Literary Philosophy and Philosophical Literature
On philosophers who wrote novels and novelists inspired by philosophy
A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it “brilliant” (Esquire), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). Maybe it is the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life?
Recently, a rather silly Substack article prompted people in my internet circles to debate philosophy. The article, from Bentham’s Bulldog, was a rehash of old analytic complaints about continental philosophy and notable mostly for being reductive and error-ridden. It’s the kind of article where you find claims such as that Hegel—a German philosopher who didn’t write or speak English—is guilty of “dreadful perversion of the English language.”1 The article was rebuked enough by others that I don’t think I need to say more.2 The idea of cleanly cleaving Western philosophy into two rival camps is silly anyway. Many philosophers are informed by both traditions, and continental philosophy is a loose term for a vast swath of different ideas and traditions.3 What was more interesting to me were the related discussions of philosophy and literature.
For example, another Substacker named
wrote a more nuanced piece with this quote: In analytic philosophy’s terms, continental philosophy clearly fails. On its own terms…I’m not sure? I get the feeling that at least some continental philosophy is genuinely beautiful art, but I can’t honestly say I’ve enjoyed or gained as much aesthetic appreciation from it as from reading, e.g., Kafka or Murakami.4 Are there philosophers whose works are beautiful as art? While, as I said, philosophy can’t be simply reduced to two camps, there is perhaps truth to the old cliche that analytic philosophy tries to be math while continental philosophy tries to be art. I’m not a mathematician and won’t speculate about how close Dummett and Quine get to dividends and quotients. But some continental thinkers are quite lovely as prose writers in my estimation. Yes, a lot of philosophers—including most analytic philosophers to be clear—are impenetrable to anyone outside the field. But Cioran’s aphorisms?5 Barthes’s essays? Camus’s novels? These are great works of prose that require no PhD to enjoy. They certainly succeed as art, at least for me.As I mentioned in a recent essay, when I was a teenager I thought I’d either be a philosopher or a punk rock singer (or ideally both). It didn’t quite pan out that way. But I have always been interested in both literary philosophy and philosophical literature. Indeed, something that drew me to philosophy was the centrality of fiction. I imagine many academic philosophers will disagree with me, but consider: Kierkegaard wrote novels. Sartre wrote novels and plays. De Beauvoir wrote novels. Voltaire’s most famous work is Candide, one of several novellas he wrote. Nietzsche’s most famous text is Thus Spake Zarathustra, a fictional narrative written in prose poetry. There is a whole category of philosophers whose novels are so brilliant and popular as novels6 that they are mostly known as novelists not philosophers. For example, Albert Camus, Iris Murdoch, and Umberto Eco. Even Plato, the father of Western philosophy, was a fiction writer. Plato can say he wants to expel the poets, but the fact remains that his dialogues are little plays with his friends as characters.
These are just some of the best known examples but there are many more (Rousseau, Kristeva, Hölderlin, etc.). And yes, almost every name I’m listing would be considered a continental philosopher or an antecedent.7 There are some analytic philosophers I enjoy as prose stylists, like Bertrand Russell, but few that I’m aware of who wrote novels. Much less great novels. (I’m focusing on Western philosophy here, as that is the source of the analytic/continental spats, but Eastern philosophy is also intertwined with literature.)
Look, I admit my biases here. I am a novelist. I love fiction. I’m fascinated by narrative and focused on story. But I think an argument can be made that fiction is the most effective means of transmitting philosophical ideas to non-philosophers. The little logic formulas of analytic philosophy are just as impenetrable as Derrida to most readers without a philosophy degree. Even more comprehensible philosophers, like the existentialists, simply hit harder in narrative.
Perhaps part of the reason continental philosophers are frequently good writers is that they take art and literature seriously as subjects. Many are literary critics as much as philosophers. If you get an English degree, you likely read at least Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “The Author Function.” I still regularly think about Nietzsche’s concepts of “Apollonian and Dionysian” art he describes in The Birth of Tragedy. If you are interested in “weird fiction” and strange horror then you should probably read Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie and Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic. This is barely scratching the surface, of course. Literature is a common subject for many Marxist continental thinkers, like Herbert Marcuse and Georg Lukács.
I wouldn’t call my fiction especially philosophical, but I find myself frequently thinking of philosophical concepts from the thinkers listed above, among others. I have a special fondness for philosophical paradoxes and puzzles such as Zeno’s arrow and the Ship of Theseus. You can see those inspire some of my stories in Upright Beasts and my novel Metallic Realms, which also has section titles inspired by Nietzsche’s hilarious chapter titles in Ecce Homo.
Obviously, I’m far from the only fiction writer who takes inspiration from philosophy for novels and stories. Some writers, like Kafka, Borges, and Beckett often read like philosophy. Herman Hesse’s books are famously inspired by eastern philosophy. Many postmodernist writers, like Donald Barthelme,8 reference philosophy in their works. Percival Everett has many books that explicitly talk about philosophers. If you hate continental philosophy, then you might enjoy Glyph, which involves Roland Barthes in a buffoonish role.
In my last post, I mentioned the Oulipo group who used constraints to generate literature. Often these were philosophically inspired, such as Italo Calvino’s using semiotic squares to generate If on a winter’s night a traveler (trans. by William Weaver). Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is her novel that is the most engaged in anarchism and other philosophical questions, and was praised by thinkers like Fredric Jameson. Jameson was also the doctoral advisor of Kim Stanley Robinson, another science fiction writer that incorporates philosophical concepts. Speaking of science fiction, I was just rereading Ted Chiang’s Exhalation to teach. Chiang’s work is often philosophical and that collection includes a novella with a title taken from Kierkegaard: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
Two more fantastic novels I have to recommend that both seem inspired by Plato’s “allegory of the cave”: First, Herbert Read’s The Green Child is a lovely novel that inverts Plato’s allegory with the character finding enlightenment by traveling underground to a civilization of strange green people.9 Second, perhaps the best fantasy novel I’ve read in years is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. I wouldn’t want to spoil that novel, but the connections to Plato’s allegory will quickly become clear when you read.
When I was in college, the best literature course I took paired novels with philosophical texts. I really wish I’d kept the syllabus. But an example was pairing Don DeLillo’s White Noise with excerpts of Baudrillard.10 One day, I’d love to create my own version of this class to teach. I guess I have a start on a syllabus in this post, though as always I love to hear recommendations in the comments. Anyway, all this is just to say that philosophy and art do not have to be opposites at all. They can be mutually reinforcing and generative. As always, read widely.
My new novel Metallic Realms is available to buy! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.
The author was embarrassed enough to edit some of these errors out, but here is a screenshot.
Though I did find it amusing BB identifies as an Effective Altruist and makes the claim that the Sokal affair proves “the field is mostly bogus.” (The Sokal affair was a physicist publishing a nonsense physics article in a non-peer reviewed cultural studies journal. It did not involve any notable continental philosophers.) If one tangentially related scandal disproves a field, then I need only to point out that the billionaire-flattering Effective Altruists are perhaps best known for boosting convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
Continental philosophy basically is what the layperson thinks of philosophy. Existentialism, absurdism, German idealism, Marxism, postmodernism, structuralism, and all the other famous -isms come from the continental tradition. Hell, so do the ideas so common they are internet memes: god is dead, the death of the author, the banality of evil, “now is the time of monsters,” and so on.
Again, I am not a philosopher. But I might suggest that at least part of the “own terms” of many continental thinkers is giving us new ways to see and analyze the world. In this respect, I have to say continental philosophy is a resounding success compared to analytic philosophy. See above note.
I also think Cioran has some of the best titles of any author, philosopher or not. The Trouble with Being Born. The Temptation to Exist. A Short History of Decay. Fantastic titles.
As opposed to e.g. Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is more a philosophical text in the form of a novel.
Murdoch is a bit of hybrid philosopher, drawing from both analytic and continental traditions.
E.g., Barthelme’s short story “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.”
In minor Lincoln lore, one of my first book reviews was of that 1935 novel. My review was quoted on a new version of the novel and so is technically my first blurb.
Because of this, “the most photographed barn in America” is the part of White Noise I remember the most.
That course pairing philosophy and fiction sounds fantastic. I’d have loved that. I wrote an essay a few years ago on how Virginia Woolf might have intentionally used ideas from Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will when writing Mrs. Dalloway.
Speaking of which, Proust definitely drew from Bergson. And apparently was the best man at his wedding (Bergson married Proust’s cousin). Great post.
"The idea of cleanly cleaving Western philosophy into two rival camps is silly anyway. Many philosophers are informed by both traditions, and continental philosophy is a loose term for a vast swath of different ideas and traditions."
This is too pat.
Concern about the analytic-continental no longer very much in vogue, certainly, and I think the analytic-continental wars are mostly a dead letter these days (save on Substack this past fortnight, I suppose). It seems pretty clear that departments are not as divided as they once were. But if you study the history of 20th century philosophy it was a *very* serious categorization, it affected both sides of the divide, and works really *were* (as a matter of intellectual history) divisible into the two camps. This is not to deny that there were occasional crossings—the most famous is Derrida's exchange with Searle (Derrida's two contributions are in his book Lies, Inc.)—but they were very much in the spirit of the more-or-less contemporary cold war cultural exchanges: attempts at peace across a distinctly uneasy boundary.
Now, the terms are imprecise: in particular the term "analytic philosophy" has a narrow reading and a broad one, and it's hard to talk without being careful what you're discussing. (A comparison for SF fans: Samuel R. Delany has long denied he had anything much to do with the New Wave... which is true on a *narrow* reading of the term (they hated space opera, he wrote it, etc), but completely false on the broader and much more common usage, in which he was central to it.) One way to put it is to reserve the term "analytic" for the narrower understanding and use "Anglo-American philosophy" for the broader usage, but this is certainly not consistently done. (Once you make this distinction, you can say Analytic philosophy died all the way back in 1970 (!!) when Kripke resurrected metaphysics with his Naming and Necessity lectures.). And the geographic divisions are also imprecise, since Fichte and Wittgenstein were central to Anglo-American philosophy, and plenty of American philosophers were focused largely on continental (although not, that I can think of off the top of my head, any of the most famous ones).
Once you clarify the terms, however, you can say that no, Iris Murdoch is not on the dividing line; she's an Anglo-American philosopher, one of those who prove that not all Anglo-American philosophy was Analytic in the narrower sense. (There are, unsurprisingly, any number of those.)
Two points about the divide as it existed: it mostly emerged in the late 19th century and lasted about a century, but it was sort of retroactively cast back to Kant; Kant was, I think, fully in the tradition embraced by both sides. Still, you can't *really* make the division until almost a century later. Secondly, I would suggest that one quick way to make the distinction (to the limited extent it still exists) is to ask someone who the greatest philosopher of the 20th century was: if they say "Wittgenstein", they're influenced by the Anglo-American tradition, if they say "Heidegger", they're influenced by the continental. (And I do think those are the two major candidates.)
So I can see why you want to dismiss Mr. Bulldog's essay, which definitely had a retro-90s feel to it. And yes, today the distinction is, as I said, mostly over. But I don't think that you can study the history of 20th century philosophy without understanding it. The division may have been foolish, as in it was a foolish thing to do back then, but to think about it now is not *silly* unless you want to dismiss the recent history of the field entirely.
As for writers influenced by Anglo-American philosophy: I would say Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Rebecca Goldstein and, of course, Iris Murdoch all count. There are lots of others too—people who are influenced by science or math often end up with Anglo-American philosophical influences without even realizing it.
Finally, to your list of philosophers who are great writers, I would put in a word for Kierkegaard; his work Either/Or, especially, is a literary as well as philosophical text (and includes a lot of fiction in it).