What is the importance of fiction? What is its relation to reality?

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What makes something important anon?

You've just opened up a rabbit hole you can't get out of.

>>8992334
Humans cannot live without assumptions. Everyday when you wake up and get ready for work you assume that your bus is going to come today, you assume society is still intact and you are going to get paid, you assume that you are going to be in need of money. But that assumptions are just too linear and automated after a point, it doesnt reflect your brain's whole capacity to make assumptions. So you start to tingle your assumption mechanism by either moving parameters of life to your liking in your mind or simply consume pre-made assumptions. This action feeds from reality and based on reality.

>>8992353
Well that's what I'm trying to figure out.

So as not to detour, let us define 'important' as beneficiary to either yourself or society in a form that goes beyond simply being entertaining. Does fiction give any insight into reality, a reflective surface, after all it is completely a product of reality and as Cervantes would stress (and I don't have an exact quote but something along the lines of)

>fiction has to be rooted in reality, being true in its logic to stimulate the reader rather than cheapen it in fantasy.

Plato would disagree stating that in Ion

>the theatre is not sufficient in conveying the truth (540c)

Huxley on the other hand,

>I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothing compared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing—both in life and in art

So which would you agree with? Is fiction a lie, An approximation of the truth or vehicle for life?

>>8992334
>thinks he can know the ding an sich
All language is fiction.

>>8992334
For me, personally, I would say fiction is like a painting, inspired by reality in some sense but standing besides it, framing an aspect of life in its beauty, roughness and complexity to produce the message or feeling that moved you into its creation. It's a kind of purification process where you take aspects and experiences from reality and boil them down and frame them in a narrative with the needed sense of focus to completely encompass the subject, which you wouldn't be able to in non-fiction.

>>8992334

reflection of reality (or at least the appearance thereof—it doesn't matter for my position) is already implicit in the structure of language. the word cow already refers to cow, whether the cow i mean is fictional or real, whether you happen upon the word in a novel or an encyclopedia. so fiction does not have to do anything special in order to "reflect" reality, in that it is nothing but a specific formation within a system that already does. what fiction does is augment reality. it constructs new worlds, people, and events, which seem to behave like "real" things by virtue of their implicitly referential existence, but which are entirely new and original in their specific being as constructs. this is why we call them novels: they create something new.

>>8992334
The depths, heights, lows, potentials, ideals, of the human spirit and world. To show the outsides ones insides. To connect, to have a friend, to ease loneliness, to make everything alright, to learn about earth and oneself. To ignore everything else for some time.

>>8992498
>fiction has to be rooted in reality,


Plato would disagree stating that in Ion
>the theatre is not sufficient in conveying the truth (540c)

Plato is not saying, fiction cannot be rooted in reality. He is saying, it is not sufficient in conveying the truth. Cervantes quote implies, he believe it can at least approach truths, or head towards them, at least bring something to light, that has some relation to reality (even if its daily life, how humans relate to one another in the market place).

The theatre is not trying to, get on stage and say "proposition A, the corollary, in section 2.4. B=B, B is not C......"

The theatre can show a person, cooking a meal, who stubs his toe, and yells in pain, and there is...arguably, some truth there.

>Huxley on the other hand,
>My job is important, my job is important, my job is worthy, I do deserve to feel good about myself

I love Huxley, think he is tremendous, and his books are important and great and valuable.