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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
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Philosophy as Fiction (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,421
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Philosophy as Fiction (Paperback)
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Philosophy as Fiction seeks to account for the peculiar power of
philosophical literature by taking as its case study the
paradigmatic generic hybrid of the twentieth century, Marcel
Proust's In Search of Lost Time. At once philosophical--in that it
presents claims, and even deploys arguments concerning such
traditionally philosophical issues as knowledge, self-deception,
selfhood, love, friendship, and art--and literary, in that its
situations are imaginary and its stylization inescapably prominent,
Proust's novel presents us with a conundrum. How should it be read?
Can the two discursive structures co-exist, or must philosophy
inevitably undermine literature (by sapping the narrative of its
vitality) and literature undermine philosophy (by placing its
claims in the mouth of an often unreliable narrator)?
In the case of Proust at least, the result is greater than the sum
of its parts. Not only can a coherent, distinctive philosophical
system be extracted from the Recherche, once the narrator's
periodic waywardness is taken into account; not only does a
powerfully original style pervade its every nook, overtly
reinforcing some theories and covertly exemplifying others; but
aspects of the philosophy also serve literary ends, contributing
more to character than to conceptual framework. What is more,
aspects of the aesthetics serve philosophical ends, enabling a
reader to engage in an active manner with an alternative art of
living. Unlike the "essay" Proust might have written, his novel
grants us the opportunity to use it as a practice ground for
cooperation among our faculties, for the careful sifting of
memories, for the complex procedures involved in self-fashioning,
and for the related art of self-deception. It is only because the
narrator's insights do not always add up--a weakness, so long as
one treats the novel as a straightforward treatise--that it can
produce its training effect, a feature that turns out to be its
ultimate strength.
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