in-sound of the emo-
tion in question, or else, as Davies sometimes puts it, of how similar the
experience of musical movement and of expressive behavior must be,
in order for the appearance generated by such movement to constitute
an emotion-characteristic-in-sound of the emotion in question.29
In effect, Levinson is raising the worry that a resemblance relation is always

underdetermined, or that the rule for determining what constitutes the accept-
able degree of resemblance between a musical passage and a type of human
expressive behavior is in principle underdetermined. This is recognizably a
version of the worry raised by Kripke in chapter 1 regarding the underdeter-
mination of the rule of addition, and Levinson opts for a version of Kripke’s
“sceptical solution” (see chapter 1, section 11): what counts as the acceptable
degree of resemblance just is whatever the community of appropriate listen-
ers deem it to be by their responses. Boghossian provides a helpful gloss:
“If you say that sad music is music that resembles sad sound, [Levinson]
observes, you have to say to what degree, since everything resembles every-
thing else to some degree. But the degree of resemblance required cannot be
specified in terms of some fixable degree of resemblance between the two. It
can only be specified as whatever resemblance is sufficient to induce appro-
priate listeners to hear the music as sad.”30 Levinson locates the normativity
of the resemblance relation in the listener’s causal-dispositional responses to
passages of music. He writes:
I think it is plain that there is no answer to this except by appeal to

our disposition to hear that emotion—rather than another, or none
at all—in the music, that is, by appeal to our disposition to aurally
construe the music as an instance of personal expression, perceiving
the human appearances in the musical ones. . . . Only if this occurs
does the music have the expressiveness in question, regardless of the
degree of similarity between the music’s appearances and the human
appearances in relation to which it ends up being expressive, or alter-
natively, the degree of similarity between the experiences of those
appearances.31
Levinson’s initial formulation of his dispositional theory is as follows:

A passage of music P is expressive of an emotion or other psychic

condition E if and only if P, in context, is readily and aptly heard by
an appropriately backgrounded listener as the expression of E, in
a sui generis, “musical,” manner, by an indefinite agent, the music’s
persona.32
The music’s “persona” is the imaginatively projected “expresser” of expres-

sive music: “if expressive music is, as I maintain, music readily heard as, or
as if, expression, and if, in addition, expression requires an expresser, then
personae or agents, however minimal, just are presupposed in the standard
experience of such music.”33 I will consider musical personae presently, but
for the moment the key issue is the use of “aptly” in the above formula-
tion, for with it we have yet another example of normativity being smuggled
into a putatively causal-dispositional account, for “aptly” amounts to the
qualification that the disposition of “hearability” is functioning correctly.34
In response to this objection, Levinson reformulated his theory as “a passage
of music P is expressive of an emotion E if and only if P, in context, is readily
heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in question, as an expression of
E.”35 Levinson thus now shifts the bearer of normativity from the disposi-
tion to the experienced listener or the community of “properly backgrounded
listeners,” by which he means “listeners demonstrably competent at under-
standing such music, such competence being manifested through various
recognitional, continuational, and descriptive abilities, and whose other judg-
ments of expressiveness are in line with established ones in uncontroversial
cases.” But this merely shifts the problem of smuggled normativity: it does
not resolve it.
Why does Levinson unwittingly opt for a variant of Kripke’s “sceptical
solution,” which, as we saw in chapter 1 serction 11, is no solution at all?
Because Levinson sees himself confronted with a dilemma: a suspect meta-
physical Platonism of fixed degrees of resemblance on the one hand, or a
communal dispositionalism on the other:
There’s the rub, for as we all know, everything resembles everything

else, yet the degree of resemblance to an emotion required to make
a musical appearance a musical emotion characteristic in appear-
ance of that emotion cannot be specified in terms of some fixable
degree of resemblance between the two. It can only be specified, it
seems, as whatever resemblance is sufficient to induce appropriately
backgrounded listeners to hear the music as sad, or as expressing
sadness.36
Levinson has, perhaps unwittingly, reproduced the dilemma between meaning

Platonism and communal dispositionalism that we examined in the context
of theories of meaning in chapter 1. As Wittgenstein argued, the dilemma is a
146 Chapter 8
false one, because it overlooks the picture of meaning—and here transposed

into philosophical aesthetics, the picture of resemblance—as nothing more,
but also nothing less, than an ongoing practice, composed of interests, human
“natural history” qua second nature, and inculcated via training and guid-
ance by which the relevant resemblances are perceived immediately, without
explicit justification. In this way listeners directly perceive emotions in music
that are grounded in resemblances between expressive characteristics of the
music and expressive characteristics of human beings.
5. Why do all these theorists speak of the expressiveness or the expressive

characteristics or qualities or properties of an artwork, rather than the
artwork’s expression; why the claim that an artwork is expressive of an emo-
tion rather than that it expresses an emotion? This is, I believe, the final
problem for a successful reconstruction of Tolstoy’s theory, for Tolstoy (at
least in certain passages) seems to hold that an artwork expresses its cre-
ator’s emotions, rather than merely being expressive of an emotion, and that
the audience responds (usually empathetically, or sympathetically) to that
expressed emotion. In non-artistic cases of human expression, we take the
person’s expression to reveal her psychological state, and her psychologi-
cal state to explain her expression. More strongly, there is a logical, that is,
a non-contingent and constitutive relationship between many psychological
states and their expressions: part of what it means to be sad is to have (at
least the disposition to have) an expression of sadness. She manifests her
sadness in her expression, and we see her sadness in her expression. In the
case of an artwork, however, the tradition holds that there is no such rela-
tionship between expression and psychological state. Peter Kivy provides a
quick reductio to support the denial of such a relationship in the context of
musical expression:
Many, and perhaps most, of our emotive descriptions of music are

logically independent of the states of mind of the composers of that
music, whereas whether my clenched fist is or is not an expression
of anger is logically dependent upon whether or not I am angry. It is
unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening
bars of Mozart’s G-minor Symphony (K.550) as somber, brooding,
and melancholy, if I were to discover evidence of Mozart’s happi-
ness . . . during its composition. But that is exactly what I would have
to do, just as I must cease to characterize a clenched fist as an expres-
sion of anger if I discover that the fist clencher is not angry. This is a
matter of logic.37
It is this argument from “logical independence” that motivates the distinction

between something expressing an emotion and its being expressive of that
emotion. The former exhibits the logically dependent or constitutive relation
between expression and psychological state, whereas the latter does not. The
illustrative example repeated in the literature is that of the St. Bernard or
basset hound, whose face is expressive of sadness independently of whatever
psychological state of mind the dog may be in. Artworks, the argument runs
by analogy, can thus be expressive of emotions without being expressions
of their creators’ emotional states. If artworks are logically independent of
their creators’ emotional states, then Tolstoy’s expressive theory of art would
require a significant qualification: in the weaker version of the theory, one
could speak of the artwork’s expressiveness or suggestiveness of emotion,
while the stronger version would hold that an artwork can transmit or con-
vey an emotion to its audience by expressing that emotion.
Carefully and successfully evaluating this claim of “logical independence”
requires identifying and setting aside three misleading lines of thought. The
first misleading thought is that an expressive artwork has merely an instru-
mental relationship to the emotion it conveys or elicits. Here the logical
independence is taken to be a contingent relationship between the expressive
features of the artwork on the one hand and the transmission of emotion on
the other. If the emotion is separable from the nature of the artwork, because
the latter is a mere vehicle or means for the former, then the function of the
artwork could be replaced by any other means—another artwork, or a drug,
or hypnosis—that reliably produces the emotional response. Conceiving the
emotional response of a specific artwork as somehow detachable in this way
seems to falsify genuine aesthetic experience, as when Wittgenstein writes:
It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us are feelings
of joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc., etc. and what repels us in this
account is that it seems to say that music is an instrument for produc-
ing in us sequences of feelings. And from this one might gather that
any other means of producing such feelings would do for us instead
of music.—To such an account we are tempted to reply “Music con-
veys to us itself!”38
A second misleading thought is the line of reasoning that proceeds from the
observation that people sometimes conceal or feign their emotional state to
the conclusion that outer expressiveness and inner psychological state must
therefore be non-constitutive, merely contingent. This is a misleading argu-
ment because feigning an emotional state rests parasitically on the genuine
expression of emotion, which is logically prior: the concept of feigned emo-
tion, like the concept of false promise, logically presupposes the concept of
genuine emotional expression and sincere promises. Likewise, perhaps a
happy Mozart composed a somber symphony analogously to a happy person
feigning a somber mood: the very possibility, let alone success, of the feint
depends on the logically prior relationship of an emotional state being consti-
tutively manifested in the emotional expression.39 A third misleading thought
148 Chapter 8
is the line of reasoning that proceeds from the observation that many human
emotional expressions are natural, whereas the expressive capacities of art-
works are artificial, in the sense that they often are thoroughly dependent on
conventions. But this line of thinking rests on an equivocation in the word
“artificial,” a shift from the sense of being the opposite of “natural” to the
sense of being the opposite of “genuine.” But while some human expressions
of emotion are natural (e.g., my face turning red with anger), many expres-
sions of emotion are conventional, such as linguistic expressions (“How dare
you!”) or gestures (elevating a certain finger). And in ordinary, non-artistic
contexts, we take these conventional expressions to be just as much genuine
manifestations of emotional states as we do genuine natural expressions of
the same states.40
While I have sought to undermine the motivations for the distinction
between expression and expressiveness from the side of human expression, as
it were, one can also do so from the side of aesthetic expression. Recall that
Jerrold Levinson’s “persona” theory, examined above as a putative correction
to Davies’s “resemblance theory,” claims that in order to perceive emotions in
musical passages, the listener must imagine an “indefinite agent” or persona, a
subject to whom the emotional state can be attributed imaginatively, because
“if expressive music is . . . music readily heard as, or as if, expression, and if, in
addition, expression requires an expresser, then personae or agents, however
minimal, just are presupposed in the standard experience of such music.”41
The imaginative projection of a persona is one remove from the perception of
the creator’s emotional state in her artistic work, and it reflects the continu-
ing presence of the “logical independence” claim. But it is an unnecessary
complication that arises only in certain situations. Consider the case where I
receive a handwritten letter from a friend, and I discern that his handwriting
looks “angry.” On Levinson’s account, I am entitled to imaginatively project
a “persona” or “indefinite agent,” distinct from the letter writer, to whom I
imaginatively attribute (Levinson claims this usually happens unconsciously)
the state of being angry. But these recommended or required philosophical
somersaults are indicative that something has gone wrong, for in my ordinary
life I immediately see that my friend is angry because his anger is manifested,
apparent in his handwriting. It is only if other considerations come to my
attention (that a recent hand injury has affected his writing ability, that he is
feigning anger in order to manipulate my feelings, that he is starting a new
game of “pretend handwriting,” etc.) that I will retreat to the more circum-
spect and skeptical attitude of postulating an intermediary “persona” and
then asking to what degree this persona might coincide with my friend. Recall
that in chapter 3 we considered an observation by Wittgenstein of one’s every-
day understanding of a linguistic symbol:
What happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted,

but: I do no interpreting [Ich deute nicht]. I do not interpret, because I
feel at home [heimisch] in the present picture. When I interpret, I step

from one level of thought to another.42
That is, I feel at home, as it were, seeing my friend’s anger expressed in his
handwriting, Such perception is immediate and non-inferential, and I am
“exiled” from that familiarity only by the impingement of exceptional cir-
cumstances that incite my will to question and interpret. Wittgenstein seems
to suggest similar thinking in the case of understanding a musical theme:
Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a

theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understand-
ing a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called
understanding a musical theme.43
This musical phrase is a gesture for me. It creeps into my life. I make
it my own.44
Here too, when one is at home with the music, one hears the emotion in
the music, without the skeptical inclination to search for an explanation or
justification: “When a theme, a phrase, suddenly says something to you, you
don’t have to be able to explain it to yourself. Suddenly this gesture too is
accessible to you.”45
6. What gives rise to the philosophical distinction between expressing an

emotion and being expressive of an emotion or the surmise of the imaginative
projection of a persona in the experience of emotionally expressive music? I
submit that au fond it is yet another version of Cartesianism, the posited gulf
between inner mental state and outer bodily or behavioral appearance, for
that gulf entails that outer appearance is detachable from the emotion, the
latter now relegated to an independent and merely introspectable inner realm
rather than the human being in her entirety. The Wittgensteinian alternative
to this Cartesianism is to embrace a holistic understanding of psychological
concepts, including emotion concepts, as including mental representations,
phenomenological and physiological qualities, and behavioral dispositions:
“It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves
like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind;
hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.”46
One might object that in cases of pretense, physical failure (say, due to
facial paralysis), and so on, it only seems as if a person’s face is expressing an
emotion (sadness, say): like the basset hound, the person’s face is expressive
of, or has the appearance of sadness, but does not really express sadness in
such cases; one is tempted to say that the corresponding inner, mental state is
not itself one of sadness. Therefore what is common to both false (insincere,
etc.) and veridical expressions of emotion is merely the identical, independent
150 Chapter 8
appearance, and an observer has epistemic access only to the appearance, not
the inner emotional state of the person. And one might go on to extrapolate
this line of reasoning to the aesthetic experience of artworks, and likewise
conclude that the audience has access only to the artwork’s expressive quali-
ties (the “emotion characteristics in appearance”), but that the artwork does
not express emotion.
Note that an unwelcome consequence of the objector’s line of reasoning is
that one can never know the emotional state of another, because at best one
can have a belief with some degree of confidence based on the appearance of
the other. The appearance—false or veridical—will always be an independent
epistemic intermediary between the observer and the inner state of the other,
and thus always invite skepticism. The objector’s error lies in his conception
of the appearance (false or veridical) as being identical, rather than allowing
of two different determinations of appearance: an appearance being either a
case of the subject’s manifesting her emotional state or of its merely seeming
to the observer that she is. Adopting this alternative, disjunctive conception
of emotional expression also shows how the objector’s reasoning is falla-
cious. Because there can be cases of failure in the expression of emotion by a
person, it does not follow that when there is no such failure (when the person
is not feigning, when her facial muscles are not damaged, etc.) her appear-
ance is not directly manifesting her emotional state and that another person
does not immediately perceive the emotional state in her appearance. Mutatis
mutandis a similar argument can be made regarding an artwork’s expression
of emotion and recognition of the emotion by the artwork’s audience.47 A
musical theme, no less than a face, may wear an expression, as Wittgenstein
claims, where this means not merely exhibiting emotional expressiveness, but
rather expressing a determinate emotion.
I have therefore provided independent arguments to make plausible
Tolstoy’s claim that an artwork can express or communicate a distinctive
emotion, even in the hard case of “pure” music. Moreover, my account of
the nature of emotion, and the roles of moral emotions in virtue theory con-
strued as sensibility theory and neo-sentimentalism, provide the theoretical
framework sufficient to explain how an artwork can convey or elicit a moral
emotion in its recipient. Thus my reconstruction over this and the previous
two chapters also vindicates Wittgenstein’s claim, quoted at the outset of this
study, that “there is much to be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing about
how a work of art conveys ‘a feeling.’ ”48
Conclusion
“The aim of music: to communicate feelings.”

Connected with this: We may say correctly “his face
has the same expression now as previously”– even though
measurement yielded different results on the two occasions.
How do we use the words “the same facial expression”?—
How do we know that someone is using these words correctly?
But do I know that I am using them correctly?
—Wittgenstein
We can now return to Tolstoy and explicate his theory of aesthetic expres-
sion according to our reconstruction. His programmatic definition in What
Is Art? reads:
To call up in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having called it

up, to convey it by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, images
expressed in words, so that others experience the same feeling—in
this consists the activity of art. Art is that human activity which con-
sists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external
signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by
those feelings and also experiencing them.1
The aesthetic means that Tolstoy lists and summarizes under the term “exter-
nal signs” should be understood as the conventions of artistic media, forms,
and genres that are artificial in the sense of “non-natural” but not in the
sense of “not genuine” expressions of the artist’s emotional state, which in
the default cases is what is expressed by the artwork (or suitable part of the
artwork), and only derivatively, contextually, to be attributed to the expres-
sive properties or imagined “persona” of the artwork.2 Wittgenstein says
something similar regarding architecture as an art form: “Architecture is a
gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just
as little as every functional building is architecture.”3 And regarding music
he writes: “ ‘I sing it [a musical passage] with a quite particular expression.’
This expression is not something that can be separated from the passage. It is
a different concept. (A different game.)”4 And more strongly still: “A theme
has a facial expression just as much as a face does.”5 Thus for Wittgenstein
an artwork is (at least partly) constituted by its being an expressive gesture
151
152 Conclusion
in analogy with human expressive gestures: aesthetic and human gestures

are just as holistically conceived.6 Since the expressiveness of the artwork
consists in its emotional response-dependent properties, the audience will
experience the emotion immediately, non-inferentially, and hence perceive
the artist’s7 (or derivatively, a persona’s) emotion in the artwork as his or her
expression:
Such words as “pompous” and “stately” could be expressed by faces.

Doing this, our descriptions would be much more flexible and vari-
ous than they are as expressed by adjectives. If I say of a piece of
Schubert’s that it is melancholy, that is like giving it a face . . . In fact,
if we want to be exact, we do use a gesture or a facial expression.8
The theory of moral emotions developed in chapter 7 entails that artworks

can “infect” their audiences with determinate moral emotions in two ways.
Artworks for young children will express “basic,” pan-cultural emotions
(our reconstruction of Tolstoy’s “universal feelings”) which will be culti-
vated and reticulated as the child matures to include finer-grained cognitive
aspects by which the emotions will be more finely individuated in explic-
itly moral terms. These finer-grained and cognitively reticulated emotions,
which may include specifically local, cultural inflections, correspond in my
reconstruction to Tolstoy’s “religious feelings.” Thus the basic emotion of
anger would be developed, through aesthetic and non-aesthetic inculcation,
into more morally reticulated emotions such as indignation, affront, moral
resentment, and so on. My account of central emotions, especially moral
emotions, as sui generis states integrally composed of cognitive, conative,
behavioral-dispositional, physiological, and phenomenological dimensions,
and their role in a sensibility theory of virtue, can accommodate this devel-
opmental account. In this way aesthetic expressivism, as the felt perception
of moral emotions in aesthetic experience, would cultivate virtue and qualify
as a case of “art as a moral institution,” in Friedrich Schiller’s famous phrase.
Such cultivation would necessarily be a contingent process, dependent on the
qualities of the specific artworks as much as the specific characters of their
recipients, for the model here is the cultivation of a skill—practical, moral-
emotional responsiveness—rather than the learning of principles, norms, or
rules; and it is that essential contingency—the “Nietzschean threat” that he
perceived in Schopenhauer’s account of the decontextualized influence of
musical emotions—that tempted Tolstoy to fall back into meaning Platonism.
Instead, we should understand the skill being cultivated as the immediate,
non-inferential emotional responsiveness to morally salient properties of a
situation, person, or action.
The retreat to interpretation in the sense of providing an explicit justifica-
tion for the moral-emotional response, typically the invocation of a relevant
resemblance between aesthetic expression and human expression, will occur
Conclusion 153
only if such immediate understanding has failed to occur or if its legitimacy

is being questioned in a context that motivates adopting a skeptical attitude.
That is, only very specific contexts will tempt or elicit the will to interpret,
which in turn may prompt the potentially endless search for ultimate justifi-
cation that is a consequence of Derridean meaning skepticism.
But if that occurs, we will no longer be thinking and feeling with Tolstoy
and Wittgenstein, but rather without them.
Notes
Introduction
The epigraphs for the introduction are from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture
and Value, rev. ed., trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 67 and 41,
respectively.
1. On Dostoevsky in the context of existentialism, see Walter Kaufman, Exis-
tentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1956); and
George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York:
Knopf, 1959). Philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who have drawn on
Tolstoy for psychological insights include Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philo-
sophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), and Graham Oddie, Value,
Reality, and Desire (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). The problem of the “paradox of
fiction” (why we feel apparently genuine emotions regarding fictional characters
whom we know do not exist) was famously motivated by consideration of Anna
Karenina in Colin Radford and Michael Weston, “How Can We Be Moved by
the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol.
49 (1975): 67–93.
2. Jonathan Glover, “Anna Karenina and Moral Philosophy,” in Well-Being
and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin, ed. Roger Crisp and Brad
Hooker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 159. Glover emphasizes
Tolstoy’s advocacy of the role of moral emotions together with moral beliefs in
practical reasoning, and likens that role to a kind of perception.
3. In 1931 Wittgenstein compiled a list of influences on his thinking:
“Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spen-
gler, Sraffa.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16.
4. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin,
1990), 115–16. Other examples: “Tolstoy was as much in his thoughts as Frege”
(Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna [New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973], 200); in a letter of 1912 to Russell: “I have just read ‘Hadji
Murat’ by Tolstoy! Have you read it? If not, you ought to for it is wonder-
ful” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell,
Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright
[Oxford: Blackwell, 1995], 20); “F. R. Leavis recalls that Wittgenstein knew A
Christmas Carol practically by heart, and the book is, in fact, placed by Tolstoy
in his treatise What Is Art? in the very highest category of art ‘flowing from the
love of God’ ” (Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 569); “[Wittgenstein] went on to
recommend Tolstoy, and encouraged me to read the Twenty Three Tales; and
when I had bought a copy he marked those which he thought most important.
These were What Men Live By; The Two Old Men; The Three Hermits, and How
Much Land Does A Man Need?. ‘There you have the essence of Christianity!’ he
155
156 Notes to Pages 3–5
said” (Rush Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections [Oxford:

Blackwell, 1981], 87–88).
5. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967), 91, does not tell us which of Tolstoy’s conclu-
sions Wittgenstein had in mind. For good summaries of the recorded evidence,
see E. B. Greenwood, “Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer: Some Connections,”
in Tolstoi and Britain, ed. W. Gareth Jones (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 239–49; and
R. M. Davison, “Wittgenstein and Tolstoy,” in Wittgenstein and His Impact on
Contemporary Thought, ed. E. Leinfellner, W. Leinfellner, H. Berghel, and A.
Hübner (Vienna: Hölder, Pichler, Tempsky, 1978), 50–53.
6. Davison, “Wittgenstein and Tolstoy,” 51.
7. The publisher Ludwig von Ficker describes the impression he had on first
meeting Wittgenstein as “a picture of poignant solitude at first glance (remind-
ing one, say, of Alyosha [Karamazov] or Prince Myshkin),” in his “Rilke und der
unbekannte Freund,” Der Brenner 18 (1954): 236.
8. The concluding chapter of Gary Saul Morson’s “Anna Karenina” in Our Time:
Seeing More Wisely (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007) invokes
Aristotelian phronêsis and several tantalizing quotations from both early and late
Wittgenstein to support his characterization of the novel as “prosaic,” where “all
realist works, by definition, contain many particularities and ordinary events; prosaic
novels regard such events as the locus of value. . . . Prosaic novels redefine heroism
as the right kind of ordinary living and sainthood as small acts of thoughtfulness
that are barely perceived” (28–29). Since Wittgenstein seeks to return metaphysical
speculation to the everyday, and acknowledges the limitations of language, Morson
concludes: “it is as if Wittgenstein had set himself the task of arriving at Tolstoy’s
conclusions by a different route. Each work can serve as a gloss on the other” (210).
One of the goals of this study is to make precise, qualify, and partially vindicate this
supposition through careful analysis, exposition, and argument.
9. Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1989) draws on Cavell’s Wittgenstein to respond to a
deconstructive version of other-minds skepticism. John Gibson, Fiction and the
Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) draws on the later Witt-
genstein’s account of criteria and standards of representation (like the Paris meter
stick) to argue that literature is neither mimetically referential nor linguistically
self-referential (as some adherents of deconstruction suggest), but rather that it
reveals and imaginatively considers those standards of representation. Students
of Wittgenstein will note that while I mainly draw on the later Wittgenstein’s
thoughts on psychological concepts, expression, and meaning, I also deploy argu-
ments and views that are continuous, or at least implicitly consistent, between
the early and the later Wittgenstein, for example, skepticism as a distinct failure
in ordinary understanding, anti-Cartesianism, values as conditions of a signify-
ing practice, and so on. On the relation between Wittgenstein’s early and later
philosophy, see David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
10. The expression “rational reconstruction” appeared in Jürgen Habermas,
Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Books, 1979), to mean making explicit and theoretically systematizing
the implicitly known presuppositions of communicative discourse. My aim is
Notes to Pages 7–13 157
somewhat similar but applied to the discourse (literary and essayistic) of late Tol-
stoy. The principle of charity, coined by Neil L. Wilson and adopted by W. V. O.
Quine and Donald Davidson, “constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth
or rationality in the subject’s sayings.” For an overview see Simon Blackburn, The
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), from
which this quote, p. 62.
11. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarst-
vennoe izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1928–58).
12. Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Lud-
wig Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984).
Chapter 1
The epigraph for chapter 1 is from Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations
of Mathematics, edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), VII-44; see also VII-48.
1. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans-
combe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §§143, 186–90; and John McDowell,
“Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in his Mind,
Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 263–78.
2. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §193. On this point see also Saul
Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1982), 33–39.
3. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§193– 95; and Kripke,
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 22–38, for an extended critical dis-
cussion of dispositional accounts. For an attempt to offer a double-dispositional
account in response, see Graeme Forbes, “Skepticism and Semantic Knowledge,”
in Rule-Following and Meaning, ed. A. Miller and C. Wright (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2002), 16–27.
4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §218.
5. See Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1–54.
6. For a very helpful comparison of Cartesian, Kantian, and Wittgensteinian
varieties of skepticism, see James Conant, “Varieties of Scepticism,” in Wittgen-
stein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (New York: Routledge, 2004), 97–136.
7. John McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Mind, Value and
Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 226–27.
8. See Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 69–71: “it seems
that no matter what is in my mind at a given time, I am free in the future to inter-
pret it in different ways” (107).
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper,
1958), 34.
11. See, for example, Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 53–54.
12. David Pears, The False Prison. A Study in the Development of Wittgen-
stein’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1: 10.
13. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §195; see also §193.
14. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 54.
15. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s
Theory of Signs, trans. with intro. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), 5, 9. Derrida uses the same locution—“metaphysical

presupposition”—in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 28–29. In chapter 1 of part II
of Logical Investigations Husserl defines the “expressive relation or function”
as conveying an ideal sense or meaning which is the same in different acts of
assertion or of understanding it. Such ideal “meaning entities” he also terms
“meaning-intentions.” See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N.
Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 1: 269–98.
16. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena, 147.
17. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 15.
18. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 16; “It [the transcendental signified] is the
unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within
the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality and uni-
versality” (20).
19. For an excellent introduction to the set of commitments identified in con-
temporary philosophy of mind as “Cartesianism,” see Gilbert Ryle, The Concept
of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), chap. 1.
20. Some scholars, such as Henry Staten, in his Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), claim that Derrida’s deconstructive
arguments are similar to Wittgenstein, but here a caveat is in order: they are simi-
lar to Kripke’s Wittgenstein, but as I shall argue, Kripke misreads Wittgenstein.
21. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986), and his introduction in his Inventions of Difference: On
Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). In Limited,
Inc., Derrida writes: “Doubtless the concept of iterability is not a concept like the
others (nor is différance, nor trace, nor supplement, nor parergon, etc.). That it
might belong without belonging to the class of concepts of which it must render
an accounting, to the theoretical space that it organizes in a (as I often say) ‘quasi-
’transcendental manner, is doubtless a proposition that can appear paradoxical,
even contradictory in the eyes of common sense or of a rigid classical logic” (127;
see also 152). However, it is clear that what Gasché calls “infrastructures” (to
distinguish them from concepts classically understood) fulfill a transcendental
function for Derrida, in that they are in part his answer to the inquiry into the
conditions of possibility of meaning überhaupt.
22. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 45–46.
23. Depending on the specific context of his reading, Derrida has coined a
variety of variations of the trace, including “supplement,” “mark,” “spacing,” and
of course, “différance.”
24. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7, 9.
25. Ibid., 23–24.
26. Ibid., 57.
27. Ibid., 62–63. A similar hypostatization occurs in Derrida’s Speech and
Phenomena: “The absence of intuition [that is, reference]—and therefore of the
subject of that intuition—is not only tolerated by speech; it is required by the
general subject of signification, when considered in itself. It is radically requi-
site: the total absence of subject and object of a statement—the death of the
writer and/or the disappearance of the objects he was able to describe—does not
prevent a text from ‘meaning’ something. On the contrary, this possibility gives
birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be heard and read.” Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena, 93.
28. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50–51. See also: “The study of the function-
ing of language, its play, presupposes that the substance of meaning and, among
other possible substances, that of sound, be bracketed. The unity of sound and
of sense is indeed here, as I proposed above, the reassuring closing of play” (57,
translation modified).
29. Derrida, “Différance,” 142–43.
30. Ibid., 139–40. There are obvious affinities to Wittgenstein’s arguments
against a “private language” in the Philosophical Investigations that I cannot
consider here.
31. Martin Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” in The New Wittgenstein,
ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (New York: Routledge, 2000), 83–117. Stone
draws on McDowell’s reading of Wittgenstein and extends it to Derrida, as do
I. Stone and I differ, however, in our choice and interpretation of Derrida’s texts.
32. Jacques Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin,” in Speech and Phenom-
ena, 103.
33. There is a similar argument in the offing for meaning holism understood
along the lines of inferential relations among concepts; for instance, if one holds
that to know the meaning of “red” is to know what conditions entitle one to
claim “this is red” (for instance, seeing something red, under normal visual condi-
tions, among English speakers, etc.) and what inferentially follows from claiming
“this is red” (e.g., “this is colored,” “this is not [completely] blue or yellow,”
etc.), then it can be argued that such conditions and such inferential relations are
potentially innumerable.
34. Derrida draws this conclusion explicitly: “it is always possible that it [an
expression] has no decidable meaning.” Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 133.
36. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI-28.
37. Derrida, Limited, Inc., 62.
38. Ibid., 15. Compare also “rigorous purity” (20), “a stability that is absolute,
eternal, intangible, natural, etc.” (146).
39. Ibid., 119.
40. This line of argument is also found in Derrida, “The Force of Law: The
‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of
Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67.
42. Ibid., 20. See also “but this condition of possibility turns into a condition
of impossibility” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 74).
43. In Limited, Inc., Derrida explains this possibility of misapplication or radi-
cal reinterpretability of an expression explicitly in terms of his earlier work on
quasi-transcendental infrastructures, identifying the ground for an expression’s
alterability in “the nonpresent remainder of a differential mark cut off from its
putative ‘production’ or origin” (10); Compare “. . . the possibility of disengage-
ment and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or
written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every
horizon of semio-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say, in the pos-

sibility of its functioning [that is, being interpretable] being cut off, at a certain
point, from its ‘original’ desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from
its participation in a saturable [i.e., determinate] and constraining context” (12).
44. “ . . a possibility—a possible risk—is always possible, and is in some sense a
necessary possibility” (Derrida, Limited, Inc., 15); Derrida’s rhetorical question:
“is this risk rather [language’s] internal and positive condition of possibility?”
(17). Compare: “the essential and irreducible possibility of misunderstanding, or
of ‘infelicity’ must be taken into account in the description of those values said to
be positive” (147). Hence “the condition of possibility of those effects [of signa-
ture, i.e., of responsibility for the meaning of one’s utterance] is simultaneously,
once again, the conditions of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rig-
orous [i.e., determinate] purity” (20).
45. “Above all, this essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this
structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context.
In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable . . . conscious intention
would at the very least have to be totally present and immediately transparent to
itself and to others, since it is the determining center of context. The concept of—
or the search for—the context thus seems to suffer at this point from the same
theoretical and ‘interested’ uncertainty as the concept of the ‘ordinary,’ from the
same metaphysical origins: the ethical and teleological discourse of conscious-
ness” (Derrida, Limited, Inc., 18). Compare: “This essential drift [dérive] bearing
on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from
consciousness as the ultimate authority . . .” (8).
46. There can be no “absolutely meaningful speech” (Derrida, Limited, Inc.,
15); see also: “determinate content, identifiable meaning, describable value,”
“ideal content” (6).
48. Ibid., 151.
49. Ibid., 133. Compare: “the essential and irreducible possibility of misunder-
standing or of ‘infelicity’ must be taken into account in the description of those
values said to be positive” (147).
50. Ibid., 157, n. 9.
51. John McDowell offers this interpretation of Kripke in “Wittgenstein on
Following a Rule.” For helpful discussion see also David H. Finkelstein, Expres-
sion and the Inner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 4.
52. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 66.
53. Ibid., 68–69, 70–71, and 77.
54. Ibid., 91–92.
55. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §85. See also §28: “That is to
say: an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case.” See also
Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 33.
56. An example of the hypostatizing move in Derrida: “The absence of
intuition—and therefore of the subject of that intuition—is not only tolerated
by speech; it is required by the general subject of signification, when considered
in itself” (Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin,” in Speech and Phenomena, 93
[bold emphasis mine]).
57. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §198; see also §87.
58. Ibid., §199.
59. Compare these types of account with a dispositional account, namely,
“That’s how I (or: we) react to sign-posts,” where such a response is susceptible
to Kripke’s objections discussed earlier.
61. “As part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But
one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an
occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would
for us just be another sign.” Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 5. See also
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: §194; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel,
ed. G. E. M. Anscombe et al., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967), §290, §139.
62. For recent defenses of the claim that an experiential state may serve as
warrant for a judgment known immediately or non-inferentially, see James Pryor,
“There is Immediate Justification,” in Contemporary Debates in Epistemology,
ed. M. Steup and E. Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 181–201. Compare McDow-
ell’s similar definition of the epistemological distinction between inferential and
non-inferential knowledge; “knowledge is inferential if the only way to vindi-
cate its status as knowledge is to invoke the goodness of an inference to what is
known from something independently within the knower’s epistemic reach . . .
Contrast . . . someone who knows that something is green by seeing that it is.
That she sees that the thing is green entails that the thing is green.” McDowell,
“Brandom on Observation,” in Reading Brandom, ed. B. Weiss and J. Wanderer
(London: Routledge, 2010), 141.
Chapter 2
The epigraph for chapter 2 is from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
part II, section v.
1. See Boris Eikhenbaum, “Tolstoi i Shopengauer: K voprosu o sozdanii ‘Anny
Kareninoi,’ ” Literaturnyi Sovremennik 11 (1935): 134–49; Eikkhenbaum, Tolstoi
in the Seventies, trans. Alber Kaspin (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982), 137–47;
and Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 143–70.
2. The older scholarship maintains the division between the pre-and post-
conversion Tolstoy, although Richard Gustafson, in Leo Tolstoy: Resident and
Stranger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986) has challenged the
view, arguing for the continuity of Tolstoy’s religious beliefs and their narrative
embodiment throughout his life.
3. For a helpful overview of readers’ reactions, see A. V. Knowles, “Russian
Views of Anna Karenina, 1875–1878,” Slavic and East European Journal 22
(1978): 301–12.
4. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 62: 268–69. Vladimir Alexandrov, in
Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of “Anna Karenina” (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2004), esp. 104–6, but passim, expands upon Tolstoy’s sugges-
tion of linkages between “images, actions, situations” by theorizing the linkages
in terms of metonymic and metaphoric relations (as in classical structuralism), to
show how such relations “function as generators of meaning that is polyvalent
within relatively circumscribed borders, or that is both plural and limited” (99).
5.  See Elisabeth Stenbock-Fermor, The Architecture of “Anna Karenina” (Lisse:

Peter de Ridder, 1975); Sydney Schultze, The Structure of “Anna Karenina” (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982); and William M. Todd III, “The Responsibilities of
(Co-)Authorship: Notes on Revising the Serialized Version of Anna Karenina,”
in Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature, ed. E. C. Allen and G. S.
Morson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 159–69.
6. This is Tussing Orwin’s conjecture, in her Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 154.
7. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(New York: Penguin: 2000), 227. The semiotician Iurii Lotman describes very
similar inversions in native-foreign binary possibilities of behavior in his “Poetics
of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiot-
ics of Russian Cultural History, ed. A. D. Nakhimovsky and A.S. Nakhimovsky
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 30–66.
8. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 7 (translation modified).
9. Ibid., 61. Lydia Ginzburg offers illuminating commentary along these lines
regarding Vronsky’s happiness in having “a code of rules which unquestionably
defined everything that ought and ought not to be done” (Tolstoy, Anna Kar-
enina, 304), in Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 348.
10. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 128–29.
11. Ibid., 174 (translation modified).
12. For example, Vronsky refers to his “regimental connections,” and his
mother refers to an extramarital affair as “sviaz’ ” in part 2, chap. 18 (173–74).
13. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 211, 213. See also also part 4, chapter 1: “The
Karenins, husband and wife, went on living in the same house, met every day,
but were completely estranged from each other. Alexei Alexandrovich made it a
rule [za pravilo postavil] to see his wife every day, so as to give the servants no
grounds for conjecture . . .” (353).
14. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 415 (translation modified). Russian“koleia”can mean
“rut” or “railway track” (my thanks to William Mills Todd III for this observation).
15. Ibid., 433.
16. See Russkaia povest’ XIX veka: Istoriia i problematika zhanra, ed. B. C.
Meilakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), 169–99.
18. On the new railroads in Russia as both “spiritual destruction and material
progress” see James Billington, The Ikon and the Axe: An Interpretive History
of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1970), 382–83. For an enumeration of
the more than thirty occurrences of the theme of “railway” in the novel and an
attempt to interpret them as emotionally charged narrative “linkages,” see Schul-
tze, The Structure of “Anna Karenina,” 117–22.
19. Gary Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina,” Slavic and East
European Journal 25 (1981): 6.
20. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “rail.” Compare the related German words
Riegel (“bar”) and Regel (“rule”). The explicitly aesthetic term “role,” however,
derives from the rolled-up parchments upon which plays were recorded.
21. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 173.
22. Leo Tolstoy, “The Memoirs of a Madman,” trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude,
in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael Katz (New York: Norton, 1991), 295–304.
23. This is at least in part the influence of the “insidious poison” of Scho-

penhauer’s philosophy, according to Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought,
154–55. See also Sigrid McLaughlin, “Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual
Development: Tolstoy and Schopenhauer,” California Slavic Studies 5 (1970):
187–245.
24. Tolstoy, “The Memoirs of a Madman,” 304.
25. There may also be a reference here to the cultural-religious figure of the
“holy fool” (iurodivyi) who imitates Christ’s virtues to the point of being consid-
ered a fool or madman by bourgeois society.
26. Tolstoy, “The Memoirs of a Madman,” 300 (translation modified).
28. Ibid., 295.
29. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 2–3. The translators note that the passage likely
alludes to Reflexes of the Brain by I. M. Sechenov, published in 1863.
30. Oblonsky in particular, as a comic figure, seems to possess mental states
that are mere effects of physical causes. Another example: “Having finished the
newspaper, a second cup of coffee, and a kalatch with butter, he got up, brushed
the crumbs from his waistcoat and, expanding his broad chest, smiled joyfully,
not because there was anything especially pleasant in his soul—the smile was
evoked by good digestion” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 8, translation modified).
There is a parallel, a linkage here, between the secondary characters of Oblonsky
and Karenin. Oblonsky’s mental life and behavior are all too often determined
by physical causes; Karenin’s are all too often determined by codes and habits of
conduct, first of polite society and officialdom, later of the church. For example,
we are told why he proposed to Anna, that he was “honor-bound and had to
propose,” and that “his relations with these people were confined to one sphere,
firmly defined by custom and habit, from which it was impossible to depart”
(507).
32. Varenka’s “excitement” (volnenie) at the expected proposal causes physi-
ological effects as well: “she felt herself blush, then turn pale, then blush again”
(Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 565).
34. Of course, according to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, their actions are the
expression of a deeper, unconscious, and unfathomable will.
35. Scholars diverge strikingly in their interpretations of this scene. Justin Weir
sees the initial unity of the lovers broken by their digression into convention:
“The failure of the proposal is not a failure of communication but an instance
of the misery of convention, which now has its way with the unlucky couple. . . .
They betray their love because they think it will develop on its own” when in fact
it requires “skill and work.” Weir, Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 134. By contrast, Amy Mandelker
reads the scene as an unqualified pastoral critique in which “Tolstoy counters
Victorian victimizing conventions, both literary and social, with a native Rus-
sian version of the courtship plot, an ‘anti-proposal’ scene.” Mandelker, Framing
“Anna Karenina”: Tolstoy, the Woman Questions, and the Victorian Novel
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 169.
36. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 61 (my emphasis).
37. Ibid., 81, 82–83 (my emphasis).

38. Ibid., 105.
39. Ibid., 149.
40. Ibid., 150.
41. Ibid., 188.
42. Ibid., 314.
43. Ibid., 182. Echoed six pages later when Vronsky sees Anna: “Besides that,
her [Anna’s] excitement [volnenie] communicated itself physically to him” (188).
44. Ibid., 314.
45. Ibid., 668.
46. The reasons why skeptical doubt creeps into Anna’s and Vronsky’s rela-
tionship are many, and their explication would take us too far afield, into the area
of self-deception (e.g., Anna’s “deliberate refusal to understand her position,”
and Vronsky’s fancying himself a painter). One reason, however, certainly has to
do with the will, in the form of countervailing desires. Vronsky’s commitment to
Anna causes him to lose the regimental and social connections, rules and codes
within which he understands himself and feels at home. Once those have been
lost, his desire moves from object to object, and he begins to lose interest in Anna.
Vronsky . . . was content, but not for long. He soon felt arise in his soul
a desire for desires, an anguish. Independently of his will [Nezavisimo
ot svoei voli], he began to grasp at every fleeting caprice, taking it for a
desire and a goal. . . . outside the sphere of conventional social life that
had occupied their time in Petersburg. . . . And as a hungry animal seizes
upon every object it comes across, hoping to find food in it, so Vronsky
quite unconsciously seized now upon politics, now upon new books, now
upon painting. (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 465)
Ultimately Vronsky finds that he cannot express his innermost attitudes to Anna
(627), and they come to misunderstand each other’s looks (641). Such a break-
down ushers in precisely the Cartesian divide: “[Vronsky] did not reproach her
[Anna] in words, but in his soul he did reproach her” (549).
47. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 396. Immediately thereafter they play the parlor
game whereby each divines words and sentences from initial letters given by the
other. Later they finish each other’s sentences in speech (559).
48. Ibid., 444.
49. Ibid., 446.
50. Ibid., 457–58.
51. Ibid., 297–98. Full disclosure: the difference in usage is not observed
without exception by Tolstoy. At one point in the novel we read: “and Varenka—
something Kitty had not seen before—melted into weak but infectious laughter
[raskisala ot slabogo, no soobshchaiushchegosia smekha], provoked in her by the
prince’s witticisms” (233), but the verb is “to communicate itself,” not “to infect.”
After all, Tolstoy wrote and serialized the novel over several years, and ultimately
is not a philosopher honor-bound to keep his terminology in line.
53. Ibid., 579.
54. Ibid., 586.
55. Ibid., 591.
56. As quoted of Amfiteatrov in Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Sixties, trans. Duff-

ield White (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982), 120.
58. Ibid., 587.
59. Ibid., 170.
60. Compare Levin’s reaction to Western treatises on political economy and
agriculture: “he found laws deduced from the situation of European farming;
but he simply could not see why those laws, not applicable in Russia, should
be universal. He saw the same in the socialist books: these were either beautiful
but inapplicable fantasies, such as he had been enthusiastic about while still a
student, or corrections, mendings of the state of affairs in which Europe stood
and with which Russian agriculture had nothing in common” (Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina, 341–42).
62. Ibid., 396.
64. Ibid., 786. Note that the secondary character emblematically called Svi-
yazhsky (suggesting “sviaz’,” “connection,” “liaison”)— whose thoughts and
actions are completely divorced from each other—serves as a contrast to Levin’s
introspections: “Sviyazhsky was one of those people, always astonishing to
Levin, whose reasoning, very consistent though never independent, goes by itself,
and whose life, extremely well defined and firm in its orientation, goes by itself,
quite independent of and almost always contrary to their reasoning” (326; see
also 337). Also, this “linkage” has another set of nodes revolving around the use
of “pretend” and “pretense” in the novel, which I will not follow here, except to
note that Dolly’s children feel no shyness towards Levin, as they do toward other
adults, because Levin does not “pretend” (267).
65. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears
and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961).
66. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969), 5.
67. Robert Fogelin, Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1987), 232–33.
68. Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. J. Rosengrant (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and relatedly, Aleksandr Skaftymov, “Idei
i formy v tvorchestve L. Tolstogo,” in Nravstvennye iskaniia russkikh pisatelei
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), 144–45; and the diary entry
(March 21, 1898) by Tolstoy: “How good it would be to write a work of art in
which one could clearly express the fluidity [tekuchest’] of a person; the fact that
one and the same man is now a villain, now an angel, now a wise man, now an
idiot, now a strong man, now the most important creature of all.” Leo Tolstoy,
Tolstoy’s Diaries, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1985), 2: 457 (translation modified); Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,
53: 187.
69. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 797 (original emphasis).
70. This is John McDowell’s felicitous expression.
71. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 44 (no. 341). Some examples Wittgenstein
provides: describing something, naming something, measuring something, fol-
lowing a road sign, issuing or obeying a command, understanding a human face.
72. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§85, 454.
73. I take this view to be one of the lessons of McDowell, “Wittgenstein on

Following a Rule.”
74. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 251, 252. Compare: “Having lived the major part
of his life in the country and in close relations with the peasantry, Levin always
felt during the work period that this general peasant excitement communicated
itself [soobshchaetsia] to him as well” (792).
75. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 791. Note that “doroga” (“road”) alone may also
be translated as “railway.”
76. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kent-
ish (New York: Penguin, 1987), 20–21 (translation modified). Schopenhauer’s
pessimism, as above, is at work here: “Can it be that only Schopenhauer and
I have been intelligent enough to understand the meaninglessness and evil of
life?” (47).
77. Tolstoy, A Confession, 58 (translation modified).
78. In the interests of fairness it must be noted that it seems Tolstoy does not
make the difference between unsinnig and sinnlos that Wittgenstein will in the
Tractatus. Thus Tolstoy finds that he cannot think of infinite matters (matters
beyond space and time, such as goodness or value) from within the spatio-
temporal context of finite, scientific thinking (which is based on causality). He
concludes:
It is somewhat similar to what happens in mathematics when, trying to
resolve an equation, we get an identity. The method of deduction is cor-
rect, but the only answer obtained is that a equals a, and x equals x, or
0 equals 0. Precisely the same thing was happening with my reasoning
concerning the meaning of life. The only answers the sciences give to this
question are identities. (Tolstoy, A Confession, 52)
Such passages would, in Tractarian terms, be sinnlos, as are logical tautologies:
vacuously true but contentless (see Tractatus 4.4611). On this point see Caleb
Thompson, “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Meaning of Life,” Philosophical
Investigations 20 (1997): 112–13; and James Conant, “Must We Show What
We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. R. Fleming and M. Payne
(Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 242–83.
79. Tolstoy, A Confession, 69.
80. Ibid., 78.
Chapter 3
The epigraphs for chapter 3 are from J. W. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen
(Frankfurt: Insel, 2000), no. 1115; and Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will
and Representation, trans. E. F. Payne (New York: Dover), 1: 271.
1. See Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 60: 288, where he calls War and
Peace a “beautiful lie.”
2. Leo Tolstoy, Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales, trans. Louise und
Aylmer Maude (Farmington, Penn.: The Plough Publishing House, 1998), 44
(translation modified); Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 26: 282.
3. Classic touchstones of this story are M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the
Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971); and Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Notes to Page 55 167
1977), chap. 1. For a general introduction to the concept of aesthetic expression,

see Dabney Townsend, An Introduction to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),
79–91; Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London:
Routledge, 1999), 58–106; Aaron Ridley, “Expression in Art,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 211–27; and Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to
Aesthetics, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 31–51.
4. It is important here to note briefly that my characterization of expressivism
differs from Krystyna Pomorska’s semiotic explication of the meaning of “natu-
ral” for Tolstoy: “It is the non-mediated, intuitive cognition and behavior, the
capacity that every person—unspoiled by rule and learning—is endowed with
from birth. Or . . . it is a special way of learning comparable to learning one’s
native language: a process based not on rules, but on memory, in which one
remembers a number of ‘texts’ in their numerous usages” (Pomorska, “Tolstoy—
Contra Semiosis,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics 25–26 [1982]: 383).
While expressivism does entail immediate (non-inferential) understanding, that
understanding need not be instinctual or intuitive, as opposed to learned or
trained. As shall be argued in chapter 8, both “natural” and “conventional” signs
can express genuine emotions; if not, then most artworks, by virtue of their con-
ventions, could not express emotions. Tolstoy does at times seem to affirm this
view in What Is Art?, incorrectly, I believe. Furthermore, Pomorska (385) associ-
ates natural communication (as not based on learned knowledge) with iconic
rather than indexical signification (according to Peirce’s semiotic taxonomy), but
iconic signification, based on similarity, differs from expressivism as the direct
manifestation of meaning content.
5. Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials
in “War and Peace” (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 37. Rim-
vydas Silbajoris, in the conclusion to his book-length study of Tolstoy’s aesthetics,
goes even further, claiming that What Is Art? should be read as “withdrawal from
all conventional standards and concepts of art carried onwards through history
by the rising tide of civilization” and “the entire enormous structure of aesthetics
that was built through long centuries” (Silbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His
Art [Columbus, Oh.: Slavica, 1990]: 263).
6. Gustafson (Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger) in his exposition of Tolstoy’s
understanding of genuine aesthetic experience as “ecstatic” from the vantage
point of Orthodox theology perhaps unwittingly draws on Longinus, who at the
outset of “On the Sublime” cautions that “the effect of elevated language upon
an audience is not persuasion but transport” (1.4, ll. 3–4), the latter of which
is “ekstasis” in the original. Gustafson lauds Tolstoy for his use of hyperbaton
in indirect discourse as a successful way to involve the reader in the charac-
ter’s thoughts and perceptions, precisely in the way Longinus praises the use of
hyperbaton as “an imitation that approaches nature” my mimicking unpremedi-
tated speech and thought (22.3). On the other hand, Amy Mandelker (Framing
“Anna Karenina,” 46–80) tries to read What Is Art? as a version of the Kantian
sublime, but I think this is less than illuminating; although concepts of power,
intensity, and effect/affect—all central to Longinus and the naturalized sublime
of Burke—are in play, for Kant the experience of the sublime reflexively reveals
cognitive aspects of subjectivity and the subject’s relationship to normativity (the
supersensible), whereas for Longinus, and for Tolstoy, the effect of the sublime is
primarily one of passion and communication.
7. Dionysius Longinus, Libellus de Sublimate, ed. D. A. Russell (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1968), 3.1 (ll. 22–3); see also 11.2 (ll. 7–9).
8. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 83–106.
9.  Jean-François Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union générale
d’éditions, 1973), 266; see also Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in
The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 196–211; and
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York:
Vintage, 1983), 104.
10. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(New York: Penguin, 1995). Art as “spiritual nourishment” (138) recurs through-
out the treatise; see also 35, 88, 114.
11. Ibid., 131–32.
12. The early chapters of the treatise are devoted to rejecting previous aesthetic
theories based on the concept of beauty or aesthetic pleasure, and need not con-
cern us directly here.
13. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 37.
14. Ibid., 39–40 (original emphasis).
15. Tolstoy’s younger brother Dmitry Nikolaevich Tolstoy died of consump-
tion on January 21, 1856; the experience formed the basis for Levin visiting his
dying brother in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s eldest brother Nikolai Nikolaevich
Tolstoy died of consumption on September 20, 1860, at Hyères in the south of
France. See A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 132–35 and
156–57.
16. Wilson, Tolstoy, 44.
17. See for example, Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics. Living
Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
18. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 41. See also 135 (where he includes “porcelain dolls”)
and 155: “. . . the whole enormous realm of popular children’s art—jokes, prov-
erbs, riddles, songs, dances, children’s games, mimicry . . .”
20. Ibid., chap. 15. Caryl Emerson notes that “sincerity” (iskrennost’) “is built
off iskra, a ‘spark’: that which flashes momentarily and either catches fire or dies.
The artistic effect either takes, or fails to take.” Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 244. And Tolstoy likens the effect of genuine
art to that of a spark: “It sometimes happens that people, while together, are, if
not hostile, at least alien to each other in their moods and feelings, and suddenly
a story, a performance, a painting, even a building or, most frequently, music,
will unite them all with an electric spark [kak elektricheskoi iskroi], and instead
of their former separateness, often even hostility, they all feel unity and mutual
love.” Tolstoy, What Is Art? 130–31.
21. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 81. See also 38.
22. Ibid., 81; my emphasis.
23. This scene echoes a related scene early in Anna Karenina in which the
spiritually stricken Levin is not infected by singing peasant women: “Levin was
envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing
this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen.
When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a
heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to the
world, came over him” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 275).
24. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 118–19. On a first approximation, these examples
illustrate or elicit the following emotions: (1) joy, gaiety; (2) motherly succor; (3)
pity or compassion; (4) a child’s love for its mother, and subsequently, sadness.
25. For example: “Once the spectators or listeners are infected by the same
feeling the author has experienced, this is art” (Tolstoy, What Is Art? 39)
26. This “persona” theory of expression has been advocated by philosophers
of aesthetics including Bruce Vermazen, Jerrold Levinson, and Jenefer Robinson,
and is discussed in chapter 8.
28. Ibid., 150.
29. Ibid., 39.
30. Ibid., 121 (emphasis in original). Caryl Emerson (“Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,”
244–45) resists the claim that Tolstoy seems to be making: that a particular emo-
tion is transmitted from artist to audience. She cites the following passage from
What Is Art? (122): “And since each man is unlike all others, this feeling will be
particular for all other men, and will be the more particular the more deeply the
artist penetrates, the more heartfelt and sincere he is,” to support her claim that
“art destroys separation—but emphasizes individuality” and “the primary value
that is ‘caught’ by the receiver is sincerity.” But this is misleading. Sincerity is a
disposition or trait possessed by a person, and is arguably a relation (person P
is sincere regarding the expression E of something F.), while an emotion does
not have this logical structure. I read the passage cited above to be about the
individuation of the feeling: Tolstoy is conceding that the feeling conveyed may
be individuated more finely or coarsely for each person. For instance, one person
may differentiate between regret and remorse, while another may not: for the first
person the feeling conveyed would be more particular than for the second, but
from this it does not follow that what is conveyed is mere “sincerity.”
31. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 122. Compare: “Thus art is distinguished from non-
a rt, and the worth of art as art is determined, regardless of its content, that is,
independently of whether it conveys good or bad feelings” (123).
32. It should be noted that in his own presentation in What Is Art? Tolstoy
does not observe the strict division between the criterion of genuine art (infec-
tiousness of feeling) and the criterion of good art (content of conveyed feeling):
see chapter 6, where he introduces thoughts he will develop in chapter 16.
34. “In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand and repeating the words of the
archpriest along with the others, swore with the most terrible oaths to fulfill all
the governor’s hopes. Church services had always had an effect on him, and when
he uttered the words, ‘I kiss the cross,’ and turned to look at the crowd of young
and old people repeating the same thing, he felt himself moved” (Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina, 647).
35. Tolstoy recounts a similar process in A Confession and “The Memoirs of
a Madman,” as we saw in chapter 2. In this sense Levin contrasts most starkly
with Karenin, who wholly subjects himself first to bureaucratic officialdom and
subsequently “was now guided by the Scriptures in all things,” but remains coldly
detached from whatever codes and rules he is observing, because his fundamental
attitude towards rules as such has not changed: “As for me, I am fulfilling my
duty” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 516–18).
36. Recall Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (6.51): “Skepticism is not irrefutable,
but obviously nonsensical, when it raises doubts where no question can be asked.
For a doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an
answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.” To ask for the
meaning, the value, of life, is to ask for a necessary, absolute thing or statement
which names or describes a contingent, accidental state of affairs. If it’s absolute,
then it cannot truthfully describe a contingent state of affairs; if it can describe
it, then it’s not absolute.
37. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 817 (translation modified).
38. Fogelin, Wittgenstein, 97. And he notes that these views “clearly derive
from Kant and Schopenhauer” (ibid.). Compare Wittgenstein in the notebooks
written during his work on the Tractatus: “Ethics does not treat of the world.
Ethics is a condition of the world, like logic.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks
1914–1916, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Ans-
combe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 77 (July 24, 1916). On this general topic,
see Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgen-
stein’s Early Thought (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).
40. “. . . more or less needed for people’s good” (Tolstoy, What Is Art? 124).
More generally, see Thomas Barran, “Rousseau’s Political Vision and Tolstoy’s
What Is Art?,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 5 (1992): 1–12.
42. Poniatie can also mean “concept,” but that would flatly contradict Tol-
stoy’s claim that it is undefinable by reason.
44. Ibid., 43, 53. Thus What Is Art? is also the theoretical vindication of the
artist Mikhailov’s rejection of mere mechanical “technique” (Vronsky’s talent),
and the compliment he pays the artist: “He knew that it implied a mechani-
cal ability to paint and draw, completely independent of content. He had often
noticed, as in this present praise, that technique was opposed to inner virtue, as
if it were possible to make a good painting out of something bad” (Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina, 474). For further interpretation along these lines, see Alexandrov, Lim-
its of Interpretation, 83–88.
45. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 129. And here we recall the devotion with which
Wittgenstein read Tolstoy’s exegesis of the Gospels.
46. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 131–32.
47. Ibid., 156.
48. See, for example, Wittgenstein, Notebooks entry for 9.11.14; Tractatus,
5.5423; Blue and Brown Books, 162–79; and Philosophical Investigations, part
II, 193–229.
49. This construal of the distinction shifts Wittgenstein’s diagnosis into the
proximity of Sellars’s “Myth of the Given” in Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
50. Wittgenstein, Zettel, §225; see also §§490, 503–14. Compare Blue and
Brown Books, 162ff., and Philosophical Investigations, §§536ff., also part II,
section vi.ff.
51. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 168–79.
52. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part II, section iv.
53. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 26.
54. Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression: A Study in Philosophical Psy-
chology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 32.
55. J. L. Austin, “Other Minds,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and
G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 108–9.
56. Wittgenstein, Zettel, §234.
57. In later writings Wittgenstein will speak of “methods of projection.”
58. Denis McManus, The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus” (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 39–40. See also Eli Fried-
lander, Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 6.
59. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 25 and 67. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein,
The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. and trans. C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian
A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), sec. 86.
61. For an excellent and accessible introduction to the problematic of causal vs.
normative relations in the theory of mind, a version of which recurs in the pres-
ent study, see Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction
to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
2003), chap. 5.
62. One might speculate that Tolstoy avoided the use of the verb “to com-
municate itself” (soobshchat’sia) perhaps to avoid any suggestion of normative
intentionality necessarily being attributed to the work of art and thereby to avoid
some of the problems that arise in aesthetic expressivism, as for instance the con-
tingent relationship between what an author might be feeling when composing a
work and what the work itself expresses: a work might convey or elicit sadness,
although its author was not sad when composing it. My thanks to Barry Scherr
for raising this question, which I attempt to address in chapter 8.
63. Obshchenie is the nominalized derivative of the verb obshchat’; Dal’
defines the latter as “to unite, share, consider together” and sets the former equiv-
alent to soobshchenie (the nominalized derivative of the verb soobshchat’, “to
communicate”) and defines it as “communication, connection, mutual relation
with someone.” Vladimir I. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka
(Moscow: “Russkii Iazyk,” 1981), 2: 634.
65. Lexically, Tolstoy seems to prefer to use “feeling” (chuvstvo) to cover the
spectrum, rather than “sensation” (oshchushenie) or the foreign calque term
“emotion” (emotsiia).
66. Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1999). makes a compelling and psychologically rich case for emotions
being mental dispositions, or “attitudes towards the world.” On this understand-
ing, distinctively moral emotions would seem to be similar if not equivalent to
what Wittgenstein calls a good or evil will. Likewise Allan Gibbard writes: “An
emotion, we can say, involves a special way of experiencing one’s world, a way
that will be difficult to express and perhaps can only be whistled” (Wise Choices,
Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990], 131), echoing Frank Ramsey’s riposte to Wittgenstein
regarding the latter’s claim that the very propositions of the Tractatus, including
ethical propositions, cannot be said.
67. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1963), 60ff. See also Tormey, The Concept of Expression, 10–17 on prepo-
sitional objects of intentional states in contrast to sensations.
68. The modern resurrection of intentionality and intentional objects in the
European philosophical tradition dates to Franz Brentano’s Psychologie vom
empirischen Standpunkt (1874), English translation Brentano, Psychology from
an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Rancurello, Terrell and McAlister (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); and Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuc-
hungen of 1900–1901.
69. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, 189.
70. Thus Heidegger distinguishes between fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst)
precisely according to this criterion in Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986),
§30. By contrast, Tormey (The Concept of Expression, 33–35) argues that moods,
as emotions, have vague or diffused objects, and marshals Freud’s analysis of
anxiety (Angst) to support his claim.
71. How exactly the cognitive dimension of emotions should be understood
receives various answers from philosophers of emotion. Some identify an emo-
tion with a form of judgment or belief (e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of
Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001]; Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in Explaining Emotions, ed.
A. O. Rorty [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980]), or evaluation (e.g.,
William Lyons, Emotion [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980]), or
sets of beliefs and desires (Joel Marks, “A Theory of Emotion,” Philosophical
Studies 42 [1982]: 227–42).
72. Thus Amélie Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, holds
that some emotions (e.g., unconscious resentment) do not involve propositional
content. Michael Stocker’s (“Psychic Feelings: Their Importance and Irreducibil-
ity,” Australian Journal of Philosophy 61 [1983]: 5–26) famous “fear of flying”
example (I know that it is irrational to fear flying, but my fear persists) and Patri-
cia Greenspan’s (Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification
[New York: Routledge, 1988]) examples of conflicting emotions (I’m happy my
colleague won a fellowship, but also jealous that she did) suggest that emotions
are more like desires than beliefs.
73. William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9 (1884): 190.
74. Wollheim, On the Emotions, 123.
75. Gary Jahn, “The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?,” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1975): 62. See also Magdalene Zurek, Tol-
stojs Philosophie der Kunst (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996), 279–81.
76. Douglas Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy,
Shklovsky, Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) interprets
Tolstoyan “infection” as “somatic mimeticism,” defined by two criteria: “somatic
transfer” (“a somatic orientation in one body is transferred to another body”)
and “somatic guidance” (the orientation should guide “thought and behavior”).
He then connects them by drawing on a neurological theory of causal associa-
tionism (the “somatic marker” theory: a certain somatic orientation will trigger
past memories, whose accompanying sensations of pleasure or pain will subcon-
sciously affect the person’s will and resulting behavior). Robinson thus collapses
the distinction between causal somatic transfer and normative guidance into a
causal-dispositional theory of decision and behavior, which effectively denies the
normative dimension of meaning. See Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private
Language, 22–38 for criticisms of the causal-dispositional view. I pursue this line
of criticism in greater depth in chapter 6.
Chapter 4
The epigraphs from chapter 4 are from Plato, Republic, book III, 401d.; G. W. F.
Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1975), 2: 903.; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse,
“Sprüche und Zwischenspiele,” §106.
1. Harry Walsh, “The Place of Schopenhauer in the Philosophical Education
of Leo Tolstoi,” in Schopenhauer, ed. E. von der Luft (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen,
1988), convincingly argues that Tolstoy’s “philosophical fragments” (filosofskie
nabroski), probably dating from the 1840s, reveal the influence of the subjective
idealism of Fichte and early Schelling.
2. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 61: 219; quoted by Sigrid McLaughlin,
“Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development: Tolstoy and Schopen-
hauer,” California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 188.
3. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 61: 219.
4. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 50: 123. But then again on October 23,
1909, he describes Schopenhauer as one of the “greatest thinkers” (ibid., vol.
57: 158).
5. Studies of Schopenhauer’s influence on Tolstoy include Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in
the Seventies, 144–47; Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 143–70; Inessa
Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of
a Long Conversion, 1845–1887 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008), 121–84;
McLaughlin, “Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development”; and Walsh,
“The Place of Schopenhauer in the Philosophical Education of Leo Tolstoi.” See
here especially Walsh, “Schopenhauer’s On the Freedom of the Will and the Epi-
logue to War and Peace,” Slavonic and East European Review 57 (1979): 572–75.
6. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2: 195.
7. In fact, following Kant, Schopenhauer claims that self-consciousness, as
“inner sense,” is subject only to the transcendental form of intuition of time,
but not space or causality, and so concludes that the agent is aware of temporal
manifestations of our noumenal being rather than having an awareness of our
noumenal being in itself. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
2: 318.
8. Compare, for instance, the will as a “blindly urging force” and “endless
striving” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 117, 164).
9. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 178–79.
10. “But now, what kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to
exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential
to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no
change, and is therefore known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas
that are the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, of the will?
It is art, the work of genius. It repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure
contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the
world.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 184.
11. Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Provi-
dence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995), 143–44 (translation modified). This general
approach to ethics—sentimentalism—finds an early voice in Adam Smith (The
Theory of Moral Sentiments [Oxford: Clarendon, 1976 (1759)], 10):
When we see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of
another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our
own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt
by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer
on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bod-
ies as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in
his situation. Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body
complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by
beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy situation
in the correspondent part of their own bodies. The horror which they
conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in
themselves more than any other, because that horror arises from conceiv-
ing what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches
whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves
was actually affected in the same miserable manner. The very force of this
conception is sufficient, in their feeble frames, to produce that itching or
uneasy sensation complained of.
12. Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and Its
Development, ed. H. Eisenberg and J. Strayder (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 17–37.
13. “Consideration of what it feels like to have sympathetic feelings towards
another’s physical pain, say on slamming his fingers in a car door, is sufficient to
show this: the feelings you have are feelings of sympathy, not feelings of pain as
of slamming your fingers in a car door,” Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical
Exploration, 214, used to substantiate his claim that “it is entirely mistaken to
assume that in addition to this recognition of, feeling towards, and response to
another’s difficulties, sympathy also involves undergoing difficulties and having
feelings of the same sort as the other person’s.” Michael Slote argues similarly
that empathy is a “matter of feeling, for example, someone else’s pain, whereas
sympathy involves feeling for the pain of another. Clearly, too, I can feel for some-
one else’s embarrassment, feeling sympathy for it, without feeling anything like
embarrassment myself, so the concepts [of empathy and sympathy] are definitely
different,” in his “Moral Sentimentalism and Moral Psychology,” in Oxford
Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 227.
This line of reasoning goes back to Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans.
Peter Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). See Stephen Darwall,
“Empathy, Sympathy, Care,” Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 261–82. Empirical
research using neuro-imaging suggests that an observer of another’s distress feels

similar distress without imagining the sensation that causes the distress. See T.
Singer, B. Seymour, J. O’Doherty, H. Kaube, R. J. Dolan, and C. D. Firth, “Empa-
thy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not Sensory Components of Pain,” Science
303 (2004): 1157–62; and general discussion in Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Con-
struction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 82–84.
14. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 147. Schopenhauer’s view thus is
to be distinguished from Adam Smith, who holds: “By the imagination we place
ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments,
we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person
with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.” Smith, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, 9. See also Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Explora-
tion, 218.
15. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 203.
16. Ibid., 209–10.
17. Ibid., 211.
19. Ibid., 81.
20. Ibid., 94.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R Geuss and R. Speirs, trans.
R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30. Compare Schopen-
hauer: “music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the
phenomenon, or more exactly, of the will’s adequate objectivity, but is directly
a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything
physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon.” Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation, 1: 262.
22. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 33.
23. Ibid., 79–80.
24. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 257.
25. Ibid., 1: 262–63.
26. Ibid., 1: 256. Schopenhauer has a normative understanding of music, which
by definition rules out programmatic music because it imitates nature, that is, is
an artistic representation of a natural representation of the will.
27. Ibid., 1: 261–62 and 264.
28. For reflections on non-observational “practical knowledge” see G. E. M.
Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
29. For arguments for a dual-aspect theory, see Brian O’Shaughnessy, The Will:
A Dual Aspect Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), especially
vol. 2. Christopher Janaway in his Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 221–29 argues for the similarity of their views.
30. Arthur Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, trans. E. F. J.
Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10. This expansion of the
scope of the concept “will,” beyond acts of the will, allows Schopenhauer’s theory
to address a prime objection to dual-aspect theories: that it cannot adequately
explain tryings, that is, willed actions that do not occur. See Janaway, Self and
World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, chap. 8.
31. Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, 12. See also Scho-
penhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), 70–74; Schopenhauer, The World
as Will and Representation, 1: 368.
32. Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root, 41–42.
33. Ibid., 72.
34. Ibid., 214 (original emphasis).
35. A caveat. We are dealing here with the human will and human acts of the
will. In Schopenhauer’s grander metaphysics, all events, including non-human,
natural events, are “objectifications of the will,” where the will here is the Kan-
tian thing-in-itself, beyond space, time, and causality. Acts of the will are a species
of this genus, distinguished by their mode of immediate awareness to the subject
and their being caused by motives.
37. Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on Freedom of the Will, 41–42.
38. Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s analyses of the affective influence of music
themselves develop a philosophical tradition that reaches back to Socrates’s trope
of “magnetic rings” of enthusiasm in Ion, the surrender of rational self-control
and judgment in the rhapsode’s audience in book 10 of the Republic, and the
notion of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics. For instance, in Compendium Musicae,
Descartes argues that music can affect the listener’s emotions through tone and
rhythm. And Hume explicitly likens a person’s emotions (“passions”) to music:
“Now if we consider the human mind, we shall find that with regard to the
passions, tis not of the nature of a wind instrument of music, which in run-
ning over all the notes immediately loses the sound after the breath ceases; but
rather resembles a string instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still
retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is
extremely quick and agile, but the passions are slow and restive . . . though the
fancy may change its views with great celerity; each stroke will not produce a
clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixt and
confounded with the other.” Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-

Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 440– 41. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s thoughts on music’s ability to convey emotion (e.g., in his Essai sur
l’origine des langues [1764] and Dictionnaire de musique [1768]) were likely
known to Schopenhauer and Tolstoy. See Ruth Rischin, “Allegro Tumultuoissi-
mamente: Beethoven in Tolstoy’s Fiction,” in In the Shade of the Giant: Essays
on Tolstoy, ed. Hugh McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
15–18.
39. Malcolm Budd puts this point well in the chapter on Schopenhauer in his
Music and the Emotions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985): “music
cannot represent the thought a certain kind of emotion may involve but only that
aspect of the emotion which is not representation but is a function of the will:
pleasure and pain, desire and satisfaction. . . . Schopenhauer defines an emotion
as ‘a stirring of the will’ by a motive, and he regards something as affecting the
will only if it is felt pleasantly or painfully. But a motive just is a representation:
it is either a sensuous representation of one of the senses, as is always so in the
case of non-human animals, or an abstract representation, a concept, as is nearly
always so in the case of human beings. Hence, Schopenhauer’s claim that music
expresses only the essential nature of an emotion, not its motive, implies that
music can express only the element of pleasure or pain an emotion contains, and
Notes to Page 83 177
not any perception or concept sometimes, usually or necessarily involved in the

experience of the emotion” (91–92).
40. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2: 430 (§218). For extended discussion of this point
in the context of “faculty psychology,” see Robert Hall, “Schopenhauer: Music
and the Emotions,” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 83 (2002): 151–61.
41. Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on Freedom of the Will, 44.
43. Ibid., 2: 448. Note that there is some ambiguity or uncertainty in Schopen-
hauer’s account regarding the relationship between music and the expression or
elicitation of feeling as an “affect of the will.” Schopenhauer sometimes appears
to hold that consonance and dissonance of tones constitute analogues respectively
of pleasure/satisfaction and pain/dissatisfaction, and thereby provide a picture
or image (Bild) of the will’s manifestations rather than the manifestations—the
feelings—themselves. Thus according to Schopenhauer music does not elicit emo-
tions themselves but rather the listener’s cognitive recognition of them: “Only in
this way does music never cause us actual suffering, but still remains pleasant
even in its most painful chords; and we like to hear in its language the secret
history of our will and of all its stirrings and strivings with their many different
delays, postponements, hindrances, and afflictions, even in the most sorrowful
melodies. On the other hand, where in real life and its terrors our will itself is that
which is roused and tormented, we are then not concerned with tones and their
numerical relations; on the contrary, we ourselves are now the vibrating string
that is stretched and plucked.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa-
tion, 2: 451. See also Malcolm Budd’s commentary: “The sense in which music
is a representation of the will is that the most important elements of musical
structure are close counterparts of the essential features and forms of the will
as it manifests itself in time and, consequently, the experience we have in listen-
ing to music is formally analogous to the will’s nature. Hence, our experience of
music more closely relates us to the will than does any perceptual representation
of something whose being-in-itself is the will” (Music and the Emotions, 93–96,
here 94–95). But in his criticism Budd acknowledges that “Schopenhauer himself
falls into difficulties when he tries to give an accurate description of the experi-
ence of music which at the same time conforms to his requirement that the will
should not be excited in aesthetic experience. . . . If [Schopenhauer’s] apparent
references to the effects of music were intended to be understood strictly, the
experience of music would not merely be an analogue of the will’s activity—it
would essentially involve it: if a dissonant chord arouses a desire for a further
chord, when we listen to music our will is not at rest. This uncertainty in Scho-
penhauer’s account is mirrored by the uncertainty we sometimes experience in
reading musical theorists as to whether they are describing in figurative terms
features we hear in music or, instead, are describing literally our responses to
what we hear” (97–98, my emphasis). For a helpful discussion of Schopenhau-
er’s reliance on the Pythagorean acoustical theory of Rameau to underwrite his
claims that due to “numerical relations” of harmony and disharmony in music
“all movements of the human heart, i.e., of the will . . . can be faithfully portrayed
and reproduced in all their finest shades and modifications . . . by means of the
invention of the melody” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
2: 451), see Lawrence Ferrara, “Schopenhauer on Music as the Embodiment of

Will,” in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 183–99.
Schopenhauer’s view of music and the emotions is echoed in Eduard Hanslick’s
influential On the Musically Beautiful (trans. G. Payzant [Indianapolis, Ind.:
Hackett, 1986]) of 1854, in which he argues that music cannot express or rep-
resent “definite feelings” because it cannot represent the “specific representations
or concepts” that determine particular emotions. More recently, Annette Baier
(“What Emotions Are About,” Philosophical Perspectives 4 [1990]: 1–29) has
argued independently along similar lines, by suggesting that certain emotions like
love have, in addition to a formal object (the lovable, which is a thin property),
deep objects (“the ghosts of all the other objects which that specific sort of emo-
tion has had in this person’s history, and maybe also the shadows of those that it
will have,” 4) that at least partly constitute a particular person’s specific emotional
responsiveness, an “intentional depth” that can be triggered by music: “What
music may do is arouse the ‘precipitate of a reminiscence’ by a shortcut—not via
a current object, but by a more direct revival of the memory of past loved ones
or lost ones, or of the general common features or such ones (the formal object),
without needing to or providing us with any current focus for that emotion” (12).
44. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 685. On the other hand, at times Tolstoy valorizes
the emotional effect of pure music, as in this diary entry from January 20, 1905:
Music is the stenography of feelings [chustv]. What I mean is: the quick
or slow succession of sounds, their pitch, their volume [sila ikh]—all this,
in speech, embellishes words and their meaning, indicating those shades
of feelings which are associated with our parts of speech. Music without
speech takes these expressions of feelings and shades of feelings [vyrazhe-
niia chustv i ottenkov ikh] and combines [soediniaet] them, and we get a
play of feelings without the things that gave rise to them. For this reason
music has such a particularly strong effect, and for this reason the com-
bination of music with words is a weakening [oslablenie] of the music,
a retrogression, a writing out in letters of stenographic signs. (Tolstoi,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55: 116–17)
45. Wittgenstein makes an analogous observation regarding the under-
determination of intentional contexts of a smiling face in Philosophical
Investigations, §539.
48. The locus classicus for this thought is Wittgenstein: “Let us not forget this:
when ‘I raise my arm,’ my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over
if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”
Philosophical Investigations, §621.
Chapter 5
The epigraph for chapter 5 is from Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 198.
1. For detailed presentation of the drafts of the novella, see N. K. Gudzii,
“Kreitserova sonata,” in Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 27: 561–624; and
V. A. Zhdanov, Ot “Anny Kareninoi” k “Voskreseniiu” (Moscow: Kniga, 1967),

155–84.
2. See, for instance, L. D. Opul’skaya, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k
biografii c 1886 po 1892 god (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), chaps. 3 and 4.
3. See, for instance, Tolstoy’s diary entries for May 15, 16, and 17, 1889.
4. “O tom, chto nazyvaetsia iskusstvom,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 37–38
(Moscow: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1939): 62–63. Tolstoy’s belief that music con-
veys emotion goes back to the early fragment “A Definition of Music” (June 17,
1850), in which he writes: “There is a fourth meaning of music—a poetic mean-
ing. Music in this sense is the means to arouse certain feelings, or to transmit
them, through sounds.” Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1: 245. Quoted in
Rischin, “Allegro Tumultuosissimamente,” 15.
5. Tolstoi, “O tom, chto nazyvaetsia iskusstvom,” 67.
6. A. B. Gol’denveizer, “Tolstoi i muzyka,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 37–38
(Moscow: Akademia Nauk SSSR, 1939): 591 (original emphasis underlined).
7. Ibid., 592.
8. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 261 (final emphasis
only mine).
9. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 96–97.
10. Ibid., 96. Compare What Is Art? chap. 5.
11. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 96.
13. Ibid., 132.
14. Ibid., 134.
15. Ibid., 135.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. Ibid., 37.
19. Ibid., 45.
20. Ibid., 43.
21. Ibid., 44. I pause at this description somewhat, because I think a case
can be made that Pozdnyshev’s desires may be more expansive. Such evidence
includes his obsession with Trukhachevsky (even when he is headed back to con-
front his wife, Pozdnyshev recounts that rather “all my thoughts led back to
him” (104), his descriptions of his beauty (“moist eyes, like almonds, smiling
red lips . . . his face was handsome in a vulgar sort of way . . . he had a par-
ticularly well-developed posterior, as women have, or as Hottentots are said to
have,” 80) and his fawning upon him (“Some peculiar, fatal energy led me not to
repulse him, get rid of him, but, on the contrary, to bring him closer,” 85), and
his quite bizarre description of his honeymoon (“It’s something similar to what
I experienced when I was learning how to smoke. I felt like vomiting, my saliva
flowed, but I swallowed it and pretended I was enjoying myself,” 52–53) that
would seem to belie his asseverations of being a Don Juan. I think scholars have
not explored Pozdnyshev as an unreliable narrator with anything approaching
the necessary attentiveness. However, see David Herman, “Stricken by Infection:
Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata,” Slavic Review 56
(1997): 15–36; and Stephen Baehr, “Art and The Kreutzer Sonata: A Tolstoian
Approach,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 10 (1976): 39–46 (reprinted in

Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. M. Katz [New York: Norton, 1991], 448–56) for very
perceptive remarks in this direction.
23. In this regard The Kreutzer Sonata rivals the confessional intricacies of
Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground. See J. M. Coetzee, “Con-
fession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” Comparative
Literature 37 (1985): 193–232.
25. Ibid., 46.
26. Ibid., 54. At this juncture Pozdnyshev also explicitly links his strategy of
naturalizing ideals and sentiments to his understanding of Schopenhauer: “But
why should we live? If life has no purpose, if it’s been given us for its own sake,
we have no reason for living. If that really is the case, then the Schopenhauers and
the Hartmanns, as well as all the Buddhists, are perfectly right” (ibid.). So here
too Tolstoy is artistically reworking his own spiritual crisis, as he had in Anna
Karenina, “The Memoirs of a Madman,” and A Confession.
27. Ibid., 91. Once again this is complicated by Pozdnyshev’s vituperations
against the “moral rot of materialism” and the elimination of moral guidance
in chapter 15: “If you’re living badly, it’s because your nerves aren’t functioning
properly, or something of that sort.” Is this a moment of lucidity that undermines
his continual causal etiologies of his and society’s behavior, or the converse? In
the same chapter he says, “I’m supposed to be a kind of madman, you know. . . .
I’m a wreck, a cripple. I’ve only got one thing. It’s what I know. Yes, I know some-
thing it’ll take other people quite a while to find out about.” This Gordian knot
of reliability can be loosened only so far, I believe.
28. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 32–33, 37.
29. Ibid., 89–90. Tolstoy’s footnote in the passage describes a mechanical mea-
suring device that records differences in muscle tension of the arm.
30. Ibid., 111.
31. Ibid., 116.
33. Ibid., 36: “The tea was really like beer, but I downed a glass” (translation
corrected).
34. Pozdnyshev’s wife made several suicide attempts, at least once with opium.
One might wonder how she got hold of it.
35. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 41. He also seemingly admits to being a frequent
masturbator: of his youth he reports that “the hours I spent alone were not pure
ones” (39), and shortly thereafter confides that “I became involved in all kinds of
moral deviations” (41).
36. Ibid., 62.
37. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, 352–55.
38. In her richly suggestive article, “Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evi-
dence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in
the O. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata” (Critical Inquiry 23
[1997]: 738–88), Shoshana Felman is one of the few readers to point to Pozdny-
shev’s jealousy and sexual ambivalence towards Trukhachevsky. She interprets his
self-confessed “swinishness” (svinstvo; Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata: 81, translation
modified) and self- confessed “real debauchery”— “genuine debauchery con-

sists in liberating yourself from moral relations with the woman with whom
you enter into physical relations [obshchenie]” (Kreutzer Sonata, 37, translation
modified)—as an instantiation of the universal différance of human sexuality,
“an inner schism or chasm not just between the narrator and his wife but within
the narrator’s own sexual desire; there is an abyss, precisely, that inhabits human
sexuality, like an internal hollowness at the bottom of a whirling chaos of attrac-
tions and repulsions, of rivalries and of conflicting, secret sexual ambiguities.
This abyss of difference (internal and external) cannot but become an abyss of
conflict . . . an abyss that fatally and radically divides sexuality from itself, makes
it different from itself” (Felman, “Forms of Judicial Blindness,” 771–72). In pro-
viding a generalized explanation, however, Felman removes from consideration
the aspects—causal vs. normative, a Wittgensteinian notion of “evil”—which, I
believe, go towards explaining the specificity of Pozdnyshev’s character.
39. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 66 (my emphasis). See also: “If jealousy hadn’t
been the pretext, some other one would have been found. I insist on the fact that
all husbands who live as I lived must either live in debauchery, get divorced, or
kill themselves or their wives, as I did” (81); Pozdnyshev’s narrative links “the
wild beast of jealousy” (109) with extended images of animality (sensuousness,
debauchery) in the novella.
40. Ibid., 105 (see 103–4 as well). I therefore must disagree with John Kopper’s
analysis that “by marrying, [Pozdnyshev] has located himself within a certain
code of behavior that permits what he only later will conclude to be impermis-
sible: jealousy, sex, and deceit” (Kopper, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A
Reading of ‘Father Sergius,’ ‘The Devil,’ and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’,” in In the
Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy, ed. H. McLean [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989], 168). On my reading we are to consider the ethical char-
acter of Pozdnyshev himself, and not necessarily that of marriage (which, he says,
exists for those who see it as a sacrament, but not for debauchers, chapter 2).
42. Ibid., 99.
43. Ibid., 104.
44. Ibid., 108.
45. Ibid., 109.
46. Ibid., 110. Notice the surprising similarity of descriptions between Pozd-
nyshev on the threshold of murder and Kitty attending to Levin’s dying brother:
“She had in her that excitement and quickness of judgment that appear in
men before battle, a struggle, in dangerous and decisive moments of life, those
moments when once and for all a man shows his worth and that his whole past
has not been in vain but has been a preparation for those moments” (Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina, 497). Both cases are paradigmatic instances of acts of will,
actions that issue directly without a conflict of motives, perhaps with an allusion
to the Aristotelian virtue of courage.
47. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 111–12.
48. Ibid., 112 (translation modified, my emphasis).
49. Ibid., 104.
50. Justin Weir likewise suggests that Pozdnyshev may simply be creating rather
than recounting his story, exercising his willed dependency on an addressee by
means of confabulation: “But the best way to account for the difference between
fabula and siuzhet is to stop assuming there is a difference. Pozdnyshev’s story is
the creation of his telling it; that is why the plot and narrative accord so well with
the violent staccato of the train, which is, of course, the perfect setting for a story
of sex and murder if ever there was one . . . [The narrator] is seduced by Pozdny-
shev’s enthusiasm and strong tea and is soon quietly listening with understanding
and sympathy.” Weir, Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2011), 164–65.
51. Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London:
Routledge, 2000), 153–54. See also J. C. Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy:
Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Tampa: University of South Florida Press,
1982). Christopher Janaway demonstrates Wittgenstein’s reliance on his reading
of Schopenhauer in this regard, in Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philoso-
phy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 336–42. Janaway also shows how Wittgenstein
engaged with Schopenhauer’s views on willing and acting in his notebooks but
excluded such thoughts from the Tractatus.
52. Diamond illustrates this aspect of Wittgenstein with readings of Haw-
thorne’s “The Birthmark” and the Grimm tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.”
In both stories the protagonists manifest ethical evil by issuing conditions to the
world and, when those conditions are frustrated, in their unhappiness and resent-
ment at the world.
54. Ibid., 105–6.
55. Compare Wittgenstein in his preliminary notes while working on the Trac-
tatus: “I will call ‘will’ [“Willen”] first and foremost the bearer of good and evil”
such that so long as even a paralyzed man is able to “think and want [wünschen]
and communicate his thoughts” he is still “in the ethical sense . . . the bearer of a
will [Willens].” Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 76–77 (July 21, 1916); thus “Good and
evil only enter through the subject” (79, August 2, 1916).
57. Ibid., 41.
58. Ibid., 42.
59. Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata, 96 (my emphasis).
60. Wittgenstein, letter to Ludwig von Ficker, in Wittgenstein: Sources and Per-
spectives, ed. C. Grant Luckhardt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979),
34–35.
61. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in Wittgenstein, Philosophi-
cal Occasions 1912–1951, ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis, Ind.:
Hackett, 1993), 44.
62. Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief, ed. F. A. Flowers III, trans. I. Hapgood
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 127–43.
63. Gary Saul Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoy and the Poetics of
Didactic Fiction,” in Leo Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom (New
York: Chelsea House, 1986), 189, quoted in David Herman, “Stricken by Infec-
tion: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata,” Slavic Review 56
(1997): 32fn. Herman is the only critic of whom I am aware who has noticed the
epigraph and its significance: “Here a portion of the audience is excluded from
the communal undertaking at the very outset. The epigraph suggests that only
certain readers will really understand, namely those who can draw on their own
experience to furnish an insight and a conviction that the text will not provide”
(34). I am ignoring the infamous “Afterword” to The Kreutzer Sonata, which
deserves extended treatment beyond this chapter. While it would seem to pose
problems for my reading, since in it Tolstoy repeats, apparently in propria per-
sona and apparently with approbation, Pozdnyshev’s views on marriage and sex,
one would need to consider the occasion of the “Afterword” (popular alarm, on
my reading due to a profoundly disappointing misreading of Kreutzer Sonata’s
poetics of address) as well as the question of intended addressee.
65. “Just as people who think that the aim and purpose of food is pleasure
cannot perceive the true meaning of eating, so people who think that the aim of
art is pleasure cannot know its meaning and purpose, because they ascribe to an
activity which has meaning in connection with other phenomena of life the false
and exclusive aim of pleasure. People understand that the meaning of eating is
the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider pleasure the aim
of this activity. So it is with art. People will understand the meaning of art only
when they cease to regard beauty—that is, pleasure—as the aim of this activity”
(Tolstoy, What Is Art? 35).
66. Stephen Baehr, “Art and The Kreutzer Sonata: A Tolstoian Approach,”
traces out some of the parallels, albeit under the motto “life is art.”
68. Ibid., 67. Were Pozdnyshev syphilitic, that fact would be yet another
respect in which Trukhachevsky would be a rival and double: “Once, when I’d
asked Trukhachevsky’s brother if he ever went to brothels, he’d replied that a
respectable man wouldn’t go to some dirty, loathsome place where he might run
the risk of catching an infection, when it was always possible to find a respectable
woman. And now his brother had found my wife” (103).
70. Ibid., 157, 158.
71. Tolstoy acknowledges science as “another human spiritual activity” (Tol-
stoy, What Is Art? 157).
72. Ibid., 159.
73. Ibid., 165.
74. Ibid., 164.
75. Ibid., 123.
76. “So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what
he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance to such
a degree that he feared suicide, and at the same time firmly laying his own par-
ticular definite path [svoiu osobennuiu, opredelenuiu dorogu] in life” (Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina, 791).
78. Ibid., 166–67 (my emphasis).
79. Unfortunately, book-length studies that consider the relationship between
art and science in Tolstoy’s treatise overlook this astounding passage: for instance,
Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art, 126– 33; Magdalene
Zurek, Tolstojs Philosophie der Kunst (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996), 322–23;
Konstantin Lomunov, Estetika L’va Tolstogo (Moscow: “Sovremennik,” 1972),

14–65; and T.J. Diffey, Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” (London: Croom, 1985).
81. Liza Knapp, “Musical Mimesis: Platonic Aesthetics and Erotics in ‘The
Kreutzer Sonata,’ ” Tolstoy Studies 3 (1991): 25–42, aligns Tolstoy with Plato
(of The Republic) against Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in a somewhat different
relation: “In ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’ Tolstoy responds indirectly to the musical
theory dominant in his time, a musical theory in which the music of Beethoven
played a pivotal role. Beethoven’s music served as the model for the Schopen-
haurian notion that music is a force that defies reason, that it is the language
of feeling and passion, that it represents the will directly, without recourse to
ideas or language, that it acts directly on the emotions . . . Whatever criticism of
Beethoven’s music is leveled in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ thus becomes a rebuttal of
Schopenhauer’s musical theory and a plea for music to remain unemancipated”
from language (37).
Chapter 6
The epigraph for chapter 6 is from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
part II, section iv.
1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§65–67 (here §66).
2. Jenefer Robinson (“Startle,” Journal of Philosophy 92 [1995]: 53–74) argues
for its being an emotion, while Richard Lazarus (“Thoughts on the Relations
between Emotion and Cognition,” American Psychologist 37 [1982]: 1019–24)
asserts that “I do not consider startle an emotion. Emotion results from an evalu-
ative perception . . . Startle is best regarded as a primitive neural reflex process”
(1023).
3. For an extended analysis of jealousy, see Goldie, The Emotions: A Philo-
sophical Exploration, chap. 8. For an analysis of grief, see Peter Goldie, “Grief:
A Narrative Account,” Ratio 24 (2011): 119–37. See also Gabriele Taylor, Pride,
Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). For
an account of emotions as dispositional traits, see Richard Wollheim, On the
Emotions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
4. Thomas Dixon in From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular
Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) provides
a rich history of definitions and theories of emotion and suggests that earlier
delineations between passions, affections, appetites, and sentiments are more
promising for research and theory than a single concept of emotion.
5. “Central” here does not mean essential, but rather indicates the relative
density of resemblances, in keeping with the notion of family resemblance: “the
strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through
its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.” Wittgenstein, Philosophi-
cal Investigations, §67.
6. Aristotle, De Anima 403a29.
7. The notion of intentionality is due to Franz Brentano, Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973; originally pub-
lished 1874). For helpful discussion see Tim Crane, “Intentionality as the Mark
of the Mental,” in Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Anthony O’Hear
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229–51.
8. This aspect of emotion is explored extensively in Nico Frijda, The Emotions

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
9. Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Intro-
duction (London: Routledge, 2012), lucidly discusses these various dimensions.
Ronald de Sousa (Rationality of Emotion, 126, 181–84) formalizes the logical
form of emotion as a seven-place relation R(Stfacmp), “where R stands for an
emotion type, S for the subject, t the target, f the focal property, a the motivating
aspect, c the cause, m the aim, p the proposition specifying the ground.”
10. See E. Hatfield, J. T. Caicoppo, and R. L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a survey of some empiri-
cal studies of emotional contagion, see D. McIntosh, D. Druckman, and R. B.
Zajonc, “Socially Induced Affect,” in Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhanc-
ing Human Performance, ed. D. Druckman and R. A. Bjork (Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press, 1994), 251–76.
11. The “James-Lange” theory of the emotions refers in addition to William
James to the Dutch physician who put forward a theory essentially similar to that
of James. See C. G. Lange, The Emotions, trans. I. A. Haupt (Baltimore: William
and Wilkins, 1922; original 1885).
12. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 189–90.
13. Ibid., 189, 194.
14. Ibid., 201–2. That is, the perception of some “exciting fact” causes some
behavior, and feeling the bodily changes constituent of the behavior just is the
emotion, which is as it were epiphenomenal, a product of the bodily changes. In
his later formulation: “My theory . . . is that the bodily changes follow directly
the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as
they occur is the emotion” (William James, The Principles of Psychology [New
York: Dover, 1950], 2: 449).
15. While Tolstoy appears to have shown little interest in James, the novelist
was one of the latter’s favorite authors after reading War and Peace and Anna
Karenina in 1896, and James notoriously devoted part of a chapter of his The
Varieties of Religious Experience to Tolstoy as an example of a “sick soul.” While
textual evidence is lacking, it is tantalizing to wonder whether James did not
read Anna Karenina earlier, and find inspiration for his physiological theory of
the emotions in the “infectiousness” of laughter there. On James and Tolstoy,
see Donna Tussing Orwin, “What Men Live By: Belief and the Individual in Leo
Tolstoy and William James,” in William James in Russian Culture, ed. J. D. Gross-
man and R. Rischin (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), 59–80.
16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §476; see also Kenny, Action,
Emotion and Will, 72. For a rejoinder, see Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of
Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987), chap. 4, in which he argues that it is the cognitive state of
non-deliberative uncertainty that is the cause of what he terms “epistemic emo-
tions,” including fear and other “forward-looking emotions.”
17. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, 75.
18. On formal and apparent objects, see Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will. On
paradigm scenarios, see De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions, further devel-
oped by Annette Baier, “What Emotions Are About”: “An adequate account of
the intentionality of an emotion such as love or revulsion must then make room
not just for a deep as well as a formal and an apparent object, but should prefer-
ably be able to indicate whether or not the deep object is the same as the earliest
apparent object. We need not only paradigm scenarios, that set the state for sub-
sequent enactments of a given type of emotion, but also ultimate scenarios where
that type of emotion really comes into its own, where it as it were finds its fulfill-
ment” (14–15).
19. John Deigh, Emotions, Values, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 34–35, has argued that the physiological states of ecstasy and anger
are indistinguishable, so that their respective intentional objects must be invoked
to differentiate the emotions. He refers to a famous experiment conducted by
S. Schachter and J. Singer (“Cognition, Social, and Physiological Determinants
of Emotional State,” Psychological Review 69 [1962]: 379–99) that provided
empirical evidence for a similar claim: that the bodily processes undergone by a
person feeling some emotion themselves are insufficient to determine the type of
emotion the person is feeling.
20. Baier, “What Emotions Are About,” 11, 12–13. Baier concludes that the
intentional objects of musically aroused emotions are “infantile so deep objects,”
that is, such emotions are directed at the originating paradigm scenarios of
their first emergence for the subject, expressed in Freudian or possibly inherited
species-memory.
21. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
(New York: Harcourt, 2003), 57, 88; Damasio, “William James and the Modern
Neurobiology of Emotion,” in Emotion, Evolution and Rationality, ed. D. Evans
and P. Cruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–14; and Brian Massumi,
“Fear [The Spectrum Said],” Positions 13 (2005): 36–37, all present their theories
as endorsements and enhancements of James’s theory of emotions.
22. Representative left-affect theorists include Brian Massumi, Parables for
the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2002); William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2004); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling:
Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003),
all of whom draw inspiration from the work of Gilles Deleuze. See Ruth Leys,
“The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–72 for further
bibliography of the turn to affect, especially its left-wing variety.
23. For this kind of view, see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Evolution-
ary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory
Variables,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. M. Lewis, J. Haviland-Jones, and L.
Feldman Barrett (New York: Guildford, 2008), 114–37.
24. See, for example, Paul Ekman, “Biological and Cultural Contributions to
Body and Facial Movement in the Expression of Emotions,” in Explaining Emo-
tions, ed. A. O Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 73–102; and
Ekman, “Expression and the Nature of Emotion,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed.
K. Scherer and P. Ekman (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum,1984), 319–43. This
approach dates back to Darwin’s classic study, The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals (1872). It is controversial how many, and which, emotions
are basic. Most scientists agree on the following: anger, fear, happiness, sadness,
and surprise (disgust is sometimes contested). Sentimentalist theory (explained
later) provisionally expands the list to include certain emotions often taken to be
in some sense “moral”: “amusement, anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment,
envy, fear, guilt, jealousy, joy, pity, pride, shame, and sorrow” (Justin D’Arms
and Daniel Jacobson, “The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotion,” in Philosophy
and the Emotions, ed. A. Hatzimoysis [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:
2003], 138), while acknowledging that ultimately such basic or natural emotions
will be discovered by empirical science.
25. Paul Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: From Evolution to Social Con-
struction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 243. Griffiths holds that
these basic emotions are evolutionarily selected natural kinds by virtue of the
individuating character of their physiological markers (facial expression, neuro-
physiological mechanisms, etc.).
26. See the work by Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious
Underpinnings of Emotional Life [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996]) and
Damasio (Looking for Spinoza) who coined the use of “substrate” in this context.
In contrast to emotion as bearing an intentional relation or meaning, Brian Mas-
sumi (Parables for the Virtual, 27) defines affect as non-signifying, unconscious
“intensity” or “energy.”
27. Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” 443. “Affect is the name for what eludes form,
cognition, and meaning” (450). “The whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi
and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations
of meaning or ‘ideology’ or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal
material-affective responses, where it is claimed, political and other influences do
their real work. The disconnect between ‘ideology’ and affect produces as one of
its consequences a relative indifference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politi-
cal, culture, and art in favor of an ‘ontological’ concern with different people’s
corporeal-affective reactions” (450–51). “In short, according to such theorists
affect has the potential to transform individuals for good or ill without regard
to the content of argument or debate” (451). Compare the definition provided
on the first page of the editors’ introduction to a popular collection of essays
on affect theory: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to
those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious
knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward
movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in
neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even
leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” The Affect Theory
Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 1. Recent literary criticism has embraced affect theory, as for
example Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden
Potential of Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), who
takes the expansive semantic field of German “Stimmung” (mood, atmosphere,
climate) to license inferences from the affective tone of a literary work to conclu-
sions regarding the author’s biography (individual, subjective mood) as well as
regarding the prevailing affective Zeitgeist (objective, collective climate).
28. Those commentators include Douglas Robinson (Estrangement and the
Somatics of Literature), who offers a more extensive and explicit interpretation
188 Notes to Page 116
via Damasio’s “somatic marker hypothesis,” and Michael Denner’s elliptical

appeal to neuroscience: “We are to understand that art accomplishes an almost
physiological change in the mind [sic] of the perceiver. Were he writing today, Tol-
stoy would no doubt replace his train metaphor [in his claim that art will “train
men to experience those same feelings under similar circumstances in actual life”]
with something like ‘art rewires the neural circuits.’ It would be hard to imagine
a more explicit rendering of Stalin’s slogan about the artist being the ‘engineer of
the human soul.’ ” (Denner, “Accidental Art: Tolstoy’s Poetics of Unintentional-
ity,” Philosophy and Literature 27 [2003]: 285–86). Caryl Emerson’s metaphors
point in a similar physiological direction when she writes that “in Tolstoy’s view,
every important truth had to prove itself on the individual body” and that the
infectiousness of art “is almost involuntary, like radiation” (Emerson, “Tolstoy’s
Aesthetics,” in Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 238–39).
29. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994), 174; quoted in Robinson, Estrangement and
the Somatics of Literature, 29.
30. Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature, xiii–xiv. Damasio
himself ascribes to the somatic marker the autonomic function of narrowing one’s
possible actions: “[The somatic marker] forces attention on the negative outcome
to which a given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal
which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose the option which leads to this
outcome. The signal may lead you to reject, immediately, the negative course of
action and thus make you choose among other alternatives. The automated signal
protects you against future losses, without further ado, and then allows you to
choose from among fewer alternatives. There is still room for using a cost/benefit
analysis and proper deductive competence, but only after the automated step
drastically reduces the number of options. Somatic markers may not be sufficient
for normal human decision-making since a subsequent process of reasoning and
final selection will take place in many though not all instances. Somatic markers
probably increase the accuracy and efficiency of the decision process” (Descartes’
Error, 173). This passage already intimates some of the problems to come: if
the somatic marker constitutes a favorable or unfavorable appraisal of the likely
future outcome of a possible action, then it does bear an intentional relation (it
is about that likely outcome), and is not a purely causal relation. If it is a purely
causal relation—say my immediately withdrawing my hand from a hot stove—
then it would seem to be a fallacy to impute a decision or choice having been
taken in that case, and indeed to view the movment as being about something (the
outcome, say) rather than caused by something (the somatic marker as trigger).
31. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 75; see also 69–70 for a related experi-
ment with crying and subsequent feelings of sadness. For related work see J. E.
LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
32. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 69. He recounts similar experiments by
Paul Ekman whereby subjects were instructed to move certain facial muscles such
that, unbeknownst to them, they formed a facial expression characteristic of a
specific basic emotion; the subject subsequently came to feel the specific emotion
associated with the specific facial expression.
33. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 115. See also G. Rizolatti and L. Craigh-
ero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004):
169–92.
34. Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature, 26. Keith Oatley
(The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories [New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2012]) has developed the theory that “mirror neurons” are activated
by an action and by the perception of the same action-type in another into a
general approach to literary understanding.
36. See also Peter Hacker’s similar comments in M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P.
Hacker, J. Searle, and D. Robinson, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind,
and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 151.
37. Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), which he subsequently developed into a theory
of moral sentiments in his The Emotional Construction of Morals.
38. This is the “disjunctive problem”: Jerry Fodor, A Theory of Content and
Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), chap. 3.
39. This is the “semantic promiscuity problem”: see, for instance, F. Adams
and K. Aizawa, “ ‘X’ means X: Semantics Fodor-Style,” Minds and Machines 2
(1992): 175–83.
40. See Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to
Minds, Machines and Mental Representation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
2003), chap. 5 for an accessible account of the problematic. For more detailed
accounts, see Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); and Brian Loewer, “From Information to
Intentionality,” Synthese 70 (1987), 287–317, on error in informational seman-
tics. For an overview of these criticisms, see Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa, “Causal
Theories of Mental Content,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/content-causal/. After canvassing criticisms of various causal
theories for implicitly relying on semantic notions, the authors hold out Rob
Rupert’s “best test theory” for meanings of natural kind terms, whereby a certain
natural kind expression “K” means a certain natural kind K if and only if mem-
bers of K are statistically more efficient in causing tokenings of “K” in a thinker.
If we assume with thinkers like Griffiths and Prinz that emotions are natural
kinds, this might be a promising theory to explicate how emotions can be about
their causal elicitors. But note that the best test theory can be taken to individuate
causal tokenings according to an individual speaker or community, and in either
case the meaning of a natural kind term could vary according to the environmen-
tal triggers, in which case the meaning of a natural kind term will be implicitly
linked to the reference class we take to describe the environment’s possible trig-
gers. But defining a reference class amounts to inserting an intentional notion
into an otherwise naturalistic theory, as Robert Brandom notes: “Relative to a
choice of reference class, we can make sense of the idea of objective probabilities,
and so of objective facts about the reliability of various cognitive mechanisms or
processes—facts specifiable in a naturalistic vocabulary. But the proper choice
of reference class is not itself objectively determined by facts specifiable in a nat-
uralistic vocabulary. So there is something left over” (Brandom, “Insights and
Blindspots of Reliabilism,” in his Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Infer-

entialism [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000], 113).
41. John Deigh, “Concepts of Emotions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Phi-
losophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
36–37.
42. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, 64.
43. On the distinction between original and derived intentionality, see John
Haugeland, “The Intentionality All-Stars,” in his Having Thought: Essays in the
Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
44. Barnaby D. Dunn, Tim Dalgleish, and Andrew D. Lawrence (“The Somatic
Marker Hypothesis: A Critical Evaluation,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral
Reviews 30 [2006]: 239–71) canvas the literature and raise significant doubts
regarding the chief experiment in favor of the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH),
including (1) the setup allows for more conscious awareness and explicit reason-
ing by the subjects, such that “the somatic marker signal could be interpreted
as a consequence of the explicit knowledge rather than being of causal impor-
tance in the decision-making chain, making the SMH indistinguishable from
other accounts of task performance” (249); (2) psychophysiological indications
of somatic marker signals (e.g., skin conductance rates) could be interpreted
as anticipatory expectations of reward or punishment following independent
decision-making rather than inducing those decisions, so that “these signals may
not play a causal role in shaping decision-making behavior” (250). For other
doubts raised regarding experiments and conclusions drawn therefrom by other
neuroscientists along similar lines, see Susan Pockett, William P. Banks, and
Shaun Gallagher, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2006), and Leys, “The Turn to Affect.”
45. Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” 455, 456–57; and M. R. Bennett and P. M. S.
Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
85–88, 111–14, 233–35.
46. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 173.
47. Examples of “pure” cognitivist theories, which equate emotions with
judgments, include Robert Solomon, The Passions, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.:
Hackett, 1993); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Robert Roberts,
Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 3.
48. Other definitions and descriptions include shame (1383b12– 14), pity
(1385b13– 16), emulation (1388a32– 5), etc. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans.
W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), volume 2.
49. For a helpful taxonomy of various types of cognitivist theories, see Robert
Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What Is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of
the Emotions and Does It Neglect Affectivity?” in Philosophy and the Emotions,
ed. Anthony Hatzimoysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–18.
50. That is, the correctness condition implies reference to rational norms that
can provide warrant or justification for the emotional state. Some (e.g., Ruth Mil-
likan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations
for Realism [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984] and subsequent work) have
proposed instead teleological norms, that is, for our purposes, an emotion would
be appropriate if it promotes the biological fitness of its subject, social group, and
so on. There are at least two problems with this account, however: first, it too
amounts to a (in this case, inherited or selected-for) causal-dispositional account
of intentionality, which is liable to the objections previously discussed; second,
teleological norms can be irrational or immoral norms (e.g., fear of those who
look different than one’s group might have been selected for, but amounts to
immoral prejudice, etc.).
51. “We can, however, consider an object fearful without being afraid of it,
namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where
we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance
would in that case be utterly futile” (§28, 260). Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans.
W. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 119–20. See also John Morreall,
“Fear without Belief,” Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993): 359–66.
52. Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press). See also Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “The
Significance of Recalcitrant Emotion (or, Anti- Quasijudgmentalism),” in Phi-
losophy and the Emotions, ed. Anthony Hatzimoysis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 127–36.
53. For a helpful discussion of this general objection, which she calls the
“problem of mixed emotions,” see Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons
(New York: Routledge, 1988).
54. This objection has been made by John Deigh, Emotions, Values, and the
Law, 17–38. It generalizes into an objection against intellectualist conceptions of
experience, that is, theories claiming that experience requires concept possession.
For helpful discussion, see Robert W. Lurz, ed., The Philosophy of Animal Minds
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially the contributions by
Eric Saidel and Robert Roberts.
55. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §281. Hacker (in Neuroscience
and Philosophy) explicitly likens this picture to that of Aristotle, for example, “It
is mistaken to suppose that human beings are ‘embodied’ at all—that concep-
tion belongs to the Platonic, Augustinian, and Cartesian tradition that should
be repudiated. It would be far better to say, with Aristotle, that human beings
are ensouled creatures (empsuchos)—animals endowed with such capacities that
confer upon them, in the form of life that is natural to them, the status of per-
sons” (160; see also 131–32).
56. Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 72. Com-
pare their reformulation: “The third generation [of neuroscientists] retained the
basic Cartesian structure by transforming it into brain-body dualism: substance-
dualism was abandoned, structural dualism retained. For neuroscientists now
ascribe much the same array of mental predicates to the brain as Descartes
ascribed to the mind and conceive of the relationship between thought and action,
and experience and its objects, in much the same way as Descartes—essentially
merely replacing the mind by the brain.” M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, “The
Conceptual Presuppositions of Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Neuroscience and
Philosophy, 131.
57. Behavior specifically, and physical processes in general are logical crite-
ria for the application of these predicates. Because of the criterial connection
between mental states and behavior, one should not make the separation between
mental phenomena and their external manifestation unless under special circum-
stances (e.g., phantom limb pain, hallucinations, etc.). But note Searle’s objection
to this use of Wittgenstein by Hacker: “Just as the old-time behaviorists con-
fused the behavioral evidence for mental states with the existence of the mental
states themselves, so the Wittgensteinians make a more subtle, but still funda-
mentally similar, mistake when they confuse the criterial basis for the application
of the mental concepts with the mental states themselves. That is, they confuse
the behavioral criteria for the ascription of psychological predicates with the
facts ascribed by these psychological predicates, and that is a very deep mis-
take.” (Searle, “Putting Consciousness Back in the Brain,” in Neuroscience and
Philosophy, 103). That is, folk psychology may be one thing, but the naturalistic
description of human psychology another. In my view this distinction restates the
normative vs. causal divide under discussion.
58. See Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, 40–41.
Chapter 7
The epigraph for chapter 7 is from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investiga-
tions, §287.
1. See Carla Bagnoli, “Introduction” in Bagnoli, ed., Morality and the Emo-
tions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1– 36; and Jesse Prinz, The
Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007):
“moral emotions promote or detect conduct that violates or conforms to a moral
rule” (68), whereas I would expand the definiens to include the promotion or
detection of moral character as well as action. Aristotle makes the connection
between emotion and virtue explicit when he writes that virtue requires not only
acting well but also having the right emotions to the right degree and in the
right way towards the appropriate objects. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.6,
1106b15–29. See L. A. Kosman, “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings
in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 103–16. The understanding of the nature
and ethical significance of emotions will depend on the specific account of moral-
ity in view; utilitarianism or Kantianism will therefore have different accounts
of moral emotions. On this point see Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions
(London: Routledge, 1992), 70–121.
2. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 7. It should
be noted that the “Humean picture” is a simplification of Hume’s own more
intricate views (e.g., his acknowledgment of “calm passions”). For a similar
exposition of the dilemma, see Michael Stocker, “The Schizophrenia of Modern
Ethical Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453–66.
3. On the notion of motivational internalism (sometimes called “judgment
internalism”), see David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
4. Smith, The Moral Problem, 11.
5. Smith’s dilemma can be considered a version of J. L. Mackie’s influential
“argument from queerness,” which reasons that, if values were part of “the fab-
ric of the world” then “they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very
strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe,” because they
would, simply by virtue of being known, impel the knower to act in certain ways,
thus bridging the gap between cognitive evaluation and desiderative motivation.
Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin,
1977), 38. Subsequent philosophers have made sophisticated attempts to bridge
the gap between cognition and motivation. On the one hand, Smith (The Moral
Problem, 177–80) proposes that to have a normative reason means that, were
we fully rational, we would desire to act on that reason, and we are rational just
to the extent that we have the desires corresponding to what moral normativity
rationally requires. He tries to bridge the divide by claiming that (full) rational-
ity entails one’s having the motivating desires that correspond to correct moral
cognition. On the other hand, David Velleman (Practical Reflection [Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], chap. 7) stipulates that a constitutive
element of human agency just is having a motive to comply with the evaluations
reason provides; he tries to bridge the divide by stipulating that human agency
entails desires’ complying with cognition. For a useful discussion of the issue,
see Bennett Helm, “Emotions and Practical Reason: Rethinking Evaluation and
Motivation,” Noûs 35 (2001): 190–213.
6. Linda Zagzebski, “Emotion and Moral Judgment,” Philosophy and Phe-
nomenological Research 66 (2003): 107.
7. Of course, a motivational state does not necessarily issue in the correspond-
ing action: it may be suppressed by other motivating states, conditions of akrasia
(“weakness of the will”), and so on.
8. Zagzebski, “Emotion and Moral Judgment,” 109, 113.
9. On “thick concepts” see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philoso-
phy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
10. Zagzebski, “Emotion and Moral Judgment,” 115, 116– 17. For related
accounts of emotion as inseparable amalgams of cognitive, conative, and affective
dimensions, see Goldie, The Emotions; Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Reason, and Vir-
tue,” in Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, ed. D. Evans and P. Cruse (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 249–67; and Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese,
Embodied Mind in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 5.
11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1144a30–1144b1.
12. The term “sensibility theory” was coined by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton
in their “Toward Fin de Siècle Ethics: Some Trends,” Philosophical Review 101
(1992): 152–65, to describe theories put forward by John McDowell (“Values
and Secondary Qualities,” in his Mind, Value and Reality [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998], 131–50); David Wiggins (“A Sensible Subjectiv-
ism?” in his Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998], 185–214);
and David McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), who argues that “a way of seeing a situation may itself be a
way of caring or feeling” (113).
13. McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” 132. Versions of ethical
intuitionism have been attributed to G. E. Moore and H. A. Prichard. Moore
claimed that values are metaphysically independent but intrinsically motivating
“nonnatural properties,” while Prichard claimed that to apprehend one’s duty is
at once to recognize an absolute moral truth and to be moved to act by it. Thus
intuitionism makes two dubious stipulative claims: that there are non-natural
properties directly accessible to one’s “moral sense,” and that these properties are
intrinsically motivating (motivational internalism).
14. This account covers both an error theory of value (J. L. Mackie) and
non-cognitivist/expressivist theories of value (Allan Gibbard’s norm expressiv-
ism, Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism). The former holds that all judgments of
value are false, because they correspond to no factual state of affairs. The latter
interprets value judgments as prescriptive or expressive rather than assertoric,
hence they are not truth-apt; rather, value judgments are more like commands
or exhortations than statements of fact. For helpful discussion see Justin D’Arms
and Daniel Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Projectivism,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 186–218.
15. On internal realism see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980): that the book is green or that
her action was cruel is a fact, but that fact depends on our regarding the book as
green or her action as cruel. Internal realism is mind-dependent factualism.
16. For helpful discussion on the controversies surrounding response-dependent
concepts and properties, see R. Casati and C. Tappolet, eds., Response-Dependence
(Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publications, 1998).
17. So color definitions are as follows: “X is green if and only if X is such
as to look green to normal human observers under standard conditions.” The
definition is circular (it uses “green” on both sides of the biconditional) but not
viciously so, as it gives a substantive (non-tautological) account of greenness,
in that it specifies the extension of the property green by appealing to a par-
ticular sort of qualitative state (that of seeing green). On this account perceptual
judgments are like ordinary predications: to judge something green is simply to
ascribe the property of greenness to it.
18. David Wiggins, “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating
Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990): 74. There is a
subtle but important point here. One might want to claim that value or evalua-
tive properties like “funny” or “cruel” supervene on non-evaluative, or natural/
physical properties, and thereby push the sensibility theorist to a primary-quality
model of moral responsiveness. Thus one might claim that “funny” supervenes
on “incongruity” or “unexpected juxtaposition,” and that “cruel” supervenes on
“gratuitously harmful.” But our patterns of response are too variegated to permit
reduction to a supervenience relation as proposed. Either the non-evaluative prop-
erties are too diverse to permit any kind of categorizing (e.g., a dog’s teeth and an
IRS audit are both “dangerous”) or the categorizing smuggles in human respon-
siveness and so is viciously circular. Thus it seems that response and property
are correlative concepts, reciprocally dependent for their definitions. Compare
Wiggins: “there will often be no saying exactly what reaction a thing with the asso-
ciated property will provoke without direct or indirect allusion to the property
itself. Amusement for instance is a reaction we have to characterize by reference
to its proper object, via something perceived as funny (or incongruous or comical
or whatever). There is no object-independent and property-independent, ‘purely
phenomenological’ or ‘purely introspective’ account of amusement” (Wiggins,
“A Sensible Subjectivism,” 195). That is, there is no priority between emotional
responses (such as amusement, shame, and moral indignation) and their associ-
ated properties/concepts (funny, shameful and morally wrong); rather, these
evaluative properties/concepts and responses arise together, in pairs, through a
co-evolution in which the character of the response and the extension of the pred-
icate influence one another. Hence, no non-circular account of either concept or
response is possible, because each depends essentially upon the other. For similar
thoughts see McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” in his Mind, Value and
Reality, 158. For a criticism of such circularity see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices,
Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press: 1990), 148.
19. That is, like perception, moral response in its cognitive dimension (as
judgment, appraisal, construal, etc.) has a mind-to-world direction of fit; but
in its conative/affective dimension (e.g., as action readiness tendency) it has a
world-to-mind direction of it. It should also be noted that with respect to cor-
rectness conditions the analogy between moral perception and color perception
is strained, because it is not clear that similar standard conditions and normal
humans can be so readily specified. The appeal to an ideal, as for instance in
Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments), trivializes the problem because
ideal is then defined to be whatever produces correct moral-emotional responses.
The problem is specifying the subjective and objective conditions underlying that
ideal responsiveness, and that is very much non-trivial. Hence theorists like Wig-
gins and McDowell acknowledge an irreducible non-vicious circularity between
moral predicate and moral property.
20. McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” 143.
21. Jesse Prinz (The Emotional Construction of Morals, 111–15) criticizes the
“merit schema” of Wiggins and McDowell here for “shifting away from a merely
causal model of the relationship between moral properties and moral sentiments”
that underwrites his embodied appraisal view. Besides introducing an inten-
tional and normative relation to sensibility theory, Wiggins’s and McDowell’s
“metacognitive” view (Prinz’s term) holds that “a moral judgment on this view
is not itself an emotional response, but is rather a judgment to the effect that an
emotional response would be appropriate. In other words, tokens of moral con-
cepts mention emotions rather than use them” (112). But the sensibility theory
under attack can answer this charge in two ways: first, on this view emotions are
sui generis amalgams of cognitive, conative, and affective states, and therefore
include a first-order cognitive component (appraisal, thought, representation,
etc.); second, the judgment that an emotional response is fitting or appropriate
is made not in lieu of the specific emotional response but rather upon reflection,
so such judgment is at most entailed by the normative correctness of a specific
emotional response.
22. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in his Mind, Value and Reality,
196–97. D’Arms and Jacobson (“Sensibility Theory and Projectivism,” 203–4)
object that the merit schema must provide a non-trivial, non-circular account of
the correctness conditions in order to differentiate a merited response of shame,
say, from an unmerited response of shame: that is, an account that says more than
“the response of shame is merited when the eliciting action, person, situation is
really shameful.” A McDowellian response refuses to countenance the position of
a “sideways on” observer of a sittliche Welt: the question and answer of evalua-
tive properties has purchase only on a member of the practice. Although we must
scrutinize our ethical responses, “the necessary scrutiny does not involve stepping
outside the point of view constituted by an ethical sensibility”; rather, the reasons
to act revealed by our ethical sensibility are “vindicated from within the relevant
way of thinking” (McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 162–63). For
McDowell, the position of an external observer is an illusion, that of a person
who on the one hand possesses the evaluative concepts and emotional responses
(and thus is within second nature) and on the other can stand outside of second
nature and evaluate the practice. It is a mythic position to answer a temptation
he locates in modernity: “what has happened to modernity is rather that it has
fallen into a temptation, which we can escape, to wish for a foundation for ethics
of a sort that it never occurred to Aristotle to supply it with” (McDowell, “Two
Sorts of Naturalism,” 195).
23. Simon Blackburn, “Errors and the Phenomenology of Value,” in Essays in
Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 149–65, outlines six
disanalogies between moral properties and color properties in his criticism of
Wiggins and McDowell.
24. Compare David Hume: “We do not infer a character to be virtuous because
it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect
feel that it is virtuous.” Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge
and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 471.
25. John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in his Mind, Value and Reality,
72–73.
26. John McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” in
his Mind, Value and Reality, 85.
27. On moral perception as a kind of skill, see Daniel Jacobson, “Seeing by
Feeling: Virtues, Skills, and Moral Perception,” Ethical Theory and Moral Prac-
tice 8 (2005): 387–409; Peter Goldie, “Seeing What Is the Kind Thing to Do:
Perception and Emotion in Morality,” Dialectica 61 (2007): 347–61; Sabine
Döring, “Seeing What to Do: Affective Perception and Rational Motivation,”
Dialectica 61 (2007): 363–94.
28. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 189.
29. McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 162–63.
30. Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism?” 197. This conception of moral emo-
tions might be deployed in support of Stanley Cavell’s reframing the skeptical
problem of other minds in terms not of knowledge but of “acknowledging” the
other (say, his being in pain) as recognizing his demand for my recognition, my
responsiveness. Cavell apparently grounds such responsiveness in a perceived
kinship between oneself and a creature like oneself, with whom one identifies,
via what he calls “empathetic projection,” which at least suggests a more indi-
vidualistic attitude then that associated with “second nature” in Wiggins and
McDowell, as when Cavell writes: “I must settle upon the validity of my projec-
tion from within my present condition, from within, so to speak, my confinement
from you. For there would be no way for me to step outside my projections.”
Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We
Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 238–66; Stanley Cavell,
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), quote p. 423. For helpful discussions of Cavell’s
thinking, see Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the
Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepti-
cism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2002); and Charles
Altieri, “Cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality: The Limits of Acknowledgment,”

in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard
Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (London: Continuum, 2011), 62–77.
32. This understanding of religious emotions contrasts with a common view,
according to which religious feelings would include emotions such as divine rev-
erence or awe (German Ehrfurcht), spiritual desolation, divine adoration, and
so on. Certainly Tolstoy writes of such emotions, in A Confession and regarding
Levin in Anna Karenina. Consideration of these emotions, perhaps in conjunc-
tion with specific tenets of various faiths, is beyond the scope of our study. On
such emotions see Peter Goldie, “Intellectual and Religious Emotions,” Faith and
Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 28 (2011): 93–101.
33. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concern-
ing the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 173. For a clear account of neo-sentimentalism, see
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110 (2000):
722–48.
34. This is the list from Paul Ekman’s seminal paper, “Universals and Cultural
Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in Nebraska Symposium on Moti-
vation 1971, ed. J. Cole (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 207–83.
The individuation and enumeration of basic emotions has been controversial
ever since. For a reassessment, see Paul Ekman, “All Emotions Are Basic,” and
Richard Lazarus, “Appraisal: The Long and Short of It,” both in The Nature of
Emotion: Fundamental Questions, ed. Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
35. Thus while sensibility theorists like McDowell and Wiggins hold that any
account of responsiveness and evaluative feature must be non-viciously circular,
sentimentalism theorists claim priority for the sentiments. This anthropologi-
cal universality between subject matter and sentiment does not entail univocity
among people, however, for a variety of reasons, some of which are helpfully
discussed in Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Sentimental Values and the
Instability of Affect,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion,
ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 585–613. Note that
D’Arms and Jacobson define sentiments similarly to how Zagzebski defines moral
emotions, as sui generis states inseparably composed of cognitive, conative, and
affective aspects: “The sentiments are syndromes of thought, feeling, and motiva-
tion, which constitute a core subset of the broad and diverse group of states that
commonly get called emotions.” D’Arms and Jacobson, “Anthropocentric Con-
straints on Human Value,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 (2006): 101. “[Basic
emotions like amusement, disgust, and fear] are syndromes of cognitive, affective,
motivational, and behavioral changes, which arise in patterns displaying some
degree of consistency across times and cultures—perhaps because of our shared
evolutionary history. Such natural emotions are amenable to study as distinctive
psychological syndromes.” D’Arms and Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Pro-
jectivism,” 206.
36. “We can fix on a response . . . and then argue about what marks are of the
property that the response is itself made for. And without serious detriment to the
univocity of the predicate, it can now become essentially contestable what a thing
198 Notes to Page 133
has to be like for there to be any reason to accord that particular appellation
to it, and correspondingly contestable what the extension is of the predicate.”
Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism?” 198. See Justin D’Arms (“Two Arguments
for Sentimentalism,” Philosophical Issues 15 [2005]: 13): “a shared response, or
sentiment, somehow moors us in a common subject matter, making it possible
for us to disagree substantively about what a thing has to be like in order to be
such that we should feel this sentiment toward it. . . . It is because our evaluative
concepts have a special tie to shared human sentiments that we are able to engage
meaningfully in debates about their application. . . . A shared sentiment supplies
a shared element in the intensions of our evaluative thoughts.”
37. There is a controversy here that needs to be acknowledged, though it can-
not be adequately discussed in the present context. Sensibility theorists hold that
emotional response and eliciting evaluative property are correlative concepts,
while sentimentalism theorists hold that basic emotional responses are logically
and ontologically prior to their eliciting properties. Some sensibility theorists, for
instance McDowell, seem to claim that disgustingness, the property that elicits
the basic emotion disgust, is not an evaluative property at all, but rather merely
a dispositional property: the disgusting is whatever reliably causes disgust, rather
than what merits or deserves disgust (“Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 157).
This view would be in keeping with our earlier criticism of Right Affectivism,
namely, that such basic emotions lack an intentional relation and intentional
(formal) object, and hence a correctness condition: the disgusting is just whatever
reliably causes the basic response of disgust. On the other hand, D’Arms and
Jacobson claim that even disgust bears a normative relation, because a gap can
arise between sentiment (emotional response) and value (the normative property
associated with the response): “Not everything that nauseates, even regularly, is
judged disgusting. Ever since an ugly food poisoning incident years ago, I can-
not eat whitefish salad; but though it reliably disgusts me, I still consider it a
delicacy—albeit one I can no longer enjoy. More generally, people often dispute
such judgments . . . It thus seems that with disgust . . . sensibility theory must be
prepared to concede the priority of emotional response to evaluative property”
(D’Arms and Jacobson, “Sensibility Theory and Projectivism,” 206). I think the
objection can be answered in the following way: the author has first described a
dispositional property (the disgusting as that which reliably causes the response
of disgust) and then an evaluative property (being a delicacy), and it is only to
the latter that a normative relation (merit, desert, justification) attaches. Or: the
author has equivocated between a descriptive understanding of the concept dis-
gusting (= reliably causing disgust) and a normative understanding of the concept
disgusting (= worthy of, meriting disgust). Or, to anticipate the developmental
story I will tell, the normative relation is a later, conceptual reticulation to the
basic emotion of disgust, so that the causal response of disgust can in fact come
apart from the judgment of “this is [not] disgusting.”
38. Moral resentment of course must be distinguished from envious resent-
ment and Nietzschean ressentiment (spiteful malice out of impotence). The idea
that moral emotions derive from more basic emotions can be traced back to
Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 7.III.iii), and has received a
contemporary inflection in Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals:
“Indignation is not a basic emotion: it derives from anger. Indignation is anger
calibrated to [that is, associated with through learning] injustice” (69); “I think
guilt is an extension of [the basic emotion of] sadness” (77); “Sympathy can be
defined as a negative emotional response to the suffering of others. A sympathetic
person feels bad that you feel bad. It’s not clear empirically whether sympathy
always refers to the same underlying emotion. If so, it’s probably a species of
sadness” (82).
39. John Rawls helpfully elucidates the distinction between emotion and
moral emotion: “A person without a sense of justice may be enraged at someone
who fails to act fairly. But anger and annoyance are distinct from indignation
and resentment; they are not, as the latter are, moral emotions.” John Rawls, A
Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 488. “In
general, it is a necessary feature of moral feelings, and part of what distinguishes
them from the natural attitudes, that the person’s explanation of his experience
invokes a moral concept and its associated principles. His account of his feeling
makes reference to an acknowledged right or wrong” (Rawls, A Theory of Justice,
481).
40. Deigh, Emotions, Values, and the Law, 62–69.
41. M. F. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Essays on Aris-
totle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980),
82. See also Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
42. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, 118–19. Using the example
of “cruelty,” arguably already a moral concept, might leave Prinz open to the
charge of circularity; replacing it with “violence” would avert the issue.
Chapter 8
The epigraphs for chapter 8 are from Wittgenstein, Notebooks (September 19,
1916) and Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, page 59.
1. For a helpful introduction and overview of recent work, see The Routledge
Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. T. Gracyk and A. Kania (New York:
Routledge, 2011); Aaron Ridley, The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Varia-
tions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and Andrew Kania, “The
Philosophy of Music,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).
2. Aaron Ridley cautions against overgeneralization and abstraction, and
advocates a judiciously pragmatic approach to theorizing about specific artworks
in Music, Value and the Passions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995)
and “Persona Sometimes Grata: On the Appreciation of Expressive Music,” in
Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, Work, ed. Karen Stock (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 130–46.
3. See Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1994), 299–307; Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphys-
ics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 319–22; and Colin Radford,
“Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 47 (1989): 69–76. Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musi-
cal Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), chap. 12, claims that
music elicits a sui generis “musical” emotion. Kendall Walton (Mimesis as Make-
Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1990], 240–55) describes our emotional responses to
expressive music as “quasi-emotions”: causally elicited affective elements of emo-

tion that we imagine to be genuine emotions.
4. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 44. Other representative texts in
this tradition include Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Litera-
ture and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1950); Wayne Booth, The Company We
Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Martin Price, Character
and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1983); and Susan Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
6. Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001), frames the problem well:
The question I am raising is how we are emotionally aroused by what the
nineteenth century called absolute music . . . It is important to remember
this because when the resources of language are added to the musical
work, the terms of the argument are radically changed. I have no quarrel,
for example, with someone who says that when he attends a performance
of La Traviata, he experiences real and intense sorrow over the death of
Violetta, . . . This is not to say that there is no philosophical problem in
just how the emotions of sorrow and love can be aroused by the fates of
fictional characters . . . But the presence of language, with all its potential
for conveying concepts, and the presence of delineated characters, such
as Violetta and Alfredo . . . provide materials for arousal of garden vari-
ety emotions far exceeding anything that can reasonably be postulated
in absolute music. And that is why absolute music poses a problem far
beyond opera, oratorio, song and programme music to those who wish to
claim that it arouses the garden variety emotions. (101–2)
For further discussion and motivation along these lines, see Derek Matravers,
“Expression in Music,” in Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, Work,
ed. Karen Stock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95–116. While the
problem of expression of emotion in music dates back to Pythagoras, Plato, and
Aristotle, and extends through nineteenth-century philosophy, it was revived in
its current inflection by Macolm Budd’s influential Music and the Emotions (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
7. Roger Scruton (The Aesthetics of Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997], 96, 141) characterizes musical expressiveness as irreducibly metaphorical
and inexplicable, which simply restates the problem: why emotional terms are so
readily and communally attributed to passages of music and audiences’ responses
to them, where these emotion terms apparently are being used with their usual
meanings. Understanding musical properties as response-dependent averts this
impasse: see Paul Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” in Philosophers
on Music: Experience, Meaning, Work, ed. Karen Stock (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 122–24. For a recent argument, drawing on empirical work in
cognitive science, that musical structure “represents” environmental affordances
for emotional responses, see Charles Nussbaum, The Musical Representation:
Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
8. Jerrold Levinson, “Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain,” in

Emotion and the Arts, ed. M. Hjort and S. Laver (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 27–28.
9. The qualifications couched in terms like “understanding” or “appropriate”
listeners are intended to allow for the fact that cultural factors may play a role in
the success of the disposition. For versions of the arousal theory, see P. Mew, “The
Expression of Emotion in Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1985): 33–
42; and Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998).
10. Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Litera-
ture, Music and Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 291–92 (original emphasis).
11. Ibid., 366.
12. There are other problems with the theory that should merely be mentioned
here. First, the arousal theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for expression.
It is not necessary, because “dry-eyed critics” experience music as expressive
without experiencing the affective feeling (see O. K. Bouwsma, “The Expression
Theory of Art,” in Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton [Oxford: Black-
well, 1954], 73–99). It is not sufficient, because many things arouse a feeling
without one’s finding them expressive. One might feel anxiety at an unexpected
noise without finding the noise expressive (see next note). Lastly, the arousal
theory seems to violate the experienced epistemology of the emotional response:
rather than an immediate experience, the theory analyzes hearing music as sad,
for example, as hearing the music and then feeling sad: that is, as two separable
experiences (see Derek Matravers, “Expression in Music,” in Philosophers on
Music: Experience, Meaning, Work, ed. Karen Stock [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007], 95–116).
13. This example comes from Ridley, “Mr. Mew on Music,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 26 (1986): 69–70.
14. See Paul Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” in Philosophers on
Music: Experience, Meaning, Work, ed. Karen Stock (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 117–29. Compare Wittgenstein: “The understanding of a [musical]
theme is neither sensation nor a sum of sensations. Nevertheless it is correct to
call it an experience inasmuch as this concept of understanding has some kinship
with other concepts of experience. You say ‘I experienced that passage quite dif-
ferently this time.’ ” Wittgenstein, Zettel, §165. “Aesthetic questions have nothing
to do with psychological experiments, but are answered in an entirely different
way”; “You could say: ‘An aesthetic explanation is not a causal explanation’ ”;
“The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic
impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by
statistics as to how people react.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversa-
tions on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966), 17, 18, 21.
15. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 403.
16. Other arousal theorists bite the bullet here and concede that music can
only induce affective “feelings,” not genuine emotions. See note 3 to this chapter.
17. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 403, 405. Stephen Davies, Musical Mean-
ing and Expression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), chap. 6, and
Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” in Contemporary
Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), 186–88, also invokes “emotional contagion” and “mirroring
responses” without any intentional object or property.
18. Compare Levinson’s judgment regarding theories of musical expression
that invoke exclusively the “sensory, or cognitively unmediated route”: “if the
capacity of music to elicit emotion were exhausted by the direct effects of sensing
basic musical features, it would be a poor thing, falling far short of the evoca-
tion of emotions proper, or even the semblance of such” (Levinson, “Emotion in
Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain,” 28).
19. Robinson likewise accepts the unwelcome consequence that no “higher-
order” or “cognitively complex” emotions can be attributed to the expressiveness
of the music, as opposed to the “cognitive monitoring” and context of the listener.
This is a revision of her earlier attempt to attribute a complex emotion—“false
hope”—to a musical work: see J. Robinson and G. Karl, “Shostakovitch’s Tenth
Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions,” Jour-
nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 401–15; and Davies’s objections in
his Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
161–66. Jerrold Levinson offers several persuasive suggestions of how music can
express cognitively complex emotions: (1) the overall totality and interrelated-
ness of non-cognitive aspects (physiological, phenomenological, behavioral, etc.)
readily expressible and inducible by music might be determinative of a specific
complex emotion; (2) expressive music can evoke intentional object-types (if
not specific tokens); (3) musical features and their implications, including the
temporal progression of variably expressive passages, can provide a determinate
context for individuating a specific emotion. This last point comports well with
the narrative dimensions of some emotions (such as grief, hope, etc.) discussed
at the outset of chapter 6. See Levinson, “Hope in The Hebrides,” in his Music,
Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1990), 336–75.
20. Levinson, “Emotion in Response to Art,” 28.
21. These theories are presented, respectively, in Bruce Vermazen, “Expres-
sion as Expression,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 67 (1986): 196–224; Jenefer
Robinson, “The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music,” in Musical
Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. P. Alperson (Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 13–22; and Robert Stecker,
“Expressiveness and Expression in Music and Poetry,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 59 (2001): 85–96.
22. For criticism of inferentialist or “judgment-based” theories of musical
expression, see Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” in his The Pleasures
of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996),
98–102, and his “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” in Con-
temporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 199–201.
23. See Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, 1994) and his “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of
Pure Music,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art,
ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 179–91. Another resemblance-
based theory is that of Malcolm Budd, The Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and
Music (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1995). Peter Kivy advanced a similar
“contour theory” in his Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989), but has voiced dissatisfaction with the theory subsequently in his New
Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
24. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 228.
25. Ibid., 229. “I think music is expressive in recalling the gait, attitude, air,
carriage, posture and comportment of the human body.” Davies, “Artistic Expres-
sion and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” 182.
26. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 239.
27. Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” 124.
28. Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” 181.
29. Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” 197.
30. Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” 125.
32. Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” in his The Pleasures of Aes-
thetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 107.
34. A form of this objection is raised by Robert Stecker, “Expressiveness and
Expression in Music and Poetry,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59
(2001): 91–94.
35.  Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” 193.
Levinson dropped the qualification of “sui generis manner” due to objections of
obscurantism, but these objections are not pertinent to my line of argument here.
37. Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14–15. Kivy is relying on the careful
exposition of the argument in Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression: A Study
in Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1971), 39–62. See my discussion of Tormey in chapter 3.
38. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 178. See also the rhetorical
question posed: “I.e., can I separate what I call this experience of pastness [caused
by hearing a specific Schumann Lied] from the experience of hearing the tune?”
(184); and the rhetorical question posed in Culture and Value: “If art serves ‘to
arouse feelings,’ is, perhaps, perceiving it with the senses included amongst these
feelings?” (42).
39. It might be helpful to think of this constitutive relationship in dispositional
or ability terms. The disposition or ability to speak Russian, say, does not pre-
clude one’s occasionally making mistakes or intentionally feigning a lack of or
imperfect mastery of the linguistic ability.
40. My thoughts in this paragraph are indebted to Aaron Ridley, “Expression
in Art,” in Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 211–27.
41.  Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” 201.
Jenefer Robinson, like Levinson, holds that we hear expressive music as the
expression of emotion of a persona in her Deeper Than Reason, 320.
42. Wittgenstein, Zettel, §234.
43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §527. See also Wittgenstein,
Zettel, §161, §175; Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 59, 63, 93. For an extension
of Wittgenstein’s likening music to the audible appearance of speech acts, see

Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Thinking,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27 (2003):
59–68.
44. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 83. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks
on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von
Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), §§435–36.
45. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, §660; see
also Wittgenstein, Zettel, §158.
47. I make this argument in greater detail in my “Towards a Disjunctivist
Conception of Aesthetic Expression” (unpublished manuscript). On epistemic
disjunctivism, see John McDowell, “The Disjunctive Conception of Experience
as Material for a Transcendental Argument,” in his The Engaged Intellect (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 225–40.
Conclusion
The epigraph for the conclusion is from Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 38.
1. Tolstoy, What Is Art? 39–40 (original emphasis).
2. For instance, in cases of collective or vague authorship, the “persona” theory
might be required. Recall that two of Tolstoy’s examples of successful artworks
are a traditional peasant wedding song and a Siberian shamanistic performance
(see chapter 3, section 2): such cases might require the audience’s projection of a
persona or implied author.
4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part II, 183.
5. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 1: §434.
6. Contrary to Roger Scruton, “Wittgenstein and the Understanding of Music,”
British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 1–9, who argues that Wittgenstein advo-
cates merely the expressiveness of art and denies that art can express an emotion.
7. “Here is a possibility: I hear that someone is painting a picture ‘Beethoven
writing the ninth symphony.’ I could easily imagine the kind of thing such a
picture would shew us. But suppose someone wanted to represent what Goethe
would have looked like writing the ninth symphony? Here I could imagine noth-
ing that would not be embarrassing and ridiculous.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, part II, 183. “I hear a melody completely differently after I have
become familiar with its composer’s style. Previously I might have described it as
happy, for example, but now I sense that it is the expression of great suffering.
Now I describe it differently, group it with quite different things.” Wittgenstein,
Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 1: §774.
8. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 4.
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Index
absolute music, 107, 139, 200n6. See art: definitions of, 151; emotions and,
also aesthetics; music 55, 69–70, 132–35, 137–38; genuine/
abstraction argument, 110–11, 123 good dichotomy and, 51, 59–60, 66,
acknowledgment, 196n30 91–92, 99–102, 151, 167n6; religious,
action readiness, 109, 123–25, 127, 132, 56, 61, 91–92, 104; universal, 56,
137–38, 185n14, 195n19 61, 108–9, 125, 132–35, 151–52,
addiction, 94–96, 181n50 165n60. See also aesthetics; emotions;
add-on theories, 124, 137–38 expressivism (aesthetic)
Aeschylus, 55 art for art’s sake, 99–101
aesthetics: ethics and, 6, 79, 84–85, 91– artifice, 147–48
92, 97, 100–105, 108–10, 131–32, attitudes (toward a soul, etc), 59–60,
137–38, 152–53; expressivism and, 65–66, 96–99, 182n52
5–7, 53–56, 107–10, 137–38, 146–53; Austin, J. L., 21, 63
immediate understanding and, 4–6, autonomic responses, 114–15, 121, 124,
62–70, 91–92, 169n30; as infectious, 141, 188n30. See also affect theory;
6, 66–70, 92–93, 103–5, 110–11, physiological reflexes
113–21, 151–52; music’s special place
in, 78–84, 101, 107, 138–39, 176n38, bad art, 59–60
200n6; Nietzschean threat in, 6, Baier, Annette, 113–14, 185n18,
56, 72, 78–85, 89–90, 104–5, 107, 186n20
113–14, 137–38, 141–42, 152–53, basic emotions, 114–17, 133–34, 151–
176n38; normativity and, 17–18, 29, 52, 180n38, 181n39
31–37, 100–101; physiology and, 68– Beethoven, Ludwig van, 87–92, 184n81
70, 101–3, 114–17; Schopenhauer’s Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 78
theories of, 29, 71–77, 88, 152–53, Blackburn, Simon, 194n14
177n43, 184n81; Tolstoy’s theories Blue Book (Wittgenstein), 12
of, 4–6, 9, 56–61, 66–70, 81, 84–85, Boghossian, Paul, 143–44
87–90, 92–96, 99–105, 107, 131–35, Brandom, Robert, 189n40
178n44 Brentano, Franz, 172n68
affect theory, 6, 110–11, 114–17, Budd, Malcolm, 176n39, 177n43
187n27 Burnyeat, Myles, 133–34
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 3–6, 29–50,
62, 66, 77, 83–84, 93–94, 163n30, Cartesianism: in Anna Karenina, 31–45;
164n46, 169n34 Derrida’s critique of, 13–27; emotions
anti-realism (moral), 128 and, 6, 62–63, 110–11, 120–24,
appraisal theory, 68–69, 109, 127 126–28, 146–50, 191n56; moral
Archilochus, 78 behavior and, 30–31, 39–45, 108–10,
Aristotle, 3, 68, 109, 121–22, 128–34, 165n60, 165n64; therapeutic solution
138, 156n8, 176n38, 191n55 to, 45–50. See also affect theory;
arousal theory of art, 139–40, 186n20, interpretations; Nietzschean threat;
201n9, 201n12 normativity
221
222 Index
causality: affect theory and, 114–21; Derrida, Jacques, 4, 13–30, 64–65,

expressions of mental states and, 37– 105, 153, 158n21, 158n27, 159n28,
39, 62–68, 77–79, 93–96, 110–11; 159n43, 160n56, 160nn44–45
music’s particular force and, 80–85, desires, 125–28, 164n46
87, 90–92, 139–42; normativity’s Dewey, John, 55
difference from, 10, 13–17, 25, 93–94, Diamond, Cora, 96–97, 182n52
103–5, 122–24; the will and, 81–83. différance (term), 15–17, 21, 64, 158n21
See also intentionality; normativity; “Différance” (Derrida), 13
science differential relations, 14–27
Cavell, Stanley, 156n9, 196n30 dilemmas, 17–27, 125–26, 144–45
character (in the moral sense), 77, 81– Dionysianism, 56, 78. See also
83, 85, 100–105 Nietzschean threat
cognitivism, 6–7, 68–69, 103, 108–14, dispositionalism, 10–11, 24, 67, 70, 109,
117–28, 130–32, 134–35, 142–46, 111–14, 122–24, 137–42, 144–45
191n54 dissolution (of skeptical problems),
Collingwood, R. C., 55 48–49
colors, 9–10, 18–19, 128–29, 142–43, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3
194n17 Dretske, Fred, 118, 120
communicate itself, 43–45, 62–70, Ducasse, C. J., 55
171n62
communion, 54–55, 66–67 education, 101–5, 114–17, 122–35, 146,
community checks, 23, 144–46 152–53
compassion, 74–76. See also Mitleid Ekman, Paul, 188n32
conative states, 126–28, 130–32, Emerson, Caryl, 168n20, 169n30,
134–35 187n28
Confession, A (Tolstoy), 29–30, 50 emotions: art and, 6, 55–61, 107–9,
consciousness, 13–18, 72–73, 141. See 113, 132–35, 137–38; Cartesianism
also cognitivism; interpretations and, 6, 62–63, 110–11, 120–24,
content indifferentism, 78, 90. See also 126–28, 146–50; causal accounts of,
Nietzschean threat 62–69, 77–79, 94–96, 109; cognitive
correctness conditions, 18–20, 54, 66– accounts of, 121–24; definitions of,
67, 107–14, 119–29, 140–45, 159n43, 67–70, 109, 127–28; education of,
190n50 114–17, 122–24, 128–35; ethics
counterfeit art, 99–102 and, 74–77, 104–5, 107–10, 125–
criteria, 59, 109, 156n9, 191n57. See 28, 192n1; evaluative properties
also grammar and, 69–70, 113, 122–24, 127–35,
crypto-Cartesianism, 120–21, 123–24 138; as family resemblance concept,
culture. See education; second nature 109; feeling theory of, 110–14, 121–
Culture and Value (Wittgenstein), 65 22; grammar of, 146–48, 151–53,
202n19; infectiousness and, 66–70,
Damasio, Antonio, 115–16, 118, 120– 91–92, 110–11, 114–21, 151–52,
21, 123–24, 187n28, 188n30, 188n32 164n51, 169n30; music’s arousal
D’Arms, Justin, 197nn35–36, 198n37 of, 6, 70, 79–84, 139–46, 151–52,
Davies, Stephen, 142–44, 148 186n20; Nietzschean threat and, 72,
Davison, R. M., 3–4 78–85, 89–90, 104–5, 107, 113–14,
deconstruction, 4, 13–27, 156n9 137–38, 141–42, 152–53; normativity
Deigh, John, 119, 133, 186n19, 191n54 of, 6, 68–69, 77–79, 104–5, 107–14,
Deleuze, Gilles, 115 121–22, 125–30, 132–33, 137–42,
Denner, Michael, 187n28 146–48, 151–53, 185n14, 192n5,
dependency (causal), 94–96, 181n50 198n37; physiological reflexes and,
Index 223
109–10, 114–17, 122–24, 186n19; Fischer, Michael, 156n9

representations of, 138, 142–46; as Fodor, Jerry, 118
sui generis states, 6, 108, 124–25, Fogelin, Robert, 48, 60
131–32, 145, 152, 195n21, 203n35; folk psychology, 117–18, 191n57
Wittgenstein on, 62–64, 112. See Frege, Gottlob, 3, 155n4
also aesthetics; intentionality; moral Freud, Sigmund, 113–14
emotions; sensibility theory (of moral
emotions) Gasché, Rudolphe, 14
Emotions, The (Goldie), 174n13 genuine art, 51, 56–61, 66, 100–102,
empathic projection, 196n30 151
empathy, 75–76, 174n13 Gibbard, Allan, 194n14
Engelmann, Paul, 3, 156n5 Gibson, John, 156n9
epistemology. See aesthetics; meaning Ginzburg, Lydia, 48
Platonism; meaning skepticism; moral Glover, Jonathan, 155n3
emotions; normativity Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 53
errors. See mistakes Gogol, Nikolai, 35
ethics: aesthetics and, 6, 79, 84–85, Gol’denveizer, A. B., 89
91–92, 97, 100–105, 152–53; causal Goldie, Peter, 124, 174n13
accounts of behavior and, 93–99; good art, 51, 59–60
emotions and, 6, 74–75, 88, 104–5, Gospel in Brief, The (Tolstoy), 3, 98–99
107–10, 125–28, 133–35, 137–38, grammar, 146–48, 202n19
152–53; Kantian, 74; Nietzschean Griffiths, Paul, 114
threat to, 72, 79–84, 89–90, 104–5, Gustafson, Richard, 95, 167n6
107, 176n38; Wittgenstein on, 6, 87,
97 Habermas, Jürgen, 156n10
evaluative properties, 69–70, 113, 122– habitual behavior, 38. See also
35, 138, 194n18 normativity; rules as rails
existentialism, 3 Hacker, Peter, 123, 191n55, 191n57
expressivism (aesthetic): causal accounts Hanslick, Eduard, 177n43
of, 36–39, 62–66, 110–11, 138– Hegel, G. W. F., 130
40; deconstruction’s relation to, Heidegger, Martin, 172n70
5; definitions of, 53, 55, 137–38; Herman, David, 182n63
emotional grammar and, 39–45, 146– home, at, 64–65
48, 151–53, 202n19; normativity Hume, David, 125–26, 132, 176n38,
and, 36–37, 107–10, 142–46; 196n24
Schopenhauer’s music and, 84–90; Husserl, Edmund, 13, 20
Wittgenstein and, 62–63, 112
imagination, 46, 48–49, 76, 175n14,
family resemblance concepts, 109, 204n7
184n5 individuation, 72–73, 76–79, 81, 91
feelings (in Tolstoy), 67–70, 77, 81, 94, infection, 6, 43–44, 60–61, 66–72, 87–
101, 108. See also emotions 92, 103–5, 110–17, 151–52, 169n30,
feeling theory of emotion, 110–14, 121– 172n76
22, 127–28 inferentialism, 7, 142–43, 196n24. See
Felman, Shoshana, 180n38 also cognitivism; interpretations
Fet, Afanasii, 71–72 intentionality: Brentano on, 172n68;
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 71 Cartesian divide and, 30–31;
Ficker, Ludwig von, 156n7 causality’s eradication of, 62–66,
Fiction and the Weave of Life (Gibson), 140–41; emotions and, 67–68, 77–79,
156n9 104–5, 107–14, 117–24, 128–30,
224 Index
intentionality, continued laughing, 44, 66, 77, 114, 116

137–38, 185n18; ethics and, 83–85, Lazarus, Richard, 118
128–30; expressions of, 37, 54–55, “Lecture on Ethics” (Wittgenstein), 98
79–84, 137–38; intelligibility of, 37, Left Affectism, 114–15, 121
39–45; Nietzschean threat and, 80– Levinson, Jerrold, 139–40, 142–46, 148,
85, 89–90; normativity and, 17–18, 202n18, 203n35
37, 113–14, 117–21, 141–42, 192n5; Leys, Ruth, 115, 120–21
skepticism regarding, 31–36, 45–47 Limited, Inc. (Derrida), 13, 20, 24,
internal realism. See sensibility theory 158n21, 159n43
(of moral emotions) linkages: in Anna Karenina, 30–31, 39–
interpretations: aesthetic expressivism’s 40, 50, 161n4; Tolstoy’s aesthetics
lack of, 53–56, 62–66, 148–49; and, 99–105
Cartesian inner/outer split and, 31– Locke, John, 128
36; Derrida’s critiques of, 14–17; Logical Investigations (Husserl), 13
Mitleid and, 76–77; therapeutic Longinus, 55, 167n6
solution to, 45–50; will to, 40–45, love, 93–96, 99–100, 180n38
49–50, 148–49, 152–53. See also Lyotard, Jean-François, 56
Cartesianism; normativity
interpretivist assumption, 5–6, 9–12, machines, 10–11, 117
16, 26, 36–37. See also Cartesianism; Mackie, J. L., 192n5, 194n14
cognitivism Mandelker, Amy, 163n35
involuntary expression, 37–39. See also Massumi, Brian, 187n27
physiological reflexes McDowell, John, 5, 12, 129–31,
Ion (Plato), 176n38 159n31, 160n51, 161n62, 195n19,
195nn21–22
Jacobson, Daniel, 197n35, 198n37 McManus, Denis, 65
Jahn, Gary, 34–35 meaning holism, 159n33
James, Henry, 138, 185n15 meaning Platonism, 5, 12–27, 104–5,
James, William, 110–11, 114–17, 123– 107–10, 144–45, 152–53
24, 141, 185n11, 185n15 meaning skepticism, 4, 13–27, 29–30,
Jazzercise effect, 140–41 35–36, 62, 153
jealousy, 95–99, 109, 180n38, 181n39, “Memoirs of a Madman, The” (Tolstoy),
182n52 30–31, 35
justification. See interpretivist metaphysics: Kantian, 72–74, 76–77;
assumption Tractarian Wittgenstein and, 47–48,
59–61. See also Kant, Immanuel;
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 60, 72–74, 122, meaning Platonism; Schopenhauer,
173n7 Arthur
Kenny, Anthony, 68, 112, 114 Millikan, Ruth, 118
Kivy, Peter, 146, 200n6 mind. See Cartesianism; cognitivism;
Knapp, Lisa, 184n81 Derrida, Jacques; interpretations;
Kopper, John, 181n40 Kant, Immanuel; representations;
Kreutzer Sonata, The (Tolstoy), 4, 6, Schopenhauer, Arthur
29–30, 71, 87–105, 179n21, 180n26, mind-dependent factualism, 129,
181n46, 182n63 194n15
Kripke, Saul, 5, 11–14, 21–26, 117, mirror neurons, 116
144–45, 160n51 mistakes, 18, 20, 54, 66–67, 107–
20, 125–27, 129, 140–41, 144–45,
Lange, Curt, 110–11, 114–17, 124, 141, 159n43, 190n50
185n11 Mitleid, 75–77, 175n14
Index 225
Monk, Ray, 3, 155n4 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 13–14

moods, 68, 141, 168n20 On the Basis of Morality
Moore, G. E., 48, 193n13 (Schopenhauer), 74, 76, 174n11,
moral emotions, 107–10, 125–30, 133– 175n14
35, 137–38, 152–53, 192n1, 196n30, On the Emotions (Wollheim), 171n66
199n39. See also aesthetics; emotions; On the Musically Beautiful (Hanslick),
ethics; sensibility theory (of moral 177n43
emotions) “On What Is Called Art” (Tolstoy), 88
Morson, Gary Saul, 99, 156n8 opinions (but rather in form of life),
motherhood, 93–94, 99–101, 134 62–63
motivations, 41, 80–84, 103, 117–21. other-minds skepticism. See emotions;
See also emotions; intentionality grammar; Kripke, Saul; normativity;
music, 6, 70, 78–85, 87–90, 101, 104–5, sincerity
107, 113–14, 137–48, 176n38
Music and the Emotions (Budd), paradox of fiction, 155n2
176n39 Parerga and Paralipomena
(Schopenhauer), 71
natural, the, 63–64, 147–48. See also Pears, David, 12
causality; normativity; second Peirce, Charles Sanders, 167n4
nature perception: of color, 9–10, 12–13,
neo-sentimentalism, 125, 132 128–29, 142–43, 159n33, 194n17;
neuroscience, 114–17, 120–21, 123, emotional normativity and, 126–30,
186n24 138, 142–46, 185n14; Schopenhauer’s
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 78–79, 91, 175n15, will/representation theory and,
176n38, 184n81, 198n38 72–74
Nietzschean threat, 6, 56, 78–85, 89– personae (musical), 144–48
90, 104–7, 113–14, 137–42, 146–48, phenomenology (of emotion), 109, 122–
152–53 24, 138–39
nonsense, 47, 166n78, 170n36 Philosophical Investigations
normativity: causality’s relation to, 62– (Wittgenstein), 10, 62, 104, 123,
66, 93–96, 103–5, 114–24, 144–45, 178n48, 204n7
198n37; color perception and, 9–10, phronimos, 128–30, 156n8
12–13, 18–19, 194n17; correctness physiological reflexes, 38, 109, 114–17,
and, 18–20, 54, 66–67, 107–10, 113– 140–41, 186n19. See also somatic
14, 119–20, 125–29, 140–45, 159n43, marker theory
190n50; education and, 101–5, 128– Plato, 176n38, 184n81
32, 152–53; emotions and, 6, 67–68, Platonism (meaning). See meaning
77–79, 90, 93–94, 109, 111–14, 121– Platonism
22, 125–28, 146–48, 185n14, 192n5, play, 15–16, 159n28
198n37; ethics and, 6, 30–31, 80–84; prayers, 34–36, 42–43, 59
evaluative properties and, 69–70, presence (self-, to consciousness), 13–18,
113, 122–24, 127–35, 138; grammar 72–73, 141
and, 146–48; intentionality and, 17– Prichard, H. A., 193n13
18, 31–37, 100–101, 109, 113–14, principium individuationis. See
117–21, 141–42; meaning holism individuation
and, 159n33; meaning Platonism principle of sufficient reason, 74
and, 12–13, 17–23, 104–5, 107–10; Prinz, Jesse, 117–21, 124, 134, 195n21
Wittgenstein’s rule-following and, Prize Essay on the Basis of Morality
24–27 (Schopenhauer), 71. See also On the
Nussbaum, Martha, 138 Basis of Morality (Schopenhauer)
226 Index
Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will Schelling, Friedrich, 71

(Schopenhauer), 71 Schiller, Friedrich, 152
prostitution, 93–94 Schopenhauer, Arthur: aesthetics of, 72–
psychology: belief/desire dilemma 84, 88, 103, 113, 137–38, 152–53,
and, 125–28; emotions and, 55, 163n23, 175n15, 176n35, 176n39,
67–70; expressivism and, 54–55; 177n43; Kantian inheritance of, 72–
inferentialism and, 142–43. See also 74, 173n7; Tolstoy’s reading of, 3–4,
Cartesianism; cognitivism; emotions 6, 29–31, 38–39, 71–72, 84–85, 88,
90–91, 137–38, 152–53, 163n34,
quietism, 45–50 180n26. See also specific works
science, 101–3, 186n24. See also
rails. See rules as rails neuroscience
Rawls, John, 199n39 Scruton, Roger, 200n7
realism (moral), 128 Searle, John, 191n57
regression-stoppers. See meaning second nature, 38, 69, 130–33, 146,
Platonism 196n30. See also education
religion: immediate understanding and, Sein und Zeit (Heidegger), 172n70
42–43; prayers and, 34–36, 42–43, self-presence, 13–18, 72–73, 141
59; Tolstoy’s crisis and, 5–6, 30–31, sensations, 67, 77, 201n14
35, 50–51, 53–54, 60–61, 101–2 sensibility theory (of moral emotions), 7,
religious art, 56, 61, 91, 104, 132–35 108, 125, 128–35, 194n18, 197n35,
religious feelings, 91, 108, 125, 132–35, 198n37
151–52, 197n32 sentimentalism, 174n11, 186n24,
representations, 72–74, 78–90, 113–21, 195n19
125–26, 138–39, 142–46, 177n43. sexuality, 93–96, 99–100, 180n38
See also cognitivism; Schopenhauer, showing, 47, 99, 170n36
Arthur; will, the signposts, 64–65
Republic (Plato), 176n38, 184n81 signs, 64
resemblance theory, 142–44, 148 Silbajoris, Rimvydas, 167n5
resentment, 95–99, 182n52, 198n38 sincerity, 46–47, 54, 57–59, 99, 147–49,
response-dependent properties, 129–30, 168n20
132–33, 139, 143, 152, 200n7 Sittlichkeit (term), 130
Rhetoric (Aristotle), 121–22 skeptical paradoxes (and solutions), 11–
Right Affectism, 114–15, 121 12, 14–17
Robinson, Douglas, 116–17, 187n28 skepticism: intentionality and, 31–
Robinson, Jenefer, 69, 140–42, 202n19 36; Kripke on, 5, 11–13, 144–45;
Rorty, Amélie, 172n72 meaning skepticism and, 4–5, 9–12;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 60 Tolstoy’s spritiual crisis and, 5–6, 27,
rule-following. See education; 29–31; will’s absence and, 42–45. See
interpretivist assumption; normativity; also causality; intentionality; meaning
rules as rails; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Platonism; normativity
rules as rails, 6, 11–12, 18, 20–21, skillfulness, 128–32, 152–53
30–36, 103–4. See also meaning Slote, Michael, 174n13
Platonism Smith, Adam, 174n11, 175n14, 195n19,
Rupert, Rob, 189n40 198n38
Russell, Bertrand, 3 Smith, Michael, 125–28, 192n5
social mores. See normativity
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14, 21 society tale genre, 34, 36–37
saying, 47, 99, 170n36 somatic marker theory, 115–18, 172n76,
“sceptical solution” (Kripke), 23 187n28, 188n30, 190n44
Index 227
Speech and Phenomena (Derrida), moral emotions and, 108–10; music’s

158n27 special role in, 78–84, 87–90; will to
Spinoza, Baruch, 120–21 interpretation and, 64–66. See also
Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism aesthetics; education; moral emotions;
(Fischer), 156n9 Nietzschean threat; Schopenhauer,
Stocker, Michael, 172n72 Arthur
Stone, Martin, 16, 159n31 universal art, 56, 61, 108–9, 125, 132–
Strakhov, Nikolai, 29–30 35, 151–52, 165n60
structuralism, 14–27 universal feelings, 101, 108, 125, 132–
sublime, the, 55–56 35, 152
substitution, 26 unreliable narration, 93, 100, 179n21
sui generis states, 6, 108, 124–25, 131–
32, 145, 152, 195n21, 203n55 valencing (of emotions), 109
sympathy, 75–76, 174n13 Varieties of Religious Experience, The
(James), 185n15
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles Velleman, David, 192n5
(homiletic), 54
therapeutic solutions, 45–47, 50–51 Wagner, Richard, 94
Tolstoy, Leo, 3; aesthetic theory of, 4–6, “Walk in the Light While There Is
9, 29, 56–61, 66–70, 78–79, 81, 84– Light” (Tolstoy), 54, 67
85, 87–90, 92–96, 99–105, 107, 125, War and Peace (Tolstoy), 53–54, 72,
131–35, 151–53, 167n5, 178n44, 185n15
183n65; affect theorists on, 115–16; Weir, Justin, 163n35, 181n50
moral skepticism of, 31–36; music’s “What Is an Emotion?” (James), 110–11
power in, 83–84, 87–90; religiosity What Is Art? (Tolstoy), 3–4, 6, 29–30,
of, 5–6, 29–31, 35, 50–51, 53–54, 43–44, 53–55, 60–61, 66, 70–72, 77–
60–61, 101–2, 132–35, 197n32; 78, 81, 84–85, 90–94, 97, 99–100,
Schopenhauer and, 4, 29–31, 38–39, 110–12, 167n5, 170n44
71–72, 84–85, 88–91, 137–38, 152– Wiggins, David, 129, 194n18, 195n21,
53, 180n26, 184n81; Wittgenstein 197n36
and, 3–4, 29–30, 36–37, 50–51, 65– will, the: absence of, in expressing inner
66, 98–99, 104–5, 124, 151. See also states, 37–39, 44, 51; attitudinal
specific works stances and, 41, 97–98; causal
Tormey, Alan, 63 accounts and, 92–99; intelligibility
trace, the, 15, 17, 158n21 of, 39–45; to interpretation, 40–45,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 49–50, 64, 87, 148–49, 153; music
(Wittgenstein), 47–48, 59–60, 62, 64– and, 78–84; perception and, 73–74;
65, 77, 96–98, 166n78 quietism and, 45–50; Schopenhauer’s
training, 103–5, 130–32, 146. See also work on, 72–74, 103, 176n35;
education Wittgenstein on, 63–65. See also
transcendental logic and ethics, 59–61, intentionality; metaphysics
77, 96–98, 173n7 Wilson, A. N., 100
Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, wisdom literature, 54
The (Schopenhauer), 71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Blue Book,
12; Culture and Value, 65;
understanding: aesthetic expressivism deconstruction’s rebuttal by, 4;
and, 53, 116–17; causality and, 62– emotions and, 62–64, 112, 148–49;
66; immediate, 4, 27, 37, 39–40, 42, on ethics, 6, 97–98; Kripke on, 11–14,
51, 161n62; interpretivist assumption 22–24; meaning Platonism and, 20–
and, 5, 9–14, 27; Mitleid and, 76–77; 21; meaning skepticism and, 47;
228 Index
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, continued Wollheim, Richard, 69, 171n66

Philosophical Investigations and, 10, World as Will and Representation,
25–26, 62, 104, 123, 178n48, 204n7; The (Schopenhauer), 71, 74–84,
rule-following and, 24–27, 104, 119– 173n10
20; Tolstoy and, 3–4, 29–30, 36–37,
50–51, 65–66, 98–99, 104–5, 124, yawning, 44, 66, 114
151, 155n4, 156n5; Tractatus, 47,
59–60, 62, 64–65, 77, 96–98, 166n78, Zagzebski, Linda, 127–28, 197n35
170n36; Zettel, 64–65, 201n14 Zettel (Wittgenstein), 64–65, 201n14

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Thinking with Tolstoy

northwestern university press

Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-​​­in-​​­Publication Data

Pickford, Henry W., author.

This book is in a way a record of my intellectual journey, at the way sta-

There is much to be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing

One could call Schopenhauer a quite crude mind. I.e., he does

1. While the novels of his antipodal doppelgänger Dostoevsky enjoyed pre-

affinity of character and spirit which is reflected in some biographical simi-

2. My reading of Tolstoy via Wittgenstein, however, also has a second aim.

3. This book is thus an extended essay and a reconstruction in several senses.

Rather I am fashioning, from the materials of his texts and my understanding

Plan of the Book

In chapter 1 I introduce the central line of inquiry through a critical pre-

tension in metaethics between moral judgment as cognitive belief on the one

A Note on Texts, Translations, and Typographical Conventions

Whenever possible currently available English translations of the works dis-

Meaning Skepticism in Derrida and Wittgenstein

Something surprising, a paradox, is a paradox only in a

1. Suppose someone correctly understands the meaning of the expression

Therefore the understanding of meaning cannot consist in actual disposi-

exercises can be said to accord or not to accord.3 The dispositional account

We shall have occasion to encounter this image again in Tolstoy’s later

3. At this point in the dialectic we have specified an essentially norma-

4. And at this point, according to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein, skepticism

Whatever piece of mental furniture I cite, acquired by me as a result

5. There is a temptation to recoil from the skeptical paradox by asserting

6. It is this conception of meaning as meaning Platonism which constitutes

What does “consciousness” mean? Most often in the very form of

In Limited, Inc., Derrida again locates his target in self-​­conscious intentional

definable context, of a free consciousness present to the totality of the opera-

7. We can reconstruct arguments from Derrida’s writings that target meaning

In fact, even within so-​­called phonetic writing, the “graphic” signi-

before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a

It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather,

classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could

The enabling but unmotivated operation of différance, anterior to intentional

Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only

We have to be more careful here, for the argument as it stands is enthymematic,

(“absolute”) self-​­presence in consciousness, it can never definitively be inter-

8. This first reconstructed deconstructive argument is, however, liable to a

Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-​

9. Although the first deconstructive argument fails to reach its conclusion of

Derrida inscribes within the structure of the expression representing a con-

condition that makes it possible for a concept to apply in novel circumstances

To account for a certain stability (by essence always provisional and

In our first reconstructed deconstructive argument, we saw how Derrida

In the description of the structure called “normal,” “normative,”

The relation of “mis” (mis-​­ understanding, mis-​­ interpreting, for

Thus we can see that both of our reconstructed deconstructive arguments by

thing as determinate meaning, no fact of the matter as to what an expres-

1. Assumption: understanding an expression requires interpreting

1. Assumption: understanding an expression requires interpreting

likewise conditions of impossibility of an expression’s having a deter-

In fact, our actual community is (roughly) uniform in its practices

This is a descriptive account of the communal recognition of meaning, and

12. Presenting Kripke’s and Derrida’s arguments in the form of a dilemma

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

In Limited, Inc., Derrida again locates his target in self-conscious intentional

In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing, the “graphic” signi-

(“absolute”) self-presence in consciousness, it can never definitively be inter-

Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-

The relation of “mis” (mis- understanding, mis- interpreting, for

A rule stands there like a sign-post.—Does the sign-post leave no

Wittgenstein is also careful to hold apart the historical-causal account of one’s

One way of looking at the novel—one of the “inner linkages” of which

5. We have sampled some instances where Tolstoy portrays a will-less expres-

Vronsky’s relationship to his steeplechase horse, Frou-Frou, prefigures the

Although Vronsky involuntarily and immediately understands Frou- Frou

The crowning scene of their immediate and will-less mutual understanding

Veslovsky began by being so naively upset and then laughed so good-

that of joining the row of mowers—Levin must give up a will to interpret, to

passion—“the transport and commotion of the soul” (20.2, ll.22–23)—and a