The ethic-aesthetic way of wonders

Abstract

Developments in the theoretical field of ecosophy have demonstrated the co-dependence of different human and natural factors, as well as connections between societal organization, natural sustainability and individual experience. Exploring these complex and organic relations between the social, the mental and the environmental, is an important task for contemporary research. A central question is where and how such research can be undertaken. This article traces central ecosophical lines of thinking, links them to ethic and aesthetic theory, and shows how these theories stand in a direct relation to three contemporary, on-going art projects. Ecosophy is proposed as a relational and practice-near research ideology, depending on the complexity-oriented principles of relationality, ethicality and immediacy. Finally, aesthetic research and research through art emerge as field-merging and practical-theoretical approaches, which should be given more attention and resources in current science and education politics. As an alternative field of knowledge production, referring to Jacques Ranciéres ‘distribution of the sensuous’ as well as phenomenological epistemology, ethic-aesthetic research not only constitutes new ways of sensing, but acknowledges larger parts of what we already know.