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Philosophy and the Single Girl

Literature and philosophy have certainly palled around, courting each other since the very beginning. The two are soul mates of a kind: tempted to tackle the big ideas, daring to answer the big questions, the perpetual trickle of the why and how, the what and the who: why are we here, wherever and whatever here is, and how should we be here? And, what does it all mean, this business of being here and being us? Still, one must admit that though the literary has taken on the philosophical, though it can and does admit and absorb the problems preoccupying the Western mind, the philosophical novel can be a dubious enterprise. A true love and pursuit of wisdom does not always encourage the kind of complications the novel thrives on; rational inquiry and argument stand at loggerheads with the irrational, unpredictable, absurd, tragic behavior that fuels literary masterpieces. Though Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, the 1991 Norwegian book about a fourteen-year-old’s studies in thinkers from Plato to Jean-Paul Sartre, was an international success, most reviewers agreed that its virtues did not include fully fleshed out characters, fully conceived actors whose feelings and motivations were given the same consideration as their philosophical undertaking. A somewhat different predicament faces Charlotte Greig’s A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy, a post-adolescent Sophie’s World. Telling the story of Susannah Jones, a twenty-year-old, second-year student in philosophy at Sussex University in the 1970s, the novel wants to suggest that the insights of Friedrich Nietzsche et al. could be adapted as a course for living, could serve as a kind of crystal ball whose cryptic pronouncements can be deciphered and, once deciphered, applied to difficult decisions. That the sometimes impenetrable thought of male philosophers can function as a girl’s guide, advising a young lady on the tricky matters of the heart, is certainly an interesting notion, one that holds out potential both comic and intellectual, promising an exploration of the demands of modern living through the explication of the complicated history of Western thinking, while sending up the pretension of those who spent more time thinking about the world than actually living in it. Imagine: Cosmo edited by Søren Kierkegaard! Sex and the Single Girl (1962) reconceived by Martin Heidegger!