Should the Novelist Get a Moral Pass?
Is The Literary Writer Morally Different Than The Philosopher?
Justin E. Smith makes an excellent defense of “immoral” literature, i.e., work whose narrators and/or authors violate moral taboos. Smith compares the moralizers who want to sanitize literature to Soviet censors. Ours is an age, he says, of “soft totalitarianism,” where an internet panopticon plays the same role that the oppressive state once played:
We have, today, a Zhdanovshchina suited to the particularities of our times, one that promotes not so much an “engineering of souls” as a “human-resources management of souls”.
At one point, Smith distinguishes between philosophy and literature, suggesting that in literature we can more easily separate author’s biography from work. He writes
[P]hilosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is. The matter is perhaps a bit more complicated when we move to literature, as it does make at least somewhat more sense to declare yourself a “fan” of Roth or Louis-Ferdinand Céline than of Heidegger or Carl Schmitt.
Do you agree that literary writers inspire fandom in a way that philosophers don’t? And does the fact that they inspire fandom mean their work is somehow less serious than that of philosophers (the Platonic view)? Why should Heidegger’s Nazism count for more than Dostoevsky’s or Pound’s antisemitism?
Smith’s point seems to be that philosophers should be held accountable for their ideas, since they say them plain, but that literary writers are allowed to be more experimental and imaginatively evil, as they are explorers of the human condition, but not necessarily advocates for the views they represent. The philosopher cannot distinguish himself from his work in the way a literary writer can. Do you buy this distinction? And If you do, what do you do with philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who wrote in a literary-dramatic way? What do you do with Plato, who wrote dialogues, not treatises?
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