Imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight. Literature can thus provide both an occasion for, and the constitutive material of, philosophical reflection. Philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, and the heightened sensitivity to the exact usages of our words – particularly philosophical central words such as truth, reality, perception, art, knowledge, verification, beauty, certainty, illusion, understanding, falsehood – can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words – metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, reference, and indeed (and I would say centrally) the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the constitutive concepts of that issue are in play can enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we comprehend those concepts. And with that change, we will see the philosophical problem itself differently as well – often in ways where we come to see into the substructure, the previously undisclosed presuppositions, embedded within the formulation of the problem. 

It was the great American pragmatist, C. S. Peirce, who claimed that the full meaning of a concept will be the full range of uses of the word naming that concept (again, “truth”, “understanding”, “meaning”, “interpretation”, etc.) across the history of its evolution in language. Of course, Peirce’s view implies that no one person can fully comprehend that full meaning in any one moment – we are always in what Wittgenstein (himself influenced by Peirce through the intermediary of Frank Ramsey) called the stream of life and not beside or above it. Fictional worlds can show us, with a descriptive fullness and exactitude that is not always available to philosophy alone, stations along the way of the long-arc progress of those concepts and words of philosophical significance.  

But about that fullness, that exactitude: this is not the kind of exactitude that would boil down (or attempt to) a broad range of variegated usages into a single, unitary essence or formula that would be present in every case (such as the classical case of knowledge being analyzed down to justified true belief). Rather, literature can afford the kind of capacious and expanded vision that is the result of the patient and perspicacious assemblage of a range, an interconnected network, of cases that employ the concept or concepts at the heart of the philosophical question at hand. And each literary case, with inflected content that is distinctive and perhaps idiosyncratic to its fictional world, to its fully imagined context, will bring into view interestingly complicating details that powerfully resist oversimplified reduction. Multiple aspects of the given concept will emerge in prominence differently as the imagined literary case calls these concepts into play. (As examples of such concepts, think of a few titles alone: Coetzee’s Disgrace; Kundera’s Identity; Roth’s Deception; Byatt’s Possession; McEwan’s Atonement.) That kind of exactitude is not earned easily – one might think here of the kind of exactitude that J. L. Austin’s work offers – and it is a kind of exactitude that is non-reductive, non-boiled-down. It is a kind of exactitude that embraces fullness of description rather than seeing that fullness as a problem unto itself. Works of literature often pursue conceptual precision and fullness of that kind; we see in them the ways that philosophical thinking has been undertaken within literary worlds from the ancient world right through to the present, and they show that the literary imagination is not separate from the world but rather is interwoven throughout it.    

Take the case of a simple, common word: the word “smile”. Does this not have a simple, uniform, invariant meaning across contexts, or at least a fairly stable cross-contextual sense? We know how to recognize a smile, and we thus know (or so we say at this level of generality) what the word means. But then, consider Wittgenstein’ observation:

I see a picture which represents a smiling face. What do I do if I take the smile now as a kind one, now as malicious? Don’t I often imagine it with a spatial and temporal context of kindness or malice? This I might, when looking at the picture, imagine it to be of a smiler smiling down on a child at play, or again on the suffering of an enemy.

This is no way altered by the fact that I can also take the apparently genial situation and interpret it differently by putting it into a wider context. — If no special circumstances reverse my interpretation, I shall conceive a particular smile as kind, call it a “kind” one, react accordingly.

((Probability, frequency.))

His parenthetical notes at the bottom, “probability, frequency”, most likely mean that we usually see the smile as, or in most contexts see it in a manner consistent with, or fitting with, the word “kind” and thus the moral quality of kindness. But the point is: not always, and not always in the same way, and we will in varying contexts grasp a whole range of subtle differentiations of meaning (his extreme case of smiling down maliciously on the suffering of an enemy shows at a glance the great breadth of the range of possibility here). The word does not carry this; what he calls here (in much abbreviated form) “the wider context” does. There is no such thing as a smile in general, nor is there a word that denotes this. What we see in facial expressions, their ranges of meaning and their microscopic subtleties of expressive content, are identical to the ranges of meaning and microscopic subtleties of content in the word “smile”. What Wittgenstein discussed in terms of seeing-as, and Richard Wollheims’s extension of the concept termed seeing-in, are wholly and fundamentally in play in our experience of the facial expression, in our experience of the word, and in any work of art in which a smile figures and we name and discuss it as such. (Consider the unanswerable questions concerning Leonardo’s Mona Lisa; the intelligent wit of Houdon’s sculpture of a smiling Voltaire; the study of expressive smiles in Hogarth’s Marriage a-la-mode series; and the subtle differentiations and dignity-preserving partial or barely breaking smiles represented throughout Joshua Reynolds’ portraits). We see a great deal of exquisitely nuanced human content in all of these – just as we do in the word “smile” as it ranges widely across cases, each with its exactingly differentiated meaning. 

So one could say here that words work in the way that smiles do. But really it is more than that: rather, we perceive words – on the level of actual contextualized usage – with the subtlety that we perceive the content of human expressions, of smiles, and it is literature that shows us this. Gently smiling through soft tears on accepting loss is very unlike broadly smiling, or beaming, with tears of joy. To say that they are at bottom the same because they are both smiles with tears is to miss everything nuanced, everything individualized – indeed everything human. We miss the same humane presence if our approach to words, to the life of our words in language, is approached in general-definition or context-insensitive ways. Literature, in this respect, becomes an antidote to a dehumanizing approach to our language. So: If words work in a way parallel to smiles; and if philosophy is conducted in words; and if the fuller understanding of our words constitutes one form of philosophical progress; then literary interpretation can function as one powerful form of philosophical investigation.  

But then there’s another way of expressing the philosophy-literature connection: literature and its fictional worlds may provide lenses through which we can see the real world. Our first thought may be that, while this can happen, the result would always be fictional, indeed always wrong, because any such way of seeing comes, as a blunt truth, from fiction, not from fact. But that is not blunt; it is too blunt -- in that it will systematically fail to capture a more delicate truth that we may learn from literature to more finely hone our concepts, our words, our sensitivity to the nuances of meaning, and in doing so not diverge from the truth. Rather than diverging, we are enabled to more accurately and exactingly describe the truth. A magnifying glass does not falsify reality; it makes it more perceivable and affords that perception greater precision and exactitude. And we can be aided by literature to order, to structure, to make sense of, facts. Life as we live it can, in a distinctive sense, aspire to the condition of literature – but this does not mean that it aspires to the condition of falsehood. We can ask of our lives if there was, in a given set of circumstances, an Aristotelian beginning. And if so, we might ask how the description of that beginning, how its terminology, how our understanding (or then-partial understanding) of it, set into play themes that grew and developed as a middle. And we might then be able to see how an end came from those teleological unfoldings in life. That understanding is literary in form, but it is not (or at least need not be -- and that is the point), by virtue of that alone, false. It is in this respect that what we may gain from a philosophically alert reading of literature does not stay within its bounds; as mentioned just above, we may well refine, and expand, and make more acute and subtle our comprehension of a concept. And then that need not be the end of it: our expanded comprehension may reach from the pages of literature into our lives, with the result that a form of sense emerges that we otherwise would have missed. (Why is “would have missed” the right phrase? Because the narrative sense was there, implicitly, resting beneath the distracting appearances of the moment; it need not be a sense we project, and not a sense we impose, but rather a sense we discover.) Philosophical concepts – that is, many of the major words of the subject – interweave throughout our lives and language in multiform ways continuously. If what I have suggested here is at all along the right lines, then the enrichment of those concepts by literature does so as well.