You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In Luigi Zoja's new and exciting book Ethics and Analysis, he traces the aesthetical and ethical attitudes of consciousness to their derivatives in the historical evolution of the Western world: to the Greco-Roman (polytheistic) and Judeo-Christian (monotheistic) religious dispensations—the former being more aesthetical in accent, Zoja asserts, the latter more theological (p. 7). Zoja conjectures that from the standpoint of the ancient Greeks, the longing for beauty and goodness was subsumed by the ‘s oul's search for elevation’ (p. 9), and he makes a decisive contribution to the field of depth-psychology when he posits two principles of penultimate value: 1) ‘aesthetics aims at fighting abuse no less than ethics does’, and 2) a ‘unitary idea’ of ethics will only be realized when beauty is allowed to put up its own kind of fight (p. 10).
The most interesting variable in Zoja's book, I believe, is that he lets the aesthetic attitude take a centre stage in his writing. Not only does he include aesthetics into a psychological attitude, he actually lets aesthetics take a lead in the play! As far as I know, this is the only text that has elevated the aesthetical attitude to a plane co-equal with the ethical attitude.
Zoja makes his calling to write his book known to us when he reveals his belief that depth psychology is faced with a synthetic ‘task that is indistinguishably ethical and aesthetic’. Here Zoja aims at an aesthetical education of ethics itself, where he makes use of tragic narratives—as in ancient Greek drama—as a way of moral instruction for the death and rebirth of analytical consciousness (p. 16). Zoja writes: ‘If aesthetics suffer injustice, they become an ethical issue. Aesthetics deprived become ethics reborn’ (p. 12). The ‘backbone of Western narration (and possibly of all narration)’, Zoja continues, is tragedy (p. 39) and tragedy is a vehicle for ‘reaching deeper consciousness’ (pp. 56-57).
Zoja then proceeds to touch tap-root when he informs us: ‘the