Literature and philosophy

Part I: Theory
1. Literature and philosophy

[T]he order of intellect and the order of morality do not exist at all, in art, except as they are organized in the order of art.
Mark Schorer

            Before considering the presence of philosophical ideas in narrative works, it seems appropriate to examine the more general relationship between literature and philosophy. Prior to that, however, one needs to define the relationship between the two areas of culture (and civilization), art and science, two, to quote John Fowles, “great manners of apprehending and enjoying existence” which, he argues, are “complementary, not hostile” (159) and which, I will argue, not only complement, but actually permeate each other, co-existing in most works of art, and possibly in some works of science, too.
What such divergent works of art as Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ Concerto in A minor or Aelbert Cuyp’s River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants have in common is that they express human experience of life in an act of creation which translates certain mental content (information) into a more or less permanent, original, material form, which other people can appreciate. Various arts employ various media; the distinctive feature of literary art is that language is its primary means of expression. This description implies that art is a mode of communication; however, unlike Fowles, I do not think that art is “the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings” (159); in particular, I object to the notion that art is “most easily comprehensible.”
Scientific works, such as Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation, Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the implied author or Immanuel Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding, are all human efforts to examine (describe and explain in a language, whether natural or artificial) various aspects of reality (of nature in the case of natural sciences or of culture in the case of the humanities). Philosophy, in turn, drawing on natural sciences, the humanities and human existential experience (also transformed in works of art) yet forwarding hypotheses reaching beyond data available in empirical experience, investigates all kinds of enigmas (such as the nature of reality, existence of Transcendent Beings, reliability of cognition, the meaning of human life and the status of moral and aesthetic values) in their most fundamental dimension.
Both literature and philosophy share reality as their (ultimate) source of inspiration and the verbal medium of articulation, though they employ language and refer to the world in highly specific ways which I will discuss below. I will also argue that both literature and philosophy operate in the fictional/hypothetical mode, typical of all human – verbal and non-verbal – representation of reality; and they are human activities involved in, among other functions each of them performs, the search for truth; that is, in cognitive exploration.

1.1. Approach to reality
Philosophy is concerned with the intellectual comprehension of the essential (as opposed to particular or individual) aspects of the world. As Iris Murdoch suggests, unlike literature, “Philosophical writing is not self-expression” (231), or at least it is not meant to be “self-expression,” but should in principle be impersonal and objective.
By contrast, literature is occupied with the creative expression of the human experience of life. The subject of literature is reality in so far as this reality is meaningful and relevant to man; that is, the scope of literature is potentially infinite. More or less openly, yet to a certain extent unavoidably, literature is personal, for it is concerned with what the author has experienced either in person or vicariously in his/her imagination. Even if the text is not meant to be autobiographical, it nonetheless bears a full imprint of its author’s personality. The rational approach of science is complemented with emotions in art. Its appeal is more holistic.

1.2. Use of language
For science (philosophy included) language is primarily (with some exceptions, e.g. linguistics or analytical philosophy) an instrument; as such it should be precise and neutral. “The ideal scientific language,” to quote René Wellek and Austin Warren, is purely “denotative”:
it aims at a one-to-one correspondence between sign and referent. The sign is completely arbitrary, hence it can be replaced by equivalent signs. The sign is also transparent; that is, without drawing attention to itself, it directs us unequivocally to its referent. (22-3)
The languages of mathematics or logic may approximate this ideal (23), at the expense of the range of issues they can articulate. Most philosophers must content themselves with natural languages and these are far from perfect. As Ludwig Wittgenstein stated in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus in 1922, the limits of language denote the limits of one’s world (thesis 5.6, 148-9). Equipped with metaphysical implications, the language interferes in philosophical research. The interference cannot be prevented, but its effect may be minimized by linguistic self-consciousness and precision.
Contrariwise, since literature is an art, its form (language) actively participates in the expression of its content; in a good work of art both form and content are perfectly integrated. Though the claim was first explicitly made by modernists (cf. Clive Bell’s definition of art as “significant form,” qtd. in Johnstone 56-7), most critics agree that it pertains to all periods. Form in art is not a neutral medium, mere (superfluous) decoration, or structural principle; form is content, content is form, their relation ideally organic. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 43). The scholar perceives form as content “incarnated”; the two cannot be separated except for the purpose of analysis (“Problem treści” 35-7). Eco adds that it is primarily through the shaping of form, not evaluative statements, that art has the right and chance to comment meaningfully upon life (Eco, “Sposób kszałtowania” 280).

            This is also true when the content is conceived of as philosophical and the form is literary; to cite Martha C. Nussbaum, “Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth” (3).
Literary language, as Wellek and Warren suggest, “stresses the awareness of the sign itself,” “abounds in ambiguities,” and is typically “highly connotative.” Apart from its referential function, it is meant to express the writer’s attitude, and evoke the reader’s response (22-23). Further, as Ewa Borowiecka suggests, it may be deliberately ornamental and innovative, and the author may even choose to ignore some rules that govern the use of language in other discourses or institute rules of organization unknown elsewhere (77; see also 76-80). Thus, literary language is not, as a rule, objective and purely descriptive; on the contrary, it is highly emotional, creative, self-conscious and suggestive of implicit depths of obliquely communicated meaning.

1.3. The hypothetical and fictional modes of operation
With few exceptions (e.g. aphorisms, literary biographies) literature operates primarily in the fictional mode, and creates with language a fictional world. To approach reality via fiction sounds like a paradox, or a contradiction in terms, since fiction is commonly taken to be the very opposite of reality, but it does not involve any contradiction in essence, because the fictional world of literature stems from the real world. As Murdoch claims, literature is open for “it refers to a reality beyond itself” (247). Wellek and Warren explain that the correspondence may be of various sorts:
It [literature] must, of course, stand in recognizable relation to life, but the relations are very various: the life can be heightened or burlesqued or antithesized; it is in any case a selection, of a specifically purposive sort, from life. We have to have a knowledge independent of literature to know what the relation of a specific work to “life” may be. (212)
To experience a fictional world, Eco argues, we need to bring in our knowledge of the real world. The real world is the background against which the parasitic, fictional world makes sense. They closely resemble each other, except for differences instituted by the writer (e.g. in “Little Red Riding Hood” wolves can speak) and the poor ontological status of the latter (Eco, Six Walks 77-85):
everything that the text doesn’t name or describe explicitly as different from what exists in the real world must be understood as corresponding to the laws and conditions of the real world. (83)
Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen also point out that if we posit that the fictional world is cut off from the real one, we will fail to explain how the former is supplemented in the act of reading with extra-fictional information (94-5). Thus the fictional world, though neither a copy of the real world, nor its perfectly faithful representation, is always a creative interpretation and expression of a personal experience of the real world, and can only be appreciated by the reader with reference to his/her experience of reality.
For a long time it has been argued that scientific language makes propositions of logical value; Borowiecka, for instance claim that there is no difference in this respect between the humanities and the sciences: both use propositions which aspire to the truth, to a close correspondence with reality (76), whereas it has been questioned whether literary sentences can be examined as logical propositions (Ingarden, “O tak zwanej prawdzie w literaturze”; Borowiecka 76-7). The opposition has recently grown more tenuous: modern science makes no presumptions to truth, being satisfied with hypotheses, or with hypothetical models of reality (Bell 12-3; Kamiński 116-181, esp. 180-1). Still, science has at its disposal experiments, observation, mathematical language and the like (that is to say, it can gradually minimize the degree of vagueness of its hypotheses), but philosophy is relatively underprivileged in this respect. Its substance is constituted by theories whose status is tentative, and the various cognitive procedures at its disposal (such as deduction, induction, definition) cannot overcome the philosopher’s lack of contact with things in themselves. Even so, fictionality in “fiction” (as literature is often called) is exuberant, while in philosophy its presence is recognized as a necessary evil.

1.4. Cognitive aspirations
The contention that both philosophy and literature are involved in the quest for truth is hardly new: it is implied in the words of Fowles, quoted above; it is explicit in the words of Iris Murdoch, a philosopher and novelist (an authority in both disciplines): “philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations” (235).
That philosophy explores reality needs no proof – the idea is obvious. It is plainly the main target of science and, hence, of philosophy. But the belief in the cognitive function of literature might prima facie seem far-fetched. Still, one may argue that it is implicit in the concept of art: expressing one’s experience involves, first of all, an act (not necessarily complete or final) of comprehension of some aspect/fragment of life-experience (which must be isolated and objectified), as well as the act of translating it into an aesthetic form (the medium must be selected and shaped, so that the work can be meaningful to a potential recipient). The literary medium being language, by far the best developed, though far from perfect, tool with which to describe reality or communicate with other human beings, literature’s explorative capacity might surpass those of other arts. At the same time one must bear in mind that to increase human awareness in its emotional, intuitional and intellectual aspects is only one literary aim; literature may also provide entertainment or instruction, induce a sense of catharsis, or diminish the sense of loneliness, to name some of its other functions.
To summarize the above considerations: in philosophy language is used instrumentally; its subject is rational description and explanation of reality; its relation to reality involves the hypothetical mode. Language in literature can be used freely within the general criterion of communicability; in principle no subject is inappropriate; the typical mode in which literature operates is fictional.
Philosophy and science try to grasp the world as it is. While reading philosophical works we deal directly with a text, indirectly with the philosopher’s hypotheses about the world, and even more indirectly with the real world. Literature, like any art, tries to represent the world as it appears to the artist. When we read a work of literature we are dealing directly with a text, indirectly with its fictional world, further, with the writer’s interpretation of his/her experience of the real world, and, as in the case of philosophy, somewhere we touch the real world.
With the exception of the didactic tradition, literary art poses questions rather than imposes answers and thus leaves the reader much space for personal discovery. Newton P. Stallknecht finds the attitude of the artist (in contrast with that of the philosopher) more “congenial.” The artist “need not be greatly concerned to convince his readers that his notion is a true one or that it excludes every alternative. In any case, he is not likely to construct an argument” (154), he has “a way of enjoying an idea without feeling any obligation to demonstrate or verify” (155), and “is usually more eager to make clear how an idea affects the life and colors the emotion of the person who entertains it” (154). Finally, literature can express indefinite thoughts: “Fictions can find a place for the experience of vague, unclear thought which may have been engendered by confusion and frustration. [. . .] Fictions can show what seems in life to be the vital necessity of incomplete, inconsistent, nonsystematic thinking” (Fletcher 5; cf. Nussbaum 29).

1.5. Philosophy in literature
The differences between literature and philosophy are so numerous that Ian Watt’s statement raises no objections: “Philosophy is one thing and literature is another” (“Realism” 82); to confuse them would be wrong, to search in literature for philosophy sensu stricto vain. To identify the search for philosophy in literary works with a search for authors who were philosophers themselves (like Iris Murdoch or Jean Paul Sartre), or who introduced fictional philosophers into their works (like Mr Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or Hugo Belfounder in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net), or else made some “real” philosopher and/or his/her ideas the subject of the fictional work (as in David Lodge’s Therapy with reference to Kierkegaard, or John Fowles’s The Magus with reference to existentialism), would limit the scope of investigation, arbitrarily excluding those assumptions about reality which every literary work makes, expressing its author’s life experience, regardless of his/her self-consciousness in this respect. Studying literature for philosophy in this way means neglecting the distinction between philosophy as an academic discipline, authorized by philosophical departments and recognized thinkers, and philosophy as personal reflection on basic facts of existence. For this reason terms such as “outlook upon life” or “vision/concept of life” will in this dissertation be used as synonyms for philosophical ideas present in literature. The scholar who wishes to retrieve the work’s philosophy aims to distil these assumptions, reconstruct their hierarchy and translate them into philosophical discourse. I do not agree with those theoreticians who, like Bakhtin (“Problem treści” 44) or Roman Ingarden, argue that this approach is irrelevant to proper literary studies. I hope to have demonstrated in the discussion of art and philosophy that the cognitive aspect of art is not secondary, negligible or irrelevant. The potential advantages of this approach are many: it helps us trace the history of human thought embodied in the art of words; it helps us see the work’s merit (the three basic criteria being, in my opinion, the aesthetic quality of form, the truth of content and the organic unity of both); above all, it helps us examine the work’s vision of life in a scholarly way, and it helps us understand the work’s message (or to be precise, its philosophical component). To quote Stallknecht: “Understanding a work of art involves recognition of the ideas that it reflects or embodies” (147).
Slightly modifying Borowiecka’s theory of the cognitive potential of art, one could say that literature conveys philosophical ideas in three ways:
– via statements made by the narrator, characters, the lyrical subject, or the implied author (literature shares this ability to communicate philosophical convictions verbally with all verbal art),
– at the level of the (fictional) presented world, which interprets the real world by means of imitation and distortion (this is common to all representational art),
– formally, by formal means of expression, structure (this is typical of all art).
Having attempted to legitimize the search for philosophy in literature, I admit that such an examination is in many respects different from a private intimate encounter with a book: it involves reliance on the text rather than on the experience of the text, and favours the cognitive content of the text at the expense of other literary dimensions. Literature may well be impoverished when studied primarily for its philosophical content. Hence the critique of Douglas N. Morgan is partially justified. The author complains that people nowadays are “truth-addicted,” cannot enjoy art unless it is identified with its cognitive content, do not accept the fact that knowledge present in art comes from familiarity and is “intimate, personal and non-verificational” (26); “We do not disserve God and truth,” Morgan argues, “[. . .] if we dare to feel honestly, without self-consciously justifying every emotive response by reference to some scientifically confirmable truth [. . .]” (21). This is true (though one should not overestimate the popularity of the scholarly approach), but I do not think that it should prevent anyone from carrying out studies such as this one, provided that one keeps in mind that this is one of several scholarly approaches, all of which are distinct from the experience of reading books.
As a source of insights into reality, a forum for existential questions and debates, a vehicle for philosophical ideas literature is irreplaceable.

1.6. Literature in philosophy
On the margin of the discussion of the ways in which philosophical ideas “infiltrate” literature, let us note that the reverse process – literary form invading philosophical treatises – is just as universal. Plato’s dialogues (with their characters, lively conversations rich in anecdotes, memorable imagery, and a significant amount of fiction) might be dismissed as a testimony to the ancient methodological light-heartedness (lack of criticism). Yet the modern philosophical tradition has not dispensed with narratives (Voltaire), dialogues (Berkeley), lyrical soliloquies (Pascal), symbols (cf. Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus), figurative language and rhetorical techniques (cf. Bergson’s metaphorical language or the paradoxes of Cusanus) and spelling effects (Heidegger). This is inevitably so. Verbal art, which finds its most elaborate expression in literature, can be encountered almost every time a human being engages in verbal activity (including the cognitive processes preceding any vocal utterance or written record), as documented by modern philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics.