Americanism now lost. These judgments might be justified. Each work seems
perhaps too overtly to argue didactically for a certain moral-political stance,
though everything will depend on how in detail the work may be aptly under-
stood to work through and clarify the responses it prescribes, rather than
simply provoking them for the sake of some moral or political action or stance.
(Compare Collingwood’s distinction between art, where a singular, object-
specific emotion is articulated and clarified, and magic, including propaganda,
where a general emotion is evoked for the sake of action.^75 ) Mullin accuses both
Carroll and Gaut, in talking of prescribed emotion in art, of undervaluing the
improvisatory imaginative exploration of emotion, and she notes that theyboth
“often make references to rather predictable genres in attempting to explain
their positions.”^76 I have complained similarly that Nussbaum, particularly in
discussing literature and politics, tends to focus on“conventionally realist
novels”–E. M. Forster’sMaurice,RichardWright’sNative Son, and Dickens’Hard
Times–“that are fairly far from the more protean imaginative and linguistic
efforts of William Faulkner or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Toni Morrison,”^77 and
I have suggested that Kantianism, with its emphasis on perfectionist moral
experimentalism, within the limits of justice and under conditions of social
antagonism, may be friendlier to a wider, somewhat less moralized conception
of artistic imagination and its moral significance.
In reply, Carroll has charged that in endorsing both experimentalism and
ethicism I fall, along with Bernard Harrison,^78 Hilary Putnam,^79 and Herbert
Marcuse,^80 among others, into what he calls“the subversion approach,”^81
according to which genuine art“is always on the side of the angels,”just
because genuine works of art inherently unsettle conventional expectations
and“show that the world can be otherwise.”^82 Against the subversion(^75) Collingwood,Principles of Art, p. 32.
(^76) Mullin,“Evaluating Art,”p. 144A.
(^77) Eldridge,“Review ofPoetic Justiceby Martha Nussbaum,”Journal of Philosophy94, 8 (August
1997), pp. 431–34 at p. 434.
(^78) Bernard Harrison,Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory(New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1991).
(^79) Hilary Putnam,“Literature, Science, and Reflection,”in H. Putnam,Meaning and the Moral
Sciences(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 83–96.
(^80) Herbert Marcuse,The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Erica
Sherover (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1977).
(^81) Carroll,“Art and Ethical Criticism,”p. 364.
(^82) Carroll,“Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding,”p. 129.
242 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art