Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction 3030992640, 9783030992644

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Wanda Teays   Editor

Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction

Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction

Wanda Teays Editor

Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction

Editor Wanda Teays Mount Saint Mary’s University Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-99264-4    ISBN 978-3-030-99265-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Willow

Acknowledgments

Thank you Michael Boylan for reshaping the field of philosophy through your narrative fiction. Your commitment to engaging your audience has furthered philosophical expression and moral reasoning. The essays here testify to the range of your influence. Thanks also to the contributors to this volume: Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Tina Fernandes Botts, Edward H. Spence, Peter Tagore Tan, Robert Paul Churchill, Gabriel Palmer-­ Fernández, Virginia L. Warren, Deborah S. Mower, Per Bauhn, Simona Giordano, Alan Tomhave, and Eddy M. Souffrant. Your insightful discussions of philosophical fiction and Boylan’s work in particular are a welcome addition to the field. I am grateful to Floor Oosting and Christopher Wilby at Springer for their support and encouragement. Thank you both. Thanks also goes to the readers. Together we can explore the intersection of fiction and philosophy and the possibilities it opens up.

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Although many people are capable of purely logical thinking, for most of us, the most natural way to understand the world around us is in terms of stories. Gerry Spence I will tell you something about stories… They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled… You don’t have anything if you don't have the stories. Leslie Marmon Silko

Renowned attorney Gerry Spence says, “Everything in life is a story. Everything. We are born—which is a story—and we die, the end of that story and perhaps the beginning of another. Our life in between was a story, a book, in fact, every day a page of the story. The question is whether anyone would want to read that book” (Tyrone 2011, 7). We chronicle the events of our lives through our stories and get an insight into others’ lives through their stories. Who we are, the choices we make, the consequences of our decisions, the expression of our values and beliefs can be traced through our stories. They are a doorway to our humanity, revealing our successes as well as failures, our joys as well as sorrows. Stories keep hope alive, give us a glimpse of what we are capable of, and help us see more clearly and reflect on the decisions we make. Great fiction bears this out. For Salman Rushdie, “The books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives” (2021). The power of stories sets in motion thoughts and ideas that develop our insights, help us acquire greater depth to our reasoning and get a better moral grip. They inspire us to look at our own lives, at the lives of others, and at the society as a whole. Our worldview takes shape, thanks to the stories defining our lives. “Although many people are capable of purely logical thinking,” Spence says, “for most of us, the most natural way to understand the world around us is in terms of stories”(Tyrone 2011, 9). Michael Boylan’s novels, his stories, are not just entertainment. They are works of fictive narrative philosophy opening a window on the human condition and helping us see how to live right. The characters inhabiting his works give us a context to reflect on the ways our moral values shape our understanding of the world. We stand ix

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at a distance, able to examine the issues characters face, the decisions they make, and the actions they take. Given the consequences, were they wise decisions? If they had to do it again, would they stay the course, or start anew? William H. Gass considers the novelist and the philosopher to be companions in a common enterprise, “though they go about it in different way” (2018, 642). Fiction transports us to a new possible world—one with a normative structure, says Boylan. We inhabit that realm until the story is concluded, and it may or may not resonate with our personal worldview (Boylan 2019, 135). He points out that we can then decide if the new offering is better or worse and therefore something to guard against. In this way we can picture the possibilities through fictional narratives, which he considers one of their key functions. The first stop on our journey, Boylan asserts, is in examining our personal worldview and how it should be constructed. Both the personal worldview and the community worldview are of key significance to Boylan’s ethics and are, thus, fundamental to his fiction. Values clarification is a vital first step. Here’s what Boylan suggests: Begin with show and tell. In stressing the importance of structure and the philosophical components of narrative fiction, there must be a coherent and complete moral order in the narrative presentation. Boylan contends that the structuring of a normative universe is the single most important point in whether the audience feels comfortable residing there (2019, 134). This comfort level links to the personal and community worldviews threaded throughout the narratives. In that sense, this is an ethical inquiry, and one we should not lose sight of. As Boylan points out, we bring in the sum of our experience with the plot, character, and physical detail. And so, it is that our values and beliefs come into view. We should not underestimate the power of fiction to explore concepts and beliefs and spotlight their meaning and significance. “Like the mathematician, like the philosopher, the novelist makes things out of concepts. Concepts consequently must be his critical concern” (Gass 2018, 672). Boylan’s work bears this out. His is a philosophical investigation using fictional narratives as his vehicle. He would agree with Gass’ view of the power of novels to explore concepts and “invade us as we read.” He would also second Martin Heidegger’s view of creation, namely “Creation as communication. Every creating is a sharing with others. To create is to share” (1984, 126–127). Boylan’s fictional narratives are fundamentally about sharing. They communicate a conceptual framework that conveys the centrality of both individual and community worldviews. In that sense, they are works of moral reasoning. As such, Boylan models a literary form of doing—and reshaping—philosophy. Most of us are drawn to literature, Boylan observes, as a source of growth and positive change. This aligns with the Aristotelian view that “only pursuing the most intellectually challenging daily habits and long-term life plan will lead to a flourishing soul” (2019, 120). In turn, this connects us to an existential self-improvement program, Boylan says. And so it is that our engagement with the fictive narrative calls us to look inward. Such introspection can have significant impact, as with the dark night of the soul. Whether it be through our lives or through our stories, we are called to construct or modify our worldviews to align with our values.

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In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus asserts, “It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence” (2001, 190). Look, for example, at Boylan’s novels The Extinction of Desire, Maya, and To the Promised Land. In each one we encounter characters confronting a set of ethical issues. All three protagonists find themselves adrift with no helping hand coming to their rescue. How they come to terms with the ethical dilemmas they face helps us reflect on own moral quandaries. Decisions have to be made, some with desirable consequences, some not. More decisions and more consequences follow (Teays 2015, 8). We are able to contemplate the choices and decisions, watching and learning as the story unfolds. Boylan’s narrative philosophy shines a light on the ethical challenges that we face. Thanks to his fictional springboard, we see how unwarranted assumptions and moral failings can wreak havoc. When our shortcomings outweigh our strengths and all hope for becoming a moral exemplar is lost, ethical assessment is in order. We must then take stock of where we’ve been and where in the world we’re headed. Boylan is in good company in using fictional narratives to reshape philosophy— as we see in the chapters in this text. The contributors show how Boylan’s narrative fiction is reshaping philosophy with his engaging alternative to discursive writing. Some of the most influential philosophers have taken the path of fiction, employing fictional methodology to explore the realm of ideas and the imagination. Think of Plato’s dialogues, Nietzsche’s aphorisms, the plays of Sartre, the novels of Camus, Kafka, and Beckett. Moreover, these different forms of philosophy have had impact, for example, with Martin Heidegger’s assessment of Thus Spake Zarathustra. According to Heidegger, “People usually take Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be the very summit of his creative work” (1984, 63). We might then say that it reaches Gass’ standard of being appreciated as properly philosophical. Nietzsche is not alone in receiving such attention. Sartre’s fiction has also been recognized for its philosophical significance. Sartre asserts that “existence precedes essence,” that we are who we are because of our actions and deeds and not because of some set of abstract ideas or concepts. Who I am as an individual, my identity, is shaped by what I make of my life—I am responsible for the choices I have made. I can’t blame anyone else for what I’ve become. How best to illustrate that except by fiction? The characters bring ideas to life. They help us see how our values, beliefs, and personal worldview imperative gets played out within the context of our lives and the society of which we are a part. For example, philosopher Linda E.  Patrik notes that Sartre’s The Flies offers a case study of an individual creating his own essence: Orestes decides to define himself, through his actions, as the e avenger of his father‘s death and as the liberator of the people of Argos. In Sartre’s version of this ancient story, Orestes was not born or fated to be an avenger or liberator. He makes himself one after discovering he is free (2001, 24).

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Orestes tells Zeus, “Neither master nor slave. I am my freedom. No sooner had you created me then I ceased to be yours” (Sartre, 39). Sartre’s view that we are free and, thus, responsible for the person we become is expressed in all of his works— literary as well as philosophical. We understand the concepts of freedom and responsibility and the values shaping identity through his characters’ decisions, actions, and reactions. So, too, with Boylan’s fictional narratives. They spotlight concepts and quandaries his characters confront and which we can contemplate at a safe distance. One advantage that Boylan illustrates is the extent to which this has a dual purpose. Through the characters we are able to reflect on the existential dimension of life. In this respect, fiction is a tool for the philosopher to dig deeper and lay bare the challenges we must contend with in making our way through life. Professors John D.  Ramage and John C.  Bean consider the ways stories have such impact and are such a powerful medium. They offer an emotional appeal— “pathos” in Aristotle’s terms—that is central to their attraction. As a result, This can turn the abstractions of logic into something palpable and present. The values, beliefs and understandings of the writer are implicit in the story and conveyed imaginatively to the reader. Pathos thus refers to both the emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on an audience, the power with which the writer’s message moves the audience to decision or action” (noted by Simms 2013).

That’s not all. We also get a window on the community in which we reside and adopt (or reject) its worldview and values. Boylan thinks we should pay close attention to the way the community is presented, as it concerns how we weigh the interests of the individual against those of the community, he notes (2019, 163). Boylan recommends that we seek a balance between an individualistic perspective and one which is communitarian. Besides the principal characters, there is the environment in which they live. This environment is important when judging the philosophical claim made by the work, he argues ((2019, 163). In that regard we need to get the big picture and not just a narrow look focusing on the particulars. With this, we are called to reflect on what this world has to offer and whether it is one we would choose to inhabit. Boylan states that we have been concerned with depicting the logical mechanics of storytelling. In his view, “This device is used every day by people all over the world to convey what they believe to be essential truths of life. Since truth is also the purview of philosophy, it is here that the origins of fictive narrative philosophy lie” (2019, 168). Entire schools of Philosophy turn on their logical foundation and the conceptual frameworks at their root. Emphasizing the role logic has to play in philosophy and, thus, in narrative philosophy he says, “We justify the fictive presentation via abductive logic if it suggests probable solutions to certain resident problems in our own world” (2019, 137). This helps us clarify the issues and point the way to a resolution. For Boylan fiction is not so much a work of either inductive or deductive logic. It is the preponderance of evidence, he says, that allows us to imagine a new perspective on the situation: “I’m going to call this process abduction. It will be an important component to understanding and applying the logic of fictive narrative

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philosophy” (2019, 133). If we look at what propels us to do this rather than that, he says, what seems most plausible tends to be the reason for favoring one course of action over the other. Fiction can provide a vehicle for such analysis and reflection. Throughout Boylan’s narrative fiction is an inquiry and an appreciation of ethics and justice. We see this with the way the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control come into play. His characters must come to terms with the virtues as they struggle with the moral dilemmas they face, such as the issues of greed and lack of moral clarity in The Extinction of Desire, forgiveness in To the Promised Land, and fate vs. free will in Maya. These novels, along with Boylan’s other fictional narratives, act as a catalyst for readers to reflect on these ideas and on their own lives. The chapters in this anthology demonstrate the range of Michael Boylan’s ethical exploration. Let’s see how.

The Structure of This Book This book is divided into five parts. They are: Part I: Theory; Part II: The De Anima Novels; Part III: The Archē Novels; Part IV: Teaching Fictive Narrative Philosophy; and Part V: Boylan’s Response to Commentators. Part I sets the stage with four chapters focused on Boylan’s fictional narratives and the ways in which they play a distinct role in philosophy. Jeffrey R. Di Leo contends that Boylan’s novels are fundamentally reshaping the field of philosophy. In his view there is a strong case for integrating literature into the philosophy curriculum; he argues that it will require a disciplinary-wide shift. This shift asks academic philosophers to move literature from being a subset of philosophy of art to center stage as a primary vehicle of philosophical discourse on ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. In the next chapter, Tina Fernandes Botts extends the focus of fictional narratives to include Critical Race Theory. She argues that structural and institutional racism are key factors in alienating persons of color from the protections of the legal liberal order, and fiction and literature have shed light on the human costs. As Botts discusses, Boylan's novel Georgia operates within the Critical Race Theory tradition while exploring such philosophical questions as the nature of racialized identity and the effects of the social construction of race and institutionalized, systemic racism. She notes that Critical Race Theory has expanded from legal theory into philosophy. This has brought interdisciplinary approaches to the societal problems of race and racism, Botts argues, including using personal narrative and fiction to offer insight into the human cost of these phenomena. In Chap. 4 Edward H. Spence sets out a model of doing public philosophy though philosophy-plays. He discusses how his approach is in line with Boylan’s narrative fiction and in keeping with the Hellenistic method of doing philosophy as a way of life. The Philosophy Plays, like Platonic dialogues, seek to engage their audiences both intellectually and affectively, combining dialectic (philosophical talk) with

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rhetoric (drama), thus rendering philosophy a practical and meaningful activity. He sees Michael Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy as sharing a common rational philosophical, ethical, and logical approach. Peter Tagore Tan gives an historical overview of different approaches to fiction— particularly Plato’s mimetic model—in Chap. 5. He sets out an alternative model to address what he considers mimetic representationalism’s inconsistencies. Tan proposes a fiction-as-adequacy interpretation modeled after the use of fiction in the legal field. In place of Plato’s representational idealism, he recommends Process Philosophy as the metaphysical grounds of fiction. Whitehead’s Process Philosophy will then ground Boylan’s claim that fiction can be philosophy. Tan’s essay gives us a broad background to understanding philosophical fiction as applicable to Boylan’s fictional narratives. Part II focuses on the De Anime novels. These are The Extinction of Desire, Rainbow Curve, To the Promised Land, and Maya: An Irish-American History. This part opens with an introduction in which Boylan sets out the aim of these novels. This is followed by Robert Paul Churchill’s discussion in Chap. 7. There, Churchill uses The Extinction of Desire as a springboard to examine fictive storytelling as it reinforces the formation of personal identity. He argues for a model of identity that forms a coherent past projecting into a meaningful future. He contends that fictive narrative philosophy has the ability to enhance self-understanding and life-­ satisfaction. His chapter ends with a look at the concerns raised by Internet-mediated experiences and Internet-mediated identity. In the next chapter, Gabriel Palmer-Fernández examines moral change and racial justice in Boylan’s novel Rainbow Curve. Boylan presents Rainbow as one of three novels of a trilogy under the concept of De Anima exploring fundamental moral perspectives, particularly the meaning of justice and how bonds of sympathy arise. Palmer-Fernández points out that these are themes Boylan has treated at length in A Just Society and Natural Human Rights. In Rainbow Curve, Boylan adds a comparative angle by seeing justice from an Islamic perspective. Much of what Boylan says about worldview, Palmer-Fernández asserts, can be seen in the life story and worldview of Malcolm X. In linking this to Boylan’s novel, Palmer-Fernández discusses how authentic people ought to be self-reflective in developing their worldview and of the body of knowledge from which the worldview draws its content. Virginia L. Warren discusses To the Promised Land in Chap. 9. The ethical focus of the novel is forgiveness. Judaism holds that, even if the group is very large, one must request forgiveness of those who have been harmed. This is virtually impossible to achieve when the group is very large. Lead character Moses Levi agonizes over what he did as a corporate lawyer in successfully defending a chemical company that caused thousands of people to be damaged by toxic waste. Warren analyzes the effectiveness of moral analogies from the perspective of different roles (victim, perpetrator, rescuer). She argues that a long reconciliation process involves empowering those who were harmed. By demanding that their stories be heard and that “reparations” be paid as a matter of justice, she says, they can forge a new identity based on agency and self-respect, rather than on being victims. And while not

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everyone harmed can be reached, she notes, the effort to include and empower as many as possible is ongoing. In the last chapter of Part II, Wanda Teays looks at the treatment of free will versus fate in Maya: An Irish-American History. Drawing from his concept of a Personal Worldview Imperative, Boylan traces the existential dimensions of three generations of an Irish-Americans family. In employing actual events to frame the narrative, he highlights the effect of social conditions and the forces at work affecting a family and community. How should they characterize the good or bad “luck” befalling their family? This leads us to the question of destiny —a philosophical puzzle that casts a long shadow on the Irish immigrants whose history Maya relays. The novel tackles such issues, demonstrating the value of narrative fiction as a vehicle for doing philosophy. Part III focuses on the Archē novels, opening with a preface by Michael Boylan. The novels under discussion here are Naked Reverse, T-Rx: The History of a Radical Leader, and The Long Fall of the Ball From the Wall. After Michael Boylan’s opening introduction to this part, Deborah S. Mower looks at Naked Reverse and the Cartesian self from the perspective of Feminist Care Ethics. She starts with assumptions of the Western tradition about moral agency and the nature of the self as a metaphysical entity. She proceeds to argue that the Cartesian conception is inadequate as a way to frame the characters’ development and the narrative of their joint journey. In its place Mower turns to Nel Noddings’ relational conception of the self for examining the novel. She approaches Naked Reverse in terms of three acts—(1) introducing the characters and their journeys, (2) their interactions, and (3) their return. Per Bauhn discusses Boylan’s novel T-Rx: The History of a Radical Leader in Chap. 13. His discussion centers on revolutionary agency, gender, and integrity, with the spotlight on the two main characters, T-Rx and Mary Taylor. Using a historical conception of the revolutionary agent outlined by the Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev, Bauhn looks at the limitations of Consequentialism along with the shortcomings of Nechayev’s conception of the revolutionary agent. In examining the novel, Bauhn argues that the fictional character of T-Rx does not fit Nechayev’s conception of the revolutionary agent so well—that he is a Socratic kind of revolutionary. In addition, Mary Taylor is the female protagonist whose interaction with T-Rx brings out the destructive implications of Nechayev’s conception of the revolutionary agent. For Bauhn, Boylan’s narrative of T-Rx and Mary Taylor illustrates at least three significant shortcomings of revolutionary agency as outlined by Nechayev. His chapter makes the case. In Chap. 14, the last chapter in Part III, Simona Giordano discusses The Long Fall of the Ball From the Wall. Her focus is on child mistreatment as exemplified in the novel and contends that the type of child maltreatment narrated there is insidious. In her view, the prevalence of child maltreatment in affluent societies challenges certain paradigms entrenched in the fabric of liberal pluralistic societies. She is especially concerned with the rights of the adults to non-interference in the upbringing of “their” children. Without serious reconsideration of the adults’ parental rights in private life, we may not be able to effectively tackle child maltreatment. Her chapter explores these important issues.

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Part IV consists of two chapters on using fictive narrative philosophy to teach philosophy. The first one, Chap. 15, by Alan Tomhave, addresses the question of how fictive narrative philosophy might change the way we teach. He starts by explaining the logic of how fictive narrative philosophy is supposed to work. He then provides three examples where the use of fictive narrative philosophy enhances student learning. In light of the benefits, he believes philosophy instructors should use fictive narrative philosophy in their classroom teaching. His chapter ends with a discussion of Boylan’s view of three kinds of narratives—fictive narrative philosophy, case studies, and thought experiments. In Chap. 16, Eddy M. Souffrant looks at practical considerations regarding narrative fiction in discussing ways to teach it in the classroom. He agrees with Michael Boylan that philosophy should involve more than the material focused on by direct discourse. It needs also to tackle the areas of life that do not lend themselves to the simple contentions of truth and validity. Boylan contends that fictive narratives are more fitting than direct discourse for examining the conditions of our living. However, Souffrant argues, some aspects of contemporary living, like anti-Black racism or white supremacy, create conditions that warrant examination and analyses. He contends that fictive narrative philosophy does not confront these conditions head-on. And so Souffrant recommends a narrative for a contemporary citizenry to provide paths for undoing the existential threats that such conditions pose. His chapter spotlights this concern. In Part V Michael Boylan responds to his commentators, reflecting on how they saw philosophy being expressed via fiction, that is, fictive narrative philosophy.

Mount Saint Mary’s University Los Angeles, CA, USA

Wanda Teays

References Boylan, Michael. 2019. Fictive narrative philosophy: How fiction can act as philosophy. New York: Routledge. Gass, William H. 2018. The William H. Gass reader. New York: Vintage Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Nietzsche vol. two: The eternal recurrence of the same, Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Patrik, Linda E. 2001. Existential literature. Belmont: Wadsworth. Ramage, John D., and John C. Bean. 1998. Writing arguments. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Rushdie, Salman. 2021. Ask yourself which books you truly love. The New York Times, May 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/opinion/sunday/salman-­rushdie-­world-­literature.html?a ction=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 26 May 2021. Simms, Gary. 2013. Tell me a story: Even an appellate judge wants a good story with emotional appeal. Plaintiff Magazine, December. https:/www.Plaintiffmagazine.Com/Recent-­Issues/ Item/Tell-­Me-­A-­Story. Accessed 5 Mar 2021. Teays, Wanda. 2015. “Foreword” to Michael Boylan. In To the promised land. Bethesda: PWI Books. Tyrone, Nelson. 2011. Conducting your own focus groups to discover story, metaphor, ‘rules’ and the ‘reptile’. GTLA, May. https://tyronelaw.com/WP_CONTE/UPLOADS/FOCUS_ GR.PDF. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Contents

Part I Theory 1 Preface to Part One: Reflections on Reshaping Philosophy and the Emergence of Un-Ordered Pairs����������������������������������������������    3 Michael Boylan 2 Boylan’s Fictional Narratives and the Reshaping of Philosophy��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 Jeffrey R. Di Leo 3 How Can Fiction Contribute to Critical Race Theory? ����������������������   35 Tina Fernandes Botts 4 Philosophy Plays: A Neo-Socratic Way of Performing Public Philosophy������������������������������������������������������������   51 Edward H. Spence 5 Processing Fiction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 Peter Tagore Tan Part II  The De Anima Novels 6 Preface to Part Two: What Is the Aim of the De Anima Novels?��������������������������������������������������������������������������   85 Michael Boylan 7 The Extinction of Desire, Narrative Identity, and the Good Life������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 Robert Paul Churchill 8 Rainbow Curve, Moral Change, Racial Justice��������������������������������������  109 Gabriel Palmer-Fernández

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Contents

9 To the Promised Land: Ethics, Religion and the Power of Storytelling ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  125 Virginia L. Warren 10 Free Will vs. Fate in Maya: An Irish-­American History������������������������  141 Wanda Teays Part III  The Archē Novels 11 Preface to Part Three: What Is the Aim of the Archē Novels?������������  157 Michael Boylan 12 Naked Reverse and the Downfall of the Cartesian-Self: Introducing a Feminist Characterization of Who We Are ������������������  165 Deborah S. Mower 13 Revolutionary Agency, Gender, and Integrity: The Story of T-Rx and Mary Taylor������������������������������������������������������  177 Per Bauhn 14 The Long Fall of the Ball From the Wall: Reflections on Child Maltreatment��������������������������������������������������������  193 Simona Giordano Part IV  Using Fictive Narrative Philosophy to Teach Philosophy 15 Fictive Narrative Philosophy as Necessary in the Classroom��������������  213 Alan Tomhave 16 Narrative for a Contemporary Citizenship ������������������������������������������  227 Eddy M. Souffrant Part V  Boylan Responds to His Commentators 17 A Reply to My Colleagues ����������������������������������������������������������������������  249 Michael Boylan

Part I

Theory

Chapter 1

Preface to Part One: Reflections on Reshaping Philosophy and the Emergence of Un-Ordered Pairs Michael Boylan

Abstract  This essay explores the field of philosophy as practiced in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia over the lifetime of the author. The focus is upon how the community of philosophers (and their interests as regarded (internally and externally)) have changed from a more homogeneous group of scholars into one that has diversified to such an extent that it is impossible anymore for anyone to keep track of most of the field. Two pivotal examples of this from the author’s own research are brought forward as illustrations. Keywords  Twentieth century philosophy · New directions in philosophy · Michael Boylan So how is it in the field of philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What does it mean to be a philosopher? These are important questions and the range of answers that are often given by those in the profession and those outside the profession have varied over the brief time that I have counted myself as a philosopher. It is instructive to think about these questions because as Socrates used to say, one cannot opine about x unless he or she understands what x is. Otherwise, we will be just like Euthyphro who prosecuted his father for being anosion (impious) when he didn’t really know what hosion (piety) was. To do that is to run the risk of corrupting our students, which is indeed a serious charge. So, to begin our brief historical journey, let us consider the shared community worldview of philosophers on or about the time that I was in graduate school in the mid-1970s. The profession as I saw it then was a very close community (uncharitable folk might even call it a clique). From the beginning of the twentieth century Originally presented as the key note at the annual meeting of the Virginia Philosophical Association Meeting, 19 October, 2012. M. Boylan (*) Marymount University, Arlington, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_1

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and the publication of Principia Mathematica and Principia Ethica by Cambridge professors, there was a decided move to situate the profession into the inquiry of ordered pairs. By “ordered pairs” here I mean a single methodological approach that unites a small group of scholars in the humanities (only classics is smaller) around a set of questions to be discussed—such as the logicist thesis, or the conceptual analysis of the word ‘good’—as well as an accepted method for doing so. The advantage of a tight-knit community is that there is a lot of positive interaction among its members. It has been shown that positive interaction among like-minded thinkers can press the advancement of various problems beyond what single thinkers can do alone (cf. the Field Prize folk and modern research laboratories).1 And so things progressed in UK, US, Canada, and Australia. Through a handful of journals and prestigious group meetings such as UCL’s Aristotelian Society, the cadre of colleagues hotly debated the accepted questions of the day. There was a general sense that people could engage arguments from the different areas of philosophy and that people read widely beyond the micro problem that engaged them at that time. There were outliers, to be sure. Process and Reality, by Alfred North Whitehead was thought to be a bit odd. Whitehead was always defending this work to his students (such as my professor, Donald Davidson). But because Whitehead had already earned his stripes with his collaborative work with Russell and Albert Einstein, philosophers in the profession talked about the work in terms of Leibnitz and his interest in mathematics. The “process thinking” that led to process theology (through followers such as Hartshorne) was not discussed in polite company. What philosophy aspired to was “a committee of the whole.” When the group decided that science was the hot topic, the logical empiricists arose and took ascendency. Talk of “black ravens” and counterfactual confirmation by reference to the Washington Monument gave everyone a chuckle. The goal at every philosophy conference was to think up an outrageous thought experiment that made people both laugh and say, “Well, there’s something to that, you know.” This showed imagination (a necessary condition to genius—the philosopher’s stone that transfixed ordinary discourse into the divine discourse—among atheists, of course). It was an interesting community dynamic that was based partly on camaraderie as well as cut-throat competition. Everyone wanted to be the last one standing. When a question-­and-answer session was engaged, it could never be left that philosopher A said x and philosopher B said ~x. No. Either x or ~x was correct and thus a rhetorical jousting contest was engaged that could last for hours—even after the official time-period of the conference or the invited public talk. This disputation of community worldviews could work positively (as mentioned above), but it could also be destructive. Richard McKeon, for example, seemed to revel in the way he could destroy “unworthy” Ph.D. students working under him—even to the point of causing suicide. If you couldn’t take argumentative 1  I’m thinking of the Polymath Project to find a new proof to the Hayes-Jewell Theory by Fields winner Timothy Gowers, cf. Timothy Gowers and M.  Nielsen, “Massively Collaborative Mathematics” Nature 461.7266 (2009): 879–881.

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attacks (and even ad hominem attacks), then you didn’t deserve to hold a doctoral sheepskin. The unified ordered pair worldview set great stock on who you worked with to attain the Ph.D., and it indulged in various anecdotes that directors and committee members would tell their students. It was almost like a medieval guild. The received wisdom of my professors supported this. Paul Ricoeur would include anecdotes about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir. Donald Davidson would have his stories about Alfred North Whitehead, and Alan Gewirth would spin tales about the notorious Richard McKeon. This was a time of narrative and collective history. It was how I learned one version of the Story of Philosophy—at least an historicized version of the Anglo-American tradition. But then there were the outliers. Other professors of mine were different. Ian Mueller, Alan Donagan, Steven Toulmin, William Wimsatt and Ted Cohen (in my school) and Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hull, and others (elsewhere)—more on that shortly. These were the parents of the un-ordered pairs. Before we go there, let us consider the 1950s. In the United States this was not a period of socially supported speculation about the nature of first principles and their causes.2 Instead, as John McCumber has persuasively argued, American philosophers tried to escape social responsibility and possible attack by the McCarthy-­ inspired Communist-hunters, by pretending that everything that they presented was value-neutral.3 It was just like the logical-empiricists’ dream: matters of fact, abstract axioms and theorems, all tied together in Ramsey sentences. Rudolph Carnap was one of the captains of the fleet. The fantasy was this: If we ascend Aristotle’s line of predicables to the highest levels of “substance,” “quality,” “quantity,” “position,” “posture,” “place,” et  al., then we have escaped. Who could question the discourse about primary substance? No one can accuse us of talking Commie-lingo, because we have been very careful that we are talking about nothing that has an application to the world we live in. No black-list for American philosophers! What they discussed didn’t pertain at all to the lived-world of the hoi polloi.4 This was the world of the ordered pairs. Like porcelain bibelots set in a row upon a mantel-piece for all to see and admire, the ordered pair shared community worldview sought an insularity that would protect it from the world of action and human events.

 Metaphysics, I.i.  John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 4  I might note here that this was the attitude of Martin Heidegger that he expressed to his student Hannah Arendt (that philosophy in Germany could be “value-free” so that Heidegger could write “value-free” philosophy and collaborate with the Nazis)—see my fictive narrative depiction of their debate in “Eichmann and Heidegger in Jerusalem” in Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson, Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010, rpt. Routledge, 2020): 234–244. 2 3

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Well, obviously this wasn’t entirely the case. There were some philosophers who stepped outside the academy to fight for civil rights and economic equality—but from the point of view of the academy the ordered pairs greatly outnumbered the unordered pairs. But this was about to change. Enter the philosophy of biology. When Hilary Putnam and Paul Oppenheim authored their famous defense of reductionism in, “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis” in 19585 they were writing toward the end of the logical empiricist tradition in the philosophy of science. The tradition began with a vision of unity. First, it was the logicist conjecture that led to the unity of science hypothesis through its insistence on thorough reductionism: if human action could be fully described via psychology and sociology and these, in turn, could be fully described by biology, and biology was nothing but chemistry, and (of course) chemistry was only applied physics and physics was only applied mathematics and mathematics was applied logic, then everything depended upon logic. Thus, Aristotle’s fundamental question in the Metaphysics whether there is a master science of everything has been answered—signed, sealed, and delivered! It was a perfect set of ordered pairs. Well, we’ve done philosophy! Now what’s next? A rousing game of tennis anyone? Things looked pretty neat to Putnam and Oppenheim but then those pesky philosophers of biology came in and spoiled the picnic. They brought in holism & feedback loops. These hurt deductive reductionism in a big way. Evolutionary theory with its potential for “top ⇒ down” causation (instead of the reductionistic “bottom ⇒ up”) ushered in an entirely new set of questions. These questions were not confined to the philosophy of science, either. My general response to this was to publish an introduction to philosophy text, Perspectives in Philosophy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993) that situated the major areas of philosophy introduced with a short story and a poem I admired.6 The book had moderate success for more than a decade. In my own work in ethics, I set out a text entitled Basic Ethics that was the anchor of what turned out to be a 14-book series with Prentice-Hall. The operative key to these books was that prospective authors had to treat the human agent and his/her community as more than a rational machine making decisions based upon readily available facts. In the ordered pair world during this period, wild thought experiments were imagined that had nothing to do with the world we all live in. Instead, a new context was set out in which a problem was created and easily solved—and then brought back to the complicated world we do live in. What might be the matter with that? It’s asserting the conclusion by importing boundary conditions that prejudge the answer. I call this the “thought-experiment fallacy.”7

5  Hilary Putnam and Paul Oppenheim, “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis” from Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol II, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958): 3–36. 6  I note with some pride, that I got a story from Maya Angelou before her celebrity at the Clinton Inauguration. 7  Michael Boylan, The Good, The True, and The Beautiful (London: Continuum, 2008): 213, n.9.

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And so, I launched my Prentice-Hall series, and it was moderately successful in the accessible monograph world (along the line of Prentice-Hall’s Foundations of Philosophy series of the 1960s-1970s). Authors from four countries contributed and because of its holistic emphasis and my own emphasis upon feminist ethics, it helped to give voice to a new audience. It created a counter-culture of un-ordered pairs. Almost instantly, my life changed. Suddenly, I became aware of many who had felt alienated by the ordered pairs. Some were the renegades of the American Philosophical Association fights in the 1980s regarding “Continental Philosophy” and “Christian Philosophy” (concerning whether the APA would recognize these un-ordered approaches). Eventually, these unordered folk prevailed: the times, they were a-changing. My own foray into holism in ethics (trying to include some feministic ethics sensibilities) can be depicted in my Personal Worldview Imperative: “All people must develop a single, comprehensive and internally coherent worldview that is good and that we strive to act out in our daily lives.”8 It is my conjecture that every agent acting or potentially acting in the world falls under the normative force of the Personal Worldview Imperative. The personal worldview imperative really features four key points: (a) comprehensiveness, (b) coherence, (c) connection to a theory of the good, and (d) a requirement of personal action. Let’s examine these each in order. Comprehensiveness  This requirement is also called ‘completeness.’ It is often said of any logical (axiomatic) theory—especially those that apply to the world—that completeness is an important formal component. A personal worldview that is complete can confront novel situations in life and present an action recommendation. An incomplete worldview would be at a loss and would have to hoist up the white flag of surrender. It seems to this author that the best way to ensure completeness in a personal worldview is by developing a goodwill. There are at least two senses of ‘goodwill’ that I would like to highlight here: a rationally-based goodwill and an emotionally-­ based goodwill. I believe that both are necessary for achieving completeness in our personal worldview.

8  Some might contend that my depiction of this imperative places an over reliance upon form over content. It is a “procedure” and thus cannot have normative “content.” Against this attack, I would reply that though the prescription simpliciter is procedural, it will result in some content. And, if taken in the Socratic spirit of living an examined life, then the force of the normativity is toward participation in a process which must be sincere because it represents each of our very best versions of the “good, true, and beautiful.” For a more rigorous examination of the personal worldview imperative see: Michael Boylan, A Just Society (Lanham, Md and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), Chap. 2. For my exposition on the relationship between the good, the true and the beautiful, see my book: The Good, The True, and The Beautiful (London: Continuum, 2008). My latest update on interpreting the personal worldview imperative can be found in Michael Boylan, Natural Human Rights: A Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): Chap. 6.

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The rationally-based goodwill requires the agent sincerely to adopt a commitment towards living a life that takes reason into account. In cases of ethics this would mean using one’s deductive and inductive powers in order to make sense of the situation confronting us and then to allow this reason to inform upon our action decisions. The standpoint of rationally-based goodwill suggests that a large part of who we all are as homo sapiens is rational. It is a dominant property of who we are. To fail to recognize and act upon this, is to degrade ourselves. This is no small thing. Because of the assumed comprehensive nature of reason itself, agents so committed will never be at a loss of what to do. Completeness will be maintained. But we are not totally rationally-based beings. We are also emotionally-based. There may be some overlap between these, but for our purposes let us assume that the ethically relevant aspect of our emotional being begins in empathy. Empathy is the rational ability to understand that other people may view the world differently than we do. This is a logical recognition of diversity in the world. Next comes sympathy. Sympathy is the connection between the emotions of two different people. Now some sympathy consists in a superior looking at an inferior: “I feel so sorry for you.” This is a form of sympathy, but it is not as morally relevant to the emotional goodwill. In the emotional goodwill there must be an even-handedness. This means one puts one’s self on the level of the agent with whom we are emotionally connected. We are equal. There is no looking downward or upward. I call this disposition: openness. It is my conjecture that sympathy that is open yields caring. Caring is an action response by one agent to another to remedy pain or need within one’s capacity. I believe that unless one is at the far ends of the Bell curve in psychological normalcy, all people who connect with others in sympathetic openness will care for the object of their concern. This combination: (empathy + sympathy + openness ⇒ care) = philosophical love. When one has philosophical love for another, there will never be a case in which one will be at a loss for what to do. Completeness will be maintained.9 Coherence  There are at least two ways to understand coherence in this context: (a) deductive coherence and (b) inductive coherence. Deductive coherence has to do with simple contradictions. We should not act in contradictory ways. Why is this? It is because that though we both embrace reason and emotion, reason trumps. Emotion is often contradictory. I want to buy the ice cream cone but I also want money for the movie ticket. I can’t have both. Or I contend that I will not use recreational illegal drugs such as Ecstasy. However, though I say this in my Bible study group, when I’m with my ‘player’ friends I take all the pills that I can get. This is a clear case of deductive incoherence. I. Jon says, “I will not take any illegal drugs.”—context #1 (Bible study group) II. Jon says, “Give me some of that Ecstasy drug”—context #2 (at a Rave).

9  In those rare cases in which the two goodwill standpoints disagree, the rational goodwill standpoint should supervene (Boylan 2004, Chap. 2).

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Example 1: Deductive Incoherence If Jon believes in taking the illegal drug ecstasy, then his belief should show forth in all contexts. If Jon does not, then that too, should be evident. One’s opinions of possible actions (that have ethical content) should not be context driven. In short, deductive incoherence asks you to be consistent with what you espouse and do between various contexts in which you are presented with action choices. Inductive incoherence is very often not thought about in this context. Inductive incoherence is also called “a sure-loss contract.” It refers to a situation in which a betting house will always lose. For example, if I were to open the Boylan betting house on whether there will be a human on Mars by 2030 and I offered 5::1 odds yes and 5::1 odds no, then unless I have an infinite amount of money, I will be out of business. This is because the contradictory odds must be at least complementary to the primary odds. But what has this to do with ethics? Many people have personal life strategies that are inductively incoherent. Take this example: A. Ms. X says she wants to be a good mother and wife. B. Ms. X also wants to have serial affairs with Mr. Y & Z.

Example 2: Inductive Incoherence In inductive incoherence the very qualities that would enable you to be successful in A will make you a failure at B. For example, a good spouse should be honest and supportive. A good parent should be there when the child is in need and be generally supportive in actions and attitudes. In B, a good cheat is adept at turning off her conscience. She must be able to lie well and to suit herself in all circumstances. The traits necessary to be successful in A will make one a failure at B and vice versa. If one were to set out to do both, she would be involved in a sure-loss contract. It is the contention of this piece of the Personal Worldview Imperative that one should not be deductively or inductively incoherent if one wishes to become the best person she can be. Connection to a Theory of Good  I have parsed several theories of the good. These include: ethical intuitionism, ethical non-cognitivism, ethical contractarianism, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology. One may also appeal to her religion or aesthetics in giving her a foundation for her ethical values. The point to all this is that one must have reasons for what she does. Some of these reasons should connect to a theory of being good: an ethical theory. Those who dismiss this part of the process are not in accord with the personal worldview imperative. The personal worldview imperative gives leeway to various ways to fulfill this requirement. But what is not up for compromise is the requirement that one is sincere (a striving hard for the ethical) as well as authentic (the situating of the striving within a legitimate c­ ontext).

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Obviously, the first requirement is more in our power than the second. We can strive because of a passion within our soul. But the object of our striving is ultimately an artifact of our reason. To strive for an improper goal would be to combine sincerity and an inauthentic goal (for example, such as a person might be passionate in his desire for wealth at the cost of unfairly hurting others). This is often the rub. Very few of us actually contemplate the best way to the achievement of our goals. We simply internalize the social givens. This is unacceptable. We need to be responsible for the direction of our lives. The personal worldview imperative enjoins us to do just that. A Requirement of Action  How little is gained by someone who proclaims a position but never really lives it in his life. Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Elmer Gantry is one clear example of this.10 In the novel, a charismatic Baptist preacher converts many and attains national prominence while really practicing actions that are contradictory to what he advocated. This is hypocrisy. Under the personal worldview imperative, we are enjoined to do what we say. In the current colloquial jargon in the United States this is often described as “walking the talk.” A second key point refers to what we are enjoined to walk. Some ethical theories prescribe impossible outcomes. For example, the Shakers (a Protestant religious sect in the nineteenth century) told followers not to have sexual intercourse. This was based upon some sort of idea of extinguishing desire as a road to salvation. However, if everyone in the world did this, the world would cease to have humans in less than 150 years. For clarification let us describe ethical theories that proscribe unattainable ends as utopian. Utopian theories are to be discarded on the grounds of the personal worldview imperative. Rather, we should adopt models that challenge us to be good in such ways that are possible—though they may be rather difficult to achieve. Let us call this approach, aspirational ethics. For example, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commitment to social justice is rather difficult for most to achieve, but it is possible. His life showed us so. Ethics should be about what is aspirational and not what is utopian.

Community Worldview Community worldview is similar to personal worldview except that it is not so exact. This is because there is inevitably more diversity in a group than there will be in any single individual. The rough similarity between the two is mirrored in the shared community worldview imperative: “Each agent must contribute to a 10  Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). Sinclair Lewis was also the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

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common body of knowledge that supports the creation of a shared community worldview (that is itself complete, coherent, and good) through which social institutions and their resulting policies might flourish within the constraints of the essential core commonly held values (ethics, aesthetics, and religion).” There are several key elements to this imperative. First, there is the exhortation to create a common body of knowledge.11 The Common Body of Knowledge is a set of factual and normative principles about which there is general agreement among a community or between communities of people. This includes (but is not limited to) agreement on what constitutes objective facts and how to measure them. It also includes (but is not limited to) what counts as acceptable values that will be recognized as valid in the realms of ethics, aesthetics, and religion. This is an essential element in order for positive group discussion to proceed. Second, there is a dialectical process of discussion among members of a single community and between members of various single communities that are united in another larger heterogeneous community. This discussion should seek to form an understanding about the mission of the community within the context of the common body of knowledge and the commonly held core values held by members of the community. These values will include ethical maxims, aesthetic values, and religious values. Of course, there will be disagreements, but a process is enjoined that will create a shared worldview that is complete, coherent, and good.12 Third, is that the result of this dialectical creation of a shared community worldview is to employ it in the creation (or revision of) social institutions that are responsible for setting policy within the community/social unit. It should be clear that this tenet seems highly inclined toward democracy. It is. However, it is not restricted to this. Even in totalitarian states the influence of the shared community worldview is significant. One can, for example, point to the great differences among communist states in post-World War II Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba during the 1960’s-80. All were Communist. Yet there were great differences in the way the totalitarian regimes operated in each instance. This is because, even without the free vote, the shared community worldview casts a strong influence upon the operation of society’s institutions and their resultant policies. Finally, it should be noted that the actions of those institutions must always be framed within the core values of the people who make up the society. Whenever the society veers too far away in its implementation of the social worldview from the personal worldviews of the members of the society, then a realignment must occur. In responsive democracies this takes the form of installing a new government as the result of the next election. In totalitarian regimes, change will also occur, but generally by coup d’état or by armed revolution.  I discuss the common body of knowledge in greater detail as it pertains to logical argument in The Process of Argument (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), Chap. 1; cf. a more recent account can be found in Michael Boylan, Natural Human Rights: A Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): Chap. 6. 12  I discuss an example of how this shared community worldview might arise in my essay, “Affirmative Action: Strategies for the Future” Journal of Social Philosophy 33.1 (2002): 117–130. 11

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Many people are more inclined to take seriously the personal worldview imperative because it makes them more effective at achieving the prudential and ethical ends that they hold. It allows for clear coherence and direction. However, one’s community standpoint should not be discounted. This is because we all live in communities. Often the help and assistance we receive from them goes largely unnoticed by us. We only become aware of the community when it asks something from us. Then we dig in our heals and cry, “Why should I help the community? What has the community ever done for me?” Many make this common complaint when the community solicits volunteers for community service and when the community orders us to pay taxes to support various community initiatives. It is inconsistent on the one hand, to accept the assistance of the community via: schools, police, fire, roads, bridges, Internet infrastructure, a fair business environment in which to compete, etc. and on the other hand to deny to a reciprocal duty to give back to that community. Community membership is a great enabler of personal liberty and a hindrance on personal liberty. One cannot have the one without the other. Of course, there are the free riders. The free riders only want to accept the benefits of society and let others pay the bill. This one-sided approach is one of the greatest threats to building a fair community for all. From the community’s point-­ of-­view the free rider must be stamped out. However, how many community resources should be devoted to this? Every dollar spent on expunging the free rider is a dollar that isn’t being spent on the core policy objectives of the community. Most communities will write-off the free riders until they reach a significant threshold (often between 5%-10% of a given population). At that point normal order will be significantly impacted by these reengages. The last piece of the shared community worldview imperative is the tolerance that it commands. All individuals whose actions are in accord with the personal worldview imperative are to be tolerated. Behind this dictum of toleration is a belief that social diversity is a good thing. We are all different and that difference is prima facie good. That diversity will make the community stronger and happier because as times change there are more possible resources to draw upon. Homogeneity is not the desired social end. Certainly, there are standards to which all must adhere—such as the personal worldview and community worldview imperatives that dictate ceteris paribus that all community members will be cooperative team players within an acceptable framework—but beyond these there is great latitude for personal and social expression of cultural diversity and its appreciation. In the end of the day, social diversity within these constraints is a future goal for us all to develop our communities to their potential as pleasant places to live. The manner in which the reader embraces this principle (or not) constitutes a response to one of the basic questions in ethics. I have since expanded the shared community worldview imperative to cover cosmopolitan interests (the extended community worldview imperative) and again in recent essays to cover concerns via the environment, the natural community worldview imperative (considering it as another sort of community—see the second and

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third editions of my Environmental Ethics book [originally part of the Prentice-Hall series and now shifted over to Wiley-Blackwell]). This is the first of two un-ordered pairs that I will present in my own work. Though I should mention that my early interest in the philosophy of science has had another exemplification in my co-authored book with geneticist Kevin Brown (Cambridge/ N.I.H.): Genetic Engineering: Science and Ethics on the New Frontier (2002).13 In this volume Kevin and I (who are friends and wrote the book very collaboratively) included the history of the philosophy of biology that supported an examination of the new cloning and genetic engineering techniques from both a philosophy of science perspective and from a an ethical (holistic/personal worldview/ community worldview perspective). It has been one of the few philosophy books that I know of that has been actually used in graduate programs in microbiology. This never existed in the ordered-pair universe. My second example of un-ordered pairs concerns a tortuous love triangle between fiction (which I call fictive narrative philosophy) and standard “ordered-­ pair” philosophy (which I call direct discourse philosophy), and me. When I completed my master’s thesis in English, “Moral Judgment in Paradise Lost” at the University of Chicago, I got caught up in philosophy from the starting point of English Literature. On one level it was all about untangling the Talmudic writings on the eating of the apple and who knew what and when. I felt compelled to connect Biblical commentary to a vocabulary consistent with Kantian philosophy. On another level, I was also trying to give a close read of the beauty of Milton’s poetry. It was a tempestuous task. After I finished, I changed degree programs from English to philosophy. I had flirted with fiction and philosophy before. At Carleton College I was a double English and Philosophy major who wrote, directed, and produced my own plays and had a novel published before graduation, Far Into the Sound. In 1979 I first made contact with Charles Johnson. He was an editor for the Fiction Collective and he was the messenger of the board’s decision to accept my novel, Georgia. Unfortunately, the Fiction Collective was dependent upon public monies and in the recession of the early 1980s it became a casualty of Reagan’s shrinking of the NEA (National Endowment of the Arts). Consequently, the book was not published until 2016-2017 in the form of a trilogy. I continued with my correspondence with Charles for more than 40 years (and counting). 1979 was also the year that I finished my Ph.D. in philosophy. Though there were some philosophers at Chicago that encouraged the intersection of fiction and philosophy—such as Paul Ricoeur and Arthur Adkins—the general attitude was that I should keep my passion for fiction a secret. Other prominent members of the department advised me to adopt a pen name if I wanted to continue “doodling stories.” Real philosophers were only interested making claims through analytic analysis of language, logic, and science.  I have also explored philosophy of biology and medicine in a holistic interactive manner through my two monographs on the same (Michael Boylan, Method and Practice in Aristotle’s Biology (Lanham, MD and Oxford: UPA/Rowman and Littlefield, 1983) and The Origins of Ancient Greek Science: Blood—A Philosophical Study (London: Routledge, 2015).

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I took their advice and published my second novel, Slipknot, under the pen name Angus Black. The maneuver was very transparent. Various libraries that purchased the book put on their card catalogues: Angus Black—see Michael Boylan! I was outed. In 1990 at Marymount University, I received funding for a poetry series in the Washington, D.C. area (still ongoing). I had previously published a non-copyrighted poetry volume, Chambers in a House of Stone and a copyrighted volume on the Persian poet, Hafez, rendered into English that had won me a solo-evening-poetry-­ reading at the Library of Congress. I was coming out of the closet as a fiction writer and philosophy writer, but the two worlds were still apart, albeit standing side-by-­ side: now out in the open. The first step at uniting these two loves of my life was my philosophy book, A Just Society (2004). The book is a monograph on distributive justice. However, in the presentation of the various theories of distributive justice, I chose to create 11 short fictive narratives that accompanied my traditional analytical approach in order to present more completely the proponents’ worldview of each distributive justice theory. Worldview. That was it. Worldview combined all the facts and values that a person might possess that would structure his or her understanding of the world. Finally, the two loves of my life had become engaged. The next step was another novel in which my worldview philosophy might come more to the fore. The result was The Extinction of Desire (2007). I did some readings and discussions at philosophy departments in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Audience reaction was positive and a perceptive essay was written by Wanda Teays (about the way the book expressed both a fictive and a philosophical perspective) convinced me I was on the right track.14 I followed up with a philosophy book aimed at the general college-educated reader, The Good, The True, and The Beautiful (2008). The book claims that we cannot properly know the good or the true or the beautiful without considering the other two as well. This was the most explicit union of philosophy (primarily concerned with the good and the true) with fiction (my depiction of the beautiful). I felt that conceptually the marriage had been consummated. I call this marriage fictive narrative philosophy.15 But what made this match possible? How do philosophy and literature operate in the way they examine and communicate? Why is fictive narrative philosophy ever to be preferred to straight direct logical discourse? To answer these questions, I returned to Plato, one of the high priests of philosophy and literature. From what has

 Wanda Teays, “Extinguishing Desire: Not a Simple Plan at All” in John-Stewart Gordon, Morality and Justice: Reading Boylan’s A Just Society (Lanham, MD, New York, Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009): 91–100. I might also note that Dr. Teays also invited me to give a lecture at her university on this topic: The Larkin Lecture, Mt. St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles. “What Narrative Can Tell Us” (2008). I was later to give two other versions of this lecture: (a) Trinity College, Dublin (2009); and (b)Valparaiso University, Chile (2014). 15  I wrote about this marriage in the popular media in the London Times: “Novel Forms of Thought” The London Times (January 27, 2011). 14

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survived of Plato we have a series of dialogues that move from the more dramatic in the early periods such as the Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito to the less dramatic in the later dialogues such as the Sophist, and Statesman. However, even in the early dialogues, the philosophical argument dominates the fictive action. I call this level-­ one fictive narrative philosophy. It is akin to the fables of Aesop and the parables of Jesus and Buddha. This sort of presentation is generally called an apologue. At the second level of fictive narrative philosophy, the claims that are presented are balanced by a robust story. The plays and novels of Sartre and Voltaire are on this level. Finally, at the third and final level, the story predominates and the philosophical claims must be ferreted out from the dominant story. The novels of Dostoevsky, Kundera, Johnson, and Murdoch are rather like this. At the edge of the third level of fictive narrative philosophy, the mechanisms of the presentation predominate and the reader must work even harder to get through them in order to discern the claim being made by the author/narrator. My fictive narrative philosophy novel, The Long Fall of the Ball from the Wall falls within this category along with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. On each of the levels, the way fiction and philosophy live together is by providing what each does best. First, let’s be clear what is and is not fictive narrative philosophy. Fiction that only imitates nature or seeks to provide an entertainment without making a claim (a contention about facts or values in the world) is not fictive narrative philosophy. It is just a story (much of genre romance, suspense, and mystery fiction is like this). Fictive narrative philosophy seeks for more. It makes a claim about truth. But why write a story about truth when you can empirically verify everything and present it in direct logical discourse? This the paradigm of the many twentieth century philosophers from those connected to logical empiricism to those who believe that clarification via linguistic analysis is all that philosophers can do. Under these accounts, only direct logical discourse counts as philosophy. So, what is the argument from the other side? To answer this question, we must return to Plato. Plato is an advocate of what I have characterized as the rationality incompleteness conjecture. This position contends that there are some truths that cannot be properly examined via the direct logical discourse mode. The rationality incompleteness conjecture claims that truth isn’t as simple as mere empirical verification or the conceptual analysis of language. Whether we are monist-materialists or dualists (or some hybrid), the rationality incompleteness conjecture suggests that some the topography of truth is often hidden from direct physical inspection. For those intrepid souls who agree with me, there is a necessity for a mode of expression that is suggestive of that hidden territory. Fictive narrative philosophy is the best candidate to put these sorts of conjectures forward. This is also consistent with Plato’s argument in the Timaeus (27d 6-29e) in which he sets out that the best we can obtain in exploring cosmology is a likely story. Though there is specificity in Plato’s argument, one can extend the point generally to the fact that humans have only limited exposure to the Forms so that we are forced to fill in the rest. So how do we fill things in? Plato chose fictive narrative philosophy, and I think he’s right. Thus, we are set with the following paradigm of how to do philosophy. For problems that are directly amenable to empirical inter-subjective investigation or are

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merely verbal disputes that can be examined and clarified to the satisfaction of all, then direct logical discourse is the way to proceed. But for those dilemmas of human existence that belie a definitive direct logical account (like Kant’s antimonies), then it is most appropriate for fictive narrative philosophy to step in and present a likely story that may holistically resonate rationally and emotionally with readers to make its claims. Once I became public about my own marriage with fiction, I gave an invited lecture in Los Angeles16 and then was fortuitously sent a short story by my longtime correspondent, Charles Johnson. Charles Johnson (also a Ph.D. in philosophy) began sending me short stories about a key moment in the lives of various philosophers. I was particularly struck by the one about Plato being confronted by a Cynic who grilled him on the Theory of Forms by asking about the form of emptiness inside his drinking cup. This was both a masterful use of the argument that father Parmenides employed against the young Socrates in Plato’s dialogue by the same name and was also an application of a key concept in Buddhism, emptiness (Charles is a Buddhist). I was struck by the genius of Charles’ story and began re-reading the other stories he had sent me. Gradually, it came to me that these stories also portrayed the marriage of fiction and philosophy in a very accessible way that could help students and interested readers find a way into philosophy that was previously blocked. Charles had had his own journey with fiction and philosophy from Faith and the Good Thing, to The Oxherding Tale, to Middle Passage (winner of the National Book Award), and to Dreamer (with lots of direct logical discourse and cartooning efforts thrown in-between). What if we could create a book that encouraged the courting of both with enthusiasm? This would change the view of those philosophers who were only interested making claims through analytic analysis of language, logic, and science. We are not averse to claims made via analytic language, logic, and science. It is the “only” that gives us problems. Why couldn’t it be just as philosophically legitimate to make claims via fiction? This question prompted a re-thinking of the arena of philosophical exploration. Our approach would be different. We would present traditional direct logical presentations alongside presentations of fiction—the short stories that Charles had written and the ones that I was about to write. Further, we would offer two modes of legitimate philosophical response by students of philosophy in any walk of life: both direct logical response and fictive response. This creates four possibilities: (a) Direct logical text with direct logical response; (b) Direct logical text with fictive response; (c) Fictive text with direct logical response; and (d) Fictive text with fictive response.17

 This was the invitation of Wanda Teays as mentioned in note #14.  The book referred to is: Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson, Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—fictive narrative, primary texts, and responsive writing (Boulder, Co: Westview, 2010, rpt. Routledge).

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Since this was quite a different way to introduce people to philosophy, I decided to create an empirical study including students at various sorts of institutions (Brown University (USA), Charles Sturt University (Australia), George Washington University (USA), Youngstown State University (USA), Marymount University (USA), and St. Mary’s College, MD (USA)). Students were given a short story that made a claim along the lines of the course they were taking and then after the course the students responded to a set of questions on how effective the fiction was at engaging them in the themes of the course compared to the traditional direct discourse philosophy approach. The findings of the study show convincingly that students celebrate the marriage of fiction and philosophy: it opens for them different vistas than traditional direct discourse alone.18 I felt vindicated. My courtship with those enticing Sirens who stood on different cliffs was not in vain. Unlike Odysseus, I never stoppered my ears nor chained myself to the mast, but instead I ventured forth to merge these two alluring messages: fiction and philosophy. And if I have been successful, then others will have a ticket for this romantic voyage that can allow them to see new places through a rich perspective of intellectual inclusion. As a side note, I continued on this journey in my direct discourse book with Cambridge University Press, Natural Human Rights: A Theory (2014) where I presented three original short stories to reinforce my philosophical argument.19 Between 2007 and 2020 I have published 8 fictive narrative philosophy novels (one of which is a trilogy). I also published a monograph, Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction can act as Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). So where are we now? The field has changed greatly since I first began philosophy. No longer do we have a small handful of “ordered-pair” journals that everybody reads and which are narrowly focused upon direct discourse philosophy. The paradigm of logical empiricism that completely defined philosophy is over (via the rebel direct discourse responses mentioned above). Now, a new way of doing philosophy via fictive narrative philosophy is also an option. These two new directions will define philosophy in the twenty-first century. This is a consequence of the end of the ordered pairs. In its place, is a more diversified discipline that speaks more effectively to other disciplines. Obviously, something is lost and something is gained. But as I mentioned earlier, my predilection for diversity causes me to vote decisively for this brave new world that also includes fictive narrative philosophy. On this new path of becoming (I think we are, on the whole), much better off in the world of un-ordered pairs.

 “Using Fictive Narrative to Teach Ethics/Philosophy” co-authored with Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Sybol Cook Anderson, Gabriel Palmer-Fernández, and Edward Spence. Teaching Ethics 12.1 (fall 2011): 1–34. 19  I might also note that I uses short narratives to reinforce my direct discourse philosophical argument in my book, A Just Society (New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004): Chap. 7. 18

Chapter 2

Boylan’s Fictional Narratives and the Reshaping of Philosophy Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Abstract Michael Boylan believes that literature is integral to philosophical inquiry. Nevertheless, this position is still the minority opinion among academic philosophers. While the typology of philosophical discourse into direct and indirect communication developed in Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction and Fictive Narrative Philosophy presents a strong case for integrating literature into the philosophy curriculum, this chapter argues that it will require a disciplinary-wide shift. This shift asks academic philosophers to move literature from the narrow corner it presently occupies as a subset of the philosophy of art (or aesthetics) and to place it center stage as a primary vehicle of philosophical discourse on ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. While this move may seem small to individuals outside of professional philosophy, for those within the profession, it would involve nothing less than a reshaping of philosophy in America. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the disciplinary split between philosophy and literature, and lays out the conditions of the field at the time of Boylan’s formative years as a PhD student in philosophy and early career philosopher. It then provides a general overview of Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy within the context of work in this area in his formative years. The argument here is that rather than avoid the methods of literary theory in his philosophical methodology, Boylan embraces them. This enables him to not only bridge the gap between literary theory and philosophy, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to provide a space where the philosophy classroom can productively utilize fiction. It concludes that given the widespread use of his textbooks in philosophy classrooms around the country and his continuing production of philosophical novels, there is every reason to believe that his work can slowly but steadily reshape philosophy in America. Keywords  Philosophy and literature · Metaphilosophy · Literariness · Propositional content · Philosophical canon · Textuality · Discourse · Literary theory · Philosophy · Reshaping the discipline of · Philosophical methodology J. R. Di Leo (*) University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_2

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Introduction Michael Boylan was a twenty-one year old undergraduate at Carleton College in the early 1970s when he published his first novel a year before graduation.1 He would go on to do a masters in English literature at the University of Chicago and complete his doctoral work in philosophy at the same institution with a thesis on method and practice in Aristotle’s biology. The latter would form the basis of his first philosophy book, which he published as an assistant professor at Marquette University in 1983.2 A prolific writer, Boylan has since gone on to publish over thirty books of both fiction and philosophy. A year after he left Marquette University in 1987, he published two literature translations and then, a year later, another novel—albeit two of them under pseudonyms.3 However, it would be nearly two decades until his literary publishing career would recommence, with the publication of his third novel,4 and another seven years until his fourth novel would appear.5 However, thereafter, a new novel or two has been published every year.6 In philosophy, since 1993 there has

 Michael Boylan, Far into the Sound: A Novel (New York: Echo Publishers, 1973).  Michael Boylan, Method and Practice in Aristotle’s Biology (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983). 3  When the Elephants Came (Washington, D. C.: Mage Publishers, 1988) was published by Boylan under the pseudonym Mariam Evans. It is a translation of an Iranian folktale about animals who decide to ask the Great Goose for help after a herd of elephants destroys their peaceful valley and drinks all of their water. The other translation from the same year is Hafez: The Dance of Life (Washington, D. C.: Mage Publishers, 1988), a verse translation by Boylan of the fourteenth century Persian poet Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi, whose pen name was Hafez. The next year, he published his second novel, Slipknot (Washington, D.  C.: Mage Publishers, 1989), under the pseudonym Angus Black. 4  The Extinction of Desire: A Tale of Enlightenment (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2007). 5  Rainbow Curve: A Novel About Race, Sports, and Politics in America (Seattle, WA: Booktrope Editions, 2015). 6  To the Promised Land: A Novel of Freedom and Redemption (Seattle, WA: Booktrope Editions, 2015); Naked Reverse: A Novel (Seattle, WA: Booktrope Editions, 2016); Georgia: A Trilogy, Part One (Bethesda, MD: PWI Books, 2016); Georgia: A Trilogy, Part Two (Bethesda, MD: PWI Books, 2017); Georgia: A Trilogy, Part Three (Bethesda, MD: PWI Books, 2017); Maya: An IrishAmerican History (Bethesda, MD: PWI Books, 2018); T-Rx: The History of a Radical Leader (Bethesda, MD: PWI Books, 2019), The Long Fall of the Ball from the Wall (Bethesda, MD : PWI Books, 2020). 1 2

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been a steady stream of philosophical monographs,7 textbooks,8 edited volumes,9 and works on philosophical pedagogy.10 As the author of eleven works of fiction and over twenty works of philosophy, Boylan stands out among contemporary philosophers for his commitment to two fields that have professionally and disciplinarily been at odds with each other for the better part of the twentieth-century into the present day. To a great extent, the animosity between philosophy and literature reached its fever pitch during the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the formative years of Boylan’s career. Nevertheless, while the heat of this fever is exemplified in his perceived professional need to publish literature under a pseudonym in the early stages of his career, as an internationally recognized ethicist and philosophy educator, the need has clearly evaporated in the later stages of his career. Since 2007, he has published ten novels and shows no signs of slowing down. Moreover, he published in 2010 with novelist Charles Johnson the pioneering textbook, Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing which employs a vision of a collaboration between philosophy and literature in the philosophy classroom. Recently, his theory of collaboration between philosophy and literature has been developed in greater detail in his monograph, Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction can Act as Philosophy (2019). These two works along with his philosophical fictions are part of a greater effort to reshape the discipline of philosophy in America—one which has long prided itself on the strict separation of philosophy and literature. 7  Genetic Engineering: Science and Ethics on the New Frontier (with Kevin E.  Brown; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002); A Just Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: A Quest for Meaning (London and New  York: Continuum, 2008); Natural Human Rights: A Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); The Origins of Ancient Greek Science: Blood—A Philosophical Study (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). 8  Perspectives in Philosophy (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1993); Ethical Issues in Business (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995); Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (with Charles Johnson; Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010); The Morality and Global Justice Reader, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011); Morality and Global Justice: Justifications and Applications (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011); Medical Ethics, 2nd ed., ed. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Business Ethics, 2nd ed., ed. (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014); Environmental Ethics, 2nd ed., ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015); Teaching Ethics with Three Philosophical Novels (Cham Springer International Publishing, 2017); Critical Inquiry: The Process of Argument (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010); and Basic Ethics (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000; 2nd ed., 2009; 3rd ed., New  York, NY: Routledge, 2020). 9  International Public Health Policy and Ethics (ed.; Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008); Gewirth: Critical Essays on Action, Rationality and Community (ed.; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); and Public Health Policy and Ethics (ed.; Dordrecht; London: Kluwer Academic, 2005). 10  Ethics across the Curriculum: A Practice-Based Approach (with James A. Donahue; Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003) and The Ethics of Teaching (ed.; New York: Routledge, 2016).

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In this chapter, I will begin with a brief overview of the disciplinary split between philosophy and literature, and lay out the conditions of the field at the time of Boylan’s formative years as a PhD student in philosophy and early career philosopher. I’ll then provide a general overview of Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy within the context of work in this area in his formative years. My argument here will be that rather than avoid the methods of literary theory in his philosophical methodology, Boylan embraces them. This enables him to not only bridge the gap between literary theory and philosophy, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to provide a space where the philosophy classroom can productively utilize fiction.

The Separation of the Study of Philosophy from Literature The traditional analytic understanding of Western philosophy takes it to be a set of inquiries that aim at true theories about fundamental problems or questions. Philosophy, practiced along these lines, is claimed to have more in common with science and mathematics than poetry and literature. This traditional analytic understanding of philosophy is predicated upon an essentialism, which posits a strict distinction between literature and philosophy. Or, in other, but related terms, this account of what philosophy is assumes a distinction between “literariness” and “philosophical assertion.” Moreover, the major manifestations of each are respectively found in literary writing (or discourse) and philosophical writing (or discourse). This distinction is related to the belief that the “content” of the products of philosophical inquiry is timeless, and that the “form” of the products of philosophical inquiry only becomes meaningful when set in opposition to something like the “form” of literary objects. A position might even be advanced that philosophy is not possible without literature, and vice versa. These oppositions might then be restated as two dogmas: the dogma of the non-textuality of philosophy and the dogma of the non-propositional content of literature. The latter dogma has been attacked in a number of different ways, and has had some good arguments made against it.11 Likewise, the former dogma too has had its dissenters.12 Boylan, as we shall see, favors the latter dogma, but not the former.  For representative work in this area, see, for example, Gerald Graff’s Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Peter McCormick’s Fictions, Philosophies and the Problems of Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Each of these studies, however in differing ways, provides good arguments for the propositional content of literature. 12  See, for example, Jorge J. E. Gracia’s A Theory of Textuality (Albany, NY: State University of New  York Press, 1995) and Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). Also, various works by Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong and Eric Havelock are exemplars of work against the dogma of the non-textuality of philosophy. Also, it should be noted that there has been some work done which arguably aims at attacking this 11

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Nevertheless, during the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the works of Jacques Derrida,13 Paul De Man14 and Geoffrey H. Hartman15 prompted thinkers to reconsider the relationship between philosophy and literature as well as the relationship of style, writing and rhetoric to philosophy.16 The main points of contention were: 1. All Texts are Equal—Literary theorists claimed that philosophical texts should be considered as equal to all other texts and forms of textuality, whereas philosophers rejected this proposal and argued for a differentiation between philosophical and literary texts; 2. All Texts Can Be Read Equally—Literary theorists claimed that philosophical texts should be read no differently than other texts, whereas philosophers rejected this proposal; 3. The Textuality of Philosophy—Literary theorists claimed that considerations of writing, style and rhetoric have a direct bearing on what philosophy is, whereas philosophers rejected issues concerning the textuality of philosophy as philosophically insignificant; 4. Reconsideration of the Philosophical Canon—Literary theorists suggested that there was a body of philosophical texts in support of their views concerning the textuality of philosophy, and that this tradition should be considered in addition to the dominant analytic philosophical tradition, whereas philosophers were hesitant to acknowledge the contemporary significance of this alternative philosophical tradition; and

dogma from a somewhat intermediary position. See, for example, Richard Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), which is discussed in the next section of this chapter. 13  Particularly, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), La Dissémination (1972; English trans. 1981), Margins of Philosophy (1972; Engl. trans. 1982) Positions (1972; Eng. trans. 1982), Glas [1974], trans John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 14  Particularly, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) and Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971; 2nd ed. 1983). 15  Particularly, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) and Saving the Text: Literature/ Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). By 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller and Hartman have come to be referred to as the “hermeneutical Mafia” with Bloom and Hartman the most “moderate” of the deconstructors and de Man, Derrida and Miller referred to as the “boa-deconstructors.” 16  Between 1976 and 1983, there was an extra-ordinary number of studies on the possible interrelations between philosophy, and style, rhetoric, and writing. Even the philosophy journal The Monist got into the act by publishing a special issue on “Philosophy as Style and Literature as Philosophy” in October of 1980 (Vol. 63, No. 4). Nevertheless, while just a speculation, it seems as though “deconstruction in America” caused an extra-ordinarily high amount of interest in the “borders” of philosophical practice both in and out of the philosophical profession.

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5. The End of Philosophy—Philosophers inferred from the aforementioned points that the end of philosophy was at hand, whereas literary theorists regarded this transition as a problem to be handled by philosophers and philosophy. The promise of a fuller collaboration between philosophers and literary theorists on these matters seemed particularly probable during this period in the 1970s and 1980s. The work of Derrida et al suggested that a closer collaboration between literary studies and philosophy was imminent, and that we should look back to previous collaborations between philosophy and literature for insight and instruction.17 In 1979, Hartman noted the excitement and anticipation of the time in his brief “Preface” to a collection of articles by the “hermeneutical Mafia”: Since the era of the German Romantics, however, and of Coleridge—who was deeply influenced by the philosophical criticism coming from Germany around 1800—we have not seen a really fruitful interaction of these “sister arts.” Yet the recent revival of philosophical criticism associated with such names as Lukács, Heidegger, Sartre, Benjamin, Blanchot, and even Richards, Burke and Empson, is like a new dawn that should not fade into the light of common day.18

Furthermore, the hope was that this newly found (or rediscovered) integration between philosophy and literature would affect both disciplines. Again, Hartman expresses this position and its stakes most directly: The separation of philosophy from literary study has not worked to the benefit of either. Without the pressure of philosophy on literary texts, or the reciprocal pressure of literary analysis on philosophical writing, each discipline becomes impoverished. If there is the danger of a confusion of realms, it is a danger worth experiencing.19

While such a collaboration ran the risk of confusing the domains of philosophy and literature, Hartman and others were claiming that confusing the realms of philosophy and literature was a danger worth experiencing. Yet, what Hartman and other literary theorists at the time failed to recognize was that what they projected from within literary studies as a potentially positive situation resulting from the integration of literary studies and philosophy would be viewed from the outside, particularly by philosophers, as a potentially negative situation for philosophy. Some philosophers at the time were discussing philosophy as an institution in crisis while others were even opening up the possibility of the “end”

 At the time, particularly after the 1977 exchange between J. L. Austin and Derrida over the work of J. L. Austin, there were a number of well-intended collections of essays published concerning the tensions and commonalties between analytic philosophy, deconstruction and literary theory. See especially, Redrawing the Lines, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), as well as Literature as Philosophy / Philosophy as Literature, ed. Donald Marshall (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987). These collections capture well the spirit and issues of the times regarding the relationship between philosophy and literature. 18  Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J.  Hillis Miller, De-construction and Criticism: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, New York: Continuum, 1979, p. ix. 19  Ibid., ix. 17

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of philosophy.20 Richard Rorty, commenting on this very passage, writes that Hartman is “simply being courteous to a defeated foe,”21 but really does not believe that philosophy and literary theory will ever fruitfully interact. The future collaboration between philosophy and literature suggested by literary theorists is perceived as a threat to philosophy. Given the continual denial of the significance of textuality to philosophical practice and the strong codification of this belief through the prevailing analytic traditions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it is not surprising that the work of Derrida, de Man, Hartman and others had only a minor impact on the dominant philosophical communities in the United States and Britain. The work of Derrida, de Man, Hartman and others did, however, compel a re-­ consideration of the philosophical canon, and the grounds for division in American philosophy departments. The European philosophical tradition was searched, and subdivided in the United States into at least two distinct parts: the “continental tradition” and the other traditions derived from European philosophy like Empiricism and Rationalism. This “continental tradition” in the United States came to be the “other” tradition—a tradition that was seldom viewed as crossing paths with the sources of the dominant analytic traditions of the time. Moreover, in cases where analytic philosophers found themselves claiming that their work was also grounded in “continental philosophy,” a further division between their continental tradition, and the other continental tradition was made: given their formative role in the development of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, sources like Bernard Bolzano’s Scientific Doctrine (1837), Gottlob Frege’s Begriffschrift (1879), Franz Brentano’s On the Origin of Moral Knowledge (1889), Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900), Alexius Meinong’s On Object Theory (1904), and Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Construction of the World (1928) came to be the “real” continental philosophy, whereas sources like Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), SØren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873),” Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1928), Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Jean-­ Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Georges Battaille’s On Nietzsche (1945), Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), Emmanuel

 See, Post-Analytic Philosophy, eds. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), and The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, eds. Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal (La Salle: Open Court, 1989). If Blaise Pascal is right that “Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philosopher,” then the late 80s (1985-1989) saw an exponential growth in philosophers: voices from many different quarters were telling us that we should not care about philosophy and that it had ended. 21  Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism (1980),” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 159n7. 20

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Levinas’ Time and the Other (1948), and Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (1955) came to be the “other” continental philosophy. The “other” continental philosophy was deemed as such in part because of its indirect influence on the dominant analytic traditions in the United States and Britain, and in part because of its “negative” association with the development of deconstruction and other types of mid- to late-twentieth-century literary theory. Furthermore, departments in the United States were sometimes literally divided between the “analytic” and the “continental” philosophers. While the “continental / analytic” divide in philosophy departments predates “deconstruction,”22 the arrival of deconstruction in America only intensified the divide. Some programs specialized in only one side; others contained “divided” faculties; some departments even fractured into different tracks. The result of all this division was that the “premier” departments in the United States were primarily “analytic,” and discouraged students from studying the “other” philosophy. French departments and Comparative Literature programs quickly became the locus for the orphaned “literary theory.” In this climate, professional philosophy in the United States was effectively able to contain and control indirectly the possibility of the collaboration of philosophy and literature as well as to ensure that it did not become part of the dominant tradition in American philosophy departments. The works of Derrida and others were marginalized into a philosophical tradition that was for the most part alien to or disregarded by the dominant traditions of the time. Moreover, many philosophers still did not acknowledge Derrida’s work as philosophically grounded.23 Finally, even aesthetics in America distanced itself from Derrida and “continental theory.” Richard Rorty was one of the few major contemporary American philosophers at the time to present his own work as a serious effort to bridge continental theory and analytic philosophy, and to acknowledge a possible relationship between philosophy and literature. Nevertheless, like most contemporary philosophers he remained  One must remember that for some, Hans Reichenbach’s publication of The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) was a benchmark in the history of the rise of analytic philosophy in the United States. From that time on, analytic philosophy clashed with differing forms of “continental” philosophy including but not limited to the existentialist and phenomenological movements of the late 50s through the early 1970s. 23  A very good introduction to some of the philosophical background of Derrida’s literary theory— or philosophy, if you will allow—is Mark C. Taylor’s Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Nevertheless, Taylor’s study is highly selective and idiosyncratic. Part of the reason for this is Derrida himself: he seldom lets us know what exactly is philosophically motivating his work. Even though he acknowledges his debt to the philosophical tradition—on the cover of Taylor’s book, for example, there is a quote from Derrida were he says that “There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context”—nevertheless, unpacking the “sources” of Derrida’s work is a difficult task. And he makes sure that it is. Still, Rorty goes a bit too far by saying that “usually the influence of philosophy is relatively remote” in Derrida and other “textualists” (Consequences of Pragmatism, 139). It seems more accurate to say that usually the particular philosophical influence is relatively remote in Derrida, even if the influence of philosophy in general is not. 22

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unconvinced of the benefits of collaboration between literary and philosophy scholarship, and seems keen on maintaining a division between them. Rorty’s argument against the integration of philosophy and literature is based on the claim that the “vocabularies” of literature and philosophy are radically different, leaving them little in common. Whereas philosophy, like science, is “the sort of activity in which … one can agree on some general principles which govern discourse in an area, and then aim at consensus by tracing inferential chains between these principles and more particular and more interesting propositions,”24 literature, on the other hand, does not lend itself readily to argumentation. “Literature,” for Rorty, concerns the “areas of culture which, quite self-consciously, forego agreement on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and thus forego argumentation.”25 As such, philosophers and literary theorists may share ideas with each other, but they will remain unable to argue with each other. For Rorty, on the basis of their relative “natures,” there is little hope for their ever joining to share a discipline. In Rorty’s mind, literary theory cannot be granted a philosophical foundation— or at best, a feeble one. Not only are literary theory and philosophy strictly distinct from one another, but furthermore literary theory can never become philosophy or philosophical. The two disciplines are strictly distinct, and any claim to the contrary by literary theorists should be viewed as an attempt to seize the role of presiding discipline of our culture. Literary theory is presented in direct opposition to philosophy: literary theory means “no argumentation” and “no philosophical foundation,” and textuality means “a position much like Berkeley’s idealism where nothing exists but ideas.”

From Literary Theory to Fictive Narrative Philosophy How then do we proceed in an academic world where the disciplinary “turf wars” of the late 70s through the mid-80s effectively precluded philosophy and literature from joining forces to explore the multifarious ways in which textuality (or discourse) has had and can have a significant impact on philosophical practices? Philosophy departments are still fundamentally anti-textualist (and anti-discourse), and subscribe to the dogma of the non-textuality of philosophy. This compels students interested in studying the textuality of philosophy to turn away from them and toward History, Political Science, Comparative Literature, Rhetoric and Communications, English and language departments. Rorty saw this clearly in 1981, at the height of the textualism in philosophy controversy. “One will not be encouraged,” says Rorty,

24 25

 Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 141.  Ibid., 142.

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J. R. Di Leo to go to a prestigious American graduate philosophy department if one does not have this particular intellectual virtue. Even if one loves to study Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, etc., but lacks this skill at argumentation, one will not be encouraged to pursue a career in philosophy. One will wind up studying, instead, in a comparative literature department, or a politics department, or a history department. The result is gradually to strengthen the analytic philosophers’ image of themselves as, not specialists in a certain area of scientific inquiry, but rather a corps d’élite united by talent rather than a list of shared problems and prior results.26

Again, Rorty holds up argumentation as the distinguishing characteristic of philosophy in contrast to other disciplines. From within the philosophical community, the distinction is made between those who can argue (philosophers), and those who cannot (casual readers of Plato); from outside the philosophical community, the distinction is between those who view philosophy as text or discourse (historians, cultural theorists, rhetoricians, comparatists, political scientists) and those who do not (philosophers and scientists). Rorty rightly adds that this environment in philosophy makes it “less and less important for analytic philosophy to have a coherent metaphilosophical account of itself”27—in other words, for philosophers to ask questions about the nature of philosophical textuality or discourse. No doubt, many philosophers still regard projects that explore the textuality and discursivity of philosophy as merely exercises in metaphilosophy. As one exposes issues relating to the textuality of philosophy— issues concerning writing, style, and rhetoric—it becomes difficult to maintain a coherent metaphilosophy for analytic philosophy (or even professional philosophy in general) that excludes textuality as an important philosophical issue. It is within the context of philosophy’s general resistance to literature—and by extension, literary theory—that Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy should be understood. The fundamental distinction that underlies his approach to incorporating literature for the purposes of philosophical inquiry is between “direct discourse” and “indirect discourse.” For Boylan, direct discourse “is based upon deductive logic and its rules to create formal, valid certainty.”28 It is not a static entity, but is rather a dynamic one in that it involves a “flow” or “transfer” of information that moves from a speaker to an audience through a point of contention, common body of knowledge, deductive argument, debate on the argument using deductive logic to a resolution.29 As a form of argumentation, it is all about someone (the speaker) convincing someone else (the audience) about the truth of something controversial (point of contention). To do this, two important tools are necessary: the common body of knowledge (a group of accepted facts and values that are generally agreed to pertain to the world we live in) and deductive argument (rules of presentation that present short declarative sentences that have truth value—called premises). Because the premises purport a truth, they need a justification. For simplicity, I have narrowed the sorts of justification into three categories: assertion (the say-so of the speaker only), fact (a  Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” Consequences of Pragmatism, 219-220.  Ibid., 220. 28  Michael Boylan, Fictive Narrative Philosophy, 48. 29  Ibid., 48, Table 3.1. 26 27

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g­ eneral agreement between speaker and audience), and inference (indicated previously by numbered premises that logically cause one to accept this premise).30

For Boylan, the direct discourse approach to argumentation is the one commonly associated with the Western tradition in philosophy. Among its proponents as their “exclusive choice” are “Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Mill, the Logical Empiricists, the Common Language Philosophers, the Philosophers of Biology reacting against the Logical Empiricists, and philosophers of language (including the ethical noncognitivists).”31 Utilized as an approach to philosophy, the direct discourse approach to argumentation models itself after science and mathematics.32 Moreover, it can be utilized in any of the five areas of that Boylan identifies with the subject matter of philosophy: ethics, logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and “‘Philosophy of’ (fill in the object).”33 However, if Boylan’s metaphilosophy began and ended with direct discourse philosophy on the model of science and mathematics, it would leave little room in philosophical inquiry for literature. It is at this point “indirect-discourse” as a model for philosophical inquiry allows for the introduction of literature into philosophy. Again, here, the communicative model is introduced to exhibit the difference between direct and indirect philosophy. For Boylan, direct and indirect philosophy “both begin with a speaker, audience, a point of contention or theme and the common body of knowledge.”34 However, the common body of knowledge may be slightly different between the flow or transfer of information in direct discourse philosophy and indirect discourse philosophy, especially for the type of indirect discourse philosophy he calls “fictive narrative philosophy.” In the main though, there are a number of other types of indirect-discourse philosophy that are not fictive narrative philosophy. Among them are the following: Reduction ad absurdum, which is “a variant of direct logical argument and refers to taking the proposition of the objector (antithesis) as a starting point for examination and then showing that the antithesis leads to an absurdity (this is how Socrates argued in the early Platonic dialogues)”; Argument from remainders, which is “a hybrid of direct logical argument and inductive logical argument and begins by asserting that the number of outcomes is finite—say A, B, and C,” such that when two of them are eliminated the remaining one is said to be the result; and Inductive logical argument, which “refers to arguments that are generally based on empirical (sense-derived) data that are systematized via the scientific method to generalizations or specific conclusions that are highly probable but not necessary.”35

 Ibid., 48.  Ibid., 53, 32  Ibid., 58. 33  Ibid., 48. 34  Ibid., 59. 35   Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson, Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), 5. 30 31

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However, as a form of indirect-discourse philosophy, fictive-narrative philosophy makes claims differently than Reduction ad absurdum, Argument from remainders, and Inductive logical argumentation. “Rather than relying on a narrow series of propositions and facts to make a point or establish a claim, as direct logical discourse and the other forms of indirect logical discourse do,” comment Boylan and Charles Johnson in their introduction to philosophy, “indirect discourse ideally makes vibrant ‘ah-ha’ connections to the reader or audience’s wider experiences and values (also know[n] as the worldview of the audience.”36 With these statements, Boylan may be viewed as favoring the aforementioned dogma of the non-propositional content of literature, particularly since literature’s form as philosophy, fictive narrative philosophy, does not rely on propositions to make its point or establish its claim. Nevertheless, Boylan is still able to establish a place in his typography of argumentative discourse for storytelling. This allows some fictive narrative to “act” as philosophy. Moreover, against the position of structural and post-structural literary theory to eliminate any role for the author in literary criticism in considerations of narrative, Boylan full embraces authors as “constructors” of shared-community worldviews. This is important because it allows Boylan to distinguish between the “scientific facts about the world and generally accepted ethical and cultural values with the target audience” of direct-discourse philosophy, and “the personal worldview of the author and his or her constructed shared community worldview” in indirect discourse philosophy.37 Additionally, because this authorial constructed shared community worldview is many times much narrower than a scientific fact about the world or generally accepted ethical and cultural values, it may be “pleasing and plausible to some” and “foreign and repugnant to others.”38 When more people find it pleasing and plausible than foreign and repugnant, the “work is thought to be a success.”39 Furthermore, unlike deductive presentation, which can be direct or indirect, fictive narrative presentation has a “logic” of its own that differs from deductive logic.40 Still, like direct and indirect deductive presentation, fictive narrative philosophy is the presumption that the “theme or point of contention has been proven (though the modality of the proof will be different).”41 Again, to be philosophy the theme or point to be proven within the narrative must associable with the aforementioned subject matter of philosophy. Lastly, it should be noted, that for Boylan there are two types of fictive narrative philosophical artifacts: the first type involves conventional direct deductive discourse or indirect deductive discourse argument

 Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 58. 38  Ibid., 58. 39  Ibid., 58–59. 40  See Michael Boylan, Fictive Narrative Philosophy, 92-115, which outlines the “special” logic of fictive narrative presentation. 41  Michael Boylan, Fictive Narrative Philosophy, 59. 36 37

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accompanied by a supportive fictive structure; and the second type involves fictive narrative structures that use the fictive narrative presentation to make the claim.42

Reshaping Philosophy in America Boylan believes that literature is integral to philosophical inquiry. Nevertheless, two decades into the twenty-first century, this position is still the minority opinion among academic philosophers. While the typology of philosophical discourse into direct and indirect communication developed in Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction—Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing and Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy presents a strong case for integrating literature into the philosophy curriculum, it will require a disciplinary-­ wide shift. This shift asks academic philosophers to move literature from the narrow corner it presently occupies in the discipline, that is, a subset of the philosophy of art (or aesthetics) and to place it center stage as a primary vehicle of philosophical discourse on ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. While this move may seem small to individuals outside of professional philosophy, for those within the profession, it would involve nothing less than a reshaping of philosophy in America. What gives Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy a fighting chance to be an agent of change in the disciplinary reshaping of philosophy in America is that his metaphilosophy provides a new perspective on all five of the main points of contention between literary theorists and philosophers: 1. All Texts are Equal—Literary theorists claimed that philosophical texts should be considered as equal to all other texts and forms of textuality, whereas Boylan rejects this proposal and argues that some (but not all) literary texts can act as philosophical texts—a view that goes against the standard position of philosophers that there is a differentiation between philosophy and literary texts; 2. All Texts Can Be Read Equally—Literary theorists claimed that philosophical texts should be read no differently than other texts, whereas Boylan, like other philosophers, rejects this proposal, albeit for reasons that allow literature to be read as philosophy; 3. The Textuality of Philosophy—Literary theorist’s claim that considerations of writing, style and rhetoric have a direct bearing on what philosophy is are consonant with Boylan’s theses on direct and indirect discourse in philosophy—a position which puts him on the side of those who reject the dogma of the non-textuality of philosophy and at odds with philosophers who reject issues concerning the textuality of philosophy as philosophically insignificant; 4. Reconsideration of the Philosophical Canon—Literary theorists suggest that there is a body of philosophical texts in support of their views concerning the 42

 Ibid., 59.

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textuality of philosophy, and that this tradition should be considered in addition to the dominant analytic philosophical tradition, whereas Boylan provides a twist on this by extending the philosophical canon to include works of literature—a position which puts him at odds with philosophers who are hesitant to extend the philosophical tradition to literature; and 5 . The End of Philosophy—Philosophers inferred from the aforementioned points that the end of philosophy was at hand, whereas literary theorists regarded this transition as a problem to be handled by philosophers and philosophy. Boylan, on the other hand, by demonstrating a place for literature in philosophy, provides philosophy with an opportunity to reshape its future. What is interesting about revisiting the main points of contention between literary theorists and philosophers is that while these debates have more or less subsided, questions regarding the relationship of literature to philosophy remain. Boylan’s strategy differs though from traditional work in philosophy on these questions because he turns the relationship between philosophy and literature “on its head,” offering that “another discipline, narrative art, can become philosophy on its own terms,”43 rather merely just another “‘Philosophy of’ (fill in the object).” One must also consider when weighing the ability of Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy to reshape a discipline that his work here is not merely just a recasting of the relationship between philosophy and literature through the development of a metaphilosophy, but also is accompanied by a host of philosophical novels and stories that showcase his metaphilosophical principles. In Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction, Boylen contributes short stories on Aristotle (“Aristotle the Outside”), Aquinas (“The Murder of Thomas Aquinas”), Kant (“Kant Awakened”), Marx (“A Game of Chess in Paris”), Heidegger and Arendt (“Eichmann and Heidegger in Jerusalem”), and Iris Murdoch (“An Accidental Woman”) composed in the spirit of exemplary fictive narrative philosophy for the introductory student. Moreover, for the more advanced student, he has written philosophical novels on the search for the good life (The Extinction of Desire), the question of group forgiveness (To the Promised Land), and the feminist deconstruction of the Cartesian self (Naked Reverse), among other philosophical topics. As these fictive narratives and others produced by him become more widely read by philosophers and their students, the odds of his work reshaping the discipline increase proportionally. Rather than being antagonistic to professional philosophy in America as the literary theorists Derrida, de Man, and Hartman were back in the late 70s and early 1980s, or trying to mediate the claims of literary theorists with those of philosophers in America like Rorty, Boylan takes a different path to reshaping the discipline of philosophy in America relative to literature: namely, that of the professional philosopher-novelist. In this regard, the company he keeps in the philosophical world today in America is limited to a handful of individuals—none of whom offer both a pedagogical and philosophical methodology for combining literature with philosophy in

43

 Ibid., 41.

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addition to a host of philosophical novels and stories.44 Consequently, given the widespread use of his textbooks in philosophy classrooms around the country and his continuing production of philosophical novels, there is every reason to believe that his work can slowly but steadily reshape philosophy in America.45

 The last great American philosopher to write novels (and poetry) was George Santayana—but his work here is mainly only of interest to historians of American philosophy. Perhaps the better story here is to consider that the poems of the mature John Dewey only exist today because a librarian at Columbia University from 1926 to 1928 secretly dug them out of the wastebasket in Dewey’s office and saved them—and fifty years later they were (controversially) published (The Poems of John Dewey [Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1977]). 45  As a sign that the boundaries between fiction and philosophy may be loosening a bit at the professional level in America, it should be noted that a recent grant from the American Philosophical Association funded a Fiction Writing for Philosophers workshop on June 1-2, 2017 (albeit fittingly in Europe). Organized by Helen De Cruz (Saint Louis University) at Oxford Brookes University, it featured presentations and mentoring sessions with philosophical fiction writers including Sara Uckelman (Durham University), Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California, Riverside), and James Hawes (Oxford Brookes University). 44

Chapter 3

How Can Fiction Contribute to Critical Race Theory? Tina Fernandes Botts

Abstract  Personal narrative and storytelling have always been key features of Critical Race Theory, that body of legal scholarship focused on the role that structural and institutional racism play in the alienation of persons of color from the protections of the legal liberal order. As Critical Race Theory has expanded from legal theory into philosophy, it has carried with it an openness to interdisciplinary approaches to grappling with the societal problems of race and racism, including using personal narrative, fiction and literature to provide insight into the human cost of these phenomena. Michael Boylan explains the usefulness of fiction to philosophy in his theory of “fictive, narrative philosophy.” Boylan’s Georgia is an instantiation of this theory. Through telling the tale of a racialized male trying to survive in the oppressively racially stratified American landscape of twentieth century America, Georgia operates within the critical race theory tradition and at the same time explores philosophical questions such as the nature of racialized identity and the effects of the social construction of race and institutionalized, systemic racism on the quality of life of the racialized. Keywords  Critical race theory · Critical race theory movement · Law and literature movement · Fictive narrative philosophy · Critical legal studies · Personal narrative · Storytelling

T. F. Botts (*) Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_3

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What Is Critical Race Theory? Broadly speaking, critical race theory (“CRT”) is a body of scholarship that examines the role of race and racism in (primarily, American) society. “It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice that critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers” (George 2021). CRT began in the 1970s as a movement in legal scholarship focused on studying the relationship between race, racism, power, and the law. The focus of the scholarship was similar to that of civil rights discourse and ethnic studies except that CRT tended to stand back and view the relevant issues through a variety of interdisciplinary lenses that included “economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious” (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 3). One key feature of CRT that distinguished it from standard civil rights discourse was that it called for a radical reexamination and restructuring of many of the foundational assumptions and bodies of knowledge upon civil rights discourse was based including “the liberal order, … equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (Ibid.). CRT built on critical legal studies, African American political philosophy and feminist jurisprudence. “From critical legal studies, [CRT] borrowed the idea of legal indeterminacy,” from African American political philosophy, it borrowed a “skepticism of triumphalist history” and “the insight that [the influence of legal precedent favorable to African Americans] tends to erode over time, cut back by narrow lower-court interpretation, administrative foot-dragging, and delay” (Deldago and Stefancic 2017, 4). CRT also incorporated from both feminist theory at large and feminist legal theory in particular the idea that the efficacy of the law relies on “the relationship between power and the social construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of [institutionalized] domination” (Ibid).

CRT and Personal Narrative Personal narrative and storytelling have always been key features of CRT. The work of early critical race theorists such as Richard Delgado and Derrick Bell, for example, often used storytelling as a tool to help readers (particularly nonracialized readers) understand and sympathize with the sociopolitical situations, plights, and perspectives of those in our society who, as a direct result of their status as racialized, have often been alienated and removed from the protections and privileges that the law seemed to offer for their non-racialized counterparts. One classic example is a series of law review articles written by

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Delgado (known collectively as the “Rodrigo Chronicles”) in which a fictional character by the name of Rodrigo engages in a series of dialogues about various racially charged encounters he has had in various institutional settings (See Delgado 1995). Explaining his use of narrative to make key points about institutionalized racism, Delgado has highlighted that “[s]ubordinated groups have always told stories. Black slaves told, in song, letters, and verse, about their own pain and oppression. They described the terrible wrongs they had experienced at the hands of whites, and mocked (behind whites’ backs) the veneer of gentility whites purchased at the cost of the slaves’ suffering” (Delgado 1989, 2435). Similarly, “Mexican-­ Americans in the Southwest composed corridos (ballads) and stories, passed on from generation to generation, of abuse at the hands of gringo justice, the Texas Rangers, and ruthless lawyers and developers who cheated them out of their lands” (Ibid). “Native American literature, both oral and written, deals with all these themes as well” (Ibid). For Delgado, it is important that “this proliferation of stories is not an accident or coincidence. Rather, oppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation” (Ibid, 2436). Delgado continues by explaining how the telling of such stories improves the condition of members of “outgroups”: “The member of an outgroup gains, first, psychic self-preservation. A principal cause of the demoralization of marginalized groups is self-condemnation. They internalized the images that society thrusts on them – they believe that their lowly position is their own fault. The therapy is to tell stories.” (Ibid, 2437). Delgado concludes that stories about oppression, about victimization, and about one’s own brutalization – far from deepening the despair of the oppressed- lead to healing, liberation, and mental health. Another classic example of CRT’s use of storytelling to convey uncomfortable truths about racial stratification is Derrick Bell’s tale, “The Space Traders,” a science fiction story in which extraterrestrials arrive on Earth and ask the nonracialized people of the Earth to sacrifice the lives of racialized people in exchange for valuables that will ensure the survival and prosperity of the nonracialized (Bell 1992). The political wrangling that ensues and the ultimate outcome are meant as cautionary tales about race relations in the United States. Ultimately, 70% of the nonracialized population in the story votes to sacrifice their racialized compatriots. The implication, of course, is that 70% of the nonracialized population of the United States does not value the lives of racialized citizens. Essential to the utilization of storytelling in CRT is the presupposition that the truths told by these stories are better received by using fiction than by using direct, linear discourse. The idea is to impact the reader on an emotional level, to reach the reader’s sense of compassion and decency, and at the same time influence mainstream thinking about the race-based, structural inequalities that surround us, all toward the end of making progress toward racial justice.

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CRT and the Law and Literature Movement The structures and methodologies of CRT also have origins in literary theory and criticism. Traditionally, the ideas in literary theory have operated as lenses through which to engage with art, literature, and, importantly, culture. For example, a literary theorist concerned with cubism might examine the political forces influencing cubist painting in the early twentieth century and how the paintings produced shared themes in novels of the same period. Similarly, a literary theorist concerned with feminism might examine the ways in which a given story handles the roles of women. Whatever the focus of a given literary theorist, the work takes some form of writing about writing. CRT entered literary theory through the law and literature movement, a school of jurisprudence that came into being in the 1990s and that was grounded in interdisciplinarity. At the center of the law and literature movement was an appreciation of what was understood as the intimate the relationship between the ostensibly separate disciplines of law and literature, including the fact that many of the greatest works of literature have the law at their center (including trials, the abuse of judicial authority, crime and punishment, punishment, retribution and the law of inheritance) and the fact that both law and literature operate within the rhetorical tradition (See Morawetz 1999). The law and literature movement was a way of theorizing and reexamining the law that focused on interdisciplinarity and advocated using the tools of literary critics to understand and interpret the law, understood as a text. From this perspective, “[the practice of] law-and-literature involves self-consciousness about law and literature as a system of texts and as a vehicle for creating and conveying meaning” (Morawetz 1999, 452). It is possible to see a healthy dose of philosophy within the law and literature movement, particularly if one steps outside of the Anglo-American tradition and looks instead to continental thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul deMan who “treat the retrieval of meaning as problematic” (Morawetz 1999, 452). The central role of (philosophical) hermeneutics in this endeavor is assumed. That is, within the law and literature movement, “literary and legal theorists have joined forces in considering whether meaning is implanted by authors or constructed by readers, how interpretive communities play their role in making communication through texts possible, and how one can determine the parameters of agreement and disagreement in text-based discourse” (Ibid.). The law and literature movement influenced CRT to treat literature and fiction as significantly informing the study of legal epistemology. The central epistemological question for both literature and law concerns how legitimacy or authority in textual meaning is ascertained. In the law and literature movement, pursuing this objective is understood as supremely challenging, if not impossible. The idea that neither literature nor the law has definitive meaning but

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only a multiplicity of context-based interpretations within particular sociohistorical and/or sociolegal contexts is either frightening or highly satisfying. Richard Posner, a central figure of the law and literature movement, has written of the ancient and lengthy relationship between law and literature, a relationship going back at least 2500 years. Posner wrote in 1999, “The academic field of law and literature is new, but the subject is not. Law’s concerns, concepts, techniques, and imagery have permeated Western literary culture, both popular and elite, since roughly the fifth century, B.C., the period of such law-saturated works as Eumenides and Antigone”. On the historically embedded relationship between law and literature, Posner points out that “a surprising number of great writers were lawyers or law-­ trained…and a number who were not law-trained nevertheless poured law into their writings, including Shakespeare and Dostoevsky” (Ibid). Posner elaborates, “[t]he law itself has strongly theatrical elements, and judicial opinions are interesting and sometimes distinguished specimens of literary style” (Ibid.) Within these discussions in law and literature, CRT finds room within the rejection of the possibility of objective meaning in the law resources for identifying the ways in which the law is interpreted and then utilized by the powerful (particularly the nonracialized) to exert power over the racialized. The critical race theorist then inserts into the open space between objective meaning and subjective meaning, stories and tales about what it means for the racialized to live in a society saturated with institutionalized and systemic racism. Richard Schur has highlighted the intimate relationship between the key ideas in the law and literature movement and CRT (Schur 2001). Schur writes, “Conversations about law and literature found a certain image of, and thus a certain reality of, social relations” (Ibid, 130). Citing Robin West, Schur continues, “The discourses of law and literature establish and circulate certain myths, tropes and metaphors that structure social interaction” (Wet 1993; Schur 2001, 130). Schur elaborates that as a result, any examination of law or literature is simultaneously an examination of the conditions that enable these disciplines, including impliedly, institutional structures like racism. Summarizing Richard  Delgado’s contribution to literary theory, including Delgado’s use of narrative to convey the reality of racial injustice in the United States, Schur goes on, “Delgado uses critical race theory to stake out the interstitial territory between law and literature in order to criticize the racial fictions that found each of them. Law and literature, in Delgado’s reformulation of the field, may be an attempt to establish a liminal space in the borderlands from which to engage in acts of social reform” (131). Schur concludes that Delgado’s “turn to fiction” “enables Delgado to make explicit what is elided in the production of legal texts” (132). According to Schur, Delgado uses fiction to convey ideas that might otherwise be difficult for the interpreter of the law to accept. Specifically, Delgado “argues that to attack discrimination means to attack the metaphors and fictions on which the law relies, especially those that mask social relations” (132).

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African American Literature and CRT Well before the law and literature movement, however, various American authors used fiction and quasi-autobiographical personal narrative in the service of making moral and political statements about the racial inequalities and injustices that plague American society, often explicitly engaging the American legal system in the process. For example, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin all engages the theme of the problem of racio-legal injustice in American society. That is, much of the fiction of each of these authors includes a literary account of encounters between racialized persons, American society, and/or the law designed to awaken in the reader a sense of outrage and urgency at the racial injustices experienced by the racialized in their everyday lives. Some have called literature of this sort “cultural criticism,” others call the novels in question “protest novels.” According to Ralph Ellison, some even called his novel, Invisible Man, a “literary race riot” (Ellison 1970). However American fiction in this vein is characterized or labeled, literature of this sort is arguably one of the key theoretical precursors to CRT. Each of the works is a work of fiction, yes, but it is simultaneously a critique of the equality status (social and legal) of racialized persons in the United States. In Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), for example, James Weldon Johnson traces the life of a nameless, racialized protagonist from his early youth in the American South to school days in Connecticut where he discovers his racial identity for the first time (formerly believing he was “white” but now realizing he is “colored”), after which he decides to attend college in the South and forget about his original Ivy League plans. He does not stay long in the South, as the protagonist finds both the South and the southern school uninteresting. At a certain point, all of his money is stolen, after which the protagonist decides to move to Jacksonville, Florida, where he has heard there is work. He ends up working at a cigar factory, eventually working in the position of someone who reads Spanish books and newspapers aloud to the cigar-makers. The factory soon shuts down and the protagonist moves to New York City where he gets interested in ragtime. The protagonist learns to play ragtime (on a piano given to him by his father in his youth). One day, the protagonist’s piano playing is noticed by an unracialized millionaire who hires the protagonist to play the piano all the time for him personally. One night, the protagonist flirts with a rich unracialized woman who has a jealous, racialized boyfriend. The boyfriend shoots and kills the woman while the protagonist is sitting next to her. The millionaire invites the protagonist to flee the scene of the crime by leaving the country with him and going to Europe. The protagonist agrees. While traveling around Europe, the protagonist becomes exposed to European interpretations of ragtime. The protagonist decides to go back to the United States to get back in touch with the racialized community where ragtime began. The millionaire is astonished at this decision and openly wonders aloud why the protagonist

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would want to go back to the U.S. to be “colored” when he could easily pass for white in Europe. The protagonist soon makes friends with a racialized doctor on the ship ride back to the United States. Once back on American soil, the doctor introduces the protagonist to his many racialized friends in Washington, D.C. The protagonist then takes a brief trip back to the American South where he attends a religious ceremony, including the sermon of a great racialized preacher. The protagonist is moved. He soon gets to know a racialized schoolteacher who takes the problem of American racism very seriously. Then, one night the protagonist sees a vicious mob of unracialized vigilantes burn a racialized man alive. This event causes the protagonist to decide to pass for white from then on. The protagonist then moves back to New York, attends a business college, takes a job at a corporation, and then receives a series of promotions and raises which allow him to invest heavily in real estate and become very wealthy. At a certain point, the protagonist falls in love with an unracialized woman. He wants to marry her but before he proposes, he discloses his status as racialized, after which she leaves town. When she returns, she agrees to marry him although he continues to pass as unracialized. They have two children but his wife dies in childbirth with the second child. The novel closes with the protagonist questioning his decision to choose money and social prominence over being who he is really is. Autobiography is written in the first person and reads as nonfiction although it is a work of fiction. Through this device the reader is drawn into the protagonist’s life in a personal way, which helps the reader sympathize with the protagonist’s various predicaments. The fact that the protagonist has no name is a rhetorical tool that seems to serve two purposes. First, it highlights that persons of color during this time period are often not seen as fully human and second, it highlights the dichotomy between who the protagonist is and how he is perceived by others, a common experience of persons of color in the United States. The protagonist’s experience of racial awakening (realizing he is “colored”) highlights the social construction of race, as does the fact that he can “pass” for being unracialized. The protagonist moves from one meaningless job to another, one profession to another, highlighting the lack of infrastructure available to him to support him in making a consistent living in virtue of his racial identity. His aversion to and visits to the American South highlight that it is not a safe environment for a “colored” person, while at the same time being a place where he can find community. After observing a racialized man being burned alive, the tragic turning point of feeling compelled to deny his racial identity in order to survive in a hostile world highlights that American is not a safe place for a racialized person. Similarly, Passing (1929), written by Nella Larsen, is the story of a friendship between two racialized women, Irene and Clare, both of whom can “pass for white,” and the very different lives they lead as a result of choices they have made regarding the racial identity each of them has chosen to perform. The novel is set in Harlem in the early twentieth century. It follows the women’s friendship from their youth into the present day of the novel and engages the concept of the consequences of “passing for white” in a racist society. While Irene passes only now and then, Clare has

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left her life as a racialized woman entirely behind and is now spending all of her time living the life of an unracialized woman. Living this life has resulted in material advantages but it has also entailed sacrifices and indignities. Passing is a fictional critique of the black-white binary in the United States, a moral condemnation of the disturbing effects that life in a racialized world has upon people, even friends. Through being drawn in to each woman’s emotionally painful existence, the reader, too, experiences this emotional pain, and at the same time develops a better understanding of the costs of the racial segregation that is deeply entrenched in the American social landscape. Bigger Thomas, the central character in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is a young, racialized man living in extreme poverty in Chicago in the 1930s. Although he aspires to more (for example, being a pilot), Bigger’s employment options are minimal, forcing him to take a job as a chauffer for a rich, unracialized family, the Daltons. Mr. Dalton is also a slum lord who owns the filthy, dilapidated building where Bigger and his family live. Mr. Dalton’s daughter, Mary, violates social conventions by conversing socially with Bigger and even flirting with him. She and her communist boyfriend, Jan, ask Bigger to take them to a bar. They ask him to join them. They all get drunk. When Bigger takes Mary home, she makes sexual advances to him. He tries to kiss her and then puts her on her bed. Mary’s mother, who is blind, walks into the bedroom. To ensure that Mary will not reveal his presence in her bedroom, Bigger smothers her with a pillow, resulting in Mary’s accidental death. To conceal the death, Bigger burns Mary’s body in the furnace. An investigation into Mary’s disappearance ensues. Bigger tries to frame Jan for Mary’s disappearance. He writes a ransom note and signs it “Red.” High on the new sense of power (a feeling Bigger has never known before) that the preceding events has generated in him, Bigger then forces his racialized girlfriend, Bessie, into helping with the ransom project and also rapes her and then kills her to keep her quiet. Bigger runs but is eventually caught after a protracted manhunt led entirely by a mob of unracialized people. Without a formal charge, trial, or conviction, the mob concludes that Bigger raped Mary and then killed her to hide evidence of the rape. Bigger ends up in jail. Despite impassioned pleas to spare Bigger’s life by an attorney hired by Jan to the effect that Bigger is a human being who is the product of his environment, Bigger is sentenced to death for Mary’s murder. There is never any trial (formal or informal) for Bessie’s rape and murder. Native Son is a classic piece in the subgenre of African American literature that highlights the injustices of the African American social position per se in the United States in the mid twentieth century but also highlights the plight of African Americans within the American criminal justice system. While the young protagonist has ambitions of being a pilot, it is clear from the start of the novel that he will never reach this aspiration in virtue of the social position to which he has been unjustly relegated in virtue of his race. The only work available to him is as a chauffeur, and he knows only too well that certain women (unracialized women) are off

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limits to him. When his is faced with a situation in which he will likely be falsely accused of raping one of these women, he panics and takes desperate action. Ironically, once this desperate action is uncovered, all of the unracialized people around him predictably conclude that he raped her anyway. This draws on the well known phenomenon of racialized men being frequently and unjustifiably accused of raping unracialized women. Also predictably, a posse of unracialized persons then railroads the protagonist into a conviction for a crime he did not commit. All of this is simply a fictionalized account of a frequent occurrence in the everyday lives of the African American community that Richard Wright felt compelled to spotlight. Adding nuance, the actual rape and murder of Bigger’s African American girlfriend is of no concern to the unracialized mob, foregrounding the dramatic difference in the perception (among the unracialized) of the value of the lives of women, depending on the racial identity to which society has assigned them. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is the story  of a (once again, nameless) racialized man who has a series of degrading encounters with the racist society in which he lives. The novel traces the protagonist from his youth in the American South, through his college years, and then to his life in New York City, which takes place in 1930s Harlem. In each phase of life covered by the book, the protagonist has several negative encounters with society and its institutions related to his racial identity. While living in the American South, he is forced by certain powerful unracialized men in his town to box with other young black men while blindfolded and then crawl on the ground to scrounge for gold coins, all of this held out as the price the young men must pay for being provided a scholarship to college. Once at college, a prestigious, historically black institution, the protagonist is eventually expelled from the school for not performing a version of black life that is whitewashed enough for an unracialized trustee of the college. After arriving in New York, the protagonist is unable to find anything but a low-paying job at a paint plant and owing to an accident at the plant, at one point loses both his memory and his ability to speak. Taking advantage of the protagonist’s disabilities (anonymity, and muteness), the unracialized doctors at the plant begin to conduct electric shock experiments on the protagonist. Once the protagonist’s memory returns, however, he leaves the plant and has a series of encounters (including two encounters with unracialized women in which they try to use the protagonist to fulfil their sexual fantasies about racialized men) that signify his growing awareness of himself as a racialized man in a racist world and a certain sense of responsibility to try to address the problem of racism as a result. Around this time, race relations in Harlem are becoming increasingly difficult. Then, one day, in the midst of a race riot, the protagonist gets caught up in an arson. As the protagonist is fleeing the scene of the crime, someone demands that the protagonist should be lynched, and the protagonist is chased by two policemen. As the protagonist is running from the police, he falls down a manhole. But, the two policemen, rather than attempt to help or even arrest the protagonist, simply pull the cover of the manhole over the hole, trapping the protagonist underground and leaving the

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him to his fate. While underground, the various betrayals and injustices of the protagonist’s life come back to him in a dream and he decides to stay underground. Like The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Invisible Man traces an anonymous, racialized protagonist’s growing awareness of his racial identity as that identity has been created and demonized in American society. In the American South, he is treated like an animal, a pit bull in a dogfight for the sport and amusement of a set of unracialized “benefactors.” In college, he is once again expected to perform an identity that is expected from others, this time an image of perfect conformity to a European ideal that is not only unrealistic, it is self-hating. He is, of course, unable to find suitable employment and must take a job well below his abilities. He is then subject to medical experimentation after having his identity stripped from him (literally and figuratively) by the work he is forced to do to survive. Like Bigger, in Native Son, he is the subject of the sexual fantasies of unracialized women. Finally, of course, he is falsely accused of a crime, resulting in being pursued by the police, and ultimately left for dead. His subsequent underground existence is all that is left for the protagonist since American society seems to hold nothing but danger for him. The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel and also a biting criticism of the social norms (particularly norms of beauty) that privilege and revere the features of the unracialized while denigrating the features of racialized persons. The novel centers around a young girl named Pecola who comes from a troubled home where there is violence and alcohol abuse and emotional neglect. People in her town treat Pecola poorly. She is even treated poorly by a young woman she befriends who is also racialized but has a fair complexion. At one point, Pecola is unjustly accused of killing the cat of a boy in town and has cruel racialized slurs hurled at her as a result. Pecola feels ugly in virtue of her racialization and believes that if she had blue eyes, her life would transform for the better. It turns out that the trauma in Pecola’s parents’ lives goes back for generations. Her mother reveres the whiteness she sees in movies, encourages her husband’s physical abuse, and is happiest when at work, cleaning an unracialized woman’s home. Pecola’s father was sexually abused as a teenager and ran away from home. He is depressed. One day, Pecola’s father rapes her. When she tells her mother what happened, her mother beats her. Distraught, Pecola goes to a local con man and asks for blue eyes. She then realizes she is pregnant. Most people involved hope the pregnancy fails, that the baby dies, and this is exactly what happens when the baby is born prematurely. Pecola then goes mad, believing that she now has the bluest eyes. The character of Pecola suffers what Toni Morrison has called the crime of innocence. That is, she is an innocent and inadvertent victim of the racist world in which she lives. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) directly engages the legal aspects of racialized injustice in the United States. It is the story of a racialized young couple (Fonny and Trish) who fall in love and decide to live together. Although Fonny’s childhood was troubled, he is now a sculptor and hopes to find a place that can operate both as a home with Trish and as a sculpting studio. One day, while out shopping and looking for a place to live, Fonny defends Trish by striking

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a racialized teenager who touches Trish and makes lewd suggestions to her. The nonracialized police officer on the scene wants to arrest Fonny due to racial prejudice but the shop owner prevents that from happening. The police officer on the scene thereafter has it out for Fonny, having been insulted by Fonny’s perceived lack of respect for the officer. The officer’s vengeful spirit against Fonny ultimately takes the form of setting Fonny up to be falsely arrested for raping a nonracialized woman. Fonny is indeed arrested even though there is a witness who provides Fonny with an alibi. Trish’s sister finds an attorney for Fonny and the whole family works very hard and even steals to pay the attorney’s fees. Things heat up when Trish soon thereafter discovers she is pregnant. Trish goes into labor as Fonny sits in jail, his mental health deteriorating under the pressure of confinement. In Beale Street, once again we have an African American male protagonist who suffers dire negative consequences for stepping out of his perceived place. As was the case in Native Son, the theme of having career aspirations that are beyond what society expects is also present. Unlike the storyline in Native Son, however, in this more modern novel, the protagonist tries to defend the virtue and dignity of his racialized female partner, but consistent with the way in which American society devalues racialized women, the protagonist is punished for this action by the police officer on the scene. Once again, the protagonist is falsely accused of raping a nonracialized women despite substantial evidence pointing to his innocence.

CRT and Philosophy In the early twenty-first century, CRT began to influence the discipline of philosophy, particularly as regards the development of the scholarship area known as critical philosophy of race and also as regards the metaphilosophical topic of “whether Western philosophy,” like liberal legal theory, “is [also] inherently white in its orientation, values, and method of reasoning” (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 7). Just as the early CRT scholars had argued in the late twentieth century that the law was inherently “white,” philosophers began to argue that the discipline of philosophy had the same flaw (See, e.g., Valls 2005). Accordingly (and building upon insights that racialized legal theorists had begun articulating in the late twentieth century), philosophers began to gather and develop avenues of scholarship within which this insight could be explored. Soon, these avenues of scholarship and tools of inquiry began to include first person narrative (See, e.g., Yancy 2002; Botts 2016). And so, due in part to CRT’s influence on philosophy, narrative and storytelling entered the discipline of philosophy for the purpose of doing metaphilosophy. That is, storytelling entered as a critique of  the notorious whiteness of philosophy’s structural modus operandi, including philosophy’s perennial questioning of whether more empirically-based inquiry into social justice issues counts as “real philosophy.”

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Michael Boylan has made the case explicitly for narrative as a form of philosophy. In Fictive Narrative Philosophy, Boylan claims to have invented an entirely new and unique approach in which literature can be a form of philosophy (Boylan 2018). Grounding his ideas in the history of philosophy, Boylan writes, “Though philosophy today is largely about direct deductive discourse,” observing, “this has not always been the case” (70). Identifying Plato as “[t]he most famous practitioner of narrative as a vehicle for philosophical discourse” (70), Boylan describes moments in Plato’s early dialogues in which “there is often sprightly fictive action…that conscripts the audience to enter the dramatic scene wherein the argument is engaged” (70, 71). Boylan compares this sort of vehicle for conveying philosophical ideas to that of “Aristotle’s or Kant’s (who don’t employ narrative)” and finds both Aristotle and Kant wanting. Boylan goes on to explain his view that normative theories are necessarily grounded, “because authentic decisions are made within the context of one’s personal worldview” (71). To make compelling (philosophical) points, Boylan seems to be saying, it is necessary to make them from a particular vantage point. What is generated is active “audience participation,” or authentic dialogue between the conveyor of the idea and the listener. Boylan writes, “The empirically suggestive narrative-philosophy presentation is more gripping than the more simple architecture of deductive philosophy because it connects to the personal worldview in more ways than a simple abstract rational presentation” (72).

Boylan’s Georgia: A Trilogy Like the American novels critiquing racism in the twentieth century mentioned above, Michael Boylan’s Georgia: A Trilogy (2017)  takes place in the American South in the twentieth century and also operates within the emerging body of scholarship in philosophy that actively embraces both the inclusion of personal narrative and fiction in the work of pursuing the answers to philosophical questions but also accepts the problem of persistent American racial inequality into the realm of questions appropriately addressed by philosophy. In that work, one of the central characters is Jefferson John Brown, the son of a former enslaved person who stayed on after Emancipation to work for pay on a plantation. Brown was 14 when his father died, after which he decides to go north to Boston using money he had saved from his own labor. While the north was rumored to be less racist than the south Brown did not find that to be the case, only that the racism was less explicit. Brown goes to New York and gets a job working for a newspaperman. The man gives Brown a basic education. It turns out that Brown is so bright that the newspaper man sends him upstate to a premier university. Brown does well at the school and graduates. Unfortunately, when Brown returns to New  York to work for the

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newspaperman, he finds that the man is overwhelmed by the corruption in the city. The newspaper is shut down, the house was torched, and the man dies in the fire. So, Brown goes south to Baltimore to work in the shipyards. Soon, Brown gets married and has a child. He then joins the union. However, racialized and unracialized people aren’t treated the same in the union so Brown goes to work with a splinter group of the fledgling New York-based NAACP. This does not go over well with Brown’s union brothers, all of whom are unracialized, who soon go to Brown’s apartment and kill his wife and child. After this tragedy, Brown returns to Georgia. Once there, Brown gets together with a man named Samuel Beauchay, the son of a man who had at one time treated Brown’s father very poorly. Beauchay is not a good manager, he puts Brown in charge of everything and pays him the going rate for an estate manager. Things go smoothly until Beauchay’s wife dies in childbirth. Her son, Jason, survives. Soon thereafter, a foundling is left in Beauchay’s bed. Beauchauy tries to find the mother of the foundling. Everyone in the adjoining farms says the mother is Myra Dow, a light skinned racialized woman who clerks at the farm store. Myra is given some money to leave. The foundling child is named “John Dow”. He is raised in the same house as Jason, who torments John. Brown acts as their father. The children grow up and as they become older, they both take a fancy to the same woman. Her father is a notorious racist. When the young men are in their early twenties, there is an incident at the county fair dance between John and a man named Victor. The next morning Victor is found dead. The town wants to lynch John in virtue of his racial identity. But for the intervention of Brown, the lynching might have taken place. Then, John goes on the lam. Brown decides to be the amateur detective who will solve the murder and make John a free man. The remainder of the book is the story of Brown’s quest that takes him to another city in Georgia to contend with the local underworld. Brown is smarter than everyone in the novel, but, as the novel explicitly interrogates, this has seldom, if ever, been enough for racialized persons to be treated fairly in the American socioracial landscape. The character of Thomas Jefferson Brown in Michael Boylan’s Georgia operates in the same sort of role and deals with the same sorts of obstacles and challenges of the protagonists in the twentieth century novels dealing with race racism in American society mentioned above. He leaves a racist home in the American South only to find similar sorts of challenges in the North. Brown’s natural intelligence is central to the story, as was the case with Bigger Thomas and the two unnamed protagonists in the earlier novels. The disparity between Brown’s intelligence and the way the world both perceives and treats him makes the case for both the social construction of race (and all of its stereotypes) and the endemic racial injustice in American society. Brown’s attempts to find solace, support, and community with his own people has the side effect of alienating those in the unracialized majority, resulting in the heartbreaking murder of Brown’s loved ones. Like the protagonists in the previous novels mentioned, our hero then goes back to his home in the American South, only to find trouble there and no home at all.

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Concluding Reflections And so the question to ask is not how fiction might contribute to CRT, but how it might continue to do so. In the theoretical birthing place of CRT, legal theory, scholars have always used fiction to make points about racial inequality and to provide normative critique of society’s racist infrastructure. As CRT has moved into other disciplines, including philosophy, it has taken with it the tool of narrative to help accomplish its goal: racial justice. Accordingly, the simple answer to the question of how fiction might contribute to CRT in the future is that, as critical race theorists have understood and acted upon from the beginning of the CRT movement, fiction engages the heart and the soul of the reader rather than just the mind. This method of persuasion CRT scholars borrowed from literature about the African American experience written in the twentieth century. CRT scholars also borrowed from the law and literature movement an understanding of legal theory as very similar to literary theory in that it understands that (fictional) texts can operate as sociolegal and cultural criticism. As CRT has moved into other disciplines, its target, the dismantling of institutionalized racism, has persisted. Through its relationship with literary theory, CRT’s recent move into the realm of philosophy brought with it its reliance on personal narrative and storytelling as legitimate methods of inquiry and explanation, particularly toward the end of the dismantling institutional racism. Michael Boylan has recently argued specifically in favor of the usage of literature or fiction to convey philosophical themes, arguing, as critical race theorists do, that appealing to emotion and other right-brain activity such as fiction is a demonstrably more effective way to have one’s points well-­ received, rather than just making good arguments, as traditional philosophy does. Boylan’s case in favor of his “fictive narrative philosophy” stresses this point, and his novel, Georgia, demonstrates it. Philosophy-as-usual (straight, rational discourse) has as its primary goal the making good arguments and seems to leave the goal of successfully making change almost to chance. When it comes to a topic as entrenched in American society (and also in need of change) as institutionalized racism, the goal of making change should arguably be moved closer to the top of philosophy’s priority list, taking with it the tools of storytelling and fiction.

References Baldwin, James. 1974. If Beale Street could talk. New York: The Dial Press. Bell, Derrick. 1992. The space traders. In Faces at the bottom of the well. New York: Basic Books. Botts, Tina Fernandes, ed. 2016. Philosophy and the mixed race experience. Lanham: Lexington Books. Boylan, Michael. 2017. Georgia: A trilogy. Bethesda: PWI Books. ———. 2018. Fictive narrative philosophy: How fiction can act as philosophy. New  York: Routledge. Delgado, Richard. 1989. Storytelling for oppositionists and others: A plea for narrative. Michigan Law Review 87 (8): 2411–2441.

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———. 1995. The Rodrigo chronicles: Chronicles about America and race. New York/London: New York University Press. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2017. Critical race theory (third edition): An introduction. New York: New York University Press. Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible man. New York: Random House. ———. 1970. Interviewed by Dorcas Speer at Iowa State University. WOI News. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQQARj90CVk. George, Janel. 2021. A lesson on critical race theory. Civil Rights Reimagining Policing, American Bar Association Human Rights Magazine, Civil Rights and Social Justice 46 (2) https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/ civil-­rights-­reimagining-­policing/. Johnson, James Weldon. 1912. Autobiography of an ex-colored man. Boston: French & Company. Larsen, Nella. 1929. Passing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morawetz, Thomas. 1999. In “Law and literature” in a companion to philosophy of law and legal theory, ed. Dennis Patterson. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Morrison, Toni. 1970. The bluest eye. New York: Rhinehart and Winston. ———. 2009. Law and literature. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schur, Richard. 2001. The dialogic criticism of Richard Delgado: Chicano/a literature, equality, and the rhetoric form. Law and Inequality 19 (1): 129–158. Valls, Andrew. 2005. Race and racism in modern philosophy. London: Cornell University Press. Wright, Richard. 1940. Native son. New York: Random House. Yancy, George. 2002. Introduction: Philosophy and the situated narrative self. In The philosophical I: Personal reflections on life in philosophy, ed. George Yancy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chapter 4

Philosophy Plays: A Neo-Socratic Way of Performing Public Philosophy Edward H. Spence

Abstract  Taking as its departure point, Michael Boylan’s “The Special Logic of Fictive Narrative Philosophy” ((Boylan, Michael, Fictive Narrative Philosophy. Routledge, New York, 2018), Chap. 5) which is the overarching topic of this edited book, this chapter provides an explanatory rationale within a theoretical philosophical framework of the Philosophy Plays project, conceived as a Way of Life and a form of communal therapy for the mind. The object of the Philosophy Plays project is to introduce philosophy to the general public through philosophical presentations by professional philosophers incorporating drama. The Philosophy Plays project first conceived and introduced in Sydney, Australia by Edward H. Spence has created a public domain for philosophy where relevant issues and topics of public interest and importance, such as love, immortality, happiness, friendship, religion, knowledge, trust, pets, morality, technology, and corruption can be presented by professional philosophers and discussed in an open forum with members of the general public. The Philosophy Plays, like Platonic dialogues, seek to engage their audiences both intellectually (primarily through the philosophical talk) and affectively (primarily through the drama). Like Plato’s dialogues, from which they draw their inspiration, the Philosophy Plays, which combine dialectic (the philosophical talk) with rhetoric (the drama) seek to engage their public audiences in a realistic and shared lived experience thus rendering philosophy a practical and meaningful activity for all participants, conceived as a way of life. Keywords  Fictive narrative philosophy · Philosophy plays · Philosophy as a way of life · Alan Gewirth · Public philosophy · Platonic dialogues · Myth of Gyges · Aristotle

E. H. Spence (*) University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_4

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Introduction Taking as its departure point, Michael Boylan’s “The Special Logic of Fictive Narrative Philosophy” (Boylan 2018, Chap. 5), this chapter provides an explanatory rationale within a theoretical philosophical framework of the Philosophy Plays project, conceived as a Way of Life and a form of communal therapy for the mind. The object of the Philosophy Plays project is to introduce philosophy to the general public through philosophical presentations by professional philosophers, incorporating drama. The Philosophy Plays project first conceived and introduced in Sydney, Australia by Edward Spence has created a public domain for philosophy where relevant issues and topics of public interest and importance, such as love, immortality, happiness, friendship, religion, knowledge, trust, pets, morality, technology, and corruption can be presented by professional philosophers and discussed in an open forum with members of the general public. The Philosophy Plays, like Platonic dialogues, seek to engage their audiences both intellectually (primarily through the philosophical talk) and affectively (primarily through the drama). Like Plato’s dialogues, from which they draw their inspiration, the Philosophy Plays, which combine dialectic (the philosophical talk) with rhetoric (the drama) seek to engage their public audiences in a realistic and shared lived experience thus rendering philosophy a practical and meaningful activity for all participants, conceived as a way of life.

Michael Boylan’s Logic of Fictive Narrative Philosophy Michael Boylan explains the logic of fictive narrative philosophy in Chap. 5 of his book Fictive Narrative Philosophy (2018). In this section of the chapter I will show that although the structure of the Philosophy Plays model is based not on fictive narrative, as in narrative novels for example, but rather on fictive dramatic dialogue, as in Plato’s dramatic dialogues. Both, however, share the motivation to approach public audiences through fictive philosophy and therefore analogously share a common rational philosophical and logical approach, that combines ethical, epistemic, and eudaimonic principles. Boylan’s logic of fictive narrative philosophy is based on his theory of world view and specifically that of the Personal World View Imperative (PWI) as well as its related Logic of the Shared Community Worldview Imperative (SCWI), each is described as follows: The Personal Worldview Imperative (PWI) All people must develop a single comprehensive and internally coherent worldview that is good and that we strive to act out in our daily lives. (Boylan 2018, 94).

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The Shared Community Worldview Imperative (SCWI) Each agent must contribute to a common body of knowledge that supports the creation of a shared community worldview (that is itself complete, coherent, and good) through which social institutions and their resulting policies might flourish within the constraints of the essential core commonly held values (ethics, aesthetics, and religion (Boylan 2018, 106).

Importantly, acceptance of Boylan’s notion of the Personal Worldview Imperative (PWI) is not dependent on a prior acceptance of any single ethical theory, be it deontological, utilitarian, communitarian, a virtue-centered or a rights-­centered theory of ethics. The only necessary theoretical pre-requisite is that one’s choice of ethical theory should not fall foul of the Personal Worldview Imperative (PWI), which requires that an ethical theory should at least adhere to the principles of goodness, coherence, completeness, and practical execution, which together comprise the four integral components of the PWI (Spence 2009). Boylan understands worldview “as consisting in an amalgam of our normative and factual views of the world”. His strategy in analysing the concept of justice, for example, is to first show why a just person must adhere to constrains imposed by the PWI, and then demonstrate why a just society must in turn adhere to those of the SCWI.  An important qualification is that the basic unit of morality in Boylan is not the community as such, understood as some abstract collective entity, but the individuals who comprise the community. Thus, the establishment and maintenance of a just society is the individual moral responsibility of each person within that society. This is important for it introduces the notion of positive rights, without which, as Alan Gewirth rightly points out in his Community of Rights (1996, 31), no community is possible let alone an ethical or a just one. For an individual who merely respected the moral rights of others in the negative sense of not interfering with the rights of others (in Gewirth those rights are freedom and wellbeing) could do so merely through inaction and indifference (Spence 2009). Just as the Personal World View Imperative (PWI), the Shared Community Worldview Imperative (SCWI) has five parts, namely, (1) agent contribution, that is, each agent must become active members of the community; (2) a common body of knowledge; (3) the shared-community world view imperative describes common traits shared by the personal worldview imperative such complete, coherent, and connected to a theory of the good; (4) the creation of social institutions; and (5) acceptance of the diversity of the community in terms of core values: ethics, aesthetics, and religion (Boylan 2018, 107–108). Although not specially expressed that way, the Philosophy Plays project, invokes analogously the underlying principles of those concepts through universal epistemic, ethical and eudaimonic concepts and principles.

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Historical Background The Philosophy Plays project, as aforementioned, was first conceived and founded in 1997 by Edward Spence (Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney) for the primary aim of taking philosophy out of the intellectually constraining spaces of university classrooms and professional conferences and into the liberating spaces of the public agora as Socrates did 2500 years ago. It was a way of once again rendering philosophy relevant and resonant to the shared and common concerns and interests of the citizenry of the modern polis. Philosophy Plays have been performed fortnightly at a Greek restaurant, in the inner-west of Sydney, close to the University of Sydney. The philosophers are from various universities from around Australia that also include visiting philosophers from the USA. As part of the Philosophy Plays project, some of the following examples of philosophy plays were written, unless otherwise stated, by Edward Spence and performed by philosophers with a cast of actors, at various Cultural and Arts Festivals in Australia and at Conferences in the USA: • 2021 “Ataraxia and Algorithms: Socrates’ Last Freedom” on the relevance of Socratic-Stoic Philosophy to the Control Problem of AI Technology for the 39th Greek Festival of Sydney, at The Hellenic Art Theatre. • 2018 “Zeno’s Secret: How to be Happy in an Unhappy World” on Stoic Philosophy for the 36th Greek Festival of Sydney, at the Factory Theatre, Marrickville, and Steki Taverna, Newtown, in Sydney. • 2011 “Wise After the Fact” a play on the Pursuit of Wisdom in the Age of Digital Information performed for the 29th Greek Festival Greek Festival of Sydney at Ithaca Caffe, Potts Point, Sydney. • 2005 “The Philosophy of Freedom” for the 23rd Greek Festival of Sydney, performed at the Museum of Sydney. • 2004 “The Philosophy of Love: Love in the Age of Terror” performed for the 22nd Greek Festival of Sydney at the Sydney Opera House. This event was also recorded and broadcast as a one-hour program on “Big Ideas”, ABC Radio National.

The Objective and Structure of the Philosophy Plays The primary object of the Philosophy Plays is to introduce philosophy to the general public and local communities through philosophical presentations by professional philosophers incorporating drama. To this end the Philosophy Plays aim at making philosophy more accessible and relevant to the general public. As a large number of people do not have the time or the resources to study philosophy at universities and other tertiary institutions, the Philosophy Plays provide a means of rendering philosophy accessible to people who would otherwise not have access to it. The Philosophy Plays are usually performed at restaurants and other venues such as

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theatres accessible to the public in the form and style of a Platonic symposium. They comprise four interrelated components: 1. A 20-minute talk by a professional philosopher. 2. A play performed by actors that dramatically illustrates some of the ideas in the philosophical talk. 3. Audience participation through discussion of the presentation and performance. 4. A banquet of food and wine served to the audience and the participants. The drama component in the Philosophy Plays is either adapted from existing plays or philosophical dialogues or created and written specifically by the philosopher presenters themselves. The Philosophy Plays, like Platonic dialogues, seek to engage their audiences both dialectically (primarily through the philosophical talk) and affectively (primarily through the drama). The restaurant setting provides a popular and relaxed forum where people from different backgrounds and different levels of philosophical sophistication and education can come together to discuss various philosophical issues. This is the setting familiar in Plato’s Symposium, and it is the setting that inspired the structure of the philosophy play presentations. The banquet and the wine are grist to the mill of philosophical discussion. They create a convivial atmosphere where the audience and the performers come together in friendship, as in Plato’s Symposium, to engage actively in a liberating and lively philosophical exchange. Interestingly, the word “restaurant” is derived from the word “restore”. One could say that doing philosophy in a restaurant restores both the mind and the body through providing food for thought. In combination, the philosophy presentation, the banquet of food and wine as well as the dramatic performance can, when presented and performed successfully, engage the public audience both intellectually and affectively. The Philosophy Plays always aim to be at once entertaining and informative but most importantly, transformative. For it is only through a personal and authentic transformation that philosophy as the examined life can be conceived as practical wisdom and become a way of life, a “βίου τέχνη” or the art of life, that leads to a flourishing and fulfilling life, as conceived by Plato and Aristotle and later, the Hellenic philosophers such as the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.

The Philosophical Rationale of the Philosophy Plays Project Thus, all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we can never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality (Pascal 1966: s.200; p. 95).

According to the quotation from Pascal above, “all our dignity consists in thought”. Pascal also said, however, that “the heart has its own reasons”. I extend the metaphor by adding that reason has its own passion. The Philosophy Plays is an attempt to bring together reason and passion, the cognitive and the affective, the intellect

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and the emotions, through the combined mediums of philosophy and drama. As disciplines and practices involving conflict, in philosophy, the conflict of abstract ideas and arguments, in drama, the conflict of characters, philosophy and drama are ideal and well-suited partners in a marriage of theory and practice. The purpose for the designed fusion of reason and passion, intellect, and the emotions, is that rational choice in decision-making, including ethical decision-making, requires it. Two overarching necessary conditions for rational choice in decision-making are (a) justification and (b) motivation. Though necessary, these may not always be sufficient conditions, as external compliance through an outside agency may also be required in cases where one is both rationally convinced that there is justification for doing something, and moreover motivated to act on his justified conviction, fails to do so because of weakness of the will or some other reason such as addiction, for example. (a) Justification Justification is intended to provide convincing if not conclusive rational reasons for selecting one course of action rather than another. In ethics, for example, these are conclusive or at least convincing reasons why one should act morally when one has alternative choice(s) for not acting morally or for acting immorally. (b) Motivation Justified reasons alone, however, are not sufficient to guide rational and moral action. That is because rational action, and moral action specifically, requires that the rational reasons of justification must also be motivating reasons. For if justificatory reasons are not motivating reasons they can’t be practical and, if they can’t be practical, they are not action-guiding and hence cannot play a role in the decision-making process. Thus, the decision-making process requires reasons for action that are at once justificatory and motivating. A crucial point with regard to motivation, however, is that justificatory reasons need only be capable of motivating action. They need not and cannot also be expected to motivate action, or bring about compliance, in every single instance. For consider the psychopath or the sociopath who, though given adequate justificatory and motivating reasons for acting morally, is due to his dysfunctional psychological condition, unable to be guided by practical reason. In such cases, the fault lies not with reason but with the psychopath’s or sociopath’s dysfunctional psychology. In more ordinary situations persons may also, for various contingent reasons, choose not to follow the justified requirements of moral rationality, even when recognizing that they have adequate justificatory and in principle motivating reasons for doing so. A possible response from such a person may be “yes I know I have got to do the right thing, but I am not going to, because I just can’t be bothered!” In short, although capable of motivating action in normal rational agents, motivating justificatory reasons may nevertheless fail in some instances to motivate particular agents into moral action who though recognizing the authority of reason for moral action in those instances may nevertheless choose to act contrary to those requirements. In sum, justificatory reasons will count as motivating and thus practical and

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action- guiding if they are capable of motivating a normal rational person to act in a certain way, including, a moral way. I define a ‘normal rational’ person as one who is capable of minimally understanding and performing inductive and deductive reasoning: With regard to inductive reasoning, the requirement that the normal rational person is capable of learning from experience; with regard to deductive reasoning, the requirement that a normal rational person is able to recognize and understand the implications of the principle of non-contradiction, namely, the logical requirement that one does not assert “A” and “not A” (a putative assertion and its corresponding negation) at the same time and in the same respect; for example, the assertion that “Canberra is the Capital of Australia” and the corresponding contradictory assertion, “Canberra is not the Capital of Australia”. With regard to the Philosophy Plays as a method for performing Public Philosophy, justification will primarily appeal to the intellect aroused dialectically with learning mediated through philosophical arguments designed to provide justificatory reasons for action in decision-making, including ethical decision-making; motivation, on the other hand, will primarily appeal to feelings and emotions aroused rhetorically with learning mediated through the dramatic plays. The decision-making model as described above that comprises both justification and motivation and corresponds respectively to philosophical arguments and dramatic plays consists of two main levels: the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical level comprises two sub-levels: the meta-ethical and the normative. The practical level, in turn, comprises three levels: the meta-motivational, the relevant –contextual, and the motivational.

The Theoretical Level The Meta-Ethical Level  at this initial and highest theoretical level, the philosophical enquiry seeks to determine through a critical and interactive dialogue with the audience (dialectic), what legitimate authority, if any, philosophy and specifically moral philosophy, exercises or at least ought to exercise over us. I refer to this question as, the authoritative question of morality1: the question of “why be moral?” The authoritative question of morality and philosophy generally, seeks in effect to determine if there are any rational reasons for thinking and acting morally that are justificatory and motivating, capable at least of motivating moral action through the agent’s own rational internal compliance. This is the most crucial level in the dialectical philosophical enquiry, since the members of the audience are invited to doubt and feel challenged in thinking for themselves if there are indeed any good internal reasons for thinking and acting 1  Alan Gewirth refers to this question as the most fundamental question in morality in his book Reason and Morality, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978).

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morally. Internal reasons for ethical action are justificatory and motivational reasons for action that appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to the agent’s subjective rational perspective. That is to say, internal reasons for ethical action appeal primarily if not exclusively to the authority that morality and philosophy generally has over a rational individual in its own right without any further reference or appeal to other external legal, social, religious, or familial edicts, rules, commandments, or other external reasons for action and in particular ethical action. To be sure, there might indeed be instrumental reasons (means-end reasons) for acting morally even when one is not rationally convinced that there are authoritative internal reasons for doing so. Such instrumental reason may have nothing or very little to do with the authority of morality to prescribe moral conduct. Such reasons might be those of self-preservation, emanating from fear or anxiety of being caught and punished by others or the state, for one’s moral transgressions. Thus, a person might abstain from shoplifting not out of any rational conviction that shoplifting is morally wrong but out of fear of being caught and sent to prison. What if, however, in the absence of authoritative and convincing internal reasons for moral conduct, one could act immorally at will without fear or anxiety of ever being caught and punished by others or the state? In other words, what if one could act immorally with total impunity? Would there be any reason, under these circumstances, for acting morally, especially if one were convinced, under our hypothetical scenario, that there were no internal reasons and certainly no instrumental reasons, for doing so? One could indeed be considered irrational or even mad to act morally under this scenario, especially if acting morally went against one’s self-interest. This is more or less what Glaukon tells Socrates in Plato’s dialogue the Republic, after relating to Socrates the “Myth of Gyges”. Myths are an effective and engaging rhetorical device used by Plato throughout his dialogues to dramatically illustrate and reinforce the dialectical arguments for and against in a given discussion or debate. This initial stage of the Socratic dialectical enquiry (elenchus) is designed to induce in the audience a state of Socratic aporia or doubt, followed by a state of anticipation for further enquiry to discover the solution, if any, to the problem of the authoritative question of morality, “why be moral?”

The Normative Level It is precisely at this point when the audience’s intellectual curiosity is aroused, and their imagination fired by the question posed by the Myth of Gyges “why be moral?” Apart from functioning as a dramatic and heuristic prop for examining possible solutions to the authoritative question of morality and philosophy generally, the authoritative question of morality is also used to provide a comparative evaluative analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different philosophical solutions.

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In analyzing the justificatory and motivational ability of each of the philosophical solutions, the audience are offered the philosophical opportunity to determine for themselves the relative merits of each alternative philosophical theory canvassed. This dialectical stage in the Socratic elenchus enhances the audience’s learning experience and helps consolidate both their meta-ethical and normative understanding. The philosopher teacher as presenter, through the use of the Myth of Gyges as a pedagogical tool, functions effectively as a Socratic midwife, helping the audience give birth to their own knowledge and understanding. The authoritative question of morality and philosophy generally, framed within the Myth of Gyges, also functions to reveal to the audience the importance of the virtues for ethical conduct and generally philosophy as a way of life, as conceived by Socrates and later by the Hellenistic philosophers such as the Stoics and the Epicureans. For if rules and principles within the theoretical framework of normative philosophical theories cannot adequately motivate philosophical thinking let alone conduct, even when they provide justificatory reasons for such conduct, the cultivation and inculcation of character virtues such as courage, moderation, prudence and justice (the cardinal virtues) offer an extra motivational boost that may, with habituation, prove adequate for motivating virtuous and philosophical conduct, conceived as a way of life for the attainment of eudaimonia, happiness or wellbeing.

The Practical Level The Meta-Motivational Level  The introduction of the virtues at this point of the dialectical enquiry is crucial in showing that ethics is not merely about the acquisition of theoretical knowledge regarding certain ethical rules and principles embedded within ethical theories. It is, more importantly, about ethical practice, both with regard to individual and collective action. As Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, we study ethics not merely to acquire knowledge about what ethics is but to learn how we can become ethical persons. Knowing what ethical conduct consists in, is not the same as engaging in ethical conduct. As argued earlier, ethical action requires not merely justification for acting ethically but also motivation for so doing. And the virtues provide the additional motivational power that can through habituation translate ethical thought based on intellectual justification and abstract, impersonal, rational motivation, into ethical action based on personal motivation through excellence of character. The inculcation of the virtues translates theoretical knowledge (knowledge that) into practical knowledge (knowledge how or know how). The introduction of the virtues as a stage in the dialectical enquiry of the learning process is designed to form and not merely inform the audience about ethics and philosophy generally. Insofar as character is motivationally important for ethical conduct, and philosophical conduct generally, the encouragement offered to the audience to help them begin to form an ethical character is a crucial aspect of the

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Socratic elenchus in moral and philosophical education. I will refer to this stage of the Socratic elenchus as the protreptic (didactic) component of ethical and philosophical education. Like the sciences, ethical knowledge includes an important applied and practical component. Unlike other sciences, however, the subject of ethical education and its application is oneself and one’s relations to other persons: the object of ethical education is to cultivate in oneself ethical and virtuous predispositions that would enable one to act ethically in most if not all circumstances, especially under difficult conditions that may go against one’s short-term self-interest. It is precisely in exhorting the audience through the dramatic dialogues of the philosophy plays that the protreptic component of ethical and philosophical education becomes essential: as Aristotle reminds us, we study ethics not to know what the good is, but how to become good persons. This brings us to the relevant-contextual stage of the dialectical learning process of the philosophy plays. The Relevant-Contextual Level  the importance of this level cannot be emphasized enough. For it is at this level of the dialectical learning process that the abstract theoretical ideas are rendered concrete and contextualized in relation to the audience’s own pre-theoretical subjective and inter-subjective experiences. For, unless the ethical and philosophical principles, theories, rules, values, and virtues can be shown to be relevant to both the audience’s own personal and cultural experiences, the ethical and philosophical pedagogy that incorporates philosophical theory, both meta-theory and normative, and character virtues, will only provide a rational and theoretical motivation for ethical and philosophical conduct. This may not prove adequate by itself in motivating ethical and philosophical conduct in concrete situations; situations similar to those that the audience are likely to confront in their personal and professional lives. The relevant contextualization of philosophical education is engendered through the rhetorical devices of live performance of dramatic plays. These are designed to wed the theoretical philosophical pedagogy with the audience’s own personal and cultural experiences and knowledge, rendering the philosophical pedagogy thus contextualized, a personal transformative and existential experience, and not simply an informative abstract intellectual exercise. This is in keeping with philosophy as a way of life as conceived by Socrates and the Stoic and other Hellenistic philosophers. The relevant-contextual level is thus primarily designed to transform the theoretical motivation discussed above into a more potent affective, visceral, and psychological motivation; capable, at least in principle if not in every practical instance, of motivating the audience to incorporate ethical conduct in their personal as well as their professional lives. Significantly note that the philosophy plays format that combines philosophy with drama, is context sensitive. That is, the content of the dramatic component of the philosophy plays can be adapted to suit the context relevant to the philosophical topics under discussion. So, for example, the content of the philosophy play A Prefect Injustice (see section “The objective and structure of the philosophy plays”) is used dramatically to illustrate the topic of corruption. This brings us to a discussion of the most crucial stage of philosophical education: the

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pre-theoretical stage that takes place at the meta-motivational level of the Socratic elenchus. The Motivational Level  The examination of philosophy as described above is on the whole an entirely new and challenging experience for a public audience. The problem is not merely to effectively motivate the audience to think philosophically using the theoretical and practical elements of the pedagogical methodology described under the various levels above; the problem initially is one of establishing an efficient and effective mode of interactive communication between the philosopher presenter and the audience as learners; that is, getting the audience to listen and be receptive to the information that is being communicated to them. The reception of communication of new information by the audience cannot be taken for granted, especially, when it concerns philosophy. That is because the authority of philosophy as rational discourse, especially when applied to morality, cannot be taken for granted. It has to be earned through the reception and acceptance of the rational arguments that support that authority through the rational endorsement by the audience. The final arbiter in the ethical decision-making model discussed under the Neo-Socratic method so far, are the member of the audience themselves. As final arbiters, the audience must voluntarily offer their personal internal rational endorsement to the theoretical arguments that support the authority of philosophy. By contrast, they must not be expected to assent to an involuntary endorsement of philosophy’s authority simply on the basis of some arbitrary authority imposed upon the audience externally, including that of the philosopher presenter, regardless of their academic credentials. Unlike legal authority, moral and philosophical authority generally, the audience must be granted willingly and internally by each rational agent on the basis of valid and sound arguments capable of eliciting the agent’s rational assent. The problem of reception that I have outlined above (getting the audience to be receptive to the ethical information communicated to them), can be compared to the problem concerning the authority of morality. The question “why be moral” is now preceded by the question that can be posed by a putative member of the audience “Why should I listen to what Plato or other philosophers, both ancient and modern, have to say about morality, or any other topic, especially since they don’t speak my language? In any case, what does all this philosophy have to do with me?” This question was once raised by one of my students in a tutorial philosophy class at the University of Sydney: “Why should we accept what philosophers say and prescribe?” From a first-year philosophy student I thought that this was an excellent question to ask. The reception problem is a problem that concerns not merely philosophy but also effective communication. The philosophical information communicated to the audience must be capable of being communicated to them in a way that speaks their language: it must be relevant to their personal, cultural, and professional interests and experiences. The reception problem is also a philosophical problem for, unless the audience can be assisted in becoming receptive to the philosophical education

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that is being communicated to them, the philosopher presenter will fail to provide effective philosophical education to the audience. So the avoidance to deal with the problem of reception at the meta-motivational level of philosophical pedagogy is not an option for any presenter or teacher of philosophy who wants to impart to their audience an appropriate and adequate philosophical education, sufficient to the audience’s cultural, social, and professional environment. In short, the philosopher-­ presenter has a philosophical obligation and a duty to address and deal with the reception problem in his or her philosophical pedagogy, especially when the pedagogy concerns moral issues. The reception problem confronted initially at the meta-motivational level can of course be addressed and met through the various rhetorical devices of the philosophy plays referred to above under the practical motivational and relevant-contextual levels. However, it is of the utmost importance to first recognize and acknowledge the reception problem as a meta-motivational problem that has to be addressed and solved though the utilization of effective and efficient rhetorical and protreptic devises that engender successful receptive communication by the audience, at the outset. As such, the reception problem must of necessity be addressed and solved at the very first stage in the dialectical process of the philosophical pedagogy offered by the philosopher. Having concluded this section on the rationale and structure of the Philosophy Plays project, conceived as a way of life, let us now examine the concept of public philosophy and why public philosophy conceived as a way of life is important and relevant for society.

Philosophy as Public Knowledge and Rationality As examined earlier, the only legitimate authority is the authority of reason that is engendered through interactive dialogue that engages both the mind and the emotions. Philosophy as presented in the Philosophy Plays is primarily a dialogue in which all contributors, philosophers, actors, and the public audience, play an equal part in their shared cognition and emotions and evaluative assessment of those shared cognitions and emotions through the discussion that follows each philosophy play. This is a process in which the subjective experience of each participant becomes objectified though interactive dialogue with others and objectivity becomes authentically subjective though the discovery of shared truths and values by each individual person. It is through this process that transformation takes place, a transformation that potentially leads to enlightenment and liberation from the shackles of subjective biases and ignorance and the arrogance of an externally imposed unauthenticated and often unsubstantiated “objective knowledge” disseminated by the media in all its different guises. Paraphrasing from Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1996:48), in order to achieve this kind of philosophical transformation it is

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necessary to trust in the ability of people to reason. According to Freire, “whoever lacks this trust will fail to initiate dialogue, reflection, and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions” (Freire 1996, 48). This reminds me of a poignant moment in Brecht’s play Galileo where Galileo, responding to his friend’s advice to be careful about expressing his dangerous cosmological views, replies that if he did not have trust in people’s ability to reason he could not get out of bed in the morning. It is perhaps this conception of public reason that Martha Nussbaum refers to as “the multi-valued conception of public rationality” (Nussbaum 1995, xv). The unreflective intellectual authority that Galileo was opposing is akin in spirit to the intellectual arrogance opposed by Socrates. Socrates’ metaphor for true knowledge was midwifery. Socrates, who saw himself as a philosophical midwife helping others give birth to knowledge, believed that true knowledge cannot be imposed by experts from without, nor generated from within through unreflective dogmatic and self-serving thoughts but, rather, generated internally both individually and collectively through participation in interactive reflective dialogue. Following Socrates’ metaphor, we can say that philosophy takes place, or should take place, in a “public nursery”. This introduces the dual concepts of love and innocence, cognitive sentiments that I believe are essential to the pursuit of truth and wisdom. As Paulo Freire correctly points out, “dialogue cannot exist in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people” (Freire 1996, 70). It is for that reason that I consider Plato’s dialogue on Love, the Symposium, to be central to his philosophy. If philosophy is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, then wisdom cannot exist in the absence of love. The innocence comes through philosophy’s magical ability to transform us into curious children encountering the world for the first time. Without stretching Socrates’ metaphor too far, we not only give birth to knowledge through philosophy but are also born anew through philosophy. This is how death and birth come together in Plato. We die to the world of arrogance and ignorance and are reborn into the world of truth and wisdom. This intricate connection between death and birth through the transformation of love is clearly evident in the thematic continuity between Plato’s Symposium and Phaedo, Plato’s dialogues on Love and Death.

Public Philosophy and the Community of Rights In his book The Community of Rights (1996), Alan Gewirth claims that “as a community of rights, the state’s relation to the positive rights to basic well-being should not be one of mere coercion whereby the required taxes are exacted by law; it should also involve civic education”….2

 Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996)

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I demonstrate how the philosophy plays can contribute to the “civic education” alluded to above by Gewirth and also fulfill my earlier promise by showing how the philosophy plays can provide Nussbaum’s “essential ingredients in a rational argument”; Specifically, Gewirth’s argument for the community of rights. Central to the argument for community rights is Gewirth’s argument from the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) to positive rights. I won’t rehearse the argument here but merely repeat Gewirth’s correct claim that positive rights are essential for community for negative rights alone can only provide non-interference with the rights of others that by and large is compatible with partial if not total indifference to others. As long as you stay out of the way of others, others can have no claims on you. This does not provide, as Gewirth rightly recognizes, a viable and stable basis for community, let alone community of rights. Public philosophy through various expressive mediums, including the philosophy plays, can provide both theoretical support for Gewirth’s argument for community rights, as well as practical support for the active promotion of community rights in society. In other words, public philosophy can provide support for rational motivation in acceptance of the argument for community rights, as well as motivation for practical compliance in the promotion of community rights in society at large. It can do so by providing a more specific cultural context both for acceptance of the argument and the promotion and establishment of community rights. For the general problem for both the argument and the promotion of community rights is not justification, but motivation and compliance. Gewirth recognizes the importance of realistic contextualization when he says that, The argument for the PGC culminates in a categorical moral principle because it proceeds from within a context – the necessary conditions of action – that no agent can rationally or consistently reject, and it shows what judgments agents are logically committed to accept within that context.3

However, because of its unavoidable theoretical abstraction, the context provided by the PGC might not be adequately motivating for people who are not acquainted either with philosophical thinking or the language of philosophy. What is required is an antecedent enculturation of the public through public philosophy in all the societal domains and especially the cultural domain. To use a gardening analogy, one has to first prepare the ground first by conditioning the soil through appropriate treatment, including fertilizing, before one can successfully plant trees or flowers. Similarly, in philosophy, the public who are not already acquainted with philosophy, must first be made aware and become familiar through public philosophy of the social, political, and cultural significance and relevance of philosophy. The public can thus be acculturated in philosophy through this wider cultural context that is presently missing from most academic philosophy. This will in turn over time, once it reaches critical mass, motivate both recognition and public debate of the argument for community rights that in turn may provide the required motivation for the promotion and establishment of community rights in the state.  Gewirth, Community of Rights, p. 27

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Gewirth recognizes the importance of the wider cultural context for the public promotion of community rights through dissemination of information regarding those rights when he states that, … recognizing how the inequalities in respect of the effective use of civil liberties mar the procedural justice of political democracy, would make radio and television time, newspaper space, and the like freely available to groups of the poor, designated be certain methods to be spelled out…the aim is to make far more available to such groups the effective ability to press their rationally grounded claims in public communication … (1986, 342)4

It is envisaged that such direct public communication of the claims for community rights by the claimants of those rights will be methodologically preceded by the enculturation of the general public of the rationale of the community rights thesis through public philosophy in the cultural and other societal domains. Public philosophy in the cultural domain as the widest in scope and generality will provide indirect motivation for the specific public debate regarding community rights. It will do so by providing an essential civic education through philosophy that is essential to any specific debates about social issues including human and community rights. The problem at present is that those debates by and large take place amongst academics with little input from the general public that those debates concern. As in economics, and political science, so in philosophy, citizens are treated as abstract place holders in different theoretical arguments. This is of course essential but by itself inadequate in eliciting and motivating public support and promotion for the positions that these theoretical arguments provide justified arguments. If the citizens are the ones who elect the government representatives that make the important decisions concerning civil rights and more generally community and human rights, then it is important that those citizens be properly apprised of the issues and arguments concerning the justification of those issues. Academic education and specifically academic philosophy cannot achieve that. What is required as Nussbaum and Gewirth rightly put it, is appropriate emotional and civic education. I believe that such education can be provided by public philosophy in the cultural domain by various modes of presentation including philosophy cafes, communal and judicial readings of literature, as in the case of Nussbaum, and as illustrated by the Philosophy Plays project and Boylan’s Narrative Fictive Philosophy.

Conclusion It is my conviction that public philosophy, as argued for in this chapter, can provide the missing “essential ingredients in rational argument” for without that “public rationality” there cannot be adequate rational and psychological motivation and compliance for creating a more just society.

 Gewirth, Community of Rights, p. 342

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To that end, public philosophy has to become part of the very fabric of our everyday political, professional, social, and most importantly, both the health of the mind and the heart, cultural lives. Finally, with regard to Boylan’s logic of fictive narrative philosophy, it should be clearer now that the rationale and logical structure of the Philosophy Plays project that encompasses ethical, epistemic and eudaimonic universal principles both at the individual and communal level as described in this chapter. Although in the form of fictive dramatic plays performed in public spaces rather than fictive narrative in novels, as in the case of Boylan, they have much in common as both Boylan’s Personal Worldview Imperative (PWI) and the Shared Community Worldview Imperative (SCWI), share a common underlined rational and logical foundation and motivation of making philosophy accessible and meaningful to public audiences.

References Boylan, Michael. 2018. Fictive narrative philosophy. New York: Routledge. Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books. Gewirth, Alan. 1978. Reason and morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. The community of rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. Poetic justice: The literary imagination and public life. Boston: Beacon Press. Pascal. 1966. Pensées. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Spence, Edward H. 2009. Justice in a just society. In Morality and justice. Reading Boylan’s a just society, ed. John-Stewart Gordon. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 5

Processing Fiction Peter Tagore Tan

Abstract  Michael Boylan’s claim that fiction can be philosophy joins other contemporary voices that challenge the interpretive dominance of Platonism’s view that fiction and philosophy are on opposites sides of an epistemological and ontological divide. Absent from these challenges, however, are two key elements that are needed to ground fictive non-representationalism: a sustained reason to reject Platonism’s separation of fiction and philosophy, and an alternative to the mimetic structure of Platonic fiction. This article will address these lacunae by first introducing another interpretive approach to fiction that avoids mimetic representationalism’s inconsistencies, proposing instead a fiction-as-adequacy interpretation modeled after the use of fiction in the legal field. Plato’s mimesis is of course more than just an aesthetic concept; it is the cornerstone of his entire philosophical idealism. In order to ground Boylan’s fiction-as-philosophy thesis, I will use Process philosophy as the foundational grounds of fiction. Meant to be a prolegomenon to Boylan’s corrective of the two and a half millennia-long art vs. philosophy debate, this is not a detailed account of a Process interpretation of fiction, but can serve as an introduction to what such an analysis should include. Keywords  Mimesis · Plato · Process · Adequacy · Whitehead · Experience · Mimetic representationalism · Hume’s model · Legal fiction · Non-literary fiction · Relationality

P. T. Tan (*) Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_5

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Introduction For a discipline marked by the imaginative use of fiction and fabulation, philosophy has been strangely monodimensional in analyzing fiction. From Parmenides’ chariot ride to meet a goddess, to Descartes’ evil genius; from Hylas and Philonius, to Johannes Climacus; from brains in vats, to desperately ill violinists needing your kidneys for a few months, philosophy has used fictional personages, events, and situations to develop and defend some of its most important and iconic concepts. And yet for all this, the subdiscipline meant to account for what fiction actually is remains limited in analytical scope. This is made more interesting because if literary fiction is indeed a branch of art, the interpretive limitations found in the philosophy of fiction are not shared with the philosophy of art. Consider the different analytical options we have by which we can understand the philosophy behind a work of art. Whether Marxist, Deweyan, Heideggerian, these alternatives are not available to the philosophy of fiction, which in the Anglo-American tradition has been beholden to Platonic mimesis. The guiding question of the philosophy of fiction is, “What makes a work of fiction different from a work of non-fiction”? and the Platonic answer has been that fiction trafficks in representations that do not deal with a strict representation of truth. In this article I want to re-examine philosophy’s relationship with fiction in light of Michael Boylan’s Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy, a work that joins philosophy’s recent attempts to rescue fiction from its negative definition with respect to reality. While Platonism understands fiction as intellectually lazy, ontologically derivative, and of no real fundamental value, Boylan and other philosophers of fiction argue that how we use fiction shows a deeper and more active involvement with it than Plato’s mimetic model can account for. Fiction is integral to how we experience things and navigate our world. This view is the subject of the contemporary philosophical literature that seeks to either undo the categories of fiction and non-fiction, or understand literature as a mode of doing philosophy. This article is a metaphysical prolegomenon to Boylan’s fiction-as-philosophy thesis. What are the main impediments to realizing Boylan’s thesis? What ought to be the generic traits of fiction if it is to be considered a legitimate way to do philosophy? These questions form the structure of this investigation and define its two goals. The first goal is to challenge the Platonic claim that fiction is fundamentally representational. This is implied in Boylan but a formal critique is never issued, an important step since the analysis of fiction in Anglo-American philosophy inevitably runs through Plato. Stacie Friend and Derek Matravers have challenged the Platonic categorization of fiction as a meaningful analytical tool, and Robert Gooding-Williams, Richard Rorty, and of course Boylan mean to elide the distinction between fiction and philosophy, but while they represent one leading edge of the philosophy of fiction debate, their analyses are not mainstream. The literature on the philosophy of fiction still begins and ends with the customary autonomic bow to Plato.

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This ubiquity of Platonic mimetic fiction is such that it exerts an interpretive gravity that pulls analyses of fiction into an orbit defined by mimetic representationalism. Plato’s representationalism is of course not unique to Plato: it is adopted by Aristotle, Hutcheson, Locke, Baumgarten, Hume, Kant. It is written into the secondary literature generated by analyses of classic texts on art and poetry. To Currie, for example, fiction is a work that intends that we make-believe the text and does so by recognizing that intention (Currie 1990), and to Searle, fiction is a work that its author intends an illocutionary act without the attempt to deceive (Searle 1975). Deutsch understands fiction as made-up stories (Deutsch 2013), and Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Walton 1990) has the issue neatly wrapped up in its title. Even Friend and Matravers, who would both collapse the fiction v. non-fiction distinction for different reasons, argue their cases along mimetic lines. The first goal of this article is thus to give good reason to reject fiction-as-mimesis in order to create the intellectual space for Boylan’s fiction-as-philosophy. The second goal is to ground Boylan’s claim that fiction can be philosophy. If we claim that mimesis cannot give a satisfying account of fiction, we are in effect seeking to replace Platonism’s fiction-as-mimesis with one that does not share in the epistemological, ontological, and axiological denigration of fiction. A new model of fiction-as-adequacy is based on the field of legal fiction instead. Legal fiction emphasizes the pragmatic use of fiction and its ability to affect rulings. Such activity focuses on fiction’s ability to construct and redirect experiential content. Fiction is important to the active process of determining what can stand as precedent and how we are to act. Replacing mimesis with adequation is, however, also a metaphysical move. Because mimesis is fundamental to Plato’s entire project of representationalism, adequation similarly needs metaphysical grounding if it is to replace Plato’s interpretive scheme. Whitehead’s Process philosophy will be used to ground Boylan’s claim. In rendering fiction as Process, I am using that term in its full multiplicity of meanings, as a verb, noun, adjective, and gerund. This layered approach to process is meant to reflect the complexity of fiction. Once freed from mimetic representationalism, fiction-as-adequacy becomes instrumental to, in the words of Process philosophy, the creative advance of the universe.

The Descriptive Allure of Mimetic Fiction Interpreting the philosophy of fiction through Plato is controversial. The most obvious issue is the anachronism. Fictionem is a Latin term that postdates Plato, and fiction as a literary category was not ‘invented’ until much later, perhaps in the 11th C with Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in Japan, but definitely by the 12th C in England. This is a technical understanding of what fiction is. It is not just “made­up stories” that have no direct factual antecedent: it is more telling of the literary relationship between the author and the reader, where both understand that what the

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author has written is imagined. The audience willingly enters the imagined world of the author, and accepts the rules of the world the author has created, yet the willed acceptance is not believed. In this sense, Homer’s epic poems are not technically fiction. The oral transmission smudges authorial intent, and the world as a stage for the gods to enact their favoritism and grudges may not just be accepted by the audience, but fully believed. There is also the fact that when Plato writes about art, it is either as poetry (and orally transmitted poetry at that), or the music that accompanies poetry, theatrical performances, or especially painting. There are sections where Plato talks about discourse and writing that conceivably could refer to fiction (Phaedrus 264c), and Stephen Halliwell claims that while visual or “musicopoetic likeness” do not “tell us the truth of these things” that are imitated, discursive language—which would include fiction as we know it—does get to the essence of things (Halliwell 2002, 46), and of course Diotima’s insights into love in the Symposium may refer to creative writing as well (Zovko 2018, 92). What is incontrovertible is that the Platonic mimetic understanding of fiction has endured. Much of this is historical. Baumgarten, the first to coin the term “aesthetic”, accepted the Platonic mind-body distinction when he supplemented logical reasoning with his newly founded aesthetic sensibility to account for all forms of cognition; Locke adopts a mimetic account of how complex ideas are created from simple ones, and simple ideas from actual experience; and Hume—perhaps the first philosopher to seriously delve into Plato’s realm of eikasia—gives an analysis of poetry (the closest Hume comes to fiction) that is an extended examination of the productive power of the imagination, Plato is aware of this propensity for humans to create something from nothing. He even has a name for the origins of creativity: they are products of εἰκασία, eikasia, the imaginative creation of things from objects that exist in our minds. And who better for Plato to model this usage of fiction than Socrates himself? Socrates: Your question requires an answer expressed in a comparison or parable. Adeimantus: And you, of course, are not accustomed to speak in comparisons! Socrates:.... All the same, hear my comparison so that you may still better see how I strain after imagery. For so cruel is the better sort in relation to the state that there is no single thing like it in nature. But to find a likeness for it and in defence for them one must bring together many things in such combination as painters mix when they portray goat-­ stags and similar creatures (Plato, Republic 6, 487e–488a).

This is from Plato’s introduction to the Ship of State analogy, and we note the ease by which Socrates lapses into eikasia in order to better make his point. As with all of Plato’s allegories, he is actively partaking in fiction, what in Greek would be called ποίησις, or poiesis, the human activity that brings something into being from nothing. It is the closest thing humans have, as Marie-Élise Zovko points out, to “become like God” (Zovko 2018, 91) in the creation of something out of nothing. That is the descriptive power of fiction: we fully grasp the Ship of State allegory and note the importance of the navigator/philosopher even though there is no single thing like it in nature.

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I bring this sense of fiction into the analysis also because when philosophy chooses to deal with fiction, it is as Platonic poiesis and as a practice of creating something out of a world rooted in eikasia. As Plato understands it, artistic creativity is based entirely on μίμησις, or mimesis. Fiction is about representation, imitation, and the levels of reality and the corresponding levels of certainty that the work of fiction brings. Especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, the philosophy of fiction has been beholden to this mimetic scheme of Plato. It is easy to understand the appeal, and Plato was of course the master of this art. The pull of the Socratic dialogues, the high-wire act of the elenchus in action, all of these create lasting intellectual drama out of everyday occurrences as mundane as (in the case of the Republic) a chance meeting of characters on the way to observe a religious festival. Despite the serious criticisms of Plato’s philosophy from Aristotle onwards, his work and his system endure, and they do so because of Plato’s mastery of fiction. It isn’t because of his exhaustive analyses into the natural world or ethics, or even art and governance. Some non-contemporary Plato scholars capture this mastery of fiction. Randall writes that Plato has no systematic metaphysics (Randall 1962, 123), has “no passion for literal scientific truth” (Randall 1962, 124); he’s “not a great logician” (ibid.), not an epistemologist, nor a social reformer. He is, to follow Randall’s larger point, primarily an artist and poet. To Collingwood, Plato is “an artist of the first rank[.] His first writings have the appearance of being dramatic sketches written by a man with a strong interest in philosophy, but an even stronger interest in the drama of philosophical discussion” (Collingwood 1925, 169). It is not difficult to understand why fiction has long captivated philosophy. For the author of fiction, there is something divine about the act of creating a work of literary fiction. For the reader of fiction, when we partake in the fictive experience, we are letting images of images ply in our imagination, allowing us access to made­up worlds that exist nowhere in reality. It expands horizons, links us to other points of view and other truths, allows us to grasp what was hidden before. Plato captures this poietic creativity, but as fascinating as fiction is to Plato the poieticist, he can’t shake off what poiesis/fiction must be according to Plato the metaphysician.

The Limits of Mimetic Fiction For all its intuitive correctness about the source and impetus for fiction, Plato’s mimetic account of creative imagination was never meant to be just descriptive. Mimesis is proper to the larger metaphysical project Plato has in mind. It is a concept used to explain how his philosophy operates, and thus it is more importantly meant to be ontologically, epistemologically, and axiologically prescriptive. Philosophers of fiction who operate with mimesis as an interpretive concept thus have two options available: they can either accept both the descriptive and metaphysically prescriptive accounts of Platonism, or they can choose to focus on

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representationalism’s descriptive correctness and jettison the problematic metaphysics of fiction. Neither approach is free from substantial difficulties. Consider the first scenario: in the philosophical analysis of fiction, it is entirely possible to argue for literary fabulation by agreeing with both his descriptive account of fiction and his metaphysical prescriptivism. What would be the disadvantage of doing so? The most obvious problem is that this would lead us directly back to the problem Plato himself had with mimesis with no possible way out. The concept of mimesis is at first glance straightforward: it is meant to explain how participation in the forms occur. According to Zovko, it is “the basis for representation of ideas or ideals in human thought and action, language and behavior, and specifically for the realization of virtue and the ultimate goal of human striving” (Zovko 2018, 89). But even a cursory reading of Plato’s dialogues shows that mimesis means different things in different dialogues: there is the Demiurge’s activity in the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus; it is used to develop philosophy’s telos, “to become like God” in the Phaedrus (to name just one dialogue); it is tied to the eros that leads us to beauty in the Symposium; and of course we have mimesis in its artistic sense in the Republic. To complicate matters, Halliwell notes that in the Cratylus there is a distinction between the “picture-model of artistic mimesis” and “poetic mimesis” (Halliwell 2002, 46), an issue that Sean Driscoll develops, pointing out that “making sense of Platonic mimesis is a staggering task, due to its application to diverse subjects throughout his corpus” (Driscoll 2018, 113). The point here is not to try and figure out what Plato meant by mimesis, for doing so would be impossible: the intuitively clear but analytical ambiguity that surrounds the concept arguably accounts for philosophy’s near 2500  year-long fascination with the term. The point is to note that because there are so many meanings of the concept, Plato has violated his own project by making something so ungrounded a cornerstone of his philosophy. In short, there is no unity of form in Plato’s understanding of mimesis. The charge gains in significance when using Plato’s own analysis. To lack a unity of form means that an idea is ambiguous, mentally hazy, undefined. It is an idea that resides in the level of eikasia, which means that Plato’s usage of mimesis is, in a very literal sense, but an imaginative creation of things that reside only in his mind. To put it bluntly, mimesis is itself a fiction. This is in distinction to his forms, which are divinely sourced, and where mimesis at the noetic level expresses this direct participation the mind has with the divine. But from at least Aristotle onwards, there has always been a strong suspicion of fabulation in Plato. How real are those Platonic forms anyway? Truth and certainty are measures of how well things re-­ present their ideal forms, but if the origins of what make re-presentation possible are left to divinity and a Symposium-like erotic desire, the ideal world of forms looks as if it depends on just this sort of creativity. This lack of unity of form may well lead us to entertain the other scenario: accept fiction-as-mimesis as descriptively accurate, but reject the pesky metaphysics. Given this, what then would become of the fictional narrative? Fiction now is about the telling of non-truths for the purpose of creative escapism. It becomes entangled in issues of taste and judgment of subjectively felt enjoyments. It is a natural but

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harmless practice because the workings of imagination and fanciful imitation do not refer to anything real, and it is important in the sense that humans seem to have a need to produce and consume such fabulations. This is the most common way to approach fiction. To Walton fiction is a text whose function is to serve as a prop in a game of make-believe (Walton 1990); to Deutsch, made-up stories “is necessary and sufficient to warrant categorizing a work as fiction” (Deutsch 2013, 367); to Lewis, fiction is but pretense (Lewis 1978), and Cohn takes fiction to autobiographies (Cohn 1989). The message is simple: we imitate to re-create. Fiction is recreational, but that’s about it. It does not figure into any grand scheme larger than itself, to—in Plato’s words—create “and become like God”. Fiction has no telos but to entertain. This putatively metaphysics-free account of mimetic fiction is probably best given in Hume’s empirical analysis of poetry, as Hume is the one who best walks us through how this representationalism works. Reflecting the scientific modernity of his age, Hume’s model is picture-based. 17th C Dutch writer, painter, and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten claimed that art should be like a mirror of nature that could reflect reality with as much perfection as the artist could muster. Van Hoogstraten’s rough contemporary, John Locke, uses this mirroring analogy and applies it to literature. According to Stephen Land, “words are thought to work like pictures; they ‘represent’ things either by convention or by virtue of actual resemblance” (Land 1974, 22). The claim is as follows: we humans—we otherwise undefined bundles of perceptions—operate mechanically as mimetic beings, somehow directly copying perceptions that can, when put in Hume’s “poetical system of things”, then spark further sentiment and feeling. In Hume, the imagination’s job is to be, in Timothy Costelloe’s words, a “trader in images and purveyor of effect” (Costelloe 2018, viii). Hume of course differs from Plato by centering his philosophical investigation on the realm of eikasia instead of noesis; but he is Platonic in that this realm of imagination and dreams is given to us as representations and mimetic copies of our world that we experience. When this is done through the use of words it becomes Humean fiction. It is still mimetic. The Enlightenment’s discoveries into the nature of the physical world gave new direction and life into fiction-as-mimesis using Newton’s concept of nature as a succession of instants of spatially distributed bits of matter. Hume is doing to fiction what Newton did to nature, splitting the world of experience into a succession of discrete mimetic representations to create a novel world that exists solely in our minds for our own sensorial gratification.1 Fiction here is a solipsistic affair. The perceptive subject revels in the objects represented before it, unconcerned that the pleasure associated with it is not shared 1  I do not wish to discount the work of Hume. Hume especially is sensitive to the power of fiction, and his analysis reads at times like a proto-phenomenology of the fictive experience. The issue is that his insights outpace his ability to account for fiction; the analytical weight is put on the powers of the imagination, a faculty that Hume, as E. J. Furlong observes, resorts to treating as a “universal remedy” (Furlong 1961, 96) for any philosophical problem that might arise without actually getting into how that universal remedy works.

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by any other perceiving subject, or that it might be felt as a displeasure. There is no purpose for fiction other than titillation, and Hume’s private world of poetic grandeur cannot, and is not meant to, elicit any betterment of character or moral teaching of the cultural values of the author of fiction. This retreat into the imagination is what Matravers calls the “consensus view” present in the literature (Matravers 2014, 24), whereby the likes of Walton especially distinguish fiction as works being directly linked to the imagination. Mimetic representations are now ends in themselves, and if they are of any use, it is to distinguish one bundle of perception from another. The world is now fractured into as many private representations of the world as there are humans. We could, of course, still talk of formal reality or necessary truths or Platonic idealism: it’s just that they’d all be products of our imaginations, perhaps fevered, perhaps not, but with no way to determine the universal content therein. The above analyses show that a fiction-as-mimesis interpretation results in incoherence, either violating Plato’s own criterion for universality, or running counter to our own experience with fiction. Both conclusions are anathema to Boylan’s understanding of fiction. Fiction-as-philosophy must of course be logically consistent, and it cannot be solipsistic It is essentially other-related. “This process of projecting oneself forward into worldview of the fictive narrative requires a particular skill, empathy,” writes  Boylan. “Empathy. .. allows one to see the multiplicity of perspectives that others have” (Boylan 2018, 69).

The Adequacy of Fiction Boylan’s claim that fiction can be an “artifact of philosophy” (Boylan 2018, 50), is far from the fiction-as-mimesis model that Plato uses. This fortunately means that his analysis of fictive narrative philosophy avoids Plato’s problem as described above, but it also presents us with a follow-up question: if mimesis is no longer the model for fiction, what would the new model be? How do we get, in other words, from fiction-as-mimesis to fiction-as-philosophy? Boylan presents us with an interpretation of fiction where fiction is not a passive art that we consume. We actively use fiction. When we fashion or create something that existed previously only in our imagination, it is not the case that we are just copying from our library of mental imagery to produce something from nothing with a concomitant lessening of reality and truth. Some examples of fiction do involve the copying and combining of previous experiences that results in less reality and truth content, but sometimes fiction is used to establish a reality and to highlight a truth. There are, for example, what Hazard Adams calls “nonliterary fictions” (Adams 2007, 130), and he identifies the legal field as one of the sources of this type of fiction. Legal fiction is defined by Lon L. Fuller as either “(1) a statement propounded with a complete or partial consciousness of its falsity, or (2) a false statement having a utility” (Fuller 1967, 9). Fiction in legal usage is thus, in the words of the editors

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at Georgetown Law Journal, “false factual suppositions that serve as the grounds for judge-made legal rules” (Smith 2007, 1435). Peter J. Smith includes the legal limiting instructions to jurors (what evidence is inadmissible even though it has been introduced in the span of the trial), the reliability of eyewitness testimony, predictions of future dangerousness, business fraud and the concept of the rational economic actor, and many more (Smith 2007, 1449–1465). Adams delves deeper for examples of legal fiction and cites Giambattista Vico’s 1744 The New Science as claiming that “ancient jurisprudence was poetic, and the connection to poetry was the fiction” (Adams 2007, 131). It is instructive to cite Vico at length: When men want to create ideas of things of which they are ignorant, they are naturally led to conceive them through resemblances with things that they know. And when there is a scarcity of known things, they judge the things of which they are ignorant in accordance with their own nature. Hence, since the nature that we know best consists in our own properties, men attribute to things that are insensate and inanimate, movement, sense and reason, which are the most luminous labours of poetry. But when even these properties are of no assistance, they conceive things as intelligent substances, which is our own human substance. This is the supreme, divine artifice of the poetic faculty, through which, in a God-­ like manner, from our own idea we give being to things that lack it (Vico 1744, 151).

Here we read that the motivation to turn to fiction is not to replicate or reproduce: it is to justify and set anew the conditions of the origins of things using our “poetic faculty”. When Vico writes of “ancient jurisprudence”, he has the laws of the Roman republic in mind. The Romans hardly needed to believe the story of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf in order for them to hold fast to Roman law. This is not about the truth or falsity of the story, nor the reality of the event. Adams writes that what “fictions are often metaphorical expressions in which the criterion is adequacy, not truth or falsity” (Adams 2007, 131). When we say that fiction is adequate, we mean that the work of fiction is equal to the task of achieving a particular goal at hand. Adequacy is a relational term; it relates the work of fiction to experience and the world of experience to fiction. Mimesis is a comparative term, where the copied thing is always compared for accuracy of likeness against the thing that is copied, hence mimetic representationalism’s concern with the epistemological content present in the act of copying. Because of this comparative foundation, the leading questions that guide the analysis of mimetic fiction deal with truth, belief, and the certitude of the ontologically derivative thing that is a work of fiction. In contrast, because fiction as adequacy is relational, the leading questions are pragmatic: Does the work expand our experience? Does it help us navigate to world? Are we given new horizons to analyze and explore when we read fiction? This emphasis on relationality and shared experience is key to Boylan’s understanding of fiction. “The reader enters into the worldview of the perceived narrator[.] Because the reader is enlisted as a partner in the enterprise, she feels empowered to add what she feels is necessary to give the scene its requisite wholeness” (Boylan 2018, 74).

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Aside from the epistemological content, we note that fiction as adequacy also lacks the ontological and axiological hierarchies present in mimetic fiction. In the legal sense the entire point of fiction is to ground an assumption that can be used to reach a legal ruling. It is the practical effect of the fiction that counts. The traditional categories of understanding are no longer adequate in explaining how fiction expands our intellectual horizons and gives us that sense of novel possibility that is a great work of fiction’s gift to us. Far from the Humean world that is restricted to private minds, fiction gives us entry into a larger community and a felt appreciation of other perspectives. Fiction as adequacy can also be found much closer to home in the act of philosophizing itself. Whereas Boylan states that fiction can be philosophical, the claim here is that philosophy is oftentimes fictional. Nenad Miščevič asks, “Does philosophy centrally involve arguments? Many of us would like to think so, but there is a strong tradition that favors [a] less argumentative, and often non-argumentative style” (Miščevič 2007, 963). In some areas of the continental tradition, philosophy has focused on the poetic presentation of ideas such that it reads becomes akin to literature. “[The] birth of its non-argumentative wing is the (re-)discovery of the a-rational, or even irrational (as contrary to the rational) as a central topic for philosophy,” writes Miščevič. “It is probably inspired by Heidegger’s very strong claim that all interpretation and understanding is founded in and guided by ‘mood’ and ‘attunement’” (Miščevič 2007, 965). He cites, not surprisingly, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as Heidegger’s exemplars of literary philosophy. Miščevič notes Richard Rorty’s claim that “[t]he transition from a philosophical to literary culture began shortly after Kant[.] In [this] culture... the question, ‘Is it true?’ has yielded to the question, ‘What’s new’” (Rorty 2007, 91–2)? In the context of the philosophy of fiction, the poetic quality of philosophy as literature emphasizes Adams’ claim that mimetic truth and representation are not the issue here. There is no one model of, for example, Dasein that can serve as the formal truth of the matter. As per Rorty’s claim, we are not asking what is true of being qua being by reading Heidegger’s literary philosophizing; we are asking ourselves how else we can understand being that we could not before. What has been hidden by the question of being indicates that Rorty’s breezy question of “What’s new”? can actually carry significant philosophical weight. Heidegger’s literary philosophy is not looking for novelty for novelty’s sake; it is seeking for novel ways to interpret questions that have been closed off by representational metaphysics and to thereby gain a deeper understanding of ontology. A similar claim can be made for the development of metaphysics in the United States in the 1920s. Dewey’s naturalized metaphysics and Whitehead’s Process ontology are both extended attempts to properly account for the active becoming of the universe. Metaphysics is about positing what Dewey would call the generic traits of existence that can adequately account for the processes that structure natural complexes. These traits are neither true nor false, nor are they real in any traditionally epistemological or ontological sense; they are admitted inferences of what has to be the case if we are to experience the world the way we do. “What’s new?” in Whitehead and Dewey is the rehabilitation of change as perhaps the central

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metaphysical element behind the development of a live-nature interpretation of a non-­ mechanical universe. That novelty includes the de-categorization of our metaphysical space, and the exploration of what metaphysics looks like when we strip essence from the doing of philosophy. We can begin to note the characteristics of fiction as adequacy. Freed of its mimetic obligations, fiction as adequacy has to do with the uncovering of concepts or understandings once considered to be long-settled; it is pragmatic inference into what is a likely explanation of how we believe and hold things to be true; it is the critique of structures using methods that defy and undermine the logic of the structure itself. In general, it consists of the entertainment of novelty for the sake of furthering insight and understanding into a topic. The underlying question for us in this article is this: can the type of philosophy practiced by Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, and others following their footsteps be considered fiction? If the model for fiction is mimetic, then not really. What exactly is being copied from what objective truth? Is the Whiteheadian God that acts as “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire” (Whitehead 1978, 344) re-presenting any real truth? Is the sorge of Dasein somehow a copy of something more primordial in the world? Fiction-as-mimesis misses the full import of the discussion. These are not things that can be demonstrated to be true, nor are they meant to be. “Metaphysical categories”, writes Whitehead, “are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (Whitehead 1978, 8, emphasis mine). But if the model is a fiction-as-adequacy instead, then the answer is that yes, philosophy can and does use fiction to forward important concepts. This is of course Boylan’s point. Adequacy understands that the requirement for mimesis to work is simply not there: there is no privileged insight into at least some form of Platonic formalism, and there is no one way to perceive what is taken to be real. “What’s true”? assumes a measure of objective truth and reality that has traditionally been assigned by a representative mimetic philosophy. Fiction is one answer to the question of what isn’t true, and thus mimetic representationalism has an inherently negative understanding of what fiction can be—it’s not true, it’s not real, and it’s not serious. Not so with the adequacy model. “What’s new” is essentially positive and forward looking; it is to ask how new insights can help us in our quest to ameliorate our present condition or understanding of important concepts. Fiction does not lead to the truth. But it can lead to a different perspective of a truth that we’ve lost sight of in our fervor to philosophically re-present. Philosophy’s rich history of allegories, thought experiments, created personages, etc. are fictional. Such philosophical examples, from Zeno’s victorious tortoise, Zhuangzi’s enlightened cook, Leibniz’s windowless monads, Wittgenstein’s boxed beetles—all of these carry an intellectual gravity that belies the purported deceptive and/or ontologically diffuse nature of fiction if fiction were merely mimetic. In each case the fiction presented serves to open up new avenues of understanding. “[S]ome literary fiction,” writes Gooding-Williams, “is philosophically significant precisely because it produces new philosophical vocabularies and thus new philosophical problems” (Gooding-Williams 1986, 673). This re-examination of

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fiction’s relationship to philosophy—first tentatively explored by Gooding-Williams in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Rorty with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, and more recently expressed as Boylan’s indirect discourse philosophy— all have one thing in common: they require a non-mimetic interpretation of fiction that is relational, constitutive to experience, and important to the navigation of the shared world.

Fiction as Process Boylan’s non-mimetic fiction has further philosophical implications. Mimesis is, we recall, primarily an epistemological/ontological concept for Plato. It is meant to account for how we re-present formal reality, not—as the term is commonly understood today—how to explain the origin of a work of art. Boylan’s fiction-as-­ philosophy can thus serve as a critique of Plato’s speculative philosophy in general, and indeed to not offer a speculative critique would leave Boylan’s project halffinished. It makes little sense to argue for a non-mimetic concept of fiction while leaving its underlying mimetic metaphysical structure untouched. Stated another way, why develop fiction-as-philosophy while not at the same time offering an alternative to the speculative scheme that necessitates mimesis in the first place? I believe that Whitehead’s Process philosophy offers the best metaphysical system to ground Boylan’s project. Whitehead never gave a formal philosophy of art, but Whitehead doesn’t have to develop an aesthetic theory from his metaphysics because he is using aesthetic sensibilities to derive his metaphysics. It is a system where entities prehend other entities, and activities are graded by intensifications; there are lures for feeling, and of course process itself is but another name for the creative advance of the universe. It is why this aesthetic-borne intensity is, according to Judith Jones, “more than an exegetically useful concept[;] it is the decisive component of Whitehead’s particular brand of realism” (Jones 1998, x). Understanding the universe as processional becoming means that at their most concrete level, what we know as things are events. That includes fiction. Fiction is an event. It is not a category of things measured according to how far it strays from reality, and non-fiction is not a report of what ‘really’ happened or just a recitation of the facts of the matter. This is not to say that fiction cannot feature imitation, only that fiction is not fundamentally representational. Even “representational” needs to be qualified. Things are abstracted events in the temporal process of becoming. But events cannot be said to be Platonic representations because the complex interplay of concrescence in Whitehead means that the conditions that gave rise to the original event cannot ever be replicated. Even that interplay of events that make up becoming makes representationalism a metaphysical impossibility. A fictious event may be inspired by previous events, it may look toward it as an example or an allegory, but in a literal sense there is no re-presentation because there is no presentation, if we mean the term in the traditional sense that there is a subject privately witnessing the experience it undergoes, what John E. Smith calls

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the “spectator view of experience” (Smith 1985, 540). The charge of committing the fallacy of simple location that Whitehead leveled against Newtonian physics (Whitehead 1997, 71–72) has an analogy in philosophical modernity’s Neoplatonic fallacy of simple experience, where each thing experienced by the subject happens in discrete units measured in force and vivacity to be reproduced by the subject’s imagination as an experience. Process understands experience as a stream of processional becomings of many feelings into one. This process of concrescence is not driven by just the objective factual content involved, but by their subjective form, their valuation. Fiction is a novel concrescence; it is not simply a mimetic representation of what has been experienced. The undergoing of an experience of fiction is an event through which we human occasions intensify and deepen our satisfactions. This is more than just a Humean private sensorial delight, as how we become affects the becoming of all other entities. At the same time, the power of fiction is not any different in kind than that of non-fiction; they both have the same purpose of intensifying our felt satisfactions in process. Plato’s hold on the philosophy of fiction is such that even though the contemporary literature is increasingly confident in questioning the results of fiction-as-­ mimesis, the underlying mimetic structure is still affirmed. Both Matravers and Friend, for example, argue that the difference between fiction and non-fiction is simply not that important. Matravers arranges them on a continuum, but since that continuum is based on representational content (Matravers 2014, 53), the specter of Platonic fiction as mimesis is still present. Friend goes one step further: there is nothing essentially different between fiction and non-fiction. The terms are genres, “categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria” (Friend 2012, 179). They are not distinguished “between the true and the false, or between what is known and what is made up” (Friend 2012, 180). There is an interpretive flexibility in what constitutes fiction according to the demands of the genre, and indeed, “fiction cannot be defined syntactically or semantically” (Friend 2012, 182). But in the categorization of it into genre, which is “a way of classifying representations that guides appreciation” (Friend 2012, 181), fiction is again directed towards a representationalism proper when categorizing things rather than a perspectival event as is demanded by process. Boylan’s strategy is different. Instead of investigating the fiction—non-fiction divide, his approach is to embrace it and analyze how the experience of fiction can be a philosophical activity. Resistance to this thesis is rooted in the mimetic tradition that primes philosophy to consider only representational concepts of what counts as clear and distinct, and indeed to posit that clarity and distinctness is unproblematic. “Much of the history of philosophy,” states Boylan, “has been driven by this fetish” (Boylan 2018, 205), where sound deductive arguments and analytic methodology (Boylan 2018, 201) can deliver truth “better” than inductive/abductive and synthetic methods. Process philosophy agrees with this strategy to include fiction as philosophical, but it situates the entire debate in a larger ontological context that can extend Boylan’s claim. Boylan’s fictive narrative philosophy is assigned to inductive/

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abductive investigations, but this takes at face value the correctness of what Boylan calls direct discourse philosophy. The analytical thrust of direct discourse is meant to understand facticity in as objective a manner as possible. “Facticity”, and “objectivity”, however, are all up for reinterpretation in Process. Boylan is aware that this Deweyan quest for certainty leads to direct discourse conveniently forming the very concepts it needs to justify itself. “Direct discourse, by its very nature, tends to the creation of essences” where essences are exactly “those pesky meanings” (Boylan 2018, 209) that Whitehead identifies as products of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Whitehead 1997, 51). It is thus not clear to Process that the analytical results of direct discourse are not themselves based on Plato’s original indirect discourse into the nature of truth, reality, and value, and indeed, what the nature of that nature is. Process allows us to take up Plato’s question again: how is fiction different than non-fiction? Non-fiction cannot be about telling the absolute truth of the matter or reflecting reality, nor can it be absent from creativity or the imagination. Whatever it is must be something like the creative use of linguistic rules and conventions to convey a particular event that has been experienced. That event cannot be replicated, so it must be told, either orally or in writing, in a serial fashion, paying close attention to the etiology of the experience. Non-fiction seeks to re-tell the experience from the singular perspective of the entity experiencing the event, whether that be a singular person or a collective. Its purpose is to get clear on the conditions that gave rise to the experienced event. Importantly in a Process interpretation, fiction is not the opposite of this. It is an extension of it. Fiction, too, is a creative use of linguistic rules and conventions, but here the purpose is to introduce novelty to the subjective form in the process of concrescence. Fiction does so by questioning the grounds of processional events, entertaining other possible subjective valuations, otherwise looking for novel interpretations, experimenting with a diversity of perspectives to explain the same event differently experienced. Since the process of becoming is driven primarily by our subjective valuation of other events and entities, the purpose and the power of fiction is most evident in its ability to make us into a different, richer, more well-­ rounded person, which is to say in the language of process that we become entities fully imbued with greater possibilities for concrescence. Fiction literally increases our options of what we can become.

Conclusion Boylan has offered a serious alternative to understanding the relationship between fiction and philosophy. Although fiction-as-philosophy has achieved more acceptance in Continental circles, it has yet to gain traction in the Anglo-American tradition. The current literature in the philosophy of fiction indicates that there is a restlessness with fictive representationalism, and Boylan’s work is strongest repudiation of this mimetic approach. It should fall on sympathetic ears.

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I’ve addressed what I believe are the two main lacunae in Boylan’s work on fiction: a reason to reject fiction-as-mimesis, and a robust metaphysical alternative to representationalism. The latter point is, I realize, lacking in explicative detail. This article should thus not be taken as an essay about constructing a detailed Process account of fiction. To do so requires a far larger project, but the general outlines are presented for any future creative advancement.

Works Cited Adams, Hazard. 2007. The offense of poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Boylan, Michael. 2018. Fictive narrative philosophy: How fiction can act as philosophy. New York City: Routledge Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1989. Fictional versus historical lives: Borderlines and borderline cases. The Journal of Narrative Technique 19 (1): 3–24. Collingwood, R. G. 1925. Plato’s philosophy of art. Mind 34 (134): 154–172. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/2249442. Accessed on 28 March 2021. Costelloe, Timothy M. 2018. The imagination in Hume’s philosophy: The canvas of the mind. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1990. The nature of fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, Harry. 2013. Friend on making up stories. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113: 365–370. Driscoll, Sean. 2018. Linguistic Mimēsis in Plato’s Cratylus. The Many Faces of Mimēsis: Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Western Greece, edited by Heather L.  Reid and Jeremy C.  DeLong, vol. 3. Parnassos Press  – Fonte Aretusa, Sioux City, Iowa, 2018, pp. 113–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbj7g5b.12. Accessed on 28 March 2021. Friend, Stacie. 2012. Fiction as genre. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112: 179–209. Fuller, Lon L. 1967. Legal fictions. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Furlong, E.J. 1961. Imagination. London: George Allen and Unwin. Gooding-Williams, Robert. 1986. Fiction as philosophy: The case of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The Journal of Philosophy 83 (11): 667–675. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2026616. Accessed on 10 April 2021. Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The aesthetics of mimesis: Ancient texts and modern problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jones, Judith. 1998. Intensity: An essay in Whiteheadian ontology. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Land, Stephen K. 1974. From signs to propositions: The concept of form in eighteenth-century semantic theory. London: Longman Press. Lewis, David. 1978. Truth in fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1): 37–46. Matravers, Derek. 2014. Fiction and narrative. Oxford University Press. Miščevič, Nenad. 2007. Philosophy as Literature: The Non-Argumentative Tradition in Continental Philosophy. Academia.edu and University of Geneva publications, https://www.academia. edu/1828410/philosophizing_without_argument, and https://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/publications/engel/liberamicorum/miscevic.pdf. Accessed on 28 March 2021. Plato. 1969. Plato in twelve volumes. In Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Randall, John Herman. 1962. Aristotle. New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty, Richard. 2007. Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1975. The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6 (2), On Narrative and Narratives (Winter): 319–332.

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Smith, John E. 1985. The Reconception of experience in Peirce, James, and Dewey. The Monist 68 (4): 538–554. Smith, Peter J. 2007. New legal fictions. The Georgetown Law Journal 95. https://core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/232643968.pdf. Accessed on 28 March 2021. Vico, Giambattista. 1744. The new science. 3rd ed. Translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of representational arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and reality. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1997. Science and the modern world. New York: The Free Press. Zovko, Marie-Élise. 2018. The Divine Poet: Mimēsis and Homoiosis Theoi in Plato. The Many Faces of Mimēsis: Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Western Greece, edited by Heather L. Reid and Jeremy C. DeLong, vol. 3. Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa, Sioux City, Iowa, 2018, pp.  89–102. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbj7g5b.10. Accessed on 28 March 2021.

Part II

The De Anima Novels

Chapter 6

Preface to Part Two: What Is the Aim of the De Anima Novels? Michael Boylan

General Aim of the Series The title, De Anima, is the Latin translation of περὶ ψυχῆς (peri psuches), the first of Aristotle’s biological works (according to the traditional ordering). I have used this moniker to refer to the many ways humans understand their nature and what they can become. As a philosophical backdrop to this, I have chosen to highlight five influential religions of the world: Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. The first four get books of their own while aspects of Christianity are set in all four. These will operate as hypotheses on how to understand homo sapiens and central problems associated with living-in-the-world. Each of the four stories may be thematically understood with these worldview hypotheses as a backdrop. Together, these five community worldview perspectives aspire to present a reflection on who and what we are as humans living on the planet. This is a fundamental philosophical question that is at the core of philosophy as a discipline: logic, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Thus, the De Anima Novels aspire to be an introductory exposition to the discipline of philosophical anthropology using the compartments of traditional Western Philosophy working through the vehicle of narrative fiction.

M. Boylan (*) Marymount University, Arlington, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_6

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Individual Novels Rainbow Curve  is the first volume of the series and features the foundation of an Islamic conception of justice. The story is about an aging former pitcher from the Negro Baseball Leagues (Billy Beauchamp) who mentors, in a fatherly way, an 18-year-old white boy who has recently lost his mother (his father had left the family years ago). The boy, Phillip Mellan, calls himself “Bo” after the nickname of his mentor who is called “Rainbow” (after his famous pitch he developed in his years as a pitcher and barnstormer—the Rainbow Curve, a pitch that not only curves, but sinks down at the last minute). There are two stories told in alternating chapters. The first story begins in 1970 when Rainbow and Bo head to New Orleans from Milwaukee in order to organize a modern barnstorming baseball team that will play in Mexico and the Caribbean (just as Rainbow did when he was young and playing in the Negro Baseball Leagues). The money for this team came from Rainbow selling his house and his dry-cleaning business. Rainbow is going all out for this. In this first part of the book, Rainbow is part “father” and part “teacher” to Bo. In the second story, beginning in 1984, Bo is a walk-on to the spring training camp of one of the weaker teams in the National League, the Chicago Cubs. Remarkably, Bo makes the team with the help of a sympathetic pitching coach who takes to Bo. Bo has good and bad times in Chicago. He is a star player, but there are those who don’t like Bo and want to do him harm. In the shadows is a Sufi-Muslim, al Sulami, who protects Bo from those who want to harm him. The city of Chicago is presented as a corrupt city with poverty and racial prejudice. Bo takes an activist stance in the midst of it all, and he does make a difference. But it is dangerous territory. Extinction of Desire  is the second volume in the series and features the background of Buddhism. The narrative structure is first-person. The action follows the events of Michael O’Meara, a high school history teacher in Bethesda, Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.). After a tragic accident at a family gathering that Michael did not attend, Michael finds himself the beneficiary of $1,000,000—which made him rich in 1989 (the date of the accident). Michael faces the question of what would you do if you suddenly became rich? Initially, Michael is not up to the task. He is pulled “this way and that” by desire that only makes him unhappy. His apartment neighbor, Mookie (who is a low-level operative in several crime syndicates) tries to help Michael out. But Michael’s problems are many and they have been magnified by his sudden wealth (which is partially stolen and coned out of him by his “new found friends”). Michael’s ex-wife tries to get her hands on the loot, as well. Things escalate to the point where Michael flees the country with Mookie and sets-up in Paris. Soon, Mookie returns to the U.S., and Michael meets a couple (Marc and Terri) who leave him in the lurch when the trio travel to Germany and

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Michael is mistakenly taken for an accomplice in a robbery. Michael goes to jail briefly and begins the process of his freedom from desire. It’s time to travel to the UK (where Michael’s girlfriend, Aisling, is finishing up her doctorate at the University of London). Michael stays away from London as he’s afraid he’s lost Aisling’s affection. Oxford is his destination. Michael happens to meet a couple of students who need another rent-payer. It is in this milieu that Michael makes great strides in his journey to self-knowledge and authentic personhood. To the Promised Land  is the third volume in the series and features Judaism as the generating philosophy. This novel is told in a combination of first-person narratives from the major characters and journal entries from the other major character, Moses Levi. Peter and Moses met as college roommates at a prestigious small liberal arts college in Minnesota, called Pembroke. Peter is non-­religious and so is Moses, a non-practicing Jew. Peter is a person to whom all things come easily. He is brilliant and has no bad habits to get in the way. Moses’ temperament gets in his way. Also, Moses’ brother (the favored child) was on his way to becoming a “successful” doctor, but then gets drafted for service in Vietnam and dies there. Therefore, the family’s ambition falls upon Moses and he can’t handle it. Peter helps Moses to transition himself to what he can handle and saves his roommate from being expelled from Pembroke. The maneuver works and Moses does well in his humanities major (as opposed to his failure at “pre-med”). As time goes on, Peter begins seriously dating (though not yet a formal marital engagement) Sarah Zipporah, also known as Sarah Z. [This is also the name of the wife of the Biblical Moses in the Torah.] The two of them apply for a Senior Fall-­ term in the school’s London program. Peter is accepted while Sarah is not. Peter goes while Sarah stays at Pembroke. In his absence, Moses (who is thriving at the school thanks to Peter’s assistance) makes a move for Sarah. She is ready for him. When Peter gets home, Sarah and Moses are engaged. Peter feels betrayed. One part of the novel is finding out whether there is a formal mechanism for one-to-one personal forgiveness (using the mechanics of the Talmud commentary on Leviticus, to answer the question). This is one of the two central questions of the book: how does interpersonal forgiveness properly occur? The second key question also is about forgiveness. It is one thing to create a model for forgiveness that concerns one-to-one. It is another thing to consider group forgiveness. This is not generally recognized. It is the sort of dynamic that would apply between Germany and Israel after the Holocaust. Is this sort of forgiveness possible? This question in this book is addressed in this way. A chemical company manufactured various compounds in its upstate New York location (similar to the “real life” Love Canel). The company followed government regulations on disposing of toxic wastes, but that wasn’t good enough. They also didn’t do any testing to see whether they were harming the water supply of a nearby town. It turns out that they were polluting the water supply and thousands got cancer as a result. The victims

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tried suing to get medical expenses and compensation, but Moses Levi successfully defended the company and the victims got nothing. Then, as if by chance, 6 months after the verdict, Moses’ wife Sarah gets brain cancer and dies. Is there a “connection”? Moses doesn’t know, but he does leave big-time corporate law, becomes an observant Jew, and turns his energy over to public interest law as a way to “earn” group forgiveness for what he had done. Thus, Moses is on the hook for individual forgiveness for taking Peter’s girlfriend and group forgiveness for his part in getting the guilty chemical company off the hook. Can Moses pull this off? Are the models of forgiveness flawed? The rest of the novel proceeds in examining the answer to these questions. Maya: An Irish-American History  is the fourth and final volume in the series and explores its themes through the lens of Hinduism. The scope of the novel is around 160 years. It is a family saga. It is told in a standard third-person narrative that centers on the O’Neil family for three generations. It begins with the family in Cork, Ireland and follows them to the United States (Philadelphia). From their working-­ class social position, how much is possible in this new world? The public propaganda promotes a strong sense of liberty: a person can be whoever they want to be if they only work hard. The truth on the ground may be different. This question can be phrased in several ways. Is it freewill versus determinism? Is it struggling with one’s fate (are we ever strong enough)? What about karma? There are different versions of this dilemma. Seán O’Neil took his family (a wife and two sons) away from Ireland because the factory at which he was working was running into bad times. Seán’s health was none too good, either. Transitioning to the USA was not easy. Working people were less helpful to each other. Seán’s wife, Mary, died in childbirth and the daughter of that event died soon thereafter. Seán didn’t know how long he could hold on with the polluted air of the textile mill clogging up his lungs. Seán’s two sons, Tommy and James, got some schooling but the need for more money required them to get jobs. Eventually Tommy went to New  York City to become a policeman. James went into the pharmacy business but got involved with some unprincipled German immigrants who wanted to control James. Was this James’s fate? What about his karma? Tommy met an early death and James eventually made some money in various cities—but all the time he was under the thumb of Wolf, the principal unethical German in his life. James married and had a large family (mostly daughters). The story focuses upon the one son not killed in World War 1. He is the first in the family history to attend college. At college Andrew meets a woman, Moira, who will become his wife. Andrew and his wife have their choices limited by World War 2—though sometimes they may have had more avenues to fight their lot than they could have imagined. Sometimes deep preconceptions got in the way. A second family then comes to the fore, the Evans family from Wales. They are second generation in the U.S. Dylan Evans attends the University of Michigan on the World War 2 G.I. Bill. He gets a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in English Literature. He meets and marries Wilma. Then Dylan decides to become a Protestant

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minister and goes cross-country in a “drive away” car (sleeping with his wife on the ground outside the car) in order to attend seminary in Los Angeles. But Dylan does not get to follow his plans. Fate gets in the way. He is not hired by any churches to be their minister. He returns to the Midwest to teach English Literature at a small Christian college. The offspring of these two families (Seámus O’Neil and Lynn Evans) meet in graduate school where both were working on doctorate degrees (Seámus in history and Lynn in English Literature). They marry but neither could get a permanent job in college education. Their choices are limited by non-rational forces beyond their control. After various attempts in various cities, Seámus ends up selling insurance to make a living and Lynn becomes a stay-at-home mom. Seámus decides to do a family history using the skills he learned in graduate school. He wants closure in his life in order to achieve Moksha. But is this ever within one’s complete control? It’s Seámus’ task to find out.

Chapter 7

The Extinction of Desire, Narrative Identity, and the Good Life Robert Paul Churchill

Abstract This chapter opens with the view that the central struggle of The Extinction of Desire’s protagonist is not so much the extinction of his desires as it is his need to establish a unified, coherent understanding of himself and his purpose in life. My intent is to support the teaching of fictive narrative philosophy by drawing on research from personality psychology and the neurosciences. I argue that fictive storytelling is critical because it mirrors and reinforces the formation of personal identity that has a narrative logic or structure. I argue for a three-level model of identity, according to which the narrator-self mediates, in an on-going process, with the agentic-self and the social-self to form an intelligible and coherent past with projection into a meaningful future. In addition to personality psychology, this account of narrative identity is supported by cognitive research on brain architecture, studies of developmental processes in childhood and adolescence, and research on happiness and life-satisfaction. Given the strong case for the value of fictive narrative philosophy as enhancing self-understanding and life-satisfaction, I close by drawing attention to a particular difficulty for educators posed by what I term Internet mediated identity, and caused by excessive time immersed in Internet mediated experiences. Keywords  Agentic-self · Brain architecture · Identity · Internet mediated identity · Life-narratives · Life-satisfaction · Mind reading · Mirror neurons · Narrator-self · Neural frames · Neural circuitry · Personal worldview imperative · Rehearsal · Serve-and-return interactions · Social-self · Storytelling · Worldviews

R. P. Churchill (*) George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. Teays (ed.), Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99265-1_7

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Introduction The springboard for this essay is Michael Boylan’s novel, The Extinction of Desire: A Tale of Enlightenment, that as Boylan explains in the Preface to Part Two of this collection, is the second of the four De Anima novels. As Boylan explains, the novels explore “the many ways humans understand their nature and what they can become.” Of course, each of these novels is philosophical insofar as it is intended to assist readers in finding unity and integrity, as well as meaning and direction in the individual’s own life. I share with Boylan a strong interest in the ways fictive narrative philosophy contributes to successful high school and university education as well, perhaps, for primary and middle school students. Boylan has not only published fictional narratives for this purpose, but also a major non-fiction work on the subject: Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy.1 The latter consists of analytic and didactic arguments for the value of fictive narrative philosophy and also ethical guidelines practitioners ought to follow to enable students to recognize and spurn sophistical rhetoric and fallacious arguments. Because of the ready availability of Boylan’s own arguments on why fictive narrative philosophy “works,” arguments with which, in the main, I agree, I do not evaluate the success of Extinction of Desire as a work in this genre; rather, I will comment on the novel sparingly and only as it illuminates the true subject of this essay. What I shall attempt in this essay is to offer, at least in its rudiments, another argument for fictive narrative philosophy, and one that I do not find Boylan considering, at least insofar as I am aware. This argument will unfold as a thesis about the nature of narrative identity. I will argue that fictive storytelling is particularly important in the educational process because narrative structure and story telling are critically important for the formation of personal self-identity. Of course, we continue to write a bit of our life’s story with each passing day, but the need to know one’s capacities, to develop dispositions, and to give one’s life direction is most pressing for those from early adolescence through early adulthood, because then limited experience, inadequate self-control, and a world of perils poorly apprehended so often result in making ongoing life-stories inchoate. Moreover, it is not just contingently the case that we construct our own life experiences in terms of narrative structures (as perhaps a matter of cultures), rather, I contend that we must do so in order to make the best sense of the past, our lives as we are now living them, and our future prospects. This is necessary, I will hold, because de anima in humans, or the soul—understood here as personality and character—necessarily has a narrative logic, or structure. Completing this argument

1  Boylan, Michael, Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy (New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020). For an earlier and shorter treatment see “What Fictive Narrative Philosophy Can Tell Us: Stories, Cases, and Thought Experiments,” Revisita del Instituto de Filosofia, Universidad de Valparaiso [S.I.] no. 2 (2013), 61–81. Available at https://revista.uvl/ index.php/RHV/article/views/10 > Accessed 15/04/2021.

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definitively would require more than I can accomplish in a single essay, but I hope readers will be interested and encouraged by the way my position, if sustainable, would complement and support Boylan’s own claims for the use of fictive narrative philosophy in education. A number of additional points must be made at the outset. First, an understanding both of identity in terms of narrative structure and of fictive narrative philosophy has become all the more important because of increasing evidence of the negative consequences of students’ immersion on the Internet. I shall raise this issue only briefly at the end, as I have addressed it in some detail elsewhere.2 The important point at present is that appreciation of narratives and their skillful use—along with other measures such as an in-class ban on smartphones and iPads—may be the best ways to combat these threats. Second, the development of my thesis will require that I draw from disciplines outside traditional philosophy, especially from cognitive neuroscience, developmental and personality psychology, and social psychology. Thus, while my discussion may not appear “philosophical” in terms of being in conversation with current philosophical topics, it is deeply philosophical in an historical sense, for as history shows, much of the relevance of philosophy, and often its own cutting edge, requires keeping abreast of advances in that behavioral, physical and social sciences that expand what we, as critical thinkers, accept as the “common body of knowledge.” Third, because the scope of this essay does not enable me to consider many traditional philosophical issues, I shall not be considering specific and contentious philosophical theories of the “good life,” “happiness,” “self-realization” or “self-­ fulfillment.” To be sure, there is much in The Extinction of Desire that invites such exploration. Indeed, as Boylan says in the Preface, the novel features Buddhism as a background, and in his journey towards “self-knowledge and authentic personhood” the protagonist, Michael O’Meara reads the Book of Mu and contemplates the wisdom of Siddhartha. Excerpts from the Book of Mu, as poetry and tales about Siddhartha’s journey toward enlightenment, function almost as narrative fiction inside the Extinction of Desire. Reading The Book of Mu offers O’Meara help in giving meaning to his own journey; and, as such the “tale within the tale” provides, I suggest, an instructive parallel for the way Boylan wants The Extinction of Desire to function for the novel’s readers. Now, while as I say, I cannot enter into these issues at length, I will say a bit more about the novel in terms of its connection with my thesis about narrative identity. Notice that as Michael O’Meara and his story come into view, O’Meara is not riven by desires; indeed, whatever he might desire is being kept in check by his humbling circumstances. (Michael must work part-time at a hardware store as well as at Fairview High School in order to make ends meet, including child-support for his ex-wife Sara’s children whom Sara had in a previous marriage.) To be sure, O’Meara does wish to use earnings from the investment of his inheritance to improve his

2  Churchill, Robert Paul, “Ghosts in the Machine? On the Limits of Narrative Identity in Cyberspace,” International Journal of Technoethics 10 (2019), 10–23.

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quality of life, but in the early chapters the key problem does not have to do with extinguishing desires. O’Meara’s main fault is that he will not be his own man; he will not reflect and critically decide for himself. Unable to interrogate and to assess his life’s journey, O’Meara remains good-naturedly passive and unable to resist the rampant desires and manipulations of his neighbor Mookie and his “friend” Bernie. Predictably, O’Meara continues to flounder as he travels abroad with Mookie and his life spirals downward until he ends up for a spell in a German prison. The windfall million-dollar inheritance exacerbates O’Meara’s unreflective, “unowned” and increasingly out-of-control life. Unfortunately, O’Meara’s inability to wisely manage this resource causes him avoidable suffering; nevertheless, this suffering is redemptive for O’Meara. Towards the end of the novel O’Meara says of his experiences, “I found myself confronted with myself. And I wasn’t really prepared for that.” Fortunately, after six months of self-exploration in England, O’Meara is able to reunite with his girlfriend Aisling, and they commit to share their lives together as true friends and partners, each contributing, with compassion but also critical reflection, to the growth and progress of the other. Let us return briefly to the contrast between the Buddhist worldview registered by the novel’s title and the course the once at sea O’Meara intends to follow with Aisling. As helpful as The Book of Mu is for O’Meara’s own sincere and authentic search for self-understanding, O’Meara intends to progress toward “enlightenment,” insofar as he can, without becoming a Buddhist or adopting the Buddha’s famous Eightfold Plan. This is hardly surprising for anyone who knows Boylan’s non-­fictive philosophy. While anchored by a philosophical anthropology, the approach Boylan follows in his non-fiction does not require the epistemological and ontological commitments of the Buddhist worldview. As O’Meara’s story moves past mid-point, it becomes more apparent that what O’Meara has failed to develop, and must now construct and pursue (with the help of his fiancée Aisling) are viable personal and community worldviews as required by what Boylan calls the Personal Worldview Imperative and the Community Worldview Imperatives. These imperatives are discussed extensively in several of Boylan’s philosophical works, including The Good Society and The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and do not need to be discussed here.3 It is well worth noting, however, that research on narrative identity, to which I turn next, strongly suggests that living a good life (in whatever terms we describe it) requires ongoing thought and activity in accord with Boylan’s imperatives. It is my thesis, as noted above, that life-satisfaction, happiness, and mental health require progress in the on-going project of identity construction, and especially the construction of what I am calling narrative identity. My account of narrative  Boylan, Michael, A Good Society (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman Littlefield, 2004) and Boylan, Michael, The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: A Quest for Meaning (New York: Continuum, 2008). At p. 211 of the latter Boylan presents the Personal Worldview Imperative, the more important of the two imperatives for our purposes, as follows: “All people must develop a single comprehensive and internally coherent worldview that is good and that we strive to act out in our daily lives.”

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identity is heavily indebted to personality psychologist Dan McAdams who first elaborated a “three level” model of self-identity.4 McAdams’s theoretical model has now been well corroborated through experimental laboratory tests and surveys.5 The model conceives of identity as an ongoing developmental process requiring interaction between three “levels,” dimensions, or predominate interactive functions. At one level, or dimension, of identity, we find more-or-less persistent dispositional traits, or general tendencies, such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As dispositional traits characterize a person’s interactions with others, McAdams regards this set as comprising the so-­ called “social actor,” or social self. Describing this dimension of identity as the social actor highlights the fact that it is primarily in the ways one acts, that is, in terms of one’s overt dispositions and external traits, that others (apart from close friends and readers of novels) come to know her. At a second level, or dimension, there is the “agentic self” consisting of the individual’s characteristic adaptations, based on his experiences, coping mechanisms, as well as on a person’s desires, beliefs, concerns, values, and ideals as the latter arise out of experience and also are implicated in the agent’s choices and actions. Finally, at the deepest “level,” or inmost “layer” of the self, we find the storyteller: the narrator, or author; and not just the active storyteller, but also—for individuals seeking authentic identities—a “deposit” of actual stories more or less woven into a single tapestry, the life-narrative that furnishes for the self both solid grounding and future direction. Personal narratives play a central role in McAdams’s model;6 for a life story doesn’t just say what happened, it explains why it was important, what it means for who the storyteller is as a person, for who she expects to become, and for what should happen next. Hence, personal narratives give life a sense of unity, meaning, and purpose, and for this reason, the narrator self is indispensable for the integration of the social and agentic actors into the personality as a whole. When the narrator is successful, a unified and coherent self emerges as the subject in an evolving story that has direction and purpose.7 In order to make experiences accessible in memory, we need to make meaning out of them and we do this is by imposing a narrative structuring on our lived

 McAdams, Dan P., The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology fourth ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006) and McAdams, Dan P., The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 5  Bauer, Jack J., Dan P.  McAdams, and April R.  Sakaeda, “Interpreting the Good Life: Growth Memories in the Lives of Mature, Happy People,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (2005), 201–217. 6  McAdams, The Person (2006) and McAdams, The Redemptive Self (2006). 7  McAdams, Dan P., “The Psychology of Life Stories,” Review of General Psychology 5 (2001), 106–122; McAdams, Dan P., and Kate C.  McLean, “Narrative Identity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22 (2013), 233–238. 4

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experiences.8 Of course, a similar point must be made about learning; in order to “hold onto,” or to recall meaningfully episodes and to integrate them with other pieces of knowledge, a student must be able to rehearse self-talk such as “Now I see what Professor Boylan meant in class yesterday,” or “I know I can distinguish between modus ponens and modus tollens.” The student’s life narrative integrates her reconstructed past and perceived present with an imagined future. Moreover, because personal narratives are stories; they have characters, plots, themes, and settings, as well as episodes and imagery. Following McAdams, identity theorists have studied how the narrator-self integrates with both the social and the agentic selves in order to maintain healthy self-­esteem.9 To be sure, all of us, and especially adolescents, are prone to rely on external social recognition to feel good about ourselves. However, each of us must also believe that it is his or her real self that is esteemed by others.10 In addition, this real and recognized self must accept that she is good enough: the autobiographical self must feel she is worthy of the praise and admiration; otherwise, feeling unworthy, she is liable to fear that others will discover her true story and know she is living a lie. Life narratives, as understood here, are not mere fantasies or imaginative scenarios. This is important to note, given our propensity to dream and fantasize about what is highly improbable, if not impossible. Unlike dreams and fantasies, events in life narratives are causally connected, and anchored—again, when the narrator is honest with herself—with factual antecedents in the past and life narratives project forward with real possibilities. Of course, the story’s causal connections reflect the perspective of the narrator, because causality is shaped in terms of the intent of the story’s main characters.11 However, in addition, individual narratives will respect real space and time, common sense physical and social realities, and generally accepted assumptions about human psychology. In other words, narratives incorporate the reasoning people typically use to “explain how the human world works— how and why, that is, human beings do what they do.”12 This introduction to narrative identity thus can be summarized as follows: “A narrative identity is an internalized, evolving, integrated story of the self” 8  Beck, Julie, “Life Stories: How You Arrange the Plot Points of Your Life into a Narrative Can Shape Who You Are—and It’s a Fundamental part of Being Human,” The Atlantic (Aug. 8, 2015). https://www.theatlantic.com/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychologyredemptive-­­mental-health/400. Accessed 12/02/2021. 9  Pemberton, Antony and Pauline G. M. Aarten, “Narrative in the Study of Victimological Processes in Terrorism and Political Violence: An Initial Exploration,” Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 41 (2017), 1–16. 10  Adler, Jonathan M., “Living into the Story: Agency and Coherence in a Longitudinal Study of Narrative Identity Development and Mental health over the Course of Psychotherapy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18 (2012), 367–389. 11  Bauer, Jack J., and Dan P. McAdams, “Personal Growth in Adult’s Stories of life Transitions,” Journal of Personality 88 (2004), 573–602. 12  Adler, Jonathan M., and Dan P. McAdams, “Time Culture and Stories of the Self,” Psychological Inquiry: Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory 18 (2017) 97–128.

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constructed “in such a way as to provide [one’s] life with unity, purpose, and meaning.”13 Individuals live out their life stories; they are both the narrator and the main character of their own story.14 Moreover, through narratives, “people convey to themselves and to others who they are now, how they came to be, and where they think their lives may be going in the future.”15 Each of us scripts our own story with the movements of our daily lives, and we must be able to see ourselves as the main character in a tale worthy of being told, otherwise we are in danger of lacking enough meaning or purpose to carry on productively. It is appropriate to turn at this juncture to evidence for the mental and neuropsychological underpinnings of life narratives. Through fMRI imaging even the most basic mental events can be observed at the neuronal level and neuroscientists are making significant strides in identifying brain circuits for certain capacities such as the capacity for empathy.16 So far research has not identified complex circuits in the brain that light up when an individual thinks of a sequence of events, or a story. Nevertheless, it helps us understand how narratives are constructed by taking a more detailed, albeit brief, look at the structures of the brain and the way it functions. Along with other mental contents, the elements of stories are stored in the brain as simple “frames” or “scripts,” consisting of a wide variety of sensory elements, simple mental events, and feelings or responses. Once different frames become associated with sufficient frequency, they become bound together and form “neural bindings” or circuits. Because sets of frames are bound together, the triggering of one string of neurons will cause other bound, or connected sets, to fire as well. Some of these neural bindings are typically neuronal pathways that give rise to sensations we recognize as the emotions; they engage the limbic system, the dopamine circuit (for positive emotions), and the norepinephrine circuit (for negative emotions).17 New experiences, such as using a new app on a smartphone, create new neural bindings that bring together neural activation in different parts of the brain to form integrated wholes.18 As the saying goes, “neurons that fire together wire together”19; hence, the more frequently neurons fire in any one part of the integrated network, in this instance, in response to a smartphone app, the more likely it will be that neurons are activated throughout the entire neural network, not just in the brain but

 McAdams, Dan P. and Jennifer L.  Pals, “A New Big Five: Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality,” American Psychologist 61 (2006), 204–217, p. 209. 14  McAdams, Dan P., and Erika Manczak, “Personality and the Life Story,” APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 4: Personality Processes and Individual Differences. Mikulincer, Mario, Phillip Shaver, M.  Lynne Cooper, and Randy J.  Larsen (eds.) (Washington, DC: APA, 2015), 425–446. 15  McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity,” (2013), p. 233. 16  Marsh, Abigail, The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between (New York: Basic Books, 2017). See especially pp. 5–6, 80–124. 17  Lakoff, George, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand twenty-first-Century American Politics with an eighteenth-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 25. 18  Lakoff (2008), 25. 19  Lakoff (2008), 83. 13

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extending throughout the body, including the tapping or swiping finger. With frequency over time, a smartphone ceases to be a tool and becomes almost an appendage.20 This phenomenon is well known in other activities, for example, writers often report thinking better with a pencil or pen in  hand, and artists with paintbrush, paints, and a canvas. Neural circuits are themselves organized into hierarchical structures connected by neurotransmitters. Brain scientists refer to “cascades” as networks of neurons linking together many brain circuits.21 Beyond the first few months of an infant’s life the brain has developed significant complexity so that it no longer responds to images, sounds, and sensations or emotional stimulations as separate phenomena.22 Indeed, as the growing infant’s brain increases in complexity, more and more of conscious representations become transformed from reflective thought or emotion into reflexive, or unconscious thought and immediate, intuitive feelings.23 According to neuropsychologists, even sequences of scripts forming narratives can become reflexive, or unconscious.24 Certain cascades contain circuitry for neurotransmitters responsible for the emotions, as well as cascades converging on event sequences that correspond to thought in the prefrontal cortex. Cascades bringing together remembered events, thoughts, and emotional responses are known as “somatic markers.” These somatic markers allow the right emotions to go where they should in a story. They are the binding circuits responsible for the emotional content of everyday experiences.”25 This account identifies a number of important points for the formation of narrative identity. First, thoughts are connected to emotions, gut intuitions, images, metaphors, frames, and narratives in very complex ways, and often in ways that leave many circuits unconscious. Reflexive thought is not governed by the rules available in conscious thought such as logical reasoning or expectations of objectivity. However, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, have shown that reflexive thought is more thoroughly integrated with the brain’s emotional system.26 This means that an event can trigger a thought or emotional reaction that  Berdik, Chris, “Hechinger Report: Teaching in the Smartphone Age. To Ban or not to Ban: Device Obsessed Students Are Forcing Educators from K-12 to College to Rethink Their Approach,” The Washington Post (Jun. 24, 2018), p. A15. 21  Damasio, Antonio, “The Brain Binds Entities and Events by Multiregional Activation from Convergence Zones,” Neural Computation 1 (1989), 123–132; Lakoff, George and Elisabeth Wehling, The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Talking and Thinking Democratic (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 29. 22  Tomasello, Michael, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 3–75. 23  Teversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (2010), 453–459. 24  Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff, ‘The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Structure,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 27 (2005), 455–471. 25  Lakoff (2008), p. 28. 26  Trepel, Christopher, Craig R.  Fox, and Russell A.  Poldrack, “Prospect Theory on the Brain? Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision under Risk,” Cognitive Brain Research 23 (2005), 34–50. 20

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triggers, in turn, a whole series of cascades even as they remain primarily reflexive. On occasion the sequence can impel the agentic self into action, often irrationally or incautiously, and to express attitudes and feelings the individual might disavow were she able to consciously control them. These concerns highlight the importance of subjecting our experiences to conscious reflection and to reviewing the ways we understand important events fitting meaningfully into the course of life. Second, as the human brain grows we develop what are known as “mirror neurons” that enable us to “mirror” or to replicate in our own minds (with varying degrees of skill) the emotional states and intentions of others. As developmental evolutionist Michael Tomasello points out “mind reading” enables us to participate in genuinely human interactions, as well of course, as to identify with and understand protagonists and other characters in plays, novels, films and on television or the Net.27 Third, and as indicated by mind-reading, mental processing (even when reflexive) is meaning-making; new particulars are placed (or place themselves) into larger contexts, or constructs, and thereby incorporated into pre-existing circuits in which new ideas or sensations are defined or grasped as analogous to previous experiences in order to make sense of them.28 The more extensive the range of phenomena to be processed, the greater the need for meaning; and hence, the more extensive the number of frame-circuits, the greater the hierarchical structure among cascading circuity, and the more complex the narrative structure. We have evolved to be storytellers, or homo dicensfabula: to make sense of the world we inhabit in terms of origin fables, genealogies and histories, and our own lives in terms of autobiographical storytelling. Indeed, there is ample evidence for the significance of storytelling in human evolutionary anthropology.29 Likewise, history and anthropology disclose that gifted storytellers have been prominent or acclaimed members of most in, if not all, cultures.30 When we think of identity formation (self-recognition) in terms of McAdams’s model and what we know about brain architecture, we have some grounds for the supposition that individuals who succeeded in crafting satisfactory life narratives enjoyed an adaptive advantage. It is important, however, not to confuse a “satisfactory life narrative” with one that enables an individual to achieve his goals by dominating or exploiting others. On the contrary, autobiographical storytelling associates positively with measures of well-being and life satisfaction established by psychologists. In the next few paragraphs, I first say a bit about some of the integrative mechanisms of the narrator-­ self. This is followed by some comments about research on the associations between

 Tomasello (2019), 43–80, 177–178, 334.  Lakoff and Wehling (2012), p. 29; Dehaene, Stanislaus, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking Press, 2009). 29  Brown, Donald E., Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991); Gottschall, Jonathan, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Mariner Books, 2012). 30   Smith, Daniel, Philip Schlaefer, and Katie Major, “Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-­Gatherer Storytelling,” Nature Communications 8 (2017). https://doi.or/10.1038/ 54146-007-02036-8. Accessed 01/13/2021. 27 28

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well-being, or life satisfaction, and those who report satisfaction with their life narratives. The narrator-self does not lurk like some managerial homunculus in the brain; on the contrary, the brain does not operate in a compartmentalized manner, but in holistic and syncretic ways. Rather than the image of a homunculus, McAdams’s model suggests one whole self with interactive layers: the agentic-self projecting the whole forward in thought and action, the social-self presenting (or hiding) the whole self (or its aspects) from others, and the narrator-self making connections, assessing continually, and seeking larger purpose. However, just because every feature of story-development draws on so many areas of the brain, it is more useful to characterize the mental processes of story-development in terms of psychological development, that is, thought and behavior in which the individual typically becomes increasingly competent as self-understanding develops with increasing maturity. Perhaps the most important of these developmental processes is known as “serve-­ and-­return interactions.” These typically begin when infants engage reciprocally with attentive, caring, and sharing parents or caregivers.31 Infants must experience sufficient success in such interactions if they are to avoid autism or other developmental difficulties. But far from being completed at the end of infancy, successful serve-and-return interactions, and increasingly, narrative formation and interpretation, must become a staple for childhood, adolescent, and adult development. Parents who share more detailed personal narratives from their own lives assist their children.32 By preschool, children who have benefited from parental assistance with storytelling have advantages—both educationally and in social adjustment—over children who have experienced greater isolation or spent more time with screens, whether these are televisions, iPads, or smartphones. Increasing competence with life-story frames, and hence, in forging narrative identity, is also facilitated by “co-­ constructed reminiscing,” in which caregivers, teachers, friends and others employ interrogative and comparative, and analytic techniques, to clarify inner motivation, to guide reflection about past events, and to assist in creating narratives that explain situations and behaviors.33 By adolescence, the capacity for using life-story frameworks is greatly accelerated because of the large jump in cognition during the teen years.34 Tragically, this jump occurs when individuals are at highest risk of ignoring or wasting what identity researchers call “autobiographical reasoning.” Such reasoning requires, as McAdams and Manczak write, “identifying lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through sequences of scenes, and  Beck (2015).  Crossley, Michele L., “Narrative Psychology, Trauma and the Study of Self/Identity,” Theory and Psychology 10 (2000), 527–546. 33  Fivush, Robyn, and Katherine Nelson, “Parent-Child Reminiscing Locates the Self in the Past,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 24 (2006), 235–251. 34  Habermas, Tilmann, and Susan Buck, “Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Story in Adolescence,” Psychology Bulletin 126 (2000), 148–769. 31 32

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showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self.”35 In addition to seeking what counts as the “truth” about one’s life, or the meaning and purpose, narrative construction is directional: As one “gets a life” his or her story-­ making ought to become, richer, more complex, and more reflective.36 Throughout life, the presence of reliable and highly “generative people,” for instance, care-givers, teachers, coaches, camp leaders, ministers and priests, social workers, sympathetic and committed spouses, and true friends, all can help us overcome “narrative ruptures” that might be caused by trauma, or dislocating experiences that otherwise might result in dissociation, or compartmentalization.37 Again, serve-and-return interactions remain critically important, and the key elements enabling such are trust and respect, sincere self-revelations, and the commitment of interlocutors to listen and to respond with sympathy and sincerity. Among true friends, these supportive exchanges enable us to reveal what’s on our minds or what we feel, while sympathetic interlocutors respond with questions, comments, or suggestions. Genuine friends, in the sense identified by Aristotle, are not those who are useful or amuse and entertain us, but those who are good for us because they identify with us and seek the best for us.38 Serve-and-return interactions also help us explore complexities and apparent inconsistencies, question the meaning of experiences, and in the process, correct, amend, and extend our stories. The research of McAdams and his colleagues indicates that sincerity, coherence and completeness are also important features of satisfaction-­generating stories, that is, of stories we accept as befitting us and our friends acknowledge as true of us. It is interesting to note in this connection the strong similarity between the features of satisfactory life-narratives and the qualities emphasized by Boylan as comprising what he calls the Personal Worldview Imperative.39 Like serve-and-return interactions, what personality psychologists call “rehearsal” is also critical for the formation of coherent and meaningful life-stories. In fact, even by disclosing or relating events we are rehearsing elements of stories, and so much so, that repeated rehearsal shapes the way people remember events. This is because repeated rehearsals—for one’s self or others—do change brain  McAdams, Dan P., and Erika Manczak quoted in Beck (2015).  Habermas and Buck (2000). 37  Pemberton, Antony, and Pauline G. M. Aarten (2017). 38  Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, trans. by Rackham, H., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 451–481. 39  To be sure, people often tailor the life stories they tell for a specific audience or context. Nothing in the theory of narrative identity contradicts the notion that self-presentations are reshaped depending on with whom we associate. However, it is not the case that “anything goes,” or that whatever “feels right” is sufficient. Such outlooks lead to selves even more inchoate than O’Meara’s in the opening chapters of The Extinction of Desire. Satisfactory narratives must move toward coherence and completeness. One can go only so far pretending that a story is “true” only for a particular person, or claim that, “my logic is not the same as yours”; life narratives, if they are to make sense of interconnections with others’ stories, and if one expects others to understand them, must meet higher standards. 35 36

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circuitry and reinforce brain pathways, and hence rehearsal has two important consequences. First, rehearsals solidify memories: the things I tell myself and you, become more accessible to me and hence more memorable. Second, because rehearsals strengthen certain mental connections and inhibit others, what is frequently rehearsed becomes reflexive, but easily retriggered in certain contexts.40 Often when an event retriggers a reflexive frame, and an accompanying circuit “lights up” in consciousness, the content of the frame will be endowed with the feeling of intuitive “truth.” Turning to the connections between positive engagement in narrative identity and psychological well-being, we should expect that, if the narrator-self is necessary for personal identity, and if successful formation of narrative identity had some evolutionary role, then we might expect that people who are successful in constructing life-stories will also enjoy greater life-satisfaction or self-realization. Of course, anyone positively influenced by Socrates’s view that the soul (psyché) or self, seeks unity and coherence, will be inclined to suggest such connections, as well as philosophers such as myself who adopt Aristotle’s view that we seek to move from potentiality toward actuality, including the full development of our individual capabilities. Such ancient wisdom is increasingly supported by evidence from personality psychologists and neuroscientists showing that persons who have “successful” life-narratives, that is, life-narratives that exhibit sincerity, coherence, and on-going completeness, also score highly on standard psychological measures of happiness and life-satisfaction.41 Research shows, first, that individuals who have not been delayed or arrested in forming on-going stories, place a higher importance on understanding new viewpoints, and score higher in affirmative ego development.42 Second, individuals who believe their life stories are coherent and accurate are more likely to be happy, and to develop themes of personal agency and openness to exploration.43 Third, individuals happier with a sense of who they are and reconciled to their life-stories, are more likely to have a positive sense of communion with others, as well as to see themselves as having made important social contributions. Fourth, the ability to find “redemptive meaning” from adversity and suffering is particularly important for well-being.44 Individuals who reflect frequently about their life journeys and work actively to understand why and how events happened as they did are better able to find redemptive meanings in adversity and suffering; they are able to interpret past negative experiences as opportunities for positive growth and the formation of values.45 This  Bauer, Jack J., and Dan P. McAdams, “Personal Growth in Adult’s Stories of Life Transitions,” Journal of Personality 73 (2004), 573–602. 41  Baenger, Dana Royce, and Dan P.  McAdams, “Life Story Coherence and Its Relation to Psychological Well-Being,” Narrative Theory 9 (1999), 69–96. 42  Bauer and McAdams (2004). 43  Adler (2012). 44  Adler and McAdams (2007). 45  Adler and McAdams (2007). 40

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is in large part because they have learned to engage with themselves the same kinds of serve-and-return techniques they have practiced with others, and because the formation of mirror neurons—in the presence of sympathetic interlocutors—enables them to forgive themselves for past false starts, as well as to feel that there is a solid core for future growth. In summary, as psychologist Jonathan Adler reports, there are positive correlations between individuals earnestly at work on their narrative identities, certain central patterns or themes of these life-stories, and the enjoyment of higher levels of maturity, mental health, and well-being.46 Of course, it has to be admitted that these research findings reflect correlations with only inductively probable underlying causal connections. Of course it is also possible that the causal arrow goes in both directions: Happier people may be better at developing life narratives. Perhaps more problematic is the possibility that what scientists have measured and what I report here does not count, from the perspective of some philosophical critics, as genuine happiness, the good life, or self-­realization. To be sure, what counts as the “good life” is highly controversial. I respectfully submit, however, that detractors seriously interested in these issues ought to be able to explain why the psychologists providing these research results have not been using measures of happiness and well-being that capture their preferred notions. In addition, perhaps philosophers could deploy their own skills at devising case studies and thought experiments to imagine experimental designs that produce results they would accept as corroborating or disconfirming the model of narrative identity. As I indicated at the outset, before closing I’d like to say a little about the threat to students’ identity, and hence to educational success, in the Internet or “Selfie” Age. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the onset of his barrage of “alternate truths” and Twitter deceit, not to mention the conspiracy theories of QAnon, we have had ample reason for concern about ways the Internet facilitates the spread of mis-information, racism, xenophobia, and anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies. Here, I limit myself to some brief observations about what I have called “Internet mediated identity” (IMI), that is, the delay, disruption and fragmentation of personal narratives as a consequences of the overuse of Internet devices.47 I will use “cyberspace” to refer to the real space and time in which interactive software and hardware is employed by individuals to present themselves, to interact with others, and to perceive themselves through the Net, Virtual Reality (that replaces the real world with a simulated one) and Augmented Reality (that alters one’s perception of a real world environment).48 However, my focus here will be immersion in cyberspace using the more familiar technologies of the Internet—particularly smartphones, iPads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat—rather than Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality. I will  Adler (2012).  Churchill (2019). 48  Already in 2017 plans were proceeding for Apple and the animators of AMC’s The Walking Dead to create “zombies” who can be experienced by Apple device owners “alongside real people” and available for gamesters to shoot. See, “Augmented Reality: Tech’s Next Battleground,” The Week 18 (Dec. 2, 2017), p. 18. 46 47

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make three claims: First, interactions among “cybernauts” in cyberspace are not just ways of “having fun” or of engaging in imaginary role-playing without deep and lasting effects; rather, these interactions re-wire and re-configure human brains in significant ways. Second, increasing research finds that there are general but negative outcomes associated with excessive immersion in cyberspace. Third, as with declining educational achievement, research suggests that various forms of malaise and declines in well-being that associate positively with excessive immersion in cyberspace, are also associated with difficulties of identity-formation. Consider that by 2014, students on average were checking their mobile devices 1500 times a week, or about 212 times a day.49 Teenagers spend more time on the Net—roughly 9 hours a day and 27 hours a week—than they do in meaningful face-­ to-­face interactions outside of cyberspace, either with family members, friends, or school teachers.50 Yet, changes accelerate without opportunities to reflect about the consequences for identity and personality. Research reported by psychologists Janet Long and Guo-Ming Chen voice concern that students spending too much time online are “increasingly immune to the balancing effects of direct experience and traditional social contexts.”51 Of course, many activities in cyberspace hardly appear harmful: catching-up with friends, entertaining one’s self, socializing, or doing schoolwork. This is why it often seems intuitive that social media platforms and Net devices are neutral, and therefore, innocent. However, the assumed neutrality of media technology depends on claims that it is not intended (designed, created, marketed) to cause harm. To paraphrase the dubious cliché about hand guns, “the technology does not ‘misuse’ people, rather people misuse the technology.” Obviously, there is much “bad behavior” on the Net in the type of content accessible and the abusive ways in which the Net is used; we need only think of cyberbullying, child pornography, the falsehoods spread by QAnon and others, or the online coordination of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. However, it is impossible for Internet technologies to be “neutral” if the term is taken to mean that mere usage has no significant effects on our brains, and consequently, our thoughts and actions. Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Facebook “like” button now refers to the allure of “likes” as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure.”52 This is a euphemistic way of noting that the human

 Woolloston, Victoria, “How Often Do You Look at Your Phone? The Average User Picks up a Device 1500 Times-a-Day,” Daily Mail (2014). https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/articles278367/How-you-look-phone-the-average-user-picks-device-1-500-times-a-day.htr. Accessed 07/08/2020. 50  Wallace, Kelly, “Teens Spend a ‘Mind-Boggling’ 9 Hours a Day Using Media, Report Says,” CNN Health, Nov. 3, 2015. https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/health/teen-tween-media-screenus-­­report/index.html. Accessed 6/24/2020. 51  Long, Janet, and Guo-Ming Chen, “The Impact of Internet Usage on Adolescent Development,” China Media Research 3 (2007), 99–109, p. 99. 52  Rosenstein, Justin, quoted in Lewis, Paul, “How Silicon Valley Hooks Us,” The Week 17, (Nov. 19, 2017), 36–37. 49

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brain is wired for sensation seeking, and each “ding” produced by tabbing the “like” button, or any other habitual “hit” online produces a small but self-reinforcing spike of dopamine in the brain. It is not surprising that Rosenstein, now a “Silicon Valley heretic” is concerned about the psychological effects of smartphones and social media on people who, research shows, touch, swipe, or tap their phone 2617 times a day.53 Despite the popularity of multitasking among students, a growing body of research records the perils of “digital diversion,” or rapid attention-switching. Observing hundreds of middle school, high school, and university students while they studied, researchers found that students stayed with a single task for less than six minutes before switching to something else, usually opening a new browser window or tapping or swiping at their Smartphone.54 In addition, students tend to depend on Facebook, Twitter, and smartphone apps for news feeds and information, and rarely question content.55 Even college students lack adequate information gathering skills and experience difficulties distinguishing between reliable information, unsubstantiated opinion, and misleading or planted and often “fake” news.56 Some researchers believe that, in order for students to benefit adequately from intensified instruction in “media literacy,” and informal and formal logic, such instruction should probably begin at age 12 or earlier, as later in adolescence, and certainly by 18 and 19, “brain architecture,” or brain structures, already may have altered too greatly, including emotional attachments to Net devices.57 By the time they are in their late teens, students who have grown accustomed to reliance on their cyberspace devices, often find that these devices have “hijacked” their minds even when they are turned off.58 A 2017 study published in the Journal for Consumer Research found that students who kept their smartphones on their desks, but facedown and silenced, performed worse on tests of attention and cognitive processing than did students who kept their smartphones or laptops in a backpack or in a different room. Tested differences were greatest among students who reported being most attached to their smartphones and most active on the Internet.59 A likely explanation for the differences in scores points to the effects of a process known as biconceptualism, namely, the tendency of one set of neural circuits, when  Lewis (2017).  Berdik (2018). 55  Jazynka, Kiston, “Colleges Turn ‘Fake News’ Epidemic into a Teachable Moment,” Washington Post Magazine, (Apr. 6, 2017), 23–23, p. 24. 56  Jazynka (2017). 57  Jazynka (2017), p. 27. 58  Lewis, Paul, “Our Minds Can Be Hijacked: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia,” The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Oct. 5, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/ oct/05/smartphones-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia. Accessed 01/21/2021. 59  Ward, Adrian, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W.  Bos, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of Consumer Research 2 (2017), 140–152. 53 54

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activated, to inhibit the firing of other neuronal circuits.60 Experiments also show that, when deprived of Net devices, students habituated to their use often experience a form of anxiety.61 Just as research suggests disturbing correspondences between increased time on Net/screen and decreases in academic performance and interest, there are disturbing trends in terms of the expressed well-being or happiness of heavy Net/screen users. In 2018, the journal Emotion published a major longitudinal study tying a dramatic drop in adolescent happiness with the increased use of smartphones.62 Conducted at the University of Michigan and based on national surveys of 1.1 million 8, 9, and 12th-grade students between 1991 and 2016, the study found that adolescent self-­ esteem, life satisfaction and happiness began plunging in 2012, the year smartphone ownership reached the 50-percent mark in the United States.63 These results were all the more concerning as measures of students’ well-being had been rising since the early 1990’s. As expected, the Michigan study found that the more hours per week teens spent in front of screens (and whatever the platform used: Internet, social media, texting, gaming, or vide chats), the greater the decline of their psychological well-being. The study also compared correlations between happiness, on the one hand, and the results of screen activities versus the results of non-screen activities such as sports, face-to-face interactions, religious services, print media, and homework. For all non-screen activities, the correlation was positive; for the screen activities, it was uniformly negative. The least happy teens were those who were on screen for 20 or more hours a week. By contrast, the happiest teens turned out to be those who are above average in face-to-face social interaction time and below average in social media use.64 Results of the University of Michigan study are consistent with other research findings indicating declining life-satisfaction with increased time on the Net, as well as the phenomenon of “being alone together”; that is, how time spent in Net interaction with “friends” often results in less bonding and intimacy. Despite regarding access to the Net as an absolute necessity given that everyone else is on it, 92 percent of those in in a 2010 study of 1000 Girl Scouts said they would “give up social networking completely if it meant keeping their best friend.”65

 Lakoff, The Political Mind (2008), pp. 70–71.  This anxiety is commonly known as FOMO, for “Fear of Missing Out.” See Turkle, Sherry, “The Flight from Conversation,” The New York Times Sunday Review, Apr. 22, 2012.