Shelley and Ethics

Today in class, we had a small range of discussion over whether or not the reading of literature enables us to be more ethical persons according to Shelley. The second paragraph on page 700 of our anthology was brought up in order to answer this question, and Shelley would indeed say yes, reading literature does enable us to be more ethical persons.

Shelley begins his argument by stating that poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind” (Norton Anthology 700). In regards to ethics, we broke this down in class to say Shelley argues that reading poetry develops imagination, and imagination is the foundation of ethics. So we had to ask why imagination is the foundation, and Shelley answers that you need imagination to understand what someone else feels and experiences; you have to inhabit another person’s way of thinking (Norton Anthology 713).

Shelley also presents another argument as to why we are more ethical persons from the reading of literature: the poets before us. If poets such as Petrarch, Shakespeare, or Chaucer (to name a few) had never authored their works, or if the poetry in the Bible had never been interpreted for us to read, then the moral quality of our world would be so much lesser than what we have now (Norton Anthology 712). Why would this be the case? Simply because the wisdom of the poets before us yielded exactly what we need to know. According to Shelley, “[w]e have more moral, political and historical wisdom that we know how to reduce into practise.” We need to learn to work with the amount of knowledge that we already have because “we have eaten more than we can digest” (Norton Anthology 712). How does reading the poets before us make us more ethical persons? Through our minds being “awakened to the invention of grosser sciences,” we can apply what we know to how we participate in society (Norton Anthology 712).