I have to clear up a technical issue. In future postings, I shall be using the term World, with a capital W; I think I have used this term already. When I use this term, I mean it in a slightly unusual way. The World and the world are two different things. The world is the totality of existing things and their relationships with each other. The World, by contrast, is the totality of that that is revealed to a particular consciousness. Although there is one world, there are as many Worlds as there are conscious subjects and these Worlds may vary from person to person.
An example might illustrate this point. I live and spend most of time at home. I have a part-time job. Occasionally I see friends and family. These experiences constitute my immediate World. In addition, I try to read the newspaper every day. Consequently, John Key and Barack Obama are a part of my World, even though I have no direct acquaintance with them. Similarly, Argentina and Somalia are a part of my World: I know they exist and know a little about these countries despite the fact that I have never visited them. Also, Doctor Temperance Brennan from the TV show “Bones” features in my World, even though she is a fictional character.
Two important points should be made. The first is that most of the knowledge one has of one’s World is second-hand. A lot of philosophy, science and ‘common sense’ privileges direct acquaintance and, in particular sight, as the proper means of acquiring knowledge. Seeing is believing, as they say. This idea is found particularly in the philosophy of science, which stresses the importance of experimentation. However, this fails to recognise that most of the knowledge actual individuals, including scientists, posses is conveyed to them by other people, by books, newspapers, television, teachers or simply through conversation. If we only could know that of which we have first-hand acquaintance, the World we live in would be seriously impoverished.
The second point is that I have deliberate smudged the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In reality, of course, people discriminate between fiction and non-fiction very effectively, at least under ordinary conditions (presuming, for instance, that they are not schizophrenic): although we are not given the truth-value of a particular story, we deduce its veracity of falsity from the context of its delivery. The reason I have fudged the distinction is to draw attention to the large number of ‘facts’ that people know, that feature in their World, that can not be easily categorised as either true of false propositions. Consider, for example, the Law against breaking and entering. Although this Law is written down in statutes and law-journals, the law itself is not identical with its verbal expression. In fact, the Law can not be said to exist ANYWHERE, in that there is no referent to which the expression applies. The law is not a part of the world. It is, however, certainly a part of the World, my World at least, and that of law-abiding citizens, in that it stops us from breaking down people’s doors and stealing their stuff.
Likewise, the themes of a piece of literature are ‘facts’ without referents. How much easier would it be do literary criticism, if one could simply point at something and say, “This is what this book is about!”
These ‘facts’ – necessary fictions, call them what you will- form the bulk of what we know. We ‘know’ that the killer feels remorse; we have Macbeth to remind us of this. We ‘know’ that no murder goes unpunished; we have “Bones” to reminds ourelves of this. The world, with a lower case w, is, if not meaningless, at least inhuman. The Existentialists describe it as Absurd, and say that when an individual realises that the world is Absurd, he feels Angst. The World, by contrast however, is saturated with meaning.
The idea that I am presenting is commonplace in modern philosophy, that reality is a social construction. I have tweaked the idea, however, by pitching it in terms of a distinction between a phenomenological World and a scientific world. In doing so, I have also fulfilled a promise I made some weeks ago – to describe the conscious subject in its phenomenological setting.
To conclude, I would like to relate this back to literature. Most literature deals thematically with ‘facts’- it asserts, defends and criticises the assumptions and ideologies that underpins the Worlds of various readers. However, on the surface, literature is fiction and readers know that it is fiction. In the next instalment I shall consider some reason why people might want to read stories that are completely outside their potential experience.