Wisdom = Knowledge + Acknowledgement
Defending John Gibson's account of art's cognitive value qua art.
Before discussing how Othello intends to make us “acknowledge” truths about jealousy, we must first define John Gibson’s use of the word. Gibson, operating on the distinction originally posed by Stanley Cavell, defines acknowledgement by describing how this act of cognition differs from one that might otherwise be confused as its synonym: knowledge. For Gibson, to know something is merely to recognize a fact of reality. To acknowledge a fact of reality is to respond in the way that is morally and culturally entailed by the knowledge of this fact.
Gibson reifies his differentiation of acknowledgement and knowledge with the twin examples of the Simpleton and the Sadist. The Simpleton and the Sadist are the same insofar as they both recognize the fact of concern, i.e., they both possess knowledge. The Simpleton, however, does nothing with this fact; to the Simpleton, nothing is implied, logically speaking, from this fact. In truth-functional logic, some fact A, implies nothing other than itself: A ⊃ A. This is trivial. In short, for the Simpleton, to know A is to acknowledge nothing.
The Sadist, on the other hand, does not acknowledge nothing; he acknowledges an inappropriate implication of the fact A. The in-class example is illustrative: Say A is the observation (the knowledge) that someone is badly wounded. Normal people acknowledge this fact by responding with concern, which we will denote with the letter B. The Sadist, however, responds with laughter, which we will consider to be the negative of B: ¬B. (Laughter is not actually the truth-functional negation of concern, but I am using semantic logic loosely here and, for the case at hand, I do not think I’ve tortured the logic too much.)
In summary, the normal person acknowledges the knowledge that a person is injured (A) by reacting, affectively, with concern (B): A ⊃ B. For the Simpleton, this knowledge (A) obtains nothing: A ⊃ A. For the Sadist, this knowledge obtains the opposite response of the normal person: A ⊃ ¬B. By Gibson’s lights, “the moral failures here suggest certain cognitive failures.”[1] Namely, the cognitive failure of insufficient understanding; sufficient understanding entailing a particular affective response and course of action.
Now that we understand what Gibson means by “acknowledge,” we can assess how Othello serves the cognitive function of forcing us to acknowledge certain truths about jealousy. Gibson denies the truth-seeking humanist’s claim that Othello provides us knowledge about what jealous is that we had heretofore lacked: “jealousy thrives on the weakness of trust” And “is a rage that can destroy what one holds most dear.” Insofar as these descriptions of the essence of jealousy are true (and I venture to say both are), Othello does not provide us the requisite propositional knowledge to justify this claim. In short, Gibson denies that “Othello advances claims about what jealousy is.”[2]
Gibson rejects the truth-seeking humanists’ attempt to save the cognitive value of art on the grounds that it can provide knowledge. Gibson regards the truth-seeking humanists’ attempts to severe the “stances, themes, and perspectives we find a work from their literary context” and treating “them as free-floating propositions”[3] as decidedly unliterary and unnecessary to save the cognitive value of art. Art is not cognitively trivial simply because it articulates that which we already know, because “’knowing’ does not exhaust the range of possible cognitive experience.”[4]
Art—in the case of Othello, literature/theater—has cognitive value insofar as it is good art, i.e., presents us with a “narrative a story of human activity” (emphasis added). I emphasize “activity” because this is precisely how acknowledgement differs from knowledge; the former entails action, the latter does not. In Othello, we learn nothing new about jealousy qua jealousy; instead, we learn that jealousy is a vice that perplexes in the extreme those whom “’loved not wisely, but too well,’” i.e., Othello himself. Othello is a cognitively enriching tragedy because it teaches the reader the lamentable actions truth-functionally entailed by the jealousy, that green-eyed monster, in a most dramatic, extreme, and therefore resonant fashion.
For Othello, jealousy implies the murder of she whom he loves above all else. For the rest of us, jealousy implies irrational, unacceptable behavior towards she whom we loved the most. Ultimately, this results in the termination of the relationship and, consequently, the non-existence of the belovéd in our universe of (romantic) discourse. And, functionally speaking, is this not tantamount to the metaphorical murder of she whom we loved most?
If this tragic lesson is not cognitively enriching, I don’t know what is. Readers are profited by the understanding proffered uniquely by art—acknowledgment—as much as they are by the understanding inculcated by works of philosophy: knowledge. Taken together, the two provide the ultimate good: wisdom.
[1] John Gibson, Beyond Truth and Triviality, 107.
[2] Ibid, 91.
[3] Ibid, 96.
[4] Ibid, 112.