The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is a provocative debate in academia.
Some of the great philosophers have been great writers in the sense of literary artists. Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Augustine are some outstanding examples. If not quite in their class Descartes, Pascal, Berkeley, Hume, and Rousseau were also good writers. Philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Juan-Paul Sartre were also awarded Nobel Prize in literature.
On the other hand, some great philosophers have also been bad writers — two of the very greatest Kant and Aristotle being two of the worst. Hegel must be the most difficult to read of all the world writers. All these examples establish one thing that philosophy, as such, is not a branch of literature.
These two branches of thought, philosophy, and literature are different in their styles and aims. Philosophy has a scientific style of writing. The essential aim of philosophy is clarification, and literature is very often mystification.
Literature is vast, and it is diverse and multiform. It is very natural and close to ordinary life, everyone loves telling stories, and it’s the part of everyday life. Literature is a disciplined technique to arouse specific emotions, and that’s why people like it. Writing novels and poems engages more of the personality of the writer and the reader.
In contrast to the literature, philosophy is repetitive. It’s coming back over the same ground. Philosophy is very unnatural and notoriously difficult to find philosophy in its real sense.
Philosophy essentially involves the criticism of beliefs and presuppositions of beliefs. But people don’t like having that done to them because it makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure. Philosophy is the history of philosophy in the sense that there are developments in the problems and philosophy lives on a philosophy much more than art lives on art.
But generally, philosophers have not written very well on art partly because they put it in a minor issue. They have got a general view of morals and metaphysics. Schopenhauer is an exception, and he is intense about art. Unlike other philosophers, he did regard art is central to human life.
Philosophy in literature
Philosophers like Volatile and Sartre, who were also novelists, have been profoundly influenced by philosophical ideas. Tolstoy, in his novel War and Peace, a great epilogue, has tried to explain specific knowledge of history.
Another famous Russian novelist Dostoevsky, who is described by existentialists as one of the greatest of all existentialists. Mainly because he is involved in the problems which they are also concerned about. But the amount of philosophy they succeeded in expressing is minimal. As soon as philosophy gets into a novel, it ceases to be philosophy.
However, Sartre’s La Nausee might be said an excellent philosophical novel. It is demonstrating about contingency and has a philosophical subject that is very close to art. Many peoples’ introduction of existentialism comes from that novel because the novel expressed the existentialist point of view in a work of fiction.
Relation
The first level of their relationship is the fact that both literature and philosophy are social phenomena. They are social, not just in the general sense of being produced by people who make up society.
Both philosophy and Literature are born out of human experiences of an individual or group, and they often treat very abstract matters that arise from a reflective pondering on the phenomena of life. They are both produced for the intellectual and practical needs of society. The second broad connection between the two subjects in question is the idea that they are both constructions in the language.
Philosophy develops concepts and clarifies them, while literature engages these words to communicate ideas, figures, and moral principles and to enlarge realities. The philosophy of an era tells of the nature of that age; likewise, the literature of an epoch tells of the problems and realities of that period. They both reflect the beliefs of men about realities.
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