Danto endorses what he describes as“Hegel’s wonderful thought [that] the
work exists for the spectator and not on its own account: it exists, as he says,
only for the individual apprehending it, so that the apprehension completes
the work and gives it final substance.”^46 This is more than a little obscure.^47
In order to unpack this obscurity, Danto suggests that what Hegel has in
mind is that
each work is about the“I”that reads the text, identifying himself...with the
actual subject of the text in such a way that each work becomes a metaphor
for each reader: perhaps the same metaphor for each...[Though] it is literally
false that I am Achilles, or Leopold Bloom, or Anna Karenin, or Oedipus or
King Lear or Hyacinth Robinson or Strether or Lady Glencora; or a man
hounded by an abstract bureaucracy because of an unspecified or suspected
accusation, or the sexual slave O, [I become each of these beings
metaphorically in the act of reading]. The work finds its subject only when
read.^48The work is, in the end, about me and every other reader, not descriptively,
but metaphorically.
Ted Cohen claims similarly that in reading works of imaginative narrative
literature we are taking up what he calls“metaphors of personal identifica-
tion”and so seeing ourselves, more or less, as Lily Bart (in Edith Wharton’s
House of Mirth), Jake Gittes (in Polanski’sChinatown), and Marlow (in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness), just as David recognizes himself as the slayer of the poor
man’s one ewe lamb in the story told by the prophet Nathan.^49 “How real is
this capacity [thus to identify ourselves with others]? How secure?”Cohen
wonders.^50 Its mechanics and limits are unclear in both art and life. Yet we
(^46) Danto,“Philosophy as/and/of Literature,”p. 170, citing, he says, Hegel,Aesthetik,inWerke,
vol. XV, p. 28.
(^47) For further explication of Hegel on imaginative apprehension or what he calls“die
poetische Auffassung der Welt”–the poetic grasping of the world–see Eldridge,“What
Writers Do: The Value of Literary Imagination,”Journal of Literary Theory3, 1 (2009), pp. 1–
18, esp. pp. 4–8, and Eldridge,“The Question of Truth in Literature: Die Poetische
Auffassung der Welt,” inThe Ethical Content of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg,
forthcoming.
(^48) Danto,“Philosophy as/and/of Literature,”p. 170.
(^49) See Cohen,“Identifying with Metaphor: Metaphors of Personal Identification,”Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism57, 4 (fall 1999), pp. 399–409.
(^50) Ibid., p. 405A.
Art and emotion 215