(The text of a speech
delivered at Annual General meeting of the Society for the Integration of
Science and Human Values, (SISHVA) of the Department of Pali and Buddhist
Studies, University of Peradeniya, on August 28,th 2018)
For a long time, SISHVA has been inviting me to give a talk,
but I could not make myself available mainly because I was busy communicating
with other audiences both in speech and writing. This time, however, I made
special efforts to commit myself to doing this.
Even today, I begin
by breaking a promise because I have changed my topic a bit- so much for human
values! I will not be talking about the debate between morality and aesthetics.
After I started writing this talk on that topic, I felt bored since I have
recently dealt with that issue in a book I translated early this year. In that
book, Arts and the Man, Irwin Edman, the author talks about moralistic
displeasure at art in following words: “Christian moralists realized how
closely the senses are overlaid with a veil of sexual feeling. To become
sensuously alive was to be also, if only incipiently or subconsciously, sexually
awakened. Much of that glamorous intensity which goes with aesthetic experience
is undoubtedly sexual in some its elements.”(46) Ultimate effect of aesthetics,
which appeals to human senses, is bodily arousal that moralists aim to keep
suppressed or at least at bay. But modern humans, Edman points out, are not
afraid of sexuality and awakened senses. Freudians would argue that aesthetic
beauty is the sublimated products of sexual energies that make moralists
tremble in fear. If had stuck with that topic, I would have end somewhere
there. But I hope I have better things to say.
I do have my own
affinities with the kind of intellectual climate SHISVA is trying to create in
and around our University. For one thing, SHISVA’s efforts to get natural sciences
and the Humanities into a conversion have a long history, and, perhaps, that is
the only effort of that nature among us. In my recent writings, I myself have
argued in numerous places that we compartmentalize our children into subject
streams such as science, commerce, and arts too early in their lives. And even
after entering the university, students of our faculty have no opportunities in
their formal education to expose themselves to the basics of natural sciences, the
philosophy of science, and history of science, and, the students at
science-based faculties have almost no opportunities to develop their aesthetic
sensibilities, critical thinking, philosophical reflection, moral imagination,
ethical reasoning or, in general, to nurture the life of the mind. My
translations of Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why democracy needs the
Humanities and Irwin Edman’s Arts and the Man and some of my own
essays on the subject were almost only call in Sinhala language for holistic
education within the intellectual scene in recent times. Here, I am joining
you, quite happily and with a great deal of respect for you for keeping a
conversation alive across faculties, disciplines, religions, and numerous other
divides.
Professor P.D. Premasiri suggested that I talk about
something related to ethics, morality and literature. In our brief conversation
about this occasion, he mentioned the long drawn confrontation between morality
and aesthetics. “Moral person represented in literature” was suggested as another
possible topic. In fact, they all are good topics that can be talked about in a
manner that transcends all the divides I mentioned earlier. Ethics, in all
possible nuances of the term, concerns all of us. Typically secular minded left
thinkers also have recently paid considerable attention to “ethics”, “morality,”
“moral leadership” and the like. Antonio Gramsci is particularly known for
that. Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote an entire chapter on
“morality” in his influential book After Theory and claimed that
contemporary cultural theorists cannot ignore the concept of morality, and,
morality is not “moralism.” For him, to talk about ethics is to analyze the social
structures within which human beings act and process their inner needs.
In this talk, however, I am going to caste the net a bit
wider: I want to say few things about the return of ethical criticism, and, the
“currency” of morality in literary studies. Then, I will focus on a short story
with which we can historicize ethical reasoning.
If one talked about “ethics” and “moral person” in relation
to literature and art some twenty years ago, one could have been accused of being
a naïve art lover because during those times poststructuralist thought had made
it difficult to assign any ethical duty to language or texts. In that intellectual
atmosphere, language and texts were understood to be unstable and slippery
phenomena in which no authorial intention was possible. When one cannot mean
anything stable in language and in texts, it is almost impossible to have any
ethical intentions. Ethical intentions are NOT expected to be shaky and
ambivalent.
If an author cannot ‘intend’ anything stable within a text,
how can she or he make any ethical claim within it? A text, especially if it is
a fairly rich literary text, would always have some groupings of signs that
would rebel against ethical intentions of the author. The poststructuralist
position against meaning was something like that.
But when that period
of high theory began to fade away, certain return of ethical criticism took
place. Numerous theorists influenced by Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein began to
show that language could still communicate. This time however, these claims
about the things literature could do have been informed by a rich theoretical
discourse on the limits of language. They seemed to ask something like this:
“yes. Language is slippery, and it is difficult to harness language into a
frame of authorial intentions, and intentions into texts where there are multiple
competing meanings are at play. Can they still contribute to important social,
political, ethical discourses in society?” To that question, resounding yes would
be the answer by recent ethical critics. There are theorists and critics
everywhere who still rejoice in almost narcissistic textual games with a
sarcastic smile of superiority writ large on their faces. But the ethical
imperatives in literature are regularly talked about now. And the fact that
literature is an important mode of reflecting on the way we live is also emphasized
often enough.
In addition, we have
been talking about the representation of women, colonized people, ethnic
minorities, sexual minorities, environmental degradation and so on all along
while the theoretical discourse on the slipperiness of language was taking
place. Arguably, ethical issues about those aspects have been raised even when
‘skepticism of language’ held the central stage of literary discourse. And as a
writer, I never thought literature cannot contribute to socially significant
discourses.
In recent times,
phrases such as ethics and literature, ethical criticism, moral imagination and
so on are quite ubiquitous in the field of literary studies. Literary works,
above all narrative arts, are often seen as sites for careful ethical
reflection. This return of ethics surprises many who remember the beginning of
classical thought on arts, especially Plato’s arguments. Let me quote from
Tobin Siebers’s The Ethics of Criticism. In Plato’s eyes, poetry is
savagely chaotic and a definite threat to the order of the republic. By
encouraging acting, impersonation and pretense to science, it imperils the
Delphic wisdom of knowing oneself. Literature entices citizens to play more
than one role, destroying the possibility of justice. For Plato’s idea of
justice depends on the neat perception that one person has one responsibility…
Plato repeatedly described drama and poetry in terms of their ability to bring
disorder into the order of the state.”(p. 19). Plato is not alone in believing that human
discourses should tame human beings into existing social structures such as
state, culture, society, or social contracts. Platonic theory that requires the
banishment of poet from the republic does not leave any room for articulating the
ethical significance of literature. After all, a banished poet cannot
contribute to the ethical make-up of the republic.
But Plato did not
have the last word on this matter. There is the other end of the spectrum. And
at that end, we find Kant claiming that human beings are ends in themselves, as
autonomous subjects, and they are not instruments of satisfying someone else’s
personal desires. This is the “ethics of autonomy” - to borrow a phrase from
Tobin Seibers(p. 44). Even against the
state or republic, a human being is an end in herself or himself. Philosopher
of liberalism John Rawls echoes this Kantian position when he says, “Each
person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the well-being
of society as a whole cannot override (A Theory of Justice, p. 3).
Martha Nussbaum
In between Plato and
Kant, there is Aristotle disagreeing with his teacher and re-conceptualizing
the connection between literature and ethics. Some ethical theorists have
attempted to turn Kantian idealism into a form of practical ethics coupling
Kantian thought with Aristotelian ethics. Later in this talk, I will be talking
about neo-Aristotelian philosopher Martha Nussbaum whose work I have found
particularly useful in my activities of cultural criticism in Sri Lanka.
Aristotle did not want to banish poets from the republic. “Literature, for
Aristotle, reveals the instability of human existence and the difficulty of
living morally in such a world. Aristotle’s approach was decidedly anti-Platonic,
but his goals were not. Aristotle’s purpose was to discover a series of limits
in order to guarantee the integrity of the city and to protect citizens from
both outside and inside violence. That he refused, however, to banish
literature, despite its apparently conflictual character, that he
established literature as an instrument for judicial contemplation, opened the
humanistic age of ethics, in which ethics advances toward the
possibility of a political rather than a transcendental formation…Tragedy
focuses on the political dimensions of ethics. It reveals that standards of
justice are the products of political dimensions and not of ideal forms,
thereby making it possible to debate those standards of justice.(Siebers.
22. My emphasis).
When participating
in contemporary ethical discourses, Neo-Aristotelian thinkers focus on
requirements for human flourishing within various forms of state and cultural
structures rather than making absolute and transcendental ethical claims. That
life is suffering is true in absolute terms; but if life is particularly
suffering for the under-privileged, the poor, women, minorities, or the first
year students of Sri Lankan universities, any ethical interventions on those
matters need to be guided by secular and pragmatic conceptions of possibility
of reform and individual and collective self-criticism. Without that, absolute
terms such as life is suffering appear a detached and indifferent defense of
the status quo.
In recent theorists of
ethical criticism, I find a certain oscillation between Aristotelian and
Kantian ethics, and one might be able to claim that it is a synthesis of the
two. I am no philosopher to make a final conclusion of that matter. In
practicing ethical criticism, I also freely draw on ideas put forward by both
philosophers though I have special liking for Kant.
An often
misunderstood Kantian idea of ‘arts for art’s sake’, argues for an art not at
the service of any mundane purpose. In that sense art is for non-utilitarian
pleasure. As Siebers puts it, “The freer the work of art, the richer it is for
taste. For Kant, “taste is the faculty of estimating an object or mode of
representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest.
Literature excites the idea of a world free of interests, competition, and
violence, and as such, it provides the image of the goal toward which ethics
should strive (p. 24).
Ethical implications
of such a view need a bit of elaboration. If art exists as pure beauty without
being an instrument of any purpose, even good purpose, that art signifies a
world where human beings or things exist in total autonomy. No one is an
instrument of someone else’s purpose or intent or pleasure. Things exist for
themselves, and others learn to appreciate things for what they really are. To
explain this, Nussbaum sites, in her Not for Profit, the well-known
poem, “twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” This little
star is up above in the sky far away. But this insignificant distant star is personified;
its identity is recognized; it is given agency for what it is. And the human
child is trained to appreciate this distant star even though it is not
practically or immediately useful to the child. The star is appreciated and
celebrated for its mere existence not for its utilitarian significance in human
affairs. For example, in this poem, the star is not valued for the possible guidance
it may provide for travelers. Similarly, when we say,
“ .i j;=iqÿ
ù msßisÿ
fmdfydh ke;sÿ
is,a.;a n÷˜ in Sinhala we are appreciating the Wathusudu
tree for the sake of its very existence. One can argue that, compared to the
poem of the star, this poem is slightly utilitarian since to the narrator the
tree is seen as having observed Buddhist precepts. Kantian idea “art for art’s
sake” which outwardly looks totally apolitical statement is deeply moral and therefore,
political.
“Kant differed from Plato in holding that
the freedom of art no longer risks introducing chaos into the governing body,
but instead designs the model for a world of free personalities, a republic of
self-sufficient subjects purposively united. For Kant, art is the production of
freedom by freedom, not the lie of inspired and insipid poets; it designs the
ideal form of ethical practice. Most important, Kant’s idea of beauty cannot
exist, as Plato’s and Aristotle’s can, within the totalitarian state” (Siebers.
24).
Cultivating Moral Imagination
As
I said earlier Martha Nussbaum is a leading contemporary philosopher who argues
that narrative art can cultivate moral imagination in readers. Her books, Fragility
of Goodness (1986/2001), Love’s Knowledge(1992), Poetic Justice(
1997) Cultivating Humanity(1997), Political Emotions (2013) and
so on, are well-known examples of her contribution to the field. Nussbaum’s
work has not received equally by everyone in literary studies. For example,
while appreciating her work on ethics and literature Robert Eaglestone in his
book, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Lavinas, claims that Nussbaum was
often reductive in her reading of literary texts (p. 45). In a way, what he is
saying is that when teasing out ethical reasoning in a literary text one often
ignores many other textual qualities in them. Nussbaum is aware of that almost
unavoidable reductionism when her focus is not on celebrating formal literary
merits. Writing a new preface to the fifteenth anniversary edition of Fragility
of Goodness, Nussbaum says,
“…I still think that
Aristotle's conception of the human being, and of practical deliberation, is of
great importance for contemporary ethical and political thought; and I believe
that the depiction of the plurality of goods and of conflicts among them that
we find in both the poets and Aristotle offers insights that are absent from
much of contemporary social reasoning (xv).”
And in Cultivating Humanity, she responds to
possible accusations about reading literature in terms of ethical frameworks in
them. “It is hard to justify such a claim without embracing an extreme kind of
aesthetic formalism that is sterile and unappealing. The Western aesthetic
tradition has had throughout its history an intense concern with character and
community”(p.89).
Even though I have considerable training in much more complex modes of reading
and analysis such as deconstruction, I find Nussbaum’s method quite useful in
highlighting certain thematic issues about Sinhala literature. And her
reductionism, if you want to call it that, stems largely from the nature of
literary texts, which, by nature, have multiple meanings in them and dynamic
formal arrangements. In contrast, ethical reasoning, by nature, has to be
precise and definite. By making ethical claims based on literary texts,
Nussbaum does not exhaust those texts so that they can no longer signify. No
one can exhaust a good work of literature.
Thus, for the rest of this talk I will stick
with some key arguments of Nussbaum and to read a Sinhala short story in light
of those arguments. Elaborating on how narrative art can cultivate “civic
imagination” in readers, Nussbaum goes on to claim, “narrative art has the
power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual
tourist’s interest – with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger
at our society’s refusals of visibility”(Cultivating Humanity. P. 88.).
Here, she is referring to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – a classic
novel about how African Americans are not visible to the eyes of white people
whose vision is shaped by racist ideologies early twentieth century America.
Not only that these black subalterns cannot speak but also they are invisible.
Any sensitive reader of Ellison’s novel is awakened to the fact that there are
numerous invisibles all around us, and the novel is not only about racism in
the US. Therefore, I think, Nussbaum is right in arguing that “narrative
imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of
empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain
form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to
another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while
respecting separateness and privacy. This is so because of the way in which literary
imagining both inspires intense concern with the fate of characters and defines
those characters as containing inner life, not all of which is open to
view; in the process the reader learns to have respect for the hidden
contents of that inner world, seeing its importance in defining a creature as
fully human (p.90. My Emphasis).
Our everyday life does not always allow us
to observe and reflect on the inner lives of our fellow human beings. As we
discussed earlier, Ellison’s novel shows that many people are invisible to us
even outwardly.
A moment of Redemption
Let me rush into a wonderful short story
by Kamal Perera, a leading fiction writer in Sinhala. The story, “Awasanayaka Arabuma”
(or “the beginning of an ending”) is about a retired colonel, his dog, Rover,
and his domestic servant, Selva. After the ending of the war in 2009, the colonel
retires into his ancestral home located in a fairly large piece of land. He is
alone. No information of his family life is given. With its many trees and
bushes, the land is nearly a forest. Behind the house, he practices target
shooting almost every day. He owns revolver. Rover, the dog is a large
Rottweiler with whom the colonel goes hunting. When small animals such as
rabbits are sho, the dog brings the dead animals to its master. In the process,
the dog develops a taste for fresh blood and raw meat. One day, the colonel
accidentally cuts his hand and the dog hanging around him licks the blood off
the floor. The taste of human blood drives the dog insane, and one day, it
jumps on to the colonel begins to rip the flesh off from all over him. When
Selva the domestic servant hears the noise it is almost too late, he comes
running to save the colonel. Until this moment in the story Selva was nearly
invisible. The almost insane dog jumps onto Selva fatally wounding him in an
instant. Meanwhile, the colonel manages to grab his revolver and shoots the dog
to death. Selva, fatally wounded, is taken to hospital.
Even though the war was over, the
colonel was still living in a war-like situation, hunting, shooting and the
like. He seems to be struggling with the traumas of war. Certain memories of
war seem too hard to get rid of. But once Selva was injured, saving his life
becomes the colonel’s moment of redemption, even of cleansing. There is
immensely poignant moment in the story where the colonel washes blood off his
body after coming back from the hospital. That moment of cleansing seems the
‘beginning of the ending’ for him.
The excellence of the story rests on the way
it shows how the war-like structure of the colonel’s retirement does not allow
him to gain a fresh view at life around him. And within that quasi-military
structure and ideologies of heroism, he does not get to see Selva as a human
being. Early in the story, his hunting buddy, Rover is presented as almost
human, and its inner world is visible to the colonel and to us. Selva, the
human being, is causally remarked upon and almost invisible. For the colonel
Selva is a Tamil domestic servant – a structural element of his existence not a
human being who has his own complete life. The dog is the final symbol of the
colonel’s military mind-set (remnants of war) and of the inner demons he
harbors within him, and after the dog has nearly taken the colonel’s life it
dawns on him the fact that his current structure of existence does not let him
become fully free and capable of seeing others as equally human as himself.
Professor Nussbaum is right in arguing that
“compassion,” another term she uses to mean ethical sensibilities literature
can develop, “requires one thing more: a sense of one’s own vulnerability to
misfortune. To respond with compassion, I must be willing to entertain the
thought that this suffering person might be me”(p. 91). Perhaps, this is not
too far from one of the key ethical configurations in Buddhism: The theory of
Karma, which is for me an ethical rationality more than a theory of causality.
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