Human Action in Philosophy and Poetry

The philosophical effort to see and say the truth about human agents and human action seems very different from the poetic effort to delight us with actors who only pretend to do what we see them do. These two modes of thinking present action differently, and I approach this difference through pedagogical considerations associated with teaching ethics in philosophy classes. Students rightly sense a difference between the philosophical appreciation of human beings as practical and the character of real human action as acted. In this paper, I argue that part of this distance can be bridged by considering the poetic imitation of action. Obviously, the imitation of action is artificial and therefore also stands at some distance from real action as acted. Nevertheless, I argue, philosophical reflection can benefit from the support of poetic display. My claim is not merely pedagogical, but philosophical: poetic imitation and presentation of action brings human action to full intelligibility, which would otherwise remain dormant.

In the first part of this article, I make some general remarks about the metaphysical warrant for supplementing philosophical ethics with artistic presentation of action, that is to say, poiêsis in the Aristotelian sense. By drawing on some familiar Aristotelian distinctions, I show how literary depictions of action can carry philosophical weight. In the second, I consider, as one instance of philosophically insightful, poetic treatment of action, a short story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn entitled “The New Generation.”

I.

There are no trolley cars in my ethics class. There are no lifeboats or desert islands where we face arresting dilemmas. These fashionable thought experiments eliminate all the ephemeral accidents of ordinary reality and place anyone and everyone at the heart of a constructed situation calling urgently for decision. They can be captivating because they feel like a puzzle or a riddle, and this helps overcome the natural tendency to evade serious thinking about how we choose. Such problems crystallize and make plain the logic we embrace in making one decision rather than another, and they help us examine how we necessarily endorse principles embedded in our actions. Still, there are no trolley cars in my ethics class. Instead, there are stories.

I have two things to say in defense of this practice. The first requires a little metaphysics, for which I appropriate and adapt a thesis recently expressed by Robert Sokolowski: “Each accidental predication specifies a property.”¹ For example, saying “The window is broken” insinuates a property—frangibility or something similar—that belongs to windows. Mentioning the one determination (broken) invokes a property lying dormant in any window, which might be actualized variously, as in a window that is cracked or shattered or creaking. Accidents reveal properties and properties, in turn, specify essences. So a transient accidental feature, like a smile, is one of many possible manifestations of a property, traditionally called risibility, which is found in all human beings and only human beings and which is therefore revelatory of the human essence.² Risibility is a power or potency that might be actualized in a knowing grin, a childish giggle, or a mocking laugh, as well as countless variants. The accident, which does not have to be there and is hardly a real being at all, signifies the property, which reveals one aspect of an essence. To mention a smile is to appeal implicitly to human nature. The Cheshire Cat, with its grin inhering in nothing, makes this point by way of nonsense.

Accidents, like smiles, mediate otherwise hidden natures. Even risibility is inaccessible to us; we know it only through its several actualizations—this polite chuckle, that impish grin, and so on. What is first for us is not first in itself, and no matter what progress we make toward understanding essences, we can never replace or dispense with our starting point, namely, the superficial and evanescent accidents. And the accident is intelligible only as a temporary and non-necessary determination of what is permanent “beneath” it, namely, the property immediately and the essence ultimately. In Aristotle’s language, accidents imply properties and essence as their matter, like snub implies...