more on why I admire good literary critics, theater critics, historians, wine-tasters, etc.

Here’s Erich Auerbach on Stendhal, doing the sort of thing we rarely do in philosophy and which for obvious reasons is never done in science:

“Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuations between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject.”

I especially like “short-winded,” which I would never have thought of myself but hits the bull’s-eye with one of Stendhal’s failings in a way I hadn’t consciously noticed until Auerbach used the word. In any case, this is a good passage of literary criticism, and of course Auerbach is widely respected. (The passage comes from his classic work Mimesis.)

Now, what if someone were to say to Auerbach: “Prove it!” This would be a ridiculous demand, because you don’t really “prove” things in criticism. You try to offer a refined personal judgment, and in so doing you expose yourself to the counter-judgments and possible scorn of readers. When I read Auerbach, though I’m not a professional literary critic, my reaction is something like: “I know a good man when I see one.” (William James writes somewhere that the whole point of education is learning how to “know a good man when you see one,” given that none of us can be specialists on everything.)

Or consider another example. When Auerbach calls Stendhal “short-winded,” imagine someone pounding the table and shouting: “Define your terms!” (This often passes for the philosophical act par excellence.) Auerbach wouldn’t be totally helpless here. He could no doubt clarify at greater length, and using examples, what he means by short-winded. And this might be pedagogically necessary in some cases, but it wouldn’t add too much to the insight. The simple, brief term “short-winded” is as clarifying as a lightning-flash if you’ve read and enjoyed Stendhal recently enough to have him fresh in your mind.

The same with wine-tasters. Daniel Dennett uses this example: “a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.” Assuming the person who describes a wine this way isn’t just a pretentious ass (you’d have to know a bit about them), it’s a perfectly successful wine-tasting result. Reading this description, it’s not that hard to imagine what the wine tastes like. If you read wine-tasters’ judgments over time, you’ll form an estimate of how good they are at their job. Replacing statements like “flamboyant and velvety Pinot” with tables of chemical data isn’t going to do the job. (The point of the current post isn’t to criticize Dennett, which I’ll be doing soon elsewhere; I just borrowed his wine-tasting description because it’s a good example.)

The same with historians. You don’t decide whether or not Gibbon is still a relevant historian of Rome by counting up how many mistakes he makes, or how many times you agree or disagree with what he says, but by spending a number of hours with his voice and coming to see that this is a person of insight and rare literary power.

As I’ve complained a few times recently, we don’t have much of this sort of thing in philosophy, because we’re immediately supposed to decide whether a philosopher is “right” about this or that issue. There’s too much of a focus on the validity or certainty of philosophical arguments, and too little on their ripeness and adequacy (Whitehead makes a similar point). This explains the strange fact that, even though reading difficult philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger is a good workout for your brain, you can feel your intelligence surge even more if you read a literary critic of Auerbach’s caliber or a historian of Gibbon’s rank. They train you to see subtle gradations in lighting, to take note of the several sides of every event, and to use a wonderful economy of language in striking at the nerve center of any literary or political or military figure.

Obviously, this sort of thing wouldn’t work in the natural sciences: describing a particular chemical as “a flamboyant and velvety inert gas, though lacking in stamina” would be a useless and even ridiculous scientific statement. In chemistry one is concerned with fully quantifiable properties, not with some elusive and complicated ambiance surrounding the chemical, as we are with literary works, historical figures, or wines.

But what about philosophy? Is the language of Auerbach or a wine-taster really useless in philosophy? As an experiment, let’s take the Auerbach passage above and enter Schelling in place of Stendhal:

“Schelling was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuations between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject.”

Whether or not you “agree” with this judgment of Schelling, it’s certainly a plausible and defensible view of him. And even more importantly for our present purposes, the passage just cited does not strike me as unphilosophical. In principle, it might shed some light on Schelling and his unique combination of strengths and weaknesses.

However, my guess is that some philosophers would call this a vague and impressionistic reading of Schelling. What they would mean is that they’d want you to say which of Schelling’s arguments are right and wrong.

And we can do that too, and should. But there’s a lot more going on in a philosophy than its explicitly stated arguments, and here again I would point to Whitehead’s insight that no verbal statement is an adequate expression of a proposition. Much more is implied in any reality than language can ever fully translate. This is why the work of interpretation remains infinite, and why philosophy needs a bit more of the wine-taster’s gift.