Tag: ethics

“Let me now briefly and dogmatically state what I take to be, in opposition to Kant’s view, the true view of the matter. Art and morals are, with certain provisos which I shall mention in a moment, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realisation of our suprasensible destiny is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man. That is incidentally why tragedy is the highest art, because it is most intensely concerned with the most individual thing. Here is the true sense of that exhilaration of freedom which attends art and which has its more rarely achieved counterparts in morals. It is the apprehension of something else, something particular, as existing outside us. The enemies of art and morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual because of Hegel’s totality, because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. This is what Shelley meant when he said that egotism was the great enemy of poetry. This is so whether we are writing it or reading it. The exercise of overcoming one’s self, the expulsion of fantasy and convention, which attends for instance the reading  of King Lear is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly
which we hardly ever do, painful. It is very like Achtung. Kant was
marvellously near the mark. But he thought of freedom as the aspiration to a universal order consisting of a pre-fabricated harmony.
It was not a tragic freedom. The tragic freedom implied by love is
this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine
the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which
we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled.
We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the
confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this difference.”

—from “The Sublime and the Good” by Iris Murdoch