Philosophy and the Art of Writing

Abstract

The ‘philosophy’ of the title is here understood in terms of ‘its Socratic paradigm’ as involving ‘a critical disciplined search for wisdom that involves self-knowledge through self-examination and that aims at improving both self and society by challenging complacency and dogma’ (p. 16). The decline in the West of the ancient idea of philosophy as a special way of life is seen as—following Pierre Hadot (1995)— in significant part a function of Christianity’s taking over of its spiritual ideals, leaving philosophy merely as a conceptual ‘handmaid’ to theology; when it regained autonomy in the modern period ‘it maintained its purely theoretical character’ (p. 22). The art of writing, it is argued, can play an important epistemological role in philosophy’s art of living, for it can enable representations of the self that are both durable (unlike the images of fallible memory) and widely sharable (thereby allowing examination of the self to be subject to critical assessment by others). Stoics typically sought to establish consistency or unity in oneself to promote self-knowledge and self-care, and writing can serve this quest; but the ‘slippery nature of language and the alterity of the text’ can lead to ‘disunity and doubt’ (p. 24), and even attempts to ‘utter what is unutterable’ (p. 56). Initially, these complexities are presented in terms of the permeability of the problematic literature/philosophy distinction. The final chapter, however, leaves Europe behind to focus on Chinese culture, where the distinction, such as it is, has little purchase. Here Richard Shusterman explores ‘China’s classical pursuit of the philosophical life through the art of writing’ (p. xi), where the embodied nature of human life, including but going beyond the education of the emotions, plays an even greater role than it does in what we are accustomed to call ‘literature’.