Philosophy of Literature & Consciousness — How Creative Work Expresses Inner Experience

Key Insight: Gallagher’s First-Person Plural theory — reading fiction literally means adopting a fictional consciousness. We genuinely inhabit characters’ intentional states, not just simulate them. This isn’t pretend emotion; it’s the generation of genuinely new phenomenal states. If consciousness is partly constituted by narrative, then the stories we read literally shape who we are.

My Take: The idea that fiction generates novel phenomenal states — not just mirrors existing ones — hit me hard. Borges’ Aleph takes this further: consciousness as a recursive point where all perceptions and memories co-exist simultaneously. Reading isn’t passive. Writing isn’t either. The poem, the novel, the painting — they’re not descriptions of consciousness. They’re actants in it. Heidegger put it best: art doesn’t express truth — it sets truth into work. And Sontag cuts through the academic noise: art doesn’t explain consciousness, it enlarges it. That’s why Rilke’s Duino Elegies hit harder than any philosophy paper — they don’t tell you about longing, they make you inhabit it.

Source: SEP — Fiction (plato.stanford.edu/entries/fiction/) + Rilke Duino Elegies; Borges Ficciones; Heidegger ‘Origin of the Work of Art’