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PARTISAN REVIEW
prose, is to make the context bring out one of its Implications to show
that its stock Emotion is deserved here."
The emotion in a word, Empson shows, is extremely public,
especially in imaginative literature, which in this sense is really less
"emotive" than other forms of discourse. The assumption is that the
emotion would be felt under the circumstances or is appropriate to
them, rather than that the writer feels it. In this respect it has a logical
or veristic character. "The solution of the 'Problem of Belief,'''
Empson says, "as to how we can enjoy the literary expression of beliefs
which we don't hold, is not that we separate them from their con–
sequences but that we imagine some other person who holds them, an
author or a character, and thus get a kind of experience of what their
consequences (for a given sort of person) really are."
Moral feelings are even more public than other kinds.
"It
is a
regular mark of moral feelings that they claim not to be private ones
-if nobody knows what is right except me they still ought to know."
Feeling is itself one test of value theories. "What you do is to see
whether your feelings can be made to accept the valuations given by
the theory." Empson thinks that positivist or behaviorist tests of truth
and the prudential most-impulses-satisfying value calculus of
I.
A.
Richards are quite unworkable. "It seems simpler, even in theory, to
say that both a moral judgement and a historical belief are in them–
selves something different from the way they are tested.... The more
you let my moral feelings form a coherent logical structure, the closer
you draw the parallel to the structure of my feelings about historical
fact. By the time you have put in the necessary reservations, it seems
to me, the 'emotive' account of ethical judgements is on exactly the
same footing as the logical-positivist or behaviourist account of beliefs
about the external world."
By distinguishing the different kinds of logical relations between
senses of a complex word, Empson shows that any given use of that
word may be more implicatively logical, less "emotive" than we had
supposed. He finds a similar range of logical possibilities when he
analyzes the structure of metaphors and of "A-is-B" propositions like
"Might is Right" or "God is Love." In an extensive discussion of the
Truth-Beauty equation of the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," he tries to
restore to Keats's poem some of the "emotive" meaning which Cleanth
Brooks and others had taken away. As against the mystic simplifica-!
tions of Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl, he applies the same structural anal–
ysis to the thinking or pre-thinking of primitive men when they
"identify"-in totemism, for instance-entities for which in ordinary
conversation they have separate names and which they are quite cap–
able of thinking of as separate.
