On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form

Philosophy and literature: an old sibling rivalry. What more is there to say? Certainly not that form is what distinguishes literature from philosophy. If anything, form yokes philosophy and literature together. From Plato's use of dramatic form to Sartre's use of the novel, philosophers have often relied upon a rich reserve of conventions drawn from literature to convey their ideas. Yet the ways in which the literary forms of plays, poetry, and novels both shape and pervade philosophical expression tend to be obscured by analyses that focus on extracting arguments or ideas from these texts. Why have philosophers as diverse as Plato, Hume, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Beauvoir been drawn to the formal qualities of plays, poetry, and novels? Are literary works ever treated as equivalents to philosophical views, and not only as their vehicles? Does philosophy's use of form reveal the power of literature to spark the philosophical imagination? These lines of inquiry challenge long-held assumptions about the mutual enmity of philosophy and literature, and invite us to seek anew the sources of their kinship.

Let me anchor these general terms by setting forth three cases. Each case is notably different from the others. Plato's Socrates debates the merits of diegetic and mimetic narrative. Nietzsche calls Plato a novelist, recasting the history of philosophy in light of the history of the novel. Sartre, a philosopher and a novelist, analyzes the relation between free indirect discourse and existentialist thought. Together, these cases demonstrate that the relationship of philosophy and literary form is far more varied and complicated than either philosophers or literary scholars have tended to admit. What draws me to these moments is that they seem at first glance to be marginal — random fragments of literary criticism gone astray, irrelevant to the business of laying out philosophical arguments. Yet these reflections on form not only shed light on the deeper significance of the philosophico-literary practices of each thinker, they also reveal that teasing out the relation between the form of a text and the possibilities of imagination that it affords can be a distinctly philosophical kind of work. For Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre, the task of reorienting the aims and methods of philosophy cannot be uncoupled from the attempt to revitalize its forms.

At crucial turning points in the history of philosophy, philosophical self-understanding — understanding of what philosophy is, and of what it can do — relies on intricate and subtle distinctions between discrete literary forms. This has important implications for both philosophy and literature. Historically, the impetus towards formalism has served to distinguish literary analysis from other kinds of inquiry, and in particular from disciplines that threaten to reduce the literary object to alien laws of meaning. Studying the philosophical uses of literary forms, however, calls our attention to the way in which form crosses over disciplinary boundaries and catalyzes new directions of thought. To grasp how literary forms do what they do, it is necessary to locate them within the intellectual historical context of their particular uses. Only then can we understand the conditions under which these forms become philosophically expressive.

If the dichotomy between formalism and historicism falls apart in such cases, so too does the mutual exclusion of literature and philosophy. Attunement to the interplay between form and the act of reading is integral to philosophical as well as literary representation. The extent to which literary forms are implicated in the history and self-understanding of philosophy suggests the need to rethink traditional boundaries between these modes of thought, and to reconceive of their relationship in a way that acknowledges their deep entanglement, even their symbiosis.1 In each of the cases we shall now examine, what is at stake is neither philosophy of literature, in the sense of a systematic account of literature's standing in relation to the various fields of philosophy, nor philosophy in literature, understood as the analysis of philosophical concepts and arguments embedded within literary works, but something else — a recognition that the task of philosophy is intimately related to its forms.2

Case I: Plato

In Book III of Plato's Republic, Socrates warns Adeimantus that friends do not let friends imitate women — specifically, women who are young or old, abusive or quarrelsome, boastful or self-pitying, sick, in love, or giving birth. Nor do friends let friends imitate slaves being slavish, or bad men being bad. The quarry of his argument is, surprisingly, neither the definition of virtue nor friendship, but rather the definition of a type of narrative style:

Then we won't allow those for whom we profess to care, and who must grow into good men, to imitate either a young woman or an older one, or one abusing her husband, quarreling with the gods, or bragging because she thinks herself happy, or one suffering misfortune and possessed by sorrows and lamentations, and even less one who is ill, in love, or in labor.

That's absolutely right.

Nor must they imitate either male or female slaves doing slavish things.

No, they musn't.

Nor bad men, it seems, who are cowards and are . . . libeling and ridiculing each other, using shameful language while drunk or sober, or wronging themselves and others, whether in word or deed, in the various other ways that are typical of such people. They musn't become accustomed to making themselves like madmen in either word or deed, for, though they must know about mad and vicious men and women, they must neither do nor imitate anything they do. . . .

They are forbidden to be mad or to imitate mad people.

If I understand what you mean, there is one kind of style and narrative that someone who is really a gentleman would use whenever he wanted to narrate something, and another kind, unlike this one, which his opposite by nature and education would favor, and in which he would narrate.3

Thus begins Socrates's argument for the superiority of diegetic narrative (haple diegesis), a mode in which the voice of the narrator reigns, over mimetic narrative (diegesis dia mimeseos), in which the voices of individual characters speak directly to the audience.4

To grasp the logic of Socrates's argument as well as its deeper implications for the overarching aim of the Republic, it is necessary to briefly recount his theory of what it means to be an imitator. Prior to the well-known discussion in Book X that establishes an affiliation between the imitator and the inferior, irrational part of the soul, a critical passage in Book III introduces a less-often examined link between the subject of imitation and the issue of narrative style. Socrates first defines imitation in terms of conforming oneself in speech or appearance with another: "to make oneself like someone else in voice or appearance is to imitate the person one makes oneself like."5 He then claims that to achieve excellence in imitation, as in any other activity, one must focus on a single kind of imitation. In the case of the guardians of the just city, given their role as the "craftsmen of the city's freedom," the kind of imitation proper to them is the imitation of "people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free."6 The argument in favor of diegetic narrative over mimetic narrative in the just polis rests on the combination of these three conditions: 1) that mimesis be understood as the conformity of one's own speech and appearance to that of another — that is, as a transformation of aspects of one's personal being; 2) that arete in any human occupation, qua the most efficient use of one's being for the activity at hand, be incompatible with the attempt to engage in various kinds of activities at once; 3) that the guardianship of the just city be understood as a particular and distinct activity.7
Socrates wants to find a strategy of representation that allows the imitator to take on the voices of those who are worthy of imitation, and to avoid imitation of those who are unworthy. He argues that whereas dramatic narrative invites the imitator to indiscriminately assume a variety of voices, diegetic narrative enables the imitator to substitute narration in his own voice whenever imitation would involve an inappropriate alteration of his being. This is true of diegetic narrative in both its simplest mode (haple diegesis), in which the poet alone narrates events in his own voice, and in its mixed or complex mode (diegesis di' amphoteron), in which the poet's narration mingles with the voices of other characters. Hence it is not mimesis as such that is impermissible in the just polis, but rather a manner of mimesis that does not preserve the constitution (hence, politea) proper to one's being:

[W]hen a moderate man comes upon the words or actions of a good man in his narrative, he'll be willing to report them as if he were that man himself, and he won't be ashamed of that kind of imitation. . . . When he comes upon a character unworthy of himself, however, he'll be unwilling to make himself seriously resemble that inferior character. . . . Rather he'll be ashamed to do something like that, both because he's unpracticed in the imitation of such people and because he can't stand to shape and mold himself according to a worse pattern. . . . He'll therefore use the kind of narrative we described in dealing with the Homeric epics a moment ago. . . . As for someone who is not of this sort, the more inferior he is, the more willing he'll be to narrate anything. . . . And this man's style will consist entirely of imitation in voice and gesture, or else include only a small bit of plain narrative.8

Here, Plato's Socrates repeatedly emphasizes the aischynē of the imitator. This Greek concept has an aesthetic dimension that the English concept of shame lacks. It connotes a state of having been made ugly, disfigured, disgraced. Its opposite is not pride, but beauty and nobility (kalos). Diegetic narration is thus considered here as a strategy by which "the pure imitator of a decent person" may narrate in such a way as to maintain expression of the unblemished nobility of his soul, and in so doing, render it manifestly present.

The valorization of this form of diegetic narration in Book III of the Republic arises from the assertion of oneself as the origin of one's deeds, one's speech. This priority of the noble self is the condition of a meaningful evaluation of any mode of mimesis undertaken by oneself of another. The imitator no longer simply appraises the words or gestures of the imitated as a third-person observer, but takes possession of them, assuming responsibility for their expression with his own being, as if they proceeded from him of his own initiative. Hence the imitator can become disfigured in the act of imitating, for to adopt another's words and responses is to literally re-constitute oneself according to another pattern of being. What is posited here is no less than a near-total identification of the narrator's point of view with first-person point of view of agency, from which an intimate relation can be forged: a relation between the model of being one regards as exemplary and that which one expresses. Consequently, the narrating voice is to be seen as directly expressive of the imitator's own being. The one who imitates is to be regarded as the originator, the author, of the narrative voice. He is answerable for adapting its use and expressivity according to his special responsibility for the state of his own being. Thus Plato, through a stunning reversal, puts mimesis in the service of self-fashioning. What is at stake in these modes of representation is not only or even primarily their capacity to establish the truth or falsity of particular doctrines, but rather their power to alternate between intimacy and distance — and, in so doing, to form the beauty and nobility of the narrator's soul.

Case II: Nietzsche

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche makes the startling claim that Plato, the first major philosopher of the Western tradition, is also the first novelist. In the very attempt to establish a mode of knowledge — call it philosophy — superior to that of literary art and mimetic practice, Plato "was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic necessity to create an art form that was related to those forms of art which he repudiated."9
The banishment of tragedy and epic from the just polis could only be achieved by an act of poetic displacement. "Indeed," Nietzsche argues, "Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel."10 This claim situates the origin of the Western philosophical tradition at the birthplace of the novel, a cannibalistic genre that subsumes all previous forms and conventions. In Nietzsche's view, Plato's "novel" is both recognizably modern — "a mixture of all extant styles and forms, [which] hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry, and so has also broken the strict old law of the unity of linguistic form" — and also naively archaic, insofar as the new genre is "an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely, the rank of ancilla [handmaiden]."11 The latter part of this statement is clearly a gross reduction of the subtle, complex relation between literary form and philosophical argument in the Platonic dialogues, but for our purposes it is irrelevant to rehearse the many compelling refutations of such a view here. Instead, let us consider a question which (to my knowledge) has not been previously asked: what is at stake for Nietzsche in calling Plato a novelist?12

Putting aside, for the moment, the complex mixture of inheritance and disavowal that characterizes Nietzsche's relation to Plato, we must first confront the pure mockery of Nietzsche's charge. The absurdity of reincarnating a would-be philosopher king, the banisher of poets from his republic, not only as a literary innovator, but also as the originator of a form universally ignored or held in low esteem by ancient and pre-Romantic aesthetics: here would be a poetic justice that Nietzsche could hardly resist.

Yet there is more to it than that. Even if the perverse thrill of revaluation yields grounds for reconciling this claim with a project of Dionysian assault upon Platonic metaphysics, it nevertheless leaves us with insufficient basis to justify the invocation of the novel as opposed to any other literary form. A more compelling explanation must grapple with the genealogical dimension of Nietzsche's radical revaluation. His claim effectively shifts the entire framework for understanding Plato's legacy from philosophy to literary history. Calling Plato a novelist enables Nietzsche to establish an alternative genealogy for his own philosophico-literary project — one that also "hovers," formally, "midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry." For if introducing the new form of the novel means bringing about a new relation between literary form and dialectical philosophy, then any future re-imagination of this relation must be not only a philosophical contribution, but also a contribution to our understanding of the novel as a mode of philosophy. Nietzsche's claim that Plato is the first novelist allows us to conceive of a different genealogy of philosophy: to adapt Martin Puchner's apt phrase, a genealogy of philosophy from the point of view of the novel.13

This, in turn, immediately raises an interesting question: what does it mean to be a philosopher? In this passage, Nietzsche critiques Plato — even mocks him — but he also represents him in a certain light. To be a philosopher is to invent a new literary form: a form that rivals and even dismantles previously established forms. To refuse the authority of prior forms, to repudiate their valuations, it is necessary to confront and destabilize them by creating a new form of representation. As is often the case with Nietzsche, his remarks about Plato betray the tell-tale combination of esteem and derision, enmity and emulation, that marks the relation of disciple to teacher. In Plato, Nietzsche sees a thinker not unlike himself, one who recognizes that each new philosophy establishes itself through the creation of a rival form.

Case III: Sartre

Over a decade before Being and Nothingness (1943) appears, Sartre delivers a series of public lectures at the Lycée du Havre. These lectures, addressing the novels of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Woolf, Hemingway, Camus, Mauriac, Kafka, and others, were later published in Le Nouvelle revue française in 1938 and 1939.14 Their subject is not existentialist themes in fictional works, as might be expected, but rather the interplay between philosophical significance and literary techniques of representation. Take, as one example, Sartre's discussion of free indirect discourse. He argues that this narrative mode is paradigmatically existentialist, insofar as it discloses the fundamental tensions between what he would later call the pour soi — being-for-itself, or transcendence — and the en soi — being-in-itself, or facticity. In his essay "John Dos Passos and 1919" (1938), he writes:

But whose memories are these that unfold through the novel? At first glance, they seem to be those of the heroes, of Joe, Dick, Fillette and Eveline. . . . But the narrator often ceases to coincide completely with the hero. The hero could not quite have said what he does say, but you feel a discreet complicity between them. . . . By means of this complicity, Dos Passos, without warning us, has us make the transition he was after. We suddenly find ourselves inside a horrible memory whose every recollection makes us uneasy, a bewildering memory that is no longer that of either the characters or the author. It seems like a chorus that remembers, a sententious chorus that is accessory to the deed.15

Dos Passos's third-person narrative slips imperceptibly between the consciousness of the character from "the inside" (the point of view of first-person agency) and the consciousness of the character from "the outside." This outside perspective is the perspective of the collective consciousness, the view of the character from the standpoint of the impersonal or social.

Sartre returns to this technique in a passage of his little-known preface to Nathalie Sarraute's Portrait of a Man Unknown (1947):

It is the bad faith of the novelist — that necessary bad faith — that horrifies Nathalie Sarraute. Is he 'with' his characters, 'behind' them or outside? And when he is behind them, does he not try to convince us that he remains inside and outside. . . . The outside is a neutral ground. . . . This is the realm of the commonplace. And this fine word has several meanings: it refers, doubtless, to the most hackneyed of thoughts, but these thoughts have become the meeting-place of the community. Everyone finds himself in them and finds the others too. The commonplace is everyone's and it belongs to me; it belongs in me to everyone and it is the presence of everyone in me.16

Comparing the "anti-novel" of Sarraute to the realist fiction of Dostoevsky and Meredith, Sartre aligns realism with the "necessary bad faith" of the novelist. In the ambiguous oscillation of third- and first-person perspectives lies the quintessential mark of realist narrative. The novel in its classic phase yields the possibility of assuming a third-person perspective that is not located in the abstract realm of objectivity, but rather in a realm that can be occupied by anyone and everyone, "the realm of the commonplace." Darting between conventionality and consciousness, cliché and confession, novelistic narrative sustains an open and ambiguous dialectic between the standpoint of the individual and the murmurings of the social and collective mind.

The novel acts upon its readers — in this case, through free indirect discourse that presents the individual consciousness of the characters as ominously indistinguishable from the collective consciousness. Seamlessly blending the social and individual perspective on experience, this technique creates an unbearable reflection of our world. Reflection is converted to participation through the process of reading, thereby transforming us into implied — and, Sartre argues, implicated — readers:

Who is its representative as I read? I am. In order to understand the words, in order to make sense out of the paragraphs, I first have to adopt his point of view. I have to play the role of the obliging chorus. This consciousness exists only through me; without me there would be nothing but black spots on white paper. But even while I am this collective consciousness, I want to wrench away from it, to see it from the judge's point of view, that is, to get free of myself. This is the source of the shame and uneasiness with which Dos Passos knows how to fill the reader. I am a reluctant accomplice (though I am not even sure that I am reluctant), creating and rejecting social taboos.17

Sartre invokes the social realism of Dos Passos not as a definitive or truthful view of the world, but rather as a strategy of representation that is meant to arouse reflective indignation and even aversion: recognition and, in turn, rebellion. This rebellion is not a heroic and impulsive break away from all public conventions, but on the contrary an ongoing dispute with our own complicity in sustaining these conventions mindlessly. The question raised by free indirect discourse is the question of existentialism: from whose point of view do I see the world? A nuanced understanding of literary form hence underlies Sartre's use of novelistic techniques of narration to expose the paradoxical nature of bad faith in later philosophical texts such as Being and Nothingness. It is the novel, for Sartre, which brings us to a deeper awareness of our simultaneous embeddedness in and collaboration with a world where human freedom is lost and found again.18

The question now arises: what are we to make of these cases, having laid them out? Form comes into view as a condition for a certain kind of philosophical work. As literary form enters into the grammar of philosophy, it fuels new connections between different paradigms of understanding and between distinct networks of texts and contexts. Whether it invites me to imagine myself as another, philosophy as literature, or everyone as me, literary form spurs the philosophical imagination. The extent to which form plays a significant role in these cases prompts us to go beyond the philosophical use of literary texts as case studies for analysis, and to radically revise our map of the territory shared by these two modes of thought. But this is not all. The juxtaposition of these cases reveals an equally crucial fact, namely that the transformation of philosophy's aims has traditionally required a transformation of its forms. To redefine the stakes of philosophy, philosophy turns to literature. This is true in the case of Plato, who burns his tragedies on the steps of the Dionysius Theater of Athens and begins to write a new kind of dialogue. As the passages quoted from the Republic both argue and enact through their very form, the "ancient quarrel" between the philosophers and the poets over who should be in charge of forming souls and cities might just as well be cast as a quarrel between two kinds of poets. This, in essence, is the claim that Nietzsche makes about Plato. In his reading of Plato, the question of how to inherit the task of philosophy is intimately linked to the disruption of poetic traditions. Finally, for Sartre, as for other thinkers such as Beauvoir and Kierkegaard, analysis of the intricacies of novelistic form is inseparable from an important ethical strand of thought within existentialism. These thinkers draw on the form of the novel to reorient philosophy toward the question of being, within a world that is increasingly pervaded by various forms of derealization and depersonalization.

In each instance, philosophy thinks — and thinks about itself — in light of its forms. The avoidance of literary form within philosophy goes hand in hand with the avoidance of the question of the task of philosophy. Do we have to be formalists to notice this? No. Indeed, if the question of why we must pay attention to form is directed only at a narrow subset of literary scholars, it is bound to miss the stakes of examining literary form across other modes of thought. The synergy of philosophy and literary form raises a different kind of problem for formalism than the one posed by historicism. If the main question asked by formalism is, how can literary scholarship mark its terrain vis-à-vis other disciplines? — how can it generate its own laws, its own logic, from within? — then it would seem necessary to abandon the very terms of such a question when examining forms that traverse the boundary of literature.19 The question of whether a form exists like some kind of transcendent fruit, plucked out of the tree of time, its possibilities encased within its skin — or whether a form is merely that which has been designated as such at a particular time, for a particular set of reasons — dissolves. In all three of these cases, the philosophical center lies not in distilling the true essence of form, but in seeing what can be done with it.
The myriad incursions of literary form into philosophical thought raise a final question: can philosophy ever be divorced from matters of form? The issue of whether philosophical writing that takes a literary form — dramatic, narrative, aphoristic, essayistic, or dialogical — can be restated as an analytical, expository argument without loss of meaning has been debated endlessly with respect to a range of thinkers, including Plato, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Yet matters of form are rarely, if ever, represented in standard pedagogical approaches to doing philosophy.20 What forms, and therefore what kinds of thinking, might revivify the practice and self-understanding of philosophy today? Can literary form give rise to new ways of philosophizing?21 Far from being a mere ornament or instrument in the service of higher understanding, form lies at the heart of the matter.

 

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Yi-Ping Ong is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines how the form of the novel reorients philosophy towards the meaning of existence. Current projects seek to explore the impact of literary form on philosophical understandings of self-knowledge, dehumanization, old age, and moral community. Ong is executive co-editor of the Comparative Literature Issue of Modern Language Notes.

 

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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References