Reasonable Imaginings: Learning from Imagination

Abstract

If imagination bears at all on moral judgment, I want to suggest that it is not by teaching a precept, either in an interested, custom-bound, Humean way or in a disinterested Kantian way.1 When the moral consequence of the artwork is hypothesized, we are often stymied by the problem of adequating moral rules with aesthetic rules, or ethical nature with aesthetic effect. In making one set of rules adequate to the other or finding the experiential ground on which they converge, we often risk losing a grasp of what kind of activity the imagination might actualize. Another way of approaching the question of what relation imagination has to morality is to grant, at least provisionally, the distinctiveness of the experiential registers each subsists upon. Aesthetic moralists from Plato to Sidney, to Johnson and Arnold, to Martha Nussbaum, treat moral knowledge largely as something to be exemplified. The universal precept governing behavior takes precedence over the possibilities otherwise inherent in potentially ungovernable behavior. I think this stance renders imagination cognitively inert. Alternatively, I want to endorse an aesthetic cognitivism that gives imagination agential parity with moral judgment without conflating the two. Such aesthetic cognitivism values instantiation as distinct from, but not necessarily at the expense of, exemplification. To put this in overly simple terms, one could say that morality teaches while imagination learns. But this is not to say that imagination learns what morality teaches. Nor is it to concede a rather weary dualism of reason and affect. In the end, I want to see the artwork as making the tension between teaching and learning an irreducible threshold of imaginative activity. But more immediately I want to maintain the relevance of rationalistic purpose to both without subsuming them to a monolithic faculty of Reason, or abandoning Reason altogether in favor of a sense particularism.