Abstract
The paper examines an important theme in Cora Diamond’s work, as this appears particularly in her reply to Martha Nussbaum (“Missing the Adventure”), namely the theme of moral attention—being sensitive to the complexity of facts as opposed to obtuseness, and the role that improvisation plays for moral attention. To further elucidate what improvisation is I consider its role in music and literature as mimetic portrayals of the complexity of moral life. I use the examples of Coltrane’s jazz music and of James’s rewriting of his novel The American to show more specifically how improvisation can help advance and use creatively the range of implication within which moral thought can occur.
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Notes
- 1.
The quotation from Henry James in his The Art of the Novel (1934, 149). The paper Diamond is discussing is Martha Nussbaum’s “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination”, in Cascardi, 1987, reprinted in Nussbaum’s collection Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Nussbaum 1990). To my knowledge Nussbaum is the first to identify and situate improvisation in a prominent position in ethical thought. To my way of thinking this itself represents a major step forward in bringing what is too often the abstract world of ethical philosophy closer to our real moral world—the world that should be the subject of that philosophy.
- 2.
The text discussed is: Frankena (1963, 1–3).
- 3.
The James passage is in James (1934, 347).
- 4.
I discuss the improvisational practices here and the issue of ethical interaction in fuller detail in “Jazz Improvisation and Peak Performance: Playing in the Zone”, (Jordan et al. 2017, 143–159); and “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in Hagberg (2008, 259–285).
- 5.
James (1976). Page numbers in the following text are to the page numbers of this volume, not to the page numbers (also present in the volume) of the 1877 printed text from which James was working.
- 6.
Special thanks to Maria Balaska for an extremely helpful and insightful reading of an earlier version of this piece.
Bibliography
Diamond, C. 1991. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. MIT Press.
Frankena, W. 1963. Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hagberg, G.L. 2008. Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections. In Art and Ethical Criticism, ed. Garry L. Hagberg, 259–285. Blackwell.
———. 2017. Jazz Improvisation and Peak Performance: Playing in the Zone. In Culture, Identity, and Intense Performance: Being in the Zone, ed. Tim Jordan et al., 143–159. Routledge.
James, H. 1934. The Art of the Novel. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 1976. The American: the Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907, Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles. London: Scolar Press.
Nussbaum, M. 1987. Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination. In A. J. Cascardi, ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore, 1987), reprinted in Nussbaum, M. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford.
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Hagberg, G.L. (2021). Improvisation within the Range of Implication: Cora Diamond, Henry James, and the Adventure of Literature. In: Balaska, M. (eds) Cora Diamond on Ethics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_6
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