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60 - Literature as philosophy
- from 14 - Ethics, religion, and the arts
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- By Rhiannon Goldthorpe, St Anne's College
- Edited by Thomas Baldwin, University of York
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2003, pp 714-720
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Summary
A survey of the themes which preoccupied writers and philosophers in parallel between 1914 and 1945, some perennial, some of more recent urgency, would doubtless include the following: relativism; the subjectivity of perception; the paradoxes of temporality; the instability of the self; vitalism and the limits of reason; the validity of intuition as a basis for knowledge; the mind–body relationship; the inadequacy, in expression or representation, of conceptual language; the problem of meaning; the relation between art and life. In the rich creativity of the period three paradigm texts stand out in that they do not simply mirror but actively renew reflection on these issues: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) (1913–27), Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (1924), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea) (1938). Proust’s emphasis on discontinuity and contingency complicates his supposed affinity with Bergson; Mann’s dialogue with the ongoing legacy of Nietzsche evolves throughout his career; Sartre’s pre-war novel is a phenomenological and heuristic fiction which clears the ground for his future theory.
PROUST: A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
Proust’s ‘search for lost time’ was also a search for truth – a search which would entail a portrayal of our errors. And, indeed, in the experience of his hero, Marcel, and in the often disabused voice of his narrator (Marcel’s older self), errors proliferate, whether they be perceptual errors, errors of self-knowledge, errors of recollection, or errors in Marcel'ment of others. Perception yields no sense of a stable world; vivid flights of imagination or expectation find no correspondence or fulfilment in an elusive reality.
5 - Understanding the committed writer
- from Part II - Psychology and ethics
- Edited by Christina Howells, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Sartre
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 28 August 1992, pp 140-177
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Summary
“A life develops in spirals: It always passes through the same points, but at different levels of integration and complexity” (CRD I, p. 71). This observation, which underpins Sartre's synthesis of biographical and historical methods in studying the individual and society, might also apply to the preoccupation with committed writing that characterized his own life and work. The reader cannot fail to note the persistence and the far from linear development of the concepts and methods which articulate that preoccupation. The range of concepts itself promises complexity. Psychological, moral, social, political, historical, linguistic, literary, and aesthetic issues must all be integrated through a correspondingly intricate method that draws its inspiration, without lapsing into eclecticism, from a number of different intellectual traditions. The tracing of the spiral is fascinating, frustrating, and exemplary - fascinating because of the commitment and tenacity of Sartre's arguments, frustrating because those arguments reach no conclusion, exemplary because the inconclusiveness is itself inherent in the problem analyzed and in the method of analysis: Sartre's open-ended writing itself enacts an open dialectic.
Two of the major theoretical points through which Sartre's spiral passes are Qu'est-ce que la littératuie? (1947), usually taken to offer the classic description of "committed" literature, and "Questions de méihode" (i960), which presents a more complex view of the interaction of individual, society, and history, prescribes a method for revealing the dialectical relationship of social conditioning and individual project, and prepares the reader for the potentially surprising claim that a writer as apparently uncommitted as Flaubert may be considered to be "engagé."