[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 09:58:01 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 10/8/2011 4:45:25 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
_jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxxx (mailto:jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx)
quotes from the quote by McCreery:
"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."
The word 'imagination' -- despite Dame Mary Warnock, in England -- has
little import in philosophy.
"A imagines that p"
does not make REAL direct sense. Consider:
"John imagined the sky is blue."
The idea of _moral_ imagination is thus pre-Humean: there are "imagines"
(singular 'imago') and this can be moral! Absurd! This results in a _r
epresentationalist_ view of stuff. As Palma notes, what's imaginative about
'withdrawal'? What is the _moral_ agent who withdraws from something
_imagining_?! Nothing!
Hence, by reductio ad absurdum, the misuses, literary and other, of that
morally VERY AMBIGUOUS character, E. M. Forster, the closet gay who wrote a
boring unpublished novel about coming out!
---- Cheers,
Speranza
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