Ethics and Aesthetics

edited by Santiago Caprio

According to time and culture

In ethics we find objective and rational bases that distinguish the human activities as good, fair, legal or moral, and the behaviors we could consider morally wrong or inadequate in our city (according to time and culture in which they live). 

It is the search for one or more criteria that allow administer and manage the individual his freedom in an appropriate way. It is also a rational consideration of the limits within which human freedom can be understood as citizen or city-user.

The moral values which determine the behavior of man and the meaning (meaning deep ethical-existential) the individual's life is not limited just to see how they perform those acts, but seeks to make a judgment on these, which determines whether an act has been ethically good or bad, adding to this the importance of the common good and collective. 

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that on one hand look at the study of the essence and perception of beauty, on the other hand looks at the field of art theory, the knowledge of natural and artistic beauty as the judgment the bad and good taste. The aesthetic was born "officially" in 1750 with the publication of the book "Aesthetic" by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and is defined as "the science of beauty", belonging to the liberal arts and epistemology, the logic sister. 

The concept of Beauty is considered as a category in itself, with criteria and values. The Illuminist Aesthetics of Denis Diderot, abandonment idealistic schemes. The sense of aesthetics and beauty become for him the result of a "relationship" between the art object and who perceives it with his own sensibility. In this way the "aesthetic" stops being "object itself" to become the "relation" subject-object, although these reflections on legitimation, seems to return with the concept of "object" of Gottlieb Baumgarten, but not based on culture and nature but something linked to personal interests and not the common good.

At times, contemporary art uses the beautiful or the ugly interchangeably in order to produce aesthetic emotion, to go beyond the sensible, to enter the field of aesthetic experience, emotion, play and surprise. With the rise of the conceptual and the popular, current art evaporates in any human action, the ugly can be aesthetic and the artistic can be anything. 

The aura that Art always tried to have at times ceases to exist. Far from the classical parameters, Ethics and Aesthetics in the city, go hand in hand with the responsible and mature artist and his art becomes a "relationship" between culture, nature and identity with the citizen and city-user, based on the elements which intercede in the relationship between -being- and environment,physical space, urban scene, biological organism, perceptive mechanisms, and the symbolic scheme of the individual and community, as a result of their cognitive activity, adaptable through their experience, thus creating a beauty that transcends the artist.