It's very risky imagining yourself into somebody else's mind, it's sometimes hard to leave.--from Javier Marías The Infatuations.
The passage is quoted from the thoughts of en empathetic spectator, María Dolz (the narrator), who has moved from being a fairly passive witness to being a rather actively engaged participant. In context María has imagined what it's like to be a murder-victim (while visiting the victim's widowed wife). María adds that this reason (it's hard to leave) is probably the reason why so few people do so. Let's stipulate that there is a double kernel of truth in this generalization: (i) people rarely really enter into another's point of view; and (ii) that their failure to do so is not, say, due to some residue solipsism or narcissism, but due to a genuine fear of remaining captured in the other's perspective. Even so, writers and readers of novels, biographies, and certain histories are systematic exceptions to the generalization. Some philosophers might get nervous about the idea that sympathetic engagement with really present people, fictional characters, and historcal agents are being equated, but let's stipulate that the same psychological mechanisms are involved.
Marías is reflexive about such matters because he repeatedly lets his characters in this novel comment on the nature of the novel. For example he writes:
It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.
In particular, the novel is here presented as a device to explore counterfactuals. The ability to explore counterfactuals is also crucial to the sympathetic process itself (as, say, emphasized, by Adam Smith): "As they are constantly considering what they themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is as constantly led to imagine in what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation." (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1.1.4.8)
Obviously, this is only one such perspective on the novel. But before we try to establish the official position, as it were, of the novel, it is worth nothing that Marías is at least willing to take his own practice seriously. His novel might, then, be taken as a rejoinder to Arnon Grunberg's idea that "We allow Satan to speak freely in the novel, because we assume that nobody will pay serious attention." Marías is responsible by thinking through what might happen if somebody did pay serious attention to his novel by exploring explicitly some of the limits and dangers of the very project he is engaged in from within the project.* One rarely encounters philosophers, who could take themselves that seriously.
One might object that the even if remaining captured in the other's perspective is a genuine possibility, it is pretty harmless. We should not be too worried about adopting the stance of the one-sided people (Nazi villain, homo economicus, etc.) that populate philosophical thought experiments. But, of course, Marías' is raising the possibility that once we end up not being the authors of our own thoughts as properly our own, we are displaced from ourselves. Engaging with novels is engaging with what it's like not being a self-legislator or being genuinely independent. Doing so, we face-up to our displaced reality, in which we rather easily and thoughtlessly let others (media, politicians, experts, teachers, religious leaders, pop-stars, etc.) be the authors of nearly all our thoughts.
*On these matters see also Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello in response to Paul West's The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg.(recall).
Wonderful post on the philosophical virtues of fiction, to which I would add that the particular type of counterfactuals invited and enacted by fiction (namely: what my life would look like from the point of an _involved_ or interested spectator, what the rationality of my choices would seem to be to such an spectator, what my intentions would be judged to be) do not render a sort of distant knowledge by description of ourselves typical of 'spectator theories of knowledge' but exactly the opposite. They provide the sort of intimate knowledge of ourselves and each other that can only be gained through real experiential involvement. This is precisely where I would put the difference between good fiction that relates to one's own life experience (and Marías is a master of this sort of fiction, but really think of any of the classics), and a corresponding or seemingly equivalent philosophical 3rd person analysis of the characters' mental or attitude states. The fiction involves the reader directly in the experience in a way that no 3rd person account is able to do. It is somewhat ironic that we all learn so much about ourselves and who we really are through good fiction...
Posted by: M. Suárez | 02/04/2014 at 05:19 PM
As a Smith-ian, I'm not sure why you would worry about this. If we think of sympathy as imagining oneself in another person's situation, then this is a harmless imaginatve exercise as there's nothing evil about even the evil person's situation...
Posted by: Bence | 02/04/2014 at 05:27 PM
Thank you, Mauricio. I was going to introduce a distinction between, say, scientific thought experiments (or the thought experiments that populate philosophy journal articles) and the kind of thig Marias is pointing to, but I am glad I didn't. You get at it more directly.
One small possible addition: Marias also seems to suggest that prior to reading a novel, we may not have intimate knowledge of ourselves--rather we tend to be very displaced from ourselves.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/04/2014 at 05:30 PM
Bence, I think your version of Smith may underestimate the situation.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/04/2014 at 05:33 PM
yes, of course, and after reading the novel we may still have a long way to go … ! I think my point is only that the sort of corresponding philosophical 3rd person account of a good fiction would not give you even this small inkling of transformative knowledge. One bit of fiction that comes to my mind is Don Quijote's late realization in Cervantes' book of his own insanity. I reread it recently and it is still nowadays incredibly powerful in forcing you, the reader, to confront your own dissociations to reality. No philosophical literature I have read on cognitive dissonance or the mind body problem or skepticism about other minds or any other thing seems to come close to this sort of insight.
Posted by: M. Suárez | 02/04/2014 at 06:00 PM
I agree with you, Mauricio, but I also want to say that maybe we should not underestimate what philosophical literature could be? One reason why I am fascinated by Coetzee, Grunberg, and now Marias is that these novelists seem to be saying to us, philosophers, to be more ambitious with our philosophizing.
Yes, the last few chapters of Don Quijote are astounding in so many ways. So many reasons to learn Spanish!
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/04/2014 at 06:07 PM
yes, that's a good way to look at it as an invitation to bring in some of these fictional techniques into our philosophizing. And indeed the literature on scientific thought experiments does to some extent show that scientists can do this, so why could not philosophers? One good attempt I know is Bas Van Fraassen's attempt to articulate a pragmatist theory of explanation through a fictional parable in The Scientific Image. Have you come across it? Whatever the merits of the theory, I find the attempt inspiring …
Posted by: M. Suárez | 02/05/2014 at 01:54 AM
Yes, Mauricio. In fact, I am very intrigued by the role of what David Lewis calls "good myths" in philosophy, including analytical philosophy.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/05/2014 at 02:23 AM
It's an intriguing idea and possible there is even more at stake than developing more perspective, sympathy or self-knowledge. In 'Inventing Human Rights' Lynn Hunt argues that the development of the novel is central to the idea of 'secular identification'; this allows a new kind of conceptual framework for the idea of universal human rights to emerge.
"Human rights could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion."
Posted by: Radical Metaphor | 02/05/2014 at 10:46 AM
And of course Rousseau's influential views on natural human capacities and ensuing rights were also introduced in the form of a fiction. When you begin to think about it there are myriad ways in which good fiction has turned out to be indispensable to critical parts of much influential philosophical argument through the ages.
Someone should write a history of the uses of fiction in philosophy. I wish I had the historical breadth for such an undertaking. Perhaps you, Eric?
Posted by: M. Suarez | 02/05/2014 at 11:10 AM
Thank you for calling attention to Hunt's work. (I am more familiar with her work on the history of epistemology.) Human rights are very important (although I would point to the significance of Christian ideas, too, in their genesis). But you may underestimate what is at stake in my post, which also aims to point to the political significance of displacement from self.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/05/2014 at 01:17 PM
Mauricio, I have written a paper on what I call "philosophical prophecy," which is meant to capture forms of philosophizing (including fictions) that are not (in roughly Plato's sense) Logos. See: Schliesser, E. (2013). Philosophic Prophecy. in *Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy,* (Oxford: OUP) 209ff.
But it is programmatic and schematic, not a proper history.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/05/2014 at 03:46 PM
Thanks Eric, if you have a preprint can you please post it, or send it over? Thanks! M
Posted by: M. Suárez | 02/06/2014 at 08:59 PM
Incidentally, on the topic of fiction in scientific modeling I've already written a fair amount and edited a book: *Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization*, Routledge, 2009. I'd be interested in your reactions.
Posted by: M. Suárez | 02/08/2014 at 09:04 AM