Morality of the New Sociality: Aestheticization as a Challenge

The article deals with the phenomenon of the aestheticization of morality in the era of the new sociality, which is specifically characterized by the decentralization of society and the self-transformation of the individual. In this context, ethical normativity stops “working” and a moral vacuum emerges. This phenomenon is commonly associated with the postmodernist worldview. But the question of the correlation between the ethical and the aesthetic, including their interpenetration and repulsion, arose long before the end of the twentieth century, and the key to understanding moral transformations, according to the author, is to analyze the category of the aesthetic. Traditionally, aestheticism was defined as “recognizing beauty as the highest good and the highest truth, and enjoying beauty as the highest principle of life” (P. Gaidenko) and was related to the sphere of sensuality. This belief was generally accepted, in spite of all the differences of opinion about the possibility of the penetration of the ethical into the aesthetic between Diderot, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard and others. Emotivism - the largest movement of ethical thought of the entire twentieth century, represented by C.L. Stevenson, A. Ayer and others, declared as its main postulate the direct dependence of morality on feelings, thus revealing its aesthetic background. Postmodernism, on the one hand, seems to develop the idea of emotivism, fixing the situation of, in the words of Z. Bauman, “ethics without morals”, based on the instantaneous feelings, sensuality and sensitivity of present-day man. Yet, behind this immediateness, some thinkers see the essential processes taking place in modern consciousness. The concluding part of the paper is devoted to Michel Foucault’s theme of the “aestheticization of life”, where aestheticization is defined not by enjoying beauty and indulging desire, but by asceticism and the “discipline of sensuality”.