philosophy of linguistics See PHILOSOPHY OF LAN -. GUAG. philosophy of literature, literary theory. However, while the literary theorist, who is often a literary critic, is primarily interested in the conceptual foundations of practical criticism, philosophy of literature, usually done by philosophers, is more often concerned to place literature in the context of a philosophical system. Plato’s dialogues have much to say about poetry, mostly by way of aligning it with Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethico-political views. Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest example of literary theory in the West, is also an attempt to accommodate the practice of Greek poets to Aristotle’s philosophical system as a whole. Drawing on the thought of philosophers like Kant and Schelling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers in his Biographia Literaria a philosophy of literature that is to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s treatise is to classical poetics: a literary theory that is confirmed both by the poets whose work it legitimates and by the metaphysics that recommends it. Many philosophers, among them Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have tried to make room for literature in their philosophical edifices. Some philosophers, e.g., the German Romantics, have made literature (and the other arts) the cornerstone of philosophy itself. (See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 1988.)
Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is understood in a second sense: philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and literature taken to be distinct and essentially autonomous activities that may nonetheless sustain determinate relations to each other. Philosophy of literature, understood in this way, is the attempt to identify the differentiae that distinguish philosophy from literature and to specify their relationships to each other. Sometimes the two are distinguished by their subject matter (e.g., philosophy deals with objective structures, literature with subjectivity), sometimes by their methods (philosophy is an act of reason, literature the product of imagination, inspiration, or the unconscious), sometimes by their effects (philosophy produces knowledge, literature produces emotional fulfillment or release), etc. Their relationships then tend to occupy the area(s) in which they are not essentially distinct. If their subject matters are distinct, their effects may be the same (philosophy and literature both produce understanding, the one of fact and the other of feeling); if their methods are distinct, they may be approaching the same subject matter in different ways; and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and poetry may deal with the same objects, the one communicating truth about the object in syllogistic form, the other inspiring feelings about it through figurative language. For Heidegger, the philosopher investigates the meaning of being while the poet names the holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge at the deepest levels of thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé, existential-political activity in the service of freedom. ‘Philosophy of literature’ may also be taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the attempt to discover matters of philosophical interest and value in literary texts. The philosopher may undertake to identify, examine, and evaluate the philosophical content of literary texts that contain expressions of philosophical ideas and discussions of philosophical problems – e.g., the debates on free will and theodicy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Many if not most college courses on philosophy of literature are taught from this point of view. Much interesting and important work has been done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Cavell’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1989). It should be noted, however, that to approach the matter in this way presupposes that literature and philosophy are simply different forms of the same content: what philosophy expresses in the form of argument literature expresses in lyric, dramatic, or narrative form. The philosopher’s treatment of literature implies that he is uniquely positioned to explicate the subject matter treated in both literary and philosophical texts, and that the language of philosophy gives optimal expression to a content less adequately expressed in the language of literature. The model for this approach may well be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art (along with religion) as imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and properly articulated only in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic. Dissatisfaction with this presupposition (and its implicit privileging of philosophy over literature) has led to a different view of the relation between philosophy and literature and so to a different program for philosophy of literature. The self-consciously literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an integral part of his polemic against the philosophical imperialism of the Hegelians. In this century, the work of philosophers like Derrida and the philosophers and critics who follow his lead suggests that it is mistaken to regard philosophy and literature as alternative expressions of an identical content, and seriously mistaken to think of philosophy as the master discourse, the ‘proper’ expression of a content ‘improperly’ expressed in literature. All texts, on this view, have a ‘literary’ form, the texts of philosophers as well as the texts of novelists and poets, and their content is internally determined by their ‘means of expression.’ There is just as much ‘literature in philosophy’ as there is ‘philosophy in literature.’ Consequently, the philosopher of literature may no longer be able simply to extract philosophical matter from literary form. Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the philosopher with problems that bear on the presuppositions of his own enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis (especially in the works of postmodern writers) raises questions about the possibility and the presumed normativeness of factual representation, and in so doing tends to undermine the traditional hierarchy that elevates ‘fact’ over ‘fiction.’
Philosophers’ perplexity over the truth-value of fictional statements is an example of the kind of problems the study of literature can create for the practice of philosophy (see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982, ch. 7). Or again, the self-reflexivity of contemporary literary texts can lead philosophers to reflect critically on their own undertaking and may seriously unsettle traditional notions of self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as another, attractive but perhaps inferior source of philosophical ideas, literature presents the philosopher with epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological problems not encountered in the course of ‘normal’ philosophizing.
See also AESTHETICS , LITERARY THEORY, POSTMODER. L.H.M.