A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination

(review)

Rosalind Ekman

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1976, pp. 120-121 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1976.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/418820/summary

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120Philosophy and Literature

is inconsistent with recognizing its aberrant logic that one attempt to explain
it by applying classical logic to aberrant premises.
"Four times twelve 'at that rate' takes her to nineteen, which is as far as
she would expect to go" (p. 24) is not a perspicuous comment; it, like many
others, is simply unintelligible without reference to Heath's source, in this
case Gardner's Annotated Alice, to which he acknowledges his debts both for
content and format. The latter, however, is the debt of the satyr to Hyperion;
both certainly have parallel columns of text and commentary, but Heath's
are in almost identical type, and some pages with no notes have two columns
of text. The resulting disruption of the reader's progress may vary the tedium,
but does not encourage perseverance.
In sum, The Philosopher's Alice can be little more than a donnish joke, but
even as such it is overdone and overpriced, and in any case it fails because
its aim is unattainable: Carroll's humor is largely intuitive—to explain the
joke is simply to destroy it.

University of GlasgowE. J. Borowski

A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination,

by A. D. Nuttall; pp. 298. London: Chatto and Windus
for Sussex University Press, 1974, £3.95; Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1974, $12.00

Bertrand Russell once received a letter from an eminent logician, Christine

Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist and was surprised that there
were no others. "Coming from a logician," Russell says, "this surprise surprised
me." The gradual evolution, however, in the history of modern philosophy
from Descartes' methodological doubt about sense experience through Locke's
epistemological dualism to the brink of solipsism in Berkeley and on to a
full-fledged skepticism about the external world in Hume justifies one in giving
the solipsistic position serious consideration. Nuttall's work is a sensitive tracing
of the history of such ideas in the philosophical world, together with discussion
of the rise of parallel ideas in selected works of fiction and poetry, including
those of Sterne, Wordsworth, Sartre, Hopkins, and Eliot. His thesis is that
while the philosophers followed reason and assumed that their skeptical
arguments went against our natural beliefs and intuitions, the novelists and
poets were beginning to give expression to nagging feelings of the unreality
of objects and the isolation of the self.
Nuttall argues that both paths to solipsism are wrong, that the philosopher
has been misled by the seventeenth century model of perception which "erects
an artifical barrier between the mind and the world" and the poet is misled
by thinking that private images are incommunicable. Nuttall concludes that
"the degree of our privacy is of our own choosing. We live beneath a common
sky" (p. 291).
 Shorter Reviews121

The main contribution of Nuttall's book is not in his knowledgeable but

ordinary comments on the philosophers nor in his weak attempts to refute
solipsism, but in his insights into fictional and poetic works. Here his thesis
stimulates him to illuminating analyses. Typical is his interpretation of Words-
worth. He shows that Wordsworth as a boy felt intimations of the unreality
of physical objects: "I was often unable to think of external things as having
external existence .... Many times when going to school I have grasped
at a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism . . ." (p. 253).
In the light of this temperamental solipsism, Nuttall claims that, rather than
springing from Coleridge's sense of imagination as fancy, Wordsworth's poetry
is the work of the primary imagination which is essentially cognitive, giving
us a picture of the real, public world of objects of perception. "Wordsworth's
poetry pleads continually for something resembling an epistemological conver-
sion in the reader" (p. 126).
Nuttall notes that we do not normally mention that which is obvious. Thus,
literature for many centuries did not focus on the obvious presence of physical
objects. In a world which has philosophical or other doubts about the reality
of objects, however, it makes sense to focus on objects. Nuttall cites in
contemporary literature Forster's characters who discuss the existence of the
cow in the field and Hemingway's preoccupation with the immediacy of physical
experience. He might well have added Woolf's cataloguing of physical objects
in the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse.
This is in many ways an ambitious and intellectually exciting book. It is
also puzzling to read, since Nuttall so often deals in paradox and writes about
philosophical topics in literary language. But it is well worth the reading.
Wheaton CollegeRosalind Ekman
Norton, Massachusetts

The Main of Light: On the Concept of Poetry, by Justus

Buchler; pp. 183. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974,
$6.50.

Aesthetic theories, particularly theories of poetry, come from two sources.

On the one hand, critics and artists speak from their direct familiarity with
specific works of art. Beginning with concrete appreciation of particular poems,
dramas and novels, they move toward general reflections on the nature of
literature. On the other hand, the primary interests of philosophers lie elsewhere,
and their aesthetic theories are supplements, sometimes incidental ones, to
their philosophical systems. More often than not, the entire cast of an aesthetic
theory will reflect these origins, derivations, and directions.
Justus Buchler's The Main of Light belongs primarily to the kind of poetic
theorizing that derives from, and is an extension of, a philosophical system.