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The article starts from a thought experiment attributed to the Greek philosopher Carneades and handed down by Cicero and Lactantius. After a shipwreck, two seamen swim in the sea. There is a plank that promises rescue, but it has room for only one of them. The problem is that in this particular situation, the survival of one is only possible at the cost of the other’s life. This thought experiment, which is, in this instance, called the rescue or survival dilemma, has many intricate moral and juridical implications that require dis cussion. It is significant that what seems to be an intellectual experiment recurs in real-life situations throughout the ages. The first part of the article examines the discussion of the dilemma in question in philosophy from classical antiquity to modernity, with a special focus on Leibniz, whose importance in this tradition has been largely ignored so far. Since the rescue dilemma raises many legal questions, it is necessary to look at the way juridical discourse deals with it. The second part of the article investigates representative instances of the rescue dilemma in literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since philosophy and literature do share a deep interest in one and the same problem here, the investigation is concluded by reflections on the relative nature of discourse in the two disciplines and their different ways of dealing with significant human issues.
Vorbemerkungen
(2022)
Though it cannot reasonably be denied that there is a fundamental difference between the mode of rational-logical discourse in philosophy and the aesthetic mode of composition in literature, the two products of the human mind have a common origin in antiquity and have fruitfully interacted in the course of intellectual history. Indeed, philosophy and literature are siblings whose relation reveals infinite possibilities of mutual inspiration. This is the basic idea that informs the present volume, which looks at the interdependence between philosophy and literature from Greek and Latin authors over the millennia to modern philosophers like Derrida, Ricœur, and Gabriel. Some of the topics discussed are Aristotle’s concept of mimesis (imitation) and its tradition, Cicero’s use of dialogue, the logician Frege’s attempt to define poetic speech, the ethical dimension of literature, the literarization of philosophy in Schopenhauer, Hölderlin’s conversion of philosophy into literature, and Wallace Stevens’ lyrical philosophizing. The symbiosis of literature and philosophy is ubiquitous and especially conspicuous, of course, in authors like William Godwin, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who are simultaneously philosophers and writers of fiction. Further examples of this symbiosis are, for instance, Schleiermacher’s vision of Plato as a philosophical artist in German Idealism; the relation between the modernist poet Francis Ponge and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, which is expressed in Derrida’s book title “Signéponge”; and the American poet Gary Snyder’s assimilation of Asian philosophy. Special emphasis is given to the respective forms of cognition (Erkenntnis) achieved in philosophy and literature and the different ways of handling the problems of reality and fiction – of truth and lying – in the two distinct kinds of discourse.
This essay attempts to establish an ethics of literature, which, as distinct from earlier approaches, is transgenerically oriented in that it does not focus on narrative alone but on the three main literary genres of narrative, dramatic, and lyric art. It follows Wittgenstein’s much-quoted dictum that aesthetics and ethics are one. Its basic assumption is that ethics emerges in literature under the condition of aesthetic form. The much-discussed problem of the relation between philosophy and literature is found in the concept of the proposition, which, in Aristotle, who uses the term apophansis, means a statement, assertion, or predication. In philosophy, the proposition is, as Gottfried Gabriel emphasizes in his monograph on cognition (2015), an essential element within deductive processes of argumentation, contributing to proving a theoretical position or working out a theoretical position. In literature, propositions usually do not occur in extended argumentative contexts. They make a statement that may have a significant philosophical and specifically ethical impact and that may relate to the entire works concerned. Hence, the concept of propositionality makes it possible to relate and simultaneously differentiate the two great achievements of the human mind: philosophy and literature. In the essay’s analytic part attention is given to specific ethical dilemmas in Homer’s “Iliad” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, the representation of evil in Shakespeare’s tragedies, narrative strategies for presenting ethical situations and events in nineteenth-century novels (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Tolstoy), and the occurrence of ethical elements in lyric poetry. As far as the lyric genre is concerned, we take note of the paradoxical fact that even in the object poetry of Rilke and the imagists (Williams), an ethical aspect emerges. A common result of textual analysis is the recognition of propositional elements in all texts investigated.
