The seventh part of Rick's project on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is centred around Goya's suite of eighty-three etchings called the Disasters of War. These depict the atrocities committed by Napoleon's soldiers who invaded Spain in 1808 to quell the local insurrection against the imperial French rule of their country. As such they stand in opposition to the French paintings that glorified Napolean and celebrated the heroism of the French troops in the Peninsula War (1808-1813).

The text that Rick attaches is Sontag comments from her book. She says:

"Goya's art, like Dostoyevsky's, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow -- as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art." (Sontag, p.44-45)

Art and morality. How often they collide. This terrain is a minefield. A lot of it surrounds the issues of censorship and freedom of expression and many hold that asking art to serve a moral, or any other end except aesthetic quality, is to make an illegitimate demand on art. On the other side, there are those who see art as providing a form of moral education. The relationship between art and morality has been a frustrating debate historically, and it has preoccupied contemporary philosophers, such as Iris Murdoch.

By and large, ethical criticism is generally associated with literature and not the visual arts.

Sontag cuts through a lot of the confusion about ethics and art with the Goya suite of images of human suffering.

Update

The continuation of this post was lost due to the change of server at Movable Type.

The post was about the value of ethical criticism in relation to the ethical tensions in an image without embracing the literary humanist idea of particular sort of moral enlightenment as character-improvement, moral uplift and an aesthetic education that teaches us to become more compassionate toward the others.

This ethical criticism connects an ethical response to human suffering represented by Goya's image to eudaimonia or human flourishing. It is a rupture from the old Enlightenment/Romantic tradition in which a radical distinction is made by the scientific Enlightenment between an instrumental reason on the one hand and on the other hand emotion and imagination. The Romantics merely inverted this hierarchy. Instead of seeking to use reason to master and control feeling, they liberated feeling and imagination from the tyrannies of reason. They did so by disconnecting feeling and imagination from accountability to the public sphere and allowing them soar free. They wanted radical autonomy.

Goya's etchings reconnect art to the public sphere and reconnect feeling and imagination to reason---an ethical reason that talks about a particular historical event: the brutality fo the French occupation of Spain. Here the artist is inside the republic ---not banished as with Plato; nor celebrating their banishment as with the Romantics, who wanted freedom from anyone telling them what to do with their art.

What Goya points to is a robust critical public culture in which one is prepared to question authority in the name of morality that gives voice to human suffering, rests on respect for reason whilst appealing to human emotion.