Aesthetics and Ethics

Reflections on the Ethical Dimension of Aesthetic Experience 

In the Contexts of the Personal, Cultural, Social, Natural, and Globalising Worlds

This course will explore how aesthetic experience, broadly interpreted, inherently involves an ethical relationship between the perceiver or artist and the environment in which the experience unfolds – whether that is another individual, a distinct culture, society, or nature itself. Subsequently, the course will examine how globalisation, with its diverse aspects such as technological advances, virtuality, speed, and fragmentation, impacts this vital ethical dimension. 

The course will begin by considering significant and highly specific elements of European philosophical movements, including personalism, existentialism, and ethical phenomenology. It will also address modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy and American idealism, focusing respectively on figures such as Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), examining themes around the individual’s position and their relationship to the world. For ethical thought in Europe, we will engage with selected topics from the works of Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) (person and community), Martin Buber (1878-1965) (I and Thou), Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) (creative fidelity), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (dwelling and the Thou), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) (intersubjectivity), Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) (the Other), Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) (interpretation and the Other), and Jean-Luc Marion (1946-) (being given and givenness). 

This ethical critique of aesthetic experience in the age of globalisation will prompt us to question the extent to which a vital aspect of existence and culture is disappearing at a worrying rate – driven partly by the use, abuse, and misuse of technology, and partly by historical, geographical, and socio-economic factors. Ultimately, it may be that this vital element hinges on our capacity or willingness to be available to the Other.

The following are indicative topics that we will explore:

• The integrity of the person at the age of virtual productivity

• Creativity, technology, and self-awakening to the Other

• After the crisis of Truth in contemporary art, the way to wisdom

• Contemporary Western culture and the possibility of a responsible humanism

• Hope and despair in postmodernity

• For an ethics of hope and availability in a multi-relational culture

• The place of cultural expressions: nihility or nothingness?

• Environmental aesthetics as creative dialogue with Otherness