Aristotle and Jane Austen

Abstract

We continue discussion of the novel and moral imagination with Jane Austen’s novels and their precise implication of Aristotelian moral philosophy. Austen illustrates the virtues with the particularity the aesthetic can offer. The clear relation between virtue and social order became clouded with the Renaissance-era ‘invention of the individual’: if an individual is sovereign, as Nietzsche argues, how can moral rules be justified? We see that Aristotle has the answer to this, and also learn that the density and particularity of literature such as Austen’s shows us this answer better than Aristotle himself does.

Jane Austen [is] the last great effective imaginative voice of the [Aristotelian] tradition . . . of the virtues .

—Alasdair MacIntyre