discrimination, condemn Dickens for his sometime sentimentality, admire
the scope and detail of Beethoven’s formal organization, laugh at Beckett’s
absurd yet idiomatic humor, or are exhilarated by the cathartic quality of
Stravinsky’sFirebird, are we responding aesthetically, morally, or otherwise?
Cohen’s answer is“aesthetically, morally, and humanly”all at once, as we
follow and participate in the work’s action of clarification.
Ethical understanding and working through puzzlement
Once we see that works of art are products of human action or themselves
performances that aim at thematizing subject matters and clarifying emo-
tional attitudes toward them, in and through the working of materials in a
medium, and once we see further that there is no sharp distinction to be
drawn between aesthetic and nonaesthetic experience, then Carroll’s moder-
ate moralism (some works have moral significance and some do not; some-
times moral defects are aesthetic defects, sometimes not) seems less plausible
than either what Carroll calls extreme variable moralism (all works are
morally good or bad to some degree or other), if we are relaxed about
classification, or ethicism (all art is clarifying and liberating), if we focus
only on cases of distinct success as art.^96 Successful art involves the working
through in an action of artistic making of possibilities of full attention to a
subject matter, including the clarification of emotion toward the subject, via
the working of materials in a medium. When this attention and clarification
are achieved, then what is further achieved will be an expressively free
attention to the subject, as opposed to a clichéd, inattentive, half-hearted,
conditioned reaction. (Robert Pippin has argued eloquently along similar
lines that Henry James’effort as a writer“really to see”^97 is an investigation
of the interest, importance, and continuing difficulty of what it would be“to
live freely”in and through specific social circumstances.^98 )
(^96) See Carroll,“Morality and Aesthetics,”for the most compact presentation of his tax-
onomy of types of positions; this taxonomy also appears in both“Art and Ethical
Criticism”and“Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding.”
(^97) James,Art of the Novel, p. 149, cited in Nussbaum,Love’s Knowledge, p. 148.
(^98) See Robert B. Pippin,Henry James and Modern Moral Life(Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Pippin’s picture of free life as a human project is largely inspired by Hegel, so that living
freely includes, among other things, some concern for mutuality and reciprocity. One
difficulty in the way Pippin describes this project in which, he argues, James took an
Art and morality 247