Literature and Philosophy: The Common Ground

Abstract

IN THIS ESSAY I shall be talking about the sort of problem that has been fruitfully treated in both philosophy and literature. It seems to me that the number of such problems is actually rather small, and this is a point I should like presently to develop at somewhat greater length; but there is a preliminary issue that it would be very risky to leave in suspense: how literature and philosophy differ in their attitude to the subject matter they share. One crucial difference, it seems to me, is the absolute requirement that the literary subject be interesting to its intended audience. A philosophical perplexity too, no doubt, will hardly be very gripping if it impinges on our lives only in our accidental capacity as students of philosophy; but such feebleness of grip is no more damaging to its purely philosophical importance, if it has any, than to the purely mathematical importance of a theorem awaiting proof. Literature is very different in this respect; if a poet picks out for serious interpretation a state of affairs that is not at least a possible source of apprehension to his audience, he is committing suicide, not as an enthusiast of extracurricular virtues but as a poet. Nor ought we to be fooled by talk of his creating the subject and making it interesting, which is usually