Philosophical Novel

[Socorro Henson]

Philosophical fiction is any fiction that devotes a significant portion of its content to the sort of questions addressed by philosophy. It might explore any facet of the human condition, including the function and role of society, the nature and motivation of human acts, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of art in human lives, the role of experience or reason in the development of knowledge, whether there exists free will, or any other topic of philosophical interest. Philosophical fiction includes the novel of ideas, which can also fall under the genre of science fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, and bildungsroman.

There is no universally accepted definition of philosophical fiction, but a sampling of notable works can help to outline its history. For example, a Platonic dialogue could be considered philosophical fiction.[1] Some modern philosophers have written novels, plays, or short fiction in order to demonstrate or introduce their ideas. Common examples include Voltaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand. Authors who admire certain philosophers may incorporate their ideas into the principal themes or central narratives of novels. Some examples include The Moviegoer (Kierkegaard), Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Wittgenstein's Mistress (David Markson), and Speedboat (post-structuralism).

Download philosophical fiction recommendations from authors Piers Anthony, Alain de Botton, Jack Bowen, Rebecca Goldstein, Khaled Hosseini, Ki Longfellow, James K. Morrow and Lynne Sharon Schwartz using the form at the top of this post.

An odd smattering in this group, from contemporary science fiction to inspirational to a mind-bending thought experiment by a comic creator to a few literary stalwarts, but all of them devotedly enjoyed by a few die-hard fans.

Reading Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, what I felt was the kind of appreciation one feels for the ornate 19th-century stonework adorning Brooklyn brownstones: I knew I was in the presence of beautiful and baroque artifacts, but they did not feel relevant to the existential dread I spent my days managing, nor did they seem tied into the bewildering speed and excess of contemporary life.

Immanuel Kant was especially instructive; he introduced to philosophy the idea that you could not talk about the world without talking about a subject through whom the world filtered. This limited our intuitions to the shape and form of a conceptual framework. When we talk about Truth and about Meaning, we are talking about Truth and Meaning for us, for human beings. Kant articulated my conundrum perfectly, but what was apparently a touchstone of philosophical progress was, for me, only a confirmation that I could never be whole.

Here we see the same comma-less, coordinating-conjunction heavy parataxis. One of the reasons McCarthy can seem to be creating a world from scratch on the page, is that he is echoing a text that claims to chronicle the literal creation of a world from scratch.

I began this essay by talking about my journey from philosophy to fiction. One writer who was with me during the most important part of this trip was the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The stories in his famous collection, Labyrinths, are so perfectly executed that they feel like mathematical formulations. They play with ideas of time, infinity, and repetition, and drive the human mind right up against the limits of what it can hold. Every story in the collection challenges our assumptions about what literature is and can be, as Borges dismantles the idea that individuals are special, that selfhood is inviolable.

But I sometimes feel the same power coursing through books written for children. I remember, for instance, encountering as a precocious kindergartener a picture book narrated by Grover (of Sesame Street fame) called The Monster at the End of this Book. Grover attempts to convince you not to turn pages (so as to avoid confronting the titular monster), unaware that he is that monster. This, of course, is supposed to be a funny metafictional lark; it chilled me to the bone. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the witch is permitted to execute Aslan according to rules of magic that are as old as time. But Aslan is able to return because he has access to a magic even older than time. (!)

All the novels below ask you to think. They cover many of the major philosophical fields: epistemology (what we can know), metaphysics (the nature of reality), ethics (how we should live), aesthetics (art and what is beautiful), political philosophy (how we organize society), and the philosophy of religion (faith, the existence of God, the problem of evil). The wonderful thing about philosophical fiction is that it covers all these fields, but does so through the trappings of fiction: character, plot, setting, etc. These novels make philosophy approachable and fun.

Set in Sweden, this work of speculative fiction opens with a violent attack on a bookstore hosting a controversial author. One of the attackers turns out to be a visitor from an alternate future. Or at least she believes she is. Over the course of the novel, she tells her story to a writer who tries to piece together what actually happened, and who grapples with his status as a Muslim in a place that is less and less welcoming. This social and political novel explores terrorism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant ideology.

Set in the Argentinian countryside, this novel tells the story of four people unexpectedly spending the day together after a car breaks down. A preacher, his daughter, an auto mechanic, and the boy who lives with him all circle around one another, talking. As time passes, they begin to talk about religion, morality, and God. They share ideas and experiences as a storm threatens on the horizon. This is a wonderful novel for thinking about matters of faith and meaning.

The classic of philosophical fiction has an unnamed narrator who has withdrawn from society. In his anger and bitterness, he writes his story and his thoughts about the world. He contemplates contemporary Russian philosophy, but, more generally, he writes about suffering and pain, freedom, and the idea of a utopian society. He is passionate, angry, and contradictory, and his narrative provides an excellent way to think about human nature and society.

Set in and around London, this 1961 novel is about morality and relationships, exploring the lives of middle-class professionals. Martin is married and having an affair. But then his wife, Antonia, leaves him for a friend and shocks him out of his complacency. The characters in this book believe they have moved past conventional morality, but struggle with how they should now live. A Severed Head is an entertaining read that looks closely at how we make sense of our lives and our behavior.

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Book Club! Last spring, I joked that for my summer reading, I was going to read my own novels. Someone said, "Let some of us read them with you!" And so a book club was formed. The last Sunday of every month, we met for 60-90 minutes mid afternoon, people around the world talking about what they had discovered and enjoyed in that month's volume of my 8 philosophical novels, which I think are the best philosophical writing of my life, largely because it wasn't up to me, but I just wrote down everything I saw in a mental movie that began playing in the theater of my mind one day in February of 2011. Early readers exclaimed "It's Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones meets Aristotle!" In every session I learned a lot from the 20-30 readers gathered on zoom. I'm thinking about doing it again this year to start in May or June. If you're interested, respond here or by DM or email with your email address and I'll let you know when it's a GO! It was the best discussion group of my life and we may do it again! Action, adventure, romance, mystery, humor, and deep philosophy all rolled into a rollicking story set in Egypt in 1934 and 35!

The point I want to make in this blog is that I think this kind of book is not a great way to explore ideas about life and how we should live it. The use of caricature in this context glosses over more than it reveals, and fails to be much more than a clever person showing off his wit. At its best the novel can explore ideas about life in a complex way which thrives of apparent contradictions and struggles to resolve them. Voltaire does not engage with the struggle.

The other strain in the book is a variety of characters, Martin, the old woman, who basically just think that humans are terrible and the world is a hard place. They have a fair bit of evidence for this position.

So by the concluding chapter Candide is living with his family and associates, strangely discontent with the world. Why is there so much evil? Why has he wound up poor with an ugly wife? He is stuck on his little property, doing nothing. Is man, as Martin claims, born to either disquiet or idleness?

So can this be posited as a sort of way out of the impasse of optimism and pessimism? This was a recent discussion I had with a friend. I argue that in the form presented in the book, the answer is no, partially because of that formal presentation.

Most of the book is devoted to showing the evils of the world. And yet we are meant to accept that simply by working hard and accepting his lot Candide can avoid the capricious whims of fate. Merely by being unconcerned with the world of kings, Candide can avoid having anything to do with them. But throughout the earlier parts of the book people are frequently subjected to the whims of the rulers. In fact, the perils of relying on the sense of justice of the aristocracy seems to be another theme of the book.

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