Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 251
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truth of their first order moral judgments: “the very general kind of judg
ment that is in question here – a judgment using a very general concept –
is essentially a product of reflection, and it comes into question when
someone stands back from the practices of the society and its use of these
concepts and asks whether this is the right way to go on, whether these are
good ways in which to assess action, whether the kinds of character that
are admired are rightly admired.”34 The ethics of Plato would be a case in
point, Kantian ethics another. The sagas do not include an external view
point from which a character’s action can be assessed; no moral judgment
is passed on actions, as Halldór Laxness noted long ago, calling their spirit
amoral or morally pessimistic.35 Now, if this distinction is tenable in gen
eral, and in this context in particular (as a conceptual instrument with
which to clarify the moral landscape of the sagas — and hence to elucidate
the morality that gave birth to them) it seems to me that a morality, like
that found in the saga-literature, can gain its distinctiveness in one of two
ways. Either, and more likely to my mind, saga morality is very thick,
although not just teeming with competitive virtues, but also co-operative
ones. As such it may have much in common with Archaic and to some
extent Classical Greek morality. or, its distinctiveness is due to its being
on the borderline between the two, the thick and the thin, in transition, so
to speak. According to MacIntyre, the Greek tragedians and philosophers
of the Classical period might be regarded as such borderline cases.36 that
position would then be the determining factor, and would explain the elu
siveness of the morality portrayed in the sagas; the idea is that moralities in
transition, from the thick to the thin, are fertile grounds for unique cul
tural products.
Vilhjálmur Árnason advances the latter idea, namely that within the
Sittlichkeit of the Icelandic republic an aporia is created when social condi
tions demand cooperative virtues in place of the dominant competitive
34 Ibid., 146.
35 Halldór Laxness, “Minnisgreinar um fornsögur,” Sjálfsagðir hlutir (Reykjavík: Helgafell
1980, 3rd pr. [1946]), 43: “... í þeim skáldverkum íslenskum sem eru af hreinustum toga og
sterkast teingd norrænni fornöld, þarámeðal egla njála Gretla Laxdæla og konúngasögur
Snorra, er yfirleitt ekki lagður dómur á verk manna ... Andi þessara verka er, þrátt fyrir
kristilegt yfirborð hér og hvar, ýmist siðblinda eða siðferðileg bölsýni. Þannig gerast í
fornsögum vorum þeir feiknstafir ... að bestu mennirnir ... vinna að jafnaði verstu verkin
og hinir verstu menn ... eru fyrirvaralaust farnir að vinna þrifnaðarverk.”
36 See MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 11.
HonouR AnD SHAMe