This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue.

March 14, 2008 6:00 PM

John Ruskin: Of The Pathetic Fallacy
posted by generalist (28 comments total)

in a world that is suffering man made global warming, pollution, extinction and draining of resources, it seems as though we would be better off if we had acted under the sort of understanding the pathetic fallacy embraces

read further in the wikipedia article until you reach the sexuality section and realize just how alienated he was from nature

i don't think much of him or his so-called fallacy
posted by pyramid termite at 6:30 PM on March 14, 2008

pyramid termite: uh, what?
posted by papakwanz at 6:35 PM on March 14, 2008

Ruskin is the one who sounds pathetic to me. Did we have to go back two centuries to find a big blowhard mischaracterized as a genius?

I find his "explanation" for Modern Atheism in the WP article hilarious...
"ascribed by Ruskin to the unfortunate persistence of the clergy in teaching children what they cannot understand, and in employing young consecrate persons to assert in pulpits what they do not know."
posted by wendell at 6:52 PM on March 14, 2008

I couldn't get more than 3 or 4 short paragraphs into it but that Wikipedia article has the Cliff Note:
"Pathetic Fallacy: a term he invented to describe the ascription of human emotions to impersonal natural forces, as in phrases like "the wind sighed". "
posted by msalt at 6:59 PM on March 14, 2008

Now where's my time machine and my nerf dependent origination, because I want to throw the nerf dependent origination at him.
posted by oonh at 7:02 PM on March 14, 2008

Ruskin's comments about poetry are all over the place. He apparently believed that knowing something about philosophy and perception validated his aesthetic conclusions. His bullying attempts at poetry criticism are, to me, pathetic. And fallacious.
posted by kozad at 7:32 PM on March 14, 2008

Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when the eye is turned to the object

Well after I finished laughing that saved me a bit of reading.
posted by localroger at 7:39 PM on March 14, 2008

The pathetic fallacy is also called the anthropomorphic fallacy. This isn't really news, or even all that interesting: we know that rivers, rocks, violets, storms, and such don't possess self-awareness or emotion (the path of "pathetic" coming from "pathos," emotion, feeling). He's essentially saying that it's lazy and inaccurate to describe the weeping willow as sad: more accurate and honest, he might say, to suggest that something about the weeping willow's appearance causes the observer (as described in a story or poem) to feel sad.

Again: pretty basic stuff.
posted by vitia at 7:43 PM on March 14, 2008

I don't really understand all the vitriol directed at Ruskin here. This is like, 100+ years old, and emerged from a particular historical sensibility -- 19th C Victorianism. It's not like this is some dominant dogma that is crushing the poor souls of contemporary poets. It has its place in the history of literary criticism, but that's about it. No reason to get bent out of shape.
posted by papakwanz at 7:50 PM on March 14, 2008 [6 favorites]

This post is very beautiful, and yet untrue.

From the wiki article, one of Ruskin's central aesthetic principles (per Clark): "Great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny."

I suppose Michelangelo, Riefenstahl, and Toby Keith would concur, but it gives this reader pause. That said, I love essays (and posts) like this, so don't lump me in with the knee-jerk haters. If I had to give a substantive retort, I think I'd begin with (the young) Nietzsche's suggestion that concept formation itself is inherently metaphorical, thus the pathetic fallacy rests on the presumption that there are bare, literal facts capable of non-perspectival description. Then again, Ruskin anticipates something like this when he attempts to dispatch the subjective-objective distinction in his opening.

Thanks for the delicious food for thought, generalist. Pathetically speaking.
posted by joe lisboa at 7:52 PM on March 14, 2008 [3 favorites]

So if metafilter is only blue when people are reading it... what color is it when nobody is paying attention?

or

Metafilter reeks of the internet.

wow why am i so annoying
posted by pwally at 7:54 PM on March 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

Victorianist on

Ruskin is one of the most significant "public intellectuals"--or "sages"--of the nineteenth century, and by far and away the most influential art critic. Like Thomas Carlyle, Ruskin doesn't always travel well, and for some of the same reasons--but you absolutely cannot understand the Victorians (and the early twentieth century, for that matter) without knowing at least something about Ruskin, given his influence on everything from aesthetics to political economics. George P. Landow offers a much better introduction to Ruskin at the Victorian Web.

Also:

The Ruskin Centre
A lifetime's supply of Ruskin at the Internet Archive
The Elements of Drawing at the Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology (digitized catalogue of Ruskin's teaching collection)
The Ruskin Gallery and Guild of St. George (founded by Ruskin)
Examples of Ruskin's own paintings at Artcyclopedia

Victorianist off
posted by thomas j wise at 8:05 PM on March 14, 2008 [4 favorites]

Despite the snark, there is a lot to be admired about Ruskin - he was, for instance, one of the prime intellectual movers behind the Arts and Crafts / "New Gothic" movement, and helped immensely in raising the profile of the "naive craftsman" to heights of social appreciation that hadn't been achieved before, particularly in England. Further, his ideas of Christian and utopian socialism created "Ruskin colonies", rural retreats for art, social work and spiritual contemplation, which were the direct ancestors of the social experimentation of communes in the 60's.

For those with little time, there's a rather good podcast on Ruskin at the BBC's always excellent "In Our Time" site.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 8:19 PM on March 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'm feeling a little bummed and annoyed that thomas j wise and Tora Bora Whora Babylon feel the need to appear even mildly sheepish about drawing attention to Ruskin's merits when the essay in question is a) complex and largely correct; and b) contra vitia, both interesting and new, given that it appeared two years before the first citation of the word "anthropomorphic" referring to anything but theological constructs.

Those of you, meanwhile, who want Ruskin to be some kind of Dawkins-reading, sex-positive, free-verse-loving PETA member might want to recalibrate your astrolabes.
posted by dyoneo at 9:06 PM on March 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

It is interesting that the word "anthropomorphic" arrived after Ruskin's essay; but the connection between man and nature (although going in only one direction, narrowly speaking, in this context) was an old saw in the tradition of Romantic poetry. Ruskin's criticism seems remarkably cold-blooded to me in terms of what a poet does: among other things, the poet explores our relationship to love, sex, nature, death...those kinds of things. As much as I defend the analytic approach to looking at poetry (along with a whole-hearted emotional response), Ruskin takes this approach to comically serious extremes, resulting in useless distinctions. (At least in the leading essay...)

It is a perfectly natural part of the artistic process to see one's own emotional and spiritual condition in nature's image. Disparaging this approach is silly.

Reading the other links in this thread elevates his status in my mind, but apparently he was a victim of the scientific approach (encouraged by the Enlightenment and Victorian thought) insofar as it influenced poetic criticism.
posted by kozad at 10:18 PM on March 14, 2008

And in another 100-odd years, someone at MetaFilter will post something similar about Alan Keyes about something he wrote that accidentally became significant later, and will be pointed out as a good example of Millennial Anti-Enlightenment though. But it'll still be batshit crazy.
posted by wendell at 11:25 PM on March 14, 2008

Dyoneo, maybe it's new to you, in which case I applaud you: I certainly love it when I see students in that "Oh, I get it!" moment. Still, most humanists have known and talked about the pathetic fallacy for a long, long time: like, since the time Ruskin published his essay. And attention to such is common advice in any college-level English class. So: no, Dyoneo, no longer new, nor interesting, since it's a part of the landscape of what intelligent people know, and has been so for a long time.

Papakwanz is on target, and Thomas J Wise's direction to Landow is on the money as well. This is ground well and thoroughly covered: learn what many, many smart people before you have had to say about it. Doing so will help one to avoid looking foolish and making vapid, vague, historically uninformed, and fundamentally stupid pronouncements about ways of reading poetry, especially if one is an English teacher.
posted by vitia at 11:50 PM on March 14, 2008

Dear mods. Plz. swap thomas j wise's comment for generalist's post. kthxbye.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:51 AM on March 15, 2008

So: no, Dyoneo, no longer new, nor interesting, since it's a part of the landscape of what intelligent people know, and has been so for a long time..

The interesting thing about this is that at one point, this differential wasn't part of what smart people know. And yet, plenty of poetry from way back in the day was conspicuously devoid of anthropomorphism, and plenty was overloaded with it. He does, in this essay, point out a dichotomy that still exists today, and always has. I've always generally fallen in line with his views, but other people don't, and it influences the kind of art that gets created. He's pointed out a pattern and tried to explain it...and it's important that we do that, because there is a pattern here, and it's one worth trying to understand.

I'm a fan of ascetic poetry. I can't stand the overbearing anthropomorphizing you find in the Victorian historical neighborhood's poetry, and that's because I just personally cannot fathom that the universe is either evil, good, benevolent, or has intention at all. I can't stand irrationality (or what I see as irrationality) because it gets in the way of those very few, simple, beautiful emotions that I believe humans are capable of feeling and controlling. Like, lost love songs? Breakups just happen to me. Natural as the sun or moon coming up. File all such experience under mourning and denial of will, call it an emotional snow day, and move on. It's weather. And weather systems can be studied, predicted, praised. One can appreciate the flittering beauty of of all the convolutions of natural law that weather creates, the mathematical precision behind a storm, but you can never ascribe it any will of its own, or any agency. I love and crave art that describes, but the minute ascription starts, I can't keep reading, because I just get so PISSED that someone would waste time on consequences of what I see as natural laws. I believe true choice, true control, is rare, because to really make an informed, principled, wise choice requires more information than you have most of the time.

But on that same principle, I don't believe that you can just reject anthropomorphic poetry as "pathetic", because you didn't write it, you didn't know what was going through their head, you don't know who the intended audience was...you almost never know that. That's where I think he's made his mistake. Anthropomorphizing alone hardly ruins a poem if the world you're trying to describe is one ruled by a fathomable principle. Convey to me sacrifice, (in)justice, poverty, overwhelming happiness, heroism...and if your anthropomorphizing does that in a way that makes a deep impression on me, you've succeeded. Poetry is a condensed format, and as such its best suited to describing facets of existence as clearly and vividly as possible, not the whole of existence. Anthropomorphizing has a place there.

The clincher in any literary technique is not its existence, it's how the technique is employed. And there are good and bad examples. If I'm not allowed to feel one hundred iron hands of the universe diligently ripping me into little tiny shreds (I forget exactly how it goes) every now and again, or feel the sun choosing me as its gay bearer of the day's good tidings, I lose the pleasure of living in the moment. Some people live more in the moment than others, right? And so the question he's posed is a worthwhile one, but it's not one I think he's answered very fairly. Some poetry isn't meant to describe the whole, and nevertheless deserves credit for what it is.
posted by saysthis at 2:39 AM on March 15, 2008

This is completely a personal sidenote, but this quote from Wikipedia article -- "... But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it." -- finally taught me the second use of verb "check". Something new every day.

(Chomsky's feature checking makes much more sense now.)
posted by Free word order! at 3:58 AM on March 15, 2008

vitia: "Dyoneo, maybe it's new to you, in which case I applaud you: I certainly love it when I see students in that "Oh, I get it!" moment. Still, most humanists have known and talked about the pathetic fallacy for a long, long time: like, since the time Ruskin published his essay. And attention to such is common advice in any college-level English class. So: no, Dyoneo, no longer new, nor interesting, since it's a part of the landscape of what intelligent people know, and has been so for a long time."

I think Dyoneo meant that it was new then - at least that's what his following reference to the use of 'anthropomorphic' suggests. It's odd that you are so keen to dismiss something because it is now 'part of the landscape of what intelligent people know' - that's exactly what makes Ruskin's essay valuable!

I refrained from commenting in the thread when I saw it last night, because the early comments really pissed my drunken self off: I still have a lot of that 'Oh, I get it!' moment left in me from when my English teacher lent me a volume of Ruskin's essays after I'd written a hamfisted essay about the way Egdon Heath 'embrowned itself' in The Return of the Native (how I cringe at the thought of my Lower Sixth self!). He didn't point me directly to Of The Pathetic Fallacy, so I was left to discover it, and as a side effect ended up with a lasting fascination for literary criticism of that period, for the Arts & Crafts movement, for the history of British Socialism, &c. That's why it's worth reading 'basic stuff', even if you're no longer a wet-behind-the-ears sixth-former.
posted by jack_mo at 4:22 AM on March 15, 2008

Sections 6 and 7 nicely sum up why I enjoy Ruskin (though I often have trouble following him): he's this great mix of genuinely passionate aesthete and fussy schoolmarm. "I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here" is such a wonderfully stuck up phrase, even if there is a little humor behind its use. He's often wrong (Pope is "no poet of true imaginative power"!), and he's just a little bit crazy, as the passion he displays seems to always be edging up against mania. In fact, I prefer later works like "The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" or some of the essays/letters in Fors Clavigera, where the crazy content has gone up a bit, while the other elements are all still in place.

Disclaimer: not a Victorianist, eminent or otherwise, came to Ruskin through a random path, and my views of him may be as idiosyncratic as his on ... well, everything.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 5:37 AM on March 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

Ruskin's a bit like Freud in this respect — the many things he's right about are things we now take for granted, which leaves us ridiculing him for all the dated and exploded elements in his work. It's hard for us to understand what a pioneer he was.
posted by orange swan at 5:44 AM on March 15, 2008

Let's not forget he influenced Proust. That also counts for something.
posted by ersatz at 6:49 AM on March 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

finally taught me the second use of verb "check".

Probably from chess, eh? Now we need a term for a name check check: "Like Thomas Yorke, huh?" "Don't be ridiculous."
posted by msalt at 10:51 AM on March 15, 2008

ruskin also championed turner! cf. :P
posted by kliuless at 9:15 AM on March 16, 2008

a bit like Freud in this respect — the many things he's right about are things we now take for granted

I thought Freud didn't get anything right.
posted by snoktruix at 9:27 AM on March 16, 2008

Not at all! Try reading Freud, which is a different thing entirely from having Freud explained to you. He came up with so many, many concepts that everyone and their hairdresser knows about and uses casually today.
posted by orange swan at 7:51 PM on March 16, 2008