Reasonable Imaginings: Learning from Imagination

If imagination bears at all on moral judgment, I want to suggest that it is not by teaching a precept, either in an interested, custom-bound, Humean way or in a disinterested Kantian way.¹ When the moral consequence of the artwork is hypothesized, we are often stymied by the problem of adequating moral rules with aesthetic rules, or ethical nature with aesthetic effect. In making one set of rules adequate to the other or finding the experiential ground on which they converge, we often risk losing a grasp of what kind of activity the imagination might actualize. Another way of approaching the question of what relation imagination has to morality is to grant, at least provisionally, the distinctiveness of the experiential registers each subsists upon. Aesthetic moralists from Plato to Sidney, to Johnson and Arnold, to Martha Nussbaum, treat moral knowledge largely as something to be exemplified. The universal precept governing behavior takes precedence over the possibilities otherwise inherent in potentially ungovernable behavior.

I think this stance renders imagination cognitively inert. Alternatively, I want to endorse an aesthetic cognitivism that gives imagination agential parity with moral judgment without conflating the two. Such aesthetic cognitivism values instantiation as distinct from, but not necessarily at the expense of, exemplification. To put this in overly simple terms, one could say that morality teaches while imagination learns. But this is not to say that imagination learns what morality teaches. Nor is it to concede a rather weary dualism of reason and affect. In the end, I want to see the artwork as making the tension between teaching and learning an irreducible threshold of imaginative activity. But more immediately I want to maintain the relevance of rationalistic purpose to both without subsuming them to a monolithic faculty of Reason, or abandoning Reason altogether in favor of a sense particularism.

In this regard, I want to present an admittedly unorthodox view of imagination as soliciting reasons for actions. This entails a rough analogy between imaginative acts and physical actions. I do not, however, invite a confusion of the realms of the physical and the mental. Instead, I claim that imagination entails a taking up of commitments—a kind of action—with respect to choices promulgated within a sensuous presentational field. Imagination therefore involves us in something like the Wittgensteinian game of giving and receiving reasons: this is the explanatory task that obtains wherever competing commitments are in the offing. More to the point, it therefore involves us in normative knowledge. I should say that, for the purposes of this essay, norms means ethical norms.

We typically think of moral norms as teachable. But when we ascribe moral norms to works of art in the manner of George Eliot’s faith in the ethical pedagogy of the novel, we are insufficiently mindful of how we learned them, or what kind of learning is presupposed in teaching them. Since Horace’s Letters to the Pisos,² I think such questions have been begged in order to hold faith with the universalistic aspirations of moralizing consciousness as if morality had to do only with adherence to norms, not the propagation of norms. Indeed the attitude that morality is normative and teachable, while imagination is norm-averse and irrational, flows from a misunderstanding about the nature of norms. On this point, I am in agreement with Stephen Turner’s recent thinking in Brains/Practices/Relativism.³ Turner wants to distance himself from the assumption that norms are somehow straightforwardly derivative of epistemic systems and therefore not integral to the rationalistic activity which animates thought as much as it registers thought. As such, normativity falls prey to the charge of ideological coercion. Following Nietzsche, Weber, and McCluhan, Turner holds with the idea that norms have—in effect—magical origins, or have their inception in extraordinary deeds. The teachable principle, or what Nietzsche would call the moralizing philosophy that gives normativity its cultural force, and that is deemed to be its cause, is revealed to be an effect for which a cause is relatively arbitrarily intuitable. What we take to be normative rules governing our activity, says Turner, is only...