Richard Stotesbury
Ian Robinson’s paper, Leavisian Thinking, delivered to the Leavis Society York Conference in 2013 and published in the The Journal of Literature and Philosophy, [1] is a characteristically thought provoking discussion of Leavis’s account of the nature of critical discourse; and it is a real pleasure to read a critic with whom one finds oneself agreeing at many points. Regrettably, this agreement does not extend to his view of Leavis and philosophy, which I have criticised elsewhere. [2] I shall not revisit my exchange with him, but will venture a short comment on the key area of disagreement that is flagged up in his present piece.
The crux of Mr Robinson’s position is set out in the following passage:
The definition of philosophy is notoriously various, but “thinking about thinking” seems to me (who am not a philosopher) as good a shot as any, at least about one important branch of philosophy. And so . . . willy nilly, thinking about the kind of thinking literary criticism is, Leavis became a philosopher and, moreover, he had to be a philosopher of language just at a moment when philosophy of language was particularly central to philosophy, especially in the work of his Cambridge contemporary and acquaintance, Wittgenstein.
The ‘notoriously various’ senses of ‘philosophy’ range from the broad colloquial usage in which it signifies the expression of an outlook on life of some sort, requiring the man who declares, in the words of the old song, ‘Always look on the bright side.’ to be counted a philosopher, to the narrow one that denotes a specific discipline. Between them are more or less informal usages that treat it as synonymous with terms such as ‘rationale’ and ‘methodology’, relying on the surrounding circumstances to make the meaning clear.
What of Mr Robinson’s definition of ‘philosophy’ as ‘thinking about thinking’? The context, with its reference to Wittgenstein, suggests that it is offered as an equivalent of the narrow sense of the term. If so, Mr Robinson’s ‘shot’ is off-target because ‘thinking about thinking’ has a far wider extension than the sense in question. In addition to the sub-division of epistemology that deals with knowledge of the mind, which seems the most plausible candidate for the unspecified ‘important branch of philosophy’, Mr Robinson’s definiens covers numerous other forms of thinking that are excluded by the narrow sense, from mundane thought processes like reflecting how hard it is to think of anything with background noise to the specialised investigations of mental phenomena that are carried out by psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Consequently, calling Leavis’s observations on critical thinking ‘philosophy’, as Mr Robinson defines it, does not mean that they can be identified eo ipso with the discipline of that name. The permissibility of the identification depends on the facts, which do not support it in as much as the epistemological and metaphysical concerns, rooted in sceptical doubt about the possibility of fundamental forms of knowledge, that give the discipline its distinctive character are patently absent in Leavis.
Turning Leavis into a philosopher like Wittgenstein by definition presents Mr Robinson with the impossible task of finding a formula that is liberal enough to include Leavis’s observations on critical thinking but sufficiently restrictive to exclude everything apart philosophy in the narrow sense. Not surprisingly, he fails to produce one. His ‘thinking about thinking’ accommodates Leavis only at the cost of admitting much more than the discipline to which Wittgenstein’s work belongs. As a result, he adds a further ambiguity to ‘philosophy’ that provides new opportunities for sliding from one meaning to another. In this case, it opens the way for the fallacious inference [3] that Leavis is a philosopher in the same narrow sense as Wittgenstein from the premise that both are ‘philosophers’ in Mr Robinson’s special sense.
The trouble with a definition such as Mr Robinson’s is that it attempts to delimit a specific form of thought in terms of its subject matter. This fails to deliver the desired result because the same subject matter can be approached from different standpoints. Numbers are the subject matter of a range of specialised activities such as statistics, actuarial science and accountancy, to name but a few, as well as untold everyday operations of all descriptions. Hence, ‘thinking about numbers’ specifies nothing in particular. Mr Robinson’s ‘thinking about thinking’ is in the same boat. Without a context to determine how thinking is though about, no specific activity has been indicated.
Mr Robinson seems to edge closer to specificity when he moves from ‘thinking about thinking’ to ‘thinking about what kind of thinking literary criticism is’; but here, too, the context is crucially incomplete. Granted that Mr Robinson’s unwieldy phrase covers philosophical thought about literary criticism as well as Leavis’s observations on critical thinking, does it mean that the latter is an instance of the former? No, because what has been omitted is the background of aims and interests that give significance and point to asking what kind of thinking literary criticism is. In the case of philosophy the motive force of the question is doubt about the rationality of literary criticism [4], and the answer requires the possibility that it is not real thinking to be entertained and addressed. This dimension is conspicuously missing in Leavis, whose account of the modus operandi of critical discourse is driven by the pragmatic aim of facilitating the profitable discussion of literature, and proceeds by ‘a necessary faith’ [5] on the basis that its credentials as a rational activity and status as a genuine mode of thought are undoubtable.
There is, of course, nothing to stop Mr Robinson from defining ‘philosophy’ as ‘thinking about thinking’ if he chooses to. He can say, ‘I call this ‘philosophy’, whether or not you do.’ However, this course changes nothing of substance, and only mires debate in muddle and confusion. The remedy in such situations is provided by Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘Say what you like, as long as it doesn’t prevent you from seeing the facts’, [6] which dissolves futile disagreement over words and opens the way to a recognition of the substantive issue. In this case, it is whether Leavis belongs to the tradition of philosophical thought that runs from the Greeks to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein, together with their contemporaries and successors, major and minor; and the facts are clear that he does not. The complete indifference to the problems of epistemology and metaphysics that he displays makes his inclusion in the above list a no-brainer in a spot-the-odd-man-out exercise. On the other hand, a list of distinguished literary figures that contains Johnson, Coleridge, Carlisle, Arnold and Stephen would be glaringly incomplete without him. The impossibility of adding his name to the first list without manifest absurdity, and of omitting it from the second for the same reason, demonstrates to which discipline he exclusively belongs.
Claiming that Leavis is ‘a philosopher’ is a symptom of the deep malaise of English letters. The major literary figures of the last century, Lawrence and Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Pound, have had no successors; and the tradition of creative writing they represent has atrophied, depriving criticism of its primary function of determining where new works of literature stand in relation to the achievements of the past. In consequence, the secondary activity of examining its own workings has moved into the foreground. However, this is not a stand-alone substitute for the loss of function, since it exists to facilitate and refine critical practice. Re-branding it ‘philosophy’, tacitly taken to signify the discipline of that name, and treating it as self-sufficient is a desperate measure to stave off bankruptcy by creating a faux rationale for criticism. In Leavis’s case, this takes the form of misplaced attempts to read a philosophical significance into his practice-orientated observations on the nature of critical discourse.
[1] ‘Symposium on Leavis as Critic, Teacher and Philosopher’, The Journal of Literature and Philosophy, John Hopkins University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/34022.
[2] http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/columns/0001Leavis.pdf
[3] An instance of the fallacy of equivocation (vide Aristotle, De Sophisticis Elenchis IV).
[4] Vide S Cavell The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, in Wittgenstein ed. G Pitcher, (Macmillan 1966)
[5] F.R. Leavis, Two Cultures? (Chatto & Windus 1962), p. 28.
[6] L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Blackwell 1968), p. 37e, No. 79.