Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times

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10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine

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Reforming the Humanities



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Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times Peter Levine




REFORMING THE HUMANITIES

Copyright © Peter Levine, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62144–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Peter, 1967– Reforming the humanities : literature and ethics from Dante through modern times / Peter Levine. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–62144–2 (alk. paper) 1. Literature and morals. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Humanities. 4. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Divina commedia. 5. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Technique. 6. Ethics. I. Title. PN49.L474 2010 809⬘.93353—dc22 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America


2009016614


All rights reserved.



For My Mother




Introduction

1

One

The Story of Paolo and Francesca

13

Two

Dante Philosophizes About Francesca’s Case

23

Three Poetry and the Emotions in Francesca’s Case

47

Four

Criticizing Moral Theory

71

Five

Good and Bad Stories, and Francesca as a Reader

105

Six

Modern Versions

127

Seven

Consequences

169

Appendix: The Text of Inferno, Canto V

207

Notes

211

Index

231



CON T E N T S




This is a book about ethics and stories. Ethics (or morality) encompasses what is right or good, what we ought to do, and how laws and institutions should be organized. I argue that a good way to make ethical judgments and decisions is to describe reality in the form of a true narrative. Fictional stories also support moral conclusions that can translate into real life. I argue that when the moral judgments supported by a good story conf lict with general principles, we ought to follow the story and amend or suspend our principles, rather than the reverse. What makes a story “good” for this purpose is not its conformity to correct moral principles, but its merits as a narrative—for instance, its perceptiveness and coherence and its avoidance of cliché, sentimentality, and euphemism. The relationship between stories and moral principles is connected to other issues that I also explore: the proper role of emotion and reason in ethics; the scope of moral judgments; what cultural diversity means for ethics; when it is appropriate to favor relatives and friends; whether to consider historical context when interpreting literary texts; and the value of fictional versus true narratives. One can explore these issues in a theoretical way, by advancing general propositions and investigating whether they fit together, what fundamental values or beliefs support them, and whether they are plausible when applied to cases. Moral particularism is an example of such a theory. It has antecedents as old as Aristotle and has recently been developed in a novel way by Jonathan Dancy and others. It asserts that we must make moral judgments about whole situations, but we should not morally evaluate abstract concepts, such as love, justice, courage, or freedom. These concepts are sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the context. One can only tell the moral significance of a concept by examining the whole situation in which it figures. Particularism opens the door to an ethics based on narrative, because stories describe whole situations. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


Particularism is a philosophical thesis that can be developed in some detail, applied to real or hypothetical examples, and connected to other principles derived from logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. Portions of this book involve such theorizing. I argue for a moderate version of particularism, one that acknowledges the value of some general moral principles. I do not, however, believe that theoretical arguments can settle the question of how to reason about moral issues, or—more specifically— how much we should trust stories versus moral principles when the two conf lict. In theoretical arguments about morality, authors frequently appeal to our intuitions about principles and methods or about hypothetical cases. But our intuitions differ; and even when all modern professional philosophers happen to agree, that does not mean that they are all right. Prevailing intuitions change over time and from community to community. We can be relatively secure when we feel strong intuitions about very simple ideas, such as “murder is wrong.” But this book explores propositions that are not categorical rules; they are generalizations or rules of thumb about complex social phenomena such as literature, modern philosophy, ordinary morality, and love (which is this book’s main example of an ethical concept). I do not maintain, for example, that narrative is inevitably better than moral theory, but that we ought to be persuaded by certain types of story if we read them well. Many readers will begin with different opinions about the value of the actual stories that exist in our culture, or in any other. If all we have are clashing intuitions about fiction, philosophy, and important ethical issues such as love, we can make no progress. Instead, I propose to investigate what happens when we try to reason about one moral issue in a highly “literary” way—by means of narrative that is subtle and carefully constructed—and also by developing and testing general principles. This book examines the advantages and disadvantages of these two ways of thinking and judging. I use as a case-study a particularly excellent story that addresses an important moral issue (adulterous love). It is also a story about the relationship between fiction and morality, the tension between emotion and reason, the place of a story in its context, and the proper role of partiality— precisely the issues that I mentioned at the outset. To say that any story is “about” something is a complex and subtle matter. Only the simplest kind of fable announces its theme explicitly. It is especially difficult to say what the narrative I analyze is about, because it deliberately breaks off before it provides essential pieces of information. It is part of the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. We call it the story of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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“Paolo and Francesca,” or the story of “Francesca da Rimini,” but the words “Paolo” and “Rimini” never appear in the text. We think we know that it is the tale of a woman who had an adulterous affair with her brother-in-law and was killed by her husband; but none of these events is even mentioned in Dante’s book. Footnotes tell us that she was a real woman who happened to be the aunt of Dante’s patron; she even quotes her nephew’s poetry when she talks to Dante. But again, we know none of this from the book itself. The main character explains that hers is a story of “love”—but her explanation cannot be complete, for she is in Hell, and one cannot be damned for love alone. The story is constructed in an extraordinary way so that readers ask: What is this about? In general, how do we know what stories are about? Does it matter what really happened to the historical person who is also a character in the literary text? What are the boundaries of any story, since all narratives are enmeshed with others? And if we decide that this story is really about love, adultery, murder, and/or poetry, what moral judgments should we make about its damned heroine? I explore these questions in Chapter 1, first explaining what literally happened in Dante’s story and then proposing a first interpretation. Dante, I argue, holds doctrines that are philosophical in origin and form. In Chapter 2, I define “moral philosophy” and analyze Dante’s philosophical reasons for favoring monogamous marriage. The purpose of this discussion is to give a f lavor of philosophical reasoning and to show that Dante is committed to philosophical conclusions that justify Francesca’s damnation. In the text, Francesca presents a rival theory, according to which love is involuntary and beyond reproach. Thus we can interpret the episode as a philosophical debate between Francesca (the character) and Dante (the author). The intended moral is that Francesca is wrong. She claims that her own story is about love, when it is really about adultery; and she holds incorrect views of love and narrative. However, as a pilgrim in Hell, Dante does not seem to grasp this moral. He is beguiled by Francesca’s sweet speech, confused by her false moral doctrine, and perhaps inf luenced by his real personal relationship to her. In Chapter 3, I investigate Francesca’s rhetoric. At least since Plato, literature has been accused of misleading its readers by skillfully distorting our emotions. I argue that Dante holds this view of literature, albeit with some important qualifications. Thus, even though he is a narrative poet, he is concerned about the moral dangers of literature and presents Francesca as a warning. She not only tells a misleading story about herself, but she is a devotee of romances who believes that she resembles romantic heroines from literature, such as Yseult. To the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


extent that she provokes our sympathy, the intended lesson is to distrust stories. Dante favors moral doctrines when they conf lict with literature, no matter how moving or convincing the latter may be. Part of the reason, I argue, is that Dante holds a very non-particularistic view of moral concepts. He believes that it is possible to define each concept so that it is always right or wrong, or good or bad, regardless of the context. The physical structure of the afterworld, as he imagines it, exemplifies this kind of moral categorization, with its tiers devoted to various sins and virtues. Under the inf luence of romantic fiction, Francesca mischaracterizes her own case. She says that it is about “love,” which she presumes to be always praiseworthy. But Virgil explains in Purgatory that love is neither good nor bad in general, although it can be very good or very bad in particular contexts (Purg. xviii, 34–39). Dante believes that love comes in several forms. These can be separately defined, and we can use independent criteria (necessary and sufficient conditions) to tell us whether a given love is good or bad. For example, the same love that it is good when it exists between a married couples is bad when the parties are married to other people. In Chapter 4, I propose an alternative moral theory, my own version of particularism. It is easiest to introduce this theory via an analogy to aesthetics.1 A large patch of red paint may contribute to the beauty of a painting by de Kooning, but it would utterly ruin a Van Eyck. Patches of red paint are not the right unit of aesthetic judgment; paintings are. Likewise, particularists believe that we can make valid moral judgments about overall situations, but not about their qualities or aspects (such as love or adultery) when taken out of context. Pure particularists argue that all moral concepts shift their meaning, and their moral significance is never knowable in advance by applying general criteria or rules.2 We can only find out whether something like love is good or bad by seeing it in a particular context. I think this claim is too radical. I am a moderate particularist, because I accept that some concepts, when properly defined, have very strong positive or negative moral force in all situations. For example, rape is always wrong. If there is an elaborate hypothetical case in which rape is justified, it should still cause immense regret. However, other ideas, such as love, happiness, marriage, courage, fidelity, and trust, are not like this. They are indispensable for moral thinking, yet their significance depends on the immediate circumstances and cannot be predicted on the basis of a general theory. I argue, specifically, that love cannot be disaggregated into good and bad types that have clear definitions, as Dante tries to do. Love is a complex phenomenon, much colored by 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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past human experience, description, and testimony, that can be either good or bad, or can easily change from good to bad (or vice-versa), or can be good and bad at the same time. All the subcategories of love that are generally bad (e.g., adultery) include praiseworthy cases. Even the good examples carry hints of the bad, and vice-versa. We must make judgments about particular cases of love. These judgments are right or wrong or somewhere in between. Yet the general concept of love is irreducibly ambiguous, because we cannot tell by any rule or independent criterion whether it will make a situation better or worse. To think about cases of love—and about other concepts that function like love—we need stories. We must assess whole situations, but the limits of any situation may be controversial. Stories persuade us that certain details are relevant to judgment and others are not. They also demonstrate that particular people are morally implicated in situations. In narratives, we find themes; and themes are useful for moral reasoning. They are unlike moral rules, definitions, principles, or doctrines in that they only literally apply to a particular story in its specific context; they are not even exhaustive interpretations of that story. Many themes can overlap in a single story: Canto V of the Divine Comedy, for instance, introduces interrelated themes of love, adultery, violence, pity, and sinful reading. Recognizing a story’s moral themes prompts us to look for similar themes and combinations of themes in other narratives, including those of our own lives. Themes generalize in just the right way and to just the right degree. Through Chapter 4, the argument presumes that Dante damned Francesca because she was moved by fiction to ignore moral principles taught by philosophy and theology. There is support for this interpretation in the text, but Dante must have held a somewhat more complicated view, for he chose to write moving, concrete, and imaginative stories that sometimes challenged his own more abstract beliefs. Many critics have noted tensions in the Divine Comedy that are sources of its power and fascination. Dante’s commitment to austere principles clashes with his evident love of human particularity. His sympathy vies with his stern morality. The pilgrim named “Dante” is often at odds with the author/narrator who bears the same name. These tensions may even be embodied in the overall form of the Comedy. The architecture of its 100 cantos is full of symmetries and regularities, yet it encompasses fantastic diversity of human types. Its terza rima has a metronomically reliable beat that embraces an incredible variety of sound and texture. If Dante is a “philosophical” thinker, driven by clear distinctions and willing to apply abstract rules to various cases, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


that is only one aspect of his great work. Sometimes his stories subvert his own philosophy. According to Lord Byron, Friedrich Schlegel, Francesco de Sanctis, Erich Auerbach, and other major critics, Dante subscribed to strict, religious-philosophical doctrines that he learned from medieval Catholic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas. These moral views led him to damn people like Francesca da Rimini. But Dante was also a poet—a close observer and sympathetic describer of human beings— and as a poet, he was inclined to pity and forgive. His stern, religiously grounded philosophy conf licted with his forgiving poetic sensibility; and Romantic critics preferred the latter. My view is different. I think that Dante chose Francesca as his chief exemplar of lust (instead of any other adulterer whom he could have selected) because she had sinned against poetry as well as against abstract moral principles. Put another way, Dante derived moral ideas from his close observation and description of individuals in their contexts. These moral views were in some tension with the abstract doctrines that he had learned from theologians and philosophers. His poetic values sometimes undermined his moral categories and definitions. But the moral views that he derived from close observation and description were by no means permissive or lenient. On the contrary, he showed that being a good reader—of literature or of human beings—took discipline and care, which Francesca conspicuously lacks. It turns out that Francesca’s speech is a pastiche of literary quotations. If we examine the books she quotes, we find that some are hackneyed and superficial. Others are idiosyncratic and morally demanding—yet Francesca reads or misreads them all as clichés. She even misremembers or misstates the literal plots of several books, changing them from peculiar to banal. Not coincidentally, she neglects to say anything specific about her own lover’s personality. Instead of “reading” Paolo carefully, she treats him as a stock character from hackneyed medieval romance. Dante uses his depiction of Francesca to show that clichés are morally hazardous. They allow us to avoid noticing what is particular about a person or a situation—so we judge it incorrectly. Identifying clichés in stories (and in the interpretation of stories) is one way to distinguish helpful from misleading narratives. Furthermore, there is an important parallel between clichés in literature and abstractions in moral philosophy. Like a formulaic story, a moral theory may overlook the important details of a situation. We now are in a position to see a second interpretation of the story, which I present in Chapter 5. According to this reading, Francesca 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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is not damned because she holds the wrong moral philosophy—nor because she has been inf luenced by stories and has ignored the moral principles taught by philosophers—but rather because she is a poor reader of literature. She prefers bad stories to good ones, and she distorts the best ones by misquoting them. Particularism (even in a moderate version) implies that we cannot identify good stories as ones that conform to general, abstract moral principles. We need different criteria— ones more intrinsic to narrative. Dante suggests several such criteria by offering Francesca as a model of poor literary judgment. She is addicted to sentimentality and euphemism as well as cliché. She also has a strong tendency to pick convenient portions of books out of context. The opposite kind of reader would appreciate candor, precision, curiosity, and empathy and would wrestle with challenging moral perspectives instead of distorting them. These emerge as moral as well as literary values, albeit not ones that are always good. By interpreting a medieval text closely and critically, I defend a version of particularism, argue for reading stories morally, and develop some ideas about love and reading. But philosophy, love, and literature have changed since Dante’s period. Historicism is the view that values are phenomena of our cultural backgrounds and contexts; and such contexts differ substantially from time to time and place to place. Although even Herodotus recognized some degree of moral diversity, true historicism was a discovery of the late eighteenth century. Confronted with evidence that Homeric Greeks and contemporary Hindus had profoundly different values from those of bourgeois Europeans ca. 1800, some historicists reached radical conclusions about culture itself. They came to believe that we make all of our moral judgments by applying general assumptions. We hold these assumptions because of the cultures in which we live. Cultures vary; hence judgments differ; hence no one can know whether he or she is morally right. Not only does a profound change in values plant doubts about the validity of our moral judgments; it also raises questions about whether anyone can represent concrete situations and episodes realistically—for all representation must ref lect the assumptions of a particular cultural context. Thus radical historicism provokes a crisis of representation; sophisticated artists in all media develop doubts about the very possibility of representing the world. If we cannot represent reality, then we cannot reason morally by examining and discussing concrete cases. I am a moderate historicist because I accept that there is a great variety in human moral judgments and ways of seeing the world, and we can often understand why people adopt their views by understanding 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


their cultural backgrounds. However, I do not believe that a culture is a set of abstract epistemological and moral premises that its members apply when they make value-judgments. To have a “culture” is not to make a few basic assumptions from which everything else follows; it is rather to possess a large set of biases, experiences, beliefs, and commitments; examples, archetypes, vocabularies, and role models; styles of representing the world; and repertoires of reasoning skills. Everyone has a different set. No one’s set is fully consistent or coherent. Even if there are two people in the world who are so dissimilar that they perceive and judge every situation differently, other people share some views with each. In short, human beings are not divided into a set of distinct “cultures,” each one with its own worldview or foundation (to mention two common but misleading metaphors). Rather, we normally relate to people who are somewhat similar and somewhat different. In Chapter 6, I investigate the dilemmas of historicism by interpreting Romantic and post-Romantic versions of the Paolo and Francesca myth, especially those by Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gabrielle d’Annunzio, and Eugenio Montale. Most of these authors drew opposite moral conclusions from Dante’s because they held attitudes toward sexuality and art that were typical of their time— but not of his. Thus the history of the Paolo-and-Francesca story provides a helpful illustration of historicism. Historicism is also an explicit theme in some of the retellings. For instance, Montale places himself in a hellish storm, tied to a mysterious woman who resembles Francesca. But he is profoundly skeptical of his ability to understand her or any other person, and he traces that skepticism to a recognition of historical change. Montale’s poetry embodies the crisis in representation: he drops the ambition of telling a story or portraying a character in her context, and instead offers fragmentary thoughts apparently (although perhaps fictionally) drawn from his inner state. The later versions of Francesca’s story not only illustrate and explore historicism; they also exemplify a specific inversion of values that deserves attention. In typical Romantic versions, Francesca is a heroine, struggling to enjoy love, passion, liberty, and self-expression despite the burdensome bonds of marriage. Many authors of the last 200 years have considered social institutions such as matrimony and monogamy and their underlying values to be conventional, arbitrary, or at best ungrounded in any deeper general truth. By contrast, sexual love is often viewed as natural, involuntary, universal, authentic, and pleasurable. Hence many major characters in Romantic and subsequent fiction are lovers who are oppressed by puritanical conventions. Adulterous passion fits this model perfectly. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Thus, in Romantic versions of the Paolo and Francesca myth, the two doomed lovers are young and beautiful. They are interested in Art (which describes beauty, nature, and passion), whereas their relatives are philistines and puritans. The passion of Art spills over into reality, encouraging them to kiss. They are killed immediately, before differences in desires and values arise to complicate their relationship. The pathos of their death provides readers or viewers with aesthetic pleasure that is closely linked to the emotion of pity. If the lovers end up in Hell, their damnation is treated as a profound injustice that intensifies their tragedy. Readers are expected to assume that young and beautiful lovers rightly belong together; this feels like a moral judgment even though it is not always consistent with ethics. We have moved beyond Romanticism. Today, many people view love with more irony than Leigh Hunt did; and many support marriage and other traditional institutions for ethical reasons. Nevertheless, we remain mired in a set of problems that arose during the Romantic era. Attuned to historical change and diversity, we distrust universal moral principles, especially ones that assume intrinsic ends or purposes in human life. Radical historicism also undermines our confidence in our own concrete judgments about particular situations, for we know that people from foreign places and distant times would both see and judge reality differently. Moral and epistemological skepticism are common in high culture, while popular culture remains fascinated with stories about romantic love (seen as natural, spontaneous, and good) versus moral norms and institutions, which are oppressive and arbitrary. It would be dangerous and damaging to live in a time that was deeply skeptical of both general moral rules and concrete moral judgments, and that instinctively turned to romantic passion as a substitute for ethics. But this describes only one aspect of our situation. Despite the challenges that arose in the Romantic era, we continue to produce and consume compelling moral stories. We thus face a version of Kant’s question: Moral reasoning continues to exist, but how is it possible? My answer lies in a combination of moderate historicism and moderate particularism. This combination explains how stories can continue to embody moral truth. It also suggests lessons for philosophers and literary critics, which I explore in Chapter 7. For philosophers, the lesson is to engage more seriously with narrative. We call mainstream moral philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition “analytical” because they analyze raw materials that come from outside of contemporary academic philosophy. They select popular intuitions and/or historical moral doctrines (especially those of Kant 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


and the British utilitarians) and analyze them to see whether they are internally consistent, harmonious with our other intuitions, and clear. I think this approach has achieved some useful results, and I would call myself an analytical moral philosopher. The method has three severe limitations, however. First, analytical philosophers try to develop general moral theories by clarifying the intuitions of particular people—most often, people just like them. This is an ahistorical method; it ignores the fact that values differ profoundly, and “our” moral intuitions may be merely local. Second, consistency and clarity can be overrated. If they become our main criteria for selecting moral views, then we may discard insights that are indistinct or that do not fit together neatly, even though these ideas are legitimate and important. Third, it is impossible to settle moral issues merely by analyzing and refining received views. Many opinions about moral issues are sufficiently reasonable that they can be clarified, rendered internally consistent, and harmonized with opinions about other topics. Thus a philosopher who seeks to refine available views will be struck by the intractability of moral disagreements and the incapacity of his or her discipline to provide answers. In fact, many of today’s leading philosophers are disarmingly modest about what they can achieve. For example, John Rawls states: “There are no experts: a philosopher has no more authority than other citizens.”3 Faced with a diversity of moral views, Rawls makes a procedural turn; he argues that people should be able to choose their own ends in a liberal democracy that makes collective choices deliberatively while safeguarding individual rights. I agree that everyone should be able to choose ends and participate in democratic deliberations. But what are citizens supposed to think and say, unless there are good arguments about moral matters? And if there are good arguments, why can’t philosophers offer them, too? I believe that philosophers can offer valuable moral ideas—not to dominate or resolve public deliberations, but as useful contributions. Their most compelling ideas often come originally from stories. The best stories contain important moral themes and insights; they give us reasons to adopt moral views. These stories are worthy of careful, professional analysis, such as moral philosophers can provide. However, to capture the power of a story, one cannot resort to a synopsis or a paraphrase. As I hope to demonstrate in this book, a story should be read with attention to specifically “literary” qualities, such as characterization, setting, point-of-view, voice, genre, irony, and style. Equally important for understanding a story is to know its context: the author’s 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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intentions, the other narratives to which the text alludes, and the norms of the community in which it originated. For the most part, Anglophone moral philosophers use stories, stripped of context, merely as examples. Hypothetical and often implausible scenarios figure much more frequently than interpretations of subtle, carefully constructed stories. Yet some prominent philosophers have interpreted narratives with close attention to their literary qualities. Recent examples include Richard Rorty on Nabokov and Proust, Bernard Williams on the classical tragedies; Colin McGinn on Shakespeare; and Martha Nussbaum on many texts, including the Divine Comedy.4 These authors have disparate interests and methods and reach various conclusions. I want to make the general point that interpreting stories is a good method for moral ref lection, and that it is especially valuable when the form, intention, and context of the text are taken seriously.5 Rorty recommended a “general turn against theory and toward narrative.”6 I endorse this direction but offer quite different reasons from his—ones rooted in the methodology of moral judgment rather than skepticism about moral truth. For their part, literary critics are experts about cultural context and the intrinsically literary aspects of stories. In addition, they often hold views about whether stories are good or bad—not only aesthetically, but also morally and politically. For example, some readings demonstrate that particular books are patriarchal or ethnocentric, and we assume these are unacceptable attitudes. In the recent past, however, explicit moral argument and evaluation became very marginal and uncommon in literary studies.7 Scholars engaged in “critical reading” were not expected to express or defend their own moral views.8 They did not discuss whether the moral themes in a given story were persuasive or what themes they would prefer the text to present. In my view, this diffidence was a mistake. Literature makes moral judgments; taking it seriously means evaluating its claims. It is important to do so explicitly, because the implicit moral positions that motivate critics’ judgments of literary works can seem simplistic or exaggerated—or even downright wrong—once they are set down in words. Discussions of literature benefit from accountability and transparency. Fortunately, there is now an “ethical turn” in literary studies that seems to mirror the literary turn in philosophy. In her inf luential 2006 book, The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson announces: “We must keep in mind that the question, ‘How should I live?’ is the most basic one.” This bold premise associates her, she says, with the “general turn to ethics.” It marks a departure from “theory,” meaning literary or 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Introduction


cultural theory as practiced in the humanities from the 1960s into the 1990s, which meant the application of “post structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, post colonialism, and queer theory” in interpreting texts and discussing methods and goals within the humanities.9 “Theory” had its own moral implications and its own ideas about character, as Anderson notes. At least some of its moral insights were valuable. But “theory” tended to deprecate human agency. Post structuralism “limit[ed] individual agency” by insisting that we could not overcome (or even understand) various features of our language, psychology, and culture. Multiculturalism added another argument against human agency by insisting “on the primacy of ascribed group identity.” Anderson, in contrast, believes that we can think morally about, and inf luence, the development of our own characters.10 I second these views but reach them from a different starting point. For Anderson, the main issues are the centrality of character and agency and the duty to make moral arguments in public. These are also perennial concerns for Martha Nussbaum, although she has considered a vast range of issues in her career. For me, the starting question is: What methods should we use for making and defending ethical judgments? An important part of my answer is: by telling and interpreting stories. But how should we read stories, how can we tell the good ones from the bad ones, and how can we generalize from stories, especially across cultures and epochs? To address these questions, I turn to a deeply challenging, seven-hundred-year-old story that still asks how we should live and where we should derive our moral ideas.



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What happened to Francesca? Imagine reading the Inferno without any background information or historical commentary—without footnotes, glosses, or prior knowledge of the characters. In Canto V (translated in the Appendix), you would find Dante conversing with two unnamed lovers. The woman of the pair offers some information about herself. She says that she was born in the city where the Po finds its peace, by which she must mean Ravenna. She fell in love with a man while reading about Lancelot; and she was killed. Before she has finished speaking, Dante realizes that her name must be Francesca. From clues elsewhere in the poem, we can calculate that the year is 1300. At this time, Francesca and her lover are dead and in Hell, but the person who killed them seems still to be alive, because she says that a lower circle of the Inferno awaits him. In short, we can glean Francesca’s given name, her birthplace, the rough date and cause of her death, and a strong sense of her personality from the text. Since Dante immediately recognizes her from a few clues, we can also assume that the circumstances of her death were famous or that he had a personal relationship to her. But everything else—including the nature of these circumstances—remains mysterious. If the text were our only guide, we would never speak of “Paolo and Francesca” or “Francesca da Rimini,” because neither “Paolo” nor “Rimini” is ever mentioned. In his lectures on the Divine Comedy, delivered about 1373, Boccaccio says if we want to understand what Francesca means in her great speech to Dante, then we must know “who she was and by what means she died.”1 Like Boccaccio, we want to ask: Who killed this Francesca, and why?



CH A P T E R


Who was her lover? Was their love illicit? What was Francesca’s role in the history of Ravenna, the city where Dante spent his own last years? Some critics would argue that these are misguided questions. They may object, first of all, to any interpretation that asks what moral judgment Dante passed on a real woman. The Divine Comedy is a work of art, they argue, not a crime report or a “moralistic apologue” (a simple story with a clear moral point).2 Literary characters are real in the text, not outside of it. We do not try to assess Hamlet’s motives by looking in the Danish national archives for evidence of his father’s murder. Even if there were such evidence, it would be irrelevant to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Similarly, we know that there was actually a Francesca da Rimini (in fact, we have more evidence of her existence than of Beatrice’s), but perhaps it is misleading to ask who she was when we interpret the Comedy. If we see Francesca as a figure in a literary text, then all facts about her are best explained by reference to the structure of the book or the intentions of the author. If, on the other hand, we view Francesca as a figure from history, then there are historical causes for some of the facts about her. Consider her given name (one piece of data that we can derive from the text). “Francesca” may mean “Frenchwoman,” because she symbolizes French chivalric culture in the Divine Comedy.3 But Francesca was also a human being whose parents named her before Dante was born. Probably, they didn’t mean to allude to France, but rather to St. Francis.4 I believe that we must seek more information about Francesca than we are provided in the text. For one thing, the suspense and confusion generated by her incomplete story require resolution. As Jonathan Usher notes, “Dante’s representation of Paolo and Francesca’s adultery in Inferno V derives a not inconsiderable part of its emotional effectiveness from the fact that the poet does not narrate the affair in its entirety but rather twice makes a start to the story, only to fall silent at precisely the moment when the reader’s interest is maximally aroused.”5 If our interest were “aroused” but left unresolved, the story would not work. It is aesthetically and emotionally satisfying only if we can consult footnotes to see who killed Francesca and why. It is a story of adulterous passion and the murder of a spouse—but we cannot tell any of that from the text alone. Besides, we need to know more about Francesca’s story than we can read in the Inferno because we are rightly accustomed to treating testimonies, confessions, and other narratives as arguments in favor of moral judgments. After Francesca speaks for the first time, Virgil asks 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Dante, “Che pense?” (“What do you think?”), and his question is meant for us as well (Inf. v, 111). When we are unsure how to judge a person or a situation, we often ask which facts properly belong in the narrative. We wonder whether the version of the story that we have heard included irrelevant facts or omitted relevant ones. When Francesca speaks in the Inferno, we are given far too little information with which to reach a moral conclusion. Since her story is strikingly incomplete, we must ref lect on what information we would need before we could make a moral assessment (imagining that her case were real). It is a virtue of Canto V that it forces such ref lection. I will not offer techniques or guidelines for deciding which informational questions a story should address, because I do not believe that general rules are available. But I will argue that we should approach a story by looking for its themes and its most important facts. This is a dynamic process; our grasp of the facts (or hypothetical facts in fictional stories) inf luences our emerging understanding of the themes, and vice-versa. Because written narratives always leave much to the imagination, what we think happens in a story depends on what we take its themes to be, yet when we read about new events, our understanding of the story’s themes may change. In the case at hand, one evident theme is sin or damnation. But we have no information about any damnable sin that Francesca has committed. We are thus driven beyond the story itself. One major early source for information about Francesca is Boccaccio’s lecture series on the Inferno. Many of the most popular Dante editions have summarized his account in a note or a preface to Canto V, thus compelling readers to experience Dante’s poem with Boccaccio’s gloss also in their minds.6 A short plot summary would go as follows: In order to resolve a feud with the Malatesta family, Francesca’s father wanted to marry her to their ugly but effective heir, Gianciotto (Giovanni the Lame). Since she was high-spirited, he feared that she would refuse. He sent Gianciotto’s handsome and well-mannered brother Paolo to Francesca’s household and fooled her into thinking this was Gianciotto. She married the wrong brother by accident, but soon began to consort alone with Paolo. Gianciotto surprised them together and tried to kill Paolo, accidentally stabbing both lovers with a single blow. He had them buried together in the same tomb. The major characters in this story were real people.7 But it is hard to believe that Boccaccio’s tale is true, since the trick that he imagines Guido Malatesta playing on Francesca could never work in real life. Besides, the trope of a lover’s messenger being mistaken for the lover was a medieval literary commonplace, and Gianciotto’s command to 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




bury Paolo and Francesca in a single grave comes from Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Several times in the Decameron, illicit lovers are buried together once their death has softened the hearts of their angry relatives, so clearly Boccaccio liked this Ovidian ending. Indeed, much about this story suggests that Boccaccio invented it wholesale, decades after Dante’s death (which means that Dante did not know or even imagine its outline). This is important because correctly understanding Dante’s text requires banishing the penumbra that Boccaccio cast around it. As Charles Singleton notes, Boccaccio goes to great lengths to “exculpate Francesca as much as possible” by making her wedding contract a fraud.8 In Boccaccio’s Decameron, speakers and listeners consistently enjoy episodes of illicit love and sex, while making fun of authority figures, especially fathers, priests, and cuckolded husbands. In contrast, the stern father in the Divine Comedy is God, whose decision to damn Francesca must be just. The gulf between the Divine Comedy and the Decameron is already apparent from the subtitle of the latter book: “Galeotto.” This is the Italian name of Galehaut, the knight who served as a go-between or pander in the Arthurian legend, encouraging the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. His name was often applied to the part of Lancelot del lac that Francesca was reading when she fell in love with Paolo. She laments: “A Galehaut was the author / of that book, and seductive was his fancy” (Inf. v, 137–138). Nevertheless, Boccaccio happily declares his book a “Galeotto” that will convey his love to his audience—which he imagines to be largely female.9 We will come to Dante’s elaborate, and very different, positions about love and literature shortly. A more reliable version of the story that Dante actually heard comes from Marco Bettagli, ca. 1350, “Paolo was killed by his brother because of lust [lussuria] committed with Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, wife of Paolo’s brother, together with whom the same Paolo met his death.”10 Dante transformed this terse story into a powerful and distinctive character-study, introducing themes of reading, love poetry, and beguiling rhetoric that are absent in the chronicle. He did so for moral reasons, but what were they? Dante’s Connection to the Story We might begin by asking what Dante knew and thought about the real Francesca. Whether an author’s biography is relevant to the interpretation of his or her fiction is a perennial controversy. The answer 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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surely depends on the nature of the fiction. In the case of the Divine Comedy¸ there are special reasons at least to consider information about Dante’s life and opinions. He gives his main character his own name and background, reports the story in the first person, and refers frequently to aspects of his own experience. The Divine Comedy is a kind of fiction (since Dante did not really travel to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven), yet he believes that all of the souls he meets there are historical figures, and he passes moral judgments on them because of what he thinks they actually did in real life. We cannot even tell what the Francesca story is about unless we consult historical sources. And once we do, we learn that Dante had a personal connection to her family. Dante sought his last refuge in Ravenna at the invitation of Count Guido Novello da Polenta, who was Francesca’s nephew.11 Guido and Dante should have been political enemies, given their contradictory views of the papacy. Yet the two men were friends, and the reason was their shared love of literature.12 While he ruled Ravenna, the Count strove to build a court that would be renowned for its men of letters. According to Boccaccio, he was a person “well tutored in liberal studies” who honored “worthy men and especially those who exceeded others in knowledge.”13 He tried for some time to attract Dante from Verona and other cities, finally succeeding before 1320. Dante served Guido in various important capacities, including possibly as professor of rhetoric. He died as a member of his household, having just completed a crucial diplomatic mission to Venice on Ravenna’s behalf. Guido organized a solemn funeral for Dante and had the poet buried in a classical sarcophagus in the local monastery of San Francesco.14 Guido Novello happened to be a poet, the author of several love sonnets that resemble Dante’s early work. If he wrote the following sonnet (which tradition attributes to him), then perhaps he shared it with his Florentine guest: The air was serene and the sky was clear And the birds by the river sang. That day was the first that felt like spring When I saw you, my joy, so fair. Your face wore an unaccustomed blush That never leaves my thoughts today And whenever I travel far away Your pleasing smile seems to rush, Gently launched toward my heart By the look that comes to your pretty eyes, And the smile that so sweetly f lies To blend with mine and never part.

Era l’aer sereno e lo bel tempo et cantavan gli augei per la rivera et in quel giorno apparve primavera qand’io te vidi prima, bella gioia. Ben fosti gioia, chè tal m’apparisti e col novo color nel tuo bel viso che già da la mia mente non se parte. E quando sono in più lontana parte più mi sovvien del tuo piacente riso. Sì dolcemente nel mio cor venisti per un soave sguardo che facesti dal tuoi begli occhi, che mi mirar fiso





Now she can never be torn away; Joy shall spare me from misery.

sì che già mai da te non fia diviso, tanta allegrezza mi dà fuor di noia.15

This is a gracious poem, although perhaps a bit naïve; it expresses gentle love. It exemplifies the dolce stil nuovo, the sweet new style launched by Guido Cavalcanti and the young Dante himself, a style that Richard Lewis defines as “poetry in praise of the loved one, without a trace of bravado, totally bereft of irony or double-edged wit, and emanating from the ‘gentle heart.’ ”16 It differs from Dante’s early work only in that there is no metaphysical terminology or speculation about the nature of love in general. Guido’s penultimate line—che già da me non fui deviso—also appears almost verbatim in the Inferno, where Francesca tells Dante: When we read that ‘the desired smile then was kissed by the ardent lover,’ he who can never be torn away kissed me, all atremble.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante. questi, che mai da me non fia diviso (Inf. v, 133–135)

Perhaps Dante chose to quote this line in the Inferno as homage to his host.17 Or perhaps he invented it for the Divine Comedy, and Guido later borrowed it for his sonnet. There are still other possible explanations, such as a lost third source or sheer coincidence. However, the shared phrase is inconclusive evidence that Dante and Guido exchanged love poetry. Eugenio Chiarini says that the line “by itself seems to establish a very special rapport between the lord [of Ravenna] and the poet of Francesca.”18 Guido’s own poems are evidence that he was a devotee of romantic verse. He probably subscribed to the form of courtly love that had originated in what is now Southern France: the culture of the troubadour and Arthurian romance. In the Inferno, Dante makes Francesca (Guido’s aunt) a part of the same culture, associating her with Tristan, Iseult, and the other donne antiche e’ cavalieri from romantic literature, and putting numerous quotations from the same literature into her mouth. The storms of Hell stop to let her speak calmly and eloquently about love, just as Guido conversed with Dante amid the political tempests of their lives. The landscape in which she and Paolo suffer resembles the Adriatic coast near Ravenna, where Guido reigned. Chiarini describes this resemblance as one of the “signs of the memory of Ravenna in the poem.”19 Francesca may even utter a line from one of Guido’s poems, quoted above. In short, the resemblance between this fictionalized Francesca and her real nephew is palpable and could be deliberate. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Ravenna is as it has been for many years: the eagle of Polenta broods over it, just as he covers Cervia with his wings

Ravenna sta come stata è molt’anni: l’aguglia da Polenta la si cova, sì che Cervia ricuopre co’suoi vanni. (Inf. xxvii, 40–42)

This is an unf lattering reference to Guido the Elder, Francesca’s father and Guido Novello’s grandfather, whose shield bore a red eagle. Dante also has harsh words for Francesca’s father-in-law Malatesta the Elder, a former lord of the nearby city of Rimini. Dante calls him “the old mastiff,” adding that he “made a drill of his teeth” to suck the life from cities (Inf. xxvii, 46, 48). Benvenuto da Imola tells a story about Malatesta that is interesting as part of the context of the Inferno and that reappears in several later versions of Francesca’s story (see Chapter 6). Malatesta and his son Malatestino once captured a knight of Rimini called Montagna. “Later, the father asked [Malatestino] what he had done with Montagna, whereupon the son replied: ‘My lord, he is so well guarded that although he is near the sea, he could not drown himself even if he wanted to.’ Malatesta, after several times making the same inquiry and receiving the same reply, at last said, ‘I see that you do not know how to guard him.’ Malatestino, taking the hint, had Montagna and several others killed.”21 It is irrelevant that these men are Italians, but they sound exactly like characters from a gangster film. Dante places Malatesta himself, his son Malatestino, and their relative Tebaldello Zambrasi in Hell as traitors—quite a long list of explicit damnations for a single family.22 We are now able to place the story in a broader context, expanding the facts that we can consider as relevant to judging Francesca’s situation—although what is right to include is itself a moral judgment. She comes from a brutal and violent family. That is not just our opinion: Dante decries their behavior and explains it as the result of Papal rule, which violates his political theory. Their region of Italy is the Romanga, which he compares to Hell; with its ruins and incessant warfare, it exemplifies any community from which legitimate order and love have been removed.23 But Francesca loves poetry, not war. In that respect, she resembles her nephew Guido Novello, a devotee of literature who would lose his domain to his own treasonous cousin after Dante’s death.24 In real life, Dante became closely associated with Francesca’s family, and he 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Dante never says a favorable word about the Polenta family in the Divine Comedy.20 Quite the contrary; in Hell, he tells the mercenary Guido da Montefeltro:

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Everything in her story that could mar our pity is set aside, and nothing remains but the quintessence of love. Amid the tortures of Hell, where all is hatred, her love does not forsake her, and she glories in the thought that she and Paolo will never be parted. Should we be inclined to question whether mere impersonal sympathy, however natural and profound, could have sufficed to lead a religious poet, a stern moralist, thus to idealize an adulteress and mitigate her punishment, we might feel ourselves justified in seeking some special reason for his kindness. [Dante’s] last and probably his happiest years were spent in Ravenna under the protection of Guido . . . There is, then, some slight ground for the supposition that this passage was intended as an incidental homage to Guido’s family (there being no other tribute to it in the poem), a rehabilitation of Francesca’s memory. Love, she says, comes to gentle hearts with irresistible force—‘a nullo amato amar perdona.’ Had she lived, she would have repented; it was her sudden taking that damned her.25

Grandgent draws on facts not recorded in the Divine Comedy to support a favorable judgment of Francesca. In essence, he broadens her story to encompass portions of Dante’s biography. His interpretation was by no means original. In 1818, the inf luential critic Ugo Foscolo (a friend of Byron and other Romantics), had written in the Edinburgh Review: Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, master of Ravenna, Dante’s protector and most faithful friend. The poet had probably known her when a girl, blooming in innocence and beauty under the paternal roof. He must, at least, have often heard the father mention his ill-fated child. He must therefore have recollected her early happiness, when he beheld the spectacle of her eternal torment; and this, we think, us the true account of the overwhelming sympathy with which her form overpowers him. The episode, too, was written by him in the very house in which she was born, and in which he had himself, during the last ten years of his exile, found a constant asylum. 26

Foscolo made some large assumptions here, as well as a significant error of fact. (He confused Francesca’s father, Guido the Elder, with her nephew, Dante’s friend Guido Novello). But his central assumption— that Dante’s portrait of Francesca was meant to be f lattering—was echoed by almost all of the critics, illustrators, and poets who retold her story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.27 Yet Dante put Francesca in Hell. His decision to damn Francesca is surprising on its face, because she seems relatively innocent compared to her fellow sinners. She suffers in Hell alongside Semiramis, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


immediately recognizes her in Hell as if she were a kinswoman. Since the Divine Comedy would otherwise contain nothing but criticism of her family, some readers have interpreted his portrait of Francesca as a quiet gift to Count Guido. C.H. Grandgent spoke for a long tradition of interpretation when he wrote in 1909:

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the Assyrian queen who legalized incest in order to justify her own obsession.28 Another denizen of the Circle of the Lustful is Paris, who, according to medieval legend, lured Achilles into a temple by arranging a sexual encounter and then killed him. Virgil also points out “lustful Cleopatra,” whose seductions caused civil strife, and Helen, who was evidently responsible for the whole Trojan War (Inf. v, 63–65). What, then, did Dante think about this murdered aunt of his own patron who liked poetry, apparently committed adultery, and went to Hell?29 Why did he choose her as a major figure in the part of the Divine Comedy devoted to lust? And once he chose her, why did he invent or emphasize certain details (for instance, her love of poetry) while hiding or passing over others (her adultery, her murder)? One way to answer these questions, which I will explore in the next two chapters, is to investigate what Dante thought in general about love, marriage, and poetry. The strategy is to derive an interpretation of his poem from his philosophical ideas. This will prove to be a one-sided method for interpreting a text that often strains against its author’s philosophical doctrines. But it as at least partly valid.







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C.H. Grandgent claimed that Dante’s portrait of Francesca was marked by “compassion, tenderness, sympathetic curiosity, [and] anguish.”1 The idea that Dante pitied Francesca still seemed so obvious to Lionel Trilling that he used it as a figure of speech, saying of a minor work: “like carnal passion in the Inferno, it evokes not blame but tender sorrow.”2 Along with most modern commentators, I think just the opposite. Dante resolutely damned Francesca and justified her punishment, using her as his chief example of lust. He was willing to apply demanding moral principles even though everyday sympathy might have tempted him to make exceptions. And although Guido Novello became his friend, Dante was so deeply troubled by the assumptions of secular love poetry that he used Francesca’s story to criticize the culture that Guido and other friends represented—the culture of chivalric romance. The damnation of Francesca was meant to be shocking, and the shock was supposed to have moral value. Indeed, we can still learn from Dante’s challenging judgment and its underlying reasons. Why then did Dante place Francesca in Hell? Perhaps he was thinking like a philosopher. Actually, philosophers might reach many different conclusions about this case, and none today would condemn Francesca to an eternity in Hell. Since this book is mostly a criticism of moral philosophy, I should stress that the main negative stereotypes of philosophers are unfair. With a few scattered exceptions (e.g., Jeremy Bentham), inf luential moral philosophers have not oversimplified moral reasoning; offered mechanical rules to override the complexities of particular contexts; overlooked the value of personal attachments; maligned the emotions; made exaggerated claims about 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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the applicability of their own theories (or of moral theory in general); or advanced overly harsh and rigid doctrines. Indeed, as Martha Nussbaum notes, moral theory tends to challenge conventional or traditional morality, which is frequently composed of abstract, simplistic doctrines and rules.3 Compared to the prevailing methods of reasoning about morality in most cultures, philosophy is suppler and subtler, more attuned to complexity, dilemma, and nuance. Moreover, the positions and methods of philosophers are remarkably diverse, leading some to believe that the effort to define “moral philosophy” or to itemize its agreed-upon aims is “pretty much doomed.”4 That last claim is too strong, I think. Moral philosophy is diverse, but it has five consistent characteristics that are evident in Dante’s decision to damn Francesca da Rimini. Moral Philosophy Promises to Assess and Guide Action In popular culture, a philosopher is a sage who hands down moral advice that he derives from a general theory. No serious philosopher in the Western canon has actually used this approach or considered it legitimate. Moral theories cannot directly answer questions about concrete situations, because cases are too complex and idiosyncratic to be settled by applying a simple principle, rule, or method. Moral philosophers have more modest goals: to give “recommendations about practical problems” and “direction for practice.”5 If, for example, we think in Aristotelian or Kantian ways about cases, then we will be led to emphasize certain types of moral factors and issues. An Aristotelian will examine Francesca’s vices and virtues—her character traits. Kant was also concerned about virtue and character, but Kantians will be primarily interested in whether Francesca’s choice of behavior was consistent with an acceptable general rule. To be a Kantian is not to have a predictable view of Francesca’s behavior, but it does imply that one reasons about cases in certain ways. As I will argue below, Dante thought philosophically because he used Aristotelian and Thomistic principles to analyze Francesca’s case morally and choose a proper punishment. Philosophy Considers Abstract Concepts, Not Narratives The stuff of moral philosophy is moral definitions, virtues and vices, goods and evils, rules and principles, rights and obligations. Philosophers 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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do not deal directly with the main material of literature and history, which is narrative.6 A conventional narrative is a description of events that are deliberately selected from a much larger array of incidents that actually happened or that can be imagined, and then arranged in a coherent way. There are many satisfactory forms of narrative coherence: for example, a single character may cause all the major events, or the story may describe the interactions of several closely interrelated characters, or the narrative may follow a causal chain. If the events are arranged chronologically but are not made at all coherent, then the text is a chronicle—or perhaps a timeline—but not a narrative. Before a philosophical theory can be applied to a narrative, the story must be analyzed: someone must show that a long series of concrete events is essentially a story of adultery or a tale of love; or someone must find inherent in the narrative such morally salient qualities as rightness, happiness, injustice, or sin. Philosophy then sheds light on these abstract qualities. Francesca tells us what she thinks her story is about, using the same word to begin three tercets in a row:7 Love soon takes hold in the gentle heart. It seized this man for my graceful being, the body whose loss I still resent. Love excuses none who’re loved from loving. It seized me for his charm and as you see it will always be my only feeling. Love steered us to a common death. He is meant for death who extinguished our blazing.

Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ‘l modo ancor m’offende. Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Caina attende chi a vita ci spense. (Inf. v, 100–108)

Dante disagrees that “love” is the issue. Presumably, before he wrote Canto V, he had heard one or more coherent narratives about Francesca, Paolo, and Gianciotto. We do not know what themes were paramount in these stories, or whose perspectives were paramount, or what morals were drawn. But because Dante puts Francesca in Hell, this literary character must have sinned. Because he assigns her to Hell’s Circle of the Lustful, her sin must have been lust. And the external evidence suggests that what made her love an example of lust was its adulterous nature. Even though adultery is never mentioned, it is the most important moral concept in the story. If Dante’s readers correctly apply Christian moral philosophy, they will know that adultery is inherently sinful and that Francesca’s punishment is just. Dante knows that we readers will be tempted to ignore the conclusions of moral theory and 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine



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Moral Philosophy Seeks Concepts with Consistent Moral Meaning Whenever such concepts apply, they help us to judge the case (or institution, or character) that confronts us. For example, “unjust” is a descriptive term, an adjective. Presumably, anything that is “unjust” is wrong—at least all else being equal. Thus, the moral valence of the term “unjust” is negative; calling something “unjust” pushes us toward rejecting that action (or institution, or character). A given action may be “unjust” but also “loving” (e.g., a parent might favor her own children over others). In such cases, the negative moral polarity of injustice is countered by the positive moral significance of parental devotion, and we have a difficult decision to make. In another kind of situation, an action may be “unjust” but also “necessary”; and if something is necessary, then we may have to ignore moral considerations altogether. Thus knowing the moral valence of a descriptive concept does not always tell us what to do. In fact, there are several reasons that a moral theory cannot guarantee good judgment: 1. Many valid reasons may apply in a particular case, with each one pushing us in a different direction. 2. The theory is probably not complete; it will not include all morally relevant concepts. 3. The theory provides general moral reasons or considerations, but we need perception, judgment, and/or experience to know which reasons apply in particular cases.8 Kant says that we need the “power of judgment sharpened by experience” to tell us how to apply moral laws to particular cases. And Aristotle says that general rules “have some validity, but truly the decision lies in the facts of life and deeds, for the authority lies in these.” For “such matters depend on the particular circumstances, and the decision lies with perception.”9 Despite these important caveats, however, most philosophers think that it is possible and useful to develop a moral theory composed of concepts with known and constant moral significance. Although such a theory will not provide conclusive answers, it will tell us which moral features to look for in particular cases, and how to interpret them when they appear. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


to pity Francesca as a doomed lover, but he hopes that we will learn better from the overall teachings of the Comedy.

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Philosophers certainly argue about which words have consistent moral significance. For example, some think that “pleasure” always has a positive moral valence. A pleasure-enhancing action may also cause pain to someone else, may be unfair, may violate a rule, or may undermine character. Nevertheless, the increase of pleasure seems always to be a positive moral factor in itself, on its face, all else being equal, and as far as that goes (There are Latin phrases available for all of these qualifications: in se, prima facie, ceteris paribus, and pro tanto). But maybe “pleasure” does not have a consistent moral valence. Consider crushing a worm. This seems an unobjectionable act unless someone derives pleasure from it, in which case it is immoral. Or consider the pleasure that some people get from watching executions: this may actually give us a reason not to let them watch.10 A philosopher’s response is “to start making distinctions.”11 If “pleasure” is not a word with consistent moral significance, then it is not a reliable building-block for theory. However, we can construct a theory out of more specific concepts. All we have to do is split “pleasure” into two subcategories. Brad Hooker writes, “Nonsadistic pleasure is always a moral plus. Sadistic pleasure, even where a self-interested plus, is always a moral minus. To be sure, these moral pluses and minuses can be outweighed by other considerations. Thus, all things considered, an act can be permissible even though it gives someone sadistic pleasure. Nevertheless, the moral polarity of sadistic and nonsadistic pleasures never changes.”12 This approach to moral theory starts with the complex, morally charged words that we normally apply in particular situations (such as “love” and “pleasure”), and seeks to clarify their general significance and implications. The concepts that prove most useful are those whose moral significance is constant. Words that are morally ambiguous need to be disaggregated into good and bad sub-concepts. At their most optimistic, philosophers hope to arm us with a set of clearly defined and reliable concepts to use when we face the dilemmas of real life. Again, these tools will not solve all moral questions, but they should come in handy. Moral generalizations look like this: “All actions of type A are right,” or “All situations that have feature B are good.” In principle, we could make more modest generalizations, such as “Actions of type A tend to be right.” However, most philosophers have been dissatisfied by such generalizations. If A merely tends to be right, they think, then it’s not an elemental moral concept. It must be composed of A, which is always right, and A1, which isn’t. Most generalizations in social science are empirical and statistical; moral generalizations are normative and universal. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




The search for concepts with constant moral polarities begins with Socrates,13 and is a theme in the whole history of moral philosophy. As noted above, Francesca tells her own story as a tale of love. Many people in the Middle Ages and subsequently have believed that human love always has a positive moral polarity. Whatever else one can say about an action, if it involves the love of one human being for another that is a point in its favor. Before refuting this belief, Virgil summarizes it neatly for Dante in Purgatory. He says that some people believe that ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa (Purg. xviii, 36): “every love is in itself a praiseworthy thing.” Francesca does not state this theory in so many words, but it helps her case that powerful positive connotations adhere to the word “Amor.” However, Dante learns from Virgil that love does not have a consistent moral polarity (Purg. xviii, 34–39). Indeed, one can plausibly argue that the presence of love, under certain circumstances, is in itself a bad thing and blameworthy. For example, if a married man loves a woman other than his wife, then his love is an immoral aspect of his feelings, even if he never acts on them. Thus Francesca is wrong to use her own love of Paolo as an implicit justification; “love” can either be moral or immoral. According to Dante, in designing the afterworld, God made appropriate distinctions, segregating the lovers of self, the incontinent lovers of others, the lovers of God, and divine Love itself. Each of these subdivisions of “love” is an appropriate basis for moral judgment, whereas “love” itself is ambiguous. Dante thinks like a philosopher when he depends on concepts that are morally consistent, and splits ambiguous concepts into consistent sub-concepts. Philosophers Specify the Limits of the Moral or Ethical I have already noted that something that is absolutely necessary cannot be immoral, because “ought” implies “can.” Thus “necessary” is a significant moral concept. It is not a word with a constant moral meaning, as “sadistic pleasure” is always wrong. It is neither positive nor negative in itself, but it bars us from making moral judgments about the actions to which it applies. That is why involuntary manslaughter is justifiable, although murder is not. Concepts that describe the limits of the ethical (or the moral—I use these words interchangeably) have powerful significance, even though they are not themselves judgments. Francesca emphasizes the inevitability of love, its unintentional, spontaneous power. Love soon takes hold in the gentle heart, and there is nothing that one can do to avoid it. If sensitive people naturally and easily 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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fall in love, then their behavior must be excusable. Paolo, for example, could not resist Almighty Love once he beheld Francesca’s bella persona. She argues, further, that “Love spares no one who’s loved from returning love” (Inf. v, 103). So Francesca’s requital is no more voluntary than Paolo’s desire: it is an equal and opposite reaction. It is often said that we are responsible only for those actions that are under our voluntary control, and for our commitments to act in deliberate ways. But perhaps “love is an emotion, not an action. As such it happens to us; we do not choose it.”14 If this is Francesca’s psychological theory, then it implies a moral doctrine—namely, that love is never subject to criticism. Her case his neither moral nor immoral; it is simply tragic. Francesca concludes: “Love steered us to a common death” (Amor condusse noi ad una morte). The word “amor” is hidden but clearly audible in “una morte”: “one death.”15 Francesca means that love, and not the lovers, was responsible for their deaths. Thus love is not good or praiseworthy in itself; rather, it is an unmerited calamity whose inevitable victims are the lovers themselves. They are to be pitied, not blamed— and perhaps admired a bit for having the kind of gentle souls upon which Amor preys.16 Francesca’s way of speaking derives in part from Andreas Capellanus, who had codified the cult of chivalric romance. She may be thinking especially of Andreas’ Rule IX (“No one is able to love except he who is compelled by the eloquence of love”) and Rule XXVI (“Love can deny nothing to love”).17 Applied to her own case, her philosophy serves as a defense. Her view is mistaken, however, if love is not simply an emotion, but also a duty, habit, or goal. Her view is equally wrong if emotions are partly under our control and responsibility. Her theory certainly contradicts Christian doctrine, according to which the soul is free to fall and the only irresistible power belongs to God’s Love, “which moves the sun and all the other stars” (Par. xxxiii, 145). In Purgatory, Virgil explains: “Love, aroused by virtue, always excites another, as long as the f lame appears without” (Purg. xxii, 10–13). The clause about “virtue” distinguishes his position from Francesca’s, and he clarifies the difference during a philosophical discussion that he holds with Dante: Now you can see how the truth’s concealed From men who say that in every case Love per se’s a thing to be praised; perhaps because the matter seems always good—but not every seal is good, however excellent the wax.

Or ti puote apparer quant’ è nascosa la veritate a la gente ch’avvera ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa; però che forse appar la sua matera sempre esser buona, ma non ciascun segno è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera. (Purg. xviii, 34–39)





Dante remarks that if love governs us from without, then our actions must lack all moral value. To which Virgil replies: “assume that every love that kindles within you arises of necessity; nevertheless, you have the power to restrain it” (ibid., 70–72). Francesca’s philosophical mistake (from this point of view) is to blame Love for everything that happens to her, from her kiss to her death. Dante concedes that we sometimes feel inappropriate emotions because of outside forces, including the motions of the stars. But no one has to act on adulterous impulses, or even allow them to fester in the soul. Cunizza da Romano was a famously passionate woman who had several extramarital affairs (including a long romance with the troubadour Sordello) because of the astral inf luence of Venus. But she ultimately chose to direct her deepest love to God, and so found a place in Paradise (Par. ix, 31–33).18 The proper limits of morality are certainly subject to debate. Some take a very broad view, arguing that we can morally assess even actions that are done out of complete necessity. Others dramatically narrow the scope of moral judgment. For example, Kant holds that the only inherently good thing is a good will, which implies that moral judgments must always ultimately be about free, rational decision-makers. We can assess intentions, decisions, hopes, ends, aims, and virtues; but welfare and other consequences of behavior are relevant only indirectly. The good agent must care about welfare, but the only thing that really matters is his will; whether he actually enhances the happiness of himself or others is not strictly a moral question. This Kantian reasoning is just an example—albeit a controversial and radical one—of achieving moral insight by limiting the domain of moral judgment. Amartya Sen describes this method in a different way, saying that philosophers often try to identify various types of information as relevant or irrelevant to normative judgment. They impose “informational restraints” by “ruling out directly evaluative use of various types of information.”19 Indeed, one can classify moral philosophies by asking what “informational restraints” they impose upon deliberators. Kant would have us ignore the consequences that f low from actions; John Rawls puts his ideal legislators behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing their own social status; Robert Nozick recommends that we overlook data about welfare; and so on. Screening out too much information would lead to moral error. But considering every fact is impossible, and the effort would paralyze a decision-maker. Therefore, philosophers hope to achieve practical advantages by proving that categories of information are morally irrelevant. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Dante thinks philosophically by describing a series of facts about Francesca, some of which he considers relevant to moral judgment, and some of which he believes are irrelevant. For example, many of the facts that Francesca mentions in order to gain the respect and pity of Dante-the-pilgrim are irrelevant, according to Dante-the-author. The purpose of her irrelevant facts is to mislead us morally; Dante wants us to correct ourselves later and thereby learn what was truly important. (I analyze Francesca’s morally misleading rhetoric below.) Philosophers Seek to Organize Moral Concepts The actual complexity and ambiguity of the world, combined with our limited mental capacities, may prevent us from developing a complete and organized list of the moral concepts that have fixed polarities, let alone allow us to understand all their mutual relationships. Yet philosophers want as much comprehensiveness and organization as possible—for practical as well as intellectual reasons. A mere list of good and bad qualities would seem to be a very unreliable guide to action.20 Whenever both positive and negative moral words applied, we would face a dilemma and be unable to reason about what to do. Furthermore, we would have to wonder why the concepts on our list had acquired consistent moral meanings, whether our understanding of these concepts was right, and whether our list was missing many other important concepts. Thus it is a victory for moral theory if someone can show that one moral concept is really an instance or subset of another. For example, perhaps “libel” has a negative moral valence, but only because it is normally an example of “injustice,” which is always bad. Then we can simplify our moral theory. We can say that we should always be against “injustice,” and once we understand what “injustice” means, then we can tell which cases of “libel” are unjust. (Or we can call speech “libelous” only if it is unjust.) Similar analysis might allow us to dispense with “fraud,” “expropriation,” and even “torture” as fundamental moral concepts. This is only one way to systematize. Another way is to show that one moral concept always trumps or negates another one. For example, classical liberals argue that certain human rights are moral considerations that always trump happiness, welfare, and equality. We should not ignore happiness as a moral factor, but it has no weight when it conf licts with core human rights.21 Another way to systematize is to argue that one moral concept provides a metric by which we can measure the significance of many or 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




all other ones. Thus, in classical utilitarianism, many things are good, but their goodness can always be measured by their effects on net happiness, which is the universal yardstick. Yet another way to systematize is to assert causal relationships among moral concepts, often based upon a theory of human psychology. Thus, for example, utilitarians think that morality and justice require us to maximize the happiness (or welfare) of as many people as possible. But human beings are necessarily the main decision-makers, and we humans lack the ability to calculate the probable net impact of every decision on aggregate happiness over the long term. We also lack the moral motivation necessary to act consistently according to utilitarian doctrine. Thus the best way to achieve the maximization of welfare (or happiness) may be to cultivate virtues in human beings.22 If people are honest, for example, then they will make more decisions that are favorable to net human happiness than if they are dishonest. Thus utilitarians systematize by showing that virtues such as “honesty” are important, but only because they are causally linked to welfare or happiness, which is good in itself. Philosophers have differed in how short a list of fundamental moral concepts we need. A monist is one who thinks that there is ultimately just one moral concept, properly understood and defined. Thus, for example, John Stuart Mill thought that all actions were good insofar as they increased the sum total of human happiness, and bad insofar as they decreased it. Utility (the property of causing happiness) was the ultimate measure of morality. Mill describes the principle of maximizing happiness as the correct answer to “the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality,” which “has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought” since Socrates.23 If Mill is right, then it might be a good idea to forbid torture, but only because empirical investigation would show that torture almost always decreases net human utility. Condemning torture is a rule of thumb, a shortcut alternative to a full moral analysis. The full analysis would always require assessing the utility of an action. In contrast, W.D. Ross thought that there was a list of moral concepts with known polarities: terms that, in his terminology, were prima facie good or bad. He did not believe that much could be said about how these basic concepts interrelate. We know that some things are good or bad by intuition, and we cannot systematize our moral knowledge further. Thus “fidelity” is good, and so is “self-improvement,” but we cannot say that each virtue is a subset of some broader category. Nor are the various goods ranked in any regular way. Ross has been criticized for concluding 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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that we simply face a “heap of unrelated obligations.” This could be the unfortunate truth about the world we inhabit, and not a valid objection to Ross as a philosopher. However, Ross actually believed that the prima facie duties were “very few in number and very general in character.”25 This made Ross a moderate pluralist and something of a systematizer. A more radical pluralist would insist that there is a long list of unrelated moral concepts that cannot be systematized at all. In between pure monists and extreme pluralists stand most other philosophers, including the greatest pair in Dante’s canon: Aristotle and Aquinas. In their philosophies, there are many concepts with known moral valences; and some moral concepts can be logically reduced to others. One of Aquinas’ characteristic methods is to argue that certain virtues and vices are instances of other, broader categories. I cite the following passage from the Summa Theologica almost at random: “Of the Sin of Usury, Which is Committed in Borrowing . . . To receive usury for money lent is in itself unjust, because it means to sell what does not exist, and this evidently establishes inequality, which is contrary to justice.”26 “Usury” is wrong, according to Aquinas, because it causes inequality (he uses this word with a negative moral valence, to mean unjustified inequality); and inequality is a species of injustice, which is fundamentally wrong. There is a sense in which Aquinas is a monist, since he holds that all moral actions aim at The Good; that The Good for man is happiness; and that the highest form of happiness is knowledge of and love for God. But there is also an important sense in which he is a pluralist. He thinks that a valid moral theory consists of many distinct moral concepts: various virtues and vices; various duties; various descriptions of consequences or outcomes; various descriptions of intentions and other mental states; and so on. Although these concepts are logically related (because we live in an ordered universe created by a beneficent and omnipotent deity), they are not merely reducible to a short list. In order to reason morally, we need a full theory composed of a large set of related but distinct moral terms. Maybe in some deep sense all the virtues are aspects of The Good and all vices are privations of it. But we do not have the reasoning capacity to derive the virtues directly from an understanding of The Good in general. Thus, we must be pluralists in practice, using a theory composed of multiple moral concepts. This approach had a major inf luence on Dante, who organized Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell into levels, each exemplifying a different virtue or sin, and each related to the other levels in complex ways. The total structure is a complete picture of human morality and immorality, since it is the entire afterworld. And every dead soul fits into an appropriate place. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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So, for example, Francesca is condemned to the Second Circle of Hell because she has committed a sin (hence Hell), but a sin of incontinence rather than one of violence, fraud, or betrayal (hence not deep into Hell). She has loved in the wrong way (which defines “lust”), whereas other denizens of the higher regions of Hell have loved the wrong things (the gluttonous and miserly) or have failed to love themselves (the suicides). The corresponding level of Purgatory is reserved for those who showed excessive love of licit objects. This is just a glimpse of the extremely complex and ordered moral architecture of the Comedy. So far in this chapter, I have argued that Dante uses techniques that are very common in moral philosophy. He analyzes a particular narrative in all its detail and complexity to find several salient moral features. He rejects one feature, “love,” as the basis for analysis because it does not have a consistent moral polarity, but he applies another concept, “adultery,” because it is always wrong. He explicitly rebuts a philosophical argument about love: that it is involuntary and therefore outside of the scope of moral judgment. And he systematizes his moral thinking by treating adultery as an instance of lust, which is misplaced love, which is sin. In using these techniques, Dante reasons like philosophers from Plato to Rawls. But Dante also holds specific philosophical doctrines, common in his own culture, which modern philosophers would find controversial. He supports monogamous marriage; he favors retributive punishment; and he holds a theory of human character according to which a person’s fundamental moral traits are consistent over time and obvious in extremis—for example, at the point of martyrdom or other violent death. We can find evidence of these views in the text of the Divine Comedy (which does not rule out the possibility that they are presented ironically). In the following sections, I explore these doctrines in order to give a f lavor of philosophical reasoning—in general—and to complete my first explanation of why Dante chose to damn Francesca da Rimini. Philosophical Reasoning about Adultery The first issue is adultery, the sin that costs Francesca an eternity in Hell. Since this book raises doubts about general rules and principles, I should say that I am against adultery. In almost every case that I know or can imagine, adultery is indeed wrong. One could hold that it is simply bad, and that nothing more need be said. Some religious believers might be content with this position, since adultery is explicitly 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Also, an intuitionist in the tradition of W.D. Ross might say that we happen to know that adultery is prima facie wrong, and that is all we can say. It belongs on a list of the bad things, but the list has no underlying structure. Most people, however, would like to have an explanation of why adultery is wrong. There are at least three motives for seeking an explanation. First, knowing what is wrong about adultery can give us confidence that it is indeed wrong, that we are not merely laboring under a prejudice. Second, the explanation is useful in moral education—after telling people “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” it helps to explain why not. Finally, we may want to understand the underlying reasons for this Commandment so that we can sort out the difficult cases. Is adultery wrong even when the marriage is patriarchal, or violent, or arranged by coercive elders? (Boccaccio makes Francesca appear blameless by claiming that she was tricked into marrying Gianciotto.) Is adultery wrong if both married partners consent to it? Could words alone constitute adultery?—or unspoken thoughts? Even Jewish and Christian theologians have wondered whether every case of extramarital sex is necessarily wrong. On one hand, there is the clear prohibition in Exodus. On the other hand, there are ambiguous cases in Scripture. Reuben sleeps with Jacob’s concubine; Abraham’s brother Nahor also has a concubine, and so does Gideon and several other righteous Israelites (Gen. 22:24, 35:22; Judges 8:31). The Lord even commands Hosea, “Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms” (Hos. 1:2). One could respond that Reuben and Nahor are not supposed to be paragons: indeed, Jacob denounces Reuben for defiling his bed (Gen. 49:2–3). But that still leaves Jacob and Gideon with their concubines; and there is God’s direct order to Hosea. For Christians, there is the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery, whom Jesus pardons for reasons that I discuss in detail below. Secular readers can add many modern texts in which adultery seems justified, or at least forgivable, from the Scarlet Letter to Ulysses. Knowing what is wrong in general with adultery would help us reason about these particular cases—or so philosophers will argue. The following, then, are several arguments against adultery, with relevant rejoinders: Adultery Violates a Sacrament and a Divine Commandment Dante presumably believed that God blesses Christian marriages. Thus adultery violates an agreement to which the Divine is a party. Sex 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




outside a sanctified union must be sinful even if it occurs after a divorce and remarriage, because no human action can put asunder what God put together. Calling marriage a religious rite or sacrament raises complex questions. Aquinas addresses some of the thorniest ones: whether this sacrament is binding on all, whether it confers merit or simply prevents sex from being sinful, whether it was already necessary in Eden (before there was sin), and whether sexual consummation is an intrinsic part of the sacrament. His goal is to clarify and develop well-established religious principles. Already in 829, the bishops of the Frankish Church had proclaimed that “marriage was instituted by God.”27 After Dante’s time, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549) explained more fully that holy matrimony “is an honourable estate, instituted of God in paradise, the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is between Christ and his Church: which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee, and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men.”28 For the purposes of this book, arguments derived from scriptural premises or religious authorities are largely irrelevant. We are fundamentally interested here in what Aquinas would call “natural reason” (arguments that should convince all human beings) rather than theology (arguments that rest on a particular faith). However, it is important to note the general structure of an argument that must have inf luenced Dante and that may still convince any devotee of an Abrahamic faith. Marriage should begin (in this view) with a wedding. The wedding has spiritual significance, having been instituted with God’s guidance or on God’s command. God is invoked in the wedding ceremony, which often takes place in a consecrated building, under the supervision of an ordained clergyperson, and accompanied by other sacramental or devotional acts. Consequently, to violate the vows taken in the marriage ceremony is not only to break a promise and harm the other spouse; it is also an affront to God, who is a kind of party to the agreement. Note that this is not an argument against adultery in general, but only against infidelity when the original wedding ceremony was theologically valid. If couples are married in civil ceremonies, or in a religion that one presumes to be false, this first argument against adultery becomes moot. Adultery Wrongs and Harms the Party Who is Cheated Thus we turn to a secular argument. Most human beings seem to want very badly to be loved exclusively by one romantic or sexual partner. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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We are therefore subject to intense pain if our committed partners have romantic or sexual relationships with other people. To cause such pain is wrong. This is the first argument that comes to my mind when I consider the issue of adultery; and in many cases, it seems determinative. However, even in our culture, people seem to have both monogamous and promiscuous tendencies, either of which could be encouraged. So is monogamy good, or is it only a psychological preference that we should try to overcome? If two partners happen to be perfectly comfortable with promiscuity, is there a moral argument against it? Further, is the preference for monogamy present in all cultures, or is it absent in some times and places? This is an empirical question (already evident to Aquinas29), but it raises a normative issue. If the desire for fidelity is not universal, then should we be proud or unhappy about its prominence in our culture? We might also ask: When do people have the right to demand sexual fidelity? You can be severely hurt by a partner’s infidelity even if you are not married to her or him. You can even suffer jealous pangs because two people are sexually involved, although you have never had a reciprocated relationship with either one. Thus the fact that sex causes distress to third parties is not a definitive argument against it. Finally, if one is concerned mainly about reducing pain and increasing happiness, one should perhaps weigh the benefits that accrue to a happy adulterer. Some have even argued that monogamy is unnatural and causes unnecessary strain within the human psyche. Adulterers are acting in natural, healthy, or honest ways, according to this theory, and their jealous spouses should simply learn to relax or let go. There are characters in Boccaccio who hold such views. For instance, Bortolomea is the young bride of Ricciardo di Chinzica, a “meager, dried up, small-spirited” judge who can’t quite manage to consummate their union and avoids having to repeat the attempt by telling his bride that sex is forbidden on every saint’s day, various feasts, and even during certain phases of the moon (Dec. ii, x). The calendar fills with forbidden days, leaving the young woman quite unsatisfied. Fortunately, she is abducted by a pirate who takes no holidays from lovemaking, and when she has the opportunity to return to her husband, she refuses. The whole company applauds this story, suggesting that they sympathize fully with the adulterous wife. While Boccaccio’s bawdy tale is not meant to support a weighty moral, some have seriously argued that marriage (a restrictive social convention) is morally null when it conf licts with natural passions and needs. In this case, a utilitarian calculus 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine



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suggests that two people’s intense pleasure outweighs the resentment of one old judge.

The previous argument focused on harms or wrongs to the spouse who is victimized by infidelity. Everything depends on how bad these wrongs are and whose happiness and unhappiness should be counted. But adultery affects more than the married couple. Families may also include children. Adultery often prevents spouses from cohabitating happily and leads to abandonment and divorce, which can harm their offspring. Aquinas asserts that adultery is a special case of lust, and one factor that singles it out for special treatment is its impact on children. Aquinas writes, “according to the Philosopher [Aristotle], we derive three things from our parents, namely ‘existence,’ ‘nourishment,’ and ‘education.’ Now a child cannot be brought up and instructed unless it have certain and definite parents, and this would not be the case unless there were a tie between the man and a definite woman and it is in this that matrimony consists.”30 He adds, “Adultery is . . . access to another’s marriage bed. In so doing, he sins doubly against chastity and against the good of human reproduction. In the first place, indeed, by having sex with a wife not conjoined to him, [he sins] against the good of his own children’s upbringing. In the second place, he has sex with someone who is conjoined to another in marriage, and that impedes the good of another’s children.”31 Married parents are required to provide for their children in various specified ways; and surviving members of a family normally inherit their relatives’ property. These are neat divisions of social responsibility and benefits that are complicated when families fall apart, when extramarital affairs produce offspring, or when spouses come to despise one another. We might add that adultery is especially likely to confuse biological paternity and moral responsibility by mixing up—“adulterizing”—the two-person family. If we consider one family at a time, it will not always be the case that marriage benefits the children, nor that adultery harms them by undermining their parents’ marriage. What about marriages in which there are no children at all? Is adultery in such cases just a voluntary act between free adults? What about cases in which there are children, but their parents’ infidelity is managed so that it never harms them? After noting the advantages of marriage to its offspring, Aquinas immediately adds that marriage is good on account of the “mutual services which married persons render one another in household 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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matters”—the man doing work that is naturally suited to him; and likewise for the woman.32 Any utilitarian would have to take those advantages into account along with the impact on children, because all people must count equally. But the utilitarian would also have to consider whether (a) adultery must always ruin the benefits of marriage, and (b) whether marriages really benefit both of the adult parties. Utilitarianism takes one position regarding equality: each person must count for the same. But we might adopt a different position, for instance, that no major decision may benefit one party at the expense of the other, even if the net gain to the pair is positive. By our lights, certainly, medieval marriages had two major f laws: they were arranged (hence, involuntary), and they were unequal, with the man monopolizing power. Since Francesca probably had no alternative but to marry Gianciotto (whatever his character may have been), and her husband had numerous advantages over her, we might excuse her for finding pleasure and fulfillment elsewhere. In Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose (which Dante probably knew well33), a character called The Friend opines that love is coarse and that deceit is inevitable because of men’s exploitation of women and the inequality of the sexes. In the same book, Héloïse defends her refusal to marry her lover. Although she wasn’t an adulteress in modern terms, she was a bride of Christ (a nun) who had sex with a man—and that could be seen as infidelity toward the Son of God: Pierre Abelard confesses too that Sister Héloïse, the abbess of the Paraclete, whom he loved, would never agree to let him take her for his wife. She was wise and well read, both loving and well loved, and with arguments she persuaded her lover to refrain from marriage. And she proved in letters and with reasons that the conditions of marriage are too hard, no matter how chaste [or wise] a wife may be. For she had read books and studied them and she knew the ways of women, which she had found in herself as well. She insisted that he love her, but also that he claim no right without her grace and permission, and never claim seignory or mastership. That way he could study in complete freedom, unchecked, while she could take up her studies too—she who was hardly devoid of learning. 34

The Roman de la Rose does not itemize all of Héloïse’s arguments, but anyone with the most rudimentary grasp of feminism could explain why a medieval marriage would lessen Héloïse’s intellectual freedom. Dante may have been thinking of her when he depicted Francesca, for both women are conspicuously well-read, independent, “bien amanz e bien amee.” Besides, it was extremely unusual to include contemporary people in romances, which were usually set in ancient or Arthurian times. Héloïse, real and recent, was therefore the obvious precedent for





Francesca. If Dante had read Abelard’s memoir, the Historia calamitatum, then he would have recalled that Abelard and Héloïse became amorous while reading books, just as Paolo and Francesca did.35 There is a hint in the text of the Divine Comedy that one should sympathize with Francesca because she is an Héloïse-like woman, gifted at reading and deserving independence from men. Overall, arguments against adultery that rely on the advantages of marriage to the family members admit many exceptions, for the benefits of marriage vary. At most, we might try to support a bias or presumption against adultery, on the ground that individuals cannot be trusted to make good judgments in cases when their own interests and desires are directly affected.

Adultery Breaks a Promise; and Promise-Breaking is Wrong A fourth argument is less contingent on circumstances than the reasons offered so far. Marital infidelity usually involves deception and breaches a promise; and both behaviors always violate Kant’s Categorical Imperative. (Roughly, the Categorical Imperative requires that the reasons that guide our individual actions always be consistent with general moral reasons that should guide everyone in similar circumstances.) Deception only works if most people generally tell the truth. If everyone always lied, then statements would imply their logical opposites, and no real lies would occur. Therefore, a liar is a parasite on others’ truthfulness; he makes himself a convenient exception to the rule that he would like to impose on the rest of humanity: “Tell the truth.” But what if one openly boasts about one’s infidelity? Then no lying is involved, but the infidelity still represents a broken promise. Kant asks: May someone deliberately break a promise in order to pursue his own self-interest? He replies: Perhaps this principle of self-love or special advantage is fully consistent with my whole future well-being; but for now the sole question is: Is it right? I convert the demand of selflove into a universal law, and so correct the question to ask: How would things stand if my maxim were a universal law? I now see immediately that it could never be valid as a universal law of nature and be congruous with itself, but it must necessarily contradict itself. For if it were the universal law that each man, when he believed himself in need, could promise whatever he pleased with the intent of not complying, then the promise itself would become impossible, as would the goal that the man had in the first place, because people would never believe that they were promised anything, but would laugh at all such utterances as empty pretense. 36



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We could say much the same about adultery, which is parasitic on the very idea of a faithful marriage. Thus infidelity is unjustifiable, even if it does no harm in a particular case, because the maxim of the adulterer (“I will cheat on my spouse”) cannot be made into a universal law. At least two possible challenges arise, however. First, is it meritorious or morally mandatory for spouses to promise to be faithful? (Or may they choose, either formally or tacitly, an “open” marriage that admits infidelity?) Second, must we accept Kant’s fundamental commitment to the Categorical Imperative? Must we categorically reject promise-breaking, or is this only a prima facie reason against adultery that can be outweighed in particular circumstances, such as when a marriage is unhappy?

Sex is Bad Except Under Specific Circumstances, and Adultery is Not One of those Circumstances One reason to believe that marriage should be monogamous (regardless of the wishes of the parties) is a desire to restrain sexuality, viewed as problematic or dangerous. Saint Paul provides a canonical version of this position. He presumes that sexual pleasure is a distraction and a vice. Thus marriage is a second-best alternative to celibacy, acceptable only because it domesticates a powerful impulse that may otherwise cause worse sins: “I say to unmarried people and widows, it is good for them to remain like me. But if they cannot control themselves, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor. 7:8–9).37 Others have been more ascetic than Paul was. According to Denis de Rougemont, medieval troubadours were secret Manicheans who believed that the physical world was inherently evil. They concluded that physical love between embodied human beings was inherently corrupt, even if the lovers happened to be married. They “scoffed at the marriage bond, which [they] called the iurata fornicatio [oath of fornication].”38 But they prized impossible or doomed love as a vehicle for transcending the body. Thus some medieval romances of adultery extolled a burning, unconsummated desire for the forbidden lady, which could be read as an allegory of mystical transcendence.39 This is an important part of the background to Canto V of the Inferno. The Cathar or Albigensian heresy, which was Manichean, had been violently crushed less than a century before Dante wrote. In the heartland of the Albigensians (Languedoc), the tradition of courtly love and troubadour poetry had developed. That was the tradition that inf luenced 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




both Francesca and her nephew. There is no reason to think they were Manicheans, but there were echoes of that heresy in the poetry they loved. It might seem an appropriate punishment for someone who believed in distant, unrequited love to be physically attached for eternity to her lover. Saint Paul, in contrast to the Manicheans, expressed the orthodox view that human bodies were God’s creation, and therefore good. Sex, too, was part of nature and therefore could not be intrinsically evil. Adam in Paradise had said that man “shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one f lesh.” However, Paul claimed that lust was distorted desire, and physical love was inferior to agape. In Dante’s period, Aquinas developed Paul’s position by arguing that sexual intercourse was not sinful at all if its motivation was virtuous: for instance, “to beget children for the worship of God.” It was sinful if its purpose was pleasure. But it was not intrinsically evil, “unless we suppose, as some are mad enough to assert, that corruptible things were created by an evil god . . . ; wherefore this is a most wicked heresy.” According to Aquinas, Paul forbade fruitio, or pleasure for its own sake. It was acceptable to have sex as long as this did not affect the more valuable parts of one’s life. Paul “did not say ‘let them not use it’ . . . but let them be ‘as if they used it not.’ ” Paul’s position, as developed by Aquinas, seems relevant to cases of adultery because adulterous sexuality would have to be done without any desire for pleasure, could not cause any distraction from virtuous acts, and would require purely virtuous motives, such as the desire to procreate new worshippers of God. In other words, it would almost never be acceptable. The same criteria would also apply for married couples; and indeed Aquinas writes, “the man who is too ardent a lover of his wife acts counter to the good of marriage if he use her indecently, although he be not unfaithful, [and] he may in a sense be called an adulterer.”40 By developing an argument against adultery that also censures passionate but monogamous marriages, Aquinas may lose credibility today. But Kant offers a more moderate and secularized version of the position that sexuality should be a means to some good end, not an end in itself. His full argument might run something like this. We have twin fundamental duties: to develop our own character and virtues and also to help others pursue reasonable ends of their own choice.41 There are many institutions within which to do this. For example, a monastery may be an excellent venue for developing oneself spiritually while caring for others; and a life of intense political engagement may be a way 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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to enrich one’s own skills while helping fellow citizens to pursue their freely chosen ends. Quite likely, monogamous relationships and families also belong on the list of beneficial institutions. The pledge to remain together “for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer” represents a commitment to care for one another respectfully. It is thus a check against the cardinal Kantian sin: using someone as a means to one’s own good. In marriage, one commits to treat one’s spouse as an end, not as a means to anyone’s welfare. The proof is that spouses traditionally pledge not to end their relationship even if it ceases to increase their happiness. Furthermore, most adults seem to need the intensive, exclusive, lasting care of one other adult, so marrying someone provides this important good for another human being. Finally, marriage domesticates sex, which is problematic from a Kantian perspective because it can involve using another person as a mere means to pleasure. Kant did not pretend that his theory would resolve moral dilemmas without the need for judgment. However, Kantian reasoning at least suggests some conclusions about adultery. It draws our attention to promise-breaking, which is involved not only in official adultery but also when unmarried lovers—heterosexual or homosexual—break their promises to be faithful. (Therefore, a modern Kantian might reject distinctions between adultery and other forms of sexual infidelity, which is itself a significant moral conclusion.) Kantianism also draws our attention to the value of marriage as a commitment to care for others as ends and not means. Today’s other most inf luential moral position—utilitarianism—does not necessarily generate different conclusions. But it draws our attention to different issues, especially the suffering and other harms inf licted on spouses and children versus the possible benefits to an adulterer and his or her lover. The above discussion is not meant to settle the arguments about marriage—only to give a f lavor of philosophical reasoning and to suggest that Dante applied religious and philosophical arguments to Francesca’s case. He judged that Francesca committed adultery, which was a sin. His own reasons were probably Thomastic, but we can support Aquinas’ arguments with ones drawn from Kant and the British utilitarians. Several other philosophical doctrines seem to play major roles in Canto V. For instance, Dante believes that a perfectly just and omnipotent deity would countenance eternal sentences in Hell. In the Inferno, damned sinners are punished by the application of a grotesque parody of their own earthly sins. Those who used magic to foretell the future 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




must trudge eternally with their heads twisted to face backwards; those who stole what belonged to others are physically merged with other thieves into one monstrous body; and those who caused schisms have their heads permanently split from their frames (see Inf. xx, xxv, and xxviii). Further, Dante understands moral character as a fairly fixed disposition (costume) of an individual that is revealed at a point of maximum stress, such as death. Similarly, in medieval hagiography, the story of each saint’s martyrdom is interpreted as evidence of the holy person’s fundamental character. There are modern alternatives to this theory. The balance sheet approach, advocated by Ben Franklin, aggregates all our achievements and subtracts the waste and damage that we cause. Unlike a medieval hagiographer, Franklin would never allow the righteous death of a person to obscure everything else, both good and bad, that he had achieved. Classical Greeks often took a different view, assessing the overall shape of a person’s life as if it were a work of art. Each of these models may lead us to judge the same person differently. Dante’s method, which assumes that every important act ref lects the deep substrate of a person’s character, seems hard to defend today. To be a philosopher is not to take the restrictive or punitive side in debates about personal behavior. On the contrary, philosophical reasoning may have helped Dante and his learned contemporaries to reach relatively humane and tolerant conclusions. In his time, popular opinion and law held that monogamy was merely a wife’s duty, and husbands were enforcers of marriage vows.42 Male infidelity was normally overlooked, even by local priests, whereas husbands could be the judges, juries, and executioners of their allegedly unfaithful wives. Late-medieval Italian cities still used an evolving form of Roman law, which had originally permitted and even expected cuckolded husbands to carry out death sentences in cases of their wives’ adultery. The Emperor Augustus had tried to discourage such killings by granting the right to kill an adulteress to her own father, and not to her husband. Furthermore, the paterfamilias had to slay both adulterers “with one blow and one attack, with equal anger against both.” Although Gianciotto was not Francesca’s father, this provision may explain why both Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola claim that Paolo and Francesca were slain with one blow. In any event, Augustus’ efforts to restrain husbands from killing their allegedly adulterous wives gave way to greater license. Barbarian (i.e., Visigothic) law guaranteed husbands impunity if they killed their unfaithful wives, and the Code of Justinian allowed such killings if the wives were found with other men, whether or not sex had occurred. Laws in various medieval and Renaissance Italian 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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cities reinforced this right or duty. Adulterous kisses were sometimes explicitly counted as grounds for death, and men who tried to bring charges of adultery in court were ridiculed for having failed to handle the matter themselves. Killing an adulterous wife was consistently legal in Italy between the third century BC and the year 1981.43 Against this background, medieval church authorities argued that husbands were as obligated as their wives to be faithful, and that adultery was a public matter, not something to be settled violently within the family. Aquinas specifically rejected wife-murder.44 Meanwhile, courtly romances sometimes took the side of adulterous wives and criticized their husbands for reacting too punitively.45 These doctrines never entirely supplanted the lay view of marriage, but they had positive effects. In principle, it seems possible that any of four factors contributed to moral progress between the twelfth to fourteenth centuries: (1) theorists advanced philosophical and theological arguments for some degree of equity; (2) poignant courtly fiction enhanced men’s empathy for women; (3) liberal cultural inf luences arrived from outside Western Europe (including from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome); and/or (4) women gained economic power in the new cities of Europe. It is beyond my competence to assess the relative impact of these four factors, but I recognize that philosophical arguments were mostly on the right side—in favor of marriage as a voluntary contract imposing obligations on both parties—whereas the traditional norms and laws of Western Europe were sexist and oppressive. Any argument against moral philosophy should acknowledge its potential for good.







T H R E E

Poetry and the Emotions in Francesca’s Case

Francesca Wins Dante’s Pity I have argued that Dante applied a moral theory to the story that he told in Canto V. Francesca’s case was a clear instance of adultery; and adultery was a voluntary act of immoral love. On this ground, Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy, assigned the couple to Hell. But Dante-the-character has a different reaction. He recalls: While one soul told its story The other wept, and I collapsed. As if I’d died, I swooned from pity And crumpled like a falling corpse.

Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, l’altro piangea; sì che di pietade io venni men cosí com’io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade. (Inf. v, 139–142)

It is not entirely clear for whom he feels compassion. Just before Dante collapses, Paolo is suddenly mentioned after many lines spoken by Francesca. So perhaps Dante pities the male lover rather than his lady.1 However, the poem’s overall rhetoric has made most readers assume that Francesca is an object of his pity. Not only does Dante feel compassion, but perhaps he realizes that God condemns this emotion. His sense that the universe is arranged cruelly adds to his distress. The lovers have sinned, but presumably Dante-the-pilgrim pities them because of the details that he sees and hears and the particular way that he perceives them. When he first encounters Paolo and Francesca, they are described in a simile: Just as doves, at desire’s call coast through the air, wings stiff ly raised,

Quali colombe dal disio chiamate con l’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido



CH A P T E R


drawn to their nest by sheer force of will, so these two from Dido’s f lock departed, And came toward us through the noxious air, so strongly and affectionately had I shouted.

vegnon per l’aere, dal voler portate; cotali uscir de la schiera ov’ è Dido a noi venendo per l’aere maligno sì forte du l’affettüoso grido. (Inf. v, 82–88)

In general, we think of doves as symbols of peace and purity. The birds in this passage are also parents, a fact that adds a second layer of positive associations.2 The simile is an invention of the Divine Comedy’s author, but presumably it ref lects that way that Dante-the-pilgrim views Paolo and Francesca on his visit to Hell. He doesn’t just see them in the windy plain; he sees them as doves (or as similar to doves). Rhetoric is often a matter of depicting x as y, without saying that x is y. This kind of reasoning has a different logic from the logic of identity, but it is not arbitrary. Not any object can be likened to any other one. In this case, the simile begins to explain and even to justify Dante’s sympathy.3 When Francesca speaks, she appeals to Dante’s “courtesy and compassion,” thus requesting the same from us. Anyone who turns a deaf ear to her story can hardly be called a “gracious and benevolent creature.” After this captatio benevolentiae, she describes her fate: she has been abandoned by the Lord of all Creation (not a gracious being, apparently), and sentenced to a place where noxious purple air drowns out all conversation. If we imagine ourselves in the same condition— forever—we rebel against the injustice. Francesca says that she has been cursed because her actions stained the world “perso”: an adjective that usually means “lost,” but that also described an extremely dark blue or purple color in the specialized vocabulary of the Florentine wool trade.4 With this phrase, she alludes to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Ovid tells us that these two extremely naïve lovers dwelled in the city that Semiramis built, and their love developed automatically as soon as their parents forbade it, for “the more it is buried, the more a concealed fire smolders” (Met., iv, 64). They died as a result of the same sequence of bad luck that also dispatches Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus’ blood, spurting all over, stained a tree dark purple. As she stabbed herself, Thisbe begged the tree to keep its berries that color forever as a memorial, which is why the mulberry looks as it does today. She died, “but her prayers touched the gods, touched her parents, too: for the color is in the fruit when it ripens darkly, and what remains of their ashes rests in a single urn” (iv, 164-6). That Dante associates this story with the staining power of blood is clear from several other passages.5 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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If Francesca is like Thisbe, then she is naïve and unfortunate, but by no means blamable. She deserves divine pity, not eternal punishment. The allusion, then, is an efficient rhetorical device that may persuade us to feel favorable emotions, just as Dante’s dove simile encouraged us to think tenderly of Francesca. By the end of Canto V, she has also alluded to Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Boethius’ Consolation, the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Old French Lancelot du lac, Andreas Capellanus, Guido Guinizelli, Dante’s lyric poetry, and (possibly) a sonnet by her own nephew. This habit reveals something about her character: she’s not an abstract example of “sinner,” but a concrete human being with appealing idiosyncrasies, above all a passionate interest in literature. In another gracious gesture, Francesca says that she would talk about anything that Dante desires. But she can only speak as long as the wind holds still: a reminder that it perpetually hounds her. Apparently it delays long enough for her to introduce herself, and she states where she was born.6 Again, we recall that she is not an abstraction, but an embodied human being. Indeed, her life began just where Dante completed his Comedy. Ravenna sits on a lagoon and is exposed to the Adriatic’s storms, but it is there that the Po finally finds peace. Francesca’s fate—we are meant to conclude—is infinitely less fortunate than the river’s. This contrast has the same function as the metaphors and allusions that we have already encountered. Francesca has introduced herself not by name, but by identifying the place of her birth. She is not Francesca da (from) Rimini—as we tend to call her—but Francesca di (of ) Ravenna, a member of that city’s ruling family. Her surname is her family’s fief. Thus her introduction has an aristocratic ring, as does the word “siede” in the following lines: “The territory where I was born sits / where the Po runs to the sea” (Inf. v, 97–98). In her mind, Ravenna does not lie by the sea, as towns normally do; it sits there like the Polenta throne. As Renato Poggioli writes, Francesca “behaves as a well-born gentlewoman in Hell; nay, as a princess, or at least someone accustomed to command. . . . She treats Dante as an equal, even better, as a friend: yet her familiarity is never informal, and her attitude seems inspired by the graciousness and generosity of a great lady condescending to honor someone of lower status or lineage than herself. All her acts, gestures and words, even when they are most captivating, betray a controlled pride, a feudal dignity.” 7 In our democratic age, we do not automatically grant people respect and admiration because they happen to be aristocrats. But even today, gracious princesses are normally heroines to be admired and pitied, especially in tragic love stories. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




Francesca tells us that Paolo fell in love first, compelled by the potent combination of his “gentle heart” and her “fair body.” And then, she says, love “charmed me so strongly with his allure / that as you see it won’t release me now” (Inf. v, 104–105). Francesca’s sin was minor, practically chaste, and the immediate cause seems innocent enough: she was carried away while reading a romance with the charming Paolo. Dante too was the author of love poetry—specifically, poetry about forbidden love—so how could he not pity someone whose fault was to be moved by a romance? A long and distinguished tradition of criticism has found Francesca’s speech profoundly poignant, disarming, and admirable. To be sure, some readers have been offended by her line, “He is meant for Caina who extinguished our blazing” (Inf. v, 107). She must be a violent and vindictive person, they claim, if she wants her cuckolded husband to be damned. In her defense, Emilio Roncaglia claimed (in 1875) that this notorious line was actually spoken by Paolo. The text, after all, suggests that both lovers have talked to Dante. Immediately after Francesca mentions Caina, the narration continues: “These words were carried from them to us. When I had heard these tormented souls . . . ”(Inf. v, 108–109). Roncaglia, Thomas Goddard Bergin, and others have attributed the whole preceding speech to Francesca with the sole exception of the line about Caina, which they consider “simply out of character for the gentle Francesca.”8 This is circular reasoning, since they only know that she is gentle because of the text of Canto V. But we may defend Francesca even if we think that she curses her husband; we may see her as spirited and passionate, rather than vindictive. Controversy has also been surrounded the line “On that day we read no further” (Inf. v, 138). Benvenuto da Imola in the fourteenth century and many subsequent readers have understood this phrase as a sly suggestion of sexual intercourse. They read it as accompanied by a wink, and claim that Francesca’s coyness makes her sin even worse. But again Francesca can be defended, as she was by the nineteenth-century critic Francesco de Sanctis, who asked: “Are they really human, the commentators who torture this poor phrase and, like friars, insist that this woman make full confession, speak what her lips cannot utter? In their attempts to give precise meaning to what must remain vague, dubious, indefinite, they are veritable impotent ravishers, striving in vain to raise the dense veil and snatch the secrets of a modest soul. It stirs my bile to see curious and gossipy vulgarians loiter about such delicate creations.”9 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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The rich details of Francesca’s story, as she relates them to Dante in a specific manner and place, cause him to feel a powerful emotion: pity. As a narrator, he transmits that emotion to his readers by selecting and describing facts in particular ways and organizing them into a narrative. In general, no one can read Dante’s accounts of human beings under eternal torture without feeling some sympathy for the damned and some anger at the God who contrived this Hell. Such pity makes Virgil “completely pale”; it prevents Dante from questioning the damned; it fills his eyes with intoxicating tears and forces him to block his ears; it pains him even in recollection; and it tempts him to write without moral restraint (See Inf. iv, 14; xiii, 84; xxix, 2–3; xxix, 44; xvi, 12; and xxvi, 19). Imagine that you were murdered immediately after a moment of guilty pleasure during an otherwise miserable life, and then you found yourself cut off permanently from all love, human or divine. Wouldn’t you crave sympathy? Wouldn’t you deserve it? As an author of romances, Dante had professed a whole theory of pity—analogous to Francesca’s philosophy of love—according to which those who sympathize with us are moved by the same love as we, and their compassion makes us pity ourselves (Vita Nuova, xxxv). But the pity that Dante feels in Hell is quite immoral. As a good Christian, Dante-the-author knows that Hell was made by the “divine authority, highest wisdom, and first love” (Inf., iii, 5–6). If Hell is God’s work, then the only emotion we should feel while contemplating it is pious admiration. As Virgil asks, “Who can be more nefarious than he who brings compassion to bear on God’s judgment?” (Inf. xx, 29–30).10 The heart-rending details in Canto V are tests of our judgment and character. They are like the siren songs that nearly lured Odysseus into a shipwreck. Dante the character fails these tests, “almost lost” in the coils of pity (Inf. v, 72), fainting because of what he hears—but he later learns that he has made a great mistake. He begins to worry about improper pity even before he enters Hell and sees the sufferings of the damned: The day departed, and the dim air freed every earthly animal from its labor; only I tried to prepare myself for a double battle, against the journey and my pity,

Lo giorno se n’andava, e l’aere bruno toglieva li animai che sono in terra da le fatiche loro; e io sol uno m’apparacchiava a sostener la guerra sí del cammino e sí de la pietate,



Dante Turns his Reason against Pity


which faultless memory will retell. O muses, O high genius, help me . . .

che ritrarrà la mente che non erra. O muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate . . . . (Inf. ii, 1–7)

Dante realizes that he will have to use his ingegno (genius, invention, skill) to avoid feeling inappropriate pity as he visits Hell. But his poetic ingegno is just what makes his descriptions so moving, so naturalistic, and so pathetic that pity is virtually unavoidable. Therefore Dante will need a different kind of skill—something like philosophical reason—to curb his poetic gift. Much later in the Inferno, he ref lects, So I grieved, and mourn again when now I turn to what I’d seen, and struggle to rein my genius in more than usual lest it run where virtue cannot guide it.

Allor mi dolsi, e ora mi ridoglio quando drizzo la mente a ciò ch’io vidi e più lo ‘ngegno affreno ch’i’ non soglio, perché non corra che virtù nol guidi; (Inf. xxvi, 19–22)

At another point, after watching souls weeping over their own contorted bodies, he says, If God permits you, reader, collect the fruit of your reading and consider how I could have kept my cheeks from getting wet.

Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto di tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso com’ io potea tener lo viso asciutto (Inf. xx, 19–21)

At first, this sounds like a rhetorical question: “How could I have refrained from crying? You would have done the same.” But reason tells us that Dante should not have wept to see justice done—nor should we. The way to avoid feeling inappropriate pity is to remember general moral truths, rather than sink into the mire of particular, emotive judgments. Like Plato long before him, Dante realized that there is nothing to prevent people from telling effective stories in which immoral behavior provokes a positive emotional response. Francesca’s story is about her own sin, yet it is skillfully contrived to incite our pity. We readers should ignore all the pretty similes and the language about “gentle hearts,” “sweet sighing,” and “deep passion.” We should feel no pity except when reason tells us that someone deserves it. Francesca, having committed a mortal sin, is fit for punishment, not for sympathy. I am making Dante sound like a Socratic rationalist. That would not be quite right, because he states clearly and often that we need faith as well as reason. Virgil, who exemplifies reason, can lead the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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pilgrim no further than the Earthly Paradise. Dante can enter Heaven only in the company of Beatrice, a figure of theology; and can reach the Empyrean only with St. Bernard, who represents mystical vision. However, Dante thinks that reason provides every rule and principle that we need to guide our behavior on earth. When Francesca sins, it is by violating a rational law; she does not act contrary to faith. As Étienne Gilson writes, “natural reason is perfectly competent to confer on man earthly felicity in the sphere of action. This sphere of action is the sphere of politics, together with its sine qua non, the sphere of ethics. I cannot see that Dante ever said anything else; he hardly stopped repeating this between the beginning of the Banquet and the Divine Comedy.”11 Not only does Dante defend the earthly role of reason, but he defines faith so that it encompasses a great deal of philosophical reasoning from religious premises. In his view, religion provides doctrines (such as the Trinity and the Resurrection) that cannot be deduced or observed, but must be shown miraculously by God. These doctrines can then be logically analyzed and combined with human knowledge of nature and history to generate further truths.12 Thus religious doctrines look exactly like philosophical theories, except that their validity cannot be proved. Philosophy and theology form one coherent system of abstract, general truths, which Dante contrasts to literature. The Road from Narrative to Theory In Hell, Dante behaves as a poet and describes his actions in poetic language that tends to provoke pity for the damned. One example is the word “perso,” which (as we have seen) alludes to Pyramus and Thisbe and thereby associates Francesca with Ovid’s naïve and pitiful young lovers. But as Dante ascends toward heaven, his language grows less vivid and concrete as his subjects become more virtuous. He is already on the right track in Purgatory, where he “consoles himself ” at the sight of God’s “ just punishment,” and tells his readers, “I do not want you to stray from your good purpose when you hear how God requires debts to be paid; attend not to the form of correction, but to the outcome” (Purg, xxi, 6; x, 106–110). The narrative now dwells less on sinners’ emotions than on general questions, such as the taxonomy of sin and the relationship between freedom and evil. By the time Dante reaches Paradiso, the poem is largely a series of theological treatises by dead saints. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




Meanwhile, his individuality diminishes as he turns gradually into Everyman. Each soul that needs purgation is assigned to the one level of Purgatory that best suits it. It then passes through the Earthly Paradise before rising to Heaven. As an individual sinner, a poet and a politician, Dante suspects that he’ll be charged with pride and purged on the first level (Purg., viii, 136–138). (Since there is no place in Hell for the prideful, Dante seems not to be worried about damnation.) However, during the journey of the Divine Comedy, Dante—alone of all souls—is punished in the Earthly Paradise, where Beatrice chides him for his sinfulness so severely that he faints. Adam was ejected from this same Paradise for tasting the fruit of general moral knowledge, so it is the appropriate place to punish Everyman. Since Dante has become almost a generic human being, he cannot be associated with any particular sin. True, the Earthly Paradise is the one place in the Comedy where his name is uttered and his appearance is in any way described. But the mention of his bearded face is just a metaphor for his status as a grown man—he was almost certainly clean–shaven (Purg., xxxi, 74). And the word “Dante” marks the point at which he renounces his individuality (Purg., xxx, 55). Finally, at the highest point in Heaven, Dante beholds Divine Love itself. His personality is annihilated by this vision and language fails him; although he can name what he sees, he cannot describe it: From that moment, my vision would surpass what speech shows, speech which succumbs at such a sight, like memory at such excess.

Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio che ‘l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. (Par. xxxiii, 55 ff )

As Dante gazes at the Infinite Goodness, what he sees is articulated in the vocabulary of scholastic philosophy, although it is paradoxical and beyond the power of human minds to grasp: In that profundity I saw confined, sewn with love into a book’s cohesion that which in the universe is unbound: substances, accidents, their disposition— almost combined in such a way that what I say gives scant illumination.

Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l’universo si squaderna: sustanze e accidenti e lor costume quasi conf lati insieme, per tal modo che ciò ch’i’ dico è un semplice lume. (Par. xxxiii, 85–90)

Dante’s metaphor justifies his own book which describes the concrete details (that is, the accidents and dispositions) that he has beheld in Hell and Purgatory. Viewed from Paradise, all of these details are mere parts 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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of a divine whole. This is true, for example, of Francesca da Rimini, whose disposition (costume) was that of a romantic and adulterous lover. She should not be pitied as an individual, but viewed as a necessary component of a perfect totality. The story of the Divine Comedy thus has dual significance for Dante. His journey, seen in the proper perspective, depicts the whole of Creation in an ordered way so that we can glimpse its aggregate perfection. And the pilgrimage ends with a direct experience of this totality, seen together and instantly. Dante cannot describe this vision literally, because it is too great for human speech to imitate. But he can tell us precisely what it entails—logically, metaphysically, and morally. His whole Comedy, then, is a pilgrimage from literature to philosophy, from emotion to reason, from metaphor to abstract language, from concrete instance to general rule, from fictional memoir to speculative theology, from subjectivity to objectivity and universality. Dante’s story is about renouncing all stories. In this respect, Dante imitates another resident of Ravenna who had lived about eight centuries earlier. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy also tells a quasi-autobiographical tale about the journey from literature to abstract reason. Boethius writes as a prisoner awaiting execution: in real life, his skull was crushed by a knotted rope. Using words that Francesca quotes in the Inferno, he dolefully explains that there is no greater misfortune than to have been happy and to remember that joy in a time of suffering.13 His only companions are the muses of poetry, who try to console him until Lady Philosophy arrives in a rage. “ ‘Who,’ she asked, ‘has allowed these theatrical sluts to get near a sick man?’ ”14 With her professional assistance, Boethius attains the perspective of Reason, from which both his pleasure and his sorrow seem inconsequential. Francesca quotes the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy in order to arouse Dante’s compassion:15 And she to me, “ ‘There’s no worse grief than to recall happy times’ when one feels sorrow: that’s your teacher’s plain belief.”

E qualla a me: «Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria; e ciò sa’l tuo dottore.» (Inf. 5, 121–123)

But Boethius’ original text moves gradually away from concrete, imagistic, “pathetic” poetry toward dispassionate prose. The logic of the whole book works against Francesca, as does the form of the whole Divine Comedy. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine



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In this chapter, I am exploring the thesis that Dante tried to understand correct and general moral doctrines and instantiate those positions in a story for the purpose of instructing his readers. The Comedy as a whole was supposed to incite emotions that were consistent with reason. For Dante, philosophy was the authoritative discipline; poetry and the other literary arts should be subservient to it. It was hazardous to use stories for deciding what was moral or immoral, because a moving tale might have a wicked message. Dante’s own ability to make us sympathize for the damned in Hell was meant as a warning about the dangerous unreliability of literary writing. An Inferno without a Paradiso would have worked aesthetically and emotionally, but it would have been a deeply f lawed and dangerous book. Thus there was a strongly anti-literary strain in Dante’s thought. The author of the Divine Comedy was a former lyric poet who had been converted from the service of Amor to that of Lady Philosophy: And just as it often happens that a man goes looking for silver and apart from his intention finds gold, which some hidden cause presents, perhaps not without divine ordinance, so I who sought to console myself found not only a remedy for my tears but also the words of authors, sciences, and books. Pondering these, I quickly determined that Philosophy, who was the lady of these authors, sciences, and books, was a great thing. I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady, and I could not imagine her in any attitude except one of compassion, so that the part of my mind that perceives truth gazed on her so willingly that I could barely turn it away from her. I began to go where she was truly revealed, namely to the schools of the religious orders and to the disputations held by the philosophers, so that in a short period of time, perhaps some thirty months, I began to feel her sweetness so much that the love of her dispelled and destroyed every other thought.16

“Compassion” is what the young poet Dante had sought from Beatrice and the other ladies of the Vita Nuova (e.g., VN, xiv; xxxv). By the time he wrote the Divine Comedy, he saw compassion and pity as highly problematic emotions, liable to apply to the wrong objects at the wrong times. Fortunately, Lady Philosophy herself showed compassion for Dante when he was sick with love, and kindly helped him to move from poetry toward abstract reason—thereby precisely repeating the pattern of Boethius’ Consolation. The figure of 30 months is probably allegorical (everything is a multiple of three in Dante’s earlier work), but it is likely that he really did study philosophy intensively and systematically after the death of Beatrice. It appears that he studied with the Dominicans and read at least Boethius and Aquinas in their company. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Dante on the Dangers of Literature

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The Comedy was then a great narrative about transcending stories, a reenactment of Dante’s own biography as a poet who had moved to theory.17 Dante said that “the branch of philosophy under which it is advanced, both the whole and the part [sc. the Paradiso] is the business of morality, that is ethics.”18 His epitaph fittingly named him “Dante the theologian, lacking no dogma / that philosophy warms in her brilliant heart.”19 I will argue in the next chapter that there is a fundamental rivalry between philosophy and literature, regarding the proper roles of generalization and principle versus close description and narrative. This conf lict arises almost regardless of the philosophical doctrines that one holds. However, before I turn to this general conf lict, I want to explicate Dante’s specific reasons for distrusting literature. His distrust was fueled by certain controversial philosophical doctrines that he held— ones that other philosophers have rejected. In brief, Dante borrowed a distinction between philosophy and poetry from Augustine and Aquinas.20 These theorists assumed that poems show what their narrators see from where they stand, and how it makes them feel. Poets imitate or invent concrete, particular objects, representing them either accurately or with deliberate distortion, using rhetorical devices such as metaphor, allusion, irony, and hyperbole both to describe and to stimulate emotions. Philosophers, on the other hand, seek the underlying structure of the universe, its general laws and principles. Philosophy thus exemplifies reason, with its abstract, objective rules and its dispassionate, third-person style. Hell, says Dante, is for those who “place reason below desire” (Inf. v, 39). Therefore, it is a sin is to favor poetry over philosophy. We can unpack that brief argument by examining its essential premises. Dante on Emotion Dante’s argument against literature first depends on a sharp distinction between reason and emotion. Dante knew that some of our emotions are morally justified, but he thought that we always need reason to tell us which ones we should feel at each time. Philosophy is reasonable, whereas poetry plays directly on the emotions and is therefore untrustworthy. Some defenders of literature adopt the opposite position. They share Dante’s view that poetry incites emotions; that philosophy is rational; 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




and that the two approaches yield different results in particular cases. However, they prefer emotion to reason. Longfellow baldly stated the Romantics’ preference: “It is the heart, and not the brain / That to the highest doth attain.” And Keats once exclaimed, “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”21 The story of Paolo and Francesca became very popular in their era, because the Romantics sympathized with the doomed lovers. Keats dreamt that he had kissed Francesca, and when he awoke, he turned his dream into a sonnet: “Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form / I f loated with, about that melancholy storm.”22 Byron translated Francesca’s speech, used snippets from it as epigraphs to every canto of The Corsair, and planned a tragedy about the lovers of Rimini. In his translation, Dante says, “Francesca—thy sad destinies / Have made me sad and tender even to tears” (Inf., v, 116–117). This is just how Byron felt about her. Her fate was enough to make him “swoon to death with sympathetic thought.”23 Byron admired the fainting Dante as a kindred spirit, one who had followed his heart, not his head. By implication, he also admired Paolo. Thus Byron and the other Romantics deliberately ignored the overall lesson of the Divine Comedy—that it is sinful to allow emotion to prevail over reason. I think it is a mistake to assume that literature is emotional, whereas philosophy is rational. “Reason” surely encompasses the complex cognitive skills that Dante employed in composing the poetry of Canto V. And the most important character who appears there, Francesca, employs her intellect to gain Dante’s sympathy, giving him reasons to pity her. Both the author and his characters use syntaxis: logical connectives and subordinate clauses that convey complex relationships among ideas. Consider Francesca’s sentence: “O gracious and benevolent creature, moving through deep-purple air to visit us, who dyed the world a bloody color, if we had a friend in the universe’s lord, we’d pray to him to grant you peace, since you took pity on our bitter plight.” The core of this sentence is “We would pray for you.” But we are efficiently told both why Paolo and Francesca would pray for Dante and why they cannot, how Dante met them, what they did on earth, what their state is now—and how all these facts fit together. As a lyric poet, Dante borrowed most of his motifs, themes, and vocabulary from troubadours and earlier Italian lyricists. But their writing was mostly paratactic: it strung statements together without many logically connectives except “and” and “but.” Dante learned syntaxis from ancient poets, especially from that paragon of “reason,” Virgil. By bringing syntaxis into medieval love poetry, Dante made it more 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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rational, as well as more moving. Philosophical writing, too, is often syntactic—but not more so than literature. If arguments that apply general rules to particular cases are rational, so are some literary devices, such as Dante’s simile of Paolo and Francesca as doves drawn to their nest. We can tell stories or use metaphors with good sense, and we can apply general rules in a completely irrational way. For example, just when King Lear is losing his mind, he starts to make broad philosophical pronouncements: “Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s,” and so on (II:iv:271). In Dante’s period, some people equated abstract and general statements with reason because they thought that the soul was divided into rational and appetitive parts. Since our desires were concrete, our rational faculties were obviously responsible for our general beliefs. For instance, Boccaccio’s character Lauretta says that rage “is nothing else but a sudden and unconsidered motion, provoked by heartfelt wretchedness, which banishes all reason and obscures the eyes of the mind with darkness” (Dec. iv, iii). This total separation of passion from reason is Platonic; but Dante could have adopted Aristotle’s position instead. According to Aristotle, an emotion is a combination of desire and cognition. Anger, for example, is “desire with distress, where what is desired is retribution for a seeming slight, the slight being improper” (Rhet. 1378a). I could get red in the face and have a high pulse-rate, but I wouldn’t be “angry” unless I believed that someone had done wrong. Empirical beliefs and interpretations form part of my emotional state; and my feelings are ways of expressing my beliefs. Someone who lacked all affect would have no capacity to perceive facts, such as “he wronged me.” In other words, the data with which we reason are given to us by our emotions, so that moral reasoning cannot occur unless we feel. An affectless person would therefore be defective in his or her reason.25 It is true that some people feel inappropriate emotions, but the solution is not to banish passion from their souls. Rather, according to Aristotle, we must train ourselves to perceive particular facts accurately and to respond proportionately. Aristotle, the first to argue for the cognitive value of the emotions, also defended both fiction and history as moral guides. Dante on Tragedy Tragedy is a special category of literature that provokes profound—but in Dante’s view, inappropriate—emotions. In Dante’s time, the whole 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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culture of courtly love revolved around the Arthurian romances, which were tragedies (even if they violated the classical aesthetic unities). The popularity and emotional resonance of tragedy is always problematic for Christians, who believe that the universe is well-ordered. For them, the deepest truth is that goodness always wins, at least after death. Tragedy is also problematic for philosophers who endorse the following argument: a. there is always a right thing to do;26 b. one’s happiness should depend simply on doing the right thing; therefore, c. one can always be happy. Socrates famously argued that there was a rational solution to every moral dilemma. No matter how awful a situation might be, if we responded rationally by choosing the best available option, then we would have nothing to be upset about (Republic x, 604b–d). Many subsequent philosophers have disputed this theory. Some believe in the existence of genuinely unsolvable dilemmas, incommensurable values, and tragic situations in which there is no morally acceptable course of action. But if principles are coherent and generally valid, then true dilemmas should arise only rarely. For instance, if our duty is to maximize happiness, then we may be unsure what to do when we cannot predict the consequences of our behavior, but one action will be objectively better than any alternative. A real dilemma can only occur in the unlikely event that two choices happen to have exactly the same effect on net happiness. Similarly, if lying violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative, then one should simply never lie. Very rarely, the absolute prohibition on lying could conf lict with an equally universal ban on some other action (such as murder). But Kant claimed that “obligations cannot clash,”27 and one who believes that the world is fundamentally just may trust that all conf licts of principle are resolvable. For instance, in Paradiso, Beatrice tells Dante about Amphiarus, who died because of his wife’s treachery. On his deathbed, Amphiarus extracted a promise from his son Alcmaeon to commit matricide in revenge. Alcmaeon thus faced an apparently tragic conf lict between obedience to his father or to the law. But, according to Beatrice, every moral choice must have a best answer. In this case, she explains, Alcmaeon’s promise to avenge his father produced a merely contingent obligation that was trumped by an absolute and universal duty to avoid matricide (Par. iv, 103–108). 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Dante also hears about two nuns who were forced to marry. As a result, each woman lived under conf licting vows of perpetual monogamy to Christ and to a human husband. Again, the situation appears to be tragic in the sense that it lacks an acceptable solution, but in fact there is one right thing for the women to do. A nun who is forced to marry should be physically faithful to her husband while reserving her heart for Christ (Par. iii, 97–117). The result is a “perfect life,” even though the circumstances appear unfavorable. There is no need to pity these nuns or to regret their circumstances, because they are granted perfect felicity in heaven (a Christian argument). Even if there were no paradise, they could achieve happiness on earth by taking pleasure from being moral (Socrates’ point). If Dante considered tragedies while he was writing his own Commedia, he might have thought of Tristan and Iseult. In fact, Tristan blows in the same infernal storm that buffets Francesca.28 According to the French Romance, he and Iseult fell in love because of a potion that they tasted in error. “And then did they enter the path that they would never again leave in their life, for they had drunk their ruin and their death.”29 Their irresistible, mutual passion clashed with Iseult’s marriage vows and Tristan’s feudal oaths. In the Romance, this conf lict could only be resolved by their simultaneous and voluptuous expiration. The cause of their sin was bad luck, and death was the only solution—fortunately, a beautiful death that would afford aesthetic satisfactions for readers. This is a frequent formula for tragedy. But Dante obviously rejects the viewpoint of the Romance, because in the Divine Comedy, he makes God damn Tristan and Iseult. What’s more, Dante depicts Arthurian romances as the equivalent of the love potion in the Tristan myth: reading the Romance of Lancelot is the cause of Francesca’s adultery and death. So in his view, tragedy is a poison, but one that we are free to refuse. As a Christian author, Dante can imagine what lovers would experience beyond the grave. In the Romance, Tristan and Iseult clung together for a few moments in death’s embrace, but in the Inferno, Paolo and Francesca “will never be parted.” They are forever panting, and forever young. By making their death scene infinitely long, Dante heightens the pathos—pushes it to such an extreme, in fact, that he def lates the whole romantic-love tradition. In romantic verse, lovers commonly yearn for perfect union, just as religious mystics sometimes strive to lose their separate identities altogether and merge with God. Since actual union is impossible on earth, the Tristan myth and similar stories suggest that death alone can bring lovers together. But for orthodox 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




Christians, love is always an ethical relationship among distinct souls. Even in heaven, the saved retain their identities as their relationships with God become perfect. Dante indicates what ideal love is like when he explains how his Lady, Beatrice, would treat him in Purgatory. Far from merging her soul with his in ecstasy, she chides him for his sins— thereby showing concern for his specific history and the future of his soul (hers is already saved).30 Meanwhile, Paolo and Francesca remain separate characters for all eternity, but their punishment for having wanted to merge is to be permanently coupled. Dante wants to show that death is not a satisfactory resolution to the pathos of romantic love, so it’s better to do what reason and morality demand. There would be no tragedy, only the happyending of salvation, if people would avoid sin in the first place. And this is always possible for rational agents. Even those who drink love potions must be morally accountable, or else God wouldn’t have sent Tristan to Hell and admitted Cunizza da Romano to heaven. Cunizza uses her free will to make her story into a commedia, not a tragedy. Her initial moral problem (the inf luence of Venus) comes from outside. But instead of damning her, it gives her an opportunity to act virtuously: but joyfully in myself I indulge the cause of my fate, and never fret— which to the vulgar may seem strange.

ma lietamente a me medesma indulgo la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia; che parria forse forte al vostro vulgo. (Par. ix, 34–36.)

Similarly, Francesca was exposed to the malign inf luence of the Lancelot romance, but she could have acted virtuously. Thus a second reason for Dante to distrust literature is its susceptibility to tragedy. Tragedy contradicts the Christian-rationalist sense of the world as morally well-ordered and just. But Dante’s aversion to tragedy has been rejected by many philosophers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche and Sartre. Dante on Partiality Some moral theories assume that all our moral judgments should be completely impersonal.31 For example, in classical utilitarianism, every human being counts for one, and none for more than one. It may be wise to concentrate one’s energies on making one’s own family members happy, because we have the most impact on those we know best. But that is a mere matter of efficiency. The test of our actions is their 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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impact on everyone’s happiness. Other moral theories are friendlier toward partiality; they hold that people have a moral right (or even a duty) to care more about those with whom they have particular relationships than about distant strangers.32 Unfortunately, a story can be an effective way to justify partiality even when it is indefensible according to any moral theory. That is because stories are selective; the narrator has a choice of what details to emphasize, whom to include, what perspective to adopt, and where to begin. If one favors a particular party in a dispute, then one can tell the story so as to make this person look relatively important or good.33 If Dante wrote Canto V of the Inferno after becoming friendly with Francesca’s nephew, then his decision to damn her may have been an object lesson in impartiality—just like his decision to place his own teacher Brunetto Latini in Hell, even though Brunetto’s “dear and good paternal image” was still fixed in his mind (Inf. xv, 82–83). But perhaps Dante reasoned as follows: “I know that Brunetto committed sodomy; sodomy is a sin; and therefore Brunetto is damned—regardless of any loyalty I might have for him.” This is a strong commitment to impartiality that (like Dante’s opposition to tragedy) arises from specifically Platonic-Christian doctrines. Many philosophers—from Aristotle and Cicero to Hume—would find it too stringent. Dante raises the question of partiality explicitly in the Divine Comedy. Near the bottom of Hell, he lingers weeping over a pit in which decapitated souls trudge in eternal circles, swinging their heads by the hair. But Virgil asked me, “What makes you gawk Only at those lopped-off, sorry Shades? Is your vision stuck? At other pits you never act this way.”

Ma Virgilio mi disse: «Che pur guate? Perché la vista tua pur si soffolge là giú tra l’ombre triste smozzicate? Tu non hai fatto sí a l’altre bolge.» (Inf. xxix, 4–7)

Virgil reminds Dante that they have twenty-two miles to walk and their time is short. But Dante is resentful; he feels that Virgil has intentionally disregarded his cagione—his specific reason or cause—for lingering (Inf. xxix, 14). The leader marched, while behind his back I thought as I walked what I’d like to say, Adding at last, “Inside that crack Where deliberately my eye just stopped, a spirit of my blood bewails, I think, his culpability.”

Parte sen giva, e io retro li andava lo duca, già faccendo la riposta, e soggiugnendo: Dentro a quella cava dov’ io tenea or li occhi sí a posta, credo ch’un spirto del mio sangue pianga la colpa che là giù cotanto costa. (Inf. xxix, 16–21).





Dante’s pity for this particular soul is stimulated by a bond of kinship. He sees that the man is a relative of his who is being cruelly treated, but he does not inquire into the reason for this punishment. Thus the way that Dante perceives this particular story is partial and biased. Urging him to leave his kinsman behind, Virgil warns, “Don’t wreck your intelligence on thoughts of him from now on; think about other things, and let him be” (Inf., xxix, 22–23). As the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante criticizes his own narrow perspective in this scene. Likewise, even if he knew that Francesca was the aunt of his protector, he damned her. He knew that reason condemned adultery in all cases. Dante believes that the emotional tug of stories and personal relationships cannot distract those who are steadfast in their commitment to the Moral Law. For instance, Cato had to leave his wife in Limbo when Christ released him: “Marcia was so pleasing in my sight,” he added, “while I was over there, that any favors she asked of me, I did. Now she remains across the vile river and can no longer move me, as the law decreed when I was freed from there.”

«Marzïa piacque tanto a li occhi miei mentre ch’i fu’ di là», diss’ elli allora, «che quante grazie volse da me, fei. Or che di là dal m al fiume dimora piú muover non mi può, per quella legge che fatta fu quando me n’usci’ fora . . . .» (Purg i, 85–90)

Since Cato chooses to obey the law, which ref lects both reason and morality, he no longer has any feelings for his spouse. This stoicism is supposed to qualify him as a hero. But we might view him otherwise: as a zealot who has oversimplified the situation in order to make it fit his principles, with cruel results. He has employed the stoic method for avoiding moral dilemmas and tragedies, cutting himself off from all complicated human entanglements. But perhaps he should feel some sense of loss and regret when he leaves his beloved wife in Limbo. It is no response to say that God made the universe in such a way that Cato must forsake his wife. For how do we know that this is God’s will? All we know for sure is that it is a story by Dante. Dante’s intolerance for partiality, as ref lected in the Cato story, is based on a doctrine that many professional philosophers have rejected. Dante on Metaphor So far, I have argued that Dante has three strong but controversial reasons to distrust literature: it plays on the emotions; it can depict the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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world as tragic; and it can rationalize partiality even when impartiality is morally required. The Inferno depicts and incites emotions, partiality, and a tragic world-view, but we are supposed to continue through Purgatory to Paradise. Dante describes Heaven as utterly un-tragic, impersonal, and filled with one particular emotion (ecstatic, pious love) that seems closely tethered to abstract reason. Platonists have traditionally made two further arguments against literature, but Dante at least partly rejects these. According to Socrates (as depicted in Plato’s dialogues), literature is suspect because it uses metaphors that are not literally and clearly true; and it tells stories that have not actually happened. In a word, poets are liars, and lying is immoral. Plato himself writes brilliant metaphors and tells fictional stories— sometimes putting them in the mouth of his quasi-fictional character Socrates—so evidently his position is more subtle than this “Platonic” one. However, the simple version figures in many Christian texts. For instance, St. Thomas asks early in his Summa theologica whether sacred writing should use metaphor.” This is also a relevant question for Dante, who calls his Divine Comedy “the sacred poem” (Par., xxv, 1; xxiii, 62). As usual, Thomas offers negative and then positive arguments, followed by a synthesis. On one hand, theology “is intended to make the truth plain; and to those who make it plain a reward is promised: ‘Those who explain me shall have life everlasting.’34 But by similes the truth is obscured. Thus it does not suit this discipline to communicate holy doctrine under the likeness of corporeal things” (Summa theol. I, i, ix). Metaphors are imprecise and thus potentially misleading compared to straightforward argumentative prose. On the other hand, the Lord Himself said, “I have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes by the ministry of the prophets” (Hos. 12:10). Aquinas adds, “To convey something by a similitude is a metaphor. Therefore sacred writing goes so far as to use metaphor.” The argument has reached a dilemma; but Aquinas has an answer (which he borrows from Augustine).35 God has license to write metaphorically, for divine truth is powerful enough to shine through parables and symbols. Besides, God’s “mysterious figures are useful to exercise the studious and to counteract the mocking of unbelievers; for it is written, ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs’ [Mat. 7:6].” Thus secrecy or esotericism is a justification for metaphor, but only under select circumstances. Dante uses similar reasoning to defend the Divine Comedy. In the “Letter to Can Grande,” he writes that his own poem’s “form or mode of treatment is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and metaphorical; 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




at the same time, it makes definitions and distinctions, provides proofs and refutations, and offers illustrative examples.”36 Here he itemizes ten characteristics of his own work, carefully divided into two groups of five: the first group pertains to form or appearance, the second to substance. Dante recognizes that the presentation of his ideas involves creativity (poeticus); invention, at least of details if not of entire stories ( fictivus); excursions into anecdotes (digressivus); and metaphor (transumptivus). These five qualities are problematic—for Socrates’ reasons—but they are justified in Dante’s case because his poem is based on and clearly implies a valid set of concepts, which are properly defined (definitivus), differentiated (divisivus), proved (probativus), contrasted to false alternative views (improbativus), and supported with examples (exemplorum positivus). Whether or not Dante wrote the “Letter to Can Grande” (whose authenticity has been controversial since 1819), it is almost certain that he would have defended his own poem in this rather standard medieval way: by distinguishing between form and content, and by defending a metaphorical form as acceptable if and only if it implied true religious or moral content. He writes, “It would be a great embarrassment if someone wrote a poem and placed something under the cover of a figure or a rhetorical coloring, and then, when asked, didn’t know how to strip his words of this cover so as to reveal the intended truth.”37 Apparently, each rhetorical figure in the Divine Comedy is supposed to point to a meaning that could be stated in plain words. Metaphors (which are half-lies) are illegitimate unless their moral or spiritual meaning is both correct and obvious. This argument could be criticized on at least two grounds. First, the distinctions between form and content and between metaphor and literal propositions have been widely attacked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; some theorists claim that there is no thought that isn’t metaphorical or otherwise rhetorical. There is no “writing degree zero.”38 If this argument is correct, then Dante cannot take refuge in assertions about the plain moral truth of his poem, for any statement of that truth would have to be expressed metaphorically. Second, major critics including Friedrich von Schlegel (1800) and Erich Auerbach (1946) have argued that there is a powerful tension, pace Dante, between his own fictive imagination and his moral philosophy. His stories and metaphors do not illustrate, but rather undermine, his abstract beliefs. Dante on Fiction The passage from the “Letter to Can Grande” mentions “fiction” as well as “metaphor.” Fiction has received special scrutiny because the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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authors of fictional stories know that their plots are not true. This is one reason that Socrates calls poets “liars” (Republic II, 377d ff.). (The other reason is that they imply morally false doctrines, such as the depravity of the gods.) According to Plutarch, when the very first tragedies were performed, the great moralist Solon attended and asked Thespis, the first playwright, “if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number of people.” Thus moral objections to fiction are as old as the genre itself, or so Plutarch says. In Dante’s essay De vulgari eloquentia (II, iv, 2), he says that poesis (his own art) “nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita.” We could perhaps translate this formula as follows: “poetry is nothing but [writing] fashioned poetically according to rhetoric and music.” That translation would assume that “ fictio” just means “made” or “fashioned”; for even a poem that is literally true is created by an author. Certainly, the medieval Latin word “ ficta” was applied to true stories insofar as someone had made them by writing them down. Others think that “ fictio” really means “fiction” in this passage; then Dante defined poetry as rhetorical, musical writing that was literally untrue.39 It is always difficult to interpret medieval passages about ficta or facta, because writers had few reliable methods for distinguishing between fact and fiction. Thus we cannot tell from their practice what their theoretical statements and definitions mean. There was also a striking lack of vocabulary for describing literature that was deliberately fictional; sometimes it was called “lying” even when it was defended.40 The standard defense of fiction holds that it isn’t a lie because its authors have no intention to deceive. Sir Philip Sidney made this point best in his Defense of Poetry: “The poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false.”41 Sidney lived long after Dante and in an era with different views of fact and fiction, but Dante may have found a similar argument in Ovid’s Amores (III 12, 15–44).42 Still, a problem remains: if an author “nothing affirms,” then it’s hard to see how he or she can be saying anything morally true. If Dante’s journey to Hell is openly fictional, then it isn’t a lie, but how can it have moral significance? Today, many philosophers would employ the notion of conditionals to explain this paradox.43 Compare the following two sentences: 1) “King Henry VIII should not have executed his wife Anne Boleyn.” 2) “King Lear should not have disowned his daughter Cordelia.” Both sentences state moral judgments, but the subject of the second sentence probably did not exist, so it is false. The way to save its truth-value is to turn it into a conditional: “If there had been 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




a king named Lear whose situation was like that described in the play, then he should not have disowned his daughter.” Likewise: “If Dante had gone to Hell in the middle of the journey of his life, then he should have learned not to pity sinners.” In this way, we can make moral sentences about fictional characters true. But a more difficult question is how any story (historical or fictional) can provide guidance for people who are not actually named in it. Unless one is an elderly land-owner with three daughters, it is not morally illuminating to learn that Lear should have given a third of his kingdom to Cordelia. Unless one is tempted, while reading an Arthurian romance, to kiss one’s brother-in-law on the lips, then the damnation of Francesca may seem to have no relevance. Clearly, we need to look for broader ethical lessons: if not philosophical doctrines, then at least themes. For instance, Stanley Cavell claims that Lear depicts several people who are moral skeptics, refusing to act kindly toward others until they can prove to themselves that these others have good natures and that nature itself is good. This search for proof, Cavell says, is just one way of “avoiding love” that is portrayed in the play.44 If we wanted to base a moral doctrine on Lear, it would be something like this: “Act kindly without seeking ultimate reasons.” But as general advice, this seems unsophisticated and unpersuasive, especially compared to the way that Shakespeare handles the “avoidance-of-love” theme in his concrete fictional world. Likewise, I find Francesca’s misuse of romantic literature the most morally interesting theme in Canto V (and I will say much more about it later). Like “avoidance of love,” “misuse of romance” is a moral theme, although not a doctrine. If we are looking for themes, then the difference between the conditional statements of fiction and the indicative sentences of history becomes unimportant. If anything, fiction may seem more promising, because it can be contrived to illustrate pertinent and relatively general themes, whereas historical situations and events often have no thematic unity.45 Dante doesn’t discuss “themes” in his theoretical writings, but he does endorse the medieval idea that texts have four “senses.” The “literal or historical” sense comprises all the concrete details about characters’ appearances, thoughts, and actions, and the physical settings in which they move. For Dante, these details are less important than the allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels of meaning—for “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6). For example, the Psalm says, “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made His sanctuary, and Israel His dominion.” 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Dante explains that this literally means that the Children of Israel left Egypt in the time of Moses. But more important than the literal is the allegorical sense (“our redemption achieved by Christ”), the moral sense (“the conversion of our souls from sorrow and the misery of sin to a state of grace”) and the anagogical sense (“the exit of a holy spirit from this enslavement to corruption to the freedom of eternal glory”).46 If the real significance of a text lies in the non-literal meaning, then it does not matter much whether the literal details are accurate. This is why Dante can call his visions in Purgatory “not false errors”: although they do not actually happen, their moral is right (Purg. xv, 117). To use Isidore of Seville’s terminology from the early seventh century, the Comedy is not a historia (something that actually happened), nor a fabula (a tale that couldn’t possibly occur), but an argumentum (something that did not but could happen, because it is both plausible and consistent with God’s moral intentions).47 Since Dante did not actually ascend to heaven in 1300, his whole Comedy (including his dialogue with Francesca) is an argumentum or a collection of non falsi errori, and on these grounds he thinks it is justifiable







FOU R


In the previous chapter, I argued that Dante’s suspicion of concrete, descriptive, narrative writing arose from specific philosophical doctrines. He distrusted emotions; he believed that tragedy was impossible; and he denied that partiality was ever legitimate. Plenty of philosophers—including such canonical authorities as Aristotle and Hume— would disagree. Those who adopt different philosophical views from Dante’s may be unmoved by his specific attack on literature. They may find the Inferno captivating because of its tragic pathos, but believe that the Divine Comedy weakens as the protagonist ascends to heaven and learns medieval Catholic metaphysics and ethics (with which they disagree). However, the conf lict between literature and philosophy goes deeper than this. Not just medieval scholasticism, but moral philosophy in general rests on the following idea: when we read stories, we must look for the presence or relevance of concepts and principles that can be defended with general, theoretical arguments. Morally good stories are ones that generate emotional reactions consistent with abstract moral principle. Thus moral philosophy is the ultimate guide; stories are to be tested for their consistency with it. Kant represents a radical version of this position. He warns that our reactions to stories are very unreliable and do not provide any grounds for moral judgment: “One cannot damage morality more than by seeking to borrow it from examples. For each example that is set before me must itself be judged first by principles of morality, whether it is worthy to be a primary example, that is, to serve as a model, but in no way can it dependably provide the conception” of morality.



CH A P T E R


Kant even applies this reasoning to the most authoritative story he knows, the New Testament. In his view, the Gospels embody general, abstract truths. However, we do not know this because of the rhetorical power or provenance of the stories themselves. The text proves nothing. Rather, our reason tells us what is Good and Right, and then we see that Jesus (as described in the New Testament stories) embodies those concepts. It is not a reliable method to emulate the behavior of a good character in a story, even if the character is Jesus. Nor should we trust texts that represent (“imitate”) concrete reality. “Imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement, i.e., they make visible that which the practical rule expresses more generally, but they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies in reason, and to guide ourselves by examples.”1 We must first reason about what is Right and Good, and then select illustrative stories to instruct the young. Kant takes a controversially strong line against drawing any moral conclusions from stories or imitative writing. Some philosophers disagree, arguing that stories provide useful data for moral theory. There are, for example, numerous philosophical articles and sections of books that use summaries of well-known literary works to provoke moral intuitions in the reader. These intuitions are then used to support or undermine abstract and general positions. Often, a major historical philosopher is quoted as the source of the general positions under consideration.2 In other words, we are supposed to turn our reactions to an individual story into a general view consistent with our moral beliefs. Intuitions are helpful starting points for theory, according to this view; but they are not good places to stop. In the following sections, I will argue that this position is mistaken. When we read good stories well, our moral reactions are valid, and any generalizations that we derive from stories are only hypotheses that need to be tested against other stories. Furthermore, “good” stories are not ones that embody or correspond to independent moral truths. Rather, they display certain moral virtues (and lack certain moral f laws) that are appropriate to narrative. This position is an alternative to the one I attributed to Dante in Chapter 3. It implies a critique of the whole Divine Comedy, if we understand that book as a fictional representation of a world organized around abstract virtues and vices. It requires an argument against the methods and assumptions, not of any particular philosopher, but of moral theory in general.



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Simon Blackburn describes a fundamental assumption of moral theory: “In trying to discover what to do, we imagine different actions, and register their good and bad features. It is essential to this process that these features are reliably extracted from any contexts or total situations in which we have come across them, and carry some moral import when transplanted into the new hypothetical situation. . . . If these features lost their moral import just as they were abstracted from other cases, in which they had been marinaded with others to give some holistic moral gestalt, then this process would be totally unjustified.”3 According to Blackburn, moral theory requires that well-defined moral concepts have consistent meanings, regardless of the contexts or situations in which they appear. Such concepts are the main topics of philosophical analysis. Presented with a complex story like Francesca’s as a moral case, a philosopher who agrees with Blackburn would seek circumstances that justify the application of general moral concepts. Francesca’s case seems to involve promise-breaking, deceit, self-indulgence, lust, pleasure, happiness, love, freedom, and self-fulfillment. These all appear to be moral (not merely empirical or aesthetic) concepts, and each one is either good or bad wherever it appears. They push us in various directions, so we need to use judgment to decide what to think of Francesca; no single concept generates a verdict. Nevertheless, the fact that her behavior involves a broken promise makes it worse than it would otherwise be. The fact that it expresses freedom or increases happiness makes it better. And so on. A large proportion of philosophical argumentation involves efforts to define such ideas and to demonstrate the consequences of a particular definition. We can even categorize philosophers by asking: To which words or phrases do they attribute consistent polarities? And how (if at all) do they recommend that we rank or weigh such concepts when they seem to clash? Thus, for example, utilitarians hold that happiness has a constantly positive significance and is the yardstick by which we measure other moral concepts; but Kant thinks that happiness has no consistent moral polarity. The use of such concepts has the advantage of allowing what Jonathan Dancy calls “switching arguments.”4 We form a strong opinion about the moral polarity of a concept that arises in well-understood cases, and then we apply (or “switch”) it to new situations. So, for example, if we admire conventional marriage because it ref lects long-term mutual



The Case for Particularism


commitment, then we ought to admire the same feature in gay relationships. The goal is to arm us with a set of concepts that have known moral polarities, so that we can apply them in the new situations that life throws at us. These concepts will not always settle cases, since often they conf lict with other concepts that are equally relevant. But they will give us guidance. However, what if moral concepts do not have the same valence or polarity in each case? What if they are not always good or bad (even ceteris paribus), but instead change their polarity depending on the context? Clearly, this is true of some concepts. For example, as noted earlier, pleasure is often a good thing, but not if it comes from observing someone else’s pain—then it is actually bad, even if it has no impact on the sufferer. Many people think it is a mistake to isolate “pleasure” as a general moral concept, because one cannot tell whether it makes things better or worse, except by examining how it works in each context. Philosophers have always been eager to reject some potential moral concepts as ambiguous and unreliable; but they have wanted to retain at least a few terms as guides to judgment. Thus, for instance, Kant drops “pleasure” and “happiness” from the moral lexicon, but “duty” remains. Shortening the list of moral ideas is helpful, because it reduces the number of circumstances in which we may observe clashing reasons. It is a way of systematizing. Dancy asserts, however, that “every consideration is capable of having its practical polarity reversed by changes in context.”5 He believes that no concepts, reasons, or values can be relied on to have the same moral polarity in all circumstances. Whether a feature of an act or situation is good or bad always depends on the context, on the way that the feature interacts with other factors that are also present in the concrete situation. This is the position that he calls “particularism” and that Anthony W. Price has called “variabalism.”6 It violates one of the premises that I claimed was definitive of moral philosophy in Chapter 2. To shake our confidence that some important moral concepts have consistent polarities, Dancy provides examples in which the expected moral significance of a concept is reversed by the context. For example, truth-telling is generally good. But willingly telling the truth to a Gestapo agent, even about some trivial matter such as the time of day, would be worse than lying. Returning a borrowed item is usually good—but not if you learn that it was stolen, in which case it is wrong to give it back to the thief.7 An analogy to aesthetic judgment may be useful here. We can say of a whole painting that it is beautiful, harmonious, striking, or original. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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We make such judgments after absorbing the details of the painting: the splash of red color over there, the angel’s rapturous expression, the unusual placement of the vanishing point. But none of these features has aesthetic value in isolation or as a general rule. Red splashes sometimes contribute to beauty, sometimes they detract, and sometimes they are irrelevant to aesthetic judgment. To be sure, we can sometimes make a separate aesthetic judgment about a part of a painting, such as a single figure in a crowd scene or the background in a landscape. However, many important components of paintings are not subject to separate judgments: they are not beautiful or ugly in themselves, but only in context. Moreover, the fact that a particular component is beautiful on its own does not prove that it will contribute to the overall beauty of the work. As Blackburn notes, a rapturous expression on the face of an angel adds beauty to a Bellini, but it would only make a Warhol campier.8 Likewise, according to Dancy, we must apply moral judgments to whole situations, not to features of them. We can call a situation good, fair, or appropriate, but we cannot apply such words to the morally important aspects of situations. Lying, causing pain, repaying debts, and other concepts of this type are like splashes of red paint: they are important to notice before one makes a judgment, but they lack a moral polarity except in context. Sometimes people view such an emphasis on moral context as slack, as an excuse to do—or to excuse—wrong actions because of where or when they happen to occur.9 This is not a fair criticism. Dancy’s position does not merely imply that something usually bad (such as lying) can be good in particular situations; it also implies that something usually good (such as generosity) can be bad in context. Thus one is not excused from making moral judgments, nor does Dancy’s view permit more acts than conventional moral philosophy would. He simply argues that one must—morally must—make judgments about the right kinds of things. Categories such as lying and adultery are not the right objects of moral scrutiny; whole situations are. But surely there are some important concepts that necessarily point in one moral direction. For instance, to say that an act is “murder” is always to say that it is wrong, because if it isn’t wrong, then it’s justifiable homicide (or perhaps not a killing at all). Some twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians treated the concept of adultery much the same way. They observed that not every sexual act committed out of wedlock constitutes “adultery,” because God sometimes commands such acts. Consequently, “adultery” must mean unjustified sex out of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




wedlock, and this is all that the Ten Commandments forbid.10 Even though the commandment not to commit adultery is categorical, some cases of extramarital sex can be excused. There is an evident problem of circularity here. We can declare adultery (and murder, lying, theft, and other sins) to be wrong in all cases, but we will have achieved this result by using the words only when the acts are unjustified. The moral precept “do not commit adultery” will give us little guidance, because any specific act of extramarital sex may be licit. The scholastics tried to add some specificity when they declared that adultery was always extramarital sex done “ex libidine”—a word for “desire” that has negative connotations. Even God could not permit people to act ex libidine, because He would be contradicting himself. But this amounts to saying that adultery is extramarital sex motivated by bad desire, and that bad desire is desire that is bad. Kant reasons much the same way when, following scholastic practice, he distinguishes between a “lie” (mendacium), which always violates moral law, and a mere “untruth” ( falsiloquium), which is permissible.11 (His notorious conclusion that we may never lie rests upon this distinction. Misleading the Gestapo would be falsiloquium, not mendacium, so it would be permitted.) The evident problem is the difficulty of telling which acts are murders instead of homicides, or cases of adultery instead of examples of love, pity, freedom or happiness. It appears that some concepts (such as “murder”) mark out cases that are good or bad, but their moral significance is part of their definition, so they provide little moral guidance—although they at least alert us to the fact that some behaviors are so problematic that they deserve negative words of their own. Other concepts have strong moral connotations (either positive or negative), but they admit exceptions. For instance, adultery generally seems sordid, but it can be acceptable or even praiseworthy in some circumstances. We need to explain both how a word can merit positive or negative associations, and how exceptions can arise. Mark Norris Lance and Margaret Olivia Little propose a theory of “defeasible generalization.”12 The following are defeasible generalizations taken from science: Fish eggs turn into fish. A struck match lights. These assertions are certainly not always true. In fact, very few fish eggs actually turn into fish, and I rarely get a match going on the first try. Nevertheless, a fish egg turns into a fish unless something intervenes. Even though the probability of its reaching the fish stage is low, to do so is its nature. The paradigm cases are the ones in which the egg turns into a fish and the struck match catches fire. All the other outcomes, even if they are more 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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common, are deviant. To understand that something will normally or naturally turn into a fish is to realize that it is a fish egg. Lance and Little make a close analogy to moral issues: “Many key moral concepts—indeed, the workhorses of moral theory—are the subjects of defeasible moral generalizations . . . . Take the example of pain. We believe it is important to any adequate morality to recognize that defeasibly, pain is bad-making.” In other words, causing pain really is bad, even though there are exceptions that may turn out to be common. An acceptable activity that causes pain, such as athletic competition, gains its meaning from the way in which it departs from the norm.13 Moral discernment is grasping the difference between paradigm cases and aberrant ones. Other examples of concepts that deserve generally positive moral associations include the whole Aristotelian canon of virtues: liberality, temperance, courage, and the like. They are good things, although there are certainly circumstances in which they are bad. Developing an idea of J.L. Austin’s, Bernard Williams calls such concepts “thick.” “Thick” words or phrases “seem to express a union of fact and value. The way these notions are applied is determined by what the world is like (for instance, by how someone has behaved), and yet, at the same time, their application usually involves a certain valuation of the situation, of persons or actions. Moreover, they usually (though not necessarily directly) provide reasons for action.”14 These concepts have strong and predictable—although not absolutely consistent—moral valences. I think it is a weakness of pure particularism that it cannot explain why such concepts are especially weighty. Courage and murder are not like the color green—good or bad entirely depending on the circumstances. As David McNaughton and Piers Rawling argue, some words are “central” to morality, because we can reasonably expect them to be strongly positive whenever they appear, and not merely because we have defined them as good. Another set of concepts are strongly negative virtually whenever they make an appearance.15 Thus, for instance, adultery is not just wrong because it is defined as “unjustified extramarital sex.” Rather, it is (almost) always wrong because we know the importance of sexual fidelity. “Rape” and “torture” are even stronger examples of words whose powerful moral valences are based on experience and judgment. But I do not think that all moral concepts work this way. Take the crucial example of love. We might say, as a defeasible generalization, that love is good. We know that in some cases love is bad. Adultery, obsessive love, and lust are common examples (although each of these 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




bad categories admits counter-examples that happen to be good). But maybe it is true to say that love is good just in the same way that it is true to say that fish eggs turn into fish. This principle (arguably) reveals an understanding of the concept of love even though many cases are exceptional. I do believe, as a statistical generalization, that most cases of love are good. However, I also believe that we have a tendency to overlook the bad side of love, especially if we are the subject or object of it. We have biases in favor of love that presumably arise from our biological desires for sex and companionship and from the legacy of a million stories, poems, paintings, movies, and songs in which the protagonists fall in love and are admired for it. As I discuss in more detail below, Francesca is an example of someone who wrongly adopts the principle that love is good. It seems that for her the goodness of love is universal and obvious. But even if the principle is treated as a defeasible generalization, a default position, or a rebuttable presumption, it is likely to mislead. And we have an alternative. That is to say that love is nearly always morally significant. It is rarely neutral. Yet you cannot know, without looking at the whole situation, whether love is a good or a bad thing. Given the important possibility that love may be bad, or that a good love may have some element or danger of bad love (or vice-versa), it is not right to make any presumption about its moral “valence” until you hear the whole story. This is a form of particularism, but a moderate one that avoids saying that every concept is morally variable. An opponent of particularism may say: Love is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This makes it a highly imperfect concept. We would be better off with two words, for instance, “good-love” and “bad-love” (or agape and eros).16 The definition of these words would not be morally tautological; we wouldn’t just say that “good-love” is love whenever it is good. Instead, a proper definition would connect “good-love” to more general moral concepts like justice and virtue, which we would also define. For example, “good-love” might be carefully defined so that it included all instances of love between pairs of consenting adults who are not married to others, because our general moral theory tells us to value love when it is both monogamous and free. As a moderate particularist, I reply: love is an extremely important moral concept. If love is involved in a case, that fact is almost always morally relevant. A story that ignores the existence of love among the parties is probably defective. However, love is morally ambiguous, in the precise sense that it only has a moral valence in context—sometimes it makes things better pro tanto (as far as that goes), and sometimes it 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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makes things worse. Although it may be good more often than it is bad, it is not prima facie good; it’s too unpredictable to support any assumption about its moral polarity until we see how it works in context. I believe that we cannot live morally without the concept “love,” nor can we split it into two categories. “Love” is not just the union of two concepts: good-love and bad-love. Part of the definition of “love” is that it can be either good or bad, or can easily change from good to bad (or vice-versa), or can be good and bad at the same time in various complex ways. As David Velleman writes in a recent essay on one type of love (a “fierce” and “compelling” attachment to a particular other person), this emotion “can coexist with, can indeed give rise to, the very opposite of benevolent affection, in the form of hostility or even hate. You can want to hurt someone you love, and both your love for him and your desire to hurt him can still be wholehearted.”17 Martha Nussbaum argues that love “unfolds, evolves, in human time. It is no one thing at all, but a complex way of being with another person . . . There are no necessary and sufficient conditions, and no certainty. . . . [Only a] story could show us a complexity, a many-sidedness, a temporally evolving plurality” that is missing in all “explicit theories” of love.18 So far, we have identified concepts that are generally good or generally bad, and also concepts that are morally variable. One problem for moral theory is that some of our essential concepts fall into the morally-variable category. A second problem is that many of our moral concepts—whether they have consistent or variable valances—are “shapeless.” As an analogy, consider (a) all the trees that are in Birnam Wood, versus (b) all the trees that are north of the 57th Parallel. Any given tree belongs to neither, one, or both of these categories. Both categories are meaningful; but Birnam Wood is shapeless whereas the 57th Parallel has a shape. To see whether a tree stands north of a latitude line, one measures its latitude and applies a rule. To see whether it belongs to Birnam Wood, one must observe the irregular shape of that forest. Particularists assert that many important moral concepts are “shapeless” in this sense.19 Shapelessness resembles the concept of “family-resemblance” from the terminology of the later Wittgenstein. Sometimes, we recognize that people belong to a family, not because they all have one feature in common, but because each individual looks like many of his or her relatives in many ways. Maybe eight out of twelve family members have similar noses; a different six out of the twelve have the same color hair; and a yet another seven have the same chin. Then they all resemble 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




each other, although there is no (non-trivial) common denominator. Wittgenstein argued that some—although not all—perfectly useful words are like this. They name sets of objects that resemble one another; but members of each set do not share any defining feature. Their resemblance is a statistical clustering, a greater-than-random tendency to share multiple traits. A good example is “curry,” which the dictionary defines as a dish f lavored with several ground spices. The word “curry” thus describes innumerable individual cases, where each one resembles many of the rest, but there is no single ingredient or other characteristic that they all share. Nor is there a clear boundary between curry and other dishes. Is bouillabaisse a curry? Clearly not, although the dictionary’s definition applies to it. Indeed, any definition will prove inadequate, yet we can learn to recognize a curry and distinguish it from other kinds of food. If we want to teach someone how to use the word “curry,” we will serve several particular examples and also perhaps some dishes that are not curries. If the student draws the conclusion that a curry must always contain coriander, or must be soupy, or must be served over rice, then we can serve another curry that meets none of these criteria. Gradually, he will learn to use the word. Even sophisticates will debate about borderline cases, but that is the nature of such concepts. Their lack of definition does not make them useless. It seems to me that “love” is shapeless, a family-resemblance word, and also morally variable. There is no common denominator to love for ice cream, love for a newborn baby, love of country, brotherly love for humanity, self-love, tough love, Platonic love, making love, amor fati, philately, etc. Some (but not all) of these forms of “love” involve a high regard for the object. Some (but not all) imply a commitment to care for the object. Some (but not all) signify an intense emotional state. Some are prima facie good; others, prima facie bad; and still others, morally neutral. Dictionaries cope by providing numerous definitions of love, thus suggesting that “love” means “lust” or “enthusiasm” or “adoration” or “agape” or “loyalty.” But “love” never quite means the same as any of these other words, because we faintly recognize all of its other meanings whenever it is used in a particular way. For instance, “love” is always different from “lust,” just because the former word can mean loyal adoration as well as sexual desire. The experience of love is complex because one has usually loved before in several different ways and has seen, heard, or read many descriptions of other loves; and these past examples and descriptions become part of the present experience. “Love” is a familyresemblance word that brings its family along when it visits. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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1. Concepts that declare general moral verdicts or all-things-considered judgments. Examples: just, good, right; unjust, bad, wrong. Professional philosophers have drawn technical distinctions among these words. For modern Anglo-American philosophers, “rightness” refers to how a situation arose (e.g., whether moral rights were respected), whereas “goodness” describes a state of affairs (e.g., whether people are happy). These are useful distinctions as terms of art, but they don’t apply in ordinary language. Normally, “good” is very much like “just”—it is a mark of overall moral approval, rather like a nod or a favorable vote. As Wittgenstein noted, “You might say that certain words are only pegs to hang intonations on.”20 2. Concepts that make empirical claims about situations or actions, and at the same time make overall moral judgments. Examples: murder, torture. These are “thick” concepts. Correctly applying them requires knowing what actually happened, and weighing and assessing all the relevant aspects of the case. For example, we only call a killing “murder” if it has actually occurred and if we consider it unjustifiable, all things considered. The moral significance of such terms is not controversial, but we can debate whether they apply in particular cases. Some people interpret virtue and vice words in this way. They argue, for example, that one exhibits “courage” only when one acts in an appropriately fearless way. Excessive or misplaced bravery is not courage but rather foolhardiness or belligerence. Interpreted this way, the sentence “She has courage” is a factual assertion combined with an overall (favorable) moral judgment. 3. Concepts that describe aspects of situations and that usually have negative moral valences. Examples: lying, adultery. Such terms may be outweighed by positive descriptors that also apply in the same cases. Or, in certain instances, such terms may actually mark something good about a situation, as when lying to the Gestapo shows courage rather than duplicity. (In this way, lying is different from murder, which is wrong by definition.) However, we can reasonably claim that such concepts are usually bad when they apply, at least prima facie. This general belief rest on our collective experience of many similar cases and also our ability to analyze these concepts abstractly. We know, for example, that there is a typical problem with adultery: it violates a promise. But we cannot conclude that adulterous behavior is necessarily wrong, even ceteris paribus. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


The discussion so far has identified six categories of moral concepts:


There are also concepts that are like this but good instead of bad. Examples: charity, freedom, equity, forgiveness. 4. Concepts that have strong moral significance but do not have predictable polarities. These concepts are almost always important to consider in making a moral judgment, but we cannot know in advance what their significance will be. Examples: love, learning, authority. 5. Concepts that describe natural objects that are usually, but not necessarily, good or bad. Examples: nutritious food, sensations of happiness; poison, pain. These concepts can be given definitions in non-moral terms. For example, a sensation of happiness could probably be measured with a scientific instrument. Its moral significance, however, is unpredictable. 6. Concepts that occasionally figure in moral assessment but are not seen as typically moral. For example, if you promise to repay a debt on Tuesday, then the fact that today is Wednesday has moral significance. Yet “Wednesday” is not typically a morally salient word. Examples of this category are too diverse to list. This list is not a series of discrete possibilities, but rather a continuum. A concept can almost represent a negative verdict of a situation, yet have a slightly unpredictable moral polarity. “Adultery” might be an example; it would fall between the second and third category listed above. Or a concept could be almost devoid of moral significance yet have a slightly positive or negative moral ring. Unfortunately, the concepts that are the most definable in naturalistic terms are also the least morally clear—and vice-versa. Thus theorists typically want to bring some order and coherence to the full range of morally-relevant concepts. They want somehow to combine the empirical clarity of the last category with the moral clarity of the first.21 For example, imagine that we could define “adultery” by reference to a set of empirical behaviors. We might say that adultery occurs if and only if A, who is married to B, deliberately kisses or has sex with or fantasizes about having sex with C. Imagine, further, that we could show that adultery, so defined, is always wrong or bad or immoral. Then we could link ordinary natural concepts (like kissing) with grand moral concepts (like wrongness), by way of “thick” moral/empirical concepts (like adultery). Clearly, we cannot systematize in this way if we use these words as in ordinary language. “Adultery,” as commonly used, is usually but not necessarily wrong; and while it can be defined, it cannot be defined naturalistically by asking whether any of a list of specified behaviors 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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has occurred. Compared to adultery, “love” looks even less promising, because it is even less morally predictable, even further from natural concepts—and besides, it is a family-resemblance term. To construct a theory, we want important concepts to entail or preclude other concepts. But family-resemblance words rarely work that way; they are too vague and encompass too much diversity. At best, they correlate with other concepts. For instance, “love” tends to combine with both “admiration” and “care.” Such correlations are useful for justifying moral rules-of-thumb—e g., “love is good”—but they are too weak and contingent to support the general moral conclusions that philosophers have traditionally sought. Efforts to Reform Language Philosophers have long acknowledged that few (if any) concepts automatically settle concrete cases. We must be satisfied with prima facie or pro tanto moral concepts: notions that are good or bad, absent some unusual circumstances. However, philosophers are trained to distrust moral concepts whose valence is truly unpredictable. Particularists assert that many of our most important concepts are indeed unpredictable: not even pro tanto good or bad, except in context. This is a fundamental problem for philosophy. One solution would be to drop all the problematic concepts from moral philosophy altogether. Let the poets pipe of “love”—and let historians tell the story of the way the word has been used—but philosophers must use precise concepts with consistent meanings that apply to definable categories of things in the world. Clearly, this approach will fail if “love” is not a rare example of a word that is uncodifiable and/ or capable of switching its moral polarity. I think the same is true of “happiness,” “pleasure,” “trust,” courage,” “duty,” “right,” “freedom,” and most of the traditional philosophical lexicon. In short, excising the shapeless or unreliable words will leave us with a very limited moral vocabulary, incapable of grappling with our problems.22 As Williams writes in a slightly different context, theorists tend to criticize—and seek to delete—conventional moral concepts, but “our major problem now is that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.”23 Another solution is to stipulate precise definitions of words like “love,” just for the purpose of a moral theory. A moral philosopher might state at the outset of her argument that “love” has many meanings in popular 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




usage, but for the purpose of her article it means “a positive evaluation of an object combined with a commitment to care for it.” The theorist can then discuss when “love” (so defined) is appropriate, what duties it entails, etc. This method requires a lot of stipulation, since not only “love” but also most of the other key concepts in any sustained argument will need to be given specialized definitions. But that is not necessarily an objection to the method. No argument can solve all problems at once; we must tolerate some ambiguity in the interests of clarifying particular points. As W.V.O. Quine famously wrote: “we must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”24 This seems a good description of contemporary analytic moral philosophy, which often aims to sharpen a definition or distinction here or there in order to generate a moral conclusion, while retaining most of the terminology of ordinary language. We must start with ordinary language, because the meaning of a word is the history of its use (where we understand “use” as wrestling with real moral and empirical questions). As J.L. Austin wrote: “Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and all the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations.”25 However, not all meanings that evolve over time are desirable. While the expansion of the word “rape” to include almost all cases of forced sexual contact is a moral advance, the casual extension of the word “love” in American English is unfortunate. Quine argued that we can and should contest the meanings of words, a few at a time. The question is: What criteria should we use in challenging traditional meanings? One approach is to try to derive most moral concepts from a few that are self-evident or otherwise “foundational”; but philosophers increasingly reject this approach.26 Instead, they turn to coherence theories of moral truth. A coherence theory asserts that we have reason to believe individual propositions that belong to sets of propositions that exhibit certain formal virtues, such as internal consistency and tight logical relationships among their members. In the moral field, theorists look for sets of moral concepts that exhibit precision, generality, and consistency.27 Sets of concepts cohere when the concepts are used in rules or principles that fit together well. If two moral rules contradict one another in a particular case, that is a reason against believing in both of them. We 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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should look for an alternative rule that can make sense of all our moral intuitions without such a contradiction. Likewise, a moral rule ought to be precise enough that it can be clearly applied to some cases (and not to others). And a moral rule or principle that is narrow and that doesn’t seem to f low from any more general belief ought to be rejected for that reason. For instance, the theory “Maximize the good for all human beings; but whatever you do, don’t lie” fails to exhibit coherence. It may give clear enough advice in all cases, and it may not be contradictory, but the clause at the end pops up from nowhere. Moral propositions should ref lect maximum generality and should hang together.28 Coherence theories began to become standard after John Rawls revived the field of moral and political philosophy, beginning in the 1950s. Even before he published A Theory of Justice, he was advocating a methodology that he called “ref lective equilibrium.” Rawls emphasized that this method was not his invention; in fact, he claimed that he had borrowed it from Aristotle and “most classical British writers.” But Rawls presented an explicit and persuasive version of ref lective equilibrium that soon became almost universal among professional philosophers in the English-speaking world. Rawls’ methodology is highly intuitionist. He starts with the presumption that people, using ordinary, inherited moral language and methods of reasoning, will judge most cases correctly.29 But intuitionism is problematic. People disagree about cases, and even when everyone agrees, they may later turn out to be wrong. Rawls hopes that clarity, consistency, and generalization will bring progress. People make concrete judgments; they also subscribe explicitly to general moral definitions, rules, and principles. If a person realizes that some of his concrete judgments conf lict with his own broad principles, then “he may well revise his judgments . . . He is especially likely to do this if he can find an explanation for the deviation which undermines his confidence in his original judgments and if the conception presented yields a judgment which he finds he can now accept.”30 For instance, if a person holds a belief or judgment that manifests racial bias, he may discard it when shown that it clashes with his own egalitarian general principles. In other cases, a moral agent may decide that the general rules he was using were wrong, or at least too simple, and may choose to amend them to conform to his concrete judgments. Thus Rawls wants us to make intuitive judgments about concrete cases and about general rules and strive to make the two consistent. There is no guarantee that human beings will make the correct choices when confronted with conf licts between their particular judgments and their 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




general beliefs. However, Rawls thinks that “going back and forth” between the two will produce the best result that we can hope for: a set of “considered judgments in ref lective equilibrium.”31 I will return to Rawls later, in discussing the hazards of moral generalization. For now, my claim is that Rawls is fundamentally an intuitionist who thinks that we can improve our intuitive judgments (and also our moral vocabulary) by making our concrete moral judgments more consistent with clear and general rules, and vice-versa. This method is standard in analytic moral philosophy. Most philosophers appeal to intuitions as the test of an argument’s validity, but they also presume that valid moral judgments will conform to general rules or principles that seem intuitively correct. This approach can be attacked on three fronts. From one side, those who admire the rich, complex, and ambiguous vocabulary that has evolved within our culture over time will resist the effort to reform traditional language—and moral reasoning—by making our judgments more consistent. They may want to challenge conventional concepts and opinions, but not simply in order to increase their clarity, generality, and consistency. Indeed, they may think that these three criteria are morally hazardous. After all, there is a lot of wisdom contained in the vague and morally indeterminate vocabulary that ordinary language gives us. Words like “love” and “adultery” introduce complex and not entirely predictable penumbra of allusions, implications, and connotations. Barely conscious images of concrete events from history, literature, and our personal lives may f lit through our heads when someone uses these words. Everyone may recall a somewhat different set of such images, sometimes with contrary moral implications. This array of sometimes inconsistent references is problematic if we prize clarity. Hence moral theorists attempt to excise overly vague terms or to stipulate clear meanings. But the complexity and vagueness of words is beneficial (rather than problematic) if human beings have embodied in their language real family resemblances and real ambiguities. There really are curries, and it would reduce our understanding of food to ban the word “curry” for vagueness or to define it arbitrarily. Likewise, there really is “love,” and it would impoverish our grasp of moral issues to try to reason without this concept or to define it in such a way that it shed its complex and ambiguous connotations, some of which derive from profound works of poetry, drama, and fiction. Thus one attack on modern analytic philosophy suggests that it is too critical of inherited moral judgments, as ref lected in ordinary language. Another attack suggests that Rawls and fellow practitioners of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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ref lective equilibrium rely too heavily on intuitions. For classical pagans and medieval Christians alike, the test of a moral judgment was not intuition; it was whether the judgment was consistent with the genuine end or purpose of human life. However, modern moral philosophy denies that there is a knowable telos for human beings. We are therefore thrown back on intuition as the test of truth.32 Even moral realists, who believe that there is a moral truth independent of human knowledge, must still rely on our intuitions as the best evidence of truth. But this is something of a scandal, because no one thinks that intuitions are reliable. It is unlikely that we were built with internal meters that accurately measure morality. Finally, some critics of ref lective equilibrium note that it can promote complacency. As long as one’s intuitions cohere, everything is fine. But wouldn’t it be better to live in a state of tension and uncertainty, driven by conf licting moral demands and beliefs, self-critical and dissatisfied, than to think that the status quo is adequate because all of one’s views cohere? Again, Simon Blackburn puts it well: “Is it likely that becoming more coherent is the only kind of improvement in my own sensibility that I can contemplate? No increases of imagination, sensitivity, or empathy? No cultivation of hidden joys or unlocking of virgin springs of contentment, no larger views or wider sympathies? This sounds like nonsense. And similarly the like view that the method must be entirely one of improving ref lective equilibrium. Such suggestions appear to take the current stock of attitudes as a datum, with the problem only that of making them rub along properly with each other; whereas often real improvement must require an expansion and change of the stock.”33 For all these reasons, I think it is a grave mistake to imagine that we can make moral progress by reducing our vocabulary or redefining words so as to bridge the gap between the moral and the natural. Many moral concepts are uncodifiable or unpredictable out of context. Philosophy seeks to improve them by making them clearer, more coherent, and more consistent; but this will not help us to make better moral judgments. Nor would we be better off if we cleansed our moral vocabulary of the “shapeless” and naturalistically indefinable terms, because we would be left with too few concepts with which to reason. Instead, we should abandon the goal implicit in much moral philosophy. We will never be able to enter a situation pre-armed with a list of well-defined concepts, each of which applies to a range of states of affairs that are always good, just, fair, or right. We cannot know in advance what the presence of important features will imply. This means, for example, that we should not approach the story of Paolo and Francesca with the pre-existing idea that adultery is necessarily 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine



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wrong and bad. Nor should we make the romantic’s mistake of thinking that Francesca’s behavior must be good if it exemplifies love.

How then are we to judge such cases and make decisions? The standard response of “particularists” (those who trust particular judgments over abstract rules) is to speak in terms of perception.34 John McDowell writes: “Occasion by occasion, one knows what to do, if one does, not by applying universal principles, but by being a certain kind of person: one who sees situations in a certain distinctive way.”35 David Wiggins likewise says, “A man usually asks himself ‘What shall I do?’ . . . in response to a particular context. This will make particular and contingent demands on his moral and practical perception, but the relevant features of the situation may not all jump to the eye. To see what they are, to prompt the imagination to play upon the question and let it activate in ref lection and thought-experiment whatever concerns and passions it should activate, may require a high order of situational appreciation, or, as Aristotle would say, perception (aesthêsis).”36 Judging a moral case is like assessing a painting; one observes the whole object with a critical eye. Being moral is not a matter of knowledge, but rather a skill, akin to developing a taste for Old Masters. I think there is truth in this position, but it can seem dangerously arbitrary or even dandyish (by making morality look like connoisseurship). I believe we can do better by anchoring moral judgment in the logic of narrative. This method will suggest a different way of interpreting the story of Paolo and Francesca. A story, whether fictional or historical, is a coherent description of a set of events. Its coherence may not be causal, such that the first event causes the second, which causes the third, etc. Instead, narrative coherence can take many forms, including: unity of character (one agent does a set of things sequentially); unity of community (a set of connected agents do a set of things); teleological unity (a set of events builds up to a significant conclusion); or thematic unity (many things with similar meanings are described). Often more than one form of unity applies. Five features of narratives are especially relevant to the argument of this book: 1. Narratives enable “thick descriptions.” In Gilbert Ryle’s famous example, we may either say that someone “contracted his eyelid” or that he 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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“winked conspiratorially.” The former is a thin description; the latter, a thick one.37 Thick descriptions often have moral significance. Contracting an eyelid is neutral, but winking conspiratorially is morally dubious. If it turns out that the contracting eyelid was a signal to commit murder, then that even thicker description marks the act as prima facie immoral. (Thus Bernard Williams adopted Ryle’s word “thick” to describe concepts that combine empirical and moral meanings). What justifies a thick description is almost always a story. For example, a camera would record a wink as a wink, whether it was a signal to commit murder or the result of biting a lemon. We know that it is one thing rather than the other because of what comes before and after it. But we don’t consider every prior and subsequent event, nor do we focus exclusively on actions that cause the wink or are caused by it. Rather, we “thicken” the description by placing the event within a coherent narrative. Particularists argue that moral judgment is about “whole situations,” not about concepts abstracted from their contexts. But how extensive is a “whole situation”? We answer that question case-by-case when we tell a story. A narrative describes all the events, emotions, statements (and so on) that the teller considers relevant to judgment. If you don’t believe that she has defined the moral situation correctly, your response is to tell a different story that omits details you find morally irrelevant or that adds important facts that you think she overlooked. To a large extent, moral debate is about what constitutes “situations”; and the medium of debate is narrative. 2. Narratives structure our experience of concepts. A philosophical argument promises a path from a premise to a conclusion. But moral premises or intuitions always rest on experiences, and we deal with them as they are described in narratives. For instance, our concept of love is colored by our past direct and vicarious experience of love stories. Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, and a host of other lovers are in the back of our minds when we love or assess others’ loves. Literature is openly allusive; most written stories refer to others, as Dante’s Canto V alludes to Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan and Iseult, and so many other texts. That allusive quality is an appropriate ref lection of moral thought. Reading a literary work that vividly describes love can change our experience of love itself (whether for better or worse). As Tzachi Zamir shows, “works of literature are structures of experience.” Any philosophical analysis of love is a discussion of the experience of love. The philosophical discussion is therefore necessarily and appropriately shaped by how love has been portrayed for us in narrative.38





3. The selection of events in a coherent narrative is moral: Human institutions and actions are always dramatically overdetermined; they arise because of many events that are insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient (INUS) conditions.39 It is a common ambition of social science to measure as many of these factors as possible in order to assess their relative contribution to the outcome. For instance, we try to predict the decision to vote in terms of factors like the voter’s income, race, and gender, the nature of the election, and the individual’s opinions and preferences. Only an unreconstructed positivist would claim that this approach is value-neutral. Social scientists must always omit some contributing factors, and they must always decide how to measure the factors that are included in their models (e.g., demographic background includes race, which is a morally contested category). Nevertheless, social science often aspires to neutrality and comprehensiveness. Ideally, every contributing factor goes into the model. In contrast, a historian almost always emphasizes factors of moral significance—especially the intentions of human beings.40 So too does a novelist, in constructing fictional narratives. Writers of narrative combine causal explanation with moral judgment by making salient those causes that they deem most morally weighty. They are not engaged in retrospective prediction; their goal is much closer to moral interpretation. Social science is extremely useful, because it allows us to assess causes that may not be deliberate or intentional. But if we want to make judgments and decisions, we need to tell stories. 4. Narratives help to ascribe responsibility for collective actions: I assume that “I am only accountable for a harm if something I did made a difference to its occurrence.” I also assume that “I am only accountable for events over which I have control, and whose occurrence I could have prevented.”41 Christopher Kutz demonstrates that these two assumptions are essential. Unfortunately, we may belong to groups that do very serious harms, yet each member of the group can rightly say, “I made no difference to the outcome, and I couldn’t control what happened.” In these cases—which probably create the bulk of the world’s evils—standard reasoning suggests that no one is accountable for the wrong. But you needn’t will an end to be responsible for it; you must only be knowingly part of a group that is moving toward some end. And it doesn’t matter whether the predictable or intended outcome of the group is actually reached: you are accountable if you associate yourself with a group that has a bad telos. Unfortunately, it is often unclear whether a person is an intentional participant in a group. It’s one thing when I voluntarily join a defined and formal body. For example, if I 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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choose to buy stock in a company whose negligence kills people, that is my problem (morally), even if I had no reason to know about the company’s behavior. But there are many harder cases, especially ones involving loose social networks. When we consider whether someone morally belongs to a group, the form of our reasoning is a narrative. We want to know whether people are intentionally part of a set of coherent actions that lead toward some telos.42 Novelists are good at showing that sets of characters are linked in morally salient ways; indeed, such linkages often provide the main themes of novels. Like novelists, historians tell stories that link people together for teleological reasons. Their methods, which we also use in ordinary life, are the only means we have for ascribing responsibility for group behavior. 5. Stories have themes. A theme is a significant concept, relation, or situation that appears in a story or a lyric poem. Often a theme is significant because it repeats throughout a narrative. Homer announces his theme in his first lines, and his introduction fits because the rest of his plot really does involve “rage,” and specifically, the all-consuming rage of Peleus’ son Achilleus. There are other ways to establish a theme. For example, no one dies suddenly until the short last chapter of To the Lighthouse. But when most of the book’s characters are quickly killed in diverse ways, we retrospectively decide that the fragility of their lives was a hidden theme of the earlier chapters. Determining the theme of a story is a dynamic process. We become gradually aware that a concept or situation is going to be repeated or emphasized. As we look for themes, we also decide what is literally going on in a text. For instance, in the first scene of King Lear, is Cordelia proud and hurt, or young and very shy, or perplexed by the formal ritual? Our answer does not determine the words she utters, but it decides much else (her tone, body language, location, expression). The only way to determine how she literally behaves is to consider what Lear is about as a whole. Thus Roger Seamon argues that a story’s theme is not some general proposition that we derive (validly or invalidly) from the plot. Rather, our emerging sense of a theme helps to tell us what literally happens.43 Themes fit moral particularism better than principles or theories do. A philosophical analysis of adultery, for example, might conclude that “adultery is wrong,” or “adultery is wrong when it occurs under specified conditions,” or even “adultery is both good and bad in different respects.” Even a nuanced philosophical treatment will abstract adultery from its context and make general claims about it. In contrast, a 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




novel might revolve around the theme of “adultery’s squalor.” A different novel—or even the very same one—might emphasize the theme of “adultery’s excitement.” The novel need not claim (even implicitly) that its theme is relevant to all cases of adultery. Indeed, a narrator often stresses that the story is highly unusual. Nor is it necessary for a theme to be presented as an adequate moral description of the case at hand. For example, an author who takes it for granted that adultery is immoral might make a theme out of adultery’s appeal, without thinking that its appeal is the most important thing about it. Regardless, a story often prompts focused thinking about whether its moral themes can also be found in other narratives, including the stories of our own lives. An Example: Interpreting the Paolo and Francesca Story These advantages of narrative can be demonstrated by looking carefully at an example. We can begin with the following lines: When we read that ‘the desired smile then was kissed by the ardent lover,’ he who ‘can never be torn away’ kissed me, all atremble. A Galehaut was the author of that book, and seductive was his fancy. On that day, we read no farther.”

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso, esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse: quell giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.” (Inf. v, 133–138)

Assume for the moment that the elements of Francesca’s narration are not empirically false. Then we know that two people, a man and a woman, were sitting close enough together that they could read from a single book. They put it down and their mouths touched. And then they read no more. In Ryle’s terminology, this summary is a “thin description.” It is what a behaviorist would say “really happened.” But what are we entitled to call the actions caught on the tape? When two people’s mouths touch, we can normally call it a “kiss,” although it can be something else (artificial resuscitation; an accidental collision; a simulation or parody of a kiss). Francesca says that it was a kiss, and this testimony is relevant evidence, but we must decide whether or not to believe her. To recognize a touching-of-mouths as a kiss, we need to “thicken” the minimal, close-up description of the event by placing it in a broader context. We need to turn behavior into intelligible action.44 A kiss is a deliberate touching of two people’s lips and mouth together for certain



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purposes and with certain meanings. An observer could tell whether Paolo kissed Francesca by looking at his body language (e.g., the “trembling”) and by watching what happened next. These clues rule out certain interpretations (such as an accidental collision), but they do not completely exclude play-acting. Paolo would know for sure whether he was really kissing Francesca, because a kiss is partly defined by the initiator’s intentions. Francesca might be almost as certain, because a kiss is hard to feign. Then, was it a passionate kiss? For a kiss to be passionate, it must be ardent and intense and expressive of love or desire. We do not have direct access to Paolo’s inner thoughts, and even he might be uncertain about what he had meant to do, or what he had unintentionally expressed through his impulsive act. One clue is the behavior of Paolo and Francesca after the kiss. Francesca passes over this behavior— either discreetly or winkingly—when she says “we read no further.” Most people think that the kiss was just the beginning of a sexual embrace, which is evidence that it was passionate (if not at the beginning, at least by the end). Another clue is the preceding context: Paolo kissed Francesca immediately after they read about Guinevere kissing Lancelot. That embrace occurs in the middle of a famous, tragic romance. The conjunction of a literary and a “real” kiss in Francesca’s story suggests that the former was the inspiration for the latter. And a kiss inspired by a romance is probably a passionate kiss, although maybe also a self-conscious one. So the actions under scrutiny can probably be called a “passionate kiss” if we place them in a context that includes intentions, consequences, and inspirations. This analysis is revealing and relevant, but it hardly justifies any particular moral response. Sometimes passionate kisses are good; sometimes they are bad. To find out what moral concepts apply here, we need to thicken the description further by placing it in an even broader context. Was the kiss the beginning of an affair? (Francesca implies that she and Paolo read together again on future days, which would have been unwise if they intended to refrain from kissing again.) Was it the beginning of love? I believe that the text suggests that Francesca did not love Paolo, and I will return to this question later. For now, I only want to show that the action thinly described as “touching mouths” can be thickly interpreted as the start of an affair or as evidence of love—words with deep moral significance. Was this particular passionate kiss “adulterous”? To answer that question, we need contextual details that are not supplied in the text itself, although the fact that Paolo and Francesca are damned is evidence that 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




their passion was some kind of sin (in Dante’s view). Dante expected us to “thicken” Francesca’s own narrative—which is deliberately evasive and incomplete—by introducing the additional context that she (and probably Paolo too) were married to other people when they kissed. We could debate whether a passionate kiss on the lips outside of wedlock constitutes “adultery,” but I certainly think it does in this case. Finally, assuming that this particular kiss was adulterous, was it wrong? To answer this question, we need to thicken the description at least one more time by asking about Francesca’s marriage. Details about her particular circumstances seem relevant. For example, if she was tricked into marrying, that would lead some people to call her affair with Paolo deserved rather than sinful. We also need a broader description of medieval marriage, which could be called patriarchal and oppressive, or socially valuable, or divinely sanctioned. If we believe the last interpretation, then we have “thickened” the original description so much that we have placed Paolo’s kiss within a story about the whole universe, one in which the Creator of everything decrees marriage (first in Eden, then at Cana) in order to advance His providential plan, but also gives humans the freedom to err. To imply, as Dante does, that this particular touching of two mouths is a mortal sin is to thicken the description to the maximum possible extent, by fitting it into a story about literally everything. No narrative can supply sufficient information to tell us what to imagine as we read or listen. Canto V doesn’t tell us about Francesca’s appearance, facial expressions, or tone of voice. Another story might fill in some of those details, but it would necessarily omit others. Thus readers must supply information, and much of it will depend on our evolving sense of the story’s theme. For example, some readers have seen Francesca as a regal figure, suffering with dignity on account of her self less but forbidden love; others have imagined her as a carnal sinner who refuses to acknowledge her sexual misbehavior. When she says that she and Paolo “read no more,” some readers imagine a sly wink, while others are deeply offended by that suggestion. Each camp might choose a different actress to play Francesca and would expect her to utter her lines in a different way. Roger Seamon writes: “While we normally think of thematic interpretation as the interpretation of a pre-existent story, we ought to think of it as a means of communicating what story we think has been told.”45 As we read, we develop assumptions and judgments, inf luenced by the text but not completely constrained by it. Then, when we tell someone what themes we detect in a story, we explicitly state our assumptions, such as “Francesca is a pitiable lover,” or “Francesca is a guilty 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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adulteress.” These assumptions are sometimes moral judgments, yet they inf luence our view of what literally happens in the story. In narrative, fact and value are deeply intertwined, and it is not simply that facts imply values; the reverse is also true. Thus, in trying to describe the literal level of the story, we can move from a mere touching of lips to big moral themes, including the one suggested by the overall architecture of the Divine Comedy (the narrator’s journey toward Salvation). It is also possible to place the kiss within the context of two other stories: the biography of the author, and that of the reader.46 Dante wrote the Divine Comedy at a particular point in his life, for particular reasons. In describing Francesca as he did, was he being sentimental, or sexist, or censorious? In turn, I have read the text for particular reasons, after having made other judgments about other cases of romantic love, both real and fictional. Is my interpretation of Canto V biased by my previous exposure to Romantic literature? By moving from a “thinner” to a “thicker” description of Francesca’s behavior, we did not reach a firm moral conclusion, but we did gain insight. Our vocabulary became increasingly normative as we began to talk about “censorious narratives” instead of “touching mouths.” These choices of words can be defended by citing facts about context. As Dancy says, we should not justify our judgments by explaining how particular cases are subsumed under general categories. Rather, we should justify our judgments by showing people how we see each case. “To justify one’s choice is to give the reasons one sees for making it, and to give those reasons is just to lay out how one sees the situation, starting in the right place and going on to display the various salient features in the right way. . . . The persuasiveness here is the persuasiveness of narrative: an internal coherence in the account which compels assent. We succeed in our aim when our story sounds right. Moral justification is therefore not subsumptive in nature, but narrative.”47 In this account, thick descriptions are not conclusive, but neither are they arbitrary. One of their great advantages is that they are subject to rational counter-argument. For example, if Paolo and Francesca never touched again after the famous kiss, then it was not the beginning of an “affair.” If Francesca was coerced into marrying Gianciotto, then perhaps her adultery was not a “betrayal.” If God did not ordain marriage, then marriage is not (for that reason) a holy institution. A thick description depends upon such facts and can be undermined by contrary facts. All the key words that figure in the various interpretations of this story are vaguely bordered. For example, in order to define “adultery” 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




in non-moral terms, we would need to stipulate that it always involves specific behaviors, such as “deliberate kisses on the lips of more than three-second duration between parties who are married to other people.” Such legalistic formulae will always fail to capture our moral intuitions. “Adultery” cannot be precisely defined by using only non-moral or naturalistic language, yet the word has great moral significance. In addition, many of the terms used in this story are morally unpredictable. They can make a situation better or worse, depending on the context. However, the words that I arrived at last, by “thickening” the narrative to the greatest extent, have the most predictable moral valences. For example, while “kissing” can be good or bad, a “sin” is always wrong. Yet whether the “thickest” words actually apply is controversial. Francesca’s adultery is only a sin if we consider certain contextual details to be true and relevant and interpret them in certain ways. I began my interpretation with a kiss, and that opening focused our attention on the meaning and consequences of what Paolo and Francesca did. Boccaccio starts instead with the political situation between Francesca’s family and Gianciotto’s, because he wants to plant the idea that she was a pawn in a power game involving older males; her marriage was loveless and coerced. In Boccaccio’s version, the elders of both families are so complicit that Francesca herself appears largely exonerated. One could begin in other ways, for example, with Francesca’s vow of fidelity to Gianciotto; with her reading of love poetry; with her murder; or with an account of women’s subjugation in medieval Italy. Each narrative will provoke a different response, authorizing our use of different words. One could conclude that moral judgments are arbitrary. I would prefer to say that moral judgments are rationally debatable, and one of the most common debating strategies is to counter one narrative with another. Each narrative is a selection of facts out of a much larger (perhaps infinite) array, to which the narrator gives shape. Storytellers have some freedom in how they shape a given set of facts, but they do not have complete license. That is because the intentions and reactions of human beings give stories their shape. Real characters actually have certain intentions and not other ones. Fictional characters can be assigned intentions, but not all intentions are plausible—nor is it always justifiable to invent plausible characters. For example, Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House really is bad—thoughtless, foolish, and self-centered—yet I think that Dickens was wrong to depict Mrs. Jellyby instead of a different kind of person. He could have written about a man who was so consumed with social reform that he neglected his spouse; a woman who successfully balanced public 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Moral Generalization In analyzing Francesca’s story, I tried to avoid moral generalization. I did not apply general rules to decide whether her behavior was sinful, nor did I suggest that our judgment of her could be generalized to a defined range of cases. I used broad terms, such as “adultery” and “love,” but I explicitly noted that these concepts are vague. Francesca’s love consists of her specific feelings and actions; love in general can be many things, and I tried not to reply on any general definition or assessment of it. I wrote of themes but not of rules, definitions, or principles. Clearly, however, one can use moral generalizations and categories. Rawls is one who argues that we need them to root out bias and incompetence. We must check our concrete judgments against our own general ideals, such as “fairness.” His position is an argument against strong versions of particularism, and Brad Hooker makes the case more forcefully: “I think that, with particularism as a decision procedure, people would persuade themselves that what they wanted to do was, in the particular circumstances, morally allowed, I think that people’s use of particularism as a decision procedure would regularly have terrible consequences.”48 I agree that checking our decisions against general principles sometimes disciplines our desires in beneficial ways. But we can also define general concepts, such as “fairness” or “justice,” so as to justify our own wishes and interests. As George Eliot’s narrator remarks in Middlemarch, “the use of wide phrases for narrow motives” is a common human frailty. The example under consideration is Mr. Bulstrode, whose “wide phrases” happen to be principles of nineteenth-century British Evangelical Christianity that justify his own economic interests. But Eliot argues, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”49 Hooker warns that unchecked particularism can be used to justify selfishness or other moral faults. Eliot argues that unchecked generalism has equivalent dangers. Clearly, both authors make valid points. But the degree to which we tip in either direction should depend on 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


and private responsibilities; or a woman, like Dorothea Brooke, who yearned for a public role but instead devoted her life to the private service of men. Both the intention and the likely consequences of Dickens’ portrait were to suppress the public role of women. To a considerable extent, moral debate is a matter of selecting and comparing narratives.


the extent to which we believe that important moral cases are covered by concepts that have necessary and sufficient empirical conditions and that always mean the same when they apply. If most concepts are like that, we should heed Hooker’s advice and use general moral principles to discipline our inclinations. If, on the other hand, many important moral concepts are family-resemblance or shapeless terms and/or have variable moral significance, then Eliot’s advice seems stronger. These are general arguments about the moral pros and cons of generalization. That kind of discussion is circular, but not fatally so. In fact, I believe that we have a moral obligation to discuss how much we ought to generalize (generally). At the same time, it is instructive to look at particular cases and to investigate in detail the advantages and perils of generalization under those specific circumstances. The central sin of Canto V provides an excellent opportunity for this kind of investigation. Francesca’s kiss belongs in a tradition of adultery stories, beginning with Daniel and Susannah and including the Woman Taken in Adultery in the New Testament. An explicit theme in these stories, as Dante knew, was the danger of generalization—and generalization is an essential issue in Canto V. In the background of the biblical adultery stories is Old Testament law, in all its somber generality. According to Deuteronomy, every case of adultery involves a married woman or a betrothed virgin who “lies with” a man. There are two possible places where this can take place: within the city or in the fields. In the city, the woman has a duty to cry out if she is raped, so if she is found with a man, her consent is assumed and she merits execution by stoning. Outside the city, however, no one can hear her cries, so she is considered innocent. In all cases, the man with whom she “lies” is to be stoned to death. These clearly defined categories are supposed to cover all instances (Deut. 22:22–27). Jesus’ enemies presumably thought that he disliked some aspects of the strict Old Testament law. They tried to entrap him by asking his opinion of an adultery case: 2. And early in the morning, he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. 3. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, 4. They say [sic] unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. 5. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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6. This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote [or drew] on the ground. 7. So when they continued asking him, he lifted himself up, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. 8. And again he stooped down, and wrote [not drew] on the ground. 9. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 10. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? 11. She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more ( John, 8:2–11).50 This passage could be read as evidence of Jesus’ antinomianism: his hostility to outward, written, or formal laws, and his embrace of emotions such as love and pity. Nietzsche, for one, thought that Jesus was a thorough antinomian who was misunderstood by the whole mainstream Christian tradition. According to Nietzsche, “Jesus said to his Jews: ‘The law was for servants—love God as I love him, as his son! What do morals matter to us sons of God!’ ”51 In a similar vein, Joseph Noel Paton, a Victorian painter, used the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery to suggest that moral laws should not be used to condemn Francesca and Paolo. Paton depicted the lovers suspended in a placid heavenly vault, accompanied by the star Venus (to indicate that love was their motive), and framed by two biblical scenes of forgiveness: Christ with the Adulteress, and the Return of the Prodigal Son. Not for Paton the windy hell of Inferno V. To anyone who views laws and ethical doctrines as burdensome, this permissive interpretation of Jesus’ teaching will be appealing. But such readers will have difficulty explaining his admonition: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law . . . For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no ways pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:17–19). A second reading makes Jesus sound more judgmental and demanding even than Moses. According to this interpretation, Jesus (like some 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




mainstream rabbis of the same era) internalizes the Mosaic Law, assessing intentions rather than actions.52 This is perhaps how he “fulfills” the Hebrew law of adultery. “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shall not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matt. 5: 27–28). On this definition, the scribes and Pharisees are evidently as guilty as the woman whom they found in “the very act”; and they have no business judging her. Nevertheless, Jesus subscribes to a clear definition of adultery, and the woman is guilty if (but only if ) she felt lust in her heart. On the other hand, if Jesus condemns all who feel lust in their hearts, then why does he forgive the Woman? He does not claim that her adultery was involuntary. Being free of sin, he could cast the first stone against her. A third interpretation is at least as plausible, and more congenial to my purposes. Tony Tanner writes: “The scribes and Pharisees . . . set up a situation in which the woman is brought forward as a classified object to be looked at and talked about; they have depersonalized her (a woman taken in adultery) and reified her (she is ‘set’ in their midst). Christ refuses to look and, initially, refuses to talk. That is, he refuses to participate in this specular attitude to the woman and to discuss her as a category. By doing this he restores the full existential reality to the situation.” The “full existential reality” is captured in the Gospel narrative. Even if we have read the story many times before, it can still generate suspense. A woman has been snatched from some intimate setting by a mob intent on stoning her to death. (It is worth imagining exactly how this would feel.) She is hauled into the temple to be used as a test for a radical young rabbi. She clearly belongs within the class of “adulterers” as defined by Deuteronomy. How then can Jesus rescue her without violating Holy Scripture? After an anxious pause, he succeeds by forcing the concrete reality of the situation onto the consciousness of the scribes and Pharisees. They must stop applying rules and generalizations in order to consider individuals—themselves first of all. As Tanner writes, Jesus’ question “thrusts them back into their own interiority (they are ‘convicted by their own conscience’), and it dissolves the group identity within which they have concealed themselves (they go out ‘one by one’ as individuals, having arrived as ‘scribes’ and ‘Pharisees’).”53 It would be fascinating to know what Jesus wrote while the audience awaited his verdict. But we pointedly are not told, which leaves us to interpret a bare act of writing. This reminds us that we are reading a written text, whose purpose is to relate the concrete facts of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Jesus’ life in order to provoke a moral and spiritual transformation in the reader. “These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name” (20:31). Perhaps Jesus’ purpose is similar: he also wants to inscribe a story so that appropriate moral judgments will follow. His story encompasses one woman’s actions, intentions, feelings, and circumstances, which Jesus knows because he can read her perfectly. “He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man” (2:24–25). He is the ideal interpreter and narrator—hence, the ideal judge. Seamus Heaney reads this scene as an illustration of writing’s moral value. “Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught,” he writes, poetry and the other imaginative arts “are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which is at the basis of every individuated life.” Poetry, Heaney asserts, is just like Jesus’ writing on the ground: It does not say to the accusing crowd or the helpless accused, ‘Now a solution will take place,’ it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves. This is what gives poetry its governing power. At its greatest moments it would attempt, in Yeats’ phrase, to hold in a single thought reality and justice.54

When Jesus is asked to judge the Woman Taken in Adultery, we expect him to offer an “instrumental or effective” solution: an answer that will acquit her (if that’s what she deserves), without violating the Law. In other words, we expect a clear and valid doctrine. But Jesus, by his mysterious act of writing, pointedly refuses such a solution. Instead, his writing somehow combines reality and justice. Yeats had in mind poetry’s capacity to describe an ideal, abstract alternative to mundane reality. So for example, he regarded the “circuits” in his metaphysical system “as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.”55 Along these lines, Jesus’ writing (or drawing?) could be understood as a mystical and transcendent act, something that challenges his audience to rise above standard human behavior. An alternative appeals to me more. On this view, Jesus combines reality and justice by describing the concrete details of the Woman’s life, using words that are appropriate to the facts but that also have 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




strong moral connotations. He knows, perhaps, that she has fallen in love, that she has gained self-respect, that she has suffered coercion, that she has experienced tender pleasure, that she regrets her infidelity, and other such details. By acknowledging them, he challenges the crowd of scribes and Pharisees to think in a similarly concrete and judgmental way about themselves as well as about the Woman. The thinking that he requires of them resembles the detailed, perceptive descriptions that are typical of fiction and poetry. Without resorting to mysticism or paradox, these descriptions hold reality and justice in a single thought. The great biblical adultery stories (the Woman Taken in Adultery and Susanna’s Trial from the Book of Daniel) both concern the tension between law and the unique situation of the accused woman. They thereby suggest that moral generalization is dangerous. This issue is in the background of Francesca’s story, and authors of nineteenth-century versions moved it to the foreground. Clearly, the biblical stories do not settle the question of particularism. For one thing, they do not test a liberal moral principle in contrast to the austere ancient laws. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is a general principle, but so is “Never punish anyone for a voluntary sexual act.” Someone might reject the former but endorse the latter. Thus many more adultery stories would be germane to the topic of this book. Still, the biblical cases draw our attention to the value of careful, particularistic perception and storytelling and the hazards of moral definition and classification. Some Hazards of Stories But aren’t there also inherent risks in storytelling? Judge Richard Posner has considered the moral case for literature and has reached a negative verdict. “One doesn’t have to raise the ghosts of Wagner, Céline, Pound, Heidegger, and de Man to be skeptical about the edifying effect of high culture in general and of literature in particular,” he writes. “The classics are full of moral atrocities . . . that the author apparently approved of. Rape, pillage, murder, human and animal sacrifice, concubinage, and slavery in the Iliad; misogyny in the Odyssey and countless other works; blood-curdling vengeance; anti-Semitism in more works than one can count, including works by Shakespeare and Dickens; racism and sexism likewise”—and Posner’s list goes on. Even a respectable novel like Henry James’ Golden Bowl cannot resolve moral problems or make us into better people, Posner writes, because it “seems to invite a variety of incompatible responses.” He concedes that stories often encourage us to 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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understand their protagonists. “But empathy is amoral. The mind that you work your way into, learning to see the world from its perspective, may be the mind of a Meursault, an Edmund, a Lafcadio, a Macbeth, a Tamerlane, a torturer, a sadist, even a Hitler.” Skills of interpretation and empathy may prove useful if we choose to act cruelly, playing on the weaknesses of our fellow human beings. “There is no evidence,” Posner adds, “that talking about ethical issues improves ethical performance. This is not the place to expound and test a theory of how people become moral. Genes, parental upbringing, interactions with peers, and religion must all play a role. That casuistic analysis stimulated by imaginative works of literature also plays a role is unproven and implausible. Moral philosophers, their students, literary critics, and English majors are no more moral in attitude or behavior than their peers in other fields.”57 In fact, there is scanty empirical research on the moral effects of any genre of writing, including fiction, legal opinions, or philosophy. A survey sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004 found that reading “literature” (defined as “any novels or short stories, plays, or poetry”) correlated with habits of volunteering and charity work when education, gender, income, and race were statistically controlled.58 This finding is consistent with the theory that stories and poems enhance human sympathies, although the data certainly do not prove that theory. Much more social science would have to be conducted before we could assess the impact of various types of literature on various moral attitudes and behaviors, or compare literature to other forms of analysis and communication, including philosophy. Social science can only tell us about the present and recent past, but one could use other methods to consider the impact of stories on people long ago or in various projected or imagined futures. Although I would find some of this research interesting, I believe it is possible to defend literature on ethical grounds without attempting to estimate its effects on the attitudes or behaviors of any particular populations, past, present, or future. When we read with ethical purposes, our first duty is to determine what the text ought to mean to us.59 We consider the moral values and intentions of the author, the moral structure and implications of the text (some of which may be unintended by the author), and the implications of the text’s moral themes for our own lives and situations. How other people are likely to think and behave as a result of reading the same text is a secondary question. Furthermore, we need not simply observe people’s response to a story; we can also try to inf luence them by telling them how they should read it. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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A telling example is Lolita. This novel is a devastating portrait of selfishness, moral blindness, tyranny, and rape. The four-foot-ten child whom Humbert Humbert calls “Lolita” is actually Dolores Haze (sad and bewildered). She is repulsed by her rapist but maintains a certain dignity despite him.60 However, many of Nabokov’s contemporaries read the book quite differently. Lionel Trilling excused Humbert by claiming that Lolita, “perpetually the cruel mistress,” lacked any emotions that could be “violated.” Robertson Davies asserted that Nobokov’s theme was “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.”61 Soon the word “Lolita” entered the English language as a synonym for an adolescent temptress (not a pre-adolescent rape victim). Trilling and his contemporaries were modernists who were used to reading fiction that took the side of sexual freedom against social convention. Humbert acted sexually as he wanted to act; thus he had to be right. The same logic caused the series of Romantic and modern misreadings of Dante that I explore in Chapter 6. Thirty years later, Azar Nafisi, a dissident professor in post-revolutionary Iran, chose secretly to teach Lolita to women because she saw a parallel between Humbert’s sexual abuse and the regime’s tyranny. Because of their experience as victims of a regime that tried to suppress their individuality and freedom, Nafisi and her students immediately grasped who was the villain and who was the heroic victim of the novel. That response put them on the opposite side from Trilling, Davies, and their contemporaries. One of the students said, “It’s strange . . . , but some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.”62 Thus we might conclude that Nabokov’s masterpiece had bad effects, at least on most readers (both prominent and ordinary) for the first several decades of its life. The book reinforced an urge for selfish sexual “liberation,” especially among leading male critics. That would be true, yet the fault would lie with them and not with the text. While some of the early consequences of Lolita were harmful, the book is profoundly good, and one can justify that assessment with a close reading. Even if most literature has negative effects on most people (which is an unlikely hypothesis), our first duty is still to use it for our own moral growth and improvement. If you read it correctly, a good narrative contains moral truth that is available nowhere else.



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Good and Bad Stories Assuming that we use stories for moral guidance, it can be difficult to decide which ones to heed. Boccaccio’s narrative emphasizes Francesca’s fraudulent marriage contract; Dante’s stresses the moment at which she and Paolo fell in love. Given these rival stories (and many subsequent ones), which version should we use for moral purposes? In the Inferno, Virgil emphasizes that the sinners who are condemned to the circle of the lustful all figure in books where they are described sympathetically. The following passage contains an important pun on legge, which means both “read” and “laws.” There is also wordplay on libido (“desire”) and licito (“permitted”). By reading the wrong texts, Virgil implies, one can learn illicit laws: “The first whose story you’d have me tell,” he said, “was empress of many tongues. The vice of lust so broke her will that she wrote her desires into the laws, legalizing her tastes so as to erase the censure that such conduct merits. She’s Semiramis; she succeeded Ninus (or so we read) and was his wife. She possessed the land where today the Sultan rules.”

«La prima di color di cui novelle tu vuo’ saper’», mi disse quella allotta, «fu imperadrice di molte favelle. A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta, che libito fé licito in sua legge, per tòrre il biasmo in che era condotta. Ell’ è Semiramìs, di cui si legge che succedette a Nino e fu sua sposa: tenne la terra che ‘l Soldan corregge.» (Inf. v, 52–60)

Virgil then alludes to the story of Helen (which Dante would have known from medieval romances, not from Homer) and Tristan. Should we read these books, despite their portrayals of adultery and other sins? 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


CH A P T E R


Should we stick instead to Scripture, or Dante, or Dostoyevsky? Should we prefer Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde? Or should we watch commercial TV dramas to gain moral enlightenment? Of course, you can read or watch more than one type of story, but at some point you have to choose, especially when different works have conf licting spirits and meanings.1 Dante would presumably advise us to read only books that conform to correct moral doctrine (despite the fact that he read plenty of dubious troubadour lyrics in his youth). But this criterion is useless if we are suspicious of general moral theories; and his advice becomes circular if we believe that the test of an ethical principle is its consistency with moving and perceptive stories. In any event, the relationship between narrative and morality is complex. Honorable writers sometimes find it instructive to describe depraved acts, even in the voice of wicked narrators. Texts with thoroughly objectionable intentions can be worth reading, if only as cautionary examples. And many texts have both uplifting and misleading aspects. Thus no universal definition of morally good literature is tenable. Nonetheless, I think that stories should usually have a virtue that is the precise opposite of philosophy’s chief vice. Whereas philosophy generalizes, literature ought to describe particular characters and events in a finely discriminating, perceptive way. People deserve to be judged as individuals, so stories that are full of stereotypes are not morally useful. It is to Dante’s moral credit that he can express more about a character in five lines of verse than sitcom authors can manage in a season of episodes. If our moral duty is to give close attention to concrete particulars, then we should favor literature that is finely observant, that describes the subtleties of people’s inner lives, that depicts a complex moral world and does not tell us in so many words what conclusions to draw. Thus we ought to prefer some literary works over others that may be equally skillful and accomplished: Browning over Pope, Chekhov over Shaw, the early Tolstoy over the late. The more subtle a story, the more ambiguous its conclusions may be. It is certainly not obvious what moral lesson we should draw from the story of Paolo and Francesca. In fact, people have responded to it in many contradictory ways. Keats was so moved that he practically fell in love with Francesca. But one of his contemporaries, a minor poet named Henry C. Jennings, had an entirely different reaction. “This melancholy event,” he wrote, referring to the passion of Paolo and Francesca, “seems to be recorded by Dante, with the sole view of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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illustrating by actual, and then recent, example the dangerous practice of young people’s reading romances together in private; and still more so, when there already exists an inclination between the parties.” If for Keats the theme of Canto V was the appeal of forbidden love, for Jennings the moral was not to let young people read adult fiction together. These contrasting reactions show that stories can be ambiguous. But when two people have different responses to literature, they don’t have to stop talking. Instead, they can try to persuade one another. For example, someone could remind a Romantic reader, infatuated with Francesca, that he had failed to consider the overall plan of the Divine Comedy, which shows that God’s justice is more important than human passion. The Romantic reader could respond that he finds this aspect of Dante vague and unconvincing compared to the vivid portrait of a suffering Francesca. And so we could fruitfully discuss what meaning to derive from the poem. Quite likely, we would conclude that the themes of Canto V include a set of deliberately and interestingly unresolved tensions between love and duty, pity and justice, poetry and philosophy. This is the kind of subtlety that was lost on Henry C. Jennings; but then he was thoroughly wrong about Dante. Consider his general reaction to the Divine Comedy. “It is, upon the whole, a painful undertaking to read it regularly through,” he wrote, on account of the poem’s “manifold repetition, and uninteresting and extravagant variation of the same nauseous descriptions.”2 Jennings was one reader who could have learned something from perceptive and informed criticism. Francesca as a Poor Reader In short, there are better and worse moral interpretations of texts, and the worst ones can be seriously misleading. Dante depicts Francesca as a particularly bad reader. This is a major theme of Canto V. In fact, Dante explores misreading in much greater detail than adultery, about which he says (and even implies) relatively little. But it turns out that misreading is closely akin to lust, so it is not coincidental that the Inferno’s worst reader is also its most famous adulterer. Francesca thinks almost entirely in the terms of romantic literature. Practically every word she says is quoted from the popular fiction of her day. Most critics think that she refers repeatedly to a fashionable type of poetry that Dante wrote and named the “new sweet style” (Purg. xxiv, 57). For example, when she says, “Love, which in gentle 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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hearts is quickly born,” she’s alluding to a famous poem by Guido Guinizelli that is often “considered a manifesto for the poets of the dolce stil novo.”3 And since Dante had explicitly cited the same poem in one of his own sonnets, perhaps she is alluding to Dante as well (or instead). On an alternative view, Francesca is not a devotee of contemporary Italian poetry, but rather of Northern French prose.4 She certainly refers to the legend of King Arthur as it was told in the popular romance Lancelot du lac. Francesca has read a great deal, including many excellent works that she can quote at will. Thus, if literature can help make readers morally sensitive, we would expect Francesca to be a fine person. Unfortunately, she has misread every literary work that she cites, and her poor interpretations ref lect badly on her character. Take the passage from Lancelot du lac that she blames for her fall. She says: When we read that ‘the desired Smile then was kissed by the ardent lover,’ he who ‘can never be torn away’ kissed me, all atremble. A Galehaut was the author of that book, and seductive was his fancy. On that day, we read no farther.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me no fia diviso la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno piú non vi leggemmo avante. (Inf., v, 133–138)

In the episode that Paolo and Francesca have been reading, Lancelot is so nervous that he becomes mute and almost faints. Meanwhile, his friend Galehaut engages in a long, coy colloquy with Guinevere. The actual kiss is studied and awkward: Galehaut shields Guinevere and Lancelot so that the Lady of Malahaut won’t see them, but she does. In the known versions of the Romance, Lancelot never initiates the kiss. He is bashful and passive to the point of foolishness, and the Queen makes all the advances.5 But the ardent lover in Francesca’s quotation is male. Barbara Vinken argues that “Francesca must have kissed Paolo and is trying, through false citation, to obliterate her initiative.”6 There are other possibilities. Maybe Paolo wanted to be manlier than the foolish Lancelot in the Romance, so he kissed Francesca. We cannot know what “really” happened, because the whole scene is part of a fiction, and Dante did not fill in all the details. But this much is clear: Francesca is unwilling to read the Romance correctly. At least in recollection, she confuses it with other episodes from the courtly love tradition, such as the one in which Tristan kisses Iseult while they play chess together. The details of the Lancelot story fade in her mind, to be replaced with a generic formula: damsel taken by ardent knight. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Perhaps this is because she wants to shift the blame from Guinevere (the woman) to Lancelot (the man). Or perhaps it is because she reads literature as a set of clichés. Part of the definition of a cliché is that it is portable and recyclable—a ready-made scenario or sentiment that shows up in many contexts. When we read a text as a series of clichés, we often commit what Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”7 This is the fallacy of taking something specific that belongs in one context and applying it elsewhere. It is particularly easy to commit this error when a text contains conventional sentiments and scenarios, or when we misread it that way. Francesca treats the love scene between Lancelot and Guinevere as a cliché, suppressing the peculiarities of that rather odd episode so that it can justify her own behavior. For traditional moral philosophers, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness may be an error, but it is not a pervasive or deeply troubling one. Philosophers assume that moral concepts usually mean the same wherever they appear, so it often works perfectly well to “switch” judgments from one context to another. However, for particularists, good judgment requires depicting a situation accurately, without importing concepts or facts from other cases. Thus Francesca perpetrates a cardinal sin for particularists when she applies a conventional formula to a situation that it does not fit. Strangely enough, Lancelot also commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Before the momentous kiss, Guinevere asks him what originally caused his love.8 Lancelot replies: Lady, I came before you when I had taken leave of my lord the king, all armored except for my head and hands, and you said “adieu” and that I would be your knight wherever I should go. And you said that you wanted me to be your knight and your friend. And then I said, “Adieu, lady.” And you said, “Adieu, sweet handsome friend [biax dols amis].” Never after that did courage forsake me. These words were my stalwart friend. Never after was I in such great trouble that I didn’t recall these words. [The word recall, “membrast,” is a pun on “kiss,” m’embrasse.] These words comforted me in all my anguish, these words protected me from my evils and guarded me in all perils; these words satisfied all my doubts; these words made me rich in all my great poverty.9

The Queen replies that she’s glad about the results, but actually she didn’t mean anything serious. She just uttered a conventional parting to a young knight who was leaving on a mission for her husband. But Lancelot understood amis to mean “amante,” or lover (which is one of its senses). Like Francesca, he believed himself loved, and so loved in return. He thereby transformed an utter commonplace into a specific expression 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




of passion for himself. Francesca does roughly the opposite. She converts a rather idiosyncratic scene from Lancelot into a paradigm of courtly love, and then uses it to give her own adultery an aura of romance. The prose Lancelot is generally seen as a repetitive and meandering work, indeed as one of the worst shaped texts in European literature.10 But when we read literature as Francesca does, we erase the difference between fine and clumsy stories, so that even Hamlet can become a store of commonplaces. When someone says, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “Aye, there’s the rub,” “Get thee to a nunnery,” “The lady doth protest too much,” “I must be cruel only to be kind,” or “f lights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” either the dramatic irony or the extreme pathos of the original is almost always lost. The works that Francesca cites in virtually every line were so popular in the high Middle Ages that she is like a modern person who speaks entirely in phrases from top-forty songs. Even the air in Canto V is filled with quotations: And as cranes will move, chanting lays in the air, ordering themselves into one long file, so I saw coming with a woeful clamor shades that were borne by the stress of the squall.

E come i gru van contando lor lai, faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga così vid’ io venir, traendo guai, ombre portate de la detta briga. (Inf. v, 46–49)

Poggioli writes that in this passage Dante uses the word lai “both in its general sense of complaint, and in a more special and technical meaning, designating a particular kind of medieval poetry, which in Provençal verse takes the form of the lyrical and melancholic reevocation of the adventure of love.”11 This is just the kind of poetry that Francesca loves and uses to guide her life. But the lays that are endlessly chanted by the birds in Hell must be repetitive to the point of meaningless, which makes them perfect symbols of cliché. Indeed, as Francesca sits and reads romances with Paolo, she probably views herself in cliché terms, recalling the “motif of enamourment by books” that she had encountered many times before in literature. The eponymous heroes of Lyropié and Floris fell in love while reading Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe together. A similar fate befell Floire (a Christian damsel) and Blanchef lor (a Saracen prince) in a widely disseminated Romance of eastern-Mediterranean origin.12 And Abelard says that he touched and kissed Héloïse while their books were open for study. Since Francesca uses literary clichés to grasp reality, she naturally finds herself acting like a character from these works. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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When Francesca is introduced to Dante, she is compared to a mother dove. This simile sets the stage for her beguiling speech and all her superficial interpretations of literature. But the dove image can be misread if we recall merely its most conventional associations. Paolo Valesio notes that doves are not only linked to peace and purity (in which case they can be clichés), but also to Venus, the goddess of physical love. Dante elsewhere emphasizes their tendency to “strut” (Purg. ii, 126), which may explain their stiff wings in Canto V. The poet has carefully observed these birds—which are so often represented as pretty and harmless—and has noticed that they bear a physical resemblance to proud human beings. Finally, the image of doves f lying in “a mighty wind” recalls the Holy Ghost’s descent at Pentecost (see Acts 2:2). This biblical allusion at first seems positive, until we ref lect that the winds of Hell are unfit for the Holy Ghost. Perhaps, then, the dove simile ref lects a “degradation” or “parody” of the Pentecost, with Francesca as a kind of unholy ghost.13 Thus the simile is not merely a device for predisposing us in Francesca’s favor. It also reminds us to read and observe carefully and to look beyond conventional meanings—which is just what Francesca fails to do. In particular, she is not in love with Paolo, for she hardly knows him. Her speech to Dante tells us nothing about his character except that he has a gentle heart (another medieval commonplace) and that he is attracted to her “bella figura.” Roger Dragonetti writes: “If Paolo loves the ravishing image of Francesca, she in turn falls in love not with Paolo, but with the pleasure that he takes in the image of his love. Taking a detour through Paolo, Francesca is a lover of the pleasure of love, that is to say, of her own image. This fake reciprocity of passion is in reality nothing but disguised narcissism.” It is a “désir du désir 14 When Francesca notices that Paolo is attracted to her, she immediately recalls scenes from old Romances. In her mind, Paolo becomes Sir Lancelot in the arbor with Guinevere—or Tristan at his chessboard with Iseult, or Floire looking at a book with Blanchef lor, or Floris reading romances with Lyriopé. She thinks she’s in love with a real human being, but she really loves the idea of a courtly suitor, which has been put into her head by books.15 In one of the Old French texts that Francesca has read, Iseult says of Tristan: He loves me not, nor I him, except because of a potion I drank, and he too; that was our sin.

Il ne m’aime pas, ne je lui Fors par un herbé dont je bui, Et il en but; ce fu pechiez.16





Denis de Rougemont comments: “Tristan and Iseult do not love one another. They say they don’t, and everything goes to prove it. What they love is love and being in love.”17 Love ought to be a bond between two whole human beings. This requires some mutual knowledge of the other’s thoughts, plans, and values, without which we cannot act sensitively. It is not an automatic “fit” between people, as in the case of Pyramus and Thisbe, nor an accident, like the potion-induced passion of Tristan and Iseult, but rather something that we create through effort and adjustment. When people are attracted only physically, we call it “lust”—the sin that is punished in the second circle of Dante’s Hell. Francesca feels for Paolo a curious but not uncommon kind of lust. It’s not his body that attracts her, but his superficial resemblance to various characters from romantic fiction. By stipulating definitions of “love” and “lust,” I am doing just what I criticized earlier (Chapter 4): I am trying to clean up our ambiguous inherited language so that it ref lects a general moral theory. However, I am fully aware of the limitations of this method. “Bonds between two human beings” are not always good and do not always deserve the term “love,” if we stipulate that “love” is good. In Canto V, Dante offers a meaningful moral theme—love as knowledge versus lust as ignorance—but this theme doesn’t generalize into a precise moral theory. Dante offers knowledge of love rather than knowledge that love is mutual understanding or concern. If Francesca is addicted to cliché, then she is a medieval Madame Bovary. The comparison is worth pursuing. The first clichés that Emma Bovary learns as a child are religious: “The similes of fiancé, spouse, heavenly lover and eternal marriage that recur in sermons aroused unforeseen sweetness in the depths of her soul.” But Emma loses interest in religion once an old maid smuggles novels into the convent where she lives. “They were about love, lovers, the beloved, persecuted ladies swooning away in solitary pavilions, postilions killed at every inn, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, troubles of the heart, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses, little boats by moonlight, nightingales in the copse, gentlemen brave as lions, sweet like lambs, as virtuous as no one is, always well appointed, and weeping like urns.”18 She has been reading the nineteenth-century equivalents of the Roman de Lancelot—indeed, its lineal descendants. The narrator tells us that before Emma was married, “she thought that she had love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love didn’t come, she must have been deceived, she ref lected. And Emma sought to know exactly what was meant in life by the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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words felicity, passion, and ecstasy, which has seemed so beautiful to her in books.”19 Once she marries, she learns little about her husband’s interior life, doesn’t appreciate his tenderness, but realizes that he has nothing in common with the romantic heroes of fiction. What is striking about Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s fresh, perceptive, sometimes sympathetic, and always precise way of depicting his characters’ hackneyed, vague, and self-serving thoughts (many of which he italicizes, to show that they are idées reçues). Likewise, Dante depicts Francesca as a person who thinks in clichés, but she is hardly a conventional character herself. On the contrary, she is a highly original creation. As Peter Dronke notes, “No woman in the world of the dolce stil nuovo alludes to her own beauty, or speaks openly of being sexually attracted to the man she loves.”20 Clichés are generally seen as the opposite of good writing—as an aesthetic failing—but Flaubert indicates that they are also morally dangerous. Emma Bovary is cruel to Charles because she sees the world in cliché terms. Pushing the argument much further, Hannah Arendt has described the power of clichés to excuse (or even to generate) true evil. On trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the Holocaust was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity.” He also said that he wanted “to make peace with his former enemies,” and that he “would gladly hang [himself ] in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth.” Arendt writes that these remarks were “self-fabricated stock phrases” popular among Germans after 1945. They were as “devoid of reality as those [official Nazi] clichés by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an ‘extraordinary sense of elation’ it gave to the speaker the moment [each one] popped out of his mouth. His mind was filled to the brim with such sentences.” In fact, she writes, “he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”21 Arendt stresses Eichmann’s “inability to think.” Although he wasn’t a very good student, he was an excellent organizer and negotiator, who had set up efficient, factory-like operations for processing Jews. So presumably he was capable of thinking as well or better than most people. Nevertheless, when he told a “hard-luck story” of slow advancement within the SS, he apparently expected his Israeli police interrogator to show “normal, human” sympathy for him.22 Similarly, when he visited a Jewish acquaintance named Storfer in Auschwitz, he recalled: “We had a normal, human encounter. He told me of his grief and sorrow: I said: ‘Well, my dear old friend, we [!] certainly got it! What rotten luck!’ ” He arranged relatively easy work for Storfer—sweeping gravel 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




paths—and then asked: “ ‘Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?’ Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with one another.” Six weeks after this normal, human encounter, Storfer was dead—not gassed, apparently, but shot.”23 If Arendt is to be believed, Eichmann’s total reliance on clichés permitted him to ignore the smoke from the Auschwitz ovens and to believe that Storfer was “very pleased.” Eichmann’s inability to think, she writes, was an “inability to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.”24 Eichmann couldn’t see things much more clearly from his own perspective. Facing the gallows, he rejected the hood and spoke with complete self-possession: “He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ In the fact of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, . . . he was ‘elated’ and he forgot that this was his own funeral.”25 In addition to relying heavily on clichés, Eichmann and his Nazi colleagues used euphemisms to describe crimes from which they might have recoiled if they had called them by other names. So “killing” was known as “evacuation,” “special treatment,” or the “final solution.” Deportation to Theresienstadt was called “change of residence,” whereas Jews were “resettled” to the other, more brutal, concentration camps. These phrases were not called “euphemisms,” of course, but rather “language-rules”— and even that term was (as Arendt notes) “a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie.” It is standard for a single act to have several potential names, each with a different moral implication. The dictionary will not tell us which name to use. For instance, it is not an incorrect use of language or logic to call mass murder “special treatment.” Nevertheless, some words are much more morally appropriate than others under particular circumstances. The Nazis’ euphemisms were extreme and telling examples of immoral language, for the crimes of the Holocaust had obvious names that the perpetrators studiously avoided using. By using euphemisms and circumlocutions, they avoided having to admit what they were doing—even privately.26 Arendt argues that Eichmann was no monster, that his evil was banal. The circumstances, however, were extraordinary, so we shouldn’t 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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immediately conclude from his example that clichés and euphemisms are a widespread danger. It’s one thing to rely on stock phrases when you’re in love, and quite another thing when you’re the logistical mastermind of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, there is always a risk that clichés will prevent us from exercising judgment and seeing the details of the world around us. Thus it is morally significant that Francesca speaks in clichés; that she overlooks the specific details of stories in order to turn them into stereotypes; and that she repeatedly uses euphemisms (“Amor,” instead of sex) and circumlocutions (“That day, we read no further . . .”). As a result, she never has to say that she cheated on her husband or that he killed her. In addition to clichés, euphemisms, and circumlocutions, one of the most common literary/moral vices that deserves mention is sentimentality. Contrary to the inf luential definition that originated with the New Critics, “sentimentality” cannot mean the depiction or provocation of excessive or disproportionate emotions, since these are features of some very great works, including the Inferno. Indeed, I am convinced that the word “sentimentality” is usually applied with bias; domestic stories and ones with female and/or bourgeois characters are too quickly called “sentimental,” when no one would similarly criticize epics that have piteous death scenes, idealized protagonists, orphaned children, sudden blows of fate, and the like.27 Nevertheless, there is a category of stories that we can accuse of being “sentimental” because they generate “a kind of superficial pain which closely resembles pleasure.” We obtain this pleasure from intense pity which we would not consider justified if we felt it for ourselves in our ordinary lives—even though we sometimes want to. Moreover, the pitied characters in sentimental fiction are often ones to whom we can condescend: little children, animals, or illiterate adults.28 And sentimental scenes are contrived so that all their details make us feel pity; there isn’t anything complicated or detached about our reaction, if the sentimentality works. Thus sentimental fiction mixes sympathy (which is often, although not always, a good thing), with condescension (which is most often bad); and it arranges or selects facts so that they promote pity to the exclusion of other emotions and judgments—including sympathy for other characters in the book. One could perhaps say that Francesca describes her own past sentimentally. As a character in the Inferno, Dante reacts to her story as if it were sentimental, overlooking the moral complications that she has skillfully downplayed. As an author, Dante is not at all sentimental, but many later writers and painters who have retold the Paolo and Francesca story are quintessentially so. (We will see this in Chapter 6.) 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine



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“Oh! When at last you’ve come back to earth and rested from your journey,” the third soul after the second spoke, “Remind yourself of Pia. My maker was Siena; Maremma, my downfall. This he knows who ringed me in marriage with his jewel.”

«Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo e riposato de la lunga via», seguitò ‘l terzo spirito al secondo, «recorditi di me, che son la Pia; Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma: salsi calui che ‘nnanellata pria disposando m’avea con la sua gemma». (Purg. v, 130–136)

Pia asks Dante to remember her because prayers from the living can shorten a soul’s time in Purgatory (Purg. vi, 28–42). But she tells her story so concisely that it is obscure without a gloss. (According to early commentators, she was born in Siena and thrown out of a window in the pestilential region known as the Maremma on her husband’s orders). Of the five lines that she presumes to speak, she spends two wishing Dante a restful return. She appears to be more concerned about the rigors of his pilgrimage than about her own story, which she fails to communicate. Francesca, in contrast, cannot request Dante’s prayers, because the damned are beyond hope. She says that she would pray for him—if only God heard appeals from Hell—because he has pitied her. In fact, pity is the one thing that she notices about him. Or perhaps she only imagines it, for nothing in the text suggests that Dante pities Paolo and Francesca before she begins to speak.29 After her greeting, she spends her time describing the causes of her own pain in a self-exculpatory speech. The contrast with Pia is designed to show that Francesca is not good at seeing things “from the other fellow’s point of view.” In arguing that Francesca is an example of a poor reader, some scholars emphasize her tendency to overlook the explicit moral doctrines that are contained in such works as the prose Roman de Lancelot and Augustine’s Confessions.30 Consider Lancelot first. This text includes romantic episodes that seem to celebrate adultery, but also pious interpolations about chastity. It tells the story of Lancelot’s romance with Guinevere, but also the tale of Galahad, who is perfectly chaste.31 Thus Francesca and Paolo could have concentrated on the pious parts of the story. But Francesca says that they read solely “for pleasure” (Inf. v, 127), and as soon as they reached the part about the kiss, they “read 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


By pairing Francesca with another woman who was also murdered by her husband, Dante suggests that her powers of moral observation are deficient. This character speaks a few abrupt lines that end Canto V of Purgatorio—exactly one cantica after Francesca:

no further” (Inf. v, 138). Dante implies that they should have read for moral meaning and continued into the didactic sections of the Romance. Ideally, they would have finished the Lancelot (without falling into sin) and then taken up the Galahad sequel. In the same way, Francesca should have read the whole of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, instead of appropriating an early passage in which the narrator shows self-pity. As Dronke asks, “This woman who has read her Boethian Consolation, the work which, long before the troubadours, had shown that gentilezza was an inner quality of virtue, the work which celebrates love as a universal, cosmic power—had she omitted to read the section which vindicates the freedom of human will?”32 If she had absorbed Boethius’ argument for freedom of the will, then she would not have told Dante that Amor had forced her to sin. Finally, just as Francesca should have read to the end of her books, we must not stop with the beautiful story of Paolo and Francesca, but must read the Paradiso in order grasp the true meaning of love and lust. When Francesca says that she read for pleasure and then read no further, this is yet another literary allusion. In the Confessions, Augustine recalls that when he was young he used to enjoy narratives about love and other strong human emotions, including adulterous passion. Recollecting those stories from his mature, Christian perspective, he recalls that he was “forced to learn I don’t know what wanderings of Aeneas, oblivious to my own, and to lament the dead Dido, because she killed herself for love, while meanwhile with dry eyes I endured my miserable self dying among these things before you, God, my life.”33 Romantic fiction had especially powerful effects, he recalls, filling him with pity and fear even when he ought to have felt stern disapproval. “In the theaters I took pleasure along with the lovers when they used each other for vice, even though their behavior was just the imaginary sport of a play, and when they parted I was sad along with them, as if I were really compassionate; yet I enjoyed both parts.”34 Then comes the famous conversion scene. Distraught, Augustine hears a voice saying, “take up and read, take up and read.” He understands this as a command to open the Bible at random. The first words he finds are those of Paul: “But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the f lesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof ” [Rom. 13:13–14]. Augustine recalls: “I wanted to read no further, nor was there need.”35 Although Francesca paraphrases these words, her situation is exactly the opposite. Augustine stops reading St.Paul because he has recognized God’s truth and renounced lust. She stops reading so that she can kiss (or be kissed by) her Paolo. Augustine repudiates love stories, but 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




Francesca quotes them even in Hell. Augustine begins as “but f lesh: a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again.”36 She ends up embracing her carnal lover in a tempest. These allusions suggest that Francesca has failed to grasp the abstract theological truths that are contained in certain literary works: the Confessions, the Consolation of Philosophy, and Galahad. Her fault, then, is to miss the philosophy that is part of these pious narratives. This is a lesson to us as readers of Dante’s sacrato poema. Vinken argues that Francesca cannot grasp the truth in what she reads because the damned are denied knowledge of divine justice. So Dante’s way of instructing us is to make Francesca misquote texts that include abstract truths.37 But it seems to me that Francesca is not only oblivious to the philosophical arguments and moral doctrines that she ought to find in Augustine, Boethius, and Arthurian Romance. She is also a poor reader of concrete narratives (which she turns into clichés) and of other human beings. Her misreadings of philosophy and of narrative suggest an important parallel. Theories and stories can both blind us to concrete details about other people: the one by reducing human beings to abstract categories, the other by turning people and situations into clichés. Among Eichmann’s favorite clichés were lines from moral philosophy. In Jerusalem, he “suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty,” which he could paraphrase accurately. Clearly, Kant’s demanding principle had become an empty formula in Eichmann’s mind.38 My portrait of Francesca as a careless reader is somewhat at odds with another plausible interpretation. Some critics begin by noting that she seems to belong to a world of books, of rhetoric, of fiction. Meanwhile, she carefully avoids citing the important facts about her case: for instance, that she committed adultery. “That day we read no further,” she says, refusing to say what happened after she put down the book (Inf. v, 138). Nor can we read any further into her story, because it suddenly breaks off without reaching the chief facts of the case: sex and murder.39 Francesca’s speech shows that her medium is the written word; she is unable to make moral judgments, to take personal responsibility, or to utter words that would signify important non-literary objects. She believes that “Love” is responsible for her plight, but Amor for her is a poetic subject, a trope. Although her husband should figure in her narrative as a real person whom her adultery harmed, she avoids ever speaking his name.40 Like every soul in Hell, she is incapable of naming 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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the ultimate source of truth, which is “God.” The whole of Canto V (starting with the scene of the sinners before Minos) is concerned with confession, but when Francesca makes hers in response to Dante’s questions, she leaves out everything that a sinner in a confessional should mention.41 Perhaps then Francesca represents all that is wrong with words when they come untethered from reality. Poststructuralist critics have drawn our attention to a series of oppositions—language/world, fiction/ reality, writing/speaking, irrational/rational, female/male—that they believe are prevalent in Western thought, with the latter term always preferred to the former. Poststructuralists argue that these binary oppositions are prejudices that ought to be “deconstructed.” In this context, it is significant that Francesca is a woman. We might have expected Paolo to do the talking, for only five contemporary women say anything in the Divine Comedy.42 So perhaps Dante is drawing a sexist implication that femininity is linked to language (as opposed to reality) and sin (as opposed to righteousness). Elsewhere, I have criticized Jacques Derrida’s view that “logocentric” prejudices are to be found everywhere in Western civilization, coloring “all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading or interpretation.”43 But there is something to the view that Canto V is logocentric, for femininity in that text is linked to passion, irrationality, irresponsibility, and writing, which are all opposed to God’s realm of masculinity, reason, responsibility, and real facts. Francesca conspicuously fails to mention two objects: God and Paolo’s penis (the latter alluded to in the apophasis “quel giorno piú non vi leggemmo avante”). Her refusal to use words for these two “primary signifiers” is certainly grist for Derrida’s mill. So is Dante’s “phallogocentric” condemnation of her speech. If this is how we read the Canto, then we may conclude that Francesca has been stereotyped and used to support misogynistic prejudices. We may even want to deconstruct Dante’s overall system, admiring Francesca for her subversive refusal “to recognize those patriarchal categories and prohibitions with even so much as a perfunctory glance.”44 (But is adultery simply a patriarchal category?) Canto V relies on a distinction between female wordiness and male moral reason, and this is a disturbing polarity even if Dante partly sympathized with Francesca’s subversive speech. I find the postmodernist interpretation of Ray Fleming and others illuminating, yet it seems to me that Francesca is not simply a reader and a woman. She is a specific kind of reader, and her manner of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




reading books and people (which has nothing to do with being female) deserves to be criticized. In short, she prefers the most hackneyed elements of romantic fiction, and she turns all other kinds of literature into romances, because romantic clichés give her the excuse to act badly. Dante thinks that love is a bond between whole persons, not a “desire for desire” or an attraction to someone whom we barely know. This definition of “love” is normative. It does not mean that genuine love produces better results than lust, but that it is better—more admirable. Thus we could say that Dante implies a philosophical doctrine. But his doctrine, stated in so many words, is itself rather trite. Furthermore, it will mean nothing to people who don’t already know what a loving relationship is, because love is only detectable in reality by people who know love; it has no non-moral definition, no necessary-and-sufficient conditions. Again, it is more useful to say that Dante explores the theme of “desire for desire” in Canto V, in conjunction with other themes, such as careless reading, pity for sinners, and adulterous love. He does not define these things or claim that they always go together, but he does show that their interplay in a particular case is morally interesting and instructive. Francesca Misreads Love Poetry In Hell, Francesca issues three grave pronouncements about Love. Amor “soon takes hold in the gentle heart”; it “excuses none who are loved from loving;” and it “steered [her and Paolo] to a common death.” These statements constitute a whole theory, according to which Francesca’s adultery was inevitable and blameless, but fatal. They are also highly allusive remarks, quoting several classic works of chivalric romance. I have already noted Francesca’s dependence on Andreas Capellanus, the codifier of courtly love. In addition, her first precept conf lates two lines from Guido Guinizelli. One of his most famous poems begins with the words “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (“Love always returns to the noble heart”). The second stanza of the same poem begins “Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’apprende” (“Love’s fire is kindled in the noble heart”). Francesca puts these sources together to get “Amor, ch’al gentil ratto s’apprende” (Inf. v, 100). Normally people are entitled to revise and combine sources in this way, but in Purgatory, Dante is careful always to quote love poets with complete precision. Arnaut Daniel is even allowed to speak in his own language, Provençal, for eight lines (Purg. xxvi, 140–147). By contrast, as Teodalinda Barolini notes, the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Inferno “accommodates only misquotations.” Every citation of a text outside the Divine Comedy is inaccurate. Even hymns are mangled by the damned who try to reproduce them.45 For Dante, literal misquotation is a sin. Francesca also misunderstands the spirit of Guinizelli’s canzon. In the first stanza, the poet treats “Amor” as an outside force that animates certain hearts, which are as passive as light shining from the sun. Francesca endorses this idea. Guinizelli then argues that a commoner can be “noble;” Francesca’s respect for Dante suggests that she grasps that lesson as well. But the last stanzas of “Al cor gentil” turn theological, as Guinizelli argues that worldly love is a ref lection of divine love. These stanzas introduce a strongly normative dimension to Guinizelli’s theory, which Francesca cannot grasp because she is permanently isolated from any idea of God or heaven. It seems that Francesca can progress no further than the fourth stanza of the canzon (just as she can never ascend beyond the second circle of Hell). Her line about love seizing the gentle heart refers not only to Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil,” but also to Dante’s sonnet from the Vita Nuova that begins, “Love and the gentle heart are one . . .” (VN, xx). It is a gracious gesture for Francesca to cite this poem in Dante’s presence—but also an ironic one. I think that Dante condemned this sonnet for a combination of aesthetic and moral reasons. The whole Vita Nuova was a self-critique or confession, and Francesca misread it because she took “Love and the Gentle Heart” at face value.46 On the first page of the Vita Nuova, Dante’s narrator calls Beatrice “the glorious woman of my mind” (VN, ii). This phrase aptly describes the subject of his poems, because he does not come to know Beatrice’s real character or her desires. Instead, he becomes love-sick, swooning at her distant sight, and asking his friends for a definition of the mighty force, Love, that has appeared to him as a male figure in allegorical visions. This demigod resembles the “Amor” whom Francesca invokes three times in Hell as the subject of powerful verbs: “takes hold,” “seizes,” “steers to a common death” (Inf. v, 100–108).47 As if to indicate his own solipsism, Dante offers no descriptions of places, physical objects, clothes, or people other than himself. Although Florence is the setting of the book, the name of the city is never uttered. As Mark Musa notes, there are only two objects in the whole book: a bed and an easel.48 This is a dream landscape—or our common world described by a strikingly unobservant narrator. When Dante encounters Beatrice again in The Divine Comedy, she says insistently: “Look well! I am, I am Beatrice” (Purg. xxx, 73). In the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine




Italian text—“Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice”—she repeats the word ben (“well”) three times. She thereby emphasizes Dante’s moral obligation: he must see her as she is. This is just what he fails to do in the Vita Nuova, which is a record of his rather embarrassing attempts to praise a woman he does not know. In the heart of the Vita Nuova is the sonnet that Francesca cites when she meets Dante in hell, as if to suggest that this is her favorite love poem: Love and the gentle heart are one As the sage in his canzon writes; Who dares to be either thing alone Is like a soul that reason quits. Nature makes them when amorous: Love the master and the heart as home, In which the lord when latent sleeps For the longest season or the briefest term. Then beauty arrives in wise woman’s form That pleases the eyes until in the heart A desire for the pleasing thing is born, Which fixes there so firmly that A loving spirit is aroused. And ladies alike to worthy men respond.

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa, sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone e così esser l’un sanza l’altro osa com’alma razional sanza ragione. Falli natura quand’è amorosa Amor per sire e ‘l cor per sua magione, dentro la qual dormendo si riposa tal volta poca e tal lunga stagione. Bieltate appare in saggia donna pui, che piace a gli occhi sì, che dentro al core nasce un disio de la cosa piacente; e tanto dura talora in costui, che fa svegliar lo spirito d’Amore. E simil face in donna omo valente. (VN, xx)

Francesca presumably admires this poem because its doctrine supports her case: love is inevitable between gentle hearts. This is the same message that she also finds in Guinizelli’s poem. Mark Musa, however, calls “Amore e ‘il cor gentil” “weakly imitative”—its staleness “unmitigated,” its lack of inspiration “obvious,” and its last line “sheer bathos.”49 Critical judgments of this kind are often arbitrary, and my translation would conceal the poem’s merits even if they were profound. Indeed, Erich Auerbach admires the unity of “Amore e’l cor gentil.” “Despite its didactic tone,” he writes, this sonnet “gives us a sense of looking on as a bud opens.”50 But according to Musa, its position within the Vita Nuova reveals that it is a failure. Dante has embarked on a project of praise, but he has neither found anything concrete to say about Beatrice, nor has he discovered an allegorical language that can explicate Christian doctrine. Instead, he has offered platitudes from the profane Courtly Love tradition. He says that he composed this poem for a friend who had read his canzone and wanted to know “what love is” (xx). This is the very question that he asks Virgil in Purgatory, provoking a summary of orthodox theological doctrine (Purg. xviii, 14). In “Love and



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Dante’s Two Paths to Morality There were two potential ways out of the crisis depicted at the end of the Vita Nuova. First, Dante could renounce the effort to praise Beatrice’s beauty as an aspect of her personality or her body; it could “become spiritual” and “spread the light of love across the sky” (VN, xxxiii). In other words, Dante could allegorize Beatrice, making her symbolize some general truth, much as Guinizelli had likened courtly romance to divine love. Dante ends the Vita Nuova with an account of a “miraculous vision”: a woman appears transfigured and speaks words that Dante cannot grasp (xlii, xvli). This “powerful apparition” comes “against the enemy of reason” that had been tormenting or misleading Dante. The mystical experience of Beatrice makes him contemplate his past experiences of her “in order” or “in sequence,” as if he were beginning to construct a self-critical narrative about his love—the final version of which is the Vita Nuova itself (xxxix).51 Most commentators think that his vision is spelled out in the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice is Dante’s guide to theological wisdom. In Purgatory, she explains that her physical beauty was a signpost toward spiritual truth that Dante should have followed, especially after her death, “when I ascended from body to spirit, and both beauty and virtue grew in me” (Purg. xxx, 127–128). She says, When first you were hit by the arrow of things deceptive, you should have lifted yourself back to me, no longer one of those things. No young girl nor any novelty of such brief benefit should have weighed on your wings, holding you down so more blows could arrive.

Ben ti dovevi, per lo primo strale de le cose fallaci, levar suso di retro a me che non era piú tale. Non ti dovea gravar le penne in giuso, ad aspettar piú colpo, o pargoletta o altra novità con sí breve uso. (Purg. xxxi, 55–60)

Beatrice describes her mortal self as a “deceptive thing”—a concrete, particular object of Dante’s fallible intellect. But death released her from her material form, her singularity, and at that point Dante should have begun to contemplate the general and abstract Beauty that is also



the Gentle Heart,” Dante offers an equally abstract theory. He has thus wandered away from his praise theme and into misguided secular philosophy. The fact that Francesca quotes from Dante’s weakest poem shows that she has not absorbed the self-critical and ironic aspects of the Vita Nuova.

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Then the nettle of repentance thrust into me so that all the other things for which I’d strayed most in my desire were now most odious to me With such comprehension my heart bit me so that I fell, fainting, and whatever else I did she knows who was the cause of it.

Di penter sí mi punse ivi l’ortica, che di tutte altre cose qual mi torse piú nel suo amor, piú mi si fé nemica. Tanto riconoscenza il cor mi morse, ch’io caddi vinto; e quale allora femmi, salsi colei che la cagion mi porse. (Purg. xxxi, 85–90)

These lines from Purgatorio indicate that the Vita Nuova is a ladder from narrative to theory that we should throw away once we have climbed it. We should heed Beatrice’s theological lessons, not what Dante tries to say about her in his love poetry. If her speeches about religion, politics, and metaphysics are accurate, then we should prefer what she says to any romantic story. If her philosophy is wrong, then we should refute it and offer a better theory. And if we cannot know the truth of her teaching, then perhaps we ought to pass over it in silence. In any case, we must abandon literature. But another course is open to Dante: to write about someone in particular. His subject could be the dead Beatrice, a living person, a historical character, a figment of his imagination, or himself. But he would have to use reason to describe this person well. The necessary type of reason would not comprehend general truths; it would understand individuals in their specificity. And no one could do that better than the perceptive, inventive, compassionate, judgmental, humorous, earthy author of the Inferno. Dante’s concrete, passionate realism was his greatest advance over the poetry of the Dolce stil nuovo. Auerbach describes its effect in the Divine Comedy: When we hear Cavalcante’s outburst: [“does not the sweet light still strike his eyes?”] or read the beautiful, gentle, and enchantingly feminine line which Pia de’ Tolomei utters before she asks Dante to remember her on earth, we experience an emotion which is concerned with human beings and not directly with the divine order in which they have found their fulfillment. Their eternal position in the divine order is something of which we are only conscious as a setting whose irrevocability can but serve to heighten the effect of their humanity, preserved for us in all its force. The result is a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else, a comprehension of human realities which spreads as widely and variously as it goes profoundly to the very roots of our emotions, an illumination of



Truth, Love, and Justice. Instead, he persisted in treating Beatrice as an individual—and a less attractive one after her demise (Purg. xxx, 129). Realizing his error in Purgatory, he faints again, but not from inappropriate pity, nor from an adolescent crush:


I have argued that Dante viewed his own passion-inciting stories as moral tests that demand restraint on our part. Our duty is to place characters like Francesca in their cosmic context and not to admire their individual passions. Yet Auerbach reminds us that Christian theology teaches the individuality, dignity, and indestructibility of each concrete human being. When Dante describes souls with “immediate and admiring sympathy,” this principle of individuality—although it is part of the divine order—“turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God.”52 Aquinas was a systematic philosopher who used necessary and sufficient conditions to judge individual cases. He tells Dante that someone “well and truly belongs among the idiots / if he affirms and denies without distinctions” (Par. xiii, 115–116). But Aquinas also tells the story of St. Francis’ life with “blazing courtesy” and “judicious language” (Par xii, 143–144). This is how St. Bonaventure describes Aquinas’ speech— Bonaventure, whose biography of St. Francis was one of the founding works of medieval prose narrative. If even Aquinas becomes a judicious and courteous storyteller in Dante’s heaven, then perhaps Aquinas has learned that philosophy is not an adequate guide to moral judgment.53 It seems that there are two explanations for Dante’s decision to damn Paolo and Francesca. Perhaps he was thinking like a philosopher, suspicious of passion and of narrative. His abstract reason told him that Francesca was guilty, and he wanted to warn us that stories can mislead by making us sympathize with particular people who have violated general laws. This was surely one of Dante’s purposes; but it was in creative tension with another goal. Dante not only thought like a philosopher, but also like a great poet, one who saw literature’s capacity to describe concrete individuals perceptively and revealingly. Literary descriptions can encourage us to feel appropriate emotions, whether sympathy and fear or scorn and anger. We can thereby learn empathy and judgment, which are indispensable skills if we want to act morally. But if stories have value, they also have risks. Whereas philosophy can prevent us from thinking by giving us abstract laws to apply by rote, so bad fiction contains clichés, euphemisms, and stereotypes that get in the way of thinking and judging accurately. Thus the second moral of Canto V is to use stories for guidance: but only good stories, well and carefully read.



man’s impulses and passions which leads us to share in them without restraint and indeed to admire their variety and their greatness.




SI X

Modern Versions

Distinguishing between ethical and immoral cases of passionate love is one our most serious responsibilities. Unfortunately, making such distinctions will not be easy if we refuse to apply general principles and if we shun definitions of concepts like “love” that employ necessary and sufficient conditions. I have argued that we must pay careful attention to whole situations before we make moral judgments. Individual details cannot be assessed abstractly, as instances of general types, but must be viewed together in context. Narratives help us to make holistic judgments of particulars. I have used an example—a literary description of a case of adultery—to show how we might think about that kind of problem. My argument suggests that moral philosophy offers relatively little guidance. We could turn instead to the concrete instances of love that are depicted in literature and art—but then we will face two problems. First, the most sophisticated artists of the last two centuries have deliberately eschewed moral representation, for reasons I discuss below. And second, the art of this era (for all its powerful depictions of infatuation, disenchantment, and tragedy) has relatively few resources with which to describe love itself. The previous chapters were based on an analysis of a particular text that is now seven centuries old. If philosophy and literature have remained constant over time, then we could analyze their relationships in one text, such as the Divine Comedy, and draw general conclusions from our investigation. Likewise, if marriage were a universal and constant institution, then we could directly compare medieval adultery cases to modern examples. However, if all these factors have changed



CH A P T E R


profoundly, as I believe they have, then the task becomes much more complicated. I would like to simplify matters somewhat by suggesting that a new set of assumptions and problems arose in the Romantic era and has caused trouble ever since. This means that even if no universal account can be given of the relationship between philosophy and concrete representation, or between marriage and infidelity, there is a modern complex of ideas and problems that we can identify and analyze. If I am right, this complex should be evident in most of the sophisticated depictions of the Paolo and Francesca myth since the Romantic era. From the late Middle Ages until ca. 1800, the representational arts were generally expected to depict objects in such a way as to provoke appropriate emotions. So when people read about Dante in Hell or looked at pictures of the Virgin and Child, they could imagine actually observing these human beings. Because of the way such characters were represented, readers and observers were made to feel Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear, or more Christian feelings of reverence and love—or many other sentiments, depending on the purpose of the work. The emotional impact of art was mainly credited to its representational quality, and representation was understood in one of two ways. Either art imitated the world as it really was, or else it imitated idealized versions of nature: instances of Platonic perfection. These two competing theories were sometimes debated and sometimes combined or synthesized, both in theory and in practice. The perceived moral power of representation was important for philosophy. Ethical theories must rest to some degree on concrete intuitions or judgments. Medieval and early-modern philosophers could assume that all their readers would reach the same judgments about concrete moral situations, because they could imagine how such situations would be represented in words or images. Their job was to derive generalizations, to systematize, and to refine. Around 1800, however, representation began to seem much more problematic. New and powerful reasons arose to make people skeptical about the accuracy of any imitation, whether what was represented was the “real world” (which now deserved quotation marks) or a Platonic ideal. Meanwhile, it began to seem difficult or even impossible to decide whether the emotions provoked by a work of art were morally appropriate. In the Middle Ages, marriage, motherhood, kingship, and other social institutions had seemed natural and permanent, part of the divine order. So a painting that made viewers revere Mary’s motherhood was obviously beneficial: philosophy, theology, scripture, and 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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tradition conspired to demonstrate the worthiness of this subject. But the Romantics began to view marriage and many other institutions as arbitrary human creations; thus they could no longer tell which emotions were morally right for art to provoke. Once, aesthetics, representation, and morality had all fit together rather neatly; but now they seemed to have come apart. Beauty, realism, and virtue were no longer natural partners. They were sometimes recombined—but only with difficulty, and never in a way that won universal or lasting assent. A Crisis of Representation In order to explain why sophisticated modern artists and writers often view moral representation as naïve, I will tell an abbreviated story that culminates in a crisis. This story can be told using many episodes and examples, but one way to begin is with a pair of images that were painted during Dante’s life and that greet modern visitors to the Uffizi in Florence. Iconographically, Cimabue’s Maestà (a Madonna in Majesty) is very similar to Giotto’s: both show the Virgin dressed in royal blue, carrying the baby Jesus, and sitting on a throne surrounded by angels. But all of the figures in Cimabue’s picture occupy a single plane, the plane of the picture, whereas Giotto’s figures seem to stand solidly on ground that recedes away from the viewer, as if we were peering through a window. Giotto’s Virgin has a lap on which Jesus sits, whereas Cimabue’s Mary is as f lat as the band of angels that support her weightless throne. Cimabue still basically belonged to a tradition that had begun around the sixth century, when artists had deliberately repudiated representation. The early Byzantines rejected earthly perspective partly because of the scriptural injunction against graven images, and partly because of a Platonic wariness of appearance. For them, the point of art was not to represent scenes and bodily objects as viewed from a human vantagepoint, but rather to capture their essence—or to create a substitute for their presence—much as the word “God” invokes Divinity in prayer. As Friedrich Ohly writes: “The allegedly perspectiveless Middle Ages have their own appropriate kind of perspective. . . . Its essence is not foreshortening, but extension to the sublime. It does not relativize to an earthly vanishing point but aligns with the absolute, making the created transparent to the eternal. It is not a physiological, visual kind of perspective but a theological-spiritual kind, and it defines as such the art of the sublime.”1 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Modern Versions


The purpose of Cimabue’s painting was to show the Enthroned Virgin in-herself, not for-us. According to Neoplatonic theory, art should not imitate concrete, empirical scenes, but should rather depict sublime forms, whose moral, aesthetic, and spiritual perfection should be clearly evident. If an icon “depicts” figures at all, they appear sub specie aeterni. Any emotion that it produces must be appropriate, because (in Ernst Gombrich’s words) the “icon is not conceived as a free ‘fiction’; it somehow partakes of the nature of Platonic truth. Even the narrative cycles of the Byzantine Church, as Otto Demus has shown, are no longer to be understood as an imaginative account of a past event. They mark the annual cycle of feasts and the timeless re-enactment of the life of Christ in the liturgy of the Church.”2 Dante may have closely studied one of Ravenna’s churches and imitated its structure in the Paradiso.3 Certainly, the end of the Divine Comedy is iconic rather than highly descriptive. The emotions that it generates (if it has an emotional impact at all) are relatively impersonal and detached—piety and awe, rather than pity and fear. These two moral justifications of art—naturalistic and idealistic—seem to explain much of what was produced in painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, fiction, and even opera and oratorio before the Romantic period. Either art was supposed to show us a piece of the real world under a moral aspect, or else its purpose was to depict ideal and eternal forms. It is sometimes claimed that medieval art was generally idealistic, whereas the purpose of Renaissance art was “the direct imitation of reality.”4 Erwin Panofsky reminds us, however, that idealism remained an important motivation well after the Middle Ages. Sometimes the two views were competitors, as when Caravaggio’s realism arose as a challenge to the Academic idealism of the Carracci. Caravaggio wanted to incite appropriate sentiments of pity and love by representing the Virgin with dirty, bare feet and the Christ-child as a heavy toddler. But the Neoplatonists replied that he was “uninventive, unintellectual, completely subject to the natural model, and satisfied with the unselective reproduction of things as they appeared to the senses, no matter how faulty this appearance might be: un gran soggetto, ma non ideale”—a great subject, but not idealized.5 At other times, naturalist and idealist theories were synthesized. Artists represented plausible scenes, using a knowledge of scientific perspective, anatomy, and optics; but by their selection of subjects and details, they managed to idealize the world. One common method was to try to detect the common features that were implicit in many actual faces or scenes, thereby revealing their underlying perfection. Raphael, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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for instance, explained to Castiglione that he painted beautiful women not from real models but by forming an idea of Beauty from his experience of many women.6 Thus Raphael’s very worldly perception of actual people, guided by an advanced knowledge of perspective, optics, and physiology, was supposed to serve the Neoplatonic goal of representing Beauty in general. Near the end of the Old Master tradition, Henry Fuseli likewise explained that a proper artist was an “idealist” who could picture perfection in his “mind’s eye”—he was not a mere “copyist” or “imitator” of concrete reality. Artists ought to derive their idealized forms from two sources: nature (looked at with a simplifying and purifying eye), and ancient art. The function or goal of art was to “fill the eye with the dew of humanity.” An artistic sensibility, Fuseli wrote, was “the mother of sympathy.” 7 These ideas help elucidate Fuseli’s aquatint entitled Dante in Hell Discovers Paolo and Francesca (1818). Here naturalistic techniques of foreshortening and modeling combine with classical inf luences to produce an image of Dante, Paolo, and Francesca as naked, Hellenic heroes. And evidently the purpose of the painting is to make us share Dante’s pity. Peter Tomory even suggests that “Fuseli saw this scene as an allegory of himself in old age contemplating the fading dreams of his distant youth.”8 The effort to mimic empirical reality grew increasingly sophisticated between Giotto’s day and the nineteenth century. Perspective was systematized; the scientific study of anatomy was exploited to improve depictions of bodies (human and animal); and chiarascuro gave figures greater solidity. Ultimately, photographs would help painters to analyze movement too rapid for the human eye. But these advances did not change the basic functions of art. When a threat to the representational tradition arose, the cause was one specific development that occurred around the year 1800. Giotto grasped spatial perspective, but he had no historical sense. For him, Biblical and heavenly characters were contemporaries who dressed in the best Florentine fashion of 1300 and dwelled in fine Tuscan cities. The same was true of Dante. By definition, Hell is timeless and permanent, yet Dante depicted it as an image of trecento Italy. In a Lombard manuscript illumination, painted about 1440, Virgil wears opulent, fifteenth-century dress. Dante surely would not have objected to this anachronism, for he had made Virgil and Statius speak his own medieval language. Awareness of history improved gradually over the centuries as more was known and understood about ancient life, but most Baroque and Neoclassical depictions of historical scenes still used contemporary clothes 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Modern Versions


and customs. This was certainly true when medieval fiction was illustrated during the Enlightenment. For example, a 1788 depiction of Tristan alludes very superficially to the Age of Chivalry by showing a shield and pike on the bare wall, but the figures have “a resolutely contemporary allure with their hoopskirts and the classical décor of their palaces; a few ornaments ‘à l’espagnole’ can’t transform them into people from the past.”9 I suspect that contemporary viewers did not notice the anachronisms in this illustration, because depictions of biblical, mythological, and medieval scenes were still generally devoid of historical consciousness. The early French king Clovis was portrayed “as a standard Rococo figure” during the Rococo period.10 And without its title, we would never know that John Flaxman’s 1783 drawing represents “A Medieval Scene,” for it looks as rigorously Neoclassical as the rest of his pictures. A decade later, Flaxman carefully dressed Paolo in doublet and hose. He and his contemporaries were beginning to depict things as they had actually looked centuries earlier. The very phrase “local color” derived from this period and described historical scenes in which the architecture, clothing, and heraldic trappings were authentic.11 For instance, Philippe-Marie Coupin de la Couperie took pains to make the costumes and décor for his Paolo and Francesca (1819) as medieval as he could. By this time, viewers had learned to analyze any image for its historical period, so an illustration of Francesca in modern or classical dress would have appeared anachronistic—whether deliberately or naively so. This does not mean that every artist embraced historicism. For his 1818 illustration of Paolo and Francesca, Fuseli stuck resolutely to classical models, so that his medieval characters looked like Greek marbles. In his view, “None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is local, or the volatile creature of the time, [is] passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of the human heart.”12 But no matter how sincerely Fuseli maintained that his own Neoclassical aesthetic was universal, he could not prevent people from reading his illustration as specifically Hellenic (and therefore anachronistic). Giotto and his contemporaries had taught observers to locate painted figures in space. Artists of the early 1800s fixed their subjects equally precisely in historical time. Thus historicism was a new stage in the long quest for objectivity and perspective. François Pupil describes Ingres’ Paolo and Francesca (1819) as an advance in these terms: Derived from literature and nourished by recollections, [Ingres’] evocation of the Middle Ages surpasses its models by precocious research and a poetry rarely attained in Troubadour



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Flaxman, Coupin, and Ingres had much in common with Giotto; they still pretended to be eye-witnesses to the event, viewing it as if through a window. But these artists implied that they had traveled through time as well as space to depict their subjects. The same could be said of Leigh Hunt, who provided medieval backgrounds for the scenes in his Story of Rimini (1816). For instance, he writes that Giovanni tried to make Francesca feel at home in Rimini by creating for her a private room Furnished, like magic, from her own at home; The very books and all transported there, The leafy tapestry, and the crimson chair, The lute, the glass that told the shedding hours, The little urn of silver for the f lowers, The frame for broidering, with a piece half done, And the white falcon, basking in the sun.

None of these trappings belongs to Hunt’s time; they are meant to suggest historical distance. Hunt also tries to give his characters medieval mores and manners. At one point, the narrator asserts that Paolo was gentle compared to Giovanni, but he hastens to explain: Not that he saw, or thought he saw, beyond His general age, and could not be as fond Of wars and creeds as any of his race, — But most he loved a happy human face.14

Almost a century later, Gabriele D’Annunzio went to extreme lengths to make his play Francesca da Rimini historically accurate. He wrote it as a vehicle for Eleanora Duse, his lover and Sandra Bernhardt’s rival on the international stage. He persuaded Duse to spend 400,000 lire on the production (forty years’ salary for a high civil servant), and the money helped to purchase historical verisimilitude. D’Annunzio even wanted the woodcarvings and armor to be made by specialists in antiques.15 His stage directions called for many touches of authenticity: for example, “twin-horned headdresses” and “tall distaffs” would shine in the sun.16 John Woodhouse notes that the text, too, is replete with “difficult, recherché, and often hypertechnical terminology relating to twelfth-century [sic] customs and objects. . . . Editions of the play owned 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Painting [e.g., that of Coupin de la Couperie]. The construction of the piece recalls the contemporaries of Uccello; the lectern and the vase that come from northern primitivism, the cupboards covered with embroidery, the vivid and slightly discordant tones of the clothes all give the impression of an atmosphere already known, an air of the ‘good old days.’13


by Italians invariably have their margins heavily paved with glosses explaining some of the specialized vocabulary which D’Annunzio excavated during the period he was ‘researching’ the play’s background.”17 Numerous references to minor historical figures and places contribute to the exotic atmosphere. Historical consciousness raises the following problem. Why should a scene from the distant past be depicted in the style of the artist’s time? Romantic painters dressed their characters in medieval clothes, but their paintings were obviously conceived by nineteenth-century artists. If they were really eye-witnesses to Francesca’s kiss, then they would have been medieval painters, and their work, as well as their subject, would look Gothic. Like Coupin, Hunt pretended that he could see Paolo and Francesca with his own eyes, yet he reminded us that they had lived long ago in a barbarous age. How could a modern narrator, with Romantic sensibilities and diction, offer a direct first-person record of Francesca’s “lovely lips, and eyes,” her “clipsome waist, and bosom’s balmy rise”?18 Similarly, D’Annunzio’s play is full of historical details, but it is written in avant-garde free verse (iambic, but with unequal line-lengths). His Francesca da Rimini is obviously not a rediscovered medieval passion play, for it obeys the conventions of symbolist poetry and modern drama. D’Annunzio’s audience sat across a proscenium arch from a scene that was supposed to resemble a photograph of Ravenna taken in 1250—as if there could be any such thing. They were obviously in the hands of a modern playwright. As Paolo Valesio writes à propos of this play, “The more the author tries to give the color of historical faithfulness to his designs, the more those designs appear as what they are: dreaming silhouettes.”19 By 1837, when William Dyce painted Francesca da Rimini, he derived the costumes, the props (such as a lute), and the background from quattrocento art. His choice of palette, his placement of a wall between foreground and background, and his use of chiaroscuro all invoke early Renaissance painting. We might complain that Francesca lived well before the quattrocentro, at a time when Byzantine conventions still dominated. Perhaps Dyce would have imitated the artists of her time if he had known and understood their work. Consider also Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s watercolor Paolo and Francesca. (The cover of this book shows an 1862 version in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford, England. The more famous 1855 version is in the Tate Gallery, London. Both works are highly colorful, although the former is reproduced here in monochrome.) Although Rossetti left 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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the Royal Academy before he reached the Life School and the Painting School, he certainly possessed the technical skills necessary to create a conventional painting in what was known as the Academic style. Academic art represented plausible scenes according to scientific perspective, yet the figures were idealized. Rossetti f launted all these conventions in his Paolo and Francesca. Here the infernal storm is depicted in a stylized fashion, as a set of yellow paint strokes against a black plane. Although there is a small step beneath the lovers’ feet—and a piece of ground supports Virgil and Dante—the painting is basically a f lat, decorated surface. There is no middle ground or background, just a hint of architecture behind the kissing lovers. Contrary to standard practice since the sixteenth century, the central panel is set at a different time from the moment depicted on the left; it is simultaneous with the scene on the right, but belongs to a different space, even though Dante and Virgil are watching Paolo and Francesca. John Ruskin, who had his own elaborate ideas about art and history, had urged Rossetti to abandon the “ridiculous ‘unities’ ” of time and space that “the last two centuries [have] insisted on.”20 The result was complex and deliberate: Rossetti created a gothic-looking image of an ancient Roman and a medieval Italian who are walking together in a place outside history, but observing both a thirteenth-century scene and a vision of eternal torture. (The fact that the painting contains anachronisms makes it similar to medieval art, although in other respects it is modern.21) Further disrupting any illusion, Rossetti placed fragments of the following tercet as labels within the frame: When I could answer, I cried, “How many ‘sweet thoughts,’ alas, and how much passion conducted these two to their destiny!”

Quando rispuosi, cominciai: «Oh lasso quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio menò costoro al doloroso passo!» (Inf. v, 112–114)

Rossetti’s Paolo and Francesca is not naturalistic, nor does it depict a timeless idea such as “romantic love.” It seems to represent something historically specific and lost, a defunct cultural construct such as “chivalric romance” or “medieval art.” Early-Christian artists had tried to depict God and the saints as they really were. Giotto had begun to show each person or object as it would appear from a particular vantage-point in space, against a physical background. Around 1800, Giotto’s successors had begun to represent objects located in historical as well as spatial perspective. Finally, Victorian artists decided that it was necessary to depict reality as it would be seen through an appropriate artistic style. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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It was at this point that the procession of international European period-styles (Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Rococo) began to falter and Revivalism became the norm. Now art didn’t pretend to represent nature or Beauty; it ref lected a culture, of which there were many. The word cultura does not appear in the Divine Comedy, but it certainly would have made no sense to Dante in the plural. For him, there was one proper way of living, epitomized in changeless heaven. For nineteenth-century painters, however, each culture had its own values and art, and the differences could rarely be described as objective improvements. The Victorian period was an age of photography, of technical drawing, of sophisticated anatomy and scientific, three-point perspective. These innovations must have seemed objective advances, much like Newton’s discovery of gravity. But even if the tradition of depicting scenes as if through a window showed evidence of progress on its own terms, this whole enterprise could be viewed as arbitrary—as just one conception of visual arts among others. Certainly, the valuejudgments that determine choices of what to represent are subjective. And the difference between medieval and modern art could even be understood as a loss, as a disenchantment. For Cimabue, it had seemed possible to conjure up the Virgin Mary in-herself, to make a sacred object. For Giotto and his successors, it had seemed possible to show how Mary would really appear. In the nineteenth century, however, many artists began to think that the most they could do was to represent another culture’s image of the Virgin. Meaning had shifted from the object to the subject, and the work of art had lost contact with any independent being. Although Rossetti actually made careful drawings from nature, he was eager to deny it, describing himself as “a quack” when it came to the depiction of “sky, sun, stone, stick, and stack.”22 With one important exception, all of his paintings were illustrations of literary texts from old authors, done in a style that evoked the art of their time. The drawback of such historicist art is that it often seems inauthentic and sentimental, a superficial appropriation of someone else’s style. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood held as one of its four goals “To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.”23 But this sentence expresses a problem, not a solution. It is one thing to identify past artists as heartfelt and naïve; it is another thing to imitate them without becoming merely derivative. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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In his best work, I believe, Rossetti solved this problem. His Paolo and Francesca borrows certain formal properties from medieval art in order to suggest an appropriate atmosphere. The colors could come from an illuminated manuscript, and the composition looks like a predella. Nevertheless, the overall effect is nothing like a medieval picture. The simplification or stylization of nature looks deliberate, a move toward abstraction. The anachronism and temporal confusion that would be naïve aspects of medieval art are self-conscious in Rossetti’s image. And his attitude toward romantic love is distinctively modern—a point to which I will return in the next section. In short, although he was inspired by an ancient text, he invented a style of his own. However, as soon as pre-Raphaelite art developed into a recognizable style, it immediately joined the list stretching from Byzantine to Rococo. It became another option to be followed by an imitative artist or rejected by someone who wanted to be original. The same fate would befall the Impressionists, when they tried to depict color and light analytically; the Bauhaus functionalists, when they proclaimed a minimalist architecture beyond “the arbitrary reproduction of historical styles”;24 the Surrealists, when they depicted the allegedly universal symbolism of the unconscious; and the Abstract Expressionists, when they sought a mystical language of pure form. The modernist’s best hope, it seems, is to create a short-lived new style in a failed attempt to transcend style. I have discussed the crisis of representation in the arts because we derive most of our moral intuitions and judgments from our concrete pictures of the world; thus morality is endangered if we find that we cannot represent human events and actions persuasively in images or words. Since circa 1800, some philosophers have argued that their discipline, too, is threatened by historicism. Dewey summarizes this position: Philosophy, like politics, literature and the plastic arts, is itself a phenomenon of human culture. Its connection with social history, with civilization, is intrinsic. There is current among those who philosophize the conviction that, while past thinkers have ref lected in their systems the conditions and perplexities of their own day, present-day philosophy in general, and one’s own philosophy in particular, is emancipated from the inf luence of that complex of institutions which forms a culture. Bacon, Descartes, Kant each thought with fervor that he was founding a new philosophy because he was placing it securely upon an exclusive intellectual basis, exclusive, that is, of everything but intellect. The movement of time has revealed the illusion. . . . Philosophers are part of history, caught in its movement; creators perhaps in some measure of its future, but also assuredly creatures of its past. 25



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For Hegel, Schiller, Marx, Heidegger, and others, historicism meant that no previous philosophical doctrine could be anything other than an expression of its own culture’s perspective; but they could understand the overall pattern of history and thereby attain a new kind of truth. For Nietszche, Dewey, Foucault, and others, there was no intelligible pattern in intellectual history; therefore historicism had destroyed philosophy’s pretensions to truth. Today, some philosophers still argue that their discipline is not time-bound, because its methods are objective and universal. They assert that philosophy, like science, represents the objective world, not the assumptions of its culture. This is possibly true of logic and even epistemology and metaphysics. However, it is very difficult to see how moral philosophy can be anything other than a ref lection of its culture, since it involves the analysis of intuitions, and intuitions come from our representations of the concrete world. As Bernard Williams notes, science can risk ignoring its own history because there is a plausible history of science that is “vindicatory.” Today’s scientific explanations are better than yesterday’s, and those who held yesterday’s theories have good reasons now to “recognize the transition as an improvement.” If that vindicatory story is right, then understanding science from the past does not help today’s scientists. But ethics does not have a vindicatory history. Prevailing ethical opinions do not change in such an orderly way. Our ethical views (such as egalitarianism) may be better than ancient ones; but ancient authors, if resurrected to debate us, would have no reasons to agree. They would start from their place, and we from ours. Some ethical dispositions may be shared by all human beings, but others—such as the idea that authenticity is a virtue—are “manifestly contingent cultural development[s].”26 We can reason about our beliefs, but fully understanding them requires treating them as ours. Williams acknowledges that there are some ethical commonalities across time and culture. Perhaps these commonalities arose before the differences and are morally fundamental. Michael Walzer summarizes that view: “Men and women everywhere begin with some common idea or principle or set of ideas and principles, which they then work up in many different ways. They start thin, as it were, and thicken with age.”27 If this were true, then historicism would lose its bite. By identifying universal principles and elaborating them correctly, we could derive a single morality for all times and places. That is a classic philosophical aspiration. “But our intuition is wrong here,” Walzer says. “Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant.” It starts as 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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a set of stories, rules, habits, and assumptions—different in each time and place. They are judgments about particular situations in particular contexts. Once we have obtained broad historical knowledge, we can see that certain general principles are shared across the globe. But these principles are simply “reiterated features of particular thick and maximal moralities.” The fact that they are widely shared doesn’t make them correct (patriarchy was all but universal 200 years ago). Even the universal principles that happen to be valid cannot serve as the foundation of a satisfactory morality; they are too sketchy, abstract, and miscellaneous.28 For example, it may be empirically true that all human beings recognize some value in reciprocity, and this instinct may have arisen for Darwinian or other naturalistic reasons. But that does not mean that reciprocity is the basis for morality—nor do our inherited instincts tell us reliably when and how we should be reciprocal. If morality is mostly set of intuitions based on our concrete representations of our experiences, and if representations differ from culture to culture, then historicism poses a deep problem for morality—not only for the arts. It implies that all our judgments are relative to our cultural backgrounds and dependent on how we (people in our culture) represent the world in narratives and images. The Dante Revival The rise of historicism can be illustrated by describing the way Dante was read after the Middle Ages. This background is also important if we want to understand the modern retellings of the Paolo-and-Francesca myth. Considering only British cases, we find that the major authors from Chaucer to Milton who came under Dante’s influence treated him as an impressive contemporary. Since they were hardly aware of cultural change, they assumed that Dante shared their interests, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, and literary influences. Indeed, Milton’s conception of the cosmos was similar to Dante’s. By the eighteenth century, however, the gap between medieval Italy and the present had become large and impossible to ignore. But readers still lacked our modern sense of cultural diversity, so now they viewed Dante as simply un-cultured. Oliver Goldsmith’s reaction was typical. He wrote, “Dante addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehensions. . . . The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived. As in the land of Benin a man may pass for a prodigy of parts who can read, so in an age of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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barbarity a small degree of excellence ensures success.”29 Augustan poets and Enlightenment philosophers assumed that there was one ideal classical aesthetic, one true Copernican cosmology, one correct set of manners for “polite society” (the same for Pericles as for William Pitt), and just a few reasonable theologies to choose from. It was obvious to them that a superstitious Catholic who wrote indecently about flatulence and placed the River Styx in Purgatory could not be a man of “culture.” But just a few years later, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron unanimously affirmed Dante’s greatness. They imitated him, read him in Italian with learned commentaries, and noted his faults only because they assumed that he was supremely worthy of imitation. After another generation, the Victorians had seated Dante securely between Homer and Shakespeare as one of the greatest poets of all time. The change was abrupt, leading Mr. Listless in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) to remark: “I don’t know how it is, but Dante never came my way until recently. I never had him in my collection, and if I had had him I should not have read him. But I find he is growing fashionable, and I am afraid I must read him some wet morning.”30 What had happened? In an age of historical consciousness, Dante’s otherness, his strangeness, his distance from Enlightenment ideals— which had once marked him as a barbarian—now attracted readers. He represented an alternative perspective, forcefully presented. The English Romantics did not, of course, believe in Purgatory, astrology, or Scholastic ethics. But they no longer expected literature to describe reality objectively (if any such thing were possible). They admired authenticity, originality, strength of will, and internal coherence—virtues that they found aplenty in Dante, even though he saw himself as repeating universal truths. As Isaiah Berlin observes: there are certain values that we in our world accept which were probably created by early Romanticism and did not exist before: for example, the idea that variety is a good thing, that a society in which many opinions are held, and those holding different opinions are tolerant of each other, is better than a monolithic society in which one opinion is binding on everyone. Nobody before the eighteenth century could have accepted that: the truth was one and the idea of variety was inimical to it. Again, the idea of sincerity, as a value, is something new. . . . no marks were given for sincerity until the notion that there is more than one answer to a question—that is, pluralism—became more widespread. That is what led value to be set on motive rather than on consequence, on sincerity rather than on success. 31

The Romantics appreciated Dante because his worldview was sincere and his work provided an alternative to their own mores, thus increasing pluralism. Friedrich Schelling saw Dante as the archetypal mythmaker, a man who had taken the “absolute arbitrariness” of the “history 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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and culture of his age” and impressed upon it the stamp of his own personality and formal creativity, thereby making something of universal appeal.32 Similarly, Macaulay wrote, “The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story appears to be told.”33 But Dante would have said that his poem was excellent only insofar as it accurately represented God’s will. Just as Romantics admired Dante’s force of will, they also appreciated his most willful characters: damned figures like Ugolino, Farinata, and Francesca. As Hollander observes, “Francesca, one of the most beguiling of Dante’s sinners, replaces the sainted Beatrice as the guarantor of the poem’s (and the poet’s) greatness; Dante becomes the unrivaled portraitist of Great Feeling.”34 Before Romanticism, Dante’s claim to greatness had been, not his own feelings or his portrayal of sinners’ emotions, but his purported access to Truth. Beatrice and Paradiso had been much more important than Francesca and Inferno. The one major British Romantic who developed “no deep spiritual relationship” to Dante was Wordsworth.35 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some authors have declared that everything is changeable, conventional, and arbitrary: everything, that is, except one universal source of value that they celebrate in their own work. Candidates for this exceptional status include God, love and/or sex, freedom, the unconscious, abstract geometrical forms, and Wordsworth’s Nature. While his friend Coleridge was drawing inspiration from medieval poetry, Wordsworth was expressing his love “of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth.”36 Hazlitt wrote of Wordsworth: “The general and the permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities.” His mind “resists all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and pantomime of the stage—or of real life.”37 Wordworth’s preference for permanent, elemental Nature over changeable culture was so strong, Hazlitt thought, “that I doubt whether he would not reject a druidical temple, or timehallowed ruin, as too modern and artificial for his purpose.”38 Hazlitt thought that Wordsworth was perfectly typical of his time, “a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age.”39 Yet he represented only one side of the Romantic coin. The “reverse” was Walter Scott, who was capable of a “greater variety of dress and attitude, and . . . more local truth of coloring.”40 Both authors beheld a world of change, in which all human “manners and actions have the interest and curiosity belonging to a wild country and a distant period of time.”41 The difference was that Scott enthusiastically portrayed these picturesque differences, whereas Wordsworth shunned them in favor of Nature’s 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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eternal verities. But Romantic depictions of nature could not be objective if every human creation was subjective and artificial. Nor could Romantic representations of cultural variety be accurate, for every representation must employ its own culture’s special perspective. As Nietzsche remarked: “Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s Greeks, Victor Hugo’s Orientals, Wagners’ Edda characters, Walter Scott’s thirteenth-century Englishmen—some day someone will reveal the whole comedy! It was all beyond measure historically false, but—modern.”42 Recall that Dante’s purpose was to describe natural and cultural phenomena as consistent parts of a divinely created, eternal whole. Neither Scott nor Wordsworth—nor any of the Romantics—thought this project possible, because they beheld a world in which human norms were infinitely various and changing. An unprecedented quantity of information was now known about diverse cultures. As imperialists, missionaries, and traders, modern Europeans increasingly understood non-Western civilizations; and they had learned enough information about medieval life and tastes to invent the very concept of the “Middle Ages.” The most sophisticated classicists had come to understand enough about ancient civilization that it no longer appeared to be a single, unified ideal, but rather a series of local and temporary stages stretching from Homer’s time to St. Augustine’s. Meanwhile, the French and Industrial Revolutions had buttressed people’s belief that society was subject to fundamental change. In all these respects, the Romantic generation understood more about history than had been grasped before. But their knowledge produced a crisis in the arts, because it implied that things could not be represented as they were, but only as various cultures had imagined them. Faced with a choice of arbitrary styles, the Romantic artist had no reason to employ one instead of another. And inventing one’s own style took extraordinary creativity and strength of will, especially if one knew that it, too, would be merely arbitrary. This is what Nietzsche meant when he noted the “nihilistic consequences of history and of the ‘practical historians,’ i.e., the Romantics. The condition of art: absolute unoriginality is its condition in the modern world. It is wrapped in gloom.”43 A Moral Crisis The nineteenth-century crisis of representation fed a crisis of moral judgment. For Dante, marriage was part of the order of the universe, decreed by God. Asked to explain it, he would have given a teleological account, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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arguing that people got married in order to create family units and to promote the virtue of chastity (Purg. xxv, 134–135). Individuals might have other motives in mind, but institutions were created by God for His purposes, not by humans for theirs. Dante could also suggest an analogy, for marriages existed in Eden and Heaven, not just on earth. There were mystic marriages and holy families as well as literal, legal ones. Dante even describes the spirits of the wise as God’s “family”—pointedly rejecting a political metaphor, such as the City of God (Par. x, 49). Down on earth, he says, in the good old days of Florentine virtue, “no family houses were without offspring” (Par. xv, 106). According to Georges Duby, the ideal of marriage that Dante took for granted was actually the result of a struggle between religious and lay authorities that culminated in a twelfth-century victory for the Church—at least at the level of ideology. The lay model had treated marriage as the union of two family lines, whose purpose was to generate a single male heir. Unions were arranged by the families’ elders without consulting the individuals who were to marry. As Simon B. Gaunt writes: “Wedding ceremonies were domestic occasions: a priest might bless the union, but the central ritual was an agreement between two families and the handing over of a woman by one man (or group of men) to another man (or group of men).”44 In the lay model, Duby notes, there was a “propensity, whether conscious or unconscious, towards endogamy”: that is, toward unions inside the family, among cousins or other relatives.45 Marriage was a privilege of first sons; other males could have sex, but could not wed. Wives were strictly and violently forbidden to have extramarital sex, partly because any children who might result would complicate inheritances. But it was possible for husbands to have extramarital intercourse and then ignore any illegitimate offspring. Therefore, male infidelity was rarely censured. As Duby writes, “This society was not strictly monogamous. To be sure, it allowed only one wife at a time, but it did not deny the husband, or rather his family group, the power to break the marriage at will, to dismiss his wife so that he could seek another, and to this end to start the hunt for a good match again.”46 In contrast, the Church understood marriage as the voluntary union of two souls, creating a new indissoluble family unit. The ties that it prized were horizontal (between husbands and wives) rather than vertical (along lines of descent). Whereas lay marriage was endogamous, the Church promoted exogamy: that is, unions outside certain limits of consanguinity. Finally, the Church promoted marriage as the ideal for everyone who could not remain chaste; it was not the prerogative of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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first-born sons. This religious model was specifically Christian. It was new in northwestern Europe in the twelfth century, and it never won a total victory over lay resistance. Indeed, marriage continues to draw on these traditions, and others, as it evolves in our era. But Dante and other medieval Catholics did not understand the history of such social institutions. They believed that the Church model of marriage was self-evidently good and as old as mankind, having been instituted by God in paradise to signify the mystical union between Christ and his Church. To be sure, Dante’s own love for Beatrice was extramarital, as was Lancelot’s passion for Guinevere and Abelard’s for Héloïse. But orthodox Catholic medieval authors were required to view adultery as a sin resulting from misplaced or misconceived love. No moral ambiguity was possible—except possibly in cases like Tristan’s, when the passion was caused by a love potion. Even though Dante’s love for Beatrice was unrequited and unconsummated, it only became acceptable once she turned into a figure of theology and directed his attention toward God. Perhaps the romances of Tristan and Lancelot derived from a pagan Celtic culture with f lexible ideas about love and monogamy, but Christian writers didn’t grasp the otherness of their sources. As for the Cathars, they may have preferred adultery to marriage because they were against intercourse, and extramarital passion could be unconsummated. But this was just a heretical inversion of Christian doctrine. Things have become more complicated in the age of historical consciousness. Even to Herodotus, it was clear that superficial customs like burial rituals and cuisines might vary from nation to nation, and that none was objectively better than another. At the opposite extreme, most people would still claim that certain facts about nature are objectively true. For instance, the circumference of a circle really is twice the radius times pi, regardless of what any cultures might believe. But marriage falls in an uncomfortable middle ground: it may be natural and universal, or it may be a mere convention. For Dante, the answer was clear; he would have regarded pagans and heretics who rejected marriage as misguided sinners. By contrast, nineteenth-century authors understood the values of some non-Western and pre-Christian cultures, and they imagined states of nature in which there were no marriages or other contracts. One might argue that family structures differ from place to place, yet some versions are morally preferable to others. But the Romantics often viewed marriage rules as completely arbitrary. Shelley, for instance, warned against assuming that the institution of marriage was natural just because it was basic to modern European 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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civilization. Only a “superficial observer considers the laws of his own society universal.” Actually, Shelley claimed, the natural human condition was “promiscuous concubinage.” Before the laws concerning marriage were enacted, “no moral affections arose from the indulgence of a physical impulse.”47 While Romantics often claimed that marriage contracts were mere conventions, they suspected that sexual passion was natural and universal. Consequently, they saw a complex, interesting, and potentially tragic conf lict in cases of extra-marital desire. A few lines before he quotes a phrase from Canto V, the narrator of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall exclaims: Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth! Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!48

Shelley was horrified that positive law would “pretend even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature.”49 This is just what happens to tragic heroes in so many Romantic stories: their instinctive affections are squelched by arbitrary social norms. The horribleness of their fate guarantees pathos. Conf licts are necessary in storytelling, but social obligations are not the only interesting barriers that arise between lovers. Indeed, they are not the source of trouble in medieval romances. Lancelot and Tristan faced conf licts, certainly, but not between natural passion and conventional morality. If anything, the opposite was true. Tristan’s love came from an unnatural human source (magic), whereas his duties to his wife and to King Mark derived from the divine order. Likewise, there was something obviously artificial about Courtly Love according to Andreas Capellanus and Francesca da Rimini, whereas marital chastity was decreed by God and was as old as Eve. When Dante told Francesca’s story, he set passion in conf lict with morality. At least part of his purpose was to suggest that sin had to be overcome by doing the right thing, or else sinners would merit damnation. But the great Romantic critic Francesco de Sanctis read the scene differently. For him, Francesca’s moral scruples weren’t right or wrong; they were a problem for her to face heroically. De Sanctis observed that in many stories, lovers cannot attain happiness because of “differences in family station, family feuds, [or] political hatreds.” In the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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case of Paolo and Francesca, the barrier happened to be moral, but this did not mean that they should resolve it by avoiding sin. Instead, their desire created an utterly unresolvable conf lict that qualified Francesca as a tragic heroine. “Sin is the supreme pathos of this tragedy because the conf lict which it engenders is not external to the lovers, but takes place in their very souls—and without conf lict, love is not tragedy but Arcadian prose, pastoral poetry, Daphnis and Chloe.” De Sanctis assumed that we should pity Francesca because she was destroyed in struggling against an obstacle to her love, even though the obstacle was morality. Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca, he wrote, “has for its muse Pity, pure of any other sentiment, a single and irresistible cord that thrills one’s soul to ecstasy.”50 De Sanctis thus exemplified what Alison Milbank calls the “negative sublime.”51 In classic authors, including Longinus, Dante, and Kant, the sublime is supposed to be an experience of ineffable beauty that improves us morally. For instance, Dante beholds aesthetic perfection in heaven; although he cannot reproduce it, it makes him a better man. He has seen the God who is simultaneously Being, Goodness, and Beauty. In Romantic tragedies, by contrast, a fatal sin is often meant to provoke exquisite, voluptuous pity for the sinner. In Hunt’s Story of Rimini, for example, Francesca expires of pure grief after Giovanni kills Paolo in a duel. The narrator stops to observe: It has surprised me often, as I write, That I, who have of late known small delight, Should thus pursue a mournful theme, and make, My very solace of distress partake.

A few lines later, he explains why he would willingly write about the most extreme pathos: E’en tales like this, founded on real woe, From bitter seed to balmy fruitage grow; The woe was earthly, fugitive, is past; The song that sweetens it, may always last.

Hunt’s story is more sentimental than sublime; I am tempted to say that you need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of his Francesca. But there are more successful examples of the negative or pathetic sublime in nineteenth-century books and operas about extramarital sex: consider La Traviata or Tristan und Isolde. De Sanctis reads the Inferno as the same kind of story. This is a mistake, because “pity pure of any other 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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The Adultery Theme The nineteenth century saw a great procession of novels devoted to adultery. This sequence included, among others, Elective Affinities, The Red and the Black, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Age of Innocence, The Good Soldier, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. These novels are morally complex and elude easy classification. But they all present the figure of the adulterous wife, who has a remarkable appeal for modern readers. Indeed, Tony Tanner suggests “that is the unstable triangularity of adultery, rather than the static symmetry of marriage, that is the generative form of Western literature as we know it.”52 Similarly, in 1940, de Rougement wrote of “our obsession by the love that breaks the law.”53 If Romantics took adultery as one of their major themes, so did their bitterest contemporary critics. Anti-Romantics from Flaubert to Joyce emphasized marital infidelity for subversive purposes. Today things are different; for every novel of adultery (say, by Updike or Roth), there must be a thousand pop songs, television shows, and movies about pre-marital courtship. De Rougement predicted this shift, arguing that since passion thrives on obstacles, relaxed sexual mores would reduce our interest in passionate love. The concentration on pre-marital romance is certainly significant, and it probably has three main causes. First, adultery stories are less interesting now that unfaithful spouses merely risk divorce, rather than utter disgrace and suicide. Second, the typical period of courtship— which now includes respectable pre-marital sex—has been greatly prolonged and has become a more fruitful subject for fiction. Finally, young people have become major purchasers of entertainment, and they are interested in their own problems. In the nineteenth century, it was difficult to avoid the adultery theme if one wanted to write about adult women, because they could not be detectives, adventurers, soldiers, or artists. They were expected to be house-keepers, and family life was not supposed to be complicated; it was not supposed to have a plot. De Sanctis explained that Francesca da Rimini qualified as a heroine because her situation avoided the usual 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


sentiment” was hardly Dante’s main emotion. But de Sanctis’ misreading reveals much about Romanticism. For one thing, it explains why the Romantics almost invariably sympathized with Francesca. The paintings by Dyce, Coupin, and Rubio express pity and admiration for the doomed lovers, as do the poems by Keats, Hunt, and Byron.


drawback of female literary characters. If a woman struggled “victoriously against some overwhelming passion”—like a heroic man—she would be “an unaesthetic character—virtuous, admirable, but unaesthetic.” On the other hand, if she succumbed to her desires and enjoyed some forbidden union, then she would be “a creature unnatural and therefore alien to us and devoid of interest.” De Sanctis concluded: “But the woman who, in the weakness and distress of her struggle, preserves inviolate the essential qualities of womanhood—purity, modesty, gentleness, exquisite delicacy of feeling: her, even if guilty, we feel to be part of ourselves, of our common nature, and she assumes the highest interest, draws tears from our eyes, and makes us fall ‘come corpo morto.’ ”54 Today, happily, there are subjects other than adultery that can involve adult female characters, and there’s a large audience for stories about the young. But despite these important developments, we still see the echoes of Romantic adultery in contemporary songs of initial infatuation, promises of endless love, doubt, cheating, and heartbreak. Pity remains a dominant theme. The vast majority of our stories still concern either the beginning or the end of love: that is, before people know much about one another, or after they have lost interest. There are relatively few novels (let alone songs) about love itself—about the course of two lives that are connected by mutual care, understanding, and adjustment. The lack of resources to describe love will be evident if we examine excellent Romantic versions of the Paolo-and-Francesca myth. Romantic Retellings English readers of the nineteenth century fastened on Francesca da Rimini as a major character—and a sympathetic one. This was not an inevitable choice. The Divine Comedy was uncharted territory in 1800. Unlike us, the Romantics and Victorians did not know in advance what passages would prove especially important or moving; and they had only the barest explanatory notes. It was up to them to make Ugolino, Pia de’ Tolomei, and Francesca da Rimini famous, and to ignore hundreds of other characters who remain obscure for most of us. They were magnetically attracted to the lovers of Rimini. The catalyst for the English Dante revival was a translation of the Inferno by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, published in 1805. This was the first English version that was sympathetic, fairly literal, and successful as verse. It went almost unnoticed for seven years, but when Coleridge praised it, a thousand copies were immediately purchased, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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When of that smile we read, The wished smile, rapturously kissed By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er From me shall separate, at once my lips All trembling kissed. (Inf. v, 133–137)

“Cotanto amante” literally means “such a lover.” Dante leaves it up to us to decide what kind of lover Paolo is—a challenging moral question. But Cary answers the question in Paolo’s favor, rendering the phrase: “by one so deep in love.” As Ralph Pite argues, Cary favors “the self-effacing but all-comprehending virtue of sympathy,” over other emotions.56 Similar motivations led Leigh Hunt to mistranslate much more freely: As doves, drawn home from where they circled still, Set firm their open wings, and through the air, Come sweeping, wafted by their pure good-will: So broke from Dido’s f lock that gentle pair, Cleaving, to where we stood, the air malign, Such strength to bring them had a loving prayer. (Inf. v, 82–87)57

There is nothing in the original about the lovers’ “good will” or gentleness; Dante always remembers that they are damned sinners. And Hunt makes Dante’s “affectionate shout” (“l’affetuouso grido”) into a “loving prayer,” even though one cannot pray in Hell. A few pages later, he makes Paolo remorseful, thus justifying Dante’s pity but making the damnation seem utterly cruel: While thus one spoke the other spirit mourn’d With wail so woful, that at his remorse I felt as though I should have died. I turn’d Stone-stiff; and to the ground, fell like a corse. (Inf. v, 139–142)58

Keats praised Hunt’s Story of Rimini, noting that this “sweet tale” might provoke readers to invent similar fantasies. Keats implied that he, at 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


and similar applause followed from Wordsworth, who said, “I think [Cary’s] translation of Dante a great national work.”55 Although Cary’s translation is faithful in most respects, it ref lects Romantic sensibilities that Dante would reject. For instance:

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The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more—it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Franchesca—I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life—I f loated about the whirling atmosphere as it is described with a beautiful figure to whose lips mine were joined it seem’d for an age— and in midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm—even f lowery tree tops sprung up and we rested on them sometimes with the lightness of a cloud till the wind blew us away again—I tried a Sonnet upon it—there are fourteen lines but nothing of what I felt in it—o that I could dream it every night— As Hermes once took to his feathers light When lulled Argus, baff led, swoon’s and slept So on a Delphic reed my idle spright So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft The dragon world of all its hundred eyes And, seeing it asleep, so f led away— Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies, Nor unto Tempe where Jove grieved that day; But to that second circle of sad hell, Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the f law Of rain and hailstones loves need not tell Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I f loated with, about that melancholy storm— 60

Keats says that he found “delightful enjoyment” in an imaginary experience of Hell. In Dante, the kiss takes place on earth and leads to death, damnation, and an involuntary conjunction of two tormented souls. In Keats, the kiss takes place in the inferno, where it nevertheless generates eternal pleasure and warmth. Like Dante’s tempest, Keats’ wind stops and starts, but when it stops it deposits the lovers lightly on a vernal landscape. Dante suggests that the garrulous Francesca would be better off silent, for her speech unwittingly reveals her sinfulness. God allows Francesca to speak by stilling the winds, but she fails to say what she should—that she committed adultery—and instead uses her speech to beguile. Her voice is part of Hell’s infernal noise. Dante thought poetry dangerous because of its capacity to “play,” “charm,” “conquer,” and thereby “bereft” listeners of their sight.61 For instance, Francesca used her voice to charm Dante into overlooking her sinfulness. But she 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


least, had been inspired by the poem to “find at once a region of his own / A bower for his spirit.”59 The next year, he took Cary’s Dante (entitled The Vision) with him on a Scottish walking tour. He later wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana:

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couldn’t fool God, so she justly went to Hell– a place not of “delightful enjoyment” but of unimaginable sorrow. In contrast, Keats’s heroine is mute because she lives in a place where “lovers need not tell / Their sorrows.” Thus her reticence ref lects discretion and welcome privacy. What’s more, she is unable to speak because her mouth is busy kissing Keats, who f lies to Hell to find solace. Like many Romantics, Keats was attracted to paganism.62 He tells us that his spright (rather than his more Christian-sounding “soul”) f led “Not to Ida with its snow cold skies, / Nor unto Tempe where Jove grieved that day.” These are settings from Ovid’s Arcadian world of nymphs and lecherous gods. Keats and his contemporaries certainly didn’t believe that Jove and Juno lived on Mount Olympus or that one ought to sacrifice oxen to the gods. But they found paganism attractive because it celebrated beauty as distinct from moral goodness. Keats once wrote: “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”63 Such aestheticism would have been impossible for a Christian. But on other occasions Keats emphasized the moral value of poetry, especially its capacity to provoke sympathy for suffering.64 So perhaps he and his fellow Romantics admired paganism because it was pluralist. There were many pagan gods, not One, and thus many separate virtues and goods. Beauty did not have to be subsumed under morality, nor vice-versa. Above all, Keats admired paganism because it was a body of stories, each with its own meaning. Actually, the same could be said of Judeo-Christian scripture, but theologians have always felt compelled to systematize biblical stories, reading them as exemplars of one consistent philosophy. This is what we mean when we describe Dante as an author of “allegorical” narratives: he makes each one express an abstract thesis that belongs within an overall intellectual system. But Helen Vendler emphasizes Keats’ “recurrent recoils against emblematic allegory,” which “always took him in the direction of mythology. Mythology was suggestive, emblematic allegory bald. Mythology, capable of motion, hovered; emblematic allegory was frozen in a single gesture. Mythology derived from narrative and came bearing, even if lightly, the aura of its narrative around it; allegory, originating in conceptualization, had no richness of story about it.”65 Vendler’s argument recalls my distinction between philosophy’s didactic use of stories and literature’s story-driven thinking about particulars. Keats was, as is well known, deeply interested in the difference between philosophy and poetry, and generally preferred the latter. This was a second reason for his subversive approach to Dante. Keats 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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believed that philosophy advanced doctrines or general propositions, using “consequitive reasoning” to “put aside numerous objections,”66 whereas the purest and best literature deliberately avoided expressing any such ideas—at least in the author’s own voice. In 1817, he wrote to his brothers that he had realized “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”67 Just months later, Keats heard Hazlitt lecture on Shakespeare’s refusal to advance doctrines of his own. The “striking peculiarity of [Shakespeare’s] mind,” Hazlitt said, “was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men.”68 Keats aspired to have the same “poetical Character” as Shakespeare. Borrowing language almost verbatim from Hazlitt, Keats said that his own type of poetic imagination “has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character. . . . It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion poet.” When we read philosophical prose, we encounter explicit opinions that ref lect the author’s thinking. But, said Keats, although “it is a wretched thing to express . . . it is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature [i.e., my identity].”69 Dante certainly expressed his own views, rejected contrary assertions, and organized his system with impressive “consequitive thought.” So Keats might have strongly disliked the Divine Comedy, preferring Shakespeare and Chaucer because of their myriad-mindedness. At the least, he might have complained about Dante much as he grumbled about Wordsworth, of whom he once asked: “for the sake of a few fine imaginative and domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered on the whims of an Egoist [?]—Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them until he makes false coinage and deceives himself—Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his halfseeing.”70 The Divine Comedy is a very self-confident report of its author’s philosophy and journey to heaven. So Keats’ critique of Wordsworth would serve even better as a hostile commentary on Dante. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Alternatively, Keats could ignore the systematic and doctrinal aspects of Dante’s poem, appreciating instead its diverse and vivid human portraits. “Intensity” was Keats’ criterion for great representative art.71 He meant the kind of description that allowed one to grasp the inner character and sensations of a sparrow, of a “squalid old Woman squat like an ape,” or of Prince Hamlet.72 Hazlitt said that Shakespeare was great because “his genius shone equally on the evil and the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar.” 73 Just the same could be said of Dante, who gave us Farinata, Ugolino, and Francesca da Rimini as well as Beatrice and St. Bernard. According to Erich Auerbach, Dante actually undermined his own allegory by portraying human characters, especially sinners, with such vivid sympathy. Thus Dante’s Negative Capability was stronger than his commitment to doctrine. Auerbach’s interpretation was anticipated by some of the Romantics. Friedrich von Schlegel, who wrote a major translation of the Divine Comedy, praised Dante for losing sight of his “general plan” when he created “true and distinctly drawn characters” to populate Hell. “It seems as if here the philosopher has willingly allowed himself to be tricked by the poet.” 74 Misreading Schlegel, Byron thought that the German critic had accused Dante of lacking “gentle feelings.” Byron countered: “Of gentle feelings!—and Francesca of Rimini—and the father’s feelings in Ugolinio—and Beatrice—and ‘La Pia!’ Why, there is gentleness in Dante beyond all gentleness, when he is tender. It is true that, in treating of the Christian Hades, or Hell, there is not much scope or site for gentleness—but who but Dante could have introduced any ‘gentleness’ at all into Hell?” 75 At least applied to the story of Paolo and Francesca, the SchlegelByron-Auerbach reading seems exaggerated or one-sided. Although Dante painted Francesca’s inner life vividly and with apparent sympathy, it is crucial to the narrative that she is sinful and deserves punishment. But Keats forcefully ignored the moral allegory of Canto V. He retold the story in such a way that Hell was not part of God’s just plan, but an autonomous region of passionate love. He overlooked Dante’s perspective—that of a pilgrim on the path to personal salvation—and instead gladly adopted the role of Paolo, a sinner. Paolo’s sin was adultery, and this brings me to a final reason for Keats’ stance in his sonnet on Francesca. Like many of the Romantics, Keats had difficulty celebrating—or even representing—marriage in his poetry. Excepting the elderly Wordsworth and Coleridge (who returned to religious orthodoxy after they had finished writing their 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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most famous poems), none of the Romantics believed that weddings were sacraments or that marital fidelity was a duty to God. Nor did they think that monogamous relationships were natural or universal. They saw love as an emotion, an instinct, or a compulsion—not as a pattern of mutual obligation. Shelley couldn’t be clearer on this point. He claims that “Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness.” On this basis, he develops an “antimatrimonialist” doctrine: “Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty. . . . Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry.” 76 According to Shelley’s theory, love develops automatically in a “delicate” person when he perceives “loveliness,” without any volition on his part. (Compare Francesca’s explanation of Paolo’s love, which arose in his gentle soul because of her bella persona.) In Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, too, “the natural love that exists between Paulo and Francesca is deliberately at odds with the [hypocritical and artificial] institutions of civil society.” 77 Marriage can indeed be unjust and despotic, especially in patriarchal societies and ones with arranged unions (the target of Hunt’s poem). Nevertheless, marriage also represents an ethical—rather than a strictly volitional—conception of a good relationship. It is a pattern of mutual obligation and care. Alasdair MacIntyre contrasts Romantic love to the view that “principles have authority over us regardless of our attitudes, preferences and feelings. How I feel at a given moment is irrelevant to the question of how I must live. This is why marriage is the paradigm of the ethical.”78 There are works of literature that support MacIntrye’s position: ones that depict enduring relationships based on moral commitment and obligation as well as passion. But the Romantics provided few major texts of this kind. Their characteristic mode was lyric: a first-person confession of sentiments and passions. I concede that it was not a lyric but a “dialogic Keats” who wrote Isabella and Endymion, poems with multiple voices and perspectives and social implications.79 And Jessica Smith has explored the dialogic form of Shelley’s Queen Mab, quoted above.80 Nevertheless, Keats’s sonnet on Paolo and Francesca exemplifies Romantic lyric, with its suppression of any voice other than the narrator’s and any consideration other than his desire. Francesca is silent and her husband is utterly missing. Nor did the Romantics excel at describing the development of a relationship over time. Sharing Shelley’s view that love happens suddenly, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Bold lover, never, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

It is significant that we don’t think of Jane Austen as a Romantic, even though she was a contemporary of Keats’ and Shelley’s. Her novels are dialogic, her narrator is detached, her characters develop, and she values social norms as well as private volitions. Keats actually aspired to write a similar kind of literature. Although there is no evidence that he read Austen, he so admired Shakespeare and Chaucer that he was ready to abandon all his lyric verse in order to write a play about “Men and women,” “Character and Sentiment.”81 Bernice Slote writes, “one constant strain in his letters, and a discernible development in his poetry, is away from the purely personal, the poet-hero who speaks in his own voice, and toward the dramatic in poetry, where the self is protean and the umbilical cord of the poem is cut.”82 But Keats’s failures in the dramatic mode were more revealing than his desire to try it. Today, he is justly remembered for his expressions of melancholy, indolence, heartache, and aesthetic awe. The same could be said of the young Dante, practitioner of the dolce stil nuovo and Beatrice’s distant lover. But the author of the Divine Comedy was moralistic, pious, encyclopedic, and dialectical (in all the meanings of that word). No wonder Keats chose to misread him. Fin-de-Siècle Francesca It goes without saying that the nineteenth century was a great period in European civilization, creative enough to perfect the bourgeois novel, the art song, grand opera, and the dramatic monologue. However, there were decadent currents, diagnosed early by Nietzsche and ultimately powerful enough to provoke the Modernist reaction. A civilization that considered all styles to be relative inevitably envied (yet simultaneously patronized) people who imagined that they employed universal or natural forms. We may recognize this combination of imitation, envy, distance, and condescension as “sentimentality,” the attitude that Victorian men famously adopted toward their own children, wives, and mothers. But they were also sentimental about the comparatively naïve 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


they often hinted that passion could only be sustained if time somehow stopped. As Keats tells the fair youth on the Grecian Urn:


cultures whose art they imitated. Orientalism was a particularly dubious example, but the same impulse led Victorians to replicate Gothic architecture and Highland Scottish customs. In its more sophisticated, tongue-in-cheek, and self-conscious forms, sentimental kitsch could become camp, another nineteenth-century invention. Meanwhile, if no one could tell for sure when or whether mimesis provoked morally good emotions, then it was tempting to justify art for art’s sake and to create works that were amoral. And if mimetic art represented the artist’s style rather than the “real world,” then it seemed appropriate to focus the audience’s attention on the representation rather than its subject. In Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, the literal object or story of the poem is almost indecipherable, but we are immediately aware of the beauty of the language. This is an early form of abstraction. Its proponents are often immoralists: not bad people, but critics of literature that has moral meanings and purposes. The popularity of Francesca da Rimini reached its peak during the last decades of the nineteenth century, during the era of Victorian sentimentalists, aesthetes, and immoralists. In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan satirized two preoccupations of the time, Orientalism and the myth of Francesca. Japan was seen as an exotic civilization devoted to aesthetics; Paolo and Francesca came from an equally exotic pre-Raphaelite past and were doomed by their love of art. So in Patience, an “idyllic poet” sings: When I go out of door, Of damozels a score (All sighing and burning, And clinging and yearning) Will follow me as before. [I’m . . . ] A Japanese young man— A blue-and-white young man— Francesca di Rimini, miminy, piminy, Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!83

Stephen Phillips treated the same themes much more seriously in Paolo & Francesca: A Tragedy in Four Acts, which epitomized fin-desiècle attitudes toward love and literature. Although it is neglected today, it was an immense critical success when it debuted at St. James Theatre, London, in 1902. The “author was greeted as the successor of Sophocles and Shakespeare, and his royalties rose to £150 a week.84 William Archer was of the opinion that “Mr. Phillips has achieved the impossible, and in so doing has produced a play that lives and breathes 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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in every line. Sardou could not have ordered the action more skillfully, Tennyson could not have clothed the passion in words of rarer loveliness.”85 Much like Dante’s Francesca, Phillips’ heroine is obsessed with literature. When Paolo finds her reading Arthurian romances, she is trying to “melt into an ancient woe” (Act III, sc. 3, p. 83). They begin to read together, and cannot help imitating the lovers in the book. Later, just before they consummate their passion behind a curtain, Paolo recalls: “Remember how when first we met we stood / Stung with immortal recollections” (Act IV, p. 109). In turns out that these “recollections” are the residue, the collective unconscious, of a literary tradition that spans or transcends history. Phillips sets his story carefully in the Renaissance and uses a style appropriate to the period. Nevertheless, Paolo maintains that the themes of romantic literature are fixed for all eternity. The implication is that social structures and norms are changeable and arbitrary, that love and the literature of love last forever. Archer wrote of this play that “Paolo and Francesca can no more be fettered to thirteenth-century Rimini than Romeo and Juliet to fourteenth-century Verona. Their scene is the eternal Italy of passion, their time the dateless spring of young desire.” 86 This is certainly Paolo’s view. He tells Francesca: Thou wast the lovely quest of Arthur’s knights— FRANC. Thy armour glimmered in a gloom of green. PAO. Did I not sing to thee in Babylon? FRANC. Or did we set a sail in Carthage Bay? PAO. Were thine eyes strange? FRANC. Did I not know thy voice? All ghostly grew the sun, unreal the air Then when we kissed. PAO. And in that kiss our souls Together f lashed, and now they are one f lame, Which nothing can put out, nothing divide. (Act IV, pp. 109–110)

We are back to Guido Novello’s line, “che già da me non fia diviso.” Paolo and Francesca feel that they have met before because they have encountered themselves in the pages of literature, in the “unreal air” of fiction. Whereas Christian doctrine teaches that love is a relationship among distinct souls, Paolo and Francesca yearn for the complete union that is promised in romance (and symbolized by coitus), but that can come only with death. She cries, “Break open then the door, / And let my 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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For what ecstasy Together to be blown about the globe! What rapture in perpetual fire to burn Together! (Act. IV, p. 112)

This passage exemplifies the Romantic “negative sublime.” Phillips seems to sympathize fully with those who violate conventional norms because of their natural instincts. He finds beauty in their utter defeat and despair, which is also a perfect union. And he suggests that romantic literature transcends history by depicting passion, which alone is universal. Just a year before the debut of Phillips’ play, D’Annunzio’s tragedy of Francesca da Rimini was launched in Rome. These works share several features, including their verse formats, their denouements, and their many allusions to Canto V of the Inferno. But D’Annunzio’s allusions to Dante are more pervasive and systemic than Phillips’; they amount to a “continual verbal echo.”87 In Francesca da Rimini, we hear repeatedly about a river f lowing to its peace in the sea; cranes and swallows; wine, potions, and poisons, and the underlying myth of Tristan and Iseult. D’Annunzio shuff les and recombines these Dantean themes for formal or symbolic effect. Whereas Phillips tells the story from Giovanni’s perspective and depicts Francesca as a passive, enigmatic, shy slip of a girl, D’Annunzio makes her central and strong, a fit role for the dark, passionate, 40-yearold star, Eleanora Duse. She sees visions and makes Sybilline prophesies, directs her many retainers like a queen, loves, curses, hates. The climax involves Paolo’s brother Malatestino. He has been left alone with Francesca in a dank fortress. He stalks her, uttering lecherous remarks, hinting that he would poison Gianciotto for her, and insinuating that he knows she is sleeping with Paolo. Meanwhile, cries of agony are heard offstage. These are the cries of Montagna, the prisoner whose fate is told by the fourteenth-century chronicler Benvenuto da Imola (see Chapter 1, above). In D’Annunzio’s version, Francesca is inadvertently responsible for the prisoner’s death. As the offstage shrieks build, Francesca tells Malatestino, “Go, go, run! Make him 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


spirit out. Paolo, kill me! / Then kill thyself: to vengeance leave these weeds, And let our souls together soar away.” (Act IV, p. 110) Francesca momentarily fears that by sinning they may cast themselves into a “region which priests tell of / Where such as we are punished without end” (p. 111). But Paolo doesn’t mind if they are damned:

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stop! Take him from this torment! I do not want to hear his crying any more.” Malatestino sees an opening and replies: “Look, I’m going. I will make it so that you / have a quiet night, the deepest / sleep, without terrors, / since tonight you’ll be sleeping alone, / while Giovanni rides on the road / to Pesaro.” (This is heavy irony: Malatestino knows that Francesca expects to sleep with Paolo.) Francesca protests, and Malatestino promises to spare the prisoner if “If your hand would only touch my hand, / if your hair would only drape once more over / my fever.” Francesca recoils in horror. Malatestino leaves with an ax that he has diligently sharpened, and Gianciotto arrives. The prisoner’s death cry is heard offstage while Gianciotto and Francesca talk. Malatestino returns, crying: “Open up; I bring you / a nice ripe fruit / for your journey: a September fig. / And how heavy!” It turns out to be the prisoner’s severed head. “Ah, it’s hot!” says Gianciotto, as he drops it on the f loor. D’Annunzio’s Francesca is so overripe with violence, foreboding, and sex that it still commands some interest today and is widely read. The combination of melodrama, exotic detail, literary allusion, and avantgarde verse is impressive in its own way. However, it is more often performed in the operatic version composed by Riccardo Zandonai to a libretto by Tito Riccordi (with some help from D’Annunzio himself ). Although the opera, first performed in 1914, reproduces D’Annunzio’s plot and quotes widely from the play, it is much shorter, and the characters’ motivations are made simpler and more explicit. Zandonai, like other composers of his generation, wrote opera music to imitate spoken language, with only snatches of definable melody, hardly any discrete arias, and little repetition of either music or lyrics. This is a restrained, verismo style that balances the grand “operatic” gestures and tableaux of the lyrics. By the time we reach Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, there are layers upon layers of textual reference. Consider, for example, Act III, scene 1, which begins with Francesca reading from the old French Lancelot (in Italian paraphrase). “And Galeotto says, ‘Lady, have pity.’ ‘That I will have,” says she, “just as you want, but he [Lancelot] asks nothing of me.’ ” Francesca sings the words “lady have pity” to a sweet snatch of melody in a minor key; but her handmaidens, switching to the major, make fun of Lancelot for being so bashful that he won’t request a kiss. Later in the same act, Paolo sees the book still open and reads the same lines to the same melody (although now in a minor key). In the new context, the words sound tragic and direct. Francesca pities him, and they kiss.88 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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That second, minor phrase—which we may hear in a huge modern opera house or on a modern recording—is an echo of Francesca’s earlier phrase, which is a setting of words from D’Annunzio’s play, where it refers to a line in Dante’s Inferno (written six centuries earlier), which is itself a reference to the Vulgate version of the Arthurian romances, which were set to paper in France more than a century before that to capture an older oral tradition. We have now reached the conclusion of a very long tradition. The plays by Phillips and D’Annunzio and the opera by Zandonai are dead ends. To write new work in these genres today would look arbitrary and affected. An audience would ask why characters were speaking in iambic pentameter or singing arias. Such behavior is expected when the author is long dead, but a contemporary playwright or composer who tried to write like Shakespeare or Verdi would risk derision. The end of these old traditions has had serious implications. It not only means that serious writers can no longer straightforwardly retell the story of Paolo and Francesca in its original setting, as many authors had done for the six previous centuries. It also means that all stories, even ones with contemporary settings, have become problematic. Explaining the problem requires a discussion of Modernism. Modernism: Montale and others Modernism arrives in any art or intellectual discipline when practitioners regard the present as the dead end of a long historical tradition. This happens partly because they come to believe that no further progress is possible along traditional lines. For instance, European artists pursued a great adventure in representing all kinds of three- dimensional scenes on two-dimensional surfaces. This was an exciting and aesthetically satisfying drama of discovery, but it seemed played out by 1900. There were no frontiers to cross. The same could be said of narrative prose, ballet, or “classical” music at the same time. Modernists in any discipline also face a more profound problem. They begin to view the tradition itself as arbitrary. It has pursued certain values and made certain core assumptions, but it could have started elsewhere and steered a different course. The careful study of works from distant cultures underlines how variable the premises of art and philosophy can be. So modernists, in a neo-Kantian spirit, ask “Why should we do art or philosophy this way—or any other particular way? What justifies or grounds the assumptions of our discipline?” 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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They regard Enlightenment as freedom from prejudice, and they morally condemn the continued production of art that rests on unquestioned assumptions.89 For instance, the inf luential art critic Clement Greenberg denounced “realistic, illusionist art” as fakery (“using art to conceal art”), whereas modernism used “art to call attention to art.”90 Unfortunately, there is no art (or any other human creation) that doesn’t rest on groundless values provided by some kind of tradition. That is the Modernist dilemma. Once modernism arrives in any art or intellectual discipline, there are six main choices: 1) scholarly historicism, the effort to reproduce past styles accurately and comprehensively. Zandonai composed in a style derived from Pietro Mascagni and Richard Strauss, but his settings were medieval, and he wrote a brief lute part for color. This mishmash would look ridiculous today. However, historicism grew more consistent and learned during his lifetime. For example, when Stravinsky was a young man, it was still common for ballets to mix epochs indiscriminately; ballerinas would dance in pink tutus to Romantic music on baroque or medieval sets. Around 1909, however, Stravinsky worked with Michel Fokine to create historically consistent productions. Fokine and Stravinsky used French classical choreography only for French classical subjects; they invented archaic costumes and choreography for ancient Greek ballets, and wild sets and music for the “primitive” Rite of Spring. Nevertheless, the whole enterprise quickly began to seem artificial. How could a play set in ancient Greece be performed before electric lights and a modern audience? How could a modern playwright or choreographer compose an ancient tragedy? Or how could a novelist describe scenes and minds from long ago, using techniques and applying values from her own era? Frances Fleetwood’s Concordia: The Story of Francesca da Rimini, Told by Her Daughter (1972) is a novel that for the first time introduces feminism to a telling of the myth. The firstperson narrator, ostensibly an adolescent Ravennese writing in 1290 about her relationships with her dysfunctional family, is very evidently a product of the 1970s. The anachronism is profound, but apparently unrecognized, and it would make a modernist laugh.91 Realizing the artificiality of historicism, some modern authors have turned to . . . 2) journalistic realism, or the accurate description of contemporary life. Realism was already a major current in Victorian fiction and art, and no approach has been more common subsequently, especially in novels, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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short stories, and movies. Photography is the model form of realist art, since the camera is said to mirror reality at the instant the shutter is released. Unfortunately, all realism (even photography) chooses topics and employs representational techniques that belong to a particular time and place; and these choices can be criticized as arbitrary and relative. Furthermore, even realistic art that deliberately criticizes prevailing norms and values must implicitly embody a set of moral beliefs. Some modernists consider those beliefs arbitrary and relative; others view them as degraded compared to the superior values of the past. The latter group naturally moves to . . . . 3) cultural reaction. For instance, T.S. Eliot and Richard Strauss knew how to create either abstract or realistic art, but they deliberately preferred to work in the pre-modern tradition, for ideological reasons. This approach obviously will not work for people who dislike reactionary politics. These people may instead embrace . . . . 4) abstraction, the effort to renounce style and representation altogether by taking inspiration from something universal, such as mathematics or the unconscious. For example, in the 1950s, Stravinsky worked with Balanchine to create the first abstract ballets. Dancers wore practice leotards and danced before plain backdrops. In Agon, Stravinsky dispensed not only with narrative, but with a recognizable melodic line (partly because tunes or melodies appeared to be arbitrary conventions).92 Unfortunately, a stage filled with dancers in practice clothes is also a style—belonging conspicuously to the mid-twentieth-century—just as plain glass cubes signal a particular moment in architecture, and paintings composed of simple “color fields” announce their origin in mid-twentieth century New York City. Therefore, some modern artists and writers prefer . . . . 5) irony, the joking recognition that there is no way out of style. Ironic works are common, but a perfect example is Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, with its eighteenth-century narrator, colonial Valley Girls who say “as” instead of “like,” and allusions to Pynchon’s postmodernist colleagues.93 It would be possible to write a novel or play about Paolo and Francesca today, but only if one made a joke out of the inevitable anachronisms. However, irony seems a poor basis for moral judgment. This leaves one more option . . . 6) the Death of Art as a theme of art. In my view, the best work of modernism describe or enact the dilemmas of modernism itself. They are moving, beautiful, and memorable—not just statements of a problem, but works of intrinsic value.



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As an example of the last category, consider Manet’s “The Old Musician” (1862). Six figures and an infant stand before a sketchy background. It turns out that each of these figures represents a classic work of art, from an antique sculpture of the philosopher Chrysippus to Manet’s own “Absinthe Drinker” (1858–1859). The whole painting, then, is an anthology of the history of art. The frame awkwardly truncates part of one figure and a vine—reminding you that you are observing a framed picture on a f lat surface, hanging in a museum. The figures seem isolated and inert. Not one meets another’s eyes, and none is doing anything. The Chrysippus figure in the middle has put down his violin, and there is a powerful sense that the music that once animated and coordinated these figures has stopped. The Old Musician, strikingly, stares directly at the viewer. Isolation (or alienation, or anomie) became a nineteenth- and twentieth-century cliché, presumably because of the reality of life in a modern metropolis, where we don’t know most of the people we see. In “The Old Musician,” the figures incorporate portraits of displaced people from a cleared slum near Manet’s house. But in this work, the theme of isolation is more than a conventional (although valid) criticism of modern social injustice. I think Manet cannot find a place for himself in the trans-historical community of artists, because he has achieved a painful “enlightenment” by realizing that all art is conventional and arbitrary. At that point, all the past moments of art look disjointed (not stages in an inevitable progression), and there is no room for Manet to join the tradition. Instead, he steps outside of the story, where we are standing, and declares it over.94 The result is moving, strange, and unrepeatable, but there are analogous works in other forms. For example, in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, Joyce describes a concrete and quotidian scene from Dublin in the year 1904—the kind of scene that would figure in “realistic” fiction. While a woman screams in pain upstairs, Leopold Bloom watches Stephen Daedelus carouse and make crude jokes. Bloom sadly recalls the death of his own child at the age of eleven days and regrets that Stephen is wasting his life. Joyce chooses to represent this scene in a narrative voice that gradually evolves from late-medieval English through almost every historical prose style down to the vernacular of the present. He thus makes the arbitrary styles and perspectives of the past his subject, while using them to create a moving human scene. “The Old Musician” and Ulysses are works of art about the end of art. Since they are representational fictions, they do not directly explain why traditional forms of painting or literature are no longer possible. (That 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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would be the job of a philosopher or a critic). However, they depict the critical situation of their respective disciplines in a comprehensive way, while also achieving the traditional goal of literature and art: inciting emotions through the representation of reality. These are exceptional cases. More often, modernists have wrestled with the past, exploring forms of deep skepticism and undermining the traditional pretensions of their own disciplines, but without creating comprehensive visions. Eugenio Montale, widely recognized as a central figure of high modernism, provides an excellent example. Montale did not exactly write the modernist version of the Paolo and Francesca story. His allusions to past works are always too fragmentary and subtle to constitute retellings. Their patchy, multi-layered, ambiguous, ironic, allusive, and lyric (rather than narrative) qualities are typical of modernism as a whole. Nevertheless, Canto V of the Inferno is an important referent for Montale. It figures, for example, in the title poem of La Bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), a book that Montale began during the Second World War and published in 1956. The Tempest 95 Princes have no eyes to see these great marvel Their hands now serve only to persecute us —Agrippa D’Aubigné, À Dieu The storm that drums on the hard leaves of the magnolia its long March thunder and hail, (the sounds of crystal in your nocturnal nest surprise you, of the gold squandered on the mahogany, on the gilt edge of the bound books, a sugar grain still burns in the shell of your eyelids) the f lash that candies trees and walls and surprises them in this eternity of an instant—marble manna and destruction—that you carry carved in you by decree and that binds you more than love to me, strange sister, and then the rough crash, the sistri, the shudder of the tambourines above the ditch of thieves, the tramp of the fandango, and above some gesture that gropes. . . . just like when you turned around and with your hand, cleared your brow of its cloud of hair, waved at me—and went into the darkness.



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This poem makes repeated, if oblique, reference to Canto V of the Inferno. Like Paolo and Francesca, the narrator and the “tu” of the poem are bound together in a hellish storm for an unchanging eternity by something that resembles love, without exactly being love. Like Montale’s “you,” Francesca was a “strange sister,” since she was both Paolo’s sisterin-law and his lover. The “tu” in Montale’s poem has been sentenced (“condanna”), just like one of the damned in the Inferno. Finally, Montale chooses for his title “la bufera,” a highly unusual word for “tempest.” Given the rareness of the word, it clearly alludes to Canto V (lines 31–33): The hellish tempest that has never stopped whips the spirits in its passion: a twisting, hounding, mad assault.

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta mena li spirti con la sua rapina voltando e percontendo li molesta

Several features of “La Bufera” are typical of the poems in Montale’s three major books, which he presented as a trilogy comparable to the Divine Comedy.96 The diction is stark, astringent, and basically informal, although there is much specialized vocabulary. (e.g., “sistri” is the Latin word—retained in both Italian and English—for the rattles shaken by ancient Egyptians.) Like many of his poems, “La Bufera” consists of a list of objects and actions; it is not a complete sentence, because there is no main verb. As in all of Montale’s writings, there are layers of reference to past literature.97 Finally, the poem is an intimate address to an unnamed “you,” a female who is known to the narrator and who shares private references and memories with him. This “tu” frequently appears, and the narrator always has intense difficulty communicating with her. One way to read “La Bufera” is biographically. Montale knew an American scholar named Irma Brandeis in Florence before the War. Later, both parties were reticent about the nature of their relationship; we do not know that it was romantic. When Brandeis left Italy in 1938, Montale lost contact with her and may have feared that she was dead. Brandeis was a Jew, and Montale was aware of the Holocaust. Thus the storm of “La Bufera” is fascism, the War, and Nazism. Brandeis is the “you” who is surprised by the breaking of crystal (perhaps a reference to Kristallnacht) and who disappears in the last line of “La Bufera,” bound to the narrator more by fascism than by love. (The subject of the phrase “binds you to me” is the “f lash” of lightning that stands for tyranny or war.) For the rest of the book, she is absent—just as Brandeis was actually away while Montale wrote—but she acquires profound symbolic meaning. Already in the title poem, she combines Jewish and classical references (“marble” and “manna”); these recur throughout the book,



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and there is an additional sense that she has become a Christ-figure or a Christ-bearer, suffering to redeem a sinful Europe. The narrator struggles to understand her, sometimes resorting to angry, misogynistic complaints about her absence and infidelity; sometimes worshipping her. I suspect that there is dramatic irony in both extremes; there is no reason to think that the author shares the narrator’s full range of emotions. There is plenty of evidence to support this biographical reading. It is, however, only one layer of meaning. The “you” of the poem is also a kind of avatar of Beatrice, Laura, and the other famous lovers from Italian poetry, including Francesca da Rimini. Montale’s predecessors had had trouble understanding the women they loved and usually failed to win their faithful attention; but in La Bufera e altro the problem is no longer moral. It is not the narrator’s unworthiness or the lover’s infidelity that prevents the two from communicating. Now the problem is political and epistemological: political, because the fascists have driven Irma Brandeis out of Europe and imposed silence and fear on all Italians; and epistemological, because moderns know that nothing can be represented or understood realistically. Connecting with “you” is the narrator’s moral and spiritual goal, yet it is impossible. As Roberto Unger writes, “The modernists often combine acknowledgement of the supreme importance of personal love with skepticism about the possibility of achieving it or, more generally, of gaining access to another mind.”98 Montale belongs to school of Modernism in which literal truth is treated as elusive, and the attention of the reader or viewer is directed instead to the work of art itself. It is very easy to notice and enjoy the sounds of Montale’s words, but difficult to concentrate on what, if anything, is being described. The opposite is true in more traditional poetry. Usually, writes, Charles Rosen, “first we take in the text visually, and we understand it almost as we take it in, and afterward we find it interesting or beautiful.” So we immediately know what Pope or Wordsworth is writing about, and we must force ourselves to notice the poet’s technique. But Stéphane Mallarmé and his successors stood “the classical way of reading poetry on its head” by making their subjects and plots very hard to decode. “Withholding the referential meaning concentrates attention initially upon the technique of representation: the poem refuses to allow the reader to substitute immediately the concept for the description. To understand we must return over and over again to the lines. Mallarmé fixes the attention of the reader where it properly belongs—on the words of the poem, the assonance, the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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rhythm, the juxtaposition of images, the emotional associations.” The same could be said of Montale. However, while Mallarmé (and Rosen) think that it is right to focus on the form of poetry, Montale appears to struggle to use his poetic language for representation. He wants to tell us about his “you,” even though what we see most easily is the poem’s assonance, imagery, and the shape of the lines on the page. Although the aesthetic aspects of Montale’s work are the most accessible, he is against aestheticism—for moral reasons.100 The two major themes of this book are particularism and historicism. Montale embodies both views in rather extreme form, and even mentions them together in a single paragraph of prose: “The language of a poet is an historicized language or report. . . . The poet searches for some precise truth, not for a general truth.”101 Montale is a particularist because he has no faith in broad philosophical or ideological truths, so he struggles to depict the concrete. His poetry consists mainly of lists of objects that evoke particular human beings; there are hardly any general pronouncements or conclusions. Describing concrete people in particular circumstances is evidently a moral imperative for him. It emerges clearly in the sonnet “A mia madre,” which he wrote shortly after his mother’s death:102 . . . the empty street is not a way, just two hands, a face these hands, this face, the gesture of a life that is not another thing but itself . . .

Montale derived political views from his particularism. Throughout his lifetime (1896–1981), most Italian intellectuals were committed to comprehensive political ideologies. They derived answers to social and moral issues from relatively few general premises, and sought to enlist all aspects of people’s lives for cultural/political struggle. Montale’s worst enemy was one of these ideologies, fascism, but he refused to associate with Marxism or Christian Democracy either. He was a liberal like his contemporary Learned Hand, who wrote that the spirit of liberty “is not too sure that it is right. . . . [It] is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.”103 Montale was liberal in favoring a private life of introspection and intimacy and resisting any efforts to mobilize human beings for ideological ends. Each life should be “not another thing but itself.” Montale was also a historicist. His prose book Nel nostro tempo (1972) is entirely and explicitly concerned with historicism.104 In a much earlier piece entitled Stile e tradizione (1925), Montale argues that “there is 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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no better way to demonstrate true philosophical culture than to forget about it, moving into concrete facts. . . . Instead of desiring a frontier too vast, skies too distant, we would choose the borders of our own country, the language of our people.”105 Montale’s poems, too, suggest that there is a tradition behind them, consisting of several well-ordered cultures that once combined artistic styles and moral worldviews harmoniously. Jonathan Galassi writes, “More deeply, more comprehensively than any other modernist poet, Montale draws on the tradition that formed him, appropriating its essential story and reshaping it to serve contemporary purposes.”106 Montale’s references range very widely, but two common touchstones are late-medieval Italy and the bourgeois Catholic world of his own childhood. He regrets the passing of these coherent and confident civilizations. He continually evokes them with nostalgia. But he lives in a different time, one more aware of the diversity of human perspectives and much less sure of truth. Galassi again puts it well: “ironically enough his appropriation of his heritage ends in its exhaustion, which is the theme of his disillusioned late work.”107 I admire Montale deeply, but his work strikes me (as it struck him) as bad news. Both in our private lives and our public institutions, we face critical moral problems and choices—as human beings always have and will. If historicism and particularism imply that we can only make fragmentary, tentative, ironic, personal statements about our most intimate surroundings and memories, then we are in serious trouble. Thus the question for Chapter 7 is how we can undertake more ambitious moral thinking given the modernist challenges ref lected in Montale’s work.



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Consequences

Moving Past Modernism Modernism is a set of responses to a serious dilemma: the groundlessness of all artistic and intellectual traditions. Postmodernism is one of those responses. Nietzsche was already thoroughly postmodern in the 1870s, so the “post-“ is largely pretentious. Postmodernism is the ironic alternative that has been obvious since the beginning of Modernism itself. The High Modernists were not ironists; they had a moral program of enlightenment, which Kant had famously defined as “emergence” from “self-incurred immaturity.” Immaturity, he added, “is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” For High Modernists, to take refuge in a conventional artistic or philosophical style was a perfect example of immaturity. In contrast, they followed Kant’s “motto of enlightenment,” Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have the courage to use your own understanding!”1 People like Nietzsche, Manet, Joyce, and Montale lived this creed to an exemplary degree, but they didn’t show the way to any positive moral or aesthetic views that others might adopt. They only spoke the truth that there was no truth in the past conventions of their respective disciplines. At this point, all general moral principles or arguments quickly fell prey to the suspicion that they rested on arbitrary foundations. An ethical argument must start somewhere, but if moral beliefs are highly variable, then it is difficult to believe that any of our assumptions can be self-evident or grounded in nature. Although we have become skeptical about moral principles, we still feel emotional responses when we read or hear stories. However, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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we now recognize that stories from different cultures teach different morals; and readers from diverse cultures may respond in diverse— sometimes even opposite—ways to the very same narrative. Nor can we take refuge in empirical realism and ask for stories that just describe the world as it is. A story in a particular style must be biased toward certain moral conclusions; but a story without a style is impossible. It is important, however, to remind ourselves that countless excellent representational works were created throughout the twentieth century, despite the High Modernists’ discovery of groundlessness. Indeed, many major artists and thinkers were not especially concerned with the consequences of deep relativism. So we need not invent solutions to modernism; we must only explain how successful work can be possible under modern conditions. Our Kantian question is: Moral art exists; how can that be? I believe that the High Modernists created lasting works of genius in response to a problem that they exaggerated. Their work was moving and significant because they felt that they faced a crisis, yet other artists have been able to proceed without being similarly troubled. I devoted most of Chapter 6 to retelling the Modernists’ own story about how we got to our current condition. I tried to make this story seem important, because it explains a sense of crisis that deeply distressed many of the greatest creative minds of modern times and disrupted the course of high art and theory. Yet I don’t believe that this sense of distress or this disruption is fully justified. J.L.Austin once said of philosophy, “There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”2 This is where I take it back. The High Modernists were right to detect a great deal of diversity in human values over time, and to recognize that judgments and perceptions are embedded in local contexts. These are discoveries of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bolstered by countless empirical findings. Nietzsche viewed historical thinking as our modern “sixth sense.”3 And Lionel Trilling wrote, “We are creatures of time, we are creatures of the historical sense, not only as men have always been but in a new way since the time of Walter Scott”—when representational artists first learned to depict the past as profoundly different from the present.4 The shift to a historicist worldview itself exemplifies historicism. Recent natural and social science have suggested that some important aspects of psychology are common to all members of homo sapiens, outgrowths of our evolved physical natures. For example, it appears that all people place a higher value on a sure gain than on a probable gain of much greater worth; but they have the opposite view of losses. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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For related reasons, people will go to great lengths to save $5 on a $10 purchase (“fifty percent off!”), but will not inconvenience themselves to save exactly the same $5 on a $125 purchase. A loss of money reduces happiness more than an equivalent gain increases it.5 I mention these findings because we are told that they emerge consistently in studies from around the world; they may ref lect mental heuristics that evolved when people were hunter-gatherers. Robert Wright tells us that “people’s minds were designed to maximize fitness in the world in which those minds evolved,” our ancestral state, which apparently resembles modern life among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert or the Inuit of the Arctic.6 However, even if such claims are true, they do not negate the existence of deep diversity in other aspects of psychology and moral judgment. If our physical natures directly determined our answers to every moral question, then we would not debate ethics or literally wage wars over differences of principle. Besides, many of the features of human psychology that are universal are not moral. Perhaps we evolved to be aggressive toward competitors and altruistic toward relatives. Yet we also have the capacity to limit our aggression and to generalize our altruism beyond family and tribe. People disagree about when aggression is appropriate and in what circumstances one must be altruistic. These differences are especially evident when one compares individuals from long ago or far away. Thus the natural basis of aggression and altruism does not in any way reduce the importance of moral diversity and disagreement. Further, the very science that generates findings about human nature is embedded in a particular time and society. This does not mean that truth is inaccessible or that science is arbitrary. It does mean that we should ask whether the questions and methods of recent science are at least somewhat limited by our local interests and capacities. In sum, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, “human beings differ, their values differ, their understanding of the world differs; and some kind of historical or anthropological explanation of why such differences arise is possible, though that explanation may itself to some degree ref lect the particular concepts and categories of the particular culture to which these students of this subject belong.”7 Although the High Modernists were right about historical diversity and change, they misunderstood culture. Imagine that a “culture” consists of a set of highly coherent abstract propositions that entail all of the concrete judgments and beliefs that are held by all of the members of that culture. For instance, people in an imaginary Catholic culture might endorse the fundamental views of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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and derive every one of their values, beliefs, and preferences from these premises. If we belonged to such a culture, and there were even one different culture in the world (past or present), then we would be in deep trouble. Examining the alien culture’s complex of ideas, we would recognize that it was as coherent as our own—yet different from ours. How then could we know that our own views were valid? If several cultures made universal claims, they could not all be right, but there would be no independent criterion for deciding which was preferable. Worse, we would have to recognize that we always see other cultures through our own lens, so even our factual descriptions of what they believed would obviously be biased. We could not know what was right; we could not even know what other people thought. We would only know that people always think what their culture teaches; and cultures vary. This is the picture of culture that we find in Hegel and Herder, circa 1800. Later in the nineteenth century, Nietszche was still committed to it: “Never did one neighbor understand another: his soul always wondered at his neighbor’s madness and evil. A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power.”8 Today, theorists usually write more prosaically about “conceptual schemes,” “lifeworlds,” “discourses,” or “regimes of truth.” Like Nietzsche’s “tables of value,” these are holistic entities that supposedly underlie the individual beliefs and assumptions of a culture, and that differ from place to place and time to time. It is difficult to prove that representational artists, such as Joyce and Manet, understood culture this way (since they made no abstract theoretical statements on the subject); but Montale did. He explained: “By ‘tradition’ is not meant the dead weight of outlines, of superficial laws and customs—but an inward spirit, the genius of a people, a harmony with the most constant expressions of our country.”9 If peoples and nations have essential “spirits” that vary from one to another, then moral relativism is a serious problem, because there is no moral vantage-point except within the various “traditions.” But this is a completely unrealistic picture of a culture.10 Even Aquinas—who was a great systematizer with a highly coherent, abstract mind—only derived a few of his conclusions directly from a small set of foundational premises. He also took onboard a huge and heterogeneous set of other beliefs, examples, and judgments, derived from sources as diverse as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and The Book of Revelations, Aristotle and St. Basil, Leviticus and the civil law of the Visigoths. In general, to have a “culture” is not to express the “inward genius of a people” nor to be in harmony with some “constant expressions.” It is rather to possess a large 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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set of biases, experiences, beliefs, and commitments; a store of examples, archetypes, and role models; a vocabulary and a repertoire of reasoning skills. Everyone has a different set. No one’s set is fully consistent or coherent. Thus everyone has a different culture, but we can usefully categorize people into different cultures depending on what issues concern us. For example, someone’s culture could be Italian for some purposes, Ligurian for other purposes, and lapsed-Catholic for still others. Cultures do not have minds; people do—and each human mind is filled with a changing, partially inconsistent set of ideas, values, and assumptions that come from numerous sources. If this picture is correct, then cultural artifacts (for example, moral beliefs and practices, stories, and philosophical arguments) generally do not rest on “foundations” composed of a finite set of general assumptions. Consider an example from the history of art. The High Modernists saw painting since Giotto as the working out of a few hypotheses about three-dimensional space. They thought that one- and three-point perspective were arbitrary and rejectable ways of organizing space that had defined a certain (“Western”) culture.11 One could thus step outside of this inherited culture by rejecting perspective, as the cubists did. I believe that this was a misunderstanding: “Western” art had always been highly diverse and had always drawn inspiration from many sources, including Biblical narrative, Islamic design, and folk pictures, to name just a few. Thus a cubist still-life was part of the Western tradition as well as a break from it. If cultures have essential premises, then each object must either be within or outside of any given culture. But if cultures are large sets of fairly similar artifacts, then it is neither puzzling nor surprising to find that a radical new work is both part of a culture and an alternative to it. Likewise, modern morality does not rest on a small set of foundational principles, but is a large set of concrete judgments. Some basic premises are important. For example, the belief that all human beings have equal moral worth is a general philosophical thesis with concrete consequences. However, modern morality is not, for the most part, a consequence of such underlying premises. And even the belief in human moral equality is not sufficient without a richer and more variegated understanding of what humans need and deserve. If art and morality never had “foundations” to start with, then their foundations cannot be knocked away. They should not enter a crisis when someone doubts the truth of one of their particular premises, because a culture or community is a complex tissue of numerous premises, and it can survive the doubting of any one component. To express doubts about all the components at once is possible but fundamentally 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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vacuous. It amounts to saying, “I doubt modern morality because I think that every moral judgment is arbitrary.” Some of the Sophists reached the same conclusion in Socrates’ day, and there is not much to say back to them; but there is also no special reason to fear this form of skepticism in the age of Modernism. Each person makes judgments somewhat differently. It is unlikely, however, that any two people would reach different judgments on all cases. Even if there are two such people in the world, there are many others who share some views with one, and other views with the other. In short, human beings are not divided into a set of detached “cultures,” each one with its own worldview (like the figures in Manet’s “Old Musician”). Rather, we are always part of a dialogue with people who are somewhat similar and somewhat different. The condition of modernity is quantitatively different because we encounter more stark diversity more frequently in the age of television and jet planes, but it is not qualitatively different from human life 1,000 years ago. To be plausible, this position must be able to accommodate the evident fact that large groups are often internally coherent. People who live around the same time and place may have harmonious, not random and unpredictable, values and preferences. For example, Dante’s fictional world is a carefully constructed amalgam of scholastic philosophy, nascent civic humanism, Ovid and Virgil, and the dolce stil nuovo—among other important elements. These are not merely individual choices that Dante picked a la carte from the list of everything that he knew. They are rather elements of a fairly coherent culture or cultural movement that also encompassed such contemporaries as Giotto, and that, as it evolved, soon embraced Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their successors. If a “culture” is merely a name for all the things that an individual knows, believes, and likes, then why is it meaningful to define a culture and to use that definition to interpret the thought of many people who live around the same time and place? I acknowledge the phenomenon of cultural coherence. I suspect it arises for several reasons. First, some people have a preference for coherence itself. They believe that all their separate judgments ought to arise from as few premises as possible. They also believe that everyone around them should share these premises. If this wish came true, then their whole society would become uniform and consistent. We see a preference for coherence in Scholastics, Calvinists, utilitarians, Marxists, and Freudians, among others—despite their deep disagreement about virtually everything else. This preference is not a good thing, in my view. It doesn’t ref lect some deep truth about the universe 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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(i.e., that everything must follow from one or a few assumptions). On the contrary, it forces diverse situations into a Procrustean bed. However, I recognize that the preference is widely held, and it has caused people to make their own and others’ views cohere. Dante, for instance, feels a powerful urge to explain everything in terms of the love that moves the sun and other stars—even the eternal damnation of lovers. When his Christian theology conf licts with his romantic troubadour heritage, he refuses to embrace each ideal separately but tries to make them cohere, much to the disadvantage of romance. Dante’s portrayal of dissidents in Hell resembles the literal burning of heretics and nonconformists by medieval temporal authorities. On the other hand, the Divine Comedy seems alive with unresolved tension between Dante’s vision of an ordered universe and his love of human diversity. Another reason the phenomenon of cultural coherence arises is that some people are deeply inf luenced by a few stories or situations. Whether one is especially moved by the Passion of Christ, the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, or one’s own rags-to-riches story, this narrative can have a powerful inf luence on many or all of one’s moral judgments. If a group of people constantly refer to a few common stories or situations, then they will share a culture that is relatively coherent. As a moral particularist, I don’t believe that any one story ought to provide the foundation of morality. But I acknowledge that a story may provide the basis for all the views of certain people and societies at certain times. (By the way, it seems to me that Dante and his contemporaries were not overwhelmingly inf luenced by one narrative. The Bible certainly held pride of place, but it is an internally various book containing many stories; and there were other inf luential narratives in medieval Italy.) Third, institutions prize coherence—and sometimes for good reasons. The best moral judgments arise from careful consideration of particular cases. But real judges and juries may be biased, incompetent, or simply unpredictable. Therefore, we define legal concepts in general terms and ask courts to enforce them predictably. This is beneficial even though there must be an imperfect match between law and morality. Religious denominations and educational institutions also pursue a degree of internal coherence. Furthermore, it is useful for the various institutions of a single society to harmonize with one another. Thus there is social pressure toward coherence, for basically pragmatic reasons. That pressure was certainly evident in Dante’s Italy. Howard Berman has argued that “law” (as we understand it) was born in the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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“twelfth-century revolution” when professionals began to systematize ecclesiastical, municipal, and feudal rules by making them consistent with a few basic premises. Professional reasoning about consistent principles began to replace arbitrary decisions by powerful individuals. Once the separate bodies of law became coherent, it was easy to recognize similarities among them and to bring them into mutual harmony. That model of coherence then spread to theology—where it reached its apogee in the great summas—and in chivalry, where it generated “laws” of courtly love. Dante, a member of the urban professional class, who meticulously organized the whole afterworld and argued for a single feudal system for all of Christendom with one Emperor at the summit, was very much an heir to Berman’s twelfthcentury revolution. Thus Dante is an instructive example of a thinker who deliberately seeks moral coherence; and he participated in a broader movement that sought to reform every important institution along the same lines. Yet not all eras appreciate coherence as much as Dante’s, nor are they all as successful at making a few rules apply to every aspect of life. And even Dante’s personal worldview was very heterogeneous, embracing numerous basically incompatible inf luences, values, and ideas. Thus, although Dante represents a relatively coherent culture, closer examination reminds us that “culture” is always a simplification. All that really exists are changing, partially inconsistent or ambivalent individuals with mixed sets of experiences and values. This means that the High Modernists were wrong to believe that there were two choices: either to subscribe naively to a coherent, closed culture, or else to stand outside of all culture and thereby lose criteria of moral and aesthetic judgment. On the contrary, human beings have always had some degree of choice among values and beliefs. We inherit many of our assumptions, which are usually somewhat heterogeneous and inconsistent, and which differ in part from the assumptions of our immediate neighbors. We are capable of changing our values, often as a result of rational dialogue with people somewhat different from ourselves. But how is that dialogue possible? Historicism and Particularism Combined In order to explain how it is possible to make moral judgments in the present age, we should combine appropriate forms of particularism and historicism, since these positions comport with our experience of the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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world. I gave arguments in favor of particularism in Chapter 6 and then claimed in Chapter 7 that historicism is an empirical discovery of the last two centuries. Both particularism and historicism are critiques of “universalism,” but the form of universalism that they attack is different. Particularism challenges the premise that judgments about particular cases should be derived from general rules that apply to large categories of cases. It says that even if two situations share the same important moral feature (such as love), we may have to judge that feature differently in the different contexts. Historicism rejects the assumption that the same moral rules should be understood and obeyed by people in different times and places. It says that two people from different cultural backgrounds may necessarily judge the very same situation differently. One can be a “universalist” about . . . Cultures

The nature of reasoning

Universalism1: The same rules or judgments apply in any time and place

Universalism 2: What is right to do in a particular case is shown by the correct application of a general moral rule

The alternative to this form of “universalism” is . . . Historicism: At least some moral principles vary over time and across cultural contexts

Moral particularism: we can and should decide what to do by looking carefully at all the features of each particular case. General rules and principles are unreliable guides to action. A rule or principle that makes one situation good may make another one bad.

It is possible to combine either item from the left-hand column with either choice on the right. For example, one can combine historicism with universalism 2 by arguing that each person should be guided by general rules or principles; but these vary by culture. One can combine universalism1 with particularism by claiming that we know what is right by looking at whole concrete situations; furthermore, there is a right judgment to be reached about any given state of affairs, and all human beings should reach the same conclusion, regardless of their culture.12 To make matters more complicated, there are various forms and degrees of particularism and historicism. Most importantly, I have distinguished between radical and moderate versions of both doctrines. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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against Universalism1 (the same rules or judgments apply in any time or place) . . .

against Universalism 2 (what is right in any case is shown by the application of a general moral rule) . . .

Radical Historicism: Moral principles arise from cultures, and there are numerous cultures in the world

Radical Particularism: All moral concepts are subject to unpredictable change in their “valence” depending on the context. Thus one can never say of a concept that it is always good or bad.

Moderate historicism: Moral principles are inf luenced by people’s prior experiences, and everyone’s experiences differ. A “culture” is just shorthand for the experiences held by most members of a group of individuals.

Moderate Particularism: Some concepts are morally invariable regardless of context, but many indispensable concepts vary unpredictably depending on context. Thus general rules and principles are often unreliable guides to action.

As I noted earlier, many Modernists were radical historicists who also believed in “Universalism 2.” That is, they assumed that people reason morally by applying general principles; but principles differ by culture. This combination leads to relativism or even nihilism. Whenever the core normative assumptions of culture A conf lict with those of culture B, there is no common metric or court of appeal. According to this theory, human beings apply moral principles but have no way of knowing the moral truth, if indeed there is any such a thing. A combination of moderate particularism and moderate historicism avoids this outcome and makes better sense of the world we observe. According to this view, people often reach judgments about situations and choices by examining a large number of relevant features, taken together. Their judgments are (necessarily) colored by their own prior experiences and by other judgments that they have made or encountered in such sources as scripture, history, and secular literature. Indeed, their own backgrounds can often be seen as part of the situations that they judge. People with different backgrounds will reach different conclusions about the same situation. However, they may not make divergent judgments because they apply incompatible rules or principles. Instead, they may define the boundaries of the situation differently, or see different aspects of the same situation as salient, or describe the same aspects using different vocabulary, or make different comparisons to other situations. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


This distinction yields the following choices as alternatives to “universalism”:

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Perhaps there is one right answer to any particular dilemma, and one right overall judgment of any particular action or situation. If there is a right answer, then people from all historical and cultural situations should acknowledge it. In practice, people will differ about cases; but we have a method for improving our views and moving them closer to the truth. The method is to deliberate with people who have contrasting opinions, offering “thick” descriptions and morally laden narratives about each case at hand. Any two individuals can deliberate in this way. Not only is it possible for people from different cultures to exchange stories; such exchanges will change each participant’s culture to at least a small degree, since a “culture” is just a set of inf luences and experiences. It is not an impermeable barrier to understanding. Isaiah Berlin used Wittgenstein’s metaphor of family resemblance to explain how there can be a kind of “human nature” even though many of our most important values and judgments vary: Wittgenstein once explained the concept of ‘family face’—that is, among the portraits of ancestors, face A resembles face B, face B resembles face C, face C resembles face D, etc., but there is not a central face, the ‘family face,’ of which these are identifiable modifications; nevertheless, when I say ‘family face’ I do not mean nothing, I mean precisely that A resembles B, B resembles C, and so on, in various respects, and that they form a continuum, a series, which can be attributed to family X, not to family Y. So with the various cultures, societies, groups, etc. That is what I mean—that there is not a fixed, and yet there is a common, human nature: without the latter there would be no possibility of talking about human beings, or, indeed, of intercommunication, on which all thought depends—and not only thought, but feeling, imagination, action.13

Although it is a thorny phrase, I think Berlin is exactly right that there is not a fixed, but there is a common, human nature. That is to say, there are no identifiable features that all human beings share and that generate a satisfactory moral worldview binding on everyone: there is no “fixed” human nature. (There are human commonalities, but they don’t generate a satisfactory moral structure.) Nevertheless, there is a “common” human nature, composed of our ongoing discussion of moral issues. This conversation is “common” because there is no insuperable barrier to discussion among cultures. Indeed, Berlin’s position would have been more convincing if he had not invoked “cultures, societies, groups, etc.” (in the Modernist fashion), but had rather seen people and their concrete judgments as the phenomena that vary.14 All human judgments resemble one another across time and space, not because they are similar or share some fixed feature, but because they are all part of one enormous series of judgments and values. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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To say that we are all potentially part of one discussion about morality does not mean that disagreement is unimportant. On the contrary, conf lict and discord are very evident in the real world. My point is rather a normative one: we can and should deliberate, even if in practice most of us never will. Deliberation certainly does not guarantee consensus, nor does consensus at any point in history prove anything. (People used to agree about certain forms of female inferiority, and they were all mistaken.) But we know what we ought to do. We must focus on particular situations, describe them “thickly,” and listen to alternative descriptions. In the rest of this chapter, I discuss what this conclusion implies for several disciplines: literature and the representational arts, history, literary criticism, and moral philosophy. The Representational Arts after Modernism Particularists should favor sensitive descriptions of concrete human situations—works that do not illustrate grand philosophical premises, but rather depict complex, irreducible, unrepeatable states of human affairs with a moral awareness. The enemies of sensitive description include cliché, sentimentality, stereotype, simplification, and euphemism. When we think of literature that carefully describes concrete and complicated moral situations, domestic novels and lyric poems come to mind. Indeed, some writers have taken the position that the most valuable aspects of life are exactly the intimate human relations that can best be described in “bourgeois” novels and lyric poems. This view implies that engagé political fiction is always too didactic and simplified. That was Montale’s position; but I disagree with it. Personal life takes place within broad social contexts. Therefore, looking only at small-scale phenomena (such as family relations and individual motivations) violates the particularist ideal that we should consider all aspects of situations. There is no reason that fictional works that are finely perceptive cannot depict major political and social issues and institutions. As I noted in Chapter 2, social generalization is not the same as moral generalization. A novel can use a particular case to indicate statistically common phenomena, such as oppression or deprivation. The novelist does not claim that his or her particular story is universal or inevitable; only that it is common and important enough to demand public attention. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge the controversial implications of particularism. A moral particularist might, for example, prefer Henry James—who was extraordinarily perspective about moral situations and 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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motives—over Theodore Dreiser, with his blunt, simple, and explicit calls for social reform. James vs. Dreiser was the contest that Trilling proposed in his essay on “Reality in America” (1940). Today it seems an uneven struggle, since Dreiser’s reputation has fallen. But when Trilling wrote, many prominent critics took Dreiser’s side, seeing him as practical, realistic, and concerned with large-scale social injustices, whereas James was an irrelevant (even neurasthenic) elitist, concerned only with the interior states of a few rich people.15 Given Dreiser’s high reputation at the time, Trilling’s criticism was prophetic rather than cheap. He wrote: “No liberal critic asks the question of Dreiser whether his moral preoccupations are going to be useful in confronting the dangers that threaten us.”16 Dreiser proved no more politically effective than James and much less durable, precisely because he wasn’t perceptive and careful enough to describe reality authentically or to face the genuine moral complexity of each realistic situation. His simple ideas endeared him to political critics of his day, but doomed him in the long term. We should reject the Dreisers of today: the authors who appear politically “relevant” but who describe reality in simplified and stereotyped ways in order to support their ideological commitments. One does not have to be a left-wing radical to disparage the narrow scope of Jamesian writing. Hannah Arendt acknowledged that modern authors had helped to discover the complexity and fascination of private lives and thoughts: “Only the modern age, in its rebellion against society, has discovered how rich and manifold the realm of the hidden has been under conditions of intimacy.” But the result, she argued, was a net loss. “Modern enchantment with ‘small things’ [as] preached by early twentieth century poetry in almost all European tongues, means that the public realm has almost entirely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere.”17 Modern readers had become mired in the trivialities of courtship and friendship and had lost sight of the possibilities of human greatness, which could only arise in politics. However, art compatible with particularist moral concerns need not be domestic and intimate in scope. Finely perceptive fiction can take for its major characters political leaders, as illustrated by authors from Shakespeare to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Highly perceptive, naturalistic writing is common today, so there is no need to reform fiction to make it useful for particularist moral thinking. However, the success of representational literature requires some explanation. To the High Modernists, moral representation seemed fraught with epistemological difficulties. One can reconstruct their skeptical thinking as follows. First, it makes no sense to represent events from the past or from a distant place using techniques specific to our 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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time. Thus “history painting” and the “historical novel” are contradictions; they are contemporary works pretending implausibly to be eyewitness reports of the past. Second, this criticism of historical painting and fiction applies to representation, generally. All styles and techniques of representation are specific to a time, hence none are objective. A realistic picture of the artist’s present surroundings is just a history painting in which the subject happens to be contemporaneous with the author. That logic makes all representational art appear problematic. Although Socialist Realist painters and folk artists continued to paint historical scenes during the first half of the twentieth century, history painting became very marginal during that era—as did pictorial realism in general. Meanwhile, some historical fiction was written, but most of it fell into two categories. Some works (like Camelot and The Lion in Winter) amounted to popular entertainment, never taken seriously by critics. Other works were highly original and self-conscious efforts to transcend history. For instance, T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is set in Canterbury in 1170. But the characters address the modern audience as a jury of Englishmen, so any illusion or artifice is deliberately broken, just as in Brecht’s Mother Courage (written in 1949 but set during the Thirty Year War). Today, in contrast, it is common for serious and highly regarded novelists to set their work in distant times and to use straightforward modern narrative techniques. For instance, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (1997) depicts an unfamiliar world: rural Germany during the Romantic era. The young poet Novalis, home from a sophisticated university, falls in love with a very ordinary 12-year-old neighbor. The values, beliefs, and behavior of the characters are plausible, even though we would never encounter anything similar today. The novel is a window into a different era, yet its form is strictly modern. Similarly, in Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play, the first-person narrator is a twentiethcentury creature. He observes and describes the emotions of the other characters with detail and psychological insight that could only be modern (post-Freudian), but he is a fourteenth-century protagonist. If you believe that cultures are distinct complexes of fundamental ideas or Weltanshauungen, then The Blue Flower and Morality Play (and many other recent novels) commit the naïve mistake of mixing cultures. They are f lawed by anachronism. However, if we combine moderate historicism and moderate particularism, we arrive at the conclusion that everyone views the world from a personal perspective, composed of his or her store of prior experiences. Since no two people have the same store, all communication is a mixing of “cultures.” Crossing bigger distances is harder, but a representational novelist 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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like Fitzgerald or Unsworth is capable of depicting one era with the tools of another. There is nothing naïve or artificial about Fitzgerald’s omniscient narrator or Unsworth’s first-person witness describing the distant past as if he were present. This is an achievement, not a lapse. Particularists should hope that the dominance of Modernism can fade in the visual arts as it has in fiction, and new forms of visual representation can emerge to portray the past and future in morally challenging ways. In addition to fictional stories, we also have the opportunity to write and read narratives that are true. The relative advantages of historical and fictional narratives is a large topic, beyond the scope of this book. In brief, fiction has the advantage that narrators can describe (in whatever detail an author likes) the inner lives of one or more characters; and such private thoughts are often relevant material for moral judgment. But history has moral advantages as well. Narrative historians know how to look for moral themes in the record of the past, and that is an essential moral task. It was Hannah Arendt’s view that modern history had no causal coherence. The terrible events of her century could not be retrospectively predicted by measuring the factors that had jointly created them. We must understand the Holocaust and other mass slaughters, but their explanation beggars the mind. Thus social science that tries to “model” modern events is incapable of answering the deepest questions about our condition. However, we may be capable of identifying repeating motifs in history. That is why Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is not a causal explanation of Hitler and Stalin, but rather a search for relevant themes in history. It describes “certain fundamental concepts which run like red threads through the whole.”18 Like novels, coherent historical narratives have themes. If we can identify the major themes of our own time, we are doing the best that can be done. Literary Criticism and Ethics The argument of this book implies that literary criticism ought to be more explicitly and self-consciously normative, but without returning to some forms of moral analysis that were common in the past. In the Romantic era, literary critics were often overt moralists. They wrote interpretive essays in order to praise or condemn the personalities of famous authors. So, for Hazlitt, Dante was “nothing but power, passion, self-will,” whereas Byron praised the poet’s “gentle feelings.”19 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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There is no poet whose moral and intellectual character are so deeply connected. The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story appears to be told. . . . It is on the sterner and darker passions that he delights to dwell. All love, excepting the half-mystic passion which he still felt for his buried Beatrice, had palled on the fierce and restless exile. The sad story of Rimini is almost a single exception. I know not whether it has been remarked, that, in one point, misanthropy seems to have affected his mind as it did that of Swift. Nauseous and revolting images seem to have had a fascination for his mind. . . . 20

Such criticism is a form of portraiture, not unlike the character studies that appear in historical and fictional narratives. The same methods remained prevalent throughout the nineteenth century and even into the 1950s, when prominent authorities still aimed to prove Dante’s delicacy or “tender pity.”21 However, as the professional techniques of literary criticism and philology began to replace belles-lettres in the academy, critics grew cautious about making moral judgments, especially about authors as human beings. Critics increasingly emphasized that the relationships among authors, narrators, and characters were complex and often ironic. It was therefore difficult to determine the private moral views of writers—let alone their virtues and vices—by reading their books. Critics now felt an obligation to substantiate their interpretations with textual citations, close readings, and historical evidence, compared to which their own broad moral judgments would have seemed subjective.22 Literary critics were perhaps the least likely of all academics to endorse positivism, with its preference for hard facts over merely subjective values. Yet critics duplicated positivism when they began to treat the moral assessment of literature as amateurish, viewing only the analysis of structure, context, form, and inf luence as appropriate for professionals.23 Starting in the 1930s, the New Critics contributed the argument that it is usually a mistake to identify the meaning of a literary work with some moral message or doctrine that one can state in propositional form. As Cleanth Brooks put the point, any paraphrase of a poem must lead us away from its real “center.”24 (I share this concern; but one can speak about the moral meaning of a literary work without imagining that it can be captured by a paraphrase.) More generally, the New Critics and many of their contemporaries were anxious to establish the autonomy of literature and of literary criticism; and ethics was one threat to that autonomy. In the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


A little later, Macaulay attributed “religious zeal, chivalrous love and honor, [and] democratic liberty” to Dante, adding:

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Oscar Wilde had announced, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Whatever Wilde really thought of this dictum, it supported critics’ sense of their own professional role. They knew how to tell whether or not a book was well written, even if they had no special expertise on morality. René Wellek and Austin Warren announced that “by modern definition,” literature is “pure of . . . practical intent (propaganda, incitation to direct, immediate action) and scientific intent (provision of information, facts, ‘additions to knowledge’).”25 Therefore, as R.S.Crane wrote in the 1930s: The essential thing about the understanding to which the literary critic aspires is that it is understanding of literary works in their character as works of art. It is not criticism but psychology when we treat poems or novels as case books and attempt to discover in them not the art but the personality of their authors. It is not criticism but history or sociology when we read imaginative writings for what they may tell us about the manner or thought or “spirit” of the age which produced them. It is not criticism but ethical culture when we use them primarily as a means of enlarging and enriching our experience of life or of inculcating moral ideas. . . . Criticism . . . is simply the disciplined consideration, at once analytical and evaluative, of literary works as works of art. 26

Later, especially after Foucault’s work became inf luential in the 1970s, a substantial minority of contemporary literary critics began to view all norms as oppressive. This is, of course, a normative position of its own, although a hard one to defend when spelled out explicitly. (It seems to imply a radical political anarchism that few would endorse.) As an implicit theory or attitude, however, it can discourage positive responses to any ethical demands found in literature. Recalling the 1960s, Nussbaum writes, “It was assumed that any work that attempts to ask of a literary text questions about how we might live, treating the work as addressed to the reader’s practical interests and needs, and as being in some sense about our lives, [was] hopelessly naïve, reactionary, and insensitive to the complexities of literary form and intertextual referentiality.”27 The result was a decline of moral literary criticism. We can trace that decline by following the history of Dante studies into the twentieth century. Romantic critics generally admired Francesca; they praised Dante for depicting her delicately and feelingly; and they used their critical arguments as ammunition in contemporary debates about freedom and love. Modern professional readers, by contrast, have shown convincingly that Dante meant to damn Francesca. She is a sinner, not a romantic heroine. This interpretation is based on close readings of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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the text and precise information about Dante’s social and intellectual context. Although it is not a definitive view, it ref lects discoveries that cannot be ignored. However, modern critics leave unspoken—and perhaps unconsidered—their own views about Dante’s values. For example, Ray Fleming argues that Dante associates Francesca (a woman) with words and emotions, in contrast to facts and reasons. He concludes his essay: “Thus Francesca’s adoption of the sweet new style is, from the view of conventional, i.e., male-imposed, morality, subversive in the extreme because it calls into doubt that same morality by adopting the vocabulary of poetry, the sweet new style, whose primary concerns are ethical, yet such literary speech now refuses to recognize those patriarchal categories and prohibitions with even so much as a perfunctory glance.”28 I find this a reasonably persuasive reading, but it breaks off just before Fleming offers any explicit moral judgments of his own. He is evidently against the “categories and prohibitions” that Dante favors, or else he would not call them “patriarchal”—but what are they, and what is wrong with them? Likewise, Diego Saglia argues that the liberal English Romantics who appreciated Francesca were engaged in “cultural appropriation . . . defined as the inclusion and adoption of foreign, other signs into one’s own cultural environment in order to aggrandize, enlarge, and reinforce it.” The most famous example is “orientalism,” the appropriation of superficial elements from Eastern cultures to support Europeans’ sense of superiority. Saglia sees “appropriation” at work in Byron’s translation of Canto V, since Byron does not “ ‘respect’ the source text and culture,” but uses it for current political goals.29 Saglia is right to see the Romantics as mis-readers of the Divine Comedy; they misunderstood its values and used the text for their own purposes. However, since Byron’s purposes included freedom, self-determination, and cultural renewal (for Italy as well as for England), it is not clear why “appropriation” should be bad. Couldn’t it be a creative and liberating approach to the past? Both Fleming and Saglia apply an interpretive theory (respectively, French post-structuralism and Edward Said’s anti-“orientalism”) to a version of Francesca’s story. They obviously disapprove of the text under consideration. But—in keeping with standard practice in modern literary criticism—they fail to express a position of their own. I do not believe that it is their duty to supply elaborate philosophical arguments. In this book, I have argued that wise moral judgments are about concrete cases, not about general categories. Therefore, it would not be helpful if a critic had to prove that patriarchy or appropriation were 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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generally bad, before he or she could use those words with negative connotations in readings of literature. However, I do believe that critics should explicitly state the moral views that are implied by their literary interpretations. Making explicit one’s own moral position forces one to confront the possibility of exceptions, tradeoffs, and limits. It forces one to drop an implicit general moral theory if that theory looks oversimplified once it is stated in so many words. For example, “imperialism” has a bad ring to it. But what are we against, if we oppose the cultural imperialism that can be found, for instance, in Byron’s reading of the Inferno? If forced to express a moral view explicitly, instead of merely using “imperialism” as an epithet, a critic would have to adopt a position like one of these: •

•

•

•

Imperialism is a form of coercion, and coercion is bad. (But what is the alternative to some form of political authority? Are literary critics who always take the side of weak individuals against states and big institutions willing to endorse anarchism? Furthermore, is it coercive to use someone else’s cultural products for one’s own purposes?) It is always wrong to build a large, centralized nation by force. (That verdict would apply to ancient Rome and China, or to the creation of the Spanish and French nationstates, or to Dante’s dream of a united Italy.) Empires may be good or bad, but British imperialism was immoral. (Why? Was the fact that white people conquered non-white people the essential problem? Or was the problem economic exploitation, which also occurs within nations?) Imperialism has bad aspects and effects under certain circumstances, including the circumstances in Byron’s day. (Then one would have to explain what precisely was wrong with his values or behavior).

Again, being explicit about your moral positions need not make you into an abstract moral theorist. On the contrary, it may make you critical of the generalizations that implicitly guided your concrete judgments. It may drive you to look for concrete facts to support a more nuanced, contextual assessment of, for example, Dante’s views of women or of Byron’s treatment of foreigners. Martha Nussbaum provides an example in her own short essay on the Divine Comedy. Nussbaum, a moral philosopher who is unusually and deeply engaged with literature, sets out to show that Dante has “among the most defensible and beautiful Christian conceptions of love.”30 Whereas Francesca believes that lovers can be passive, Beatrice chooses to love Dante. Her love is not conditional on Dante’s excellence, nor is she blind to his faults. As part of her love, she comes to know his character thoroughly and deliberately assists in improving him. Nussbaum admires Dante’s description of this love and defends her own positive evaluative



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language with examples from the text. But she also dissents from Dante in some respects. For example, she sees Beatrice’s love as “authoritarian,” and Dante-pilgrim as “infantilized”—and blames Dante’s version of Christianity for this misconception of what love should be. Literary critics have always assessed texts morally. They have held opinions about what is worth reading for its impact on our lives and institutions. However, theoretical defenses of such normative opinions were scarce between the 1960s and the 1980s. This is one reason that critics often made their judgments implicitly and obliquely and without overt justification or argumentation.31 In advanced courses on literary criticism, professors rarely considered how one might make or defend judgments, especially ethical and political ones. As Wayne Booth argued in the 1980s, ethical criticism “is practiced everywhere, often surreptitiously, often guiltily, and often badly, partly because it is the most difficult of all critical modes, but partly because we have so little serious talk about why it is important, what purposes it serves, and how it might be done well.”32 Claims of racism, sexism, and other forms of bias in the canon have gained considerable traction since the mid-1960s. Not only are some books dropped from curricula because of their implicit or explicit attitudes toward minority groups; some are added because (at least all things being equal) it is thought to be fair or beneficial to include the perspectives of minority authors.33 What we choose to read and how we read it are indeed ethical questions, relevant to matters of justice and the development of good character. We may want the canon of assigned books to reduce—or at least not to reinforce—racism, sexism, and other forms of invidious discriminatory bias. But those are not the only ethical issues worthy of consideration as we read and advise others on what to read. As Amanda Anderson wrote in 2006, “Ultimately, a whole range of possible dimensions of individuality and personality, temperament and character, is bracketed, as is the capacity to discuss what might count as intellectual or political virtue or, just as importantly, to ever distinguish between the two.”34 Unless we are careful to defend rights of free expression, criticizing books on moral grounds may increase the chance of censorship. Yet it is insufficient to assert freedom of expression. Teachers, schools, universities, and publishing houses inevitably choose what texts to require, assign as voluntary readings, publish, translate, sell, purchase, and otherwise select for special treatment. And even if I may read anything I want, I must still make decisions about what to read and how to respond



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to it. I may benefit from Mein Kampf, and the First Amendment permits me to read it. Yet I am morally obligated to read it disapprovingly. Some books imply challenging and worthy judgments about ways of life and institutions. Other books embody pernicious values and assumptions, and just for that reason they may be worth studying carefully—and critically. We need not read literature for moral purposes alone. But almost all literary works address matters of right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and injustice, and deserve to be engaged on that level. This calls for a literary criticism that is judgmental, argumentative, and explicitly moral. As we develop a moral approach to criticism, Hazlitt and Macaulay should not be our models, for they too boldly attributed virtues and vices to authors on the basis of their works. Nor should we apply conventional arguments from moral philosophy directly to literature, forgetting that stories and poems are often ironic, ambiguous, and concrete, whereas philosophy aims for clarity and generality. But we should ask explicitly moral questions about literary texts and defend our answers. Stories depict people (and sometimes whole communities) living in some relation to conscious or unconscious values that guide them, repel them, allow them to rationalize their behavior, or make them into hypocrites. Sometimes characters defend their ethical positions explicitly; sometimes they embody them inarticulately. Meanwhile, the narrator may imply a stance toward these characters, their values, and their behaviors. This stance may or may not be identical to that of the author, for even some third-person narrators are untrustworthy. In works that Bakhtin called “dialogic,” characters present conf licting ethical positions, while the text itself is relatively neutral. Other works relentlessly drive readers toward specific conclusions. Regardless of the many forms of literature, if we practice “ethical literary criticism,” we ask: What are the moral stances, the goals, the ways of life, and the ethoi that we can detect in this book? What are the consequences of living according to these ethical frameworks in a world that the book describes as constrained for metaphysical, institutional, cultural, economic, or even biological reasons? What are the tradeoffs and costs? And finally, should we live according to these values? Below, in discussing philosophy, I will say more about why it is better to ask these questions in relation to a narrative text than abstractly. For now, I simply want to observe that we can ask these questions and debate the answers productively. There are other questions for an ethical critic to ask. For example: What judgments are we encouraged to draw from a text’s descriptions of society and nature? What should we think of these judgments? What are 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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the consequences of the author’s choice of plot and characters? Would it have been better to write about different people and circumstances? How does the rhetoric of each text function morally? What virtues and vices seem to be evident in the characters’ actions and in the narration? (Examples would include sympathy, benevolence, or malice.) Would there be other ways to describe the same facts—and if so, would these ways be morally preferable? To what extent may we generalize from the concrete instances described in a story or poem? Although we cannot achieve conclusive answers to most of these questions, we can deliberate about them rationally, giving reasons, incorporating alternative perspectives, and drawing analogies from other books and real life. The last decade has seen a resurgence of explicit ethical criticism along with theoretical arguments in its favor. Michael Warner has criticized English departments for holding a particular model of good reading as “critical reading.” Their purpose is to teach students not to be manipulated by the techniques of literary authors or taken in by the assumptions and biases of stories. Warner asks whether English professors have scrutinized this pedagogical goal. He does not argue for ethical criticism as an alternative, but he ends by quoting Bernard Williams on the need to retain ethical concepts, even if we cannot justify them with elaborate reasons. If one tries to be fully enlightened, critical, and detached, Williams notes, one has no self or purpose at all.35 The inf luential critic Jane Tompkins presents her intellectual autobiography as a struggle to understand encounters between Europeans and Native-Americans (as described in texts). The availability of completely divergent accounts first reinforced her epistemological skepticism, which was consistent with postmodernist theory. She “came to regard with sympathetic condescension any person so old-fashioned and benighted as to believe that there really was some way at arriving at the truth. But this skeptical standpoint was just as firm as any other,” she writes, and it was “seriously disabling.” Tompkins concludes, “one encounters contradictory facts and divergent points of view in practically every phase of life, from deciding whom to marry to choosing the right brand of cat food, and one decides as best one can given the evidence available.” Her real problem, she writes, is not epistemological or moral skepticism, but the failure of her own work (as of 1986) to reduce injustice in the world.36 Likewise, Amanda Anderson takes Jürgen Habermas’ side in the debate with Jacques Derrida and argues that one should offer arguments about good and bad character in the public sphere, defending those arguments with reasons.37 She emphasizes that a rational, deliberative, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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and analytical stance—sometimes seen as the liberal ideal—is just one kind of character. Like other character types or identities, it must be cultivated in oneself and in others before it can f lourish. Thus a Kantian or Habermasian stance is not an abstract ideal, but a way of being in the world that requires—as those authors know—education, institutional support, and “on ongoing process of self-cultivation.” Like other character types, critical rationalists and civic deliberators must be assessed morally. The primary question is how should one live. To live as a critical rationalist is just one response, which should be morally examined like the others.38 Anderson argues that although they seem to reject deliberation about how to live, postmodernist theorists also have views about character. For example, Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty have presented the ironist as an ideal character type. “With varying degrees of explicitness and selfawareness, I argue, contemporary theories present themselves as ways of living, as practical philosophies with both individualist and collective aspirations.”39 Most of The Way We Argue Now is devoted to close, often sympathetic, but also critical readings of theoretical texts. Anderson is insightful about character, form, irony, ambiguity, and development in these works—elements that we usually associate with literature, not with literary theory. She defends several postmodernist and multicultural authors by showing that they embody moral stances or characters that have value. She is a pluralist in contrast to a liberal or deliberative democrat who would see the only valuable theory as one that embodied the character traits of reasonableness or tolerance. She believes that the question, “How should I live?” opens a broad discussion in which the radical theoretical movements of the 1960s to 1990s have a place. Anderson’s arguments about the public sphere, moral reasoning, and the centrality of character are not especially focused on fiction or other literary genres. She could have addressed political theorists or anthropologists instead of literary critics. I hope that my reading of Canto V can serve as an example of ethical criticism as applied to a work of fiction. It is meant to illustrate the following points. First, the main moral theme in Canto V is not adultery but rather Francesca’s poor interpretations of books and real people. Specifically, she is oblivious to other people’s interests because of her susceptibility to cliché, sentimentality, and euphemism. She is guided by an elaborate code of behavior, similar to that which we would find codified in Andreas Capellanus’ Rules of Love. Dante demonstrates that this code is incompatible with real love for a human being (and also with God’s plan for the universe). It is significant that Francesca has committed a sin of lust, but the significance 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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is indirect. Reading about love without concern for details—and yearning to be a romantic hero or heroine like those in hackneyed stories—is a state of mind akin to lust. It is narcissistic. I have argued that these are valid and compelling points. However, the Divine Comedy also makes a woman into the main exemplar of sentimentality, euphemism, and cliché. This is a deliberate choice, since only five contemporary women are permitted to speak in the whole book. The association of literary vice with femininity was not Dante’s fault; it was an extremely common association in his time and in the centuries before and after, so he would have been hard pressed to avoid it. Thus we needn’t use the “gendering” of literary vice in the Divine Comedy as a reason to disparage Dante Alighieri as a person, but we should note it and rebut it. Hypothetically, it would have been better for Dante to have made Paolo the sinful reader. The Comedy addresses countless other moral issues as well. An important example is the tension between obeying a set of abstract moral principles, on one hand, and appreciating diverse human personalities, on the other. Dante’s own abstract principles were religious, but his text is relevant for those considering a secular moral philosophy instead. The tension between Dante’s love of human particularity and his commitment to abstract principles is embodied in the narrator’s ambivalence toward his main character; in the gradual but relentless movement from concrete and emotional narrative toward abstract speculation; and even in terza rima, which marries a metronomic regularity to great variety of rhythm and texture. Thus all aspects of literary criticism, including formal analysis, can help us to identify the values of Dante-pilgrim and of Dante-poet, and to decide whether we should agree with either of them. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline40 The argument of this book has implications, finally, for the discipline of moral philosophy. In Chapter 2, I argued that this discipline—despite great variety of topics and approaches—ref lects a few fundamental principles. Philosophers prefer to use concepts whose significance is always the same (either positive or negative) wherever they appear. In defining such concepts, philosophers try to identify necessary and sufficient conditions, such that if something can be done, it will be obligatory, praiseworthy, desirable, permissible, optional, regrettable, shameful, or forbidden to do it. Most believe that moral concepts can conf lict; thus 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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each one applies only ceteris paribus. But concepts have consistent meanings, and it is possible to link them together into larger structures by showing that some entail others, trump others, or are more fundamental than others. As a whole, morality has limits. Some things are subject to moral evaluation; others are not. For instance, Kantians assert that voluntary actions and their maxims can be judged, but we may not judge accidental outcomes. But what should we say about complex and ambiguous phenomena that have evolved over biological and historical time and that now shape our lives? We cannot use concepts such as love, marriage, painting, the novel, lawyers, or voting in a deontic logic made up of propositions like “P is necessary.” These things are sometimes good and sometimes not. We could try to divide them into subconcepts. For instance, love could be divided into agape, lust, and several other subspecies; painting can be categorized as representational, abstract, religious, etc. Once we have appropriate subconcepts, we can say that they have a particular moral status if (and only if ) specified conditions apply. The urge is to avoid weak modal verbs like “may” and “can” or other qualifiers like “sometimes” and “often.” Love can be wonderful; it can also be a moral snare. Love can be voluntary or involuntary, or a mix of both. Paintings sometimes invoke the sublime; sometimes they don’t. Some paintings have moral implications; some do not. Lawyers have legitimate and helpful roles in some cases and controversies, but not in others. A core philosophical instinct is to get rid of these qualifiers by using tighter definitions. For example, agape (properly defined) might turn out to be always good and never a snare. You always need and have a right to a lawyer when you are arraigned. All paintings by Giorgione or similar to Giorgione’s are sublime. And so on. My fear is that the pressure to avoid soft generalizations prevents us from saying anything useful about a wide range of social institutions, norms, and psychological states. They do not split up neatly into subcategories, because they did not evolve or develop so neatly. They won’t work in a deontic logic unless we allow ourselves soft modals like “may” and “can.” And yet, outside of philosophy, the humanities involve moral evaluations of just such concepts. For example, a great nineteenth-century novel about marriage does not claim that marriage is always good or bad, or always good or bad under specified conditions. The novel evaluates one or two particular marriages and supports qualified conclusions: marriage (in general) can be a happy estate, but it also has dangers. It is wise, when contemplating a marriage, to consider how events may play out for both partners. “Marriage,” of course, means a union of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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a specific, culturally-defined type (monogamous, exogamous, heterosexual, voluntary, permanent, patriarchal, and so on). That institution will evolve subtly and may be altered suddenly by changes in laws and norms. The degree to which the implied advice of the novel generalizes is a subtle question that the novel itself may not address. Much contemporary philosophy has a forensic feel. The goal is to work out definitions and rules that, like good laws, permit the permissible and forbid the evil. I do not doubt the value of forensic thinking—in law. I do doubt that it is adequate for moral thinking. It seems to me that the search for clearly defined and consistent concepts narrows philosophers’ attention to discrete controversial actions (abortion, torture, killing one to save another) and discourages their consideration of complex social institutions. It also directs their energy to metaethics, where one can consider questions about the status of moral propositions, rather than “applied” topics, which seem too messy and contingent. In the recent past, when almost all inf luential literary theorists were hostile to ethical criticism, they often viewed ethics as a legalistic discipline. David Parker writes that for the inf luential theorists Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva, “moral thinking is categorical: it consists in ‘ranging everything’ into pre-existing ‘categories.’ . . . In this account, the traditional categories are systematized into a pre-existing ‘code,’ on the analogy, presumably, with the Code Napoleon. On this view, ethics is modeled on law, especially French law. A second point is that these categories are organized in patterns of binary difference . . . A third is that moral thinking is essentially ‘judgmental’ always . . . on the pattern of I am good and the Other is bad.”41 This is a caricature of ethics or moral philosophy, which is always much more nuanced—and usually more forgiving—than a list of binary distinctions in black-letter law. But the caricature bears some resemblance to analytical moral philosophy, at least insofar as the analytical tradition prizes clear moral definitions and universal quantifiers (e.g., all cases of a certain type are bad). In 1997, Colin McGinn wrote that “moral philosophers systematically ignore the role of fictional work in ethical understanding.”42 McGinn probably did not base this generalization on a literature review, which would have uncovered too many philosophical books and articles about works of fiction to be counted. Nevertheless, McGinn’s testimony is useful because he is a highly distinguished analytical philosopher who has taught or visited in several of the most prominent departments of philosophy in the world and who frequently acknowledges debts to other famous philosophers. From his vantage point at the center of the discipline, the serious use of narrative (which he favors) remains 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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peripheral—or did when he wrote a decade ago. The core of the discipline of moral philosophy was the search for structures of clearly defined moral concepts: what McGinn called in the same paragraph “universally quantified ethical prescription.” McGinn described a focus on “moral norms and types of action” as “orthodox” within the discipline. Still today, graduate programs and most undergraduate majors require students of ethics to understand prevalent systems of moral reasoning (Kantianism and utilitarianism) and to have thought about meta-issues such as moral realism and relativism. Students learn know how to apply prominent moral systems to problems that are especially well suited to such analysis, such as abortion and euthanasia. The same range of topics also predominates in distinguished journals such as Ethics and Philosophy & Public Policy. The “orthodox” discipline of moral philosophy that McGinn describes resembles medieval scholasticism in several important respects. Not long after Dante died, scholasticism was challenged by the movement that we call “Renaissance humanism.” We need a similar reform today, and it may already be in its early stages. The Scholastics interpreted ancient scripture and literature, taking their sources as morally authoritative but attempting to generalize and synthesize what they read. Likewise, modern Anglophone moral philosophers usually analyze raw materials that come from outside of contemporary academic philosophy. That is why they deserve to be called “analytical.” For the most part, they analyze intuitions (i.e., the judgments and opinions of contemporary people, especially those who are socially and culturally similar to the author) or canonical doctrines from the past, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism. Philosophers strive to make these raw materials more consistent and clear and reject any aspects that prove fatally contradictory. However, philosophy is unsatisfactory if all it does is to analyze exogenous data, whether modern intuitions or doctrines from the past. The best moral philosophy has been synthetic and generative rather than merely analytical. Philosophers have proposed new and challenging moral ideas. Today, analytic moral philosophers sometimes achieve novel results by applying canonical doctrines in new ways. (For instance, Peter Singer showed that certain forms of utilitarianism bar the exploitation of animals.) At least as often, they debunk moral opinions by showing that these ideas cannot be stated in highly clear and consistent language. But we need moral opinions, even if we cannot state them in perfectly clear and mutually consistent ways. Indeed, clarity and consistency are easily overrated. We are better off wrestling with a set of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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incompatible, partial, but demanding truths, rather than retaining only the ones that fit comfortably together. In any event, a process of analysis cannot answer most moral questions, because even after some views have been discarded as unclear or internally contradictory, more than one opinion usually survives. For example, both sides in the abortion debate hold clear and consistent views, as do both libertarians and egalitarians. Many of today’s professional philosophers are deeply impressed by what John Rawls called “the fact of pluralism”: the existence of multiple, incompatible moral assumptions. Equipped only with tools of analysis, philosophers feel they should not offer answers about ends, goods, virtues, or ways of life. Instead, they debate how our institutions should be structured to handle pervasive disagreement about these matters. Should individuals have maximum freedom to pursue their own choices, as classical liberals assert? Should democratic peoples deliberate and impose their decisions on themselves, as strong democrats argue? Should various cultural groups embrace their own traditional values, as communitarians claim? These are efforts to delegate moral reasoning to “ordinary people,” since, as Rawls says, “There are no [normative] experts: a philosopher has no more authority than other citizens.”43 But there is no escaping normative argument. What are ordinary citizens or private individuals or communities supposed to think and say when they face moral questions? Even in a democratic state that gives everyone an equal voice, citizens must somehow decide what policies they favor. Even in a libertarian society that gives members maximum autonomy, people need moral beliefs that move and guide them individually. Even in a traditional community, elders must give explanations and reasons to each rising generation, or else the young will defect. In short, we need people (whether or not we call them “philosophers,” and whether or not they are academic experts) who can contribute sophisticated and convincing moral arguments to the full range of public and private debates. Besides, if moral questions are intractable, then social institutions are just methods for turning arbitrary individual opinions into policies. Liberal democracy—to name one available institution—may be preferable to radical alternatives, such as theocracy; but we can give it no more than two cheers. It is not a means for people to arrive at inspiring moral truths, but just a system of checks and balances. And if human values differ intractably, then it is not even clear why we should prefer democratic and/or liberal procedures over violence and tyranny. In times of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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real crisis, democratic leaders have always dropped moral pluralism as a justification of democracy and have proposed instead very demanding and impressive notions of the human good. But philosophers cannot develop such notions if their methods are strictly analytical. In short, the first limitation of analytical philosophy is its incapacity to generate compelling moral ideas. A second problem is its failure to grapple with historical or cultural contexts. Most moral and political theorists are acutely aware that norms and values differ, especially over time and among “cultures.” They wrestle with the question: What can we say about justice, given that human values differ profoundly? Should we find a modus vivendi for very diverse cultures, or assert that cultural communities ought to develop autonomously, or develop norms that only apply to modern Western democracies, or find some lowest common denominator to define human rights? In short, almost all contemporary philosophers are historicists—in theory. Nevertheless, few interpret specific arguments and values from distant times and places with any serious attention to their original meanings and contexts. In fact, the way that analytic philosophers read texts from the past resembles the Scholastics’ use of the ancients. The Scholastics had no historical sense at all; they treated ancient authors as their exact contemporaries. They examined phrases and short passages from canonical books, largely without regard to context. Often they used isolated passages by classical authors, as reported in Islamic treatises. Similarly, in the 1950s, Galen Strawson wrote, “When I allude to the system of Leibniz, I will scarcely be troubled if the doctrines I discuss are not at each point identical with the historical doctrines espoused by the philosopher called Leibniz.”44 Strawson wanted to develop a true metaphysical position, a description of the most basic and consistent features of the universe. Leibniz was a useful aid to Strawson’s thinking, but he was also a long-dead German with no knowledge of quantum mechanics or Frege. So there was no philosophical point in trying to recall what Leibniz actually thought. Likewise, a “reconstructionist” reading of Kant’s moral theory does not ask what Kant meant to say. He was a pietist from eighteenth-century Koenigsburg who held many superannuated beliefs that need not concern us. Rather, the point is to develop a true doctrine by retaining and clarifying persuasive aspects of Kant’s writing while jettisoning the rest. This was exactly the Scholastics’ approach to Aristotle. In fact, Aristotle may appear together with Kant and J.S. Mill in a contemporary treatise about ethics or politics. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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I think this is a largely misguided method for moral philosophy. The raw materials of moral analysis—the intuitions of the present and the philosophical doctrines of the past—are always ref lections of local circumstances. They arise because of people’s experiences in the world, including the representations and stories that they have found persuasive. Moral ideas are never self-evident, axiomatic, or self-justifying, although they may appear self-evident to people who have narrow horizons. Nor are moral ideas and judgments self-contained: they always assume and imply numerous other ideas and experiences. Philosophers should treat intuitions and philosophical theories as cultural phenomena that must be understood before they can be judged—and that can only be understood in context. Third, the style of analytic philosophy is third-person exposition. There is no reason to wonder whether the author whose name appears on the title page actually holds the views that are described, as unambiguously as possible, in the contents. Nor is there much reason to wonder about the context, audience, or motivation of the work. To learn that the author has a hidden agenda or fails to follow his own moral advice is merely to engage in gossip; the value of a book lies exclusively in its arguments. Note, however, that this was not true of some of the best moral philosophy of the past, in which questions of irony, intention, style, character, and context were complex and essential. But even in interpreting works from the past, “the predominant tendency in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy has been either to ignore the relation between form and content altogether, or, when not ignoring it, [to treat] style as largely decorative.”45 Finally, moral philosophy adopts an implicitly superior position visà-vis the narrative arts, such as history and fiction. These arts generate stories; moral philosophy decides whether the judgments and intuitions supported by such stories are correct. The superiority of moral theory was more explicit and uncontroversial in the Middle Ages. Then, most writers described the various disciplines not as independent ways of thinking, but as parts of an overall hierarchy of knowledge. For instance, theorists constructed many rival lists of the “seven liberal arts,” but all lists described a progression from the elementary disciplines of the trivium (from which we derive the word “trivial”) to the advanced sciences of the quadrivium.46 Some theorists placed moral philosophy and theology in the quadrivium; others saw them as higher pursuits than all seven of the liberal arts. But consistently, medieval theorists assumed a progression from grammar and rhetoric toward philosophy. The former disciplines were simply tools for communicating truth (or falsehoods). 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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They were taught by exposing students to Latin stories and speeches. Students were expected to master grammar and rhetoric early, so that they could proceed to study truth as revealed by philosophy and theology. These disciplines, in turn, were abstract and encyclopedic, not concrete or based in narrative. Renaissance humanism undermined the medieval system. I understand it mainly as a revolt of the trivium.47 The first people to call themselves “humanists” were independent tutors who provided advanced undergraduates with instruction in grammar and rhetoric. They taught what they called the “studia humanitatis” on the side, while the university’s formal curriculum emphasized logic and theology. Parents paid for this “humanistic” instruction because they wanted their sons to learn eloquence to succeed at court or in the law. Humanist pedagogy consisted of reading and imitating ancient narrative authors, with attention to style and form, plot and character. The great works of humanist philosophy do not consistently endorse the dignity of human beings or any other doctrine that we could call “humanism.” What they have in common is a similarity of form. They are literary texts that are explicitly concerned with character, context, voice, irony, and plot. In each case, the role of philosophical argumentation is itself a theme. Thus, for example, Thomas More’s Utopia contains a blueprint of a society, complete with arguments for why that polity is ideal. In this respect, it resembles Rawls’ Theory of Justice. However (just as in Plato’s Republic) the account of an excellent society is set in a complex and deliberate literary and rhetorical frame. The narrator, also an Englishman named “Thomas More,” is visiting Flanders on a mission for his king. By sheer chance, he meets a friend and colleague named Peter Giles, who is talking with an old and somewhat ragged man whom More takes for a mariner. “ ‘Nay’ ” said Giles, “there ye were greatlye deceaved. He hayth sayled indeed, not as the maryner Palynure [the helmsman for Aeneas], but as the experte and prudent prince Ulisses; yea, rather as the auncyent and sage Philosopher Plato.” In short, this man (whose name turns out to be Raphael Hytholday) is not just someone who knows his way around the empirical world; he is also a source of ref lection and wisdom. But his wisdom is thoroughly experiential, as shown by his traveler’s garb and his knowledge of “manye strange and unknown peoples and contreis.”48 More is so impressed with Hythloday’s recollected arguments that he tries to persuade the wise traveler to become a counselor to princes—as More is. Hythloday responds that his advice, based on philosophical arguments and experience, would be so radical that no one would pay 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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him any attention; so he prefers a private life (the opposite of More’s). Several times in the course of this discussion, Hythloday alludes to a superior society that he had visited called Utopia (No Place). The character Thomas More doubts Hythloday’s philosophical position—which is an attack on private property—but he seems to recognize that the concrete existence of a superior alternative to modern England might be persuasive. In other words, he is more interested in Hythloday as a traveler than as a philosopher. He prays and beseeches Hythloday to “descrybe unto us the Iland,” not brief ly but in full detail, mentioning “al thinges that you shal thinke us desierous to knowe. And you shal thinke us desierous to knowe what soever we knowe not yet.”49 There follows Hythloday’s description of Utopia. For my purposes, it is important to note the role of specific historical context, accident, characterization, and dramatic irony in the structure of Utopia. The book does contain arguments and conclusions. However, for almost five hundred years, readers have debated whether those arguments are meant to be taken seriously. That debate raises questions about the work’s social context and its author’s biography and intentions. For those of us who believe that moral arguments are always deeply dependent on people’s concrete experiences, this debate is a healthy one. I doubt that there is a fully general and decisive argument either in favor or against private property; but we may learn a great deal (morally) by examining what one capable man thought about property, under the particular circumstances of his life. A comparable example is Machiavelli’s Prince. This text looks like a treatise on government, an argument in favor of tyranny. But it is also a letter written by the exiled and recently tortured author to his tyrannical lord. Therefore, some readers have long suspected that Machiavelli was deeply ironic. As Rousseau wrote: “Machiavelli was a proper man and a good citizen; but, being attached to the court of the Medici, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country’s oppression. The choice of his detestable hero, Caesar Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim.”50 This may not be an accurate theory of Machiavelli’s motives, but the fact remains that “Machiavelli” is a character in the Prince, living in particular historical circumstances, writing with particular motives, and not necessarily identical to the author. Each of these works invites us to ask whether the author agrees with the doctrines that are expressed inside its complex narrative frame. There is a layer of ambiguity that violates the modern (or Scholastic) philosopher’s preference for clarity. We cannot paraphrase a humanistic 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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work without losing its significance, whereas a modern philosophical argument is supposed to be subject to restatement and summary. In order to assess the intended purpose of these books—which is only one of several questions we might pursue in interpreting them—we must explore the immediate context in which they were written. For instance, Machiavelli’s real relationship with the Medici is relevant to interpreting The Prince, much as Dante’s relationship with Guido Novello is relevant to understanding Canto V.51 These very particular forms of context are often as important as the grander contexts of cultures, eras, ideologies, and “discourses.” I believe that the humanists meant something very serious by adopting the forms that they did. They assumed that philosophical arguments were important, but not universally binding. Moral arguments were appropriate to particular people in particular settings. They were always partial truths, because other people, differently situated, could legitimately hold and believe different values. This did not mean that ethics was a matter of individual preference and taste. But readers always had to ask whether the reasons and conclusions of any speaker were relevant to them. This question required a holistic judgment of the circumstances described in the text and those of the reader. Since all the circumstances had to be considered together, humanist authors described settings, personalities, and even facial expressions as well as arguments. Humanists derived all of these literary devices from classical philosophy. They were able to do so because they paid attention to the literary qualities of texts by Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch, their favorite moral philosophers. Whereas a Scholastic reader would consider a doctrine of Plato (probably via an isolated quotation in a medieval Islamic treatise), the humanists debated the character of Socrates, his development in Plato’s corpus, his rhetorical figures, and his behavior under various concrete circumstances. Since their greatest books made use of dramatic irony, it seems likely that they treated Plato’s dialogues as literary models. After all, Plato is different from his leading character, Socrates, who, in turn, is charged with “well-known eironia.”52 Miles Burnyeat says that Plato is “good to think with.”53 Evidently, I believe the same of Dante, for I have chosen to write about certain current moral issues by interpreting sections of the Divine Comedy. Like Plato’s dialogues and the works of renaissance humanism, the Comedy is a concrete story in which abstract ideas appear as statements by embodied characters in specific historical circumstances, who attempt (to various degrees) to live by what they say. In all these works, the question of irony arises; after all, Dante-poet is not the same as Dante-pilgrim. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Why should such a book be “good to think with”? One reason is that any historical text provides a perspective on the world that challenges our own. For instance, the Divine Comedy helps us to understand what it would be like to see everything (historical events, the behavior of animal species, even the movements of the stars) as if it had a moral purpose. But I must say that I do not find a morally teleological universe at all plausible; thus it may be interesting to understand Dante’s medieval teleology, but it is not life-altering. However, Dante’s exotic perspective is not what I find most useful in him. The Divine Comedy is “good to think with” because it embodies several moral perspectives in vivid characters and situations—including that of the author. Embodying moral values is how we must think if we want to make most of the really serious ethical choices. Philosophers often hope to be able to construct persuasive moral arguments that run from premises to conclusions. So, for example, Robert Nozick argues that if you value freedom, then you cannot favor schemes to guarantee particular distributions of wealth. Peter Singer argues that if you believe that we must minimize the quantity of suffering in the world, then you cannot permit vivisection. Judith Jarvis Thompson argues that if you believe that individuals may refuse to be involuntary life-support systems for other individuals, then you must permit abortion in cases of rape and incest. Impressive as some of the arguments are, they have two major limitations. First, there is substantial and reasonable disagreement about the premises that generate the conclusions, and there may never be arguments strong enough to decide the premises. Second, we will never have abstract arguments that address a wide (and crucial) range of questions involving our choice of a life or our valuation of characters and institutions. It is simply implausible that any argument, abstracted from context, could decide whether I should lead an active or a contemplative life, advise the powerful or seek power myself, pursue civic engagement or study mathematics, raise children or devote myself to work, or prefer the political economy of Norway to that of Hong Kong (or vice-versa). To grapple with such issues, we need detailed, “thick” descriptions that give us portraits of whole situations over time. Thus, when I wanted to consider whether it was better to take moral guidance from stories or from philosophical principles, I found it most illuminating to “think with” a story—the Divine Comedy—in which that choice is a major theme, woven into the structure and not merely talked about. “Humanistic” moral philosophy, in the most general sense, is philosophy that engages with narrative. After McGinn describes the 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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We need new methods and styles with which to discuss stories and morals. Our discussions will be less abstract and more immediate, since we are now closer to lived ethical experience. The ethical will be seen to be inextricably bound up with other concerns, particularly with aesthetic ones, but also with specific details of character and context. . . . We will need to mingle the general and the specific in ways that are not typical of the orthodox ethical treatise. . . . This opens up a whole region of moral interest that is not covered by the usual division into metaethics and normative ethics.54

The “region of moral interest” that McGinn recommends is marginal to the kind of philosophy I described in Chapter 2, which is circumscribed by its preference for clearly defined and morally unambiguous concepts. But some philosophers are now willing to use methods and explore topics that resemble more closely the other humanistic disciplines. First, some contemporary philosophers tell stories with moral themes. Fashioning plausible and moving fiction is a special skill not often possessed by people who are also good at philosophical analysis, although Iris Murdoch, Rebecca Goldstein, and a few others have shown that this combination remains possible. Again, Martha Nussbaum provides an example: her own version of the Paolo-and-Francesca story, which is entitled “Love and the Individual.”55 This document purports to be a manuscript that she discovered in a closet. It is by another philosopher, strikingly similar to Nussbaum herself. The unnamed narrator is happily reading Dante; quotations from Canto V are dispersed throughout the story. The narrator describes a third woman’s thoughts during a Florida ice storm, after the breakup of a romance. This third woman is the narrator herself, some years before. In her Tallahassee guest room, the grieving protagonist asks herself: What is love for an individual human being? Is it the result of some features of that person, or of one’s relationship with that person, that might recur in other relationships? Is one justified, then, in mourning the end of a particular love? The elaborate narrative frame recalls those of Plato and More—and Dante. This is an attempt at fiction. (“You should doubt whether any of it happened as told.”56) However, philosophers have another option, which is to write true stories in order to highlight moral themes. A philosopher’s version of a narrative is distinctive. Compared to historians and novelists, philosophers are more explicitly concerned with moral analysis and more likely to put theoretical arguments in the mouths of 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


“orthodox” contemporary version of moral philosophy as a search for “universally quantified ethical prescription[s],” he writes:


characters; but they can still write concrete and particular narratives. An extraordinary example is Susan Brison’s autobiographical Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self.57 Second, some philosophers closely read fictional and historical stories and legal testimony in order to elucidate moral themes. A fine example of a philosopher’s close, sensitive, and original narrative interpretation is Richard Rorty’s chapter entitled “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty.” Rorty uncovers a subtle but moving subtext in Lolita and uses it to illustrate the theme of moral obliviousness, which (in turn) motivates his form of liberalism.58 Many other examples could be mentioned. A recent and impressive one is Tzachi Zamir’s philosophical reading of several Shakespeare plays, which combines careful attention to genre and structure with sophistication about moral theory and epistemology.59 A moral philosopher who reads narratives ought to borrow some methods and concerns from the other humanistic disciplines. Thus, for example, Rorty rightly considers “literary” issues such as point-ofview, style, and irony, as well as historical issues such as context and audience. At a more practical, everyday level, professional interpreters ought to read their texts in the original languages (whenever possible) and trace allusions and other intertextual references. A conventional modern work of analytical philosophy is meant to be self-contained. A philosopher once told me that he regarded any footnote in a philosophical article as a f law, because the article should be able to stand completely on its own, without the need to refer elsewhere. In contrast, narratives almost always incorporate other stories “by reference.” Readers of Canto V will benefit from consulting the Book of Daniel, the Gospels, St. Augustine, and numerous medieval romances as they seek to understand Dante. On the other hand, moral philosophers need not simply replicate the methods of literary critics and historians. Critics examine single works or combinations of texts that share common authorship, genre, or provenance. They often (and appropriately) investigate matters that have little bearing on moral judgment. Historians study periods, traditions, or communities—and, like critics, they often investigate non-moral questions as well as moral ones. In contrast, moral philosophers should look for common moral themes, not only in literary texts and episodes from the past, but also in legal testimony, contemporary newspaper accounts, and hypothetical cases. Furthermore, moral philosophers have a comparative advantage when they analyze the explicitly theoretical statements that literary and historical characters and narrators often make. While 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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these statements and arguments should be understood in the context of the overall genre and purpose of the works in which they appear, they should also be analyzed—a task that philosophers can perform especially well. This is where it can be useful to apply methods and insights from standard philosophical schools such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. A third approach to “humanistic” moral philosophy is to look for patterns and developments in the history of ideas. For example, in After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre tells a story about the progressive loss of teleology—of a sense that human life aims toward some knowable end—in Europe after the Middle Ages. More modestly, Seyla Benhabib once showed that classical liberals, despite their claim to reason a priori from the state of nature, actually drew a line between the public and private spheres that mirrored the traditional distinctions between male and female work roles.60 MacIntyre and Benhabib both practice genealogical criticism, arguing that widely shared assumptions are based on suspect moves made at particular points in the past. In Chapter 6, I told a story about the development of European culture as a series of logical (not simply random) intellectual developments. This was not an original story, but one that I derived from Hegel and Isaiah Berlin, among others. These philosophers exemplify an important type of humanistic moral philosophy, one that looks for logical patterns in the empirical history of culture. Finally, philosophers who are humanists can help to recover attitudes and frames of reference from past or distant places that challenge widespread current assumptions. Clifford Geertz writes, “The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding their sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.”61 Anthropologists are very good at this, as are historians and critics; but sometimes it takes a philosopher, steeped in the distinctions of moral theory, to recognize the hidden moral assumptions of a distant time or place. An example is the concept of “moral luck”—incompatible with both Christian and liberal thought—that Bernard Williams discovered in Greek tragedy.62 It is possible to describe moral luck as a doctrine: We are not in control of our moral condition, but can be made morally better or worse by chance. However, I find it much more fruitful to see moral luck as a theme, a tendency in particular circumstances for individuals to become better or worse by sheer luck. Williams’ analysis of moral luck does not prove that it is a correct theory (which would imply, in turn, that Kantian and Christian ethics are fundamentally mistaken). In fact, the contrast between Greek notions of moral luck and modern ethics seems 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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fairly intractable. But Williams performed a major service in revealing a lost theme. To build an intellectual movement, one needs a direction or purpose, numerous examples, networks of reference and collaboration among practitioners, a name (or set of names) for the whole venture, and arguments that seriously engage its critics. We now have examples of literary criticism that advance moral arguments and of philosophy that engages with narrative. Ethically-inclined critics typically read and cite philosophers, and vice-versa. There is a big enough base of examples that anthologies can now be published with titles like Mapping the Ethical Turn.63 The overall movement has not been named—and any name would be controversial—but Daniel R. Schwartz writes that “we are in the midst of a humanistic revival or at least a neohumanist burst of energy.”64 This is the terminology that I would favor. Such leading figures as Martha Nussbaum and Amanda Anderson are willing to defend the movement in respectful debates with critics of humanism, who argue instead for moral abstraction, relativism and skepticism, or for a sharp distinction between morality and aesthetics. I hope to have contributed to this humanistic revival in specific ways: by focusing on literary narratives (and especially fictions) as sources of moral insight, by investigating the methods we should use to make moral judgments, by introducing recent versions of particularism from analytical philosophy, by considering both the advantages and disadvantages of narrative, and by combining particularism with historicism. I have used a specific method, which is to wrestle with a literary text from a distant culture that is itself concerned with the differences between moral philosophy and literature. That is certainly a method that could be repeated: the Platonic dialogs, Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf are just a few other authors and texts that investigate the contrasts between philosophy and literature. But it is equally valuable to practice everyday criticism with explicit ethical purposes and to investigate issues in moral philosophy by turning to literature. In all this work, we might use as a motto Hannah Arendt’s observation: “No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.”65



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So I descended from the first circle to the second, which rings a smaller space but so much pain that it prompts a howl. There stands awful Minos, gauging sins, proclaiming verdicts at the portal, and condemning by the way he winds. I mean that when each ill-begotten soul comes before him, it confesses all, and this connoisseur of sin must rule What place is fit for it in hell: he wraps himself once with his tail for every tier he makes it fall. There’s never a pause at his tribunal; one by one they join the assembly; they speak, listen, and he makes them tumble. “O you who come to this grim infirmary,” said Minos when he saw me appear (pausing the exercise of his official duty), “Watch how you enter and whom you trust here: don’t be fooled by the width of the entry!” To this my guide replied, “Why roar? Don’t try to block his irresistible journey; it’s been willed in that place where any wish can be. So drop your query.” Now the mournful notes begin to blare, striving to make their weeping heard, 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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Appendix

pounding me with a doleful clamor. I’ve come to a place where all light’s suppressed, which bellows just as the sea is ripped in a storm as opposite winds contest. The hellish tempest that has never stopped whips the spirits in its passion: a twisting, hounding, mad assault. When they come before Minos’ ruin, they shriek and sorrow and lament; there they curse the power of heaven. I understood that this was the torment of the damned whose sin was carnal: those who made reason desire’s servant. As in cold weather their wings propel starlings in full and ample f locks, so in hell strong breaths of wind compel wicked spirits up and down, to and fro. No hope will ever comfort them. No lesser sentence, no pause is granted: this they know. And as cranes will move, chanting lays in the air, ordering themselves into one long file, so I saw coming with a woeful clamor shades that were borne by the stress of the squall. “Master,” I said, “who are those people scourged like that by the purple gale?” “The first whose story you’d have me tell,” he said, “was empress of many tongues. The vice of lust so broke her will that she wrote her desires into the laws, legalizing her tastes so as to erase the censure that such conduct merits. She’s Semiramis; she succeeded Ninus (or so we read) and was his wife. She possessed the land where today the Sultan rules. One who killed herself for love is next, breaking faith with Sichaeus’s ashes, and after her Cleopatra, the oversexed. See Helen, hub of such wicked times, and great Achilles whose last opponent was invulnerable Love. See Paris; 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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After I had listened to my teacher identify the ancient knights and ladies pity fastened on me and I neared despair. I began, “Poet, gladly would I converse with that pair who go together and seem to move so buoyantly in the winds.” And he to me: “You will see them when they’re closer; then you must entreat them by the love that drives them. They will come.” The next time the wind blew them past I sent forth my voice: “Battered souls, will you come and talk, if Another permits it?” Just as doves, at desire’s call coast through the air, wings stiff ly raised, drawn to their nest by sheer force of will, so these two from Dido’s f lock departed, And came toward us through the noxious air, so strongly and affectionately had I shouted. “O gracious and benevolent creature, moving through mulberry air to visit us, who dyed the world a bloody color, if we had a friend in the universe’s lord we’d pray to him to grant you peace, since you had pity on our bitter plight. Whatever would please you to hear or express, we’ll listen and speak to you, so long as the winds still themselves as they do now for us. “The territory where I was born sits where the Po runs to the sea at last to make a peace with its tributaries. Love soon takes hold in the gentle heart. It seized this man for my graceful being, the body whose loss I still resent. Love excuses none who’re loved from loving. It seized me for his charm and as you see it will always be my only feeling. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


there’s Tristan,” and a myriad shades he showed me with his finger. Those whom Love split from Life he named.

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Once I’d understood the spirits’ grieving, I lowered my face and looked so gloomy that the poet said, “What are you thinking?” When I could answer, I cried, “How many ‘sweet thoughts,’ alas, and how much passion conducted these two to their destiny!” Then back I turned in their direction and spoke, starting: “Francesca, your sufferings make me weep from sadness and compassion. But tell me, at the time of your sweet sighings, how and in what way did Love give leave for you to know your suspect longings?” And she to me, “ There’s no worse grief than to recall happy times’ when one feels sorrow: that’s your teacher’s plain belief. But if you have so much desire to learn the first root of our love, I’ll relate it as one who weeps while she spins her yarn. “It was our pleasure one day to read of Lancelot, by Love abducted. we were alone and had no urge or portent. Breathing as one, we felt our eyes attracted by the reading, and our faces paled; but a definite point was our sure defeat. When we read that ‘the desired smile then was kissed by the ardent lover,’ he who ‘can never be torn away’ kissed me, all atremble. A Galehaut was the author of that book, and seductive was his fancy. On that day, we read no farther.” While one soul told its story the other wept, and I collapsed. As if I’d died, I swooned from pity and crumpled like a falling corpse.



Love steered us to a common death. He is meant for Caina who extinguished our blazing.” These words were carried from them to me.

Introduction 1. Simon Blackburn introduces this analogy but rejects it. See Simon Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons, eds., Moral Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 97. 2. Jonathan Dancy, “The Particularist’s Progress,” in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, eds., Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 131. 3. John Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 3 (March 1995), pp. 140–141. 4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994); Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Martha C. Nussbaum, “Beatrice’s ‘Dante’: Loving the Individual?” Apeiron, vol. 26, nos. 3 and 4 (September/ December 1993), pp. 170–171. 5. Martha C. Nussbaum makes precisely this point. See, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 30. 6. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 16. 7. David Parker observes “the virtual absence of explicit ethical interest in contemporary literary discourse” during the 1970s and early 1980s. David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3. And Daniel R. Schwartz asks, “Why did ethics virtually disappear from the universe of literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s?” Daniel Schwartz, “A Humanistic Ethic in Reading,” in Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 9. However, Michael Eskin criticizes the rhetoric of a “turn,” mainly because there was always more ethical literary criticism than recent manifestos suggest. Eskin, “Introduction: The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no 4 (2004), pp. 557–572. 8. An inf luential depiction of critical reading (albeit without a definition) is Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Jane Gallop, ed., Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 13–38. 9. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 6, 4. 10. Ibid., p. 127.



NOT E S

Notes One


1. Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed., Giorgio Padoan, in Vittore Branca, ed., Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1965), vol. vi, gloss on Inf. v, 97–99. 2. Paolo Valesio, “Canto V: The Fierce Dove,” in Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross, eds., Lectura Dantis: Inferno (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), p. 81. In the terminology of the New Critics, great literary works are “autotelic”: they have their own purposes and are not well understood as commentaries on the world outside the text. 3. Dante uses the word “francesca” to mean “the French” at Inf. xxix, 123. 4. The real Francesca had a brother named Francesco who died in infancy. See “Le fonti documentarie” at www.rimini.com/storia/, which is mostly based on documents assembled by Luigi Tonini in the nineteenth century. Dante too would have heard the echo of St. Francis in Francesca’s name, and possibly he wanted to compare her relationship to birds with the saint’s. The ultimate origin of the name Francesco/Francesca is the Late Latin word Francus, which means “free” or “freeman.” Dante uses the Italian franco to mean “free” at Inf. ii: 132, so he may have heard the root meaning in Francesca’s name. 5. Jonathan Usher, “Paolo and Francesca in the Filocolo and the Esposizioni,” Lectura Dantis, no. 10 (Spring 1992), p. 22. 6. For example, Rev. Henry Boyd provides the whole tale (in English) with his translation of The Divina Commedia (London, 1802), vol. 1, pp. 134–137, thus bringing a fairly obscure Boccaccio text to the attention of the English Romantics. 7. See “Le Fonti documentarie,” at the Web page of the Comune di Rimini’s: www.comune. rimini.it/storia/. 8. Charles S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, 2. Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 84. Whereas the Francesca of the Divine Comedy is prolix and eloquent in explaining her own private motives and passions, the character in Boccaccio’s commentary is utterly silent. Whereas Dante’s Francesca acts on blind passion, Boccaccio’s is rather deliberate (she opens the door “believing that she could come up with some excuse”). In short, as SunHee Kim Gertz concludes, “Boccaccio’s Francesca is almost an antithesis to Dante’s.” Dante, “The Readerly Imagination: Boccaccio’s Commentary on Dante’s Inferno V,” Romanische Forschungen, vol. 105, no. 1 (1993), p. 22. 9. Peter Dronke (“Francesca and Héloïse,” Comparative Literature, vol. 27, no. 2 [Spring 1975], pp. 113–135, p. 129) notes that a galeotto was also a word for a pilot or steersman, citing Inf. viii, 17 and Purg. ii, 27. 10. “I Commentatori di Dante e i cronisti, via www.rimini.com.” 11. For Dante’s exile, see Robert Hollander, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 5–6; R.W.B. Lewis, Dante (New York: Penguin, 2001), pp. 77–89. 12. Gerolamo Biscaro, Dante a Ravenna (indagine storiche), Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano, no. 41 (1921), p. 55; Giorgio Petrocchi, Vita di Dante (Rome: Guiseppe Laterza e Figli, 1983), p. 192. 13. Boccaccio, Tratello in laude di Dante, section i, paragraph 80, in Vittore Branca, ed., Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mandadori, 1974), vol. 3, p. 456. 14. Ignazio Baldelli, Dante e Francesca (Florence: Olschki, 1999), p. 29; John Larner, The Lords of Romagna: Ramognol Society and the Origins of the Signorie (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 257, n. 35. 15. See Corrado Ricci, L’Ultimo rifugio di Dante (revised edition), Ravenna, 1965, pp. 514–5, 520. Italian text with modernized spelling from Francesco Protonotari, ed., Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze, ed arti (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1903), p. 582. 16. Lewis, Dante, p. 53. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


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17. So thought Giovanni Pascoli, mentioned in Larner, Lords of Romagna, p. 257, n. 39. Imagine that Guido read Canto V and recognized his own poem quoted by Francesca. He might have understood the bond described in line 135 as a private reference to the friendship between himself and Dante, che non mai fia diviso. 18. Chiarini, “Ravenna” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, directed by Umberto Bosco (Rome, 1973), vol. 4, p. 860. 19. See his “Riflessioni su un vecchio problema: Dante e Ravenna,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Danteschi (Ravenna, 1971), p. 230. Dante calls Francesca and Paolo “two relatives,” which may imply that he viewed them as members of his own family (Inf. vi, 2). The birds, the wind, and the ruins that are prominent in Ravenna also recall the setting of Canto V. 20. Gerolamo Biscaro, Dante a Ravenna: Indagine storiche (Rome, 1921), p. 52, referring to Purg, xiv, 98 and 107. Dante praises the Traversari family of Ravenna, even though they were “humiliated and driven into exile by the Polentas.” 21. Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Aldigherij Comoediam, quoted and translated in Singleton, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, 2. Commentary, pp. 480-481. 22. Baldelli, Dante e Francesca, p. 29. 23. Larner, Lords of Romagna, p. 62: “Romagnol treachery is a recurrent theme in the Inferno.” 24. In 1322, Guido left his brother, the pious and learned Archbishop Rainaldo, to manage Ravenna. Rainaldo was killed by their cousin, Ostasio, who seized the city and defeated Guido on the battlefield, driving him into exile. See Larner, Lords of Romagna, p. 68. 25. C.H. Grandgent, ed., Dante Alighieri, La Divina Comedia (Boston, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1909), p. 44. 26. Quoted in Diego Saglia, “Translation and Cultural Appropriation: Dante, Paolo and Francesca in British Romanticism,” Quaderns. Revista de traducció, vol. 7 (2002), p. 115. 27. See Chapter 6, below, and Renato Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno,” PMLA, vol. 72, no. 3 ( June 1957), p. 322. 28. Dante’s source is the church father Orosius (i.4): see Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 114. 29. One possibility is that he had not yet encountered Guido Novello when he wrote Canto V of the Inferno, and only later did he move into Guido’s household. Still, the fact that he left the text alone requires an explanation, I think, if he had meant to criticize Francesca.

Two


1. Grandgent, Dante Alighieri, p. 43. 2. Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America” (1940) in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 6. (Literally, Trilling refers to V.L. Parrington’s attitude toward Henry Clay’s alleged “romanticism.”) 3. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle, and Bad Behaviour,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, pp. 227–255. 4. Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1983), pp. 167–168. 5. Nussbaum, “Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory,” pp. 236, 234. 6. Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 175. writes, “moral philosophers systematically ignore the role of fictional works in ethical understanding.” See Chapter 7 for some important exceptions, of whom McGinn mentions only Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. 7. Cf. the first three tercets of Inf. xiii, each beginning with “non.” Dante has just entered the forest of suicides, that negates, life. 8. Cf. Mark Norris Lance and Maggie Little, “From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics,” in Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč, and Vojko Strahovnik, eds., Challenging Moral Particularism (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 54. 10.1057/9780230104693 - Reforming the Humanities, Peter Levine


Notes

Notes

9. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals), edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), BA ix; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1137b13ff; 1179a19–120. 10. Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 56. 11. Hooker, “Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, p. 7. 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. For example, Republic, 331c ff. 14. I am quoting an argument that Mike W. Martin introduces, only to reject: see his Martin, “Love’s Constancy,” Philosophy, vol. 68, no. 263 ( January 1993), p. 64. 15. Lewis, Dante, p. 107. 16. In medieval manuscripts, as in today’s editions, the word “Amor” is capitalized in lines 100–106, because it follows periods and begins new lines. Thus Francesca may be thinking of the god Amor. See Dante Alighieri, Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander with introduction and notes by Robert Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 98. Hereafter cited as Hollander notes. 17. Gianfranco Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta sella Commedia,” in Un’idea de Dante (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1976), p. 46. Francesca is also quoting two poems by Guido Guinizelli and a sonnet by Dante (VN, XX) that alludes to Guido. I discuss these allusions below, in Chapter 5. 18. Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 126. 19. Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well-Being,” in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 20. Moral philosophy, John Rawls says, cannot be “simply a list of the judgments on institutions and actions that we are prepared to render . . . .” A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999, sec. 9, p. 41). 21. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, section 11 (pp. 53–4). Cf. Ronald Dworkin, “Rights as Trumps,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1 (1981), pp. 177–212. 22. See, for example, Roger Crisp, “Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue,” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 167 (April 1992), with a clear statement at p. 160. 23. Utilitarianism (New York, 1987), pp. 9–10. Some readers would claim that Mill was not a consistent monist, since his commitment to liberty and his distinction between higher and lower pleasures do not follow from the principle of utility. If he was a pluralist, it was despite himself. 24. H.W.B. Joseph, Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 92, quoted in David McNaughton, “An Unconnected Heap of Duties?” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 185 (October 1996), p. 434. 25. W.D. Ross, The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 190. 26. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II:ii, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1859), Question LXXVII, Article 1, pp. 586, 587. 27. See Georges Duby, The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, 1981, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1983), p. 30. 28. The Book of Common Prayer, printed by Robert Barner (London, 1642), section entitled “Of Matrimony.” 29. Summa Theologica, Supplement, Quest. xli, objection 1, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, online edition via www.newadvent.org/summa/ copyright 2008 by Kevin Knight, retrieved July 5, 2009 30. Ibid. 31. Summa Theologica II-II, Question CLIV, article 8, Migne, pp. 1087–1088 (my translation). 32. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement, Quest. xli, objection 1, via www.newadvent.org/ summa. 33. Hollander, Dante: A Life, p. 8.



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33. Hollander, Dante: A Life, p. 8. 34. My translation from Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, edited by Ernest Langlois 34. (Paris, My translation from Meun, Romanabout de lalove Rose, by Ernest Langlois 1921), vol. iii, Jean lines de 8759ff. TheLepassage andedited economic exploitation is (Paris, 1921), vol. iii, lines 8759ff. The passage about love and economic exploitation is 8355–8454. 8355–8454. 35. For these arguments, see Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” pp. 130, 132. 35. For these arguments, Dronke, der “Francesca and Héloïse,” pp.Metaphysics 130, 132. of Morals), edited 36. Kant, Grundlegung zursee Metaphysik Sitten (Groundwork of the 36. by Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik Sitten (Groundwork Metaphysics of Morals), edited Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurtderam Main, 1991), BA of 54,the55. Wilhelm Weischedel am Main, 54, et 55.al., Novum testamentum graece 37. by I translate from Eberhard(Frankfurt Nestle, Erwin Nestle,1991), Kurt BA Aland, 37. (Stuttgart, I translate from Eberhard Nestle, Erwin Nestle, Kurt Aland, al., Novum testamentum 1985). Unless otherwise noted, subsequent Biblicaletpassages come from the graece King (Stuttgart, 1985). Unless otherwise in noted, subsequent James Version, with my alterations square brackets.Biblical passages come from the King James Version, with myLove alterations in square brackets. 38. Denis de Rougemont, in the Western World, revised and augmented version translated 38. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World,University revised and augmented by Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1983, p.version 85. translated by Montgomery Princeton University 1983, p. about 85. three per39. De Rougemont isBelgion wrong (Princeton: about the troubadours as a group,Press, because only 39. De is wrong about the troubadours a group, because three centRougemont of their songs seriously extol adultery, andasmany criticize it. only See about William D. percent Paden, of their songs seriously extol many it. See Paden, Troubadour’s “The Troubadour’s Lady: Heradultery, Marital and Status andcriticize Social Rank,” Studies “The in Philology, vol. 72 Lady: Status and Love Social Studies in Philology, 72 (1975), pp.at28–50. (1975),Her pp. Marital 28–50. However, andRank,” the Western World describesvol. a doctrine that least a However, thesince Western World describes few peopleLove haveand held medieval times. a doctrine that at least a few people have held medieval times. 40. since Summa Theologica II-II, 8, 154 (my translation). 40. 8, 154 translation). 41. Summa Marcia Theologica W. Baron II-II, is typical of (my modern Kantian moral philosophers in that she emphasizes 41. these Marcia W.duties Baronrather is typical Kantian moral philosophers thatofshe emphasizes two than of themodern Categorical Imperative as the usefulin heart Kant’s ethics. these two duties rather than the Categorical as the useful of Kant’s See Marcia W. Baron, “Kantian Ethics,” in Imperative Baron, Philip Pettit, andheart Michael Slote,ethics. eds., See W.ofBaron, “KantianBlackwell, Ethics,” in1997), Baron, Philip Pettit, Michael Slote, eds., ThreeMarcia Methods Ethics (Oxford: especially pp. 19,and 35–36. Three Methods of Ethics Blackwell, pp. 19, 42. Georges Duby, Love (Oxford: and Marriage in the 1997), Middle especially Ages, trans. Jane35–36. Dunnett from Mâle 42. Georges Duby, and Marriage the3–21; MiddleDuby, Ages, The trans.Knight, Jane Dunnett from moyen moyen age, 1988Love (Chicago, 1994),inpp. The Lady, andMâle the Priest: age, (Chicago, 1994), pp. 3–21; Duby, The Knight, The Lady,Barbara and the Bray Priest:(New The Making The 1988 Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, 1981, trans. York, of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, 1981, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1983), p. 48. 1983), p. 48. 43. Honor: The Development of Italian Adultery Law over 43. See See Eva Eva Cantarella, Cantarella,“Homicides “Homicidesofof Honor: The Development of Italian Adultery Law Two in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller,P.eds., Theeds., Family Italy from over Millennia,” Two Millennia,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard Saller, Thein Family in Antiquity the Present Haven, Conn.: Yale Conn.: University 1991), pp. 229–244. Italy from toAntiquity to (New the Present (New Haven, YalePress, University Press, 1991), pp. 44. Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 60. 229–244. 45. example, in theSupplement, Italian version of the Arthurian romance, La Tavola ritonda, Mark pun44. For Summa Theologica, Q. 60. ishesexample, his wife Iseult her version lover Tristan adultery,romance, but Arthur punishes 45. For in the and Italian of the for Arthurian La then Tavolashames ritonda,and Mark punMark forwife his actions. See Scaglione, Nature and in the Middle Ages ishes his Iseult and herAldo loverD.Tristan for adultery, but Love Arthur then shames and(Berkeley, punishes Calif.: University of California Press, 1963), p.Nature 21. and Love in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, Mark for his actions. See Aldo D. Scaglione, Calif.: University of California Press, 1963), p. 21.

1. 2. 1. 2. 3. 3. 4. 4. 5. 5.

Three

Chapter 3 Poetry and the Emotions in Francesca’s Case

I owe this point to my colleague Robert Wachbroit. A mother dove in a high wind appears in Virgil, Aeneid V, 213–217 (Hollander notes, p. 96; Isee owe thisV:point to my RobertorWachbroit. Infe. 82–84). Forcolleague some negative even sinister undertones in the dove simile, see A mother5.dove in a high wind appears in Virgil, Aeneid V, 213–217 (Hollander notes, p. 96; Chapter see Infe. V: 82–84). For some negative or even sinister undertones in theAnscombe, dove simile,third see On seeing-as, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Chapter 5. edition (New York, 1958), section IIxi; and Peter Levine, Living Without Philosophy: On On seeing-as, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical G.E.M. Anscombe, third Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality (Albany, N.Y.:Investigations, SUNY Press,trans. 1998), pp. 31–38. edition (New York, 1958), section IIxi; and Peter Levine, Living Without On Giovambattista Gelli, a sixteenth-century commentator, explains that in Philosophy: the “vocabolo Narrative, Rhetoric,particulore,” and Morality “(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY significa Press, 1998), pp. 31–38. nostro fiorentino ‘perso’ propriamente un colore azzurro, ma oscuGiovambattista a sixteenth-century commentator, explains that inquoted the “vocabolo rissimo e buio.” Gelli, See Gelli’s Letture edite e inedite sopra la Commedia di Dante, in Della nostro fiorentino particulore,” “ ‘perso’ propriamente significa un colore azzurro, ma oscuTerza, “Inferno V: Tradition and Exegesis,” p. 51. rissimo e buio.” See Gelli’s Letture edite ep.inedite Purg, xxvii, pp. 37–39 and Purg, xxxiii, 69. sopra la Commedia di Dante, quoted in Dante Della Terza, “Inferno V: Tradition and Exegesis,” Dante Studies, vol. 99 (1981), p. 51. Purg, xxvii, pp. 37–39 and Purg, xxxiii, p. 69.



Notes

Notes

6. According to Prudentius, Christ gives the damned a respite annually on the anniversary of the harrowing of Hell (the same day when he died on the cross, i.e., Good Friday). Dante descends into Hell on Good Friday. So perhaps the winds still for this reason. See Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 123. 7. Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance?” pp. 330, 326. 8. Thomas Goddard Bergin, “Lectura Dantis: Inferno V,” in Lectura Dantis, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987), p. 17. 9. De Sanctis, “Francesca da Rimini secondo i critici e secondo l’arte” (1869), in Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin, eds., trans., De Sanctis on Dante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 45. 10. See editorial notes to this verse, which various editions have as either “che al giudicio divin passion comporta?” or “che al guidicio divin compassion porta?” 11. Étienne Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, trans. David Moore (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1949), p. 304. 12. “And from these articles of faith it behooves us / to syllogize” (Par. xxiv: 72–73). 13. Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, edited by Ludwig Bieler, Corpus christianorum, series latina (Turnhout, Belgium, 1957), part II, prose 4.1–4.2. 14. Consolatio, part I, prose 1.8. 15. Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta,” in Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin, 1970), p. 344. 16. Convivio, II, 12, trans. Richard Lansing (1998), online through Digital Dante at http:// dante.ilt.columbia.edu/books/convivi/. 17. His son introduced him as “phylosofo poeta Dante Alighieri.” See Jacopo Alighieri, “Proemio di Jacopo Alighieri al suo comento sopra la Commedia di Dante suo Padre,” in Catherine Mary Phillimore, ed., Dante at Ravenna: A Study (London: E. Stock, 1898), p. 171. 18. Letter to Can Grande, 16. 19. “Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers, / Quod foveat claro philosophia sinu.” 20. See, for example, De doctrina christiana, in Patrologiae cursus completus, J.P. Migne, ed. (Paris, 1887), II, vi, 8; IV, xxviii, 64; Summa theol. I, i, ix. 21. Keats to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. I, p. 185. 22. For the full text and a commentary, see Chapter 6. 23. In March 1820, Byron wrote two full and two partial translations of Canto V. I quote from two of these versions. See The Complete Poetical Works, edited by Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, 1986), vol. iv, pp. 283–284. For Byron’s reading of Dante, see his dairy entry for January 29, 1821, discussed below. 24. See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), especially pp. 54–59. 25. The biological link between emotion and cognition supports a generally Aristotelian theory of the emotions. See, for example, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt, “How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 6, no. 12 (2002), pp. 517–523; Steven W. Anderson, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Impairment of Social and Moral Behavior Related to Early Damage in Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Nature Neuroscience, vol. 2, no. 11 (November 1999), pp. 1032–1037. 26. Roger Crisp writes: “On the most plausible account of the virtues, they cannot conf lict. Justice, for example, could never come into conf lict with kindness. Conf lict is ruled out by the idea that what is virtuous in any situation is what the virtuous person would do, that person being able to do only one thing.” “Particularizing Particularism,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, p. 45. 27. Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten: I, Metaphysische Unfangsgründe der Rechstlehre (Metaphysics of Morals, Part One: Metaphysical Elements of Justice), Akademie-Textausgabe (Berlin, 1969), 224.



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28. In the Italian version of Tristan, La tavola ritonda, xlvii, when Tristan learns of Isolde’s death, “e cadde sì come corpo morto” (and he fell like a dead body): almost exactly the same phrase as the last line of Canto V. See Hollander notes, pp. 100–101. 29. The Romance of Tristan and Isolt, translated from MS 103 of the fonds français of the Bibliothèque Nationale by Norman B. Spector (Evanston, 1973), p. 28. 30. See Nussbaum, “Beatrice’s ‘Dante’: Loving the Individual?” pp. 170–171. 31. Margaret Urban Walker provides an excellent list of inf luential recent statements in favor of partiality: Walker, “Partial Consideration,” Ethics, vol. 101, no. 4 ( July 1991), p. 758, n. 1 32. See Susan Wolf, “Morality and Partiality,” Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 6, (1992), pp. 243–259. 33. For connections among partiality, emotion, and narrative, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 53–60, 67–70. 34. Editions of the Summa cite Ecclesiasticus 24:21 or 24:31, but the New English Bible has quite different words in both places. 35. De doctrina christiana, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, J.P. Migne, ed. (Paris, 1887), II, vi, 8; IV, xxviii, 64. 36. Letter to Can Grande, 9. 37. VN, XXV, pp. 57–58, in Vita Nuova, Rime, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Milan, 1978). 38. The phrase is Roland Barthes’, from the title of Le Degré zero de l’écriture (Paris, 1953), but Barthes actually believed that there was writing without metaphor (pp. 108–110). 39. For example, Hollander, Dante: A Life, p. 68. 40. D.H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction: 1150–1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 8. 41. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or the Defense of Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: T. Nelson, 1965), p. 52. 42. Jack Lynch also cites De mendacio, in Saint Augustine: Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari, vol. 16 of The Fathers of the Church (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952), p. 54: “Jocose lies . . . have never been considered as real lies, since both in the verbal expression and in the attitude of the one joking such lies are accompanied by a very evident lack of intention to deceive.” 43. See, for example, Peter McCormick, “Moral Knowledge and Fiction,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 41, no. 4 (Summer 1983), pp. 399–410. 44. Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 39–123, especially 94–95. (My own similar reading of the play is in Living Without Philosophy, pp. 212–235.) 45. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics IX (1451b ff.), discussed below, Chapter 7. 46. “Letter to Can Grande,” 7. 47. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, p. 4.

Four


1. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, BA 30. 2. For example, Gregory Keller uses Macbeth to illustrate a general theory of Hannah Arendt’s. Keller, “The Moral Thinking of Macbeth,” Philosophy & Literature, vol. 29, no. 1 (2005), p. 56. 3. Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” p. 97. Blackburn himself thinks that moral judgment does require assessing general categories (actions) outside of their context. He emphasizes a difference between artistic judgment and moral judgment that I don’t find persuasive. 4. Dancy, Moral Reasons, pp. 64–66.



Notes

Notes

5. Dancy, “The Particularist’s Progress,” p. 131 (italics added, but the implied emphasis is in the original). 6. Anthony W. Price, “Particularism and Pleasure,” in Lance, Potrč, and Strahovnik, eds., Challenging Moral Particularism (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 186. 7. Socrates uses the example of borrowing a weapon from a friend who later goes insane, in which case returning the object is not just (as it usually would be). Socrates does not conclude that all moral concepts are unpredictable, only that “telling the truth” plus “returning what you have received” cannot define “ justice.” (Republic I, 331c–d.) 8. Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” p. 97. 9. This was the argument against “Situation Ethics,” a popular in movement in the 1950s and 1960s that charged moral rules with being overly stringent in particular contexts. Indeed, a book like Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1966) is an argument for loosening our traditional moral strictures. However, modern particularism is not a version of “Situation Ethics”; unlike Fletcher and his colleagues, particularists do not criticize moral rules for being too stringent. 10. See John F. Dedek, “Intrinsically Evil Acts: An Historical Study of the Mind of St. Thomas,” The Thomist, vol. 43, no. 3 ( July 1979), pp. 385–341, discussing Peter of Poitiers, William of Auxerre, William of Paris, Philip the Chancellor, Hugh of St. Cher, the Summa fratris Alexandri, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. 11. Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis, 1963), p. 229. For the scholastic background, see Dedek, “Intrinsically Evil Acts,” p. 412. 12. Lance and Little, “From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics.” This chapter is very similar, but not identical, to Mark Norris Lance and Margaret Olivia Little, “Defending Moral Particularism,” in James Dreier, ed., Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 13. Lance and Little, “From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics,” p. 68. 14. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 129–130. 15. McNaughton and Rawling, “Unprincipled Ethics,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, p. 268. 16. Cf. Paul Tillich’s advice to avoid the word “love” in favor of the New Testament agape. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 39–40. 17. Velleman, “Beyond Price,” Ethics, vol. 118 ( January 2007), p. 196. I find it interesting that Velleman never defines love in this article. 18. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, pp. 281, 283. 19. Margaret Little, “Moral Generalities Revisited,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism (p. 282). The term was introduced in Simon Blackburn, “Reply: RuleFollowing and Moral Realism,” in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 167–70.. 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, edited by Rush Rhees and trans. by Anthony Kenny (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press 1974), p. 66. 21. Cf. Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 84. and Nenad Miščević, “When the Plot Thickens: Dancy on Thick Concepts,” in Lance, Potrč, and Strahovnik, eds., Challenging Moral Particularism. 22. Dancy, Ethics Without Principles, pp. 121–122: “without a reasonable supply of thick concepts, moral thought and judgment are hamstrung.” 23. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 117. 24. Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 78–79. John McDowell recommends a Neurathian approach to ethics: John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Rosalind Hursthouse, Philippa Foot, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn, eds., Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 169.



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25. Austin, Philosophical Papers, p. 130, quoted in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972), p. 151. 26. Gilbert Harman, “Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy” (unpublished MS), p. 6: “Some ‘Kantian’ approaches seem to have tried to provide a foundational justification for ethics. But work in ethics increasingly rejects special foundationalism. Perhaps it is boring for me to mention it; it is so obvious.” 27. Quine himself suggests more pragmatic guidelines for reforming language: “the purpose of concepts and of language is efficacy in communication and in prediction. Such is the ultimate duty of language, science, and philosophy, and it is in relation to that duty that a conceptual scheme has finally to be appraised” (p. 79). Useful as Quine’s criteria are, they will not suffice in morality. Efficacious communications are not beneficial unless what is communicated is morally right, and prediction is not the point of normative reasoning. Thus, if we are bent on reforming traditional moral language, we need other criteria. 28. See Don Loeb, “Generality and Moral Justification,” Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1996), pp. 79–96. Loeb argues that the demand for generality is very widespread, but it depends on a metaphysical belief in the moral simplicity of reality that no one defends. 29. “Each person beyond a certain age and possessed of the requisite intellectual capacity” has a “skill in judging things to be just and unjust, and in supporting these judgments by reasons” (sec. 9, p. 41). 30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), sec. 9, pp. 41, 44, 45, 42, 43. 31. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 18, 44, 45. 32. Alasdair MacInyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984). 33. Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” p. 95. 34. Lance and Little, “From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics,” p. 58: “Dancy’s epistemology, in turn, is a thoroughly discernment-based account.” 35. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 36. David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays in Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), p. 233. 37. Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers II (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 474–475, 480–496, especially 480–481. (The original texts are “The Human Agent” [1966–1967] and “University Lectures, no. 18” [1968].) 38. See Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 127. 39. John Mackie, “Causes and Conditions,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2, (1965), p. 245. Here I am following David Luban, Legal Modernism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 36. 40. I am drawing a distinction between narrative historians and quantitative modelers. However, some professional historians resemble social scientists in collecting and analyzing descriptive statistics or even explaining social phenomena by creating quantitative models. Furthermore, some professors of social science act like classic historians, writing narratives about (for example) recent political events or Balinese cockfights. So this is not an inductive distinction (based on what historians are observed to do), but a conceptual one. 41. Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. 42. Ibid., p. 140: Accountability “is based on the teleological rather than causal relations between the group members’ intentions and the collective act.” 43. Roger Seamon, “The Story of the Moral: The Function of Thematizing in Literary Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 3 (Summer 1989), p. 232. 44. Ibid., p. 233.



Notes

Notes

45. Ibid., p. 232. 46. Cf. David Bakhurst, “Ethical Particularism in Context,” in Hooker and Little, eds., Moral Particularism, p. 174. 47. Dancy, Moral Reasons, p. 113. 48. Brad Hooker, “Moral Particularism and the Real World,” in Lance, Potrč, Strahovnik, eds. Challenging Moral Particularism, p. 27. 49. Eliot, Middlemarch (1874), Book VI, Chapter LXI, in the edition of Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 428. 50. This episode does not appear in Greek Gospel manuscripts until around 900 AD, but it could have ancient origins as an independent story about Jesus. See the Anchor Bible, Gospel According to John, with notes by Raymond E. Brown (Garden City, N.Y., 1966–1970), p. 335; and John Marsh, The Gospel of John (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 351. Nestle-Aland call the passage an “early insertion.” It is considered canonical by most Christians because it has been included in John (or sometimes in Luke, after 21:38) for so many centuries. There is no concordant passage in the Synoptic gospels. 51. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), 164. 52. C.G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1938), § 745 (Yoma 29a, init); §748 (Tanhuma [ed. Buber], Naso §13 f. 16a). 53. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 22–23. 54. Heaney, “The Government of the Tongue,” in The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978–1987 (New York, 1988), pp. 107–108. 55. William Butler Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 35. 56. Cf. Robert E. Goodin, “Democratic Deliberation Within,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 29, no. 1 (2000), pp. 95–98. 57. Ibid., p. 12. 58. National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (research division report #46), June 2004. 59. Noël Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions for Research,” Ethics, vol. 110 ( January, 2000), pp. 370–371, makes the same point. 60. I summarize the evidence for this reading in “Lolita and Aristotle’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 1995), pp. 32–47. 61. Trilling, Encounter (October 1958) and Davies, “Mania for Green Fruit,” Victoria Daily Times ( January 17, 1959), both quoted in Levine, Living Without Philosophy, p. 141. 62. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 50.

Five


1. See Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), p. 222 and elsewhere. 2. Jennings, A Translation of the Fifth Canto of Dante’s Inferno, and of the Entire Scene and Narrative of Hugolino (1794), quoted in Werner P. Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350–1850 (New York, 1950), p. 236. 3. Teodalinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 6. The poem by Guinizelli is “Al cor gentil.” 4. See especially Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance?” p. 350. Poggioli even says, without justifying this remark, “that, although Dante shapes her words and thoughts into the rhythmical and metrical structure of the Commedia, [Francesca] speaks not in verse but in prose.” 5. See Anna Hatcher and Mark Musa, “The Kiss: Inferno V and the Old French Prose Lancelot,” Comparative Literature, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 1968), pp. 97–109. Barbara Vinken



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is more emphatic on the same point. See her “Encore: Francesca da Rimini; Rhetoric of Seduction—Seduction of Rhetoric,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 3 (1988), p. 404. 6. Vinken, “Encore,” p. 405. 7. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, (New York: Free Press,(1925), pp. 58–59. 8. Compare Dante’s question to Francesca: But tell me, at the time of your sweet sighings how and in what way did Love give leave for you to know your suspect longings?”

Ma dimmi: al tempo de’ dolci sospiri, a che e come concedette amore che consceste i dubbiosi disiri? (Inf. v, 118–120)

9. I translate from H. Oskar Sommer, ed., The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, vol. iii, Le Livre de Lancelot del lac (Washington, 1910), part I, p. 261. (See p. 131 for the scene that Lancelot is recalling.) A similar passage is quoted in Old French in Elspeth Kennedy, “The Re-writing and Re-reading of a Text: The Evolution of the Prose Lancelot,” in Alison Adams et al., The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance (Bury St. Edmonds, 1986). The quote comes originally from Kennedy, ed., Lancelot do Lac: the Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance (Oxford, 1980), 345.31–346.3. 10. See James Douglas Bruce, The Evolution of the Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings Down to the Year 1300 (Gloucester, Mass, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 399, 410–411. But cf. de Rougemont, p. 125: “literary historians are at liberty to talk about ‘incredible adventures,’ ‘easily contrived marvels,’ ‘touching ingenuousness,’ ‘primitive freshness,’ and so on. A little more penetration would lead us to see, on the contrary, that the real barbarism is displayed by our contemporary notion of the novel, which we are quite content to take as a fake photograph of events without significance, whereas Arthurian romance was knit by an intimate coherence of which we no longer possess so much as an inkling. Actually, in these wonderful adventures nothing whatever is without meaning; everything is a symbol or delicate allegory; and only the ignorant stop short at the apparent puerility of the tale, this puerility being intended of course to conceal the underlying meaning from the superficial glances of the uninformed.” 11. Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance?” p. 318. 12. Usher, “Paolo and Francesca,” p. 25. 13. Valesio, “Canto V: The Fierce Dove,” pp. 66–67. 14. Roger Dragonetti, “L’episode de Francesca dans le cadre de la convention courtoise,” in Aux frontières du langage poétique: Études sur Dante, Marrarmé, Valéry, Romanica Garensia IX (1961), quoted in French in Della Terza, p. 63. 15. See N.J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 140–154, for an argument that (p. 141) “Francesca and Paolo have their truest ties with Iseult and Tristan.” 16. Béroul, Tristan and Yseut, Old French text edited by Guy R. Mermier, lines 1413–1415 (p. 72). 17. De Rougemont, p. 41. 18. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Moeurs de province (Paris, 1965), Part I, section 6, pp. 61, 62. 19. Madame Bovary, Part I, section 5, p. 27. 20. Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 125. 21. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised and expanded edition (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 22, 53, 48. 22. Ibid., pp. 41, 46, 49, 50.



Notes

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

Notes

Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., pp. 87–88. Brian Wilkie, “What Is Sentimentality?” College English, vol. 28, no. 8 (May 1967), pp. 564–575. Wendy Lesser, “From Dickens to Conrad: A Sentimental Journey,” ELH, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 196–197. Ray Fleming, “Francesca’s Sweet New Subversive Style,” Lectura Dantis, vol. 3 (Fall 1988), p. 16 (viewed online at the Lectura Dantis site, www.brown.edu/Departments/ Italian_Studies/LD). See, e.g., Sommer, Arthurian Romances, pp. 113–117. Roger Sherman Loomis calls the Romance a “frank glorification of idealized adultery.” The Development of Arthurian Romance (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p. 92. But Susan Noakes thinks that the “Lancelot text is quite lucid, even overstated, in its condemnation of adultery.” It is, she thinks, “a religious attack on chivalric values.” Susan Noakes, “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca,” Philological Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2 (Spring 1983), p. 226 (italics added). Dronke, “Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 125. Conf., 1.13.20. I owe these citations to Vinken. Conf. 3.2.3. Conf., 8.12.29. Conf. 1.13.20. Like William Watts, I translate Augustine as if he were quoting Psalm 78:39 (cf. James 4:14). In St. Jerome’s translation, Psalm 77:39 (now numbered as 78:39) reads “sed recordatus est quia caro essent spiritus vadens et non revertus,” whereas Augustine writes, “qua caro eram et spiritus ambulans et not revertens.” Vinken, “Encore,” p. 403. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 135–136. See Usher, “Paolo and Francesca,” p. 23. Glauco Cambon, Dante’s Craft: Studies in Language and Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 48. Hollander notes, p. 99 (Inferno V, 8 and 118–120). Fleming, “Francesca’s Sweet New Subversive Style,” p. 13. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), p. 46. For a critique, see my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities, pp. 175–181. Fleming, “Francesca’s Sweet New Subversive Style,” p. 21. Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 4, 126. Mark Musa first read the Vita Nuova as Dante’s self-critique and self-parody. See Mark Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova: A Translation and an Essay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). See Cambon, Dante’s Craft, p. 58. Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova, p. 100. Ibid., p. 150. Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 42. As Dronke notes (“Francesca and Héloïse,” p. 126), the poem that accompanies this prose passage (VN, xxxix) uses precisely the same rhymes (sospiri, disiri, m[art]iri) that Dante employs when he addresses Francesca in Hell. But near the end of the Vita Nuova, his sighs and desires and sufferings are caused by his infidelity to Beatrice and what she symbolizes. Not everyone believes that the subject at the end of the Vita Nuova is Beatrice. It could be Lady Philosophy, a purely allegorical female figure who is a major personage in the



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Convivio. (See, e.g., Lewis, Dante, pp. 60–61). But I think the final vision continues from VN xxxix, where Beatrice is clearly its object. 53. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1974), pp. 200–202. 54. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “the story of St.Thomas visiting Bonaventure’s cell while the latter was writing the life of St.Francis and finding him in an ecstasy is well known. ‘Let us leave a saint to work for a saint,’ said the Angelic Doctor as he withdrew” (quoting the online edition, copyright 1999 by Kevin Knight).

Six

Modern Versions

1. Ohly, “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mettelalter,” in Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (Darmstadt, 1977), p. 15. Cf. Walter Lowrie, Art in the Early Church (New York, 1947), p. 24. 2. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 145. One of the greatest Byzantine symbolic cycles is the interior decoration of San Vitale in Ravenna. 3. Rachel Jacoff, “Sacrifice and Empire: Thematic Analogies in San Vitale and the Paradiso,” in Andrew Morrogh et al., ed., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1985), pp. 317–331. 4. Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), trans. Joseph S. Peake (New York, 1968), p. 47. 5. Ibid., p. 104, citing G. P. Bellori (1664) and Luigi Scaramuccia (1674). 6. Letter of 1516, in Panofsky, Idea, p. 60. 7. Henry Fuseli, “Aphorisms, Chief ly Relative to the Fine Arts,” in John Knowles, ed., The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. III, nos. 101, 102, 36, 82; cf. 103, 139, 144, 151. 8. Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 121. 9. François Pupil, Le Style troubadour ou la nostalgie du bon vieux temps (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1985), pp. 65–67. 10. See Francis Haskell, “The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting,” in Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 79; see also p. 86. 11. Ibid., p. 79. 12. Fuseli, aphorism number 201. 13. Pupil, Le Style troubadour, pp. 423–424. 14. Leigh Hunt, “The Story of Rimini, Canto III” (“The Fatal Passion”), in Reginald Brimley Johnson ed., Poems of Leigh Hunt (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1891), pp. 25, 26. 15. William Weaver, Duse: A Biography (London: Harvest Books, 1984), pp. 234–235; John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 211, n. 13. 16. D’Annunzio, Francesca da Rimini, trans. Arthur Symons (New York, 1902), Act. 1, p. 47 17. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 210. 18. Hunt, “Story of Rimini,” Canto I, p. 5. 19. Paolo Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame, trans. Marilyn Miguel (New Haven, 1992), p. 49. 20. Ruskin to Rossetti, June 15, 1854, in William Michael Rossetti, ed., Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism (London, 1899), p. 13. The letter does not make clear what picture is involved. But Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 32, explains that Rossetti was working on Paolo and Francesca.



Notes

Notes

21. Stella Bottai suggests that the “burning background and oblique attitude of the couple” in Rossetti’s picture are borrowed from Botticelli’s illustrations to Paradiso canto VI and VIII in the Hamilton Codex, Berlin. See “Four Keats Poems and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision of the Middle Ages,” at www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/bottai1.html. 22. Rossetti to Jack Tupper, ca. 1850, in Alicia Craig Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: Abbeville/Cross River Press, 1989), p. 24. 23. In Faxon, Rossetti, pp. 46–47. 24. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Strand (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1965), p. 44. 25. Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931), p. 3. 26. Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” (2000), in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 189, 192. 27. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 4. 28. Ibid., pp. 4, 10. 29. Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), quoted in Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, p. 220. 30. Quoted in Saglia, “Translation and Cultural Appropriation,” p. 103. 31. Isaiah Berlin, “The First and the Last,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 8 (May 14, 1998), via http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13853. 32. Schelling, “Über Dante in philosphischer Beziehung,” 1802–1805, trans. Longfellow in 1850 and anthologized in Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage, 1314(?)–1870 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 411–420, especially 412–415. 33. Macaulay, “Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers” from Knight’s Magazine (1824), in Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad. 34. Hollander, Dante: A Life, p. 105. 35. Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, p. 243. 36. William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (1798), in Wordsworth, Poems, edited by Matthew Arnold (London, Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 251 37. Hazlitt, “On Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem, ‘The Excursion,’ ” in Lectures on the English Poets (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), p. 216. 38. “On Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem, ‘The Excursion,’ ” pp. 214–215. 39. Hazlitt, “Mr. Wordsworth,” from The Spirit of the Age, in Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age (New York, 1964), p. 252. 40. Hazlitt, “Lectures on the Living Poets,” in ibid., 155–156. 41. Ibid. (on Scott). 42. Der Wille zur Macht (Will to Power), p. 830. 43. Ibid., I. Der Europaïche Nihilismus: zum Plan (Book One, European Nihilism: Toward a Design). 44. Simon B. Gaunt, “Marginal Men: Marcabru and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery,” MediumÆvum, vol. 59, no. 1 (1990), p. 16. 45. Duby, Love and Marriage, p. 9. 46. Ibid., p. 10. 47. “On Marriage,” in Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. vii, pp. 149–150. 48. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (published 1842), lines 59–61. Lines 75–76 allude to Inf. v: 121–123: “Comfort? comfort scorn’d of devils! this is truth the poet sings, / That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happy things.” 49. Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab, in Complete Works, vol. i., p. 141. 50. De Sanctis, “Francesca da Rimini secondo i critici e secondo l’arte,” pp. 48, 50. 51. Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, pp. 157–161.



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52. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, p. 12. 53. De Rougement Love in the Western World, revised and augmented version translated by Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 16–17. 54. De Sanctis, pp. 40–41. 55. Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, pp. 229–232; Oscar Kuhns’ Preface to The Divine Comedy, trans. Cary (New York, 1897), pp. vii–viii. 56. Ralph Pite, The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 26 (italics added). 57. Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets: Dante Alighieri (New York: Putnam, 1888), p. 104. 58. Ibid., p. 107. 59. Sonnet “On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The Story of Rimini.” 60. Letter of April 16, 1819, in Letters, vol. II, p. 91. 61. “Bereft” does not rhyme with “slept”: an unusual lapse for Keats, but one that we may easily overlook. By breaking a rule here—and getting away with it—Keats shows that poetry can beguile. 62. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1983), pp. 50–51. 63. Keats to George and Tom Keats, December, 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 194. 64. Keats to J.H. Reynolds, November 22, 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 189; Keats to the George Keatses, February 14–May 3, 1819, in ibid., vol. II, p. 74 (quoting Hazlitt at length); Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univetsity Press, 1963), pp. 253–263. 65. Vendler, Odes, pp. 303, 304. 66. Keats to Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 185. 67. Keats to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 27 (?) 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 193. 68. Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” in Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age, p. 47. For the inf luence of Hazlitt’s lecture on Keats’ development of “negative capability,” see Walter Jackson Bate, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 30; and Bate, John Keats, pp. 255–261. 69. Keats to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, in Letters, vol. I, p. 387. 70. Keats to J.H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Letters, vol. I, pp. 223–234. 71. Keats to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 27, 1818, in Letters, vol. I, pp. 191–192. 72. These are Bate’s examples of beings whose inner states especially interested Keats. See his letter to Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Letters, vol. I, p. 186; to Tom Keats, July 3, 5, 7, 9, 1818, in ibid., pp. 321–322; and to Reynolds, May 3, 1818, in ibid., p. 279. 73. Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 47. 74. Schlegel, quoted and translated in Pite, p. 56. 75. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vol. v, pp. 193–194 ( January 29, 1821). 76. Shelley’s note to Queen Mab, in Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 141. 77. Michael J. Sider, The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1998), p. 51. 78. MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame, 1984), pp. 41–42 (italics added). 79. See Sider, The Dialogic Keats. 80. Jessica Smith, “Tyrannical Monuments and Discursive Ruins: the Dialogic Landscape of Shelley’s Queen Mab,” The Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 47 (1998), pp. 108–41. 81. Keats to John Taylor, November 17, 1819, in Letters, vol. II, p. 234. 82. Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), p. 4. 83. Patience. Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, p. 150. 84. Dictionary of National Biography 1912–1921, ad loc. Cf. The Times of London. October 10, 1915. I quote from Phillips, Paolo & Francesca, (New York and London, 1915).



Notes

Notes

85. William Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation, 1902 (New York: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1970), p. 340. 86. Archer, Poets, pp. 344–345. 87. Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 87. 88. Riccardo Zandonai, Francesca da Rimini (Milan: Ricordi, 1945), pp. 173, 227. (This is a piano redaction, so the key signatures may be different in a full score. However, the relationships will be the same.) 89. See David Luban, Legal Modernism, pp. 54–59. 90. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The New Art (revised edition, 1973), p. 68. 91. Frances Fleetwood, Concordia: The Story of Francesca da Rimini, Told by her Daughter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972). Fleetwood said that her favorite authors were Scott, Stevenson, Kipling, Tolkien, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart, and Lawrence Durrell: writers who used contemporary forms to tell stories about distant times. None were taken seriously by modernist critics. (Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.) 92. See Jennifer Homans, “Geniuses Together,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 49, no. 20 (December 19, 2002), www.nybooks.com/articles/15915 (read July 6, 2009). 93. It is the voice of an ironic historicist that states (in mock Georgian English): “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government . . . ” Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York, Macmillan, 2004), p. 350. 94. I draw my interpretation of this painting from Charles Fried, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 28–43 and Luban, pp. 60–63. 95. The copyrighted Italian text can be found in Jonathan Galassi, ed., Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1920–1954 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), p. 268. 96. Montale in 1966, quoted by Galassi, Collected Poems, p. 538. “My poetry is to be read together, as one single poem. . . . I don’t want to make the comparison to the Divina Commedia, but I consider my three books as three canticles, three phases of human life.” The three major works are Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La Bufera e altro. 97. Galassi, Collected Poems, p. 420: “As Gianfranco Contini has observed, Montale’s work is written at the point of ‘veritable cultural saturation’; it is so heavily layered with allusion and quotation, especially self-quotation, that at times it seems to approximate the echo chamber of Walter Benjamin’s ideal works, the collage of borrowings. Yet Montale’s weft of references and echoes performs a function in his poetry similar to that of his famously difficult vocabulary, his odd, seemingly reluctant rhyming, and his shifting metric: all are evidence of his determination to use every tool at his disposal in the attempt to unburden himself of something that nevertheless remains virtually impossible to convey.” 98. Roberto Unger, Passion: An Essay on Human Personality (New York: The Free Press/ Macmillan, 1984), p. 38. 99. Chares Rosen, “Mallarmé the Magnificent,” The New York Review of Books (May 20, 1999), www.nybooks.com/articles/487, read July 6, 2009 100. For instance: “To belong to a generation which can no longer believe in anything may be a cause of pride for anyone convinced of the ultimate nobility of this emptiness or of some mysterious need for it, but it does not excuse anyone who wants to transform this emptiness into a paradoxical affirmation of life simply to give himself a style.” Montale, Poet in Our Time (1972), trans. Alastair Hamilton from Nel nostro tempo, p. 61. 101. Montale, Poet in Our Time, p. 47. (Note that Montale uses the word “storicismo” in a narrower way, to refer to Hegel and Marx.)



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102. Italian text from Galassi, Collected Poems, p. 296. 103. Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty,” speech given in Central Park, New York, on May 21, 1944. 104. Consider, for instance, this aphoristic sentence: “Read the poetry of today: you cannot trust the words since their words are of today, but their meaning must be sought between the lines.” Montale implies that poetic language is narrow and transitory—so we cannot believe what any poet says and believes—but we may discover broader meanings if we trace the history of past thought “between the lines,” in a poem’s references and allusions to the tradition. Montale, Poet in Our Time, p. 42. 105. Montale, Stile e tradizione, my translation from the appendix of Arshi Pipa, Montale and Dante (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 152. 106. Galassi, Collected Poems, p. 417. 107. Ibid., p. 427.

Seven Consequences 1. Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung?, edited by Ernst Cassirer and Horst D. Brandt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999), p. 20. 2. J.L Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 2. 3. Will to Power, 224, in Schechta, ed, vol. II, p. 687. 4. Lionel Trilling, “The Sense of the Past” (1942) in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 176. 5. The classic paper is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica, vol. 47, no. 2 (March, 1979), pp. 263–292. 6. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 38. 7. Letter of Isaiah Berlin to Beata Polanowska-Sygulska (Feb. 24, 1986), reprinted in The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 2004, p. 24. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra,” in Karl Schelchta, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke (Frankfurt: Karl Hanser, 1972), vol. II, p. 332. It is Zarathustra who speaks here, not Nietzsche. Indeed, every passage in Nietzsche’s mature work is potentially ironic. However, I have argued at some length that Nietzsche understood cultures as Weltanschauungen. See my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities, pp. 39–43, 57–62. 9. Montale, Stile e tradizione, p. 153. 10. As noted by Donald Davidson in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984), pp. 183–198. 11. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1993). 12. There is also a third form of universalism, which is the belief that we have identical moral duties toward all human beings and are not permitted to favor members of our own community over outsiders. The opposite of this universalism is some form of communitarianism. Particularism and historicism do not entail any position regarding universalism. People who believe in general moral rules can argue about whether, in general categories of situations, one may favor members of one’s own community. People who believe in particularistic moral judgments can argue about whether person A, in situation X, ought to favor her own community. 13. Berlin, letter to Beata Polanowska-Sygulska. 14. Cf. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1991), p.12: “What is clear is that values can clash—that is why civilizations are incompatible. They can be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between you and me.”



Notes

Notes

15. Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 16. Trilling, “Reality in America,” p. 12. 17. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 52, 72. 18. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” The Review of Politics ( January 1953), p. 78, quoted in Samantha Power, “The Lesson of Hannah Arendt,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 51, no. 7 (April 29, 2004), p. 34. A social scientist who has argued for “phronesis” (moral evaluation of particular situations) over “episteme” (predictive theories) is Bent Flyvbjerg; see his “Social Science That Matters,” Foresight Europe, no. 2, (October 2005– March 2006), pp. 38–42; and “Making Organization Research Matter: Power, Values and Phronesis,” in Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón, eds. The Northern Lights: Organization Theory in Scandinavia (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press), 2003, pp. 357–381. 19. Hazlitt’s Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1826), quoted in Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, p. 246; The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, edited by Rowland E. Prothero (New York, 1966), vol. v, pp. 193–194 ( January 29, 1821). 20. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers,” in Friedrich, Knight’s Magazine (1824), pp. 296–297. 21. Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance?” p. 313. 22. T.F. Diffey cites a comment of Ruth Saw in 1961 and then several remarks by Malcolm Bradbury and colleagues in 1970 to substantiate his claim that moral criticism was dominant in mid-century, and marginal shortly after. See “Morality and Literary Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.33, no. 4 (Summer 1975), p. 452, n. 1. 23. Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel, p. 12: “a rather old-fashioned scientific positivism . . . is still reasonably widespread in the literary academy.” 24. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, 1947 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1975), p. 199. 25. René Wellek and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1962), p. 239. 26. R.S. Crane The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), vol. 2, p. 12. 27. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, p. 21. 28. Fleming, “Francesca’s Sweet New Subversive Style.” 29. Saglia, “Translation and Cultural Appropriation,” pp. 98, 116. 30. Nussbaum, “Beatrice’s ‘Dante’: Loving the Individual?” p. 168. 31. Or they might argue for their ethical judgments in f lagrant disregard of their own theoretical rejection of such normative arguments. For examples, see Booth, The Company We Keep, p. 31. 32. Ibid., p. 29. 33. Carroll, p. 350. 34. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, pp. 121–123. 35. Warner, Uncritical Reading, pp. 36–37. 36. Jane Tompkins, “ ‘Indians’: Textuality, Morality, and the Problem of History,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986), pp. 117–119. 37. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, p. 5. 38. Ibid., pp. 112, 127. 39. Ibid., p. 3. 40. This is also the title of Bernard Williams’ 2008 book, which is a leading example of what I advocate. 41. Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel, p. 3. 42. McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, p. 175.



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43. Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” pp. 140–141. Writing in the same issue, Habermas is equally modest about philosophy: see his “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’ Political Liberalism,” pp. 128–131. 44. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 117. 45. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, p. 8. 46. Otto Willmann provides a compact summary in “The Seven Liberal Arts,” The Catholic Encylopedia (1907), Online Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. Knight 47. Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), p. 5. 48. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robynson, 1551 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 26. I have slightly altered the spelling for legibility. 49. Ibid., p. 113. 50. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole in The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Everyman, 1993), pp. 244–245. 51. Joseph M. Levine, “Method in the History of Ideas: More, Machiavelli and Quentin Skinner,” Annals of Scholarship, vol. 3 (1986), pp. 37–60. 52. Republic I, 337a; Thrasymachus is speaking. 53. Burnyeat, “Plato,” The British Academy Review (2000), p. 20. 54. Ibid. 55. Nussbaum, “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration,” in Love’s Knowledge, pp. 314–334. 56. Ibid., p. 317. 57. S.J.Rom Brison, Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 58. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 141–168, especially 162–163. 59. Zamir, Double Vision. 60. Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory,” Praxis International (1986), pp. 38–60. 61. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 14. 62. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Martha C. Nussbaum subsequently developed Williams’ view, also by interpreting classical literature. See her The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 63. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2001). 64. Daniel R. Schwartz, “A Humanistic Ethic in Reading,” p. 3. 65. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), p. 22.



Notes




Abelard, Pierre, 39–40, 110, 144 abstraction, 137, 156, 162 adultery, 25, 34–45, 75–6, 81–3, 91–2, 95–102, 145–8 Albigensianism, 41–2, 144 Alcmaeon (mythical character), 60 Anderson, Amanda, 11–12, 188, 190–1, 206 Andreas Capellanus, 29, 49, 145, 191 Aquinas, St. Thomas adultery, theory of, 36–9, 42, 45 Dante, inf luence on, 6, 33, 56–7 metaphor, theory of, 65 methods of, 33, 65, 125, 171–2 Archer, William, 156–7 Arendt, Hannah, 113–15, 181, 183, 206 Aristotle emotion, theory of, 59, 71, 216n25 marriage, theory of, 38, particularism and, 1, 26, 33, 85, 88 Romanticism and, 153–4 tragedy, theory of 62–3, 71 Aristotelianism, 24, 128 art, 9, 101, 128–37, 180–3. See also representation Arthurian romance, 16, 18, 61, 62, 108, 111–12, 157, 160 Auerbach, Erich, 6, 66, 122, 124–5, 153, 216n24 Augustus Caesar, 44 Austen, Jane, 155 Austin, J. L. (John Langshaw), 77, 84, 170

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 189 Bakhurst, David, 220n46 Balanchine, George, 162 Baldelli, Ignazio, 212n14, 213n22 Barolini, Teodalinda, 120–1 Baron, Marcia W., 215n41 Barthes, Roland, 66, 217n38 Bate, Walter Jackson, 225n68, 225n72 Beatrice (Beatrice Portinari), 14, 53, 121–4, 144, 166 Bellini, Giovanni, 75 Benhabib, Seyla, 205 Bentham, Jeremy, 23 Benvenuto da Imola, 19, 44, 50, 158 Bergin, Thomas Goddard, 50 Berlin, Isaiah, 140, 171, 179, 205, 227n14 Berman, Howard, 175–6 Bernhardt, Sandra, 133 Bettagli, Marco, 16 Biscaro, Gerolomo, 212n12, 213n20 Blackburn, Simon, 73, 75, 87, 211n1, 217n3 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 13–14, 15–17, 35, 37–8, 44, 59, 96 Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius), 49, 55–6, 117 Booth, Wayne C., 188, 228n31, 229n1 Bottai, Stella, 224n21 Brancusi, Constanin, 101 Brandeis, Irma, 165–6 Brecht, Berthold, 182 Brison, Susan, 204 Brooks, Cleanth, 184



I N DE X

Index

Bruce, James Douglas, 221n10 Burnyeat, Miles, 201 Byron, George Gordon, Lord Byron, 6, 20, 58, 140, 153, 183, 186–7 Byzantine art, 129–30, 134, 136 Cambon, Glauco, 222n40 Cantarella, Eva, 215n43 Capellanus, see Andreas Capellanus Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio), 130 Carroll, Noël, 220n59, 228n33 Cary, Henry Francis, 148–50 Castiglione, Baldassare, 131 Cathars, see Albigensianism Cato (Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, known as Cato the Younger), 64 Cavalcanti, Guido, 18 Cavell, Stanley, 68 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 139, 152, 155 Chiarini, Eugenio, 18 Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), 63, 201 Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo), 129–30, 136 cliché, 6–7, 109–10, 113–15 coherence theories, 84–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 140–1, 149, 153–4 Contini, Gianfranco, 214n17, 216n15, 226n97 Convivio (The Banquet), 53, 56 Coupin de la Couperie, Phillipe-Marie, 132–4 Crisp, Roger, 214n22, 216n26 critical reading, 11 culture, concept of, 7–8, 136, 171–6 Cunizza da Romano, 30, 62 Dancy, Jonathan, 1, 73–5, 95, 211n2, 214n10, 218n21–2 Daniel, Arnault, 120 d’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 8, 133–4, 158–60 Dante Alighieri biography, 17–20, 54, 56, 63, 95 and the law, 176 as philosopher, 5–6, 24–34, 56–7

as poet, 5–6, 51, 58–9 reception of, 139–42 see also Convivio, Divine Comedy, Letter to Can Grande, Vita Nuova, De vulgari eloquentia Davidson, Donald, 227n10 Davies, Robertson, 104 Davis, Todd F., 229n63 deconstruction, 12 Dedek, John F., 218n10–11 Della Terza, Dante, 215n4 democracy, 10 Demus, Otto, 130 Derrida, Jacques, 119, 190 Dewey, John, 137–8 Diamond, Cora, 24, 213n4 Dickens, Charles, 96–7, 102 Diffey, Terry J., 228n22 Divine Comedy, The autobiography in, 17, 69 Boccaccio’s lectures on, 13–14, 15–16 structure of, 5, 34, 53–5, 95 dolce stil nuovo, 18, 108, 113, 120, 134, 155 Dragonetti, Roger, 111 Dreiser, Theodore, 181 Dronke, Peter, 113, 117, 212n9, 214n18, 215n35, 216n6, 222n51 Duby, Georges, 143, 214n27, 215n42 Duse, Eleanora, 133, 158 Dyce, William, 134 Eichmann, Adolf, 113–15 Eliot, George, 97–8 Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 162, 182 emotion, 29, 47, 57–9, 128, 130. See also love, pity Eskin, Michael, 211n7 ethical criticism, 11–12, 185–92 euphemism, 7, 114–15 faith, 35–6, 53 fiction, 65–9 Fish, Stanley, 191 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 182–3 Flaubert, Gustave, 89, 112–13, 147



232

Flaxman, John, 132–3 Fleetwood, Frances, 161, 226n91 Fletcher, Joseph, 218n9 Fleming, Ray, 119, 186, 222n29, 222n42 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 228n18 Fokine, Michel, 161 Foscolo, Ugo, 20 Foucault, Michel, 138, 185 Francesca da Rimini biography, 3, 13–21 reader, 6–7, 107–13, 116–23, 191 rhetoric of, 25, 47–51 Fried, Charles, 226n94 Fuseli, Henry, 131–3 Galahad, 116 Galassi, Jonathan, 168, 226n97 Galehaut, 16, 108 Gaunt, Simon B., 143 Geertz, Clifford, 205 generalization, 97–102 Gertz, SunHee Kim, 212n8 Giotto (Giotto di Bondone), 129, 131–3, 135–6, 173–4 Gilbert, W. S., 156 Gilson, Étienne, 53 Goldsmith, Oliver, 139–40 Goldstein, Rebecca, 203 Gombrich, Ernst, 130 Goodin, Robert E., 220n56 Grandgent, C. H., 20–1 Green, Dennis Howard, 217n40 Greenberg, Clement, 161 Guido da Montefeltro, 19 Guido Novello (Count Guido Novello da Polenta), 17–20, 23, 157 Guinevere, 93, 108–10, 116, 144 Guinizelli, Guido, 49, 107–8, 111, 120–3 Habermas, Jürgen, 190–1, 229n43 Hamlet, 14, 110, 153 Hand, Learned, 167 Harman, Gilbert, 219n26 Haskell, Francis, 132, 223n10

233

Hatcher, Ann, 220n5 Hazlitt, William, 141, 152, 183, 189 Heaney, Seamus, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 102, 138 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 138, 172, 205 Héloïse (Héloïse d’Argenteuil), 39–40, 110, 144 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 172 Herodotus, 7, 144 historicism, 7–9, 127–9, 131–45, 161, 167–8, 170–80, 197 history, 14–17, 68, 183, 219n40 Hollander, Robert, 141, 212n11, 214n16, 214n33, 215n2, 217n28, 222n41 Homer, 91, 102, 140, 142 Hooker, Brad, 27, 97–8, 214n11 Howe, Irving, 228n15 humanism, 195, 201 Hume, David, 63, 71 Hunt, Leigh, 8–9, 133–4, 146–7, 149, 154 impartiality, see partiality Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 132–3 intuitions, 2, 9–10, 85–7, 138–9, 198 irony, 10 Iseult, 3, 18, 61, 89, 108, 111–12, 158 Jacoff, Rachel, 223n3 James, Henry, 102, 180–1 Jameson, Fredric, 194 Jennings, Henry C., 106–7 Jesus, 72, 98–102 Joseph, Horace William Brindley, 214n24 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 147, 163–4, 169, 172 Kahneman, Daniel, 227n5 Kant, Immanuel, 197 enlightenment, definition of, 169 ethics, 26, 30, 40–3, 60, 73, 76 judgment, theory of, 26 method of, 9, 137 narrative, theory of, 71–2 Kantianism, 24, 193, 195, 205



Index

Index

Keats, John, 8, 58, 106, 140, 146–7, 149–55 Keller, Gregory, 217n2 Kelley, Donald R., 229n47 King Lear, 59, 67–8, 91 Kooning, Willem de, 4 Kristeva, Julia, 194 Kutz, Christopher, 90–1 Lance, Mark Norris, 76–7, 213n8 Lancelot, 16, 49, 61–2, 93, 108–11, 116–17, 144–5 Larner, John, 212n14, 213n17, 213n23, 213n24 Latini, Brunetto, 63 law, 44–5, 98–102, 176, 194 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 197 Lesser, Wendy, 115, 222n28 Letter to Can Grande, 65–6 Levine, Joseph M., 229n51 Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin, 18, 212n11, 214n15, 222n52 Lewis, Wyndham, 101 literary criticism, 11–12, 183–92 Little, Margaret Olivia, 76, 213n8 Loeb, Don, 219n28 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 58 Loomis, Roger Sherman, 222n31 love artistic representation of, 127 definition of, 4–5, 77–80, 83–4, 86, 112, 120 Francesca’s view of, 25, 28–9, 120–1 free will and, 28–30, 154 Romantics’ view of, 147, 154–5 Luban, David, 219n39, 226n89 Lynch, Jack, 217n42 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 141, 184, 189 Macbeth, 217n2 Machiavelli (Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli), 200–1 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 154, 205 Mackie, John, 219n39 Madame Bovary, see Flaubert, Gustave

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 156, 166–7 Malatesta the Elder, 19 Malatesta, Gianciotto, 15–16, 25, 39, 44, 95–6 Malatesta, Malatestino, 19, 158–9 Malatesta, Paolo, 13, 15–16 Manet, Édouard, 163–4, 169, 172, 174 Manicheanism, see Albigensianism marriage, 34–46, 73–4, 94–61, 127, 143–5. See also adultery Martin, Mike W., 29, 214n14 Mascagni, Pietro, 161 McCormick, Peter, 217n43 McDowell, John, 88, 218n24 McGinn, Colin, 11, 194–5, 202–3, 213n6 McNaughton, David, 77 Meun, Jean de, 39 metaphor, 59, 64–6, 68–9 Milbank, Alison, 146, 223n20 Mill, John Stuart, 32 Milton, John, 139 Modernism, 155, 160–74, 181–3 Montale, Eugenio, 8, 164–9, 172, 180 morality, see ethics More, Thomas, 199–201 Murdoch, Iris, 203 Musa, Mark, 121–2, 220n5, 222n46 Nabokov, Vladimir, 11, 104, 204 Nafisi, Azar, 104 narrative, 25, 88–99, 125, 180–3 Neoclassicism, 132, 136 Neoplatonism, 130–1 Neurath, Otto, 84 New Testament, 72, 98–102, 117 Newton, Isaac, 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106, 206 on Christianity, 99 on historicism, 138, 142, 169, 227n8 on modernism, 155, 169–70, 172 on tragedy, 62 Noakes, Susan, 222n31 Nozick, Robert, 30, 202 Nussbaum, Martha



234

Index

Ohly, Friedrich, 129 Old Testament, 98 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 16, 48–9, 67, 110, 151 paganism, 87, 144, 151 Panofsky, Erwin, 130, 173, 227n11 Paolo, see Malatesta, Paolo Parker, David, 194, 211n7 partiality, 2, 62–4, 227n12 particularism, 1–2, 4–5, 73–83, 97, 167, 177–80 Paton, Joseph Noel, 99 Peacock, Thomas Love, 140 Perella, N. J., 221n15 perspective, 129–32, 135 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 212n12 Phillimore, Catherine Mary, 216n17 Phillips, Stephen, 156–8, 160 philosophy analytical, 9–11, 86, 194–8 Dante on, 56–7 moral, 24–34, 192–206 Pia (La Pia de’ Tolomei), 116, 124–5, 148, 153 Pite, Ralph, 149 pity, 51–3, 115, 146, 148–9 Plato, 3, 28, 59–60, 65, 199, 201, 206 pleasure, 27, 73–4 Plutarch, 67, 201 Poggioli, Renato, 49, 110, 184, 213n27, 220n4, 228n21 Posner, Richard, 102–3 postmodernism, 12, 119–20 pre-Raphaelite Movement, 136–7 Price, Anthony W., 74 Proust, Marcel, 11 Pupil, François, 132–3, 223n9 Pynchon, Thomas, 162, 226n93

Pyramus and Thisbe, 16, 48–9, 89, 110–12 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 84, 219n27 rape, 4, 77, 84 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 130–1 Ravenna, 13, 17–20, 49, 55, 130 Rawling, Piers, 77 Rawls, John, 10, 30, 85–6, 97, 196, 199, 214n20 reason, 36, 51–3, 57–9 ref lective equilibrium, 85–6 religion, see faith representation abstraction and, 156 crisis of, 7–8, 127–37, 161, 173 relation to ethics, 72, 101–2, 167, Romanticism, 8–9, 128–9, 134, 140–55, 183–6 Roncaglia, Emilio, 50 Rorty, Richard, 11, 191, 204 Rosen, Charles, 166–7 Ross, W. D., 32–3, 35 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 8, 134–7, 223n20 Rougement, Denis de, 41–2, 112, 147, 215n39, 221n10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 200 Rubio, Louis, 147 Ruskin, John, 135 Ryle, Gilbert, 88–9, 92 Saglia, Diego, 186–7, 213n26, 224n30 Said, Edward, 186 Sanctis, Francesco de, 6, 50, 145–8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 62 Scaglione, Aldo D., 215n45 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 140–1 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 138 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 66, 153 scholasticism, 195, 197 Schwartz, Daniel R., 206, 211n7 Scott, Walter, 141–2, 170 Seamon, Roger, 91, 94–5



Dante and, 203–4, 211n4, 217n30 literary criticism and, 11–12, 185, 187–8 love, theory of, 79 moral philosophy of, 24, 198, 206, 211n5, 217n33, 229n45

235

Index

Semiramis, 21, 48 Sen, Amartya, 30 sentimentality, 7, 115, 155–6 Shakespeare, William, 140 anti-Semitism in, 102 ethical readings of, 11 love in, 89 Negative Capability of, 152–3, 155, 181, 206 See also Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth shapelessness, 79–80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 140, 144–5, 154–5 Sider, Michael J., 225n77 Sidney, Sir Philip, 67 Singer, Peter, 195, 202 Singleton, Charles, 16 skepticism, 9, 11 Slote, Bernice, 155 Smith, Jessica, 154 Socrates, 28, 60, 65, 67, 201, 218n7 St. Augustine, 49, 57, 65, 116–18, 142 St. Bernard, 53 St. Bonaventure, 125, 223n54 St. Francis of Assisi, 14, 125 St. Paul, 41–2, 117 St. Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas, St. Thomas Strauss, Richard, 161–2 Stravinsky, Igor, 161–2 Strawson, Galen, 196 Sullivan, Arthur, 156 Tanner, Tony, 100, 147 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 145, 157 themes, 5, 15, 68, 91–2, 120 Thomism, see Aquinas, St. Thomas Thompson, Judith Jarvis, 202 Tillich, Paul, 218n16 Tomory, Peter, 131 Tompkins, Jane, 190 tragedy, 11, 59–62 Tristan, 18, 61–2, 89, 105, 108, 111–12, 132, 144–5, 158

Trilling, Lionel, 23, 104, 170, 181 Tversky, Amos, 227n5 Unger, Roberto, 166 Unsworth, Barry, 182–3 Usher, Jonathan, 14 utilitarianism, 10, 32, 37–9, 43, 62–3, 195, 205 Valesio, Paolo, 111, 134, 212n2 van Eyck, Jan, 4 Velleman, David, 79 Vendler, Helen, 151 Verdi, Guiseppe, 146, 160 Verlaine, Paul, 156 Vinken, Barbara, 108, 118, 220n5 Vita Nuova, 51, 121–3 De vulgari eloquentia, 67 Walker, Margaret Urban, 217n31 Walzer, Michael, 138–9 Warhol, Andy, 75 Warner, Michael, 190, 211n8 Warren, Austin, 185 Weaver, William, 223n15 Wellek, René, 185 Whitehead, Alfred North, 109 Wiggins, David, 88 Wilde, Oscar, 184–5 Wilkie, Brian, 222n27 Williams, Bernard ethical theory of, 77, 83, 89, 190, 228n40 on historicism, 138 on tragedy, 11, 205–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79–81, 179, 215n2 Wolf, Susan, 217n32 Womack, Kenneth, 229n63 Woodhouse, John, 133–4 Woolf, Virginia, 91, 206 Wordsworth, William, 141–2, 149, 152–4 Wright, Robert, 171 Zamir, Tzachi, 89, 204 Zandonai, Riccardo, 159, 161



236

Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times

Doing Business 2010: Reforming through Difficult Times

Modern Times

Dante (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Modern Literature and the Tragic

Dante and the Romantics

Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Roman Literature and its Contexts)

Blake and Modern Literature

Modern Times - The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

Arts And Humanities Through The Eras. Ancient Greece And Rome

Dante and the Empire

Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media (Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft Spectrum Literature)

The Chronology of American Literature: America's Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Human sciences: reappraising the humanities through history and philosophy

Dante

Dante

Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times

Regionalism and the humanities

Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times

Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age

Codes: The guide to secrecy from ancient to modern times

Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age

Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times

Doing Business 2010: Reforming through Difficult Times

Modern Times

Dante (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times

Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times

Modern Literature and the Tragic

Dante and the Romantics

Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Roman Literature and its Contexts)

Blake and Modern Literature

Modern Times - The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

Arts And Humanities Through The Eras. Ancient Greece And Rome

Dante and the Empire

Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media (Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft Spectrum Literature)

The Chronology of American Literature: America's Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Human sciences: reappraising the humanities through history and philosophy

Dante

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Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times

Regionalism and the humanities

Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times

Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age

Codes: The guide to secrecy from ancient to modern times

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