The Moral Medium

Corey mentioned as a comment on an earlier post of mine: "I would not concede that there is an objectively better way to represent a claim, in any certain form."

I initially agreed with him but the more time I spent thinking about it, I became less and less sure until I arrived at the conclusion that there is, I think, better mediums for certain types of claims. I'll begin with what I consider to be the more obvious and move to the more contentious:

"Atoms have mass." Here is a comment for which there is one best medium. While it may be interesting to read a novel that somehow makes this claim intriguing and bases upon it a novel, this claim needs to be clearly explained and the supporting research needs to be provided. This is the expectation in the scientific community, and rightly so: such claims need to be tested.

"Theft is wrong." Moral philosophy, the subject of Nussbaum's introduction does, I think, have a best medium: dialogue. Dialogue synthesis literture's ease of reading with the philisophical rigor of a treatise prose. It allows characters to challenge other views and presuppositions providing a more natural venue for the exploration and defense of claims and supporting claims. To maintain that theft is wrong, perhaps it may be necessary to develop a fully robust moral theory with specific that would likely be lost is a work of literature.

An idea I am taken with is similar to the strategy Matthew Silliman used. He wrote "Sentience and Sensibility: a Conversation of Moral Philosophy" as a dialogue and then, as an appendix, included an essay he co-authored with Professor Johnson articulating, exactly, the moral theory.

Degrees of Literature

I am surprised, actually, that it took me until my fifth post to ask this question: what is literature?

The reason I ask is because if we are to maintain that literature is the best medium for ethical philosophy, we are going to need to understand what, exactly, literature is. One of my q&a questions, for example, is how literary does a work have to be? There may be degrees of literature: Republic is likely less literary than The Brothers Karamazov, but, again, likely more literary than Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Or is literature a binary classification?

So,

What is Literature?
To what degree, if it is a vague quality, must a work be literary?

Literature as Moral Medium?

Nussbaum is maintaining that literature is the best medium for investigating and conveying ethical philosophy.

I think that for the virtues of literature there is typically a corresponding vice: Articulating the ineffable occurs, when it does, at the price of precision; increased effect and import is bought at the cost of unreliablilty. While identifying a specific metaphor as being about other metaphors may be done with a certain degree of certainty, well written literature, as a rule, is less clear than a well written treatise. Using indirect communication can be powerful when it is successful, but the successful transfer of information is less reliable than straight forward prose.

I think great literature often has great philisophical ideas. This may be even the reason the literature is great. For more on this, I believe it is the topic of Nicole's next year Commonwealth Thesis. My contention is that I am not sure literature is the best medium for ethical philosophy.

Nussbaum's Novel Notion

There is a question that will inevitably arise, and for good reason: it is a potent question. Why did not Nussbaum write this in narrative form?

She maintains that literature is the best fit for investigating and answering questions about how one ought to lead his or her life. Such investigating and answering is actually an act of life, and therefore, to prescribe the best method to investigate how to live your life is actually to prescribe, minimally, how to live your life. Nussbaum is not using narrative; why not? Her hypocrisy, if it is indeed hypocrisy, runs one layer deeper. She, in the first section, actually calls hypocritical any author who would maintain literature as the appropriate medium for conveying truths and then writes a "treatise." I am lost in this Escher-like labyrinth of hypocrisy and inconsistency.

I do not mean this as an attack. Nussbaum argues, if not convincingly, spiritedly that literature is the better medium for this material; why then, does she not write in it?