Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals

Abstract

In aesthetics and the philosophy of art, two pictures of art's relation to morality predominate. On one picture, let us call it ethicism, there is the notion that proper, however indirectly, prescribes and guides us toward a sound moral understanding of the world. The historical precedent for this kind of picture is strong: the classical Greeks looked to the Homeric poems to render their moral cosmos intelligible, and the Victorians fueled a dramatic expansion of galleries in order to enlighten and ennoble the masses. However, at least within the dominant strand of philosophical aesthetics, this picture has traditionally been given short shrift. On the alternative picture, let us call it aestheticism, the spheres of morality and are thought of as autonomous rather than complementary. The aestheticist's historical precedent is similarly strong: Plato's disparagement of rests upon the presumption that bears no necessary relation to morality, and Oscar Wilde's art for art's sake concerns the perfections of beauty severed from the burden of moral intimation. Typically, it is presumed that the arguments in favor of aestheticism are far stronger than the crude, wishful thinking constitutive of ethicism. The aestheticist need not even deny that an artwork may contingently cultivate ethical insight. Rather, she need only point out that we value, as art, works like the Marquis de Sade's Juliette which promote apparently immoral understandings of the world and others. That is, we may properly enjoy the pleasures an artwork affords whilst recognizing that, morally speaking, the view represented in the work is itself flawed. For example, a work which gets us to imagine torturing another with pleasure may be, as art, equally as valuable as, or more valuable than, one which gets us to imagine the same event with disgust. Contrastingly, what is taken to constitute morally or politically correct may possess little of artistic value; hence, the aestheticist can explain the evaluative fallacy committed by those who would evaluate on moral grounds. The fact that artistic and moral value may come apart like this, the aestheticist claims, proves that artistic value must be morally neutral. The truth is that the pleasures afforded by are of value in and of themselves independently of any relation to the appropriate moral understanding of the events portrayed. I Yet, I will argue, the arguments against the role of moral evaluation in art, which strengthen the presumption in favor of aestheticism, can only undermine a crudely instrumentalist conception of art's relation to morality; that is, where an artwork is conceived of as morally significant to the extent it evokes morally sound responses and understandings. Contrastingly, contra aestheticism, an account of which recognizes an inherent link between what is represented artistically and moral understanding may yet prove more adequate to our judgment and evaluation of art. Any account of which recognizes the pleasures inherent in the peculiar and vivid imaginings prescribed by artworks must allow for a distinctive relation to moral understanding. It is through what we imagine and the promotion of imaginative understanding in engaging with artworks that may justifiably lay claim to the cultivation of our moral sensibilities.