Literature and Moral Vision: Autonomism …timothyquigley.net/ipa/deligiorgi-lmv.pdfThe current flourishing of substantive models of aesthetic appreciation, which stand in direct

Katerina Deligiorgi/ Philosophical Inquiry 29:3-4 (2007)

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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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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.


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


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


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.



10 Nussbaum, ‘Flawed Crystals’, p.43 and p. 45.


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.


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-


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.


24 Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism’, p.362.

25 Carroll, ‘Art and Ethical Criticism’, p.372.






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.


22

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.


Documents

Literature and Moral Vision: Autonomism …timothyquigley.net/ipa/deligiorgi-lmv.pdfThe current flourishing of substantive models of aesthetic appreciation, which stand in direct