The Philosophers' Cocoon

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.

Poetry and philosophy (guest post by Sophie-Grace Chappell)

The Cocoon will be hosting a series of guest posts by philosophers who write fiction or poetry. The aim of this series of guest posts will be to explore how we can express philosophical ideas in formats that go beyond the standard academic article or monograph. By looking at the work of philosophers who do this, the hope is also to demonstrate that philosophy is much bigger and broader than narrow norms of professionalization suggest. We will feature blogposts by established academics, as well as graduate students and academics outside of the tenure track. Our first guest post is in the form of an interview, and features Sophie-Grace Chappell (Professor of Philosophy at Open University), who tells us about her poetry. 

How long have you been writing poetry and fiction and other non-philosophical writing?

 Longer than I’ve been writing philosophy. The first philosophy I tried to write was A Theory Of Everything, a complete metaphysics, a catalogue of all existents, when I was about 9. But that lasted about three pages, and it was a one-off, because I went to the town library and discovered that Aquinas had beaten me to it; most annoying. And before that I had already written lots of non-philosophy.

I had various ambitions as a small child, including joining the “clever men at Oxford” that Mr Toad compares himself to in The Wind in the Willows. Specifically, I wanted to be Oxford Professor of Greek. I didn’t start wanting, intermittently, to be a Philosophy professor till I was about 16. And even when I did encounter the formal study of philosophy, at Oxford in 1984, one of my first main objections to it as a subject was that it wasn’t creative—it was about criticising, not making; it was pulling things apart, not putting them together. As an undergraduate I didn’t like that about philosophy; but then, I didn’t like it about lit crit either. It took me a long time to see, first, how criticising things is valuable too, and secondly, how, anyway, writing philosophy can be creative. And literary criticism as well.

Whatever else changed, I always wanted to be a writer. So, from the beginning, I wrote. From about seven onwards, when I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there was lots of sub-Tolkien stuff, both prose and verse, and I invented maps and languages like Tolkien too. My made-up languages were probably better than my made-up worlds. But surely this is one of the main roots of being a writer—parallel in its way to one root of being a musician, I suppose. You read things and you think “That’s marvellous, could I do that? Or anything like it?”

Probably it was partly Tolkien’s fault, and partly the Lake District’s, that as an adolescent trying to write poems I got stuck on the Romantics, all cloud-capped crags and babbling becks and trumpeting torrents. I was, in James Stephen’s wonderful phrase, bleating articulate monotony. I needed, of course, to do something more than mere imitation. And I couldn’t find a voice of my own that wasn’t sub-Wordsworth or, worse, sub-Tennyson or sub-Tolkien.

When I was in the sixth form, so between 16 and 18, three things unstuck me. One was Mel Shewan, an English teacher at school whose persona was Geordie working-class down-to-earthness. Via Dylan Thomas, and William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes, and R.S.Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, and Coleridge and Keats and Shakespeare and Yeats and, yes, even old Wordsworth and Tennyson, Mel Shewan helped us see that poetry is neither swords-and-sorcery, nor a stuck-up fop in a floppy shirt swooning over a snowdrop. It’s elemental, it comes from the dark places within you, from the cellars or Minotaur-labyrinths of the psyche, from the gut. But it’s also real, and this-worldly.

The second thing was the Mersey Beat poet Steve Turner, whose sharp, witty, hip, up-to-date, and (again) down-to-earth free verse showed me that poetry can be completely contemporary, unpretentious, straight-talking, streetwise—and funny, too. (I love comic verse, and I think in general it’s not taken seriously enough. The best comic poets are never just comic: Michael Rosen, Wendy Cope, Hilaire Belloc, Betjeman, Kipling, Pope.)

And the third was seeing Tony Harrison’s Oresteia at the National Theatre with my parents—my 19^th birthday treat in November 1983. That was one of the two greatest theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. (The other was the English Shakespeare Company in Southampton in 1989, all the history plays, Richard II to Richard III in a single day.) Harrison’s Aeschylus was a revelation to me of what a translation from the Greek can be. Again, it’s elemental, it’s verse from the gut, studiedly proletarian, very psychically immediate and powerful. And about as far from Gilbert Murray, God help us, as it’s possible to be.

I’ve been writing poetry, on and off, ever since. I haven’t really kept up other kinds of non-philosophical writing. There’s been a little writing about mountaineering, but only the odd bit, and what I wrote when for example I described this climb was really a prose-poem. If that doesn’t sound too pretentious. All I mean is that I wrote to get it across what it felt like to be there, and to climb that; like most things I write, the narrative subserves the feel, not the other way round.

I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist; not sure why, perhaps because of this prioritising of feel over narrative. When you write a novel you show, not say, in the sense that you pare down the description of feeling to let it emerge from the story. And when you write a film script you keep going past where a novelist stops paring down and pare down even further, to make space for the actors and the camera-work to fill back in. It’s not like that with poems; with poems, essentially it’s all there on the page. Poems come naturally to me. Novels don’t, and I imagine a screen-play would still less, if I ever tried to write one.

Maybe it’s also a lack of long-distance stamina. Apart from the translations, my poems tend to be short; if I write something long, it’s probably a philosophy book. On the rare occasions when I’ve tried to write a novel myself, what I write never stands up even to my own scrutiny; I reread and I think “No, people don’t talk like that or act like that; your take was so naïve, and I’m not sure what’s changed since you wrote this, but somehow, now, you know better than that.”

Or maybe it’s because, with a few exceptions (Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, A.S.Byatt, Evelyn Waugh, John Updike, E.M.Forster), I don’t myself much enjoy “the modern novel”. I love Dickens and George Eliot and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo and Moby Dick, but most things after that just bore me. Also some very canonical novels, in particular those of Hardy and Lawrence, I actively detest. It’s ideological, I’m afraid: I think both Hardy and Lawrence, in their very different ways, had quite preposterous world-views. And their novels are nothing without their world-views. One would, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, need a heart of stone to read the dénouement of Jude the Obscure without roaring with laughter. Which at least beats Sons and Lovers, where there’s not a laugh to be had in all its 350 pages of portentous, lugubrious, tortuous, ill-digested adolescent angst. Can’t be doing with it.

Also—the feel/ narrative contrast again—the things in modern novels that I do enjoy are very often the lyrical set-pieces: Moby Dick is I think the greatest American novel for just this reason, for Melville’s fantastic set-pieces. But then when I read the purple passages I’m going “Why not take away all this plot-flannelling, all this he-said-she-said yada-yada, all the tedious logistics of getting X and Y from A to B as the plot boringly requires, and just cut to the chase already? But you know, when you get to the chase, the fact that it’s typeset as prose is merely accidental: the chase is actually a piece of poetry.”

Philosophy fiction magazine & (e)book series

A couple of weeks ago, a reader noted that they write fiction on philosophical themes, asking how it would look to others in the discipline. As I and a couple of commenters responded, publishing fiction may well be an asset, particularly at SLACs. In any case, this week I was contacted by the creator of a philosophy-themed fiction magazine and book series, After Dinner Conversation. In addition to accepting unsolicited submissions (which they pay modestly for if accepted), they also hold fiction-writing contests with cash prizes which accept work in multiple age-genres (children's stories, young adult, and adult). Here are just a few of the ebook stories they have published that are currently listed as available for free:

1. Patchouli Lost(Free!)*: Patchouli calls a friend for help getting out of an abusive relationship. (Podcast)

2. My Fellow (Immortal) Americans (Free!): The President gives a speech about a proposed raise in the minimum “time wage” and its effect on those who plan to live forever. (Podcast)

3. The Shadow Of The Thing (Free!): Maeve calls on her friend to help her take a new street drug that (she thinks) will forever open her see the true meanings that hide behind the curtain. (Podcast)

4. This I Do For You (Free!): A spoiled child is raised in the lap of luxury until he is finally called on to serve others. (Podcast)

5. Pretty Pragmatism (Free!): A US Senator introduces a bill that borrows public policy ideas from the Nazi party.

6. Bunny Racing (Free!): Two bunnies race, but one of them has been eating a special carrot from the forbidden forest to help him run faster. (All-Ages)

7. The Truth About Thurman (Free!): Two Americans are captured by a terrorist group who give the government a choice, pick one for us to let go free, or we kill them both. (Podcast)

I can't attest to the quality of the fiction writing or philosophical sophistication of the stories, but in any case I think this is a really cool endeavor, and well as a great opportunity for philosophers who write fiction. The world needs philosophy now as much (if not more) than ever, and fiction seems to me a wonderful way to reach the broader public.