This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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Great works of literature are great because they reveal important truths about human nature and the human condition that might be regarded as too obvious to be worth stating, except that it's a claim Peter Lamarck wishes to challenge.
Peter Lamarck, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
Glad to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is literature and truth.
Some people argue that the reason why we should read a novel like Dostoevsky's crime and punishment is because it reveals something true at a deep level about the human condition.
Is that a plausible view?
I'm a bit skeptical about that.
I'm skeptical that the idea of truth or the idea of knowledge or insight, that these are the right ideas or the right idioms for finding value in the sort of novels that you're talking about, maybe Tolstoy's novels or Dostoevsky's novels, there is a tradition which sees those novels as revealing truths about human nature, human existence, what it's like to be a human in a certain situation, and so on.
And I can accept a lot of those intuitions, but I'm skeptical that truth and knowledge are the right terms to describe those intuitions.
Even when we come to a writer like Shakespeare, for instance, because often he's held up as their master psychologist, this is somebody who really understands what it is to be human.
There are so many different facets of human psychology revealed before us.
And Harold Bloom, the american critic, thinks that Shakespeare, in a sense, invented us.
I think is the expression that he uses because he revealed the modern sensibility.
I accept that.
I'm not denigrating Shakespeare or Shakespeare's achievement, of course.