No Alibi For Being

"For both Tolstoy and Bakhtin, novels, the most prosaic of prosaic forms, occupy a special place in ethical education. For good or ill, they are powerful tools for enriching our moral sense of particular situations" Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford U. Press: 1990), 27.

"Bakhtin inherited the moral urgency of Russian literature and turned it into a theory" Gary Saul Morson, "At Last: Bakhtin and the Teaching of Literature," Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 41, no. 3 (Feb. 2007), 350.

As I noted in a previous post (May 15, 2012, below), my Tolstoyanism is a morally enabling tradition. It enables me to "imaginatively project myself into the shoes of another" and, in so doing, to acquire the kind of insight that makes for genuine ethical engagement.

But what is that?

It is, as Mikhail Bakhtin argued, an approach to life that offers no "alibi for being." Morson summarizes the Russian thinker's notion thus:

In his writings on ethics, Bakhtin outlined numerous ways in which thinkers can avoid engaging with the world. They can live "representatively" by allowing the ideology or religion to which they subscribe make their moral decisions for them. Intellectual systems thus provide an "alibi for being," to use Bakhtin's term. But to be truly alive and truly ethical is to recognize that "there is no alibi." Without any guarantees, one must directly engage with others and expose oneself to perspectives and feelings different from one's own. One must risk one's sense of self and most cherished values. Morson, "At Last," 351.

The manner in which one engages "directly" with others is, in a word, "novelistic," i.e., it replicates the kind of dialogic engagement to which great fiction invites us. Again, Morson interprets Bakhtin: "Great works invite us to do two things: first, 'live into' them and understand them from within; then, enter into dialogue with their perspective from one's own" ("At Last," 355).

For Bakhtin, fictions are, in a real sense, persons--for they are the products or "offspring" of persons (authors). By the same token, persons are, in a real sense, fictions--for, just like fictions, they resist "finalization," i.e., they or their stories (what we can actually know about them) are always undergoing interpretation (both elaborative and revisionary). See Morson, "At Last," 353-354.

Learning to negotiate novelistic meaning in dialogical fashion is, therefore, ethical training. It is what allows one to come to terms with, say, the complexities of the Iranian government's relationship with the Baha'is--not in order to condone the nature of that relationship but, rather, to be able to parse its peculiar logic and, potentially, to be able to answer it.

Without, in any case, offering an alibi.