Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination - Garry L. Hagberg Editor - FAGI Leipzig
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Garry L. Hagberg
Editor
Fictional Worlds and
the Moral
ImaginationEditor Garry L. Hagberg Department of Philosophy Bard College Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA ISBN 978-3-030-55048-6 ISBN 978-3-030-55049-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Dina Belenko Photography / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
12
Improvisation Within the Range
of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry
James, and the Space of Moral
Reflection
Garry L. Hagberg
1 From Robots to Sherlock Holmes
If the picture were an accurate portrayal, we would be, at least in moral
life, not unlike high-end robots: we would face a circumstance, identify
the relevant facts, place those particular facts into their general categories,
pull down general imperatives or universal rules that tell us how to choose
one of two or more possible courses of moral action, and then simply
proceed – all in a sense (hence “robotic”) automatically. The descriptions
of those facts would be direct and singular (that is, there would be one
description for one fact), the categories to which they belong (a case of
lying, or of cheating an unwittingly-overpaying customer, or of keeping
or breaking a promise, etc.) would be clearly bounded and without ambi-
guity, and the principles or universal rules covering them would be clearly
and succinctly propositionally encapsulated (where those principles are
themselves descriptively singular). We owe a good deal to the work of
G. L. Hagberg (*)
Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA
e-mail: hagberg@bard.edu
© The Author(s) 2021 231
G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_12232 G. L. Hagberg
Cora Diamond for showing why this picture is interestingly hopeless,
why that is itself morally instructive, and why seeing this with some intri-
cacy is what it takes to achieve an intellectual liberation from (what
Wittgenstein called) the grip of this picture.
In Diamond’s rich discussion in her paper “Missing the Adventure:
Reply to Martha Nussbaum”, she writes,
Moral attention is our topic: the other side of it is moral inattention,
obtuseness, and denial. Professor Nussbaum began with a quotation from
Henry James’s Preface to What Maisie Knew, that “the effort really to see
and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that
makes for muddlement.” James was speaking there of a particular kind of
obtuseness: the moralistic dismissal of art, of the novelist’s art, expressed in
the criticism of What Maisie Knew as a morally disgusting work.1
There are multiple connections already in play: the kind of moral criti-
cism, the kind of unthinking moral dismissal, that James was lamenting
was that of a formulaic kind; that is, of general condemnations generated
by facile categorization followed immediately by principle-based judg-
ment – the kind of judgment robots could make. The effort to “really see”
requires, well, effort: it is not a matter of a direct single-description per-
ception of facts (we will explore this point at length in what follows).
Nussbaum, quoting James, sets Diamond here in motion, with all three
having seen something deep about moral awareness and the comprehen-
sion of complexity that the robotic picture misses. And for all three,
1
Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (MIT Press, 1991),
pp. 309–318; this passage p. 309. The quotation from Henry James is in: Henry James, The Art of
the Novel (New York, 1934), p. 149. The paper Diamond is discussing is Martha Nussbaum,
“Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination”, in A. J. Cascardi,
ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore, 1987), and is reprinted in Nussbaum’s col-
lection Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990). To my knowledge
Nussbaum is the first to identify and situate improvisation in a prominent position in ethical
thought. To my way of thinking this itself represents a major step forward in bringing what is too
often the abstract world of ethical philosophy closer to our real moral world – the world that should
be the subject of that philosophy. Appropriately to its subject, Diamond takes up the theme of
improvisation and develops a new variation, a new rendition, of it; my attempt here – for jazz play-
ers, a new arrangement of a standard – is to further elucidate what improvisation is and to consider
its role in literature as a mimetic portrayal of the complexity of moral life. A much shorter version
of this essay appeared in Cora Diamond on Ethics, ed. Maria Balaska (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 233
moral inattention is itself a form of immorality, and it is concealed within
the very picture that presents itself as morally attentive. So what, to be
more precise, is that picture? One of the ways to formulate it is as ethical
deduction: one cannot accept both the major and minor premises of the
deduction concerning the mortality of Socrates and then deny the con-
clusion. Similarly, it is thought, moral knowledge, knowing the right
thing to do, would be ensured by establishing an accepted, or even irre-
futable, major premise, linking it to a similarly accepted minor premise,
and drawing the conclusion (All lying is wrong; this is a case of lying;
ergo…). Diamond writes,
I shall start with some obtuseness in philosophy: with a particular wild
misunderstanding of a kind of moral activity. William Frankena, in a well-
know introduction to moral philosophy, asks his readers, right at the begin-
ning, to take as an example of ethical thinking Socrates’s reasoning in the
Crito about whether to escape from prison. According to Frankena, Socrates
has three arguments to show that he ought not to break the laws by escap-
ing. Each has two premises: a general moral rule or principle and a state-
ment of fact.
So on this quite standard view of ethical thinking or moral reasoning, one
begins with a general rule prior to any consideration of the details of the
case at hand. And on this broadly deductive or syllogistic model, it is the
general rule – a case-transcending rule – that instructs. Diamond thus
continues,
The three arguments are then: first, we ought never to harm anyone, and if
Socrates escaped he would be harming the State; secondly, we ought to
keep our promises, and if Socrates escapes he will be breaking a promise;
and thirdly, we ought to obey or respect our parents and teachers, and if
Socrates escapes he will be disobeying his parent and teacher. Frankena
comments that Socrates’s argument is instructive because it illustrates how
a reflective and serious moral agent solves problems by the application of
moral principles, and he goes on to raise questions about how a reflective
moral agent can proceed to try to justify the principles themselves. Thus
one sees what it is to be reflective about one’s working ethics.2
2
The Realistic Spirit, pp. 309–310.234 G. L. Hagberg What Diamond shows is that this is the opposite of moral reflection, and that it closes down what I will call below the range of implication within which any such reflection could occur. On Frankena’s picture, the particular case is merely a site for the application of a general principle: what one might call the “noise” of the case are all the circumstantial details that are distinctive to that case, that append themselves as distor- tion to what is regarded as the “signal” of the case – the direct single description of the fact that is like all other cases in its category. And if there is occasion for further moral reflection, that reflection will be about the justification of the general principle, not about anything concerning that “noise”. (Although Diamond does not say so directly or in these words, what she goes on to show is that, once free of the grip of this tra- ditional picture of moral psychology, one has as much difficulty applying the phrase “serious moral agent” to this kind of schematic or automatic cognition as one would have applying seriousness to a robot.) Part of the intellectual liberation for which she is working is captured in the following: Frankena is convinced, in advance of actually looking at the Crito, that moral thought about a particular case consists of bringing principles and rules to bear on the facts of the case. He does not envisage as a possibility that any moral thinking goes on in what one takes to be the facts of the case, how one comes to see them or describe them. That is to say: description is not, in and of itself, noticed to be anything other than a simple, direct, and one-to-one match of words to the world. The passage continues, He chooses as an example of moral thought one in which it is quite con- spicuously the case that terrifically original moral thinking is involved in describing the facts of the case—describing them in such a way that they can be connected with familiar principles—and he totally ignores that. Facts are facts. Socrates says that his escaping would be breaking an agree- ment. If that is a premise in the argument, and it is not a moral principle, it must be a statement of fact—so that cannot be where any moral thinking is.
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 235
And so we see here (in addition to what follows) the stultifying precon-
ception of case-transcending moral principles or rules doing their blind-
ing work: “breaking an agreement” is unreflectively presumed to be one
thing, one action of a generic kind that is captured in one brief generic
description. And so Diamond continues,
That is how Frankena sees the case. And this is despite the fact that the
moral originality of the description of the facts is underlined by Plato….
Crito has no idea how to answer, he does not understand the questions,
does not know how to bring the terms of the questions into connection
with the case before him. Socrates then by an exercise of moral imagination
involving the personification of the Laws enables Crito to see the situation
differently. All of which is regarded by Frankena as nothing to do with
moral thinking. Facts are facts: describe them, and then comes the moral
work: apply your principles.3
It is no secret that Wittgenstein understood philosophical work on
himself, and philosophical work of a kind that will help others attain
conceptual clarification, as a change in one’s way of seeing. And it is no
secret (well, at least for some) that this was methodologically a major step
forward in the history of the subject: conceptual analysis in search of
necessary and sufficient conditions (for truth, beauty, justice, etc.) was
not the only way forward, nor was it any longer the preferred or standard-
setting way forward. Diamond, here shining a spotlight on what Frankena
misses in considering the case of Crito (that is, the morally-imaginative
tutelage of Socrates that brings about an illuminating change in his way
of seeing), shows how things look when one brings to a moral case a fixed
template or conceptual picture prior to that case. This is like the differ-
ence between a good and a bad detective: the bad one comes into the field
of evidence with a calcified preconception that itself produces blindspots;
the good detective comes in with, as Wittgenstein described it in philoso-
phy, the ability to constantly change one’s stance, one’s position, so as not
only to see everything actually available, but also to see the available net-
works of connections between things. (Sherlock Holmes, as a kind of
3
The Realistic Spirit, pp. 310–311. The text discussed is: William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J., 1963), pp. 1–3.236 G. L. Hagberg
analogue of an ideal person possessing the most acute moral perception,
is fascinating not only because he sees facts of the case on the level of the
most minute and hence most easily-missed detail, but equally because he
sees connections between things that the embedded preconceptions of
those around him systematically miss.)
With the detective analogy in mind, we can better see why Diamond
wrote the passage above, “He does not envisage as a possibility that any
moral thinking goes on in what one takes to be the facts of the case, how
one comes to see them or describe them.” This has quadruple importance
for our understanding of Diamond’s contribution and for what I will
discuss below:
1. The envisaging of possibilities, openings and potentials, and the abil-
ity to imaginatively see in the mind’s eye beyond the range of what is
(or what we take to be) given in immediate appearance, are not only
centrally significant for what we call moral vision, they are themselves
constitutive of our moral being and so subject to morally evaluation
accordingly;
2. What one takes to be the facts of a particular case is itself a matter of
selection, of apparent or hidden patterns of acceptance and avoidance,
of spotlighted attention, and a matter of what one might call percep-
tual style, so this itself, rather than being morally inert and prior to
moral engagement, is already part of morality and also subject to
moral evaluation;
3. How one comes to see them is not, or at least often will not be, a sin-
gular affair, so that any such single “stance” in Wittgenstein’s sense will
prove anemic as moral perception and in need of the kind of sympa-
thetic imagination that takes one out of oneself and one’s perceptual
predispositions; and
4. Diamond’s phrase “or describe them” is especially important as it
opens the way to removing a common presumption concerning
language and its role in moral life, i.e. that it is secondary to the action,
that it is taken to be “merely linguistic” or a matter of “mere seman-
tics”, or as though the role language plays in moral perception and the
cultivation of the moral imagination is passive – and thus, here again,
not itself subject to moral evaluation or a matter of moral reflection.12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 237
It is with these themes in mind that Diamond brings in Nussbaum’s
observation that, for Henry James, there exists a direct link between the
moral imagination in a life well lived and the creative imagination of the
novelist. Words matter in a way that no simple bifurcation between words
and the world could accommodate. And so consider Diamond’s further
remarks bringing together the importance of the seeing of possibility and
that capacity’s interwoven relations with language:
Professor Nussbaum quotes James’s remarks about Adam Verver. “He had
read his way so into her best possibility”; and we can use that remark to
describe what Socrates aims at: he enables his friends to read their way into
his best possibility. His imaginative description of his situation, including
the personification of the Laws, is an exercise of his moral creativity, his
artistry. It is as much a significant moral doing as is his choosing to stay
rather than to escape, or, rather, it in fact goes to any full characterization
of what Socrates is doing in staying: the story of his death includes the
imaginative understanding of the death by his friends, the understanding
to which they are led by his remarkable redescription of the situation.
And note: Diamond does not use the singular “the full characterization”
or even “a full characterization”; she uses “any full characterization.”
What constitutes a full characterization – what we would, for circum-
stantially specific reasons, call a full characterization – is not invariant
across cases. It is not generic in such a way that a single description of a
moral action or characterization can be employed irrespective of circum-
stantial detail. And so Diamond continues,
Using the phrase that Professor Nussbaum quotes from Henry James, “to
‘put’ things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them”:
to ignore how Socrates puts things, the very particular way he puts them,
to leave that out of the doing, is to be ignorant of what it was he was doing,
what he was making of his death in prison.4
If leaving the way – the very particular way – Socrates puts things “out
of the doing” is tantamount to failing to see the what of his moral choice
4
The Realistic Spirit, p. 311. The James passage is in Henry James, Art of the Novel, p. 347.238 G. L. Hagberg
and action, then there is an internal relation between the way we describe
and the way we understand – in Wittgenstein’s sense the way we see – the
action. And also in Wittgenstein’s sense, the change to our way of seeing
can be effected by a change in the structure and content of our descrip-
tions. (This is true to an extent that we can ask if “description” is the right
word – the term itself can re-enliven both the moral-deduction picture
and the language-as-mere-additive picture.) A remarkable redescription
redirects our attention, changing what we see and comprehend, and thus
changing what we understand. What lies before us in a morally activated
context is not a matter of simple seeing followed by simple or unmediat-
ing description. It is only an oversimplified picture that can make it seem
that way.
2 Socrates with Coltrane
Is there an organizing concept that brings this all together? A concept, or
a new word, can function like a key in opening a passageway to a new
way of seeing. Diamond writes,
I want to look more at obtuseness, look at it in terms suggested by Professor
Nussbaum. And I want to bring out some connections it has with two
other terms important in her papers, improvisation and adventure.5
It is in examining the case of Maggie Verver (in James’s The Golden Bowl)
that Nussbaum
speaks of the improvisation of an actress who must, far more than someone
going by an external script, be responsively alive to the other artists, to the
evolving narrative, to the laws and constraints of the genre and its history.
She must like an improvising musician, in contrast with one who works
from a score, be actively responsive and responsible, a person who will not
let the others down. The description fits Socrates: he makes his death part
of an evolving narrative to which his earlier talks with Crito and other
friends belong. He takes up themes of the earlier parts of that narrative, like
5
The Realistic Spirit, p. 309.12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 239
his own theme that one must not treat people badly, a theme itself sounded
earlier by Crito, who has accused Socrates of planning to do what will
bring disgrace on his friends and harm his sons. He takes up that theme
and makes something entirely unexpected out of it. He will not let the
other players down, and this in a situation in which the other players were
sure he was going to let them down. An extraordinary improvisation shows
something to be possible that the others had not even imagined was there.6
The seeing, and enacting, of a possibility that others did not even imagine
was there; taking up a theme and making something entirely unexpected
out of it: this is improvisation with insight, with originality, with inven-
tiveness. The deductive view, the principle-application model, keeps all
this corralled within its blindspot. So I want to ask: how might we further
bring out the significance of what Diamond has brought into view by
insightfully and inventively riffing on a theme from Nussbaum and, as
she has done in this powerful essay, making something unexpected
out of it?
When John Coltrane went into the studio in 1959 with his quartet to
make his fifth studio album (his first with his new label, Atlantic Records),
he handed to his players the chart for his now-classic composition “Giant
Steps” (the title track of the album). This piece is famous throughout the
jazz world for a reason that relates directly to what Diamond and
Nussbaum are discussing: the structural steps of the harmonic progres-
sion – the chord changes – demand a kind of inventiveness, a depth of
harmonic understanding, and a resourcefulness of musicality and melodic
creativity that in its time (and actually is close to doing that to the present
day) raised the bar of the entire artform.
The chord structure is derived from descending major-third relations,
in a way where one is constantly being shifted, just as one is almost com-
fortable for a moment in a key, to a new key a major third below. (This is
not the far easier move to a minor third below or a major third above, the
move to a relative minor or relative major – those far more familiar
changes do not require one to “uproot” one’s home key every few beats.)
And Coltrane uses standard ii-V-I chord progressions, but here also in
6
The Realistic Spirit, pp. 11–12.240 G. L. Hagberg ways that are constantly destabilizing in terms of the longer-duration key centers of more familiar progressions. But all of this, challenging as it is in terms of its harmonic realization on the piano and bass, is after all only the support for the person facing the real challenge, the soloist-improviser. That player has to find a way through those changes (something like walking confidently and maintaining one’s stride through an earthquake) that makes melodic sense, that preserves musical-thematic coherence, that creates long-form flow over small-form disruptions. Although great players do this with confidence and musical integrity, no one thinks this is easy. So what are they, in connection with Diamond’s considerations, doing? And how do we say, in Diamond’s sense, the what of what they are doing? Coltrane’s own playing on this piece remains astonishing: he finds routes through this destabilizing sonic landscape not only that no one else played, but indeed that no one else perceived as possibilities, no one else had even imagined were there. By playing rapid-fire tightly struc- tured arpeggios (major, minor, augmented, diminished, quartal interval stacks, everything) and linking them together without interruption, he found what seemed an impossible synthesis of vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic) considerations, meeting both categories of demands simultaneously. Adding rapid ascending and descending scalar passages (often diminished scales, which themselves display an internal harmonic ambiguity) to the arpeggios, and then positioning these materials into equally rapidfire sequenced or repeated short-form rhythmic motifs, Coltrane showed a way forward for an entire generation. It created, within those unprecedentedly severe demands, an evolving narrative in a way aware of but at the same time developing the laws and constraints of the genre of jazz and its history, performed interactively with constant responsiveness to and acknowledgement of the other artists, never letting the others in the ensemble, the tradition, or himself down. Again: “An extraordinary improvisation shows something to be possible that the oth- ers had not even imagined was there.” If we free ourselves from the deduc- tive picture, if we see possibilities that such a conceptually entrenched picture precludes, we begin to see (here there emerges a way of saying the “what”) what it would mean to say that jazz (of this kind in any case) is a representational art. And we could begin to articulate the character or
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 241
nature of the moral life, the moral psychology, of which jazz improvisa-
tion can be seen (changing our way of seeing for this purpose at this
moment) as a mimetic depiction of inward life. With the Coltrane exam-
ple in mind, let us then consider another passage of Diamond’s:
And it is that connection between improvisation and possibility that I want
to insist on. It is essential in contrasting Frankena’s view of what moral
activity is, what moral thought is, with the view that is expressed in Martha
Nussbaum’s paper. As Frankena sees moral thought, it goes on in a situa-
tion with fixed, given possibilities, the terms of choice, the alternatives, are
something for which one has no responsibility (except so far as one has by
one’s previous actions brought into existence certain now fixed elements of
the situation). The moral agent must take these now fixed alternatives as
they are and must determine which of them is supported by the strongest
moral reasons.
Thus the presumed inertness of simple-fact description is conjoined to, or
indeed generates, a picture of fixed, or in a moral sense frozen, possibili-
ties. Against that entire picture, Diamond encapsulates the enlivening
alternative, drawn from Nussbaum, that she is developing:
The notion of improvisation signals an entirely different view of what is
involved in moral life, in life simpliciter, in which possibility and the exer-
cise of creativity are linked.7
The classical musician, playing from a score, working under a conduc-
tor, performs exclusively predetermined possibilities for which that player
has no responsibility (the composer does), and in a way dictated by the
external “principles” of the conductor. In short: Fixed elements of a cir-
cumstance or situation with a direct and straightforward description.
Coltrane signals an entirely different view. But Diamond captures still
more here:
What is possible in Socrates’s story is something unthought of by his
friends, and depends on his creative response to the elements of his situa-
7
The Realistic Spirit, p. 312.242 G. L. Hagberg
tion, his capacity to transform it by the exercise of creative imagination,
and thus to bring what he does into connection with what has happened in
his life. The idea of possibilities as fixed in advance and built into the situ-
ation located the moral agent’s responsibility and his freedom in quite a
different place from where one sees it if one takes the capacity for improvi-
sation as essential in any account of our moral life. The link that Professor
Nussbaum makes between the task of the literary artist and the ethical task
is implicitly denied when moral thought is limited to the direction of
choice between fixed and readily grasped possibilities, with the idea that it
is not for us as moral agents to struggle to make sense of things.8
It is not only that Socrates transforms the circumstance by the exercise of
his cultivated critical imagination; it is also that he makes what he is now
doing an enactment of who and what he is, making his present action
resonant with, internally consistent with, and in a sense-making way con-
nected to the characterological teleology of his life. This aspect of a lived-
out moral decision, this aspect of moral psychology, is lost to the simple
picture from which Diamond is working to free us, and it itself resonates
with the famous and oft-quoted remark of another of our greatest jazz
improvisers, Charlie Parker: “Man, if you don’t live it, it won’t come out
of your horn.” It was Coltrane, Parker, and so many other improvisers
who showed, if in the mirror of the work of art, where our freedom was
located. And – as so many jazz students have since 1959 struggled with
as an artistic analogue (or instance?) of moral life – our responsibility, our
duty to play that music well.
But then what of the struggle to make sense of things? As another
aspect of our moral lives that the improvisational analogy brings out and
that the deductive model obscures, this is precisely what Coltrane does
(and depicts) in “Giant Steps”. So we should look, if briefly, more closely.
If the underlying rapidly changing chord progression serves as ana-
logue of the ethical circumstance or situation, then it would seem, at a
glance, to be fixed – and thus more consistent in that respect with fixity
of the deductive picture. But as all chordal-instrument players know, it
isn’t – indeed, anything but. The chord chart describes the harmonic
structure, but the realization of that structure is itself an improvisation:
8
The Realistic Spirit, p. 312.12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 243 on the piano or the guitar, for example, there are countless ways to voice a given chord, countless ways to move or lead a chord’s individual voices or notes from one chord to the next, countless ways to move through registers on the instrument as the chords are voiced, countless ways to give the chords rhythmic definition, countless ways to create counter- melodies on the top line of the voiced chords – and so on through count- less combinations of all of these. Thus selection, within what one might call this atmosphere of possibility, is unto itself a strongly creative act. It stands as the perfect parallel to what Diamond described as the un-fixed elements of the circumstance. So just as improvisation is not limited solely to the single choice of action by the moral agent within an other- wise fixed situation, so improvisation within Coltrane’s improvising quartet on that recording date is not limited solely to the soloist. This is what she called “the moral originality in the description of the facts” in discussing Socrates above. And Coltrane moves, finds his original, insight- ful, often ingenious ways through the changes in, and not merely above, the ensemble. Like Socrates with his companions, Coltrane negotiates and renegotiates who he is, enacting who he is, as he races through that harmonic-rhythmic terrain. He makes sense of the ever-evolving chal- lenges presented in that terrain, and he produces musical coherence through mastery, interactive creativity, acuity of vision, and intelligent and untiring, relentless, responsiveness.9 (As Stanley Cavell has noted, it was Socrates who, ever responsive to philosophy and never tiring, stayed awake after the symposium until dawn while others slept.) But in looking into musical improvisation to more fully appreciate the theme that Diamond is herself developing, by using this example of Coltrane I may have given the impression that the rapid negotiation of severe complexity is a precondition for the kind of insightful inventive- ness and the acute perception of possibility to which Diamond and Nussbaum are directing our attention as, in Wittgenstein’s sense, a tool with which to pry loose the grip of a picture. The concept of 9 I discuss the improvisational practices here and the issue of ethical interaction in fuller detail in “Jazz Improvisation and Peak Performance: Playing in the Zone”, Culture, Identity, and Intense Performance: Being in the Zone, ed. Tim Jordan et al. (Routledge, 2017), pp. 143–159; and “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in Garry L. Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (Blackwell, 2008), pp. 259–285.
244 G. L. Hagberg improvisation is that tool (or, as I mentioned above, key), but it need not be seen in one way. Another example expands its significance for the understanding of moral life. In that same year, 1959, Miles Davis (with Coltrane in his group) went into the studio to record what holds fast as the most famous record in jazz history, Kind of Blue. This recording defined and stylistically solidified what is called modal jazz. In its way the opposite of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” (and really of the entire album Giant Steps), the underlying har- mony, the chord charts, of modal jazz often moved very slowly in what is called their harmonic rhythm (the rate at which chords change). For example one encounters eight-bar sections on one single minor chord followed by a repeat on that same chord of eight more bars, followed by eight bars on single minor chord one-half step up, followed by eight more bars on the first minor chord. Of course all the issues of improvised voic- ing are still in play, but the terrain the soloist traverses is not an earth- quake that won’t stop; by contrast, these are sonic surfaces often with the smoothness of glass. And where there are changes, they are gentle and often more in the language of comfortable ii-V-I relations or twelve-bar blues forms. The soloist, the improviser, thus creates within more of a sonic atmosphere than on rugged and shifting ground, and so the nature of what Diamond has discussed as “Socrates’ creative response to the ele- ments of his situation” changes accordingly. To put it one way: the solo- ist, in modal jazz, can (metaphorically speaking) more easily look up, out, and around, rather than down. (By “looking down” I mean focusing one’s attention on the chord changes moment by moment.) This itself encour- ages, within this compositional style, the close attention, the acuity in the responsiveness to others, and the capacity to truly see in the ways Diamond has emphasized. But the case of modal jazz improvisations does not only provide an illustration of these themes; it also teaches us some- thing about some of the details of moral attention of the kinds she is investigating. In these open spaces (such as the 32-bar form, the four 8-bar sections I mentioned above), the improviser has more of an oppor- tunity to consider long-form structure and the development and further articulation of themes across a span of time and musical space. Thematic development, including (a) thematic motifs and following out their unfolding logic, (b) the transposition of a thematic motif through
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 245
different keys, registers, and melodic planes, (c) the compacting or com-
pression of a melodic idea, (d) the expansion or stretching out of a
melodic idea, (e) the dividing of a melodic passage and distributing it
between two melodic planes (think of the classic song “The Shadow of
Your Smile”), (f ) the fragmenting of longer melodic content into shorter
elements and then treating those to all of the above, and numerous fur-
ther types of melodic invention all come into play here. What we learn
here is: each of these has an immediate counterpart in our world of moral
interaction, and each of them can focus our attention on the sub-catego-
ries of creative, insightful moral responsiveness that the concept of impro-
visation, as the key to a new pathway, opens.
But before moving to the next stage of this discussion, there remains
one further issue concerning improvisation that I should bring into the
examination of some of the content of this concept as it moves into the
center of a non-reductive way of seeing ethical life. In the demanding
process of learning to improvise, young jazz players often make for them-
selves written-out transcriptions of various improvised solos of the great
players, or they study transcription books of those solos. Thinking
through what Socrates has said, what he has done and is doing, and how
he has cultivated a depth of comprehension and a new way of seeing in
the minds of his compatriots shows us a great deal about moral under-
standing. (The very concept of understanding, as diamond’s work shows,
is itself greatly reduced on the deductive picture.) Reading our way into
the intricate circumstance of Maggie Verver and coming to truly fathom
it and her within it, or the reading of Middlemarch, or the reading of the
Oedipus plays or countless others, does not give us direct knowledge of
what to do in life in any directly prescriptive way. That is, we do not learn
what to do if we are a young American heiress with a widowed art-
collector father, getting married to an impoverished Italian aristocrat
with the father getting married to a friend, each of whom were passion-
ately involved with each other in the past. Or what to do if we kill a man
who turns out to be our father and unknowingly marry our mother. Or
again, countless other things.
That we all know this to be the case is obvious; why it is the case is
perhaps less well known. In studying both the circumstances – that is, the
precise details of a most particularized kind that literature always affords246 G. L. Hagberg
and philosophy so rarely does – and the thoughts, words, and deeds of a
character we come to know who is living and thinking inside those cir-
cumstances, we come to grasp precisely the dimensions of moral atten-
tion that Diamond is pursuing. We see the features Diamond has named:
the exercise of moral imagination; the enabling of people to see differ-
ently; to realize how little there are of blunt facts, simply described, of any
interesting case; to see the power of description and redescription in
moral life and how important it is to “put” things, as Henry James
observed; to find possibilities others did not even imagine were there;
and, more broadly, to uncover the riches of life contained within the
struggle to make sense of things. The student of jazz improvisation, mak-
ing and studying transcriptions, is doing all this within the world of
melodic invention. If they play, on the stand, the exact solo as transcribed
of, say, Charlie Parker, they are offering a quotation from a master; they
are saying precisely what Maggie Verver did. In such a case they are not,
of course, improvising: they are saying what someone else already said.
But when they do begin improvising, they in a sense take all that with
them (for example, all the varieties of melodic treatment listed above –
along with much, much more); they do not go out there alone. It is in
this sense that literature does not send us out there alone.
3 On Our (Conceptually Re-orienting)
Ability to Know What’s Not Right
But what can we say about that content we are sent out with? We can
certainly sense it, and is readily apparent when it is present or absent (in
jazz as in life), but to say it, to articulate it, is trickier. But as we shall see,
there is a good and fitting reason for this difficulty. In her paper “Riddles
and Anselm’s Riddle”, Diamond writes,
…it may seem puzzling that we can guess at the solution of a riddle, and
puzzling, too, that we can reject something as the solution without know-
ing what the solution is. For if it is the finding of something we are willing
to recognize as the solution that fixes the sense of the riddle-question, how
can we reject anything before we have the solution? I could put the prob-12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 247
lem this way. Whoever is asked the Sphinx’s riddle has the answer before his
eyes, as it were. But if the solution to a riddle can be something that is
before your eyes and you still not recognize it, how are we able to say of
anything that it is not the solution? If in a sense we do not know what we
are looking for, how can we say “This isn’t it”? And yet it is clear we can.10
And yet it is clear we can. Precisely. We know we can make such judg-
ments, and we can readily tell the difference between our having such a
sense of things and not having that sense of things – yet we cannot say in
any succinct form what it is we know, or (when that sense of knowing is
absent) what we don’t know.
Part of the problem here is a unitary or essentialistic conception of
what it is to know something; Wittgenstein provides the examples of
knowing the height of Mont Blanc, knowing the taste of coffee, and
knowing the sound of a clarinet for this reason (we too easily model
knowing on the Mont Blanc type of case where we deliver in a few words
a singly-correct answer in singly-verbalized language and, with that one-
sided diet, forget the others). But that is not the entirety of the problem.
If the young jazz improviser is asked backstage, just before going onstage,
what it is she learned from studying Charlie Parker transcriptions with
the expectation of being able to articulate that in a compact sentence,
that player will probably say something like “um, well, I guess I learned a
language, sort of ”. In fact, the answer will probably have a question mark
after it, indicating that this is an almost guessing attempt to answer a
query reductively about content that does not allow reduction. The ques-
tion, “What did you learn when you learned German?” is a similar ques-
tion. One could probably answer with the kind of joke that shows the
impossibility of the question – such as “Well, I learned that it is possible
for our verbs to be at the end of our sentences put”, or something of the
kind. But if the inquirer asked again, “but seriously, surely you learned
something from learning German; what was it?”, this, instructively, would
not be answerable. What I want to suggest is that capturing this some-
thing is like capturing the what of Socrates’ action.
Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle”, in The Realistic Spirit, pp. 267–289; this passage
10
pp. 270–271.248 G. L. Hagberg Diamond observed that Socrates effected a dramatic change in the way of seeing the entire issue in Crito. In cases where we feel a sort of half- articulate puzzle concerning what we know but cannot say, or can say that something is not the answer even though we do not yet know what the answer is, or (I would add) sensing that a given expression (say in writing a note of condolence) is not yet quite right but where we do not yet know what the right expression is, the answer, the resolution to this puzzlement, will not be found in elusive singly-phrased propositional content capturing what it is that we, like the jazz improviser, know. Rather, it will be resolved by changing, as in Crito’s case, our entire way of seeing the issue at hand. And to do this what is needed is to be reminded of the ways in which implication in language, in speech, in communica- tion, works. There is, strictly speaking, what we say – the exact words we have uttered – and then there is what we, as persons, are doing with those words, what we mean by them. In a court of law the mafia don is accused of ordering a murder from inside prison; the defense says “All he said to his underboss was ‘It is time to weed the garden’”. The defense, “He cares so much about his backyard”, is laughably unconvincing because we know who he is, what he has done, what kind of person he is, the kind of organization he is running, the history of his actions, and, broadly speak- ing, the trajectory of his character. Knowing who, and what, he is strongly inflects our knowledge of what his words mean.11 But suppose he speaks enigmatically and we do not yet know what he means. Still, we can, like the case Diamond has described, know in advance of knowing what he means how to judge a number of candidate interpretations, how to exclude some, consider others as outside possibilities, and fix on still oth- ers as the leading possibilities. And then, when a piece of dispositive lin- guistic evidence emerges, we know our way forward. All this is possible, indeed common, in our language because we live, linguistically, not within a world of direct reference, invariant semantics, and singular atomist word-meaning, but rather within ranges of 11 I offer a fuller discussion of this in, “A Person’s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding”, Philosophy and Autobiography, ed. Christopher Cowley (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 39–71.
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 249
implication. The jazz player has learned in this sense what follows from
Parker’s improvisations, what they in this sense imply. And when she
decides to play in the style of Parker (but without quoting any of Parker’s
solos), she plays within that range of implication. When the great jazz
guitarist Mike Stern toured with Miles Davis during his fusion phase,
although Stern is able to play the most demanding bebop in the post-
Parker idiom as well as anyone, Davis walked up to him and said “No,
man; play like Jimi.” Every guitarist knows what he meant – and Stern’s
conception of what he was doing in that ensemble on that tour changed
dramatically (the result was one of the high points in the history of jazz-
fusion guitar). Crito’s mind changed, through the introduction of a way
of seeing, suddenly discerning a set of possibilities that he had not real-
ized were there. And so here again (like the question about learning
German), if someone asked Stern what precisely he learned from Miles’s
comment, and what he had learned as a younger player from the work of
Hendrix, there would not be, nor could there be, any succinct answer of
a Mont Blanc kind. But the range of implication – the range we usually
live in within the dynamic world of linguistic action and exchange, is
such that he would be able to tell what kind of playing was central to it,
what was on its periphery, and what was outside of it. Improvisation, as
conceptual key, tells us something about meaning (or in Wittgenstein’s
sense, reminds us), and about implication, as well.
Diamond invites us to consider this-
kind of question in mathematics. If I am asked “What fraction, squared,
gives 2?’ I can recognize, even before I have a system which gives me a way
of deciding all such questions (and in that way fixes their sense), that 1.4 is
not the answer. But what it is not, is only as yet a form of words. The rejec-
tion of an answer, like the question itself, seems not quite to grasp its own
sense (see PG, p. 455), seems to exist, as it were, on borrowed sense, on an
advance from the solution of the problem.12
These words, this way of saying what this phenomenon actually is, is at
once powerfully insightful and to my mind a perfectly accurate
The Realistic Spirit, p. 271; “PG” refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush
12
Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1974).250 G. L. Hagberg description of our psycho-linguistic experience in such cases. The rejec- tion and the question itself do not grasp their own sense; they borrow their sense, on advance from the solution we do not yet directly possess. The borrowed meaning in play here is of a kind that direct and succinct prop- ositional assertions cannot repay. A jazz chart, the chord-and-melody chart that awaits ever-changing improvised realization, demarcates the range of musical implication. In a classical score, that range is closed down to a minimum; the composer already made most of the choices in that world of possibility. In a jazz chart, the range is opened to a maximum. The interpretation of the piece, the given performance, develops or unfolds within that opened space of musical implicature. Description and redescription in language – and so in literature – work in the same way. 4 Back to James: The Nature of Obtuseness Henry James’s second novel, The American, was published in 1877 when he was thirty-four years of age. It was then thirty years later, with most of his life’s work, including the masterpieces of his late style completed, that he substantially revised the text for the summative New York Edition. By all accounts this book received by far the most extensive rewriting of any of his work included in the New York Edition, and it has been taken as the best example we have of the older mature writer commenting on the work of his younger self, in such a thorough way that the younger is brought up into the older.13 It is certainly that, but I want to suggest, it is also more than that. And what that “more” is we can better see by keeping the considerations brought out by Diamond in mind. The plot is not difficult to encapsulate: the protagonist, Christopher Newman, is a very successful American businessperson who, having amassed his fortune while still in his thirties, travels to Europe in search of a culture that reaches well beyond the confines of his life in American 13 Henry James, The American: the Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907, Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles (London: Scolar Press, 1976). Page numbers in the following text are to the page numbers of this volume, not to the page num- bers (also present in the volume) of the 1877 printed text from which James was working.
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 251 business, in search of enriching aesthetic experience, and, primarily, in search of a woman to marry. Through various chance connections he meets a woman, a young widow and part of a socially elevated, old-money family that is concerned far more with social standing than individual human happiness, and Newman struggles against the class-prejudice and social exclusion (at which they are well-practiced experts) from other members of her family. Newman befriends the one good member of the family, the woman’s younger brother, who later dies in a duel, and, with his proposal finally accepted and the wedding planned, Newman is ulti- mately told that he is unfit to marry the woman owing to his commercial background along with other nuances of personality that clash with their self-image and that the wedding is called off. He learns their terrible and long-hidden secret (the mother and older brother deliberately caused the death, years back, of the husband and father) and plans to use it against them, but realizes that this is beneath him (so James shows where the true superiority lies), and he leaves for San Francisco. But unable to forget the woman, who has since gone into a convent, he returns, only to gaze at the large and forbidding front wall of the convent, there realizing that she is lost to him forever. With unfinished business now, in its broken, partial way, finished, he departs, a forever-changed older, and wiser, person. But what I want to pursue here, again, in light of all the preceding, is not a philosophical reading of the story, but rather a philosophical read- ing of the rewriting. On the first page of the original version, James, in introducing us to Newman (strolling in the Louvre), writes “The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead with a somewhat wearied gesture” (p. 1 and following lines). The rewrite has: “The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly, with vague weariness, passed his handkerchief over his fore- head”. The concept of vagueness, subtly introduced within our introduc- tion to him, awakens slight connotations of unconscious yet still motivating mental content. (If mental content were transparently avail- able to introspection vagueness in the first-person case would not be intelligible – and it plainly is.) This hint is then strongly confirmed in what follows: the original has, “And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the
252 G. L. Hagberg sort of vigour that is commonly known as ‘toughness’”. Revised, we get the psychologically very different, and much more acute, “…long, lean and muscular, he suggested an intensity of unconscious resistance.” Physical feats in his past, we learn, caused him far less fatigue; in this case he has developed “an aesthetic headache” (p. 2) from looking at paintings so closely and reading his Badeker guide so assiduously. So we see, by this revision of a few words, into a mind more deeply in the revision than in the original. And we see a person acting on the clear and obvious inten- tional decision to go see paintings in the Louvre, and yet harboring a resistance to continuing and manifesting itself in weariness that he him- self has not formulated to himself. Again, this is on the first page and the picture of robotic decision-making based on direct propositionally encap- sulated courses of action is already destabilized. Similarly, the notion of simple, singular, and straightforward description of a person’s state of being is similarly destabilized. (That we know, and thus readily accept these things when we see them in literature, is obvious, but we forget them when under the spell of a philosophical picture; this is one reason that throughout Diamond’s work she measures philosophical progress by the degree of liberation from the forms of philosophy, from imposed philosophical pictures and conceptual templates, that would distort our perception and comprehension of what lies before us in moral life.) Shortly later Newman, in discussing the possibility of learning French from the father of a young woman he meets who is painting a copy in the Louvre, says simply: “Oh yes, I should like to learn French” (p. 12 and following lines). Revised, James has him say, “I should like to converse with elegance”, James now intimating that the way or the style with which a given thing is said is important to the composition of a person’s identity, but more importantly, originally Newman continued, “with democratic confidingness”, where now the narrator tells us “giving his friend the benefit of any vagueness”. This of course continues James’s theme of vagueness just above, but it simultaneously introduces another theme that runs throughout the novel: conversation opens lines of devel- opment, ranges of implication, within which interpretation lives. And James shows how we, although with amorphous borders, can sense when the limits of implication, the limits of a language-game in Wittgenstein’s
12 Improvisation Within the Range of Implication… 253 sense, are near or have been transgressed: Newman, reflecting on a com- ment, in revision has the words added, “I seemed to feel it too far off.” James draws a contrast between a form of aestheticized detachment and the perception of the real also early on in the novel, and this sets the stage for his contrast between Newman and the stultifying self-image of the French family. Having met an old friend, Mr. Tristram, in the Louvre, the friend originally exclaims, “Hang it, I don’t care for pictures; I prefer the reality!” (p. 18). Revised, he says, “Hang it, I don’t care for inanimate canvas, for cold marble beauty; I prefer the real thing!” Within the range of the idea James here has seen a better way to prepare us for the battle Newman has coming, against a family governed by a mother and elder brother made of “inanimate canvas” and “cold marble”, their “beauty” of a kind that is pure social appearance. These connotations do not flow with the same force in the original: redescription matters. Such connota- tions, or indeed verbal possibilities, sometimes flow across large expanses of narrative (Miles Davis), and sometimes they run in tightly compacted exchanges (John Coltrane): in discussing what he wants to see in Europe with his friend, James, rewriting, detects and delivers one such small-scale possibility resident within the language-game. Newman originally says, “I have great ideas about Venice”, his friend replying “I see I shall have to introduce you to my wife” (p. 27). Rewritten, Newman says, “I have grand ideas about Venice”, his friend replying “I see I shall have to intro- duce you to my wife. She’ll have grand ideas for you!” James captures what Diamond discussed as the effort of moral atten- tion everywhere; it comes near the surface in the following passage origi- nally, but in the rewrite it fully surfaces, powerfully and explicitly, in his description of Mrs. Tristram when they meet. What is originally one compact sentence is now expanded (stretching the melody in the impro- visation) into: “Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman’s social service resides not in what she is but in what she appears, and that in the labyrinth of appearance she may always make others lose their clue if she only keeps her own” (p. 29). “Acutely exer- cised” requires effort and discernment; the content of what is observed is not given on the level of mere sensory impressions; what Diamond dis- cussed as the comprehension of complexity is woven throughout the words that capture Ms. Tristram’s perception.
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