Fiction, a philosophical tool

Suppose the world is suddenly annihilated. Only one man escapes this destruction of all things. What can this man be thinking ? Are his ideas fundamentally different from those he had before the annihilation of the world ? It is with this fiction that Hobbes begins the exposition of his first philosophy in the From Corpore. This is a typical example of the thought experiments that philosophers sometimes resort to. From Platonic allegories to thought experiments developed by contemporary philosophers, such as the now famous one of the brain in a vat, philosophical discourse is peppered with fiction. But what is the status of these fictions? ? How to read them ? We can consider them simply as a rhetorical device, an educational device or even a way of explaining a thesis conceived outside of fiction. But fiction can also be approached as a certain way of posing and dealing with philosophical problems. This is what Pierre Cassou-Nogués proposes in his latest work My zombie and meby showing how there can be philosophy in fiction but also how “ fiction works philosophy » (p. 338). The issue is twofold. It involves, on the one hand, questioning the role of fictions within philosophical discourse and, on the other hand, undertaking a philosophical analysis of literary fictions.

Fiction determines possibilities

My zombie and me is not a theoretical reflection on fiction as such and practically does not address contemporary philosophical discussions on the status of fiction and fictional universes. More than a philosophy of fiction, Pierre Cassou-Noguès offers us a philosophy through fiction and, more precisely, through literary fiction, whether classic works (Poe, Maupassant), science stories -fiction (Wells, Dick, Stapledon) or even fictions imagined by the author himself such as, for example, that, on which the first chapter opens, of a zombie, this decapitated character whose head remains conscious and continues to act distance on the body and make it perform actions just as it did before the decapitation.

These fictions, as improbable as they may be, present characters, situations, events that we judge to be possible and to which we adhere: “ the hypothesis that guides my research, specifies the author, is that fiction, fiction that is written and told, narrative fiction as I will sometimes say, determines the possible » (p. 34). These possibilities are not those of our world, they are facts or situations which we absolutely cannot experience. Narrative fiction even presents to us as possible things that would be totally impossible from a scientific point of view. But fiction is not necessarily reduced to the description of another possible world. On this point, Pierre Cassou-Noguès’ analysis differs from the theory of possible worlds developed by David Lewis which invites us to think of a plurality of possible worlds isolated and causally independent of each other. Fiction does not claim to describe a reality radically distinct from that which constitutes our world, it is rather a “ imaginary variation » from our own experience. A successful fiction is a fiction that the reader can adhere to to the extent that he experiences situations that are only variations in relation to his own perception of the world and his awareness of himself. If I can put myself in the zombie’s place it’s because “ I vary my experience, modifying its characteristics in such a way that this variation remains an experience that I can imagine living » (p. 279).

A successful fiction cannot therefore tell just anything. If the story of the invisible man (who sees without being seen) seems possible to us, on the other hand, it seems more difficult to adhere to the fiction of an intangible man (who could touch without being touched). So there are limits to fiction. They are determined by our own experience but also by a “ structure of the imagination » (p. 270) likely to transform over time ; the possible which is revealed in fiction is therefore “ mobile and the metaphysics which results from it always provisional » (p. 41).

These imaginary variations which unfold in fiction can lend themselves to phenomenological analysis. By varying the properties of our own experience, fictions make it possible to distinguish the contingent characteristics and the necessary characteristics of experience. Explicitly inspired by the method of eidetic variations developed by Husserl, which consists of varying the perspectives on a phenomenon in order to grasp its essence, which constitutes the stable core of these variations, Pierre Cassou-Nogués offers us a “ phenomenology mediated by fiction, a quasi-phenomenology » (p. 168), a method which he also describes as “ metafiction » (p. 340).

Philosophical fictions

Beyond a philosophical reading of literary fictions, the work is interested in the fictions contained in philosophical discourse, more particularly in modern and contemporary theories of the subject. The hypothesis of interpretation that Pierre-Cassou Noguès suggests consists of rereading certain key texts in the mode of fiction. So the Metaphysical meditations are interpreted as “ a fiction, comparable to a science fiction novel and describing a possible situation from which a certain figure of the subject emerges » (p. 74). THE cogito Cartesian would be formulated through fiction. Chapter 7 focuses on the Lockean theory of personal identity and the discussions it generates among contemporary philosophers, showing how it “ opens paths that literary fiction will develop and problems that call for new philosophical fictions » (p. 209). The author also highlights, in chapter 8, the fictions to which philosophers sometimes resort to to know if it is possible to design a machine that thinks. On all these questions, the work offers a clear and entirely accessible presentation of certain contemporary questions which arise in philosophy of mind, showing in passing how fiction can contribute to the understanding of the problems.

But the main issue is to show how the modern and contemporary figures of the subject are constituted by and in fictions. This original hypothesis leads to a reassessment of the status of fictions within philosophical thought. More than a simple thought experiment confirming or illustrating a thesis, narrative fiction would give us access to a certain knowledge of the subject and the mind. By exploring these fictions, by deploying their possibilities, a conception of the subject is discovered to which we are capable of adhering. ; a conception which, according to Pierre-Cassou Noguès, would be neither that of a reductionist materialism nor that of a totally disembodied subject. Indeed, “ the possible which is given in fiction, implies that I cannot get rid of a minimal incarnation, necessary for the story that I must deliver of my experience » (p. 294). But what is important is less this conception of the subject, which poses nothing fundamentally new, than the recourse to a method based on “ metafiction “.

But if the modern figure of the subject was constituted through fictions, would the problems it raises not be, in the end, only productions of our imagination? ? This obviously raises the question of the status of fiction in philosophical analysis. On this point, the author claims to take the opposite view of certain analyzes of Wittgenstein: “ in order to show the aberration of philosophical problems with regard to ordinary circumstances, Wittgenstein imagines extraordinary situations in which our philosophical problems would indeed arise » (p. 338). Whereas for Pierre Cassou-Noguès the fictional story discovers possibilities which give rise to problems which make sense. However, it is not certain that there is such an opposition between the Wittgensteinian perspective and the approach followed by the author. If, in recent years, literature has been able to regain its place in the philosophical field, we owe this largely to authors who claim Wittgenstein’s heritage and whose objective is to show how fictions can lead to a form of moral knowledge. If literature contributes something to ethics, we also see, thanks to My zombie and methat it can bring something to the philosophy of mind.

We can, however, wonder why Pierre Cassou-Noguès chooses to mainly use fiction “ extraordinary » which determine and limit the type of problems addressed. Regarding a question like that of the subject, the works of Proust or James are of major interest. We can also regret that the reflection is limited to literary fictions without mentioning cinematographic fictions. Some recent work suggests that cinema also has a lot to teach us about personal identity or the nature of the mind.

My zombie and me opens a real research program on philosophical fictions, thus participating in a real rehabilitation of literary fictions in contemporary philosophy. That a form of thought can be deployed within narrative fiction is also the idea defended by Franck Salaün, director of the collection “ Thoughtful Fictions » from Hermann editions, in his latest book Need for fiction which brings together a series of studies aimed at defining what a “ literary thought experiment » (p. 13). Through these works another way of doing philosophy is undeniably affirmed.