Narrative Fiction as Philosophical Exploration: A Case Study on Self-Envy and Akrasia

Abstract

Emotions were one of the main philosophical concerns of Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). His novels, short stories, poems, narrations, and other fictional and non-fictional writings all seek to understand the human heart better. However, Unamuno rarely presents his complex and fine-grained views on feelings in form of statements or arguments in favour of specific positions. With the sole exception of his major essay Del Sentimiento trágico de la vida (1913), in which he analyses the »man of flesh and bone« and his desire for survival and immortality, Unamuno’s philosophy of emotions is developed primarily in literary form. Indeed, his literary writings engage with a wide range of emotional phenomena – such as sham emotions, herostratism, envy, jealousy, love, hatred, malice etc. – as he aims to shed light on their constitutive role for human beings. Yet, in none of them do we find arguments for specific claims. As Carlos A. Longhurst has noted, Unamuno was not a conventional philosopher: »[...] he was a philosopher in a sense that has less to do with the discipline that is practiced in university departments of philosophy and more to do with the mythic style of exploring and communicating ideas though the medium of imagined worlds, as was the case with much Greek tragedy, with which Unamuno was very familiar.« (Longhurst 2014, p. 153) Thus, if we want to know and understand the basis of Unamuno’s philosophy of emotions, we have to turn to his literary writings rather than to his major philosophical treatise. Unamuno’s interest in philosophizing in literary form has two main motivations. First of all, he thought that rational argument might deceive and mislead us. He did not reject rational forms of argumentation, but he was aware of the manifold ways in which they can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Contrary to rational argument, literature does not aim at reducing the vital experiences to justified true statements. Secondly, and related to the first motivating factor, literature has the capacity not only to present the complexities of human beings without circumscribing them within specific concepts but also to engage the reader at an emotional level. Thus, while Unamuno sees rational argumentation and poetic reason as two complementary ways of doing