What is the relationship between literature and philosophy? It depends on how you understand each and, more broadly, on how you approach the matter of defining things. In his 2001 book “Philosophy’s Literature“, philosopher Andrew Benjamin explores, among other things, the way philosophy (or rather one of its dominant traditions – stemming from Plato and Aristotle) has identified literature with ‘non-philosophy’. He argues that philosophy has posited literature as its ‘Other’ and excluded it from what is ‘philosophical’. Why?
Within this dominant tradition, Benjamin says, philosophy understands itself as the practice of truth. Thus, philosophy’s Other – in a straightforward antagonistic sense – is anything that obscures truth. Benjamin argues that this is the meaning given by philosophy to literature and, more broadly, to the literary, myth, poetry, rhetoric. Why did literature receive such a negative identity from philosophers? One of the reasons Benjamin gives for “literature’s failure to retain a hold on truth [is] its connection to the imagination” which opens the possibility of error because “literature may, in the end, work against the dictate of reason” (p.71). So, the position of this philosophical tradition can be summarised as the following opposition:
Philosophy = reason = truth vs Literature = imagination = non-truth/error/deception.
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The either/or dichotomy is built into philosophy’s self-conception. According to Benjamin, philosophy posits literature’s otherness, it does not reflect or investigate this alterity as a question.
“The literary is only ever present as the other – the named and identified other – that has to be excluded in the name of philosophy. Philosophy continues by a refusal to think the literary precisely because it positions it as the already present other.”
Benjamin (2001, pp.73-74)
Benjamin presents a convincing case that the philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle has been concerned with positioning itself as the sole authority of truth with a particular understanding of truth formulated for the purposes of its self-identity. In this picture, only philosophy leads to truth, its project is (final) clarity. If something else happens to convey truth, its content is philosophical. If the content it conveys is not aligned with philosophy’s ideas about truth or is conveyed in a way not in line with philosophy’s approach to truth, it is non-philosophy.
This allows for an interesting observation. Asserting something as ‘other’ can be problematic because it risks placing that something into a pre-conceived box or category, creating a sense that no further thought of it is required because our picture of reality/truth/world is complete. However, if we shift our thinking from striving for completeness and absolute, final clarity to accepting plurality and incompleteness where “the possibility of absolute finality is precluded” (Benjamin 2001, p.ix), that allows for the ‘other’ to be a positive description of something, producing a possibility of further thought, of other options.
Can we allow plurality and incompleteness into our worldview, accept them as necessary, productive parts of the structure of reality, and at the same time not feel paralysed about making decisions and taking action?
keep exploring!
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