Sportive Thoughts

Today I've been reading Andrew Bowie's From Romanticism to Critical Theory. Bowie gives a concise reason for teachers of literature to focus on more philosophical issues, so that their students can avoid typical mistakes in literary interpretation:

The fact is that it will be problems in epistemological foundationalism, even in the more modest version proposed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, which lead to the story of aesthetics and the beginnings of literary theory...the significance of 'literature' and art for the thought of Kant's period relates precisely to the awareness that epistemology cannot complete the job it is intended for. It was Jacobi who was one of the first to claim he could show why.
The epistemological problems whose consequences both Kant and Jacobi confront put into question the very status of Western philosophy's attempt to reach the truth of the world, if that truth is understood to be 'ready-made' and awaiting its adequate 're-presentation'...The world of the laws of nature for Kant is a world of 'conditions', in which the explanation of something depends on seeking its prior condition, such that z is conditioned by y is conditioned by x, etc. This leads to a regress, because any particular judgment will be reliant upon a potentially infinite series of prior conditions... (33)

I started reading Bowie when a mentor brought up his treatment of "eternal regression," such as it is quoted above. I think I could answer Bowie's worry, and my teacher's, by citing the ordinary language philosophers' treatment of sufficient conditions; most familiar to me is Cavell's reading of Austin in The Claim of Reason. A principle of sufficient condition would state that an eternal regression--synonymous with philosophical skepticism and its threat of nihilism--can be avoided if the search for truth can be quieted once enough reasons are given for z being real, i.e. not an illusion (in which case Cavell's question would be, why or how am I mistaken?).

Though Bowie in his early chapters slips past a potential cure for eternal regression, in doing so he points out where so much of literary theory goes wrong: it assumes the philosophical tradition has not adequately questioned its formation of rationallity as the basis of human activity. Certainly, when theorists emulate Derrida's avoidance of analytic order or Deleuze's false Nietzscheanism, they do good to ask why philosophy has come to say what it does about language and reason. But often, by not recognizing how Modern philosophy has its roots in a debate over the stability of the most prominent and successful epistemological schemas, literary theorists assume that the rules can be cast aside, and interpretation can proceed at will. This is wrong, not only because it is theoretically unsound, but also because the Modern study of literature began in response to epistemology's failure to cover the entire field of human knowledge. Bringing the two back together means we need to figure out why they split in the first place, and that requires a good, accurate knowledge of philosophy.