Let me attempt a drastic summary, or symbolic reduction, of Mr. Foss's adeptly metaphorical exposition. The use of the copula is, implicit in the appositive series, will do some violence to the complexity of the argument, but since causes and parts are frowned on by the same argument, the simpler arrangement cannot be altogether out of keeping. In logical and grammatical terms, we have on two sides of a profound ledger: "symbolic reduction," the divisive subject and predicate,--and "metaphoric process," the (...) underlying and unifying energy of the proposition, the subjectum. The negations of dialectic operate to show the insufficiency of symbolic concepts and are the "door to philosophic truth." And in ontological terms, we have on the one hand number, time, space, cause and effect, coincidence and contingency; and on the other the different, the naught, the apeiron, the potential, the tension of process, freedom and necessity in metaphoric lawful unity. There are two closely similar extremes of reduction between which one locates the transcendent philosophy of metaphor: that of sensationalism, the philosophy of the brute and atomic, and that of rationalism, the philosophy of expedient action. And in more or less theological terms, we have on the one hand the environment and its complement the ego, purposive and possessive; on the other, World, the I and the Thou, prayer, sin and grace in the metaphorical unity of consciousness, the widening power of personality in intercession or metaphorical representation. On the one hand, birth and death, past and future, and a present extending ad libitum into either; on the other, the eternal present of the integrated process stretching over past and future, expressed in its purest form in art. And so in aesthetic terms: on the one hand catharsis, a rationalized mixture of the ego's pleasure and pain, asceticism and hedonism, play; on the other, drama--especially tragedy, which par excellence action--Eudaimonia, purification, artistic distance, stylization, imagination, conscience, love. On the one hand, comedy in the sense of farce, environment symbolically reduced, actions and persons according to type, the mechanism of means and ends, rules, rituals, tricks, chance, the caricature of symbolic fixation--producing laughter: on the other hand, true and great comedy, the attempt to understand life in all its contradictions, producing the smile. (shrink)
It would therefore be reasonable to undertake a description and appreciation of this book precisely in its character as a dialectical dictionary or magazine of aesthetic issues and arguments. One could conduct a guided tour, stopping to admire the fullness of information, or fertility of invention, and the nicely graded series of the ideas collected in this locus or that, or in some area where one happened to be well enough informed, noting the omissions. One might even raise a theoretical (...) question about this whole aspect of the work, starting with the author's bald assertion: "What I have written is, simply and literally, a guide to aesthetics—a guide to the structure and problems of the subject, not to its literature." His "approach," he says, "is systematic, not historical." He "mentions names," but he says he is "not concerned much with who first said what," and his references are not always to the "earliest or best exponents of the views they illustrate". Much of the literature he says he has not read and does not mean to read. One who has himself not read all of the aesthetic literature can hardly object to this very strenuously. (shrink)
Some people have found my distinction between meaning and significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction, I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that “there is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness.” 1 That assertion would be true (...) if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and knowledge. Hence there is a land of meanings beyond past and present human consciousness—the land of the future. What I should have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and future. This correction of my original statements leads to a deepening of the concept of meaning.In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader’s opinion is as valid as another’s would then be right, despite any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. 3 I also assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that meaning. 1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation , p. 4.2. See my “Objective Interpretation,” PMLA 75 : 463-79.3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry , which ends:We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: the way of biographical or genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem “Prufrock”; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P. 18] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Against Interpretation?” , “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation , and “Stylistics and Synonymity”. (shrink)
If the title of this article resounds with the polemical palavering of literary theory in the 1940s, I have to submit that the allusion is not entirely accidental. It is not my intention here, however, to resuscitate the arguments of W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley, but rather to evoke a sense of parallelism between their issues and those at stake here. A crucial objective which informed Wimsatt's and Beardsley's project was to buttress the significance and (...) irreducibility of the literary text in the face of monopolistic authorial and receptional meaning-making. [3] The scholarly environment that was American New Criticism tended to consider intentionalism and emotionalism as threats to the epistemological prominence and integrity of the text, which was all too readily lost in a plenitude of contexts whose relevance for the literary work was not always impressively transparent. Similarly, within the domain of film studies, it has perhaps become increasingly unclear whether the real object of study is the film text itself, or rather a concatenation of different disciplinary discourses hailing from departments of psychology, sociology, and biology (to name a few). The colonization of cinema studies is not a novel development; as a process its apogee was in the 1970s. (shrink)
One of the more controversial articles published in the philosophy of criticism during the past twenty-five years is “The Intentional Fallacy” by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have expended a lot of energy in attacking and defending the Wimsatt-Beardsley position. Their efforts fall mainly into two classes. Either they have been exploratory with respect to the nature of the concept ‘intention’, but so exploratory as to present no tangible discovery; or (...) they have merely been occasions to air the author’s own views, views which take sides, but views which in the end only serve to define what positions may be taken without really convincing anyone whether one position is clearly better than the other. This dilemma is really rather odd because in a certain sense it is pitifully easy to understand what the intentional fallacy amounts to. There is a kind of minimal meaning to it, and I suspect that introductory students in courses in Aesthetics and Criticism have little difficulty in understanding it. ‘Difficulties’ seem to arise primarily in connection with its implications and general scope within the totality of criticism. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these difficulties have nothing to do with the intentional fallacy. They do. And the reason is this: the way in which one argues for, that is, establishes, the intentional fallacy has much to do with its implications and general scope within the realm of criticism. (shrink)
One of the more controversial articles published in the philosophy of criticism during the past twenty-five years is “The Intentional Fallacy” by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have expended a lot of energy in attacking and defending the Wimsatt-Beardsley position. Their efforts fall mainly into two classes. Either they have been exploratory with respect to the nature of the concept ‘intention’, but so exploratory as to present no tangible discovery; or (...) they have merely been occasions to air the author’s own views, views which take sides, but views which in the end only serve to define what positions may be taken without really convincing anyone whether one position is clearly better than the other. This dilemma is really rather odd because in a certain sense it is pitifully easy to understand what the intentional fallacy amounts to. There is a kind of minimal meaning to it, and I suspect that introductory students in courses in Aesthetics and Criticism have little difficulty in understanding it. ‘Difficulties’ seem to arise primarily in connection with its implications and general scope within the totality of criticism. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these difficulties have nothing to do with the intentional fallacy. They do. And the reason is this: the way in which one argues for, that is, establishes, the intentional fallacy has much to do with its implications and general scope within the realm of criticism. (shrink)
It became customary in the eighteenth century to praise Longinus in ways that mimicked one of his own favorite turns of thought—to identify enthusiastically two elements that would more commonly be thought of as quite distinct. To say, with Boileau and Pope, that Longinus “is himself the great Sublime he draws,” or to profess to doubt, as Gibbon did, “which is the most sublime, Homer’s Battle of the Gods or Longinus’ apostrophe…upon it,” is knowingly to override certain conventional lines of (...) demarcation—between writers and their subject matter, between text and interpretation—very much in the manner of Longinus overriding the distinction between Homer and his heroes, between sublime language and its author , or between sublime poet and his audience .1 Longinus’ admirers, struck by the force of the treatise, are usually willing to release him from the strictures of theoretical discourse and allow him the license of a poet; they are likely to appreciate his transgressions of conventional limits without ever calling them into question. It has been left to more skeptical readers, wary of Longinus’ “transports,” to draw attention to his odd movements of thought: W. K. Wimsatt, for example, is unsympathetic but acute when he accuses Longinus of “sliding” from one theoretical distinction to another, a slide “which seems to harbor a certain duplicity and invalidity.”2 Wimsatt is right: something one might want to call a “slide” is observable again and again in the treatise, and not merely from one theoretical distinction to another. One finds in the treatise a rhetorician’s argument conducted with great intelligence and energy, but one also discovers that it is remarkably easy to lose one’s way, to forget which rhetorical topic is under consideration at a particular point, to find oneself attending to a quotation, a fragment of analysis, a metaphor—some interestingly resonant bit of language that draws one into quite another system of relationships. I want to attempt to follow that movement here, to hold it in mind and to question its implications. I will look closely at a number of passages in which Longinus interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he admires—for it is here, out of the play of text with quotation and of quotations with one another, that the most interesting meanings as well as the peculiar power of the treatise are generated.1. ‘Longinus’ On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell , 9. 2, 7. 2; all further references to this work will appear in text, though I have changed a word or two of Russell’s translation in the interests of a more literal rendering of the Greek. I am indebted to another recent translation, G. M. A. Grube’s Longinus On Great Writing , and more particularly to the ample and intelligent introduction and notes accompanying Russell’s edition of the Greek text, ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime .2. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History , p.101. (shrink)
One of the more controversial articles published in the philosophy of criticism during the past twenty-five years is “The Intentional Fallacy” by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have expended a lot of energy in attacking and defending the Wimsatt-Beardsley position. Their efforts fall mainly into two classes. Either they have been exploratory with respect to the nature of the concept ‘intention’, but so exploratory as to present no tangible discovery; or (...) they have merely been occasions to air the author’s own views, views which take sides, but views which in the end only serve to define what positions may be taken without really convincing anyone whether one position is clearly better than the other. This dilemma is really rather odd because in a certain sense it is pitifully easy to understand what the intentional fallacy amounts to. There is a kind of minimal meaning to it, and I suspect that introductory students in courses in Aesthetics and Criticism have little difficulty in understanding it. ‘Difficulties’ seem to arise primarily in connection with its implications and general scope within the totality of criticism. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these difficulties have nothing to do with the intentional fallacy. They do. And the reason is this: the way in which one argues for, that is, establishes, the intentional fallacy has much to do with its implications and general scope within the realm of criticism. (shrink)
We present the opinion of some authors who believe there is no force between a stationary charge and a stationary resistive wire carrying a constant current. We show that this force is different from zero and present its main components: the force due to the charges induced in the wire by the test charge and a force proportional to the current in the resistive wire. We also discuss briefly a component of the force proportional to the square of the current (...) which should exist according to some models and another component due to the acceleration of the conduction electrons in a curved wire carrying a dc current (centripetal acceleration). Finally, we analyze experiments showing the existence of the electric field proportional to the current in resistive wires. (shrink)
This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown (...) University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)
