FICTION AS PRAXIS: Was thinking the other night about the odd perceived dichotomy between philosophy and fiction, or philosophy and art more generally. I blame Plato (despite my general Plato fangirlness). It seems obvious to me that although some practicioners of fiction may operate primarily by intuition (just as IMO Nietzsche, in his aphoristic moods, operated primarily by intuition), in general fiction is both an act of philosophy and part of the foundation of philosophy.

It’s an act of philosophy because so much of fiction is about credibility. We’ve all heard the cliche that “truth is stranger than fiction,” and I expect most authors have been frustrated to realize that we just can’t write stories in which things happen the way they really did happen! because it would appear too coincidental and too neat. Fiction is not about presenting the raw world. Life does that for us. Fiction is supposed to tease out some kind of language from the raw world. Fiction is meant neither to replace nor to mirror life, but rather to interpret it.

In order to do that, fiction writers must have some sense of cause and effect. If thing X is true about the world I’m describing, what else logically follows? Intuition often helps here, but it should be ditched if it conflicts with the story’s internal logic. To take a trivial example, in “I Count Only Sunny Hours” one character has deeply satisfying, harmonic psychic experiences when she touches people. She also has a fairly promiscuous sexual history. I didn’t connect the two until after I’d worked out the story’s midsection. Now I know that she slept with men in large part because she hoped for that intense psychic connection. If my intuitive sense about her past history had not hooked up with the story’s basic setup, I would have had to figure out why I thought she’d slept around. If my intuition had no hook into the story’s internal philosophy, there would be no point in including it. And, more importantly, if I thought the internal philosophy of my fictional world had no connection to the world through which I in fact move, I would have no reason to write the dratted story, and should ditch it and write something else. All science fiction and all fantasy and all horror and all bildungsroman and all good fiction generally is about the unsatisfying, ragged, halfhearted, doubletongued and doubting world in which we move and have our being.

And so fiction is no substitute for philosophy; but also, vice versa, since fiction provokes recognition (yes, this is the world I see!) and without recognition there is no philosophy at all.