The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument:
Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
Hartwick College
Forthcoming, Fictional Characters, Real Problems: Essays on the Ethical Content of Literature
(edited by Garry Hagberg)
Abstract
Heidegger and Aristotle show us that the fundamental task of moral philosophy is not to
construct arguments for particular views, and it is not to offer up rules for correctly carrying
out actions. The work of these two philosophers, rather, shows us that morality requires a kind
of seeing, and that this mode of perception cannot be reduced to its propositional content.
Changing our moral point of view, then, is not something for which we can rely on argument
alone. I will suggest, by briefly exploring the novels of Coetzee, that literature provides a better
source for our moral imagination than argument.
I’ll start with a bit of autobiography and a bit of self-accusation.
As a young man, I was struck by what I thought was the immense hypocrisy and
immorality of most of those human beings around me. I had very recently learned about the
conditions in factory farms across the United States, and had decided to stop purchasing and
consuming the products of that farming. When others failed to have the same reaction, I was
shocked—shocked that the brutality of our farming practices seemed irrelevant to those around
me, that, even when the brutality was acknowledged, so few bothered to change their dietary
and purchasing practices. It struck me as deeply irrational, and that thought stayed with me for
many years.
It stayed with me, that is, until I began to count up my own wrong doings. I had long
been persuaded that we ought to protect our environment, yet I did nothing to change my own
practices in accordance with that conviction. I still drove when I could walk places, I still
consumed food that travelled an average of 2,500 miles, and I still kept my thermostat set at 70
degrees. I had also long been convinced that we ought to do more to help those in need of food
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and medical treatment in less fortunate countries than our own. I was convinced, but that did
not stop me from amassing a collection of CDs, videos, and books that would make even Adam
Smith blush. I did all this without giving so much as a dime to charitable organizations. When
the hypocrisy of this struck me, I cooked up convenient arguments: I’m a student, I don’t have
anything to give, and so on. I was oblivious to the fact that I didn’t have anything to give because
I was too busy buying CDs (and cassette tapes, still readily available at the time).
My point here is not that I was hypocritical. We are all hypocritical. My point, rather, is
that my moral perspective was at once both wider and more myopic than the moral perspective
of those around me. It was wider in the sense that I had seen what I regarded as a grave
injustice: the mass accumulation and production of suffering and misery for the satisfaction of a
desire, as Plutarch put it, to chew on the juices of the death-wounds of other animals. But it was
also more myopic in the sense that I, too, was blind to the suffering and misery that I still
supported in other arenas of my life.
What my arrogance prevented me from seeing—and which it still prevents, more often
than I’d like to admit—is a recognition of our deep moral frailty, the fact that we are all, to a
greater or lesser degree, complicit in wrong-doing of the most heinous sorts: we promote
suffering; we let others die; we destroy the world of our children.
I’d like to draw some philosophical lessons from these somber thoughts—lessons about
the scope and limits of moral reasoning, and about the prospects for changing the way we
understand what philosophy has to contribute to the problematic situations in which we are
embroiled. To do this I will draw heavily from the work of Heidegger and Aristotle, on the one
hand, and the work of novelist J.M. Coetzee, on the other. Heidegger and Aristotle show us, I
contend, that the fundamental task of moral philosophy is not to construct arguments for
particular views, and it is not to offer up rules for correctly carrying out actions. The work of
these two philosophers, rather, shows us that morality requires a kind of seeing, and that this
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mode of perception cannot be reduced to its propositional content. Changing our moral point of
view, then, is not something for which we can rely on argument alone. I will suggest, by briefly
exploring the novels of Coetzee, that literature provides a better source for our moral
imagination than argument.
Perceptual Morality and the Limits of Argument:
A sketch of Heidegger and Aristotle on Ethics
In Book Z of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes five modes “in virtue of which the soul
possesses truth”: phronesis, techne, sophia, episteme, and nous (418; 1139b15).1 Aristotle claims
that “practical wisdom cannot be knowledge or art; not knowledge because that which can be
done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of
things” (420; 1140b1-3). This entails that the way we encounter the world in episteme—a
disclosure of things through theorein—cannot adequately capture the way we encounter things
in phronesis—a disclosure of things through praxis. Episteme, unlike phronesis, involves the
capacity to demonstrate (syllogismos). The morally appropriate actions to be carried out,
however, do not admit of such demonstration, but of deliberation or good counsel (euboulia).
While the objects of knowledge (purely actual Being) can be set out and demonstrated (once we
perceive the first principles through nous, at any rate), actions cannot be so easily put into
propositions. The reasons for this are several.
First, actions are unique to particular contexts. What the phronimos will do in a
particular case will depend crucially on the circumstances. This is why the phronimos must rely
on euboulia (deliberation)—a consistent openness to the novelty of each new circumstance that
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discloses what is to be done (namely, eupraxis). Such a shift in circumstances, however, can
have no effect on episteme, as episteme deals exclusively with the necessary and eternal. Second,
and related, is the fact that phronesis always concerns the ultimate particular: an action in a
concrete context. Episteme, by contrast, is concerned with the universal. Thus, the way in which
moral action is disclosed is fundamentally unlike the way one acquires knowledge of the
propositional sort. Specifically, morality involves a kind of sight: “practical wisdom is concerned
with the ultimate particular, which is the object not of knowledge (episteme) but of perception
(aesthesis)—not the perception of qualities peculiar to one sense but a perception akin to that
by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle…” (424; 1142a23-29).
Heidegger thought of Aristotle as the first phenomenologist—and as the first to delimit
the phenomenological notion of world that Heidegger develops in Being and Time.2 Heidegger
also saw, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, some of the central concepts he would elaborate in
the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time: Vorhandenheit, Zuhandenheit, and Dasein figure
prominently in Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle, albeit not always under these names.3
Likewise, the idea of authenticity and the ‘they’ emerge in Heidegger’s interpretations of
phronesis.4 In fact, Heidegger sees Aristotle as having laid bare the ontological character of
Dasein in Being-with—this, Heidegger contends, is precisely what it means both to speak a
language and to live in a polis (this corresponds to Aristotle’s two most famous definitions of
human beings—the animal with logos and the animal that lives in a polis).5 It is thus not
surprising to find elements of an Aristotelian ethics in Heidegger; nor is it surprising to find
critiques of rule-based ethics in Heidegger, as these critiques mirror Aristotle’s own account of
phronesis.
Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein centers around some central concepts that seem to be
fundamentally concerned with questions of value, despite his seeming protestations to the
contrary. Among the most central, of course, is Heidegger’s account of Being-with. As Heidegger
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argues, “the world is always the one I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world.
Being-in is Being-with Others” (155). Importantly, this is not to be understood as the trivial
claim that human beings are around other human beings. Rather, Heidegger intends to capture
something he sees Aristotle as having captured: Dasein is a zoon politikon—an animal that has
its being in a polis, in a koinonia, a community. To try to understand Dasein apart from its social
existence is to fail to understand Dasein.
Heidegger’s central contribution to moral philosophy, in my view, is his elaboration of
the two divergent modes of Being-with—one involving the persistent acceptance of standard
rules of conduct, unreflectively accepting their legitimacy (the moral praxis of the ‘they’); the
other involving action that cannot be rule-governed—that reflect the particularity of individual
situations, refusing to reduce these to the pre-conceptions of everyday understanding. This
‘authentic’ mode of Being-with, I want to suggest here, involves a recognition of one’s finitude
that works against the hubris common to moral failures of all sorts. Authenticity, above all else,
reveals the emptiness of universalizing rules of conduct, and does this through an uncovering of
moral perception as central to appropriately living in our thrownness.
On the view I am advocating, one function of the distinction between authenticity and
inauthenticity is to highlight two modes of how we understand the demands of the world
around us. For the inauthentic, our actions must conform to publically accessible rules of
conduct, and we can be measured against such rules, and judged accordingly. For inauthentic
Dasein, there is nothing more than the social rules of the ‘they.’
Inauthenticity “disburdens Dasein of its Being” (165). This disburdening, a central
feature of inauthenticity, applies even to our average everyday moral action. We appeal to rules,
acting as though these individual sentences are sufficiently capable of appropriately
determining courses of action. Of course, as part of average, everyday understanding, rules
cannot do more than gesture at moral action. They are good, as Aristotle points out, for the
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moral novice; they are useless for the phronimos. Heidegger agrees: “The common sense of the
‘they’ knows only the satisfying of manipulable rules and public norms and the failure to satisfy
them. It reckons up infractions of them and tries to balance them off. It has slunk away from its
ownmost Being-guilty so as to be able to speak more loudly about making ‘mistakes’“ (334).
Heidegger offers no clues as to the content of an authentic life—and this is deliberate.
What he does offer, however, is an account of what structural features authenticity will involve.
Unlike inauthentic, average, everyday comportment, the authentic life is one where one
recognizes the kind of being one is, and does so without illusion. This recognition, however, is
not a recognition that can simply be articulated in a clean set of propositions. It is perhaps for
this reason that Heidegger claims that silence is the authentic mode of discourse: the endless
attempt to articulate rules of conduct, and to pass these on to others, closes off our ability to see
the particularity of the situations in which we find ourselves.
This ability to see situations in their concreteness and particularity is characteristic of
authentic Dasein—Dasein which is resolute in the face of constantly changing circumstances
that cannot be divined in advanced. Resolute Dasein, Heidegger contends, ‘wants to have a
conscience’—that is, she wants to avoid reducing the complexities of the situation to a set of
pre-given rules for how to proceed. Once we understand that Heidegger thought Aristotle had
discovered conscience in the idea of phronesis, the view Heidegger takes of conscience becomes
much more transparent: to want to have a conscience, in Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein, is to be
open to the concrete context of action in its particularity.
Resoluteness gives itself the current factical Situation, and brings itself into that
Situation. The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like
something present-at-hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely
gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but
is open to the possibility of such determination…it simply cannot become rigid
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as regards the situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance
with its own meaning as a disclosure, must be held open and free for the content
of the factical possibility (355).
The notion of Dasein’s guilt, in my view, should be read with this in mind: the moral life is not
neatly articulable into a set of universal rules. Our ‘guilt’ is more primordial than that, and this
primordiality captures the basis of our lives as moral animals. “This essential Being-guilty is,
equiprimordially, the existential condition for the possibility of the ‘morally’ good and for that
of the ‘morally’ evil—that is, for morality in general and for the possible forms that this might
take factically” (332).
One sense of Being-guilty, Heidegger points out, involves being the basis of someone
else’s lack. When I owe something to another Dasein, I am guilty. As Heidegger explicitly
remarks, this kind of Being-guilty—being indebted to another Dasein on the basis of a “breach
of a ‘moral requirement,’ is a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein” (328). We are moral
animals, and our existence simply involves our guilt before other Dasein. Being responsible is
part of the being of Dasein. Thus, Heidegger contends, “if one takes ‘laden with moral guilt’ as a
‘quality’ of Dasein, one has said very little” (328). One has said very little because the nature of
existential guilt has not been clarified, and this guilt is the basis for factical moral guilt. It also
says very little, however, because one has simply asserted a well-known feature of Dasein’s
being—namely, that Dasein is the moral animal through and through. Heidegger sees our
existential guilt as rooted in our Being-with. He also sees the possibility of authentically beingwith other Dasein as making possible a different mode of Being-with—one where we do not
allow antecedent rules or principles to decide every course of action in advance.
But might it be the case that authenticity, given that it involves no concrete
prescriptions, might actually prevent our engagement in the world of praxis? Perhaps
surprisingly, Heidegger says just the opposite: it is our inauthentic mode of Being-with that
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prevents action. One need not act; or, if one does act, one simply acts in whatever way one is
thought to be required to act. The problem here, of course, is that what ‘they’ say we should do
fails to capture the unique possibilities of our Being—and it fails to authentically recognize and
deliberate about the concrete situations that we must live through. Where deliberation belongs,
we instead find rules and procedures.
It is here that we see the way that Heidegger’s phenomenological account of
authenticity and inauthenticity reveals the problem with a rule-based conception of morality:
rules replace careful perception; they substitute for our appreciation of nuance and complexity.
The parallels with Aristotle are striking: the phronimos is one who understands the ergon and
arête of human beings, and seeing this clearly (rather than relying on, say, moral rules that the
hoi polloi regard as universal) allows the phronimos to live with excellence in the polis—to have
the kind of being appropriate to human Dasein.
Because the moral life involves a kind of perception, we should not understand the
phronimos (or the authentic individual) as knowing in advance what to do in every action.
Rather, the phronimos has made a resolution to seek the good in every situation, and to
deliberate about how best to achieve this. In the 1924-25 lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger
identifies phronesis with conscience. Based on this, it is a short step to understanding
Heidegger’s account of wanting-to-have-a-conscience as at least analogous to the resolution of
the phronimos to find arête in all action—to be resolved to find arête despite not knowing, in
advance, what situations will emerge and how precisely to deal with these situations.
Wanting-to-have-a-conscience “brings one without Illusions into the resoluteness of
‘taking action’” (Being and Time, 358). This is precisely how Heidegger describes the moral
phenomenology of the phronimos in his lectures on Aristotle’s ethics: the phronimos has
resolved to repeat the decision to act with arête, despite the obscurity of the future. In this
respect, the phronimos’ comportment to the world is one of anticipatory resoluteness (as
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described in Division II of Being and Time). This does not entail that there is no moral content in
the actions of the phronimos. The desire for such content misunderstands the very nature of
phronetic action—it is non-articulate, and concerned fundamentally with the concrete
particulars of an action. “We miss a ‘positive’ content in that which is called, because we expect
to be told something currently useful about assured possibilities of ‘taking action’ which are
available and calculable. This expectation has its basis within the horizon of that way of
interpreting which belongs to common sense concern—a way of interpreting that forces
Dasein’s existence to be subsumed under the idea of a business procedure that can be regulated
(340).
The relationship between phronesis and authenticity is a complex one. Unfortunately, in
the little space I have, I can’t do justice to either the nuances or the difficulties of the
relationship. Suffice it to say that the parallels are significant, though of course not without
limitation. For the purposes of my current endeavor, it will be useful to simply enumerate these
similarities as a way of reiterating what I regard as Heidegger’s essential contributions to our
understanding of the proper scope and limits of ethical theory—and as a primary lesson that
moral phenomenology occasions.
1. Both phronesis and authenticity involve a mode of perceptual experience that discloses
things in a way that is unavailable in our average everyday understanding.
2. Neither phronesis nor authenticity can be captured propositionally. The sight of each
does not translate into a set of prescriptions for how to behave. Relatedly, neither
phronesis nor authenticity can be taught.
3. Both phronesis and authenticity are intimately connected to preparedness for action. In
phronesis, such preparedness involves having the capacity to see what a particular
situation requires in its concrete singularity. In authenticity, such preparedness is
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termed ‘wanting-to-have-a-conscience,’ and involves a readiness to hear the demand to
be what one is.
4. Heidegger identifies phronesis with ‘conscience,’ and the phronimos with one who
wants-to-have-a-conscience.
The idea that all moral philosophy is to be carried out in arguments, and that the appropriate
domain of ethics is in the linguistic, leaves untouched a large realm of experience that is
essential to experiencing our obligations to those around us. This is perhaps the primary lesson
we can gain from Aristotle and Heidegger. A second lesson, however, comes from a recognition
of the way in which we can affect change in our moral perception. If not argument, then what?
Thinking our way into morality: The case of J.M. Coetzee and for literature
The view of ethics that we find in Heidegger and Aristotle presents a substantial challenge to
moral philosophy traditionally construed. It suggests, among other things, that moral argument
cannot accomplish what it hopes to accomplish. If a manner of seeing is the essential mark of
the moral life—of phronesis—and this manner of seeing cannot be mastered by learning rules
or memorizing arguments, the crucial question becomes how we are to acquire the appropriate
moral phenomenology.
Aristotle’s answer to this is famous enough: we act as though we see things like the
phronimos sees things. Eventually, through habituation, this will happen. The problems with
this answer are equally famous: how can we know which persons we are to emulate? On
Aristotle’s view, as on Heidegger’s, we must ‘choose a hero.’ The problems with this are of
course legion: what if our heroes are anything but? How can we be certain we have chosen
correctly?
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Here, both Aristotle and Heidegger have an answer that is worth considering: we share
enough by way of common understanding to have a general agreement concerning what sorts
of things will count as heroic. We must begin with common understanding.
I want to suggest a similar answer. We learn to see things appropriately through
practice. We can learn to sympathize with other human beings, or feel their suffering, or see
what’s wrong with racism, sexism, and heterosexism through placing ourselves into imaginative
contexts that make this happen. Of course, relying on our own moral imagination cannot be
effective: we need others to force our imagination into places where it might not usually go—to
stretch the boundaries of our thinking. There may be no real heroes, and there may be no real
phronimos. Those we choose as heroes may well mislead us. But, I contend, our chances are best
when we allow the works of imagination (rather than just those around us) to act as our moral
guides. And for this task, I think, there is nothing better than literature. Literature allows us to
think our way into contexts that are wholly unique—that emphasize particularity—and that can
educate the moral imagination.
I want to consider just one example of this phenomenon: the work of Nobel-prize
winning author J.M. Coetzee. The view of morality that emerges in his work, I want to suggest,
highlights what we might call ‘the burden of being.’ It highlights this in a way that reveals how
little argument can accomplish to alleviate this burden, and how argument can in fact get in the
way of our seeing appropriately the world around us. For my current purposes, I’d like to
discuss two of Coetzee’s novels, albeit terribly briefly. The first is the novel Disgrace, the second
is his Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons.
Disgrace is a complex and interesting novel. Ostensibly, it tells the story of a South
African academic who has an affair with a student, is brought up on sexual harassment charges,
and is forced out of university life. He travels to his daughter’s farm where he tries to adjust to
his new life. Soon after, the academic (David Lurie) and his daughter (Lucy) are assaulted, in
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their home, by some local Africans. While Lurie suffers some injuries (the assailants attempt to
light him on fire), his daughter, Lucy, is gang-raped. She becomes pregnant, and decides to have
the child. Disgrace tells this story in painfully sparse prose, from the point of view of David
Lurie. Much of the novel takes up the simple burden of living—a burden shared by all involved:
the native Africans, struggling with a post-apartheid South Africa; the privileged whites, no
longer comfortable in a state that seems to be plummeting into anarchy; David Lurie, who has
been disgraced by his inability to control his own libido; Lucy, who refuses to leave her home,
but who cannot continue living her life on the farm in the wake of her rape; even the stray dogs
of South Africa—animals with whom Lurie comes to feel a strange affinity, and for whom he
tries to provide dignified funeral rites.
In one respect, Disgrace is a portrait of just that: the various forms of disgrace—those
we are responsible for, and those we are not—that we all must bear. The entire tone of the
novel is one of a shameful awareness of the crimes of South Africa—crimes for which Lucy feels
some measure of responsibility, despite the fact that she had nothing to do with the racial
oppression of generations past. There is also the disgrace Lurie suffers as the result of his affair
with a student—an affair that he pursues with some rigor, despite the fact that his student
seems to want nothing more than to be away from him. Lucy’s disgrace is perhaps the hardest
to take: she describes herself as dead at one point in the novel. She wants to blame herself for
her rape; she refuses to go to the police, insisting that what happened to her is a private affair.
And finally, there is the collective disgrace in the face of our relation to our past and to the nonhuman world. Despite the attempt to construct an ever-more rational society—a process that
Coetzee tellingly sees as fraught with moral peril—despite what looks like moral progress on
racial matters, we are left with stunning portraits of the lives of animals, and our continual
cruelty to them—a cruelty that is amplified by our consistent desire to bring the processes of
rationalization to bear on the existence of all animals, human and otherwise. There are too
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many dogs. Response? Kill them and burn the bodies. There is anger at being continuously
oppressed. Response? Take what you feel is rightfully yours. Crush whomever is in the way.
The kinds of disgrace that we all face litter the novel from cover to cover—disgrace for
what we’ve done, what has been done to us, and for the systems that we allow to stay in place
(apartheid, racial oppression, cruelty to animals). There is no solution offered. If anything, what
comes to the fore in Coetzee’s writing is a recognition that ‘solutions’ are part of a rationalist
agenda that can be part of the problem. Even seeing the ‘problem’ is no mark of astute
perception, as seeing the problem becomes a kind of deflection: we now concoct solutions by
implementing rational machinery; we ‘solve’ the suffering and disgrace that we cause.
Except that we don’t. Every character in Disgrace—except for the animals, killed off by
the dozens on Sunday afternoons—suffers from moral blindness to varying degrees. To take
just one example, Lurie sees Lucy’s disgrace at being raped as something forced on her from the
world that is fundamentally unjust, and he sees his own disgrace as something similar, albeit
less significant. What is interesting, however, is that Lurie never acknowledges that his own
actions are at least parallel to the actions of those who raped his daughter. He is blind to his
own earlier wrongdoing—“not quite rape,” he says, characterizing the second and third times
he has sex with his student, “but certainly undesired.”
Coetzee’s fiction is dark, but it is a darkness that is honest, that allows us to see. Even as
we rage against injustice, we become blind to our own failings. We criticize the irrationality of
others, all the while ignoring the fact that our own arguments and obsessions make us blind to
our own complicity in wrong-doing. As with most (or even all) ethical lapses, Lurie’s moral
blindness is one of overestimating his own importance; failing to recognize the finitude of his
judgment and capacities. Like the rest of us, he thinks he’s better than he is.
The lesson I would like to draw from this is a lesson of humility in moral matters—one
that I, for one, still struggle to learn. Despite my own lapses into hubris, I do not think it fruitful
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to speak of those who routinely engage in wrongdoing as ‘irrational.’ We all routinely engage in
wrong-doing. What is required in response to this is not more argument, or a better grasp of
principle, or of the valid forms of argumentation. A course in logic is no cure for moral
blindness. Indeed, it can actually increase our blindness as we look for tears in the logical
ligature of some argument rather than actually grappling with the subject matter of an
argument. What is required to cure moral blindness is a means by which we can see what we
could not see before, and there are few vehicles as effective as literature in this regard.
Should Lucy report her rape to the police? Is it up to her to make that decision? Is it a
simple matter of ‘wrongness’ to steal property that resulted from the oppression of your
ancestors? Moral principles, I think, can actually inhibit our ability to see the complexities of
moral matters. It is easy to apply a principle and then simply react. Seeing the contours of the
issue in concrete particularity is by no means so straight-forward—and this is something that
no principle can accomplish. This, at the end of the day, is what the novel offers that the moral
theory cannot: the concrete particularity of our moral entanglements.
J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello accomplishes a similar task. The novel centers on
several lecturing engagements of an aging novelist (Elizabeth Costello). Her lectures center on
various topics, but the central of which concerns animal suffering. Costello characterizes herself
as a wounded animal, unable to understand how she can live in a world where wanton cruelty
to animals is carried out on such a massive scale. She rejects the idea that her stance is ‘ethical.’
Rather, she contends, she is ‘trying to save her soul.’ Her vegetarianism, however, creates all
kinds of complexities for her relationship with the human beings in her life. Her daughter-inlaw, a philosopher of mind, thinks of Costello’s views as unforgivably pedestrian. Costello claims
that, if she can ‘think her way’ into something that doesn’t exist—namely, her fictional
characters—there is no issue experiencing what it’s like to be an animal condemned to a life of
suffering and death. When objections to this are raised (that she possesses reason, for example,
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and language), Costello simply asserts that she is not so sure she possesses reason, if reason is
what leads to such rampant cruelty. Her lifestyle consistently alienates others, and she
recognizes this. Despite all of her sympathy with those tortured animals in factory farms, she
finds very little sympathy with the human beings around her. She simply doesn’t understand
how they can be blind or oblivious to the slaughter going on around them—a slaughter she
provocatively compares to the holocaust.
The ruminations on the limitations of reason in this novel are a sufficient reason to
engage it—but there are many more besides. Among the most intriguing elements of the novel
is a recognition that civility is a truly difficult enterprise. Costello refuses the standards of
civility in many ways throughout the novel, although she certainly does not mean to. When a
provost of a university expresses his respect for her vegetarianism, Costello responds bluntly: ‘I
am wearing leather shoes and I carry a leather purse. I wouldn’t have over-much respect.’
Elizabeth Costello is, I would like to say, a good person, but this does not entail that she
never errs. On the contrary, she errs frequently. She has difficulty relating to people, and
difficulty allowing people to maintain any particular view of her. Much of her goodness, I think,
lies in her near-brutal recognition of her own moral failings. She emphatically does not claim
that she is surrounded by immoral meat-eaters. What she says, rather, is that she cannot
understand how others can do nothing about the lives of animals in the modern industrial
world. She lives in a state of moral desperation—one which, the novel suggests, will only end in
her death. But despite her woundedness, despite her desperation, she is never holier-than-thou.
She admits her wrong-doings freely; she knows many of her moral limitations.
In Coetzee’s novel, then, I think we find several lessons: our obsessions with particular
moral issues can create difficulties for those around us, and we would do best to recognize our
own deep moral limitations. The complexities of the moral life, moreover, cannot simply be
brushed aside by a philosophical theory, or some set of principles, or even some set of
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arguments. Coetzee allows us to see these difficulties in vivid detail. Indeed, his fiction thrives
on just this kind of perception.
Even more intriguing, perhaps, is Coetzee’s recognition of the limitations of fiction for
the moral imagination. In one of the lectures Costello gives, for example, she takes up the issue
of whether novelists should try to imagine every possible point of view. Aren’t there some
modes of moral perception that we should assiduously avoid? Should we try to sympathize with
the Nazi soldier, for example? Isn’t there a danger in just this? While Costello defends this view
in one lecture, she takes it back in another, claiming that a writer’s job is not to believe, but to
sympathize. To see, not to judge. In this imaginative exercise—one deeply reminiscent of Kafka’s
‘Before the Law’—Costello once again shows us the danger of principle. Principles—even those
about where our sympathies should lie—oversimplify the moral complexities of our world.
What is required, above all else, is humility at our own moral frailty, and the consistent attempt
to exercise our moral imagination in a way that explicitly recognizes our finitude. There is no
principle available for how to do this. We can’t have a set of rules for what to read any more
than we can have a set of rules for what to do. Particularism here, forgive the irony, is absolute.
The exercise of the moral imagination, I would like to add, can be carried out in many
ways—through film, literature, poetry, and through phenomenology. All of these can facilitate
our ability to imagine our way into a recognition of our limitations, and into a more transparent
understanding of the elements of moral experience.
Seeing our problems clearly: The case for phenomenological ethics
Allow me to return to myself as an arrogant young man. Coetzee taught me to see my hubris
about moral matters much as Homer taught me to see the perils of war. The phenomenological
account of the moral life offered by Aristotle, and developed in Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle,
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show that same arrogant young man that his arguments were not enough—that the source of
morality is more basic to lived experience than premise and conclusion.
But to advocate humility and a recognition of moral frailty is not to give up one’s moral
convictions; it is to see them in a new light. I have not changed my mind about factory farming,
for example. I still do not think that anyone can seriously defend factory farming; nor do I think
that anyone can seriously defend the fact that we allow children to die from easily preventable
problems, like malnutrition or the absence of antibiotics. The absence of these convictions in
others, however, is by no means a mark of irrationality, or of some kind of malevolence. On the
view I have been articulating, we are to understand this as an absence of a certain way of seeing
our current practices. This mode of seeing can be cultivated, as can other modes. What will
distinguish the better from the worse mode, of course, will be the subject of some dispute. How
to resolve such disputes, however, is not likely (on my view) to result from a consideration of
the arguments. It is more likely, I think, that certain kinds of seeing will reveal themselves to be
insufficient to our experience.
I concede that this initially looks like philosophical heresy. To disparage the use of
arguments in the realm of moral philosophy may well strike my audience as simple
irrationalism. Rather than accepting this, I would contend that critics of my view are in danger
of making two mistakes: first, they may be over-confident about the ability of an argument to
move a person to action. Second, I would say that any philosophical vantage point that limits
philosophy only to argumentation involving explicit premises, conclusions, and the inferential
link between them, has a very impoverished view of philosophical thinking. Such a view, I
would contend, robs us of the resources of the philosophical imagination—of our ability to
‘think our way’ into the positions of those around us, like us, and even radically unlike us.
I would also like to make clear, again, that my claim is not that arguments are useless, or
even usually useless. That kind of claim would amount to performative contradiction, and
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would underestimate the significant merits of argumentative discourse. My claim, rather, is that
we should not mistake the absence of persuasive argument for the absence of truth. Rather, we
should follow Gadamer’s dictum that truth is not method, and the general phenomenological
point that there are other modes of accessing truth than the syllogism. This is no more an
irrationalism than is the view that the axioms of geometry cannot be proven: we presuppose
these axioms as a constitutive element of the practice of geometry; to deny their validity is to be
unable to do geometry.6 To become distracted about the provability of these axioms is, in a
sense, to become obsessed with argument where argument has little role to play. In this respect,
it ‘deflects’ the real issues at hand, to again borrow a term from Cora Diamond and Stanley
Cavell.7
Likewise, I contend, it is a deflection of the issues at stake in factory farming, or world
poverty, or environmental degradation, to worry about the absence of arguments that everyone
finds convincing. Such a deflection, as Cora Diamond reminds us, makes our problems simple
ones of premises and conclusions: does this theory generate an obligation to feed the poor? To
end cruelty to animals? To stop global warming? These questions, in a very straight-forward
sense, are simple ones. Our ethical challenge is not to sort out these issues, in my (Aristotelian)
view. It is to see the world aright. And to do this, we will need more than argument. We will
need imagination and humility.
Can phenomenology contribute to this task? I think so. Excavating the structure of moral
experience can allow us to see more clearly by bringing us to have experiences we did not have
before, or to notice things about our experience that we did not notice before. It cannot do this
work alone, of course. Perhaps the richest source of the moral imagination, I have suggested, is
to be found in literature—where we see the moral demands made on people in their concrete
particularity. But phenomenology does have a substantial role to play in making us see more
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clairvoyantly what the significance and value of literature is, and what kinds of values we’re
already committed to.
End Notes
1. J.L. Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987).
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962).
3. Heidegger’s analysis of Vorhandheit corresponds to the analysis of theorein;
Zuhandenheit corresponds to the analysis of techne, and Dasein corresponds to the
analysis of praxis.
4. See Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre
Schuwer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in
particular Sections 8, 19, and 20, as well as Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of
Aristotelian Philosophy, translated by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
5. On the polis, see Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, on the sociality of logos,
Plato’s Sophist, in particular Section 25, and Basic Concepts of Aristotelian
Philosophy, Section 9.
6. It doesn’t matter if the axioms in question are Euclidean or not.
7. See Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, et al, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008).
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