On Christmas Eve, millions upon millions of Americans sat down to watch A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, just as they did in 2009, 2008 and so on back into the decades. They found themselves captivated; weeping and laughing, alternating between righteous anger and warm-hearted approval. Many walked away from their television screens with a deep sense of moral strength, knowing in their hearts that that an insatiable lust for money will destroy a person and his community, certain beyond a doubt that greedy, irresponsible lending practices are the scourge of individuals and societies alike.
Hang on...“Insatiable lust for money?” “Greedy, irresponsible lending practices?” Haven’t those phrases been in the headlines recently?
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In recent years, many have argued that the narrative arts—theatre, film and literature—are a great boon to the development of an ethical personality. Martha Nussbaum is perhaps the most respected advocate of this basic kind of position, arguing (in “Love’s Knowledge”) that to read a good novel just is to exercise our capacity for ethical judgment. Michael DePaul summarizes this idea when he suggests that literature can “supply the kind of experience needed to develop a person’s faculty of moral judgment”(DePaul 1993). It has been said that a heartfelt engagement with those arts expands our imaginative horizons, engages our emotions of sympathy, and allows us to see the world through other eyes. We project ourselves into the lives of others, and this broadening of perspective makes us more sensitive and empathic.
Plato, by contrast, was famously grouchy about art, specifically about mimetic art, that is, art which aims to portray or to represent:
Painting or drawing, and artistic imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason... they have no true or healthy aim. (Republic, Book X)His arguments in this section of the Republic have struck modern readers as bizarre or even childish, but we cannot deny that Plato was certainly right in one respect. The mimetic arts do not and cannot represent ethical reality. Because of this, we actually have reason to suspect that art degrades our ethical faculties.
Let me explain. When we read a novel or watch a film, we will usually find ourselves sympathizing with certain characters, despising others, and sensing a kind of deep lesson or theme in the narrative. However, there is, by necessity, one important character missing from any film, novel or theatrical production. That character is us. We are the audience, and an audience is precisely what real life does not have.
One of the pesky things about real life is that you cannot really “opt out” of the picture, choosing to view it from the sidelines passively. For this is itself a choice, a decision with character and consequence. In real life, there are no audiences, only actors.
While some philosophers have invited us to view mimetic art as a tool for ethical development, Plato’s basic insight—that mimetic art falsifies reality—makes enormous trouble for this proposal. The fact that we necessarily experience art as outsiders means that art cannot replicate a central feature of ethical experience. It cannot replicate what it is like to actually express ethical emotions and make ethical decisions. This probably explains how we can sit down every Christmas, en masse, to “learn” ethical lessons that we promptly ignore, destroying economies and communities in the process.
Now, it may well be that the novel or the play expands our imaginative powers or engages our emotions of sympathy, and it may well be that these are ethically useful functions. After all, a person without imagination or sympathy is a person incapable of ethical feeling. Yet, when we examine the ways in which mimetic art provokes these changes in us, we ought to become suspicious.
Mimetic art invites us to direct our ethical emotions (or "reactive attitudes") towards imagined simulacra, towards people and situations who do not exist and thus cannot even respond to us. These are simulated or "virtual" ethical experiences, experiences which contrast rather strongly with the actual experience of directing emotions and attitudes towards real, responsive flesh-and-blood persons.
For this reason alone, we should reject the idea that the consumption of mimetic art is ethical training. In fact, it might just be an invitation to ethical passivity. The obvious question here is this: in a world full of comedy and tragedy, a world filled with fantastical events and wild drama, in a world bursting at the seams with joy and suffering and love and hate and good and evil, why would anyone ever think that we need art to produce ethical situations for us? Surely we are all surrounded by such situations, and to engage with imaginary ones is to choose passivity over activity.
For this reason alone, we should reject the idea that the consumption of mimetic art is ethical training. In fact, it might just be an invitation to ethical passivity. The obvious question here is this: in a world full of comedy and tragedy, a world filled with fantastical events and wild drama, in a world bursting at the seams with joy and suffering and love and hate and good and evil, why would anyone ever think that we need art to produce ethical situations for us? Surely we are all surrounded by such situations, and to engage with imaginary ones is to choose passivity over activity.
I, for my part, will continue to enjoy novels, plays, poetry and film for as long as I can. I will not, however, justify my enjoyment of art by reference to its supposed ability to make me into a better person. As a corollary, I will not justify the existence of humanities departments by clinging to this odd fantasy. Let us at least be honest enough to admit that we enjoy art for its own sake, and save ourselves the trouble of trying to uncover this strange and unlikely harmony between aesthetic experience and ethics.
