In the 1950s, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell dabbled for a while in novel writing. He later remarked that novel writing was not much different from philosophy, his major interest, which also happened to be nothing more than another kind of fiction. Russell was great enough to have no insecurities about his life’s work, which cannot be said about the average philosopher, who tends to take himself a tad too seriously. Besides, Russell had a wicked sense of humour and may merely have been joking. If so, like all good jokes, the joke could not have been closer to the truth.
The distinction between fact and fiction, of course, is that the former deals with things as they are, while the latter with things as somebody desires them to be. In novels for example, the writer moulds the story as he wishes. Of course, he includes some facts as well – he would not be credible otherwise: for example, even in a narration straight out of his fantasy, people would drive on a certain side of the road, and would eat certain foods characteristic of the city the story is located in. But apart from this, his imagination is the only limit to the strange turns the circumstances take. Fact, on the other hand, does not offer this type of luxury to a narrator, for it seldom seeks the authors’ opinions (even if they are philosophers). Karl Marx, who is regarded worldwide as the philosopher who gave a new interpretation to materialism for explaining the movement of history, can equally be seen as a fiction writer. Like all fiction writers, he presents some facts, which he then surrounds by a lot of fiction. Like all fiction writers, he is more partial to some truths as compared to others. Like all fiction writers, his temperament nudges him in a certain direction to the exclusion of all other directions. This is by no means to singe Marx out, for he is only one example; all philosophers are storytellers.
It is well known that philosophy started with a much broader view than what is now generally considered its subject matter. Aristotle’s works included what we would now categorize under science, logic (mathematics) as well as what we are apt to refer to as ‘philosophy’. But it is rather easy and very tempting, to oversimplify the process. Because philosophy is never quite eliminated from any subject matter, even as ‘scientific’ as quantum mechanics.
It is well known that philosophy started with a much broader view than what is now generally considered its subject matter. Aristotle’s works included what we would now categorize under science, logic (mathematics) as well as what we are apt to refer to as ‘philosophy’.
Also, as was the case with psychology, many scientists (and philosophers) in their enthusiasm were guilty of declaring it a science when it was obviously too early to do that. And all that based merely on experiments on mice in cages and on men and women pushing buttons under various stimuli! The aim of reducing mental processes to experimental testing was a noble one indeed, but since mental phenomena are infinitely more complex than physical phenomena encountered in physics and chemistry, what has resulted is merely behaviourism. The basis for the rest of psychology is still for the most part fiction.
So spectacular was the progress made in science owing to Descartes’s dualism that it was easy for many to forget that the neat classification was after all an artificial one. From ‘there is a mechanistic world consisting of measurable phenomena’ to ‘there is only a mechanistic world with nothing outside it’ was the next (predictable) step. This is despite the fact that the purely mechanistic worldview never explained the origin of the universe, origin of life, biological development, and consciousness. To which objection the standard answer was, and to date is: ‘We are working on it.’ Which brings one back to the only limit when it comes to fiction: imagination.
According to ‘modern’ philosophy, apart from other things, it is a sign of extreme rationality to believe that a man is constrained to do what he does (he has no free-will); that oft-times he is unaware of even his own motives; and that the whole concept of punishment and rewards is therefore not only unfair but grossly irrational. All the while when, in real life (as opposed to fiction), the whole world and intelligent life therein (including philosophers, I dare say) is based squarely on responsibility, reward and punishment. There is nothing new about this brand of ‘rational’ materialism, which is exemplified in Sam Harris – philosophy has this way of repeating itself cyclically. Hume had famously taken reason to a similar extreme, and Kant had no option but to retort that there were two sorts of reason: pure and practical; and that Hume could merely have been talking about pure reason. For all Kant’s failings (and he had a good many) he was intelligent enough to know that only fiction could counter fiction.
