One and the Same?

Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth

Robert Eaglestone
English, Royal Holloway, University of London
Abstract The aim of this article is to come to terms with the implications of Witt-
gensteins remark that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. Arguing that
ethics, truth, and aesthetics have been implicitly or explicitly part of literary dis-
course for many years, despite being constantly disavowed, I suggest that the recent
movement called the New Aestheticism can contribute much to understanding the
relationship between ethics and literature. The article discusses Heideggers concept
of aletheiaand correlations in Wittgensteinand its relation to art. I then suggest
that this, in conjunction with an understanding of metaphysical inquiry as ethical,
oers a deeper and as yet unexplored sense of ethics and literature as an expres-
sion of truth. This sense of truth contrasts with what I take to be the two wings of
recent ethical criticism roughly, a more narrative-based neo-Aristotelian wing
and a more deconstructive wing, and brings to light a shared presuppositioninboth
wings: that a literary text oers a certain sort of positivist knowledge. This means
that neither wing comes to terms with the world revealing aspect of literature
and the ways in which ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6..:
I have puzzled over this remark for a long time: the current debate over
the relationship between ethics and literature has led me to think about it
again with the hope of trying to nd what is at the heart of these debates.
Poetics Today .: Winter .oo,. Copyright .oo by the Forter Institute for Foetics and
Semiotics.
596 Poetics Today 25:4
Contemporary accounts of the relationship between ethics and literature
from the neo-Aristotelian work of Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth to
the narrative-centered work of AdamZachary Newton, to theWittgenstein-
inuenced thought of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, to the decon-
structive approaches oered by J. Hillis Miller and the rigorous work of
Dominic Rainsfordare wide-ranging and sophisticated.
1
Yet they do not
seem to me to have reached the core of the matter, this being one and the
same that Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests. I suggest that this is because we
already think of the two as being divided ethics and literature,, though, in
the work of Martin Heidegger and perhaps Wittgenstein, there are sugges-
tions that this view of the two as divided is an error. In this article, I suggest
that by thinking through the relationship between ethics, literature, and
truth it is possible to envisage a way of thinking that does more justice to
Wittgensteins insight and more fully reects a sense of what is at stake in
ethics and literature.
As an introduction, however, I want to make some general points to ori-
ent the later discussion. Eirstly, while many critics have made the claim
that ethics had disappeared from critical discourse see, e.g., Farker :qq:
.; Schwarz .oo:: q, and is now returning, I would suggest that all major
debates in the humanities in the last forty years or so have been explicitly or
implicitly about ethics. Indeed, debates in literary studies over, say, value
or the canon or the politics of representation are, at base, about ethics and
moral commitments.
Secondly, I would argue that ideas about truth and how it is to be under-
stood have also been central to the major debates in the humanities in
general and in literary studies in particular. This is primarily because, as
Donald Davidson :qqq: oq, argues, truth is one of the most elementary
concepts we have: indeed, without a sense of truth we would have no con-
cepts at all. Any discussion of means, ends, values, representation, and so
on relies on in some way or is involved with ideas about truth and truth-
fulness. And of course, all the debates in literary studies between, speak-
ing roughly, postmodernists and traditionalists turn on issues of truth.
However, this importance seems to me to be often overlooked because it
is generally unacknowledged. Truth is constantly invokedit cannot but
bethoughwe do not understand fully what it is or evenhowwe are reusing
it: buried deep in the heart of many debates, it is outside philosophy, rarely
explicitly the object of reection. This is why, I suggest, that when in dia-
logue, the participants in these debates often seem like ships passing in
the night, as if they have missed each others meaning entirely: they have
:. A full bibliography of this subeld would be too long: useful summaries of the debates to
date can be found in Garber et al. .ooo and Davis and Womack .oo:.
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 597
been unclear about the ways in which they have been referring to or rely-
ing on dierent concepts of truth. In response, then, I want to suggest that
much in these debates can be claried by developing or foregrounding some
rough account of how truth works in relation to literary texts. That is, if
implicit, unstated, and conicting ideas about the nature of truth, unreec-
tively assumed, lie at the heart of the major debates in the humanities, then
it seems to me to be important to foreground these ideas, if only to make
clear what dierent positions are, in essence, disagreeing about.
Thirdly, in literary studies at least, I suggest that the aesthetic, broadly
understood, also plays a central and unavoidable role. While less happy
than their professional forebears to make explicit prescriptive judgments
about texts, contemporary literary critics can never escape the question of
literary or aesthetic value, if only, and most basically, at the level of why
choose to write about or teach this text rather than that one` Why, from
:q.., James Joyces Ulysses rather than Edgar Rice Burroughss The Chessmen
of Mars or, indeed, vice versa,` There might be reasons to value The Chess-
men of Mars that are dierent from the reasons for which Ulysses is valued,
but these reasons are still to do with value, with selection. If we had no belief
in some form of value, we would teach and study, texts at random. Even
a strict historicist makes value distinctions based on which texts he or she
considers are most useful in illuminating a historical period., This is not to
argue, of course, that texts survive, are taught, are republishedare can-
onized, in shortpurely for their aesthetic value: indeed, the response to
this incorrect claim that texts survive and are valued purely for aesthetic
reasons, began the canon wars in literary studies. But the converse claim
texts have no aesthetic value, is not the case either.
To say that ethics, truth, and aesthetic value are implicitly or explicitly
unavoidable in discussions about literature is not necessarily to return to
an ArnoldLeavis position; nor is it a return to a sort of literary human-
ism advanced by many recent thinkers on the subject outlined in, say,
Schwarz :qqq and .oo:,. In fact, this eortto think about the relationship
between ethics, truth, and art in a way which seems to reect Wittgensteins
remarklies at the heart of the recent philosophical and literary critical
movement called the NewAestheticism, which takes its intellectual inspi-
ration from the German hermeneutic tradition.
The perhaps rather unhappy term New Aestheticism was coined by David
Beech and John Roberts in Spectres of the Aesthetic, a :qq6 article in
New Left Review.
2
Beech and Roberts :qq6: :o, attacked a fairly disparate
number of white male thinkers including Andrew Bowie and J. M. Bern-
.. It is reprinted, with additional articles and responses, in their edited volume, The Philistine
Controversy .oo.,. A response to this is The New Aestheticism Joughin and Malpas .oo,.
598 Poetics Today 25:4
stein, because, in Beech and Roberts view, they did not view aesthetics
as re-enacting social contradictions but rather took the paradox of the
aesthetic as the starting point for the aesthetic grounding of ethics. This
meant that by stressing a certain aspect of the experience of art, the new
writing on aesthetics not only suppresses the critique of the categories
of art that have occurred this century, but also suppresses art as a practi-
cal category of living and contested culture ibid.: :o.,. In no small part,
this debate circles around the signicance and importance of art in general,
and great art in particular, for the left. Both Bowie and Bernstein wrote
replies Bernstein :qq;; Bowie :qq;a,. My aim here is not to explore this
debate in detail nor to argue for or against the philistine or for the New
Aestheticism but rather to draw out from this debate what seems to be the
signicance for debates about ethics and literature.
The central claim of the New Aestheticism is about the relationship
between art and truth and about the meaning of this relationship: this is the
core of both Bernsteins The Fate of Art :qq., and Bowies From Romanticism
to Critical Theory :qq;b,. However, in this context, truth is not to be under-
stood as what Hilary Futnam :q8:: :.6, calls Metaphysical realism: the
belief that truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between
words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things, the agree-
ment or correspondence of a judgment, assertion, or proposition with its
object. Bowie :qq;b: :66, writes that
the philosophical question of truth can either become reduced to the attempt to
give an adequate explanation of how it is we can generate valid evidence |for
testable facts and theories about human or nonhuman nature| . . . or it becomes
a location of ways of thinking which have no obvious place in a world where cal-
culability and pragmatic success increasingly dominate public discourse about
truth . . . |a location which| confronts us with the deepest questions about our
self-understanding.
And it is this latter noninstrumental location of truthand its relation to
art and our self-understandingwhich interests the New Aestheticism.
Indeed, this dierent understanding of truth aims to pick up on the sense
that an artwork seems to be more truthful than empirical truth Bernstein
:qq.: :., and on what Bowie .oo.: :;o, calls the unique world-disclosing
capacity of high culture.
There is a range of ways to understand this concept of truth, which stems
broadly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy: it is
central to Theodor Adornos work, for example. However, as even those
who are no friends of Heidegger may admit, it is Heideggers characteriza-
tion of this understanding of truth that is the most clear and potent, and it is
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 599
on Heideggers account that I will focus. Heideggers argument on truth is
well known, and I have discussed it elsewhere Eaglestone .oo,. It is based
on his Heidegger :q6.: ..6, realization that assertion
is not the primary locus of truth. On the contrary, whether as a mode in which
uncoveredness is appropriated as uncovering or as a way of Being-in-the-World,
assertion is grounded in Daseins uncovering, or rather in its disclosedness. The
most primordial truth is the locus of assertion; it is the ontological condition for
the possibility that assertions can either be true or falsethat they may uncover
or cover things up.
What Heidegger argues here is that how we normally think of truththe
correspondence between a proposition or assertion and a state of aairs it
is raining outside and the rain beyond the window,itself already depends
on there being a world revealed the ontological conditions, in which such
statements can occur or make sense, and so the proposition is not a pri-
mordial sense of truth. Wittgenstein :q;: ., has an analogous insight
in the Tractatus: .o6 A proposition can be true or false only in virtue of
being a picture of reality. He goes on to discuss the nature of negation
that is, whether or not negative as well as positive propositions correspond
with reality. He concludes that nothing in reality corresponds to the sign
- and that
.o6 Every proposition must already have a sense: it cannot be given a sense
by armation. Indeed, its sense is just what is armed. And the same applies to
negation, etc. Ibid.: ..,
That is, the sense of a proposition lies beforethat is, groundsits truth
or falsity. If the assertion or proposition is the sentence the dog is brown
while the propositional truth could be true or false either the dog is brown
or not,, the sense of the proposition that we live in a world where there
are dogs, and we agree that there are dogs, and that they inescapably have
certain colors which are matters of interest to us, and so on,, its ontological
condition, preexists the proposition. Likewise, in order to be able to say,
p is true or false,, I must have determined in what circumstances I call
p true, and in so doing I determine the sense of the proposition ibid.: .,.
Heideggers less clear, example is the picture hanging askewon the wall:
to adjust this picture, we already have to be in relation with it, to knowwhat
hanging means, what being askew and straight are, to know that pictures
are supposed to be hung straight, and so on, before we could understand
the truth or falsity of an assertion suggesting that it is askew. In this way,
discussions of truth move from the qualities of a proposition or assertion
to thinking about the ways in which a world, and ourselves in and of that
600 Poetics Today 25:4
world, appear or are revealed. It is this, being knowingly in relation to what
grounds the sense of a proposition, that Heidegger calls aletheia, uncov-
ering. The New Aestheticism aims to foreground this sense of uncover-
ing, this other, non- or pre-propositional sense of truthwhich Heidegger
explains most clearly but which underlies a whole tradition of hermeneutic
philosophyand its aesthetic and political importance as well as its poten-
tial dangers.
The question of the relationship between this conception of truth and
literature is central: it is the subject of Heideggers On the Origin of the
Work of Art. Here, he argues that artworks do not simply represent reality
as assertions do although they also do this,. More centrally and primor-
dially, they open up or uncover the world. AGreek temple opens a world,
an artwork transforms our accustomed ties to the world Heidegger :q;::
66,. Art is able to break open an open place, in whose openness every-
thing is other than usual ibid.: ;., because of its nature as what Heidegger
names poetry. It is poetry because language is the paradigm of how all
art works, since language alone brings what is, as something that is, into
the Open for the rst time ibid.: ;,. Thus, for Heidegger ibid.: ;8,, the
nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of
truth. . . . Art lets truth originate. It seems to me that Heidegger is getting
at two ideas or, rather, at one idea from two sides or directions. The rst
is the widely known idea that art defamiliarizesand so draws attention
tothe nature of things. Second, these things are already there, they under-
lie and construct who and how we are: artpoetry, foundinglyshapes or
discloses our world, drawing attention fromthe ordinary and particular to
that which lets the ordinary and particular have their peculiar shape and
meaning Bernstein :qq.: 88,: that is, the world.
It is fair to ask how this aletheia cashes out. The answer is not some
general category not the mythical literary-ness, the essence of literature,
for example, or propositional assertion. What actually is revealed, for Hei-
degger, is not a content in a simple sense, but the world which both shapes
and sets the frame for a content. The world unveiled will vary from work
to work: the world of a Greek temple is not the world of an Henri Matisse
painting nor the world of Finnegans Wake, The Satanic Verses, or War and
Peace. Artworks in the broadest sense, then, disclose or give us that world in
which we live as a concrete, determinate, and specic place, revealed and
enframed by those artworks.What is revealed is contingent: for example, we
would not think in precisely the same way about the terrors and violence of
colonial power had it not been for Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, A Grain
of Rice, and The Life and Times of Michael K. Likewise, Jonathan Bate, in The
Song of the Earth .ooo,, argues that it is WilliamWordsworths poetry which
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 601
reveals and begins a sense of how the natural world isor was, perhaps
for us.
It is important to note that it is, in part, this thick and originary disclo-
sure of a world which makes literary and other cultural texts the source of
such ferocious andthough it may not seem like it sometimesimportant
debates. Because we now, inhabit multiple and often conicting worlds, it
is the artworks that reveal to us who and howwe are, what these worlds are,
and to some extent, what our potentialities for being are. Of course, it is
often not as simple as artworks, which are already a historical and con-
structed category through which we in the West analyze objects: dierent
cultures reveal themselves in dierent ways, which is why to ask for, say,
the Zulu War and Peace is foolish., Debates about texts are not only about
identity, but also about those things on which identity rests, about how the
world is revealed to us and how we are in it.
Joanna Hodge :qq, develops this argument still further when she ex-
plores howtruthinthis sense andethics occur together inHeideggers work.
Eor Heidegger, once the thinking has been divided into categories or elds,
it is suspect. Even such terms as logic, ethics, physics, begin to our-
ish only when original thinking comes to an end, he writes in the Letter
on Humanism :qq: .:q,. In this light, Hodge suggests that Heideggers
work of fundamental ontology is also a work of originary ethics. Consider
the Letter on Humanism again:
If the name ethics, in keeping with the basic meaning of the word thos should
now say that ethics ponders the abode of man, then that thinking which thinks
the truth of Being as the primordial element of man, as one who ek-sists |sic|, is
in itself the original ethics. Ibid.: .8,
Hodge thus argues that the work of Being and Time is both about ethics and
about epistemology because it aims to understand what these are, and how
they are understood, before they are split up and divided by philosophy into
separate realms of enquiry. Indeed, she :qq: .o., argues that Being and
Time is an ethical inquiry because Heideggers fundamental ontology, as
a description of what it is to be human, is an ethics in the wider . . . sense,
in which there is an unavoidable connection between ethical and meta-
physical enquiry. Hodge is trying to stress how, for Heidegger, all these
fundamental areas of inquiry the ethical, the epistemological, the meta-
physical, the aesthetic, share a common ground, are one and the same.
How does this visionof ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics as aletheia,
as onet into contemporary discussions of ethics and literature` As a
range of publicationsincluding this special issueshow, the literary criti-
cal establishment has returned to ethics as an explicit subject although, as I
602 Poetics Today 25:4
suggested, it never really left it as an implicit one,. However, the argument
outlined above about the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and truth
seems to cast useful light on much of the work in this eld.
There seem to be, very roughly, two broad wings of ethical criticism.
One concentrates on the importance of narrative and the ways in which it
shapes and informs our lives and might be characterized broadly, as neo-
Aristotelian. The other, in contrast, focuses on how narratives, and texts
in general, are interpreted or misinterpreted and might be again broadly,
characterized as deconstructive. I will argue that both wings presuppose
ideas about truth and about the relationship between truth and literature:
moreover, the discussion of truth as aletheia and its relation to ethics seems
usefully to advance these positions.
The rst wing is the position championed by critics and thinkers like
Wayne Booth :q88,, Martha Nussbaum e.g., :qqo,, and more recently,
though with signicant nuances stemming from her intellectual debt to
HannahArendt, Adriana Caverero .ooo,.They argue that literary texts are
an eective and acute form of moral reasoning and as such can be used
to heighten our ethical awareness. This is because, they argue, literary texts
have patterns of possibilityof choice and circumstance, and the inter-
action between choice and circumstancethat turn up in human lives with
such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities Nuss-
baum:qqo: :;:,.This, in turn, relies on the argument that, as AdamNewton
:qq: ., puts it, narrative literature shares structures and assumptions
with other forms of social understanding. In these versions, the narrative
content including, often, the form as content, adds to our lives, reects our
lives, and by our thinking through, or living through, these texts, we are
forcefully reminded of our ethical responsibilities.
There seemto be three interlinked problems with this approach. In brief,
rst, it takes up a strong mimeticist position, suggesting that we and art
are, in deep ways, the samethat art refers directly to our experience and
not for example, to other art. Of course, this is the illusion created or
better, perhaps, assumed, by the traditional view of the realist novels of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, it is not clear how their work
would apply to other literary forms the lyric poem, for example,, writing
from other periods the Gawain-Foet, Shakespeare,, or literary genres like
testimony Equiano, Levi,. In addition, this view of realism accepts that
realism is what some of its critics claim it to be, a form that writesor
claims to writein an unmediated way about reality. In fact, as works on
realism have argued, no realist novelists
were deluded into believing that they were in fact oering an unmediated
reality. . . . Despite its appearance of solidity, realism implies a fundamental
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 603
unease about self, society and art. . . . Realists take upon themselves a special
role as mediator, and assume self-consciously a moral burden that takes a spe-
cial form: their responsibility is to a reality that increasingly seems unname-
able . . . . |Ear from a| solidly self-satised vision based in a misguided objec-
tivity and faith in representation . . . |realism is a| highly self-conscious attempt
to explore or create a new reality. Its massive self condence implied a radical
doubt, its strategies of truthtelling a profound self-consciousness. Levine :q8::
8, :., .o,
The second problem with the neo-Aristotelian approach is that, in the
words of Leo Bersani :qq6: .,, this way of asking us to consider art as a cor-
rection of life leads to a misreading of art as philosophy. That is, works
become sources for the exploration of ethical issues rather than autono-
mous artworks: precisely what makes themsuch good examples their inex-
tricable aesthetic complexity, is necessarily reduced in the act of reading
them. In Nussbaums reading of The Golden Bowl, for example, attention is
drawn to the moral power to correct ones vision of the world rather than
to the artwork and response to it as a whole. As I have suggested elsewhere
Eaglestone :qq;,, the consequence of this is that the novel, as a complex
artwork, is sidelined in favor of the novel as a heuristic moral lesson. This
both leads to and stems from particular readings. Two examples: In her
reading of The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum assumes that Maggie is the char-
acter for whom the reader has the most sympathy. However, Gore Vidal,
in his introduction to the Fenguin edition, nds Amerigo, not Maggie, the
most sympathetic James :q8: ::,, which illustrates how these sorts of
moral readings can sometimes bypass the shifting nature identication and
sympathy which make up the realist novel. Again, Nussbaum takes her key
claimthat Maggie is in pursuit of moral purityfrom the lips of Eanny
Assingham, who, among other things, lies throughout the novel and admits
that she is no more than a high-class pander: what Eanny says simply can-
not be taken at face value, and Maggie can equally well and on her own
admission, be seen as selsh and acquisitive. These sorts of complexities
make claims for a moral meaning of the novel much harder to support.
The third problem is that narrative itself seems often to miss precisely
what it is trying to seize in relation to ethics. Thinkers like Nussbaum and
Cavarero want to nd, through narrative, both a unity to human life and,
so, a way of coming to terms with ethics. As Alasdair MacIntyre :q8: .:6,,
whose work parallels much of this, argues: I can only answer the ques-
tion What am I to do` if I can answer the prior question Of what story
or stories do I nd myself a part` Eor these thinkers, the story is that
which oers and constructs a rounded life, a full sense of the self and the
social.
604 Poetics Today 25:4
Yet this view seems to me to miss something essential about life. Witt-
genstein writes, in Culture and Value :qq8: e,, that when
people have died we see their life in a conciliatory light. His life looks well-
rounded through a haze. Eor him it was not well rounded however, but jagged 8
incomplete. Eor him there was no conciliation; his life is naked and wretched.
Eor Wittgenstein, there is the sense that a story of a life, told, as it were,
from the outside and seen in a conciliatory light, bringing all the aspects
of a life together, fails to express that life adequately. There is a mismatch
between narrative and life. In this respect, while it is clear that storiesand
literatureplay a signicant role, it is also clear that they fail to get at some-
thing central: the jaggedness andincompleteness of life. Adorno seems to be
getting at the same thing in the nal section of Negative Dialectics :q;: 68
;,, with the added suggestion that it is post-Holocaust modernity which
has made this rounded story of a life impossible: death and suering have
been broken out from the social, from the story of life. Of course, much
modernist and postmodernist literature has taken this incompleteness as
an inspiration. This means, in turn, that this wing of ethical criticismdoes
not really consider literature per se, but rather only a subset of the literary.
Indeed, Nussbaum .oo:: 6., herself makes this pointthough others do
notwhen she writes that she explicitly eschews . . . general claims |about
literature| . . . and I insist that my argument is conned to a narrow group
of pre-selected works, all of them novels.
Moreover, it is this sense, this mismatch between lived experience and
text, that seems to underlie the more deconstructive approaches to the
relation between literature and ethics, the other wing of the ethics and
literature debate. The relation of text and narrative to life is the focus of
Cathy Caruths Unclaimed Experience :qq6,, which can be seen as coming
from this deconstructive wing. Eollowing Faul de Man, specically his
essay The Resistance to Theory, Caruth ibid.: ;, argues that linguisti-
cally oriented theories like deconstruction do not necessarily deny refer-
ence, but rather deny the possibility of modelling the principles of reference
on those of natural law, or, we might say, of making reference like percep-
tion. That is, the relationship between narrative and life is not so simple
as the more Aristotelian-inuenced thinkers argue: to rephrase Nussbaum,
literary texts do not represent patterns of possibility that turn up in
human lives. Novels about the less-developed world by writers often called
postcolonial are not simply reports by what Gayatri C. Spivak :qqq:
ix, names while critiquing the concept, native informants. Instead, for
Caruth :qq6: ,, words or gures . . . |which| engender stories . . . in fact
emerge out of the rhetorical potential and the literary resonance of these
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 605
gures, a literary dimension that cannot be reduced to the thematic con-
tent of the text. It isnt that the texts do not refer to the world how, in fact,
could any text not refer to the world in some way`, but that the passage
from world to text is far from straightforward. To revise Newtons argu-
ment above, it seems here that narrative literature does not share structures
and assumptions with other forms of social understanding, and the job of
the critic is, in part, not to nd but to argue for or construct the complex,
particular, and multiple ways in which texts refer both to other texts and
to what one might vaguely, call life or lived experience. And it is this
precisely because the path between text and interpretation is not straight
that leads to the claims for the ethical signicance of undecidability and
interruption and the responsibility for reading, which underlies much work
in the deconstructive approach to the issue of ethics and literature. As
J. Hillis Miller .oo:: .88, argues, the reader
must act on his or her own on the basis of a reading that has no fully prescribed
basis, though the reading must try to follow as closely as possible the tracks that
James made in the snow. The reader-critic must then take responsibility for what
results from that act of retracing.
However, both of these wings, while making important points, seemto
rely on an idea that literature oers a certain sort of truth, a sort of posi-
tivist knowledge, which can oeror be made to oeraxioms or propo-
sitions that correspond, even if not in a strict way, to some form of reality.
However heuristically experienced and complex the path, the rst wing
seems very close to oering positivist assertions: a sort of the moral of the
story is . . . claim perhaps, be sympathetic,. The second wing seems
to oer a negative version of the rst, showing the impossibility of deriving
a moral from the text and then leaving us with both the experience of
undecidability and particularity and the responsibility for our ineluctable
choices. Ferhaps this amounts to a paradoxical axiom that warns do not
trust axioms: each case is dierent., In this sense, then, both wings of
the debate assume certain ideas about the sort of truth and thus the sort of
knowledge that the work of art can create. More than this, they also rely on
the idea that ethics and literature represent two dierent elds that need to
be joined rather than, following Heideggers account of thos and aletheia,
versions of the same uncovering.
Neither wing is incorrect, of course, and both have important insights
to bring to the experience of literature. Indeed, one might go so far as to
say that each wing has drawn the conclusions from the canon of texts it
chooses as central. Realist textsreaderly ones, as Roland Barthes might
saywill lead to a content- and axiom-driven ethics of literature, just as
606 Poetics Today 25:4
texts that stress their unreadabilitywriterly oneswill lead to a negative
ethics of undecidability and questioning. The matter of interest, of course,
lies in the work of critics like Miller, who nd readerly texts unreadable.,
However, and this is the crux of the problem, neither wing seems to get to
the sense of ethics or of truth that is so central to literature and art for
Heidegger and for the hermeneutic tradition from which his work comes.
Neither seems to come to terms with the world revealing aspect of lit-
erature and the way that this is alsoin the larger sense outlined above
ethical.
I have suggested that understanding the truth of art as aletheia, following
Heidegger and the dominant concerns of Romantic Fhilosophy and the
history of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy Bowie :qq;b: :6,, oers
a dierent and more profound sense of what the ethics of literature might
be: something that is, at least, not reducible to axioms or to instrumental use
even when this includes being a tool to tell us how to be better people,.
This understanding of truth also oers a connection between ethical, meta-
physical, and aesthetic enquiry. Or rather, it does not oer a connection
linking these together, but instead, it lays bare the ground in which they are
one and the same before they are, as it were, divided by forms of enquiry.
This is also why the issues of ethics, truth, and aesthetic value with which I
began are so unavoidable: because they are already inextricably the ground
of who and how we are. The way of thinking about these issues lays before
us what Bernstein :qq.: ., calls the challenge . . . to think through what
truth, morality and beauty or its primary instance: art, are when what is
denied is their categorical separation from each other.
It seems to me, then, that ethical criticismat least, as currently
formedhas not met this challenge, has not begun to think through what
it might mean to say that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. In
part, this is because we seem very attached to a certain mode of analysis
that seeks to understand an artwork as an object of productive knowledge
and that relies on one understanding of truth and not upon the idea that
an artwork is world revealing. In this sense, then, perhaps we are simply
still within the paradigm that Hans-Georg Gadamer :q8q: , identied at
the start of Truth and Method: one where the self-reection that accompa-
nied the development of the human sciences in the nineteenth century is
wholly governed by the model of the natural sciences. That is, we rely at
a deep level on methodologies and presuppositions taken from the natu-
ral sciences, and this includes the natural sciences way of understanding
truth: the correspondence of a proposition with a state of aairs. Until we
escape these and are prepared to defend a noninstrumental theory of truth,
we may nd that we cannot understand Wittgensteins remark.
Eaglestone

One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth 607
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