Abstract
What might a mode of grammatical and rhetorical criticism, one largely motivated “after Cavell after Wittgenstein,” look like, and do? Since those two predicates in the first place here—“rhetorical” and the “grammatical” (philosophical) investigations of Cavell and Wittgenstein—are oriented to the practical in various senses, it may be better to reformulate such ambition by circumscribing a specific, concrete case. Then we could ask a more or less compelling, anyway a more modest question: If we take poems “as” continuous somehow with everyday thinking—reasoning, arguing, imagining, comparing, and judging—then how might we think ourselves more intelligently and pleasurably into such poetry as that (for example) of Elizabeth Bishop, trying to see her as exemplifying what Harold Bloom said of A. R. Ammons
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- 1.
See Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, eds., Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2004). (Dauber and Jost 2004)
- 2.
Harold Bloom, “A. R. Ammons: ‘When You Consider the Radiance’,” in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 271 (Bloom 1971). Beyond established works on the so-called everyday and ordinary by Auerbach, Lefebvre, Benjamin, De Certeau, Charles Taylor and others, recent efforts in literary and cultural studies on the everyday and ordinary clearly overlap on, but do not conceptualize or feature, most of the issues at stake in this essay; for a small sampling see e.g., Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) (Randall 2007); Liesel Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford, 2009) (Olson 2009); Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) (Phillips 2010). For suggestions regarding the long tradition of humanist rhetoric, practical reason, and the interplay of reason and imagination in poetry and politics, see the various works of Danielle Allen, Rita Copeland, Eugene Garver, Jerrold Siegel, P. Christopher Smith, and Nancy Struever among others. A helpful overview of the tradition of prudential rhetoric can be found in Wendy Olmsted, Rhetoric: An Historical Study (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) (Olmsted 2006).
- 3.
Langdon Hammer, “The New Elizabeth Bishop,” The Yale Review, 82.1 (1994): 135–49 (Hammer 1994), reviewing books by Bonnie Costello, Lorrie Goldensohn, David Kalstone, Jeredith Merrin, Brett Mellier, Robert Parker, and Thomas Travisano. Characteristic of the approach discussed here are Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 63–99 (Kirsch 2005); C. K. Doreski, Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) (Doreski 1993); Kit Fan, “Imagined Places: Robinson Crusoe and Elizabeth Bishop,” Biography 28.1 (2005): 43–53 (Fan 2005). Exceptions are Bonnie Costello, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal,” American Literary History 15.2 (2003): 334–66 (Costello 2003), and Herbert Marks, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Memory,” Literary Imagination 7 (2005): 197–223 (Marks 2005).
- 4.
Marianne Moore, quoted in Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 145 (Goldensohn 1992).
- 5.
James Merrill, “Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979),” New York Review of Books, December 6, 1979 (Merrill 1979).
- 6.
- 7.
For an exception, see Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981) (Cameron 1981). What Robert Scholes has noted in Paradoxy of Modernism ((New Haven: Yale UP, 2006), 118 (Scholes 2006) regarding rhetoric and poetry applies equally well to rhetoric and (philosophic) grammar: “The rhetoric/poetry opposition…is clearly a case of modernist paradox: a binary opposition that covers complexity with a façade of simple clarity.” An intelligent if under-theorized account of rhetoric in modern poetry is Jonathan Kertzer’s Poetic Argument: Studies in Modern Poetry (Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 1988) (Kertzer 1988).
- 8.
Michel De Montaigne, “Of Practice” in Donald M. Frame, trans., The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 273 (Montaigne 1957).
- 9.
“Crusoe in England,” lines 1–10, in Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), 162–66; hereafter cited parenthetically by line number (Bishop 1999).
- 10.
E.g., Aristotle’s On Interpretation, Poetics, Rhetoric, or Saussure’s Cours Linguistique. Cf. Thomas Sloane and Walter Jost, “Rhetoric and Poetry,” in Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman et al. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012), 1175–81 (Sloane and Jost 2012).
- 11.
Rita Copeland, “Chaucer and Rhetoric,” in Seth Lehrer, ed., The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 123 (Copeland 2007); cf. Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), pp. 15ff (Struever 1970). See also Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) (Copeland 1995), Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) (Kahn 1985), and Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), p. 223 (Carruthers 1998): “To characterize such works as I have done is to insist that all medieval arts were conceived and perceived essentially as rhetoric, whether they took the form of poems or paintings or buildings or music.”
- 12.
Hannah Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1972), 120 (Pitkin 1972): “Wittgenstein teaches what might be considered a sort of linguistic Kantianism; what Wittgenstein calls ‘grammatical knowledge’ very much resembles Kant’s ‘transcendental knowledge’.” But it is important to distinguish Kant’s effort to deduce conditions of thought from the thinking ego from that of the later Wittgenstein: see Werner Leinfellner, “Is Wittgenstein a Transcendental Philosopher?” Revista Potugesea de Filosofia (March, 1982), passim (Leinfellner 1982).
- 13.
Cf. P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Comparisons and Context (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 13 (Hacker 2013): “The a priori nature of things is fixed by the sense-determining rules for the use of expressions signifying things. To suppose that things, their properties and relations, have an a priori nature in any other sense, is to fall victim to an illusion.”
- 14.
Practical criticism of the kind I value may also, like theory, help simplify, but, like art, it will do so mostly in the long run, for the literary critic relies more or less, as judges often must, on what Edward Levi calls “fruitfully ambiguous” concepts (An Introduction to Legal Reasoning [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949]) (Levi 1949), and employs a quotidian, case-by-case reasoning (cf. PI § 77, and Walden, 222). If and when one finds satisfaction, it gets recorded not in robust generalizations but in plural provisional measurements. Criticism can make a virtue of this necessity since it may turn out that only such labor-intensive piecework, one language game at a time, can be intricate enough to elicit how many poems might be illuminated by a juncture of Wittgensteinian procedures and what Francis Bacon once called rhetoric, namely, an “insinuative or imaginative reason,” related by family resemblance (Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973], 121, emphasis added) (Bacon 1973). On how such case study might accrue general import, see John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966) (Casey 1966); Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) (Staten 1984); William Righter, The Myth of Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) (Righter 1994), and Austin Quigley, Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (Quigley 2004).
- 15.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori (New York: Continuum, 2006), 53–65, 74–5 (Gadamer 2006). For a good account of the relations of rhetoric and hermeneutics, see Klaus Dockhorn, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 (Summer, 1980): 160–80 (Dockhorn 1980); Anthony Cascardi, “The Place of Language in Philosophy; or, The Uses of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (1983): 217–27 (Cascardi 1983); P. Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998) (Smith 1998); and John Arthos, “Gadamer’s Rhetorical Imaginary,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (April 2008): 171–97 (Arthos 2008).
- 16.
Wittgenstein keeps “language game” a fuzzy concept but gives it substance by way of examples, analogies, and dis-analogies: “Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all—for there are many different kinds of affinity [in vielen werscheidenen Weisen varwandt] between them” (PI § 65). “What belongs to a language-game is a whole culture” (Lectures and Conversations, 8); “I shall call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’.” (PI § 7, emphasis added). When appropriate, I try to follow that practice here.
- 17.
F. Leinfellner, “Is Wittgenstein a Transcendental Philosopher?” 17 (Leinfellner 1982).
- 18.
On the relation of word and world, see Stanley Cavell’s titular essay in MWM (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), 19 (Cavell 1969): “we forget that we learn language and world together, that they become elaborated and distorted together, and in the same places. We may also be forgetting how elaborate a process the learning is.” Although Cavell draws heavily on Heidegger, he explicitly avails himself of none of Gadamer’s self-consciousness about the nature and scope of rhetoric. In Words and Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 152, Hilary Putnam attributes several theses applicable in what follows to otherwise quite different American pragmatists: “(1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief…(2) fallibilism…(3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between ‘facts’ and ‘values;’ and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy.” (Putnam 1994).
- 19.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume 2006). Hume’s language is that of sentiment underwritten by empiricism, but the passage cited, though it aestheticizes beauty over praxis, is really not far from the rhetorical Philip Sidney 200 years earlier calling the poet the “right popular philosopher.” On Hume’s method as rhetorical, see R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), Vol. 1, 110–111 (Crane 1967).
- 20.
By “rhetorical rationality” I am referring to their potential to function as productive projections, exemplary models, for present or future thought, feeling, value and so on.
- 21.
William Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” in ibid, Argufying in Poetry, ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 163 (Empson 1987). Empson employs “argument” and “reason” and related terms in ways far closer to ordinary uses than to traditional philosophical standards of validity in formal logic; on this point see Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: The Athlone Press, 1978), 129 (Norris 1978). Also illuminating on Empson generally is Paul Fry, William Empson (London: Routledge, 1991) (Fry 1991). Cf. also Geert-Leuke Leuken, “On Showing in Argumentation,” Philosophical Investigations 20 (1997): 205––23 (Leuken 1997).
- 22.
Cf. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 55 (Adorno 1997): “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art is not something prerational or irrational.” See also Kertzer, Poetic Argument, passim. On the modernists’ rhetoric of anti-rhetoric, see Hope Howell Hodgkins, “Rhetoric Versus Poetic: High Modernist Literature and the Cult of Belief,” Rhetorica XVI (Spring 1998): 201–25 (Hodgkins 1998).
- 23.
Cf. Michael Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism” in Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 9–32 (Bell 2011). To my knowledge, only Norris has noted how contemporary practical orientations, and specifically those of Wittgenstein and Cavell, align so well with Empson’s seemingly retrograde Enlightenment interests: “Empson’s books all seek…to make terms between poetry and the normal conditions of language and commonsense discourse;” and again, “Stanley Cavell moves in a similar direction [as that of Empson] when he sets about the appropriation of Wittgenstein’s ideas for a worked-out philosophy of criticism.”
- 24.
The concept of “natural history” is intended to include the more or less stable but contingent “second nature” manifest in the cultural conventions of human action, not least in the ways humans use language; thus, Wittgenstein also can say that “we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history—since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes” (PPF § 335). Cf. John Mcdowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994) (Mcdowell 1994). Paul Fry (William Empson, 67) calls Empson a critic “who refuses to distinguish between grammar and rhetoric.”
- 25.
On the centrality of Hegel to the British and American tradition of philosophy, see Robert Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3–4 (Pippin 2011), and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 233 (Taylor 1989): “one can see the origins not only of Transcendentalism but also of pragmatism in this outlook.” For helpful exposition, see Alan Malachowski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) (Malachowski 2013). On the differences between a pragmatist like Dewey and a thinker like Wittgenstein, particularly with regard to method as “scientific,” see Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” in ibid., Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) (cited as ETE), 215–23 (Cavell 2003). On the interplay of rhetoric and mathematics (numbers) in social networks, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987) (Latour 1987).
- 26.
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 33 (SW) (Cavell 1992), and ETE, 17; Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 200 (Buell 2003): “Today receptivity to Emerson as a bona fide philosophical thinker has never been greater, though it is hardly to be taken for granted. Why? The principal factors have almost certainly been revival of interest in Pragmatism and the opening of the border between the philosophic and the literary by continental philosophy from late Heidegger through Derrida and (for Cavell especially) the later Wittgenstein.” Cf. Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) (Poirier 1992); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 5 (West 1989). Cf. Russel B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) (Goodman 1990): “Emerson shares an open-ended, experimental attitude with the pragmatists James and Dewey. They all leave room for the possibility that the true account of a given matter is quite different even from what they are convinced of. James distinguishes himself from Hegel on this point, for example, by finding the ‘completed’ Hegelian system ‘suffocating’.” Yet we also do well to bear in mind David van Leer’s cautionary remark about Emerson in Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 47 (Emerson 1986): “Yet one would want to think very carefully before conflating transcendental idealism and pragmatism.”
- 27.
Cavell’s statement in MWM 33 is a version of Thoreau’s point: “The sounded utterance is only a salience of what is going on when we talk…so a statement of ‘what we say [when]’ will give us only a feature of what we need to remember.” For Thoreau and Cavell alike, then, what does “philosophical” interleave with the everyday and ordinary activities of practical life, including, not least, writing, which is to “[take] responsibility” for itself, meaning that “the saying of something when and as it is said is as significant as the meaning and ordering of the words said” (SW, 34). I take it that this “when” and this “as” are distinctly rhetorical aspects of Wittgensteinian philosophical (logical, grammatical) investigations. Although it is true that Thoreau himself in Walden explicitly disparages the rhetoric of oratory, the parlor, and the newspaper, he does so not because it is rhetorical in my sense but because it seems insufficiently transformative for his ends: “The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement” (Walden, 218). See also the preceding note.
- 28.
Cavell’s formulation of this in note 27 is far more exact than the account Marjorie Perloff has given of Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism that “Philosophy should be written only as one would write poetry” (CV § 28) (Marjorie Perloff, “Writing Philosophy as Poetry: Wittgenstein’s Literary Syntax,” in Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society—New Series, 15 [2010]: 277–96.) (Perloff 2010). For Perloff what is central in both poetry and philosophy is not “what one says but how one says it,” and she characterizes the how as writing that is “extraordinary,” “thick and dense,” “repetitious,” “paratactic,” figural,” “metonymic,” meant to be read slowly, and so on. Any one of these characterizations can be correct for any given example of poetry or philosophy, for both usually do display some, or even all, of them (and more). But these characterizations, and hence Perloff’s modernist penchant for further characterizations like “enigmatic” and “epiphanic,” are misleading, as if these particular traits of style characterize what is of the “incomparable essence” of both—whereas the essential thing is that both poetry and philosophy are secondary, nonempirical uses of language, games that inter alia display or show forth or model grammatical structures and the rhetorically expressive values of an author. Style is crucial to these efforts, but no particulars of style or generalizations about them will capture the essential. For this “showing” aspect of literature and power, see Walter Jost and Michael Hyde, eds., “Introduction,” Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 19–22 (Jost and Hyde 1997); PI §§ 531–34; on the difference between high modernist “epiphany” and low modernist “epideictic,” see my Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), Chap. 4 (Jost 2004); and Altieri, Reckoning with the Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2015), 197–98 (Altieri 2015): “most texts we take as literary are primarily rhetorical…their basic constitutive labor directly engages us in worlds of meaning and the structuring of sense.”
- 29.
Kant sought to establish necessary (a priori) yet synthetic categories that objectively establish and govern any manifold of subjective empirical intuition. In several places in his work, Cavell relates Kant’s categories to language as such; cf. David Greenham, “The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’,” ESQ 53 (2007): 265 (Greenham 2007): “It is the task [for Cavell] not just of Kant’s twelve categories but of every word in the language to place us, as subjects, in a relationship with objects.”
- 30.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010), 170 (Bernstein 2010).
- 31.
Jost, Rhetorical Investigations (Jost 2004); Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) (Fletcher 2004). Notably, Fletcher also mentions as one of those poets in his sights, though he does not analyze, Elizabeth Bishop (New Theory, 13). For related insights, see Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: UC Press, 2008), esp. Chap. 4, “Thought.” (Hallberg 2008)
- 32.
- 33.
P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Meaning and Mind, Part 1: Essays (London: Blackwell, 1990), 149 (Hacker 1990). For a good discussion of Wittgenstein on the concept of thinking, see Lars Hertzberg, “The Importance of Being Thoughtful,” in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 50–74 (Hertzberg 2007). See also John M. Ellis, “Wittgensteinian Thinking in Theory of Criticism,” New Literary History 12 (1981): 437–52 (Ellis 1981).
- 34.
Cf. RPP, II, 216: “If one also includes working thoughtfully, without any talking in our consideration, one sees that our concept ‘thinking’ is a widely ramified one.” Cf. Hacker, Meaning and Mind, 154, on the “adverbial” aspect of thought. Cf. Zettel, 114: “One learns the word ‘think,’ i.e. its use, under certain circumstances, which, however, one does not learn to describe.” Cf. Hacker, Wittgenstein, 113.
- 35.
Cf. Hacker, Wittgenstein, 218: “Forms of words are not misleading because the surface structure conceals something that can be called the deep structure given by the predicate calculus…but rather because the surface form does not reveal the use, because sentences with totally different uses may have exactly the same form or structure.” In my view the best account of a non-dogmatic pluralism in Wittgenstein—non-dogmatic, meaning that it does not attribute to the world features of the norms by which one represents the world —is Oscari Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) (Kuusela 2008).
- 36.
In a letter, Wallace Stevens writes that “There is no reason why any poet should not have the status [the status, not the title] of the philosopher, nor why his poetry should not give up to the keenest minds and the most searching spirits something of what philosophy gives up and, in addition, the peculiar things that only poetry can give;” Holly Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 292 (Stevens 1966).
- 37.
Quoted in George Monteiro, ed., Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 43, and cf. 65 (Monteiro 1996).
- 38.
Bishop to Stevenson, 5 December, 1964, emphasis added. In Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), 12 (Bishop 1994), Bishop writes: “But the best part [of a certain writing by the scholar M. W. Croll], which perfectly describes the sort of poetic convention I should like to make for myself…is this: ‘Their [the writers of Baroque prose] purpose was to portray, not a thought but the mind thinking…” Cf. Buell, Emerson, 215: “Here we get to the heart of what most absorbed Emerson as a philosophical writer—replication in language of the motions of the mind as it thinks through how much, and how, it can know anything.”
- 39.
Like the term language game, Wittgenstein’s many “aspect” concepts elude straightforward definition. For now, the following should suffice: “When an aspect of a picture [or text] dawns, we recognize that a new kind of description of the perceived figure might be given, and we see it in those terms; when we continuously perceive that aspect, we take the status of the figure as the particular kind of thing…for granted.…In this sense, aspects are on a different level to colour and shape [or, say, the sound of words] because the latter describe parts or properties of objects rather than objects considered as a whole”; Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), 28–9 (Mulhall 1990).
- 40.
Fletcher, New Theory, 53: although description “be the humblest of intelligent symbolic acts, yet, because it is so common, its possible range eludes us.”
- 41.
See Thomas Kent, Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction (Lewisbur: Bucknell UP, 1993) (Kent 1993).
- 42.
In saying “may be one but is not the only criterion,” I am agreeing with Gilbert Harman’s view in Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 8, that formal “validity and invalidity have no clear applications” to practical reasoning (changes in view) (Harman 1986).
- 43.
I construe this line of reasoning syllogistically, that is, as a structure of formal logic, only to bring out the substantive weakness of the argument formulated this way, not to impugn the actual argument’s cogency; in fact I suggest below that, in its context and in another formulation, it is both reasoned and reasonable. Cf. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 136: “The logic of art, a paradox for extra-aesthetic logic, is a syllogism without concept or judgment. It draws consequences from phenomena that have already been spiritually mediated and to this extent made logical. Its logical processes transpire in a sphere whose premises and givens are extralogical.” Two of the better books on so-called informal logic and reasoning are Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) (Toulmin 1958) (Toulmin was a student of Wittgenstein), and Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Meta-Argumentation: An Approach to Logic and Argumentation Theory (London: College Publications, 2013) (Finocchiaro 2013).
- 44.
Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.21.1395b13–17: “A maxim makes the speech ‘ethical.’ Speeches have character insofar as deliberative choice is clear, and all maxims accomplish this because one speaking a maxim makes a general statement about preferences, so that if the maxims are morally good, they make the speaker seem to have a good character.”
- 45.
The first is a clear case of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, the second of equivocation in the major and minor premises: (1) Whoever does wrong (If A) must be punished (B). I am being punished (B); therefore (A) I must have done wrong. And (2): If one has done something wrong (A), one deserves to be punished (B). I have done something wrong (A; but what has he done “wrong”?); therefore (B) I deserve to be punished.
- 46.
Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 11 (Poirier 1992).
- 47.
“Preface to Volume III of Robinson Crusoe,” from Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), Ar2–Ar7, in Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994), 240, hereafter referred to parenthetically as Crusoe (Defoe 1994).
- 48.
- 49.
“But I found I was yearning for, say, some lines about how they communicated, Crusoe + Friday: did they make a language? Of sounds? Of signs?…The poem is so magnificent, and so touching, and so strong (for me) except at this one turning where something seems to wobble unintentionally” (Correspondence with James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.).
- 50.
For Hicock the misfit lesbian Bishop finds a home and a community; for Diehl, Friday’s loss is “irreparable” and Crusoe’s mourning is “unsuccessful”; for Merrin the Adamic Crusoe is a site of Bishop’s psychological conflicts and gaps; for Doreski “the poem still aches for affirmation of interpretive possibilities.”
- 51.
Cf. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 4: “Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity. Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence.”
- 52.
See for example, J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) (Hunter 1966).
- 53.
Coby Dowdell, “The American Hermit and the British Castaway: Voluntary Retreat and Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture,” Early American Literature, 46 (2011): 121–56 (Dowdell 2011).
- 54.
- 55.
J. L. Austen, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962) (Austen 1962).
- 56.
- 57.
Walter J. Ong, SJ, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986): 12 (Walter J. Ong 1986).
- 58.
John Mullan, Crusoe, xii (Mullan 1992).
- 59.
Franco Moretti, quoting the seventeenth century natural philosopher Robert Boyle, in The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2014), 64 (Boyle 2014).
- 60.
Cf. Fletcher, New Theory, 238 (Fletcher 2004): “all poets and artists living and working since the late eighteenth century in the West submit to the increasing authority of a dimension, a condition, an environment we may simply call numerosity.…”
- 61.
Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (New York: Penguin 1999), V.1 163 (Shakespeare 1999). BC does not measure up to what Mary McCarthy said of Bishop herself: “I envy the mind hiding in her words, like an ‘I’ counting up to a hundred waiting to be found.” Of McCarthy herself Bishop wrote to Lowell, “Sometimes I think that she could say a lot less and it would count for more”; both quoted in Colm Toibin, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015), 108, 162 (Toibin 2015).
- 62.
Cavell resists identifying “criteria” with “rules,” but for a compelling rapprochement between those terms as used by him and Wittgenstein, see Stephen Mulhall, “Stanley Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language: Grammar, Criteria, and Rules” in Richard Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) (Mulhall 2003). Here also a strong resemblance seems to arise to the “pragmatic inferentialism” of Robert Brandom in Making It Explcit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) (Brandom 1998). But where Brandom construes rules as unstated, “implicit” major premises of logical inferences, Wittgenstein and Cavell see some substantive argument as irreducible to formal logic and in no need of further premises, implicit or explicit, warranting a conclusion. For shrewd critical accounts of Brandom on this point, see J. N. Bernstein, “Mimetic Rationality and Material Inference: Adorno and Brandom,” Revue international de philosophie, 2004: 7–23 (Bernstein 2004); Christina Lafont, “Meaning and Interpretation: Can Brandomian Scorekeepers be Gadamerian Hermeneuts?” (Lafont 2009) and John McDowell, “How Not to Read the Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein,” in John McDowell, The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays, Harvard University Press, 2009), 96–111. (McDowell 2009)
- 63.
On this point, see Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 82 (Mulhall 1994), and David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 135 (Schalkwyk 2004): “It is one of the fundamental tasks of the rule, or the concept, to reduce…difference to sameness or identity…in our conceptual world we keep seeing the same, because concepts are not for use on one occasion. But such perception is crucially situated or aspect-related: we see the same only because we are at home in a particular conceptual world.” Also OC, 105: “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.”
- 64.
I say Crusoe seems “bewildered,” not quite Wittgenstein’s “bewitched” [Verhexung]: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI § 109; recall that “grammar” shares etymological roots with “glamor”). I take it that part of the difference between “bewitched” and “bewildered” is Crusoe’s awareness that there are, in his own linguistic expressions, various slippages and breakdowns.
- 65.
Cf. Fletcher, New Theory, 78: “This was Montaigne’s concern in his essay ‘Du repentir,’ on repenting earlier errors, since he perceived that early and late are fused into a cyclical movement of actual life which is so lacking in forward thrust that, instead of progression, we should speak of living as a state of ‘natural drunkenness.’ The radical repetition of one moment in the next is the source of our life in nature, but we are thereby born to accept an indistinct, imprecise, wavy existence.” (Fletcher 2004)
- 66.
David Kalstone, Five Temperaments (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 36 (Kalstone 1977).
- 67.
I take Crusoe’s “dejection” here to be mimetically unproblematic: anyone might feel miserable living alone on a desert island, as Crusoe clearly indicates he feels when he says of the waterspouts at sea: “Pretty, yes, but not much company” (54). But then Kalstone’s happy talk of BC’s “joy in the homemade” and “fresh experience” now sounds to me like special pleading; Five Temperaments, 36. Only compare Walden: Thoreau says that his fellow townspeople would often remark “I should think you would feel lonesome” (Walden, 133); but in his chapter on “Solitude,” Thoreau shows his distance from that thought, and from BC, and his closeness to us others, by declaring that, when we are mentally and physically healthy, “we are never alone” (Walden, 136).
- 68.
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991) (Taylor 1991).
- 69.
In this way Walden hazards new accounts of familiar concepts sublimed by others, by means of a holistic method that enfolds Enlightenment numeracy into a comprehensive and far more modern literacy, one that undertakes words not as discrete units but as progressive, emergent relations in a field of practical activity, in which old philosophical oppositions are overcome. This is holism: “Our whole life is startlingly moral” (Walden, 148, emphasis added; also 53, 98, 214–15). Think then of Walden, and here I mean its innumerable observations, exhortations, admonitions, parables, anecdotes, aphorisms, maxims, fables, tropes, images, metaphors, not as doctrines or theses, but as intellectual tools that Thoreau’s complex writing exemplifies—instruments that can direct, as they are directed by, recognizable interests, social practices, institutions, and individual efforts (Walden, 76–7).
- 70.
It can be objected that the expression has only its usual function, as an intensifier; but the more telling angle is to ask how we would know what is and is not “usual” here.
- 71.
Cf. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 247 (Abrams 1971).
- 72.
PI, II, 197e: “[S]ince it [seeing-as] is the description of a perception, it can also be called the expression of thought.—If you are looking at the object, you need not think of it; but if you are having the visual experience expressed by [an] exclamation, you are also thinking of what you see. // Hence the flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought.”
- 73.
Back in England the virile, phallic knife that once “reeked of meaning” (162)—“the bluish blade, the broken tip,/ the lines of wood-grain on the handle” (166–67)—now looks meaningless: “The living soul has dribbled away” (169). Perhaps something like the opposite or converse of all of this, a species of “aspect-blindness,” also occurs: when he dyes a baby goat red, its mother “wouldn’t recognize him” [128], and meanwhile the tame goats and gulls may have “thought/ I was a goat too, or a gull” [102–3]. Cf. PI II, 214e: “Aspect blindness will be akin to [wird werwandt] the lack of a musical ear;” cf. Bishop to Stevenson, 5 December, 1964: “I’m not too good at ideas. It’s like being tone deaf.” Cf. PI § 341:“Speech with and without thought is to be compared to the playing of a piece of music with and without thought.”
- 74.
And why shouldn’t he joke? Short of skeptical despair, why shouldn’t Crusoe shape his concepts in accordance with his own cares and commitment, in “constant re-adjustment,” as Bishop puts it elsewhere (“The Gentleman of Shallott,” 42) to his situation, particularly when doing so gives him courage—is it?—anyway, “no ill effects” (78). We might better ask how anyone could avoid such twists of thought and speech, because there is (per impossibile) only “one kind of everything” (68).
- 75.
Godfrey Baldacchino, quoted in Anna Meisel, “Is Great Britain really a ‘small island’?” BBC News, 14 September 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24083162: “At the top we usually define the very large islands as continents and from a geographical point of view there are only four of those: Eurasia-Africa, America, Antarctic and Australia.” Thus Bishop herself follows Emerson’s “I unsettle all things” (CW Emerson 1903–04: 3, 20) (Meisel 2013).
- 76.
Cf. Josiah Ober, “Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens,” in Josiah Ober, ed., The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), 121 (Ober 1996), and Smith, Hermeneutics of Original Argument, 74: “In oral speech [cultures] the phenomena of the world were not yet construed in terms of some invisible static, necessary laws of cause and effect behind them, but rather as a narrative sequence of actions and births and deaths as these have happened over time.”
- 77.
Cf. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998), 1 (Hawking 1998): “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down’!” Cf. David Greenham, “The Skeptical Deduction: Reading Kant and Cavell in Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’,” 253–81 (Greenham 2007); Heidegger, WCT 233; and SW, 133: “It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty: our relation to its existence is deeper—one in which it is accepted, that is to say received.”
- 78.
Quoted in Oscari Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism, 280 (Kuusela 2008).
- 79.
CXf. Mikhail Epstein, “What is interesting about the ‘interesting’?” in The Transformative Humanities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), esp. 229–30 (Epstein 2012): “Thus, what makes a certain theory interesting is its presentation of a consistent and plausible proof for what appears to be [improbable].”
- 80.
In “Transcendental Arguments and the Problem of Dogmatism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2007): 12 (Kuusela 2007), Oscari Kuusela brings out the nature of “specific” transcendental arguments: “the crucial difference from general arguments is that rather than involving universal claims about cases falling under concepts, specific arguments leave open their scope, i.e., how generally a given definition of the necessary conditions of possibility is applicable to the objects of philosophical examination.”
- 81.
Cf. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 41–42 (Poirier 1992): “Pragmatism…is a philosophy that recommends ‘vagueness’ as a counteraction to the dogmatizing of existent truths and as the necessary condition for the exploratory search for new truths”; and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 55 (Adorno 1997): “Artworks do not repress [rationality]; through expression they help to make present to consciousness the diffuse and elusive without, as psychoanalysis insists, ‘rationalization’.”
- 82.
George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Philip F. Gura and Joel Meyerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 248 (Santayana 1982).
- 83.
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04), 2, 101–02 (Complete Works of Ralph…1903–04).
- 84.
Stephen Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945), 74 (Pepper 1945).
- 85.
On this last point see Anthony Reynolds, “Romantic Ignorance: The Hope of Nonknowledge,” in Angelaki 10 (December 2005): 15–25 (Reynolds 2005).
- 86.
Cf. Fletcher on the idea of “the surround,” New Theory, passim.
- 87.
See my Rhetorical Investigations, 146–55; my treatment of epideixis is in debt to Jeffrey Walker’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) (Walker 2000).
- 88.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 5 (Heidegger 1995).
- 89.
Bishop quoted in a letter in Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (Twayne, 1966), 66 (Stevenson 1966).
- 90.
Among others see David Schalkwyk, Literature and the Touch of the Real, 126: “literary fiction offers the kind of grammatical investigation with which [Wittgenstein] was concerned in his philosophical works. If he opens the doors of philosophy to fiction, it may be that his kind of philosophy has long been a guest in its house” (Schalkwyk 2004).
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Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Wendy Olmsted (Professor Emerita, University of Chicago) for several suggestions regarding earlier drafts of this paper. I also owe thanks to Charles Altieri, whose recent Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2015), although it appeared after this paper was all but finished, helped me better formulate several of my points bearing on what I had been calling the ethical and normative, leading me sometimes to specify these as “valuing” and “the expressive.”
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Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (CHU); In Quest of the Ordinary (IQO); The Claim of Reason (CR); Must We Mean What We Say? (MWM).
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04) (CW Emerson).
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking (WCT).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (OC); Zettel (Z); Culture and Value (CV), Philosophical Investigations (PI), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (RPP), The Blue and Brown Books (BB).
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Jost, W. (2017). Thinking the Poem: Elizabeth Bishop’s Transcendental “Crusoe in England” (For Example). In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_6
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