Ethics, broadly defined, deals with questions of the origin of goodness, how we ought to live, and what makes an action the right, rather than the wrong, thing to do. This paper explores the complex relationship between ethics and aesthetic research, and is in two parts. The first demonstrates how our concepts of ethics and aesthetics are interwoven in the history of ideas. I consider the positions of Plato and Nietzsche in order to show that concepts of morality are worked out within theoretical frameworks which are also responsible for determining concepts of art and the aesthetic. In part two, I consider the ethical dimension of aesthetic (art and design) practice, and reflect upon what bearing the status of aesthetic practice as research has on its ethical implications. Once art and design are regarded as forms of research and, therefore, as contributions to knowledge, an additional level of complexity is introduced, I suggest, and in order to work through it, some of the philosophical relationships between knowledge, morality, and art (broached in part one) need to be borne in mind.

About the Author

 

Clive Cazeaux is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK. He is the editor of The Continental Aesthetics Reader (Routledge 2000), and the author of articles on modern European philosophy, the philosophy of sound, and the relationship between art theory and practice. He is currently working on the cognitive status of metaphor in continental philosophy.

 

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