The Ethical Imagination of Art

Why, when we see acts of apparent selflessness, do we often swell with emotion?

Why, to put an even finer point on this, when we observe even fictional gestures of sincere compassion, do we pause, tear up, reach for a tissue or a nearby loved one, and become seized with something that transcends admiration -- something that feels like melting?

Art, in its various forms, uniquely taps into the human imagination, grips our emotions, and, if we listen, instructs.  Take, for example, the following short video clip, which of late, and deservedly, has been making the social media rounds.

(The YouTube link for the video is here.

The brief article about the video from Gawker is here.)

This video called "Giving" is a 3-minute, advertisement for the Thai telecommunications company True.  No product is featured, and so this is perhaps a preeminent example of indirect persuasion.  The goal seems to be to persuade by associating good actions and positive feelings with a company, regardless of whether those feelings have anything to do with the company's products and services.  This short Thai video (which you really must watch) grounds what I am about to say.

Beyond the questions related to emotional manipulation involved in marketing, there is the more serious matter of the ethics tied to the emotion that art stirs.  A number of things seem to be going on of which we should be aware -- but as is the case with art I do not think I often am.  I am not always aware because of the intricate synthesis of ideas, narrative, and emotion.  Let me mention just a few of these as they relate to the video above.

1) Impression, not Direct Argumentation.  I have heard it said that there are three levels at which ideas are communicated:  (i) philosophy -- the formal, abstract, theoretical level of ideas; (ii) art -- the level of creative representation of ideas in visual, musical, lyrical, literary, and other forms; and (iii) life -- the kitchen-table-existence level of our daily affairs.  Most people do not function at the philosophical level, and, at least, they are not routinely persuaded by arguments that come from it.  Art is the channel through which new or different ways of thinking sway most of us.  Impressions influence.  Often we are not aware of the influence. And so if this is a form of argumentation, of recommending one view over another, it proceeds indirectly by means of the representations.  Art fosters argumentation through emotional imagination.

2) Fragility of Just World Theory.  The video "Giving" links two instances of compassionate altruism in an apparently humble man's life.  In one scene he extends compassion; in the other, he, or his daughter, receives it.  Notice how the narrative sequence uses conflict to build emotional tension, each of which is relieved by an expression of compassion.

Part of the poignancy of this video story is the increased explicitness of the severity of a sickness that may, we suspect, result in death.  The boy's mother at the open is never seen; we just learn that she is sick -- we assume badly.  When the soup-man pays for the medicine the boy purloined (and supererogatorily tosses in a bowl of soup for the boy's mother), we take note.  The man redeems the boy from punishment, and we admire him for it.  An act of compassion is observed; intuitive empathy by the man contrasts with the shopkeeper's anger; the boy's loving concern for his mother is affirmed and set morally straight -- ah, a world in balance.

This impression of a just world, however, is upended when thirty years later the man is sick, hooked up to every sort of hospital contraption, and his daughter, like the boy earlier, feels the desperate need, against all odds, to help.  There is no money to pay the bills and presumably continue medical treatment.  And it all seems futile.  Now there is no redeemer.  Therein lies the heightened tension.

3)  Compassion Confronting Death.  But the felt conflict also comes from the persistence of sickness and death.  Outmaneuvered one time by an individual's empathetic generosity, there it is later, seemingly with the upper hand.  Death is, as the apostle Paul put it, the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26).  We may not frame it as Paul did, but we sense this about death nevertheless.  When commentators talk about "the triumph of the human spirit," I think they are really referring to this ongoing contest in life against death, especially if death stands synecdochically for a messed up world that is not (yet) right.

In applauding with our hands and our hearts instances in which others tangibly counter something that is wrong in life, we are applauding a surge of life (in its deepest sense) over death (in its deepest sense).  Compassion is a fuel to these acts, and re-presentations of them through art are vehicles that disseminate this central dynamic of our lives.  Art disseminates because it stimulates our emotions, largely through empathy.  In this way, by tapping or shaping our sense of what is right relative to what is wrong, art also channels ethics.

4) The Moral Sense.  I am influenced to a degree in my phrasing of these thoughts by the major British sense theorists of the 18th century:  Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.  For Francis Hutcheson, "[m]oral action is motivated by the disinterested feeling of benevolence, and moral judgement expresses the disinterested feeling of approval or disapproval that [he] called 'the moral sense'" (see "Introduction" by Raphael and Macfie in Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12).  Hume privileged sympathy over benevolence in explaining the moral approbation of actions, but benevolence is not absent:  "There is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble and generous action; nor any which gives us more abhorrence than one that is cruel and treacherous" (Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 3.1.2).

5)  Outside Spectator.  This, in turn, leads us to an important point of intersection between morality and art, between ethics and aesthetics:  spectation that triggers sympathy is judged as beautiful ("fair").  Morally good acts have an appearance of beauty, of comeliness.  We might even say of the video above, "That was beautiful!"  We use evaluative terms for art and ethics interchangeably.  Are we referring to the reproduction, or depiction, of the two acts?  Of the cinematography as especially exquisite?  Simply put, do we refer to content (ethics) or form (art)?  I do not think separating the two is straightforward, and that is the point.  "The approval of virtue," for Hutcheson, "is like the appreciation of beauty, a feeling aroused in a spectator" ("Introduction," in Smith, TMS, 12).

Art that is observed to be especially beautiful probably, more often than not, also points us to consider something judged to be morally good.  To say this is not to say that the quality of morality or art is merely subjective because, or when, the evaluation of an outside spectator is involved.  It is, however, to point out that our language is telling us something important about the connection between ethics and aesthetics:  that the connection exists.  This subject is something to explore more fully another time.

6) Emulation.  For now, I simply wish to point out that aesthetics may influence ethics by stimulating emulation.  We may "sense" this, but it could help us to understand the power of art by making it explicit.  Something like the following, it seems to me, happens.  (a) Art taps into our human emotional core (especially by triggering sympathy or empathy, whether the cognitive or affective type, or both).  (b) Art also, and in this way, catalyzes our moral sense.  (c) Then, so affected, we mirror the thinking or the actions that have appealed to us in the art.  This emulation occurs especially when an idea or action is represented in the art as virtuous -- empathetic, kind, compassionate, sacrificial -- in the face of something that seems wrong in the world.  And this (d) activates at some level, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, our self-perception.  We ask, "Am I that type of person?" Or we say to ourselves, "That is so appealing.  I want to be like that, too!"

7) Contra Karma.   I do not think that this desire to emulate the good and the beautiful stems from a hunger for good karma. (And now perhaps we can understand better why ancient Greek philosophers used these terms together, kalos k'agathos.) One, apparently egoistic, commentator on the YouTube video thought that this karma-seeking was the point of the video. What is beautiful to us, however, in the depiction of giving, of compassion, is precisely that it is given with no expectation of repayment. Reciprocity is farthest from the minds of the givers. We may not like that the world does not always reciprocate compassion. That inequity is what generates conflict on the assumption of a just world, and it is why, I suggested above, acts of altruism affect us so powerfully -- both emotionally and ethically. 

8) Conversion of the Imagination.   Inasmuch as we find ourselves through art affected by the fragility of a just world, we may also find ourselves longing for it anew.  The creative expression may unsettle our often hitherto complacent vision of the unjust present and refashion our desired vision of the just future.  Our vision is recast, reshaped, even reconfigured.  Art can help us not only to access our preexistent moral vision; it can also help to convert it.

We might realize for the first time, for instance, that we assume the world should be just -- and that we have an implicit notion of justice itself -- by finding ourselves so emotionally moved when we observe that it is not.  We are turned (converted) to this latent vision of justice.  Or, second, we might continue to create, now in our mind’s eye, a sketch of what the world might be like someday when it is made right.  We expand or alter (convert) our vision of justice.  Maybe we do both.  Aesthetics re-routes our ethics.

9) Grand Spectator.  But when art converts our ethical imagination in this way, we probably will also find ourselves assuming a Grand Spectator, a personal and not a mere karmic force, to whom all is open and laid bare and with whom we have to do.  This Spectator, like the characters in the video above, except with perfect vision, sees the unfolding unjust spectacle.  Ultimately impartial, this one has the will and power to make, in time, all things right -- freely, fully, finally.  

10)  Emulation and Anticipation.  Art previews what may be yet to come and turns our mind to it.  In this sense, art prompts us to reflect, in magical moments, on why this vision ought to be made real -- certainly in the future but also, maybe, even now partially, proleptically, in our lives.  We start to act now as we wish for all to act in time to come.  We not only emulate a representation; we also anticipate a desired consummation.

In my previous two posts -- one on Tarjei Vesaas’s novel The Ice Palace and one on Franz Kafka’s short story ”The Metamorphosis” -- I touched on this matter of the imagination-expanding power of art in the literary sphere.  I have struggled in this post to unpack how, in what ways, art may expand our ethical imagination in visual stories.  It is a start.  The more we grasp how aesthetics and ethics, art and morality, function together in our imagination to prompt action, the better we will appreciate what is good and beautiful, and the better we will know what to mirror now in our lives.