The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp.

519–534, 2009

Of Poets and Thinkers: A Conversation

on Philosophy, Literature and the
Rebuilding of the World

COSTICA BRADATAN, SIMON CRITCHLEY, GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA

AND ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

Sometimes there can be something supremely seductive about the unclear and the indistinct. On one
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occasion the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Chou made this disturbing confession, which must have
left his disciples utterly perplexed: ‘‘Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly
flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was
Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But
he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming
he was Chuang Chou’’ (trans. Burton Watson). The distinct philosophical charm of the situation
Chuang Chou found himself in seems to come precisely out of the structural indistinctness on which it
is based. Any attempt to pin it down would certainly spoil it; this charm exists only insofar as it
remains related to the corresponding ambiguity. The only appropriate way to deal with such a
situation consists precisely in ‘‘letting it be’’ and taking its indistinction as a given.
In many respects, the relationship between philosophy and literature is not unlike that between
Chuang Chou and the butterfly he was dreaming he was: its intense attractiveness comes precisely
from the indistinctness on which it relies, and which, needless to say, is in itself a philosophical
problem worthy of the most serious consideration. To discuss the charmingly ambiguous relationships
between philosophy and literature I have invited three distinguished scholars of philosophy and
literature: Simon Critchley, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social
Research, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian at
Yale University, and Alexander Nehamas, Carpenter Professor in the Humanities at Princeton
University. (C. B.)
***
Costica Bradatan: First of all, I would like to thank the three of you for kindly agreeing
to take part in this conversation. I know how busy you all are and I am certainly grateful
to you for finding the time to participate.

Costica Bradatan, The Honors College, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79401, USA. Email: Costica.
Bradatan@ttu.edu
Simon Critchley, 321 1/2 State St., Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA. Email: critchls@newschool.edu
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University, Department of Italian, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. Email: giuseppe.
mazzotta@yale.edu
Alexander Nehamas, 692 Pretty Brook Road, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA. Email: nehamas@Princeton.edu

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/050519–16 ! 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770903128414
 520 COSTICA BRADATAN ET AL.

I would like to start with a certain observation that has puzzled me for some time.
It is about a rather widespread presumption in today’s mainstream philosophy (especially
in the English-speaking world) that the literary aspects of a philosophical text do not
in general mean anything, that they do not—and should not—play any significant role in
the production, interpretation and appreciation of that text. It is as though a philosophical
text is (or can be easily considered) something perfectly transparent, as if you can ‘‘see
right through it,’’ without having to take into account its literariness. The literariness of
a philosophical text is, according to this prevalent view, perfectly negligible, something
you can easily leave aside, and still the significance of that text will remain intact. There
was a time, not long ago, when philosophers (a Bergson, for example) could get the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Today, in some circles, if you praise philosophers for the
literary qualities of their writings, they might well take that as a disguised criticism. How
do you comment on this state of affairs? Where does it come from? What do you make
of this trend?
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Simon Critchley: Let me answer about the relation of philosophy to literature by

telling a story. I remember having given a paper at the philosophy department of a
prestigious English university that modesty forbids naming. I was in my late 20s and
pretty inexperienced at giving papers. The question period was pretty lively and slightly
hostile, I recall. At dinner afterwards, a philosopher of a rather different persuasion to
mine said, in response to some remarks I’d made during questions, ‘‘I don’t see why
reading a philosopher isn’t just like sitting down to dinner with him.’’ The example we
both had in mind was Descartes. I pointed out the fact that Descartes would probably
not been fluent in English, lived 400 years ago in a very different and indeed
explosive cultural and historical context, defined by the Thirty Years War in which was
a participant, that he wrote in different styles in his Latin and vernacular texts
and experimented constantly with literary form, using the Jesuitical meditation,
Montaigne’s autobiographical essay, and even allegedly finishing his career writing the
verses to a ballet at the request of Queen Christina of Sweden. After I’d finished
pleading, my interlocutor made the obvious move and said, ‘‘That’s all very well from a
historical and literary perspective, but what matters is the truth or falsity of Descartes’
arguments.’’
The prejudice here is, as you say in your question, that we can read through the
surface of a philosophical text and judge its arguments as either valid or invalid. The book
series that epitomizes this approach is Routledge’s ‘‘Arguments of the Philosophers,’’ that
I believe was first edited by Freddie Ayer, though I might be wrong. The presupposition
of this approach is that it is only the arguments that are important and that we can ignore
the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, cultural and literary features of a text as irrelevant
surface details that are best ignored. I disagree very strongly with this approach.
Arguments are obviously hugely important, but we ignore those other features at
our peril and, when we do ignore them, we risk falling into a rather flat-footed philistine
approach to philosophical texts. If philosophy is exclusively about arguments, then how
do we explain the fact that there are so many poor arguments in so many philosophical
texts, beginning with Plato’s dialogues? Was Plato stupid?
I think we have reached a very peculiar state of affairs when philosophers are
approached with suspicion because they write too well.