The studies in this volume focus on the content connections between aesthetics and individual ethics on one hand, and individual ethics and social ethics on the other. A guiding motif is the idea of an individual way of life that, not without inner tension and conflict, is attuned to its own possibilities, sensitive to moral considerations, and open to aesthetic perception. In such openness lies the central ethical competence, which allows one to be disturbed not only by others but also by the other - a capacity for productive responses to realities that contradict or exceed one's own knowledge and desires.