Thursday, February 7, 2013
William Cowper 'The Negro's Complaint'
William Cowper's poem 'The Negro's Complaint' raises ethical questions from an ontological prospective by showing the absurdity in enslaving a race of human-beings who share the same human capacities of both thought and emotion. It is ridiculous to exclude people from their "people-ness" due to their skin color. The lines in particular "Skins may differ, but affection/ Dwells in white and black the same." reminded me of Spinoza in his "Ethics: Demonstrated in Geometric Order" with the concept of "affect"; it follows that "affection" or the capacity for change(both psychologically and physiologically) is the haecity and is closest thing we have to essence or eternal form. That is why it follows equal capacities means equal en su genre. Their is no deviating substantial essence that can be identified to deviate from actual potentials. The poem demonstrates the same affections that black people face to that of any human-being by expressing the suffering that slavery imposes on them. I really liked the closing lines "Prove that you have human feelings/ Ere you proudly question ours!". The prospectives that the poet used were effective in exalting his argument in critique of the unmoral society.
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Aside from the fact that I had to look up the word ontological I agree with your point that the poem is intended to raise ethical questions rather than just sympathy or empathy. Sympathizing with the slaves is easy to do, few people like to see a puppy get dropkicked, and empathizing is easy for other oppressed groups. That does not solve the problem though. Making it an ethical question raises it to a kind of morally righteous level. The importance of religion in that time makes it almost a sin to agree with slavery in any way.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting about this poem, and the comment is the intertwining of ethics and emotion. The ethical questions raised in the poem about the equality of races are answered mainly on the basis of emotion, rather than rationality. The slave FEELS pain and anguish in the same way that a white person would. Human FEELINGS are at the root of the the argument. This raises two interesting questions. Is the author suggesting that it is our emotions that make us human rather than our rationality? Or, given the time period, does he believe that the emotional equivalency will be more effective than a rational equivalency? Even some who advocated freeing slaves held to the mistaken belief that white people were inherently more rational. I wonder if that undercurrent runs in this poem. Or perhaps I am just cynical.
ReplyDeleteGreat post & comments! Affect and affection are the keys to this poem, and part of this goes back to 18th century moral philosophy and the debates over how exactly people come to sympathize with each other. Here's Adam Smith in _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive of it in a very lively manner." This philosophical concept reveals how the poem was intended to work: by making the reader conceive of the slave's suffering in a lively manner, it creates compassion, which is turn links the reader to the slave as fellow human beings who share the same "affections." As the speaker of the poem, the slave is clearly able to make rational arguments, but that did not guarantee his humanity as much as the criteria of shared affections and the capacity to provoke a sympathetic response in the reader. .
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