Volume 1, No. 2:

In Praise of Ignorance
Liberal Education and Literature
Eurocentrism and Pluralism
Socrates and the Homeric Gods
Freedom and the Supersensible
On Private and Public Values
The Epistemology of Panic

Liberal Education and Literature

by Jim Kee

The notion of a liberal arts education is an old one, but our shared understanding of its meaning and significance today has not kept pace with the reality of institutional structures in higher education. Somewhat more than a century ago The Johns Hopkins University was founded and became a prototype of the modern research university. Its departmental structures reflected the fact that modern forms of knowledge and inquiry are many and diverse and that individual disciplines do not arrange themselves hierarchically in relationship to some foundational discipline such as philosophy or rhetoric. During the twentieth century liberal arts colleges have, of necessity, conformed themselves more and more to the model of the research university—with the result that our ability to articulate a compelling vision of the integrity that might belong to liberal education has become more and more attenuated.

What are we to do about this? First, we must not, in the face of the apparent fragmentation of knowledge, abandon the search for an integral vision of liberal education. The "freedom" that "liberal" education aims at demands as much. Secondly, nostalgia for some real or imagined hierarchy of disciplines is not likely to lead us to a vision of liberal education appropriate for today or tomorrow. The differentiation of knowledge into more or less autonomous disciplines has had its own necessities and has produced many salutary effects. Whatever the vision of liberal education that we are capable of today, its principles of unity will be all the richer if we honestly address the multiplicities that belong to the contemporary college or university. Thirdly, despite the relative degree of autonomy that characterizes individual disciplines today, they still need philosophical reflection. There are limit-situations encountered in each discipline at which the discipline’s founding presuppositions become questionable. At such places, a kind of thinking is called for that is, properly speaking, philosophical, and a discipline will not remain authentically responsive to its subject matter if it evades this call. For this reason, philosophy itself cannot afford the luxury of construing itself as just one discipline among others. Philosophy has its special concerns, to be sure; but philosophy will not remain true to its vocation if it withdraws from engaging in dialogue with other disciplines when they encounter limit-situations.

In these respects, then, my title indicates a desire to take up the invitation to think about our common commitment to liberal education. I do so, however, from the standpoint of one who is a practicing literary critic. I assume that my discipline, too, operates in a manner that grants it a degree of autonomy. Literary critics engage in a variety of practices that cannot be subordinated to the requirements of philosophy—or, for that matter, the requirements of history or sociology. At the same time, literary critical practices lead us to encounter limit-situations in which, to be responsive to our subject matter, we must engage in a kind of thinking that is best characterized as philosophical. One of these limit-situations is encountered when we ask about the essential contributions literary studies might make to a student’s liberal education. What I propose to ask about here, therefore, is just that: Of all the matters that belong to the "diffuse" discipline of literary criticism, what, given the array of other disciplines practiced at a liberal arts college, is the most essential contribution made by literary studies?

From one point of view, literary studies has rarely been in a position to offer more possible answers to this question. And that, of course, is part of the challenge. The multiplicity that I earlier characterized as belonging to the contemporary university in fact inhabits the supposedly individual disciplines of that university. The challenge goes so deep that many would, of course, object to the very point of the question I have posed. Indeed, I’m willing to acknowledge that literary criticism, left to itself, may today find little reason to ask questions about what is most essential. But that is why I want to tie my reflections to the issue of liberal education. In our dealings with young people who come here hoping to realize for themselves the promises of liberal education, we can’t afford the luxury of considering questions about unity or integrity to be pointless or meaningless. Looked at within the context of the lives of concrete people who have been born and who will die, and who are here to try and come to terms with what Wallace Stevens has called the "whole shebang," questions concerning what is most essential are inescapable. Priorities will be set—unconsciously, or on the basis of thoughtful reflection.

Let me explore the adequacy of some of the answers that have been given since World War II. I will not and indeed could not seek to be comprehensive here. In fact, I will make choices based in part on what I think I know about the courses a typical English major takes before graduating.

We have to start, I think, by considering that version of formalism that came to be known as the "New Criticism," and, for purposes of focus, I will refer primarily to the understanding of literary studies common to such critics as Cleanth Brooks, in The Well-Wrought Urn, and William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, in The Verbal Icon.

The principles of the New Criticism are in part responsible for making literary studies available to multitudes of students since WWII. Prior to the New Criticism, the dominant model of literary study had been literary scholarship—a model, that is, which required one to undergo years of specialized training in languages and philology and literary history and textual scholarship in order to be, not a literary critic, but a literary scholar. But the New Criticism made the autonomous individual literary text the primary object of study, and it developed principles for the critical evaluation of that text which could be learned comparatively quickly. To this day these emphases affect the way that we introduce students to literary study in CRAW.

New Critics were intensely aware that the natural sciences had emerged as the most prestigious disciplines in the research university. They therefore sought in part to establish literary criticism as a discipline with a certain kind of scientific respectability. At the same time, they saw in literature something vital that needed to be preserved and defended against the imperialistic spirit of scientific method. Their conceptions of poetry and the ways in which a reader ought critically to evaluate poems reflect these competing concerns.

On the one hand, literary criticism needed to be made more objective by being based upon evidence that was readily available in the public domain. The primary evidence, New Critics argued, should be the language of the poem—its syntax and semantics. The poem in turn was conceived as an autonomous work of art with an essential form. The New Critics’ emphasis upon publicly available evidence was intended to differentiate their conception of literary criticism from a Romantically inspired kind of criticism that located the essential being of a poem in the consciousness of its creator. For the New Critics, literary criticism could never be established as an objective discipline if critics must somehow come to know the consciousness of the author. What mattered was not the author’s intentional acts in creating the poem but the form of the created object. And this, they argued, is available for all to inspect. The standard of evidence that operates in the New Criticism is almost positivistic—a fact which indicates that the New Critics wanted literary criticism to measure up to standards established by the positive sciences.

As I said earlier, however, there is an "other hand" to New Critical formalism. For New Critics literary criticism should also preserve the vitality of the human spirit against scientific reduction. A poem is a special kind of language, essentially different from the language of science or of everyday communication. When a poet creates a good poem, he or she brings into being a verbal icon. The verbal icon has a thingly character. Unlike scientific propositions or everyday discourse, the verbal icon’s words and syntax do not immediately refer to something beyond themselves. They interact with each other to create a work of art with a distinctive form. Based on the interplay of parts and whole, the work has iconic significance. For the New Critic, to understand a poem is to evaluate how its parts fit together into a unified, organic whole. Content emerges from the appreciation of form. Two criteria operate within the process of interpretation and evaluation: unity and plenitude of meaning. The interpretation of a part is acceptable if it can be made to fit into the form of the whole. And the best poems—as well as the best readings of them—are marked by a plenitude of meaning which is, potentially, infinite.

Cleanth Brooks offers valuable insight into the basic assumptions that underlie the New Criticism, and we do well to recognize these if we are to appreciate why New Critical formalism remains so appealing to many despite the loss of much of its authority within the discipline. If we ask, "From whence is this conception of poetry derived? On what is it founded?" Brooks provides the following response: from a set of metaphysical assumptions associated with Romantics such as Coleridge. A poem’s organic unity is an index of the kind of unity effected by the creative imagination itself. That unity reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order.

The passage, taken from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, is a veritable catalog of the artistic ideals by which New Critics distinguish good poems from bad ones. New Criticism values the paradoxical unities achieved in poetry by the imagination because human experience itself earnestly needs to be unified. In the depths of this vision of poetry and experience is faith in what Gadamer has called an "aesthetic metaphysics of individuality." Every properly realized work of art is homologous with the totality of being as a whole. Hence a great poem offers an experience of infinity. It endures as a manifestation of eternity in time.

Before addressing contemporary critiques of New Critical formalism, however, I wish to attend to an alternative vision of literature that was never entirely supplanted by it. In fact, this alternative even combined with formalism at the level of commonsense practice to define the discipline of literary studies in which most people earning their Ph.D.s before 1980 were trained. I refer here to what now needs to be called the old historicism or traditional historical criticism.

In contrast with New Criticism’s iconic conception of the literary work of art, the old historicism conceived of literature rhetorically. That is, it assumed that the literary work is a linguistic form addressed by someone to an audience. To understand the work is to grasp the author’s intention in writing it or to recognize how the original audience would have understood it. For the old historicists poetic language is not essentially different from other kinds of language. In addition, poems can’t be treated as autonomous objects because no verbal sequence, poetic or otherwise, can carry a determinate meaning within itself. Even simple utterances can mean different things in different contexts. For the old historicism, therefore, the discipline of literary scholarship had to be founded upon attempts to reconstruct the original context within which the work was written.

Old-style historical criticism endured as a necessity of sorts within those periods of literary history that pre-dated Romanticism. Here the historical distance, one might even say alienation, between the world of the contemporary reader and the horizon presumed by the text seemed palpable, inescapable. To fail to attend to this problem of historical distance would be to run the risk of merely seeing one’s own prejudices in texts from the past. Traditional historical criticism sought genuinely to listen to what was other in the text. It felt an ethical obligation to do so. By so listening it hoped to retrieve the past for the present, delighting in the past’s artistic achievements and learning from its wisdom.

Like formalism, the old historicism was more a practice than a highly reflective theoretical position—in English and American literary studies, as least, if not elsewhere. And despite the different manner in which historicism conceived of textual meaning, it shared some deeper assumptions with formalism that allowed the two to co-exist with a certain complementarity. Both schools wanted to establish literary studies as a respectable discipline within the university. Both conceived of this challenge in terms of the need to seek objective knowledge. Both thereby assumed the burdens of a whole array of epistemological problems associated with the subject-object relationship. In practice, the most successful New Critics were scholars who possessed a historical sense that informed their readings of poems. Similarly, the best traditional historicists attended to the form of the texts they studied and appreciated their unique features. They thereby resisted in all forms of historical criticism trying to assimilate the individual text to typical patterns of meaning.

There can be no doubt that traditional historical criticism and the literary history that it produced has had many lasting effects upon literary studies. But this enterprise, too, rested upon assumptions that have today lost their authority for many. Let me touch upon a few of these assumptions—again, primarily for the sake of making the contemporary scene more intelligible. The old historicism turned to context because the determinate meaning of the individual text was not given in experience. But what is context? It is not given in experience, either, and thus has to be constructed. The actual practice of historical criticism indicates that, rather than allowing the discipline to converge upon the true, determinate meaning of individual texts, historical criticism often relocated the problem of indeterminacy at the level of context. In the extreme, the problem of context proliferates until one recognizes that the old historicist project depends upon our ability to interpret history as a whole. Unless we are Hegelians, that’s a problem. Moreover, because of its rhetorical conception of the literary text, traditional historical criticism tended to conceive history along the lines of intellectual history or the history of ideas. It thus overlooked other ways of conceiving history and literature’s relationship to it. Finally, the requirement of wholeness led traditional historicists to emphasize continuity in their construction of historical contexts. This emphasis encouraged the formation of literary canons that excluded texts which didn’t fit into the story being constructed.

As I have mentioned, in England and America historical criticism was always more a canon of practices than a well-articulated theoretical movement. It never went through the agonizing theoretical quests that were pursued by thinkers within the German hermeneutical tradition. Nevertheless, the failure to reflect theoretically does not mean that one is exempt from theoretical dilemmas. In my judgment traditional historicism lost its authority because it was implicated in the same set of Enlightenment and Romantic dilemmas that German philosophers such as Dilthey wrestled with and whose character has become so questionable in continental thought ever since Nietzsche (at least).

Anglo-American literary studies today is a collection of diverse practices, many of which were unimaginable just thirty years ago. I can envision no return to greater uniformity in the near future. Nor do I see a need to return to the kind of comparative uniformity that once existed. Much differentiation has occurred within the modern university, so I acknowledge the value of much that has emerged in literary studies during the past thirty years. In order to tolerate or even celebrate these differences, however, must we abandon the search for ways to talk to one another across the abysses that now seem to divide us? My own work is motivated by a faith that we not only can but must keep searching for greater mutual understanding amid our differences. We must do so out of responsibility to the subject matter of our discipline. We must do so out of a sense of obligation to each other. And we must do so for our students, who deserve a major at the heart of their liberal arts education that affords them more than an opportunity to be exposed to the many different styles of literary criticism. Such a major they can hardly but experience as a collection of idiosyncrasies. To engage in the search for genuine conversation across the divides of the discipline is already to belong together in a certain way.

This is where we need help from our philosophically inclined colleagues. After a fairly lengthy period of commonsense-based activity, so-called literary "theory" has exploded upon the scene. At its best it is, in my judgment, exhilarating, but at its worst it is willfully self-justifying. Moreover, lots of practical literary criticism proceeds on the basis of insufficiently understood motifs imported from philosophy. It’s one thing to pick up the language of the philosophical topoi. It’s another to have a genuine feel for what’s at stake in the great traditions of philosophical debate that lie behind these topoi. So, my dear philosophers, we need your help.

To return now to my narrative: what happened to the old consensus? Well, just about every major category of thought upon which its world rested became questionable. The conception of the literary text as an object; the conception of author and reader as subjects capable of creating and receiving meaning; the conceptions of language; the relation of subject, object, and language to history; the character of history; the human relationship to the world—you name it, all become questionable. Let me sketch briefly some of the major stages in the process—not for the sake of evaluating the relative merits of each but rather simply to register their successive shock values.

A conception of language derived from structural linguistics called into question the basic assumptions about language and meaning upon which both formalism and the old historicism were founded. Structuralism claimed to account for the production of meaning without conscious intentionality, thereby reducing the author from a source of meaning to a function of language. It accounted for linguistic meaning in terms of a play of conventional differences that made formalism’s autonomous work of art appear to be the product of a mystifying desire. The individual text began to lose its objective boundaries and became a more loosely defined site whose identity was a function of differential relations within a web of inter-textuality. Finally, structuralism made it appear that nature—the vaunted reference of poetic mimesis at least since Aristotle—was not natural but social. Nature, that is to say, is never given in immediacy; it is always experienced as linguistically constructed.

A variety of reader-response criticisms also began to explore what had been concealed in the more traditional conceptions of texts and reading. Stanley Fish, for example, indicted formalism as an ideology that was positivist, holistic, and spatial. As such, he sought to undermine the notion that a poem stands there as a finished object in space with a meaning embedded in it, and that the reader’s job is to grasp that meaning by figuring out how the object’s parts form themselves into a whole. His critique aimed at clearing the way for an appreciation of the reader’s active engagement over time in a process of making sense of his or her experience as a reader. Fish himself was criticized because his reader often looked like the kind of privileged male who holds an endowed chair in English at a prestigious university. But the way had been opened (and I certainly don’t mean to give Fish all or even most of the credit here) for considering the concrete reader’s subjective experiences in reading. Others therefore have also explored reading from the point of view of women, non-first-world women, different racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, members of different classes, and so on.

As more and more literary critics became convinced that the essential foundations of formalism and the old historicism were in fact ideologically determined, the way was also open for the wholesale entry into literary studies of methods of critique derived from such thinkers as Marx and Foucault, just to name two. The styles of literary criticism which are today known by such names as the new historicism and cultural studies draw their inspirations from these traditions of critique. The traditional notion of the text as an object to be analyzed is replaced by a conception of the text as a set of notations embedded in a complex network of social practices. The task of literary criticism is thus to analyze, not the components of a product, but the conditions of a practice. Since these conditions are not likely to be given overtly on the surface of texts, a depth-hermeneutic is required that makes use of theoretical models—those drawn, for example, from historical materialism. Influenced by Foucault’s notion of discourse—i.e., linguistic practices understood in the context of their relationships to social institutions—the new historicism re-conceives history as a field of discursive practices in which literature and criticism make their own impact as political forces. They participate, as it were, in the dialectic of historical materialism.

If one were to survey the books and articles published by major university presses and leading journals over the last dozen years, I think one would conclude that cultural studies and the new historicism have emerged, for now at least, as the dominant forms of literary critical practice. Given this development, we ought to ask, "What essential contribution to liberal education is made by literary studies thus conceived?" The answer, it seems to me, would have to be that it offers students the opportunity to engage in certain powerful styles of critical thinking. They learn to be suspicious of the past and its traditions and to work toward uncovering the ideological distortions that permeated those traditions. It is worth distinguishing between two different styles of critique here. One stands squarely within the classic tradition of the modern Enlightenment and is committed to the project of political liberation. In the spirit of a thinker like Habermas, practitioners of this style believe in the possibility of a critical reasoning that is not reducible to one more set of powerful interests. They take their orientation from a utopian vision of free and undistorted communication among autonomous individuals. The other style of critique I would associate with the name Foucault and, through him, Nietzsche. Its practitioners are much less utopian in orientation—their suspicions extend even to the projects of enlightened reason—and they are much more strategically focused on particular historical situations.

I cannot end this all too hasty survey of post-formalist developments in literary studies without mentioning what is probably the most notorious name to come upon the scene during the last thirty years: Jacques Derrida. Before American literary criticism had had a chance to come to terms with the structuralist critique of formalism, Derrida arrived on the scene as a "post"-structuralist practicing something known as deconstruction. It’s not much of a caricature to say that deconstruction was received as having all the worst features of structuralism-except that it also had a few of its own that made it worse still! In many circles Derrida became known simply as a nihilist—with little awareness of what that word had come to mean in the thinking of Nietzsche or Heidegger. I would have to say that Derrida is not much of a presence in literary studies today—and this is deeply ironic, given the passions that his thought provoked not long ago. I think this is so largely because deconstruction was translated into American literary criticism simply as a technique of reading, and it quickly became uninteresting as such. Derrida’s work is in fact deeply and compellingly engaged with central problems of thinking associated with names like Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, but American literary critics had neither the background nor the inclination to read him as such. Consequently, the form of life called deconstruction (if I might invoke Wittgenstein’s notion here to distinguish deconstructive thinking from deconstructive technique) was not well apprehended in American literary criticism. I have come to think this unfortunate, but I do not have time on this occasion to indicate why.

So much for my survey. Let me conclude it simply by saying that the gap between the formalists’ vision of literary study and the visions of those who have come after is large; and regardless of what might be happening at the most prestigious presses and journals, this divide is having an extraordinary impact upon the character of the undergraduate English major at most liberal arts colleges. We hardly know how to talk to each other any more. And so, we tolerate the differences until something important like a hiring decision brings them to the fore.

It’s time for me to offer my answer to the question I have posed. What does literary studies today have to contribute to liberal education? I must begin with a confession. I have all along tacitly been thinking about these matters guided by my knowledge of the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics associated with names such as Sehleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and, more recently, Gerald Bruns and Donald Marshall. Although this tradition of thinking has had only a slight impact upon American literary studies, I think it may offer us resources for imagining literary studies in ways that not only preserve what both formalists and cultural critics value but even make sense of their strife. In part this is because hermeneutics today is not primarily concerned with finding a method of interpretation. Rather, hermeneutical reflection seeks to gain greater insight into the conditions in which understanding occurs. It has a descriptive, phenomenological side to it that I will seek to draw upon here.

The principal starting point for a hermeneutical understanding of literary studies today is Heidegger’s essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art." Let me begin by suggesting how the hermeneutical thinking in this essay might enable us to gather together some of the seemingly opposed concerns that currently characterize literary studies. First, hermeneutics valorizes the literary work of art just as formalism does. It acknowledges the historical dimensions of the work in a manner that allows it to address the concerns of the old historicism. It recognizes and affirms the reader’s activities. It moves beyond the limited understandings of language that characterize formalism and traditional historicism. And it acknowledges in the work an historical play of blindness as well as insight that may call for a critical hermeneutic of some sort.

Beyond these virtues, however, hermeneutics offers resources for thinking that are simply not to be found in most of literary studies today. It makes a profound break with the subject-object schema and the epistemological problems that have plagued it. It thereby enables us to think through the character of historical understanding more adequately. More essentially still, it does not take the presence of the world, or the work of art, or human beings, or society, or history for granted. This is so because hermeneutics today emerges from Heidegger’s retrieval of the pre-Socratic distinction between das Sein and das Seiende—in English, between Being and the individual being—a distinction that Heidegger names the ontological difference. In the light of this difference, we are able to provide a much more radical description of human understanding. And we are able as well again to take up fundamental issues of poetics—a topic that, oddly enough, has long been pushed to the margins of literary studies.

At the heart of the thinking in "The Origin of the Work of Art" is the insight that the work of art is a happening, a work to be accomplished, not a product finished once and for all. More pointedly, the work of art is one of the ways in which truth happens. "Truth" here does not name one of the transcendentals of traditional philosophy but rather the way in which being unfolds, the process in which things emerge into presence and withdraw from presence. Heidegger’s habit of taking nouns and restoring them to the more primordial verb forms that still inhabit them is a guide to his thinking here. The work of art is just that: work to be accomplished, not an object present at hand in the world. The work of art sets up a world, holds open a world, within which the truth of some matter can emerge. If that sounds remarkable, worthy of wonder, it is. Art, claims Heidegger, is one of the "few essential ways" in which truth happens. This is so, however, not because poetry is an essentially different kind of language, as in the New Criticism. It is because poetry realizes a possibility that is inherent in language as such.

The work of art is carried out by its creator—of course. But this work is also carried out by those who receive and take up the work—in literary criticism we usually call these readers. In "The Origin of the Work of Art" Heidegger calls them "preservers." Just as a work "cannot be without being created," so what is created "cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it." Creating and preserving are different in many respects—poetics is not identical with hermeneutics. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s language describing what belongs most essentially to creating and preserving is identical in one crucial respect. Of creation, he writes the following: "to create is to let something emerge as a thing that has been brought forth." Of preserving, he writes: preserving the work means "letting the work be a work." At the heart of both activities is a "letting be"—the German here in both cases rests upon the verb lassen. On a later occasion Heidegger would come to speak of this "letting be" in language borrowed from the German mystical tradition, i.e., as Gelassenheit. It is inextricably tied to an awareness and acknowledgment of that which lets things emerge, of what in German is heard as Es gibt—a phrase which translates into English, unfortunately, only as "There is," not as "it gives."

This "letting be," which is so essential to carrying out the work of art for both poets and readers, is not a passivity but a doing of the highest degree. It is characterized by uncommonly disciplined attentiveness. In the finest poetic and hermeneutical accomplishments it ordinarily rests upon superbly honed skills of the most mature sort. But it is an activity that may also require something like a self-emptying, even a suffering. To accomplish the work of art we may have to "transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is."

Heidegger’s call that we acknowledge the "letting be" which belongs to the work of art may provide a way beyond one of the most contentious points of debate between formalists, who place such emphasis upon the poem as a whole, and those practitioners of newer styles of literary criticism who accuse formalists of "holism." For formalists, being accountable to the poem as a whole is a sine qua non for disciplined literary criticism. It’s the only way to be sure that your efforts are carrying you beyond yourself and an uncritical enslavement to your prejudices. For more recent critics, an insistence upon the unity of the poem can make one complicit in the poem’s ideological project. The demand for unity is intended to enforce hierarchies and conceal differences. There may be truth to this suspicion. From a formalist’s point of view, however, failure to respect the poem as a whole makes it too easy for cultural critics to treat poems as raw materials for producing allegorical readings.

From the perspective provided by "The Origin of the Work of Art," the formalist’s demand for unity has a certain naïve character to it. It is flawed by the assumption that the poem stands there fully present as a completed object that carries its meaning within it. In spite of this naïveté, however, formalists’ hearts are in the right place. They seek to be accountable to the truth of the poem’s subject matter as these emerge in carrying out the work of art. This truth never stands forth, however, in the mode of full presence. What emerges into presence always does so on the basis of a concealment. In the language of Heidegger’s essay, truth in the work of art happens as a strife between world and earth, between that which sets up a clearing and that upon which it must stand - called here the earth, that which shelters and conceals.

The perspective provided by "The Origin of the Work of Art" also offers some support to those whose work makes use of a critical, suspicious hermeneutic. Their refusal to accept the formalists’ demand for unity appears based upon a justifiable suspicion of the formalists’ desire for unity conceived as a presence. In addition, the character of truth’s happening as both disclosure and concealment helps to illuminate why ideological distortions can occur. But that said, we must ask: Can we simply dismiss with all concern for unity? Or is there a desire for unity concealed even in the practice of critical hermeneutics?

Heidegger’s account of the work of art as the truth that happens in the strife between world and earth has analogies with the ancient insight that thinking unfolds between the One and the Many, between unity and indeterminacy. In the Philebus Plato cautions against those who would arrive at the One or the Many too quickly out of a desire to escape the burdens of being in the in-between. If the formalists have assumed Oneness too quickly, their postmodern critics, I fear, have arrived too quickly at multiplicity. And when we arrive at the Many too quickly, we often do so by unwittingly thinking from a standpoint that presumes unity. (Think here, for example, of the monolithic ideological character of some of the simpler expressions of multiculturalism.) A critical hermeneutic carried out relentlessly rests upon the presumed unity of the critical consciousness that carries out the critique. Such a consciousness refuses to risk the self-emptying, the internal multiplicity even, that the work of art can call for. It thus cannot engage in the work of letting be.

How do we know if we are engaging in this work of letting be? I don’t think we can know for sure, and this may be one of the reasons why we return over and over again to the greatest works of art and try to carry out the work more responsively. But we are not totally ignorant, either. We may have an indication that we are "letting the work be" when we are aware of what is concealed in the work as concealed. That is, we recognize the concealment and let it be as concealment. This awareness, in my judgment, is a sign that we are acknowledging the work’s authenticity, its ownness, the essential unfolding of its historical identity, and not just pursuing the advancement of our own projects.

To illustrate the character of this "letting be" more concretely, I would like to look briefly at a poem by Elizabeth Bishop called "The Fish"—a poem which is probably known to many of you. I suggest we read the poem as a parable of "letting be." As we go through the poem, we take note of the active verbs used by the speaker: "I caught, I thought, I looked, I admired, I saw, I stared and stared, I let go." These actions, I wish to argue, all belong to the action of letting be that the speaker explores in the poem.

At the very moment that the fish’s essential being stands most fully revealed, it withdraws into the brilliance of the symbol that discloses the truth of its being: the rainbow. In that symbol the poem articulates the speaker’s awareness of the mystery concealed in the revelation of the fish’s being. And so, she lets the fish go. This is what I mean when I say that an awareness of the concealed as concealed may be a crucial indication that we are indeed engaged in the disciplined labor of letting the work of art be.

I have tried to present an argument that is inclusive in spirit—that is open to discovering how today’s diverse modes of literary critical practice might, in the light of philosophical hermeneutics, be valued for the different contributions they make even as they are understood as belonging together in some intelligible way. I believe, however, that there is one question implicit in what I have said that does confront us with an either/or choice. The question concerns what Paul Ricoeur calls the fundamental gesture of thinking, and it goes like this: Is this gesture one of acknowledgment—acknowledgment of the mysterious conditions between becoming and perishing, birth and death, in which all human understanding happens? Or is it, in the last analysis, a critical gesture, relentlessly and repeatedly on guard against forms of false consciousness?

I believe the fundamental gesture of thinking is this gesture of acknowledgment. And I think that the future value of literary studies within liberal education will depend upon a renewed appreciation of this gesture. At its best literary studies prepares students to participate in one of the few essential ways in which truth happens: the work of art. More than many other disciplines in this scientifically and technologically driven age, it can offer students an opportunity to engage in a kind of thinking that is not just critical but also humble, hopeful, and even thankful. It can lead them to recognize the happening of the world - and to wonder at the mystery that this should be so.