In reading a work of fiction or a poem or in listening to a piece of music,122 we pass through a sequence of psychological states partly shaped by our antecedent judgments, conceptions, and emotions and partly the product of our apprehension of the words or the sounds. We imagine the actions and situations described in words; we identify the emotions and moods expressed in the music.123 The occurrence of these states sets up connections with other parts of our psychological lives, recalling past judgments or emotions, sometimes modifying our established ways of conceiving and evaluating. The result is what I shall call a synthetic complex, whose elements may be radically disparate: memories of our own experiences, images from earlier perceptions or encounters with other works of art, judgments previously endorsed or rejected, emotions now excited by different objects, or even emotions of types we have not previously felt. The power of some works of literature and music to build synthetic complexes accounts for their enduring hold on us—as we return to them, again and again, the synthetic complexes they generate grow and change, perhaps expanding into areas of our psychological lives that were initially quite remote from their influence, so that we come to think of the pertinent works as inexhaustible.
The formation of synthetic complexes, when they persist as stable parts of our thinking and feeling, can revise our conceptions and judgments. Of particular concern are endorsements and rejections, judgments in which a subject concludes that some state of affairs is tolerable or to be resisted, or in which she takes a scenario as a serious possibility for herself, a goal to be worthy of pursuit, a course of action she has hitherto viewed as necessary to be trivial and dispensable (these are prominent examples among a wide range). Prior endorsements or rejections are evoked by reading or listening; they are brought into the synthetic complex generated, and they may be reinforced by it, found to align themselves with the judgments and emotions now made or felt,124 or, conversely, they may jar with the present contents of consciousness. In the latter case, the experience of the work of art may lead to the embedding of a stable synthetic complex produced by discarding the endorsement or rejection previously made.
In section 2 of chapter 1, Dickens’s Bleak House, and specifically its depiction of the plight of Jo, the crossing sweeper, was used to illustrate this possibility. That simple example can now be considered more carefully. Some of Dickens’s Victorian readers, and some contemporary readers who think of the urban poor either as responsible for their own condition or as properly served by the “market forces” of a free society, might come to the novel with judgments starkly incompatible with the images and emotions evoked by the descriptions of Tom-all-alone’s. Reading may lead them to endorse emotions of outrage and to discard their prior judgments of the wise providence of unfettered capitalism. Skeptics question the propriety of allowing a work of fiction to displace the older attitudes, and we can now see that the root question concerns the relations between the recently induced synthetic complex and the broader corpus of the subject’s psychological attitudes. Were the reader to have compelling arguments for the earlier endorsement of economic “freedom,” it would be irresponsible to embed the synthetic complex unless it could meet and overcome those arguments. If, on the other hand, the original enthusiasm for capitalism was simply taken over from an unquestioned tradition, and if the reader recognizes that unthinking acceptance of that tradition is manifested in the callous disregard for the poor, prominent in some of the voices sounded in the novel,125 the change of heart is not so evidently irresponsible.
More on this, shortly. First, however, it is important to see the respects in which this particular illustration is so simple. In the “Deaths in Venice” considered in this chapter and its predecessors, many different types of human predicament and human possibility are at issue. Mann’s novella and Mahler’s Das Lied induce in reader and hearer a diversity of types of image, emotion, and judgment, and a serious engagement with these works involves apprehending the structures of theme and mood embodied in words or music—one should understand the relations between Aschenbach’s musings on the sea on his first morning at the beach and the perceptions of his final moments, recognize the kinship between the soulful cry that ends the song of “Der Einsame in Herbst” and the soaring affirmations of the finale. Whether or not I have done it well, there is philosophical work, the work of Dewey’s “liaison officer,”126 to be done in helping others build synthetic complexes the philosopher judges to be valuable. Those complexes can range, as mine have done, over an author’s corpus of writings, over the writings of other authors as well, and into different genres. The focusing of music on philosophical issues may be achieved through attention to the ways in which words are set—indeed, vocal settings can serve as a bridge by means of which a sensitive hearer can approach music without words, broadening further the possibilities for the growing synthetic complex: Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied may help us trace philosophical themes in those Mahler symphonies where the human voice is absent.127
Back now to the skeptic’s complaint, first in the form in which it arises for relatively simple examples and then for the more intricate cases. The imagined reader of Bleak House may undergo a change of mind because of a feeling of new insight into the conditions of urban life: “I had never realized that the poor live in such squalor,” he may say. If that is the source of the new reaction, the skeptic has a serious point. Dickens’s great novel should not be treated as a source in empirical sociology—it can be the provocation to investigate the facts about how poor people live in cities, but it cannot rightly substitute for any such investigation. Encounters with works of art can thus lead people to inquire into matters they had previously taken for granted, playing a role in discovery but having no force as justification.128 Yet that is not the only possibility for the reader. Perhaps the impact of Bleak House leads him to view familiar phenomena in a different way, to understand that in situations he knows to be widespread, options he had assumed to exist may not be available, to see his casual assumption that those options—“the deserving poor can always escape through hard work”—are the uncomprehending, comfortable platitudes voiced by those who do not think seriously about the facts, to feel resentment toward the voices in the novel that dismiss problems of poverty, and to see himself as one of those who has spoken in this way. The synthetic complex built here contains images our reader finds worthy of protest, a recognition that he himself has not protested similar things about which he has long known, and that his deafness to the need for protest has been the product of his casually endorsing a tradition that is both well regarded and personally comfortable. If this is the pattern of his change of heart, then it is far less obvious that further evidence is needed or what that evidence might be.
Skeptics may respond by contending that the conclusion just reached depends on the simplicity of the example, or, more ambitiously, that the simplicity of the example allows ideas about responsible judgment to be easily distorted. An illustration that moves in the direction of the issues addressed by Mann and Mahler will enable the skeptical concern to be forcefully expressed. Imagine a listener who attends a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, who is swept up by its finale into fervent acceptance of the truth of Christianity—or, to take a more extreme example, a previously unconvinced reader of Fechner who finds a performance of the finale of Das Lied von der Erde so compelling that she becomes a passionate convert to panpsychism. What differentiates her from the reader of Bleak House who changes his mind about the rightness of unfettered capitalism? The tugging of the heartstrings, the Schwärmerei, may seem acceptable in the Dickensian case, and some may even tolerate it when the outcome is affirmation of the resurrection, but when the encounter with art has generated a conviction that the inorganic world is full of souls, something seems to have gone badly wrong.
The leap into panpsychism is so plainly premature that it is difficult to envisage anyone making it, yet, as with the imagined reading of Bleak House, it is not entirely obvious how someone te
mpted toward animism might engage in further inquiry. If she were genuinely provoked to the metaphysical possibility, where would she seek evidence? The obvious answer is that nothing more is needed to quash the thought of pervasive ensoulment: contemporary listeners (and probably their modern predecessors too) share a picture of the world and its contents that understands inorganic matter and organisms, even sentient and sapient ones, without recourse to souls, and commitment to that picture would make it gratuitous to invoke mysterious entities in response to some momentarily urgent metaphysical need.129 The real import of this fanciful case consists in exposing an important condition on the formation of synthetic complexes. Responsible building of such complexes should be reflectively stable: that is, as the reader or listener ponders the connections she makes in light of the full range of her antecedent attitudes and commitments, she should discover that the complex is sustainable. The reader of Bleak House jettisons some old convictions, but the synthetic complex that displaces them accords with quite general and fundamental commitments to avoid wishful thinking and to suspend judgment about what has been casually taken for granted, once it is clear that it can be called into question. The newly hatched panpsychist either abandons commitments of this kind in response to a momentary inclination or, if she never had them, stands in need of reeducation.
The first grade of reflective stability comes in admitting only those synthetic complexes that achieve the best overall ft with prior attitudes and commitments.130 The simplest case of the requirement debars the adoption of attitudes that presuppose something the subject has conclusive reasons to deny: as when a work of literature or music inspires endorsements that only make sense on the assumption of beings whose existence would be at odds with a mass of evidence. Sometimes higher grades of reflective stability can be in order. In modifying our attitudes we should not simply be content to assess the ft of potential changes with the perspectives we currently have but also to explore the ideas and commitments of our fellows—we try to acquaint ourselves with the best of what is known and thought and felt. Endorsements and rejections are sometimes rightly held hostage to other people’s verdicts. As we saw at the end of chapter 2 (sections 8 and 9), Thomas Mann’s decision to endorse a particular identity and a specific mode of life as valuable cannot be divorced from the effects of that decision on others. Any approach to the ethical life that views ethical judgments as justified in virtue of the ability to defend them in a particular type of conversation131 will take the possibility of that defense to be a condition on the formation of synthetic complexes.
Some will suppose that justification only accrues to judgments of questions of fact and that the standards of justification are (broadly) scientific. Others will adopt a three-tier picture: most basic are the matters of fact we justify through undertaking the inquiries we label “scientific”; although these constrain our ethical judgments, the latter are also subject to further conditions, through the introduction of other people’s perspectives. Finally, there are ultimate endorsements about values, and these are required to be consistent with the facts and the ethical considerations (and perhaps subject to yet more conditions). The second of these views is an important advance on the first, but it overlooks the interpenetration of the levels it tries to separate. Significant ethical discussion cannot be divorced from consideration of what matters in human life; nor can factual inquiry, even rigorous scientific inquiry, be detached from the values we properly endorse.132 If our encounters with art and literature warrant us in endorsing or rejecting particular claims about what is valuable, the sort of justification they provide is not “second rate” or “tacked on” but interwoven with the searches for evidence we view as our paradigms of rigor.
Finally, we are prepared to address skeptical concerns, as they arise with respect to the philosophical themes I have taken to be shown in the works that have been the focus of this book. Both Mann and Mahler, as I have read and heard them, address a fundamental challenge they find in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Human finitude undercuts the worth of what we are and do: our strivings are endless, our accomplishments ephemeral, our lives incomplete. We should either recognize the futility of our actions (abnegating the will) or find some way to transcend the run of common humanity (in some act of self-affirmation). To this challenge Mann’s coda and Mahler’s Abschied Lied have been taken to show the possibility of value in the connection with something that endures beyond the individual self. The novella and the Lied evoke a synthetic complex into which readers and listeners can absorb their experiences and integrate them with the endorsement of finite human worth.
The complex achieves the first level of reflective stability. The facts are agreed on: a human life ceases with bodily death, the effects of any life on human society and the broader world will dissipate into nothingness, and human society, sentient life, and our planet will eventually be no more. All that can be embedded into the complex of thoughts and feelings induced by the closing pages of Death in Venice or the final moments of Das Lied von der Erde without any displacement from equilibrium; those facts simply do not bear on the sense that the life with finite connection matters. Nor does a broader search for facts about nature introduce trouble. Hence, if reflective stability is to be threatened it must occur through a potential clash of human perspectives. Endorsing the value of the connected life must be seen as something that could not be sustained in an ideal conversation with one’s fellows. There are versions of the endorsement that would succumb in this way: the connections that matter might be viewed as lying in the apprehension and communication of beauty, in the realization of an aesthetic ideal that rode roughshod over the lives of others—that question arose sharply and uneasily with respect to Mann’s own attempt at self-endorsement (see section 8 of chapter 2). The endorsement itself, however, is by no means committed to any such version: although it may be a constraint on its articulation that the possibility of connected lives for others be honored, the endorsement survives the skeptical challenge.
Yet there is a last important doubt: don’t the actual careers of the creators on whose works I have drawn, Thomas Mann and Gustav Mahler, belie the thought of a reflectively stable synthetic complex evoked by Der Tod in Venedig or Das Lied von der Erde? Even if Mahler achieved an answer to the challenge of finitude, a challenge pervading not only Das Lied but his earlier songs and symphonies as well, he was apparently forced to renew his struggles—there followed a (numbered) Ninth Symphony and an incomplete Tenth. Mann’s disciplined efforts would extend for more than forty years beyond the writing of Death in Venice, punctuated by bitter self-doubt and the late desolation of wondering if he should have died after completing Doktor Faustus.133 The case of Mahler might be handled by special pleading. His Ninth Symphony can be heard as extending the farewell of Das Lied, as a sequence of Abschied-Lieder without words, while the Tenth responds to the very different disturbances introduced into Mahler’s last years by Alma’s infidelity.134 Mann, however, clearly worried about the same questions for decades—witness his tactless confession to Katia on their thirty-third wedding anniversary that he would not choose to relive his life.135 His preoccupation reflects, I believe, his own conception of the ArtistErzieher, compelled to submit endorsements of the value of a human life—of his own life—to continued question, to place himself upon trial again and again.136 The true Artist-Erzieher seeks an extreme standard of reflective stability, one in which the most basic endorsements are embedded in synthetic complexes again and again and scrutinized from perspective after perspective.137 We return to the division of labor envisaged in section 1 of chapter 2, in which the role of the artist is to explore and secure the values by which others live—live less reflectively and more lightheartedly: Mann (and perhaps Mahler too) becomes Tonio Kröger, making the worthwhile life safe for Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm.
So we return to the second and more obvious version of the question with which this section began: What is the significance for the many whose lives are patterned alo
ng other lines, who are dedicated to pursuits that are less self-lacerating? If the lives of more than a few exceptional individuals attain genuine worth, they do so not in virtue of some large effect that lingers for decades, perhaps even centuries, celebrated in our collective memory, but because of differences felt only by a few and only for a short period of time. As Leverkühn says, apropos of Max Schweigestill’s pipe smoke, “immortality” is a period sometimes a little shorter, sometimes a little longer—but, relatively soon, most of us will have perished as though we had never been. Nevertheless, the connections we make with those who survive us are real: we rear, guide, teach, produce, or preserve parts of the physical or social environments in which those who come after us live—Schweigestill maintains the farm his father passed on to him and bequeaths it in turn to his son. The connections that matter most are those that enrich the lives of those we love, the shared projects we undertake with them, the contributions to family, to community, or to some lasting structure that our descendants will enjoy—for a longer or shorter while.
If the fundamental challenge to the possibility of worth in admittedly finite human lives is turned back—if, for example, Mahler and Mann show us that it is answerable—a natural proposal is that some human lives obtain worth through creating or fostering the possibility of worthwhile lives for others.138 Value is a matter of having enough of the right sort of impact on others—where the vague phrase, “right sort of impact,” is understood in terms of positive effects on those others having the opportunities to find their own projects, to shape their own lives in ways that connect them to yet further people (and the equally indefinite “enough” is to be pondered later). This proposal faces an obvious skeptical objection: if the value of your life depends on your contributions to the lives of others, specifically on your aiding them to achieve something worthwhile, and if the value of their lives accrues from what they do to promote the worthwhile lives of yet further people, then a regress looms—at some point, it seems, there must be something intrinsically valuable, a terminal accomplishment that can confer worth on everything that contributed to it. The objection misses something crucial that Mahler and Mann show us: value lies in the relationship itself. If what you do sets up conditions that help enable others to act in similar ways, ways of their own choosing, that suffices for the generation of value.139
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