ABSTRACT
Our discipline seems so singular a crossbreed of art and science that it is some-
what surprising that only lately has it seemed imperative to some that philoso-
phy be viewed as literature – surprising and somewhat alarming. Of course so
much has been enfranchised as literature in recent times that it would have been
inevitable that literary theorists should have turned from the comic strip, the
movie magazine, the disposable romance – from science fiction, pornography,
and graffiti – to the texts of philosophy, this in virtue of a vastly widened con-
ception of the text that enables us to apply the strategies of hermeneutical
interpretation to bus tickets and baggage checks, want ads and weather reports,
laundry lists and postage cancellations, savings certificates and address books,
medical prescriptions, pastry recipes, olive oil cans and cognac labels – so why
not meditations, examinations, and critiques? Admittedly this is not the exalted
sense of literature we have in mind in speaking of philosophy as an art, but even
if we retain the normative connotations of the term, there is something dis-
turbing in the fact that this particular face of philosophy should have now
become visible enough that we should have been enjoined to treat its texts as a
particular literary genre. For after all the imperatives that have governed the
transformation of philosophy into a profession have stressed our community
with the sciences. Were a kind of semiotic egalitarianism to direct us to regard
as so many texts the papers that regularly appear in Physical Review, their literary
dimension must seem deeply secondary, as ours has always seemed to us to be:
so to treat it suddenly as primary has to be unsettling.
