Stop reading fiction

Lol

when will you release a new short story collection you hackfraud

>them nipple gainz
is this achievable natty?

>mfw I realise that literature and philosophy are fundamentally the same

i think this is basically wrong. for all its claims to avoid totalization, deconstruction can only make this sort of claim by reducing all text to its least common denominator, textuality. it's another instance of the exchange principle: things that share properties are basically interchangeable in western society. ironically deconstruction partakes of the very hegelian, idealist, totalizing abstractions it tries to criticize, and this is coded into the rhetoric of textuality, which is nothing less than the hard fulcrum of its own attempt at critique.

if you really look at what philosophical texts set out to accomplish, or even what they are capable of accomplishing, by comparison with these same things in literature, you find that by equating the two, both suffer. literature is cloudy and imprecise in a philosophers hands; whereas for the literary scholar philosophical arguments always lose themselves in figures, metaphors, and accidental associations.

i'm not saying we always need to keep the boundaries strict. all i'm saying is that philosophy and literature are much more rewarding than the abstract reduction of all writing to text suggests.

FPBP

>he's identified the value of a thing with its technical utility

Give me one (1) good reason not to do this.

Thanks for the well thought out reply. I wasn't actually trying to state that both philosophy and literature are equivalent because they're both "just texts", the way some deconstructionists seem to. What I have in mind is more related to Rorty's romantic ideas about their potential for allowing humans to express themselves creatively. His ideas about philosophy not occupying a special, or unique domain of human knowledge - it instead being continuous with every other sphere of culture - also help to destroy any sort of boundary between philosophy and literature. If you take his anti-representationalism seriously, Philosophy (with a capital "P") really does just end up being reduced to a form of literature, because it's not about getting the world right anymore, instead its about trying to articulate a better form of life, whatever that may mean. Rorty thinks that literature can do that just as well as, and oftentimes, for most people, even better than traditional philosophy.

I don't even necessarily agree with all of Rorty's conclusions, but I think they're pretty interesting and provocative in their own right. Useful for waking people from dogmatic slumbers anyhow. He's wrote an interesting essay called "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" that's a pretty good read. I'd recommend looking at it if you haven't before.

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