J. M. Coetzee

Truth, Meaning, Fiction

Anthony Uhlmann

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501357480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction illuminates the intellectual and philosophical interests that drive Coetzee's writing. In doing so, it makes the case for Coetzee as an important and original thinker in his own right. Whilst looking at Coetzee's writing career, from his dissertation through to The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and interpreting running themes and scenarios, style and evolving attitudes to literary form, Anthony Uhlmann also offers revealing glimpses, informed by archival research, of Coetzee's writing process. Among the main themes that Uhlmann sees in Coetzee's writing, and which remains highly relevant today, is the awareness that there is truth in fiction, or that fiction can provide valuable insights into real world problems, and that there are also fictions of the truth: that we are surrounded, in our everyday lives, by stories we wish to believe are true. J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction offers a revealing new account of one of arguably our most important contemporary writers.

1

Intuition, Knowledge, Truth

The problem of how to ground the truth has been recurrent in philosophy.¹ Plato makes use of the ideal or form to establish the truth and as we will see Coetzee has a strong interest in Plato. Yet Plato’s idea depends on belief in a realm above which can only be explained through recourse to myth.

A firmer ground is provided by the concept of intuition, and the concept of intuition in turn has been extremely important to writers, both in the Romantic and Modernist periods. In addition, it is apparent that recent studies in neuroscience have turned to the concepts of insight and intuition. Currently, there are two main conceptual approaches to the concept of intuition in psychology (Hodgkinson et al.). Firstly, it is considered to be ‘tacit knowledge’ related to associative understanding where information we have processed has become so ingrained as to constitute habit. This information is then accessed unconsciously to aid in decision-making processes (Reber; Dienes and Berry). Secondly, it involves a similarly unconscious process through which, in attempting to solve a problem, one suddenly arrives at a solution, through insight (Mayer; Nisbett and Wilson; Jung-Beekman et al.). Both of these responses presuppose a model of unconscious learning and unconscious processing. Furthermore, such processes are distinguished from instinctual behaviour recognized in non-human organisms (though potentially also residual in human behaviour) which is considered to not be learnt but rather innate within these organisms (Carlson).

Philosophical traditions differ somewhat from these models of tacit knowledge or unconscious processing by going back to still more foundational processes of understanding, considering how we might understand anything at all. Such philosophical systems have identified intuition with the idea of the foundational premise (Aristotle) which might relate to knowledge of the self (Descartes), of existence (Spinoza), of the perception of time and space (Kant), of consciousness and duration (Bergson), for example.

While these ideas beg the question as to how intuition might be aligned with belief systems, these will be left to one side here.² The components of the concept of intuition I will be concerned with are as follows: firstly, it is foundational, involving implicit presuppositions that allow thought to begin. Secondly, it involves the feeling of understanding that occurs when one grasps some idea that has not occurred to one previously (whether it is offered by another or encountered within some process of thinking), which extends the model of deliberation followed by understanding identified through the neuroscientific idea of insight. Thirdly, it involves a forceful feeling of the truth of something which then informs decision-making (as opposed to purely associative understanding).

Here I will set out an overview of some aspects of the idea of intuition. I will begin with Aristotle who is the first philosopher to make use of intuition as both a foundation of knowledge and an explanation of how we come to understand. After briefly discussing the Ancient Stoics and Descartes I will then turn to Kant because of his influence on aesthetic theory since the Romantics. I will also discuss Spinoza, whose concept of intuition remains the most comprehensive and useful and strongly resonates with contemporary theories of cognition. Spinoza too was a major influence on the German and English Romantics, nineteenth-century literature, and Modernism. I will end with Bergson’s conception of intuition, which was important to literary Modernism, before briefly considering the work of cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio to underline how the feeling of meaning and intuition are connected.

My claim is that ‘the idea’, as outlined by Spinoza, explains how one might affirm it is possible to recognize or sense truth and situate it as something which might plausibly occur in literary fiction. While these readings are applicable to Coetzee’s works, and Coetzee himself has, particularly in recent times, developed strong interest in the idea of intuition (as will be examined in The Childhood of Jesus chapter below), I am not claiming that Coetzee develops a genealogy of the concept or works directly with the philosophers discussed here. Rather, my claim is that the idea of intuition is applicable to thinking in literature in general terms and provides grounding for the claim that there is truth in fiction. There are models for such claims in both Romantic and Modernist literature, and I will touch upon how each of these was influenced by the concept of ‘intuition’.

Plato and inspiration

A number of critics have underlined the importance of Plato to Coetzee’s work, and this is something I will consider in more detail with relation to The Childhood of Jesus below, although it will also be touched on in readings of Waiting for the Barbarians and Elizabeth Costello. Plato allows a bringing together of the idea of the truth in art and what might ground that truth.

Famously in Phaedrus and Ion, Plato has Socrates consider, among other things, the truth value of art. Plato has Socrates identify art in these dialogues with knowledge. To be an art something must involve knowledge, and to speak the truth about anything one must have adequate knowledge of what one is speaking about. The charioteer has knowledge of chariot racing, the doctor of the human body.

Socrates wonders, in Phaedrus, if rhetoric could be an art and concludes that it can only be where the one speaking has knowledge of this kind about what they are discussing and can readily explain and justify this knowledge. In Ion, a dialogue often paired with Phaedrus, Socrates explains that artists often do not know how or why they arrive at the truth claims they make. This is the case even of the greatest, even for Homer, but is exemplified in the dialogue through Ion, a performer of Homer who is also a commentator on Homer. The critic Ion, like the artist Ion, seems to work without either absolutely knowing the truth or being conscious of possessing the adequate foundational knowledge on which it must be built.

As Nikolas Pappas argues in drawing together Ion and Phaedrus, there can only be two possibilities. The first is that the artist is a fraud. This is the case with the one who makes use of rhetoric. That artist has mastered techniques through which he/she might convince others of the truth of something without himself/herself knowing the truth. In this way he/she might convince others that things are true which are not in fact true.

The second possibility, however, is that the true artist might be saved by ‘inspiration’. That is, the artist can convey the truth without knowing it himself/herself if he/she is inspired by the gods. The gods give the poet access to the truth; the truth does not belong to the poet, but is spoken through the poet who transmits the truth of the gods (which in turn can be transmitted by the poem to the reader infused with inspired understanding, see Pappas).

Aristotle and intuition (nous)

While the idea of inspiration has fallen from fashion and has come to be associated with an idealized notion of artistic process, the idea of an immediate understanding, as that which founds the truth, survives in philosophy through the concept of intuition. That is, both intuition and inspiration involve a sense of understanding that seems to occur unbidden, as something that we know and sense to be true. In what follows I will trace some of the outlines of the concept of intuition as it emerges in a number of philosophers. I do not wish to imply that the concept is identical in each of these thinkers; on the contrary, they each give the concept their own particular inflections, which I will attempt to sketch. What they all have in common, however, is the functional application of the concept of intuition, which, like Plato’s ‘inspiration’, is used as a foundational concept that allows an initial access to the truth upon which knowledge might be built.

While Plato turns to myth to ground or explain the feeling of recognition (the ‘a ha’ moment that marks any true feeling of understanding, where, to paraphrase Spinoza, we know that we know that we know), others, beginning with Plato’s student Aristotle, shifted this idea of recognition onto a concept of intuition (or nous for Aristotle) (see Aristotle, Aydede, Lesher). Aristotle’s nous, like inspiration, involves an immediate understanding of things, an immediate grasping of a foundational truth. One might begin by asking why this is necessary. Why do we need some foundational concept? For Aristotle, and for many who came after, the problem of how one begins to think with certainty is troubling. For Aristotle, one begins with premises, which one knows to be true, and builds from these premises through logical method in order to achieve truths with absolute certainty. This is the kind of method one sees in mathematics or geometry. But how does one start? Aristotle suggests there are (at the time he writes, though one can see similar ideas repeated throughout the history of philosophy) two schools of thought:

Some hold that, owing to the necessity of knowing the primary premises, there is no scientific knowledge. Others think there is, but that all truths are demonstrable. […] The first school, assuming that there is no way of knowing other than by demonstration, maintain that an infinite regress is involved, on the ground that if behind the prior stands no primary, we could not know the posterior through the prior […] The other party agree with them as regards knowing, holding that it is only possible by demonstration, but they see no difficulty in holding that all truths are demonstrated, on the ground that demonstration may be circular and reciprocal. (Aristotle, Posterior, 3–4)

The first school might be aligned with the Sophists who held to the idea that all knowledge and truth is subjective. The second school Aristotle describes not only relates to empiricists of Aristotle’s times but also brings to mind the failed project of the English philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead in the early twentieth century, who, taking up the challenge of the German mathematician David Hilbert concerning the foundations of mathematics, sought to prove that mathematical systems could be self-contained and complete. That is, that no prior term was required in mathematical thinking. They were proved wrong by Kurt Gödel, with his famous ‘incompleteness’ theorems, which show that no mathematical system is complete or self-contained (see Goldstein). That is, one might argue that Gödel confirmed Aristotle’s view, which requires something outside the system, to underwrite or found the truth of the system.

Intuition and foundation

It is the moment of immediate understanding that allows us to begin to reason and thereby discover further truths. In Posterior Analytics Aristotle sets out his own doctrine opposed to those two set out above:

Our doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premises is independent of demonstration. […] Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the definitions. (Aristotle, Posterior, 4)

He goes on to link this knowledge to intuition (nous) stating that, ‘by rational intuition I mean an originative source of scientific knowledge’ (Aristotle, Posterior, 33), affirming that ‘rational intuition, science, and opinion […] are the only things that can be “true”’, but that of these three, opinion is concerned with that ‘which may be true or false’ (Aristotle, Posterior, 33). He later extends this idea, further underlining the importance of intuition as that which founds knowledge. He concludes his Posterior Analytics, a work that sets out with great rigour his scientific method, as follows:

From these considerations it follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premises, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premises – a result which also follows from the fact that demonstration cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor, consequently, scientific knowledge of scientific knowledge. If, therefore, it is the only other kind of true thinking except scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge. And the originative source of science grasps the original basic premiss, while science as a whole is similarly related as originative source to the whole body of fact. (Aristotle, Posterior, 54)

The Ancient Greek Stoics: The truth of perception

Aristotle is not alone in developing intuition as a kind of foundation. The Ancient Stoics, who followed him, sought to modify his understanding by tying the grounds of knowledge more explicitly to our perception. The link between intuition and perception is something that returns, in differing ways, in Descartes, Kant, and Bergson. It is apparent that the ideas of intuition, and its connections to perception, relate to art and literature more or less directly, because art and literature are concerned with perception, feeling, and understanding. It is not difficult to see why some of the ideas of philosophers who affirmed the importance of immediate understanding might be attractive to artists, then, as they offer explanations, precisely, of how art might access the truth (via intuition and heightened moments of perception).

It is worth pausing to consider the Stoic understanding of the ‘comprehensive image’, which they see as founding truth. In Chrysippe et l’ancien stoïcisme, the French philosopher Émile Bréhier offers an overview of the comprehensive image.

Bréhier underlines how for Plato the ‘truth’ was available to a few. For the Sophists, however, appearance was identified with the truth. For the Stoics there is an immediate apprehension of the truth, anyone can find it, but they cannot find it anywhere, that is, not every perception will lead to the truth (Bréhier, 80–81). The Stoics define representation, or perception, as ‘the image of the real produced in the soul by the action of an exterior object’ (Bréhier, 82).

The Stoics turn from the Sophists in two ways. Firstly, the Sophists claim that truth comes to us through perception, but that it is relative, it is ‘my truth’ alone, and so neither contestable nor universal. Secondly, the Sophists claim that all representations or perceptions lead to this kind of personal truth. For the Stoics, however, in certain cases the truth of my representation is not relative to me, but absolute. Therefore, there is the possibility of a science of the immutable truth, a science of the sensible (something that is not possible with the relative worldview of the Sophists). This knowledge is not found in general laws, but rather, as with Aristotle, relates to singular propositions which can then be linked together through a chain of reasoning to build certain knowledge (Bréhier, 86).

The special case, which allows an immediate understanding of a premise or proposition, is called the ‘comprehensive image’. For the Stoics not all appearance is of equal value; the comprehensive image carries the mark of its own truth. The comprehensive image itself is an act of understanding, that is, it is active, whereas some images (or representations or perceptions) are passive. The action has its origins in the soul, whereas the passion comes to us from outside (Bréhier, 87–88). The comprehensive image is active, ...