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ublished in
ublished in
Eldridge, Richard (ed.),
Eldridge, Richard (ed.),
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature
. Oxford: Oxford
. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
University Press
(2009)
(2009)
.
.
LITERATURE AND KNOWLEDGE
John Gibson,
University of Louisville
I INTRODUCTION
It is common to claim that in works of literature we find some of the most powerful representations
of reality our culture has to offer. This claim is central to the general humanistic conception of the
value of the literary work of art: it is at least partly in the business of revealing to readers something
of consequence about the nature of their shared world. According to this view, the literary
perspective (and the artistic perspective more generally) is the definitive human perspective: the
standpoint from which we are best able to bring to light the range of values, desires, frustrations,
experiences, and practices that define the human situation. On this view, works of literature, at least
when they live up to their promise, represent cognitive achievements: they embody ways of knowing
the world.
But in developing a literary tradition, we have come to devise a rather curious way of going
about revealing our world. As the saying goes, literature is ‘the book of life’. And what is curious,
simply put, is that when we open this book we find it to be filled with fictions. That works of
imaginative literature – the sort of literature I shall discuss here – speak about the fictional rather
than the real is hardly news. To be sure, one would think that literature’s use of the creative
imagination constitutes rather than refutes its claim to cognitive value: it is the tool with which
literature builds its vision of our world. But the challenge the philosopher of literature faces is one of
explaining just how this may be. How is it, exactly, that a textual form which speaks of fictions can
tell us something of consequence about reality? Why is it that we have come to find that writing
about fictions can be a powerful way of opening up a window on our world? We tend to think that
it can be, of course. But as with all philosophical challenges, explaining this with a respectable degree
of sophistication turns out to be a difficult affair.
The problem runs deeper than literature’s interest in the imaginary and the unreal. It is not
only that when we look between the covers of a novel we find descriptions of fictions. We also notice
a conspicuous absence of all those tools, devices, and techniques we commonly take to be essential to
the search for truth and knowledge: argumentation, the offering of evidence, the setting forth of ‘the
facts’, the proffering of premises, the derivation of conclusions, and so on (see Stolnitz 1992; John
1998; Lamarque & Olsen 1995; Diffey 1998). Needless to say, the ways in which works of history,
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philosophy, and science – paradigm cases of works of inquiry – make use of these devices and
techniques varies considerably. It may even be the case that they are all, like literature, irreducibly
narratological in form – this is a fairly popular claim in contemporary postmodern culture (see
White 1978; Fish 1980). But works of inquiry weave their narratives in ways very unlike literature,
and it is the particular way a narrative is woven that makes the difference here. Literature standardly
constructs fictional narratives that have dramatic structures; works of inquiry standardly attempt to
construct factual narratives that have argumentative (or evidentiary) structures. This would seem an
important difference. And the challenge is to show that literary works can have a claim to cognitive
value in the absence of those features of writing commonly taken to be the stuff of the pursuit of
knowledge. For in their absence, precisely what aspect of literary works do we point toward that
justifies treating them as players in the pursuit of knowledge? What do we find in works of literature
that even entitles us to think that they wish to be read for knowledge? Again, we tend to think that
there is something, but identifying precisely what is the challenge.
It is also now generally understood that to call into question the view of literary works as
vehicles of knowledge is not thereby to embrace a form of literary philistinism, namely the picture of
literary works as entertaining but ultimately trivial playthings. Since the rise of various brands of
literary formalism and aestheticism in the past century, philosophers and literary theorists have done
much to show that there is a powerful alternative to this so-called ‘cognitivist’ tradition of speaking
about literature, one which has an equal claim to being a defense of the value of literature.
Philosophers and literary theorists of an anti-cognitivist bent do not deny that literary
representations are very often profound, perceptive, awe-inspiring, and so forth. The thought is
rather that while we will have a very hard time accounting for this profundity (etc.) in cognitive
terms – say a profundity of insight – it is altogether easy to do so in aesthetic terms. It is also likely
more natural, for literary works are, after all, artworks. Indeed, an aesthetic view of literature can
even urge that it is to commit what Gilbert Ryle would call a category error to try to account for the
value of literary representations in cognitive terms: it amounts to a silly desire to carry over to
aesthetic domains terms meant to account for the value of representations in philosophical and
scientific domains.
Whether or not one quite agrees with this, it does have a certain intuitive appeal. For we
have a vocabulary that works perfectly well for talking about artworks – an aesthetic vocabulary –
and it is not altogether ridiculous to think that to apply the vocabulary we use to account for the
value of works of inquiry also to literature is simply to misunderstand the nature of what we are
talking about. At any rate, the possibility of offering a fully aesthetic theory of literature marks the
presence of a more direct, and certainly less challenging, way to account for the value of literature. It
is hard to imagine a literary cognitivist who has not at one time felt its appeal, who hasn’t at least for
a moment thought that she may have taken the wrong route to arrive at her defence of the value of
literature.
This is the challenge I shall address in this chapter. I hope to give a sense of how powerful
the arguments against the cognitivist view of literature are but also to bring to light how the
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philosopher beholden to it might respond to them. More precisely, I shall argue that we must accept
that literature’s particular manner of engaging with reality is sui generis, so much so in fact that it
constitutes its own form of cognitive insight. This implies, among others things, that we abandon
what we might call the philosophy-by-other-means view of literature, and in general any defence of
literary cognitivism that attempts to model literature on a theory of how other sorts of texts can have
cognitive value (say by showing them to mimic philosophical works, perhaps by being a thought
experiment in literary disguise, a sort of dramatic ‘proof’, an exercise in moral reasoning by example,
and other like things we in no obvious sense find when we look inside the majority of literary
works). I also hope to show that literature’s cognitive achievements are intimately bound up with its
aesthetic achievements. The humanist need not turn her back to the aesthetic dimension of literary
works when defending the cognitive value she believes many of them store. Rather, the humanist
must embrace it, for it is here that literary works effect their particular enlightenment.
Before beginning, one should notice that the debate on the cognitive value of literature does
not concern a mere epistemological puzzle. It begins with this; but it brings something much more
important to the attention of the philosopher of literature. It opens up a discussion of the general
cultural significance of the literary work of art. Perhaps the issue of whether literary works can offer a
precise sort of knowledge is not even what is really at stake in this debate. In asking whether works of
literature can offer knowledge, we are asking to have the worldly interest we take in art vindicated.
What is at stake here is our ability to articulate what amounts to a satisfactory account of the
interplay of art and life itself. I shall not be attempting anything as grand as this here. But I do hope
that what I say about the epistemological issue will give a sense of how one can use it as a tool for
exploring the variety of ways in which literature and life take an interest in one another.
II THE TEXTUAL CONSTRAINT
It should be confessed that there are any number of things we can learn from works of imaginative
literature, though many are trivial and of little literary relevance. From a master stylist I might learn
how to write with wit and grace; from an Elizabethan drama I can gain insight into the English of an
older age; from a novel of dazzling inventiveness I can acquire knowledge of possibilities of
description and conceptualization. The list is nearly endless. If the problem of literary cognitivism
were simply one of identifying something – anything – we can learn from literature, it would be a
very dull debate, for it is impossible to imagine how one could fail to arrive at a positive response to
the problem. But the challenge is not merely to find a way of showing that we can leave our literary
encounters with ‘more information,’ so baldly put. We do, in countless ways. Rather, the challenge is
to reveal literary works themselves to have as one of their goals the offering of a form of
understanding, and this is a quite different and much more difficult matter. The claim to cognitive
acquisition on the part of a reader is of little literary relevance if not tethered to a complementary
claim to the effect that what the reader has learnt is a lesson the literary work actually puts on offer.
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It is only in this sense that the question is a proper literary one; that is, a question that stands to
reveal something about the nature of the literary work of art.
This is not always appreciated as it should be. One finds much ink spilt on how works of
literature might help improve our faculty of imagination (Currie 1998; Harold 2003), develop our
cognitive skills (Novitz 1987), discover what we would think, feel, or value if in another’s shoes
(Walton 1997; Currie 1998), become more sympathetic and adept moral reasoners (Nussbaum
1995), and so on. These are genuine cognitive achievements, and literature can certainly help us in
our pursuit of them. But, like the above examples, they tend to say too much about readers and too
little about literary works. Since literary works are for obvious reasons rarely about the imagination,
cognitive skills, or emotions of their readers, to gesture towards these things in an attempt to defend
the thesis of literary cognitivism is to gesture towards the wrong thing. The question is primarily
textual: it concerns the nature of the literary, of what we find of cognitive significance when we look
inside a literary work. It is only about readers – about the ways in which their minds and morals can
be improved through their encounters with literature – in a secondary, derivative sense.
Consider a classics student who, having been asked to read Plato’s Symposium, returns to his
teacher and claims to have learnt much from it. The teacher asks the student to explain exactly what
he has learnt, to which he replies, ‘a considerable amount of Attic Greek and some fine metaphors
for drunkenness.’ He very well may have learnt this – one can find all of this in Plato’s dialogue –
and he might be all the better for it. But naturally the teacher will think that the student has missed
the point of the assignment. The student has learnt something, but he has not learnt it from Plato.
This is because what he claims to have learnt makes no reference at all to what we might describe as
the cognitive labour of Plato’s dialogue, to the lesson it wishes to impart, to the insight it struggles to
articulate – assuming as I am that Plato intends in that dialogue to illuminate the nature of love and
not the grammar of Attic Greek or our capacity to speak in metaphors. Indeed, the student’s
response fails to show an understanding of the text, which is what we expect a claim of cognitive
acquisition to reveal.
Likewise, responses to the problem of literary cognitivism which put all of the emphasis on
how readers might become more successful imaginers, emoters, and reasoners are in the end much
more sophisticated versions of the mistake of the classics student. It is valuable to have accounts of
how engagements with the literary affect readers in morally and intellectually positive ways. We do
live in a culture in which art is at times thought to be of no more significance than its ability to
amuse, and these accounts do much to counter literary philistinism of this brand. But as a response
to the question of whether literary works themselves have cognitive aspirations, they are not very
satisfying. In fact, they are largely silent on this matter.
It is true, as Berys Gaut argues, that we are able ‘to apply the imaginative world of the
fiction to the real world, and thereby to discover truths about the world’ (Gaut 2006: 123). We do
this often when moved by a work. We turn from it and find ourselves now capable of seeing the
world in its light, and this can be an important source of cognitive insight. After we read George
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Eliot’s Middlemarch or Shakespeare’s Henry IV, for example, we can identify all the Casaubons and
Falstaffs who inhabit our world. These characters are, in their proper literary mode of presentation,
creatures of pure fiction and so without any intrinsic cognitive value. But we can use these characters
as tools for approaching reality, treating them as lenses through which we can attempt to perceive
human character more clearly. This, in turn, can open up a way of acquiring truths about human
nature, of coming to discover something about it. But while this may be a significant feature of what
we do with literary works, it is not a particularly good strategy for a defense of literary cognitivism. If
the acquisition of truth depends on the reader applying aspects of a fictional world to the real one,
then presumably that truth is not given expression in the work itself, and so the work cannot quite
put it on offer. We may come to learn about the world when we do what Gaut claims we do. But
we haven’t quite come to learn about the world from literature. And this is what we want answered:
can literature itself record, document, or bear witness to something about our cognitive relation to
reality? We miss the point if we try to explain this by describing ways in which readers rather than
literary works perform all the cognitive labour here.
This is a problem with many popular versions of the so-called ‘propositional theory’ of
literary cognitivism (for a discussion of its history, see Lamarque & Olsen 1995). In an influential
and clever defense of this, Peter Kivy writes:
Now if one thinks, as I do, that part of the reader’s literary appreciation consists in
confirming and disconfirming for himself the general thematic statements he
perceives in fictional works he reads, sometimes unaided, sometimes through the
help of literary critics, one will see why it is quite compatible with the
Propositional Theory that such confirmation and disconfirmation are part of
appreciation, and that appreciation is the job, if I may so put it, of the reader, not
the critic qua critic. The critic’s job, qua critic, is, among other things, to make
available to the reader whatever hypothesis the fictional work may, directly or
indirectly, propose. It is the reader’s job to appreciate them, in part by confirming
or disconfirming them for himself. (Kivy 1997: 125; see also New 2000: 116-120)
When we find ourselves struck by a literary representation, we tend to find a suggestion in it,
a clue as to how we may view the real world. Though the characters we find in a literary work are
fictional, the particular ways in which an author invests their lives with meaning, their actions with
urgency, their relationships with consequence, always suggest to the reader a way of regarding actual
human affairs. The production of these visions and suggestions is typically a matter of literature’s
thematic rendering of its subject, say the way in which a certain work configures ‘suffering’,
‘jealousy’, or ‘joy’ as this sort of experience. Through the force of its thematic representation of a
region of human concern, literature is able to hold up for appreciation a finely wrought vision of
human experience and circumstance. And we tend to have an interest in subjecting these visions to
cognitive scrutiny, in asking whether our world is really like that, or whether it would be better if it
were. Much of this is surely right, and to this extent positions such as Kivy’s capture an important
dimension of our appreciation of literary works.