Moral Imagination

       Russell Kirk must also have had in mind those higher values and virtues he ascribed to the moral imagination, which…aspires “to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.”  Utilizing the power of the word and the requisite imaginative responsibility, the artist can play an active role in orienting a reader toward something higher, in growing wings to overcome gravity, as Plato expresses.  The artist, in short, has the capacity to fulfill the function of visionaries who also can serve as shepherds of the peoples.  The artist’s impact can thus contain both a moral and a redemptive element.  It is precisely in this sense that Conrad’s greatest novels engage the reader in the moral life; and “hold truth enough,” as Conrad’s narrator in Under Western Eyes (1911) observes, “to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale Yet moral discovery is never detached from the moral reality which Conrad unceasingly confronts and which he recreates with astonishing intensity as he takes the reader into “the heart of darkness” and all of its perils.  In Conrad’s fiction, moral discovery must ultimately emerge from moral reality in the extended form of moral courage.  This triple process constitutes what one critic calls “the morality of Conrad’s imagination.”  At the center of vision, then, Conrad locates a profound and desperate opposition between disintegration and the creative imagination stirred to life in his reader.  ~ George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Part I

          Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907) particularly illustrates not only his moral universality but also his moral indictment of the betrayal of order, which a civilized society needs for its existence.  His view of ‘the natural sensibilities of mankind” in this novel, in the context of what he calls “the moral squalor of the tale,” is unyielding in “its unsparing indignation and underlying pity,” as Conrad wrote in his “Author’s Note,” published later, in 1920, which pinpoints his aims in writing The Secret Agent.  Perhaps no other of his novels…most memorable passages and scenes deal with the sea, but that his most mature insights emerge “when he touches dry land.”