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Someone has asked me: “Do you use fiction to discuss and develop your philosophical ideas?”
A good question deserves a vigorous attempt at a good answer.
One may certainly use fiction for many different purposes.
When Abraham Lincoln was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", he, half jokingly, said, "And here is the lady who started the Civil War."
Upton Sinclair certainly put literature to good use with "The Jungle" to illustrate the inhumane abuses of an industrial society. Upton Sinclair
After President Theodore Roosevelt read The Jungle, he ordered an investigation of the meat-packing industry. He also met Sinclair and told him that while he disapproved of the way the book preached socialism he agreed that "radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist."
I recently came across the statement that "literature is philosophy in motion." I very much admire that notion.
Modern secular democratic republics strive to separate Church and State. Theocracies see church and state as naturally one.
The emblem of the Russian Tsar, the double headed eagle, symbolized the church and the state as united in the emperor, who was head of both church and state.
So, how are we to separate philosophy and literature. I am certain that we may find literature in which there is no trace of philosophy, at least, no trace of philosophy placed there consciously by author.
It is more difficult to find philosophy which is divorced from a literary vehicle. Plato's dialogues are a masterpiece of literature. Even Sartre becomes literary with phrases like "the bronze of being."
Wallace Stevens' poetry breathes philosophy from every verse.
What do I do personally?
Some days, I write an essay. Other days, I write a poem. Yet other days I work on a short story. What I have undertaken several times, but never completed, is a book, or novel. I shall be happy if I can add that to my list of completed tasks before I die.
I am reminded of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The first several pages are denser than a collapsed star, a black hole, with Nietzsche's notion of "eternal return" which Kundera describes as so heavy that, were it true, one would feel nailed to a cross with the gravity of ones each and every choice. But, in the next breath, he states that from time immemorial, a woman has desired to feel the heaviness of her lover weighing her down. Kundera then relates all this to Heraclitus' notion of opposites. If there is heavy, there must be light. Kundera never comes out and says this explicitly, but my guess is that the unbearable lightness of being is the existential lightness of the absurd, that nothing whatsoever which we do makes any difference. Sartre said we are condemned to be free.
After these first several pages of dense, overt philosophy, we springboard into a world of sexuality. We are shown the absurd freedom of a naked woman squatting on a toilet holding a derby hat above her head.
The novel ends with a butterfly encircling a room. A creature and a circle, in this universe which Kundera has created, symbolize a happiness which is rarely accessible to fallen human nature vainly chasing after happiness in a linear logical fashion.
Does Kundera use philosophy as a springboard to fiction and art? Is art a laboratory instrument or alembic or cyclotron to capture and concentrate and study the quarks and gravitons of philosophy? Is philosophy a dialectical loom with shuttle, warp and woof, to weave a tapestry of life as we wish it would be? Is beauty philosophical or literary or both?
What comes into my mind is:
Truth is beauty,
Beauty truth.
That's all I know
And all I need to know
Which is really: Od e On a Grecian Urn
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
John Keats (1795-1821) "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Do you see how my memory had changed Keat's lines?
Whenever we successfully read something which is worthwhile, then what we have read changes us and, in turn, we alter what we have read; call it the "Third Law of Fiction." Our memory of the experience of reading "War and Peace" is different from "War and Peace."
Socrates, in the [b][u]Symposium[/u][/b], argues that the same person may, in theory, become master of both comedy and tragedy.
When does a couple cross the line from friends to lovers?
When does expository prose cross the line to fiction?
When does fiction cross the line to poetry?
When does poetry become divinely inspired?
Why are lines drawn and then crossed?
Why is the sacred deconstructed?
Why is the everyday consecrated?
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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