On deontology, duty and aestheticism

Abstract

The article raises the question of the place and role of deontology in philosophical dis­course. In the works of the classics of deontological thought, we find different answers to this question: Aristotle understands δέοντος in the broadest context and seeks to combine “should be” (correct, established, “horizontal”) and “ought to be” (corresponding to the model, the will of God, “vertical”); in the Kantian doctrine, duty-Pflicht as a vertical ele­vates a person above herself; J. Bentham criticizes the idea of duty as a fiction, “ought to” is criticized as an expression of violence and lays the foundations for consequentialism. The author of the article puts forward the thesis about the “inevitability of obligation”, that is, the non-eliminativity of expressions of obligation from philosophical discourse: they play an effective role, transforming worldview into world-attitude, theory into prac­tice, description into proscription. The ought to be (“should be”) expresses the type of attitude that can be called “rejection” and can be seen to reveal the basis of what P.P. Gaidenko called “the tragedy of aestheticism” or the result of a contemplative and theoretical attitude to the world. It is characteristic of modernity, which does not abandon plans to transform (and nowadays technocratic “reassembly”) the world. The possibility of such a world attitude is a distinctive feature of European philosophy, founded by the insurmountable gap between what is and what is due. The duty of action (“ought to do”) is associated with the world-attitude as “acceptance” and a cardinal positive solution to the problem of the correlation between “ought to” and “can”.