Does fiction help us navigate through life's complexities and conundrums? Can it help us become a better person via moral instruction?
It could be argued that fiction allows us to view life from the perspective of another (usually the main character) thereby increasing our capacity to empathize with people in different situations in life, perspectives and folkways different from our own. You could almost even view literature as a simulation in which we can traverse different ethical dilemmas without real world consequences.
On the other hand, it may be possible that empathizing with fictional characters makes it harder for us to empathize with real people in the real world. For instance, a story about an ideal, nuclear family can act as a simulacrum, a copy without an original, because we frame our conception of what our family or others families ought to be like based on a fictional representation of a family in a book.
Note: I'm not saying that nuclear families are bad, what I mean is that is it possible for us to base our expectations of what a family ought to be like on a family that does not exist and is perhaps a projection of the author's fantasy.
So what do you think Veeky Forums? Does literature bring us closer together as humans and instruct us on how to be a better person? Or does literature create obstacles for real human beings to relate to each other in a meaningful way?
Nicholas Reed
I think about this often, maybe not quite in the same way. But a recurring aspect of Plato's Dialogues is Socrates' reluctance to believe in the ability to simply teach virtue. Socrates may have further had a disdain for written works (possibly those in treatise format), as the writing said only one thing and could not engage in dialogue. This is why Plato may have written in a Dialectic form, purposing an argument and counterargument and rarely affirming something as proven.
Now to get to the point, the emotional journey of a character, lifestyle or time can give one deep insight into that particular sphere and results of it. While emotional drive is surely separate than virtues in the Platonic sense, I do believe that wisdom is in fact perspective from a different point of view. Perspective is difficult to teach, yet the connection one builds with literature, in particular fiction is one of the surest ways to open someone to pursuit of perspective, and perhaps wisdom. Thoughts?
Logan Miller
Interesting you bring up Socrates. I remember in the Republic, he argues that poetry (in this context, epic poems like the Illiad) should be suppressed in a just city if they do not cultivate a sense of civic virtue and duty in the citizen. So while Socrates, reacting against the Sophists like Gorgias, does not appear to believe that virtue can be taught but he does seem to believe that poetry can in fact have a corrupting influence on the virtue of the civic body. For instance, he believes depictions of the Underworld and Hades cultivate a fear of death in a soldier whose primary virtue is courage in the face of death.
I certainly believe there is wisdom to be gained from understanding the perspective of another. Perhaps to use a literary example, Macbeth is a protagonist who blinded by his own ambition, commits various atrocities which are returned upon him in turn. I think there is wisdom to be gained from viewing the story from the perspective of Macbeth who is not necessarily an evil man but a man who is corrupted by ambition and rationalizes his atrocities in pursuit of advancing his social standing. We are not necessarily suppose to imitate Macbeth but see his folly as a warning which is a lesson we would not have learned if the main characters of stories are all moral and virtuous all the time.
Jackson Bailey
I am not a smart guy and I'm not looking at this issue from a philosophical standpoint or anything, but practically speaking, most of the people that I've known in real life that are greatly into literature and philosophy would end up being caricatures of book characters or would choose to live and think only in terms of dumbed-down philosophical works.
For example, I once knew a girl who who read Sartre religiously and infected everything in her life with her ideas about existantialism and behaving more like a fanatic than a mature person. She later on went to worship Simone de Beauvoir, which made her into a totally crazy, toxic person who went on and on about all these certain weird aspects of life, made a lot of seemingly unimportant things important and turned everything into dramatic situations.
It's hard to explain, but personally I tend to avoid people who trust literature too much as guidance in life. As far as my experience goes, the kindest and most mature people take literature into account of their maturity, but are aware of the more complex aspects of life than one could understand from even the most all-encompassing books.
Jayden Wright
This is a great point and is what I was alluding to in the second half of my post, that literature can detach us from common life in some respect by causing us to view life and moral decisions as black and white (hero and villain, conflict and resolution, etc) when reality may be more gray. Or viewing ourselves and others as archetypes that may have no instantiation in real life which can have real world consequences like basing your expectations of what a romantic relationship ought to be like on a fictional relationship like Romeo and Juliet, then becoming disappointed and bitter when reality does not conform to these expectations.
