Introduction to the Fine Arts. The meaning of the phrase “fine arts” Fine arts

FINE ARTS (French bea ux-arts) is a concept widely used in the aesthetics of the 18th-19th centuries. to designate a specific field of art. creativity, in which the aesthetic principle in general and the principle of beauty in particular plays a structure-forming role and separates its objects from the products of practical and scientific activity. The process of isolating I. and. began in the late Renaissance. Historical isolation of the artist. began as a result of the awareness of the differences between sculpture and carpentry, the exclusion of crafts and science from the sphere of art, as well as due to the establishment of proximity between such seemingly distant spheres of culture, like poetry. For theoretical self-awareness of the artist. In the culture of its specific function, a significant role was played by C. Batteux’s treatise “The Fine Arts, Reduced to a Single Principle” (1746), which united poetry, painting, eloquence, sculpture, on the basis of “imitation of beautiful nature,” which was fully consistent with the principles classicism. There is eloquence here, but there is no such type of art as decorative and applied art, which, starting from Hellenism and right up to Hegel, fell into the sphere of “mechanical” art and did not meet the criteria of the elegant. True, in mid. XVIII century English the esthetician Hom wrote that “park design has become one of the fine arts.” Concept of I. and. Kant developed in detail, dividing the so-called. aesthetic arts (having as their goal to give pleasure) to those that exist for pleasure as such, for a pleasant pastime (jokes, laughter, table setting, table music, funny things, games), and to I. and. , which promote “the culture of the soul’s abilities for communication between people.” He believed that, unlike crafts, the subject of I.. and. must appear free from "all coercion of arbitrary rules" and can perfectly describe things "which in nature are ugly or disgusting"; subject I. and. commensurate with the plan and makes it possible not to infringe on the freedom of its flight. According to Kant, there are three types of speech: 1) verbal art (eloquence, poetry); 2) fine art (plastics, consisting of sculpture and architecture, painting, which means not only the depiction of nature, but also the art of an elegant arrangement of natural products or decorative plant growing, as well as interior and human decoration; 3) art -games of sensations (music, art of beauty). Hegel, who excluded history and history from the sphere. pl. applied types, nevertheless, included not only sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but also architecture. In the second half of the 19th century. concept "I. And." sometimes it is extremely narrowed (plastic, visual arts), sometimes it expands relatively, including “fine literature” and choreography. music, the problem of decorative and applied arts as fine art is debated. To overcome the usual view of decorative and applied art as “inferior” in relation to the sphere of art and art. Morris W. did a lot in England, Semper in Germany, and Chernyshevsky in Russia. In the 20th century sphere of art activities are expanding due to the arts. photography (Photo art), film and television art, folk art, new spectacular performances, etc. Some researchers therefore believe that the artist. the life of modern times is unlike the classical existence of I. and -, which means that this concept is becoming outdated (Tatarkevich). At the same time, academies of artificial intelligence continue to exist all over the world. And where they lose their specificity, the danger of depreciation of high art and erosion of art increases. values ​​in the world of surrounding comfortable things and technical products.

Aesthetics: Dictionary. - M.: Politizdat. Under general ed. A. A. Belyaeva. 1989 .

See what “FINE ARTS” is in other dictionaries:

Fine arts- (French les beaux arts, German feine Künste or schöne Künste) is a general term for art forms such as painting, sculpture, architecture and music. It was first assigned by Charles Bateau in the second half of the 18th century to the genres and... ... Wikipedia

Fine arts- a name usually applied to the figurative arts of painting, sculpture and architecture; in the latter, the technical or construction part itself has a necessary scientific and practical addition. See corresponding words … Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Ephron

FINE ARTS- arts ensemble. In a narrower sense, the term defines fine arts: painting and sculpture; but in reality extends to music, choreography and even poetry... Eurasian wisdom from A to Z. Explanatory dictionary

FINE ARTS- arts ensemble. In a narrower sense, the term defines fine arts: painting and sculpture; but in reality extends to music, choreography and even poetry. See Art... Philosophical Dictionary

fine arts- outdated General name for the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music) ... Dictionary of many expressions

Liberal Arts- Philosophy and the seven liberal arts. Miniature from the book of Gerrada of Landsberg “Hortus Deliciarum” (1167 1185). The Seven Liberal Arts (septem artes liberales), liberal arts (artes liberales), or liberal sciences (doctrinae liberales), or ... Wikipedia

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Books

• Exhibition of contemporary Japanese applied art. Catalog, . The publication is a catalog of the Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Applied Art, held in the USSR in August 1957. The publication is preceded by an essay by Okada Jio “On Japanese Applied...

fine arts

Fine arts (French: les beaux arts, German: feine Künste or schöne Künste) is a general term for art forms such as painting, sculpture, architecture and music. It was first assigned by Charles Bateau in the second half of the 18th century to genres and types of art that, from an aesthetic point of view, were focused on creating beauty, in contrast to the decorative and applied arts. Traditionally, this concept is contrasted with the so-called: mechanical art, pleasant art and...

The Academy of Fine Arts (Italian: accademia di belle arti) is a scientific and educational institution with the aim of developing the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music).

The National Higher School of Fine Arts (French: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) is an art school, also known as Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, founded in Paris directly opposite the Louvre in 1671 on the initiative of Colbert. During the Revolution, it was expanded by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, established in 1648 at the request of Lebrun. It was considered a citadel of French classicism.

Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education "Academy of Watercolor and Fine Arts of Sergei Andriyaka" with the Museum and Exhibition Complex - opened from September 12, 2012 at the address: Academician Vargi Street, 15.

Pontifical Academy of Letters and Fine Arts, full name - Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Literature of Virtuosi under the Pantheon (Italian: Pontificia Insigne Accademia di Belle Arti e Letteratura dei Virtuosi al Pantheon) is the oldest papal academy, founded in 1542.

Western European aesthetics of the twentieth century. Collection of translations. Vol. 2. About the spirituality of art. M., 1991. P.35-46

What does it mean to philosophize about art? [...] It is natural that in his declining years, overwhelmed with the pleasure of art, a philosopher would wonder about its source. What is art? The answer is easy to find. Literature, music, painting, sculpture, arts of all kinds lavished their works. Those of them that were not created in our time were literally dug out of the ground by the labors of historians and archaeologists in order to appear before his eyes. Researchers deciphered and revived Gilgamesh for him, brought to light statues of Egypt and Greece, returned the voices of countless musicians whose works slept like incomprehensible gibberish in old sacristies and never-visited libraries. The philosopher limited himself to enjoying this world of forgotten works, as well as those whose birth he had the good fortune to witness. Art owes him nothing. He will die without enriching the earth with a single object capable of increasing beauty. Performing his only function - to understand and make others understand, he can only wonder about the source of so many joys, beneficial and noble, the nature of which eludes him. It is his responsibility to do this for himself and for others. This is his personal responsibility; as a philosopher, he cannot escape this.

[...] The confusion that reigns in the philosophy of art, which treats the problems of the creation and nature of works of art, is found in the field of aesthetics, designed to understand them. First of all, the second problem is confused with the first one, which is different from it. Then the object itself is defined in different ways, since it happens that in art itself, consisting of a large number of different elements competing in achieving the final results, we take as the basis of the work what is directly accessible to us in it. A truly beautiful work can first be liked by the fact that there is little in it. The proposed accessibility is welcomed. Examples of this will be abundant in the course of our research. For now, in relation to this fact, we will touch upon the reason that is most common to it: everything that art uses for its own purposes and includes in its works constitutes to a certain extent a part of art itself and is ignored by it. Indeed, without this kind of elements there would be no work itself and, due to the lack of substance necessary to saturate its form, art would be doomed to sterility.

The reason for the main confusion in the philosophy of art, as well as in aesthetics, lies in the substitution of the point of view of the perceiver for the point of view of the artist. This mistake leads to a confusion of the problem of the quality of the created, which arises in the perceiver, with the problems that the creator must first resolve in order to create the work, although for the most part, one might even say always, they are deeply different.

In this conflict, the point of view of the perceiver of art inevitably prevails over the point of view of the artist... The public is for him the majority, and the only thing he expects from it is a judgment about his works; although the artist may consider her incompetent, it is a fact that he subordinates his works to her and hopes for her approval; It is pointless to reproach the public for making a judgment about what it is invited to read, listen or watch, and since it is given the right to do so, it has a huge advantage over the artist, practically limitless and in any case unrequited. The artist's task to do something is always associated with problems, while the viewer only evaluates the result. which is much easier. The traditional remark that one does not have to know how to make a chair to judge whether a chair is good is inappropriate. A good chair is a chair on which it is good to sit, which everyone can judge, but who can answer the question whether this chair is beautiful? Everyone will say whatever they think about it, and therefore the roles are not equal, since few can do it. but everyone can talk. First of all, it is highly natural for a person to talk about what he sees, hears or reads and to formulate for himself or for others the impressions that he receives and the thoughts that arise in him. Hence the ineradicable conviction, sometimes suppressed, but always revived, that art is essentially a language, an expression, a sign, a symbol, a brief transmission of a feeling that the artist must express and the viewer must understand. Art is even sometimes defined as a Dialogue with nature, as they say, with reality, at least if not with the public, or even the artist with himself. But these so-called dialogues are in reality the monologues of a critic, an esthetician or a philosopher, who himself poses questions and gives answers, never consulting either nature or the artist. Be that as it may, this is always essentially a verbal activity and since the only thing a non-artist can do in relation to art is to rant about it; It would be in vain to try to explain to a philosopher that art is not essentially a language. He has the right to think what he does not hope to convince others of, but his ambitions should not extend further.

Even in the depths of his own thoughts, the philosopher does not have the opportunity to act completely in his own way. The nature of the subject dictates the method. Since we are talking about the definition of the concept of art, there seems to be no other method other than traditional analysis, which comes from the separation of abstract concepts and sensory experience.

Philosophy of art must equally guard against attempts to become art and renounce the pretense of being art criticism. Both of these errors have a common source - the idea that everything that a person talks about with talent is said, in his opinion, competently, as if he created it. The philosopher is no more an art critic than the artist. Its task is to say what art is and what it does, and not to establish differences between successful and unsuccessful works of art. Accordingly, he cannot refuse to consider known forms of art under the pretext that they are too modern, or illusory, or even formally contradict the accepted traditional canons. Everything that corresponds to the definition of a work of art deserves the attention of a philosopher and can fuel his thoughts. His personal tastes cannot play any role in these studies. One may like or dislike certain concrete forms of literature, one may like or dislike the styles of modernist painting called “abstract”, but in no case should aesthetic judgments made about works of this genre interfere with the philosopher’s thoughts about the very nature of art, which rise above all particular considerations. This very transcendence, however, prohibits the philosopher from deriving from his conclusions any rules for aesthetic judgments about the quality of a particular work of art. No esthetician has ever succeeded in this kind of opus, and it is enough to read them to get rid of illusions to the contrary; we often admire what they have neglected, and often their admirations lead us to confusion. Every philosopher who studies art, returning to the question thirty years later, states how much the examples he cited bear the trace of the era and the prevailing tastes of that time. Today he would name other works of art and other artists. Only the great names that are generally admired remain more or less stable.

It does not follow from this that philosophical knowledge of the nature of art cannot in any way be used as a rule of judgment; it must be assumed that, accepted as a rule, it will provide only one criterion for judging what is and is not a work of art. And this is not small. It is especially important to be able, thanks to a small amount of fundamental certainties, to recognize in the depths of specific complexes, which are the works of artists, the pure grain of art, which includes them in works of fine art. But even so, it does not become possible to distinguish in a work what is in it the supporting material or filler - such as the educational, moralizing, edifying or simply commercial functions that it may, in addition, perform.

Is a general philosophy of art even possible? Nobody seems to doubt this. That is why so many writings about art have been and will continue to be published. There is nothing easier than to talk about art in general, because every assumption about art can itself be justified by an example borrowed from some kind of art. If what is said is not true for painting, it may be true for music or fiction. You have to be very unlucky in your assumption for it not to find confirmation in any form of art. But it happens for the same reason that what is justified by one type of art is denied by another. The existence of a general philosophy of art is possible only on the condition that only statements exclusively about art and, more precisely, about fine art are taken into account. Of course, it is impossible to talk about art in general without turning at all to its individual types, but it is important that issues related to art, and not to this art, are considered; within such a general approach it will be possible to examine how its conclusions are confirmed in each individual art form. But this will require a special approach, since its object will be specifically different.

Fine arts.

The difference between the beautiful in reality and the beautiful in art exists in itself. For the latter, it is essential that an object that is pleasant to perceive is felt as the work of a person, an artist. This is indisputable, because a completely successful forgery would seem to the viewer to be an object or phenomenon of reality; he would experience the pleasure and admiration that a beautiful flower, a beautiful animal or a beautiful landscape gives us, and not the specifically different pleasure evoked in the reader, viewer or listener by a work of art as such. Behind a work of art you can always feel the presence of the person who created it. This is what will give the aesthetic experience its intensely human character, since a work of art inevitably brings a person into communication with other people. Virgil, Vermeer of Delft, Monteverdi and even those whose names are unknown to us are eternally present to us in their works, and we feel this presence. It manifests itself in the fact that artistic experience is associated with the feelings that it arouses in us. No human presence is felt in nature; only his tragic absence is felt, which, as we know, de Vigny expressed with such fury in his curses, and if a presence is felt in her, it can only be the presence of God.

There is no point in declaring that God is an artist, since he is one to the extent that being is perfect, but his being is only a distant analogy of ours. God creates natural beauty by creating nature, but it is not the purpose of nature to be beautiful, and God will not create objects whose ultimate purpose is to be beautiful. God does not create paintings, symphonies, and even Psalms—these are Psalms not of God, but of David. Just as God creates nature into being and gives it the opportunity to follow its own processes, so God creates artists and leaves it to their share to replenish nature by creating works of art. Art testifies to the presence of God, just like nature, but just as the subject of the philosophy of natural science is nature, and not God, so the philosophy of art relates directly not to God, but to art. Therefore, for the beauty of art, our sense of the artist, of the person, is so necessary, since art is an extremely human thing. God has no hands.

All works of art are material objects that arise as a result of sensory perception. What is true of music is also true of poetry, which is the music of articulate language. This is even more true of the so-called plastic arts, whose works mainly appeal to sight and touch. Therefore, to explain the genesis of the works created by artists, it will be futile to try to create a philosophy of art that addresses exclusively intellectual processes. The very structure and substance of works includes the relationship of the sensual with sensitivity and affect, providing them with the desired effect on the reader, listener or viewer. Every artist who wants to be liked must master the skill of using material resources, which he uses to create works that are pleasant to the eye and arouse the desire to repeat it. The enemies of sensitivity are sometimes those who lack it. They are worthy of regret, since the joys of art are inaccessible to them, and at the same time, reliable consolation from many sorrows. Through art, matter enters in advance into that state of triumph, into that spirituality that theologians predict for it with the end of the world. A universe in which all the functions of existence will be reduced to beauty, a beautiful thing. And there is no need for those for whom such a concept is meaningless to prevent others from dreaming of the world that is promised to them and from tasting its first fruits. Only fine art can deliver them.

The second general conclusion from this fact is the deep and essential relativity in the perception of beauty. To a certain extent, the ontology of art lays the foundation of aesthetics here. There is nothing more objective than the beauty of an object, which pleases the eye, but nothing is more changeable and fickle than the views to which it is offered.

(...) One must be able to listen to the singing of bells, to hear the harmonious world contained in the buzzing of an insect, in order to sensibly judge what art is for those who create it. We know that we are not capable of writing music like Mozart or paintings like Delacroix, but it is already very good to be able to listen to music and see paintings, as Mozart and Delacroix heard and saw them. We can envy Racine's pleasure in reading Sophocles, not because he understood him - this was accessible to any Hellenist, but because of the supreme poetic quality of the pleasure he received. One must have great modesty in order to engage with great works. Like the natural world, the art world is aristocratic: everyone must take his place there, since access to it can only be democratized to a certain extent, and its democratization will be its destruction.

Religious art.

There is no necessary connection between religion and art. In fact, it always exists, because the subject of religion is a person, and when he has to do something, for example, create a cult, there will always be people who will do it through the means of art. However, it is noteworthy that art is given the right to serve only under the condition that penetration into the realm of the religious, or, more precisely, the divine, is prohibited. (...) The reason for this mistrust is simple. Spiritual religions fear paganism and the idolatry that too often accompanies it. Naturally, the conflict between beauty and the sacred, or art and religion, first took the form of a conflict between the cult of spirit and truth, on the one hand, and the art of the sculptor or painter who creates images, on the other. Jehovah himself went on the offensive by forbidding the Jewish people to create images, and the all too frequent relapses of his people into idolatry sufficiently explain this prohibition. This well-known fact is mentioned here in order to clarify the relationship between art and religion. The existence of religion without art should be possible, since art is sometimes excluded from religion.

It should be noted, however, that in such cases the representation of the divine, primarily in images, is excluded. This does not apply to art that is now called non-representational or abstract, nor to the art that Islam called arabesques. For the same reason, disputes in the field of religious art first took the form of disputes about “images” and the question of the legalization of art as a representation of the sacred came to the forefront of discussions. By taking sculpture and painting under its protection, the church first of all sought to legitimize respect for “images of saints” as a recognized means of Christian worship.

This problem was inevitable for Christianity. Incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, God became visible to people. Consequently, he became representative. The cross as an instrument of redemption required, so to speak, to be depicted. This principle was recognized very early in the history of the church, and when the iconoclasts attempted to suppress the cult of images as tainted by idolatry, the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicea was able to counter them as an argument irresistible to the Catholic Church, the existence of an established tradition. In 787, the Ecumenical Council approved the legality of various types of representations, provided that such representations - the image of the form of the saving cross, the images of God the Father, our savior Jesus Christ and his holy mother, angels and all holy persons worthy of respect - would use appropriate materials and paints. This permission extended to churches, vases and sacred ornaments, as well as to wall paintings and paintings in rooms and on roads. The meaning of this decision was to have an impact on subsequent times. Because “the respect shown to the image is transferred to its model, and whoever loves the image will love the reality depicted.”

As always, Thomas Aquinas was able to give a concise, clear and complete statement of the doctrine of the church on this delicate issue. Summing up the past and preparing the future, he succinctly set out his doctrine in his Commentary on the maxims of Pierre Lombard (III, 9, 2, 3): “There were three reasons for introducing imagery into the Church. The first is to teach the ignorant, because with its help they are taught how with the help of various books. The second is to promote better memorization of the sacraments of the incarnation and the examples of the saints, visually reproducing them every day. The third is to nourish feelings of piety, since visible objects excite it better than auditory ones." The doctrine of the church is completely and essentially contained in these lapidary formulations. It is a collective experience of incomparable breadth and at the same time a subject for philosophical reflection.

First of all, it is shocking that there is no question of art in it. Recommendatory or theological texts deal exclusively with the problem of images, whether pictorial, sculptural, or any other nature. Their beauty is not even mentioned. From this it would be a false conclusion that this question did not interest the Fathers, that they would have approved of ugliness if the opportunity had arisen to judge it; rather it must be thought that they would not approve of it, not so much as the opposite of beauty, but as harmful to the efficiency of the training required or to the piety that should be instilled. But if we are not talking about art or beauty, then a lot is said about representativeness and imagery of teaching. Imagery is clearly regarded as a language used by the illiterate (remember the Amiens Bible) and under all conditions as useful and beneficial to general piety. Therefore, they make a mistake when they drag religious art into the strife of abstract art, as if the choice depends on the artist, while he no longer even depends on the church. In religious art there has always been a significant element of the non-representational in the form of decorative art. By giving beauty orderliness, which itself serves religious purposes, decorativeness is associated with the achievement of these goals and is thereby legalized.

Another question is when, for some artistic reasons, it comes to replacing abstract art with representative art in all so-called religious, or sacred, art in general. It is surprising that today priests are taking this path, as if the church has not made the most firm decisions on this issue. The point is in no way about determining the higher or lower position of abstract or non-figurative art in relation to traditional art, which we inherited from the Greeks and the Renaissance, passing through the imagery of the Middle Ages. The Church requires imagery for the teaching and piety of the faithful. Imagery is an art whose purposes are representative and imitative, requiring from the artist intelligence, knowledge, technique and the gift of imagination and invention, infinitely variable. The combination of this gift with the art of painting or sculpture in order to achieve beauty is possible and can be realized in an infinite number of ways with an incalculable degree of differences in infinitely varied proportions. The meaning of the question is different. It is necessary to understand that all art that can be considered as religious, even Michelangelo’s Pieta, becomes so only by devoting itself to the service of educational-religious goals or piety included in this art . In this case, art is subordinated to goals that are not art’s own. It happens that the dignity of art rises from the consent to serve goals higher than its own. Being verifies truth, which precedes goodness, which, in turn, precedes beauty, and God is being. Art is ennobled. when placed in the service of God and religion; it is filled and enriched from there with true emotions of a higher order in comparison with the creation of substance solely in the name of beauty. This is a higher order, but also different. The beauty of a religious work, if it is truly beautiful, prevails over a clear and simple work of art ()

The global beauty of a work depends on the ends it serves and the means it uses to achieve it; its beauty as a work of art depends solely on the manner in which its own goal is achieved - to create a beautiful object, the right to existence of which lies in beauty itself.

A huge mass of religious imagery successfully fulfills the three functions intended by its form: to teach, to remind, to excite. Who would dare to assert that imagery gave them greater success the more beautiful it was? They would rather claim the opposite. The efforts of religious art to reach the level of purely plastic art tend to confuse the public by offering them an "object of art" instead of what is so well defined as an "object of piety."

The perception of a pictorial picture of religious works is, of course, not excluded, it is simply not the focus of attention; we are talking only about imagery, that is, the representation of what must be seen at least in the form of images due to the lack of opportunity to show reality.

This conclusion most obviously relates to the plastic arts, but it really applies to all types of art. For example, for music, which the church has always sought to reduce to a purely liturgical function and which, for its part, has continuously managed to cross these boundaries to the point of dangerously attacking the religious cult itself. There was often discussion about “how to bring music into its place, or religious music into the church.” It seems that there is only one answer to this question: religious music is a collective form of singing a prayer, the more simple it is, as in traditional church singing, the better it adapts to its inherent functions in a religious ensemble. The point is not to know whether the most beautiful church music is the so-called Gregorian chant. It has a beauty of its own, but it is a religious rather than an artistic beauty, since it was not written to create structures of sound that are in themselves pleasing to the ear and the repetition of which is in itself desirable. Music, strictly religious and strictly artistic, form two heterogeneous orders, which will be in vain compared and sadly mixed.

(Gilson E Introduction aux arts du beau. Paris, 1963)

Personalistic approach.

Personalism is close to neo-Thomism, however, it is more humanistic than neo-Thomism, assessing the essence of man, his role and place in life, in being. Formed at the end of the 19th century. in Russia, the philosophical direction of personalism became widespread in Western Europe and the USA in the 1930s. Personalist aesthetics was most fully developed in France. The head of the French personalists E. Mounier (1905-1950) considered personality as a “self-fulfilling entity” endowed with the highest spirituality. An individual is different from a personality, “closed in himself”, immersed in his own world of “I”. Only the individual can be fully realized and only, Mounier argued, by directing his efforts towards the transcendental

E. Mounier called for the moral renewal of man, criticized capitalism, fascism, colonialism, which suppressed the individual. Moral renewal should, according to the philosopher, lead to a “communal revolution”, which, by uniting “introduced” people, will contribute to their self-improvement.

The staff's evolving concept of personality is most clearly embodied in their aesthetics. The path of personality formation passes, according to personalists, through aesthetically colored activities. Poetic images should make discussions about time, body and spirit, biological and physiological “tangible.” Contemporary art does not provide these opportunities and therefore requires rethinking. This should be helped by the imagination, which art should “awaken.” Dreams can help awaken the imagination, but on the condition that they are directed not into the “bubbling abyss” of Freudian talk, but upward, into the “divine reality”, into the “cosmic abyss” located beyond the threshold of consciousness.

Personalistic normative principles of morality are religious in nature. The aesthetic consciousness of people, “reoriented” in a religious way, the “spirit of man,” is found, according to personalists, in the interval between the divine superreality and earthly reality. A person, as if breaking with his past, gains the opportunity to create his future, throwing a “divine spark” into the earthly.

Personalists resolutely reject the lack of spirituality of their contemporary artistic culture, but they see the positive direction of art not in the embodiment of human “earthly” ideals by artistic means, but in the aspiration to “divine super-reality.”

The aesthetic positions of the French personalists were consistently presented in his book “Introduction to Aesthetics” by M. Nédoncel. Personalist aesthetics, aimed at improving the individual, is built on the category of the heroic, but this category is interpreted from the religious-idealistic positions of “Christian humanism,” which includes both a humanistic idea (belief in human abilities) and elements of nationalism (glorification of a certain “French spirit” ") A significant place is given to the category of the tragic, understood as “the disintegration of the integrity of the divine and human.” Personalist aesthetics sees the way to recreate these broken ties in restoring the broken “filial knots” of a person with God. Accordingly, not only in art, but also in art criticism, the search for “Christian heroism” comes to the fore.

The most capacious definition of aesthetic was introduced then by A.F. Losev: “The aesthetic is the expression of one or another objectivity, given as a self-sufficient contemplative value and processed as a clot of socio-historical relations.”

One of the reasons for the widespread use of the category of aesthetic in the science of the twentieth century. There was an almost complete devaluation of the category of beauty, which in classical aesthetics was often identified with its subject or denoting one of its essential aspects. The dominance of avant-garde-modernist and postmodernist trends in the artistic and aesthetic culture of the twentieth century called into question the relevance of the very category of beauty in aesthetics. Among researchers, the idea formulated by one of the modern estheticians has become quite widely established: “The science of beauty is impossible today, because the place of beauty has been taken by new values, which Valery called shock values ​​- novelty, intensity, unusualness.” The compilers of the collection “No More Fine Arts” (Munich, 1968) argued that “the borderline phenomena of the aesthetic” in modern art are the absurd, ugly, painful, cruel, evil, obscene, base, disgusting, disgusting, repulsive, political, instructive , vulgar, boring, chilling, terrible, shocking. It is clear that in order to include such phenomena in the research field of aesthetics, if it still claimed to be a philosophy of art, some more abstract and generalized category was required to designate its subject.

Having spontaneously established itself in science, the category of aesthetic remains one of the most controversial problems of aesthetics, because its content - the subject of science itself - also still remains debatable. The following can be identified as one of the historically determined and most adequate meanings of the aesthetic today.

With the help of this category, a person’s special spiritual and material experience is designated (aesthetic experience - see below), which comes down to a specific system of non-utilitarian relationships between subject and object, as a result of which the subject receives spiritual pleasure (aesthetic pleasure, spiritual joy, achieves catharsis, a blissful state and so on.). The experience itself is either purely spiritual in nature - non-utilitarian contemplation of an object that has its existence, as a rule, outside the subject of contemplation, but in some contemplative and meditative practices (usually related to religious experience) - and inside the subject (“interior aesthetics” of monks); or – spiritual-material. In this case, we are talking about diverse practices of non-utilitarian expression - first of all, about the entire sphere of art, one of the main reasons for the historical emergence of which was the need for material actualization (realization, fixation, consolidation, visualization, procedural presentation, etc.) of aesthetic experience ; but also about non-utilitarian components or, more precisely, about the non-utilitarian aura inherent in any creative human activity in all spheres of life.

In the case of artistic and aesthetic expression, spiritual contemplation either precedes or, most often in artistic practice, proceeds synchronously with the creative process of creating an aesthetic object or work of art. The state that is experienced by the subject as “spiritual pleasure” is evidence of the reality of the contact between the subject and the object of the aesthetic relationship, the achievement by the subject of one of the highest levels of spiritual state, when the spirit of the subject, with the help of aesthetic spiritual-material experience, quite completely renounces the utilitarian sphere and soars into space pure spirituality, reaches (in an act of instant insight, catharsis) a state of essential merging with the Universe and its First Cause (and for a believer - with God, the Spirit), a breakthrough in the flow of time and at least an instantaneous exit into eternity, or more precisely, a sense of self involved in eternity and existence. Aesthetic, thus, means one of the most accessible to people and widespread in culture systems for introducing a person to the spiritual through optimal (i.e. creative) realization of oneself in the material world. Moreover, the aesthetic testifies to the complete essential harmony of man with the Universe despite the external, transitory, but well-felt conflict with it in everyday life, to the essential integrity of the Universe (and man in it as its organic component) in the unity of its spiritual and material foundations.

The remaining aesthetic categories are, as a rule, more specific modifications of the aesthetic. The sublime directly points to a person’s contact with the incommensurable cosmourgic fundamental principles of being, with “formless” primordial forms as the source of any forms; on the potential energy of being and life, on the transcendental prerequisites of consciousness. The beautiful testifies to the subject’s holistic perception of the ontological presentness of being in its optimal concrete sensory expression, to the adequacy of the meaning and the form that expresses it; and the ugly indicates that counterproductive sphere of the formless, which corresponds to the disintegration of form, the extinction of being and life, the descent of spiritual potential into nothingness.

The aesthetic, therefore, is neither ontological, nor epistemological, nor psychological, nor any other category other than the strictly aesthetic one, i.e. the main category of the science of aesthetics, which is not reducible to any of these disciplines, but uses their experience and developments for its own purposes. The concept of spiritual pleasure, which seems to form the basis of this definition, i.e. a purely psychological characteristic is not the essential basis of the aesthetic, but only the main indicator, signal, sign that an aesthetic attitude, aesthetic contact, an aesthetic event took place, took place.

From this descriptive definition of the aesthetic, the place and functions of the aesthetic in life and culture are already partly visible, and it becomes clear, among other things, how deeply and accurately some Russian religious thinkers of the past felt the essence of the aesthetic.

In particular, Konstantin Leontyev, how. we have seen, one of the few in his socially and positivistly sharpened time clearly realized that beauty, the aesthetic in nature and in art, is by no means mere appearance and additional or unnecessary decoration, but “a visible, outward expression of the innermost, innermost life of the spirit,” that it is aesthetics, and not morality or even religion, that is “the best measure for history and life,” and that the aesthetic criterion (for him, the aesthetic is traditionally identical with beauty) is the most universal characteristic of existence. Having experienced a strong spiritual and religious turning point, by the end of his life he came to a complete opposition between the aesthetic and the religious, realizing the aestheticism of culture as “elegant immorality,” to which he contrasted “the poetry of the Orthodox religion with all its rituals and with all the “adjustments” of its spirit.” While sympathetic to this tragic personality, one cannot help but be surprised by Leontyev’s strange understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the aesthetic. The entire history of Christianity, the entire Christian cult are closely intertwined with aesthetic, artistic, art and in no way deny the aesthetic in its essence. How such an interesting thinker and writer did not see this is difficult to understand. Another question is that Christianity has accepted in the history of culture and now accepts far from everything in the sphere of aesthetics and art, and some rigorists among monasticism actually denied almost the entire sphere of the sensually perceived aesthetic. However, , as we will see later, the strictest monastic rigorism in essence also relied on one of the forms of the aesthetic.

In a polemic with Leontyev, the largest Russian theologian and philosopher of the beginning of our century, Fr. Pavel Florensky. He designates it as “religious aestheticism,” using this concept exclusively in a positive sense and sharply delimiting his position from Leontief’s, it seems, without really delving into the latter in essence. What is important for us in this case is not this polemic itself, but Florensky’s position, which is most clearly formulated in it.

In one of his main theological works, “The Pillar and Statement of Truth” (1914), he wrote: “Thus, for K.N. Leontiev, “aesthetics” is the most general attribute; but, for the author of this book, it is the deepest. There beauty is just a shell, the outermost of the various “longitudinal" layers of existence; but here it is not one of many longitudinal layers, but a force that penetrates all layers across. There beauty is furthest from religion, and here it is most expressed in religion. There the understanding of life is atheistic or almost atheistic; here, God is the Supreme Beauty, through participation in Which everything becomes beautiful... Everything is beautiful in a person when he is turned to God, and everything is ugly when he is turned away from God. And whereas in Leontyev beauty is almost identified with Gehenna, with non-existence, with death, in this book beauty is Beauty and is understood as Life, as Creativity, as Reality." Once again emphasizing that Florensky’s understanding of Leontiev’s aesthetics seems to me inadequate, because their positions on this issue are much closer to each other than Fr. Pavel, I want to especially draw attention to Florensky’s deep insight into the essence of the aesthetic and especially to his wise understanding of the place of the aesthetic in culture.

Almost all of a person’s existence in culture, his activity in culture, and sometimes even in the broader context of existence, turn out to be permeated with aesthetic intuitions. It is clear that the quintessence of aesthetic relations is concentrated in the sphere of art, where the aesthetic functions in the form of art, artistry, and artistic form. What we call art today, i.e. a certain special activity (and its results), aimed primarily at the creation and expression of the aesthetic (or beauty, the beautiful, as modern European aesthetics was expressed) and which was realized only a few centuries ago under the guise of the fine arts (more details below in Chapter III “Art” ), has a long history, going back almost to the origins of culture itself, but it has not always been isolated from utilitarian-everyday or cult-religious activities as an independent and valuable species.

In the history of culture, art (in the new European understanding of this word, for in antiquity and the Middle Ages the arts were understood as almost all sciences and many crafts) appeared not only to express beauty or satisfy the aesthetic needs of man. They were primarily focused on sacred-cult actions and utilitarian-practical activities; on their implementation, but at the same time intuitively the emphasis was placed precisely on their aesthetic (artistic) essence. Already in ancient times they felt, and since the times of the Greek classics they understood that beauty, beauty, rhythm, imagery, etc., i.e. all the specific features of the artistic language of art gave people pleasure, elevated them to a certain higher level of existence and thereby facilitated this or that activity, attracted people to religious actions, rituals, developed in them a desire for something other than the ordinary, more sublime life. Without understanding the mechanism and specifics of the impact of aesthetic phenomena, people since ancient times empirically learned to use them well and effectively.

Ornamentation, music, dance, visual and verbal arts (eloquence, poetry), all kinds of shows (later theater), cosmetic arts have played a significant role in culture since ancient times (that is, in the cultures of almost all civilizations known to us). The meaning of this role, however, was often not adequately understood. It was often believed that the arts are a kind of optional, useless, but pleasant addition to serious (i.e. practical, pragmatic, utilitarian), “useful” affairs, something like honey, with which doctors in ancient times lubricated the edges of the cup from which They gave the children bitter medicine. Along with the sweet and useless, the bitter and useful is also easier to swallow. However, everyone knows that adults calmly drink bitter medicine (and not even just medicine) without honey, but without arts, not a single culture or civilization has yet been discovered in the history of mankind. This means, obviously, that without art, i.e. Without aesthetic phenomena and relationships, culture, and humanity as a whole, is not able to exist, which, as we remember, was well felt in Russia by K. Leontiev and clearly stated by P. Florensky.

In art, aesthetic consciousness is expressed in the most concentrated form, although when creating a work of art, artistry was not always the main goal of its creators or customers. Nevertheless, it was precisely thanks to it (and for it) that a work of art was valued, for only highly artistic works were objectively able to fulfill the functions intended for them by the culture itself (or expressed in it and through the Spirit) functions, only they were highly valued (as a rule, on the basis intuitive criteria) by contemporaries and only they ultimately entered the treasury of human culture, being true artistic and aesthetic phenomena.

The field of art in cultural history is vast and diverse. And it is reasonable to ask whether an ornament on some snuff box, a tattoo on the body of an African, the cosmetics of a society beauty, a light dance melody, frivolous scenes in the paintings of 18th-century artists. and the Orthodox icon have something in common and can be placed on the same level, at least on some level? Yes, they have and can be supplied. Under one condition, of course, that they are all true works of art, i.e. are works of art or aesthetic phenomena. In this case, they appear as exponents of a certain meaning, objects of non-utilitarian contemplation, and perhaps meditation, and provide spiritual pleasure to those who contemplate them. It is then that they are all aesthetic objects, perform their main function of spiritual contact and can only be put on the same level in this (aesthetic) plane. It is clear that the level of the aesthetic, the degree of contact and elevating a person to the spiritual spheres in all these and similar cases with works of art will be significantly different, but only quantitatively, not qualitatively; therefore, such a difference does not change the essence. The main thing in any real works of all types of art (regardless of the purpose for which they were created and what functions they were intended to perform in their culture at the time of their inclusion in it) is their artistic value, i.e. an aesthetic function with the help of which they performed other, usually utilitarian-applied or religious functions.

In connection with the above, the question quite naturally arises about the level of aesthetics in one form or another, genre, or specific work of art. This is a large and complex problem, which is not the place to go into detail here. In essence, we can only say that, as is clear from the very definition of the aesthetic, strict criteria for “measuring” the levels of the aesthetic do not exist and cannot exist in principle, because the aesthetic is a characteristic of the relationship between subject and object, and since the subjective component is fundamentally variable (all subjects of aesthetic perception or creativity differ from each other in a mass of parameters), then there cannot be an objective criterion for the aesthetic level. However, the order (in the mathematical sense of the word) of the aesthetic level of a particular work, type, genre of art can, with a greater or lesser degree of probability, be revealed on the basis of empirical and statistical research (for a certain culture, of course, i.e. for a certain group or class of subjects of perception) or intuitive views and judgments of professional aestheticians, art critics, artists themselves (however, in the latter group, intuitive criteria for assessing the level of artistry or aesthetic, although often quite high, are highly subjectivized and often have a narrow focus, and even tendentiousness in within the limits of their professional gifts).

For example, it is more or less obvious that for an artistically educated or simply artistically receptive person, i.e. possessing a fairly high aesthetic taste, a person of Orthodox culture, the level of aesthetics in highly artistic ancient Russian icons is much higher than in a painted spoon or in the painting of Leonardo, the sculpture of Michelangelo, etc. However, already for a modern aesthetically sensitive person (even an Orthodox one) a logical question may arise about the correlation of the levels of the aesthetic in the same medieval icon and, for example, in the painting of Titian or Kandinsky, the music of O. Messiaen, etc. And for an artistically gifted Chinese or a representative of Muslim culture, the level of aesthetics in calligraphy (for one - hieroglyphs, for another - Arabic script) will be significantly higher than in the same ancient Russian icon. And objectively, this is completely natural and reflects the specificity (and at the same time the difficulty of understanding it) of the aesthetic and its functioning in culture.

Art is the main, but far from the only carrier of the aesthetic in culture. It practically covers, to one degree or another, all its phenomena, and, moreover, the aesthetic principle permeates the entire civilization, i.e. accompanies virtually any human activity. First of all, we can point to the gaming principle as the most common for all spheres of culture. That real play has a close connection with the aesthetic seems obvious, for play is, first of all, non-utilitarian and gives pleasure to both its participants and its spectators. And we can assume that the game arose objectively from the need to satisfy a person’s aesthetic needs, although it was conceptualized in different ways for a long time. And even now, apparently, not all cultural experts will agree with me, but we will still have the opportunity to talk about this specifically.

Another thing is that the game, firstly, is not reduced only to an aesthetic function (in fact, nothing in culture is reduced exclusively to this function, with the exception, perhaps, of the decorative and jewelry arts), and secondly, different types of games have different levels of aesthetics. In a game, for example, there may be a fairly strong (although not always recognized as such) element of modeling the real behavior of people in certain situations, which contributes to the development of appropriate behavioral stereotypes and skills. Further, the most important component of the game is the competitive element, passion, the desire to win at any cost, i.e. a kind of specific utilitarianism, arousing the passions of rivalry, competition, etc., which also do not fit, of course, into the sphere of aesthetics. Nevertheless, the basis of the game is the aesthetic principle. Moreover, its range in various types of games is great (as in art, where, by the way, the game element also plays an important, and in some types, the main role) - from the most minimal and primitive, for example, in sports, golf, football, hockey to the sophisticated, refined, for example, in chess, games of thoughts and meanings in philosophy, modern verbal humanitarian practices or in the limit of imaginable games - the Glass Bead Game, created by the imagination of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Hermann Hesse.