Beauty as a Moral Compass: Aesthetics vs. Ethics
- sarah
- Aug 31, 2023
- 1 min read
German-born (Jewish) American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that during Nazism those few who refused to obey the orders of the dictatorship did not do so out of a sense of duty, but because of another feeling, simpler and at the same time deeper:
"They did not feel in themselves an obligation, but they simply acted in accordance with something that was self-evident to all of them.”
The philosopher goes on to say that their conscience did not tell them: "I don't have to do this," but rather: "I cannot do this." What does that mean?
It means that some humans avoid breaking the values for which they live, not because they feel within themselves the pressure of a duty or command, but because they experience a kind of disgust for what would be the consequences of their infraction.
And by saying disgust, you encounter the matter of taste. We perceive that there are actions which so violate something essential and precious in ourselves, resulting in us being terribly ashamed in front of our conscience and aware we would be unable to co-exist with the filth of such a self.
Ethics appears here as an aesthetic sensibility derived from a love for beauty and cleanliness. It is the aesthetic foundation of ethics, in the sense that the original underlying source of ethics is of an aesthetic nature, it is born out of a passion for the beauty of justice.
— Vito Mancuso, Ethics for Difficult Days (2022), describing Hannah Arendt
