James Ryerson discusses whether novels can have philosophical content. The discussion is inconclusive, its main purpose being to register a question, a problem. Ryerson sets up a number of oppositions between literature and philosophy (though he does also qualify them). He says, for example:
Philosophy is concerned with the general and abstract; literature with the specific and particular.
He also refers to the view of Iris Murdoch:
Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy."
I must say, I'm surprised by this opinion. Obviously, novels aren't the same sort of thing as works of philosophy, and thank goodness they aren't. Even philosophers, or most of them anyway, don't want to be doing philosophy the whole time. One reads novels for different reasons than one reads Wittgenstein or Rawls. It is true, as well, that the contrasts between the general and the particular and the analytical and imaginative minds do divide works of philosophy from those of literature. All the same, Murdoch's claim that the occurrence of philosophical themes in her novels was 'an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know' is unconvincing to me. Take this passage from the principal narrator in The Black Prince:
A serious kiss can alter the world and should not be allowed to take place simply because the scene will be disfigured without it. These considerations will no doubt seem to the young unutterably prudish and fussy. But precisely because they are young they cannot see how all things have their consequences... There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off. The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull their sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of tiny interconnections.
Or this one:
I daresay human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent... But more usually it is the product of a semi-deliberate inattention, a sort of swooning relationship to time.
Or consider this passage:
Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery [goodness - NG], but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.
And here, finally, is one of another stripe:
The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings.
My purpose in displaying these passages isn't to say that one must agree with them, or to comment on how much truth they have. It is merely to show that they carry eminently philosophical thoughts, and to add that, for my part at least, I find them all very interesting. The suggestion that they're sort of chucked in by the author because philosophy was what she happened to know doesn't stand up. None of them is there gratuitously; they are reflections that 'belong' where they do in Murdoch's tale, not mechanically but integrally. A novel of pure generalities, were it even possible, wouldn't give much pleasure. But a general idea may be contained by a specific character or incident or state of affairs, so I don't see how the contrast of general and particular defeats the possibility of there being fruitful relationships between literature and philosophy. The Black Prince itself ends with a statement about artistic truth that is not just 'tagged on' but of critical import in deciding about what has 'really' happened in the book. And also... Crime and Punishment, maybe? Me, I prefer to go with this: 'Prof. Grayling calls works of literature a "treasure house" for philosophers.'