Against Literature

Epistemic status: completely unhinged, partially satirical

“I was an infant when my parents died.
They both were ornithologists. I've tried
So often to evoke them that today
I have a thousand parents. Sadly they
Dissolve in their own virtues and recede,
But certain words, chance words I hear or read,
Such as "bad heart" always to him refer,
And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.”

―Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Like an Archie Bunker-style racist¹, I spend lots of time brooding over the superiority of my group over others. In my defense, I belong to a good group: Jews people interested in analytic philosophy. It’s really staggering how much better we are than other people!

I’m not here referring primarily to those in very different domains. The mathematicians and scientists build bridges—far be it for me to claim that what they’re doing is unproductive as I sit around proving the self-indication assumption. Despite my argument being decisive, at the end of it, they have a bridge, and I just have some disgruntled commentators!

Of course, I still am of the view that analytic philosophers and their ilk are better at general thinking than, say, the typical anthropologist or even mathematician. As friend of the blog Michael Huemer writes in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

By the way, it is not just studying in general or being educated in general that is important. The point I’m making is specifically about philosophy, and about a particular style of philosophy at that (what we in the biz call “analytic philosophy”). When I talk to academics from other fields, I often find them confused. That is a very common experience among philosophers. To be clear, academics in other fields, obviously, know their subject much better than people outside their field know that subject. That is, they know the facts that have been discovered, and the methods used to discover them, which outsiders, including philosophers, do not. But they’re still confused when they think about big questions, including questions about the larger implications of the discoveries in their own fields. Whereas, when philosophers think about other fields, we tend to merely be ignorant, not confused.

But if the engineers can make bridges, the mathematicians can make elegant proofs, and the anthropologists can uncover…whatever they uncover…far be it for me to criticize them. No, the people I have in mind—the confused foil to the crystalline mental clarity of analytic philosophers—are literature fans.

I do not, of course, have in mind all literature fans. Some analytic philosophers are literature fans. I’ve even been known to enjoy some literature upon occasion (I’m a simple man, so as long as they stick to little words like if, it, and of, I enjoy it—but if they use bigger words I get terribly confused). The people I have in mind are those who spend a lot of time thinking about great literature, talking about it, meticulously interpreting famous authors. The sorts of people who become Enlish professors, for instance.

I guess you can paraphrase this as “analytic philosophers > English professors, on average.”

The problem is that the field of literature interpretation—and especially those who make reading literature a major part of their personality—seem very light on arguments. They have their philosophical views majorly shaped by, for example, their interpretation of Steinbeck. Hang out around lit people and you’ll find a great deal of discussion of what Melville meant by such and such, but very little discussion of whether Melville was saying anything true.

A literature professor I was listening to recently remarked that nearly all Shakespeare scholars seem to think Shakespeare shared their politics—his works were either a veiled critique of the state or of statelessness, of egalitarianism or inegalitarianism. Those who spend a great deal of time interpreting literature seem to spend more time learning about what the author was thinking than whether it was true. They find it hard to believe that one as wise as the person they devote their life to studying could be so confused!

One will hear lots of statements along the lines of “the author analyzes the subjective nature of art and beauty,” or “Camus highlights the paradoxical nature of the world, where we must eek out meaning from a world that is meaningless.”

Very few people say things like “Camus thought he was highlighting the paradoxical nature of the world involving a meaningless world, but he was completely off-his-rocker and assumed that there isn’t objective value based on no argument.” (I offer up this article as a modest example of how people should analyze literature). They’ll have these weird existential crises based on reading some author because the author said, using elegant prose, that nothing matters or something (if you’re going to have an existential crisis, you should have it about something serious, like the fact that infinity breaks ethics, which is especially worrisome given that we live in an infinite world…but I digress).

When literature conveys philosophical ideas, it does so in a confusing roundabout way. Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoevsky—these people don’t give arguments with premises and conclusions, they just sort of vibe. But this can be very convincing. People aren’t mostly convinced by rational argument.

For example, there’s some Russian novel—maybe by Dostoevsky—which is seen as a devastating rebuke of consequentialism. One of the characters goes out and kills another, thinking it will be for the greater good—the person killed is hated and is I think abusing someone? Yet it all turns out disastrously for everyone! The lesson you’re supposed to take away—and many people do—is that you shouldn’t do greater good killings.

But this is a very, very stupid argument. The fact that someone can come up with a story where a person tries to do X, but it ends disastrously, tells you nothing about the circumstances in which doing X is a good idea. This would be like suggesting that it’s a bad idea to stretch your nose because we can come up with a story whereby scratching your nose starts a nuclear war.

Even when works of literature do advance philosophical arguments, it’s obvious that the convincingness of the literature isn’t commensurate with the strength of the argument. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas isn’t a convincing argument—it only convinces people because the prose is good. Our philosophical judgments are hugely influenced by emotions; having an eloquent writer beat some emotion into you over the course of 600 pages is quite effective in changing minds. A significant part of the reason so many people hate consequentialism with such a passion is because the consequentialists are always the bad guys in fiction!

Reading Ender’s Game hugely shapes the sorts of things that people think about young children. But really, it shouldn’t. In it, Orson Scott Card doesn’t give arguments for the things he thinks—he just tells a story where they’re true. Now, while I think he’s reasonably accurate in his assessment of what kids are like, one who didn’t think he was right prior to reading him shouldn’t think he was right after reading him.

Forming beliefs based on literature—as is the modus operandi of such literature types—is a bit like forming your beliefs about the material world by dropping acid. It distorts your judgment in fairly predictable ways. The beliefs based on intuitions that you developed through reading literature are unreliable, not remotely selected for based on correlating with the truth.

Modern literature readers seem to spend a great deal of time criticizing authors for things they thought that were racist or sexist. They spend a great deal of time showing how the fact that an author is wealthy or white might influence their views on things. But when it comes to analyzing whether the ideas they churned out about philosophy are true, people think that one’s aim is to interpret more than analyze—and if you are analyzing, do it sympathetically.

Sorry, if some author tells a nice story about people disagreeing and then concludes that morality isn’t objective, they’re worthy of not a bit more deference than when lay people raise the argument from disagreement. Being able to write nice stories about some idea doesn’t make the idea more defensible, and your intuitions based on your emotional reaction to such stories are unreliable—not likely to pick out the truth.

One should strive to be ruthlessly critical of others’ ideas, not treat them as objects of worship. Most people, when they opine on complex philosophical topics, are confused, and say false things, and make bad arguments. While we’re generally instructed to find the good in others’ ideas, I think this is generally bad policy; what you should instead do is find out what others’ ideas are, and then see if they’re any good.

If, for instance, Nietzsche makes a stupid argument, you shouldn’t try to twist it into something clever. The mistake of many of those who study history of philosophy is assuming that the people they’re studying never made stupid mistakes. Whenever Kant says something false and bizarre, roughly a hundred papers are written trying to explain how ACTUALLY what he was saying was brilliant, persuasive, and perhaps even true.

Literature is certainly not without use (or, without the double negative, it has use). But people should treat it like LSD—while it might be fun and prompt interesting revelations, you shouldn’t take especially seriously the thoughts you have while under its influence. Oftentimes, it causes people to think, based on some vague feeling, something that is bizarre and almost certainly false!

To be safe, and avoid the dangers of book learnin’, stick to watching television. Oh, and my blog!

1. Note for morons and/or journalists writing a hitpiece: I am not saying I am an Archie bunker style racist!