reader to suspend moral judgments,”^11 as though works of literary art
presented a self-contained imaginary world that is altogether insulated from
our own. Developing this line of reasoning more fully, Monroe Beardsley
notes that the writer of a work of fiction“does not make an assertion, at least
on the Report level.”^12 Nothing is urged on anyone. The literary work“is not
a‘message,’and not in the ordinary sense a‘communication,’since it is not
an assertion and therefore claims to convey no information.”^13 At best ideas
are entertained or suggested, and there is little risk of harm in gazing on self-
contained imaginative products from without.Of course literary works cannot be understood apart from their language; of
course they have social roots and fruits; of course their enjoyment requires in
the readeranelaborateset ofpreviousadjustmentsinbeliefandfeeling; of course
the themes and theses of literary works are taken from, or contributed to, the
whole life of man. But what makes literature literature, in part, must be some
withdrawal from the world about it, an unusual degree of self-containedness
and self-sufficiencythat makesitcapable of beingcontemplated withsatisfaction
in itself. And the secret of this detachment seems to lie in its capacity to play
with, and to swallow up in its design, all the vast array of human experiences,
including beliefs, without that personal allegiance and behavioral commitment
to them that constitutes assertion in the fullest sense.^14
Withdrawal from the world into self-containedness seems to apply even
more fully to abstract paintings and works of pure instrumental music,
which seem, as Carroll puts it, to“have no moral dimension”such that“it
is just conceptually confused to attempt to assess them morally.”^15
It is tempting, then, to conclude that art is its own practice with its own
distinct values. William Gass, for example, claims that“artistic quality
depends upon a work’s internal, formal, organic character, upon its inner
system of relations, upon its style and structure, and not upon the morality it
is presumed to recommend.”^16 Or, as Oscar Wilde notoriously remarks even
more sharply,“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books(^11) Richard Posner,“Against Ethical Criticism,”Philosophy and Literature21, 1 (April 1997),
pp. 1–27 at p. 7.
(^12) Beardsley,Aesthetics, p. 421. (^13) ibid., p. 423. (^14) Ibid, pp. 436–37.
(^15) Carroll,“Morality and Aesthetics,”p. 280A.
(^16) William Gass,“Goodness Knows Nothing of Beauty: On the Distance Between Morality and
Art,”inReflecting on Art, ed. John Fisher (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Press, 1993), p. 115.
228 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art