Featured, Mortimus on Writing and Books

Plato and The Purloined Boy

The following are excerpts of an interview of Christopher Wiley (personal secretary to Mortimus Clay)  conducted by Jana Mohr Lone, Director, Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington.  Portions of this interview are soon to be published on the center’s blog.

Jana: “Please tell me about your professional history.  What led you from philosophy to writing young adult fantasy?”

Christopher: “Well, I’m a Presbyterian minister.  I taught philosophy to undergraduates for nearly ten years and I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School.

For me there wasn’t a direct road from philosophy to fantasy.  Both have been part of my life since I started reading seriously as a teenager.  I didn’t begin to write young adult fantasy so that I could encode philosophy in order to slip it past the unsuspecting reader.  Instead – I’m a philosopher who loves fantasy and got an idea for a story stuck in his head and used philosophy to help get it out.”

 

“Do you think that fantasy novels are a particularly good way to facilitate young people’s exploration of philosophy?  And if so, why?”

“Probably not in an academic sense – didacticism is the death of fiction.  There have occasionally been great stylists in the history of philosophy: Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre (that about exhausts it).  Of those, only one was a writer of fiction.  The dialogs of Plato, the confessions of Augustine, the parables of Kierkegaard, the sundry thoughts of Pascal, the diatribes of Nietzsche, and aphorisms of Schopenhauer – these are all edifying and entertaining – but they all put the lesson first.  They’re all so tendentious; and to readers of fiction they’re tedious.  And if you’re going to write fiction people want to read and not merely assign for a class then you’ve got to let the story set the agenda.  (Jostein Gaarder’s, Sophie’s World is a partial exception to this.  Yet I wonder how many of his book sales were to Introduction to Philosophy classes.)

All that said, fantasy is a great place to explore philosophical themes.  You can even have fun with characters – basing them on philosophers or schools of philosophy.  The easiest thing to do is to work with symbolism and foreshadowing.  But I think the most fruitful use of philosophy in writing fiction is allowing philosophical problems arise for the characters to address within the context of the plot.  I’d say that philosophy, when practiced well, helps us identify the fundamental issues to respond to in any situation we find ourselves in.  Since it is helpful in that way in our lives – it certainly can work that way in a narrative.”

“What do you think are the primary philosophical themes in The Purloined Boy?  Why did you choose to utilize the social structure of Plato’s Republic and in particular to set up the structure in the way that you did (which, I imagine, would not please Plato)?”

“This is a tough question to answer succinctly.  Nearly every page is dripping with Plato.  Seeing it largely depends on how conversant you with him are and how apt you are at picking up literary allusions.

First I think I should say that I’m really a convert to Platonism after years of being an Aristotelian.  Much of the book is an exploration of Plato’s philosophy.  Running throughout the story is the conflict between appearance and reality.  Themes of light and shadow, conventional belief and truth, blindness and sight are everywhere.  The eye is a powerful symbol in the story.  Epictetus is half blind – he wears an eye patch but turns it up at important points in the story in order to truly see.  The name “augo” (for the magical ball Trevor uses to see what he can’t see with his naked eye) is a Germanic root for the word eye.  I could go on but I’d give away too much.  There are a number of references to the Myth of the Cave in chapter one.  When Trevor is abducted at the beginning of the book his open closet is said to resemble the mouth of a cave.  While he’s lying on his bed in Superbia he sees shadows dancing on the ceiling that he imagines look like things.  Epictetus carries a special lamp fashioned to resemble a mountain with light coming from the cave mouth.  Plato’s epistemological theory of recollection is introduced by Zephyr in the scene where Trevor meets the magical mouse for the first time – again in a cave like place, this time the prison where the bogeys keep children before they do their dastardly worst to them.

Second, the main protagonist, Trevor Upjohn, is presented with an ethical dilemma which pits the views of Aristotle and Plato against each other.  Trevor remembers his home and wants to get back to it.  This is something that would truly make him happy.  But he is challenged by Zephyr to stay and help those who need him.  His choice is between personal happiness and social responsibility.  Where the Aristotelian calculates and must leave town so as to prevent Athens from sinning against philosophy a second time; the Platonist doesn’t seek happiness through ethics – but drinks the hemlock.  I’ve always thought that if I were a drowning man I’d want a Platonist standing on the shore and not an Aristotelian.  (For those who demure – no, I don’t think you can’t habituate yourself to dying for the sake of others. Death is a singular experience.  And no – making little sacrifices won’t prepare you.)

As to the social structure of the Republic – I had a lot of fun with that but I think in the end Plato – if he looked past appearances – would see I’m actually working within the framework of his convictions.

First of all I’m not an uncritical Platonist.  I’ve always been repelled by his attitudes toward the physical body and the family.  If there are places where we part company decisively it is at those points.  The Republic is a nightmare from a child’s point of view.  You have to admit the androgynous Guardians are pretty creepy.  But further, the structure of the society, which he says is an analog to the individual – with a head, chest and stomach – fails to address practical problems arising from such a scheme.  He naïvely trusts the virtue of his Guardians and he fails to see just how clever those governed by their appetites can be.  He also fails to see the myriad of ways the coercive power of the State can be made to serve horrid ends.  All I do with the Republic is put the stomach in charge (the bogeys – who literally eat people) while keeping up appearances with the Guardians serving as a sort of puppet class (returning to the theme of appearance and reality).  The slaves turn out to be the morally virtuous (the Guild under the leadership of Epictetus – but they lack knowledge because they have lost the secret of reading their books).  So in a way you could say that the disorder in Superbia (my “Republic”) is actually rife with every malady Plato sought to diagnose and cure with his state.”

“Is The Weirdling Cycle intended to get young people to think about philosophical questions?  If so, which questions in particular the series inspires examining?”

As to the first part of the question – definitely yes.  But the approach is narrative rather than didactic.  I think a good story yields itself to examination.  As I wrote the first installment the series I wove the tale with three threads.  First, I wanted to tell a rip-roaring good story that kids would like.  Second, I wanted to explore philosophical themes throughout the story. My suspicion is that this would provide depth to the tale and in many cases remain dormant in the reader’s mind until, at a later time, the reader thinks, “Say, that story I read by Mortimus Clay has stuff in it that kind of sounds like what I’m hearing in Introduction to Philosophy.”  Hopefully, at that point, the reader will go back and re-read the story and, even more hopefully, enjoy it again and get more out of it.  In fact, I hope the reader will enjoy it more precisely because he or she gets more out of it.  Third, I wanted to work out some ethical conundrums I’ve come across in the course of life – principally, how to reconcile my longing for personal happiness with social responsibilities.

There is something else I’m aiming for too.  It is something so ambitious that I’m a little embarrassed to mention it.  I hope that my readers experience something of the numinous in my stories.

“You mentioned in our mail exchange that the books are “an attempt to live philosophy from the inside.”  What do you mean by that?”

Each of us has a life to examine and we examine it from the inside.  What makes literature an art that can’t be replaced by any other medium is that it allows the artist to speak within the mind of the reader.  All other forms address us from the outside.  Even music must be audible to be received.  Only the written word enters silently, paradoxically from without and from within at the same moment.  As such it enables the writer to propose ideas, images, judgments, etc. with the inner voice of the reader.  At the same time the reader is taken out of himself or herself and enters the mind of the author – through the narrator or a character.

Now literally there is no such person as the character one reads about in a book.  Even accounts based on real events are not literally true.  They’re representations.  But they can tell us something true.   (Here is where I think Plato was inconsistent.  His philosophy of art and his method for teaching philosophy stand in contradiction.)  When good fiction does its work disbelief is suspended for a time and the reader can envision the world from another’s perspective.  I can’t imagine a better way to introduce metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions to someone.  One might say propositions do that.  But they don’t, really.  A proposition is something a thinker holds before himself or herself and considers.  One doesn’t enter into it unless he or she has an unusually sympathetic disposition and a powerful imagination.  Through fiction I can help readers entertain questions they may not entertain in any other way.”