Philosophy, Literature and Understanding

On Reading and Cognition

Jukka Mikkonen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350163980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer's influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways.

1

Introduction

Philosophers have traditionally taken a great interest in the cognitive value of literature, understood as its ability to convey knowledge and insight or to contribute to our understanding of ourselves, others and reality. Initially, the study underlying this book began with age-old academic philosophical questions, such as: Can works of literature improve the understanding of readers? and How is this improvement best conceived of from an epistemological point of view? However, it suddenly became apparent that ‘cognition’ and ‘benefit’ were everywhere, and the question of literature’s contribution to readers’ thought – namely, social cognition and empathy – had not only become of transdisciplinary interest but also received much popular attention because of bold empirical studies on the topic. This turned my interest towards the reasons why people read, the values sought from literature and methodological issues in the study of art and cognition.

Recently, there has been much interest in art’s cognitive and affective impact in psychology and neurosciences.¹ Broadly speaking, the psychological and neuroscientific study of art’s improvement of cognition stems from a hectic, individualist, instrumentalist culture where temporary employment and continuous competition are the norms. One has to constantly develop oneself, and office workers need to keep their most valuable instrument, their brains, fit. As Svend Brinkmann, a psychologist feeling aversion for the ‘self-improvement craze’, puts it,

The religion of the self has taken over many of the functions of Christianity: the role of the priest is now played by a psychotherapist or coach; religious denominations have given way to therapy, coaching and other techniques for personal development; grace and salvation have been replaced by self-realisation, skills enhancement and lifelong learning. And finally, perhaps most importantly, where God used to be at the centre of the universe, now it is the self. Never before in history have we talked so much about the self and its characteristics (self-esteem, self-confidence, self-development, etc.). Never before have we had so many ways to measure, evaluate and develop the self – even though we basically have no idea what it is.²

What about literature? Frank Hakemulder and his colleagues in the psychology of literature, for example, propose that ‘in the contemporary economy it has become more important for workers to be creative, innovative and to have interpersonal skills, and all of these may be influenced through fiction reading’.³ P. Matthijs Bal and his colleagues, in turn, suggest that empathic skills and enhanced prosociality gained by reading fictional literature could lead to higher performance, productivity and creativity in the workplace.⁴ Further, they suggest that fictional narratives also help workers to recover.⁵

In media, fiction is offered as a miracle cure for everything. It is common to see headlines such as ‘Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer’,⁶ ‘Reading Literary Fiction Can Lead to Better Decision-Making, Study Finds’,⁷ ‘For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov’,⁸ ‘Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy’,⁹ ‘Want To Read Others’ Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction’,¹⁰ ‘Reading Fiction May Enhance Social Skills’,¹¹ ‘Now We Have Proof Reading Literary Fiction Makes You a Better Person’,¹² ‘9 Ways Reading Fiction Will Make You Happier and More Successful’,¹³ ‘4 Ways Fiction Makes You a Better Human’¹⁴ , ‘Five Ways Reading Can Improve Health and Well-Being’,¹⁵ ‘How Reading Rewires Your Brain for Greater Intelligence and Empathy’,¹⁶ ‘Why Readers Are Generally More Thoughtful People, According to Science’,¹⁷ ‘How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Rece nt Scientific Studies’,¹⁸ ‘Reading Fiction Improves Brain Connectivity and Function’¹⁹ or, symptomatic of our time: ‘Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction’.²⁰

Few ‘can’ afford – have the courage to engage in – slow narrative arts today, for the demand of continuous self-improvement is everywhere. When it comes to leisure, there are interesting things all around and not enough hours in the day to explore them. An exhausted student or worker might find it difficult to fight against the temptations of digital media – instant pleasure only one click away. A novel feels heavy in one’s hands and the interface of a book obsolete. Digital media also offer aesthetic pleasures, equally only a click away, and in terms of effort and payoff, literary narratives do not seem to fare well. This book examines a part of the distinctive value of literature, although it maintains that the ‘cognitive benefits’ of literature, if we are to crudely call them that, are not instant and straightforward. Moreover, if literature has real value in affecting one’s view of the world, it might rather show one the absurdity of life in late capitalism and help one quit a meaningless job than become a little more friendly at the workplace.

* * *

There are several reasons why the question of the cognitive value of literature has returned to literary studies where it used to be considered a mundane matter. In the 2000s and 2010s, there has been a boom among literary scholars to articulate the values of literature and the study of it.²¹ Partly, this is due to the ‘crisis’ of the humanities and the closing of literature departments. In a utilitarian age, every discipline has had to legitimize itself, and many defenders of literature have preferred to use a language understood by the people in charge and to impress them with buzzwords, such as ‘cognition’. As said, literature has also been considered threatened and its role in society weak. Statistics tell us that people, especially young people, spend less and less time ‘reading books’ which typically means long narratives printed on paper. In these defences, literature is seen, for example, as a way of helping one to understand oneself better or providing places to examine fundamental questions about life and to give meaning to events in one’s life; literary works give insights into others’ lives and improve the reader’s empathic attitude; works of literature celebrate a multiplicity of meaning, perspectives and values; they encourage the reader to look at the world from new viewpoints or to sketch reality anew; and of course, literary works give the reader new worlds to explore and provide distinctive emotional, cognitive, aesthetic and even mystical pleasures.

Another reason for the interest in cognition in the humanities relates to the rise of cognitive science in the 1990s. The sciences of the mind, the top science in the age of the brain, have been interested in the reception of art, and the psychology of art is living its heyday. Literary scholars have either sided with approaches in the cognitive sciences²² or defended literature’s distinctive value from them. There is also a third reason, happily a positive one. Today, literature is again allowed to speak about the world and the reader to reflect its content in relation to reality (after all, literature is not distinct from the world). Minorities have found literature as a medium for exploring, articulating and communicating their experiences,²³ and conversely critica l practices – postcolonialism, feminism, posthumanism, for instance – have explored literary works for their political, societal, moral and philosophical import.

* * *

Philosophical defences of literature’s epistemic value have a long history, and they can be, somewhat crudely, reduced back to Aristotle. While the question has puzzled philosophers in virtually all traditions, there has been a special interest in it in analytic philosophy, an approach that has been keen on matters concerning truth and meaning. (Arguably, analytical philosophical problems regarding the epistemology of art are partly self-inflicted and have arisen as the result of philosophers conceiving of knowledge in a frame of comparative narrowness.)

Much of analytic discussion on the cognitive value of art operates on an Arnoldian humanistic conception of literature,²⁴ in which quality literature is distinguished by its high truth and seriousness. Often, the traditional humanist conception is simply assumed, but recently it has also been philosophically defended. John Gibson, for one, characterizes the humanist view as the thought that ‘literature presents the reader with an intimate and intellectually significant engagement with social and cultural reality’.²⁵ In his view, ‘literature is the textual form to which we turn when we want to read the story of our shared form of life: our moral and emotional, social and sexual – and so on for whatever aspects of life we think literature brings to view – ways of being human.’²⁶ Alan Goldman goes on to argue that ‘the evaluation of thematic theses uncovered in the process of interpreting, and the learning that occurs in that process of evaluation, are part of the cognitive engagement that is part of the appreciation of the literary value of novels [that contain profound themes]’.²⁷ For him, ‘reflective cognitive exercise’, in which the reader evaluates a literary theme for truth or plausibility, is part of the aesthetics appreciation of the work.²⁸ Richard Gaskin, for his part, argues for ‘literary humanism’ which maintains that works of literature ‘bear on the world’ by employing terms that refer to real, principally universal entities, and by making or implying true or false, principally general statements about the world; further, the view holds that some works of literature have cognitive value in that they make or imply true statements that can be known to be true and are worth knowing.²⁹ Bernard Harrison, in turn, renders ‘humanistic literary criticism’, a conception promoted by Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams, as a view that ‘took it for granted that major creative literature constitutes one of our main resources for critical reflection on the human condition, both individual and cultural’.³⁰ In the humanistic conception, ‘[l]iterary fiction [. . .] works by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances in such a way as to allow us to focus on the roots in social practice, with all of its inherent ambiguities and stresses, of the meanings through which we are accustomed to represent our world and ourselves.’³¹ Harrison, defending the humanist view, writes: ‘If the humanities, including the study of literature, are to be defended as an important part of university studies, then it needs to be shown that they contribute kinds of understanding of the human condition that are different from, and independent of, those contributed by the social sciences.’³² Finally, Tzachi Zamir maintains that ‘[e]xceptional literary creations owe much of their value to the relationship between the insights they enable and the experiential pathways via which these insights are reached’.³³

* * *

But what are ‘cognition’ and ‘cognitive value’? Although ‘cognition’ in the general scientific sense refers to a wide variety of mental processes from language comprehension to problem-solving, in analytic philosophy of literature it has been customarily identified with ‘higher mental states’, in particular with the communication of knowledge and acquisition of true beliefs, cognitive value thus being epistemic value rather narrowly construed.³⁴ In different times, however, philosophers have prioritized different kinds of knowledge that the arts could provide. Now in the age of multiculturalism and pluralism, the chief cognitive virtue is not to master universal truths (for there are few of these in domains such as ethics) but to be able to read other people, to understand different viewpoints, to put oneself in another’s shoes.

On the other hand, ‘cognition’ is on the move, and many philosophers have recently been eager to broaden its scope above, or rather below, higher mental states. For instance, in the 4E model cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive and extended; it gets its shape and structure from the brain, body and physical and social environments. As the literary critic Terence Cave puts it,

[M]ost cognitivists nowadays give the word ‘cognition’ a much broader sense, embracing mental functioning and mental processes as a connected whole. Those processes include abstract and rational thought, imagination, emotion, and somatic reflexes and responses. These are assumed to be connected and mutually interactive processes.³⁵

Today, it seems, the relevant question is What does cognition not include and what does not improve cogni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Imagination
• 3 Narrative
• 4 Cognition
• 5 Evidence
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright