Does reading fiction make us better people? | Hacker News Reader

Does reading fiction make us better people?

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10 pointsclouddrover8 comments

It might be an unpopular opinion, but I wonder if reading only, and only fantasy and fiction makes people lose their grip on reality.

Maybe you're just being vague, but I don't think that's even possible. I would say the effect is more that that it can innapropriate supplement their understanding of reality in matters that aren't contradicted by reality -- high-minded concepts that are popular subjects of discussion, but very marginal in day-to-day living seem to often driven by experiences with fiction, and that might be inappropriate. (E.g., People often assume space travel is inevitable or far easier than it is due to fiction.)

On the other hand, so many kinds of error can be distilled down to a failure to understand the difference several orders of magnitude make, so I wouldn't blame fiction per se.

Yes. Humans experience life as a narrative, and the wider the set of narrative experience a person can understand the wider the set of humans that person can get along with or connect together.

Does reading fiction guarantee that a person will not do bad things? Do we require reading fiction to be good people? Of course not.

I'd also be interested in a related question: Does writing fiction and philosophy make us better people?

I always thought unequivocally yes, but then you have the cases of Martin Heidegger, Gunter Grass, and Milan Kundera.

Everyone can have blind spots that originate early and persist but I still feel like the answer is yes. In your examples at least two of them are condemned for actions at a young age no?

For Grass, he may have been condemned for actions at a young age.

For Heidegger, he was in his 40s and 50s during the Nazi regime. Also, I would recommend reading up on what he did to Husserl. A book that goes into detail about Heidegger's actions during World War II is here [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Existentialist_Cafe

Can you please add some details. What is it about Kundera that you find deplorable?

>philosophy make us better people?

You sound like SOCRATES on virtues:

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