" Let me look again ": The Moral Philosophy and Literature

Debate at 40

Ruth Murphy

New Literary History, Volume 55, Number 1, Winter 2024, pp. 21-46
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2024.a932369

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/932369

[107.15.32.170] Project MUSE (2024-09-02 19:25 GMT) Duke University Libraries

 “Let me look again” : The Moral Philosophy and
Literature Debate at 40
Ruth Murphy

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between ethics and literature,
particularly as it has been conceived in academic debates since the early 1980s. It
offers a reconciliation of the dichotomy between literature and moral philosophy
through the concept of bifocality: writing that responds to the moral demands
of a lived reality in both a philosophical and literary way. I suggest that bifocal
writing is often found in works of testimony. Primo Levi’s 1986 work The Drowned
and the Saved, a collection of essays on the significance of the Holocaust, is then
presented as an arch example.

Introduction: Moral Philosophy and Literature

[107.15.32.170] Project MUSE (2024-09-02 19:25 GMT) Duke University Libraries

I’ve read the metaphysic of morals, and the

categorical imperative, and it doesn’t help a bit.
—Maria von Herbert, letter to Immanuel
Kant, August 1791

T
his article examines an old debate with new glasses. The rela-
tionship between literature and moral philosophy has long been
disputed; famously, Plato banished the poets from his philosophi-
cally ruled Republic. In its more modern guise, the debate has revolved
around questions such as whether literature can be moral philosophy
(and the reverse), and whether one is a more effective moral teacher
than the other—in short, which form of discourse should have the privi-
lege of taking the “moral high ground.” I begin with a revisitation of
the debate and its concerns before offering the concept of “bifocality”:
a style of writing that responds to the moral demands of a lived reality
in both a philosophical and literary way.

New Literary History, 2024, 55: 21–46

22 new literary history

Forty years ago, a special issue of New Literary History reinvigorated

the literature and moral philosophy question.1 Philosophers and liter-
ary scholars returned to these matters, mostly driven by a feeling that
philosophy was failing in its transmission of moral insight. From the
enterprise emerged what could now be called a new form of ethical criti-
cism, with its accompanying bibliography.2 I begin by looking at some
of the issues at stake in this landmark 1983 special issue.
The first contribution, “Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy?” by
the Scottish moral philosopher D. D. Raphael, was usefully schematic.
Raphael saw the idea of a “positive connection” between literature and
moral philosophy as having four possible interpretations: “(1) A work of
moral philosophy can also be a work of literature; (2) A work of literature
can also be a work of moral philosophy; (3) Moral philosophy can feed
literature; (4) Literature can feed moral philosophy.”3 He affirms the
first three propositions, giving examples of each. For the first, he takes
Plato’s Phaedo. While this is clearly a work of philosophy, he claims that
its “dramatic intensity” may also qualify it as a work of literature (CL
2). For the second proposition, he proposes Aeschylus’s Oresteia, argu-
ing that its development of the concept of justice performs the work of
moral philosophy by literary means (CL 7). To illustrate the third, how
moral philosophy can feed literature, he chooses Henry Fielding’s Tom
Jones, which features caricatures of rationalist moral philosophers, and
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, which puts forward an argument for determin-
ism. He leaves the last proposition to those with a deeper knowledge of
literature, assuming it is the most important of the four (CL 12).
Other essays were less direct in their approach to the issue’s theme,
and for this reason I do not discuss them in detail here. In his contribu-
tion, for example, literary scholar Murray Krieger insisted on the morality
present—bidden or unbidden—in literary criticism and theory.4 If one
reads between the lines, one can infer from his argument that literary
criticism has taken up the mantle of moral philosophy. An article by
philosopher David Sidorsky emphasized the novelist’s artistic vocation
over a commitment to ethical ideals, proposing that it was precisely their
liberation from morality that was the mark (and greatness) of modernist
writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.5
But the centerpiece of the 1983 special issue was Martha Nussbaum’s
now-classic essay “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature
as Moral Philosophy.”6 Nussbaum’s piece was, in her words, “the begin-
ning of a journey.”7 Encouraged by the late Ralph Cohen to contribute,
she saw it as a chance to elaborate her thinking on the discipline of moral
philosophy itself. As she reflected years later in the same journal, “If I
didn’t take this opportunity to stick my neck out as a philosopher, ad-
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 23

dressing questions not connected to ancient Greek philosophy, I might

always be pigeonholed as a narrow historic specialist.”8 Through her
sensitive and probing study of The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum showed how
such literature does a kind of moral work that philosophy, at least as it
stood at her time of writing, cannot do. Her argument, and its implica-
tion for the relationship between philosophy and literature, is captured
in the following line: “If our moral lives are ‘stories’ in which mystery
and risk play a central and a valuable role, then it may well seem that
the ‘intelligent report’ of those lives requires the abilities and techniques
of the teller of stories.”9
The second part of the 1983 issue featured responses to Nussbaum’s
claims, and it was here that the contours of the moral philosophy and
literature debate came into view. Cora Diamond’s piece, “Having a Rough
Story About What Moral Philosophy Is,” strengthened the case made by
Nussbaum for a more “literary” philosophy.10 Diamond begins by test-
ing P. H. Nowell-Smith’s assertion that “moral philosophy is a practical
science; its aim is to answer questions in the form ‘What shall I do?’”11
As her argument develops, however, this practical definition comes into
question. Diamond draws on Nussbaum’s article and the philosophy of
Iris Murdoch—whose work I turn to below—to elucidate what is left
unsaid when the moral sphere is limited to action and reasoning (HRS
165). Such a “narrowness of focus” cannot give us a complete moral
vision (HRS 168). That may be so, Raphael responds, but “philosophy
as we know it in the Western tradition takes its stand on rationality.”12
Raphael’s disagreement with Diamond comes down to whether rational-
ity is a defining feature of moral philosophy, and this remains a central
tension in the moral philosophy/literature debate. In Raphael’s view, for
a work to be classified as moral philosophy, it must convey moral insight
by a rational method of persuasion; our understanding of human nature
may be greatly enhanced by certain works of literature, but this does
not characterize them as philosophical works. Whether we can receive
enough moral insight through rational methods of persuasion seems to
be what is at stake for Diamond, Nussbaum, and Murdoch.
The philosopher Hilary Putnam countered Nussbaum’s view in his aptly
titled response, “Taking Rules Seriously.”13 If we emphasize exceptions
and contingency in our moral thinking, he argues, it opens the door to
self-serving casuistry. Putnam is keen to defend Kant against allegations
that his philosophy is based on detached, “unrealistic and aprioristic
thinking” and looks to a passage from Perpetual Peace (1795) in which
Kant shows himself to be enraged by the political evils of his day.14 The
example Putnam himself gives in order to demonstrate the importance
of rules is that of a person who is against torture, and therefore will not
24 new literary history

torture, “even if it is a case of finding where a bomb is going to go off

before many innocent lives are lost.”15 But this example—in my view—
actually reinforces Nussbaum and Diamond’s call for a moral philosophy
more closely related to the human experience, for how many people
will ever find themselves in such a situation? In her measured reply to
the doubts raised in the issue by Putnam, Richard Wollheim, and Pat-
rick Gardiner (all three, philosophers), Nussbaum clarifies that she is
deeply concerned with rules and duties and that her interpretation of
Henry James’s Maggie Verver reflects this. Nor does she want works of
philosophy to be replaced by works of literature in university curricula;
rather, she asks for literary works to be taken seriously as alternatives, as
offering a different moral vision. For now, she simply suggests, we should
work “with a more inclusive conception of what moral philosophy is.”16
The dialogue spread to other journals. In 1999, PMLA devoted a
special issue to “Ethics and Literary Study.”17 In 2004, Poetics Today revis-
ited (with some of the same contributors) the questions asked by NLH
twenty years before. In symposia such as these, the dominant view was
that philosophy would do well to learn from the lessons of literature
and its capacity to enrich us ethically, to look beyond its being “a sort
of orchard full of juicy examples” to embellish a philosophical point.18
Philosophy, especially that of the analytical school that dominated in the
anglophone world, confined itself to that which would fit into a logical
system, leaving little room for moral subtleties such as those that take
place in silence, hesitation, and internal struggle. This judgment was all
the more pronounced given the fact that it was usually made by moral
philosophers.19 Defences of philosophy against literature, by contrast,
were (and still are) harder to come by. Where these have been made,
the central argument is that literature, in its particularity, cannot achieve
the systematicity that characterizes the enterprise of moral philosophy.20
In almost all contributions to the debate—whatever the specific con-
clusion reached—the relationship between philosophy and literature is
sketched as a fundamental dichotomy. Then, in some works, attempts
are made to reconcile the two. These oppositions, though they have a
subtly different meaning in each argument, can be mapped onto each
other. The tension between moral philosophy and literature, then, in
various formulations resembles that between outward action and the
inner life (Murdoch, Diamond),21 rule and perception (Nussbaum),22
dry and wet (Murdoch),23 Kant and Aristotle (Nussbaum, Paul Voice),24
general and particular (Diamond, Voice), detachment and engagement
(Richard Eldridge),25 rational and nonrational (Raphael), nowhere and
somewhere (Voice), apophantic and nonapophantic speech (Michael
Eskin),26 tidiness and messiness (Adamson), or systematic accounts and
 moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 25

“the fluidity of human experience” (Diamond, HRS 157). Other binaries

that shape the scholarship on this topic include objective and subjective,
abstract and concrete, clarity and ambiguity, and impersonal investigation
and imaginative enquiry. I would also add, tentatively, male and female,
and I will return to this later in the discussion.27
There is an important sense in which questions of moral philosophy’s
relation to literature can almost—but not quite—be mapped onto the
analytic/Continental divide in philosophy. The quarrel against moral
philosophy that I have outlined above has been almost exclusively with
analytic philosophy, partly because this debate was predominantly an
anglophone one, but more essentially because the kind of scientism
critiqued by Diamond and Nussbaum is much more a characteristic
of analytic than Continental philosophy. But it is complicated, for the
categories of “analytic” and “Continental” have themselves been chal-
lenged and are vulnerable to stereotype.28 “Continental philosophy” in
particular has been used to refer to the work of thinkers as divergent as
G. W. F. Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and philosophers
in the realm of critical theory. Yet, whether one likes it or not, the distinc-
tion between analytic and Continental represents a state of affairs that
informed the moral philosophy/literature debate, and to some extent
it still endures. In some philosophy departments in the UK, Kant is
about as Continental as it gets. Andreas Vrahimis has warned against the
generalization that “Continental philosophy” is closer to literature and
the arts; however, the generalization seems justified when one consid-
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ers the number of Continental philosophers who were also playwrights

and novelists or who simply wrote philosophy of a more literary style.29
It is a long-standing association, as shown in two essays by John Stuart
Mill, which Simon Critchley argues were instrumental in the develop-
ment of what is meant by the category of “Continental.”30 Mill saw two
paradigms in English philosophy: that of Jeremy Bentham, who asks of
a doctrine or a theory, “Is it true?,” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who
asks, “What is the meaning of it?”31 It speaks for itself that Coleridge, a
poet influenced by German idealism and Romanticism, embodied the
“Continental” spirit.
It may now be that the professionalization of philosophy has driven
out much of what made Continental philosophy closer to literature.
Academic journals produce stylistic norms that are not always conducive
to more experimental philosophical writing. As for analytic philosophy,
the incorporation of literary works, at least in the field of ethics, seems
to be more accepted, but whether or not this has altered the nature of
analytic philosophy is much less clear. An interesting example of this
is found in one of the most influential works of (analytic) philosophy
26 new literary history

in recent years, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice.32 Fricker’s theory

cannot be my theme here, but suffice to say that works of literature are
integral to her thesis, to the point where it is difficult to imagine how
it could have taken shape without them. The issue is that there is no
reflection on this interdependency between her arguments and the novels
and plays that bring them to life. Despite their coexistence in her work,
we seem not to have moved beyond Adamson’s worry that literature is
there only to serve or evidence philosophy—“a sort of orchard full of
juicy examples.”33 One could imagine, though, that Fricker’s taking for
granted the ethical value of literature in philosophy is possible precisely
because of the work done by Murdoch and Nussbaum and in forums
such as those provided by NLH in 1983.
I would like to offer a new framing of the relationship between moral
philosophy and literature in terms of distance, aided by forty years of
distance itself. If the object of vision is the ethics of human life, enmeshed
as it is in our messy reality, philosophy suffers from far-sightedness and
literature from near-sightedness: both have ethical blind spots. Philoso-
phy is far-sighted in its dissociation from lived experience, literature
near-sighted in its attachment to it. One may respond to this by saying
that philosophy is in fact near-sighted, self-referential, and elitist, and
that while literature may tell a story that takes place in a particular
context or setting, this story can take on a universality that is not at all
“short-sighted.” Whether philosophy is accused of short-sightedness or
long-sightedness, the point is that for both, a blind spot still remains.
As for literature, we may concede that it has a unique ability to describe
and illuminate the density of our lives, but does this make it ethically
instructive?
I suggest inverting the optics. Following Nussbaum, I find that a
change of perspective is required, one in which reality places demands
on philosophy. In what follows, I will adhere to Voice’s reformulation of
Nussbaum’s thought on this issue: “A moral situation is not something to
which rules are applied, but from which moral demands arise” (WL 127).34
Lived experience, everyday occurrences, and historical events create
moral dilemmas that call for an individual or collective ethical response;
because it does not always respond to these, moral philosophy can be
blind to its own subject matter. Theoretical work has done much to show
what philosophy and literature do not do when it comes to ethics, but very
little has been done to reconstruct what an alternative would look like.
I offer here an answer to this, or at least the beginnings of an answer.
I begin by looking at the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Although
Murdoch did not directly contribute to the 1983 NLH special issue, the
presence of her work in those articles and in the concerns of the debate
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 27

as it developed is magnetic. In her dissatisfaction with what she saw as

the over-professionalized analytic philosophy that prevailed in her time,
Murdoch espoused a philosophy of attention to the moral dilemmas of
everyday life and to the ways in which literature can attune us to these.
Her work was prelusive to the “double turn” to ethics and literature.35
Following Murdoch, this article makes the case for combining literary
and philosophical approaches to moral challenges. I show how testimony,
both as a literary genre and as a discursive category, may accomplish
this. Testimony incorporates both the literary and the ethical, and
precisely through and from this convergence derives its moral charge.
I am not engaging in an exercise of generic definition (i.e., determin-
ing a set of criteria that characterize what text is or is not “testimony”)
but demonstrating how the general qualities of what we consider to be
“testimony” hold an ethical value that is unacknowledged in the above
debates. Taking the work of Primo Levi as a case study, especially his
last book, The Drowned and the Saved, I propose that testimony can offer
a bifocal perspective that cancels out the blind spots found in literature
and philosophy.36 In particular, I show how Levi’s writing on shame both
echoes and answers Murdoch’s call for new concepts, and I invoke his
formulation of the “gray zone” as a bifocal moral concept that encom-
passes literary and philosophical viewpoints.
Finally, it is important to recognize how criticisms of literature’s or
philosophy’s ethical approaches contain implicit understandings of
what ethics should be. In other words, when outlining what ethics or
literature fail to do in the transmission of moral insight, we reveal what
we want this morality to look like. In proposing that testimony’s bifocal
vision can have a unique ethical perspective, I too am saying something
about the nature of ethics, or what counts as ethical.

Iris Murdoch and the Need for New Concepts

As both a distinguished novelist and philosopher, Murdoch is a unique

figure in thought on the relationship between literature and ethics. Her
work has been essential to many of those who contributed to the NLH
debate, such as Cora Diamond, Nussbaum, and, later, Jane Adamson.
Murdoch struggled with a moral philosophy dominated by Kantian
and utilitarian theories, disputing its depiction of man as a rational
animal, “stripped and solitary”; for Murdoch, literature was superior in
its portrayal of the substance of our being (AD 291). Philosophy must
therefore pay more attention to the everyday, to the moral struggles in
human relationships, and to the Good.
28 new literary history

In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch gives us the parable of M and D.

It goes as follows: “A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her
daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted
girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lack-
ing in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar,
insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always
tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses.
M feels that her son has married beneath him.”37 If this example feels
dated and unrelatable, D can be replaced by someone whom we dislike;
particularly someone we dislike for reasons that seem petty, or someone
who has not badly wronged us. In Murdoch’s parable, M is a very “cor-
rect” person and so, despite her feelings, always treats D with courtesy.
Murdoch continues: “However, the M of the example is an intelligent
and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving
careful and just attention to an object which confronts her.” M tells
herself: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced
and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me
look again” (S 17). Through an ethical looking again, M comes to see D
differently. She is “not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified
but spontaneous,” and so on (S 17). Throughout all this, M does not
act any differently, and yet something ethical has happened.
Through this parable, Murdoch illustrates how much of our moral
activity takes place without any outward, quantifiable “results.” It con-
tradicts an idea of morality based solely on concrete action and explicit
reasoning. Morality has an inner life that is constitutive of our “fabric
of being” (S 21). In fact, when we make any kind of moral choice, the
“choice” as such has already happened by virtue of the subtle and con-
tinuous work of attention.
“Attention” is a concept Murdoch borrows from the French philoso-
pher Simone Weil and expands upon. For Weil, who was inspired by
Christian mysticism, “attention” is “regard without motive,” the act of
surrendering to a person, an object, or a situation, and forfeiting one’s
personality in order to receive the supernatural, which may be in the
form of one’s neighbor.38 It is no coincidence that Murdoch was one
of the first to introduce French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre
and Weil to an English academic audience; her interest in such thinkers
may be understood as part of her disaffection with analytic philosophy.
In Murdoch’s thought, “attention” is a critical instrument of moral
perception: the extended process of turning one’s moral imagination
toward a given reality. The process is punctuated by what she calls “sec-
ondary moral words,” words that are laden with ethical significance,
that occupy the vast space between extremes of “good” and “evil” but
 moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 29

are nonetheless part of what leads us to either extreme (S 22). It is by

means of “secondary moral words” that what Murdoch calls the “siege
of the individual by concepts” takes place; for example, the evolution in
M’s feelings toward D is paved with secondary adjustments (“not vulgar,
but refreshingly simple”) (S 31).
The story of M and D, although in many ways a simple, domestic ex-
ample, shows us the dissonance felt between the life of the mind and its
representation in moral philosophy. A multitude of inner struggles form
the texture of our striving toward the Good, but how can we allocate
value to these in a moral system based on action? They are missing from
our ethical vocabulary. Murdoch seeks to reinstate them, and this will
resonate in later reflections on literature and ethics.

***

Along with Murdoch and her disciples, I would argue that there is
a quasi-self-evidence in the idea that morality encompasses more than
just actions (take, for example, those who do the “right” thing but for
what we perceive as the “wrong” reasons). With them, too, I argue that
the blinkered vision of moral philosophy can be remedied by greater
attention to our texture of being, through a richer, more subtle vo-
cabulary and descriptions of inner thought processes. Morality has an
inner life—an aspect that is of course more difficult to examine—but
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that is nonetheless there. Moral thought can go beyond assertion and

argument, involving emotional response, ambiguity, dissonance, and
other literary techniques to inspire “new moral visions” (HRS 168).
One may simply point out that “texture of being” is not the concern of
moral philosophy. Yet if the aim of moral philosophy is to give “sharp-
ened moral insight” and to go beyond judgment of actions, as shown
by Diamond, then “texture of being” certainly has a place within it (CL
5). It is morally charged. If literature can give us access to these layers,
it is saying something about the subtleties of morality that conventional
moral philosophy does not.
“Texture of being” comes into play in narrative. And parallel to the
revival of the literature/ethics debate was the development of narrative
theory. Given that narrative is central to what we define as “literature,”
and given the ethical dimension of much of the critical work on narra-
tive, it may even be seen as another guise in which the literature/eth-
ics debate was borne out. It has its own lineage of philosophers, from
Hannah Arendt to Adriana Cavarero to Judith Butler. Unifying these
two strands (the ethics/literature debate and narrative theory), many
30 new literary history

female philosophers and political thinkers seem to align themselves to

the idea that there is something more “textured,” more human, even,
in a kind of (narrative) philosophy that moves away from the theoretical
and systematic. The uniting factor amongst the women I have mentioned
is their acknowledgement of the limits of conventional philosophy, its
“narrowness of focus,” in Diamond’s words—and the reinstating of
the subjective in the form of the narrative, or story (HRS 168). While I
would not claim that the urge for a more “literary” moral philosophy is
an essentially feminist movement, it is certainly plausible that, because
many women were pushed to the margins of the discipline, they were
required to think in new ways and to test the boundaries of standard
practice.39 This interpretation is further strengthened by two recent
publications that group the same four women in their challenge to the
analytic orthodoxy: Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something:
How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch
Revolutionized Ethics and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s
Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life.40
The same bloom of interest is true for Weil: Murdoch’s influence (see
Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil).41 The titles of these biog-
raphies alone reveal something of these women’s role in loosening the
boundaries of academic philosophy. In the case of the “Sommerville
quartet” (Murdoch, Anscombe, Midgley, and Foot), for example, they
were at once inside the world of academic philosophy, and, as women,
somewhat outside it. Their closeness to the messy reality informed their
critique of philosophy’s distance. In this and in other ways, they are the
progenitors of the ethics-and-literature turn.

Bifocality
One of the central observations of the “moral philosophy versus
literature” debate was that neither discipline could see the full moral
picture: philosophy was long-sighted in its abstraction and detachment
from human affairs, literature short-sighted in its attention to the par-
ticular. Is it possible, then, to have a genre, a style, or a form that can
overcome both visual impairments? Is there a better channel for work
that has an explicit ethical concern? Or will there always be a tension
between messiness and tidiness or, to put it in Nussbaum’s terms, be-
tween “perception and rule”?42 There is work I have encountered that
seems to bridge this gap; it is often in writing that falls loosely under
the category of “testimony,” though I suspect that there could be many
other related genres that share this trait. There appears to be a unique
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 31

moral charge to works that have both a philosophical and a literary

perspective, that look both near and far; I call this quality “bifocality.”
Bifocal is a term used to refer to lenses whose upper half allows one
to look at things far away, while the lower half is for objects at a close
distance. The invention of bifocal spectacles is generally attributed to
Benjamin Franklin. In his sketch of them below (Fig. 1), from a 1785
letter to an optician friend, we can see how each lens is divided within
one pair of glasses, forming a kind of two-in-one.

Fig. 1. Benjamin Franklin’s sketch of his own bifocal lenses in a letter to a friend, dated
May 23, 1785 (Library of Congress).

Ethical writing that is bifocal responds to the moral demands of reality,

the near and particular, and then opens out to the abstract, to its general
ethical significance. It is reflexive and inductive. The circumstances of
the writer are not inconsequential: they are in some way implicated,
through either direct personal experience (as in the case of testimony
or, to give a different example, in many of James Baldwin’s essays) or
indirectly (for example, Arendt documenting Adolf Eichmann’s trial
in Jerusalem).43 It is inductive in its responsiveness to reality; an arch
example of this is how Holocaust survivors use their experiences to re-
valuate our conceptions of good and evil. It also seems that confessional
literature—such as Augustine’s or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions—
has a similar twofold vision.
In bifocal work, there is both a response to reality and a responsibility
to convey the moral significance of its subject matter; this substantially
differentiates it from a work of fiction. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,
32 new literary history

for example, has moral concerns insofar as it investigates evil, but it does
not have the same responsibility as a nonfiction portrait of a perpetra-
tor.44 Bifocality counteracts philosophy’s long-sightedness by originating
in real events and facts. It counteracts literature’s short-sightedness
through the reach of its ethical considerations. Murdoch’s story of M
and D comes close to bifocality in that it takes a very real, everyday sce-
nario (as opposed to, say, the paradigmatic “trolley problem”) and uses
it to make a philosophical point; it also draws on literary language to
describe this scenario. However, it is fundamentally a thought experiment
and therefore not a central case of what I mean by “bifocal.” Similarly,
fiction and drama can have profound moral insight (in Nussbaum’s
work, for example, Greek tragedy and the novels of James); this does
not necessarily make it bifocal.

***

Ethics is an optics.
—Emmanuel Levinas

Bifocality reflects a development in ethics. The moral philosophy/

literature debate was much more than mere academic border control;
in showing how philosophy had gone astray, the debate revealed an
ethical ideal through a vision of what constituted good ethical writing.
“Bifocality” describes both what those such as Murdoch, Nussbaum, and
Diamond were looking for and where it can be found.
Why is this vision best expressed through the language of optics and
of distance? In many ways, ethics itself has often been as associated with
the visual; one thinks of the importance of the look in the philosophy
of Emmanuel Levinas. But even long before this, ethics has been for-
mulated in terms of a mediation between distance and closeness. In an
expansive collection of essays, Wooden Eyes, Carlo Ginzburg explores the
concept of distance across different times and places.45 In relation to
ethics and distance, two moments stand out: the first is his discussion
of the invention of linear perspective in the Italian Renaissance and
the coeval emergence of a critical attitude toward the past. These lines
converge in the opening dedication of The Prince (not, famously, a work
of moral philosophy), where Niccolò Machiavelli states that distance is a
precondition of knowledge. But while distance can aid a critical eye, too
much can lead to apathy and dehumanization. This is the other side of
 moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 33

Ginzburg’s reflection: the moral myopia caused by an excess of distance.

He illustrates this through the letters of Denis Diderot, which, in their
perspicacity, obviate much of current commentary on empathy:46 “To a
blind person, what is the difference between a man urinating and a man
who bleeds but does not cry out? Do not we too cease to feel compas-
sion once distance, or the smallness of objects, produces the effect on
us that the lack of sight produces on the blind?”47
Distance, then, is useful for detached analysis, but not for the cultiva-
tion of compassion. For this reason, Ginzburg argues for holding onto
both the near and far, the “tension between subjective point of view and
objective and verifiable truths.”48 If an excess of distance or nearness
can be ethically blinding, writing that is bifocal gives both perspectives.
This is where it takes a new ethical stance to an existing view of ethics
as optics. It is not a middle point but a point from which both the pan-
orama and the detail are in sight. The turning point in the story of M
and D, where M makes an ethical choice, is in her words, “Let me look
again.” Bifocality implies this looking again, with the distance of space
and time. To return to Weil and Murdoch’s concept of “attention”: if
this is an ethical inner act in which one stays with a given reality, an
act which leads to a deepening of concepts, perhaps “bifocality” is the
equivalent of this attention in writing. Finally, the visual trope invokes
the epistemic dimension to bifocality, for looking or seeing also implies
knowing. As will be seen in the analysis of Levi’s work below, this dual
association captures the nature of concepts, such as the gray zone, that
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are both ethically and epistemically illuminating.

Bifocality tends to encompass both form and content. Content can
be deemed bifocal when it draws on both a particular historical event
and on the conception of this event as a moral breach in a collective
ethical sphere. Form is bifocal when it combines elements of literary
and philosophical languages to derive an ethical message. That the
characteristics of literature can ethically enrich philosophy has already
been shown by Murdoch, Nussbaum, and many others. But what I am
proposing here is that, before their work, a unique coalescence of the
two was already happening in a particular kind of nonfiction writing that
acquired significant (moral) importance in the latter half of the twen-
tieth century: testimony. I am not claiming that all testimony is bifocal
or that all bifocal writing is testimonial. In fact, bifocality seems to be
found most often in works that defy any obvious categorization. While
incorporating elements of both literature and moral philosophy, bifocal
writing has its own kind of geometry. This is one that extends upward
from lived experience, that gives attention to a distinct reality, and then
places it on the axis of human affairs. It draws a (moral) line between a
34 new literary history

point in history and an Archimedean point. A problem with moral phi-

losophy, as outlined in recent work by Sophie Grace Chappell, is that it
often hides the (personal) experience that has given rise to the theory.49
Such experiences—Chappell calls them “epiphanies”—are rationalized
by argument; the line I alluded to above is not drawn. But bifocal writing
seems to have the balance that Chappell seeks in Epiphanies, through
its disclosure of the particular’s role in the formation of the general.
Once the position of “bifocality” has been established, we can enrich it
as a metaphor. “Bifocality” evokes vision, focal distance, and standpoint.
This imagery mirrors the moral philosophy and literature question, as
it is essentially one of perspective, of finding an ideal viewpoint from
which to consider ethical questions.
It is significant that James, whose work was the vessel in which Nuss-
baum cast her defense of literature’s ethical value and whose novels have
been exemplars of ethical fiction for many others since, had his own
theory of “point of view.”50 “Point of view” was more than an idiom for
James: it was a way of writing ethically.51 In a well-known passage from
the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James illustrates the plurality of
perspectives in the novel through visual, spatial imagery. In his “house
of fiction,” there is a figure at each window with a “field glass, which
forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument.”52 In bifo-
cal writing, the fictitious scene observed from James’s house is replaced
by the lived experience of the writer, and the “unique instrument” they
possess is the bifocal lens. The person who wears these “double spectacles”
is not quite an artist, nor novelist, nor philosopher but has something
of each (a curious evocation of Franklin’s own character). If anything,
they are a witness. Describing Mill’s phase of disillusionment with his
utilitarian education, his dissatisfaction with Bentham’s judgment that
“poetry was no better than push-pin,” and subsequent immersion into the
work of Coleridge and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Critchley relates
an episode in which Mill uses a metaphor very close to mine: “When
asked by the historian Thomas Carlyle whether he had entirely changed
his opinion of matters, Mill replied, referring to the logic on which he
had been brought up, I “believe in spectacles,’ but added, ‘but I think
eyes are necessary too.’” 53
As a metaphor, then, “bifocal” also denotes the position of the writer.
It marks a place in writing where the voice is both “finely aware” of what
is close and “richly responsible” for what is distant.54 In this sense, it is
also possible to interpret the place of women such as Murdoch, who
enlivened the literature/philosophy question, through a bifocal lens,
positioned as they were at once inside and, as women, at the margins
of the academic world.
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 35

Finally, the notion of testimony (along with the countless works that
meet this classification in recent years) is mostly absent from the litera-
ture/ethics debate.55 Part of the reason for this is the casting of literature
in the role of the fiction novel. If the above contributions to the rela-
tionship between literature and philosophy found different blind spots
in their respective ethical visions, it seems that the genre of testimony
was a blind spot in the debate itself. In what follows, I show what aligns
the “testimonial” with what I have defined as “bifocal,” and examine a
work emblematic of this “bifocality”: Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved.

Bifocality and Testimony

The language of testimony presents us with a situation that challenges

to an extreme degree questions of morality. It does so in the form of
a narrative and seems to encompass both the ethical charge of moral
philosophy and the “texture of being” of literature. In what follows,
testimony will be discussed primarily in reference to Holocaust testi-
mony. While this is by no means the only writing that can be defined
as “testimonial,” the emergence of testimony as its own genre came with
the wave of survivor memoirs in the wake of the Holocaust. It evolved
into a template. In the words of Elie Wiesel, “If the Greeks invented
tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our
generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”56 If, “as for
Nussbaum, a moral situation is not something to which rules are applied,
but from which moral demands arise,” then it is not hard to see why;
the Holocaust was a historic event marked by morality’s total collapse
(WL 127). The generation who lived through it and those who lived
in its moral shadow were left with a hermeneutical demand. Testimony
articulates this demand and entrusts it to its reader as a story, a story
whose necessity derives from the fundamental “breach” caused by the
Holocaust. Jerome Bruner writes that “to be worth telling, a tale must
be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated,
or deviated from in a manner to do violence to what Hayden White calls
the ‘legitimacy’ of the canonical script.”57 Given that the Holocaust un-
doubtedly represented this severe breach in the Western moral “script”
or canon, I suggest that much of the narrative component or the nar-
ration of this breach was realized through testimony. In this sense, I am
arguing that the popular success of testimony as a literary and ethical
genre illuminates the perceived failures of moral philosophy and that
it does so through a kind of writing that I call bifocal.
36 new literary history

But what, then, are the intrinsic qualities that give testimony its moral
charge? It is clear that testimony is not prescriptive in the way that moral
philosophy is; it does not attempt to produce moral imperatives through
reasoned argument alone. Yet, as noted by Robert Gordon, testimony
has origins in theology and jurisprudence, from which it has inherited
languages of redemption and judgment.58 A paradigmatic example of
this biblical legacy is Levi’s epigraph to If This is a Man:

Consider if this is a man

Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf . . .59

Here there is an imperative to “consider.” It is reached not by reasoned

argument but through rhetoric and poetry. Levi’s poem is modelled on
a prayer, and entitled Shemà (“hear”) after the words of Deuteronomy.
The demand to “consider” and “hear” is representative of testimony as
a genre. It is nuanced and open-ended, inviting the reader to introspec-
tion. To Kant’s “What ought I to do?” and Socrates’s “How should one
live?,” it adds, “What do I think?” and “What would I have done?”60 These
questions also suppose a temporal dimension to the ethical interroga-
tion by relating the reader to a defined (past) experience. This tempo-
ral connection performed by testimony indicates another conceptual
problem in its relationship to ethics: its facticity. Is it that testimony’s
being true (allowing for a degree of literary distortion and subjectivity,
we may say it is “true” in the sense that it claims to bear witness to a
specific historical event) gives it a moral importance superior to, say,
that of a similar moral conflict in a work of fiction? As in Levi’s poem,
testimony considers “what has been”: “Ponder that this happened.”61 It
responds to that which has been “irrevocably introduced into the world
of things that exist.”62
The language of testimony inevitably has a measure of temporal
distance from the event, yet, through the mediation of experience, it
is closer to human affairs than the lofty reason of moral philosophy, or
even the world of fiction (OV 11). It is closer to the squalid reality. Is
it therefore, to put it simply, that testimony brings philosophy down to
earth? Or is it the inverse: that the events recounted in testimony (again
I am here referring principally to Holocaust testimony) were once un-
imaginable, and that their entrance into the realm of what is human
creates new moral demands that philosophy cannot ignore? Finally,
testimony is often associated with a feeling of responsibility, an urge to
tell one’s story (as faithfully as possible) so that the crimes and injustices
 moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 37

suffered may never be repeated. There is also, often, a responsibility to

the dead. Here testimony diverges from literature as a broad category,
whose freedom is part of what makes it art; Murdoch writes that much
literature belongs “to the vast irresponsible variety of play,” to fantasy
and private consolation.63 Testimony, by contrast, has significant ethical
ties that take it somewhere between the ambitions of moral philosophy
and the liberty of fiction. Finally, it is likely that the wave of testimony
in the latter half of the twentieth century has determined, at least in
part, the now commonplace assumptions about the (fictional) novel’s
ethical value; its role in this has yet to be acknowledged.
Levi’s last work, The Drowned and the Saved, does not faultlessly match
the category of testimony. It is a collection of essays, reflections on both
his personal experiences in Auschwitz and the repercussions of the Holo-
caust more generally. While it incorporates many aspects of Levi’s If This
is a Man, it goes beyond testimony in its analytic, multifaceted approach.
The Drowned and the Saved’s incorporation of the ethical and testimonial
gives it a bifocality free of the blind spots found in literature and moral
philosophy. It seems to demand a new category—and it gives us new
concepts by philosophical and literary means. Two passages in this work
particularly resonate with the concerns of the ethics/literature debate
and, in their bifocality, fulfil some of its demands: Levi’s rethinking of
shame and his formulation of the “gray zone.”
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Bifocality in The Drowned and the Saved:

“Shame” and the “Gray Zone”

In the chapter “Shame,” Levi recalls an episode from the camps which
has plagued his conscience. This extract, despite its entirely different
setting and subject matter, bears some resemblance to the problems
posed in Murdoch’s parable of M and D. During the hot summer of
1944 in Auschwitz, when the inmates were driven mad by thirst, Levi
finds a small pipe in which there is not more than a litre of water. After
an initial debate about whether to keep this discovery to himself, share
it with Alberto, or reveal it to the entire team, he chooses the second
option, that of “egotism expanded to the nearest person” (DS 2465).
They drink it in secret, but later he meets another friend, Daniele, who
has seen their betrayal: “But on the march back to camp I found myself
next to Daniele, who was covered with gray cement dust, his lips cracked
and his eyes glazed over, and I felt guilty” (DS 2465).
Daniele confronts him months later when they have been liberated,
and it is clear that this is a particularly painful memory for Levi. Sig-
38 new literary history

nificant in the passage that follows is Levi’s attempt to grapple with

the irrationality of the shame he feels: “Is there any justification for
feeling shame in hindsight? I could not figure this out then, nor can I
today, but the shame existed and it is still there, concrete, heavy, perpetual.
Today Daniele is dead, but in our affectionate, fraternal get-togethers
as survivors, the veil of that failure to act, that unshared glass of water,
stood between us, transparent, unexpressed, but tangible and ‘costly’”
(DS 2466, emphasis mine.)
Here we are dealing with expressions of remorse akin to the survivor-
shame suffered by Levi and so many others. “Survivor-shame” is itself a
new concept that has been identified and deepened through testimony.64
Yet, beyond the event Levi describes, there is an ethical significance in
Levi’s feeling of shame, and his describing it in writing, that deserves
a name. This is what takes us to Murdoch’s parable of M and D. Just
as Murdoch shows how, in M’s change of mind about D, something
ethical has happened, so too is something ethical happening in Levi’s
remembering. There is an inner reprocessing of an initial event that
has no outward manifestation, and yet it is an ethical occurrence. Our
moral vocabulary struggles with this kind of phenomenon. While one
would not think Levi should suffer, his feeling of regret or shame in
remembering an act of completely understandable self-preservation is
still a good thing—“good” in the sense that we think it better to feel it
than to feel no shame at all. Yet “shame” in our understanding is charged
with negativity and captures none of this ethical valence. Shame is also
typically an outward feeling, ignited in confrontation with others, but
here it becomes introjected. In this sense, the concept seems to fail.
Similarly, to say that this shame is “good” is incongruous; it simplifies
the feeling and almost amounts to shaming him who feels it. We might
say that it is more human to have shame than not to have it; does the
word “human” give us some of this ethical nuance?
Levi is also asking, “What to do with shame?” To question whether it is
justified or not is to discover the inadequacies of terms such as “justified,”
part of a more purpose-driven, propositional moral language that coerces
an emotion into something it is not. Throughout her philosophical work,
Murdoch is concerned with what we may call the asymmetry between the
“substance of our being” and the concepts we have at hand to express
it (AD 293). She shares with Levi both a sense of loss in our language
and an urge to regenerate it: “What have we lost here? And what have
we perhaps never had? We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the
loss of a moral and political vocabulary” (AD 290).
It may seem unexpected to bring Murdoch’s philosophy into dialogue
with Levi’s work. Yet the horrors of the Second World War inevitably
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 39

form a backdrop to Murdoch’s thinking, as they did for so many of her

generation. To engage seriously with moral philosophy in its wake was to
heed its haunting presence. As George Steiner writes in his introduction
to Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, “it is to take into account, albeit
obliquely and with a somewhat troubling decorum, the barbarism of
this twentieth century and the collapse of liberal, humanistic comforts
under the impact of the inhuman (the world of the death-camps, the
resurgence of torture and enslavement in myriad and technological
forms.)”65
There are also many explicit references to the Holocaust in Murdoch’s
essays. Sometimes, as noted by Steiner above, the “concentration camp”
or “Hitler” can crop up in a way that is a little jarring, for example, “the
best kind of courage (that which would make a man act unselfishly in a
concentration camp) is steadfast, calm.”66 Although Murdoch does not
approach the ethical repercussions of the Holocaust in a systematic way,
it is at least taken into account, considered, and part of her opposition
to the insular world of Anglo-Saxon analytic moral philosophy may be
seen as a reaction to its continuing on unabated, as if we do not “need
more concepts” (AD 293).

A Bifocal Concept: Primo Levi’s “Gray Zone”

Have we survivors succeeded in understanding and making other people under-

stand our experience? What we commonly mean by the verb “to understand”
coincides with “to simplify”: without a profound simplification, the world around
us would be an endless and undefined tangle that defies our ability to find our
bearings and decide our actions. So we are forced to reduce the knowable to an
outline: this is the purpose of language and conceptual thought, the wonderful
tools that we have built over the course of evolution and which are specific to
the human species. (DS 2430)

These lines in Levi can be interpreted as another face of the litera-

ture/philosophy debate. Literature is more concerned with the “tangle,”
philosophy with its outline. The work of testimony is the unraveling of
experience, but this is often accompanied by reflection on the mean-
ing of this particular story for our collective understanding of ethics
and history.
In the defense of philosophy, Voice has pointed out that it is not its
task to meditate with sensibility and attention on the messiness of life,
that it must instead provide a schema to which we can apply whatever
moral questions we face. In a piece directed against Nussbaum’s hope
40 new literary history

for a (literary) philosophy of feeling, he justifies the need for Kantian,

universal rules: “A Kantian ethic seeks a neutral position outside of our
affective concerns and sentimental attachments—it aims at occupying an
Archimedean point from which a moral judgement, sanitized by reason,
can be made” (WL 130). The commitment to abstract reason thus pro-
tects philosophy from partiality because rules that can be universalized
“overlook gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, tribe, material and social
status, regarding these features as morally irrelevant” (WL 131). We can-
not completely do away with imperatives and universals. Yet, pace Voice,
the conception of these universals can be more devotedly committed to
and informed by human experience; this is what Nussbaum and others
argue for. The relationship may be of interpretation, one not only from
philosophy to the more capacious medium of literature but also between
philosophy and the messiness of reality as they coalesce in testimony.
An example of what this bifocal view can look like, I believe, is Levi’s
formulation of the gray zone.
“La zona grigia” is the now-paradigmatic concept coined by Levi to
describe the moral ambiguities and impasses in our judgment surround-
ing those compromised by the Nazi regime: those such as the Kapos
(prisoners in positions of authority over other prisoners) and Sonderkom-
mandos (those in charge of the cremation of bodies in the death camps).
It counteracts our tendency to simplify events into a binary narrative of
good and evil, victims and perpetrators, conceptualizing the oft-ignored
space in between, a “gray zone” of insurmountable moral complexity:
“Many signs indicate that the time has come to explore the space that
separates the victims from the persecutors (and not only in the Nazi
Lagers), and to do so with a lighter touch and a less turbid spirit than
has been the case, for example, in certain films. It would be schematic
and rhetorical to claim that this space is empty: it never is. It is populated
by figures who are contemptible or pathetic (or sometimes both), and
whom it is indispensable to know if we wish to understand the human
species” (DS 2433).67
I would like to take the concept away from the specific context of
the camps and see how it fulfils some of what is deemed missing in the
above debates. The gray zone is a nuanced schema, conceptualized through
the moral demands of a complex human situation, yet not limited to
this historic reality. Levi clearly wanted it to unsettle our more general
“Manichean tendency,” to dismantle the divides between victim and
perpetrator, good and evil (DS 2433). In this sense it can function as a
“view from nowhere,” though of course it comes from somewhere (WL
130). It has elements of the Kantian “What ought I to do?” (recognize
that we must suspend judgment) but cannot be accused of detachment.
 moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 41

The personal and general coexist: Levi was a first-hand witness of the Ho-
locaust’s challenge to our moral judgment, and he wrote The Drowned and
the Saved after a lifetime of reflection and engagement with this subject
(Murdoch’s “looking again”). This work therefore comprises encounters
and occurrences that have been met with long, considered attention.
Murdoch’s “attention” is a domain of subtleties and struggles; the gray
zone, too, is such a space. Transposing the concept from its immediate
context to Levi’s worldview and ethics, Gordon describes the gray zone
as “a messy mix . . . a hybrid compound where ambiguity and uncertainty
reign” (OV 115). Levi’s refusal to tidy up this reality is what makes him
a “subtle ethicist”: “A sense of measure, of accepting the grey zone that
is reality and fleeing extremes of action or reaction, contains within it
the prime moral responsibilities of individual and personal action. To
accept this messy reality and its responsibilities is to be what Levi calls both
rational and “reasonable” (OV 115, 118, emphasis mine).
Although they would not describe this stance as “rational” or “reason-
able,” this is exactly what is at play in Nussbaum’s “bewilderment” and
Murdoch’s “attention”; there is a sense of “staying with” a given reality.68
The gray zone is occupied by what Murdoch called “secondary moral
words” (“populated by figures who are contemptible or pathetic”) that
could be said to be linguistic manifestations of this “staying with.” Levi’s
account of Chaim Rumkowski, the puppet-ruler of the Jewish ghetto of
Łódź, is sprinkled with adjectives and recast labels: “an energetic, rough
and authoritarian character,” “a fool with an air of respectability,” “the
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perfect dupe,” “complex,” “a petty tyrant,” “a corrupt despot” (DS 2450-

52). This is more than pure stylistic variation; it is a way of expressing
the moral complexity of this figure. The changes in description mirror
the fluctuations in our judgment when it comes to such cases: “Since
man, as Thomas Mann says, is a confused creature. And he becomes
even more confused, we might add, the more subject he is to tensions.
Then he escapes our judgment, just as the needle of a compass goes
wild at the magnetic pole” (DS 2452).
Levi’s gray zone is also formulated with apophantic and nonapophantic
speech. It is propositional (apophantic) in that it contains a “there is”;
“there exists (theoretically, conceptually, ethically) such a place.” And
yet it is distinctly nonapophantic for its rhetorical, poetic elements:
“gray” as a metaphorical blurring of black and white, understood to be
the spectrum of moral complexities between good and evil, guilty and
innocent. This kind of language, with its implicit “aesthetic analogy,”
is exactly what Murdoch sees as the natural language of ethics.69 The
message contains the apophantic and nonapophantic in a morally in-
structive dissonance. “Texture of being” is reflected in a bifocal texture
42 new literary history

of writing. It is a philosophical rendering of a moral impasse, filling

what Murdoch would think of as a void in our ethical vocabulary: “We
need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our
being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral
progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of at-
tention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention” (AD 293).70
Michael Eskin has proposed that literature can be seen as a transla-
tion of ethics, as “philosophy’s haunting twin—its critic.”71 Given the
marked ethical charge of testimony and its bifocal view, we may see it as
a real embodiment of this translation of ethics—not from a philosophi-
cal treatise but from history. It seems strange, then, that testimony as a
genre is overlooked in the ethics/literature debate.
Finally, having explored the concept of bifocality both as a metaphor
in itself and through specific examples in Levi, I believe it is helpful to
list some of its characteristics. Bifocal writing shares some or all of the
following qualities: It is i) nonfiction (an essential qualifier), ii) ethical
(tied to moral demands), iii) defined by responsibility (as opposed to
the freedom of fiction), iv) testimonial (personal experience informs
the writing), v) hybrid (combining literature, philosophy, reportage,
history), vi) inductive (proceeds from a discussion of a specific reality to
a general reflection), and vii), through all this, formulates a new ethical
concept or vision.

Coda

In 1992, an article appeared in Philosophy that gave an account of a

correspondence between Kant and a woman called Maria von Herbert.72
In this influential essay, Rae Langton used their exchange to show how
von Herbert’s letters posed an implicit challenge to Kant’s philosophy.
Herbert wrote to Kant of a breach in her deep and loving friendship
with a man. As Langton shows, this conflict is inextricable from Her-
bert’s status as a woman and second-class citizen. After an initial letter
of upright counsel, Kant effectively abandons her, even passing on her
letters, accompanied by his own disparaging remarks, to another female
acquaintance. Von Herbert later commits suicide.
Langton’s article shows how the founder of moral philosophy as we
know it failed to respond to a messy reality. By extension, I read this
episode as a metaphor for the moral philosophy and literature debate.
It is also bifocal. In recuperating these letters (the testimony) and
confronting them with philosophical dogma, Langton responds to a
(posthumous) moral demand and from this develops thought on the
ethics of friendship and of suicide.
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 43

In concluding on this note, I hope to open up the concept of bifocality,

taking it beyond the works of intrinsic testimonial nature that initially
led me to it. As in the examples I have shown, it can be brought to any
writing that responds to the moral demands of reality, and that, through
looking again, becomes both literature and philosophy.

University of Cambridge

NOTES

1 See “Literature and/as Moral Philosophy,” special issue, NLH 15, no. 1 (1983).
2 Throughout this piece, I use the terms “ethics” and “moral philosophy,” as well as their
adjectival cognates, interchangeably, following most current practice, and for the purposes
of stylistic variation. It should be clear from the context whether “ethical”/“moral” refers
to philosophical argument or holds a more general meaning. However, there is work in
which the ethics/morality distinction is strictly maintained, even becoming an analogy for
the literature/moral philosophy debate itself (see Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature,
Ethics: Relating to the Other,” and David Haney, “Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer,
Levinas, and Romanticism: Problems of Phronesis and Techne,” in “Ethics and Literary
Study,” ed. Lawrence Buell, special issue, PMLA 114, no. 1 [January 1999]: 20-31, 32-45).
By “philosophy,” I am principally referring to analytic philosophy; this is consistent with
the confines of the debate.
3 D. D. Raphael, “Can Literature Be Moral Philosophy?” NLH 15, no. 1 (1983): 1
(hereafter cited as CL).
4 Murray Krieger, “In the Wake of Morality: The Thematic Underside of Recent Theory,”
NLH 15, no. 1 (1983): 135.
5 David Sidorsky, “Modernism and the Emancipation of Literature from Morality:
Teleology and Vocation in Joyce, Ford, and Proust,” NLH 15, no. 1 (1983): 137-53.
6 Martha Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral
Philosophy,” NLH 15, no. 1 (1983): 25-50.
7 Nussbaum, “Reply to Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner, and Hilary Putnam,” NLH
15, no. 1 (1983): 208.
8 Nussbaum, “Ralph Cohen and the Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature,”
NLH 40, no. 4 (2009): 758.
9 Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals,” 44.
10 Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” NLH 15,
no. 1 (1983): 155-69 (hereafter cited as HRS).
11 P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, (London: Harmondsworth, 1954): 319, in Diamond, HRS
155.
12 Raphael, “Philosophy and Rationality: A Response to Cora Diamond,” NLH 15, no. 1
(1983): 172.
13 Hilary Putnam, “Taking Rules Seriously: A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” NLH 15,
no. 1 (1983): 193-200.
14 Putnam, “Taking Rules Seriously,” 196.
15 Putnam, “Taking Rules Seriously,” 193-94.
16 Nussbaum, “Reply to Richard Wollheim,” 204.
17 “Ethics and Literary Study,” PMLA 114, no. 1 (January 1999).
18 Jane Adamson, “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus moral philosophy,” in Rene-
gotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Adamson, Richard Freadman, and
David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 89.
44 new literary history

19 Similarly, those that cast doubt on literature’s ethical value are more often literary
scholars. This irony has been noted by Adamson (“Against Tidiness,” 84) and David Parker,
“Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s,” in Renegotiating, 14.
20 See Paul Voice, “Why Literature Cannot be Moral Philosophy,” Theoria: A Journal of
Social and Political Theory, no. 83/84 (October 1994): 123-34 (hereafter cited as WL).
21 See Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Rout-
ledge, 2001). See also Diamond, “Having a Rough Story.”
22 See Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral
Imagination,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990; Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1992), 157.
23 See Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and
Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 287-97 (hereafter cited as
AD). Nussbaum describes philosophy as being too “watertight”; see Love’s Knowledge, 141.
24 See Nussbaum, “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in
Love’s Knowledge, 26-27. See WL 126.
25 See Richard Eldridge, “Introduction: Philosophy and Literature as Forms of Atten-
tion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Eldridge (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2013), 5.
26 See Michael Eskin, “On Literature and Ethics,” Poetics Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 573-94.
27 Parker alludes to this male/female binary in the context of moral philosophy and
literature; see Renegotiating, 5.
28 See Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2001), esp. 44.
29 Andreas Vrahimis, “The “Analytic”/“Continental” Divide and the Question of Phi-
losophy’s Relation to Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 43, no. 1 (2019): 253-69.
30 Critchley, Continental Philosophy, 50-58.
31 Critchley, citing John Stuart Mill, in Continental Philosophy, 51. Mill’s essays first ap-
peared in the London and Westminster Review in 1832 and 1840.
32 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2007).
33 Adamson, “Against Tidiness,” 89.
34 See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 37: “to show the ethical crudeness of moralities based
exclusively on general rules, and to demand for ethics a much finer responsiveness to the
concrete.”
35 See Eskin, “Introduction: The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today
25, no. 4 (2004): 557-72. Eskin questions whether the notion of a “turn” is suitable in
describing what he believes is more of a renewal in critical preoccupation with the question
of ethics and literature, pointing out the long-standing association of the two.
36 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), in The Complete Works of Primo Levi,
ed. Ann Goldstein, trans. Michael F. Moore (London: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
2015), vol. 3 (hereafter cited as DS).
37 Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge,
2001), 16-17 (references to this volume are hereafter cited as S).
38 “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” Critical
Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 224. See Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans.
Arthur Wills, Vol. I (New York: Routledge, 1956), 59.
39 For a discussion of Murdoch’s and other women’s experiences in academic philoso-
phy, see Marije Altorf, “After Cursing the Library: Iris Murdoch and the (In)visibility of
Women in Philosophy,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 384-402.
40 Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa
Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2022);
moral philosophy and literature debate at 40 45

and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals (London: Chatto
& Windus, 2022). That these women’s philosophy can be seen as forming a coherent
“school,” as in some ways suggested by the books, has been contested.
41 Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 2021).
42 Nussbaum, “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” in Love’s Knowledge, 157.
43 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (1964;
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976).
44 Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones: A Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009).
45 Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate
Soper (1998 [in Italian]; London: Verso, 2002).
46 For a recent philosophical essay on empathy, see Shaan Sachdev, “Hysterical Empathy,”
in The Point no. 26 (Winter 2022): 97-111.
47 Denis Diderot, “Letter on the blind, for the use of those who can see,” in Oeuvres, ed.
A. Billy (Paris, 1951), 820. Cited in Ginzburg, “To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral
Implications of Distance,” in Wooden Eyes, 162.
48 Ginzburg, “Distance and Perspective: Two Metaphors,” in Wooden Eyes, 156.
49 Sophie Grace Chappell, Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2022), esp. chapter 2, “If not Moral Theory, then What?”
50 See Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).
51 Hale, drawing on Henry James’s work, calls this the novel’s “capacity for alterity” (
The Novel and the New Ethics [Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2020], 33).
52 James, preface to The Portrait of a Lady, first published 1881 (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1998), 8.
53 See Critchley, Continental Philosophy, 51.
54 Nussbaum takes this formula from James; see James, preface to The Princess Casam-
assima (1886; London: Bodley Head, 1972). See Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly
Responsible,’” in Love’s Knowledge.
55 One exception to this is Mary Beth Tierney-Tello’s article, “Testimony, Ethics and the
Aesthetic in Diamela Eltit,” PMLA 114, no. 1 (1999): 78-96.
56 Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” in Wiesel et al., Dimensions of
the Holocaust. Lectures at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1977), cited in Robert S. C. Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 1.
57 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1
(1991): 11.
58 Gordon, Ordinary Virtues, 4-12 (hereafter cited as OV).
59 Levi, If This is a Man (first published 1947), trans. Stuart Woolf (poem trans. Jonathan
Galassi), in The Complete Works, vol. 1, 7.
60 Plato attributes the question to Socrates in his Republic. For a discussion of these
words as a starting point for ethical enquiry, see Bernard Williams, “Socrates’ Question,”
in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985; London: Routledge, 2011), 1-24. With thanks
to Sophie Grace Chappell for pointing out that this is Socrates’s (not Aristotle’s) phrase.
61 Levi, If This, 6.
62 This phrase comes from a passage that first appears first in The Truce and subsequently
DS. Levi is describing the reaction of the Russian soldiers who have liberated Auschwitz.
What they see there generates a complex sense of shame—shame because this horror has
been “irrevocably introduced.” See Levi, The Truce, trans. Goldstein, in The Complete Works,
vol. 1, 216.
63 See Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy,” in Existentialists, 6.
46 new literary history

64 On survivors and shame, see Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).
65 George Steiner, foreword in Murdoch, Existentialists, xii.
66 Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” S 56.
67 I have amended Moore’s translation in places: “tormentors” (persecutori) to perse-
cutors,” “less troubled spirit” (spirito meno torbido) to “less turbid spirit,” “movies” to
“films.”
68 For Nussbaum, our feeling of “bewilderment in the face of the present moment” is
precisely what moral philosophy overlooks. See “Flawed Crystals,” 43.
69 See Murdoch: “Here, as so often, an aesthetic analogy is helpful for morals” (S 31).
70 This is not to suggest that “moral progress” can be derived from the events of the
Holocaust but that Levi’s formulation allows for deeper understanding in delineating this
ethical paralysis.
71 Eskin, “On Literature,” 588.
72 Langton, “Duty and Desolation.”