CSPH7049 - Adrian Camilleri - 1302048 - The Value of Literature

The Value of Literature:
Knowledge and Imagination
Adrian Camilleri
Student Number: 1302048
Submitted to the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in fulfilment for the award of
MA in European Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities & Performing Arts.
September 2017
2
Master’s Degrees by Examination and Dissertation
Declaration Form
1. This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not
being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree.
Name: ADRIAN CAMILLERI
Date: 28th September, 2017
2. This dissertation is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of
MASTER OF ARTS in EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
3. This dissertation is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except

where otherwise stated.
Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references.
A bibliography is appended.
4. I hereby give consent for my dissertation, if accepted, to be available for

photocopying, inter- library loan, and for deposit in the University’s digital repository
Supervisor’s Declaration.
I am satisfied that this work is the result of the student’s own efforts.
Signed: ………………………………………………………………………………
Date: …………………………………………………………………………………
3
Table of Contents
Declaration Form ............................................................................................................................... 2

Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................. 3
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................... 4
1: Introduction.................................................................................................................................... 5
What is literature?......................................................................................................................................... 5
Theories of Art ............................................................................................................................................. 6
Mimesis ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Art as Expressing Emotion ................................................................................................................... 8
Formalism ................................................................................................................................................ 9
The Institutional Theory of Art ............................................................................................................ 9
Knowledge and Imagination ....................................................................................................................11
2: Art and Knowledge ..................................................................................................................... 12
What sort of knowledge ............................................................................................................................15
Plato and Aristotle .....................................................................................................................................16
Truths in Literature ....................................................................................................................................20
Knowledge of “what it’s like” ..................................................................................................................24
3: Imagination ................................................................................................................................... 28
Metaphors and poetry ...............................................................................................................................29
“What if?”: Counterfactual thinking .......................................................................................................31
The benefits of imaginative engagement ................................................................................................33
Moral imagination ......................................................................................................................................35
A wider system ...........................................................................................................................................39
4: Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 43
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 45
4
Abstract
The Value of Literature: Knowledge and Imagination
The motivation behind this thesis is partly a climate where people seem to be reading
less literature and where its importance no longer goes unquestioned. This thesis
proposes two ways in which works of literature can be valuable: (1) by revealing to us
knowledge (qualitative) that is different from, but complimenting, other forms of
knowledge such as scientific; and (2) by enriching our empathy and our moral potential
through imagination, as part of a wider, social, holistic, and lifelong system of moral
education. I also argue how metaphors in poetry make it possible for us to imagine
abstract notions that are otherwise unimaginable, and also how engaging imaginatively
with a work of literature is akin to engaging in counterfactual thinking.
5
1: Introduction
In this thesis I will argue in favour of claims that literature has special value in terms of
knowledge and morality. My aim is to propose two such ways in which we find
literature valuable: (1) It reveals to a type of knowledge that is different from, but
complementary to, other forms of knowledge, such as scientific knowledge. The type of
knowledge I am arguing for is qualitative in nature, of the “what it’s like” sort,
sometimes referred to in philosophical literature as knowledge of qualia. (2) It plays an
important role in our moral potential and education by feeding our imagination, as part
of a wider, social, holistic, and lifelong system of moral education. Both types of value
that I argue for should be taken in the context of a wider ‘system’ that is the whole.
The motivation behind my attempt is partly prodded by a climate where people seem to
be reading less literature.1 Contrary to a period in the west where education centred
around the formation of character, and the value and study of classic works was taken
de facto, the importance of literature is no longer unquestioned.2
What is literature?
‘What is literature?’ is an ambitious question to attempt to answer comprehensively, and

a definition of literature falls beneath the scope of this thesis. Nevertheless, it seems
necessary to supply at least some basic definition as a premise on which this thesis is
built. Whereas the term ‘literature’ can be and is used to mean any sort of writing, from
the works of Nabokov and Philip Larkin, to scientific reviews and instruction manuals
for washing machines, it should be fairly obvious that the sort of literature in discussion
here is the artistic sort. By ‘literature’, I am also meaning works of film, theatre, lyrical
music, and works based on words in a way analogous to works of literature.
Occasionally, the discussion branches out to include other, non-literary, forms of art.
1
The percentage of people in the EU who read at least one book in a 12-month period
went down from 62% in 2007 to 58% in 2011. Source: Eurostat, accessed 24 Sep 2017:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Culture_statistics_-
_cultural_participation
2
Skilleås, 2001, p. 40
6
The word ‘poetry’ conjures artistic expression: the careful and creative choice and
layout of words for their meaning, their articulation, the rhymes and rhythms of their
sounds, and their interrelationship within a text. A manual for a washing machine,
written in the form of rhyming verse, may be commended for the effort, but whether
its form enhances its artistic merit is debatable; as for the wonderment it inspires, it is
probably fair to assume it doesn’t go deeper than the trivial. Most instruction manuals
are written in the form of prose, but then so are most novels. While not necessarily so,
prose is less prone to decorated expression than poetry; its constituent words are less
liable to being overly self-conscious. Having said that, well-written prose can and often
does employ poetic devices that make the text both aesthetically richer and more
intriguing to the reader.3 “Literature”, says Iris Murdoch, “is the art that uses words. . . .
[While] not all literature is fiction, the greater part of it is or involves fiction, invention,
masks, playing roles, pretending, imagining, story-telling.”4 This definition should be
sufficient to serve the purposes of this thesis.
A related – but substantially wider – question is what is art?
Theories of Art
Questions about the nature and value of art go back to ancient philosophy, and
throughout history several theories have been proposed. While a detailed exploration of
each theory of art would be far lengthier than what this thesis allows, a quick overview
of some of these questions helps to give context to the arguments raised in the thesis.
While nowadays universal theories of art are no longer generally assumed to be
available,5 art as mimesis (Plato, Aristotle), art as expression (Tolstoy, Collingwood),
3
"The bombing, for which Mr and Mrs Khuruna were not present, was a flat, percussive event that began under
the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800, though of course that detail, that detail about the car, could only be
confirmed later. A good bombing begins everywhere at once."
The opening sentence of The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016) is an excellent
example of prosaic text making use of poetic devices. Metaphorically, it starts by dropping
the bomb (“The bombing”) and waits for the flattening shock wave (“was a flat,”) punctuated
by the comma after “flat” and a series of plosive sounds (“percussive event that began under the
bonnet of a parked”). The words and sounds chosen mimic those of the event they describe,
giving us not only a visual image, but also the noises that came with it.
4
Murdoch I. , Iris Murdoch, 2001, p. 2
5
Hanfling, 1992, p. 1
7
formalism (Bell), and the institutional theory of art (Dickie) are some of the more
prominent theories addressing the question of what art is and what, if any, is the
common thread running through all those things we recognise as artworks, tethered
under the banner of “art”.6 If we are to gather together items seemingly as diverse as
Shakespeare’s Sonnet LX, Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, Jackson Pollock’s No.5,
1948, and Chopin’s Nocturne #2 in Eb and use the same label for all of them (ie. ‘art’)
then it seems natural to think that they must have some common component.
Mimesis
For centuries, it was accepted that art is mimesis, variously translated in English as either
‘imitation’ or ‘representation’.7 In his republic, Plato explains how the things we see
around us are but an imitation of perfect ideas that cannot be grasped by anything
other than reason. Art is but an imitation of these imitations: it is twice removed and
therefore not only not useful in uncovering truths, but also dangerous in making us
conclude the wrong sort of things.
It’s fair to say that, though, that we do not always value works of art based on their
imitative properties. When we look at Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day
(1887), despite its realism, we may admire the painting for its composition, the strength
of its geometry, the fine attention to detail, or the way the brushstrokes were applied.
Similarly, we may appreciate novels for their use of language, for the atmosphere they
create, or for the construction of their plot, even when the characters are not ‘true to
life’.8 While the notion that art is imitation seems plausible when applied to, say, trompe-
l'œil,9 or hyperrealistic landscapes, portraits, or literature, it is otherwise puzzling when
applied to, say, abstract art, poetry, or music.10 We tend think of such works as
expressive rather than imitative.
6
Ibid., 1992, Essay 1. The Problem of Definition
7
Sheppard, 1987, p. 8
8
Ibid., p. 7
9
Andrea Pozzo’s trompe-l’œil dome (1685) at the Church of Sant’Ignazio, in Rome, is a
perfect example of art that imitates reality so well that it “cheats” the eye, as it were. Pozzo
was commissioned to paint the illusion of a massive dome on what is essentially a slightly
concave ceiling when the church ran out of funds to build an actual dome. The illusion is
especially impressive when viewed from the right position. (Field, 1997, p. 230)
10
8
Art as Expressing Emotion
According to Tolstoy, the true artist both expresses and evokes emotion by infecting
his audience with his own feelings. “Art”, argues Tolstoy, “begins when a man, with the
purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up
again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.”11 One trouble with
Tolstoy is that he lays down in advance which feelings are worthy of art. While
communicating feeling of brotherly love and the simple feelings of common life may be
more morally valuable than communicating feelings of pride, sexual desire, and
discontent with life, Tolstoy fails to make a distinction between moral and aesthetic
criteria.12 Second, it seems odd to take Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to be an expression
of some emotion on the artist’s part, rather than as a sort of conceptual statement.
R.G Collingwood (The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938)) is also closely associated with the
theory of art as expression. A difficulty with his theory is that it is never clearly
explained how one can feel an emotion without being conscious of it.13 Another
difficulty, following from the idea that the real work of art is the expression in the
artist’s mind and that the object produced is only its externalization, is that the theory
denies that there are significant differences between different forms of art, or even
between different genres within the same form.14 While Collingwood puts much weight
on what goes on in the mind of the artist, there is no reason to assume that this should
be the case. An artwork that stirs certain emotions in a viewer or a listener does not
necessarily depend on those same emotions to have existed in the mind of the artist. It
would be odd to assume that, for instance, a character with an intense hatred for his
mother is an expression of the author’s own emotions towards her own mother. A
masterful artist should be able to create a work that moves the audience regardless of
any inner feelings felt by the artist. Moreover, the expression of emotion only partially
explains the production of an artwork. As Sheppard points out, “art may not be all craft
but craft plays a considerable part in it. . . A successful work of art may arouse some
emotions, express others, and exhibit technical mastery, all at the same time.”15
11
Tolstoy, 1995 [1897], p. 38
12
13
Ibid., p. 25
14
15
Ibid., p. 28
9
Formalism
Formalism focuses on the formal properties of works of art as the source of their
essence.16 The formal properties of works of literature include the plot, the poetic
metre, metaphors, and imagery. In the 18th century, Kant in his Critique of Pure Judgement
(1790) claimed that free beauty is ascribed to an object in virtue of its form alone,
without any consideration to any end to which the object may be directed.17 In Art
(1914), Clive Bell introduced the notion of significant form as the distinctive characteristic
of great art, able to arouse in us a special aesthetic emotion. Bell’s arguments should be
seen within their historical context, as an effort to give Post-Impressionism credibility,
especially against what he considered the realistic imitation of classical Greek visual art
and that of the Renaissance.18 A problem with significant form is that not only is it
difficult to describe works of art in purely formal terms; it is rather psychologically
impossible to actually see a painting as form only, devoid of content.19 As is the case
with the phenomenon of pareidolia where we see faces and familiar shapes in random
items such as clouds or cheese toasties,20 our natural tendency is to see representation
even where there is none, let alone where there is indeed.21
Perhaps the biggest failing of formalism is the idea that art works exist entirely as if in a
vacuum. As Sheppard points out, “works of art are not in the end independent of their
makers, their audiences, and the wider world.”22 However productive it may be as a
method of criticism, formalism cannot stand alone as a theory.
The Institutional Theory of Art
In contrast to the three theories outlined above, according to George Dickie (Art and
the Aesthetic, 1974) “what makes something a work of art is not some special quality that
can be observed within the work, but a certain status that has been conferred by ‘the
16
17
Ibid., p. 41
18
Ibid., p. 44
19
Ibid., p. 47
20
McKinney, 2015
21
22
Ibid., p. 55
10
artworld’.”23 What is the artworld? It is the people involved in the production,
commission, presentation, preservation, promotion, chronicling, criticism, and sale of
art, as well as the audiences of art. Moreover, “every person who sees himself as a
member of the artworld is thereby a member.”24
I see two conflicting problems: first, if the definition of ‘the artworld’ is very wide, as
Dickie’s definition seems to suggest, then everyone who fancies himself part of the
artworld is part of the artworld; consequently, whatever anyone fancies as art, is art.
The consequence of this is that, essentially, the word ‘art’ is rendered meaningless.
Second, if, on the other hand, the definition is restricted to mean the establishment of art
– that is gallery owners, art historians, curators, critics, and other members of the inner
circle – then there are at least three cases where the artworld, and the institutional
theory, failed. First, when the Salon de Paris turned down the impressionists, who then
relegated themselves to the Salon des Refusés in 1863.25 Second, when, at the time of
his death in 1890, Vincent van Gogh, generally regarded as the greatest Dutch painter
after Rembrandt, had produced 900 paintings and managed to sell only one.26 Third, in
1917 with the refusal of Duchamp’s Fountain, rejected by a committee whose only rule
was that the artist pay the submission fee, which Duchamp had done; Duchamp would
become a major influence on 20th century art and art theory.27
Other Theories
There are many other theories of art, including the functional (or aesthetic response)
theory mainly associated with Monroe Beardsley,28 the historical theory mainly
associated with Jerrold Levinson,29 and the anti-essentialist theory based on
Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance and mainly associated with Morris Weitz.30
The recurrent problem with comprehensive theories of art is that no one definition
manages to cover all forms of art, all styles, movements, and works. If this is because
23
Paraphrased in Hanfling, 1992, p. 20
24
Dickie, 1974, p. 36
25
Gombrich, 1995, p. 514
26
Biography.com Editors, 2017
27
Gombrich, 1995, p. 601
28
Beardsley, 1982
29
Levinson, 1979
30
Weitz, 1956
11
there is no single definition, then the word ‘art’ can stand for several things, or groups
of things, even when these seem to be very different.
Knowledge and Imagination
Famously, in Republic X, Plato drew a distinction between poets, who were only
mouthpieces for accepted and authoritative wisdom, and philosophers, the lovers of
wisdom,31 who were critical seekers of the truth.32 A substantial part of the history of
aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to either prove Plato right or wrong. I argue for
the view there is a special relation between art and knowledge, which is the source of at
least some of its value. Famously, Martha Nussbaum argues that literature is an integral
part of the search for and the statement of truth.33 I argue for a qualitative part:
literature is able to provide insight into the quality of experiences: the way things feel.
‘Imagination’ starts with a discussion about metaphors, where I contend that by making
us see something as something else, metaphors make it possible for us to understand
abstract and unimaginable concepts like time. I then advance the idea that
counterfactual thinking is as a form of fictional creation akin to artistic creation,
drawing an analogy between the benefits of engaging with a work of literature and
engaging in counterfactual thinking. Encountering works of literature helps promote in
us the development of moral imagination, in that these works introduce us to, challenge
us with, and lead us to reflect on ideas and thought processes in vivid and intriguing
ways.
31
Plato introduces the term “philo-sophoi” (philosophers) in Phaedrus, 278d: literally meaning
“lovers of wisdom.”
32
33
Nussbaum, 1990, p. 3
12
2: Art and Knowledge
The debate about truth and knowledge is especially interesting because virtually all
artworks are, to some extent or other, a fabrication of the artist’s imagination, a fiction.
This raises justified questions – and objections – about what and how we can learn
from invented characters and the invented events they bring about. Typically, in
determining the content of a work of fiction, we ‘import’ information from the actual
world into the fictional world of the work, assuming that what we know about the real
world also holds true in the world of fiction – unless we have reason to think
otherwise.34 Nowhere does Conan Doyle state that Sherlock Holmes had wings and six
legs – we just take it for granted that, in all appearances, Holmes is a human being
much like us. This also happens because the Holmes stories, although fictional, fall
under a genre that does not include people with wings and six legs. In a sense, “unlike
Clark Kent et al., Sherlock Holmes is a real-life person of flesh and blood, a being in the
very same category as Nixon.”35 Even though it is not made explicit that Holmes has a
liver, or lungs, we take it for granted that he does, “given he is a normal human being,
and not a robot or Martian.”36
Besides importing elements of the actual world into the work of fiction, we may also
partake in a process of ‘export’, as we take elements out of the fiction and bring them
into the actual world. Even while accepting magic spells, flying brooms, cave trolls, and
elves, at a deeper human level we feel saddened by the passing of Dumbledore or
Gandalf. Perhaps linked with the necessity to suspend our disbelief when reading
fiction, the latter is able to transmit very powerful emotions such as loss, love,
happiness, and heartbreak, with which we are able to connect. This emotive connection
may very well lead us to lower our guard and scepticism, which in turn may mean that
we become more susceptible to accept things unquestioningly. To paraphrase Aristotle,
when we feel friendly to that which comes before us for judgement, we regard it as
having done little wrong (Rhetoric: 1378a1-2). Given the ability of art, be it poetry,
novels, film, or paintings, to make a very powerful and emotive presentation, we have
34
Walton, 1990, Chapter 4 cited in Lamarque, 2005, p. 385
35
Lewis, 1978, p. 37
36
Lamarque, 2005, p. 385
13
to appreciate Plato’s concern about the perceived danger of its seductiveness and ability
to change minds and persuade, an ability with a long history of exploitation.
Propaganda has been used for centuries to manipulate the populace in some way or
other: the glorious, heavenward architecture of gothic churches, the cautionary and
apocalyptic paintings of the counter-reformation; the depiction in Holy Books of a
certain tribe, race, or nation as the chosen, special one; the epic Nazi films of Leni
Riefenstahl down to the present day theatricality of political campaigns. We can be
seduced into believing something for the wrong reasons: not through argument and
clarity and analysis, but because we get emotionally swept along by the power of the
language and the theatricality. It seems very plausible to think that what we take out of
art (and literature) can influence our beliefs about the actual world.37 We can be
manipulated to see things as being the case when, actually, they are not.
Fiction’s tendency to focus on being well written, versus the tendency of nonfiction to
focus on getting the facts right, may also provide a more palatable source for supposed
knowledge for many readers. A novel may be easier to read, more engaging, more
entertaining; it sets the scene, the characters tend to be developed better, they have
better plot twists, and so on. The reason for this seems rather obvious: nonfiction is
more about delivering facts whereas fiction seems to be more about the experience of
the work itself. Historical fiction illustrates this point perfectly: it notoriously blurs the
lines between fact and fiction, the novelist’s aim being, first and foremost, to deliver a
good novel; this may very well mean to not let history get too in the way of the story.
Historical or biographical accuracy do not necessarily make a good story, and yet the
correspondence to real people, places, or events, can make us lower our guard and trust
historical facts as told by historical novels. As James Forrester points out in The Lying
Art of Historical Fiction (2010), if we were to ask a historical author how to stop facts
getting in the way of a story, the historian will assure us that the facts are the story,
whereas the novelist, “driven by his or her imagination, will offer a wealth of
answers”.38 We seem to have a natural disposition to accept facts of fiction as truths,
37
“My particular favourite historical error appears at the end of Braveheart, where it is
suggested that the future Edward III (born in 1312) was the product of a union between
the Scottish rebel William Wallace (executed in London in 1305) and Princess Isabella of
France, who was nine at the time of Wallace's death. It would be funny – if I had not met
so many people who believed it.” (Forrester, 2010)
38
Forrester, 2010
14
especially when they seem to be referencing or addressing general descriptions of real-
world facts. My point is not that historical fictional is not, or cannot be, historically
accurate; some works may pay better attention to accuracy when it comes to
background facts. But in historical fiction, the distinction between the background and
the foreground becomes less obvious, with fictional facts and actual facts blending in
tighter and moulding better together, making them their pulling apart more difficult,
and making it just as likely for us to pick up things that are not actually, historically, true
facts. Paradoxically, works in which fact and fiction are blended so well, possibly being
all the more engrossing, mean that it is harder for us to take knowledge from. Historical
fictions such as The Name of the Rose or Girl with a Pearl Earring, stories of social realism
such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Bleak House, adventure and survival stories
such as Robinson Crusoe or The Coral Islands may be more mislead to us than obviously
fanciful fiction such as fantasy or science fiction sagas.
Therefore, while we can argue for truths, to some degree or other, from works of
literature, given the issues raised above, three conclusions seem to follow. The first is
that art is not an exclusive source of these truth: we do not really need to read a novel
to learn, say, which city is the capital of which country: a book on geography serves that
purpose perfectly. Second, the stronger claim that art is not a reliable source of these
truths if, after reading a novel, we still have to double-check with a geography book
what the capital city of, say, Liberia, is. We may come across many passing truths about
geography, geology, history, fashion, science, law, politics, and even etiquette,39 but if
we are to take knowledge to be justified true belief, then we are faced with the problem
that any true beliefs we acquire from a work of literature may be next to impossible to
justify. They may be true, but due to their lack of justification we cannot really call them
“knowledge”. Third, certain truths are relevant only within the boundaries of the work.
Sherlock Holmes refers to a real London and a real Baker Street, but 221B is (was)
fictional since at the time the stories were published, addresses in Baker Street did not
go as high as 221.40 Unless we leave the text, we do not have a reliable way of telling
what is true and what isn’t. This leads us to an interesting point: whether 221B actually
exists or not adds nothing to the qualities of Holmes as a work of fiction, and if it were
actually true, it’s a superficial, trivial sort of truth relevant only within the work.
39
Novel of manners, 2016
40
Stamp, 2012
15
What sort of knowledge
So what sort of knowledge can we expect from literature, then? As pointed out, by and
large a lot of what we learn from a novel would classify as little more than trivia, bound
by the confines of the work itself: the names of the four houses at Hogwarts, or the
colour of Arwen’s hair. It is not that these are things that we might not take (very)
seriously, as in the case of cosplay41, but they mostly concern only the work they
inhabit: knowing Sherlock Holmes played the violin doesn’t tell us much beyond the
fact that Sherlock Holmes played the violin. Let’s call this sort of knowledge intratextual
knowledge, because of it being confined to the text. It follows that if these are by and
large unimportant truths then they are not the kinds of truths that make a work of
literature valuable. Truistically, if they were valuable then they would be important.
Naturally, we may find value in a novel or a poem giving us a perfect way to disconnect
from the real world for a while; after all, the ability and need to rest is a very important
part of our lives, and art can offer us that. Yet, it seems that when we assert that there
is a relation between truth and art, rather than shutting out the world we are somehow
immersing ourselves in it and taking something of value from the work that will outlast
the end the novel, the play, the film, or the song. We seem to be implying the
acquisition of some non-trivial knowledge whose value goes beyond the confines of the
work from which it springs.
Here, too, we need to clarify what we mean by non-trivial knowledge. Suppose we open
a medicine box looking for migraine pills, only to find a small glass bottle with a red
warning sign reading “Ingesting will result in fatal poisoning”; the announcement is
definitely not trivial: it’s life-saving knowledge to have. Nevertheless, once the bottle
has been safely locked away or disposed of, the value of that knowledge is unlikely to
transcend the situation. It is a particular, isolated sort of knowledge, not too different
from the intratextual sort of knowledge I mentioned earlier.
What I am arguing is that works of art can and do reveal are a different sort of non-
trivial truths, ones concerned with universality, depth, and what it means to be human.
41
A contraction of the words costume play, where participants go through much effort to
accurately dress up as characters from popular culture, usually fictional, and attend
dedicated conventions and competitions (Steuver, 2000).
16
Gavin Stevens, a character from William Faulkner’s The Town, famously frames the
distinction: “Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not
really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that
even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”42
To prove whether poets, and writers of literature more widely, are “almost always
wrong about facts” is not the aim of this thesis and, frankly, is irrelevant to the
argument. That is because if authors are free to play loose with the facts, historical,
scientific, or otherwise, even if they get a hundred percent of them correct, as I argued
earlier their loyalty lies with the work itself. The crucial point about Gavin’s speech is
his bringing to our attention that poets are in a position to reveal truths: big truths
compared to which facts seem trivial.
Plato and Aristotle
In Plato’s view, truth was a realm of perfect, ultimate, immutable, and true forms; the
actual things by which we are surrounded, the particulars, be they trees, beds, or acts of
courage, while they participate in the qualities of true and perfect forms, are but a
shadow or an imitation of them43. A carpenter makes an instance of the ideal bed, yet
his work is but an imperfect imitation of this ideal bed. The artist, on the other hand,
makes an imitation of the carpenter’s imitation of the perfect bed; it is but a copy of a
copy of the perfect form, twice removed from it, and twice fallen from grace. It follows
then that if we want to learn anything about the perfect bed, an artwork is the wrong
place to start.44 Plato went even further: poetry is not only not useful in uncovering
truth; it is dangerous because it can make us conclude the wrong sort of things. Homer’s
and Hesiod’s gods are “completely human, differing from men only in being immortal
and possessed of superhuman powers”45. The questionable behaviour of their divine
characters deemed a bad influence, Homer in particular receives a special mention by
Plato to be banned from his utopian republic for several reasons, succinctly gathered
into four points by Bertrand Russell. First, for representing the gods behaving badly;
this echoes the thoughts of an even earlier philosopher, Xenophanes, who saw Homer
42
Faulkner, 1957, p.88
43
Plato, 1997, p. 1132-7: the analogy of the cave
44
Ibid., p. 1201-3
45
Russell, 1984, p. 32
17
and Hesiod ascribing to the gods “all the things that are a shame and a disgrace among
mortals.”46 Second, for making young people fear death. This has to be seen within the
context of its turbulent times, when having young Athenian men fearing death could
very possibly mean getting invaded by the militaristic Sparta. The third speaks about
decorum and how this demands that we never laugh out loud: an observation whose
meaning is all but lost on us, the smartphone generation. Finally, the fourth condemns
passages praising rich feasts that discourage temperance.47 “On all these counts, the
poets are to be condemned.”48 No wonder Plato thought artists, whom he saw as liars,
deceivers, and corruptors of the young, should be sent away to another city.49
However, a parenthesis here needs to be made that even though Plato is critical of
poetry, he is talking about poetry that diverges from the truth, which would imply that
poetry that does not diverge from the truth need not banned from his ideal republic.
Indeed, Plato goes as far as to say that it is for the benefit of the republic to employ a
poet “who would imitate the speech of a decent person.”50 Furthermore, Plato does not
want to outlaw imitation, but only poetry that encourages and leads to imitativity, which
is “the desire and ability to imitate whatever, independent of its moral worth, and
without the proper attitude.”51
When it comes to aspects of fiction that concern the real world, psychological studies
show in us a tendency to lower our guard.52 If we are so easily influenced to even
accept assertions that are blatantly false about the real world, about which one would
assume we would be more vigilant, then we could very well be even more easily
influenced in accepting false beliefs from works of fiction, particularly if those beliefs
are not stated explicitly but were seamlessly woven in the work: in the makeup of a
character, or in the events surrounding him, or his choices and their consequences, or
in the worldview the film or play advances, or in the metaphors used to carry a poem.
When assessing Plato’s position it is useful to note that, arguably, he constituted
46
Cited in Russell, 1984, p. 58
47
Ibid., p. 126
48
Ibid., p. 32
49
Plato, 1997, p. 1035
50
Ibid.
51
52
Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997 cited in Wheeler, Green, & Brock, 1999, p.136
18
philosophy as a separate undertaking. It is therefore hardly surprising that he needed to
distance philosophy from literature as much as possible, “for few quarrel more
intensely than those with a rival claim to the same territory.”53 Having established
philosophy as “a way to discover the truth, he may have set out to discredit other and
more established competitors. . . . Literature . . . was indeed a close competitor in
classical Greek culture.”54
In contrast, Aristotle had a more friendly view of the arts, which he saw as the
realisation in external form of a true idea.55 “Tragedy”, he claimed, “is essentially an
imitation not of persons but of action and life.”56 Virtue manifests itself in action, and
an action counts as virtuous when we hold ourselves in a stable equilibrium.57
Therefore, tragedy is an imitation of virtue, as manifest in action.
He also scores another interesting and redeeming point for poetry: that it is more of a
philosophical enterprise than history. Unlike the latter, which is limited to recounting
things that actually happened, poetry seeks to depict things in their universal character,
making itself more philosophical and more elevated. Unlike that of the historian, “it is
not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen.”58
Artists, therefore, reveal the universal. History teaches us what Marc Anthony did and
when; literature teaches us what such a person will probably or necessarily say or do.
Aristotle’s position leads to an interesting concern. Most works of literature, if not all,
also tell us about particulars: they deal with particular narratives, particular characters,
particular settings; they use particular words, particular expressions, and particular
devices to deliver particular works that are fictional particulars. The Mayor of Casterbridge
tells the story of a particular and fictional protagonist, Michael Henchard, who never
actually existed other than as a figment of Hardy’s imagination. It is a concern we can
imagine Plato raise because it was precisely his misgiving that poets were attached to
53
54
Ibid., p. 18
55
Aristotle (384—322 B.C.E.), n.d.
56
Aristotle, 1995, p. 2320
57
Sachs, retrieved 2017
58
Aristotle, 1995, p. 2323
19
what is fictive and particular, rather than real and universal.59 How, then, do we speak
of universals if what we are dealing with are particulars that, for the most part, never
even existed? Arthur Danto turns the tables around by making the texts of literature
about the individual reader, at the time of reading. For this to happen, ‘I’ the reader
identify myself “with the actual subject of the text in such a way that each work
becomes a metaphor for each reader: perhaps the same metaphor for each.”60 While I
do not literally become Michael Henchard, I become metaphorically him; that is when
the work becomes literature. “The work finds its subject only when read.”61 Literature,
as it were, holds a mirror for us to see ourselves externally, something that we would
otherwise have no access to. Each individual and different work in canon of literary
works can be seen as another way for us to see aspects we would otherwise not know
were ours. Moreover, apart from these literary mirrors returning our reflections to
show us ourselves, literature has a transformative effect on our self-consciousness:
“Literature is in this sense transfigurative, and in a way which cuts across the distinction
between fiction and truth.”62
Picking up from where we left off with Aristotle, that poetry is universal, we can start
to form some conclusions on what makes poetry what it is and also what it is not.
While some texts may look like poetry because they use poetic devices, they are not
necessarily so, especially if their only concern is the particular. A children’s history
book, written using poetic devices, may look like poetry: the text makes use of some of
the same devices used by the poet: alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, consonance,
stanzas, metre, and so on. Its use of these devices may mean that it fulfils its pedagogic
duty even better by being an enjoyable read; after all, we tend to remember things
better when we take pleasure in reading them. And yet, despite the author’s ‘poetic’
efforts, it is probably safe to assume that the book’s contribution to poetry (and to our
understanding of ultimate truths) would be akin to the contribution of a McDonald’s
Happy Meal to gourmet fine dining: wildly peripheral at best.
59
Plato, 1997
60
Danto, 1984
61
Ibid., p. 16
62
Ibid.
20
Truths in Literature
How does poetry reveal special, universal truths? W.H. Auden’s Refugee Blues is set in
Hitler’s Europe. It refers to him by name and there are direct references to how dogs
and cats enjoyed a better life than German Jews (“Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened
with a pin, / Saw a door opened and a cat let in: / But they weren't German Jews, my
dear, but they weren't German Jews.”). Whether Auden actually saw a poodle in a
jacket is irrelevant; it is an (imagined?) fact that may or may not be contested by his
biographers or by Holocaust deniers, and yet, what it expresses goes beyond mere
factuality or the truth-value of its constituent parts. The themes it tackles,
discrimination and xenophobia, are themes that unfortunately never stop being
relevant; the way it tackles them, through poetry, opens our imagination and allows us
to get a feel of what it’s like to be unwanted. Perhaps today, almost a century after it
was written, the poem speaks with even stronger relevance when the advent of digital
technology and the immediacy and sheer breadth of the news, with which we are
constantly flooded, seem to be making us increasingly desensitised. Refugee Blues takes
the particular case of German Jews during Nazi Germany to reveal truths about
discrimination and persecution that are, unfortunately, universal and, it seems, eternal.
Especially poignant – and pertinent to today’s world – is the depiction of refugees
facing indifference, if not outright resentment and hostility, when seeking help:
“Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.”63
Examples such as this seem to confirm Aristotle’s point about poetry revealing
universal truths, to the point where today it is not uncommon for artists to be deified as
mystics and prophets of their age, imbued with keen powers of perception into the
human condition.64 With the diminishing importance of religion in the West, we seem
to have the need to turn somewhere else to get the sort of deep meaning that for
63
Written in 1939, the full poem can be read on the Peace Pledge Union website, at
http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/poetry_against1.html
64
The blurb at the back of the Penguin Popular Classics edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1994) reads, “In this powerful depiction of a man who overreaches himself, Hardy once
again shows his astute psychological grasp . . .”, almost leaning on the appeal that the
author is worth reading because of some deep knowledge his works transmits about how
humans behave and why. By no means is this an isolated case.
21
centuries and millennia we had been getting from elsewhere.65 Martha Nussbaum
claims that literary form is not only inseparable from philosophical content, but “an
integral part . . . of the search for and the statement of truth.”66 Only certain narrative
styles can adequately state certain important truths about the world, and, moreover, the
nature of the relevant portions of human life fully and fittingly.67
Despite being works of fiction, works by Tolstoy or E.M. Remarque give us a picture
of what it is like for actual people to be in certain situations, like a soldier in a battle or
a war. In the case of Auden’s poem, it is what it’s like to have been a Jew in Nazi
territory. How reliable is that picture? If we want to know about the particular case
used by the work, we may get a better understanding by going beyond it, by learning
more about the author and the context in which the work was written. While a work of
art should be able to stand on its own feet, putting a work in its historic, geographic, or
political context often adds another dimension to our understanding of it. To write War
and Peace, Tolstoy spoke to soldiers who had lived through the 1812 French invasion of
Russia; he also worked from primary source materials, such as interviews, history
books, works of philosophy, and other historical novels. Moreover, he made use of his
own experience in the Crimean War to recount how the Russian army was structured,
bringing vivid realism to the work.68
Remarque fought in the German trenches at Ypres in 1917, where he was wounded by
shell-splinters.69 Though All Quiet on the Western Front should not be taken as a memoir
– and as a novel should also not be taken as a piece of historical documentation – the
author drew on some of his own first-hand experiences in the war. Remarque himself
declares it to be an account of “a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those
of it who survived the shelling”.70 The novel presents the first world war through the
65
“These days we frequently use religious language when talking about art. We make
‘pilgrimages’ to museums or to landmarks of public art in far-off locales. We experience
‘transcendence’ before major paintings or large-scale installations. Especially important
works – Mona Lisa at the Louvre, most famously – are often displayed in their own niches
rather than in historical presentations, all the better for genuflection. What is the busiest
day of the week for most contemporary art museums? That would be Sunday: the day we
used to reserve for another house of worship.” (Farago, 2015)
66
67
Ibid., p. 7
68
Feuer, 2008
69
Murdoch B., 2005, p. 210
70
Ibid., p. 212
22
eyes and thoughts of Paul Bäumer, a schoolboy urged by his teacher to join the war. By
having the narrator move frequently from the first person singular to the first person
plural, that is, from ‘I’ to ‘we’, Remarque makes it “quite clear that Bäumer is a
representative”.71 That ‘we’ takes on different meaning throughout the novel and can
refer to
“the Germans as a nation, to the entire German army, to Bäumer’s company, to
the ordinary soldiers as a class-group, to Bäumer’s squad, or to a sub-group
consisting of those members of the squad with whom he was at school. In
Baumer’s thoughts it can also imply all the members of his age-group – the lost
generation – and this can extend very easily to all the millions of young men in
all the armies.”72
All Quiet on the Western Front conveys to us what war is really about at a time when
children were being sent to the front, often spurred forward by their schools with
accounts of dignified heroism and cries of For King and Country.73 However, for those
fighting it, the war “is not about falling bravely and nobly for one’s country (‘he was
killed instantly was usually a lie’), but about losing a leg, crawling blinded in no man’s
land, or . . . being wounded in every conceivable part of the body.”74 This conveyance is
of a different sort from what we get when reading battle documents, historic records,
or scientific reports written in an emotionless language.
In fact, Nussbaum addresses a tradition of influential moral philosophers (specifically

Kant, Bentham, and Spinoza) whose work “could never find its fitting expression in
novels or tragic dramas.”75 The conventional style of Anglo-American philosophers –
“a style that seemed to be regarded as a kind of all-purpose solvent in which
philosophical issues of any kind at all could be efficiently disentangled, any and all
conclusions nearly disengaged”76 – frequently prevailed. On top of this, there has been
a well-established fascination of Western philosophers with the style and methods of
natural science, which seem to embody “the only sort of rigor and precision worth
cultivating.”77 Nussbaum’s point is also taken up by Danto, who claims that “all the
imperatives which have governed the transformation of philosophy into a profession
71
Murdoch B., 2005, p. 214
72
Ibid.
73
Pegler, 2014, p. 254
74
Ibid, p. 215
75
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
23
have stressed our community with the sciences”78, which is somewhat surprising given
that philosophy seems “so singular a crossbreed of art and science.”79
We have become so accustomed to this type of language being the language of ‘truth’
that we run the risk of assigning it exclusivity.80 This fascination can be traced back to
Locke, who in the 17th century defined philosophy as “the handmaiden of the
sciences.”81 It is a dry and flat language, ironically glamourized because of its absence of
glamour. Every word, phrase and idiom is chosen for their lack of emotion and
presented in such a way as to state facts and only the facts: double-blind, clear-headed,
rational, cool, and collected. It is the preferred way to express truths because,
supposedly, it takes away all that is personal and subjective, and leave us with
something impersonal, monist, objective, unambiguous, and as decipherable as
possible. The truth should not be something that is affected by how we feel: we cannot
afford to be blinded by rage or to look through rose-tinted glasses. Like the scientist,
the philosopher, in his quest for truth, is positively trying to eliminate emotional appeal
from his work.82
Needless to say, there is benefit in rational thinking, and a certain emotional

detachment does have a place in the process. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet
impulsively and mistakenly kills Polonius, Ophelia’s father, and his rash actions mean
he “has aimed, maimed, and killed the wrong person, at the wrong time, with the wrong
motive, and in a blind, woefully wrong way.”83 The killing provokes Ophelia’s fit of
madness, leading to her eventual death and, ultimately, a duel between her brother
Laertes and Hamlet, resulting in the death of both. Had Hamlet reacted less
impulsively, all this would have been avoided. However, philosophers including
Putnam84, Popper85, Hayek86, and Todorov87, have been critical of an approach that
reduces knowledge to only that which can be measured, counted and weighed. The
78
Danto, 1984, p. 5
79
Ibid.
80
81
Scruton, 2014
82
Bryan Magee in Murdoch I. , Iris Murdoch, 2001, p. 235
83
Langis, 2010, p. 64
84
Putnam, 1992, p. x
85
Hacohen, 2002
86
Hayek, 1980
87
Todorov, 2001, p. 20
24
term ‘scientism’ is sometimes used to refer to this sort of excessive belief in the powers
of scientific knowledge and techniques, particularly in situations where scientific
method, despite it being unwarranted, is employed eagerly and uncritically. Roger
Scruton argues that,
“the idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has
a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is a system
of organised matter . . . [but] the world can be understood completely in
another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths
of science.”88
Brain scans can’t tell us what love is: images of the hippocampus have no meaning, any
more than a chemical reaction in a test-tube has a meaning. Moreover, some questions,
such as ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, cannot have a scientific answer
because it is an answer that predates science. Furthermore, the Mona Lisa is more than
just pigment, and music speaks to us from another realm: “a chemist . . . could analyse
the Mona Lisa and describe it completely, but you would never have mentioned the
face, which is the meaning of this thing”; “music is an example of something that’s in
this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm
even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.”89
Knowledge of “what it’s like”
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. . . . The man who never reads
lives only once.”
- George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (Bantam: 2011)
One important form of knowledge that I think we can get from literature is qualitative
and has to do with what it feels like to be someone else, or in situations other than our
own.
In 2010, the young son of poet Oliver de la Paz was diagnosed with Asperger’s. As part
of the diagnosis, he and his wife had to fill an autism screening questionnaire, a list of
fourteen questions “fairly cold and flat” that did not allow for much emotion and did
88
Scruton, 2014
89
Ibid., 2014
25
not really process what the parents were feeling at the time. 90 De la Paz wrote his poem
Autism Screening Questionnaire – Speech and Language Delay to respond to the same
questions in a more emotional and personal way.91 Here is an excerpt that exemplifies
the striking quality setting apart de la Paz’s poetic language from that of the questions:
4. DOES YOUR CHILD SPEAK FREQUENT GIBBERISH OR

JARGON?92
To my ears it is a language. Every sound

a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan
in his throat for water – that of a man with thirst.
The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence
a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid
a want. We make symbols of his noise.
De la Paz, being both a poet and a father, personalises and brings humanity to what is
essentially an impersonal question. Gibberish is meaningless and unintelligible. The
family, of which the child is an integral part, builds a language of its own; it may not be
spoken by millions or display the more complex traits of grammar, semantics, or
recursion. But it is language nonetheless, used between family members and that may
challenge preconceptions we have about language, while also displaying some of its
constitutive qualities: that it’s a living thing, that it changes and evolves so that it serves
its speakers, that it’s the speakers who constitute it. Language is made of symbols
intended to communicate something, and while the child may lack linguistic skills in the
established sense, together with his parents he is also the creator of their own private
language (“We make symbols of his noise”). They take what would otherwise be
unintelligible sounds and give them meaning together, make them normal.
The father as poet then turns those interactions into poetry. The questions treat the
child as a carrier of symptoms with problems to be solved, or at least identified. The
poem, while facing these “problems”, persists in asserting the humanity of the child. It
does so by using a type of language different from and outside of the language of
science.
90
de la Paz, 2017
91
Ibid.
92
The full poem can be read on the Poetry Foundation website:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142858/autism-screening-
questionnaire-speech-and-language-delay
26
My point is not that poetry is an overall better language than the scientific idiom, but
that there are truths that lie beyond the expressive capabilities of scientific language that
poetry is in a perfect position to express. Dry, scientific answers to de la Paz’s
questionnaire are certainly helpful for assessing where the child’s digital dot places on
the disability graph. The beauty of a flowchart is its simplicity, and it doesn’t get much
simpler than a binary “yes” or “no”, but metaphor, similes, the way words look and
sound, the rhythm of their syllables, their consonance, resonance, may all contribute to
the exact opposite: ambiguity, subjectivity, emotion, and what may be seen as outright
alienation from a message that should, for accuracy’s sake, be ultimately simple enough
to chart a graph. The latter should say much about measurable quantities but not a lot
about the quality of the experience. In one of its simper, broader definitions, the Latin
term quale (and its plural qualia) is sometimes used to describe this subjective quality of
human experience93, the “what kind”, “what sort”, or “what it must be like” to see
yellow, smell the sea, taste a lemon, feel wet sand, hear a sonata, win the lottery, or have
your heart broken. Although never using the term himself, Hayek rightly observes that
to eliminate these qualia from human experience is to eliminate the human factor.94 To
take the language of science to be the only language compatible with truth is to run the
risk of lapsing toward excessive reductionism in knowledge.
The point is exquisitely illustrated by question no. 5 in de la Paz’s Questionnaire.
5. DOES YOUR CHILD HAVE DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING

BASIC THINGS (“JUST CAN’T GET IT”)?
Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.
Scientifically speaking, such an answer is meaningless and will, in all likelihood, add
nothing to the child’s prognosis. It does not fit the formula and, even more, taking into
consideration the fact that it’s written through the sensibilities of a poet, almost makes
a statement in its rejection of a more mundane and formalistic reply. And yet, the poet’s
answer does not belittle or invalidate the answers of every other parent or guardian who
took the same questionnaire without the touch of an artist.95 It is, however, an answer
93
Eliasmith & Mandik, 2004
94
Hayek, 1980
95
One would assume that, when first given the questionnaire, de la Paz submitted more
conventional answers and the poem came later, after reflection.
27
that seems to reveal the new dimension that poetic and literary expression opens for us.
It’s a dimension that lies outside of the rigidity of science and its sterile, impersonal
idiom.
So what is poetry’s place in our quest for knowledge? Only by recognising the
distinctiveness and merits of poetry and science can we appreciate and understand
better their place in a wider system of knowledge, to which they both belong and of
which they are both important, balancing parts. If we are to enrich ourselves,
epistemologically speaking, it is crucial that we recognise that there are different but
equally important sides to the same multifaceted coin of knowledge. We should be as
wary of blind faith in scientistic concepts of knowledge just as many of us are, and
should be, of religious fundamentalism that is blind in its faith in holy books. In the
words of Paul Feyerabend, “science should be thought as one view among many and
not as the one and only road to truth and reality”96. ‘The one and only’ is a key warning
here: we must be wary of any system intent on asserting its dominance and entitlement
over our access to knowledge and truth, including systems that deny scientific
knowledge. Otherwise, we risk going back to a flat Earth, success based on lucky
charms and palm readings, and an early funeral thanks to the common cold.
Epistemologically, we stand to benefit and enrich ourselves much more from an arena
where, rather than competing between them, the natural sciences, philosophy,
literature, and other spheres are aware of and recognise their own and each other’s
merits and shortcomings. Each has its own share in epistemology, contributing to a
holistic understanding of the world, the universe, and ourselves, both as individuals and
as members of the human race.
96
Feyerabend, 1975
28
3: Imagination
There is little doubt that when we engage with works of art we engage imaginatively.
While the value of imagination can be difficult to articulate, it is amusing to think that it
takes imagination to imagine a world without imagination, and it seems fairly obvious
that a life without imagination is a terribly impoverished life. In evolutionary terms, it’s
fascinating why, even as children, we take pleasure in and spend so much of our time
imagining things we know are not true. Then, as adults, we ‘waste time’ reading,
watching, or listening to stories about people and worlds that seem to have no
connection to ours. Much of what we generally read is virtually alien to us, be it fantasy
novels, but be it also ‘real life’ material, such as biographies of prime ministers, pop
stars, or members of royal families, who to many of us belong to alien worlds of which
we form no part, nor will we ever personally encounter; they are so remote, so foreign
to us, that they could as well be fictive.
Why should we choose to spend time in fictive places rather than real ones? One
answer is that the experience provides us with a way to escape reality. We get a chance
to switch off and recharge, ready to face our own world again. That is, in itself,
valuable.
However, I want to argue for a value that goes beyond mere escapism. One such
argument could be that the world being as big as it is and our time here being so short,
we have only a very finite window of actual, first-hand experiences. By reading about
things that fall outside our own sphere, our imagination of other spheres is triggered.
While it is preposterous to assert that imagination allows us to view the world in its
completeness, it is reasonable to think that the more widely we read, the bigger a
possibility we have of widening our window of awareness.
Another, related, argument is that imagination has a great and important role to play in
morality. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley claims that in order to be greatly good, we must
imagine “intensely and comprehensively”; we must place ourselves in other people’s
29
shoes, the “pains and pleasures of [our] species must become [our] own.”97 Arguably,
literature kindles our imagination and provides us with a way of putting ourselves in
place of others. Imagination, being the “great instrument of moral good”,98 fosters
empathy and allows us to better understanding other people’s emotions, their thoughts,
and their actions. Empathy involves imagining the experience of another person and
helps us relate to others. By helping us imagine what they are going through, it helps us
understand how they feel.99 A good moral education goes beyond philosophising; the
reading of fiction, intrinsically tied to the imagination, plays an important role.100
Metaphors and poetry
In the previous chapter, I have argued how literature can give us depth of
understanding by exposing us to experiences outside our actual own. In this sense, in
the previous chapter, ‘seeing as’ was taken to mean the experience of the quality of
being something else: seeing, feeling, hearing through the senses of another. This type
of ‘seeing as’, I have referred to as qualia, or the quality of ‘what it is like to be’.
There is, however, another sense for ‘seeing as’: that of seeing something not through
someone else’s eyes, but as if that something is transformed into something else in a
process that allows us to understand it better. This other type of ‘seeing as’ is the
‘metaphor’. Metaphors, by denoting one kind of object or idea in place of another, help
us see the daily reality that we have grown accustomed to – and perhaps even
desensitised to – in fresh and novel ways.
Time – and its implication on us as living human beings: death – is an abstract concept.
It is also a favourite subject for poets. One element that lends itself very well
metaphorically, to express and help us visualise and imagine the passage of time, is
water. The use of water as a poetic device, as a metaphor for the passage of time, can
be found in sources as diverse as the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Shelley. Here is
97
Shelley, 1840, p. 17
98
Ibid.
99
Chandler, 2015
100
Nussbaum, 1990
30
an interesting comparison from the Book of Job between our time, that is our lives, and
water:
As water evaporates from a lake,
and a river wastes away and dries up,
so man goes to sleep, never to wake up.101
While ‘time’ itself is never mentioned, there is the allusion to evaporation and to drying
up that depicts how we are, at the end, left with nothing, least of all time. It’s an
accumulation of images that brings to mind how the human body itself “wastes away
and dries up”, becomes wrinkled with age. It alludes to life leaving us bit by bit,
incessantly. Without these images, the central idea loses much of its force.102
Comparably, in Sonnet LX, Shakespeare makes use of a similar metaphor to tell us that
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
so do our minutes hasten to their end.
Here, it’s the image of waves rushing unabatingly towards the shore that drives home
the unremitting persistence of time – or the increasing lack of it. Moreover, less
explicitly, Shakespeare seems to suggest we are like the pebbled shore, constantly
pummelled by the time.
Likewise, Shelley’s Time makes use of water to paint us an image of what is essentially
an abstract and unimaginable concept.
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality!103
With or without the help of poetry, all of us are certainly aware of our own limited time
and impending death. Needless to say, time is not, literally, water, but metaphor allows
us to give it an image; it helps us see a reality we may already be aware of but somehow
not altogether able to visualise, thanks to a strong reference to something with which
we are visually familiar and which we can imagine (create a mental image of). Indeed, the
expression “flow of time” is itself a metaphor, linking time with water. Such
expressions, so ingrained in the language that we use every day, bring imagery and
vivacity to abstract concepts. “Against the clock”, “time flies”, “save time”, “out of
101
Job (14:11), New American Standard Bible
102
Friggieri, 2009
103
Shelley, Time, retrieved 2017
31
time”, “sweet tooth”, “eye-catching”, “all ears”, “long arm of the law”, “old hand” are
just a few examples of English metaphors that are such an integral part of our day-to-
day language that we take them for granted; they become clichés and we almost fail to
see them for what they really are: abstract concepts made imaginable. One way that, in
my view, distinguishes poetic metaphor from these quotidian expressions is exactly our
getting so used to the latter that we they become stale and fail to stop us in our tracks
and excite us.
An interesting point is that, even though the three poems above make use of the same
element (water) to explain the same concept (time), they do it in different ways. The
Book of Job focuses on evaporation and drying up; Shakespeare on the incessant
marching forward of waves; Shelley, while seemingly taking inspiration from
Shakespeare, focuses on the eternity of time as a shoreless flood – its limitlessness and
immortality – and contrasts it with our own limits as mortals. While each is a separate,
independent, and complete work standing on its own merit, an interesting observation
can be drawn. By depicting and making concrete different qualities of time, all three
contribute to our building a composite image, as it were, of it. We see time as water
evaporating from a lake, as waves making towards the pebbled shore, as an ebbing and
flowing shoreless flood: a composite and tangible image out of what, in essence, is
something conceptual, abstract, and unimaginable. The result is an enriched knowledge,
awareness, and experience of that something.
“What if?”: Counterfactual thinking
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
– Dante Gabriel Rossetti104
An interesting concept addressing the importance of imagination can be found in

psychology, in what is known as ‘counterfactual thinking’. After a brief introduction, I
will then advance the idea that counterfactual thinking can be seen as a form of
fictional creation akin to artistic creation, drawing an analogy between the benefits of
engaging with a work of literature and engaging in counterfactual thinking.
104
Roese, Counterfactual Thinking, 1997, p. 133
32
The theory has philosophical roots and can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, who
reflected on the epistemological status of subjunctive suppositions and their non-
existent but feasible outcomes.105 Leibniz’s arguments for an infinite number of
logically non-conflicting, alternate worlds can also be seen as a form of counterfactual
thinking.106
The literal meaning of counterfactual is “contrary to the facts”, and the point of departure
for counterfactual thinking typically involves some factual outcome. Then, one may
change some factual antecedent in order to assess the consequences of that change and
what it implies for the outcome.107 For example, say Mark arrived late to an important
job interview, late enough to botch it, resulting in him note getting the job despite the
relevance of his skills and possessing the right sort of attitude for the job. The factual
outcome is that Mark did not get the job. He was late for the interview because of road
works he was not aware of, which led him to take a longer, slower route. The factual
antecedent is that Mark left home half an hour before the interview, which on any
other day would have been plenty of time. After failing the interview, in Mark’s head
forms a sort of fiction that runs counter to the facts as they happened. He imagines a
different outcome that never came to pass: him checking traffic updates in advance and
planning accordingly, by leaving earlier, or taking the bicycle instead of the bus. The
imagined outcome of this imagined scenario has Ms Interviewer offering him the job
on the spot. Luckily for Mark (up to a certain point), it’s a scenario from which he can
learn something useful for the future. He may have missed this particular boat, but he
will be offered other interviews and he will check traffic updates.
We have a tendency to regularly imagine alternatives that run counter to reality. When
we think in terms of “what if”, “if only” and “what could have been” we are essentially
engaging in counterfactual thinking, coming up with way of learning from our past. By
tweaking or changing our actions, even if in our heads, we are, essentially, creating
fictional scenarios wherein we can explore better ways to improve our chances of
obtaining to a different, more desired outcome. We engage our imagination in fictional
105
Birke, Butter, & Koeppe, 2011
106
Roese & Olsen, What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual
Thinking, 1995
107
Roese, 1997, p. 133
33
creation; much like a novelist, we are creating a scenario that is not real. Although
Mark’s counterfactual antecedent and outcome may not have the artistic inventiveness
or depth of a Dostoyevsky novel, the difference should be a matter of degree rather
than substance. If this is the case, then it also seems to be the case that the principle of
counterfactual thinking – that is, imaginative fictional creation – is also the principle
behind literary artistic creation: novels, plays, poetry, films, short stories, and so on.
Consequently, the same principles that apply when we engage in counterfactual
thinking should also apply when we engage ourselves in a work of literature. If that is
indeed the case, then the greater the work of literature, the more it engages us, then the
likelier it seems that engaging imaginatively with it should have the same sort of
benefits as engaging in counterfactual thinking.
The benefits of imaginative engagement
How do we become invested in a character? In the Harry Potter books, we may start out
not liking Professor Snape much, but by the time the character is made to exit the
story, author JK Rowling has us invested enough in him that his passing leaves us
saddened and moved. Rowling achieves this through character development: by
progressively uncovering more of him, of his real intentions, of his thinking process, of
his backstory. The more we learn about Snape, the more we can empathise with him
and the more invested in and caring about his outcome we are likely to become.
Needless to say, the arc of a literary character’s life is almost certainly the way it is by
necessity. Most characters are written the way they are in order to fulfil their destiny, set
by the needs of story-telling. Their choices, their thoughts, their virtues and vices, their
luck or lack of it, are hardcoded by the author. There is no “next time” unless this is
already in the narrative, probably as a consequence or prelude to some other event in
the story: coherence of narration requires that, and inconsequential things that “just
happen” are generally frowned upon by publishers. Sadly, not all the situations in our
lives afford us the luxury of a second chance. Certain counterfactual thinking can never
be put into practice and become actual, and unless we escape and isolate ourselves from
reality in some alternative version of events, a bit like Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a
34
Dream108, thinking counterfactually can make us fall deeper into despair. Since neither
the past nor works of fiction can be changed109, we may question the point of
counterfactual thinking, especially if seems to make us dwell guiltily or negatively about
an outcome.
The psychological or evolutionary reasons why we think counterfactually, even when

we clearly have no second chance, fall beyond the scope of this thesis. However, an
interesting analogy can be drawn to illustrate why we may value works of fiction, over
which we have similarly no control. We tend to tell others about our experiences: the
choices and actions that led to them, the regrets we may have and how hard it is to live
with them. We are, in essence, sharing and narrating a story, albeit our own story and
by no means fictional. We are storytellers, and I will return to this point shortly.
I would like to point out two ways in which we, as readers, can benefit from written
narratives. First of all, while we are obviously engaged in the immediate present, we are
also aware of what went before (what led to the current page, paragraph and line) but
also (depending on how good the work is) we are building expectations about what is
likely to happen. We (literally) read the thoughts of character who may be very different
from us, and speculate and imagine their future. We wonder if this act will mean the
death of Snape, or the death of Dumbledore, and how they might escape it, or whether
they will face it with fortitude or cowardice and how. Engaging with works of literature
in this way is part of why we are entertained while possibly donning other people’s
shoes and learning something about how they work.
108
Sara Goldfarb, the mother of Harry, one of the main characters in the film and a drug
addict, is an old and lonely woman who wants to feel important and loved again. She starts
off as normal, sane and average until she gets a phone call from a game show that she loves
to watch, telling her could be on it. Thinking this could be her big break, she slowly
becomes obsessed with fitting into her old beloved red dress and starts taking what she
thinks are diet pills. By the end of the film, she suffers from delusions, her hair is all
frazzled and grey, and mentally ill, permanently escaped in the happy but fictitious
gameshow world that she built in her own mind, oblivious to the crumbling, real world.
(Buchanan, 2012)
109
For the sake of relevance, I am only taking into consideration finalised works of fiction
that have already been written, recorded, or performed, such as prose, poetry, and scripts
for theatre and film, while excluding more malleable works of fiction such as interactive
theatre and computer games, where the audience takes on a more active and central role
and the outcome of such works can change considerably depending on the audience’s
decisions and behaviour.
35
The second way in which we, as readers, benefit from written narratives is more
personal. As mentioned above, we are storytellers. Conceivably, sharing is a form of
bonding, and bonding is foundational to societies and may well be considered
imperative for a society’s survival. When we narrate our experiences, there is a chance
the listener learns something from our story, whether frivolous or life-changing,
without having to go through the experience of failure first-hand the way we had to. By
engaging our imagination with each other’s anecdotes and narratives, we learn as a
collective, sharing a pool of knowledge that is bigger than any single, constituent
individual part. We learn what consequences can result from certain decisions, their
effect on our emotions, on our reasoning, on the way we see the world and each other.
We learn even though we do not have first-hand experience.
This is analogous to the way we learn from a work of fiction. When we wear a
narrator’s or character’s shoes, he or she becomes of a sort of counterfactual of
ourselves. We may recognise traits of ours in the fictional character, such as hard-
headedness, timidity, boldness, brashness, a tendency for violence, lack of self-control,
persistence, etc. We see the character, with which we can at least partially identify, going
through internal dialogues and making the choices that she makes, going through the
consequences, good or bad; we get to see the world through her eyes; it’s her world, but
since we’re inhabiting it with her, it also become a bit ours. The character becomes a bit
us. Her actions, the events that she is a part of, her experiences, her thought processes,
become our counterfactual events, our counterfactual experiences, our counterfactual
thought processes. The truths that the novel invites us to imagine become our truths as
we learn about the character, but also as we learn something about ourselves. In doing
so we are engaging in a form of moral imagination.
Moral imagination
Since we have no immediate, first-hand knowledge of what other people feel, and since
we cannot tell what is going on in other people’s minds just by observing their
behaviour, the only way is by imagining what we ourselves should feel in their
situation.110 Active imagination enables us to mentally approximate, to some extent or
110
Smith, 1976 cited in Werhane, 1998
36
other, the thoughts and emotions that occur in other people’s minds. Whereas it is
debatable whether this active, imaginative process allows us to literally feel what
another person feels or thinks,111 it also seems to me undeniable that active imagination
allows us to see through other people’s eyes and, as it were, walk in their shoes. We can
understand what other people feel and what it is like to experience something from
someone else’s perspective.112 By linking moral judgement to moral sentiment, we can
find a moral role for emotion. Sympathy and imagination are the sources of moral
judgement, since they provide both an understanding of what others feel as well as
allow us to engage in imaginative self-evaluation, in order to judge based on the
experience of a sentiment of approval or disapproval.113
Patricia Werhane defines moral imagination as the ability to imaginatively discern a

wide range of possible ways to act in a given situation, the moral consequences –
helpful or harmful – of those possibilities, and solutions.114 Werhane’s definition sheds
light on how moral imagination can be seen akin to counterfactual thinking – which in
itself is morally neutral since not all scenarios in it is exercised carry moral weight – plus
the added moral dimension.
Like empathy, moral imagination allows us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes; it is
about understanding and getting other people’s stories right.115 There are two elements
of moral imagination: (1) creative and (2) prescriptive. Creative elements are concerned
with imagining how and bridge the gap between moral principles and actions. They allow
us to imagine which course of action to take in order to act according to our moral
principles. Prescriptive elements are concerned with imagining that, which is the ability to
“to disengage from a particular schema and be morally imaginative.”116 In everyday life
there are those who seem to be very apt at imagining how. They are innovators whose
actions expand the moral worlds of other people by turning existing logic upside down
111
While Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum
Est are very powerful in helping us imagine the horrors and terror of life in the
trenches, it seems to me that to say that our own feelings, as readers, are identical to the
actual horrors and terrors felt by the soldiers themselves is at the very least a naive
overstatement.
112
Werhane, 1998, p. 82
113
Ibid.
114
115
Ciulla, 1998, p. 101
116
Ibid., p. 100
37
and making new things possible; they go beyond the ordinary in figuring out highly
creative ways that defy conventional wisdom to address a problem. “The element that
connects imagining how with imagining that”, argues Ciulla, “is the desire to seek truth and
a passion to do what is morally right.”117
Werhane illustrates this point by giving an actual example from the world of banking.
In the 1970s, Ronald Grzywinski and his colleagues purchased the South Shore Bank in
the South Shore area of Chicago to fight what is known as redlining, the unethical
practice of denying services such as home loans or insurance, either directly or through
selectively raising prices, to residents of poorer neighbourhoods.118 By 1970, the
population of South Shore was primarily black and poor and it was predicted that
within 5 years the neighbourhood would become one of the worst slums in the city.119
The bank became the first community development bank in America, a type of bank
that operates with a mission to serve the communities of and generate economic
development in low- to moderate-income areas.120
“[T]he bank focus[ed] its attention on housing and to loan money to people
willing to rehab buildings in South Shore. It also set up a series of subsidiaries,
one of which concentrates on real estate development, another on minority
business enterprises, a non-profit institution that works with state and federal
programmes to rehab and develop housing for low-income residences. . . . It
raised money [by] encouraging wealthy people from other neighbourhoods to
open accounts at South Shore. . . . Today South Shore, still primarily black . . . is
a viable place to live. Drugs and gangs are virtually absent, and more than ¾ of
the residences and apartments are restored and inhabited.”121
It took moral imagination to engage in such a project that no other bank at the time
would engage in, in a neighbourhood written off by leading sociologists, and to see the
low-risk element in this kind of venture. It’s especially impressive considering this was
not a government project or a charity, but an enterprise working for profit. The Bank
did this by reconfiguring the framework of traditional banking logic while also working
within the given social conditions and banking regulations.122
117
Ciulla, 1998, p. 106
118
Redlining, n.d.
119
120
Thomsen, 2001
121
Werhane, 1998, pp. 92-93
122
Ibid., p. 93
38
While classes in ethics can and should inspire moral creativity, perhaps the most
important part of teaching ethics is cultivating moral feelings.123 What is the role of art,
especially literature, in such cultivation? Nussbaum argues that, before Plato’s time,
poets were considered teachers to whom people turned with questions about how to
live. Tragic drama was not considered a distraction, but a way “to engage in a
communal process of inquiry, reflection, and feeling with respect to important civic and
personal ends.”124 Dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical ethics both
addressed a single subject and a general question: human life and how to live. While the
answers given by philosophy and poetry were often at odds with one another, the
quarrel “could be called a quarrel only because it was about a single subject.”125 Both
tragic poets and philosopher interested in ethics saw themselves as engaging in
psuchagogia, or the leading of the soul, through ethical discourse.126 By looking at works
of art, by reading literature, rather than being told what to believe we exercise our
creative imagination in making our interpretations. Much like Socrates in Athens, rather
than handing us hard-coded moral laws, works of literature act best when they are agent
provocateur, challenging us to think for ourselves.127 Tellingly, Plato’s dialogues are both
works of philosophy and of literature that, arguably, work thanks to their use of literary
devices. He uses similes and allegories in his Republic, such as that of the cave, in order
to reveal certain concepts he wants to explain. Works of art have the capacity to invoke
our imagination and very possibly expose us to a wider range of experiences. They
show us internal dialogues and thought processes; we get to see what motivates
different people and how they process moral situations.
As mentioned earlier, for Aristotle ethics was a very practical pursuit of virtue. We form
character not according to formulae telling us how to live, but by forming virtuous
habits through our actions.128 The formation of the right sort of habits is fundamental,
since we do not always have the luxury to deliberate for a long time when facing a
choice,129 and while no two situations have identical particulars, the right choice
depends on ethical norms we have ingrained, as well as on the specific circumstances of
123
Ciulla, 1998, p. 106
124
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid., p. 16
127
Skilleås, 2001, pp. 18-19
128
Ibid., p. 132
129
Ibid.
39
the situation. How do we ingrain habits? We learn from our own actions, by living our
own life, but we also learn through the example of others,130 and literature is full of
such examples, both good and bad.
A wider system
While empathy teaches us other people’s thoughts and feelings, it does not necessarily
entail agreeing with them.131 Arguably, it’s what detectives do: they try to get inside the
minds of criminals in order to catch them; it’s also what the more intelligent criminals
do: they get inside their victim’s heads in order to do whatever it is they want to do to
them, and also inside the heads of law enforcement to avoid captivity. Through
empathy we can, for example, come to understand the mind of a fraudster, a drug
baron, or a serial killer, without becoming fraudsters, drug barons, or serial killers
ourselves. It is arguably also what enables actors to take on convincing roles as rapists,
murderers, and other monstrous characters, without turning into monsters themselves.
As Diderot famously argues in The Paradox of the Actor, no one could become Oedipus
and continue the performance.132 This point echoes that made by Werhane, who argues
that imagination is very important because it allows us to project ourselves and
understand other people’s feelings and thoughts, even when we find those feelings and
thoughts revolting.133
I want to point out two ways in which this is a very important point, if we are to look at
the moral life as a lifelong effort to build and fine-tune a virtuous character. First, by
recognising in ourselves disagreeable traits that do nothing for building a virtuous
character, including ingrained prejudice such as racism, sexism, religious intolerance,
homophobia, bigotry, and so on. And second, by recognising in others those same
disagreeable character traits we must not adopt. For this, we need the addition of one
final component: compassion.
130
131
Ciulla, 1998, p. 101
132
Carroll, 1998, p. 131
133
40
What is the nature of compassion? It is important not to confuse it with similar, but
different, moral qualities like pity, which can be aroused by suffering but which may
contain condescension and personal distance, or with benevolence and altruism, which
carry much broader meanings than compassion and do not focus on suffering.134
Compassion involves a consideration of other people’s values, beliefs, needs and wants
in terms of which their suffering can be understood and hence be shared. Like empathy
“it takes us out of ourselves and into the hearts and minds of other people,”135 with a
capacity to understand what the other person takes to be important and how the other
person judges his situation.136 It functions thereby as an important social virtue.137 The
degree of imagination required to feel compassion depends on how different from
ourselves the people towards which we feel compassionate are. “The expansion of our
powers of imagination,” claims Brian Carr, “expands the range of humanity over which
our altruism can extend. It is precisely in this extension that the claim of compassion to
be a social virtue lies.”138 Imagination plays a key role in compassion, in understanding
and feeling for the suffering of other people.139
However, there may be cases where merely transposing ourselves onto other people’s
suffering is not enough. A richer, more powerful imagination is needed to understand
the suffering of people of different backgrounds, values and needs. In Can compassion be
taught?, Pence recounts how, when it comes to medical education, some educators claim
that compassion is naturally ‘picked up’ by students in their medical training, without
interacting with suffering patients, as if by ‘osmosis’. On the contrary, compassion can
be taught by taking inspiration from Plato’s Protagoras, where Socrates appears to argue
that virtues cannot be taught by anyone, and Protagoras counters by saying that everyone
teaches them: parents, friends, spouses, early childhood stories, and colleagues.140 As
cited earlier, in ancient Greece tragic drama was a way to engage communally;141
society, as a whole, benefitted from it. Moral ideals, argues Pence, are developed by an
entire medical system, a social and professional network.
134
Pence, 1983, p. 189
135
Carr, 1999, pp. 411
136
Ibid., p. 425
137
Ibid., p. 411
138
Ibid., p. 426
139
Pence, 1983, p. 189
140
Ibid.
141
41
“Morality is not learned the way one learns to play the flute or to do a
tracheotomy by observing a ‘master’ proficient in a certain craft or technique.
Compassion similarly is not learned from a Master of Compassion. . . . Instead
. . . the overall . . . context . . . is more important than the efforts (however
noble) of any one individual.”142
Compassion as a virtue can indeed be taught if it is rewarded, alongside other medical

virtues such as diagnostic skill and factual command, but to rely on a few individuals is
to “forsake compassion as a characteristic excellence of medical graduates.”143
I think this ‘overall context’ suggested by Pence can be taken as a representative of a

moral system for the wider society. Virtue, as Aristotle claims, manifests itself in action,
and we acquire moral character when we reach stable equilibrium. Morality and
compassion, I believe, are both dependent on and the cause of a more holistic and
moral society formed by several interconnected parts, including knowledge, where the
whole is not, as it were, a mere heap, but a totality that is something besides the sum of
its parts.144 Each part works towards strengthening the whole.
Admittedly, there is a sort of circularity in what I am proposing, and with it the distinct
possibility of a sort of Zeno’s paradox over how to even start accomplishing anything.
However, I think that, first of all, journeys have to start somewhere. It’s never going to
be perfect, but first steps, as big or as small as they may be, are where anything starts;
and second, rather than getting disheartened by what may seem Sisyphean in its
circularity, I think we should see this more as an upward spiral: we may, indeed, go full
circle, but we still end up at a place higher than where we started. We need a society
whose individual members can fulfil their own self-interest and maximise their own
potential, but who are also compassionate, aware of the needs and wants of others,
altruistic, and who reciprocate, treating one another “not just as things, but as agents
and as ends.”145 A better society is one able to negotiate such a golden mean. How do
we get there? We start by nurturing our young by example, teaching them emotional
intelligence while their young mind is still constantly absorbing our behaviour. We need
to start long before they develop rationality and critical thinking, by which time it starts
142
Pence, 1983, p. 190
143
Ibid., p. 191
144
Aristotle, Metaphysics: 1045a9-10
145
42
to get harder to undo the wrong sort of influence. Then, as adults, building our
character and maintaining moral equilibrium is a lifelong work.
Literature, for shedding light on the minds of others, for acting as agent provocateur and
challenging us to think for ourselves, for aiding our moral imagination, and all this
while keeping us entertained, has a valuable part to play in that journey.
43
4: Conclusion
In this thesis, I have aimed to show that art, especially literature, has an important role
to play in our search for knowledge and moral equilibrium.
In ‘Literature and Knowledge’, I made a distinction between facts and truth. While
acknowledging that works of literature can, to some degree, transmit facts, I reached
two conclusions: (1) that art is not an exclusive source of these facts: we can learn
geography, history, and science from books about geography, history, and science; and
(2) that art is an unjustified source of these truths because the artwork’s loyalty, first
and foremost, lies with itself. Even supposedly realistic works of fiction such as
historical novels tend to bend the truth in favour of a more compelling read. We may
gather true facts from literature, but we are hard to justify those facts as knowledge, or
justified true belief.
For a long time, Anglo-American philosophy has been enamoured of scientific method
to the point of dismissing knowledge outside the realm of science; the term “scientism”
is often used to refer to this sort of uncritical and excessive belief in scientific method.
While I have argued that scientific method and the scientific idiom have their place and
importance, I have also argued that there are truths that lie beyond the expressive
capabilities of scientific language, citing examples given by Roger Scruton.
Martha Nussbaum claims that literature is an integral part of the search for and the
statement of truth, and along these lines I have argued that literature can provide us
with insight into and knowledge of certain qualities of experiences: qualia. Using Oliver
de la Paz’s poem Autism Screening Questionnaire, I have shown how artistic skill is vital in
personalising and bringing humanity to the otherwise impersonal and anonymous
scientific idiom, making accessible to the reader a form of qualitative knowledge.
Furthermore, I have argued, we stand to benefit more when science, philosophy,
literature, and other disciplines recognise their own and each other’s place, contributing
to a holistic and balanced understanding of the world, the universe, and ourselves.
Knowledge enriches us as human beings, as we also feel part of a wider, universal
reality.
44
In ‘Imagination’, I have argued that works of art, particularly works of literature, can
present the world with a clarity that is not usually available to us. Furthermore, great
works of literature in particular allow us to exercise what can be called “moral
imagination”. The result of this is that works of art can also direct us towards moral
imagination, developing and enriching our character.
I have aimed to show that poetry and metaphors make it possible for us to better
understand abstract and otherwise unimaginable concepts, like time; they manage this
by making us see things as something else. Using poems from the Old Testament,
Shakespeare, and Shelley, I have shown that, while each of these poems is a separate,
independent, and complete work of art, our combined experience of them contributes
to our building a composite image of time by bringing to our attention different
qualities; these, in turn, enrich our knowledge, awareness, and experience.
I have also aimed to show the importance of imagination of a certain kind, namely
counterfactual thinking, which is the type of thinking we engage in when we imagine
antecedents and outcomes that run counter to what actually happened. Counterfactual
thinking, I have argued, is a form of fictional creation akin to artistic creation, and an
analogy can be drawn between the principles of counterfactual thinking and those of
experiencing a great work of literature. Consequently, we also enjoy the same benefits.
Finally, I have argued that reading great works of literature is a valuable way for us to
be vividly introduced, thanks to imagination, to ideas and worldviews different from
our own. This, I have shown to have the potential to challenge the way we see other
people and the world and the possibilities thereof. Our being part of a society bigger
than the sum of its parts, each part works towards strengthening the whole. Moral
imagination and compassion, have a special place in cultivating our character and
making us better people in a better, more ethical society.
A better, more ethical society is a journey rather than a destination, and literature, by
way of its contribution to knowledge, to imagination, to morality, has a valuable place.
45
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The Value of Literature:

Knowledge and Imagination

Master’s Degrees by Examination and Dissertation

3. This dissertation is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except

4. I hereby give consent for my dissertation, if accepted, to be available for

Declaration Form ............................................................................................................................... 2

The Value of Literature: Knowledge and Imagination

‘What is literature?’ is an ambitious question to attempt to answer comprehensively, and

A related – but substantially wider – question is what is art?

The Institutional Theory of Art

Knowledge and Imagination

Plato and Aristotle

In fact, Nussbaum addresses a tradition of influential moral philosophers (specifically

Needless to say, there is benefit in rational thinking, and a certain emotional

Knowledge of “what it’s like”

4. DOES YOUR CHILD SPEAK FREQUENT GIBBERISH OR

To my ears it is a language. Every sound

The point is exquisitely illustrated by question no. 5 in de la Paz’s Questionnaire.

5. DOES YOUR CHILD HAVE DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING

Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.

Metaphors and poetry

“What if?”: Counterfactual thinking

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

An interesting concept addressing the importance of imagination can be found in

The benefits of imaginative engagement

The psychological or evolutionary reasons why we think counterfactually, even when

Patricia Werhane defines moral imagination as the ability to imaginatively discern a

Compassion as a virtue can indeed be taught if it is rewarded, alongside other medical

I think this ‘overall context’ suggested by Pence can be taken as a representative of a

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