Eileen John on Art and Morality

This is "Isthetic Spites", a series for philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmund. "Isthetic Spites" is made in association with the London Isthetics Forum and made possible by a grant from the British Society of Isthetics. What is the link between art and morality? And can art teach us anything about ethics? I mean John, a Warwick University believes it can. I mean John, welcome to Isthetic Spites. I'm very happy to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is art and morality. Now I know you're particularly interested in literature. It'd be really interesting to explore how particular works of literature are informative and allows to explore moral questions. So can we just begin by picking out an example of a literary work that introduces moral questions? Yeah, let me say I take art and morality to be really great interacting spheres, but they do different things. They have different commitments. I'll give you an example of a work of drama, "Ibsens Play the Wild Duck" that I think is a good example of art helping us learn about morality. Taking morality as a subject matter for art and going after it in a really funny and engrossing way. So for those of us who aren't familiar with that play, could you just broadly sketch what goes on there? Yes, I don't want to spoil the plot of the play, but it's a wonderful family drama and it has a central character who tries to be a moral perfectionist. He wants to live by the perfect moral law. For example, thou shalt not lie. So he trundles out this perfect moral principle and basically destroys his family because of it. I'm laughing. It's actually a very moving and disturbing play, but in his family he wants this moral perfection to be enacted. Meanwhile, his wife turns out to be, I would say, a more morally admirable figure in the play because she realizes you can't inevitably sustain a family without doing such things as lying. So she is in a way a figure of moral imperfection and yet she is also the figure who does a better job of holding her family together. So is this because life is messy and complex and a can't you and moral framework just doesn't map onto it? Is that what the message of the play is? That is one nice way of summing up what Ibsen is helping us to see or at least helping us to wonder about. I would say most works of art that are in my terms about morality are question raising. They're not inevitably going to show you this is the philosophically definitive view to have of morality, but I do think Ibsen is taking on not just Kant, but other moral thinkers who would say you can trundle out your moral principles and be done with it. This reminds me a bit of Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to life where he was adamant that he shouldn't tell any lies and he has a lot of people, I think, in the process because he wasn't compromising. Well, yeah, I think this idea of the uncompromising moral agent is a great target for exploration in art and in literature in particular. Because moral principles are also kind of beautiful, they do appeal to us. We are drawn to the perfectly resolved moral position, but the artist is someone who has the chance to make us step back and assess even that perfection. One of the valuable things about art is that it allows us to step outside our normal set of commitments as friend, as employee, as family member, and examine and experiment with what morality asks of us. I'm interested to know why you couldn't just have an anecdote of something that was true. So, for instance, Wittgenstein was horrible to the young American visitor who was singing in German, he said, "Look, you have to excuse my German," Wittgenstein, he said, "I couldn't possibly, I just stormed off a vulnerable behavior to somebody who was so vulnerable, but maintaining his integrity, it's the same kind of thing that somebody concerned about being honest to themselves, they couldn't honestly have said I loved the way you pronounce the stupid song there." So, what's the difference then between a true story like that and a work of literature or art? I guess I think there is greater freedom in the context of the work of art and our response to it. So, when someone's telling you about the rudeness of a real person, you probably have a somewhat limited set of concerns in that exchange. And you're likely to agree with the charge of rudeness and perhaps be a little amused. With the Ibsen play, it's, of course, a very carefully constructed and complex whole. There are a whole bunch of interacting characters in the play who bring different qualities to their human engagement, and you have the chance to not only realize this character is making a mistake and insisting on his moral principles, but you can see how the other people in his social world are helping him to make that mistake or perhaps failing to recognize the nature of his mistake. You have quite a rich range of possible questions to ask. You're not, in a way, really interested in judging the person's rudeness or moral failure. You want to see what it is and where it came from, and you also have this much more abstract question raised. What should morality be like in a human life? Should it be a matter of striving for perfection or not? That's just unlikely to be on the table as a problem for you in the personal anecdote. Does that mean that moral psychology needs more attention as it were? That the very schematic nature of some moral philosophy is almost a failing of moral philosophy that it isn't rich enough to map on to real life? Well, you're asking someone who works with literature a good bit, and I would say yes, that seems obvious to me. On the other hand, literature is a very confusing resource for moral psychology because it has this freedom that means it's not responsible always to the demands of describing human nature accurately. That's not its project, or it's not its whole project. You can have artists who exaggerate, who make human beings be funnier than they actually are, who are quite mean to human beings. Perhaps someone like Patricia Heismith paints a quite unattractive fixture of humanity, and I think that's a legitimate artistic project. The moral psychologist I assume needs to be trying to show the representative features of humanity well. That's not what the artist has to take on as their project. If we talk about novels, there's a certain kind of engagement they require of the reader, an immersion imaginatively in the work that seems to be quite different from reading a typical monograph on moral philosophy. It's an emotional involvement, typically. Do you think that has any significance for the impact of a novel, say, as opposed to a work of moral philosophy? I think it does. Reading and being imaginatively engaged in that reading process can make you not just understand something better about human life and the moral opportunities it holds, but can make you understand and feel what is important. A student once said something to me. I'm reminded of here. She said, "Well, in my philosophy classes, I learn what's true. But when I'm reading a novel, I understand the weight of what's true." It's kind of a metaphor, but I think it's a helpful metaphor that certain things have weight for us or should have weight. And it may be that you can only get access to that through getting inside a great story, for instance, where the weight of moral concerns plays out. With a novel, for instance, you immerse yourself in a character's experience, that can be quite imaginatively expansive. You are not only entering into a character's perspective, but you are somehow engaging with a construction of the author, which has its own complexity and is not usually aligned perfectly with what any given character is thinking or feeling. It can be shifting, it can be funny, it can have a whole tone that you are trying to adjust to, you're trying to react to. And that can be a kind of experience that is multi-level. perfectly perspectival. And again, that's a bit different from the ordinary human exchange where you kind of do have to do justice to the person you're talking to. And if you start bringing in multiple other perspectives, you're probably going to kind of fail in that particular exchange. That's not true with the work of literature. In fact, you can really move through different sets of concerns quite gracefully and easily given what the work offers. We usually think of works of literature, particularly novels as things that we simply read. But from some of what you're saying, these are actually ways in which we start a conversation with each other, reflect on our own behaviour, so that it doesn't end when you've read the book. That's a really nice point. The thinking that goes on while you're reading, the thinking that goes on when you set the book down and make a cup of tea or talk to someone about what you've been reading, I would take all of that into account the memory you have of the book 10 years later and why it was important to you. That's a kind of lifelong, reflective activity that I think is important to why works of art, not just literature, but lots of works of art that you return to can have the impact they do. A critic might say, well, look, we could glean a few interesting examples from literature, but really the stuff of moral philosophy is life, thinking, reasoning. We don't need to go to literature, don't make us read novels, don't make us watch plays. Okay, I think literature as an art form is very interesting with respect to moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is generally not only a matter of getting your premises to be true and your reasoning to be valid or inductively strong. It is also a matter of situating yourself in your social community adequately and realizing who has power, who doesn't. You used, I think, the word vulnerable earlier in talking about the Wittgenstein example, and I'd say that's very important to moral reasoning in real life. It's a short story, I like, by an American writer, Flannery O'Connor, the barber, where a man is trying to convince his barber who to vote for in the upcoming election. And this is said in the American South during segregation. The barber wants to vote for the segregationist candidate. The customer is supporting the more progressive candidate, but he doesn't actually argue very well with his barber. He gives a kind of standard morally appropriate argument, but he doesn't realize he, too, shares a lot of the racism of his barber. And so his moral reasoning looks quite fine in the abstract, but it's quite inadequate in terms of who he really is in relation to the barber situation. He needs a much more sophisticated and self-examining argument in order to do what I would call good moral reasoning. That's really interesting, that case, because it's a kind of catalyst to a certain way of thinking about am I caught up in a certain false consciousness and am I deluding myself, am I rationalizing my prejudices, the sorts of things which could take us to another level in moral reasoning. Yeah, exactly, where I think it's not enough just to get the general moral truths on the table. It is a question of self scrutiny and figuring out what your moral ground is at the moment. It may be a more racist or somehow morally compromised position, and you may actually need to change as a person in order to start thinking better morally. And that's very much the stuff of the literary approach to moral life, to sort out what people understand about themselves and how that affects what they're capable of thinking and feeling in moral terms. From what you've said, it might seem to follow that a good work of literature, a good play will actually help you think in that right kind of way about morality. Is that what you believe? Hmm, I think that is possible. I don't think it is necessary. I don't think good art or specifically good literature needs to make you a better moral thinker. I just think art is important as a space in which we can experiment with morality. Even in a dangerous way, we can experiment with seeing how it feels not to take morality seriously at all. We can experiment with thinking that morality is in fact a coercive limitation on human life. This is why I think art and morality interact in an interesting way, but they just don't coincide. I'd enjoy. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. For more information about aesthetics bites, go to www.londonestheticsforum.org. And for more information about philosophy bites and how to support us, go to www.philosophybites.com.