Philip Kitcher on the Philosophy of Literature

Tell me about your background. How did you get into philosophy?

I began as a mathematician, and I got bored with doing mathematics. I thought I wouldn’t do any creative work in it. My tutor suggested that I do history of science, so I did this in my third year at Cambridge, which I had to do to finish my residence requirement for the degree. While I was doing history of science, I got interested in philosophy of science. I then went to graduate school in philosophy without having taken any philosophy classes, which was nearly disastrous. But I survived, and I worked in philosophy of science for  the first part of my career. But I’ve done lots of other kinds of philosophy at various stages along the way.

One of them being philosophy of literature.

Yes.

So what is philosophy of literature? What kind of questions does it ask?

Two different kinds of questions. There is an approach to philosophy of literature that is allied with aesthetics: questions about the presentation of character in literature, the different forms of narration, that sort of thing. Then there is philosophy of literature that is the study of philosophical themes in works of literature, which I regard as something many European philosophers have often done. Many doubled as literary figures in their own right. Think of Camus and Sartre, and in certain respects Schiller and Dostoevsky. You’ve got that tradition well established in Europe, whereas in English language philosophy it’s been much less prominent—although there are some like John Stuart Mill, who is one my heroes.

I was personally extremely excited by Stanley Cavell’s essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love.” It’s a really great essay. That’s what led me to think that there could be serious work done in philosophical explorations of literature. That’s now becoming much more frequent, and a number of people have written philosophical works exploring themes in literature. Henry James is very popular, but others like Robert Pippin and Martha Nussbaum have all written things about this. It’s a developing genre. I’d like to see more of it taught at the undergraduate level. I’ve actually taught from quite early in my career courses on the philosophy of literature. Part of this goes very deep into my past because when I was fifteen, I was in the British educational system and there you had to specialize at fifteen. I really found this a very difficult choice because one side of me really wanted to do English, French and German, and the other side of me wanted to do mathematics and physics. I was quite torn.

I have to say, it was Lydia Goehr who got me to do philosophy of literature at an earlier stage than I thought I would. She invited me to write an essay on the legacy of Don Giovanni in Wagner. That got me started and once I did it was difficult to stop!

In what ways does the philosophy of literature connect with the work you do in other areas?

Well, it doesn’t really connect with the philosophy of science at all. It connects with some of the philosophical questions you ask in CC. So, in a way, all those years I spent teaching CC were perfect for preparing me for these sorts of philosophical questions. Lit Hum and CC are all about the nature of the good life. Literature is often a very vivid exploration of that. I find Joyce particularly good, but not just Joyce. I’m very interested in Thomas Mann, and Shakespeare, of course. I have all sorts of tentative projects for doing things in the philosophy of literature. I’m very interested in ethical and social change, and so a play like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seems to me to be a very interesting study of change between two sorts of ethical attitudes: one based on informal relations of sympathy and another based on very definite rules. I think there are vast amounts of stuff you can do in the philosophy of literature. We’ve only just begun.

How does having knowledge of the philosophy of literature enhance the experience of reading?

If you’re interested in philosophical themes in literature, then you tend to gravitate towards particular kinds of literary works. You tend to read them incredibly closely, as closely as you read the most difficult texts in philosophy. It seems to me that as I’ve been doing this I’ve really been immersing myself in some texts in ways that make me feel that my previous readings of them were utterly superficial. You just see things in them, and you follow them through. You read very carefully indeed. It’s a distinctive way of approaching a text. I often find that much secondary literature about a text I find most interesting to probe is often not very probing or helpful at all. People are interested in different things. Philosophers, once they really get inside a text, are going to think about it in a very distinctive way.

What is your favorite book written by a non-philosopher, and how is it philosophical?

Well, this is really hard. The obvious thing to go for would be Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s prose work really wrestles with questions about how lives can flourish and how they can fail to flourish. So you have a bundle of stories of how lives can just be blocked and pinched and narrowed and confined. Then you have in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man this vision of a character with tremendous aspirations to escape from this pinched, debased world in which life can never really succeed. It’s interesting because Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist, thinks he has to soar—hence the name—and it doesn’t work. We know that it’s dubious at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then when we see him again in Ulysses, he’s come down in a complete crash. Ulysses is all about people who have lost a sense of where they’re going. Stephen has lost a sense of where he’s going. Leopold Bloom is lost and wandering, and Molly is lost and wandering. In the end, there’s a movement back together, but it’s left wonderfully uncertain.

And then there’s Finnegans Wake: different style, immensely interesting, difficult and complicated. It seems to me to be all about how you come to terms with your life at a moment when you can’t really do much to change it, when its shape is fixed. It’s immensely complementary to the book I’ve just been teaching in Lit Hum, Montaigne’s Essays, also written under the awareness of approaching death. I think Joyce wrote an extraordinary novel about things that you can’t face directly, and therefore float in dream language and have to be approached obliquely. They have to be approached again and again and again to reassure yourself that you’ve really worked everything through and that the reconciliation, when it comes, is real, genuine and not premature. Joyce was not a tragedian by nature. He wrote a comedy as Dante wrote a comedy. His books are funnier than Dante’s. But his books are funny in that there is a possibility of reconciliation.

Thomas Mann strikes me as also extremely interesting. There’s one thread that runs through two of Mann’s greatest novels, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. That thread is the conflict between the liberal values of the Enlightenment and the richness and depth and turbulence of reactions to the Enlightenment. Mann is working his way through this material and trying to come to terms with a sense of passion, depth and seriousness of existence that the Enlightenment in some ways doesn’t do justice to, while at the same time recognizing its dangers. It’s no accident that both books turn to the opposition of two figures, one of whom is profoundly dark and dangerous, and the other who is apparently refined and civil and enlightened. The difficulty in both cases is finding either of them to be satisfactory. These are both deeply philosophical books. Not surprisingly in Mann’s case, he has this famous passage in a book that he wrote to try to justify Germany’s participation in the First World War, where he writes about reading Schopenhauer, and the passage concludes, “One only reads that way once.”

What do you think literature can tell us about philosophy?

I think philosophers tend to be very good at what one might call anatomy, that is, recognizing certain kinds of structures. So if you think about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it gives you a picture of the categories in which you might try to understand “the good life.” Novelists, as it were, put flesh on this skeleton and really give you a vivid understanding of how one might live through something. Dewey, another one of my heroes, is really committed to this idea that great literature is a way of ethical experimentation, experimentation with values. I think there is something to this idea. In one place he says that our understanding of what is valuable, and what it means and the ways in which values are consolidated and spread has not so much been carried out by philosophers as by great works of drama and poetry and literature. I think that’s a real insight.

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