Eileen John is a Reader in the Philosophy Department at the University of Warwick. Her research is primarily in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, with particular interests in art and ethics, and literature’s philosophical role.
A post by Eileen John
The term ‘moral imagination’ commonly refers, in my usage, to something nebulous: activity that goes beyond argument and direct experience, somehow concerns the moral dimension of life, and is somehow a good thing. My philosophical work often deals with morally interesting literary texts, and ‘moral imagination’ can be handy for gesturing at what readers do when engaging with morally charged fictional or figurative content. But is immersing oneself in such content in itself a moral activity? If I construe moral imagination, albeit hazily, as a morally good thing, the activity ought to be more demanding of a reader’s moral resources. Maybe it counts as moral imagining if imaginative activity leads readers to exercise moral judgment or to generate moral understanding in response to the work. I remember realizing, in the middle of reading a short story, that I had behaved terribly to someone exactly as the self-absorbed central character in the story had – would re-understanding myself in light of moral understanding of a character count as moral imagination? That seems a bit accidental (depending on readers happening to have an autobiographical realization) and still not especially deep in terms of demands on moral resources. Maybe these are slightly good outcomes, and the morally imaginative potential of literature is slightly good. I will approach this issue, of how there could be morally demanding potential in what readers do, first by raising a few general questions about moral imagination.
Mavis Biss, on this site (Biss 2017) and in a series of publications, has written extensively about “radical moral imagination,” in which people create “new possibilities for moral action through the modification of meanings” (Biss 2016, 558). In one of her examples (which happens to concern a fictional character, Bashevis Singer’s Yentl), Biss ties the linked imaginative and moral aspects of the character’s activity to her anticipating a not-yet-articulated concept and justification – Yentl is imaginative in moving toward a new conception – and this movement is morally constructive, as Yentl “imagines a new way to be self‐respecting” (Biss 2013, 940). The very broad idea is that we sometimes need imagination-supported innovation to “make exceptional moral moves” (Biss 2013, 937), as in conditions of “hermeneutical injustice” when entrenched concepts do not adequately identify experiences of oppression (Fricker 2007). Biss builds a rich conversation on these issues between people such as Fricker, Claudia Card, Susan Babbitt, and Cheshire Calhoun – go read all of this. I will consider an example from fiction in a moment that is similar, yet I think different from Biss’s case – maybe the morally imaginative activity is conceptually less radical, but more accessible and able to form part of one’s standard moral repertoire.
My brief addition to this conversation carries a mixed message. On the one hand, I worry about tying moral innovation to imagination and leaving the imaginative project especially to the interests and desires of whoever in some sense most needs the innovation. Could we all get access to moral progress through careful observation, thinking, and reasoning about what we already know? I think moral truths are often staring us in the face, whatever our interests are. That’s the ‘we don’t need to depend on imagination’ thought. On the other hand, human life seems insistently, alarmingly, crucially open to new ways of embodying moral meaning, and maybe it is helpful to call readiness for and activation of that openness a kind of morally imaginative stance. I am not sure that this stance needs canonical forms of imagination, in which we summon up what is absent or engage experientially with counterfactual scenarios (see Kind 2013 on non-primary uses of the vocabulary of imagination). It is more like being ready to see one’s actual circumstances anew, not assuming that the moral meaning they have held so far is coherent or fulfills one’s moral commitments and aspirations.
Let’s consider a fictional case, both for the content it immerses the reader in and to return to my question about readers and “moral imagination.” In Percival Everett’s short story, “The Appropriation of Cultures,” the protagonist Daniel is a young, well-to-do black man living in South Carolina. (I think the story is set in the late 1990’s, from its initial publication date.) Daniel occasionally plays guitar at a bar, sitting in with a jazz combo of older men. The story gets rolling when, “One night, some white boys from a fraternity yelled forward to the stage”, shouting repeatedly at Daniel, “‘Play ‘Dixie’ for us!’” (Everett, 91). Daniel pauses, looking back at them, and at the “uncomfortable expressions” on his fellow musicians’ faces, and at “the embarrassed faces of the other college kids in the club” (Everett, 92).
And then he started to play. He felt his way slowly through the chords of the song once and listened to the deadened hush as it fell over the room. He used the slide to squeeze out the melody of the song he had grown up hating, the song the whites had always pulled out to remind themselves and those other people just where they were. Daniel sang the song. He sang it slowly. He sang it, feeling the lyrics, deciding that the lyrics were his, deciding that the song was his. Old times there are not forgotten … He meant what he sang. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland. (Everett, 92)
The song goes over well (except with the ones who requested it). This experience ends up helping Daniel decide to do something even more dramatic – and hilarious, and powerful – but I won’t spoil the story. My gloss on this initial scene is that Daniel finds a morally salutary way out of an unpromising corner. He claims the song as his own and, with the help of a receptive audience, it takes on new meaning, now insisting on remembering the past adequately and affirming “Dixie” as his home. It seems he would have been justified in ignoring or actively refusing a request aiming to denigrate him and the other musicians. But it also seems that refusing to play the song would leave its meaning and the human relations it attempts to enforce untouched. Daniel is unwilling to leave them untouched, and as a performer, he has a meaning-making opportunity available to him.
In the fictional scene, various things seem relevant to Daniel pulling this off. He is motivated to do something because he has been a target of the racism carried by the song. His gesture works in part because he is black and is not supposed to find anything to like in this song. Singing it sincerely is shockingly transgressive. The musical possibilities – that the song’s jaunty pace can be slowed down, that its lyrics have ambiguous literal meanings, and that the context is jazz and Daniel trusts himself to improvise – all seem relevant. Perhaps Daniel has some aesthetic luck here.
I think this character exercises moral imagination. Note that he does not seem to have imagined doing what he does with the song, in the sense of running through it in a planning or mentally experimenting sense. Or perhaps his feeling his way through the chords is simultaneously hearing it and imagining it differently? His musical experience seems crucial (that he has the jazz musician’s openness to musical change), as well as his knowledge of what he hates about the song, taking the song as the tip of an iceberg. I would not immediately say that the scene shows Daniel resisting a “hermeneutic injustice,” if that would mean there was a gap in hermeneutic resources that had made it difficult to render his experience of racism intelligible (Fricker 2007, Ch. 7). It seems plausible that Daniel is very clear about the racist system he lives with; he can name the problem. He faces a less conceptual problem, of how to take charge of this moment and sing what he wants to sing. The ‘new meaning’ for the song is not conceptually radical (I think) – it is fairly obvious that “Dixie” is his family’s home and has been for a very long time, and that remembering its past should be, as it were, a slow and somber experience. But it isn’t usually and openly said in this way. He is morally imaginative, on Everett’s fashioning of the story, because he assumes the role of meaning-maker at all and is ready to try to express adequate understanding of self and history.
Granted that there is no one thing that readers of a story will, must or can do, what might be morally imaginative about engaging with this story? As fiction, it seems likely that canonical imagining will go on, with Everett’s writing triggering experience as of “what is happening in the bar.” I don’t know what it would be like to read this without already knowing the song and its cultural presence. But for readers who do know it, my speculation is that the story, with the imagining it prompts – taking on board what Daniel does, has a surprising ability to do to readers what Daniel does for his audience. I hear that song differently now. But this seems like Everett’s achievement, not drawing too much on my moral being. A more demanding response, not in any sense guaranteed but in various ways encouraged, is to read the story as an occasion for thinking harder and further about what I already do, think, feel, and expect as normal. If I would be one of the “embarrassed faces” in the bar, for instance, how does that situate me in keeping uncomfortable meanings afloat? Who do I think of most readily as belonging somewhere, as having a legitimate claim to a home? Whose history looms large for me and why? The story can, by way of its outrageous yet ordinary imaginative project, remind me of and perhaps activate my own role as a sustainer and maker of meaning. To the extent that it makes me more open to the moral burdens of meaning-making, I suggest this is a form of moral imagination.
References
Mavis Biss (2013). “Radical Moral Imagination: Courage, Hope and Articulation,” Hypatia 28(4): 937-54.
_____ (2016). “Radical Moral Imagination and Moral Luck,” Metaphilosophy 47 (4-5): 558-70.
_____ (2017). “Moral Imagination and the Problem of Reception.” Junkyard of the Mind, 11/29/17. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2017/11/28/moral-imagination-and-the-problem-of-reception
Percival Everett (2004). “The Appropriation of Cultures,” in Damned If I Do. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, pp. 91-103.
Miranda Fricker (2007). Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Amy Kind (2013). “The Heterogeneity of the Imagination,” Erkenntnis 78(1): 141-59.