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Professor Dobson
ENGL 302
10 December 2021

The Moral Responsibility of the Artist as Man

The moral responsibility of the artist, no matter their specific medium, has long been a hotly debated subject; even now, people the world over cannot seem to come to any sort of resolution on it, typically claiming they belong entirely to one side of the debate or the other. This in itself is a classic example of non-dialectic, black-and-white thinking: either artists are to be forbidden from expressing themselves, at least in a “morally unvirtuous” fashion, or they are to beholden by nothing, not even the societies in which they reside; to these people, the artist and his art are entirely separate from the real world, and can have no effect on it. The former is reflective of the ideas of Aristotle: that “good men ought not to be shown passing from prosperity to misfortune” (109). The truth is, of course, far more nuanced than that: it resides somewhere in the middle. Art has the capacity for great transformative influence on society; as Shelley puts it: “Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” (605) Art also requires a human to create it, and art does not tend to bring itself into existence by its own volition. The artist is that human. He has no moral responsibility to his art, only the responsibility for creating it; in turn, the art has no moral responsibility to him, being the piece of his creation. An artist does not necessarily need to be a good person— some people who might be considered great artists, with phenomenal works, might be terrible in their private lives, or unkind to their audiences. An artist has no real moral responsibility to himself except his own personal code of conduct. However, the artist does have a moral responsibility to his society and the world in which he lives, because he is a human just like any other; while his work may transcend time, his flesh cannot. His art is incapable of morality by itself, but it exists within a moral society. The artist does not live in a bubble, and him and his art should be beholden to at least some of society’s rules. At the same time, this does not mean that he should be entirely forbidden from writing about certain things and only permitted to show that which is ethically virtuous, though, because doing so would be foolish. Human beings are drawn to the ethically dubious, and stories about the ethically dubious; and, if they have some baseline critical ability, should be able to separate what the artist creates from the facts of the real world. The artist can create whatever he wants, but he must accept that he can be criticized for it. The moral responsibility of the artist, in short, is to function as a member of society like any other: the artist’s job is to criticize society and help bring about change as needed, but not to uphold negative and outdated values and conceptions.

In Poetics, Aristotle outlines a strict set of guidelines for tragedic plots, many of which rest upon moral foundation. His arguments rest largely on his idea that "good men ought not to be shown passing from prosperity to misfortune" (109), for fear that doing so might negatively impact the perception of the audience. This fear is still prevalent in the modern world, a fear that showing something in a literary body of work means that the audience will be somehow compelled to action or a change of belief by the work, and/or find themselves uncritically and suddenly swayed by the depiction. It is true that art is essential to the formation and sustained existence of a culture and a society; without art, we would have nothing, as art of some kind is the basis for everything from technological invention to politics. It plays a huge role in developing a society's sense of right and wrong, its sense of good and bad, of ego, and everything in between. It is not, however, a strict, straightforward bible for what to do and what not to do, and to believe it is would be a fool's errand. Aristotle goes on to argue that "evil men" should also not be depicted "rising from ill fortune to prosperity", nor should the "wicked man be seen falling from prosperity into misfortune" (109), since all of these outcomes would inspire various combinations of pity and fear, or both, or neither. While Aristotle is less moralistic than Plato, he certainly comes across as decently moralistic here. He states that "[w]ithin the events of the plot itself, [...] there should be nothing unreasonable" (112), implying that art should not have anything in it that is "too challenging" for its audience lest it give the wrong idea. Art is often inspired by and a reflection of reality, so to pretend that "nothing unreasonable" must make its way into a work disregards what it is to be a creator. As well, art and the artists who create it should not be fully responsible for all the meaning that an audience extrapolates; a work typically has an intended meaning, though others can take away different interpretations from it and even "wield" it differently as a critical tool. Narratives are also capable of inspiring feelings in their audience, part of the intrinsic power of literature; these feelings are often engineered by the artist through use of literary devices. At the same time, some people will feel differently about a work, thanks to interpretation, and may resist the "intended" feeling something is meant to convey. If an audience member viewing the tragedy takes away some entirely different lesson or moral from it, feels pity where he is supposed to feel fear or fear where he is supposed to feel pity and misinterprets the intention of the work and its creator, that "misinterpretation" or "alternative interpretation" is not the moral responsibility of the artist but rather the moral responsibility of the individual. The individual is largely responsible for their own actions: if a piece of art drives them to some moral conclusion or feeling, or in the most extreme of scenarios drives them to perform some act they wouldn't previously, then that is the choice of the audience member and not the fault of the artist who created the narrative work. At the same time, however, certain concepts can be normalized within a society by art. That is primarily where the artist's moral responsibility comes in: he has the responsibility to not assist the normalization of certain things (perhaps most notably negative outlooks on race i.e. racism, though antiquated gender roles are yet another thing that should not be upheld uncritically within literature). Artists have the moral responsibility, as the creators of things and the "unacknowledged legislators of the World" (Shelley 619) to challenge society where necessary but to uphold aspects of it where it is necessary too. Aristotle's statements on the matters of gender roles and of slavery come off antediluvian in this regard, when he states that "perhaps as a class women are inferior and slaves utterly base." (111). By today's standards, this statement alone would perhaps be giving off some of his own "unreasonable" ideas. Literature often reflects the social state and reinforces it; the social affliction of belief change using art is much slower and gradual than a sudden shift or swing from one extreme to the other, and while certain things shouldn't necessarily not be depicted the common ways in which they are depicted often prove harmful in the stereotypes or ideas they spread.

One example of criticism involving this impact of art, and how it can cause societal harm, revolves particularly around criticism of fiction and the ways it approaches certain subjects can be found within Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, in the section "Chloe Liked Olivia". Woolf calls out the traditional narrative of woman versus woman, particularly in competition for the attention of a man, bringing up the example of Antony and Cleopatra, wherein Cleopatra resents Octavia (and thus must compete) for her position as the wife of Mark Antony: "Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy." (859) She laments these depictions of women in typical fiction, how they are often shown pitted up against one another: "All these relationships between women [...] are too simple." (859) . She advocates instead for more variety in fictional female relationships, stating that "if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory [...] [it] will make their friendship more varied and lasting" (860) and thus more complex/true to life and interesting. The rhetoric that ends up being pushed by narratives of women in constant competition is that women are intrinsically enemies. These ideas, albeit fictional, force women into stereotypes. They implant the idea that a woman should think every other woman is her enemy. They bring women to hate one another so that they may better blend in with the society that these works have both helped create and reinforce. It is the idea that fellow women are competitors, rather than fellow human beings, people to crush and put down rather than help, or to differentiate themselves from entirely (the "manic pixie dream girl"). and this idea ties itself intrinsically to the artist's moral responsibility. Aristotle on the whole tries to be too rigid in controlling art, by laying down a skeleton on which a story (namely a tragedy) is to be built (he gives too harsh an outline for everything from plot to characters, stating for example that characters "first and foremost [...] must be good" (111) morally for tragedic feelings to be justified), but it is true that consistently depicting the same narrative of women in strife with one another can create a cultural inundation of these kinds of stories. This then creates a sort of new social norm and starts to influence the idea that a woman should consider other women obstacles to overcome. The moral lesson here, then, is not that narratives like this should be outlawed; rather, that an oversaturation of these kinds of stories, especially uncritical depictions, can lead to a change of social consciousness: reality can change to reflect unreality. An artist has a moral responsibility to not encourage stereotypes, be they sexist, xenophobic, racist, etc; he is free to be himself, to write what he wishes, but as he is still a person he should not be encouraging the pigeonholing of his fellow humans. Even if he does, however, he is sure to be criticized for it by laypeople and scholars alike, which one could only hope will start to resist the more negative cultural effect.

Art as a physical thing or work exists beyond morality; by its own virtue it is neither moral or immoral on its own. It simply cannot be, by virtue of what it is, as it is an expression of humanity but not human itself. In a perfect, untouched state, art exists within a vacuum; however, we live in the real world, and art does not reside within a void. At the same time, trying to restrict art too much can be detrimental in a wide variety of aspects, whether that be to the pleasure or enjoyment of the audience or to the message it conveys or even in gatekeeping certain people (namely women) from writing, as was historical precedent. Aphra Behn calls attention to the fact that trying to reign creation in is a net negative in her "Epistle to the Reader"; she denounces the standard "musty rules of Unity" (333) and states that men "disturb their heads with any other rules of Playes besides the making them pleasant" (333). This stands in direct contrast to Aristotle's ruleset, wherein abiding by his moral rules his "construction [makes something] the finest kind of tragedy" (109). If Aristotle is outlining a strict regiment of moral "righteousness" in what he says, then Behn is advocating for the more realistic, less inflexible concept of letting artists create as they will, as they are wont to do, and then from there allowing criticism of their art shape their social profile as it does for the rest of society. Artists should function as other members of society do, able to act "as they please", but then be criticized for that work of literature, analogous but not equivalent to the way an ordinary citizen would receive consequences for acting against a social norm or law of society. One can technically do as they please, but they must accept that for doing so, they may face consequences, of varying degrees.

One must be careful not to apply too much moral pressure to literature, and more to its authors as members of a human society, for in matters of literature it is primarily the agency of the audience or the criticizers that matters; however, since art is a human tool it is at the same time wise not to regard art as some untouchable godly thing that should not be criticized lest it become devalued. Art is not godly, it is human. The things people read and internalize can and often do affect their own biases, especially uncritical depictions of social issues like race and gender or even contentious moral and ethical issues. Art should be criticized, and the artist should have a moral responsibility to act like a member of society. He should not necessarily be forbidden from certain "unreasonable" depictions as Aristotle and Plato would have him be, and he should not be forbidden from his depictions eliciting "wrong" or negative emotions in his audience because beyond the scope of criticism which seeks to detach itself from the emotional, life itself is not necessarily always just or nice or even "moral", and full of infinite possibility. Aristotle himself even mentions this in saying that an artist is to "tell of such things as might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselves [...] probable." (109) An artist's depictions may, however, be criticized for what they are. Art is founded upon criticism, whether it be outright criticism in the form of a response or essay or criticism veiled within fiction like satire or even a narrative, and the artist can and should continue to be able to criticize certain things and thus depict certain things without it being a negative; he should not be as restricted in form and practice as Aristotle wishes he was, but he should also be aware that he is morally fallible, imperfect-- and capable of being criticized ("receiving consequences") in turn. He may not feel morally responsible to himself, but he is morally responsible for himself, his works, the ideas he sows (and thus, for fielding the criticism with which people respond to them), and ultimately his own artistic fate.

Bibliography

Aristotle. “Poetics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 99–127.

Behn, Aphra. “Epistle to the Reader (from The Dutch Lover).” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 329–334.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence Of Poetry.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 601–618.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One's Own.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 857–865.