Abstract
For decades, Anderson has been pressing critical theorists and literary scholars to acknowledge the inescapably normative dimensions of their work. Through careful attention to rhetorical styles, she has persuasively argued that epistemological positions and social theories are tethered to âcharacterologicalâ judgmentsâto implicit endorsements of ethos. Meanwhile, critical discourse has warmed to the claims of lived experience (the âturn to ethics,â the interest in âaffectâ), but the âethicalâ has remained a negative movement, either as the critique of social and discursive structures or as clearing space for the âotherââand âaffectâ has been construed as the pleasure and self-care that enable resistance to the pressure of these structures. The questions that galvanize ethical criticism (What is wrong with the way things are?) and theories of affect (How can I survive?) continue to evade the deeper one that Anderson sees as basic to any theorizing: How should I live?The lesson of Anderson's The Way We Argue Now is that ethics without ethos is shallow. In Psyche and Ethos, the lesson is that psychology without morality is benumbed. Though Anderson is characteristically judicious in her reconstruction of the arguments she opposes, there are several rhetorical targets in these lectures. The first is contemporary cognitive science, which pictures moral thinking as either the âbelatedâ rationalization of decisions really made by âautomaticâ psychological processes or as a mechanism for eliminating âcognitive dissonance.â Anderson shows how these pictures assume an abstracted, âpunctualâ model of moral experience; their âdeflationaryâ zeal ironically depends on an untenable ideal of moral voluntarism that is then speciously âdebunked.â By contrast, novels are able to explore the temporal dimension of moral consciousness, especially through their representation of what she calls âmoral rumination,â a concept further developed in her recent contribution to Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies. Anderson shows, moreover, that narrative fictions like The Winter's Tale, Middlemarch, and The Beast in the Jungle understand âbelatednessâ not as evidence for the superficiality of morality but as a distinct mode of moral recognition that can unfold only across time.Anderson worries that the new âeudaimonicâ literary criticism, which explores âenabling moods,â unwittingly perpetuates the moral confusion of empirical psychology and âprivileg[es] psychological over moral desiderata,â even as certain âpsychological statesâ are âpresented as morally desirable.â This contradiction is another iteration of one she has been confronting throughout her career: the strange incapacity of critical discourse either to recognize or to avow the normative claimsâthe elaboration of an ethos as good or valuableâwith which it is nonetheless saturated. Still, the contradiction has been a defining feature of modern âtherapeutic cultureâ (a formulation she employs): the neutral, functionalist descriptions of empirical psychology ostensibly bracket morality, yet some descriptions are inevitably coded as âbetterâ or âworse,â and they are consistently harnessed to fully moral evaluations. It is rare to hear a literary theorist of Anderson's provenance reanimate, if indirectly, the criticism that Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and Jackson Lears directed toward âtherapeutic culture,â which has largely been forgotten or vulgarized by right-wing pundits. In essence, however, her plea is similar to theirs: she wants us to acknowledge that the moral life is integral to the âhealthyâ life; and she wants critics to stop dismissing it as epiphenomenal to either psychology or politics. She sees the novel, and the humanities more broadly, as the preeminent cultural vehicles for âclarifyingâ the moral life.
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