381. A Tribute to Herbert Feigl

Russian professors of mathematics have a custom at their parties of toasting, each in his turn, their graduate advisers.  It is more formal than anything I remember us in the Ohio University English Department having at our parties and, long-practiced, requires no setting up.  Everybody seems to know it's time for the ceremony, the chairs go in a ring, and you, whether or not you're there just because your wife is a mathematician, have got to produce when your turn comes.

Even though your mind is busy  there's no keeping the tenderness in some of the tributes from coming through.  Perhaps because we're always well into the vodka, and it's late, and perhaps because I've learned the history of many of the men (they're all men): a youth under communism, a choice of mathematics (the pull of the subject, the magnetism of the man at the blackboard, the push of the fact that the subject, being apolitical, was risk free), then turmoil, and haven in America — some glimpses of the past simply shove my anxieties behind me.  An aging man, honored in his field, an impressive body of work behind him (like Shura Arhangelskii), loses himself in memories of a man at the blackboard (like his Pavel Alexandrov), or next to him over a paper, enforcing the discipline, opening up the beauty it leads to.

The man I probably have the tenderest memories of is Herbert Feigl, not my adviser, just a teacher of courses in my minor (I took symbolic logic, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of science from him), and member of the committee of seven that questioned me for three hours to see if I could go on to write a thesis.  It was this last that endeared him to me.  I was extremely nervous.  I knew that some Ph.D. candidates at this stage were so nervous they had botched the first question and in some cases never recovered.  Well, Feigl apparently knew this and had thought through his kindness to me.  While the others were still taking their seats he opened a conversation with me about something that had come up in class, some misunderstanding about deduction and induction.  I was clear about it.  I was chattering away my easy understanding of the problem when I looked around and saw the whole room listening.  The examination had begun and I was winging over the first hurdles.  My philosophy professor was a master of the tactics of kindness. 

And that's a teaser because I had been prepared to regard him as my enemy — in the way academics have enemies.  He was a logical positivist, and about as logical positivist as you can get: trained as a physicist, member (the youngest) of the founding body of logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, and leading formulator of its latest version, logical empiricism, in America.  In English departments at the time (1951), and especially in the University of Minnesota English Department, that philosophy, known to us by its alternate name, "scientific philosophy," was poison.

Our modern word "reductive" condensed the poison, though years of exposure to poets injured by science — Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and lately T. S. Eliot — had prepared us for it.  We had seen the robust Christian word "soul" weaken on the page.  Half of Donne limped, and Herbert fell before our eyes.  So many poet's words were Christian words, and as the faith was weakened, they weakened.  And then there was "truth."  What was truth?  "A species of revelation," said Coleridge. "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty," said Keats.   Seizes out of an abundant world.  Take that from the definition and you took something from your own soul.

Robert Penn Warren's influence would have been enough to establish the poisoning.  He had recently published his interpretation of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and we graduate students were gripped by it.  In that poem the poison is represented by the sun, "under whose aegis the bad events of the poem occur."  The events had to be bad because, as Warren explained using Coleridge's terms, the sun's light was the light of the "mere reflective faculty," reason, narrowly ratiocinative and so limited compared to the faculty of the imagination, the faculty that, under the "aegis of the moon," produced life-embracing poetry. 

What did reason, thought of as the ratiocinative power, produce?  Well, in the end, disaster.  Everybody in English departments in 1951 agreed: there was a direct line between the worldly rationalists of the seventeenth century and the mad scientists who had just made the atom bomb.  Coleridge was justified in saying that the mere reflective faculty "partook of death," and Warren was right in seeing the poem's sun as "the sun of death."  When he went on to see in that "a fable of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, whose fair promises had wound up in the blood-bath of the end of the century," we all were with him.  I especially.  I had had his two-quarter Interpretation of Poetry course and I was thoroughly convinced.

Then I took Feigl's Symbolic Logic.  On the second day I came face to face with Truth.  There it was in a table, down in a column, where the T's were.  Not behind the misty moon, not fleeting through a lover's eyes, not tangled with beauty, but there, right there, in a box.  Exactly what my companions in poetry and religion were groping for.  Ho Pontius, over here!

I had been smacked by a reduction so shocking it took my breath away.   Afterward, of course, I got an explanation, letting me understand that these philosophy-department people with their T were not identifying in the mist anything like our abundant Truth but simply a species of sentence.  I heard a kind voice saying, in a European accent, "Here, disturbed visitor, is simply a system to guide you to kinds of sentences you can safely call 'true' in relation to other kinds of sentences."

The problem might not have been so acute at other schools, but at Minnesota at that time both the English Department and the Philosophy Department were leading the way in developing new approaches to their discipline, each making the cut into poetry more painful.  In English it was the New Criticism, with Robert Penn Warren in the lead, and in Philosophy it was logical empiricism, with Herbert Feigl and Wilfred Sellars in the lead, each backed by a line-up of bright converts, and each stirring the kind of ferment that later looks so golden.  At the time graduate advisers all over the country, those who knew where the action was anyway, were sending their students there.  My adviser had made Minnesota one of only three graduate schools he would recommend.

Coffee with some of Feigl's students redrew my picture of the logical positivist mind.  It wasn't working constantly to reduce the riches of life, an opposite to the way ours (and Coleridge's and Warren's) worked.  No, it wasn't the way their minds worked at all, it was the way the system they had bent their minds to worked.  Bent humbly.  To themselves they were simply saying, "Let's at least get this straight."  And to accomplish that they were deliberately impoverishing their world.

So, get off your humanities' high horse for a while, my message to myself went, and "Let X equal...whatever.  As in a mathematical system."  Just let it, as in any theorem.  Provisionally.  So we can see what this reduction allows us, what the formula cranks out.  If I, the soldier of the Imagination, had only had the imagination to see, in my first math class, all that was in, and wasn't in, that word "let," I would have saved myself so much trouble.  My poet and I could have kept possession of our abundant world.

And I could have done that later (but in time to avoid a lot of anguish) if I had gone back and looked more closely at Feigl's introduction to our textbook, his Readings in Philosophical Analysis, done with Wilfrid Sellars.  There he allows distinctly more room for the imagination, for poetry, for Coleridge, and later, even for Derrida and Foucault, than any of us in the humanities distance would have guessed then, or now. 

To Feigl our complaint against logical positivism was, or would have been, a complaint against what he called "nothing but" statements, a complaint he makes more knowledgeably and with broader sweep than we could.  Radical materialists say, "Mind is nothing but matter," radical phenomenalists say, "Matter is nothing but clusters of sensations," extreme nominalists say, "Universals are mere words," and ethical skeptics say, "Good and evil are no more than projections of our likes and dislikes."  All these, he said, using the word we used for the movement we attached his school to, were "reductive" to the point of fallacy.

Feigl recognized, and I want to see his modesty again here, that his logical empiricists "may not always have been able to avoid these fallacies" and then he says something that applied to both swarms of graduate students, in both disciplines:

A young and aggressive movement in its zeal to purge thought of confusions and superfluous entities naturally brandishes more destructive weapons than it requires for its genuinely constructive endeavor.

It's a piece of wisdom I could have used again and again as I witnessed New Critics purging our discipline of the confusions of Historical Criticism, and, with varying degrees of zeal, the New Historicists purging it of New Criticism, and Poststructuralists purging it of Structuralism, and Postmodernists purging it of Modernism, and Anti-Foundationalists  purging it of Foundationalism, and so on.  Feigl taught me to discount zealous overstatements.  They, as compensatory exaggerations, appear in all new movements of any significance.  What their authors produce, or rather over-produce, gets discarded in the genuinely constructive effort that matters. 

In the genuine construction of logical empiricism, as conceived by Feigl, there is clearly a place for poetry and the imagination.  Unfortunately it appears in a table (the worst kind of optics for humanists) and it's in terms poets and their friends are unaccustomed to, and often resentful of.  It's under "Non-cognitive meanings," and then under its subdivisions, "Pictorial, Emotional, and Volitional-Motivational" meanings.

The pivot-word is "emotional."  That's where the reduction comes in and bites.  The word stands for what literature gives us.  In the logical empiricists' system there has to be an opposite of cognitive, they have to give it a name, and this is the one they chose.  My whole department will have to admit that it fits.  What our supreme genre, tragedy, at its supreme moment, defined by our supreme critic, Aristotle, produces in us, pity and terror, are feelings, and feelings aren't cognitive. 

So yes, we can't deny that what we come out of a performance of King Lear with is a feeling, yes the term fits, yes it meets all the logical objections we or anybody can think of raising, and yes the logical empiricist system works.  But no, no, no, we can never be satisfied with such a word.  There is so much more in our experience of King Lear, than what the word refers to.

For one thing we, when the curtain closes, know a lot more about fatherhood than we did.  As, when we finish Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle we know a lot more about male egotism, and, when we put down Anthony Trollope's The Warden, a lot more about male altruism.  And "know" is the right word.  Test it by our ability to make predictions and we say, "Yes, we can pretty well tell you how John Marcher is going to act when he has a reunion with his sister."  The same with Septimus Harding at any class or family reunion.  As it would be with Lear if we were to predict how he, back on the throne after his learning and suffering, would make decisions — as about the treatment of the kingdom's "wretches."

So the words "emotional" and "emotive appeal" had a referent that didn't work.  I had gained something after reading these fictions that was not a gain in feeling.  The right word for what I had gained was "knowledge."  The title for Feigl's second course was "Theory of Knowledge" and this belonged in it.  If he kept it out he would show me that "reductive" was still the right word for his system.  I of course (not yet seeing how putting all my literary apercus under the category "knowledge" would muddle his system) found that he did keep it out. 

Did that make him a "reducer"?  I found it very hard to call him so. In class, in moments outside of his business with symbolic logic and the new systems, his broad education, the classical education of the assimilated Austrian Jew, shone through.  Shakespeare was on his tongue.  He had bent his mind to his system but I feel sure, as sure as anyone at student distance from a professor can feel, that those in our circle of literary humanists would have been amazed at how far he could unbend it, and take (provisionally, of course) any approach they wanted to try.  Long after I had taken his courses, when I was in the library turning over books of interest to my thesis, I found on the list of checkouts of one, a collection of metaphysical poetry, his name.   Metaphysical poems were Exhibit A in the case the New Critics were making.  Some of those poems would have bent his mind to the cracking point.  But he was giving them a good try.

Outside his system Feigl was the full, Viennese man of culture, a full-feathered bird; inside it he was a single-minded hawk, all beak and talons.  I can't imagine him handling a literary critic's insight the way he handled a fellow philosopher's formulation — if it rested on a metaphysical base.  Even here, though, with the logical positivist's bugaboo, he was never peremptory.  He'd write some semi-mystical statements on the board and then, counting on what we had learned so far, ask if we "smelled something fishy."  (He had been quick to learn American slang and having a teenage son was no doubt a great help; he gestured at the statements over his shoulder, with his thumb, like a Catskills comedian.)  He believed, with Wittgenstein, that "the mystic was reduced to silence" and the student who sniffed resistance to that conclusion was likely the first to raise his (or her) hand and haltingly explain the mess on the board.  Feigl then agreed in terms that kept us from ever again wasting time on such nonsense: "Sure.  Right.  You can't unscrew the inscrutable." 

My view of Feigl's full "sensibility" (our department word for what poet's had) couldn't help but force re-examination of my word "reduction."  I found, even after taking Feigl's expansions into account, that I had used it properly.  That, however, did not account for all the objections that kept rising within me — and, I felt sure, would have risen inside all my fellows in literary studies.  Those objections were not to a logical reduction (they couldn't be) but to a rhetorical reduction.  And rhetorical reductions hurt.  Bring the ends of a discipline, all a department's work, down from "knowledge" to "emotion" and you're going to get a howl. 

Were there alternatives?  Maybe there wasn't one in the logical empiricist's lexicon, shared in disciplines (most sciences) that put logical fit first.  But every student of poetry and the Bible would have a word ready to pull from his lexicon: "wisdom."  Shakespeare and James and Trollope offered wisdom.  It was fuzzy around the edges, maybe, and it made a loose fit, but the word contained oh so much more of what those authors gave us than "emotion" did.

(Suppose the logical empiricists had by some chance chosen "wisdom" instead of "emotion."  I find myself dreaming, or hypothesizing counter-factually: would there ever have been a science war?  A casus belli for the culture war?  It wouldn't be the first time that rhetoric has turned hawks into doves.)

We live life outside our systems, which we turn to for this or that purpose.  Our success in life, finding and leading the good life, depends so much on our knowledge of ourselves and where we are in life, what each occasion calls for.  What system to turn to here?  What words to plug into the system?  Here's one that makes a tight fit, is a good conductor, and will let us crank out a reliable product.  It's worth a lot — if the occasion calls for such a product.  Here's another word that makes a loose fit, is not a good conductor, and could jam the system.  But what it lets us crank out (if there's no jam) will be worth diamonds and rubies.  Great, provided that diamonds and rubies are what the occasion calls for. 

That's the way I came to see "emotion" and "wisdom," though there are many words like them.  The trouble on the "wisdom" side is usually an overload of life's riches; the trouble on the "emotion" side is an underload.  Life is in the end too rich for any system.  We end in frustration.  I was already getting frustrated in my attempt to describe the relation between "emotion" and "wisdom."  That's why I, in the eternal practice of poets, turned to metaphor.  It fills the gap when there are no good fillers in the lexicon.

Feigl wanted logical empiricists to find a way between "a philosophy of Nothing But" and "a philosophy of Something More."  I was going to want my students, in their choice of words to fit their ideas, to find a way between not enough and too much, between underload and overload, between simple-mindedness and muddle-headedness. "Simple-mindedness and muddle-headedness."  That was one of the ways Feigl pointed to the difference between Nothing But and Something More.  We were aiming at the same thing.  His lessons in philosophical analysis were a gift to my future in English.