The most capacious definition of the aesthetic was then introduced by A.F. Losev: “The aesthetic is the expression of one or another objectivity, given as a self-contained contemplative value and processed as a clot of socio-historical relations.”
One of the reasons for the wide spread of the category of aesthetic in the science of the twentieth century. there was an almost complete devaluation of the category of beauty, often identified in classical aesthetics with its subject or denoting one of its essential aspects. The dominance of avant-garde modernist and postmodernist tendencies in the artistic and aesthetic culture of the 20th century called into question the relevance of the very category of beauty in aesthetics. Among researchers, the idea formulated by one of the modern estheticians was quite widely established: “The science of the beautiful is impossible today, because the place of the beautiful was taken by new values, which Valerie called shock values - novelty, intensity, unusualness” . The compilers of the collection “No More Fine Arts” (Munich, 1968) argued that “as the borderline phenomena of the aesthetic” in modern art are the absurd, ugly, painful, cruel, evil, obscene, base, disgusting, disgusting, repulsive, political, instructive , vulgar, boring, shivering, terrible, shocking. It is clear that in order to include such phenomena in the research field of aesthetics, if it still claimed the role of the philosophy of art, some more abstract and generalized category was required to designate its subject.
Having spontaneously established itself in science, the category of the aesthetic remains one of the most debatable problems of aesthetics, because its content, the subject of science itself, also remains debatable. The following can be indicated as one of the historically determined and most adequate senses of the aesthetic today.
With the help of this category, a special spiritual and material experience of a person is designated (aesthetic experience - see below), which is reduced to a specific system of non-utilitarian relationships between subject and object, as a result of which the subject receives spiritual pleasure (aesthetic pleasure, spiritual joy, reaches catharsis, a blissful state etc.). The experience itself has either a purely spiritual character - a non-utilitarian contemplation of an object that has its own being, as a rule, outside the subject of contemplation, but in some contemplative-meditative practices (usually related to religious experience) - and inside the subject ("interior aesthetics" of monks); or - spiritual and material. In this case we are talking about the diverse practices of non-utilitarian expression - primarily about the entire field of art, one of the main reasons for the historical emergence of which was the need for material actualization (implementation, fixation, consolidation, visualization, procedural presentation, etc.) of aesthetic experience; but also about non-utilitarian components or, more precisely, about the non-utilitarian aura inherent in any creative activity of a person in all spheres of life.
In the case of artistic and aesthetic expression, spiritual contemplation either precedes, or, most often in artistic practice, proceeds synchronously with the creative process of creating an aesthetic object or work of art. The state experienced by the subject as “spiritual pleasure” is evidence of the reality of the contact between the subject and the object of the aesthetic relationship, the achievement by the subject of one of the highest levels of the spiritual state, when the spirit of the subject, with the help of aesthetic spiritual and material experience, completely renounces the utilitarian sphere and soars into space pure spirituality, achieves (in an act of instantaneous insight, catharsis) the state of essential merging with the Universe and its First Cause (and for a believer - with God, Spirit), about breaking through the flow of time and at least an instant exit into eternity, or more precisely, about feeling oneself involved in eternity and being. Aesthetic, thus, means one of the most accessible to people and widely spread in culture systems of introducing a person to the spiritual through the optimal (ie creative) self-realization in the material world. Moreover, the aesthetic testifies to the complete essential harmony of a person with the Universe with an external, transient, but well-felt conflict with it in everyday life, about the essential integrity of the Universe (and a person in it as its organic component) in the unity of its spiritual and material foundations.
The remaining aesthetic categories are, as a rule, more specific modifications of the aesthetic. The sublime directly points to the contact of a person with the cosmological fundamental principles of being, incommensurable with him, with the “formless” proto-forms as the source of any forms; on the potential energy of being and life, on the transcendental premises of consciousness. The beautiful testifies to the subject's holistic perception of the ontological presentation of being in its optimal concrete-sensual expression, to the adequacy of the meaning and form that expresses it; and the ugly points to that counterproductive sphere of the formless, which corresponds to the disintegration of the form, the extinction of being and life, the descent of the spiritual potential into nothingness.
The aesthetic, therefore, is neither ontological, nor epistemological, nor psychological, nor any other category, except for the proper aesthetic, i.e. the main category of the science of aesthetics, not reducible to any of these disciplines, but using their experience and developments for their own purposes. The concept of spiritual enjoyment, which seems to be the basis of this definition, i. a purely psychological characteristic is not the essential basis of the aesthetic, but only the main indicator, a signal, a sign that an aesthetic relationship, an aesthetic contact, an aesthetic event took place, took place.
From this descriptive definition of the aesthetic, the place and functions of the aesthetic in life and culture are already partially visible, and it becomes clear, by the way, how deeply and accurately some Russian religious thinkers of the past felt the essence of the aesthetic.
In particular, Konstantin Leontiev, like. we saw, one of the few in his socially and positivistically sharpened time clearly realized that beauty, aesthetic in nature and in art, is by no means a mere appearance and additional or superfluous embellishment, but “a visible, outward expression of the innermost, innermost life of the spirit”, that it is aesthetics, and not morality, and not even religion, that is “the best measure for history and life,” and that the aesthetic criterion (the aesthetic for it is traditionally identical with beauty) is the most universal characteristic of being. Having experienced a strong spiritual and religious turning point, by the end of his life he came to a complete opposition between the aesthetic and the religious, realizing the aestheticism of culture as "graceful immorality", to which he contrasted "the poetry of the Orthodox religion with all its rituals and with all the 'corrections' of its spirit." Being sympathetic to this tragic personality, one cannot but be surprised at Leontiev's strange understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the aesthetic. The entire history of Christianity, the entire Christian cult, are closely intertwined with aesthetic, artistic art and in no way deny the aesthetic in its essence. It is difficult to understand how such an “interesting thinker and writer did not see this. Another question is that Christianity accepted in the history of culture and now accepts far from everything in the field of aesthetic and art, and some rigorists among monasticism really denied almost the entire sphere of the sensually perceived aesthetic. However , as we shall see later, even the strictest monastic rigorism in essence also relied on one of the forms of the aesthetic.
In a polemic with Leontiev, the greatest Russian theologian and philosopher of the beginning of our century, Fr. Pavel Florensky. He designates it as "religious aestheticism", using this concept exclusively in a positive sense and sharply delimiting his position from Leontief's, it seems, without really delving into the latter in essence. For us in this case what is important is not this controversy itself, but Florensky's position, which is formulated in it most clearly.
In one of his main theological works, The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914), he wrote: “Thus, for K.N. beauty is only a shell, the outermost of the various "longitudinal" layers of being, and here it is not one of many longitudinal layers, but a force penetrating all layers across. There beauty is the furthest from religion, and here it is most expressed in religion. There is an atheistic or almost atheistic understanding of life, and here God is the Supreme Beauty, through communion with Whom everything becomes beautiful... Everything is beautiful in a personality when it is turned towards God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God. beauty is almost identified with hell, with non-existence, with death, in this book beauty is Beauty and is understood as Life, as Creativity, as Reality. Once again emphasizing that Florensky's understanding of Leontiev's aesthetics seems inadequate to me, because their positions on this issue are significantly closer friend to a friend than seemed about. Pavel, I want to draw special attention to Florensky's deep insight into the essence of the aesthetic, and especially to his wise understanding of the place of the aesthetic in culture.
Almost all of a person's being in culture, his activity in culture, and sometimes even in a broader context of being, turn out to be permeated with aesthetic intuitions. It is clear that the quintessence of aesthetic relations is concentrated in the sphere of art, where the aesthetic functions in the form of art, artistry, art form. What we call art today, i.e. some special activity (and its results), aimed primarily at the creation and expression of the aesthetic (or beauty, beauty, as the new European aesthetics expressed it) and which was realized only a few centuries ago under the guise of fine arts (more details below in Chapter III "Art" ), has a long history, dating back practically to the origins of culture itself, but it has not always been isolated from utilitarian-domestic or cult-religious activities as an independent and valuable species.
In the history of the culture of art (in the new European sense of the word, because in antiquity and in the Middle Ages almost all sciences and many crafts were understood as arts) appeared not only to express the beautiful or satisfy the aesthetic needs of man. They were primarily focused on sacral-cult actions and utilitarian-practical activities; on their implementation, but at the same time, intuitively, the emphasis was on their aesthetic (artistic) essence. Already in ancient times, they felt, and since the time of the Greek classics, they understood that beauty, beauty, rhythm, imagery, etc., i.e. all the specific features of the artistic language of art, gave people pleasure, elevated them to a certain higher level of being and thereby facilitated this or that activity, attracted people to cult actions, rituals, developed in them a desire for some other than ordinary, more sublime life. Not understanding the mechanism and specifics of the impact of aesthetic phenomena, people from antiquity empirically learned how to use them well and effectively.
Ornamentation, music, dances, visual and verbal arts (eloquence, poetry), all kinds of spectacles (later - theater), cosmetic arts have played a significant role in culture since antiquity (i.e. in the cultures of almost all civilizations we know) a significant role. The meaning of this role, however, was often not adequately realized. It was often believed that the arts were some kind of optional, useless, but pleasant addition to serious (i.e. practical, pragmatic, utilitarian), “useful” affairs, something like honey, with which doctors in ancient times smeared the edges of the cup from which gave the children bitter medicine. Together with the sweet-useless, the bitter-useful is also easier to swallow. However, everyone knows that adults calmly drink bitter medicine (and even not only medicine) without honey, but without the arts in the history of mankind, not a single culture, not a single civilization has yet been discovered. This obviously means that without art, i.e. without aesthetic phenomena and relations, culture, and humanity as a whole, cannot exist, which, as we remember, was well felt in Russia by K. Leontiev and clearly stated by P. Florensky.
In art, aesthetic consciousness is expressed in the most concentrated form, although when creating a work of art, artistry was by no means always the main goal of its creators or customers. Nevertheless, it was precisely because of it (and for it) that a work of art was valued, because only highly artistic works were objectively able to fulfill the functions intended for them by culture itself (or by the Spirit expressed in it and through it), only they were highly valued (as a rule, on the basis of intuitive criteria) by contemporaries, and only they eventually entered the treasury of human culture, being true artistic and aesthetic phenomena.
The field of art in the history of culture is vast and diverse. And it is reasonable to ask, is it really an ornament on some kind of snuffbox, a tattoo on the body of an African, cosmetics of a secular beauty, a light dance tune, frivolous scenes in painting artists of the XVIII in. and an Orthodox icon have something in common and can they be placed in one row at least in some plane? Yes, they have and can be supplied. On one condition, of course, that they are all true works of art, i. are works of art or aesthetic phenomena. In this case, they appear as spokesmen for a certain meaning, objects of non-utilitarian contemplation, and perhaps even meditation, and deliver spiritual pleasure to the contemplator. It is then that they are all aesthetic objects, they perform their main function of spiritual contact and can only be put in one row in this (aesthetic) plane. It is clear that the level of the aesthetic, the degree of contact and elevation of a person into spiritual spheres in all these and similar cases with works of art will be significantly different, but only quantitatively, not qualitatively; so such a distinction does not change the essence. The main thing in any real works of all types of art (regardless of the purpose for which they were created and what functions were called upon to perform in their culture at the time of their inclusion in it) is their artistic value, i.e. aesthetic function, with the help of which they performed the rest, as a rule, utilitarian-applied or cult functions.
In connection with what has been said, the question naturally arises about the level of the aesthetic in one form or another, genre, concrete work of art. This is a large and complex problem, which is not the place to deal with it in detail here. In essence, one can only say that, as is clear from the very definition of the aesthetic, strict criteria for “measuring” the levels of the aesthetic do not exist and cannot exist in principle, because the aesthetic is a characteristic of the relationship between the subject and the object, and since the subjective component is fundamentally variable (everything subjects of aesthetic perception or creativity differ from each other by a mass of parameters), then there can be no objective criterion for the level of aesthetic. However, the order (in the mathematical sense of the word) of the aesthetic level of a particular work, type, genre of art can be identified with a greater or lesser degree of probability on the basis of empirical and statistical studies (for a certain culture, of course, i.e. for a certain group or class of subjects of perception) or intuitive insights and judgments of professional aestheticians, art historians, artists themselves (although the latter group has intuitive criteria for assessing the level of artistry or aesthetic, although often quite high, they are strongly subjective and often have a narrow focus, and even tendentiousness in within their professional gifts).
For example, it is more or less obvious that for an artistically educated or simply artistically receptive, i.e. possessing a sufficiently high aesthetic taste, a person of Orthodox culture, the aesthetic level in highly artistic ancient Russian icons is much higher than in a painted spoon or in Leonardo's painting, Michelangelo's sculpture, etc. However, even for a modern aesthetically receptive person (even an Orthodox one), a logical question may arise about the correlation of the levels of the aesthetic in the same medieval icon and, for example, in the painting of Titian or Kandinsky, the music of O. Messiaen, etc. And for an artistically gifted Chinese or a representative of Muslim culture, the aesthetic level in calligraphy (for one - hieroglyphs, for the other - Arabic script) will be much higher than in the same old Russian icon. And objectively, this is completely natural and reflects the specificity (and at the same time the difficulty of understanding it) of the aesthetic and its functioning in culture.
Art is the main, but by no means the only carrier of the aesthetic in culture. It practically embraces to one degree or another all its phenomena, and, moreover, the aesthetic principle permeates the entire civilization, i.e. accompanies virtually any human activity. First of all, one can point to game principle as the most common for all spheres of culture. That the real game has a close relationship with the aesthetic seems obvious, because the game, first of all, is non-utilitarian and gives both its participants and its spectators pleasure. And it can be assumed that the game arose objectively from the need to satisfy the aesthetic needs of a person, although it was understood for a long time in different ways. And even now, apparently, not all culturologists will agree with me, but we will still have the opportunity to talk about this specifically.
Another thing is that the game, firstly, is not reduced only to an aesthetic function (in fact, nothing in culture can be reduced exclusively to this function, except, perhaps, only decorative and jewelry arts), and secondly, different types of games have different aesthetic levels. In a game, for example, there may be a fairly strong (although not always perceived as such) element of modeling the real behavior of people in certain situations, which contributes to the development of appropriate behavioral stereotypes and skills. Further, the most important component of the game is the competitive element, passion, the desire to win at any cost, i.e. a kind of specific utilitarianism, the excitement of the passions of rivalry, competition, etc., which also, of course, do not fit into the realm of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, the basis of the game is the aesthetic principle. At the same time, its range in various game types is great (as in art, where, by the way, the game element also plays an important, and in some types even the main role) - from the most minimal and primitive, for example, in sports, golf, football, hockey to subtly refined, for example, in chess, games of thought and meanings in philosophy, modern verbal humanitarian practices or in the limit of conceivable games - the Glass Bead Game, created by the imagination of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Herman Hesse.
FINE ARTS (French bea ux-arts) is a concept widely used in the aesthetics of the 18th-19th centuries. to designate a specific area of art. creativity, in which the aesthetic principle in general and the principle of beauty in particular plays a structure-forming role and separates its subjects from the products of practical and scientific activity. Process of allocation And. and. began in the late Renaissance. Historical isolation of the artist. began as a result of awareness of the differences between sculpture and carpentry, exclusion from the sphere of crafts and science, and also due to the establishment of proximity between such seemingly distant spheres of culture as poetry. For theoretical self-awareness, the artist. The treatise “Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle” (1746) played a significant role in the culture of its specific function, in which poetry, painting, eloquence, sculpture are combined, and on the basis of “imitation of beautiful nature”, which is fully consistent with the principles classicism. There is eloquence here, but there is no such type of art as arts and crafts, which, starting from Hellenism and up to Hegel, fell into the sphere of “mechanical” art and did not meet the criteria of fine art. True, in Ser. 18th century English esthetician Home wrote that "parking has become one of the fine arts." Concept I. and. Kant developed in detail, dividing the so-called. aesthetic claims (aimed at giving pleasure) to those that exist for pleasure as such, for a pleasant pastime (jokes, laughter, table setting, table music, a funny thing, games), and on I. and. , to-rye contribute to the "culture of the abilities of the soul for communication between people." He believed that, unlike the craft, the subject of I.. and. must appear free from "all coercion of arbitrary rules" and can perfectly describe things "which in nature are ugly or disgusting"; subject I. and. is commensurate with the plan and makes it possible not to infringe on the freedom of its flight. According to Kant, there are three types of I. and .: 1) verbal art (eloquence, poetry); 2) fine art (plastics, consisting of sculpture and architecture, painting, which means not only the image of nature, but also the art of the elegant arrangement of natural products or ornamental plant growing, as well as interior and human decoration; 3) claim - in games of sensations (music, art of beauty). Hegel, who excluded I. and. pl. applied types, however, attributed to it not only sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but also architecture. In the second half of the XIX century. concept "I. and." sometimes it narrows to the limit (plastic, pictorial arts), sometimes it expands relatively, including “belles-lettres”, choreography. music, the problem of arts and crafts as fine art is being discussed. To overcome the usual view of arts and crafts as “lower” in relation to the sphere of I. and. Morris W. did a lot in England, Semper in Germany, Chernyshevsky in Russia. In the XX century. sphere of art. activity expands at the expense of the artist. photography (photo art), film and television art, folk art, new spectacular performances, etc. Some researchers therefore believe that the artist. the life of modernity is unlike the classical existence of I. i-, which means that this concept is becoming obsolete (Tatarkevich). At the same time all over the world continue to exist academies I. and. And where they lose their specificity, the danger of depreciation of high art and erosion of art increases. values in the world of surrounding comfortable things and products of technology.
Aesthetics: Dictionary. - M.: Politizdat. Under total ed. A. A. Belyaeva. 1989 .
See what "FINE ARTS" is in other dictionaries:
Fine arts- (French les beaux arts, German feine Künste or schöne Künste) is a general term for art forms such as painting, sculpture, architecture and music. It was first assigned by Charles Batyo in the second half of the 18th century to genres and ... ... Wikipedia
Fine arts- the name usually applied to the figurative arts of painting, sculpture and architecture; in the latter, the actual technical or construction part has the necessary scientific and practical addition. See resp. the words … Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron
FINE ARTS- ensemble of arts. In a narrower sense, the term defines fine arts: painting and sculpture; but in reality extends to music, choreography and even poetry... Eurasian wisdom from A to Z. Explanatory dictionary
FINE ARTS- ensemble of arts. In a narrower sense, the term defines fine arts: painting and sculpture; but in reality extends to music, choreography and even poetry. See Art... Philosophical Dictionary
fine arts- obsolete. The general name of the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music) ... Dictionary of many expressions
free arts- Philosophy and the seven liberal arts. Miniature from the book of Gerrada of Landsberg "Hortus Deliciarum" (1167 1185). Seven liberal arts (septem artes liberales), liberal arts (artes liberales), or liberal sciences (doctrinae liberales), or ... Wikipedia
Fineart(s)- Fine arts; Fine Arts … Brief dictionary for printing
ELEGANT- The word graceful entered the Old Russian literary book language from the Old Church Slavonic language. In its origin, it is usually associated with the verbal theme *izm and the verb izѧti (cf. modern seize). Its original meaning is understood as ... ... The history of words
ART- a form of culture associated with the subject's ability to aesthetic. development of the life world, its reproduction in figuratively symbolic. key when relying on creative resources. imagination. Aesthetic attitude to the world background art. activities in... ... Encyclopedia of cultural studies
Art— Vincent van Gogh. Starlight Night, 1889 ... Wikipedia
Books
- Exhibition of contemporary Japanese applied arts. Catalog , . The publication is a catalog of the Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Applied Art, held in the USSR in August 1957. The publication is preceded by an essay by Okada Jio "On Japanese Applied…
Fine arts (French les beaux arts, German feine Künste or schöne Künste) is a general term for art forms such as painting, sculpture, architecture and music. It was first assigned by Charles Batyo in the second half of the 18th century to genres and types of arts that, from an aesthetic point of view, were focused on creating beauty, in contrast to decorative and applied arts. Traditionally, this concept is opposed to the so-called: mechanical art, pleasant art and ...
The Academy of Fine Arts (Italian: accademia di belle arti) is a scientific and educational institution with the aim of developing the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music).
The National Higher School of Fine Arts (French: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) is an art school, also known as Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, founded in Paris directly opposite the Louvre in 1671 at the initiative of Colbert. During the Revolution, it was expanded at the expense of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, established in 1648 at the request of Lebrun. It was considered the citadel of French classicism.
Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education "Sergey Andriyaka Academy of Watercolors and Fine Arts" with the Museum and Exhibition Complex - opened on September 12, 2012 at the address: Academician Varga Street, 15.
Pontifical Academy of Letters and Fine Arts, full name - Pontifical Outstanding Academy of Fine Arts and Literature of the Virtuosos at the Pantheon (Italian: Pontificia Insigne Accademia di Belle Arti e Letteratura dei Virtuosi al Pantheon) is the oldest papal academy, founded in 1542.
Western European aesthetics of the twentieth century. Collection of translations. Issue. 2. About the spirituality of art. M., 1991. pp.35-46
What does it mean to philosophize about art? [...] Naturally, in his declining years, overwhelmed by the enjoyment of art, the philosopher wondered about its source. What is art? The answer is easy to find. Literature, music, painting, sculpture, the arts of all kinds lavished their works. Those of them that were not created in our time were literally dug out of the earth by the labors of historians and archaeologists in order to appear before his eyes. Researchers have deciphered and revived Gilgamesh for him, brought to light the statues of Egypt and Greece, restored the voices of an uncountable number of musicians whose works slept like incomprehensible gibberish in old wardrobe trunks of sacristies and never visited libraries. The philosopher limited himself to enjoying this world of forgotten works, as well as those whose birth he had the good fortune to observe. Art owes him nothing. He will die without enriching the earth with a single object capable of increasing beauty. In fulfilling his only function, to understand and make others understand, he can only wonder about the source of so many joys, beneficent and noble, the nature of which eludes him. It falls to him to do this for himself and for others. This is his personal duty; as a philosopher, he cannot escape it.
[...] The confusion that reigns in the philosophy of art, which treats the problems of the creation and nature of works of art, is found in the field of aesthetics, which is called upon to realize them. First of all, the second problem is confused with the first, which is different from it. Then the subject matter itself is defined in various ways, since it happens that we are in art itself, which consists of a large number of different elements competing in achieving end results, we take as the basis of the work what is directly available to us in it. A truly beautiful work may at first be liked by what is insignificant in it. Approval is given to the proposed accessibility. Examples of this will abound in the course of our study. For the time being, we will touch on the most common reason for this fact: everything that art uses for its own purposes and includes in its works is, to a certain extent, part of art itself and is ignored by it. Indeed, without such elements, the work itself would not exist, and due to the lack of the substance necessary to saturate its form, art would be doomed to sterility.
The reason for the main confusion in the philosophy of art, as well as in aesthetics, lies in the substitution of the point of view of the perceiving point of view of the artist. This oversight tends to confuse the problem of the quality of the created, which arises in the perceiver, with the problems that the creator must first resolve in order to create the work, although for the most part, one might even say always, they are profoundly different.
In this conflict, the point of view of the recipient of art inevitably prevails over the point of view of the artist... The audience is the majority for him, and the only thing he expects from her is a judgment about his works; although the artist may consider her incompetent, it is a fact that he subordinates his works to her and hopes for her approval; To reproach the public for making a judgment about what it is offered to read, listen to or watch is meaningless, and since it is given the right to do so, it has an enormous advantage over the artist, practically unlimited and in any case unrequited. The task of the artist to do something is always associated with problems, while the viewer only evaluates the result. which is much easier. The traditional remark that you don't have to be able to make a chair to judge if it's a good chair is out of place. Nice chair it is a chair that is good to sit on, which everyone can judge, but who will be able to answer the question, is this chair beautiful? Everyone will say what he thinks about it, and therefore the roles are not equal, as few can do. but everyone can talk. First of all, it is highly natural for a person to talk about what he sees, hears or reads and formulates for himself or for others the impressions that he receives and the thoughts that Arise in him. Hence the ineradicable conviction, sometimes suppressed, but always resurrected, that art is essentially a language, an expression, a sign, a symbol, a brief transmission of some feeling that the artist must express and the viewer must understand. Art is even sometimes defined as a dialogue with nature, as they say, with reality, at least if not with the public, or even the artist with himself. But these so-called dialogues are in reality the monologues of a critic, an aesthetician, or a philosopher who himself asks questions and gives answers, never consulting either nature or the artist. Be that as it may, it is always essentially a verbal activity, and since the only thing a non-artist can do about art is rant about it; it would be futile to try to explain to the philosopher that art is essentially not a language. He is entitled to think what he does not hope to convince others, but his ambition must not extend further.
Even in the depths of his own thoughts, the philosopher does not have the opportunity to act completely in his own way. The nature of the subject dictates the method. Since it is a matter of defining the concept of art, there is no other method than the traditional analysis, which proceeds from the separation of abstract concepts and sensory experience.
The philosophy of art must equally beware of trying to become art and abandoning the pretense of being art criticism. Both of these errors have a common source - the idea that everything that a person speaks with talent is said, in his opinion, competently, as if he created it. A philosopher is no more an art critic than an artist. Its task is to say what art is and what it does, not to distinguish between successful and failed works of art. Accordingly, he cannot refuse to consider known forms of art on the pretext that they are too modern, or illusory, or even formally contrary to accepted traditional canons. Anything that fits the definition of a work of art deserves the philosopher's attention and can feed his reflections. His personal tastes cannot play any role in these studies. One may like or dislike certain concrete forms of literature, one may like or dislike the styles of modernist painting called "abstract", but in no case should the aesthetic judgments made about the works of this genre interfere with the philosopher's reflections on the very nature of art, which rise above all private considerations. This transcendence itself, however, forbids the philosopher to derive from his conclusions any rules of aesthetic judgments about the quality of this or that particular work of art. No aesthetician has ever succeeded in such opuses, and it is enough to read them to get rid of the illusions in the opposite; we often admire what they have neglected, and often their delights lead us to confusion. Every philosopher who studies art, returning to the question thirty years later, states how much the examples he gave bear the trace of the era and the tastes that prevailed then. Today he would name other works of art and other artists. Only the great names that are generally admired remain more or less stable.
It does not follow from this that the philosophical knowledge of the nature of art cannot in any way be used as a rule of judgment; it must be assumed that, taken as a rule, it will provide only one criterion for judging what is and what is not a work of art. And this is not a little. It is especially important to be able, thanks to a small amount of fundamental certainty, to recognize in the depths of specific complexes, which are the works of artists, a pure grain of art, including them in works of fine art. But even then it is not possible to distinguish in a work what is in it a supporting material or filler - such as the functions of enlightenment, moralizing, edifying or simply commercial, which it can, in addition, perform.
Is a general philosophy of art possible at all? Nobody seems to doubt it. That is why so many writings about art have been and will be published. Nothing is easier than talking about art in general, because every assumption about art can itself be justified by an example borrowed from some kind of art. If what is said is not true of painting, it may be true of music or fiction. You have to be very unlucky in your assumption for it not to be confirmed in any form of art. But it happens for the same reason that what is justified by one kind of art is denied by another. The existence of a general philosophy of art is possible only on the condition that only statements about art and, more precisely, about fine art are taken into account. Of course, it is impossible to talk about art as a whole without referring to its individual types at all, but it is important that in this case questions related to art, and not to this art, are considered; within such a general approach it will be possible to explore how his conclusions are confirmed in each individual art form. But this will require a special approach, since its object will be specifically different.
Fine arts.
The difference between the beautiful in reality and the beautiful in art exists in itself. For the latter, it is essential that an object that is pleasant for perception is felt as a work of a person, an artist. This is indisputable, because a completely successful forgery would seem to the viewer an object or a phenomenon of reality; he would then experience the pleasure and admiration that a beautiful flower, a beautiful animal, or a beautiful landscape give us, and not the specifically different pleasure aroused in the reader, viewer or listener by a work of art as such. Behind a work of art, the presence of the person who created it is always felt. This is what will give the aesthetic experience its intense human character, since a work of art inevitably leads a person into communication with other people. Virgil, Vermeer of Delft, Monteverdi and even those whose names are unknown to us are always present for us in their works, and we feel this presence. It manifests itself in the fact that artistic experience is associated with the feelings that it excites in us. There is no human presence in nature; only its tragic absence is felt, which, as you know, de Vigny expressed with such fury in his curses, and if a presence is felt in her, it can only be the presence of God.
It is useless to say that God is an artist, since he is an artist insofar as being is perfect, but his being is only a distant analogy of ours. God creates natural beauty by creating nature, but it is not the purpose of nature to be beautiful, and God will not create objects whose ultimate purpose is to be beautiful. God does not create any pictures, or symphonies, and even the Psalms - these are not God's Psalms, but David's. Just as God creates nature into being and gives it the opportunity to follow its own processes, so God creates artists and leaves it to them to take care of replenishing nature by creating works of art. Art testifies to the presence of God, just like nature, but just as the subject of the philosophy of natural science is nature, and not God, the philosophy of art also does not directly relate to God, but to art. That is why our feeling of the artist, of man, is so necessary for the beauty of art, since art is a highly human thing. God has no hands.
All works of art are material objects that have arisen as a result of sensory perception. What is true of music is also true of poetry, which is the music of an articulated language. This is even more true of the so-called plastic arts, whose works mainly appeal to sight and touch. Therefore, to explain the genesis of works created by artists, it will be futile to attempt to create a philosophy of art that addresses exclusively intellectual processes. The very structure and substance of works includes the correlation of the sensual with sensitivity and affectation, providing them with the desired impact on the reader, listener or viewer. Any artist who wants to be liked must master the art of using the material resources that he uses to create works that are pleasing to the eye and arouse the desire to repeat it. The enemies of sensitivity are sometimes those who are deprived of it. They are worthy of pity, because the joys of art are inaccessible to them, and at the same time reliable consolation from many sorrows. Through art, matter advances into that state of triumph, that spiritualization that theologians predict for it with the end of the world. The universe, in which all the functions of being will be reduced to beauty, is a beautiful thing. And it is not necessary that those for whom such an idea is meaningless should prevent others from dreaming about the world that is promised to them and eating its first fruits. Only fine art can deliver them.
The second general conclusion from this fact is a deep and essential relativity in the perception of beauty. To a certain extent, the ontology of art lays the foundation of aesthetics here. There is nothing more objective than the beauty of an object that pleases the eye, but nothing is more changeable and inconstant than the views to which it is offered.
(...) You need to be able to listen to the singing of bells, to hear the harmonic world enclosed in the buzz of an insect, in order to sensibly judge what art is for those who create it. We know that we are not capable of writing music like Mozart and paintings like Delacroix, but it is already very good to be able to listen to music and see painting, as Mozart and Delacroix heard and saw them. We can envy Racine's pleasure in reading Sophocles, not because he understood him - this was available to any Hellenist, but because of the higher poetic quality of the pleasure he received. One must have great modesty in order to partake of great works. Like the world of nature, the world of art is aristocratic: everyone must take his place there, since access to it can only be democratized to a certain extent, and its democratization will be its destruction.
Religious art.
There is no necessary connection between religion and art. In fact, it always exists, because the subject of religion is a person, and when he has to do something, for example, create a cult, there will always be people who will do it by means of art. However, it is noteworthy that art is given the right to serve only on the condition that it is forbidden to penetrate into the realm of the religious, or, more precisely, the divine. (...) The reason for this mistrust is simple. Spiritual religions dread the paganism and idolatry that too often accompanies it. Naturally, the conflict between beauty and the sacred, or art and religion, first took the form of a conflict between the cult of spirit and truth, on the one hand, and the art of the sculptor or painter who creates images, on the other. Jehovah himself went on the offensive by forbidding the Jewish people from making images, and the all too frequent relapses of his people into idolatry explain the prohibition sufficiently. This well-known fact is mentioned here in order to clarify the relationship between art and religion. The existence of religion without art must be possible, since art is sometimes excluded from religion.
It should be noted, however, that in such cases the representation of the divine is excluded, primarily in images. The art that is now called non-representational or abstract, like the art that Islam called arabesque, is not. For the same reason, disputes in the field of religious art first took the form of disputes about "images" and it was the question of the legalization of art as a representation of the sacred that came to the forefront of discussions. Taking under the protection of sculpture and painting, the church primarily sought to legitimize respect for the "images of the saints" as a recognized means of Christian worship.
This problem was inevitable for Christianity. Incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, God became visible to people. Hence, it has become representative. The cross as an instrument of redemption required, so to speak, to be depicted. This principle was recognized very early in the history of the church, and when the iconoclasts tried to suppress the cult of images, as tainted with idolatry, the 7th Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was able to oppose them, as an argument irresistible to the Catholic Church, the existence of an established tradition. In 787, the Ecumenical Council approved the legitimacy of various kinds of representations, provided that such representations - the image of the shape of the saving cross, the images of God the Father, our savior Jesus Christ and his holy mother, angels and all holy persons worthy of respect - will use appropriate materials and paints. This permission extended to churches, vases and sacred ornaments, as well as wall paintings and paintings indoors and on the roads. The meaning of this decision was to have an impact on subsequent times. Because "the respect shown to the image is transferred to its model and whoever loves the image will love the depicted reality."
As always, Thomas Aquinas succeeded in giving a brief, clear, and complete exposition of the Church's doctrine on this delicate subject. Summarizing the past and preparing the future, he succinctly outlined his doctrine in his Commentary on the Maxims of Pierre Lombard (III, 9, 2, 3): “There were three reasons for introducing imagery into the Church. with the help of various books. The second is to contribute to a better memorization of the sacraments of the incarnation and the examples of the saints, visually reproducing them every day. The third is to nourish feelings of piety, since visible objects excite her better than auditory ones. The doctrine of the church is completely, in the main, contained in these lapidary formulations. It is a collective experience of incomparable breadth and at the same time a subject for philosophical reflection.
First of all, it is striking that there is no question of art in it. Recommendatory or theological texts deal exclusively with the problem of images, pictorial, sculptural, or of any other nature. Their beauty is not even mentioned. From this it would be a false conclusion that this question was not of interest to the Fathers, that they would have approved of ugliness if there had been an opportunity to judge it; rather, it must be thought that they would not approve of it, not so much as the opposite of beauty, but as detrimental to the effectiveness of the education required, or to the piety to be inculcated. But if we are not talking about art or beauty, then a lot is said about representativeness, imagery of education. Imagery is clearly seen as a language used by the illiterate (think of the Bible of Amiens) and under all conditions as useful and beneficial to general piety. Therefore, they make the mistake of dragging religious art into the quarrels of abstract art, as if the choice depends on the artist, while he no longer even depends on the church. AT religious art there has always been a significant element of the unrepresentative in form decorative arts. Giving order to beauty, which itself serves religious purposes, decorativeness is attached to the achievement of these goals and is thereby legalized.
Another question is when, for some artistic reasons, it is a matter of substituting abstract art for representative art in all so-called religious or sacred art in general. It is surprising that today priests are embarking on this path, as if the church has not taken the most firm decisions on this issue. It is by no means a matter of determining the superior or inferior position of abstract or non-figurative art in relation to traditional art, which we inherited from the Greeks and the Renaissance, passing through the imagery of the Middle Ages. The church requires imagery for the education and piety of the faithful. Figurative is an art whose aims are representative and imitative, requiring from the artist an intellect, knowledge, technique, and the gift of imagination and invention, infinitely varied. Combining this gift with the art of painting or sculpture in order to achieve can be realized in an infinite number of ways with an incalculable degree of differences in infinitely varied proportions The meaning of the question is different. It must be understood that all art that can be considered religious, even Michelangelo's Pieta, becomes religious only by devoting itself to the service of educational-religious goals or piety, which is part of this art . At the same time, art is subordinated to goals that are not its own. It happens that the dignity of art rises from the consent to serve goals higher than its own. Being checks the truth, which precedes goodness, which, in turn, precedes beauty, and God is being. Art is ennobled. when placed in the service of God and religion; it is filled and enriched from there with true emotions of a higher order compared to the creation of a substance solely in the name of beauty. This is a higher order, but also a different one. The beauty of a religious work, if it is really beautiful, prevails over a clear and simple work of art
The global beauty of works depends on the ends it serves and on the means it uses to achieve it; its beauty as a work of art depends solely on the way in which its own goal is achieved - to create a beautiful object, the right to exist of which lies in beauty itself.
A huge mass of religious imagery successfully fulfills the three functions assigned to it by the form: to teach, to remind, to excite. Who dares to assert that imagery gave them the greater success, the more beautiful it was? Rather, they will argue the opposite. The efforts of religious art to reach the level of purely plastic art lead rather to embarrass the public by offering them an "object of art" instead of what is so well defined as "an object of piety."
The perception of the pictorial picture of religious works, of course, is not excluded, it is simply not in the center of attention; it is only about figurativeness, that is, the representation of what must be made visible at least in the form of images due to the lack of the possibility of showing reality.
Such a conclusion most obviously correlates with the plastic arts, but it is valid for all types of art. For example, for music, which the Church has always strived to reduce to a purely liturgical function and which, for its part, has continuously managed to overstep these boundaries, even to the point of dangerously attacking the religious cult itself. There was often discussion about "how to put music in its place, or religious music in the church." It seems that only one answer is possible to this question: religious music is a collective form of prayer singing, the more simple it is, as in traditional church singing, the better it adapts with its inherent functions in a cult ensemble. The point is not to know whether the most beautiful church music is the so-called Gregorian chant. It has a beauty of its own, but it is a religious rather than an artistic beauty, since it was not written to create sound constructions that are in themselves pleasing to the ear and whose repetition is desirable in itself. Properly religious and strictly artistic music forms two heterogeneous orders, which will be compared in vain and sadly confused.
(Gilson E Introduction aux arts du beau. Paris, 1963)
personalistic approach.
Personalism is close to neo-Thomism, but it is more humanistic than neo-Thomism, it evaluates the essence of a person, his role and place in life, in being. Formed in late XIX in. in Russia, the philosophical direction of personalism became widespread in Western Europe and the United States in the 1930s. The personalist aesthetic was most fully developed in France. The head of the French personalists E. Munier (1905-1950) considered the personality as a "self-fulfilling entity" endowed with the highest spirituality. An individual, "closed in himself", immersed in his world of "I", is different from personality. Only a person can be fully realized and only, Munier argued, directing his efforts towards the transcendent
E. Munier called for the moral renewal of man, criticized capitalism, fascism, colonialism, which suppressed the individual. Moral renewal, according to the philosopher, should lead to a "communal revolution", which, by uniting people "withdrawn into themselves", will contribute to their self-improvement.
The most distinctly personal expiring concept of personality was embodied in their aesthetics. The path of personality formation passes, according to personalists, through aesthetically colored activity. Poetic images should make "tangible" reasoning about time, body and spirit, biological and physiological Modern Art does not provide these opportunities and therefore requires rethinking. This should help the imagination, which art should "wake up". Dreams can contribute to the awakening of the imagination, but on the condition that they are directed not into the "seething abyss" of the Freudian sense, but upwards, into the "divine reality", into the "cosmic abyss", located beyond the threshold of consciousness.
The personalistic normative attitudes of morality are of a religious nature. The aesthetic consciousness of people "reoriented" to a religious way, the "spirit of man", is acquired, according to personalists, in the gap between the divine superreality and the reality of the earth. Man, as if breaking with his past, acquires the opportunity to create his future by throwing a "divine spark" into the earthly.
Personalists resolutely reject the lack of spirituality of their contemporary artistic culture, but they see the positive direction of art not in the embodiment artistic means human "earthly" ideals, but in the aspiration to the "divine super-reality".
The aesthetic positions of the French personalists were consistently outlined in his book "Introduction to Aesthetics" by M. Nedonsel. Personalist aesthetics, aimed at improving the personality, is built on the category of the heroic, but this category is interpreted from the religious-idealistic positions of "Christian humanism", which includes both the humanistic idea (belief in human abilities) and elements of nationalism (the glorification of a certain "French spirit"). ") A significant place is given to the category of the tragic, understood as "the decay of the integrity of the divine and human." Personalistic aesthetics sees the way to recreate these broken ties in the restoration of the broken "son's knots" of man with God. Accordingly, not only in art, but also in art criticism, the search for "Christian heroism" comes to the fore.