[lit-ideas] Re: someone help
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 13:54:06 -0400
Ursula quotes a Web site: Art and the moral
imagination? Art /is/ the moral imagination.
When I was younger I used to side with John
Gardner in his _On Moral Fiction_ that art is
essentially a moral force. There are so many
partisans of that view, great writers like
Tolstoy, etc.
Is the imagination essentially moral?
Lately I tend to regard the imagination as
trans-moral or amoral. The direction of
imagination is essentially wider than any
particular moral vector. As easily as it shows the
triumph of character, imagination shows us the
death of beauty, the Byzantium we can't maintain
here.
Art can inspire us with beauty. I mean we can try
to live beautiful lives, a'la Nietzsche and Henry
James. Or like Proust's character in _The
Captive_, Bergotte, we can die from beauty. But
beauty, like moral force, are things subsumed by
the imagination (Bergotte's death for example
being just a small incident in a larger work of
the imagination) and not even necessary for it.
Is the imagination moral? Does the artistic
imagination have to be moral?
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