The Question Of Truth In Literature: Die Poetische Auffassung Der Welt (original) (raw)

Expressive Truth: An Argument for Literary Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2006

At present, philosophy appears to be consigned to the role of critic: its skeptical task is to cast doubt on any apparent truism by exposing its vulnerable underbelly. Whether we clarify concepts to excise a purer kernel of truth or deconstruct texts to expose a chasm of complexities, we are experts in the skill of intellectual dis section. While this critical stance is of undoubted value, both in exposing our hidden prejudices and in opening our minds to alternative possibilities, the question remains whether this is all that our field has to offer. Certainly metaphysics and logic have proven to be troublesome bedfellows, but in our efforts to be precise, have we too narrowly drawn the parameters of our discourse? Philosophy is, or should be, the love of wisdom, an ongoing consideration of life's most profound mysteries; and yet we have reason to suspect our ability to address these broader questions. By what methods, then, can we affirm truths about the meaning of life in the wake of our skepticism of the possibility of such truths? It is my claim that philosophy has become trapped by the belief that preci sion is our surest path to knowledge. In our despair of knowing things in them selves, we confine our discourse to subjects that lie within empirical confines. We hope that where we failed to capture the bigger picture we can still master objects closer to hand, or at least be precise about why we cannot master them. I aim to challenge this limitative assumption and to affirm in its place a variety of means by which we may "speak" philosophically on a wider variety of topics. In doing so, I will reconsider the purported disjunction between poetry and literature,1 on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, as when Plato aligned poetry with the passions and philosophy with reason (Plato 1992, 522 a-b), or when Carnap distinguished meaningful analysis of philosophical fact from the "merely expres sive"?read meaningless?poetics of metaphysics.2 In both cases, philosophy's method of securing knowledge depends on distinguishing rational arguments from expressive utterances without a meaningful referent, and poetry is decidedly placed into the latter camp, its role being to arouse our emotions, not to illuminate our intellect. However, we need to turn from Plato's condemnation of the poets and instead investigate poetry's potential for veridical philosophical communication.

The Philosophy of Literary Judgement in Hegel (Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015, De Gruyter)

(Galley proof) The paper will address the role of literature and repeated ends, or deaths, of art in Hegel . There is the well know ‘end’ or ‘death’ of art in Hegel, in which he refers to the supposed disappearance of art to any claim to representation of Spirit, in his own time. Philosophy and religion can then be seen to both exceed art, defined as where spirit which becomes a thing. Spirit as Absolute emerges in the decline of picture thinking, when self, thing and world are grasped as Spirit, not in representation. In the end, or death, of art in his own time, Hegel refers to an associated shift from epic to the novel, which has a superficial status in comparison with epic. The emergence of the novel is itself part of the death, or end, of art. It is this position which leads Hegel to a major underestimation of the significance of Don Quixote; and a general failure to see the philosophical, and form giving, aspects of the novel. The element of social realism in the novel is a disturbing factor for Hegel, as he associates Spirit in art with the manifest domination of Spirit over materiality. The modern death of epic is parallel with the death of ancient tragedy in modern tragedy. Tragedy dies as a form of absolute spirit with the general ‘end of art’, but before that as the death of ancient tragedy, which is strongly distinguished from modern tragedy. Modern Shakespearean tragedy features the isolated individual, who is self- reflecting, rather than representing an essential universal force. In Hegel’s account, earlier tragedies are concerned with the absoluteness of law, and the concreteness of the action of the individual who opposes law. The original ancient tragedy dies after the Athenian classics, and then again in the modern version of tragedy. The emergence of ancient tragedy itself marks a first end, or death, of epic. The minstrel, epic and tragedy appear in the ancient world in the emergence of ethical order, including the democratic Greek city state. When the ethical order becomes more concerned with universality, as in Stoicism, and then Christianity, art is dying, in particular literature, and it is tragedy that Hegel dwells on most. For Hegel, tragedy defines its own death in the world of law. Tragedy comes from a mixture of Dionysian rites and Athenian democracy. These are the ways in which a unity of the social body can be created, which is the basis of the chorus in tragedy. Tragedy, in Hegel’s understanding of antiquity, is preceded by the minstrel, who appears to be Homer, and who gathers material which is universal and outside the individual. Tragedy’s successor comedy represents another stage in emergence of the individual, but in ways which place the individual under universality. The emergence of ethical form first requires literature, and then excludes it from spirit, as comedy gives way to the universality of ethics and law. What Hegel loses in going beyond ancient tragedy, after what he considers its final form in Antigone, is awareness of the tension between law as decided by state sovereignty, and law as defined by individual ideas of the good. He also loses the Athenian democratic world of citizenship, equality, and free speaking. All of this has to be contained for Hegel, as does any literary form concerned with individuality, mis-judgement, accident, loss of will, the cruelty of gods and rulers. Hegel’s philosophy depends on literature to explain how Spirit develops, and needs to reject it to preserve the universalistic, intellectualist, deterministic, unitary, self-transparent, and eirenic,aspects of the dialectic.

Pre-Modern Philosophical Views on Reality and Truth in Literature

Synthesis Philosophica, 2014

The views of the writers outlined and examined here show that a philosophical approach is unavoidably in a contrasting position in relation to literary ways of representing reality and truth in literature. The specific domain of philosophical reflection is to clarify concepts through deductive methods or a purely rational viewpoint, whereas literature is based on the experience of life stories in concrete circumstances. The prospect of our dealing with sacred and secular literary texts is to disclose literary ways of observing and expressing reality and truth in its most elementary form of life. In all times we can observe the need to convey sense­experience and to evoke ethical reflection by using a more suitable mode of expression with an eye to the larger structures of literary representation of reality and truth. Literature deals with representation of life in all its contrasting manifestations in persuasive literary forms and is therefore intrinsically connected with the issues...

Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2014

Richard Gaskin's book builds on a specific understanding of language and the world, an understanding which he has developed in two earlier works (Gaskin 2006; Gaskin 2008). Gaskin calls this theory 'linguistic idealism'. According to linguistic idealism, the world is by necessity describable in language. Indeed, for Gaskin, language is ontologically fundamental, while the world is, so to speak, the content side of language: 'This is so not in an ordinary empirical sensethere were of course things before empirical language existedbut in a transcendental one: the thing exists by virtue of the fact that it is capable of being referred to by the word; it exists by virtue of containing within itself the possibility of reference to it in language' (p. 13). Gaskin suggests that the world consists of propositions (p. 21); objects and properties also form part of the world because they are contained in propositions (p. 14). Declarative sentences that refer to propositions constitute the ultimate reality: 'In one sense true and false sentences are all there really is' (p. 329). Gaskin's application of those ideas to literature forms the core of his present book, a work meant to add further elements to the system of linguistic idealism. Gaskin considers that literature, too, refers to the world and that this also goes for utterances involving fictions. He views fictional characters as abstract objects and ascribes to them 'a genuine real-worldly existence like all other abstract objects, such as the natural numbers' (p. 56). Gaskin understands literary works as texts uttered by a specific person at a specific time and as acquiring definitive meaning thanks to the contexts (in a very wide sense) in which they are produced. With respect to meaning, Gaskin elaborates on the Fregean distinction between sense and reference. He holds that the reference of a literary work is of a propositional nature and maintains that most literary works can be paraphrased, that is, one can formulate 'a set of declarative sentences that jointly share the same referent as the paraphrased work, but differ from it in sense' (p. 68). The sense of the literary work is the way in which the referential content is presented, the route taking us to the reference. Conceived like that, literary works will convey propositions, and Gaskin maintains that such propositions may be interesting truths. The respective works will then have cognitive value, and such cognitive value will sometimes be essential to the aesthetic value of the works (p. 63). The ideas that I have now briefly outlined differ in some respects from standard views in analytical aesthetics. I believe that most analytical aestheticians would say that a literary work has a definite meaning, but that only a minority suppose that

Truth-Claiming in Fiction. Towards a Poetics of Literary Assertion

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and es­pecially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author sheds light on certain type of literary narratives, it is insufficient in a so-­called conversational interpreta­tion, which emphasizes the truth-­claims conveyed by a fiction. In my paper, I shall show that, first, from an ontological point of view, truth­-claims or actual assertions in fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, sec­ond, that the question of truth-­claiming in and by fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author.

The Sensuous and Truth: Hegel's Prose in Light of his Aesthetics

2017

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel s conception of art is a complex one that has given rise to many controversies, none more pertinent for aesthet-ics today than the debate regarding Hegel s equation of artistic beauty and truth. In the context of Hegel s philosophy this leads inevitably to some confusion as to the relative status of art next to the other purveyors of truth: religion and philosophy, which constitute Absolute Spirit. One possible con-sequence of Hegel s art theory which seems to have gone little noticed is the question of what role the sensuous can play in the higher reaches of Spirit, if Spirit s apprehension of truth has already been cleansed of the external and the material after it leaves the realm of art. This question has a particular relevance for philosophy. After all, the main form of philosophical discourse is the prose it is written in.

The Novel and Hegel's Philosophy of Literature

Hegel's philosophy of literature, in the Aesthetics and other texts, gives no extended discussion of the novel. Hegel's predecessor Friedrich Schlegel had produced a philosophy of literature with a central position for the novel. Schlegel's discussion of the novel is based on a view of Irony which allows the novel to be the fusion of poetry and philosophy. Hegel retained a placed for art, including poetry, below that of philosophy. The Ironic conception of the novel has themes, which also appear in Hegel, of the unity of opposites. However, for Hegel Irony does not allow the unity of artistic form and does not allow art to be guided by law and science. Therefore Hegel's philosophy of literature owes much to Schlegel but needs to attack Irony and minimise the role of the novel. Irony is criticised as a purely negative position of a 'beautiful soul', which cannot act and in its absolutely subjective resistance to evil in the world becomes evil itself. Hegel gives great importance to Epic which foreshadows the emergence of philosophy in its unity, but it is a unity based on conflicting individuality and lawlessness. In the modern world Heroic lawlessness can only be approached as nostalgia, the novel cannot integrate individuality and law, only religion and philosophy above aesthetics, including the novel.