COUCH MUSINGS

I had an interesting email the day before yesterday from someone who had watched some of my YouTube videos on the Critique of Pure Reason while also struggling with the book and wanted to know whether I thought Kant would agree with my reconstruction of his argument. I told him I had been thinking about that for the past 60 years and did not really know the answer. But it raises an interesting and important question: in what circumstances, if any, are you as the reader in a better position to judge the structure and meaning of an argument in a text than the author of the text himself or herself?  The question comes up all the time, of course, in courses on literature and it is not uncommon for a critic to deny that the novelist is the best judge of the novel. My mind went to one of my favorite moments from the first year of the new doctoral program in Afro-American Studies at UMass – it would have been in the spring semester of 1997. Here is my description of that moment, excerpted from my autobiography:

 

“The assignment one day was Margaret Walker's novel, Jubilee, which chronicles the life of a young woman born into slavery, liberated at the end of the Civil War, and then struggling to make a life for herself during Reconstruction and in the terrible aftermath of Jim Crow.  One of the students asked whether the novel could be read as a work of feminist literature.  Mike Thelwell said that it certainly could not be so read.  John Bracey, who knew a great deal about feminism, then launched into a lengthy and extremely interesting rebuttal to Mike, distinguishing a number of different schools of feminist thought, and suggesting that the novel might be read as feminist by one or another of those schools, but not by yet a third or fourth.  Mike Thelwell, who disliked feminist literary theory as much as he disliked every other school of literary theory, stood fast, insisting that there was no way that the novel could be construed as feminist.

The next class period, the students came in, having read a new book and having prepared a new paper.  As soon as we were convened, Mike began to speak in his characteristically courteous and somewhat orotund fashion.;  "You will recall," he said, "that my esteemed colleague, Professor Bracey, and I had a disagreement when last we met about whether Margaret Walker's novel, Jubilee, could be construed as a feminist work.  I said that it could not, and Professor Bracey mistakenly argued that it could.  I was quite persuaded that I was correct, but I did not wish to leave my judgment thus unsubstantiated, so after the class ended, I went home and I called Miss Walker.  We had a very pleasant conversation, during which I asked her whether her novel could be construed as feminist, and she assured me that it could not."

John exploded at this, saying that every literary critic knew the author was the last person you wanted to ask about the proper interpretation of a piece of fiction, and pointing out that a collection of Mitchell's short stories had been published by a feminist press [a fact of which everyone in the room save John was, of course, ignorant.]  At that point, the rest of us intervened and suggested that we start discussing the book assigned for that day.  But I am very much afraid that the students came away from the experience thinking that in graduate school, when one had a disagreement about the meaning of a text, the normal thing to do was to call up the author, with whom one was, of course, good friends.”

 

But that still leaves us with the question whether a philosophical text can present a central argument that the author is unaware of or unprepared to acknowledge, and in the case of Kant, furthermore, it would unfortunately be impossible to call him up and ask. 

 

All my life, I have been convinced that the answer to the question is “yes” in the case of great philosophers but “no” with respect to the rest of us. Why do I believe that? My reason is this. I think that great thinkers, when they are struggling with questions of great complexity and importance, sometimes see more deeply into an issue than they can say. Seized by this powerful insight, they are unwilling to relinquish it for a less profound but more clearly and easily explainable superficial argument, and so they cling to the insight and preserve it in some form in their writing, even while they may refuse to acknowledge the fully revolutionary character of what they have managed dimly to grasp. It is for we who come after them to grapple with their texts, to wrestle with them all night and not release them until we have been blessed by them, as the Good Book says.

 

In cases like this, of which there are a number but not a great number, it is inevitable that different readers struggling with the text will reconstruct that text in different and incompatible ways so that, just as there are a number of different legitimate ways of performing the same great violin concerto or string quartet, so there are number of legitimate ways of reading a great text.

 

Of course, it is possible that this is merely what the psychoanalysts call rationalization. I recall one day on the analytic couch that I was talking about this very subject and my struggle to find and explicate the argument in the Critique of Pure Reason.  My analyst noted that although I claimed that Kant was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that the Critique was his greatest work, I was also saying that without my interpretation of it, no one would truly understand what it was saying.  Could this possibly have anything to do with my ambivalent feelings about my father?  Well, I have had two intellectual father–figures in my life, Kant and Marx, and with regard to each of them I have claimed to be able to find and to state clearly a great argument that they placed in their greatest works but were unable to expound with the clarity that I brought to the subject.

 

My analyst may have had a point.