Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology, by Amanda Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology by Amanda Anderson Jane F. Thrailkill (bio) Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology, by Amanda Anderson; pp. 114. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £26.49, $35.95. Though literary scholars may think we have left psychoanalysis behind, our current critical practices are powered by assumptions and concepts that derive from a therapeutic worldview that moots questions related to value, virtue, and morality. This “displacement from the moral to the therapeutic” (Anderson 93) within the humanities reflects an attempt to sidestep normative claims yet hamstrings our ability “to make the case for [the humanities’] significance to meeting the grand challenges” of today’s society (103). So argues Amanda Anderson in her provocative recent book Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology, which ranges widely among critical theories and engages with exemplary works of literature to examine the “contemporary situation of our discipline and its reading protocols” (18). Adapted from a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University in 2015, this slim book surveys the “therapeutic dimension” of not just symptomatic modes of reading but also newer methods that include cognitive literary studies and affect theory (93); surface, distance, and reparative reading; and “‘the eudaimonic turn’” that includes for Anderson critics such as Rita Felski, Jane Bennett, and Heather Love (91). Anderson discerns in these diverse critical approaches a shared reticence about “moral experience” (9). Wary of normativity, conventionality, and smuggled-in ideology, contemporary scholars in the humanities by Anderson’s account have skirted the topic of morality in favor of critique, politics, aesthetics, affect, and a host of other “intellectual formations” (24). Despite the titular term ethos, Anderson’s argument is not especially concerned with the ethical turn in literary studies from the late 1990s with its emphasis on precarity, the subaltern, regimes of power, and the thinning of human agency. Rather, her subject is morality, and she is unabashed in her advocacy of it as a hermeneutic lens and a critical practice. Anderson affirms a strong account of human agency and perspicacity, which as a Victorianist scholar she does not hesitate to call character. Character provides the ground for reason-based judgments, meaningful commitments, and values-inspired actions that Anderson believes “empirically driven psychological literature” vitiates in a variety of ways (20). Though Freudian psychology makes a brief appearance in the introductory chapters, Anderson primarily treats cognitive science as distilled in the work of Daniel Kahneman. An economist by training, Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) teamed with cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky to explain how human beings are equipped to make both quick appraisals and slower, deliberative decisions, the latter frequently merely giving post hoc justifications for the former. Anderson has a more favorable account of slow thinking. Both surprise and rumination, for Anderson, contribute to the meaningfulness of shared human existence, and she wishes to affirm the widened vision that attends unfolding collective practices of discernment and discussion. [End Page 119] In the two middle chapters of four, she treats William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), and Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle (1903), though her concern is primarily with canonical critical accounts of these works by Stanley Cavell, Fredric Jameson, and Leo Bersani. These critics exemplify the disdain for “the bluntness of morality” (47). In contrast, through her brief readings, Anderson seeks to portray the “existential density” and “moral force” of the works, especially in their evocation of human experience unfolding in time (48). With respect to James’s story, Anderson emphasizes protagonist John Marcher’s persistent rumination about what fate awaits him, all the while missing “in her specificity” his loving companion May Bartram, who patiently accompanies him on his narcissistic quest to discover his fate (52). In a slightly awkward mistake, given the value placed on careful attention to particulars, Anderson misspells May’s last name throughout, and at one point refers to the two characters as “May and Bertram” (47). This peccadillo suggests that Anderson is less concerned to produce a nuanced reading of the story than to counter more swaggering, theoretical readings of The Beast in the Jungle that display...