Can Fiction Offer Moral Truth Beyond Truisms?

This paper challenges Jerome Stolnitz’s view that art cannot teach us anything but merely offers truisms, which he asserts in his article “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art”. The current inquiry is limited to fiction and explores the relationship between aesthetics and morality and their cognitive and emotional implications. Employing the contemporary debates surrounding the literature, I defend the view that fiction can offer us moral truth beyond truisms through the reader’s interaction with the text as she employs her imaginative, moral and emotional faculties throughout the unique process of reading.

Stolnitz’s first worry is that the cognitive value of fiction is superficial, and the “message” of a text hardly qualifies as knowledge. He bases his argument on the case that artistic truth doesn’t exist because there are no experts who could judge the epistemic status of knowledge on arts; hence there is no such thing as artistic knowledge – and without knowledge, art cannot teach us anything. Even if fiction offers certain conceptions which may evoke moral wisdom, they are already stale truisms devoid of cognitive worth. I respond to this criticism by proposing that works of fiction contain a different type of knowledge; the type of know-how rather than know-that which alludes to moral knowledge.

Stolnitz’s second worry is that the moral themes contained in fiction can fit in a sentence or two, without us having to bother to read the whole text. My response is that the act of interaction with the text is an indispensable part of enhancing our emotional and moral education which helps us cultivate our moral imagination. Similar to any thought experiment in philosophical arguments, fiction helps us direct our moral attention and evaluate diverse (moral) possibilities. The process of reading allows us to acquire a moral space or distance from which we can formulate moral responses to what happens in the text. Cultivating moral judgment takes time; and it is this time consuming act of reading the text which enables us to critically engage with the text. Learning from fiction entails an internal change we undergo in our being; and the greater the literary work is, the more we can learn from it.