Abstract
In August Strindberg’s Preface to Miss Julie there is a statement of what literary Naturalism took to be its new concept of motivation:
What will offend simple minds is that my plot is not simple, nor is its point of view single. In real life an action — this, by the way, is a somewhat new discovery — is generally caused by a whole series of motives, more or less fundamental, but as a rule the spectator chooses just one of these — the one which he can most easily grasp or the one that does most credit to his intelligence.1
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Notes
August Strindberg, Author’s Forward, Miss Julie, trans., Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, 1955), p. 63.
The point of departure for my critique of Naturalism is the work of Owen Flanagan, in particular The Science of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)
Owen Flanagan “Consciousness, Naturalism and Nagel” Journal of Mind and Behavior, Vol. 6, no. 3 (Summer, 1985), 373–90. I am grateful to Owen Flanagan for innumerable discussions over the last ten years.
Flanagan, “Consciousness”, 378–9.
See Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, pp. 98–104.
Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, pp. 66–74.
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious (London, 1958).
Flanagan, “Consciousness”, 386 et passim.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1915), II, 2, 1103b; IX, 9, 1169a ff. I have drawn some of the implications of this view as it contrasts with what philosophers currently expect from ethics in my paper, “Does Ethics Rest Upon a Mistake?”, presented to the Bergen University Philosophy Department in October, 1983 (unpublished).
Flanagan concludes his “Admirable Immorality and Admirable Imperfection” Journal of Philosophy LXXXIII (1986), 41–60 on a similar note to my point of departure in a treatment otherwise wholly different.
B. F. McGuinness, “Freud and Wittgenstein”, Wittgenstein and His Times, B. F. McGuinness (Chicago, 1982), p. 27.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1967), p. 42. Hereafter I refer to Wittgenstein’s writings parenthetically in the body of my text as follows: Tractatus = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans., D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961); PI = Philosophical Investigations, trans., G. E. M. Anscombe (2nd. ed.; Oxford, 1969); Z = Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1967); OC = On Certainty, trans., G. E. M. Anscombe and Denis Paul (New York, 1972); C&V= Culture and Value, trans., Peter Winch (2nd ed. Oxford, 1980).
See Norman Malcom’s penetrating essay “Wittgenstein: the relation of language to instinctive behavior”, Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 5, no. 1 (1982), 3–22. I have profited greatly from conversations about the relation between causes and reasons in the explanation of behavior in the later Wittgenstein with Kjell S. Johannessen.
For the classical statement of this view see Rudolf Carnap, “Psychology in a Physical Language”, Logical Positivism, Ed., A. J. Ayer (New York, 1959), 165–98.
On Darwin and evolution by natural selection see Loren Eisley, Darwin’s Century (Garden City, 1961), 141–204.
Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (Harmondsworth, 1955), 184–85.
This is stressed, for example, in the works of John Ziman. Stephen Jay Gould has explored the darker side of this picture in The Mismeasurement of Man (New York and London, 1981).
Nancy Mairs, Plaintext (Tuscon, 1984). Mairs’s book is an autobiographical account of the way in which feminist identity can be, and in her case was, perceived as madness in patriarchal society. This is, curiously, the sort of thing Wittgenstein seems to have perceived as deeply problematic in modern thinking about mental disturbance: “madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why should’nt it be seen as a sudden — more or less sudden — change of character?” (C&V, p. 54).
J. B. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 1981), p. 34.
Strindberg, loc. cit.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Janik, A. (1989). Self-Deception, Naturalism and Certainty: Prolegomena to a Critical Hermeneutics. In: Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 114. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2251-8_11
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