Philosophy and Literature

Philosophy and literature is one of my enduring interests (at the moment I'm working on [/procrastinating from] a seminar paper on T.S. Eliot and Eric Voegelin and the relationship between philosophy and poetry; earlier today I was flipping back to a paper I wrote two years ago on "Ash-Wednesday" and Voegelin). Martha Nussbaum has written in the past on the relationship between philosophy and literature, and in a book review essay for The New Republic published yesterday she addresses the intersection between the two. She is a harsh critic! And gives away much of her own position when she writes:

To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?

And again:

To write philosophically about Shakespeare, or any other great author or artist, one needs not so much philosophical learning, or even philosophical argument, but a genuinely philosophical temperament, puzzled and even humble before life's complexities, and willing to put one's sense of life on the line in the process of reading a text. As Plato rightly said, it is no chance matter that we are discussing, but how one should live. The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.

I don't think I've done the first thing in my paper, but I'm fairly sure I've at least done the latter two. She gives me great hope, however, that I might approach a philosophical temperament one day. We shall see.