SCIENCE AS FICTION:

Vilém Flusser’s Philosophy

Gustavo Bernardo Krause

Abstract:
This text comments the “philosophical fiction” of the Brazilian-Czech
philosopher Vilém Flusser. It condenses one of the chapter of the book Vilém
Flusser: an introduction, recently published in Portuguese. If René Descartes
told us that thinking moves through doubts, Friedrich Nietzsche told us that
truth is a multiplicity of metaphors, Hans Vaihinger told us that thinking moves
through fictions and Ludwig Wittgenstein shown us that our thinking is limited
by our language, what does Vilém Flusser tell us? Since the concept of fiction,
Flusser looked for a original synthesis of those thinkers. He thought that all
discourse need to make explicit its fictional condition – the philosophical
discourse more than others, because Philosophy has always been close to
Poetry. A poet-philosopher as Flusser writes making explicit the speculative
conditions of his thinking in order to provoke and unfold new thinkings.

The night – huge night

This is a haiku written by the Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski. In Portuguese, we read: “A noite –
enorme / tudo dorme / menos teu nome”. This haiku points to the indeterminate but active
essence of the name of things: everything sleeps nested in the so vast night which nests
everything but for the name which throbs and disturbs.
“Fiction” is a word, of course, but we can say that all words are a kind of fiction. We use
words because we cannot show things and feelings all the time. Therefore, words replace things
or feelings in order to fill their absences. This means that the fiction problem is not only a
literary problem, it is the core of all philosophical problems.
The word “fiction” has positive connotations when it designates the art of literature. We
refer to the fiction of Franz Kafka or João Guimarães Rosa with amazement, saying that their
fiction is either beautiful or intriguing. The same word “fiction”, however, has negative
connotations when it designates the opposite of reality. We refer to the image of a certain kind
of politician, for instance, with worry, saying that his fiction of himself is false.
Nevertheless, these connotations shuffle themselves. In different times, the reading of
fiction works is seen as harmful to people because it would lead them to live out of reality, to
live in a illusory world. That idea justifies police, pedagogic and cultural censure. In counterpart,
the attention with the image of the politicians became bigger than the care with their histories
or with the content of their ideas. This attention makes the politician who has the best proposal
not to win the elections, because the winner will be that one who shows the best image, or, in
other words: the winner will be that one whose fiction of himself will be the best.
The word “fiction” can be used still in another field: the scientific field. Scientists know
that they cannot observe all things, all the time, in all possible variations. They do not have to
say what nature is like but only what it would be like if, by hypothesis, they considered that
their restricted angle of observation were enough. The scientific hypotheses are already a kind
of deductive fiction. To carry out an experiment about the movement, the physicist does not
consider neither gravity force nor air resistance. This lack of consideration is designated by the
Latin expression “ceteris paribus”, which means: “everything else being invariable”. Well, the
scientific use of “ceteris paribus” is also an exercise of fiction.
Poets experience fiction as the subject matter to build their truth. Historians experience
the political fiction as the antagonist which they must bare to approach historical truth.
Scientists experience the fiction of their hypothesis as their tools also to approach scientific
truth. And what happens with philosophers?
A philosopher like the Brazilian-Czech Vilém Flusser, who we have studied for many
years, tries to understand how we think what we think and why, to think about the world, we
need to reinvent it by different fictions. While we choose a specific field to talk about fiction,
the philosopher departs from the word itself to see how fiction draws each field: poetical,
historical and scientific.
In the essay “Da ficção” (“On Fiction”), Vilém Flusser remembered the thinkers who
saw a deceitful fiction in the world: when they were platonic, they asserted, “we see only
shadows”; when they were impressionist, they asserted, “the world is only an as if”; when they
were medieval christian, they asserted, “the world is a trap built by devil”; when they were
renaissantist, they asserted, “the world is only a dream”; when they were baroque, they asserted,

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“the world is theatre”; when they were romantic, they asserted, “the world is only my
representation”.
In all those cases, the thinkers lamented the fictional character of the world, and so of
the reality. To our philosopher, however, all above-mentioned conceptions were correct in
essence but improper in terms of attitude. One must recognize the fictional character of the
world, but not to lament it. Some apocalyptic thinkers say today that the sign is absorbing the
referent to become more real than the real itself: the simulacrum would convert, in a devilish
way, the real in its own shadow. Flusser, nevertheless, disagrees with this kind of thinking; he
warns that the known world always has been a simulacrum, as long as we cannot know all the
world.
The virtual does not oppose the real, the virtual opposes the ideal of truth. The world
itself is not a fiction, of course, but actually our noble explanations for the world are fictions.
There are illusions in every place, either as ideals of truth or as the illusions of the end of all
illusions. The depreciative connotation of the simulacrum is very old, it derives at least from
Plato. The speech of the common sense takes all illusions by lie, although we need the illusion
of the magicians as far as we need games and narratives. However, science, phenomenology
and cybernetics recognize the impossibility to apprehend all the aspects of the world; that is
why they need to rebuild them hypothetically and fictionally. The one who reproduces a
phenomenon or an object by a simulacrum or a model knows not everything but something
essential about the object or the phenomenon. So, it is necessary to insist to think, to
investigate and to argue as if we could reach the truth of things and human beings.
Our approach to reality does not come up by the things themselves, it comes up by our
relationship with them. This relationship, as abstract as a word, is built up in a similar way to
that of a fiction. Therefore, if we understand how to write and how to read fiction we can also
understand our relationship with the world and things. In a brief definition, we would say that
fiction is an “as if”: the author writes it as if the world looks like him, the reader reads it as if
what he reads is the truthful truth. The reading of a fictional work can be so intense to the
point of fiction looking like more real than reality itself. We read as if it is true to the point of
our reading looking like more truthful than the quotidian truths. We also read as if we are
others, to the point of our becoming another person, a person converted by the intensity of the
experience.

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 So, the expression “as if” is very important both to fiction theory and contemporary
philosophy. Nevertheless, when fictions represent the world they produce another world,
which generates internal contradictions which, in due time, generate paradoxes. Such
contradictions must not be denied or “solved”, because thinking moves across contradictions
and paradoxes.
René Descartes told us that thinking moves through doubts. Friedrich Nietzsche told us
that truth is a multiplicity of metaphors. Hans Vaihinger told us that thinking moves through
fictions. Ludwig Wittgenstein shown us that our thinking is limited by our language. What does
Vilém Flusser tell us?
From his concept of fiction, Flusser looked for an original synthesis of those thinkers.
He thought that all discourse needs to make its fictional condition explicit – the philosophical
discourse more than others, because Philosophy has always been close to Poetry. Nevertheless,
that connection between Philosophy and Poetry has caused some conflicts.
The philosopher opposes to the poet because the first is a friend of the concept and a
lover of the “orthotes”, that is, of the agreement between the concept and the thing. At
universities, the philosophers tend to prefer the scientific rigour than the poetical
indeterminacy. A poet-philosopher as Flusser, however, walks in the contrary direction: he
writes making the speculative conditions of his thinking explicit, in order to provoke and
unfold new thinkings.
In the essay “Do espelho” (“On Mirror”), Flusser remembers that in Latin the word
“speculation” derives from the word “mirror” (in Portuguese, a latin language, we see that
“especulação” derives from the word “espelho”). He considers that the mirror in fact reflets the
reality, but it also inverts the same reality. That is why everyone who reflects and thinks
necessarily thinks about the mirror.
Precisely due to its speculative character, Abraham Moles entitled his essay to pay
homage to Flusser “Philosophiefiktion bei Vilém Flusser”, in a book entitled Überflusser. Moles
considered Flusserian style as a kind of “philosophical fiction”. He understands that Flusserian
philosophical fiction is able to open a fissure by which life and philosophy communicate with
each other.
Gabriel Borba, who was Flusser’s assistant in São Paulo, explains this philosophical
fiction through a metaphor. At page 34 of the book Vilém Flusser no Brasil, Borba asks us to
imagine a carpet on the floor; he asks us to raise it up, also imaginatively, by holding the carpet

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at any point, and to do that for several times. It doesn’t matter where we start to raise the
imaginary carpet: at each time we can raise the whole carpet. But: the minimum variation of the
point that we choose to raise the carpet provokes big variations in the original patterns of the
carpet, exactly because of the corrugations which take shape during the process.
According to Borba, Flusser’s style can be compared to the different attempts to raise
the imaginary carpet: the points from which at each time we raise the carpet are like pills of
matter; they are like nimble vortices of reflection and argumentation. Such vortices are good for
dazzling rethorical constructions. What does the philosopher do? He takes each subject as if it
were the imaginary carpet and then he raises it up several times, but each time by a different
point, provoking big variations in his own theme. He is not concerned with finding the truth,
that is, finding the final agreement between the concept and the thing, but he is only concerned
with exploring the truth as a poet or as a story-teller. Thus, the Flusserian style, the same in his
class, lectures and books, was opened to interpretations and modifications as a kind of
“Wikipedia”, that is, as a kind of dynamical encyclopaedia “avant la lettre et la Internet”.
Gabriel Borba’s description shows us Flusser’s generous thinking, in the etymological
sense of the adjective “generous”: the thinking which generates and engenders other thinkings.
So, we see that the concept of fiction is fundamental to the whole work of Vilém Flusser, but
he also thought about the fiction in a restricted sense. He did that almost like Borges.
It is said that the Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges, when he had taught at the
university, guided his students first not to read the reviews and the theories about the novels
which they were reading. After he had convinced them of that, he had guided them to do
exactly the opposite, that is, to read all the reviews and theories about the novels which they
were reading.
The upset students could not follow the two guidances, because they were contradictory.
Borges’ solution was very simple. He had said to them: read twice as if you were two different
persons. In the first reading, he had said, you must read as if you were still naïve readers,
suspending your disbelief to really “live” the story. In the second reading, he had said, you must
read as if you were already expert readers, analysing critically both the book and your first
reading.
Borges had used the expression “as if” because he knew that a student of literature is
not either a naïve or an expert reader. However, he had defended that the readers try to
intensify either one position or another, according to the moment of reading. His paradoxical

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advice had taught the students not to say hurriedly their final interpretations of the text, just to
explore it at least from two different ways.
Flusser’s solution to the reading of a literature work is equally twofold. In his text
“Esperando por Kafka” (“Looking forward to Kafka”), he says that we can read a fiction text
also from two ways: as an answer or as a question.
In the first case, we understand the literary work as an answer to its context or to a
preceding text. In the second case, we understand the literary work as a question to the reader.
When we understand the work as an answer, we criticize it to establish relations with its context
or with the preceding texts. When we understand the work as a question to us, we talk with the
work and try to give our own answer: the text becomes a kind of pretext to our own text, in
other words, to our own speculations.
The two fields demand two different attitudes: criticism presumes curiosity, speculation
presumes involvement. The philosopher prioritizes speculation, but he understands that, to
develop it better, it is also necessary to study the relationship among the fictional text and the
preceding texts critically.
Flusser recognizes the world as a huge set of fictions, which does not means that reality
does not exist. His idea of fiction was not on the level with the notion of lie, therefore, his idea
of fiction does not oppose the idea of truth. What he asks us is to recognize the fictional
character of the models which inform our life, to recognize fiction as the basis of science and
ethics.

REFERENCES

Borges, Jorge Luis

Finger, Anke & Guldin, Rainer & Krause, Gustavo Bernardo

Flusser, Vilém
1963 “Esperando por Kafka”. São Paulo: Comentário, abril de 1963.
Língua e realidade. São Paulo: Herder.
1966 “Do espelho”. São Paulo: O Estado de São Paulo, 6 de agosto de 1966.
“Da ficção”. Ribeirão Preto (SP): O Diário, 26 de agosto de 1966.
1967 Da religiosidade: a literatura e o senso de realidade. São Paulo: Comissão Estadual de Cultura.
1992 Die Schrift: hat Schreiben Zukunft? Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
1999 A dúvida. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará.

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Krause, Gustavo Bernardo & Mendes, Ricardo (organizadores)
2000 Vilém Flusser no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará.

Krause, Gustavo Bernardo

Leminski, Paulo
1991 La vie en close. São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Rapsch, Volker (Herausgeber)

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