Literature, Logic and the Liberating Word: the Elucidation of Confusion in Henry James

The literary style of henry James has attracted the attention of a number of leading analytic philosophers who are drawn to make claims for the philosophical signiicance of works of literature. Many of these philosophical commentators share a common approach: namely, they locate the philosophical center of gravity of James’s style in a philosophical view that his way of writing is understood to embody or corroborate. The aim of this essay is to argue that such an approach fails to capture what is philosophically most signiicant about how James writes. By contrast, the essay works out a comparison between James’s literary forms of expression and the logically perspicuous modes of representing thought developed by gottlob frege. it highlights one use to which frege sought to put his Begriffsschrift: namely, as a tool for the task of clarifying forms of philosophical confusion. This comparison helps to illuminate what is philosophically most distinctive and powerful about the modes of perspicuously representing human life that James develops. These literary forms inherit a time-honored aspiration of philosophical writing: seeking to represent a reader’s life to the reader herself in such a way as to allow her to recognize her own confusions in living. The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in the face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has colour and form and character.