ACLA 2022: Intermediary Zones Between Philosophy and Literature (original) (raw)

Where is truth to be found? "When I was eighteen, I read a great deal; I would read only as one can read at that age, naïvely and passionately. To open a novel was truly to enter a world, a concrete, temporal world, peopled with singular characters and events. A philosophical treatise would carry me beyond the terrestrial appearances into the serenity of a timeless heaven. In either case I can still remember the vertiginous astonishment that would take hold of me the moment I closed the book. After having thought out the universe through the eyes of Spinoza or Kant, I would wonder: "How can anyone be so frivolous as to write novels?" But when I would leave Julien Sorel or Tess d'Urberville, I would think it useless [vain] to waste one's time fabricating systems. Where was truth to be found? On earth or in eternity? I felt torn apart." A Profound Demand of the Mind "For, after all, there is only one reality; it is in the midst of the world that we think the world through. If some writers have chosen to retain exclusively one of these two aspects of our condition, thereby raising barriers between literature and philosophy, others, on the contrary, have long sought to express this condition in its totality. The effort at reconciliation that we witness today follows in this long tradition and answers to a profound demand of the mind. "