Pre-Modern Philosophical Views on Reality and Truth in Literature

The views of the writers outlined and examined here show that a philosophical approach is unavoidably in a contrasting position in relation to literary ways of representing reality and truth in literature. The specific domain of philosophical reflection is to clarify concepts through deductive methods or a purely rational viewpoint, whereas literature is based on the experience of life stories in concrete circumstances. The prospect of our dealing with sacred and secular literary texts is to disclose literary ways of observing and expressing reality and truth in its most elementary form of life. In all times we can observe the need to convey sense-experience and to evoke ethical reflection by using a more suitable mode of expression with an eye to the larger structures of literary representation of reality and truth. Literature deals with representation of life in all its contrasting manifestations in persuasive literary forms and is therefore intrinsically connected with the issues of aesthetics. Ethical sensibility, meanwhile, works best when dealing with particular persons in specific contexts. Works of literature combine the particular and the general in concrete life situations and in individual characters.