Aesthetic Justice:On The Ethical Aesthetics Of Martha Nussbaum

The paper illustrates the key approach of Martha Nussbaum’s aesthetic justice on the basis of the theoretical background of The Ethical Turn,taking aesthetic justice as the core issue running through the study of Nussbaum’s ethical aesthetics thought,and by focusing on the three core issues in Nussbaum’s academic researches,that is,tragic ethics,emotional justice,imagination and ethical possibility.The relationship between aesthetics and ethics is the core issue of Nussbaum’s thinking.The discernment of the issue went through a process in which beauty and goodness are the same,aesthetics and ethics are independent,now they have oneness.Nussbaum explores the plurality of ethical possibilities by combining the research paradigms of virtue ethics,Anglo-American ethical criticism,and post-analytic aesthetics under a contemporary the ethical turn in aesthetics,with a Deweyian pragmatic that transforms reader-response theory to an ethics of tragedy with vulnerability as its essence,and a cognitive aesthetics of justice with emotion and imagination to reconstruct it.Through tragedy,Nussbaum clarifies the nature of human nature and the fragility of good life,and identifies that the starting point of a just life is to acknowledge that vulnerability,on the other hand,the tragic dilemma represented by this reveals the complexity of ethical life.Tragedy’s contingent ethical space through emotion,luck and conflict does not mean that a negative necessity dominates ethical life,conversely,it reveals the existence of virtue in the emotional intuition of action,pity and fear.At the same time,under the premise that the heterogeneous phenomenon and the multiple value cannot be commensurable,the meta-value still has the significance and the possibility to survive.The problem of emotional justice is the core of Nussbaum’s ethical aesthetics.Nussbaum advocates the cognitive nature of emotion and reconstructs the path of justice with rational emotion,in which compassion and love are the key knots that keep a just society going,while avoiding disgust and primitive shame is the key to eliminating irrational and projective identity in the public sphere.Anger and love are two different emotional mechanisms that transform between the public and private spheres.Intentionality of emotion illustrates the plasticity of emotion.Nussbaum believes that the proper artistic and cultural form constitutes a “love’s knowledge” that focuses on individual situations and this special form of justice plays a basic role in cultivating political emotion and perfecting human nature.Nussbaum points out that after postmodernism,reasonable talk of imagination lies first and foremost in the materiality and quasi-emotion of imagination.These two core features endow the imagination with the ethical authenticity that survives,that is its ethical responsibility to explore the possibility of good life.Imagination,as a kind of ability,has different levels of meaning: fancy expresses the perceptual sensitivity of the agent’s multiple living environment,narrative imagination shows the creative potential of agent,and public imagination is a proper public reasoning to intervene in daily life.The lack of imagination restricts the implementation of global justice as well as creating adaptive preference and negative ethical identity.Nussbaum states that imagination is of methodological importance in the construction of a true theory of global justice,which is especially reflected in the reflective balance between cosmopolite and the animal ethics.