Primeras páginas de:

Diamond, Cora. “Missing the Adventure”, Chapter 12 of The realistic Spirit, MIT Press, 1995, 309-
313.

Moral attention is our topic: the other side of it is moral inattention, obtuseness, and denial.
Professor Nussbaum began with a quotation from Henry James's Preface to What Maisie Knew:
that "the effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force
that makes for muddlement."2 James was speaking there of a particular kind of obtuseness: the
moralistic dismissal of art, of the novelist's art, expressed in the criticisms of What Maisie Knew as
a morally disgusting work. Just such 'lucidities', coming from such critics, he 'appreciates' for the
vivid reminder they provide the painter of life, not just of the conditions in which he works but
also of the rich opportunities he has. Professor Nussbaum mentions the significance of the analogy
for James, between the moral imagination in a good life and the creative imagination of the
novelist. James in fact uses the moralistic criticisms of What Maisie Knew to point that analogy:
here suggesting that it lies between the monstrous circumstances in which Maisie's freshness
must operate (the blunted moral perception, the dim moral lights, of those who surround her) and
the circumstances of the artist in a social world in which perception of life is characterized by
incapacity to see or to value Maisie's vivacity of intelligence.3 I want to look more at obtuseness,
look at it in terms suggested by Professor Nussbaum. And I want to bring out some connections it
has with two other terms important in her paper, improvisation and adventure. I shall start with
some obtuseness in philosophy: with a particular wild misunderstanding of a kind of moral activity.
William Frankena, in a well-known introduction to moral philosophy, asks his readers, right at the
beginning, to take as an example of ethical thinking Socrates's reasoning in the Crito about
whether to escape from prison. According to Frankena, Socrates has three arguments to show that
he ought not to break the laws by escaping. Each has two premises: a general moral rule or
principle and a statement of fact. The three are then: first, we ought never to harm anyone, and if
Socrates escaped he would be harming the State; secondly, we ought to keep our promises, and if
Socrates escapes he will be breaking a promise; and thirdly, we ought to obey or respect our
parents and teachers, and if Socrates escapes he will be disobeying his parent and teacher.
Frankena comments that Socrates's argument is instructive because it illustrates how a reflective
and serious moral agent solves problems by the application of moral principles; and he goes on to
raise questions about how a reflective moral agent can proceed to try to justify the principles
themselves. Thus one sees what it is to be reflective about one's working ethics.4 Frankena's
account may seem quite unextraordinary and indeed humdrum. But it is because we are so used
to such talk that we do not see how very odd it is as an account of Socrates's thought. The oddness
of it is most easily brought out if we consider the statement of fact in the third argument: that if
Socrates escapes he will be disobeying his parent. That is not a fact unless it is a fact that the Laws
of Athens are Socrates's parents. How is that a fact? If Socrates had said, "Crito, you don't know
this, but I was brought up by wolves," there would certainly have been a fact about Socrates's
upbringing of which Crito had previously been ignorant. But that is not the sort of fact about his
upbringing that Socrates thinks Crito needs to recognize. ("Unbeknownst to you, Crito, I was
brought up, not by my folks, but by the Laws of Athens.") And in the case of each of the other two
arguments as they are expounded by Frankena, the factual premise, or supposedly factual
premise, raises comparable questions. Frankena is convinced, in advance of actually looking at the
Crito, that moral thought about a particular case consists of bringing principles and rules to bear
on the facts of the case. He does not envisage as a possibility that any moral thinking goes on in
what one takes to be the facts of a case, how one comes to see them or describe them. He
chooses as an example of moral thought one in which it is quite conspicuously the case that
terrifically original moral thinking is involved in describing the facts of the casedescribing them in
such a way that they can be connected with familiar principlesand he totally ignores that. Facts are
facts. Socrates says that his escaping would be breaking an agreement. If that is a premise in the
argument, and it is not a moral principle, it must be a statement of factso that cannot be where
any moral thinking is. That is how Frankena sees the case. And this is despite the fact that the
moral originality of the description of the facts is underlined by Plato. When Socrates asks Crito
whether, if he escapes without persuading the State to let him go, he would be treating someone
badly, and not just treating someone badly but treating badly those whom least of all he should,
when Socrates follows that with the question whether he must stand by his agreements or no,
Crito has no idea how to answer; he does not understand the questions, does not know how to
bring the terms of the questions into connection with the case before him. Socrates then by an
exercise of moral imagination involving the personification of the Laws enables Crito to see the
situation differently. All of which is regarded by Frankena as nothing to do with moral thinking.
Facts are facts; describe them, and then comes the moral work: apply your principles. What
interests me is that the case of Socrates in the Crito is not a case in which it is easy to miss the
work of the moral imagination. We see Crito's imagination at work at the beginning of the
dialogue. He describes life after Socrates's death, what that will be like for Socrates's friends and
his children. Socrates then enables him to redescribe that future; he wants to teach Crito and his
other friends to see what he is doing, wants to give them a way into his story. Professor Nussbaum
quotes James's remark about Adam Verver: "he had read his way so into her best possibility"; and
we can use that remark to describe what Socrates aims at: he enables his friends to read their way
into his best possibility. His imaginative description of his situation, including the personification of
the Laws, is an exercise of his moral creativity, his artistry. It is as much a significant moral doing as
is his choosing to stay rather than to escape, or, rather, it in fact goes to any full characterization
of what Socrates is doing in staying: the story of his death includes the imaginative understanding
of the death by his friends, the understanding to which they are led by his remarkable
redescription of the situation. Using the phrase that Professor Nussbaum quotes from Henry
James, "to 'put' things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them":5 to ignore
how Socrates puts things, the very particular way he puts them, to leave that out of the doing, is
to be ignorant of what it was he was doing, what he was making of his death in prison. It takes
some doing to ignore that side of the Crito entirely, and I shall consider later what is going on in
Frankena's failure of attention. But now I need to look further at what Socrates does, taking from
Professor Nussbaum's paper the notion of improvisation. She wants to show how Maggie Verver's
standing obligations to her father are related to her understanding the particular situation in
which she finds herself, her capacity to see it. Maggie's perception is aided by the general
principles she recognizes, and Professor Nussbaum introduces the idea of improvisation at just this
point; she speaks of the improvisation of an actress who must, far more than someone going by an
external script, be responsively alive to the other artists, to the Page 312 evolving narrative, to the
laws and constraints of the genre and its history. She must, like an improvising musician, in
contrast with one who works from a score, be actively responsible and responsive, a person who
will not let the others down. The description fits Socrates: he makes his death part of an evolving
narrative to which his earlier talks with Crito and other friends belong. He takes up themes of the
earlier parts of that narrative, like his own theme that one must not treat people badly, a theme
itself sounded earlier by Crito, who has accused Socrates of planning to do what will bring disgrace
on his friends and harm his sons. He takes up that theme and makes something entirely
unexpected of it. He will not let the other players down, and this in a situation in which the other
players were sure he was going to let them down. An extraordinary improvisation shows
something to be possible that the others had not even imagined was there. And it is that
connection between improvisation and possibility that I want to insist on. It is essential in
contrasting Frankena's view of what moral activity is, what moral thought is, with the view that is
expressed in Martha Nussbaum's paper. As Frankena sees moral thought, it goes on in a situation
with fixed, given possibilities; the terms of choice, the alternatives, are something for which one
has no responsibility (except so far as one has by one's previous actions brought into existence
certain now fixed elements of the situation). The moral agent must take these now fixed
alternatives as they are and must determine which of them is supported by the strongest moral
reasons. The notion of improvisation signals an entirely different view of what is involved in moral
life, in life simpliciter, in which possibility and the exercise of creativity are linked. What is possible
in Socrates's story is something unthought of by his friends, and depends on his creative response
to the elements of his situation, his capacity to transform it by the exercise of creative
imagination, and thus to bring what he does into connection with what has happened in his life.
The idea of possibilities as fixed in advance and built into the situation locates the moral agent's
responsibility and his freedom in quite a different place from where one sees it if one takes the
capacity for improvisation as essential in any account of our moral life. The link that Professor
Nussbaum makes between the task of the literary artist and the ethical task is implicitly denied
when moral thought is limited to the direction of choice between fixed and readily grasped
possibilities, with the idea that it is not for us as moral agents to struggle to make sense of things.