Sir Philip Sidney's Dilemma: On the Ethical Function of Narrative Art

Abstract

Poetry, Horace famously declared, should either please or instruct.' Despite two unlikely features, this statement is the foremost classical precedent for humanist aesthetics, which espouses an ethical function of art.2 First, although it is clear from other passages in The Art of Poetry that Horace had moral instruction specifically in mind, this dictum points in a very general way toward aesthetic cognitivism, the view that is primarily valuable in art is the knowledge we gain from it.3 Not all humanists are cognitivists, since art's ethical function might not be to provide knowledge; conversely, one might think that the knowledge art provides has little to do with ethics. Hence, it is worth asking why Horace (and so many other cognitivists4) should seize on moral knowledge as the bounty of poetry, fiction, or the theater. There is a second respect in which Horace's injunction is an unlikely humanist slogan. By offering instruction and pleasure as disjunctive ends of poetry, he offends against the strictest forms of both cognitivism and its antithesis, aesthetic hedonism, the view that art's value is simply the pleasure it provides. Both theories would give precedence to one half of the disjunction or the other. True, Horace says it is the poet who mingles the useful with the sweet [who] carries the day by charming his reader and at the same time instructing him.5 Yet, even here, his rationale is decidedly crass: this is the work, he says, to enrich its publisher and ensure its author's fame. Horace conspicuously lacks the earnestness of both ideological critics and the champions of 'Art for Art's Sakeloosely speaking, moralists and formalists. Although Horace's worldly cynicism can be refreshing, it is frustrating that he is so unconcerned to explain how the useful and the sweet can be truly mingled in poetry. His explicit account sounds simply additive, and hence is prone to the most pervasive complaint leveled against humanism: that it is alienated from aesthetic value. This complaint is exacerbated by the traditional humanist metaphor for art, the sugarcoated pill, in which art's pleasure merely serves to make its moral medicine go down easier. In fact, we go to the theater not primarily for instruction, but for delight-though, to be sure, its delights are various, and not all are aptly deemed pleasure. Furthermore, fables and morality plays, the traditional paradigms of morally instructive fiction, are seldom among the works we care most about, or find most profound. Hence it is crucial to recognize that art can serve an ethical function without its manifesting didactic intentions and moralistic purposes. One way to put this point is to say that we can learn from fiction without thereby being taught by it. Yet Horace's few examples adhere to a straightforward propositional model, on which poetry instructs by teaching a prosaic moral lesson. Although propositional knowledge is most familiar, philosophers have recognized other varieties: know-how and knowledge-of; knowledge by acquaintance, and phenomenological knowledge. Whichever variety the cognitivist chooses, though, a similar epistemological worry will arise. If we do come to believe something from reading a story, could justify this belief? For instance, phenomenological knowledge-about what it is to F-might well seem especially amenable to the vehicle of fiction. Yet here too there is ample room for skepticism. You might think you have learned love is like from reading about it in books, and yet be tragically misled. (Consider Madame Bo-