1

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THEAESTHETIC ATTITUDErati_441 1..23

M. W. Rowe

AbstractAn attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an objectis often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes toderive knowledge from it. The current paper argues that thisalleged conflict only makes sense when the aesthetic attitude andknowledge are construed unnaturally narrowly, and that whenboth are correctly understood there is no tension between them.To do this, the article first proposes a broad and satisfying accountof the aesthetic attitude, and then considers and rejects twelvereasons for thinking that deriving knowledge from something isincompatible with maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards it.Two main conclusions are drawn. 1) That the representational artsare often in a good position to communicate non-propositionalknowledge about human beings. 2) That while our desire to obtainpleasure from a work’s manifest properties, and our desire toobtain knowledge from it, are not the same motive, the formalsimilarities between them are sufficiently impressive to warrantboth being seen as elements of the aesthetic attitude.

Some philosophers and critics feel that a desire to appreciatesomething aesthetically, and a desire to acquire knowledge fromit, are two quite separate and possibly incompatible motives.1

Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen, for example, have arguedthat it is quite possible to acquire truths from a novel, but that thetruths thus acquired have no bearing on its artistic quality.2 Thisdoes not mean, however, that they endorse aestheticism or feelthat novels are unconnected with life. On the contrary, they arguethat novels enact, develop, explore and imaginatively realize

1 This paper tries to draw together, and show the consistency of, three of my previousessays, ‘The Definition of “Art” ’, ‘Poetry and Abstraction’, and ‘Lamarque and Olsen onLiterature and Truth’, all in M. W. Rowe, Philosophy and Literature: A Book of Essays(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

2 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: OUP,1996).

COPYRIG

HTED M

ATERIAL

perennial human themes – love, death, ageing, and so forth – andthat these themes can be developed and explored without endors-ing or discovering truths.3

A closely related position holds that the truth or falsity of anovel is relevant to its assessment, but that this, ipso facto, meansthat novels cannot be, or cannot wholly be, works of art. ElisioVivas takes the extreme view when he writes that ‘The BrothersKaramazov can hardly be read as art . . .’,4 while the more moder-ate and popular position is taken by Desmond MacCarthy:

It is tenable that one of the mistakes of late nineteenth andearly twentieth century criticism has been to regard the novel as‘a work of art’ in the same sense that a sonata, a picture, or apoem is work of art. It is extremely doubtful whether the aim ofthe novel is to make an aesthetic appeal. Passages in it may doso; but it aims also at satisfying our curiosity about life as muchas satisfying the aesthetic sense . . . I am inclined myself toregard it as a bastard form of art, rightly concerned with manyinterests which the maker of beautiful things must eschew . . .5

Both positions feel that aesthetic interest and curiosity about lifeare utterly distinct motives, but they respond to this idea in dif-ferent ways. Lamarque and Olsen argue that an interest in thetruth of literature is misconceived, and this allows them to claimthat novels, correctly approached, are unproblematically works ofart. Vivas and MacCarthy believe that an interest in the truth ofliterature is legitimate, but feel this entails that novels are eitherwholly or partly not works of art.

I find Lamarque and Olsen’s position unconvincing becauseit does not take proper account of the universal practice ofusing predicates like ‘sentimental’, ‘adolescent’, ‘true’, ‘unrealis-tic’, ‘probable’, ‘idiotic’, ‘penetrating’, ‘false’, ‘accurate’,‘correct’, ‘profound’, ‘insightful’ etc in criticism of the arts. All ofthese contain either explicit or implicit appeals to truth or lack ofit, and it is very hard to imagine what literary criticism would look

3 Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, pp. 405–454.4 E. Vivas, ‘Contextualism Reconsidered’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1959.

Quoted in Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1978), p. 54.5 Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Trollope’, in his Portraits. Quoted in Walter Allen, The English

Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 18.

2 M. W. ROWE

without such terms. In addition, it’s difficult to believe that theartistic quality of novels which enact objectionable statements(‘Bourgeois individualism must be ruthlessly suppressed’), oridiotic statements (‘Collecting plastic bags is the highroad tohealth and happiness’) are not affected by the falsity of the propo-sitions they enact. It is strange that Lamarque and Olsen feel it isimportant for novelists to discuss perennial themes – love anddeath etc – while being apparently quite indifferent to the plau-sibility of what novelists actually say about them.

MacCarthy’s position is unconvincing because he conceivesof the artist as, exclusively, a ‘maker of beautiful things.’ Clearly,this view runs into difficulties with all those works of art which arenot beautiful: for example, the finale of Alkan’s Sonatine, Picasso’sGuernica, and Hardy’s ‘Ah, are you digging on my grave?’. Theseworks, while in many ways great, are clearly not beautiful in anystraightforward sense, and are more appropriately classifiedunder Nietzsche’s label of ‘interesting ugliness.’6 MacCarthynotices the difficulty with novels, and tries to deal with it by the adhoc device of claiming them to be ‘bastard’ works of art, but infact the trouble is much more wide ranging, and requires histheory to be rejected altogether.

I suspect that what have been dubbed ‘no-truth’ theories of artare nourished by a too narrow a conception of the aesthetic and toonarrow a conception of knowledge. Accordingly, the purpose of thispaper is to examine in detail the reasons why some philosophersand critics find the cognitive and aesthetic impulses in tensionwith one another, and to provide an account of the aestheticattitude and literary knowledge which shows that the allegedtension is only apparent. In my view, the ability to impart knowl-edge can sometimes be a part, and an important part, of a work’saesthetic quality.

I hope that what follows has a general application to all therepresentational arts, but I shall largely restrict my discussion toliterature because that has always been the main focus of debate.And my discussion of literature will largely focus on fictionbecause that is where the most distinctive features of literaryknowledge can best be seen.

6 Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans.: R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), §239, p. 140.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 3

The first prerequisite for showing that the alleged tensionbetween curiosity and aesthetic interest is only apparent, is toclarify the nature of aesthetic interest.7

The aesthetic attitude is a mode of attention to an object ofsight, hearing or – to a lesser extent – touch. There are two kindsof attention: willed and unwilled. In the former case my attentionis an action; it is something I do for a reason. Thus I may look ata picture to try to discover whether the castle it represents had aportcullis, or whether the canvas is large enough to cover my wallsafe, or whether the artist who painted it was a Mason. In all thesecases my interest is not in the picture per se but in the castle, thesize of the canvas, and the artist who painted it. Consequently, if Iam shown conclusive proof that the canvas is not large enough tocover the safe, or that the artist or castle which interest me werenot involved in the picture, then my interest will immediatelylapse. Even if such proof is not forthcoming, we would naturallyexpect that my interest would motivate me to move on to otherpaintings and other documents to do with the safe, the castle orthe artist. In all these examples, it is easy to give an analysis of theaction in terms of beliefs and desires.

On the other hand, unwilled attention is not an action; it is notsomething I do, it is something which happens to me. Willed atten-tion requires me to hold my attention on an object; in the caseof unwilled attention the object holds and absorbs me. This stillappears to cover a number of non-aesthetic cases, for example,unwilled attention caused by sexual interest, disgust, hunger,thirst and so forth, but in all these examples looking is merely aprelude to some other action. If these interests take their normalcourse then sexual interest will be followed by sex, disgust byturning away, hunger and thirst by eating and drinking, and so on.It is frequently true that in everyday life unwilled attention is notfollowed by the normal actions, but in these cases an explanationis required – the other party was unwilling, I was too paralysed byfear, the food turned out to be plastic etc. In the aesthetic case,unwilled looking is not merely a prelude to some other action,and no special explanation is required to show why I did not moveonto the next stage of my interest. Aesthetic interest is an end initself, and has no “next stage” beyond continuing to look.

7 This section is a brief summary of my ‘The Definition of “Art” ’, in M.W. Rowe,Philosophy and Literature, pp. 148–164.

4 M. W. ROWE

Although it is usually possible to give reasons for my aestheticabsorption these will take the form, not of mentioning the beliefsand desires that motivate my project, but of pointing out aspectsof the object which will allow another person to share my experi-ence. This unwilled or disinterested attention is exactly what plea-sure is on an Aristotelian analysis, and it is an essential componentof the aesthetic attitude.

The best aesthetic objects need not absorb us immediately. Theymay require a good deal of willed attention, together with practicewith the genre they exemplify, before they begin to reward ourefforts by sustaining our unwilled attention. Indeed, objects whichabsorb us immediately may be unable to sustain our pleasure in thelong run, and it is the durability as well as the intensity of ourexperience which determines the object’s aesthetic quality. Inaddition, although aesthetic experience is not motivated by beliefs,it may need to be informed by beliefs. My appreciation of Hamletneeds to be informed by a knowledge of what ‘jump’ (for example)means in the play, what era the play was written in, and to whatRosencrantz is referring in the ‘little eyases’ speech. But clearly Iam not thereby committed to admiring any play written in the lateElizabethan and early Jacobean era, containing the word ‘jump,’and referring to the War of the Players, as I would be if these beliefsmotivated my attention.

The advantage of this account of aesthetic attention is that itdoes not restrict the class of aesthetic objects to beautiful objects.Anything can be an object of aesthetic contemplation as long as itwill eventually sustain disinterested absorption, and this can be forany number of reasons. These can include being beautiful, beingprovocative, being interestingly ugly, or even conveying a certainkind of truth.

For the rest of this paper, I shall consider and attempt to refuteevery reason I have been able to discover which purports to showthat a desire for knowledge is incompatible with aesthetic interest.Here’s the first:

1) Aesthetic interest must be distinct from a desire to knowbecause it is impossible to maintain that the non-representational arts such as music and abstract painting giverise to knowledge of any kind: ‘true’, ‘false’ and ‘improbable’are concepts which simply have no application (at least not inthe senses in which we are interested in them) to these cases. It

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 5

follows that an interest in truth and knowledge is not anelement in aesthetic appreciation.8

In reply, we can point out that just because certain concepts arenot used in criticism of all kinds of art, this does not show thatthe assigning of truth-values does not play a vital role in evalu-ating some kinds of art, i.e., the representational arts. We do notnecessarily look for charm in tragedy or for profundity insalon music, but it would be foolish to rule out charm and pro-fundity as valuable aesthetic qualities just because they do nothave universal application to all forms of art. Similarly, eventhough truth and falsity may have little role to play in music anddance criticism, they may still play a vital role in the criticism ofliterature.

2) It is quite possible to have a deep admiration for a work ofart while disagreeing profoundly with what it asserts. Isenberg,who endorses the no-truth position, takes as an example thelines from Keats’ Hyperion, when Oceanus, one of the old Titansnow deposed by Zeus and the other Olympians, speaks theseconsoling words to Saturn: ‘So on our heels a fresh perfectiontreads,/ A power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fatedto excel us, as we pass / In glory that old darkness; nor are we/ thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule / Of shapelesschaos . . . . . . for ‘tis the eternal law / The first in beautyshould be first in might.’ Isenberg comments: ‘I should think ita fair paraphrase to say that this asserts a constant and unend-ing progress from lower to higher in nature. Herbert Spencermay have believed something of the sort. We do not believeanything of the sort.’9

It is true that many statements or enactments of falsehoods do notaffect our literary assessments of the works in which they aremade, but again there is no reason to generalize from ‘Certainfalsehoods do not affect a work’s aesthetic quality,’ to ‘All

8 This objection is raised by Peter Lamarque in his ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts:Marking the Boundaries’, in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 127–139.

9 Arnold Isenberg, ‘The Problem of Belief’, in Aesthetics and Critical Theory, eds: WilliamCallaghan, Leigh Cauman et al. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 88.

6 M. W. ROWE

falsehoods do not affect a work’s aesthetic quality.’ The passageIsenberg quotes from Hyperion is part of a speech made by theTitan, Oceanus. Clearly, authors are not committed to endorsingthe truth of utterances made by their characters, and Keats is nomore committed to the utterances of Oceanus than Shakespeareis to the speeches of Lady Macbeth. Indeed, Keats and Shakes-peare might be congratulated on documenting the truth that, incertain circumstances, a sufficiently desperate character will utterfalsehoods of just this kind.

Assuming we can tell the difference between authors and nar-rators (although this is not always easy) we shall think the worse ofa work where the author articulates false or obnoxious opinions,and we shall be even more unsympathetically disposed to a workthat enacts false or obnoxious views. However, it is still possible tolove and admire works which both state and enact falsehoodsbecause truth is merely one artistic quality amongst others, and afalse or otherwise obnoxious book can still be intensely alive,observant, funny, imaginative, emotionally generous, charmingand so forth.

3) Ignoring the truth-value of a work’s propositions is held tobe a prerequisite for treating it aesthetically, as opposed totreating it as a source of factual information. Thus, if I amreading a Victorian history book about ancient Rome as awork of history (i.e., because I want to find out about andunderstand what occurred in ancient Rome) and you produceconclusive proof that this book is a tissue of errors and mis-understandings, then, unless I have good reasons for thinkingthe rest of the book more reliable, I can no longer explain myreading with reference to my interest in ancient Rome. If,however, I say that I am continuing to read because I envy thestyle and enjoy the story, you might reasonably reply: ‘Ofcourse you can read it as literature, I merely said it was worth-less as history.’

Reading a work as literature (rather than history or science)does mean giving up an interest in the literal truth of most of itspropositions, but this does not mean giving up an interest intruth altogether: it means only that literary interest is focused ona different kind of truth. Imaginative literature is concerned notwith categorical truths (what is and was) but with modal truths

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 7

(what could be and what might have been);10 it is not concernedwith all modal truths of this kind, but only with how humanbeings (or other rational creatures) might think, feel and act;it does not attempt to understand these things by formulatinglaws but by using the projective imagination; and finally, litera-ture can not only state its truths, but also enact and symbolizethem.

As this last clause implies, there are exceptions to the rule ofliterature’s not being concerned with straightforward factualtruth. The first is that we find factual errors (as opposed to inten-tional authorial deviations from known facts) distracting, and thiscan lower our opinion of a work, even though reading a work asfiction does not mean reading it to acquire facts.11 The second isthat where literature makes a generalization about human nature,we require it to be true or close to the truth because such state-ments are at least partially based on the kind of modal enactmentsfound in literature.

Consequently, even when you are persuaded that the historicalworks of Herodotus and Sir Walter Raleigh are distinctly unreli-able on particular facts, you can still value them from the literarystandpoint, not only because of their narrative power and style,but because they state, enact and symbolize profound truths abouthuman nature.

4) Even in the case of representational art, when you feel youhave undergone a profoundly cognitive experience, it oftenseems impossible to say what you know which you did not knowbefore. I.A. Richards therefore dismisses as illusory the ideathat the knowledge conveyed by the text is the central core of itsvalue: ‘The central experience of tragedy and its chief value isan attitude indispensable to a fully developed life. But in thereading of King Lear what facts verifiable by science or acceptedand believed in as we accept and believe in ascertained facts arerelevant? None whatever.’12 In a similar spirit, Jerome Stolnitzclaims that it is extremely unclear what the ‘truths’ derived

10 This suggestion is, of course, Aristotle’s. See, The Art of Poetry, trans.: Ingram Bywater(Oxford: OUP, 1920), p. 43.

11 On the importance of factual errors in the evaluation of literature see my ‘Lamarqueand Olsen on Literature and Truth’, in Rowe, Literature and Philosophy, pp. 126–47.

12 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul,1955), p. 282.

8 M. W. ROWE

from novels are supposed to be. From Crime and Punishment hederives the moral: ‘The criminal [some criminals?] [all crimi-nals?] [criminals in St Petersburg] [criminals who kill old mon-eylenders, and come under the influence of saintly prostitutes]desire to be caught and punished.’ The clear implication isthat, because the proposition learned cannot be specified,nothing of any kind has been learned from the novel.13

If literature were only concerned with conveying propositionalknowledge, then these objections would be well founded.However, there are at least five kinds of non-propositionalknowledge:

i) Knowledge by acquaintance. This is perceptual knowledgeof the world (what a certain shade of red looks like, how theclarinet sounds, what Paris is like).

ii) Empathic knowledge. This is knowledge of what it is liketo be someone other than your current self (a refugee, abeauty queen, passed over for promotion again).

iii) Knowledge of how to do something. This would includeknowing how to checkmate, tie a shoelace, play the violin,abseil.

iv) Phronesis. This is practical knowledge or knowledge of whatto do (e.g., how tactfully to diffuse someone’s anger orwhen to get married). This differs from iii in at least threeways. First, there are no acknowledged experts in suchmatters (Aristotle says that in these circumstances we needto speak to a wise and experienced friend) whereas thereclearly are experts at playing chess and playing the violin.Second, there are no prodigies. It is evident that there arevery brilliant five-year-old violinists and chess masters;whereas a five-year-old divorce lawyer or prime minister isunthinkable. Third, know-how is more localized thanphronesis. We would naturally expect someone wise andexperienced to make good decisions about getting mar-ried, having children, accepting job offers etc, and if his

13 Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art’, in Peter Lamarque and SteinHaugom Olsen (eds), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition (Oxford:Blackwell, 2006), p. 342.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 9

performance is very uneven some explanation is required.But no explanation is required to make us understand whysomeone who plays the accordion well does not also speakIcelandic, or why someone who can tie a whole variety ofknots is not an accomplished watercolourist

v) Learning how certain situations could be reconceptualized:for example, seeing some of the people you meet as Salin-ger’s ‘phoneys’, or coming to see the world through theprism of Hardy’s pessimism, or seeing a landscape as a partof the geology which lies beneath it. This reconceptualiza-tion may well have practical consequences, but its percep-tual component is equally important.

Often, these kinds of knowledge can be increased by interactionwith the real world, but sometimes they can also be increasedthrough the use of the imagination. For example, you canimagine a shade of green you have not seen, which lies betweentwo shades of green you have seen; you can suddenly realize howto finger a difficult keyboard passage by practising it in your head;you can rehearse various ways of approaching a difficult personwhen they need to be told something disagreeable; you can try outdifferent ways of viewing the world by running through them inimagination.

Knowing that [such-and-such is the case] can be captured inpropositions, the five kinds of knowledge listed above cannot. Inthe case of knowledge by acquaintance, it is sometimes impossibleto say anything meaningful at all about a newly encounteredphenomenon (e.g., what red looks like), in other cases, it’s pos-sible to say a great deal about a new experience (e.g., what Paris islike) but no one supposes that what can be said is equivalent to theknowledge acquired by actually undergoing it.

Now consider two people who are asked how to tie a shoelace.One may be able to tie a lace rapidly but be utterly inept attranslating his practical ability into words; another may give you afluent description and yet be unable to carry out the practical task.The same distinction – between knowing something and beingable to articulate what you know – applies to knowledge of what todo, and knowledge which allows us to reconceptualize reality. Imay be able to give a few rules of thumb to help someone betactful, but understanding my sentences and thinking them truewill not, by themselves, make him tactful; similarly, I may be ableto say a number of things I have learnt from Hardy, but this will

10 M. W. ROWE

not necessarily allow someone to understand what a pessimisticvision of the world is like.

If someone asked me what I have learnt form my general expe-rience of the world over the last five years, I could say that I’velearnt what Bangkok and Bergen were like, what it was like to livein various parts of London, and to teach at two universities. Thisknowledge is significant because it affects my interests, outlook,feelings and abilities, but much of it is perceptual, practical andempathic knowledge which is too particular to put into words.However, it would be odd to deny that my last five years of expe-rience count as knowledge for this reason.

What applies to experience of what has happened also appliesto experiences of what might or might have happened, and this isthe kind of experience we gain from encountering representa-tional art. All representational art shows us scenarios, but litera-ture has the apparently paradoxical power of being able to showby means of statement. This is partly because a whole narrativecan show truths which any one proposition cannot; but mainlybecause the propositions of literature prompt my imagination,allowing me to feel and picture the things and events described.In reading a novel, I live through something in imagination, Iextend potentialities of my own being, and I imaginatively expe-rience people, places and incidents which I could not have imag-ined unaided. In this way, literature can increase the detail andvividness with which I envisage hypothetical scenes; enlarge myknow-how; intensify my powers of empathy; hone my understand-ing of human affairs, and allow me to discover new ways of con-ceptualizing reality. All these kinds of knowledge can affect myfuture life by operating below the propositional level: structuringthis in terms of that, highlighting this, downplaying that, makingthis seem possible, making that seem comprehensible, and so on.

I can often describe aspects of the novel-reading experience toanother person, but, as with real life, no one supposes that acquir-ing this information is equivalent to the knowledge derived fromreading the novel. Thus both Richards and Stolnitz are quitewrong to think that, because I have learned no general proposi-tions from a novel or play, I must have learnt nothing.

If I am asked what general truths about human nature I havelearned over the last five years of my life, then I might be able to saysomething (‘Don’t trust casual acquaintances,’ ‘Seize all opportu-nities’) but it is more than likely that I won’t be able to think ofany such propositions at all. Similarly, you might also be able to

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 11

think of a few propositional truths that a novel conveys (and asnovels are sometimes self-consciously constructed by their authorsto demonstrate certain truths, such propositions may be easier tofind), but again, it would not be surprising if you were unable todiscover any.

5) Stolnitz goes on to claim that if, in spite of the pessimismstated in objection 4, you succeed in articulating a propositionalaccount of what you have learnt from a work of art, then theseartistic truths will be ‘preponderantly, distinctly banal’. Forinstance, he infers ‘stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keepattractive people apart’ from Pride and Prejudice, and ‘Pride goethbefore a fall’ from the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy.14

But it is not difficult to think of other works from which it ispossible to infer propositional insights which are neither banalnor uncontentious. Measure for Measure, I would argue, offers acritique of act-centred morality and suggests it should be replacedby an agent-centred morality based on enlightened self-knowledge.15 This is not banal. Similarly, Mansfield Park, offers acritique of charm, grace, liveliness, excitement and spontaneity,and suggests these qualities are inferior to conventional morality,piety, withdrawal, sincerity and rest.16 This is not banal either; infact, many readers of the novel find its moral outlook distinctlydistasteful and hard to swallow.

It may even be possible to infer a non-trivial propositionalstatement from Crime and Punishment: ‘There could be a criminalwho desires to be caught and punished’ summarizes a truth thatcan be learned from Dostoevsky’s work (the novel cannot supportany statements about some or all such criminals, given that thenarrative contains only one) and it is greatly to Dostoevsky’s creditthat he renders such a counter-intuitive proposition psychologi-cally plausible.

Stolnitz goes on to make two further and interrelated points aboutthe irrelevance of truth to art.

14 Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, pp. 338 and 340.15 I argue for this conclusion in my ‘The Dissolution of Goodness: Measure for Measure

and Classical Ethics’, in Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, pp. 92–125.16 See Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, in The Opposing Self (Oxford: OUP, 1980),

pp. 181–202.

12 M. W. ROWE

6) The propositions of folk wisdom – which, according toStolnitz, are all the truths that can be acquired from the arts –are hardly unique to the arts: ‘None of its truths are peculiar toart. All are proper to some extra-artistic sphere of the greatworld. So considered, there are no artistic truths. Not one.’17

7) Works of art are insufficiently commensurable to form abody of knowledge: ‘Artistic truths, like the works of art thatgive rise to them, are discretely unrelated and therefore formno corpus either of belief or knowledge. Hence formal contra-dictions are tolerated effortlessly, if they are ever remarked.’18

Measure for Measure’s debate between act- and agent-centredmoralities can be found in books of moral philosophy; and thecase made by Mansfield Park in hundreds of Christian sermonsand pamphlets. We can thus agree with Stolnitz that many truthsderived from the arts are not only to be found in the arts. None-theless, novels can make different visions uniquely concrete, pro-tracted, detailed and vivid. And the author, as well as commentingexplicitly on the characters and actions, can implicitly guide usthrough a novel’s complexities, highlighting this, foregroundingthat, hinting at parallels and patterns which we might have missedby ourselves. Consequently, we need feel no embarrassment inconceding to Stolnitz that knowledge conveyed by the arts is notuniquely conveyed by the arts. Some of it can be obtained from ageneral experience of life, some of it can be obtained from phi-losophy, but fiction’s distinctive blend of pleasure, imaginativeexperience, and reflection makes it uniquely well placed to conveycertain kinds of experiential and practical knowledge.

However, we should not concede that the knowledge conveyedby novels is too ‘discretely unrelated and therefore form[s] nocorpus either of belief or knowledge [,] hence formal contradic-tions are tolerated effortlessly, if they are ever remarked.’ Thelanguage here is misleading. There is certainly no corpus of artisticknowledge, and normal propositions of fictions do not contradictone another (‘X might be the case’ and ‘Not-X might be the case’is not a contradiction). But having said this, the statements about

17 Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, p. 341.18 Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, p. 342.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 13

human nature stated or implied in different works of fiction cancontradict one another, and the visions of individual authorsare often sufficiently commensurable and various to make com-parison and evaluation profitable. Strawson, outlining someof the ideals which literature has to offer us, emphasizes theiropposition:

As for the ways of life that . . . present themselves at differenttimes as each uniquely satisfactory, there can be no doubt abouttheir variety and opposition. The ideas of self-obliterating devo-tion to duty or to service of others; of personal honour andmagnanimity; of asceticism, contemplation and retreat; ofaction, dominance and power; of the cultivation of ‘an exquis-ite sense of the luxurious’; of simple human solidarity andhuman endeavour; of a refined complexity of social existence;of a constantly maintained and renewed sense of affinity withnatural things – any of these ideas, and a great many others too,may form the core and substance of a personal ideal. . . . ‘Thenobleness of life is to do thus’ or, sometimes, ‘The sanity of lifeis to do thus’; such may be the devices with which these imagespresent themselves.19

8) The durability of our absorption in a text is one criterion ofaesthetic merit. If, however, we are simply interested in learn-ing something from a work of art then it would seem to be verydifficult to explain why we return again and again to a text weunderstand perfectly well. Given that we cannot learn what wealready know, continuing curiosity is only a comprehensiblemotive if we have never learned or have simply forgotten whata text can teach us.

There are a number of answers to this. The first is that works ofliterature are often long and complex and we can never be surethat we have completely mastered them or have learned all theyhave to teach. Second, even if we restrict ourselves to proposi-tional truths, we realize that these truths can be known withdifferent degrees of intensity. We can agree to a proposition, andacknowledge its truth, without realizing or assenting to all its

19 P.F. Strawson, ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’, in his Freedom and Resentment(London: Methuen, 1974), p. 26. The literary origins of Strawson’s ‘images’ are obvious.

14 M. W. ROWE

propositional implications, or all its implications for our emo-tions, dispositions, actions and habits. ‘Traffic is dangerous,’ is astatement I can happily assent to now; but after a traumatic caraccident my assent is both deeper and more intense, and it has afar greater effect on my thoughts, feelings and actions. This is partof the distinction Cardinal Newman attempted to draw in hiswritings about Real and Notional Assent.

The third and the most important response, once again, is thatliterary knowledge is not propositional. You either know theproposition ‘Beethoven died in 1827’ or you don’t, but knowingyour way around a town, having the ability to diffuse anger,knowing what it’s like to be a refugee, are all matters of degree.Your skill, or the intensity of an experience, can wane or fade withtime, and continual returns to a work may be necessary to ensureyour abilities are honed and your recollections vivid. The onlytime you would not have a reason to return to a work for theknowledge it conveys is when you have absolute and photographicrecall of it. But this, of course, is exactly the same circumstance aswhen you would not need to return to a non-representationalwork that conveys no knowledge at all.

9) W.W. Robson suggests that doubt has been cast on therelevance of truth-value in assessing the quality of literature byphrases like the following from Leavis, which describe how thethought processes required for understanding a work of litera-ture differ from those required for understanding a scientifictext:20 ‘Words in poetry invite us, not to “think about” and judgebut to “feel into” and “become” – to realise a complex experi-ence that is given in the words.’21

This fails for a similar reason. It may be true that poetry does notinvite us to ‘think about’ and ‘judge’ in some analytic or deductivesense, but thoughts and judgements of this kind may not be theonly route to truth. Indeed, as I’ve tried to show above, we some-times derive knowledge from literature by use of empathy, andthis exactly requires that we, in Leavis’s words, ‘feel into’ and‘become.’

20 W.W. Robson, ‘Ivor Winters: Counter Romantic’, in his The Definition of Literature(Cambridge: CUP, 1978), p. 263.

21 F.R. Leavis, ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’, in his The Common Pursuit (Harmond-sworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 212–13.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 15

10) Isenberg’s other central objection to the relevance of truthto aesthetic judgement receives a condensed summary fromR.K. Elliott:

. . . Aesthetic experience is the contemplation of an imaginaryworld, which is the meaning of a literary work. The imaginaryworld is the ‘aesthetic object’, and only properties internal toit are relevant to aesthetic judgement. If attention is directedaway from the aesthetic object in an attempt to discover itsvalue in its correspondence with something external to it, theaesthetic point of view is therefore abandoned, experienceceases to be aesthetic experience, and any evaluative judgmentgrounded upon any discovered correspondence (or lack ofcorrespondence) is not an aesthetic judgment.22

If Isenberg’s objection is correct, then a) the idea of correspon-dence must make some sense, b) the kind of investigation re-quired to determine a representation’s truth-value must distractattention from the representation, c) there is at least the possibil-ity of a considerable lapse of time between understanding therepresentation and deciding whether or not it is true. (Isenbergis quite explicit on this last point when he writes, in his paper‘Critical Communication’, ‘[that] questions about meaning areprovisionally separable if finally inseparable from questionsabout validity and truth is shown by the fact that meanings can beexchanged without the corresponding cognitive decisions.’23)

All these considerations apply to a bald a posteriori propositionlike ‘Between sixty and eighty thousand people live in Keighley’. Ican understand it perfectly well but I have no idea whether it’s true,and to determine its truth-value would require considerable labourover and above the apprehension of its meaning. It is also clear thatthe idea of truth as some kind of correspondence between theproposition and a state of affairs is at least an intuitively plausibleidea; and one aspect of this is that the population of Keighley musthave played a part in causing the cognitive states of the knower.

However, none of these considerations apply to a priori knowl-edge. As Descartes argues, to apprehend a simple a priori propo-sition clearly and distinctly is to be immediately convinced of its

22 R.K. Elliott, ‘Poetry and Truth’, Analysis, 27, (1967), p. 77.23 Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, in Aesthetics and Critical Theory, p. 156.

16 M. W. ROWE

truth, and if someone were to deny that ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘If A then A’then the usual explanation would be that he did not understandthem. There is no time-consuming evidence gathering to distractus from the proposition, and the idea that the truth or justifiedassertion of ‘If A then A’ depends on a correspondence betweenthe proposition and ‘If A then A’ states of affairs is not evenintelligible let alone attractive.

Literary truth is normally thought to be a posteriori truth, butwhen we look at Wordsworth’s claim that literary truth is not‘individual and local, but general and operative; not standing onexternal testimony . . . but truth which is its own testimony [my italics]’24

or Blake’s remark that ‘Truth can never be told so as to beunderstood but not believed,’25 it is evident that they think literarytruth is akin to a priori knowledge, and therefore avoids Isenberg’sobjection.

What arguments can be offered in favour of the idea that literarytruth is akin to a priori truth? Let me begin by considering a passagewhere an author has an unexpected insight into one of his charac-ters. It comes from John Carey’s book, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius,where Carey paraphrases a passage from Vanity Fair. Rawdon is theneglected husband, Becky his wife, and Lord Steryne her lover:

Rawdon, escaping unbeknown from the sponging house, sur-prises [Becky], aglitter with guilt and diamonds, in Steryne’scompany, and flings the nobleman bleeding to the ground. At ablow, Becky’s schemes lie in ruins. Years of hard work andhypocrisy are cancelled in an instant. She might justifiably feelboth aghast and aggrieved. But in fact she watches Rawdon,quivering with something like adoration and something likedesire. ‘She admired her husband, strong, brave and victorious’.‘When I wrote that sentence’, Thackeray told Hannay, ‘I slappedmy fist on the table and said “That is a touch of genius” ’.26

Is it a touch of genius? Is it even plausible? Looking for some kindof empirical correspondence will not help decide the matter.Thus interviews with wives who have seen their lovers assaulted by

24 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)’ in Stephen Gill (ed.),William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors series, (Oxford: OUP, 1984), p. 605.

25 William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in Selected Poems of William Blake,ed.: F.W. Bateson (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 68.

26 John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 182.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 17

their husbands will not decide the issue. Nor will interviews withyoung wives caught with elderly aristocratic lovers, or young wivescalled ‘Becky’ surprised while dining with elderly aristocraticlovers by handsome military husbands. Trends, laws and generali-ties have no bearing on the kind of dispute described. Even ifthere were an interviewee whose character and circumstanceswere identical with Becky’s, and who said that she was aggrievedby her husband’s behaviour, then this would still not show thatThackeray had made a misjudgement. There are clearly an infi-nite number of possible people and circumstances that satisfyThackeray’s description, and the fact that one possible persondoes not behave in the way he specifies does not show that otherpossible people might not behave in exactly the way he describes.

In fact, two kinds of consideration are relevant to this kind ofdispute. The first, and most important, is imaginatively engagingwith the details of the text, thinking about the individual charac-ter’s motivation and background, and reviewing the various inter-pretations of her behaviour. When literary critics argue about thiskind of issue, the overwhelming majority of their considerationsare of this kind, and they will usually emphasize certain features ofa text so that they become highlighted in the reader’s conscious-ness. One critic will say: ‘Becky’s far too cynical and self-interestedto allow herself to be overcome by such a feeling’; while anotherwill emphasize her impulsiveness and susceptibility to handsomemen. Thus, in order to justify a literary insight, a critic generallydoes not have to leave the page.

In this, the justification of literary knowledge resembles thejustification of a priori knowledge. A mathematical calculation, forexample, is justified, not by talking about your maths teachers, butby working through the stages of a calculation, asking for assentto each step. Leavis describes literary criticism as functioning inthe same way: ‘The critical procedure is tactical: the critic, withhis finger moving from this point to that in the text, aims at soordering his particular judgments (“This is so, isn’t it?”) that,“Yes” having in the succession of them almost inevitably come foran answer, the rightness of the inclusive main judgments standsclear for prompted recognition . . .’27

27 F.R. Leavis, ‘Thought, Language and Objectivity’, in his The Living Principle (London,1975), p. 35. Leavis is here talking about how a critic evaluates a poem, but, as I arguebelow, exactly the same kind of argument is employed when we argue about the plausibilityof a fictional character’s feelings and actions.

18 M. W. ROWE

The second consideration is general knowledge of humannature and the kind of character being discussed. This may seem tocontradict what I said above about the irrelevance of empiricalevidence in disputes about literary truth, but this is not the case.Our view of how a character could behave can be adjusted byour experience of other human beings and, in particular, of thekind of human being in question, but there will always be a gapbetween previous real cases and the fictional example being dis-cussed. This gap can only be crossed by means of judgements, andjudgements of this kind are always open to dispute and latermodification. But the opinion of a critic with extensive knowledgeof the relevant kind will have, all things being equal, more weightthen one which lacks it; and a book we find utterly compellingwhen young can become increasingly implausible as we grow olderand acquire more knowledge of life. In this, literary judgementmore closely resembles a posteriori knowledge, since how we cameby our knowledge, and how reliable it is, are clearly relevant issues.However, when engaged in critical argument, we are not consciousof passing from the fictional character to the real cases and backagain; rather, we use the sensibility these real cases have helpedform, to guide us through the fictional world presented.

Pursuing literary truth does not mean setting aside a text, atleast temporarily, in order to compare it carefully with someoriginal. This procedure, as Isenberg correctly sees, would distractus from the aesthetic object. On the contrary, pursuing literaryknowledge means paying closer attention to the text, engaging withit more imaginatively, and looking for patterns and coherences wemay have overlooked before. As in mathematics, truths and errorsare not discovered and rectified by empirical research, but byreflection on the concepts employed and the events depicted. Andas in mathematics, literary truths are not conveyed via a text, theyare conveyed by a text; or perhaps it is more accurate to say thatthey become known through a reader thinking with a text. Isuspect this is because, in both mathematics and literature, we arenot interested in real existences. We begin with certain fictionalassumptions, and then in both cases we use the imagination todiscover what the consequences of these assumptions will be. Bothsubjects are not concerned with correspondences (although thesemight exist) but with certain kinds of coherence which the readermust follow and assent to.

In sum, I would argue that literary truths are akin to simple apriori knowledge. There is no notion that a fiction corresponds to

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 19

reality; there is no notion that investigating the truth of a fictionneed distract us from the fiction; and we are usually in a positionto determine the truth or falsity of a fiction immediately, even ifour judgement later changes. The only respect in which literarytruth is not like a priori thought is that experience of life andpeople can influence and change our judgements.

Literature, we feel, might have conveyed truths about math-ematics, physics and botany. Why, therefore, is it only concernedwith the limited class of truths discussed above – modal truthsabout rational creatures discovered by the projective imagination?The reason, I think, is as follows. If I am asked to evaluate anabstract painting, I do not need consciously to go outside thework, I can make my judgement immediately, and if you do notshare my judgement I can attempt to bring you round by empha-sizing one aspect and playing down another. The way I evaluateand argue about the qualities of an abstract work is thereforeexactly the same as the way I evaluate and argue about the plau-sibility of a fictional character’s behaviour. In both cases, whatI have elsewhere called ‘critical reasoning’ is employed.28 This isthe reason why, of all the kinds of truth which could have beenconveyed by literature, it actually enacts and conveys modal truthsdiscovered by the concrete imagination. The two kinds of interest(pure form and human truth) we take in representational artappear, when superimposed, indistinguishable, and we thus feelno sense of strain when passing from one topic to the other;indeed, the way an artist uses one to enhance the other will be anobject of keenest interest.

11) ‘If literary works are construed’, write Lamarque andOlsen, ‘as having the constitutive aim of advancing truths abouthuman concerns by means of general propositions implicitly orexplicitly contained in them, then one should expect somekind of supporting argument, the more so since the purportedtruths are mostly controversial. [In this, they clearly disagreewith Stolnitz who claims that artistic truths are “banal”.]However, there are no such arguments or debate either in theliterary work itself, or in literary criticism.’29

28 See my ‘Criticism Without Theory’, in Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, pp. 22–43.29 Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, p. 365.

20 M. W. ROWE

12) Critics of cognitive theories of aesthetic value frequentlyask how it is possible to distinguish between the alleged knowl-edge supplied by literature and mere opinion; how can we tellthe difference between what is true and what merely purportsto be true? Since they conclude that, in a literary context, wecannot tell the difference, they reject literature’s claim toimpart discoveries and insights.30 Objection 11 says that wedistinguish between knowledge and opinion by means of argu-ment. The current objection is open to the idea that there aremethods other than argument for distinguishing between thetwo, but claims that, whatever these methods are, literature andcriticism lack them.

Contra Lamarque and Olsen, there are endless arguments anddisputes in literary criticism, not only about the views stated orenacted in various works, but also about the plausibility of char-acters’ behaviour and reactions. Indeed, the generalizationsstated in fictions are generally based on the behaviour shown inthe work; the generalizations enacted in a work are clearly logi-cally reliant on the behaviour shown. A recent example is thedispute between John Banville and Craig Raine about the plausi-bility of an incident in the last chapter of Ian McEwan’s novel,Saturday.31 In this scene, the hero’s daughter reads Arnold’s‘Dover Beach’ to a violent thug who is threatening her family, andin the resultant mood-swing he allows himself to be overpowered.Admittedly, he is suffering from a degenerative brain disorder,but the whole incident, where the art of poetry triumphs overviolent philistinism, is uncomfortably close to a literary man’sfantasy.

A critic is only justified in claiming that a certain character’sactions are unlikely if he has imagined a more plausible set ofactions. In certain cases, a critic, outraged by the implausibility ofwhat he reads, will actually write what should have happened andwhat the author should have written. Thus Strindberg obliginglyrevises some of Helmer’s speeches in A Doll’s House :

30 Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, p. 368.31 Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 218–228. See John Ban-

ville’s review, New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No.9, May 26th 2005, and Craig Raine’s reply,Times Literary Supplement, 2/12/2005.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 21

Nora: ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that this is the first time that wetwo, husband and wife, have talked seriously to one another?’Helmer is so taken aback by this mendacious question that he(or the author!) answers: ‘Seriously – what do you mean byseriously?’ – The author thus achieving his object, Helmer hasbeen made to look a fool. He should have answered: ‘No, mylittle pet, it doesn’t occur to me at all. We talked very seriouslytogether when our children were born, we talked about theirfuture. We talked very seriously when you wanted to install theforger Krogstad, as head clerk in the Bank. We talked veryseriously when my life was in danger, and about giving MrsLinde a job, and about running the house, and about your deadfather, and our syphilitic friend Dr Rank. We have talked seri-ously for eight long years, but we have joked too, and we wereright to do so, for life isn’t only a serious business. We couldindeed have had more serious talk if you’d been kind enoughto tell me your worries, but you were too proud, for you pre-ferred to be my doll rather than my friend.’ But Mr Ibsen doesnot allow Helmer to say these sensible things, for he must beshown to be a fool . . . The scene is absurdly false.32

Sometimes discursive prose is dispensed with altogether and awriter simply takes the starting point of a work and then whollyreworks it. Golding was apparently so irritated by the implausibil-ity of Ballantyne’s Coral Island, that he took its starting point – agroup of boys marooned on a deserted island – and then showed,in Lord of the Flies, what he felt would actually happen. Had Bal-lantyne been alive, he would rightly have thought Golding’s bookcritical of his own work.

From these cases we can see that there are other ways apartfrom evidence and analytic argument of showing that a view istrue or false. One of these is demonstrating how a state of affairscan come about through showing it evolve in a complex andplausible narrative. For example, a policeman might ask a youthhow he comes to have three car radios in his knapsack, and thelatter’s fate may well hang on how convincing and coherent thenarrative he produces is, even before its factual content has beenchecked. Narrative is also literature’s method, and it can be usedto answer certain questions. Thus, if someone wonders ‘How can

32 A. Strindberg, Getting Married (London: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 35.

22 M. W. ROWE

someone be reduced to a virtual non-entity through irony?’, thenwe might well direct him to Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice33; ifhe wants to know how a virtuous man can admire someone notin spite of but because of his particularly hateful crimes, then wemight recommend he look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.34

The desire for imaginative knowledge of rational creatures is notthe same as the desire to enjoy certain formal patterns of sound,movement and colour, but the two desires show remarkableformal similarities, and both are part of our desire for aestheticexperience. Thus, when a correct understanding of aestheticknowledge is combined with a correct understanding of the aes-thetic attitude, we see that there is no conflict between aestheticinterest and curiosity about life.35

33 Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, p. 181.34 See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: OUP, 1974), pp. 106–111.35 I would like to thank audiences at the various institutions where versions of this paper

have been read: Oxford, 2006; UEA, 2007; Reading, 2008; and the London AestheticsForum, 2009. The contributions of John Hyman, John Cottingham, Peter Lamarque andStacie Friend were particularly useful, as were a set of comments from the editor of thisissue of Ratio, Severin Schroeder.

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE 23