On Philosophy and Literature with Eleonore Stump

I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you heart of flesh.--Ezekiel 36:26

Interpretations present, suggest, offer, and invite; unlike philosophical arguments, they cannot attempt to compel.--Stump, Wandering in Darkness (27).

After I wrote my post on De Gournay's treatment of Judith's magnanimity, I checked the index to Eleonore Stump's massive Wandering in Darkness (2010). I found no mention of Judith, alas. Of course, it doesn't mean she is not mentioned in the book, which I had been afraid to open. It's not because I fear that Stump has composed a 'succesful theodicy' (37). My reluctance is, in part, autobiographical: after college, I spent two years of traveling, working, and writing (fiction, non-fiction, and a theory of memetics); to my surprise I gravitated toward philosophy. (It was my second major, and I did not measure up well to the very impressive faculty and stellar MA students at Tufts.) I hesitated about doing a PhD in philosophy not just because several of my philosophy teachers were encouraging me to continue with political science (I had some ideas about a game-theoretical approach to multi-party bargaining), but because I worried, in part, that philosophy seemed the wrong place for me; while philosophy seemed increasingly necessary, I also devoured history, novels, and (in smaller doses) poetry.* Joy in reading books seemed a disqualification for a career in professional philosophy. To this day, I sometimes get told by peers, "You're so broad," and I know it is not really, fully intended as a compliment.

While I was hesitating about graduate school, I allowed myself to be reassured that there might be a place for bookish types in philosophy by a wonderful lecture by Eleonore Stump that I was fortunate enough to attend. Even though she clearly had read a lot, she continued to have the respect of my teachers. She seemed wise, insightful, generous, and rigorous. I wanted to be like her! Given that I cherish the role Stump had in my life, I have actually been a bit fearful to do anything that might have her fall from my imaginary pedestal. Fate also facilitated my emotional childishness because when I lived in St. Louis, she was on leave elsewhere. 

Most of all I was reluctant to open Stump's book because I have grown mistrustful of what my fellow professional philosophers do with literature due to our collective, professional intolerance of ambiguity and our abhorrence of multiplicities of meaning. This intolerance and abhorrence infects the scholarly literature on the ontological status of fictional objects as much as it does the (often very subtle) use of fiction in moral psychology.

In her methodological chapters, Stump articulates many of my reservations about our peers's complicated relationship toward literature better than I could. Even so, for her the philosophical exploration of narrative is ultimately a means toward a form of "knowledge" about persons and their relationships that she thinks is unavailable in (standard) philosophical approaches (see chapter 3 on the "Franciscan mode" of knowledge). Let's stipulate that Stump is right, so that I am not taken to disagree with her over this.

 

As the second quote at the top of this post brings out, Stump is sensitive to the fact that narratives require interpretations and that these "invite." Now, for Stump this invitation is to "readers to consider that text and ask themselves whether after all they do not see the text in the way the interpretation recommends." (27) That is to say, she views interpretations as a kind of hypothesis put forward by one investigator (the inviter) that can be confirmed by and replicated in the 'phenomena' (that is, the narrative text) by another researcher (the invitee). Now, putting it like this is very unfair and misleading. One way it is unfair is that Stump wants such confirmation to include not just the 'phenomena;' we evaluate interpretations also in light of our wider (second-person) experience of persons (see chapter 4).

Fair enough.

But note that the invited one is not an equal partner in the enterprise of knowledge here. She is not being asked to put forward her own, alternative interpretation(s). Rather, she is more like a research-assistant than a co-equal partner in inquiry. What I am getting at, is that Stump has a magisterial understanding of the philosophical role of narrative; she speaks of "the interpretation" (emphasis added). This is no surprise because for Stump interpretation is a means to present or teach a "worldview" (21, 81). This means that ultimately, and for all her abundant generosity, Stump's interpretations are not really invitations to disagreement.

My disagreement with Stump is philosophical, not theological. As regular readers of these Digressions may realize, I think we need conceptions of philosophy that place more value on open-ended conversations** than the knowledge or worldviews we can teach. Her view of philosophy is that ultimately philosophy should move us either by compelling or by gentler means toward a conclusion. Her engagement with narrative literature does not threaten to transform this understanding of philosophy. As she writes, "once" narrative "has been allowed into the discussion on its own terms, philosophical reflection enlightened by the narrative can proceed in its customary way." (27) But we can only proceed in such a way, if we keep our distance from literary works that fundamentally challenge our mores, that is, works that would compel us to change our ways.

 

*I didn't help that I encountered some boundary policing.

**Those that know my impatience with others and my rhetorical excesses are free to psycho-analyze me.

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

Eric, I think you're being a bit uncharitable to Stump here. I think that your response to her work is being distorted by the idea that what she sees narrative as imparting knowledge about persons rather than knowledge of persons. (That seems to me to miss the point that the distinction between Franciscan and Dominican knowledge that she draws is not supposed to be simply a distinction between two kinds of propositional knowledge.) When she speaks of "the" interpretation, surely it is charitable to take her to simply mean "the interpretation that has been offered" and not "the uniquely correct interpretation." The context makes that clear: the passage which you have quoted from is immediately preceded by, and comments on, the remark that "we can definitively rule some interpretations out, but it is hard to make a compelling argument that only this interpretation is right." In her own interpretations she constantly considers alternatives and criticisms of the ways she reads the texts. In fact it seems to me that the book is so massive in part because she has spent so long presenting many of these ideas to various audiences and has incorporated so many of the criticisms she has received and so many responses to them (which often, in my experience of reading the book, detract from the clarity of her argument, unfortunately). I doubt Stump would reject your picture of an philosophy as an open-ended conversation; as far as I can tell she has been engaged in just such a conversation about these topics for many years. But when one comes to publish a work, of course one is taking a freeze-frame of any conversation.

As for knowledge of worldviews, you say that Stump "means to present or teach a worldview" but it seems to me this is ambiguous. She does not mean to "teach a worldview" in the sense of inculcating it. "Present" may be more accurate, but only if understood in the right way: she says explicitly that she will "explicate the worldview within which a typical medieval theodicy is embedded" in order "only to show what it is." She thinks this worldview and theodicy can count as a "defense" if in understanding it we can see how it might be a possible way for things to be. This relies on the Plantingian theodicy/defense distinction, which might be objectionable for other reasons. But I take part of the point of the long explication and presentation of the medieval worldview on such topics as love and the human good, to be the sense in which this possible way of looking at things has been culturally lost and become unavailable. The point of making such a worldview available for thought is surely not to shut down conversation, but to allow conversation to move in directions that would otherwise be blocked off.

[Eric Schliesser]

Michael, thank you for this thoughtful response. I see why you think that I present Stump as more dogmatic than she is. I should not have implied she is somehow against an open-ended conversation, for she is -- indeed -- responsive to objections and surely does not suggest she offers the final word. One can believe in open-ended conversation, as Stump does (you are, surely, right about that), and yet think that there is (a) a privileged interpretation of a literary/revealed text, and (b) that privileged interpretation can be subsumed within philosophical argument. It's the latter approach, which combines (a-b), to literature/revelation that I discern in Stump and that I object to--even if it is entirely legitimate as theodicy, or cultural rescue operation.