The Trouble with Literature

The trouble with literature, according to Kahn, is that it is fictive and subjective yet aims to produce belief, an apprehension of objective reality. This trouble, she argues in her Clarendon Lectures of 2017, goes back to the Reformation: its emphasis on individual interpretation of scripture conflicted with its demand for inward belief and not just outward conformity with ritual. Kahn focuses on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton as two writers in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation who grappled with this dilemma. In her final lecture, she argues that Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee did too.On Kahn's account, Hobbes and Milton both attempt to generate belief out of fiction. Hobbes creates the fictions of the state of nature and of a sovereign Leviathan, who can rescue the rest of us from that state, and then he urges that sovereign to create the fiction of belief in a state-established religion so as to avoid the sort of sectarian civil war into which contemporary England had descended. Milton created fiction in going beyond the biblical text in his own literary creations of God, Satan, Jesus, and Samson, yet he was a sincere believer. Kant makes it possible for fiction and belief to coexist, separated by the wall of disinterestedness that characterizes aesthetic judgment. Kierkegaard contrasts the aesthete and the knight of faith but carries over into religious belief the aesthete's nonconceptualizing focus on particularity. Coetzee transforms the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment into the writer's task of making the world downright strange to us and thus, as his character Elizabeth Costello tries to do, banishing belief from writing altogether.Kahn's recognition of the importance of the third and fourth parts of Leviathan as well as of its better-known first and second parts is welcome, but her treatment of the book as a literary fiction is debatable. She says that “Hobbes's narrative was a poetic and legal fiction designed to impress upon his readers the benefits of absolute rule,” but a philosopher would say that his conception of the state of nature and the compact to exit it is a thought experiment rather than a fiction: we imagine people existing without any government at all and then ask what sort of government they should design to correct the deficiencies of that situation; then we should modify our existing government according to that result. Hobbes's method of thought experiment is no different from that of John Rawls in positing the “device” of the “original position” in A Theory of Justice, which no one would consider a work of literature (although Rawls begins with a more moralized conception of human beings than Hobbes's).And we should note that Hobbes's solution to the problem of sectarianism was deeply problematic. His idea was that people should be free to believe what they want in private but that, to preserve peace, the sovereign must impose a single public religion. What the British settlers (or invaders) of North America came to realize—beginning with Roger Williams in his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (published in 1644, seven years before Leviathan), but hitting their stride with Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) and of course the First Amendment to the US Constitution—is that the solution to the problem of sectarianism is to keep religion out of government (“anti-establishment”) and government out of religion (“free exercise”) altogether. Too bad so many now seem to have forgotten that great lesson.From Hobbes to Kant: in her first lecture, Kahn refers to the “Kantian tradition in aesthetics” as formalist, equating “the literary with a non-instrumental experience of the particular, to the exclusion of a wide range of cognitive or practical effects of literary experience.” Such an approach would side with fiction rather than belief and pave the way for Kierkegaard's deep parallel between aesthetic and religious arationalism and Coetzee's image of the writer who avoids belief altogether. But such a reading of Kant confuses his initial account of aesthetic judgment, specifically of judgment of the beautiful, with his subsequent account of fine art, which locates its “spirit” in “aesthetic ideas” (which Kahn mentions only in an endnote). The sensuous presentation of ideas of reason, above all moral ideas, in imaginative form, Kant's “aesthetic ideas” are the direct forerunner not of Kierkegaard but of the idea of Hegel, Kierkegaard's bête noire, that “art and works of art, by springing from and being created by the spirit, are themselves of a spiritual kind, even if their presentation assumes an appearance of sensuousness and pervades the sensuous with the spirit.” This view of art is also Kant's, although while Hegel identifies aesthetics with the philosophy of art and thus finds nothing of interest in natural beauty, Kant begins with the case of natural beauty, finds that to lie in form with which the imagination can freely play, but then conceives of art as a free play with the ideas that are most important to us—ideas of good and evil, heaven and hell, and the like. Without such content, Kant insists, art with merely formal appeal would soon render “the spirit dull . . . and the mind, because it is aware that its disposition is contrapurposive in the judgment of reason, dissatisfied with itself and moody.” Kant should not be enlisted in the cause of any separation between imagination and belief; for him, art is where they come together.Finally, it seems even more misleading to me to associate Kant with Coetzee's idea that the point of literature is to make the world strange to us. For Kant, the point of all aesthetic experience—the experience of natural beauty, of the sublime in nature, and of fine art—is if anything to overcome the frustration and alienation that we might experience in our inability to fully comprehend our world with our ordinary sensory and conceptual equipment. Perhaps not a modernist, certainly not a postmodernist, thought—but it was Kant's motivation for writing an aesthetics at all

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