XII

Literature and Philosophy

[Excerpt]

Renford Bambrough

IN THE beginning was the Word (with a capital W).

In the beginning was the Logos (with a capital Lambda).

The Word is manifold, and in more than one way. First, it is twofold. Logos is both Speech and Reason. When Aristotle says that man is a λογικόν ξώον he means that man is the animal that speaks and reasons. From λόγοϛ and λέγέω in Greek we have inherited logic, but also dialogue; not only syllogism, but dialectic.

The Word is Reason made flesh. Without reason the word is a noise or shape. Without words reason is a ghost.

The Word is also manifold because speech is manifold and Reason is manifold. Each of them is both one and many, and the modes of utterance are modes of understanding.

But the duplicity of speech and reason is united in the Logos.

The multiplicity of the modes of utterance is united in Speech, and the multiplicity of the modes of understanding is united in the power and the glory of the Reason.

When speech and reason were called λόγοϛ the primal unity still hid the duality and multiplicity. Professor H. D. F. Kitto has said that the Greeks had no word for it—no word for literature. He might have added that the Greeks had no word for philosophy, or for history or science. The unity of understanding and of utterance concealed the distinctness of their modes. Plato’s ‘ancient quarrel’ between ποίησιϛ and ϕιλοσοϕία is therefore a γενναΐον ψεΰϭοϛ—a useful fiction. It was because Plato was struggling to separate ποίησιϛ from ϕιλοσοϕία and poetry from philosophy that he found it convenient to represent them as separate and opposed. His struggle to separate them would have been unnecessary if he had not recognised that both in principle and in ancient practice philosophy and literature were modes of one substance. Parmenides and Empedocles were not poets who happened to be interested in philosophy or philosophers who chose to write in verse. Like Homer and Hesiod and Heraclitus

275

and Herodotus they were Greeks who understood and uttered, thought and spoke. Plato’s struggle was an internal struggle not because poetry and philosophy were at war in him but because they were united and he strove to tear them apart.

The Greeks had no word for literature because they still lived in a united Republic of Letters. The themes of literature are the themes of philosophy too: Man, God, Nature, Art; Will, Fate, Necessity, Chance and Freedom; Knowledge and Ignorance, Truth and Falsehood, Good and Evil. To learn about self-knowledge and self-deceit you need the help of Socrates and Oedipus; Bishop Butler and Freud and Hobbes and Hume, but also Proust and George Eliot and Henry James and James Joyce and James Baldwin; Sartre on mauvaise foi in L’Être et le Néant, but also Sartre on mauvaise foi in La Putain Respectueuse. I once met a philosopher from the Sorbonne whose doctoral subject was the idea of seduction in literature and thought, and I was surprised until I remembered Camus and his epigraph from Defoe: ‘II est aussi raisonnable de représenter une espėce d’emprisonnement par une autre que de représenter n’importe quelle chose qui existe réellement par quelque chose qui n’existe pas.’ And this is a special case of Wittgenstein’s remark about the value and the risk of seeing one thing as a limiting case of another. Wittgenstein was struck mainly by the risk, but his own contributions to literature and philosophy display the value, and help to explain why readers with no taste for literature are baffled by his obscurities and are so often at a loss to understand his clarities.

The Republic of Letters is disunited now, and it is therefore its continuing unity that must be emphasised. To emphasise this hidden unity is to provoke insistent stress upon its unconcealed variety, to be involved in a philosophical conflict about literature and philosophy. This conflict serves to suggest a unity of method between philosophy and literature that is just as important and just as liable to be forgotten as the unity of theme. The two main points of method that bind philosophy and literature into one republic are both expressed by Blake.

‘Without contraries is no progression.’ In philosophy and in literature the human understanding moves in dialectical paths, and it does so because of the nature of the tasks that are set before it in those provinces of the republic. Philosophy is the conflict of the obvious with the obvious. It is obvious that we are free agents

276

and obvious that our actions have causes, and obvious that if we are free agents our actions cannot have causes and that if our actions have causes we cannot be free agents. It is obvious that there are many things that we know for certain to be true and obvious that the conditions and criteria that must be satisfied before we can know anything for certain to be true cannot and could not possibly be met. It is obvious that every conclusion needs a reason and that every reason is a conclusion and needs a further reason and so that no procedure of proof can ever come to an end that is not arbitrary and so that no procedure of proof is a procedure of proof. And it is obvious that you and I and Galileo and Pythagoras can prove things.

Moral conflict is often the conflict of right with right, of the obviously right with the obviously right, and this is what among other things explains and justifies the belief that a philosopher should have something to offer to the morally perplexed. Moral perplexity is structurally akin to philosophical perplexity and calls for the same dialectical procedures.

Tragedy is often concerned with moral conflict, and that to some extent explains and to nearly the same extent justifies the belief that tragedy is the conflict of right with right. A problem play is also a play about a conflict between something obvious and something obvious. (Even if every tragedy is a problem play, not every problem play is a tragedy.)

‘The Holiness of minute particulars’. Blake’s phrase is inscribed on the ark of the republic’s covenant. T. E. Hulme’s gists and piths are to the same effect: ‘Something is always lost in generalisation. A railway leaves out all the gaps of dirt between. Generalisations are only means of getting about.’ (Speculations, p. 230). These generalisations of Blake and Hulme are means of getting as near as their own justice will allow to a summing-up of the procedures of literary and philosophical dialectic. A dialectical conflict is normally a conflict between generalities, which are partial and distorting because they are generalities, and the process of resolving such a conflict is the process of examining more minutely and particularly the minute particulars concerning which the opposed generalities are in conflict. Such a method of reasoning is usually informal, and its typical informality serves to link it with literature rather than with the formal and generalising mathematical and natural sciences, and so to disguise from many

277

of its exponents as well as from nearly all its critics the fact that it is a method of reasoning at all.

Such a method is not confined to literature and philosophy, and it may be practised with a high degree of formality, as may be seen in the operation of the adversary system in courts of law. The system stylises and institutionalises what is in outline the same dialectical procedure for discovering and displaying an informal and complex pattern of details without losing scope and generality. What it stylises and institutionalises is the method of conversation, a mode of speech and reason which is itself a plurality as well as a unity, ranging as it does from Odysseus in the tent of Achilles or Jesus with the elders in the Temple to the austerities or asperities or banalities of police interrogation, bus queue altercation, lovers’ quarrel. Question Time, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society or extraordinary general meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The dialectical or adversary system that is the de jure method of the law is de facto the method of philosophy and history and criticism, in general of the humanities—of what in reports of the General Board of the Faculties at Cambridge are happily called the literary subjects. It is their conversational character, their untidy informality, that lays them open to the suspicion of indiscipline and subjectivity, of not getting anywhere. A conversation seems to have achieved nothing if we cannot say what it has achieved ; but the appearance of failure is often deceptive. (A man I see every day may change without my noticing that he has changed. I may notice the change and not be able to say how he has changed.)

In ordinary conversation we make many remarks that are trivial and obvious; it is cold for the time of year, but to say so may just be to pass the time of day. In ordinary conversation we often make remarks that are obvious without being trivial. It may be obvious that she loves me or that she loves me not, and still important to me that she should answer Yes or No. In conversational conflict between the obvious and the obvious, and therefore in literary and moral and philosophical conflict too, it is necessary for both sides to state the obvious ; for each to re-affirm what the other knows but denies or forgets because it seems to conflict with what is also obvious and is nearer to the front of his mind. Plato’s judgement was sound when he linked dialectic with Anamnesis, with reminding and recalling of what we know but

278

still need to be told by ourselves or others. And reminders are usually of minute particulars, of forgotten instances to which some hasty generality is vulnerable. Let me illustrate the importance of reminders of instances by reminding you of instances.

In his exchange with Professor René Wellek on ‘Literary' Criticism and Philosophy’ Dr. Leavis declines to state any norms or criteria or principles by which he judges works of literature. He hints that philosophy may have need of such machinery, but literary criticism is concrete and philosophy is abstract, and we must fear the blurrings and bluntings and muddlings and misdirections that are commonly the ‘consequences of queering one discipline with the habits of another’. Most people, whether they are philosophers or not, are unthinkingly on Wellek’s side. Leavis has been challenged by many critics who were not philosophers to define his terms and state his principles. The old Socratic assumptions die hard, partly because of the influence of Socrates but mainly because of the powerful plausibility by which they beguiled Socrates in the first place. Even Leavis in his answer to Wellek is defensive on the philosophical point, and is uncompromising only in the claim to have a discipline of his own that can dispense with philosophic apparatus.

I believe that Leavis is right on the philosophical point as well as on the literary point; right on the philosophical point because he is right on the literary point, and because that point is not just one about literature but about the nature of all criticism, about the nature of values, and about the nature of all the modes of utterance and of understanding. Always and everywhere we must worship the Logos in the holiness of minute particulars.

So when Leavis offers what he pertinently calls ‘some elementary observations by way of reminder’ he might well have said that philosophy could do with more of the habits of literature and criticism and that criticism could do with less of what critics often think are the grander habits of philosophy. The definition of tragedy has by this time turned into the tragedy of definition, and when critics parade their postulates and nail down their necessary and sufficient conditions for being a sonnet or a novel or an epic, or Romantic or pastoral or picaresque, they are aping the apes among the philosophers who from Socrates to Russell have played follow-my-leader and queered philosophy with the bad habits of philosophers.

279

But many philosophers, like most critics, have been too good at their job to practise what they have preached. The ‘placing’, the setting of instance by instance, that Leavis rightly represents as the concrete and intricate task of the critic, is sometimes well done and often boldly attempted even by critics who will tell you, because they will also tell themselves, that they are doing and ought to be doing something quite different. Even when they do go through the motions of the abstract gymnastics that their theories call for they are usually covering with only a thin disguise a more or less well directed attention to the despised particularities. The wild goose of definition is never captured, but the chase takes the hunter over just the rugged and uneven ground whose contours he needs to survey.

It is the same story in philosophy as in criticism. There too the role of abstraction and generalisation is to take one side in a dialectical pattern whose objective is always and whose achievement is sometimes to set out what in particular stands where and in what relations to this and that and the other thing. Leavis has said elsewhere that in the last resort a critical conversation comes to this: that one man says ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ and the other answers ‘Yes, but . . .’. In his answer to Wellek he does not make strong enough and wide enough claims for this technique of comparison, on which all reasoning and not just all critical reasoning is ultimately founded; though he does insist on the point that I most want to extend from criticism to all the modes of thought when he claims for his methods a ‘relative precision that makes this summarising seem intolerably clumsy and inadequate’.

Professor Donald MacKinnon has warned philosophers in general of the dangers of an ‘excessively cerebral’ approach to literature and has rebuked Aristotle in particular for forgetting when he came to write on poetry that according to his own wider philosophy all knowledge must be of what is universal. But Aristotle in the Poetics is not so much forgetting that knowledge is of the universal as remembering that there are more ways than one of achieving a grasp of the universal. When he says that poetry is more serious and more philosophical than history, that it deals not only with what particular things Alcibiades did and what in particular happened to Alcibiades but with what is universal, he is fully faithful to his wider theory of knowledge and its modes. For as much as any of the great philosophers he saw and emphas-

280

ised that only through the particular can the universal be apprehended, and that much at least of the value of knowing the universal consists in the fact that to grasp the universal is to grasp the particular. He is therefore near to Ezra Pound’s conception of literature as a science: ‘Art does not avoid universals, it strikes them all the harder in that it strikes through particulars.’ (Literary Essays, p. 420). ‘The arts, literature, poesy, are a science just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man, mankind and the individual. The subject of chemistry is matter considered as to its composition’ (p. 42). Pound may be unduly limiting the subject-matter of the science that is literature, but on the perils of the old bad dichotomies he says the right things one after another: ‘Saxpence reward for any authenticated case of intellect having stopped a chap’s writing poesy! You might as well claim that railway tracks stop the engine. No one ever claimed they would make it go.’

T. E. Hulme’s respect for the gaps of dirty individuality between the generalisations did not inhibit and does not contradict his correspondingly emphatic claim for philosophy: ‘From the outside it has all the appearance of a science. But this we might take as a piece of protective mimicry to ward off the multitude, to preserve it in its seclusion as the rarest of the arts.’ Nor did he forget that the arts as well as the sciences have to do with knowledge and ignorance and truth and falsehood: ‘I do not mean what Nietzsche meant when he said “Do not speculate as to whether what a philosopher says is true, but ask how he came to think it true”. This form of scepticism I hold to be just fashionable rubbish. Pure philosophy ought to be, and may be, entirely objective and scientific.’ (Speculations, pp. 17-18).

There is a hint of the influence of the old dichotomies in the demand that works of literature be judged by canons of strictly literary discrimination: the old dichotomies of form and content, feeling and reason, imagination and intellect, subjective and objective. A hint, too, of the essentialism about literature of which there is more than a hint in the insistence that to say what literature is is only or primarily to say what is distinctive about literature and not what is true both of literature and of some things that are not literature. It is the most tedious platitude, but one that needs to be asserted because it is sometimes denied, that to know the nature of a thing is to know both how it resembles

281

other things and how it differs from other things; to know, as one revealing idiom puts it, what that thing is like.

At its most extreme the old dichotomizing becomes the destructive madness of I. A. Richards in The Principles of Literary Criticism: ‘There are two totally distinct uses of language’ (which are of course the scientific and the emotive). In the same sense there are two totally distinct universities, Oxford and Cambridge; two totally distinct species of animals, whales and wallabies; two totally distinct works of art, Rodin’s Thinker and the Madonna of the Rocks. But there are ten thousand other works of art, animal species, universities, for these to be totally distinct from.

Here of course I parody and oversimplify. Nobody would be tempted to dichotomize away Harvard and the Sorbonne or the hedgehog and the fox, and it is not for nothing that Richards and others are drawn into the particular exaggerations that madden and destroy them, and which then have to be palliated by maddening exaggerations that would be destructive if they did not ex hypothesi meet with their saving antidotes. It is not just that the scale is different, that reason and emotion are vast categories rather than isolated instances in the realm of thought and language. What is more important is that the extremes of dispassionate reason and unreasoned passion, though sharply opposed and separated by three thousand miles, are closely akin and linked by intermediate states. And wherever one extreme may by slow degrees become its opposite there is scope and need for the same dialectical conflict of reminder against reminder: good and evil, selfish and unselfish, free and compelled, sanity and madness, ignorance and knowledge. These are all paradigm examples from the sphere of operation of that fundamental mode of thought and talk in which each says to the other, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ and each replies ‘Yes, but. . . .’ For they are all cases in which what is obvious is in conflict with what is obvious, and when the obvious conflicts with the obvious something that is obvious will have to be denied and something that is obvious will have to be asserted, and so we shall reach for the patent instruments of philosophy and literature, tools and weapons forged for the battling and building of the workers and warriors of the Logos: paradox and platitude.

We are nearly all, like Socrates, wiser in our practice than in our theory, and recognise in speaking and reasoning, as we may fail to recognise in generalising about speech and reason, that there

282

is a time for platitude and a time for paradox; a time for being literal-minded and accusing another’s paradox of being merely fanciful, and a time for being fanciful and accusing another’s platitude of being merely literal-minded. But even here it is easy and unhelpful to stop at this general observation. What is difficult and valuable is to know in the concrete which barrel to fire and which stop to pull out. We at once recognise as parody Hopkins’s reminder to Wordsworth that ordinarily it is the man who is the father of the child. We all set down as an idiot the editor who improves As You Like It, Act II, Scene i, lines 16-17, ‘Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones’, to the more sober and accurate sense of ‘Stones in the running brooks, sermons in books’. But nobody is immune from the impulse to unseasonable literalness. Philosophers are beset by the sin of meeting a paradox only with a demonstration that it has ‘unacceptable consequences’; with a demonstration, in other words, that it is a paradox.

Sometimes it is just this that needs to be said and shown. For it can easily happen that the author of a paradox does not recognise his paradox for what it is, and wants to have the benefits and take the risks of literally denying a literal truth. His reminder then calls for an answering reminder. One half-truth deserves another, and it takes two halves to add up to a unified apprehension. In rarer cases the paradox will not even be a half-truth and its perversity will need and deserve the literal-minded savagery that philosophers, with even-handed injustice, visit upon the deserving and the undeserving alike.

It is this to and fro and give and take that gives us vision in depth, whether in literature or philosophy or in the dialogue and dialectic of an ordinary day in an ordinary life. A stereoscope uses two pictures from different angles. You will not see the landscape in perspective if you never shift your point of view. The Parthenon or the Winged Victory of Samothrace cannot be presented in a photograph but only in a book of photographs, cannot be seen at a glance or even with a long steady gaze but only by going round in circles on the Acropolis or in the Louvre. If you want to see life whole you must not begin by trying also to see it steadily. When you have made the round trip several times you may be able to stand in one place and still see or remember all at once what at first could only be seen by moving from one partial view to another.

All talk of points of view and aspects and perspectives brings

283

with it the risk of sliding into subjectivity. It can be made to seem that what something is like depends on how you look at it or where you see it from, and this is one of many but one of the most influential reasons why literature is said to have nothing to do with knowledge.

It is obvious that the look of a thing will be different if you look at it from a different angle. This seems to conflict with what should also be obvious, that what a thing is like from this point of view and from that point of view is all part of what the thing is like, and that if that is what we want to know we are not at liberty to choose part of it and represent it as being the whole. This is already shown by the cases of the statue and the temple, but a few examples that come nearer to the bones of contention may be necessary and should be sufficient to establish that nowhere in the wide scope of this principle is its application limited by any variation in subject matter or logical kind or degree of subtlety, difficulty or complexity.

SOURCE: Bambrough, Renford. “Literature and Philosophy,” in Wisdom: Twelve Essays [in honour of John Wisdom], edited by Renford Bambrough (Oxford: Blackwell; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), pp. 274-292; pp. 274-283 reproduced here.

Note: The balance of the essay gives several more examples of Bambrough’s points, but adds little to the general argument, such as it is. Note the presence of William Blake in the argument. Blake reappears in the final paragraph:

Blake attributes our common understanding to a universal poetic genius, but he knew as we all have reason to know how much in our efforts to gain or retain or regain a grasp of the familiar we need to depend on the individual poetic genius. [p. 292]

Renford Bambrough on Distinctions & Connections in Philosophy

Philosophical Style: Selected Bibliography

“‘Philosophy’ and ‘Literature’: Relationships of Genres and the Frontiers of Thought” by R. Dumain

William Blake Study Guide

Offsite:

Renford Bambrough - Wikipedia

“The Roots of Reason” by Jeffrey Scheuer