Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

The complete truth about being a human being is often falsified or at least partially obscured by a young child’s subjective experience. A person has to grow as a moral self in order to transcend this childlike subjectivity and primitive narcissism. He must begin to take a view of the world that is conditioned by an internal discipline of the passions and a “receptivity to teaching [and] . . . willingness to accept advice.”9 This is certainly what Pinocchio’s pilgrimage toward maturity is about. This mature way of experiencing and knowing the world is not the objective knowing normally associated with physical science, nor is it the subjectivity of solipsism. It is an intersubjective and relational way of experiencing and knowing. It is a way of interpreting the world that requires memory and a moral imagination; otherwise a moral self cannot come into being. Just as the appetites require discipline that they may be directed toward their proper ends, so the imagination needs to be guided by reason, sound memory, and the common stock of human wisdom about the world and its possibilities.