Ethics, fiction, and the death of the other

Sartre and Kant

pp. 47-63

in: Colin Davis, Ethical issues in twentieth-century French fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

Philosophers, especially moral philosophers, repeatedly turn to examples to show their principles in action, or to put them to the test, or to refine them. But examples are also a distrusted resource; narrative (even a minimal narrative such as a philosophical example) may have a semantic waywardness which makes it an uncertain ally in philosophical discussion. What is at stake here is the extent to which stories can be contained within clearly delineated conceptual frames. To put it bluntly, can a narrative be relied upon to mean what it is supposed to mean? The question is important because the tactic of exemplarity plays a crucial role in philosophical discourse. The Greek work paradeigma, whether taken in the Platonic sense of model or the Aristotelian sense of individual instance, assumes the burden of mediating between the singular and the normative, the particular and the universal.² The example is either a model to be imitated or a particular instance of a more general truth; but either way its role consists in its capacity to ensure the connection between separate domains.