"Philosophy is ethical insofar as it transforms alienation into freedom and beauty."
I will put this in context a little..."Ethical", although a familiar enough word, is distinct from "moral". Whereas morality is consumed with right and wrong, the ethical encompasses life in its entirety with all the shades of grey left in. For Ricoeur the relation between identity and the projection of the "good life" is intimate and integral. For philosophy to be ethical would be for philosophy to play a part in who we are and how we live.
Ricoeur was a French philosopher who was a brilliant writer on, among many things, hermeneutics; the science of interpretation. I think this is relevant here because of the notion of "alienation"; part of Ricoeur's concept of interpretation is that it always involves distance; understanding necessarily implies, to some extent, criticism.
Alienation in the context of the ethical, then, implies how we become distanced from our own lives; the way that the extraordinary removes us from the ordinary, or when the ordinary becomes the uncanny. In reflecting upon anything we risk encountering strangeness within familiarity. Philosophy can help us overcome this.
Or so it seems to me. What interests me is the relationship between freedom and beauty in this process. I would argue that there are different ways in which these two qualities can exist in relation to one another, and that this relationship is shaped by the philosophical methodologies and traditions we bring to bear on the aporia we encounter.
Systematic and analytic philosophy aim for freedom through beauty. They rely upon elegance. Analytic philosophy demonstrates the beauty of the ordinary; life through the microscope. Systematic philosophy constructs elegant structures of ideas, aimed towards perfection within the limits of discourse. The freedom they grant is one of lightness; the alienation we encounter can be explained, or integrated into something else.
Therapeutic philosophy, as typified by certain interpretations of Wittgenstein, finds beauty in freedom. The alienation we encounter is a form of confusion; we see the ordinary as extraordinary because we are seeing an unusual aspect of some phenomena. As soon as we realise this, we realise that the alienation we feel is simply a result of looking at something awry. Rather than explain the aporia we dissolve it. Beauty does not emerge from the freedom this dissolution endows us with, the freedom itself is beautiful.
Hermeneutic and existentialist philosophies, however, have the potential to forge beauty from freedom. The freedom they grant us is by denying the Absolute; in the absence of God, everything is permitted. This is not to say that everything is possible; our actions are still circumscribed by our circumstances. But it means that we are free to be the authors of our own existence. Of course, this is a heavy kind of freedom. But then nobody said beauty was cheap...
As ever when I write philosophy on here, all simplistic nonsense. It's the kind of thing that you couldn't possibly agree with unless you already believed it. But, even if philosophy has nothing to do with it, freedom and beauty, both separately and in relation to one another, are surely worthy of our consideration?
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