Talk of consciousness has largely disappeared from Romantic studies and, indeed, from literary scholarship more generally. As a symbol of this disappearance we might look to Harold Bloom’s edited volume Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). While the volume was officially dedicated to the proposition that to talk about Romanticism simply was to talk about consciousness, its inclusion of Paul de Man’s essay “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” (written in 1960) in fact marked the beginning of the end of the association between Romanticism and consciousness. Some years later de Man could retrospectively mark his own deconstructive turn as a swerve, however imperfect, from consciousness-talk. Writing in 1983, looking back on his landmark 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man remarked that the essay was “still uncomfortably intertwined with the thematic vocabulary of consciousness … that was current at the time, but it signals a turn that, at least for me, has proven to be productive.”

One could note other similar “turns” at about this same time, for example within the Yale School and its turn away from phenomenology (in the careers of Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller), and also in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Literary Absolute (1978).

Meanwhile, the historicism that has dominated Romantic studies for the past-quarter century has likewise had little patience with consciousness talk. Inspired by Marx and Engels’s German Ideology, it has tended to identify consciousness with “false consciousness.” There is a complicated intellectual history here that would have to be traced in some detail. Perhaps we can simply note, first, that some of the foundational texts for this turn date, like de Man’s turn, to an approximately 10-year period from 1965-1975

, and second, that like The German Ideology before them their attack was aimed at speculative idealism, which was assumed to represent philosophy of consciousness in general.

And yet, as sometimes happens in academic discourse, the preoccupations that disappeared in one quarter have popped up in another. As consciousness-talk was disappearing from literary study (especially from versions of literary study that referenced Continental philosophy), it was re-emerging in neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Under the influence of behaviorism, Anglo-American philosophy had gone through its own skepticism about consciousness in the early years of the twentieth century, but the demise of behaviorism after the middle of the century and the rise of what we now know as cognitive science has resulted in a rich, varied, and completely unresolved conversation about the mind’s relationship to the brain and how that relationship might produce conscious experience. Thus Jerry Fodor, from a recent essay in the London Review of Books: ‘Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

’ Literary scholars have paid little attention to this conversation. Committed in various ways to the assumption that what goes on in the mind is an effect of something else—rhetoric, history, ideology—we have largely missed out on one of the interdisciplinary intellectual discussions of our era. Can we change this? Do we want to?

As Fodor indicates, how we get from N to C has become known in philosophy of mind as the “hard problem.”

And although the hard problem has gotten a lot of attention lately, its roots go back to the beginning of modern philosophy. Descartes worried about the causal interaction between brain and mind and eventually settled on the pineal gland as the place where they came together, though this didn’t convince some of his contemporaries. With the famous analogy of the mill in his Monadology, meanwhile, Leibniz suggested that materialism couldn’t account for perception. By 1866 Thomas Huxley had posed the hard problem in a recognizably modern form: “[H]ow it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” In 1985 Thomas Nagel reiterated the point: “The strange truth seems to be that certain complex, biologically generated physical systems, of which each of us is an example, have rich nonphysical properties.” This happens, Nagel continued, “in some way that we do not now understand.”

We need first to distinguish consciousness from self-consciousness. Literary scholars tend to use the terms interchangeably; we might speak about a character—Prufrock, for instance—as being overly conscious, by which we mean excessively self-aware. This is essentially the same state that Coleridge calls “Dejection,” and that Wordsworth analyzes in the opening 200 lines of The Prelude. A more accurate title for Bloom’s volume would have been Romanticism and Self-Consciousness. When philosophers and cognitive scientists speak of consciousness, by contrast, they mean something more basic. Here is John Searle’s definition: “those states of sentience or feeling or awareness that begin when you wake up from a dreamless sleep and continue on throughout the day until you fall asleep again, or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are also a form of consciousness.”

Consciousness is the thing we lose when we go under general anesthesia.

Consciousness in this strict sense is sometimes referred to as “phenomenal consciousness” because it seems to have phenomenal qualities: there is a redness to the red rose that I see in my garden; there is a painness to the pain I feel when its thorn pricks my finger. There is something that it is like for me to see or feel these things. In his classic 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel helped to put this subjective character of experience at the center of the reviving consciousness conversation. According to Nagel, we can safely assume that bats have experiences; but bats are neurologically different enough from humans that we can also assume that their experiences are quite different. So what is it like to be a bat, then? Nagel argues that there is no way we could know, because the facts of experience are only accessible from one point of view: in this case, the bat’s. If this is right, then there is no way that an objective physical description—of the way that sonar works, for example—could capture the subjective character of the experience that sonar delivers.

Now it might be that the notion of consciousness in this sense isn’t very interesting for literary studies; its focus on first-person phenomenal experience would seem to require attention of the sort that disappeared from literary study with the collapse of phenomenology. Thinking in terms of self-consciousness and its deconstruction, by contrast, allows us to bring culture and history and biography into the mix and this is where most of the action has been for literary studies.

It is commonly asserted, for example, that the Romantic period witnessed an unprecedented level of historical self-consciousness. The gamble of this essay, however, is that students of literature and culture have something to learn from the challenges involved in grappling with the “hard problem” of consciousness rather than simply overleaping it on the way to issue of self-consciousness. Having now distinguished consciousness from self-consciousness a little more fully, I turn in sections two and three to the position often described as “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC), a position that tends to avoid strictly philosophical considerations. I will suggest that Alan Richardson’s recent work on Romantic-era brain science overlaps with the NCC position. In section four I turn to emergence theory, a variant of position (c) with important Romantic-era roots; in section five I consider Alan Liu’s recent writings about emergence. In sections six and seven I distinguish my position from Liu’s by identifying “natural piety” as the characteristic attitude of emergence theory, and I extrapolate natural piety’s importance for thinking about the relationship between Romantic culture and mind-body questions. At stake is a Romantic physicalism that can only be recovered, I argue, when literary study turns its attention to the mind-body problem and the question of phenomenal consciousness that makes that problem so hard.

Many neuroscientists would fall into my category (a); they think that the hard problem is not so hard and that neuroscientists (unlike philosophers) are getting to work solving it. They are busy searching for what they call the “Neural Correlates of Consciousness” (NCC). It should be noted that everybody thinking about the mind-body problem takes it for granted that conscious states and neuronal states correlate in some way. The question is whether an accurate description of that correlation is all that is required to explain consciousness. The NCC proponents are betting that the answer is “yes.” If we map the NCC, their thinking goes, we will either get consciousness along the way (which will indicate that the hard problem wasn’t such a hard problem after all) or we’ll discover that we don’t really need a theory of consciousness at all (which will indicate that the hard problem was a pseudo-problem). The late Francis Crick and his colleague Christof Koch have been among the most prominent exponents of this approach, arguing for example that identifying neural correlates could make the hard problem “appear in an entirely new light. It might even disappear.”

For an NCC program to succeed, all that would be needed would be to locate exactly where and how a particular group of neurons fires when I see red, or prick my finger with a needle, or smell my coffee in the morning: “locating the neurons in the cerebral cortex that correlate best with consciousness, and figuring out how they link to neurons elsewhere in the brain,” as Crick and Koch put it (84). We may not have the technology to map NCC so precisely right now, but in principle it certainly seems possible.

From a certain perspective, then, the NCC program seems both philosophically unsophisticated and methodologically uninterested in the first-person quality of phenomenal experience. In his famous article “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Frank Jackson formulates these objections with somewhat greater precision by calling attention to the qualitative dimensions of experience—what have become known in the literature as “qualia.” Jackson’s argument depends on a thought experiment. He asks us to imagine Mary, a neuroscientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of vision. In particular, Mary knows exactly what happens in the visual cortex when it encounters the different wavelengths that produce the experience of color. However, for perverse and unexplained reasons, Mary has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room. So Mary knows everything there is to know about color, but she has never seen color. Then, one day, Mary leaves her black-and-white room and encounters color (for some reason it is almost always red in these examples) for the first time. The question is how we describe what has happened to Mary. Jackson argues that at the moment she sees red Mary learns something that she didn’t know before: she learns what red is like—she experiences its qualitative character. But Mary already knew everything that there was to know about the physical facts of color. So the physical facts must not be all the facts.

If, impressed by these or other arguments, we accept that the hard problem is just that, we must then face up to just how we might get from N to C—from knowing everything physical that there is to know about how we experience red to actually experiencing red. This brings us to group (b), and the many and varied attempts to face up to the hard problem: behaviorism, functionalism, the “identity thesis,” epiphenomenalism, and panpsychism, to name only the most celebrated contenders.

The various technical aspects of these positions are very interesting in their own right, and each has well-respected defenders and detractors. A terrific amount of ink has been spilled on these issues in the past quarter-century; as Jerry Fodor notes, “consciousness is all the rage right now.” The technical aspects of the debate need not concern us, though, because I want to keep the focus on the broader point that ties all the positions in group (b) together, which is simply that the NCC program misses both how important and how hard the hard problem is. That is, the NCC program doesn’t appreciate just what is involved, theoretically, in trying to link the physical to the mental; and it doesn’t appreciate just what is involved, subjectively, in our phenomenal experience, namely the fact that it is like something to be in a particular mental state. Each of the contenders in group (b) tries to account more adequately for both of these things.

Despite its unassuming stance, however, Richardson’s book aims to do more than simply recover a neglected influence on Romantic-era culture. The polemical thrust of his book—understated but nevertheless present—is that the entire “German swerve” of Romantic studies has been misguided. Our traditional intellectual histories of the period (encouraged by Coleridge, DeQuincey, and Carlyle) typically move from Hume to Kant to post-Kantian German Romanticism and idealism; we read Romantic literary production in light of these continental developments. Even scholarship that has resisted this procedure—either through deconstructive criticism of the symbol or materialist criticism of the German Ideology—has moved within the orbit of post-Kantian Continental philosophy. Perhaps we now substitute non-identity for the logic of identity postulated by an earlier generation of Romantic humanists, but we continue to take our bearings from the questions and concerns that surfaced in Kant’s wake. In consequence, the dualism of subject and object comes to displace mind-body dualism as the chief philosophical problem, and it becomes difficult to disentangle questions of consciousness from questions of self-consciousness.

Richardson’s procedure, by contrast, is to stay closer to home by examining the (predominantly) British empirical tradition that continued chugging along in Hume’s wake.

In his narration, the associationist paradigm derived from Locke eventually ran aground with Hartley and Priestley, who conceived of the brain as passive. But a new emphasis on the brain as an active participant in experience developed in the post-associationist empirical tradition. Biologically rather than mechanically inclined, Bell, Gall, Lawrence, and others emphasized the brain’s plasticity rather than simply, like Hartley, treating it as a passive receptacle for impressions.

Thus, Richardson suggests that Coleridge’s extended diatribe against Hartley in the Biographia Literaria is a clever sleight-of-hand. By lumping all empirical work on the brain under the banner of associationism, Coleridge is able to dispense with the whole lot and then turn his attention to Schelling’s idealism. But Richardson argues that this ignores what is really going on in British brain science during the time that Coleridge is writing, and in the process it transposes the mind-body problem into a much more abstract and fuzzier subject-object problem. The apparatus of self-consciousness, identity, and non-identity (and their eventual deconstruction) follow in turn.

I come now to position (c), which I described above as the position that the hard problem is so hard that we can’t solve it, even in principle. Here I will add a corollary to that position, (c1): the fact that we can’t solve the hard problem of consciousness is a good thing, because by deflating the importance of getting the answer it re-orients our relationship to philosophical questions and thus saves us from anthropocentric epistemological arrogance.

Emergence theory is the example of (c1) that I will consider here. Emergentism flourished in Britain between 1850 and 1925. John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843) is generally cited as its founding text; other famous emergentist works are George Henry Lewes’ Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity (1920) and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). Many other intellectual giants of the period, including A. N. Whitehead, William James, Arthur Lovejoy, and Henri Bergson espoused versions of emergentism. In his thorough overview of the British Emergentists, Brian McLaughlin argues that the advent of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s signaled the end of the emergentist tradition. In particular, quantum mechanical explanations of chemical bonding in terms of electro-magnetism made emergentist explanations of chemical laws irrelevant.

Until the advent of quantum mechanics, however, emergence seemed like a highly plausible explanation for a variety of phenomena.

According to emergence theory, some properties “emerge” from a physical substrate in a way that cannot be explained from the perspective of that substrate (eg. from the perspective of physics). Furthermore, these emergent properties cannot be reduced to the properties of their physical substrate. In a familiar though imprecise analogy, neither bees nor ants possess intelligence, and yet a bee-hive or an ant colony could be said to possess intelligence; somehow intelligence “emerges” from the way in which each individual ant or bee goes about its task.

Consciousness, accordingly, is sometimes said to be an emergent property in that it arises from a physical substrate (the brain) and yet cannot be reduced to the brain, nor fully predicted by the sciences of the brain. The issue of prediction is important here: for a property to be emergent, no amount of knowledge about the substrate will enable us to predict facts about the emergent property. Consciousness (to stick with this example) emerges from lower-level systems, but however much we might learn about those systems we will not be able to say what consciousness looks like before it actually arrives on the scene.

In a slightly more technical idiom, emergence proposes that higher-level mental properties are determined by and dependent upon lower level properties—yet are not reducible to the lower-level properties. The delicate balancing act required here is particularly tricky when it comes to the idea that emergent properties must be not only unpredictable but novel. Of course, objects can have properties that their parts do not have; a watch, for example, tells time, while a random heap of springs and gears does not. The novelty required for a property to be emergent must be of a different order than this. At the same time, how can a property be truly novel and yet determined by its physical substrate? This will require both that the arrangement of parts brings something new into existence and that nothing new is actually added to the mix from the outside. (Thus the soul is not emergent in classical theological accounts because it is added to the body.) In this sense emergent properties must supervene on their physical substrate—but it must be supervenience such that C is determined by N but not identical to it.

Given this description, it seems fair to say that emergentism is an attempt to formulate a truly non-reductive physicalism. C.D. Broad, for example, referred to his position as “emergent materialism.”

“Non-reductive physicalism” might seem like an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too.

The conceptual coherence of emergentism is not really my concern, however. What interests me, rather, is what we can learn from the very existence of the emergentist option. Indeed, a number of philosophers, including Tim Crane, Jaegwon Kim, and Brian McLaughlin, have written about emergence in recent years not because they are themselves emergentists but because they think that the problems and difficulties faced by emergence tell us a good deal about what we need from an adequate physicalist solution to the mind-body puzzle.

As an idea, “emergence” lends itself to analogical extrapolation. Though the British Emergentists focused particularly on chemistry, Broad and Alexander at least were willing to extend their notion of fundamental chemical laws in such a way as to make mentality an emergent property. More recently, emergence theory has found new life in the cultural zone. In his essay “A Forming Hand: Creativity and Destruction from Romanticism to Emergence Theory,” Alan Liu notes the presence of emergentist thinking in current models of information theory, management theory, ideas about artistic autopoesis, complexity, and self-organization, and especially in notions of “creative destruction” prominent in the business world. One of the goals of his essay is to critique the one-size-fits-all picture of emergence that these various cultural domains offer. Liu zeroes in particularly on their relentless anti-historical bias: “[w]estern cognitive, artificial-intelligence, new-media, business, and other theories of emergence,” he writes, “celebrate their cause as a way to swear allegiance to democracy without seeming also to swear to any old-fashioned individualism, nationalism, or industrialism able to pull puppet strings in the background.”

Emergence—in its current status as all-purpose explanation in the increasingly fragmented world of late capitalism—is in this sense an ideology; like all ideologies it covers up actual material and historical conditions (individualism, nationalism, industrialism) and wows us precisely because it seems stripped of all the tiresome conversations that such terms necessitate.

Yet if emergence in this vein seems an appropriate object of critique, there is a Romantic side to this story, as well, that is rather more complicated. Following some of the recent work of Anne-Lise François, Liu locates two distinct models of creativity in Wordsworth’s Prelude. One is the familiar model of “egotistical transgression” and intensive lyric exceptionalism, as in the Spots of Time or Simplon Pass. The other is found in those large sections of the Prelude that we typically skip over, the more discursive, everyday, extensive give-and-take of life, imaged most powerfully by the Infant Babe and what Liu calls the “forming hand” passage of Book 2:

A plastic power

Abode with me, a forming hand, at times

Rebellious, acting in a devious mood,

A local spirit of its own… (2.381-84)

Characterized by what Liu calls a “distribution of inspiration along a whole chain of temporal transmission” (11), this alternate mode of creativity is sprinkled liberally over broad patches of the Wordsworth that we usually don’t read. For Liu its “local spirit” becomes a Romantic anticipation of emergence, a picture of lower-level agency that does its thing without any inkling of a larger project: “There is agency, nothing but agency… but no one at the control stick that would be identified as the agent. Agency is a cascade of local agencies,” he writes (18). In this respect the amorality of emergence does seem to capture something of our contemporary world situation, in which things can go terribly wrong and there is no one around to blame, just a cascade of local agencies going about their very limited business.

Liu’s description of emergence as amoral is important for his larger project of identifying elective affinities between emergence theory and the business culture of postmodernity, with its command to innovate ceaselessly. But if we shift our attention to philosophical versions of emergence a rather different picture appears. Alexander and Broad, for instance, both elaborated metaphysical systems in which the world was a basically meaning-full place; emergence became a way to be a physicalist (“there is only one fundamental kind of stuff,” writes Broad [77]) without committing oneself to a picture of the universe as fundamentally amoral and directionless. And it is in the context of this elaboration that Alexander in 1920 has recourse to a resonant phrase: ‘The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I should prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the ‘natural piety’ of the investigator. It admits no explanation.

’ The remainder of this essay will be taken up with unpacking the relationship between natural piety and emergence. I will argue that the relationship is a Romantic one, and that we need to grasp it in terms of the hard problem of consciousness—the very problem that, as I have tried to demonstrate, tends to slip away from literary and cultural critics.

For readers familiar with Romantic literature, of course, the phrase “natural piety” summons not the debates of early twentieth century metaphysics but rather a canonical, if not necessarily beloved, poem:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,5

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

⁽²⁵⁾

All Wordsworth quotations come from the Complete Poetical Works (London: Macmillan and Company, 1888).

I have not been able to determine where Alexander got the phrase “natural piety.” It might have come from “My heart leaps up” itself, or from Book 3 of The Excursion,

or (least likely) from The White Doe of Rylstone.

All three uses of the phrase are roughly equivalent, and each suggests an affective disposition characterized by reverence and calm acceptance. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that Alexander got the phrase not from “My heart leaps up” itself but from the “Intimations” Ode. In the 1815 edition of his Poems Wordsworth made the final three lines of “My heart leaps up” the epigraph to the Ode.

I say this is the “most intriguing” possibility because it allows us to push the Romantic provenance of the natural piety/emergence relationship a bit further. The figure who links Wordsworth to emergence theory is John Stuart Mill. In Chapter 5 of his Autobiography (1873), Mill described an intellectual and spiritual crisis: “[M]y heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. … I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”

As is well known, in the autumn of 1828 Mill worked his way out of this crisis with the help of Wordsworth, specifically the 1815 Poems, which “proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture” (151). Mill then relates that by 1830 he had begun writing what would become the System of Logic, eventually published in 1843. In his description of that work, Mill revisits his crisis in a more intellectual vein. In particular, he describes how he turned his attention to what he called the “Composition of Forces”: ‘On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effect of the one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of these separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the introduction to that favorite of my boyhood, Thomson's System of Chemistry. 

’ As McLaughlin shows, Mill’s discussion of the “Composition of Forces,” and particularly the distinction between mechanical and chemical causes, comes in that part of the System of Logic that became central to the emergentist tradition.

Here, though, I would insist upon the distinction I made near the beginning of this essay between consciousness and self-consciousness. C. D. Broad, the last and probably greatest exponent of the British Emergentist tradition, quoted Alexander’s invocation of natural piety approvingly, but he titled his 1925 book The Mind and Its Place in Nature.

There is thus a crucial difference between Broad’s (Romantic) project and the project of a Romantic humanist such as M. H. Abrams, who writes for example in 1965 that “[t]he central enterprise common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth, was to join together the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate man in a world which had become alien to him.”

Both Broad and Abrams are writing about the relationship between the human subject and the material world. But the crucial difference is that Broad is interested in the mind-body problem and Abrams is interested in the subject-object problem, and the result of that difference is that when Broad considers the mind and its place in nature he can simply avoid the spiritual and ideological weight that Abrams loads up onto what he calls “Romantic philosophy.” Natural piety understood through the lens of British emergentism is not an attempt to “re-domiciliate man in a world that had become alien to him.” Rather, it is consonant with a physicalist/naturalist solution to the mind-body problem.

Picking up on Wordsworth’s own language, Harold Bloom many years ago called natural piety a “binding agent,” and once again the chemical metaphor seems appropriate to the history of emergetism. Bloom goes on, speaking of the “Intimations Ode”: “Wordsworth’s poem is concerned, not with a history of conceptualization, but with the flowing given of our sensuous experience.”

Contrast Bloom’s comments with those of more recent vintage by Peter Manning, who argues that the lines about natural piety serve to overwrite and simplify the political and emotional complexities of the Ode: “the lyric reinstalls at the head of the text the constant relation of man and nature, affirming at the outset the continuity that the poem must labor to establish.”

Manning’s reading takes its place in a well-established line of criticism that comes at Wordsworth via a critique of Burkean “second nature.”

What drives this line of thought—to reiterate my point—is a notion of critique that takes the subject/object dialectic (Manning’s “relation of man and nature”) and its deconstruction as its point of departure.

Once again, though, things look different if we come at natural piety from the perspective of emergence. If the emergence of one set of properties from lower level properties is the result of a basic law, and therefore doesn’t require another law to explain it, it is certainly possible to put this idea in brute terms. So understood, it would seem a long way from the fuzziness of natural piety. Thus Colin McGinn: “It is implausible to take these correlations [between neurons and conscious experience] as ultimate and inexplicable facts, as simply brute. And we do not want to acknowledge radical emergence of the conscious with respect to the cerebral; that is too much like accepting miracles de re.”

Here McGinn dismisses natural piety by linking it to belief in miracles, which seems about as far from brute empirical reality as possible. Alexander, though, would refuse to accept this distinction between the brute and the miraculous. The same goes for Tim Crane, who argues that the natural piety of the emergentists is worth attending to because “[t]he availability of the emergentist position encourages us to look with suspicion on the idea that there must nonetheless be a philosophical account” of the correlation between body and mind. On this account, natural piety makes it possible to feel that we don’t have to answer the mind-body problem. This, argues Crane, is the epistemological attitude that emergence recommends to naturalism.

Working from a very different theoretical archive, Anne-Lise François reaches an analogous conclusion in her use of Wordsworthian natural piety to critique biotechnology. If nature is conceptualized as simply brute, she notes, then it begs for completion. Lately, of course, that completion has come in the form of genetic tinkering: Bt corn, salmon that grow six times faster than normal, silk-producing goats. One need not subscribe to some reified discourse of the natural in order to want to resist this tinkering, which as François points out is done so often in the name simply of undifferentiated “possibility,” the proliferation of “options” that characterizes late capitalism, or even out of sheer boredom. Yet how does one offer such resistance without fetishizing nature, falling back into a series of oppositions (progressive/conservative, urban/rural, artificial/natural) that have their own problematic histories? For an answer she also turns to natural piety, which she nicely describes as “the precarious basis for an otherwise unjustifiable choice in favor of already existing beings.”

This conception of natural piety leans theoretically on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the given, and in so doing it recalls the complex relationship between brute and pious to which Alexander also gives voice: “on the one hand,” writes François, the given is “a trope for brute priority, for the intractable that precedes and escapes human decision; on the other, [it is] the name for decision itself, the incalculable, unforeseeable response that comes as if from nowhere and cannot be anticipated.”

François is redacting Derrida here, and yet her way of putting it also returns us to Alexander. Thus, helped by François, I think at this point it becomes possible to take Alexander at his word and view brute priority and natural piety as really two descriptions of the same thing. Moreover with the example of biotechnology in mind I believe we can accept his implication that natural piety is to be “preferred” precisely because the bare assertion of brute priority is generally not enough to get us to leave something alone. Quite the contrary.

And so to, I am arguing, for recent literary study. One virtue of emergence theory is that it forces us to concentrate on the murky and unclear relationship between a novel property and its material determinants. Indeed, the emergentist attempt to describe how C is determined by and dependent upon N, and yet is also something over and above it, is a fascinating analogue of the ever-present discussion in literary studies about the relationship between the literary object and the various cultural forces that determine it. Like non-reductive physicalists, I suspect, most of us want it both ways: we want to be able to dissolve the literary object back into its social, cultural, and historical conditions, but we also want, embarrassingly, to hold onto the novelty or uniqueness of the object itself.

Its appearance on the scene, we would like to think, was not entirely predictable. And we would like to think that it has something to say to us.