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Does The Study of Literature Belong Within Moral Philosophy - Reflections in The Light of Ryle's Thought
Does The Study of Literature Belong Within Moral Philosophy - Reflections in The Light of Ryle's Thought
ISSN 0190-0536
1. This is a central conclusion of the line of thought that Ryle develops in his
discussions of `knowing-how' and `knowing-that'. See CM, ch. 1 and `Knowing
How and Knowing That' (CPII, 212±25). Ryle is concerned with the implications of
this basic line of thought also in a number of later essays: `Thinking Thoughts and
Having Concepts' (CPII, 446±50), `Teaching and Training' (CPII, 451±64), `Thought
and Imagination' (OT, 51±64), `Thinking and Self-Teaching' (OT, 65±78) and
`Improvisation' (OT, 121±32).
2. See, e.g., CPII, 223±4 and 455.
3. See `Forgetting the Difference Between Right and Wrong' (CPII, 381±90) and
`Conscience and Moral Convictions' (CPII, 185±93).
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316 Philosophical Investigations
rationality ± a conception that leaves room for forms of moral
discourse which persuade in the sense that they direct our feelings and
which are capable of producing rational conviction, or of containing
a rational form of instruction, in so far as they do so.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this area of Ryle's
thought has not been widely received. Contemporary moral
philosophers for the most part simply take for granted the conception
of rationality that he was concerned to challenge ± a conception on
which any stretch of discourse capable of producing rational
conviction must be recognizable as such prior to and independently
of any emotional engagement with it, and on which a person's ability
to grasp the connections constitutive of a rational line of thought
therefore cannot essentially depend on her possession of any particular
emotional capacities. What count as rational on the terms of this
conception are arguments ± where an argument is understood as a bit
of reasoning in which one proposition or set of propositions (i.e., a
premise or set of premises) permits a further concluding proposition
to be inferred in such a way that there is no room for the fact that it
does so to depend on any tendency of the propositions in question,
either individually or together, to elicit emotional responses. We
sometimes speak of argument in a wider (some would say `looser')
sense in connection with bits of discourse or texts which appeal to
our hearts in various ways ± as Milton, e.g., speaks of `the argument'
of the individual books of Paradise Lost4 ± but it is argument in this
narrower sense which is taken to be the hallmark of the rational on
the conception of rationality that dominates contemporary moral
philosophy.5
It is a testimony to the extent to which this conception is engrained
in recent discussions in ethics that moral philosophers not only for the
most part at least tacitly rule out the possibility that a bit of discourse
4. See Paradise Lost, 2nd edition, ed. Scott Elledge (London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1993), e.g., 7.
5. Notice that this `narrower' construal of argument is broad enough to
accommodate, in addition to formal inferences, also what some philosophers call
material inferences ± i.e., inferences taken to depend for their validity on the content of
their premises and conclusions (e.g., `It's raining; I'll get wet'). The thinker who
embraces a conception of rationality in terms of argument in the narrower sense ± and
who thus in effect takes issue with the philosophically heterodox conception of
rationality Ryle favours ± need not be any sort of formalist. She need only hold that
any bit of discourse containing a rational form of instruction, without regard to
whether the inferences it licenses are formally or materially valid, must be
recognizable as such independently of any emotional engagement with it.
7. Ryle also once gave a lecture on Jane Austen. (I have this from Anthony Palmer.)
But I have been unable to find any text of it and so cannot comment on its relation to
the published essay.
8. New Literary History (15 (1983): 1±12). Raphael's paper is published in a special
issue of New Literary History devoted to the topic `Literature and/as Moral
Philosophy'. In what follows, I will refer to several other papers in this issue: Cora
Diamond's `Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is' (155±69,
reprinted in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, Ma.:
MIT Press, 1990): 367±81), Martha Nussbaum's `Flawed Crystals: James' The Golden
Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy' (25±50, reprinted in Love's Knowledge: Essays
on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 125±47)),
Richard Wollheim's `Flawed Crystals: James' The Golden Bowl and the Plausibility of
Literature as Moral Philosophy' (185±91), and a response to Cora Diamond by
Raphael entitled `Philosophy and Rationality: A Response to Cora Diamond' (171±
7). All page references to these papers will be to the versions that appear in this volume
of New Literary History.
9. `Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy?', 4.
10. There are some thinkers Raphael takes to rely on non-rational methods of
persuasion whom he is nevertheless willing ± albeit reluctantly ± to represent as in the
business of producing moral philosophy. (He places Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, e.g.,
in this category. See `Can literature be moral philosophy?', 4±5.) But his grounds for
saying that these thinkers produce moral philosophy is simply that they rely on what
he counts as rational methods of persuasion in at least some of their works. (See
`Philosophy and Rationality', 173.)
11. Passages in which Raphael describes the rational character of moral philosophy
in terms of argument such as those touched on in the last paragraph ± do not by
themselves demonstrate that he takes for granted the narrower conception of
rationality. For he might be using `argument' in a wider sense, and his representation
17. Ibid., 1.
18. It would be possible to capture one of my main aims in this paper by saying that
I hope to cast doubt on the assumption that it is invariably possible to perform this
feat of separation. It follows that there is an important sense in which talk of
descriptive and emotive features of texts represents for me a merely transitional
vocabulary. In so far as such talk carries the suggestion that descriptive and emotive
elements of texts are always in principle distinct and separable, it should, I hope to
show, ultimately be given up.
19. `Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy', esp. 2±3.
24. Three of the contributors to the issue of New Literary History on Literature and/
as Moral Philosophy mentioned above in note 8, e.g., make such a proposal with an
eye towards getting us to consider this basic possibility: Martha Nussbaum (see also
esp. ch.1 of Love's Knowledge, `Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and
Literature'), Cora Diamond (see also esp. ch.11 of The Realistic Spirit, `Anything But
Argument?') and Richard Wollheim.
25. In this connection, Ryle points out that in Emma she speaks of `the elegancies of
mind' and of `delicacy of mind', and in Sense and Sensibility she speaks of `rectitude
and integrity of mind'.
26. Only Northanger Abbey is said to lack `an abstract ethical theme for its backbone'
(CPI, 283).
27. Any such plain rankings would be the sorts of doctrines which, as we might put
it, a Mr. Collins could without loss include in one of his impromptu sermons or a
Mary Bennett could without loss rehearse at the dinner table.
28. Ryle's suggestion that Jane Austen's moral outlook is basically Aristotelian was
anticipated by some of her contemporaries. Thus, e.g., in an 1821 review of
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Richard Whately wrote: `We know not whether
Miss Austen ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any,
writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully.' (Cited in B.C.
Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1968): 96.) And many readers of Jane Austen since Ryle have taken up his suggestion
of Austen's Aristotelianism. See, e.g., Alisdair MacIntyre's discussion of her novels in
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984). (It is noteworthy that MacIntyre also follows Ryle in claiming that Jane
Austen's moral ideas are given expression in the form of her writing. In his words,
`Jane Austen's moral point of view and the narrative form of her novels coincide'
(243).) See also Anne Ruderman, The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels
of Jane Austen (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995) and David
Gallop, `Jane Austen and the Aristotelian Ethic', Philosophy and Literature (23(1999):
96±109).
29. Forster employs these descriptive terms in his critical writings as well as in his
fiction. See, e.g., his `Notes on the English Character' in Abinger Harvest (London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964): 3±15.
30. In his reliance on different sorts of mild irony ± as well as in other respects ±
Forster is properly regarded as belonging to the same English comic tradition to
which Jane Austen (together with Fielding, Goldsmith, Eliot, Dickens and others)
belongs.
31. It is naturally no coincidence that Forster gives the emotionally more responsive
family in his novel the name of some of the most prominent German romantics.
(Compare his choice of `Schlegel' here with his choice of `Emerson' in A Room with a
32. New York: Penguin, 1960. Some readers will want to protest that this story is
characterized by a didacticism which defeats the very aim ± i.e., that of combating
our tendency to seek understanding of our lives in the form of doctrines ± which I am
maintaining it pursues in an especially clear manner. Although I am receptive to the
thought that this story is relatively didactic, compared to certain other works of
Tolstoy's which pursue the same aim, I am nevertheless happy to claim that it attains
the aim in question. I don't, however, directly confront challenges to this claim here.
33. `The Death of Ivan Ilych', 129.
34. Ibid., 100.
35. Notice that to represent the moral instruction these works contain as yoked to
emotional responses in this way is not to endorse an emotivist view ± of the sort that,
say, Tolstoy himself develops in What is Art? (Aylmer Maude, trans. (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1960), esp. chapter 5) ± on which a person
understands a work of literature if reading it evokes in her the feeling the author had
when writing it. On the view developed here, a person's understanding of the
thought contained within a work of literature may presuppose her capacity to at least
imaginatively enter into emotional responses it is designed to elicit ± or to `resonate'
with it in a particular way ± but she may nevertheless fully grasp the moral thought
the work contains without feeling (or in any way concerning herself with) what its
author felt in composing it.
36. If we detached the idea of the literary author as wine-taster from the connection it
has, in Ryle's essay on Jane Austen, with narrative strategies Jane Austen uses for
getting us to compare and contrast our responses specifically to fine-grained
distinctions in the quality and quantity of particular personal qualities, and if we let
this idea stand instead for the activity of inviting one's reader to submit her emotional
responses to criticism by eliciting responses which in one way or another comment
on each other, we might say that all three literary authors whose work is considered
in this section are wine-tasters.
37. Culture and Value, G.H. von Wright, ed., Peter Winch, trans. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980): 58e.
38. It is perhaps worth explicitly observing that claiming that `emotive' features
cannot always be disentangled from `descriptive' features does not commit us to
denying that it is sometimes useful to extract descriptions of actions, traits of character
and so forth from literary texts and to employ them in arguments. It only commits us
to allowing that when we do extract literary descriptions and employ them in
arguments we may fail fully to capture the contribution the relevant stretches of
discourse make to the moral thought of the works from which they are drawn.
39. I discuss this assumption below in ½ 5.
40. Martha Nussbaum sometimes formulates the `wider' view that literary style
may be internal to the moral thought a work contains as the view that the way in
which literary qualities of a work in virtue of which it engages our feelings may be
directly expressive of an author's moral understanding. See, e.g., her discussion of
James' authorship of The Golden Bowl in `Flawed Crystals', 40ff..
41. For a helpful treatment of these topics, see Richard Moran, `The Expression of
Feeling in Imagination' (The Philosophical Review, 103 (1994): 75±106), esp. 86ff..
42. There would be a straightforward analogy between the vividness of a literary
description, conceived in this way, and, e.g., the elegance of a proof. The elegance of a
proof lies ± roughly ± in its directing us in an economical and perspicuous manner to
make the connections on which it depends for its validity. We may be unable to
recognize that a particularly elegant proof is a valid one unless, in inspecting it, we are
led to make certain connections ± unless, that is, we are led to respond in various
ways.
4. Persuading Ryle
43. On Certainty, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds., Denis Paul and
G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
44. The passage continues as follows:
. . . and I believe that she herself found that her story tended to break away from its
rather flimsy ethical frame. Certainly, when Anne and Wentworth at last came
together again, their talk does duly turn on the justification of Anne's original
yielding to Lady Russell's persuasion and on the unfairness of Wentworth's
resentment of her so yielding. But we, and I think Jane Austen herself, are happy to
hear the last of this particular theme. We are greatly interested in Anne, but not
because she had been dutifully docile as a girl. We think only fairly well of Lydia
[Louisa] Musgrove, but her deafness to counsels of prudence is not what makes our
esteem so tepid. Some of the solidest characters in the novel, namely the naval
characters, are not described in terms of their persuadability or unpersuadability at
all, and we are not sorry (CPI, 279).
45. I am speaking here of `rational methods of persuasion' in a different sense than
Raphael does. (See the second paragraph of ½ 1, above.) Whereas in Raphael's work,
the question of whether a method of persuasion is rational is answered by considering
its relation to argument, here no appeal to argument is called for.
46. There is a lovely irony in the fact that Emerson ± the philosopher who
championed self-reliance as the mark of a genuine individual ± so underrated the
merits of Jane Austen. Emerson confided to his journals:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate,
which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the
wretched conventions of English society, without genuine wit, or knowledge of the
world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the
writer . . . is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this
one, Has he (or she) the money to marry with, and conditions conforming? . . .
Suicide is more respectable. (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Linda Allardt and David Hill, eds. (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University
Press, 1982), vol. XV: 146.)
47. A classic statement of the view that Jane Austen the novelist repudiates any
serious concern with larger social and political events is in Raymond Williams, The
Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). Mimicking one of the most
famous sentences in Austen's opus, Williams writes: `It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her
time . . .' (113). For a relatively recent expression of the view, see Edward Said, `Jane
Austen and Empire', Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993): 80±
96, esp. 81±2. But this view of Jane Austen no longer enjoys the favour it once did.
Two particularly insightful pieces of contemporary commentary which challenge it
are Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University
Press, 1972), chapters 3 and 4 and Tony Tanner's Jane Austen (London: Macmillan,
1986).
48. Throughout the novel, London represents moral laxity. It is not only home to
the Crawfords. It is also the scene of Tom Bertram's dissipation, Maria Bertram's
disgrace and Julia Bertram's elopement.
49. Thus, for instance, young Mr. Elliot cares about the baronetcy he is to inherit
(which he once despised for its lack of monetary value) only on account of the social
status it confers; Mrs Clay is attentive to distinctions of rank, but her attentiveness is
grounded, not in respect, but rather in her zeal for advancing her private interests; and
Lady Dalrymple is, we are given to think, as vulgarly and hypocritically self-
important as Sir Walter is.
50. She is the only one of Austen's heroines whose marriage doesn't tie her to
property and the social world of property-owners: when she marries Captain
Wentworth, she in effect becomes a member of a new naval society.
51. See Ryle's description of the novel's treatment of the theme of persuadability,
cited above in ½ 2i.
52. Note: The two `comments' I made above in ½ 2iv about the literary examples of
½½ 2i±iii are intended to apply also to this description of the narrative strategy of
Persuasion.
The appeal I have been making for including the study of literature
within moral philosophy depends for its plausibility on the wider
conception of rationality. And the case I have been making for the
wider conception in turn depends for its plausibility on my
description of a set of examples of stretches of literary discourse (in ½½
2i±iii and 4, above) which appear to present us with rational forms of
instruction in virtue of ways in which they direct our feelings. This
case for the wider conception is likely to strike many philosophers as
plainly inadequate. It will seem to many that we would be warranted
in dismissing the case on the grounds that anything we uncover about
how we ordinarily take some considerations which engage our
feelings to constitute rational forms of instruction is properly
understood as showing ± not that we need to `widen' our conception
of rationality, but rather ± that our ordinary discursive practices
encode a confusion about what genuine, rational instruction is like
and, further, that our practices are in this respect open to criticism.
What makes this dismissive posture seem reasonable is the familiar
philosophical assumption that we arrive at an undistorted view of
objective reality as we approach a standpoint which abstracts from all
our subjective (i.e., perceptual and affective) endowments ± either
those characteristic of us as individuals or those characteristic of us as
humans or members of some larger group. According to this
assumption about the epistemic privilege enjoyed by a `view from
nowhere',54 any perspective on the world which is afforded by
emotional endowments has an inherent tendency to obstruct our
view of how things are and therefore has no hope of being
intellectually compulsory. Hence it appears that if any stretch of
54. See Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), esp. ch.1.
55. There are, after all, unintelligent, irresponsible and even corrupt works of
literature.
References
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