Emotions as Forms of Understanding – A Defense of Urs Widmer (an older paper)

                                                      Urs Widmer (1938-2014)

 

The late Urs Widmer boldly asserted in a little-known essay “On Reading” that the naïve, unsophisticated reader is generally a better reader than the academic or professional reader of literature. He explained this curious phenomenon as a result of an approach to literature that brackets out emotional response as irrelevant to deeper understanding. Now Widmer asserts what he takes to be a fact, and explains that alleged fact; but given many would deny the assertion, it should not be treated as a fact but a truth claim, and his explanation rather as the premises supporting that claim. The ‘argument’ raises the problem precisely of the role of emotional response and indeed emotional intelligence in good reading. Although Widmer in this short essay does not really offer any in-depth, justified criticism of academic approaches to reading literature, his stress on the indispensability of an ‘educated’ emotional response – a necessary if not sufficient condition of any good reading –  does offer a much-needed correction to some academic approaches, especially but not only those focused on a priori conceptualizations of literature itself.

            The most obvious prima facie objection to Widmer’s stress on emotional response derives from the deep-seated and perfectly intelligible belief that the essence of any scientific or scholarly approach to anything (‘wissenschaftlich’) requires the bracketing out of personal beliefs and emotions in order to conform the mind to the reality confronting one, the reality the scientist or scholar is trying to discover. We can imagine two climate researchers, one a committed Greenpeace activist, the other a committed believer in technological progress and the free market; the former desires to confirm the influence of fossil fuel burning on dramatic climate change; the latter desires to discount or relativize that possible influence. But as scientists they work with the same methods and the same data. To the extent their private beliefs and emotions – their biases – distort their determination or analysis of the data, they are bad scientists: indeed, not scientists at all, strictly speaking. By analogy, if one’s profession as academic reader (or editor, etc.) is to understand literary works more profoundly than the “unsophisticated reader,” then it would seem plausible that the reader should at least be aware of these emotional and attitudinal biases and not simply project them onto a given work. Academics ranging from those sympathetic to Christianity  to programmatic postmodernist scholars are all in equal danger of allowing their emotional responses to a work as filtered through their differing set of preconceptions blind them to aspects of the work itself. Though a literary work is different from climate change in that human meanings are part of its essence, for this argument they have a relevant similarity: explaining climate change and understanding a literary work both seem to involve conforming the intellect to a reality that may at least not be reducible to a particular person’s emotional responses and the attitudes which inform these responses. 

            One problem with this objection, it seems to me, is that it is not relevant to the point Widmer is trying to make, and this does have to do with the difference between literature and non-human natural phenomena like the climate. However, there is an internal tension in Widmer’s essay that seems to invite the objection.  When he writes that the “unsophisticated reader, the one who can’t tell Büchner from Brecht” is the better reader than the academic, he seems close to implying that any “unsophisticated reader’s” emotional response is self-authenticating – that a reader’s personal emotional responses, as different as these may be, necessarily have the key (of which there are many) to the work; or that the work is an ontological ink blot onto which readers project the emotions their belief systems predispose them to project. At the same time and in stark contrast with this impression he also stresses in the key passage that only emotional response as observed by the intellect or understanding (Verstand) makes a good reader:

 

. . .professional readers neglect their most valuable means of insight [literally: ‘epistemological instrument’ GL] – their emotions as observed by their understanding. These emotions thus become only a diffuse and unconscious part of their reading (emphasis and translation mine). . .

 

The problem with academic readers, then, is that they do not attend to their emotional responses, considering them irrelevant to the understanding of literature. Emotional response is thus not self-authenticating since it stands in need of observation by the intellect.

Moreover, emotions are not seen as subjective, perhaps biologically, culturally, or biographically pre-wired subjective responses which impinge against a reader’s mind but embody no ways of seeing, beliefs, judgments concerning the object which themselves are subject to reflection. Indeed, the thought is that emotions themselves are a (not infallible) means of insight or an epistemological instrument, connecting the reader to that which is to be understood, namely, the literary work. But they are an epistemological instrument; indeed, an indispensable one. Of course, in such a short essay Widmer can only assert rather than justify that view, and in this short essay I can only lay out what seems to me the most promising line of argument to support it.

            The ‘scientific’ conception of the reading of literature assumes a situation in which reality is to be discovered by means of a methodology which presupposes a detached, spectator point of view. In the case of the climate scientists, their emotional biases can only negatively affect their determination of relevant data and analysis of that data, whatever passions drove them to undertake the research in the first place and sustains them in it. As Widmer points out, this kind of emotional involvement is indeed motivational for much scientific work; however, contra Widmer, I think it irrelevant to the critical question of emotion’s relation to knowledge. Given the framework of science, the facts of climate change are what they are regardless of any person’s emotional responses and the beliefs that give rise to them, and the point of doing scientific research is to find out the facts and explain their causes regardless of whether the results fit into one’s belief system, regardless of whether the results frighten, disappoint, or gladden the scientist.

             However, Widmer’s argument assumes – rightly, I believe – that the situation is different for the literary scholar. All access to the reality of the text passes through emotional response. Any spectator view can only be fruitful given an informed insider reading: readers must first understand what it is they are praising, criticizing, or just analyzing for theoretical purposes, in other words, and quality of emotional response is indispensable for this. To see this more clearly, we will engage in a thought experiment: imagine the Star Trek android Data reading a comedy of Shakespeare – say, All’s Well That Ends Well. The very ‘stuff’ of which the play is made is irreducibly emotional: humor, love, resignation, hope, fear, desire, and so on. Now Data in our thought experience – artificial intelligence – is probably the greatest scientist in the whole Federation of Planets, and indeed nothing would prevent a super-intelligent android from conducting research into climate change. There would certainly be no emotions to have to bracket out; Data would be the perfectly neutral spectator. But as a literary scholar, while Data could recite the semantics, the historical background facts, the formal metric structures and such things, his inability to feel or find intelligible emotion would render him in a sense blind to the substance of the play, even though he may be able to pass a ‘Turing Test’ in conversation about it. Not being a creature of flesh and blood, born of woman, doomed to die, Data is only and always an outsider to the inner emotional lives of human beings and thus also to (most) literature.

            Of course, literary scholars are human beings, and can read the play with their emotions in play, can understand the humor, the fear, the grief, and so on. Widmer’s criticism is that a certain type of scholar uses a certain approach – I would not share his generalization to the profession as such based on my experience – which in principle denies these emotions have any relevance for a deeper understanding of the work:

 

These emotions thus become only a diffuse and unconscious part of their reading:  somewhat like a scientist who places his sample, dissolved in Rhine water, under the microscope, without first taking notice of its composition.

 

I would interpret this passage with an illustration. Imagine a overly simplified version of a ‘Marxist’ scholar who a priori posited the axiom that literature just is ideology belonging to the superstructure of a society and tending to be functional for the power constellation that happens to control the base (i.e. the means of production). Given that axiom, all the humor, fear, hope, etc. – the inner lives of the fictional characters – would be nothing but constructs tending by design or some ‘invisible hand’ mechanism to reconcile readers (or spectators, if the play is performed) to their social lot. Reading the play through the emotions of the characters, and through the readers emotional response to the characters in their situations, would be in a way irrelevant to its real meaning as determined by its ideological function. The point of ‘literary science’ (Literaturwissenschaft) would be to ‘see through’ the charm of these emotional lures and identify the features of the play that reconcile the audience to their lot. For this purpose, the spectator role is required, and the insider view necessary only in order to know what effects the text produced.

On reflection, it seems any a priori conceptualization or theory such that the essence of literature lies outside the works themselves would require the purely spectator view vis-à-vis any particular work and suspicion of naïve emotion-informed reading, giving the study of literature at least a family resemblance to science. It seems an distant echo of Plato’s deep mistrust of art. From such a perspective it would seem the naïve, unsophisticated reader (“the one who doesn’t know Büchner from Brecht”) is a resident of Plato’s allegorical cave, or for those more into contemporary film, of The Matrix. Writers of fiction construct images designed to release predictable emotional responses for purposes like catharsis, propping up support for a war or a regime, reinforcing the private (as opposed to political) life as the source of real value, constructing gender, and so on. These, allegorically, are expressed by the constructed images in front of the fire whose shadows are projected onto the cave wall, shadows that the chained prisoners take for reality. The objects of emotion are unreal, constructed; therefore, to accept to invitation to respond emotionally is to take as real or important that which should be seen through and debunked, given that ignorance is not bliss but the precondition for subjugation. This follows from the a priori conceptualization of literature as ideology. In all such cases of a priori conceptualizing, we have a situation as in an opera where the spectators are taken in by the illusions created on stage while the literary scholar looks behind and under the stage to describe the mechanisms whereby the effects are produced. To return to The Matrix metaphor, Widmer chooses to take the red pill and return to The Matrix; the literary scholar, in contrast, takes the blue pill and chooses to go down the rabbit hole of literature.

So as to reassure you that I am not constructing a straw man argument here but a position I take seriously, I would like to illustrate the validity of approaches like this through a personal experience. As a twelve or thirteen year-old, I watched a film entitled The Green Beret, starring John Wayne. The plot revolved around a kind-hearted marine developing a friend-father relationship to a Vietnamese child orphaned by the war. In the end, the kind-hearted marine is killed in action by a North Vietnamese enemy depicted as utterly corrupt.  I was moved to tears by the scene in which John Wayne’s character, the commanding officer, broke the news of the kind-hearted marine’s death to the boy. Now however improbable, it is certainly possible that there were kind-hearted marines and that one of them may have befriended a boy orphaned by the war. Such a marine may even been killed by a North Vietnamese unit that was a corrupt as the one depicted in the film, though I find that more improbable.

Now I don’t blame my twelve year old self for crying over that scene. All things being equal, that was an intelligible, even appropriate response. A person who felt no compassion when confronted with a real-life situation like that would not really understand what it was to lose one’s parents, and then such a friend for such a reason: it is not only that such a person would be cold-hearted or emotionally obtuse; they would lack the cognitive ability to really understand grief and compassion, and what these emotions when authentically felt disclose about human reality. And the power of art – when well-done – is just that it allows us to put ourselves in a position to experience grief and compassion purely, since nothing in real life is at stake: a kind of exercise in emotional intelligence, if you will, through which we learn to value human life and understand what love and loss mean.

At the same time, it became clear from a distance in time that, after observing my emotional response and reflecting on it in light of what I later came to believe, those noble emotions were consciously evoked in the service of a message – John Wayne to orphan boy: “You’re why we are here.”  I don’t believe in any automatic causal relationship between my response to the film and my youthful support for the war in Vietnam in the sense that one billiard ball striking another causing the second to move with a certain speed in a certain direction; but neither do I believe the two things were disconnected. Now a scholar of the type I have been imagining would have seen right through that propaganda film: the idealization of the good and evil, the gut-wrenching plot to underscore love of the good side and hatred of the bad side, and the association of each with the real conflict parties in that war. Now surely my twelve year old self might seem a perfect example of what Widmer means by the “so-called ‘unsophisticated’ reader, the one who can’t tell the difference between Büchner and Brecht” – indeed, I had never heard of either. And my example illustrates the problem with relying on one’s emotional responses as a guide to understanding the work. Of course, I would have been grateful for some scholarly guidance at that time.

In defense of Widmer, one could only repeat that he writes of ‘emotions as observed by the intellect’ – and my twelve-year-old self was incapable of that. And to that reply we can now add that Shakespeare’s comedies are not on the same level as a propaganda film, though that is what the a priori Marxist axiom would make of all literature (on my overly simplified construction of that position). The alternative to the a priori conceptualization is to think about particular works not only as exemplars of a particular conceptualization of literature, but as concrete particulars which cannot always be so reduced to the procrustean bed of theory. Prima facie, it seems that the best methods for understanding a propaganda film or a dime store romance might be different than those needed to understand Shakespeare’s comedies, the novels of Dostoevsky, the Vedas, fairy tales, or Greek tragedy, though the difference need not be thought of as absolute. The point is this: when we see literature as ‘nothing but. . .’ (ideology, text, event, form, Freudian fantasizing, etc.), it follows that its invitation to sympathetic, emotionally-informed reading need not be taken seriously. It is not that Shakespeare’s comedies, say, are necessarily free of ‘ideology,’ either in themselves or how they are used in a curriculum, but that they apparently cannot be reduced to ideology as can the propaganda film. Thus understanding the comedies as nothing but ideology (or whatever) requiring only a spectator view seems inappropriate. So what it amounts to is that we have a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur) in competition with a hermeneutics of trust, a set of outsider-spectator approaches in competition with insider-trusting approaches that inform our “observation of emotions” in reflection, with works whose invitation to be insiders we must decline at the outside at one ideal limit.

It seems clear that I cannot intelligently criticize a novel like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for example, if I, a literary scholar, say, find it unintelligible and indeed irrational – naïve and unsophisticated – for a reader to be moved by Raskolnikov’s remorse. Indeed, it seems impossible to understand the significance of the murder he committed unless one can find the remorse not only intelligible but appropriate. Raskolnikov’s remorse discloses not only the significance of murder but through that a sense of the sublime experience that every human life, even those whose worldly, empirical lives like the old pawnbroker seem degraded, confront us as absolute limits to our will. Note also another lesson of the careful reading of the novel: Raskolnikov’s intellectual grasp of reality, the ‘argument’ that lead to the conclusion of the murder, was corrected by the emotional judgment expressed in remorse, the “pained recognition of guilt,” as Gaita put it. Such a lesson is a gift of (good) literature, since it may never become fully conscious in real life, where emotions like remorse for wrong or evil done can tear us apart or where we find defense mechanisms to repress it. It is this possibility that Widmer wants to keep open: the possibility of sympathetic reading as against an approach, a training that teaches readers suspicion on the basis of pre-conceived re-conceptualizations of literature as we naïve readers know it.

Emotional responses, far from being like gusts of the wind of biology or culture that push us around despite ourselves (i.e. emotions as non-self), are very close to judgments: in fact, they are forms of understanding. My twelve-year old emotional response included at least the following: a seeing of both the soldier and the Vietnamese orphan boy are extremely important, valuable, precious human beings; the belief that people can really be precious; that we are vulnerable and can lose the things and people that matter most to us; that risking and sacrificing one’s life for the sake of a boy is courageous and noble, the sacrifice saintly; and that grief is only intelligible against the background that one has lost irrevocably someone who mattered a great deal indeed; and my compassion for the boy in his grief, based on a belief in the significance of such a loss. Of course, emotional responses to art have a different quality than those in real life. The basic structure of emotion, however, is the same. The difference is that in the experience of art, even bad art naively experienced, nothing in our lives is personally involved. We come to know what grief, nobility, and love ideally is through sympathetically, compassionately accepting the invitation of the (non-sentimental) work to suspend our disbelief and allowing the characters to matter to us for the time of the experience. Thus freed from the pressures of real life, we can experience the meaning of ideals like love, grief, or nobility in concrete form.  In my film example, however, all this was degraded a means to a political objective that had little to do with deepening my experience of life. That it achieved this by what experienced readers would recognize as clichés was a view not available to my twelve-year old self, but recognizing clichés comes through experience and not a theory which in effect treats all representative literature as cliché.

Now imagine I weren’t twelve when I watched the propaganda film but fifty-eight, and contrast that reading experience with the description offered of reading Crime and Punishment. What should strike one is the sentimentality of the propaganda film: its exaggerated idealizations of good and evil characters; its reliance of clichéd, stereotypical depictions; its melodramatic climax with those comforting words “you are the reason we are here.”  (Of course, I do not want to exclude the possibility that some soldiers believed something like that, but in this film it seemed manipulative.) Now it is not from some outside, theoretical perspective that we recognize these defects, but as in the Dostoevsky example through emotions and reflection on them. Just as we judge propositions as true or false, we judge emotional responses as authentic or sincere as opposed to sentimental or cliché. Widmer doesn’t say anything directly to the fact that emotional responses can be misguided, even as judgments can be wrong. But he does imply it in the phrase ‘emotions as observed by the intellect.’

Recall the climate scientists, in whose case emotions were a potential cause of their making scientific mistakes. Defective emotional responses as judgments are not so much causes of bad reading as the form that bad reading takes. In other words, the inability on the part of a reader to find Raskolnikov’s remorse intelligible is a kind of meaning blindness. That meaning blindness doesn’t cause the reader to misread, as the Greenpeace scientist’s passion and idealism threatens to cause him to exaggerate his findings; rather the misreading consists in this blindness. All understanding depends on finding intelligible what remorse may disclose about human life. A hypothetical Spartan reader may find remorse intelligible for the betrayal of a comrade in battle, for example, but not intelligible for the ‘mere’ killing of an old woman. Thus, a hypothetical Spartan would not be a good reader of Crime and Punishment.

Emotional judgments are also tied to broad images of what it means to be a human being, and with that to a worthwhile, good, or decent kind of life – images that can be explored and communicated by literature, which points to a further important idea: the failure to take a book like Crime and Punishment seriously, to desire to see it only from the outside according to some reconceptualization of literature, can be a symptom of a failure or refusal to take the ‘worldview’ that permeates the atmosphere of the book seriously – in Crime and Punishment a kind of existentialist-Christian worldview pitted against something like nihilism (‘anything goes’). But then the illusion of a spectator view threatens to dissolve, since the decision that the work merits only critique from outside and the consequent decision to refuse the invitation to sympathetic participation in the characters’ fates is not based on scientific methodology but worldview conflict. With the climate scientists, their worldview conflict was external to their scientific explanation; with literary scholars, worldview conflict seems internal to a decision to see the work one way as opposed to another. This is what I meant by writing that in the one case the emotions may be a cause of failure to understand, whereas in the other it is a form of that misunderstanding itself. Emotional response, spectator or naïve, is in any case internal to how a book is read. The ideal of the pure spectator view seems illusory. As C. S. Lewis writes:

 

…you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always mislead.

And since we are not always mislead, to complete the argument, not all inside experiences can be misleading; indeed, if one is not misled, it is because one has the right kind of inside experience. This, I believe, is what Widmer was gesturing towards.

What I have done is defend the inclusion of emotion in reading from one possible objection. There are many others, and it exceeds the scope of this paper to go into all the issued raised by Widmer’s short essay. But what my argument comes down to is this: no compelling argument forces us to accept in advance the proposition that all literature is ‘nothing but x’ such that we should always reject the invitation to read sympathetically, with our emotional responses fully in play. It is often only such quality reading that makes understanding – and criticism – fruitful. I can’t help recall some of the ‘socialist-realist’ criticism I read coming from the German Democratic Republic, which is not to say that all GDR criticism fits this mold. But no matter what the book, time, or author, the readings I am referring to used the same dogmatic categories of class, etc. to interpret it, so that the feeling arose that once you knew the theory you could definitively interpret any book. Programmatic postmodernism leaves me with much the same feeling, for example.

So the question of the legitimacy of emotional, sympathetic response in reading seems to depend on an answer to the question: What is literature? The naïve answer seems to be: beyond general descriptive features of not much significance for reading, it depends on what work you are talking about. That goes beyond what Widmer wrote, but is consistent with it. In any case, when we readers come across a work we consider good, we all seem to be first naïve readers and only then sophisticated critics; we adopt the outsider approach selectively, for those works we already know we don’t want to understand from the inside.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Cordner, Christopher. Ethical Encounters: The Depth of Moral Meaning. Swansea

            Studies in Philosophy. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002.

Gaita, Raimond. Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd ed. Swansea Studies in

          Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004.

___________. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice.

          London: Routledge, 1998.

___________. The Philosopher’s Dog. London: Routledge, 2002.

Lewis, C. S.  “Meditation in a Toolshed.” in God in the Dock. Ed. Walter Hooper.

          Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmann’s Publishing Co., 1970.

Murdoch, Iris. “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.” in Existentialists and

          Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books,

          1997.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.

          Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. 3^rd ed.

          Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.

 

November 3, 2017