Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 20, August 2002
Murray Smith
The Bad and the Beautiful
Colin McGinn _Ethics, Evil, and
Fiction_ Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997 ISBN 0198237162 (hb)
0198238770 (pb) x + 186 pp. McGinn's book is a book of
two halves. While the first part constitutes an essay on the
nature of morality in general, and evil in particular, the
second part dwells on the relationship between morality and
aesthetics, especially as these phenomena are explored and
revealed through works of fiction. These two halves are
framed by considerations of 'method' in moral philosophy:
what, McGinn asks, is the appropriate form of discourse for
the investigation of moral life? McGinn argues that the
significance of fictional discourse for moral thinking has
never been properly taken on board by moral philosophy; his
aim in this book is to suggest how moral philosophy might
properly accommodate fiction's moral dimension. Over the first two major
chapters ('Goodness' and 'Knowledge of Goodness'), McGinn
mounts a defence of moral realism along with a critique of
dispositional theories of morality which reduce moral
concepts and values to psychological ones. This is then
bolstered by a comparison between moral and scientific
knowledge, through which McGinn aims to demonstrate that
moral knowledge is at least as robust as scientific
knowledge; moral knowledge may be different in nature from
scientific knowledge, but it is not 'epistemologically
queer'. The basic strategy here is to show that the
supposedly unique fragility, or fallibility, of moral
knowledge only arises in the context of a highly-dubious
empiricist metaphysics, which measures all types of
knowledge by the single, arbitrarily privileged yardstick of
knowledge-through-sense-experience. Moving closer to the
target of the second part of the book, 'The Evil Character'
sets forth an investigation and analysis of the moral
psychology of evil. McGinn begins with an abstract formula
for a type of being for whom the pain of others is
pleasurable ('the evil who are happy', as Nietzsche
described such persons), and the pleasure of others is
painful. He then goes on to survey a range of actual and
imagined types of immoral behaviour, including sadism
(analysed in terms of the power and pleasure derived from
destroying the most basic values of the victim -- above all,
her attachment to life itself), cruelty motivated by envy,
revenge, rivalry, as well as 'primitive evil' -- a brute
pleasure in the pain of others for its own sake. From the point of view of
aesthetics, the next chapter, 'Beauty of Soul', is the
pivotal chapter in the study. Drawing on Thomas Reid, McGinn
argues that the mind (or 'soul', in the language he inherits
from Reid) and moral character of an individual possess
aesthetic qualities (and thus, by extension, that aesthetic
qualities are not restricted to objects of perception). This
claim is buttressed by the pervasiveness, in ordinary
language, of 'aesthetic-moral' terms -- words which deliver
moral judgements by attributing aesthetic qualities to the
object of judgement: you might say that someone's behaviour
'stinks', or that someone has a 'sweet' personality, for
example. (I cannot resist citing another piece of evidence
in support of this thesis, from Hanif Kureishi's _The Buddha
of Suburbia_: 'But you're not ugly inside', says Jamila to
the unprepossessing Changez. 'Yes, inside I look like Shashi
Kapoor, I know that for sure', he replies.) The final two
major chapters then pursue the implications of this thesis,
which McGinn dubs the *aesthetic theory of virtue* (ATV),
through two complementary literary case studies (thus making
good on his ambition to bring together two modes of moral
investigation -- metaethical analysis and the moral exegesis
of fiction). 'The Picture: Dorian Gray' examines Wilde's
novel in which outward beauty co-exists with ugliness of
soul, in part as a means of testing the *amoral
aestheticism* for which Wilde is (somewhat misleadingly)
famed. Noting that all human lives run 'on separate
aesthetic rails' (145) -- beauty of body and of soul --
McGinn turns his attention to another case of radical
'aesthetic bifurcation' (117), though one which inverts the
polarities of _Dorian Gray_: the conjunction of a monstrous
body with inner beauty in the monster of Mary Shelley's
_Frankenstein_. If in the first case we see the corruption
of soul by the overvaluing of outer beauty, in the second we
witness the destruction of soul by outward ugliness --
insofar as the initially gentle and generous monster is
driven to revenge (an evil state of mind on McGinn's
analysis, if not the most nefarious) by the hostile
reactions of others to his appearance. (Changez continues in
_The Buddha of Suburbia_: 'But some people are really ugly
pig-faces, and they have a terrible time and all. I'm
beginning a national campaign to stop this prejudice.') The
existential difficulties and moral dangers of our
aesthetically-riven existence lie at the heart of both
cases. McGinn pairs the ATV with a
complementary thesis (developed on the basis of Nabokov's
remarks on 'aesthetic bliss' in the Afterword to _Lolita_).
Call this the *moral theory of beauty*, or MTB: 'an object
is beautiful if and only if it affords aesthetic bliss, and
aesthetic bliss is a state of mind in which one is connected
to other states of being in which art is the norm -- where
art involves curiosity, tenderness, kindness, and ecstasy'
(110), these qualities all being construed as moral ones.
McGinn is clear that the ATV and MTB taken together are not
intended to reduce morality to aesthetics or vice versa, but
rather to show how intimately and systematically the two are
interrelated: 'The ATV takes us from morality to aesthetics,
while Nabokov's formula takes us from aesthetics to
morality: the upshot is that morality leads back to itself,
after taking a detour through aesthetics' (111-2). This
culminates in the case for *moral aestheticism*, as a
superior alternative to the amoral aestheticism examined in
_Dorian Gray_: 'The true aesthete must be a moralist, since
he cares about the beauty of his soul' (139), as well as the
beauty of appearance. Where does this leave
aesthetics ? The MTB is introduced as a subordinate thesis,
designed to show us how the 'beauty' of a virtuous person
takes us through aesthetics and back to morality. But it is
also a thesis about the nature of aesthetic experience, and
since McGinn adheres here to what he calls 'panaestheticism'
('We are aesthetic beings through and through; we apprehend
the world through aesthetic eyes' (121)), one must ask: just
how tight is the fit between morality and aesthetics?
Compared with the precision with which McGinn discusses the
relationship between psychological and moral concepts
earlier in the book, the discussion here, though never less
than stimulating, is relatively loose. There are hints that
McGinn doesn't regard the MTB as an exhaustive theory of
beauty, that aesthetics can't be equated with or reduced to
questions of beauty, and that morality and aesthetics 'do
not exist in perfect harmony' (141). But the formal
statement of the MTB as it stands allows precious little
space for any aesthetic quality or experience which does not
lead us to a moral quality, or have a moral dimension. We
are warned, for example, that architectural forms, or the
patterns and rhythms of modern city life, might not just be
exhilarating or unpleasant, but morally edifying or
corrupting. By the time that we reach the statement that
'the better a society's taste in outer things, the better
placed it will be to promote virtue' (120), one feels an
urgent need to know just what the moral status of (say)
platform shoes and long hair is, and how one would decide
this matter. McGinn's own examples, and
indeed his own notion of aesthetic bifurcation, suggest how
much of aesthetic experience escapes the zone of overlap
between the moral and the aesthetic. One of the lessons of
both _Dorian Gray_ and _Lolita_ is that there are types of
beauty -- physical, perceivable beauty -- that don't
reliably tell us anything about the moral character of the
person or thing exhibiting them. It is precisely because
physical beauty may tell us nothing about a person's moral
character that we can be betrayed by it. If a harmonious
appearance necessarily carried some sort of moral
implication, then in being swayed by the handsome charmer we
would not really be deceived, or at least not so
devastatingly, for we would be responding to something
morally good (and not merely aesthetically pleasing) in that
person. These aesthetic-moral virtues might co-exist in that
person with other moral defects of character, but they would
themselves be moral virtues. The challenge, then, is to the
comprehensiveness of the MTB, and to the exclusivity of the
circuit which McGinn argues runs between morality and
aesthetics. No doubt there is significant interconnection;
but surely the aesthetic network runs off in other,
non-moral directions as well. A recurring worry for
McGinn, which arises out of his analysis of the evil moral
psychology (one for whom the pain of others causes pleasure,
and the pleasure of others causes pain), is 'entertainment'.
Usually McGinn's chosen examples are modern media (movies
and TV), where we find pleasure in depictions of violence,
disaster, and suffering. But the problem never comes
properly into focus. The vast majority of mass media
representations are, in one way, very conservative: where
spectacular, graphic violence is represented as something to
take pleasure in, it is the violence of revenge against
figures of evil. True, revenge is one of McGinn's evils; but
in that case the problem extends back through history to
vast swathes of representation in all media. McGinn's chief
examples, _Dorian Gray_ and _Frankenstein_, are full of
appalling moral acts, but both works afford considerable
pleasure. Taking some form of pleasure in representations of
suffering or evil -- as we do from forms like tragedy, the
sublime, and horror, which depend on negative emotions, or
dystopian fictions which depict wholly undesirable states of
affairs -- is a long-standing problem in aesthetic debate.
But the problem surely isn't that these forms might
promulgate sadism or detached aestheticism -- McGinn's
worries -- but that we (non-sadists) can find some sort of
satisfaction and pleasure in such depressing things.
McGinn's use of the word 'entertainment' seems to play the
purely rhetorical role of separating worthy, legitimate
depictions of evil and illegitimate ones, as if 'art' and
'entertainment' were mutually exclusive terms, when they
clearly are not. Most of the difficult questions, concerning
how we evaluate a depiction of evil which gives us pleasure,
are left unaddressed. The simple conjunction of depictions
of evil with pleasure in those depictions tells us very
little; responding with pleasure to a work can't be assumed
to equate with responding with pleasure to an evil act or
character within the work. McGinn's book is a bracing
read, raising challenging questions and proposing
provocative, intriguing, and often compelling solutions in
equal measure. Written with considerable verve, the tone of
the book is nevertheless uneven. While there are many
passages of meticulous argumentation, at times McGinn comes
across as a querulous moralist. The book is also compact,
more like a sustained essay than a comprehensive statement,
and some disappointments arise from its impatient momentum.
McGinn shares with Martha Nussbaum an emphasis on the value
of fictional explorations of moral life in stressing
specificity over abstract prescription. While acknowledging
an overlap in interest, however, McGinn hurries us by the
likeness, devoting no space whatsoever to a comparison.
Similarly, Hegelian objections to the 'beautiful soul' are
swept aside as 'obscure' -- a little odd, since Hegel
characterizes this state of being as a sort of moral
narcissism, a problem that McGinn does address. It is
testimony to the interest and originality of McGinn's book,
though, that one is left wanting more of it, so that the
gaps and difficulties touched on here might be more fully
addressed. University of Kent at
Canterbury, England Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Murray Smith, 'The Bad and
the Beautiful', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 20, August
2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n20smith>.
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