ABSTRACT
One of the more distinctive features of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is his belief that when philosophy steps on the scene – good intentions notwithstanding – it tends to create the very conceptual messes it claims to have come to clean up, and is in the end responsible for that from which it styles itself as a liberator: confusion.3 This, I will argue, is especially true of a small but important area of philosophizing about works of literature. The confusion I will discuss concerns two basic but evidently contradictory views we have about the nature of the literary work of art. One view emphasizes the social and cognitive value of literature, and it tells us that literature offers the reader a window on the world. It is the idea, familiar to all of us in some respect, that literature is the textual form to which we turn when we want to read the story of our shared form of life: our moral and emotional, social and sexual – and so on for whatever corners of our world literature brings to view – ways of being human.4 The second view emphasizes, simply put, the fiction that goes into a work of literary fiction. For it seems equally intuitive to say that the imaginative basis of literary creation presents to the reader not her world but other worlds, what we commonly refer to as fictional worlds. Works of literary fiction trade in aesthetic creation rather than factual representation. They speak about people made of paper, who inhabit worlds made only of words. And from this it seems quite natural to conclude that literature is therefore essentially and intentionally silent about reality, choosing instead to speak about worlds none of which are quite our own. The confusion, then, concerns how we might make sense of this basic vision of literature as somehow
at once, as it were, both thoroughly our-worldly and otherworldly, how we might reconcile these two very different ways of speaking about the nature of the literary work of art.
