How does James Joyce rate as a philosopher?

Yes, James Joyce was a clever fellow. Yes, Ulysses is delivering on its author’s mission to “keep the professors busy for centuries”. Yes, I said, yes, the book – which turned 100 this year – is very punny.

But does Ulysses have any philosophical merit? Specifically, does it help us to better understand the human condition, or to shed light on life’s meaning?

The question goes to the heart of a wider debate about the distinction between philosophy and literature. Iris Murdoch, who worked in both forms, said philosophers must make their writing “subservient” to the goal of saying “exactly” what they mean; they must “avoid rhetoric and idle decoration”. On this standard, it seems Joyce falls at the first hurdle.

However, his books do explore some big questions and, in grappling with them, he was deeply influenced by certain philosophers. Four in particular stand out:

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1. Aristotle

Joyce described Plato’s illustrious student as “the greatest thinker of all times”. UCD emeritus professor Fran O’Rourke, who has long studied this association, writes in a new book Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas: “It is impossible to exaggerate the importance for Joyce of the Aristotelian concepts of form, actuality and potency and their application to the soul. In the metaphysical context, the soul is defined as the ‘entelechy’, the first form or actualisation of the body, which constitutes the human individual as a real single entity.”

That is quite a lot to get one’s head around but, in short, entelechy is the realisation of potential in matter by endowing it with form. Entelechy gives an intelligible shape to the world, and it links to Artistotle’s overarching theory that all things have a purpose.

In a general way, Ulysses “does enact or uphold the Aristotelian concept of entelechy”, says Joycean scholar Terence Killeen. “You could say, I think, that Ulysses is the realisation of the inert potential of inert Dublin by realising it in the form of the book. It is also true that by writing it Joyce had actualised his own unrealised potential – he had become or achieved a form.”

2. Thomas Aquinas

The teachings of this 13th-century Dominican friar were core to Joyce’s education. At the university Joyce attended, later to become UCD, Thomist inquiries about angels and demons (work later mockingly reduced to the question “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”) were earnestly explored right up to the 1970s when the department of metaphysics was quietly retired.

Joyce loved the legalistic, hair-splitting scholasticism of Aquinas, describing the Italian as “the lucid sensual Latin” and likening his reasoning to “a sharp sword”, as O’Rourke highlights in what is set to become the standard reference work on Joyce’s key philosophical influences. Aquinas wrote several important commentaries on Aristotle and together they “furnished Joyce with an applied aesthetic and provided his characters with multifarious themes of discourse as they reflect on daily life”, says O’Rourke.

“Wholeness, symmetry and radiance” were hallmarks of beauty in the Thomist tradition – it’s a credo Stephen Dedalus takes to heart in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and which Joyce himself expressed through an obsessive degree of literary scheming.

3. Giordano Bruno

The Italian philosopher burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600 was a hero to Joyce. His writings on the art of memory, the coincidence of opposites and “cosmic pluralism” – the idea that the universe is infinite, with no centre – were rich material for the Irish writer. But it was Bruno’s example – his courage and willingness to meet Stephen’s challenge to risk it all “to make a mistake” – that bonded him to Joyce.

Bruno was an exemplar of “having an idea and sticking with it”, notes Trinity College Dublin’s Sam Slote, and it is through Bruno that Joyce developed his lifelong interest in heresy, or “the idea of taking orthodoxy so far that it becomes considered unorthodox”.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche

The German cultural critic was the hottest intellectual of Joyce’s era – Nietzsche died in 1900 when the Dubliner was 18. The young Joyce appeared to have Nietzschean pretensions, signing a letter in 1904 to a prospective publisher “James Overman”.

Joyce “certainly did have an ego on him. He would have been an unbearable person if he wasn’t a literary genius and it’s almost amazing that someone of that ego has the goods to deliver,” says Slote, who is author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics and is on Monday opening a week-long conference in Dublin to mark the centenary of Ulysses.

While Joyce fitted the bill of the Übermensch, a genius capable of standing above the rabble, he turned against Nietzsche’s elitist philosophy – and it is left to bombastic Buck Mulligan, modelled on Oliver St John Gogarty, to speak up for it in Ulysses. Joyce’s democratic instincts can be seen in the book where “crowds are not a thronged mass; everyone has a name”, says Slote, citing a paper on the subject by Sean Latham. (Joycean scholars do like to reference each other – one suspects the man himself would approve.)

Where does that leave us judging Joyce as a philosopher?

“There is Joyce as philosopher and then there is Joyce as reader of philosophers, and the second one is not that good,” Slote admits. “Nietzsche is mostly consigned to a trivial reading, whereas Joyce’s own project of the expression of self-realisation actually starts to more directly parallel Nietzsche than Joyce is perhaps aware of.” Joyce absorbs Nietzsche’s “idea of the multitudinous perspective”, and shares a taste for using different styles and voices, but his engagement with the German’s metaphysics is relatively superficial.

“I mostly agree with Fran on this in that the philosophers Joyce really rates are pretty much only Aristotle and Aquinas,” Slote says. In the case of Ulysses and other works, “Joyce does not actively engage in the history of philosophy in a sustained manner.”

O’Rourke concurs on the latter point: “The influence of Aristotle and Aquinas, while extensive, was shallow... Joyce’s attitude to philosophical questions was that of the amateur: fascinated, wondering but still puzzled.” This “was the secret of his success” as a novelist, he adds, reinforcing Murdoch’s point about philosophy clashing with literature.

Ulysses is admired by many philosophers – the American moral theorist Martha Nussbaum, for example, says “there is no finer teacher than Ulysses” on human disgust, such is the depth of Leopold Bloom’s contemplations on bodily movements. But has the book something fundamental to teach us?

“I do not believe that Ulysses is a philosophical text,” replies Killeen, author of Ulysses Unbound. “It is many things – fun, infuriating, fascinating, intriguing, complex etc, but its perusal does not result in wisdom. You certainly know a lot more after reading it than you did before, but it is not philosophical knowledge.” Bloom appears to uphold Aristotelian virtues – valuing friendship, honesty and compassion. However, says Killeen, “I think it goes a bit far to hold Bloom up as a model of the ethical life, or the good life, as such. He has many admirable qualities but it is not entirely unmixed – he seems to support capital punishment, for example.”

Some scholars depict Ulysses as a form of wisdom literature, among them Declan Kiberd who has suggested that, beyond all the wordplay, the book contains practical lessons on everything from how to cope with grief to how not to tell a joke. Slote agrees with this assessment, albeit with a different emphasis: “I would say it’s a guide to life precisely because of the weird stylistic episodes. Mobilising a multiplicity of styles, also in effect plunging the reader into ambiguity, is very much an element of the ‘quote’ lessons Joyce is imparting.”

Where does this leave us judging Joyce as a philosopher? It comes down to how you define philosophy. Epicurus said “empty is the argument of the philosopher that does not relieve any human suffering” and, while Joyce was not always faithful to logic, he certainly offered consolation, affirming life despite all its contradictions.

Ask a sage

What’s the meaning of life?

Leopold Bloom replies: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life… Love.”

* An earlier version of this article described “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as a Thomist inquiry. Thomas Aquinas did not pose this question specifically but rather asked, among other things, whether several angels can be in the same place at once.