Writing and sharing philosophical fiction
I’m having a wonderful time with Jhana meditation these days, but since I decided to take my time with it (two months) I am not ready to tell you about my progress yet. For this month’s post, instead, I decided to share another wonderful occupation of mine: writing fiction. This post will focus on saying a few things about the hobby itself and how it might constitute a philosophical exercise. Then, at the end, I will share a fantasy short story that I wrote.
Inspiration
As a philosopher, busy with the writing of philosophical essays, I was reticent to devote any time to writing fiction, and even more reticent to share what I hypothetically would have written. But a few people inspired me to take the plunge. Among them, two philosophers: Helen de Cruz and Liam Kofi Bright.
One of the reasons the late Helen de Cruz is so inspiring to me is the way they wrote and shared speculative fiction. I always thought it was so cool! It encouraged me to embrace that part of myself and focus on the craft. This post will mostly draw on their ideas about the philosophical value of storytelling.
More recently, Liam Kofi Bright has shared with the internet a cool fanfiction project, set in the universe of Warhammer 40k: a collection of short stories and other artworks, created for the stated purpose of making sense of how a certain dystopian society could even function, practically and philosophically speaking. This is a fun thought experiment, deployed with beautiful nerdy enthusiasm. This was the last push I needed to think that, maybe, there was no need to make a big fuss over sharing fiction as a philosopher. It could be done.
I am really thankful to both of these people for leading by example.
Reading philosophical fiction
In many places, Helen de Cruz has defended the idea that fiction has philosophical value. I am not well acquainted with all the subtleties of their views on the topic, so I shall mainly leave aside thorny questions like: is there a meaningful distinction between philosophical fiction and non-philosophical fiction, and is speculative fiction very different from non-speculative fiction in the way it deals with “thought-experiment”? I don’t know everything that they thought about it, and I also don’t know what I think about it yet. So let’s put that aside. Suffice it to say that, sometimes, there are stories that really tickle the philosopher’s brain.
In this 2016 interview with Skye Cleary, Helen de Cruz offers a few interesting arguments about the philosophical importance of fiction. I would like to highlight some of them and, as is my custom, to gently bend these arguments towards a related but distinct thesis: that this philosophical importance can be understood in terms of the efficacy of a philosophical exercise well worth practising.
“[Good] fiction has the ability to transport you away from your day-to-day concerns. This has peculiar effects, one of which is an increased tolerance for open-endedness and ambiguity.” The ability to transcend the petty worries of daily life, in order to see things from a different perspective, is a crucial feature of philosophical exercises. We do have this ingredient right there, which is a big part of the philosophical exercise recipe.
This “break from day-to-day concerns”, crucially, comes with other interesting features. “I think reading philosophical fiction is beneficial for philosophers because it explores issues and ideas that aren’t easily dealt with in the format of a journal article or monograph. [...] By contrast, fiction can draw you in by its transportative qualities. Transportation is a term coined by Richard Gerrig to denote the sense of being absorbed in a story. Fiction also engages us emotionally. The long format of a story helps us better to understand the consequences of philosophical positions.” Right there, two other virtues pop up. It’s not just that we forget about day-to-day concerns, it’s that we are engaged emotionally and our concerns are replaced by other concerns (intra-diegetic concerns, like: will this character be able to make it?). And not only that, but we can hold these new concerns for a pretty long time, as long as the story keeps us interested. We can see how these concerns play out over a relatively long period of time. You can feel someone’s life over the duration of a novel, for example.
This long emotional engagement can make you keep track of the concepts that work in the background of the story. “A work of fiction can be distinctively philosophical by virtue of the way it tackles a given question. Many works of philosophical fiction are elaborate thought experiments. Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for instance, is one long thought experiment of whether a libertarian society—a minimal state that doesn’t even deal with crimes—could feasibly work and how such a society would be organized. Heinlein comes up with all sorts of interesting concepts along the way. For instance, because of lack of a social safety net, people would need to organize social security privately. As a solution, he invents the line marriage, with dozens of people marrying each other into one large existing marriage, which can stretch for generations.”
I don’t think reading fiction is always a philosophical exercise, I think sometimes it’s just something we do to pass the time. But coming up with criteria to distinguish the two cases is yet another thorny question I want to set aside for now. I’ll just say that, probably, this “keeping track of ideas” criterion is paramount. In this example, Helen de Cruz is open to the book teaching them something new: “while I am not a libertarian and in general find libertarian arguments unpersuasive, I found Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to be an engaging and compelling read, and it genuinely made me consider the positive aspects of a libertarian society. While Heinlein didn’t sway me, I believe I now have a more charitable view of libertarianism.” By contrast, to treat the book as mere entertainment would have been the best way to make the book mere entertainment. It wouldn’t have been a philosophical exercise.
Writing philosophical fiction
So far, we have talked about the benefits of reading fiction. But what about writing it? My personal theory of authorship is that the author is merely the first spectator of the work. They are in the same position as the audience. A sort of first test subject who moves the dials on their own experiment to see what happens to them. The work of art happens to them. All of that said, I must obviously acknowledge the more “crafty” state of mind that the author sometimes engages in, behind the scenes, in order to successfully accomplish the work of art. There is a remaining sliver of authorship where the experience of the author is different from that of the audience: more strategic, more lucid of the ropes and pulleys behind the stage. In this privileged space, some really interesting stuff is happening.
How would I describe that space? I can do it a little bit, but it’s hard. I don’t have fully formed thoughts on it yet. Helen de Cruz has a playlist of videos on Youtube called “Fiction writing for philosophers course”. It’s exactly what it says on the tin. The videos are short and useful. One of them in particular helps me to think about the ascesis of writing as a spiritual exercise. In “Idea, story, plot, governing idea”, Helen de Cruz distinguishes between those four elements. The “idea” is the first spark of inspiration that makes you want to write the story. The plot is the causal chain of events that happen within the story. But then, things get more subtle and complex. Helen de Cruz quotes Ursula le Guin in Steering the Craft on the difference between plot and story (I’m quoting directly from the video so apologies for messing up the punctuation or mishearing some words, but the gist is there):
“Some people interpret story to mean plot. Some reduce story to action. Plot is so much discussed in literature and writing courses, and action is so highly valued. I want to put in a counterweight opinion. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvelous device but it’s not superior to story. It’s not even necessary for it. As for action, indeed, a story must move, something must happen, but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day... Unceasing violent action is usually a sign, in fact, that no story is being told.”
Right there, we have the first demand of writing as a philosophical exercise. Naively, we might think that the events of the plots are meaningful in and of themselves. A kills B, C takes revenge on A. Thrilling... But actually things are not automatically meaningful, and automatically thrilling. There is a layer of story, made of “arcs” and “character developments”, that breathes life into the skeletal structure of the plot. So much so that something as un-photogenic as a “thought that remains unspoken” can feel like the most edge-of-your-seat action-heavy story beat ever. As a philosopher, using fiction writing to figure out what makes things meaningful is a great exercise. As a phenomenologist, I can’t get enough of working out the subtle details of the meaningfulness of subjective phenomena: the presence of an absence, etc, that type of nerdy phenomenology stuff... Here, when I am writing, I love to feel the tension between plot/action and story: they are not entirely the same, but not entirely distinct either, in my opinion. The entire game is to find how one contributes to the other.
Next, Helen de Cruz says that there is yet another layer to consider: the governing idea. For example, the governing idea behind Frankenstein has to do with the hybris of man, inspired by the motif of electricity increasing the power of mankind. Here again, this tickles the philosopher’s brain: you can keep track of a philosophical position (the governing idea) throughout the span of a story. The governing idea dictates how you will treat the themes of your story. Which will dictate how your characters will evolve through story arcs. Which dictates what actions they will take, scene by scene. Sometimes the process of writing feels bottom-up and sometimes it feels top-down. Bottom-up means you come up with plot first and themes & ideas emerge from that petri-dish. Sometimes it’s top down, as you trim down anything that is not relevant to your governing idea.
There is so much to keep a philosopher busy here. I think this philosophical exercise works by demanding of you a kind of sustained engagement with the reciprocal relationships between the spark of inspiration, the plot, the story, and the governing idea. This is a lesson in meaningfulness. And this lesson occurs in the same depths experienced by the reader: it is deep because your real life concerns are replaced by other, intra-diegetic, concerns, and this “transport” happens over a relatively lengthy period of time, so you really marinate in it.
The World of Eladnys
I’ll give a brief introduction to the result of my own writing exercise.
Eladnys is my secondary world. It is a world of elves, humans, and gnomes, etc. You know the type. Within this secondary world, I am mostly concerned with – right now, at least – the Sableonian Empire. This empire relies heavily on slavery, and its religious apparatus is very ideologically invested in justifying the goodness of slavery. The Church is very powerful. It has a monopoly on hunting and horses, in a way that, in real life, is usually the privilege of the aristocracy; and in a way that factors into its power and ideology. The story that I am writing follows two young girls, who have been raised to believe that runaway slaves should be hunted down by gryphon riders. Emphasis on should. These girls begin to wrestle with their conscience as they come up in the world.
If you want to read this story, you can find it on the blog that I created for the World of Eladnys. One short story is already available "How close the All-Divine", it’s fairly long – 10 000 words – and I do believe that, in the end, it will constitute chapter 1 of a fantasy novel. I will post other musings and stories on the blog.
I don’t think I should talk too much about the governing idea behind this story. It is too early. I don’t know what the effect would be of “giving the game away” like this, especially when I don’t know if I am right about what the story will demand to be about. But I guess I can say what my sparks of inspiration were. In school, I was taught some of the history of the United States. The states that abolished slavery versus the states that did not. I was told about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: “It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate.”1 I remember thinking that it was the most unjust thing I had ever heard. It really struck me. And keep in mind that, in school, we were taught about the World War 2 extermination camps, so it is not the “amount” of evil that I was unfamiliar with, but something else… There was something about the set-up that I found particularly twisted, in a way that hit me differently than other evils .
My other sparks of inspiration brought into focus characters who were like parts of my soul. A character who loved the Capital more than anything in the entire world. Another character, of whom it could be said “this morning, she had fallen again”. I started to wonder about these characters’ souls and their conscience. And now, I am wondering how they will live in that slaver’s empire. Can they escape that evil?
So I am writing about it to figure it out.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, last time, I explored Modern Postural Yoga and finally managed to develop the sense of sky that had eluded me for so long. Another time, I practiced Jhana meditation and experienced mind-blowing effects, unlike anything I had ever experienced in meditation. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!)
(12/08/2025)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social
Twitter: @PhiloTranquille
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