This is a book review published in "Mind" (2012) 121 (484): 1052-1055. doi: 10.1093/mind/fzt004
First published online: March 21, 2013.
I thought it was interesting in the sense that we are all re-writing our own narratives and healing our emotions (i.e. Timothy Wilson's books). The book is pricey, so I'll go ahead and post the review:
Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, by Noël Carroll, and John Gibson (eds). Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. Pp. 188. H/b £52.95/$64.95.
_http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/121/484/1052.full.html?etoc
Daniel D. Hutto
Some artistic narratives are a source of valuable and bona fide philosophical insights. Some narrative artwork may even confirm the claims they advance. Sometimes engaging with artistic narratives puts us in a position to gain personal insights. In many cases our dealings with well-crafted narrative works of art — of various literary, dramatic, and musical kinds — enables us to achieve these philosophical and personal goods by tapping into, directing, and educating our emotions and, sometimes, our higher-order capacities for reflecting on our emotions. All of this can be so even though it is true — as many philosophers have been at pains to advertise — that certain fictionalizing tendencies that arise when thinking of our lives in overly literary ways, presents serious risks and dangers.
The set of claims summarized above gives a fair account of the main and recurrent themes in the chapters of this edited volume. This is not to say, of course, that any single one of the nine collected essays seeks to defend each and all of these claims (though they are surely compatible if not complementary). Indeed, at least one of the essays, the final one by Matravers, hardly touches on or advances the fortunes of any of these claims directly at all. Even so, it performs the crucial service of putting to bed a common misconception that abounds concerning the relation of narrative and fiction. It does so by disentangling questions about what is involved in engaging imaginatively with narratives from questions about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Matravers convincingly reminds us that we must engage imaginatively with all narratives, whether they are pure fictions or straightforward non-fictional documentaries. Putting his moral starkly: ‘our engagement with narrative is one issue, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction quite another’ (p. 181). Readers are warned against being taken in by the overly simplistic, and all too often uncritically endorsed, convention of assuming that we systematically adopt an attitude of ‘make believe’ only with respect to, and when dealing with, fictions, and a quite different attitude of ‘belief’ with respect to, and when dealing with, non-fictions.
Although the point is not developed in detail in Matravers’s concluding essay, it connects briefly with one of the major themes of the volume — concerning the importance of the emotions in narrative engagements — by noting that confusion of the sort just described has wrongly promoted the tendency to focus on propositional imagining, to the neglect of ‘non-propositional engagement, through effects that alter mood, set up expectations, or operate through other priming effects’ (p. 181). Identifying and steering clear of this and related errors provides a crucial backdrop for the volume as a whole, since — as underscored in Gibson’s introduction to the volume — each of the chapters does its work by ‘deemphasizing (though not ignoring) the role of fiction in art in favor of a discussion of narrative’ (p. 3). In further justifying this choice, Gibson underscores the fact that ‘to think about the importance of narrative is to consider the nature and significance of stories, and we tell stories not only when we write literary works but always when we attempt to make sense of ourselves and our lives. Stories are, in this respect, a currency of communication common to art and life’ (p. 3).
In her chapter, Mullin defends the view that at least some complex literary narratives provide at least one way of developing and honing meta-affective abilities, those of a sort needed for personal autonomy. In pursuing this line, she focuses not on the related idea that by engaging with narratives we might develop our folk psychological abilities as such — that is, by familiarizing us with the explicit links between attitudes of, say, believing and desiring — but on the way that encounters with literary narratives help us to identify emotions and thus, by that means, to come to know what one most cares about.
Although Mullin calls on empirical evidence to support this claim, her main claim is simple and compelling enough — that repeated experiences of identifying and evaluating the emotions of literary characters is at the same time exercising one’s capacities for identifying and evaluating one’s own emotions. The more controversial idea is that emotionally based understanding can — at least occasionally — do a better job of revealing what we truly care about than explicit self-conceptions or beliefs about our primary motives. Although Mullin admits that strong emotions sometimes misdirect us on this score, this is consistent with claiming that ‘emotions can sometimes be better guides to what we should do, since they reflect what we really do care about (even if we don’t realize it)’ (p. 95).
Picking up on a similar theme, Eldridge draws on precedents in the history of ideas in defending the idea that — in absence of theory — one possible way of coming to know ‘what human life as such is for ’ is through narrative rehearsal. That is, in order to explore possibilities for living and to test these in feeling, ‘one might tell a story to oneself’ (p. 111). Emphasis on the way that narrative art can play the critical role of stirring emotions and feelings in order to reveal what is most significant is also the centerpiece of Smuts’s chapter. Focusing on what might explain our attraction to sad songs, he argues that personalizing such songs by engaging with their narrative, listeners become emotional about important happenings in their own lives. Moreover, these painful artworks are sought out precisely because they have this effect. Why? Smuts’s preferred answer is that this form of emotional engagement constitutes a special non-propositional ‘awareness of value’ (p. 148). It yields a kind of understanding that is neither know-that or know-how.
On a more traditional footing, Feagin claims that a cognitive achievement of discovery is pivotal to tragedy of the sort that is useful for addressing ‘some of the most fundamental questions about how to live in an uncertain world’ (p. 154). For at the heart of her analysis is the idea that tragedies — such as Oedipus Rex — reveal that, even though most of the time we reasonably take it for granted that we know what we are doing, this assumption is never wholly secure — there are times when our actions admit of other, more tragic descriptions, and coming to recognize this requires an evaluative shift.
All of the aforementioned chapters focus on the sorts of personal insights — and the special character of those insights — that engaging with various kinds of narrative art can yield. The claims are pitched modestly — they do not claim that narrative art is the only means to gain such insights (though this is an interesting question to explore). Moreover, in stressing these putative functions of narrative arts these authors make no strong claims about narratives constituting or even being the basis of our sense of self. However, Goldie’s contribution addresses the now oft-voiced worry that seeing our lives in narrative terms — especially in terms of literary narratives — may be positively bad for us. Goldie acknowledges the risks which attend what he identifies as four prevalent ‘fictionalizing tendencies’: to plot our lives; to find agency where it is not; to seek narrative closure; to characterize ourselves in line with recognizable genres. Yet, he argues, convincingly that these evident risks do not undermine the value that narrative thinking plays in enabling us to make sense of and strongly evaluate our lives. Upping the ante, Gibson draws a link between the thickness of personal narratives, those with an especially rich and descriptive content, and ethical insights of the kind that literary narratives afford. By his lights, the former enable us to gain a sense of ourselves by means of the way we construe our stories as stories of a ‘specific kind of self’ (p. 74). By the same token, thick, and less intellectualist, literary narratives play a similar role when it comes to exploring the structure of particular ethical lives as opposed to focusing on establishing universal moral truths. The latter play the role of enabling readers to make sense of — or to render intelligible — a culture, revealing via construal something general about the culture under examination. Gibson holds that both ways of making sense are ethical, in a broad sense and both furnish a form of understanding ‘as much emotional and aesthetic as it is cognitive’ (p. 77). Laying stress on the distinction between morality (concerned with discovering correct moral judgements) and ethics (concerned with the structure of an ethical life), he argues, ‘it is possible for a literary work to fail morally yet still offer a very significant kind of ethical insight’ (p. 86).
Carroll tackles an even more contentious idea head-on, arguing that narrative artworks — even some popular ones — can convey genuine philosophical insights of a more general variety. Sunset Boulevard is his existence proof. He regards the film as a necessarily elaborate thought experiment, designed to provoke its viewers’ emotions in order to get them to attend to the fact that our mortality is undeniable. In making his case against the sceptics, Carroll defends a liberal view of philosophy, according to which the purpose of philosophy is not always and everywhere to provide arguments of the traditional sort. It is also legitimate philosophy to engage audiences emotionally in ways that bring to their attention something important that lies in clear view but which they systematically fail to notice. (As Holmes tells Watson in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear’.)
Finally, making much of the distinction between the narrative — what is presented — and narration — how it is presented, Gaut brilliantly takes Carroll’s idea a step further, providing a detailed analysis of the way that Memento is uniquely designed to engage and cognitively challenge its audience in order to both advance and simultaneously establish the truth of a series of claims about the nature of memory.
Normally, a good review offers some critical engagement with the central claims of a book. It is not due to lack of space that I have failed to do this. The chapters of Narrative, Emotion and Insight are individually very strong, some first rate: there are some real gems and nothing to seriously complain about. Taken as a whole, the book provides important correctives and advances appropriately modest, convincing, but nevertheless deeply insightful claims about the importance of narrative art. It successfully brings to light issues that anyone interested in the philosophy of narrative and emotion should care about and opens the way for new and promising work in this domain.
© Mind Association 2013
First published online: March 21, 2013.
I thought it was interesting in the sense that we are all re-writing our own narratives and healing our emotions (i.e. Timothy Wilson's books). The book is pricey, so I'll go ahead and post the review:
Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, by Noël Carroll, and John Gibson (eds). Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. Pp. 188. H/b £52.95/$64.95.
_http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/121/484/1052.full.html?etoc
Daniel D. Hutto
Some artistic narratives are a source of valuable and bona fide philosophical insights. Some narrative artwork may even confirm the claims they advance. Sometimes engaging with artistic narratives puts us in a position to gain personal insights. In many cases our dealings with well-crafted narrative works of art — of various literary, dramatic, and musical kinds — enables us to achieve these philosophical and personal goods by tapping into, directing, and educating our emotions and, sometimes, our higher-order capacities for reflecting on our emotions. All of this can be so even though it is true — as many philosophers have been at pains to advertise — that certain fictionalizing tendencies that arise when thinking of our lives in overly literary ways, presents serious risks and dangers.
The set of claims summarized above gives a fair account of the main and recurrent themes in the chapters of this edited volume. This is not to say, of course, that any single one of the nine collected essays seeks to defend each and all of these claims (though they are surely compatible if not complementary). Indeed, at least one of the essays, the final one by Matravers, hardly touches on or advances the fortunes of any of these claims directly at all. Even so, it performs the crucial service of putting to bed a common misconception that abounds concerning the relation of narrative and fiction. It does so by disentangling questions about what is involved in engaging imaginatively with narratives from questions about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Matravers convincingly reminds us that we must engage imaginatively with all narratives, whether they are pure fictions or straightforward non-fictional documentaries. Putting his moral starkly: ‘our engagement with narrative is one issue, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction quite another’ (p. 181). Readers are warned against being taken in by the overly simplistic, and all too often uncritically endorsed, convention of assuming that we systematically adopt an attitude of ‘make believe’ only with respect to, and when dealing with, fictions, and a quite different attitude of ‘belief’ with respect to, and when dealing with, non-fictions.
Although the point is not developed in detail in Matravers’s concluding essay, it connects briefly with one of the major themes of the volume — concerning the importance of the emotions in narrative engagements — by noting that confusion of the sort just described has wrongly promoted the tendency to focus on propositional imagining, to the neglect of ‘non-propositional engagement, through effects that alter mood, set up expectations, or operate through other priming effects’ (p. 181). Identifying and steering clear of this and related errors provides a crucial backdrop for the volume as a whole, since — as underscored in Gibson’s introduction to the volume — each of the chapters does its work by ‘deemphasizing (though not ignoring) the role of fiction in art in favor of a discussion of narrative’ (p. 3). In further justifying this choice, Gibson underscores the fact that ‘to think about the importance of narrative is to consider the nature and significance of stories, and we tell stories not only when we write literary works but always when we attempt to make sense of ourselves and our lives. Stories are, in this respect, a currency of communication common to art and life’ (p. 3).
In her chapter, Mullin defends the view that at least some complex literary narratives provide at least one way of developing and honing meta-affective abilities, those of a sort needed for personal autonomy. In pursuing this line, she focuses not on the related idea that by engaging with narratives we might develop our folk psychological abilities as such — that is, by familiarizing us with the explicit links between attitudes of, say, believing and desiring — but on the way that encounters with literary narratives help us to identify emotions and thus, by that means, to come to know what one most cares about.
Although Mullin calls on empirical evidence to support this claim, her main claim is simple and compelling enough — that repeated experiences of identifying and evaluating the emotions of literary characters is at the same time exercising one’s capacities for identifying and evaluating one’s own emotions. The more controversial idea is that emotionally based understanding can — at least occasionally — do a better job of revealing what we truly care about than explicit self-conceptions or beliefs about our primary motives. Although Mullin admits that strong emotions sometimes misdirect us on this score, this is consistent with claiming that ‘emotions can sometimes be better guides to what we should do, since they reflect what we really do care about (even if we don’t realize it)’ (p. 95).
Picking up on a similar theme, Eldridge draws on precedents in the history of ideas in defending the idea that — in absence of theory — one possible way of coming to know ‘what human life as such is for ’ is through narrative rehearsal. That is, in order to explore possibilities for living and to test these in feeling, ‘one might tell a story to oneself’ (p. 111). Emphasis on the way that narrative art can play the critical role of stirring emotions and feelings in order to reveal what is most significant is also the centerpiece of Smuts’s chapter. Focusing on what might explain our attraction to sad songs, he argues that personalizing such songs by engaging with their narrative, listeners become emotional about important happenings in their own lives. Moreover, these painful artworks are sought out precisely because they have this effect. Why? Smuts’s preferred answer is that this form of emotional engagement constitutes a special non-propositional ‘awareness of value’ (p. 148). It yields a kind of understanding that is neither know-that or know-how.
On a more traditional footing, Feagin claims that a cognitive achievement of discovery is pivotal to tragedy of the sort that is useful for addressing ‘some of the most fundamental questions about how to live in an uncertain world’ (p. 154). For at the heart of her analysis is the idea that tragedies — such as Oedipus Rex — reveal that, even though most of the time we reasonably take it for granted that we know what we are doing, this assumption is never wholly secure — there are times when our actions admit of other, more tragic descriptions, and coming to recognize this requires an evaluative shift.
All of the aforementioned chapters focus on the sorts of personal insights — and the special character of those insights — that engaging with various kinds of narrative art can yield. The claims are pitched modestly — they do not claim that narrative art is the only means to gain such insights (though this is an interesting question to explore). Moreover, in stressing these putative functions of narrative arts these authors make no strong claims about narratives constituting or even being the basis of our sense of self. However, Goldie’s contribution addresses the now oft-voiced worry that seeing our lives in narrative terms — especially in terms of literary narratives — may be positively bad for us. Goldie acknowledges the risks which attend what he identifies as four prevalent ‘fictionalizing tendencies’: to plot our lives; to find agency where it is not; to seek narrative closure; to characterize ourselves in line with recognizable genres. Yet, he argues, convincingly that these evident risks do not undermine the value that narrative thinking plays in enabling us to make sense of and strongly evaluate our lives. Upping the ante, Gibson draws a link between the thickness of personal narratives, those with an especially rich and descriptive content, and ethical insights of the kind that literary narratives afford. By his lights, the former enable us to gain a sense of ourselves by means of the way we construe our stories as stories of a ‘specific kind of self’ (p. 74). By the same token, thick, and less intellectualist, literary narratives play a similar role when it comes to exploring the structure of particular ethical lives as opposed to focusing on establishing universal moral truths. The latter play the role of enabling readers to make sense of — or to render intelligible — a culture, revealing via construal something general about the culture under examination. Gibson holds that both ways of making sense are ethical, in a broad sense and both furnish a form of understanding ‘as much emotional and aesthetic as it is cognitive’ (p. 77). Laying stress on the distinction between morality (concerned with discovering correct moral judgements) and ethics (concerned with the structure of an ethical life), he argues, ‘it is possible for a literary work to fail morally yet still offer a very significant kind of ethical insight’ (p. 86).
Carroll tackles an even more contentious idea head-on, arguing that narrative artworks — even some popular ones — can convey genuine philosophical insights of a more general variety. Sunset Boulevard is his existence proof. He regards the film as a necessarily elaborate thought experiment, designed to provoke its viewers’ emotions in order to get them to attend to the fact that our mortality is undeniable. In making his case against the sceptics, Carroll defends a liberal view of philosophy, according to which the purpose of philosophy is not always and everywhere to provide arguments of the traditional sort. It is also legitimate philosophy to engage audiences emotionally in ways that bring to their attention something important that lies in clear view but which they systematically fail to notice. (As Holmes tells Watson in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear’.)
Finally, making much of the distinction between the narrative — what is presented — and narration — how it is presented, Gaut brilliantly takes Carroll’s idea a step further, providing a detailed analysis of the way that Memento is uniquely designed to engage and cognitively challenge its audience in order to both advance and simultaneously establish the truth of a series of claims about the nature of memory.
Normally, a good review offers some critical engagement with the central claims of a book. It is not due to lack of space that I have failed to do this. The chapters of Narrative, Emotion and Insight are individually very strong, some first rate: there are some real gems and nothing to seriously complain about. Taken as a whole, the book provides important correctives and advances appropriately modest, convincing, but nevertheless deeply insightful claims about the importance of narrative art. It successfully brings to light issues that anyone interested in the philosophy of narrative and emotion should care about and opens the way for new and promising work in this domain.
© Mind Association 2013