Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature

Martha Nussbaum

New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2009, pp.

757-765 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0111

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v040/40.4.nussbaum.html

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 Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between
Philosophy and Literature
Martha Nussbaum

P
hilosophy and literature have had a very uneasy relationship
throughout the Western philosophical tradition. Already in the
Republic (c. 380–370 BCE), Plato’s Socrates refers to a “quarrel of
long standing” between the poets and the philosophers—which he then
pursues, expressing both a deep love of literary art and a reluctance to
admit it into the instructional plan of the ideal city. So central was this
debate to subsequent Greek and Roman philosophers that one could
write the history of at least the ethical portion of those traditions as
an extended conversation about this theme.1 Later philosophers in the
Western tradition continue the conversation, never without consider-
able ambivalence, but usually with a lively sense of the ethical insight
that literature may possibly offer. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger—all these major Western philoso-
phers, and many others, have contributed to keeping the conversation
alive. Only in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy has the re-
lationship between the two disciplines been virtually neglected. Analytic
philosophers sought to write in a nonliterary style and rarely discussed
the contribution of literature to understanding; literary authors and
writers about literature felt, with much justice, that philosophy offered
little that was relevant to their concerns. With the exception of figures
such as Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell, always treated as eccentric and
marginal, there was little sustained cross-disciplinary conversation.
Today, all of this has changed. Young philosophers working on eth-
ics are likely to have a keen interest in works of literature—not just as
grab bags of examples, but as sources of ethical insight in their own
right. Particularly in the part of the discipline known as “virtue ethics,”
concern with notions of character, ethical vision, and virtue, as well as
a preoccupation with relationships of love and friendship, lead almost
every participant in the subfield to turn to literature. Meanwhile, writ-
ers about literature are far more likely to discuss the ideas of moral
philosophers than they were before. Conferences that bring critics and
literary historians and theorists together with moral philosophers are

New Literary History, 2009, 40: 757–765

758 new literary history

reasonably common, and joint dissertation committees are very com-

mon indeed.
What produced this remarkable change? One major factor, at least,
was a bold enterprise of Ralph Cohen’s: an issue of New Literary History
on the theme “Literature and Moral Philosophy.” The issue was a typical
example of Ralph’s uncanny ability to identify significant debates that
ought to occur, and then to set the stage for their occurrence—to lead
fashion, rather than to be led by it. In recognition of his remarkable
insight and courage, I shall devote this essay to telling the story of how
that issue came into being, and then to some reflections on the changes
we have seen since then. I can’t avoid telling the story from the point
of view of my own involvement in the issue, but I hope to make it clear
that other thinkers played a generative role.
Around my fifth year of teaching, in 1980 or 1981 (for I can find no
documentary evidence of what exact year it was), I was invited to pres-
ent an Invited Paper at the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific
Division meeting in San Francisco. Despite the general absence of inter-
disciplinary conversation, prior to Ralph’s intervention, I had long had
an interest in the relationship between literature and moral philosophy,
and had made a point of teaching, every year, one course that was not
in ancient Greek philosophy (the primary area of my appointment).
One of the courses I offered was “Philosophy and the Novel,” and I had
been working out some ideas about Henry James and Marcel Proust, and
their relevance to moral philosophy. I discussed those issues with Ralph
when we first met on a visit I made to Virginia in around 1980, and he
had already given me encouragement and advice. When the invitation
arrived, without restriction of content, I decided, now or never. That is,
if I didn’t take this opportunity to stick my neck out as a philosopher,
addressing questions not connected to ancient Greek philosophy, I might
always be pigeonholed as a narrow historical specialist. So I decided to
write up some of my ideas about James’s The Golden Bowl.2
“Not connected to ancient Greek philosophy” is not quite right, since
for a number of years—since at least 1972—I had been investigating is-
sues of literary form and ethical content in writing about the Greeks. An
early article on Sophocles’ Philoctetes,3 first written in 1974, had appeared
in the very first issue of the now well-established journal Philosophy and
Literature, whose longtime editor, Denis Dutton, has always been a major
source of encouragement. By the early 1980s, I was in the midst of writing
what later became The Fragility of Goodness,4 and my work on those con-
nections between tragedy and philosophy had been amply encouraged
by Bernard Williams and by my Harvard colleague, Stanley Cavell, with
whom I was then teaching a large humanities course in which I lectured
dialogue between philosophy and literature 759

on Sophocles and Dante alongside Plato and Aristotle, and he lectured

on Shakespeare and Hollywood film comedies alongside Immanuel
Kant and John Stuart Mill. (Cavell’s famous essays on Lear and Othello
emerged from lectures in that class, as did my chapter on Antigone and
Symposium in Fragility.) So it really was not new to me to raise questions
about the relationships between literary works and philosophical works,
especially works that posed ethical questions—but Ralph was the first
person on the literary side who had encouraged me to pursue these
connections, and who led me, by the quality of his attention, to believe
that they might be important.
When a young philosopher is asked to give an Invited Paper, the
usual custom is to assign the role of commentator to a more established
philosopher. There are many who might have played that role uncom-
prehendingly, or narrowly, or even with hostility to the new project. My
good fortune, however, or the program committee’s sagacity, led to the
selection of Richard Wollheim, who later became a protagonist in the
creation of the NLH issue. Though best known for his writing on the
aesthetics of painting,5 Wollheim always had a passionate concern for
literature. He had already published a novel (and wrote for Ralph and
NLH a fascinating commentary on it6): he later published a remarkable
memoir of his childhood.7 He also later wrote wonderful works on the
emotions, informed by psychoanalysis.8 He was the most perceptive
reviewer and critic of my own later work on emotions.
Richard was a natural ally for Ralph Cohen, in the enterprise in which
they soon joined. A German Jew among the Oxfordians, the son of a
ballet dancer and an impresario among the British philistines, a social-
ist among the Tories, Richard was to the bone an iconoclast, impatient
with post-Victorian proprieties, eager to talk about the deepest passions
of the heart even if people thought that not a very polite thing to do
in a philosophy meeting. Richard was, in every way, for me, a felicitous
choice. Elegant and reserved, somewhat ponderous in manner, he hardly
seemed to me to be the person who had written that extremely violent
novel of jealousy and murder— until he began to give his paper. From
that time on, we had a ball.
Richard’s reply was more than I might have hoped for. 9 Not only did
it respond with great seriousness and sympathy to the overall proposals
I made about philosophy’s relationship to the James novel, it also of-
fered a reading of the novel that took issue with mine. Over the years
I have come to believe that Richard’s reading, focusing on Maggie’s
predatory qualities, is in many ways superior to my own, which praises
her qualities of perception. But what a surprise that these deep human
issues would be engaged, and so seriously pondered, in a philosophy
760 new literary history

meeting. The only question I remember from the audience was an ex-
tremely long one from logician Ruth Barcan Marcus, and I remember
it for its surprising sympathy.
After the session, Richard and I talked matters over, and we decided
that the exchange deserved publication somewhere. Since I had already
met Ralph on that earlier visit and had formed the very highest opinion
of his engagement with both literature and philosophy, I suggested send-
ing the exchange to him. Richard, another admirer of Ralph’s, agreed.
Ralph, to our great surprise and delight, not only agreed to publish
the exchange, but also proposed devoting an issue to the topic. He
invited a number of independent papers on the theme, but also invited
a group of philosophers to join the specific conversation about Henry
James that Richard and I had begun. By that time, Patrick Gardiner of
Oxford had already written an illuminating commentary on my article
for a session of the Oxford Philosophical Society. Ralph published his
piece, and invited additional commentaries from Cora Diamond, D. D.
Raphael, and Hilary Putnam, to which I then responded. All of them
raised fundamental issues, and the conversation was a rich one.
This conversation did not take place in a vacuum. Although ways
of doing moral philosophy most prevalent at that time, Kantian and
Utilitarian, tended to focus on general principles of conduct rather
than the fine-tuned perception that James’s novels both describe and
promote, those ways of looking at ethics were already being challenged,
in the name of an Aristotelian type of “perception,” by the important
contributions of Iris Murdoch and the more elaborate development of
such ideas in the articles of John McDowell and David Wiggins. Bernard
Williams’s bracing assault on conventional moral philosophy made room
for attention to literature by emphasizing the ethical importance of the
emotions and the imagination. In America, although Stanley Cavell’s
work was in some quarters unjustly neglected, his Harvard colleagues
Hilary Putnam and Robert Nozick had already given signs of sympathy
with some of Cavell’s ideas. Putnam was already teaching a class on
“Nonscientific Knowledge” that included knowledge gained from lit-
erature alongside religious and ethical knowledge; Nozick’s daring and
wide-ranging explorations of topics such as happiness, wisdom, and the
meaning of life also made room for a philosophical engagement with
literature. The journal Philosophy and Literature was already beginning to
have a certain influence on the work of mainstream philosophers. So
the ground was in a certain sense prepared for our enterprise. I have
always felt gratitude to Williams, Cavell, Putnam, and Wiggins—all of
whom read and engaged with my work—for a sense of permission they
gave me to do what I wanted to do.
dialogue between philosophy and literature 761

Nonetheless, Ralph’s contribution was of central importance. It’s all

very well to converse about such things, but publication in a prominent
journal, and publication in a special issue that dignified the importance
of the questions and drew other people to them (for example Cora
Diamond, who had not written on those topics before, but did so repeat-
edly later) makes a huge difference in giving legs to a new movement,
especially one that crosses disciplines. Its result was, first, that the same
people went on to have a lot more to say about these issues. (Cora
Diamond and I shortly had another exchange about James at another
American Philosophical Association meeting, where we were joined,
halfway through by the great philosopher Nelson Goodman, who read
the papers in his hotel room and got so excited about the issues that
he decided to join the discussion.10
The second thing that happened was that new voices joined the
conversation. From the side of literature, Anthony Cascardi,11 Charles
Altieri, Wayne Booth, and, as time went on, many more; from the side
of philosophy, Richard Eldridge (whose work over the years has been
especially significant), Marcia Baron, Julia Annas, Daniel Brudney,
Robert Solomon, and, again, as time went on, many others—including,
recently, the gifted young Israeli philosopher Tzachi Zamir, whose
book on Shakespeare is among the most remarkable contributions to
the debate, both in its treatment of general issues and in its wonderful
readings of individual plays.12
The conversation has also spread to other countries. In Paris, Sandra
Laugier (also Cavell’s translator, and a charismatic teacher and insight-
ful philosopher in her own right) arranged for translations of many of
the relevant papers, and by now many of the young moral philosophers
working under her influence are pursuing related questions. Finland,
Germany, and India have all, in different ways, joined in (India through
recovery of the example of Rabindranath Tagore, who moved effortlessly
and perceptively between his work as novelist and poet and his work as
essayist and philosopher).
Any new movement needs tough critics to provoke further debate,
and this one found Richard Posner, whose “Against Ethical Criticism,”
published in Philosophy and Literature,13 took my work—which by then
included the books Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice14 (the latter being
a critique of Posner)—as its particular target. At yet another American
Philosophical Association meeting—this time in Chicago—Wayne Booth
and I presented papers replying to him, and he replied to us—the
whole exchange being published in a subsequent number of Philosophy
and Literature.15
762 new literary history

In these subsequent developments, Ralph’s guiding hand has always

been evident. Some of the participants in that initial issue—Diamond
and Putnam especially—have gone on to be among the conversation’s
most formidable participants. Even more important, the fact that Ralph
chose to focus the special issue on questions of moral perception and
on the novels of James has steered the debate over literature’s role in
moral philosophy to a close affiliation with the revival of neo-Aristotelian
virtue ethics that has by now had a huge influence in moral philosophy.
In effect, Ralph set an agenda for the conversation to follow, and it has
been following his lead for many years now, with increasing refinement
and insight.
How do things stand today? Has the project Ralph’s editorial vision
nourished changed the way things are done in both disciplines, or hasn’t
it? Before I can answer that question, I have to say a little more about
what the conversation was about. Of course there are many different
issues that its different participants have raised, but let me reduce them
to two. The first concerns the need for moral philosophy to recognize
ways of thinking and imagining that do not focus exclusively on general
principles. My own turn to James was part of a defense of an Aristotelian
perception-based approach in ethics, and my claim was that we cannot
see what such an approach offers, or consider its claims fairly against
the claims of its Kantian and Utilitarian rivals, without detailed inves-
tigations of the role of perception and particular vision in individual
lives. Philosophical articles cannot, all by themselves, offer us such
investigations, although they can helpfully comment on them. Novels
such as the novels of Henry James are such investigations. Their form,
I argued, is not incidental, but essential to their ethical contribution.
For that reason, I concluded, no work in the form of a philosophical
treatise could make a complete statement of the case for Aristotelian
perception-centered ethics. Moreover, the dialogue that such novels carry
on with their (implied) reader involves the activation of capacities of
perceiving: so the very reading of such a novel, if one reads attentively,
is a type of responsible ethical action.
Those arguments were addressed to moral philosophers and those
who care about moral philosophy. They were relevant, too, in a differ-
ent way, to scholars of literature and interpreters of literary texts. For
example, Wayne Booth’s wonderful The Company We Keep: An Ethics of
Fiction,16—along with other writings by ethical critics of the sort I have
mentioned—showed (in ways that lie close to the debate within phi-
losophy) that a focus on how form directs the moral gaze opens up a
set of fruitful strategies for reading. These claims, then, were primarily
disciplinary and cross-disciplinary.
dialogue between philosophy and literature 763

Poetic Justice made a broader set of claims.17 Here I argue that the sort
of imagination to which (a group of selected) novels direct their reader
is an essential ingredient of good citizenship: so anyone concerned with
citizenship has reason to teach these works, and any other works of art
that similarly cultivate the imagination. I have developed these claims
repeatedly in writing about higher education, and, at present, about
both primary and secondary education.18 So, in asking where things
stand with respect to the conversation Ralph opened up, we have to
ask about at least two different sorts of issues (and no doubt there are
many more that others have raised and are raising).
As to the broader set of claims about literature and citizenship, I be-
lieve that society as a whole is moving away from the educational vision
they embody. Recent cuts in the arts and humanities, in most nations of
the world, betray a lamentably narrow focus on short-term profit, rather
than on the conditions that make possible meaningful individual lives
and stable democracies. Unless we wake up quickly, a large part of what
we rightly care about will be relegated to the dust-bin of history.
Where the narrower cross-disciplinary claims are concerned, at least
there is a conversation now. Most academic departments of philosophy
teach courses in “Philosophy and Literature.” Law schools teach related
courses in “Law and Literature.” Young philosophers, however, would be
ill advised to focus too much of their energy on this area at a vulnerable
stage in their careers because academic moral philosophy still does not
consider such inquiries central. One can write schematically about virtue
ethics, character, and moral perception; that is progress. But the messier
investigations that Wollheim and I pursued under Ralph’s aegis still seem
to many people as if they belong somewhere else, but not in philosophy.
I myself have absolutely no animus against schematic ethical theory. I
am quite critical of Bernard Williams on this score, and of other people
in virtue ethics who spurn all attempts to systematize. My complaint,
then, is not made from Williams’s extreme antitheoretical viewpoint, or
even from the more moderate antitheory viewpoint of John McDowell.
Even from the viewpoint of someone, however, who simply thinks that
everyone should consider all the major theories and that one cannot
consider Aristotle’s exhaustively without turning to literature (the thesis
I maintained all along), the current climate is forbidding.
Another way of putting this point is that very few philosophers have
become cultivated readers of fiction, drama, and poetry. They don’t
seem to think that this matters to their craft. In organizing, recently, a
conference on Shakespeare and the Law, my co-organizers and I could
not locate very many philosophers whose views on Shakespeare we
would like to hear. Where novels are concerned the same is true, and
764 new literary history

even more so, because, unfortunately, young people just don’t read
long difficult novels as much as they used to, unless they are planning
to specialize in literature.
As for departments of literature, the turning to philosophy repre-
sented by academic postmodernism was no help to the movement
Ralph encouraged us to start, since the philosophy it focused on was
metaphysical and epistemological, not ethical. I am still disappointed
that so few professors of literature regularly grapple with the major works
of recent moral philosophy, such as those of John Rawls, Williams, and
McDowell. My colleague Richard Strier is a paradigm of someone who
does do that: he regularly teaches “Philosophical Perspectives” in our
core curriculum, and he has written about Williams and Cavell with great
understanding and rigor. For several years we have taught a course on
Shakespeare together (along with Richard Posner, so you can imagine
the lively debates that occur). There are others like Strier, but perhaps
not as many as it would be good for there to be. Ralph’s countercultural
vision has not been fully realized.
Ralph Cohen courageously and generously opened a door through
which scholars of literature and philosophy might walk together toward
a richer understanding of the connections among their disciplines. Let
us hope that more people, and young people in particular, will walk
through that door. Ralph deserves honor for using his power to give
permission to young unknown people to do daring things—in this area
as in so many. Many people in the academy use their power to network
or to bolster reputation. Ralph, by contrast, is a virtuous person in the
Jamesian sense of that term: “finely aware and richly responsible,” want-
ing neither glory nor adulation, but rather for both writers and readers
to understand both texts and human life better.
“[A]rt is nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active,” wrote
Henry James in the preface to The Golden Bowl. It is all of our good for-
tune that Ralph, like art, goes on being exemplary and active. I can’t
express strongly enough the respect and affection I feel for his character
and his achievement.

University of Chicago
Notes

1 Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), while not organized around this theme, does trace most
of the important moves in the debate. See also my essay, “Philosophy and Literature,” in
the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David N. Sedley (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 211–41, with bibliography.
dialogue between philosophy and literature 765

2 Martha Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature As Moral
Philosophy,” New Literary History 15 (1983): 25–50, later reprinted in my Love’s Knowledge:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990).
3 Nussbaum, “Consequences and Character in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Philosophy and
Literature 1 (1976): 25–53.
4 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986, updated edition 2001).
5 Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: Harvard
and Row, 1968, expanded second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980);
Painting as an Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987).
6 Wollheim, “Art, Interpretation, and the Creative Process,” NLH 15 (1984): 241–53.
7 Wollheim, A Family Romance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Germs: A Memoir of
Childhood (London: Waywiser Press, 2004).
8 Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984); The Mind
and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); On the Emotions (New Haven,
CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1999).
9 Nussbaum,“Flawed Crystals,” 185–92.
10 In those days, Eastern Division APA papers were pre-printed in The Journal of Philosophy;
ours were in issue 82 (1985); my paper, on which Diamond commented, was Nussbaum,
“‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,”
516–29.
11 Cascardi’s anthology, Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1987), was another influential early contribution; my “‘Finely Aware’” appeared there, in
an expanded version.
12 Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).
13 Richard Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21 (1997), 1–27;
a longer version of his argument appears in Posner’s Law and Literature: The Relationship
Rethought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press).
14 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995).
15 See my “‘Exactly and Responsibly’: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and
Literature 22 (1998): 364–86, and the related discussion in “Literature and Ethical Theory:
Allies or Adversaries?” Yale Journal of Ethics 9 (2000): 5–16.
16 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univ. of California Press, 1988).
17 See also my Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Case for Reform in Higher Education (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), chap. 3.
18 Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press, forthcoming).