Intertwining of philosophy and fiction

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

probably only via either a very extended single prose work or else the correlation of a series of shorter pieces.

If I'm looking for quibbles, I'm not sure why you specify a series of shorter pieces. Why not individual short pieces?
I don't expect to see many brilliant weird novels in a longer series, or at least not particularly scary ones but I think it's possible.

[Speaking Mute]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

I must confess to having looked forward in anticipation to seeing this perspective of mine contradicted. Is there no one willing to do so? I don't mean for the sake of merely doing so, but on a point of genuine principle? I am sure someone must be willing to do so. Mark S.

I'll bite. Insofar as Weird - or Surrealist, Irrealist, Symbolist etc. - Fiction involves the subversion of reality, the writer has at least an intuitive stake in metaphysics, epistemology, and human psychology. Writers like Borges - or more baroque works by certain writers (Lem's His Master's Voice) - strike me as having their primary appeal rooted in their bizarre philosophical speculations.

I'll even make an odd suggestion that many philosophical works are themselves unwitting entries in the irrealist tradition. There are, obviously, the Nietzsches and Schopenhauers, but consider something like Sydney Shoemaker's thought experiment in "Time Without Change":

YouTube

I find this argument eerie. There is, at the outset, a fantastic world where items disappear at regular intervals for set amounts of time. But the ultimate end of the argument is conceptualizing something that our mind rebels against - the notion that time can pass without anything altering or changing. There is no apparent logical necessity in associating time and change, but because the human mind simply cannot "picture" such circumstances we deem them impossible or meaningless. Shoemaker's argument sidesteps our usual reliance on imagery by using induction. He thus builds the possibility of something inconceivable using the same indirect means employed by Lovecraft and mystics like Nagarjuna and John Eriugena. This is, for me at least, rather uncanny - a sort of glimpse into the world without us.

But I full well understand many look at this as puzzle-mongering - about as interesting as the cryptograms that were once found buried in the entertainment section of newspapers - and unworthy of literary interest. I say, "To each their own"....

It's interesting you mention Borges, SM. He once contended that it was hazardous to suggest a combination of words could much resemble the universe, and that all schools of philosophy were only branches of fantastic literature. I think there is a danger (at least creatively) in reversing his contention and narrowing it down to advocating specific philosophical content in fiction as being meritorious because it accords with certain cultural values of contemporaneity.

I am not sure that Borges purely fantastical work can be tied down in quite the same way. I tend to think of his fiction as being somewhat outside the current of modernity and possessing a timeless quality that will ensure its long-term survival.

I suppose what I am driving at is that you often find commentators in literature extolling what is (“up-to-date”) philosophical, and not aesthetic, content.

And I am not sure quite how we have got to this state of affairs. If one turns the idea on its head and said something like “I read a really wonderful philosophical book the other day. I took no note of the reasoning in it, but I found it so very beautifully well-written, with many fresh metaphors and no lack of imaginative force.” I imagine people would be rightly suspicious of such a recommendation for a book of philosophy.

This is just my own deficiency, but quite why we are all expected to uncritically adopt (very much culturally loaded) Critical Theory, PoMo (or whatever school of literary analysis is currently in vogue) is a thing I cannot understand. It seems to me the resurgence of a modish standard very much like, in effect at least, the cultural equivalent of the “necessity” of Victorian values in literature as a bulwark against decadence, aestheticism and the like in the 1890s.

Mark S.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

And I am not sure quite how we have got to this state of affairs. If one turns the idea on its head and said something like “I read a really wonderful philosophical book the other day. I took no note of the reasoning in it, but I found it so very beautifully well-written, with many fresh metaphors and no lack of imaginative force.” I imagine people would be rightly suspicious of such a recommendation for a book of philosophy. It seems to me the resurgence of a modish standard very much like, in effect at least, the cultural equivalent of the “necessity” of Victorian values in literature as a bulwark against decadence, aestheticism and the like in the 1890s.

I'm not a philosophy reader at all but I've considered reading Nietzsche purely for the imagery because I enjoy quotes of him on that level.

One of the reasons I love music so much is because unlike virtually everything else, people overwhelmingly like it for aesthetic reasons. Music wouldn't cross language barriers so much if this weren't so.
You do get some rock critics who place an absurd amount of importance on the lyrics but people with truly expansive music taste tend to treat lyrics like an optional bonus (which in some cases might be a huge bonus). Some genres like rap, singer/songwriter and folk often prioritise lyrics more and can get away with substandard music easier, but the stuff with great sounds is always more celebrated.
Why couldn't visual art have been more like that?

And yes, I think people are still way more moralistic about art than they realise. Always with the "relevant" stuff. Sometimes I thought BBC arts coverage must always have had directors asking about every subject they might cover "How is this relevant to modern people?" It drove me nuts how they had to justify everything in those terms.

[Speaking Mute]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

If one turns the idea on its head and said something like “I read a really wonderful philosophical book the other day. I took no note of the reasoning in it, but I found it so very beautifully well-written, with many fresh metaphors and no lack of imaginative force.” I imagine people would be rightly suspicious of such a recommendation for a book of philosophy.

...insofar as "I took no note of the reasoning" the suspicion would be justified - my rejoinder would be, of course, that reasoning and logical structure is part of what qualifies literature as philosophical to begin with. Shoemaker's original paper "Time Without Change" is by no means outwardly poetic, but the though experiment itself is both logically interesting and, I believe, successful in its goal of demonstrating that changeless time isn't meaningless. The fictitious aspect is that his paper would remain interesting even if time and change were ultimately the same - validity and soundness being different animals.

Even "literary" philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein use discursive argument even though their presentation obscures it. Such work can likewise be appreciated even if one is not agreement with it.