What fiction constitutes, in a way, is a form of journalism. I have always thought that journalists often underestimate the literary potential of the situations they experience in their working lives; that they think there’s something more important they could be doing, or that real life is taking place elsewhere. But they are actually processing fascinating raw material. Just as authors do, they actually use words as effectively as possible to communicate their thoughts to the public. No matter how elegantly an author sculpts his subject matter, he is nothing more than a high-flying journalist. One that is probably wasting more paper than most people in order to express themselves!
David Gavan interviews J.P. Donleavy.
I am interested in a certain mode of posthumous isolation that is not incompatible with the growing fame of Benjamin in the intellectual world. It was important for me to estimate his uniqueness by the way in which he engages the past of philosophy. The problem is of course that much of what he writes does not look like philosophy. That is why I think of my book as a philosophical portrait of Walter Benjamin, as gathering his corpus of writings so that it can be recognized as a configuration of philosophy.
The intellectual life of most philosophers is closer to that of novelists and artists and musicians than people who study novelists and artists. There is great naïveté in the ambition to write the great American novel, naïveté that is mirrored in the ambition to solve some of the long-standing philosophical questions once and for all. It’s utterly natural to view someone who is trying to write the great American novel, or is trying to explain once and for all how autonomous action is possible, as not only naïve but also ignorant (of the greatest of Melville, or the greatness of Kant). So there really is a cultural divide between the vast majority of humanists and the majority of philosophers.
If philosophers have misconceptions as to what philosophy is, they’re likely to produce poor philosophy. Now I wouldn’t want to say that scientific facts can never be relevant to a philosophical problem, or anything like that; the dispute here rather concerns the distinctive aims and methods of philosophy on the one hand and of science on the other. But there is also the fact that scientism or science-worship is a cultural phenomenon, an element of the Zeitgeist, and in certain ways a dangerous one; so it is depressing to see philosophers succumbing to it.
I’m very attached to some fairly conventional notions of right and wrong. I hope that they apply, perhaps in some generalized form, on larger fields of play. I imagine two areas affected by oncoming events: The last few hundred million years, we (metazoan life on Earth) have depended on relatively high boundaries between individuals. When humans showed up to think about this situation, “self” issues were a large part of the resulting ethics. For much of the last 150 years, notions of bloody confrontation have been the general perception of evolution. I think we’re entering an era where self, identity, and mortality will be reexamined.
Proust and Joyce – and Woolf, who is my favorite in that line – are brilliant artists. But the stream of real human thought is probably much less interesting to most people than what is portrayed in their fiction. Our real stream of thought is probably no more really like the streams of thought we see in their writings than Elizabethan-era conversations were really like what we see in Shakespeare plays. It’s stylized art, in a medium of words.
There is a good reason why Spinoza’s masterpiece is titled Ethics, and in the end what I am doing is indeed intended to resurrect for contemporary concerns the ethical dimensions of philosophy while demonstrating the relevance of this dimension to metaphysical and epistemological problems. Perhaps this goes back to my initial entrée into philosophy by way of Plato’s Dialogues, but I continue to think that the ethical dimension is essential to the nature of philosophy itself. This is the main reason why I think it is a mistake to charge philosophy with the task of aspiring to the status of being a science, or that it ought to hitch its wagon to scientism.
I’m not sure there is a demi-monde to the West Midlands and if there is I certainly didn’t grow up in it, though my parents were slightly unusual in that they both went to art college as mature students when my brothers and I were kids, then my mother became a painter and my dad set up an art transport company. They weren’t bohemians – indeed, my mother disdains that sort of self-conscious artiness – but some of their friends were and I used to be attracted to those kinds of people, though I’m too straight to really live ‘on the edge’. When you’re young you’re more keen to hang out with oddballs – or at least, I was.
I don’t think I have a process. I guess most writers are lying when they babble on about their process. It would be like talking about how you pray or make love. You don’t really think about it, you just do it. You do it because you’re infected with it. I just write when I want, and I write what I want. I think I was a really bad writer when I worried about process. Of course, maybe I’m still a really bad writer. I think people should quit trying so hard. I haven’t tried hard in years.
Rosenberg’s position is a bracing one, and a useful challenge to lazy anti-naturalist tendencies in a lot of Anglophone philosophy, but it does seem to me to be based ultimately on armchair philosophy of the kind naturalists are supposed to decry. Physicalism is not a scientific result - Carnap thought it would be, but we know it isn’t the case that everything that is causally explicable is explicable in terms of causal relata that are physical. So my view on this issue is certainly not Rosenberg’s, as much as I admire his work. In any case, it seems to me that American literature departments have recovered quite a bit from the intellectual disaster of the 1980s, a happy development. And if I may paraphrase Nietzsche, life without literature would be a mistake!
