The Proceedings ofthe International Symposium

Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy

Edited by
Akiko Nakata

The Nabokov Society of Japan

The Proceedings of the International Symposium

Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy
May 15―June 20, 2021

Edited by Akiko Nakata
The Nabokov Society of Japan
2022

Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy
The Proceedings of the International Symposium
Edited by
Akiko Nakata
March 2022

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K00410.
Copyright©2022 by The Nabokov Society of JapanTokyo, Japan
Composed by KWIX Co., Ltd.
Nagoya, Japan

Forewordi

Foreword
Hard, but Rewarding to Be a Nabokovian
Mitsuyoshi NumanoThis volume of proceedings is the complete record of the “Cyber Conference” that took place in
May 2021. In the midst of the seemingly endless new coronavirus pandemic, it is not unusual forvarious academic conferences to be held online, but most of them use a real-time video conferencing
tool such as Zoom, Meet, Teams, or Webex. This conference, on the other hand, was held on a special
website of the Nabokov Society of Japan, where the texts of the comments and all the discussions
were posted after the files of the papers were emailed to the participants.
Compared to the real-time online method, it seems to be a snaillike way of doing things, but theresults were unexpectedly remarkable: a very lively exchange of ideas and discussions developed overthe course of about a month on our web pages. According to the estimate by Professor Akiko Nakata,the main organizer and moderator of the conference, the total of all the papers, comments, questions
and answers posted on the web was equivalent to eleven hours of oral communication. This shows
just how lively the conference was.
Unfortunately, I was not able to take part in this lively discussion and could only watch from theside, but after the conference Professor Akiko Nakata asked me to write a foreword to the proceedings,
as I happen to be the president of the Nabokov Society of Japan. I was delighted to accept her offer,
but it turned out to be both an honor and a great challenge. Although I have enjoyed reading
Nabokov’s literary works in Russian and English over the years, I am not at all familiar withentomology or analytic philosophy（I knew nothing about the philosopher G. E. Moore before thisconference, for that matter）, and I found it difficult to keep up with the discussions that took place at
the conference. However, it was also a very rewarding intellectual pursuit to read all the texts. I
would like to thank Professor Akiko Nakata for providing me with this unique opportunity.
The keynote of the conference was set by papers by Brian Boyd, Zoran Kuzmanovich and Akiko
Nakata, to which Tora Koyama, an expert in analytic philosophy, provided detailed comments.
Professor Boyd, who is, needless to say, one of the foremost authorities on Nabokov in the world
today, has always been a special mentor to us at the Nabokov Society of Japan. He has given much of
his time and expertise to us over the years and has shared his expertise with us generously. This time
he has contributed to the conference a brief, but comprehensive comparison of the two intellectual
giants of the 20th century, namely Vladimir Nabokov and Karl Popper. They were contemporaries
who spent a great deal of time parallelly, but they had very little personal contact. Nabokov, first andforemost an aesthetic artist and subjective idealist, and Popper, a philosopher of science who valued
objectivity, were like water and oil.
Professor Boyd, however, devoted his energies to Popper as well as to Nabokov and succeeded inpresenting the brilliant intellectual “vitae parallela” that paired Nabokov and Popper, who are not easy

ii

Mitsuyoshi Numano

to grasp in their entirety, even when taken individually. As a result, Professor Boyd makes a convincing
case that, despite the many differences between them, they unexpectedly have much in common witheach other in the realm of ideas. In coming to this conclusion, he touches on a number of universally
important topics, such as human freedom and the openness of the future, creativity and critical thinking,time and death; it clearly demonstrates the enormous range of his paper which seems to have condensed
so many ideas into a brief presentation. But what is more interesting to me is that the very idea of“comparing the incomparable”（a term by David Damrosch）
̶Nabokov and Popper̶raises thequestion of what the act of comparison means in the first place. As we follow Boyd’s arguments, we
can better understand the specificities of these two great minds by seeing how they illuminate eachother in spite of their fundamental differences. Isn’t that the ultimate significance of the act ofcomparison?
Professor Zoran Kuzmanovich is also an eminent Nabokov scholar and an old friend of the
Nabokov Society of Japan. We owe him much inspiration as well. His contribution for thisconference is a fresh one, dealing with a totally unexpected theme. Contrasting Nabokov’s early piece“Man and Things” with the British philosopher Gregory Currie’s essay “Empathy for objects,” heargues that both of them examine “the power of discrete objects to affect the sensibilities.” Currie is a
British scholar who began his career in Frege studies, but later became known mainly for his work on
philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Indeed, as Professor Kuzmanoivich’s uniqueapproach shows, the contrast of Currie with Nabokov provides a rich food for thought. If Professor
Boyd’s comparison of Nabokov and Popper is perhaps the first serious attempt in the history of
Nabokov studies, Professor Kuzmanoivich’s comparison of Nabokov and Currie offers an even more
unexpected perspective.
Professor Kuzmanovich’s essay is so brilliantly developed, with so many questions piled on top ofeach other that it was difficult for me, not being familiar with Currie’s philosophy, to follow, but thecomments of Professor Tora Koyama provide excellent guidance. Professor Koyama is a philosopher,
specializing in analytic philosophy, affiliated with the Research Institute for Time Studies（Yamaguchi
University）, perhaps the only institute of its kind in Japan. From the standpoint of such a professional
philosopher, he lucidly explains Professor Kuzmanovic’s series of questions as a critique of Currie’s
theory of empathy and extends the discussion to a wider scope. Kuzmanovich’s questions are thenmet with Koyama’s counterquestion: Is empathy for objects the only way to realize the “otherwise”
worlds?
This is not the place to insert personal digressions, but I can’t resist the temptation to point one out
from my own interest. It is a question about the relationship between man and things in the context ofRussian literature of the late 1920s, which apparently has something to do with the question of
empathy for objects, but which goes beyond its framework. In Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave（1928）, written at almost the same time as “Man and Things,” there is a striking phrase: “Things did
not love Franz”（вещи не любили Франца）.1 A very similar expression can be found in Yury
Olesha’s novel Envy（1927）when its protagonist Kavalerov complains: “Things don’t love me”（Меня не любят вещи）.2 We can presume that Nabokov was aware of Olesya’s Envy, but whatmatters here is not that Nabokov is making a secret quotation from Olesha. Rather, the point may bethat, in their clumsy inability to come to terms with the real world of things, Kavalerov and Franzhave much in common and perhaps it refers to a rather hostile relationship between man and thingsForewordiii

where imaginative creation of the aesthetic through empathy is forbidden.
The third paper, last but by no means least, “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in
Transparent Things” by Professor Akiko Nakata, one of the leading Nabokov scholars in Japan. Once
Professor Nakata pioneered the theme of Wittgenstein in Nabokov with her groundbreaking article“Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things” in 2000. This time, however, she takes it a step further,establishing from a variety of angles that not only Wittgenstein, but also the so called “Moore’s
Paradox”（as Wittgenstein called it）and eventually G. E. Moore himself cast a shadow over
Nabokov’s novel. This study is an exemplary combination of biographical inquiry and meticulous
textual analysis that explores the subtle references to Shakespeare’s plays in the novel and leads to thethrilling discovery that the relationship between Wittgenstein and Moore is parallel to that between
Hamlet and Horatio. It clearly shows how reading Nabokov can be both a challenging and a delightful
discipline.
In this conference, all the three papers by Boyd, Kuzmanovich, and Nakata have been accurately
reviewed and critically commented on by the aforementioned Professor Tora Koyama with his
expertise in analytic philosophy. He also brings in the historical context of philosophy and thus tries
to contextualize the discussion. Professor Shoko Miura, another leading Nabokov scholar in Japan
along with Professor Nakata, and Ryo Chonabayashi, an expert in philosophy and ethics, also joined
the discussion. Thus, the symposium on the web page becomes a kind of chorus（true, not always
harmonious）of creative debate with the participation of diverse specialists: literary scholars as well as
philosophy researchers. In the course of these discussions there sometimes occur rare and illuminating
moments. For example, when Professor Miura, in a comment on empathy, contrasts Nabokov with
Chaplin in a rather striking way, Professor Kuzmanovich takes over the unexpected pair and readily
begins to elaborate on the comparison of Limelight and Lolita.
Then, when Professor Miura asks a penetrating question about memory in Nabokov and Popper,
Professor Boyd, explaining in response to it the striking difference between the two great minds’
views of memory, comes up with the idea of writing a new book devoted to the topic “Nabokov andPopper: the two giants of 20th-century achievement.” It is thrilling to witness such a moment.
When Professor Nakata asked me to write this foreword, the first thing that came to my mind was
the phrase: “Hard to be a Nabokovian,” which is my parody of the title of a novel by the Brothers
Strugatsky “Hard to Be a God.” In order to be a Nabokov scholar, it is not enough to be a literaryscholar with a good knowledge of stylistics and poetics. You have to be at least fluent in Russian andEnglish, a good chess player and a professional lepidopterist. And in addition, you must be an expert
in analytic philosophy!?
Then I called to mind the defiant words of the Soviet semiotician Yury Lotman. In a debate withconservative ideological critics in the Soviet Union, Lotman argued that “literary study must be ascience”:
A new kind of literary scholar is a researcher who needs to combine a broad mastery of independently gatheredempirical material with the skills of deductive reasoning produced by the exact sciences. He must be a linguist（...）, be skilled in working with other modeling systems, keep abreast of psychological science, and constantly
sharpen his scientific method by reflecting on the general problems of semiotics and cybernetics.（...）He should

iv

Mitsuyoshi Numano

train himself to cooperate with mathematicians, and ideally to combine literary scholar, linguist, andmathematician in his person.
Yes, it is becoming difficult to be a literary scholar, and it will become immeasurably more difficult in the near
future. And in this, perhaps, is the most encouraging result of the new developments in the humanities.3

To borrow Lotman’s expression, it is indeed becoming more difficult to be a Nabokovian. But it isalso the hope of a new development in literary studies. What this conference has shown is that those
idyllic days are now a thing of the past when even such an erudite literary scholar as Harry Levincould say, laughing, “But he [Nabokov] doesn’t have a philosophy!”（as quoted at the beginning ofProfessor Boyd’s paper）. Thanks to this conference, now we know that Nabokov had a philosophy
and we have before us a fascinating terra incognita to explore.
Notes1Юрий Олеша, Избранное. М.: Книжный клуб 36.6, с. 18.

2Владимир Набоков, Собрание сочинений русского периода в пяти томах. Том 2. СПб.: Симпозиум, 1999, с. 278.

3Лотман, Ю. Литературоведение должно быть наукой / Ю. Лотман // Вопросы литературы. ―1967 - № 1. ―C. 100.
The translation from Russian into English is mine. The Russian original is as follows: Литературовед нового типа это исследователь, которому необходимо соединить широкое владение самостоятельно добытым эмпирическим
материалом с навыками дедуктивного мышления, вырабатываемого точными науками. Он должен быть лингвистом
（поскольку в настоящее время языкознание «вырвалось вперед» среди гуманитарных наук и именно здесь
зачастую вырабатываются методы общенаучного характера）, владеть навыком работы с другими моделирующими
системами, быть в курсе психологической науки и постоянно оттачивать свой научный метод, размышляя надобщими проблемами семиотики и кибернетики. Он должен приучать себя к сотрудничеству с математиками, а видеале - совместить в себе литературоведа, лингвиста и математика. Он должен воспитывать в себе типологическое
мышление, никогда не принимая привычной ему интерпретации за конечную истину. Да, быть литературоведом
становится трудно и в ближайшее время станет еще неизмеримо труднее. И в этом, может быть, самый
обнадеживающий результат новых веяний в гуманитарных науках.

v

Contents
Foreword

Mitsuyoshi NumanoiSymposium
Greetings

Akiko Nakata

2Papers / Comments and Discussions / Questions and Answers
Brian Boyd
Paper 4
Comments and Discussions: with Tora Koyama / Zoran Kuzmanovich / Akiko Nakata 15
Questions and Answers: with Ryo Chonabayashi / Shoko Miura 30
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Paper 38
Comments and Discussions: with Tora Koyama / Brian Boyd / Akiko Nakata 54
Questions and Answers: with Ryo Chonabayashi / Shoko Miura 83
Akiko Nakata
Paper 95
Comments and Discussions: with Tora Koyama / Brian Boyd / Zoran Kuzmanovich 104
Questions and Answers: with Ryo Chonabayashi / Shoko Miura / Brian Boyd 123
Tora Koyama
Comment and Response: with Ryo Chonabayashi 131
Acknowledgments
Contributors

133

Akiko Nakata

132

Symposium

2

Greetings

Greetings
The Nabokov Society of Japan is pleased to present an online symposium called “Vladimir Nabokov
and Analytic Philosophy” as a part of our annual NSJ Conference on May 15, 2021. Anyone
interested is welcome to join us online.
The symposium will host Brian Boyd and Zoran Kuzmanovich, with Akiko Nakata as moderator. Oursociety has invited many leading Nabokovians from overseas, including Professors Boyd andKuzmanovich, as speakers at our conferences, but thanks to the convenience of online communication,
we are able to welcome these two legendary Nabokovians to our cyber-conference free from COVID―
19.
This project is also an interdisciplinary collaboration. We invited as guest commentator, Dr. Tora
Koyama, who specializes in analytic philosophy and has ample experience in interdisciplinary
projects.
For this online symposium, you can read and refer to the speakers’ papers and comments, and thecommentator’s comments as well as their biographies and abstracts on this webpage as materials.
I hope that many scholars and readers will join us and that this symposium will be an opportunity for
all the participants to experience a new border-crossing krug [circle] of research. I am deeply grateful
to our guest speakers and commentator, my colleague Nabokovians, and all the participants for theirgreat support.
Akiko Nakata, Moderator
The Nabokov Society of Japan＊

Uploaded April 26, 2021

Papers / Comments and Discussions / Questions and Answers

4

Paper

Brian Boyd
Paper
Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences
Vladimir Nabokov（1899―1977）and Karl Popper（1902―1994）overlapped for 75 years. In theirlast decades Nabokov was often called the greatest writer̶and Popper the greatest thinker̶of histime. Both published several times in the prominent highbrow journal Encounter, but neither showed
any awareness of the other.1 While I was working on Nabokov’s biography, I gave a copy of Popper’s
autobiography to his widow, Véra, for Christmas 1984. She said that it was over her head, but that
Popper was certainly original̶perhaps the supreme compliment in the Nabokovs’ vocabulary. And
now I’m working on Popper’s biography.
The distinguished literary critic Harry Levin, a close friend of Nabokov’s, asked me, when I firstinterviewed him, what interested me most in Nabokov. Caught off guard̶or I might have simply
said “Everything”̶I found myself answering, “I suppose̶his philosophy.” Levin laughed: “But hedoesn’t have a philosophy!” No critic familiar with Nabokov would make that mistake now. Nabokov
made the heroes of his novels Bend Sinister and Ada philosophers; he invokes philosophers from
Heraclitus and Parmenides, through Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, to Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley,Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and more; his work has aphilosophical̶especially metaphysical and epistemological̶cast from almost the first to the last,and from the first chapter of his autobiography to the last.
Both Nabokov and Popper straddled many disciplines. Nabokov was a world-class scientist̶alepidopterist̶as well as a writer, scholar, translator, and chess problemist, and emphasized the valueof combining the artistic and the scientific: “Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainsideof ‘scientific’ knowledge joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?”2 Popper was even morediverse, ranging from the pre-Socratics to quantum physics, from probability and biology to ethics andfrom logic and epistemology to politics, and composed Bach-like fugues played by world-classorganists, and he writes: “Science is not only, like art and literature, an adventure of the human spirit,
but it is among the creative arts perhaps the most human.”3
Both were fiercely individual and champions of the independence of the individual. Popper, muchless known for his humor than Nabokov, jokes that almost his only exercise was “swimming against
the tide”4̶a comment Nabokov might have made if he weren’t so well known as a sportsman andbutterfly hunter.
Their two rich, curious, polymathic, and highly distinctive minds raise interesting philosophicalquestions in their convergences and divergences of attitudes.
First, their instruments and their disciplines. Nabokov likes words, often the rarer the better（stillicide, ganch, kinbote, luciola, mollitude）; “the one real treasure a true writer has”;5 he likes “totake a word and turn it over and to see its underside”6 and claims he dislikes ideas and generalizations（by which he usually means other people’s ideas）: “Big general ideas are in yesterday’s newspaper.”7

Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences

5

Popper likes ideas and powerful generalizations and dislikes both focusing on words or definitions,8
common in the analytic tradition in twentieth-century philosophy, and piling on would-be impressive
words, frequent in the continental tradition from Hegel on. Both Nabokov and Popper liked
translating but had contrary views: Nabokov wanted his to be literal, to find the most exact equivalent
for every word and image; Popper, who loved retranslating the pre-Socratics, especially Xenophanes
and Parmenides, preferred bold imaginative reinterpretation and even asked for that, rather than flatfooted literalism, from translators of his own work.
I could spend the whole time just on their contrasting attitudes to words and ideas. But let’s moveto larger issues.
Both Nabokov and Popper emphasized human freedom and the openness of the future. Nabokov,
who confessed to “an innate passion for independence,” 9 would have loved Popper’s way of
explaining his “idea of freedom”: “that thought is essentially creative and contributes to the creationof a future in every single person’s life”10̶although Nabokov might not have been so sanguine about“every single person’s life.” Popper, after writing that “Science . . . is among the creative arts perhaps
the most human,” adds that it “shows those flashes of insight which open our eyes to the wonders of
the world and of the human spirit. But this is not all. Science is the direct result of that most humanof all human endeavours̶to liberate ourselves.”11 Nabokov, in unusually serious mode, describes the
purpose of learning, as he sees it, as “enriching one’s individuality by enlarging one’s spiritualhorizons and thus becoming better adapted to serve the spiritual and cultural development of theworld.”12 Both in their own ways were champions of freedom, attacking both communist and fascist
totalitarianism in books they wrote during World War II: Nabokov in the novel Bend Sinister, begun in
1941, just after Hitler invaded his native Russia, and Popper in what he called his “war work,” The
Open Society and its Enemies, begun in 1939, if not even sooner after Hitler swallowed up his native
Austria.
Both insist on the openness of the future. Nabokov goes so far as to deny that the future exists: 13“nor do I believe that the future is transformed into a third panel of Time, even if we do anticipate
something or other”;14 “Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that
could be discerned by a better brain. . . . But the future has no such reality（as the pictured past andthe perceived present possess）; the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.”15 Popper
stressed the reality of time and that the future cannot be foreseen, not least because it “depends partly
upon us,”16 including our future inventions, which we cannot foresee or they would not be future
inventions.17 Popper insists on the arrow of time;18 Nabokov denies it;19 but actually, curiously, I thinkthey mean the same thing.
Both believe in the endlessness of discovery. Nabokov describes scientific theories as “always the
temporary gropings for truth of more or less gifted minds which gleam, fade, and are replaced byothers,”20 a conception almost exactly like Popper’s, but quite independently arrived at. Or as heremarks more vividly at the end of his last finished novel: “the neat formula a physicist finds to keeppeople happy . . . until the next chap snatches the chalk.”21 Popper has his own image: “The game ofscience is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for
any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”22
Both Nabokov and Popper stress the relationship between creativity and criticism in both artistic
and scientific discovery. Nabokov declares that “Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the6

Brian Boydrichest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer.”23 He holds adamantly to his right to criticize
anything or anybody, not just a Dostoevsky or a Stendhal, but even a Shakespeare or a Pushkin,however much he may admire them. And he thinks that art advances by knowing and challenging
one’s tradition, by criticizing and overcoming the conventions, the stale expressions and forms andfeelings, of the past. He revised so heavily that he would write in pencil, rubbing out what was notgood enough, and proudly declare that he wore out his erasers at the end of the pencil before he usedup the lead. Criticism is even more central to Popper; indeed, he once defined it as the unifying factor
in his thought.24 He criticizes not only Plato, Marx, and Freud, but even Darwin and Einstein, whom
he reveres. He stresses that science advances through a tradition of criticizing traditions, ofchallenging old answers, even if they are as apparently endlessly confirmed as Newton’s laws ofmotion, or the chemical formula for water, H20.25 He is known as the founder of critical rationalism,
but I would call his philosophy “creatively critical rationalism,” because for Popper rationalism is theability to accept criticism and the challenge of contrary facts, and a spur to the creative invention of
new hypotheses̶which he stresses, are imaginative leaps. And he too revises his own work
compulsively, changing his text before and after publication and adding twenty addenda to the tenrevised editions of his breakthrough work, Logik der Forschung, the Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Nevertheless, Nabokov and Popper have two or three strong and central philosophical differences.
First, in their contrasting attitudes to the subjective and individual versus the objective and thesocial. Nabokov thinks individual consciousness primary, the source of all our knowledge. That has
been a central position in the empiricist tradition, from Locke to Mach. Nabokov goes even further:
he describes himself as “an indivisible monist.”26 Shadowing the philosopher Krug in Bend Sinister,
he writes: “consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”27
Monism, especially a mind-first or mind-only monism, was philosophically dominant in the world inwhich he grew up. “Reality,” he writes, “is a very subjective affair.”28
But Popper̶one of whose key books is Objective Knowledge̶rejects the idea that our knowledge
derives from subjective perception. He argues against what he calls “the bucket theory of the mind,
which in the history of philosophy is well known as the theory of the tabula rasa, or the ‘empty
blackboard,’ on which experience is to engrave its findings” on the grounds “that most of thedispositions which constitute our knowledge are inborn, or hereditary; that most of those which are notinborn are modifications of inborn dispositions; and that the remainder are taken over from objective
knowledge, and are not subjective at all. So, actually, nothing remains of the ‘bucket theory’̶
it is wrong on all counts.”29
What Popper means by “objective knowledge” is the knowledge we have acquired throughlanguage and the theories that language allows to be intersubjectively proposed, criticized, andsuperseded: the identifications, for instance, of distinct species of tree, flower, butterfly, and bird thatwere so important to Nabokov. Nabokov had to learn these himself, but this does not make theknowledge subjective, since he learned it from prior cumulative proposals and revisions by others,
from hard-won “objective knowledge.”
Popper emphasizes that the psychological world（which he labels World 2）engages not only withthe physical world（which he labels World 1）but also with and through the world of objective
products of the human mind（World 3）, like language, theories, and works of art. He does notminimize the subjective, as some think（for us, World 2 is always there）, but he proposes that theNabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences

7

objective products of the human mind offer a unique and humanly central way for us to grasp theworld, to criticize our grasp, to discover where we are inadequate and where we need to learn more.
Here I must say that think Popper has the better epistemological position, and a fairer
apportionment of the relationship between the individual and the social.
Second, Nabokov extols the irrational, the inexplicable, the trans-rational, where Popper promotes
and seeks to extend the rational: he is, after all, the proposer of “critical rationalism.”
This needs unpacking. What do they mean by the irrational? First, the priceless particularity of
individual things and moments and places. Popper sounds surprisingly like Nabokov when he writes
that
the unique individual and his unique actions and experiences and relations to other individuals can never be fully
rationalized. And it appears to be just this irrational realm of unique individuality which makes human relations
important. Most people would feel, for example, that what makes their lives worth living would largely bedestroyed if they themselves, and their lives, were in no sense unique but in all and every respect typical of a classof people, so that they repeated exactly all the actions and experiences of all other men who belong to this class.
It is the uniqueness of our experiences which, in this sense, makes our lives worth living, the unique experience ofa landscape, of a sunset, of the expression of a human face.30

Or the flight of a particular swift: Nabokov expresses much the same thought in the language of
poetry in what he calls his “favourite Russian poem”（it’s much better in the original）, written by thehero of his greatest Russian novel, The Gift:
One night between sunset and river
On the old bridge we stood, you and I.
Will you ever forget it, I queried,̶That particular swift that went by?
And you answered, so earnestly: Never!
And what sobs made us suddenly shiver.
What a cry life emitted in flight!
Till we die, till tomorrow, for ever,
You and I on the old bridge one night.31

Second, Nabokov and Popper agree on calling the irrational what is and must remain beyond
human knowledge. Nabokov values the irrational̶he writes of “the dreamworld of permanent andirrational art,”32 he comments that “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have
all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a
secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift.”33 But he values the irrational in his own way, withouteschewing the rational, the right to discover, analyze, and criticize: “The creative work of the mind isbased upon a happy agreement between the rational and the irrational. By rational I do not mean thelinear logic of pedestrian thought; and by irrational I do not mean the vulgar vortex of more or lessneolithic instincts.”34

8Brian Boyd

Nabokov extols “inspiration,”35 the sense that creative ideas come from somewhere unknown andunknowable, somewhere irrational. In this he and Popper are surprisingly close. Popper too denies“the linear logic of pedestrian thought” as a way of arriving at scientific ideas（although it is necessary
for testing them, as Nabokov would agree that cool, alert reason is necessary for testing artistic
choices）. Despite his breakthrough first book being called The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper
maintains there that there are no logical steps we can take to arrive at hypotheses, which he sees asbold creative leaps: “there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logicalreconstruction of this process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery contains ‘anirrational element,’ or ‘a creative intuition,’ in Bergson’s sense.”36 Nabokov would have liked
Popper’s later formulation: “knowledge is an adventure of ideas.”37
One of Nabokov’s strongest objections to “logic” or “rationality” is to the “logic” of cause andeffect, the supposed complete rational explicability of events, what he calls “the miserable idea of
determinism, the prison regulation of cause and effect.”38 Against this, he asserts that “The highest
achievement[s] in poetry, prose, painting, showmanship are characterized by the irrational andillogical, by that spirit of free will that snaps its rainbow fingers in the face of smug causality.”39
Popper agreed with Nabokov in rejecting determinism and the apparent logic of cause and effect. He
began to argue in the 1950s that “Our universe is partly causal, partly probabilistic, and partly open: it
is emergent.”40 He “completely reforms . . . the theory of causality,”41 he considers, by introducing thenotion of “propensity” rather than rigid causality. Propensities are “real dispositions” within a nondeterministic state of affairs: “although the fact that the state of affairs is not deterministic may well
be said to indicate an incompleteness, this incompleteness may be not a fault of the theory̶of thedescription̶but a reflection of the indeterminateness of reality, of the state of affairs itself.”42
Nabokov would have liked the title of the book that first spelled out this proposal: The Open Universe.
Nabokov’s advocacy of the irrational appears less in conflict with Popper’s critical rationalism
than might first seem the case. Both accept the irrationality, and the value, of the particular; and theirrationality, the creative surprise, the inexplicable inventiveness, of discovery; and the openness of aworld less controlled by a tight logic of cause and effect than commonsense may suppose.
I was planning to write that there is one area in which Nabokov and Popper remain some distanceapart. Both Nabokov and Popper emphasize the limits of human understanding, of human rationality,
but for Nabokov transcending these limits is a metaphysical issue, whereas for Popper it is an
epistemological one. But that contrast started to dissolve as I assembled the evidence.
Both are indeed very aware of the limits of human knowledge, once we ask ultimate hardquestions. After talking once about the occult in the work of seventeenth-century archpriest Avvakum,
the first Russian prose master, Nabokov added, musingly: “Electricity. Time. Space. We know
nothing about these things.”43 In a discussion of religion, Popper says something strikingly similar:“An ideology-free religion would above all be one that is intellectually modest: for we know so little;
even in physics we have no idea why（for example）all electrons have the same charge or all
subelectrons（‘quarks’）.”44 Or more generally, Popper the fallibilist says: “I know how very little I
know̶much less than many others̶and I know that none of us knows anything.”45
Nabokov has strong, at times almost mystical, intuitions about states of being beyond the limits ofhuman understanding, perhaps in the form of a transformation of human consciousness beyond humandeath, perhaps in some designing consciousness in the universe, some God. He builds into any hints

Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences9or hopes of these, however, a sense of how humanly unknowable these states would be, how“irrational” they are, since to rational thought they are indescribable, inexplicable. Take the hereafter:
Van pointed out that here was the rub̶one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized
paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy ishandicapped̶to a quite hopeless extent̶by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along̶or your enemies
for that matter̶to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably
turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a [fool] . . . can imagine being met, inthat Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by themosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in thewake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.46

Or take the idea of a God. When he was asked by an interviewer: “do you believe in God?”
Nabokov answered: “To be quite candid̶and what I am going to say now is something I never said
before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill̶I know more than I can express in words, and thelittle I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”47 Asked by anotherinterviewer about his attitude to religion, he replied: “it seems to me that every artist is in contact withsomething which he doesn’t quite understand, and I have always had that sensation̶that there’s
something so mysterious about everything when you start to think of it, you are just on the brink ofinsanity. For instance, I can’t think for a long time about space being infinite. I’ve tried that and I’ve
gone rather far out into space, and of course space is infinite.”48
Curiously, this is all far less distant from Popper than one might expect. Nabokov’s reflections on
infinity in space resemble and could perhaps̶although there is no evidence̶owe something to Kant
on the antinomies of reason at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason. Popper writes: “I am arationalist; but reason tells me that reason has its limits. In this, as in many other points, I am not far
removed from Kant.”49 Elsewhere, he elaborates: “We may know how little we know, but this mustnot be turned or twisted into a positive knowledge of the existence of an unfathomable secret. Thereis a lot in the world that is in the nature of an unfathomable secret, but I do not think that it isadmissible to make a theology out of a lack of knowledge nor turn our ignorance into anything likepositive knowledge. . . . Any discussion of God somehow is in a sense unpleasant. When I look atwhat I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God.
However, the moment I even speak of it, I am embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God intalking about God.”50 He even writes: “I think that all theology is blasphemy”51 and “My objection toorganized religion is that it tends to use the name of God in vain.”52
This is uncannily like not only Nabokov’s “there’s something so mysterious about everything when
you start to think of it” and his “in my metaphysics, I am a confirmed non-unionist and have no use
for organized tours through anthropomorphic paradises,”53 but also like his sense of gratitude at thegift of life, and his sense of the unknowable source of that gift: his “thrill of gratitude to whom it may
concern,”54 as he puts it in his autobiography, or his hero Fyodor’s “getting deeper, to the bottom ofthings: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green
grease-paint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer
thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days̶from Person

10Brian Boyd

Unknown.”55
There is a difference between Nabokov and Popper here, but it is subtle. In the last chapter of his
autobiography, Nabokov refers again to the limits of our knowledge and what may lie beyond: for
instance, the disinclination of “professional physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, thewhereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, andif, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn,warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows̶a special Space
maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.”56 “A special Space, . . .
we trust”: despite the vagueness of the prospect Nabokov proposes, Popper would not even go this far.
The spiral image here is one dear to Nabokov’s heart, and connected for him with the so-called
Hegelian triad.57 In one place he even notes privately:
From the point of view of evolutionary dialectics the hereafter finds its beautiful proof in the following series:
1. Time without consciousness（the lower animal world）
2. Time with consciousness（man ＝ chelovek ＝ Conscious Time）
3. Consciousness without Time（the future of the immortal soul）
58

NB: The last term is really the thesis of a new series
Here Nabokov shows his difference from Popper: a private quest for something beyond death, evena hunch, for at least a moment, that thought signposts the way there; and a readiness to say, publicly,that “surely, another dimension follows”̶but, even here, a recognition that he cannot say more.
Popper on the other hand emphasizes the mysterious and unknowable, and the reverence for mysteryin the humility of scientists at their best: “And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist
who devotes himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to facts, and always awarethat even his boldest achievement will never be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after
him, or the mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any test?”59
And finally, one area where Nabokov and Popper differ emphatically: their attitudes toward death.
Nabokov’s last philosopher, Van Veen, writes in his last chapter, about dying, that there arethree facets to it（roughly corresponding to the popular tripartition of Time）. There is, first, the wrench ofrelinquishing forever all one’s memories̶that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go
through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again theriches of consciousness that will be snatched away! Then we have the second facet̶the hideous physical pain̶
for obvious reasons let us not dwell upon that. And finally, there is the featureless pseudo-future, blank and black,an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!60

But for Popper individual death is final and not to be regretted̶“I should think less of a Universe
which makes of me an indestructible piece of furniture”61̶but hopes that as a species we may be able
to liberate ourselves, gradually, successively, from the limitations of our subjective perspectives, in akind of social transcendence of the limitations of individual consciousness that Nabokov feels so
acutely and would like to transcend in death.62 All the same, Popper too knew that given how little heNabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences11

knew he could exclude nothing. His secretary and confidante reports his saying: “If there is a God, I’ll
know about it in due course.”63
Nabokov and Popper are not identical in their epistemology and metaphysics, but for two
individuals so independent of mind, their very substantial similarity is surprising. How could we
account for this degree of convergence, despite the difference between their fields and their mental
dispositions̶which I could detail if I had space? Because of a common derivation from Kant? But
unlike Popper, Nabokov gives no sign that Kant occupied any particular place in his thinking.
Because Nabokov, like Popper, understood the necessary modesty of the scientist, the difficulty of
discovering more about the world? But few scientists share the common features of Nabokov’s andPopper’s epistemology and metaphysics. Because of the scientific revolutions of the twentiethcentury, starting with Einstein, whose results Nabokov did not accept but realized, as Popper did, thatthey confirmed how little we know for sure? Or just because of a rare convergence of genius?
And what does this comparison of Nabokov’s and Popper’s epistemologies and metaphysics show?
Is it a simple tabulation of similarities and dissimilarities, without the space to argue for or evaluate
any position? Nabokov has one of his most gifted characters say: “Resemblances are the shadows ofdifferences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences”64̶ itself a remark richin philosophical significance. Is this essay just an anthological showcase of original ideas andalternatives of some force and value, which can offer food for thought both in their convergences（how did two men with such differences come to agree so often?）and in their divergences（who has
the better position, or how could one position challenge the other or complement it?）? Is it ademonstration of the range of options available in one historical era, even for people who agree inmany unusual ways, and who both strongly resist the clichés of their time? Does it show the depth of
Nabokov’s thinking, and the creativity of Popper’s? Or is it no more than a demonstration of what
appeals to me: am I the lowest common denominator?
Let me conclude with a few final observations. Had I investigated Nabokov’s and Popper’s
esthetics, we would have seen little but their divergences; had I investigated their ethics, I’m not surewhat I would find, because both, for different reasons, tended to avoid talking about ethics directly.
Had they known each other’s work, Nabokov would have loved Popper’s ideas, and Popper would
have hated Nabokov’s words. Had they met in person, Nabokov’s playfulness would have recoiled
from Popper’s seriousness, and vice versa. But in the realm of ideas they embrace even more warmly
than I expected.
Notes
1With one small exception, which I discovered, to my great surprise, only after completing this essay. Nabokov took notesfrom G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time（New York: Harper & Row, 1961）for the essay on The Texture ofTime composed by the hero and narrator of his 1969 novel, Ada, philosopher Van Veen. Among the notes, which include
brief quotations from other philosophers, is this: “p. 288: . . . Popper: there is an inherent delay, which cannot be overcome,in deriving information from the environment about the environment.” Unlike in many other cases, Nabokov makes nocomment. Notes for the Texture of Time, Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Berg Collection, New York Public Library（henceforth
VNA）.

2

Nabokov, Strong Opinions（henceforth SO）（New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973）, 330.

12Brian Boyd

3

Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, ed. W. W. Bartley, III（henceforth RAS）
（London: Hutchinson, 1983）, 259.

4

Popper letter to Mario Bunge, 10 April 67, Karl Popper Archive, Hoover Institution, Stanford University（henceforth KPA）,
Box 280, Fol. 25.

5

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia
Tolstoy（henceforth TWS）, New York: Knopf, 469.

6

TWS 469.

7

TWS 469.

8

Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography（henceforth UQ）（1974; London: Routledge, 1992）, 18―31.

9

TWS 426.

10 Popper letter to Alain Boyer, 9 May 1990, KPA Box 530 Folder 17.
11 RAS 259.
12 Nabokov letter to Mademoiselle Magazine, 27 June 1947, VNA.
13 By this he means, I presume, that there is no concrete future our present has not yet reached, but merely an endless vapor ofcontinually branching or dancing possibilities that have yet to condense.
14 Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle（New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969）, 550. Cf. also Ada 559―60: “Time is anything
but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the durationless point of the Present, and a ‘not-yet’ that may never come.
No. There are only two panels. The Past（ever-existing in my mind）and the Present（to which my mind gives duration and,
therefore, reality）. If we make a third compartment of fulfilled expectation, the foreseen, the foreordained, the faculty ofprevision, perfect forecast, we are still applying our mind to the Present. “If the Past is perceived as a storage of Time, and if
the Present is the process of that perception, the future, on the other hand, is not an item of Time, has nothing to do with Timeand with the dim gauze of its physical texture. The future is but a quack at the court of Chronos.”
15 Nabokov, Transparent Things（New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972）, 1.
16 Popper interview with Signore Carruba, L’Opinione, 24 July 1979, KPA Box 333 Folder 7.
17 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism（1957; 2nd ed., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961）.
18 Popper, “The Arrow of Time,” Nature 177（17 March 1956）, 538; “Time’s Arrow and Entropy,” Nature 207（17 July 1965）,
233―34; “Time’s Arrow and Feeding on Negentropy,” Nature 213（21 January 1967）, 320; “Structural Information and theArrow of Time,” Nature（15 April 1967）, 322.
19 See e.g. Ada 538: “The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one
moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation.”（Asthe novel notes, “ardis,” the key place-name of the action, means “point of an arrow” in Greek.）
20 TWS 327.
21 Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!（New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974）, 253.
22 Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery（henceforth LScD）（1934; London: Hutchinson, 1959）, 53.
23 Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers（henceforth LRL）
（New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/
Bruccoli Clark, 1981）, [ii], facing title page.
24 Popper, in Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper（La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974）, vol. 2, 1053.
25 Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach（1972; Oxford: Clarendon, rev. ed. 1979）, 10.
26 SO 85. He elaborates at SO 124: “Monism, which implies a oneness of basic reality, is seen to be divisible when, say, ‘mind’sneakily splits away from ‘matter’ in the reasoning of a muddled monist or half-hearted materialist.”
27 Nabokov, Bend Sinister（1947; New York: Vintage）, 188.
28 SO 10.
29 Popper, Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction, ed. Mark Notturno（London: Routledge, 1994）,
24―25.
30 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies（henceforth OS）（1945; 5th ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966）,

Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences

13

vol. 2, 245.
31 Nabokov, The Gift（1938; New York: Vintage, 1991）, 94.
32 Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers（New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1983）, 68.
33 LRL 54.
34 TWS 191.
35 See for instance his essay “Inspiration,” SO.
36 LScD 32.
37 Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge（1963; rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1965）, 95.
38 Unpublished lectures on literature, Notebook 2, 16ff., VNA.
39 Nabokov, “The Tragedy of Tragedy,” in his The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, ed. Dmitri Nabokov（New York:
Bruccoli Clark/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984）, 326.
40 Popper, The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism（London: Hutchinson, 1982）, 130.
41 Popper letter to Antony Flew, 22 November 1989, KPA Box 537 Folder 5.
42 UQ 155.
43 Cited in Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part（New York: Viking, 1977）, 87）.
44 Popper letter to Thomas Häringer, 29 June 1982, KPA Box 304 Folder 10: “Eine ideologiefrei Religion wäre vor allem eine,
die intellektuell bescheiden ist: wir wissen ja so wenig; sogar in der Physik haben wir keine Ahnung, warum（zum Beispiel）
alle Elektronen gleiche Ladung haben oder alle Subelektronen（,Quarks’）.”45 Popper letter to Mark Notturno, 4 December 1982, KPA Box 332 Folder 7.
46 Ada 586.
47 SO 45.
48 Nabokov interview with Robert Hughes, 1965, from TS material not included in SO, 41, VNA.
49 Popper letter to Stephen Makin, n.d., KPA Box 550 Folder 5.
50 Popper interview with Edward Zerin, 1969, published as “Karl Popper on God,” Skeptic, 6: 2（1998）, 46―49.
51 Popper letter to Leslie Graves, 20 November 1992, KPA Box 540 Folder 10.
52 Popper, Zerin interview.
53 Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited（henceforth SM）（New York: Putnam, 1966）, 297.
54 SM 139.
55 Gift 328.
56 SM 301.
57 For the close connection between the image of the spiral, the idea of the “Hegelian” dialectical triad, and Nabokov’s
metaphysics, see Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years（Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990）, 294―95:“Already as a schoolboy Nabokov had reinterpreted the Hegelian dialectic of history as an opening out of the closed circle
into a spiral in which the first arc, the thesis, leads into the ampler arc of the antithesis, and that in turn into the synthesis,
thesis of a new series. That image of the expanding spiral never ceased to unfurl in his mind. He applied it to the structure of
his own life, to his scientific speculations about the evolution of butterfly wing markings, and above all to his metaphysics,
to his sense of time as a progressive widening out̶a sense that seems to stem from an almost innate yearning for freedomthat precedes his exposure to either Hegel or Bergson: “every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, andif, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akinto thought, then, surely, another dimension follows.” In a previous book [Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness（1985;
rev. ed. Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001）] I have explained the structure of Nabokov's metaphysics as a double spiral inwhich his twin passions for independence and combination determine his attitude to each of the arcs of being he defines:
space; time; thought, or human consciousness; and something further beyond.”
58 Nabokov notes in “Yearbook 1951,” 16 February 1951, VNA.

14

Brian Boyd

59 OS vol. 2, 245.
60 Ada 585
61 Popper letter to John Beloff, 29 September 1976, KPA Box 276 Folder 1.
62 The physicist David Deutsch even calls one of his books, strongly inspired by Popper, The Beginnings of Infinity:
Explanations that Transform the World（London: Penguin, 2012）.
63 Brian Boyd interview with Melitta Mew, 20 July 1998.
64 Nabokov, Pale Fire（New York: Putnam, 1962）, 265.

Comments and Discussions

15

Brian Boyd
Comments and Discussions
Comment on “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”
Tora Koyama, Commentator
Prof. Brian Boyd basically discusses the similarity and dissimilarity between Vladimir Nabokov
and Karl Popper, a famed philosopher of science. For instance, both of them are polymathic andhighly renowned in their fields. Nabokov is playful, while Popper is serious; Nabokov likes words,
while Popper hates focusing on words, unlike orthodox analytic philosophers.
More importantly, both of them praise human freedom and the endless discovery by the humanmind, according to Prof. Boyd. Creativity and criticism are also important to both. Theirdissimilarities seems to me rather philosophical. For Nabokov, individual consciousness is everything:“Reality is a very subjective afffair”（Nabokov 1973, 10, as cited in Boyd 2021）Prof. Boyd depicts
Nabokov as a subjective idealist George Berkeley, the 18th-century Irish philosopher, or John M. E.
McTaggart, the neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher at Trinity College, Cambridge University, whotaught Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, two founders of analytic philosophy.
For Popper, in contrast, objectivity through language and theories is what is to be pursued andacquired. Popper’s “World 3” is neither physical（“World 1”）nor psychological（“World 2”）but anobjective product of the human mind. Presumably, Popper would have rejected Navokov’s view on
the ground that the activities and the products of the human mind should be distinguished and thelatter is not purely individual but social at least to some extent. Prof. Boyd sees Popper’s view as
better than Nabokov’s.
Prof. Boyd finds another dissimilarity between Nabokov and Popper in（ir）rationality. Popper is arationalist̶he is known to advance critical rationalism, while Nabokov praises irrationality forcreativity as a writer. Despite such an apparent opposition, however, given that Nabokov’s appraisalof irrationality is for criticism（because creativity and criticism are closely related）, this dissimilarity
implies another similarity: acknowledgment of the limit of human knowledge. Because humanknowledge is limited, for Popper, the scientific discovery is endless; because human knowledge islimited, for Nabokov, creative ideas come from somewhere unknowable and irrational. It isremarkable how Prof. Boyd explicates that their dissimilarity implies their similarity. Surely it cannot
be denied that “their very substantial similarity is surprising”（Boyd 2021）.
The surprising similarity between Nabokov and Popper leads us to ponder what could cause thiscommonality. But Prof. Boyd gives us no clear answer to this or to related questions. Rather he asks
us just before concluding what could be accomplished by comparing these two great figures. No
doubt he could have offered some explanation of the source of their similarities and dissimilarities.
He suggests, it seems to me, that it is important to think about why we compare them, what isaccomplished by the comparison, or what the comparison means.
I would like to think about these questions here. I think they are philosophically significant. We

16Tora Koyama

cannot escape from these issues as researchers who are required to produce results, preferably resultsthat are easily understandable to stakeholders. This requirement appears to be reasonable because
research is the task of rendering unknowns known. The traditional definition of knowledge inphilosophy is justified true belief; after all, we have to justify our findings. However, I believe weshould not try to justify them fully. I agree with Popper and also Nabokov in that scientific discovery
is endless and open to criticism. Justification may be a necessary part of scientific discovery, but it is
only part of it. What is more important is room for human creativity. The similarities anddissimilarities between Nabokov and Popper as indicated by Prof. Boyd will stimulate our creativity,or perhaps “inspiration.”
Admittedly, this is just what I thought. I would love to hear what Prof. Boyd thinks about it.
Let me show an inspiration. Is there a relevant connection between Nabokov and Popper?
Here is my speculation or imagination. Nabokov lived in Berlin from the 1920s to the 1930s. At thattime Berlin was the center of the philosophy of science in Germany. There was a group of scientificphilosophers led by Hans Reichenbach, who is a renowned philosopher of science. Reichenbach’sgroup and the Vienna Circle organized international conferences on philosophy of science, participantsof which came from various countries such as France, Italy, Poland, Denmark, let alone the US andthe UK. Popper attended some of these conferences in the 1930s, after his studies at the University of
Vienna in the 1920s. Although no conference was held at Berlin, supposedly Berlin intellectuals
easily could learn of Reichenbach’s group and their activities. For the group held regular meetings at
Berlin and invited notable scientists as lecturers such as Einstein, who worked at Berlin University
and supported Reichenbach’s activity.
Interestingly, there are similarities and dissimilarities among Popper, Reichenbach, and the Vienna
Circle, which presumably developed through their interactions. For instance, both Popper andReichenbach worked on probability, though it is known that they had opposed each other personally（see, e.g. Milkov 2012, n. 9）. Popper advanced fallibilism, opposing the verificationism of theVienna Circle. Despite the fact that Reichenbach and the Vienna philosophers worked together,
Reichenbach distances himself from the anti-metaphysical view of the Vienna Circle（Reichenbach
1936）.
It may well be highly unlikely that Nabokov knew well these philosophers in Berlin. Still, it seems
to me possible that he could have heard about them and become interested in their thoughts andactivities. If so, probably he would have hated it and developed his own philosophy.
All that I said may sound silly. In that case, I would say it stems from my respect for irrationality, andI would like to welcome criticism.
References
Boyd, Brian,（2021）, “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”, paper presenterd at Symposium: Vladimir Nabokov
and Analytic Philosophy, the Nabokov Society of Japan, May 15th to 31st.
Milkov, Nikolay,（2012）, “Karl Popper’s Debt to Leonard Nelson”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 86, 137―156.
Nabokov, Vladimir,（1973）, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Reichenbach, Hans,（1936）, “Logistic Empiricism in Germany and the Present State of its Problems”, Journal of Philosophy, 33（6）, 141―160.

Boyd Comment on Koyama Comment on Boyd 2021

17

Boyd Comment on Koyama Comment on Boyd 2021
Brian Boyd
My thanks to Professor Koyama for his clear and perceptive summary of my paper. Just a few
responses:
I think Nabokov derived his subjective idealism not from Berkeley（or McTaggart）but from theidealism rife in the late nineteenth century in the arts, in the anti-positivist mode of the Symbolists（such as the poets Mallarmé and Blok, and perhaps also the philosophers Schopenhauer and Bergson,in both of whom Nabokov, like many artists, had an interest）and from his own radical individualism.
But he does mention Berkeley approvingly in a 1970 reply to Jeffrey Leonard’s essay on the Textureof Time excursus in Ada. After dismissing the connection Leonard makes between The Texture ofTime and Proust, he adds “And finally I owe no debt whatsoever（as Mr. Leonard seems to think）tothe famous Argentine essayist [Borges] and his rather confused compilation ‘A New Refutation ofTime.’ Mr. Leonard would have lost less of it [time, that is] had he gone straight to Berkeley andBergson”（Strong Opinions, 289―90）. I discuss the contrast between McTaggart’s and Nabokov’s
views of time in Nabokov’s Ada（1985; 2001 rev. ed.）, 325n11.
I would not say that Nabokov’s valuing the irrational in art reflects his esteem for the critical mind; it
has much more to do with the feeling of mystery, gratitude, and wonder an artist has at the sudden
surprise of a flash of inspiration, and with a hunch that in intuiting something previously quite
unforeseen the artist reaches somehow beyond the limits of the purely rational. Certainly both Popperand Nabokov have a deep awareness of the limits of human knowledge, although their demarcationsof those limits and their hopes for how they might be partially transcended are quite distinct. For
Nabokov, the limits are those of individual human consciousness, in our confinement to the self, to thepresent moment of awareness, and to the terms of human understanding; for Popper, they are limits ofhuman knowledge in the face of the infinity of a universe emergent in space and time. For Nabokov,
the way beyond may involve some transformation of consciousness beyond death; for Popper, the way
beyond our present ignorance will be collective scientific discovery, which can continue endlessly but
which will still fall endlessly short of the vastness of the cosmos.
Professor Koyama suggests that “no doubt” I “could have offered some explanation of the source of
their similarities and dissimilarities.” I do not think I can, really, since as both Nabokov and Popper
are highly independent of most of the prevailing trends of their times, I could explain the similarities
only in terms of a chance coincidence of very distinct personalities（but an appeal to chance is no
explanation）or a shared if uncommon insight into the human predicament（for those who accept that
their ideas do indeed involve uncommon insights, as I do, but others may not）
. Popper was antipositivistic, like Nabokov, but also anti-subjectivistic, unlike Nabokov. Perhaps the most relevant partof their shared intellectual background is their recognition of the uncertainty of even the best of ourknowledge, science, in the wake of the Darwinian, Einsteinian, and quantum revolutions, none ofwhich either accepted as final.

18

Brian Boyd

Professor Koyama writes: “The traditional philosophical definition of knowledge is justified true
belief.” Popper rejected each of these terms. As his student and closest collaborator, David Miller,
argued with characteristic firmness, for Popper our best knowledge, science, is neither justified, nortrue, nor belief. Not justified, because a scientific hypothesis proposing a natural law must cover
relevant future instances which it cannot possibly know, and which could contradict the proposed law.
Not true, because although truth matters absolutely, we cannot be sure that we have attained it: we do
not know what piece or class of evidence might sooner or later prove our explanation or description
wrong. Not belief, because individual belief matters little in science, where it is the capacity of ahypothesis to withstand objectively all possible valid criticism, to survive public and objective testing,that can corroborate the hypothesis up to the present but cannot guarantee future validity.
I very much doubt that Nabokov was in any way influenced by the ideas of Reichenbach, even if bothof them lived and worked in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. In those years Nabokov’s reading was
almost exclusively in literature（and Lepidoptera and chess）, and in the Russian émigré press; he kept
himself as hermetically sealed from German culture as he could. Popper was strongly opposed to theideas of Reichenbach, especially to Reichenbach’s search for a probabilistic justification of scientificresults. And to judge by such evidence as we have, Nabokov had developed the major contours of his
philosophy by 1918, before he left Russia.

A Belated Response to Brian Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”

19

A Belated Response to Brian Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper:
Convergences and Divergences”
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Brian, your lucidity about complex matters continues to impress me after 35 years of reading yourwork. I read your paper as a discussion of criteria necessary for a piece of writing to make it into
Popper’s World 3. My knowledge of Popper is very slight, but what I know I like: I share Popper’s（and Nabokov’s）opinion that belief in, and striving for scientific certainty without some professional
self-reflection about the necessity of fallibility is erroneous. I am always initially horrified to have myrepeated errors in the chemistry of perfumes pointed out, but time and further thought have always
pushed me to recognize that I have learned less from my untested hypotheses and more from myfalsified ones no matter how compelling I found my original imaginative insight. That is in part why I
am enjoying this symposium.
The organization of your paper（intro to the potential embrace in the realm of ideas, similarities,
differences, apparent differences, irreconcilable differences, moment of required self-reflection byyou, and final observations on the “embrace”）for some reason made it seem very easy to imagine that
it was the right time for me to begin correcting my knowledge deficit regarding Popper.
And that is where the trouble（and the delays）began. My self-corrections so far have kept me
spinning my thought wheels in Popper’s World 3 and generating more questions than answers about
Popper’s real ideal objects and Nabokov’s conceptions of language, thought, and time. Of Popper’s
two solutions to the lack of success I am experiencing（develop new organs, find the “feedback
mechanism”）, I am going to go with the second and pass those questions on to you for feedback, fully
understanding that you will answer only those of interest to you. Or none at all.
My first step was to read “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject”（to see why you find that
“Popper has the better epistemological position” in relation to Nabokov）. I then moved on to “On the
Theory of the Objective Mind” to learn Popper’s basis for seeing monism of the sort Nabokov used inself-description as “subjectivist blunder.”From your paper I assume that Popper’s goal（in Objective Knowledge）is to replace “the bucket
theory” of knowledge with “intersubjectively proposed, criticized, and superseded” knowledge.
Presumably that kind of knowledge would be objective and thereby qualify for membership in his
World 3.
1. When Popper says that in acquiring knowledge “the conscious problem need not be the objective
problem,” where do we locate the unconscious version of that problem? World 2 where theunconscious presumably operates? Or some Platonic world of ideas in which Kepler, Schrodinger,
and Einstein solved the problems they actually set out to solve? Or is the Borges’ Library of Babelversion of World 3 where all formulable knowledge exist in a state of being potentially discoverable

20

Zoran Kuzmanovich

through inspiration or through error and conjectural intersubjective correction? I am not trying to be
funny here. I am asking the question seriously in light of failing to understand this passage fromThe Self and its Brain: “the World 3 object is a real ideal object which exists, but exists nowhere,
and whose existence is somehow the potentiality of its being reinterpreted by human minds”（SB450）. How/Why “reinterpreted”?
2. Similar question: Nabokov says several times that he thinks in images. At one point, he suggeststhat images come to him in a “shapeless flash.” Sometimes he speaks of words dissolving into
images and sometimes he speaks of the problem of converting inspirational images to words. But
in all cases the creative process is one necessary for the “dislocation of the given world and then recreation of it through the connection of hitherto unconnected parts.”（Think, Speak, Write）. When“dislocated”
an indivisible monist says this, it seems as if it is World 1 that is being
which reallycannot be because in such a case monism become dualism. Or is it just World 2 that is “given” tothe monist? If it’s World 2, by whom/what is it given within the subject’s state of mind? Why is it
given with parts that need reconnecting? Or is it given by cultural heritage of World 3? Or is it
World 3 that has to be dislocated? If either World 2 or World 3 are “given” or “dislocated,” then
Nabokov cannot be an entirely happy monist. You quote Van’s metaphor of the “boxed brain.” In
the expanded version of that image, Nabokov says: “The human mind is a box with no tangible lid,sides or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining
in it at the same time.” While there may be some “unearthly” way of unboxing, Nabokov does notgive us much to work with. To the question “What surprises you?” Nabokov gave the answer: “themind’s hopeless inability to cope with its own essence and sense.” How do you read that answer inlight of VN’s adherence to monism?
3. In discussing Nabokov’s difference from Popper regarding “another dimension” beyond death you
suggest that for Nabokov “thought signposts the way.” As you rightly point out, Nabokov was
reluctant to talk at length about this topic. Or he may hedged his bets with statements like this one:“thought itself, as it shines its beam on the story of a man’s life, cannot avoid deforming it. Thus,
what our mind perceives turns out to seem true, but not to be true.” Another ambiguous signpost
worth visiting on this topic is in the margins of Nabokov’s copy of the book The Voices of Time. In
responding to Friedrich Kummel’s essay “Time as Succession and the Problem of Duration,”
Nabokov annotated the phrase “the circular relation of past and future” with the following: “Puretime, time free from all content, tangible time Space paralizes time.” In light of your magisterial
annotations to Ada, is there any reason（from psychology or from physics）to connect “Space
paralyzes time” with “A special space, maybe”? How exactly does such paralysis happen?

Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich’s Comment on Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper”

21

Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich’s Comment on Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper”
Brian Boyd
Popper would have been delighted at your opening sally, Zoran:
I am always initially horrified to have my repeated errors in the chemistry of perfumes pointed out, but time andfurther thought have always pushed me to recognize that I have learned less from my untested hypotheses andmore from my falsified ones no matter how compelling I found my original imaginative insight.

Popper’s friend the neuroscientist John Eccles was sure synaptic transmission must be electrical, notchemical. Popper convinced him to formulate his electrical hypothesis sharply enough to allow him
to look for an experiment that would decide between the electrical or chemical hypotheses. Eccles
took his advice, predicted what time range would indicate electrical transmission and what would
indicate chemical transmission, ran the experiment, and found this electrical prediction falsified. This
both dashed his first hopes and sent him off with renewed energy to elaborate the chemicaltransmission hypothesis̶work which won him his Nobel Prize.（Later it was discovered that somenerve transmission is electrical.）Wait for your call from Stockholm.
I am impressed, Zoran, by the zeal with which you have followed up my Popperian proddings.
Just before your question 1, you write:
From your paper I assume that Popper’s goal（in Objective Knowledge）is to replace “the bucket theory” ofknowledge with “intersubjectively proposed, criticized, and superseded” knowledge. Presumably that kind ofknowledge would be objective and thereby qualify for membership in his World 3.

I would say more generally that Popper’s aim is（a）to reject the idea of knowledge as something
filled up in us̶demonstrably accumulated, as it were̶by experience（the filling of the bucket）, and（b）to replace it with the idea of knowledge, especially in its best form, scientific knowledge, as ourgroping attempts to fathom a complicated world, with always tentative results（not necessarily“superseded,” as you write, but certainly “supersedable”）. We don’t know what might sooner or latershow our hunches̶yours on the chemistry of perfumes, Eccles’s on the electrical nature of synaptictransmission̶to be wrong.
But Popper’s World 3 includes all the products of the human mind, including written or spoken
utterances, and, among much else, problems, wrong ideas, and, say, banknotes（in so far as they are
understood in terms of their monetary value and not merely as seen, say, by members of a previously
uncontacted tribe, as mere colored scraps of some kind of thin flat crinkly substance）. To “qualify formembership in” World 3, as you write, doesn’t mean to be valid, only to be somehow intersubjectively
knowable（as the value of a banknote is recognized in a community that understands currency and thecurrent purchasing power of a particular denomination, or the value of one of Mozart’s “Haydn

22

Brian Boydquartets” is appreciated in a community that understands the conventions of Western music, and,preferably, also those of string quartets, Haydn quartets, and early Mozart quartets）.
You write, citing Popper:“the World 3 object is a real ideal object which exists, but exists nowhere, and whose existence is somehow thepotentiality of its being reinterpreted by human minds”（SB 450）
. How/Why “reinterpreted”?

Popper’s example here is a symphony（but it could also be, say, Lolita, to take the focus of last night’s
Zoom seminar in St. Petersburg: a good week for Nabokov）. The World 3 version of Beethoven’s
Fifth would not be the manuscript, or any particular edition or printing of the score, or any particularperformance or recording of the symphony, which would all be World 1 phenomena; the World 3
version is the intellectual content of the symphony, if you like, which can be reinterpreted
performatively by different orchestras, or analytically by different music critics, or appreciatively bydifferent listeners.（If listeners form an interpretation as they listen, but do not articulate it, thisremains a World 2, a purely psychological, phenomenon; but if they put it into words they utter orwrite, then it becomes a World 3 phenomenon, intersubjectively available and up for discussion.）In
the same way Lolita is neither the destroyed manuscript, nor any particular edition or printing orelectronic file or physical book, nor any public reading（all World 1 phenomena, all particularphysical instantiations, whether types or tokens, but not the novel itself）nor any private reading（aWorld 2 phenomenon）, but the novel’s intellectual content（the words in the right order, in whatever
physical instantiation）, as discussable and engageable with and reinterpretable by any and all readers.
2: I think it’s a little precarious to conflate Popper’s Worlds 1 to 3 with Nabokov’s monism, sinceneither knew the other’s terms.
Nabokov’s mind-first or mind-only monism would imply that all is somehow World 2, a phenomenonof consciousness, even the material world. Frankly, I do not understand such a mind-only monism,
unless it means something like the idea that what seems to us Matter（more or less World 1, forPopper）is actually, ultimately, the imagining of some ultimate Mind, God “dancing not-dancing,” inZen philosopher Alan Watts’s terms（in, I think, Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship, 1964）,
and that what seems to us our consciousnesses（our individual Worlds 2）is, within the concrete
imagining of the ultimate Mind, God dancing now not completely not-dancing, but dancing somepartial dance of Mind̶if you follow Watts’s terms!
I agree that, despite Nabokov calling himself an indivisible Monist, he doesn’t behave like one（thankgoodness, if you ask me）: he accepts the reality of things, including the details of a lily or alepidopteron, even if such details are not humanly identified until discovered by the botanist or theentomologist. As a writer, he accepts the features of a Kansas landscape, say, but has to take themapart（to select, to analyse, to verbalize them）and to resynthesize them, as in a sentence like this,from Lolita: “Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing
glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water andComment on Zoran Kuzmanovich’s Comment on Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper”

23

harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas”（152―53）. Herehe brings together Midwest weather, El Greco, pregnancy, ink, mummies, Kansas farmers, Kansas
landscapes, mercury（quicksilver）, a synesthetic color association（“harsh green”）, visual kinesis and“dislocatedmore, elements he hasfrom the given world” and re-created “through the connection ofhitherto unconnected parts” into a sentence describing the impression of motoring through Kansas that
long-time Kansan Stephen Jan Parker thought almost unbelievably perfect.
You write:
To the question “What surprises you?” Nabokov gave the answer: “the mind’s hopeless inability to cope with its
own essence and sense.” How do you read that answer in light of VN’s adherence to monism?

I think it perfectly possible to be a monist̶to imagine, say, that the cosmos is the imagining of some
ultimate Mind that wants to give all the independence it can to the things it imagines and thereby
creates̶and to have a strong sense of not knowing how this works or manifests itself in any detail atall.
I can’t tell from Nabokov’s annotation to Fraser’s Voices of Time what he might have had in mind. I
cannot figure out even some of my own marginal annotations when I see them years later, andNabokov may have been the same（in Popperian terms: an unremembered and cryptic marginal
annotation is a World 1 phenomenon that reflects World 2 processes whose intellectual content has
been lost, because so incompletely worked out, and now hardly qualifies as part of World 3, as an
objectively available idea）. Nabokov may have meant that when we conceive of spatial simultaneity
across an instant of time, it paralyzes the moment, or time, as it were, since it leaves out what in Ada
Van thinks of as “pure time,” experienced time, which always has duration and change. Or that, as inZeno’s paradoxes of movement, an ever-more-narrowly defined segment of the trajectory of an arrowor a tortoise makes it seem unmoving, paralyzed, at that locus. Hard to know. I don’t think I would
connect it with Speak, Memory 301’s “a special Space, maybe” without more to link them.

24

Zoran KuzmanovichBoyd on Kuzmanovich（Currie）and Kuzmanovich on Boyd（Popper）Final RoundZoran Kuzmanovich
Tagline: Having finally made it through Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations and Unended Quest,
Kuzmanovich reluctantly agrees to make this the final rebound:I fully accept your third point, Brian, and I stand corrected on Nabokov’s possible factual uncles（though I still have a difficult time seeing Nabokov as being factually in love with a porcelain pig）.
I defer to your far greater knowledge of Popper. When I wrote that Popper “requires that the purposeof intellectual engagement be refutation,” I was basing my claim on these two perhaps atypical but
undeniably certain- sounding sentences. The certainty especially evident in Popper’s use of “every,”“always,” “all,” mistaken,” and “false”:
For the test of a theory is, like every rigorous, always an attempt to show that the candidate is mistaken̶that is,that the theory entails a false assertion. From a logical point of view, all empirical tests are therefore attempted
refutations.”（CR 192）

I think I understand the logic of the claim that a theory T can be refuted by a negative instance p（thefailure of its predictive powers）, but that it cannot really be proved by positive instances since“theories cannot be logically derived from observations.”（CR 260）. So I understand but am notenthused by the default “double not-” logic of falsification: If T then p; Not-p; Therefore, not-T. In
the final paragraphs of my response to your comments I was not disputing Popper’s theories ofscience but simply expressing a preference for learning more about what sets of conditions（personal,
moral, scientific, technological, and cultural）made the theorist mistakenly link T and p as logicallyor empirically connected in the first place. While some of those conditions could be examined in aproper Popperian frame of refutation（“falsifiability, or refutability, or testability”, CR 48）., a numberof them cannot be. The sort of thing I have in mind here is the influence of conditions such as Joyce’s
failing eyesight or Nabokov’s synaesthesia on what they said they saw and knew. Perhaps an example
would help: I would have loved to have seen VN’s promised “furious” refutation of natural selection
theories based on his own observations of supervenient mimicry. From the Popper statements you
quote I understand Popper to be saying that no theory/intuition/hypothesis can ever be proved but only
provisionally confirmed. Still, it would have been fascinating to see what “criteria of refutation”（CR49）Nabokov would have introduced for his claim that mimicry by an animal exceeds the noticing
powers of its predators. At which point does Nabokov’s synaesthesia affect his metric for estimating
the predators’ noticing power? And when asking such questions, I keep going back to Kant because inyour essay you mentioned Kantian antinomies as linking Popper and Nabokov. There is indeed afamily resemblance, especially in the First and the Third. I do find Kant’s Third antinomy（causal
determinism vs. causal spontaneity）the adopted grandmother of Popper’s World 3 and the real
grandmother of Nabokov’s hypothesis that there is a “still more vivid means of knowing” than visualscientific observation. Given Nabokov’s statement about reality’s layers, I think the means Nabokov

Boyd on Kuzmanovich（Currie）and Kuzmanovich on Boyd（Popper）Final Round25

has in mind is the feeling-suffused contemplation of nature’s deceptions by the appreciative, possibly
synaesthetic, and possibly memory-prompted re-combinative or juxtaposing “eye” of the artist, but
writing such an eye’s “subjective purposiveness” into the format antecedent+
consequent=conclusion would be difficult in not impossible since both T and p would be sointersubjectively variable.
Faced by that difficulty（the gap between human reason and the world of things, between theempirical and the intelligible self）, I am sent back to Kantian antinomies of space, time, causality, andhis notion of respect. Popper gives credit to Tarski for solving or bypassing the problem of Kantian
antinomies（CR 36）. I understand those antinomies to be problems that pure reason encounters when
two proofs clash and thus reason contradicts itself or when reason ignores the input from the senses
while deploying some correspondence theory of truth. Even though Popper states that he learned
more from Tarski than from anyone else（UQ 99）, I cannot follow the logic of Tarski’s proof after the
point where the elimination of self-referentiality, the T-scheme, and the law of bivalence enter the
discussion. But I can follow your recommendation that I see Popper as inviting me to refute rather
than challenging me to do so out of some snobby sense of certainty. And if I ever do accept theinvitation, I will begin with Popper’s own metaphors for Kantian antinomies of space and time: “asystem of pigeon-holes, or a filing system”（CR 242）and subsequent notions of causality: “Out of[our theories] we create a world: not the real world, but our own nets in which we try to catch the realworld.”（CR 65）Any philosopher willing to risk such metaphors or to describe a certain flavor ofexistentialism as “the utter boredom of the bore-in-himself bored by himself”（CR 262）is worth a far
more leisurely visit than the one I can afford now.

26

Brian Boyd

Tests and Refutations
Brian Boyd
One final diminishing rebound, Zoran. Popper does not “require that the purpose of intellectual
engagement be refutation,” as you earlier wrote, but merely claims, in the passage you now quote（Conjectures and Refutations 192）and elsewhere, that the purpose of testing（only one of many
possible kinds of intellectual engagement, after all）is testing. If a theory fails a test, we have learned
we don’t know as much as we thought, and need to think again to find a better theory; if a theory
survives a severe test, an attempted refutation, then the test corroborates the theory, which is good
news, but still does not prove the theory: it could still fail later tests. This is a very modest attitude, as
far as one could wish from the “snobby sense of certainty” you previously suspected in Popper.
Since you appreciate Popper’s imagery, as I do, may I offer one further example that puts the matter
nicely:science has thus nothing “absolute” about it. Science does not rest upon rock-bottom. The bold structure of its
theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down fromabove into the swamp, but not down to any natural or “given” base; and when we cease our attempts to drive ourpiles into a deeper layer, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied
that they are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.（Logic of Scientific Discovery, 11）

I too would have loved to have seen Nabokov’s “furious” refutations of natural selection on the basisof mimicry. But I doubt they would have stood up. Nabokov suffered from the limitations of his time
when he assumed that “the noticing powers” of non-human animals were much less than those ofhumans. In many cases they have been shown to be better（dogs can be trained, after all, to sniff out
cancer or Covid―19 in humans）. And the rigorous experimental testing of mimicry over the last fifty
years has repeatedly refuted, at least in all the cases so far examined, Nabokov’s claim that thesophistication of animals’ mimetic devices exceeds the noticing powers of the relevant predators.

Comment on Brian Boyd, “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”

27

Comment on Brian Boyd, “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”
Akiko Nakta
I learned many important things from your comprehensive and illuminating paper on the similarities
and differences between Nabokov and Popper. One point that impresses me is that their attitudes
towards God were surprisingly close, but Nabokov's esoteric and mystical remarks are not found in
Popper. .
Popper’s remarks you cite, “Any discussion of God somehow is in a sense unpleasant. When I look atwhat I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God.
However, the moment I even speak of it, I am embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God intalking about God,” “I think that all theology is blasphemy” and “My objection to organized religionis that it tends to use the name of God in vain” might have sounded offending to traditional believersin those days, but today many people with religious sensibilities would agree with him.
It is hard to imagine the same with Nabokov’s remarks on God, answering to an interviewer’s
question if he believed in God, “To be quite candid̶and what I am going to say now is something I
never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill̶I know more than I can express inwords, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.” Nabokov's
idea of the hereafter is inaccessible to the readers. We can only imagine that Nabokov knew
something about God and the hereafter no one else knew and that he hid the key to that something in
his works, but even if we are aware of such keys in his works, we still do not know exactly about hisidea.
I believe that Nabokov’s awareness of death and the afterlife, given he originally had it since hischildhood, was intensified by the loss of his homeland, of his father assassinated and brother killed ina concentration camp, and the separation with his mother and siblings. Many details of Nabokov’slife are reflected in his works to be shared with the readers, but some of his thoughts remain exclusive.
On the other hand, Popper’s thoughts on God and religion seem open to the others. Is it because hefaced his belief in the same way as he explored theories in philosophy and science?
Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers1 explains
the reason Popper was more highly estimated in continental Europe than in England, citing Ralf
Dahrendorf, as follows:
Popper was very happy in England because he felt safe. It was a country in which a man who was immune to thegreat passions of the century̶notably communism and fascism̶could feel that he wasn’t challenged. But,
precisely because England was such a country, Popper was too normal to be interesting. Now the Continent has
the opposite story. The great passions threatened every single country. And there Popper stood, a tower of reason
in the midst of turmoil. And that, over time, commanded enormous respect. More than that, it was regarded as

28

Akiko Nakta

the great answer to the destructive and disastrous consequences of the passionate policies from 1917 to Stalin’s
death, and that includes the whole of the Nazi period.（217）

I am convinced by this passage, which seems to give me the proper image of Popper for Europe in the
middle of the 20th century. I would like to ask you whether you agree with the statement? And do you
think that the book treats Popper fairly?
The book also mentions Popper’s influence on the University of Canterbury, citing its official history
reports, “Popper’s impact on academic life was greater than that of any other”（218）. Did you feelthat when you were a BA and MA student at the university?
Note1

Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great
Philosophers. Ecco, 2001.

Comment on Akiko Nakata’s Comment on Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper”

29

Comment on Akiko Nakata’s Comment on Boyd’s “Nabokov and Popper”
Brian BoydThank you for your kind and rich response to my paper, Akiko.
I interviewed Lord Dahrendorf, whose comment on Popper you cite（like many I interviewed, he hassince died）. Popper was in fact very well received at various moments in England and the Englishspeaking world: from the late 1940s to the end of the 1960s he was regarded by many（including
Bertrand Russell）as the most exciting philosopher in Britain, or as “incomparably the greatest
philosopher of science there has ever been”（Nobel Prizewinner for Medicine Sir Peter Medawar）andso on. In 1973 philosopher Bryan Magee, who was friends with both Popper and Russell and thought
Popper the greater philosopher, published a book on Popper that became the biggest seller in the
Fontana Modern Masters series, outselling volumes on Darwin, Marx, Freud, Chomsky and the like.
But at that very time philosophers in the English-speaking world were coming to regard Popper as
passé（partly because of the machinations of his former protégé Imre Lakatos）, just as he was being
taken up with enormous enthusiasm in European countries. That was indeed partly because of his
politics, because his reformist liberalism offered an alternative̶an open society̶to the fruitless tugof-war in many countries between communist and fascist ideologies.
No, I do not think Wittgenstein’s Poker treats Popper fairly. He comes across there as rather colorless,unpleasant and uninteresting. In fact he galvanized, inspired, and was loved by many, while he also
antagonized, repelled, and alarmed others with his intensity, not least his intensity in criticizing theirpositions. His sense of the endless adventure of discovery in science and society frightens some but
thrills others, like physicist David Deutsch, who calls his book inspired by Popper The Beginning ofInfinity.
I wasn’t aware while a BA and MA student at the University of Canterbury of Popper’s impact there
and indeed throughout the whole New Zealand university system. I just took it for granted that
academics researched as well as taught, not realizing that that ethos owed more to Popper than anyoneelse. But I was interested in Popper already, and went to a public lecture he was to give there in May
1973, on a visit back to New Zealand, but which he couldn’t deliver because he had had a severetachycardia attack a few days before. His lecture was read, unsympathetically, by a Canterbury
philosopher, and I remember thinking of a series of objections to the ideas being aired. But now I findit hard to think of an idea of Popper’s I don’t like and feel excited by!

30

Questions and Answers

Brian Boyd
Questions and Answers
I
Ryo Chonabayashi
First Question（on Page 6）: It seems there are some intricate issues concerning whether John Locke
would support the view “individual consciousness is the source of all our knowledge.” Locke thinks
we can be directly aware of ideas, and these ideas are the source of all of our knowledge. But his
reason for this claim is this: there are some causal relations between what he calls “the primary
qualities of things themselves” and our ideas about these. Because there is such a causal（andmirroring）link between them, Locke thinks that we can reach（at least）some probable knowledge
about the external world. Indeed, George Berkeley criticised this claim, and Berkeley reached a moreradical idealist position. So I am not too sure if it is right to categorise Locke in the tradition of theview Professor Boyd discusses in the paper（Locke does not support monism Nabokov attributes tohimself）.
Second Question（on Page 8）: I’m curious why Nabokov thinks irrational/illogical features of arts are
the reason against causal determinism. I understand causal determinism as the thesis that all states arecaused by prior states, and how one state causes another state is regulated by laws of nature. With thisunderstanding of determinism, perhaps we can give deterministic causal explanations of why great
artists produced their work while those explanations also appeal to the irrational/illogical aspects ofwork. I suppose I don’t see the link between being irrational & illogical and being free from causal
determinism（well, this may be a question to Nabokov, not professor Boyd!）. Note how Popper
argues against determinism is different from Nabokov: he rejects causal determinism by arguing thatthe world is not fully deterministic（in the sense presented above）but probabilistic.

Brian BoydThanks so much for engaging so attentively with my paper, and keeping the discussion going, as
philosophers do! Let me paste in your questions in case this circulates more widely:Re your first question: I certainly did not mean to suggest that Locke was a monist, but only that heaccepted that the source of knowledge was ideas（associations）in the mind or what we would callsense impressions of the world. This could and sometimes eventually did lead to a radical mind-firstmonism, as it did in some of Mach’s work, and as it did for Nabokov.
Re your second question: Nabokov did not think that only the arts argued against causal determinism

Questions and Answers

31

but that life allowed room for indeterminism. What he did think was that the rational mind wasoverreaching when it proposed that everything that happened could be explained by iron laws ofdeterminism or cause and effect. He particularly disliked storytelling（drama especially）constructedon the basis of such rigid determinism and allowing no room for unpredictable chance.
In his critique of the determinism in so much of tragic drama, for instance, Nabokov writes: “we cling
to the same old iron bars of determinism which have imprisoned the spirit of playwriting for years andyears. And this is where lies the tragedy of tragedy”（Man from the USSR, 326）. In his Lectures on
Russian Literature he praises Chekhov: “his achievement was that he showed the right way to escapethe dungeon of deterministic causation, of cause and effect, and burst the bars holding the art of drama
captive”（285）. The most explicit elaboration of his critique of what he also calls “the idea of logicalfate”（Man from the USSR 328）is perhaps this: “The general and greatest danger which the drama
faces and the source of incalculable mischief, which has already in our times thrust back the theatre toa secondary rank in artistic endeavour, and may, eventually, shrivel it up altogether, is the miserable
idea of determinism, the prison regulation of cause and effect. It is assumed̶and this notion has
grown upon us and blinded us, with the development of the stage from antiquity̶that the leading
character in all drama is the devil of causation and that whatever happens on the stage as an interplayof cause and effect. We know from real life that however obediently we may follow the paths of
causation, some queer and beautiful force, which we call free will from want of a better expression,
allows or at least appears to allow us to escape again and again from the laws of cause and effect. And
biologists who have tried to find corresponding rules to explain the evolution of life on this earth willtell you, that nothing is explainable if these rules are unswervingly followed and that everything is
explained if the idea of the unexplicable freak, the mutation, the sudden jump or whim of the vital willis accepted as a factor.”（This last quote is from an essay on Soviet Drama, which I don’t think has
been published, though I may be wrong; I transcribed it directly from Nabokov’s archive over forty
years ago）.

Ryo Chonabayashi
Thank you very much for your detailed response. Your response to my first question clarifies theissue I raised. Thank you! Also, your answer to my second question is very interesting, and I feel I
now have deepened my understanding of Nabokov’s attitude toward determinism. It seems we candevelop two lines of argument based on what Nabokov says. First, we may argue that we should not
believe determinism because belief in determinism makes artistic work unenjoyable. Second, we may
argue that causal laws assumed in real life are not strict enough（due to “queer and beautiful force”）.
Nabokov might say that such queer and beautiful forces are part of the explanations of various events,
but those forces are not strict, and this is why determinism is false.

32

Ryo Chonabayashi and Brian Boyd

Brian Boyd
Reading your response, I suddenly thought of another similarity between Popper and Nabokov onindeterminism. Not only Nabokov but Popper too uses the unpredictability of art as an argument forindeterminism.
Popper advances as one of his arguments against indeterminism the reductio ad absurdum of a deaf
physicist with a complete knowledge of the physical world, like Laplace’s demon, being able, evenwith no knowledge of hearing or music, to predict at any point from the start of the universe what art
would emerge on earth: the particular scores of works by Mozart and Beethoven, for instance:
if physical determinism is right, then a physicist who is completely deaf and who has never heard any music could
write all the symphonies and concertos written by Mozart or Beethoven, by the simple method of studying the
precise physical states of their bodies and predicting where they would put down black marks on their lined paper.
And our deaf physicist could do even more: by studying Mozart’s or Beethoven’s bodies with sufficient care hecould write scores which were never actually written by Mozart or Beethoven, but which they would have written
had certain external circumstances of their lives been different: if they had eaten lamb, say, instead of chicken, or
drunk tea instead of coffee. // All this could be done by our deaf physicist if supplied with a sufficient knowledgeof purely physical conditions. There would be no need for him to know anything about the theory of music̶
though he might be able to predict what answers Mozart or Beethoven would have written down under examination
conditions if presented with questions on the theory of counterpoint. // I believe that all this is absurd; 35[n35 My deaf physicist is of course closely similar to Laplace’s demon（see note 15）; and I believe that hisachievements are absurd, simply because non-physical aspects（aims, purposes, traditions, tastes, ingenuity）playa role in the development of the physical world; or in other words, I believe in interactionism（see notes 43 and62）. Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, 1920, vol. ii, p. 328, says of what he calls the ‘Laplacean
calculator’: ‘Except in the limited sense described, the hypothesis of the calculator is absurd.’ Yet the ‘limitedsense’ includes the prediction of all purely physical events, and would thus include the prediction of the positionof all the black marks written by Mozart and Beethoven.]（Objective Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon, 1972, p223）

Questions and Answers

33

II
Shoko Miura
Thank you, Brian, for your admirable paper on VN and Popper. Many congratulations for beingnearly finished（already finished?）with your book on Popper.
I have three questions for you on your paper.
My first question concerns time, consciousness and the “soul.”
You outline a triad to clarify Nabokov’s evolutionary dialectics in which “the hereafter” can beproven, as follows:
1. Time without consciousness（the lower animal world）
2. Time with consciousness（man＝chelovek＝Conscious Time）
3. Consciousness without time（the future of the immortal soul）

And you add, “The last term is really the thesis of a new series.” It was a mind-blowing statement.
However, I find it hard to imagine what the “consciousness without time” is and what could comeafter it. Could you give us your idea of the “new series”? Would it be another triad about the “soul”?
My second question is about time and the motifs you found in Ada. Would you say that the threads
linking these “motifs”̶as you call them̶throughout the book and in the lives of Van and Ada form
an image of Nabokov’s philosophical concept of Time? By linking them with the power of Van and
Ada’s memory, he seems to liberate Van and Ada from the limitations of chronological time andspace. Is this why Van as narrator weaves them into the story?
My third question is on Popper. How does Popper conceptualize memory, which is for Nabokov theloyal, resourceful and trustworthy partner in the face of reality, death and loss?

Brian Boyd
Dear Shoko,
Thanks for your questions.
Question 1: That triad is Nabokov’s not mine. So what he means by “Consciousness without time（the” was known best only to him. But I suspect it’s something along thefuture of the immortal soul）
lines of the passage from The Gift:

34

Shoko Miura and Brian Boyd

I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exitfrom the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, ‘but I refuse to
see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job’（Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45）. And thenagain: the unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed（life as a kind ofjourney）is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us
always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; thedoor, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. ‘For our stay-at-home senses the mostaccessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with thedisintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the cyesockets of the flesh and our transformation into
one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory
insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.’（Ibid. p. 64）.（309―10）

Question 2: Yes, I think the motifs in Ada（and the whole structure of the novel）reflect aspects of
Nabokov’s sense of time. This passage
The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested andtasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large
theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer
morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered all over the parquet in 1888; a russet blackhatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of ayoung English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge’s prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in
1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three,confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side
while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled
quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such
images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven--except, perhaps, in one matter whichhappens to be hard to settle.（545―46）

links both the element of succession（the chronological dates）and the resistance to succession（inmemory, in collocating and multiplying references to the same element, as a motif does）in a way thatmakes Nabokov feel he’s getting closer to, if not the texture of time, then to the texture oftimelessness. Or that’s my answer today!
In Question 3, you ask “How does Popper conceptualize memory, which is for Nabokov the loyal,resourceful and trustworthy partner in the face of reality, death and loss?” Here you’ve put your finger
on a key difference between Nabokov and Popper: for Nabokov, memory is subjectively central, ameasure of one’s knowing one has lived（hence “Speak, Memory” as the title of his autobiography,“Conclusive Evidence,” to use its earlier title, of his having lived）. But Popper is not interested muchin memory in that subjective sense, sustaining the self（although he had an excellent memory too）;
he’s more interested in problems, in what we can resolve now or in the future, so, in the case ofmemory, explaining it as a scientific problem, as part of the brain or the self. So, in The Self and Its
Brain（1977）, which he co-wrote with neuropsychologist Sir John Eccles, he lists various kinds ofQuestions and Answers

35

memory, including especially（7）The continuity-producing memory. In connection with this there exist several interesting theories. It is, or soit seems to me, related to what Henri Bergson [1896], [1911] calls “pure memory”（as opposed to “habits”）, [142]a record of all our experiences in their proper temporal order. This record, however, is not according to Bergson
recorded in the brain, or in any matter: it exists as a purely spiritual entity.（The function of the brain is to act as afilter for the pure memory, to prevent it from intruding on our attention.）It is interesting to compare this theory
with the experimental results obtained by Penfield and Perot [1963] by stimulating selected regions of the exposed
brains of conscious patients, described by Eccles in chapter E8: Bergson might perhaps have claimed that theseexperiments support his theory, since they prove the existence of a perfect record of（at least some）past
experiences. However, as Eccles points out, we have no such reports from non-epileptic patients; besides,
Penfield was stimulating the brain, rather than preventing it from acting as a Bergsonian filter. It still seems themost likely conjecture that the continuity-producing memory is not perfectly stored; neither in the mind nor in thebrain, and that Penfield’s amazing discoveries show only that certain splinters of it may be perfectly stored insome people̶perhaps only in epileptics. The normal memory of past situations does not, of course, have thecharacter of immediate re-experience, but rather of a dim “I remember that” or “I remember how”.（141―42）

You can see how far from VN that is!
I joked with Akiko before writing my paper, seeing how much could go into it, that I might need towrite a whole book on the topic! But now, thinking a little more about your question, I do have theidea for a new book̶the seventh book project I have in line̶on Nabokov and Popper as two giantsof twentieth-century achievement, as I at least see them, sharing a belief in the endlessness of
discovery, but also contrasting yet in complementary ways: one an artist, the other a thinker, one
subjectivist, the other objectivist, one totally individualist, the other individualist but also recognizing
the centrality of social interdependence.

Shoko Miura
Thank you, Brian, for your quick reply. I apologize for not being so quick with mine. Thinking ofquestions to ask Akiko and Zoran took a lot of reading and research. But this symposium gave me achance to get back to serious studying and exposure to the unfamiliar field of analytic philosophy. I
find it fascinating. I am very grateful for your very clear answers to my three questions. I have twoquestions to ask.
Your reply to my first question about the soul and the hereafter brought me back to The Gift, which I
must reread again. I have another, broader question for you. As you remember, in Nabokov 101 in St.
Petersburg, you and Sasha Dolinin exchanged exciting arguments on Ada and The Gift. There is a gapof 31 years and two languages between these novels. Rereading The Gift after rereading Ada, as you
must have done many times, do you see changes in Nabokov’s philosophical conjectures about time?

36

Shoko Miura and Brian Boyd

In your reply to my Question 2, you quoted Nabokov’s delightful passage about the Past. I agree that
Nabokov’s Ada weaves “the texture of timelessness,” as you brilliantly phrased it, through motifs
occurring in memorable scenes of the past. I feel that by recurring throughout the book, like Wassily
Kandinsky’s colors and shapes in his abstract paintings, Nabokov’s motifs rise out of chronologicalsuccession and resonate with each other outside time, forming another world of perception in thereader’s mind. And this leads to my new second question, which is also linked to your reply to myprevious Question 3.
According to Popper and Eccles, neuropsychological experiments proved that there exists “purememory” in the human brain, but it is prevented from our awareness by what is called a “Bergsonian
filter.” Only a select few, if at all, can have a glimpse of memory which can be “re-experienced.”（Ihope this is an accurate summary of your citation from their book, The Self and the Brain, 1977.）If
you agree that Nabokov’s pursuit of truth about time involves creating another world of perception
through recurring motifs, is there not a parallel between Popper and Eccles’ assertion and Nabokov’s
writing of Ada? Nabokov died in 1977, so he could not have read the book, and I do not intend to see
any influence, but as you said, “memory is subjectively central” for Nabokov. If so, can Terra, in
short, be seen as “pure memory” for Van?

Brian BoydThanks again, Shoko, for your responses and questions.
I think Nabokov’s attitude to time was remarkably consistent from before The Gift to after Ada,
indeed, all through his mature years（say, from 1925 on）. There is the same sense of theinexhaustibility of the past, the bountiful immensity and yet the cruel confinement of the present, andthe unpredictability and openness of the future; and simultaneously, an intuition that some richer modeof or access to time lies surrounding human consciousness, although unimaginable and even logicallycontradictory to human reason.
That said, Ada is different because Nabokov through Van is also trying here to express a philosophy oftime in which the phenomenology of time, the subjective experience of time in the present, is central,and in which time is rigorously severed from space（perhaps this last part is a reflection of Nabokov’s
meditations on time and space for Speak, Memory, including that “triadic” series in 1951 that I quoted
in my original paper）.
I’m not sure I quite understand your second question-cluster. I think both Popper and Eccles are
reluctant to suggest that experience is perfectly preserved, even if brain stimulation in epileptic
patients seems to give them a sense of reliving a past experience.
In Ada, especially, Nabokov does try to show the infinitely rich patterns in experience, or in the
personal past（the storehouse of experience）, where it’s the storing̶and therefore the possible

Questions and Answers

37

collocation of̶different parts of the past, rather than the succession between past moments, thatmatters more.
No, I wouldn’t say that Terra is “pure memory” for Van. Terra seems objectively out there, even if
dimly perceived through the vagaries and visions of the insane. Terra doesn’t, for Van, contain his
past with Ada, it’s something quite different. I’ve been working hard on Ada for half a century（therough distance in time between events in Terra and Antiterra, according to the novel!）and while I
enjoy the discrepancies and the disjunctions between the two planets, I’m far from saying I understandwhat they mean.

Shoko Miura
Brian, thank you for your reply to my second batch of questions. I am sorry my questions weresometimes muddled. Philosophy of time was a difficult subject for me. As always, yourcomprehensive and accurate understanding of Nabokov and his works is amazing. I am learning somuch from your replies. Though I have attended the Kyoto Reading Circle on Ada both in person andonline for ten years or more（but far shorter than your half a century!）, Terra is still a bottomless
mystery to me. Your comments this time on Popper and Nabokov, however, brought me closer towhat life, death and time meant for Nabokov. Now I feel I can read with a more vibrant framework inwhich to read Ada, Speak, Memory, and other works.
Best wishes for your future writing projects. In the meantime, I might think up more questions to ask
you. This is such a precious opportunity.

38

Paper

Zoran Kuzmanovich
Paper“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”:
Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He isfull of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant, without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
-The Books of Bokonon（Vonnegut, 1965, p. 187）

Why Currie and Nabokov? Several answers suggest themselves: both Currie’s “Empathy for1
objects”（2011）and Nabokov’s “Man and Things”（1928）
examine the power of discrete objects toaffect the sensibilities of those who encounter them.
Currie also surveys possible evidence for the claim that empathic access to such objects may serve as
the basis of aesthetic experience. Nabokov’s essay meditates on the role of anthropomorphizing andpersonalizing of things2 in our efforts to understand and accommodate the world of others, objects,
and events. Finally, there is some similarity of their views regarding the author-reader relationship.
Currie insists that the value of literature is not to be found in learning about the human mind but insharing and imitating the experience of others:
I’m interested in the value of literature. One thing that people have said is valuable in literature is that we canlearn about the human mind from it. But why wouldn’t psychology lectures be a better way of learning that? Isuggest we think about our relation to literature not in terms of learning but in terms of sharing an experience withthe author [...]Writing great literature is a very good way of showing that you have the kinds of qualities thatpeople will like and admire. So it’s not at all surprising that people when they read great literature do so partly
because it enables them to share the point of view of somebody who they admire and to partake of their way ofseeing the world.
Transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EthnpjW3lRA&t=48s

Nabokov, too, in “Good Readers and Good Writers” imagines a possible encounter between theauthor and the reader: “Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge,
whom do you think he meets?
The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if thebook lasts forever.” As this exam Nabokov administered to his Cornell students in 1955 shows,“climbing” involves imagining and remembering the details writers put into the fictional worlds theycreate.

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

39

Courtesy of the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154361674888688&set=p.10154361674888688&type=3

Despite these commonalities, Nabokov’s and Currie’s respective essays arrive at very different
conclusions about the nature of aesthetic experience. Juxtaposing their essays results in several
questions about the assumptions behind, and consequences of, Currie’s aesthetic approach.
Currie strives to provoke by disabusing us of the ways we ordinarily think about the mind and theworkings of film and fiction. Attentive to intellectual history and to developmental and experimental
psychology, Currie consistently examines the role of imaging in our experience of art, and, since
1995, 3 consistently finds reason to oppose the claim that fiction can function as a source ofknowledge̶if by knowledge we mean “learning consistent with or supported by the best science”（TLS, 14）. It is not surprising, then, to find him, in “Empathy for Objects,” grounding his discussionof empathy in both the history of the Empathists4 and the simulative functioning of mirror neurons,
experimentally confirmed in the early 1990s:
While simulative processes underlie empathy for objects and for persons, a variety of other tasks involve
simulation, including, apparently, language processing.... When people read action-related words, the motor

40

Zoran Kuzmanovichhomunculus is activated in appropriate ways, moving its feet at the sound of the word ‘feet.’（86）Currie posits the mirror neuron systems as the motor of embodied simulation, uncontrolled
neurophysiological imitation that serves as the kinetic basis of intersubjectivity. In “The Moral
Psychology of Fiction”（1995）Currie extends this kind of simulative activity even into theimaginative perception necessary to engage fictional characters: “Part of engaging with a fictional
work consists of imagining those things which it makes fictional . . . imaginings about the story’s
characters and situations” ... “‘I come to simulate the thoughts, feelings and attitudes I would havewere I in that situation’（54―55）.5
In “Imagination and Simulation”（1995）Currie adds the stipulation that “fictions function to drive
imagination, [and] they do so in ways of which the subject is sometimes unaware, and over which thesubject rarely exerts conscious control.” While this 1995 line of reasoning may sound as if Currie
allows for the reader’s or viewer’s direct, automatic, and unconscious inner imitation of a Humbert’s
or an Iago’s actions and feelings, such allowance is no longer the case. By 19976, Currie closed thatloophole, arguing for a mediating factor he calls a “hypothetical reader of fact.” His argument
requires a summary: as readers of fiction, we experience simulated emotive contact with fictional
characters even though we know that they do not exist and thus their intentions, events, and feelings
cannot take place. That paradox forces us into imagining or simulating the mental states of a“hypothetical reader of fact,” someone who does not experience the characters and their beliefs,
desires, and actions as fictious but as factual and real:
I simulate that hypothetical reader, and acquire off-line versions of his（relevant）beliefs and desires. But how do
I also simulate his I-states - the off- line beliefs and desires he got as a result of simulating [a fictional character,zk] Easy: I do that by having exactly those I-states myself. Simulating someone’s I-states is different fromsimulating his beliefs and desires. I simulate someone’s belief that P by having belief that P; I simulate someone’s
belief that P by having exactly that state of belief that P.（Emotion and the Arts, 69）

Question #1. How do we select between off-line and online beliefs and desires?
If I understand Currie correctly, the I-states he posits as taking place within the hypothetical readersduring their imaginative perception/simulation of a fiction are “off-line” in the sense that when I
simulate the hypothetical reader’s simulation of a fictional character’s states of mind, my sensorimotor
simulations do not motivate actions they would cause “online” were I empathetically simulating themental states of someone I encounter in my non-make-believe directly perceived life. The conclusion
Currie draws from this act of mirroring simulations is that fiction-generated emotions, even when
productive of empathy, are not genuine since they are not action- prompting beliefs.
But if we now remember Currie’s belief that we read fiction in order “to share the point of view ofsomebody who[m we, zk] admire and to partake of their way of seeing the world,” we thus end up
with a layer of imaginative perception that looks suspiciously like belief, a Holden Caulfield type of
belief that it would be a good thing to have the real author as a “terrific friend” we could call on thephone whenever we felt like it. Caulfield’s belief that an admirable story implies an admirable author
strikes me as naïve. Novelists like Philip Roth have pointed out to their actual friends the flaw in this“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

41

conception of the implied author7: “I have chosen to make art out of my vices rather than what I taketo be my virtues.” Currie’s belief in sharing the experience of admired authors also seems
contradicted by his caution: “to the extent that creative writers are subject to the emotional distortions
we associate with bipolar disorder, we can expect that they, on balance, will be more prone than therest of us to misjudge the emotional impact of imagined scenarios.”（TLS, 15）
Question #2: How do we choose the source of our empathy and yet experience immersion?
While it is easy to accept that what Currie calls “bodily imaginings” play a role in our engagementof others and of fictional characters, “bodily” empathy for objects requires a specific example. Curriechooses Rubens’ Descent from the Cross（1612―1614）and provides a firsthand report:

When I look at Rubens’ Descent from the Cross with the right kind of attention I am made directly, noninferentially aware of the heaviness of Christ’s represented body, and of the sense of strain represented in thebodies of the mourners as they lower the body. I may, in addition, have experiences constituted by the coming toconsciousness of motoric simulations of bodily strain, but I think we do well to distinguish these from perceptualstates.（90）

Currie’s sense of the heaviness and the strain is a result of his body’s neurological mirroring of theactions depicted by the painting. But what tells him that the people in the painting are mourners? One
has to guess inference, since Currie does not report neurological readiness to simulate crying, the act
depicted in this detail from the painting and usually associated with grief and mourning.

42

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Stripped of its background contextual implicature（Who are these people effecting Jesus’s descentfrom the cross? Why is one woman looking away from the action and the only one crying? Why isthis the central panel of the triptych? Etc.）, the ignored contextual implication makes it possible toposit that the kinetic response Currie describes could just as easily have come from another input, forexample, this illustration from Winnie the Pooh.

It is not my intent here to caricature Currie’s position or his feelings. I simply do not understand why

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

43

his model of human cognition foregoes any contextualization or any recognition of the differences in
the cognitive environment. Part of me even believes that Currie would not object to this juxtapositionof works by Rubens and E. H. Shepard. Why? “Empathy for Objects” concludes with the claim that
empathy for aesthetic objects does not differ from empathy for all other objects like chairs, trees,
sculptures, and buildings:
We need not be looking at a chair with aesthetic attention in order to activate a motor simulation of sitting on it.
We might say that empathic responses are of special relevance to understanding our relations to the aesthetic,
because these responses become particularly salient when we are in the presence of aesthetic things. But it is hard
to see why this should be.

Currie seems to be invoking Wittgenstein of Zetel to explain the difficulty:§§627. It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external
world. §§629. “Seeing and imaging are different phenomena.” ̶The words “seeing” and “imaging” havedifferent meanings. [...]§§632. When we form an image of something we are not observing. 8

Wittgenstein reasons that because imagination, unlike perception, is controlled by our will, theimagery it provides can be only what we have put there, and therefore such imagery cannot be
productive of new information about the world.9 Of course, Currie（and Wittgenstein）are right:
artworks are objects and they represent things, so our empathic responses to such objects are reallyresponses to our own bodily- simulation-aided mental representations of such objects. We may notalways be aware of our responses, but even if we were, Currie concludes that because they are“difficult to control, and with the potential to distract us from the work; I don’t think we know muchabout the circumstances in which, or the ways in which, consciousness of these states will deepen our
experience of the work rather than detracting from it.”（91）Currie has not backed off this particular
notion of empathy and has proclaimed elsewhere that “Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a rolein literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is.”（Artsand Minds, back cover）
However, if empathy is not the psychologically plausible mechanism of a reader’s/viewer’s
absorption, we are left to our own devices to posit a better mechanism or process responsible for our
becoming immersed in a fiction or transported out of our “online” cognitive environment to the point
where engagement with the fictional is so intense and immediate that it generates emotions. Nor is it
clear why our emotionally vivid sense of serious moral and psychological engagement with thethought-world of the fiction in the end must prove to be a false sense, without any special relevance.
Question #3: Who Owns Reality?
While it is not clear to me what Currie means by “the right kind of attention” in his description of
his engagement with “Descent from the Cross,” he does not see the kinetic empathy he reports as aperceptual state. Instead, he treats it as an irrelevant emotion:

44

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Emotions are good when it comes to forming and maintaining a relationship with your baby, but they are as easily
triggered by sentimental ballads and horror movies. You might hope to find some special emotional reactions,highly sensitive to the truth about human psychology--let me know when you have found one.（TLS, 15）

Emotions a child learns through simulation of its parents are good, but emotions are not good in
the context of empathically engaging aesthetic objects since they do not lend themselves to inferences,
generate no propositions, and thus offer no “truth about human psychology.” I intend to use
Nabokov’s essay to look for just such truth, and I would like to start where Currie stops: considering
the mental states of people responding to paintings. Here are Nabokov’s imaginings of possible
responses to a framed painting of an unnamed woman:
One person looks at it and, with the cold admiration of a connoisseur, analyzes the colors, the chiaroscuro, thebackground. Another, a craftsman, filled with a certain complex sensation, in which images of his craft mix̶theglue, the yardstick, the decorative molding, the firmness of the wood, the gilding̶looks at the frame with aprofessional eye. A third, a friend of thewoman depicted, discusses the likeness or, pierced for a moment by oneof those faint recollections that are like the street urchins of memory, sees and hears with great clarity（albeit for a
moment）that very woman put down her handbag and gloves on the table and say: “Tomorrow is the last sitting,thank God. The eyes have come out well.” And, finally, a fourth looks at the painting with the thought that today
the dentist will cause him a great deal of pain, so that each time he sees this painting, he will recall the buzzing of
the drill and how the dentist’s breath smelled.（“Man and Things”）

The responses Nabokov enumerates include admiration, analysis, sensation, comparison,
involuntary synaesthetic memory or visual/auditory hallucination of a past event that may or may not
be occasioned by empathy, and what Nabokov has called elsewhere “future recollection”（Lolita 86）
Of these, only the second, the craftsman’s “complex sensation” of the objects and processes necessary
to make the frame resembles Currie’s required response of “bodily simulation.” All other responses
involve more or less conscious cognitive activity. Nabokov does not seem to privilege any particularresponse to the painting but posits the responses as necessarily involving the absent past（“street
urchins of memory”）and the possibly synaesthetic future（buzzing of the drill and the smell of thedentist’s breath that will come to be associated with the painting）. When in 1962 Peter Duval Smith
asked Nabokov10 about the relation between art and reality, Nabokov’s answer took very much thesame form he used to describe the possible responses to the painting:Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as
specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist
than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reachedwith that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never
get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence
unquenchable, unattainable.（Strong Opinions, 10―11）

While in the end, Nabokov does not claim that art provides us with full “access” to reality, he doessuggest that there are cognitive gains: “gradual accumulation of information” accomplished through“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

45“the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science”（Strong Opinions）that allows us to “getnearer and nearer” to reality. That is, if reality is made up of matter, energy, and information. Nothingin Currie’s arguments rules out information as a dimension of reality; in fact, his insistence that fiction
produce new information about the world seem to posit information in just such a light. But nothingaccounts for the fact that viewing the painting involves adopting a specific experiential point of viewby the subjects of their respective experiences. It is a question of ownership: Currie’s images of thepainting’s stress and weight are not mine. Neurophysiology cannot tell the whole story here without
perspectival subjectivity of the sort Nabokov enumerates. If Currie is a sentient being, then what hefeels consciously or subconsciously are his mental objects. He cannot be merely an unreflective
fMRI-like witness to his experience of “Descent from the Cross.” As Nabokov puts it, “not only isthere no object without man, but there is no object without a definite relationship to it from the humanside.”
Question #4: What’s the time?
In addition to the painting, Nabokov’s other examples of emphatic “things” in “Man and Things”
include a porcelain pig, a suicidal coin, old trousers, spent matches, ashtrays, ancient vending
machines, childhood toys, and his neighbor’s boots. If one asks what links those objects, one is forced
to push precisely toward the conclusion Currie did not want to draw: as objects of human empathy, in
combination, they seem to make a narrative and may even serve as the basis of aesthetic appreciationand offer knowledge of the world. Let’s start with the porcelain pig:
At a fair, in a remote little town, I won a cheap porcelain pig at target shooting. I abandoned it on the shelf at thehotel when I left town. And in doing so, I condemned myself to remember it. I am hopelessly in love with thisporcelain pig. I am overcome by an unbearable, slightly silly tenderness when I think of it, won, andunappreciated, and abandoned.

The pig, now as remote as the little town, by its very remoteness generates “unbearable” tenderness.
If tenderness or any other emotion or thought could be read by a cognitive neuroscientist, would she
be able to read out of such a map a temporal and thus causal sequence? By failing to become a valued
souvenir, the pig was betrayed and has in turn become a relic, a memory of something abandoned but
repeatedly remembered, an instant of time that drags the history of the event back into the private timeand consciousness of the first person narrator. Is the cognitive gain the awareness that our involuntary
memory will not let us forget our betrayals? Nabokov’s narrator confesses to not being able to erase
the gap between the pig’s absence in fact and its presence in his memory̶the pig has become an
extension of himself, a phantom limb provoking a mourning for some unappreciated, underdeveloped,
and abandoned past facet of the narrator’s formerly occurrent self.
The forgotten pitied porcelain pig thus radiates both desire and loss, memory and imagination.
That is some pig! It may have been cheap, but there are no substitutes for it. We do not need souvenirs
from an experience we can repeat or for which we can find ready substitutions. Yet the experience oflosing/forgetting/betraying the pig is repeated because some mechanism of memory recorded theevent, the memory of the event, and the emotional meaning of that memory. While it is possible that

46

Zoran Kuzmanovich

the love for the porcelain pig emerges strictly out of chemicals within the nervous system, it may also
be possible that art records events and their meanings in the language of emotions whose cognitive
dimension will emerge only in due time.
Question #5: Why is the Qualia Problem a Problem?
Because Currie’s theory of empathy has no room for either time or loss（those inevitable axes ofthe subtexts that make fiction into literature）, if we apply his theory of reading to Nabokov’s story
about the porcelain pig, we must posit a hypothetical reader of fact who must in turn conclude that
Nabokov’s narrator is either pretending to be in love with a porcelain pig or is simply deluded.11
Since all fiction-making involves pretense, that is the less interesting alternative here.
Because Curry proposes that we deal with fictional objects as we do with actual ones, the delusion
path is the far richer one, especially if we remember Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols,” where ayoung Jewish man’s delusory relation to objects is diagnosed as “referential mania.” He suffers froma condition where he perceives the non-human world, however random or irrelevant its objects may
be, as connected to his personal situation in negative or even threatening ways. His world strikes him
as “a hive of evil.” The reader of “Signs and Symbols” would be a good candidate for an fMRI scanof her brain’s pre-frontal and anterior cingulate regions, where the deluded young man would
presumably be experiencing functional disconnections in his hyperdopaminergic activity.12 While
such a scan of neuronal firings would perhaps reveal that the reader is “seeing” something, the next
required step, interpreting what is “seen,” has so far not been taken or discussed in the literature ofscientific experiments. As a result, the fMRI scan still cannot tell us what the reader was “seeing” norname the steps in explaining how such seeing/imaging/simulating is occurring. And furthermore, itwould not be possible to gauge scientifically what effect the experience of simulating the referentialmania would be having on the reader. The subject/object and the mind/brain dichotomies would
remain in place, and that of course would bring us to the qualia problem.
Guven Guzeldere defines qualia as “experiences [that, zk] have ... non-causal, nonrepresentational,
non-functional and perhaps non-physical properties”（Guzeldere 37）. Michael Tye reduces thedefinition to the phenomenal character of the “immediate subjective ‘feel’ of experience”（Tye 619）.
The “qualia problem,” in the simplest possible terms, is a problem because the properties andactivities of consciousness are not reducible to, and may not parallel, the properties or activities of thebrain.13 Explanations of the way our nerves act leave out many features of our mental lives. What
exactly is the immediate feeling of love for an abandoned porcelain pig? The “qualia problem” does
have a consequence: since utterances about one’s one mental states are not subject to external
validation, reported love for the porcelain pig would have the same degree of incorrigibility or
certainty as the statement “I am sad at the loss of the porcelain pig souvenir,” or “I am experiencing
melancholy or nostalgia for a particular temporal slice of my life.” And since the self is in one sense
the organization of all the conscious and unconscious attitudes a human being can have towards allthat is sensible, Karl Jaspers tells us that we cannot simply tell the narrator of “Man and Things” that
he is mistaken.
To say simply that a delusion is a mistaken idea [or belief] which is firmly held by the patient and which cannot becorrected gives only a superficial and incorrect answer to the problem [...] All experience of reality [...] has a root

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

47

in the practice of living [...] Delusion proper [...] implies a transformation in our total awareness of reality（Jaspers
1913/1963, pp. 93―94）.

Nabokov was very interested in such transformations, and here he makes it clear that the total
awareness of reality he is concerned with has to do with our “anthropomorphizing ardor”:
We have christened the parts of things, weapons, machines, with words we use for different parts of our bodies,making these diminutives as if we were talking of our children. “Toothlet, eyelet, earlet, hairlet, noselet, footlet,
back, handle, head.”

Susanne K. Langer explains our anthropomorphizing as an evolutionary device:
Bodily feelings may be the first thing man projected and thus, all unwittingly, imputed to everything he objectified
as material bodies in his world. The very existence of ‘things’ is modeled on his own inward expectation ofstrains, directions, and limitations of his felt actions; the wholeness and simplicity of molar objects is that of his
own soma.（48）1415

Unlike Langer, Nabokov is also concerned with the consequences of consciously or unconsciously
seeing the world as a human likeness: “In the lazy positioning of a woolen shawl draped over the backof a chair there’s something moping: oh, how the shawl longs for someone’s shoulders!”16 But he also
notes that the empathy generated by “lend[ing] things our feelings,” that is, by projecting our own
fears, hopes, desires, or griefs onto objects, also generates some risks:
It is as though I am surrounded by little monsters, and it seems to me that the little teeth of the clock are gnawing
away at time, that the “ear” of the needle stuck into the curtain is eavesdropping on me, that the teapot spout, witha little droplet poised on its tip, is about to sneeze like a man with a cold.

The sensation Nabokov describes here is certainly not the Wordsworthian capacity to “see into the lifeof things” activated by “the deep power of joy.”17 The life of things seen in this way generates
anything but joy. Nabokov presents us with the case where we prefer not to be imagining but cannot
help it. Why would we bother to simulate imaginatively frustration and anxiety, feelings we normally
don’t value? Why would we appreciate fiction that generates those feelings? In fact, why crave andimagine and simulate narratives at all? The answers Nabokov and Currie give to these questions makethe differences in their approaches to art the most obvious.
One answer Currie gives in the co-authored “Art and Delusion”（2003）is that such imagining is asign of unhealthy “mental economy” because while “narrative seems to be a significant feature of
normal mental life, one implication of this paper is that the best example we have of a life pervasively
experienced as narrative is the life of madness.”（574）
Nabokov, who thought that for the writer, “the art of seeing” implied seeing the world “as thepotentiality of fiction,”18 saw such imaginings as affecting our knowledge of, and attitude towards, theworld.

48

Zoran Kuzmanovich

We fear letting̶not for anything do we want to let̶our things return to the nature they came from. It is almost
physically painful for me to part with old trousers. I keep letters I will never reread. A thing is a human likeness,and sensing this likeness, its death, its destruction, is unbearable for us.
What do I care about a pair of boots left by my neighbor outside his door? But were my neighbor to die tonight,
what human warmth, what pity, what live and tender beauty would these two old, shabby boots, with their eyelet
flaps sticking out like little ears, left standing at the door, radiate over me.

Despite the eyed and eared boots, Nabokov stops short of joining Cézanne in saying “The landscapethinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.”19 The boots do not transport themselves into thenarrator, but they do in a sense occupy the narrator’s consciousness by existing in two time frames andthus creating the story. As with the painting and the porcelain pig, Nabokov connects empathy withsensed changes in the flow of time. It is the interruptions in our customary sense of before and afterthat create radiant discontinuities. The radiance is at once a projection and a discovery.20 The deadman’s absence becomes an act of abandonment no different than the abandonment of the porcelain
pig. Puppy-like, the boots exist in impossibility, waiting for the owner who is never coming back.
Nabokov also points to a dimension in things that eludes us and thus frustrates human designs:
And note, by the way, how eagerly and how adroitly the very slightest thing strives to slip away from man, andhow inclined it is to suicide. A dropped coin, with the haste of a desperate fugitive, traces a wide arc on the floor
and disappears into the farthest corner under the farthest sofa.

Final Question: Can cognitive pornography teach grief?
We’ve reached that point in the paper where I need to explore the implications of the differences
between Nabokov’s and Currie’s approaches. The best way to do so is to consider the underlying
structures of the two essays. Currie’s leads us to a recognition（stated elsewhere）that we must accept
his conclusion. We need to recognize that “when we engage seriously with great literature we do notcome away with more knowledge, better abilities, clarified emotions or deeper human sympathies.”
The best outcome we can hope for is that we may get to “exercise capacities that let us explore afascinating, demanding conception of what human beings are like.” But since even that conception is“probably a wrong one,” we should “make do” with “the pleasures of pretended learning,” anacceptance that makes literature into a form of “cognitive pornography.”（TLS, 15）Extracting a compelling structure out of Nabokov’s essay requires that we somehow imagine aworld in which the “betray[al]” of a porcelain pig, the imaginary death of the boot-wearing neighbor,the real deaths of ancient kings and a diphtheria-infected uncle, the anticipated loss of a child’s toys,
and the suicide of a coin be seen as proper, formally justified, preparation for this passage:And, no matter how hard man tries, he, too, decays, and his things decay, too. And better than lying like amummy in a painted sarcophagus in a museum draft, it is far more pleasant, and somehow more honest, to decay
in the ground to which in their turn toys, and linotypes, and toothpicks, and automobiles will return.

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

49

The cognitive leap we need to make in order to avoid having to accept Currie’s recommendation isbased on two questions: “More pleasant and more honest for whom?” and “Why is this kind of decay
more poetically right?” To get at one convincing answer to both questions, I will borrow a strategy outof Currie’s book and invoke Wittgenstein’s meditation on grief in Philosophical Investigations:“Grief” describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life. If a man’s bodily
expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have thecharacteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy.（174）Wittgenstein sees grief as a state not susceptible to the regimen of measurement. He then separates
grief from pain by noticing that language already reflects the difference as the sensation and durationof pain may be measured:
For a second he felt violent pain. “̶Why does it sound queer to say: “For a second he felt deep grief”? Only
because it so seldom happens?”（174）Wittgenstein posits language as the instrument by which grief, something whose depths we cannot
plan, something internal and unmeasurable, makes itself somewhat but not completely intelligible. In
other words, Wittgenstein relies on the same mode of explanation Nabokov uses to explain eyelets andearlets. They may also agree that our language makes the world intelligible in the very act of our
projecting ourselves into that world. Wittgenstein’s insistence that the world is all that is the case21
also suggests that to the degree it gives us access to other minds language functions as a form of
empathy. If we now ask the reasons for Nabokov’s linking his sequence of “things” with the sensationand comparative value of decay, “grief” suggests itself as a possible reason.22
The contemplation of death at the end of Nabokov’s essay is not an outcry against Fate, theinjustice of dying, or even the impermanence created by little teeth gnawing at the nipple of time. It is
not a sudden epiphany about the value of life, not a conciliation, nor a restoration of some disturbed
moral order. In fact, it seems merely an expression of preference. Death is but an unceremonious
signature of completion. Yet, when looked at in the light of a string of empathy-provoking things, thecorpse is the final object and state in the series, blurring and finally eliminating all distinctions
between self and the objects of its empathy. We are left with the image of the artist as a corpse andthe recognition that（1）we do not have bodies but are bodies, and（2）that in our empathy for things
we have merely delayed or tried to evade the realization that the body, like that runaway coin, is thething that runs away from us. Currie has identified “thinking that wherever I happen to be marks thecentre of the universe”（TLS, 15）as a “crazy error” of the type that should warn us against seeking
cognitive gains from literature. Yet, at the moment of our deaths, we are precisely that center. As thehundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses go off-line permanently, a world
centered on us disappears, and the suddenly articulate moaning ghost of the lovingly concealed
porcelain pig reminds us that one psychological truth literature teaches us is that it requires acceptanceof the magical and the paradoxical. If there is such a mental state as a hypothetical reader of fact, it
may very well be the means by which during aesthetic experience we simultaneously trigger andrepress our consciousness of our own death. And fiction may very well be a form of magic that ushers

50

Zoran Kuzmanovich

death onstage while pretending that it is also possible to chase it off.
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov the butterfly collector speaks of “cherishing” nostalgia and of his“hypertrophied sense of lost childhood.” Nabokov’s essay discussed here collects and mourns lost
objects, but it also mourns an object that has not been lost yet. The “moping” Nabokov refers to ismelancholia, and Agamben, in a departure from Nabokov’s bête noire, Freud, defines such an emotion
as “withdrawal from a good that had not yet been lost”（44）. Agamben also points out thatmelancholia is “not so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative
capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost”（45）, a position compatible with Nabokov’s
notion of artistic perception as the ability to glimpse not just one’s own extinction but other people’s“future recollections.” Literature often exists between Agamben’s two “not’s（my emphasis, zk）andthe paradoxical nature of our imaginative capacity when fueled by empathy requires that cognitionand emotion, perception and imagination, belief and desire be porous and not easily separable, at least
not to the degree Currie requires. Without such porousness, intercultural empathy as significant
imaginative, intellectual, emotional, and political participation in another person’s experienceenvisioned by President Obama may very well not be possible. Yet Obama invites us to imagine sucha possibility. I trust Currie when he admits that “it is hard to see why” [...] these [emphatic, zk]
responses become particularly salient when we are in the presence of aesthetic things.” Here again,
Wittgenstein may be helpful to both of us: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I do not know myway about.’”（Philosophical Investigations §§123）Like Aristotle who insisted that philosophy
begins in wonder, Wittgenstein suggests that a sense of dislocation from the felt and believed
certainties of our everyday world, its practical concerns, and possibly its learned delusions andprofitable ignorance23 must accompany our wondering about the worlds that are the case for others
and their beliefs. A good start is admitting to the feeling that we do not know our way about. And
since “One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief”（again Wittgenstein, PI, 190）,
empathy, as Obama defines it, is the beginning of questioning one’s beliefs that the world is as it andcannot be otherwise. Reading fiction emphatically does not instantaneously revise our values, but it
may just help us get much needed practice at imagining those “otherwise” worlds.
Greg Currie seems unwilling to engage in, and cautions against such a practice. While his wieldingof lucid logic when addressing concepts is enviable, his treatment of aesthetic objects is not. In his
thought they seem almost interchangeable and transparent and have somehow tasked themselves withthe cognitive goals usually reserved for science. Currie also seems to need art only a source of
examples necessary to test his theories of meaning, belief, and imaging.
Finally he seems to do such testing while striving for some kind of ahistorical objectivity, all thewhile avoiding self-reflection of the sort philosophers like Herder, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Feyerabend,
and Rorty regard as a precondition of philosophical thought. In his 2009 book Philosophy of
Literature Peter Lamarque proposes that philosophers of literature study “fundamental principles” and“conceptual connections” involved in the “phenomenon, common to most if not all cultures, of
elevating certain kinds of linguistic activities̶notably story-telling or poetry-making or drama to anart form issuing in products that are revered and of cultural significance.”（8）Until Currie recognizes
the differences between the tension of lowering oneself into a chair and the tension while looking at
the Rubens painting of Christ’s descent from the Cross, I fear we will not learn much from Currie
about elevation.

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

51

Works Cited
Currie, Gregory and Jon Jureidini. “Art And Delusion.” The Monist, Volume 86, Issue 4, 1 October 2003: 556―578. https://doi.
org/10.5840/monist200386429
Currie, Gregory. Arts and Minds.
https://books.google.com/books?id=cE0hGNEk_SUC&newbks=0&hl=en―. Creativity and the Insight that Literature Brings” in Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman（eds.）, The Philosophy ofCreativity: New Essays（Oxford: Oxford University Press）: 39―62.
―. “Does Great Literature Make us Better?” New York Times Opinionator（1 June 2013）, http://opinionator.blogs nytimes.
com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/?_r=0―. “Empathy for Objects,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Also available at https://www.academia.edu/8664386/Empathy_for_objects―. “Imagination and. Simulation: Aesthetics Meets Cognitive Science,” in Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications,ed. Martin Davies and Tony Stone. Blackwell, 1995: 151―169.
―. “Literature in the Psychology Lab,” Times Literary Supplement（31 August 2011）.
―. “The Moral Psychology of Fiction” in Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society edited by Stephen Davies.
1995. Also at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048409512346581―. “The Paradox of Caring: Fiction and the Philosophy of Mind.” In M. Hjort and S. Laver（eds.）, Emotion and the Arts. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 63―77.
Guzeldere, Guven. “The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide.” In Block Ned, Flanagan Owen, Guzeldere Guven, The
Nature of Consciousness, Philosophical Debates. London: The MIT Press, 1977: 1―69.
Herder, Johann Gottfried Herder, “Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft”（1799）, Aus Verstand und Erfahrung, inSprachphilosophie, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Erich Heintrel（Hamburg: Meiner, 1960: 183―227. I read this work in Serbian.
Jackson, Richard, ed. “Lives We Keep Wanting to Know,” Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1984.
Jaspers, Karl. General Psychopathology. Translated from the German Seventh Edition（1959）by J. Hoenig and M. W. Hamilton.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963.
Lamarque, Peter. Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, Rev. Ed, 2008.
Langer, Susanne K. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1989.
―. “Man and Things.” In Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, ed. Brian
Boyd and Olga Tolstoy. New York: Vintage, 2021: 68―73.
―. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage, 2011.
Oyelakin, R. T. “The Problem of Qualia”
https://academicjournals.org/journal/IJPC/article-full-text-pdf/C5DF9795828
Tye, Michael. “Consciousness, Colour and Content,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Reviewed by Fiona Macpherson. 53（213,
2003）: 619―621.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Collected Manuscripts of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Facsimile CD Rom, 1997, The Wittgenstein Archives
at the University of Bergen（ed.）, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
―. On Certainty. Trans. D. Paul, & G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975.
―. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
―. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, New York: Humanities Press, 1961.
―. Zettel. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright; Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

52

Zoran KuzmanovichEndnotes
1

Note on “Man and Things” from Think, Write, Speak, Ed. Boyd and Tolstoy: V. Sirin, “Chelovek i veshchi,” night of Jan. 13―
14, 1928. Holograph, VNA Berg. That night was the “Old New Year’s Eve”̶when magical things might happen̶of the Old
Style calendar, which émigrés still kept in mind for festive occasions. This piece was presumably a talk for the AykhenvaldTatarinov circle. Published and edited by Alexander Dolinin, “Chelovek i veshchi,” Zvezda 4（1999）, 19―24.

2

Aggarwal, Pankaj; McGill, Ann L.（1 December 2007）. “Is That Car Smiling at Me? Schema Congruity as a Basis for3

In his 1995 paper “The Moral Psychology of Fiction,” Currie sees fiction as not only capable of generating cognitive gain but

Evaluating Anthropomorphized Products.” Journal of Consumer Research. 34（4）: 468―479.
having that gain play a role in our ethics: “[A] really vivid fiction might get you to revise your values”（254）.
4

Currie lists the following empathists: Theodor Lipps, Vernon Lee（Violet Paget）, Herbert Lagerfeld, and Karl Groos.

5“The Moral Psychology of Fiction” in Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society edited by Stephen Davies.

6

Currie, G. 1997. “The Paradox of Caring: Fiction and the Philosophy of Mind.” In M. Hjort and S. Laver（eds.）, Emotion
and the Arts. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie’s skeptical vehemence has risen in tone over thefollowing pieces: “Literature in the Psychology Lab,” Times Literary Supplement（31 August 2011）; “Creativity andInsight” in Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman（eds.）, The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays（Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014）; and “Does Great Literature Make us Better?” New York Times Opinionator（1 June 2013）, http://
opinionator.blogsnytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/?_r=0

7

Philip Roth to Jack Miles, author of God, A Biography（1996）.

8

Wittgenstein, L.（1967）. Zettel.

9In reading Currie on the shortfalls of aesthetic experience, I often wished he had spent more time reading Kant, especially
Critique of Judgment, p. 212（344）: “[S]ince the reduction of a representation of the imagination to concepts is equivalent togiving its exponents, the aesthetic idea may be called an inexponible representation.” Kant’s positing of the aesthetic idea as
too rich in thought and feeling to be captured by concept or language is a warning to all of us, including Currie.

10 The Listener, LXVIII（Nov. 22, 1962）.
11 See also TLS, 14―15.
12 （Kudos to my colleague Julio Ramirez for explaining this.）
13 In Zettel, 610, Wittgenstein delivered his version of this discrepancy in the form of a question: “I saw this man years ago: now
I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in
my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored up there in any form? Why must a trace
have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds?
If this upsets our concept of causality then it is high time it was upset.”
14 Susanne K. Langer, “Art is the objectification of feeling.”
15 Susanne K. Langer, in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling（Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
16 Cf. Wittgenstein, PI 201: “A triangle can really be standing up in one picture, be hanging in another, and can in a third besomething that has fallen over.̶That is, I who am looking at it say, not “It may also be something that has fallen over,“ but“That glass has fallen over and is lying there in fragments.”
17 I should make it clear that “the life of things” Nabokov depicts is not a case of mono no aware. But it is related to pareidolia
such as the Man in the Moon or the human profile visible in the photograph of tree below.
18 Cf. Nabokov’s 1948 lecture “Good Readers and Good Writers.”
19 In “Lives We Keep Wanting to Know,” Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, ed. Richard Jackson（University of Alabama Press, 1984）.
20 As Heidegger will argue, eight years after Nabokov’s essay, in “The Origins of the Work of Art.” Heidegger too wascontemplating footwear but in a Van Gogh painting.
21 “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is at it is, and everything happens as it does

“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

53

happen: in it no value exists̶and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie
outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it
non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world”（Tractatus,§6.41）.
22 Wittgenstein on Grief, 29 June 1948: ‘Lass dich die Trauer nicht verdriessen! Du solltest sie ins Herz einlassen und auchden Wahnsinn nicht fürchten! Er kommt vielleicht als Freund und nicht als Feind zu dir und nur dein Wehren ist das Übel.
Lass die Trauer ins Herz ein, verschliess ihr nicht die Tür. Draussen vor der Tür im Verstand stehend ist sie furchtbar, aber
im Herzen ist sie’s nicht’: MS 137, 29.6.48. In MS 137, 11.7.48, roughly two weeks later, he would identify the cause of his
grief and guilt as the death of Francis Skinner seven years before.
“Don’t let grief vex you! You should let it into your heart. Nor should you be afraid of madness. It comes to you perhaps as afriend and not as an enemy, and the only thing that is bad is your resistance. Let grief into your heart. Don’t lock the door on
it. Standing outside the door, in the mind, it is frightening, but in the heart it is not.”Grief is also one more possible impulse for the invention of language, a not quite sufficient tool to share and decodechronobiological and emotional disturbances caused by human attachments to that which is no longer present but feels as if
it is. Even now, language does poorly with uncontrollable physical grief over the mourned objects still felt to be present. To
convey the urgency of one’s grief in such cases seems to require that time and grammar be tenseless. And in turn, comforting
the mourner meaningfully seems to require utterances that somehow always remain beyond language. That linguisticallyuncontainable and unintelligible dimension of grief is self-evident if you try to imagine the reaction of parents at the funeralof their child when they are ritually told “Your child is in a better place now.” But, however banal such a sentiment is when
expressed, the expression of the platitude further cements the loss and makes it less deniable to the mourners. And it also
reminds us of the incommensurability of what we perceive as true, good, and reasonable and what we are able to put intowords. However well-meant our utterances may seem to us, language is rarely innocent: we can never speak so as not to be
misunderstood. And not just at funerals.
23 I am still reluctant to count among samples of ignorance what McDermott calls “inescapable framework illusions（IFI’s）”: “abelief in free will, the persistence of the self through time, and, among humans, the universalizability of moral statements.”

54

Comments and Discussions

Zoran KuzmanovichComments and Discussions
Comment on “I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”:
Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects
Tora Koyama, Commentator
Prof. Kuzmanovich criticizes philosopher Gregory Currie’s simulationist theory of empathy forobjects comparing it to Vladimir Nabokov’s view. His argument covers a broad range of subfields inphilosophy such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Admittedly, I may
fail to see some of his important points, but I hope he generously finds my comment worth
considering.
In any case, as Prof. Kuzmanovich poses a series of questions to Currie, let me consider them inorder.
Q1: How do we select between off-line and online beliefs and desires?
As Prof. Kuzmanovich summarizes, one problem with the simulationist theory of empathy is that,
although readers of fiction empathetically simulate a fictional character and have simulated mental
states, such as sharing the character’s beliefs, those states are not genuine, as they do not motivate thereaders’ actions as the character’s mental states do in fiction. According to Currie, this problem canbe solved as follows: Readers do not simulate a fictional character directly; rather a “hypotheticalreader” simulates the character directly and has simulated mental states that motivate her actions as
the character’s states do. A reader’s simulated mental states are generated through the hypotheticalreader so that they do not motivate actions. The mental states of “hypothetical readers are “online”
and those of（actual）readers are “off-line” in the sense that the latter do not motivate actions.
Prof. Kuzmanovich criticizes Currie’s view, as far as I can understand, for naïvely considering thatreaders share the experience of the author（or someone closer than us to the author）and also for
conflicting with his other view. I am afraid that I failed to see his point, as Currie maintains, it seems
to me, that the person simulated is a fictional character rather than the author. I would be grateful toProf. Kuzmanovich for kindly correcting my misunderstandings, if any.
By the way, the question posed here by Prof. Kuzmanovich here is interesting to me. Surely it
must be explained how we select between online and off-line versions of simulated mental states. I
believe Currie would answer that the distinction between online and off-line is gradual. A mental state
can get more off-line in various ways, such as by being simulated iteratively, or by difficulty insimulating the character. Perhaps readers’ awareness of fiction has the same result because we cansuppress our impulse to action. That may involve what Currie means by “the right kind of attention”（Currie 2011, as cited in Kuzmanovich 2021）.

Comment on I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

55

Q2: How do we choose the source of our empathy and yet experience immersion?
Another criticism that Prof. Kuzmanovich levels at Currie regards his lack of contextualization,
which may imply, or be implied by, the fact that empathy for aesthetic objects does not differ from
empathy for all other objects. Prof. Kuzmanovich finds this unsatisfactory, as immersion in a fiction
would be left with no explanation. If we can be immersed in a fiction, it is presumably throughempathy. I think his concern is appropriate. Currie has to explain how immersion in a fiction can be
possible even though empathy for aesthetic objects is irrelevant to it.
Currie could reply to this criticism. I suspect that he believes he is prepared for such an objection.
The key is the notion of “the right kind of attention.” Granted, the meaning of this phrase is unclear,as Prof. Kuzmanovich points out. However, it seems to be the only apparatus in Currie’s frameworkthat can distinguish between aesthetic experiences and other experiences. I speculate that, for Currie,what makes immersion in a fiction possible（and an experience truly aesthetic）is attention rather thanempathy. This is consistent with his tendency to invoke neuroscientific findings, as attention is a hot
topic in recent neuroscientific studies. I would like to hear what Prof. Kuzmanovich thinks of that.
Q3: Who owns reality?
Prof. Kuzmanovich also criticizes Currie for an inadequate inquiry into human psychology, citing’s imagining various possible responses to a painting, including admiration, analysis,
Nabokov（2021）
sensation, comparison, hallucination of a past event, and “future recollection”（Nabokov 1989, as
cited in Kuzumanovich 2021）. Prof. Kuzmanovich seems to find Currie’s view narrow, focused on
only specific kinds of responses.
I was perplexed, however, when Prof. Kuzmanovich described this as a matter of the ownership ofreality. For Currie, there is no difference between empathy for aesthetic objects and empathy for otherobjects, so artworks give us information about the world or reality just as ordinary objects do.
Accordingly, Currie should consider the broader kinds of information that Nabokov enumerates. I
agree. But this is a matter of reality only when Nabokov’s subjective idealism is assumed.（I take
Nabokov’s metaphysics to be a kind of subjective idealism, as suggested in Boyd（2021）, the paper
also presented at this symposium.）Currie would not see reality as Nabokov does.
Moreover, even an objective idealist who agrees with the idealistic part of Nabokov’s philosophy
but does not agree with the subjective part would not think it is a matter of ownership. The 19thcentury British idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley stated that “Reality is one”（Bradley 1893）, so, for
Bradley, there is no question of the ownership of reality. Admittedly, Bradley’s philosophy sounds
odd, but it is unlikely that Nabokov knew nothing about it, as, around the turn of the 20th-century,
idealism was the standard view in British philosophy and Bradley was its central figure.
Q4: What’s the time?
The discussion of time may be the highlight of this paper. Prof. Kuzmanovich seems quite rightthat Nabokov’s examples of empathetic things, especially a porcelain pig, show the limits of Currie’s
theory. These things evoke memories and narratives, that is, things other than the bodily sensations
that Currie’s theory supposes to be involved in empathy. The empathy invoked by the porcelain pig ismore subtle and complex than the simple bodily empathy that Currie assumes.
I am very curious about the nature of that kind of empathy. Perhaps it is a different kind of

56

Tora Koyama

empathy that Curries has in mind. I suspect that the porcelain pig reveals a serious crack in thesimulationist theory of empathy.
Q5: Why is the qualia problem a problem?
Subjectivity seems to be central in Prof. Kuzmanovich’s criticism of Currie, which naturally leads
to the qualia problem. However, I was perplexed when Prof. Kuzmanovich uses the qualia problem tojustify the so-called first-person authority（see, e.g., Davidson 1984）. Philosophers andneuroscientists of consciousness try to reveal the neural correlates of consciousness. Of course, they
may simply be wrong; there may be no such correlates. However, the qualia problem itself does notentail their non-existence. According to the problem, the properties and activities of consciousness
and the brain only may not parallel, as Prof. Kuzmanovich correctly puts it. If scientists reveal thatthey are parallel, fMRI scanning would be a powerful tool to explicate the subjectivity of delusion.
For this reason, the problem of correlation between consciousness and the brain is called the easy
problem of consciousness, which opposes the hard problem of consciousness, the problem of identity
or metaphysical necessity between consciousness and the brain（Chalmers 1996）. Importantly, thelatter problem also does not justify the first-person authority by itself, as utterance about one’s own
conscious states has contents other than qualia.
Another perplexity I felt is that, although Prof. Kuzmanovich maintains that the difference in
Nabokov’s and Currie’s approaches to art is made “the most obvious” through their answers to thequestion of why we simulate narratives at all, it seems to me that they are heading in the same
direction. Currie’s answer is to blur the distinction between healthy and unhealthy mental life. Even
though narratives are an important part of our lives, a life pervasively experienced as narrative is anunhealthy one. Nabokov’s answer is to blur the distinction between narrative and delusion, because
what Prof. Kuzmanovich depicts recalls the young man of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.”
Admittedly, there is a considerable difference between Nabokov’s and Currie’s answers. Nabokovsees the matter from a metaphysical point of view while Currie sees it from an epistemological/
positivistic/realistic point of view. Perhaps that is what Prof. Kuzmanovich means. It seems to me,
however, to be a rather surprising agreement between their different points of view.
Final Question: Can cognitive pornography teach grief?
The final objection Prof. Kuzmanovich poses to Currie is probably the most serious one. Citing
Wittgenstein and ex-president Barack Obama, Prof. Kuzmanovich criticizes Currie’s theory as being
unable to explain the ordinary practice of the arts or the nature of aesthetic objects. According toCurrie’s theory of empathy, empathy for aesthetic objects does not teach us anything about how theworld might be otherwise, which artworks are supposed to teach us, because there is no difference
between empathy for aesthetic objects and empathy for ordinary objects that teaches us about theworld as it is. Consequently, his theory ignores the significance of artworks.
Although I agree with Prof. Kuzmanovich in his criticism of Currie, I have one thing I would liketo ask: Can only aesthetic objects help us to imagine such “otherwise” worlds? I suspect that scientificdiscoveries can also do the job. Surely, scientific discoveries reveal only how the world actually is,but that also is a beginning of questioning one’s beliefs that the world cannot be otherwise. The
history of science shows that scientific discoveries have repeatedly transformed our awareness ofComment on I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects

57

reality. Even the possible responses that Nabokov enumerates could be provoked by scientificdiscoveries. There must be a difference between aesthetic objects and scientific discoveries, because
empathy for scientific discoveries seems impossible.
Let me conclude my comment with the following question:
Q: Is empathy for objects the only way to realize the “otherwise” worlds?
References
Boyd, Brian,（2021）, “Nabokov and Popper: Convergences and Divergences”, paper presented at Symposium: Vladimir Nabokov
and Analytic Philosophy, the Nabokov Society of Japan, May 15th to 31st.
Bradley, Francis Herbert,（1893）, Appearance and Reality, Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, David J.,（1996）, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press.
Currie, Gregory,（2011）, “Empathy for Objects”, in Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie,（eds.）, Empathy: Philosophical andPsychological Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 82―99.
Davidson, Donald,（1984）, “First Person Authority”, Dialectica, vol. 38, no. 2/3, pp. 101―111.
Kuzmanovich, Zoran,（2021）, ““I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”,
paper presented at Symposium: Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy, the Nabokov Society of Japan, May 15th to 31st.
Nabokov, Vladimir,（1989）, Lolita, Vintage, originally published in 1955.
―（2021）, “Man and Things”, in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, ed.
by Brian Boyd & Olga Tolstoy, Vintage.

58

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Empathising into “an otherwise” world: A Response to Professor Koyama
Zoran Kuzmanovich
I thank Prof. Koyama for his careful reading of my paper and for his suggested improvements. I also
invite further communiaction. As with comments by Prof. Brian Boyd, Prof. Akiko. Nakata, and Prof.
Shoko Miura, I will respond to specific concerns I have isolated as “Comment x.” I also apologize
for the delay in responding. Reading Chalmers on problems of consciousness required more time than
I had at my disposal.

[Comment #1] “it seems to me, that the person simulated is a fictional character rather than theauthor. I would be grateful to Prof. Kuzmanovich for kindly correcting my misunderstandings,
if any.”I regret not having been clearer on this point. Currie’s concept of the “hypothetical reader of fact” isalmost 25 years old, and Currie has not used it much lately. But to my knowledge neither has hebacked away from it. That concept has always struck me as more suitable for describing the activityof a movie-goer rather than of a reader, but that is a subject for a different occasions. I am not eager
to correct your understanding, Prof. Koyama, but I am happy to explain how I arrived at myinterpretation and use of Currie’s concept. In his most extensive treatment of the hypothetical reader
of fact, “The Paradox of Caring”（1997）Currie both explicitly and implicitly makes it clear that the
hypothetical reader of fact is not simulating characters but readers. Explicitly he states that “As areader of fiction, I simulate . . . someone who is reading a factual account of whatever the work is
about”（1997: 68）. So hypothetical reader of fact treats the fiction as a report or factual account, not
as a fictional story. To such a reader, fictional character is a kind of a prop, a set of instructions forcarrying out the author’s vision of “whatever the work is about.” Implicitly, Currie connects such areader to the author again when he says that the “moral experience of fiction is primarily the productof our accepting or rejecting the invitation to become a certain kind of person: the person the novel
seems to be intended for.” Using C. P. Snow’s novel The Masters as an example, Currie concludes,that “the intended reader seems very much to be someone who shares Lewis’s outlook [the novel’s
narrator, zk], an outlook close to that of the “implied” author, and, very probably to that of the realauthor, C. P. Snow himself”（73）. However nested such intent may be（through levels of characters,
narrators, implied authors, real authors）, in the end intent in novels is placed there by the author whocollects the royalties. To me not merely the moral experience of fiction but every other experience
fiction can generate has the author as the origin or as the final filter. Whether authors always succeed
in carrying out the intentions they have for their works is a different question altogether, but Currie’s
notion of authorial intent suggests that authors hypothesize and to some degree create their readers.
[Comment #2] “I believe Currie would answer that the distinction between online and off-line isgradual. A mental state can get more off-line in various ways, such as by being simulated
iteratively, or by difficulty in simulating the character. Perhaps readers’ awareness of fiction
has the same result because we can suppress our impulse to action. That may involve what

Empathising into “an otherwise” world: A Response to Professor Koyama

59

Currie means by “the right kind of attention.”
That makes sense to me, and I would agree with you completely if reading of fictional narratives
consisted only of the readers entertaining unasserted propositions and enacting hardwired simulationsof the perceptual experience of a fictional character. But the moment the reader’s memory or
imagination that is not simulative（not imitative of a character’s or an author’s imagined perceptual
experience）enters into the act of reading, or the reader becomes conscious of the act of reading andbegins censoring her empathy and evaluating the mental states of the protagonist or the narrator, thereader becomes something between an onlooker and a participant/jury which to me seems a kind of
simultaneous online and offline mental state. In fact, there are cases of narratives such as the “cardshuffle novel” or “novel-in-a-box” where the reader is, in a sense, competing with the author to createa more engaging story. See, for example, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates（1969）, Robeet Coover’s
A Child Again, and even Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers（2016; among other things, acontemporary rewriting of the most moving passages from Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe）.
So while I certainly accept the validity of the gradualness hypothesis, I suspect there may be a kind of
a see-saw effect if iterations are involved. At least that is the pattern of response I encounterfrequently when I teach a complex work like Ulysses or Nabokov’s The Gift.
[Comment #3, Comment #5, Final question] “However, it seems to be the only apparatus in
Currie’s framework that can distinguish between aesthetic experiences and other experiences. I
speculate that, for Currie, what makes immersion in a fiction possible（and an experience truly
aesthetic）is attention rather than empathy.”
I am glad you asked this question twice, Professor Koyama, since the answer to it cuts to the heart ofthe contributions philosophy of art and literary criticism can make to each other. As you have alreadyindicated, the answer to this central question again has to do with “the right kind of attention.” Had
Currie explained which kinds of attention paid to the text by the hypothetical reader of fact heconsiders the right ones and what role empathy plays in such attention, I would not have felt the needto write the paper. It does not seem to me that by “the right kind of attention” Currie means thereader’s attention and responsiveness to the narrative’s style or other formal and aesthetic qualities, oreven the ways in which its story and plot are constructed so as to invoke and transform a real-life
events or another work of literary art. As in “Empathy for Objects,” he seems to go out of his way toargue that aesthetic experience ought not to be really separable from other experiences. Following
Moran1, he points out that there is a class of cases where we respond with emotional feeling tosituations that are not our own, current situation, such as when I recall an embarrassing moment or
think about the merely possible mishaps that confront my child（1994）. If our reactions to fictions
are puzzling, these other reactions ought to seem puzzling for the same sorts of reasons.（64）
To me, the mishaps that may confront someone’s non-fictional child include that child’s death, aconsideration which always takes that situation out of the realm of the merely possible and for reasonsquite different from my fretting that Harry Potter will hurt himself during game of quidditch. I
speculate that by using the phrase “merely possible” Currie, for the sake of his “off-line” argument,
may wish to make the child’s death situation both non-fictional and non-actual. But therein lies thebiggest difference between Nabokov’s and Currie’s aesthetics. Because for Nabokov death is the

60

Zoran Kuzmanovich

mother of beauty（and pity）, death is never “off-line” in Nabokov’s work even though many of his
narratives（including “Man and Things”）deceive us into thinking during the act of reading that welive in “a grief-proof sphere”（Lolita）, that “there is nothing to fear” and that “death is but a questionof style”（Bend Sinister）. In Nabokov’s work we never control the off-line/online switch, and ouraesthetic（and sometimes moral）sense is the compensation for not having such control. The closest
Currie seems to get to the idea of a narrative’s aesthetic dimensions is his mentioning of the readers’“susceptibility to narratorial direction” and his description of C. P. Snow’s The Masters as working “bypersuading me to engage in a certain piece of imaginative role-play, not by getting me to have false
beliefs.” And “imaginative role play” seems to be confined to vicariously trying on “the views,
values, and general outlook of others, to imitate, in a playful way, other perspectives on the world.”
Such play is “functional” since “To be critical of our own outlooks and to be willing to see theadvantages in the outlooks of others is a useful thing”（73）. Nabokov’s aethetics are a matter ofcoping with death; Currie’s（at least in this essay）seem to be about advantage building. Playfulness
and advantage seeking also separate Currie’s notions of empathy from President Obama’s, though I
agree with Currie’s notion that non-debilitating self-criticism is always a good idea.
[Comment 4] I was perplexed, however, when Prof. Kuzmanovich described this as a matter ofthe ownership of reality.... But this is a matter of reality only when Nabokov’s subjective
idealism is assumed.（I take Nabokov’s metaphysics to be a kind of subjective idealism, assuggested in Boyd（2021）, the paper also presented at this symposium.） Currie would not see
reality as Nabokov does.
I regret the perplexing, and I will not speak for Nabokov here. I was trying to point out that in even inneurophysiology, an evidentiary level of reality Currie seems to value over verbal reports ofinvoluntary empathy, the pattern of neurons that “light up” during simulation studies is always
someone’s psychophysical pattern and thus still hopelessly subjective. I also mean my reply to thiscomment to help resolve the possible confusion I may have created with my paragraphs on qualia. I
do not have your familiarity with either Kripke’s conceivability argument or Chalmers’ double aspect
theory in part because I tend to do very poorly when imagining brains in a vat or zombies, but on theface of it Nabokov’s hypothesis that reality is “unquenchable” infinite series of information layers
where infinite consciousness and the finite brain can never be completely identical seems perfectlycompatible with my admittedly very limited understanding of Chalmers’ proposed relation between
informational and phenomenal states, systems, and mechanisms. I would be happy to take our
discussion of this point off-line and profit from your much greater familiarity with the problems ofconsciousness. I am quite intrigued by Chalmers’ so-far underspecified notion of “physically realized
information”（285―86）.
Q: Is empathy for objects the only way to realize the “otherwise” worlds?
Currie seems to think so:
By treating our responses to fictional characters and situations as a matter of off-line simulation, we can unify our
response to fiction with our empathetic responses to the situations of others, our earlier selves, or people of ourown imagining. Sorrowing for Jago, worrying about my child’s future, and shuddering over the disaster that was

Empathising into “an otherwise” world: A Response to Professor Koyama

61

my first date all get an explanation in terms of a single mental mechanism with respectable psychologicalcredentials: simulation.（“The Paradox of Caring” 71）

I hope that Currie turns out to be wrong about this, in part because of your astute comment about thenature of scientific discoveries and because at some level our exchange here about Currie’s theory isan effort to make our respective intellectual worlds open to others even if we accept the fact that we
can never speak or write so as not be misunderstood. Such openness is what makes them “otherwise”
worlds, and the hope is that our observations and interpretations produce the text of a reality with anever smaller number of situations that perplex. I confess I do not feel the need to make memory,
judgment, fantasy, imagination, desire, regret, and empathy into a “single mental mechanism” either
on- or off-line. I do not think or feel that I live in a world that is permanently observable and thus
objective and universally accepted. Perhaps that is why I am unable to explain why such totalizing
seems to matter so much to Currie, but thanks to Popper, specifically Prof. Boyd’s understanding of
Popper, I now regard all single explanations as invitations to disagree.
Note
1

Moran, Richard. 1994. “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.” Philosophical Review 103: 75―106.

62

Tora Koyama

A Response to Prof. Kuzmanovich’s Comments
Tora Koyama
I am deeply grateful to Prof. Kuzmanovich for his warm response to me, which corrects mymisunderstanding and helps me to understand his original intention that I was unable to see in mycomment.
Especially, I failed to realize the compatibility of Nabokov’s view of reality as a gradual accumulationof information and Chalmers’ informational theory of consciousness. One of the reasons why I was
perplexed is that I thought that there was no connection between Nabokov’s and Chalmers’ views.
Nabokov’s view is utterly idealistic̶Prof. Boyd affirmed it in his reply to my comment, andChalmers is not an idealist at all; he is the champion of contemporary mind/body dualism. However,the compatibility suggests a possible combination of idealism and dualism. I would like to thank Prof.
Kuzmanovich for letting me realize this possibility.

Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, “‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”

63Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, “‘I am hopelessly in love withthis porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”
Brian Boyd
In responding to Akiko Nakata’s paper, I thought I was expected to be more formal than was
actually the case; after learning that from Akiko, I became a little less formal in responding to Tora
Koyama’s comment on my paper, although since I do not know Professor Koyama or the decorum ofJapanese philosophical discussion, I couldn’t unbend much; I will try to be still less formal now,
because I have known Zoran Kuzmanovich, as I have known Akiko, for many years. But not informal
enough, as I see today from Zoran’s fascinating response to my own paper.
Zoran contrasts philosopher of art Gregory Currie’s 2011 paper “Empathy for Objects”（andCurrie’s generally sceptical attitude to what we can learn from fiction）with writer Vladimir
Nabokov’s 1928 talk or essay “Man and Things” in order to examine their contrasting attitudes to theway objects can “affect the sensibilities of those who engage with them”（1）. His sympathies in thiscontrast clearly lie with Nabokov rather than Currie. I grant that Nabokov on his feeling for objects ismuch more convincing than Currie on empathy, simulation, or emotional response to fiction or art ingeneral; but I don’t think Nabokov’s subject is empathy with things but feelings for things, so to me
his essay and his ideas seem not to relate closely to Currie’s argument.
I will challenge Currie as Zoran presents him more than I question Zoran directly; but I will refer
to Zoran as Kuzmanovich, to equalize the terms in which I refer to the philosopher, the critic, and thewriter, Nabokov.
I apologize for the length of this comment, but there seems little in Currie as presented here that
does not deserve robust challenge all along the way.
Kuzmanovich’s first quotation from Currie includes this: “One thing that people have said isvaluable in literature is that we can learn about the human mind from it. But why wouldn't psychology
lectures be a better way of learning that? I suggest we think about our relation to literature not in termsof learning but in terms of sharing an experience with the author”（2）.
There are many reasons why psychology lectures are not a better way than fiction of learning about
the human mind. Unlike the best fiction, psychological findings are often not “ecologically valid”:
that is, appropriate to real-life situations, as when subjects in a psychology experiment are asked toindicate their preference for one of two individuals represented by two photographs and rather
pointedly different prose character descriptions or histories of the individuals, rather than people met
directly in person and discovered gradually through interaction. Psychological findings are often
disconfirmed in later replication studies; they often focus on things like reaction times and peripheral
vision, of less interest to readers of fiction than engaging with human social and ethical predicaments
as fiction invites. In a recent essay I have offered many more arguments against Currie’s latest claims
that we cannot learn about human nature from fiction.1
After Currie’s question above, he suggests that “we think about our relation to literature not interms of learning but in terms of sharing an experience with the author”（2）. This seems most

64

Brian Boydunhelpful. An author's experience in returning to her desk to continue a story, sharpening a quill or a
pencil, inventing a new scene to develop the plot, finding the words needed, in a dictionary or
thesaurus or the recesses of memory, revising them if they can be improved, and so on, has very little
in common with a reader’s experience of reading and inferring from an already-established written
text. Imagining on cue is very different from inventing from scratch and refining cues to prompt
imagination in others.
In Kuzmanovich’s next inset quotation from Currie, Currie writes: “When people read actionrelated words, the motor homunculus is activated in appropriate ways, moving its feet at the sound of
the word ‘feet’”（4）. If this were true, then my phrase “Currie writes” should have activated yourmotor homunculus either to move a pen or pencil or to type out words. Unlikely. If this were true,
too, then when Austen’s characters, whom she does not invite us to imagine with physical vividness,say something, prefaced or interrupted or followed by a verb of speech, the speech production regionof our motor homunculi should be activated as we read, but not whenever in a dialogue mere quotation
marks indicate a new speech, without a verb of speech. I find these implications so implausible I will
not wait for replication studies to show them wrong.
In general, Currie is misled here by the over-enthusiasm in the 1990s for the implications of the
discovery of mirror neurons at the end of the 1980s. There is now doubt among psychologists about
whether humans（as opposed to the monkeys of the original experiments）have mirror neurons, about
what role they play within human neural processing, about whether they are evolved mechanisms ordevelop through associative learning, and so on: a good illustration why we might prefer to learn
about human nature from fiction rather than from the fashions and fallible hypotheses of psychology.
In 1997, Kuzmanovich notes, Currie introduced the “hypothetical reader of fact”（5）to explain
how we respond to fiction. As readers of fiction, we know characters are unreal, so, Currie argues, wecannot respond to their unreal situations, actions, and reactions, and instead simulate the reactions of ahypothetical reader who does not know the text is a fiction. This is psychologically andphilosophically muddled and aesthetically disastrous. As we encounter fictions, our knowing thatcharacters do not exist as part of the history of the real world is less salient than our monitoring what
the characters are doing and feeling, that’s all. Even when we hear true reports about real others we
do not know, we have to imagine them（as shown by philosopher Derek Matravers in the case of all
factual as well as fictional narrative, and by linguist Daniel Dor in the case of all language referring
beyond the here and now）
,2 and we respond accordingly to the accounts of these others’ predicaments（a cancer diagnosis, a discovery of infidelity, and so on）.
We have default responses to the situations of those we hear or read about, and that includes
fictional characters, even if we know they are fictional, particularly as expert storytellers are expert at
stimulating our imaginations to envisage characters in their situations. But we have those default
responses even when there is little attempt to appeal to our sensory imaginations. There is a famous
1944 psychological experiment by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, in which viewers are shown
without cues an untitled 90―second silent black-and-white film of two triangles and one circle moving
about a plane（have a look at it on YouTube now, before reading on）.3 Nearly all viewers construe thisas a story about the smaller triangle and the circle, friends or more likely lovers, being cornered by thelarger, bullying triangle, and viewers are pleased when the pair escape the frustrated bully. No viewer
supposes these shapes are real individuals, nor do they suppose a “hypothetical reader of fact” or aComment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, “‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”

65“hypothetical viewer of fact” who thinks the shapes are real 2―D individuals, yet almost all viewers
feel empathy for the threatened pair and relief at their fortunate outcome.
Kuzmanovich adduces Currie’s conclusion that “fiction-generated emotions, even when productiveof empathy, are not genuine since they are not action-prompting beliefs”（5）. But there are manycases where even true narrative generates emotions but does not prompt action: when a friend tells us,
for instance, of another friend we do not know who has discovered their partner to be unfaithful. We
may feel for the betrayed partner, but we do not act. The feeling of concern nevertheless remains real.
On the other hand, we can have sensorimotor responses to fiction: we can laugh at an absurd situation,
we can cry or gasp with emotion at an affecting outcome, we can tense up at a moment of risk forcharacters we care about.
Kuzmanovich then introduces, as a way of showing Currie’s treatment of his response to objects inart, Currie’s analysis of his reactions to Rubens’s painting Descent from the Cross: “When I look at
Rubens’ Descent from the Cross with the right kind of attention I am made directly, non-inferentiallyaware of the heaviness of Christ’s represented body, and of the sense of strain represented in thebodies of the mourners as they lower the body”（7）. Currie seems to underestimate drastically theamount of inference, even if unconscious, the mind makes in interpreting sense data, a psychologicalfact well known from optical illusions（the Muller-Lyer illusion, the Ames room, and the like）. To
disambiguate visual arrays our minds have to interpret a scene as three-dimensional（or as a twodimensional representation evoking a three-dimensional scene）, even if the impacts on the retina are
two-dimensional. Oddly, although Currie invokes psychology lectures or textbooks against fiction, heseems to forget what psychology textbooks actually say.
And to infer effort in the personages depicted in the Rubens painting we have to infer much more:
the weight of Christ’s body, the number of people supporting that weight, the likely proportion each of
those figures takes of the total weight, to judge by their position, their physiques, and their degree ofcontact with the corpse and the shroud, and the stability of their support on the ladder or the cross.
And, as Kuzmanovich notes, we also need to infer, from the cultural context of the story of Christ’s
crucifixion, and of its depiction in other paintings, that those present are mourning a particularly acuteloss̶a point he illustrates wonderfully by his example of the very different context of Winnie-thePooh’s reaching up for the honeypot. Moreover, motoric simulation of the kind Currie appeals to
simply does not work, since there are eight live figures handling or about to handle Christ’s body, andin one simulatory system we cannot simulate eight bodies at once. Or do we sequentially simulate
each mourner’s effort as we focus on each? But that does not seem to be what Currie suggests, in his “I
am made directly, non-inferentially aware . . . of the sense of strain represented in the bodies of themourners as they lower the body.”
Kuzmanovich notes that Currie’s “‘Empathy for Objects’ concludes with the claim that empathy
for aesthetic objects does not differ from empathy for all other objects like chairs, trees, sculptures,and buildings”（8）, and quotes Currie: “We need not be looking at a chair with aesthetic attention inorder to activate a motor simulation of sitting on it”（8）. In fact although we can readily imagine
ourselves or someone else sitting on a particular chair we see, we do not usually engage a motor
simulation of sitting on it whenever we see a chair. If that were the case our simulation system would
be wildly overloaded when we entered a furniture shop or an auditorium with hundreds or thousandsof chairs. And when we see chairs we could also imagine kicking them over, or simply moving them

66

Brian Boyd

along the floor: if motor simulation were an automatic part of perception, why would these motions
too not come into play? Once again Currie seems to be vastly overreaching with his appeal to mirror
neurons and simulation.
Moreover I simply do not understand what Currie means when he writes of “empathy for objects.”
Empathy is a sharing of feeling with others: in the words of Suzanne Keen, in her tough-minded
Empathy in the Novel, “a spontaneous sharing of feelings, including physical sensations in the body,
provoked by witnessing or hearing about another’s condition,” “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing ofaffect [that] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s
condition, or even by reading.”4 Unless we are animists we will not assume that a chair or anotherinanimate object has any feelings to empathise with. We can, if not as a routine concomitant or instantelement of perception, imagine ourselves, say, sitting down on or sitting in a chair, but we do not tend
to imagine the chair’s sensation on being sat on by ourselves, or a cat, or a sumo wrestler, because we
assume the chair will feel nothing, although we can imagine that it may compress or creak differently
under different sitters. We may feel something about a chair̶its elegance, perhaps, in a museum ofdesign, its inferred or experienced degree of comfort or discomfort for a sitter, its age and condition,
in a second-hand shop. But that is not “empathy” in any normal usage, and to equate such attitudes
with what we may feel about a frail old woman, or a cat, or a sumo wrestler seated or about to sit
down on the chair can only confuse.
Kuzmanovich writes: “Currie seems to be invoking Wittgenstein of Zettel to explain the difficulty:‘§§627. It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about theexternal world’”（8）. Wittgenstein is no help. Images often arrive not voluntarily but spontaneously,
most strikingly in involuntary memory, but also in dreams or hypnagogia or reverie. Kuzmanovich
adds: “Wittgenstein reasons that because imagination, unlike perception, is controlled by our will, theimagery it provides can be only what we have put there and therefore such imagery cannot be
productive of new information about the world”（9）. Wittgenstein’s conclusion is wrong. If images
do arrive voluntarily, that does not mean that we cannot learn from them, as Einstein’s thought
experiments enabled him to reason about light, time, and frames of reference. And chemist August
Kekule could also learn about the structure of the benzene molecule, if the story is true, from theinvoluntary image of his famous dream.
Kuzmanovich continues: “Of course, Currie（and Wittgenstein）are right: artworks are objects andthey represent things, so our empathic responses to such objects are really responses to our own
bodily-simulation-aided mental representations of such objects”（9）. I challenge these claims. A
Bach fugue or sonata may be an object, but it does not represent a thing or things. And I doubt thatbodily simulation aids much our responses to many a static painting, like a Vermeer, with its exquisitebalance and interaction of light, shade, gleam, and reflection, or a Caravaggio, Kalf, Liotard, orMatisse still life. I doubt that bodily simulation aids at all in responding to most of Austen, whose
fiction mostly pays little attention to physical detail or movement. And our mental representations are
not “of such objects,” of the works of art, but of details and situations within them.
Midway through his essay, Kuzmanovich shifts to Nabokov’s description of his feelings toward
objects, including works of art, in “Man and Things.” I feel an immediate release from Currie’s
confusions and untenable conclusions to Nabokov’s clear understanding, of, for instance, the varietyof reactions four different individuals could have to the one painting, according to their dispositions,Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, “‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”

67

histories, and circumstances. As Kuzmanovich comments, “Neurophysiology cannot tell the wholestory here without perspectival subjectivity of the sort Nabokov enumerates”（11）.
Kuzmanovich reports Nabokov’s other examples of objects, not works of art, for which he has ormight have strong feelings. One technical aside, here: Kuzmanovich refers repeatedly to “Nabokov’s
narrator”（12, 13, 14, 16）. Despite recent narratological dogma, there are strong grounds for not
positing a narrator in fiction, unless the author has specifically created a narrator distinct from
himself,5 and nothing Nabokov reveals of the “I” referred to here distinguishes the writer from thesensitive, imaginative, reflective Nabokov. And “Man and Things” is not a fiction: it is an essay, aform that since its invention by Montaigne has foregrounded the author’s individuality, feelings, andreflections. This makes irrelevant Kuzmanovich’s claim that “if we apply [Currie’s] theory of reading
to Nabokov’s story about the porcelain pig, we must posit a hypothetical reader of fact who must in
turn conclude that Nabokov’s narrator is either pretending to be in love with a porcelain pig or simply
deluded”（13）.
Nabokov’s feeling for the porcelain pig he won and abandoned and now laments abandoning do
involve a whole complex of experience, a narrative of gain and loss or neglect and regret that, asKuzmanovich insists, cannot be reduced to the kind of neurophysiology Currie wishes to emphasize.
Kuzmanovich writes: “While it is possible that the love for the porcelain pig emerges strictly out ofchemicals within the nervous system, it may also be possible that art records events and their
meanings in the language of emotions whose cognitive dimension will emerge in due time”（13）. I
would simply note that “emerges strictly out of chemicals within the nervous system” seems to me
simply the wrong level of analysis: I do not doubt that brain activity accompanies the feelings
Nabokov has for the porcelain pig, but would emphasize that the succession of feelings depends on
Nabokov’s dispositions and experiences, reflected in but not caused, in a bottom-up way, by theneurophysiological activity within his brain.
For reasons I do not quite understand, Kuzmanovich brings in the idea of delusion in the feeling of
Nabokov（as I see it）or his narrator（as Kuzmanovich sees it）toward the porcelain pig, andcompares it with the delusions of the young man in Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols.” He writes:“The reader of ‘Signs and Symbols’ would be a good candidate for an fMRI scan of her brain’s prefrontal and anterior cingulate regions, where the deluded young man would presumably be
experiencing functional disconnections in his hyperdopaminergic activity.” I do not think introducing
technology or technical terms from neuroscience helps here in the least. The reader of “Signs andSymbols” does not feel or simulate the son’s delusions, and is not invited to feel or simulate them, but
simply to understand them in a summary sense.
Kuzmanovich agrees with my attitude, I think. He writes: “Explanations of the way our nerves act
leave out many features of our mental lives. What exactly is the immediate feeling of love for anabandoned porcelain pig?”（14）. The “immediate feeling of love for an abandoned porcelain pig” iseasy enough to imagine, simply in these very terms, especially as provided in the more detailed
narrative in Nabokov’s essay, and especially if one has some knowledge of Nabokov’s sensitivity andsense of pity at loss. I don’t think it would be problematic in principle to specify such an “immediate
feeling of love for an abandoned porcelain pig” in neuroscientific detail, although no doubt it istechnologically well beyond our current capacity. But it wouldn’t be very interesting, in fact, except
as proof of the progress of our understanding of brain circuitry: it would reveal a process way more

68

Brian Boydcomputationally complex than we could readily assimilate, with hundreds of excitatory and inhibitoryflows and feedback loops, and wouldn’t tell us as readers, empathizers, and imaginers of theexperience of others much more than, or probably even nearly as much as, “the immediate feeling oflove for an abandoned porcelain pig.”
I must confess that I am mystified by Kuzmanovich’s citations, without objection, fromphilosophers: from Currie, from Wittgenstein, and now from Jaspers and Langer. First, Karl Jaspers:“Delusion proper [...] implies a transformation in our total awareness of reality”（14）. I do not know
Jaspers’s grounds for this improbable assertion. Kuzmanovich then quotes Suzanne K. Langer: “Thevery existence of ‘things’ is modeled on [man’s] own inward expectation of strains, directions, andlimitations of his felt actions; the wholeness and simplicity of molar objects is that of his own soma”（15）. This seems highly implausible to me: it is much more likely that the ability to manipulate, forinstance, a piece of stone（as a projectile or a handaxe, say）or a piece of fruit provides a first imageof “the wholeness and simplicity of objects.”
I am again with Kuzmanovich when he returns to Nabokov. He writes that Nabokov “also notesthat the empathy generated by ‘lend[ing] things our feelings,’ that is, by projecting our own fears,
hopes, desires, or griefs onto objects, also generates some risks”（15）. Nabokov’s description“lending things our feelings” seems much more accurate than the word “empathy”（a word he does
not use at all in “Man and Things”）, and Kuzmanovich’s “projecting our own fears, hopes, desires, orgriefs onto objects”（15）seems more accurate still. But when Nabokov writes “It is as though I am
surrounded by little monsters, and it seems to me that the little teeth of the clock are gnawing away attime, that the ‘ear’ of the needle stuck into the curtain is eavesdropping on me, that the teapot spout,with a little droplet poised on its tip, is about to sneeze like a man with a cold”（15）, it does not seem,as Kuzmanovich describes it, that “Nabokov presents us with the case where we prefer not to be
imagining but cannot help it”（15）, but rather that Nabokov is enjoying the challenge of deploying ananthropomorphization taken for granted in language as the basis for whimsical and deliberate
imaginative, imagistic, extrapolation: not something we cannot help, but something that needs anespecially fresh and alert imagination to activate, unlike the dulled common sense blandly accustomed
to taking routine terms for granted.
Kuzmanovich offers a sharp contrast between Currie’s and Nabokov’s views of narrative. He cites
Currie and Jon Jureidini’s “one implication of this paper [“Art and Delusion,” 2003] is that the best
example we have of a life pervasively experienced as narrative is the life of madness”（15）. Not
knowing their argument, I cannot challenge it, but the conclusion seems preposterous, even if I do notbelieve experience is narrative in form.6 Kuzmanovich proposes that Nabokov suggests that narrative
allows experience continuity and emotional depth. Nabokov imagines a neighbor’s boots, to which heis indifferent: “But were my neighbor to die tonight, what human warmth, what pity, what live andtender beauty would these two old, shabby boots, with their eyelet flaps sticking out like little ears,
left standing at the door, radiate over me”（16）. Kuzmanovich writes: “The dead man’s absence
becomes an act of abandonment no different than the abandonment of the porcelain pig”（16）. I do
not read Nabokov’s paragraph this way. Rather, I would cite Nabokov’s famous “Beauty plus pity̶that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity, for the simple
reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with
the individual.”7 Or, conversely, where there is pity, there is beauty, as in the boots of the now deadComment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, “‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”

69

owner.
Wittgenstein comes to the fore in the closing section of Kuzmanovich’s paper, and to me, quite
untenably. I simply do not understand what Wittgenstein attempts to imply in the conditional in his
second sentence: “‘Grief’ describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of
our life. If a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say with the ticking of a clock,here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy”
（17）
. Kuzmanovich then cites Wittgenstein’s next fragment: “‘For a second he felt violent pain.’ ̶Why does it sound queer to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief’? Only because it so seldom
happens?”（18）No, only for the reason that grief is a long process. “For a second he felt deep grief”
is absurd for exactly the same reason as it would be absurd to say “For a second he grew up,” “For asecond she lost weight,” or “For a second he aged.” And I do not understand when Kuzmanovich
writes “Wittgenstein’s insistence that the world is all that is the case also suggests that to the degree it
gives us access to other minds language functions as a form of empathy”（18）: how does that famous
assertion imply this? Kuzmanovich speculates in a note that “Grief is also one more possible impulse
for the invention of language, a not quite sufficient tool to share and decode chronobiological andemotional disturbances caused by human attachments to that which is no longer present but feels as if
it is. Even now, language does poorly with uncontrollable physical grief over the mourned objects
still felt to be present”（n22, p. 25）. The idea that grief is an impulse for the invention of language
seems implausible. Intense emotions from wild laughter or gut-wrenching grief are never reducible tolanguage. These emotional intensities predate the invention of language and are both experienced
deeply and witnessed clearly enough to render language both inadequate and superfluous, and in thecase of grief the emotion is particularly allayed by physical sympathy（hugs, touches）of a primal
primate kind and, in the case of laughter, amplified by sociophysical contagion（again, as in primate
choruses）.
In his final significant move, Kuzmanovich, arguing against Currie’s more positivistic reading of
our response to art, writes “one psychological truth literature teaches us is that it requires acceptanceof the magical and the paradoxical”（18―19）. I am not sure that the idea that literature “requires
acceptance of the magical” is a truth, and I am sure that it is not one of the things that some great
literature, like Austen and Chekhov, for instance, teaches us. Kuzmanovich continues: “If there issuch a mental state as a hypothetical reader of fact, it may very well be the means by which we
simultaneously trigger and repress our consciousness of our own death”（19）. I doubt not only that
Currie’s “hypothetical reader of fact” exists in readers’ minds, but also that Currie himself thinks that
it is a mental state. In discussing how we simultaneously trigger and repress our consciousness of ourown death̶certainly an issue in Nabokov̶Kuzmanovich might have cited the so-called Terror
Management Theorists, and perhaps physicist Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time.8 Kuzmanovich
concludes the paragraph: “fiction may very well be a form of magic that ushers death onstage while
pretending that it is also possible to chase it off.” I prefer not to see literature as magic, although it
can have extraordinary effects. And while some fiction（and indeed much poetry）ushers death
onstage while pretending that it is also possible to chase it off（an elegant formulation）, much does
not, like Austen and Chekhov, again, or the Shakespeare of King Lear or the Beckett of Malone Diesor much else.
I sympathize with Zoran’s doubts about the adequacy of Currie’s account of artistic response,

70

Brian Boydalthough my own doubts would be much more frequent, at almost every formulation of Currie’s citedhere（but Currie has written work with much of value, especially, to my taste, Narratives &Narrators）,9 as well as at almost every formulation cited from other philosophers̶all dubious
assertions or pointless speculations, it seems to me. But I would not offer magic as a solution, even if
Nabokov in particular has his magical side. Imaginative feeling-for, though, of the kind Nabokov
showcases in “Man and Things,” would seem much more promising, as I think Zoran agrees.
Notes
1

Brian Boyd, “Learning from Fiction?”（review essay focused around Gregory Currie, Imagining and Knowing: The Shapeof Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020）, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 5: 1（2021）, 57―66. DOI:
10.26613/esic/5.1.210

2

Derek Matravers, Fiction and Narrative（Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014）; Daniel Dor, The Instruction of
Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology（Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015）.

3

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” American Journal of Psychology,
1944（57: 2）, 243―259; see the film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E&t=22s. For more background,see Bart Keunen, “Plot, Morality, and Folk Psychology Research,” in Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart
Vervaeck, Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative（Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013）,
175―97, pp. 175―76.

4

Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel（Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007）, xx, 4.

5Brian Boyd, “Does Austen Need Narrators? Does Anyone?” New Literary History, 48: 2（Spring 2017）, 285―308（see n2, p.
304, for a long list of similar critiques）, and “Implied Authors and Imposed Narrators, or Actual Authors?,” in Sylvie Patron,ed. Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals（Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, 53―71）,
and that volume as a whole.

6

Brian Boyd, “Prompting Monopods: Or, The Options and Costs of Narrative,” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 3:1（2019）, 33―35, doi: 10.26613/esic/3.1.114.

7

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers（New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark,
1980）, 251.

8

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life（New York:
Random House, 2015）; Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving
Universe（New York: Knopf, 2020）.

9

Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories（Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010）.

Comments on Brian Boyd’s Response to My Paper

71

Comments on Brian Boyd’s Response to My Paper“‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’:
Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Prefatory comment: I am very grateful for your detailed attention to my paper, Brian. There having
been so few Nabokov conferences lately, Akiko’s way of conducting this symposium is to beapplauded for creating repeated opportunities to visit old friends and think out loud about thoseportion of Nabokov’s work that remain enthralling for all of us who enjoy studying him seriously. If
necessary, I will happily make these comments more formal when my health permits it, but it would
be unprofessional for me to delay responding any longer.
I am also pleased to see that our papers and responses and responses to the responses have initiatedwhat I hope Popper would have seen as the process of improving our guesses though “planned
gropings into the unknown."（SB 133）I am also happy to have that phrase apply only to me in thiscase. Lest our gropings be too random or just too blind, I am proceeding on the assumption that yourversion of my Currie and my version of your Popper are also linked. At the same time I must confessthat I am only really familiar（and that by way of not-too-recently visited dissertation I wrote 33 yearsago）with the underlying Kantian substratum of the Popperian quest for objective knowledge, so
forgive me for starting there. Popper sums up Kantian theory of pure reason as the process whereby“our intellect does not discover universal laws in nature, but it prescribes its own laws and imposes
them upon nature”（CR 94）. He goes on to characterize Kant’s theory as “misconceived（CR 92）butat the same time concludes that is “a strange mixture of absurdity and truth”（CR 94）. If I understandhim correctly, he finds Kantian thinking in this vein absurd for the same reason you and I find Currie’s
thinking about art in his essay on empathy very unhelpful. Both my Currie and Popper’s Kant makethe mistake of seeing knowledge as “the necessary result of our mental outfit”（Popper’s words）: “weare not passive receptors of sense data, but their active digestors. By digesting and assimilating them
we form and organize them into a Cosmos, the Universe of Nature. In this process we impose upon
the material presented to our senses the mathematical laws which are part of our digestive andorganizing mechanism.”（CR 92）
Popper finds this idea absurd but at the same time recognizes the “truth” portion of Kant’s “strange
mixture.” After “reducing [Kant’s] problem to its proper dimensions,” Popper sees Kant’s Copernican
revolution in thought as asking the same question his own philosophy asks “How are successful
conjectures possible?” The answer, of course, is “Because we not only invent stories and theories, but
try them out and see whether they work and how they work.”

Comment #1 on “I don’t think Nabokov’s subject is empathy with things but feelings for things,
so to me his essay and his ideas seem not to relate closely to Currie’s argument.”: I disagree, but I
hope the following strikes the right note rather than a defensive, didactic, and time-wasting one. If for

72

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Nabokov empathy is axiomatically a mental event that transpires only between humans, then of course
there can be no empathy with things. However, although Nabokov does not use the word “empathy”
in the essay, the word “and” of Nabokov’s title, when coupled with the idea that “we lend our
feelings” to things implies a certain kind of transaction or a two-way emotional investment to create a“feeling with” rather than merely a “feeling for.” Consider this example: “In the lazy positioning of awoolen shawl draped over the back of a chair there’s something moping: oh, how the shawl longs forsomeone’s shoulders!” If the shawl provokes an “oh” from us, and if we see the shawl as “moping,”
we cannot avoid the conclusion that there has been an attribution of human feelings to things not
merely an expression of feeling for things, and since it has to be our feelings（who else is seeing theshawl as “moping”?）, the process of sensing our moping in the spatial disposition of the shaw strikes
me as an almost dictionary example of Herder’s Einfühlung: “The sensing human being feels his way
into everything, feels everything from out of himself and imprints it with his image. . . . Hence,
Newton in his system of the world became a poet contrary to his wishes.” I think Herder is referring
to Newton’s comparison of gravitational attraction and repulsion to love and hate. I suspect that
Currie started his discussion of empathy only with the late 19th and early 20th centuries to avoid
accounting for Herder’s original notion of empathy since for Herder, empathy is a par excellence
demonstration of the continuity between sensation and cognition, a continuity Currie for some reason
seems to find especially annoying. Says Herder: “Cognition and sensation are with us mixed creaturesintertwined; we have cognition only through sensation, our sensation is always accompanied with asort of cognition.” [Herder’s emphasis in Herder, “On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forcesof the Human Soul”（1775）]
Comment #2 on “As we encounter fictions, our knowing that characters do not exist as part of
the history of the real world is less salient than our monitoring what the characters are doing
and feeling, that’s all.”: Unless our reading also includes mortality salience for the very reasons you
suggest when your write that “Kuzmanovich might have cited the so-called Terror Management
Theorists.” Nabokov “monitors” those who may die or have died more attentively, so I suspect that
there is more mortality salience in this creative non-fiction Nabokov piece than initially meets the eye.
Comment #3 on “Wittgenstein’s conclusion is wrong. .... I challenge these claims.”: Wittgenstein
as summoned by Currie may very well be guilty as charged regarding images, but I seem to have done
him a disservice. When revising the essay, I cut out too much here. What I cut pertained to
Nabokov’s seeing the imagination as a form of memory that is not under the control of our but
Mnemosyne’s mysterious will. While I recognize that your subsequent challenge is to Currie,
Kuzmanovich, and Kuzmanovich’s Wittgenstein, what was also cut out is the simple explanation thatby this point I was using “simulation” to designate any reception/mental representation/registration ofsense data.
Comment #4 on “‘Man and Things’ is not a fiction: it is an essay, a form that since its invention
by Montaigne has foregrounded the author’s individuality, feelings, and reflections. This makes
irrelevant Kuzmanovich’s claim that ...”: I admit to trying to read as Currie suggests he does,
though my way of doing it may not be proper Popperian conjectural testing of Currie’s claims. But

Comments on Brian Boyd’s Response to My Paper

73

there are other reasons for not seeing “Man and Things” as strictly an essay. If “Man and Things” isan essay, it seems to me to be of the creative non-fiction sort which admits narrators, poses, playfulmasks, performances. If you read the piece as a factual talk, do the facts not oblige you to see either
Nabokov’s Uncle Ruka or his Uncle Konstantin Vladimirovich Nabokov as having died from“diphtheria”? I do not know what was the cause of KVN’s death. In your biography you give thecause of Uncle Ruka’s death as “angina.” Did the Nabokov family prefer the cause of Uncle Ruka’s
death to have been diphtheria or are diphtheria and angina really the same in medical terms? Or were
they so in 1916?
Comment #5 on “I do not doubt that brain activity accompanies the feelings Nabokov has forthe porcelain pig, but would emphasize that the succession of feelings depends on Nabokov’s
dispositions and experiences, reflected in but not caused, in a bottom-up way, by theneurophysiological activity within his brain.”: I completely agree that mapping “chemicals only” is
if not the wrong at least the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time approach. When it comes to literary
empathy, the explanatory power of current brain mapping techniques does seem to not move us muchbeyond phrenology in the field in which Currie is citing it as relevant. There may very well be ameaningful correspondence among the brain’s functional domains, the language of fiction, and motorsimulated empathy, but our current models are simply not sophisticated enough unless we are willingto claim that among the studies of macaques time is spent on telling and listening to stories of thecomplexity of Pride and Prejudice. So far, even David Perrett and Giacomo Rizzolatti, the pioneersof STS（superior temporal sulcus）studies among the macaques have not been willing to make thatclaim.
Comment #6 on “The reader of “Signs and Symbols” does not feel or simulate the son’sdelusions, and is not invited to feel or simulate them, but simply to understand them in asummary sense. Kuzmanovich agrees with my attitude, I think.”: We agree only partially. To thedegree that the reader recognizes that she has been in the mother’s mind for much of the story, the“identification” with the mother, specifically the mother’s empathy with “beautiful weeds,” isprecisely such an invitation to sense the approach of “monstrous darkness” even in the seemingly
innocent farming process of harvesting fields.
Comment #7 on “I must confess that I am mystified by Kuzmanovich’s citations, without
objection, from philosophers: from Currie, from Wittgenstein, and now from Jaspers andLanger.”: Let me try to dispel the mystery or the fog of my deference to these philosophers. Onceagain, it starts with Kant. Even Popper gives Kant credit for the idea Popper was expanding on, thenotion that our theories are “the free creations of our own minds, the result of an almost poetic
intuition, of an attempt to understand intuitively the laws of nature. But we no longer try to force ourcreations upon nature. On the contrary, we question nature, as Kant taught us to do; and we try toelicit from her negative answers concerning the truth of our theories: we do not try to prove or toverify them, but we test them by trying to disprove or to falsify them, to refute them.”
What Kant said was: “A philosophy of any subject（a system of rational cognition from concepts）

74

Zoran Kuzmanovich

requires a system of pure rational concepts independent of any conditions of intuition, that is, a
metaphysics”（MS, 6: 375）.
I felt that at a certain level, Popper had “reduced” Kantian metaphysics too much and thus had, despite
his emphasis on free creations of our minds and the presence of poetic intuition, left out or deemphasized what Wittgenstein, Jaspers, and Langer bring to the table when to comes to certainty ofconfirmation and refutation. For Wittgenstein that is the “forms of life” theory that requires us to hearan “echo of thought in sight”（1945: §212）; for Jaspers it is informational encapsulation, now known
as the “frame problem” in artificial intelligence, and for Langer it is the idea that our language
anthropomorphizes but（unlike music）still gets in the way of the intuitive organizing and form-giving
functions of the senses. In The Gift Nabokov has Fyodor’s father use a metaphor to alert us to thepossibility that our understanding of the conditions of possibility（of either truth or refutation）is notentirely free: “beware of letting our reason̶that garrulous dragoman who always runs ahead̶
prompt us with explanations which then begin imperceptibly to influence the very course ofobservation and distort it: thus the shadow of the instrument falls upon the truth.” Conditions of
intuition that may invalidate empirical testing and thus a metaphysics seem to have been on
Nabokov’s mind as much as on the minds of the philosophers I invoked.
Comment #8 on “It does not seem, as Kuzmanovich describes it, that “Nabokov presents us withthe case where we prefer not to be imagining but cannot help it”（15）, but rather that Nabokovis enjoying the challenge of deploying an anthropomorphization taken for granted in languageas the basis for whimsical and deliberate imaginative, imagistic, extrapolation.”: With youremphasis on the originality of Nabokov’s time- and death-cancelling robust joy, I suspect we willcontinue to disagree on this matter. Nabokov’s “thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern̶to thecontrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal” is a thrill I would
gladly seek and share. But that thrill in this essay seems outbalanced by things in the humanenvironment seeking to commit suicide. That thought, when coupled with Nabokov’s thoughts of ourminds as boxes and our sense of time as a prison, has a cumulative effect on me countering thehappiness and joy of being. I do think that the joyous Nabokov celebrating human consciousness
outexamples the grieving Nabokov, but not by much, in part because I think Nabokov recognizes thesophism of the claim that “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.” Theclaim, by the way, is Wittgenstein’s（1921: §6.4311）. I also think that for Nabokov the trauma ofgrief is precisely the loss of the deceased’s empathy.
Comment #9 on “Or, conversely, where there is pity, there is beauty, as in the boots of the now
dead owner.”: Would not the neighbour to whom/to whose boots you find VN（or his narrator）
indifferent still have to be the source of the dying beauty and/or the object of pity? If the boots are theobject of pity, then you may need to revisit your objections to seeing Nabokov’s essay as being about
empathy（feeling “with” rather than “for” things）.
Comment #10 on “Wittgenstein’s insistence that the world is all that is the case also suggeststhat to the degree it gives us access to other minds language functions as a form of empathy”

Comments on Brian Boyd’s Response to My Paper

75

（18）
: how does that famous assertion imply this?”: The general answer comes by way of Kant,
Husserl, and Searle when they see language as that which gives us the only access to what is otherwise
epistemically off-limits, the otherness of others. The specific answer is that when Wittgenstein’s
famous comment is combined with Wittgenstein’s comment on grief cited in my essay, it implies thateven though emotions/sensations are brute forces, beyond the will, immeasurable, and independent of
reason it is the case that we still differentiate them. In the recognition of that difference as normativelies the possibility of our empathic and not merely vicarious receptivity to the world as it isexperienced by others.
Comment #11 on “emotional intensities predate the invention of language and are bothexperienced deeply and witnessed clearly enough to render language both inadequate andsuperfluous, and in the case of grief the emotion is particularly allayed by physical sympathy（hugs, touches）of a primal primate kind...”: While I agree with you that language postdates grief
and may not be adequate to representing the emotions of grief, language still seems to me a pretty
useful tool for engaging and keeping the no-longer-here-and-now virtually present. My other point（borrowed from Wittgenstein）is that the “grammar” of grief forces our language into different
language games/speech acts̶self-repression, self-repugnance for remaining alive, denial, evasion,commiseration, commemoration, etc. But I won’t insist on this. In the form of life I exist in perhaps I
have heard the virtualizing words Вечная Память! one too many times.
Comment #12 on “I am not sure that the idea that literature “requires acceptance of themagical” is a truth, and I am sure that it is not one of the things that some great literature, like
Austen and Chekhov...”: There is plenty of paradoxical magic even in Jane Austen, starting with the
opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man inpossession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That categorical and universal “must”
premised of the single man is not only paradoxical because it is a statement about the social
expectations for, and powerlessness of most women during the Austen era; within the larger narrative
the sentence itself is the magician’s patter necessary to disguise the trick of introducing the muchmaligned Mrs. Bennet’s and retrospectively identifying this ironic view as hers. As a mother of fivedaughters in danger of going destitute if they remain single, whether she recognizes the irony or not,she cannot help but express this view and pathetically hope for its universality And I certainly take asparadoxical Chekhov’s positing fictionally that in times of great grief a horse is much better equipped
to express what you call “physical sympathy” than any human beings my poor namesake encountersin that story.
Coda: Reading just under 2000 pages of Currie made me frustrated much of the time until I copied
this into my notes and remembered it every time Currie seemed to make a provocative statement andthen back off his initial position: “[W]orks of the poets peacefully pasture side by side like lambs,
those of the philosophers are born voracious beasts, and their longing to destroy is even like
scorpions, spiders, and some insects, chiefly directed towards their own species.”
I would not end on this quotation from Schopenhauer had you and I not known each other for well

76

Zoran Kuzmanovich

nigh three decades and not shared certain philosophical presuppositions about possible conceptions ofobjective knowledge and certain readings of Nabokov by folks who had not read much Nabokov
beyond Lolita.（Not to mention some first-hand knowledge of some voracious poets.）But I think ourdisagreements stem from my remaining more Kantian and less Popperian than you. Popper’s way of
thinking about knowledge requires that the purpose of intellectual engagement be refutation. So as to
avoid feeling the full bite of Schopenhauer’s figure, I prefer learning to knowledge, curiosity tocertainty, and（these days）quest for survival to quest for truth. But whatever happens to be myintellectual starting point or destination regarding Nabokov, I prefer your companionship above allothers, and I appreciate Akiko’s giving me this opportunity to say so.
As for the really significant difference between Currie and Nabokov, it seems to me easily inferredfrom these two statements:
Currie in “Empathy for objects”（2011）: “But motoric responses of this kind are not irrelevant to art
and the aesthetic, any more than sight is. And if aestheticians had somehow forgotten or nevernoticed that colour, and the perception of colour, are relevant to painting, it would be an urgent
obligation to point out their relevance. That is what I am doing with respect to motoric responses.”
Nabokov in “PROF. WOODBRIDGE IN AN ESSAY ON NATURE POSTULATES THE REALITY
OF THE WORLD”（1940）: “But is visibility really as dominant as that in all imaginable knowledgeof Nature? Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hillor a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid meansof knowing butterflies and hills.”
For Currie who（to make himself convincing）must imagine a “nor irrelevant” double negative worldin which furthermore he must appoint himself with the task of urgently reminding aestheticians thatcolor is important to painting; empathy, including bodily simulation, seems at best a subset of, or aparallel to sight but still does not amount to knowledge of that world. For Nabokov, empathy（sensed
and shared vulnerability）of the world of people and things around us offers us a far more vivid senseof knowing that world.

Boyd on Kuzmanovich on Boyd on Nabokov and Currie

77

Boyd on Kuzmanovich on Boyd on Nabokov and Currie
Brian Boyd
This discussion should not rebound endlessly, Zoran, but let me just pick up three points: one on
Nabokov, one on Popper, since you generously include him in the discussion, and one on Currie.
First, Nabokov did not have only two uncles, but twelve by my count（several of his aunts remarried）;
but “uncle” can be a loose designation, and he may have called “uncle” Alexander Alexandrovitch
Nabokov, the grandson of VN’s great-grandfather Nikolay’s brother Peter, who died in 1911. I doubt“Man and Things” was meant to be fictional: Nabokov read it as a talk among a group of friends,
referring to an “I” he knew they knew, as he had in other nonfictional essays he read to them.
Second, Popper. You write “Popper’s way of thinking about knowledge requires that the purpose of
intellectual engagement be refutation. . . . I prefer learning to knowledge, curiosity to certainty, and（these days）quest for survival to quest for truth.” No, for Popper the purpose of intellectual
engagement is not refutation but learning or discovery（refutation is a way of discovering that what
we thought we knew is wrong and we need to learn more）. Describing his critical rationalism, hewrote that it depends on “an attitude of admitting that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, and byan effort, we may get nearer the truth”（Open Society and its Enemies, II, 225）
. He opposed the quest
for certainty all his life, at least from the Logic of Scientific Discovery onwards（“The old scientificideal of epistēmē̶of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge̶has proved to be an idol. The
demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remaintentative for ever,” LScD 280）. And I do not see how the quest for survival and the quest for truth areat odds. For Popper, knowledge̶tentative knowledge̶starts with problems, problems of survival（which way should I move to eat? to avoid being eaten?）. We cannot cope with climate change or apandemic unless we find out what causes it and what will work to stop its advance.
Third, Currie. I did not know of Currie’s ambition to point out that “motoric responses” in the brain
have been overlooked in responses to art, which, he says, is absurd as not noticing color as a feature ofpainting. But we do have well-known motoric responses to art, in dance, and in music（tribal danceand chant, Black American church singing, moshpits at rock concerts, swaying and clapping）.
Different arts appeal to different senses（and one, literature, not primarily to any sense）: music, blackand-white drawing, photography, film and East Asian（but not Islamic or Christian）calligraphy notmuch to color; and literature, textile arts, pottery and much other visual art（most architecture, stilllife, landscape and much abstract painting）not much to movement. Forcing movement, andespecially motoric mirror-neuron simulation, on arts where it is not relevant is a puzzling overreach.

78

Akiko Nakata

A Much Belated Response to Zoran Kuzmanovich,“‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’:
Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”
Akiko Nakata
I have to confess that I am not a good reader of Currie at all. I cannot assume what kind of reader heimplies and what he expects of his reader. He often sounds provoking and challenging, and I am
provoked and challenged to some degree, but I have never thought of any new idea or a newparadigm, which might be what Currie expects of his readers. However, this time, thanks to Zoran’scritical and amusing discussion, I had the best experience of reading Currie. Zoran’s insightful paper
led me to consider Nabokov’s empathy, sympathy, and feelings to things.
It seems to me that one of the reasons of Nabokov’s affection to the porcelain pig is because he lost it.
Unlike in the case of his childhood, homeland, and loved ones, in this case, he freely just abandoned
it, not dreaming he would never forget it in the future. I think that his attachment to the pig is becauseof its triflingness, its absence and its unchangeability. As Brian cites in his lucid comment on Zoran’s
paper, Nabokov defines art as “beauty plus pity,” for “beauty must die: beauty always dies. . . . ”（Lectures on Literature, 251）. Indeed, it would be difficult for us to love something durable like plain
plastic even if it is a trifle. On the other hand, Nabokov cherishes the things in his memory, for they
are lost（absent）from his world and, at the same time, they are in his memory unchangeable for good,
like his schoolroom in Vyra.
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of
the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling.
Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.（Speak, Memory, 77）

It seems to me that Nabokov’s feelings̶both empathy and sympathy̶and everything in the room
could not be separated from each other. If Nabokov had not lost Vyra, he would not have kept theschoolroom as it is in the passage. Even if he had kept it, he would not have felt what he felt while hewas writing it.
I was surprised to read Brian write in his comment on your paper, “The reader of ‘Signs and Symbols’
does not feel or simulate the son’s delusions, and is not invited to feel or simulate them, but simply tounderstand them in a summary sense”（Boyd 6）, and you reply that you partially agree（Kuzmanovich, “Comment #6”）. That is not my reaction to the passage describing the son’sreferential mania. Though I do not understand the son’s delusions, I partially experience his fear ofthem. Moreover, when I read, “Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in thestaring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding
him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees”（“Signs and Symbols,” 599）, I remember how I felt watching the tall trees in my grandfather’s garden
when I was a small child. In windy evenings, they looked to be violently moving their boughs andA Much Belated Response to Zoran Kuzmanovich,“‘I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’: Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects”

79

branches, as if trying to walk leaving the ground they rooted on. Though I was scared of them as theylooked totally different from what they were in the calm daylight, I was also a little fascinated. What
I felt is far from the son’s fear, which is towards the natural elements sharing the information about
him and revealing his magnified secrets to the world.
Leona Toker indicates that his madness takes shape in the Holocaust era:
when the “dark gesticulation” transmitted awful messages, when nations, armies, classes, and societies conspired
against the Jewish population, predatory spies watched its moves, and organized insanity conducted its destruction
with such a scientific thoroughness that the very air it breathed seemed to be “indexed and filed away.”（Toker 213―14）

We could relate his fear to that of the spies and denouncement threatening them in the era.
On the other hand, I have sympathy and empathy for the son’s terror, remembering the complex
feelings I had for the trees. Like the son, I, as a child, personified the trees I watched. But by such
personification, the trees in the story do not become understandable like humans. On the contrary,
they gain a kind of otherness or alienness beyond my comprehension.
I would like to ask about another example: “Now ‘happy’ is something extremely subjective. One of
our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy”（Pale Fire, 17）. What do you think theZemblan proverb introduced by Kinbote causes in yourself for the personified glove? Empathy or
sympathy, or we just enjoy the joke with no feelings? It seems to me to be another case of
personification that makes it harder for us to analyze our feelings about the object.
Works Cited
Boyd, Brian. “Comment on Zoran Kuzmanovich, ‘“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”: Nabokov and Currie on
Empathy for Objects.’” “Symposium: Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy.” May 2021.〈http://www10.plala.or.jp/
transparentt/BB%20ZK.pdf〉
Kuzmanovich, Zoran. “Comments on Brian Boyd’s Response to My Paper ‘“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig’”:
Nabokov and Currie on Empathy for Objects.” “Symposium: Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy.” May 2021.〈http://
www10.plala.or.jp/transparentt/ZK%20BB%20ZK.pdf〉
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Vintage, 1989.
―. “Signs and Symbols.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage, 1997, pp. 598―603.
―. Speak, Memory. Vintage, 1989.
Toker, Leona. “Signs and Symbols: In and Out of Contexts.” Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs andSymbols.” Edited by Yuri Leving. Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 203―14.

80

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Response to Prof. Nakata’s comments on“I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Thank you for your comments on my paper, Akiko. I will respond to them quickly, off the top of
my head since I am now finally at the beach and far away from most of my library and roughly 50
years’ worth of comments and notes on Nabokov’s work less than half of which have been converted
to easily portable electronic form. And I will use the same method I used in my response to Brian.
First let me start by agreeing with you about the process of reading Currie. You write:[Comment #1] “I have never thought of any new idea or a new paradigm, which might be what
Currie expects of his readers.”
I had a similar impression. I have not offered an evaluation of Currie’s process, but, as Rafe
McGregor puts it in his review of Currie’s Imagining and Knowing, Currie’s work “is exemplary ofanalytic philosophy at both its best and worst” since despite “rigorous evidence” and “impeccable
logic” Currie’s “findings are, on a charitable reading, a limited advance in the subject area.”
Philosophy in Review Vol. 40 no. 3（August 2020）: 104. The “new paradigm” often does not seemnew or fully justified. Brian Boyd’s critique of my paper Points out several examples of Currie’s
thought when it is not at its nimblest.
[Comment #2] “Indeed, it would be difficult for us to love something durable like plain plastic
even if it is a trifle. On the other hand, Nabokov cherishes the things in his memory, for they arelost（absent）from his world and, at the same time, they are in his memory unchangeable forgood.”
You and I certainly agree on that point. In fact, my main interest in the pig started when I noticed
that Nabokov uses the indexical of presence “this” rather than the more semantically proper “that” tomark the pig’s absence. So, the plastic pig, absent in fact, nonetheless seems to be present enough.
Your phrase “unchangeable for good” seems a good way of describing the fact that the long-gone pig
is still affecting the nature of the narrator’s belief, emotion, self-knowledge, and perspective.
[Comment #3] “I was surprised to read Brian write in his comment on your paper, “The readerof ‘Signs and Symbols’ does not feel or simulate the son’s delusions, and is not invited to feel orsimulate them, but simply to understand them in a summary sense”（Boyd 6）, and you replythat you partially agree（Kuzmanovich ‘Comment #6’）.”
The partial agreement stems from the first part of the story where we are given facts about the son,but the attitude to those facts is not foregrounded. And then, we arrive at this passage after which it is
no longer possible for me not to empathize with the mother.
And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias
of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened as itwere into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making him totally inaccessible to normal minds.

Response to Prof. Nakata’s comments on “I am hopelessly in love with this porcelain pig”

81

This, and much more, she accepted̶for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another,not even joys in her case̶mere possibilities of improvement.

The switch from “his parents had stubbornly regarded” to “This, and much more, she accepted̶
for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case̶mere possibilities of improvement” is Nabokov’s application of what in Joyce studies Hugh Kenner
calls the “Uncle Charles Principle,” an empathic “gravitation” of the narrator’s voice into theperspective and feelings of another character within the story. Initially we are told that the son’s mind
is “totally inaccessible to normal minds.” But then it turns out that his mind is somewhat accessible tothe empathic mind of his mother. Prior to that point, we are receiving information about each memberof the family in what Brian calls “summary sense.” Hence my partial agreement with Brian. But
once the Uncle Charles Principle delivers us into the mind of the mother sharing her son’s referentialmania and thereby his sense of being persecuted, we cannot exit her mind and her sense of her
family’s vulnerabilities. Prof. Toker sums up ways in which the family’s vulnerabilities areoccasioned by their ethnicity at that historical moment, even though common ethnicity does not let themother have full access to some aspects of her son’s suffering. For example, she clearly does notunderstand what is scaring her son in this figure（a detail of Peter Breughel the Elder’s painting The
Triumph of Death（1522?）: “afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in abook which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging
from the branch of a leafless tree.” I thank Don Johnson for first pointing this detail out to me）.
[Comment #4] What I felt is far from the son’s fear, which is towards the natural elements
sharing the information about him and revealing his magnified secrets to the world.
Is it possible that instead of the son’s fear we share the mother’s understanding of, or feelings
about her son’s sense of the world as an alien and evil menace?
[Comment # 5] “the lost glove is happy”（Pale Fire, 17）.... It seems to me to be another case of
personification that makes it harder for us to analyze our feelings about the object.
I confess to never being quite happy with my understanding of that Zemblan proverb. There aremateless or single gloves across Nabokov’s work, but their sense of happiness often escapes me, so
please read what follows with a great deal of skepticism. My observations are meant to be merely
suggestive: Margot glove opens and closed LID, Krug drops one into the river after losing its mate,and if my memory serves, there are several lost or forgotten gloves in Invitation. However, the twoplaces where the matelessness of the gloves does the most work to bring up questions of empathy andsympathy are The Gift and Speak, Memory. In The Gift, Zina plays with one during a tryst, Yasha’s
father wears one for the eczema he gets after Yasha’s suicide, and a man on a moving train deliberately
drops his other glove after accidentally dropping the first one because he wants to make the finder of
the accidentally dropped glove happy to have found a pair of gloves. In Speak, Memory Miss Norcott
loses a white kid glove, and young Nabokov’s inability to find the glove makes him unhappy, an
unhappiness that would soon become “inconsolable” when Miss Norcott is summarily dismissed forlesbianism（Boyd, Russian Years 52）. If the glove had been found（or kept）by Miss Nortcott’s
lesbian partner, the older Nabokov, intent on seeing chance as choice and accident as a part of a

82

Zoran Kuzmanovich

pattern, could very well imagine it as a happy glove, in the same way Kinbote’s loss of one publisher
secures him another one, the “touchingly carefree and chummy,” “good old Frank” whom Kinbote
would like to see as a “permanent fixture” in his life. The white glove（this time the footman’s）islinked in Speak, Memory with the light brought into Nabokov’s life by another switch in governesses
since it accompanies the departure of Miss Robinson and the arrival of the unwanted Mademoiselle.
So there may very well be a private pattern of single gloves linking the finding and losing of mates,
trysts, and change, but at the moment I am unable to account for such a pattern in a way I find fully
convincing.

Questions and Answers

83

Zoran Kuamanovich
Questions and Answers
I
Ryo Chonabayashi（Question on Page 43）: Would Currie agree with the view “our emotionally vivid sense of serious
moral and psychological engagement with the thought-world of the fiction prove to be a false sense”?
Wouldn’t Currie simply says that empathy toward artistic objects on its own may be not very reliablegiven its nature? The latter claim is more modest. It seems Currie is not committed to the view that
empathy never reveals any truth about human psychology. What he is committed to is the view thatpsychology can better reveal truths about human psychology.

Zoran Kuzmanovich
Thank you for that question, Prof. Chonabayashi. It is a fundamental one since it goes to the heart ofone of Currie’s main projects, dissemination of skepticism about empathy as a form of cognition thatbuilds ontological bridges between ourselves and others.
In the earliest versions of my paper, I had given some thought to not using the term “false sense” butin the end decided to stay with it and with the “immodest” Currie, primarily because of Part 4 of his
essay under discussion and the comments on empathy（and fiction）he has made in his otherpublications and which are reproduced in my paper. I think you and I disagree only over the breadthof Currie’s claims in this essay in part because you emphasize the claims and I emphasize the tone ofthose claims. In fact, I see tone as a feature of one’s claims. As a result I think we agree on Currie’s
claims in Parts 1―3 but disagree not on the philosophical import of Part 4.
During the first three parts of the essay, Currie（1）limits the study of the truths of human psychology
to empathy, specifically the claim that empathy is of special relevance to aesthetic experience;（2）dismisses as too precarious the idea of simulational empathy as a mind-reading mechanism among
humans, and then turns to（3）the role of empathy for objects as the basis（salience）for aesthetics. I
understand your reading of Currie’s “modest” claims for, and conclusions about（3）to run something
like this:On its own, empathy for objects is an unreliable process for claiming bodily simulation as the basis ofaesthetic experience because（in its nature）bodily simulation isa. Non-specific（thanks to our canonical neurons, we react to actual chairs as we do to ones depicted in great
paintings）;

84

Ryo Chonabayashi and Zoran Kuamanovichb. Somewhat unstable（our simulational empathy could be caused by either the content of the painting or by theartistic activity necessary to produce such content）;
c. Difficult to control（as an emotion-inducing sensation, it is not merely pre-rational but often unconscious）（d）it is also̶d. Potentially distracting（even when we are conscius of it）, and as a result of（a）
e. Rule defying.

If Currie had ended the essay at（d）, I would happily endorse your reading of the “modest” claim.
But he does not. Having argued against empathy as the foundational center of aesthetic responses, heseems intent on removing it from the periphery as well. Having made the argument that bodily
simulation processes should not be the basis of aesthetic responses, he declares, modestly, I admit, thatthese processes “are not irrelevant to art and the aesthetic.” However, I cannot see the statement “theseprocesses play an aesthetic role when they play a role in the generation of a response which is anaesthetic one” as modest. Even Currie calls formation “unhelpful.” Why would a philosopher write adeliberately unhelpful statement when he is clearly not providing it as an example of a particular typeof statements? Is it because Currie cannot imagine what Novalis calls “feeling oneself into” things?
（83）Possibly. In fact, at the beginning of Part 4 Currie confesses that “it is hard to see” why anyone
should posit “special relevance” of empathy to aesthetic experience. Without the near-tautology at theend of the penultimate paragraph, one could see such a statement as a simple speech act designed toexpress confusion. But when that statement is added to “these processes play an aesthetic role when
they play a role in the generation of a response which is an aesthetic one,” we are no longer playing
the language game of self-scrutiny. The speech act here is provocation by dismissal. The neartautology invites the reader who disagrees with Currie to play Euthyphro to Currie’s Socrates. I prefer
not to do that. Nor do I wish to imagine the flow of meaning from aesthetics to empathy as taking
place in only one direction. Since empathy exists in ordee to give “us” access to “the non-us” andvice versa, why not imagine empathy and existing in the same mutually modifying relationship Gods
and piousness exist in “Euthyphro”?
But Currie does not wish to consider that possibility since he does not supply his analysis ofarguments made by the proponents of the idea of empathy-based aesthetics that preceded theEmpathists. They are dismissed without being represented. Within this essay Currie does not evensupply arguments for psychological processes that do a better job of revealing truths about human
psychology than empathy does. He does name mirror neurons as one possible process, but using
mirror neurons as the basis of aesthetic responses is also not very helpful. In fact, it is a little likeanswering the question “Does the tree that falls in the forest without anyone being present make asound?” with “Yes, just interview the disturbed molecules in the air.”Questions and Answers

85

II
Shoko Miura
Thank you, Zoran, for an inspiring paper on the philosophical aspects of empathy. It sent me readingin many interesting directions. I heard from Akiko about your illness and I am grateful that youpersevered heroically in writing your paper under extremely difficult circumstances.
My question for you is about the emotive effect of empathy. The rejection of impressionism’s
misconception of “affective fallacy” by the New Critics is well known and I do not mean empathy inthat way. If, as you paraphrased Currie, empathy has to do with “sharing and imitating the experienceof others,” who is imitating whom? Whose emotion does the empathetic expression reflect? And whatis the motive for sharing the emotion?
When I read your paper, I became interested in Humbert’s phrase, “the smiling surface of Hourglass
Lake” when he fantasizes that he succeeded in drowning Charlotte. The lake’s surface is smiling toreflect Humbert’s satisfaction in killing his wife. It is the lake which “imitates” Humbert’s emotion̶
or, rather, Humbert as narrator imposes his emotion on the lake surface. There is an opposite instanceof empathy in a skit by Charlie Chaplin in Limelight imitating various “things” such as a rose and a“Japanese tree” which are used to change the viewpoint of another character. Chaplin imitates aJapanese bonsai tree（I suppose it is a living miniature tree from his small gesture）for the benefit of
the woman he had saved from suicide. He says to her that a Japanese tree “grows sideways” and both
his hands and his eyes point energetically upward and to his left. His hands are the branches“growing” from his face. Indeed, many Japanese bonsai trees are sculptured to grow out of balance toone side. Chaplin’s gesture expresses the tree’s will to grow in one kinetic direction. It seems merely
a comic routine but when we think of why Chaplin chooses a bonsai tree to make this gesture, we
become aware of his intent to convince the woman that everything in this world is individuallydifferent and yet shares the common drive to live and survive. Chaplin imitates the bonsai tree inorder to change the woman’s despair into courage to start over. We are moved by Chaplin’s tree but
alienated by Humbert’s smiling lake. Both are therefore successful in creating the intended effect.
However, Chaplin uses empathy not to impose his emotion but to evoke an emotion in his listener.
There is a difference in the existence or nonexistence of subjectivity of the person making theempathetic expression. Chaplin somehow avoids subjectivity in making that gesture. He does notthink of himself. The emotion he finds from the tree and imitates does not originate from a selfcentered viewpoint as Humbert’s does. Why one “shares” an experience seems to be critical increating an ethical effect through empathy.
So, my question is, how would an analytic philosopher view this difference?
Also, would anyone like to comment on a comparison of Nabokov and Chaplin since they lived only
ten years apart and died in the same year?

86

Shoko Miura and Zoran Kuamanovich

Zoran Kuzmanovich
Dear Shoko, thank you for finding something of value in my paper. I am happier now with it knowingthat it has elicited the kind of reactions from you, Akiko, Brian, and Professor Ryo Chonabayahsi.
The four interlinked questions you pose are, as Americans say, a real doozy in the good sense of thatword. But the combination of your questions is an inspiring one, too. I cannot speak for analytic
philosophers, having read（with any seriousness of purpose）roughly a third each of the philosophicaloutput by Currie, Wittgenstein, and Popper. And I am a rather poor historian, so I will leave the taskof discussing the intersections between Chaplin’s and Nabokov’s life to someone with a better library,
better eyesight, and more interest in visa troubles, transportation of minors across state lines,
preference for life in Switzerland, attitudes to Senator McCarthy, and body-snatching. I do feel（as I
think you do）that someone should do such a project, especially given Chaplin’s notions about beauty
residing in life’s “smiling sadness” in the everpresence of death and Nabokov’s idea about art being
based in “beauty plus pity” over beauty’s dying. So I will have to concentrate on empathy, Limelight,
and Lolita. I will do so informally. Since you made it possible for me to experience my first Noh playand patiently answered all of my questions about the masks, sparse sets, fixed lighting, and thehaunting drums, I find that I cannot really be formal in my response to you. I have studied and taught
Limelight paired with Lolita（book and the 1962 film）because Kubrick knew Chaplin’s work very
well and admired it greatly. I believe the still in Figure 2 is Kubrik’s winking tribute to both
Nabokov’s lepidoptery and Chaplin’sLimelight.
Limelight itself is as precise as a Japanese watch, and its marvelous symmetries make it a joy to teachits form with or without the New Critics and their insistence that whatever is there must be there formore than a single reason. I hope you have taught Limelight or will teach it at some point. I will
quote generously from the film since few people seem to know it well（one consequence of its having

Figure 1: Still from Limelight（1952）

Questions and Answers

87

Figure 2: Still from Lolita（1962）

been banned in the US）. Many events in the film are repeated with variations, and the similarities anddifferences among those incomplete repetitions generate the film’s tone and thus theme. Now to yourquestion about the differences in empathic response and motivation, where several problems quickly
present themselves. The first is the problem of medium, the second of genre, and the third of tone. I
need to think out loud about the first two before actually addressing the third which is where thethread of your questions leads me.
Medium: Seeing a sideways-growing small tree imitated to help a suicidally depressed young woman
find the desire to live, and trying to imagine a lake smiling in approval of the cleverly concealed
murder one has just imagined committing present us with very different stimuli. As film watchers
who have suspended disbelief we see in shared time and space Calvero’s conscious effort to imitate aflower or a tree and we see and hear the effect of such imitations on Terry. We cannot see but must
only imagine Humbert’s projection of his self-satisfaction onto the murky（?）, glistening（?）, wavy（?）
, cloud-reflecting（?）surface of the lake. Humbert tells us three things that complicate our imagemaking in the spatio-temporal and causal dimensions and thus the effect of “smiling surface”:（1）I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the ease of the act, the nicety of the setting!
（2）I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection（you know̶trying to see things as you willremember having seen them）.
（3）[P]oor Mrs. Humbert Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be standing on
her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the smiling surface of Hourglass Lake.

By the end of this passage from Lolita we have to imagine the “smiling surface” of a lake named after
the device from which the sands invariably run out. In light of Humbert’s sentence（#2）, on our firstreading we briefly even fear that Humbert is actually remembering rather than planning the murder.

88

Shoko Miura and Zoran Kuamanovich

Thus when we imagine the “smiling surface,” the most damning images are those of Humbert’s own
current or future smile, a smile of complete indifference to Charlotte’s psychological and physicalpain made all the worse if we further imagine（as we are invited to do）that the smile also emerges
from Humbert’s sense of his own cleverness and/or from his image of nature as a willing andapproving accomplice in his murderous plans.
Genre: You say that “Chaplin somehow avoids subjectivity in making that gesture. He does notthink of himself. [...]Why one ‘shares’ an experience seems to be critical in creating an ethicaleffect through empathy.”
I agree that motivation plays an important in our empathic responses and their link to ethics..
Humbert, for example, emphasizes the ways in which he intends to take advantage of Charlotte’s
weaknesses. Calvero senses Terry’s weakness and attempts to help her overcome it. The empathic
link between them is based on Terry’s paralysis over life’s futility that has led her sister into
prostitution and driven her to suicide and Calvero’s paralysis as a has-been comedian who became
box office poison after discovering his wife’s infidelity and then needing to be drunk in order to be
funny. But since empathy is supposed to be immediate and unfiltered by reflection, there is a problemof sharing in comedic empathy, especially physical or slapstick comedy of the Chaplin type. So I readyour “somehow” as being rightly a cautionary one.
Where empathy is usually a result of our unconscious mirroring of the mental/emotional state ofothers, Calvero’s humor is based on his conscious decision to hide rather than share the pain he feels.
He hides his pain both from the audience and at the end from Terry as well. And the drinking can beseen as the effort to hide the pain from himself. I know your question was not about the ending, butplease bear with me while we address the “somehow” and the idea of sharing within the film’s genre.
So Calvero rejects mass empathy by hiding his feelings and even his heart attack. After the heart
attack, he also diverts what more likely would have been Terry’s pity and gratitude rather thanempathy by pretending to imagine a future for himself and Terry now that they are both successful.
Humbert, however, shares the glee of his imagined freedom-from-Charotte only with nature since hemust not share it with anyone else（while of course sharing it with us, “hypocrite lecteurs”）. It is also
possible to read Calvero at the end as dying from both heart attack and a broken heart in the sense of
Humbert’s “coronary thrombosis.” It is possible but not advised. In the case of a broken heart, we
would be empathizing with Calvero’s desire not to live without Terry. But we could think of selfsacrifice as not necessarily involving a broken heart as I think you do by putting emphasis on“sacrifice” rather than “self.” At least that is how I read your separation or even opposition of“subjectivity” and self-centeredness. Calvero knows that both Terry’s career and her erotic desire for
Neville（played by Chaplin’s son）would be sacrificed if Calvero were to give in and marry Terry
whose desire for such a marriage is driven mainly by idealistic gratitude. So, instead, Calvero
sacrifices himself for Terry, and the sacrifice gives him back the dignity he has sought ever since hisheadliner days. Paradoxically that dignity he has regained from his staged self-humiliation: he has
again gotten “up on his feet” and he “goes out on top” having sacrificed himself not just for Terry but
for his art. We understand the poetically just/formally required nature of such an ending, we applaud
the performance, and we admire the dignity of the way he camouflages his pain, but I am not sure that

Questions and Answers

89

most of us could really empathise with, that is share and imitate, such a pain and such a feeling.
（Historically, Chaplin’s lack of self-sacrifice on behalf of his British compatriots during WWII galled
a number of his former fans, in London and elsewhere. But that part we will leave to the future
historian.）Tone. Your questions are specifically about the rose and the Japanese tree: “If ... empathy has to dowith “sharing and imitating the experience of others,” who is imitating whom? Whose emotion
does the empathetic expression reflect? And what is the motive for sharing the emotion?
The scene you are analysing comes about when Terry confesses she attempted suicide because shefinds life “without meaning,” and because even in music and flowers” she finds only “utter futilty.” To
that Calvero responds with
Calvero: What do you want a meaning for?
Life is a desire, not a meaning.
Desire is the theme of all life!
It makes a rose want to be a rose,|and want to grow like that.
Ever seen a Japanese tree? |They’re lopsided, they grow this way.
Of course pansies grow this way.
The dark ones frown and go like that.
However, the meaning of anythingis merely other words|for the same thing.
After all, a rose is a rose.|Not bad, should be quoted.

I will leave off picking the low lying fruit of the allusions to Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein andmove on to your analysis of this scene. Your analysis is outstanding:
Chaplin’s gesture expresses the tree’s will to grow in one kinetic direction. It seems merely a comic routine
but when we think of why Chaplin chooses a bonsai tree to make this gesture, we become aware of his
intent to convince the woman that everything in this world is individually different and yet shares thecommon drive to live and survive. Chaplin imitates the bonsai tree in order to change the woman’s despair
into courage to start over.

As you point out, in this initial mention of flowers and trees, Calvero is imitating the rose’s/pansy’s
and tree’s shape and desire for growth, hoping that Terry will mirror such desire and abandon her
desire to die. He is also subtly recapitulating his insistence that human consciousness is a wonderful
toy that has taken billions of years to be grown and should not be destroyed so carelessly.
Consciousness as a wonderful toy is of course a very Nabokovian thought. In planning Charlotte’s
murder, Humbert has no such thoughts about Charlotte’s consciousness as something rare andprecious, though after Lolita abandons him, he posits just such a possibility not for Charlotte’s but for
Lolita’s consciousness:

90

Shoko Miura and Zoran Kuamanovich

my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it
struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind
and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palacegate̶dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags
and miserable convulsions...”What prevents Humbert from positing the richness of Lolita’s consciousness is the almost mechanicalnature of his sexual desire for Lolita. For Calvero, sex is not a concern except in his dreams. Andeven in those dreams the memory of his wife’s infidelity still affects him: when he reaches for Terry’s
waist, she picks his pocket. In his waking life, he soberly tells Terry “I’ve arrived at the age whereplatonic friendship can be sustained on the highest moral plane.” That sentence strikes me as a politeananouncment that for physiological reasons sex between them is no longer on the table.
I introduced the problems of medium and genre because I wish to be very cautious about my answers
regarding trees and flowers. The images of the flower and the tree will return during Calvero’s song
about reincarnation and the life of a sardine. He sings this song at the Empire Ballet at the galaperformance given in his honour at the end of the film and arranged for him by Terry and Neville.
It makes my heart feel warm
To know that I’ll return
In some other form
But I don’t want to be a tree
Sticking in the groundI’d sooner be a flea
I don’t want to be a flower
Waiting by the hour
Hoping for a pollen to alight on me

Please note that the images of the flowers and the tree he imitated for Terry were meant to mime
growth and thus change. But in the “Sardine Song” the flower and the tree are rejected because they
are stationary. The tone here changes completely: what was good for motivating Terry out of her
hypochondriac paralysis and depression is openly rejected as not being good enough for Calvero. We
could argue perhaps that sardines are a few evolutionary levels up from flowers and trees, but I do notthink such an argument from evolutionary climbing is sufficient to account for Calvero’s desire here
since the refrain is “So when I cease to be/I want to go back, I want to go back,/I want to go back tothe sea.”
The audience reaction is different as well. The first time Calvero（under a different name）sang thatsong, the Middlesex audience fell asleep or walked out. Fearing such an outcome again, and believingthat such an outcome would “kill” Calvero, Terry has gone so far as to bribe a group of her sycophants
to laugh and applaude after every joke. But the complete Empire Ballet audience greets Calvero’s
jokes with loud laughter and even tears. And the same audience gets to see him carried off-stage in a

Questions and Answers

91

drum as if he were a sardine in a round can. So, looked at as a parallel to the empathy scene you
analyzed, the “Sardine Song” in some ways suspends or questions that initial empathy.
Despite that, your intuition that Calvero’s notion of selfhood differs from Humbert’s is one I share, inpart because the “Sardine Song” does not end the film. After the doctor has diagnosed him as having
suffered a heart attack and not a broken back, Calvero asks to be carried to the wings so he can see
Terry dance. To understand the importance of this gesture, and to understand the subtitle --“theglamour of limelight from which age must pass as youth enters”--we need to look at the intersectionof three motifs, all of which have to do with the relation between life and art: feet, windows, andColumbine’s death.
Feet: The feet come in by way of this exchange:
Calvero to Terry（after she has begun walking again）: Don’t be discouraged. You’ll get on your feet again.
Terry: On my what again?

While this exchange sounds as if Terry does not understand idiomatic or figurative English, since she
is already walking with Calvero by the riverside, Calvero must be talking about her artistic feet, that
is, a more desirable step in her career. Whatever the case, the phrase “on your feet again,” in thelanguage of Russian Formalists, is being foregrounded. Yet when Calvero and Griffith（Chaplin and
Keaton）perform their musical number as Calvero’s final encore at the grand gala, Calvero’s feet
repeatedly keep disappearing into his pant legs suggesting the degree of anxiety Calvero feels duringthis（drunkennes-unaided）performance, but the routine also explains why Calvero so quickly
recognized and understood Terry’s psychosomatic paralysis.
Windows/Columbine’s Death: The Stage Director of Harlequinnade explains the action to his actors:
Harlequin, who is the lover, and the clowns, are at her [Columbine’s] bedside. She asks to be carried to thewindow. She wants to look upon the rooftops one last time. The clowns weep. She smiles. “Their clothes are
not for sorrow but for laughter.” She wants them to perform, do their tricks. The clowns can do their comedy.
Calvero: While she’s dying?
Director: Yes.

The window comes up again in connection with dying when during their make-up session Griffith（another washed-up clown hired to replace the poorly performing Calvero in the Harlequinade）
gruffly announces “If anybody else says “it’s like old times,” I’ll jump out the window! First thedoorman, then the call boy, now the stage manager.” When the Empire Ballet owner enters, he too
makes just such a comment: “It’s like old times seeing you here again putting on your war paint.”
Given the “if-then” nature of Griffith’s announcement, the theatre owner’s comment, by being
foregrounded, suggests that we should expect something connected with windows and/or jumping tofollow. And our expectations are justified when Calvero pretends to stumble off the stage, a routingthat requires him to jump out of the audience’s view into the orchestra pit. But where the younger
Calvero could carry off such a trick, the older Calvero suffers a heart attack during the pratfall.
Though the audience does not notice, it is not at all like old times. Yet Calvero had insisted on having

92

Shoko Miura and Zoran Kuamanovichthat trick be his final encore number. While he is unlikely to be planning that his leap be the leap ofdeath, in retrospect we see that where before death was a prentese for entertaining others, here it is asupreme expression of concern for another human being.
And just as Columbine in her dying moments asks to be taken to the window, the dying Calvero asks
to be taken into the wings（the theater’s doors/windows）to see Terry dance. And of course he dieswhile watching her perform her desire for life by dancing to Neville’s music. She is in fact imitating
his miming of the tree’s and flower’s growth and putting into practice his ideas about life as a desire
for more life.
Humbert who very much regrets not taking pictures of Lolita, concludes his narrative by seeing it as
the “only immortality” he and Lolita may ever have. Calvero’s career, forgotten by all but his earliest
audiences, suggests that immortality is not guaranteed by one’s art. Rather it is Terry and Neville,
both beneficiaries of empathy（Terry of Calvero’s, Neville of Terry’s）, who recreate the best of
Calvero’s career by creating the conditions for a gala sending off, conditions under which Calvero cango out with dignity even if that dignity is secured by stumbling off the stage into a drum. Because thegala sendoff is definitely not like old times, Calvero carries out Griffith’s threat and in essence jumps
out the window by jumping off the stage. He kills himself despite convincing Terry that there are too
many reasons for not doing so. While in legal and medical terms, Calvero’s death is the result of an
accident, the film’s form and themes suggest otherwise. Formally, Limelight thus begins and ends withthe act of suicide. But as you, Shoko, have already concluded, Calvero “does not think of himself,”
so paradoxically Calvero’s suicide is not about Calvero. He does not kill himself because he does notwish to live without Terry or because he did not get his way. He kills himself because that is the only
way for Terry to become the artist and person she with Calvero’s help now wants to become. Now
that is some empathy! Imagine Humbert doing that for Charlotte or Lolita.（3264 words）

Shoko Miura
Dear Zoran,
Thank you for your amazing reply. It looks like I hit upon a gold mine when I was just scratching the
ground!
I had no idea you knew so much about Chaplin’s movies. I love them, too, but never went deeply into
them. Your citing of the “Sardine Song” especially was a delight. Now that you have focused on thestationary “tree” and the “flower,” in contrast to the animate “sardine” and the “flea”（Calvero’s flea
routine earlier）, I can see that Chaplin was as masterful at weaving recurrent motifs and underlying
themes as Nabokov was. As you pointed out, this contrast recurs in Terry’s psychosomatic paralysis
and Calvero’s re-animation of Terry in the ballet. How Nabokovian!
Another point you made which made me see the work of empathy in comparing Chaplin and Nabokov

Questions and Answers

93

is your interpretation of Columbine looking out of the window in the Harlequinnade. It reminded meof the waxwing killed “by the azure of the windowpane” in Pale Fire. Both windows are the border
between two worlds̶of the living and the dead（or the dying）, but also between the “real world” andthe world of art. Where does Calvero die? Between curtains dividing the stage where Terry dancesand backstage where the clowns return to their normal lives. Kinbote escapes death in his kingdom bycreeping through green curtains. Windows and curtains seem to suggest for both artists the line
between Time（a succession of minutes）and No Time（where such a succession does not exist）. So
long as we are alive, we are not allowed to cross this border. The work of empathy, it seems to me,
enables one to cross it. Empathy works by using imagination, the essential medium of art. When you
empathize, rather than sympathize, you cross the border between yourself and another thing or person.
Sympathy is merely “feeling with” another but empathy enables you to share your selfhood withanother’s selfhood. You quoted a passage of Humbert’s uncharacteristically honest admission:...behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable
regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me....

Here Humbert faces an invisible border because he cannot share his selfhood. However, as you
discussed, Calvero can because his love is capable of the nobility of self-sacrifice. What is impressivein the ending is that the curtains between which Calvero dies serves both as entry and exit. Reality
and fiction of the stage can merge, like the work of empathy. Calvero’s death opens the border for
Terry who inherits his world of art.
Your reply led me to clarify my thoughts and a thread（about Nabokov’s border motifs）I myself havebeen following for a dozen years. I know that your eyes have made it difficult to write andconcentrate. I also have a problem with my eyes since a tiny clot lodged in my brain three years ago.
So, I sincerely appreciate your generosity.

Zoran Kuzmanovich
Dear Shoko, I am glad you were able to find something worthwhile in my musings about Limelight.
You are quite correct about Chaplin’s clever interweaving of motifs, especially the flea one:
[Comment #1] “flea”（Calvero’s flea routine earlier）. The interesting part about this routine is thatit contains some bawdy jokes and some historical homage. The flea that Calvero discovers fightingwith Henry and that may or may not be the one that repeatedly bites Calvero is named Phyllis（syphilis）. At the same time, the routine is a tribute to Marcelino, a great auguste（clown who does
not wear the traditional oversized costuming of the clown）whom Chaplin highly respected. Chaplin
worked with Marcelino（whose wife “left” him for another）. At the same time, Limelight’s story
structure is an allusion to（or perhaps a tribute to）Laugh, Clown, Laugh（1928）.1 Either way, thestories are very similar.

94

Shoko Miura and Zoran Kuamanovich[Comment #2] Windows and curtains seem to suggest for both artists the line between Time（asuccession of minutes）and No Time（where such a succession does not exist）Absolutely, where
we find Calvero at the end is the border between the not quite over yet and the not quite yet, especially
if you look closely at the final scene where Calvero says: “I believe I’m dying, Doctor. But then, I
don’t know. I’ve died so many times.”[Comment #3] I sincerely appreciate your generosity. Ditto. The drum from the Noh play you took
me to still resonated in my head. I am sorry about the clot. My doctor has mentioned that as a likely
scenario for me.
I am very grateful to Akiko who behind the scenes connected us all just as she did the last time I was
in Japan.（This time she also took on the task of quietly correcting the errors my compromised eyes
left in.）Note
1

From Laugh, Clown, Laugh（1928）, with Lon Chaney, Bernard Siegel, Loretta Young: <https://ok.ru/video/988772960948>.
A clown named Tito Beppi（Lon Chaney）adopts orphaned Simonetta（Loretta Young）, and they begin to travel and performin the circus together. As Simonetta grows into a beautiful young woman, Tito eventually falls in love with her. Though thegirl actually has eyes for the young and noble Count Ravelli（Nils Asther）, she pretends to want the kindly clown because
she is unwilling to break his heart. When Tito realizes that he stands in the way of her happiness, things turn tragic.

Paper95

Akiko Nakata
Paper
Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things
This paper1 discusses how Ludwig Wittgenstein（1889―1951）and G. E. Moore（1873―1958）canbe found hidden in Transparent Things（1972, TT）. Vladimir Nabokov（1899―1977）and these twoanalytic philosophers graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, but in different years and indifferent fields.
Nabokov majored in modern and medieval languages from October 1919 to June 1922.2
Wittgenstein studied mathematics and philosophy in 1912 and 1913, first as an undergraduate, thenas an “advanced student.” He did not return to Cambridge until 1929, when he received his Ph. D.
and became a Fellow in the following year. In 1949, they both were in Ithaca during September andearly October,（Boyd, The American Years, 141-43; Malcolm 84）,3 but there is no record or likelihoodthat they met.
Moore spent most of his academic life at Trinity after 1892, when he entered as an undergraduate.
When Nabokov was studying French and Russian as a Tripos student, Moore was a Lecturer who
taught Psychology̶he writes that his lecture was on Philosophy of Mind rather than Psychology̶
and Metaphysics for the Tripos, as well as the Philosophy of Nature（Moore, Autobiography, 28―30）.
Nabokov definitely responded to a question by Alfred Appel, Jr., in an interview held in 1966 that hehad no contact whatsoever with the philosophy faculty at Cambridge（Strong Opinions, 70）.
Additionally, there are no records of Nabokov attending Moore“s lectures. In his first year, Nabokov
abandoned Zoology to devote energy to writing poetry, playing football on the Trinity team, and otherengagements. Brian Boyd remarks, “Of course there is a possibility that Nabokov could have attended
a lecture or several by Moore, but I would think it a vanishingly small possibility. While at Cambridge
he was interested in writing poetry, in chasing women, in playing football, and in letting off steamwith his friends, to judge by all the evidence（including his letters to his parents）, not in maximizing
his intellectual range.”4
Nabokov’s only published comment on Wittgenstein was in answer to the same interview question
by Appel, when he confessed complete ignorance of the philosopher’s works. He also said that thefirst time he heard the philosopher’s name must have been in the 1950s. That tends to sound unnatural
to our ears. For general readers today, Wittgenstein seems to have been one of the most famous andadmired philosophers, probably since the time he published Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus（1921,
TLP）. However, Wittgenstein was mostly unknown to general readers during his lifetime. I think that
Nabokov must have read Wittgenstein’s books sometime between the interview and his writing of TT.
There is no record of Nabokov ever directly referencing to Moore. In contrast to our reaction to
the case of Wittgenstein, we may regard it as not unnatural. As a matter of fact, in contrast to
Wittgenstein, Moore’s popularity and prominence have been drastically decreasing. Most generalreaders are ignorant of the philosopher, who was the superstar of elite intellectuals of Trinity and of

96

Akiko Nakata

the Bloomsbury Group, and highly admired since his early twenties.5 Moore, a freshman, madeBertrand Russell（1872―1970）, a third-year student, worship him “as if he were a god” and feel “anextravagant admiration [he had] never felt for anybody”（Russell 163）. Leonard Woolf, aBloomsbury member, who had admiration and respect for Moore throughout his life, praises him
indiscriminately also in his autobiography: “George Moore was . . . the only great man whom I haveever met or known. . . . There was in him an element which can, I think, be accurately called
greatness, a combination of mind and character and behaviour, of thought and feeling which madehim qualitatively different from anyone else I have ever known”（Woolf 131）
. In addition to Moore’s
philosophy and virtuosity, his childlike innocence, purity, good looks, and talent in music attracted
select people to him. Considering his singular popularity at Trinity, it would be imaginable that
Nabokov, who read Wittgenstein and found Moore’s name there, recalled a brilliant Lecturer of thename at Trinity about half a century ago. Moore was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, thelegendary intellectual discussion club for select students and young scholars, but there is no record of
Nabokov’s connection to the club. In his autobiography, Nabokov discusses Lenin and his despotism
with a socialist student whom the author calls Nesbit, using a pseudonym（Speak, Memory, 199―203）.
Nesbit seems a student who could have been related to the Apostles and possibly he told Nabokov
something about Moore.
Two decades ago, I wrote a note entitled “Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things”6 for The
Nabokovian, which presumed that Nabokov had read Wittgenstein’s works after the 1966 interview.
The note indicates similarities between the text of TT and some of the lines in Wittgenstein’s TLP,
Philosophical Investigations（1953, PI）, and On Certainty（1969）regarding several themes,
including the inexplicable; survival after death; the recurrent misremembering of colors and theinterest in delicate differences of shades; and the use of rain for the problem of information. I also
pointed out in another note “Shi to Inpei̶Transparent Things o Chûshin ni” [Death and Concealment
in Transparent Things and Other Works] 7 that Transparent Things, Tralatitions, the title of a
voluminous novel written by a major character in TT, and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus alliterate
revealing their close relationship. Moreover, we can add to the titles the triple “tra” from Nabokov’s
poem “Slava [Fame]”: “That main secret tra-tá-ta, tra-tá-ta, tra-tá-/and I must be overexplicit” citedby Véra Nabokov, after her husband’s death, as the lines where Nabokov defined the theme of theotherworldliness, the hereafter, as “a secret that he carries within his soul and that must not and cannot
be revealed”（Dmitri 175）.
In this paper, following the note, I will add some details related to Wittgenstein and indicate how
Moore can also be found in the text without being referred to as a philosopher, unlike in the case of
Wittgenstein. I will clarify that the obscure joke, including the name “Wittgenstein” in Chapter 23
and the paragraph that includes it, present a unique, multi-layered design for the novella, and how
these two philosophers play key roles in the design. In addition, I would like to consider the
possibility that these philosophers, hidden in the wholly spiritual novella narrated by ghosts from thehereafter, should have had an interest in spiritualism in their real lives.
“Raining in Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein”
Throughout the novella, Wittgenstein is referred to only once in the obscure joke “Raining in
Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein” cited from Mr. R.’s last novel, Tralatitions. The joke and its

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things

97

source conclude both the chapter and its last paragraph:
Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to function more freely. Earth and sky were drained of
all color. It was either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that
only certain old Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, but versionize, as it were, through theghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs. “Raining in Wittenberg, but not in
Wittgenstein.” An obscure joke in Tralatitions.（91）As I introduced in my note, David Rampton relates the joke as the problem of how others
understand the author’s creation, quoting from PL, “Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘if it doesn’t rain I
shall go for a walk’?”（Rampton 172―73）. Brian Boyd annotates it quoting passages on the problem
of information with “either raining or not raining” from TLP（4. 461）
: “For example, I know nothing
about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining” and PI（para. 356）:“One is inclined to say: ‘Either it is raining, or it isn’t̶how I know, how the information has reached me, isanother matter.’ But then let us put the question like this: What do I call ‘information that it is raining’?（Or have
I only information of this information too?）.”（Boyd, Notes to LOA, n. 814―15）

I would like to propose that not only Wittgenstein but also G. E. Moore who proposed a famousparadox should be found in the sentence. The paradox is as follows: “It’s perfectly absurd or
nonsensical to say such things ‘I don’t believe it’s raining, yet as a matter of fact it really is raining’”
though the sentence itself is not nonsensical only if it is not asserted in the present tense by the firstperson（Moore, “Moore’s Paradox,” 207）. The paradoxical statement was introduced in a lecture by
Moore, but he did not publish any paper on it. Wittgenstein, who attended the lecture and became
keenly interested in the paradox, named it Moore’s paradox and developed arguments in PI（II.x,
190）. Contrasting that it is possible to say, “He seems to believe,” and that it is impossible to say, “Iseem to believe,” Wittgenstein comes to a revelation: “My own relation to my words is wholly
different from other people’s”（192e）. It would not be difficult to hear, “It was either raining orpretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense” as a Nabokovian literaryparaphrase of Moore’s paradox and Wittgenstein’s extensive argument.
If we look closely at the rest of the sentence, “[It was . . .] yet still appearing to rain in a sense that
only certain old Northern dialects can either express verbally, or not express, but versionize, as it were,
through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs,” what could wefind there?
First, it may be natural to apply “versionize” to Wittgenstein’s further discussion of Moore’s
paradox. Second, we can find an alternative to “certain old Northern dialects” other than certain old
Russian dialects Nabokov knew or plainly some old New England dialects Hugh Person, theprotagonist, is familiar with. Moreover, the adjectives to the dialects remind us of Skjolden, an
isolated place at the longest fjord in Norway, where Wittgenstein sometimes stayed and worked in asmall hut, mostly by himself. According to Georg Henrik von Wright, “He liked the people and thecountry very much. Eventually he learned to speak Norwegian fairly well”（6）.8 We could assume

98

Akiko Nakata

the possible “old Northern dialects” to be an old Norwegian dialect spoken around Skjolden.
If we take “the obscure joke” into account, another alternative to “certain old Northern dialects”
will be in our sight. Needless to say, Wittenberg has a historic university founded in the early 16th
century, where Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, studied before the beginning of the play. In the play,
Hamlet seems to the audience either insane or pretending to be insane or not insane at all. An oldDane dialect naturally appears in the list of possible old Northern dialects. Some Shakespearean
motifs, such as those of Romeo and Juliet and Othello, are obvious in some chapters of TT, but thosefrom Hamlet are rather obscure except for the reference to Wittenberg in the joke. However, by thejoke that involves Wittenberg and Wittgenstein together, we can see that the theme of Hamlet and thatof Wittgenstein are entangled as a hidden design of TT.
How should we versionize the obscure joke for ourselves, comparing Hamlet and Wittgenstein side
by side in it? At first, we could find a character to pair with Hamlet as Moore is with Wittgenstein:
Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend at Wittenberg University. He accompanies the prince after they return to
Elsinore until the death of the latter. His age and background are not certain, but his character is
elucidated as Hamlet catalogues his beautiful points:
for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,As I do thee.（III.2 1944―1953）

Hamlet praises Horatio’s calmness, modesty, gratitude, and well-balanced passion and reason. Veryfew scenes are prepared in the play for Horatio to make a spectacular showing, but he mostly follows
Hamlet, gives him advice when necessary, and puts what Hamlet asks him to do into practice without
fail. His personality and role in the play somewhat suggest what Moore was to Wittgenstein. It seems
that Moore was not as practical and tough as Horatio, but he was calm, modest, and evencommonsensical enough̶in the sense of daily use of the word̶compared with Wittgenstein.
Horatio’s age is not certain, but he sometimes advises Hamlet like his senior, and obeys him as his
attendant and friend. Moore was seven years older than Wittgenstein, and they met as professor andstudent at Trinity. Later, Moore was the only professor who regularly came to Wittgenstein’s classand took notes of his lectures, most of which were posthumously published. This reminds us ofHoratio asked by dying Hamlet to survive his own death to tell the prince’s story. Sometimes
sensitive Moore was so offended or shocked by Wittgenstein’s unhesitating words and outbursts ofindignation or resentment that their relations were sometimes broken off for a while. It never happens
between Hamlet and Horatio, but Hamlet’s eccentric statements and behavior, as well as his outburstsof rage and sorrow, could be associated with Wittgenstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things

99

Hamlet himself “versionizes” a letter from the King of Denmark so that the King of England will
kill the couriers Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern in place of Hamlet as originally intrigued by his uncle
and stepfather, the King of Denmark. Thinking that the name Rosenkrantz is rosary in German,
originated in rose, we could see in “grateful rose shrubs” Rosenkrantz flattering hyper-gratefully at the
castle of the King of England, not knowing about his sudden end, which is whispered by “the ghost ofdrizzle sound” on the rosary of his name.
Here are presented the condensed entangled themes of analytic philosophers and Shakespeare,
which are hidden as various appearances and in various places of the text, functioning as a major
framework of the novella.
Witt, a resort in Switzerland
From the name Wittgenstein is supplied a fictional Swiss place name, Witt, the setting of 11
chapters out of 26. In Witt, Hugh Person, the protagonist, courts and engages Armande, revisits theplaces of their memories after her death, and dies in fire at the end of the last chapter. In every page,as always in this novella, his behavior and feelings, inside and outside of his body, as well as his life
history are all watched transparently, beyond time and space, and reported by the ghosts who knew
him in their lives. The place name Witt suggests those witnesses as well.
In Chapter 15, Hugh finally succeeds in touching Armande’s heart and they kiss experiencing aminor miracle: “. . . yet that brief vibration in which she dissolved with the sun, the cherry trees, theforgiven landscape, set the tone for his new existence with its sense of ‘all-is-well’ . . .”（55）. He
impresses her by confessing his despair towards life because he is discouraged by their distantrelationship, especially by their unsatisfactory sexual intercourse just before. He expresses despair as
his hatred to Witt and himself, “‘I hate Witt,’ said Hugh. ‘I hate life. I hate myself. I hate that beastly
old bench’.”（ibid.）Apparently, Witt or Wittgenstein seems to help Hugh and lead the couple to aminor miracle.
On the other hand, their miraculous kiss is disturbed by a group of boy scouts:
She disengaged herself without a word. A long file of little boys followed by a scoutmaster climbed toward themalong the steep path. One of them hoisted himself on an adjacent round rock and jumped down with a cheerfulsqueal. “Grüss Gott,” said their teacher in passing by Armande and Hugh. “Hello, there,” responded Hugh.（55）

Elated Hugh’s lively greeting is smile-provoking, but we should note that the teacher’s greeting isused in Southern Germany and all through Austria.9
Now, we could assume the reason the teacher and his boys disturb the new lovers’ miraculous
kiss̶it seems for the reason Hugh cries that he hates Witt just before the kiss. Mysteriously,
Wittgenstein, aka Witt, greatly supports and then disturbs Hugh.
The Moores
Moore also appears in the novella as some characters’ names. Two characters of the name appear
in person and another is referred to: Julia Moore, Jack Moore, and Marion（probably）Moore. Julia
Moore is a major character, who is once Hugh’s date before he meets Armande and the exstepdaughter of Mr. R. Marion is his ex-wife and Julia’s mother, whose first name is referred to only100

Akiko Nakata

twice: once by the narrator（Ch. 10）and once in a letter written by Mr. R. just before his death（Ch.
21）. Mr. R. is the author whose last novel is taken care of by Hugh as the editor. Jack Moore is
Hugh’s roommate at college and shakes Hugh awake in the middle of a nightmare. He is a minor
character who never appears again, but he has some importance. The narrator draws the readers’”（20）, to the who-is-narrating problem.
attention using “a fellow student, Jack Moore（no relation）
In addition to it, Jack introduces the spiritual theme by saving Hugh from a nightmare regarding aséance.
Julia Moore has another importance besides playing a major character. She is the center of thechimeric Romeo and Juliet names. Juliet is a nickname of Julia, and Romeo is an anagram of Moore;
Giulia Romeo appears in another nightmare as an amalgam of Julia Moore, Armande, and a prostituteyoung Hugh met in Geneva. In the nightmare, Hugh means to save Julia/Giulia from a burning house,but actually he strangles Armande. His murder of Armande is related to another Shakespearean play,
Othello. As its original title, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moore of Venice, indicates, the drama is a
tragedy of Armande, aka Giulia Romeo, in the dream, and Hugh, who is suspected of choking his wife
out of jealousy.
Other Moore derivatives can also be found. Jimmy Major̶major is a synonymous of, in terms ofamount, “more,” and more’s archaic spelling is moore̶is Julia’s dead boyfriend, whose image
disturbs her feelings during the date with Hugh. The hotel in Stresa, whose room Hugh tries to bookfrom Witt in vain, is also related to Moore. The hotel must be Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées at
Lake Maggiore [more, in Italian], but Hugh wrongly memorizes it as something that “sounded like
‘Beau Romeo’”（95）. All the Moores and their subspecies are related to death and/or spiritualism,
and the hotel at the Moorean lake leaves Hugh to his fate of death by not answering to the call forbooking.
In the notes for his introductory remarks to his students at Cornell, Nabokov defines, “[O]ne cannot
read a book; one can only reread it”（Nabokov, “Good Readers,” 3）. As a beginner in a game needs
to learn the rules in detail while playing it, a reader as a novice begins to read a book and tries to know
how to read it and what to read in it̶the rules of the book̶while reading it. That can be said about
any literary work, but particularly true with Nabokov’s works. They have plural layers in the texts
and numerous things hidden between the layers, which could change the whole picture of a work to
the eyes of the reader who found them out. TT is an extreme example, where a ren-reader still finds a
hidden rule and experiences a dramatic change in the whole picture. I have presented above a possible
new picture of TT with Wittgenstein and Moore, but much more rules must be hidden unnoticed in the
text.
Were Wittgenstein and Moore related to spiritualism?
TT is narrated by ghosts watching Hugh’s life from the other world. The whole novella can be
regarded as a huge séance. Were Wittgenstein and Moore related to spiritualism in their lives? When
Nabokov was an undergraduate, and Moore was a student and a young scholar at Trinity, spiritualism
was unprecedentedly popular among people who were suffering grief for their family members killedin WWI. Many of them sincerely wanted to communicate in séances with their dead loved ones.
Nabokov vaguely mentions in his autobiography attending séances where he had to “mentally endureaccompanying” old spiritualists（20）. Trinity was strongly connected to the Society of PsychicalLudwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things

101

Research（SPR）. In 1882, the society was founded, and Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Philosophy at
Trinity, was elected the first president（in office, 1882―84）and later as the third（1888―92）.
Moore entered Trinity in 1892 and after two years he attended the lecture of Sidgwick, but herecalls, “His [Sidgwick’s] personality did not attract me, and I found his lectures rather dull” and“gained least from personal contact with him”（Autobiography, 16）. According to his autobiography,
Moore in childhood was a type that can be called “‘ultra-evangelical’”（10）, and long before he cameto Trinity, he became “a complete Agnostic”（11）. Moore wrote nothing about the SPR or spiritualism
in his autobiography. When he discusses a future life in academic writings, he seems to carefully
evade such expressions as to sound spiritual and focuses on the problem of recognition（e. g., “Whatis Philosophy,” 17―18）.
Wittgenstein lost his three brothers by suicide. His close friend and collaborator, David Pinsent,
was killed in a flying accident during WWI. It would be natural if he had tried to communicate withthem in séances or he had committed to some psychical research by the SPR, but no record of the kind
is found in his published writings or his biographies by Norman Malcolm, Georg Henrik von Wright,
Brian McGuiness, and Ray Monk. Wittgenstein’s belief in Christianity may seem surprisingly simple
and pious to those who expect, even in his religious belief, something extremely original as foundboth in his life and philosophy. In the diary he kept in code while serving with the Austrian Army
during WWI repeatedly appears the sentence, “Man, the son of God, is weak in the flesh but free in
the Spirit.”10 The statement was cited from Lev Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, his constant companion（Wittogenshutain, n.30）. In the diary, he repeatedly prays, “May the Spirit be in myself!”（e. g.,
September 12, 1914）and complains of the difficulty of being with the Spirit as “With empty stomach
and lack of sleep, it is hard to serve the Spirit”（September 14, 1914）and “I am certainly free in the
Spirit, but the Spirit has left me”（September 21, 1914）. It would not be difficult to assume that such
belief could neither go together with the rigidly objective experimentation of the SPR nor with
dubious mundane spiritualism.
Based on what I have read so far, I should say that the possibility that these two analytic
philosophers should be related to spiritualism seems very slight. However, I am going to visit
Cambridge University to research the documents from the SPR stocked in the library when it ispossible to do so after Covid―19.
Notes
1

I am deeply grateful to Brian Boyd for useful comments and suggestions he generously gave to the earlier stage of this paper.
I am also sincerely grateful to Shoko Miura for improving my English.

2

Unless otherwise noted, Nabokov’s biographical facts are based on Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.

3

Wittgenstein was visiting Norman Malcolm, who taught at Cornell University. Unless otherwise noted, Wittgenstein’s
biographical facts are based on Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

4

By a personal correspondence, which I greatly appreciate.

5

Two articles published last year enlightened me on Moore’s “splendor and decline”: Ray Monk, “He Was the Most Revered
Philosopher of His Era. So Why Did G E Moore Disappear from History?” Prospect, April 3, 2020. www.prospectmagazine.
co.uk/magazine/ge-moore-philosophy- books-analytic-ray-monk-biography; Thomas Baldwin, “G. E. Moore: A Great102

Akiko Nakata

Philosopher?: The Realist Who Championed Simplicity and Common sense, and Who Discovered ‘Moore’s Paradox’.” TLS,
September 25, 2020. www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/g-e-moore-a-great-philosopher/.
6

The note is available at: www10.plala.or.jp/transparentt/shiryou3.html.

7

The original Japanese version is available at: www10.plala.or.jp/transparentt/ttseinen.pdf.

8

Wittgenstein appreciated its quietness and scenery, which were helpful for his work. Sometimes he urgently invited Moore tostay and discuss with him there（Wittgenstein, Letters, 145―48）. In the spring of 1914, Moore visited Wittgenstein for two
weeks and discussed the host’s work in progress̶the early version of TLP̶and took a lot of notes by dictation（Monk 101
―02）.

9

Among Ray Monk’s descriptions of Wittgenstein who taught at a small school in Otterthal, a rural area in Lower Austria,
we found: “They [a special group of boys who became Wittgenstein’s favorites] were taken by Wittgenstein on an outing toVienna and on walks through the local countryside . . .”（Monk 228）. We know that Nabokov did not have an opportunity toread Monk’s biography, but the teacher seems to us like Wittgenstein with his pupils.

10 “Spirit” is “Geist” in the original German, and “rei” [霊] in the Japanese translation. The Japanese translator notes that hechose “spirit” [rei] from possible several meanings of the term because it obviously has a religious role in the diary, in which
Wittgenstein prays and addresses to Geist as he does to God（n.30）. The book is the complete Japanese translation of thephoto version of the original diary. The English translation of the citations is mine.

Works Cited
Boyd, Brian. “Notes.” Nabokov: Novels 1969―1974. Library of America, 1996, pp. 786―824.
―. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton UP, 1991.
―. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton UP, 1990.
Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford UP, 1958.
McGuiness, Brian. Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life 1889―1921. Oxford UP, 1988. Monk, Ray. Wittgenstein: The Duty ofGenius. Vintage, 1991.
Moore, G. E. “An Autobiography.” The Philosophy of G. E. Moore. The Library of Living Philosophers IV. Edited by Paul Arthur
Schilpp. Cambridge UP, 1968, pp. 3―39.
―. “Moore’s Paradox.” G. E. Moore: Selected Writings. Edited by Thomas Baldwin. Routledge, 1993, pp. 207―12.
―. “What Is Philosophy?” Some Main Problems of Philosophy. 1953. Routledge, 2014, pp. 1―27.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers, pp. 1―8.
―. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1966. Penguin, 2000.
―. Transparent Things. 1972. Vintage, 1998.
Nakata, Akiko. “Shi to Inpei̶Transparent Things o Chûshin ni” [Death and Concealment in Transparent Things and OtherWorks]. The Rising Generation, vol. 145, no. 8, November 1999, 20―22.
―. “Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things.” The Nabokovian, no. 45, Fall 2000, 48―53.
Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872―1914. Little, Brown, 1967.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by John Dover Wilson. Cambridge UP, 1958.
Von Wright, Georg Henrik. “A Biographical Sketch.” Malcolm, pp. 1―22.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Wittogenshutain Himitsu no Nikki--Daiichiji Sekai-Taisen to RonriTetsugaku-Ronko [Wittgenstein’s SecretDiary: The World War I and TLP]. Translated by Takao Maruyama. Commentaries by Keiji Hoshikawa and Ikuma Ishigami.
[The complete Japanese translation of the photo version of the original diary]. Shunju-sha, 2016.
―. Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. Edited by G. H. von Wright. Blackwell, 1974.
―. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, 1963.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things―. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1921. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. RKP, 1961.
Woolf, Leonard. Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. HBJ, 1960.

103

104

Comments and Discussions

Akiko Nakata
Comments and Discussions
Comment on Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things
Tora Koyama, Commentator
Prof. Akiko Nakata argues in her paper that L. Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore, two of the foundersof analytic philosophy, are hidden in Vladimir Nabokov’s novella Transparent Things（hereafter TT）.
Let me summarize her points. There is an intriguing common ground between Nabokov and the two
philosophers in that all three studied at Trinity College, Cambridge Univerisity, although there seems
to be only a faint relationship between Nabokov and the other two. Interestingly, however, the two
philosophers still appear in the novella. What connects Nabokov to the philosophers is, surprisingly
to me, Shakespeare.
Let us begin with Hamlet. In TT, Wittgenstein appears alongside Hamlet in the phrase “Raining in
Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein”（91, as cited in Nakata 2021）. Wittenberg is the university
where Hamlet studies. Hamlet famously says “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
Wittgenstein popularized a comparable paradox, which he named Moore’s Paradox: Moore
claimed that it is not contradictory but instead absurd to say that it is raining and I do not believe it israining（Wittgenstein 1953, Sec. II. x）. We can find the Nabokovian paraphrase of this idea in TT: “Itwas either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense”（91,
as cited in Nakata 2021）.
Moore also appears in TT with Shakespeare’s Romero and Juliet. Julia Moore’s name acts as a
pseudonym for the play. Juliet is a nickname of Julia and Romeo is an anagram of Moore.（Julia is
not the only Moore in TT, by the way.）Furthermore, Armande’s tragedy can be likened to Othello,
whose original title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moore of Venice. Thus the name of Moore prevails
in the novella. These instances make it tempting to imagine that when Nabokov had the name of
Moore in mind while writing TT and someday happened to come across the name of philosopher G. E.
Moore while reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. That’s quite amusing to me.
More connections of Wittgenstein and Moore to TT are pointed out. For instance, Moore is anolder friend of Wittgenstein. Hamlet also has an older friend, Horatio. We can liken the former pairto the latter. The teacher who leads a Boy Scout group who gives an Austrian greeting may have beenmodeled after Wittgenstein, who possibly sometimes dressed like a Boy Scout.
Let me focus on Moore. Moore’s position in the history of analytic philosophy is rather complex.
Moore is usually counted as one of the four founders of analytic philosophy along with G. Frege, B.
Russell, and Wittgenstein. Especially, he is the first who opposed Idealism, which dominatedphilosophy in the English-speaking world at that time, and Russell immediately followed. This
marked the beginning of analytic philosophy in the textbook; Young Moore and Russel are not called
analytic philosophers, as the first philosophers with that designation are Moore’s disciples.
These disciples insisted that analysis is the primary philosophical method, and founded aComment on Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things

105

philosophical journal Analysis, which remains one of the top journals. Some may speculate fromthese facts that analytic philosophy would not exist without Moore.
However, his name is much less well-known than those of the other three. Even Frege, who is thesecond-least popular figure among them, is now studied intensely. Most of Frege’s works aretranslated into Japanese, just like Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s. In contrast, few philosophers study
Moore, and although some of Moore’s works are also translated into Japanese, most of them arecurrently out of print. I don’t know exactly why Moore is so unpopulated now. Maybe the reason isquite complicated. In any case, his fame is limited even among philosophers, despite his contribution
to the beginnings of analytic philosophy.
How did Nabokov get to know of Moore, especially Moore’s relationship with Wittgenstein? Prof.
Nakata suggests that Nabokov might have recalled a lecturer from his student days at Trinity or that afellow student might have told him about Moore. Both scenarios are plausible. However, it seems tome unlikely that Nabokov would know of the personal relationship between Wittgenstein and Moore,
which mirrored that of Hamlet and Horatio.
I would like to suggest another possibility. Both Nabokov and Wittgenstein were in Ithaca in 1949.
Although there is no record of their encounter according to Prof. Nakata, still there remains thepossibility of a connection. I think it would have been easy for Nabokov to gather information about
Wittgenstein in Ithaca. Many people met Wittgenstein during his legendary visit. In fact, Cornell
University at Ithaca was the center of Wittgenstein studies in the 1950s, mostly due to this visit.
Wittgenstein is known to have been influential to those around him. In Trinity College, Cambridge,
philosophers, especially young graduate students, were heavily influenced by Wittgenstein after
meeting him. Even his mannerism was imitated and traveled to other colleges and universities. This
happened again at Cornell University（Pitch and Swedberg 2012）.
Supposedly, Nabokov could have found a student who knew someone who had actually met thephilosopher in person. Wittgenstein often met various people inside and outside of the philosophy
department during his stay. Perhaps such a student was so impressed by the legendary philosopher
that he imitated Wittgenstein’s mannerism. Perhaps he introduced Nabokov to Norman Malcolm, thephilosopher who invited Wittgenstein to Ithaca. Malcolm liked to talk about Wittgenstein. If
Nabokov talked with Malcolm, he might have become interested in Moore.
Perhaps Prof. Nakata has already examined this possibility. In any case, I would love to hear her
thoughts on it.
References
Nabokov, Vladimir,（1998）, Transparent Things, Vintage, originally published in 1972.
Nakata, Akiko,（2021）, “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things”, paper presenterd at Symposium:
Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy, the Nabokov Society of Japan, May 15th to June 20th.
Pitch, Trevor, and Swedberg, Richard,（2012）, “Wittgenstein’s visit to Ithaca in 1949: on the importance of details”, Distinktion:
Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 1―28.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,（1953）, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell.

106

Akiko Nakata

A Reply to Professor Koyama’s Comment on My Paper
Akiko Nakata
Thank you very much for your generous, valuable comment on my paper.
It is not easy to decide which came earlier to Nabokov’s mind, to use a name of Moore inTransparent Things（TT）or to make these two philosophers, Wittgenstein and Moore, prevail in it as
characters’ names and a place name as the setting for various scenes, but my imagination is rather ofthe latter.
I think that Nabokov planned to use the two philosophers as a kind of hub of some subtexts,
images, and motifs. Let me explain that by the case of Amilcar that appears in a sentence in Chapter
26, “The little spitz dog is asleep on the back seat of an Amilcar being driven by the kennelman’s wifeback to Trux”（101）, for example.
First, Amilcar is the brand name of French sports cars that were very popular before WWII.
Second, “the lady with the little dog”（99）in an Amilcar reminds the readers of a famous story
entitled “The Lady with a Little Dog”（1889）by Anton Chekov, one of the authors whom Nabokov
admired and lectured on at Cornell, and in addition, of “Spring in Fialta”（1936）, Nabokovian versionof the story.
Third, Amilcar is a Carthaginian military commander who is the protagonist of Salammbô（1862）,
a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, who is also highly esteemed and lectured on by Nabokov.
Amilcar’s/Hamilcar’s son, Hannibal, can be considered associated with Hugh’s climbing of the Alpsand his father’s agonized clambering over huge blocks in his nightmare. By the meaning of his name,“Grace of Baal,” ̶Baal is a god of fire and patron deity of Carthage̶Hannibal is also related to thetheme of fire in the novella.
Finally̶the list could be longer, though̶Hannibal is Gannibal in Russian, and Abram Gannibal
is Alexandre Pushkin’s great-grandfather, on whom Nabokov wrote an essay. Pushkin is the greatest
Russian poet and Nabokov translated and annotated his masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin（1833）.
This is the way Amilcar centers some subtexts on various fields and levels of the work. I think thatevery name in TT is given such function, to some degree, by the author.
The sentence in which Amilcar appears is very simple, but the long sentence followed by the
obscure joke is complex, and we could find various images and subtexts entangled in it. I tried todisentangle them to see what are hidden there, but I could see only very little.
G. E. Moore seems really inconspicuous to the eyes of general readers like me, who do not know
well the history of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century that Professor Koyama kindly
explained. Moore is rarely discussed these days. This symposium is supported by a Kaken grant, anduntil last year I was the only researcher who was supported for a project whose major theme isconcerning Moore. This year I found the other Kaken supported project on Moore̶just two in all.
In contrast, more than 60 projects on Wittgenstein have been granted by Kaken. In average, threebooks, academic or non-academic, on Wittgenstein are published in Japan every year, but publications
on Moore are very rare. Some months ago, Professor Koyama kindly suggested to me a possibility

A Reply to Professor Koyama’s Comment on My Paper

107

that certain Cambridge students around Nabokov might have told him about Moore, but it was noteasy for me to imagine that until I happened to read two articles written on brightly shining young
Moore. Then I remembered a student called “Nesbit,” who could be related to the Apostles, andadded a paragraph on him, compensating my ignorance.
I also learned that we could miss something important when we do not have the exact whole
picture. I read how Wittgenstein was respected at Cornell University in his biographies: For example,
when he appeared in a hall and was introduced as the speaker, the students in the audience gasped as
if Plato had been introduced（Monk 558）. However, I was not aware of the fact that in the 1950s
Cornell was the center of Wittgenstein studies mostly because of his visit, until Professor Koyama
mentioned it. Probably Nabokov saw piled books by Wittgenstein at bookshops on campus andperhaps he read articles on the great visiting philosopher in the college bulletin. I think it is mostpossible that Nabokov heard the name of Wittgenstein in the early 1950s at Cornell, and read
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and/or Philosophical Investigations（PI）after the interview given in
1966. He knew a little about the relationship between Wittgenstein and Moore, as well as Moore’s
paradox, from PI and the biographies by Norman Malcolm and Georg Henrik von Wright published in
1958. Malcolm described how Wittgenstein could be self-centered̶or rather philosophy-centered forhim̶when he was with Moore: In a meeting of philosophers, Wittgenstein talked on at least for twohours arguing back against Moore, without allowing him to talk or answer（Malcolm 33）;
Wittgenstein was not willing to leave Moore after 90 minutes of philosophical discussion though heknew that Moore had suffered a stroke and was advised by the doctor to avoid excitement and fatigue（Ibid. 67）. As Nabokov answered to the interviewer that he had no contact with the faculty ofphilosophy at Cornell, I think that probably he had no opportunity to talk with Malcolm about
Wittgenstein.
Another possibility how Nabokov became interested in Wittgenstein and Moore could be found in
related to Bertrand Russell. In Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle（1969）, a novel written before TT,
is a character called Professor Rattner, who seems to model Bertrand Russell. Professor Rattner rarely
appears in person and he is only referred to several times. His nephew, Bernard Rattner, is a closefriend of the protagonist, Van Veen, at high school, and finally Van is elected to the Rattner Chair of
Philosophy in the University of Kingston（Ada, 506）. Nabokov’s interest in Russell seems rather
complicated. He was critical of Russell as activist, for the philosopher was against the Vietnam War,which meant to Nabokov that he should be classified with “the Reds”（Strong Opinions, 98）.
Finally, I would like to add a note to “the scoutmaster.” The earlier version of my paper included apassage regarding the scoutmaster as Wittgenstein:
In the summer vacation, Wittgenstein went from Otterthal to Manchester to visit William Eccles:
When he [Wittgenstein] went to Manchester, both Eccles and his wife were surprised at the great change inhim. They . . . found in the place of the immaculately dressed young man, the ‘favourite of the ladies’ they
had known before the war, a rather shabby figure dressed in what appeared to them to be a Boy Scout

108

Akiko Nakata

uniform.（Monk 231）

Now, we could assume the reason the leader of the group is called both scoutmaster and teacher. . . .
The citation is from Monk’s biography published more than ten years after Nabokov’s death sothat I deleted it from the final version of my paper. However, according to Professor Koyama,
Wittgenstein’s dressing like a boy scout uniform was well known among the people who knew him.
Then it might be possible for Nabokov to hear about it somewhere.
Many thanks for reading this long, rambling reply.
Works Cited
Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford UP, 1958.
Monk, Ray. Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Vintage, 1991.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill, 1973.
―. Transparent Things. 1972. Vintage, 1998.

Comment on Akiko Nakata, “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things”

109Comment on Akiko Nakata, “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in
Transparent Things”
Brian Boyd
In a 2000 paper, Professor Nakata has already done a thorough job of attempting to explain the
explicit and riddling allusion to Wittgenstein in Nabokov’s 1972 novel, Transparent Things.1 That
was no easy task, since, as she shows there, nowhere else does Nabokov reveal any knowledge ofWittgenstein’s work, and indeed in 1966 he only attests to his then ignorance of Wittgenstein’s ideas.
Moreover the Wittgenstein allusion in TT is highly specific, playfully and puzzlingly linked to
Wittenberg, and of unclear relevance to the larger designs of the novel. In that earlier paper, Professor
Nakata rightly and aptly links the “raining or . . . not raining”（TT 91）to a key passage with clear
metaphysical implications in The Gift, Nabokov’s last Russian novel（published 1937―38, 1952）,
even if there is almost certainly no causal connection between Wittgenstein on “raining or not raining”
in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus（1921）and The Gift’s emblematic scene of not raining
mistaken for raining.2
In her new paper, Professor Nakata tries to show the likelihood of an additional allusion inTransparent Things to George Moore, Wittgenstein’s distinguished colleague in philosophy at
Cambridge, through Wittgenstein’s interest in what he called “Moore’s paradox”（“It’s perfectly
absurd or nonsensical to say such things as ‘I don’t believe it’s raining, yet as a matter of fact it reallyis raining’”）.3 Unlike the Wittgenstein allusion, the possible reference to Moore is anything but
explicit in TT, and given the “raining or not raining” passages in both the Tractatus Logicophilosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, could be seen as superfluous.
Yet as Professor Nakata shows TT also has an insistent pattern of play on the words and letters of thename “Moore,” in the character Julia Moore, and other Moores, and in patterns connected with Romeo（including Giulia Romeo）, and, she also suggests, another Shakespeare love-tragedy, Othello, The
Moore of Venice, a play in which the strangling of Desdemona bears a relationship（obvious once
Professor Nakata has pointed it out）to the strangling of Armande by Hugh Person at the center ofTransparent Things. In the chapter of TT ending with the passage “either raining or pretending to rain
or not raining at all. . . . ‘Raining in Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein’”（TT 91）, there is anotherpointedly featured and foregrounded “more”: recalling his earlier humiliating hike in the wake ofArmande and three other young men, which he is now trying to relive, Hugh recollects that “he rested
on a rock, and, looking down, seemed to see through the moving mists the making of the very
mountains that his tormentors trod, the crystalline crust heaving up with his heart from the bottom of
an immemorial more（sea）”（TT 89）. More is the Russian word for “sea,” and Russian is Armande’s
native language, not Hugh’s, so that both the echo of “immemorial” and the strangeness of the Russian“more” in this context bring the “Moore”-more pattern particularly close to the passage that could
contain an echo of Moore’s paradox. And the two paragraphs that follow “‘Raining in Wittenberg, but
not in Wittgenstein.’ An obscure joke in Tralatitions,” at the start of the next chapter, again return tothe highly unusual “tralatitious” and to Julia Moore（92）.

110

Brian Boyd

Given the prominence of the “Moore” pattern in the novel, and the relationship of Moore’s paradox tothe “raining or not raining” options in TT, an allusion to Moore’s paradox could well be part of
Nabokov’s design. Yet it remains unlike the undoubted Wittgenstein allusion, which stands out within
the rather spare style of TT, so much less allusive than Nabokov’s two previous novels, Pale Fire andAda. But this prominent and provocative allusive riddle has not yet yielded the precise literary payoffthat most of Nabokov’s allusions have, even in its Wittgenstein portion, let alone with the possible but
much less distinct shadow of Moore.
In her 2000 paper, Professor Nakata refers to Nabokov scholar David Rampton’s adducing anotherWittgenstein passage related to rain: “Can I say ‘bububu’ and mean ‘If it doesn’t rain I shall go for awalk’?”（PI 18e）
. I wonder if at the end of Chapter 23 of TT Nabokov has this passage in mind, as
well as the later passage from PI that Professor Nakata cites（“One is inclined to say: ‘Either it israining, or it isn’t̶how I know, how the information has reached me, is another matter.’ But then let
us put the question like this: What do I call ‘information that it is raining’?（Or have I only”（PI 356）
information of this information too?））. For in the chapter that ends with the Wittgenstein
allusion, Hugh hikes the mountainside above Witt in the hope of rediscovering the trail where he had
walked with Armande, only to be deterred as “The grayness of rain would soon engulf everything. He
felt a first kiss on his bald spot and walked back to the woods and widowhood. . . . It was eitherraining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain”（91）. Partly because it israining（and because his feet are causing him agony, and because he is not sure of the way or of thechances of retrieving anything of his past with Armande by means of the climb）, Hugh turns backfrom his walk. Both Wittgenstein’s conditional “If it doesn’t rain I shall go for a walk” and his
disjunction “Either it is raining or it isn’t” seem conflated here in Nabokov’s retentive andcombinative memory̶although even if that is the case, it is not clear what the consequences would
be for the novel.
Professor Nakata has the frankness and courage to admit she does not have a clear explanation for
Moore’s possible implication in TT, and the tenacity to try to discover more. My hunch is that theanswer is more likely to be found in internal connections within what Nabokov has already suppliedin TT than through research in the archive of the Society for Psychical Research at Cambridge. The
passage under our attention, after all, describes the uncertainty about raining, or pretending to rain, or
not raining at all, in terms thatcertain old Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, but versionize, as it were, through theghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs. “Raining in Wittenberg, but not in
Wittgenstein.” An obscure joke in Tralatitions.

This incorporates the word “ghost”; a strong suggestion, via the Hamlet connection with Wittenberg,of the ghost in Hamlet; and it purportedly comes from a novel by R., whose ghost, we know fromother inferences, is the main narrator of Transparent Things. The italics for “versionize,” too, seemconnected with the second paragraph in the next chapter, where, on behalf of the ghosts interested in
Hugh’s fate, the narrator writes:

Comment on Akiko Nakata, “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things”

111

The most we can do when steering a favorite in the best direction, in circumstances not involving injury to others,
is to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure such as trying to induce a dreamthat we hope our favorite will recall as prophetic if a likely event does actually happen. On the printed page thewords “likely” and “actually” should be italicized too, at least slightly, to indicate a slight breath of wind inclining
those characters（in the sense of both signs and personae）.（92）

But what to make of these provoking internal connections remains obscure.
One final comment. Moore and Wittgenstein both use the contrast between raining or not raining.
Perhaps this has a long tradition in philosophy̶perhaps all the way from Plato or Aristotle: does
Professor Koyama know? In his autobiography Karl Popper, for instance, reports saying, in thediscussion after Bertrand Russell presented a paper at the Aristotelian Society in 1936, that part of the
problem in Russell’s attempt to find a principle of induction “was due to the mistaken assumption thatscientific knowledge was a species of knowledge̶knowledge in the ordinary sense in which if I knowthat it is raining it must be true that it is raining, so that knowledge implies truth”.4 Is this a tradition,
a “meme” as it were, in philosophy, or is it that raining or not raining merely supplies a stark
contingent disjunction that philosophers independently find useful?
Notes
1“Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things.” The Nabokovian, no. 45, Fall 2000, 48―53.

2

Nabokov, The Gift 312.

3

“Moore’s Paradox.” G. E. Moore: Selected Writings. Edited by Thomas Baldwin. Routledge, 1993, pp. 207―12.

4

Popper, Unended Quest, 110.

Works Cited
Moore, George. “Moore’s Paradox.” G. E. Moore: Selected Writings. Edited by Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.
207―12.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. 1937―38, 1952; trans. Michael Scammell, 1963; New York: Vintage, 1981.
―. Transparent Things. 1972; New York: Vintage, 1998.
Nakata, Akiko. “Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore Hidden in Transparent Things.” Nanzan University Conference, “Vladimir
Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy,” May 2021.
―. “Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things.” The Nabokovian, no. 45, Fall 2000, 48―53.
Popper, Karl. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. 1974; London: Routledge, 1992.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 1953; 2nd ed, 1958, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell,
1998.
―. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1921. Translated by C. K. Ogden. 1922, London: Routledge, 1996.

112

Akiko Nakata

A Reply to Professor Boyd’s Comment on My Paper
Akiko Nakata
Thank you very much for your generous comment that illuminated some important points.
I had missed the connection between Hugh’s decision to return to the hotel caused by the raindrop on
his head and Wittgenstein’s “If it doesn’t rain I shall go for a walk.” Indeed, the sentence, together
with his “Either it is raining or it isn’t,” sounds in Nabokov’s long, entangled sentence about the
obscure raining.
I had not related “more” to Armande. I thought that it was one of the pointers to Nabokov himself, but
to regard it as a sign to Armande’s appearance is better.
“The first kiss, he felt on his bald spot” sounds like Armande’s-she might love to kiss his bald spot
when she is in a good mood, except̶which leads Hugh back to the hotel and his death. She seems towish his death, as we find her among the flames coming up “humming happily” towards Hugh in thelast scene（103）. The raindrop also has an association with “a raindrop fell on Charlotte’s grave” inLolita（118）, but unlike the mother in despair̶the sentence has a twist, though̶the raindrop that
falls on Hugh cannot be a teardrop of Armande. She may not be in the group of ghosts trying to
influence Hugh to evade the catastrophe in the paragraph you cited.
I had thought of the ghost in Hamlet, but did not mention it because I did and do not have a clear
picture including the ghost. The ghost of Hamlet appears to his son, and tells the story of his deathand his being suffered in the limbo so that the son swears revenge on the murderer. The ghost
prepares the plot of the drama. On the other hand, we do not see the ghost of Hugh’s father or wehave no idea what he wants. In the midnight just after his death, Hugh feels as if his father wereinviting him to join him in the hereafter. We do not understand why his father wants his son to die,but we only imagine that Hugh must feel guilty because he did not love his father so much. I cannot
identify the ghost of his father anywhere. In place of his real father, Mr. R. takes a role of godfather toHugh.
The italics for “versionize” seem connected with the italics of the passage you cited. According to theghosts, they can influence the living only by “a breath of wind” “the lightest, the most indirectpressure” just like “the ghost of sound produced by a drizzle.”
As researching the documents of the SPR at the Cambridge Library is involved in this Kaken project,
I will do it if possible. At least, I will be certain that neither Wittgenstein nor Moore had anything to
do with the society.
For the participants who may not know this, I would like to add that the letters in the picture book,
The Vege-men’s Revenge, are also italicized, imitating the legs of the vegetables in the pictures. The

A Reply to Professor Boyd’s Comment on My Paper

113

book by Florence Kate Upton seems to be referred to at the end of Hugh’s life.

The Vege-men’s Revenge (pp. 28-29) from the Abebooks.com website: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/
BookDetailsPL?bi=30853670021&cm_sp=SEARCHREC-_-WIDGET-L-_-BDP-R&searchurl=sortby%3D17%26tn%
3Dvege%2Bmen%2527s%2Brevenge%23&gid=1&pid=1

Moreover, also analytic philosophers seem to me to depend on italics. Wittgenstein sometimes uses
Italics, and Moore often uses them, almost on every page, for all the parts of speech, not only fornouns, verbs and adjectives. For example, I quote from “The Conception of Intrinsic Value”:
A kind of value is intrinsic if and only if, when anything possesses it, that same thing or anything exactly like itwould necessarily or must always, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same degree. （290）
But what the difference is, if we suppose, as I suppose, that goodness and beauty are not subjective, and that they
do share with “yellowness” and “containing pleasure,” the property of depending solely on the intrinsic nature ofwhat possesses the in a sense in which predicates of value never do.（297）

I am not certain if I can say that Moore depends on italics much more than the other analytic
philosophers, but I think that we can see the ghosts, the picture book, and probably Moore̶or Moore
and Wittgenstein, or analytic philosophers in general̶are related to italics, a hub of the novella.
It is stimulating that “raining or not raining” may be the long tradition in philosophy. If it is the case,
did Nabokov know that? In this novella, we see a lot references on rain. Some of them show thenarrator’s interest in, or memory of, raining, like this: “He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter,

114

Akiko Nakata

to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would
undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times”（TT, 18）.
I look forward to Professor Koyama’s comment on this topic.
Works Cited
Moore, G. E. 1922. “The Conception of Intrinsic Value.” Principia Ethica. Edited by Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge UP, 1993, 28098.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1955. Vintage, 1981.
―. Transparent Things. 1972. Vintage, 1989.
Upton, Florence Kate. The Vege-men’s Revenge. Longmans Green & Co., 1897.

A Reply to Prof. Boyd’s Question on the Phrase of Raining and Not-Raining

115

A Reply to Prof. Boyd’s Question on the Phrase of Raining and Not-Raining
Tora Koyama
First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Boyd and Prof. Nakata for their kind replies to my commentson their papers. I would be grateful if my comments could be of some help to them.
Prof. Boyd mentions me in his comment on Prof. Nakata’s paper concerning the phrase of raining andnot-raining. It does seem to stem from Aristotle because it is an example of the principle of excluded
middle（or the principle of non-contradiction）. It also seems to stem from Kant because it is an
example of tautology.（The notion of tautology as analytic truth, a truth in virtue of its meaning, wasoriginated by Kant.）However, the examples that Aristotle and Kant use are not about raining.
Perhaps it is Wittgenstein who popularized the phrase because he is the first philosopher who claims
that a logical truth is a tautology, as I learned it only a few days ago. Presumably, the combination ofraining and not-raining is intended to insignificant. For Aristotle, however, the principle of excluded
middle is not insignificant because it is an important logical principle. For Kant, similarly, tautology
is not insignificant because it is an analytic truth（a truth in virtue of its meaning）. For Wittgenstein,in contrast, the principle of excluded middle（and a tautology）is insignificant（or “sinnlos”）because,
according to his notion of tautology, a logical truth is a tautology it the sense that it does not represent
any possible states of affairs. Before Wittgenstein, accordingly, philosophers did not need such an
insignificant example of tautology or the principle of excluded middle.
By the way, I think that raining alone（without combining not-raining）is a paradigmatic example ofknowledge for empiricism: we know that it is raining simply by looking out of the window. Popper
seems to me to use the example in this vein.

116

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Random Late-Night Thoughts on Prof. Nakata’s Paper
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Akiko, you have written a richly suggestive paper explicating one of the most complex passages inTransparent Things. In doing so, you have argued convincingly for Nabokov’s “versioning” ofMoore’s Paradox . Since the explication was merely a first step, and since your will undertake further
research into the connections among Moore, Wittgenstein, Nabokov, and spiritualism, a possible
method for expansion would involve linking some of the paths you have already taken.
One way to connect the materials from the final third of the paper to the argument developed so far
would be to continue examining the differences between Moore’s notion of the paradox named after
him and what you call Wittgenstein’s “developed arguments” regarding Moore’s Paradox. To me,
Moore seems interested in implications of first person present indicative for making assertions,expressing a belief, and reporting a state of mind. These are basically situations in which what one
asserts conjunctively contradicts what one implies.（210）The developments you mention take Wittgenstein in a somewhat different direction:
Moore’s paradox can be put like this: the expression “I believe that this is the case” is used like the assertion “Thisis the case”; and yet the hypothesis that I believe that this is the case is not used like the hypothesis that this is thecase.（PI 190）

I remember having conversations with my colleague Irv Goldstein about Wittgenstein’s use of
Moore’s Paradox. Prof. Goldstein mentioned that Wittgenstein imagined three cases in which Moore’s
Paradox is neither a contradiction nor an absurdity theoretically or practically. In one case a station
master announces the arrival of a train but then says he does not believe it will arrive at the announced
time. In another, a soldier writes military communiques but adds that he believes they are incorrect. I
have forgotten the third, but I think all three are discussed in Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the
Philosophy of Psychology, 1980.
Wittgenstein’s way of thinking about Moore’s Paradox prepares us for trans-gendered students whoon the first day of class introduced themselves and utter sentences of the ‘p & I don’t believe that p’variety, for example, “I am female, but I don’t believe that I am female.”On the other hand, Moore’s way of thinking about the paradox opens up the opportunity for fictional“versionizing” of the slowly revealed difference between belief and assertion:（1）A proposition itself does not imply belief: the proposition “it is raining” does not imply that I believe it israining. “It is raining” ought to be asserted by someone.
（2）A proposition asserted by S does not imply belief. S may say it is raining and be lying.（210）

Random Late-Night Thoughts on Prof. Nakata’s Paper

117

Moore, G. E. “Moore’s Paradox.” G. E. Moore: Selected Writings. Ed.
Baldwin, Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1993.

If S is lying, S is violating Grice’s Cooperation Principle of Meaning, specifically the maxim ofquality, and Nabokov’s narrators are often experts at such violations.
Since you bought up the presence of Othello in Transparent Things, if you need more evidence that
Nabokov used Moore’s Paradox, consider another Othello-animated story, “That In Aleppo Once”（1958）. The story uses a narrator who offers several varieties of “p & I don’t believe that p”
utterances:
Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed.
Once, however, quite suddenly she started to sob in a sympathetic railway carriage. “The dog,” she said, “the dog
we left. I cannot forget the poor dog.” The honesty of her grief shocked me, as we had never had any dog. “Iknow,” she said, “but I tried to imagine we had actually bought that setter. And just think, he would be now
whining behind a locked door.” There had never been any talk of buying a setter.

Having confessed to adultery, the narrator’s wife takes back her confession:“You will think me crazy,” she said with a vehemence that, for a second, almost made a real person of her, “but I
didn’t̶I swear that I didn’t. Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps thisbench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star.

In Zettel, Paragraph 717 Wittgenstein says: “‘You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you canhear him only if you are being addressed.’ --That is a grammatical remark.” If the goal of yourresearch is a longer discussion of the link between Moore and Wittgenstein’s non-raining rain andNabokov’s capacity for spiritualism, a good place to start is this passage from The Gift, detailing
Alexander Chernyshevsky’s final words:
The following day he died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying（itwas darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds）: “What nonsense. Of course there is nothing afterwards.”
He sighed, listened to the trickling and drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness:“There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”
And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant
upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony, and the water trickled down with a drumming sound.

Chernyshevsky’s final words about rain ask readers of The Gift to complete yet another Nabokov
version of Moore’s Paradox: “I believe that the afterlife does not exist, but it may.”
By the way, The Gift is Nabokov’s rainiest book, and it offers moments when it seems that it is bothraining and not raining:

118

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Stray arrows of rain that had lost both rhythm and weight and the ability to make any sound, flashed at random,
this way and that, in the sun.

To your already impressive count of Moore’s, you may wish to add the implied subtitle of Othello, theMoor of Venice, a tragedy brought about because Iago believes and does not believe his wife Emilia is
involved sexually with Othello.

A Response to Professor Kuzmanovich’s Random Late-Night Thoughts

119

A Response to Professor Kuzmanovich’s Random Late-Night Thoughts
Akiko Nakata
Zoran, thank you very much for your illuminating comment. I am deeply grateful to you forgenerously sharing your thoughts though you were not in good condition.
Your comprehensible explanations so helpfully make up for deficiencies in my discussion that all theparticipants, including those who might not be familiar with Moore’s Paradox and Wittgenstein’s
arguments regarding the paradox, will be able to grasp the points of them. “I am female, but I don’t
believe that I am female” is the best variation of “p and I don’t believe that p” I have ever seen!
The fictional “versioning” of the slowly revealed the difference between belief and assertion, which
you indicated as a possibility that Moore’s paradox opens up and its examples you found in “That In
Aleppo Once” are really amazing. I have never thought about that. And Iago’s belief and disbelief ofEmilia’s betrayal is a telling example of Moore’s Paradox.
I only thought about the doubling of the characters in the last line of Othello:
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog,
And smote him, thus. [He stabs himself]（5.2.354―358）

In the scene in Aleppo are a Turk, a Venetian and Othello involved, and Othello helps the Venetian bykilling the Turk who has beaten the Venetian. In the last scene, Othello commits suicide to punish
himself for murdering Desdemona, where Othello is himself and the Turk he punished in Aleppo.
Desdemona is the Venetian beaten by the Turk [Othello], and also the Turk who was strangled by
Othello in Aleppo. It did not occur to me that I could relate these doublings or amalgams to Moore’s
paradox.
As for Alexander Chernyshevsky’s last words, I compared it with Wittgenstein’s last words in mynote1 and discussed it as an example of the hereafter paradoxically revealed in a Japanese essay “Deathand Concealment: Transparent Things and Other Works.”2 However, I did not discuss his words as
related to Moore’s Paradox.
Thank you very much for reminding me of another Nabokov version of Moore’s Paradox in The Gift.
I had completely forgotten it. What Fyodor’s father experiences at the base of a rainbow, which
follows the description, seems to have pushed it aside in my memory.
For your information, I add an image of the first folio of Othello. The page shows The Tragedie of120

Akiko Nakata

Othello, the Moore of Venice.

Courtesy of the Miami University Library³
https://www.flickr.com/photos/muohio_digital_collections/22483847107/
Thank you very much again for your really helpful comment and please accept my apologies for thisbelated and meager reply.
Notes
1“Lastly, I would like to cite Wittgenstein’s last sentences, which could suggest another example of similarity between
Nabokov and Wittgenstein in treating rain in the matter of recognition. Two days before his death, Wittgenstein wrote hislast note: ‘Someone who, dreaming, says ‘I am dreaming,’ even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if
he said in his dream ‘it is raining,’ while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noiseof the rain’（On Certainty 1969; trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, para 676）. Wittgenstein of course wrote it

A Response to Professor Kuzmanovich’s Random Late-Night Thoughts

121

long after The Gift, and there is no record that he had read Nabokov at all. We know that this is nothing but a coincidence;
however, it still allures us to read it as if it paraphrased the last paradoxical words by Alexander Chernyshevsky, who, on his
deathbed, is deceived by the sound of dropping water from the flower pots on the upstairs balcony under the cloudless sky.
‘Of course there is nothing afterwards.’ He sighed, listened to the trickling and drumming outside the window and repeatedwith extreme distinctness: ‘There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining’（The Gift, 312）.” Akiko Nakata,“Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things,” The Nabokovian 45（2000）: 48―53.
2

Akiko, Nakata. “Shi to Inpei̶Transparent Things o Chûshin ni” [Death and Concealment in Transparent Things and OtherWorks], The Rising Generation, vol. 145, no. 8, November 1999, 20―22.

3

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moore of Venice, First Folio, p.1.
ID 22483847107, Set 72157660800287162, Digital Collections, Miami University Libraries.

122

Zoran Kuzmanovich

A Quick Response to Prof. Nakata Response to My First Response to Her Paper
Zoran Kuzmanovich
I must start by apologizing for not reading your Nabokovian article on TT and Wittgenstein. For somereason, most likely my carelessness, I assumed that both your articles on the subject were in Japanese.
I think you are on solid footing in treating Othello’s suicide as an example of character doubling. But
such doubling can also be paradoxical, when for example, Othello is and is not Othello.
Paradox requires that an assertion/situation be absurd or contradictory but nonetheless true either
literally or figuratively, and situations where people kill themselves are often paradoxical, withidentities（or what Foucault called “subject positions”）far more fluid than they are in situations not
involving dying.
Shakespeare prepares for the Othello as Turk or Othello as both friend and enemy of Venetian state byhaving Othello give the long speech in Act I, scene iii, lines 127―168 and then by having Othelloconfuse the voice of dead Desdemona with that of live Emilia so that he smothers again an already
smothered Desdemona yet fails to kill her since she lives long enough to tell Emilia first that she wasmurdered and then that she was not murdered but committed suicide.
It is no surprise then that when Lodovico asks for Othello “Where is this rash and most unfortunateman?” Othello answers “That’s he that was Othello: here I am.” The final paradox has to do with thekiss Othello gives dead Desdemona: “I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee: no way but this; /Killing myself,
to die upon a kiss.” The phrasing allows the reader to read “Killing myself” as “I killed myself when
I summoned enough cruelty to smother you” or even “When I smothered you I was acting as God
does when He takes the lives of those he loves.”
This is the passage that to me suggests such a reading:Ah balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after. One more, and this the last:
So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears: this sorrow’s heavenly;
It strikes where it doth love.（5.2.16-22）

So in the end Othello is Othello that was, Othello that is, the Turk, Desdemona, and God. These are
not examples of Moore’s paradox, but they are significant in that these unstable identities alter
Desdemona’s murder as well, so that it is also “sacrifice,” “sweet revenge,” a rash mistake, an act of
cruelty, Desdemona’s suicide, Othello’s figurative suicide before his real one, etc.

Questions and Answers

123

Akiko Nakata
Questions and Answers
I
Ryo Chonabayashi
Question（On Page 98―99）: I would like to hear more on the discussion on Moore's paradox. I am
not sure how uttering（or, more precisely, asserting）“It was either raining or pretending to rain or notraining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense” can be the Nabokovian paraphrase of Moore's
paradox. A mere appearance does not entail truth, so I find it is perfectly intelligible to assert the
Nabokovian paraphrase（well, it is not very clear what it means by saying “pretending to rain”）. So,
it is not clear whether the Nabokovian paraphrase represents a paradox（because this paraphrase
seemts to be intelligible）. On the other hand, I do find there is something wrong in asserting thesentence “it is raining, but I don't believe it is raining”. Given this difference, it seems to me the
Nabokovian paraphrase is not a version of Moorean sentences. Or, is the idea here that for
Nabokovians uttering a Moorean sentence can be understood as making a joke, not asserting the two
propositions expressed by the sentence?

Akiko Nakata
Thank you very much for the good question. It is not easy for me to explain my intention clearly, but
I will try.
The sentence, “it is raining but I don't believe it is raining,” an example of Moore’s paradox, consistsof two clauses. Alone, both clauses are completely intelligible and natural, but when they are united
in a sentence asserted by the first person in the present tense, the sentence becomes illogical.
Nabokov’s sentence in question does not fulfill the conditions.
So, how can I relate the sentence from TT to Moore’s paradox? As the two clauses cannot be together
in a sentence in the case of Moore’s paradox, I assume that they do not belong to the same dimension
or the same world̶from now on, we leave logic for narrative. Looking back at “It was either raining
or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense . . . ,” we are aware of“pretending to rain” and “in a sense” that sound unnatural, unlike the rest of the clause, which would
be totally natural in an everyday conversation. “Pretending to rain” is the personification of rain, and“in a sense” is an unnecessary adverbial phrase. These phrases puzzle us, as we cannot be sure why
they are put in the clause together with the other, very ordinary expressions.
Moreover, the latter part of the sentence is also confusing and mysterious. “. . . in a sense that only

124

Ryo Chonabayashi and Akiko Nakata

certain old Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, but versionize, as it were,
through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs.” We sometimes
observe that it appears to rain and do not need any special dialects（and which dialects are meant
here?）to express the phenomenon. But the narrator goes further or slides in another direction. We
could summarize it as “it appears to rain, and that is expressed by a sound of drizzle in a rose shrubs,”
but in the sentence, the sound is doubly faded; it is not the sound but the ghost of it, and the drizzle
falls not on the shrub but in the haze of it. By versionizing, the appearing raining loses its substanceand fades into the sphere of ghosts.
One of the purposes of this complicated sentence is to attract the readers’ attention to the beings
behind the world of the living characters. Moreover, the sentence represents the world with two,essentially incompatible, dimensions; in this way, it is similar to the sentence that exemplifies Moore’s
paradox.
I do not think this explanation completely clarifies this topic, but I hope it would be of some help.

Questions and Answers

125

II
Shoko Miura
Thank you, Akiko, for your fascinating study of Transparent Things（TT）relating it to Wittgenstein’s
philosophical arguments on time. I must also thank Dr. Chonabayashi’s questions and Brian Boyd’s
answers for focusing on Nabokov’s opposition to determinism. The exchange gave me a rich source
for contemplating the expressions of time in Nabokov’s novels and short stories.
My question for Akiko（and, for that matter, Brian, Zoran or anyone following this symposium）isabout the terms “simultaneity” and “coincidence” in Nabokov’s works such as, for example, “TheVane Sisters” and Ada regarding Nabokov’s anti-deterministic idea of death. I assumed from theBoyd-Chonabayashi exchange that these two terms would reflect Nabokov’s refutation of determinism
as well as his affirmation of the power of the imagination to transcend the prison-like limits of time.
In my understanding of determinism, the past is a sequence of causes that determine the future.
Therefore, the present in which we live and think we are making our free choices to form the future isan illusion and we are powerless to change or create the future.
It was therefore intriguing for me that Akiko pointed out in Moore’s lecture the use of the present
tense for what we would normally use in the past tense, and how Wittgenstein responded to what hecalled “Moore’s paradox”: “I don’t believe it’s raining, yet as a matter of fact it really is raining.” As
Akiko suggests, Nabokov makes clear his knowledge of this paradox by mentioning a joke including
raining and Wittgenstein, and Hugh’s subjective thoughts of whether the rain is falling toward the endof Chapter 23 of TT. Wittgenstein’s point is, of course, that it is a paradox only if the first person isused as the subject, but the paradox depends also on the use of the present tense in the two statements:“I don’t believe” and “it is raining.” If the first statement was “I didn’t believe,” there is nothing
paradoxical in the sentence. Moore’s paradox therefore necessitates the subjective viewpoint existingin the present. This seems essential to Nabokov’s concept of “simultaneity” and “coincidence”（anunpredictable occurrence, without predetermination by a cause）. If the present tense can be used forwhat happened in the past, we regain our freedom from the deterministic concept of time. If a narrator
could freely exist in both time present and time past of the story, this is possible.
Then, what does Nabokov’s idea of death have to do with his negation of deterministic causes? In Ada
andTT, do the characters’ deaths occur without a predetermining cause? Lucette drowns because ofwhat Van and Ada had done to her. In contrast, Hugh Person’s death apparently is not related to what
he did to Armande. I’m merely guessing that, since Nabokov allows for the possibility of ghosts̶
who are presumably free of time̶narrating stories like “The Vane Sisters,” there must be a reason forthe difference. Could anyone enlighten me?

126

Shoko Miura, Brian Boyd, and Akiko Nakata

Akiko Nakata
Thank you very much, Shoko, for the inspiring question regarding1 deterministic causes in relation to
the tense problem that Moore’s paradox aroused. I will try to think about the problem of determinism
and free will in TT.
In the beginning of Ch. 24, Mr. R., a ghost narrator, denies determinism and causal relation:
Direct interference in a person’s life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking,hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some “future” events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all
are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actuallyclosed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.（92）

As you say, Hugh’s death apparently is not related to what he did to Armande while Lucette dies as
the result of her suffering what Van and Ada did to her. Indeed, the cause and effect is not so obvious
in TT as in Ada, but we could think that possibly Armande causes Hugh’s death.
First, one of the reasons Hugh decides to revisit Switzerland for the last time̶not knowing it would
be the last, though̶is that Armande has appeared repetitively in his dreams, whose settings are Swiss
mountains and Italian lakes, not in an American winter. Armande seems to behave in the way that theghost narrator explains how they（ghosts）can influence their favorites. He insists they can only
indirectly lead their favorites to go in the best direction “by a breath of wind” or by “trying to induce a
dream that we hope our favorite will recall as prophetic if a likely event does actually happen”（92）.
Second, we can find Armande among the flames in the lethal fire, and moreover, she finally pushes
Hugh to death in fire and smoke.2
Now flames were mounting the stairs, in pairs, in trios, in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue,
conversing and humming happily. It was not, though, the heat of their flicker, but the acid dark smoke that caused
Person to retreat back into the room; excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying
to close. . . . and he realized before choking to death that a storm outside was aiding the inside fire.（103）

The flames happily mounting the stairs remind the reader of Armande and her athlete fellows. The
flamelet seems Armande, the only woman in a party of sportsmen, who is once called “the little one”
by a member（50）. “Excuse me” also relates the flamelet to Armande, who once absents herself withthe polite apology during the first date with Hugh（54）. The other character who uses the apology inthe novella is Tamworth, Mr. R.’s secretary, but we do not know whether he is dead at the time of thefire, and even if he is dead, he cannot be called “flamelet.”There is no description in the text illuminating that Armande feels resentment at her death and wants
to revenge herself on Hugh. However, if we remember that most women around her criticize “herrather pathetic little tricks of attack and retort,” her aiding with the death wind may be understandable

Questions and Answers

127

for the reader（64）. For Hugh, it is a tragedy that he strangles his loved wife while he is dreaming anightmare, never in purpose, but for Armande, it is nothing but a violent, cruel murder, and she could
think that the perpetrator must be punished. From the viewpoint, Hugh’s death can be also the effectof a cause.
On the other hand, it is not easy to say how much Hugh’s death is deterministic. As we have seen
above, the ghosts seem to be able to indirectly influence their favorites, and Armande succeeds inleading Hugh to return to Switzerland by appearing in his dreams. Hugh is conscious of something or
someone warning him to leave Witt for somewhere else, but he disregards the warning and dies during
the night. As the narrator says, “after all it was for him to decide, for him to die, if he wished”（99）.
The ghosts can see freely through the spaces and existing time̶present and past̶but they can see
future only partially, as the ghost narrator admits at the beginning of the novella, “the future is but afigure of speech, a spector of thought.”（1）Could anyone enlighten us?

Shoko Miura
Thank you, Akiko, for a thorough and detailed reply on TT to my comments and questions. I now seethat Hugh Person’s death can be seen as indirectly caused by the ghosts in the imagistic form offlames and a “flamelet” suggesting Armande. I also think that without this interpretation, the story
will lose its thematic unity（begun on page 1 which you quoted at the end of your reply）. The“specter” in the sentence on the first page of TT is a key statement in that it speaks of the future as amere “specter.” If you turn the sentence around, we see that specters are equated with the future,
which we mortals are not permitted to know. This is consistent with VN’s view of time and its threeparts̶the past, imprisoned unless freed by memories, the present, a flash of “reality,” and the dark,
unknowable future. This view, according to Brian Boyd in his reply to my second batch of questionsin this symposium, basically stayed the same throughout his life. Thus, your argument based on TT
reinforces the view that VN was opposed to the idea of predeterminism. Ghosts, or imaginative
suggestions of their presence, are VN’s essential expression of his concept of time.
This symposium has been stimulating and enlightening, especially since I lacked knowledge ofanalytic philosophy, Popper and Wittgenstein and Currie. Thank you so much, Akiko, for your hard
work in making it possible. I am also grateful to Brian Boyd, Zoran Kuzmanovich and Professor Tora
Koyama for their generous contributions.

Akiko Nakata
Thank you very much, Shoko, for your stimulating response. As you interpret, we can consider that

128

Shoko Miura, Brian Boyd, and Akiko Nakata

the ghost narrator allude̶not only who they are but also̶that they, specters, are equated with the
future, and that is related to Nabokov’s opposition to the idea of predeterminism.
Shoko, I deeply appreciate your generous contributions, too. Thanks to your energetic lead, we had
spirited discussions.

Brian Boyd
In response to Shoko’s comments on Akiko’s paper, and Akiko’s reply, and since both of them ask for
more:
I think Moore’s paradox does not have much to do with time, nor to me（pace Moore andWittgenstein）is it really very interesting. “I don’t believe it is raining and yet it is raining” is muchthe same as “I believe I am five feet tall and yet I am six feet tall”; the “yet is raining” or the “yet I am
six feet tall” can be expressed as “it is true that it is raining” or “it is true that I am six feet tall,” or in a
subjective mode “I believe that it is raining” or “I believe that I am six feet tall,” since “I believe p” asusually understood means “I think（or know）it is true that p.” Whereas someone else saying p, orthat p is true, or that she believes that p, we acknowledge, may be wrong: if Jane Bloggs thinks themoon is made of green cheese, she may assert that it is true, yet（we think）it is false. But if Jane
Bloggs says “I don’t believe the moon is made of green cheese, and yet it is made of green cheese,”
she’s simply contradicting herself; not much of a paradox.
Nor would I agree with Shoko’s definition of coincidence. “An unpredictable occurrence, without
predetermination by a cause” might be a surprise, or a mystery, but it is not a coincidence until two
things come together whose conjunction is not to be expected. Two people meeting by chance andintroducing themselves truthfully to the other as “John Smith” is a mild coincidence, and surely
happens from time to time; two people meeting by chance and introducing themselves truthfully to theother as “Jedediah Warrington-Pimbly” would be highly coincidental, since the name itself is
improbable and the conjunction of their improbabilities meeting must have astronomical odds againstit.
I would not agree with Akiko that there is evidence that Armande has helped cause Hugh’s death, orthat she is in some sense there among the flames.
I think it is crucial for Nabokov that the transparent things of the novel, the ghosts, have a richer, more
flexible relation to time than human consciousness does（VN often expresses his sense that thepresent, for all its bounty, is a prison for human consciousness, and that there is surely some freer
access to time outside it）, but that nevertheless they cannot see the future, because this would require
the future to be predetermined̶for humans, and, for that matter, for transparent things, for ghosts:
they too would be able to do nothing freely, which wouldn’t make for a very interesting eternity（ifthat’s where they are）
; and nor would humans, so there would be no point in trying to influence Hugh.

Questions and Answers

129

Nabokov has a very strong sense of the riches of the past, and the possibilities of discovering patterns
within it, once it is past; but even if such patterns do seem to converge on or indicate some apparent
likelihood ahead, that might not in fact happen, and if it does not, a different set of past events may
then be illuminated by what does happen instead.
I recall one of Maurice Couturier’s conferences in Nice, where Vladimir Alexandrov was puzzled bywhat he saw as a contradiction between Nabokov’s interest in freedom in time and his interest in fate,in patterns in time. He felt that the more patterns there are in time, the less freedom, the more fate
there must be. Robert Scholes refuted that brilliantly by pointing to Joyce’s Ulysses: there are few
novels more patterned than Ulysses, and few novels more genuinely open about what happens in thecourse of the day and about what might happen after the day is over, and the novel finished, than
Ulysses. You can imagine the transparent things of VN’s novel, if they inhabited Dublin on
Bloomsday, to have a sense of the patterns in the course of that day, as events are unfolding, as goodas or better than the best re-rereader of the novel; they might predict some outcomes on the bases ofthe patterns they can see, yet they too might turn out to be wrong, since this world is open.

Shoko Miura
Thank you so much, Brian, for a succinct and forceful reply to my comments on Akiko’s paper. As
Zoran wrote, your clarity of expression is amazing. Here are my thoughts, not really questions, toyour reply.
In your first paragraph, do you mean that Moore’s paradox, “I don’t believe it is raining, and yet, it israining,” is not a paradox but a contradiction? I think you are right, but one point bothers me--why did
Wittgenstein take it as a paradox? I thought I understood it but now I am not sure. Perhaps Akiko canhelp me, too.
In your second paragraph, I admit my definition of coincidence was incomplete. I asked my question
about coincidence because VN seems fascinated by coincidences and near-miss coincidences in his
works and even in his past life. The essential part of coincidence, as you pointed out, is that it is an
unexpected “conjunction” of at least two events. When a coincidence happens, one can take it either
as an occurrence of fate or sheer chance, depending on whether you see time as “fixed”（predetermined）or “open.” If time is open, there are degrees of “improbability” of the occurrence, so
we call an event a coincidence when it is improbable to a certain degree. If time is fixed, coincidences
cannot occur since there is no question of “probability.” The occurrence is predetermined. Am I rightin following your argument so far? To avoid dialectic thinking, I should say that when we call an
event as coincidental, each of us differs in the actual degree of believing or disbelieving inpredetermination. When VN creates ghosts in his stories, we are never sure if he believes inpredetermined events. He leaves the question open since, as you say, “the world is open.” I see now
that his ghosts reveal his emphasis on ambiguity as a necessary consequence of his concept of time.

130

Shoko Miura, Brian Boyd, and Akiko Nakata

Thank you again for your wonderful thoughts and your patience with my questions. I learned so muchfrom you again.

Comment and Response

131

Tora Koyama
Comment and Response
Ryo Chonabayashi
Question（On Page 105）: It may be fair to say that Moore is the name of the philosopher every
student of contemporary ethics hears in their first metaethics lecture. He is the author of Principica
Ethica, a work regarded as the starting point of contemporary metaethics. The scholars and studentsof ethics/moral philosophy cannot miss Moore, especially as a very important figure in the tradition of
non-naturalistic moral realism.

Tora Koyama
Prof. Chonabayashi is perfectly right. Moore is fairly known among philosophers. I might
overemphasize his comparative unpopularity. What I meant is that because he is less popular thanother founders of analytic philosophy, especially Wittgenstein, Nabokov would have trouble if he tried
to learn about Moore.

132

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments
Akiko Nakata, Editor
The international symposium, “Vladimir Nabokov and Analytic Philosophy,” supported by JSPS
KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K00410, was held online initially from May 15th to May 31st, thenextended to June 20th, as part of the 2021 annual conference of the Nabokov Society of Japan. Three
speakers’ papers were emailed to the society members and registered participants, and all thecomments and discussions as well as the questions and answers were uploaded on the society’s
website. The symposium was unprecedented, both in theme and format, not only for the society but
also for Nabokov studies in the world. There were 43 files uploaded in all, which would be roughly
calculated as talk sessions for around 11 hours and 20 minutes, without a break. It may be the longest
symposium ever held which featured only three speakers and one commentator, with two questioners
from the floor. I would first like to extend my deepest gratitude to our guest speakers, Brian Boyd andZoran Kuzmanovich. Professor Boyd generously gave, in addition to his brilliant paper andcontributions, valuable advice on the symposium project and the earlier stage of my paper. Professor
Kuzmanovich, though facing serious health issues until just before the symposium, energeticallyenriched the event with his inspiring paper and contributions. I owe the highest gratitude to our guest
commentator, Tora Koyama. As analytic philosopher, Professor Koyama made this symposium
worthy of its title by stimulating discussions and providing clarifications about philosophy. I am
genuinely appreciative of our two questioners, Ryo Chonabayashi and Shoko Miura. Professor
Chonabayashi asked all the speakers and the commentator pertinent questions from the perspective ofa metaethicist, academically heightening the discussions. Professor Miura, ex-president of the
Nabokov Society of Japan, asked challenging questions, led the discussions, and raised issues for
future consideration. My sincere thanks go to Mitsuyoshi Numano, current president of the society,who took over the office on the first day of the symposium, for writing an excellent foreword for thisvolume. Finally, I am grateful to the audience of the symposium and the readers of this volume. If
any aspect of the symposium can lead to future studies on Nabokov̶and possibly on analytic
philosophy̶there would be no greater reward for me.

Contributors

133

Contributors
Brian BOYD, University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland, has
worked on Nabokov since 1970（as annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, andtranslator）; on literature（and art more generally）and evolution, from the Paleolithic and Homer tothe present, since 1995; and on Popper since 1996. His Popper biography has long been held back by
his work in his other two areas but has for some years been again his central focus. He has written oredited over 20 books（including, on Nabokov: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery; on literature/art and evolution: On the Origin of Stories; Why Lyrics Last; On the Origin of Art）. His work has
appeared in twenty languages.
Ryo CHONABAYASHI is an Associate Professor in philosophy at Soka University. His main
research interests lie in contemporary metaethics, especially the issues concerning naturalistic moral
realism and the relationship between issues in ethics and relevant empirical findings. His otherresearch interests include issues in applied ethics（suicide and death, medical ethics, ethics for social
workers）, and Buddhist philosophy and its relevance to contemporary philosophical theories. His
published work includes The Frontline of Metaethics, Keiso-Shobo 2019, [Japanese, editor], Can
Ethics be a Science? A Defence of Naturalistic Metaethical Theory, Keiso-Shobo 2016, [Japanese].
Tora KOYAMA is an associate professor at Research Institute for Time Studies, Yamaguchi
University. He is a philosopher specialized in analytic philosophy. He has also worked withresearchers in other fields especially robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. His mostrecent research interest focuses on history of analytic philosophy. His publication includes“Truthmaker Monism,” Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, vol. 29, 2020（coauthored with Taishi Yukimoto）and Thinking Trust: From Leviathan to AI, Keiso Shobo Publishing,2018（in Japanese, editor）. He also translated（with colleagues）On the Plurality of Worlds（Blackwell, 1986）, the 20 century philosopher David Lewis’ masterpiece, into Japanese（Shunjusha,
2016）.
Zoran KUZMANOVICH teaches at Davidson College and writes on fiction, film, fragrance, andfeelings. Twice the President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, since 1996 he has been
the editor of Nabokov Studies. With Brian Boyd, Steve Blackwell, and Dmitry Kirsanov, he helped
create the Nabokov Society website thenabokovian.org. He is also the creator and curator of the
Amazon.com hosted Scentopedia©, the first complete database of fragrant plants.
Shoko MIURA is Professor Emerita of English at Tokyo University of Marine Science andTechnology. She was president of the Nabokov Society of Japan（2010―11）and is a member of the
Kyoto Reading Circle on the KRC Annotations to Ada.
Akiko NAKATA is Professor of English at Nanzan University. She co-translated into Japanese and134

Contributors

annotated, with Tadashi Wakashima, Transparent Things. Her publications in English on Nabokov
include: “A Failed Reader Redeemed: ‘Spring in Fialta’ and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,”
Nabokov Studies 11（2007/2008）, “The Last Muse Escapes the Text,” Nabokov Online Journal V“Narrating（2012）,Her Own Absence: The Narrator and Protagonist of ‘A Slice of Life’,” Women in
Nabokov’s Life and Art（2016）and “Memories Trick̶Memories Mix: Transparent Things,”
Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory（2019）.
Mitsuyoshi NUMANO is now Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo and Vice President of
the Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. He is a scholar of Russian literature and a literary critic.
He is a founding member and the 6th president（2021―）of the Nabokov Society of Japan. He
translated into Japanese and annotated Dar. He is the winner of the 2002 Suntory Prize for Social
Sciences and Humanities for Tetsuya no katamari: bomei bungakuron [A String of Sleepless Nights:
Essays on Exile Literature] and the 2004 Yomiuri Literature Prize for Yutopia bungakuron [Utopian
Literature].