The Story Of Philosophy
Darios Uclaray
After reading the five articles which begin this issue, I no longer have any doubts on this point. They all, in very different ways, use literature as a starting point for doing really interesting philosophy.
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The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.
The author believes that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.
The only place that Durant surpasses Russell is in his chapter on Kant, which I think is a truly excellent piece of work, and a good place to start for any students seeking to understand that obscure German metaphysician. Other than this brief flash of sunlight, the rest of this book is nothing but passing storm clouds, rumbling ominously, constantly threatening to rain, and yet passing overhead with nary a drop, leaving us as parched as they found us.
So here we have two openings raising the same philosophical issue, one written in story-form, the other written in academic-form. One of these openings targets a public audience, the other targets peer researchers. The peer-facing piece seeks to describe an issue with full generality, and therefore makes liberal uses of variables and subscripts. The public-facing piece presents an anecdote and a sequence of events that happened in the world with a surprising twist, a twist that raises an expectation and desire to know, a desire for a resolution. Both openings are about the same issue, but curate the experience of thinking about that issue differently. They are, in effect, different genres of nonfiction engineered for different purposes but nonetheless on the same topic.
As a species of academic writing, much of philosophy is characterized as a genre engineered for epistemic justification, not for engagement, entertainment, and most certainly not for the task of holding the attention of an arbitrary reader. As Michael Lewis writes, the author of an academic paper is trying to survive its readers, not bring them joy. Surviving the reader means that every matter of misrepresentation, uncharitable reading, or objection, must be anticipated and alleviated. The biggest flaw of a piece of peer-facing philosophy is that its key idea is poorly supported.
Of course, all nonfiction aims to communicate some kind of idea, and by virtue of it being nonfiction it does so by using language in a way that is primarily literal and representative of something in the world. Yet in contrast to academic nonfiction designed around epistemic support, there are other forms whose design is nothing of the sort.
Narrative nonfiction, for instance, is not engineered primarily to survive the epistemic scrutiny of its readers, but rather to engage them and hold their attention for a duration of time in order to tell them a story whose character, plot, conflict, and resolution gives them some insight into something, whether it is the human condition, the reality of certain scientific postulations, or the supernatural. Given these constitutive aims, the design features that make for good academic philosophy might make for terrible public philosophy. Justifying a point against a knowledgeable but hostile audience demands all matters of things, objections to objections to objections, multiplying labels for positions in logical space, and so on. Needless to say, these academic devices may be antithetical to the primary public goal of sustaining attention over time for those who are not antecedently invested in the topic.
Philosophy designed for such purposes will take engagement, attention-holding, tension-creation, and resolution as central to its construction, with epistemic justification of secondary importance. Unlike in academic writing, narrative writing does not anticipate that its reader starts with disbelief and requires persuading, but rather suspends disbelief with faith that you are taking her to a place worth going.
The pursuit of truth and the pursuit of a good quality story should not be as conflicted as it is presented, with academics skewering journalists with charges of butchering their research in the interest of selling books and magazines, and journalists charging academics with preoccupations so subtle and nuanced that they become arcane, with no one but their 20 peers understanding or caring about their work.
With that said, I think academics are in a better position than journalists for producing good public-facing philosophy. It is a lot easier for us to learn about the design-principles that make for great non-fiction writing than for them to acquire our subject-matter expertise. When academics take control of the narrative, and learn to curate the experience of their work for engagement rather than simply argue their way to professional success, we have the opportunity to create a whole new genre of nonfiction for print, audio, and video that will propel our visibility in the public sphere.
Philosophy is a tool that helps to elicit wonder and to encourage people to actively engage in reflection on hefty subjects (such as the meaning of life in the face of death). Thinking about such substantial subjects as life, death, and meaning is not the exclusive terrain of philosophers, however. Novelists have also explored such issues, from a different angle.
What is the advantage of exploring one or more philosophical ideas through fiction? This is, in itself, a philosophical question. Philosophers have a large array of tools at their disposal, such as conceptual analysis, as well as results from the sciences. Why then do they keep on coming back to stories? As the philosopher R. P Cameron argues, thought experiments are a form of mini-fiction: we engage with a story to draw a conclusion about the world.
A total of 45 philosophers applied, and 27 were accepted. Every workshop participant sent a draft of a short story or book chapter beforehand, which was used for a mentoring session. The workshop consisted of talks in the morning by philosophers Sara Uckelman and Eric Schwitzgebel, and me, as well as professional writer and creative fiction lecturer James Hawes, who gave a hands-on presentation where we had to write the beginning of a story closely modelled on the beginning of a novel by Ernest Hemingway. In the afternoons, Sara, Eric and James had one-on-one sessions with the workshop participants to help improve their short stories.
At the end of the second day, there was a panel session with workshop participants who had already successfully published fiction, including Frances Howard-Snyder (short fiction, genre: romance), Carol Quinn (novel), Sara Uckelman and Eric Schwitzgebel (short fiction, genre: Science Fiction and Fantasy). We also had one panellist who had published poetry (Mara Daria Cojocaru). Each panellist briefly talked about their experience in publishing, and this was followed by an hour of questions and answers from the public. The publishing panel was particularly interesting in showing how different the publication of stories is compared to journal articles. Submission is not anonymised, and it matters to some extent if you have name recognition in the field, although publishers are always interested in reading something from a new, unpublished author. Hence it is important to place your first works in well-regarded magazines, which, like philosophy journals, have their own prestige hierarchies. Submitting to book publishers, especially without an agent, can be tricky.
If you are a philosopher (or someone interested in philosophy), here is a way to see if writing fiction is for you. Try to write a short story on a topic of philosophical interest. There is no set formula to begin, and that is not a bad thing; creativity is a serendipitous process and we need to take advantage of the serendipity. In that respect, writing a story is not so different from writing a philosophical paper. As Sara Uckelman argued in her lecture Plot as argument, argument as plot, both philosophy papers and stories are adventures you take the reader on. Both require careful attention for structure, bringing in the right elements at the right time. As she puts it,
As James Hawes argued in his lecture for our workshop, sometimes it is convenient to forget about plot, and to focus on the big picture, the big governing idea that holds your story together. Sometimes plot comes first and you can connect it to a bigger philosophical topic. Engaging in philosophy in this way can provide new insights into philosophical problems and a different way of engaging with them.
I guess what I would have liked the session to take away was that philosophy could be geared to a general audience, that philosophy, as the ancients understood it, as Hadot understands it, was always geared to a thoughtful public that might change everyday life. That is what I think our culture and our discipline needs to return to.
When you get tenure, you are supposed to take risks. When you become promoted beyond that, and your job is very secure, you are supposed, I take it, to take very big risks. This is my attempt to push myself well beyond the comfortable confines of university publishing.
Carol and I have a five year-old, so there is no such thing as a writing routine for me. Thankfully, I write in my head pretty well, so if I get stuck in traffic or a really boring meeting, that is what I am doing. The temptation, one that I have had to curtail, is to write (in my head) when I should really be present to others. That, I can tell you, is something I would discourage.
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