Philosophical and theoretical foundations of classical aesthetics. Theoretical foundations of aesthetics
Aesthetics is considered as a philosophical science, the history of aesthetic teachings, the essence of aesthetic attitude and aesthetic value, categories of aesthetics, axiological (neo-axiological) interpretation of the nature of art, the concepts of aesthetic and artistic are introduced as meta-categories of aesthetics. There is a short terminological dictionary.
Prepared in accordance with the standard discipline program. For university students and everyone interested in the problems of modern aesthetics.
Subject of aesthetics.
The term “aesthetics” (from the ancient Greek aisthetikos - sensual) refers to sensory perception.
In the history of the development of aesthetics, two main periods can be distinguished:
implicit aesthetics (from Latin implicite - implicit, in a hidden form);
explicit (from Latin explicite - unraveled, put in order; in an expanded, explicit form).
Implicit aesthetics has existed in all periods of human history and represents the understanding of aesthetic experience both within the mythological consciousness and in theoretical disciplines (philosophy, rhetoric, philology, theology).
The birth of explicit aesthetics as an independent science occurred in the 18th century. in the works of the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (“Aesthetics”, 1750-1758), who called aesthetics the lowest level of philosophy, the science of sensory knowledge, and its perfect form - beauty. The scientist thought in the traditions of contemporary philosophy of the New Age.
According to another philosopher of the same time, G. Leibniz, there are three spheres of the spiritual world of man - will, reason and feeling. Baumgarten believed that logic was the study of reason in European philosophy, ethics was the study of will, and no one was studying feelings. Aesthetics was designed to fill this gap.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1. Aesthetics as a philosophical science
1.1. Subject of aesthetics
1.2. The structure of aesthetic theory and the objectives of the aesthetics course in the education system
1.3. Methods and functions of aesthetics, its functions
1.4. Aesthetics in the system of humanities
Chapter 2. History of aesthetic teachings
2.1. Basic theories of ancient aesthetics
2.2. Medieval aesthetics
2.3. Renaissance Aesthetics
2.4. Aesthetics of classicism
2.5. Aesthetics of the Enlightenment
2.6. Aesthetic ideas of German classical philosophy
2.7. Marxist stage in the development of aesthetic thought
2.8. Non-classical concepts of Western European aesthetics of the 19th century
2.9. Development of Russian aesthetic thought
2.10. Aesthetics in Belarus
Chapter 3. Aesthetic attitude, aesthetic activity, aesthetic value and aesthetic evaluation
3.1. Aesthetic attitude
3.2. Aesthetic activity
3.3. Aesthetic value and aesthetic evaluation in the light of neo-axiology
Chapter 4. Categories of aesthetics
4.1. System of aesthetic categories
4.2. Aesthetic as a metacategory of aesthetics
Chapter 5. Object categories of aesthetics
5.1. The problem of beauty is aesthetics. The beautiful and the ugly
5.2. Categories of aesthetics: sublime and base.
5.3. Categories of aesthetics: tragic and comic
Chapter 6. Aesthetic structure of personality, aesthetic consciousness and subjective categories of aesthetics
6.1. Aesthetic personality structure
6.2. Aesthetic consciousness
6.3. Subjective categories of aesthetics
Chapter 7. Artistic as a meta-category of aesthetics
Chapter 8. The nature of art
8.1. Aesthetic foundations of art
8.2. Multifunctionality of art
Chapter 9. Morphology of Art
Chapter 10. Types of art
10.1. Fiction
10.2. Architecture
10.3. Design
10.4. Fine arts
10.5. Synthetic arts
10.6. Music
10.7. Choreography
Chapter 11. Artistic creativity and artistic work
11.1. The essence and nature of artistic creativity
11.2. artwork
11.3. Categories that analyze the degree of value of a work of art
Chapter 12. Aesthetics of the 20th century
12.1. Main trends in the development of aesthetics in the 20th century.
12.2. Modernism
12.3. Postmodernism
Conclusion
Brief terminological dictionary
Literature.
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Medieval aesthetics
During the period of dominance of the religious worldview, aesthetic views were based on the denial of pagan ones, i.e. ancient ideas. Not only carnal, bodily beauty was denied, but also the beauty of the natural world in general. And at the same time, religious philosophical aesthetics used the philosophical language and those concepts that were developed in the era of antiquity. Late antiquity also moved away from the materialistic ideas of the ancient Greeks.
Neoplatonism already combined elements of mysticism and the idea of the supersensible. From this there was one step to the idea of the world as the embodiment of the divine plan, to the supersensible beauty of God. According to the views of religious philosophers, eternal, supersensible, absolute beauty is God. Plato's thoughts about the supersensible world of ideas were here taken to their extreme. But Plato, through this mystification, took a step towards understanding human nature.
To understand that a person lives in a world of ideas, his activity is based on ideas, on the implementation of ideas. And therefore, human interaction with the objective world is based on the perception of the relationship between an idea and a sensory individual object. Religious aesthetics further absolutizes the ideal world of man, turning it into the transcendental world of God. And it completely contrasts the ideal and the material. Both in cognition and in creativity, a person has the opposition of an idea and a thing, but only in interrelation. Religion, by absolutizing the spiritual principle, perhaps reveals its real significance in the life of mankind, but at the same time it distorts the real interaction of the spiritual and material in human nature.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) actually summed up Western medieval aesthetics. He transferred the emphasis of beauty to sensually perceived, natural beauty, appreciating it in itself. For him, a thing is beautiful only when its nature and essence are fully expressed in its appearance. Thomas defines beauty as the totality of its objective and subjective characteristics. Objective characteristics: “proper proportion or consonance, clarity and perfection.” He saw subjective aspects in the relationship between beauty and cognitive ability, which is realized in the act of contemplation, accompanied by spiritual pleasure. By art, Thomas understood any skillful activity and its result.
Renaissance aesthetics
The worldview of the Renaissance can be imagined from the following excerpt from the famous “Speech on the Dignity of Man” by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Mirandola (1463-1494) writes that God, having created man and placed him at the center of the world, addressed him with the following words: “We do not give you, O Adam, neither a specific place, nor your own image, nor a special duty, so that and the place, and the person, and the duty you had at will, according to your will and your decision. The image of other creations is determined within the limits of the laws we have established. You, unconstrained by any limits, will determine your image according to your decision, into the power of which I represent you.” The Renaissance is considered to be a return to antiquity. But it differs from antiquity radically in its understanding of man, in the ideal of man. Antiquity forms the idea of a person whose boundaries are limited and determined by his nature. The worldview of the Renaissance realized for the first time that this world did not set any limits to human development. Begins to feel the limitlessness of human creative powers. Renaissance - the era of early capitalism. The Middle Ages prepared the development of productive forces, the population grew, crafts improved, and man began to comprehend the laws of nature. And he himself began to change. His thinking, will, interest, and needs developed. His own development became a necessity.
Early capitalism brought the need for personal activity and entrepreneurship. And a person reconsiders his attitude towards himself, his understanding of himself. Renaissance thinkers believe that man is good by nature, not inclined to evil, noble, and most importantly, that man makes himself great by his deeds. The Renaissance is rich in titans of the spirit. The ideal of the era is the master. And the titans of the Renaissance speak several languages. They are proficient in several types of arts. Leonardo da Vinci is a sculptor, an engineer, a poet, an architect, a painter, a philosopher, and an art theorist. At the center of Renaissance art is a natural, sensual person who lives by earthly joys. But at the same time, the Renaissance creates the ideal of a person of honor, dignity, high spirituality and morality. Dante in The Divine Comedy goes through the centuries lived by humanity and surveys the moral state of these eras using the example of the fate of historical figures who ended up in hell. Boccaccio in The Decameron is full of irony towards the ostentatious piety of church ministers. In fact, he opposes the universal hypocrisy that is characteristic of believing humanity. And seeks the true purity of the human spirit.
The philosophy of this era is more occupied with the problems of art. Art in this era has a basic ideological function. It creates the sensual ideal of the era and at the same time it is the creation of man’s sensuality. Your human sensuality. Theorists of the era consider art a form of knowledge of nature. And this is true, because human nature as a sensually perceived nature is not given to a person hereditarily. He creates this nature and appropriates it. Creates with the power of imagination.
Aesthetics of the era of classicism
The era of the formation of a single economic market over large territories. Strong centralized states emerge. Because of this, nations emerge with a single language and a single psychological make-up. There is a development of sciences and a scientific way of thinking. The general requirement of the era is the subordination of the individual to civic duty. And at the same time, there is a need to strengthen the role of the state in the relationships between individuals, since the strengthening of bourgeois relations is fraught with a war of all against all. Aesthetic views of the era
are influenced by their time. The rationalistic worldview gives birth to the aesthetics of Nicolò Boileau (1636-1711). In his work “Poetic Art,” written in poetic form, Boileau pursues the idea of regulating genres and types of art. According to his views, the spiritual principle makes the external, material beautiful. But for him the spiritual principle is ratio, reason. There is no beauty outside truth. The strict definiteness of the genres of art, say, in drama, the principle of the unity of time, place and action, comes from the understanding that rationality is, first of all, the organization, according to the logic of reason, of clear logical forms. A striking example This understanding of art is served by the garden of Versailles, where the principle of bringing beauty into nature is professed. Wild nature is not beautiful, but only when it is ennobled by the human mind.
Aesthetics of the Age of Enlightenment
The next stage in the development of capitalist society is characterized by heated hostility to serfdom. The idea of communion with God, elevation to the divine is replaced by the idea of enlightenment, education of the people. The leaders of education defend the interests of the masses and peasants. They believe that the abolition of serfdom will bring with it general prosperity. Early bourgeois revolutions took place in this era. The bourgeoisie acts as a progressive class that brings liberation to the people. The ideas of the bourgeoisie in this era are progressive. Its spiritual leaders fight ignorance, obscurantism, religious dope, medieval pseudoscience, inhumane feudal morality, religious art and aesthetics.
The aesthetics of this era is an integral part of the ideology of the third estate before the Great French Revolution. This aesthetics develops the idea of art that is accessible to everyone, which is democratic, professes the principle of reproducing life and judging it, truthfully and ideologically. Denis Diderot comes to the idea that art reproduces typical characters, that each class has its own characteristic features, its own human types. Almost all figures of this era write and argue about the educational role of art. And the French philosopher E. Caudillac (1714-1780) saw the main reason for the emergence of art in the need for communication between people.
Contemporary Central European aesthetics
By the beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of the natural sciences, and also partly as a result of psychological research and the developed classification of mental elements, an idealistic methodology of phenomenology was formed. Considering non-experiential structures of consciousness, freed from naturalistic attitudes, it removes the division into subject and object, reduces the activity of reflection of consciousness exclusively as subordinate to self-knowledge. One of the founders of phenomenology is F. Brentano. E. Husserl was a student of F. Brentano and began his philosophical career when the most influential trends in Western philosophy were positivism and neo-Kantianism, and in general empiricism, individualism, scientism, and conventionalism “dominated.” Skepticism and relativism, according to E. Husserl, destroying human knowledge, aroused a sharp protest in his soul and he finds a new, logically reliable basis in the form of phenomenological reduction. “Husserl attached very great importance to his discovery of the world of objects possessing absolute existence. It was here that, in his opinion, a truly extensive apodictic foundation was discovered on which human knowledge could be built. Phenomenological reduction leads to a change in point of view, attitude, person: having carried out the reduction, he moves from the natural attitude of consciousness to the phenomenological one.
With a natural, natural attitude of consciousness, the existence of objects of study is relative and subject to doubt; with a phenomenological attitude, it is absolute and undeniable”4. E. Husserl’s new position attracted many young philosophers, such as M. Scheler, N. Hartmann, A. Pfender, M. Geiger, A. Reinach, O. Becker, including M. Heidegger, who formed a phenomenological movement. The aesthetic theory of the 20th century receives in phenomenology all the necessary means for its development and existence in the context of a rather complex spiritual picture of Western Europe. The reduction method makes it possible to explore the understanding of the subject of knowledge not as empirical, but as transcendental, which is fundamentally important for aesthetics. Man appeared as (a kind of whole) world of designated truths located above the empirical-psychological consciousness and giving it meaning.
Husserl's method of identifying a priori structures of human existence was actively used in aesthetics by such phenomenological scientists as M. Merleau-Ponty, M. Dufresne, R. Ingarden and others. In his philosophical concept, Maurice Merleau-Ponty interprets the human attitude to the world through such a characteristic of consciousness as intentionality. Raising the category of perception to the “supreme and central”, the philosopher finds that “neutral field” where human intentions (intentions) communicate with the world. Dealing with problems of a linguistic nature, M. Merleau-Ponty creates a number of prerequisites for the analysis of artistic and aesthetic phenomena and their existential interpretation. A phenomenological connection with aesthetics, art and literary criticism was shown by a scientist of a later generation, Mikel Dufresne.
In his views on the content, state and prospects for the development of art, he expressed a number of fundamental additions to new European aesthetic thought in such works as “Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience”, “Poetic”, etc., as well as in the articles “Aesthetics and Philosophy” /I967/, “Philosophy in the West” /I973/. The scientist proposes to take into account in relation to contemporary art such indicators as internationalization, the prevalence of art in reproductions, the reasons for the aggressiveness of anti-art, the ratio of “new means” of artistic production,” standardization of industry and the creative freedom of the artist. The philosophical and anthropological tradition in the form of classical psychoanalysis attracted the widest interest of artists not only in Europe, because the psychoanalytic approach greatly contributed to avoiding not so much artistic collisions as psychological isolation into oneself. Complete emotional openness did not occur immediately, and the embodiment of Freud’s ideas in works of art led to the desociologization of art and a decrease in its universal significance.
However, S. Freud himself was most likely aware of what stage of spiritual maturity humanity is at, in any case, what are the reasons for its anxiety, unhappiness and anxious moods. “It seems to me,” Freud writes, “that the question of the fate of the human race depends on whether the development of culture, and to what extent, will be able to curb the human urge of aggression and self-destruction, which disrupts the coexistence of people. In this regard, perhaps just modern era deserves special interest." The human personality in all the fullness of its essential characteristics is at the center of the teaching of personalism, which also proceeds from the correlation of the human will with God as the highest principle. Personalists give human activity not so much a rationalistic, but an aesthetic and poetic character. Thus, Emmanuel Mounier, through poetic images, made tangible concepts and thoughts about the spirit and body, about the biological, physical and existing in time. The personalists enclosed the “magical language” of transforming the world in poetry and art, protesting against certain trends of modernism and counterculture. E. Mounier speaks in a romantic manner and with deep sadness in his observations on the means of art and the fate of personalist aesthetics in general: “Being incorporeal, poetry also cannot be reduced to either the pure contemplation of an idea or the creative power of the spirit. Throughout human history, it has been a sensory expression of the inner groundlessness of existence; she tends to debunk conventional points of view, direct divine light onto ordinary objects and bring the exciting presence of the ordinary to the sublime spheres.
It is also true that many use games of abstraction to cover up their inability to comprehend the limits of the human, while others, disillusioned with all kinds of intricacies, are consoled by external beauty or what is in fashion today. It is also true that all kinds of deformations in art are a sign of the deep nihilism of the era.”8 The given remark of the thinker is also valuable because it seems to predict current situation, when the aesthetic in the structure of human existence does not find a conceptual analogue in theory, as it is reflected (albeit hierarchically) in classical epistemology. Philosophical understanding of art in its relation to consciousness acquires a cosmic dimension, which they try to integrate into the worlds of historical realities and social forms human life. Indeed, the ontology of art requires a sociocultural dimension, but does this mean that we need to completely abandon the classical foundations of methodology; will this allow us to reach a new level of understanding the nature of art as a unique phenomenon of human existence? As long as the question remains open, there is always hope for some kind of “breakthrough” that would capture the attention of social anthropology in the direction of “aesthetic expertise” on humanity and humanity. Indeed, in the tradition of philosophical anthropology there is such experience.
On the eve of the 21st century, the “self-reflection” of aesthetic theory is becoming increasingly important; various aspects of the formation and existence of this science are still of constant interest to scientists. Moreover, an objective, essentialist (essential) theory of art is necessary and possible. Another thing is that at the stage of postmodernism, where everything turns out to be in the past and this is a normal situation in which not only world culture finds itself, but to a certain extent ours too: “... A new situation arises in which cultural studies as a metascience becomes the only way of adequate description and analysis of this type of relationship, while traditional aesthetics, due to its hierarchy, is powerless to understand what is happening”9. The confusion and alleged crisis of aesthetic science could turn into a constructive process through an appeal to the fundamental foundations of aesthetics itself, its empirical and theoretical level, based on the same philosophical and anthropological tradition.
Research into aesthetic knowledge as a theoretical system and analysis of the functional orientations of aesthetics have not lost their relevance. Due to the fact that aesthetics is an area of methodological reflection addressed to humanitarian knowledge, and therefore to science appealing to man, the interpretive-phenomenological and activity-constructive, philosophical-aesthetic and scientific-aesthetic principles fall into the field of view of aesthetic achievements. Through the efforts of centuries-old cultural creativity, combined with the individual theoretical constructs of individual aesthetic scientists, three types of aesthetic theory were formed depending on the prevailing system-forming principle: philosophical-aesthetic theoreticality, general aesthetic theoreticality and particular scientific aesthetic-theoretical constructs.
Currently being established new style methodological reflection, forming a certain type of methodological attitude to knowledge and philosophical and aesthetic transformation. In its content, this path integrates subject-specific aesthetic and philosophical knowledge. However, the greatest difficulty arises when interpreting the concept of “picture of the world” as subject boundaries and completeness of volume with regard to the strict scientific nature of the categories, principles, and laws of modern aesthetic theory. Along with the biological, physical, philosophical, one can distinguish sensory-spatial, spiritual-cultural, metaphysical pictures of the world. Discussing this issue “...we make the subject of special study the ambivalence of the human worldview, its inconsistency, which in its borderline manifestations acts as antinomy.
Human existence contains a fundamental tension, the manifestations of which range from “all-linguistic” semantic dialogicity to the intense human tension between finitude and infinity, meaning and nonsense, life and death, etc.” Thus, philosophical anthropology, the integral essence of which consists of phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, neo-Thomism, personalism and their various modifications, serves as the context for a new fundamental ontology of the aesthetic.
The 18th century, called the Age of Enlightenment in the history of culture, set the task of forming a rational man who possesses knowledge and uses it for a comprehensive understanding and transformation of the world. The solution to this problem, in turn, involves the question of what to change in a person, how to form a person of reason? A. Baumgarten (1714-1762), a German philosopher who came from anthropology, thought about this question. In the 18th century, a person was considered as a combination of three spiritual abilities: reason, will, feelings. Having identified this “triangle,” Baumgarten discovered that the first two abilities were considered in ancient philosophy. Philosophy dealing with the conceptual sphere has long been formalized - this is logic. In the 18th century it was believed that the attitude towards the world can only be cognitive, hence the science that examines the laws of rational knowledge - logic. The second ability is will, i.e. freedom of action, also long ago, back in antiquity (“Nicomachean Ethics” by Aristotle), was comprehended by philosophy in ethics, the philosophy of action, the semantic side of which interests philosophy. But there is also a sphere of direct, sensory comprehension of the world. Philosophy began to deal with this in the 18th century, but the corresponding section of philosophical knowledge had not yet been identified. In 1750-1758. Baumgarten publishes his famous work entitled Aesthetica, which marked the birth of a new science. And here Baumgarten turns to the ancient Greek aisthetikos - sensual, emotional. Sensual, among other things, has a common meaning with the ancient Slavic “smell”, i.e. for the Russian consciousness, to feel means to comprehend, to penetrate somewhere. And Baumgarten spoke, first of all, about feeling as the ability to comprehend the world, those aspects of it that are inaccessible to rational knowledge: for example, the beauty and harmony of the world. Then he made a bridge: the highest form of feeling is the feeling of beauty, and the highest form of beauty is art, and in aesthetics he included both the sphere of the aesthetic and the sphere of the artistic. From this moment on, aesthetics exists as a philosophical science, a philosophy of aesthetics and art.
The final formation of aesthetics as a science occurred in the philosophy of the German Enlightenment in the works of I. Kant (1724-1804). In addition to the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), “Critique of Practical Reason” (1788), Kant creates the “Critique of the Judgment” (1790), or rather the “Critique of the Evaluative Judgment”, where Kant formulates the specifics of this sphere. A. Baumgarten is usually called the father of aesthetics, since it was he who gave the name to science; in fact, he only recorded the existing realities. Aesthetics as a philosophical science begins with Kant, then there will be Hegel, the romantics and beyond. The history of aesthetics deals with the formation of aesthetic issues in historical dynamics. We are interested in the theory of aesthetics and therefore we will define the object and subject of aesthetics.
2. Subject of aesthetics
Note that the object of aesthetics is not equal to its subject. Object - those realities that are external to a person, towards which his cognitive activity is directed. The specifics of science are determined by the subject - the goal of comprehension, the modality of the existence of the object, and this is the internal content of science. An object is what “I want” to know in an object and the understanding of which constitutes science.
Let's start with those external aspects of reality that a person distinguishes in an aesthetic attitude towards the world. Man named these special qualities: beautiful, sublime, tragic, comic, etc. So, the first layer of the object of aesthetics is the aesthetic phenomena of reality. What is aesthetics trying to understand here? Aesthetics tries to understand the nature of these phenomena: where they come from, what their essence is and the specificity of specific manifestations, such as beauty, for example. Let us immediately determine that we do not reduce the entire variety of aesthetic phenomena to beauty: the aesthetic as a special reality has long been no longer only beauty. The main question is the question of the meaning, the human purpose of this sphere, and aesthetics is always asked this question. As N. Zabolotsky wrote in his poem “Ugly Girl”:
……………….what is beauty?
And why do people deify her?
Is she a vessel in which there is emptiness?
Or a fire flickering in a vessel?
In essence, aesthetics is concerned with comprehending the depths and basic patterns of aesthetic realities, this is what makes aesthetics a philosophical science.
The second layer of the object of aesthetics as a science: aesthetic reality is given to a person through certain subjective mechanisms, although it has long been believed that these mechanisms do not have certain specific characteristics. But there are aesthetic realities that are obvious as signs of a certain subjectivity, for example, the aesthetic ideal. For the first time, the problem of aesthetic subjectivity was posed by Kant, highlighting those properties and processes that are mental, internally subjective in nature, which act as a way to open and master the sphere of aesthetic phenomena. We are talking about the existence of a special functional mechanism associated with the human psyche, a special aesthetic consciousness and its individual elements and structures. This includes the structures on which the aesthetic attitude to the world is based: aesthetic taste, ideal, perception, experience, attitudes, aesthetic value orientations, aesthetic needs, aesthetic self-awareness. Aesthetic consciousness is a specific structure: there may be a morally developed person who is deaf to the aesthetic and, conversely, the phenomenon of aesthetics is the hypertrophy of a developed aesthetic consciousness, intoxicated by the beauty of a person, the moral aspect of whose actions is not considered at all.
Aesthetic expressiveness and value of the world appears to a person, being mediated by mental manifestations, for example, aesthetic experiences. The world of values of beauty and ugliness, tragic and funny, appears only through a special experience. Therefore, anyone who does not have experience of aesthetic values and art will not be able to understand the science of aesthetics.
What is the subject of aesthetics? In a systemic quality of aesthetic. Psychology deals with general psychological mechanisms for detecting the aesthetic in the experience of feelings; the task of aesthetics is to understand the universal for this sphere and at the same time specific foundations, structures and processes of aesthetic consciousness. It is possible to record the inseparability of the first and second layers: aesthetic being and aesthetic consciousness. In aesthetics, the category of aesthetic attitude, which explains this integration, becomes a categorical expression of the inseparability of aesthetic being and aesthetic consciousness.
We can say that the object of aesthetics is the aesthetic attitude to the world or the aesthetic development of the world - the most important category, starting with F. Schiller (1759-1805) and I.V. Goethe (1749-1832). The subject of aesthetics is the study of the most general foundations and patterns of aesthetic exploration of the world by man.
The third layer of the object of aesthetics is associated with the understanding that people not only sensually master, but themselves create an aesthetically expressive environment, starting from the Upper Paleolithic era. By creating tools, they began to simultaneously decorate them, their home and their body. From the very beginning of culture, this has been inherent in humanity, and the sphere of multilateral reconstruction of the world is expanding as much as possible at the present time. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. An activity has arisen that specifically designs the forms of such reorganization - design. Aesthetic practice is the creation of an aesthetically significant world, and design is responsible for this aspect of universal aesthetic practice. Aesthetic practice shapes and changes not only the object - the surrounding world; in its course, the subject of aesthetic attitude is also formed. In aesthetic practice, very subtle work occurs on the spiritual world of a person. We are talking about aesthetic education and self-education. In this applied sense, aesthetics can be called a philosophy of aesthetic education as well as a philosophy of design.
Finally, the fourth layer is art. For centuries, art has been thought of as a form of aesthetic attitude towards the world, an elite cultivation of the ability to create beauty. Today, in the 21st century, we cannot reduce art to an aesthetic principle. In Russian this is indicated: along with “aesthetic”, there is another word - “artistic”. Art is a system artistic activity people and the products of this activity.
The second macro-object of aesthetics is art, and the key category on which modern aesthetics is based is artistic.
The traditional view is that the artistic coincides with the aesthetic ( ancient look), then for Hegel, in the era of classical aesthetics, aesthetics is the philosophy of art, and the aesthetic lives only in art. A similar position was already held in the 20th century by M.M. Bakhtin (1895-1975). The other extreme: the aesthetic and the artistic do not intersect - this is the position of modern American aesthetics. It is impossible to agree with this; art remains a form of aesthetic attitude towards the world, still pursuing aesthetic goals. We find aesthetic quality in all three parts of art: in artistic creativity - as the author’s aesthetic attitude to the world and his vision of aesthetic values; in a work of art, which is the unity of aesthetically significant content and aesthetically perfect form, where artistic value includes aesthetic value; in artistic perception, which involves enjoying the beauty and expressiveness of form. Today it turns out that not only in the form of beauty, but also ugliness, the aesthetic is present in art. And here the question arises: how to understand artistic activity, what to classify as it? Is everything that a person who considers himself an artist “created” to be art? What does aesthetics do when applied to art? What is she trying to understand? The philosophy of art poses the following questions:
- What is art? What is its essence? What is the integral specificity of art that allows the results of creativity to be classified as artistic?
- What is the structure of art? What constitutes a phenomenon of art?
- What is art for? What are the sociocultural functions of art?
- What are the laws of the genesis and historical evolution of art?
- What is historical typology or historical morphology of art, i.e. what are the historical types of art.
So, the status of aesthetics as a science is determined by its subject - identifying the most general foundations and patterns of aesthetic and artistic exploration of the world.
The characteristics of the subject of aesthetics determine the philosophical and worldview nature and place of science in the structure of humanitarian knowledge. The aesthetic attitude to the world, which arises in archaic culture, is one of the fundamental world relations that reveals the degree of correspondence between the world and man, the nature of man’s incorporation into the world. Categories of aesthetics reveal a person’s worldview, worldview, worldview and worldview, and the value priorities of cultural eras.
3. Historical development of aesthetic thought. Classical and non-classical aesthetics
Although the term “aesthetics,” as we have seen, was introduced by Alexander Baumgarten in the Age of Enlightenment, aesthetic thought is rooted in ancient times and represents a free understanding of aesthetic experience both within other sciences (philosophy, rhetoric, philology, theology, etc.) , and by the creators of art themselves - the artists. Thanks to the works of Plato, we know about the first philosophical reflections on beauty. Long before the 18th century, already in the era of antiquity, the main categories and problems of the science of aesthetics were determined, which were considered throughout all subsequent stages of its development. Researchers of the history of aesthetics (V.V. Bychkov) conventionally distinguish three periods of the formation of science: proto-scientific(until the middle of the 18th century, before the appearance of Baumgarten’s work), classical, coinciding with the development of classical philosophical aesthetics (mid-18th-19th centuries) and postclassical or non-classical (from F. Nietzsche to the present day).
In the “proto-scientific” period, the subject of reflection of ancient aesthetics (Pythagoreans, Socrates (c. 470-399 BC), Plato (428 or 427-348 or 347 BC), Aristotle (384- 322 BC), Roman rhetoric) - the nature of beauty, features of art and its perception. Categories such as beauty, tragedy and tragic, sublime, comic, aesthetic pleasure and catharsis have forever entered the arsenal of aesthetic science, thanks to antiquity. Medieval aesthetics (Augustine the Blessed (354-430), first of all) introduced the concept of a symbolic image into the system of aesthetic categories, having examined its main modifications (imitative, allegorical, symbolic), and highlighted creativity as a process that brings beauty and art to life. An important point in the continuity of the development of aesthetics within the first stage is the conviction of thinkers in the close connection of beauty with ethical values - goodness, goodness, love. The aesthetics of the Renaissance and subsequent classicism and baroque, based on the ideas of antiquity and the Middle Ages, focuses on the analysis of the patterns of artistic creativity and the identification of optimal, from a human point of view, rules for constructing a work of art.
In the European tradition, at the first stage, aesthetics actively developed in antiquity, especially within the framework of ancient Greek philosophy, then in the Middle Ages, and further in the Renaissance and the culture of the 17th century within the artistic and aesthetic movements of classicism and baroque.
The development of the science of aesthetics in the classical period is associated primarily with German classical philosophy represented by Lessing (1729-1781), Schiller (1759-1805), Goethe (1749-1832), and, mainly, Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1834), and in the 19th century - with the cultures of romanticism, realism and symbolism.
The non-classical stage of philosophy, which began with Nietzsche (1844-1900), radically changes the nature and conceptual apparatus of philosophical aesthetics, taking it beyond analytics into the sphere of metaphorical consideration. Non-classical aesthetics of the 20th century returned to a categorical analysis of the essence of aesthetics and art, but significantly supplemented the composition and conceptual dominants of the apparatus of science.
The ideas of classical aesthetics organically continued the thoughts of antiquity, however, the interpretation of the established categories changed depending on the philosophical positions of the thinker. German and English (Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Burke (1729-1797), Hume (1711-1776)) philosophy of the 18th century introduced the problems of studying the aesthetic subject as central to aesthetics. A significant place will be devoted to classical aesthetics in our lectures, where we will also turn to its interpretation of aesthetics and art.
The beginning of the non-classical stage of aesthetics is determined by the philosophical turn of the second half of the 19th century, determined in turn by the radical cultural modernization continued by the 20th century. In the 20th century, problems of aesthetics are productively considered in the context of such sciences as art history, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, semiotics, linguistics and the latest philosophical trends, such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, semiotic philosophy and the philosophy of postmodernism. The categorical apparatus and methodology of these sciences have significantly enriched aesthetics in the study of modern forms of aesthetic practice and art and determined the possibility of their explanation. For example, a characteristic feature of the aesthetic practice of a person in the twentieth century. - the desire to create something ugly; this becomes a pattern of aesthetic formation and artistic form, and is a sign of a cultural crisis, because no society can rest on decay. It is clear that the category of the ugly is becoming a full-fledged category of modern aesthetics. Thus, if we turn to the arsenal of its categories, the prefix “not” becomes clear: these categories are not aesthetic from the point of view of classical aesthetics. Non-classical aesthetics or non-classics takes as the main problems the existence of modern man, using the categories simulacrum, artifact, absurdity, abstruse, ugly, cruelty (“tin” in common parlance), deconstruction. With the establishment in the humanities of the study of the phenomenon of everyday life as a specific sphere of human existence, aesthetics included such categories as art practices ( latest forms art), contemporary art (as opposed to fine, classical).
Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky
Preface
The beginning of the philosophical work of Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky (1870–1965), the great Russian philosopher who created the original system of intuitionism and personalistic ideal-realism, dates back to the period of the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance. Before forced emigration in 1922, Lossky acquired world fame thanks to his fundamental research: “Substantiation of intuitionism”, St. Petersburg, 1906 (here his theory of knowledge is presented, or, in Berdyaev’s words, “epistemological ontology”); “The World as an Organic Whole”, M., 1917 (metaphysics); “Logic”, Pg., 1922.
The emigrant period of Lossky's activity was marked by extraordinary productivity. He carefully develops and improves all aspects of his philosophical system, strives to give it conceptual completeness, integrity and completeness. His books are published on the foundations of ethics, axiology, theodicy, and the history of world and Russian philosophy. Summing up the preliminary results of the philosophical work of Russian thinkers by the middle of the 20th century, V.V. Zenkovsky noted: “Lossky is rightly recognized as the head of modern Russian philosophers, his name is widely known wherever people are interested in philosophy. At the same time, he is perhaps the only Russian philosopher who built a system of philosophy in the most precise sense of the word - only on issues of aesthetics he has not yet (as far as we know) expressed himself in a systematic form, and on issues of philosophy of religion he touched upon in various of his works only a few – mostly private issues.”
At the end of the 40s. XX century, when the above lines were written, the books “Dostoevsky and his Christian worldview” (1953), “The Doctrine of Reincarnation” (first published in 1992 by the Progress Publishing Group in the “Path Magazine Library” series) had not yet been published "), which together with the previously published monograph “God and World Evil. Fundamentals of Theodicy” (1941) give a complete picture of Lossky’s religious views.
The main aesthetic work of N.O. Lossky’s “The World as the Realization of Beauty” was created in the second half of the 30s – early 40s. Based on it, Lossky read a course of lectures “Christian Aesthetics” for students of the New York St. Vladimir Theological Academy, where he taught from 1947 to 1950. Some fragments of this work were published at different times in different languages. As evidenced by Lossky’s letter to A.F. Rodicheva dated April 9, 1952 (see Appendix), the book lay in the YMCA-Press publishing house for a long time. Now there is an opportunity to publish it in the author’s homeland.
Giving the reader the opportunity to evaluate for himself the encyclopedic versatility of Lossky’s aesthetic views, we will refer to only one interesting testimony from his son - B.N. Lossky, a famous art critic and architectural historian, which reflects the essential intention of the entire book. Recalling an episode related to sorting literature in the last days before deportation from Russia, B.N. Lossky writes that his father “no longer saw directional realism as a seventieth grandmother, but also not as the World of Art to Volodya and me as an “absolute value” in Russian painting. The latter became clear to us when our father, indignant at our action, took out of the folder a loose-leaf sheet with Kramskoy’s “inconsolable grief” with words like “well, doesn’t such a heartfelt manifestation of thought say anything?” I remember precisely the word “thought” and it seems that for my father, fine art was mainly one of the types of “manifestation of thought,” which, perhaps, will be noticed by the reader of his book “The World as the Embodiment of Beauty,” which, it seems, will finally appear in Russia."
30 years after the death of the “patriarch of Russian philosophy”, the publication in his homeland of the book “The World as the Realization of Beauty” completes the publication of the main philosophical works of N.O. Lossky.
The work is printed from a typewritten original with handwritten corrections kept by the Institute of Slavic Studies in Paris. The publication preserves the features of the author's spelling and punctuation.
P. B. Shalimov
Introduction
“Aesthetics is the science of the world because it is beautiful,” says Glockner.
Actually, the solution to any philosophical question is given from the point of view of the world as a whole. And of course, research into the essence of absolute values, which permeate the whole world, can be carried out only by examining the structure of the whole world. Therefore, aesthetics, as a department of philosophy, is the science of the world, since beauty (or ugliness) is realized in it. In the same way, ethics is the science of the world, since moral good (or evil) is realized in it. Epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge, is a science that discovers those properties of the world and cognizing subjects, thanks to which truths about the world are possible. The clearest direction of philosophical research on the world as a whole is revealed in the central philosophical science, in metaphysics, which is the doctrine of world existence as a whole.
Realizing that every philosophical problem is solved only in connection with the world as a whole, it is not difficult to understand that philosophy is the most difficult of sciences, that there are many directions in it that fiercely fight among themselves, and many problems can be considered far from any satisfactory solution. And aesthetics, like ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, contains many directions that are sharply different from each other. However, I dare to assert that aesthetics belongs to the number of philosophical sciences that are relatively highly developed. True, there are many very one-sided directions in it, for example, physiologism, formalism, etc., but getting acquainted with these extremes, it is not difficult to see what aspect of truth they contain and how it can be included in a non-eclectic way into the complete system of the doctrine of beauty. I will give an exposition of these trends and criticism of them at the end of the book. Moreover, even the main disagreement, the doctrine of the relativity of beauty and the doctrine of the absoluteness of beauty, that is, aesthetic relativism and aesthetic absolutism, I will pit against each other for a summary refutation of relativism only at the end of the book. I will conduct the entire presentation of the doctrine of beauty in the spirit of aesthetic absolutism, so that along the way it will contain refutations of various arguments given in favor of relativism. In the same way, in the very process of presentation, arguments will be given against psychologism in aesthetics, but a summary presentation and refutation of this trend will be given only at the end of the book.
The starting point of the entire system of aesthetics will be the metaphysical doctrine of ideal of beauty. This top-down presentation provides the greatest clarity and completeness. The so-called “scientific”, positivistic research, proceeding from the bottom up, leads the most prominent representatives of these trends to approximately the same ideal in essence, but without sufficient clarity and strength, and among the less outstanding it ends in falling into extreme one-sidedness.
Absolutely perfect beauty
1. Ideal of beauty
Beauty is value. The general theory of values, axiology, is set out by me in the book “Value and Being. God and the Kingdom of God as the basis of values”<Париж, 1931>. In exploring beauty, I will, of course, proceed from my theory of values. Therefore, in order not to refer the reader to the book “Value and Being,” I will briefly outline its essence.
Good and evil, that is, positive and negative value in the most general sense of these words, not in the sense of only moral good or evil, but in the sense of any perfection or imperfection, also aesthetic, is something so basic that the definition of these concepts through indication of the closest genus and species character is impossible. Therefore, the distinction between good and evil is made by us on the basis of immediate discretion: “This is good,” “that is evil.” On the basis of this immediate discretion we recognize or feel that one is commendable and worthy of existence, and the other is blameworthy and not worthy of existence. But when dealing with the complex content of life, it is easy to fall into error and not notice the evil disguised by the admixture of goodness, or not appreciate the goodness, which in earthly existence is not free from shortcomings. Therefore, it is necessary to find a primary, absolutely perfect and comprehensive good, which could serve as the scale and basis for all other assessments. This highest good is God.
The slightest communion with God in religious experience reveals Him to us as Good itself and precisely as the absolute fullness of being, which in itself has a meaning that justifies it, makes it the subject of approval, giving it the unconditional right to implementation and preference to anything else. In this consideration of the highest value there is no logical definition of it, there is only an indication of the primary principle and a verbose, but still not complete enumeration of the consequences arising from it for the mind and will, to some extent joining it (justification, approval, recognition of the right , preference, etc.).
God is Good itself in the comprehensive meaning of this word: He is Truth itself, Beauty itself, Moral Good, Life, etc. Thus, God and precisely every Person
The Most Holy Trinity is the Comprehensive absolute self-worth. The complete mutual participation of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in each other’s lives gives the right to assert that the Comprehensive absolute self-worth is not divided into three parts and does not exist in triplicate: It is one in three Persons. Moreover, every created member of the Kingdom of God is a person worthy of joining the Divine fullness of being as a result of the path of goodness he has chosen and has actually received, by grace from God, access to the assimilation of His endless life and active participation in it; this is a person who has achieved deification by grace and at the same time, having a character, although created, but still of comprehensive absolute self-worth. Every such person is a created son of God.
Personality is a being that has creative power And freedom: she freely creates her life, performing actions in time and space. In a person, it is necessary to distinguish between his primordial, God-created essence and the actions he himself creates. The deep essence of a personality, its Self, is a super-temporal and super-spatial being; Only to his manifestations, his actions, does a person give a form that is either temporary (mental or psychoid manifestations) or spatio-temporal (material manifestations).
A supra-temporal being that creates its manifestations in time and is their carrier is called substance in philosophy. To emphasize that such a being is the creative source of its manifestations, I prefer to call it the term substantial agent. So, every person is a substantial agent. Only individuals are capable of realizing an absolutely perfect life, actively joining the Divine fullness of being. Therefore, only persons, that is, only substantial agents, were created by God. The world consists of an infinite number of individuals. Many of them create all their life manifestations on the basis of love for God, greater than for themselves, and love for all other beings in the world. Such individuals live in the Kingdom of God. Every creative plan of a member of the Kingdom of God is unanimously picked up and complemented by the rest of the members of this kingdom; such creativity can therefore be called cathedral. The creative power of the members of the Kingdom of God, due to their unanimity, and also due to the fact that it is complemented by the creative assistance of the Lord God Himself, is limitless. It is clear, therefore, that the individuals who form the Kingdom of God realize the absolute fullness of life.
The conciliarity of creativity does not consist in the fact that all figures create the same thing in the same way, but, on the contrary, in the fact that each figure brings from himself something unique, unique, inimitable and irreplaceable by other created figures, i.e. individual, but each such contribution is harmoniously correlated with the activities of other members of the Kingdom of God and therefore the result of their creativity is a perfect organic whole, infinitely rich in content. The activity of each member of the Kingdom of God is individual, and each of them is individual, i.e. personality, the only one, unique but being and irreplaceable in value by no other created being.
Substantial agents are free beings. All of them strive for the absolute fullness of life, but some of them want to realize this fullness of being for all beings in unanimity with them on the basis of love for them and for God, while other figures strive to achieve this goal for themselves, without caring about other beings or thinking about them, but desiring to do good to them without fail according to his own plan and permission, that is, placing himself above them. Such selfish, i.e., egoistic figures are outside the Kingdom of God. Many of the goals they set are in conflict with the will of God and the will of other figures. Therefore, they are in a state of partial falling away from God and isolation from other figures. They enter into an attitude of hostile confrontation towards many creatures. Instead of conciliar, unanimous creativity, the result is often mutual constraint, obstruction of each other’s lives. Being in this state of isolation, the selfish worker lives, instead of a full life, a meager life with impoverished content. An example of extreme isolation and poverty of manifestations can be seen in such lower stages of natural existence as free electrons. These are substantial figures who perform only monotonous actions of repelling other electrons, attracting protons, and moving in space. True, they too, as the creators of these actions, are super-temporal and super-spatial beings; and they strive for the absolute fullness of being, but they cannot be called real personalities. In fact, valid a person is an actor who is aware of absolute values and the obligation to implement them in his behavior. In our fallen kingdom of existence, man can serve as an example of a real personality, although we humans often do not fulfill our duty, yet each of us knows what is called the word “duty”. As for creatures that are at such a stage of impoverishment of life as the electron, they do not at all know how to carry out acts of awareness, but they also perform their actions purposefully, guided by psychoid (i.e., very simplified, but still similar to mental) instinctive aspirations for a better life, and they unconsciously accumulate life experience and are therefore capable of development. They emerge from the poverty of life by entering into alliances with other figures, that is, combining their forces with them to achieve more complex forms of life. This is how atoms arise from a combination of electrons, protons, etc., then molecules, unicellular organisms, multicellular organisms, etc. At the center of each such union is a figure capable of organizing the whole of the union and creating a type of life that attracts less developed figures , so that they freely enter into an alliance and are more or less subordinate to the main figure, combining their forces to jointly achieve common goals. Ascending higher and higher along the path of complicating life, each activist can reach the stage at which he becomes capable of acts consciousness and finally can become a real person. Therefore, no matter how low he stood at the previous stages of his development, he can be called potential(possible) personality.
Acts of repulsion performed by actors who set selfish goals create material corporeality each actor, that is, the relatively impenetrable volume of space occupied by these manifestations. Therefore, our entire area of existence can be called psycho-material kingdom.
Every worker in the psycho-material kingdom of being, despite his state of falling away from God and remaining in the poverty of a relatively isolated being, is still an individual, that is, a being capable of realizing the unique individual idea, according to which he is a possible member of the Kingdom God's therefore, every substantial agent, every actual and even every potential personality is an absolute value in itself, potentially all-embracing. Thus, all agents, that is, the entire primordial world created by God, consists of beings who are not means for some goals and values, but absolute values in themselves and, moreover, even potentially comprehensive; It depends on their own efforts to become worthy of God’s gracious help to raise their absolute self-worth from potentially comprehensive to the degree of actually comprehensive, that is, to be worthy of deification.
The doctrine according to which the whole world consists of individuals, actual or at least potential, is called personalism.
Only personality can be actually comprehensive and absolute. self-worth." only a person can have the absolute fullness of being. All other types of being, derived from the being of the individual, namely the various aspects of the personality, the activities of individuals, the products of their activities are the essence of values derivatives, existing only under the condition of all-encompassing absolute good.
Derived positive values, that is, derivative types of good can now be defined by indicating their connection with the all-encompassing good, namely with the absolute fullness of being. Derivative good is being in its meaning for the realization of the absolute fullness of being. This teaching should not be understood to mean that every derivative good is only a means to achieve comprehensive good, but in itself has no price. In this case, one would have to think that, for example, a person’s love for God, or a person’s love for other people, is not good in itself, but only as a means to achieve the absolute fullness of being. Likewise, beauty and truth would not be good in themselves, but only as a means.
Awareness of this thesis and an accurate understanding of it is necessarily associated with disgust for its meaning, and this feeling is a sure symptom of the falsity of the thesis. In fact, love for any being, devoid of intrinsic value and reduced to the level of a mere means, is not genuine love, but some kind of falsification of love, fraught with hypocrisy or betrayal. The falsity of this thesis is also revealed in the fact that it makes the goodness of the Absolute all-encompassing Good itself incomprehensible: if love, beauty, truth, undoubtedly present in Him, are only means, then what is the primordial goodness in this absolute Good itself, in God himself? ? Fortunately, however, our thought is not at all obliged to oscillate between only two possibilities; comprehensive absolute value and service value (means value). The concept itself comprehensive absolute value suggests the existence of different parties one all-encompassing good; each of them is absolute “ partial” self-worth. Despite their derivativeness, in the sense of the impossibility of existing without the whole, they remain self-values. In fact, we have placed at the head of the theory of values (axiology) the all-encompassing fullness of being as absolute perfection. That indefinable goodness, justification in itself, with which the fullness of being is permeated through and through, belongs, due to its organic integrity, also to every moment of it. Therefore, every necessary aspect of the fullness of being is perceived and experienced as something that in itself is good, is itself justified in its content as something that should be. These are love, truth, freedom, beauty, moral goodness. All these aspects of the Kingdom of God with the Lord God at its head are imprinted with features inherent in the Absolute Good, such as non-self-closure, non-involvement in any hostile confrontation, compatibility, communication, being for oneself and for everyone, self-giving.
Thus, in God and in the Kingdom of God, as well as in the primordial world, there are only values in themselves, there is nothing that would be just a means, they are all absolute and objective, that is, universally significant, since there is no isolated, separate existence here.
Following the doctrine of positive values, i.e. goodness, it is easy to develop the doctrine of negative values. Negative value, that is, the nature of evil (in a broad, and not just an ethical sense) has everything that serves as an obstacle to the achievement of the absolute fullness of being. From this, however, it does not follow that evil, for example, illness, aesthetic ugliness, hatred, betrayal, etc., are in themselves indifferent and only insofar as consequence theirs is the failure to achieve the fullness of being, they are evil; just as good is justified in itself, so evil is something unworthy in itself, deserving of condemnation; it is in itself opposed to the absolute fullness of being as absolute good.
But unlike Absolute Good, evil is not primary and not independent. Firstly, it exists only in the created world, and then not in its primordial essence, but initially as a free act of the will of substantial agents, and derivatively as a consequence of this act. Secondly, evil acts of will are committed under the guise of good, since they are always aimed at a genuine positive value, but in such a relationship with other values and means to achieve it that good is replaced by evil: thus, being God is the highest positive value, but self-inflicted the appropriation of this dignity by a creature is the greatest evil, namely satanic evil. Thirdly, the realization of negative value is possible only through the use of the forces of good. This lack of independence and inconsistency of negative values is especially noticeable in the sphere of satanic evil.
Having become acquainted with the general doctrine of values, we will try to give an account of the place of beauty in the value system. Direct contemplation undoubtedly testifies that beauty exists. absolute value, i.e. a value that has a positive value for all individuals capable of perceiving it. Ideal of beauty realized where the comprehensive absolute value is truly realized perfect fullness of being, it is this ideal that is realized in God and in the Kingdom of God. Perfect beauty is the fullness of being, containing in itself the totality of all absolute values, embodied sensually. Although ideal beauty includes all other absolute values, it is not at all identical to them and, in comparison with them, represents a special new value that arises in connection with their sensual embodiment.
The doctrine of values that I have outlined is ontological theory of values. Also, the doctrine I expressed about the ideal of beauty is an ontological understanding of beauty: in fact, beauty is not some addition to being, but being itself, beautiful or ugly in one or another of its existential contents and forms.
The definition of the ideal of beauty was expressed by me without evidence. What method can be used to justify it? - Of course, not otherwise than through experience, but this is experience of the highest order, namely mystical intuition in combination with the intellect is sewn(speculative) and sensual intuition. What I mean by “experience”, exact information about this can only be obtained by becoming acquainted with the theory of knowledge that I have developed, which I call intuitionism. It is described in detail in my book “Sensual, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition”<Париж, 1938>and in my “Logic” system. I give the following meaning to the word “intuition”: direct contemplation by the knowing subject of existence itself in the original, and not in the form of copies, symbols, constructions produced by the mind, etc.
2. Absolutely perfect beauty of the God-man and the Kingdom of God
God in his depth is something ineffable, incommensurable with the world. That department of theology that deals with God in this sense of the word is called negative(apophatic) theology, because it expresses only denials of everything that exists in the created world: God is not Reason, is not Spirit, is not even being in the earthly meaning of these words; the totality of these negations leads to the idea that God is Nothing, not in the sense of emptiness, but in the sense of such positivity that stands above any limited created “what.” Hence, in negative theology, it becomes possible to designate God with positive terms borrowed from the realm of created existence, but indicating His superiority: God is the Super-rational, Super-personal, Super-existential, etc. principle. And even in positive (cataphatic) theology, where we talk about God as a trinity of Persons - God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, all the concepts we use are used only by analogy with created being, and not in their own earthly sense. So, for example, the personal existence of God is deeply different from ours: God, being one in essence, is three-person, which is impossible for humans.
From all that has been said, it is clear that the beauty inherent in God as a person is something deeply different from everything that exists in the created world, and can be called by this word only in an improper sense. However, it was precisely as a result of the deep ontological abyss separating the Divine super-existence from created existence that the Lord God, according to the basic Christian dogma, descended to the world and intimately approached it through the incarnation of the Second Person of St. Trinity. The Son of God, Logos, having created idea perfect humanity, He Himself assimilates it to Himself as His second nature, and from eternity has stood at the head of the Kingdom of God as a Heavenly man and, moreover, a God-man.
Moreover, at a certain historical epoch, the God-man descends from the Kingdom of God and enters our psycho-material kingdom of existence, taking on the image of a slave. Indeed, as a heavenly man he has cosmic body, embracing the whole world, and in His appearance on earth in Palestine as Jesus Christ, He lived even in a limited, imperfect body, which is a consequence of sin. Being sinless Himself, He nevertheless took upon Himself the consequences of sin - an imperfect body, suffering on the cross and death, and showed us that, even being in the living conditions of fallen creatures, the human Self can realize a spiritual life that completely follows the will of God. Moreover, in His appearances after the resurrection He showed us that even a limited human body can be transformed, glorified, free from the imperfections of material corporeality. The appearance of Christ in the spirit-bearing body is the highest available to us symbolic expression of God on earth: in him all perfections in sensory embodiment are realized, therefore, also realized ideal of beauty.
They will tell me that the thoughts I have expressed are just my guess, not confirmed by any experience. To this I will answer that such an experience exists: Jesus Christ appeared on earth in a glorified body not only in the near future after his resurrection, but also in all subsequent centuries right up to our time. We have the testimony of many saints and mystics about this. In those cases when persons who have received these visions report them in more or less detail, they usually note the beauty of the image they saw, surpassing everything that exists on earth. Yes, St. Teresa (1515–1582) says: “During prayer, the Lord deigned to show me only his hands, which shone with such wonderful beauty that I cannot even express it.” “A few days later I also saw His divine face”; “I could not understand why the Lord, who later showed me the mercy that I contemplated Him throughout, appeared to me so gradually. Subsequently, I saw that He led me in accordance with my natural weakness: such a low and pitiful creature could not bear to see such great glory at once.” “You may think that to contemplate such beautiful hands and such a beautiful face you don’t need such great strength spirit. But the glorified bodies are so supernaturally beautiful and radiate such glory that when you see them you are completely beside yourself.” “During Mass on St. Paul, the holy humanity of the Lord appeared to me, as it is depicted in the Resurrection with beauty and majesty, as I have already described to your grace” (spiritual father) “by your order.” “I only want to say one more thing: if in heaven for the delight of our eyes there was nothing but the sight of the sublime beauty of glorified bodies, especially the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, then this would already be extreme bliss. If this view, even here, where His greatness appears only in accordance with our weakness, already brings such bliss, what will be there. , where the enjoyment of this good will be complete.” “The whiteness and brilliance of such a vision surpasses everything that can be imagined on earth. It is not a brilliance that blinds, but a kind whiteness, an emanating radiance that does not cause pain to the beholder, but gives the highest pleasure. Also, the light that shines so that one can contemplate such divine beauty does not blind.” “In comparison with this light, even the clarity of the sun that we see is darkness”; “This is a light that does not know the night, but is always shining, not obscured by anything.”
The appearances of Christ described with such delight by St. Teresa saw “with the eyes of the soul.” These were, therefore, “ imaginative” visions in which sensory qualities are given to the human soul as if from within itself; whereas in “sensory” visions they are given as sensed from the outside. What differs from them are “intellectual” contemplations, in which the human mind has to non-sensible entity God or members of the Kingdom of God. However, says St. Teresa, both types of contemplation almost always occur together, i.e. imaginative contemplation, supplemented by intellectual contemplation: “with the eyes of the soul you see the perfection, beauty and glory of the Lord’s most holy humanity” and at the same time “you know that He is God, that He is powerful and he can do everything, puts everything in order, controls everything and fills everything with his love” (371).
Likewise, the members of the Kingdom of God shine with their unearthly beauty. “On St. Clara,” says St. Teresa, “when I was about to receive communion, this saint appeared to me in great beauty” (XXXIII chapter, p. 463). About the vision of the Mother of God of St. Teresa reports: “the beauty in which I saw her was extraordinary” (466).
Medieval mystic Dominican monk bl. Henry Suso lived half on earth, half in the Divine world, the beauty of which he describes in especially bright, living colors. Talking about his visions of Jesus Christ, the Mother of God, and angels, Suso always notes their extreme beauty. Especially often he saw the inhabitants of heaven, hearing at the same time their singing, playing the harp or violin, the heavenly beauty of which is indescribable. In one vision, for example, “the sky opened before him and he saw angels flying down and up in bright clothes, he heard them singing, the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. They sang especially about our beloved Virgin Mary. Their song sounded so sweet that his soul was blurred with pleasure.”
In Russian literature there is a description that is especially valuable for the purposes of the doctrine of beauty of what the landowner N.A. saw and experienced. Motovilov, when he visited St. in the winter of 1831. Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833). They were in the forest not far from the saint’s cell and talked about the purpose of Christian life. “True<же>the goal of our Christian life,” said St. Seraphim, “consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God.” “How,” I asked Father Seraphim, “can I find out that I am in the grace of the Holy Spirit?” “Then Fr. Seraphim took me very tightly by the shoulders and said to me: “We are both now, father, in the Spirit of God with you... why don’t you look at me?”
I answered:
“I can’t look, father, because lightning is pouring from your eyes.” Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes are aching with pain.
O. Seraphim said:
- Do not be afraid, your love of God, and now you yourself have become as bright as I myself. You yourself are now in the fullness of the spirit of God, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see me like this.
And, bowing his head to me, he quietly said to me in my ear:
- Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy towards you. You saw that I did not even cross myself, but only in my heart I mentally prayed to the Lord God and said within myself: Lord, grant him clearly and with bodily eyes to see the descent of Your Spirit, with which You honor Your servants when You deign to appear in the light of magnificent glory Yours. And so, father, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of the poor Seraphim... How can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift of His to both of us. This way, father, the Lord God does not always show His mercy to the great hermits. It is the grace of God that has deigned to comfort your contrite heart, like a loving mother through the intercession of the Mother of God Herself. Why, father, don’t look me in the eyes? Just look and don't be afraid. - The Lord is with us!
After these words, I looked into his face, and even greater awe fell upon me. Imagine in the middle of the sun, in the most brilliant brightness of its midday rays, the face of a person talking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, hear his voice, feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders with their hands, but not only do you not see these hands, you do not see either yourself or his figure, but only one dazzling light , stretching far, several yards around, and illuminating with its bright shine the snow veil covering the clearing, and the snow pellets showering from above both me and the great old man. Is it possible to imagine the situation in which I was then!
- How do you feel now? – Fr. asked me. Seraphim.
- Extraordinarily good! - I said.
- How good is that? What exactly?
I answered:
“I feel such silence and peace in my soul that I cannot express it in any words!”
“This is your love for God,” said Father Fr. Seraphim is the world about which the Lord said to His disciples: “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives, I give to you. If only you had been from the world, the world would have loved its own, but I chose you out of the world, and for this reason the world hates you. But dare, for I have conquered the world.” It is to these people, hated by this world, but chosen by the Lord, that the Lord gives the peace that you now feel within yourself. “Peace,” according to the apostolic word, “above all mind” (Phil. 4:7).
What else do you feel? – Fr. asked me. Seraphim.
- Extraordinary sweetness! - I answered.
And he continued:
“This is the sweetness about which the Holy Scripture says: “They will make Thy house drunk with the fatness, and I will give Thy stream of sweetness to drink.” It is this sweetness that now fills and spreads through all our veins with indescribable delight. From this sweetness our hearts seem to melt, and we are both filled with such bliss that cannot be expressed in any language... What else do you feel?
- Extraordinary joy in all my heart!
And Father Seraphim continued:
– When the Spirit of God descends upon a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His influx, then the human soul is filled with indescribable joy, for the Spirit of God joyfully creates everything that He touches, this is the same joy about which the Lord speaks in His Gospel: “wife When she gives birth, she has sorrow, for her year is gone; When a child gives birth, he does not remember the sorrow for the joy of a man being born into the world. You will be in a world of sorrow, but when I see you, your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” But no matter how comforting this joy that you now feel in your heart is, it is still insignificant in comparison with that about which the Lord himself, through the mouth of His apostle, said that that joy “neither eye has seen, nor ear has heard, not a good sigh has entered into the heart of man, such as God has prepared for those who love Him.” The preconditions for this joy are given to us now, and if they make our souls feel so sweet, good and cheerful, then what can we say about the joy that is prepared in heaven for those who cry here on earth? So you, father, have cried enough in your life, and look at the joy with which the Lord consoles you even in this life.
What else do you feel, your love of God?
I answered:
- Extraordinary warmth!
- How, father, warmth? Why, we are sitting in the forest. Now winter is outside, and there is snow under our feet, and there is more than an inch of snow on us, and cereals are falling from above... How warm can there be here?
I answered:
- And the kind that happens in a bathhouse, when they turn it on the stove and when steam comes out of it like a column...
“And the smell,” he asked me, “is it the same as from the bathhouse?”
“No,” I answered, “there is nothing on earth like this fragrance.” When, during my mother’s lifetime, I loved to dance and go to balls and dance evenings, my mother used to sprinkle me with perfume, which she bought in the best fashion stores in Kazan, but even those perfumes did not emit such a fragrance...
And Father Fr. Seraphim, smiling pleasantly, said:
“And I myself, father, know this just like you, but I’m deliberately asking you whether you feel it so.” The absolute truth, your love for God! No pleasant earthly fragrance can be compared with the fragrance that we now feel, because we are now surrounded by the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God. What earthly thing can be like it? Notice, your love of God, you told me that all around us it’s as warm as in a bathhouse, but look, the snow doesn’t melt either on you or on me, and above us the same way. Therefore, this warmth is not in the air, but in ourselves. It is this very warmth about which the Holy Spirit, through the words of prayer, makes us cry out to the Lord: “Warm me with the warmth of Your Holy Spirit.” The hermits and hermits who were warmed by it were not afraid of the winter filth, being dressed, as in warm fur coats, in grace-filled clothing woven from the Holy Spirit. This is how it should actually be, because the grace of God must dwell within us, in our hearts, for the Lord said: “The kingdom of God is within you.” By the kingdom of God the Lord meant the grace of the Holy Spirit. This kingdom of God is now within you, and the grace of the Holy Spirit shines and warms us from without and, filling the air around us with a variety of fragrances, delights our senses with heavenly delight, filling our hearts with unspeakable joy. Our present situation is the same one about which the apostle says: “the kingdom of God is food and drink, but righteousness and peace through the Holy Spirit.” Our faith consists “not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in manifestations of the spirit and power.” This is the state in which we now find ourselves. It is about this state that the Lord said: “There is nothing from those who stand here, who have not tasted death, until they see the kingdom of God coming in power”... Here, father, your love for God, what indescribable joy the Lord God has now vouchsafed us with!.. This is what means to be in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, about which Macarius of Egypt writes: “I myself was in the fullness of the Holy Spirit.” It is with this fullness of the Holy Spirit that the Lord has now filled us, the poor... Well, now, it seems, there is nothing more to ask, your love for God, how people are in the grace of the Holy Spirit!.. Will you remember the present manifestation of the ineffable mercy of God, visited us?
- I don’t know, father! - I said, - will the Lord honor me forever to remember this mercy of God as vividly and clearly as I now feel?
“And I remember,” Father Seraphim answered me, “that the Lord will help you to keep this in your memory forever, for otherwise His goodness would not have so instantly bowed to my humble prayer and would not have so quickly preceded to listen to the poor Seraphim, especially since It was not given to you alone to understand this, but through you for the whole world, so that you yourself would be confirmed in the work of God and could be useful to others.”
In Motovilov’s story there is no word “beauty,” but it is in the testimony of novice John Tikhonov (later abbot Joasaph), who reported the following story from Elder Seraphim: “Once, reading in the Gospel of John the words of the Savior that in My Father's house there are many abodes, I, poor thing, stopped thinking about them, and longed to see these heavenly dwellings. He spent five days and nights in vigil and prayer, asking the Lord for the grace of that vision. And the Lord, indeed, in His great mercy, did not deprive me of the consolation of my faith, and showed me these eternal shelters, in which I, a poor earthly wanderer, was momentarily transported there (in body or incorporeally, I don’t know), I saw the inscrutable beauty of heaven and those living there: the great forerunner and baptizer of the Lord John, the apostles, saints, martyrs and venerable fathers of ours: Anthony the Great, Paul of Thebes, Savva the Sanctified, Onuphrius the Great, Mark of France, and all the shining saints in unspeakable glory and joy, such as it did not see, the ear did not hear, and it did not enter into man’s thoughts, but what God has prepared for those who love Him.
With these words Fr. Seraphim fell silent. At this time, he bent slightly forward, his head drooped down with his eyes closed, and he moved his outstretched right hand equally quietly against his heart. His face gradually changed and emitted a wonderful light, and finally became so illuminated that it was impossible to look at him; on his lips and in his entire expression there was such joy and heavenly delight that in truth one could call him at that time an earthly angel and a heavenly man. Throughout his mysterious silence, he seemed to be contemplating something with tenderness and listening to something with amazement. But what exactly the soul of the righteous admired and enjoyed - only God knows. I, unworthy, was worthy to see Fr. Seraphim is in such a state of grace, and he himself forgot his mortal composition in these blissful moments. My soul was in inexpressible delight, spiritual joy and reverence. Even to this day, with just one memory, I feel extraordinary sweetness and consolation.”
After a long silence, Fr. Seraphim began to talk about the bliss that awaits the soul of the righteous in the Kingdom of God, and ended the conversation with the words: “There is no illness, no sorrow, no sighing, there is sweetness and joy unspeakable, there the righteous will be enlightened like the sun. But if Father Apostle Paul himself could not explain that heavenly glory and joy, then what other human language can explain the beauty of the mountain village in which righteous souls dwell!” .
A poetic description of the mystical experience that reveals the perfect beauty of the Kingdom of God is given by Vl. Solovyov in his poem “Three Dates”. In the tenth year of his life, Solovyov had a vision, which was subsequently repeated two more times and influenced his entire philosophical system. It arose in connection with his first love. The girl he was in love with turned out to be indifferent to him. Overcome with jealousy, he stood in the church at mass. Suddenly everything around him disappeared from his consciousness, and he describes the unearthly things that he saw as follows in a poem written shortly before his death:
Azure all around, azure in my soul,
Permeated with golden azure,
Holding a flower of foreign countries in my hand,
You stood with a radiant smile,
She nodded to me and disappeared into the fog.
And childhood love became alien to me,
My soul is blind to everyday things...
What he saw, he subsequently interpreted as the manifestation of the Wisdom of God, Sophia - the Eternal and Perfect Feminine.
At the age of 22, Soloviev, who wanted to study “Indian, Gnostic and medieval philosophy”, being carried away by the problem of Sophia, received a trip abroad to prepare for professorship and went to London with the aim of studying in the library of the British Museum. In his notebook From this time his prayer for the descent of the Most Holy Divine Sophia was preserved. And in fact, here he experienced a vision of Sophia for the second time. However, it did not satisfy him with its incompleteness; Thinking about this and persistently wanting to see her completely, he heard an inner voice telling him: “Be in Egypt!” Having given up all his studies in London, Soloviev went to Egypt and settled in a hotel in Cairo. After living there for some time, one evening he set off on foot to Thebaid without supplies, in city clothes - a top hat and an overcoat. Twenty kilometers from the city, he met Bedouins in the desert, who at first were terribly afraid, mistaking him for the devil, then, apparently, they robbed him and left. It was night, the howling of jackals was heard, Solovyov lay down on the ground and in the poem “Three Dates” he recounts what happened at dawn:
And I fell asleep; when I woke up sensitively, -
The earth and the sky were breathing roses.
And in the purple of heavenly radiance
With eyes full of azure fire
You looked like the first radiance
World and Creative Day.
What is, what was, what is to come forever -
Everything was embraced here by one motionless gaze...
The seas and rivers turn blue beneath me,
And the distant forest, and the heights of the snowy mountains.
I saw everything, and there was only one thing, -
Just one image of female beauty...
The immeasurable included in its size, -
In front of me, in me, there is only you.
O radiant one! I will not be deceived by you!
I saw all of you in the desert...
In my soul those roses will not wither,
Wherever the wave of life rushes.
And in fact, the system, the development of which filled Solovyov’s entire life, according to many researchers, can be called the “philosophy of Eternal Femininity.”
The greatest Greek philosophers Plato and Plotinus, ascending to the highest kingdom of being, like Solovyov, not only through thinking, but also with the help of mystical experience, characterize it as a region of perfect beauty. In the dialogue “Symposium,” Socrates conveys what Diotima told him about the beautiful: “What would we think if someone happened to see the beautiful itself as clear as the sun, pure, not mixed, not filled with human flesh, with all its colors and much another mortal vanity, but if it were possible for him to see the divine beauty itself uniform? What do you think, would the life of a person looking there, constantly seeing this beauty and being with it, be bad? Realize that only there, seeing the beautiful with the organ with which it can be seen, will he be able to give birth not to the ghost of virtue, but - since he is not in contact with a ghost - true virtue - since he is in contact with the truth.
In the dialogue “The Republic” (Book VII) Socrates says: “In the realm of the knowable, the idea of good is the highest and barely accessible to contemplation; but having seen it, one cannot help but conclude that it is the cause of everything right and beautiful, generating light and a source of light in the realm of the visible, and in the realm of the intelligible it dominates, providing truth and comprehension.” He explains his idea with a myth about a cave in which there are chained people who can see on the wall of the cave only the shadows of things carried behind them in front of the fire; one of them manages, freed from the chains, to leave the cave and he, when his eyes get used to the light, sees the sun and the living, rich in content, authentic reality illuminated by it. In this myth, the highest super-worldly principle, the idea of Good, is compared with the sun, and the kingdom of perfect intelligible ideas with objects illuminated by the sun. The Moscow philosopher Vladimir Eri, the author of the wonderful book “The Struggle for the Logos” (a collection of his articles published in 1911), began publishing an article in 1917 in which he set out to show that Plato’s “solar comprehension” was the highest level of his spiritual experience. Probably in this article he would have come to the conclusion that Plato's kingdom of the intelligible corresponds to the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, Ern died before finishing his article.
In the philosophy of Plotinus, three higher principles stand above earthly reality: the One, the Spirit and the World Soul. At the head of everything is the One, which corresponds to Plato’s idea of Good. It is inexpressible in concepts (the subject of negative theology), and therefore, when Plotinus wants to express himself quite precisely, he calls it the Super-Unity, also the Super-Good. From it comes the Kingdom of the Spirit, consisting of ideas that are living beings, and, finally, the third stage is occupied by the World Soul. Just as for Plato the idea of Good is “the cause of everything right and beautiful,” so for Plotinus the One is “the source and fundamental principle of the beautiful”*. The ideal of beauty is realized in the Kingdom of the Spirit, the intelligible beauty of which Plotinus, by the way, characterizes with the following features: in this kingdom “every being has the entire (spiritual) world in itself and contemplates it entirely in every other being, so that everything is everywhere, and everything there is everything, and everyone is everything, and the brilliance of this world is limitless.” """Here", that is, with us on earth, “every part comes from another, and remains only a part, there every part comes from the whole, and the whole and the part coincide. It seems to be a part, but to a keen eye, like the mythical Lynceus, who saw the interior of the earth, it opens as a whole.”
In his book “The World as an Organic Whole”<М., 1917>(chap. VI) I try to show that the Kingdom of the Spirit in Plotinus’ system corresponds to the Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God as the kingdom of love. Thus, both in the Christian idea of the world and in the teachings of Plotinus, which completes all ancient Greek thinking, since the philosophy of Plotinus is a synthesis of the systems of Plato and Aristotle, the Kingdom of God is considered as an area where the ideal of beauty is realized.
Composition of perfect beauty
1. Sensual embodiment
The experience of the Kingdom of God, achieved in the visions of saints and mystics, contains the data of sensory, intellectual and mystical intuition in an inextricable combination. In all these three of its aspects, it represents man’s direct contemplation of existence itself. However, in human consciousness this contemplation is too little differentiated: very many data of this experience are only conscious, but not recognized, that is, not expressed in a concept. This is one of the deep differences between our earthly intuition and the intuition characteristic of Divine omniscience. In the Divine mind there is intuition, as he says about it. P. Florensky, combines discursive fragmentation (differentiation) to infinity with intuitive integration to unity.
In order to raise to a greater height the knowledge about the Kingdom of God received in visions, it is necessary to supplement it with speculative conclusions arising from knowledge of the foundations of the Kingdom of God, precisely from the fact that it is a kingdom of individuals who love God more than themselves and all other beings as themselves. The unanimity of the members of the Kingdom of God frees them from all the imperfections of our psycho-material kingdom and, being aware of the consequences that arise from this, we will be able to express in concepts the various aspects of the goodness of this Kingdom, and, consequently, the aspects necessarily inherent in the ideal of beauty .
Beauty, as already said, is always a spiritual or spiritual being, sensually embodied, i.e. inextricably welded to bodily life. By the word “corporality” I designate the entire totality spatial processes produced by any being: repulsion and attraction, the relatively impenetrable volume that arises from here, movement, sensory qualities of light, sound, heat, smell, taste and all kinds of organic sensations. To avoid misunderstandings, we must remember that by the word “body” I mean two deeply different concepts: firstly, the body of any substantial agent is totality all substantial figures who submitted to cmi/ for living together; secondly, the body of the same agent is totality everyone spatial processes, produced by him together with his allies. There can be no confusion from this, because in most cases it is immediately clear from the context in what sense the word “body” is used.
In the psycho-material realm the bodies of all beings material, i.e. the essence is relative impenetrable volumes, representing the actions of mutual repulsion of these creatures. Repulsion arises between them as a consequence of their selfishness. In the Kingdom of God, not a single being pursues any selfish goals; they love all other beings as themselves, and therefore do not produce any repulsions. From this it follows that members of the Kingdom of God do not have material tel. Does this mean that they are disembodied spirits? No, no way. They do not have material bodies, but they have transformed bodies that is, bodies consisting of spatial processes of light, sound, heat, aroma, organic sensations. From material bodies transformed bodies are profoundly different in that they are mutually permeable and in that material barriers do not exist for them.
In the psycho-material kingdom, bodily life, consisting of sensory experiences and sensory qualities, is a necessary component of the richness and meaningfulness of being. Countless organic sensations are of high value, for example, feelings of satiety and normal nutrition of the whole body, feelings of bodily well-being, vigor and freshness, bodily cheerfulness, kinesthetic sensations, sex life in that aspect that is associated with physicality, as well as all sensations that are part of emotions . No less valuable are the sensory qualities and experiences of light, sound, heat, smells, taste, and tactile sensations. All these bodily manifestations have value not only in themselves, as the flowering of life, but also the value that they serve expression mental life: obviously this is the nature of smiling, laughing, crying, paleness, blushing, various types of gaze, facial expressions in general, gestures, etc. But also all other sensory states, all sounds, heat, cold, tastes, smells, organic sensations of hunger, satiety, thirst, vigor, fatigue, etc., are bodily expressions of the spiritual, mental, or at least psychoid life, if not of such a subject as the human self, then at least of those allies, for example, body cells who are subordinate to him.
The close connection between spiritual and mental life and physical life will become obvious if we take into account the following consideration. Let's try to mentally subtract from life all the listed sensory-physical states: what remains will be abstract soulfulness and spirituality, so pale and devoid of warmth that it cannot be considered completely valid: realized being, deserving the name of reality, is embodied spirituality and embodied sincerity; the separation of these two sides of reality can only be done mentally and results in two abstractions that are lifeless in themselves.
According to the teaching I have expounded, the sensory qualities of light, sound, heat, etc., as well as in general all organic sensations of hunger, satiety, paleness, blushing, suffocation, refreshing breath clean air, muscle contractions, the experience of movements, etc., if we abstract from them, our intentional acts perceive them, i.e., we mean not the act of sensation, but the felt content itself, have a spatio-temporal form and, therefore, the essence not mental states A bodily. To the area mental only those processes that have only temporary form without any spatiality: such are, for example, feelings, moods, aspirations, drives, desires, intentional acts of perception, discussion, etc.
Mental states are always intimately intertwined with physical ones, for example, feelings of sadness, joy, fear, anger, etc. almost always are not just feelings, but emotions or affects, consisting in the fact that the feeling is complemented by a complex set of bodily experiences of changes in the heartbeat, breathing, the state of the vasomotor system, etc. Therefore, many psychologists do not distinguish the physical side from the mental side. For example, at the end of the last century, the James-Lange theory of emotions appeared, according to which emotion is only a complex of organic sensations. Many psychologists even deny the existence of intentional acts of attention, perception, memory, striving, etc.; they observe only differences in the clarity and distinctness of the objects of attention, they observe only the perceived, remembered, serving as an object of desire, and not the mental acts of the subject aimed at these states or these data.
Whoever clearly distinguishes between mental, i.e., only temporary states, and bodily, i.e., spatio-temporal, will at the same time easily see that all bodily states are always created by actors on the basis of their mental or psychoid experiences; therefore, every sensory, bodily experience, taken in a specific full form, There is psycho-physical or at least psychoid-corporeal state. In our kingdom of being, corporeality has material character: its essence comes down to the actions of mutual repulsion and attraction, in connection with which mechanical movements; substantial figures perform such acts purposefully, that is, guided by their aspirations towards a particular goal. Consequently, even mechanical bodily processes are not purely physical: they are all psycho-mechanical or psychoid-mechanical phenomena.
In our psycho-material kingdom of being, the life of each actor in each of its manifestations is not completely harmonious due to the underlying selfishness: each actor is more or less divided within himself, because his main desire for the ideal of the absolute fullness of being cannot be satisfied by any actions containing an admixture of selfishness; also in relation to other agents, every egoistic being is, at least in part, at odds with them. Therefore, all sensory qualities and sensory experiences created by figures of the psycho-material kingdom are always not completely harmonious; they are created by agents in combination with other beings through complex acts, among which there are processes of repulsion, which already indicates a lack of unanimity. Hence, in the composition of the sensory qualities of our kingdom of being, along with their positive properties, there are also negative ones - interruptions, wheezing and creaks in sounds, uncleanliness, in general one or another disharmony.
The bodily manifestations (meaning by the word “body” spatial processes) of complex beings, such as, for example, man, are never in our kingdom of being a completely accurate expression of the spiritual-mental life of the central figure, in this case the human Self. In fact, they are created by the human I together with the agents subordinate to it, that is, together with the body in the first meaning of this word that I accepted (see above, p. 32). But the allies of the human ego are partly independent, and therefore often the sensory states created by them are an expression not so much of the life of the human ego as of their own life. So, for example, sometimes a person would like to express the most touching tenderness with his voice and instead, due to an abnormal state vocal cords, makes rough hoarse sounds.
The transformed physicality of the members of the Kingdom of God has a different character. Their relationships with each other and with all beings of the whole world are imbued with perfect love; therefore, they do not perform any acts of repulsion and do not have impenetrable material volumes of their bodies. Their physicality is entirely woven from the sensory qualities of light, sound, heat, aromas, etc., created by them through harmonious cooperation with all members of the Kingdom of God. From this it is clear that light, sound, heat, aroma, etc. in this kingdom have perfect purity and harmony; they do not blind, do not burn, do not corrode bodies; they serve as an expression not of the biological, but of the superbiological life of the members of the Kingdom of God. In fact, the members of this kingdom do not have material bodies and do not possess organs of nutrition, reproduction, blood circulation, etc., serving the limited needs of an individual being: the goal of all their activities is spiritual interests aimed at creating a being that is valuable for the entire universe, and their corporeality is an expression of their perfect superbiological spiritual life. There is no such force outside the Kingdom of God, much less within it, that would prevent the perfect expression of their spirituality in their physicality. Therefore, their transformed bodies can be called spirit-nosed. It is clear that the beauty of this incarnation of the spirit surpasses everything we encounter on earth, as can be seen from the testimony of St. Teresa, Suso, St. Seraphim.
The idea that beauty exists only where it is realized sensual embodiment positive aspects of mental or spiritual life, apparently belongs to the number of especially firmly established theses of aesthetics. I will give just a few examples. Schiller says that beauty is the unity of the rational and the sensual. Hegel establishes that beauty is “the sensual realization of an idea.” This doctrine of the sensual embodiment of soulfulness as a necessary condition for beauty was developed in especially detail in Volkelt’s detailed work “System of Aesthetics.” In Russian philosophy, this doctrine is expressed by Vl. Soloviev, from. S. Bulgakov.
Most estheticians consider only the “highest” sensory qualities perceived by sight and hearing to be relevant to the beauty of an object. “Lower” sensations, such as smells and tastes, are too closely related to our biological needs, and therefore they are considered non-aesthetic. I will try to show that this is not true in the next chapter when discussing the question of earthly beauty. As for the Kingdom of God, the experience of St. Seraphim and his interlocutor Motovilov shows that in the Kingdom of God aromas can be part of an aesthetically perfect whole as a valuable element. I will also cite Suso’s testimony. The vision of communication with God and the Kingdom of God, he says in his biography, gave him unspeakable “joy in the Lord”; when the vision ended, “the strength of his soul was filled sweet, heavenly aroma, as happens when precious incense is poured out of a jar, and the jar still retains its fragrant smell. This heavenly aroma remained in him for a long time after that and aroused in him a heavenly longing for God.”
The entire bodily sensory side of existence is external, i.e. spatial realization and expression internal, spirituality and soulfulness that does not have a spatial form. Soul and spirit are always incarnate; they are valid only in specific individual events, spiritual-physical or soul-physical. And the great value of beauty is connected only with this whole, which contains sensually realized physicality in inextricable connection with spirituality and soulfulness. N.Ya. Danilevsky expressed the following aphorism: “Beauty is the only spiritual side of matter, - therefore, beauty is the only connection between these two basic principles of the world. That is, beauty is the only aspect in which it, matter, has value and significance for the spirit - the only property with which it meets the corresponding needs of the spirit and which at the same time is completely indifferent to matter as matter. And vice versa, the demand for beauty is the only need of the spirit that can only be satisfied by matter.” “God wanted to create beauty, and for this purpose he created matter.” It is only necessary to make an amendment to Danilevsky’s thought, namely to point out that the necessary condition for beauty is physicality in general, not necessarily material physicality.
2. Spirituality
The ideal of beauty is sensually embodied perfect spirituality.
In the previous one, we had to talk about spirituality and sincerity several times. It is now necessary to define these two concepts. Everything spiritual and spiritual differs from physicality in that it does not have a spatial form. To the area spiritual refers to all that non-spatial side of being that has absolute value. These are, for example, activities in which holiness, moral goodness, the discovery of truth, artistic creativity that creates beauty, as well as the sublime feelings associated with all these experiences are realized. The realm of the spirit also includes the corresponding ideas and all those ideal foundations of the world that serve as a condition for the possibility of these activities, for example, the substantiality of figures, their personal structure, the formal structure of the world expressed in mathematical ideas, etc. To the realm spiritual, i.e. mental and psychoid, refers to all that non-spatial side of being that is associated with self-love and has only relative value.
From what has been said, it is clear that spiritual principles permeate the entire world and serve as its basis in all its areas. Everything mental and everything physical has at its core, at least to a minimal extent, a spiritual side. On the contrary, spiritual existence in the Kingdom of God exists without any admixture of the soul and without any material corporeality; perfect spirits, members of the Kingdom of God, have not a material, but a spiritually transformed body, and this body is an obedient means for the realization and expression of the indivisible and indestructible benefits of beauty, truth, moral goodness, freedom, fullness of life.
3. Fullness of being and life
The ideal beauty of the Kingdom of God is the value of life, realizing the absolute fullness of being. By the word “life” here we mean not a biological process, but the purposeful activity of members of the Kingdom of God, creating an existence that is absolutely valuable in all senses, that is, morally good and beautiful, and containing truth, freedom, power, harmony and etc.
The absolute fullness of life in the Kingdom of God is fulfillment in it all contents of existence that are consistent with each other. This means that within the Kingdom of God only good existence is realized, not constraining anyone or anything, serving the whole, not mutually pushing out, but, on the contrary, perfectly penetrating each other. Thus, in the spiritual side of life, the activity of the mind, sublime feelings and desires to create absolute values exist together with each other, mutually penetrating and supporting each other. In the bodily side of life, all these activities are expressed in sounds, the play of colors and light, warmth, aromas, etc., and all these sensory qualities mutually penetrate each other and are permeated with meaningful spirituality.
Members of the Kingdom of God, creating the fullness of being, are free from the one-sidedness that abounds in our meager life; they combine activities and qualities that at first glance seem to be opposites that exclude each other. To understand how this is possible, we need to take into account the difference between individuating and adversarial opposites. Opposing opposites really are opposite: during their implementation they constrain and destroy each other; such, for example, is the action of two forces on the same object in opposite directions; the presence of these opposites impoverishes life. On the contrary, individualizing opposites just perfect opposite, namely, they are different from each other in their content, but this does not prevent them, when realized, from being created by one and the same being in such a way that they mutually complement each other and enrich life. Thus, a member of the Kingdom of God can exhibit the strength and courage of perfect masculinity and at the same time feminine softness; he can carry out all-pervasive thinking, permeated at the same time with strong and varied feelings. The high development of the individuality of the personalities of this kingdom is accompanied by the perfect universalism of the content of their lives: in fact, the actions of each of these personalities are extremely unique, but in them absolutely valuable contents of being are realized, which, therefore, have universal significance. In this sense, the Kingdom of God has achieved reconciliation of opposites.
4. Individual personal existence
In the created world, as well as in the more or less accessible region of Divine existence, the highest value is personality. Every personality is an actual or possible creator and bearer of the absolute fullness of being. In the Kingdom of God, all its members are individuals who create only such contents of existence that are harmoniously correlated with the entire content of the world and with the will of God; every creative act of the celestials is an absolutely valuable being, representing a unique and irreplaceable aspect of the fullness of being; in other words, each creative manifestation of the members of the Kingdom of God is something individual in the absolute sense, that is, unique not only in its place in time and space, but also in its entire content. Consequently, the leaders of the Kingdom of God themselves are individuals, that is, such creatures, each of which is a completely unique, unique, unrepeatable personality and not replaceable by other created beings.
Each person in the Kingdom of God and even each creative act, being unique in the world, cannot be expressed through descriptions, which always consist of the sum of abstract general concepts; only the artistic creativity of great poets can find apt words and combinations of them, which are capable, however, only of hinting at the originality of a given individuality and leading to contemplation her. As an object of contemplation, the individual personality can only be embraced by the unity of sensual, intellectual and mystical intuition. Every person in the Kingdom of God, who fully realizes his individuality in the creation of absolute values, since he and his creations are sensually embodied, represents the highest level of beauty. It follows that aesthetics, ideally developed in a way that is only possible for members of the Kingdom of God, must solve all aesthetic problems based on the doctrine of the beauty of the personality as an individual, sensually embodied being. We, members of the sinful psycho-material kingdom, have too little data to give a complete accurate teaching about this beauty, convincingly based on experience. The visions of saints and mystics are described too briefly; they do not deal with aesthetics and in their descriptions, of course, do not set out to contribute to the development of aesthetic theories. We are therefore forced to approach the question of the ideal of beauty realized in the Kingdom of God only abstractly with the help of that impoverished experience that is achieved in speculation, that is, in intellectual intuition.
That intellectual intuition is not the construction of an object by our mind, but also experience (contemplation), meaning the ideal side of the object, is clear to anyone who is familiar with the theory of knowledge, which I developed under the name of intuitionism.
5. Aspects of ideal beauty of a person
The highest in its value, the main manifestation of a perfect personality is love of God, greater than to yourself, and love to all beings the whole world, equal to self-love, and at the same time selfless love also for all available absolute values, for truth, moral goodness, beauty, freedom, etc. Sublime beauty is inherent in all these types of love in their sensual embodiment, beauty and the general expression of the character of each such person, and every act of her behavior, permeated with love. Especially significant is the beauty of reverent contemplation of the glory of God, prayerful appeal to God and glorification of Him through artistic creativity of all kinds.
Every member of the Kingdom of God participates in Divine omniscience. Therefore, loving God and all the creatures created by him, every celestial being has perfect wisdom, meaning by this word a combination of formal and material reason. The material mind of the actor is his comprehension of the final absolutely valuable goals of the world and each creature, corresponding to the Divine plan for the world; The formal intelligence of an actor is the ability to find suitable means to achieve goals and to use the objective formal rationality of the world, which ensures the systematicity and orderliness of the world, without which it is impossible to achieve absolute perfection.
Possession of not only formal, but also material reason, i.e. wisdom, ensures the rationality of all the activities of a celestial being: they are not only purposeful, but also distinguished by the highest degree expediency, that is, the perfect achievement of a correctly set, worthy goal. Wisdom, reasonableness in all its forms, expediency Sensibly embodied behavior and the objects created by it is one of the important aspects of beauty.
According to Hegel, the essential point of the ideal of beauty is Truth. He explains that this is not about the truth in subjective sense, that is, in the sense of the agreement of my ideas with the cognizable object, but about truth in the objective sense. Regarding truth in the subjective sense, I note that it is also related to beauty: as can be seen from the previous, the sensually embodied activities of the knowing subject, in which his rationality and his knowledge of the truth are revealed, are a beautiful reality. But Hegel, speaking about truth in the objective sense, means something more significant, namely that Truth, which is written with a capital letter. In his “Lectures on Aesthetics” he defines this concept as follows: Truth in the objective sense consists in the fact that the Self or the event actually realizes its concept, that is, its idea. If there is no identity between the idea of an object and its implementation, then the object does not belong to the realm of “reality” (Wirklichkeit), but to the realm of “appearance” (Ehrscheinung), i.e., it represents only some objectification abstract side of the concept; since it “gives itself independence against wholeness and unity,” it can become distorted into the opposite of the true concept (p. 144); there is such an item a lie incarnate. On the contrary, where there is the identity of the idea and its implementation, there is reality, and she is embodied Truth. Thus Hegel comes to the doctrine that beauty is truth: beauty is “the sensual realization of an idea” (144).
In connection with the beauty of rationality, it is necessary to consider the question of the value of consciousness and knowledge. Many philosophers consider awareness and recognition to be activities of imperfection that occur when a being suffers. Eduard Hartmann developed in particular detail the doctrine of the superiority and high virtues of the Unconscious or Superconscious in comparison with the area of consciousness. One could agree with these teachings only if the acts of awareness and recognition inevitably had to fragment the conscious or create a lower type of being, motionless, passive, devoid of dynamism. The theory of knowledge, developed by me under the name of intuitionism, shows that the essence of the acts of awareness and recognition does not necessarily lead to the indicated shortcomings. According to intuitionism, intentional acts of awareness and recognition, being directed at a particular object, do not change its content and form at all and only add to the fact that it becomes conscious or even known to me. This increase is a new high value, and its presence in itself cannot harm anything. It should be noted, however, that living reality is infinitely complex; therefore, the fullness of consciousness, and especially knowledge about it, requires in each given case an infinite number of intentional acts, therefore, it is possible only for God and members of the Kingdom of God who have infinite powers. As for us, members of the psycho-material kingdom, we are capable at any given moment of performing only a very limited number of acts of awareness and recognition; therefore, our consciousness and knowledge are always incomplete, it is always fragmentary, fragmentary. From this incompleteness, if we are careless and uncritical of our knowledge, errors, distortions, and misconceptions arise. As a result of this incompleteness of our consciousness and knowledge, the area of conscious existence, compared to the area of unconscious existence, is less organic, less integral, etc. But this does not mean at all that the unconscious is higher than the conscious. This only means that you need to increase your strength in order to raise to the height of consciousness and knowledge as fully as possible the area of unconscious life with all its advantages, which are in no way diminished by the fact that they are imbued with the light of consciousness. In the mind of the Lord God and the members of the Kingdom of God, which is characterized by omniscience, everything in the world existence appears as permeated through and through by acts of awareness and recognition, not subject to fragmentary selections, but in all its integrity and dynamism.
The fullness of life, the richness and diversity of its harmoniously coordinated content is an essential feature of the beauty of the Kingdom of God. This richness of life is achieved, as explained above, through unanimous cathedral creativity of all members of the Kingdom of God. The creative power of the figure and its manifestation in activities that reveal genius, there is an extremely high element perfect beauty. In the Kingdom of God, this moment of beauty is realized not only in the individual activity of the celestials, but also in the collective, cathedral their creativity. From here it is clear that this beauty infinitely surpasses everything that we happen to observe in earthly life: and with us harmonious unity of social activities gives remarkable manifestations of beauty, but this harmony is never complete, if only because the goals of earthly social processes largely contain an admixture of selfish aspirations.
Works of conciliar creativity, whether they be poetic, musical creations or joint influences on the sinful kingdom of existence, thanks to the unanimity of the celestials, omniscience and all-encompassing love, they are distinguished by the highest degree organic integrity: each element is harmoniously correlated with the whole and with other elements, and this organicity is an essential moment of beauty.
Members of the Kingdom of God carry out all their actions free on the basis of such a free manifestation as an ardent feeling of love for God and for all beings. It should be noted that formal freedom, that is, the freedom to refrain from any action and even from any desire and replace it with another, is inherent in all individuals, without exception, even potential ones. Determinism is a philosophical trend that seems highly scientific, but in reality is amazingly poorly substantiated. Indeed, the only any serious argument that determinists can bring in their favor is that every event has a cause. But indeterminists do not reject this truth either. It goes without saying that events cannot flash in time by themselves; there is always a cause producing them. But if you think about what exactly causes events, and develop a precise concept of causality, based on experience, and not on arbitrary assumption, then it turns out that it is precisely the reference to causality that is the best argument in favor of indeterminism. The true cause of an event is always one or another substantial agent; He creates event, striving for some goal that is valuable from his point of view.
Only a person, actual or possible, that is, only a substantial agent, being supertemporal, can be the reason new event; only the substantial agent has creative power. Events by themselves cannot cause anything: they fall into the past and cannot create the future, they have no creative power. Of course, the substantial agent creates new events with events in mind environment, one’s own previous experiences and values, real or imaginary, but all these data are only reasons for him to create a new event, not a cause. All of them, as one might say, using Leibniz's expressions, “incline, but do not force” (inclinant, non nécessitant) to action. Seeing on the street crying baby, an adult passerby may approach him to begin to console him, but may also refrain from this action. He always remains a master, standing above all his manifestations and above all events. The choice of another action is always meaningful, i.e. it means a preference for another value, but this preference is absolutely free, nothing is predetermined. It goes without saying act this preference still has a reason in the sense established above, namely this event arises not by itself, but is created by a substantial agent.
The mistake of the determinist is that he not only relies on the thesis “every event has a cause,” but also adds to it the statement that the cause of the event is one or more previous events and that the event follows this cause according to law, always and everywhere with iron necessity. In reality, these two statements are completely arbitrary, have never been proven by anyone and cannot be proven. In fact, events, falling into the past, cannot produce anything; they have no creative power; as for legal the following of one event after another, such a structure of nature has not been proven by anyone: in fact, only a larger or smaller right course of events, but it can always be canceled by substantial agents and replaced by another course of events. Determinists say that if there were no causality as a law-governed connection of events, then the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, etc. would be impossible. They lose sight of the fact that for the possibility of such sciences as physics, chemistry, physiology, a greater or less correctness of the course of events and their absolute conformity with laws is not required at all.
By establishing the dominance of the individual over his manifestations, we show from what she is free: she is free from everything, and formal freedom her absolute. But another question arises before us: For what, for the creation of what contents of being and values a person is free. This is a question about .material freedom of the individual.
The selfish agent, belonging to the realm of psycho-material existence, is more or less separated from God and other beings. He is not capable of perfect creativity and is forced to realize his aspirations and plans only through his own creative power and partly with the help of temporary combinations with the forces of his allies; at the same time, he almost always encounters more or less effective resistance from other creatures. Therefore, the material freedom of a selfish worker is very limited. On the contrary, the celestial being, creating an absolutely valuable existence, meets with unanimous support from all other members of the Kingdom of God; Moreover, this conciliar creativity of the celestials is also supported by the addition to it of the omnipotent creative power of the Lord God himself. The enmity of the satanic kingdom and the selfishness of the leaders of the psycho-material kingdom are not able to interfere with the aspirations and plans of the celestials, because their spirit is not subject to any temptations and their transformed body is not accessible to any mechanical influences. From this it is clear that the creative power of the members of the Kingdom of God, insofar as it is combined with the power of God himself, is limitless: in other words, not only their formal, but also their material freedom is absolute.
The celestial beings are completely free from sensual bodily passions and from the spiritual passions of touchy pride, pride, ambition, etc. Therefore, in creative activity there is not even a shadow of internal coherence, coercion, or subordination to painful duty: everything they do flows from free, perfect love for absolute values. As has already been said, external obstacles are powerless to hinder their activities. One has only to imagine this all-overcoming, boundless power of creativity, permeated with love for the absolutely valuable content of existence being created, and it will become clear that its sensual embodiment constitutes an essential aspect of the beauty of the Kingdom of God.
6. Personality as a concrete idea
All aspects of beauty that we have found are necessary moments of the absolute fullness of life. At the head of everything is the personality, because only the personality can be the creator and bearer of the fullness of being. In its deepest basis, personality, as a super-temporal and super-spatial substantial figure, as a bearer of creative metalogical (that is, standing above limited certainties, subject to the laws of identity, contradiction and the excluded middle) force, is perfect start. In short, personality at its core, standing above the forms of time and space, is idea.
The kingdom of ideas was discovered by Plato. Unfortunately, Plato did not develop a doctrine of two types of ideas - abstract and concrete ideas. The examples of ideas he gives, for example, mathematical concepts, concepts of generic essences, such as horsehood, pregnancy (the essence of a table), the idea of beauty, etc., belong to the field of abstract ideas. Even the ideas of individual beings, since we are not talking about the agents themselves, but about their nature, for example, Socrates (the essence of Socrates), belong to the realm of abstract ideas. But abstractly ideal principles are passive, devoid of creative power. Therefore, idealism, which posits ideas as the basis of the world and has not consciously developed a doctrine of concrete ideas, gives the impression of a doctrine of the world as a system of a dead, numb order. In particular, this reproach can be directed against various types of neo-Kantian epistemological idealism, for example, against the immanent philosophy of Schuppe, against the transcendental idealism of the Marburg and Freiburg schools (Cohen, Natorp, etc.; Rickert, etc.), against the phenomenological idealism of Husserl.
Idealistic systems correctly point out that the world is based on ideal, i.e., non-temporal and non-spatial principles. But they do not realize that abstract ideas alone are not enough; are higher than them concrete-ideal principles, super-temporal and super-spatial substantial figures, actual and potential personalities, creative real being, that is, being, temporal and spatio-temporal, in accordance with abstract ideas. Thus, abstract ideas, passive in themselves and even unable to exist independently, receive a place in the world, as well as meaning and significance thanks to concrete ideal principles: in fact, substantial figures are carriers abstract ideas, moreover, they are often even creators them (for example, an architect is the creator of a temple plan, a composer is the creator of the idea of an aria, a social reformer is the creator of a plan for a new social order) and give them effectiveness, realizing them in the form of real existence.
Systems of philosophy in which the world is consciously or at least actually understood as a real being, which is based not only on abstract, but also on concrete ideal principles, can most accurately be called the term “concrete ideal-realism”. Unlike abstract ideal-realism, they are the essence of a philosophy of life, dynamism, and free creativity.
Having developed in my book “The World as an Organic Whole” and in my subsequent writings the doctrine of the difference between abstract and concrete ideas, I still rarely use the term “concrete idea”; speaking about substantial figures, i.e. about personalities, subjects of creativity and cognition, I prefer to call them the term “concrete-ideal principles” for fear that the word “idea”, no matter what adjectives one attaches to it, will evoke a thought in the reader’s mind about abstract ideas, such as the idea of tragedy, democracy, truth, beauty, etc.
Every concrete ideal principle, every substantial figure, i.e., a personality, is, as explained above, an individual, a being capable of, in a unique way participating in world creativity, containing within itself the absolute fullness of being, infinitely meaningful. Vl. Soloviev says that human personality negatively unconditional: “she does not want and cannot be satisfied with any conditional limited content”; Moreover, she is convinced that “she can achieve positive unconditionality” and “can have complete content, the fullness of being.” Not only human, every personality, even potential, strives for a perfect, infinitely meaningful fullness of being and, being connected, at least only in the subconscious, with its future perfection, carries it within itself from the beginning, at least as its ideal, as its individual normative idea. It follows that the entire stated doctrine of the ideal of beauty can be expressed in this way. There is an ideal of beauty the sensually embodied life of a person realizing his individuality in its entirety,” in other words, the ideal of beauty is the sensual embodiment of the fullness of manifestations of a concrete ideal principle; or another way, the ideal of beauty is the sensual embodiment of a specific idea, the realization of the infinite in the finite. This formulation of the doctrine of the ideal of beauty is reminiscent of the aesthetics of metaphysical German idealism, especially Schelling and Hegel. Let us briefly consider their teachings in their similarities and differences from the views I have presented.
The names of the following philosophers close to the Hegelian system of aesthetics should also be mentioned here: the original thinker K.Hr .Krause(1781–1832), “System der Aesthetik”, Lpz., 1882; Xp. Beiicce(1801–1866), “System der Aesthetik ais Wissenschaft von der Idee der Schonheit”, Lpz., 1830; Kuno Fisher(1824–1908), “Diotima. Die Idee des Schónen”, 1849 (also cheap edition in Reclams Unwersal-Bibliothck).
The views I have expressed are in many ways close to the aesthetics of Vl. Solovyov, as will be indicated later.
7. Teachings about beauty as a phenomenon of an infinite idea
Schelling, in his dialogue “Bruno,” written in 1802, sets out the following doctrine about the idea and about beauty. The Absolute, i.e., God, contains the ideas of things, as their prototypes. The idea is always the unity of opposites, namely the unity of the ideal and the real, the unity of thinking and visual representation (Anschauen), possibility and reality, the unity of the general and the particular, the infinite and the finite. “The nature of such unity is beauty and truth, because what is beautiful is that in which the general and the particular, the race and the individual, are absolutely one, as in the images of the gods; only such unity is also truth'" (31 p.). All things, insofar as they are prototypes in God, that is, ideas, have eternal life“beyond all time”; but they can for themselves, not for the Eternal, abandon this state and come to existence in time” (48 p.); in this state they are not prototypes, but only reflections (Abbild). But even in this state, “the more perfect a thing is, the more it strives, in what is finite in it, to express the infinite” (51).
In this doctrine of ideas, Schelling clearly means concrete-ideal beginning, something like what I call the words “substantial agent,” that is, a personality, potential or actual. It, however, has significant shortcomings: under the influence of Kantian epistemology, all problems are considered here, based on the unity of thinking and visual representation, from the relationship between the general and the particular, between originally from And single thing, so that the concept of an individual in the precise sense has not been developed. This epistemology is expressed even more clearly in Schelling’s work, which appeared two years earlier, “The System of Transcendental Idealism” (1800), where world plurality is derived not from the creative act of the will of God, but from the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, namely from two activities opposed to each other and consisting in the fact that one of them strives to infinity, and the other strives to contemplate itself in this infinity.”
The doctrine of beauty as a sensory phenomenon of an infinite idea in a finite object was developed in more detail and detail by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. He believes that aesthetics is based on the doctrine of the ideal of beauty. It is impossible to look for this ideal in nature, because in nature, Hegel says, the idea is immersed in objectivity and does not appear as a subjective ideal unity. Beauty in nature is always imperfect (184): everything natural is finite and subject to necessity, while the ideal is free infinity. Therefore man seeks satisfaction in art; in it he satisfies his need for the ideal of beauty (195 p.). Beauty in art, according to the teachings of Hegel, is higher than beauty in nature. In art we find manifestations absolute spirit; therefore art stands next to religion and philosophy (123). Man, entangled in finitude, seeks access to the realm of infinity, in which all contradictions are resolved and freedom is achieved: this is the reality of supreme unity, the realm of truth, freedom and satisfaction; the desire for it is life in religion. Art and philosophy also tend to this area. Dealing with truth as an absolute subject of consciousness, art, religion and philosophy belong to absolute realm of the spirit: the subject of all these three activities is God. The difference between them lies not in content, but in form, precisely in the way they raise the Absolute into consciousness: art, says Hegel, introduces the Absolute into consciousness by feeling different direct knowledge - in visual contemplation (Anschauung) and sensation, religion - in a higher way, namely through representation, and philosophy - in the most perfect way, namely through the free thinking of the absolute spirit (131 p.). Thus, Hegel argues that religion is higher than art, and philosophy is higher than religion. Philosophy, according to Hegel, combines the virtues of art and religion: it combines the objectivity of art in the objectivity of thought and the subjectivity of religion, purified by the subjectivity of thinking; philosophy is the purest form of knowledge, free thinking, it is the most spiritual cult (136).
Perfect beauty must be sought in art. Indeed, beauty is “a sensory phenomenon of the idea” (144); art purifies the subject from accidents and can depict go beauty(200). There is perfect beauty unity of concept and reality, unity of the general, particular and individual, finished integrity(Totalitàt); it exists where the concept posits itself as objectivity through its activity, that is, where there is the reality of the idea, where there is Truth in the objective sense of this term (137–143). The idea in question here is not abstract, but concrete (120). In beauty, both the idea and its reality are concrete and fully interpenetrated. All parts of beauty are ideally united, and their agreement with each other is not official, but free (149). The ideal of beauty is the life of the spirit as free infinity, when the spirit truly embraces its universality (Allgemeinheit) and it is expressed in external manifestation; This - living personality, holistic and independent (199 pp.). The ideal artistic image contains “bright peace and bliss, self-sufficiency,” like a blessed god; it is characterized by a specific freedom, expressed, for example, in ancient statues (202). The highest purity of the ideal exists where the gods, Christ, Apostles, saints, penitents, and pious are depicted “in blissful peace and satisfaction,” not in finite relationships, but in manifestations of spirituality as power (226 p.).
The teachings of Schelling and Hegel on beauty are of high merit. Without a doubt, they will always lie at the basis of aesthetics, reaching to the last depth of its problems. Neglect of these metaphysical theories is most often due, firstly, to an erroneous theory of knowledge that rejects the possibility of metaphysics, and secondly, to a misunderstanding of what these philosophers mean by the word “idea.” In Hegel, as in Schelling, the word “idea” means a concrete ideal beginning. In his logic, Hegel means by the term "concept"“substantial power”, “subject”, “soul of the concrete”. In exactly the same way, the term “idea” in Hegel’s logic designates a living being, namely substance at that stage of its development when it must be thought of in the philosophy of nature as spirit, How subject, or more precisely “as a subject-object, as a unity of the ideal and the real, the finite and the infinite, soul and body.” Consequently, the idea in the specifically Hegelian meaning of this term is not an abstract principle, but concrete-ideal, what Hegel calls “concrete community”.
A concept can, in the process of self-propulsion, be transformed into an idea, because both the concept and the idea are stages of development of the same living being, moving from soulfulness to spirituality.
In general, it should be noted that Hegel’s system of philosophy is not an abstract panlogism, but a concrete ideal-realism. The need for such an understanding of his teachings is especially clear in modern Russian literature, in the book by I.A. Ilyin “Hegel’s philosophy as a concrete doctrine of God and man”, in my article “Hegel as an intuitionist” (Western Russian Scientific Institute in Belgrade<1933>, vol. 9; Hegel ais Intuitivist, Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophie, 1935
There are, however, serious shortcomings in Hegel's aesthetics. Realizing that beauty in nature is always imperfect, he seeks the ideal of beauty not in living reality, not in the Kingdom of God, but in art. Meanwhile, the beauty created by man in works of art is also always imperfect, just like the beauty of nature. Protestant abstract spiritualism This is reflected in the fact that Hegel does not see the great truth of specific traditional Christian ideas about the sensually embodied glory of the Lord in the Kingdom of God and even decides to assert that philosophy with its “pure knowledge” and “spiritual cult” stands above religion. If he understood that Catholic and Orthodox body-spirit remote control much more valuable and true than spirituality that is not embodied physically, he would also appreciate the beauty of living reality differently. He would see that the rays of the Kingdom of God penetrate our kingdom of existence from top to bottom; it contains, at least in embryo, the process of transformation, and therefore beauty in human life, in the historical process and in the life of nature is in many cases infinitely higher than beauty in art. The main difference between the system of aesthetics that I will outline is precisely that, based on the ideal of beauty truly realized in the Kingdom of God, I will further develop the doctrine of beauty mainly in world reality, and not in art.
The second significant drawback of Hegel’s aesthetics is due to the fact that in his philosophy, which is a kind of pantheism, the correct doctrine of personality as an absolutely real immortal individual who brings into the world the unique content of existence in its originality and value has not been developed. According to Hegel's aesthetics, the idea is a combination of metaphysical community with the certainty of a real particular (30); she is unity general, private And single(141); in the ideal individual, in his character and soul, the general becomes his own even the most personal (das Eigenste 232). The individuality of character is his Besonderheit, Bestimmtheit, says Hegel (306). In all these statements he has in mind the logical relations of the general (das Allgemeine), the particular (das Besondere) and the individual (das Einzelne). In fact, these relationships are characteristic of our fallen kingdom of existence, in which a person does not realize his individuality, and even, going beyond the limits of his selfish isolation, for example in moral activity, is most often limited to embodying only general rules morality, and does not create something unique on the basis of an individual act; in such a state, the personality in most of its manifestations fits into the concept of the “individual” in which the “general” is realized, i.e. it is class instance. The true ideal of individuality is realized where the individual embodies not the general, but the values of the world the whole and represents microcosm so unique that the concepts of the general and the individual cease to be applicable. Therefore, in order to avoid misunderstandings, when speaking about beauty, I will not use the term “idea” and will base aesthetics on the following principle: ideal beauty is the beauty of personality, as a being who realized fully yours individuality V sensual embodiment and achieved absolute fullness of life in the Kingdom of God.
8. The subjective side of aesthetic contemplation
Exploring the ideal of beauty, we saw that beauty is an objective value that belongs to the most beautiful object, and does not arise for the first time in the mental experiences of the subject at the time when he perceives the object. Therefore, the solution to the basic problems of aesthetics is possible only in close connection with metaphysics. However, the esthetician cannot completely ignore the question of what happens in the subject contemplating the beauty of an object, and what properties the subject must have in order to be capable of perceiving beauty. This research is necessary, among other things, in order to combat false theories of beauty. By producing it, we will not only be engaged in psychology aesthetic perception, but also epistemology), and also metaphysics.
Hegel's thoughts on the subjective side of aesthetic contemplation are extremely valuable. Beauty, says Hegel, is not comprehensible by reason, since it divides one-sidedly; reason is finite, but beauty endless, free. The beautiful in its relation to the subjective spirit, Hegel continues, does not exist for its intellect and will, which reside in their non-free limb: in its theoretical activity, the subject is not free in relation to perceived things that he considers independent, and in the field practical he is not free to act due to the one-sidedness and contradictory nature of his goals. The same finitude and lack of freedom are inherent in the object, since it is not an object of aesthetic contemplation: in theoretical terms, it is not free, since, being outside its concept, it is only particular in time, subject to external forces and death, and in practical terms it is also dependent. The situation changes where the object is considered as beautiful: this consideration is accompanied by liberation from one-sidedness, therefore, from finitude and lack of freedom both the subject and its object: in an object, unfree finitude is transformed into free infinity; Likewise, the subject ceases to live only in scattered sensory perception, he becomes concrete in the object, he unites abstract aspects in his Self and in the object and remains in their concreteness. Also in practical terms, the aesthetically contemplating subject puts aside their goals: the object becomes for him an end in itself, concerns about the usefulness of the object are pushed aside, the lack of freedom of dependence is eliminated, there is no desire to possess the object to satisfy final needs (pp. 145–148).
Without a doubt, Hegel is right that beauty cannot be comprehended by reason alone: to perceive it, a combination of all three types of intuition, sensual, intellectual and mystical, is required, already because the basis of the highest stages of beauty is the sensually embodied individual existence of the person (for the perception of individuality, see chapter “The Human Self as an Object of Mystical Intuition” in my book “Sensual, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition”). But this is not enough; before the act of intuition elevates the subject for aesthetic contemplation from the realm of the subconscious to the realm of the conscious, it is necessary to free the will from selfish aspirations, disinterest the subject or, more precisely, a high interest in his subject as an intrinsic value that deserves contemplation without any other practical activities. It goes without saying that this fascination with the object itself is accompanied, like any communication with value, by the emergence in the subject of a specific feeling corresponding to it, in this case - a feeling of beauty and enjoyment of beauty. From here it is clear that the contemplation of beauty requires the participation of the entire human personality - feelings, will, and mind, just as, according to I.V. Kireevsky, comprehension of the highest truths, mainly religious, requires the combination of all human abilities into a single whole.
Aesthetic contemplation requires such a deepening into the subject that, at least in the form of hints, its connection with the whole world and especially with the infinite fullness and freedom of the Kingdom of God is revealed; it goes without saying, and the contemplating subject, having abandoned all finite interest, ascends into this kingdom of freedom: aesthetic contemplation is an anticipation of life in the Kingdom of God, in which a disinterested interest in someone else’s being is realized, no less than in one’s own, and, therefore, is achieved endless expansion of life. From this it is clear that aesthetic contemplation gives a person feeling of happiness.
Everything that has been said about the subjective side of aesthetic contemplation especially applies to the perception of ideal beauty, but we will see later that the perception of imperfect earthly beauty has the same properties.
We may be asked the question: how do we know whether we are dealing with beauty or not? In my answer, let me remind you that each person, at least in his subconscious, is connected with the Kingdom of God and with an ideally perfect future, his own and all other beings. In this ideal perfection we have an absolutely certain scale of beauty, unmistakable and universally binding. Both truth and beauty irrevocably testify to themselves. We will be told that in this case the doubts, hesitations, and disputes that arise so often when discussing the question of the beauty of an object become incomprehensible. In response to this bewilderment, I will point out that disputes and doubts arise not when meeting the ideal of beauty, but when perceiving the imperfect objects of our kingdom of existence, in which beauty is always closely intertwined with ugliness. In addition, our conscious perception of these objects is always fragmented, with some people seeing certain aspects of an object, while others are aware of other aspects in it.
Damaged beauty
Damaged beauty
Our psycho-material kingdom of the world consists of actual and potential individuals, more or less selfish, selfish, that is, loving themselves more than God and than other beings - if not always, then in many cases. Hence, in our kingdom of being, a more or less significant separation of beings from each other and from God arises. Such creatures are incapable of collective creativity; each of them in its activities can use only its own forces or, having entered into an alliance with a group of other figures, only its own and allied forces, encountering indifference or hostile opposition from other figures. The absolute fullness of life in our kingdom of existence is not achieved by any individual, and therefore not a single action, not a single experience gives us complete satisfaction; therefore, every figure in this kingdom is a more or less divided being, devoid of integrity.
See my article “The Formal Reasonability of the World”, Zap. Russian Scientific Inst. in Belgrade<1938>, vol. 15.
See in detail about this in my books “The Conditions of Absolute Good” (in Slovak and in French “Les conditions de la morale absolue” and “Dostoevsky and his Christian worldview” (in Slovak).
Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, X Century, 1. 1835, p.144.
J. Volkelt, System der Aesthetik, I vol. 2 ed. 1926; I and III vols. 2nd ed. 1925.
Quote from Suso in N. Arsenyev’s book “Thirst for True Being”<Берлин, б.г.>, page 103.
Reported by N.N. Strakhov in the biography of N.Ya. Danilevsky with his book “Russia and Europe”, 5th ed., p. XXXI.
See Leibniz about the “divine art” that creates the world according to the “principle the largest number existence”, in his article “On the fundamental origin of things”. Favorite Op. Leibniz, M., 1890, p. 133.
For the doctrine of individual existence, see my book “Value and Being. God and the Kingdom of God as the basis of values”, ch. II, 5.
See my article “The Formal Reasonability of the World”, Zap. Russian Scientific Inst. in Belgrade, vol. 15.
Hegel,
See about the material freedom of the members of the Kingdom of God and about slavery, in the sense of limited material freedom, of the members of the psycho-material kingdom, my book “Freedom of Will” SPARIS, 1927>.
For the differences between abstract and concrete ideal-realism, see my book “Types of Worldviews”<Париж, 1931 >, chapter VII; Abstract and concrete Ideal-Realism, The Personalist, spring, summer<1934>.
Readings about God-manhood. Collection cit., Ill., 23.
See about this my book “Conditions of Absolute Good” (fundamentals of ethics); in French under the title “Des conditions de la morale absolue”.
Schelling, “Bruno,” Philos. Bibl., vol. 208, pp. 29–31.
Schelling, Collection. Op. I department, Ill t., 427.
“Hegel, X V., I. 1835, p. 150.
Encycl. I. Th., Die Logik, §§ 160, 163; Wiss. der Logik, ed. Glockner, IV vol., p. 62; V vol., p. 380. Encycl., I. Th. §§ 213, 214, Encykl. II. Th., Naturphilos. (1842 ed.), VII. V. I. Abth., § 376, p. 693.
On this, see, in addition to my book “Value and Being”, also the chapter “The Human Self as an Object of Mystical Intuition” in my book “Sensuous, Intellectual and Mystical Intuition”, as well as the article “Transcendental Phenomenology of Husserl”, Path, September 1939 .
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LECTURES ON AESTHETICS
1. Subject and tasks of aesthetics
2. History of aesthetic teachings
3. Aesthetics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
4. Aesthetics of the New Age
5. European artistic movements in the 19th-20th centuries
6. Aesthetic attitude to reality
7. Art as the highest form of aesthetic activity
1. Subject and tasks of aesthetics
aesthetics art artistic
Definitions of aesthetics.
Aesthetics and other sciences.
Definitions of Aesthetics
Historically A number of definitions of aesthetics have emerged that reflect the development of its content.
1. Aesthetics - the study of beauty and art. This is the simplest definition. Beauty has always existed; its perception by the human consciousness is designated as “beautiful.” Art also originated a very long time ago (cave paintings, ritual dances), so we can say that the subject of aesthetics has existed as long as human society has existed. However, the term “aesthetics” was introduced into scientific circulation by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750.
2. Aesthetics is the science of beauty in life and art. This definition emphasizes that beauty exists in life, so we can talk about the aesthetics of work, the aesthetics of everyday life, the aesthetics of thinking, the aesthetics of communication.
3. Aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and the philosophy of art. This formulation emphasizes the philosophical nature of aesthetic knowledge. The creators of aesthetic concepts are the same authors who entered the history of philosophical teachings, because the question of beauty is not some private issue. The answer to the question of beauty depends on the answer to fundamental philosophical questions: what is a person, what is his place in this world, what abilities does he have. The ability to understand beauty is the specificity of human existence, for only man can perceive beauty and create beauty. And vice versa: a real person is one who can see and create according to the laws of beauty. Aesthetics deals with the philosophical justification of beauty and the philosophical interpretation of art.
4. Baumgarten formed the term “aesthetics” from the Greek word “aesthesis” (sensation, sensory perception) and defined aesthetics as the science of sensory knowledge, the “rules of sensuality in general.” The feelings that the German thinker wrote about are different from simple sensations; they are mental experiences developed with the help of the fine arts. The philosophy of the 18th century divided human abilities into reason, will and feelings, and in accordance with this, identified three main philosophical sciences: logic, ethics and aesthetics. The need to highlight the beautiful in a special sphere arose when science replaced art in social practice. Aesthetics has become a reminder of the fullness of life, of the need for not only a rational, but also an aesthetic attitude towards the world.
5. Aesthetics is a philosophical doctrine about the aesthetic attitude to reality and about art as the highest form of aesthetic activity. This modern synthetic definition shows that the aesthetic attitude is among other types of human relations to the world. In addition, it cannot be reduced to the beautiful; the aesthetic attitude is expressed in such categories as the sublime, tragic, comic, base and even ugly. Beauty remains an aesthetic ideal, but not everything in life and art is ideal.
The essence of the aesthetic attitude to reality becomes clear in comparison with the cognitive and moral attitude to the world.
The cognitive attitude is characterized by such parameters as: repeatability and universality of its results, evidence of knowledge. The object of a cognitive relationship appears impersonally, and the knowing subject also abstracts from his personal properties. In contrast to this, the aesthetic attitude is extremely personal, in it subjectivity not only does not interfere, but allows one to identify the laws of beauty. An aesthetic attitude gives a sensory comprehension of the laws of the world.
The moral attitude to reality is characterized by normativity (it is built in accordance with the rules), rigorism (moral rules are not chosen by the participants, but are prescribed to them), and the presence of sanctions for non-compliance with the norms. In contrast, the aesthetic attitude is free, harmonious and is a way of personal expression.
Aesthetics and other sciences
As already noted, aesthetics is a philosophical doctrine; it studies the aesthetic attitude as one of the fundamental features of human existence. Aesthetics explores psychology creative process and the psychology of artistic perception. Aesthetics also includes the sociology of art, analysis of the role of art in public life, and is also interested in the social preconditions of certain ideas about beauty. Aesthetics and cultural studies are united by attention to the artistic culture developed by humanity. Art criticism deals with the analysis of trends in the artistic process; it is specialized in accordance with different types art, aesthetics studies the essence and functions of any art, the basic laws of its development. Finally, art criticism, which analyzes specific works, provides aesthetics with specific material for analysis, and in turn is guided by general aesthetic criteria.
2. History of aesthetic teachings
Aesthetic teachings in antiquity (IV-V centuries BC).
- Pythagorean aesthetics.
- Aesthetics of the Sophists.
- Aesthetics of Socrates.
- Plato's aesthetics.
- Aesthetics of Aristotle.
- Treatise of Pseudo-Longinus “On the Sublime.”
Aesthetics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
- Aesthetics of Byzantium (IV-XV centuries).
- Aesthetics of the European Middle Ages.
- Aesthetics of the Renaissance.
Aesthetics of the New Age.
- Aesthetics of classicism.
- Baroque aesthetics.
Aesthetics of the French Enlightenment.
Aesthetics of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Aesthetics in German classical philosophy.
- Aesthetics of I. Kant.
- Aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel.
Russian aesthetics of the 19th-20th centuries.
- The main problem of aesthetics of the 19th century.
- Aesthetics of V.G. Belinsky.
- Aesthetics of N.G. Chernyshevsky.
- Aestheticism and symbolism.
European artistic movements in the 19th-20th centuries.
- Naturalism.
- Elite and mass art.
- The theory of “art for art’s sake.”
- Modernism.
- Postmodernism.
Aesthetic teachings in antiquity (IV-V centuries BC)
WITH From an aesthetic point of view, the ancient Greek treated the world as a plastic body, sculpture, therefore the subject of aesthetics became a visible form, the harmony and measure of which corresponded to the harmony of the universe. As a result, all philosophy was, as it were, aesthetics; ancient Greek philosophers believed that the essence of the world is revealed in “contemplation” as the highest form of spiritual activity.
Since the ancient Greeks viewed the world as a cosmos, which, in contrast to chaos, presupposes order, early Greek aesthetics was cosmological, i.e. beauty, harmony, proportion, measure were, first of all, properties of the universe.
Pythagorean aesthetics
Main category of Pythagoras' philosophy is number, number is the beginning of being, the basis of cosmic measure. The Pythagoreans discovered the same numerical principle in music, and therefore the entire cosmos was thought of by them as musical-numerical harmony. Cosmic spheres, tuned to a certain tone, generate the “music of the celestial spheres.”
The Pythagoreans discovered the connection between music and mathematics; in particular, they established the relationship between the length of the string and the tone of the sound and came to the conclusion that the correct mathematical combinations of such strings also produce harmonic consonances.
In the aesthetics of Pythagoras, music was also associated with religion. The right music was supposed to purify the soul for religious ecstasy. Moreover, music is more than art; it is part of the religious experience.
The teachings of the Pythagoreans also contained thoughts about the moral significance of music: just as good (cosmically harmonious) music educates the soul, so bad music spoils it. The religious significance of music did not allow it to be treated as a pleasure, but made musical activities a high form of spiritual practice.
The application of Pythagorean aesthetics in artistic practice was the work of Polycletus, who created the sculpture “Canon”, and the treatise of the same name on the mathematical proportions of the human body. From his point of view, art imitates not nature, but the norm. Like the structure of the cosmos, it must be harmonious, proportionate, and proportional.
The period of the middle classics in the philosophy of Ancient Greece is characterized by the transition from cosmologism to anthropologism in aesthetics.
Aesthetics of the Sophists
Sophists proclaimed that “man is the measure of all things,” including aesthetic attitudes. The source of beauty is not the world, but man with his ability to perceive something as beautiful. As Gorgias believed, “what is beautiful is what is pleasing to the eye and ear.” This is a subjectivist (beauty is a subjective matter), relativistic (beauty is a relative thing), hedonistic (beauty is what you like) approach to understanding beauty.
Art for the sophists is an illusion, the creation of an “elevating deception.” In contrast to the Pythagoreans, the Sophists believed that images of art are created by man and are not a reflection of reality.
Socrates' aesthetics
Socrates shared the thesis of anthropology that the idea of beauty should be correlated with man, and not with the cosmos. The beauty of things is truly relative (a beautiful monkey is not comparable to a beautiful person, much less a beautiful god), so one should find beauty in itself, a general definition of beauty.
According to Socrates, the general principle of beauty is expediency. Since the world is arranged intelligently and harmoniously (the world is a cosmos), every thing in it is intended for some purpose, which makes it beautiful. So beautiful are those eyes that see better, that spear that flies and stabs better. Expediency, however, does not mean usefulness (this would make Socrates’ position pragmatic); expediency is the involvement of a thing in the good. Good for Socrates is an absolute value determined by the structure of the universe; good is truth, goodness, and beauty. Socrates put forward the ideal of kalocagbtia (from the Greek calos - beauty, agathos - good), i.e. the coincidence of goodness and beauty in man. An evil disposition manifests itself in a disharmonious appearance, and inner kindness manifests itself in external attractiveness.
Since beauty in itself is conceived by Socrates as ideal perfection, the task of art is to imitate this prototype, and not nature. The artist selects the best, perfect features in the objects around him and combines them into an ideal image. Isolating the prototype and capturing it is the main goal of art.
Plato's aesthetics
Following Following his teacher, Socrates, Plato believed that the task of aesthetics is to comprehend the beautiful as such. Looking at beautiful things (a beautiful girl, a beautiful horse, a beautiful vase), Plato concludes that beauty is not contained in them. The beautiful is an idea, it is absolute and exists in the “realm of ideas.”
You can get closer to understanding the idea of beauty by going through a number of steps:
· consideration of beautiful bodies;
· admiring beautiful souls (Plato rightly shows that beauty is not only a sensual, but also a spiritual phenomenon);
· passion for the beauty of science (admiring beautiful thoughts, the ability to see beautiful abstractions);
· contemplation of the ideal world of beauty, the actual idea of beauty.
True comprehension of beauty is possible thanks to reason, intellectual contemplation; this is a kind of supersensible experience, i.e. Plato's aesthetics is rationalistic aesthetics. Plato explains man's desire for beauty with the help of the doctrine of Eros. Eros, the son of the god of wealth Puros and the beggar woman Pynia, is rude and unkempt, but has lofty aspirations. Like him, man, being an earthly creature, desires beauty. Platonic love (eros) is love for the idea of beauty; Platonic love for a person allows you to see a reflection of absolute beauty in a particular person.
In the light of Plato's idealistic aesthetics (an aesthetics that believes that beauty is an ideal essence), art has little value. It imitates things, while the things themselves are the imitation of ideas; it turns out that art is “an imitation of imitation.” The exception is poetry, for the rhapsode at the moment of creativity is seized with ecstasy, allowing him to be filled with divine inspiration and join in with eternal beauty. In his ideal state, Plato wanted to abolish all the arts, but left those that have educational value and cultivate the civic spirit. In turn, only perfect citizens are able to enjoy such “correct art”.
Aristotle's aesthetics
If For Plato, the beautiful is an idea; for Aristotle, the beautiful is an idea represented in a thing. The idea of a thing is its form; when matter is shaped, a beautiful object is obtained (like marble, having received the artist’s idea, becomes a statue).
Based on this, Aristotle interprets art as activity; through art, those things arise whose form is in the soul. According to Aristotle, the essence of art is mimysis (imitation); art imitates reality and has a mimetic nature. However, this is not blind copying, but a creative identification of the typical, general, ideal with its obligatory embodiment in the material.
Based on the theory of mimesis, Aristotle divided the arts into those that are imitative and those that complement nature. The latter include architecture and music; the philosopher did not value them very highly. The most valuable arts are those that reflect reality. They, in turn, are divided into the arts of movement (temporal) and the arts of rest (spatial). Types of art can also be distinguished by means of imitation (color, movement, sound). Having a high regard for poetry, Aristotle distinguished epic, lyric and drama in it, and divided dramatic works into tragedy and comedy.
The goal of the tragedy is kbtarsis, the purification of the soul through empathy for the heroes; going through a crisis contributes to the elevation of the soul. The doctrine of the cathartic nature of dramatic art was widely accepted in aesthetics.
Unlike Plato, who recognized only the educational role of art, Aristotle also considered the hedonistic function of art, viewing it as a means of obtaining pleasure.
Treatise of Pseudo-Longinus “On the Sublime”
Treatise“On the Sublime” was written in the 3rd century. AD, but for a long time was attributed to the Roman rhetorician Longinus, who lived in the 1st century. AD The treatise is remarkable for highlighting the sublime as an independent aesthetic category. Man has always been fascinated by grandiose objects, sublime in the literal and figurative sense: high mountains, volcanic eruptions, great rivers, the light of the planets. Similarly, in art, along with the beautiful, calm and harmonious, there is the sublime, the task of which is not to convince with arguments, but to lead to a state of delight. In addition, the sublime in art is “an echo of the greatness of the soul”; delight is caused not only by external objects, but also by spiritual movements.
3. Aesthetics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Aesthetics of Byzantium (IV-XV centuries)
Byzantine the empire was a Christian state, whose culture had a great influence on the formation of the culture of the Eastern Slavs. The aesthetics of Byzantium are of a religious nature, i.e. First of all, the beauty of the divine is considered, and art is thought of as a way of comprehending the divine. The absolute beauty of the divine world is the model, cause and goal of earthly beauty. In the treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, for example, three levels of beauty are considered:
· absolute divine beauty;
· beauty of celestial beings;
· beauty of objects of the material world.
Light was revered as the main modification of beauty in Byzantine aesthetics: divine light, the rays of which penetrate all existence, making the world beautiful. The basis of this teaching was the Gospel legend about the Light of Tabor, physical and spiritual, which illuminated the face of Jesus at the moment of transfiguration on Mount Tabor. “Smart light” is also needed by a person to see mental things and merge with the light of the deity.
Another modification of beauty is color. Byzantine aesthetics developed a pictorial canon that assumed the symbolic meaning of color: purple symbolizes the divine; blue and blue - transcendental, heavenly; white - holiness; red - life, fire, salvation and blood of Christ; golden - light.
A special feature of Byzantine aesthetics is its symbolic nature. Since God cannot be comprehended by the human mind, one can approach him through an image, a symbol. For the same Dionysius the Areopagite, the entire earthly world is a system of symbols through which the deity shines through. The symbol does not depict spiritual reality, but points to it and allows one to contemplate supersensible objects. In the struggle between iconoclasts and icon-worshippers, the latter won, and since then the theory of the icon as an image-symbol leading to the prototype, God, has developed. An icon-painting canon was drawn up, suggesting that the bogomaz (artist) should paint not the external, but the innermost; not a personal vision, but a universal spiritual content.
Christian theologian John of Damascus identified three main aspects of icon veneration:
· didactic (an icon is a book for the illiterate);
· psychological (the icon inspires religious feelings);
· dogmatic (the icon acts as documentary evidence of transcendental reality, a source of grace).
The religious aesthetics of Byzantium had much in common with the Christian-infused aesthetics of the European Middle Ages.
Aesthetics of the European Middle Ages
IN The aesthetics of the European Middle Ages was dominated by a religious approach to aesthetic problems. God is the highest beauty, and earthly beauty is only a reflection of the divine. Since God, who created this world, is the supreme artist, the artistic activity of people has no independent meaning. Secular spectacles are rejected as devoid of religious meaning. Images of religious art are valuable because they act as intermediaries between the world and God.
The main aesthetic achievement of medieval art was the formation of two major styles: Romanesque and Gothic. Since all types of art were concentrated around worship, these styles manifested themselves in the architecture and decoration of cathedrals.
The Romanesque style was dominant in the VI-XII centuries. The term itself was introduced during the Renaissance, to whose thinkers this art seemed similar to the “Roman” style (Roma - Rome). The Romanesque style is distinguished by massive forms, powerful walls, overwhelming the volume of buildings with grandeur. The temple in this case appears not so much as the abode of God, but rather as a receptacle for parishioners. The sculpture and reliefs are inscribed in the space of the temple and demonstrate the predominance of the spirit over the physicality.
The Gothic style (XII-XIV centuries) was formed when the functions of the cathedral changed. It became not only a religious building, but also the center of social life, a symbol of the wealth of the city and the power of its power. The term “Gothic” was again coined by Renaissance ideologists, because in comparison with the Romanesque, “classical” style, it seemed “barbaric” (the Goths are one of the barbarian tribes). Gothic style is characterized by the upward direction of the building, which was achieved through a special architectural design. The building was supported by a system of supports: supporting arches inside and buttresses outside. As a result, the load on the walls was reduced and they could be built very high. Gothic architecture is richly decorated: carved turrets, balconies, stained glass windows, rosettes, sculptures inside and outside the building made the temple an exquisite work of art.
Renaissance Aesthetics
Term Renissance (Renaissance) belongs to Giorgio Vasari, the author of “The Lives of Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects” (1550). Vasari considered antiquity to be an ideal example of art and believed it was necessary to revive its examples. As in antiquity, main theme in art it becomes not God, but man, aesthetics acquires an anthropocentric character. Even for comprehending divine beauty, human senses, especially sight, are best suited. Thus, God became closer to the world, and an interest was formed not in transcendental (“beyond”) beauty, but in natural beauty.
The result was the flourishing of the visual arts, especially painting, in which the genre of landscape arose (in medieval and even ancient art, nature was not the subject of depiction, but only a conditional environment in which characters were placed). Leonardo da Vinci considered painting the queen of all sciences.
This convergence of art and science assumed that art is capable of providing true knowledge about the essence of things; it highlights this essence and makes it obvious. For art to provide knowledge, the image must be based on mathematical laws. In particular, Albrecht Durer developed the doctrine of numerical proportions of the human body; Leonardo pursued the same goal with his drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. In their constructions they were guided by the rule of the “golden ratio”. Renaissance artists discovered the secret of constructing direct perspective, i.e. images of volume on a plane. So, the creators of the Renaissance sought to develop clear, almost scientific rules for the artist, “to verify harmony with algebra.” At the same time, they avoided blindly copying reality; their artistic method was idealization, the depiction of the real as it should be. One should imitate nature, but only the beauty in it. In essence, this approach is very close to Aristotle’s idea that art, imitating nature, should imprint the ideal form in the material.
Renaissance aesthetics paid considerable attention to the category of the tragic, while medieval thought gravitated toward analyzing the category of the sublime. The philosophers of the Renaissance felt the contradiction of the ancient and Christian foundations of their culture, as well as the instability of the position of a person relying only on himself, his abilities and reason.
4. Aesthetics of the New Age
Aesthetics of classicism
This the direction developed in the 17th century under the influence of the rationalistic tradition in the philosophy of modern times, according to which the world is structured logically, commensurate with reason, and therefore is understandable with the help of reason. In particular, R. Descartes believed that artistic creativity should be subject to reason, the work should have a clear internal structure; The artist's task is to convince with the power of thought, and not to influence feelings.
Nicolas Boileau became the theoretician of French classicism and wrote the treatise “Poetic Art.” It proclaimed ancient art to be the aesthetic ideal and recommended following the plots of Greek mythology, because they reflected life in its ideal form. The term “classicism” means “exemplary style”, which was attributed to ancient culture. The style of the work should be high and elegant, simple and strict. In accordance with the rationalist attitude, Boileau believed that in art fantasy and feelings should be subordinated to reason.
The character of the hero in classical works was considered unchangeable and devoid of individual traits. Each character must be a complete embodiment of some qualities, be a complete villain, or an example of virtue. Another feature of the classical style was the principle of unity of place, time and action, which was particularly strictly observed in dramatic art. Pierre Corneille, Racine, and Jean Baptiste Moliere made a great contribution to the creation of plays in the spirit of classicism.
The goal of the art of classicism was considered to be education, the formation of a correct (in accordance with reason) attitude to reality, which lies in the fact that reason and moral law should curb the passions of the individual and direct him to the fulfillment of the universal laws of life. It should be noted that the art of that time existed primarily as court art; classicism owed its heyday largely to the reign of the French king Louis XIV and his love for decorating his court.
Baroque aesthetics
Baroque- another artistic movement of the 17th century, widespread in Italy and Russia (as many Italian architects worked in it). The name comes from the concept of "irregularly shaped pearl", thus implying that baroque is something extravagant. The term was coined by 18th-century aesthetes as a mockery of the style of the 16th-17th centuries; Baroque was considered a decadence of beauty and good taste. Therefore, it is sometimes believed that every culture has its own baroque, decadence, attraction to strange forms to the detriment of content (the architecture of the Roman Empire was included in this category)
III-IV centuries; late, “flaming” Gothic; the famous Sistine Chapel).
Baroque is the obvious antithesis of classicism: the purpose of art is to create the wonderful and amazing, the unusual and the fantastic. Art is contrary to science; it is based not on reason, but on inspiration, the play of the imagination. Of all the intellectual abilities, the closest to art is wit, i.e. not a harmonious and logical mind, but a sophisticated one, connecting the incompatible.
Baroque artistic techniques include metaphor, allegory, and emblem; this style allows you to depict the grotesque and even ugly, mixing various techniques of representation. Baroque put forward the idea of a synthesis of arts, the main achievement of which was the emergence of opera. An excellent demonstration of the synthesis of arts was the work of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, who built and designed many buildings in the Vatican. Baroque theorists advanced the idea that architecture was frozen music, and artists practiced creating architectural illusions through pictorial means. In general, Baroque art is distinguished by its pomp and decorativeness, intricacy of forms and passion of expression. In terms of its social functions, it turned out to be a means of glorifying the Catholic Church and royal absolute power. If the achievements of classicism are associated mainly with literature and theater, then baroque found its greatest expression in architecture and sculpture.
Aesthetics of the French Enlightenment
XVIII century - the century of Enlightenment, the time of activity of Diderot and other encyclopedists, the period of ideological preparation of the Great French bourgeois revolution. During this era, many problems were posed that became an obligatory component of aesthetic knowledge and, in particular, the problem of taste.
Voltaire, analyzing the cultural heritage of mankind, discovered that art changes in accordance with historical events, art imitates social reality (and not nature, as many believed). And since life is tragic, tragedy is the most moralizing genre of literature, evoking compassion and raising moral feelings. However, with all his respect for Greek art, Voltaire did not share the idea of catharsis. In the article “Taste,” written for the Encyclopedia, Voltaire calls taste “the ability to recognize food,” as well as “the sense of beauty and error in all the arts.” Thus, he reveals the specifics of aesthetic appreciation: its instantaneous and sensual nature, when in experience a person receives pleasure from order, symmetry and harmony in the world.
Diderot believed that the nature of taste consists of the combination of three components: sensory perception, rational idea and emotion of experience. Thus, Diderot moves away from crude rationalism, trying to build a more harmonious concept of aesthetic perception. In French aesthetics, the problem of the plurality of tastes was posed (“there is no comrade for taste and color”), which was solved by the fact that the spoiled aristocratic taste must be contrasted with the “enlightened” taste, based on knowledge. The Enlighteners were confident in the existence of unchanging criteria for good taste, which, meanwhile, needs education, because it arises as a result of the experience of recognizing the true and the good.
Aesthetics of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism
Merit German thinkers of the 18th century is the creation of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline. Based on the Enlightenment concept of man as a being with three abilities (mind, will, feelings), Baumgarten called aesthetics the science of sensory knowledge.
A significant contribution to aesthetics was made by the literary and artistic movement “Storm and Drang,” to which F. Schiller joined in his youth. The main tendency of young German intellectuals was to break with classicism. Unlike the latter, who proclaimed unchanging perfection as an aesthetic ideal, they proclaimed a historical approach to art. The work should not be abstractly perfect, but consistent with the “spirit of the times”; for the first time the idea of “progressive” rather than “correct” art arose. Culture should be imbued with the national spirit, and not with the desire for “classical” models. This artistic movement showed interest in German folk art, as well as in the medieval heritage that left its mark on the German character.
The “Storm and Drang” movement became a prerequisite for the formation of a powerful artistic movement - romanticism, which developed in the circle of “Jena” romantics, in the works of Novalis, Tieck and others. The theorists of romanticism believed that art is the fruit of the creative activity of the artist, and not the imitation of anything was, therefore, the main subject of the image becomes the artist’s feelings. In this creativity, the individual is unlimitedly free, can put forward any ideals, create any images. At the same time, the romantic worldview captures the insoluble contradiction between high ideals and base reality. The artist’s subjective elevation above vulgar reality became a stylistic device of “romantic irony.” From the heights of the aesthetic ideal, the romantics criticized the bourgeois morality of their time. Art became the highest reality for the romantics; it is in art that the soul lives to the fullest, creating a “beautiful appearance”; art provides an outlet for a person’s innermost aspirations.
In the 19th century, romanticism resulted in a flowering of the arts in Germany and then in France. An example is the work of such composers as Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Schubert, the novels of Dumas and Hoffmann, and the paintings of Delacroix.
Aesthetics in German classical philosophy
Aesthetics I. Kant
IN In the work “Critique of Judgment”, I. Kant revealed the specifics of aesthetic judgment. One of its features is that the aesthetic object gives pleasure, free from practical interest. Moreover, like the French Enlightenment thinkers, Kant believed that aesthetic judgment is a judgment of taste. However, such a judgment is not purely subjective. Aesthetic judgment, like scientific judgment, is universal and necessary, but no rules can be specified for its universality. Thus, beauty is like a pattern without a law. And aesthetic judgment is the perception of the appropriateness of an object, taken without any idea of the purpose. So, in judging taste, a person does not pursue a pragmatic goal and selfish interest, but reveals certain patterns, the expediency of the object under consideration.
Kant developed the doctrine of the sublime and believed that this was a more serious category than the beautiful. The sublime is the pleasure of the eternal power of the mind, opposing the chaotic nature. The sublime testifies to man's dominance over the elemental forces of life.
In Kant's aesthetics, the doctrine of genius as the ability for artistic creativity was developed. A genius is distinguished not only by high creative achievements, but by a special way of obtaining them, a type of giftedness. Therefore genius exists only in art; If in science results are achieved in a rational way, then the basis of artistic creativity lies irrational force inspiration. Genius is distinguished by originality, i.e. the ability to create according to unknown laws that cannot be learned rationally. In addition, his work should become a role model, because genius creates new rules.
Art for I. Kant appears as the highest, irreplaceable form human activity, which makes the ideas of reason and moral principles sensually comprehensible, it represents the infinite in the finite. Classifying the arts, Kant divides them into verbal, visual, and the arts of “graceful play of sensations.”
Aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel
IN In his multi-volume work Aesthetics, Hegel developed a dialectical approach to the history of art. Art appears to him as a stage in the self-knowledge of the absolute idea, and itself goes through three stages in its self-development.
The first historical stage in the development of art is symbolic art. Here the idea cannot find an adequate form of expression; the vagueness of the idea leads to the dominance of form over content. This is, for example, the art of Ancient Egypt or the medieval East.
Classical art is characterized by the unity of content and form; the absolute idea here receives the features of individuality and acts as an ideal. Classical, according to Hegel, is the art of Ancient Greece.
Romantic art is distinguished by the priority of spiritual content over sensual form, which ultimately leads to the self-destruction of art. At this stage of historical development, human knowledge rises to such a high level that it can no longer be expressed through the means of art. The spiritual content becomes so complex that art is no longer able to express it and loses its cognitive function. Art retains only a hedonistic (ability to bring pleasure) and didactic (teaching ready-made knowledge) function.
Aestheticism and symbolism
Aestheticism and symbolism - trends in artistic creativity that proclaimed the intrinsic value of art. Aestheticism developed in the 50s of the 19th century as a reaction to the one-sidedness and tendentiousness of revolutionary democratic aesthetics, presented by Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Botkin, Annensky and Druzhinin became the authors of the so-called “artistic criticism”; they preached “the poetic and musical relationship of art to reality.” The task of art is to separate from reality, to rise above it.
Symbolism is a broad artistic movement of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius, V. Bryusov and K. Balmont, A. Bely and A. Blok contributed to the theory and practice of symbolism. All of them proceeded from the belief in the existence of a higher reality, which can only be reflected symbolically. Symbolism practiced techniques close to medieval art: ornament, graphics, convention. The task of art was considered to be to discover the connection between the visible and invisible world. A work of true art is timeless and valuable in itself, because only an irrational creative impulse allows one to comprehend the true essence of the world. Art has no social function, art exists for art's sake.
5. European artistic movements in the 19th-20th centuries
The aesthetics of the 19th-20th centuries was formed under capitalism. This, on the one hand, leads to the fact that the tastes of the bourgeois are expressed in art, and art itself becomes a commodity. On the other hand, art strives to gain autonomy from social processes and assert its special role and functions. In relation to the XIX-XX centuries. We will look at some artistic movements in European art, as well as several aesthetic issues that arose during this period.
Naturalism
Naturalism- an artistic method that developed under the influence of the philosophy of positivism, which proclaimed the priority of positive, concrete scientific knowledge over speculative philosophical reasoning. Such principles of positivism were proclaimed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In addition, under the influence of Charles Darwin’s theory, social processes began to be reduced to biological ones, and the physiology and human psyche were considered the source of artistic creativity. Art was interpreted as the result of the inevitable action of heredity and the material environment.
The main theorist of naturalism was the English philosopher I. Taine. In his History of English Literature, he applied natural scientific methods to the analysis of artistic culture and identified three components that determine the character of art: race, environment, moment. Firstly, the biology of each race determines the national character, in accordance with which the forms of art are formed. In particular, the specificity of the culture of the Germanic and Romance peoples was explained by this component. Secondly, the geographical and climatic environment influences art forms. Thirdly, any artistic culture goes through periods of formation, maturity and extinction in its development; each moment of this process corresponds to special phenomena in art.
In the 70-80s of the 19th century, socially significant topics were raised in naturalistic art. Naturalist literature showed in detail the lives of the oppressed and pointed to the need to change the “environment.” The novels of E. Zola and G. Maupassant are an excellent example of social criticism.
Naturalism as an artistic method presupposed a desire for external verisimilitude, protocol, and a detailed description of the individual (as opposed to realism, which presupposes the need for generalization and typification).
Elite and mass art
IN Unlike the previous, classical tradition, which valued “high art” and believed that a person can and should join it, in the 19th century the problem of “mass art” was posed. The problem arose when the bourgeois man in the street became a consumer of art, needing not the “high”, but the understandable.
Already A. Schopenhauer divided humanity into “people of genius”, capable of aesthetic contemplation and artistic activity, and “people of utility”, focused on utilitarian activities. Since the basis of existence according to Schopenhauer is the World Will to live, the goal of creativity is creativity itself, which involves comprehending the World Will on an intuitive level and embodying its content with the help of conscious efforts and technical techniques. Therefore, artistic creativity is irrational and has no social purpose. The beautiful exists only in art, but not in reality, therefore the departure from life into “pure art” is inevitable. This thesis later became the slogan of the “art of decadence” (“the art of decline”).
In the philosophy of F. Nietzsche, the key category is also will. In his work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” Nietzsche puts forward the idea of two principles of European culture: Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian principle in art makes it possible to create harmonious, orderly, harmonious plastic images. Here the World Will is realized in the creation of a beautiful illusion. The Dionysian principle in art is the manifestation of the World Will without the mediation of human consciousness; this is a passionate, intoxicating, exciting beginning in art. All culture appears in Nietzsche as a rivalry between two principles, in which historically the Apollonian principle has prevailed, and now there is an awakening of the Dionysian principle. Nietzsche admired the work of the German composer Richard Wagner. In the opera tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelungs”, written on mythological themes, the heroes are carried away by strong and fatal passions. In these works one can hear an echo of romanticism, which preached the pursuit of an ideal that should influence people's lives. Nietzsche evaluates the democracy of bourgeois culture negatively, considering it a sign of “massification, profanation and decline. Only a superman should have the right to put forward criteria of beauty.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in the twentieth century continued the line of criticism of mass art. In his work “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925), he develops the idea that modern art is addressed not to the masses, but to the elite, and is therefore “incomprehensible.” It is contemporary art that divides the public into artists and non-artists; it is purely “artistic art”. The elite is distinguished not by its social status, but by the presence of a special organ of perception; it is to them that the true creator of beauty turns. Ortega y Gasset's article became a manifesto of avant-gardeism as an artistic movement.
The theory of "art for art's sake"
Theory“art for art’s sake” or “pure art” was developed by a number of thinkers (the same A. Schopenhauer) and artistic movements. They all believe that art is the main, valuable and self-sufficient sphere of activity, not connected with society. Reality provides only material for the artist’s expressive tasks, for it is not what is important, but how it is depicted.
Impressionism (impression - impression) developed in France in the 60-70s. XIX century and in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The impressionists considered their task to depict impressions of the world in their instantaneousness, uniqueness, randomness, and variability. O. Renoir, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, C. Pissarro, V. Serov, K. Korovin developed specific techniques of artistic expression to achieve this goal. Impressionism paid great attention to the landscape en plein air, seeking to convey air and light in a natural environment. Impressionism in music is represented by such names as Maurice Raville and Claude Debussy, and in sculpture by the work of Auguste Rodin.
Symbolism in France, as in Russia, sought to show the world through the prism of the artist’s soul, to reflect his experiences. The function of the symbol is to give a hint of the mysterious content of the poetic soul. Art must capture the highest reality with which the artist is in contact, and each creator has his own original path to it, an individual vocabulary of artistic techniques. Symbolists Paul Werlein, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbo made the glory of French literature.
Modernism
Modernism(modern - contemporary) is an artistic movement of the twentieth century that made an attempt to abandon traditional methods of artistic depiction and set the task of creating “new art.”
Avant-garde is an artistic movement that nihilistically rejected tradition in art. The avant-garde includes such diverse phenomena as the cubism of Pablo Picasso, the suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, the futurism of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and such movements as Dadaism and expressionism. They all proclaimed a rejection of life-likeness, of an objective image of reality. Avant-garde in art became a sign of the crisis of reality itself and a call for social renewal. Avant-gardists treated the revolution as a social theater, a form of artistic creativity. In the field of dramatic art, avant-gardeism became the source of such new techniques as mass theatrical events (“happenings”), street performances by artists (“performances”), etc.
In the art of the twentieth century, the ideas of psychoanalysis put forward by S. Freud and C. G. Jung found expression, according to which the cultural processes unconscious instincts lie. Society and culture suppress them, and art, on the contrary, is a way to satisfy them. Such ideas form the basis for the development of mass art, which appeals to the strongest animal instincts of man: fear, aggressiveness and sex. As a result, thriller, action and porn turned out to be the most popular genres of mass cinema. Another implementation of the psychoanalytic program in art was surrealism.
Surrealism (“superrealism”) saw the main goal of art in depicting the sphere of the unconscious. A work of art was represented as a “dream” or a “dream”; creativity should reflect hallucinations, delusions, mystical visions, and not everyday reality, this is the “super-realism” of the image. The life and work of Salvador Dali became a manifesto of surrealism. Dali’s painting technique was the combination of incompatible but photographically reliable objects (“Burning Giraffes”) on canvas.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism became a consequence of disappointment in modernity, progress, creativity and became a new, radical revision of all attitudes of artistic creativity and perception. Postmodernism does not reject the heritage of culture, but treats it as a subject of play, rather than a serious sacred tradition. Irony over the artistic programs of the past has become a mandatory attitude of aesthetic consciousness. Postmodernism is distinguished by stylistic pluralism, eclecticism, and “anarchism of styles,” elevated to a principle. The works of postmodernists are distinguished by “quotations”: fragments of other people’s creations are inserted into the author’s text; moreover, any text contains references to the heritage of the past. Therefore, the artist reorients himself from creativity to compilation and creation of collages (it is assumed that “everything has already been created”, “all words have already been said”, any phrase is a quotation).
The main aesthetic relationship becomes not the “artist-work” relationship, but the “work-viewer” relationship, thus, the meaning of a work of art is born not at the moment of creation, but at the moment of perception. Accordingly, each viewer has his own.
Moreover, postmodernist works obviously contain “double coding”: the same work can be read both as elitist and as mass. The average person is interested in the plot, and the professional environment admires the originality of artistic techniques and the sophistication of “quotes.”
6. Aesthetic attitude
to reality
The concept of "aesthetic".
Basic aesthetic categories.
- The beautiful and the ugly.
- Sublime and base.
- Tragic and comic.
Main areas of aesthetic activity.
- Aesthetics of nature.
- Aesthetics of work.
- Aesthetics of everyday life and human relationships.
The concept of "aesthetic"
Subject Aesthetics in the broad sense of the word is an aesthetic attitude to reality and art as the highest form of aesthetic activity. Aesthetic attitude manifests itself through aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic activity. Aesthetic consciousness consists of such phenomena as:
· aesthetic perception (grasping a special, aesthetic aspect of the real world);
· aesthetic taste (system of value preferences and ideals of the individual);
· aesthetic concepts (theoretically meaningful aesthetic experience).
Aesthetic activity is the embodiment of value concepts of consciousness in the practice of life. There are various spheres of aesthetic activity (aesthetics of work, everyday life, nature, relationships), as well as specialized aesthetic activity - art.
The specificity of the aesthetic attitude is revealed by comparing it with the utilitarian attitude towards reality.
1. The “labor” theory of the origin of beauty was developed in Russian and then in Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, which was based on a broad previous tradition. It states that work, and not contemplation, provided people with the primary ideas that there is a certain harmony, proportionality, orderliness and purposefulness in the world. A spear that performs its function well was called beautiful. In accordance with this ancient tradition, Socrates identified the beautiful and the expedient, and considered the aesthetic attitude to be a variety of other relations to the good.
At the same time, neither Socrates nor Marx identified the aesthetic and the utilitarian. If the beautiful and the useful came together, what was said was that the beautiful is useful “in the highest sense”, “in the interests of all mankind”, “in the perspective of human development”.
2. In the aesthetics of I. Kant, among the romantics, in the theory of “art for art’s sake,” the idea of the complete opposition of the beautiful and the useful developed. I. Kant believed that with the aesthetic perception of an object, our attitude towards it is disinterested, disinterested, which is fundamentally different from a practical and moral attitude. The subject here is perceived as expedient, but “without any idea of the goal.”
The aesthetic attitude demonstrates the freedom of the human spirit in relation to matter, the individual in relation to society, the individual and unique in relation to the typical. The freedom from the ordinary provided by an aesthetic attitude is extremely attractive. Here you have the opportunity to create a new reality, to make any object serve your own taste, and not the laws of physics or economics. Freedom of aesthetic attitude is possible due to the fact that it does not change the world in essence, but creates a beautiful appearance. By using his imagination, a person enjoys playing with the material and the play of his own creative powers.
The aesthetic attitude to reality is the realization of a special aesthetic need - to see and build the world according to the laws of beauty. The aesthetic value of a phenomenon is not utilitarian, but the broadest social and practical significance, its value for the human race as a whole. Beauty is a sign of the “humanization” of the world and the development of man himself, and the aesthetic attitude is a specifically human attitude towards the world, an attitude in which universal human values are manifested at the concrete level. “The world of beauty” (created, in particular, by art) is a world in which a person feels himself to be completely Human, the sphere of humanity.
The specificity of the aesthetic attitude can also be revealed in comparison with the scientific attitude to reality. Scientific and aesthetic attitudes to reality have long gone hand in hand. In aesthetic experience we are given a sensory contemplation of scientific truth, thus, both spheres introduce a person to knowledge, to certain objective laws of the universe.
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