Closed Drawers and Hidden Faces: Arendt’s Kantian Defense of Fictional Worlds

Does a fictional story imply a fictional world in which that story takes place? Critiquing Monroe Beardsley and Roman ingarden, Ruth Lorand argues that conflating a story with its world collapses the distinction between the story’s foreground and background. The Kantian tradition, especially the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, instead shows that a world is what gives every representation its implicit background—its character of having additional details ready to be told. I show that a fictional story does necessarily take place in a fictional world; however, a fictional world differs from the real world in that its background remains essentially indeterminate.