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Art, Emotion and Ethics Art, Emotion and Ethics BERYS GAUT 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Berys Gaut 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First Published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gaut, Berys Nigel. Art, emotion, and ethics / Berys Gaut. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–926321–9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–926321–3 (alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics. 2. Ethics. 3. Art—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. BH39. G36 2007 111’.85—dc22 2006103223 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–926321–9 13579108642 Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations x 1. The Long Debate 1 1.1. The Controversies 1 1.2. Disentangling the Issues 6 1.3. A Thematic Overview 9 1.4. Two Bathshebas 14 2. Aesthetics and Ethics: Basic Concepts 26 2.1. The Puzzle of the Aesthetic 26 2.2. The Aesthetic and the Artistic 34 2.3. The Concept of the Ethical 41 3. A Conceptual Map 49 3.1. Options in the Debate 49 3.2. Pro tanto Principles 57 4. Autonomism 67 4.1. Radical Autonomism and Artistic Acts 67 4.2. Moderate Autonomism 76 4.3. Aesthetic Relevance 82 5. Artistic and Critical Practices 90 5.1. Artists’ Ambitions 92 5.2. Criticism 95 6. Questions of Character 107 6.1. Artworks and Friends 109 6.2. Moral Beauty 114 6.3. Moral Beauty and Works of Art 127 7. The Cognitive Argument: The Epistemic Claim 133 7.1. Formulating Aesthetic Cognitivism 136 7.2. Sources of Knowledge 141 7.3. How to Learn from Imagination 147 7.4. Imagination and Ethical Learning 157 viii Contents 8. The Cognitive Argument: The Aesthetic Claim 165 8.1. Arguing for the Aesthetic Claim 165 8.2. Autonomist and Contextualist Objections 172 8.3. Techniques and Strategies 186 8.4. Lolita 194 9. Emotion and Imagination 203 9.1. The Importance of Emotional Realism 203 9.2. The Possibility of Fiction-Directed Emotions 208 9.3. The Rationality of Fiction-Directed Emotions 216 10. The Merited Response Argument 227 10.1. Versions of the Argument 227 10.2. Objections and Replies 234 10.3. Humour 242 10.4. Conclusion 251 Bibliography 253 Index 263 Acknowledgements I am grateful to the many philosophers who have commented on the precursors, partial or whole, of this book. I would like in particular to thank David Davies, Daniel Jacobson, Mathew Kieran and Paisley Livingston, all of whom read versions of the complete manuscript and provided valuable comments, suggestions and examples, many of which have been incorporated into the book. Other philosophers have commented on various papers, draft chapters, or talks, material from which has been used in this book. These include Noël Carroll, Alan Goldman, Gordon Graham, Peter Lamarque, Jerrold Levinson, Richard Moran, Alex Neill, Monique Roelofs, Robert Stecker, Kendall Walton and Nick Zangwill. Several philosophers have published criticisms of or responses to an earlier version of the merited response argument, and I am grateful to them for helping to clarify my thoughts on the subject; besides some already mentioned, these include James Anderson and Jeff Dean, Oliver Conolly, Kate Thomson-Jones and Eddie Zemach. I would like to thank the University of St Andrews for a period of Research Leave, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding a contiguous period of leave during which most of this book was written. I am also grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and Rupert Cousens at Oxford University Press, whose enthusiasm, forbearance and support during the preparation and publication of this book have been much appreciated. I am grateful to the Louvre for permission to use Figures 1 and 2, and the National Gallery of Ireland for permission to use Figure 3. I would also like to thank the following publishers for permission to use material from published articles: Routledge, for ‘‘Reasons, Emotions and Fictions’’, published in Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds), Imagination and the Philosophy of the Arts; Cambridge University Press for ‘‘The Ethical Criticism of Art’’, published in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection; Blackwell Publishing, for ‘‘Art and Cognition’’, published in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art; and Oxford University Press, for ‘‘Art and Knowledge’’, published in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. My greatest debts are to my parents, and to Morag, Suzanne and Robert. Without their support and encouragement, writing this book might have been possible: but it would have been a lot less fun. List of Illustrations 1. Rembrandt, Bathsheba with King David’s Letter. 1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Oil on canvas. Photo RMN/ Jean Schormans 15 2. Willem Drost, Bathsheba with King David’s Letter. 1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Oil on canvas. Photo RMN/ Jean-Gilles Berizzi 16 3. Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ. 1602, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Oil on canvas. Photo National Gallery of Ireland. Indefinite loan from the Jesuit Community who acknowledges the generosity of the late Dr. Marie-Lea Wilson. 134 1 The Long Debate 1.1. THE CONTROVERSIES Art has the power to upset, to disturb, to make us question our assumptions, to change us. But it also has the power to celebrate our cherished convictions, to pacify us, to be, as Matisse put it, ‘‘like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue’’.¹ These powers of art have made it the recurrent object of high ethical hope and of deep ethical concern. In recent years concern has been the more prominent of the two: many artworks have been publicly represented as evil or corrupting, and have been condemned or even censored on such grounds. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs became celebrated in 1989 as objects of conservative fear and hatred. Guided by the animadversions of Senator Jesse Helms, the resulting uproar led to cutbacks in the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts and a serious threat to its very existence. In 1998 in England, controversy erupted over the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, sculpted by Eric Gill. Critics pointed to a biography of Gill, which had exposed its subject’s unquenchable sexual appetites, appetites that had allegedly been exercised on prostitutes, two of his sisters, his daughters and even on a dog. How, it was argued, could the sculptures of such a man be set up as the vehicles of devotion in a place of worship?² And the Royal Academy’s 1997 Sensation exhibition in London lived up to its title, causing a furore in the British popular press by exhibiting Marcus Harvey’s picture of the child murderer Myra Hindley made from prints of children’s hands. When the show transferred to Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani denounced Chris Ofili’s picture of a black Madonna that included elephant dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines, threatening to remove city subsidies from the museum and evict it from its site. Moral anxieties have been directed not just at the fine arts, but perhaps even more recurrently and forcefully at the popular arts. Michael Medved wrote a controversial and influential book that denounced Hollywood for celebrating a ¹ Henri Matisse, ‘‘Notes of a Painter’’, p. 135. ² The biography of Gill was Eric Gill by Fiona MacCarthy. 2 Art, Emotion and Ethics culture of violence and indifference to suffering; and films such as Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction became the objects of considerable popular concern.³ In the early 1990s ‘gangsta’ rap was frequently and vehemently denounced for its misogyny, its glorification of brutality, its crass and strutting materialism, and in 1994 became the subject of congressional hearings.⁴ These fears about film and popular music, centred around but not exhausted by concerns about sex and violence, are only the most recent expressions of anxieties that reach back into the histories of these media. Film as soon as it became a mass medium was the object of moral panic; the Catholic Legion of Decency had been a major force in getting the American movie industry to tighten up its Production Code in 1934 in order to curb the industry’s dangerously immoral tendencies.
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