Intertwining of philosophy and fiction

[MetaMortician]

Philosophy and fiction are the same thing. Both attempt to make sense of reality by telling stories.

We cannot help but linguistically model our perceptions of reality.

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The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian - 245

[DoktorH]

Quote Originally Posted by Matthias M.

What do you think about the following statement: Lovecraft's as well as Ligotti's fiction is deeply intertwined with their philosophical views respectively there real worldview. I have the impression that Lovecraft as well as Ligotti use their fiction to illustrate their real, actual worldview. What is your opinion on this? Is my suspicion right that in a sense, both authors don't write ordinary fiction but worldview-philosophy?

I think both of these writers put their worldview in their stories. it has been a while since i read anything by either of them, but from what I recall i would not be surprised if a number of their stories are at least set in world where some element of the author's worldview has been exaggerated to the point of taking over that setting.

I think the same can be said for a lot of fiction. the world is the product of the author's imagination, a bit of their their personality and worldview and influences.

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by MTC

Deleuze and Guattari's distinction from What Is Philosophy is probably still valid. "The difference between conceptual personae [fx Descartes or Schopenhauer] and aesthetic figures [fx Lovecraft or Ligotti] consists first of all in this: the former are the powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. The former take effect on a plane of immanence that is an image of Thought-Being (noumenon), and the latter take effect on a plane of composition as image of a Universe (phenomenon). The great aesthetic figures of thought and the novel but also of painting, sculpture, and music produce affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinions. Melville said that a novel includes an infinite number of interesting characters but just one original Figure like the single sun of a constellation of a universe, like the beginning of things, or like the beam of light that draws a hidden universe out of the shadow: hence Captain Ahab, or Bartleby. Kleist's universe is shot through with affects that traverse it like arrows or that suddenly freeze the universe in which the figures of Homburg or Penthesilea loom. Figures have nothing to do with resemblance or rhetoric but are the condition under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe. Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe of affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts."

I agree with all of that but would add that concepts themselves can be experienced affectively and perceptually. I recently ran across the term

ideasthesia

Ideasthesia

-- this puts a name to something I've experienced since childhood. Robert Musil's sprawling, unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities explores and enacts what could be called ideasthesia repeatedly and obsessively.

[Matthias M.]

Dear qcrisp (#8),

I like your description of writing/art as open-ended. This is why I like Laruelle's approach towards philosophy (see 'Axiomatic Heresy' by Ray Brassier).

I am convinced that we as humans cannot know universal truths, we couldn't even know if there are any such truths. I'd like to correct myself and say that I, when writing, see it as my task to infuse my writing with my contingent worldview and with my philosophical views (most important: no free will / no essential self). But I am far off to say that all people should do this or read all books like political manifestos. I am simply attracted to authors that infuse their fiction with their philosophical views. Therefore this thread.

[Matthias M.]

MTC (#10), in my view, the powers of concepts can have great effects on our affects and percepts. A good example for this is Lovecraft's cosmicism. I think it is not so easy to make this dissection.

But I have to confess that I'm not sure if I have understood the quote by Deleuze/Guattari correctly. In a nutshell, can we say that both, philosophy through concepts and art through percepts/affects point beyond the everyday?

[Revenant]

Quote Originally Posted by Matthias M.

Revenant (#4), thanks for your comment. You write: "Most of us have a personal philosophy that shapes our worldview." To rewrite the question: Is any 'serious' author's fiction shaped by her/his philosophical view?

I think every serious fiction author's work is shaped by their philosophical view. It is something that invariably comes out, whether they mean for it to do so or not.

[MTC]

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

I agree with all of that but would add that concepts themselves can be experienced affectively and perceptually.

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MTC (#10), in my view, the powers of concepts can have great effects on our affects and percepts.

Yes concepts can pass into affects. I'd say this is how concepts generally work in Deleuze and Guattari's own philosophy. And affects can pass into concepts as it happens fx in their book on Kafka. Just below the passage quoted before they write:

"This means that the concept as such can be the concept of the affect, just as the affect can be affect of the concept. The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other."

Yet despite these conjunctions the difference in kind between art and philosophy remains.

"They branch out and do not stop branching out".

[matt cardin]

Although this basically sidesteps the question at hand in this thread, when I read MTC's quoted passage from Deleuze and Guattari I'm put in mind of Robert Frost's insightful characterization of the distinction between scholars and artists, which has always stayed with me (and which I included as an epigraph at the beginning of Dark Awakenings):

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Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic. -- Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes" (1939)

[Arthur Staaz]

Mathias, I would say, yes, my writing is infused by my worldview. But it's also infused with a sense of experimenting with variations on my worldview. My writing comes from a dark place and sees the world in a much less positive/optimistic way than the consensus view (at least here in the US).

I suspect the appeal of Ligotti for many of us is that he expresses truths we don't see elsewhere. Many, perhaps most of us, don't necessarily find ourselves in complete agreement with his worldview, but we find much that attracts us. My writing aims towards the same kinds of extremes because I believe the dark places are worth getting to know rather than turning away from what we don't like to see. Plus, let's face it, we get a thrill in the dark, too, don't we. In playing in the dark spaces, I sometimes try on, in my writing, variations on my worldview to see how they fit and where they go.

I also try to keep in mind the wise statement of one of the greatest of philosophers - Marx. (Groucho, that is.) "Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I've got others."

[matt cardin]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

There is at least one difference (and there may be others) between a writer of fiction and a philosopher, in general terms. The writer is more like an actor. An actor might put himself into a particular role, but we would be foolish to assume that he plays the same role off-camera. [. . .] I am tending more these days towards what I gather is the view of Ananda Coomaraswamy that those who have no philosophical understanding are not likely to produce good art, but will fall into 'sentimentalism', which I think can also mean not just work that is focused on feeling in a meretricious way, but the kind of thing we now call 'sensationalist'. [. . .] And having said that, I do think there's a place for 'popular entertainment' - that is, the sentimental, the guignol and the burlesque, which have their own kind of ritual and catharsis.

Yes, yes, and yes. Well said, Quentin. (Ditto for the rest of your post, for that matter.)

More generally, and in response to your original question, Matthias, I'm inclined to answer unhesitatingly that, yes, Ligotti and Lovecraft both write/wrote in the way you're asking about. I have the sense that Tom has always done so quite directly, deliberately, and consciously, whereas Lovecraft only did it that way sometimes, in some of his stories. In others he did it more intuitively by using his literary art not to advance a philosophical viewpoint consciously held but to pursue and pin down certain mingled aesthetic, emotional, and philosophical impressions that perennially haunted him. But in all cases, I think the result is still what can validly be called worldview fiction.

I also think that second approach of Lovecraft's parallels what a great many literary authors have always done. Those who consciously and deliberately write fiction as a vehicle for communicating a worldview are a minority. Then again, maybe this distinction is too arbitrary to hold, since many (most) of us who are possessed by the demon of writing only understand how it is that we're seeing, understanding, and experiencing the world (and ourselves) in and through and from and by the very act of trying to articulate this in written words. Our fiction is worldview fiction not least because the act of writing is how we come to understand how we view the world.

What's more, and crucially, all of these attempts are centrally inflected by the very presence of that creative demon itself. Writers, and also other "creative" types, see-feel-know the world and themselves differently than other people do.