I am currently reading through sections of Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher in my abundant spare time. As a pleasant diversion, I wiled away a Sunday afternoon watching the man in action in his BBC series, The Great Philosophers. Somewhat cowardly I steered away from the likes of A.J Ayer, Hilary Putnam and John Searle, and watched Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature.
Having had a passing acquaintance with Murdoch's writing, my mental image of a tall, willowy, elegant English aristocrat was forever destroyed, though an audio clip alone would have saved my happy fantasy! Click on the link to get the idea, the other parts of the interview are found on youtube.
What I found most interesting was that philosophy and literature, for Iris Murdoch, are distinct disciplines with a couple of points of contact.
Both are imaginative activities that aim at 'truth-seeking' and 'truth-revealing'. Both must navigate the territory between genuine imagination and the danger of personal 'fantasies' or 'daydreams'. Both seek to give form to the chaos that is a constant undercurrent to human existence.
However, there are significant differences. Literature is a form of self-expression that uses the most natural form of human communication - story telling. Through using characters, masks and imagination, literature appeals to the emotional. Literature is opaque, it aims at mystification and encourages illusion. By also imposing form, philosophy is similar to literature. But the philosopher is constantly suspicious of her own attempt to create a theoretical structure. If literature is natural to the life of ordinary human beings, philosophy is counter-natural. By its nature, philosophy questions deeply held beliefs. Critical thinking prompts the philosopher to pursue a problem doggedly, to refuse to settle for the answers that satisfy every day people. The philosopher is willing to submit herself to criteria outside herself, committing to something that is more than personally true. Unlike the illusion created by literature to appeal to human emotions, philosophy is a discipline that seeks to exclude emotion, to liberate from illusion - it aims for clarification and by solving a particular problem it attempts to establish truth in a positive sense.
This all may seem to praise philosophy at the denigration of literature, but Iris wants to keep the two disciplines separate because philosophy ultimately damages artistic expression by squeezing art into a narrow theory. Philosophers and their theories should keep well out of the world of literature.
Perhaps for Iris, philosophy is too far removed from the reality of human existence. She describes literature and art as mimetic of the world, the commonsense world of ordinary life, and are tested by the connection to that reality. The artwork is both a production of autonomous or formal objects and a reflection of the world. This combination of the formal and the concrete differentiates between the (a shared?) imagination and the (private?) fantasy or daydream. At one point, Iris Murdoch says philosophy has no place in novels, except insofar as it constitutes the 'raw material' of that novel. In response, Bryan Magee points out Tolstoy's writings, especially War and Peace, are quite a deliberate working out of his philosophy. Similarly, Dostoyevsky is considered the greatest of existentialist writers. Iris rejoins that the 19th century writers are not doing philosophy, they are engaging in idea-play. Most of the time philosophers just interfere in art in order to have something interesting to say. As for those writers who claim to deliberately put philosophical theory in their stories, why pay attention to them - 'don't trust the writer, trust the tale'. Finally, Iris Murdoch concedes Sarte's La Nausée is the only work to successfully intermarry philosophy and the novel.
Perhaps the philosophy Iris Murdoch protests against is analytic philosophy, which seems the epitome of formal objects that bear no relation to reality, that is the ordinary world of human beings. For analytic philosophers that may be a virtue. But the history of philosophy shows philosophy is more than a concern with formal objects, and the great philosophical advances begin by engaging in 'idea-play.'
In any case, Bryan Magee in his book Confessions of a Philosopher does a fine job of pulling the rug from beneath analytic philosophy, but that is a tale I shall save for another day.
Whilst watching this interview, I could not help but think of Kierkegaard as the embodiment of a writer and thinker who moves dialectically between literature and philosophy, between masking and unmasking, between mystification and clarification. I think that maybe it is this dialectical movement that is the condition of human existence, of what it is to be human in this life with all its unpredictable twists and turns. Philosophy and literature both address important aspects of our humanity and one cannot afford to denigrate the other without somehow diminishing itself. I can only imagine the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and analytic and continental philosophy shall unite in blissful communion. And with that little fantasy and daydream I shall now end.
What I found most interesting was that philosophy and literature, for Iris Murdoch, are distinct disciplines with a couple of points of contact.
Both are imaginative activities that aim at 'truth-seeking' and 'truth-revealing'. Both must navigate the territory between genuine imagination and the danger of personal 'fantasies' or 'daydreams'. Both seek to give form to the chaos that is a constant undercurrent to human existence.
However, there are significant differences. Literature is a form of self-expression that uses the most natural form of human communication - story telling. Through using characters, masks and imagination, literature appeals to the emotional. Literature is opaque, it aims at mystification and encourages illusion. By also imposing form, philosophy is similar to literature. But the philosopher is constantly suspicious of her own attempt to create a theoretical structure. If literature is natural to the life of ordinary human beings, philosophy is counter-natural. By its nature, philosophy questions deeply held beliefs. Critical thinking prompts the philosopher to pursue a problem doggedly, to refuse to settle for the answers that satisfy every day people. The philosopher is willing to submit herself to criteria outside herself, committing to something that is more than personally true. Unlike the illusion created by literature to appeal to human emotions, philosophy is a discipline that seeks to exclude emotion, to liberate from illusion - it aims for clarification and by solving a particular problem it attempts to establish truth in a positive sense.
This all may seem to praise philosophy at the denigration of literature, but Iris wants to keep the two disciplines separate because philosophy ultimately damages artistic expression by squeezing art into a narrow theory. Philosophers and their theories should keep well out of the world of literature.
Perhaps for Iris, philosophy is too far removed from the reality of human existence. She describes literature and art as mimetic of the world, the commonsense world of ordinary life, and are tested by the connection to that reality. The artwork is both a production of autonomous or formal objects and a reflection of the world. This combination of the formal and the concrete differentiates between the (a shared?) imagination and the (private?) fantasy or daydream. At one point, Iris Murdoch says philosophy has no place in novels, except insofar as it constitutes the 'raw material' of that novel. In response, Bryan Magee points out Tolstoy's writings, especially War and Peace, are quite a deliberate working out of his philosophy. Similarly, Dostoyevsky is considered the greatest of existentialist writers. Iris rejoins that the 19th century writers are not doing philosophy, they are engaging in idea-play. Most of the time philosophers just interfere in art in order to have something interesting to say. As for those writers who claim to deliberately put philosophical theory in their stories, why pay attention to them - 'don't trust the writer, trust the tale'. Finally, Iris Murdoch concedes Sarte's La Nausée is the only work to successfully intermarry philosophy and the novel.
Perhaps the philosophy Iris Murdoch protests against is analytic philosophy, which seems the epitome of formal objects that bear no relation to reality, that is the ordinary world of human beings. For analytic philosophers that may be a virtue. But the history of philosophy shows philosophy is more than a concern with formal objects, and the great philosophical advances begin by engaging in 'idea-play.'
In any case, Bryan Magee in his book Confessions of a Philosopher does a fine job of pulling the rug from beneath analytic philosophy, but that is a tale I shall save for another day.
Whilst watching this interview, I could not help but think of Kierkegaard as the embodiment of a writer and thinker who moves dialectically between literature and philosophy, between masking and unmasking, between mystification and clarification. I think that maybe it is this dialectical movement that is the condition of human existence, of what it is to be human in this life with all its unpredictable twists and turns. Philosophy and literature both address important aspects of our humanity and one cannot afford to denigrate the other without somehow diminishing itself. I can only imagine the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and analytic and continental philosophy shall unite in blissful communion. And with that little fantasy and daydream I shall now end.
