Barry Stocker

A discussion of how the criticisms of ethical theory in Søren Kierkegaard and Bernard Williams both reinforce each other and also provide some challenges to each other. Despite Williams’ brief and dismissive encounter with Kierkegaard around the reading of a ancient tragedy, both oppose any tendency to see the characters in those tragedies as lacking in agency. Both are consistently concerned with how the individual struggles for some ethical agency and how no individual can be free of the influence of chance or error. Kierkegaard and Willliams are shown to both oppose relativism and communitarianism in ethics, along with utilitarianism and to both have an interest in plurality of ethical ideas of how to live.

Wide-ranging essays making up the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. This volume collects a wide-ranging set of essays examining Friedrich Nietzsche's engagement with antiquity in all its aspects. It investigates Nietzsche's reaction and response to the concept of "classicism," with particular reference to his work on Greek culture as a philologist in Basel and later as a philosopher of modernity, and to his reception of German classicism in all his texts. The book should be of interest to students of ancient history and classics, philosophy, comparative literature, and Germanistik. Taken together, these papers suggest that classicism is both a more significant, and a more contested, concept for Nietzsche than is often realized, and it demonstratesthe need for a return to a close attention to the intellectual-historical context in terms of which Nietzsche saw himself operating. An awareness of the rich variety of academic backgrounds, methodologies, and techniques of reading evinced in these chapters is perhaps the only way for the contemporary scholar to come to grips with what classicism meant for Nietzsche, and hence what Nietzsche means for us today. The book is divided into five sections -- The Classical Greeks; Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics and Stoics; Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition; Contestations; and German Classicism -- and constitutes the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. Contributors: Jessica N. Berry, Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet and Isabelle Vanden Poel, Paul Bishop, R. Bracht Branham, Thomas Brobjer, David Campbell, Alan Cardew, Roy Elveton, Christian Emden, Simon Gillham, John Hamilton, Mark Hammond, Albert Henrichs, Dirk t.D. Held, David F. Horkott, Dylan Jaggard, Fiona Jenkins, Anthony K. Jensen, Laurence Lampert, Nicholas Martin, Thomas A. Meyer, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, John S. Moore, Neville Morley, David N. McNeill, James I. Porter, Martin A. Ruehl, Herman Siemens, Barry Stocker, Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, and Peter Yates. Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow.

This chapter presents a discussion of philosophical themes and references in Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. This is organised around desire and love, consciousness and pan-psychism, action and tragedy, solitude and community, inner consciousness and responsibility, metaphor and aesthetics. The chapter argues that pan-psychism and the psychic world are metaphors which bring some temporary order to the chaos of chance and some temporary relief from the unpredictable consequences of action. Chance and unpredictable consequences of actions make for a tragic world. Enduring tragedy is a necessary part of the development of the self. Aesthetic and erotic experiences, in which we reach new stages of development, serve this ethical-tragic process. Pan-psychism is a convenient metaphor for the attempted unity of experiences and the communication between individual consciousness, along with the role of dreams and imagination. Irony enables us to understand the negative consequences of well-intended actions and is an indication of how we can try to order the world. Metaphor is the necessary element for finding order in the chaos. References to Hegel and Bergson enable us to understand the place of consciousness in Murakami without him writing a Hegelian or Bergsonian novel. Indirect reference to Arendt directs us towards the role of imagination in ethics. References to Plato are suggestive with regard to the role of love as an ideal.

How the novel and philosophy may become the same and the limitations on such hopes. After a survey of examples, the chapter focuses on James Joyce’s relationship with Vico and Homer (continuing considerations in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-319-65891-9_2), Joyce’s relationship with Kierkegaard, Jane Austen’s relationship with ethics and Austen’s indirect relationship with Kierkegaard. The chapter considers both how the most obviously literary philosophical and philosophical literary works may be considered from a philosophical novel perspective, but also how a less obviously philosophical writer like Austen is full of philosophical insights. This continues considerations in the introduction on how ethics and the novel may be related.

Søren Kierkegaard is discussed as the first philosopher to develop an understanding of the novel at length. Four of his texts are considered: From the Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, A Literary Review. The first is considered for its account of Danish novels in a world of unpredictability and subjectivity. The second is considered for its view of Socratic irony and dialogue, Romantic irony and novels, along with Hegel’s criticisms. The third is considered for its accounts of tragedy and opera, as deeply connected with novelistic aesthetics, as well as the Romantic novelistic structure of Either/Or. The fourth is discussed for its view of the place of the novel in the political and social understanding of the time.

This chapter investigates major aesthetic approaches to the philosophy of the novel and develops distinct approaches to be used in the book. The distinction between Analytic and Continental European philosophical approaches is established. The Analytic approach is largely explored with reference to Peter Lemarque. Its limitations are defined through a discussion of Lemarque’s approach to Roland Barthes as a literary critic. The nature of ethics and literature as an approach to the novel is identified and its limitations are discussed. Martha Nussbaum is selected as an example of ethical philosophical criticism at its best. Her approach and its limitations are discussed in relation to poetics, erotics and ethics, focusing on her reading of Jacques Derrida.

Bakhtin is discussed with regard to the antique and medieval precursors for the novel, pluralism of voices, carnival, temporal analysis and approach to Dostoevsky. François Rabelais is discussed as the source of the transformation of the carnivalesque into novel. The ethical and political aspects of Bakhtin’s commitment to plurality of voices and registers are considered. The relation of his literary analysis with his view of the distinction between Orthodox and Catholic churches is discussed, along with his Russian populist leanings.

Epic is discussed as a forerunner to the novel. Aristotle’s comments on Homeric epic in the Poetics and Rhetoric are fully explored, to establish a view of what epic is and its relation to public forms of speech. Giambattista’s New Science is discussed with regard to its philosophy of history, its account of poetry and the central role it gives to Homeric philosophy. This is discussed as partly the product of a growing novelistic culture in Vico’s time and as applying to main aspects of the novel including its relation both to epic discourse and the more variable discourse of everyday life.

The chapter begins with what Nietzsche contributes to the philosophy of his novel through his remarks on Stendhal and Dostoevsky, along with his view of how the novel emerges from the death of tragedy in antiquity. These thoughts are considered as what opens the way for Lukács. Lukács is mostly considered for his Romantic work on the novel, though his Marxist phase is also considered. His view of the novel as a fall from epic unity between individual, and the world is emphasised along with other historical aspects.

Marcel Proust’s river novel, In Search of Lost Time, is considered as anovel of absolutes as advocated by the Romantics. The consideration of Proust both as a philosophically interested writer and as the object of an enormous amount of philosophical attention. How Proust’s transcendental aesthetic subjectivity connects with historical, national and European consciousness through memory. His place in the history of literature and how he writes as someone located in the history of literature always concerned with other kinds of history. The specific place of his writing in Third Republic France and the political interpretation of this include the movement from aristocratic to democratic worlds.

This chapter looks at how French writers of the mid-twentieth century take mimesis away from the centre of the novel. Georges Bataille puts ‘evil’ at the centre, that is the breaking of social habits to reach some deep level of desire which is enacted rather than represented. Maurice Blanchot puts death and meaninglessness at the centre of the novel, which drifts towards and between moments of emptiness and extinction. René Girard has a more Christian Huımanist view of the dangers of mimetic desire and violence, which may be resolved by moments of transcendence. The more violent and apocalyptic aspects of his views are also explored. Finally, the chapter considers how French anti-mimeticism is taken up by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

The literary aesthetics of the eighteenth century is discussed with regard to the growth of the novel as a literary genre, noting it that is not incorporated much into aesthetics. It is in the late eighteenth century that Romantic philosophers such as Friedrich Schlegel begin to develop a philosophy of the novel based on its appeal to subjectivity and unstable perspectives, summed up in the term ‘irony’. Hegel’s reaction to Schlegel and less elevated role for the novel is explored along with related aspects of his literary aesthetics. This chapter then covers the role of nature, particularly as known to chemistry as a model for understanding and appreciating the novel, or at least setting up the possibility of doing so.

Erich Auerbach is considered as a theorist of mimesis and of the decline of Europe, influenced by Vico. His more humanist view is compared with the anti-humanism of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to the extent that they see the current civilisation as doomed and lacking in ideals. This Marxist view is compared with more conservative and liberal views of the growth of state power. Adorno and Benjamin are compared as more nihilistic and more religious thinkers. Their views of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel are discussed.

The Introduction discusses the field of philosophy and literature and how it is composed of work in literary theory, literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics, and philosophy of literature as well as work very specifically focused on the interactions between philosophy and literature. The general scope and ambitions of the Handbook are outlined. It includes summaries of each chapter along with general remarks on work in the field concerned. It finishes with discussion of relevant further reading.

This chapter looks at the major thinkers about the philosophy of the novel over time. Giambattista Vico is identified as the first major figure, though he did not write about the novel, because his writing about epic poetry and the loss of the poetic sets up the themes of philosophy of the novel. Friedrich Schlegel is considered as the first notable philosopher of the novel, operating with German Romanticism, taking the novel as an ironic play of subjective positions. Kierkegaard is then taken up with reference to his views on irony and modernity. This is the stage for consideration of other thinkers of the novel, with regard to the historically embedded nature of the novel along with the philosophical significance of the relation between subjectivity and history.

This paper gives an account of the most significant elements of Derrida’s ethical thought, drawing on the desert of the Hebrew Bible, which Derrida associates with a moral law that is ethically troubling. Partly with reference to Kierkegaard’s account of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida examines how ethical law can become subordinate to the sovereignty of the power apparently at the source of ethics which may then destroy moral law. The political equivalent of this is the decision proposed by Carl Schmitt, drawing on Kierkegaard. Derrida’s famous statement that “deconstruction is justice” is the recognition that justice, and ethics in general, is caught between the formality of law and the violence of the sovereign power. One outcome of this is sacrifice as substitution, where ethics becomes recompense for violation through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the offering of a substitute. The substitution becomes repeated and itself is then the source of violence contravening some sense of ethics. Derrida’s attempts to escape from these deserts include a poetics which recognises the subjective and the aesthetic in the interpretation of law. It also includes the development of a form of sacrifice which is the individual responding to violation in an individualised way which cannot be substituted.

This book explores the aesthetics of the novel from the perspective of Continental European philosophy, presenting a theory on the philosophical definition and importance of the novel as a literary genre. It analyses a variety of individuals whose work is reflected in both theoretical literary criticism and Continental European aesthetics, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Moving through material from eighteenth century and ancient Greek philosophy and aesthetics, the book provides comprehensive coverage of the major positions on the philosophy of the novel. Distinctive features include the importance of Vico’s view of the epic to understanding the novel, the importance of Kierkegaard’s view of the novel and irony along with his other aesthetic views, the different possibilities associated with seeing the novel as ‘mimetic’ and the importance of Proust in understanding the genre in all its philosophical aspects, relating the issue of the philosophical aesthetics of the novel with the issue of philosophy written as a novel and the interaction between these two alternative positions.

This comprehensive Handbook presents the major perspectives within philosophy and literary studies on the relations, overlaps and tensions between philosophy and literature. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and literature, literary theory, philosophical aesthetics, literature as philosophy and philosophy as literature, its twenty-nine chapters plus substantial Introduction and Afterword examine the ways in which philosophy and literature depend on each other and interact, while also contrasting with each other in that they necessarily exclude or incorporate each other. This book establishes an enduring framework for structuring the broad themes defining the relations between philosophy and literature and organising the main topics in the field. Key Features • Structured in five parts addressing philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, and main areas of work within philosophy and literature • An Introduction setting out the main concerns of the field through discussion of the major themes along with the individual topics • An Afterword looking at the interactions between philosophy and literature through itself enacting philosophical and literary writing while examining the question of how they can be brought together The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in philosophy of literature, philosophy as literature, literary theory, literature as philosophy, and the philosophical aesthetics of literature. It is an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, philosophy and literature, cultural studies, classical studies and other related fields.

This paper seeks to displace contemporary “progressive” attempts to bring Adam Smith into the fold of thinkers who support a form of state intervention favouring the welfare of its poorest members through distributive justice. The paper argues that despite the validity of pointing to Smith’s support of those at the lowest economic level, it never amounts to redistribution of wealth, especially to the poorest. The state structure Smith proposes does favour those with the most at stake in maintaining a stable political structure. The paper argues that the real and genuine concern Smith shows for the poorest element, would be supported by the state through the development of a legal system that would prevent or hinder the bad behaviour of the upper classes and state craft that promotes broader economic development while promoting the better virtues of societies wealthier members. Though there are distributive elements of Smith’s theory that favours the poor, they tend to be measures that prohibit attempts at distribution that could end up harming the poor. Thus, there is no basis for the assertions of egalitarian liberals who see in Smith’s work support for state sponsorship of an ideal formula for resource distribution.

Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) hb: 0-521-41722-8. pb: 0-521-42721-5. Paul Patton, ed., Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (London: Routledge. 1993) 0-4150-8256-0. Lester M. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London: Routledge, 1993) 0-4150-9580-8. David Owen, Maturity and Modernity. Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge, 1994) 0-4150-5398-6. Peter Lassmann and Ronald Spiers, eds., Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994) hb: 0-521 -39312-4. pb: 0-521 -39719-7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, tr. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994) hb: 0-521-40459-2. pb: 0-521-40610-2.