10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 a lexaNdra s trohmaier On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy William James’s Pluralism and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives 1 Introduction: William James and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives William James has frequently been characterised as a “literary philosopher,” 1 especially with regard to the pervasive and profound impact he has had on modernist and postmodernist literary texts and genres 2 As the US-American literary scholar Richard Lewis has claimed, “William James had arguably a greater literary influence than Henry James,” 3 his novelist brother 4 It is above all James’s famous conception of the stream of thought with which he left an enduring mark on literature and literary studies Furthermore, James’s literary influence can be attributed to the specific literary quality of his writings, which are marked by polyphony, metaphoricity, and dialogism 5 1 David C Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 204; Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed James Conant (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 1992), 232 2 See also David E Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings’: What Wordsworth gave to William James,” William James Studies 13 1 (2017), 1 3 Richard W B Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 442 4 See also Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 2 5 On the “heteroglossia” of James’s psychological and philosophical discourse see e g Frederick J Ruf, The Creation of Chaos: William James and the Stylistic Making of a Disorderly World (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1991), 100 On the “metaphorical proliferation” characteristic of James’s writings see Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 131 On the metaphoricity of James’s style see also Jill M Kress, “Contesting Metaphors and the Discourse of Consciousness in William James,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 2 (2000), 263-283; Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1990), 210-235 On James’s dialogism see e g Miriam Strube, “In the End 100 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Whereas James’s enormous influence on literature and literary studies has been widely recognised in recent research, much less attention has been given to the reverse question of literature’s influence upon William James. 6 This research question, however, deserves further exploration, since James was an ardent reader of literature, a fact, which is substantially documented in his work as well as in his correspondence, and stressed by his biographers According to Robert D Richardson, for example, James developed an enthusiasm for literature in his early youth and, throughout his life, “never stopped reading literature, no matter how busy he was ” 7 So far, the scholarship that has inquired into the significance of literature for William James has concentrated on the impact of British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism, especially of such authors as William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Walt Whitman on James’s work 8 But James’s writings also give ample evidence of his intensive reception of the German literary tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries James’s published writings are marked by implicit and explicit intertextual relations to some of the most important autobiographical, literary, and theoretical works of the two protagonists of Weimar Classicism, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller Furthermore, James’s unpublished diary notes, especially those that date from his study period in Germany (from April 1867 to November 1868), record his close reading of some of the major aesthetic treatises that affected German literary culture around 1800 9 was … ‘A Dialogue’: William James’s Performing Pragmatism,” Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy: Beyond the Mainstream, eds Till Kinzel/ Jarmila Mildorf (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 211-225 On the polyphony, performativity, and metaphoricity of James’s philosophical discourse as textual realisation of his pluralistic ontology see Alexandra Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus: Goethe und William James (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 175-198 6 See also Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 1-2 7 Robert D Richardson, In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography (Boston/ New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 52. For this argument see also Todd Barosky/ Justin Rogers-Cooper, “Introduction to ‘New Directions in William James and Literary Studies’,” William James Studies 13 1 (2017), ii 8 On the importance of William Wordsworth for William James see e g Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 1-26 On Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James see e g Sean Ross Meehan, “Metonymies of Mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and the Rhetoric of Liberal Education,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 49 3 (2016), 277-299 On James’s engagement with Walt Whitman see e g John Tessitore, “The ‘Sky-Blue’ Variety: William James, Walt Whitman, and the Limits of Healthy-Mindedness,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 4 (2008), 493-526 9 For a list of the texts by Goethe and Schiller which James read during his study period in Germany see Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 68-69 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 101 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Against the background of James’s intensive engagement with literature, and especially with literary narratives, this article intends to sketch the epistemic value of literature for James’s philosophy of pluralism James’s ontological and epistemological or noetic pluralism, i.e. his specific conception of the world and of knowledge, seems to be informed by what could be characterised as a narrative ‘episteme’: a specific kind of knowledge mediated through narrative discourse as a set of forms and structures through which narratives are constituted and mediated James’s commitment to plurality as one of the reigning features of his ontology and epistemology entails an appreciation of particularity, of temporality, change, contingency, processuality, and multiperspectivity - aspects that, as will be argued, are closely tied to genuine structures of literary narratives and their epistemic implications, especially as they emerged and were reflected upon around 1800. The phrase “knowledge of literary narratives” as it is used in the subtitle of this article is thus to be understood in a double sense: as a genitivus obiectivus that refers to James’s knowledge of narrative literature, as well as a genitivus subiectivus that relates to the assumption, especially advanced by literary cognitivism, that literature itself is a ‘knowing agency ’ 10 With this focus, the article will also target a relatively understudied domain concerning the relation between literature and philosophy 11 In the history of research on this relation, preference has been given to the question of philosophical content in literature 12 Thus, the function of literature has been tentatively reduced to the mere representation or at best modification of philosophical theories On the other hand, those approaches that have considered the presence of literature in philosophy have so far tended to concentrate on the importance of literary style for philosophical writing, perceiving the relevance of literature for philosophy merely in terms of rhetoric 13 In contrast to these approaches, the intention of this article is to show the impact of literary or rather narrative form on philosophical content, thus outlining the epistemic potential of narrative structures and their performative function in the con- 10 For a concise recapitulation of current positions on and approaches to “the knowledge of literature” in this second sense (as a genitivus subiectivus) see Michael Basseler, An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019), 51-64 11 For an introductory account of the complex relation between literature and philosophy see e g Anthony J Cascardi, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge UP, 2014) 12 See for instance the volume by Christiane Schildknecht/ Dieter Teichert, eds , Philosophie in Literatur (Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 1996) 13 See for instance the volume by Gottfried Gabriel/ Christiane Schildknecht, eds , Literarische Formen der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 102 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 stitution of philosophical theories Moreover, while there has been a certain predilection for ethics in the research on the relation between literature and philosophy, 14 limiting the philosophical issues raised by literature to moral questions, this article, by dealing with ontology and epistemology, attends to two rather neglected philosophical branches in this respect 2 William James’s Ontological and Epistemological Pluralism The term “pluralism” entered American philosophical discourse in the early 1880s, and it is William James who has been credited with the advancement of “pluralism” as a new philosophical concept 15 In fact, as Russell Goodman has claimed, James can be considered as “the point of origin” 16 for “the proliferation of the term in English language metaphysics and epistemology at the turn of the nineteenth century ” 17 The advancement of pluralism by James appears in general to be closely related to his suspension of logic as the main principle of philosophical inquiry and to his turn towards life and lived experience as the primary subject matter of philosophy As James indicates in his famous lecture “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” published in 1898, his philosophy has to do “with life rather than with logic ” 18 In his works James habitually criticises traditional philosophy, or what he calls monism, absolute idealism, or rationalism, for its obsession with “the quest or the vision of the world’s unity” 19 and for its distance from real life James’s criticism is that “philosophy is out of touch with real life ” 20 He demands that “philosophy must pass from words […] to life itself,” 21 and suggests that literature, or rather ‘experimental’ literature, can serve as an epistemological model for a philosophical orientation towards life With special reference to ethics, he demands from the 14 For a review article on current publications in the field of literature and ethics see e.g. Alexander Nebrig, “Neue Studien zu Moral und Ethik der Literatur und ihrer Kritik,” Orbis Litterarum 71 6 (2016), 549-560 15 For a very short overview of the history of the term in European and US-American philosophy see for instance Russell B Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” Revue internationale philosophie 2 (2012), 155-156 16 Ibid , 156 17 Ibid 18 William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1 4 (1898), 287 19 William James, The Works of William James, eds Frederick H Burkhardt/ Fredson Bowers/ Ignas K Skrupskelis, Vol 1: Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 1975), 64 Hereafter, references to The Works of William James will be by volume and page 20 James, Works, Vol 7, 19 21 James, Works, Vol 5, 190 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 103 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 philosopher that “his books […], so far as they truly touch […] life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic, - […] with novels and dramas of the deeper sort ” 22 Along with this he envisions that philosophy will gradually draw closer to reality until it will finally entertain a relationship with reality that approximates the worldliness of literary narratives: “In the end philosophers may get into as close contact as realistic novelists with the facts of life ” 23 For James, philosophy has to turn towards life in its diversity, and it is narrative literature that provides a sense of direction in this respect In A Pluralistic Universe, published in 1908, James reinforces his plea for a shift of focus in philosophy with a quotation from Goethe’s Faust, a work that in its incommensurability is characterised by an epic rather than a dramatic quality As Goethe notes in his correspondence with Friedrich Schiller, which James examined closely during his study period in Germany, 24 Faust appears as a “barbaric composition,” 25 as a “whole, which will always remain a fragment,” 26 and for which only “the new theory of the epic poem” 27 may provide some orientation Resisting the urge of “getting a consistent ‘philosophy’ out of it,” 28 James read Goethe’s Faust, as he wrote in a letter to his family from Dresden in 1867, “with enjoyment,” 29 and he complemented his reading of Faust with a study of Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s lengthy article on the scholarly reception of this drama 30 In A Pluralistic Universe James draws 22 James, Works, Vol 6, 159 23 James, Works, Vol 7, 19 24 For James’s reading of the Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe (in the German original) see e g James’s letter to his brother Henry: “I have been reading up Goethe a little lately […] I had read previously his and Schiller’s correspondence, the perusal of wh I strongly urge upon you […] The spectacle of two such earnestly living & working men is refreshing to the soul of any one ” William James, “To Henry James Dresden June 4 68,” The Correspondence of William James, eds Ignas K Skrupskelis/ Elizabeth M Berkeley, Vol 1: William and Henry, 1861-1884 (Charlottesville/ London: U of Virginia P, 1992), 49-50 25 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “To Schiller Weimar, 27 th June, 1797,” Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, From 1794 to 1805, trans George H Calvert (New York/ London: Putnam, 1845), 270 26 Ibid 27 Ibid 28 William James, “To the James Family July 24 ‘67, Dresden,” The Correspondence of William James, eds Ignas K Skrupskelis/ Elizabeth M Berkeley, Vol 4: 1856-1877 (Charlottesville/ London: U of Virginia P, 1995), 185, original emphasis 29 Ibid 30 James’s study of this article is documented in an unpublished manuscript on Goethe that contains extensive excerpts from Vischer’s article on Goethe’s Faust On this see in more detail Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 87-88 104 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 upon Goethe’s “masterpiece of philosophical literature” 31 in order to redirect the philosopher’s perspective from heavenly metaphysics to earthly matters: What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and manners of the sky […]? I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history ‘Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und diese sonne scheinet meinen leiden ’ I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description […] 32 The turn James takes towards life goes hand in hand with his development of a pluralistic philosophy In his publications, the term “pluralism” makes its first appearance in an article from 1884 entitled “The Dilemma of Determinism ” 33 It is already in this article that James’s pluralistic conception of the world is interrelated with a pluralistic conception of knowledge The world according to James can be termed a “pluriverse,” 34 it is marked by an irreducible fullness and a variety of facts that cannot be grasped by a single point of view, but that require multiple perspectives The conception of the world he suggests is that of “a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene ” 35 One central implication of James’s pluralistic conception of the world concerns “the existence of possibilities ” 36 In contrast to monism, which posits that the world is a unity determined by necessity, pluralism acknowledges the reality of contingency The world that his philosophy deals with is, as James writes in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “a world with a chance in it ” 37 Another important feature of the Jamesian pluriverse is its temporal structure Further contrasting his pluriverse with what he calls the “block-uni- 31 This characterisation of Goethe’s Faust is suggested by Thomas L Cooksey, who, in his monograph Masterpieces of Philosophical Literature, devotes a chapter to Goethe’s Faust See Thomas L Cooksey, Masterpieces of Philosophical Literature (Westport, CT/ London: Greenwood Press, 2006), 115-135 32 James, Works, Vol 4, 27, original emphasis For the quotation in the quotation see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, ed Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt a M : Dt Klassiker-Verlag, 1994), 75 33 See also Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 160 34 In A Pluralistic Universe, James uses the term “multiverse” (James, Works, Vol 4, 36) However, the term “pluriverse” has become more common in recent scholarship See e g Kennan Ferguson, William James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, MD et al : Rowman & Littlefield), 2007. 35 James, Works, Vol 6, 136 36 Ibid , 118 37 Ibid , 137, original emphasis On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 105 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 verse” 38 of the absolute, James states in A Pluralistic Universe: “The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute’s ‘timeless’ character For pluralists, on the other hand, time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history ” 39 Rejecting or rather inverting the classical metaphysical dichotomy, dominant since Greek antiquity, between timelessness and temporality, a dichotomy which implies that only eternity or stasis is worthy of philosophical inquiry, James accentuates the reality of time and history Against the absolutist conception of reality as an unchanging entity, as a stable and timeless state, James argues for the reality of change: “Of our world, change seems an essential ingredient There is history There are novelties, struggles, losses, pain But the world of the Absolute is represented as unchanging, eternal ‘out of time ’” 40 Its radical intrication with time involves that the pluriverse is dynamic and open James’s pluriverse is in progress, and exposed to the future In his classic Pragmatism from 1907, where James associates pluralism with pragmatism and monism with rationalism, the processuality and hence openness of his pluralistic ontology serves as one of the key differences between pragmatism and rationalism: “The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is readymade and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures ” 41 Consequently, James characterises the world as it presents itself to the pragmatist or pluralist as “a tramp and vagrant world ” 42 It is, as he declares, using an apt metaphor, “a dog without a collar ” 43 3 Epistemic Implications of Narrative Structures and their Impact on Philosophical Pluralism The core features of James’s conception of the world - plurality, contingency, temporality as well as processuality and openness - also constitute some of the defining characteristics of narrative discourse, also and especially as discussed in German aesthetic theories of the late 18th and early 19th centuries These theories explicitly reflect on those structures as defining characteristics 38 James, Works, Vol 4, 140 39 Ibid , 28 40 James, Works, Vol 7, 72 41 James, Works, Vol 1, 123, original emphasis 42 Ibid , 125 43 Ibid 106 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 of narrative form that seem to serve as implicit epistemological catalysts for James’s ontological and noetic or epistemological pluralism Thus the concept of “chance,” which gains increasing prominence with the erosion of a deistic world order in the second half of the 18th century, becomes an essential ingredient of narrative worlds 44 According to Lessing or Goethe among others, chance even constitutes one of the generic features that distinguish the novel from drama In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, for example, the narrator, after presenting a discussion among the novel’s characters about the differences between narrative and drama, concludes that, in contrast to drama, “in the novel something might be left to the operation of chance ” 45 With regard to the impact of Faust upon James, it is important to note that this drama, in accordance with the somewhat epic character that Goethe has ascribed to it, not only refuses to reduce contingency, but rather accentuates it. Goethe’s play is marked by a significant modification of the traditional Faust tale through which, as Michael Holquist has argued, the fictional world is transformed into a “universe of contingency.” 46 The substitution of the traditional pact between Faust and the devil through a wager that characterises Goethe’s creative adoption of the classic Faust plot implies that the parties “agree to accept the intervention of chance ” 47 Analogous to the narrative world of the novel around 1800, the universe modelled in Faust centres indeterminacy and contingency as constitutive and irreducible factors of the (pluralistic) universe Furthermore, in the theoretical debates that take place around 1800, processuality becomes a constitutive principle of narrative worlds This can be attributed to a shift of focus with regard to the subject of representation As novelists and theorists, such as Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Friedrich Blanckenburg, Karl Philipp Moritz, Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others, postulate, literature has to pass from static representation of the so called ‘natura naturata,’ of created 44 See e g Arnd Biese, “Spielers Erzählungen, oder: Zufall herstellen,” Literatur und Spiel: Zur Poetologie literarischer Spielszenen, eds Bernhard Jahn/ Michael Schilling (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2010), 151-152 45 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans R Dillon Boylan (London: Bohn, 1855), 285 For Goethe’s generic differentiation between drama and narrative with reference to the existence of “chance” see also Peter Gendolla, “Erdbeben und Feuer: Der Zufall in Novellen von Goethe, Kleist, Frank und Camus,” Die Künste des Zufalls, eds Peter Gendolla/ Thomas Kamphusmann (Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 1999), 201 46 Michael Holquist, “Gambling with Kant: Faustian Wagers,” New Literary History 40 (2009), 65 47 Ibid On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 107 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 nature, to the dynamic representation or rather simulation of the creating principle of nature itself The active principle of nature, the so called ‘natura naturans,’ becomes the dominant organising principle of narratives Thus, representation is no longer concerned primarily with the product but with the process of creation, and with this new orientation, representation itself becomes a dynamic operation 48 As Nicolas Pethes has argued, in the poetic simulation of the productivity of nature, the techniques of representation are modified in such a way that representation itself acquires the nature of a process 49 Generally, the orientation towards new principles, such as processuality, in literary narration around 1800 can be related to the rise of “life” as a new anthropological and aesthetic paradigm As Dirk Oschmann has shown with special reference to Lessing, Schiller, and Kleist, aspects of movement and process, which are perceived as essential structural characteristics of life, pervade literary and aesthetic discourses around 1800 and bring about literary texts marked by performative and dynamic structures 50 Significantly, new genres emerge in the field of narrative, such as the dramatic novel or the dialogic novel - genres that present narrative worlds as infused with a processual logic 51 Apart from processuality, variability is stressed as one of the defining criteria of life in literary (and scientific) discourses around 1800. In literary narratives, variability is simulated through generic hybridity on the level of discourse and is also reflected upon at the propositional level. In Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Goethe’s sequel to the Apprenticeship, for example, change is defined as intrinsic to life and lived experience: “Life belongs to the living, and those who live must be prepared for change ” 52 With respect to the novel’s eclectic mixture of narrative forms, this comment on the inevitability of change appears to be a reflection on the novel’s formal experiments and innovations But even for less experimental novels, and, in fact, for narratives 48 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 36-38; Lars-Thade Ulrichs, Die andere Vernunft: Philosophie und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 348-351 49 Nicolas Pethes, “‘In jenem elastischen Medium’: Der Topos ‘Prozessualität’ in der Rhetorik der Wissenschaften seit 1800 (Novalis, Goethe, Bernard),” Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz, ed Jürgen Fohrmann (Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2004), 138 50 Dirk Oschmann, Bewegliche Dichtung: Sprachtheorie und Poetik bei Lessing, Schiller und Kleist (München: Fink, 2007) 51 See also Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 37 52 My translation Original quotation: “Das Leben gehört den Lebendigen an, und wer lebt, muß auf Wechsel gefaßt sein ” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, ed Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt a M : Dt Klassiker-Verl , 1989), 285 108 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 in general, change has to be considered as an essential feature Indeed, the fictional worlds modelled through narratives can be defined by alteration, as Vera Nünning has claimed: “A story presents a model of a world in which changes occur ” 53 The narrative’s tendency towards change in German literary texts of the late 18th and early 19th century culminates in the innovative genre of the “archival novel” 54 that Goethe established with Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years The “‘aggregate’ structure” 55 of the novel, which according to Goethe accounts for the “incommensurability” 56 and “incalculability of the production,” 57 presents a self-reflexive celebration of plurality and of variation as structural characteristics of life As can be argued with Martin Bez, Goethe’s “archival novel” constitutes a narrative genre that “reflects, acts out, stages and modifies plurality.” 58 Furthermore, the “logic of the archive,” 59 exploited in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years as well as in Faust, 60 implies the abandonment of any aspiration towards completion Through its plurality, its suspension of closure and its orientation towards variation and transition, Goethe’s archival poetics attempts an approximation towards narrating the incommensurability of life 61 Another important aspect discussed in the aesthetic debates around 1800 is the potential of narrative literature to mediate between realism and idealism, which is also one of the main aims of modern German philosophy beginning with Kant 62 As could be argued with reference to Martin Wieland, for instance, novels of the late 18th century anticipate this philosophical project of mediating between realism and idealism by showing that reality is inevitably 53 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: On the Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 52 54 Ehrhard Bahr, The Novel as Archive: The Genesis, Reception, and Criticism of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 14 55 Ibid 56 Ibid 57 Ibid Goethe himself describes Wilhelm Meister as “one of the most incalculable productions,” to which he himself almost lacked “the key ” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, Vol 1, trans John Oxenford (London: Smith/ Elder, 1850), 200-201 58 My translation Martin Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: Aggregat, Archiv, Archivroman (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 112 59 Ibid , 232 60 See Steffen Schneider, Archivpoetik: Die Funktion des Wissens in Goethes Faust II (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005). Schneider identifies the “logic of the archive” (ibid., 57) as constitutive of Goethe’s Faust 61 See also Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 272 62 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 31-36 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 109 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 bound to the partial perspective of the knowing subject On the propositional level this epistemological insight brought about through narrative structures of dialogism and multiperspectivity is expressed in Wieland’s famous dictum: “We cannot and should not all look at the world through the same keyhole ” 63 Accordingly, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, omniscient narration becomes disintegrated through the “introduction of a personalized narrative perspective ” 64 In this respect, the philosophical position of perspectivity and relativity of all knowledge of the world can be regarded as an epistemological insight brought about by point-of-view-narration and multiperspectivity After all, as Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning have shown in various publications, the generation of multiple perspectives constitutes one of the cognitively most significant strategies of narrative worldmaking. 65 In view of all these epistemic implications of narratives it comes as no surprise that in the theories formulated around 1800 the novel is regarded as the privileged medium for modern philosophy For Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, the novel as a hybrid genre qualifies as “the best philosophical organ ” 66 The philosophical relevance of the modern or romantic novel as envisioned by Schlegel is essentially tied up with its pluralistic form This becomes especially evident when Schlegel, in one of the fragments that make up his collection Philosophical Apprenticeship, posits Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as the paradigm of a pluralistic philosophy: “Ecl.[ectic] φ [philosophy] in W[ilhelm] Meister.- Eclectic φ [philosophy] = philosophy of life ” 67 Considering William James’s intensive engagement with the German literary tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and with Goethe in 63 My translation Original quotation: “[W]ir können und sollen nicht alle durch ein und dasselbe Schlüsselloch in die Welt gucken ” Christoph Martin Wieland, “Geschichte des Weisen Danischmend,” Abderiten, Stilpon, Danischmend, ed Ludwig Pfannmüller (Berlin: Weidmann, 1913), 377 See also Ulrichs, Die andere Vernunft, 97 64 Bahr, The Novel as Archive, 18 65 See e g Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning (eds ), Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Trier: WVT, 2000); Ansgar Nünning, “Lebensexperimente und Weisen literarischer Welterzeugung: Thesen zu den Aufgaben und Perspektiven einer lebenswissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft,” Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft. Programm - Projekte - Perspektiven, eds Wolfgang Asholt/ Ottmar Ette (Tübingen: Narr, 2010), 57; V Nünning, Reading Fictions, 39-40 66 My translation Original quotation: “Der Roman war von jeher das beste Organ d[er] besten Ekl.[ektischen] φ [Philosophen] d[er] Modernen.” Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796-1806, ed Ernst Behler (München/ Paderborn/ Wien: Schöningh, 1963), 12, original emphasis 67 Ibid., 12, original emphasis, my translation. Original quotation: “Ekl.[ektische] φ [Philosophie] im W[ilhelm] Meister.- Die Eklektische φ [Philosophie] = Lebensphilosophie.” 110 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 particular, it seems that the eclectic form of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as well as the hybridity of Goethe’s Faust, which Goethe had described as a heterogeneous composition closer to modern novels than to classical drama, served as an implicit paradigm for William James’s pluralistic conception of the world This view is substantiated not only by the various intertextual references to Goethe in James’s writings, 68 but also, on a more general level, by James’s generic characterisation of his pluralist philosophy In “The One and The Many,” the fourth chapter of Pragmatism, James draws upon a literary category to characterise his view of the world In contrast to the form of classical drama that James makes out as the privileged paradigm of monistic ontologies, his conception of the world is orientated towards another genre For James, the “world appears as something more epic than dramatic ” 69 He rejects the monistic dogma “that the whole world tells one story” 70 and explicates: “The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds ” 71 Resisting unification, the pluriverse of stories as modelled by James resembles the narrative world created through the narrative genre of the “archival novel” that Goethe established with Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Indeed, the “‘aggregate’ structure” 72 constitutive of Goethe’s novel is also a fundamental characteristic of James’s conception of the world, which he describes as a “universe of simply collective or additive form ” 73 In the preface to his volume The Will to Believe James declares, with an implicit self-referential gesture that points to the genre of this very volume, that “the world is a pluralism; […] its unity seems to be that of any collection ” 74 In A Pluralistic Universe, this world as a “collection” of concrete particulars is further specified by its resistance to homogenisation and its irreducible openness: Whereas “absolutism thinks that the […] substance […] is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the pluralistic view […] is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ” 75 68 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus 69 James, Works, Vol 1, 71 70 Ibid 71 Ibid 72 Bahr, The Novel as Archive, 14 73 James, Works, Vol 4, 51 74 James, Works, Vol 6, 5-6 75 James, Works, Vol 4, 20, original emphasis On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 111 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 From the perspective adopted in this article, this concept of a pluralist universe appears to be a translation of Goethe’s “archival poetics” into philosophical discourse After all, the features, central to the “logic of the archive” 76 exploited in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years as well as in Faust - plurality, contingency, change, openness, and multiperspectivity - constitute distinctive features of James’s conception of the world In fact, James even explicitly acknowledges his formal indebtedness to Goethe’s archival poetics In the preface to his opus magnum The Principles of Psychology, James justifies his over 1,400-pages-long composition of a “mass of descriptive details” 77 with explicit reference to the structure of Goethe’s Faust, quoting the words of the manager in Faust’s “Prologue for the Theatre,” who has tasked the poet with writing a “ragout” - a “piece […] in pieces” 78 : James calls himself a “sanguine man,” 79 hoping “in this crowded age, […] to have many readers for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen But wer Vieles bringt wird Manchem etwas bringen ” 80 Transferring Goethe’s “archival poetics” to his conceptualisation of pluralism, which he describes as a “mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts,” 81 James has obviously come to synthesise what he had at first kept apart when trying to come to terms with Goethe In a letter written from Germany to his brother Henry that reflects on his in-depth study of Goethe, James records his initial irritation about Goethe’s habit to “save[] up everything” 82 and “to put the important and the accessory in one sheaf,” 83 and he reports that he has “learned to distinguish between his [= Goethe’s] general philosophic tendency, and his constitutional habit of collecting He [= Goethe] was a born collector & cataloguer of facts ” 84 In the pluralist ontology that James develops later in his life, reality becomes a collection of facts, both essential and accidental, and each fact valuable in its particular reality: “The reality exists as a plenum […] each part is as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else ” 85 For James, the collection of facts and “stories” that make up the pluralistic universe requires the suspension of what he calls “the notion of the one 76 Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 232; Schneider, Archivpoetik, 57 77 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1 (New York: Holt, 1890), vii 78 My translation Goethe, Faust, 17 79 James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1, v 80 Ibid For the German quotation see Goethe, Faust, 17 81 James, Works, Vol 3, 22 82 James, “To Henry James,” 50 83 Ibid 84 Ibid , 51 85 James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 2, 634, orginal emphasis 112 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Knower ” 86 Criticising the monistic concept of an “All-Knower,” 87 James insists upon “the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once ” 88 The plea James makes for what Russel Goodman has called James’s “point of view pluralism” 89 comes close to a description of narrative multiperspectivity and even unreliability In James’s pluralistic universe everything gets known by some knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be liable to forget 90 In this quote, as in many other of James’s discussions of his doctrine, pluralism appears as a jointly ontological and epistemological conception, 91 one which holds that the world is made up of a plurality of facts and requires a plurality of perspectives, a fusion of ontology and epistemology that prior to the philosophy of James seems to have been exclusive to narrative literature 4 Conclusion: Towards a New Paradigm of Interdisciplinary Research: Literature in Philosophy The epistemological implications of narrative discourse and its performative function for ontological and noetic pluralism as captured above would appear to call for a modification of the dominant orientation in researching the relation between literature and philosophy So far, Christiane Schildknecht has distinguished essentially four paradigms in the tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship on the relation between literature and philosophy: 92 1) philosophy in literature, 2) philosophy as literature, 3) philosophy of literature, and 4) philosophy and literature. The significance of narrative worldmaking as an 86 James, Works, Vol 1, 71, original emphasis 87 Ibid , 72 88 Ibid 89 Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 157 90 James, Works, Vol 1, 72, original emphasis 91 On James’s pluralism as “a jointly metaphysical and epistemological view,” see also Michael R Slater, “William James’s Pluralism,” The Review of Metaphysics 65 (2011), 69 According to Goodman, James “blends the moral with the metaphysical and epistemological ” Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 161 92 Christiane Schildknecht, “Literatur und Philosophie: Perspektiven einer Überschneidung,” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014), 41- 56 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 113 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 epistemological model for philosophical conceptions of the world and for its perception and cognition as outlined in this article seems to call for yet another paradigm - one that does justice to the presence of literature in philosophy This presence of literature in philosophy, as has become visible, amounts to more than mere intertextual presence in the form of literary quotations or simple ornament in the form of literary style It even extends the scope of epistemic relevance attributed to literature in those approaches to the relation between literature and philosophy that can be subsumed under the paradigm of “philosophy as literature ” Although in these approaches it has almost become a commonplace that rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, allusions, or neologisms, play a significant role in philosophical discourse, their significance has been primarily seen in expressing concerns that escape or challenge traditional philosophical reasoning Strangely enough, by conceiving rhetorical devices as intentionally employed strategies in the service of a postmodernist critique of rationalism, these approaches tend to argue in line with a philosophical tradition that postmodernist philosophy has actually worked to overcome Claiming that the cognitive role of literature in philosophy consists in representing “the other of reason” 93 or in “presenting the unrepresentable,” 94 these approaches indirectly affirm the traditional Platonic conception of literature as ‘the other’ of philosophy By contrast, philosophy’s indebtedness to literature, and especially to narrative literature as sketched above, requires an approach that is able to capture the epistemic potential of literary or rather narrative form for philosophical reasoning and theory formation What theoretical positions and implications would such an approach have to involve? One central premise would consist in a conception of literature as a productive medium of generating knowledge 95 Rather than merely representing philosophical positions, literature actively participates in the constitution of philosophical knowledge; and it seems to do so not only through its content, but also, and possibly even more so, through its specific form. Thus, in contrast to analytic philosophy, which rejects the notion of literary knowledge altogether (since knowledge is restricted to propositional knowledge), such a paradigm of literature in philosophy would emphasise the epistemological 93 A T Nuyen, “The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25 2 (1992), 186 94 Ibid , 188 95 For such a concept of literature with special reference to life knowledge see e g A Nünning, “Lebensexperimente und Weisen literarischer Welterzeugung,” 56 For such a concept with special reference to philosophical knowledge see Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 10-11 114 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 significance of literary forms as non-propositional knowledge. 96 In this respect, literary cognitivism, the field of research that investigates the cognitive or epistemic potential of literature and literary forms, can provide a productive interface for further research 97 However, in contrast to some of the approaches of literary cognitivism, the knowledge of literature would have to be conceived of as ‘fully-fledged,’ so to speak, as non-supplementary 98 As James’s pluralism seems to suggest, the knowledge transmitted through literary form cannot be reduced to a sort of alternative knowledge with simply complementary or compensatory functions After all, the notion of a pluralistic universe that is composed of unique particulars and marked by temporality, processuality, and contingency, and that depends on a multitude of perspectives for the perception and cognition of its plurality, is, as has been argued in this article, eminently prefigured through narrative worlds, which seem to serve as models for ontological and epistemological configurations. In a paradigm of “literature in philosophy,” as envisioned here, literature aspires to generate genuine ontological and epistemological insights that go beyond literature’s alleged function of merely supplementing philosophical discourse This does not involve, however, a dedifferentiation of literature and philosophy either In contrast to poststructuralist approaches, which tend to level out the differences between literature and philosophy, by arguing that both literary and philosophical discourses are rooted in language and “governed by the quasi-transcendental principle of différance,” 99 the approach suggested here insists on the uniqueness of literary or rather narrative form and investigates its epistemic potential In this respect, it shares common grounds with 96 For literary strategies as forms of non-propositional knowledge see e g Christiane Schildknecht, “‘Ein seltsam wunderbarer Anstrich’? Nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis und ihre Darstellungsformen,” Darstellung und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant, ed Brady Bowman (Paderborn: mentis, 2007), 31-43 On the importance of literary strategies (as non-propositional knowledge) for philosophy see Gottfried Gabriel, “Zwischen Wissenschaft und Dichtung: Nicht-propositionale Vergegenwärtigungen in der Philosophie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 51 (2003), 415-425 97 For an overview of literary cognitivism and its relevance in the study of the relation between literature and philosophy see e g Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, “Das Wissen der Literatur und die epistemische Kraft der Imagination,” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014), 119-140 98 For the conception of literature as a form of alternative knowledge (“Alternativ-Wissen”) see e g Jochen Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur (München: Fink, 2007), 10 99 Herbert Grabes, “Introduction: Literature and Philosophy - A Relationship under Debate,” Literature and Philosophy, ed id (Tübingen: Narr, 1997), 6 115 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy narratologically informed research that has demonstrated that narrative literature, and especially narrative fiction, is marked by unique cognitive functions generated by specific forms and structures exclusive to (fictional) narratives (such as multiperspectivity, polyphony, or psycho-narration) Whereas this research has mainly inquired into the significance of particular narrative structures for cognitive abilities and social cognition, 100 the approach of “literature in philosophy” as suggested here elaborates the epistemic potential of genuine narrative structures for ontological and epistemological theory formation And, in accordance with research that could be integrated under the umbrella term “narrative cognitivism,” it does so through a narratologically trained eye. By exploring narrative worlds in their specific discursive formations as models for ontological and noetic pluralism, such an approach values the specific epistemic qualities of (narrative) literature. 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