The Moral Dimension of Literature

THE MORAL DIMENSION OF LITERATURE

Evil grows unchecked due to its ability to flee recognition. Philosophy fails to capture it within its net of concepts, which adds to the question of its recognition a sense of exigency.

Literature, alternatively, is capable of unveiling the self-concealment of evil. It does so by focusing on the surrounding circumstances and grasping the absent. The very restlessness its descriptions instigate is itself a giving of what cannot be given. In such unmasking, literature accomplishes what philosophy cannot and earns its special, moral dimension.

Simultaneously, the interpretation of the good is multifunctional in literature. Good is regarded as a model, an ideal of morality, and a practical norm.

Besides, literature enables us to put together a simple but extensive and coherent theory of evil. In this respect, the Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky locates evil within us. Only by acknowledging this fact, can we obtain freedom to act.

“Evil has always been an important literary topic. We might even say that evil has assumed many forms in the work of literature. Different from philosophy and theology, literature probes into the body of evil not to find its divine message. Literary ways of thinking keep, within evil, something transcendent that escapes the grip of 'the good'.”21

21 Donny Gahral Adian, LITERATURE AND EVIL: Dostoyevsky's Poetic Thinking On Evil, p242, 24.2.2008