Ethics and aesthetics are one

Abstract

The claim that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same is problematic not least because it assumes some singular understanding of both terms, 'Ethics' and 'Aesthetics', as though such terms named two distinct and homogeneous realms of value. This idea of seeing the world from the viewpoint of eternity, with roots and branches in both Eastern and Classical thought, certainly commands respect, since it is an attempt to articulate something very deep, both spiritually and metaphysically, about existing as a temporal, finite being with desire, ambition, memory and hope, within an intractable world. The technical notion of pictorial perspective employs general principles of visual attention, principles which in some cases are explicit, as in the system of linear or artificial perspective articulated by Alberti, and sometimes not, as in earlier methods which less systematically employed the use of orthogonal construction, and so on.