Criticism as Perspicuous Representation: Wittgenstein, Critical Reasons, and the Cognitive Value of Literature

Abstract

Two debates in the analytic philosophy of literature have run in parallel: one asks how literary criticism can be rational when critical reasons neither entail nor inductively support the readings they back (Isenberg, Sibley); the other asks whether literature has cognitive value, and is stalled on a dilemma, since extractable truths are banal and non-trivial ones unevidenced (Stolnitz, Lamarque and Olsen, Currie). This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing dissolve both problems jointly, and that each dissolution is incomplete without the other. Criticism, I argue, is not proto-theory but the production of perspicuous representations: arrangements of what already lies open to view, assembled reminders whose characteristic success is the dawning of an aspect rather than assent to a conclusion. Correspondingly, the literature’s cognitive yield is aspectual rather than propositional: a transformation of perception and an enriched responsiveness to situations, motives, and words, in which meaning is not extracted from the text but lived in the reader’s altered practice. Criticism is the institutionalized practice by which such dawning is occasioned, disciplined, and transmitted (the care of a shared sensibility), and the aspectual character of literary understanding explains why critical reasoning must take the reminder-assembling form it does. The two debates are two descriptions of one practice, sustained by public criteria within forms of life. The account is developed through the critical history of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” and defended against the objections of quietism, interpretive relativism, and empirical skepticism.