Creative Writing as Philosophy

A Final Advertisement for My Writing Workshop at the American Library in Paris, Beginning February 3, along with Some More General Considerations

tl;dr: I’m teaching a workshop on writing philosophical fiction at the American Library in Paris, February 3, 10, and 17, and I’d love to see you there!

I’d also love for you to subscribe to my Substack!

1. Philosophy of what now?

Of what can there be a philosophy? I mean, what is the range of nouns proper or common that may appropriately stand as the value of x in the phrase “philosophy of x”? I’ve seen some pretty bold substitutions for this variable over the years. I remember early in my career when my higher-ups attempted to press me into teaching a course called “Philosophy of Leisure”.
“Philosophy of what now?” I stammered.
“Leisure,” said the chair firmly.
“I’m not doing that,” I replied, no less firmly.
“Care to explain?”
“It’s undignified.”

That reaction of mine motivates the question as to what, exactly, is the implicit rule that makes us reject certain candidates for x, while embracing others. It is interesting to note here that it is precisely in terms of indignity that Socrates in the Parmenides rejected the suggestion that there might be a Form of “hair, mud, and dirt”. His dismissal of these entities is visceral rather than argued, yet it also provides a rough template for understanding how we go about deciding what may replace the x, even in our grossly non-Platonist age: there can be a philosophy of whatever we continue intuitively to imagine there can be a Form of, which is pretty close to saying whatever is universal.

But there are many objects that are, so to speak, relatively universal. The Sun, for example, is as good as universal relative to all life on Earth, yet in our current cultural context the very idea of a university course called “Philosophy of the Sun” sounds absurd — not, I note, undignified, just absurd. But the Sun, I would argue, is vastly more important, and more rewarding for a philosopher to think about, than is “leisure”. All leisure depends on the Sun, after all, which on the face of it should motivate us to rethink our presumption that leisure is universal in the fullest sense of the term while the Sun is not: leisure might be something that is found wherever human beings are found (that’s a big “might”, as we’ll see in a moment), but that’s only a vanishingly small corner of the physical universe, not to mention of reality as a whole, and it’s a corner, I repeat, that is entirely dependent on, and shaped by, a certain large ball of plasma 150 million or so kilometers away.

It’s not that I don’t think there could in principle be a philosophy of leisure. But it would plainly have to be investigated together with the twin concept of labor, without which it makes no sense. And once we understand it as part of a pair, we also see it as highly culturally and historically specific, i.e., not universal. Both spear-hunting elk and clocking in at the widget factory are things people have done to keep themselves alive, but the meaning of these endeavors for the people involved in them is so different as plainly to warrant different analyses under different general headings, and not indiscriminately as “work”. And similarly for what goes on in these respective groups’ “downtime”, campfire stories and bowling, say, respectively. There might be something similar in these two activities at a physiological or ethological level, but if that is enough for both of them to be grouped under the same heading, as “leisure”, then the concept is general enough also to permit, perhaps to require, attention to the cycles of activity and rest we also see across the entire animal kingdom (even insects sleep and dream).

And don’t get me started on “Philosophy of Sport” (almost always written in the singular, even or especially by Americans, with that lamentable Anglophilic wink, as if to signal that you may be sure even before cracking the cover that the great bulk of examples are going to be drawn from cricket, perhaps rugby, and of course that game they call “football”). I’ve read around in that subfield’s literature, hoping to find at least some engagement with more outlying phenomena, such as the Native American rubber-ball game, and have found virtually no traces of them. To take them on would require at least moderate familiarity with cultural anthropology, but such familiarity would, at the same time, force us, as in the case of philosophy of leisure, to recognize the fluidity of the concept of “sport”, and to notice in particular the way it opens out into broader reflections on the extremely challenging concepts of ceremony and ritual. Any adequate “philosophy of sport” is also a philosophy of mating ritual, of sublimated-combat ritual, of divination. It would ask such questions as, “Should the members of the losing team be beheaded?”

In short, after five pages or so of David Papineau’s Knowing the Score: What Sports Can Teach Us about Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us about Sports) (2017) (thanks for that plural, Professor Papineau!), I find myself looking up and instinctively scanning my bookshelves once again, hoping to rediscover Theodore Stern’s vastly more enlightening work, The Rubber-Ball Games of the Americas (1950). What we tend to find, across the globe, is that competitive matches generally occur mostly as a component of larger annual festivals with a sociocosmic regulatory function. Thus for the Witoto people of southern Colombia, the rubber-ball game “marks the full moon in the lunar cycle, a symbolization which, however, has taken on an extraneous character in the harvest festival, in which the ball becomes the representative of the fruits of the harvest.” Comparable symbolism can be found in the Sakha or Yakut games of the Ysyakh or summer-solstice festival in Northeastern Siberia, which features wrestling and tug-of-war, but is primarily centered on sacrifice, on ritual consumption of fermented mare’s milk, and, indeed, on gratefulness towards the Sun in this brief season of its reign (hail again, universal Giver of Life!). Fascinating stuff, but don’t expect to hear about it in your intro-level “Philosophy of Sport” class.

There’s probably an annual college football game out there somewhere called the “Harvest Bowl”, and you might make the case that this is a residual hint of the same sort of annual cyclical ceremony that we may discern in pre-Columbian America. But by now everything that happens under the banner of “sport” is so fully subordinated to the forces of capital that such residual labels amount more to an offense to the values fossilized in them than to a celebration of these values. If there still is a Harvest Bowl, it is almost certainly a vestige of an event that started eighty years ago and that is about to be renamed “Costco Bowl” or something equally terrible. Whatever we are doing in our stadiums or at our beach resorts is at best a perversion of, but more likely a total rupture with, what people have done in most times and places, with the result that we really cannot hope to draw any lessons about humanity as such from any inquiry that attends exclusively or predominantly to the contemporary world.

What I’m trying to get at, in my meandering way, is that what’s universal and what’s particular depends very much on where you’re standing. For this reason I myself am a great admirer of thinkers who tackle topics that appear to be hopelessly particular, without any obvious openings from which to draw universal lessons. I’m thinking in particular of Gaston Bachelard’s wonderful works on the elements, such as La Psychanalyse du feu. Bachelard is using the term “psychoanalysis” in a way that betrays almost no debt to Freud, and that seems almost synonymous with “philosophy”. Can there be a “Philosophy of Fire”? Émilie du Châtelet thought there could be, with her Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu of 1744. So did Immanuel Kant: the work he submitted for his MA degree —yes, in philosophy— in 1755 was entitled Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio [Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire]. In his untimely way, Bachelard is really just returning to a conception of philosophy that had only very recently fallen out of fashion in the early twentieth century, and that, one might argue, had been the reigning conception ever since this tradition’s archaic origins, when a certain Miletian took an interest in water.

My own proclivities have often pushed me to attempt “deep-dives” on hyper-specific topics to see what profound lessons might be teased out of them: the old “universe in a grain of sand” approach to humanistic inquiry. Could there be a “Philosophy of Horns”, as in, the keratinous excrescences on the foreheads of certain mammals? Let’s start investigating and find out. How about a “Philosophy of Hyenas”? That seems like a stretch, hyenas are just a couple of species, after all. But again, universality and particularity are always relative. Increasingly we are seeing courses on the “Philosophy of Animals”, though typically, for reasons I don’t quite understand, they do not follow the “Philosophy of x” format, but rather have more boutique names like “Animal Minds and Human Morals” (also the title of a wonderful book by Richard Sorabji). But animals constitute only about 2.5% of the Earth’s biomass, and a similarly small portion of the tally of species. “Animal” is only somewhat less particular than “hyena” — a higher-order taxon, but still a vanishingly small portion of the pie-chart that includes bacteria, archaea, etc. So why not make a little effort and see what we can draw out of an exercise in sustained attention to the Hyaenidae family?

2. “Of” vs. “and” vs. “as”

If I were a preening continental type I might have called this essay “Philosophy of/as/and Creative Writing”. While I would never resort to that rebarbative Derridean slash in my own writing, I do think it’s worth reflecting for a moment on the different connotations of these conjunctions.

Anglophone philosophy departments often, or at least often used to, feature courses with the title “Philosophy and Literature”. I taught one myself in the General Studies program when I was in grad school at Columbia in the 1990s. The purpose here is to use literary works to draw students, who might be put off by ordinary argumentative treatises, into engagement with philosophical ideas. The guiding lights here are, e.g., Camus and Dostoyevsky.

This is good stuff, of course, but the approach is essentially the same as the one we also see in that book series I’ve railed against here before, which takes mostly forgettable fragments of popular culture and conjoins them with Philosophy, in the hopes, as they say, of “meeting the kids where they’re at”: The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Sopranos and Philosophy, and so on. Obviously, if I deem that we can philosophize productively about hyenas, I’m not about to say we can’t also philosophize productively about The Simpsons. But two things rub me the wrong way about this series and similar efforts. One is that they do not stand the test of time: how, I would like to know, is, say, Orange Is the New Black and Philosophy selling in 2024? The second is that damned “and”. It is as if the people who have conceived these works have some clear idea of a discreet domain of activity, “philosophy”, that can be fueled by any fruit of cultural production imaginable, while on the other side of the conjunction we have these cultural fruits that are fundamentally and essentially not-philosophy. I’ve never understood the confidence with which academic philosophers in the analytic tradition assert the existence of such a boundary.

Potentially, depending on how you read it, all literature is philosophy, and I suppose I have to grant, though I’d rather not, all TV shows are philosophy too. Hansel and Gretel is philosophy. Gargantua and Pantagruel is philosophy. Bouvard and Pécuchet? Definitely philosophy. These are all stabs at working out the basic contours of reality, and determining in view of these what the shape of a human life should be. The problem with the formulation “Philosophy and Literature” is that it implies what we might call an “exclusive conjunction”, which again I just don’t think can be justified, especially when we consider the actual range of texts that have found their way into the agreed-upon canon of philosophy.

“Of” proves to be equally unserviceable. In the analytic tradition “Philosophy of Fiction” is likely to lead you into such Meinongian quandaries as whether Sherlock Holmes has a height — Arthur Conan Doyle never tells us what it is, so we have no right to say, e.g., that he is 5’9’’ or instead 6’2’’. But how could a man have no height? We must either assign one at random, or concede that a fictional man is a very peculiar sort of man indeed, and from there we enter into a whole titillating adventure in contemplation of imaginary entities.

This is all a bit limited, but still I’d take the “of” over the “and” any day, if I had to choose, nor would I begrudge you your right to undertake research in the “Philosophy of Better Call Saul” or whatever, if that’s what you wish to do. Still, with the “of” as with the “and”, what we too often see, I think, is a sort of ad-hoc elevation of x’s that are extremely particular to our place and time to the status of what we might call “honorary universal”. I suppose, to cite an omnipresent example from our current moment, that there can indeed be a “Philosophy of Taylor Swift”. But there can also be a “Philosophy of The Monkees”, or a “Philosophy of Whatever that Group Was that Sang ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy)’ (1968)”. After all, “Is the seat of love in the tummy?” is plainly no less legitimate a question to pursue as a philosopher than, say, “Is the brain the seat of the intellect?” or “Does thymos proceed from the heart?” The only thing therefore that makes Taylor Swift seem well-suited to philosophical pedagogy in 2024, but not The Monkees or Ohio Express (I just remembered their name, not to be confused with the sublime Ohio Players —hell yeah, I’m gonna go listen to “Skin Tight” (1974) now, back in a few—); the only thing that makes Taylor Swift seem more suited to philosophical inquiry than The Monkees, or G.G. Allin, I was saying, is, obviously, marketing. It is deeply undignified.

But what now about “as”? Have this conjunction’s potentials been fully explored in a pedagogical context?

3. What I’m getting at

For a while now, in this very space, I have been pursuing as if by instinct, like a blind naked mole rat digging its tunnel it knows not where, a sort of writing that comes naturally to me but that wants a convenient label. Some philosophy colleagues, I suspect, believe I’ve gone crazy, and it’s true I did have a series of literal mental breakdowns between March 2020 and October 2023, which I’ve openly and honestly chronicled here, and which I hope are now behind me by the grace of God. But the fictional work I’ve also shared on Substack has not been so much a symptom of these crises, as their cure. When I write, say, in the voice of a “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI”, as I did last week, I am eminently sane. And not only am I sane, but I am also fulfilling, as I see it now, my vocation as a philosopher. For a while, in the depths of crisis, I was thinking of this new work as a total rupture with who I had been and what I aspired to do before. Now I think of it not as a rupture, but only as a turn.

I’m loath to admit it, but the operative sense of “philosophy” here is one articulated by Gilles Deleuze, who is otherwise far from my personal short-list of heroes and influences (I can’t make heads or tails out of what he’s saying! What the fuck is a “body without organs”?!). This is, namely, philosophy as concept creation.

What is philosophy, anyway? Wittgenstein said it’s “shewing the fly the way out of the bottle”, not so much creating new concepts, as getting rid of old and unnecessary ones. François Bernier said it’s the study of the properties of saltpeter, and stuff like that. Philosophy is many different things. One thing it could be, I think, is incitement of the imagination, by creative means, to see the world in unfamiliar ways. This might only be a preliminary stage of what will later be elaborated in the form of argumentative treatises, but even if that’s how it’s approached, we can still affirm it as a proper part, rather than a mere propaedeutic, of philosophy itself, especially given the wide diversity of authoritative definitions that have preceded us in history.

It seems to me that introducing a creative dimension into the practice of philosophy is all the more urgent in the present era, when increasingly machines are able to do the drudge work of regurgitating corpora of knowledge that we used to think of as intrinsic to any rigorous program of humanistic study. Ask a student to write a paper on, say, whether Descartes’s Cogito is a “speech act” or not, and there’s an ever-growing chance what you get from that student will have been composed by an AI. Ask a student instead to imitate an AI in the process of malfunctioning after being asked to write that same paper, and he or she is very likely to realize that there’s just no way any system but a conscious human one can produce the expected work.

I sincerely believe that to save the humanities, within which I include philosophy, we are going to have to reconceive what we do as at least in part a creative endeavor — literary, artistic, imaginative, playful, in short, all those things of which a human spirit is capable, and a machine never will be.

So far, as I’ve complained before, most readers don’t like my fictions. Most readers like my essays griping about how most readers don’t like my fictions more than they like my fictions. But I’m playing the long game here, and I do have occasional hints that boost my confidence in what I’m doing. Just as I was writing this present essay, someone wrote to say about one of my weirder and more intricate pieces: “spectacular. i lost track of how many layers of fiction you were on (complimentary). i think the stuff you're doing here is extremely unique and interesting and it warms my heart to see it; consider me firmly one of the 18% or whatever that number is that is all in favor of more of this sort of thing!”

This warms my heart too, and indeed there is a lot more to come. But more than that, I propose to take it on the road, so to speak, to share with others the basic elements of this approach to philosophy, which is said in many ways. To that end, as an initial foray into the pedagogy of “Philosophy as Creative Writing” (or I suppose vice versa), I am teaching this workshop at the American Library in Paris, February 3, 10, and 17. I believe there are a few slots still open, and I would be thrilled to see you there. There will be no video recording or tele-participation. If you’re not in Paris, perhaps we will have another occasion. But please do get the word out, and let anyone who is around know about it. L’anglais sera la langue d’enseignement par défaut, après tout c’est la Bibliothèque Américaine qui nous accueille, mais cela va sans dire que ceux qui le préfèrent sont invité.e.s à soumettre leurs créations littéraires en français aussi. See you there, I hope!

Get creative! Let your freak-flag fly! (Within appropriate bounds, of course.)