Philosophical fiction is not always acknowledged as a viable means to write and interpret philosophy, supposedly muddled by characters and contexts that bias our critical interpretation. Most literary texts could be analyzed philosophically to an extent, though such texts do not have the same falsifiability nor vulnerability as an author defending a claim directly as their own. Philosophical fiction stories, however, can provide multiple viewpoints, traverse detailed contexts and situations as philosophies play out, and have conversational back and forth discussions that offer greater refutation. This refutation can help resist presenting one overall claim for the book, allowing the reader to decide the most compelling philosophy for themselves. I will explore and contrast the benefits of the fictional narrative structures in Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera as they demonstrate compelling philosophical ideas in an accessible medium.
Philosophical fiction can be executed in several effective ways; Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael features essay-like monologues between a teacher and learner, allowing discussion and rebuttal, dumbing down concise poetics into a more fleshed out explanation. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a philosophical theme is presented in full at the beginning of the novel and then is explored through character foils.
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael feels close to the original essay form yet with more accessible language and, most importantly, features a narrator that is learning from scratch. The protagonist narrator is the receiver of Ishmael’s monologues and offers counterarguments like a more engaging version of footnotes or critical reviews of a philosophical text, and he obliges Ishmael to break down his poetic phrasing for the ill-informed company. J.D. Hughes, in his imagined dialogue with the character Ishmael to review the book in the same manner it was written, parses out Quinn’s chosen form:
“Novel? I think you have been deceived by the cover of the paperback version, which labels it a novel,” he undeceived me, “since if you examine the literary structure of the book, you will recognize its form as a philosophical dialogue set within a minimal, contrived narrative.” ... “Oh, you must mean a Platonic dialogue,” I replied. “But it was original of Quinn to script you, a gorilla, in the place of Socrates.” (Hughes)
Hughes again poses as Ishmael to say, “‘Quinn gave the narrator, his alter ego, a pose of denseness as a literary device, but that doesn't negate the fact that he didn't always understand me. He grossly oversimplified my points about the cultural construction of nature’” (Hughes).
Oftentimes, an important idea is still worth sharing and supporting even if you still don’t fully grasp it, or have to otherwise simplify it for a broader audience to appreciate. As with complex theories and philosophies that take time to bud and blossom, Quinn struggles to share his proclamation while streamlining the detailed account that a traditional philosophical thesis may demand.
In her essay “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge,” Philosophy Professor Eileen John points out “how standard it is in philosophers' conceptual inquiry to seek out and rely on intuitive responses to imagined cases,” which is precisely what Daniel Quinn does by providing the intuitive responses of the narrator. Posing broad questions and using the opponent’s resulting judgments in argument is a “…legitimate part of philosophical practice. Bare intuitive responses to an example are not the ultimate goal, though the sense of ‘intuitive conviction’ has some weight as the response of a competent concept user. Along with that, the example should help us to think about and articulate what our conceptual commitments are,” (John). Interjecting quips and one-liners from the narrator like: “I don’t get it,” or “That makes sense,” or even asking a follow-up question, serves a real-time influence like a reading guide as to how we should be pacing ourselves in keeping up with Ishmael’s ideas. Furthermore, by making the learning narrator a human and the philosopher figure an animal, this coincides with Quinn’s premise “that humans are captives of a worldview of our own making but which we do not understand, one that forces us to continue our destruction of the natural world until it can no longer support us,” (Pollock).
Using a different approach to the philosophical fiction novel, Milan Kundera opens The Unbearable Lightness of Being with a chapter closely resembling a philosophical essay, but then abandons this for a more traditional narrative, alternating between characters that dance on a spectrum of worldviews from the heaviest of burdens to the lightest of spirits. Kundera doesn’t offer an opening stance, but instead poses a question. He expresses what the theme and various values looks like in theory before spelling them out in his characters’ lives:
The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth. The more real and truthful they become. Conversely the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, ... and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness? (Kundera 5-6)
In her analysis of shame in Kundera’s novels, Rochelle Gurstein highlights the ways Kundera uses different characters to represent different philosophies, particularly within his recurring themes of intimacy, privacy, the internalization of shame, and the duality of the body and spirit. For example, casting a main character, Tomas, as a surgeon allows easy ways to explore themes of the duality of the body and soul through examples in a controlled fictional setting (Gurstein). Tereza’s mother, the “vulgarian,” shamelessly flaunts her nudity and the grotesqueness of the body. It’s easiest to represent and develop an opinion toward her worldview in context with other characters of differing views and in cultivated moments of privacy for the character, rather than the performative way that argumentative essays are written in their best and most confident manner/light.
Gurstein concludes that Tereza’s mother’s impudence "was but a single grand gesture, a casting off of youth and beauty. Now she had not only lost that modesty, she had radically broken with it, ceremoniously using her new immodesty to draw a dividing line through her life and proclaim that youth and beauty were overrated and worthless,” (Kundera). Given a personal history of her character, we see aesthetic philosophy intertwine with insecurity and psychology in the complex ways it would in someone’s real life. Surely, this does not make our critical evaluations less accurate, but rather more considerate of the approach’s possible applications in real lives.
Is philosophical fiction more or less valid, academic, and critical in its presentation of ideas and in our ensuing analysis? When we interpret fiction, is our judgment clouded? Eileen John goes back and forth with this idea, first acknowledging that in the view of some, such as in Lamarque and Olsen’s Truth, Literature, and Fiction, “while a work of fiction might influence someone to change in that way, the literary work is neither intended nor expected to justify such changes.” The reader does not gain any new conceptual insight that wasn’t already buried within them. Whatever insight they feel that they generated could lack “the real-world constraints and sense of critical responsibility that are needed for a knowledge-gathering project,” (John). John goes on to say,
A story leads a reader to a conceptual problem by prompting a number of connected responses to the story, and a resolution of the problem is similarly likely to be supported by a number of considerations that are summoned up and connected by the story. [Comparatively, an essay only has room for one adequate account.] . . . If the point of our interpretive, judging responses is to make sense of the world portrayed within the work and of the theme and structure of the work itself, rather than to make sense of the real world, why should we take those responses to have any further relevance? (John)
John answers herself to say that the general nature of concepts is that they are “tools to be applied consistently in ever context”, and therefore it seems that we rely on our “normal conceptual resources” when we interpret a character or theme of a work of fiction, though she concedes that it may be possible for fiction “to set up a context in which we seem to apply a familiar concept, but where we do not rely fully on our normal conceptual competence” (John). I would argue that we can detect what possibilities are plausible and what are far-fetched in the same way that we can detect what is plausible in the gossip of our own social lives. Even though evidence is selective, if one outlier narrative is convincing enough to argue a particular worldview to be moral, there are likely many others that would be equally convincing as well.
If philosophical fiction supposedly provides a more complex psychological picture to consider than the crude theoretical logic of an argumentative thesis, it’s important to ascertain whether or not the author is emboldening a specific, intentional argument or presenting unbiased evidence to be parsed through and interpreted in any direction. László Kajtár discusses the importance of author intent as he writes about Jukka Mikkonen’s The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction. In Mikkonen’s spirit, he says that “works of philosophical fiction can be seen as a type of rhetorical argument-what Aristotle called enthymeme, in which the conclusion is missing-and that the reader is intended to make the inference based on the fictive premises” (Kajtár). Continuing from there, he says that such works provide knowledge “not only in the form of assertions but also through suggestions, implications, and contemplations.” This idea of suggestion instead of assertion contradicts a common claim that the authors of fictional narratives “make literal assertions in their works” which can be “scrutinized for truth value,” whereas Mikkonen argues that those assertions, too, are made by a “fictive voice” (Kajtár). Mikkonen’s book takes a view of moderate actual intentionalism, in which “the author’s intentions do not determine meaning but they are relevant for it. In other words, if there are competing meanings, the correct one is that which is compatible with the author's intention” (Kajtár).
In Jay Scott’s article about how The Unbearable Lightness of Being shuns conventional moralizing, he uses a quote from Kundera to directly compare his beliefs and values as the author to the values of his character, Tomas:
‘The strong individualism of the writer makes him an exile. By his very nature the writer can never be a spokesman for any sort of collectivity. The writer is always the black sheep.’ Hence, Tomas's joyful philandering, while not psychologically romanticized, receives Kundera's guarded approval … Tomas's symbolic promiscuity is the imprisoned body politic's poetic gesture of defiance. (Scott)
Despite this preference, though, Kundera also details the great extent that this lifestyle harms Tereza, showing that in practice, the author’s own worldview has ethical consequences.
Discussing Beethoven’s view that contradicts Parmenides’, Kundera says, “necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value” (38). Kundera associates value with heaviness yet seems to lift passion, lightness, higher still. He shows the ethical merits and setbacks of both philosophies, although ultimately showing that weight causes great sorrow, like that which Tereza carries. Tereza resents the suffering that comes with her modesty and heaviness, wishing she could learn the lightness of Tomas: “She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love,” (Kundera 143). Sabina, her foil, is a character charmed “more by betrayal than by fidelity,” romanticizing the magnificence of “breaking ranks and going off into the unknown,” (Kundera 91). Scott also says, “Sabina, the woman for whom he feels the strongest lust, is a mirror image of himself, with this difference: she does not fool herself into supposing she is capable of fidelity.” Sabina, then, is the more refined seeker of lightness than Tomas, disillusioned as she avoids the false promises of monogamy and prevents harm through a commitment to upfront honesty.
In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn is likely embedded in both Ishmael and the narrator who is trying to understand and constantly asking questions. Quinn’s beliefs about environmentalism and abandoning anthropocentrism are encased inside of the character Ishmael, but he uses a first person narrator that imitates the reader learning these ideas for the first time. Even if Quinn does not fully support Ishmael’s philosophy, by writing and publishing this novel, he at the very least wants the narrative passed along. As greater evidence still, when the narrator asks Ishmael for clearer instructions to help ‘save the world’, Ishmael encourages passing along the message. The narrator begs, “‘Yes, I see all that, but that’s a program for mankind, that’s not a program for me. What do I do?’ ‘What you do is to teach a hundred what I’ve taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred,’” (Quinn 248). Quinn, by definition, observes the program that Ishmael commands by having written this book to sustain and propagate the message.
When reading philosophical fiction, it is possible that our judgment is actually clearer as we see possible effects play out, so long as we know these writings are a possible route rather than exclusive and inevitable. Paisley Livingston and Andrea Sauchelli dissect the different philosophical perspectives on fictional characters: the premise of realist approaches is that “at least in some cases, claims about fictional characters refer to something real and can be right or wrong,” whereas irrealist approaches are oriented around the idea that “fictional characters are in some sense a figment of the human imagination.” Due to the role of the imagination in the irrealist view of fictional characters, “this play of mind is what allows us to play and test and puzzle out philosophical propositions posed to them” (Livingston and Sauchelli).
Are our conclusions about characters real, then, or all in the mind and inapplicable to reality? One perspective that allows us to apply meaning and truth to fiction “is to hold that fictional characters are the denizens of possible worlds, while also holding that possible worlds exist. Very briefly, philosophizing about possible worlds finds its point of departure in the fact that we tend to talk and think, not only about what (we think) is actually the case, but also about what could or could not happen,” (Livingston and Sauchelli). How real we perceive a character to be may influence the strength of our emotions surrounding them and their beliefs.
Our empathy toward a character may affect how badly we desire their success regardless of how sound their morals are, or as John says, “Caring about doing justice to the characters then puts me in the position of making choices about concept use and motivates me to take those choices seriously.” A novel’s protagonist may be swayed by one perspective, but that doesn’t make that philosophy more correct. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray himself is compelled by a path that distorts his soul beyond recognition, allowing the reader to conclude for themself that his choices were not ideal (Wilde). Oftentimes, the negative aspects of a philosophy are best shown by exploring it in depth through a character. Lord Henry’s philosophy is heard through the filter of his word play and charm as a whimsical side character, converting others through charisma without being rationally evaluated. As a reader, we enjoy his quips without having the normal gravity of accepting a life philosophy. Within a novel, poor behavior “does not spoil the hero's fascinating perfection,” (John). His wordplay flips our typical views on their head and so is possibly presented at its strongest in literature. It is fun to read through the barrier of fiction whilst being radically immoral in reality.
Philosophical fiction conveys perspectives differently from standard philosophical essays by offering dialogue and situational examples and affecting our perception of specific philosophies based on their relation to the characters we’ve grown attached to.
In the end, certain questions may be best organized and considered “in the kind of narrative context a literary work provides,” rather than by a one-note argumentative essay (John). Perhaps even more importantly, fiction can make philosophy more accessible to readers that are intimidated by the pretension associated with the field. In philosophy, questions are discussed and not always answered. Fiction provides the discussion and evaluates the spectrum of grey between black and white philosophical camps and should continue to do so independently of the traditional form.
Works Cited
Gurstein, Rochelle. “The Warning of Shame in Modern Life: Kundera’s Novels as a Case Study.” Social Research, vol. 70, no. 4, Winter 2003, pp. 1259–76. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.drury.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=12012774&site=ehost-live.
Hughes, J. D. "Resuming the Dialogue with Ishmael." Environmental History, vol. 10, no. 4, 2005, pp. 705-707. ProQuest, https://drury.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/resuming-dialogue-with-ishmael/docview/216124672/se-2?accountid=33279.
John, Eileen. “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 4, Fall 1998, p. 331. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.drury.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/432124.
Kajtár, László. "The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction." Philosophy and Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 317-319. ProQuest, https://drury.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/cognitive-value-philosophical-fiction/docview/1821712767/se-2?accountid=33279.
Kundera, Milan, and Michael Henry Heim. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.
Livingston, Paisley, and Andrea Sauchelli. "Philosophical Perspectives on Fictional Characters." New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 337-361. ProQuest, https://drury.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/philosophical-perspectives-on-fictional/docview/902873089/se-2?accountid=33279.
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. Bantam Books, 1995.
Scott, Jay. "THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING A Romantic and Political Epic the Unbearable Lightness of being Shuns Conventional Moralizing." The Globe and Mail, Feb 04, 1988. ProQuest, https://drury.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/unbearable-lightness-being-romantic-political/docview/386031252/se-2?accountid=33279.
Wilde, Oscar, and Richard Ellmann. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings. Bantam Dell, 2005.