40.4.nussbaum

Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and LiteratureMartha Nussbaum

New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2009, pp.757-765 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0111

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New Literary History, 2009, 40: 757765

Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature

Martha Nussbaum

Philosophy and literature have had a very uneasy relationship throughout the Western philosophical tradition. Already in the Republic (c. 380370 BCE), Platos Socrates refers to a quarrel of long standing between the poets and the philosopherswhich he then pursues, expressing both a deep love of literary art and a reluctance to admit it into the instructional plan of the ideal city. So central was this debate to subsequent Greek and Roman philosophers that one could write the history of at least the ethical portion of those traditions as an extended conversation about this theme.1 Later philosophers in the Western tradition continue the conversation, never without consider-able ambivalence, but usually with a lively sense of the ethical insight that literature may possibly offer. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heideggerall these major Western philoso-phers, and many others, have contributed to keeping the conversation alive. Only in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy has the re-lationship between the two disciplines been virtually neglected. Analytic philosophers sought to write in a nonliterary style and rarely discussed the contribution of literature to understanding; literary authors and writers about literature felt, with much justice, that philosophy offered little that was relevant to their concerns. With the exception of figures such as Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell, always treated as eccentric and marginal, there was little sustained cross-disciplinary conversation.

Today, all of this has changed. Young philosophers working on eth-ics are likely to have a keen interest in works of literaturenot just as grab bags of examples, but as sources of ethical insight in their own right. Particularly in the part of the discipline known as virtue ethics, concern with notions of character, ethical vision, and virtue, as well as a preoccupation with relationships of love and friendship, lead almost every participant in the subfield to turn to literature. Meanwhile, writ-ers about literature are far more likely to discuss the ideas of moral philosophers than they were before. Conferences that bring critics and literary historians and theorists together with moral philosophers are

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reasonably common, and joint dissertation committees are very com-mon indeed.

What produced this remarkable change? One major factor, at least, was a bold enterprise of Ralph Cohens: an issue of New Literary History on the theme Literature and Moral Philosophy. The issue was a typical example of Ralphs uncanny ability to identify significant debates that ought to occur, and then to set the stage for their occurrenceto lead fashion, rather than to be led by it. In recognition of his remarkable insight and courage, I shall devote this essay to telling the story of how that issue came into being, and then to some reflections on the changes we have seen since then. I cant avoid telling the story from the point of view of my own involvement in the issue, but I hope to make it clear that other thinkers played a generative role.

Around my fifth year of teaching, in 1980 or 1981 (for I can find no documentary evidence of what exact year it was), I was invited to pres-ent an Invited Paper at the American Philosophical Associations Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco. Despite the general absence of inter-disciplinary conversation, prior to Ralphs intervention, I had long had an interest in the relationship between literature and moral philosophy, and had made a point of teaching, every year, one course that was not in ancient Greek philosophy (the primary area of my appointment). One of the courses I offered was Philosophy and the Novel, and I had been working out some ideas about Henry James and Marcel Proust, and their relevance to moral philosophy. I discussed those issues with Ralph when we first met on a visit I made to Virginia in around 1980, and he had already given me encouragement and advice. When the invitation arrived, without restriction of content, I decided, now or never. That is, if I didnt take this opportunity to stick my neck out as a philosopher, addressing questions not connected to ancient Greek philosophy, I might always be pigeonholed as a narrow historical specialist. So I decided to write up some of my ideas about Jamess The Golden Bowl.2

Not connected to ancient Greek philosophy is not quite right, since for a number of yearssince at least 1972I had been investigating is-sues of literary form and ethical content in writing about the Greeks. An early article on Sophocles Philoctetes,3 first written in 1974, had appeared in the very first issue of the now well-established journal Philosophy and Literature, whose longtime editor, Denis Dutton, has always been a major source of encouragement. By the early 1980s, I was in the midst of writing what later became The Fragility of Goodness,4 and my work on those con-nections between tragedy and philosophy had been amply encouraged by Bernard Williams and by my Harvard colleague, Stanley Cavell, with whom I was then teaching a large humanities course in which I lectured

759dialogue between philosophy and literature

on Sophocles and Dante alongside Plato and Aristotle, and he lectured on Shakespeare and Hollywood film comedies alongside Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. (Cavells famous essays on Lear and Othello emerged from lectures in that class, as did my chapter on Antigone and Symposium in Fragility.) So it really was not new to me to raise questions about the relationships between literary works and philosophical works, especially works that posed ethical questionsbut Ralph was the first person on the literary side who had encouraged me to pursue these connections, and who led me, by the quality of his attention, to believe that they might be important.

When a young philosopher is asked to give an Invited Paper, the usual custom is to assign the role of commentator to a more established philosopher. There are many who might have played that role uncom-prehendingly, or narrowly, or even with hostility to the new project. My good fortune, however, or the program committees sagacity, led to the selection of Richard Wollheim, who later became a protagonist in the creation of the NLH issue. Though best known for his writing on the aesthetics of painting,5 Wollheim always had a passionate concern for literature. He had already published a novel (and wrote for Ralph and NLH a fascinating commentary on it6): he later published a remarkable memoir of his childhood.7 He also later wrote wonderful works on the emotions, informed by psychoanalysis.8 He was the most perceptive reviewer and critic of my own later work on emotions.

Richard was a natural ally for Ralph Cohen, in the enterprise in which they soon joined. A German Jew among the Oxfordians, the son of a ballet dancer and an impresario among the British philistines, a social-ist among the Tories, Richard was to the bone an iconoclast, impatient with post-Victorian proprieties, eager to talk about the deepest passions of the heart even if people thought that not a very polite thing to do in a philosophy meeting. Richard was, in every way, for me, a felicitous choice. Elegant and reserved, somewhat ponderous in manner, he hardly seemed to me to be the person who had written that extremely violent novel of jealousy and murder until he began to give his paper. From that time on, we had a ball.

Richards reply was more than I might have hoped for. 9 Not only did it respond with great seriousness and sympathy to the overall proposals I made about philosophys relationship to the James novel, it also of-fered a reading of the novel that took issue with mine. Over the years I have come to believe that Richards reading, focusing on Maggies predatory qualities, is in many ways superior to my own, which praises her qualities of perception. But what a surprise that these deep human issues would be engaged, and so seriously pondered, in a philosophy


meeting. The only question I remember from the audience was an ex-tremely long one from logician Ruth Barcan Marcus, and I remember it for its surprising sympathy.

After the session, Richard and I talked matters over, and we decided that the exchange deserved publication somewhere. Since I had already met Ralph on that earlier visit and had formed the very highest opinion of his engagement with both literature and philosophy, I suggested send-ing the exchange to him. Richard, another admirer of Ralphs, agreed. Ralph, to our great surprise and delight, not only agreed to publish the exchange, but also proposed devoting an issue to the topic. He invited a number of independent papers on the theme, but also invited a group of philosophers to join the specific conversation about Henry James that Richard and I had begun. By that time, Patrick Gardiner of Oxford had already written an illuminating commentary on my article for a session of the Oxford Philosophical Society. Ralph published his piece, and invited additional commentaries from Cora Diamond, D. D. Raphael, and Hilary Putnam, to which I then responded. All of them raised fundamental issues, and the conversation was a rich one.

This conversation did not take place in a vacuum. Although ways of doing moral philosophy most prevalent at that time, Kantian and Utilitarian, tended to focus on general principles of conduct rather than the fine-tuned perception that Jamess novels both describe and promote, those ways of looking at ethics were already being challenged, in the name of an Aristotelian type of perception, by the important contributions of Iris Murdoch and the more elaborate development of such ideas in the articles of John McDowell and David Wiggins. Bernard Williamss bracing assault on conventional moral philosophy made room for attention to literature by emphasizing the ethical importance of the emotions and the imagination. In America, although Stanley Cavells work was in some quarters unjustly neglected, his Harvard colleagues Hilary Putnam and Robert Nozick had already given signs of sympathy with some of Cavells ideas. Putnam was already teaching a class on Nonscientific Knowledge that included knowledge gained from lit-erature alongside religious and ethical knowledge; Nozicks daring and wide-ranging explorations of topics such as happiness, wisdom, and the meaning of life also made room for a philosophical engagement with literature. The journal Philosophy and Literature was already beginning to have a certain influence on the work of mainstream philosophers. So the ground was in a certain sense prepared for our enterprise. I have always felt gratitude to Williams, Cavell, Putnam, and Wigginsall of whom read and engaged with my workfor a sense of permission they gave me to do what I wanted to do.


Nonetheless, Ralphs contribution was of central importance. Its all very well to converse about such things, but publication in a prominent journal, and publication in a special issue that dignified the importance of the questions and drew other people to them (for example Cora Diamond, who had not written on those topics before, but did so repeat-edly later) makes a huge difference in giving legs to a new movement, especially one that crosses disciplines. Its result was, first, that the same people went on to have a lot more to say about these issues. (Cora Diamond and I shortly had another exchange about James at another American Philosophical Association meeting, where we were joined, halfway through by the great philosopher Nelson Goodman, who read the papers in his hotel room and got so excited about the issues that he decided to join the discussion.10

The second thing that happened was that new voices joined the conversation. From the side of literature, Anthony Cascardi,11 Charles Altieri, Wayne Booth, and, as time went on, many more; from the side of philosophy, Richard Eldridge (whose work over the years has been especially significant), Marcia Baron, Julia Annas, Daniel Brudney, Robert Solomon, and, again, as time went on, many othersincluding, recently, the gifted young Israeli philosopher Tzachi Zamir, whose book on Shakespeare is among the most remarkable contributions to the debate, both in its treatment of general issues and in its wonderful readings of individual plays.12

The conversation has also spread to other countries. In Paris, Sandra Laugier (also Cavells translator, and a charismatic teacher and insight-ful philosopher in her own right) arranged for translations of many of the relevant papers, and by now many of the young moral philosophers working under her influence are pursuing related questions. Finland, Germany, and India have all, in different ways, joined in (India through recovery of the example of Rabindranath Tagore, who moved effortlessly and perceptively between his work as novelist and poet and his work as essayist and philosopher).

Any new movement needs tough critics to provoke further debate, and this one found Richard Posner, whose Against Ethical Criticism, published in Philosophy and Literature,13 took my workwhich by then included the books Loves Knowledge and Poetic Justice14 (the latter being a critique of Posner)as its particular target. At yet another American Philosophical Association meetingthis time in ChicagoWayne Booth and I presented papers replying to him, and he replied to usthe whole exchange being published in a subsequent number of Philosophy and Literature.15


In these subsequent developments, Ralphs guiding hand has always been evident. Some of the participants in that initial issueDiamond and Putnam especiallyhave gone on to be among the conversations most formidable participants. Even more important, the fact that Ralph chose to focus the special issue on questions of moral perception and on the novels of James has steered the debate over literatures role in moral philosophy to a close affiliation with the revival of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that has by now had a huge influence in moral philosophy. In effect, Ralph set an agenda for the conversation to follow, and it has been following his lead for many years now, with increasing refinement and insight.

How do things stand today? Has the project Ralphs editorial vision nourished changed the way things are done in both disciplines, or hasnt it? Before I can answer that question, I have to say a little more about what the conversation was about. Of course there are many different issues that its different participants have raised, but let me reduce them to two. The first concerns the need for moral philosophy to recognize ways of thinking and imagining that do not focus exclusively on general principles. My own turn to James was part of a defense of an Aristotelian perception-based approach in ethics, and my claim was that we cannot see what such an approach offers, or consider its claims fairly against the claims of its Kantian and Utilitarian rivals, without detailed inves-tigations of the role of perception and particular vision in individual lives. Philosophical articles cannot, all by themselves, offer us such investigations, although they can helpfully comment on them. Novels such as the novels of Henry James are such investigations. Their form, I argued, is not incidental, but essential to their ethical contribution. For that reason, I concluded, no work in the form of a philosophical treatise could make a complete statement of the case for Aristotelian perception-centered ethics. Moreover, the dialogue that such novels carry on with their (implied) reader involves the activation of capacities of perceiving: so the very reading of such a novel, if one reads attentively, is a type of responsible ethical action.

Those arguments were addressed to moral philosophers and those who care about moral philosophy. They were relevant, too, in a differ-ent way, to scholars of literature and interpreters of literary texts. For example, Wayne Booths wonderful The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction,16along with other writings by ethical critics of the sort I have mentionedshowed (in ways that lie close to the debate within phi-losophy) that a focus on how form directs the moral gaze opens up a set of fruitful strategies for reading. These claims, then, were primarily disciplinary and cross-disciplinary.


Poetic Justice made a broader set of claims.17 Here I argue that the sort of imagination to which (a group of selected) novels direct their reader is an essential ingredient of good citizenship: so anyone concerned with citizenship has reason to teach these works, and any other works of art that similarly cultivate the imagination. I have developed these claims repeatedly in writing about higher education, and, at present, about both primary and secondary education.18 So, in asking where things stand with respect to the conversation Ralph opened up, we have to ask about at least two different sorts of issues (and no doubt there are many more that others have raised and are raising).

As to the broader set of claims about literature and citizenship, I be-lieve that society as a whole is moving away from the educational vision they embody. Recent cuts in the arts and humanities, in most nations of the world, betray a lamentably narrow focus on short-term profit, rather than on the conditions that make possible meaningful individual lives and stable democracies. Unless we wake up quickly, a large part of what we rightly care about will be relegated to the dust-bin of history.

Where the narrower cross-disciplinary claims are concerned, at least there is a conversation now. Most academic departments of philosophy teach courses in Philosophy and Literature. Law schools teach related courses in Law and Literature. Young philosophers, however, would be ill advised to focus too much of their energy on this area at a vulnerable stage in their careers because academic moral philosophy still does not consider such inquiries central. One can write schematically about virtue ethics, character, and moral perception; that is progress. But the messier investigations that Wollheim and I pursued under Ralphs aegis still seem to many people as if they belong somewhere else, but not in philosophy. I myself have absolutely no animus against schematic ethical theory. I am quite critical of Bernard Williams on this score, and of other people in virtue ethics who spurn all attempts to systematize. My complaint, then, is not made from Williamss extreme antitheoretical viewpoint, or even from the more moderate antitheory viewpoint of John McDowell. Even from the viewpoint of someone, however, who simply thinks that everyone should consider all the major theories and that one cannot consider Aristotles exhaustively without turning to literature (the thesis I maintained all along), the current climate is forbidding.

Another way of putting this point is that very few philosophers have become cultivated readers of fiction, drama, and poetry. They dont seem to think that this matters to their craft. In organizing, recently, a conference on Shakespeare and the Law, my co-organizers and I could not locate very many philosophers whose views on Shakespeare we would like to hear. Where novels are concerned the same is true, and


even more so, because, unfortunately, young people just dont read long difficult novels as much as they used to, unless they are planning to specialize in literature.

As for departments of literature, the turning to philosophy repre-sented by academic postmodernism was no help to the movement Ralph encouraged us to start, since the philosophy it focused on was metaphysical and epistemological, not ethical. I am still disappointed that so few professors of literature regularly grapple with the major works of recent moral philosophy, such as those of John Rawls, Williams, and McDowell. My colleague Richard Strier is a paradigm of someone who does do that: he regularly teaches Philosophical Perspectives in our core curriculum, and he has written about Williams and Cavell with great understanding and rigor. For several years we have taught a course on Shakespeare together (along with Richard Posner, so you can imagine the lively debates that occur). There are others like Strier, but perhaps not as many as it would be good for there to be. Ralphs countercultural vision has not been fully realized.

Ralph Cohen courageously and generously opened a door through which scholars of literature and philosophy might walk together toward a richer understanding of the connections among their disciplines. Let us hope that more people, and young people in particular, will walk through that door. Ralph deserves honor for using his power to give permission to young unknown people to do daring thingsin this area as in so many. Many people in the academy use their power to network or to bolster reputation. Ralph, by contrast, is a virtuous person in the Jamesian sense of that term: finely aware and richly responsible, want-ing neither glory nor adulation, but rather for both writers and readers to understand both texts and human life better.

[A]rt is nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active, wrote Henry James in the preface to The Golden Bowl. It is all of our good for-tune that Ralph, like art, goes on being exemplary and active. I cant express strongly enough the respect and affection I feel for his character and his achievement.

University of Chicago

NOTES

1 Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), while not organized around this theme, does trace most of the important moves in the debate. See also my essay, Philosophy and Literature, in the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David N. Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 21141, with bibliography.


2 Martha Nussbaum, Flawed Crystals: Jamess The Golden Bowl and Literature As Moral Philosophy, New Literary History 15 (1983): 2550, later reprinted in my Loves Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). 3 Nussbaum, Consequences and Character in Sophocles Philoctetes, Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 2553. 4 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986, updated edition 2001). 5 Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: Harvard and Row, 1968, expanded second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980); Painting as an Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). 6 Wollheim, Art, Interpretation, and the Creative Process, NLH 15 (1984): 24153. 7 Wollheim, A Family Romance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (London: Waywiser Press, 2004). 8 Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984); The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); On the Emotions (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1999). 9 Nussbaum,Flawed Crystals, 18592.10 In those days, Eastern Division APA papers were pre-printed in The Journal of Philosophy; ours were in issue 82 (1985); my paper, on which Diamond commented, was Nussbaum, Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature, 51629. 11 Cascardis anthology, Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987), was another influential early contribution; my Finely Aware appeared there, in an expanded version. 12 Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007). 13 Richard Posner, Against Ethical Criticism, Philosophy and Literature 21 (1997), 127; a longer version of his argument appears in Posners Law and Literature: The Relationship Rethought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press). 14 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 15 See my Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism, Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 36486, and the related discussion in Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries? Yale Journal of Ethics 9 (2000): 516. 16 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988). 17 See also my Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Case for Reform in Higher Education (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), chap. 3. 18 Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, forthcoming).

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