Why Literature Matters: The Aporetic Approach

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

— Niels Bohr

Framing

Having “been reduced to the perplexity of realizing that he did not know… he will go on and discover,” Plato writes of the boy who “feels the difficulty he is in” after attempting to solve Socrates’ riddles.^[1] Socrates argues that “by causing him to doubt and giving him the torpedo’s shock” of his own ignorance, “he will push on in the search gladly, as lacking knowledge; whereas then he would have been only too ready to suppose he was right.”^[2] Encountering contradictions and complexity beyond his comprehension plunged the boy into aporia — an impasse, a quandary one cannot resolve, a state of puzzlement, a doubting and bewilderment, a being-at-a-loss. Aporia is the dazzling of the mind by the intricacy of existence.^[3] While this state seems empty, the paucity of knowledge in aporia is fertile. Specifically, aporia created by literature offers the following routes of learning: it fosters epistemic humility by revealing our uncertainty, broadens our possibilities by expanding our imaginative horizons, and promotes existential authenticity.

This paper focuses on aporetic literature, a genre of fiction that is usually long-form, complex, and narrative or poetic. Fiction itself is characterized by the way it “invites imaginings.”^[4] What distinguishes aporetic literature is a specific “mode of persuasion” distinct from the realist mode of persuasion.^[5] While some authors portend to represent the real world and offer the reader closure, aporetic authors “multiply mysteries and indeterminacies and keep the reader guessing to the end and beyond.”^[6] Instead of straightforwardly representing the world, aporetic literature is enigmatic, perplexing, and questioning, making interpretation difficult. It is aporia-promoting. My paradigm examples are intricate masterworks with nuanced internal tensions, like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Heller’s Catch-22, and The Bible. However, any aporia-causing fiction fits in this category, and virtually any text—Dr. Seuss’s storybooks, Disney’s Frozen, Egyptian myths, a peer’s Instagram poetry—could produce aporia. In fact, almost all literature contains a period of puzzlement between the initial pieces and the end result. Thus, aporetic literature is on a continuum and it overlaps with many other genres. To avoid excessive scope, I will concentrate on the most aporia-promoting literature.

How can fictional imaginaries instruct us in meaningful ways about the world outside the fiction? This paper aims to provide a solution to this puzzle of instructive literature, which asks how imaginative representations can change our perspectives or teach us in ways relevant to the real world. This is adjacent to the puzzle of moral persuasion^[7] but is broader, including not just the way literature can teach us about morality, but also about the world, its meaning, and ourselves. I argue that imagination guided by aporetic literature can be genuinely instructive.

Rather than educating us on a predefined landscape of knowledge, persuading us to hold certain beliefs, providing specific answers, or promoting moral skills, aporetic literature primarily serves as a way to confront readers with intractable dilemmas. It offers a range of challenging and often contradictory perspectives that create doubt and questioning (aporia), leading the reader to a fertile space of possibility where they can recognize their limits, explore alternate worldviews, create their own values, and construct an authentic personal interpretation of both the text and life itself. There are three vital ways we learn from imaginaries guided by aporetic literature:

1. Epistemic humility. The aporia created by the complexity and internal tension within literature causes us to recognize our ignorance. In essence, we gain insight about our lack of knowledge.
2. Openness. Literature leads us to recognize the breadth of possibilities, widening our imaginative scope and our ability to generate new ideas.
3. Existential authenticity. Aporia urges the reader to choose to create herself. This choice leads to greater existential authenticity as formulated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

None of these routes of learning presume any particular view of ethics. After all, aporetic literature does not stress a particular ‘correct’ morality, but instead engenders aporia, opening up a mental space where individuals can develop new values or explore their existing values. Furthermore, I do not rely on any particular view of truth, where the purpose of fiction might be to track or remain faithful to the Truth. The three roles of aporetic literature function regardless of the moral or epistemic position the reader takes—a desiderata which most views of learning-from-literature cannot fulfill.

What is Learning?

Learning in my view is broader than just epistemic improvement or skill-acquisition.^[8] These are both forms of learning, but they do not capture a full picture. For instance, in transformative experiences as described by L.A. Paul, one’s entire way-of-perceiving, values, and phenomenological perspective undergo a metamorphosis.^[9] Just like you cannot know what it would be like to be a vampire until you become one, you cannot understand what it will like to be yourself after personal transformation. After a transformative experience, one’s window into the world is shattered. One cannot say that after a transformative experience our views have improved, since after the paradigm shift are standards of what “improvement” itself even means have changed. This paradigm-shift kind of learning cannot be understood as mere epistemic improvement. And aporetic literature is not strictly truthful or knowledge-promoting, but is better called illuminating, enlightening, or instructive.

Paradigm shifts do not just entail epistemic improvements, but new lens through which to view the world. Explaining transformative experience requires a wider conception of learning as the process of growing one’s understanding, where “understanding” is the ability to see and utilize varying perspectives. Learning is not just refining the glasses we use to view the world; it is not just improving the glasses’ prescription. Rather, transformative learning makes our window more kaleidoscopic. It shatters our existing lens, adding new perspectives, and layering these new lenses on top or alongside of our earlier lenses. Through literature, we convert our solitary pair of tinted glasses into a many-tinted kaleidoscope.

I. Epistemic humility

(a) The method of aporia

Unlike the Sophists, Socrates does not vend his wisdom away or allow his students to “mindlessly swallow the conclusions of their mentors.”^[10] Rather, he uses a questioning dialectic to induce aporia, an uncertain state of possibility which urges students to “discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light.”^[11] With Socrates, students learn valuable mental skills and perhaps even wisdom, rather than tokens of knowledge “they can buy from time to time for a drachma.”^[12] Even if this is more painful, as the student is often “distressed and annoyed at being so dragged…into the light of the sun,”^[13] it is far more rewarding. While knowledge or skill acquisition is valuable, Socrates surpasses a sole focus on this method and encourages an aporetic approach as well. This approach to learning emphasizes epistemic humility—recognition of our uncertainty and limited perspective—as a first step. As Confucius described in the Analects, “to know when you know; and when you do not know; that is wisdom.”^[14]

Through contradiction, metaphor, and other narrative and stylistic elements, literature exposes what we do not know. Aporetic literature is Socratic, provoking internal dialogue within the reader about significant questions instead of dictating conceptual truths. The aspiration of aporetic authors is “perhaps most of all to frustrate reason itself with the sheer complexity of their projects,” moving past the restrictions of internal consistency and direct matter-of-fact communication.^[15] Rather than erecting “edifices of concepts” with “rigid regularity,” these authors use their fictions to build an “infinitely complex cathedral of concepts upon shifting foundations and flowing waters.”^[16] Thus, the author leaves the reader in a state of internal tension and psychological ambiguity.

Aporetic literature does not employ optimal communication techniques to make understanding or knowledge-acquisition easier. The opposite is true. As Kierkegaard wrote, “I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.”^[17] Aporetic authors create stumbling blocks in their books to trip up the reader. Similarly, in Socrates’ method of elenchus, he creates difficulties for his conversation partners by exposing internal contradictions in their views.

(b) Exposing uncertainty

Aporetic literature depicts a series of impossible dilemmas, unanswerable questions, and gripping quandaries. These aporias reveal our ignorance and uncertainty. For instance, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan asks his brother Alyosha a confounding question:

“Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, [one child], and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?. . . And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?”^[18]

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The primary effect of this passage is not knowledge-acquisition, but aporia. I realize my own ethical ignorance. I do not know what the correct ethical response to this question is; I barely know where to start. Dostoyevsky has thrust me into aporia. This grows my epistemic accuracy, in a sense, because I now know what I do not know. But more importantly, the aporia has created a space of possibility—I can now re-evaluate my values.

As another example, the novel Catch-22 satirizes war, puzzling the reader through conflicting character’s perspectives and disquieting descriptions. The common phrase “Catch-22” can even be seen as a synonym for aporia, as it describes a bewildering problem where the only solution is precluded by the conditions of the problem itself. This exposition by the character Yossarian exhibits one of the most aporia-inducing passages of the novel:

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?”^[19]

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

This relentless series of confusing, contradictory questions thrusts us into a knotty situation. As a reader immersed in the novel, my empathy with Yossarian’s plight leads me to try to answer his questions. But I am unable. I cannot resolve his contradictions (lying honest men, crooked straight paths), elucidate valid rationales behind the social structures he challenges (food insecurity, triumphant cockroaches), or simplify all of his questions into a coherent logical structure. My uncertainty is exposed. Aware of my epistemic limits, my loss of confidence makes me more open to further exploration.

Finally, one of the most influential passages in English literature is Shakespeare’s poignant creation of aporia about death:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
…To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?”^[20]

Hamlet, Shakespeare

This passage thrusts the reader into a state of questioning. Especially for readers who had not before considered the question of being or non-being, it creates aporia about whether life is worth living. Even for those accustomed to this question, it induces perplexity about what might come after the end, puzzling the will and giving the reader pause.

(c) Reshaping cognition

In Currie’s view, the “sheer complexity of great narrative art…may increase its power to spread ignorance and error.”^[21] Complex literary works make language “harder to process,” and this nuanced style generates an illusory sense of learning.^[22] Literature engages our emotions and bypasses our epistemic defense mechanisms. Rather than promoting epistemic humility, literature can just reinforce biases and facilitate misguided beliefs.

The aporetic approach resolves Currie’s sensible critique of confusing, doubt-creating, and contradictory literary styles. This seemingly obstructive complexity is necessary to create aporia. Aporetic literature is designed not to lubricate the mind’s mechanisms, but to disrupt the smooth operation of the intellect. The aim is not to provide a straightforward set of rules to minimize confusion, but to mimic the intricacy of lived experience and draw out paradoxes. The conflicting ambiguity of in aporetic literature is not mere random noise, but carefully constructed and meaningful dissonance that is “strategically opposed to the harmonies it disrupts.”^[23] Puzzlement and perplexity are positive effects of aporetic literature, not unfortunate byproducts.

Aporia-promoting writers throw a stick into the well-oiled spokes of our mental equipment. Our synthesis is thwarted. This breakdown discloses our automatic cognitive processes and encourages playful, self-conscious, hypothesis-testing exploration in their place. Once they are in the open, our pre-programmed interpretations can be changed, as “the brain plays with alternative ways of interpreting these elusive, intriguingly unstable representations.”^[24] Aporia can help emancipate us from our biases, “breaking their grip to enable new modes of cortical organization.”^[25] The dissonances of aporetic literature upset our cognitive habits and “what was dulled becomes visible again as new configurations of meaning, based on new neuronal assemblies, emerge.”^[26] Writing aporetic literature is an art of taking-away, luring the reader away from their supposed knowledge. We learn through unlearning.

(d) Epistemic virtues

Epistemic humility is especially important in post-Gettier epistemologies which emphasize epistemic virtues over discrete periods of knowledge-acquisition. Fiction can model characters with epistemic virtues like humility, inquisitiveness, or intellectual courage, and is unique in its capacity to show the complexity of these virtues. For instance, Dr. Frankenstein exhibits a love of learning and passion for discovery, both usually considered epistemic virtues. But Shelley makes it clear that this curiosity is obsessive, power-hungry, and vicious, and thus not a virtue. Pip of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations develops a vicious preoccupation with increasing his status by acquiring knowledge. His intellectual vices interfere with genuine learning, and the novel exposes his epistemic arrogance.

Tracing these fictional characters in our imaginations encourages epistemic humility. By reading a wide variety of fiction, readers can mediate between different character-models and pursue epistemic virtues with more understanding. Even if literature does not promote knowledge-acquisition directly, it builds the virtues necessary for learning.

II. Openness

Aporetic literature broadens our horizons and expands our range of vision. It offers new vantage points and possibilities. In Kant’s account, in engagement with fiction our minds are “in free play, because no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition.”^[27] Aporetic literature encourages the “playful application of a multiplicity of concepts.”^[28] Aporetic literature can thus expand the scope of our imagination, causing us to learn of endless new possibilities, as “The Brain—is wider than the Sky.”^[29] In this way, the author does not give us a thing to see but offers a light by which we may see for ourselves. Even if our behavioral responses do not become “more virtuous” by some moral standard and our models of the world do not become “more accurate” by some epistemic standard, we still learn from literature. We gain broader possibilities, a vaster imaginative scope, and a range of potential responses to the world.

(a) Neuroplasticity

Some learning can happen through fictions that invoke familiar patterns and “strengthen already existing cross-cortical processing networks,” but aporetic literature instead reconfigures neural networks, “rewiring synapses to reshape the brain’s plasticity.”^[30] Oft-travelled patterns are important to create habits, but they come with a loss of flexibility and openness. In aporetic texts, the brain is tossed into a heaving tumult, oscillating between unified structure and dissolute chaos as “the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, Earth to heaven.”^[31] This narrative fluctuation keeps the brain open to possibility and maximizes mental adaptability. As Byron declared, “poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”^[32] The turmoil of a restless and uncertain mind is sublimated through aporetic literature. Rather than encouraging unconscious repression, aporia prompts the reader to fully experience the destabilizing doubt and respond to it intentionally.

(b) Defamiliarization

The physical world around us can be seen as a massive stage full of props, where props are defined in Walton’s terms as objects which prescribe “principles of generation” for our imaginings.^[33] Imagination prompted by aporetic literature can defamiliarize us from our existing props. As literary theorist Shklovsky writes, “the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult.”^[34] The phenomenon of defamiliarization is a key element of aporetic literature: “the writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”^[35] Our cognition is de-automatized, we are broken from normal robotic routines of perception, and the ossified props around us are made fluid. After our props are defamiliarized, we are able to inscribe new principles of generation upon them. This enables us to re-imagine the world around us with new frameworks.

(c) Imaginative horizons

Even if fiction writers do not understand the psyche better than anyone else, they can still offer us insights into the possibilities of human behavior. Even completely fabricated characters can portray what human behavior and motivation might be like in an alternate reality. For instance, in the novel Lord of the Flies and the more recent Hunger Games, adolescents are thrust into extreme situations. Quickly, the youths devolve into brutal violence; one of the kids wonders if “maybe there is a beast…maybe it’s only us.”^[36] Readers also place themselves in the intense circumstances through immersion. They thus learn more about the possibilities of human behavior and learn how they might respond in similar circumstances. Apocalyptic or utopian literature constructs imaginaries that contradict our occurrent reality. It thereby makes the status quo seem more contingent and less necessary, encouraging interrogations into the ‘way the world is’ and new visions of what is possible. The aporia produced by fictional situations widens our imaginative horizons beyond just our quotidian experience of everyday life and behavior.

Furthermore, fiction can instigate imaginations about our personal possibilities. It thus expands our view of our own potentiality:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor…and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”^[37]

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Like the character in this passage, we may start to see all the distant branches and figs of our own future by reading about the lives of fictional characters. As Kierkegaard writes, being immersed in an imaginative fictional world allows the reader “to disperse himself among the innumerable possibilities which diverge from himself… the personality is not yet discovered.”^[38] Aporetic fiction challenges the reader’s stable identity, deconstructing her epistemic confidence that ‘I am what I am,’ and grows her imagination of her personal prospects. It also offers a way to simulate alternate ways-of-being. Ultimately, this engagement with fiction can be the foundation for authenticity: the “shaping of Dasein’s being into an authentic existence depends upon its first finding itself submerged in the imaginative projections of its infinite possibilities.”^[39] The authentic self is built on this primordial flux of possibilities. Without imagining our future possibilities, we cannot become ourselves.

III. Existential authenticity

“You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,/ You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.” — Walt Whitman^[40]

(a) What is authenticity?

For the existentialists, our being is always a becoming. We perpetually make choices and enact certain roles to take a stand on who we are. Nietzsche exhorts his readers that we should “want to become who we are— human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!”^[41] Authenticity in the existential view is not discovering what we already are, but striving towards what we decide to become: “for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you.”^[42] An authentic identity cannot be static. It is an action: self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s terms, perpetual striving in Kierkegaard’s, self-surpassing in Sartre’s, or in Heidegger’s vocabulary, Dasein’s constant up-surging into the future.^[43] Authenticity is a constant sculpting, a “making ourselves, shaping a form out of all the elements—that is the task!”^[44] In the search for authenticity we do not seek to know ourselves, but to will a self and become that self.

Further, no one can determine what I am for me:

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it. Who was it who said: “a man never rises higher than when he does not know where his way can still lead him”? [Oliver Cromwell].^[45]

Friedrich Nietzsche

Aporetic literature does not ferry us safely over the stream. Rather, it gives us jumping-off-point to dive into the construction of ourselves. The impetus to this action must arise from the person in question and cannot be forced by external forces. Authenticity cannot be arrived at by simply repeating a set of actions or taking up a set of beliefs; it springs from self-creation. As aporia induces the “shattering of the individual,”^[46] challenging our notions of what we are, it catalyzes our self-creation. Aporetic fictions thus jumpstart the reader on their path to authentic becoming-oneself.

(b) Escaping bad faith

What prevents authenticity? The existentialists are in resounding concordance on the answer: it is laziness and bad faith, which lead people to “hide themselves behind customs.”^[47] Through the pressures of norms and the inertia of default interpretations, we can become lost in the They (Das Man),^[48] forgetting that our identity is a choice, not a circumstance. Aporia-inducing passages shock us out of this laziness, encouraging the reader to “rebel against a state of things in which he only repeats what he has heard, learns what is already known, and imitates what already exists.”^[49] As Sartre writes, authenticity arises from having a “lucid consciousness of the situation,”^[50] as we must recognize our contingent situation but do not let it define us, making a choice to establish an identity.

(c) Emotional engagement

Kierkegaard criticized the culture of his time for the way it promoted detached reflection rather than engaged passionate commitment. Fiction encourages emotional engagement that prompts us to make our own decisions and interpretations. In fact, emotional engagement is required to even comprehend the plots and characters of complex literature.^[51] More significantly, only the spark of a personal relationship to a book can ignite a fire worth stoking. In Fahrenheit 451, a woman is consumed in an inferno of paper because she refuses to give up her books to the firemen. After this, Montag reflects that “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”^[52] What is this unimaginable quality? What are these intensely personal things in books that some are willing to set themselves ablaze for?

The lesson of literature is that mere theses and universal principles are not enough to provide meaning to our lived experience. After all, could you die for a set of knowledge or a series of ‘true’ postulates? Could you live based on facts alone or according to a sophisticated model? As Kierkegaard wrote:

“The obliging, immediate, wholly unreflective subject is naïvely convinced that if only the objective truth stands fast, the subject will be ready and willing to attach himself to it.”^[53]

Soren Kierkegaard

Rather, objective truths are only meaningful when they are infused with emotion and integrated into one’s self. Aporetic literature prompts transformative self-investigation, in which the book serves as a prop for the reader’s authentic reimagination of herself. She encounters aporia and subsequently must decide upon her own values, her self-definition, her own meaning of life. These choices are intensely subjective and only accessible or meaningful to the individual. They are not “knowledge.” Furthermore, they cannot be called “true” according to external standards but become personally true when they are fully appropriated into the individual’s subjective life-view.^[54]

Without an inward transformation, yeastless and objective truth is irrelevant. The reader cannot muster the passion to burn for such objectivity. A reader who has only acquired stale knowledge is like “a man who has collected furniture, rented an apartment, but as yet has not found the beloved to share life’s ups and downs with him.”^[55] Even if the reader could discover objectivity, it is just an unfurnished apartment until become personally intertwined with this truth. Acquiring knowledge or truth will not change one’s life in any meaningful sense. Rather, our aim when we read aporetic literature should be akin to Kierkegaard’s:

“The crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…this was what I needed, to lead a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge, so that I could base the development of my thought not on – yes, not on something called objective – something that in any case is not my own, but upon something that is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence, through which I am grafted into the divine, to which I cling fast even though the whole world may collapse. This is what I needed, and this is what I strive for.”^[56]

Journal Entry, Soren Kierkegaard

This simplifies into an unavoidable reality: it doesn’t matter if it is true if it is not your own. This is why the woman who burns with her books retorts to the firemen that “You can’t ever have my books.”^[57] She didn’t just mean this in the physical sense, as in, ‘I won’t let you burn my books without burning me too.’ She also meant that the books were so intensely personal that no one else could understand them or possess them the way she did. This is why the hero in Fahrenheit 451 is not Beady, who knows about the ancient books and can quote them while keeping them at arm’s length from his soul. Rather, it is the woman who martyrs herself for a book. Those who gain the most from literature are those who undergo the agonizing process of transplanting books into their minds and hearts.

(d) Liveness

An idea is living if you can live it, if you can act upon it irrevocably, and the idea is dead if you can only conceive it. Furthermore, as William James wrote, “deadness and liveness are measured by a thinker’s willingness to act.”^[58] To oversimplify: an idea is live to the extent you can live for the idea. The bold pursuit for a book worth dying for is an adventure worth caring about. Our feeble attempt to gain knowledge from books is a mere side-quest to the task that has real existential significance. Conclusively, pieces of literature should become ways of living. Otherwise books are just the symbol-pockmarked corpses of trees. After reading the poetry, we must become poets of our own lives; after reading the narrative, we must become the narrators of our own stories.

Absorbing literature is not a passive activity in which the reader mentally consumes a series of linguistic units. Rather, “reading is a creative act…without this process of interpretation, we cannot know ourselves. ”^[59] In other words: reading cannot just be filling the mind with information. If a book is to change a person in any meaningful way, the individual must be prompted to respond to the text. The reader must be like a painter inspired by blank canvas—creating through reading, using the printed words as a jumping off point to generate their own ideas. The book functions as a prop for further imagination and action rather than as a script for belief and behavior.

For Kierkegaard, the ethic of a piece of narrative literature is not explicitly given, but is rather “reached by the reader in response to the aporia that the tragedy creates.”^[60] The fiction is “thereby provoking a self-defining choice.”^[61] In line with the aporetic method, Kierkegaard wrote that the purpose of his work was not to “compel a person to an opinion, a conviction, a belief,” but to “compel him to be aware.”^[62] Kierkegaard’s method “favors dialogic contemplation of significant questions over the systematic, discursive presentation of conceptual truths.”^[63] Through his varying, self-contradicting, difficult-to-decipher pseudonyms and his aporia-promoting textual maneuvers, Kierkegaard ensured that his work required active interpretation rather than passive receptiveness.

As humans we are tossed into the desert of the world. In this wilderness, some hunt for an oasis, a wellspring of meaning, something that will define who they are for them; this is an inauthentic pursuit. The authentic approach is to build upon the desolation our own building, to dig our own oasis, to stop the mindless searching and construct ourselves wherever we are standing. From Nietzsche’s perspective, “honest exploration of an individual’s inner life and sensibility was more valuable than the objective presentations of impersonal knowledge and wisdom passed on through the ages.”^[64] The role of aporetic literature is not to promote acceptance of true facts, as we cannot systematically understand our situation amidst the ambiguous complexity of existence. Rather, for Nietzsche, the true function of this form of art is to “leads us, despite the impossibility of knowledge, toward a valid intimation of what we truly are.”^[65] The fundamental ground or metaphysical reality will always elude us. But we can become more authentic human beings.

Conclusion

Socrates calls aporia the “torpedo.” It slams into the mind, dazzling its abilities to comprehend, causing us to forget the convenient structures and systems that hoodwink us into believing we understand existence. In this paper I argue that one purpose of literature is to barrage the mind with flurries of these aporetic torpedoes. The staggering uncertainty these aporias create enables us to truly explore. Through epistemic humility, an increase in openness, and a widening of our imaginative scope, literature broadens our perspective, causing us to recognize that the map is not the territory—the systems we build to understand existence are always wrong. After inspiriting our recognition of this radical uncertainty, literature can prompt its readers to make the existential choices necessary to become authentic.

The complexity and even indecipherability of aporetic literature is a feature and not a bug. Instead of rejecting the complexities, nuances, and idiosyncrasies of literary expression, we should embrace them as essential methods literature uses helps us understand. After all, if an aspect of existence appears easily decipherable, then we are likely missing something. Many things are simple on the surface. But almost no experience or concept is simple once its superficial cardboard packaging is unwrapped. Literature encourages this unwrapping through intricate metaphors, narratives, and stylistic structures that prompt aporia. It reminds us, in Pope’s terms, to keep drinking from the fount of all wisdom, rather than resting in the comfort of a small sips:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again…
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanc’d, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!^[66]

Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope

Through the complexity of literature, we can open the floodgates to seeing far beyond our own position. Rather than taking the limits of our own imaginations for the limits of the world, we can develop a variety of kaleidoscopic lenses that provide new insights into this enigmatic existence. Furthermore, the questioning prompted by aporia is valuable in of itself:

“But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant unity of things] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, … [is] contemptible…This is my type of injustice.”^[67]

Friedrich Nietzsche

Here, Nietzsche paints the recognition of the immense complexity and contradiction of reality (the discordant unity), and our subsequent response to this aporia, as an intrinsic value. To stare into the “marvelous uncertainty” and dive into the abyss to seek an answer is not some means to an end but an activity that is its own justification.

To summarize, aporetic fiction reveals an irresolvable puzzle. The reader is left at a loss, which his leads to a recognition of ignorance. This recognition fosters a creative space for exploring new ways-of-viewing, lenses, or possibilities. The reader is then prompted to move forward to acquire knowledge to fill in the gaps, develop skills and epistemic virtues, or to create their own authentic identity and make existential choices. Ultimately it becomes clear that aporetic literature can lead us to certain forms of learning. Even after the literature is returned to the shelf, its ideas linger beyond the pages, and the reader is left with interpretations to construct, decisions to make, conclusions to reach, and actions to take.

Appendix

A. The aporetic position on moral persuasion

My position is beyond and distinct from the established views in the philosophy of imagination: optimism, fidelity, clarificationism, enhancement, and the deflationary position.^[68] Alternatively, under Noël Carroll’s outline of the three broad approaches to the puzzle of moral persuasion,^[69] the aporetic approach constitutes a 4^th approach, distinct from the knowledge (the arts improve our knowledge of moral truths), acquaintance (arts acquaint us with novel perspectives), and the cultivation (arts refine our existing moral positions and skills) approaches. The aporetic approach is somewhat similar to acquaintance, but it has some distinguishing features discussed in this paper.

B. Plato, art, tragedy, and literature

Example of contradiction in Plato: in the Gorgias, Socrates tells Polus that he is not a politician: “I’m not one of the politicians. Last year I was elected to the Council by lot, and when our tribe was presiding and I had to call for a vote, I came in for a laugh. I did not know how to do it” (473e- 474a). However, later in the same dialogue, Socrates contradicts this assertion: “I believe that I’m one of the few Athenians…to take up the true political craft and practice true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification, but at what’s best” (521d-e). Through imagining possibilities that contradict the reader’s everyday frameworks, authors expose the limitations and implications of the maxims the reader lives by.

However, I seek to move beyond Plato. As Nietzsche describes in the Birth of Tragedy, Plato, after all, criticized tragic art because it did not “tell the truth” and failed to morally persuade: “Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts which only represent the agreeable, not the useful, and hence he required of his disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical allurements; with such success that the youthful tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to be able to become a scholar of Socrates.”^[70] This is in itself a tragedy and discounts the power of poetry. However, Nietzsche recognizes that “though there can be no doubt whatever that the most immediate effect of the Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of Socrates’ own life compels us to ask whether there is necessarily only an antipodal relation between Socratism and art, and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” is in general something contradictory in itself.”^[71]

C. Fiction and Empathy

Multiple studies and replications have found that, even after accounting for other variables, fiction exposure predicts performance on empathy tasks.^[72] As empathy is a “multi-level construct extending from simple forms of emotion contagion to complex forms of cognitive perspective taking,” different types of literature may promote different forms of empathy.^[73] Some fictions activate the frontal lobe areas that are associated with theory of mind and conceptual understanding of others, while some fictions activate the fundamental limbic structures that are associated with the visceral experience of compassion or feeling-with the other.

Currie also claims that “fiction’s supposed capacity to enlarge empathy would be a good thing only if it led to prosocial behavior,” which disregards the possibility that empathy is intrinsically valuable to the individual. We often treat empathy as valuable in of itself – if someone empathizes with us, we express appreciation or gratitude, and if they fail to empathize, we express critique or negative judgement. We judge them not for specific behaviors, but for their expression of empathy (often through words). Of course, language is a behavior, but in this essay Currie does not consider the possibility that empathy produced by engagement with fiction can promote more empathetic language—which seems to be one of our primary metrics of someone’s empathy.

However, empathy might be of intrinsic value from a first-person perspective. I place intrinsic value on having more empathy for others because (a) it allows me to understand them more fully, (b) it somewhat bridges the abyss between subject and Other. These are non-behavioral benefits. Currie’s focus on behavior seems somewhat myopic.

Currie may respond that empathy is valuable because it causes people to act with consideration of others. We like when others ‘hear us out’ with empathy because it shows concern or other attached values like caring or understanding. This is a practical concern— I want you to understand me or accept me. The possibilities raised above are all still prosocial behaviors that benefit the other, oneself, and society.

D. Examples of Aporetic Works

Crime and Punishment “narrates the mental agony and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov.”^[74] In a conversation with Dunya, Raskolnikov describes his dilemma: “you come to a certain limit and if you do not overstep it, you will be unhappy, but if you do overstep it, perhaps you will be even more unhappy.” In this work, Dostoevsky recognizes that his character “give rise to unresolved conflicts, that there is no higher harmony into which they are subsumed.”^[75] E.g. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment describes his understanding of his murder in this passage:

“But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to commit a murder as I went then? I will tell you some day how I went! Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever.… But it was the devil that killed that old woman, not I. Enough, enough, Sonia, enough! Let me be!”^[76]

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

While it may be true that Dostoevsky is not painting an accurate picture of human psychology here, we still learn from this passage. We learn that one who murders might potentially feel as if they murdered themselves – even if this is not how most or even any humans do feel in actuality. We gain another potential scenario. One could object that perhaps this is not even a potential way a human might feel. However, we still learn even in that case – we learn about the limits of the human psyche, the ways in which we are emotionally or psychologically constrained, and we gain an imagined possibility of what it might be like if we were not so constrained. This also guides our emotional responses to scenarios. Furthermore, we understand the perspective of Raskolnikov, and what led him to murder: “When the reader comes to feel understanding regarding a characters wrongdoing, she is also forced into a realization that her immediate affective response to the wrongdoing…is morally arrogant. The effect is humbling.”^[77]

Books like Ulysses are “difficult and resistant to comprehension,” as the “puckish, rebellious” Joyce creates complexities to “push to the limits—and beyond—the brain’s powers of integration.”^[78]

E. Critique of Currie’s View of Fiction

This paper partially constitutes a critique of Currie’s view of fiction as “Cracks in the Glass” and “Imagination and Learning,” where he argues for a somewhat deflationary position on learning from literature. In his view, fiction is at least as likely to “generate an illusion of learning” and “spread ignorance and error” as it is to improve.^[79] Currie views “great literature as epistemic traps rather than fonts of learning.”^[80] I agree with Currie that literature is not necessarily effective at encouraging understanding of or behavioral adherence to any particular moral or epistemic framework. However, for aporetic literature, this is not a flaw, but a feature. Literature that leans in the aporia-generating direction creates learning by disrupting the reader’s equanimity, challenging their status quo, and encouraging doubt about their current beliefs and behaviors. Increasing uncertainty is a benefit of literature and even the source of our learning.

Currie’s exposition on the cognitive biases ingrained in literature is insightful, and it is true that our interpretation of literature is tainted by these biases. But I argue that literature itself is a method of revealing these cognitive biases and allowing us to understand the flaws of our own perspective. It does this by exposing logical inconsistences, revealing the limits of our perspective and our imaginative horizons, and creating narrative distance that bypasses the mechanisms which normally protect our established beliefs from cognitive dissonance. By creating narrative distance, literature overcomes the provincial biases of our limited imaginations. Narrative distance is the “the cognitive or emotional space afforded by indirect communication that invites listeners to make sense of content.”^[81] in fiction, the reader is given room to reflect, accept, reject, and decide. In contrast, lectures, nonfiction, other direct forms of communication strike straight at the reader’s mind, and “the poor listener, denied any room to say No is thereby denied the room to say Yes.”^[82] Aporetic literature does not provoke as much defensiveness because its content is not a straightforward assault on the reader, but guides readers into an aporia where they can set their prejudices aside. The strategic construction of distance in literature can have transformative effects where direct communication would only reinforce biases.

Through complex language and nuanced narrative that distances the reader from their normal habits of thought, aporetic literature can instigate profound insights and create transformative experiences. The paragons of the aporetic genre embed enough ambiguity in their stories to force the reader herself to make sense of the story; the burden of deciding the meaning of the text is placed on the reader, not the writer. As the text does not rigorously delineate concepts, it gives the reader almost nothing to work with, and thus the reader is forced to give to this “airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”^[83] As the reader is required to actively engage with the text in this way, aporetic literature makes the reader more likely to reflect and makes her more open to making personal changes.

Even if the reader doesn’t want to learn anything, literature massages the mind, slowly easing the reader into an alternative world. Just as a frog is best boiled slowly rather than tossed straight into sizzling broth, massaging the brain rather than confronting it directly is the best way to overcome cognitive biases. In fact, research in cognitive science suggests that fiction prompts a “less critical approach to the material,” and readers “relax their critical and evaluative standards when transported into a story.”^[84] Reading fiction has its greatest impact when the reader approaches the text experientially rather than rationally, critically, or with the purpose of extracting information.^[85] As Currie argues, fiction’s power may activate cognitive biases, and it may lead to false beliefs. However, it also has the benefit of creating narrative distance, in which the reader can escape their limited perspective and explore seeing the world through a different lens, a different set of cognitive biases.

Ultimately, I find Currie’s view to be a solid starting point, but it is sabotaged by a set of enthymematic assumptions. Specially, it seems that at least in these two papers, he presumes that (a) literature of all genres functions in essentially the same way, (b) that the reader subscribes to some form of realism in which they are seeking to acquire morally or epistemically true beliefs from the literature, (c) that learning is essentially the accumulation of knowledge and skills. Once these presumptions are revealed and refuted, it becomes clear that aporetic literature can produce learning.

G. An Objection to My View of Learning

In this view, can learning ever be wrong? If someone’s paradigm shift or experience of aporia leads them to a “wrong” answer, is that learning? If learning is solely subjective knowing, would it constitute learning if they learn wrong things – e.g. after reading Crucible, I think it’s fine to throw friends under bus for my own sake. Or after reading Curious George I think monkeys are better at city life than most people. Would this be learning under the aporetic model?

First, the concept of a “wrong answer” does not apply to self-learning. I cannot be ‘wrong’ about my own views in a straightforward sense. Rather, I can have an insufficient understanding of myself, I can fail to develop a perspective on a particular topic, I can misunderstand my actual motivations and desires, I can develop an inauthentic identity, or I can behave in ways that contradict my second-order desires and larger goals. However, it is incoherent to say that I am “wrong” in the sense that I fail to correspond to some objective, correct, or right version of myself. This self does not exist, or if it does, I do not have access to it or it exists only in my imagination. Furthermore, as Sartre describes, as a subject with existential freedom, I am constantly aware that all of the standards I create to evaluate myself are in fact created by myself. If I use standards created by others, I choose to use them; others can coerce or incentivize me to use particular standards, but they cannot force me to evaluate my own thoughts and behaviors in any way. Whether or not one has “learned” about oneself can only be judged by oneself. This makes it more difficult to determine whether one has learned, but as Kierkegaard says, the purpose is to create difficulties everywhere.

The author could intend a specific perspective in their work and may seek to promote a specific moral framework or worldview. They may have structured the plot and characters in order to support this worldview. Therefore, it may not be the author’s intent to promote aporia, but my argument is that this is the effect of a specific kind of literature—aporetic literature. The purpose of aporetic literature is to get audience members to think about the issue and implicitly lead them to these questioning states.

H. Further Unanswered Questions

• How does learning occur in aporetic literature? What is the mechanism or process?
  • Does there have to be intent behind it?
  • Is the aporetic view just one extra step to the intended answer?
• What causes failure to learn? Is it the fault of the subject? How could it be at fault, since we are defining learning based off of the subject?
• Does learning from aporetic literature just have the requirement of entering the aporetic state? Or is there something after the aporia that the reader must pursue?
  • Is aporia intrinsically valuable or only valuable for secondary purposes?
• Is aporetic learning defined by introspection? What is the cognitive model of aporia?

I. Text-based literature vs images

Furthermore, textual, narrative fiction of my paradigmatic kind has unique advantages over other forms of art in moral persuasion. Literature cannot literally represent the world. It can only paint images and ideas in the imagination. Fiction gestures at a world beyond the reality we perceive, creating a sense of transcendence and encouraging readers to question their immanent surroundings. Fiction also can generate a contradiction between (a) my immanent reality and my physical perceptions and (b) my sense of transcendence and imaginative view of a world beyond my own perspective. This contradiction generates aporia, and it makes me more likely to accept the possibility that my perspective is limited and perhaps there is something beyond.

As morality is not a landscape or object we perceive in occurrent reality, it is in a sense imaginary. Text encourages imagination and thus allows readers to more easily conceptualize a “realm of morals” or a moral law that exists in a transcendent sense. On the other hand, representational image-based art (e.g. photography, non-animated film, animations that track reality) generally encourage us to take reality as a given and to reject the transcendent. Thus, images are not as effective as text-based narratives in moral persuasion or in moral learning, as they do not activate the imagination. Narrative fiction is consumed through imagination, visual art and images are consumed through perception.

The media theorist Vilém Flusser argued that visual media presents the world ‘as it is,’ when inevitably these visual mediums are representations of the artist’s view: “Flusser classifies the different media in three categories: traditional images, texts and technical images. Each of these media are created by man as an explanation of the world in order to facilitate his orientation in this world. Yet, each medium is possessed by the same sly dialectics: instead of representing the world, media present the world as it is perceived by them…instead of representing the world, they [the images] obscure it until human beings finally become a function of the images they create.”^[86] Images mediate between the world and human beings, and “therefore images are needed to make [the world] comprehensible.”^[87] Aporetic texts do not claim to make the world comprehensible; they rather reveal the incomprehensibility of the world.

J. Other Notes

Heidegger might say that through literature we are temporarily freed from our own Das Man and we can imagine another Das Man, allowing us to glimpse another meaning-structure and another world of possibility.

What makes Socrates a radically effective mentor of philosophy is also precisely what makes him an “abject failure” by modern standards, with their emphasis on “formalizable, repeatable data points representing operational knowledge, skill sets, and material mastery.”^[88]

Aporetic literature is in line with Nietzsche’s conception of imagination as Urvermögen menschlicher Phantasie [‘the primal faculty of human fantasy’], through which we spontaneously try and express the way we perceive the world, making each individual into an “artistically creating subject.”^[89]

Kierkegaard did not seek to lead his reader to any specific judgement, for after all, “what he judges is not in my power.”^[90] Ultimately, “Any attempt on Kierkegaard’s part to control or make decisions for the reader would invalidate his entire authorship. Rather, his task is simply presenting his metaphors before withdrawing from the reader to allow the reader to accept or reject the message of the metaphor.”^[91] As he asks in his journals ‘Have I the right to use my art in order to win over a person, is it not still a mode of deception? … When he sees me moved, inspired, etc., he accepts my view, consequently for a reason entirely different than mine, and an unsound reason.”^[92]

Through his complex, layered, aporia-promoting textual maneuvers Kierkegaard expressed his ideas while “retaining an ironic distance from the explicitly stated views.”^[93] The lack of direct communication of information in aporetic literature does not originate in a paucity of information to communicate. As Kierkegaard writes, in most communication, “there is no lack of information…something else is lacking, and this is a something which the one cannot directly communicate to the other.”^[94] Narrative fiction is the way of communicating the incommunicable. Rather, it does not directly communicate them, but prompts readers to discover these ineffable things for themselves. In other words, “the world grows stranger as we stare / with vortices of maddening change / How understand what we unbare / as through the ragged scene we range? … the gap is widening betwixt / reality and the minds of men.”^[95]

In fact, “the ability of uniting opposing qualities into distinctive, socially powerful and coherent patterns, shapes and forms is the hallmark of any creative society.”^[96]

As Sartre argues, our “emotional reactions to the irreal are freer because they are not confronted with the same constraints and resistances we encounter in reality.”^[97]

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