Why I Write Fiction (guest post by J Edward Hackett)

This is a second installment of a series of guest posts on philosophers who write poetry and/or fiction. This is a guest post by. J. Edward Hackett

1. The Compatible Function of Fiction Writing and Some Philosophical Traditions

Helen De Cruz asked me this question: what do I as a philosopher get out of writing fiction? In this question, I feel there are two questions. First, what is the philosophical function of fiction writing? Second, what is the place of fiction writing in my own philosophical explorations? While it might look like these two are bound, I must first review how it is that fiction writing is a way of doing philosophy. I have a very Continentally-laced answer. Put simply, all of my philosophical interests are bolstered by a thick conception of experience that if you may be skeptical of primarily since many philosophers have avoided talking about the subjective point of view. It’s as this point where I have rehearsed this conversation many different times with people who adopt what Aaron Preston called the no-subjectism in the history of analytic philosophy[1] that I often do not want to have the same conversation over and over professionally. 

My interests are primarily three currently. Process-oriented philosophies in American religious thought, American pragmatism, and phenomenology (including its existential varieties). When you add up these philosophies, they all have the concept of “experience” in common, and from that starting place a host of questions that has fallen along the analytic/Continental divide take shape. This is not to say that analytics cannot take interest in existential questions that pertain to one’s own life and existence, but that there are tendencies for these questions to be seen through the professionalized institutionalization of philosophy in terms of the Divide.

These questions are the existential and pragmatic concerns that are not simply taken up because they are of interest to professional philosophers. Instead, these existential concerns matter for how we are existing and philosophy in these traditions resembles not only an answer to existential concerns like finitude, death, suffering, anxiety/despair, the question of values and the like, but ultimately something akin to wisdom traditions that frame how we might explore these existential themes. These wisdom traditions are not simply various ways of deciding on these very important issues, but ways of navigating life’s overall purpose and meaning. For this reason, many people like myself also include Buddhism and Stoicism as themes to explore in existentially-themed classes.

Moreover, there is significant overlap in my philosophical interests that crosses traditions in American and Continental philosophy. While existentialism may avoid metaphysical speculation in the idealistic tradition, existential phenomenology has a lot to answer for on its own ontological considerations. So when William James takes up the question of life’s significance and ultimately whether there’s a difference that makes a difference in some metaphysical question, then the concerns of metaphysics may also find the same existential importance we find in more Continentally-driven efforts. Both phenomenology and pragmatism come together to look at how onto-relational the structures of experience disclose themselves. Let me explain. First, I’ll focus on the Continentally-driven efforts in brief. Then, I’ll move onto pragmatism.

Existentialists and the existential phenomenologists used literature to enact what we would call phenomenological description of their and our lived-experience. Sartre for instance wrote plays. Alexander Roquentin musing on a park bench is a way to show others what the existential condition of human beings are using literature to disclose the description of it and the implication of that existential philosophy as lived out in a character’s life. Roman Ingarden points to the fact that within reading a novel we have an unusual access to the way the inner life of someone’s intentionality is playing out (here I mean intentionality in the way Husserl described it, or what being-in-the-world means for Heidegger not what analytic philosophers take to be aboutness). This means that novels are ripe for disclosing possible structures of existence that make up existential explorations of their efforts.

Second, even though I have spent many years invested in Continental philosophy, I think more akin to the classical pragmatism of William James. Siding with Barrett, I would include James in any class that takes a look at existential themes. These themes are initially concepts, and what it means to do philosophy means something different for pragmatism. Philosophical concepts are rooted in action. These concepts take on life only insofar as they help us experience the world and its objects in meaningful ways. The controversial thesis that many might not accept from James is that we are forever blind to metaphysical reality we propose. In fact, the assumption that metaphysics is possible has its roots in what it means to believe in a fixed universe with laws and whether or not modeling metaphysical speculation based on logical deduction even mirrors the universe. There’s nothing there but the assumption to see the universe as fixed and completely determinate such that the object of metaphysical efforts is to capture that reality.

Because James successfully shows how much of us is invested in believing we can access that reality, when ultimately our experience is one of a lack of access, we can, however, experiment with our concepts and how we put them together. We can test the waters of philosophical ideas and see how they illuminate our lives. For example, we can test what it means to see a universe with fixed determinate laws that govern us and its implication for human freedom, or we can propose a new way of seeing the world as indeterministic. The point is that pragmatic experimentation and the letting-it-show-itself-from-itself of existential phenomenology we find in either Heidegger or Sartre amount to a very similar thing with fiction writing. Fiction writing is both disclosure and pragmatic experimentation all at once because these philosophies assume it is philosophy’s task to analyze personal and interpersonal experiences.

I will say that the pragmatism is better than phenomenology in one sense. As phenomenology is the study of structures of lived-experience from the description of those structures, phenomenology can help itself to thinking that some of our basic notions are self-evident and given in experience. This is the danger of phenomenology. Pragmatism adds the testability of even those descriptions. For without the pragmatist test about experience, the goal of opening up eidetic seeing in phenomenological description creates an inertia that paints philosophy as providing ground for revealing the givenness of experience when that ground may have been presupposed in bad examples of phenomenology, but not questioning what such revealing is for. A pure phenomenology is nigh, and pragmatism helps to avoid the dangerous excess of thinking one’s presuppositions are to be gleaned in careful descriptions of experience.

2. Fantasy and Magick Systems as Whitehead’s Call to Speculative Metaphysics
   
   

This experimental approach to metaphysical questions is one of the best features to come out of James. Insofar as we treat a metaphysical belief as a tentative hypothesis and avoid the wanton dogmatism of many metaphysical traditions, we can earn a right to speculate back. I say “earn it back” because in a Post-Kantian way, philosophers have had to earn the right back to do metaphysics after Kant, Nietzsche, and even James kill metaphysics. This criticism all turns on the heels of not having access to reality in the way that metaphysicians have assumed in the past whether they are mystics or theists. In fact, winning back the right to speculate is one justification for philosophers to focus on speculative fiction, hard and soft science fiction, and in my case, fantasy (more on this later). One can see that Whitehead adopts an almost Jamesian commitment to how he defines speculative philosophy in the very opening of Process and Reality,

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of ‘interpretation’ I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate.[2]

In this passage, speculative philosophy is an endeavor. Here, Whitehead does not spell out what produces these endeavors, but only that they must be coherent. By this, a speculation must be not only logically inconsistent, but all the ideas of that general scheme (or philosophical system) must presuppose each other. The separate ideas would be meaningless in isolation from each other. Next, logical means the system must be consistent and avoid contradiction. Finally, such a system must be applicable and adequate, and it seems here that James’s pragmatism is in full swing. A system of metaphysics is adequate if it has “the texture of observed experience,” similar to James’s tissues of experience, and that texture illustrates the system’s “own warrant of universality throughout all experience.”[3] By the same token, I propose that any magick system produced in a fantasy setting has the same trappings as a form of speculative philosophy in Whitehead.

For Whitehead, these endeavors are produced by imaginative construction, and the imagination is the most important faculty when engaged in fantasy writing. A good fantasy book is responsible for building up a world with different rules fundamentally than our own and must contemplate the perspectives of the characters at a fundamental level. According to Whitehead, the imagination constructs metaphysical systems of fundamental ideas to explain the elements of immediate experience. Immediate experience is the starting point of all thought, and so it is the same starting place for us real people as the characters in a novel. The problem of immediate experience is the problem to which all philosophies that thematize experience as its center (which again include, process, pragmatic, and phenomenological systems) because all proposed speculations make sense of our experiences. Given the experimentation and freedom of the imagination to answer questions about our immediate experience, the imagination is by and far the only faculty to which metaphysics and fantasy writing could emanate. Moreover, metaphysics and fantasy writing share in common the freedom of the imagination and perhaps also that each is a form of poetics.

It is for these reasons that I have made up a magick system in my own fictional world of Apeiron and named it so accordingly inspired by aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. The elves are Emersonians about nature. Necromancers are pure will-to-power Nietzscheans, and while I know that is the worst interpretation of Nietzsche, it makes sense for the type of magick Necromancers engage in. Dwarves are Stoics, and a few other ideas I’ll leave enigmatic. Apeiron is the realm where Flight of the Ravenhawk takes place. Borrowed from Anaximander, I chose Apeiron to mean boundless and indefinite since the possibilities of fantasy writing are more open and seemingly infinite than hard science fiction and even soft science fiction. For science fiction is always conditioned by some technology, the terran setting, or explanation that grounds the setting. Let us call this the demand for a grounding element. In fantasy, if you have floating castles, then nobody bats an eye. For this reason alone, the freedom of fantasy does not answer to the grounding element of science fiction. Instead, it is pure possibility in the most creative force. In this way, if one wanted to explore Hegel, Spinoza, Taoism, or any other idea and make it real in a fantastic way, one does not need to ground it as someone who writes science fiction.

In conclusion, writing fantasy is a way to embrace a groundless grounding and offer up pure speculation without the warranting function demanded by science fiction settings. In this way, fantasy can be pure speculation in the truest sense. Because it is also fiction, one can court those fantastical ideas also without commitment. The lack of realism in fantasy is its virtue and its liberation.

There is also a wisdom in creative writing that is not boiled down to philosophy. No matter the question or tradition in philosophy, one writes it already in search of an answer. We never sit with the questions. We never sit in silence with those questions and let them reverberate across the space of thought. As professional philosophers, we are always engaged in proposing an answer in that space rather than listening, dwelling and sitting with a question. In creative writing, one can sit with an idea for some time. In fiction or poetry, we can let it sit with us for a long time and slowly let it work on us. As Rainer Maria Rilke said in a Letter to his protégé, Franz Xaver Kappus, in 1903,

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet).

In having the answers already set in motion my mind, I have never learned to sit with questions well. Like you, dear reader, I read a philosophical text and it fits in my head almost immediately. I can now come to conclusions lightning fast in my mind. I get the sense of a text, its ideas, and already know with some degree of predictability how some idea or set of propositions is to be rejected, affirmed, or problematized. The same is done with the existential questions just as much as whether or not some argument for moral realism is true. And yet, in creative writing, the ideas and the characters work on me slowly. They grind against my mind, and they act almost like they are agents at work to which I cannot arrest them in my imagination half the time. They take on a life of their own, and in periods of intense creativity, I let them have that life, more slowly than when I do philosophy.[4] At other times, I control them more fully in a give and take reminiscent more of Rilke’s advice to a young poet than the demand to have an answer immediately when arguing against professional philosophers.

3. The Professional Realities of Not Writing Anything Other than Academic Philosophy

Some may really like what I’ve said, but now the brass tacks concern. Someone might object that it’s great you found what works for you, but I am young. In my philosophy department, the work I must do for my retention and promotion materials for tenure are based on doing recognizable professional journal publishing. In so doing, I do not have time but to develop – perhaps – my dissertation or book project. I cannot engage in creative writing. I must continue to publish articles in said areas of specialization to remain marketable for future opportunities in my tenure clock or especially if one possesses a visiting or temporary position.

And you’re right. Many employable futures are constrained by this over-specialization demand in philosophy. I am in an English Department, and at a teaching-intensive university, I am governed by different norms. Creative works in the English Department count just as equally as scholarship as the traditional philosophy journal articles. I would also say that in already being engaged in my fields, I have made a small and modest contribution such that I can do the writing I really enjoy. I could already hear one of my graduate professors folding his arms and telling me that creative writing is a post-tenure project.

If more philosophers considered themselves writers and not philosophers, this consideration could free us on a professional level. The outcome would be that like Simone De Beauvoir, philosophy is the product of creative energy, but not what should be the animus behind it. If we opened ourselves up to the possible ways philosophy could be presented, then it may be acceptable to write philosophy into plays, novels, and creative works of fiction. Moreover, the fact that philosophy is not written creatively and that many professional philosophers think philosophy should imitate the norms of scientific publishing means that philosophers consider their written work outside the humanities. They publish only reasoned defenses of a thesis in short journal articles. This is also a problem. The double-edged sword cuts both ways. In mirroring science, philosophy becomes boring ass journal articles written by detached professionals that do not seek to integrate their work in creative ways that other areas of the humanities have regarded, and philosophy cannot be creative in the ways that Beauvoir and other Continentals enjoyed. The effect is that philosophers only write to other professional philosophers and not to wider audiences. By contrast, we should put the imagination back into philosophy and see what philosophy can be.

This is what I get from writing fiction, and why, perhaps, others should engage in creative writing as a mode of philosophical reflection.

J. Edward Hackett

Assistant Professor of Philosophy
English and Philosophy Department
Southern University and A&M College
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

 

[1] see Aaron Preston’s “Personhood in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Anglophone Philosophy” in Persons: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019): p. 263-300.

[2] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 3

[3] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 4.

[4] While I do not mention it in the above text, as an avid tabletop RPG gamer, the telling of stories has been my hobby for 28 years and to this day at the age of 41, if I am fortunate to be in a game, I always bring my scholarly life into every character I play. I am always a scholarly wizard in D&D.

Comments

[Fool]

Enjoying this series.
"If more philosophers considered themselves writers and not philosophers, this consideration could free us on a professional level."
I've long thought that philosophy would benefit from accepting that it and each of its modes is another sub-category of Literature.

[J. Edward Hackett]

I have thought that for a long time.