On Contemporary Anglo-American Studies Of Relations Between Art And Morality

It has always been accepted self-evidently since ancient Greek,in terms of diachronic perspective,that the study of the relation between art and morality exists as an important part of aesthetics and literary theory,which means that artworks contain moral contents and aesthetic activities relates to ethical issues.However,since late nineteenth century,because of the enormous impacts of aestheticism in Anglo-American academic field,the study of the relation between art and morality had been gradually neglected which did not gain enough attention until early 1980s.And it is since the 1980s that the research of relation between art and morality renewed and entered its booming period again in Anglo-American.This dissertation,on the basis of a standpoint that art does relate to morality,focuses on the contemporary study of the relation between art and morality in Anglo-American aesthetic field with a detailed elucidation of it that consists of the research of four main propositions.The body of the whole dissertation is divided into introduction,four main chapters,and conclusion,and the words of whole dissertation amounts to approximately 250,000.The introduction is divided into three parts.The first part serves as an elucidation of the intrinsic reason and mechanism of the prosperity of the research of relation between art and morality in contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics.This dissertation reckons that such research gained its popularity mostly owing to the emergence and convergence of two academic turns—ethical turn and narrative turn of liberal art.The second part is an analysis of foreign and domestic literature review related.On the one hand,the study of the relation between art and morality of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics has provided us with many topics of research after its rapid development during the past forty years;on the other hand,Chinese scholars engaged in this field has not cared enough about the academic accomplishments related to Anglo-American aesthetics,and this comparison suggests further the necessity of the project in this dissertation.The third part is an explication of the research thought,method,keywords and so on.Firstly,this dissertation chooses to finish the research in virtue of the problem-orientated method instead of that of time-orientated or concept-orientated,extracting four propositions mostly discussed among the the research of relation between art and morality of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics,on the basis of which this dissertation can give more possible elucidation and extension.Besides,this part presupposes and explains the usage of several core concepts related to this dissertation.The first chapter consists of three parts,focusing on the arguments of three main positions of the debate on the relations of aesthetic value and ethical value in the field of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics.The first part is an analysis of some arguments of moralism,all of which hold that aesthetic value of an artwork would be positively affected by its ethical value.For example,moderate moralist claims that aesthetic value of narrative art relies hugely on the correctness of its moral contents,the supporters of ethicism reckon that any ethical drawbacks can be regarded as an aesthetic one.The second part researches on three arguments of immoralism,whose common position is that the relationship between aesthetic value and ethical value is negative.For example,cognitive immoralist believes the artistic value of artworks would be enhanced with the appearance of the ethical disadvantages on account of their helps for our moral cognition,emotional immoralists maintain that the moral drawbacks of artworks would promote their aesthetic value for such drawbacks lead to the breakthrough of emotional resistance against the immoral contents of artworks.Based on integral immoralism,the aesthetic value and ethical disadvantage can not be separated and the former always exists in the latter one.The third part is about moderate autonomism,and that position is featured as its idea that moral badness of an artwork can never be counted as an aesthetic defect although that work can be morally defective.There are three arguments supporting moderate autonomism,respectively emphasizing the binary opposition of existence of aesthetic and ethical value,the binary opposition of aesthetic and ethical judgment,and the coherence of aesthetic structure of artworks.The second chapter is divided into three parts,mainly analyzing the research on the relation between aesthetic imagination and morality based on the studies carried out by contemporary Anglo-American aestheticians.The first part focuses on the term imaginative resistance,which can be traced to David Hume and had gained popularity in the study of Anglo-American aesthetics recently.This term,on the basis of related explanation and expression,refers to a psychological phenomenon which appears as aesthetic subject’s reluctance to engage in some imaginative activities filled with moral defects.Generally speaking,there are two routes of the elucidation of the origin of imaginative resistance:the first one stresses the cognitive impossibility of engaging in some prompted imaginative activities,the second one emphasizes the unwillingness of engaging in such activities.The second part explores the ethical limits of aesthetic imagination.The relevant responses to this question can be summarized to three kinds:radical limitism holds that the aesthetic imagination should conform to daily ethical norms even if under the fictional context,moderate limitism maintains that fictive imaginative must ensure their accuracy of the imagined objects and the sincerity of the intention of imaging,and moderate unlimitism deems that there is no moral restrictions of fictive imaginative unless an imagination with moral flaws contains an inclination to be exported into real world.The third part analyses the moral functions of aesthetic imagination,and these are two as follows:it can promote us to transfer the moral thinking mode,reflecting on ethical issues in perceptual and imaginary ways in terms of making narratives with the help of moral imagination,and it can broaden our moral knowledge,deepening our moral understanding under imaginative situations.The third chapter composes of three parts,researching the study of ethical criticism of literature both from theoretical and practical dimension.The first part focuses on a small-sized debate which happened in the late of 1990s on whether ethical criticism of literature should be banned or not.This debate mainly handled two divergences:one is the correspondence between ethical criticism of literature and attributes of literature,another one is the moral significance in reality of this kind of criticism.Although the three scholars took part in the debate failed to justify whether ethical criticism of literature is legal or not because of the ambiguity of the core terms,this debate still provided us with some enlightened ideas for the development of new ethical criticism of literature.The second part is about the changes of the theoretical mode of contemporary Anglo-American ethical criticism of literature.The first change appears as the overall re-elucidation of the theory of ethical criticism of literature,including the reflection of the drawbacks of traditional moral criticism,the exploration of connotation of the term "ethics",and some broad definitions of new ethical criticism of literature.The second change is the trend of diversity of the theory of object of ethical criticism of literature,and this trend can be seen from an academic phenomenon that objects of criticism such as the attitudes manifested by work and the literary work itself are be deemed as proper ones.The third one is the theory of three-dimensional paradigm of ethical criticism of literature,which indicates that this kind of criticism can be finished in terms of many factors like the ethical consequences of literary works and the quality of its exploration of ethical issues.The third part is a study of the practical modes of contemporary Anglo-American ethical criticism of literature,which contains not only the analysis of the main characteristics of ethical criticism of literature,but also several cases of ethical criticism as proof,revealing that this kind of criticism is an organic combination of aesthetic forms and ethical contents.The forth chapter serves as an analysis of contemporary Anglo-American ethical criticism of other kinds of art besides literature.The first part focuses on the oughtness of ethical criticism of art through the three following aspects:Firstly,it is clear that some representative theory of aesthetics like Empirical Aesthetics and German Classical Aesthetics holds no idea of forbidding ethical criticism of art,and some claims of these theories are in accordance with moral pursuits.Secondly,the ethical criticism of art itself would never do harm to aesthetic features of artworks it criticizes on consideration of its proper range of application and the correspondence of its theoretical mode with artistic activities.Thirdly,the practice of ethical criticism of art could contributes to the manifestation of some aesthetic details of artworks which are often ignored,so that our experience of appreciation of these artworks can be enriched and enhanced.The second part focuses on the combination of ethical criticism and fours types of art.Roughly speaking,in the scope of ethical critics,music can be regarded as a symbol of human emotion with some ethical contents in daily life as a metaphor;performative art is relevant with interaction of human bodies,covering some common ethical issues like reliance and trust;photography may involve some moral issues such as offending others and lowering the degree of reality of the object being shot which are supposed to be carefully considered;what’s more,even art exhibition should be regulated by some ethical demands,for instance,in the aspects of arranging and displaying the artworks in order to fully demonstrates their own aesthetic and cultural features.The third part overviews the conditions of ethical criticism of art from aspect of theory in brief,concluding the content mentioned above and further explaining some points of this kind of criticism:clarifying the scope,feature,possibility of ethical criticism of art and providing the necessities of the incorporation of artistic practice and ethical perspective.The conclusion consists of two parts,serving as an extraction and extension of the whole dissertation.The first part overviews the four main propositions mentioned above and put forward some ideas about the common factors of them as follows:firstly,the research of the relation between art and morality of aesthetic field of contemporary Anglo-American prefers the concrete issues in daily life to pure thinking with the inclination of gazing at some micro problems in reality which are mainly in connection with subject;secondly,the most obvious representation of the research of the relation between art and morality is the two-side relation of the objects of research,implying that these four propositions both ties each other and holds its own features,which can be regarded as an evidence of the conclusion that the macro mode of research of the relation between art and morality of contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics appears as an organic systematic one;thirdly,there are two drawbacks among those researches,one of which is the ambiguity of core terms and the another is the lack of empirical analysis.In the second part,on the basis of the achievements of Anglo-American aestheticians,this dissertation claims that the research on the relationship between art and morality deserves further focus and attention on consideration of its correlated theoretical mode,academic importance and practical significance.