In this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida.

Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy’s philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy’s encounter with Schopenhauer’s thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy did not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein’s critical appreciation of Tolstoy’s thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression.

HENRY W. PICKFORD is associate professor at Duke University. He is the author of The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art, co-author of In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto, and the editor and translator of Theodor W. Adorno's Critical Models and Lev Loseff's Selected Early Poems.

"Pickford, who is trained in the analytic philosophical tradition, brings formidable Apollonian skills to bear on this Tolstoyan texture. He tames it, smoothes out its anger, annotates the major issues in elegant footnotes, and draws distinctions necessary for responsible intellectual argument (between, for example, our affective reactions to sensations and the more normative emotions triggered by beliefs, judgements, cognitive acts). He shows why Schopenhauer on music delighted and terrified Tolstoy, and how Wittgenstein (who adored Tolstoy, novels and treatises alike) had insights that could calm those confronted by these unmediated emotions... Trained philosophers will whizz through this book. Its exposition is so meticulous, its scholarship so deep and gracious, its terms so lucidly laid out, that such disagreements as do arise can be resolved within the logical grid of its own argument (and Pickford anticipates most of them). The rest of us, like Tolstoy, will stumble and ponder... Because the issues that Henry Pickford discusses—whatever his title says—are not what people think by, but, to borrow the title of one of Tolstoy’s parables, 'What People Live By'. It’s no small risk to map this terrain for the analytic mind." —Times Literary Supplement