ABSTRACT
In the essay of D. D. Raphael’s on which I was commenting, Raphael had located Tom Jones in the context of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Fielding’s novel, he says, “[makes] a genuine contribution to moral philosophy…in that its instances of goodness and innocence contradict the theory of Mr. Square (a caricature of rationalist moral philosophers such as Samuel Clarke and John Balguy), while implying support for the ‘sentimentalist’ theories of their opponents, notably Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson.”2
The philosophical interest of Tom Jones thus lies, on Raphael’s view, in the views it represents, one of which it supports, and the other of which it is concerned to refute. I contrasted Raphael’s reading with that of Wolfgang Iser. Iser sees the reader of Tom Jones as coming to recognize the inadequacy of all of the philosophical viewpoints represented by the various characters in the novel. But what is thus recognized is not something that is “in” the novel in the same sort of way as is the caricature, say, of rationalism, in the person of Mr. Square. My contrast, then, between Raphael and Iser is a contrast between taking the philosophical interest of a text to lie in the ideas in it, on the one hand, and, on the other, taking the philosophical interest to lie in what is not in the text. The contrast extends also to the kinds of demand on readers which go with the two different understandings of the philosophical interest that a text may be thought to have.
