The Change in Models for Describing Moral and Ethical Consciousness in the Second half of the 20th century: from the “Categorical Imperative” of I. Kant to the “Aesthetics of Existence” of M. Foucault

The article considers the change of models while describing moral and ethical consciousness, which occurred in the humanities in the second half of the twentieth century. The methodological basis of the article is the fundamental book of a psychologist Erich Neumann in the middle of the century “Deep Psychology and New Ethics”, where he proved that the ethics of conscious attitude (“old ethics”) could no longer meet the requirements of a person of the twentieth century. Modernity requires the inclusion of unconscious processes of the psyche in the field of ethics: it is necessary that “each of us consciously took over the leadership of his shadow”. It is the meeting of the conscious and the unconscious that turns out to be the basis for the reversal of human ethical consciousness from objective imperativeness and universality to subjective individual concreteness, to individuation. The article traces how this principle develops in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century in the works of postmodernism theorists. Categories that have always been the main ones in the description of the ethical sphere, such as a “moral norm”, “moral law”, “good/evil”, etc., are replaced by completely different concepts of “spontaneity”, “situationality”, “empathy”, “energy”. The author examines the cluster of concepts that Michel Foucault uses when considering ethics in more detail: “self-care”, “self-techniques”, “aesthetics of existence”. It is emphasized that the Foucault’s “ethical” is justified only as an “aesthetic phenomenon”, as a personal “art of living beautifully”, which, naturally, presupposes the ultimate form of individuation of moral and ethical consciousness.