Whose goodness? : ethics and aesthetics in a landscape of dissensus

Abstract

Is there a logical relationship between ethics and aesthetics? Or perhaps even a natural link between practical reasoning, ‘common sense’ and the sphere of sensuous judgment? Propelled by an increasing environmental engagement and landscape awareness, these and similar philosophical questions again incur interest, motivating commentators to talk about ‘an ethical turn’. However, it is a ‘turn’ that gives rise to supplementary questions concerning the role of aesthetics and the conditions for creativity, contestation and change. Revisiting earlier ethico-aesthetic turns and twists, from modernist anti-aesthetics to contemporary neo- and onto-aesthetics, the essay aims to historicize the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, including the effect on landscape in these polemics. Ultimately, the ethico-aesthetic conjuncture constitutes the structural paradox of a ‘modernity’, which simultaneously expands horizontally and elevates vertically, consensually interlocking assumptions of commonality, subjectivity and reality. The critical alternative, it is argued, is to consider the aesthetic as a political site, where the distribution of the sensuous is a dissensual matter of (landscape) concern.