Contemporary Usage of Philosophical Discourse and Literature
Abstract
This paper discusses three different contemporary uses of philosophy and literature in non-philosophical and non-literary texts. Most often, both discourses are used as tools, and they are invoked instrumentally (for example, by means of quotation) in popularizing literature or in teaching. Philosophy and literature can also be treated as a source or starting point for reflection outside its mother field (for example, in literary theory), or even as a cause of various social and political processes (as in Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom and Michał Paweł Markowski’s Wojny nowoczesnych plemion [The Wars of Modern Tribes]). The most interesting usage of both discourses is to refer to them as the symptoms or signs of the times allowing us to make diagnoses about the present (this is the case, among others, in After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in Rysy na tafli. Teoria w polu psychoanalitycznym [Cracks on the Surface. A Theory in the Psychoanalytic Field] by Andrzej Leder, while in relation to literature, in Agata Sikora’s Wolność, równość, przemoc [Liberty, Equality, Violence], the essays by Zygmunt Bauman and Przemysław Czapliński). These uses of the two discourses show the similarities between literature and philosophy on a purely pragmatic level that is relevant to their contemporary functioning in a non-specialist sphere. The convergence in this regard is a testimony to the transformation of the position of both discourses in the contemporary humanities involving the loss of their privileged (though increasingly marginal) position. At the same time, literature and philosophy in this crisis situation are gaining new areas of influence in public discourse, realizing their cognitive and reflexive potential through their utilitarian use.
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