Philosophy and Literature

A Book of Essays

M.W. Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351151740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Bringing together eight previously published essays by M. W. Rowe and a substantial new study of Larkin, this book emphasizes the profound affinities between philosophy and literature. Ranging over Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, Arnold and Wittgenstein, the first five essays explore an anti-theoretical conception of philosophy. This sees the subject as less concerned with abstract arguments that result in theories, than with prompts intended to induce clarity of vision and psychical harmony. On this understanding, philosophy looks more like literature than logic. Conversely, the last four essays argue that literature is centrally concerned with truth and abstract thought, and that literature is therefore a more cognitive and philosophical enterprise than is commonly supposed.

Chapter 1
Goethe and Wittgenstein

The influence of Goethe on Wittgenstein is just beginning to be appreciated. Hacker and Baker,¹ Westphal,² Monk,³ and Haller⁴ have all drawn attention to significant affinities between the two men’s work, and the number of explicit citations of Goethe in Wittgenstein’s texts supports the idea that we are not dealing simply with a matter of deep lying similarities of aim and method, but of direct and major influence. These scholarly developments are encouraging because they help to place Wittgenstein’s work within an important tradition of German letters which goes far beyond his contemporaries and immediate forebears in Vienna; and they show that Wittgenstein’s profound interest in literature and music is ceasing to be merely a matter of biographical anecdote, and is being used to illuminate some of the most central areas of his work.

Of course, there are many ideas in Goethe which are not echoed in Wittgenstein: the latter had no belief in the unity of all things, or the divinity of nature, or in reality progressing through dialectics (another stream of German philosophy would develop these ideas). But there are a number of points of contact which are well worth stressing, and in this essay I shall examine two: firstly, that there are a number of very striking similarities between Goethe’s conception of science and Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy; secondly, that this shared understanding of aim and method results in a literary form which is common to Goethe’s most important scientific treatise – the Theory of Colours – and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. By comparing the two, I hope to give at least preliminary answers to two questions raised by Stanley Cavell: ‘Why does [Wittgenstein] write [this] way? Why doesn’t he just say what he means, and draw instead of insinuate conclusions?’⁵

* * *

Goethe believed that the senses, properly used and developed, showed you the truth about the world, and he vigorously resisted any doctrines, however well entrenched, that tried to show that this fundamental conviction was false. In Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were two notable sources of pressure on this belief: the first was the transcendental idealist philosophy initiated by Kant and later developed by Fichte and Schelling, which, Goethe felt, devalued the objects of the physical world in favour of the metaphysical subject; the second was Newtonian science, which he believed devalued the living multiplicity of nature by ossifying it into mechanisms, dissolving it into mathematical abstraction, and leaving the human subject a prisoner of delusory sensations.⁶

Writing to Schiller after reading one of Schelling’s early works, he remarked that he saw no more possibility of transcendental idealists being able to get from mind to bodies than of materialists getting from bodies to mind. Until the philosophers should decide the matter, he continued, he preferred to remain ‘in dem philosophischen Naturstande’ (in the philosophical state of nature) and to make the best possible use of his ‘undivided existence’.⁷ He was prepared to concede that the Cartesian divide between subject and object might be an instrument that was useful for one kind of thinking, but it was not a way of conceptualizing the world he could experience, and he therefore never felt the need to separate them. He was vehemently opposed to the view that mind and body could be thought of as inner and outer, and that mental activity is something which takes place in the recesses of the mind. Such a belief, he felt, was of a piece with the doctrine that all we can ever experience of nature are appearances, and the poem ‘Allerdings’ was written in irritated response to yet another expression of this view:

I have heard this reiterated for sixty years –
And cursed it on the quiet.
I tell myself a thousand times:
Nature gives everything amply and gladly,
She has neither core
Nor husk,
She is everything at once.
You just ask yourself,
Whether you are core or husk.⁸

We know from Hacker and Baker’s researches that Wittgenstein seriously considered using this verse as a motto to head Philosophical Investigations, and the Wittgensteinian elements in the foregoing do not need to be laboured: in the later philosophy, the temptation to divide mind from body, inner from outer, is vigorously resisted; there are no noumena or metaphysical subjects, only ordinary human beings embedded in cultures who respond to and act on their environment.

Goethe was not opposed to conventional science or mathematics but he was opposed to scientism. He disliked the immense prestige these disciplines enjoyed as the final arbiters of what the world did and did not contain, and disavowed any attempt to conceptualize a fluid and dynamic reality in terms of static rules, axioms or definitions. As Humphrey Trevelyan puts it: ‘The forces at work, not the finished products, were what enthralled him. For this reason, like Wordsworth, he distrusted “the false secondary power” which classifies, analyses and anatomizes, and strove always to see the living totality.’⁹ Nature could not be captured in general terms, but only by bringing intuition (‘Anschauung’) to bear on particular cases in order to apprehend them in their full individuality. The nature of plant growth, for example, was only to be discovered by sympathetic discernment – apprehending the part, seeing its place in the economy of the whole, returning with renewed insight to the part, and so on – which called on every resource of the investigator’s sensibility. In other words, Goethe approached nature with the critical tact of a fellow artist; to understand was not passively to record, but to use imagination in actively seeking and exploring; and self-knowledge and psychical harmony on the part of the investigator were just as necessary for success as thoroughness and precision in the investigation itself.¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, Goethe reserved his heartiest scorn for the Newtonian treatment of colour. Colour seems the richest and most immediate of sensory phenomena, and yet Newton’s mathematical treatment of light in his Opticks was regarded as one of the triumphs of modern physics. The detail of Goethe’s objections, and the precise nature of his alternative theory need not be investigated here, but the argumentative strategies he employs against Newton in his Theory of Colours are well worth considering.

First, he accused Newton of basing his entire theory on a limited number of contrived, highly artificial experiments: very narrow beams of sunlight passing through glass prisms for example. Inevitably, he felt, the erection of a supposedly comprehensive theory on such a narrow base resulted in distortion and partiality: ‘Newton… based his hypothesis on a phenomenon exhibited in a complicated and secondary state; and to this the other cases that forced themselves on the attention were contrived to be referred, when they could not be passed over in silence…’ [Ffiii].¹¹ Second, because of his mathematical background, Newton was interested in system and consistency at the expense of the particular concrete case: ‘…a great mathematician had investigated the theory of colours and having been mistaken in his observations as an experimentalist, he employed the whole force of his talent to give consistency to his mistake…’ [F:lx]. This could only result in virtually meaningless technical terms, utterly divorced from lived experience (‘Bundles and fasces of rays, and like hypothetical notions’ [F:401]) and misplaced reification and abstraction (‘For hitherto, light has been considered as a kind of abstract principle, existing and acting independently…’ [F:367]).

Goethe wished to discredit such theoretical distortions and artificialities, by placing the phenomenon back in the real world where it belonged, and establishing a much broader base for investigation. In particular, he wished to draw attention to the colour effects everyone experiences (or could experience) in everyday life, and the reader of the Farbenlehre is bombarded with a thousand quotidian observations: the sun goes red as it sets, smoke from your neighbour’s chimney grows light as it rises, distant mountains look blue, rainbow effects can be seen on spiders’ webs in sunlight, washing a dark blue painting can turn it temporarily light blue, tobacco smoke turns roses green. Experienced en masse, such observations have the effect of making us see just how limited the kinds of phenomena investigated in laboratories actually are, and draw attention to the quite extraordinary range and complexity of the phenomena we have experienced – but frequently overlooked – in everyday life. Goethe placed far more reliance on the opinions of practical everyday men, who had no inclination to premature theorizing and every reason to observe carefully, than he did in mathematicians and physicists: ‘[The practical man of affairs] feels the erroneousness of a theory much sooner than the man of letters, in whose eyes words consecrated by authority are at least equivalent to solid coin; the mathematician, whose formula always remains infallible, even though the foundation on which it is constructed may not square with it’ [F:lxi]. Consequently, Goethe refers just as often to the untainted observations of dyers, industrialists and painting restorers, as he does to the findings of other scientists.

Here again, the parallels with the later Wittgenstein are striking. Unlike Goethe, he had a very thorough scientific training, but an opposition to the worship of science and scientists was a major motivation behind his philosophical outlook. ‘Soapy water science’ [CV:49]¹² – the attempt to use science to interpret the world for us – was always dismissed with contempt: ‘Jeans has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading… I might say the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being science and the scientist’ [LC.27]. His attitude towards mathematicians was also ambivalent, feeling that they had an innate tendency to mythologize the nature of proof and necessity: ‘There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics’ [CV: 1].

The idea that the conceptual understanding cannot capture and codify the nature of reality, and that it is essential to understand individual cases in the greatest possible detail is also characteristic of Wittgenstein. In the discussion of family resemblances in Philosophical Investigations, for example, he argues that it is not possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions for most of our ordinary concepts, and that a philosopher who imagines he has done so has merely constructed a simpler concept which is in some way analogous to ours. Similarly, logicians do not discover a hard logical core underlying our language which makes it usable; and no rule, however detailed, can determine how a practice is to proceed. Wittgenstein is at pains to stress that knowledge, mathematics and language are grounded in activity, in ungrounded ways of acting, in an inimitably vast and overlapping series of natural responses. As he says in On Certainty: ‘Giving grounds, however, justifying… comes to an end; but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true… it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language game’ [OC:204], When, some two hundred sections later, he quotes the famous line from part one of Faust: ‘In the beginning was the deed’ [RPP:I, 1236, OC:402], he shows himself aware that his emphasis on life and dynamism places him in the Goethean tradition.

The errors of Newton’s Opticks, Goethe believed, were caused by concentrating on a narrow range of artificial cases and then prematurely generalizing from them. Wittgenstein brings exactly the same arguments to bear on philosophical error. The philosopher’s ‘craving for generality and the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case’ [BB:18] is frequently caused by ‘a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example’ [PI:593] and this ‘philosophical disease’ can only be cured by looking and seeing (not simply thinking) at the sheer multiplicity and variety of ordinary practice. Rarefied theoretical discussion is replaced by detailed description of the humdrum affairs of practical life, in an attempt to bring words back from their puzzling metaphysical uses to the ordinary circumstances in which they have their life [PI: 116]. In this way, entities which the philosopher feels inclined to reify or ‘sublime’ are shown not to be puzzling Platonic objects, but words which are perfectly straightforward and unproblematic when their true use and context is established [PI: 117].

It is when we reach Goethe’s conception of explanation, however, that we arrive at the true centre of his affinity with Wittgenstein. Goethe’s central explanatory idea is the Gestalt. This is a concrete form or pattern which it is the object of the critic or the scientist to discern amongst a multiplicity of superficially dissimilar i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Previous Places of Publication
• Preface
• 1 Goethe and Wittgenstein
• 2 Criticism without Theory
• 3 Wittgenstein’s Romantic Inheritance
• 4 Arnold and the Socratic Personality
• 5 The Dissolution of Goodness: Measure for Measure and Classical Ethics
• 6 Lamarque and Olsen on Literature and Truth
• 7 The Definition of ‘Art’
• 8 Poetry and Abstraction
• 9 Larkin’s ‘Aubade’
• Bibliography
• Index