Questions of literature and aesthetics m 1975. Book: M

Department of Russian Classical Literature and Theoretical Literary Studies of Yelets State University

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(Narrativ Library)

Bakhtin M.

Questions of literature and aesthetics. Research from different years. M., “Art. lit.”, 1975

The book combines the works of M.M. Bakhtin of different years, mostly published for the first time. The works examine the problems of genre theory, primarily the theory of the novel, the study of the literary word; separate works devoted to the word in the novel, artistic time and space in the novel, comparison of the epic and the novel.

The research is conducted on the widest possible material of world literature.

From the publisher

This publication contains theoretical and literary studies of the outstanding philologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895 - 1975). These works were written by M. M. Bakhtin in different years. Some of them have been published recently in the journal “Questions of Literature” and in scientific publications; others are being published for the first time (only individual chapters from them have been published).

Preparing this book for printing was the last work of M. M. Bakhtin.

a kind of replica in this methodological dialogue, a significant and original replica, but due to circumstances “dropped out” of the dialogue of that time. To create a more complete and objective picture of the scientific life of that time, the publication of this article by M. M. Bakhtin will be of significant importance.

In discussing the problems of the content and form of a literary work, M. M. Bakhtin took a deeply independent and scientifically fruitful position. His concept, as the published work shows, was defined in polemical repulsion from the direction in poetics that was represented by the “formal school”; In relation to this direction, the work is deeply critical. The time at which the work was written, of course, affects the terminology used by the author; but at the same time, using some of the terms used in those years, the author fills them with his original content. In general, the work “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creativity” retains theoretical relevance for the present time (part of this work was published in the publication of the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences “Context 1973”, M., “Nauka”, 1974).

Other works published in this book are focused on the study of two main problems that were the subject of special attention of M. M. Bakhtin throughout his entire creative career. This is problem novel as the most specific and leading genre of literature of modern times and the problem of literary words, especially artistic and prose words. The scientific interests of M. M. Bakhtin were focused on the intersection of these two problems.

The great work “The Word in the Novel” was written in 1934 - 1935. (two chapters from this work entitled “The Word in Poetry and Prose” were published in “Questions of Literature”, 1972, No. 6). The author later returns to this topic in the report “The Word in the Novel”, read on October 14, 1940 at the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (this report was published in the form of two articles - in “Questions of Literature”, 1965, No. 8, and in the collection “Russian and Foreign Literature”, Saransk, 1967; in this edition this work is entitled by the author “From the Prehistory of the Romance Word”). Somewhat later (March 24, 1941), also at IMLI, M. M. Bakhtin read the second report - “The Novel as a Literary Genre” (published in Voprosy Literatury, 1970, No. 1, under the title “Epic and Novel”; under this the title is also printed in this edition).

The theory of the novel is studied in the works of M. M. Bakhtin from different sides and in various aspects. Special study author

devoted to the problem of time and space in the novel. This is a study that the author has approved for publication in this edition. The title “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” was associated with M. M. Bakhtin’s work on a book about one of the varieties of the European novel, the so-called “novel of education” (the manuscript of the book has not survived). M. M. Bakhtin's study of time and space in the novel, written in 1937 - 1938, anticipated the relevance that the problem of time and space in literature has now acquired in our literary criticism. While preparing the work for publication, the author wrote “Concluding Remarks” for it in 1973 (a fragment from the work “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” was published in “Voprosy Literatury” 1974, No. 3).

The short article “Rabelais and Gogol” is a fragment from the author’s dissertation “Rabelais in the History of Realism”, which was not included in M. M. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais (the article was published in the collection “Context 1972”, M., “Nauka”, 1973) .

Published works cover a wide range of issues of literary theory and historical poetics. At the same time, these works give an idea of the unity and integrity of M. M. Bakhtin’s scientific creativity. The main themes of his work - the theory of the novel and the literary and artistic word - unite the works collected in this book. Taken together, they provide a multifaceted and at the same time imbued with a single thought study of the artistic nature of the leading genre of literature of modern times.

Bakhtin M.

Questions of literature and aesthetics. Research from different years. M., “Art. lit.”, 1975

The research is conducted on the widest possible material of world literature.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Preparing this book for printing was the last work of M. M. Bakhtin.

The theory of the novel is studied in the works of M. M. Bakhtin from different sides and in various aspects. Special study author

THE PROBLEM OF CONTENT, MATERIAL AND FORM IN WORDAL ARTISTIC CREATIVITY

This work is an attempt at a methodological analysis of the basic concepts and problems of poetics on the basis of general systematic aesthetics.

The starting point of our research was some Russian works on poetics, the main provisions of which we subject to critical consideration in the first chapters; However, we do not touch upon the directions and individual works in their entirety and in their historical certainty and do not evaluate them: only the purely systematic value of the basic concepts and provisions comes to the fore for us. Our task also does not include any reviews of works on poetics of a historical or informative nature: in studies that set themselves purely systematic goals, where only theoretical provisions and evidence can be significant quantities, they are not always appropriate. We have also freed our work from unnecessary

There is no ballast of quotations and references that generally have no direct methodological significance in studies that are not historical, but in a condensed work of a systematic nature - completely unnecessary: they are not needed by a competent reader and are useless for an incompetent one.

I. ART STUDY AND GENERAL AESTHETICS

Currently, extremely serious and fruitful work in the field of art history is being carried out in Russia. Russian scientific literature has been enriched in recent years with valuable works on the theory of art, especially in the field of poetics. One can even speak directly about a certain flourishing of art criticism in Russia, especially in comparison with the previous period, when the field of art was the main refuge of all sorts of scientifically irresponsible, but pretending to be profound, chatter: all those thoughts and considerations that seemed deep and vitally fruitful, but which were not could not be included in any science, that is, they could not find a place for themselves in the objective unity of knowledge, the so-called “wandering revelations” were usually expressed and brought into an external random order regarding art in general or this or that individual work. Aestheticized semi-scientific thinking, which through a misunderstanding sometimes called itself philosophical, always clung to art, feeling its blood, although not entirely legal, relationship with it.

something completely different. As we will see later, young Russian poetics did not always know how to avoid this. To build a science about one or another area of cultural creativity, preserving all the complexity, completeness and originality of the subject 1, is an extremely difficult matter.

Despite the undeniable productivity and significance of Russian works on poetics published in recent years, the general scientific position taken by most of these works cannot be considered completely correct and satisfactory, and this applies especially to the works of representatives of the so-called formal or morphological method, but also extends to some studies that do not completely accept this method, but have some common premises with it: these are the remarkable works of Professor V. M. Zhirmunsky.

The unsatisfactory scientific position of these works on poetics is ultimately due to the incorrect or, at best, methodologically vague relationship of the poetics they construct to general systematic and philosophical aesthetics. This is a common sin of art criticism in all its fields, committed in the very cradle of this science - a negative attitude towards general aesthetics, a fundamental rejection of its leadership. The science of art is often defined by contrasting it with obviously non-scientific philosophical aesthetics. To construct a system of scientific judgments about a particular art - in this case about verbal art - regardless of questions about the essence of arts in general - this is the tendency of modern works on poetics.

define as a claim to build a science of a separate art independently of knowledge and systematic determination of the uniqueness of the aesthetic in the unity of human culture.

Such a claim, in essence, is generally impossible to fulfill: without a systematic concept of the aesthetic, both in its difference from the cognitive and ethical, and in its connection with them in the unity of culture, it is impossible even to single out the subject to be studied by poetics - a work of art in the word - from masses of verbal works of a different kind; and this systematic concept, of course, is introduced every time by the researcher, but not at all critically.

Sometimes they claim that this concept can be found directly in the subject of study, that the student of literary theory does not need to turn to systematic philosophy for the concept of the aesthetic, that he will find it in literature itself.

Indeed, the aesthetic is somehow given in the work of art itself - the philosopher does not invent it - but only systematic philosophy with her methods. The concept of the aesthetic cannot be derived intuitively or empirically from a work of art: it will be naive, subjective and unstable; for confident and accurate self-determination, it needs mutual determination with other areas in the unity of human culture.

but goals and purposes alien to his holo-factual nature: he would have nothing to object to, for bare nature can only be exploited; fact and purely factual originality have no say; to receive it, they need to become meaning; but one cannot become meaning without communing with unity, without accepting the law of unity: isolated meaning is a contradictio in adjecto 1. It is possible to overcome the methodological discord in the field of studying art not by creating a new method, another method - a participant in the general struggle of methods, only exploiting the factuality of art in its own way, but only through a systematic and philosophical substantiation of the fact and originality of art in the unity of human culture.

Poetics, deprived of the basis of systematic-philosophical aesthetics, becomes unsteady and random in its very foundations. Poetics, defined systematically, must be the aesthetics of verbal artistic creation. This definition emphasizes its dependence on a general aesthetics.

The absence of a systematic and philosophical general aesthetic orientation, the absence of a constant methodologically thought-out glance at other arts, at the unity of art - as a field of a single human culture - leads modern Russian poetics 2 to an extreme simplification of the scientific task, to superficiality and incomplete coverage of the subject to be studied: the study feels confident only where it moves on the very periphery of verbal artistic creativity, it disavows all problems that lead art onto the high road of a single human culture and are insoluble outside a broad philosophical orientation; poetics clings closely to linguistics, afraid to retreat from it more than one step (among the majority of formalists and V.M. Zhir-

1 Formal-logical contradiction in the definition with the defined (lat.).

2 Among Russian works on the poetics and methodology of the history of literature of recent times, there are, of course, those who have taken a more correct, from our point of view, methodological position; The remarkable article by A. A. Smirnov “The paths and tasks of the science of literature” (“Literary Thought”, II, 1923) deserves special attention. In the future, we fully subscribe to many of the provisions and conclusions of this article.

Munsky), and sometimes directly striving to become only a department of linguistics (in V.V. Vinogradov).

For poetics, as for any special aesthetics, where, in addition to general aesthetic principles, one has to take into account the nature of the material, in this case verbal, linguistics as an auxiliary discipline is, of course, necessary; but here it begins to occupy a leadership position that is completely inappropriate for it, almost the same one that general aesthetics should occupy.

The noted phenomenon is highly characteristic of the arts sciences, which oppose themselves to aesthetics: in most cases, they incorrectly assess the importance of material in artistic creativity, and this overestimation of the material moment is due to certain fundamental considerations.

At one time, a classic slogan was proclaimed: there is no art, there are only individual arts. This position actually put forward the primacy of material in artistic creativity, for material is precisely what divides the arts, and, if it is methodically brought to the fore in the consciousness of an aesthetician, isolates individual arts. But what is the reason for this primacy of the material and is it methodologically justified?

In its desire to build a scientific judgment about art, regardless of general philosophical aesthetics, art criticism finds material as the most stable basis for scientific discussion: after all, an orientation towards material creates a seductive proximity to positive empirical science. In fact: space, mass, color, sound - the art critic (and artist) receives all this from the corresponding departments of mathematical natural science; he receives the word from linguistics. And so, on the basis of art criticism, a tendency arises to understand the artistic form as the form of a given material, no more, as a combination within the material in its natural scientific and linguistic certainty and regularity; this would make it possible for the judgments of art criticism to be positively scientific, in other cases directly mathematically provable.

In this way, art criticism comes to the creation of a prerequisite for a general aesthetic character.

tera, psychologically and historically completely understandable on the basis of what we have said, but hardly legitimate and can be proven systematically, a premise that we, having somewhat developed what was said above, formulate as follows: aesthetic activity is aimed at the material, shapes only it: an aesthetically significant form is a form material - natural science or linguistically understood; Artists’ statements that their work has values, is aimed at the world, at reality, deals with people, with social relations, with ethical, religious and other values, and are nothing more than metaphors, because in fact the artist is offered only material: physical -mathematical space, mass, sound of acoustics, word of linguistics - and he can take an artistic position only in relation to a given, specific material.

This premise of a general aesthetic nature, which tacitly or expressly underlies so many works and entire trends in the field of sciences about individual arts, gives us the right to talk about a special general aesthetic concept, uncritically assumed by them, which we will call material aesthetics.

Material aesthetics is, as it were, a working hypothesis of areas of art criticism that claim to be independent of general aesthetics; Both the formalists and V.M. Zhirmunsky rely on it: this is the premise that unites them 1 .

It is not superfluous to note here that the so-called formal method is by no means connected either historically or systematically with formal aesthetics (Kant, Ger-

1 This premise, formulated by us with all clarity and sharpness, often takes on more relaxed forms, a characteristic variety of which is the concept of V. M. Zhirmunsky, which puts forward a thematic point; however, the theme is introduced by him only as a moment of the material (the meaning of the word), and in some arts, the material of which is devoid of this moment, the theme is absent.

Barth and others, in contrast to the aesthetics of content - Schelling, Hegel, etc.) and does not lie in its path; in general aesthetic terms, it should be defined as one of the varieties - it must be said, somewhat simplified and primitive - of the material aesthetics we have indicated, the history of which is the history of the Kunstwissenschaften 1 in their struggle for independence from systematic philosophy.

When evaluating works of art criticism, it is necessary to strictly distinguish between this general concept of material aesthetics, which is completely unacceptable, as we hope to show later, and those purely specific private statements that may still have scientific significance, regardless of the false general concept, although only in that areas where artistic creativity is determined by the nature of a given material 2.

We can say that material aesthetics - as a working hypothesis - is harmless and, with a methodologically clear understanding of the limits of its application, can even become productive when studying only the technique of artistic creativity and becomes absolutely harmful and unacceptable where they try to understand and study artistic creativity on its basis in general, in its aesthetic originality and meaning.

Material aesthetics, which is not limited in its claims only to the technical side of artistic creativity, leads to a number of fundamental errors and difficulties that are insurmountable for it. We will analyze the most important of them; Moreover, in everything that follows we will consider material aesthetics independently of the sciences of individual arts, but as an independent general aesthetic concept, which is what it actually is; as such, it must be subject to discussion and criticism: whether it can satisfy the requirements that

1 Arts Sciences (German).

2 In the works of formalists, along with completely unlawful statements - mainly of a general nature - there are many scientifically valuable observations. Such works as “Rhyme, its theory and history” by V. M. Zhirmunsky and “Russian Metrics” by B. V. Tomashevsky are fully of high scientific value. The study of the technique of works of verbal art in general first began on the basis of material aesthetics, both in Western European and Russian aesthetic literature.

absolutely obligatory in relation to any general aesthetic theory.

1) Material aesthetics is not capable of justifying artistic form.

The basic position of material aesthetics regarding form raises a number of doubts and generally seems unconvincing.

Form, understood as the form of a material only in its natural scientific - mathematical or linguistic - definition, becomes some kind of purely external, devoid of a value element, its ordering. The emotional-volitional intensity of the form, its inherent character of expressing some kind of value attitude of the author and contemplator to something other than the material, remains completely misunderstood, because this, expressed by the form - rhythm, harmony, symmetry and other formal aspects - is an emotional-volitional attitude. too intense, too active a character to be interpreted as an attitude towards the material.

Any feeling, deprived of an object that comprehends it, descends to a holo-factual mental state, isolated and non-cultural, therefore, an unrelated feeling expressed by a form becomes simply a state of a psychophysical organism, devoid of any intention that opens the circle of naked mental presence, becomes simply pleasure , which ultimately can be explained and comprehended only purely hedonistically - in this way, for example: the material in art is organized by form in such a way as to become the causative agent of pleasant sensations and states of the psychophysical organism. This conclusion is not always reached, but material aesthetics must consistently arrive.

A work of art, understood as an organized material, as a thing, can only have significance as a physical causative agent of physiological and mental states, or it must receive some utilitarian, practical purpose.

Romana: “On the Eve” by I.S. Turgenev in Dobrolyubov’s interpretation // Questionsliterature. 2006. No. 2. P. 202 – 222. 1, 25 pp. ... . St. Petersburg: Nevsky Prostor, 2002. P. 157. 9 Bakhtin M. Questionsliterature And aesthetics: Research from different years. M.: IHL, 1975 ...

1975 edition. The condition is good. The book brings together the works of M. M. Bakhtin from different years, mostly published for the first time. The works examine the problems of genre theory, primarily the theory of the novel, the study of the literary word; Some works are devoted to the word in the novel, artistic time and space in the novel, and the comparison of era and novel.

Publisher: "Fiction. Moscow" (1975)

Format: 84x108/32, 504 pages.

RUSSIAN LITERATURE. The global significance of Russian literature- At the main stages of its development, R. l. created ideologically artistic values of an undeniably world-class level, both in the breadth of the formulation of social and moral problems and in the novelty of aesthetic solutions. But for a long time the works of Russian... ...

ART- a form of creativity, a way of spiritual self-realization of a person through sensually expressive means (sound, body plasticity, drawing, words, color, light, natural material, etc.). The peculiarity of the creative process in I. is its indivisibility... Philosophical Encyclopedia

AESTHETICS- (from the Greek aisthetikos feeling, sensual) philosopher. a discipline that studies the nature of the entire variety of expressive forms of the surrounding world, their structure and modification. E. is focused on identifying universals in sensory perception... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia

THE USSR. Bibliography- Population State system. Constitutions and constitutional acts of the USSR (1922 1936). Sat. documents, M., 1940; Constitutions and constitutional acts of the RSFSR (1918 1937). Sat. documents, M., 1940; History of the Soviet Constitution... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich- special in the region theory of knowledge, aesthetics, cultural studies, philology, literary criticism. Genus. in Orel. He graduated from high school in Odessa and entered history. Philol. ft Novorossiysk University, then moved to Petrograd University, graduated... ... Large biographical encyclopedia

BAKHTIN- Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895 1975) philosopher belonging to the post-symbolic period of Silver Age culture. Gymnasium received his education in Vilnius and Odessa. In 1913 he entered Novoross. University of T, a year later transferred to St. Petersburg, University of T on... ... Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies

POETICS- (Greek poiētikē téchnē creative art), the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest disciplines of literary criticism. In the expanded sense of the word, literature coincides with the theory of literature; in the narrowed sense, it coincides with ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary

Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich- (1895 1975), literary critic, art theorist (USSR). In 1930, 36 was in exile (in Kustanai). Historical and theoretical works devoted to the formation and change of artistic forms (epic, novel) reveal the value-philosophical meaning of the categories... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

AESTHETICS- (from the Greek aisthētikós feeling, sensual), philosophical science that studies two interconnected circles of phenomena: the sphere of the aesthetic as a specific manifestation of a person’s value relationship to the world and the sphere of artistic activity... ... Literary encyclopedic dictionary

Preparing this book for printing was the last work of M. M. Bakhtin.

The book opens with a general theoretical work, “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creativity,” written in 1924 at the request of the then famous magazine “Russian Contemporary,” one of whose leaders was A. M. Gorky. The work did not see the light of day, as the magazine soon ceased to exist. When assessing this long-standing work of M. M. Bakhtin, it is necessary to remember that it was created during a period of broad and heated discussion around general methodological problems of literary criticism. The work of the young scientist is a kind of replica in this methodological dialogue, a significant and original replica, but due to circumstances “dropped out” of the dialogue of that time. To create a more complete and objective picture of the scientific life of that time, the publication of this article by M. M. Bakhtin will be of significant importance.

The theory of the novel is studied in the works of M. M. Bakhtin from different sides and in various aspects. The author devoted a special study to the problem of time and space in the novel. This is a study that the author has approved for publication in this edition. The title “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” was associated with M. M. Bakhtin’s work on a book about one of the varieties of the European novel, the so-called “novel of education” (the manuscript of the book has not survived). M. M. Bakhtin's study of time and space in the novel, written in 1937 - 1938, anticipated the relevance that the problem of time and space in literature has now acquired in our literary criticism. While preparing the work for publication, the author wrote “Concluding Remarks” for it in 1973 (a fragment from the work “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” was published in “Voprosy Literatury” 1974, No. 3).

The problem of content, material and form in verbal artistic creativity

This work is an attempt at a methodological analysis of the basic concepts and problems of poetics on the basis of general systematic aesthetics.

I. Art criticism and general aesthetics

Now the situation is changing: recognition of the exclusive rights of scientific thinking and in the field of studying art is becoming the property of even wide circles; one can almost talk about the other extreme - about the fashion for scientificism, about superficial scientificism, about the hasty and self-confident tone of scientificism where the time of real science has not yet arrived, for the desire to build science at any cost and as quickly as possible often leads to an extreme reduction in the level of problems, to the impoverishment of the subject to be studied, and even to the replacement of this subject - in our case, artistic creativity - with something completely different. As we will see later, young Russian poetics did not always know how to avoid this. To build a science about one or another area of cultural creativity, preserving all the complexity, completeness and originality of the subject 1, is an extremely difficult matter.

If the question of the essence of art is understood as the metaphysics of art, then, indeed, we have to agree that scientificity is possible only where research is carried out independently of such questions. But now, fortunately, there is no need to seriously argue with metaphysics at all, and the independence that poetics claims takes on a completely different, sadder meaning for it, which can be defined as a claim to build a science of a separate art independently of knowledge and the systematic determination of originality aesthetic in the unity of human culture.

1 Placemarks here and throughout indicate selections in the text that belong to the author of this book, and italics indicate selections that belong to the cited authors.

Not a single cultural value, not a single creative point of view can or should remain at the level of simple existence, bare factuality of a psychological or historical order; Only a systematic definition in the semantic unity of culture overcomes the facticity of cultural value. The autonomy of art is justified and guaranteed by its participation in the unity of culture, by the fact that it occupies not only a unique, but also a necessary and irreplaceable place in it; otherwise, this autonomy would be simply arbitrary; on the other hand, it would be possible to impose on art any goals and purposes alien to its holo-factual nature: there would be nothing to object to, for bare nature can only be exploited; fact and purely factual originality have no say; to receive it, they need to become meaning; but one cannot become meaning without communing with unity, without accepting the law of unity: isolated meaning is a contradictio in adjecto 1. It is possible to overcome the methodological discord in the field of studying art not by creating a new method, another method - a participant in the general struggle of methods, only exploiting the factuality of art in its own way, but only through a systematic and philosophical substantiation of the fact and originality of art in the unity of human culture.

1 Formal-logical contradiction in the definition with the defined (lat.).
2 Among Russian works on the poetics and methodology of the history of literature of recent times, there are, of course, those who have taken a more correct, from our point of view, methodological position; The remarkable article by A. A. Smirnov “The paths and tasks of the science of literature” (“Literary Thought”, II, 1923) deserves special attention. In the future, we fully subscribe to many of the provisions and conclusions of this article.

In this way, art criticism comes to the creation of a premise of a general aesthetic nature, psychologically and historically completely understandable on the basis of what we have said, but hardly legitimate and capable of being proven systematically, a premise that, having somewhat developed what was said above, we formulate as follows: aesthetic activity is aimed at the material, forms only him: an aesthetically significant form is the form of a material - natural scientifically or linguistically understood; Artists’ statements that their work has values, is aimed at the world, at reality, deals with people, with social relations, with ethical, religious and other values, and are nothing more than metaphors, because in fact the artist is offered only material: physical -mathematical space, mass, sound of acoustics, word of linguistics - and he can take an artistic position only in relation to a given, specific material.

It is not superfluous to note here that the so-called formal method is by no means connected either historically or systematically with formal aesthetics (Kant, Herbart, etc., in contrast to the aesthetics of content - Schelling, Hegel, etc.) and does not lie on its path; in general aesthetic terms, it should be defined as one of the varieties - it must be said, somewhat simplified and primitive - of the material aesthetics we have indicated, the history of which is the history of the Kunstwissenschaften 1 in their struggle for independence from systematic philosophy.

1 This premise, formulated by us with all clarity and sharpness, often takes on more relaxed forms, a characteristic variety of which is the concept of V. M. Zhirmunsky, which puts forward a thematic point; however, the theme is introduced by him only as a moment of the material (the meaning of the word), and in some arts, the material of which is devoid of this moment, the theme is absent.

1 Arts Sciences (German).
2 In the works of formalists, along with completely unlawful statements - mainly of a general nature - there are many scientifically valuable observations. Such works as “Rhyme, its theory and history” by V. M. Zhirmunsky and “Russian Metrics” by B. V. Tomashevsky are fully of high scientific value. The study of the technique of works of verbal art in general first began on the basis of material aesthetics, both in Western European and Russian aesthetic literature.

1) Material aesthetics is not capable of justifying artistic form.

The basic position of material aesthetics regarding form raises a number of doubts and generally seems unconvincing.

The Russian formal method, with the consistency and a certain amount of nihilism characteristic of all primitivism, uses the terms: “feel” the form, “make” a work of art, etc.

When a sculptor works on marble, he, undoubtedly, processes marble in its physical definition, but the value-based artistic activity of the creator is not directed towards it, and the form carried out by the artist does not relate to it, although the implementation itself is not at a single moment without marble, - however, one cannot do without a chisel, which in no way enters into the artistic object as its moment; the created sculptural form is an aesthetically significant form of a person and his body: the intention of creativity and contemplation goes in this direction; the attitude of the artist and the contemplator to marble as to a certain physical body is of a secondary, derivative nature, governed by some primary relationship to objective values, in this case - to the value of a bodily person.

Of course, it is unlikely that anyone will seriously apply the principles of material aesthetics as consistently as applied to marble, as in our example (and, indeed, marble - as a material - has a more specific, narrower meaning than is usually given to the term “material” in material aesthetics); but in principle the situation is no different when, instead of marble, one means the sound of acoustics or the word of linguistics; It’s just that the situation becomes somewhat more complex and not so obviously absurd at first glance - especially, of course, when the material is a word - the subject of the humanitarian discipline - linguistics.

The usual metaphorical expressions: an artistic form glorifies someone, decorates someone or something, transforms, justifies, affirms, etc. - still have some degree of scientific correctness - and precisely in the fact that an artistically significant form really , refers to something, is value-directed towards something in addition to the material to which it is attached and with which it is nevertheless inextricably linked. It seems necessary to allow for a moment of content that would make it possible to comprehend form in a more significant way than in a crude hedonistic way.

But there is free, unbound beauty, there is non-objective art, in relation to which material aesthetics, apparently, is completely legitimate.

Without going into a more detailed discussion of this issue for now, we will only note the following: the liberal arts are free only from purely cognitive certainty and objective differentiation of their content - music, for example. But even in them the form is equally free from the direct primary relationship to the material - to the acoustic sound.

In general, one must strictly distinguish (which is not always done) content - a moment, as we will see, necessary in an artistic object - and cognitive objective differentiation - a moment that is not obligatory in it; freedom from the definiteness of the concept does not at all equal freedom from content, pointlessness is not vacuity; and in other areas of culture there are values that fundamentally do not allow for objective differentiation and limitation by a certain stable concept: thus, a moral act at its peak realizes a value that can only be accomplished, but cannot be expressed and cognized in an adequate concept. Music is devoid of objective certainty and cognitive differentiation, but it is deeply meaningful: its form takes us beyond the limits of acoustic sound, and not at all into the void of values - the content here is fundamentally ethical (we can also talk about the free, non-predetermined objectivity of ethical tension embraced musical form). Contentless music as an organized material would be nothing more than a physical stimulant of a psychophysiological state of pleasure.

Thus, even in non-objective arts, form can hardly be justified as a form of material.

2) Material aesthetics cannot justify a significant difference between an aesthetic object and an external work, between the divisions and connections within this object and the material divisions and connections within the work, and everywhere shows a tendency to mix these points.

For aesthetics as a science, a work of art is, of course, an object of knowledge, but this cognitive relationship to the work is of a secondary nature, while the primary relationship should be a purely artistic one. Aesthetic analysis should be directly directed not at the work in its sensory and only by the knowledge of the ordered reality, but at what the work is for the aesthetic activity of the artist and contemplator directed towards it.

The object of aesthetic analysis is, therefore, the content of aesthetic activity (contemplation) aimed at the work.

To understand an aesthetic object in its purely artistic originality and its structure, which we will further call the architectonics of an aesthetic object, is the first task of aesthetic analysis.

Further, aesthetic analysis must turn to the work in its primary, purely cognitive data and understand its structure completely independently of the aesthetic object: the esthetician must become a geometer, physicist, anatomist, physiologist, linguist - as an artist has to do to a certain extent. Thus, a work of art in the word must understand everything completely in all its moments, as a phenomenon of language, that is, purely linguistically, without any regard to the aesthetic object it realizes, only within the limits of the scientific law that governs its material.

And, finally, the third task of aesthetic analysis is to understand the external material work as realizing an aesthetic object, as a technical apparatus of aesthetic accomplishment. It is clear that this third task presupposes that both the aesthetic object in its originality and the material work in its extra-aesthetic reality have already been known and studied.

When solving this third problem we have to work using the teleological method.

We will call the structure of a work, understood teleologically as realizing an aesthetic object, the composition of the work. The target composition of a material work, of course, does not at all coincide with the calm, self-sufficient artistic existence of an aesthetic object.

Composition can also be defined as a set of factors of artistic impression.

Material aesthetics does not realize with sufficient methodological clarity its secondary nature and does not fully carry out the preliminary aestheticization of its object, therefore it never deals with an aesthetic object in its perfect purity and is fundamentally incapable of understanding its originality. According to its basic premise, it cannot go further than the work as an organized material.

Strictly speaking, only the second of the tasks of aesthetic analysis that we have indicated is completely accessible to material aesthetics, in fact, the not yet aesthetic study of the nature of a work - as a natural scientific or linguistic object. The analysis of the work as a compositional, target whole cannot be carried out satisfactorily due to the lack of understanding of the uniqueness of the aesthetic object. This object, of course, is introduced from the living aesthetic contemplation of the researcher, but not at all critically and methodologically conscious.

Failure to distinguish between the three points we have indicated: a) the aesthetic object, b) the extra-aesthetic material reality of the work, c) the teleologically understood compositional organization of the material - introduces into the work of material aesthetics - and this applies to almost all art criticism - a lot of ambiguity and obscurity, leading to constant quaternio terminorum in inferences: sometimes they mean an aesthetic object, sometimes an external work, sometimes a composition. The study oscillates mainly between the second and third moments, jumping from one to another without any methodological consistency, but the worst thing is that, not critically understood, the target composition of the work is declared to be the artistic value itself, the aesthetic object itself itself. Artistic activity (and contemplation) is replaced by cognitive judgment and poor - because it is not methodologically conscious - technical assessment.

3) In the works of material aesthetics, there is an inevitable constant mixture of architectonic and compositional forms, and the former never achieve fundamental clarity and purity of definition and are underestimated.

This lack of material aesthetics is due to the very essence of this concept and on its basis is insurmountable. Of course, it is closely related to the features we indicated in paragraphs one and two.

Here are some examples of the methodical distinction between architectonic and compositional forms.

Aesthetic individuality is the purely architectonic form of the aesthetic object itself: an event, a person, an aesthetically animated object, etc. are individualized; The individuality of the author-creator, which is also included in the aesthetic object, has a special character; but the form of individuality cannot at all be attributed in the same - that is, purely aesthetic - sense to the work as an organized material - a picture, a verbal whole, etc.; one can attribute individuality to them only metaphorically, that is, by making them the object of a new elementary artistic verbal work - metaphor, by poetizing them.

The form of self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency, which belongs to everything aesthetically completed, is a purely architectonic form, least of all can it be transferred to a work, as an organized material, which is a compositional teleological whole, where every moment and the whole is purposeful, realizes something, serves something. To call, for example, the verbal whole of a work self-sufficient only by using an extremely bold, purely romantic metaphor.

The novel is a purely compositional form of organization of verbal masses; it realizes in an aesthetic object the architectonic form of artistic completion of a historical or social event, which is a type of epic completion.

Drama is a compositional form (dialogue, act division, etc.), but the tragic and comic are the architectonic forms of completion.

Of course, we can talk about the compositional forms of comedy and tragedy as varieties of drama, while keeping in mind the methods of compositional ordering of verbal material, and not cognitive and ethical values: the terminology is not stable and not complete. It must be borne in mind that each architectural form is realized by certain compositional techniques; on the other hand, the most important compositional forms - for example, genre - correspond to significant architectonic forms in the object being realized.

The form of the lyric is architectural, but there are compositional forms of lyric poems

Humor, heroization, type, character are purely architectural forms, but they are realized, of course, by certain compositional techniques; a poem, a story, a short story are purely compositional, genre forms; chapter, stanza, line are purely compositional divisions (although they can be understood purely linguistically, that is, regardless of their aesthetic telos).

Rhythm can be understood in both directions, that is, both as an architectonic and as a compositional form: as a form of ordering of sound material, empirically perceived, audible and cognizable - rhythm is compositional; emotionally directed, related to the value of the internal aspiration and tension that it completes - the rhythm is architectonic.

Between these architectonic forms that we have indicated without any systematic order, there are, of course, significant gradations, which we cannot go into here; All that matters to us is that all of them - as opposed to compositional forms - are included in the aesthetic object.

Architectonic forms are the forms of the mental and physical value of an aesthetic person, the forms of nature - as his environment, the forms of an event in its personal life, social and historical aspect, etc.; They are all the essence of achievement, fulfillment, they do not serve anything, and tranquility is self-sufficient - these are forms of aesthetic being in its originality.

The compositional forms that organize the material are teleological, auxiliary, seemingly restless in nature and are subject to a purely technical assessment: how adequately they carry out the architectonic task. The architectural form determines the choice of compositional form: thus, the form of tragedy (the form of an event, partly a personality - a tragic character) chooses an adequate compositional form - dramatic. From here, of course, it does not follow that the architectonic form exists somewhere in a ready-made form and can be realized in addition to the compositional one.

On the basis of material aesthetics, a strict fundamental distinction between compositional and architectonic forms is completely impossible, and often a tendency arises to completely dissolve architectonic forms into compositional ones. The extreme expression of this tendency is the Russian formal method, where compositional and genre forms tend to absorb the entire aesthetic object and where, in addition, there is no strict distinction between linguistic and compositional forms.

The matter essentially changes little when architectonic forms are related to the theme, and compositional forms are referred to as stylistics, instrumentation of the composition - in a narrower sense than the one we give to this term - and are placed side by side in the work (there is no distinction between an aesthetic object and an external work) and differ only in the forms of ordering different aspects of the material (as, for example, in the works of V. M. Zhirmunsky). A fundamental methodological distinction between compositional and architectonic forms and an understanding of their complete diversity is missing here too. Added to this is the denial of the thematic aspect of some arts (for example, music), and this creates a complete abyss between thematic and non-thematic arts. It should be noted that the theme in Zhirmunsky’s understanding does not coincide with the architectonics of the aesthetic object: it, however, included most of the architectonic forms, but not all, and next to them something alien to the aesthetic object was included.

The basic architectonic forms are common to all arts and the entire aesthetic field; they constitute the unity of this field. There are analogies between the compositional forms of various arts, due to the commonality of architectonic tasks, but here the characteristics of the materials come into their own.

A correct formulation of the problem of style - one of the most important problems of aesthetics - without a strict distinction between architectonic and compositional forms is impossible.

4) Material aesthetics is not capable of explaining aesthetic vision outside of art: aesthetic contemplation of nature, aesthetic moments in myth, in worldview, and, finally, everything that is called aestheticism, that is, the unlawful transfer of aesthetic forms into the area of ethical action (personal, life, political , social) and into the field of knowledge (semi-scientific aestheticized thinking of philosophers such as Nietzsche and others).

A characteristic feature of all these phenomena of aesthetic vision outside of art is the absence of specific and organized material, and therefore of technology; the form here in most cases is not objectified and not fixed. That is why these phenomena of aesthetic vision outside of art do not achieve methodological purity and complete independence and originality: they are chaotic, unstable, hybrid. The aesthetic fully realizes itself only in art, therefore aesthetics should be oriented toward art; it would be methodologically absurd to begin aesthetic construction with the aesthetics of nature or myth; But aesthetics must explain these hybrid and non-pure forms of the aesthetic: this task is philosophically and vitally important. This task can serve as a touchstone for the productivity of any aesthetic theory.

Material aesthetics, with its understanding of form, does not even have an approach to such phenomena.

5) Material aesthetics cannot substantiate the history of art.

There is, of course, no doubt that the productive development of the history of this or that art presupposes the developed aesthetics of this art, but we must especially emphasize the fundamental importance of general systematic aesthetics - in addition to the significance that already belongs to it in the construction of any special aesthetics - because only she alone sees and substantiates art in its essential mutual determination and interaction with all other areas of cultural creativity, in the unity of culture and in the unity of the historical process of the formation of culture.

History does not know isolated series: an isolated series as such is static, the change of moments in such a series can only be a systematic division or simply a mechanical position of the series, but not at all a historical process; Only the establishment of interaction and interdependence of a given series with others creates a historical approach. You need to stop being just yourself in order to go down in history.

Material aesthetics, which isolates in culture not only art, but also individual arts and takes a work not in its artistic life, but as a thing, as an organized material, is, at best, capable of substantiating only a chronological table of changes in the techniques of a given art, for isolated technique is not at all may have a history.

These are the main, inevitable shortcomings of formal aesthetics and insurmountable difficulties for it; all of them are quite clearly illustrated by the Russian formal method due to the inherent primitivism and somewhat sectarian harshness inherent in its general aesthetic concept.

All the shortcomings that we noted in our five points are ultimately due to the methodologically false position indicated at the beginning of the chapter, that it is possible and should build a science of art independently of systematic-philosophical aesthetics. The consequence of this is the lack of a solid basis for science. To escape from the subjective sea, in which the judgment of aesthetics, devoid of a scientific basis, is drowning, art criticism seeks to find shelter in those scientific disciplines that know the material of a given art, just as before - and even now sometimes - for the same purposes, art criticism clung to psychology and even physiology ; but this salvation is fictitious: a judgment is truly scientific only where it does not go beyond the limits of a given saving discipline, but as soon as it goes beyond these limits and becomes the actual judgment of aesthetics, it finds itself, with the same force, captured by the waves of the subjective and random, from which it hoped to be saved ; This is the situation in which, first of all, the main statement of art criticism finds itself, establishing the significance of material in artistic creativity: this is a general aesthetic judgment, and willy-nilly it has to withstand criticism of general philosophical aesthetics: only it can justify such a judgment, and it can also reject it.

The points we have examined make the premise of material aesthetics highly questionable and partially outline the direction for a more correct understanding of the essence of the aesthetic and its aspects. To develop this direction in terms of general aesthetics, but with a primary application to verbal artistic creativity, is the task of subsequent chapters.

Having determined the moment of content and correctly established the place of material in artistic creativity, we will master the correct approach to form, we will be able to understand how form - on the one hand, truly material, entirely realized on the material and attached to it, on the other hand - takes us beyond the value the limits of a work as an organized material, as a thing; this will clarify and strengthen everything we noted above in the form of only assumptions and indications.

II. Content problem

The problem of a particular cultural area in its entirety - knowledge, morality, art - can be understood as a problem of the boundaries of this area.

This or that possible or actually existing creative point of view becomes convincingly necessary and necessary only in correlation with other creative points of view: only where a significant need for it, in its creative originality, is born at their boundaries, does it find its solid justification and justification; from within itself, outside of its participation in the unity of culture, it is only holo-factual, and its originality can seem simply arbitrary and capricious.

However, one should not imagine the area of culture as a kind of spatial whole that has boundaries, but also has an internal territory. The cultural region has no internal territory: it is all located on the borders, the borders pass everywhere, through every moment of it, the systematic unity of culture goes into the atoms of cultural life, just as the sun is reflected in every drop of it. Every cultural act essentially lives on boundaries: this is its seriousness and significance; distracted from boundaries, he loses ground, becomes empty, arrogant, degenerates and dies. In this sense, we can talk about the specific systematicity of each cultural phenomenon, each individual cultural act, about its autonomous involvement - or participatory autonomy.

Only in this concrete systematicity, that is, in direct reference and orientation in the unity of culture, does a phenomenon cease to be simply a present, naked fact, acquires significance, meaning, becomes, as it were, a kind of monad, reflecting everything in itself and reflected in everything.

In fact: not a single cultural creative act deals with matter that is completely indifferent to value, completely random and disordered - matter and chaos are generally relative concepts - but always with something already valued and somehow ordered, in relation to Why should he now responsibly take his value position. Thus, the cognitive act finds reality already processed in the concepts of pre-scientific thinking, but, most importantly, already assessed and ordered by ethical action: practical, everyday, social, political; finds it affirmed religiously, and, finally, the cognitive act proceeds from the aesthetically ordered image of the object, from the vision of the object.

What is before knowledge is, therefore, not res nullius 1, but the reality of the ethical act in all its varieties and the reality of aesthetic vision. And the cognitive act everywhere must occupy an essential position in relation to this reality, which should not, of course, be a random collision, but can and should be systematically substantiated from the essence of knowledge and other areas.

1 Nobody's thing (lat.).

The same should be said about the artistic act: it lives and moves not in emptiness, but in a tense value atmosphere of responsible mutual determination. A work of art as a thing is calmly and stupidly delimited spatially and temporally from all other things: a statue or painting physically displaces everything else from the space it occupies; reading a book begins at a certain hour, takes several hours of time, filling them, and ends at a certain hour; in addition, the book itself is tightly bound on all sides; but the work is alive and artistically significant in an intense and active mutual determination with the reality recognized and evaluated by action. A work is alive and significant - as an artistic work - of course, and not in our psyche; here it is also only empirically present, as a mental process, temporarily localized and psychologically natural. A work that is alive and significant in the world is also alive and significant - cognitively, socially, politically, economically, religiously.

The usual opposition between reality and art or life and art and the desire to find some significant connection between them is completely legitimate, but needs a more precise scientific formulation. Reality, opposed to art, can only be the reality of cognition and ethical action in all its varieties: the reality of life practice - economic, social, political and actually moral.

It should be noted that in terms of ordinary thinking, reality, opposed to art - in such cases, however, they like to use the word “life” - is already significantly aestheticized: it is already an artistic image of reality, but a hybrid and unstable one. Very often, while blaming new art for its break with reality in general, they actually contrast it with the reality of old art, “classical art,” imagining that this is some kind of neutral reality. But the aesthetic as such must be opposed with all its rigor and clarity to the not yet aestheticized and, therefore, not unified reality of cognition and action; We must remember that it becomes a concretely unified life or reality only in aesthetic intuition, and a given systematic unity in philosophical knowledge.

One must also beware of an unlawful, methodologically unjustified restriction that, on a whim, puts forward only one moment of the extra-aesthetic world: thus, the necessity of the nature of natural science is opposed to the freedom and imagination of the artist, or especially often only the social or actual-political moment is put forward, and sometimes even naive unstable reality life practice.

We must also remember once and for all that no reality in itself, no neutral reality can be opposed to art: by the very fact that we talk about it and contrast it with something, we somehow define and evaluate it; you just need to come to clarity with yourself and understand the real direction of your assessment.

All this can be briefly expressed as follows: reality can be opposed to art only as something good or something true - to beauty.

Each cultural phenomenon is concretely systematic, that is, it occupies some significant position in relation to the reality of other cultural attitudes predetermined by it and thereby participates in the given unity of culture. But these relationships of cognition, action and artistic creativity to the reality they find are profoundly different.

Cognition does not accept the ethical evaluation and aesthetic design of being, it starts from them; in this sense, cognition, as it were, does not predetermine anything, starts over, or - more precisely - the moment of pre-finding something significant besides cognition remains outside it, moves into the realm of historical, psychological, personal-biographical and other factuality, accidental from the point of view of cognition itself .

Pre-found evaluation and aesthetic design are not included in the inquiry. Reality, entering science, throws off all valuable clothing in order to become the naked and pure reality of knowledge, where only the unity of truth is sovereign. Positive mutual determination in the unity of culture takes place only in relation to knowledge as a whole in systematic philosophy.

There is a single world of science, a single reality of knowledge, outside of which nothing can become cognitively significant; this reality of knowledge is not complete and is always open. Everything that exists for cognition is determined by it itself and - in the task - is determined in all respects: everything that persists, as if resisting cognition in an object, has not yet been recognized in it, persists only for cognition, as a purely cognitive problem, and not at all as something extra-cognitively valuable - something good, holy, useful, etc. - knowledge does not know such value resistance.

Of course, the world of ethical action and the world of beauty themselves become the subject of cognition, but they by no means introduce their assessments and their self-legitimacy into cognition; in order to become cognitively significant, they must completely submit to its unity and regularity.

Thus, the cognitive act has a purely negative attitude towards the pre-found reality of the act and aesthetic vision, thereby realizing the purity of its originality.

This basic character of cognition determines its following features: the cognitive act takes into account only the work of cognition that precedes it and does not take any independent position in relation to the reality of the act and artistic creativity in their historical certainty; moreover: the isolation, singularity of the cognitive act and its expression in a separate, individual scientific work are not significant from the point of view of knowledge itself: in the world of knowledge, in principle, there are no separate acts and separate works; it is necessary to introduce other points of view in order to find an approach and make significant the historical singularity of the cognitive act and the isolation, completeness and individuality of a scientific work, meanwhile - as we will see later - the world of art must essentially fall apart into separate, self-sufficient, individual wholes - works of art, each of which takes an independent position in relation to the reality of cognition and action; this creates the immanent historicity of the work of art.

The ethical act has a somewhat different attitude towards the pre-found reality of cognition and aesthetic vision. This relation is usually expressed as the relation of ought to reality; We do not intend to go into consideration of this problem here; we will only note that here the attitude is negative, although different than in the field of knowledge 1 .

Let's move on to artistic creativity.

The main feature of the aesthetic, which sharply distinguishes it from cognition and action, is its receptive, positively accepting nature: the reality pre-found by the aesthetic act, recognized and evaluated by the act, enters into the work (more precisely, into the aesthetic object) and becomes a necessary constitutive moment here. In this sense, we can say: indeed, life is not only outside art, but also in it, inside it, in the fullness of its value weight: social, political, cognitive and other. Art is rich, it is not dry, not special; the artist is a specialist only as a master, that is, only in relation to the material.

Of course, the aesthetic form transfers this recognized and assessed reality to a different level of value, subordinates it to a new unity, organizes it in a new way: it individualizes, concretizes, isolates and completes, but does not cancel its recognition and assessment: it is precisely this identification and evaluation and direction of the final aesthetic form.

1 The relationship between ought and being is of a conflictual nature. From within the world of knowledge itself, no conflict is possible, because in it it is impossible to encounter anything value-alien. It is not science that can enter into conflict, but a scientist, and not ex cathedra, but as an ethical subject for whom knowledge is an act of knowledge. The gap between ought and being has significance only from within ought, that is, for the ethical acting consciousness, it exists only for it.

Aesthetic activity does not create a completely new reality 1 . In contrast to cognition and action, which create nature and social humanity, art glorifies, embellishes, remembers this pre-found reality of cognition and action - nature and social humanity - enriches and replenishes them, and above all, it creates a concrete intuitive unity of these two worlds - places a person in nature, understood as his aesthetic environment - humanizes nature and naturalizes man.

In this acceptance of the ethical and cognitive into the interior of its object there is a peculiar kindness of the aesthetic, its benevolence: it seems to choose nothing, separate nothing, cancel nothing, and is not repelled or distracted from anything. These purely negative aspects occur in art only in relation to the material; the artist is strict and merciless towards him: the poet mercilessly discards words, forms and expressions and selects a little, fragments of marble fly from under the sculptor’s chisel, but the inner man in one case and the physical man in the other turn out to be only enriched: the ethical man has been enriched by a positively affirmed nature, natural - ethical meaning.

Almost all (not religious, of course, but purely secular) kind, accepting and enriching, optimistic categories of human thinking about the world and man are aesthetic in nature; The eternal tendency of this thinking is also aesthetic - to imagine what is due and given as already given and present somewhere, a tendency that created mythological thinking, and to a large extent metaphysical.

Art creates a new form as a new value relationship to what has already become reality for knowledge and action: in art we learn everything and remember everything (in knowledge we learn nothing and remember nothing, contrary to Plato’s formula); but that is precisely why in art the moment of novelty, originality, surprise, freedom is so important, because here there is something against the background of which novelty, originality, freedom can be perceived - a recognizable and empathic world of knowledge and action, it is this that looks and sounds like -new in art, in relation to it the artist’s activity is perceived as free. Cognition and action are primary, that is, they create their object for the first time: what is known is not recognized or remembered in a new light, but is determined for the first time; and the act is alive only by what does not yet exist: here everything is new from the beginning, and therefore there is no novelty here, everything here is ex origine, and therefore there is no originality here.

1 This seemingly secondary character of the aesthetic does not, of course, in any way reduce its independence and originality next to the ethical and cognitive; Aesthetic activity creates its own reality, in which the reality of cognition and action turns out to be positively accepted and transformed: this is the uniqueness of the aesthetic.

The peculiarity of the aesthetic that we have indicated—positive acceptance and concrete unification of nature and social humanity—explains to us the peculiar relationship of the aesthetic to philosophy. In the history of philosophy, we observe a constantly returning tendency to replace the systematic predetermined unity of cognition and action with a specific intuitive and, as it were, already given, available unity of aesthetic vision.

After all, the unity of knowledge and ethical action, being and obligation, concrete and living unity is given to us in our direct vision, in our intuition: isn’t this intuitive unity the sought-after unity of philosophy? This, indeed, is a great temptation for thinking, which created, next to the single great road of science, philosophy, parallel, but not roads - but isolated islands of individual artistic and philosophical intuitions (even if sometimes brilliant in their own way) 1. In these aestheticized intuitive comprehensions, the quasi-philosophical unity they find relates to the world and culture in the same way as the unity of aesthetic form relates to the content in a work of art 1 .

1 Another unique variety of the intuitive-aesthetic unity of cognition and action is myth, which, due to the predominance of the ethical moment over the cognitive, in addition, is almost completely devoid of differentiation, due to greater freedom of aesthetic design than in intuitive philosophy (the moment of isolation or detachment and mythical events, although, of course, incomparably weaker than in art, the moment of aesthetic subjectification and personification and some other moments of form are stronger) - much closer to art than intuitive philosophy.

One of the most important tasks of aesthetics is to find an approach to aestheticized philosophemes, to create a theory of intuitive philosophy based on the theory of art. Least of all, material aesthetics is capable of carrying out such a task: ignoring the content, it is deprived of even an approach to artistic intuition in philosophy.

The reality of cognition and ethical action, which is included in its recognition and evaluation in the aesthetic object and is subjected here to concrete, intuitive unification, individuation, concretization, isolation and completion, that is, comprehensive artistic design with the help of a certain material, we - in full agreement with traditional usage - we call it the content of a work of art (more precisely, an aesthetic object).

Without being related to the content, that is, to the world and its moments, the world - as an object of knowledge and ethical action - the form cannot be aesthetically significant, cannot fulfill its basic functions.

The position of the author-artist and his artistic task can and should be understood in the world in connection with all the values of knowledge and ethical action: it is not the material that is united, individualized, singled out, isolated and completed - it does not need any unification, because there is no gap in it , nor in completion, to which he is indifferent, because in order to need it, he must join the axiological and semantic movement of the act - but the comprehensively experienced value composition of reality, the event of reality.

1 As an auxiliary tool, like a drawing in geometry, and as a heuristic hypothesis, philosophy can use the intuitive image of unity; and in life we work at every step with the help of a similar intuitive image.

An aesthetically significant form is an expression of an essential attitude to the world of knowledge and action, but this attitude is not cognitive and not ethical: the artist does not intervene in the event as a direct participant in it - he would then turn out to be cognitive and ethically acting - he takes an essential position outside the event, as a contemplator, uninterested, but understanding the value meaning of what is happening; not the one who experiences it, but the one who empathizes with it: for, without appreciating it to a certain extent, one cannot contemplate the event as an event.

This externality (but not indifferentism) allows artistic activity from the outside to unite, shape and complete the event. From within cognition itself and action itself, this unification and completion is fundamentally impossible: neither the reality of cognition can, while remaining true to itself, unite with the ought, nor the ought, while maintaining its originality, unite with reality - an essential value position is needed outside the knower and outside the ought and acting consciousness , being on which it would be possible to accomplish this unification and completion (and completion from within knowledge and action itself is impossible).

The aesthetic intuitive-unifying and final form descends from the outside onto the content, in its possible fragmentation and constant predetermination-dissatisfaction (this gap and this predetermination are valid outside of art, in ethically experienced life), transferring it to a new value plane of detached and complete, value-calmed in itself being - beauty.

The form, embracing the content from the outside, externalizes it, that is, embodies it - the classical traditional terminology, thus, remains fundamentally true.

In modern poetics, the denial of content, as a constitutive moment of an aesthetic object, has taken two directions, which, however, are not always strictly distinguished and have not found a completely clear formulation: 1) content is only a moment of form, that is, the cognitive and ethical value in a work of art has a purely formal meaning; 2) content is only a moment of material. We will touch upon the second direction briefly in the next chapter devoted to the material. Let's focus on the first attempt.

First of all, it should be noted that the content is given in an artistic object completely formed, completely embodied, otherwise it is bad prosaism, not dissolved in the artistic whole of the moment. It is impossible to single out any real moment of a work of art, which would be pure content, just as, however, realiter 1 there is no pure form: content and form mutually penetrate each other, are inseparable, however, for aesthetic analysis and are not merged, that is, they are significances of different orders: in order for a form to have a purely aesthetic significance, the content it embraces must have a possible cognitive and ethical significance, the form needs the extra-aesthetic weight of the content, without it it could not realize itself as a form. But can we say on this basis that content is a purely formal element?

Not to mention the outwardly logical - terminological - absurdity of leaving the term “form” while completely denying the content, for form is a concept correlative to content, which is not form, there is, of course, a more significant methodological danger in such a statement: the content in it is understood as a substitute from the point of view of form, the form does not care about the cognitive and ethical significance of the content, this significance is completely random in an artistic object; form completely relativizes content - this is the meaning of the statement that makes content the moment of form.

The fact is that a similar state of affairs can indeed occur in art: form can lose its primary relationship to content in its cognitive and ethical significance, content can be relegated to a “purely formal moment”; such a weakening of the content, first of all, reduces the artistic significance of the form: the form is deprived of one of the most important functions - the intuitive unification of the cognitive with the ethical, which is so important, especially in verbal art; Both the isolation and termination functions are weakened. And in such cases, of course, we are still dealing with content as a constitutive moment of a work of art (after all, otherwise we would not have a work of art at all), but with content taken from second hand, simplified, and as a result with in a simplified form: we are simply dealing with so-called “literature”. We should dwell on this phenomenon, because some formalists are inclined to consider “literature” the only type of artistic creativity in general.

1 Really (lat.).

There are works that really do not deal with the world, but only with the word “world” in a literary context, works that are born, live and die on the pages of magazines, which do not open the pages of modern periodicals, and in no way take us beyond their limits. The cognitive-ethical moment of content, which they still need as a constitutive moment of a work of art, is not taken by them directly from the world of knowledge and the ethical reality of an act, but from other works of art or constructed by analogy with them. The point, of course, is not the presence of artistic influences and traditions, which necessarily take place in the highest art; the point is in the internal attitude to the assimilated content: in those literary works of which we are talking, the content is not co-identified and not empathized, but is assimilated according to external purely “literary” considerations; Here the artistic form does not come face to face with the content in its cognitive-ethical weight; rather, here one literary work comes together with another, which it imitates or which it “foreignizes,” against the background of which it “feels” like new. Here the form becomes indifferent to the content in its immediate non-aesthetic significance.

In addition to the words of reality, knowledge and action that the artist predestined, they also prescribe literature: they have to fight with old or for old literary forms, use them and combine them, overcome their resistance or find support in them; but at the basis of all this movement and struggle within a purely literary context lies a more essential, defining primary struggle with the reality of knowledge and action: every artist in his work, if it is significant and serious, is, as it were, the first artist, he directly has to take an aesthetic position according to in relation to the extra-aesthetic reality of cognition and action, at least within the limits of his purely personal ethical-biographical experience. Neither a work of art as a whole, nor any moment of it can be understood from the point of view of one abstract literary pattern, but it is also necessary to take into account the semantic series, that is, the possible pattern of cognition and action, for an aesthetically significant form embraces not emptiness, but persistent self-legitimate meaningful orientation of life. In a work of art, there are, as it were, two powers and two legal orders determined by these powers: each moment can be defined in two value systems - content and form, because in each significant moment both of these systems are in a significant and value-intensive interaction. But, of course, the aesthetic form embraces from all sides the possible internal law of action and knowledge, subordinating it to its unity: only under this condition can we speak of a work as artistic.

How is content realized in artistic creativity and in contemplation, and what are the tasks and methods of aesthetic analysis of it? We must briefly touch on these problems of aesthetics here. The following remarks are by no means exhaustive of the subject and only outline the problem; Moreover, we will not touch upon the compositional implementation of content with the help of certain material here.

One must strictly distinguish between the cognitive-ethical moment, which really is the content, that is, the constitutive moment of a given aesthetic object, and those judgments and ethical assessments that can be constructed and expressed about the content, but which are not included in the aesthetic object.
The content cannot be purely cognitive, completely devoid of an ethical moment; Moreover, we can say that the ethical has a significant primacy in content. In relation to a pure concept and a pure judgment, the artistic form cannot realize itself: the purely cognitive moment will inevitably remain isolated in the work of art as undissolved prosaism. Everything known must be correlated with the world of human action, must be significantly connected with the incoming consciousness, and only in this way can it enter into a work of art.
The most incorrect thing would be to imagine content as a cognitive theoretical whole, as a thought, as an idea.
Artistic creativity and contemplation master the ethical aspect of content directly through empathy or empathy and co-evaluation, but not through theoretical understanding and interpretation, which can only be a means for empathy. Directly ethical is only the very event of an act (an act - a thought, an act - a deed, an act - a feeling, an act - a desire, etc.) in its living accomplishment from within the acting consciousness itself; It is precisely this event that is completed externally by artistic form, but by no means its theoretical transcription in the form of ethical judgments, moral norms, maxims, judicial assessments, etc.

Theoretical transcription, the formula of an ethical act is already its translation into a cognitive plane, that is, a secondary moment, while an artistic form is, for example, a form carried out by a story about an act, or a form of its epic glorification in a poem, or a form of lyrical embodiment, etc. - deals with the act itself in its primary ethical nature, mastering it through empathy with the leading, feeling and acting consciousness, while the secondarily cognitive moment can only have an auxiliary meaning as a means.

It must be emphasized that the artist and contemplator empathize not with psychological consciousness (and one cannot empathize with it in the strict sense of the word), but with an ethically oriented, acting consciousness 1 .

What are the tasks and possibilities of aesthetic analysis of content?

Aesthetic analysis must first of all reveal the composition of the content immanent in the aesthetic object, without going beyond the boundaries of this object in any way - as it is realized by creativity and contemplation.

Let's turn to the educational moment of the content.

The moment of cognitive recognition accompanies the activity of artistic creativity and contemplation everywhere, but in most cases it is completely inseparable from the ethical moment and cannot be expressed by an adequate judgment. The possible unity and necessity of the world of knowledge seems to run through every moment of the aesthetic object and, without reaching full actualization in the work itself, is united with the world of ethical aspiration, realizing that peculiar intuitively given unity of the two worlds, which, as we have indicated, is an essential moment of the aesthetic as such 2. Thus, behind every word, behind every phrase of a poetic work, one senses a possible prosaic meaning, a prosaic bias, that is, a possible continuous reference to the unity of knowledge.

The cognitive moment, as it were, illuminates an aesthetic object from within, like a sober stream of water mixed with the wine of ethical tension and artistic completion, but it is not always condensed and condensed to the degree of a definite judgment: everything is recognized, but not everything is recognized in an adequate concept.

Empathy and sympathetic co-evaluation in themselves do not yet have an aesthetic character. The content of the act of empathy is ethical: it is a vital-practical or moral value orientation (emotional-volitional) of another consciousness. This content of the act of empathy can be comprehended and processed in various directions: it can be made an object of knowledge (psychological or philosophical-ethical), it can determine an ethical act (the most common form of understanding the content of empathy: sympathy, compassion, help), and, finally, it can be made an object of aesthetic completion. In the future we will have to touch in more detail on the so-called “aesthetics of empathy.”
In the future, we will highlight the role of the creative personality of the author as a constitutive moment of the artistic form, in the unity of whose activity the cognitive and ethical moment finds its unification.

If it were not for this all-pervading recognition, the aesthetic object, that is, what is artistically created and perceived, would fall out of all connections of experience - both theoretical and practical - just as the content of a state of complete anesthesia falls out, about which there is nothing to remember, nothing to say and which cannot be evaluated ( one can evaluate the state, but not its content), and artistic creativity and contemplation, deprived of any involvement in the possible unity of knowledge, not penetrated by it and not recognized from the inside, would simply become an isolated state of unconsciousness, which can only be known to have existed post factum no elapsed time.

This internal illumination of an aesthetic object in the field of verbal art can rise from the degree of recognition to the degree of definite knowledge and deep comprehension, which can be highlighted by aesthetic analysis.

But, having isolated this or that cognitive comprehension from the content of an aesthetic object, for example, the purely philosophical comprehension of Ivan Karamazov about the meaning of the suffering of children, the rejection of God’s world, etc., or the philosophical, historical and sociological judgments of Andrei Bolkonsky about war, about the role of the individual in history, etc. - the researcher must remember that all these comprehensions, no matter how deep they are in themselves, are not given in the aesthetic object in their cognitive isolation and that the artistic form is not related to them and does not directly complete them; these comprehensions are necessarily connected with the ethical moment of content, with the world of action, the world of event. Thus, the indicated achievements of Ivan Karamazov have purely characterological functions, are a necessary moment of Ivan’s moral life position, are related to Alyosha’s ethical and religious position, and thereby are involved in the event towards which the final artistic form of the novel is directed; Also, the judgments of Andrei Bolkonsky express his ethical personality and his life position and are woven into the depicted event not only of his personal, but also of his social and historical life. Thus, the cognitively true becomes the moment of ethical accomplishment.

If all these judgments were not in one way or another necessarily connected with the concrete world of human action, they would remain isolated prosaisms, which sometimes happens in the works of Dostoevsky, and also occurs in Tolstoy, for example, in the novel “War and Peace”, where By the end of the novel, cognitive philosophical and historical judgments completely break their connection with the ethical event and are organized into a theoretical treatise.

In a slightly different way, the cognitive moment that takes place in descriptions, natural science or psychological explanations of what happened, etc. is connected with an ethical event. It is not our task to indicate all possible ways of connecting the ethical and cognitive in the unity of the content of an aesthetic object.

Emphasizing the connection of the cognitive moment with the ethical, it should be noted, however, that the ethical event does not relativize the judgments included in it and is not indifferent to their purely cognitive depth, breadth and truth. Thus, the moral events in the life of the “underground man,” which are artistically designed and completed by Dostoevsky, require purely cognitive depth and consistency of his worldview, which is an essential moment of his life attitude.

Having highlighted, within the limits of the possible and necessary, the theoretical moment of content in its purely cognitive weight, aesthetic analysis itself must further understand its connection with the ethical moment and its significance in the unity of content; but, of course, it is possible to make this isolated cognitive moment the subject of theoretical consideration and evaluation independent of the work of art, relating it no longer to the unity of the content and the entire aesthetic object as a whole, but to the purely cognitive unity of a certain philosophical worldview (usually the author). Such works have great scientific, philosophical, historical and cultural significance; but they already lie outside the boundaries of aesthetic analysis proper and must be strictly distinguished from it; We will not dwell on the unique methodology of such work.

Let's move on to the tasks of analyzing the ethical aspect of the content.

His methodology is much more complex: aesthetic analysis, as a scientific one, must somehow transcribe the ethical moment, which contemplation masters through empathy (feeling) and co-evaluation; making this transcription, one has to abstract from the artistic form, and above all from aesthetic individuation: it is necessary to separate the purely ethical personality from its artistic embodiment into an individual aesthetically significant soul and body, it is necessary to abstract from all moments of completion; the task of such transcription is difficult and in other cases - for example, in music - completely impossible.

The ethical aspect of the content of a work can be conveyed and partially transcribed through retelling: one can tell in other words about the experience, action and event that found artistic completion in the work. Such a retelling, with the correct methodological understanding of the task, can be of great importance for aesthetic analysis. In fact: retelling, although it still retains an artistic form - the form of a story, but simplifies it and reduces it to a simple means for feeling, abstracting as much as possible from all the isolating, final and calming functions of the form (a story, of course, cannot completely escape from them) : as a result, although the feeling has weakened and turned pale, the purely ethical, incomplete, responsible character of the empathized, involved in the unity of the event of existence, appears more clearly, those connections with unity from which the form has denied appear more clearly; this can facilitate the ethical moment and the transition to a cognitive form of judgments: ethical - in the narrow sense, sociological and others, that is, its purely theoretical transcription to the extent that it is possible.

Many critics and literary historians have mastered the high skill of exposing the ethical moment through a methodically thought-out semi-aesthetic retelling.

Pure theoretical transcription can never possess the fullness of the ethical moment of content, which is mastered only by feeling, but it can and should strive towards this, as to its never-attainable limit. The very moment of ethical accomplishment is either accomplished or artistically contemplated, but can never be adequately formulated theoretically.

Having transcribed, within the limits of the possible, the ethical moment of the content, completed by the form, aesthetic analysis itself must understand the meaning of the entire content of the aesthetic object as a whole, that is, as the content of a given artistic form, and the form as the form of a given content, without going beyond the boundaries of the work at all. But the ethical moment, like the cognitive one, can be isolated and made the subject of independent research - philosophical-ethical or sociological; can be made the subject of actual, moral or political evaluations (secondary evaluations, and not primary co-evaluations, which are also necessary for aesthetic contemplation); Thus, the sociological method not only transcribes an ethical event in its social aspect, empathized and co-evaluated in aesthetic contemplation, but also goes beyond the boundaries of the object and introduces the event into broader social and historical connections. Such works can be of great scientific importance, for a literary historian they are even absolutely necessary, but they go beyond the boundaries of aesthetic analysis itself.

The psychological transcription of the ethical moment is not directly related to aesthetic analysis. Artistic creativity and contemplation deal with ethical subjects, subjects of action and ethical-social relations between them; the artistic form that completes them is value-oriented towards them, but not at all with psychological subjects and not with the psychological connections between them.

It should be noted, without yet subjecting this position to deeper development, that in some cases, for example, when perceiving a musical work, an intensive deepening of the ethical moment is methodologically completely acceptable, while its extensive expansion would destroy a given artistic form; the ethical moment in depth has no boundaries that could be unlawfully violated: the work does not and cannot predetermine the degree of depth of the ethical moment.

To what extent can content analysis have a strictly scientific, generally valid character?

It is in principle possible to achieve a high degree of scientificity, especially when the corresponding disciplines - philosophical ethics and social sciences - themselves achieve the degree of scientificity possible for them, but in fact the analysis of the content is extremely difficult, and a certain degree of subjectivity is generally impossible to avoid, which is due to the very essence of the aesthetic object; but the scientific tact of the researcher can always keep him within proper boundaries and force him to stipulate what is subjective in his analysis.

This is the basic outline of the methodology for aesthetic analysis of content.