Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel: Why Literature is Not Philosophy

Abstract

When Plato banished the poets from his ideal philosophical state, he accused their work of being merely an art of illusions: speaking to the lower parts of our soul, making us take the sensuously apparent as unquestionably true, relaxing our impulses for philosophical investigation and giving us license to have way too much erotically charged fun. Since then, a great deal of philosophical work has been dedicated to proving him wrong by defending a view of literature as philosophically relevant, or even as being philosophy in another form. Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, is one of the few modern thinkers who has taken Plato?s side in this ancient quarrel, by insisting on a firm distinction between philosophy and literature. Nonetheless, most of the scholarship on her work has (often in order to read her own novels as philosophical) disputed her emphasis on the distinction. In this dissertation, I set out to do the opposite. With Murdoch as my main guide, among other thinkers such as Stanley Cavell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Weil, Hegel, Kant and Plato, I argue for why literature is not philosophy. After giving a historical background for the ancient quarrel, I propose some aesthetic characteristics which make it unfruitful, unnecessary or misguided to regard literature as philosophical. Through a discussion of the sensory illusion of sense, the role of conceptual thinking in literature, the clash between epistemology and fiction, the consolations of tragedy, and the immorality of art, I provide an extensive description of literature as distinct from philosophy.