The Seminars of Philosophy of Perception, Mind, and Language
The Seminars of Perception, Mind, and Language (former Seminars of Philosophy of Language and Mind) take place every year since 2001 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. The meetings aim at being an opportunity for people working in analytic philosophy to debate the latest directions of research.
The meetings are structured as a 45-50 minutes presentation, followed by an extensive discussion time. They are open to anyone interested in the topic, especially undergraduate and Ph.D. students. The language of the talks is either Italian or English.
Carola Barbero (University of Torino)
June 9 MON — 12.30-14.30
Sala Riunioni — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Immoralism and Aestheticism
Abstract: Should the immorality of literature influence its aesthetic value? What is the relation between immorality (in fiction) and immorality tout court? Should literature impart moral lessons to readers? Actually, if one of literature’s duties were to educate or to impart knowledge, then it wouldn’t be a minor detail that of having the possibility to derive from it moral (instead of immoral) lessons (Nussbaum 1990). This paper calls into question the idea that this is really the central and fundamental function of literary works, i.e. that there is a relation between ethical value and literary value of a work. We will defend here (together with Posner 1997 and 1998, Kieran 2003) an immoralist position according to which literature can survive its moral faults, growing often precisely on accounting of them. In order to support this position for a sharp distinction between ethics and aesthetics it is enough to think to the classics, full of moral atrocities – murders, human and animal sacrifices, slavery, gratuitous violence, torture – and then far from moral edification, whose greatness of value is undisputed. So, since the world of literature is moral anarchy, it seems reasonable to presume that literature’s value resides somewhere else. We need recognize a genuine literary value of works according to which literature need to be considered an autonomous and non-cognitive discourse, detached from moral or other interests, and following its own methods and rules. This is not to deny that literature may also have an instrumental value, but simply to underline that moral edification shouldn’t be seen as one of its essential characteristics. Our interest should be in the intrinsic value of literature qua literature, and literature does not fail as literature when it prescribes an immoral response or when it tells immoral stories, but when its formal or structural features are not good or do not work. The work might be shocking or dangerous but not a literary failure in the way that a tragedy fails if it is not tragic or a horror fails if it is not horrific. We should therefore distinguish between a basic aesthetic or literary level – where ethics could be as much ignored as psychology, anatomy and politics are – and a higher level – where the connections between art and reality are considered as fundamental. At the aesthetic level readers are supposed to suspend those conventions holding in the real world. The opposition here is between formalism and moralism: according to formalism the preservation of literary value rests on the containment of literature as an autonomous and non cognitive discourse, according to moralism literary texts have ethical and cognitive values and effects in the world.