Ploddingly detailed expository arguments deserve a central role in academic philosophy. Yay for boring stuff! But emotionally engaging fiction can be philosophy too. And science fiction or "speculative fiction" has a special philosophical value that is insufficiently appreciated by mainstream philosophers.
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Canonically recognized Western philosophers have often worked through fiction: Sartre's plays, Camus's stories, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Rousseau's Emile and Heloise, to some extent Plato's dialogues, and (a personal favorite) Voltaire's Candide. My favorite non-Western philosopher, Zhuangzi, often uses brief parables or goofy stories (such as his famous butterfly dream). And I would argue that great works of fiction are often philosophical in the sense that they inspire, or become the medium of, potentially transformative reflection on the human condition -- even if those works aren't normally treated as "works of philosophy". In the Western literary tradition, for example: Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Faulkner.
What is philosophy? I reject the idea that philosophy is argument. If philosophy is argument, then Confucius's Analects is not philosophy, and the pre-Socratics' fragments are not philosophy, and the aphorisms of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are not philosophy. I say, instead: If an essay, or a parable, or a dialogue, or an aphorism, or a movie engages the reader toward new reflections on fundamental questions about meaning, value, the human condition, the nature of knowledge or art or morality or love or mentality, pushing us out of our settled and conventional ways of thinking, challenging us to explore and reconsider -- that's philosophy. Most real philosophy, as experienced by most people, takes the form of fiction.
Although expository essays have many virtues, they also have limitations. Compared to fictions, expository essays tend to lack imaginative specificity and emotional power. Philosophy looks different through the lens of imagination and emotion. It's one thing to consider, wholly abstractly, some principle like "in an emergency, you should act to maximize the expected number of lives saved". Maybe it sounds pretty good in the abstract (perhaps with some modifications to consider quality of life or expected remaining life years). But it's hard really to evaluate an abstract claim without trying some thought experiments. For example, if the only way to save five innocent people in a hideout would be to kill a noisily crying baby, ought you do it, as the abstract principle says you should?
Our philosophical evaluations are dry and empty if we don't challenge ourselves to emotionally engage with imaginatively vivid scenarios and consequences. We needn't always judge that overall the best thing to do is the thing that's most emotionally attractive when vividly imagined, but we should at least think through how it might really feel to live one way or another. Philosophers' paragraph-long thought experiments start us down the path. But more vivid, richly imagined fictions take us farther. Fiction and abstract expository argument have complementary roles to play in philosophy. Each needs the other.
Consider George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", great philosophical SF movies like The Matrix and Her, great philosophical TV shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation or Black Mirror. All of them imagine a way the world could be, or a helpfully simplified and cartooned world with certain aspects exaggerated, and they challenge us to think better about fundamental questions of human value and the human condition -- and they do so in a way that no abstract essay could.--Eric Schwitzgebel "Science Fiction as Philosophy" [emphases in original] [HT Dailynous]
Let me start with stating three non-trivial grounds of agreement with Schwitzgebel: (i) there is a lot more to philosophy than 'ploddingly detailed expository arguments;' (ii) fiction can instantiate philosophy; (iii) among the things philosophy can do is inspire 'potentially transformative reflection on the human condition.' So far so good, and there is a risk that which follows emphasizes comparatively small differences.
His (ahh) argument or case is structured around [A] a contrast between (un-felt) argument associated with professional philosophy and (felt) emotion associated with what fiction can inspire. I think the contrast is a mistake here. In addition, [B] I have reservations about the idea that what's mainly philosophical about speculative fiction is that it gives us (let's call it) thick thought experiment. I suspect there is an underlying problem, and I hope to get to that.
First, much fantastic philosophical fiction -- characteristic of modernism -- violates [A]: Borges or Calvino do offer a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure, but their work, which I stipulate pushes us out of our settled and conventional ways of thinking, is crafted to deny the benefits of emotional engagement.
Second, and more important, in [A] there is a suppressed assumption: that works which do not present themselves, say, in terms of premises and a conclusion lack an argument. But there are many kinds of arguments (deductive, inductive, and abductive, etc.); but also many kinds of ways to convey the (master) argument that is presupposed in a text. In addition, most of the time when we philosophers talk about arguments, we have in mind something inspired by formal logic; but there is also a huge field (studied in a number of disciplines) of informal logic which studies, inter alia, informal arguments. We miss what is really argument if we only think of arguments inspired by formal logic.
Yes, many of the complex texts Schwitzebel mentions instantiate a plurality of perspectives, but the act of interpretation is, in part, the act of recovering what the grounds of a point of view are (in light of some rules--i.e., don't conflate the author's with (a) character(s)'s perspective, etc.) These grounds and that point of view can be represented as an argument. (I think this is very true of Voltaire's Candide [recall].) For example, one claim I have defended in some of my digressions about a number of the authors mentioned and discussed in his essay, is that they help the reader to compare the relative merits of different institutional frameworks/models. (I call this Socratic Political Philosophy.)*
A final thought on [A] there is an aesthetic to professional philosophy's style of argument (which I would argue actually evolves more rapidly than we think) that is part of its persuasive power. I once tried to explain this in terms of Carnap's and Quine's competing conceptions of clarity (recall here; and don't miss Liam Kofi Bright's clarifying (!) follow up). See also yesterday's post by Bright, which emphasizes the significance of logic as an invitation to use one's imagination!
Let me turn to [B] It is undoubtedly true that many professional philosophers are more receptive to the philosophical significance of fiction, when one mentions 'thought experiment' to them. But that's because thought experiments are part of our approved methodological tool-kit. With a few authors excepted, treating their works as extended thought experiments is reductive (and why so much philosophical writing about fiction is soulless and banal).** In my opinion doing so blocks the very transformative potential that makes these authors philosophical. After all, a thought experiment (like all experiments) is a means to exercise control over an environment (and, thereby, to make visible underlying patterns).
To return to Borges; philosophers love The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. These are then treated as philosophical thought experiments or starting points for philosophical analysis. This is completely legitimate. But it is also generates domesticated reading of Borges; even these stories connect up to significant political, aesthetic, and political questions which could lead us to a transformed sense of reality (I have tried to hint at some of this in some posts).
So, to sum up and to connect [A] and [B]. Schwitzgebel rightly want us to engage with the philosophical riches fiction offers us. But he do so by leaving the self-conception of professional philosophy oddly unchallenged. I close with two quick examples to convey what I have in mind: George Eliot's Middlemarch has a lot to offer on how to begin to think about living meaningful lives, on how sympathy works, and even the character of magnanimity (to name a few standard topics). But as Zadie Smith shows (recall) the novel also teaches the reader how to read Spinoza. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is a novel about family relationships and the role of memory as mediated by (say) war. But it is also -- always another also --, a (recall) unsparing explorations of the limits of philosophical analysis in order to open possibilities for better living.
*In conversation, some philosophers have denied that comparative (institutional) modeling is what we philosophers do--that's best left for the social sciences. But Schwitzgebel can't avail himself to this response because comparative modeling is a key method of the Republic; the appeal to a city is introduced as a model, and subsequently we're taken through many kinds of models (of it/them).
**I don't object, of course, to treating fictional thought experiments seriously. I love how Helen de Cruz's drawings force us to confront our interpretations of (relatively famous) thought experiments by using another medium altogether. (More about that some other time.)
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