Philosophy and Literature: A Night Meeting

“My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one” Ludwig Wittgenstein (quoted by Fann 1969 page xv)

In this essay I want to look at two arguments and a question put by Ole Martin

Skilleas in his “Philosophy in Literature?” (2001 pp 129-150)

His first argument rests on a critique of Martha Nussbaum’s idea that many

literary texts especially novels actually do the work of ethical philosophy. She puts this

strongly in “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible” (2004) when she contends that: “…

the novel is itself a moral achievement, and the well-lived is a work of literary art.”

(p.329)

Nussbaum uses “the Golden Bowl” by Henry James to make her case. She picks

out a crucial scene in the book between Adam and his daughter Maggie where he must

allow her to move on and get married. However this summary cannot do justice to what’s

really happening. James through subtle deployment of image and metaphor represents

this situation in all its particulars; showing the depth of the relationship and the huge

sacrifice required of Adam. It is also clear that sacrifice must be made in a way that

neither will be demeaned by it and that both will still be loved and respected in the

other’s eyes. This, for Nussbaum, goes beyond the examples used in rule based ethical

systems1 reflecting a situation specific Aristotelian ethics that only Henry James’s

imagery (or a similar work) can do justice to. As she puts it on page 334:

If this view of morality is taken seriously and if we wish to have texts that represent it at its best…it seems difficult not to conclude that we will need to turn to texts no less elaborate, no less linguistically fine-tuned, concrete, and intensely

1 Kantianism or Utilitarianism for example.

focused, no less metaphorically resourceful, than this novel.

Now this surely restricts us to a very limited selection of books and this is the first

argument I take from Skilleas’s article. As he puts it (ibid p. 133) it seems not a question

of opening yourself to the possible moral insights of a work but simply one of “..picking

out the “right friends.” It appears that for Nussbaum moral conceptions are worked out

before encountering the work supposedly doing the philosophy.2 However come with

such expectations surely removes the suggestiveness present in even the simplest story. Is

it not this very openness to multiple readings that makes literature ethically interesting?

Skilleas points out (p. 134):

…that the process of literary interpretation is complex, and that different epochs, cultures and people come up with different interpretations of the same work. The choices and emphasises in literary interpretation are also important in what the reader takes the work to “teach” in terms of moral significance.

If one approaches “the canon” looking for friends or, alternatively, for works that disrupt

commonplace ethical norms you are limiting you choice of works fairly radically.3

This leads directly to his next point that one of the things to be open to in reading

literature is how it may pick up resonances and questions particular to its time.4 He

illustrates this through the work of the American Philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell

and his analysis of a type of scepticism he sees working in many Shakespearian plays,

notably, “King Lear”.

2 It might be open to Nussbaum to counter that it is in and through the process of reading literature from a young age that we actually build and develop our moral ideas and pick our friends but this certainly isn’t what she says here. As Skilleas points out this would actually mean hanging out with some bad friends initially in order to discover the good ones.3 In reference to this approach Skilleas uses Kafka’s lovely quote: ““I think we ought only to read the books that wound and stab us…A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us” (ibid p.140) - this would surely apply to many modernist art movements from Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism to, more recently, Situationism.4 Or, even more strangely, it may actually come to highlight particular questions and issues for times hundreds of years after its publication.

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In the famous opening scene Lear demands that his daughters declare their love

for him in effusive terms. This proves to be no problem for the conniving older sisters

who do so in extravagant and lying terms but Cordelia refuses to play the game replying

“Nothing my Lord”5 (ibid p.143) As Skilleas puts it “…this is all she can say in a context

where the words of love have taken on the opposite meaning through the false

pronouncements of her sisters.” Lear’s scepticism about human relations and the

“natural” love between father and daughter proves his undoing. Cavell posits that “…

scepticism concerning other minds is not scepticism but tragedy” (ibid) This is all made

even more interesting by the fact that shortly after the play was published6 a certain

French philosopher called Rene Descartes writes his “Meditations on First Philosophy”

which focus on a doubter seeking something on which to ground his knowledge of the

world.

Cavell’s point7 is that certain questions (often implicit) are in the air in any given

society and time. Knowledge may accrete around these but the “grit” on which it builds

may remain unstated, murky. As Cavell puts it (ibid) “the presence of the sceptical

thematic in Shakespeare’s plays was a question of scepticism being dormant in and

tormenting the culture of the time.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that Shakespeare was a

conscious philosopher or that Descartes ever read his plays. However when Descartes sat

down to pen his meditations the question of scepticism per sae was: “already in full flight

5 We see later that her love reside deeply at the level of action rather than words.6 King Lear was probably first published between 1603 and 1608 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear) where as The Meditations came out in 1641 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy) I know Wikpedia is not highly reliable but surely gives us a “ball park” figure anyhow.7 Which also may have something in common with historically minded philosophers like Hegel and, more recently Foucault in works like the Order of Things

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in the Shakespearean corpus” (ibid). Literature and philosophy may work on broadly

philosophical questions though pursuing them in different ways.

I will examine Ray Bradbury’s short story “Night Meeting.” (2001) using these

two ideas from Skilleas. I will further touch on an interesting question that Skilleas raises

briefly towards the end of his article: have literature and philosophy always been as

separate as many seem to assume?

“The Martian Chronicles” (first published in 1950) is commonly known as “a fix

up” (Brians 1995): a collection of previously published 1940s pulp stories stitched into a

rough chronology with short fillers and some new stories. A range of suggestions as to

what may have happened on Mars from mass extermination of the Martians to the

humans somehow being telepathically absorbed by them are presented. Though each

story is fairly short and simple quiet a rich tapestry of possible histories is woven with no

authoritive version of what actually happened.

“Night meeting” (written for the collection in 1950) is the story of a brief meeting

between the Earthman Tomás Gomez and the Martian Muhe Ca on an ancient highway in

the dark Martian hills. Although the Martian seems to be a ghost from a civilisation

centuries in the past and Tomás is alive and well in his present they get along well after

some initial suspicion. This possibility for friendship across a gulf in time, space and

culture in itself, may well be the major point Bradbury wanted to get across.

A second strong theme centres on doubt (scepticism even) about identity. This

makes for some strange exchanges as both parties severely doubt each other’s existence.

Mr. Ca is supposed to be long dead and yet he finds “I have flesh…I am alive” (Bradbury

2001 p.110). Eventually he points out that there is nothing inherent to either of their

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systems nor any standard outside of them which can prove whether or not they can exist

within those particular systems:

You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the past and who is from the future…It is as if I told you it is the year 4462853 S. E C.. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand? (ibid.p.113)

Bradbury consciously takes on the complex philosophical issue of identity at the end of

this almost Socratic dialogue – clearly philosophy being tackled directly in literature.

However this story could equally well be a “friend” for Martha Nussbaum’s

position. Tomás and the Martian quickly and easily get on and yet nothing could have

prepared them for this encounter. That wisdom gained through lived experience is the

only possible guide available. This is emphasised in Tomás’s meeting with the old petrol

pump attendant whose rather uncommon view is that as people get older they seek more

variety and stimulation. He stresses the value of experience and openness: “I’m just

looking. I’m just experiencing. If you can’t take Mars for what she is, you might as well

go back to Earth.” (p.106) Further it seems that Tomás’s experience of life has well

equipped him for novelty: “… Tomás had swum in blue rivers on Earth, with strangers

passing on the road, and eaten in strange houses with strange people and his weapon had

always been his smile” (p 108-109) The first thing Mr. Muhe Ca says is “Something

different?...eyeing him and the coffee, referring to them both, perhaps” (ibid) Both seem

already well equipped to deal with this night meeting.

Yet Bradbury seems quite an odd “friend” to Nussbaum given her own claim that

only dense works like James’s fiction can convey the ethical subtlety of real human

interaction. Though he uses some beautiful imagery8 this story is short and simple in

8 For example “the stars were white and sharp beyond the flesh of the Martian, and they were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorous membrane of a gelatinous sea fish.” (p 110)

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structure. Yet his point of understanding being possible across massive boundaries is

made very believably.

Though he might well be counted as a “friend” by Nussbaum - Bradbury does his

own philosophy too. In the study guide Paul Brians tells us:

One striking feature of these stories is the progressive political values they embrace. Written during the height of the Cold War anti-Communist hysteria, they criticize imperialism, racism, environmental pollution, censorship and the nuclear arms race. (ibid 1995)

Cold war America was completely swept with the fear of Soviet style

communism. In the 1940s Sci Fi tales depicting hostile Martian and Venusian monsters

hell bent on ravaging planet earth were ubiquitous. The metaphor was obvious: hostile

alien system as hostile communist system. Bradbury is pioneering in depicting complex,

“human” Martians who are sometimes quite friendly in intent. Tomás and Mr. Muhe Ca

approach each other with hands empty of weapons. Another tortured question is briefly

touched in this story. Just exactly what could complete hostility between two huge,

opposing belief systems lead to?9 “Yes, dead. I saw the bodies. Black, in the rooms, in the

house, dead, Thousands of them” (p.111)

Another common image from this age of pulp fiction is that of rugged

individualism and the frontier myth; the chance to escape a decadent, crumbling world

and start afresh. The works of James Blish, Fritz Lieber and Robert Heinlein are full of

steely eyed; self reliant young men busy launching rockets and building frontier towns. 10

Clearly Tomás and the Martian are two such individuals. In one way their meeting of

9 We must remember this story came out a mere five years after World War II10 Some one has actually put up a fairly exhaustive timeline of 1940s sci fi on the web http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1950.html (accessed April 8th 2009)

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minds is only possible because they are somewhat separated out from their cultures and

therefore more receptive to “Something different”.

They are individuals - but mirrored individuals. They are both alone, both on

holidays, both driving on a deserted road after a long period of hard work to get back to

civilisation and party for a few days. In the end as they both return to their journeys both

are both confident in the existence of their respective universes and their place in them.

Yet there is no confidence at the end of the story (especially the poignant last paragraph)

in the existence of either. We are left simply with “Starlight twinkled on the empty

highway...no car, no person nothing.” (p.115) Any individual like any civilisation is

ultimately fleeting and even as Bradbury uses the trope of rugged individualism he also

seems to mock it. It seems that he is consciously doing ethics in his take on the fear of

communism and the attraction of, but limitations to the idea of rugged self-reliance. He

also looks at the question of personal identity: what gives us substance; the feeling of a

real existence.

Finally I think that this night meeting might even be seen as a metaphor

for the meeting of philosophy and literature. Initially this encounter may be suspicious

with both sides doubting the other’s right even to existence:

“And if I am real, then you must be dead.”“No, you!”“A ghost”“A phantom!”“They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies…(p. 110)

However as per the story they may at least come to agree to disagree and hope to meet

again. (p. 114)

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One hopeful sign in this regard is the dagger. Tomás and Mr. Ca quickly realise

that they are transparent and ghostly to each other. However can actually put their full

trust into this first shared assumption? When Mr. Ca reaches for his knife - Tomás is

startled:

You misunderstand, catch!” said the Martian, and tossed it. Tomás cupped his hands. The knife fell through his flesh. It hit the ground. (p. 110)

Tomás is willing to reach for the knife immediately. Maybe both sides can begin working

on that very basis that they are completely apart and “unreal” to each other.

Skilleas at the end of his article suggests that Philosophy and literature haven’t

always been strangers. He points out that “Philosophy was not established as a separate

discourse when Plato wrote…” (p 147) Plato uses his “consummate writerly skills” (ibid)

to address a public raised on Homeric myth. Skilleas points out that “the Phaedrus”

“reads like a modern play” (ibid) and that most of his dialogues are genuinely dramatic to

some extent. In chapter 4 of his analysis of “The Republic” Adi Ophir (1991) considers

the drama and movement at the start of the first book11 especially the interventions of

Thrasymachus; the sophist as he endeavours to control what Ophir terms “the space of

discourse” Unsurprisingly Socrates wins out and most of the book flows like a lecture

with minor interruptions. However this is not the end of Plato’s dealings with literature as

he has recourse to the ten myths in the course of his description of the city, the form of

the good etc. It seems that when logos run out Plato turns naturally to myth to continue

his point.

From Plato’s time forward the barrier between philosophy and literature has

always been semi-permeable. Various writers straddled it comfortably - we might

11 Indeed the first three words “I went down…” are the title of a play by Irish playwright Conor Mc Pherson.

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mention Plutarch, Dante, Laurence Stern and Goethe purely as samples. By the end of the

nineteenth century there are tappings on the wall from both sides: Nietzsche and

Kierkegaard from Philosophy and Emerson and Dostoevsky from the literary side. A case

could be made that the latter’s “Brothers Karamazov” and “Notes from Underground” are

works of philosophy in literary form. Nietzsche’s earlier works like “the Genealogy” or

“the Birth of Tragedy” might be read as philosophy written in an inventive, literary style.

However a later work like “Zarathustra” is surely literature pursuing philosophical

themes. By the twentieth century with existentialism and early modernism the trickle

through has become a decent sized river. In Walter Kaufman’s 1975 collection of

existentialist writing we get on the literary side Kafka, Rilke and Camus12 and from

philosophy (besides the two mentioned above) Ortega and Jaspers. Gordon Marino’s

2004 collection adds Ralph Ellison and De Unamuno Y Jugo to the fiction side.

On the fringes of “The Frankfurt School” were Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin;

philosophers, critics and stylish writers and there are many other consciously

philosophical twentieth century writers such as Borges and James Joyce.

Deconstructionists like Derrida and Barthes seem to have a foot in both camps. Deleuze

and Guttari write partially in technical, philosophical language and partially in bursts of

literary prose. Ethicists like Iris Murdoch wrote philosophical novels and Susan Sontang

was a great ethicist as well as a literary critic and fiction writer. Yet while some wings of

Philosophy have increasingly engaged with literature others have moved further away

from it. Today the gap between the broad camps of Analytical Philosophy and

Continental Philosophy has become a gulf.

12 To which you might add Samuel Beckett.

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Yet some have crossed that gulf. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus” was written from within the analytical tradition of Moore and Russell. He

attempted to form an exact correspondence between the structure of language and the

logical structure of things - what can be said with clarity and what, in his view, amounted

to non-sense. However within about ten years he completely repudiated his previous

work in his “Philosophical Investigations”. Language does not, necessarily, say anything

about the world. In fact it is simply a tool, a practice, an exchange, an agreed socially

mediated game with no automatic correspondence to anything real. (See Fann 1969

pp.72-81) It seems that Wittgenstein took the possibility of analytical philosophy as far

he could and then quietly abandoned it admitting that language was a slippery human

construction useful only within limits. 13 So having reached the edge of philosophy we

may find ourselves back in myth. We are back with Plato who could with equal comfort

use myth to continue a philosophical point or drama to preface philosophy.

Artists and philosophers generally work within the assumptions, forms and frames

of reference of their disciplines. Exchanges between them may be friendly but they may

also be like suspicious signals semaphored across a gulf. Like Tomás and the Martian

they have first to convince each other of the other’s right to an existence; their right to

pursue questions in their particular way. The philosopher may suspect that the novel has

nothing systematic to say about life and conversely the novelist may find the

philosopher’s take on morality narrow and fixated with universals and rules. They may

remain strangers in the night despite being taken up with similar concerns. In this context

perhaps Wittgenstein’s journey is worth considering as well as Plato’s ability to move

13 In a 2005 interview with Andrew klevan Stanley Cavell speaks of Wittgenstein’s (and his own): “distrust of language as well as his trust in it…that combination of absolute reliance and absolute questioning of every word that came out of me”

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smoothly back and forth between myth and logos in pursuit of philosophical goals.

Practitioners of both disciplines may pursue questions to the edge of what is possible in

their domain but then surely the courageous step is to continue, in a friendly way and

with due modesty14, into the other’s domain if the pursuit warrants it.

14 Welcoming all available help from those already within that particular field.

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References

Bradbury, Ray. ”Night Meeting” in The Martian Chronicles (London: Voyager Classics. 2001), pp 106-115.

Brians, Paul. “Study Guide for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles” 1995 (revised 2003) http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/martian_chronicles.html(Accessed March 19th 2009)

Stanley Cavell in conversation with Andrew Klevan “What becomes of Thinking in Film” in Film as Philosophy – essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell, edited by Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2005. pp 167-209.

Fann, K. T. “Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy” Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1969.

Kaufman, Walter. “Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.” New York: Penguin 1975.

Marino, Gordon. Basic Writings of Existentialism. New York: New Modern Library 2004.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible” in Philosophy of Literature. Contemporary and Classical Readings, edited by Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell. 2004. pp. 329-340.

Ophir, Ade. “Plato’s Invisible Cities: discourse and power in the Republic.” London: Routledge1991.

Skilleas, Ole Martin. “Philosophy in Literature?” in Philosophy and Literature: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2001, pp. 129-150.

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