In the 1999 film The Ninth Gate, there is a scene in which the character named Boris Balkan delivers a lecture with the title ‘Demons in Medieval Literature’. The movie does not present any significant lecture content, but it is certainly a plausible title that one can imagine delivered by a scholar of literature or classics or philosophy in numerous academic settings. Further, I think that the role of demons as characters in medieval literature sounds like an interesting topic. But the title moved me to consider a question: what could a talk on demons in medieval literature actually tell us?
There is one answer we can rule out, I believe, right from the start. The talk can tell us nothing at all about demons for the simple reason that there are, so far as we know, none. I will come back to this point shortly, for there are two ways this could be wrong: (1) demons in fact exist, contrary to what we may believe; and (2) non-existent entities can be the subject of truths (they can be the values of variables that render propositional functions true). But for now let us assume that demons are non-existent and, accordingly, there is nothing to learn about them.
This leave the possibilities that the lecture could teach us something about either medieval literature, by conveying facts about a type of character that appears therein, or else something about medieval writers, by passing inferentially from information about the characters created by the writers to conclusions about them.
Starting with the latter, I will raise the following objection: it is not possible to learn anything about writers from what they write without a largely true psychological theory of (1) writers in general; (2) medieval writers; (3) medieval writers of demon stories; or (4) the individual writers under consideration. In short, one must have a true psychological theory of the individuals involved, which would require a theory of psychology of sufficient generality that it covers the particular writers in question. The reason for this is that the reasons people do things are complex, varied, and often opaque (to both themselves and others). Accordingly, if we are going to draw any conclusions about a writer from what they write – really, any artist from what they create – then we need a theory that connects created work to the mind and character of the creator.
So, hoping to enlighten our understanding of past writers on the basis of what they write depends on some properly researched and correct cognitive science. Now, the character in the movie is not a scientist but a humanist, so the question is whether training in a humanities discipline could equip one to form justified inferences from creation to the mind or character of the creator. I don’t see any good reason to suppose that it could. We wouldn’t suppose that humanities training equips one to be a medical doctor or chemist or police officer, so why does it allow one to function as a psychologist or other cognitive scientist?
Returning to the former suggestion, let us consider whether a humanist can tell us something about literature by analyzing the characters that lie within it. This depends on what we think we can learn about a work by analyzing its characters, which will depend in part on what the analysis is and what it presupposes about the nature of literature. Suppose, for example, that we think that a sudden in increase in stories about demons can be traced to a famous outbreak of plague, which caused people to search for some kind of understanding of the terror they were experiencing at the time. This relates features internal to stories of a time to events external to those stories, in particular the emotions of the writers of the day, but once again we are drawing a conclusion about people’s minds on the basis of their writings, which would require a psychological theory, something humanists do not study as anything more than interested amateurs.
Perhaps, then, humanistic analysis can remain entirely internal to the world of the literature studied; humanists simply examine stories on their own terms, analyzing the nature of the fictions created. The problem with this view is that there would seem to be nothing interesting to say about fictional creations themselves: they don’t exist, so presumably there is nothing to say about them except what the author intended to convey to us by creating them, which requires that we know something about the author, or the times in which s/he lived, which requires that we move outside the internal world of the fictional creation, to either a psychological theory about the author or a psycho-sociological theory about the relation between people and stories at the time the author wrote. So the question remains, what does the humanist bring to this endeavour without scientific training?
Let me return now to the point I mentioned at the start. Suppose, first, that there is something true to say about demons because they in fact exist. If that is the case, then once again it is not people with training in humanistic disciplines but, rather, something like a demon biologist to whom we would want to turn for information about the creatures; if they are sufficiently sophisticated, we may need demon psychologists, sociologists, economists, etc. as well. Assuming there are beings with the properties of demons, existing either in space-time or some other realm, then they would need to be observed and studied before we could draw any conclusions specifically about them, so empirical sutdy of some sort is required.
The other suggestion that though demons do not exist, there can nevertheless be true propositions about them. This would require a move away from a classic objectual interpretation of the semantics of demon claims toward the less common substitutional interpretation. Roughly, the former insists that ‘there are demons’ is true if and only if there is some object or entity that can serve as the value of the variable in an existentially quantified proposition, such as (Ex)x is a demon ((Ex)Dx). If there are no demons, then there are no values for x, and the proposition is false. The same applies for any other proposition about demons, such as demons are tall. So, if there are truths about demons themselves, despite their non-existence, then we must interpret ‘there are demons’ as expressing a proposition that is made true so long as there is a term that, when substituted for a in ‘a is a demon’ yields a truth. As many philosophers have pointed out, this seems to remain quite obscure: how can a term, a linguistic entity, a, make it true that a is a demon if there are no demons? I think this question hist the mark, but the idea is, roughly, that fictional realms have sufficient richness to make it true that, say, unicorns have horns but not demons, even though both are non-existent, merely fictional entities. How this could be is unclear, but proposals are out there: e.g. non-existent entities subsist even if they don’t exist – not sure what to make of that, but even assuming subsistence is something above and beyond mere make-believe, how do we learn about subsistent entities? Perhaps intellectual intuition – some kind of intellectual contact with the abstract realm – would do the trick, but assuming, again, that this isn’t a form of make-believe, this seems relevantly like perception to stand in need of some kind of scientific investigation; at any rate, it is hard to know what a training just in humanities could reveal here.
So, what kind of analysis could one do on texts under the assumption that fictional worlds somehow manage to support true claims about demons, unicorns, centaurs, or what have you? Since, by hypothesis, there are no such creatures, the analysis will not involve empirical investigation other than a psychological or sociological investigation into the states of the creators of fictional worlds, which brings us back to the need for trained scientists. So, the analysis must be a priori, perhaps a conceptual investigation of the relationship between various parts of the fictional worlds. The question is what ‘conceptual analysis’ is in this case. One can easily imagine investigating a work of fiction for logical relations between propositions: finding inconsistencies, for example, or looking for formal entailments of key propositions in the literature. The latter would involve something like translating the language of the literature into first order predicate calculus and then using well defined derivation rules to see what is entailed by the logical form of the relevant sentences. This may be of some interest, though it still depends on bringing a discipline external to the fictional world – mathematical logic – to bear on the analysis of the world of fiction, and most humanists do not receive such training and, indeed, many philosophers do not either. Further, formal logic is, arguably, a mathematical discipline, so it is not clear that this is a way into texts that is open to specifically humanistic training.
Of course there are certain to be all kinds of theories that some will wish to bring to the analysis of literature. Economic, psychological, sociological, mathematical, etc. ones will fall under the purview of scientists, but there are others that purport to be non-scientific but still informative: Marxist, postmodernist, deconstructionist, etc. One could imagine an argument to the effect that such theoretical stances allow for an analysis that is both internal to the texts but also informative. I am not sure how this is supposed to work. Take the case of Marx, for example; he took himself to be uncovering laws that governed human history, in part via a detailed examination of factory records. If Marxist analysis of history and economics turns out to be false, it can hardly tell us anything interesting about the internal world of a text: false laws of material reality can have little bearing on a fictional world that subsists independently of its creator. Even if they turn out to be true, it is hard to see their relevance: the laws of physics may be true, but what can they tell us about a fictional world of unicorns or demons?
So the question is what a theory that is not a purely logical one – so, one that can be learned in a typical humanities department – can tell us about the internal relations of the parts of pieces of literature without at some point relating the parts of the literary work to alleged facts about human psychology, society, economics, biology, etc. What can something like deconstruction or postmodernism tell us about a piece of text that isn’t either a logical analysis or a scientific one? This is, I should reiterate, all premised on the already flimsy assumption that realms of non-existent beings are sufficiently robust to allow for true propositions in the first place, which is by no means obvious.
This is starting to sound a bit like the classic positivist argument against metaphysics, but there is a difference, perhaps slight. I am raising no objection to the Russellian-Quinean-Davidsonian-Putnamian program of tying metaphysics to science. Whether through indispensability arguments, ontological commitments, or what have you, there is plenty of room on my view for metaphysics in philosophy. It is just that metaphysics is grounded in, broadly speaking, two realms: mathematics/logic and science; it is, in fact, part of those realms, as Quine believed. Russell argued, famously, that a logical analysis of the logical form of denoting phrases shows us that they are, in fact, not referential terms but propositional functions: existentially quantified formulas. This allowed him to eliminate the need for reference to subsistent but non-existent entities, but it is possible for the analysis to go the other way: to demonstrate the need to posit a kind of entity that we did not previously realize we needed; e.g. sets or universals. So, again, this is not a general argument against metaphysics.
The worry is that when one constructs a theory to take care of interpreting texts but that is neither scientific nor mathematical/logical in nature, i.e. a theory that is purely internal to the text, then one is more likely to be imposing or projecting than revealing or detecting. That is, one could be smuggling into the theory at the ground floor what are just one’s a priori presuppositions about human nature, society, economics, physics, medicine, what have you, and then contorting the interpretation of the text to fit the theory. Since texts fail to push back against us in the way that chemicals or living human beings do, it is far easier to hold onto one’s literary theory in the face of any possible textual evidence than it is to hold onto a chemical or psychological theory in the face of any possible chemical or behavioural evidence. And, again, all of this is on the presupposition that a substitutional interpretation of propositions about non-existent entities works.
So, does the worry about demons in medieval literature generalize? Are the humanities either science in disguise or speculative fiction?
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