Introduction

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the
realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists
draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.1

... There are arts whose purpose is to entertain, which are dance, poetry and representational art. There
are arts whose purpose is to "find favor" that are sculpture, painting and architecture. There are arts
whose purpose is to "influence," which are music, literature and philosophy.2

The choice to deal with the connection between literature and philosophy has many
reasons, and many philosophers have been dealing with this question in recent years.
Literature is often adapted to real life more than philosophy because it calls for the
imagination and sensitivity of the readers and provokes a deep response. Literature
encourages us to think about moral matters even if we do not control the philosophical
lexicon. It helps us to pay attention to the context, details and nuances of moral
situations. It helps to accept the inevitable ambiguity of the difficulties that arise when
we want to solve moral problems, but at the same time creates a reflection on the
importance of the limits of ethical theory. Literature shows how abstract ideas become
dramatic in the behavior of individuals and groups. Literature helps to broaden the
sensitivity and understanding of points of view described in different cultures and
helps us empathize with the suffering of others. As Rorty, one of the philosophers
who dealt with the subject explains: "Fiction like that of Dickens...gives us the details
about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not
attended… Henry James or Nabokov give us the details about what sorts of cruelty we
ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the
novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the
sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress."3
Attentive readers are readers who actively bring criticism and intelligent sensitivity to
the world of romance in the process in which they become partners within it.

Saramago's scholars avoided dealing with the ethical dimensions of his literary work
and they were satisfied with the numerous non-literary texts he wrote as expressing

1
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (trans. Linda Asher, Grove Press Inc. 1988), 23.
2 Pessoa (no date), p. 2

3
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press 1989), xvi.
the author's personal moral doctrine4. His diaries and criticism articles will also serve
me in this book to substantiate my claim that the same elements exist in his fictional
work. My challenge is to sharpen the moral tangle of human society in a period of
economic liberalism.

From what Saramago wrote in his diary after he finished writing the novel Blindness I
extract the questions that bother the writer which I will explore in this book:

In the novel Blindness that became an allegory, I tried to tell the reader that the life we live is not
rational, that we use reason against logic, against life itself. I tried to say that logic should never be
separate from human dignity, that solidarity should not be an exception, but a law. I tried to say that
our logic is a blind logic that does not know where to go and does not want to know it. I tried to say
that we still lack the way to become authentic people and that I do not think the way we go is good.5

José Saramago has created a world that is sometimes dark and bitter, skeptical and
disappointing, where major questions intersect, such as the need to look back at
history and re-discover new heroes, victims of injustice, or examine the question of
Portugal's status on the Iberian Peninsula and in Europe.

Saramago deals with a world that re-examines the myths, beliefs and fundamental
values of Western culture, or the egoism and cruelty that destroy a world that seems
hopeless. Saramago examines this in combination with characters inhabiting his
fictional images in all the novels. I will substantiate my argument on most of
Saramago's work in this book.

Saramago is a writer who belongs to the stream of constructive modernism - all he

wants is to build and not to destroy. He does not direct at playful cynicism, and
therefore the irony of his work is actually constructive. Although Saramago uses
postmodern tools, his ideological statement is entirely modern: he is a writer with
strong Marxist political views, a stubborn and persistent freedom fighter.

The keys which I present in this work to Saramago's "reading" do not "open" only the
texts of the author I choose to focus on, but offer the keys to interpretive reading of all
his works and perhaps even keys to interpretive reading of other authors.
4
Most of the research papers that were written discussed Saramago's work from a historical and literary point of view
and delved into one or several works. Below I will mention some of the important works written (important because
most of the authors became university professors following their research: Allemand, M.L de Oliveira. (1996),
Arnaut, A.P. (2001), Berrini, B. (1998), Bloom, H. (2001), Cerdeira, T.C. (1989), Cerdeira, T.C. (2000), Costa, H.
(1997), Feraz, S. (2012), Martins, Adriana Alves de Paula. (1992), Mesquito, M.L.R. (1993),
Seixo, Maria Alzira. (1987), Seixo, Maria Alzira. (1999).
5
José Saramago, Diaries from Lanzarote, Caderno IV, (Caminho, 1996), 233. (From now on the Portuguese
translation of all non-literary texts is mine -m.r).
Saramago testifies to the fact that he constantly seeks a formula of ethics, wants to
prove the ethical significance of existence, and wishes to express it in his books.

In recent years, I have realized that I am looking for a formula of ethics: I want to express, through
my books, the ethical sensitivity of existence and to give it literary expression (from an article
entitled "The Words Hiding the Inability to Feel", August 9, 1996, interview given to Juan Manuel
Prada).6

To illustrate Saramago's ethical worldview, I will demonstrate in close reading parts

of his literary and non-literary work. To this end I will use interdisciplinary
methodology that connects literature, moral philosophy and linguistics, and through it
I will examine texts from Saramago's literary work as developing "ethical sensitivity"
in the reader. The question of whether or how literary text evokes ethical sensitivity is
the question I wish to examine in this book and to give some answers based on
philosophical studies on the subject, alongside the work of José Saramago. I will
argue that Saramago is a special case of someone who establishes ethical expression
and ethical coping. What does "ethical expression" mean? I am referring to a literary
text that presents the reader with ethical problematics. But I will not confine myself to
this encounter, but will see how Saramago does not only presents ethical problematics
but also offers a way to deal with problems.

Sometimes, it is not easy to explain how the literary text manipulates the reader's
ethical sensitivity without clinging to didactic clichés. Nevertheless, in a carefully
studied literary text which follows each character and analysis the possibility
available to it, as well as in the process that it passes through the story, can lead the
reader to another place and enables the development of ethical sensitivity. What turns
the ethics into the novel is that it finds a picture reflected in the narrated narrative. It
should be noted, however, that only a few writers are philosophers in a way that
makes it possible to summarize the content of their work in philosophical terms. But
there are philosophers who have written books such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch and others.

When we discuss about the novel from an ethics perspective, we talk about certain
ways of reading. Charles Taylor argues in the context of the narrative that individuals
give meaning to their lives in terms of narrative. This is done through stories that

6
"Percebi, nestes últimos anos, que ando procurando uma formulação da ética: quero exprimir, através dos meus
livros, um sentimento ético da existência, e quero exprimi- lo literariamente". "Las palabras ocultan la incapacidad de
sentir", ABC, Mardi, 9 de Agosto de 1996 (Entrevista a Juan Manuel de Prada).
individuals tell about their lives and allow us and them to discover how, for example,
they make choices, meet expectations, and so forth.7

Albert Camus, who deals in his writings about the meaning that artist and art bring to
us, says that it is common to think that work is mutually beneficial to the creator and
the reader. We still have to ask ourselves: "it would still be necessary to ask why it
was incumbent on a large part of humanity to take pleasure and an interest in make-
believe stories. Revolutionary criticism condemns the novel in its pure form as being
simply a means of escape for an idle imagination. In everyday speech we find the
term romance used to describe an exaggerated description or lying account of some
event.... In general, it has always been considered that the romantic was quite separate
from life and that it enhanced it while, at the same time, betraying it..."8 Camus' work
can serve as an extensive platform for examining the subject on which this book is
concerned. If we take away the romantic element, we will find that it evokes an
extensive ethical sensitivity that has also influenced the author of our work, José
Saramago.
In the chapter on the artist and art in The Rebel, Camus introduces the question: From
what do we escape through the novel? Is it from a difficult reality? After all, happy
people read novels.

The incontestable importance of the world of the novel, our insistence, in fact, on taking
seriously the innumerable myths with which we have been provided for the last two centuries
by the genius of writers, is not fully explained by the desire to escape. Romantic activities
undoubtedly imply a rejection of reality. But this rejection is not a mere escapist flight, and
might be interpreted as the retreat of the soul which, according to Hegel, creates for itself, in its

disappointment, a fictitious world in which ethics reigns alone. The edifying novel, however, is

far from being great literature; and the best of all romantic novels, Paul et Virginie,9 a really
heartbreaking book, makes no concessions to consolation… The contradiction is this: man
rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the

world and by far the majority does not want to abandon it.10

7
In a discussion of Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Teddington: Acumen, 2000), p. 37-40.
8
Albert Camus, The Rebel, (Trans. Anthony Bower, First Vintage International Edition, 1991), 129.
9
The book Paul et Virginie by Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre was published in 1787. The two heroes are
friends from childhood who fell in love. The story is located on the island of Mauritius under French rule. It was written
on the eve of the French Revolution and criticized the class division in France in the eighteenth century.

10
Ibid.
The American philosopher John Kekes in his book Enjoyment11 argues that literature
is a rich source of understanding of life, and its contribution to moral thought is
deeper than supplying concrete scholar examples. One of the reasons that works of
literature endure is partly because they describe possibilities whose realization makes
lives good, and limits whose violation makes lives bad. These possibilities and limits
are also a central concern of moral thought. The subject of literature and the subject of
moral thought overlap. Kekes demonstrates this through three lifestyles that should be
assessed as worthy and three defective styles.12 According to Kekes, moral thoughts
are directed at significant facts. Literature conveys their sense of meaning, mobilizes
the sensitivity and imagination of attentive readers, thereby enabling them to
understand the heroes in their meaningful lives.13 The literary text therefore offers us a
sort of simulation of corrective experience. If we do not experience an ethical
sensitivity, we sink into despair and pessimism.

Adia Mendelson-Maoz, in her Literature as a Moral Laboratory,14 claims that there

are two types of reading: passive reading and active reading. She writes: "There are
two ways of reading literature: one is static and the other is dynamic ... On the one
hand, we can read the work and absorb it into a kind of passive activity ... Passivity
does not prevent us from feeling turbulent emotions when reading. But it is based on
the acceptance of the fictional world, acceptance of the general framework of reading,
without appeal. On the other, it is possible to carry out an active, free and liberated
reading, characterized by constant awareness of the reading process and the distance
between us and the fictional world. This is the reading appealed by ethical researches
of the reading15 (Mendelson-Maoz gives a long list of scholars who dealt with the
ethics of reading). The ethics of the fiction and its writer, the ethics of the reading and
the reader create circles that are artificial, because on the continuum of author- text –
reader there are many points of encounter. And all the hermeneutics theories are
needed for this triangle.

Mendelssohn-Maoz wrote about the ethical process. In my book I shall go one step
further and relate to the development of ethical sensitivity in the author and the

11
John Kekes, Enjoyment , (Cornell University Press 2008).
12
Ibid., 143.
13
Ibid.
14
Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Literature as a Moral Laboratory, (Bar-Ilan University Press 2009, in Hebrew).
15
Ibid., 45.
reader; I will present pre-reflective and reflective processes of the author and the
reader that have ethical processes.

The argument that literature develops in us an ethical sensitivity means that the book
must act on the emotional and moral level. But in order to develop ethical sensitivity
does not mean that we should only read texts with a moral message, which is
commonly referred to as "didactic literature." On the contrary, it is precisely a novel
that has moral "disharmony" that presents the reader with question marks and
provokes deep thought that generates ethical sensitivity. In this book I examine how
the literary text provokes ethical sensitivity even when it presents a situation in which
the characters behave in non-ethical sensitivity, or do immoral acts: for example, the
protagonist in the Double, or the bullies in Blindness in Saramago's work. The books
of the American philosopher John Kekes will help me throughout the book. On the
last topic I mentioned, he speaks mainly in his books dealing with evil.16

How can one "save" the ethical sensitivity from the didactic position? The subject is
fraught with mines because the question of the nature of "goodness" arises
immediately, as well as questions about human nature and how people make their
choices. John Kekes presents an alternative to religious perception and moral
approach through the pluralistic-realistic approach. One of the main arguments of the
pluralist approach says: "A meaningful life can be immorally good and a good moral
life can be meaningless."17

This position is important and appropriate to the approach of Saramago's work. The
lives of the Church people, the kings, the tyrants, and even those who hold power,
which is supposedly democratic, can be meaningful when they are not morally good
and their acts towards other human beings teach about it. And ordinary people, who
are most of the heroes of Saramago's work, have moral life, but for some of them this
life has no meaning.

One of the central questions of Saramago's worldview is the question: "Is life
meaningful?" And this is an eternal philosophical problem. The source of the problem
lies in the disruption that is taking place in our daily lives, and it appears in the lives
of the heroes in Saramago's work. Poor and unlucky people (most of his main

16
John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton University Press 1990) and The Roots of Evil (Cornell University Press 2005).
17
John Kekes "The Meaning of Life", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, IV (2000): 34.
characters are such), tired (Ricardo Reis in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ,
José, in the novel All the Names, or Raimundo Silva in the novel The History of the
Siege of Lisbon), unsuccessful (José in the novel All The names), bored (Tertuliano
Máximo Afonso, in The Double, King Joao V in the novel Baltasar and Blimunda),
or victims of injustice (the blind heroes in Blindness, in Baltasar and Blimunda, in
Seeing, in Death with Interruptions and more). From this disruption in the life of
the heroes, the eternal question is asked: "Is life meaningful, and if it has meaning,
where can it be found?" My argument is that through the development of ethical
sensitivity, life receives its meaning both in the heroes in the novels and in the
readers, and I will illustrate this later in the discussion of ethical issues and attentive
reading of passages from Saramago's work.

The term "ethics" comes from the Greek; Greek ethics deals with the search for a
proper "form of existence" in the wisdom of action. The Stoics have turned ethics into
the core of philosophic wisdom in the distinction of what man does of things that
depend on him and of things that are independent on him, giving priority to things that
depend on him. The Stoics compared philosophy to "the egg whose shell is Logic,
whose white is Physics, and whose yolk is Ethics."18

For modern philosophers, from Descartes onwards, the question of the subject has
become a central question, and ethics is more or less a synonym for morality. Kant
says that in practical wisdom, which is distinguished from theoretical reasoning, is a
relation between subjective action and its representable intentions, and universal law.
Ethics is the principle of judgment of the subject's practices, be it a private or
collective subject. Badiou points out that Hegel created a subtle distinction between
"ethics" and "morality," while maintaining the principle of ethics for immediate
action, while morality is expressed in calculated action.19

Badiou claims that the concept of ethics has recently been blurred. The term is
attributed to too many fields and is being dimmed. There is a kind of "inflation" of
the concept in order to create a sense of comradeship: we talk about "ethics of living",

18
Alain Badiou, Ethics (trans. Peter Hallward, Verso 2001), 57.
19
Ibid., 59 (a note):G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 466, p. 280. The whole of this section of the
Phenomenology is difficult, but very suggestive.
"ethics of being together" and "ethics of the media." There are "national ethics
committees", and all professions study their "ethics". For example, we talk about "the
ethics of human rights", which are violated worldwide.20 In this regard, it is
worthwhile to note Luce Irigaray's book, Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of
Difference which deals with the violation of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights of 1948, to show that every right is violated against women.21

Following the teleological and ontological theories and the distinction between
compulsory concepts and value concepts, John Kekes speaks of the difference
between the wide and the narrow sense of morality: in the narrow sense, the concern
of morality is what is right. In this sense, morality deals with the formulation of
impersonal, impartial, disinterested rules that need to control human interactions. In a
wide sense, morality deals not only with what is right, but also with what is good. In
this sense, morality relates not only to rules, actions, commitments, but also to ideals,
virtues, conceptions of good life, personal aspirations, intimate relationships, private
projects, doing beyond duty and so on. Right actions are impersonal conditions of a
moral life, while the full meaning of moral life stems from the personal sphere in
which there are great individual variations. A technical expression of this is that the
meaning of life can be found in the best dimension or in the well-being of the human
than in the deontological aspect of morality.22

This discussion raises an important question that will arise in this book: Human
Dignity and Moral Responsibility. On the philosophical level, I will bring together
the voices of those who seek to rely on the combination of the James's pragmatism
that claims that a person who considers himself free can indeed live a more
autonomous life: A concept which is aware that freedom imposes a profound
responsibility and does not let us rely on the deterministic concept that gives a sort of
"moral holiday,"23 with the existentialist view that presents the man in the extreme
state of the "falling" (Heidegger) and the "The abandonment" (Sartre). These
perceptions are based on the assumption that man is free and he decides by himself
and is responsible for his life. I will also examine the issue of responsibility in the
20
Ibid., 58.
21
Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (trans. Alison Martin, Routledge 1993), 86-92.
22
John Kekes "The Meaning of Life", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, IV (2000): 27.
23
William James, Pragmatism, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), 93.
prism presented by the philosopher John Kekes in his books. I will argue that
Saramago belongs to a period in which morality is no longer viewed as a general and
rational validity (Kant), nor is it a religious one, but rather an attempt to examine the
possibility of giving value to individual life, a worldview that also takes into account
the individual needs and as a unique individual.

In the article "The Meaning of Life," John Kekes argues that religious perception and
moral perception failed because they sought a general answer. Their basic assumption
was that finding meaning depends on finding something that was right and worth it.
The religious approach seeks a cosmic order; the moral approach seeks it in morality.
They recognize individual differences, but they see only variations on the same basic
theme. Individual differences are of interest to them only because they force us to do
different things in order to accommodate to that general and significant demand. Both
concepts assume that for all of us the meaning stems from the same source, whether it
is the will of God or a moral principle.24

Moral imagination

The term "ethical sensitivity" refers to the ability to identify an issue as ethical and to
identify the moral aspects that are learned from it, to discover or teach about
sensitivity within ethical situations or issues. Many authors have presented the term in
the context of educational psychology. Callahan25 defined it as: 'Ethical sensitivity is a
combination of two different abilities: moral imagination and identification of ethical
issues.'

"Moral Imagination" is a common term in philosophical literature and will be

expanded in a separate chapter of the book. At this stage, I will suffice with clarifying
the term "moral imagination" as generally responsible for broad and varied human
activities. Through imagination, we manage to look at the lives of people who are
trying to understand their behavior constantly. And to this end we must also
understand our own behavior.

24
John Kekes "The Meaning of Life", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, IV (2000): 31.
25
Daniel Callahan, "Goals in the Teaching of Ethics", Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, (1980):71.
John Kekes extensively discusses "moral imagination" in some of his books and
argues that the balance ideal of reflective self-esteem is the connection between the
expansion of life and moral imagination. Life should be expanded if people are not
satisfied with it, or if their interests are not realized. The balance ideal aims to ease the
absence of these satisfactions through moral imagination. Imagination is "moral"
because its concern is the good, that is, a responsible and fulfilling life. And it is a
kind of "imagination" because it recreates the past frames of man's brain, including
the cognitive, emotional and voluntary elements, and predicts how life will look
according to possible ideals of a good life that someone recognizes as such.

The expansion of life is done by meeting the possibilities that one recognizes with his
social and personal possibilities. It is a psychological private activity, concentrated in
the Being and increasing human control over their lives, and it must be maintained
within the limits of logic and morality, which are characterized by responsibility and
self-realization.26 Kekes claims that moral imagination does its work in three ways he
calls as corrective, exploratory, and disciplined. Three ways I will describe in detail
in the chapter on "Imagination and Moral Imagination".

The processes that Kekes talks about, the combination of the various types of moral
imagination are the epithets of motivations that can be shown in the literary text.
Kekes demonstrates his conception in this book and in his later one, 27 by presenting
examples from reality and from literature. In this book I will use the terms that Kekes
coined, and illustrate how the moral imagination works in Saramago's work and how
it develops in the readers an ethical sensitivity.

Identification and awareness of ethical issues are associated with the realization of
moral imagination. If moral imagination is the ability to discern ethical issues,
recognition is the application of this ability. It is an attempt to analyze what appears
retrospectively, to recognize the moral aspects of a given situation and to assess the
significance of the moral consequences of this situation. We can therefore see ethical
imagination as a skill that can be acquired and developed, and not only as innate

26
John Kekes, Enlargement of Life - Moral Imagination at Work (Cornell University Press, 2006), 33-34.
27
John Kekes, Enjoyment – The Moral Significance of Styles of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
ability. Ethical sensitivity can be gained through exposure and experience in ethical
problems.

Kekes claims that in our daily lives we meet intimate relationships only with few
people and also with these people we often fail to decipher their behavior, their
desires, and the like. Literature gives us countless examples that teach us what to try
and adapt to the circumstances of our lives (not in a perfect imitation, because it does
not serve the purpose), and what is better to try to keep away from us. Literature
shows us individuals of different characters in certain contexts struggling to face
important choices they are doing in a good or bad way and live with their results.

Works of literature can do it good or bad. There are works that enable reflective
readers to understand types of character, circumstances, and choices whose meaning
deviates from the particularity of place and time. For example: the difficult situations
of Oedipus, Antigone, and Socrates. Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, Augustine,
Montaigne and Hume, Abraham, Job and Pontus Pilate. Faust, Anna Karenina and
Robinson Crusoe, all these characters were milestones in Western thought. They
provide us with a diverse range of life possibilities, common moral vocabulary, and
symbolic figures that allow us to compare. Thus they form together the accumulated
experience of our moral tradition - the means by which we can learn about others. The
works of this kind are the classical works and the richest we inherited from previous
generations.

When we learn from the example of classical characters we do not learn to live like
them, but learn what kind of life they lived. We learn to see their lives and attitudes
from within, as they did. We learn how the world looks to those who have been
immersed in rules of behavior, or death, or pride, or moderation, or honor, or
independence. At the same time, we learn to articulate our views on these possibilities
of life. And the more clearly we express our thoughts about them, the more we will
understand how we should live on our own. We can like or dislike these possibilities,
to appreciate or degrade them, but in any case, we see them. But it is not enough that
we see them, we need to exchange perspectives from someone else's point of view.
Kekes argues that by raising imaginary arguments, we are doing moral reflection
guided by literary meanings. This means that literature raises the sensitivity and
imagination of attentive readers, to enable them to understand the heroes that in their
lives the described facts are significant. Literary works enable moral reflection guided
by literary meanings.28

Ethics of Justice and Ethics of Compassion

Saramago's work will serve me as a place that aspires to a meeting between "Ethics of
Justice" and "Ethics of Compassion." Understanding these two ethics will enable me
to present the relationship between them in the areas of moral practice and the
different disposition that they shape in Saramago's work. "Ethics of Justice," assumes
that man seeks to act justly and overcome his tendencies, feelings and preferences
when he places his concerns on the worthy and the just. "Ethics of Compassion" is
based on personal and interpersonal communication, and is not based on a legal,
objective and rational system that is characteristic of the perspective of justice.29 In the
"Ethics of Compassion," the concern becomes a universal moral imperative; this is an
ethics that expresses free choice, without the conventional interpretation of
conventions, and in this way it articulates moral dilemmas in a way that makes it
possible to accept responsibility for the acts of choice.30 "This ethic, which reflects a
cumulative knowledge of human relationships, evolves around a central insight, that self
and other are interdependent."31

At the basis of Saramago's ethical conception is the concrete suffering of the

individual as an example of a general social defect, and there is a desire to establish a
social life that in addition to compassion is governed by the just law. "Ethics of
Compassion" is based on the fact that all human beings are exposed to the same
possibilities of suffering and harm, and therefore they are equal. In my book I will
show how in Saramago's work compassion is perceived as a human trait attributed to
people with unique qualities (figures like the doctor's wife in Blindness or Blimunda

28
Ibid., 258
29
Avi Sagi, "Between Ethics of Compassion and Ethics of Justice", My Justice, Your Justice (ed. Yedidia Z. Stern in
Hebrew 2010):173. (This article appeared also in Avi Sagi Facing Others and Otherness (Hakibbutz Hameuchad,
2012, in Hebrew).
30
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice – Psychologic al Theory and Women's Development (Harvard University Press,
2003), 95.
31
Ibid., 74.
in Baltasar and Blimunda), while society as a whole is guided by other motivations
lacking compassion (survival, power, greed, etc.).

Although Saramago presents a pessimistic world directed by forces of corrupt and

exploitative rule (the kings, the church, the dictator), nevertheless it leaves hope and
aspiration for universal universality of social justice. This dichotomy between 'ethics
of compassion' and 'ethics of justice' will serve me in the ethical discussion of my
work, and through it I will also ask the questions: "How to fight evil, and is it possible
to establish a life of responsibility?"

The ethical world that Saramago describes in his work "corresponds" with
existentialist philosophers and writers (Sartre, Camus) and also with Marxism, and
undermines the religious and theological thinking that characterizes many characters
inhabiting his work and his concrete existence as a Portuguese native. 'God is the
invention of man,' Saramago says often in his diaries and in his interviews with the
written and photographed media.32 He ridicules the tyrannical rulers: the monarchy,
the church and the dictatorship, but also casts great doubt on the way democracy is
realized. Hannah Arendt says that even after losing the power of the monarchy, when
there is supposedly a kind of "no one" control, as seen in the most socialist regimes,
bureaucracy does not cease to rule over us. Control by "no one" is not necessarily
"lack of control". In some data it could even become one of the most vicious and
despotic versions.33
"Ethics of Justice" rejects the personal aspect and praises the principles on which to
establish the moral act of man as a human being. "Ethics of Compassion," which is
presented in the works of the feminists, also known as "Ethics of Concern" (Ethics of
Care), speaks of personal and interpersonal communication that is not based only on a
legal system that is determined by the perspective of justice. Tronto argues that caring
is not just a disposition or position but a general practice with unique characteristics
that includes consideration, responsibility, authority, and responsiveness.34 And
32
Cadernos I, 1993, p. 26; Cadernos I, 1993, pp. 72; Cadernos II, 1994, p. 252; Cadernos IV, 1996, p. 182; Jornal
Publico 18.9.2001; As Palavras de Saramago, (organização e selecção de Fernando Gómez Aguilera, Campanhia Das
Letras, 2010), 116-130. This last mentioned book is a collection of quotations arranged by topic, from Saramago's
numerous interviews and the written press. (from now on All quotations from this book are translated by me – m.r).

33
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1958), 40.
34
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Routledge, 1993), 118-119, 126-
137.
defines caring in the most general way as "activities that include everything we do to
maintain, to continue our 'world' so we will be able to live in it as good as possible."35

It seems that Saramago, as a secular humanist, agrees with Hume's moral

subjectivism, which argues that the origin of morality is not in the mind, but in the
emotion.36 He opposes morality dictated by religion and does not accept the view that
a moral thing is what is accepted in society, that whoever manages it exploits the
weak for his own good. Saramago is a metaphysical rebel, not an atheist who removes
God, but a rebel who rejects the reality created by God. It is a writer who is
disappointed from God and converts the claim against God from "you are not deserve
to exist" to "you do not exist."37 From the view that stems from the 'ethics of
compassion' and 'ethics of justice' that seeks to build an ethical view that applies to all
human beings because of their being, Saramago creates his literary work where kings
are present in his historical books; God and the Church in all his books, and in the
radicalization in the novel The Gospel according to Jesus Christ; The dictatorship,
and the democratic, or supposedly democratic regime (in radicalization in the novels
Blindness and Seeing). And all impose their rule and power on the small, helpless
man who needs compassion and care and does not know how to demand a just
treatment.

Solidarity, absurdity and irony

The ethical issue of solidarity will be examined in this book through an illustration of
Saramago's work. And I will try to present a worldview in which alienation may lead
to human solidarity in different perceptions: the metaphysical possibility that
mobilizes solidarity for the other as a basic response to injustice and evil; the revolt is
a phenomenological fact that solidarity is the depth of its meaning (Camus, 1991) and
the historical conception which argues that human solidarity depends on a particular
social reality, as Rorty says:

35
Ibid., 103, 171.
36
David Hume, An Inquiry Principals of Moral (Chicago: The Open Court Publishers Co. 1912), 128.
37
Albert Camus, The Rebel, (Trans. Anthony Bower, First Vintage International Edition, 1991), 53.
 In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away
"prejudice"… but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by
imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not
discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details
of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people…
This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic
book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel.38

In the discussion of solidarity one can distinguish between the subject of solidarity,
the purpose of solidarity and the context in which solidarity appears. The hardest test
for realizing solidarity is in places where people harm other people. In places where
regimes fear for their fate shoot and murder their citizens. This is the reality described
in most of Saramago's works, all rooted in the Portuguese culture of a long-standing
monarchy, dictatorship and republic, which is also not a regime that protects its
citizens.
"Ethics of Compassion" which is a part of the discussion in this book, creates
solidarity. This is not metaphysical solidarity. It is solidarity with beings that have a
name, an address, and so forth. These are certain people and, therefore, such solidarity
does not deviate from the historical space in which people live. In The myth of
Sisyphus Camus was still engaged in his own metaphysical question: how to be in the
face of absurdity? When the absurd is a problem of consciousness and has no
connection to others. The absurdity of its various appearances is presented in
Saramago's work, especially in the feelings of absence and alienation that many of his
heroes feel. In The Rebel Camus presents solidarity as metaphysical, universal, and
not a concrete among human beings. The change in Camus begins with the novel The
Plague in which the ethic of compassion rises, because it describes a disease, and
disease poses a test to a person. In this plague city, or in a city where a plague of
blindness is occurring, as in the novel Blindness of Saramago, people are putting to a
test and most of them fail. Human solidarity is hardly revealed, except in the
compassionate attitude of individuals (Rieux, the medical doctor in The Plague by
Camus, or the doctor's wife in Blindness).39

Saramago is driven by a metaphysical desire for justice, a refusal to accept an

injustice done to helpless people. But Saramago's solidarity usually is not
metaphysical at all. It is very concrete because it exists in the relations between

38
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press 1989), xvi.
39
Avi Sagi, Facing Others and Otherness (Hakibbutz Haneuchad 2012, in Hebrew) 55.
concrete people and also is "present" in its absence. Saramago presents a world of
knowledge with a touch of irony, which has a possible insight into existence. Irony
enables us to free ourselves from essentialist universalistic claims, since most of the
important things in our lives, such as family, children and spouses, are completely
unique. The forms of organization of our lives provide a taste for life, not a search for
their universal meaning. Irony makes it possible to soften the distress Saramago
describes in his books.

In Saramago's thought, there is ethical humanism: at the center of his thought stands
human dignity. This apprehension stems from a conception of justice and solidarity.
In his diary, on December 10, 1995, he quotes an article he wrote on human nature,
and it is possible to find in it what can be called the "casing" of his whole ethical
structure, or what was published through his aesthetic writing. These lines explain his
approach to "human dignity."

Just as goodness does not have to be ashamed of being good, so justice must not forget that it is,
above all, restitution, restitution of rights. All of them are under the basic right to live in dignity. If I
were commanded to dispose of charity, justice and goodness in order of precedence, the first place
would be goodness, the second would be justice, and the third would be charity. Because goodness,
by itself, dispenses justice and charity, because righteous justice already contains sufficient charity
in itself. Charity is what remains when there is neither kindness nor justice… Let's call it the charity
of the right hand, for it is the easiest and most common, the left hand will be called goodness, for it
is so rare, but the justice that both must manage, is the reason to be found. The human relationship
will have to be the work of reason so that it can be, together, charitable, kind and just.40

The discussion of solidarity and absurdity is linked, as stated, to irony, as it is

presented in studies that link philosophy and literature. In Kierkegaard's definition of
irony the individual suffers from a tremendous "anxiety of influence" and only irony
can soften his distress.41 Harold Bloom situates his irony in what he calls "cultural
agon," which is a constant struggle between an individual who wishes to present his
uniqueness in the arena of cultural expression, even though he is challenged by a
culture that already exists, as if everything has already been said and done, and the
fear that maybe it arrives too late.42 One of the questions asked by Rorty is: "Is
ironism compatible with a sense of human solidarity?"43 In the ideal liberal society,
which Rorty describes in his books, intellectuals will still be ironic, but it is not true
40
José Saramago, Cadernos de Lanzarote III (Caminho 1995), 215-216.
41
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (trans. M. Lee, Indiana University Press, 1965), 296.
42
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A theory of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1997), 16.
43
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press 1989), 87.
for nonintellectuals. A person who lives in such a society even though he is not an
intellectual will not need justification for his sense of human solidarity, for he has not
grown into the language game in which these kinds of beliefs are asked and accepted.
Rorty refers to the culture of a utopian liberal society, which is almost absent on our
planet, certainly not on the private planet of Saramago, and therefore in his books
solidarity is rare in its positive sense, and examples of this will be given in the chapter
on solidarity. Saramago, with the social sensitivity that motivates him in his life and
work, manages by ironic tone to avoid an unacceptable pathos, and thus manages to
convey to us through the narrative the sense of absurdity and solidarity, alongside the
rebellion characteristic of some of his heroes.

Responsibility and freedom of choice

"Responsibility" refers mainly to political responsibility, to the responsibility of the

administration towards the citizens. Contemporary philosophers who deal with the
question of responsibility, especially what they call "moral responsibility", seek to
answer two simple questions about responsibility: (1) "What does it mean to be
responsible?" (2) "What is it that a person is responsible for?" These questions are no
longer related solely to political responsibility, but rather to the personal responsibility
of every individual. Saramago's work presents a possibility of personal responsibility
alongside collective responsibility, that in most cases shifting the weight to the
individual responsibility that stands above the group responsibility.

Aristotle believed that the individual was equally responsible for his actions and his
character and also realized that in pursuit of a good life, aspects of happiness would
remain to some extent a matter of luck. A happy and moral life can end in continuous
and painful death. Aristotle44 argued that a person is morally responsible for all his
actions, except acts committed by force or out of fear deriving from pressure or
threats that are not dependent on him, and therefore they absolve him of responsibility
or diminish his responsibility. "Repentance" does not exempt a person from
responsibility.

44
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co,. Ltd. Trans. F.H. Peters), Book I.
Anger and lust can pass a person on his mind, but the act done as a result of it does
not absolve him of responsibility. A person is not called a "villain" or a monster on
the basis of one act he did. "The evil of an action ... consists on the combination of
three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive harm
caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for their actions." 45
Each of these elements is necessary and together they are sufficient to present an act
of evil.

The role of each and every one of us is first and foremost to be a human. When I take
responsibility, I express the idea that I am a person who does things and creates
changes in the world and that I take the account for these actions, for myself and for
the society in which I live. In taking responsibility I express my partnership in society
and show that the reactions of other people to my actions are important to me. "Moral
responsibility" is the link between the moral character of the act or its consequences
and the moral character of the personality of the agent. On the one hand, there is a
deontological theory that says that the moral value of an act does not depend on the
question whether the act is aimed at achieving a worthwhile purpose or whether the
consequences are good or bad. The important question is whether the act itself should
be done. According to this approach, there are deeds that deserve to be done and there
are actions that should not be done - and whatever the consequences. It is appropriate
to fulfill promises, to help others, not to lie regardless of the results. On the other
hand, there is the teleological approach that speaks of the "responsibility for the
consequences" of actions. This approach determines that the moral value of the act
depends solely on its consequences.46 A third approach, different from the two, places
character and personality at the center of moral discourse. The question that one is
supposed to present to himself here is not "What do I want to be?" And not "what
shall I do?" But "What kind of person do I want to be?" This approach places the
"morality of character" against the "morality of choice" and John Kekes writes
extensively about it in his book Facing Evil.47
When discussing the question of moral responsibility, we must also take into account
the voices of the Pragmatists philosophers who believe that those who see themselves

45
John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Cornell University Press, 2005), 2.
46
Elazar Weinryb, Problems in Moral Philosophy, (Open University Press, 2008, In Hebrew) vol. I, 176.
47
John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton University Press. 1990).
free, will be able to live a more autonomous life. 48 While the existentialists present the
man in the extreme state of "falling" (Heidegger) and "abandonment" (Sartre). These
concepts assume that man is free and he alone decides and is responsible for his life.
Saramago tries to explore the possibility of giving value to individual life. In his work
he examines the individual value of man as a different individual, as a being who
chooses to realize his self, or as someone who remains indifferent and passive to the
forces exerted upon him and leaves the "choice" to others.

Saramago's work deals with a subject that has troubled many philosophers and
scholars49 who argued that the fundamental condition for imposing responsibility is
that the moral agent will have "the ability to act differently". A most commonly
accepted definition of freedom is: Freedom is one's ability to act differently, which
means wanting to act differently, or being able to choose a different course of action
than it actually does. Therefore, responsibility in relation to the concept of freedom
assumes that a person is responsible for acts only if he has made them being free.
Susan Wolf,50 following Frankfurt, Watson, and Taylor claims that to be free and
responsible is not enough to have the ability to control our actions according to our
wishes; we must have the ability to control our desires in accordance with our "deep
inner selves." In other words, we need to be able to change ourselves: get rid of some
desires and traits and perhaps replace them with others on the basis of our deeper
desires, of values and thoughts. But because the self that makes the change will be
itself or the gross product of external forces, or the malicious product of a random
generation. The question arises whether the ability to change itself is enough to
guarantee us responsibility.

Distinctions between an "egoistic act" and an "altruistic act" (Hume), 51 and the
perception of solidarity as a result of the activity of a metaphysical rebellion that is
the awakening through which a person rises to the conditions of his life and all of the
creation, with the most elementary rebellion expressing paradoxically the aspiration to
order,52 will serve as a central axis in the distinction between moral and immoral
48
William James, Pragmatism, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), 118-119.
49
Laura Waddell Ekstorm, Free Will: A Philosophical Study (Westview Press, 2000) and Robert Kane ed, The Oxford
Handbook of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2002).
50
In Robert Kane ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2002), 143-163.
51
David Hume, An Inquiry Principals of Moral (Chicago: The Open Court Publishers Co. 1912), 143.
52
Albert Camus, The Rebel, (Trans. Anthony Bower, First Vintage International Edition, 1991), 15.
responsibility among the men and women who inhabit Saramago's work. For
example: the doctor's wife in Blindness or Blimunda in Baltasar and Blimunda,
who behave with responsibility and impartially to the other, and the many cases of
irresponsibility when men send women to be raped in the bullies' room in Blindness,
or when the authorities close people behind bars when there is a blind plague in this
same novel. Or in the case of the authorities who censure citizens for putting white
voting cards in the mayoral elections in Seeing, or interfere with their death or burial
of human beings in Death with Interruptions.

Philosophy and ethics are an inseparable part of the life and the literary work of
Saramago, which is a work written within and not outside life. From Saramago's point
of view, life is the way people shape it. Responsibility for the way in which they live
their lives rests with human beings and only with them. No other divine or external
entity can make you a better person. You are the only one who shapes your life and
your good and bad tendencies together. The ethics emerging from Saramago's work
focus on human dignity and responsibility and the connection between freedom and
.'responsibility and 'the ability to do otherwise

I call without a harsh claim, to a very clear and frequent painful consciousness, to the …
responsibility of each person for himself, and society, to take responsibility not in the comfortable
53
.abstract sense, but in the concrete mutual reality of individuals and people

The questions arising from Saramago's work, which will be discussed in this book,
are: Is man a living creature whose life is only the fulfillment of his desires? What can
one learn about the concepts of "good and evil," "praise and condemnation" in this
writer's work? Should obedience to morality rules come from man, or obeying written
rules or talks are enough to make a person behave with moral responsibility? The
determination of Frankfurt54 that it is not true that a person is morally responsible for
what he did only if his choice was free when he did the action, is compatible with
Saramago's position. The agent can be morally responsible for his actions even if he
was not at all free. Thus, for example how the doctor's wife behaves in Blindness
when she is in a madhouse, and so does Blimunda in Baltasar and Blimunda, with
the arms of the Inquisition being sent in all directions, and so does Lydia's brother in

53
José Saramago, Cadernos de Lanzarote II (Caminho 1994), 129.
54
Harry Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 834.
the novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in the revolt against the
dictatorship of Salazar.

When do you absolve a person of responsibility? A long list of exemptions from

responsibility includes acts committed because of physical coercion; Self-defense;
Compliance with the law (such as a policeman in the performance of his duties); The
fulfillment of a moral duty (such as acts committed in an attempt to save lives), a
mistake; Shock, numbness, hypnosis; madness; Mental stress as a result of illness and
the like. This is discussed by many philosophers, including Kekes in his book The
Roots of Evil,55 Which speaks of moral people being able to perform immoral acts
within one of the situations described here. In the context of Saramago, the most
significant examples of this are revealed in the figures of two women: the doctor's
wife in Blindness, who murders the villain from the bullies' room after the rape, and
receives a moral exemption, because this is an act done after physical coercion and
self-defense. And so is Blimunda, the heroine in Baltasar and Blimunda who kills
the priest who is trying to rape her. On the other hand, for the villains who raped and
looted the inhabitants of the madhouse there was a different way for them to act and
they chose what they chose.

The question of freedom and the authentic existence

Philosophers from the ancient world and modernity have conducted and still hold
discussions on the question of freedom and authentic existence and present opposing
positions as to the ability of man to fulfill his desires as a free agent: "Act so that you
use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at
the same time as end and never merely as means".56

The rationalist tradition has identified man as a rational being, but the entire
existentialist tradition describes freedom as the very essence of existentialism.
Freedom is always pre-object freedom and the choice is of an object. Freedom is
established on the one hand by an image of what we relate to, and on the other hand

55
John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Cornell University Press, 2005).
56
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral (G 4:429) (trans. Allen W. Wood, Yale University Press,
2002), 19. (second formula).
by action of judgment. Choice always closes, but at its foundation liberty stands as
something infinite. Saramago follows the modes of activity and performance of his
heroes, which are agents who live in a given reality and relate to certain objects.

Kierkegaard argues that at the heart of consciousness lies a foundation of freedom:

"For the self is the synthesis of which the finite is the limiting and the infinite the
extending constituent."57 Synthesis is the mediator of the contradiction. In man's
performance there is both freedom and necessity, finite and infinite, temporal and
eternal. Kierkegaard claims that the self reflects the person's data. One does not have
to do anything to have freedom, infinity or restraint for time - it is - that is how we are
born and life may have oscillated between these domains. Freedom is the factor by
which the character of man is revealed as being. The ego is required to decide not
from an ethical point of view, but because only in decision and freedom does it
establish itself. In Kierkegaard's question: "But what then is this 'self'? ... It is the
abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete - it is freedom."58
The self is therefore freedom.

Sartre thought humans had "absolute freedom." 'You cannot find limits to my freedom
other than freedom itself, or, if you prefer, we are not free to stop being free'. His
view of freedom stems from his radical conception of human beings as devoid of any
positive nature. In this view, 'a person has no freedom - he is free,' 59 he is essentially
free. Saramago expresses pessimism about human nature, but his perception is not as
radical as that of Sartre, because alongside the manifestations of cruelty and evil he
presents people who have positive qualities and they carry hope and the ability to
change the world. Such are the doctor's wife and Blimunda in his novels.

In the essay Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin60 examines freedom and liberty
in two political senses:

57
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna. Hong, Princeton University Press,
1980), 55.
58
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II (Trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1944), 180.
59
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Trans. E. Barnes, Routledge,
1969), 567.
60
Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" (reprinted from Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969).
 (1)"Negative liberty", which is "freedom from", and refers to the freedom of the
individual from the control of others. In other words, the freedom of the
individual depends on the amount of restrictions imposed by external factors.
The "negative" implication involves answering the question: "What is the area
within which the subject - a person or group of persons - is or should be left to
do or be what he is able to do so, be, without interference by other persons?" 61
Non-intervention does not stand for itself and cannot allow the development of a

moral society.

(2) "Positive liberty", which means that one is self-aware and does the rational and
the right things. The positive concept of freedom is not "freedom from
something", but rather "freedom for something". Freedom to live one dictated
life form, which is presented by proponents of the "negative" conception,
sometimes it is nothing more than a disguised for cruel tyranny. The positive
meaning of the word "liberty" derives from the individual's desire to be his own
master. The basis for positive liberty lies in the individual's desire to realize
oneself, and the "positive" meaning involves answering the question: "What, or
who is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do or
be this rather than that?"62

This distinction between "positive liberty" and "negative liberty" is one of the ways
that allows an in-depth examination of the phenomenon of freedom and its negation in
Saramago's work, remembering that Saramago is a writer with strong and coherent
social political opinions expressed both in his publicist writing and in his artistic
writing.

John Kekes discusses in his books mainly about the ways we use to make our lives
better. When he deals with freedom, he links it to the "moral imagination". He argues
that the moral imagination can extend freedom, but that does not mean that moral

61
Ibid., 15.
62
Ibid.
imagination makes us free, the goal is more modest: moral imagination can make us
freer.63

Kekes presents an interesting position that people are born with different talents and
as a result they are able to expand their freedom in varying degrees. One might say
that people are different from one another in their "talent" for freedom. Therefore,
some of them will live a life without examining them properly and others will
examine their lives according to their talent for freedom, thus increasing their field of
possibilities. There is a pointless life, for there are quite a few people who lack the
"talent for freedom," and sometimes even those who have such talent live in
conditions that do not allow them to realize their talents.64 This view is consistent with
the spirit of the Saramago's work. It is not enough to have talent for freedom which
sounds so utopian and idealistic; there are conditions in which even such talented
people cannot realize it because of objective circumstances, political, social, and so
on.

When we examine the freedom and modes of existence of human beings from an
ontological perspective, man seems to have two ways of being: the authentic versus
the non-authentic. Authenticity is the situation in which a person perceives himself as
an existentialist. In the non-authentic existence, one surrenders to one of the wings of
existence, as in Kierkegaard's discussion of the aesthetic stage (to be expanded in the
chapter on responsibility). From Heidegger's point of view, most people, for the most
part of their lives, are in the non-authentic existence. This is the initial state in which
they find their being. Heidegger has no interest in how people will live; he wants to
explain the way people live. The ability to be authentic is just a "subtilized instant". It
is not something you can hold and say: "I have moved from a modus of non-
authenticity to authenticity."

Heidegger's "being-towards-death" is to die authentically, which means living in such

a way that death constantly watches man's act. In the authentic understanding, the
Dasien already anticipates its final possibility, and only in its preliminaries can it
understand its death in an authentic manner. Existence, facticity and falling

63
John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton University Press, 1993), 111.
64
Ibid., 115.
characterize the Being –toward- the- end, and are therefore constitutive for the
existential conception of death.65

Dealing with the subject of death in Saramago's work allows discussion of

authenticity and inauthenticity existence, especially in the novels All the Names and
Death with Interruptions. Most people, or who Heidegger calls "the id," succumb to
the false security of today's life dictated by accepted conventions and customs. The
individual expresses himself only through public discourse.66 This discourse has no
real content and no real meaning. All attention is focused on speech itself,
accompanied by common clichés. Saramago deals a lot in the presentation of the
meaningless speech of the kings, of the people of the government and of the people of
the Church in all his novels and especially in the novels where the heroes stand
against the rule of power such as in Baltasar and Blimunda , in The History of the
Siege of Lisbon and in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and the novels
Blindness, Seeing and Death with Interruptions.

Authentic existence is standing with courage in the face of the certainty of death as
perceived in self-consciousness. The reference to death is not to an external event that
comes to man after living his life, but as part of an immanence reality (Heidegger).
Saramago adopts this concept mainly in his book All the Names, in which life and
death face the same description of the office of Central Registry and the office of the
cemetery and in Death with Interruptions which deals entirely with the issue of
death or its absence as a reality that the heroes are required to relate to.

Skinner67 and other modern thinkers argue that freedom, and especially freedom to
choose is an illusion and all that remains for man is to get along with the only
freedom he can have within the social and political framework of his life. The
question that Saramago puts at the center of his work is what happens to a person
when one takes his liberty. Can he then exercise rational and responsible judgment?
We will examine these questions by means of the two concepts of freedom
("negative" and "positive") derived from the central question of politics - the question
of obedience and coercion that Isaiah Berlin presents, and the questions he asks about
them: "What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons - is or
65
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarie &Eduard Robinson, The Camelot Press Ltd. 1962), 296.
66
Ibid., 297.
67
B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (Hackett Publishing Company, inc. 1948).
should be left to do or be what he is able to do or, be, without interference by other
persons?" And in the "positive" meaning – "What, or who, is the source of control or
interference that can determine someone to do, or be s, this rather than that"?68
We are fascinated by the freedom we encounter, but this freedom carries with it the
responsibility of choice. Most of the heroes in Saramago's work walk like a herd,
subject to the governmental authority of the monarchy, of the church, or of the
dictatorship, and therefore live in an inauthenticity existence. Within each such set of
settings, Saramago describes the hero or heroine who lives an authentic life, who say
their "no", who refuse to remain in the crowd and act as an independent body.

For example: Raimundo Silva who writes "No" in The History of the Siege of
Lisbon; Or the doctor's wife (Blindness) who leads a group of people in an
impossible situation of incarceration in a madhouse after having contracted the plague
of blindness, or Blimunda and Baltasar, who join the priest Bartolomeu Gusmão and
help him build the Passarola (airship) as a representation of freedom and rebellion.
What is the degree of freedom, or freedom of choice of simple people in monarchical
regimes or dictatorships against a Catholic Church that controls everything? Is it
possible to talk about freedom or moral responsibility as an element in the nature of
man?69 Or is it that people who are objectificated by such regimes are expected to a
deterministic behavior, that is, everything is given and there is no possibility of
changing anything, and thus they lose their "natural freedom"? The Portuguese, and
Saramago as their representative, lived throughout the centuries under monarchical
rule and throughout the twentieth century in three different regimes that affected the
entire population: monarchy, dictatorship and republic (founded after the 25 April
1974 revolution). This unique history opened up this writer with an extensive
platform for writing literature with strong social criticism, which will be presented in t

his book.

The Outer Space versus the Inner Space

Saramago's work presents a perception in which men tend to emphasize "outer space"
and women emphasize "inner space." The absence of family and the absence of the

68
Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" (reprinted from Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969),
15.
69
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (trans. F.H. Peters, 10th edition, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner co. Ltd. 1906): Book III
55-58.
traditional Portuguese "house" serve as a center for its work. A house, Heidegger
says, is the man's way of being. We were all born with a "loss" or "absence of a
home." A man deals with the loss by building through which he gathers the flowing
and amorphous elements into a strong structure.70 Irigaray claims that women have
been excluded from all Western construction on all levels (practical and symbolic).
According to her, the man attributed himself to subjectivity dependent on
objectification of the woman and became "landlord" at the expense of the woman who
has no home.71 The woman lived in a threat that she would be treated as an object and
be invaded in her physical space. Because of the fear of rape, as the extreme form of
invasion of her physical space, she is willing to live by choice within the "inner
space."72

During the eight hundred years of Portugal's existence, the woman had a secondary
place. The woman remained at home and was unable to demand freedom and
equality. Even in modern female writing, which began to be written in Portugal only
in the second half of the twentieth century, the "house" is still the space of the woman,
while the man wanders in the world and goes out all the time.73 The exit from the
private space of the house to the public space is described by Hannah Arendt: "Under
modern circumstance… mass society not only destroys the public realm but the
private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private
home, where they once felt sheltered against the world."'74 Saramago reverses the
Portuguese tradition in his novels and the heroine women in his books no longer hold
on to the house, but lead the group to the "outer space" (like Blimunda in Baltasar
and Blimunda. the women in The Stone Raft, the doctor's wife in Blindness, Maria
Sarah in The History of the Siege of Lisbon). But the price of leaving the house is
sometimes unbearable; this is mainly expressed in the novel Blindness. Most of the
women who inhabit the novels resemble Penelope, the waiting woman, but the main
women characters feature Circe, the magic goddess.
70
Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking", Poetry, Language, Thought, (trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper
and Row, 1971), 100.

71
Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (trans. Alison Martin, Routledge 1993),18.
72
Ibid., 46, 88.
73
Isabel Allegro de Magalhães, O Tempo das Mulheres: A Dimensão Temporal na Escrita Feminina Contempor ânea,
(Impresa Nacional Casa de Modna ( 1995), 36-37.

74
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1958), 59.
In Saramago's work, home creates a "sense of absence". Most heroes lose the meaning
of the home. They live in temporary houses, they move away from their homes, and
wander the length and breadth of the country in which they live (the madhouse as a
substitute for the home of the blinds, in Blindness, the lack of a home for Blimunda
and Basltasar and the workers who build the monastery in Baltasar and Blimunda;
the apartment attached to the office of Jose in All the Names: Ricardo Reis, who lives
in a hotel as a substitute for a home in the Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis etc.).

There is not even one family in the entire Saramago's work.75 Children do not inhabit
the texts (except for the squinting child in Blindness who has no role as a hero, or the
baby in Marta's womb in The Cave). The "outer space" remains the masculine space:
the sea, the war, the people of government and the soldiers who are outside their
home. Within the "house" the man will find it difficult to show responsibility. The
woman, on the other hand, emerges as a leader and responsible in the "inner space,"
even if it is a madhouse, or a hostile environment of dictatorship, or a monstrous
monarchy.

The questions that will be presented in this book will deal with the ways of
establishing reflection: in the author, in the protagonists, and explore how he trains in
us readers the muscle of reflectivity, and the muscle of solidarity. How does it
succeed in creating a new establishing-self? I have already claimed that establishing
of the self is due to the fact that we ask ethical questions as a result of reading the
literary text.

Ethics of men and the ethics of women

In this book, which seeks to present Saramago's philosophy of ethics, I will argue that
there is a clear distinction between the ethical conduct of men and the ethical conduct
of women. I will examine this difference mainly in the ability to take responsibility.
Most of the protagonists in Saramago's work are single men and women around the
age of fifty. The ties between them are mostly superficial and based on transient
sexual contact. Marriage and childbirth are not included in the life plan of most men
and from the point of view that I would like to present in this work, it is characteristic
75
Except for the family story in the novel "Raised from the Ground" (1980), this describes the dynasty of a rural family
in Portugal.
of neglecting responsibility (for example: Raimundo Silva in The Story of the Siege
of Lisbon, José in All the Names, the men in The Stone Raft, Or Tertuliano
Massimo Afonso in The Double). On the issue of men's responsibility in Saramago's
work I already discussed in my previous book.76 In this book I want to expand the
discussion on the subject and also present the possibility of "poetic existence", as
'allowing' escaping from responsibility.

Women in Saramago's work tend to use perceptions of caring based on the personal
and interpersonal aspect of taking responsibility. In "ethics of caring," women can
"agree" to be raped in order to allow life to the other, or to kill evil representatives in
order to allow freedom. For example: women in Blindness and in Baltasar and
Blimunda. Men, on the other hand, are motivated by perceptions derived from a
perspective of justice, but often do not follow the "ethics of justice." Assuming that
"ethics of justice" is based primarily on self-sufficiency, that is, the moral agent
overcomes his inclinations, his personal biases, and acts as an autonomous
sovereign,77 I will ask a few questions: Is this really justice? Is this really what life
should look like? Or the more important question: What should be done?

Language as establishing an ethical world in Saramago's work

... Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might
express a tiny part of what it is. Once language has said all it has to say and falls silent, I wonder how
we will go on living.78

The text of Saramago, which will be examined in this book, is composed of different
types of discourse: monologues, dialogues, polyphonic discourse, integrated discourse
and more. The text, which is almost entirely composed of a discourse between author
–text-readers, allows for different interpretations, and this is the basis of the many
researchers of Hermeneutics theory. Hermeneutics as "science or art dealing with the

76
Miriam Ringel (2009), A Journey in the Footsteps of the Voices - The Life and Work of Jose Saramago, Jerusalem:
Caramel Publishing. (in Hebrew. The Portuguese title is:Viagem na Senda das Vozes).
77
Avi Sagi, "Between Ethics of Compassion and Ethics of Justice", My Justice, Your Justice (ed. Yedidia Z. Stern in
Hebrew 2010):190. (This article appeared also in Avi Sagi Facing Others and Otherness (Hakibbutz Hameuchad,
2012, in Hebrew).

78
José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, (trans. Giovanni Pontiero, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991),
50.
interpretation of texts" presupposes several assumptions: (1) Man is a creature who
understands or can understand (there is no hermeneutic scholar who does not deal
with the subject of understanding); (2) Man's intelligence is his source of authority.
There is no authority that determines the truths of the text, man is his own authority;
(3) At the basis of interpretative activity, the person is perceived as capable of being
aware of what he is doing, or of reflecting; (4) There is no one interpretation, there is
more than one way to approach the text, for there is a difference between people.

The hermeneutic approach, which stems from the text towards the reader, assumes
that the meaning of the text as text is deciphered from the reader's own context. For
example, the Greek reader sees an expression of the rule of fate in the myth of
Oedipus, whereas the modern reader views it as a completely different complex.
These approaches deal with the question: What is the relationship between the cultural
world of the reader and the world of the creation? How do we understand the text?

This hermeneutic approach is appropriate the view I wish to present in my book,

although I cannot ignore Saramago's personality, which is expressed not only in his
artistic writing but also in his articles, diaries and statements in the various media.
Saramago takes seriously the situation of the dialogue in his work. When speech is
monologue, Saramago presents a critical position, describing dialogue experiences as
a proximity relationship between his protagonists and between himself and his
readers.79

In the literary action many writers had a distinctly existential orientation. For
example: Pirandello, Moravia, Camus, Kafka, and Rilke. For Saramago the act of
writing is talking to the self, a kind of therapeutic action that turns writing into a kind
of searching for the meaning of his life and the life around him. He tries to understand
them as they are. From this I repeat that it is possible to assume that the literary text
develops ethical sensitivity and can be learned through the ethics of the author.

The texts that will be examined at the center of the book will illustrate Saramago's
writing, which adopts the dialectic between ideological messages and the elements of

79
I discussed this in my book, Miriam Ringel, A Journey in the Footsteps of the Voices - The Life and Work of José
Saramago, Jerusalem: (Caramel Publishing House, (2009 (in Hebrew. The Portuguese title is: Viagem na Senda das
Vozes). In the chapter: "The orchestration of voices in the work of Jose Saramago", pp. 35-135 (in Hebrew).
discourse in the literary text. Saramago's text is mostly composed of dialogues,
without any conventional punctuation. It uses commas and periods only.

There is no meaning that after a character says something, a comma will appear, and in the answer
that follows, the comma will become a capital letter. If I am told this, I ask: What does it mean
to say "So –and-so came and said" followed by a colon and a hyphen? What the point?
The language of speech has no colon and no hyphen.80

Ricoeur defines "a text is any discourse fixed by writing."81 In contrast to the speech
which presents a "real" world to the listeners, the text represents an imaginary world
because of the gaps in it. These gaps in the end must be filled by the reader. Reading
is possible because texts allow for sharing and renewal.82 When the reader interprets
the text, he appropriates the text, "culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject
who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or
simply begins to understand himself."83 Since "interpretation is interpretation by
language before being interpretation of language."84 Ricoeur believes in the ability of
the "Hermeneutical Circle" to transform what is foreign in the text into a familiar. 85
The basic principle of the hermeneutic circle according to the theorists of
hermeneutics says that prior understanding leads to interpretation and leads to deeper
self-understanding. Standing in front of a text does not mean that we do not project
our beliefs and prejudices onto the text, but rather that we 'give the creation and its
world an opportunity to enlarge the horizon of my understanding of myself.' In this
sense, interpretation is ontological. Heidegger argues that being in a circle means
being in a state of impending, thrown into possibilities that are ours, and also
discarding the way of our beings. Circular captures us within absolute and we cannot
exist outside this circle, nor can the world exist outside it. "What is decisive is not to
get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way."86

What I will call "moral observation", and examine it in Saramago's work, will be
associated to the category of deliberate speech actions, when the criterion for their
examination is success or failure, not truth or falsehood. "To say something is to do

80
Carlos Reis, Diálogos com José Saramago (Caminho, 1998), 102.
81
Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (trans. J.B. Thompson, Cambridge University Press, 1981),
145.
82
Ibid., 158.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid., 163.
85
Ibid., 164.
86
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trams. John Macquarie & Eduard Robinson, The Camelot Press Ltd. 1962), 195.
something," says Austin.87 Saramago returns the speech to the center of the stage,
hereinafter "speech action".88 It is a writer who presents in the center of his stories
heroes that most of them are common people (often illiterate), and the culture of
writing is not recognized or denied to them by the church, kings and nobility. From
the words of his protagonists, one can deduce their actions and examine them on the
ethical level.

Until Austin, the language was considered as describing the world. Austin resumed by
saying that language sometimes deviated from logic and most of what we do through
language is "speech action." Pragmatic linguistics discusses about speech activity that
is "executive" as opposed to "descriptive." Speech is not necessarily bound by
grammatical rules and can, for example, bequeath an inheritance, express
commitment to relationships, and many other things that are not included in grammar.
Through the pragmatic linguistics of Austin and Searle we analyze language in a way
that allows us to distinguish between us and the world. Through language we can
distinguish between successful action and failed action. Austin resumed by saying that
language not only describes, but also does things in the world.89 With the help of
operational expressions, we generate things in the world in every way. For example
we can transfer a house or car from person to person. Through the executive
expression, it is possible to convey something tangible, for example: "We went to the
post office and signed documents." "The speech act" is an action that is not performed
only in language and grammatical functions, but is performed in the world, on the
pragmatic level.90

Language has a function of meaning that is created as the result of an action that is
subordinated to rules that are both semantic rules and cultural rules. "Speech acts" are
actions performed by expressions consistent with "regulative rules" and "constitutive
rules."91 These are actions that combine both the speaker and the listener. These are
natural facts that will emerge from natural rules. For example, the rules of tact do not
create human behavior, but rather launch it, and familiarity with natural rules and
natural facts allows us to talk about intentionality. When you talk about institutional

87
John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford University Press, 1962), 94.
88
John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1969).
89
Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Ibid.
90
Searle, Speech Acts, 23.
91
Searle, Speech Acts, 32-42.
rules like army, math, politics, each one of these institutions establishes a system of
rules of meaning. This system is fictitious, it is not natural. Searle says that it is not
only "doing things in words," but that all the data in the game must be taken into
account and act in accordance with certain rules. His argument is that because
meaning is the product of rules, we can decipher any expression of meaning.92
Morality belongs to "regulative rules" and a literary corpus establishes such rules. In
his work, Saramago deals with the question of the limits of liberty that allow or do not
allow a person to act morally in a society where people are controlled by institutions
driven by "regulative rules." Rules that leave no room for the ordinary citizen to
understand and decipher them and what is left to him is to obey them out of
compulsion. I will also examine the performance of the language in Saramago's work
as a set of "constitutive rules" and convey ethical messages.

Austin assumes a basic assumption that every "act" in the world has both intent and
meaning. He introduces a central concept: "intention." If you did not mean, Austin
says, your utterance is void.93 And he offers a series of new terms and new criteria
developed by his student John Searle, who is still using as methodological tools:
"speech action" "intention and effect". The term Intentionality that Searle will open in
a book titled by this name94 carries a pragmatic meaning rather than Husserl's
epistemic meaning. In other words, standards of reporting are required through which
we can report the "intention".

When talking about "moral observation" in Saramago's work, it is appropriate to

distinguish between representation and communication. "Describing" and "providing"
are two different things, and Searle says they characterize two main types of intention:
the intention of representation and intention of communication. When we understand
a language or use it we do both. He gives an example of four sentences at the level of
representation giving the exact same content, but in terms of meaning, things are quite
different.95 It is not enough to clarify the "language game", but rather to clarify the
intentionality of the sender, the intentionality of the text itself, and the recipient's

92
Searle, Speech Acts, 16.
93
Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 51.
94
John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
95
The four sentences are of Searle, Speech Acts, 22.
1. Sam smokes habitually; 2. Does Sam smoke habitually? 3. Sam, smoke habitually!;
4. Would that Sam smoke habitually.
intentionality. Understanding the meaning means understanding the intentionality of
the three factors involved in speech acts.

In discussing what he calls "language play," Wittgenstein argues that if someone

learns the meaning of a word in a language game, or the meaning of a particular
moment of behavior within a game, the person has no choice but to participate and
learn to play the game. "The essence of a language game" is a practical method (or
method of action), not speculation, empty speech. In this sense, language games have
the character of life forms, that is, they can only be understood as life forms of action.
In his book Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein sums up this point when he
says that imagining a language is to imagine a form of life.96 A form of life is
connected to a common aspect of language that makes us aware that we are part of the
tradition, and members of a language community.97

Meaning is created as the result of action subject to rules, and this subordination
includes both semantic rules and cultural rules. The Portuguese language and
Portuguese culture that Saramago demonstrates in his work create a meaning that is
the product of rules, which enable us to decipher any expression of meaning. What
does it mean to express meaning? Meaning is the inner intentionality of the speaker
that can also be expressed at this level of representation. For example, I can write to
myself without wanting to give it to someone else.

There are several conditions that allow us to switch from representation to

communication: first, consideration of the satisfied conditions (that there will be some
action, for example, pulling the trigger to be shot), and the second condition is
direction of fit, which means that any act of speech intended to make a
communication stems from somewhere and is directed to somewhere. The direction
can be toward a person, sometimes toward the world, but it always deviates from the
individual's alignment. If I want to convince someone else, my conditions of
satisfaction should be shared by me and that other person. Thus, if a writer has
intention and provides conditions of satisfaction, it allows me as a reader, to connect
to the collective intentionality and to understand it.98

96
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, 1958), section 19.
97
Ibid., section 23.
98
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (The Free Press, 1995), 23.
In Saramago's work, where irony is also derived from "intentionality," I find a
connection between "speech acts" performed in accordance with social reality and the
terms "constitutive rules" and "constitutive facts." In contrast to Searle, who claims
that we will be able to cope with these rules if we become familiar with them and
become aware of them, I will show how Saramago presents the governmental,
religious, and legal and other institutions as presenting "rules" that do not allow them
to be recognized. And his heroes, whether or not they are aware of these rules, their
lives are subject to the authorities (monarchy, church, bureaucracy, etc.).

Intertextuality is a tool used a lot by Saramago and examples will be presented in the
chapter on language in which I will examine the hermeneutic link between author –
reader –texts. I will argue that an extensive use of intertextuality creates closeness
and distance. Sometimes the reader experiences alienation from the text, when he
does not understand or does not know why the text is interwoven with
incomprehensible passages, and sometimes he feels an intimate closeness to the writer
and the text.

It seems to me that each of us often encounters a written or spoken text that causes us
to get closer to the writer / speaker or to disconnect from it and sail away in our
thoughts or imagination because the text is plentiful of references. The feeling that
passes through us in these cases is, of course, a subjective feeling, but sometimes we
have a feeling that the man or woman writing or talking want to prove how much they
live in the culture. As to say: 'if you understand, it is very good, if you will not
understand, you are not really civilized people.'

One of the central questions in the hermeneutic research is how do you read a text? Is
there one reading? Like there is one truth? Texts allow for different interpretations
and they demand a complete activity from the reader. The reader is not passive.
During reading it becomes active. Intertextuality is a kind of social practice among
cultural people from a certain field who understand the context when someone quotes
from another work (song, story, speech, etc.).

One of the key questions is the placement of intertextuality within the text. It is in the
text if the reader notices it or not. This raises the question of why the author inserted
the reference in this particular place, and did he intend it himself? The additional
location is that of the reader himself - whether he came to the current reading with
previous texts or is a kind of a clean slate that understands everything in its primary
meaning. Intertextuality allows dialogue writing versus monologue writing, and thus
carries great moral significance. According to Umberto Eco's approach, there is a
place in a text laden with references to various readers: in his text, textual
hermeneutics is dependent on the reader's level and his ability to decipher the textual
texture of the text. On this complexity, Umberto Eco says, 'The author is nothing
more than a textual strategy that puts semantic connections and activates the reader.99

In my book I will go one step further and link the intertextuality to the term "fusion of
horizons," coined by Gadamer. The process of "fusion the horizons" is far from
translating from one language to another; It involves the establishment of a new
common language. During dialogue as a conversation, understanding is part of the
process of establishing meaning. The purpose of the dialogue is not to reach a
common goal but to establish a common meaning, where each side sees the possibility
of enriching its ideological structure with the ideas of the other side.100

At the end of the introductory chapter I will return to the topic that connects all the
questions that arise in this book - "literary text as developing the ethical sensitivity"
- the work of Joée Saramago will serve as a demonstration.

Ethical content arouses controversy, raises questions and presents many different
perspectives: Is ethical sensitivity culture-dependent? Does it depend on the person
who activates the muscle of reflection? Or is it something with which we are born and
into which we pour content? Is it necessary for a person to come "ready" to be
influenced when he reads literature like someone who comes for psychological
treatment of his own accord and is willing to have something happen in his meeting
with the therapist?

A good writer says, "Look for ethics in you," meaning you will interpret yourself.
Saramago makes a lot of comments of an intervening author, and the question arises
as to whether these comments are meant to tell us: Wait, this is not reality, it's a
fantasy. This is a question that I will discuss extensively in the various contexts and in
the examples I will present in the book. I will argue that these comments are intended

99
Umberto Eco, The Open Text (Indiana University Press, 1989), 7.
100
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donal G. Marshall, Continuum, 2004), 269,
271.
to create an aesthetic distance that the writer / author presents to us in order to
approach ethics. We need as readers for a certain distance, not in the sense of saying,
"What you read here did not really happen, it's just a fiction." On the contrary, a story
with fantastic elements, such as the story of Blimunda's ability to see inside the souls
of human beings in Baltasar and Blimunda, or when the Iberian Peninsula begins to
move like a raft due to acts of no special significance of the heroes in The Stone
Raft, still it is not a story of science fiction. There is a writer here telling us about a
possible reality.

When a writer chooses to tell us about a plague of blindness that strikes an entire city
in his novel Blindness, and out of this blindness he manages to arouse ethical
sensitivity precisely because of the contrast between vision and blindness. Suddenly,
blindness becomes something we are not used to think about. He turns good people
into bad guys and bad people worse. It presents evil excessively, and at the same time
manages to create situations of ethical sensitivity, of solidarity, of compassion, of
love, etc., in this chaos of the madhouse. It is similar to the strange situation of the
cockroach in the Metamorphosis of Kafka, or of the artist who is in a cage in the
story of Kafka The Fasting Artist. Both of them awaken our ethical sensitivity
precisely because of the alienation.

A claim that assumes a possible ethical direction is perhaps a little courageous in light
of the collapse of ideals and significance, and against the background of the command
that dominates our time (according to some of Lacan's successors): to savor as much
as possible. But that is why it is also an important argument. Saramago does this in his
work mainly through the irony and sarcasm that characterize him. He tries to dig
holes for believers in God and his messengers on earth. He does it with references to
the Old and New Testament (in The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Cain as
examples to be elaborated later). Saramago argues against globalization and artificial
modernity of life, especially in the novel of The Cave where he ridicules the
commercial center that creates an artificial alternative world to the harsh world of
reality, He does so by placing the village versus the city, and of the village potter in
versus the guard in the commercial center.

If one day people cease to die, because death has decided (in Portuguese, death is
female A Morte), that she goes out to "vacation" and stops killing people, what
happens to all the surrounding systems? (Death with Interruptions, 2008). The
government, insurance companies, parents' homes, gravediggers and any other civil
authority lose their meaning. But not only them - life itself is in danger of losing its
meaning.

In my book, I will try to present to the readers of literary works the existence of a
range in arousing ethical sensitivity. A range between "caring" and personal "worry";
the interpersonal concern and then concern in the larger circle of society; the range of
personal and collective "responsibility" and "solidarity" itself. I will also present a
range of "evil": between personal and interpersonal evil or of the governmental evil.

Books have always influenced people and there have been books in which they have
had extraordinary experiences, for example, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young
Werther, which resulted in many young people committing suicide. But this is only
an exceptional example and usually poeticism does not generate extreme moral
change. Reading evokes emotional echo and good art evokes ethical thinking and
variety of exciting emotions. This is the moral imagination that succeeds in arousing
in the reader new reflection, a new observation at familiar and unfamiliar situations,
and he learns what to do, what to avoid, and so on.

Saramago's books are anchored in a platform of socialist sensitivity, love of man,

commitment to humanity, and the endless optimism that stems from the desire to
understand, to connect with the visible and hidden in man, his desires and impulses,
fate and free will. A connection to history, which is not only a genealogical platform,
but, a part of current reality, from being and current existence. Saramago is a
pessimistic writer who has testified to this in non-literary writings and innumerable
interviews. Optimism is not a reversal of pessimism. What we call optimism,
depression, and pessimism are points on the axis of the will to live, the opposite of
optimism is nihilism, because nihilism is emptying out of the strait of existence, a
doubt of morality. "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate
themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer.101 The pessimist has a
survival instinct, but he is burdened with worries and has difficulty lifting his head.

101
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968), 9.