ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how affective dissonance, born of experiencing oneself as both riveted to egocentric, ethnocentric measures of significance and estranged from them, pushes toward a problematizing of conventional moral sociality. For humans, neither fusion with others’ registering of significance nor indifference to it is a neurophysiological possibility, barring major psychic-physical dysfunctions. Affective dissonance accompanies self-consciousness. Abiding unease, not just with conflicts between selfish impulses and socially enjoined/coerced expectations, but also with conflicts between those expectations and a deeper sense of right, lays the groundwork for welcoming literary evocations of irruptive, anarchic ethical sense. Awareness that others, no less than oneself, have lives and perspectives distinctively their own brings with it recognition of human life’s precariousness and transience, as well as mindfulness that our lives are embedded in and reliant on larger sustaining material, affective, and intentional orders. Such mindfulness engenders feelings of indebtedness and gratitude that prompt consideration of what one owes others and a sense of the good independent of reference to self. Once moral sociality’s implicit equation of the good with what is good for us is felt to be inadequate, imaginative discourse that measures forms of moral sociality against what ethical sense enjoins finds receptive audiences.
