Philosophy, Fiction, and the Human Condition

For most of my adult life, I’ve been both a philosopher and fiction writer. Through both, I’ve tackled the deep questions that most engage me, especially questions of faith, social justice, human sexuality, and violence. The imminent release of my debut novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, has got me thinking about the relationship between these two things that have so shaped the course of my life.

 

Two Distinct Roles

Fiction and philosophy are two distinct approaches to engaging with questions central to understanding the human condition—questions about our values and basic assumptions, about the things that shape our worldviews and, by implication, how we respond to our world, what kinds of lives we strive for and what choices we make.

Fiction does so by telling stories about people—distinct individuals who have their own perspective on things, who live in a concrete environment, and who have problems. Fiction is about these individuals in these circumstances, facing and trying to overcome the problems they face.

Philosophy explores these questions by developing various alternative answers to these questions, and then formulating and critically evaluating arguments for and against these alternatives in the effort to determine which answers have the stronger arguments in their favor.

Both disciplines focus on the human condition, on issues about who we are and how we ought to live, how we should understand our world and our lives and the point of it all. But each has a different primary role.

Here’s my sense of these distinct roles. Fiction at its best inspires us to ask questions about the human condition—new questions, or old question asked with greater urgency or honesty or openness. Philosophy at its best helps us to decide which questions we have to answer (however tentatively) in order to live our lives, and it provides a means of fairly and honestly seeking out answers that make sense to us while also enabling us to understand why different answers might make sense to someone else.

In brief, oversimplified terms, fiction prompts us to care about the questions; philosophy offers a path to look for answers.

Of course there is overlap here. Great fiction can help us explore answers to our questions, and philosophy can help us to ask new questions and see why they matter. The difference is one of emphasis. But the emphasis matters. It matters especially to me, as a writer of fiction and as a philosophy teacher.

The Limits of Philosophy 

In my role as a teacher of philosophy, I pose to my students questions that we then explore philosophically. Some of those questions are ones my students care about already. But that’s not always true. When it’s not, what do I do? I’ve tried to get them to see the importance of the question by presenting alternative answers, showing how there are arguments for and against each, and showing that each answer has different implications for how we ought to live.

Sometimes that works. But if I rely on philosophy alone to inspire my students to really care about these questions, I have far less success than if I pause to tell a story that dramatizes the question’s importance. Tell a story, and the students listen. Tell the right story, and they see why the question matters. Tell a story featuring a character they care about, facing a problem relating to the question, and they care about the question.

Furthermore, I’ve discovered that sometimes when it looks like a student cares about a question, what they really care about is their preferred answer. The question, and the inquiry it triggers, is not for them something they value. On the contrary, they see it as a threat. It treats as dubious or debatable something they don’t want to treat that way.

As Plato stressed, we are furthest from the truth not when we are uncertain but when we are in the grip of false certainty. If we think we have the answer, we stop asking the question. Or, perhaps more accurately, we stop believing that the question matters as a question. Instead, we only care about it as a layup to the slam-dunk.

Like a catechism, the question is posed not to prompt inquiry but to set the stage for announcing our answer. Put simply, it is treated like a closed question.

When students confront a question in this spirit, arguments that challenge their preferred answer are not something to be taken seriously and wrestled with but, rather, something to be discredited. Something to be attacked.

When someone treats a question that way, they aren’t in a place where they can do honest philosophy about that question. At best, they can be philosophical apologists: they can recite the arguments in favor of their preferred answer and bash the arguments against. To do honest philosophy about a question, the question must be treated as open.

Open Questions, Closes Questions, and the Power of Stories 

Now there may be a time and a place for refusing to treat a question as open, and hence to refuse to approach it philosophically. If someone asks whether Black people are really human with a human’s right to life, I would think it better to insist that this is not an open question, that the right answer is they are fully human with a human being’s right to life. Perhaps, also, I might say a few words about why—but without legitimizing the opposing arguments and objections by taking them as serious arguments and objections worthy of consideration.

In other words, there are cases where it is more than fitting to treat a question as closed. But how do we decide when this is true? I’d look to stories. In the case above, I’d look to stories from the point of view of Black people living in environments where their full humanity is treated like an open question. Stories that lay out what that’s like.

On the flip side of things, imagine a story set in a community where a particular religious question is treated as closed. Suppose the community thinks that non-Christians are all damned. The main character, let’s call him Bill, meets a practicing Jew for the first time—Jacob, let’s say. Through a series of events, they become friends. Bill, desiring to save Jacob, tries to convert him, prompting conflict and ultimately an angry challenge to the idea that Jacob is only acceptable if he gives up his faith and identity to become something utterly alien. Bill goes through an anguished internal struggle. Does he really believe that Jacob, who is a good person, who is committed to his faith and appears to love God deeply, is doomed to hell?

Bill is further torn by competing perspectives and testimonies—especially from Jacob and from his beloved mentor and pastor, Luke. In the end, the friendship with Jacob falls apart. Jacob is clearly deeply wounded by what he describes as Bill’s intolerance. Bill returns to the pews of his church but is now grieving, and he can’t listen to what Luke preaches with the comfortable confidence he used to have.

It is at least conceivable that such a story, powerfully told, could inspire a Christian reader to wrestle with the question of whether Jacob is saved—that is, to treat the question as open—when previously it had for them been closed. This might happen even if the reader doesn’t actually change their answer to the question.

I think that most of the time, stories are more likely to open us up to questions that we might have previously treated as closed, rather than closing questions we’d previously treated as open.

This is true because of the ability of stories to expand the range of our experience. They help us to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to get a sense of what something is like that we haven’t experienced personally. Often, the reason we treat a question as closed is because we haven’t personally had an experience that challenges the answer we’ve come to accept. Such personal experiences are the primary pathway to being jarred loose from fixed ways of seeing things.

But stories can offer another way—vicarious experiences to supplement our own. The point is that stories inspire us not only to care about questions we didn’t think were important before, but also to treat questions as open—or as closed—that we didn’t treat that way before. And they do this by their power to give us vicarious experiences, a sense of what it would be like to face challenges we’ve never faced or to see things in a way we haven’t before.

If someone with a fixed idea is presented with philosophical arguments that challenge that idea, their spontaneous reaction is defensiveness. Something they believe is being attacked, which means they are being attacked. The walls come up, and they become even more entrenched in their position than they were before.

But tell someone a story, and there is a different response. A leaning in. An opening up. This is the power of stories.

Stories, Propaganda, and the Need for Philosophy

But it is one thing when a story opens us up to new questions. It is something else when it leads us down a narrow narrative tunnel to a single answer, an answer so vividly rendered that we lose sight of any other possible answers. Plato was worried about oratory and poetry because it has the power to persuade even if it offers no instruction. This is the dark side of storytelling: it’s potential to function as propaganda. 

The worst fiction is preachy. Few stories can survive preachiness, and teachers of creative writing warn against it for good reasons. A preachy story tells you what to think, what to believe. It’s in-your-face about it, and it is off-putting. I think our aversion to preachy stories tells us something about what stories are supposed to be about: not answering our questions, but encouraging us to wrestle with questions by shedding light on them. 

Stories are meant to expand the range of human experiences available to us, thereby providing us with more data than we had before, more information with which to wrestle with the big questions. But if we want to wrestle with those questions fairly and honestly, we need to do it in a way that considers the arguments for different answers, the objections to alternative arguments, the ways that different human experiences feed into alternative answers, etc. In other words, we need to get philosophical.

A story overreaches when it becomes preachy—it tries to draw too universal a conclusion from something that is essentially particular. Stories are about particular people in particular settings facing particular problems.

But propagandistic stories are not necessarily preachy. In fact, the best propaganda is not preachy at all. Rather, propaganda tells a particular story without ever telling you explicitly what to believe. Instead of telling us what to believe, the most crafty propaganda creates a story experience that fits with the view the propagandist wants us to believe: vicarious experiences that, typically, reinforce those preconceptions or prejudices that serve the propagandist’s interests, making it less likely that we will question them.

Two kinds of propaganda are particularly significant. First, there is propaganda that relies on othering. It tells a story in which the protagonist, who belongs to the same group as the audience, encounters the Other (someone who belongs to a different and unfamiliar group). And not only is the Other the source of the problem the main character faces, but the Other turns out to be just as bad (or worse) than the audience fears they are based on their preconceived ideas.

The other kind of propaganda is what I think of as manufactured discontent. It follows the model of the dandruff shampoo commercial where the first step is to make the viewer worry that they have dandruff and that others are rejecting them because of this (by dramatizing a scene in which exactly that happens). The second step is to introduce the shampoo as the solution to this manufactured problem (by having someone buy the shampoo, use it, and suddenly be embraced by those who had previously rejected them).

For this kind of propaganda, the aim is to hit on common sources of anxiety—and to magnify our anxiety about them. For the hero of the propogandist’s story, these aren’t niggling worries to be lived with. They aren’t things to be solved by an inner change of attitude. In the fictional world the propagandist creates, there are people out there free of these worries who are living idealized lives. As the story unfolds, what might have been something the reader hardly worried about is now something that clearly is a matter of concern—because it is standing in the way of protagonist’s best life. A threat to happiness. Fortunately, the thing the propagandist is selling comes along to fix things, and our hero lives happily ever after.

Propaganda, by its nature, relies on caricatures, stereotypes, and clichés. That is, it relies on reinforcing a single narrow body of experience through repitition. A single story along these lines—a single story in which audience fears and preconceptions about the Other prove all too real, or audience anxieties are presented as serious impediments to happiness that are cured by the right shampoo or ideology—isn’t enough to push the audience towards a specific answer. Propaganda works through volume (one kind of story dominates) and through marginalization (alternative stories go unheard).

When we look to stories to give us the answers, we are empowering the propagandist, because it is only in the hands of propagandists that stories will tell us what to believe. This is one reason why we need philosophy—why stories are not enough. When stories are not controlled and shaped by propagandists, they open us up to considering new questions and they shed light on those questions by expanding the scope of our experience. But then we need to think about those questions, making use of our own experiences and the range of vicarious experiences that we receive from the stories others have to tell.

The necessary follow up to good stories is philosophy. Not necessarily academic philosophy, but philosophy nonetheless.

If we aren’t prepared to do that work—that philosophical work—of thinking things through for ourselves, we become easy prey for the propagandist. This is true because, simply put, we need to come up with answers to some of the more pressing questions of life. If we don’t find those answers through thinking philosophically about our experience and the range of vicarious experiences that diverse stories provide, we risk putting ourselves into the propagandist’s hands. And in their hands, stories narrow the range of our experience in the way well-worn grooves in a trail narrow the path a cart will take. We find ourselves channeled reliably towards the answers the propagandists want us to have.