[...] these works expose what might be taken by such a reader as simply being "given" as a picture - and therefore something that might be relinquished - or chosen - as opposed to being merely reproduced or capitulated to. Although there is nothing wrong with their doing so, readers need not "identify" with the characters in a book in order for this process to occur; it would be better to say that, if the critics description is convincing enough, readers will be unable to escape recognizing the image of themselves in the book. To call that recognition philosophical is simply to refer back to the notion [...] of philosophy as a self-critical activity, whose aim is to produce a kind of (self-)knowledge, unlikely to be arrived at through either unexamined practical experience or "pure" logical analysis. [...]

[...] For Hegel, art was one of the organs through which a society could reflect on - by making explicit to itself - its form of life, which meant not only its habits of thought or speech but also the institutional structures and power relations that continuously shaped those habits. Much of Pippin's philosophical criticism is devoted to making explicit how novelists like James and Proust can help us recognize configurations of thought that are less eccentric than common, less a function of individual history than of "the situation of modernity itself". One of his recurrent points is that exclusively psychological readings of individual action can itself become a sociohistorical habit, so seemingly "natural" to us that we cease to see it as a choice?

That so much of our social and communal life has become so fine-grained and circumstantail that is it difficult, from any amount of distance, to see as anything other than the result of arbitrary pathology is in large part why Pippin believes the novel "might be the great modern philosophical form". He means that novels can show in a manner that philosophy cannot - or has not been inclined to - how ordinary people struggle to be recognized as moral agents and to do justice to the claims of others in th everyday social world. [...]

[...] Psychoanalytically speaking, the best literary works will be characterized in part by their bearing a message for their reader that is "unspeakable"; that this message is hiding in plain sight does not make it any easier to decipher.

Toril Moi, in her essay "Nothing Is Hidden", identifies this difference between the kind of criticism practiced by many in her academic discipline and philosophically therapeutic criticism: whereas the suspicious literary theorist presumes that the "text is hiding something from us," she writes, the Cavell/Wittgenstein critic presumes that "the problem is in me, in us". In other words, the artwork's value comes from showing readers something about themselves. [...]