Ethics and aesthetics: afterword

Abstract

The pairing of ethics and aesthetics is anything but new. The ancient Greek notion of kalokagathia was nothing but the conjunction of the beautiful and the good, as the ideal of human conduct; in particular, the conduct of aristocratic men and warriors – ‘gentlemen’. Thousands of years later, Wittgenstein concisely affirmed that ethics and aesthetics are one. What he was aiming at was probably far from Greek notions of kalokagathia: he was approaching ethics and aesthetics as forms of axiology, the study of value. And yet from these two opposite ends of philosophical thought, the conjunction remains.

Keywords:

• ethics
• aesthetics
• anthropology

ORCID

Roger Sansi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7084-9243

Notes on contributor

Roger Sansi was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1972. After studying at the Universities of Barcelona and Paris, he received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago (2003). He has worked at Kings College and Goldsmiths College, University of London. Currently, he is Professor of Social Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He has worked on Afro-Brazilian culture and religion, the concept of the fetish, and on contemporary art in Barcelona. His publications include the books Fetishes and Monuments, (Berghahn, 2007), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (edited with L. Nicolau, Chicago UP 2011), Economies of relation: Money And Personalism in the Lusophone World (U. of New England Press 2013) and Art Anthropology and the Gift (Bloomsbury 2015).

Notes

1. ‘L’art moderne […] refuse de considérer comme séparés le produit fini et l’existence à mener. Praxis égale poiésis. Créer, c’est se créer’ Bourriaud (2003, 13).