Philosophy, Fiction, and Bullshit

In On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983), John Gardner raises the question of what the aspiring writer should study if he goes to college:

A good program of courses in philosophy, along with creative writing, can clarify the writer's sense of what questions are important . . . . There are obvious dangers. Like any other discipline, philosophy is apt to be inbred, concerned about questions any normal human being would find transparently ridiculous. [. . .] All human thought has its bullshit quotient, and professional thought about thought has more than most. Nevertheless, the study of philosophy, perhaps with courses in psychology thrown in, can give the young writer a clear sense of why our age is so troubled, why people of our time suffer in ways in which people of other times and places suffered. (93-94)

Gardner goes on to mention Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein as philosophers it would be useful for the aspiring writer to know something about since the problems they discussed or helped cause are problems of "ordinary modern people." But what interests me at the moment is the way Gardner views philosophy.

1. Philosophy is concerned with questions normal people find transparently ridiculous. This is true if 'most' is substituted for 'normal.' The latter term is ambiguous in that it can be used either normatively or descriptively. The normal may or not be normative. Having read a fair amount of Gardner's writing, both his fiction and his criticism, I am quite sure he means 'normal' in the normative sense. So what he is saying that the problems of philosophy, most of them anyway, are ridiculous to those with properly functioning faculties, and so are ridiculous simpliciter.

In saying this, Gardner is simply airing his bias. He is an aesthetic type for whom the sensuous and concrete is real and the abstract and conceptual relatively unreal. The multifarious felt particulars of life in all their jumbled richness and finely cut detail are what is interesting and important and to be captured and preserved.

The novelist, the poet, the composer will find in philosophy nothing but abstractions. As the poet Wallace Stevens puts it in Adagia, “The momentum of the mind is all towards abstraction.” Stevens does not intend this approvingly. Like the mystic, the artist objects to the perceived abstractness of philosophy and seeks direct experience of the concrete. Unlike the mystic, however, the artist seeks this concreteness not in a world-transcending experience of, say, the unity of all things, but in the lived experience of the singularities of the multiple world.

If there is an objection to philosophy from art, it must be that ultimate reality lies in the aforementioned singularities, and not where philosophy seeks it, in the universal. But it would be folly to look to a poet or a novelist for any justification of this theory of reality. Only a philosopher could provide such justification. Of course, if a philosopher is brought in to provide it, philosophy gains the upperhand.

But of course the aesthetic type does not care whether his attitude and theory of reality is justifiable: his enmirement in the particular prevents him from ascending to the philosophical plane. He shuns all abstractions, even the ones implicit in his own practice. In this regard he is like the practical man for whom it is just plain self-evident, and in need of no justification whatsoever, that reality is what can be eaten, drunk, bought, sold, and in general subjected to one's will, with the intellect serving in a purely ancillary capacity.

The momentum of the philosophical mind is away from particularity and toward the universal. For the philosopher, individuum ineffabile est: the individual is ineffable. I could demonstrate this quite easily from texts of Aristotle and Hegel and scores of others. (And you hope I won't!) Hegel takes this to the extreme with his dictum that the real is the rational, das Wirkliche ist das Vernuenftige. This is tantamount to saying that the merely particular does not exist. The artist, however, and the poet in particular aims to eff the ineffable, capturing , preserving, and perhaps even honoring the particular in its particularity, here and now.

2. Philosophy is professional thought about thought. This is obviously false, and beneath refutation; but it illustrates the sort of bias we find in the aesthetic type, a bias also found in a different way in the practical type (subsuming both the economic type and the political type) who views the world sub specie voluntatis. For the poet and the novelist, philosophy is not about 'reality' (what the aesthetic type takes to be such), so it must be about thought, i.e., bloodless and 'unreal' abstractions. It can only be mental masturbation, a jacking off and around with concepts that have been carefully drained of all 'reality' (what the aesthetic type takes to be such in his 'theory' of reality which of course must remain unarticulated lest the aesthetic type betray himself by doing philosophy).

3. There is more bullshit in philosophy than in any other field. Again, this can only be taken as indicative of Gardner's bias. It also raises the question as to what he means by 'bullshit.' Part of what he means is that philosophy is a lot of pretentious noise about what is ultimately unreal in any case. You see, our man 'knows' what reality is and how it is to be accessed, and so he 'knows' that other conceptions of reality must be 'bullshit' along with the very question, What is real?

But of course these are precisely things he does not know.