Belief and Disbelief

Abstract

Nominally the current preoccupation with the role of belief in literature goes back only some thirty-five years, to the issue as raised by I. A. Richards and debated by T. S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, and the many other critics and philosophers who took up the challenge. In fact Richards' theory is a late stage in a perennial concern about the clash between what poets say and what their readers believe to be true. The problem of belief, in one or another formulation, is no less ancient than criticism, and it has always been argued in terms of "knowledge," "truth," and "reality," which are the cruxes of all philosophical disagreement. In retrospect, there seems greater weight than comfort in T. S. Eliot's weary conclusion that "the problem of belief is very complicated and probably quite insoluble." But a review of the conditions of this endless debate may itself offer some possibility of headway. For we have inherited from the past not only the problem, but the largely unvoiced aims and assumptions which control the way it is posed and answered. To know how we got where we are may help us to decide where we go from here.