Joseph Brodsky and the Aesthetic Origins of Ethics

ABSTRACT

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics.

KEYWORDS:

• ethics
• aesthetics
• poetry
• Joseph Brodsky
• John McMurtry
• life-value

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Brodsky, “Nobel Lecture.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/.

^2. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 35.

^3. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 543. The person who “lives aesthetically sees only possibilities everywhere … whereas the person who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.”

^4. McMurtry, Value of all Values, 267–68.

^5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 65.

^6. Such arguments are wrong because they confuse the author as a literary explorer of problems with a moral agent who endorses solutions. Literature is an exploration which has to go into the dark corners because human desire leads imagination there. But a literary character is a creative construction. Characters that affirm repugnant practices in a novel are not affirmations of those practices, precisely because they are invented to explore those practices in a contrived and constructed literary space. For a general discussion and survey of various perspectives on the question of the relation between ethics and aesthetics in this narrower sense, see Boos and Glowacka, Between Ethics and Aesthetics. I am also not interested in the opposite question of whether aesthetics in the narrow sense generates ethical obligations. I am interested in the more basic problem of how felt sensuous receptivity and felt response are the source of all forms of evaluation, regardless of content. On the problem of ethical duties arising from aesthetics in the narrower sense, see Dyck, “Aesthetic Obligations,” 1–21.

^7. Romantic literary critics tended to argue in this direction. See, for example, the discussion in Griffin, “Georg Eliot’s Feuerbach,” 475–502.

^8. Ibid. In Lenin’s case, one of his justifications for revolution was to spread literacy so the Russian masses could appreciate Tolstoy and classical Russian literature. See Lenin, “Leo Tolstoy,” 60.

^9. My goal is not to defend or develop the content of ethics in this sense. I have developed those systematic arguments at length elsewhere. See Noonan, Materialist Ethics and Life-Value.

^10. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 204, 202.

^11. McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, 23.

^12. I chose these examples because in them the poets themselves focus on the transformative power of poetry. I do not mean to argue that all poets consciously set out to prove my philosophical point or deny that an essential element of poetic creation involves the experimental invention of new forms. I say that formal innovation itself involves the sort of felt relationship I am examining, although in this case it is directed at the history of poetry rather than the physical world.

^13. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 38.

^14. Rancière, Aisthesis, 57.

^15. Scarry, Body in Pain, 286.

^16. Ibid.

^17. Brodsky, “The Butterfly,” in Selected Poems, 33, 34.

^18. Graham, “Manifest Destiny,” in Materialism, 100.

^19. Ibid., “Invention of the Other,” 132.

^20. Lanchester, Debt to Pleasure, 35.

^21. Levi, Periodic Table, 232.

^22. Ibid.

^23. Camus, The Outsider, 48.

^24. Ibid., 112.

^25. Ibid., 120.

^26. McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, 260.

^27. Ibid., 266.

^28. Ibid., 270, 274.

^29. Ibid., 276.

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Notes on contributors

Jeff Noonan

Jeff Noonan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His most recent books are Embodied Humanism: Towards Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment (Lexington Books, 2022), and Embodiment and the Meaning of Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).