Aesthetic Ethics

M. Mookie C. Manalili is Licensed Independent Certified Social Worker (LICSW) Psychotherapist, Professor and Researcher based in Boston, USA. He is completing his PhD in Pastoral Counseling and Psychology at Boston University. He is faculty at School of Social Work and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston College, and is co-leader of the Psychological Humanities Lab. He is also in a private group practice in Boston, MA.David M. Goodman is Clinical Psychologist and Dean of the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, USA, where he also serves as Executive Director for the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics. Dr. Goodman is on the faculty in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and in the Philosophy department at Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. He also has a private practice in Boston, MA.Diana Boros is Professor of Political Theory in the Political Science Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the National Honors College. She is also affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at SMCM. She has published books on the topics of art, public art, politics, and public space and is creator of the video podcast series "Hosting Art".

‘This volume arrives at a moment when psychology has grown increasingly estranged from the very experiences it once claimed to illuminate. Across its chapters, we are reminded that moral life cannot be reduced to compliance, calibration, or codified procedures. What emerges instead is a textured account of ethics as a matter of attention, relation, and aesthetic encounter. The authors take seriously the idea that beauty can unsettle us, that it can disrupt the sterile logics of self-optimization and invite us into forms of perception that resist abstraction. Rather than treating the aesthetic as decorative or indulgent, the book positions it as a condition for ethical responsiveness, for seeing the world and one another with care. In doing so, it gestures toward a psychology that has not forgotten how to wonder and that has room for what lingers unresolved.’Justin M. Karter,Ph.D., Boston College ‘For more than a hundred years, there has been an intense debate over which branch of philosophy could replace metaphysics as the first and most foundational way of knowing. Some have argued that ethics ought to take the place of primacy and be enshrined as our "first philosophy." Others, myself included, have championed the supremacy of aesthetics. With deftness and insight, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the proximity and reciprocity of the Good and the Beautiful in ways that their intellectual forerunners would no doubt have envied.’Matthew Clemente,Ph.D., author of Bacchus Agonistes: Metarealism and the Future of Art ‘Aesthetic Ethics is poised to become a landmark text, reminding us that being moved by beauty, form, and the sublime is no luxury but the very pulse of our personhood. The contributing authors reclaim the aesthetic as an inroad to moral imagination by illustrating how embracing our discarded, inferiorized aspects can ignite the exaltation and urgent vision needed to forge new possibilities for humanity.’Zenobia Morrill,Ph.D., William James College'The western philosophical tradition has long parsed out aesthetics from ethics, and subject from object, often regarding art and pleasure as a distraction from the cold, fish-eyed, rational pursuit of truth, morality, justice, and the good.Indigenous epistemology, by contrast, tends towards the holistic or what Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer calls “holographic” experiential truths, where the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of experience emerge in concert. Like many philosophies, the native Hawaiian ethic and aesthetic of Mo-ike Aloha stresses the wholeness and simultaneity of seeing, knowing, and experiencing, which is manifest in a grounded praxis of life, love, art, and community. Or, as Wittgenstein said in the Tractacus, “aesthetics and ethics are one” in that both signal something beyond the strictly empirical.A new edited collection by Goodman, Manalili, and Boros, on the interconnectedness and interdependence of truth, beauty, and art, “Aesthetic Ethics? Towards the Beauty of Moral Imaginations” acts as a bridge between the rational and the affective -what C.P. Snow called the “two cultures”- and perhaps between the western and non-western philosophical and cultural traditions as well, which seem unsuffered by this dissociation.With contributions from a diverse variety of scholars and practitioners, the three sections of this volume examine the philosophical, moral, and political dimensions of aesthetic ethics: exploring how the experience of art can provoke a moral resonance; how the site of the artistic encounter can operate as an arena of trauma and memory; and how public art may be employed for civic and moral intervention. This unique and provocative collection not only challenges the traditional disciplinary structures and tropes of academic inquiry, but clears a space for interdisciplinary engagement, collaboration, and aesthetic-ethical practice.'Michael Kilburn, Professor of Political Science, Endicott College

• Introduction: Aesthetic Ethics? Towards the Beauty of Moral Imaginations Part 1: Aesthetic Ethics as “Moral Attunement and Formation” 1. Can the Experience of Beauty Make Us Better People? Thinking Otherwise about the Aesthetics/Ethics Connection 2. ‘Aesthetic Articulations’: Toward a Poetics of Formation 3. Small Tears in Logic: The Power of Poetic Image and Aesthetic Knowing4. Meaning and Morality: Shaping How the Light Shines In5. The Power of Art to Shape our Ability to See: A Phenomenological Reflection on Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer Part 2: Aesthetic Ethics as “Responsibility and Attentive Witnessing” 6. Mourning the Dying of the Unharmed Self 7. To Speak of Suffering: Art’s Ethical Obligation 8. Psychoanalysis, Art, and the Vale of Soul-Making 9. How to Build the Other from Scratch After Its Destruction? 10. Levinas, Decreative Hermeneutics, and Holocaust Testimony Part 3: Aesthetic Ethics as “Political and Prophetic Action” 11. Whom Shall I Walk With? Reflections of a Black(ish) South African Scholar in the North American Academy 12. Spoken Futurities: Poetry, Prophecy, and Psychology 13. Aesthetic Motivation In Religious Activism 14. The Beloved Community as Aesthetic Theory: Intimations from Josiah Royce, Martin Luther King Jr., and Erich Fromm 15. Radical Empathy: Socially-Engaged Art as a Democratic Tool