The literary fuzzhead

Bill Vallicella is not impressed by the novelist John Gardner, who once claimed that “at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better—though slower.”

Although it is unclear why he is wasting his time on Gardner, Vallicella says some interesting things at the poor writer’s expense. He ends by treating the author of The Sunlight Dialogues and Nickel Mountain (novels that I culled from my library decades ago) as quite typical of the literary mind in its disdain and misunderstanding of philosophy at a high level. “The literary fuzzhead cannot help but think that philosophy done seriously, with patience, rigor, and clarity, is just abstract bullshit,” he concludes.

As someone who has done his share of serious thinking about literature, I naturally take offense. Not all literary minds are fuzzy, I want to protest. But instead of trying to establish the philosophical fides of far better writers than Gardner, perhaps it would be well to examine Vallicella’s own thinking—on fiction.

“It would have been nice,” Vallicella says, “had Gardner told us what the same thing is that both fiction and philosophy do or try to do.” Unfortunately, when he tries to do just that, he himself stumbles badly.

“A good novelist,” he proposes, “has the ability to set before the reader in concrete and memorable terms a believable character who illustrates a certain set of values or a certain modus vivendi.” His example is Zorba the Greek, although he “quotes” the 1964 film out of Twentieth Century Fox and not the eighteen-years-earlier novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.

Nevertheless, “the sensitive reader must ask himself whether perhaps Zorba’s way is the way to live,” Vallicella says, attributing to Zorba the view that “Life is trouble, only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble!”

Now, as it happens, the great philosopher Hilary Putnam has said something strikingly similar, although perhaps more rigorously and clearly thought through. (Disclosure: I quoted Putnam’s remarks in the Afterword to The Elephants Teach.) Putnam argues that, even though the “psychological insights” of a good novelist cannot be described as empirical knowledge, because they have not been tested, fiction can yet achieve knowledge of a different kind:

[I]f I read [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night [1932] I do not learn that love does not exist, that all human beings are hateful and hating (even if—and I am sure this is not the case—those propositions should be true). What I learn is to see the world as it looks to someone who is sure that hypothesis is correct. I see what plausibility that hypothesis has; what it would be like if it were true; how someone could possibly think that it is true. But all this is still not empirical knowledge at all; for being aware of a new interpretation of the facts, however repellent, of a construction that can—I now see—be put upon the facts, however perversely—is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of a possibility. It is conceptual knowledge.[1]On Putnam’s showing, the “sensitive reader” does not ask himself whether “Zorba’s way is the way to live.” If the novel is any good, he comes to understand how “Zorba’s way” would look and feel if it were “the way to live.” He understands it as a possibility.

The difference between Putnam’s account of fiction and Vallicella’s is immense. The trouble with Vallicella’s account is that it is limited, although it may not seem so at first. Many novelists do in fact “set before the reader in concrete and memorable terms a believable character who illustrates a certain set of values or a certain modus vivendi,” but not all novelists do. The proposition does not account for Nineteen Eighty-Four or Darkness at Noon, for example, two novels in which the “believable character” is harried by a totalitarian modus vivendi until he voluntarily abandons his own “set of values.”

And the proposition is far too simple to explain the effect of Lolita, in which it is not his way of life but Humbert’s atonement that is “illustrated” (wrong word!). Or Ulysses, in which the modus is everything that happens in twenty-four hours and the vita is an entire city’s. Or Invisible Man, in which the character is not “believable,” at least to the other characters in the book. Or Pictures from an Institution, in which the character is not a character at all but, well, an institution.

Putnam comes closer to an all-embracing (and true) proposition about fiction, when he defines its modality, not as the illustration of a way of life, but as possibility. Some philosophers deal with possibilities too, but this hardly means, pace Gardner, that they are doing the “same thing” as novelists. Philosophers want to show that a possibility is valid; novelists try to make it plausible. The distance between validity and plausibility is the distance between philosophy and fiction, but it does not follow that the one is sharp while the other is fuzzy. They are, instead, as Putnam suggests, merely different approaches to knowledge.
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[1] Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 89–90. Emphasis in the original.

Toleration

In an excellent post over at The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella defends both religious toleration and the proposition that toleration has its limits.

I agree entirely, but for entirely different reasons. Vallicella defends religious toleration, because “the existence of these competing worldviews is a good and enriching thing in that it helps us clarify and refine and test our own views and practices and helps us progress toward truer and more life-enhancing systems of thought and practice.” What Vallicella describes, however, is not really religious toleration, but intellectual diversity, which may be a necessary precondition to intellectual honesty but not necessarily to religious integrity.

My argument for religious toleration is naggingly formal. Arguments in defense of Revealed Religion are forever circular, and thus can never be decided—by those inside or outside the circle.

Hillel Halkin makes this point brilliantly in his new Jewish Encounters biography of Yehuda Halevi. Halevi’s most famous book was The Kuzari (ca. 1140), a vindication of Judaism. While Christianity and Islam “make claims for a single savior or prophet that cannot be empirically justified and demand an act of faith on the part of the believer,” the book argues, according to Halkin, Judaism by contrast “is based not on faith but on historical experience.” God handed down his Torah in front of six hundred thousand Israelites who witnessed Mount Sinai’s smoking. Judaism is attested to, in short, by “many miracles,” and not just one.

But of course, as Halkin goes on to note, Halevi’s reasoning in The Kuzari is circular:

[W]e know, it says, that there were six hundred thousand Israelites at Mount Sinai because the Bible tells us so—and we know that the Bible is telling us the truth because six hundred thousand Israelites could not have been wrong!Halkin blocks the objection ingeniously, but the fact remains that there is no logical defense of Judaism’s superior truth that escapes the circle of its faith-accepted premises.

My view is that arguments across the circles are fruitless. There is no possible means of settling the religious dispute over first principles. Toleration, on my showing, would entail the unspoken agreement to put up with religious differences without ever undertaking the impossible mission of reconciling them, which—in the absence of any logical method for doing so—can only end in coercion or violence. Note, however, that toleration differs subtly from tolerance. The latter is an act of weakness, and seems much like indifference as a consequence. Toleration, though, is always from a position of power. Religious opinions that differ from the established view (from my own religious commitment, that is) are granted the freedom to express and spread themselves, because they are not a threat. They are not a threat precisely because their arguments, spilling out from within a different circle, cannot serenade me with any degree of persuasion. When they become a threat because they are backed by violence, then and only then have the limits of toleration been reached. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff are surely right that Islamists’ death threats should be a criminal offense.

My idea of toleration, then, is very close to Miriam Burstein’s third way between the positive and negative varieties: “in which everyone keeps their mouth shut while feeling rather grumpy.”

Within the circle of faith-accepted premises, Vallicella’s “good and enriching” arguments can occur. Perhaps they are the antidote to grumpiness. But you must first accept the premises to have your understanding of what follows from them “clarified and refined and tested.”

In short, religious argumentation (or theology, for that matter) is a lot like fiction. (That’s how Halkin blocks the objection to Halevi’s circular logic, in fact. The Kuzari is a work of fiction.) You must accept a donnée before you can be instructed or delighted or both at once. And this is the whole of what I have to say on the question of religious toleration.

Why intellectuals are political

Why are literary intellectuals addicted to politics?

For Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, the answer is obvious. “[T]he human being, by nature, is zoon politikon, a political animal,” he points out. And the intellectual, presumably, is a human being (at least some of the time). The truly important distinctions, Vallicella insists, are between politics and partisanship, on the one hand, and between the vita activa and vita contemplativa on the other.

Still I boggle. Intellectuals would appear by definition to have dedicated themselves to the life of the mind, and yet for many—correction: most—intellectuals the questions that arise in art, literature, history, religion, or philosophy end with a bump in politics. And I mean politics, not partisanship—not merely the active life, but the public life, the social life, the practical workaday campaign for hope and change or the organized opposition to it. I am beginning to think that politics are never separated from advocacy if not partisanship. And this is true even of the fuzzier notion retailed by literary types, where politics refers to a social vision.

Take Vallicella’s example. On C-Span, the head of an “outfit promoting a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution” repeated again and again that his “organization was not political, not political, not political!” Nonsense, Vallicella replies. “What the man wanted to say was that his outfit was not partisan,” he suggests, going on to explain that by not partisan he means “not affiliated with any particular political party such as the Republican Party, or the Democrat Party.”

But this is an excessively narrow meaning. That strict interpretivist outfit is clearly partisan, because it is a party administered and mobilized for the purpose of advocating a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, it belongs to the organized opposition to the intellectual school or party advancing the concept of a “living Constitution.”

The distinction between politics and partisanship is without a difference. All political animals are partisans; political action is collective action. Every proposal for the sake of change and hope has its supporters and detractors, and they are likely to organize themselves pretty quickly.

What is not clear to me is how to explain the party-mindedness of the literary intellectuals now on the scene. Consider “Bush bashing,” for example. Between about 2002–’03 and this year, it became a commonplace in fiction and literary discourse, as I have remarked here and here. Even Marilynne Robinson, who need not declare herself on the side of the angels to gain the respect of her readers, appended a Bush-bashing essay to The Death of Adam when it was reprinted in 2005 after Gilead had won the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote:

[F]or some time the word “bashing” has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are straightforwardly true or false. To say that the disparity between rich and poor in this country exceeds any previously known in American history (putting aside the marked economic disparity between plantation owners and slaves) is to say something falsifiable—that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case arguable. But such statements are now routinely called “Bush bashing.”[1]And is this closing statement also falsifiable? Or is it a different kind of statement altogether?—a Two-Minutes Hate, perhaps. How much courage is required of a professor of English at the University of Iowa to praise “Bush bashing,” or to pretend that a statement about income disparity is a representative example of it? What is at stake for Robinson?—other than posturing as politically courageous, I mean.

What is so disheartening is that an earlier generation of literary intellectuals had good reason to be political. In the ’thirties and again in the decade and a half after the Second World War, the intellectual class displayed great courage and energy, first in opposing fascism and then in opposing Communism. In the first decade of the new century, however, there has been no comparable passion for anti-Islamism. Politics have decayed to a stylistic flourish.

The source of this undemanding political attitudinizing antedates George W. Bush. In the two decades between the emergence of the New Left and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political obsessions of literary intellectuals were oblivious to totalitarianism. They were narrowly fixed on what the intellectuals decried as American imperialism. (Since America was not legitimately an empire, they were obliged to modify the object of their indignation to cultural imperialism.) Thus the events of 1989–’90 brushed past them without effect. During the holiday from history that ended on September 11, 2001, they were holed up in their departments, systematically replacing Western civilization with multiculturalism.

But the generation of intellectuals who identified themselves as anti-fascist and anti-Communist were not cultural relativists. Indeed, they sharply differentiated themselves from those on the Left, like I. F. Stone and Lillian Hellman, who found a way quietly to abandon their anti-fascism after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” Hellman famously told the House Un-American Activities Committee in a 1952 letter.[2] But by then she had already cut her conscience many times over.

There are those, then, for whom politics is cause for urgency and those for whom it is an image on a T-shirt, a means of sympathizing with force in the name of justice. The problem is not that intellectuals are political, but that so many belong, not to an active political party, but to what Edith Wharton calls “the throng of fashion.” They imitate the language of real politics, because it is the way they trim their texts to suit the current fashions.
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[1] Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Picador, 2005), p. 257.

[2] Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 353.

Plot and thought

On Saturday, as if replying in her own way to Bill Vallicella’s argument on the relative merits of philosophy and fiction, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein (who is also an academic philosopher) listed the five best novels of ideas.

Two names on her list were entirely expected. Saul Bellow is better perhaps than any other fiction writer at putting human intellect on exhibit. Goldstein picked Herzog (1964) as his best, as the best, although she could as easily have picked Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, or even Ravelstein (2000). The last would have been the most tantalizing pick, not only because it was his last novel, written in his eighties (suggesting the endurance of Bellow’s own intellectual powers), but also because its eponymous hero, modeled upon Bellow’s lifelong friend Allan Bloom, is himself a philosopher.

Similarly, the name of Iris Murdoch was no surprise. Murdoch was herself a philosopher, Oxford-trained; she even sat in on Wittgenstein’s lectures for a time. The Black Prince (1973) was Goldstein’s pick for third spot, although (again) a number of Murdoch’s books would have stood out nicely on the list. And, again, had it been me, I might have selected The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), if only for its portrait of John Robert Rozanov, the philosopher (sometimes said to have been modeled upon Michael Oakeshott).

But the coincidence of Vallicella’s reflections and Goldstein’s list got me thinking. In reconsidering Nabokov’s Bend Sinister a couple of weeks ago, I called Adam Krug, the central figure in the novel, “[o]ne of the few successful portraits of a deeply intelligent man in American fiction.” What are the others?

Well, there is The Unpossessed (1934), in which Tess Slesinger catches a group of Jewish intellectuals in the act of founding a radical magazine. There is O My America (1980), in which Johanna Kaplan focuses on just one of the type—a Jewish man of letters who comes to be known more for his political than his literary views. Two novels from 1983, Cynthia Ozick’s Cannibal Galaxy and Arthur A. Cohen’s Admirable Woman, are built around the figure of Hannah Arendt. In John and Anzia (1989), Norma Rosen invents (or reinvents) a love affair between John Dewey and the Jewish novelist Anzia Yezierska. Published the same year, Goldstein’s own Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind features a philosopher who lectures on the “futility of the passions” and longs to be reduced to a state of pure reason (she gets her comeuppance, of course, in a love affair with a younger man).

But the more I think about it, the unhappier I become. It strikes me that the whole question of philosophy and fiction—philosophy in fiction—has been mishandled. The tendency has been to identify the intellectual element in fiction with a character or characters. And it’s hardly astonishing, then, when the “intelligent” or “intellectual” figure begins to spout off in more or less “intelligent” or “intellectual” ways. Even in Vallicella’s original example, Zorba the Greek, the “Zorbatic” approach to life is largely a matter of what Zorba says. “I have so much to tell you,” Zorba says to Basil.

Intelligence in fiction, then, is usually conceived as a variety of Aristotelian dianoia:

Under Thought [dianoia] is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being: proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite. Now, it is evident that the dramatic incidents must be treated from the same points of view as the dramatic speeches, when the object is to evoke the sense of pity, fear, importance, or probability. The only difference is that the incidents should speak for themselves without verbal exposition; while effects aimed at in [speech] should be produced by the speaker, and as a result of the speech. For what were the business of a speaker, if the Thought were revealed quite apart from what he says? (ch XIX, trans. S. H. Butcher)What, indeed? Thus intelligence in fiction stands apart from the action; it belongs exclusively to character. For Aristotle, after all, the characters of a drama were “universal propositions, existing independently of the particular series of incidents that the drama presents.”[1] And what the characters say, accordingly, is merely the articulation of the universal that they really are.

But since this conception of character no longer determines modern fiction, the Aristotelian understanding of Thought must be discarded. There is a reason that the free nations dominate the world’s fiction: individualism cannot be repressed, bought off, or charmed away there. But is there, then, a more adequate notion of intelligence in fiction?

But what is the intellectual aspect of a fiction if not its plot? The plot is fiction’s answer to argument in philosophy: it is what connects up and advances the whole. If an argument is the setting forth of the proofs (reasons and evidence) for an assertion, then a plot is the setting forth (that is, the narration) of the events that lead to a catastrophe, the final turn that brings everything to an end.

Indeed, it is in the ordering of events that novelists often display their greatest ingenuity. The most intelligent novels, I am almost tempted to claim, are those that are the most brilliantly plotted, in which every piece locks into place with an audible and satisfying click, and you are persuaded that no other ending is even possible. And that fewer and fewer novelists waste much thought on plot may explain the decline of intelligence in contemporary fiction.
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[1] O. B. Hardison Jr., Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 243.

“Believable character”

My best male students have been pestering me to go see Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island, a cop thriller with Leonard DiCaprio playing the lead role of U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels. Conveniently enough, the latest magazines to arrive at the house carried reviews of the film.

“This is a movie that requires audiences to care, and care deeply, about what’s happening in poor beleaguered Teddy Daniels’s brain,” Ross Douthat writes in National Review. “His psychological problems are the film, in a way—but Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t the man to make you believe in them, or him.”

In the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz asserts the reverse. The Dennis Lehane novel upon which the film is based is so excessively long, he says, that “one’s ability to suspend disbelief is taken to the breaking point and beyond.” The movie version would be an utter flop “were it not for DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance, which (unlike the plot) only seems to get better the more you think about it.”

The coincidence of two critics reaching diametrically opposed conclusions in very nearly the same terms set me to thinking. Bill Vallicella, as I recalled, had also used the same terms. “A good novelist,” he proposed, “has the ability to set before the reader in concrete and memorable terms a believable character. . . .” Believability, on this showing, seems inseparable from whatever a good novelist is good at.

At all events, critics say this kind of thing all the time (“the character comes to life,” “the character just never seems real”), but only now do I realize that I have no idea what they mean. Podhoretz’s opinion is the most respectable, because it is attached to something outside his opinion: most people would agree that a 400-page thriller, written in “indifferent prose,” would be a strain on more than disbelief. But the conventional form of the critical plaudits and disapproval seems little more than the interjection of a mood.

Foe of persistent obscurity

Today is the one hundred and seventeenth birthday of the American idealist philosopher Brand Blanshard, author of the slim but indispensable On Philosophical Style (1954). His thesis in this seventy-page essay (originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Manchester) is that, although philosophy is a specialized intellectual activity, it examines questions which are of vital concern to everyone, and ought therefore to be written in language exacting enough for professional philosophers and yet accessible to the educated laity. When a man’s thought is incomprehensible, Blanshard held, there is something deeply wrong with it—or with the man.

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, offers a witty apothegm from the book: “Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.”

He publishes the sentence under the title What Blanshard might have said to Derrida.

Update: Patrick Kurp also wrote about Blanshard’s On Philosophicl Style early in his blogging career.