Emotion, Ethics, and Aesthetic Judgment: Reading Literature Through the Lens of Nussbaum, Barthes, and Sontag

Aesthetes such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag proclaim the immediate response of emotion  of emotion as an aesthetic reality; this reality reflects the role of emotion as an aesthetic value judgment, a sense of ethics. This convergence of ethics and aesthetics, an aesthetics that betrays emotions, lies at the heart of Martha C. Nussbaum’s assertion in Upheavals of Thought that emotions are “intelligent responses to the perception of value” (Upheavals 1). Thus Nussbaum, beginning her writing in the nineteen-eighties, reflects the model of “against interpretation” that Barthes and Sontag developed in the nineteen-sixties as an argument for the evolution away from structural consideration in aesthetics. For Nussbaum, literature, as one of many artistic endeavors including music and visual arts, does not merely entertain or stimulate emotion—it provides a substantial method of the development of ethics. Literary characters have both emotional and moral responses, and the same is true of readers.

The emotional intensity found in many passionate literary characters not only shows a sense of aesthetics but also reflects deeper truths about human values., including ethical values. Nussbaum argues that emotions are cognitive and include ethical values, a consideration that she points out is as old as Aristotle. Emotions and ethics reveal what we care about and how we understand our place in the world. In this light, a character’s emotional response becomes an ethical issue, shaped by their social context and moral understanding.

One such ethical dimension is Nussbaum’s concern with the objectification of women in literature. In her essay “Objectification,” she presents the compelling idea that women can sometimes reclaim power through a self-conceived objectification. This duality—seeing oneself as both subject and object—can allow a unique moral self to emerge. Nussbaum illustrates this through D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lady Chatterley’s self-awareness marks a type of moral agency through self-objectification (“Objectification” 213–39). Lady Chatterley’s act of reclaiming one’s narrative, even in the context of a traditionally objectifying society, intertwines ethical judgments with aesthetic representations and does so with a sense of a new awakening.

This same pattern of ethical reevaluation extends beyond gender to colonial critique. In her essay “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,” Nussbaum turns her attention to literary portrayals of colonial societies—often depicted as heroic or civilizing—and reveals them instead as ethically problematic (“Finely Aware”). The traditional narrative valorizes colonial figures, but a deeper reading, informed by emotion and ethics, reveals traditional figures of patriarchal colonization as “monstrous villains.” The objectified subject—often a colonized character—must wrestle with an imposed identity in a bid for self-determination. The reader, too, becomes involved, forced to confront their own stance on objectification and agency. The redear creates both an ethical and an aesthetic response to the text through the power of emotional response.

This confluence of response—visceral and moral—is central to how Roland Barthes understands the aesthetic experience. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes, “Does writing in pleasure guarantee my reader’s pleasure? Not at all… [But there is] a possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss” (Barthes, Pleasure 4). While Barthes stops short of overtly linking ethics with aesthetics, his notion of a “dialectics of desire” suggests an overlapping concern with the complexity of response. Emotional and aesthetic pleasure is not neutral, especially when the text confronts readers with depictions of objectification, identity, or power.

Nussbaum’s moral philosophy, linked to an emotional/aesthetic response, corresponds to Barthes’ reader’s search for pleasure in the text, and his student Susan Sontag’s insistence that immediate experience be considered in determining meaning. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Sontag challenges readers to appreciate culture and literature with immediacy and sensual responsiveness. Her critique of the modernist overreliance on interpretation invites a return to the experience of art itself (Sontag 95–104). For Sontag, aesthetic pleasure need not be subordinated to meaning; it is a mode of understanding in its own right. Nussbaum shows how this consideration links to a more traditional Aristotlean view of ethics and emotions.

Barthes’s earlier work, Mythologies, provides the intellectual bridge between mass culture and narrative myths. His deconstruction of French cultural products of the 1950s paves the way for the American interpretive revolutions of the 1960s such as those of Sontag. While the emotionally charged novels of Hardy or Lawrence may seem a far cry from the polished surfaces of French advertisements or Warhol’s factory images, Barthes’s theories still enable us to approach all text, literary or popular, with a layered sensibility. As he writes in “In the Ring,” myths mask ideology through aesthetic gloss, which readers must work to uncover (Barthes, Mythologies 11–20). By applying Barthes’s insights to traditional literature, contemporary readers can expand their approach to even the most emotionally intense passages with a refined ethical lens.  

Nussbaum calls for such an exploration in the dramas of classical antiquity and the modernist novels of Henry James, among others. She makes her individual viewpoints on the links between art and ethics a central part of her explanation of emotional response. In doing so, Nussbaum paves the way for the further use of the Barthes/Sontag aesthetic in the interpretation of all literatures. In the viewpoints of Barthes, Sontag, and Nussbaum, literature becomes not merely a mirror of life, but a crucible in which the reader's values are tested and transformed.

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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “In the Ring.” Mythologies. (1957) Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 2012, pp. 11–20.

---. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible.” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990.

---. "Introduction." Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–16.

---. “Objectification.” Sex and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 213–239. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com.proxy.myunion.edu/lib/tui-ebooks/detail.action?docID=272685.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader, edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95–104.

 

Nick Harris

Blog 7-3-2025