I’m reluctant to say this baldly, but the function of literature is not to generate testable hypotheses about the world and evidence for them, and the older purpose of literary criticism was not to generate testable hypotheses about works of literature (the more recent purpose of literary criticism is to sabotage the older one). The purpose of literature is to give pleasure that engages a wide range of our faculties while making us better people, both in moral and non-moral senses. Since talking about the latter would be difficult in a brief comment, I would say that at least with regard to morality, even if moral philosophy produces moral knowledge, literature contributes to moral performance. Compare the function of a nutritionist to a diet coach or a psychologist to a therapist. One aspect (not the only one) is that literature cultivates empathy for a wide range of types of people in a way that could only be beat by actual telepathy. And whatever morality *is*, empathy seems essential to successful moral performance (I could give you a neurological argument for that, but let’s not bite off more than we can chew here).
Btw, I was trained in analytic philosophy so I get your exasperation. But you should probably read Crime and Punishment anyway, and for now, ignore people who write about it.
The example you give from the Russian novel is a common trend in stories that I call the Straw Utilitarian (by analogy with the Straw Vulcan). Much like the Straw Vulcan, it tries to argue against a certain type of rationality (in this case, instrumental rationality + impartiality + welfarism) by showing a supposedly utilitarian person do the supposedly utilitarian thing and then have it end in horrible utilitarian consequences. Of course, a utilitarian who was actually acting rationally wouldn't do things likely to lead to bad consequences, so it's a strawman argument based on incorrect stereotypes of how utilitarians act. Either that, or it makes its argument by just stipulating that something ridiculous and unrealistic occurs, and therefore you shouldn't do the thing that in any realistic scenario actually would be the right thing (much like the problem Michael Huemer points out here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/crappy-thesis-movies).
If someone says you should base your actions on some non-consequentialist principles because it leads to better consequences, they are just a confused consequentialist!
No, they just point out humans suck at calculating consequences.
The problem with consequentalism is not really being clear who should be consequntalist - a hypothetical omniscient being, your favourite booksmart philosopher (who might not be streetwise enough) or the kind of people who have trouble finding London on a map?
Maybe so if you mean people who get non-obvious consequentialist reasoning wrong, but the Straw Utilitarian is typically someone who does something that's very obviously bad even on consequentialism. Either that, or the Straw Utilitarian is actually right, but the story uses an unrealistic outcome to make them look wrong.
I think you dislike literary criticism, not literature. & that I get. But to defend literature as a thing worthy of serious and sustained attention: other folks have said the bulk of it better, but: literature isn't for advancing arguments, mostly. It's for "what it's like to be a human being," which is a thing that's hard to summarize or talk about explicitly (but also very important). Novels aren't the theorems, they're the examples or the exercises. And for a great many complicated things, we only know the exercises, the theorems are still foggy and unglimpsed. or totally unhelpful in isolation. like, infinite jest didn't convince me of the abstract proposition "sometimes you gotta set aside your cleverness"---it showed me a clear, emphatic worked example of the principle
I don't see why we should take seriously our judgements about e.g. analytic thought experiments, but not our judgements about cases presented in literature. Is the idea meant to be that we can get usable intuitions from stories, but only if the stories are really short and badly written?
You say that judgements about literary cases are unreliable because people are being persuaded by the writing rather than the content. But I don't think that's true (at least, not always). Just to take one example that you mentioned: when the Omelas story is presented verbally to people (such as in an ethics class), I find that they still have the intuition that Omelas is bad. That's anecdotal, of course, but it seems to indicate that people aren't just being swayed by pretty prose.
[EDIT: I misread what your post says about Dostoevsky and retract my claim about the mix-up of plot points, though I still claim that the philosophical argument is not just "consequentialist thinking leads to bad outcomes by the consequentialist's lights."]
Thought experiments aren't really stories, and they convince in a totally different way than literature. Literature uses emotion and eloquent prose to get its point across, but neither of these things are related to the truth value of its philosophical claims. So in a sense, yes, being really short and badly written actually does make thought experiments better for getting at the truth than literature.
The other problem with literature is that it often just stipulates that a position is right by creating a world where it's right. But that's not a very convincing argument. Imagine trying to explicitly argue against consequentialism by saying, "But what if you do the consequentialist thing and it has bad consequences?" rather than dressing it up in a story.
But that isn't actually what philosophical novels and stories do, right? Dostoevsky never gives a story in which the upshot is "pursuing the best outcome leads to subpar outcomes," or anything that simplistic. What he *does* do is present characters who live by certain sets of values, and allow the reader to see how those values play out, and whether they find these characters to be morally appealing. Some authors do this well, by authentically portraying those who have opposing values (Dostoevsky is actually a good example here), while others do it badly, by making the opposing characters into cartoon villains (Ayn Rand comes to mind). But it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and it seems to me that it can lead to genuine philosophical insight.
[EDIT: I ignorantly misunderstood the original claim about the Dostoevsky story. Mea culpa.]
I think you've already realized based on the edit that main problem BB has is that the story doesn't authentically portray the results of following consequentialism. It's not impossible to avoid this of course, but it is extraordinarily common for stories to portray consequentialism as actually leading to worse consequences, which in real life can only happen if you're doing consequentialism wrong, or if you get really unlucky. It's not impossible to create a misleading thought experiment, too, but literature allows many more degrees of freedom than a short, boring thought experiment for doing so. And since literature is judged on factors other than, "Does this story provide a sound, well-reasoned argument for the conclusions it's trying to draw?", it is much easier to write good literature that argues for bad conclusions than it is to do the same thing with thought experiments.
Right, though I'm still skeptical that the point of the story is as simple as "consequentialism produces outcomes which are bad by the consequentialist's lights," as if Dostoevsky was trying to show that consequentialism is self-effacing. In any case, regardless of his intent, I don't think that's what people necessarily *do* take from these sorts of stories: a more plausible (and, I suspect, likely) reaction will be to notice how unappealing and vicious the character is who really lives these values. That's presumably why these stories focuses so much on the inner lives of their primary characters.
I also think the greater opportunity for detail in long-form literature can be advantageous. For instance, in your other comment you linked to an article by Mike Huemer, where he reports feeling that he had genuinely learned something about socialism by reading a passage in Atlas Shrugged. My own feelings on Rand's work aside, it seems like this sort of thing could happen quite commonly: one way of seeing whether an e.g. normative theory is appealing is to try and sketch out, as realistically as possible, how such a society would play out.
I don't know about the specific example in Dostoevsky, but it is often the case that stories don't show how a normative theory would realistically play out. I agree that a story that does show it realistically can be a useful tool for judging normative theories. But it is difficult to write a story like that. Even if the author doesn't intend to use the story as an argument against a particular theory, bias can still creep in.
Most thought experiments reveal that the author is a hack divorced from reality. Scott Alexander is rare for trying to combine thought experiments and literature.
Most thought experiments aren't trying to portray realistic situations. They are usually used to illustrate a distinction that's more obvious in a weird hypothetical than everyday cases, or refute some idea that's supposed to apply to any situation by showing that it gives the wrong result in the thought experiment.
Life is a game, Broseph. If your ilk is superior, why not put this fact to good use? You could easily become a superstar in literary criticism without even reading anything, really. In the paper you submit to your blue-haired leftwing activist literature professor, just throw in a bunch of fancy math equations along with an ad hoc argument for why the sexist white male author of the work you're criticizing is guilty of producing phallocentric propaganda. You'll get gushing praise for your brilliance, and you might even get the opportunity to give her a personal demonstration of just how phallocentric YOU are. And then on up, up, up the ladder you go. Rise!
In contrast, look at how difficult it is to float deliberately bogus arguments past ultra hard-nosed analytical philosophers or mathematicians. And on the rare occasion you succeed, the celebratory affair that follows is likely to be little more than a pain in the ass, and any gushing you get will only leave you with a bad taste in your mouth
> 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
That's because how we experience, the world; pure unmediated experience; isn't through arguments with premises and conclusions, it's more just vibes. So it makes sense that people will resonate more with those type of authors. Also, since experience is ultimately the bedrock of everything we know as humans, I'd argue that those kinds of authors speak much better to the human condition than do analytic philosophers with interminable debates about how to define truth or if holes really exist.
Is it fair to view literature as a medium used to convey philosophical ideas through "vibes," but not something that should be used to determine the validity of these ideas?
Personally I think this distinction is super important; it allows me to improve my rational thinking with boring analytical philosophy, and simultaneously enjoy & extract meaning from literature.
Well, analytics surely has debated many uninteresting questions and subjects. But at least, on average, analytic philosophers have the best approaches to obtaining true answers or, at the very least, are not as confused as continental philosophers are. And no, those thinkers can't have better answers for the human conditions if they are deeply confused and wrong about everything.
In my opinion, the best kind of literature allows you to feel the weight of ideas. For many people, abstract philosophy is cold and absurd, but narrative allows them to “walk around” within an idea, or a world shaped by ideas.
The platonic ideal of a reader would not let these narratives completely sway their opinions, but rather inform them, and give them emotional weight.
Consider Candide. Voltaire could simply have said, “Leibniz is wrong, we couldn’t possibly know that we live in the best possible world, and even if we did, how could we explain all this suffering?” Instead he gave us a story that demonstrates not only why the idea is so absurd, but allows us to actually experience the feeling of living in a “best possible world” that is rife with misery.
Perhaps most analytic philosophers don’t really care about that, but many other people do.
Put another way; story-telling is how humans transmit qualia to one another.
Voltaire is a PoS for his slander of Maupertuis and Candide is just a hack work deliberately misunderstanding his work. More generally Voltaire does not seem to value empiricism (given his critique of the Lapland expedition) nor does he seem to understand variational principles more generally and his false accusations of Maupertuis plagiarizing Leibniz will hopefully leave a black mark on Voltaire's legacy.
Candide is basically just arguing with a strawman or, in common parlance, "making up a guy to get mad at". Voltaire was just a jealous hater, Maupertuis did nothing wrong!
(That said, Maupertuis was obviously wrong, but not for reasons Voltaire gave, so much as that he didn't count on saddle points. Action is not always minimized but can rest at a saddle point but everyone in the 1700s was really stupid and seemingly didn't realize saddle points were a thing.)
These are excellent points, but I don't think my comment really rests on whether or not Voltaire sucks or is correct. I just pulled that example out of a hat to illustrate how philosophy and fiction interact, since it is probably the most well-known philosophical novel.
A few thoughts... you are arguing against the wrong people, what about the actual writers themselves? lots of people talk crap about Kant as you say, but we assess Kant based on his work... also I'd like to see some discussion of the fact that some of the most impactful thought experiments in philosophy are basically sort stories!
“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.”
That’s because they’re mainly interested in the effect of literature on culture, and the evidence for facts about culture in literature!
What literary critic these days even believes "deep meaning" is a thing? Things may have changed in the last 20 years, but when I was in school it was basically a given that truth doesn't exist, language has no meaning, and "Death of the Author" is not only inevitable, but beneficial to literary theory
I mean, I assume they should sometimes (when they gain some “knowledge-how” about themselves or other people [presumably there’s also propositional knowledge you can gain through imagination, from epiphanies prompted by literature [https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0007/29941/kindfinal.pdf])—I agree there are propositions that it’s irrational to believe on the basis of a novel (about economics, the meaning of life [?]), but I don’t think that describes what English and comp-lit professors are actually doing for the most part.
Aren’t those people making the unwarranted assumption that you can know facts about a culture through studying it literature through tools developed in universities that their utility and explanatory power were never truly demonstrated or tested in anyway ?
Idk which tools of literary analysis issue with in particular—I mean, you’d expect some to be worse than others, in the way that all humanities disciplines have some methods that are better than others—, but surely there’s an obvious sense in which you can learn about Victorian England by reading Charles Dickens.
I used to think that literature captures something from social reality but unfortunately after reading few novels about the culture i was born in i see novels and tv shows say more about the person writing them and his or her imaginary audience than the social and emotional life they try to depict
So there is a certain circularity to this, huh? I was inclined to reply with some boilerplate about literature being far richer than analytic rigor, which I do hold to generally speaking, but I’ve developed an aversion to “Literature professors” for probably this reason, but just temperamentally: instead of living life, certain sorts of people who are damn well capable of it would rather do it vicariously. I’ll take a real if misguided trip down the Ohio river in an innertube over an imaginary whaling adventure. Dammed cowards.
Eh. You're playing games and not consistent. In your fallacy post you talk of how an example provides evidence but not proof of a claim.
Literature is evidence of how the author understands the world.
This data is valuable. It is weak evidence of what the world actually is, because it is strong evidence of how at least some people view the world. Understanding how others frame the world is valuable in-off itself. Nobody has time to live a hundred lifetimes, but you can read a thousand books.
Ironically, your take makes you come across (to me at least) as confused and unexamined (as opposed to merely ignorant :p)!
You and I are both analytic philosophers, yet we disagree on a wide variety of topics. Put 100 analytic philosophers in a room, have them argue for a month: will you end up with 100 utilitarians? Is the reason you have not convinced people that the anthropic principle proves God exists that you haven’t explained it well enough? I think you give far too much credence to the idea that philosophy can settle disputes. Philosophers discuss exactly the topics which they can’t settle. I wrote about this one time. https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/How_I_Solved_Humes_Problem_and_Why_Nobody_Will_Believe_Me
There is a difference between persuasion and evidence. Evidence can be persuasive, but persuasion depends on more than evidence. Insofar as literature is engaged in communicating truths, it relies on more than simply offering evidence: it tells a story, and stories are more persuasive than analytic philosophy to most people.
Now, it’s true that some writers have very dumb ideas that they present persuasively, but some analytic philosophers also have dumb ideas, like that the self-indication assumption can tell us something about what universe we live in. So really, isn’t the advantage with the writers who actually manage to persuade people and are entertaining in doing it? It’s the old problem with rhetoric that Plato worried about, but of course Plato is remembered today largely because his writing was so good. His arguments, as you probably know, mostly suck. So if Plato teaches us anything, isn’t it that writing beautiful literature is the best way to do philosophy?
What Plato teaches us is that writing beautiful literature is the best way to be remembered and the best way to persuade a large number of people that you have the right philosophy.
On the other hand the most philosophical of writers, Jorge Luis Borges, used to say that philosophy is a branch of fantastic literature.
To learn naturalistic dualism, Chalmers book is accurate but too long and difficult. Greg Egan “Axiomatic” is easy and you get the main ideas in a few examples.Read this piece:
I think the point being made is that if we read Crime and Punishment as a critique of consequentialism (which I’m sure someone has argued), or even if we assume that was indeed Dostoevsky’s intention, that doesn’t refute or really even argue against whether or not consequentialism is in fact correct. Analytic philosophy would be required to do that.
(I agree with your interpretation of Raskolnikov btw.)
I like the mixup of views in this completely unhinged and partially satirical post . A lot should be said for such leeway when writing - a lot of Nietzsche is completely unhinged and partially satirical, but his allowed him to strike gold once in a while. I wish he had prefaced his books with that caveat, but, whatever..... . On another point, you did not followup on how the fragment of the poem from Pale Fire fits into your argument - other than, of course, pointing to an amazing, somewhat unhinged and satirical novel .
I like to quote Nozick: "The history of philosophy exhibits a more varied texture. Plato argued and developed abstract theories, but he also told evocative myths that linger in memory—about people in a cave, about separated half-souls. Descartes rooted his most powerful writing in what was then Catholic meditative practice; Kant expresses his awe of two things, 'the starry heavens above and the moral law within.' Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Pascal and Plotinus: the list could continue"
We do Philosophy to think about things, and philosophy is just one way to do that; it need not exclude the modes of essayists, poets or novelists.
I’m reluctant to say this baldly, but the function of literature is not to generate testable hypotheses about the world and evidence for them, and the older purpose of literary criticism was not to generate testable hypotheses about works of literature (the more recent purpose of literary criticism is to sabotage the older one). The purpose of literature is to give pleasure that engages a wide range of our faculties while making us better people, both in moral and non-moral senses. Since talking about the latter would be difficult in a brief comment, I would say that at least with regard to morality, even if moral philosophy produces moral knowledge, literature contributes to moral performance. Compare the function of a nutritionist to a diet coach or a psychologist to a therapist. One aspect (not the only one) is that literature cultivates empathy for a wide range of types of people in a way that could only be beat by actual telepathy. And whatever morality *is*, empathy seems essential to successful moral performance (I could give you a neurological argument for that, but let’s not bite off more than we can chew here).
Btw, I was trained in analytic philosophy so I get your exasperation. But you should probably read Crime and Punishment anyway, and for now, ignore people who write about it.
The example you give from the Russian novel is a common trend in stories that I call the Straw Utilitarian (by analogy with the Straw Vulcan). Much like the Straw Vulcan, it tries to argue against a certain type of rationality (in this case, instrumental rationality + impartiality + welfarism) by showing a supposedly utilitarian person do the supposedly utilitarian thing and then have it end in horrible utilitarian consequences. Of course, a utilitarian who was actually acting rationally wouldn't do things likely to lead to bad consequences, so it's a strawman argument based on incorrect stereotypes of how utilitarians act. Either that, or it makes its argument by just stipulating that something ridiculous and unrealistic occurs, and therefore you shouldn't do the thing that in any realistic scenario actually would be the right thing (much like the problem Michael Huemer points out here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/crappy-thesis-movies).
Exactly!
If someone says you should base your actions on some non-consequentialist principles because it leads to better consequences, they are just a confused consequentialist!
No, they just point out humans suck at calculating consequences.
The problem with consequentalism is not really being clear who should be consequntalist - a hypothetical omniscient being, your favourite booksmart philosopher (who might not be streetwise enough) or the kind of people who have trouble finding London on a map?
Real life is full of straw utilitarians.
Maybe so if you mean people who get non-obvious consequentialist reasoning wrong, but the Straw Utilitarian is typically someone who does something that's very obviously bad even on consequentialism. Either that, or the Straw Utilitarian is actually right, but the story uses an unrealistic outcome to make them look wrong.
I think you dislike literary criticism, not literature. & that I get. But to defend literature as a thing worthy of serious and sustained attention: other folks have said the bulk of it better, but: literature isn't for advancing arguments, mostly. It's for "what it's like to be a human being," which is a thing that's hard to summarize or talk about explicitly (but also very important). Novels aren't the theorems, they're the examples or the exercises. And for a great many complicated things, we only know the exercises, the theorems are still foggy and unglimpsed. or totally unhelpful in isolation. like, infinite jest didn't convince me of the abstract proposition "sometimes you gotta set aside your cleverness"---it showed me a clear, emphatic worked example of the principle
Love, love, your comment. "Literature isn't for advancing arguments, mostly. It's for ‘what it's like to be a human being.’”
👏
aw thanks!
I don't see why we should take seriously our judgements about e.g. analytic thought experiments, but not our judgements about cases presented in literature. Is the idea meant to be that we can get usable intuitions from stories, but only if the stories are really short and badly written?
You say that judgements about literary cases are unreliable because people are being persuaded by the writing rather than the content. But I don't think that's true (at least, not always). Just to take one example that you mentioned: when the Omelas story is presented verbally to people (such as in an ethics class), I find that they still have the intuition that Omelas is bad. That's anecdotal, of course, but it seems to indicate that people aren't just being swayed by pretty prose.
[EDIT: I misread what your post says about Dostoevsky and retract my claim about the mix-up of plot points, though I still claim that the philosophical argument is not just "consequentialist thinking leads to bad outcomes by the consequentialist's lights."]
Also, if you read widely enough, you’re less likely to be taken in by pretty writing alone!
Excellent point!
Thought experiments aren't really stories, and they convince in a totally different way than literature. Literature uses emotion and eloquent prose to get its point across, but neither of these things are related to the truth value of its philosophical claims. So in a sense, yes, being really short and badly written actually does make thought experiments better for getting at the truth than literature.
The other problem with literature is that it often just stipulates that a position is right by creating a world where it's right. But that's not a very convincing argument. Imagine trying to explicitly argue against consequentialism by saying, "But what if you do the consequentialist thing and it has bad consequences?" rather than dressing it up in a story.
But that isn't actually what philosophical novels and stories do, right? Dostoevsky never gives a story in which the upshot is "pursuing the best outcome leads to subpar outcomes," or anything that simplistic. What he *does* do is present characters who live by certain sets of values, and allow the reader to see how those values play out, and whether they find these characters to be morally appealing. Some authors do this well, by authentically portraying those who have opposing values (Dostoevsky is actually a good example here), while others do it badly, by making the opposing characters into cartoon villains (Ayn Rand comes to mind). But it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and it seems to me that it can lead to genuine philosophical insight.
[EDIT: I ignorantly misunderstood the original claim about the Dostoevsky story. Mea culpa.]
I think you've already realized based on the edit that main problem BB has is that the story doesn't authentically portray the results of following consequentialism. It's not impossible to avoid this of course, but it is extraordinarily common for stories to portray consequentialism as actually leading to worse consequences, which in real life can only happen if you're doing consequentialism wrong, or if you get really unlucky. It's not impossible to create a misleading thought experiment, too, but literature allows many more degrees of freedom than a short, boring thought experiment for doing so. And since literature is judged on factors other than, "Does this story provide a sound, well-reasoned argument for the conclusions it's trying to draw?", it is much easier to write good literature that argues for bad conclusions than it is to do the same thing with thought experiments.
Right, though I'm still skeptical that the point of the story is as simple as "consequentialism produces outcomes which are bad by the consequentialist's lights," as if Dostoevsky was trying to show that consequentialism is self-effacing. In any case, regardless of his intent, I don't think that's what people necessarily *do* take from these sorts of stories: a more plausible (and, I suspect, likely) reaction will be to notice how unappealing and vicious the character is who really lives these values. That's presumably why these stories focuses so much on the inner lives of their primary characters.
I also think the greater opportunity for detail in long-form literature can be advantageous. For instance, in your other comment you linked to an article by Mike Huemer, where he reports feeling that he had genuinely learned something about socialism by reading a passage in Atlas Shrugged. My own feelings on Rand's work aside, it seems like this sort of thing could happen quite commonly: one way of seeing whether an e.g. normative theory is appealing is to try and sketch out, as realistically as possible, how such a society would play out.
I don't know about the specific example in Dostoevsky, but it is often the case that stories don't show how a normative theory would realistically play out. I agree that a story that does show it realistically can be a useful tool for judging normative theories. But it is difficult to write a story like that. Even if the author doesn't intend to use the story as an argument against a particular theory, bias can still creep in.
You need to be lucky to get consequentialist calculation right
Most thought experiments reveal that the author is a hack divorced from reality. Scott Alexander is rare for trying to combine thought experiments and literature.
Most thought experiments aren't trying to portray realistic situations. They are usually used to illustrate a distinction that's more obvious in a weird hypothetical than everyday cases, or refute some idea that's supposed to apply to any situation by showing that it gives the wrong result in the thought experiment.
Hey man, F you
For being anti-Camus
And anti-literature, too!
Life is a game, Broseph. If your ilk is superior, why not put this fact to good use? You could easily become a superstar in literary criticism without even reading anything, really. In the paper you submit to your blue-haired leftwing activist literature professor, just throw in a bunch of fancy math equations along with an ad hoc argument for why the sexist white male author of the work you're criticizing is guilty of producing phallocentric propaganda. You'll get gushing praise for your brilliance, and you might even get the opportunity to give her a personal demonstration of just how phallocentric YOU are. And then on up, up, up the ladder you go. Rise!
In contrast, look at how difficult it is to float deliberately bogus arguments past ultra hard-nosed analytical philosophers or mathematicians. And on the rare occasion you succeed, the celebratory affair that follows is likely to be little more than a pain in the ass, and any gushing you get will only leave you with a bad taste in your mouth
> 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
That's because how we experience, the world; pure unmediated experience; isn't through arguments with premises and conclusions, it's more just vibes. So it makes sense that people will resonate more with those type of authors. Also, since experience is ultimately the bedrock of everything we know as humans, I'd argue that those kinds of authors speak much better to the human condition than do analytic philosophers with interminable debates about how to define truth or if holes really exist.
Is it fair to view literature as a medium used to convey philosophical ideas through "vibes," but not something that should be used to determine the validity of these ideas?
Personally I think this distinction is super important; it allows me to improve my rational thinking with boring analytical philosophy, and simultaneously enjoy & extract meaning from literature.
Well, analytics surely has debated many uninteresting questions and subjects. But at least, on average, analytic philosophers have the best approaches to obtaining true answers or, at the very least, are not as confused as continental philosophers are. And no, those thinkers can't have better answers for the human conditions if they are deeply confused and wrong about everything.
In my opinion, the best kind of literature allows you to feel the weight of ideas. For many people, abstract philosophy is cold and absurd, but narrative allows them to “walk around” within an idea, or a world shaped by ideas.
The platonic ideal of a reader would not let these narratives completely sway their opinions, but rather inform them, and give them emotional weight.
Consider Candide. Voltaire could simply have said, “Leibniz is wrong, we couldn’t possibly know that we live in the best possible world, and even if we did, how could we explain all this suffering?” Instead he gave us a story that demonstrates not only why the idea is so absurd, but allows us to actually experience the feeling of living in a “best possible world” that is rife with misery.
Perhaps most analytic philosophers don’t really care about that, but many other people do.
Put another way; story-telling is how humans transmit qualia to one another.
Voltaire is a PoS for his slander of Maupertuis and Candide is just a hack work deliberately misunderstanding his work. More generally Voltaire does not seem to value empiricism (given his critique of the Lapland expedition) nor does he seem to understand variational principles more generally and his false accusations of Maupertuis plagiarizing Leibniz will hopefully leave a black mark on Voltaire's legacy.
Candide is basically just arguing with a strawman or, in common parlance, "making up a guy to get mad at". Voltaire was just a jealous hater, Maupertuis did nothing wrong!
(That said, Maupertuis was obviously wrong, but not for reasons Voltaire gave, so much as that he didn't count on saddle points. Action is not always minimized but can rest at a saddle point but everyone in the 1700s was really stupid and seemingly didn't realize saddle points were a thing.)
These are excellent points, but I don't think my comment really rests on whether or not Voltaire sucks or is correct. I just pulled that example out of a hat to illustrate how philosophy and fiction interact, since it is probably the most well-known philosophical novel.
Wonderful comment, Nick.
A few thoughts... you are arguing against the wrong people, what about the actual writers themselves? lots of people talk crap about Kant as you say, but we assess Kant based on his work... also I'd like to see some discussion of the fact that some of the most impactful thought experiments in philosophy are basically sort stories!
“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.”
That’s because they’re mainly interested in the effect of literature on culture, and the evidence for facts about culture in literature!
But then they shouldn't try to squeeze deep meaning out of it.
I think it helps them enjoy the novels more!
Or, at the very least, they shouldn't believe they have derived deep meaning.
What literary critic these days even believes "deep meaning" is a thing? Things may have changed in the last 20 years, but when I was in school it was basically a given that truth doesn't exist, language has no meaning, and "Death of the Author" is not only inevitable, but beneficial to literary theory
I mean, I assume they should sometimes (when they gain some “knowledge-how” about themselves or other people [presumably there’s also propositional knowledge you can gain through imagination, from epiphanies prompted by literature [https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0007/29941/kindfinal.pdf])—I agree there are propositions that it’s irrational to believe on the basis of a novel (about economics, the meaning of life [?]), but I don’t think that describes what English and comp-lit professors are actually doing for the most part.
Aren’t those people making the unwarranted assumption that you can know facts about a culture through studying it literature through tools developed in universities that their utility and explanatory power were never truly demonstrated or tested in anyway ?
Idk which tools of literary analysis issue with in particular—I mean, you’d expect some to be worse than others, in the way that all humanities disciplines have some methods that are better than others—, but surely there’s an obvious sense in which you can learn about Victorian England by reading Charles Dickens.
I used to think that literature captures something from social reality but unfortunately after reading few novels about the culture i was born in i see novels and tv shows say more about the person writing them and his or her imaginary audience than the social and emotional life they try to depict
So there is a certain circularity to this, huh? I was inclined to reply with some boilerplate about literature being far richer than analytic rigor, which I do hold to generally speaking, but I’ve developed an aversion to “Literature professors” for probably this reason, but just temperamentally: instead of living life, certain sorts of people who are damn well capable of it would rather do it vicariously. I’ll take a real if misguided trip down the Ohio river in an innertube over an imaginary whaling adventure. Dammed cowards.
Eh. You're playing games and not consistent. In your fallacy post you talk of how an example provides evidence but not proof of a claim.
Literature is evidence of how the author understands the world.
This data is valuable. It is weak evidence of what the world actually is, because it is strong evidence of how at least some people view the world. Understanding how others frame the world is valuable in-off itself. Nobody has time to live a hundred lifetimes, but you can read a thousand books.
Ironically, your take makes you come across (to me at least) as confused and unexamined (as opposed to merely ignorant :p)!
You and I are both analytic philosophers, yet we disagree on a wide variety of topics. Put 100 analytic philosophers in a room, have them argue for a month: will you end up with 100 utilitarians? Is the reason you have not convinced people that the anthropic principle proves God exists that you haven’t explained it well enough? I think you give far too much credence to the idea that philosophy can settle disputes. Philosophers discuss exactly the topics which they can’t settle. I wrote about this one time. https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/How_I_Solved_Humes_Problem_and_Why_Nobody_Will_Believe_Me
There is a difference between persuasion and evidence. Evidence can be persuasive, but persuasion depends on more than evidence. Insofar as literature is engaged in communicating truths, it relies on more than simply offering evidence: it tells a story, and stories are more persuasive than analytic philosophy to most people.
Now, it’s true that some writers have very dumb ideas that they present persuasively, but some analytic philosophers also have dumb ideas, like that the self-indication assumption can tell us something about what universe we live in. So really, isn’t the advantage with the writers who actually manage to persuade people and are entertaining in doing it? It’s the old problem with rhetoric that Plato worried about, but of course Plato is remembered today largely because his writing was so good. His arguments, as you probably know, mostly suck. So if Plato teaches us anything, isn’t it that writing beautiful literature is the best way to do philosophy?
What Plato teaches us is that writing beautiful literature is the best way to be remembered and the best way to persuade a large number of people that you have the right philosophy.
Oh beautiful!
On the other hand the most philosophical of writers, Jorge Luis Borges, used to say that philosophy is a branch of fantastic literature.
To learn naturalistic dualism, Chalmers book is accurate but too long and difficult. Greg Egan “Axiomatic” is easy and you get the main ideas in a few examples.Read this piece:
https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me.pdf
Kind of weird to interpret Raskolnikov's crime as an act of committed consequentialism rather than a rebellion against moral absolutes.
Similar motivation as Kirillov deciding to kill himself to prove that he doesn't fear God's judgment.
I think the point being made is that if we read Crime and Punishment as a critique of consequentialism (which I’m sure someone has argued), or even if we assume that was indeed Dostoevsky’s intention, that doesn’t refute or really even argue against whether or not consequentialism is in fact correct. Analytic philosophy would be required to do that.
(I agree with your interpretation of Raskolnikov btw.)
Analytic Philosophers when someone compares views on their latest article with any published literature whatsoever.
I like the mixup of views in this completely unhinged and partially satirical post . A lot should be said for such leeway when writing - a lot of Nietzsche is completely unhinged and partially satirical, but his allowed him to strike gold once in a while. I wish he had prefaced his books with that caveat, but, whatever..... . On another point, you did not followup on how the fragment of the poem from Pale Fire fits into your argument - other than, of course, pointing to an amazing, somewhat unhinged and satirical novel .
I like to quote Nozick: "The history of philosophy exhibits a more varied texture. Plato argued and developed abstract theories, but he also told evocative myths that linger in memory—about people in a cave, about separated half-souls. Descartes rooted his most powerful writing in what was then Catholic meditative practice; Kant expresses his awe of two things, 'the starry heavens above and the moral law within.' Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Pascal and Plotinus: the list could continue"
We do Philosophy to think about things, and philosophy is just one way to do that; it need not exclude the modes of essayists, poets or novelists.