Art, knowledge and moral understanding

Abstract

The Platonic view that art is incapable of providing us with knowledge is sufficiently widely held as to merit a serious attempt at refutation. Once it is acknowledged that there are alternative forms of knowledge other than propositional, then it is possible to establish the truth of the claim that the knowledge which art affords has a value on a par with that provided by other disciplines. Art, it is argued, has a unique potential to provide imaginative insights by reference to which we may understand what it is like to experience and to feel, in ways very different from those with which we may be familiar. It is shown to be instrumental in enabling us to refine our moral concepts as well as in determining what is salient from the moral point of view. As a powerful tool in the education of the emotions, artworks have the power to increase our moral sensitivity and to sharpen our perception of what is required of us inways that are otherwise unobtainable.

Keywords:

• Knowledge
• art
• imagination
• emotions
• moral understanding

Notes

1. Preface to his Picture of Dorian Grey.

2. Contemporary aesthetics abounds with responses to the autonomist claim that the asthetic merits of an artwork are in no way affected by whatever so-called moral merits or flaws it may be thought to possess, but these cannot be addressed here. The interested reader will find Carroll (2000) an invaluable guide through the conceptual minefield. Suffice it to say that they include: (i) ‘ethicism’ – defended by, amongst other, Berys Gaut, according to whom ‘the ethical assessment of attitudes manifested by works of art is a legitimate aspect of the aesthetic evaluation of those works, such that, if a work manifests ethically reprehensible attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically defective, and if a work manifests ethically commendable attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically meritorious’ (1998, 182); (ii) ‘moderate moralism’ – an altogether weaker claim, defended by Carroll (1996, 1998b), to the effect that while a moral flaw in a work of art can count as an aesthetic flaw, this is not always the case.

3. See Book X. The questionable metaphysical presuppositions upon which Plato based his objections to art as a source of knowledge, thereby rendering it morally suspect, need not detain us, there being altogether more challenging arguments to aesthetic cognitivism.

4. On this point, see, for example, Kivy (1998, 22). Terry Diffey rests his denial that art could be a source of knowledge on the view that ‘the mediums of art show something without asserting it’ and that ‘a condition of learning from art in any unproblematic sense requires works of art to refer to the world’ (1995, 208). (His reason for concluding that ‘there is nothing significant to be learned from art about history, society or life’ presupposes a view of learning which, on his own admission, is narrowly confined to ‘the acquision of previously unknown truths or facts’ (ibid., 210). Michael Oakeshott, as a result of a wedded attachment to autonomism, similarly denies that literature, for example, has anything to teach us ‘about the world in general and about the conduct of life’, or that it might serve a purpose in moral education (1981, 240–243). For an interesting critique of Oakeshott’s position, see Williams (2002).

5. A good introduction to the issues involved may be found in Gaut (2001). Again, as Kieran points out, in the history of art there are numerous examples of exquisite works of art intentionally serving religious, didactic or propagandistic purposes. Examples he cites include: Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, David’s The Death of Socrates, Goya’s The Disasters of War and Tatlin’s Model for the Monument of the Third International (2005, 42, 43).

6. She draws attention to Rosemary Hursthouse’s response to looking at Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s war paintings, and the respects in which her view of war as something glorious, changed as a result; the purpose of which is to show, according to Hursthouse, ‘that visual art may create in us … images of reality, of how things are [or how reality/life] may be thought of’ (1992, 279). Such an experience can, according to John, ‘have justificatory force, if the fact that some experiences cannot be ignored serves as provisional evidence that they should not be ignored’ (2001, 425).

7. While fiction is different from philosophical analysis, it can nonetheless result in the modified revision of many of our concepts as when, according to Catherine Wilson, a person ‘(a) recognises the conception presented in the novel as superior to his own and (b) adopts it in recognition of its superiority, so that it comes to serve as a kind of standard by which he views his own conduct and that of others’ (1983, 495). For as David Novitz says, ‘if in the light of Jane Austen’s Emma, one comes to believe that pride breeds self-deception [a factual belief], one may come to look for, and the first time to notice, the respects in which proud people are deceived’ (1987, 137). Again, according to Carroll: ‘Clarification does not claim that, in the standard case, we acquire interesting, new propositional knowledge from artworks, but rather that the artworks in question can deepen our moral understanding by, among other things, encouraging us to apply our moral knowledge and emotions to specific cases. For in being prompted to apply and engage our antecedent moral powers, we may come to augment them’ (1998a, 142).

8. As Scruton says: ‘a man may react violently when he should have been contemptuous, or might be contemptuous when he should have been amused’ (ibid., 143).

9. As he quite rightly points out elsewhere: ‘Constructing my own imaginings would … require of me a prodigious capacity to stand aside from my own immediate desires, since a natural tendency is to rig the narrative so as to get from it the lesson we want to hear’ (1998, 165).

10. For the view that such responses are indeed irrational, see Radford (1975). For a comprehensive survey of the issue, see Levinson (1997).

11. Robinson follows Patricia Greenspan’s (1988) reasoning, to the effect that ‘the cognitive component in an emotion may be a proposition that is merely borne in mind or attended to without being believed, as when, because of a nasty experience with a fierce dog, I am now afraid of dear old Fido whom I know to be harmless’ (ibid., 215). While many philsophers have endorsed the supposition that ‘belief’ is a necessary feature of emotion (see, for example, Oakley (1992), they have been equally emphatic about the necessity for the additional components of ‘feeling’ and ‘desire’. In spite of this, Gaut argues, it is questionable whether I have to experience the desire to do something about that which I am said to pity. I may feel pity for Anne Boleyn, without being motivated to rush to her assistance. The ‘desire’ element of the emotion in this context, he maintains, being simply the desire that she had not suffered (2003). In seeing Anna Karenina as sad, from her own perspective on life, it is not axiomatic that we necessarily feel pity, any more than seeing a living person as sad need result in an emotional reaction on our part. By parity of reasoning, I may hear a piece of music as sad without thereby feeling sad as a result. (How something as abstract as music can be expressive of emotion is not something that can be entered into here. However, Geoffrey Madell has persuasively argued that the sadness of some music is not dependent on its ‘resembling’ the sadness expressed by people; rather, ‘the sadness is a feature of the music’ (1996, 71). Furthermore, to be saddened by the music is to identify with it in such a way that one experiences ‘its vicissitudes as one’s own’ (ibid., 74). If evaluative judgments were a necessary condition of experiencing emotion when listening to music, ‘it makes it very difficult to make sense of the obvious fact that at least some music expresses emotion’ (ibid., 77). The intentional object to which one’s feelings are directed in listening to music are musical and not evaluatively characterised as states of affairs (ibid., 80) Merely because I do not feel despair when listening to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, is insufficient to establish the truth of the claim that the emotion expressed in the music is a quasi-emotion, on the grounds that not all emotions require judgments that are somehow causally responsible for felt bodily changes. Emotions are, he maintains, ‘patterns of intentional/affective states, of feelings-towards’ (ibid., 82, emphasis added). On how emotions may be expressed in music, see, for example, Trivedi (2003), and for ways in which an emotion as complex as ‘hope’ may be so expressed, see Karl and Robinson (1997).

12. As an example, he cites a passage from Anna Karenina (pt. VII, ch. 16) where Levin expresses his emotion on seeing his baby for the first time. ‘There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling’ Tolstoy writes, ‘on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension. It was a new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was so painful at first … that it prevented him from noticing the thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt when the baby sneezed’. The significance of this as far as the education of the emotions is concerned, says Hepburn, is that ‘the individuality, unexpectedness and intricacy of emotion are not denied, in the way that generalizing clichés of everyday life deny them and reduce them to greeting-card emotion-stereotypes’ (ibid., 173).

13. As Richard Eldridge says: ‘some art might show that many different things might count as virtues and vices in different contexts, (2003, 218) …. Without art morality becomes either emptily abstract or conventionalistically rigoristic; with art morality becomes legible as fundamental to the complex nature of our human lives’ (ibid., 230).

14. This was clearly recognised by Peter Winch in his reference to Melville’s Billy Budd (1972, 196–197), where Captain Vere is forced to decide between condemning an innocent man or releasing him. Vere's decision may not be the same as that which you or I would have made, but it reminds us of the fact that in deciding upon a right course of action, we cannot ignore the ways in which the moral demands of a specific situation are, in significant respects, determined by reference to the fundamental moral commitments of the moral agent in question and his or her legitimate concern with personal integrity.

15. According to Amy Mullin, there are at least three different ways in which artworks can be morally imaginative. They can encourage us to adopt an entirely novel moral perspective, they can put our moral ideas into ‘free play’, or they can endorse a familiar position (2004, 255, 256). She might also have suggested that they have the power to subvert moral complacency. (For a defence of the power of art to subvert, see Marcuse (1977). If the ability to imagine has moral significance, then according to Mullin someone might be held morally culpable for her failure to imagine. Confusion or perplexity notwithstanding, a failure to even try to imagine the consequences of our actions or inactions, or to endeavour to see the world from another’s point of view, might well merit the charge of justified moral culpability.

16. What Van Gogh sought to achieve in The Potato Eaters, according to Kieran, was ‘an imaginative understanding of the harsh living and working conditions the peasants were subject to’. The picture is not a substitute for some all too obvious piece of sociological information about the lives of peasants in nineteenth century Holland. Instead, what we learn from looking at the picture, he says, is that ‘a particular imaginative understanding of the peasants’ lives is appropriate … Van Gogh shows us this through representing the peasants unthinkingly sharing their meagre sustenance, the direction of their gazes and the group circle which displays their concern for one another’ (1996, 344). As a result of a sympathetic engagement with the picture, we may discover the importance of sharing or the importance of eating together as a family, or how people forced to live in abject poverty are equally worthy of our respect.