Philosophy and Literature: The Sense of an Opposition

ANKUR BARUA

A

The conjunction in ëPhilosophy and Literatureí will probably be regarded with some measure of suspicion both by philosophers and by litterateurs. In the current state of scholarly specialization, in which what earlier generations might have reverentially referred to simply as ëknowledgeí has become splintered into many ëdepartmentsí, it is not unusual for academics to stay away from one anotherís fields of enquiry to avoid the charge of encroachment. Unfortunately, methodological boundaries which are drawn by way of division of intellectual labour tend to rigidify, so that they soon begin to be viewed as absolute walls of separation quarantining the insiders from contamination by outside influences. Thus, some influential styles of philosophizing in the last century viewed ordinary discourse ñ and by implication, literary works ñ as riddled with ambiguities and perplexities which philosophical analysis had to dissolve and establish some semblance of coherence and order. Literary figures, on the other hand, have sometimes repaid such compliments in equally stern terms: literature, it might be said paraphrasing their sentiments, is about life, with its rich sensuous dimensions, whereas philosophy is a futile exercise in abstract cogitations which inexorably culminates in disbelief, skepticism and nihilism.1

A good example of philosophyís drive towards clarity of thought and economy of expression ñ which literature allegedly lacks ñ can be found in the writings of three philosophers of the last

© Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research,OctoberñDecember 2010, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, 75ñ90.

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century: Bertrand Russell with his theory of descriptions, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred Ayer.2 Though their philosophical enterprises were somewhat different, they agreed that ordinary language is a source of bewitchment, and that the task of philosophy was, among other things, to break through the encrusted layers of ëgrammatical formí to the perspicuity of the underlying ëlogical formí. For instance, the surface texture of the sentence ëHarry Potter does not existí might suggest the reading ëSomeone called Harry Potter who exists does not existí ñ which amounts to a contradiction ñ while its deeper core can be rephrased as ëIt is not the case that someone answering to the name ëHarry Potterí existsí ñ which removes the contradiction. In some ways, the intellectual predecessor of this conception of philosophy was a famous remark made by David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ëIf we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusioní.3 Hume argued that the only meaningful statements are ëanalyticí statements such as ëAll bachelors are unmarriedí which are known to be true simply by reflecting on them and ësyntheticí statements such as ëThe grass is greení whose truth or falsity is determined through sense-experience. This notion was later developed by some positivistic philosophers in the earlier part of the twentieth century who argued that most of our utterances in everyday life ñ because they are neither ëanalyticí nor ësyntheticí ñ are in fact non-sense. Statements such as ëAbortion is immoralí, ëShakespeare was a great poetí and ëSalvador Daliís paintings are a work of artí are therefore not cognitively meaningful since, firstly, they are not ëanalyticí and, secondly, there is no universally accepted procedure for determining their truth or falsity. So, for instance, such a philosopher might reply after reading John Keatsí Ode to Autumn: ëAh, there is apparently a lot of fine sentiment going on there, but it is all inside the poetís heart. It does not communicate anything real about the world out thereí. It might be argued that the tastes, smells and colours that the world is seemingly filled with are all ësecondaryí qualities ñ as opposed to

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the ëprimaryí qualities studied by natural science ñ which are not objectively ëout thereí.4

Consequently, this line of philosophical investigation would conclude that literature is, at best, an expression of merely subjective attitudes or tastes, and, at worst, a baggage of metaphors and metonyms which have to be ëreducedí to the clarity of unequivocal statements. Now some poets and novelists have turned the tables on such philosophical attitudes and retorted that it is precisely literatureís ability to highlight the ambiguities and complexities ñ which are affirmed to be irreducible ñ of human existence that demonstrates its superiority to the bloodless abstractions of philosophical argumentation. William Wordsworth complained that our ëmeddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things, we murder to dissectí, and a Wordsworthian can extend his protest to certain philosophical patterns of thought which allegedly analyze and deconstruct the ëharmonious orderí of nature into minute classifications. Keats was even more straightforward when he launched his complaint against ëcold philosophyí: ëThere was an awful rainbow once in heaven; we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angelís wingsí. Keats probably spoke for many literary antagonists of philosophy, both then and now, when he charged that it denudes the world of a sense of mystery by explaining too much, that is, by seeking to encapsulate the diversity of human emotions and natural phenomena in a regimented set of concepts.

Therefore, there would seem to be some prima facie justification for the thesis that philosophy and literature stand at two diametrically opposed poles and that the twain will never meet. If philosophy seeks rigour, lucidity and precision of speech and thought, literature encourages, even revels in, ambiguity, irony and vagueness. If philosophy is constantly seeking to draw the lines between meaning and nonsense, between being and non-being and between the self and the world, literature, it might be said, is a reminder of the very impossibility of laying down such neatly drawn boundaries. More aphoristically, if literature is about life, philosophy is about books; and while, as Kafka pointed out, you can get many books out of life, you can get hardly any life out of books. Notwithstanding this

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impression of conflict, if philosophy and literature were indeed implacably opposed in this way, one would be hard pressed to make sense of two sets of considerations: first, many works which are today classified as ëphilosophicalí by academic conventions are also, by general consensus, regarded as part of the classical canon of ëliteratureí; and, second, in the case of quite a few litterateurs, it is arguably impossible to properly appreciate their writings without an understanding of some well-established ëphilosophicalí themes that they were seeking to articulate.

B

To begin with, for all their views about the baneful effect of ordinary, philosophically impure discourse, Hume and Russell were in fact masters of English prose, Hume having written volumes on the history of England and Russell being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. More generally, Platoís works such as the Republic which were composed in dialogical form, Descartesí Meditations which was written as an autobiographical reflection and many other texts in the ëphilosophicalí canon which are filled with thought-experiments and playful allusions are somewhat difficult to categorize as ënon-literatureí. Further, while Hume and Russell are associated with an extremely significant method of philosophizing in the Anglophone world, they do not by any means exhaust the technique or content of philosophy. An equally substantial body of work in philosophy deals with issues that one encounters in what one may term the mortal questions of ëperennial literatureí: matters relating to freedom, contingency, emotions, despair, hope and so on. Soren Kierkegaard, for instance, is usually studied in departments of philosophy, but many of his writings, under various pseudonyms, launch a vigorous attack on philosophical structures which he believed were untrue to the richly variegated concreteness of human existence. Likewise, on the assumption of a very sharp distinction between literature and philosophy, it would be difficult to know precisely where to put figures such as Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, for they seem to straddle the divide. Further, ëoutsidersí to philosophy are sometimes unaware of the existence of

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powerful deflationary auto-critiques of the philosophical enterprise which seek to cut down to size philosophyís claims to have dissolved once and for all, in a clear cut fashion, the recurrent puzzles and perplexities that keep on raising their heads in the philosophical literature. In their own different ways, Nietzsche and Heidegger who have now themselves become part of the philosophical canon launched incisive critiques of system-building in philosophy. Therefore, the philosophical field contains at least two kinds of streams: one which moves in the direction of a quest for certainty and coherence, and the other which alleges that it is precisely this quest that gives rises to pseudo-problems which need not to be solved but dissolved.5

In turn, many poets and novelists who are now part of the ëliteraryí canon either implicitly or explicitly wove ëphilosophicalí themes into their works, so that any reading of their texts which is not philosophically informed would be an impoverished one. Whether we speak of ëmetaphysicalí poets such as George Herbert or ëexistentialistí novelists such as F. Dostoevsky as ëphilosophersí or ëlitterateursí is perhaps nothing much more than an instance of intra-academic squabbling, for any rigid separation of the ëphilosophicalí content of their texts from the traditional ëliteraryí questions of style and form would be rather artificial. Indeed, to say that a certain text, say Spinozaís Ethics is ëphilosophicalí and not ëliteratureí or Sartreís Nausea is ëliteratureí and not ëphilosophyí already presupposes that the boundaries separating the one from the other can be clearly drawn. This raises the rather delicate question: what, after all, is the difference between ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí?

Now while it would be quite hazardous to offer a ëdefinitioní of ëliteratureí or of ëphilosophyí, it seems clear that those who sense a clear opposition between ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí do presuppose some conceptions of these two enterprises which are mutually opposed.6 Suppose, for instance, we were to regard a literary text as one which is imaginative and not in a strict sense historical or factual. This criterion would not be sufficient to mark out literature as distinct from philosophy: firstly, not every product of the imagination is viewed as literature (for instance, cartoons and detective fiction); secondly, many novels have a historical core; and

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thirdly, many philosophical texts are interspersed with arguments involving highly imaginative situations. Or, suppose, we regard literary texts as those which have non-utilitarian values of, say, providing us aesthetic pleasure or evoking in us a sense of wonder: after all, while poems and novels may contain a lot of information about cars, houses and dogs, we do not read them primarily to find out how to buy a car, build a house or pet a dog. Even this standard, however, would not neatly separate literature from philosophy: while philosophers actively disagree with one another over precisely what philosophy is about, it would be a somewhat curious philosopher who argued that philosophyís primary function is to equip us with a set of rules regarding ëhow ñ to ñ do Xí. As a third attempt, one might seek to mark out a literary work as one that exhibits good writing, and one would undoubtedly be on solid ground for by almost universal consensus this is what a literary work is valued for. Nevertheless, while some philosophers ñ most notoriously Immanuel Kant and Hegel are atrociously difficult to read ñ many other philosophers ñ Locke, Mill and William James ñ have written in charming lucid prose. Earlier in time, Descartesí texts, which are today regarded as ëphilosophicalí, are said to have set the standard for subsequent French prose.

If the distinctions between literature and philosophy are not as clear-cut as they might seem to be at first sight, do we conclude, then, that ëeverything goesí in literature and philosophy, that something counts as literary or philosophical if you choose to call it so? Some contemporary intellectual currents would answer in the affirmative, regarding a negative response to this question as a politically motivated one directed towards maintaining the status quo of the ëgreat canoní written by dead white males. Without entering into this intensely disputed question, we may simply state that this debate reveals that ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí ñ regarded as academic disciplines ñ consist of institutional objects, that is, a set of texts, themes, issues and problems which have become institutionalized over time and regarded as exemplars of what counts as ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí.7 That is, Shakespeareís plays and Russellís philosophy are institutional objects of ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí respectively not in the ëelitistí sense that anybody

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who has not encountered them should be denounced as ëilliterateí or ëunphilosophicalí but in the somewhat innocuous sense that Shakespeare and Russell have come to be accepted as paradigms of what literature and philosophy consist of.

C

If certain texts have come to be accepted as ëliteraryí and others as ëphilosophicalí largely due to reasons of academic institutionalization and compartmentalization, shall we say that this distinction is purely arbitrary, especially given that we have failed to unearth criteria which will clearly mark their mutual difference? That is, while the question ëAre you studying literature or philosophy?í when put to a fifth or even fifteenth century reader of Plato might have been incomprehensible, it is one that is at least intelligible to many of us. The reason why we can make sense of such a question is, as we have indicated, because over the last three hundred years, with the rise of modern universities, literature and philosophical departments have carved out the textual terrain in some distinctive ways with specific methodologies concerning how these should be discussed, studied and talked about. While we argued earlier that the differences between ëliteratureí and ëphilosophyí are not as obvious as they are sometimes made out to be, it would, of course, be absurd to claim that they are non-existent. What, then, are the criteria that are used to characterize certain texts as ëliteratureí and others as ëphilosophyí?

Here is one attempt. For all the great diversity in philosophical styles, most philosophers exhibit a drive towards a certain level of abstraction in language that is as far as possible unequivocal, seek to develop patterns of argumentation which will be inter-subjectively shareable for they are based on some basic principles of logic, and write from a third-person perspective. Most litterateurs zoom into the level of the individual, employ language which is evocative and ëaestheticallyí pleasing, and even when they utilize certain themes which might be called ëphilosophicalí focus not on their logical consistency but on how they are lived out in the heat and dust of everyday existence.8

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Consider the following themes: the beauty of a sunset, the hunting of whales in the oceans, a scientist who becomes clinically insane, people of a country starving to death because of an economic blockade and a musician who struggling against the odds becomes well-established pianist. In most philosophical texts, the immediate focus will not be on the concrete particularities of each specific case, but on what general problems and questions that they raise. Is beauty ëout thereí or is it merely a subjective disposition that some people have? Do animals have rights, and if they do, can we make a case for moral vegetarianism? Do we properly understand precisely what sanity consists of, or if the line between sanity and insanity is a fuzzy one, does it imply that most of us frequently crisscross it? Is there something called humanitarian intervention in the contemporary global order? Is creativity the unfolding of the unique expressivity of an individual or is it simply a matter of fashions and trends? Now it is important not to caricature: the point is not that the philosopher cannot him/herself be passionately engaged in and committed to the issues alluded to above. Russell, for instance, was imprisoned twice, first for his pacifist views during the first world war and later, at the ripe age of eighty-nine, for his stance against nuclear armaments, and outside academic circles, he is probably better known as a social critic than as a philosopher. Philosophers such as Peter Singer and Arne Naess have actively campaigned for the preservation of the ecological habitats of animals, and a major Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett allowed his career to stall to campaign for civil rights for minorities. However, in their specifically academic writings, while they are empirically-informed and sensitive to socio-historical contexts, their prime focus is on issues which are pegged at a certain level of generality. A philosopher who claimed to have developed an understanding of beauty or human rights or creativity, but went on immediately to add that it applies only to an individual in some specific circumstances will probably not be taken very seriously. How ëgeneralí a philosophical analysis should be ñ valid for one individual or for a group of people in the same culture or for peoples across all cultures ñ is, of course, itself a philosophical debate we need not enter into: we may simply note that such an

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analysis is regarded as valid within philosophical circles if it aims to attain some measure of inter-subjective consensus.9

Now consider how most litterateurs would approach one of these themes, say, insanity. A novelist would typically construct a narrative showing the various influences on the life of an individual, the complexities of her relations and their possible breakdowns, her attempt to survive in the face of what wider social norms would regard as a debility. At times, the characters in the novel might even explicitly raise the question: what is sanity? but it would be a somewhat peculiar novel that would go on to provide a meticulous analysis of this concept. In contrast to philosophical texts which seek to abstract away, at least to some extent, from particular cases to a summary outline, from the details of the territory to the overview of the map, literary works often focus on the irreducible singularity of each particular individualís quirks, eccentricities, puzzles, sorrows and hopes.

Therefore, as a second attempt at a criterion one can offer the following pithier statement: literature is experimental philosophy. That is, literature expresses, and sometimes projects into the future as a possible state of affairs, certain experiments in living, with their associated idiosyncrasies, dilemmas and complexities which cannot always be subsumed under some putative ëlaw of human existenceí. Philosophy does not emerge out of nowhere in a conceptual vacuum but is an informed reflection on these experiments, and while it may not be directly involved with traditional literary concerns of style, flair and form, it derives its matter from the content of these experiments. Therefore, the statement to the effect that ëliterature is about life, philosophy is about booksí both contains a grain of truth and is somewhat misleading. It is true to the extent that philosophy is a parasitical enterprise, it does not provide you with any new ëinformationí: you do not turn to philosophy to know more about the number of planets, the classification of animals in Siberia, the structure of capitalism, the anguish of a child who has lost her parent and so on. By way of occupation, philosophers draw elements from everyday existence and seek to clarify the inner connections and associations between them. On the other hand, however, while abstractionism is indeed an occupational hazard of

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philosophers, it is somewhat mistaken to regard what is ëabstractí as necessarily ëlifelessí. It so turns out, on closer inspection, that some of the lively, concrete aspects of human existence are also the most abstract. Take a ten rupee note. At one level, it is a very tangible entity, but at another, it is also a highly abstract one, for in itself the note is simply a piece of paper, and it is only because of the abstract notion of ëmoneyí as a formal medium of exchange that it gets its value. Therefore, a novelistic description of individuals dealing with bundles of notes and a conceptual analysis of these notes as instantiations of ëmoneyí need not be regarded as competitive: they are two types of understandings at two different levels. Likewise, a litterateur who has immersed herself in the lives of Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, Jane Eyre, Tess and Clarissa Dalloway, and a philosopher who might claim to have unearthed certain commonalities ñ across the differences of time, space, language and context ñ among these women are not necessarily on a collision course: the philosopher can be seen as engaged in a second-order discourse, being attentive to detail but at the same time seeking to abstract away from the minutiae of the plot towards some broader generalizations.

D

The conclusions of the previous section can now be strengthened. Our comments seemed to imply that ëphilosophyí is a sort of superficial and therefore dispensable adjunct to literary studies: it can help you to understand concepts such as ëwomanhoodí or ëfeminityí but you donít need such grand theorizing to read Anna Karenina. In fact, it might even be urged to the initiate to literary studies: ëJust read the plain letter of the text. Donít get lost in the commentary. Leave that to the philosophersí. Now, indeed, there is solid wisdom in this advice, for it would be a poor student of literature who spent so much of time reading about how to read Shakespeare that she never managed to actually read Twelfth Night. At the same time, however, such words of caution gloss over a crucial conceptual issue: is there, in fact, such a thing as the plain unvarnished sense of a text? Philosophers have spent much time and ink debating this

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question and many agree that there is probably no ëraw experienceí, for most, if not all, of our experiences are experiences-as. That is, individuals do not first look at the sun setting over the Grand Canyon and then subsequently infer ëtherefore, this is beautyí, rather, they always-already experience the sunset as beautiful. According to this understanding of how our ëperceptsí (what litterateurs might exalt as ëpure feelingí uncontaminated by philosophical obfuscations) are subsumed under our ëconceptsí (what philosophers would call ëpure understandingí) to organize our raw perceptions, the world is nothing but a blooming, buzzing confusion unless and until it is systematized by certain concepts. You do not first perceive a nose, two pairs of eyes and a face and then infer ëthis is my friendí but you perceive the whole as your friend, your brother or your classmate.10 If this close connection between ëperceptioní and ëconceptualizationí is not clear, think about the ways in which a new-born babyís encounter with the ëworldí differs from ours. Does a baby encounter its mother as a mother? Cutting through a dense thicket of controversy, let me state somewhat dogmatically that it does not, and the reason for this inability is that it has not yet developed the concept of another individual as a mother, because it does not experience its source of nurturance as a mother. Now while this is precisely the point at which a litterateur may throw up her hands and complain that the argument is becoming too abstract, this discussion is extremely pertinent to the discussion of whether or not we can lay down certain criteria for settling the million-dollar question: what, in fact, is literature? If philosophers are broadly correct in arguing that there is no ëtheory-independentí perception, with the corollary that what you regard as literature is always-already determined by your prior assumptions of what should count as a literary work, it should come as no surprise that some people passionately claim that Harry Potter is literature and others, equally passionately, claim that it is not. Here, then, is one clear instance where philosophy, far from being peripheral to the study of literature, is almost constitutive of what is to count as literature, as they say, in the first place. The upshot of this discussion is that there is no ëneutralí reader of Anna Karenina ñ you can come up with diverse readings from a feminist, Marxist, liberal standpoint ñ and

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while this conclusion might seem ground-breaking to a litterateur, it is not very astonishing to any philosophically-informed student of literature who is acquainted with the philosophical thesis that there is perhaps no ëtheory-neutralí reading or observation.

Philosophical considerations are relevant not only to the crucial matter of what is to count as literature, but also to many of the standard themes that one encounters in literary texts for these happen to be ones that philosophers have often discussed and debated. One reason why there is not much dialogue between philosophers and litterateurs is that both tend to couch their discussion in academic jargon that might put off the uninitiated.

(a) To begin with, consider this ëphilosophicalí question: ëis the self a mental substance or is it just a series of insubstantial tropes connected through regular succession?í At first sight, nothing might seem more recondite to a student of literature. But suppose we rephrase this question in the following manner: ëIs there something which makes a human being essentially that same person between childhood, adulthood and old age, or is a human being a collection of new masks or appearances that are somehow connected over a day, if not over an hour?í If, along with some prominent philosophers, we were to accept the second pole of this disjunction, we would come closer to a solution of a time-honoured philosophical problem, namely, that of ëpersonal identityí in terms which are familiar to readers to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce with their notion of a ëstream of consciousnessí.11 Therefore, debates about the nature of the self ñ whether it is ësubstantialí, or simply an aggregate of psychological events ñ can throw interesting light on what in fiction is sometimes called the narrative construction of the self.12

(b) Here is another one: is the self atomistic or it always implicated in relations with the other? Philosophers who go by the name of epistemologists and metaphysicians delight in this question, and have expended much energy in discussing questions such as whether we are justified in believing in anything beyond our immediate perceptions. In Descartesí nightmare, in particular, you face the question of whether you have any rational justification in claiming that you are not in a dream right now as you read these

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words. At the heart of these matters is the question: how real are things around you?, one which recurs through various types of literature which seek to defragment our ordinary sense of reality as composed of apparently solid chairs, tables and trees into a stream of Joyce-like waves.

(c) Following on the heels on the previous question is this one: is the world, and our lives in it, a story? Philosophers often make a distinction between ëexplanationí and ëunderstandingí: the former is applicable to natural phenomena such as the fall of an apple in terms of gravitation and the latter to human actions in terms of intentions, beliefs and desires. If human beings have to be ëunderstoodí, and not merely ëexplainedí, it seems it is necessary to place them ñ or emplot them, as litterateurs might put it ñ in the narratives that they weave around themselves and in the complicated intermeshes of other narratives that they find themselves in. This narrative density of individual existence leads to a question whose ramifications literature often delights in developing: are human beings ëfreeí? one which is familiar to philosophers under the title of the so-called ëfree will problemí. Are we what we become almost entirely through socio-cultural and socio-economic influences, or is there some essential core to us that might be constrained by such influenced but not predetermined by them? These questions form almost the staple diet of most streams of existentialist literature. Further, Tolstoyís War and Peace contains an Epilogue in which he outlines his views precisely on these matters, his philosophy of history and his conception of free will.

(d) One last question, closely related to the previous one: is it possible to provide an exhaustive description of the world in the objective vocabulary of science or will something be left out in such an account? Or in slightly different terms, is the world nothing but matter in motion or is there also an irreducible aspect to it in the form of, say, agency, intentionality, freedom and so on? In general, litterateurs, of course, have plumped for the second claim, vigorously contesting the view that ëcreativityí can be given such a reductive treatment in terms of, say, atoms and molecules.13 Human existence has an inner subjective dimension which cannot be ëexplained awayí by the apparatus of physicalism, and this is a

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thesis that one periodically encounters in literary works. Indeed, the claim that the ultimate constituents of the world are composed of material bits whose movements can be accurately predicted is one that is depicted in anti-totalitarianism literature, such as 1984.

The sense of an opposition between philosophy and literature, then, is both real and artificial. They are circumscribed by somewhat different methodological principles which are at one level an artifice and which lay down certain texts as ëliteraryí and ëphilosophicalí. While philosophical works are not entirely devoid of the kind of attention of detail that usually marks literature, they aim at a certain level of generality that literature does not primarily aim at. Consider, for instance, the following paragraph, and as you read it, try to make up your mind as to whether you would classify it as ëphilosophyí or ëliteratureí:

ëMary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ëredí, ëblueí, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ëThe sky is blueí ... What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous know-ledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is falseí.

The occurrence of words such as ëneurophysiologyí and ëPhysicalismí will probably give it away as a ëphilosophicalí text, and indeed it is a thought-experiment put forward by a well-known philosopher of mind called Frank Jackson.14 Further, on most accounts of what can be classified as ëliteratureí, it will perhaps not be regarded as a literary work. Nevertheless, the themes raised in it

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are densely woven into a novel such as David Lodgeís Thinks... which deals, among other things, with the question of whether the mind and body are two independent substances and whether the study of consciousness is the distinctive domain of the humanities.

In other words, philosophy is more ësystematicí than literature in that it proposes definitions, draws distinctions, analyses assumptions and raises questions for reflection. It is precisely here that literary works can remind philosophers of puzzle-cases, vagueness and indeterminacies that are the stuff of everyday existence, but which they might have glossed over in this drive towards systematicity.

ANKUR BARUA,Department of Philosophy,

St. Stephesnís College,University of Delhi, Delhi

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Arthur Gibson, What is Literature? (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p.30.2. A.C. Grayling, Russell: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2002)3. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. L.A. Selby-

Bigge (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 91.4. Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 89ñ94. 5. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell,

1980).6. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,

1983), pp. 2 ñ 15.7. Paul Hernadi (ed.), What is Literature? (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1978).8. Louise Rosenblatt, The reader, the text, the poem: the transactional theory

of the literary work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 23ñ5.

9. Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)

10. N.R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

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11. Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd (eds.) Reading Metaphysics: Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp.36ñ54.

12. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

13. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

14. Frank Jackson, ëEpiphenomenal Qualiaí, The Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), pp. 127ñ36.