5 - What differences can contemporary poetry make in our moral thinking?

Summary

The invitation to write this chapter arrived at a most opportune time. I have been trying to think through a book that sets the contemporary against the postmodern by arguing that there are several features of contemporary literature and visual art, even work promoting itself as postmodern, that have strong claims upon us. But these claims have been blunted by the ambitious, overgeneralised abstractions dominating our rhetorics about the postmodern. Crude theory in effect colonises the art and limits its capacity to serve as ‘equipment for living’ as we enter the twenty- first century. Now I have the opportunity to work on one of the most important of these features – the possible ways in which these contemporary experiments have the power to modify our approaches to moral thinking.

These modifications will not stem from direct ethical arguments; nor will they depend on the dramatic engagements with exemplary dilemmas that occupy most philosophers seeking to bring literary works into moral theory. Most contemporary art and literature with even the slightest experimental ambitions tend to be extremely wary of making any ethical claims for themselves. I can partially finesse this problem by relying here on contemporary poetry, which is considerably less cynical and/or less insistent on transforming the moral into the political than is the visual art most celebrated by postmodern theorists. But even then we cannot avoid that wariness but instead treat it seriously as carrying a possible moral weight, or at least as asking us to qualify what we do in the name of the moral weight.