June 17, 2012, by Stephen Mumford
Literature, Philosophy and Existentialism
I have a difficult relationship with novels. I sometimes wonder what’s the point of a fictional story. And should I really spend frivolous time on novels when I haven’t yet even read the complete works of Aristotle, where surely more truth is to be found? Dickens is my favourite author but I always feel a bit guilty reading him and he thus tends to be kept for holidays. Does the seeker after truth have any business reading fiction, which after all is just a figment of one author’s imagination?
My pondering on such questions was recently to an extent resolved when I read Simone de Beauvoir’s outstanding 1946 essay ‘Literature and Metaphysics’ (in her Philosophical Writings edited by Margaret Simons). Important truths about the world can be found in both philosophy and fiction but different kinds of truth. In metaphysics – the branch of philosophy in which mostly I work – the truths are objective, abstract, general and eternal. Metaphysical questions, such as what is a particular or what is a cause, should have the same answers now as two thousand years ago. Philosophy attempts to do the seemingly impossible: to describe the world as if from no particular point of view on it, either in time or space.
But we all do have a point of view on the world. Every writer is situated, where experiences determine many of our thoughts, feelings and attitudes. And so is every reader. Novels give us a subjective, concrete, particular and temporal description of a world. They provide a view from somewhere, which, as it is not ours, allows us to experiment with other ways of thinking: seeing things through the eyes of others that we would most likely never experience ourselves.
Nevertheless, these two approaches – objective and subjective – can come together in the philosophy that describes the nature of individual existence; namely existentialism. And to show what it is to exist as a person in our world, the novel form may be just as attractive to the existentialist as the abstract dissertation. Hence, Beauvoir points out “It is not by chance if existentialist thought today attempts to express itself sometimes by theoretical treatises and sometimes by fiction; it is because it is an effort to reconcile the objective and subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical” (p.274). Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir all wrote both metaphysics and literature. And perhaps the highest form of all, as Beauvoir suggests, is the metaphysical novel, which will grasp humanity in relation to the totality of the world. Find such a novel, and you will not be wasting your time.
I’m in. 3 wonderful things to read, in my view, by people who have explored this idea: (1) Iris Murdoch, Existentialists & Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature; (2) Plato (yep, Plato; for the barest hint of a taste, see Jonathan Lear, “Allegory and Myth in Plato’s Republic” — but there’s much good work on the union of philosophy and poetry/art/lit in Plato); (3) Aladair MacIntyre, After Virtue, esp. the bits about the narrative structure of human action.
Ok, maybe 4, depending on how you count. 🙂
Thanks for those suggestions Nous Bros! (smiley face…)
Aw man, I forgot about how these programs turn a perfectly viable symbol of light-heartedness into an insipid smiley face.
With the metaphysical novel Beauvoir exposes all the strength and novelty of her philosophical framework. There, whatever she wrote about alterity, ambiguity, freedom and gender, appears in motion, i.e., as part of the whole of reality; as being disclosed in “the living relation that is action and feeling before making itself thought,” as she herself points out. That’s indeed a brilliant essay, which makes us inquire about what is the nearness that brings literature and philosophical thinking together – or, what’s the structure that allow us to perceive what is at work in a work of art. I agree with you and Beauvoir when both of you explain that philosophy and literature hold two different perspectives regarding Truth. But what fascinates me the most in this whole argument is the power of literature [good literature!] to evoke human situatedness and to awake our thoughts to a metaphysical attitude without which we would lack the proper means to engage in the ‘atemporal’ realm of Philosophy proper.
Your post’s simply amazing and evocative of the questions that make up the path of our Philosophical and, why not, ‘Sentimental Education.’
Nice post. And I agree that philosophers should pay more attention to literary narrative. After all, as Martha Nussbaum points out, philosophers often rely on minimal narrative vignettes (‘thought experiments’) for logical or persuasive purposes, and full literary narratives are capable of playing the same role for far richer and more sophisticated ideas.
But I think what’s important about the classic French existentialist use of fiction isn’t just that it presents the author’s subjective take on the world. Lots of other kinds of writing can do that, from poetry to polemic. Literary narrative allows the author to present the characters’ subjective views of the world. Through contrasting these views among different characters, or even within the same character at different times, literary fiction can express and argue for nuanced accounts of human phenomenology more clearly and carefully than abstract theorising.
The two novels usually held up as great examples of this are Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Outsider (aka The Stranger). But I think that Beauvoir’s own She Came To Stay might outstrip them both in its philosophical sophistication. It certainly does in its literary execution. I think I’ll give it another read.
Thought provoking post and follow-up comments. I’d add this: if you’re going to read Camus or Satre then read also Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’. Pre-dates the French efforts by 50 years or so.The American author Paul Auster says that “Hunger is a work of existential art, a story in which a human being looks into the face of death, with no hope of salvation.” Norwegian too which will appeal to Prof Mumford. What is less appealing is Hamsun’s later fascistic leanings; never stopped us reading Heidegger, though. But I guess that’s the topic for a future post? My other concerns about philosophy’s ‘objectivity’ are best left for discussion over a beer in the Staff Club.
Twitter recommendations for the Philosopher’s Existentialist holiday reading list:
bflow_love: @UoNArts Perhaps “The Rebel” by Albert Camus? I think it’s his most underrated work but also his best.
the_stardust: @UoNArts Beauvoir’s All Men are Mortal: impressive novel about temporality and alterity.
Any more?
Nice post and Im not going to say what everyone else has already said, but I do want to comment on your knowledge of the topic. Youre truly well-informed. I cant believe how much of this I just wasnt aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. Im truly
grateful and really impressed.
This is another interesting bit of work on the topic of literary philosophy. http://books.google.com/books?id=vSXkTBniJZAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
My approach to this question is that of a (primarily) fiction writer who has an interest in studying philosophy, so I cannot speak with specific knowledge about philosophers or their approach to literature. I have many thoughts in response to your excellent post and I hope that you will find them relevant to this discussion.
First of all, I just want to point out that as someone who has made the study and writing of fiction her lifelong pursuit, I think there are many fiction writers who would be surprised to hear their work described as being in opposition to seeking after truth. (I am inserting a *smiley face* here as I do not wish you to read my post as inflammatory or trolling.) I think most fiction writers who take their craft seriously are seeking after truth. Look at Shakespeare – his plays, five hundred years on, still have relevance to people regardless of culture or language. I would argue that the plays are as relevant to any discourse on the subject of truth as a philosophical essay. (Though obviously they may lack the specific structure and language of one.)
Personally, I find it…unproductive to sort sources of information into useful or not useful. Any piece of work (whether “bad” or “good”) can activate my imagination and give me a new perspective on an idea I am working on. If the shape of an idea is well-defined enough in our minds, then it can cross over into other fields, so that nowadays we use evolution to discuss more than just the process by which organisms gain or lose characteristics over generations in response to their environment. At any point, we may receive information from television, from the internet, from an overheard conversation, from a simple observation that for one reason or another can fertilize a previously barren area of thought. In his book “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex”, Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-mann wrote that in order to do physics he only needed his brain (and possibly a pencil)… that his best ideas often occurred while going for long walks with his wife. Just because an activity (such as reading Dickens) does not seem directly productive, just because it doesn’t seem directly related to the pursuit one has dedicated one’s life to, does not mean that it doesn’t fulfill a function that allows you to be productive. understand better that we all have a limited amount of time and that we must prioritize. It is not up to me (thank goodness) to tell you which battles you must chose. I wished merely to give a brief argument on behalf of the utility of fiction.
Thank you. *smiley face*
I agree with this last comment. The idea that reading Kafka or Dostoevsky is ‘not productive’ for those interested in Philosophy seems very narrow, to say the least..