On Literature (Counterfactuals #8)

Can fiction provide evidence for philosophical theses?

When I set out to write this post my intention was to engage with one philosophical treatment of a work of literature. I had just finished reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and felt it would make as good a case study as any, since the author has a lot to say about self-deception, among other things. Alas, the paper I found was hidden behind a paywall, and I guess it can’t help but color my perception of literary studies that the first time I try to seriously engage with it, I can’t. All the philosophy articles I’ve cited on this blog have been free to access. In the end I decided on diving into a behemoth of a paper that offers a philosophical treatment of Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre.

Lit and I have something of a troubled history. Actually, the humanities and I have something of a troubled relationship, present tense. Strange for someone who writes a philosophy blog, perhaps, but as some of my readers know I come from a mathematics background, and I gravitate towards analytic philosophy. I like my philosophy to resemble math more than sociology.

When I was an undergrad, like all students, I had to take various humanities gen eds. In particular, after I transferred from community college to a research university, I had to take three humanities gen eds there in anthropology, history, and lit. All three of the professors made us buy their book to use as one of the course texts. That certainly left a sour taste in my mouth. None of my philosophy or math professors did this. You have to wonder what they’re paying tenured humanities professors these days, that they feel the need to force broke ass college students to buy their books. That this is just an accepted practice boggles the mind.

And we could go back further to the sexist English teacher I had junior year of high school who would let girls use the bathroom but not boys. I’m proud to say I made her life as difficult as possible that year (no, this is not a chicken or egg problem; I only did that after I had become thoroughly satisfied as to her vileness). Once, when we were in the computer lab to work on our term papers, one of the tech-savvy kids hacked into the school’s system and shut down the teacher’s computer remotely. She suspected me, but to paraphrase Tyrion, “I did not do it. I did not shut down your computer but I wish that I had! Watching your computer get shut down gave me more relief than a thousand bathroom breaks!”

It always seemed bizarre to me whenever people would talk about learning something from a work or literature, or talk about what an author was trying to teach through a given work of literature. It’s a work of fiction! The author has total control over the story; he can make the outcome anything he wants it to be. Why should I take a work of fiction as evidence for any particular claim? The Pearl “teaches” us that love of money is the root of suffering? That capitalism sucks? It teaches us nothing! Kino is not a real person. It’s a fictional scenario Steinbeck contrived to reach a predetermined outcome intended to propagandize. Or so I thought at the time.

Anyway. I tell you all this to give some context for why I ended up thinking literature was of dubious or no philosophical value. It wasn’t solely the hubris of the late teens/early twenties STEMlord that would have driven me to say something like English is mostly pseudointellectual nonsense; I had legitimate complaints about literature and the people who studied it. Books? I loved books! I had been reading Stephen King since middle school. But you wouldn’t catch me dead reading The Pearl, much less trying to sieve some deeper meaning out of a propaganda piece.

Over the years my stance toward lit softened and then hardened again, but not quite back into the rock of dismissiveness it had been before.

It softened when I started to think about how it could be that a work of fiction could advance a philosophical thesis and how someone could learn something philosophical from a work of fiction. And that happened when I realized that fiction is really not all that different from the thought experiments of philosophy. The philosophical implications will be a bit more opaque of necessity, but fundamentally, the ingredients are all there.

With that in mind, I decided to try to formalize some of my intuitions about fiction.

In particular, I claim that any work of fiction is a counterfactual¹ with a really, really long antecedent, and a really, really, really long consequent. We can think of the antecedent as the underlying premise of the story and the consequent as the events of the story proper. In essence, we can view any work of fiction as a single huge compound sentence of the form “If the world had been like such and such, then so and so would have happened,” where there are hundreds or thousands of conjuncts making up the so and so’s and the such and suches.

“If there were wizards and a dark lord named Voldemort and a couple named Lily and James Potter who died protecting their son Harry from Voldemort and there existed a half-giant named Hagrid and… then Harry would go to live with his mean aunt and uncle and go to Hogwarts and learn magic and…”

Obviously I’m leaving out more than a few conjuncts here, but in principle we can boil down the entire story of Harry Potter, all seven volumes, into an unimaginably long counterfactual of this sort. The less speculative the premise of the story, the fewer sci-fi or supernatural elements, the shorter the antecedent will have to be, as a rule.

So how does this theory cash out?

In a word: verisimilitude. The closer to true we judge the counterfactual to be, the more we are willing to suspend disbelief, and the closer to false we judge it to be, the less we are willing to suspend disbelief. On this view, the premise of a story isn’t itself reason to suspend disbelief or not; rather, the truth of the counterfactual as a whole is.

Why do we care about verisimilitude? Because it answers my concern above about the arbitrary control the author has over the story. Should he choose to exercise that control too blatantly, e.g. for propaganda reasons, it will damage the verisimilitude of the story and hence our suspension of disbelief. People in general don’t claim to “learn” anything from stories that consistently break their suspension of disbelief, except, perhaps, how to avoid writing a bad story.

An obvious competing analysis to my counterfactual verisimilitude analysis would be that a story gets its verisimilitude not from any counterfactual analysis, but simply by virtue of how similar it is to the actual world.

Reasons to prefer my analysis over that one:

1. My analysis licenses verisimilitude in speculative fiction. Having just a couple months ago re-read the excellent Never Let Me Go (NLMG) by Ishiguro for the second time, I feel quite confident in saying that despite its speculative sci-fi premise, NLMG has as much verisimilitude as any literary classic you would care to name, and that despite the world of NLMG being extremely dissimilar to our world². That's because the counterfactual about what the world would be like if human clones were raised and harvested for their organs rings true.

2. My analysis licenses calling unconvincing literary fiction lacking in verisimilitude. You ever read a pretentious arthouse book where the characters are all unintentional caricatures of the artsy-fartsy bohemian lifestyle? Neither have I, but I assume such a book exists. Those art gallery people with astrology tattoos and cornrows who quote Bukowski in bed? They’re real. They exist in every major city in western civilization (and a few other places). By a pure “similarity to the real world” analysis such a book should have verisimilitude in spades. But, reading that book, we might (rightfully) not credit it as authentic. The counterfactual theory gives us more flexibility; we can argue that the counterfactual is false for some reason or another even if the world of the book strongly resembles the real world.

3. My analysis also, incidentally, can account for the difference between fiction and a straight up lie. Whereas on a traditional semantics fiction will plainly be considered a falsehood, my analysis lets us judge the truth or falsehood of fiction and propositions about fiction on counterfactual, and not truth-conditional, terms. It’s not clear that the competing account of verisimilitude gives us this.

Of course, whether you think the counterfactual is closer to true or false will in many cases turn upon your philosophical priors, and people are not obligated to find the same stories convincing. But one example of an author who is almost universally regarded as writing with profound verisimilitude is Cormac McCarthy. I recommend starting with No Country For Old Men, if you haven’t read any of his books before. You read his books and you are given the impression that not only could this happen, not only is the counterfactual plausible, but that McCarthy, through some weird psychedelic divination or occult ritual, actually peeked into the most similar possible worlds where it did happen and transcribed what happened beat for beat. How he achieves this effect—well, if I knew that, I’d be a successful fiction writer. But I have a few kernels of ideas about how he does it.

1. Mostly denying us access to the characters’ internal worlds and thought processes is a neat trick. We don’t have to question whether the characters’ motives or actions comport with their personality types or anything because we usually don’t have much access to that data; we only see what the characters do and say, and are forced to build our internal models of what they are like from the ground up.

2. Spelling everything out in painstaking detail. I don’t mean he dumps exposition on you; I mean that he often spells out exactly how a character performs some physical action in detail. I think sometimes writers don’t want to think about that stuff and would rather move the plot along, whereas McCarthy puts his cards on the table and says, “look, no tricks, no sleight of hand, I’m not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes, this is exactly how it went down.” And so we believe him.

Now I come to the main point of this section: I claim that, in order to learn something philosophical from a work of fiction, it should both have verisimilitude in the counterfactual sense (i.e., the counterfactual must be more or less true) and there should be an underlying philosophical thesis—planted intentionally by the author or not—which the story exemplifies. I think the latter condition should not be too terribly controversial.

There could be exceptions. You might have a story that breaks your suspension of disbelief completely but you still acquire new philosophical beliefs from it because a character is serving as mouthpiece for the author and stating the author’s thesis directly in dialogue. I think this is substantively different from the conditions above; it doesn’t seem like the fiction itself is providing anything of distinctly philosophical value here. You might as well read the author’s treatise directly and forego the fiction altogether.

Speaking of which, I now come to my next point: why would an author choose to couch his philosophical thesis in fiction?

Well, I wouldn’t. Most analytic philosophers wouldn’t. When you read a work of literature advancing a philosophical thesis it will almost always be continental in nature. I can think of two reasons why an author might insert philosophy into their fiction (and three if we’re being particularly uncharitable):

1. More people read fiction than philosophical treatises, so as a purely practical matter of reaching more minds, it makes sense to smuggle your philosophy in with your fiction. And continental philosophy just makes for more interesting fiction than analytic philosophy. I could, I guess, write a novel about counterfactuals or justified true belief or category theory, but who wants to read that? Fiction is more compelling when it deals with themes that bear directly on people and their lives.

2. Maybe their primary concern is writing a good story and the philosophical implications are mostly incidental.

3. This is the uncharitable one. We ought to at least consider the possibility that some authors who couch their philosophy in fiction are doing so because they can’t state their theses clearly or won’t for fear of subjecting them to direct criticism.

Point (2) I can respect. Personally, I think an author’s first and foremost job is to write a compelling yarn, and that’s about all I’m looking for when I pick up a book. I hate getting the sense that I’m being preached at, even when I agree with the person doing the preaching. I read books to be moved and to feel something and, if we’re being honest, to kill some time with escapism. Anything else is an ancillary benefit. If I want philosophy I’ll cut out the middleman and read philosophy.

Point (1) I don’t necessarily respect, because it feels manipulative to me, but I can understand it pragmatically.

As for point (3), I won’t go there, but you all know there are examples of writers who do this.

Reasons authors might dab a hint of philosophy onto their fiction aside, this was stage two of my evolution with regard to the philosophical merits of literature. I had formalized some ideas and accepted that, yes, some literary works have philosophical value, for much the same reason that thought experiments have value.

Then just recently came stage three, which I will summarize as follows: even if in principle literary works can have philosophical value, the field of literary criticism is in a state of total disrepair as regards correctly appraising it.

Now, I’m not married to this. It’s just a first impression. If anyone has good examples they want to show me of philosophical treatment of a work of literature, I’m happy to read it (I suspect if you can find an example of an analytic philosophical treatment of a work of literature, preferably not hidden behind a paywall, I’ll find it more compelling). I’ve so far only seen the Cormac McCarthy paper (Hawkins, 2017) I mentioned in the opening paragraph, but it was so irritating that it has, perhaps unjustly, colored my perception of the entire field.

I will be frank: there’s little resembling clear, logical argumentation in the paper. It reads like a series of loosely connected assertions.

As we have seen, if there is no universal truth outside of Will, no Truth,
then evil finds its opposite only in Will, which by definition must tran-
scend the limits of man’s knowledge. Hence, while man may refuse to
participate in evil—man may, in fact, even rise up against it—man can-
not create a stable vision of justice, no Justice, to oppose it: knowledge
of Justice is beyond man’s epistemological limits.

I’m trying to be charitable, but this is just not an argument. Even if you can get some vague sense of what Hawkins might be trying to convey, he does no legwork to substantiate it. You could argue that I’ve taken this quote out of context, and you’d be right. I invite you to read the paper and see for yourself. The context doesn’t help. It’s more of the same³. I am quite sure that Cormac McCarthy is a brilliant man with lots of interesting philosophical ideas; I am equally sure that these aren't them.

Maybe I just haven’t been initiated into the lit crit gnostic circle yet, and that’s why it seem so bizarre to me. Am I the one that’s wrong here for refusing to engage with lit crit on its own terms? Am I just the literary equivalent of an evolution denier who has done all his research on YouTube?!

But again, I’m open to changing my mind on this. Show me clear, well-argued philosophical treatment of literature—something that would be up to the argumentative rigor standards of analytic philosophy—and I will change my tune. I will sing the praises of lit crit from the rooftops.

So that’s stage three of my evolution on the question of the philosophical merits of literature, and that’s where I’m at now.

Maybe I’m still just bitter about not being allowed to go to the bathroom in high school English.

1. Recall from previous posts that I favor the similarity analysis, i.e., that the counterfactual A>B is true just in case in a large majority of the possible worlds most similar to our own where A is true, B is true. But intuitively I think we can probably remain agnostic about what semantics we’re using here.

2. Unless the CIA has been behaving badly again.

3. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of stuff like this in the paper: “The first sentence foregrounds the difficulty, or perhaps even the impossibility, of separat-
ing essence from appearance. It is for this reason that McCarthy alerts us
both to the candleflame and the image thereof.” It’s just wild to me that some literary types seem to think they have a direct line of communication to the author’s intent behind writing a single sentence. Cormac McCarthy is still alive! He could hop on Twitter tonight and tweet “Nope, that’s all bullshit” at Ty Hawkins and decimate his entire paper. Ty, if you did reach out to Cormac and get confirmation from him about his intentions, I apologize.