Literature and Common Life
There seems to be a classical intuitive interest in the question, ‘What is the relation between philosophy and literature?’ I will refrain from either defining literature and philosophy or attempt to locate their respective areas of operation via inevitab
- PDF / 142,195 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 186 Views
Literature and Common Life
We learn much more of human interest, about how people think and feel, by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology. Noam Chomsky
The charming thing about the issue of convergence of literature and philosophy is that the issue is embedded in opposing intuitive pulls. On the one hand, there is a clear intuition that literature and philosophy, as forms of human thought, have significant convergence that goes deeper than the historical convergence of any pair of reflective forms of human thought. In other words, the intuition demands that the convergence of literature and philosophy be viewed in terms more intimate than what binds, say, literature and science, or literature and music. On the other hand, there is a strong intuition that literature and philosophy are very distinct forms of human thought which, in their appearances, have large autonomous areas of discourse and application that have very little to do with each other.
11.1
Saving the Appearances
Of course, two entities, A and B, need to be distinct in order to converge in the first place; I am not missing that logical point. In fact, I am going to play on it. For now, I am trying to draw attention to the methodological point that any interesting account of convergence ought to keep these opposing pulls firmly in view. Otherwise, it is all too easy to trivialize the issue. In our eagerness to locate convergences, we might be uncritically ignoring significant non-converging aspects of the disciplines. An account of convergence ought to leave enough degrees of freedom for the disciplines to diverge. Working with opposing intuitions thus severely constrains the scope of an interesting account. That is where the issue is This is a thoroughly revised version of a paper published as Mukherji (2006). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2017 N. Mukherji, Reflections on Human Inquiry, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5364-1_11
171
172
11
Literature and Common Life
most challenging. Let me illustrate this point by sketching some possible approaches to the issue that I reject, precisely because they do not obey the methodological constraint just suggested. For example, it is possible to draw on wide and common notions of literature and philosophy such that a convergence could be seen in almost any instance of human discourse. With such wide notions, no reflective articulation of human thought can fail to display aspects of literature and philosophy wherever they are coming from. I myself have often been struck with the quality and articulation of thought when conversing, say, with a Santhal labourer working in my garden, or with a Bihari rickshaw-puller taking me to the market. One is impressed with the abstract nature of the opinion, subtle interpretation of common experience, rational character of the position defended, creative enumeration of choices at hand, uses of irony, metaphor, imagery, deliberate ambiguity, apt idioms, analogies, and the like. It is difficult to conclude, from such ubiquitous presence o
Data Loading...
