The Source of Moral Meaning

Rembrandt’s 1659 rendering of Moses with the Ten Commandments 

Do our great stories create moral meaning? Or do they actually detect and reveal it? 

"Good fiction does not create phenomena; it describes them. Like all art, fiction is a language for communicating a type of reality that can’t be communicated in any other way: the interplay of human consciousness with itself and the world. That experience can be delusional, as when we hear voices, mistake infatuation for love, or convince ourselves that slavery is moral. But the very fact that it can be delusional points to the fact that it can be healthy and accurate as well. When it is healthy, the “common imagination of human beings” can be regarded as an organ of perception, like the eye. Fiction merely describes the world of morality and meaning that that organ perceives."

~Andrew Klavan, "CAN WE BELIEVE?"