honneth, literary imagination and morality

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

DOI: 10.1177/0191453798024002041998; 24; 41Philosophy Social Criticism

Axel Honnethproposal

Literary imagination and morality: A modest query of an immodest

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Axel Honneth

Literary imagination andmorality

A modest query of an immodest

proposal

In his 1991 lecture that has since become famous, Joseph Brodsky,accepting his nomination as Poet Laureate of the United States, madethe immodest proposal that volumes of poetry be made available towide segments of the population at a minimal price.By subsidizing theretail price and multiplying the circulation a hundredfold, or even athousandfold, it would be possible to offer poetry at a going-rate asfavorable, say, as that of ice cream or the daily paper:

Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. Itshould be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which

poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not ascars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on campuses ormain drags, but at the assembly plants gates also. Paperbacks of those wedeem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all,a country of mass production, and I dont see why whats done for cars cantbe done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because youdont want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, its because you aredeprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and thedestinations that I have in mind dont exist. (32)

Anyone who proposes such an extensive redistribution of publicmonies must have good reasons for that proposal, even if it is onlymade ironically or in order to be provocative. For it is not self-evidentthat

poetry,or fiction in

general,serves

purposes

that we all would

consider worthy of our support. If I read him correctly, Brodskyslecture puts forth two independent arguments to justify subsidizing the

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mass production of literature, and at first glance, it is not easy to seethe connection between the two. Indeed, both arguments refer to the

positive effects that the reading of fiction should have on the moralcapacities or qualities of ordinary humans - Brodsky claims categori-cally that aesthetics is the mother of ethics (35). But what sort ofedifying function literature should have, and how our moral capacitiesare to be amplified in the reading of poems, are questions that areanswered in a completely different manner in Brodskys two argu-ments. In the first, Brodsky describes the moral effect of literature inconnection with human sensitivity: since our expressive vocabularymultiplies and grows more differentiated in the reading of fiction, our

capacity to feel the pain of the other and to relate to the suffering ofthe other is also heightened.According to Brodskys terse formulation,literature is the only insurance available against the vulgarity of thehuman heart (35).As long as it is not penetrated by the metaphoricalpower of poetic text, normal language is bound to merely instrumentalaction:

Yet what weve mastered [as adults] is but an idiom, good enough perhapsto outfox an enemy, to sell a product, to get laid, to earn a promotion, but

certainly not good enough to cure anguish or cause joy. Until one learnsto pack ones sentences with meanings like a van or to discern and love inthe beloveds features a pilgrim soul, until one becomes aware that nomemory of having starred/atones for later disregard/or keeps the end frombeing hard - until things like that are in ones bloodstream, one still

belongs among the sublinguals. Who are the majority, if thats a comfort?(34)

While this argument sees the moral effect of literature in its ability,thanks to its metaphorical riches, to heighten our sensitivity, the secondrefers to our cognitive faculties.According to Brodskys lecture, the

reading of fiction increases our perceptive capacity and staves offignorance (35); only thus are the cultural presuppositions of a true

democracy established on a broad foundation. But this thesis only givesrise to a complete argument when it is supplemented with a furtherdetermination, one which is of classical origin and which can elucidatethe sense of what Brodsky means: Literature today presents an indis-

pensable medium, because it offers to us the cognition of the uniqueproperties of the special case and of the singular form of life in a

waythat is

indispensableto the democratic

associatingof citizens with

one another. In other words, Brodsky sees the moral effect of fictionaltexts in its heightening of our capacity to perceive differences by virtueof an aesthetic presentation of the particulars. We may infer that this

heightened capacity benefits the ethical life of democracies, where wehave to learn to deal with individual differences both sensitively and

calmly.



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In what follows I would like to show that neither of these argumentsis able to ground Brodskys far-reaching proposal. With these argumentshe does

no favors to his own proposal, as important and as worthy ofdefense as it is. To anticipate: the theses put forward by Brodsky areeither too one-sided or too general to characterize precisely the moraleffect that arises only in literary texts, and in every literary text. Too one-sided, in that they can find support from only a small sampling of themultiplicity of poetic and fictional literature; too general, in that theyrefer to characteristics of literature that are found just as readily, if notmore readily, in our other cultural media. Here I do not bring objectionssolely against Brodskys reflections, which remain, for good aestheticreasons, argumentatively rather undeveloped. For in the currently wide-spread debate about the relation of ethics and aesthetics both of Brod-

skys arguments have been independently and philosophically defended.In her new book, Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1995) argues forthe first of Brodskys theses: fiction owes its moral quality to the aestheticproperty that allows us to participate in the suffering and pain of theother, and in such a way that leads to a de-centering of our feelings andan increase in our sensitivity.And Wolfgang Welsch (1996) has recentlyprovided philosophical support to the second argument Brodsky makesuse of: in different texts he has maintained the thesis that literature,indeed aesthetic presentations in general, possess a moral effect insofaras they heighten our capacity to set off the particular from the universaland to perceive it in its concrete singularity. To this degree there is an

impulse to justice (Welsch) inherent in modern art.As is easily seen,both philosophical positions hark back to considerations already devel-oped in the classical debates on the moral role of art: the reference tothe aesthetic heightening of our sensitivity is already found in Schillersletters on the aesthetic education of mankind, and the reference to the

aesthetic elevation of our capacity for individualizing cognition isalready recognizable, in a certain way, in Kants concept of reflectivejudgment. But this relation with classical aesthetic positions is not whatleaves both philosophical theories inappropriate for a justification ofBrodskys proposal. It is the complementary weaknesses of the two argu-ments (too exclusive and too general) that prevent them from providinggood moral reasons for subsidizing literature.

Like Brodsky in his first thesis, Nussbaum sees the ethical function ofliterature in the fact that it lets us take on the role of a disinterested yet

passionate participant, one who learns to see with his own eyes the argu-mentative weight of the pain and suffering of others in aestheticallypresented attitudes and stances. For feelings and emotions possess a

cognitive content; they are affective bearers of convictions that we can

only disclose when we find for them, through the expressive power of

fiction, the appropriate language. In this Nussbaum is in almost word for



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word agreement with Brodsky. In this way the reading of literaturestrengthens our capacity to include the affective reactions of others as

potential arguments in moral judgment.An extensive grounding for thespecific connection that Nussbaum sees between literary imagination andmorality is found in her essay, FinelyAware and Richly Responsible(1986), which offers an interpretation of an action-sequence from TheGolden Bowl by Henry James. In light of a revised moral conception,according to which the adequacy of a moral judgment is to a large extentappropriate to principle-guided attentiveness to all nuances of a particu-lar context, she produces the constructive contribution of an aestheticallyguided presentation of the practice of moral attention.According to

Nussbaum, in our refracted identification with protagonistswe as read-

ers learn, with the help of the authors creative metaphors, to set ourselvesin the infinite complexity of a morally exemplary situation so that in theend we have shouldered our moral attentiveness for moods, life expec-tations, and concrete duties.

The weakness, not of this moral-theoretical conception but ratherof the aesthetic one presented here, shows itself immediately when weask which type of fictional texts in general cohere with such a charac-terization of literature. This position is bound to those literary presen-

tations that permit a certain measure of disinterested identificationinsofar as they allow us to participate in the action-sequence of a storyof emotional reactions and affects. That back and forth movement

between identification with and compassion for the protagonist, ofwhich Nussbaum speaks, is only possible in narrative texts that developa morally instructive interaction between sufficiently deep characters. Inshort, such a determination is applicable only to the novels of the real-istic tradition, to bourgeois drama, and perhaps to parts of classical and

expressionistic poetry. Thus it is no surprise that Nussbaum develops her

thesis in connection with the novels of Charles Dickens or Henry James,once in a while allowing herself a side glance at E.M. Forster. With sucha systematic and, from Nussbaums position, unavoidable limitation,one renders no aid to Brodskys proposal. For in the final analysis, onlya particular sampling of fictional literature would prove to be worthy ofsupport from such moral criteria: Dickens, Fontane, and perhapsFaulkner might thus be available at any gas station, but Mallarme andErnst Jandl, Joyce and William Gaddis would be so expensive thatalmost no one would be able to afford their works.

Wolfgang Welsch, on the other hand, starts out from a position iden-tical to Brodskys second thesis, claiming that the reading of fictionpermits us an aesthetic experience that indirectly delivers a cognitivegain. For in understanding what is aesthetically presented, we sharpenour perception of the incomparable [unverfiigbar] individual, so that inthe end we arrive at a developed sense for the particularity of the single



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case, one removed from any generalization. The reading of literature,indeed the experience of art in general, strengthens our capacity to

perceive situations and events from the point of view of the individualother, and to include this unique viewpoint in evaluating moral conflicts.Now the problem with this second position is certainly not that it is tooexclusive or restrictive. In fact, much of that which is achieved inaesthetic experience generally understood can be described in a similarway: as the perception of a foreign view of the world. But isnt thisdetermination then too general to be able to describe an advance incognition which should only be achieved in the experience of the workof art? The model of a cognition that penetrates, by way of the circle-

like disclosure of particularities, to the individual nucleus of a particu-lar point-of-view is of hermeneutic descent; it was evolved, already inSchleiermacher, in connection with the experience of conversation, andwas carried over by Gadamer, for one, to the understanding of works ofart. But then it is the communicative experience of reciprocal under-standing that makes possible that specific form of individualizing cogni-tion, the form which Welsch would like to reserve for aesthetic

experience alone. Thus Brodskys proposal isnt served by this aesthetic

position, either. For why should we support the production and distri-

bution of the novels of Claude Simon, lets say, when the German-Frenchstudent exchange service accomplishes the same, morally speaking, orindeed, much more? Why subsidize modern poetry for the sake of the

progress in moral cognition which mass tourism might produce on amuch broader foundation?2

The result of my excursion through the various aesthetic possi-bilities of justifying Brodskys proposal is thus negative: the concepts ofaesthetic experience that are here offered with an eye towards moral

insight are either too one-sided or too general to justify a special ethi-

cal position for literature. Obviously the question remains whetherthere is an aesthetic idea of fiction that is both concrete and generalenough to justify, or at least to make plausible, Brodskys thinking. Iwant to close with a speculative idea, one that attempts to draw conse-quences from ancient tragedy as to the indirect moral function offiction.3 In its political life,Athenian democracy, the polls, dependedfundamentally on tragic theater; for attendance at the tragedies permit-ted the citizens to withdraw temporarily from their routinized, every-day life of political decision-making in order that they be opened up toan experience that was to benefit, in return, the rationality of theirdecisions. To be more specific: in the experience of the aestheticallypresented event, these citizens were emotionally confronted with thefact that they had to make their decisions in a world that was essen-

tially more morally complex and more morally contradictory than wasvisible in the rational will-formation of the polis. There were many



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actions in tragedy that had more than one plausible interpretation.Forms of life, in themselves just, always collided with one another: what

counted as rational was periodically and abruptly distorted, and eventransformed into its opposite.

Why shouldnt we understand literature as a whole as being for ourstill incomplete democracy what ancient tragedy was for the rationalwill-formation of the polis: a necessary form of interruption thatconfronts us all with the fact that the human soul is too profound andtoo rich in meanings to permit simple answers to the question about howto live? Fictional literature in all its forms aesthetically reveals to us the

insight that our action always contains more in symbolic meaning thanwe

commonly visualize in the everyday life of democracy. Thus, in orderto protect ourselves from the over-hasty decisions that are guided onlyby the easiest interpretations of utterances or the vicissitudes of life - inother words, for the sake of political rationality - we must keepourselves open to this aesthetically presented surplus of meaning. In thissense, the engagement with fiction would afford to every member of a

democratic community the interruption of the everyday that is necessaryin order to make us aware of the indispensable plurality of possibleinterpretations of all that we do.

Such, it seems to me, could possibly justify Brodskys immodestproposal. Literature deserves an economic subsidy from the consti-tutional state, since it opens for us in its various guises the experience ofthe multiplicity of possible meanings for our everyday actions. For with-out such a knowledge, which can be developed only aesthetically, our

political decisions would lack that particular type of rationality thatconsists in the consciousness of the provisionality and fragility of ourrespective dominant, intersubjectively worked out interpretations of

meaning. In grounding his proposal Brodsky would have thus done

better to speak only of an indirect function of the literary imaginationfor morality. What we reach in a unique way through literary imagina-tion is neither moral sensitivity nor hermeneutic capability, but ratherthat feel for the surplus of meaning in our actions that fosters level-head-edness in political-moral decisions.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitt, Faculty of Philosophy,Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

(Translated by Stephen Findley)



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Notes

1 All numbers in parentheses in the following text refer to the correspondingpages of this lecture.

2 I owe the comparison with mass tourism to Ruth Sonderegger.3 In the following I make use of an idea developed by Jonathan Lear in

reference to psychoanalysis.

References

Brodsky, Joseph (1991) An Immodest Proposal, The New Republic

,

11

November, 31-6.

Lear, Jonathan (1995) The Shrink is in, The New Republic,

25 December,18-25.

Nussbaum, Martha (1986) FinelyAware and Richly Responsible: MoralAttention and the Moral Task of Literature, The Journal of Philosophy,82(10): 516-29.

Nussbaum, Martha (1995) Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public

Life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Welsch, Wolfgang (1996) Asthethik: Ethische Implikationen und Konsequenzender Asthetik, in Wolfgang Welsch Crenzgnge derAsthetik. Stuttgart:Reclam Verlag.


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