As Plato demonstrates, there is no reason in principle why a work of literature can’t be worthy of study as philosophy. Having said that, I don’t find a lot of argument in most fiction, poetry or myth. Fiction and poetry are good for stimulating ideas and myth can provide important insights into a people’s beliefs and values. All are worthy of a philosopher’s attention. Still, there is no substitute for reasoned argument.

yes justin, your supposition is correct. that’s what i was getting at. i am puzzled by the fact that, although the transcript of the talk has just been published, i have already received a bunch of emails of people interested in it. does it mean that the question has become particularly timely? i think so. as the digital medium opens up new possibilities of writing (and thinking), we are forced to rethink our inherited forms and maybe find out that they were not the best possible ones…

Sometimes philosophy is written in verse. Think of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, or Pope’s Essay on Man. At other times, poetry can be particularly philosophical. Blake comes to mind — he’s rigorous and transparent and seems to be giving arguments (he’s got some strange views though). These are examples from a few centuries ago. I suspect that the clean divide between philosophy written in non-fiction prose on the one hand and philosophy written in verse or in an explicitly fictional context on the other is a pretty recent development.

It’s notable that many of the responses here assert or assume the primacy of “reasoned argument” in philosophy, and that on an set of assumptions about argument and about reason that necessarily exclude narrative, metaphor, and sundry tropes of literary expression.

I could point out that even forms of expression that present themselves as a set of bare propositions that, joined together, build up to a rigorous argument are nonetheless full to the brim with metaphor. (Count the metaphors in that last sentence . . . starting with “point out” and including the term ‘metaphor’ itself. Regarding this point, I would point out Lakoff and Johnson’s excellent book, Metaphors We Live By.)

I could also point out that some forms of argument draw heavily on analogy or example, or turn on distinctions best drawn by telling a story.

More than this, though, asserting that philosophical inquiry must always and only come down to “reasoned argument” begs the question of what does and does not count as “real philosophy” . . . a question that, as far as I can tell, has not been and may never be settled to the satisfaction of everyone or, indeed, anyone.

Another goal of philosophy might be to elucidate aspects of human experience that elude straightforward expression, or to draw attention to values that are not just lying around like logical pebbles on a rational beach to be collected and counted, or to voices that might not be heard except through the stories they tell. For all of these things, various kinds of expression other than rational argumentation, expressions that might be classed as “literary”, may not only be acceptable but even necessary.

But even leaving all that aside, leaving aside even the fact that many readers of this comment will instantly brand me as “one of those Continental types” – not strictly true, but a label I can live with – I would suggest that literary works may be indispensable for teaching philosophy, perhaps especially practical ethics.

One of my goals as a teacher is to help students learn to discern moral values that may be at stake in complex human situations, situations full of uncertainty and open to multiple interpretations, situations in which choice and action may be multiply constrained by the workings of systems and institutions. I’ve been experimenting with a way to help them live through such situations without actually having to live through them: they have been writing and acting out scenes, setting up a situation and showing how three different endings would play themselves out. It’s too soon to tell, but the students’ reactions to their projects have been quite positive; if nothing else, they’ve remained actively engaged in the hunt for instances of value.

To take another example, I regularly use Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac as the basis for my environmental ethics courses, but not for the reasons many philosophers would think to be obvious. I know there is heated controversy over this point, but I don’t see Leopold as offering an argument for a moral theory in his brief comments on “the land ethic” at the end of the book. What interests me more, and what I have my students work through and reflect on, are the stories that make up the first two sections of the book, stories in which Leopold exhibits a finely tuned imagination for the workings of systems and for the ways in which the systemic effects of human choices intersect with the lives and fortunes of other people and other living things.

In a brief story on culling trees from a woodlot, Leopold can contribute more to students’ understanding of the world and their place in it then I could contribute by a month of lectures structured in terms of formal argumentation.

Although I’m a continental philosopher, I hate to see this question devolve into team sports again. To be sure, continental philosophy, historical philosophy (i.e. philosophy before the divide), and non-Western philosophy have a more overtly positive relationship with literature and the arts. At the same time, however, their integration of art and philosophy often preserves the boundary between the two.

In Taoist texts, for example, stories are often subordinated to a larger structure of argumentative reasoning, even if that reasoning is (like some ancient and Hellenic philosophy, like Kierkegaard, like Wittgenstein) aporetic, skeptical, or designed to get us out of reason by way of reason. In the use of dialogue in Plato, Hume, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and others, the line between the literary and the philosophical is still quite clear and the implicit assumption that reasoned argument is primary is not called into question.

So, if some think that assumption *should* be called in question, it’s still false to assume that continental, historical, or non-western philosophy are not implicated. I’m also at a loss to understand why and how that assumption should be questioned. To ask why should we make reasoned argument primary is to demand a reasoned argument. It makes more sense to ask: why such an overvaluation of reasoned argumentation to the exclusion of artistic methods?

To my mind that makes better sense of the long history of this problem, beginning with Plato, a poet who bans the poets while writing poetry about Socrates who is, in turn, a philosopher who claims that truth is ineffable by effing never shutting up about it. One aspect is, surely, that it’s a defensive gesture: philosophers know we’re much closer to literature than we’d like to be, so we distance ourselves from explicit practitioners to avoid remembering this (Baudelaire: “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère). This is also surely the basis of Socrates’ obsession with the Sophists: their uncomfortable similarity.

But in Plato and Socrates’ defense (and of all philosophers who think there’s a meaningful difference, if not a strict line, between art and philosophy), they aren’t just in denial. Plato’s dialogues are full of critical self-awareness about his appropriation of art. In places, the philosopher is portrayed as using a counter-spell, an irrational magic turned against the irrationality of magic. In other places, Socrates is very explicit that we turn to metaphor and image out of necessity, implying philosophical language is ultimately as metaphysically suspect as artistic representation, with the important difference that it admits to it. To be blunt: we have to seduce people away from seducers, lie them away from liars, a position that doesn’t reject the divide between reason and myth.

And, of course, we always fail to notice that Socrates does not ban the poets. First, he temporarily bans them, allowing for a reversal if a sufficient argument is made on their behalf. Second, he bans only imitative, deceptive poets, those intent on convincing their audience that their imitations (mostly mythical stories about religion and social values) are truths. (For a bit of historical context, one way of looking at it is, quite frankly, that he bans religious and political indoctrination in schools, which hardly makes him an enemy of the arts.) Plato’s objection to the poets is not that they are poets but that the poets of his day happen to be dishonest, misinformed, and overly revered poets given a high degree of moral, social, and political authority.

“A scholarly annotated epic poem on the pitfalls and tribulations of “good philosophizing”.

This reminds me of my own answer to the question: why should philosophy overvalue reasoned argument to the exclusion of artistic methods?

In principle, there’s no reason, but in practice:
1. Philosophers are often lousy artists.
2. Art is, ultimately, a higher, more valuable activity than philosophy, so it’s not worth ruining art to improve philosophy.

I mean, have you *read* Nietzsche’s poems?

“Many thought experiments could be read as philosophical myths”

This is an intriguing comparison, especially given the fact that for Socrates and Plato, there were good and bad usages of myths, where the bad ones mislead people into thinking they’re not myths at all.

For example, is trolleyology, at least when used to confirm philosophical positions by appeal to intuition (which is, at bottom, by appeal to unconscious social authority of the kind Socrates attacked), a paradigm case of the bad use of myth?

Is philosophy, especially some forms of so-called analytic philosophy, in a sense, not mytho-phobic enough?

(For the record, I can think of continental cases of bad use of myth, too! I just want to reject the “continental=art=good, analytic=non-art=bad” dichotomy. After all, even the the history of art makes room for artistically valuable cases of “anti-art”!)

The question “Why should philosophy overvalue reasoned argument to the exclusion of artistic methods?” is only going to be interesting to people who are already convinced that philosophy overvalues reasoned argument. The question seems to leave the issue that divides us untouched.

Arguably, Plato thought he could, and sometimes should, do philosophy through literature. (Otherwise, the Symposium would’ve ended with Socrates, not Alcibiades.) So did Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and maybe Murdoch. Proust and (late) Wittgenstein have more in common with each other than they have with most other novelists or most other philosophers.

Philosophy that should be assigned in (most) courses, or published in professional journals, is not done through literature, though I suspect that this has more to do with (perfectly justified) norms about courses or professional journals, rather than with the nature of philosophy per se.

“Is it to reinforce the idea that philosophy concerns arguments, reason, the logos, whereas fiction concerns stories, metaphors, and myths…? But has philosophy ever liberated itself from myth? And even more so: does it even need to do so in the first place?”

Yes, yes, and yes.

Footnote, since this is academia, Tolkien said this in “On Fairy Stories”, 1939, and I really do think his concept of subcreation is what Plato needed.

This is just reporting on my probably naive conception of philosophy, but here goes:

I thought what we are doing in philosophy is getting at the truth. Ideally, stating the truth in such a way that we rid ourselves of all of the reader’s context and present the truth as pristine and sterile as we possibly can. We are hindered and burdened by the baggage of natural language, but to be as clear as possible and not talk past each other, we do our best define our terms in such a clear way that we all end up having the exact same concept in mind.

Literature does the very opposite. It, like art, plays on the fact that we are all subjects with unique histories that bring our own stories to the text, and thereby create a new story for every perspective from which it is read. I don’t at all doubt the value in this enterprise, but I hold out hope that unlike knowing what it is like to be a bat, I can know what it is like to be you, and if you tell me what the story reads like from your perspective in such a way and with such words that I can fully understand what you are reading, then I will truly know. But if you do that, and you sterilize your words and anesthetize the biotope of language to a degree that we both have the same concept in mind when we see the same word, then, and only then, have we gone beyond literature and done philosophy.

So no, I do not think that literature can ever be philosophy. That is because the language of fully defined unambiguous terms, probably more logic than English, just makes terrible prose.

Well…

1. Intuition pumps;
2. Acquaintance knowledge via empathetic imagination;
3. Provision of counterexamples to universal assertions hitherto unassailed.

For a start.

“Is it to reinforce the idea that philosophy concerns arguments, reason, the logos, whereas fiction concerns stories, metaphors, and myths…? But has philosophy ever liberated itself from myth? And even more so: does it even need to do so in the first place?”

MAStudent: “Yes, yes, and yes.”

I disagree on all three scores. First, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, for instance, deals with the very nature of reason and logos (and concerns a “classic” philosophical problem, viz. free will). It also proceeds by way of arguments from a particular character. Its themes are inextricably tied up with the philosophical perspectives explored by its character. Similar things can be said about the Platonic dialogues and the writings of Nietzsche (and Dostoevsky’s other writings of course).

Second, philosophy has not liberated itself from myth. As others have rightly noted, analytic philosophy relies heavily on imaginative thought-experiments, analogies, and metaphors to forward arguments. In other words, like literature, it uses fiction (and more specifically, science fiction) to get at the truth.

Third, philosophy does not need to rid itself from its reliance on analogy, metaphor, and fiction. Why? Because these are very useful tools for communicating complex ideas (although not always). This is the very reason it has been the domain of philosophers and poets for centuries.

We might ask, where are the dividing lines, then? I would say they aren’t sharp. It’s just that the goals of any given work of literature or art may not be exclusively philosophical, and any given work of philosophy may not be most effectively communicated through literary means. As such, literature may not always be especially philosophical, and philosophy may not always be especially literary.