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Article Excerpt
Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), xi + 262 pp.
In this intriguing, quirky, and frustrating study Catherine Osborne adopts a kind of idealist, quasi-Platonist perspective from which to examine and extol the humane outlook she finds in selected authors from Pythagoras to William Blake. The thesis that drives her inquiry is that we can learn moral truths better from listening to poetry and stories than from "arid argument" (viii) and "rational debate" (5).
In chapter 1, Osborne presents selections from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence and Songs of Experience as evidence that "Blake is fight that moral vision consists in seeing things as offensive when they are offensive, and as wonderful when they are wonderful" (5). She challenges the notion that the value of a human being derives from her rationality, intelligence, capacity for altruism, or any of her natural features. Rather, "the location of moral value ... is in the outlook of the person who has a developed moral vision" (12), and the humane attitude, which discovers what is precious about nature, is only achieved through poetry, art, and stories. Science and argument, Osborne insists, are impotent to change our sense of "which features of the world demand our attention and our love" (11). If scientists, philosophers, or poetry-haters cannot be convinced of the superiority of this developed moral vision (the humane attitude), so much the worse for them. This vision, Osborne insists, is better not for any pragmatic or utilitarian reasons, or because it promotes human flourishing, "[i]t is better because it is more noble, more admirable, finer, more beautiful, and because it sees a beauty that is really there" (14; her emphasis). She ends this chapter by examining two texts. The first is a brief exchange in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One between Falstaff and Prince Hal about the mortality of a band of rascals conscripted into Hal's army. Osborne approves of Falstaff's rejection of the idea that human life is of some supreme value. She likewise applauds William Blake, in his poem about a fly he has thoughtlessly squashed, for recommending a realistic shattering of our delusions about the relative value of human life. Osborne concludes that anthropocentric pride, cruelty, and callousness are all to be avoided.
What seems so odd about this account of moral vision, moral value, and moral development is Osborne's total rejection of "academic arguments" (5) as effective ways to learn moral truths. Couldn't a sympathetic reader be equally suspicious of her argument for what moral vision consists in and where moral value is located? If her interpretation of Falstaffs line is better than others, then we may well come to see that by being persuaded by her argument for that interpretation. On the other hand, if Osborne is not offering an argument for her outlook, then she is merely opining,...
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