In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Henry James: Making Moral Life Interesting
  • Eileen John

One reason for philosophers to turn to Henry James is for his insistent, critical, and provocative attention to the relations between the moral and the aesthetic domains. In Martha Nussbaum’s work on James and in responses prompted by her arguments, a number of ways of linking and distinguishing the moral and the aesthetic have been explored. In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum has argued for a positive alliance between aesthetic and moral activity in her account of the good reader of James, offering moral activity as a model for the aesthetic activity of encountering the literary work. I want to follow up on this issue of how being a “good reader,” of Henry James in particular, calls upon one’s moral resources.

Nussbaum argues for the intimate connection between the demands of moral life and the demands on a good reader by developing a rich view of what moral perception in life requires and pointing out that characters such as those created by James in The Golden Bowl require comparably rich perception from readers.

[T]his conception of moral attention implies that the moral/aesthetic analogy is also more than analogy. For (as James frequently reminds us by his use of the author/reader “we”) our own attention to his characters will itself, if we read well, be a high case of moral attention. “Participators by a fond attention” (AN 62) in the lives and dilemmas of his participants, we engage with them in a loving scrutiny of appearances. We actively care for their particularity, and we strain to be people on whom none of their subtleties are lost, in intellect and feeling. So if James is right about what moral attention is, then he can fairly claim that a novel such as this one not only shows it better than an abstract treatise, it also elicits it.

(162)

Nussbaum emphasizes how we can take “the good reader in life” and “the good reader inside a text,” the latter being the Jamesian character who perceives and [End Page 234] interprets her life attentively, as models for “the reader of this character and this text, who must be a moral being of the appropriate sort or else he (or she) will clearly cheapen the value of the text” (140). As readers, then, we have an obligation—I assume one best described as an aesthetic obligation—to assess the value of the literary work fairly, and with a writer like James, we will be unable to do so unless we bring to the reading our full capacities for moral perception and evaluation.

Nussbaum also draws on James’s notion of adventure to stress the bewildering, unpredictable, risky nature of moral deliberation (see esp. 140–44). To the extent that the reader engages with and appreciates the richness of the characters’ deliberative activity, the reading experience becomes an adventure as well. Cora Diamond endorses Nussbaum’s view of moral deliberation as an adventure of improvisation and exploration of new possibilities and presents it as an important corrective to views which misrepresent moral life as addressing situations “with fixed, given possibilities,” where “the terms of choice, the alternatives, are something for which one has no responsibility” (312). And Diamond also takes this moral model as exemplary for readers of James, the “bad reader” being one who misses both the characters’ adventures and the adventure of reading, while the good reader of James is

the adventurous reader . . . who delights in there being more in things than meets the eye, who delights in the invitation the tale offers to find, to make, adventure in reading. That spirit is linked by James with imaginative perception in life, the capacity and the wish to bring to what befalls one an attention that makes it adventure, with all the dangers that may bring.

(314–15)

This claim—that the morally perceptive reader is the one who can have the best adventure in reading—seems quite right, certainly with respect to reading Henry James. But I think there is more to be said about exactly how the goals of adventure and fine moral awareness, in reading and in real life, relate to...

Share