The main aim of this research is to explore the epistemological and ethical values of narrative art and to explain how engagements with such works influence our cognitive capacities and moral sensibilities. We claim that engagements with narrative art can, in light of such art’s influence, benefit individuals and we extend this thesis to the public sphere to claim that narrative art makes a positive contribution to education, culture, and society. Given such theoretical commitment, this research lies at the intersection of three philosophical traditions:
(1) the claim that narrative art is a source of truth, capable of transferring knowledge and other cognitively relevant states (aesthetic cognitivism);
(2) the exploration of the transformative power of aesthetic experience with respect to one’s ethical development (aesthetic education); and
(3) the defence of the value of the humanities and humanistic education (i.e. the one that recognizes the relevance of art and art-related subjects, including other branches of humanities such as philosophy).
Each of the three main domains of our interest can be traced back to the ‘ancient quarrel’ and Plato’s challenges to the educational value of art primarily poetry and dramatic works, which is our starting point. Our aim is to address Plato’s challenge from the perspective of contemporary views on narrative art, where such views are informed by analytic philosophical tradition, artistic practices, cognitive sciences and psychological research. Furthermore, we want to relate our defence of the narrative art’s epistemic and ethical values with the contemporary battles of the humanities for the recognition of their values.
Issues related to aesthetic cognitivism and aesthetic education nowadays fall primarily under the umbrella of philosophy of art and aesthetics, but we want to bring these closer to another relevant debate currently domineering the public space and educational policies: that of the public use and theoretical values of the humanities. Generally, this is an extremely complicated issue, with various branches within the humanities standing rather disunited with respect to the ‘proper mode of defence’. Rather than addressing these challenges directly, we will narrow our research according to the account of the value of the humanities established by Nussbaum and widely augmented by Richard Gaskin’s work in literary humanism, Patrick Hogan’s merging of literary theory, philosophical aesthetics and cognitive sciences and Helen Small’s account of the plurality of humanistic values. Thus, we are concerned with that aspect of the humanities which deals with art and art-related topics and subjects, and we narrow this further by paying attention almost exclusively to narrative art. In that context, we rely on the tradition of viewing such art as crucial for development of one’s imaginative and emotional capacities, as developed in the classical writings of Shelley and Matthew Arnold. Furthermore, our interest in this question is fuelled by the rapidly growing scepticism regarding the use and value of philosophy, which, for the purposes of this research, we think of as primarily humanistic discipline. Given the points of contact between narrative art and philosophy, namely the fact that both areas are concerned with human experience and human well-being, we believe that by creating an account of the mutually supportive ties between the two we can help defend the value of both.