“But were it not … ”: Spenser with Kwame Anthony Appiah

Abstract

Edmund Spenser was a foundational apologist for European colonialism, while Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most forceful anticolonialist thinkers of our present era. The ethical theories offered by these ideological and intellectual antitheses converge, however, on the notion that counterfactual representations play a crucial role in imagining and actively shaping our moral and political lives. Reading Spenser’s ethical poetics through the taxonomy of counterfactual thought described in Appiah’s As If: Idealizations and Ideals (2017) clarifies the various forms and functions assumed by what Appiah would call “strategic untruths” in The Faerie Queene’s moral allegory. The centrality of counterfactual thinking to Spenser’s writing is evident in the poet’s use of it in the Gardens of Adonis, which is the cosmogonic apex of the 1590 Faerie Queene, and in his representations of slander, the paradigmatic social ill in Spenser’s ethical imagination. For both Spenser and Appiah, counterfactual reasoning and representation are crucial tools for moral self-formation and, more largely, for articulating moral societies in a mutable world marked by historical and cultural transformations.