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"anguish" - August Friedrich Schenck (1878)

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"I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning" - Haruki Murakami

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#DarkoSuvin#CognitiveEnstrangement

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Darko Suvin is one of the most important critics of science fiction. His work on science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement was one of the first major academic engagements with the genre, and has proved both enduring and influential; he has received the SFRA Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship, and dialogue with his ideas continues in the criticism of Frederic Jameson, Carl Freedman, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and others. The essay reprinted here, "Estrangement and Cognition," is one of the earliest statements of some of Suvin's core theses. This version is the author's preferred text as it appeared in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979). References to other book chapters have been retained in this reprint, but a new postscript has been added for 2014. We are grateful to Professor Suvin for his permission to reprint and his assistance in preparing this version.

Author's note, 1979: The first version of this essay emerged from a lecture given in Spring 1968 in J. M. Holquist's seminar on fantastic literature in the Yale University Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. I have derived much profit from discussions with him, with the late Jacques Ehrmann, my UMass colleague David Porter, and my McGill colleagues Irwin and Myrna Gopnik, over and above a number of persons mentioned in my general acknowledgments. The final version owes much to Stanislaw Lem's Fantastyka i futurologia (see Bibliography I), which considerably emboldened me in further pursuits within this protean field, even where I differed from some of Lem's emphases and conclusions. Notes to all chapters are supplemented by the bibliographic sections to be found at the end of the book.
Contents

1. Science Fiction As Fiction (Estrangement)

2. Science Fiction As Cognition (Critique and Science)

3. The World of the Science Fiction Genre (Concept and Some Functions)

4. For a Poetics of Science Fiction (Anticipation)

5. Postscript (2014)

1. Science Fiction As Fiction (Estrangement) [ contents]

1.1. The importance of science fiction (SF) in our time is on the increase. First, there are strong indications that its popularity in the leading industrial nations (United States, USSR, United Kingdom, Japan) has risen sharply over the last 100 years, despite all the local and short-range fluctuations. SF has particularly affected such key strata or groups of modern society as college graduates, young writers, and the avant-garde of general readers appreciative of new sets of values. This is a significant cultural effect which goes beyond any merely quantitative census. Second, if one takes as the minimal generic difference of SF the presence of a narrative novum (the dramatis personae and/or their context) significantly different from what is the norm in "naturalistic" or empiricist fiction, it will be found that SF has an interesting and close kinship with other literary subgenres that flourished at different times and places of literary history: the classical and medieval "fortunate island" story, the "fabulous voyage" story from antiquity on, the Renaissance and Baroque "utopia" and "planetary novel," the Enlightenment "state [political] novel," the modern "anticipation" and "anti-utopia." Moreover, although SF shares with myth, fantasy, fairy tale, and pastoral an opposition to naturalistic or empiricist literary genres, it differs very significantly in approach and social function from such adjoining non-naturalistic or metaempirical genres. Both these complementary aspects, the sociological and the methodological, are being vigorously debated by writers and critics in several countries, evidence of lively interest in a genre that should undergo scholarly discussion too.

In this chapter, I will argue for an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. This definition seems to possess the unique advantage of rendering justice to a literary tradition which is coherent through the ages and within itself, yet distinct from nonfictional utopianism, from naturalistic literature, and from other non-naturalistic fiction. It thus makes it possible to lay the basis for a coherent poetics of SF.

1.2. I want to begin by postulating a spectrum or spread of literary subject matter which extends from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author's empirical environment [ 1] to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum. From the 18th to the 20th centuries, the literary mainstream of our civilisation has been nearer to the first of these two extremes. However, at the beginnings of a literature, the concern with a domestication of the amazing is very strong. Early tale-tellers relate amazing voyages into the next valley, where they found dog-headed people, also good rock salt which could be stolen or at the worst bartered for. Their stories are a syncretic travelogue and voyage imaginaire, daydream and intelligence report. This implies a curiosity about the unknown beyond the next mountain range (sea, ocean, solar system), where the thrill of knowledge joined the thrill of adventure.

From Iambulus and Euhemerus through the classical utopia to Verne's island of Captain Nemo and Wells's island of Dr. Moreau, an island in the far-off ocean is the paradigm of the aesthetically most satisfying goal of the SF voyage. This is particularly true if we subsume under this the planetary island in the aether ocean-usually the Moon-which we encounter from Lucian through Cyrano to Swift's mini-Moon of Laputa, and on into the nineteenth century. Yet the parallel paradigm of the valley, "over the range" (the subtitle of Butler's SF novel Erewhon), which shuts it in as a wall, is perhaps as revealing. It recurs almost as frequently, from the earliest folktales about the sparkling valley of Terrestrial Paradise and the dark valley of the Dead, both already in Gilgamesh. Eden is the mythological localization of utopian longing, just as Wells's valley in "The Country of the Blind" is still within the liberating tradition which contends that the world is not necessarily the way our present empirical valley happens to be, and that whoever thinks his valley is the world is blind. Whether island or valley, whether in space or (from the industrial and bourgeois revolutions on) in time, the new framework is correlative to the new inhabitants. The aliens-utopians, monsters, or simply differing strangers-are a mirror to man just as the differing country is a mirror for his world. But the mirror is not only a reflecting one, it is also a transforming one, virgin womb and alchemical dynamo: the mirror is a crucible.

Thus it is not only the basic human and humanizing curiosity that gives birth to SF. Beyond an indirect inquisitiveness, which makes for a semantic game without clear referent, this genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary). At all events, the possibility of other strange, covariant coordinate systems and semantic fields is assumed.

1.3. The approach to the imagined locality, or localized daydream, practiced by the genre of SF is a supposedly factual one. Columbus's (technically or genologically nonfictional) letter on the Eden he glimpsed beyond the Orinoco mouth, and Swift's (technically nonfactual) voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubbdrib, Luggnagg, "and Japan" represent two extremes in the constant intermingle of imaginary and empirical possibilities. Thus SF takes off from a fiction ("literary") hypothesis and develops it with totalizing ("scientific") rigor-the specific difference between Columbus and Swift is smaller than their generic proximity. The effect of such factual reporting of fictions is one of confronting a set normative system-a Ptolemaic-type closed world picture-with a point of view or look implying a new set of norms; in literary theory this is known as the attitude of estrangement. This concept was first developed on non-naturalistic texts by the Russian Formalists ("ostranenie," Viktor Shklyovsky) and most successfully underpinned by an anthropological and historical approach in the work of Bertolt Brecht, who wanted to write "plays for a scientific age." While working on a play about the prototypical scientist, Galileo, he defined this attitude ("Verfremdungseffekt") in his Short Organon for the Theatre: "A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar." And further: for somebody to see all normal happenings in a dubious light, "he would need to develop that detached eye with which the great Galileo observed a swinging chandelier. He was amazed by that pendulum motion as if he had not expected it and could not understand its occurring, and this enabled him to come at the rules by which it was governed." Thus, the look of estrangement is both cognitive and creative; and as Brecht goes on to say, "one cannot simply exclaim that such an attitude pertains to science, but not to art. Why should not art, in its own way, try to serve the great social task of mastering Life?" [ 2] (Later, Brecht would note that it might be time to stop speaking in terms of masters and servants altogether.)

In SF the attitude of estrangement-used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly "realistic" context-has grown into the formal framework of the genre.

2. Science Fiction As Cognition (Critique and Science) [ contents]

2.1. The use of estrangement both as underlying attitude and dominant formal device is found also in the myth, a "timeless" and religious approach looking in its own way beneath (or above) the empiric surface. However, SF sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view. The myth is diametrically opposed to the cognitive approach since it conceives human relationships as fixed and supernaturally determined, emphatically denying Montaigne's "la constance même n'est qu'un branle plus languissant." The myth absolutizes and even personifies apparently constant motifs from sluggish societies. Conversely, SF, which focuses on the variable and future-bearing elements from the empirical environment, is found predominantly in the great whirlpool periods of history, such as the sixteenth-seventeenth and nineteenth-twentieth centuries. Where the myth claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena, SF first posits them as problems and then explores where they lead; it sees the mythical static identity as an illusion, usually as fraud, at best only as a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies. It does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in what kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world? As a literary genre, SF is fully as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical estrangement as it is to naturalism or empiricism.

2.2. SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.

Estrangement differentiates SF from the "realistic" literary mainstream extending from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. Cognition differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the folk (fairy) tale and the fantasy. The folktale also doubts the laws of the author's empirical world, but it escapes out of its horizons and into a closed collateral world indifferent to cognitive possibilities. It does not use imagination as a means of understanding the tendencies latent in reality, but as an end sufficient unto itself and cut off from the real contingencies. The stock folktale accessory, such as the flying carpet, evades the empirical law of physical gravity-as the hero evades social gravity-by imagining its opposite. This wish-fulfilling element is its strength and its weakness, for it never pretends that a carpet could be expected to fly-that a humble third son could be expected to become king-while there is gravity. It simply posits another world beside yours where some carpets do, magically, fly, and some paupers do, magically, become princes, and into which you cross purely by an act of faith and fancy. Anything is possible in a folktale, because a folktale is manifestly impossible. Furthermore, the lower-class genre of folktale was from the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries on transformed into the more compensatory, and often simplistic, individualist fairy tale. Therefore, SF retrogressing into fairy tale (for example, "space opera" with a hero-princess-monster triangle in astronautic costume) is committing creative suicide.

Even less congenial to SF is the fantasy (ghost, horror, Gothic, weird) tale, a genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment. Where the folktale is indifferent, the fantasy is inimical to the empirical world and its laws. The thesis could be defended that the fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a superordinated maleficent world of its own, causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate. Gogol's Nose is significant because it is walking down the Nevski Prospect, with a certain rank in the civil service, and so on; if the Nose were in a completely fantastic world-say H. P. Lovecraft's-it would be just another ghoulish thrill. When fantasy does not make for such a tension between the supernatural and the author's empirical environment, its monotonous reduction of all possible horizons to Death makes of it just a subliterature of mystification. Commercial lumping of it into the same category as SF is thus a grave disservice and rampantly sociopathological phenomenon.

2.3. The pastoral, on the other hand, is essentially closer to SF. Its imaginary framework of a world without money-economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in a laboratory, two human motivations: erotics and power-hunger. This approach relates to SF as alchemy does to chemistry and nuclear physics: an early try in the right direction with insufficient foundations. SF has much to learn from the pastoral tradition, primarily from its directly sensual relationships which do not manifest class alienation. This lesson has in fact often been absorbed, whenever SF has sounded the theme of the triumph of the humble (Restif, Morris, and others, up to Simak, Christopher, Yefremov, etc.). Unfortunately, the baroque pastoral abandoned this theme and jelled into a conventional sentimentality, discrediting the genre; but when pastoral escapes preciosity, its hope can fertilize the SF field as an antidote to pragmatism, commercialism, other-directedness, and technocracy.

2.4. Claiming a Galilean estrangement for SF does not at all mean committing it to scientific vulgarization or even technological prognostication, which it was engaged in at various times (Verne, the United States in the 1920s and 30s, USSR under Stalinism). The needful and meritorious task of popularization can be a useful element of SF works at a juvenile level. But even the roman scientifique, such as Verne's From the Earth to the Moon-or the surface level of Wells's Invisible Man-though a legitimate SF form, is a lower stage in its development. It is very popular with audiences just approaching SF, such as the juvenile, because it introduces into the old empirical context only one easily digestible new technological variable (Moon missile, or rays which lower the refractive index of organic matter) [ 3]. The euphoria provoked by this approach is real but limited, better suited to the short story and a new audience. It evaporates much quicker as positivistic natural science loses prestige in the humanistic sphere after the world wars (compare Nemo's Nautilus as against the United States Navy's atomic submarine of the same name), and surges back with prestigious peacetime applications in new methodologies (astronautics, cybernetics). As I will argue in chapter 7, even in Verne the "science novel" has a structure of transient estrangement, which is specific to murder mysteries, not to a mature SF.

2.5. After such delimitations, it is perhaps possible at least to indicate some differentiations within the concept of "cognitiveness" or "cognition." As used here, this term implies not only a reflecting of but also on reality. It implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author's environment. Such typical SF methodology-from Lucian, More, Rabelais, Cyrano, and Swift to Wells, London, Zamyatin, and writers of the last decades-is a critical one, often satirical, combining a belief in the potentialities of reason with methodical doubt in the most significant cases. The kinship of this cognitive critique with the philosophical fundaments of modern science is evident.

3. The World of the Science Fiction Genre (Concept and Some Functions) [ contents]

3.0. As a full-fledged literary genre, SF has its own repertory of functions, conventions, and devices. Many of them are highly interesting and might prove very revealing for literary history and theory in general. I shall discuss some of these-such as the historically crucial shift of the locus of estrangement from space to time-in the chapters that follow. I shall not, however, attempt a systematic survey of such functions and devices, which would properly be the subject of another book, one that encompassed modern SF as well. I should only like to mention that all the estranging devices in SF are related to the cognition espoused, and that, together with the historical venerability of the genre's tradition, this seems to me a second, methodological reason for according SF much more importance than is usual in academe. However, it might here be possible to sketch some determining parameters of the genre.

3.1. In a typology of literary genres for our cognitive age, one basic parameter would take into account the relationship of the world(s) each genre presents and the "zero world" of empirically verifiable properties around the author (this being "zero" in the sense of a central reference point in a coordinate system, or of the control group in an experiment). Let us call this empirical world naturalistic. In it, and in the corresponding "naturalistic" or "realistic" literature, ethics is in no significant relation to physics. Modern mainstream fiction is forbidden the pathetic fallacy of earthquakes announcing the assassination of rulers or drizzles accompanying the sadness of the heroine. It is the activity of the protagonists, interacting with other, physically equally unprivileged figures, that determines the outcome. However superior technologically or sociologically one side in the conflict may be, any predetermination as to its outcome is felt as an ideological imposition and genological impurity: the basic rule of naturalistic literature is that man's destiny is man [ 4]. On the contrary, in the non-naturalistic, metaphysical literary genres discussed in 2.1 and 2.2, circumstances around the hero are neither passive nor neutral. In the folktale and the fantasy, ethics coincides with (positive or negative) physics, in the tragic myth it compensates the physics, in the "optimistic" myth it supplies the coincidence with a systematic framework.

The world of a work of SF is not a priori intentionally oriented toward its protagonists, either positively or negatively; the protagonists may succeed or fail in their objectives, but nothing in the basic contract with the reader, in the physical laws of their worlds, guarantees either. SF thus shares with the dominant literature of our civilization a mature approach analogous to that of modern science and philosophy, as well as the omnitemporal horizons of such an approach-aspects which will be discussed in the following chapters.

3.2. As a matter of historical record, SF has started from a prescientific or protoscientific approach of debunking satire and naive social critique and moved closer to the increasingly sophisticated natural and human sciences. The natural sciences caught up and surpassed the literary imagination in the nineteenth century; the sciences dealing with human relationships might be argued to have caught up with it in their highest theoretical achievements but have certainly not done so in their alienated social practice. In the twentieth century SF has moved into the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and-most important-a mapping of possible alternatives. This historical movement of SF can be envisaged as an enrichment of and shift from a basic direct model to an indirect model (both to be analyzed at greater length in chapter 2). What matters here is that the concept of a science fiction tradition or genre is a logical corollary of the recognition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. It can be gleaned from my approach and examples that I think the literary genre which I am trying to define embraces the subgenres mentioned in 1.1, from Greek and earlier times until today (the Islands of the Blessed, utopias, fabulous voyages, planetary novels, Staatsromane, anticipations, and dystopias-as well as the Verne-type romans scientifiques, the Wellsian scientific romance variant, and the twentieth-century magazine- and anthology-based SF sensu stricto). If the argument of this chapter holds, the inner kinship of these subgenres is stronger than their obvious autonomous, differentiating features. Some historical discussion of these kinships and differences will be attempted later on in this book; here I want only to observe that the significant writers in this line were quite aware of their coherent tradition and explicitly testified to it (the axis Lucian-More-Rabelais-Cyrano-Swift-M. Shelley-Verne-Wells is a main example). Also, certain among the most perspicacious surveyors of aspects of the field, like Ernst Bloch, Lewis Mumford, or Northrop Frye, can be construed as assuming this unity.

3.3. The novelty of such a concept shows most distinctly when one attempts to find a name for the genre as it is here conceived. Ideally this name should clearly set it apart from (1) nonliterature, (2) the empiricist literary mainstream, and (3) non-cognitive estrangings such as fantasy; furthermore (4) it should try to add as little as possible to the already prevailing confusion of tongues in this region. The academically most acceptable designation has been that of a literature of utopian thought. The concept is no doubt partly relevant, but fails to meet the first criterion above; logically, such an approach was usually taught and considered within the scope of either the history of ideas or political and sociological theory. Although I would agree that literature (and especially this genre) is most intimately involved with life-indeed, that the destiny of humanity is its telos -I think one should quickly add that literature is also more than an ideational or sociological document. Since this is the rationale for any systematic literary study and scholarship, I may not need to labor the point.

The only proper way of searching for a solution seems to require starting from the qualities defining the genre, since this would take care of the criteria 1 to 3 at least. Taking the kindred thesaurus concepts of science for cognition, and fiction for estrangement, I believe there is a sound reason for calling this whole new genre Science Fiction ( sensu lato).

There are two main objections to such a solution. First, cognition is wider than science; I argued as much myself in 2.5. It is much less weighty, however, if one takes "science" in a sense closer to the German Wissenschaft, French science, or Russian nauka, which includes not only natural but also all the cultural or historical sciences and even scholarship (cf. Literaturwissenschaft, sciences humaines). As a matter of fact, that is what science has been taken to stand for in the practice of SF: not only More or Zamyatin, but the writings of Americans such as Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, Dick, etc. would be completely impossible without sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, and other parallels. Further, an element of convention enters into all names (compare "comparative literature"), but it has proved harmless as long as the name is handy, approximate enough, and above all applied to a clearly defined body of works. The second objection is that the use of "science fiction" confuses the whole genre with the twentieth-century SF from which the name was taken. Given the advantages of the only term at hand fulfilling the above criteria, I would argue that this is at worst a minor drawback; nobody has serious trouble in distinguishing between More's book, the country described in it, and the subgenre of "utopia." The trouble begins with the variety of unrelated interdisciplinary and ideological interpretation foisted upon such a term; "science fiction" might perhaps escape the interdisciplinary part of that obstacle race. Furthermore, there are always advantages to acknowledging clearly one's methodological premises. As both Lukács and Eliot would agree, any tradition is modified and reestablished by a sufficiently significant new development, from whose vantage point it can be reinterpreted. This is, I would maintain, the case with the mentioned ci-devant traditions, for example, of "utopian literature," in the age of science fiction. If that is accepted, the new name is no drawback at all, but simply an onomastic consummation.

4. For a Poetics of Science Fiction (Anticipation) [ contents]

4.1. The above sketch should, no doubt, be supplemented by a sociological analysis of the "inner environment" of SF, exiled since the beginning of the twentieth century into a reservation or ghetto which was protective and is now constrictive, cutting off new developments from healthy competition and the highest critical standards. Such a sociological discussion would enable us to point out the important differences between the highest reaches of the genre, glanced at here in order to define functions and standards of SF, and its debilitating average [ 5].

4.2. If the whole above argumentation is found acceptable, it will be possible to supplement it also by a survey of forms and subgenres. Along with some which recur in an updated form-such as the utopia and fabulous voyage-the anticipation, the superman story, the artificial intelligence story (robots, androids, and so on), time travel, catastrophe, the meeting with aliens, and others, would have to be analyzed. The various forms and subgenres of SF could then be checked for their relationships to other literary genres, to each other, and to various sciences. For example, the utopias are-whatever else they may be-clearly sociological fictions of social-science-fiction, whereas modern SF is analogous to modern polycentric cosmology, uniting time and space in Einsteinium worlds with different but covariant dimensions and time scales. Significant modern SF, with deeper and more lasting sources of enjoyment, also presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political, psychological, and anthropological use and effect of knowledge, of philosophy of science, and the becoming of failure of new realities as a result of it. The consistency of extrapolation, precision of analogy, and width of reference in such a cognitive discussion turn into aesthetic factors. (That is why the "scientific novel" discussed in 2.3 is not deemed completely satisfactory-it is aesthetically poor because it is scientifically meager.) Once the elastic criteria of literary structuring have been met, a cognitive-in most cases strictly scientific-element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific pleasure to be sought in SF. In other words, the cognitive nucleus of the plot codetermines the fictional estrangement itself.

5. Postscript (2014) [ contents]

All of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times. Perhaps the richer among us, up to 5% globally but disproportionately concentrated in the trilateral U.S.A.-western Europe-Japan and its appendages, have been cushioned from realizing it by the power of money and the self-serving ideology it erects. But even those complain loudly of the "criminality" and in general "moral decay" of the desperately vicious outside their increasingly fortress-like neighbourhoods. We live morally in an almost complete dystopia-dystopia because anti-utopia-and materially (economically) on the razor's edge of collapse, distributive and collective.

In a look backwards to my writing of the 1960s from this most endangered cusp of history, I see a main limitation to my "Poetics of SF" essay in its innocently and naively Formalist horizon. That is, I presupposed the tide of history was flowing, even if with regrettable eddies, towards socialism or democratic communism, and concentrated on the problems of understanding, pleasure, and form within that tide. Thus I seem to have felt I could freeze or even freeze out history, as all pursuits of aesthetics do: transcending the moment. I was wrong.

"Poetics" as a term comes of course from Aristotle. In 1971 I held a graduate seminar, "Aristotle after Brecht and Marx." Brecht's "estrangement" is perhaps well suggested here. But there is far too little Marx. Therefore I have later amended my definitions to indicate that what is cognition (and in particular the defining factor of SF, the Novum) cannot be answered in a vacuum but only within an explicated value system wedded to the labouring, exploited and dominated, classes-that is: from their standpoint (as guessed at by the critic).

In a nutshell, we've got to get the good old class struggle back as a key factor of our considerations: especially today, when it is conducted from above, by the rich rulers, against the impoverished people, who seem to go on struggling-where are you, Lenin?-each all alone or in powerless little groups.

Ah yes: on Fantasy. The lay of the land has changed here: I wrote before the Deluge. I've looked anew at it in my essay "Considering the Sense of 'Fantasy' or 'Fantastic Fiction'," Extrapolation 41.3 (2000): 209-47. It does not simply deny but it supersedes (as Hegel would say) what is written here. Please look at it. Though I'm having a hard time publishing books these years, it may soon be included in a new book in the Ralahine Utopian Studies series by Peter Lang (UK) Publishers.

1. A benefit of discussing the seemingly peripheral subject of "science fiction" is that one has to go back to first principles, one cannot really assume them as given. One must ask, for example, what is literature? Usually, when discussing literature one determines what it says (its subject matter) and how it says what it says (the approach to its themes). If we are talking about literature in the sense of significant works possessing certain minimal aesthetic qualities rather than in the sociological sense of everything that gets published at a certain time or in the ideological sense of all the writings on certain themes, this principle can more precisely be formulated as a double question. First, epistemologically, what possibility for aesthetic qualities is offered by different thematic fields ("subjects")? The answer given by the aesthetics prevalent at the moment is: an absolutely equal possibility. With this answer the question is booted out of the field of aesthetics and into the lap of ideologists, who pick it up by default and proceed to bungle it. Second, historically, how has such a possibility in fact been used? Once one begins with such considerations, one comes quickly up against the rather unclear concept of realism (not the prose literary movement in the nineteenth century but a metahistorical stylistic principle), since this genre is often pigeonholed as nonrealistic. I would not object but would heartily welcome such labels if one had first persuasively defined what is "real" and what is "reality." True, this genre raises basic philosophical issues, but it is perhaps not necessary to face them in an initial approach. Therefore I shall here substitute for "reality" (whose existence independent of any observer or group of observers I do not at all doubt, in fact) the concept of "the author's empirical environment," which seems as immediately clear as any. [return]

2. Viktor Shlovsky, "Iskusstvo kak priem," in Sborniki po teorii poèticheskgo iazyka, 2 (Petrogad, 1917). In the translation "Art as Technique" in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln, NE, 1965), ostranenie is rendered somewhat clumsily as "defamiliarization." See also Victor Erlich's classical survey, Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955).
Bertolt Brecht, "Kleines Organon für das Theater," in his Gesammelte Werke, 16 (Frankfurt, 1973), translated in John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre (New York, 1964). My quotations are from pp. 192 and 196 of this translation, but I have changed Mr. Willett's translation of Verfremdung as "alienation" into my "estrangement," since "alienation" evokes incorrect, indeed opposite, connotations: estrangement was for Brecht an approach militating directly against social and cognitive alienation. See Ernst Bloch, " Entfremdung, Verfremdung: Alienation, Estrangement," in Erika Munk, ed., Brecht (New York, 1972). [ return]

3. Note the functional difference from the anti-gravity metal in Wells's First Men in the Moon, which is an introductory or "plausibility-validating" device and not the be-all of a much richer novel. Devices of plausibility are further discussed in chapter 4. [return]

4. In such cases as certain novels by Hardy and plays by Ibsen, or some of the more doctrinaire works of the historical school of Naturalism, where determinism strongly stresses circumstances at the expense of the main figures' activity, we have, underneath a surface appearance of "naturalism," an approach to tragic myth using a shamefaced validation for an unbelieving age. As contrary to Shakespeare or the Romantics, in this case ethics follows physics in a supposedly causal chain (most often through biology). An analogous approach to fairy tale is to be found in, say, the mimicry of "naturalism" in which Hollywood happy-end movies engage. [return]

5. A first approach to the sociology of SF may be found in the special issue of Science Fiction Studies, November 1977, edited and with an introduction by me. [return]

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Darko Suvin is one of the most important critics of science fiction. His work on science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement was one of the first major academic engagements with the genre, and has proved both enduring and influential; he has received the SFRA Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship, and dialogue with his ideas continues in the criticism of Frederic Jameson, Carl Freedman, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and others.

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Simone Weil and Kathe Kollwitz: Attention and Suffering

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Simone Weil and Kathe Kollwitz: Attention and Suffering

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#SimoneWeil#KatheKollwitz#Attention#Suffering

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Attention to Suffering in the Work of Simone Weil and Käthe Kollwitz

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This dissertation traces the ethical and conceptual connections between Weil's account of attention and Kollwitz's artistic practice of attention, especially attention to suffering. Attention, in Weil's view, is a strenuous surrender to things as they are, which involves the difficult work of letting those things be other than we desire (or even need) them to be.

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#HannahArendt#Forgiving

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"To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt," poet and philosopher David Whyte observed as he dove for the deeper meanings of our commonest concepts. But, as James Baldwin and Margaret Mead demonstrated in their historic conversation about forgiveness and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility, Western culture has a confused understanding of what forgiveness really requires of us and what it really gives us - a confusion tangled in the conflicting legacies of Ancient Greek culture, that primordial womb of drama and democracy, with its politically immature notions of justice, and Christian dogma, with its incomplete and psychologically puerile conceptions of love.

To disentangle this cultural confusion into a lucid and luminous understanding of forgiveness demands an uncommon largeness of spirit and depth of intellect, an uncommon breadth of erudition and historical knowledge, and an uncommon sensitivity to what it means to be human. That is what the uncommon Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906-December 4, 1975) accomplishes throughout The Human Condition (public library) - the superb 1958 book that gave us her insight into how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world.

The very need for forgiveness, Arendt observes in a chapter titled "Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive," springs from "the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting" - a process fundamental to what it means to be alive. We act because we are, but we don't always act along the axis of who we aspire to be. Aspiration is a sort of promise - a promise we make to ourselves and, sometimes, to the world. Forgiveness is only ever needed, and possible, because of the inherent tension between action and aspiration. Arendt writes:

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing - is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past... and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between [us].

To live in a world without forgiveness, she intimates, is to make of life an instant fossil record, each imperfect action instantly ossifying us into a failed promise of personhood:

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities - a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self.

As a secular philosopher and one of the greatest champions of reason amid one of the most unreasonable epochs in the history of our civilization, Arendt observes:

The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense... Certain aspects of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which are not primarily related to the Christian religious message but sprang from experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers, bent on challenging the public authorities in Israel, certainly belong among them, even though they have been neglected because of their allegedly exclusively religious nature.

The capacity for forgiveness and the enactment of that capacity in the willingness to forgive is what holds the sphere of human experience together - the private sphere as much as the public sphere, for forgiveness is as vital in our deepest personal bonds as it is in the collective experience of public life. In a sentiment the great civil rights leader John Lewis would echo in his life-earned conviction that "forgiveness and compassion must become more important principles in public life," Arendt writes:

Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action's constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men* from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

In a passage evocative of Oliver Sacks's stirring first-hand lesson in choosing empathy over vengeance, she adds:

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus' teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

Arendt observes that punishment is not the opposite of forgiveness but an alternative to it - one enfeebled by the paradox that human beings are "unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable." (Yes, do read that again; turn it over in your mind like a Zen koan - I did - until it unfolds its subtle riches of profound wisdom.) She considers the complicated and often superficially understood relationship between forgiveness and love - the least public emotion upon which, somehow, the foundation of all public and political life rests:

Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it... It is the reason for the [Christian] conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others... Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.

With one of her exquisite pirouettes of logic, Arendt thus delivers us at - and delivers us from - the most dangerous fault line in the Christian model, a fault line that must be sealed and healed before we can have a less confused, more complete and generative understanding of forgiveness: one based not on the emotionally intoxicating but unstable experience we call love but on the ethically and intellectually grounded orientation of respect. She writes:

If it were true, therefore, as Christianity assumed, that only love can forgive because only love is fully receptive to who somebody is, to the point of being always willing to forgive him whatever he may have done, forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations. Yet what love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of "friendship" without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.

Against this backdrop, forgiveness can only ever be a communal experience. More than half a century after Arendt, in a cultural moment so inflamed with reflexive indictment and so clouded with the saccharine delirium of self-righteousness, it is nothing less than an act of countercultural courage and resistance to regard this wisdom with unwincing receptivity. Such courage asks of us what Arendt terms "the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them." There is, after all, nothing riskier than willingness, and nothing more rewarding.

Complement this fragment of Arendt's enduringly illuminating The Human Condition with philosopher Martha Nussbaum - in many ways an intellectual heir of Arendt's - on anger and forgiveness, then revisit Arendt herself on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.

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The Antidote to the Irreversibility of Life: Hannah Arendt on What Forgiveness Really Means

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"Forgiving... is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both...

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#MarthaNussbaum#Feeling#Judgement#Suffering #consolence#Morality#UnconditionedJudgement#DisinterestedJudgement#LovingGaze#Acceptance#NewPerspective

Looking With the Third Eye whic is Making Things Strange

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De Amerikaanse filosofe Martha Nussbaum verdedigt in al haar werk de opvatting dat ethische reflectie in dienst moet staan van onze alledaagse pogingen 'goed te leven'. Ethische reflectie kan daarom niet volstaan met liet formuleren van algemene, abstracte morele principes. Nog belangrijker is dat we leren wat die algemene principes in concrete situaties betekenen. In dit subtiele proces van morele perceptie en oordeelsvorming spelen naast de ratio de emoties een rijke rol. Om die reden zijn volgens Nussbaum niet alleen filosofische, maar ook literaire werken van groot belang voor de scholing van het morele oordeelsvermogen. In haar werk onderzoekt zij' welke bijdrage filosofen, Griekse tragedie schrijvers en twintigste-eeuwse romanschrijvers aan onze morele vorming leveren.

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De Amerikaanse filosofe Martha Nussbaum verdedigt in al haar werk de opvatting dat ethische reflectie in dienst moet staan van onze alledaagse pogingen 'goed te leven'. Ethische reflectie kan daarom niet volstaan met liet formuleren van algemene, abstracte morele principes. Nog belangrijker is dat we leren wat die algemene principes in concrete situaties betekenen.

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#IrisMurdoch#Love#Struggle#Acceptance

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The idea of attention was brought back into mainstream philosophical thinking about ethics by Iris Murdoch. Murdoch was herself drawing on Simone Weil ― as she made clear in her essay, "Against Dryness": "Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will." She continued: "We need a new vocabulary of attention." But while many writers have noted the importance of attention for Murdoch, I think the deepest lessons of Murdoch's invocation of attention have largely been missed.

Murdoch's highlighting of attention is linked to her recovery of the image of vision for moral philosophy, over against what she took to be the predominating image of choice. By making morals most fundamentally a matter of choosing and acting, against a background of unproblematically given facts, the image or model of choice deflected appreciation, Murdoch thought, of the moral importance and difficulty of seeing clearly, truly, justly. It is against this background that Murdoch invokes the concept of attention as important for moral philosophy.

But even those who are otherwise sympathetic with Murdoch on this point tend to slide over the radical implications of her concern with attention. Admittedly, this tendency is not exactly discouraged by some of the ways that Murdoch herself spoke about attention. But on such occasions, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Murdoch herself overlooks her own deepest insights.

Murdoch's famous example of M and D from "The Idea of Perfection" highlights the importance of attention, and the example has attracted a great deal of commentary:

A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D's accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him ...

Thus much for M's first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl.

However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: 'I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.' Here I assume that M observes D until gradually her vision of D alters ... D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on.

Murdoch shortly thereafter reiterates the importance of attention in this example:

I have used the word 'attention', which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.

A couple pages later, Murdoch relates her use of attention to her use of the word "looking":

When M is just and loving she sees D as she really is ... I would like on the whole to use the word 'attention' as a good word and use some more general term like 'looking' as the neutral word. Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary (M seeing D as pert-common juvenile, etc.) Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion.

So, Murdoch ties attention closely to "just and loving" seeing. She also says that "when M is just and loving" ― that is, when she sees justly and lovingly ― "she sees D as she really is." One way of describing my task in this essay is as getting clear about the connections, in Murdoch's thinking, between the three elements just mentioned: attention (or attending), seeing justly and lovingly and seeing D as she really is. This task needs revisiting if we are to appreciate the radical import of Murdoch's thinking.

Murdochian attention as 'attention to detail'?

Let me begin with one relatively common misreading of Murdochian attention. This one comes from an essay by Julia Driver on method and moral theory in Iris Murdoch's philosophy. About the M and D episode, Driver writes:

M is someone who is 'capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. And she does just that with D. By careful attention to detail, [M] comes to change her view of D ... [This] gives us an example of moral reflection, and how it works. Attention to detail gets us further at the truth. But we have to approach such cases with mental descriptions that are general, and then search for more detail.

Driver seems to take it that, by contrast with simply looking, Murdochian attention is "attention to detail." A link to "seeing something as it really is" is then forged by supposing that the reality of what is attended to is more fully revealed by this attention to its details: "Attention to detail gets us further at the truth." Driver's reading thus absorbs Murdochian attention into seeing accurately: hence, attention is attention to detail and attention to detail gives us more accurate perception of what is seen.

An immediate problem with this reading is that it simply overlooks Murdoch's explicit insistence that attending cannot be assimilated to seeing accurately: "What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly." To interpret M's giving just attention to D as a matter of M's newly giving "careful attention to detail" is surely both unwarranted and misleading.

But this misreading of Driver's is not a minor misreading. Driver says that the example of M and D "gives us an example of moral reflection and how it works." She says the example presents moral reflection as here working by an attention to detail which "gets us further at the truth." But this has, I suggest, little plausibility either as a general account - even as an element of a general account - of "moral reflection and how it works," or as a reading of how Murdoch invites us to see it as working in this particular case. Let me justify these blunt claims in turn.

Moral reflection obviously sometimes can involve an attention that aims to disclose actual details - whether coarse- or fine-grained - about a situation or object or person. But, a focus on such details is not - not ever - per se "an example of moral reflection." Whether it does exemplify such reflection will depend, to put it simply, on the point and the spirit of the focus. Sometimes, such focused attention to details is simply irrelevant to moral reflection ― and to just and loving attention as expressing such reflection; and sometimes, it positively obstructs genuine moral reflection. It certainly constitutes no model of moral reflection and how it works, as Driver implies it does.

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One aim of moral reflection is indeed naturally enough expressible as "taking us further" ― as Driver puts it ― to the truth of what we reflect on. But, lest that formulation be thought suspiciously tilted towards 'metaphysical' talk of moral truth, we might instead re-describe this aim of moral reflection as helping us better appreciate the moral dimensions of a situation. That aim, I am suggesting, is not always best realised through greater attention to detail and is sometimes obstructed by such attention.

Some people, for example, have an acute eye for others' weaknesses, enabling them to home in on things about another that most people miss. Sometimes, a guiding purpose of their attention is, say, to turn the screws of humiliation. Indeed, perhaps an attraction to exploiting and humiliating others is sometimes what gives a person his acute perception of others' weaknesses. Again, there is a straightforward sense in which someone's acute sensitivity towards such details gets him "further at the truth" about the other, provided this person does indeed have this or that hard-to-detect weakness.

But nothing could be further than this attention to detail from the "moral seeing" Murdoch has in mind ― a "just and loving gaze" directed on another. Here, attention to detail is at odds with moral reflection; it stands in opposition to any moral understanding realised through "just and loving attention" to another.

This does not mean that just and loving attention requires turning a blind eye to people's weaknesses and seeing only their good points. But there is a big difference between someone who has a sense of some of our blemishes but accepts them as part of the person they love ― and perhaps sometimes even finds it necessary for our own good to draw one of them to our attention ― and someone who has a sharp nose for sniffing out weaknesses with an aim to exploit them.

So much, then, for attention to detail as anchoring a perfectly general characterisation of moral reflection and how it works. Driver's terms fare no better in application to Murdoch's specific example of M and D. Driver says that, "By careful attention to detail, [M] comes to change her view of D ...," and that, "Attention to detail gets us further at the truth ... we have to approach such cases with mental descriptions that are general, and then search for more detail." The suggestion seems to be that M comes to register more features of the situation when she "looks again" than when she looked earlier. But, this is not so.

M does not register a greater number of details about D than previously. There is just a re-description of what was seen: D, she says, is "not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on." And not only is there no increase in the number of details actually registered, but M does not even search for more detail. The difference lies not in increased resolution of her attention to detail, but in the quality or character of her orientation to D. Driver simply misrepresents what actually goes on in the example as Murdoch gives it to us, and her terms are unconnected with what Murdoch means by loving and just attention.

A 'perfect perception'?

Before turning to how I think we should understand what Murdoch means by 'attention', let me link Julia Driver's misreading with an apparently very different reading of Murdoch. In her essay on critical moral perception, Bridget Clarke says this about Murdochian attention:

To attend to something is to approach it with a just and loving eye, and therewith to perceive it in its unbounded particularity and complexity and so as it truly is.

Here there is, at least, a real attempt to get away from thinking of 'moral vision' of another in terms of attention to specific details or features, and to get (so to speak) "the whole person" in as the object of attention that is loving and just. Unfortunately, the attempt fails, in a way at once different from and continuous with the failure of Driver.

Consider M's initial seeing of D when M is under the sway of her jealousy and snobbishness. It is naturally describable as a distorted or obstructed seeing of D ― M's vision being obscured by her jealousy and snobbishness; that is roughly how M herself regards it, when she looks again. But, why should M's coming to see D as "not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous," be represented as her coming to perceive D "in her unbounded particularity and complexity"? I have no idea what it would be to see another like that, nor what it would be to think that one was being seen by someone in that way.

Clarke also speaks of seeking "a perfect perception" of someone as another "aim" of attention. I can attach no sense to this, either, as a way of seeing or of being seen. Of course Murdoch herself speaks of the "idea of perfection" in connection with the "task" of attention - hence, the title of her essay! But, she means neither that there is an achievable aim of reaching a perfect perception of another, nor that the reason there is no such aim is that there will always be more details to be perceived. Admittedly, Murdoch perhaps does sail rather close to the wind here ― for example, when she says: "M's activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible ... M is engaged in an endless task."

But if attention to detail does not constitute seeing better, more morally truly, as I have already argued, it does not do so even if we add to it a recognition that there will always be more, as yet unknown, details to register. In trying to get the whole person back in as the object of loving and just attention, Clarke is groping for a formulation that will reflect a change in M's whole orientation to D, a change that means she is really attending to D, here and now. But by just indefinitely extending - in effect, to infinity - the attention to detail emphasised by Driver, Clarke's formulation turns out to be an extreme variant, a limit version, of Driver's view rather than a genuine alternative to it.

Under Murdoch's 'sharp probing' gaze

A story recounted by Martha Nussbaum can, perhaps, bring us nearer to a clearer appreciation of some important elements of Murdochian attention that are missed by the related readings I've considered so far. Nussbaum recollects being invited to lunch at Iris Murdoch's house in North Oxford, after a conference in New York where Nussbaum had given a talk on Murdoch's work:

I went round to the house, very nervous and awkward, and sat for two hours being scrutinized, as I felt it, by her sharp probing eyes. We talked about Proust and Henry James, about postmodernism and current developments in ethical thought, about Charles Taylor whom she admired, and R.M. Hare whom she did not.

All the while, I felt that her very intense gaze went, as it were, straight through me, to something that was not me at all, but to which I was somehow related ... She fixed me with her eyes and went on, eating pâtéabsent-mindedly with her fingers ...I had no doubt ... that Murdoch could have described me, after an hour, far more precisely than any lover of mine after some years ...

But I think that there is something more to loving vision than just seeing. There is, for example, a willingness to permit oneself to be seen. There is also a willingness to stop seeing, to close one's eyes before the loved one's imperfections. There is also a willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant, relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the presence of a beloved body.

Two themes of this passage are in tension. Nussbaum expressly recognises that Murdoch's "sharp probing eyes" may have generated the most refined concepts for precisely describing the particularities and foibles of the "very nervous and awkward" guest "fixed" under her gaze - concepts more refined, precise and accurate, Nussbaum implies (perhaps with some exaggeration), than any that her lovers of some years might have come up with. But from Nussbaum's description of how Murdoch "saw" her with those "sharp probing eyes," it is obvious that loving attention is not at all what Nussbaum felt in being thus scrutinised, and that she did not is surely wholly apposite in response to a gaze with the character she ascribes to Murdoch's. Nussbaum is quite right to explicitly resist equating a "loving gaze," or loving vision, with accurate, even penetratingly accurate, determinations of its object.

Nussbaum does not have to be read as saying that Murdoch the philosopher equates these things. She may be pointing to a disconnect between the loving vision spoken of by Murdoch the philosopher, and the character of the seeing she felt to be exemplified by Murdoch the woman on this occasion. But, either way, Nussbaum does better than Julia Driver, who not only think Murdoch equates loving vision with penetratingly precise accuracy of observation, but who herself endorses the equation. Nussbaum certainly does not endorse it. I suspect she also probably does not ascribe such an equation to Murdoch the philosopher.

Nussbaum says she felt that Murdoch, looking at her with that "sharp probing" gaze, did not really see her at all. If still higher resolution of scrutiny is not the answer, then what does Nussbaum think really looking - looking in a way that would indeed see her - might require? Nussbaum's (admittedly very brief) observations on that score are both intriguing and puzzling. "I think," she writes, "that there is something more to loving vision than just seeing." But, what "more," exactly?

There is, for example, a willingness to permit oneself to be seen. There is also a willingness to stop seeing, to close one's eyes before the loved one's imperfections. There is also a willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant, relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the presence of a beloved body.

"To let oneself be seen," "to stop seeing" and "to relinquish the sharpness of creative alertness" ― on the face of it, these do not seem to be matters of vision at all. So, why does Nussbaum present these things as instances of what more there is to loving vision than just seeing? In saying that loving vision is more than just seeing, Nussbaum implies that it does involve seeing, but something more as well.

Let us take a hint from Nussbaum's insistence that, despite Murdoch's precise registering of her (that is, Nussbaum's) details, Murdoch did not really see her at all - "her intense gaze went ... straight through me." What Nussbaum says affords a critical perspective on the shared limitation of the accounts of attention I've examined so far: they each try to shoehorn seeing D truly, lovingly, justly into more highly focused registering of details (or facts or properties). They render "attending to D" in terms of ascertaining details or facts about D. But, Murdochian attention is not seeing something about another - seeing her more truly because one has come to register more truths about her. It is, instead, an orientation to her.

Nussbaum says loving vision is "more than" just seeing. I take it that the seeing she thinks is exceeded by loving vision includes the kind of seeing she ascribes to Murdoch in North Oxford: the identifying of details or features that would enable Murdoch to describe Nussbaum better than Nussbaum's lovers could.

The hint I want to follow is that "letting oneself be seen," "stopping seeing" and "relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness" are elements of what is needed for really attending to another. And this - to anticipate - will lead us in another direction: attention as a kind of receptiveness, and as accompanying, being present at or to, waiting-on, serving, answering to.

'Attention' as disarming love

Let me begin with "being present to" and then move on to "waiting-on." Consider this from David Velleman's description of love. Love, he writes:

arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defences; it makes us vulnerable to the other.

Of course, that disarming of our emotional defences also often leads us to put them up again very quickly when we become aware of just how vulnerable our love makes us. This "disarming" just is a matter of becoming exposed to another - which is to say, of "letting oneself be seen," in Nussbaum's phrase. But then, love's disarming is a mode of becoming present to the other, working against the tendency to "close oneself off" from others by raising those defences against them.

Nussbaum's really "letting oneself be seen" is different, linking to love as attending in the sense of "being present." One thing still not quite clear, however, is why this connotation of attending ― as "being present to" ― is a mode of vision. If attending as "being present to" involves letting down those defences which block one from being seen by the other, is not that a matter of being seen by the other, rather than of seeing her? How, then, does attention as "being present" link to attention as vision, seeing? Velleman is explicit that the two are interdependent:

This hypothesis [that love makes us vulnerable] would explain why love is an exercise in 'really looking', as Murdoch claims. Many of our defences against being emotionally affected by another person are ways of not seeing what is most affecting about him. This contrived blindness to the other person is among the defences that are lifted by love, with the result that we really look at him, perhaps for the first time, and respond emotionally in a way that's indicative of having really seen him.

Many of our defences against being affected by another are also ways of not seeing him: the defence I put up to block his affecting me simultaneously blocks my seeing of him. Stanley Cavell is also explicit about this reciprocity: "recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him." Cavell clearly is not speaking of "factual" recognition - coming into possession of information one lacked. That I could do while myself hidden. As Cavell puts it, the ignorance that is overcome by what he is here calling recognition is "ignorance which is not to be cured by information (because it is not caused by lack of information)."

David Velleman, in the passage I quoted above, is working with a similar kind of 'blindness' and seeing. This is what is missed in the focus on attention to detail, as if what is at issue in Murdochian attending - seeing "lovingly and justly" - is either actually acquiring more information or setting oneself to acquire it. But it is not so. M at first sees D as "pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D's accent or the way D dresses." In so seeing D, M walls herself behind class prejudice and maternal jealousy in a way that protects her from the exposure of being present to D.

The mode of her false seeing of D also enacts her self-protection against exposure. The barrier against being affected by D is thus Janus-faced in the way Velleman describes: it blocks her from being seen by D, and blocks D from being seen by her. When M looks again, that barrier is lifted and she sees D as "not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful." These are re-descriptions of D, not new empirical details against an unchanged background: M's "ignorance" - her having failed to see D truly - is not "cured by information." Her orientation to D has changed, and that change involves her having let down her defences against D.

If this fits with Stanley Cavell's observation that "recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him," the fit may seem tested by Murdoch's setting up of her example, where D herself is kept out of the picture: how does M's recognition of D depend on her allowing herself to be recognized by D, if D is absent? Well, her orientation to D is now one that would indeed allow D to recognise her if D were present, simply in that it is now free of those defences blocking her from such recognition by D. As Cavell is careful to put it: "recognizing a person is dependent on allowing oneself to be recognized by him" - not on actually being thus recognised. That D is in fact absent then does not matter as far as this point is concerned.

Let me dwell a moment longer on the significance of the fact that what M sees when she looks again at D is not further empirical details against an unchanged background. There certainly is a kind of self-protection against one's vulnerability that can lead to one missing empirical details one would otherwise have registered. I refuse the invitation to the party because of my timidity in the face of Fred's casual arrogance, and so, I miss out on discovering he has had a breakdown. In this case, my self-defensiveness is indeed the cause of a continuing ignorance that could indeed be cured by information - you did go to the party and you tell me about Fred the following morning.

But that is not what Murdoch has in mind, and neither has Velleman or Cavell. So, when Velleman says, "Many of our defences against being emotionally affected by another person are ways of not seeing what is most affecting about him," by "ways of not seeing," he means modes of not seeing, rather than efficient causes of failing to do so. My not going to the party is an efficient cause of my failing to (come to) know that Fred has had a breakdown; it is not a mode of failing to see him. Likewise, M's snobbishness could lead her to have some empirically false beliefs about D, but her seeing of D as pert and common is a mode of false-because-snobbish seeing of D, not a matter of her ascribing details to D that can be determined as empirically false independently of that way or mode - roughly, a jealous and snobbish way - of seeing D.

Equally, that failure to see D, or false seeing of her, is not "cured" by M's acquisition of information but by her coming to see D in a different way - namely, lovingly and justly. Murdoch says, "Moral change comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily, other people, but also other things." "An increased sense of the reality of" D is a striking description of what is effected in a "truer" seeing of D that is not a matter of coming to see or know more details or facts about D.

An 'increased sense of reality'

So much, then, for teasing out Nussbaum's hint that "letting oneself be seen" is a condition of truly seeing. This helps us see how the connotation of attending as "being present" illuminates Murdochian attention. Let me now comment briefly on attending as "waiting-on." In fact, letting oneself be seen by another in the sense that involves undefensive exposure is already a kind of waiting-on the other - a receptiveness or patience in relation to the other.

But, there is also more to the idea of waiting-on in connection with receptiveness. As Megan Laverty puts is: "M's second description of D implies greater vulnerability in her relationship with D." This is at least because the first description functioned to keep D at a distance from her - or, as we can equally well put it, contrived to block her from D and D from her. Her second description reflects an openness to D - and openness to, exposure to, vulnerability to, are all recognisably ideas in similar territory.

Of course, there is also a way of being open, exposed, vulnerable to someone or something that is quite independent of one's attending at all to that someone or something: exposure to the sniper's bullet, the gossip's tongue, or the common cold, for example. But, the vulnerability Laverty speaks of is evidently interdependent with a mode of attentiveness to. Her seeing of D is now more responsive to D, meaning that the reality of D now shapes her seeing of D to an extent it previously did not. The way she now sees D is thus more open - more exposed - to the reality of D, and that is precisely the form or mode of her vulnerability to D.

That can also be put by saying that her seeing of D "waits on" D to an extent it did not; to use the term from Blum's footnote again, it is more 'receptive' to the reality of D than it was.

This aspect of loving attention as waiting-on in a way that involves greater receptiveness to reality thus also further emphasises "an increased sense of the reality of" another as integral to Murdochian attention. Among other passages from Murdoch that give expression to this idea are these: "Love is the imaginative recognition of ... otherness"; and "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love ... is the discovery of reality."

These related formulations about attention also illuminate Murdoch's potentially puzzling insistence that, "if I attend properly I will have no choices," because right action will flow from my attending. To find one's response necessitated by one's loving attention is to find the reality of, for example, another human being in his need fully and "compulsively present to the will." The modalities of moral necessity - "I can't," "I must," "I have to" - directly register this "increased sense of the reality" of another. We do not always so see and respond. As Raimond Gaita puts it: "Generally perception is not so clear and full and action not so pure. A sense of obligation steps into the breach."

*

The common misreading of Murdochian attention I explored earlier is thus superficial because it tries to assimilate Murdochian attention to a certain conception of attending-as-knowing - attending as acquiring, or as setting oneself to acquire, more information. It should now be clear how differently we need to understand Murdochian vision if we are to appreciate the real, and radical, implications of her idea of attention.

Murdochian attention as "just and loving vision" involves being present to another in a way that includes "letting oneself be seen or recognized." Beyond that, attending as waiting-on gives shape to Murdochian talk of attention as greater receptiveness to reality, and perhaps even as an increased sense of the reality of someone or something.

Christopher Cordner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and the author of Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning. You can hear him discuss the moral vision of Iris Murdoch with Cora Diamond and Scott Stephens on The Philosopher's Zone on RN.

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What did Iris Murdoch mean by 'attention'? - ABC Religion & Ethics

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The idea of 'attention' was brought back into mainstream philosophical thinking about ethics by Iris Murdoch. This was connected to her recovery of the image of vision for moral philosophy, over against what she took to be the predominating image of choice.

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#Solitude

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#Sinister#Storytelling

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Sometimes I don’t want to be human

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Am I doing this thing right? Am I living up to the expectations of being a human being?

Tell me dear entity, before I become just like you.

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Endless nights of deliberating love. I kept picking petals but even the flowers couldn’t decide. It died the second it touched my hand. Dissolving everything I ever felt for him. I felt like that for a long time. Still, each time I get a glance of my reflection, I see us together.

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