In the Middle of Life

This chapter explores the specific challenges that cognitive science and social psychology pose to those literary concepts and modes that are grounded in traditional moral understandings of selfhood and action, including integrity of character and notions such as tragic realization and moral repair. Focusing on the concept of moral time, the chapter explores two literary texts in which profound middle-of-life dramas take place: Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. A form of slow psychic time entirely lost to view in recent cognitive science is shown to take place in James’s tale, while The Winter’s Tale insists on the forms of moral and emotional experience that are beyond reflection and explanation. The readings presented are set in relation to key critical debates on the works, to challenge a persistent evasion of moral frameworks in contemporary anti-normative approaches.

A Human Science

The final chapter considers the question of psychology’s challenge to morality in light of larger debates over the value of the humanities. While many of the influential calls for new methods within the literary field therapeutically privilege psychological over moral desiderata in their promotion of new moods of literary appreciation and pleasure, public-facing defenses of the humanities typically stress their moral value, their ability to promote civic virtue and individual moral growth. Surveying the broad conditions affecting the self-understanding of the humanities in literary studies today, this chapter underscores the ability of humanistic thought to capture both the quality and duration of experience (what I identify as moral time) and to take reflective distance on questions of value. As the modern university orients itself toward the grand challenges facing society today, with leading roles assigned to the natural and social sciences, these specific strengths of the humanities become critically important.

Organizational Time and Social Conflict

Modeled after Donald Black’s Moral Time, a movement of organizational time is any change in organizational space. Organization takes three forms: inclusion, regulation, and distinction. Overorganization is an increase in an organization’s size (overinclusion), regulatory activity (overregulation), or subculture (overdistinction). Underorganization is a contraction in size (underinclusion), regulatory activity (underregulation), or subculture (underdistinction). Numerous examples show how conflict is a direct function of the movement of organizational time.Copyright 2017 Louis Hicks