[lit-ideas] Moral Imagination
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 14:40:23 +0900
Was taking a break. Arts & Letters Daily took me to a Gertrude Himmelfarb
review of a new book about Lionel Trilling. I read the following and thought
instantly of John Wager and his observation that if choices are black and
white there is no moral judgment to be made.
Trilling matters, then, Kirsch insists, because literature matters—and
> literature as Trilling understood it. His novel, The Middle of the Journey,
> has been criticized for creating characters who are merely the spokesmen for
> ideas. The same charge has been levelled against his literary criticism,
> which is said to treat novels and poems as vehicles for ideas about society
> and politics rather than as aesthetic responses to personal experience.
> Kirsch counters this objection by elevating Trilling’s literary criticism to
> the “primary,” “autonomous” status of literature itself, reflecting the same
> aesthetic sensibility that the novelist or poet brings to experience—and
> reflecting, too, the ideas about society and politics that are implicit in
> the novels and poems themselves.
> Kirsch is treading a fine line. He does not want to reduce Trilling to the
> role of social or, worse, political commentator. Yet he fully acknowledges
> the social and political import, even intent, of Trilling’s literary
> criticism: “More than any twentieth-century American intellectual, Trilling
> stood for the principle that society and politics cannot be fully understood
> without the literary imagination.” And the literary imagination, for
> Trilling, was preeminently a “moral imagination.” Moral imagination—not the
> moralistic dicta or pronouncements evoked in present-day debates about
> same-sex marriage, abortion, and the like. The true moral imagination
> transcends such dogmatic moralizing because it is imbued with “moral
> realism,” a realism that is “not the awareness of morality itself but of the
> contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life.”
> It is this combination of “moral realism” and “moral imagination” that was
> the basis of Trilling’s critique of the “liberal imagination.” That phrase
> first appeared in the title of the introductory chapter of his book on E.
> M. Forster, “Forster and the Liberal Imagination”:
>
For all his long commitment to the doctrines of liberalism Forster is at war
> with the liberal imagination. Surely if liberalism has a single desperate
> weakness, it is an inadequacy of imagination: liberalism is always being
> surprised. Surprised, because the “liberal mind” has an unrealistic and
> simplistic view of morality itself. It thinks that “good is good and bad is
> bad. . . . Before the idea of good-and-evil its imagination fails.” It
> cannot accept this “improbable paradox,” a paradox that such “great
> conservative minds” as Johnson, Burke, and Arnold well understood.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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