TIM BEWES: Hi.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Tim Bewes.
I'm delighted to be introducing
this particular panel.
And we have three speakers.
Toril Moi teaches
at Duke University.
Her books include Sexual/Textual
Politics from '85--
that's 1985--
Simone de Beauvoir--
The Making of an
Intellectual Woman from 1994,
and Henrik Ibsen and the
Birth of Modernism from 2006.
The publication of
her latest book,
Revolution of the Ordinary--
Literary Studies After
Wittgenstein, Austin,
and Cavell is imminent.
She also works on
Norwegian literature
and has a regular column in the
Norwegian Weekly Morgenbladet.
Am I saying that right?
And her talk is entitled
"Language and Attention--
Morality and Literature
after Wittgenstein."
Nancy Yousef is a professor of
English at the City University
of New York where she
teaches literature
and philosophy from the early
18th to the mid 19th century.
Her current work deals
with the intersections
between aesthetics, ethics, and
the history of the emotions.
She is the author of two books--
Isolated Cases from Cornell
University Press in 2004
and Romantic Intimacy
from Stanford,
2013, which received the
Barricelli Prize for the year's
best work in Romanticism.
And Helen Small is professor
of English at Oxford,
where she holds the
Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt
Fellowship in English
literature at Pembroke College.
Her most recent
books are The Value
of the Humanities from 2013
and The Long Life from 2007.
Much of her work
focuses on the relations
between moral philosophy
and theories of value.
And she is in the early
stages of a new project
on the function of cynicism
at the present time.
Nancy's talk is entitled
"Unresolved Attention and Form
in Eliot and Wittgenstein,"
and Helen's talk
is called "Particular
Attention."
So we are going in
that order, Amanda--
so Toril Moi, first of all,
on "Language and Attention,
Morality and Literature
after Wittgenstein."
Thanks, Toril.
[APPLAUSE]
TORIL MOI: Right.
So first of all, I need this--
so you can hear me
now, even if I just--
way back there?
OK, great.
I'm hoping that this paper will
last no more than 30 minutes,
which was my total limits.
So I'm going to try
to stick to that.
You should have two handouts.
One is the flyer
for the new book.
You will notice on the back
you have the chapter overview.
And this paper is actually
a much edited and really
constrained version
of Chapter 10.
So you can see all the work
that comes before this.
And I've cut a lot from that.
The other thing is
the other handout
should look something like this.
And that has some
quotations on it,
not all of which I
will read in the talks.
So it's good to
have the handout.
So having said that,
"Language and Attention,
Morality in Literature
After Wittgenstein--"
so my paper builds on
the vision of language
proposed by ordinary
language philosophy.
By ordinary language
philosophy, I
mean the specific reading
of Wittgenstein and Austin
pioneered and extended
by Stanley Cavell.
The paper is based on the
last chapter in the book,
so you can see all the
work that has preceded it.
But I will not say
anything about the book,
because then 30
minutes will flash by.
So we'll go for it.
So language and attention--
the capacity to use language
attentively and to pay
attention to language
is more important than ever.
We live in a world in which
language has long threatened
to float free of reality.
Academic theories concerning
signs, signifiers,
and reference have
contributed to the sense
that words simply don't
connect with anything.
But by now, the situation
has become intolerable.
The language of politicians
has increasingly
been drifting free of reality.
Back in 2004 already, George
W. Bush's adviser, Karl Rove,
famously now scolded
the journalist
Ronald Suskind for
still living in
a quaintly old-fashioned,
reality-based community, as he
put it.
In 2005, Stephen Colbert
coined the word "truthiness"
to convey his sense of
the peculiar unreality
of the political
language surrounding him.
When politicians, advertisers,
bureaucrats, academics
produce a quagmire of words
that don't mean anything,
their words serve one purpose--
to make us acquiesce in
ideas, actions, and projects
we don't actually understand.
This is as dangerous
for intellectual life
as it is for democracy.
In this situation, we need
a philosophically serious
alternative to theories
promoting the idea
that language is, in some
fundamental way, disconnected
from reality just as
we need an alternative
to linguistic
positivism or scientism,
which is the belief that
words simply present reality
just as it is.
That alternative can be found in
Wittgenstein's late philosophy.
Wittgenstein was
obsessed by attention.
If he had been the sort of
man who went in for slogans,
he might have gone with
attention to particulars--
nice logos and so on all over
his Wittgensteinian t-shirts
or something.
Or maybe he would have selected
the simple "look and see."
Philosophical
Investigations shows
that we lose our footing
existentially and
philosophically if we fail
to pay attention to language.
Ordinary language philosophy,
as developed by Stanley Cavell,
has also developed a
strong understanding
of the moral power of attention.
These two things are connected,
and I hope to show why.
In this paper, I will not speak
much about Stanley Cavell.
Instead, I'll focus
on Cora Diamond's work
on moral philosophy.
She writes about morality
and moral philosophy.
Those are the terms she uses.
Sometimes morality, I think,
overlaps with politics,
and sometimes it does not.
To figure out the
connection, or lack of it,
between politics
and morality, we
would need to examine a
range of specific cases.
So I'm not saying,
either, that morality
is politics or that politics--
political questions-- are always
moral questions, or vice versa.
I think they sometimes
overlap and sometimes diverge,
and that's for a future debate.
In this paper, I'll
make three claims,
and they're on the handout.
This is Austin, by the way--
a sharpened awareness of words
is a sharpened
awareness of reality.
To use words is to
exercise judgment.
And Cora Diamond's
moral philosophy
is a magnificent
philosophy of attention
that can only be understood
in the light of the first two
points.
So I'll go straight to point
one-- sharpened awareness
of words is a sharpened
awareness of reality.
In ordinary language philosophy,
word and world are intertwined.
Now, how can that be?
The answer can be found in
Wittgenstein's notion of use.
And here we'll now, for
about 3/4 of a page,
follow what I can only call
an intense condensation
of Wittgenstein's extremely
simple yet incredibly
challenging vision of language.
So this is shorthand
or a haiku-type version
of the whole thing.
So words and world are
intertwined in use.
Use here stands as opposed
to terms like representation,
or reference, or interpretation,
or iterability, and so on.
Use gives words meaning.
Use arises, meaning
arises in use.
Use requires others.
Use arises from shared practices
and feeds back into them.
Use itself is a practice
carried out in a social world.
Use produces meaning in
a shared form of life.
To speak is to use the words
of a linguistic community.
It's not to agree with
any specific opinion
or ideology in that community.
But if you are to disagree or
engage in ideology critique,
you simply have to have
some kind of agreement
on what the words
you're criticizing mean,
or you can get going
with your critique.
Use requires what Wittgenstein
calls agreement in judgement.
And I'll come back to that.
For ordinary
language philosophy,
then, the act of using words--
the act of saying or
writing something--
is always an act of judgment.
We judge that these
are the right words
to use here in this situation to
convey these specific nuances.
Use-- and this I will come
back to at some length-- use
does not rely on judgment.
Use reveals our judgment.
It's not like judgment happens
first, and then you use,
because then it
would make no sense
to say that meaning
arises in use.
So the emphasis on judgment,
the ethical dimension
of ordinary language
philosophy arises.
But utterances are not just
acts and interventions.
They are also expressions.
So I should just say they
are acts and expressions
in that way.
My words reveal me.
They express me.
When I tell you what
I see in the world,
even in the most intense
description of something,
I reveal the quality
of my own attention,
the scope of my own
interests at the same time
as I say something about
the world or about others.
The quality of my
attention reveals
something about my moral--
and sometimes also political--
capacities and investments.
Good writing exemplifies
acute attention
to words in their
intertwinement with the world.
Literature-- fiction
and nonfiction alike,
if it's truly well
written-- makes
us pay attention to
reality because it makes
us pay attention to words.
We make our lives in language.
When Austin writes that a
sharpened awareness of words
is a sharpened
attention to reality,
he is thinking of all kinds of
normal and natural practices.
Just think of the
specialist distinctions
that appear to come naturally
to chefs, fashion designers,
farmers, and fishermen.
In my book, I have
a long discussion
of the language of bullfights
inspired by a short story
by Julio Cortazar.
So you'll see how--
which turns on how
French students can't
understand bullfight
Spanish and get very, very
angry with their dictionaries.
It's a fascinating short story.
But the point can be made
about any human practice.
So chefs, fashion designers,
car mechanics, farmers,
fishermen-- they
instantly see features
that I don't even notice.
When I look at the engine of my
car, I see some kind of chaos.
Whereas when my car mechanic
does, they use all these words
and tell me something
about something.
You see?
My language is giving out
there because my attention
is giving out, because I haven't
paid enough attention to this.
So they see features
I don't even notice,
both because I don't know
how to do what they do
and because I don't know how
to talk the way they talk.
The two go together.
The doing and the
talking are intertwined.
Craftsmen and
practitioners develop
ways of talking that register
the finest gradations
in their craft, their activity.
Whether it's sewing, cooking,
fishing, hunting, tennis,
soccer, bullfighting,
motorcycle repair,
and so on, every human
practice gives rise
to its own expressions,
its own way of speaking.
The language of
such practitioners,
Austin writes, embodies
the inherited experience
and acumen of many generations.
But it also constantly projects
old words in new context
and invents new
expressions in response
to new practices
and technologies.
To people who don't
share their skills,
highly experienced
craftspeople appear
to have uncannily heightened
powers of perceptions.
Experts see the
world differently.
They notice things that
non-experts don't see,
[INAUDIBLE] writes.
By expert, [INAUDIBLE]
mean people
like exceptionally
highly trained
and experienced chessplayers,
successful chicken sexers,
and skillful police officers.
And note that such
practitioners can't always
explain what they do.
This is not about having
reasons and explanations.
It's about the intertwinement
of practices and words.
Expert chicken
sexers, for example--
now, that is-- the more I
read about chicken sexing,
the more impressed I am.
Expert chicken
sexers, for example,
appear to have no
way of explaining
how they decide whether a
chicken is male or female.
There art is explicable,
[INAUDIBLE] writes.
Yet someone teaches
chicken sexers to see.
It's a two-year intense
training course.
Those teachers must
say and do something
to convey their art
to their successors.
Maybe learning chicken sexing is
like learning a first language.
We don't know how
we learn it, yet we
learn it by imitation
and response,
by training, by doing it.
And we do it in constant
interaction with others.
If we care about
language, then we
have good reason to care
about literature, too,
not because it necessarily
uplifts us and makes us better,
but because writers
specialize in language.
Using words is their
specific craft.
Writers spend their lives
trying to find the right words.
Now, obviously, here I'm only
talking about good writers.
There's lots of bad
writing going on.
They can't teach us anything.
And how do you know whether
it's good or it's bad?
Well, you've got to try it.
You've got to look at
it and see what happens.
So writers spend their lives
trying to find the right words.
They can teach us differences,
as Wittgenstein said.
He didn't say it about writers,
but he liked the phrase
"I'll teach you differences."
When Henry James had to
give advice to writers,
he didn't tell them to work
hard to develop a specifically
literary language.
So everything I say here is
built on something in Chapter 9
where I say you can't
define literature
and you can't define
a literary language,
and please give it up.
That's part of what--
I discussed that
already in the book.
James simply said
that they should
try to notice
everything, try to be
one of the people on
whom nothing is lost.
So I see that as a
call to attention.
The best writers have
an exceptional capacity
to convey nuance, sense
impressions, emotions,
experiences, imaginative
ruminations, reflections,
thoughts.
Their writing reveals them,
expresses the precision
of their attention.
Attentive writing doesn't
have to be fiction.
Good writing requires the
capacity to think concretely,
to imagine specific
situations, to consider
how different situations endow
words with different nuances.
This is not a skill
limited to literature
or to a particular
genre of writing.
I should say given the context
of this conference, above all--
not above all, but
it's a supreme skill
of psychoanalytic
therapy, for example,
to know exactly when
to say something,
not to say something,
and what words to choose.
And to use words well
require imagination
just as much as it requires
descriptive powers.
The imagination is simply trying
to imagine what the world might
look like for the person
you're trying to talk to,
for example, if
you're going to have
some good communication going.
Imagination is not just the
province of fiction writers,
but of everyone who
tries to understand
the meaning of words.
You have to try to imagine
what they might conceivably
have meant, for example,
before you conclude
that it's all meaningless.
Austin exalted
philosophers, of all people,
to use their imagination.
He said that what we need to
do to understand what something
means is, quote, "to imagine
the situation in detail
with the background of
story and to imagine cases
with vividness and fullness."
Those things go for philosophers
as well as for writers
and for every one of us.
So now I'll turn to
the idea that to use
words is to exercise judgment.
Now, this may be a
more philosophical part
of the paper.
But I think it's crucial
to try to understand
what the claim here
is and what it is not.
So I'll do it, as it were.
This is one of
Wittgenstein's-- and indeed,
Cavell's-- most
fundamental insights.
Now, why is this such
an important idea?
It may help to contrast it with
two much better known and still
widely influential
views of language.
And the first one is
positivistic or scientistic
visions of language, where
language is considered
a kind of neutral
presentation of facts
and value-free
registration of phenomena.
The Sicilian and the
post-Sicilian tradition,
which has been dominant
in the literary humanities
for generations,
considers language
to be a closed system
of differences.
In this view, language,
because it's a closed system,
is fundamentally
unconnected to reality.
This produces a
theoretical problem
for theorists in this
tradition because they now
have to spend a lot of
time proposing theories
to explain how it is that words
nevertheless sometimes appear
to connect with the world.
Some argue, of course,
that there's no connection,
that the signifier always
floats free of the signified.
Others claim that there are--
mostly the signifier
float around,
but there are some anchoring
points that occasionally pains
the signifier on to the world.
Yet others, again, propose
quite complex theories
intended to explain how it
is that words mean anything.
And these theories have
names like interpretation.
You need a mechanism
of interpretation
to connect the empty
signifier with whatever
meaning it might have.
Or iterability [INAUDIBLE]
is another stab
at the same problem.
Performativity-- yet another
stab at the same problem.
I can't go into
this here, but I do
in the book, why this is a
non-problem for Wittgenstein.
You only end up having to
solve the problem of how words
connect to reality if
you posit that they are
separate in the first place.
If you start with the
language practice,
words and world intertwine--
that's just not the issue.
I know it takes a long time
to truly feel how that works,
but it's true.
I guarantee you.
So I'm going to
skip a little bit.
So in the post-Sicilian
tradition,
in later versions of it,
it has become quite common
now to praise [INAUDIBLE]
for having realized the fully
post-human vision of language.
That is a vision in which
speakers and judgment
are quite irrelevant.
In many ways, the two traditions
I mentioned-- positivism,
the post-Sicilian
contrasts sharply.
The post-Sicilian
tradition is skeptical.
It insists on the
political, historical,
and social embeddedness
of language.
In this tradition, no
utterance is value free.
The positivistic tradition,
on the other hand,
takes language to be neutral
and objective, a vehicle
for the transmission of facts.
But note that both traditions
share one underlying picture
of language, which is
that language, for them,
is a system or a practice--
whatever they think
it is-- in which
individual speakers are
irrelevant for the
constitution of meaning.
Because positivists
don't think it
matters who speaks,
because you're just
registering whatever's there.
And for the
post-structuralist, obviously,
the system of language doesn't
depend on a specific speaker,
so they actually come
together on this point.
For Wittgenstein,
Austin, and Cavell,
words are not simply signs
referring to-- or failing
to refer to-- reality.
To them, it makes no sense to
think of language as a system
without speakers.
For them, meaning
arises in use understood
as a shared human practice.
Every speech act-- even those
that utter scientific claims--
takes place against the
background of shared judgment.
Wittgenstein writes
famously in paragraph 242,
"it is not only agreement--
and here, the German word
is [GERMAN], so think
of attunement, tuning,
[INAUDIBLE], mood, even.
So it's not only agreed
agreement in definitions,
but also, odd as it
may sound, agreement
in judgements that is required
for communication by means
of language,
Wittgenstein writes.
To agree in judgment, Cavell
helps us grasp more fully.
So what's coming now
is sort of Cavellian.
To agree in judgment is
to share criteria for when
and how to apply concepts.
We have criteria for how to
use words such as cat or dog,
or words like
reluctant or eagerly.
Use is not random or accidental.
It's governed by criteria.
But-- and here's the problem--
there's a great article
by Steven Affeldt
that explains how criteria work
for Cavell and Wittgenstein.
Governed by doesn't
mean that criteria
is some kind of metaphysical
or ontological entity
that exists before
the act of speaking.
Criteria are not rules
that provide a grounds
of intelligibility for words.
The whole language
of ground of meaning
is alien to this tradition
I'm talking about here.
The wonder of human
language, Cavell notes,
is precisely that
it does not depend
on such a structure
of and conception
of rules as grounding.
Criteria don't underpin
or ground language.
Criteria and language are,
as it were, two perspectives
on the same utterance.
Agreement in language
and agreement in criteria
are two ways of
describing the same thing.
And this is where we're
coming to that long quote
on page 1, the Cavell quote
number 2 on page 1 there.
Criteria don't exist apart
from the specific situation,
apart from the specific
occasion of asking,
and a specific need which
our asking is to address.
Cavell goes on to describe
that in that long quote.
It's very important
here to see that--
OK.
So the claim is that
all our knowledge
is governed not just by we
understand as evidence or truth
conditions.
If we did that, we would be
on the more scientistic part
of things, but by criteria.
And Cavell then says, he
uses the phrase, not merely.
That's a misleading emphasis.
Criteria are not alternatives
or additions to evidence.
You don't choose between
facts on one hand
and criteria on the other.
Without the control of
criteria in applying concepts,
we wouldn't even
know what counts
as evidence for any
claim, nor for what claims
evidence is needed.
Now, I'm itching to
give some examples
and practical considerations
here, but if I do that,
my poor co-panelists
wouldn't feel good.
So I'm going to not do that,
but we can discuss later.
So there's a kind of--
but put it this way.
If I set up a fancy MRI
scanning test of your brain
and I'm looking to
see what happens when
I say the word tea to you as
opposed to the word coffee,
I'm already taking completely
for granted all kinds of things
that maybe we do with words
and things like tea and coffee
in my very hypothesis that this
is worth MRI scanning, and so
on.
That sort of thing.
Anyway, facts
therefore remain facts.
But we couldn't
establish facts unless we
shared the background of
necessities and agreement
that make up our form of life.
Criteria do not
precede judgment.
If they did, they would
be a ground of language.
We discover, lay bare,
uncover our criteria
by investigating what we
say, but we don't investigate
our language all the time.
We do it when we have a problem.
So that when we say
things like, what?
What do you mean?
That's a case of calling
for criteria very often.
So the stunning
systematicity of language
reveals itself in the
discovery, the fact
that we share criteria
for what to say when.
That's what so many
conversations work so fine.
I mean, we seem to
get it, and then
we don't call for criteria.
Maybe we should sometimes.
We have in fact
misunderstood each other,
but we discover
that later maybe.
To speak, then, is to utter
something against a background
of shared judgment.
This is why Cavell emphasizes
the concept of voice, which
stresses the inescapable
element of subjectivity
in every human utterance.
And here, note, subjectivity
does not stand in opposition
to objectivity,
it signals rather
that so-called
objectivity is something
we achieve in language.
It doesn't mean that
you can't have--
I will still criticize
you for giving
a blatantly biased account of
this and a fair minded account
of that, but that's in language
that we do those things.
So it's crucial to understand
that this is not an attempt
to collapse facts into values.
And quote three is about
that, but I'll skip that here.
This emphasis on the
subject's judgements
at work in every utterance
enables ordinary language
philosophy to move us beyond
both linguistic skepticism,
which is the sense that language
never grasps the world, that it
floats free of the world, and
various kinds of scientism
and positivism,
the idea that only
a certain kind of objective
scientific language
provides true knowledge.
Language itself
makes no judgment.
Note how many articles you
will read about language doing
this, that, and the other.
For Wittgenstein and
Austin and Cavell,
language doesn't
do anything, we do.
Language doesn't
make judgements,
we make judgment in use.
We are responsible for our
words and responsibility
is a moral, and ethical,
and political concept.
So that gets me to Cora
Diamond's moral philosophy
of attention.
Obviously, I would have liked
to spell out her debt to Simone
Weil and Iris Murdoch,
and, particularly,
to spell out Diamond's
understanding of Murdoch's
ideal of just and
loving gaze, which I've
come to like more and more.
But there's no
time for that here.
So I'll just say that
for Cora Diamond,
moral reflection is a
specific kind of attention,
a particular response to the
world, a way of seeing things.
Seeing the world, seeing
other people, seeing oneself.
For her, moral
philosophy must focus
on the particular case on
the individual, the specific,
and the unique.
Murdoch writes that there
are moral attitudes which
emphasize the
inexhaustible detail
of the world, the endlessness
of the task of understanding.
And diamond agrees
deeply with that.
We never finish the
work of understanding.
As the best literature
demonstrates,
there's always more to see.
As an example, Diamond quotes
the last stanza of Ducks.
Now, this is on page two or
this back page of your handout.
It's a children's poem.
It's got six or seven stanzas
and it talks about ducks.
Different types of ducks.
And then this is the last
stanza quoted by Diamond,
"All these are kinds, but
every duck himself is,
in himself, alone.
Fleet wing, arched neck,
webbed foot, round eye,
and marvelous cage of bone.
Clad in this beauty, a creature
dwells of sovereign instinct,
sense, and skill.
Yet secret as the
hidden wells whenst life
itself doth thrill."
Now, that last line is
awful in my opinion.
But nevertheless, the poem
shows in a very simple way
that the duck is a creature of
beauty and dignity deserving
of respect and admiration.
Diamond wants us to see that
there's something morally
important about the quality
of the poet's attention
to a common duck.
This stanza is an example
of a just and loving gaze.
It's an example.
You see, there's no
action involved here.
This is important for
Diamond and Murdoch
that there's a way
of seeing things,
and a way of finding
words for what you
see that embodies your stance.
It exemplifies the stance of
the intertwined mental language
and attention.
In the chapter that
this is taken from,
I discuss writers like Ibsen,
[INAUDIBLE], Wolf, [INAUDIBLE],
and others, but here I
don't do that at all.
I'll just mention
Ted Hughes briefly.
But diamond disagrees
with the widespread idea
that moral reflection always
takes the form of deliberation
on clear cut choices or
explicit evaluations,
right, wrong, evil, good.
Traditional moral
philosophy, she writes,
takes a far too narrow
view of what count
as morally relevant insights.
And the famous trolley problem
is the quintessential example.
Here's one version in case--
I was very lucky
when I first started
reading these things because I
had somehow missed the trolley
problem, and then I had to
learn about the trolley problem,
and then I had to learn that
that wasn't really worth
learning.
But anyway, one version
of the trolley problem
is, a runaway railway trolley
comes down the railway line.
If nothing is done, it will
kill five workers further
down the track.
I'm standing on a
bridge over the track
next to a very fat man.
Should I put push this
stranger down on the line
in order to save the 5 workers?
And there are millions
of versions of this.
This way of setting up
the question of morality
turns morality into
something added
to already existing knowledge.
It sort of purifies
the moment of morality
to the moment of choice.
Morality becomes a moral icing
on an already existing cake.
But Diamond objects, and I
can't go into her deep reasons
for this which are
totally Wittgensteinian,
but she objects to the idea that
epistemology and metaphysics
provide the framework for
what we can say about reality.
And then once that
framework is in place,
moral philosophy can
step in and tell us
what to count as good
or evil, right or wrong.
This view reduces
morality to the question
of how to label people
and their actions
and divorces it from question
concerning truth and insight,
because those
questions are taken
to be settled before the
moral inquiry begins.
She reminds us that
moral action only
rarely takes the form of a clear
choice in which we sit down
and make the list of
arguments for and against.
In real life, we often
are in experiences
like we feel we have no choice,
or we discover that we actually
already have done something
with huge moral implications
without really
thinking about it.
And then sometimes, we make
long lists of arguments,
consider them carefully,
decide what to do,
and then we go out and
do exactly the opposite
just without thinking.
Or we do nothing.
And in all these cases, the
trolley problem is of no help
whatsoever.
In short, when it
comes to explaining
the kind of moral
reasoning we actually
engage in everyday life,
the trolley problem
and that kind of way
of thinking of morality
is not very helpful.
First, it's overly focused
on dramatic choices.
Second, it divorces the
question of moral action
from the question of
how we see the world.
It assumes that the way
of seeing what is the case
precedes the words, the
judgments we make about them.
And everything I'm
saying here is to say,
no, the judgment, the
morality, the problem
is in the very act of seeing,
attention, and judgment,
and words go together.
So if morality requires a
certain kind of attention,
a certain way of
seeing, and we need
to find words to express that
way of seeing, then, of course,
the best writers have
a lot to teach us.
And now I'm going to come to
the sort of end and pararation
here, which is to talk a
little about Diamond's notion
of the difficulty of reality.
So to devote one's
full attention
to a phenomenon or
a person and to find
a language in which to express
what we see is difficult.
Even when we do our best,
others may never understand us.
Sometimes we are overcome
by our own inadequacy.
We simply can't
find the words, we
turn away, we don't
want to pay attention.
Diamond writes about the
difficulty of reality
which she defines as
something we aren't
capable of thinking about.
Something we can't
express in words
maybe because it's
too painful, maybe
because it's inexplicably good.
Now, I should say,
I started working
on this chapter in the aftermath
of the horrendous Utoya
massacre in Norway.
And there's quite a bit about
that in the actual chapter,
but I'm not going there.
But there's an underlying
sense that something happens.
You need words to name
this thing in reality,
you need to pay attention,
and yet it's too awful.
You don't know how to do it.
And that's where the
difficulty of reality comes in.
This is a phrase,
Diamond writes,
"For experiences in which
we take something in reality
to be resistant to
our thinking it,
or possibly to be painful
in its inexplicability.
Difficult in that way, or
perhaps awesome and astonishing
in its inexplicability.
We take things so, and
the things we take so
may simply not to others
present the kind of difficulty
of being hard, or impossible,
or agonizing to get
one's mind around."
Note that Diamond
here is totally
breaking with conventional
trauma theory.
She's not just talking
about traumas, by the way,
but inexplicably
good things, as well.
And even when she does talk
about traumatic experiences,
she doesn't share the
widespread conviction
that trauma always, quote,
falls outside language.
To think that, you need
to believe that language
is a closed system.
You need to picture it as
a kind of spacial thing.
Which, of course, language
is action and practice.
What would it be
to be outside that?
You can see that that
whole outside language
discourse is based on the
Sicilian vision of language.
But that's an aside.
So to her, note that the
difficulty of reality
is something that has to
do with the way we take it.
It's just like when we
speak, we make judgment.
It's not language
speaking for us, we speak.
And here, where we can't
find the words, where
we find that reality is too
difficult, we can't say it.
It's the problem
[INAUDIBLE] the unsayable.
It's not a thing
that's unsayable.
What's unsayable won't
be the same for everyone.
Someone else will breeze
in and say, oh, that.
That's nothing.
I don't see why you get
so upset about that.
She has some good
examples of that.
So this difficulty of reality
can't be turned into a theory,
is another way of saying this.
All we can do is to investigate
the particular case,
to make an attempt
to acknowledge
the experience that's being
conveyed to us by paying
attention to it.
So then, Diamond gives a
wonderful example of the poem
by Ted Hughes, which
I will also skip here.
And then I will just say that
the reason why Diamond uses
literary examples, and
why we should use more,
is that the right
kind of attention
isn't simply just a cool,
clinical noting down
of features of reality.
Truly to get inside
the experiences
of the other is difficult.
To convey the full complexity
of a situation is just as hard.
Such tasks require
us to mobilize
the powers of
imagination, compassion,
identification, alongside
our powers of reflection
and reason.
These are the skills of language
and imagination developed
by the best writers.
My argument, note, is not at
all that reading literature
makes us better people.
Because if that were true,
all literature professors
ought to be moral paragons.
I spent my life in
literature departments,
and somehow I'm
not convinced yet.
I'm simply saying that the
best writers can teach us how
to pay attention to language.
I'm also saying that there are
strong philosophical reasons
to take their practice
with words seriously.
If word and world
are intertwined,
if meaning arises in use,
and use reveals judgment,
then a sharpened
attention to words
is a sharpened
attention to reality.
We need to train
our attention so as
to be able to tell when words
are used to obfuscate reality,
and when they float free
of reality altogether.
A society that loses
faith in language--
this argument is all an
argument against what
I call linguistic skepticism,
which came in with modernism,
I think, and has lasted for
about 130 years at least.
Anyway, a society that rejects
the very idea of a just
and loving gaze, an attentive
gaze in Diamond's sense,
as so much unscientific
sentimentalism will necessarily
go on to try to replace
judgement with measurements.
In such a society, leaders
won't ask themselves
if they have truly looked at
the situations for which they
are responsible.
Instead, they will proceed
as if rules, benchmarks,
and checklists abolished
the need for human judgment.
When disaster strikes,
they will hide
behind their rules
and regulations,
and their vague, lifeless, and
peculiarly impersonal language.
They will forget that
as Hannah Arendt once
said, "Man's faculty of judgment
rules out blind obedience."
When we ask what such leaders
take responsibility for,
their answers will
certainly make
us feel that reality is
slipping through our fingers.
In a world in which so
many powerful people
and institutions have a
vested interest in making
us lose faith in language's
power to respond to
and reveal reality, precise
and attentive use of words
is an act of resistance.
In politics and the
English language,
George Orwell
declares that, "One
ought to recognize that the
present political chaos is
connected with the
decay of language,
and that one can probably
bring about some improvement
by starting at the verbal end.
In such a situation,
every imaginatively
crafted sentence, every
perceptive reflection,
every clear formulation, at
every accurate description
is a small victory."
Thank you.
NANCY YOUSEF: Hi, everybody.
I'm going to try to angle
this so that you can hear me
and so that I can
also reach the screen.
So let's see how that works.
Is the projector on?
Yeah, OK.
All right, this talk is
divided into three parts.
Let me see if I can move
the computer closer.
Can you hear me?
We're good?
I'm going to project,
first, a long piece of text.
No need to try to take it
fully in at this point,
just to register maybe
that it's familiar.
I'll also say that
as I proceed, I'll
occasionally project
pieces of text
that I don't directly discuss.
They're in conversation with
the material of the paper,
and hopefully will be helpful
rather than just distracting.
Although, it may
just be distracting.
So part one, a woman is crying.
I'm sure everyone
here will recognize
what is probably the most
famous passage in Middlemarch.
One that is memorable
in itself and also
seems to crystallize
the profundity
of the book, its aspirations,
the affecting humility
of its boldest insights.
This is a paper about
loosening the powerful grip
of this passage, and trying to
see that the novel is always
showing something
even when it seems
to be explaining what it shows.
I do not mean by this
that I'm resisting
the authority of the narrator.
The narrator extends
a guiding hand
and I still take
the hand in mine.
Not to be guided this time,
but to arrest the movement
as if to say, I'm not
sure of this path forward,
let's keep looking about.
You know from my title
that Wittgenstein
will be joining the discussion.
He's already here
urging hesitation.
"A philosophical
problem has the form,
I don't know my way about."
Which I take as a
caution that the drive
to find a clear direction
might, itself, be problematic.
That turning around might
also be a way of proceeding.
Certainly, one path
taken in this passage
leads away from the
woman who is crying.
To what is our attention
being drawn instead?
"If we had keen vision and
feeling of all ordinary life,
it would be like
hearing the grass grow."
The analogy is remarkable
for seamlessly compounding
figuration and hypothesis.
The unheard sound
of growing grass
metaphorically representing the
unsensed thoughts and feelings
of others, but also
indicating that the limits
of emotional sensibility
are like the limits of sense
perception.
And these limitations
are sublime.
The difference between
the course emotion
of mankind and a keen
vision and feeling is vast.
The analogy conjures up a
criterion no one can meet,
and the impossibility
hardly seems
conciliated by the assurance
that our frames could hardly
bear it.
But is this
fatalistic rendering--
and it's literally fatal.
[INAUDIBLE] we should die.
The only way to
imagine what it would
entail to have keen vision
and feeling of ordinary life.
If I'm moved by the
figure, must I also
follow the speculative
path indicated by it?
The analogy sublimes
what Stanley Cavell
calls disappointments
in our occasions
of knowing one another.
A pivotal moment
in his own effort
to wrest the realistic features
of human misunderstanding
from the surreal ramifications
of traditional philosophical
skepticism.
Eliot's analogy
offers an explanation
of these disappointments, but
one that deflects attention
away from the feeling of
disappointment just as surely
as it moves away from the
woman crying, pointing instead
toward an ideal of keen
vision and feeling,
and away from the element of
tragedy attached to the thought
that we do not expect
people to be deeply moved
by what is not unusual.
And this is where I want
to continue to look about.
What is not unusual is
usually not a deeply moving.
Vision and feeling of ordinary
life are ordinarily not keen.
Even as I find myself
implicated in these remarks,
accepting the hand
extended by the narrator,
I also feel rushed away from
the difficulty by what follows.
The sense that we
ordinarily fail
to find ordinary life meaningful
is the motivating insight,
but quickly by-passed.
It is easy to agree, to nod
a demurral as if the remark,
or maybe it's a complaint,
requires no more than passive
assent.
I'll be returning to
Middlemarch the end of the talk,
and specifically to the
problem of recognizing
what calls for response
in the novel, what
counts as a question, and
what passes for explanation.
The middle section,
to which I now turn,
offers the broader
framework within which
I understand the provocations
to attentive engagement actuated
by the form of this novel.
Especially by the purposefully
unresolved variances
between occasions for
knowing it dramatically
presents and the
conceptual tendency
of its narrators
guiding insights.
So part two, The
Urgency of the Everyday.
My current project, The
Aesthetic Commonplace,
attempts to establish coherent
connections between three
distinct appeals to the everyday
as the vital yet somehow
always overlooked sight
of meaningful engagement
with others.
And now given
Heather's question,
I might have to
abandon the project.
William Wordsworth's proposal to
choose incidents and situations
from common life, to describe
them in plain language,
and above all, to
make them interesting,
is probably the most
memorable such declaration.
A half century after
Wordsworth, George Eliot
renewed this appeal in
her earliest fiction,
most openly in a
manifestolike chapter
she placed at the center of her
first full length novel, Adam
Bede, which was written
in 1859, but set
in 1799 with the first edition
of lyrical ballads appearing
as one character's
gift to another.
Eliot's knowledge of
Wordsworth was deep,
so her avocation of the poets
aesthetic of everydayness
is hardly surprising.
But it is also strange,
given Wordsworth's presence
in her writings, that Eliot
would have her narrator defend
artistic commitment
to common course
people and commonplace
things as if that
were a novel
original task and not
a reminder of what Wordsworth
had earlier proposed.
My intuition is that the
coherence of this appeal
depends on the gesture of
awakening to a suddenly
imperative mission.
Something is stipulated by the
willful urgency of the call
to see the everyday
as overlooked.
The affective inflection
is intrinsic to the demand,
not stylistically incidental.
And I'll return to that
note of urgency in a moment.
For both Wordsworth
and Eliot, the task
of making ordinary
things interesting
seems to suspend the
distinction between description
and invention, and
to subsume them
under the term recollection.
Which is to say that
attending to the everyday
entails discovering nothing
new, nothing unknown, nothing
we haven't already seen.
It is in precisely these
terms, as an assembling
of recollections and not
a hunt for new facts,
that the 20th century
philosopher most associated
with the everyday
describes his method.
Wittgenstein enters
this discussion
of 19th century literary
aesthetics abruptly today.
There's no time for
the justification
of a detailed
intellectual history.
I'll simply state directly that
the philosophers resolution
to stick to matters
of everyday thought
in the Philosophical
Investigations
needs to be read alongside
the aesthetic statements
of the romantic poet
and the realist novelist
as a significant inheritance
of their aspirations
in order to understand
the conceptual and ethical
implications of the
commitment to the ordinary
as a neglected
region of meaning.
At stake for all
three is the sense
that certain forms
of knowledge fail
to accommodate features of
experience that press upon
us too closely, too frequently,
and too particularly to be
systematically understood.
In that way, these appeals form
part of a broader 19th century
debate about the
value of abstraction,
the efficacy of generalization,
and the significance
of particularity or detail.
The intersection with the
theme of this conference
involves not only the
emphatic call for attention
to the everyday,
but also that we
are coupling of the assurance
that attending to the everyday
involves just
seeing what's there,
and the insistence that this
just seeing is not so easy.
That temptations and resistances
obscure and obstruct.
In suggesting that tonal urgency
is intrinsic to the appeal,
I mean also to indicate that
its repetition is always
a renewal, never a
claim to originality.
More an exclamation of
something suddenly remembered,
immediate, and of the moment.
I draw attention to
this feature in order
to keep in focus the
dialogic form of the appeal,
especially in Eliot
and Wittgenstein,
where advocacy for
a certain practice
does not proceed by theoretical
justification or defense,
but instead conjures up
interlocutors and calls
for response and assent.
In emphasizing the
structure of address,
I am also suggesting
that the call
to attend to the everyday
entails an approach
or methodology, and not an
effort to direct attention
to or identify some category
of overlooked objects
or persons of phenomena.
And here, I am not
so much dissenting
as just veering away, moving
to the side of an ample body
of scholarship in which the
aesthetics of the everyday
is understood to involve an
elevation of low, or vulgar,
or humble subjects into the
dignified region of art.
That transvaluation is, indeed,
important for the history
of art taste and realism
in the 19th century.
But so long as the
appeal to the everyday
is primarily associated with
the represented content of art,
then it is also
confined to a framework
in which predictable
questions come begging.
Concerns about
instrumentalization
and the casting of classes
of things and persons
into ethically edifying service.
To take just a recent
example, even Jane Bennett's
important work on
everydayness and enchantment,
which I think is
very interesting,
can't seem to get off the ground
without a dense theoretical
defense against
charges of quietism
or ideological blindness.
And such a defense
is actually necessary
insofar as the ethics associated
with the everyday foregrounds
sensory receptivity, and
appears attached in that way
to particular ideas
of everyday things.
On my understanding, the appeal
to the everyday, its tonal
urgency, its
structure of address
are arresting precisely because
the objects of attention
are worrisomely indeterminate.
Defined as no more and no less
than the near at hand, yet
overlooked.
That very indeterminacy
alerts us to the possibility,
indeed, insists
on the possibility
that we do not yet know
where or how to look,
or what to say about it.
The appeal depends on responsive
concurrence to the sense
that something
obviously important,
and important because
obvious, has gone unnoticed.
But that concurrence
does not magically
bring the thing to light.
How, then, does the urgent
appeal and the agreement
it elicits constitute
a form of attention
that is at the same time
irresolute and unclear
about its object?
Today, I'm going to give this
question some concreteness,
or try to, by proposing a formal
correspondence between two
radically different texts.
George Eliot's Middlemarch and
Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations.
The cultural worlds
of these writers
are more proximate
than might appear.
Linked by mid to late
19th century debates
internal to
philosophy in England
by the legacy of
empiricism, the development
of logic as an
academic discipline,
and an ongoing preoccupation
with the relationship
between science and art.
So that's a big history
for another occasion.
And I only mention it to say
that the connections that I'm
trying to propose between
Eliot and Wittgenstein
aren't really just
arbitrary or coincidental,
I think they have a
historical grounding.
I'll mention first
the evident centrality
in each of the problem
of other minds, the idea
that there is an essential
and irremediable disjunction
between what I
can know of myself
and what I can know of others.
In Middlemarch, the
epistemic limits
inherent to individuation,
the ethical and emotional
consequences of those limits are
the narrator's recurrent theme.
The subject of her most
elaborate reflections,
the basis for what might
be termed her theory
of human misunderstanding.
This problem pervades the
Investigations as well.
Most obviously in
the series of remarks
that have come to be known as
the private language argument,
but elsewhere
throughout the work
and in the many
lectures and notebooks
composed in the preceding years.
Superficially, there would
seem to be a clear difference
of attitude between the
novelist and the philosopher
on the problem of other minds.
For Eliot's narrator,
being blind or insensible
to the word troubles of another
simply follows from the fact
that each one of us has a center
of self from whence the light
and shadows must always fall
with a certain difference.
A passing observation,
such as each
lived in a world of which
the other knew nothing,
is typical of the voice animated
by that idea of radically
distinct inwardness.
In this particular case from
the novel, and in many others,
nothing especially
impressive or dramatic
has transpired in the preceding
scene to motivate the judgment.
But the existential
conviction underlying it
has so frequently
been expressed,
that it's easy to glide
over another articulation
of the notion that
our inner worlds are
hidden from one another.
The strangeness of
what Wittgenstein
would call its
picture of human life,
and the even stranger
failure to let
it pass as if it were an
edifying insight and not
a catastrophic
vision, is attenuated
by its repetition in the
familiar, sympathetic voice
of the narrator.
Formally, Wittgenstein's
orchestration of differently
voiced remarks on the privacy
of sensation and experience
seems to offer no such
comfort or guidance.
And substantively, those
remarks can all too easily
be seen as amounting to a
denial of psychic inwardness
altogether.
Each lived in a world of which
the other knew nothing is
precisely the kind of sentence
that a certain kind of reader
would imagine
Wittgenstein exposing
as metaphysical nonsense.
But I think that
view of Wittgenstein
as the deconstructor of private
experience has been superseded.
Readers more attentive to this
sympathetically diagnostic work
being done in his writing, and
I'm thinking of Cavell here.
Also of Cora Diamond, Jim
Conant, Stephen Mulhall,
among many others.
Readers who are appropriately
wary of translating
its formal complexity into a
discursive line of argument
find in the
Investigations no denial
that phrases such as, each lived
in a world of which the other
knew nothing, or, no one else
can really know how I feel,
are meaningful.
But there is a denial that
they convey information,
which is related to
the aim of making
a radical break with
the idea that language
always functions in one way,
always serves the same purpose.
No one can know how
painful this is.
They live in different worlds.
He never knows
what is in my mind.
These are what Wittgenstein
speaking diagnostically
comes to describe as
expressions and exclamations.
But it is difficult to recall,
and tempting to avoid thinking
of them as such,
easier to drift away
from the occasion that
elicits them to be captivated
by the picture of
unreachable inwardness
that seems to explain
their meaning.
Problems arising through
a misinterpretation
of our forms of language
have the character
of depth, Wittgenstein
notes, which is not
to say that their
resolution involves
an exposure of false depth,
but an acknowledgement
of the deep disquietudes
shaping them.
He never knows
what is in my mind.
The aim, I think, is to attend
to the occasion in which we
would like so much
to say something
like this, are
irresistibly inclined
to say it without being
forced into an assumption
about its ramifications.
How, then, are we to attend
to everyday expressions
of those disappointments
in our occasions
of knowing one another?
To take heed of them and
resist subliming them?
I said earlier that tonal
urgency is constitutive
of the appeal to the everyday.
At the very least, the
affective inflection
makes it impossible to forget
that the appeal is issued
as an address,
elicits concurrence,
but doesn't point
out or point to
the obvious, overlooked thing.
The overlooking
of which motivated
the appeal in the first place.
Let me now give some indication
of the kind of engagement
that this urgent but
indeterminate appeal demands.
Part three.
Expecting a Response
Without Forming a Question.
So the most distinctive
feature of the Philosophical
Investigations is
its composition
as a contention among
different voices.
There are debate-like
episodes in which
one voice seems to prevail
over its interlocutors.
But read as a whole, multiple,
distinctly inflected voices
offer generative insights
without anyone emerging
as authoritative.
I want to propose that George
Eliot shares with Wittgenstein
not only the urgently
articulated appeal
to the everyday and not
only a related preoccupation
with the deep disquietudes
hushed under the label,
the problem of other minds,
but also the deployment
of a polyvocal form that
provokes successive rethinking
of the assumptions shaping
its most powerful figures
of human misunderstanding.
The opperent coherence of the
extreme view of individuation
and privacy voiced
by Eliot's narrator
is as much in need of
engaged interrogation
as the simplified view of
Wittgenstein's rejection
of interiority.
A web is woven, but I'm
not sure the novel calls
on us to repair it in the
places where we find it torn.
To suggest that
Middlemarch is formed
by a contention among
different voices,
none of which are
authoritative, means
relinquishing the hold
of one of the books' most
beloved features, the warm
and brilliant reflections
of its distinctive narrator.
Its wisest voice, its
confiding intelligence.
It means demoting Eliot's
narrator, omniscient narrator.
I think there are
many narrators,
but it means demoting
Elliott's omniscient narrator
from the position of
theorist of the novel
to that of a theorist
in the novel.
And for me, at least, this has
not been a purely intellectual
exercise.
It has been difficult to
relinquish insights conveyed
in cherished passages,
and instead, pause
to ask whether their
character of depth
obscures rather than illuminates
the deeper disquietudes that
are in plain view
throughout the novel.
So in the time remaining, I'll
offer just one example of how
the novel provokes an
interrogative re-orientation,
even as its narrator provides
a resolution to questions that
deflect attention away from what
seems most obvious and least
unusual in the deeply moving
and undeniably ordinary
scenes of domestic
tension it relates.
So the moment in
which the heroine
is discovered alone and in
tears during her honeymoon
inspires the remarkable
passage about the roar
on the other side of
silence with which I began.
That moment is the
fulcrum around which
several richly detailed
chapters of the novel
unfold, dilating
temporally through the days
and hours preceding it with the
focalization and the heroine's
psyche punctuated by narration
of a series of restrained,
yet exceedingly tense exchanges
between the disastrously
ill-suited newlywed couple.
On the very morning preceding
the tearful afternoon,
Dorothea's naive importuning
interest in her husband's work
inadvertently aggravates
his anxious insecurity,
each touching unperceived
vulnerabilities in the other,
and each aroused to an
indignation in which neither
of them felt it
possible to speak again.
In this uncomfortable intimacy
within which silence itself
is audible, as the withholding
of speech within which
the slightest withdrawal would
feel like a violent rebuff,
they abide together.
The wife accompanying
her husband
to the Vatican as usual,
leaving him at the library,
and then entering the adjacent
museum because she had
not the spirit to turn round.
So we won't follow her
there, though it is worth
mentioning to her
morning at the museum is
as much a fulcrum
for these chapters
as her tearful
afternoon, and there's
a lot to be said about that.
But what I'm interested
in now, is the point
at which the story does
finally move forward
in time past the
tearful afternoon
to bring husband and
wife together again.
Effectively, no time has passed.
She is anxious, he is
weary, and her words
recall the angry parting
by plainly beseeching
reconciliation.
So after it has been
impossible to speak,
this is one way to
resume conversation.
"Forgive me for speaking so
hastily to you this morning.
I was wrong.
I fear I hurt you and made
the day more burdensome.
I'm glad that you
feel that, my dear.
He spoke quietly and
bowed his head a little,
but there was still an
uneasy feeling in his eyes
as he looked at her.
But do forgive me?
Said Dorothea with a quick sob.
In her need for some
manifestation of feeling,
she was ready to
exaggerate her own fault.
My dear Dorothea, who with
repentance is not satisfied
as not of heaven or earth?
You do not think me to be
worthy of that severe sentence,
said Mr. Casaubon,
exerting himself
to make a strong statement,
and also to smile faintly.
Dorothea was silent, but a tear
which had come up with the sob
would insist on falling."
So without anger, without--
sorry, here's the full passage.
Without anger, without
overt disagreement,
without open hostility, the
others' need may nevertheless
be repulsed, expectations
unmet, wounds inflicted.
Perhaps this is one
element of tragedy which
lies in the fact of frequency.
And, surely, it is remarkable
that the human frame
does bear so much of it.
When the narrator
enters the scene,
it is with the hand
extended, I would say,
to guide us through and
past this difficult moment.
Her remarks condense
the heroine's distress,
situate it within a broader
analysis of ethical failing,
and conclude with a
memorably abstract figure
for the enlightenment to be
wrested from disillusionment.
Today, she had begun
to see that she
had been under a wild
illusion in expecting
a response to her feeling
from Mr. Casaubon,
and she felt the waking
of a presentiment
that there might be
a sad consciousness
in his life, which made as
great a need on his side
as on her own.
We are all of us born
in moral stupidity,
taking the world as an udder
to feed our supreme selves.
Dorothea had early begun to
emerge from that stupidity,
but yet it had
been easier to her
to imagine how she would
devote herself to Mr. Casaubon
than to conceive with that
distinctness which is no longer
reflection, but feeling--
an idea wrought back to
the directness of sense,
like the solidity of objects--
that he had an equivalent
center of self,
whence the light and
shadows must always
fall with a certain difference.
What does it mean to discover
as if it were previously unknown
that others have a center
of self, a sad consciousness
within?
Is the narrator proposing that
we, as a matter of course,
live together,
converse, tell stories,
trade goods, share
meals, play games,
but that it takes some
extraordinary revelation
to make the others'
inwardness real in the way
that solid objects are real?
Is this the sound of
the grass growing?
If not as a roar, then at
least as a gentle murmur.
Everything about this passage is
consistent with the narrator's
theorization of privacy and
intersubjective opacity.
And the assumptions of informing
it are worth specifying.
The ontological priority
of a single subject
remind the supreme self
that it is our birthright
and our dark enclosure.
The inner dimension
and hidden depth
of the self, a consciousness,
be it sad or happy,
that I know from
my own experience,
but might only
guess at in others.
The tendency to conceive
and, consequently,
to represent and explain
the limitations of response
to others.
Our moral stupidity as an
epistemological constraint
or limitation.
That certain difference between
how the light and shadows
fall for you and for me.
To read this concluding and
seemingly conclusive revelation
is itself a kind of
event in the novel,
rather than a definitive
interpretation of events
in the plot, is part of
what I mean by understanding
the novel as a contention
among different voices
and perspectives.
And by event, I literally mean
that something occurs here.
Not a movement
forward in the plot,
but a turn away from
the occasion that
prompts this
specular reflection.
As in the famous passage
with which I began,
attention is deflected
from a woman who is crying.
Again, disappointment with our
ordinary occasions of knowing
one another is at issue.
And again, the narrator
extends an eloquent invitation
to accept a picture of an
existentially faded constraint
or obstruction.
We are all born
in moral stupidity
and if, as we have already
been told, most of us
walk around well-wadded
with stupidity, then woe,
betide any of us who expect
a response to our feeling.
I want to say that
the narrator provides
a kind of explanation for the
defeated expectation here,
and in so doing, looks away
from what the novel has just
brought into plain view.
Feelings of repulsion,
frustration,
disappointment, for which
there is no ready resolution.
It is not just any
response to her feeling
that Dorothea feels she
can no longer expect.
If feeling is a kind of
question put to another,
then an answer may be given,
or withheld, or misunderstood,
or evaded, and all of these
are forms of response.
Expectation and response
are terms of exchange,
forming the contours
of the space
in which one and the
other are held together
for better or worse.
But in drawing inward to expose
the waking of a presentiment
in Dorothea about the other's
existential separateness,
the narrator is also
retreating from that shared
space in which expectation
and response are co-created.
If I see someone writhing
in pain with evident cause,
I do not think, all
the same, his feelings
are hidden from me.
Dorothea's disappointment
in Casaubon's failure
are not epistemic.
The quick sob that rises
with Dorothea's plea
for reassurance, but
you do forgive me,
and the tear which had
come up with the sob
and insists on falling
are plainly expressive.
And if this tear
that escapes is not
wiped away by the other's
hand, is that not, itself,
a response?
Casaubon has, in
fact, all along been
responding to Dorothea's
feeling in the painful scene
between them.
The tragic element of what
occurs consisting precisely
in being made to see that just
this weariness, impatience,
resentment are his
responses to her feeling.
Perhaps it helps,
then, to imagine
or to have it explained that
the comforting hand is withheld
because the other might
not know that the tear is
a sign of the sad
consciousness within.
How much more difficult to
just look and not think,
and so to see that
the withheld hand is
as explicit an expression
of feeling as the tear.
The alienation between husband
and wife at this moment
could not then be
so readily composed
into a definitive illustration
of the existential distance
between minds, but
would instead have
to be withstood as an all
too common form of intimacy.
In this way, the
novel brings us to see
how Dorothea comes to learn that
Casaubon always said, my love,
when his manner was the coldest.
If one goal of
the Investigations
is to bring words back
from their metaphysical
to their everyday use
and, nevertheless,
these combinations of words, he
never knows what is in my mind,
means something.
Then something, if
not a resolution,
can only be arrived at by
recalling their humble home
in language, a procedure that
requires successively entering
into a range of genuinely
felt disappointments,
resisting the impulse to
formulate a big question,
remaining on the rough
ground between expectation
and response, always turning
around the real needs expressed
in small questions.
Thank you.
HELEN SMALL: [INAUDIBLE] I
think you must all be fighting
for attention at the moment.
[INAUDIBLE] challenge
going third.
I'm going to be nearer the 20
minute than the 30 minute mark,
you might be relieved to hear.
I had lunch with a
friend in New York
yesterday who looked with
applause at the program
and asked me what
my paper was about.
And when I said it was about
Wittgenstein Iris Murdoch,
he responded, I do not
know why your interest
in British philosophy
has not hurt you more.
So this is the voice of the
discipline from on high.
I don't think it's as true
here as he thought it was.
This is a paper about
paying attention to things
that other people don't think
you should be paying attention
to.
Iris Murdoch's classic essay,
The Idea of Perfection,
in 1964, pursues an answer
to a technical question
within philosophy.
Should the kind of thinking
that goes on in our heads
when we're reflecting morally
count as moral activity
even when it does
not in any way escape
the confines of our heads?
Elaborating on the
strict internality
to be imagined here,
Murdoch reaches
for hypothetical examples.
I was at first tempted to take
a case of ritual, she says.
I'll save that for a second.
And out of framework which
both occasions and identifies
in an event.
A case, in other words, that
could give a formal context
to what may or may not be
going on vividly to ourselves
inside our heads as we
adjust our own moral tuning.
A feasible question
along these lines
might have been do I,
in a religious context,
repent by sincerely uttering
the words, I repent?
Am I heartily sorry
simply by saying
in an appropriate situation
that I am heartily sorry?
Is this so even if I
then amend my life?
That last sentence is
one of many moments
when I, Helen, fear I am
not sufficiently in tune
with the way Iris
Murdoch's mind works.
I expect a different sequitur.
Is this so even if I then
fail to amend my life?
But perhaps that would be the
question of the theologian,
not the philosopher in search
of a definitionally robust form
of inwardness.
Murdoch, at any rate,
deems that ritual
raises special difficulties.
A more ordinary and everyday
example is called for.
So here is the example.
A mother, whom I shall
call M, feels hostility
to her daughter-in-law, whom I
shall call D. M finds D quite
a good-hearted girl,
but whole not exactly
common, yet certainly
unpolished and lacking
in dignity and refinement.
D is inclined to be pert
and familiar, insufficiently
ceremonious, brisk, sometimes
positively rude, always
tiresome and juvenile.
M does not like D's
accent or the way dresses.
M feels that her son
has married beneath him.
Let us assume, for the
purposes of the example,
that the mother who is
a very correct person
behaves beautifully to
the girl throughout,
not allowing her real
opinion to appear in any way.
Whatever is in question as
happening, happens entirely
in M's mind.
Time passes.
And it could be
that M settles down
with a hardened
sense of grievance
and a fixed picture
of D imprisoned,
if I may use a question
begging word, by the cliche.
My poor son has married
a silly, vulgar girl.
However, the M of the
example is an intelligent and
well-intentioned person
capable of self-criticism.
Capable of giving careful
and just attention
to an object which
confronts her.
M tells herself, I'm old
fashioned and conventional.
I may be prejudiced
and narrow minded.
I may be snobbish.
I'm certainly jealous.
Let me look again.
Here, I assume that M observes
D, or at least reflects
deliberately about D until
gradually, her vision of D
alters.
D is discovered to be not
vulgar, but refreshingly
simple.
Not undignified,
but spontaneous.
Not noisy, but gay.
Not tiresomely juvenile,
but delightfully youthful.
And so on.
I will have more to say
about M and D in a minute,
but let me start with the core
claim here for what attention
is and why Murdoch thinks
we should afford it
moral significance.
Attention is the name she
gives to a bestowing of careful
and just thought
on another person.
In a way that she
was to persuade
us should count
as moral activity,
even though no further
action may flow from it.
Murdoch takes the
term from Simone Weil,
and Weil's influence
is clearly audible
in the essay's characterization
of this scrupulous effort
at thinking a right
about someone else.
Not least the faint
hint of religiosity
dampened but not
eradicated by Murdoch
that makes careful
and just sound
only a slight skeptical notch
away from Weil's assertion
that absolutely unmixed
attention is prayer.
As in Weil, attention looks
rather like a quiet substitute
for will.
Non-assertive piecemeal, but
to directed mental activity
of a specifically moral kind.
The idea of
perfection lays siege
to a claim explicit in
the work of Murdoch's
contemporary Stuart
Hampshire, but as she
puts it, lurking behind much
moral philosophy of the time.
That morality in order
to count as morality,
must be a matter of thinking
clearly and then proceeding
to visible action.
Hampshire is, indeed,
strict in seeking
to distinguish something
he is happy to call
thought from
daydreaming, or musing,
or the drifting of
ideas through the mind.
In a sentence that may have had
special resonance for Murdoch
as a practicing
novelist, he goes on
to direct this
definitional stringency,
specifically at the concept
of interior monologue.
The idea of thought as an
interior monologue will become,
he says, altogether empty
if the thought does not even
purport to be directed
towards its issue
in the external world.
In short, Hampshire
leaves no space
for an active introspection that
remains purely internal and not
objectifable.
Murdoch sets out to
rescue that in tonality,
the inner moral life,
as she calls it,
and to do so without
objectifying it.
Without, for example,
appealing to any kind
of metaphysical witness for
introspection, the eye of god,
as it were.
Or giving introspection
a hypothetical status
that would render it cogent
to a third person view.
If M were to speak
her mind about D now,
she would say different things.
Hampshire is more an indicative
than a representative
adversary.
A striking variety of
philosophical opponents lines
up beside him in the
course of the essay.
Old fashioned empiricism, modern
British empiricism, kantianism,
and above all, perhaps,
modern analytic philosophy.
What they have in common,
as Murdoch represents them,
is a hostility to the
notion of privacy,
to history, and what often
looks like a placeholder
for both privacy and
history, the complexity
of lived reality.
Wedded to an ideal
of universal reason,
their hostility to
these things makes
them incompetent to speak about
important and large tracts
of ordinary moral experience,
especially those parts
of our experience that have
to do with difficulties
in understanding, imitating, or
orienting oneself in relation
to public standards and rules.
Existentialism, Murdoch
credits with at least making
an effort in the direction
of restoring reflective
interiority, but
it falls short when
it imprisons the individual in a
relation with a very inflexible
view of external facts.
Above all, the
idea of perfection
sits in a love-- it's not
a love-hate relationship,
but a love-ambivalence,
shall we call it,
relationship with Wittgenstein.
Much more love than
anything else, I think.
Murdoch's desire to
defend the notion
of an attentive inner
life is a moralist's reply
to the Wittgenstein
assisted attack on privacy
by many of the most influential
philosophers of her time.
An attack from which she
exempts Wittgenstein himself.
Sphinx like
reticence, she thinks,
on the kinds of mental activity
that interests her most.
Murdoch has no
compunction at all
about muddying the waters
of logical analysis
by insisting that
mental concepts enter
the sphere of morality.
This makes her, to many of
her contemporaries' eyes,
a very improper reader
of Wittgenstein,
in ways that are both
exasperating and fruitful.
And proper, I should add in, a
different way to several uses
of Wittgenstein then,
and sometimes since,
which have made the logicians'
it is what it is serve
the purposes of
disciplinary conservatism.
Murdoch called herself a
Wittgensteinian neoplatonist.
The best gloss I can suggest
being that she espouses
a view of metaphysics as
complex, continuous, pictorial
activity.
A kind of secular novelistic
substitution for metaphysics,
but wants to keep onside
with philosophy of language
while forcing it to make
a space for moral concepts
as a special kind of
psychological sense data.
She once said that if she were
shut up in prison for 10 years
and told to write
her philosophy,
she could have a shot
at explaining it,
but it would take a long time.
Her essay makes some
quite shameless leaps
from the philosophy of language
and philosophy of knowledge
to moral philosophy.
Shameless for its day.
Inducing an intense
version of the giddiness
Wittgenstein described as our
characteristic human response
to confronting the gap
between modern empiricists
can say about how
our minds work,
and what it feels like
to be inside them.
That is, of course, a
prejudicial description.
It's hard to imagine
the literary critic who,
whatever their relation
to Wittgenstein,
will not think they ought to be
voting with Murdoch on behalf
of internality
and the complexity
of ordinary lived
experience, whether or not
they accept her way
of going about things.
Attention, as we've heard,
plays an important role
in the Philosophical
Investigations.
It's by clarifying the
legitimacy of attention's scope
that Wittgenstein is able to
establish a difference in logic
between mental states which
cannot be direct objects
of our attention, and the
things we can attend to.
The sensory stimulus
that gives rise
to a sense impression,
for example,
or the verbal expression
of a mental state.
The privacy of your
sensory experiences
or your psychological
activity is an illusion
in Wittgenstein's account.
You do not have access to
it as you do to an object.
Only to the
qualitative character
of the external
prompt or response.
The color red, for example.
The howl of pain.
Put simply, possession
of a concept,
any concept in the late
Wittgensteinian view
is a public skill.
The attack on the idea
of a private language
follows the projection
of the commonplace view
that we use words
as we do because we
have direct knowledge of the
sensations they stand for.
If I cannot attend directly
to psychological states,
my own or anyone else's,
it makes no sense to think
of a language for my
private sensations,
which is understandable
only by me.
Murdoch does not want
a private language,
but she wants something
quite close to it.
A notion of internal attention
to one's moral positioning.
Operative over long
tracts of time.
A life, even, that has
no public expression.
Moral concepts for
Murdoch are things
we apprehend, but the
Wittgenstein in her agrees,
not as objects.
They come to us in the form
of normative descriptive words
by means of which
there takes place
what we might call the siege
of the individual by concepts.
The words that interest
her most are not
the blunt, moral instruments,
good, bad, wise, evil,
and so forth, but what she calls
the specialized or secondary
value words, vulgar,
spontaneous, etc.
Linguistic idiosyncrasy
is, for her,
the marker of a moral life.
More complex than a public
reason's approach to morality
would recognize.
Heavily context dependent,
historically embedded.
Learning takes
place when normative
and specialized normative
words are employed
in context of attention.
Hence, the importance
of the M and D exemplar.
What M is trying to do is
not just to see D accurately,
but to see her
justly or lovingly.
So far from claiming for
it a sort of infallibility,
this new picture has
built in the notion
of a necessary fallibility.
M is engaged in an endless task.
As soon as we begin to use
words such as love and justice
in characterizing
M, we introduce
into our whole picture of her
situation the idea of progress.
That is, the idea of perfection.
It would be grist to
Murdoch's argument
that many of the terms by which
M conducts her in a moral life
have changed their connotations,
if not their meanings,
over the past 50 years.
Common has a ring not
just of snobbery now,
but of antiquated snobbery.
And so forth,
behaved beautifully
sounds like a borrowed
irony from Henry James,
but perhaps it always did.
The quality of attention
called for on M's part,
even without being able to
second guess language change,
is high.
Attention is self-critical,
intelligent moral activity.
A process of watchfulness
over time in one's
response to another
person, gradually
changing the initial
perception of the other person.
And in so doing,
perhaps rectifying
an internal condition
of injustice.
A hardened sense of
grievance, for example.
It matters greatly that
everything that is thought here
about D is unverifiable.
I'll go back to it.
Go back to the beginning of it.
The literary critic
encountering M and D
will reach immediately for
the language of narratology
as honed in the reading
of moral realism.
This is free and
direct style twisted
in its philosophical
purposes so that the absence
of an objective report
beyond the character
is plainly subjective.
And to the reader, but not
D, self-exposing prejudices
are working to expose M not to
our judgment, but to her own.
Murdoch, the
philosopher, he argues
for a version of
the moral life that
looks very like an internally
scripted novel never put
on paper about how morally
thoughtful people develop
over time, and how and
why it may make sense
to conceive of different
moral temperaments.
That is a novel very like
the ones Murdoch wrote.
Murdoch's description
of internal reasoning
about morality places
a high value on ability
to wrestle with the
language, though she
does suggest that there
are other ways of figuring
an internal life.
Imagistically, for example.
Not the least of her
purposes is to find
an account of
moral activity that
steers a course between total
freedom in moral choice,
and total moral determinism.
British philosophers tend to
go with the first, she thinks.
Total freedom,
assertion of the will
in the moment of moral choice.
Existentialists veer
widely between the two.
Be that as it may, the
internal work of redescription,
revisualization,
potentially, figures
as an exercise of freedom in
the small, piecemeal business
of attention.
Attention is a kind
of moral preparation
for life, which is why it's
possible for Elijah Milgram
to include the
idea of perfection
in a context where one
might not expect it,
a modern volume of
essays on varieties
of practical reasoning.
What attracts Milgram
about the essay is,
indeed, the invitation
to think of the building
up of a conceptual
tool kit as a kind
of practice or moral expertise.
There's something appealing
about that thought.
The most internal self
scrutinizing articulate people
might turn out on
this account to be
thoroughly practical people.
It's just that they
haven't put their practice
into the public domain.
Our philosophically
satisfactory is a refiguring
of Wittgensteinian attention
as the psychological action
of wrangling with
moral concepts.
This is going to be where
you're going to really regret
that you asked me because I'm
going to go off message here
big time.
If you're a committed
Wittgensteinian,
it is undoubtedly
problematic in the 1960s.
You know, the
immediate reception
of the pre-Cavell
reading of Wittgenstein.
In effect, what
Murdoch has done is
to take a term that has a
definition in the late logic,
attention is an aspect
of the rule based
way we use words, emphatically
not an inner analog of pointing
in John Campbell's
careful elaboration,
and asked it to comprehend
a kind of moral activity
that goes well beyond what a
logical analysis can readily
deal with.
Although she's
careful not to fall
foul of the
Wittgensteinian attack
on thinking about concepts
as middle sized objects.
It's hard not to think that
she's teetering on the brim
when she writes of moral
concepts of things that
lay siege to the individual.
Valuing idiosyncracy
and the right
of the process of wrestling
with the languages as she does,
there is, it seems
to me, a danger
that the task of the
wordsmith overtakes
the task of the moralist.
That is, that's
what's going on may
be less moral than writerly.
Protest, though, she does
that M's thoughts need not
be nearly as
coherent as they are
made in their
hypothetical rendition
as internal monologue.
It's never very clear
theoretically what
a more shadowy
wrestling with concepts
would look like or feel like.
And her allergy to
certain philosophical
uses a psychoanalysis seems
to prevent her reaching out
to the psychoanalysts for help.
Not least with M
and D in view, it's
extremely difficult to
imagine inner moral activity
of this sort toward another
without entertaining
the possibility of some
kind of subconscious leakage
and responsiveness that
will produce a feedback
loop into the relationship.
This is a difficulty Murdoch
acknowledges but will not
bow to.
She labors strenuously to
keep M's inner moral life free
of external interference,
and is particularly
fierce in her strictures
against the uses Hampshire
and others make of Freud.
She calls it a means of letting
in the historical individual,
but hoping by this means
to keep him upon a lead.
It's hard to know
whether there is
any irony in the
suggestion twice repeated
that it might help us to
imagine that D is dead.
If our lives are,
as Murdoch says,
it pains to remind her
fellow philosophers thickly
can textualized
and historical, why
is she so keen to keep
the internal activity
of any other equally complex
person out of our heads?
Reading Murdoch in the light of
day looks equally problematic.
I'd rather welcome the
dampening of Weil's fervor,
but that probably
makes me a bad reader
from a Weilian point of view.
I don't feel inclined
to be more attentive.
Enough said.
The idea of perfection
is an old essay,
and the opponents it has in view
now seem rather remote enemies.
The inheritors of
the imperialist's
hard quasi scientific
attachment to rules, grammar,
and a rigid universal
idea of reason
that Murdoch's all dominating
philosophy generally.
And moral philosophy,
particularly in the mid-1960s,
now look less powerfully
imperial than they were.
Which is a way of saying
that moral philosophy is
more plural now than it was in
the early 1960s in Oxford East.
I strongly suspect
one sense of that
will be very dependent on
the institution you inhabit.
But reading the essay as
an address to the academy
gives another character
and address to its thinking
about attention.
The idea of perfection casts
a very wide argumentative net.
Though it has at its heart
the technical argument
and defense of a notion
of moral privacy,
it's also a plea for
restored attention
on the part of the
discipline of philosophy
as a whole to large
areas of inquiry that
had over recent decades been
widely deemed illegitimate.
It's not irrelevant
that she writes
of attentive redescription
as a moral discipline.
If Stuart Hampshire and AJ
Ayer are indicative figures
of what had gone wrong to
Iris Murdoch's way of thinking
in the pursuit of an
impersonal world of language,
GE Moore stands at
the start of the essay
as a figure of unjustly
exiled intelligence.
Many of his beliefs
"philosophically"
unstatable now," she says.
Murdoch detects an unlovely form
of hostile narrow mindedness
here, a disciplinary
tendency to determine
that certain lines of
inquiry are progressive,
others regressive or
assumed to be superseded.
Here as elsewhere,
Murdoch thinks
the humanities in the
1960s have been led astray
by a model of progressivism
taken from the sciences
so that retrieving GE Moore
for serious consideration
is looked on askance
as might be the case
with a modern physical
chemist taking up alchemy.
We're well-practiced
as humanists
in making the case for
the retrieval of discarded
texts, historical
episodes, even whole bodies
of intellectual labor
or cultural practice.
But broad disciplinary
agreements
about what is worth our
attention and what is not
are part of what the
term "discipline" itself
comprehends.
To put the point morally,
there is a difference
between retrieval under
the auspices of history
and retrieval in good faith.
Attention of the kind
Murdoch gives to Moore
is capable of redescription.
I'm suggesting as the public
version of what she would have
us understand goes on in
the private life of the mind
careful and just thinking
about another person's ideas--
an attempt to wrest value
from a context of prejudice
in which the quality
of the thought
yielded through
attention may be fallible
but is nevertheless
perfectionist in its intent,
striving continually at
more accurate rediscription.
A stricter
Wittgensteinian of her day
would tell her that
there is a problem
with the word "accurate."
Accurate to what?
How can we know?
But that's accounted for in
her modeling of moral concepts.
It is I think not a small
problem with this extrapolation
from the moral attentiveness
of private thought
to the disciplinary
attentiveness
of intellectual study
that the quality
of the description Murdoch
gives to the sciences
is so plainly hostile.
She is, it would seem,
in the early stages
of the mother-in-law
relationship
so far as the threatening
and historically younger
other divisions of the
university are concerned.
This is not just her
moral failing as it were--
I told you you were going
to regret inviting me.
Assertions to the effect that
the humanities and perhaps
especially literature a,
have a distinctive interest
in the kinds of thinking
that resist public rule
bound or otherwise
normative agreements and b,
are in that sense better
ethically oriented
toward the subject matter
than other divisions
of the university is
still very much currency
in our public debates.
They're not unchallenged.
So b is so obviously
shaky that I
hope I can dispatch it with
an opinionated sentence.
Advocacy for the humanities that
doesn't distinguish interest
in ethics and
ethical comportment
and doesn't distinguish between
the laboratory science's
commitment to method
and the plural
orientations of the sciences
towards their conceptual
content isn't doing
its job I think.
A is more interesting.
The humanities are
often deemed to be
the intellectual home of a
certain kind of resistance
to public reasoning.
Put so blankly, it's not a
very helpful characterization--
far more true of certain
fields of intellectual inquiry
than of others
and in any context
likely to be only
partially true.
Not, I think, very
true in this room.
Murdoch puts the
point more exactingly
when she targets the
kind of reasoning that
assumes we can only work
backward from public statements
to individual discrepancies.
Even this is, I
think, a description
we might be wary of.
The problem's not that the
orientation to a moral concept
"validation of
idiosyncracy" is wrong
or even that the mother-in-law
scenario is not a good basis
for discipline
memorializing, welcome
though an injection
of comedy might be;
rather, that resistance to
public norms of articulation
can only have very
limited viability,
I think, as a platform
for defending what we do.
It may have some appeal not
least in its perversity,
but it won't be enough.
So as part of a
pluralist defense, fine.
But as the thing
itself, I'm worried.
You'll be gleaning by now that
Murdoch's essay makes claims
on my attention that distract
from its explicit purposes.
The idea of
perfection exemplifies
for me a not unfamiliar problem
but in unusually stark form.
What does it mean
to read someone
with whom we perceive
ourselves to be out of tune?
My desire to adjust and
apparent non-sequitur
in Murdoch's brief
consideration of ritual
has numerous other
counterparts in the essay.
How can she put Wittgenstein
and Vey together
in such close proximity?
Is there a glimmer of humor
in the suggestion that 'D'
would conveniently be dead?
I hope there is, but I
honestly have no idea.
How can she so easily knock
the sciences into the back row
by claiming that
words trump ideas?
"It is and always will
be more important to know
about Shakespeare than about
any scientist," she says.
Her mind does not
work as I want it to.
I'm no doubt too rule-bound
even if in different ways
from the rationalists'
rule-boundedness
that vexes her.
Her philosophical writing is
of that very idiosyncratic kind
that pulls the reader up hard
against their own disciplinary
and sometimes moral
anticipations of what
academic writing should be,
even with the very wide latitude
academic writing can
sometimes permit it.
This is no doubt more true
because her primary audience
is one versed in the technically
restrictive requirements
of philosophy of language.
She's a formidable
reader of Wittgenstein
when she wants to be.
And for them even
more than for me
she must seem prone to going
dramatically off-piste.
Iris Murdoch is dead.
It helps to make this explicit.
I do not owe anything to
her morally in the sense
that I owe something
to anyone alive
and with an immediate
claim on my attention.
So I'll end by asking in the
light of the idea of perfection
what the scope of
morality is here.
Murdoch asks me to
consider that attention
to writing that
has been superseded
is a moral activity, even if
it does not leave my head--
that it is an effort, however
fallible of justice and care.
Let's say that I'm
not on this occasion
asking anyone else
here to validate
a public act of attention
to the idea of perfection
by bringing it back
into current discussion.
Milgram, I think has
taken care of that.
There remains something
to be said here
about the psychology
of intellectual labor
that we all engage in private
acts of redistribution
towards the objects
of our reading
over long periods of time
much indeed most of which
will not make it into
the public domain.
I'm not entirely
convinced, though I take it
most people here are, that
this is a moral activity.
But it's certainly activity
that can encroach upon morality.
It's intellectual activity--
an extended recalibration
of description
that becomes moral
when it moves toward
judgements of quality.
And I think it's worth saying
that Murdoch anticipates
[INAUDIBLE] and wanting to
keep judgment at a distance.
So you're not in the act of
paying attention-- judging--
you're doing the preliminary
conceptual toolkit
bit that may or may not
one day yield a judgment.
OK?
Wittgenstein's metaphor--
continual retuning
is I think the best
metaphor to be found for it.
Thank you.
Coffee.
Let people seize
the coffee, huh?
Shall I turn the--
shall I turn the screen off?
Shall Iturn the screen off--
not a Mac user--
NANCY YOUSEF: We're
waiting on [INAUDIBLE].
TIM BEWES: OK.
OK, thanks.
Three amazing papers--
we have about 20 minutes.
Jeff?
AUDIENCE: I'm going
need all 20 minutes.
Actually, this is a
question for Nancy.
And I've been tormented
by your argument
and tormented by
it in a good way.
And I'm prepared to agree
with it reluctantly.
And I want to actually ask
you the following two--
what's your main argument
as far as I'm concerned?
Your main argument as far as
I'm concerned, leaving aside
the Wittgenstein--
the skepticism that
you want to attach
to the Eleatic jingle about
her version of the problem
of other minds, right?
I'm with you there.
That's not a problem.
But the problem I had the
hardest time with as a
confirmed Elea--
Eleatic-- is the notion
that the narrator
is one among many
narrators as it were.
And I want to actually ask you--
to agree with you--
to see if these are, as it were,
friendly amendments to what
you're suggesting-- or examples.
Example one, it
seems to me there's
a kind of affective
motive in this--
we could call it the
solution of other minds.
In other words, the notion
that I don't know what's
going on in your mind.
And if you think about the sort
of fundamental emotional fact
of the refusal of
forgiveness in Elea--
Tom Tulliver, never
mind Grandcourt.
Adam Bede, only after
he's killed his father
can he forgive, right?
That is to say, you stop.
Stop Arthur.
Well, yeah, right?
He says, stop I've
been harsh, too harsh.
Basically, I waited
until my father was dead.
He didn't literally kill him
but you know what I mean.
Gwendolyn refusing to forgive
[INAUDIBLE], et cetera,
et cetera--
all these moments,
et cetera et cetera.
Think about the flood at the
end of Mill on the Floss.
Here's what I was
thinking, that moment where
Dorothea does what
anyone does who
really wants to stop fighting.
Even though I'm
still really pissed
I'm going to ask for
forgiveness, right?
Let me start.
Let me throw it down here.
And you come along too, right?
Now you do your job and say
you're sorry too, right?
None of that, right?
Then we go immediately into--
from there we go to
the bad and we go--
via the basilicas--
we go to the roar
on the other side of silence.
Right?
NANCY YOUSEF: You know the
sequence in those chapters
is so incredibly weird.
The scene of
Dorothea crying alone
happens I think
three different times
over the course of the chapter.
So the "forgive me" is
really the culminating sort
of episode in that sequence.
So the roar is actually earlier.
AUDIENCE: Oh, I know.
What's leading up
to that is, the roar
which lies on the
other side of silence
has been eventuated, produced
by this, "Please forgive me.
Do you forgive me?"
And then you get that pompous
non-forgiveness, just in terms
of the sequence of the action.
No?
That's what the novel says.
She's crying on the bed.
How did we get here?
We got here in
the following way.
There was this argument earlier
in the day, dah, dah, dah.
NANCY YOUSEF: Yeah.
So the "forgive me," is after.
Is temporally--
AUDIENCE: Prior.
Narratively after.
NANCY YOUSEF: Narrative
in the novel, after.
AUDIENCE: Right, but you
follow what I'm getting at?
NANCY YOUSEF: Yeah.
I think so.
AUDIENCE: So what I'm suggesting
is that it's like good thing
that there's the
prop of other minds,
because if it weren't for
the prop of other minds
there'd be all this
returning rage, right?
Point one.
Point two, it seems
to me that the notion
that the narrator is constantly
producing the sense of like--
let's start again.
Let's just say you're right--
I think you are--
about the narrator being
one of many narrator voices.
Contest of Faculties,
Bulstrode, Lydgate the narrator.
The narrator-- as
usual when there's
a contest to faculties,
home court advantage,
the home court wins.
Excuse me, let's start with
Lydgate-- an obvious example--
lacks sympathy, right?
Therefore he goes down
because he lacks sympathy.
He doesn't realize
that Rosamond's
another being, right?
So he lacks the narrator
sympathy, all right?
NANCY YOUSEF: OK.
Go on.
Go on.
AUDIENCE: Bulstrode,
falls into a kind
of a pre-panopticon situation.
He sees into your life.
Turns out you can see
into his life too, right?
That's the problem.
But with the narrator,
she's sympathetic
but no one can see her.
She's ontologically
curtained from the--
[INAUDIBLE] their
turn to say, "Well,
how dare you put past all these
judgements on us you trollop?
You living in London out of
wedlock with this other guy."
So that also brings
in this notion
that suggest that as it
were, a kind of motive--
whether it be a
disciplinary motive--
the realist novel
versus whatever--
a psychological-- a motive
for the notion of the problem
of other minds, where
the prop of other minds
becomes the solution
of other minds.
NANCY YOUSEF: Right.
Well, thanks for that.
It's really interesting.
This is the first time that
I've presented this material
and I realize it's
kind of complicated and
countercounterintuitive
argument that I'm
trying to make about the
novel, so it's in development.
You know, among the
this sort of-- sir,
if you're proposing Lydgate and
Bulstrode a sort of surrogate
figures for the kind
of narrative project--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, Bulstrode,
Lydgate [INTERPOSING VOICES]
NANCY YOUSEF: Mary
Garth I would say.
There are multiple
surrogates, all right?
You know, Lydgate is
an interesting example
because his project,
right, his medical project,
his scientific project is--
on my reading-- closest to the
kind of omniscient narrator
conception.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
NANCY YOUSEF: Yeah,
because of the emphasis
on penetration, right?
To penetrate, to find
the primitive tissue.
So there's a really telling line
in this description of Lydgates
project where a voice--
that I don't think is the same
as the Problem of Other Minds
narrator voice enters
to say, well, he
was after the primitive
tissue in that way
he put the question, not
quite in the way quite
of the awaiting answer.
But doesn't that
happen so often?
So I think for me
that's a sort of cue
that the very mode of inquiry
for which the omniscient
narrator is providing answers
is kind of under investigation
in the novel.
But there's so much
more to talk about.
So other people.
TIM BEWES: [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Having recently-- I'm
an anthropologist--
having recently completed
a year of anthropological
fieldwork on mental
health and illness.
In trying to understand
what happens to households
or families in the
case of mental illness,
the single most useful
concept I've found
has been Cavell's Conception
of the Temple of Skepticism
in The Claim of Reason, and
skepticism as a concept.
To understand certain doubts
about existence and his claim,
it is absolutely the
central principle
and what separates
Austin and Wittgenstein.
And what struck
me quite strongly,
is in each of the
three papers here
we find a very different
relationship to skepticism,
or the conception
of what is at stake.
Because according to Cavell,
Philosophical Investigations
is written in continual
response to the threat
of skepticism and the idea
that the world may dissolve.
But [INAUDIBLE] paper it
seemed almost like an academic
or it's written in
argument-- as you said--
against a certain
kind of skepticism.
But what is interesting
to me in Cavell
is that the argument
with skepticism
is something you can never
win or lose, he says.
So I just wanted
to draw out-- so it
seems to be a certain kind
of argument in your case,
a certain kind of opacity
in the case of Nancy,
and a certain something
that can be overcome.
A problem with respect
to other minds that
can be overcome if I read one
version or some form of what
your example was doing.
Except interestingly,
Cavell as a [INAUDIBLE]
never quite goes away.
It's not something that can
be defeated in that sense.
So I just wanted to draw
for each of your papers,
how you would think of
the problem of skepticism.
TORIL MOI: OK.
So I didn't see
my paper as being
an argument against skepticism
in that non-Cavellian way
at all.
I think I only use the
word once or twice,
and then it's a diagnosis.
I'm just saying that
certain theories of language
are skeptical.
They just are forms
of skepticism.
I was certainly not trying
to persuade or argue them out
of their skepticism.
In chapter nine in my book, the
key concept is acknowledgment.
And for me that scene that
you quoted, first of all,
I think the concept
that really fits
the scene where
Casaubon [INAUDIBLE]
doesn't want to forgive her.
But she's actually fake here.
She doesn't really want to
be forgiven because she--
Dorothea-- it says,
she's exaggerating
her fault a little.
And Casaubon can't forgive
her, won't forgive her
because he-- you know, we know
what we know about Casaubon.
But the point is,
acknowledgement for Cavell
requires not just
that you understand
how it is with the
other, but that
knowledge your own position
in relation to them.
And of course Casaubon can't
do that because he would then
have to acknowledge how
he is in relation to her.
And she doesn't
actually, right there--
she's asking for
forgiveness because it's
what the woman should do.
She feels a bit bad.
So for me, the concept of
acknowledgment is the one.
That's not the
concept that Cavell
uses as a counter-argument
to skepticism.
I mean you and I
agree completely.
It's the concept that he
uses to show that there's
a dimension of being
with other minds that
is not an epistemological one.
The idea is not where the right
can have 100% certain knowledge
of what goes on in your mind.
The idea is, can I acknowledge
how it is with you?
Can I acknowledge the
plight of mine, you're pain,
or whatever it is that's
at stake right now?
And it's not clear.
And that does turn our knowledge
in the positivistic way.
So essentially I agree
that you can't argue people
into believing.
It's the picture of what counts
as knowledge of other minds
that's wrong, Cavell shows.
The idea that it turns
on 100% certainty,
well, sure we can't have that
if your picture of certainty
is a positivistic one.
But acknowledgment
is the live option,
and the moral claim on us.
So essentially I agree.
I didn't try to argue against
skepticism in the slightest.
Acknowledgment, I could
go on about forever.
NANCY YOUSEF: I can
only agree with you.
I think acknowledgement
may be the missing term
in the question that you asked.
And I guess maybe the
one thing I would add,
is that in Cavell acknowledge--
I mean you're quite
right, it's a concept.
It's an idea that
is meant to suspend
a question of an epistemological
relationship to the other.
Acknowledgement
is something else,
but it's also not always
successful, all right?
So there are failures
in acknowledgment
that are different than
failures of knowing.
There are failures of response.
There are ethical failings.
And in that sense,
maybe that's what
you mean by the
tempo of skepticism
that we live in
relation to others.
You know, if we were all
perfect in our acknowledgements
there would be no
problems between them.
HELEN SMALL: Kind of covers its.
I'd only add, what's really
obvious is that I don't think
what need now is a turn
against skepticism,
I think we just need a better
debate about what's frivolous
and what's a
non-frivolous skeptism.
TIM BEWES: [INAUDIBLE] and
there's somebody back there
[INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: I have a
slightly incorrect question
I think possibly, most
directly for Toril Moi.
Thank you all for your
very stimulating papers.
I just feel a worry.
Perhaps I feel
skeptical about how much
depends on figuring out
the internal relationship
of the somewhat frugal
binary of word and world.
Insofar as, you know, word
is also world and vice versa,
and perhaps the same
obtains for other binaries
that came up in
all of your papers
say self and other,
subject and object.
And I wonder-- which is why
I'm directing this question
to Toril Moi first of all--
is whether in the [INAUDIBLE]
corpus, in the way
that [INAUDIBLE]
especially, who is not
summoned often enough,
gives up on referentially
without giving up on the real.
But might we not be able to
say that the case is being made
for permutation as the means to
provoking attention and being
attentive?
And by permutation I mean
when I say at this moment jam
tart, I in this
gathering, at the time,
I mean jam tart the thing.
I also mean the expectation
of shared hunger and low sugar
levels.
And I express a permutation.
And that in every
such case of OLP
utterance there is
room for rather more
complex permutations of
things, and selves, and others,
and so on and so forth.
Thank you.
TORIL MOI: Well, I
always think it's
hard to give talks where you
hint at Wittgenstein's very
rich vision of language.
If I gave the impression
that he operates
with like two terms,
word here, well there,
and let us now intertwine
them, then I'm very sorry.
That's not the vision.
So obviously I then failed to
convey in very brief form what
I wanted to say.
It seems to me that
in the tradition-- as
I understand it after
Wittgenstein, Austin,
and Cavell.
Everything you want out
of your jam tart and more
is fully available in
every conceivable way.
That's the whole
idea of words that
are-- as you like--
utterances that
are at once actions, and
interventions, and expressions,
and depend on who
you're talking to.
And they depend on uptake.
And they depend on exactly the
situations that's at stake.
That's what it means to say
that practices and utterances--
if you don't like the
word, world and word,
I suppose one says it
because it both begins
with w, which is one sort
of pressure you can go for--
then feel free to use others.
The idea that there
should be a binary at work
here is like alien to me.
And I just can very
well see that I
could have given
that impression,
but that's not my view.
The whole beauty of
the vision of language
here is one that takes you--
obviously some things
are binary opposites,
but that's neither
here nor there
when it comes to understanding
how language works.
I mean binary opposites
are fine but they're not
the foundation of anything.
But then at the same time
I don't see any trouble
in talking about self and
other, because sometimes we need
to talk about self and other.
Point here being,
that I think this
is precisely the
kind of tradition
that you're looking for
and I commend it to you.
TIM BEWES: Do you
guys want to respond?
So there are just three
other people with questions.
Can I ask you to
each be fairly brief?
Yes, you in the back.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I'll be very brief.
This is a question that
arose during Toril's talk.
If anyone has any thoughts
I'd love to hear them.
One of the memorable aspects of
Wittgenstein's investigations,
and of the [INAUDIBLE]
books for me,
is that recognition of what he
calls the process of meaning
words, the feeling with
language, what he calls
sort of the tune to language,
the song that accompanies
the process of meaning
words, as an important aspect
of his understanding
of language there.
And I was just wondering
how that comes into--
Toril-- into your understanding
of words sharpening
our understanding of the world.
Because if anything--
and I may be wrong--
this tune would seem to soften
the understanding of the world
rather than sharpen it.
TORIL MOI: Well, maybe we're not
talking about the same thing,
but when you talk about tune I
am thinking about a tune that--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TORIL MOI: OK.
Sorry.
I assumed you are
saying attunement,
and language as attunement,
which is [INAUDIBLE] as we
talked about.
That's come in the
paragraphs where
he talks about how we agree in
judgment but not in opinion.
I don't see how
that is connected
for or against the sharpening
of our understanding of words
or the softening.
In fact, I'm not even sure
I know what a softening of--
I'm not sure what you
mean by softening.
I would just say that
what Wittgenstein
wants from the
attunement concept
is the idea that I
can't even quarrel
with you if we
didn't share criteria
for when to deploy concepts.
So that if I wanted
to really slug it out
with you over the idea of
softening, say, something,
I would have to
understand what you mean,
how are you using the
word softening here.
And I'm not quite
sure I got that.
So also, you know,
Wittgenstein, [INAUDIBLE]
agree with what you're saying.
Wittgenstein begins by
saying you don't even
have a philosophical problem
unless you feel confused.
Confusion, this fog
we're in sometimes,
that propels you into thinking.
And then when you've done
that, you will see clearly
this clear view or the
perspicuous representation
or survey is what he wants.
I don't think there's anything
in Wittgenstein to give primacy
to the opaque or the unclear.
But you see, he also
says, sometimes what
you want is a blurred picture.
You don't always need clarity.
You sometimes need subtle tact.
Am I saying you should always
define all your I don't know,
critiques of your friends
as clearly and sharply as
possible?
No.
But sometimes what you
need is the blurred picture
and sometimes you don't.
But that's not the theory.
There's no theory here about
sharpness or lack of it.
And Wittgenstein
loved clarity, it
was the goal of his philosophy.
TIM BEWES: We can just have
the last two questions maybe.
AUDIENCE: Can you hear?
TIM BEWES: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I was just thinking,
I was fascinated by M and D.
I wanted just to know a bit
more about why she stops--
does she stop the
vignette there?
Because if she does
it's odd that--
and maybe this ties
into the resistance
to the psychoanalytical you
we're talking about in her--
she stops after she's
made a power in progress
from denigrating D
to idealizing her.
Is that right, roughly?
She sort of says, the
movement is, I learn patience.
I'm getting more just.
I'm on the way to
becoming more perfect by--
I'm being slightly caricature,
but the question is really, why
do you think Murdoch does not--
why is there the silence about
why M might need to idealize?
[INAUDIBLE] say there's no
glimmer of the power that
will be at stake in being
charitable and feeling
the power of that.
I don't know whether that
ties into a larger argument,
but there's a place where
Murdoch says that attention is
patience with the contingent.
But that didn't sound like it.
That vignette sounds
like stage to,
I was bad then and now good.
And I'm going to blank
off the unconscious.
It's my other motives
for being able to pass
my beautifully charitable
judgment on D. Does that make--
HELEN SMALL: It does.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: This is
of course for Nancy.
Thank you though,
fabulous papers.
Great panel.
You're being critical of the
Middlemarch narrator, right?
Because I mean part
three was introduced
as poly-vocal ways of
re-looking at things
as we move along
through the novel.
But it seemed to me that you
ultimately were giving a very
sophisticated updating of the
critique of the intrusively
didactic [INAUDIBLE] narrator,
or alternately a kind of--
there's also some
sort of affinity
between what you're doing and DA
Miller's critique of the Scenes
of Sympathy, right?
Where there's like, this is
what's really happening here,
impasse, egotism, you
know, complex affect.
And I agree with you that
it's really interesting
to read the theoretical
voice or voices
of the narrators in relation
to the embedded characters.
I think that's a really
fruitful way to read Elliot.
But I was just wondering
if you're ultimately
also sort of saying the
novel might be better
without some of these?
NANCY YOUSEF: No, I hope that's
not what I was saying at all.
I mean I think that the fact
that that voice is there
is crucial.
And I mean I hope I conveyed--
I guess I didn't--
I hope I conveyed that
love the narrator.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
it's the swerve away.
And I think what perhaps didn't
quite come out in this paper
as much as I hope it does
in the longer version,
is that the intense desire
and temptation to embrace
the narrator's insight.
So it's difficult.
And I even think
Wittgensein says in of the
earlier drafts of Philosophical
Investigations that it's
very hard to give up using
certain combinations of words.
That's a painful relinquishment.
So yeah, I'll have to be careful
that in the later version
of that.
Okay, so just M and D. The
funny thing about [INAUDIBLE]
just edited it out and an issue
of NLH on [INAUDIBLE] parody.
HELEN SMALL: And
the lovely thing
about [? Murdoch's ?]
examples is-- and all examples
are spurious, right?
But hers are known
to be spurious.
So it doesn't function
like internal monologue,
bottom line.
Nevertheless, I'm going to give
you an approximation to it,
which is internal monologue.
So the whole thing is falsely
articulate from the start.
And what she wants you
to do is to pull out
those second order
descriptive words and think,
that's where the moral
tuning is going on.
And the bit that's
funny is that--
[INAUDIBLE] is she being funny?
I'd love to think
she's being funny.
Is yes, it achieves a
kind of perfectionist,
here is an idealized version of
my daughter in one direction.
But that is itself supposed
to be a fallibility I think,
because it's clearly
self-serving in one
kind of judgmental reading.
But the entire thing
is a secondary move
on a judgmental reading.
So she could have
scripted it any which way.
That's the whole point, that
what she wants you to do
is pull out those
twiddling the dial words
and see what's going between.
TORIL MOI: Could I just
ask a quick question?
Because the M and
D story, is just
meant to counteract
the idea that you
don't have moral transformation
unless you have action?
So that it doesn't really much
matter what transformation--
I mean [INTERPOSING VOICES],
because she's arguing against
people like [INAUDIBLE] where
you absolutely have to commit
yourself to doing
something in the world.
And the whole idea is this
woman sits there and is
doing nothing, right?
She's just thinking.
So from that point of
view, it wouldn't matter
what the details were, right?
HELEN SMALL: Exactly.
TORIL MOI: So the question is
whether it works on that level
or not.
So whether we think she's
kind or narcissistic,
as long as we think
there's a change,
Murdoch has got her point.
HELEN SMALL: Yeah, a
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
non-visible change,
something has just
happened inside the box as
it were of internal monologue
where the box has
the one label on it.
It shouldn't be internal
monologue anyway.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TORIL MOI: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
HELEN SMALL: Exactly.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
HELEN SMALL: I think
people need the jam tarts.
TIM BEWES: Yes, jam tart time.
So we have 15 minutes and we'll
reconvene here five past 12
for the next session.
Thanks a lot again
to our panelists.
