Ethics and Aesthetics

Abstract

The central concepts in ethical discourse are held to be responsibility (regarding ourselves and others), justice, and mercy (or charity), whereas in the discourse of aesthetics a similarly important position is attributed to the concepts of perception (or sensibility), experience (of the particularity and alterity of the phenomenal), and art (in terms of objects, processes or events that motivate this kind of experience). What makes for a persistent difference or even sometimes an incommensurability of the ethical and aesthetic stance is the claim to absolute autonomy and unrestricted validity that is made by both. In some postmodern versions of ethical discourse we can observe an approximation to aesthetics that can side-step the area of possible conflict. What is more important, however, is that both in the Levinas type of ethics and in postmodern aesthetics the focus is on alterity ; moreover, the aesthetic stance, in its emphasis on the specificity of the particular and on the imagination as the faculty of the possible, may well be indispensable for any ‘right’ way to act.