Abstract

Various philosophers have already written articles about what might be called the philosophical lessons to be derived from James’s tales and novels. Showing a close acquaintance with those articles as well as with recent literary studies of James’s work, Pippin, the author of several earlier books concerned with modernity or with modern philosophical texts, has here produced a book which is at once a detailed and subtle interpretation of several of James’s most famous fictional works and also the presentation of an explicit philosophical view about “modern moral life” that appears to be adumbrated in those fictions. That view is that in the modern world, where fluid relationships based ultimately upon money or the lack of it have undermined traditional authority, the possibility of a meaningful life for oneself turns out to require appropriate recognition of others in what amounts to a continuing dialogue, one in which the meaning of one’s own intentions, desires, and attitudes is dependent, in large part, on what others “make” of them and on how they respond, while at the same time one’s response to others is importantly determinative of who they are and of what they mean or meant. Expressed differently, the view is that there are, at least in the modern world, no social—and, indeed, no moral or psychological— facts, but only at best mutually supportive interpretations, each the product of a person’s self-reflections and of one’s responses to the reflections of that person in others. Pippin, however, is not directly concerned to defend the latter view, although it seems clear that he regards it as at least fundamentally correct. His principal concern, rather, is to defend, through his careful readings of various of James’s works, the thesis that that view is implicit in such great works of James’s as The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. In a related way, Pippin takes James’s wonderful stories about ghosts or about secret truths to be concerned with modern persons who, despite their modernity, are committed, even if not in a wholly conscious way, to the existence of real social or moral facts of the matter.