On the way to ethical culture the meaning of art as oscillating between the Other, Il y a, and the Third

ENIn essay raises the question of ethics in relation to the meaning of art. She asks, “How can the existence of art be justified?” She suggests that Levinas’s vision of art takes it to be instrumental, and as such is subjected to the ethical. At the same time, she sees Levinas as remaining uncertain about die relation between the artistic (senses) and philosophy (reason), and the ability of the artistic to climb its path to the ethical alone. Raising the more general question about the meaning of art as a distinctive dimension of the human condition, she locates art within die optics of Levinas’s metaphysical ethics. To accomplish this, she explicate the relation of the artistic with il у a (“there is”), the Other, and the Third. She makes the point that artistic existence rises out of the ilya as does the human existent, and hence must be regarded within the latter perspective. The key difference, however, is that the human existent seeks to escape from il у while the artistic existent maintains itself exposed to ilya. Borkowski’s thesis, then, is that Levinas’s understanding of art is one that sees it as essentially connected to ily a. By further describing the artistic as an intersection of three movements: directly transforming the nonsense of ily a into sense, acknowledging such sense as involving relationship with the Other, and placing the artistic also as response to the Third, Borkowski claims that a Levinasian approach justifies artistic existence not as knowledge, truth, pure form, or expression but as an ethical response to and for the Other. [From introduction of volume]