In an earlier post I discussed an article by Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, in which they wondered about the cognitive benefits of reading Jane Austen. Since then I have been mulling over their last paragraph, which I think is very insightful. Here is most of it:

In the past, efforts to find a scientific justification of literature have encountered a seemingly insuperable contradiction: employing science to validate literature has implied that science is the more fundamental practice, tacitly undermining the reputation of literature instead of strengthening it. Many literary critics have therefore rebelled against scientific justifications, preferring instead to place literature in a separate sphere that stands as its own de facto justification. Yet as science has increasingly been promoted as useful, relevant, and progressive, this segregation has backfired, implying that literary studies is impractical, irrelevant, and antiquated. As a result, literary scholars have found themselves in a bind: they can oppose science, and find themselves marginalized, or they can embrace scientific theories and contribute to this marginalization themselves.

Having identified this problem, they present their approach as one which preserves ‘the usual order [i.e., the way in which evidence and hypotheses are handled] of both scientific and literary research’:

Beginning with a historical investigation of the development of a particular literary form and then transitioning into empirical verifications, it reveals as a tool that emerged over time as a practical means for addressing the physical distinctness of minds. Seen in this way, FID is a distinctly literary response to an environmental concern, providing a scientific justification that does not reduce literature to a mechanical extension of biology, but takes its value to be its own original form.

I really just want to quote this as, more or less, music to my ears. The antipathy of literary critics to scientific justification is perhaps unnecessary, but it’s clearly understandable given the way our cultural environment is structured. The ‘double bind’ they identify is just the thing that this blog, as well as their article, aims to address. And their analysis of Adam Smith and Jane Austen prizes, I think, what their works know about the functioning of minds, and sees them as self-standing sources of insight that are enhanced by, and enhance (more so, I think, in this case), their encounters with science.