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Web-Only |<br>Examined Life |<br>July 15, 2022

Art Is for Seeing Evil

by<br>Agnes Callard

I teach a class called “Death,” on the question of whether it is rational to be afraid of death. Like all my classes, it is a philosophy class, so of course I assign the seminal philosophical texts on that topic. But I also assign Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”—a poem I strongly disagree with. In my class on the philosophical puzzles surrounding self-creation, we read contemporary philosophical essays—and we also read novels by James Joyce and Elena Ferrante. I teach Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Descartes’s Meditations: they are both about what it’s like to be trapped in one’s own head, looking for a way out. I pair Plato’s Euthyphro with Sophocles’s Antigone, because they offer contrasting portraits of the clash between human and divine law. In my class on courage, we read some Platonic dialogues, bits and pieces of Aristotelian treatises and all 24 books of Homer’s Iliad.

Looking back, I am surprised by how many pages of literature I have assigned over the years, far more than is the norm in college philosophy classes. I never formulated a plan to do so; I never self-consciously aimed for interdisciplinarity. How did my syllabi wind up populated by so many novels, stories, poems and plays?

As an undergraduate, I did not major in philosophy, perhaps in part because there were so few novels on the syllabi. The (non-philosophy) professors in whose classes I read Homer and Tolstoy claimed for those texts a kind of moral authority, presenting novels as sources of personal ethical guidance. Initially, I accepted this rationale, but over the years I have come to question it: I don’t feel that reading novels has helped me navigate difficult decisions, or made me more empathetic.

So why assign them to my students? I do acknowledge that great art affords us access to distinctive aesthetic pleasures, but I don’t see it as my job to expose students to them. My goal in constructing my syllabus is neither to improve their moral character, nor to offer them literary entertainment. Rather, the situation is this: the topic of the course requires reference to something that doesn’t show up clearly outside the space of artistic fiction. My hand is forced, because without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness.

I am talking about evil.

There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some—though far from most—paintings, photographs and sculptures. My theory is that art is for seeing evil.

I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction.

I can name many works of fiction in which barely anything good happens (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, José Saramago’s Blindness, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jon Fosse’s Melancholy are recent reads that spring to mind), but I can’t imagine a novel in which barely anything bad happens. Even children’s stories tend to be structured around mishaps and troubles. What we laugh at, in comedy, is usually some form of misfortune. Few movies hold a viewer on the edge of their seat in the way that thrillers and horror movies do: fear and anxiety evidently have their appeal. Greek and Shakespearean tragedy would rank high on any list of great works of literature, which is consonant with the fact that what is meaningful and memorable in a novel tends to be a moment of great loss, suffering or humiliation.

David Hume’s essay “Of Tragedy” gestures at this simple theory in a footnote when he observes that “nothing can furnish to...