INTRODUCTION

There is much to be learned from Tolstoys false theorizing about how a work of

art conveys a feeling.

Wittgenstein1

One could call Schopenhauer a quite crude mind. I.e. He does have refinement,

but at a certain level this suddenly comes to an end & he is as crude as the crudest.

Where real depth starts, his finishes.

One might say of Schopenhauer: he never takes stock of himself.

Wittgenstein2

1. While the novels of his antipodal Doppelgnger Dostoevsky enjoyed preeminence

among philosophers inclined toward Existentialism, Tolstoys artistic prose and its

unmatched psychological realism have often served as true north for philosophers writing

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value, revised edition, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1998), 67. 2 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 41.

on the nature of mind, emotions, moral psychology and value theory.3 Indeed, one

contemporary philosopher has confessed of Anna Karenina that [s]ome of us come away

from the book with the sense that there is at least as much to learn from Tolstoy about

how we should live as can be learnt from Aristotle or from Kant. If this is right,

philosophy will be poorer if philosophers stay away in their professional compartment

and ignore Tolstoy and other novelists.4 One philosopher who did not ignore Tolstoy is

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously admitted to having read few thinkers: chiefly Frege,

Russell, and Schopenhauer.5 Recent scholarship has concluded that Tolstoy should be

added to this narrow pantheon. Ray Monk writes of the young Wittgensteins fascination

with Tolstoy's A Brief Exegesis of the Gospel: It became for him a kind of talisman: he

carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of

it by heart If you are acquainted with it, he later told a friend, then you cannot

3 On Dostoevky in the context of Existentialism, see Walter Kaufman, Existentialism

from Doestoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1956) and George Steiner,

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1959).

Philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who have drawn on Tolstoy for

psychological insights include Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) and Graham Oddie, Value, Reality, and Desire (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2005). The problem of the paradox of fiction (why we feel apparently genuine emotions regarding fictional characters whom we know do not exist) was

famously motivated by consideration of Anna Karenina in Colin Radford and Michael

Weston, How Can We be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 49 (1975): 67-93. 4 Jonathan Glover, Anna Karenina and Moral Philosophy, in Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin, ed. Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2000), 159. Glover emphasizes Tolstoys advocacy of the role of moral emotions together with moral beliefs in practical reasoning, and likens that role to a kind

of perception. 5 In 1931 Wittgenstein compiled a list of influences on his thinking: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16.

imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.6 And several memoirs by colleagues

attest to his enthusiasm for Tolstoys later writings in general, including the treatise What

is Art?, with some conclusions of which, Engelmann reports, Wittgenstein said he

agreed.7 While Tolstoys importance for Wittgenstein has been acknowledged in the

literature, most often that importance is relegated to Wittgensteins supposed emulation

of Tolstoy in his personal life and outlook. Representative of this view is Davison, who

claims that [t]he root of Tolstoys appeal for Wittgenstein lies in an essential affinity of

character and spirit which is reflected in some biographical similarities,8 such

similarities including teaching in rural schools, forsaking family fortunes for a life of

simplicity, and so on. While these biographical similarities are compelling (indeed, both

6 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), 115-

116. Other examples: Tolstoy was as much in his thoughts as Frege (Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgensteins Vienna [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973], 200); in a letter of 1912 to Russell: I have just read Hadji Murat by Tolstoy! Have you read it? If not, you ought to for it is wonderful (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa, ed. Brian McGuinness

and G. H. von Wright [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995], 20); F. R. Leavis recalls that Wittgenstein knew A Christmas Carol practically by heart, and the book is, in fact,

placed by Tolstoy in his treatise What is Art? in the very highest category of art flowing from the love of God (Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 569); [Wittgenstein] went on to recommend Tolstoy, and encouraged me to read the Twenty Three Tales; and when I had

bought a copy he marked those which he thought most important. These were What Men

Live By; The Two Old Men; The Three Hermits, and How Much Land Does A Man

Need?. There you have the essence of Christianity! he said (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Oxford: Blackwell, 1981], 87-88). 7 Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1967], 91) does not tell us which of Tolstoys conclusions Wittgenstein had in mind. For good summaries of the recorded evidence, see E. B. Greenwood,

Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer: Some Connections, in Tolstoi and Britain, ed. W. Gareth Jones (Oxford/Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1995), 239-249, and R. M. Davison,

Wittgenstein and Tolstoy, in Wittgenstein and his Impact on Contemporary Thought, ed. E. Leinfellner, W. Leinfellner, H. Berghel and A. Hbner (Vienna: Hlder, Pichler,

Tempsky, 1978), 50-53. 8 Davison, Wittgenstein and Tolstoy, 51.

Tolstoy and Wittgenstein are often viewed as leading somewhat saintly lives9), I think

that Tolstoys artistic and essayistic texts his images, ideas and thoughts are far more

deeply implicated in Wittgensteins thought than has hitherto been acknowledged.10 In

this book I endeavor to show how a certain line of reasoning in Wittgenstein can be seen

to be responding to problems mooted in Tolstoys texts. In so doing I will show how

Wittgenstein can elucidate Tolstoy, help us understand his theory of art and help us see

how it ultimately fails. Moreover, enlisting further philosophical insights by Wittgenstein,

I will develop a revisionary account of Tolstoys idea of aesthetic expression that, I hope,

will merit renewed consideration.

2. My reading of Tolstoy via Wittgenstein, however, also has a second aim.

Deconstruction, based on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, has profoundly influenced

literary theory and several generations of scholars in a wide variety of fields. While some

scholars have argued for apparent affinities between Derridas semiological critique of

meaning and Wittgensteins (later) philosophy, I join others who see that Wittgenstein

9 The publisher Ludwig von Ficker describes the impression he had on first meeting

Wittgenstein as ein Bild ergreifender Einsamkeit auf den ersten Blick (an Aljoscha etwa oder Frst Myschkin be Dostoevski erinnernd), in his Rilke und der unbekannte Freund, Der Brenner 18 (1954), 236. 10 The concluding chapter of Gary Saul Morsons Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) invokes Aristotelian phronsis

and several tantalizing quotations from both early and late Wittgenstein to support his

characterization of the novel as prosaic, where [a]ll realist works, by definition, contain many particularities and ordinary events; prosaic novels regard such events as the

locus of value Prosaic novels redefine heroism as the right kind of ordinary living and sainthood as small acts of thoughtfulness that are barely perceived (28-9). Since Wittgenstein seeks to return metaphysical speculation to the everyday, and acknowledges

the limitations of language, Morson concludes: it is as if Wittgenstein had set himself the task of arriving at Tolstoys conclusions by a different route. Each work can serve as a gloss on the other (210). One of the goals of this study is to vindicate and make precise this supposition through careful analysis, exposition and argument.

can offer a powerful rebuttal to deconstructive arguments for meaning skepticism.11 In

the first chapter I lay out how such a Wittgensteinian rebuttal might look, drawing on its

key move, the claim that there are instances of understanding that do not require an act of

interpretation qua justification. That claim recurs in Tolstoys later writings, literary and

essayistic, and tracing it out in some detail in subsequent chapters reveals new insights

into some of Tolstoys best known writings: Anna Karenina, What is Art?, and The

Kreutzer Sonata. We will also come to see how Tolstoys study of Schopenhauers

philosophy raised a problem for his conception of immediate understanding in his

aesthetic theory, and how, in trying to resolve it, he fell behind his own best insights. This

in turn suggests how a revised aesthetic theory, modified in accordance with

Wittgensteins philosophy including his implicit criticism of Tolstoy, might be worth our

renewed attention today. The final chapters of the book draw on lessons learned in

previous chapters in order to situate a modified Tolstoyan aesthetic expressivism in the

contexts of todays vigorous debate in philosophy of mind surrounding the philosophy of

11 Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1989) draws on Cavells Wittgenstein to respond to a deconstructive version of other-minds skepticism. John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007) draws on the later Wittgensteins account of criteria and standards of representation (like the Paris meter stick) to argue that literature is neither

mimetically referential nor linguistically self-referential (as some adherents of

deconstruction suggest), but rather that it reveals and imaginatively considers those

standards of representation. Students of Wittgenstein will note that while I mainly draw

on the later Wittgensteins thoughts on psychological concepts, expression, and meaning, I also deploy arguments and views that are continuous, or at least implicitly consistent,

between the early and the later Wittgenstein, e.g., skepticism as a distinct failure in

ordinary understanding, anti-Cartesianism, values as conditions of a signifying practice,

and so on. On the relation between Wittgensteins early and later philosophy, see David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgensteins Philosophy, two vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

emotions in general and of moral emotions in particular, and the equally lively debate in

philosophical aesthetics surrounding the nature of aesthetic expression.

3. This book is thus an extended essay and a reconstruction in several senses. First, it is a

rational reconstruction of Tolstoys thought, drawing on various texts he wrote in his later

years. My general claim here is not that I am postivistically recreating what Tolstoy was

thinking when he put pen to paper. Rather I am fashioning, from the materials of his texts

and my understanding of Wittgenstein, a rationally compelling account I believe his texts

can suggest to us. This endeavor in rational reconstruction is guided by the principle of

charity towards Tolstoys writings: trying to make sense out of them with a view to the

reasonableness, coherence and consistency of their author.12

Second, the first chapter is a rational reconstruction of two arguments by Derrida,

which I lay alongside a similar argument by Saul Kripke in his influential reading of

central passages in Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. By construing Derridas

arguments in this context, I hope to bring out how Wittgenstein offers a telling refutation

to them. Admirers of Derrida might claim that I have twisted the master to suit my

purposes; my response is to request the same principle of charity that I bring to my

readings.

12 The expression rational reconstruction appeared in Jrgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon

Books, 1979), to mean making explicit and theoretically systematizing the implicitly

known presuppositions of communicative discourse. My aim is somewhat similar but

applied to the discourse (literary and essayistic) of late Tolstoy. The principle of charity,

coined by Neil L. Wilson and adopted by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson,

constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality in the subjects sayings. For an overview see Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1994), from which this quote, p. 62.

Lastly, if I can show how to revise Tolstoys aesthetic expressivism, then such a

revised aesthetic theory would constitute a qualified reconstruction of Tolstoy in answer

to Derrida-inspired deconstruction. Moreover, elaborating that reconstruction in the light

of Wittgensteinian perspectives in contemporary debates surrounding emotions and

aesthetic expression enhances its plausibility.

Plan of the Book

In Chapter One I introduce the central line of inquiry through a critical

presentation of what could be considered a platitude in contemporary literary theory: that

any act of understanding (of a text, of spoken words, of a person) requires an act of

interpretation qua justification. I call this platitude the interpretivist assumption. What

often follows this assumption is the conclusion of meaning skepticism, either in an

epistemological vein (we can never be certain of having correctly or conclusively

understood an expressions determinate meaning) or a metaphysical vein (there is no such

thing as determinate meaning). I juxtapose arguments for this conclusion by Saul Kripke

in his reading of Wittgenstein and by Jacques Derrida, and then show how their

arguments for meaning skepticism can be construed as versions of one horn of a general

dilemma (whose other horn is meaning platonism) that issues once the interpretivist

assumption has been made, by way of an alternative reading of Wittgenstein indebted to

John McDowell. This alternative reading holds against the Cartesianism of the

interpretivist assumption that there are instances of understanding that are not acts of

interpretation, where ones understanding is immediate, non-inferential, and without

recourse to what could be called a justification in any robust sense.

In Chapter Two I turn to Tolstoy at the time of his spiritual crisis and locate a

similar notion of immediate, non-interpretive understanding at work in his novel Anna

Karenina, specifically functioning within a larger frame of his avatar Levins skepticism

about the meaning of life. I here introduce a few thoughts from Wittgenstein in order to

tease out how skepticism, understanding and the will may be related in Tolstoys novel.

In Chapter Three I interpret Tolstoys major treatise on aesthetics, What is Art? to

show how he develops this notion of immediate understanding into a central concept in

his expressivist aesthetic theory: a successful work of art will infect immediately and

universally its recipients with a distinct feeling, and a good work of art will convey the

right types of feelings, namely those that foster either Christian brotherhood or universal

communion.

In Chapter Four I explore how Schopenhauers ethical and aesthetic theories

might inform Tolstoys later writings. In doing so I unfold what I call the Nietzschean

threat implicit in this model of ethico-aesthetic understanding, based on an interpretation

of Schopenhauers theory of the influence of music together with his theory of action and

moral psychology. I conclude by showing how Tolstoys theory in What is Art? appears

to be susceptible to this threat.

In Chapter Five I turn to the novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy wrote

concomitantly with What is Art?. I read the novella as Tolstoys attempt to work out

precisely the Nietzschean danger, that is, as an obstacle to the ethical ambitions Tolstoy

has for his aesthetic theory. Here again some thoughts on ethics by Wittgenstein,

themselves likely derived from his study of Schopenhauer, inform my discussion. I then

return to the last chapter of What is Art? and suggest that it was added to the treatise in an

attempt by Tolstoy to avert the Nietzschean threat he had come to realize inhabited his

aesthetic theory and its ethical aspirations. In order to guarantee the ethical aims of his

aesthetic theory Tolstoy uses precisely the metaphor of rules as rails that he had criticized

so savagely in his earlier writings, and the same metaphor that Wittgenstein famously

uses to trope meaning platonism. In so doing we see that Tolstoy ultimately falls behind

his best insights.

The final three chapters outline a reconstruction of Tolstoys theory sufficient to

constitute a viable alternative to interpretist accounts of aesthetic understanding that

derive from Derridean principles. Such a reconstruction must negotiate three areas of

vigorous debate: current controversies in the philosophy of emotions in general, and of

moral emotions in particular, and debates about the nature of aesthetic expressivism.

Chapter Six identifies constraints on the ontology and epistemology of emotions from my

earlier interpretations of Tolstoys writings, and argues that a conception of central

emotions as a sui generis amalgam of cognitive, conative and affective dimensions best

fulfills those constraints. This view of emotions is defended against rival theories

including non-cognitive affect theory, which rest on causal accounts that cannot

incorporate the intentionality and normativity of moral emotions.

Chapter Seven extends the examination of emotions to specifically moral

emotions, and demonstrates that the amalgam account resolves a fundamental tension in

metaethics between moral judgment as cognitive belief on the one hand, and motivating

desire on the other. The chapter also argues that a sensibility theory of moral emotions

best fulfills the epistemological constraint, as opposed to a purely causal-dispositional

account or an overly cognitive inferentialist account. Lastly, the chapter provides an

account of an individuals development of the cognitive dimension of moral emotions

sufficient to explain how aesthetic experience might contribute to ones moral upbringing.

Chapter Eight locates a version of the causal-normative distinction within various

theories in philosophical aesthetics surrounding the emotional expressiveness of artworks.

Surprisingly, these debates reproduce some of the positions that were identified and

evaluated in Chapter One regarding meaning skepticism, so that it is possible to discern a

theoretical account of an artworks expression of emotion that parallels the account given

of meaning and understanding at the outset of this study. In this way I intend to show that

Tolstoys theory, suitably reconstructed and developed, constitutes a viable position

within these debates today. The books Conclusion unifies the arguments of the previous

chapters in order to offer just such an account of aesthetic expressivism.

A Note on Texts, Translations, and Typographical Conventions:

Whenever possible currently available English translations of the works discussed

have been consulted and cited. English translations of Tolstoys works have been

checked against the Jubilee edition of his works,13 and those of Schopenhauer and

13 L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe

izdatelstvo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928-1958).

Wittgenstein against their respective collected works.14 Unless otherwise noted, all

translations are my own.

In keeping with current philosophical conventions, reference to words will be

made using quotation marks, while concepts will be indicated by underlining. Thus fear

refers to the word, while fear refers to the concept.

14 Arthur Schopenhauer, Smtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984).