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Here Was One
No. 16
Grant Hodges
October 16, 2023
The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn
Dear Reader,
In light of the horrific, ongoing, and tragic events in the Middle East, I wanted to do something a little different for this week’s piece.
Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930) is a retired philosopher who held academic posts at Haverford, Cambridge, the University of British Columbia, and Syracuse. His work focuses primarily on language and metaphysics, but his most famous essay—”The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” (1974)—deals with ethics and morality through a close reading of Mark Twain’s most famous character. Although not technically literature, Bennett’s essay demonstrates how fiction can inform our moral sensitivities and make us more ethical beings.
Background
In case it’s been awhile since you’ve read Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn relates the odyssey of Huckleberry (“Huck”) Finn, a teenage boy in 1830s Missouri. Huck absconds from the custody of his abusive, alcoholic father and links up with a runaway slave named Jim. The two of them flee via a raft on the Mississippi, initially intending to seek shelter downriver in the town of Cairo, Illinois (a free state at the time). But while Huck and Jim are friends, Huck remains very conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, which is not only illegal, but, from Huck’s perspective (i.e., the perspective of a boy raised among slaveholders in a slave state), a terrible sin.
Huck’s moral dilemma reaches an inflection point when two white men seeking runaway slaves come across their raft. That’s where Bennett picks up the story, describing Huck’s sheltered perspective as an example of a “bad morality”:
From “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”
By Jonathan Bennett
In his earliest years Huck wasn’t taught any principles, and the only ones he has encountered since then are those of rural Missouri, in which slave-owning is just one kind of ownership and is not subject to critical pressure. It hasn’t occurred to Huck to question those principles. So the action, to us abhorrent, of turning Jim in to the authorities presents itself clearly to Huck as the right thing to do.
For us, morality and sympathy would both dictate helping Jim to escape. If we felt any conflict, it would have both these on one side and something else on the other—greed for a reward, or fear of punishment. But Huck’s morality conflicts with his sympathy, that is, with his unargued, natural feeling for his friend. The conflict starts when Huck sets off in the canoe towards the shore . . . planning to turn Jim in:
“As I shoved off, [Jim] says: ‘Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck I’s a free man. . . Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim ever had; en you’s de only fren’ old Jim’s got now.’ I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn’t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn’t. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says: ‘Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.’ Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it—I can’t get out of it.”
In the upshot, sympathy wins over morality. Huck hasn’t the strength of will to do what he sincerely thinks he ought to do. Two men hunting for runaway slaves ask him whether the man on his raft is black or white:
“I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried, for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says: ‘He’s white.’”
So Huck enables Jim to escape, thus acting weakly and wickedly—he thinks. In this conflict between sympathy and morality, sympathy wins.
What It Offers
Bennett’s main point, as suggested above, is that between following a bad morality or following our sympathy (i.e., our emotional, conscience-centered response), we should always come down on the side of sympathy. But he also makes a broader point about conflicts between moral principles and sympathies:
On the raft, Huck decides not to live by principles, but just to do whatever “comes handiest at the time”—always acting according to the mood of the moment. Since the morality he is rejecting is narrow and cruel, and his sympathies are broad and kind, the results will be good. But moral principles are good to have, because they help to protect one from acting badly at moments when one’s sympathies happen to be in abeyance. On the highest possible estimate of the role one’s sympathies should have, one can still allow for principles as embodiments of one’s best feelings, one’s broadest and keenest sympathies. On that view, principles can help one across intervals when one’s feelings are at less than their best, i.e. through periods of misanthropy or meanness or self-centredness or depression or anger.
What Huck didn’t see is that one can live by principles and yet have ultimate control over their content. And one way such control can be exercised is by checking of one’s principles in the light of one’s sympathies. This is sometimes a pretty straightforward matter. It can happen that a certain moral principle becomes untenable—meaning literally that one cannot hold it any longer—because it conflicts intolerably with the pity or revulsion or whatever that one feels when one sees what the principle leads to. One’s experience may play a large part here: experiences evoke feelings, and feelings force one to modify principles.
All over the world, not only in Israel and Palestine, people make decisions based on received principles without considering whether those principles conflict with their most basic sympathies. They ignore or override the troublesome conscience in favor of what they have been taught or told by someone they trust. Bennett rightly notes that this behavior inverts how morality should work—our principles should flow from, or at least be checked by, our sympathies.
Indeed, in Bennett’s view, a person who follows their conscience—like Huck ultimately does—will not commit unspeakable acts of violence against children, send families to gas chambers, or carpet bomb hospitals or refugee camps. And while it might be unfashionable to say that literature should always be didactic, works of fiction that confront difficult, abiding moral questions—like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—can provide us with far better moral instruction than any dense theoretical or philosophical treatise.
To steal a sentiment from Neil Gaiman, books can show us that “[t]he world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.