On Ethics as the First Philosophy but Not on the Metaphysical Foundations of Ethics

Abstract

The article is based on the disagreement with the attempts to see the connection between ethics and metaphysics through the idea of the metaphysical foundation of ethics which puts ethics on the secondary, derived part of philosophy. From the very beginning of philosophy it put forward two interconnected questions of the one whole basis of the world, of the ἀρχή and of the being oneself, both of which were basically ethical and could not get their answer through cognition. Even more, they were the questions about being oneself of a philosopher in the act of thinking. The ethical essence of these questions becomes especially vivid when Aristotle unites them in his answer when he finds the way of being oneself in being ἀρχή of an act, of πρᾶξις. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle directly indicates the identification of ἐνέργεια with the act: the point is not in the fact that Aristotle uses metaphysical and ethical terms for their intermutual definition, but in their essential identity and ethical basis: they mean the immanency of goal and the acting one’s being in the act. The notion of an act appears to be the final philosophical concept realizing ethics as the first philosophy.