The following are excerpts of an interview of Christopher Wiley (personal secretary to Mortimus Clay)  conducted by Jana Mohr Lone, Director, Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington.  Portions of this interiview are soon to be published on the center’s blog.

Jana: “Please tell me about your professional history.  What led you from philosophy to writing young adult fantasy?”

Christopher: “Well, I’m a Presbyterian minister.  I taught philosophy to undergraduates for nearly ten years and I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School.

For me there wasn’t a direct road from philosophy to fantasy.  Both have been part of my life since I started reading seriously as a teenager.  I didn’t begin to write young adult fantasy so that I could encode philosophy in order to slip it past the unsuspecting reader.  Instead – I’m a philosopher who loves fantasy and got an idea for a story stuck in his head and used philosophy to help get it out.”

“Do you think that fantasy novels are a particularly good way to facilitate young people’s exploration of philosophy?  And if so, why?”

“Probably not in an academic sense – didacticism is the death of fiction.  There have occasionally been great stylists in the history of philosophy: Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre (that about exhausts it).  Of those, only one was a writer of fiction.  The dialogs of Plato, the confessions of Augustine, the parables of Kierkegaard, the sundry thoughts of Pascal, the diatribes of Nietzsche, and aphorisms of Schopenhauer – these are all edifying and entertaining – but they all put the lesson first.  They’re all so tendentious; and to readers of fiction they’re tedious.  And if you’re going to write fiction people want to read and not merely assign for a class then you’ve got to let the story set the agenda.  (Jostein Gaarder’s, Sophie’s World is a partial exception to this.  Yet I wonder how many of his book sales were to Introduction to Philosophy classes.)

All that said, fantasy is a great place to explore philosophical themes.  You can even have fun with characters – basing them on philosophers or schools of philosophy.  The easiest thing to do is to work with symbolism and foreshadowing.  But I think the most fruitful use of philosophy in writing fiction is allowing philosophical problems arise for the characters to address within the context of the plot.  I’d say that philosophy, when practiced well, helps us identify the fundamental issues to respond to in any situation we find ourselves in.  Since it is helpful in that way in our lives – it certainly can work that way in a narrative.”

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