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Art, Mind, and Narrative

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

M i n d A s s o c iat io n O c c a sio na l Se r i e s
This series consists of carefully selected volumes of significant original papers on
predefined themes, normally growing out of a conference supported by a Mind
Association Major Conference Grant. The Association nominates an editor or
editors for each collection, and may cooperate with other bodies in promoting
conferences or other scholarly activities in connection with the preparation of
particular volumes.

Director, Mind Association: Julian Dodd

Publications Officer: Sarah Sawyer

Recently Published in the Series:

The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft
Edited by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee
The Epistemic Life of Groups
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Reality Making
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The Metaphysics of Relations
Edited by Anna Marmodoro and David Yates
Thomas Reid on Mind, Knowledge, and Value
Edited by Rebecca Copenhaver and Todd Buras
Foundations of Logical Consequence
Edited by Colin R. Caret and Ole T. Hjortland
The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant
Edited by Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader
How We Fight
Ethics in War
Edited by Helen Frowe and Gerald Lang
The Morality of Defensive War
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Metaphysics and Science
Edited by Stephen Mumford and Matthew Tugby
Thick Concepts
Edited by Simon Kirchin
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Art, Mind, and Narrative

Themes from the Work of Peter Goldie

edited by
Julian Dodd

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

For Peter and Sophie

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Peter Goldie
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Preface

Peter Goldie’s death, on 22 October 2011, was felt keenly, not just at the University of
Manchester, his academic home since 2005, but throughout the world of philosophy.
The many admirers of his work on the emotions, narrative thinking, and aesthetics
mourned the loss of a wise and witty philosopher, whilst his graduate students fondly
remembered the time they spent with a supportive and nurturing supervisor.
Unsurprisingly, both the University of Manchester and King’s College London
(where Peter was a lecturer from 1998 to 2003, and then a reader until 2005) organized
memorial conferences to pay tribute to his work. Celebrating the Work of Peter Goldie,
sponsored by the University of Manchester’s School of Social Sciences and The Mind
Association, was held on 14–15 September 2012; The Mess Inside: In Memory of Peter
Goldie, sponsored by King’s College London and The Institute of Philosophy, took
place in London on 11 October 2012. Eight of the contributions here (those of Robert
Hopkins, Matthew Kieran, Dominic McIver Lopes, Derek Matravers, David Papineau,
Joel Smith, Ronald de Sousa, and Kathleen Stock) are versions of papers given at the
former event. Two of the other contributions (those by Paul Harris and Marya
Schechtman) were first delivered in London. The remaining chapters were specially
commissioned for this volume.
I would like to thank all of the contributors for agreeing so readily to get involved in
this project, and for producing work that pays such a fitting tribute to Peter. Tragically,
Sophie Hamilton, Peter’s widow, herself died on 19 October 2012, soon after being
guest of honour at the memorial conference in Manchester. Peter and Sophie were a
team, and we miss them both terribly. This book is for them.
Julian Dodd
University of Manchester
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Contents

Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction1
Julian Dodd

Part I. Narrative Thinking

1. A Mess Indeed: Empathic Access, Narrative, and Identity 17
Marya Schechtman
2. Life and Narrative 35
Derek Matravers
3. Peter Goldie on Narrative Thinking 47
Peter Lamarque
4. The Foundations of Narrative 61
David Papineau
5. The Dangers of Fiction: Lord Jim and Moral Perfectionism 80
Edward Harcourt
6. ‘Remember Leonard Shelby’: Memento and the Double Life of Memory 89
Robert Hopkins

Part II. Emotion, Mind, and Art

7. Free Indirect Style and Imagining from the Inside 103
Kathleen Stock
8. Perceptual Recognition, Emotion, and Value 121
Joel Smith
9. Love and Reason: Reflections on Themes from Peter Goldie 138
Ronald de Sousa
10. Sentiment and Sentimentality: Affective Attachment in Life and Art 154
Matthew Kieran
11. Expressing Emotions: From Action to Art 176
Sabine A. Döring
12. Missing Persons 190
Paul L. Harris
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xii Contents

Part III. Art, Value, and Ontology

13. Aesthetic Sensibility, Epistemic Virtue, and Emotional Sharing 209
Elisabeth Schellekens
14. In the Eye of the Beholder 223
Dominic McIver Lopes
15. The Ontology of Conceptual Art: Against the Idea Idea 241
Julian Dodd

Index 261
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Notes on Contributors

Sabine A. Döring holds the Chair of Practical Philosophy at Eberhard Karls

Universität, Tübingen. She is also board member and Principal Investigator of the
�cluster of excellence Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN). She has published
widely on the emotions in article form, including ‘Why be Emotional?’ in P. Goldie
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Julian Dodd is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester and
Director of The Mind Association. He has written predominantly in the philosophy of
language, metaphysics, and aesthetics. His publications include two monographs, An
Identity Theory of Truth (Palgrave, 2000) and Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology
(Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as the co-edited collection, Truthmakers: The
Contemporary Debate (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a
book about authenticity in musical performance.
Edward Harcourt has been a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 2005. His
research is in ethics, in particular in moral psychology, neo-Aristotelianism and
child development, ethical dimensions of psychoanalysis, meta-ethics, the moral
emotions, love and the virtues, and Nietzsche’s ethics; in the philosophy of mental
health and mental illness; in literature and philosophy; and in Wittgenstein. He is
currently Principal Investigator of the Wellcome ISSF project Therapeutic Conflicts:
Co-Producing Meaning in Mental Health, and of the AHRC network The
Development of Character: Attachment Theory and the Moral Psychology of Vice
and Virtue, and a director of the biennial Oxford Summer Schools in Philosophy
and Psychiatry.
Paul L. Harris is a developmental psychologist with interests in the development
of cognition, emotion, and imagination. He currently holds the Victor S. Thomas
Professorship of Education at Harvard University, and is the author of Children and
Emotion (Wiley, 1989), The Work of the Imagination (Wiley,
� 2000) and Trusting What
You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others (Harvard University Press, 2012). This
latter monograph received both the Eleanor Maccoby Award from the American
Psychological Association and the Book Award of the Cognitive Development Society.
In 2015, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robert Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He works
mainly in aesthetics and philosophy of mind. His publications on themes related to
those he discusses in his contribution to this volume include ‘What Do We See in Film?’
(Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2006), ‘Episodic Memory as Representing
the Past to Oneself ’ (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2014), and ‘Imagining the
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xivâ•… Notes on Contributors

Past: On the Nature of Episodic Memory’ (in F. Dorsch and F. Macpherson (eds),
Memory and Imagination (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds.
He is the author of a number of books and many articles on art, creativity, and ethics.
His publications include Revealing Art (Routledge, 2005) and co-edited collections
such as Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (Routledge, 2003), Aesthetics and the
Sciences of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Philosophical Aesthetics and the
Sciences of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He regularly speaks at conferences
and public events and is currently writing a book on creativity.
Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He works
primarily in the philosophy of literature and aesthetics. His books include Truth,
Fiction, and Literature, with Stein Haugom Olsen (Clarendon Press, 1994), Fictional
Points of View (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Philosophy of Literature (Blackwell,
2009), Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford University
Press, 2010), and The Opacity of Narrative (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).
He was editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics from 1995–2008.
Dominic McIver Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of
Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has written on pictorial rep-
resentation, the values of pictures, computer art, and new art media. His most recent
books are Beyond Art (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Four Arts of Photography
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and he is now writing a book entitled Being for Beauty:
Aesthetic Agency and Value.
Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and a Senior
Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published two books recently:
Introducing Philosophy of Art: Eight Case Studies (Acumen, 2013) and Fiction and
Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is working on another book, on empa-
thy, to be published by Polity in 2016. He is the author of Art and Emotion (Oxford
University Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles in aesthetics, ethics, and the
�philosophy of mind.
David Papineau was educated in Trinidad, England, and South Africa. He has a BSc
in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from
Cambridge. He has previously held posts at Reading University, Macquarie University,
Birkbeck College London, and Cambridge University, and is currently Professor of
Philosophy of Natural Science at King’s College London and Presidential Professor at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Reality and
Representation (Blackwell, 1987), Philosophical Naturalism (Blackwell, 1993), Thinking
about Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Philosophical Devices
(Oxford University Press, 2012). He was elected President of the British Society for the
Philosophy of Science for 1993–5, of The Mind Association for 2009–10, and of the
Aristotelian Society for 2013–14.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/25/2016, SPi

Notes on Contributorsâ•… xv

Marya Schechtman is a Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Laboratory

of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her area of special-
ization is the philosophy of personal identity, with special attention to the connection
between ethical and metaphysical identity questions. She also works on practical rea-
soning and the philosophy of mind, and has an interest in existentialism, bioethics,
and philosophy and technology. Professor Schechtman is the author of The Constitution
of Selves (Cornell University Press, 1996) and numerous essays on personal identity
and related topics. Her new book Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns,
and the Unity of a Life (Oxford University Press, 2014) offers a novel methodological
approach to questions of personal identity and a new account of identity in terms of
the unity of a characteristic kind of life.
Elisabeth Schellekens is Chair Professor of Aesthetics in the Philosophy
Department at the University of Uppsala and Honorary Professor at the University of
Durham. Since 2007 she has been co-editor (with John Hyman) of the British Journal
of Aesthetics. She is the author of Aesthetics and Morality (Continuum, 2007) and Who’s
Afraid of Conceptual Art? (Routledge, 2010, with Peter Goldie), and has published on
aesthetic properties, the normativity of aesthetic judgement, Kant, aesthetic sensibil-
ity, empirical approaches to aesthetics, and the interaction of cognitive, moral, and
aesthetic value in art.
Joel Smith is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He
works primarily in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and phe-
nomenology, and has a particular interest in issues of self-consciousness, the con-
sciousness of others, and emotion recognition. He is the author of Experiencing
Phenomenology (Routledge, 2016).
Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of
Toronto. He was educated in Switzerland, Oxford, UK, and Princeton, USA. He is a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book is Love: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015). His current research interests focus
on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and sex.
Kathleen Stock is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She mostly
publishes on questions arising from the relationship between imagination and fiction.
She has also written on mental images, definitions of art, and sexual objectification.
She is currently finishing a book entitled Fiction and Imagination: A Love Story.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Introduction
Julian Dodd

1 Peter Goldie: Twenty-one Years in Philosophy

The route Peter Goldie took to academic philosophy was as distinctive and remarkable
as the man himself. Born on 5 November 1946 in Woodford, Essex, he attended Felsted
School, before starting work as an accountant. Swiftly demonstrating the incisiveness,
sangfroid, and cultured intelligence that would serve him so well in his philosophical
career, by 1971 he was a partner of the accountancy firm that he had first joined as a
school-leaver. He subsequently moved into a career as a financier, and by 1987 he had
become the managing director of a FTSE 100 financial services company: a role which
gave him a colourful and, at times, controversial profile in the City of London.
Throughout his time in the City, Goldie had developed a taste for philosophical
questions, reading and thinking about them in what little spare time he had. So when
his company encountered problems, he saw this as a chance to leave the City and
devote his time to the academic study of philosophy. The philosophical community
soon became grateful for this decision. Goldie’s student career was exceptional. A first
class degree from University College London, garnering many prizes, was followed by
a distinction for his BPhil in Oxford, where he also won Balliol College’s Jowett prize.
1997 saw him complete his DPhil under the supervision of Bernard Williams, who
became a close friend. Two years teaching in Oxford preceded his arrival as a lecturer
at King’s College London in 1998, where, in 2003, he became a Reader. In 2005 Goldie
left King’s to take up the vacant Samuel Hall Chair in philosophy at the University of
Manchester. Held in great esteem and affection by his colleagues and students, and
contributing energetically and decisively to the renaissance of Manchester philosophy,
he remained in the Samuel Hall Chair until he died on 22 October 2011.
There were two reasons for Goldie’s meteoric rise in academic philosophy: the
­quality and influential nature of his work, which I shall get onto in a moment, and his
prodigious productivity. A publishing career that only really got going in 1999 saw him
produce: two major research monographs (The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration
(Oxford: OUP, 2000) and The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford:
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

2 Julian Dodd

OUP, 2012)); two monographs aimed at the intelligent layperson (On Personality
(London: Routledge, 2004) and Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? with Elisabeth
Schellekens (London: Routledge, 2010)); five edited collections, including The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: OUP, 2010); and more than fifty journal
articles and book chapters, including papers in Mind, Mind and Language,
Philosophical Studies, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, The British Journal of
Aesthetics, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. One explanation for this
level of output was that Goldie had a lot to say philosophically; another is that he prob-
ably felt that he was making up for lost time. No matter. Philosophy—and, in particu-
lar, the philosophy of the emotions, the philosophy of narrative, and the philosophy of
art—were hugely the better for it.

2 A Body of Work
A striking feature of Goldie’s work is its innovativeness and healthy disrespect for the
philosophical canon. He had the knack of putting his finger on topics of great philo-
sophical interest and of developing distinctive things to say about them, even if they had
been largely neglected by mainstream analytical philosophy. The nature of the emo-
tions, the place of narrative thinking in our lives, the challenges conceptual art brings to
our theorizing about art: Goldie was one of the handful of philosophers responsible for
reviving philosophical interest in the first; he was a major driving force behind the
upsurge in philosophical interest in the second; and (with his co-author, Elisabeth
Schellekens) he produced the first sustained philosophical treatment of the third.
This interest in relatively uncharted philosophical territory was not an affectation,
and neither was it motivated by a shallow desire to fill a ‘gap in the market’. On the
contrary, it was the unaffected product of his motivation for doing philosophy in the
first place: namely, to try to make sense of certain aspects of our everyday experience
that genuinely puzzled him (in part, because of their complexity or the way in which
they resist reductive theorizing); and, in so doing, to address the kinds of philosophical
questions that naturally occur to those of us who stop to think about what our experi-
ence is like, and what matters to us and why.
This is seen to great effect in The Emotions, in which Goldie resists what he sees as
the cognitivist’s tendency to over-intellectualize our emotional experience and, as a
result of this fundamental error, either leave emotional feelings out of the picture
entirely, or else add them merely as an afterthought. The distinctive and original aspect
of Goldie’s position has it that the intentionality of the emotions lies not in their being
reducible to propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires, but in the nature of
emotional feeling itself. Emotional feelings themselves have intentionality—they are,
as he puts it, feelings towards things—and, hence, doing justice to both the felt element
in emotional experience and that experience’s intentionality does not require us to
bolt together two distinct factors. This insight, together with two others (respectively,
that making sense of our emotional experience goes beyond giving a rationalizing
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Introduction 3

explanation, and that such sense-making involves seeing one’s emotional life as part
of an unfolding narrative), are a large part of what gave the book its rejuvenating effect
on the philosophical study of the emotions.
Reading The Emotions, one is also struck by the way in which two features character-
istic of Goldie’s mature philosophical style are already securely in place. First, the book
proceeds by insightfully and lucidly characterizing its subject matter, using an impres-
sively diverse range of examples to illustrate its observations. Rather than providing
logic-chopping arguments or imposing elaborate, constructive theories upon the data,
Goldie carefully makes his case by constructing a detailed and nuanced representation
of the phenomena, and then explaining how the emotions must be in order for this
representation to be accurate. Second, in addition to drawing on philosophical sources
to inform his thinking, Goldie appeals both to the psychological sciences and to works
of art to shed light on philosophical problems. His method embodies the idea that we
can find out about the nature of the emotions, not merely by working through the phil-
osophical and psychological literature, but by considering examples from the works of
writers such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
The same approach, allied to a seemingly effortless ability to introduce philosophi-
cal questions to the non-specialist without being patronizing, characterizes both On
Personality and Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? In the former, he finds himself in
agreement with those social psychologists who have concluded that character traits
are not as robust as we are tempted to think they are. Tellingly, however, he uses
examples from the arts to point out that this conclusion is far from new, and he also
observes that this scepticism about the reliability of character traits does not under-
mine their normative function of serving as useful ideals to aspire towards.
Furthermore, it is in Goldie’s handling of the data provided by social psychology that a
third key element in his philosophical approach emerges most clearly. In his view, the
ordinary language that we use to talk about emotions, character traits, or other famil-
iar psychological phenomena, whilst not itself scientific language, is nonetheless
informed by scientific discoveries and revised in the light of such. Consequently, a phil-
osophical treatment of the subject matter can remain broadly conceptual—a kind of
‘conceptual analysis’ of our ordinary language talk of its subject matter, if you like—at
the same time as being properly sensitive to empirical research. Since our ordinary
concepts are themselves sensitive to the empirical data, an analysis of these concepts
will be to some extent empirical.
Goldie’s next monograph, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?, uses a simple question—
namely, why so many of us mistrust, fear, or otherwise derogate conceptual art—as the
way in to a detailed disquisition on conceptual art that is engaging to academic philoso-
phers of art and non-specialists alike. Systematically, yet with a lightness of touch,
Goldie and his co-author, Elisabeth Schellekens, provide a clear and bold characteriza-
tion of conceptual art as an essentially intellectual art form which: self-reflectively and
ironically raises the question of its own status as art; challenges extant definitions and
theories of art; rejects the doctrine of medium-specificity and the traditional media of
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4 Julian Dodd

painting and sculpture;1 is dematerialized (in the sense that its artworks are not material
entities); is anti-aesthetic (in the sense that its works are not intended to be contem-
plated for their ‘traditional’, perceptible aesthetic qualities); and is discourse-dependent
(in the sense that understanding such works requires us to have some background theo-
retical—often philosophical or art-theoretic—knowledge).
This initial description of conceptual art is developed soberly yet engagingly, and in
a way that is both well informed and fair minded. It is neither an apology for, nor a
polemic against, conceptual art. According to Goldie and Schellekens, whilst many
conceptual works have great epistemic value, and whilst some such works’ daring,
ingenuity and sheer chutzpah may be enjoyed and appreciated, their primarily intel-
lectual nature goes some way towards explaining why so many of us regard conceptual
art as falling short as art. Nicely linking this topic with one of Goldie’s lifelong philo-
sophical concerns, the significance of our emotional life, Goldie and Schellekens sug-
gest that it is the fact that conceptual art tends to restrict itself to engendering interests
and emotions of an intellectual kind that most likely explains the widespread dissatis-
faction with it. Great art, he thinks, encompasses the entirety of shared human thought,
feeling and emotionality.
Goldie’s final monograph, The Mess Inside, takes a theme that he first tackled in The
Emotions—narrativity—and develops it into a qualified defence of narrative thinking
about our lives. A narrative, according to Goldie, is a representation of a sequence of
events from a certain perspective or perspectives which brings coherence, meaning-
fulness, and evaluative and emotional import to the events related. With this concep-
tion in place, he then marks out a distinctive position between ‘narrativists’, who argue
that we constitute ourselves as persons by means of our construction of narratives, and
‘narrative sceptics’, who claim that narrative thinking is inessential to us in our lives
and, at worst, distorting, particularly of our sense of self. In Goldie’s view, sceptics are
right to reject the idea of the narrative self, literally constituted by narrative thinking;
yet the narratives we tell about our lives, whilst distorting if we model them too closely
on fictional narratives, are also capable of truth and objectivity and, as such, serve as
vehicles for understanding of the deepest kind.
Here, once more, we see Goldie addressing questions that stem from his concern to
make sense of life, the mind, and the life of the mind without oversimplifying them.
Resisting the temptation to let philosophical theory shrink-wrap the subject matter,
and having the courage to acknowledge this subject matter’s messiness and impreci-
sion, he gives us the kind of perspicuous representation that enables us to better
understand aspects of our lives that have fundamental significance for us. As philoso-
phers, this is what we will miss, not just in newly written work by him, but in corres­
pondence and in person.

1
The doctrine of medium-specificity is the thesis that each art form has its own physical medium that
is ‘proper’ to it.
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Introduction 5

3 The Chapters
A plausible way of thinking of Goldie’s oeuvre is to see it as comprising three overlap-
ping clusters of enquiry: the place and value of narrative thinking in our lives; emo-
tional experience, the expression and recognition of emotion, and our emotional
engagement in the arts; and, finally, art, its value, and its appreciation. This volume is
structured accordingly.

3.1 Narrative thinking

For Goldie, Marya Schechtman’s work on personal identity represents the kind of
narrativist position that, though laden with many significant insights, ultimately
over-reaches itself. Accordingly, in The Mess Inside he makes two criticisms of her
position. First, he rejects her claim that self-narration constitutes persons as the kinds
of beings they are, largely on the grounds that the positing of such a narrative self is
predicated on a radical over-estimation of our psychological stability. Second, he
argues that Schechtman’s concept of empathic access—roughly, the ability to inhabit a
first-person perspective one previously inhabited—is not, as she thinks, a useful tool
for thinking about identity, literal or figurative. According to Goldie, appeal to the
notion of empathic access to explain survival: wrongly presupposes that we have sin-
gle defining traits whose loss precludes our survival; presents a significant hostage to
fortune, inasmuch as it is unclear how we can know when we have empathic access to
past stages of our lives; and fails to allow for substantial moral or intellectual change
within a life.
Schechtman uses her chapter in this collection as a means of reply. Whilst she is at
pains to stress the helpfulness and nuanced nature of Goldie’s discussion, she believes
that neither of the aforementioned strands of her position has been undermined. Her
defence of the notion of the narrative self has two prongs. First, she claims that Goldie
misconstrues the kind of stability required by the narrative self as a stability of traits,
when it is, in fact, a structural ability consisting in the ability to think of all of the per-
spectives one has experienced as part of a single life. Second, and in an irenic move, she
points out that the apparent disagreement with Goldie over the narrative self may not be
as significant as he thinks, since her claim is just that a narrative sense of self is a signifi-
cant, but not the only, factor in the constitution of metaphysical identity. Meanwhile,
when it comes to Goldie’s three criticisms of the notion of empathic access, Schechtman
thinks that it is only the third that has real bite. Given a definition of empathic access in
terms of occupancy of a previously inhabited first personal perspective plus endorse-
ment of this perceptive, Goldie’s third criticism stands: there could be no positive trans-
formations within a single life. But according to Schechtman, what this reveals is not
that the notion of empathic access should be rejected, but that the second clause in its
provisional definition—what we might call the ‘endorsement’ clause—should be
dropped. The value in Goldie’s critique consists in its challenging the narrativist to elab-
orate and explicate her position, not in its demonstrating the position’s falsehood.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

6 Julian Dodd

Derek Matravers, by contrast, finds less to disagree with in the substance of Goldie’s
position. However, whilst he concurs with Goldie that our narrative thinking can
occasionally be distorting and, as such, is capable of undermining, rather than enhanc-
ing, our understanding of our lives, he is less sure about the way in which Goldie
­portrays the sources of such error. Goldie thinks that our autobiographical narratives
lose their truth and objectivity when we slip into constructing them along the lines of
fictional narratives. Specifically, he outlines four ‘fictionalizing tendencies’ we are apt
to fall victim to: thinking of ourselves as plotting out the course of our lives; finding too
much agency in the world; seeking narrative closure where it cannot be found; and
transplanting notions of character and genre from fiction into real life. However,
Matravers argues that the said tendencies, though dangerous when constructing auto-
biographical narratives designed to make sense of our lives, are not properly classified
as fictionalizing. For in his view, the features Goldie presents as being distinctive of fic-
tions are, in fact, found in certain kinds of non-fictional narratives, too. Furthermore,
whilst the tendencies that Goldie describes are dangerous when figuring in those auto-
biographical narratives we use to give shape to our lives, they are not dangerous in the
construction of real-life narratives per se. From here, Matravers goes on to conclude,
fascinatingly, that, leaving aside the obvious fact that non-fictions have an obligation
to truth that is not shared by fictional narratives, our experience of engaging with
non-fictional narratives is ‘by and large, the same’ as our experience of dealing with
fictional ones.
Giving this section a representative spread of opinion on the value of narrative
thinking in our lives, Peter Lamarque takes the opportunity to defend his version of
narrative scepticism against Goldie’s attempt to thread his middle way between the
sceptic and the narrativist. Lamarque presents Goldie with a dilemma. In the face of
criticism from those, like Galen Strawson and Lamarque himself, who deny that they
have a sense of their lives as narratives, and who stress the danger of the ‘fictionalizing
tendencies’ that Goldie himself draws our attention to, Lamarque thinks that Goldie is
best advised to adopt a diluted sense of ‘narrative’, according to which narratives can be
vague, indeterminate things far removed from both the narratives of fiction and from
the overarching life narratives modelled on these. And yet, Lamarque suggests, once
Goldie makes this concession, the claim that narrative thinking is central to our pro-
ject of making sense of our lives begins to look like a mere truism. If it turns out, on the
diluted conception of a narrative, that ‘I forgot my umbrella and it rained, so I got wet’
is a mini-narrative, then observing that such thinking is common seems a wholly
unexceptional claim. Goldie, no doubt, would see this challenge as an opportunity to
develop further a notion of a narrative that is neither trivial nor overblown. Lamarque,
however, suspects that Goldie has tried to impose too much narrative order on the
mess inside.
Somewhat more consensual in approach is David Papineau’s chapter. Its starting
point is that Goldie is right about both the nature of narrative and the role that narra-
tive thinking plays in our lives. Papineau heartily endorses the idea that narrative
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Introduction 7

understanding helps us to make sense of our pasts, futures, and the people that we are,
and he goes on to applaud the way in which Goldie artfully draws our attention to
some of the characteristic facts concerning narratives: specifically, that narratives can
have a non-linear order, that they can involve multiple perspectives, and that they
­typically lend a significance to the events they relate. What is lacking from Goldie’s
picture, however, is an explanation of how narrative has come to have this structure
and role. As Papineau puts it, Goldie takes ‘narrative structure for granted, as some-
thing that influences human lives in various ways’.
Reflecting his own philosophical approach—that of ‘digging down’ in an attempt to
uncover the evolutionary origins of phenomena and clarify how things have come to
be as they are—Papineau attempts to make Goldie’s picture more satisfying by offering
a complementary explanation of the origins of our narrative thinking. His thesis in this
regard is that narrative thinking has its distinctive structure and role because it is a
consequence of a more basic human tendency to construct histories: that is, to repre-
sent events as happening at observer-independent times. According to him, all
­memory properly so-called—that is, all history construction—has the possibility of
non-linearity and divergent perspectives built into it. Furthermore, Papineau sur-
mises, since the function of history construction is to help us formulate long-term
plans, it follows that this activity’s point is to highlight sequences of events that reveal
things that matter to us: a fact that explains why our narrative thinking is a sense-­
making enterprise and, as such, something that is so central to our project of self-­
understanding. It turns out that the nature of our narrative thinking about our lives, as
well as its importance, can be explained, not by assimilating it to the telling of fictional
stories, but by seeing how it has emerged out of our more basic tendency to construct
histories.
Edward Harcourt’s contribution is similarly supportive in tone. In a move that we
have already noted as distinctive, Goldie uses a literary discussion—in this case, of
Conrad’s Lord Jim—to illustrate how his fourth fictionalizing tendency (the tendency
to view people in ways that borrow too heavily from fictional genres) distorts our
understanding of their character. According to Goldie, Jim’s self-understanding suffers
from just this failing, in that he constructs a self-narrative in which he figures as some-
thing like the hero of an adventure novel: a tendency that leads him to expect too much
of himself, and which results in his overwhelming sense of shame when he fails to
measure up to his ideals.
Whilst being broadly in sympathy with The Mess Inside, Harcourt believes that
Goldie has not properly understood Lord Jim. Jim’s real failing, Harcourt suggests, is
neither a failure of self-knowledge—that is, a failure to see his own fully rounded char-
acter beyond the flattened-out version in his fictionalizing—nor simply a failure to be
as good as he would need to be to live up to his ideals. Indeed the fictional models
which dominate Jim’s thinking aren’t properly speaking ideals at all, but pseudo-ideals,
a distinction Harcourt’s chapter tries to spell out in terms of the different roles which
ideals and pseudo-ideals play in an agent’s psychology. In Harcourt’s view, Jim fixes on
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

8 Julian Dodd

the kinds of fictional narratives he does in order to defend himself against a pervasive
sense of worthlessness. It is thus not Jim’s attempt to live up to the standards embodied
in fictional narratives which, when it fails, causes his sense of worthlessness; rather the
causal relation runs the other way, from his fragile sense of self-worth to his use of
­fictional narratives to try to preserve it. Harcourt concludes by suggesting that a satis-
fying understanding of the distinction between a well-functioning moral conscious-
ness and Jim’s depends upon seeing Jim as thus subject to a distinct, fifth fictionalizing
tendency that escapes Goldie’s taxonomy.
This section closes with Robert Hopkins’s enquiry into the place of episodic mem-
ory in autobiographical narrative thinking: a discussion that is informed by the philo-
sophical work of both Goldie and Richard Wollheim, but which also follows Goldie’s
own methodological lead in addressing the topic through an examination of an artwork.
In his engaging discussion of Christopher Nolan’s film, Memento, Hopkins claims
that the film shows us two things. First, and in an echo of Goldie’s warning about our
fictionalizing tendencies, Memento teaches us that, given sufficient emotional pres-
sure, we can all tell fictionalized stories about ourselves with such intensity that we
bootstrap ourselves into taking them for genuine memories. Second, the film reveals
the depth of the role that episodic memory has for us in allowing our emotions to
persist beyond the events responsible for them. Episodic memories enable past events
to affect how one feels in the present; and, in so doing, such memories give a sense of
shape to one’s life as a whole, and thereby make it possible for one to think of oneself
as leading a life at all. This, needless to say, is a conclusion with which Goldie would
­heartily agree.
3.2 Emotion, mind, and art
This section begins with Kathleen Stock’s chapter on the nature of free indirect style
and its demands on the reader who comes across it in fictional narratives. This is a
topic that matters to Goldie, since he makes much of the idea that the autobiographical
narratives we construct often exhibit what he calls ‘the psychological correlate’ of free
indirect style: a kind of narrative in which the first-person perspective of one’s past self
and the perspective of one’s present self are both invoked. Stock presents Goldie as
subject to a kind of philosophical anxiety in his characterization of this psychological
manifestation of indirect style: a kind of simultaneous temptation by (if not quite a
see-sawing between) two unacceptable accounts of the imaginative response free indi-
rect style calls for. The first such account, what we may regard as his official doctrine, is
that free indirect style merely calls for the reader to imagine the narrator’s perspective,
whilst avoiding imagining the participant’s perspective ‘from the inside’. This, argues
Stock, is unacceptable because some kind of imaginative occupancy of the participant’s
perspective is required if a significant purpose of free indirect style—namely, that of
enabling us to feel the full force of the dramatic irony in a situation—is to be achieved.
(If we cannot, for example, see the world as the deluded participant sees it, then we
cannot fully appreciate the irony of the fact that she really is so deluded.) This, perhaps,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Introduction 9

is why Goldie is apt to talk of internal and external perspectives as being ‘integrated’ in
free indirect style: a way of putting it that suggests that perspectives with incompatible
­elements are combined into a new perspective on the events represented. But this latter
view is incoherent, as Stock takes Goldie himself to have shown in earlier work: we
cannot admit, within the scope of the same imagining, conscious representations that
would obviously conflict. There is no perspective, for example, from which an event is
both honourable and shameful.
The solution, according to Stock, lies in making a deceptively simple move. What
free indirect style demands on the part of the reader is not that we imagine solely that a
narrator reports the speech of another, nor (per impossibile) that we combine the nar-
rator’s perspective and the participant’s perspective into an integrated whole, but that
we imagine the two distinct and conflicting perspectives consecutively. The mistake
consists in thinking that what free indirect style demands of our imagination is
demanded of it at one and the same time.
Moving on now to the topic of emotion and value recognition, Goldie believes that
recognizing another’s emotion and recognizing a thing or situation’s possessing an
evaluative property are forms of knowledge that are sometimes perceptual. He thinks
both that another’s expression of emotion, when perceived, can give us an immediate
and highly reliable grasp of the said emotional state, and that we can, on occasions, see
what is the kind thing to do. Joel Smith is sceptical of this latter claim since, for value
recognition to be perceptual knowledge, how the perceived object looks would have to
be explained by the way the object is, and this condition is not met in the case of value
recognition. Things do not look as they do because they have evaluative properties.
However, Smith argues that matters are more promising for emotion recognition on
this score. Furthermore, empirically based challenges to the perceptual model of emo-
tion recognition—specifically, those that appeal to the existence of audience effects
and other contextual factors as determining facial expression—admit of replies.
A properly formulated perceptual account of emotion recognition will be able to admit
contextual factors into its principal claims, thereby drawing the sting of empirically
grounded scepticism about the perceptual model of such knowledge. This conclusion,
though it departs from the letter of Goldie’s position on emotion expression, is natu-
rally regarded as a development of its central insight.
Ronald de Sousa takes the same kind of supportive approach to Goldie’s work, this
time about the nature of one particular emotion: love. First of all, de Sousa warns us
not to impose an unjustified unity onto the phenomena that we call ‘love’. Indeed, he
takes there to be three distinct psychological processes that tend to go by this name:
lust, whose duration is a matter of minutes or hours; limerence, or romantic love,
which tends to last for weeks or months; and attachment, a form of non-sexual
love, which can last for years. Whilst, within our culture, many deny that we can expe-
rience ‘true love’ without being subject to these three processes at once, de Sousa
claims that they are so fleetingly enjoyed simultaneously as to make such ‘true love’
appear far-fetched.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

10 Julian Dodd

This latter fact, together with the plurality of emotional experiences labelled ‘love’,
might encourage the idea that we should be eliminativists about love, or else take it to
be a social construct of some sort. Another source of scepticism about genuine love
concerns the problematic nature of what it is for love to be reason governed, something
de Sousa takes to be revealed by what he terms ‘love’s paradoxes’. It is at this point that
de Sousa introduces what he takes to be the key to dissolving the said paradoxes: love’s
narrative character or historicity. Whilst this sort of answer is not in itself new, de Sousa
presents Goldie as having placed an innovative, Aristophanic, spin on it. For whilst
Goldie agrees with those who take love to be the consequence of a uniquely shared
intertwining of lives, he supplements it with the claim that sustained love involves the
kind of dynamic interaction alluded to in Aristophanes’s myth of humans as halves of
original wholes. Whether this approach explains how love can be for reasons, or merely
how it can appear to be such, de Sousa is not sure. What he is sure about, though, is the
originality and ingenuity in Goldie’s Aristophanic ‘take’ on the historicist insight into
the continuity of love.
Matthew Kieran’s chapter is less directly related to work of Goldie’s, but no less valu-
able for that, since it concerns a topic central to philosophical study of the emotions
and the arts: sentimentality. As Kieran explains, according to the standard view, to
describe a person, attitude, or artwork as ‘sentimental’ is to condemn it. Indeed, we
tend to regard sentimental attitudes or expressions as defective on the grounds that
they involve an indulgence of inappropriately excessive emotions and feelings: an
indulgence produced by the epistemic error of distorting the objects of these emotions
by idealizing them, and which is driven by a desire to savour the self-image afforded by
directing such rich and potent emotions at their objects.
Kieran replies in two ways. First, he points out that there are many cases where, far
from undermining our ability to function within the world, sentimentality enables us
to flourish in our dealings with it. Insofar as the charge against sentimentality involves
the claim that the idealizations involved are bound up with overly optimistic attitudes
or assessments, it is certainly no worse than many other positive illusion biases that
help us to get through life. However, as he recognizes, this response remains open to
the charge that no matter how prudential sentimentality may sometimes be, it is an
emotional state that tends toward epistemic error. So it is for this reason that he floats a
second, more radical response, according to which—and partly inspired by views of
the emotions such as Goldie’s—sentimentality is not to be evaluated in the epistemic
terms set by narrowly cognitivist accounts but is, rather, a kind of emotional response
with the role of affirming or furthering emotional attachments: in other words, a state
that manifests non-cognitive attitudes, such as wishes and hopes, as opposed to overall
judgements or evaluations. Kieran maintains that once sentimentality is understood
along such lines, there is good reason to think that it can often be admirable or praise-
worthy, both in art and in life.
Sabine Döring’s concern in her chapter lies with the phenomenon of expressive
action—roughly, an action’s being expressive of an emotion of the agent—and its
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

Introduction 11

r­elation to the question of what it is for artworks to be emotionally expressive.

Consider, for example, a jilted lover who, in a fit of hatred, scratches out the eyes of a
photo of her rival. Following Goldie’s lead in The Emotions, Döring argues that expres-
sive actions such as these, though intentional, are not done as a means to some further
end. Additionally, she claims that expressive actions resist the belief-desire model of
action explanation. This being so, she must explain two things: how expressive actions
can be rationalized without being governed by means–end reasoning; and what it is for
an action to express emotions on this picture.
Goldie himself argues that the jilted lover’s action is expressive of a wish: she desires
to scratch out her rival’s eyes and imagines that she is doing this in the expressive
action. Döring ultimately rejects this proposal, on the grounds that it fails to explain
what it is for the action to express the jilted lover’s hatred. In her view, a satisfying
answer to this, the second question, must acknowledge that the emotion expressed is
not a fully formed state distinct from its means of expression, but a response disposi-
tion that is completed and clarified by the expressive action. When it comes to answer-
ing the first question—explaining how expressive actions can be rationalized without
involving means-end reasoning—Döring thinks that the key lies in seeing expressive
actions as governed by the norm of fitting the emotional attitudes they express: specifi-
cally, that the expressing action should do justice to how the objects of the expressed
emotion are valued under the influence of the emotion concerned.
The idea that expressive actions clarify and complete the emotions they express has
clear echoes of Collingwood’s account of how art expresses emotion, of course. And
Döring elaborates this thought to make a case for art’s emotional expressiveness being
a special case of expressive action. Since, she argues, artworks are expressive in this
manner, the artistic expression of emotion yields evaluative knowledge: knowledge of
how the targets of the subject’s emotion matter to her.
Paul Harris’s chapter concerns emotional development in children, and it is the
most empirically focused of the collection. His stalking horse is the tempting view,
made under the assumption of a continuity between human beings and non-human
animals, that human emotions are primarily responses to physically proximate trig-
gers. This view, not just as applied to adults but to children, he takes to be undermined
by the data. Carefully charting his way through a series of experiments, Harris points
out that the intensity of children’s physical responses often depends on their mental,
rather than physical, connection to those involved. Specifically, those Harris engag-
ingly describes as ‘missing people’—that is, people who are not physically present—
can be the objects of intense emotional responses amongst children. Children respond
emotionally to reports about public figures to whom they feel some kind of connection,
and to fictional characters they have themselves invented or heard about in stories, and
they also use symbolic reminders, such as photographs, to help bring absent loved
ones to mind and thereby find solace or reassurance. Harris’s key moral is that chil-
dren, unlike non-human animals, do not have their emotional states governed exclu-
sively by proximal events and people they encounter directly. The intensity of children’s
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/22/2016, SPi

12 Julian Dodd

emotional responses is primarily calibrated to a metaphorical mental space, rather

than to a literal physical space.

3.3 Art, value, and ontology

The three chapters in the collection’s final section all either explicitly address positions
Goldie has taken in the philosophy of art, or else pick up questions raised by his work
in this area. Elisabeth Schellekens offers a generally supportive, yet not uncritical, elab-
oration of Goldie’s virtue theory of art: in essence, the idea that what matters for being a
good producer or appreciator of art is that one possesses the right kinds of artistic
character traits. Working within this framework, Schellekens asks what such artistic
virtues could amount to, and her answer is that artistic virtue seems to have more in
common with epistemic virtue than we, Goldie included, might think. Art, she claims,
can provide a coherent and insightful picture of real-life situations, and so can be a
source of knowledge. Furthermore, narratives, whose construction is in part governed
by the operation of the aesthetic sensibility, have a central role to play in scientific and
other explanations. These considerations suggest to Schellekens that artistic virtue and
epistemic virtue are difficult to pull apart, and even, perhaps, that a certain kind of
aesthetic sensibility is required in order to discern truth and the objects of knowledge.
Indeed, she is prepared to entertain (without arguing for here) the yet stronger thesis
that artistic virtue can be understood as a kind of epistemic virtue.
The final two chapters in the collection touch on conceptual art. Dominic McIver
Lopes is primarily concerned with the prospects for what he calls ‘the experience the-
sis’ concerning aesthetic properties: namely, that aesthetic properties are principally
represented in experiential states. Conceptual art (along with literature) threatens the
experience thesis because, Lopes says, whilst it would be precipitate to deny that con-
ceptual artworks can have aesthetic properties, many conceptual artworks are not
objects of sensory states.2 Lopes explores the possibility that the kind of experience
appealed to in the experience thesis can be generalized beyond sensory experience: an
approach which, if made good, opens up the strategy of smoothing away the apparent
tension between the experience thesis and the phenomenon of conceptual art.
Leaving aside some refinement, the core idea in Lopes’s proposal is that experiences
(sensory or otherwise) should be viewed as essentially states that encode information
in analogue form for delivery to downstream cognition in completely digital form (in
belief-like states).3 And it is to be noted, once such an account of experiential states is
in place, how natural it is to speak of our ‘experiencing’ a work of conceptual art’s
aesthetic properties. As Lopes explains, when a properly informed appreciator
­

2
In endorsing this latter claim, Lopes seems to adopt a version of ‘the idea idea’—the claim that conceptual
artworks are ideas—which is the topic of Julian Dodd’s chapter.
3
A state carries the information that a is F in digital form if and only if it carries no additional informa-
tion about a, unless that information is analytically or nomically determined by a’s being F; a state carries
the same information in analogue form if and only if it carries additional information about a that is not
analytically or nomically determined by a’s being F.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ingeniosas que avn muy
enseñados hombres no bastaran
hazerlas? ¿Qué has oydo dezir
del elefante, del tigre, lebrel y
raposa? ¿Que has visto hacer a
vna mona, que se podria dezir de
aqui a mañana? Ni habrá quien
tanto te diga como yo si el tiempo
nos diesse a ello lugar, y tú
tuuieses de oyrlo gana y algun
agradeçimiento. Porque te hago
saber que ha mas de mil años
que soy criado en el mundo, y
despues acá he viuido en infinitas
differençias de cuerpos, en cada
vno de los quales me han
aconteçido tanta diuersidad de
cuentos, que antes nos faltaria
tiempo que me faltasse a mi que
dezir, y a ti que holgasses de oyr.
Miçilo.—O mi buen gallo, qué
bienauenturado me seria el
señorio que tengo sobre ti, si me
quissieses tanto agradar que con
tu dulce y sabrosa lengua me
comunicasses alguna parte de los
tus fortunosos aconteçimientos.
Yo te prometo que en pago y
galardon de este inextimable
seruiçio y plazer te dé en
amaneçiendo la raçion doblada,
avnque sepa quitarlo de mi
mantenimiento.
Gallo.—Pues por ser tuyo te soy
obligado agradar, y agora más por
ver el premio reluzir.
Miçilo.—Pues, aguarda,
ençenderé candela y ponermehe
a trabajar. Agora comiença, que
oyente tienes el mas obediente y
atento que nunca a maestro oyó.
Gallo.—O dioses y diosas,
favoreced mi flaca y dezlenable
memoria.
Miçilo.—¿Qué dizes? ¿Eres
hereje ó gentil, cómo llamas á los
dioses y diosas?
Gallo.—Pues, cómo y agora
sabes que todos los gallos somos
françeses como el nombre nos lo
dize, y que los françeses
hazemos deso poco caudal?
Principalmente despues que hizo
liga con los turcos nuestro Rey,
truxolos alli, y medio proffesamos
su ley por la conuersaçion[299].
Pero de aqui adelante yo te
prometo de hablar contigo en toda
religion.
Miçilo.—Agora pues comiença,
yo te ruego, y has de contar
desde el primero dia de tu ser.
Gallo.—Ansi lo haré; tenme
atençion, yo te diré cosas tantas y
tan admirables que con ningun
tiempo se puedan medir, y sino
fuese por tu mucha cordura no las
podrias creer. Dezirte he muchos
aconteçimientos de grande
admiraçion, verás los honbres
conuertidos en vestias, y las
vestias conuertidas en honbres y
con gran façilidad. Oyrás
cautelas, astuçias, industrias,
agudeças, engaños, mentiras y
trafagos en que a la contina
enplean los honbres su natural,
verás en conclusion como en vn
espejo lo que los honbres son de
su natural inclinaçion, por donde
juzgarás la gran liberalidad y
misericordia de Dios.
Miçilo.—Mira, gallo, bien, que
pues yo me confio de ti, no
piensses agora con arrogançias y
soberuia de eloquentes palabras
burlar de mi contándome tan
grandes mentiras que no se
puedan creer, porque puesto caso
que todo me lo hagas con tu
eloquençia muy claro y aparente,
auenturas ganar poco interes
mintiendo a vn honbre tan bajo
como yo, y hazer injuria a ese
filosofo Pithagoras que dizes que
en otro tiempo fueste y al respeto
que todo honbre se deue á sí.
Porque el virtuoso en el
cometimiento de la poquedad no
ha de tener tanto temor a los que
la verán, como a la verguença
que deue auer de si.
Gallo.—No me marauillo, Miçilo,
que temas oy de te confiar de mi
que te diré verdad por auer visto
una tan gran cosa y tan no vsada
ni oyda de ti como ver vn gallo
hablar. Pero mira bien que te
obliga mucho, sobre todo lo que
has dicho, a me creer, considerar
que pues yo hablé, y para ti que
no es pequeña muestra de
deydad, a lo qual repugna el
mentir; y ya quando no me
quisieres considerar mas de gallo
confia de mi, que terné respecto
al premio y galardon que me has
prometido dar en mi comer,
porque no quiero que me
acontezca contigo oy lo que
aconteçio a aquel ambicioso
musico Euangelista en esta
çiudad. Lo qual por te hazer
perder el temor quiero que oyas
aqui. Tu sabras que aconteçio en
Castilla vna gran pestelençia,
(año de 1525 fue esta
pestelençia)[300] que en un año
entero y más fue perseguido todo
el Reyno de gran mortandad. De
manera que en ningun pueblo que
fuesse de algunos vezinos se
sufria viuir, porque no se entendia
sino en enterrar muertos desde
que amanecia hasta en gran
pieza de la noche que se recogian
los hombres descansar. Era la
enfermedad un genero de
postema naçida en las ingles,
sobacos ó garganta, a la qual
llamaban landre. De la qual
siendo heridos suçedia vna
terrible calentura, y dentro de
veynte y cuatro horas heria la
postema en el coraçon y era
çierta la muerte. Conuenia huyr
de conuersaçion y compañia,
porque era mal contagioso, que
luego se pegaua si auia
ayuntamiento de gentes, y ansi
huyan los ricos que podian de los
grandes pueblos a las pequeñas
aldeas que menos gente y
congregaçion huuiesse. Y
despues se defendia la entrada
de los que viniessen de fuera con
temor que trayendo consigo el
mal corrompiesse y contaminasse
el pueblo. Y ansi aconteçia que el
que no salia temprano de la
çiudad juntamente con sus
alhajas y hazienda; si acaso
saliese algo tarde, quando ya
estaua ençendida la pestelencia
andaua vagando por los campos
porque no le querian acoxer en
parte alguna, por lo qual sucedia
morir por alli por mala prouision
de hambre y miseria corridos y
desconsolados. Y lo que más era
de llorar, que puestos en la
neçesidad los padres, huyan
dellos los hijos con la mayor
crueldad del mundo, y por el
semejante huyan dellos los
padres por escapar cada qual con
la vida. Y suçedia que por huyr
los sacerdotes el peligro de la
pestelençia, no auia quien
confesasse ni administrasse los
sacramentos, de manera que
todos morian sin ellos, y en el
entierro, o quedauan sin
sepoltura, o se echauan veynte
personas en una. Era, en suma,
la mas trabajada y miserable vida
y infeliz que ninguna lengua ni
pluma puede escriuir ni
encareçer. Teniasse por
conueniente medio, do quiera que
los honbres estauan exerçitarse
en cosas de alegria y plazer, en
huertas, rios, fuentes, florestas,
xardines, prados, juegos, bayles y
todo genero de regoçijo; huyendo
a la contina con todas sus fuerças
de qualquiera ocasion que los
pudiesse dar tristeza y pesar.
Agora quiero te dezir vna cossa
notable que en esta nuestra
çiudad passó; y es que se tomó
por ocupacion y exerçiçio
salutifero y muy conueniente para
euitar la tristeza y ocasion del mal
hazer en todas las calles, passos,
o lo que los antiguos llamaron
palestras o estadios, y porque
mejor me entiendas digo que se
hazian en todas las calles vnos
palenques que las cerrauan con
vn seto de madera entretexida
arboleda de flores, rosas y yeruas
muy graciosas, quedando sola
vna pequeña puerta por la qual al
principio de la calle pudiessen
entrar, y otra puerta al fin por
donde pudiessen salir, y alli
dentro se hazia vn entoldado
talamo[301] o teatro para que se
sentassen los juezes, y en cada
calle auia vn juego particular
dentro de aquellos palenques o
palestras. En vna calle auia lucha,
en otra esgrima, en otra danza y
bayle; en otra se jugauan virlos,
saltar, correr, tirar barra; y a todos
estos juegos y exerçiçios hauia
ricas joyas que se dauan al que
mejor se exercitasse por premio,
y ansi todos aqui venian a lleuar
el palio, o premio ricamente
vestidos[302] o disfraçados que
agradaban[303] mucho a los
miradores y adornauan la fiesta y
regocijo. En vna calle estaua
hecho vn palenque de mucho
más rico, hermoso y apazible
aparato que en todas las otras.
Estaua hecho vn seto con
muchos generos y diferencias de
arboles, flores y frutas, naranjos,
camuessos, çiruelas, guindas,
claveles, azuçenas, alelies, rosas,
violetas, marauillas y jazmines, y
todas las frutas colgauan de los
árboles que juzgaras ser allí
naturalmente nacidas[304]. Auia a
vna parte del palenque vn teatro
ricamente entoldado, y en él auia
vn estrado: debajo de vn dosel de
brocado estauan sentados Apolo
y Orfeo prinçipes de la musica de
bien contrahechos disfrazes.
Tenia el vno dellos en la mano
vna bihuela, que dezian auer sido
aquella que hubieron los
insulanos de Lesbos; que yua por
el mar haziendo con las olas muy
triste musica por la muerte de su
señor Orpheo quando le
despedaçaron las mujeres
griegas, y cortada la cabeça
juntamente con la vihuela la
echaron en el Negro Ponto, y las
aguas del mar la lleuaron hasta
Lesbos, y los insulanos la
pusieron en Delphos en el templo
de Apolo, y de alli la truxieron los
desta çiudad para esta fiesta y
desafio[305]. Ansi dezian estos
juezes que la darian por premio y
galardon al que mejor cantasse y
tañiesse en vna vihuela, por ser la
mas estimada joya que en el
mundo entre los musicos se podia
auer. En aquel tiempo estaua en
esta nuestra çiudad vn honbre
muy ambiçioso que se llamaba
Euangelista, el qual avnque era
mançebo de edad de treynta años
y de buena dispusiçion y rostro,
pero era muy mayor la presunçion
que de si tenia de passar en todo
a todos. Este despues que obo
andado todos los palenques y
palestras, y que en ninguno pudo
auer vitoria, ni en lucha, ni
esgrima, ni en otro alguno de
aquellos exerçiçios, acordó de se
vestir lo mas rico que pudo
ayudandose de ropas y joyas muy
preçiadas suyas y de sus amigos,
y cargando de collares y cadenas
su cuello y onbros, y de muchos y
muy estimados anillos sus dedos,
y procuró auer vna vihuela con
gran suma de dinero, la qual
lleuaua las clauijas de oro, y todo
el mastil y tapa labrada de vn
taraçe de piedras finas de
inestimable valor, y eran las
maderas del cedro del monte
Libano, y del ebano fino de la
insula Meroe, juntamente con las
costillas y cercos. Tenia por la
tapa junto a la puente y lazo
pintados del mesmo taraçe a
Apolo y Orpheo con sus vihuelas
en las manos de muy admirable
official que la labró. Era la vihuela
de tanto valor que no auia preçio
en que se pudiesse estimar. Este
como entró en el teatro, fue de
todos muy mirado, por el rico
aparato y atauio que traya.
Estaua todo el teatro lleno de
tapetes y estançias llenas de
damas y caualleros que auian
venido a ver diffinir aquella
preciosa joya en aquella fiesta
posponiendo su salud y su vida. Y
como le mandaron los juezes que
començase a tañer esperando dél
que lleuaria la ventaja al mesmo
Apolo que resuçitase. En fin, él
començo a tañer de tal manera
que a juizio razonable que no
fuese piedra pareçeria no saber
tocar las cuerdas mas que vn
asno! Y cuando vino a cantar
todos se mouieron a escarnio y
risa visto que la cançion era muy
fria y cantada sin algun arte,
gracia, y donayre de la musica.
Pues como los juezes le oyeron
cantar y tañer tan sin arte y orden
esperando dél el extremo de la
musica, hiriendole con vn palo y
con mucho baldon fue traydo por
el teatro diciendole vn pregonero
en alta voz grandes vituperios, y
fue mandado por los juezes estar
vilissimamente sentado en el
suelo con mucha inominia a vista
de todos hasta que fue
sentenciado el juizio, y luego
entro vn mançebo de razonable
disposiçion y edad, natural de vna
pequeña y baja aldea desta
nuestra çiudad, pobre, mal
vestido y peor atauiado en cabello
y apuesto. Este traya en la mano
una vihuela grosera y mal dolada
de pino y de otro palo comun, sin
polideza ni afeyte alguno. Tan
grosero en su representaçion que
a todos los que estauan en el
teatro mouio a risa y escarnio
juzgando que este tambien
pagaria con Euangelista su
atreuimiento y temeridad, y
puesto ante los juezes les
demandó en alta voz le oyessen,
y despues de auer oydo a
aquellos dos tan señalados
musicos en la vihuela Torres
Naruaez y Macotera, tan
nombrados en España que
admirablemente auian hecho su
deuer y obligacion, mandaron los
juezes que tañese este pobre
varon, que dixo auer por nombre
Tespin. El qual como començo a
tañer hazia hablar las cuerdas
con tanta exçelençia y melodia
que lleuaua los honbres bobos,
dormidos tras si; y a vna buelta de
consonancia los despertaua como
con vna vara. Tenia de voz vn
tenor admirable, el qual quando
començo a cantar no auia honbre
que no saliesse de si, porque era
la voz de admirable fuerça,
magestad y dulçor. Cantaba en
vna ingeniosa composicion de
metro castellano las batallas y
vitoria del Rey catolico Fernando
sobre el Reyno y çiudad de
Granada, y aquellos
razonamientos y auiso que pasó
con aquel antiguo moro
Auenamar, descripçion de
Alixares, alcazar y meschita. Los
juezes dieron por Tespin la
sentençia y vitoria, y le dieron la
joya del premio y trihunfo, y luego
voluiendose el pregonero á
Euangelista que estaua
miserablemente sentado en tierra
le dixo en alta voz: ves aqui, o
souerbio y ambiçioso Euangelista
qué te han aprouechado tus
anillos, vihuela dorada y ricos
atauios, pues por causa dellos
han aduertido todos los miradores
mas a tu temeridad, locura,
ambiçion y neçedad, quando por
sola la apariençia de tus riquezas
pensaste ganar el premio, no
sabiendo en la verdad cantar ni
tañer. Pues mentiste a ti y a todos
pensaste engañar serás infame
para siempre jamas por exemplo
del mentir, lleuando el premio el
pobre Tespin como musico de
verdad sin aparençia ni fiçion.
Esto te he contado, Miçilo, porque
me dixiste que con aparato de
palabras no pensasse dezirte
grandes mentiras, yo digo que te
prometo de no ser como este
musico Euangelista, que quiso
ganar el premio y joya con solo el
aparato y apariencia de su
hermosura y riqueza, con temor
que despues no solamente me
quites el comer que me prometes
por galardon, pero avn me des de
palos, y avn por mas te asegurar
te hago juramento solemne al
gran poder de dios; y,
Miçilo.—Calla, calla gallo,
oyeme,—dime, y no me
prometiste al prinçipio que
hablarias conmigo en toda
religion?
Gallo.—Pues en qué falto de la
promesa?
Miçilo.—En que con tanta fuerça
y behemencia juras a dios.
Gallo.—Pues no puedo jurar?
Miçilo.—Vnos clerigos santos
que andan en esta villa nos dizen
que no.
Gallo.—Dexate desos santones.
Opinion fue de vnos herejes
llamados Manicheos condenada
por conçilio, que dezian: que en
ninguna manera era liçito jurar.
Pero a mi pareçeme que es liçito
imitar a Dios, pues el juró por si
mesmo quando quiso hazer çierta
la promessa a habraan. Donde
dize San Pablo que no auia otro
mayor por quien jurasse Dios, que
lo jurara como juró por si, y en la
sagrada escriptura a cada passo
se hallan juramentos de profetas
y santos que juran por vida de
Dios[306], y el mesmo San Pablo
le jura con toda su santidad, que
dixo escriuiendo a los Galatas: si
por la gracia somos hijos de dios,
luego juro a dios que somos
herederos. Y hazia bien, porque
ninguno jura sino por el que más
ama, y por el que conoçe ser
mayor. Ansi dize el refran: quien
bien le jura, bien le cree. Pero
dexado esto, yo te prometo contar
cosas verdaderas y de admiraçion
con que sobrelleuando el trabajo
te deleyte y de plazer. Pues
venido al principio de mi ser tú
sabrás que como te he dicho yo
fue aquel gran filosofo Pythagoras
samio hijo de Menesarra, honbre
rico y de gran negoçio en la
mercaderia.
Miçilo.—Espera, gallo, que ya
me acuerdo, que yo he oydo dezir
dese sabio y santo filosofo, que
enseñó muchas buenas cosas a
los de su tiempo. Agora, pues,
dime, gallo, porque via dexando
de ser aquel filosofo veniste a ser
gallo, vn aue de tan poca estima y
valor?
Gallo.—Primero que viniesse a
ser gallo fue transformado en
otras diuersidades de animales y
gentes, entre las quales he sido
rana, y hombre bajo popular y
Rey.
Miçilo.—Y qué Rey fueste?
Gallo.—Yo fue Sardanapalo Rey
de los Medos mucho antes que
fuese Pithagoras.
Miçilo.—Agora me parece, gallo,
que me comienças a encantar, o
por mejor dezir a engañar, porque
comienças por vna cosa tan
repugnante y tan lejos de
verisimilitud para poderla creer.
Porque segun yo te he oydo y me
acuerdo, ese filosofo Pithagoras
fue el mas virtuoso hombre que
huuo en su tiempo. El qual por
aprender los secretos de la tierra
y del cielo se fue a Egipto con
aquellos sabios que alli auia en el
templo que entonces dezian
Sacerdotes de Jupiter Amon que
vibian en las Syrtes, y de alli se
vino a visitar los magos a
Babilonia, que era otro genero de
sabios, y al fin se voluio a la
ytalia, donde llegado a la ciudad
de Croton hallo que reinaua
mucho alli la luxuria, y el deleyte,
y el suntuoso comer y beber, de lo
qual los apartó con su buena
doctrina, y exemplo. Este hizo
admirables leyes de templança,
modestia y castidad, en las
quales mandó que ninguno
comiesse carne, por apartarlos de
la luxuria, y desta manera bastó
refrenarlos de los viçios y tambien
mandaua a sus discipulos que por
çinco años no hablassen, porque
conoçia el buen sabio quantos
males vengan en el mundo por el
hablar demassiado. ¡Quan
contrarias fueron estas dos cosas
a las costumbres y vida de
Sardanapalo Rey de los Medos,
del qual he oydo cosas tan
contrarias que me hazen creer
que finges por burlar de mi!
Porque he oydo dezir que fue el
mayor gloton y luxurioso que
huuo en sus tiempos, tanto que
señalaua premios a los inuentores
de guisados y comeres, y a los
que de nueuo le enseñasen
maneras de luxuriar, y ansi este
infeliz suçio mando poner en su
sepoltura estas palabras: aqui
yaze Sardanapalo, Rey de
Medos, hijo de Anazindaro: Come
honbre, bebe y juega, y
conociendo que eres mortal
satisfaz tu animo de los deleytes
presentes, porque despues no
hay de que puedas con alegria
gozar. Que ansi hize yo, y solo
me queda que comi y harté este
mi apetito de luxuria y deleyte, y
en fin todo se queda acá, y yo
resulto conuertido en poluo! Mira
pues, o gallo, qué manifiesta
contrariedad ay entre estos dos
por donde veo yo que me estimes
en poco pues tan claramente
propones cosa tan lexos de
verisimilitud. O parece que
descuydado en tu fingir
manifiestes la vanidad de tu
fiçion.
Gallo.—O quan pertinaz estás,
Miçilo, en tu incredulidad, ya no
sé con que juramentos ó palabras
te asegure para que me quieras
oyr. Quanto mas te admirarias si
te dixesse, que fue yo tambien en
vn tiempo aquel Emperador
Romano Heliogabalo, vn tan
disoluto gloton y vicioso en su
comer.
Miçilo.—O valame dios si verdad
es lo que me conto este dia
passado este nuestro vezino
Demophon, que dixo que lo hauia
leido en vn libro que dixo llamarse
Selua de varia leçion. Por cierto si
verdad es, y no lo finge aquel
auctor, argumento me es muy
claro de lo que presumo de ti,
porque en el viçio de comer y
beber y luxuriar excede avn a
Sardanapalo sin comparaçion.
Gallo.—De pocas cosas te
comienças a admirar, ó Miçilo y
de cosas faciles de entender te
comienças a alterar, y mueues
dubdas y objeçiones que causan
repunançia y perplegidad en tu
entendimiento. Lo qual todo naçe
de la poca esperiençia que tienes
de las cosas, y principalmente
proçede en ti esa tu confusion de
no ser ocupado hasta aqui en la
especulaçion de la filosofia,
donde se aprende y sabe la
naturaleza de las cosas. Donde si
tú te hubieras exercitado supieras
la rayz porque aborreci el deleyte
y luxuria siendo Pythagoras, y le
segui avn con tanto estudio
siendo Heliogabalo, o
Sardanapalo. No te fatigues agora
por saber el prinçipio de
naturaleza por donde proçeda
esta variedad de inclinaçion,
porque ni haze a tu proposito ni te
haze menester, ni nos deuemos
agora en esto ocupar. Solamente
por te dar manera de sabor y
graçia en el trabajar pretendo que
sepas como todo lo fue, y lo que
en cada estado passé, y
conocerás como de sabios y
neçios, ricos, pobres, reyes y
filosofos, el mejor estado y mas
seguro de los bayuenes de
fortuna tienes tú, y que entre
todos los hombres tú eres el mas
feliz.
Miçilo.—Que yo te parezco el
mas bien auenturado honbre de
los que has visto, o gallo? Por
çierto yo pienso que burlas pues
no veo en mi porqué. Pero quiero
dexar de estorbar el discurso de
tu admirable narracion con mis
perplexos argumentos, y bastame
gozar del deleyte que espero
reçebir de tu graçioso cuento para
el passo de mi miserable vida
sola y trabajada, que si como tú
dizes, otro más misero y
trabajado ay que yo en el mundo
respecto del qual yo me puedo
dezir bienauenturado, yo concluyo
que en el mundo no ay que
desear. Agora pues el tiempo se
nos va, comiençame a contar
desde que fueste Pythagoras lo
que passaste en cada estado y
naturaleza, porque
neçesariamente en tanta
diuersidad de formas y variedad
de tiempos te deuyeron de
aconteçer, y visto cosas y cuentos
dignos de oyr. Agora dexadas
otras cosas muchas aparte yo te
ruego que me digas como te
suçedio la muerte siendo
Heliogabalo, y en qué estado y
forma sucediste despues, y de ay
me contarás tu vida hasta la que
agora possees de gallo que lo
deseo en particular oyr.
Gallo.—Tú sabras, cómo ya
dizes que oyste a Demophon, que
como yo fuesse tan viçioso y de
tan luxuriosa inclinaçion, siguio la
muerte al mi muy más continuo
vso de viuir. Porque de todos fue
aborreçido por mi suçio comer y
luxuriar, y ansi vn dia acabando
en todo deleyte de comer y beber
esplendidamente, me retray a vna
privada a purgar mi vientre que
con grande instançia me aquexó
la gran repleçion de yrle a baçiar.
En el qual lugar entraron dos mis
mas pribados familiares, y por
estar ya enhastiados de mis viçios
y vida suçia, con mano armada
me començaron a herir hasta que
me mataron, y despues avn se
me huvo de dar mi conueniente
sepoltura por cumplido galardon,
que me echaron el cuerpo en
aquella privada donde estuve
abscondido mucho tiempo que no
me hallaron, hasta que fue a salir
al Tibre entre las inmundiçias y
suçiedades que uienen por el
comun conducto de la çiudad. Y
ansi sabras, que dexando mi
cuerpo caydo alli, salida mi ánima
se fue a lançar en el vientre de
una fiera y muy valiente puerca
que en los montes de Armenia
estaua preñada de seys lechones,
y yo vine a salir en el prímero que
pario.
Miçilo.—O valame Dios; yo
sueño lo que oyo? Que de honbre
veniste a ser puerco, tan suçio y
tan bruto animal? No puedo
disimular admiraçion quando veo
que tiene naturaleza formadas
criaturas como tú que en
esperiençia y conocimiento llena
ventaja a mi inhabilidad tan sin
comparacion. Ya me voy
desengañando de mi ceguedad, y
voy conociendo de tu mucho
saber lo poco que soy. Y ansi de
oy más me quiero someter a tu
disçiplina, como veo que tiene
tanta muestra de deidad.
Gallo.—Y este tienes, Miçilo, por
caso de admiracion? Pues menos
podrias creer que aurá alguno
que juntamente sea honbre y
puerco, y avn pluguiesse a dios
no fuesse peor y mas vil. Que avn
la naturaleza del puerco no es la
peor.
Miçilo.—Pues cómo y puede
auer algun animal mas torpe y
suçio que el?