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Katerina Deligiorgi/ Philosophical Inquiry 29:3-4 (2007)
1
Literature and Moral Vision: Autonomism Reconsidered
Is it legitimate to bring moral concerns to bear on works of literature? Through
most of Western history the answer to this question has not been in doubt. Since
Plato’s exile of poetry from the just city, the point of contention has been whether
the effects of literature are beneficial or harmful, whether the experience elevates
us, ‘announcing that light … in which individual interests shall resolve into one
common good’, or distracts us from our moral vocation and flatters our self-love.1
What motivates fresh engagement with this question is current debate about the
broader issue of artistic autonomy.
One of the few unifying features in the proliferation of artistic movements of the
latter half of the 20th century was the determination to address explicitly issues of
gender, class, race, and power, thus challenging an earlier conception of the artwork
as an autonomous object. This conception has deep historical roots in 18th century
arguments about the need to secure the domain of artistic creation from the
encroachments of religion, politics, morality or the dreaded ‘market-place’,2 and,
concomitantly, the need to establish independent criteria of aesthetic judgement.
The current flourishing of substantive models of aesthetic appreciation, which stand
in direct opposition to the idea that a work of art is, in Mary Deveraux’s mocking
gloss, ‘a thing of beauty and a joy forever’,3 provides the context for the recent
philosophical interest in the relation between aesthetic and moral judgement.
Contemporary ‘autonomists’ argue that it is never appropriate to bring moral
considerations to bear in judging works of art, whilst moralists argue that ethical
considerations are not only appropriate but that they trump other considerations. In
their moderate and more widely held versions, both positions have been modified to
accommodate some of their opponents’ points: moderate autonomists thus allow
that moral evaluation of a work is a perfectly legitimate activity, provided it is
clearly distinguished from aesthetic appreciation, whereas moderate moralists,
adopting a pro tanto approach, argue that ethical values should prevail in the
absence of other compelling grounds for judgement.4
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It would seem, then, that if we want to provide a positive answer to our initial
question, we will need to side with the moralists. Underpinning the moralist
justification of the permissibility of moral criticism of literary works is the
conviction that literature matters morally to us. The problem is showing how
exactly literature matters morally. Martha Nussbaum’s vindication of the moral and
philosophical significance of one particular work, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
has attracted much attention in recent years.5 Although her combination of literary
analysis and philosophical argument distinguishes her approach from that of taken
by the philosophers who developed the moralist position in contemporary analytic
aesthetics, she clearly endorses the moralist goal, which is to show that literature
educates us or somehow shapes our moral responses. If this can be established, then
it becomes much easier to accept that moral discussion of literary works is a
legitimate and indeed an integral part of literary judgement. Accordingly, moralist
arguments aim mainly at securing a cognitive and a causative role for literature.
However, as it will be argued in the first part of this paper, these arguments are
unconvincing. Their failure is nonetheless instructive and opens the path for an
alternative defence of the moralist position. The moralist case is best prosecuted, it
will be argued, if we begin by reflecting on the nature and elements of the
experience of reading, precisely as the autonomists urge us to do.
1. Three moralist models: cultivation, translation, simulation One of the most powerful recent advocates of the moral significance of literature is
Martha Nussbaum. However, despite the fine detail of her literary analysis, there
remains a philosophical gap in her argument about how exactly literature performs
the moral role she claims for it.6
In her article on The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum canvasses the claim that James’s novel
is a ‘major or irreplaceable work of moral philosophy’.7 She justifies this claim by
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arguing that the novel explores ‘significant aspects of human moral experience’ in a
way similar to works of moral philosophy, in particular, it enables the reader to
specify what the good life for a human being is by ‘working through alternative
theoretical conceptions’ of the good.8 We need to distinguish here between the
unexceptionable observation that some works of literature have moral content, and
the more ambitious claim that our engagement with these literary works is morally
significant. It is the latter claim that concerns us here because what we seek to
establish is precisely the moral significance of literature. By ‘moral significance’ two
things at least are understood: first that moral faculties or abilities are activated and
needed in reading, and second that reading affects one’s moral personality or
disposition. It is when making this double, more ambitious claim, however, that
Nussbaum’s argument is at its weakest. On her account, reading and interpreting
engages our ‘moral abilities’.9 By ‘moral abilities’ Nussbaum does not mean ‘virtues’
such as kindness or honesty. Rather she seeks to draw our attention to what makes
a good reader. Reading well requires ‘intuitive perception’, ‘imagination’ and ‘the
cognitive engagement of both thought and feeling’.10 As a result, the good reader is
not simply knowledgeable or clever, but also perceptive, discriminating, and
endowed with a fine sensibility. Morality enters into it because, for Nussbaum, these
same abilities also distinguish the good agent, hence, it seems, they can be called
‘moral’. It transpires then that despite her admonition that the aim of moral
philosophy, and presumably also of literature as moral philosophy, ‘is not just
theoretical understanding but also practice’ (Nussbaum, 40), ‘practice’ is not a
matter of doing, but rather of judging.11 Reading, then, is ethically relevant because
it demands from us the exercise of the same range of abilities that are needed for
ethical judgement. It thus follows that if one cultivates the features that are
necessary for being a good reader then, at the same time, one also cultivates
features that are necessary for being a good agent.
But it is precisely at this point that something like a Rousseauean worry begins to
emerge: we have no good reasons to believe that the acuity of judgment and the
focused attention displayed by a good reader are directly transferable into the
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domain of practice.12 Put differently, it may well be true that a good reader is
perceptive and also that a good agent is perceptive, but it is wrong to conclude that
therefore the good reader and the good agent are one and the same. This is simply
because what we mean by the former claim is that this is a perceptive reader, and
hence a good one, and in the latter that this is a perceptive agent, and hence a good
one. Moreover, the range of faculties invoked in Nussbaum’s analysis, intuition,
perception, imagination, thought, feeling, is so broad that it cannot be used to pick
out readers and agents only, these abilities are just as desirable in friends, or
doctors, for instance.13 For the argument to succeed what needs to be shown is that
the cultivation of certain intellectual skills (when ‘intellectual’ is broadly
understood, as Nussbaum urges) is morally enhancing. As it stands, Nussbaum’s
argument appears to rely on the sympathetic magic of her literary analysis. But this
does not explain how literature matters morally.
One solution to this problem is to focus on particular claims contained in the literary
work. This approach is characteristic of what I shall call the ‘translation’ model.
Here, the cognitive role of literature is specified by narrowing the focus to the
content of literary works. We are shaped morally by literature, not because certain
of our faculties are engaged in a particular way, but rather because when we read
we absorb moral claims contained in literary works. We gain moral insight through
morally valuable and are corrupted by the teaching of morally reprehensible works.
To identify the message or ethical position that is presented to us, we need to
translate into basic propositional form the ideas disseminated in literary form.14 The
translation model secures the cognitive role of literature, thus justifying its
educational value (literature educates us, because it teaches us something).
Furthermore, it bridges the gap between the fictional and the real since the moral
theses or maxims extracted from literature can be judged according to real world
criteria and applied to real world cases.
The weaknesses of the model become apparent once we look at particular cases. To
take a recent example used by Noël Carroll, the moral of Tartuffe is that ‘hypocrisy is
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noxious’.15 This, however, is merely a truism. As Adorno observed, ‘hardly anyone
needs to be taught the fabula docet that can be derived from it’.16 The claim that we
learn something is undermined by the triviality of the message. The moral
significance of literature is preserved by making it a handmaiden to morality, by
giving it, that is, the auxiliary role of disseminating easily digestible chunks of moral
wisdom. If we accept this, however, as a necessary cost in defending the moralist
position, we shall find that literature immediately becomes merely the linguistic
domain from which we extract a set of propositions. It becomes redundant as
literature since the identification of the propositions that contain moral claims can,
in principle at least, be re-arranged in simple syllogistic form. This may be thought
by some to be an advantage, on the grounds that we can then better inspect and
assess what is presented to us for our assent. This hope of clarity and order
however founders when we confront the problem of deciding whether the moral
proposition we have extracted is to be thought of as a conclusion of an argument
concealed in literary form, or rather as a major premise that is necessary for to
accept for the rest of the plot to follow. If the latter, then truly we learn nothing we
did not already know before we opened the book or took our place in the stalls. If
the former, the results are equally unsatisfactory. Staying with Tartuffe, we could
say that Molière presents to us in theatrical form the following propositions,
‘Hypocrisy is a cause of innocent suffering’, ‘Innocent suffering is wrong’, from
which we draw the concluding moral lesson ‘hypocrisy is wrong’. That this might be
the right measure of ethical education is absurd.17 The stultifying implication that
ethical knowledge and ethical education comes down to the absorption of a set of
given basic rules can be addressed by focusing the main work of ethical judgement,
namely the critical evaluation of the message extracted from literature. But again if
we do this, all the important ethical work is conducted with literature in absentia.
On this model, literature has at best a secondary role of message-bearer, not a
formative role.18
A more promising line of argument aims to establish a morally causative role for
literature by showing that we learn not by extracting a set of propositions but
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through a ‘form of knowledge by acquaintance’.19 To answer the question how
exactly we are involved as readers, the simulation theorists seek to identify the
precise mechanisms of literary absorption. The key claim is that our imaginative
engagement as readers of literature takes a specific form, when we read, we try out
imaginatively different situations and thus learn how it feels to be someone or do
something. It is argued that this imaginative inhabiting of roles or situations is
especially relevant for moral reasoning because when we reason morally we also
need to engage in counterfactual reasoning. The first to describe the psychological
mechanism activated through reading and to apply the ‘simulation’ model in the
domain of aesthetics is Greg Currie. Currie begins with a basic claim about moral
reasoning arguing that ‘if we are thoughtful about decisions [about what to do or to
be or to have] we shall try to think ourselves into a variety of imaginary
circumstances’.20 Thinking oneself into a variety of circumstances, or engaging in
simulation, can be very productive, ‘we can undergo moral learning; we can learn
something about whether a goal is worth pursuing for ourselves and for those we
care about’.21 The idea here is that simulation has an emotive and a cognitive
component, we both feel our way around characters and situations and we factor
different information as we entertain alternative courses of action. When simulating
then, we use all our cognitive and emotional resources, but disconnect our
belief/desire system to the real world. Given this model of moral reasoning, or
indeed of thoughtful decision making, it is easy to see how literature has a role in
this as a prop for such games of ‘make-believe’. Literature is valuable because, on
Currie’s account, ‘good fictions give us, through the talents of their makers, access to
imaginings more complex, inventive and instructive than we would hope to make
for ourselves’.22 He concludes: ‘Drugs aid the body’s natural defenses against
desease, clothes keep us warmer than skin alone could, and fictions aid our natural
capacity to plan our lives’.23 To clarify how this works in practice, Carroll offers the
following example: ‘if one is contemplating murder, one should among other things
reflect on what it would be like to live as a murderer. Reading a novel such as Crime
and Punishment can give one an inkling about this’.24 ‘Could we stand being a
murderer?’ Carroll asks. The answer is: ‘Simulate Rashkolnikov and see’.25
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Despite the clarity and conviction with which the claims on behalf of the simulation
model are presented, a number of puzzles persist. The moral significance of
literature is identified with the possibilities it offers for simulation. An inventive and
complex work of fiction will afford us a good range of opportunities for simulation
and thus train us in the kind of reasoning we require when we need to make choices
in real-world moral situations. Literature is not different in kind to other
counterfactual imaginings, it is different only in quality. One objection to this model
is that it is reductive with regard to literary quality, it emphasises plot and character
at the expense of other features, say, the writing itself, or, more elusively, the style of
the work. This need not be a damaging objection since the point is not to establish
general aesthetic criteria but rather identify the kind of literature that is morally
significant and relevant, though clearly the work must be able to arouse and sustain
the reader’s interest in some profound way if the simulation is to work. More
difficult to answer is the question of how exactly is literary simulation morally
relevant. In what we might call the ‘thin’ interpretation, our exposure to literary
imaginings enables us to perform a kind of intellectual workout. As a result, we
become more agile in our own imaginings, so that when we need to make a decision,
we consider a greater repertory of options. The envisaged gain in intellectual
flexibility is not sufficient, however, to support Currie’s repeated claims that we gain
moral knowledge. Moral knowledge is minimally knowledge that something is right
or good. Knowledge that things may turn out in this or that way, or that we may end
up feeling thus or so, is clearly useful in calculating and decision-making but not in
any direct or clear way moral. A thicker interpretation might get round this problem
by stipulating that we become more empathetic by being able to simulate positions
very different from our own. Expansion of our horizons, which includes capacity to
entertain different sets of values and commitments than those we currently
endorse, might render us less dogmatic in our moral judgments, more generous
even, but then again it might confirm our belief in the superiority of our own moral
standpoint. Whilst both outcomes have moral effects, these are not necessarily the
ones Currie intends. We can narrow things down by specifying that literary
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simulation educates us morally in the same way that a flight simulator might be
used as a teaching aid for prospective pilots. Carroll seems to have this
interpretation in mind when he advises that we start with a moral question, such as
‘should I kill someone?’, and then read the appropriate fiction to help us answer it:
‘simulate Rashkolnikov and see’. But here it is difficult to say what exactly we are
supposed to ‘see’. Even if we assume that moral questions occur in the abstract as in
Carroll’s example - ‘unsubscripted’ in Philippa Foot’s phrase - it is unclear that
simulating a character in a complex fictional narrative offers any sort of answer.
Further doubts arise once we consider the variety of relations readers have with
literary texts: some are interested only in characters or situations that most suit
their own – and thus never get to experience the imaginative range promised by the
simulation model – others only seek escape and desire nothing better that to pursue
fantasies of themselves down fictional paths. In such cases it is difficult to sustain
the thought that anything is learned or that morality has much to do with this. For a
model that is so tightly linked with the experience of the reader it is curiously
uninformative about the reading experience itself. Literature could be taken out of
the picture altogether: in principle taking a Rashkolnikov pill or playing at a
Rashkolnikov video game would be just as good a trigger of the simulation process
as reading.
2. Elements of experience: moral salience and moral reversal The models we examined so far touch on different aspects of our reading experience
but fail to establish a convincing connection between it and the moralist position
they seek to defend. Despite their differences, the three models have a similar
structure, they lead us to morality through some third element that is involved in
reading but is also separable from it. Thus moral significance is established by
reference to the exercise of certain abilities, the stimulation of certain mechanisms,
or the extraction of particular claims. The difficulties we encountered with this
strategy suggest that we may need to go about defending the moralist case in a
different way. Rather than asking how certain elements of our reading experience
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can be seen to be morally relevant, we might begin by asking how morality comes
into our reading experience itself. Granting the autonomist claim that literary works
aim at engaging us imaginatively – but not the conclusion they seek to draw from
this, that literary works should be judged as good or bad to the degree that they are
successful in achieving this aim- we may begin by examining the nature of such
imaginative engagement to see whether it contains any moral elements.
Rather than speaking generally about imaginative engagement and the reading
experience, we can start with an account of the experience of one particular reader,
Nussbaum’s s discussion of The Golden Bowl. Nussbaum presents us with a subtle
and moving sketch of the life and choices of the heroine, Maggie Verver. In doing
this, she does not set out to offer us a summary of the novel, but rather to
communicate one particular, one possible, experience of reading The Golden Bowl.
Nussbaum shares her, as well as James’s, Maggie Verver with us. It becomes
immediately clear that morality enters into it from the very start: ‘She wants, this
woman, to have a flawless life. She says to her good friend Fanny Assingham, “I want
a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger … The
bowl without the crack”’.26 Maggie Verver’s desire for a life like ‘a pure and perfect
crystal, completely without crack or seam, both precious and safely hard’ is, on
Nussbaum’s retelling, already a feature of Maggie Verver’s moral life, indeed, one of
the features of her life that ‘strike us as salient’.27 The ‘us’ here contains a double
reference. It is the generic ‘we’ of all and any reader of The Golden Bowl who would,
perhaps should, upon reading Maggie Verver’s wish be struck by its salience in the
development of the character and the novel. Yet it is also a reference to us, who, as
readers of Nussbaum’s discussion, can come to recognise this feature as salient. In
sharing with us elements of her imaginative engagement with the novel, Nussbaum
educates us into seeing certain things in it that we might have missed, or interpreted
differently, but does so without straying from the book, the words of the characters
and their situations. She picks out certain features as salient and justifies her choices
by showing that they have a crucial role in the story. It turns out that Maggie
Verver’s ‘assiduous aspiration to perfection, especially moral perfection’ has a role
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to play not only in the internal development of the character but in what, on
Nussbaum’s account, her story is about. Discovering that her pursuit of perfection is
doomed, Maggie sets on the path of becoming ‘a real woman’, she learns ‘to be a
“mistress of shades”’.28 Under Nussbaum’s guidance, we, the readers, follow through
the series of reversals that Maggie’s moral vision undergoes until the end, when
vision itself is surrendered for the sake of love.29 Recognising these reversals as part
of Maggie’s story, we also recognise them as part of the novel’s moral vision. ‘The
richness of the novel’s moral vision’, Nussbaum comments, ‘lies in the way in which
it both shows us the splendour of a rigorous moralism … and at the same time
erodes our confidence in this ideal by displaying the guilt involved in such
innocence’.30
Nussbaum’s account of her reading of the novel achieves what her argument fails to
do, it shows us how moral elements shape the experience of reading. Before we
proceed to analyse those features of reading that are morally load-bearing, we need
to deal with a rather obvious objection. Do we not make things easy for ourselves by
choosing as our example a novel with moral content? Speaking of moral content
gives a rather misleading impression that a work of literature is a vessel into which
(some) authors pour moral ideas, which readers subsequently imbibe. Undoubtedly
some didactic fiction may well fit this picture. But this is not the kind of activity we
have just described. When we follow Nussbaum’s account of her imaginative
engagement with The Golden Bowl, we follow the stages of a reading of how things
gain the shape of a story for a reader. So, to see Maggie Verver’s desire for perfection
as salient is to see it as morally significant, which, in turn, is to follow the reversals
of her moral vision, which is, finally, to read, and to have a particular reading of, this
story. To get a better grip on the elements that make up this chain of reading we
need to examine what is involved in establishing relations of salience and
recognising reversals.
Being struck by something as salient is central to our engagement with literary
works.31 Salience can be understood in both the passive and the active mode. To be
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struck by something is to have our attention grabbed by this feature of the narrative,
it is a feature that sticks out, compelling us to take note. This is part of what we
mean when we say that we are absorbed, engaged, hooked in a literary work; it does
not cover the entire range of these terms but it is an essential constituent of the
experience they describe (we could say that it addresses our receptivity as readers).
Salient features though are not simple facts of the matter, we do not stumble upon
them as if they were stones. We pick them out because we think they capture
essentially what we read, the story, the character, the world that is presented to us.
Salience thus forms our reading but also our interpretation, what we make of what
we read. For example, when Nussbaum picks out Maggie Verver’s desire for
crystalline perfection or her being a daughter as salient features, she justifies her
choice by telling us something about the narrative, how these things shape Maggie’s
life, but also by telling us something about perfectionism and filial attachment,
inviting us thus to think about how these features might shape a life. The simple
relation of being struck by something we read becomes, on reflection, more
complex, involving the judgement ‘this matters’, or ‘this is important’, which is
justified by reference to what happens in the work and our estimation of what the
work is about. Morality enters in this story with the identification of certain features
as morally salient. Moral salience too can be understood in the passive and the
active mode. As we read, we are nudged into seeing something –importantly:
something that need not have ostensible or explicit moral character- as morally
relevant. Nussbaum sees and enables us to see the moral salience of Maggie Verver’s
relation to her father by having a story of how it shapes Maggie’s moral aspiration in
the novel, an aspiration to the moral simplicity of innocence. The reason ‘being a
daughter’ stands out is because it tells us something about this character’s moral
life. Admittedly, desiring perfection or being a daughter are not otherwise morally
empty features, but it takes a particular narrative and a particular experience of
reading to bring out and communicate their moral salience in this context. Other
less morally loaded examples are not hard to find, Adorno makes a powerful case for
the moral salience of Hölderlin’s use of parataxis, Auerbach draws our attention to
the moral salience of a particular use of the plural in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot.32 Just as
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in the general case of salience, here too, having the response ‘this is morally
significant’ also involves a judgement by which we render visible to ourselves the
moral character of a desire, a relation, or indeed, a syntactical or grammatical usage
and thus pick out a prominent part of the moral landscape that is revealed to us.
Judgements about moral salience are however only one way in which morality
enters into the experience of reading. Another way is through our following -and
making complex judgements about- the moral reversals that make up the story.
Nussbaum’s ‘reversal’ is a common translation of Aristotle’s ‘peripeteia’ and is useful
in this context because it lends itself to broader application than it has in Aristotle,
who defines it as ‘a change to opposite in the actions being performed …in
accordance with probability or necessity’.33 Reversals need not refer only to actions
performed, but also to perspectives that throw suddenly different light on events, or
simply words or descriptions that challenge our expectations. When we read, we
become engaged in something that has a given order with which we cannot
interfere. This is just to say that a work of literature has been put together in a
certain way and that we encounter it as complete in itself.34 How this orderly work
is internally organised relates to conventions of literary practice, which can be
adhered to, challenged, or in the case of some authors, created in the work itself
(Rorty claims this of Proust and Cavell of all modernist creative work). So, speaking
of order and completion does not commit us to the kind of narrative tidiness James
ridicules when he describes the final ‘distribution of last prizes, pensions, husbands,
wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks’.35 There are
different ways in which reversal is part of the reading experience. Expectations
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formed by precedents of reading can be defeated when precedent is extended in
new ways, or indeed turned on its head (to take a familiar example, in Tristram
Shandy, Lawrence Sterne plays with expectations concerning genre, coherence, or
first-person narrative readers bring to the novel). Expectations are also formed in
the process of reading and turned around internally as a result of ‘actions
performed’, or sudden change of view-point. There are myriad ways in which we
can come to see an act or a character or a situation in an unexpected light, or gain a
new perspective. The characteristic of reversal that concerns us here is not how it is
explored or instantiated in different examples, but rather how recognising what it is,
or perhaps better, recognising it for what it is, requires that we hold together both
the familiar and that which replaces it. To take again the example of Nussbaum’s
analysis of The Golden Bowl, it is because we know of Maggie’s attachment to the
purity of innocence that we recognise the surrender of her vision. One of the
reasons why the application of the simulation model to Crime and Punishment is so
unconvincing is that something important, something we get precisely by following
the reversals in the novel, is entirely missing. In this particular instance, we might go
as far as to say that reversal describes the act of reading itself as we traverse a series
of upturns to a final promise, given, appropriately, in an appended paragraph. The
promise is of something new: ‘a new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man,
the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to
another, of his acquaintance with a new and hitherto unknown reality’.36 This
ending is also an example of a final moral reversal, given ambiguously in the
language of atonement and salvation (we may be reading about death and afterlife
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as much as about the possibility of a new life). As this example shows, moral
reversal is simply identifying a particular reversal as morally salient. Moral reversal
can be understood by analogy with Scruton’s observation that the point of metaphor
is ‘not to describe an object, but to change its aspect, so that we respond to it in
another way’.37 Attending to the moral reversals in Tartuffe, for instance, enables us
to recognise a more complex moral universe than the translation model affords us.
It is because of the way Molière plays with our expectations that we are able to see
Tartuffe not just as a hypocritical villain, but also, at the same time, as a dynamic
intruder who animates a dull world of bourgeois complacency. The literary-moral
peripeteia –which keeps us hooked and puzzled and entertained- has nothing to do
with bromides about the noxiousness of hypocrisy. Rather the predictable, the
familiar, the very stuff of our expectations is tugged away and we come to see,
reluctantly perhaps, that Tartuffe’s intrusion was a necessary educative trial for the
other characters who, as a result of their encounter with Tartuffe, learn to
appreciate the weight of words and to recognise truthfulness and true goodness.
3. Moral Vision and Moral Judgement
The purpose of identifying the moral constituents of the experience of reading is to
show that morality is not an external feature of reading. It is best thought of as a
possibility that is realised –or not- in the process of reading itself. Something either
strikes us as morally salient or not. This, in turn, is not a matter of extracting ‘moral
content’, or of adhering to a prior decision to orient our reading morally. Rather it is
a matter of seeing something in a certain way and making a judgement to that effect,
which, of course, allows for such judgements to be revised on second readings or
after comparison with those of others. With this in mind, let us return to our original
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question: ‘Is it legitimate to bring moral concerns to bear on works of literature?’
We are now in position to appreciate its complexity. It queries the legitimacy of a
certain approach to works of literature. The implication is that such an approach
needs to be justified. In our discussion so far, however, we have not treated moral
concerns as extraneous matter, we have instead focused on the way in which
identification of moral salience and of moral reversal is just an aspect of our
imaginative engagement with literature. If this account of (part of) what we do
when we read is accurate, then the question of legitimacy does not even arise. Stated
bluntly, the argument is that moral significance is an a priori possibility of reading,
hence the compatibility of an autonomist premise with a moralist conclusion. This,
however, is just one way of capturing the moralist conviction that literature matters
morally to us. There is another way of interpreting such ‘mattering’ that directly
affects the issue of legitimacy and opens a different way of understanding our
original question.
The question asks whether it is right (in an as yet unspecified sense of right) morally
to praise or condemn literary works. In short, it assumes a perspective outside
reading, namely the perspective of a judge. The aim of historical as well as
contemporary autonomist arguments is to show that this external perspective is
somehow flawed, incongruous or unavailable, and that if there is to be a judge, then
the tribunal she presides over must be a literary one. Since there is no literary sense
of ‘right’ which can be used to justify the moral praise or condemnation of literary
works, such judgements, it is concluded, are illegitimate. The onus is then on the
moralists to specify ‘right’ in such a way that the contrary result obtains. The task is
to determine the domain in which legitimacy claims are redeemed. This is why the
moralist arguments we considered previously seek to establish a different way in
which literature matters morally to us, by showing how it affects us morally. The
urge to go outside reading is thus motivated by the perceived need to establish that
it is morally right to judge literature morally. If reading something corrupts us, then
its condemnation is justifiable on moral grounds, just as the condemnation of a
corrupting adviser might be so justified. Conversely, we may praise works that
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16
elevate us, just as we praise a righteous educator. Understanding moral judgement
in terms of moral praise and condemnation is premised on the assumption of a tight
causal link between reading and behaviour. Few moralists endorse this position.
The more sophisticated moralist arguments we discussed claim a link between
reading and human capabilities, for developing a fine sensibility (Nussbaum) or for
making reflective choices (Currie). Accordingly, it is not appropriate to speak of
moral praise and condemnation of literary works, but rather of moral judgements
about how a particular work engages or thwarts our moral abilities and allows or
curtails exposure to a range of ‘morally charged experiences’.38 Nussbaum’s and
Currie’s views represent two distinct views of moral achievement, one takes its
bearings from broadly phronetic conceptions that embrace ideas of discernment,
moral vision, moral perception and receptivity, the other from conceptions
emphasising reflective endorsement – a family to which belong ideals of reasoned
choices, of autonomy and of Mündigkeit. Despite their roots in different moral
models, however, the two perspectives appear to converge when it comes to putting
some flesh on the idea of moral judgement of literary works. In both cases, the
judgement made is about the moral texture of the world revealed in a particular
work. Focusing then on this type of judgment, rather than on the consequences that
these authors claim are contingent upon such engagement with literature, it should
be clear that nothing more is being said than that morality enters into the
experience of reading. But this is a moralist conclusion we have already reached. We
need not, therefore, become entangled with fatuous attempts to offer moral
legitimation for moral discussion of literature. And thus we can preserve in good
faith also our autonomist premise.
Katerina Deligiorgi/ Philosophical Inquiry 29:3-4 (2007)
17
1The quote is from S. T. Coleridge; Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some
Other Old Poets and Dramatists, ‘The Eighth Lecture’ (London and New York: J. M. Dent & Co,
1909), pp. 435-436; the critics alluded to here are the Abbé St Pierre and J-J. Rousseau.
2 Friedrich Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L.A.
Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 7. In light of the argument defended in this paper,
it is important to point out that, historically, commitment to the idea of autonomous art and
(or) of autonomous criteria of aesthetic judgement has not precluded commitment to the
idea that art or aesthetic judgement are morally significant (the key reference here is I.
Kant, Critique of Judgement § 59). The difficulty is to show how such a connection can be
made and maintained. Difficulties with the Kantian and Schillerian positions respectively
are examined in Christoph Menke, ‘Aesthetic Reflection and Its Ethical Significance. A
Critique of the Kantian Solution’ (unpublished ms), and K. Deligiorgi Kant and the Culture of
Enlightenment, (Albany: SUNY Press), pp. 142-157. In the twentieth century, when Clive Bell
states that ‘there are no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there is
no greater means to good than art’, the aesthetic-moral connection appears only as a
rhetorical trope; ‘Art and Ethics’, Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 117. The
political dimension of autonomous art is analysed in T. W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Notes to
Literature vol.2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), pp.76-94. See also Dudley Knowles and John Skorupski (eds.), Virtue and Taste:
Essays on Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
3 Mary Devereaux, ‘Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers And The Gendered Spectator: The
New Aesthetics’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48(1990) pp. 337-344, here p. 340. It
is worth noting that the turn to substantive issues, both in terms of artistic practice and
exhibiting and in terms of aesthetic discourse, was not uncontroversial. An interesting
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18
account of the theoretical issues stirred in this controversy is given in Michael Kelly, ‘The
Political Autonomy of Contemporary Art: The Case of the 1993 Whitney Biennial’, in Salim
Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds.), Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp.221-263
4 The basic positions are outlined in Berys Gaut ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art’, in Jerrold
Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp.182-203; Marcia Muelder Eaton, ‘Integrating the Aesthetic and
the Moral’, Philosophical Studies 67 (1992), pp.219-240; Noël Carroll, ‘Moderate Moralism’,
British Journal of Aesthetics 3:36(1996), pp.223-238 and in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean in ‘Moderate
Autonomism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2:39 (1998), pp.150-166.
5 Martha Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral
Philosophy’, New Literary History 15 (1983), pp.25-50. The essay was part of a symposium
in which Nussbaum’s piece was discussed by a number of authors including D. D. Raphael in
‘Can Literature be Moral Philosophy?’, ibid., pp.1-12, Hilary Putnam ‘Taking Rules Seriously’,
ibid., pp.77-81, Cora Diamond, ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is’, ibid.,
pp.155-170, and Richard Wollheim, ‘Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and the
Plausibility of Literature as Moral Philosophy’, ibid., pp.185-192.
6 It is important to note here that there is a reason for Nussbaum’s reluctance that has to do
with her broader philosophical project. Nussbaum, but also other contemporary
philosophers who engage in philosophical-literary analysis, for instance, Richard Rorty
writing on Orwell, Bernard Williams on Homer, Stanley Cavell on Shakespeare, is not
primarily concerned with answering autonomist critics and defending a moralist position.
Rather, her, and their, key aim is to enlarge the boundaries of what is to count as philosophy
in the first place. So Nussbaum (and much earlier Iris Murdoch) turns to literature in
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19
protest at the narrow confines of moral philosophy. However, the pursuit of this objective
does not obviate the need to address the questions we are raising here. To say that
‘aesthetic’ or ‘moral’, or ‘cognitive’, or ‘philosophical’ are narrowly defined is not to say that
they are unusable, but that we need to revise what we do with them. In this context see also
Marcia Cavell, ‘Taste and the Moral Sense’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34:1
(1975), pp. 29-33 and more recently Mike Weston, Philosophy, Literature, and the Human
Good (London: Routledge, 2001).
7 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.39.
8 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.40.
9 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.41.
10 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.43 and p. 45.
11 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.40.
12 This worry, which is not unique to Rousseau (see e.g. Voltaire’s ‘Story of the Good
Brahmin’), is central to Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, in which he undertakes precisely to
unravel the deep psychological and metaphysical forces that can bridge intellect and
aesthesis. In a subtly critical essay Cora Diamond contrasts the obtuse reader with the
obtuse agent making pretty much a Rousseauean point, whilst remaining entirely
sympathetic to the broader aims of Nussbaum’s essay; see Cora Diamond, ‘Missing the
Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum’, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and
the Mind (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Pres, 1995), pp. 307-318.
13 Elsewhere, Nussbaum concedes that the skills of the reader and the skills of the agent are
not in fact the same, they are similar or ‘analogous’; see ‘“Finely Aware and Richly
Responsible”: Literature and the Moral Imagination’, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press1990), pp. 148-167.
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20
14 Various versions of this propositional view have been defended over the years, for a
sample of views and critical debate see: M. J. Sirridge ‘Truth from Fiction?’ Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 38:1 (1975), pp. 453-471, D. E. B. Pollard ‘M.J.Sirridge, Ficiton
and Truth’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38:2 (1977), pp. 251-256, Peter
McCormick ‘Moral Knowledge and Fiction’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41:4
(1983), pp. 399-410.
15 Noël Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research’,
Ethics 110 (2000), pp.350-387, here p.361. It should be made clear that this is not a position
Carroll defends, merely one he illustrates, the same is the case with the simulation model
discussed below; see also his Beyond Aesthetics.
16 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p.84.
17 It is worth referring the reader to an episode recounted by Molière in his preface to
Tartuffe. After Tartuffe was censored in 1664, a piece entitled Scaramouche ermite was
presented in court which also had religious content presented in a comic context. When it
finished, the King expressed his puzzlement as to why people were scandalized by Molière’s
play but not by Scaramouche, to which the Grand Condé replied: ‘Scaramouche is about the
heavens and religion, of which people are indifferent, Molière’s play is about themselves,
and that they cannot stand’ (Paris: Hachette, 1933), p. 15.
18 This is precisely Hare’s conclusion in R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1963), p.185.
19 Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism’, p.362. Note that McCormick also employs this
distinction in order to get to a sophisticated version of the translation model, see esp. p.406.
The main proponent of the simulation theory is Gregory Currie, see G. Currie ‘The Moral
Psychology of Fiction’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), pp. 250-259, and
‘Realism of Character and the Value of Fiction’ in Levinson, Aesthetics and Ethics, pp.161-
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21
181. For an outline of the position in psychology, see S. Stich and S. Nichols, ‘Folk
Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?’, Mind and Language 7 (1992), pp. 35-71.
20 Currie, ‘The Moral Psychology of Fiction’, p. 250.
21 Currie, ‘The Moral Psychology of Fiction’, p.250.
22 Currie, ‘Realism of Character’, p.171.
23 Currie, ‘Realism of Character’, p.171.
24 Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism’, p.362.
25 Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism’, p.372.
26 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.25.
27 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.25.
28 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.35.
29 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.38.
30 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.33.
31 The kernel for the concept of salience developed here can be found in the idea of salience
used in Searle’s second principle of metaphorical interpretation; see P. Cole and J. L. Morgan
(eds.), Syntax and Semantics III, Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 114-116.
See also William Lycan, ‘An Irenic Idea about Metaphor’ (unpublished ms), also relevant
here is Scruton’s discussion of metaphor in Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.80-87. Relevant to the discussion of moral reversal that
follows is Lawrence W. Hyman, ‘Moral Attitudes and the Literary Experience’, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38:2 (1979), pp.159-165.
32 T. W. Adorno, ‘Parataxis’, Notes to Literature, pp.109-149; Erich Aurebach, ‘In the Hôtel de
la Mole’, Mimesis, trans., Willard R. Trask (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974),
pp.472-3.
33 Aristotle, Poetics, 52a, l.11, trans., Malcom Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p.18.
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34 To say this is simply to acknowledge a logical, indeed, a metaphysical distinction. Nothing
is thereby implied about power or seriousness of the reading experience, as, for instance, in
Austin’s classification of poetry among the ‘etiolations of language’, in which language is
‘used not seriously but in ways parasitic upon its normal use’, J. L. Austin, How To Do Things
With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp.21-2. Nor is a relevant counter-
example in this context work that challenges the idea of an ending (e.g. unfinished or
unfinishable works, nouvel roman, post-modernist fiction).
35 Henry James, ‘Preface’, Roderick Hudson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 37.
36 F. M. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans., D. Magarshak (Harmonsdworth:
Penguin, 1966), p.559.
37 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p.84.
38 Currie, ‘Realism of Character’, p.173.