Along with moral values, aesthetic values play an important role in our life orientations and actions. The word “aesthetics” itself comes from the Greek “asthetikos” - “feeling”, “sensual”, but in the modern sense it means not feelings in general, but those emotions that cause us extraordinary phenomena in life itself (beautiful and ugly, sublime and insignificant , tragic and comic), and their reflection in artistic images. Moreover, in the second case, if we really have a work of art in front of us, aesthetic experiences are often even stronger. We are extremely happy, we laugh uncontrollably, we cannot hide our indignation or our grief.
Defining the nature of values in general, we correlated them with socially significant utility. Such usefulness of moral values is obvious: the assimilation of these values and turning them into a habit allows us not only to adapt to the micro, macro and mega environments around us, but also to go through our own life path dignified, as befits a normal person. When it comes to aesthetic values, at first glance they seem completely incompatible with utility, and in order to refute this superficial impression, it is necessary to return to the problem of human nature and start from it in our reasoning.
Describing the generic essence of man, K. Marx wrote that “the animal produces only what it itself or its cub directly needs; it produces unilaterally, while man produces universally; it produces only under the power of immediate physical need, while man produces even when he is free from physical need, and in the true sense of the word only when he is free from it. Because of this, Marx emphasizes, man builds (produces) “also according to the laws of beauty” 1 . So, a person by nature is an artist, and therefore, along with a utilitarian, purely practical attitude, he has an aesthetic attitude to reality. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why our primitive ancestor, weighed down by the struggle for survival, not only built a dwelling, made shoes and clothes, ceramic dishes, but also framed them with a pleasant ornament, gave them a pleasing shape, painted in a soothing or - on the contrary - exciting color. He thereby satisfied his aesthetic needs, and beauty thereby realized its usefulness both for the producer of artistic values and for their consumer.
The main aesthetic values (and by the way, the main categories of aesthetics) are the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic and the comic. They are opposed by anti-values - the ugly, base (insignificant), etc. Of course, since aesthetic evaluation is of an axiological (value) nature, it always contains a fair amount of subjectivity associated with the individual and social experience of the perceiver, with his personal and social sympathies (including ideological ones), with the development of his aesthetic taste. Bad taste, as a rule, is not able to give a true aesthetic assessment and is ready to evaluate objectively ugly phenomena or works of art as beautiful; no less likely with bad taste is a reverse order error. Normal aesthetic perception presupposes an appropriate upbringing of a person - artistic and general cultural.
Beautiful is a characteristic of phenomena and objects from the point of view of their perfection. Beautiful Taj Mahal - an outstanding monument of medieval architecture in India, beautiful "The Seasons" by Tchaikovsky, beautiful snowy Elbrus against the blue sky. On what basis does all this have the highest aesthetic value for us? Beauty in all the above examples is inseparable from harmony, that is, the unity of all that is diverse that is in these phenomena - the harmony of their sizes. individual elements, harmonies of colors, harmonies of sounds. The perception of beauty evokes in us various, but always positive emotions - joy, a feeling of selfless love, etc. But that's not all: each successive perception of the beautiful confirms (or refutes) our aesthetic ideals, in any case enriching them.
Sublime there is a characteristic of phenomena that go beyond the usual human measure: they have a gigantic scale and colossal power, and society (not to mention the individual) cannot immediately master them either epistemologically or practically. Lofty is the love of Romeo and Juliet, lofty is the power of volcanoes and typhoons, lofty are the figures of outstanding fighters for the freedom of their peoples. Unlike the perception of the beautiful, the perception of the sublime can cause contradictory and diametrically opposite emotions. In some cases, the superiority of a sublime object (for example, the forces of nature) over me suppresses me, causes a feeling of fear; in others - there is a delight and a desire to imitate the attractive that is in the sublime. We also note that the feeling of fear ultimately also plays a positive role, because, as a rule, it encourages a person to find in himself hitherto hidden opportunities for mastering a frightening phenomenon.
tragic there is a characteristic of the most acute life situations and contradictions - public and personal. In its concrete expression, the tragic is associated with the suffering and death of a person, but not of any person, but of a struggling, sublime and beautiful person. It can hardly be called a tragedy those terrible sacrifices that accompany the struggle for mastery of things and money. “Tragedy,” Gorky wrote, “is too high for a world where almost all “suffering” arises in the struggle for ownership of a person, of things ... Tragedy completely excludes the vulgarity inherent in petty, petty-bourgeois dramas that so abundantly stain life" 1 . tragic hero sets itself rather lofty goals that are very significant for society, regardless of whether it is about moral perfection, achieving political freedom or mastering the forces of nature. In tragedy, the social meaning of human life is revealed to us, and tragedy itself educates and strengthens historical optimism in us: after all, only through struggle can a better future be achieved.
comic there is a characteristic of phenomena that by their nature are capable of causing laughter. Sarcasm and irony evoke in us ugly and base phenomena (blatant social ailments; nonentities who imagine themselves to be geniuses and superhumans, etc.), we denote some imperfections of our own and our friends with mild humor. Ridiculous may be the inconsistency of the form with the content, an unexpected break in the usual course of events. The reaction to the comic contributes to the moral purification of a person. But the comic also has a more ambitious value in the social sense, the essence of which Marx once deciphered as follows: “History acts thoroughly and goes through many phases when it takes an outdated form of life to the grave. The last phase of the world-historical form is its comedy... Why is the course of history like this? This is necessary for humanity funny parted with their past” 2 .
Aesthetic values are not just side by side in relation to each other - they are organically interconnected, interpenetrate and often grow into one another. The beautiful can simultaneously appear before us as sublime, and at the same time often as tragic. The tragic is often intertwined with the comic. Such, for example, is the image of Don Quixote by Cervantes: tragic, because he suffers in the name of protecting the disadvantaged, and at the same time comical, because he reveals complete helplessness and naivety in understanding reality.
There is a unity not only of the aesthetic categories themselves, but also their unity with moral and cognitive values. As Aristotle noted, art, while satisfying our aesthetic needs, at the same time ennobles a person through catharsis - the moral purification of the individual. The aesthetic is also connected with the cognitive, and not only in the system of functions of art: a socially significant truth found by science is beautiful, if it opens up grandiose prospects, then it is also sublime. In the science of science and in epistemology, beauty acts as one of the criteria of truth, that is, from two theories of the same order, coinciding in the conclusions of theories, preference is given to the one that is distinguished by the beauty and harmony of evidence.
Along with moral values, aesthetic values play an important role in a person's life orientation. The very word "aesthetics" in Greek means feeling, sensual, but in the modern sense it means not feelings in general, but emotions that cause in a person certain phenomena of the surrounding reality. Aesthetics is a science that studies general principles figurative comprehension of the world by man, primarily in art.
For many centuries, aesthetic problems have been studied within the framework of one or another philosophical direction. Aesthetics began its history from antiquity, then during the Middle Ages it was influenced by theology, in the Renaissance aesthetics received a new sound due to the expansion of artistic practice and art in general. As an independent field of scientific knowledge, aesthetics arose in the 18th century. The main categories of aesthetics are: beautiful - ugly, sublime - base, tragic - comic.
The central category of aesthetics has long been considered the category beautiful. The beautiful characterizes phenomena that have the highest aesthetic value. It is associated with a certain sensual form and has a disinterested character. The value of the beautiful for a person and society is of a spiritual and practical nature, it merges personal and social interests. A person realizes himself involved in the social significance of the beautiful, thus, the aesthetic attitude also has an ethical aspect, which corresponds to the unity of aesthetic and moral values.
The perception of beauty always evokes only positive emotions in a person. Each successive such perception confirms (or refutes) aesthetic ideals, enriching them in any case.
Sublime- this is an aesthetic category, which is characterized by the internal significance of objects and phenomena that are disproportionate in their ideal content with the real forms of their expression (the love of Romeo and Juliet). The sublime reveals the duality of a person, it suppresses him as a physical being, forcing him to realize his finiteness and limitations, but, at the same time, elevates him as a spiritual entity, awakening in him the ideas of reason, awareness of moral superiority even over his overwhelming nature.
comic there is a characteristic of phenomena that by their nature are capable of causing laughter. Ridiculous may be the inconsistency of the form with the content, an unexpected break in the usual course of events. The reaction to the comic contributes to the moral purification of a person.
The beautiful, the sublime and the comic reflect the objective states of a person.
The category in which the social and spiritual essence of a person is expressed is an aesthetic ideal. It exists as a historically specific image of the modern life of man and nature. It should be noted that various spheres of public life play an important role in the formation of the aesthetic ideal: economic, political, religious and others.
The creative ability of a person is reflected in the categories "art" and "artistic image". The artistic image reflects objective reality through the use of the laws of art. It can be both a concrete-sensual and a generalized reflection of an object of art.
Art arises on the basis of the appearance of aesthetic feelings, an aesthetic attitude to the world in ancient man. Note that aesthetic feelings were the ultimate generalization of practical values - useful, durable, good. Things that did not carry utilitarian value also acquired an abstract aesthetic value, and, thus, all spheres of human life were mastered.
Art served as a means of emphasizing the social significance of ongoing events, which were revealed through the means of artistic expression: song, dance, music, painting, etc.
It should be noted that in art the communicative aspect is especially clearly distinguished, uniting people, contributing to their awareness of their unity, their common strength.
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Philosophy
Approved academic council University as a teaching aid for 2nd year students of full-time education of specialties 150
Statement of the problem of being in philosophy
The concept of "being" is a fundamental category of philosophy. The branch of philosophy that studies the problem of being is called ontology, which includes questions of the origin
The idea of the essence of being in the history of philosophy
In antiquity, being was understood as the so-called cash being, that is, the world(nature, things, people), the real process of life, existing in a general, abstract sense in the form of a receptacle
The idea of the essence of man in the history of philosophy
In the philosophical system ancient east, in particular China, a person is considered inextricably linked with society. The most important meaning of his life is to follow the laws of the relationship between people.
Biological and social in man
The emergence of man, his consciousness and thinking would be impossible without the anatomical and morphological changes that prepared these innovations. Unlike animals, which sometimes have
Structure and typology of personality
Each personality has a certain structure, the elements of which are consciousness, self-awareness, cognitive processes, emotions, will, temperament, intuition, values, beliefs, ideals.
Personality and society
Starting a discussion about the relationship between the individual and society, one must keep in mind that historically there have always been specific societies with specific types of personality, but in these specific
Basic concepts of understanding society
The study of society is accompanied by significant difficulties, due to the complexity of its system. Public life is quite dynamic and there are many factors that influence the course of historical development.
Society as a self-developing system
The systemic analysis of society has become the most complete methodologically. The main research in this area was outlined in the previous question. The essence of the systems approach is to consider
Society as a process
An important characteristic of society is its constant change. Therefore, the philosophical study of society is based on dialectics (the science of development), considering the social
Culture and its social functions
Today there are more than 500 definitions of culture. This is due to the fact that culture is multifaceted and covers all spheres of life of the individual and society. culture
Basic approaches to understanding values
Values are of great ideological significance. The main task of axiology - the philosophical doctrine of values - is to determine the nature, place, possibilities
Moral values and morality
The concept of "morality" can be considered in two ways; firstly, it is a set of rules and norms of human behavior that regulate the relationship of people between themselves and society; secondly, it
Diversity and Interrelation of Religious Values
Religion arose in the process of the historical formation of a person, society, culture and had a social basis in the form of economic and socio-psychological prerequisites.
Basic approaches and problems of consciousness
The problem of consciousness has always attracted the attention of philosophers. Cognition of consciousness faces a number of difficulties, since it is not directly given to a person, and the images that arise in the brain do not have
The emergence of consciousness and its essence
Living matter, which is the basis of life, after its origin continued to develop intensively in a progressive direction. The criteria for progress in this case were the complication of the organization
Consciousness and the unconscious
Consciousness is integral part psyche, the other part of it is the unconscious. The unconscious is a phenomenon, properties and states that influence
Cognition as a subject of philosophy
Cognition is an activity aimed at obtaining knowledge. As you know, the section of philosophical knowledge devoted to the problem of cognition is called epistemology. Gnoseology
The problem of truth in philosophy and science
The main goal of human cognitive activity is the achievement of true knowledge or truth. Truth is an adequate reflection of reality in the human mind.
Unscientific knowledge
Cognition is not limited to the sphere of science, knowledge in one form or another exists outside of it. The advent of scientific knowledge did not abolish or make other forms of knowledge useless. Complete department
Its historical evolution
In the philosophy of science, there is a generally accepted position that the stage of the formation of science was preceded by the stage of accumulation of prescientific, prerequisite knowledge. It includes the rational level of mythological
The structure of scientific knowledge and its dynamics
Scientific knowledge is a complex and unique system of procedures that changes according to its own laws. The structure of scientific knowledge includes: facts, concepts, hypotheses, theories, laws, methods,
Axiological problems of modern science
In the philosophy of science, there is a view of science as value-neutral, therefore, all scientific activity is indifferent to values, therefore value judgments in science may not concern itself.
Scientific forecasting and social progress
The future can be considered depending on the periods taken as the basis of the study. If they mean the concept of "foreseeable future", then this is the prospect of the next two or three decades, which
GOALS:
What does the study of basic aesthetic values mean for aesthetics? It is primarily to analyze the following grounds phenomena:
The first historically distinguished and then until the 20th century the main aesthetic value is beauty or beauty, for classical aesthetics these are synonyms. Beauty is, one might say, a value beloved for aesthetics, which is empirically manifested not only in the constant perception of life, admiring beauty, but also in the mythologization of this value by the consciousness as having a special power that brings harmony and bliss to life. C. Baudelaire, the famous poet of French symbolism, whose life was very bleak and rarely harmonious, in his poetry in the cycle "Flowers of Evil" creates "Hymn to Beauty" (1860), the finale of which is as follows:
Whether you are a child of heaven or a child of hell,
Whether you're a monster or a pure dream
You have an unknown, terrible joy!
You open the gates to the immensity.
Are you God or Satan? Are you an angel or a siren?
Is it all the same: only you, Queen Beauty,
You free the world from a painful captivity,
You send incense and sounds and colors!
F.M. Dostoevsky then we come across a firm conviction that beauty will save the world, although Dostoevsky understood the complexity and inconsistency of beauty.
On the other hand, in the history of art, in addition to mythological perception, we see the desire to rationally comprehend beauty, to give it a formula, an algorithm. For a certain time, this formula works, although then it becomes necessary to revise it. An absolute answer cannot be obtained in principle, because beauty is a value, which means that every culture and every nation has its own image and formula of beauty.
Paradox: beauty and beauty is something simple, immediately perceived, and at the same time, beauty is changeable and difficult to define.
The external reaction to beauty consists entirely of positive emotions of acceptance, delight. At the level of the object, this is due to the fact that beauty - the positive significance of the world for man. Any aesthetic value has the goal of harmonizing the world and man. Beauty has to do with its essence. Several categories can reveal the essence of the relationship from which beauty grows:
Let's consider the first class of prerequisites in the understanding of beauty - its objective subject-value bases. It's about about the specific dimension of the object. A person has psychic powers, with the help of which he perceives the form and meaning of the world, and those objects that are organically perceived are beautiful. Color, for example, is perceived by the eye within certain limits, infrared radiation- beyond the scope of normal human perception. In the same way, the feeling of heaviness does not correspond to the perception of beauty. For example, the contemplation of the pyramids of Egypt, in contrast to the Parthenon, which was erected in accordance with the peculiarities of visual perception. A certain inclination of the columns that make up the walls of the Parthenon removes the feeling of heaviness, and we feel like free people, like the Greeks of the classical period. In terms of information, content, beauty is the semantic openness of a thing, expressed in a clear form. Abracadabra cannot be beautiful.
But not all things proportionate to man are beautiful. The next class of prerequisites is the form.
There is no absolute formula for a perfect form. The aesthetic perfection of form for a person does not always coincide with formal correctness: a rectangle is more attractive than a square, although a square is a more perfect shape. This is because a person needs variety. The favorite ratio of artists is the proportion of the "golden section", which establishes the ideal ratio of parts of any form between themselves and the whole. The golden section is such a division of a segment into two parts, in which the larger part is related to the smaller one as the entire segment is related to the larger part. The mathematical expression of the golden ratio is the Fibonacci series. The principles of the golden section are widely used as the basis of composition in spatial arts - architecture and painting, and the term for this proportion was introduced by Leonardo da Vinci, who created his canvases based on it. Interestingly, in music, the system of consonances corresponds to this mathematical proportion.
The significance of the formal foundations of beauty is so great that humanity singles out the so-called formal beauty, which expresses the aesthetic value of forms in itself. Renaissance artists created treatises, where they represented accurate calculations proportions in which the beauty of the world is optimally represented. In the Italian Renaissance, this is the famous work of Piero della Francesca "On the Picturesque Perspective", in the northern Renaissance - Albrecht Durer's "On the Proportions of the Human Body".
But the beautiful and the beautiful are not identical in meaning: the beautiful emphasizes the perfection of the external form, the beautiful implies the unity of the external and internal form - the quality of the content. And here special categories arise that concretize the beauty of form. Graceful - the perfection of the design, expressing its lightness, harmony, "thinness". Graceful - the perfection of movement, aesthetic optimality of movement, special harmony, smoothness, which corresponds to the movement of a person and an animal, and not a robot, and means a vital background. Charming is the perfection of the material texture itself, the material from which the object is “made”. Beauty in this case is the snow-white skin, the blush of the girl, the pomp and density of the hairstyle. “Am I sweeter than everyone in the world, all blusher and whiter” - Pushkin has the queen’s every morning question to the mirror, after a rhetorical answer to which the queen confidently does the planned things. But form is not enough to determine the aesthetic beauty of perfection. The beautiful in nature is the vital meaning of nature, the most beautiful landscape is the landscape of the Motherland, the native nature is beautiful. Therefore, content-related prerequisites are important. The beautiful in a person is determined depending on the socially significant qualities of a person. It is no coincidence that the category of ancient aesthetics kalokagatiya - beautiful-kind. It is, therefore, about the humanity of the content, which is the basis of beauty (beautiful). And here amazing things happen: an outwardly imperfect form can be transformed, an unobtrusive appearance can become beautiful. For the romantic Hugo, human fullness is the main basis of Quasimodo's beauty. In Dostoevsky, Nastasya Filippovna has a magical appearance, which is combined with a bifurcated character, and therefore her beauty is not indisputable. For Tolstoy, the beauty of Marya Bolkonskaya is obvious, in whose eyes all the depth, cordiality and kindness of her soul shine, which is opposed only by the outwardly impeccable Helen Bezukhova. Moral qualities are the foundation human beauty: responsiveness, sensitivity, kindness, warmth of the soul. A person who is malicious, selfish, hostile towards his own kind cannot be beautiful. But when both external and internal perfection are combined, a person exclaims: stop for a moment, you are beautiful!
The experience of beauty, its subjective sign, is in exact accordance with its essence: a feeling of lightness, achieved freedom in relations with the world, the joy of finding harmony.
The sublime is often identified with beauty at its maximum concentration, but there are areas where the phenomenon is sublime, but not beautiful. There is an idea that the sublime is associated with large sizes. But here, too, there is a misconception: the sublime is not always manifested in quantity. For Rodin, for example, "Eternal Spring" - a small-sized sculpture represents the sublime, and the facts from the Guinness Book of Records, despite the numerical parameters that amaze the imagination, do not.
So the sublime is a matter of quality. The world of man is given by the radius of his own activity. Everything inside the circle has been mastered by man, but man is constantly overcoming the boundaries that he believes for himself, and he is not only closed, but also open in the world. A person enters a zone beyond the usual formal possibilities, a field that he does not know how to measure. This takes the breath away. The essence of the sublime is those relations with the world and aspects of reality that are incommensurable with normal human capabilities and needs, which are perceived as something immeasurable and infinite . Subjectively, this infinity can be formulated as incomprehensibility. The sublime is immeasurable, incommensurable with simple human capabilities and far exceeds them. A person's heart begins to beat faster when he meets the sublime.
It is possible to feel the sublime not so much in direct sensual contact as in the beautiful, but through the imagination, for the sublime is immeasurable. The sea, the ocean, what is impossible to exhaust - an example of such a force that challenges ordinary person and which man cannot relate to his strength. Mountains are perceived as sublime, because it is something not conquered, above us, it is sublime not only in space, but also in time: we are small, finite, the rocks are endless and this is breathtaking. The horizon, the starry sky, the abyss are always sublime, because they give rise to the image of infinity in our minds. Verticality, movement into the infinite heavenly world becomes the basis of our perception of the sublime. Human perception of the world is vertical as an ascent to value limits, ideals. Tyutchev:
“Blessed is he who visited this world in its fatal moments
He was called by the all-good as an interlocutor to the feast!
The soul rises when you understand the meaning of these events. But the second is the moral law, the difficult overcoming of the initial egoism makes a person sublime, elevates him. The heroic, as an act for the sake of humanity, is a kind of sublime.
Two concepts are important in defining the sublime: vertex(top manifestations of natural and social being), noticed sensually(the embodiment of the vertical, for example, religious buildings). Man cannot live without absolute values that act as ultimate goals and ultimate criteria of value for a person. These absolutes, of course, go beyond the usual repetitive everyday existence, they are not derived from it, these are values for the existence of which there are no human prerequisites.
In the beautiful, a person measures the surrounding world by himself, and in the sublime, a person measures himself by the absolutes of the surrounding world, which are the antipode of everything relative, they are irrelevant. The sublime is the absolute in the relative world. There are such absolutes within human existence, where the beautiful and the sublime coincide, for example, this is the truth. There is no limit to truth and the pursuit of truth, freedom too. Love is also boundless, it requires the fullness of self-giving, the fullness of living. But the endless affection of the old-world landowners in Gogol is an expression of the beautiful, and love in Rodin is sublime. And yet there are phenomena far from the ethically absolute. In Pushkin's "Feast in the Time of Plague" from "Little Tragedies", presiding over the banquet during the plague, proclaims the hymn to the plague:
So, thank you, Plague!
We are not afraid of the darkness of the grave,
We will not be confused by your calling.
We sing glasses together,
And the rose-maidens drink the breath -
Perhaps ... full of the Plague.
A person challenges the plague that destroys everyone, opposing this disaster with his spiritual strength, capable of overcoming fear of the oncoming plague. The sublime embodies the inner growth of man. In the beautiful, a joyful agreement with the world is embodied; in the sublime, we feel inner infinity, immortality, participation in which gives the sublime.
Beautiful - homogeneity, harmony, consistency, experienced emotionally. The sublime embodies a psychological contradiction that must be resolved by spiritual effort. Enormous forces and new horizons are opened up by man as a result of the application of these forces. If fear wins, there is a paralysis of the will, and an inability to act.
In aesthetic consciousness, the positive principle wins in the internal struggle, we fly up, we soar above the earth, and begin to experience a high excitement of the soul, in which we feel our immortality through a breakthrough into infinity. The pinnacle of the perception of the sublime is communion with heaven and a sense of coincidence with the infinite.
But the beautiful and the sublime are equally necessary and complement each other. A person needs two worlds - home, reproducing stable and necessary connections with the world, and heavenly, affirming immensity, enticing and elevating him.
Aesthetics since the time of Aristotle has dealt with the tragic. Aristotle, in the Poetics that has come down to us in fragments, reflects on tragedy.
Let us immediately divide: one should not confuse the tragic in everyday usage, the tragic in life and aesthetics. It is necessary to determine, considering the aesthetic tragic, the content, on the one hand, and its form of development. In the tragic, this form has a special meaning. For in this form only the aesthetic effect of the tragic is born.
Not all troubles and losses are tragic. There are situations in life when there is no death, but there is - tragic. Chekhov in the plays "Uncle Vanya", " The Cherry Orchard"- a tragedy, although Chekhov called them comedies. And not every death is tragic. Death may not be tragic if: 1) it is the death of an outsider, 2) it is natural, it is the death of an elderly person. The content of the tragic is more complex: loss as a direct reality of the tragic is only on the surface.
In the beautiful and sublime we find peace, in the tragic there is a loss human values, and it can be material values. But not every loss is tragic and not all tears are tragic. The tragedy itself determines the scale of the values that we lose. In Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Barbarina sings an arioso about the loss of a pin. The music sparkles with false tears of loss. But the peaks of world opera are tragedies: Otello, Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, La traviata, Aida by Verdi; "Ring of the Nibelungs", "Tristan and Isolde" by Wagner are the best tragic operas. Thus, at the heart of the tragic loss of fundamentally significant values for a person.
The loss of such values is a breakdown, a breakdown of human existence in its most intimate qualities, and it is impossible to survive such losses. What are these values?
1. Loss of the Motherland. Chaliapin in exile for the rest of his life wears an amulet with his native land on his chest. This is the spiritual and vital value of the beloved space.
2. Loss of one's business, and in essence, life. A cause without which a person cannot live, and therefore this is an irreparable loss. Life must be started all over again (a singer who has lost his voice, an artist who has lost his sight, a composer who has lost his hearing). The tragedy of the impossibility of creativity, which for the artist is life.
3. Loss of truth - a value without which people cannot live either. Life in a lie is unbearable for a person, we lie all the time, but the moment of truth comes!
Kindness, a clear conscience - values of the same plan. A conscience that torments a person, punishes him, makes a person feel like an executioner. Boris Godunov is a sick conscience that begins to torment him, and life stops, breaks down. There is a breakdown of life at the moment of loss of values. For Raskolnikov, retribution follows not in the form of condemnation and exile to hard labor, but in the fact that he does not find a place for himself, turns out to be an outcast among other people. Man prefers death to trample on the moral foundations of life. V. Bykov: Rybak and Sotnikov. The fisherman compromises from the first minute, Sotnikov remains a moral being, going to the gallows, looking at the world with a smile. Tragedy optimism: a person freely chooses his moral essence, life after that turns out to be impossible. The tragedy of love is that a person who has found love can no longer exist without it, cannot live without a loved one. Freedom - a person is free in essence, the loss of freedom is a colossal tragedy. All this together can be summarized in one more value - the meaning of life. Where it does not exist, life is absurd. According to A. Camus, the world is devoid of meaning for a person and, therefore, the main question of life is the question of suicide.
The meaning of life is that last, intimate thing that connects us with being. Then, when it is, it is worth living. The situation of the loss of opportunities to communicate with another person is also the loss of the meaning of life, which is accurately expressed in the films of M. Antonioni.
This is the first layer of the tragic - the loss. But what is important is the inevitable, regular nature, the hidden essence of these losses. When the loss is accidental, there is no tragedy. The Greeks - fate, fate embody precisely the inevitability of loss. Why is it so? A person tries to gain experience from the life in which he lives. Randomness is something in which it is impossible to navigate and what is impossible to predict. In the tragic for a person, the truth of life is revealed, and this is what we inevitably not only discover, but also lose. Through the tragic, we become on a par with the deep laws of being. Randomness is variable, regularity is stable. Tragic leads to the loss of the most precious thing we have. Why is Oedipus Rex a tragedy? Oedipus killed his father and married his own mother, and thereby violated two basic laws of life, two values that hold the archaic cosmos of antiquity; commits the murder of a relative and incest, and then other patterns begin to operate. Here we see not only the objective content, but get to the bottom of the essence, comprehend the truth, experience and overcome the conflict. This tragedy has always excited the audience.
The art of tragedy as a genre is different from melodrama: melodrama - everything is accidental, all events are reversible (replaceable), the triumph of villains is temporary, tragedy - there is nothing accidental, everything is natural, death is inevitable. From melodrama we get little spiritually, tragedy is a deep experience. A. Bonnard argued that crying with tragic tears means understanding, it cannot be otherwise - this is the truth that tragedy reveals to us. Throughout the history of mankind, symbolically meaningful fate passes. The whole tragedy is expressed in some symbols. Dostoevsky's tear of a child is an aesthetic symbol of tragedy.
Finally, in the tragic we comprehend cause of loss. Causes of the tragic: the contradictions of human existence, contradictions that cannot be peacefully resolved, they are also called antagonisms. As long as there are antagonisms in the world, the world will live in tragedy. And often antagonisms express the true essence of human relations, and if there are many of them, then tragic culture and tragic life. Van Gogh's painting is the embodiment of a tragic worldview, consciousness living in an insoluble antagonism, where life is the absence of the most essential values, life is the components of hope, meaning, love. Van Gogh loved people and had no recognition during his lifetime. "Night cafe in Arles" - an atmosphere in which a person can go crazy.
What antagonisms form the basis of the tragic? The first - man - nature: the eternal struggle of man with nature. A person enters into a struggle with such elements with which it is impossible to agree, and nature crushes a person.
Secondly, the antagonism of man with his own nature, and this antagonism cannot be eliminated: the infinity of the spiritual essence of man, the subjective immortality of man, which comes into irreconcilable contradictions with the human body, its mortality, biological limitations. Fear of death and desire to overcome death. The condition of a normal life is freedom from the fear of death, which must be gained by incredible spiritual efforts. Religious consciousness through the idea of the immortality of the soul helps the believer to get rid of this fear. Each person carries a tragic contradiction, and the life of each person is tragic.
Third, social antagonisms: the very dynamics of human life determine social antagonisms. The social world is built on irreconcilable contradictions: wars of peoples for territories, conflicts between classes, clans, groups, worldviews. The contradiction between society and the individual is every time an encroachment on the freedom of the individual. Sometimes this conflict takes on more banal forms, but it is no less tragic: the environment devours a person, burns him. But conflicts are inherent in the human personality itself, which is interpreted differently in different cultures. In the culture of classicism, where duty is a feeling, a social norm and a personal desire, Phaedra dies because she cannot fulfill her duty. A person needs to make a choice between two sides of his own personality: feeling is a duty, and this is infinitely difficult. Bertolucci "Last Tango in Paris" A person learns not only by analyzing patterns, but also by overcoming regular contradictions in practice. Fate and man opposed to fate is the very first confrontation in Greek tragedy. different degrees lack of freedom in relation to fate: people are originally toys in the hands of fate. Tragic guilt is a manifestation of the maximum freedom of a person in a tragic situation. Man, realizing the inevitability of his death, freely and responsibly chooses his death. Otherwise, it will be a rejection of your destiny. Carmen cannot be cunning, being free is more important to her than lying. Freedom and love are affirmed by Carmen by her death. She is to blame for her death, this is a tragic guilt. But she cannot give up either love or freedom.
Why do people need to recreate and perceive the tragic in art? This is a complex process, where the rational is connected with the emotional, the unconscious with the conscious. The logic of the perception of the tragic: begins with a plunge into the abyss of horror, fear, suffering. It is a shock, a darkness, almost a madness. Aristotle states: the experience of tragedy is in the unity of fear and compassion. Suddenly, light appears in the darkness: here a bright mind and good will are of tremendous importance in a person's life. At the level of experience, there is an almost mystical transition of weakness into strength, impasse into dawn. Darkness leaves the soul, we begin to experience a feeling that cannot be experienced. The Greeks called this transformation catharsis, the purification of the soul. For this there is tragedy.
Important moments of perception and experience of the tragic: in horror there is compassion, I become different, I rise to the suffering of another, I already rise in this. We rise, secondly, to the understanding of what is happening, and this is also a way out of the situation. We comprehend not only the inevitability of losses, but also the scale of them and the significance of those values that are lost. We want to love like Romeo and Juliet, etc. There is an initiation into fundamental values at the deepest level. These values compensate us for understanding the hopelessness of the situation. The pessimism of the mind gives rise to the optimism of the will, according to A. Gramsci. And this is the moment of the true exaltation of man: I insist on freedom, love. Truly human principles triumph in a person, do not give up their positions, continue life. Beethoven: life is a tragedy, hurrah! For the man himself, this is every time the affirmation of the man. Courage as an inner strength, loyalty to something, the will to live, the connection of a person with life, its values, is every time affirmed in the tragic. That is why the tragic is irremovable and necessary in normal human culture.
There are some elements of structural similarity between the tragic and the comic: in the comic, a certain contradiction is also the basis; in the tragic and comic - the loss of values, but in the comic - others. The generalized expression of the tragic is cleansing tears, the comic is laughter.
Often the comic is identified with the funny. But it is important to remember that the comic is not the same as laughter, laughter has different reasons. Laughter in the comic is a reaction to a certain content.
In a sense, the entire history of mankind is a history of laughter, but it is also a history of loss. Consider the comic: what is the comic, what are its functions and structure.
There is a need in society for the spiritual overcoming of what has lost its right to exist. In the world of human values, false values or pseudo-values, anti-values appear, which objectively act as an obstacle to the socio-cultural existence of a person. The comic is a way of reassessing values, an opportunity to separate the dead from the living and bury what has already become obsolete. But, the less a phenomenon has the right to exist, the more it claims to exist. The exposure of pseudo-value is achieved by a laughter reaction. Gogol: from the warnings to the actors for The Inspector General: the one who is not afraid of anything is afraid of ridicule.
Ancient cultures already had a mechanism for ritual laughter. The meaning of the comic is the humiliation and thus the reassessment of certain socially ranked values. It is no coincidence that before social upheavals there is an explosion of comic creativity. Laughter exposes outdated values and deprives them of reverence. The medieval carnival performed the function of doubting the value of royal power, the absoluteness of the establishment of the church, and this was a reserve for development. There is a mechanism of reversal of values, which contributes to a change in the proportions of world perception. In grotesque mockery, bodily prohibitions were removed, a feast of the flesh was performed, which contributed to its fearless reassessment. The origins of the Russian mat - in its carnival character. The use of this vocabulary as a norm in the current transitional and crisis period for Russia is at least inappropriate, or rather destructive in conditions where the old values have already been rejected, and the new ones have not yet taken place.
But in comedy, not everything comes down to negation. Along with the negation, a certain affirmation also takes place, namely, the freedom of the human spirit is affirmed. Laughing and playing, a person defends his freedom, the ability to overcome any boundaries. According to Marx: humanity, laughing, parted with its past. Comic is the affirmation of creative forces, novelty, ideals, because the denial of false values occurs when the positive principle dominates. But there can be scabrous laughter of a soulless person, without ideals, which means peeping through a keyhole, and laughter caused simply by the manifestation of corporality: vulgar anecdotes, and cynical laughter - over everything, including shrines, from the standpoint of denying everything and everything, and in relation to dear aspects of other people's lives.
Defining the structure of the comic, it should be noted that this is the only aesthetic value in which the subject acts not only as a recipient, receiver of information, in the comic the creative role of the subject himself is needed. In the comic, a certain distance is not needed, the subject must destroy it by putting on a comic mask, entering into a free play relationship with reality. When it turns out and there is a comic.
The comic occurs when there is some contradiction in the object. To make it funny, some anti-value must be manifested in the incongruity of the object. In aesthetics, this is called comic discrepancy. Initially, this is an internal mismatch in the object. In the light of the ideal, inconsistency becomes absurd, absurd, ridiculous, revealing. The condition of a comic relationship is the spiritual freedom of a person, then he is capable of ridicule.
Comic inconsistency is a form of comic existence, just like tragic conflict is a form of tragic being. . Hence the two interrelated abilities of the subject: wit- the ability to create comic inconsistency; connection of the unconnected (in the elderberry garden, and in Kyiv - the uncle; shoot sparrows from a cannon). Here - the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon, form and content, design and result. As a result, a certain paradox arises, exposing the strangeness of this phenomenon. The effect of the comic is always born according to the principle of metaphor, as in a children's joke: an elephant smeared himself in flour, looked at himself in the mirror and said: “This is a dumpling!”.
The second ability of the subject, which determines the edge of aesthetic taste, is the ability to intuitively feel a comic discrepancy and respond to it with laughter - humor. If you explain the joke, he loses everything. It is impossible to explain the comic; the comic is grasped immediately and entirely. essential feature- the intellectuality of the comic as the need for the manifestation of sharpness of mind; for fools, the comic does not exist, it is not defined by them. One of the common forms of revealing comic inconsistency, suggesting sharpness of mind, is the opposition between meaning and form of expression. In literature, for example, in Chekhov's " notebooks»: German - my husband is a great lover to go hunting; deacon in a letter to his wife in the village - I am sending you a pound of caviar to satisfy your physical needs. In the same place in Chekhov: the character is so undeveloped that it is hard to believe that he was at the university; a small, tiny schoolboy named Trachtenbauer.
Let us turn to modifications of the comic, and, first of all, these are modifications of an objective nature:
1. Pure or formal comedy. The sublime or the tragic cannot be formal. The beautiful, as we have seen, perhaps the form of the beautiful is valuable in itself. Formal comedy, devoid of the slightest critical content, is a play on words, a joke, a pun. In S. Mikhalkov's poem about the absent-minded hero: "Instead of a hat on the go, he put on a frying pan." Formal comedy is a paradox in pure form, an aesthetic game of the mind, which is the "technological" basis of subsequent forms of comedy. In this case, they laugh not at something, but along with something. On this basis, meaningful comedy arises.
2. Humor- one of the modifications of the meaningful comic, and not just a feeling. Humor is a comic aimed at a phenomenon that is positive in its essence: a phenomenon is so good that we do not seek to destroy it with laughter, but nothing can be perfect, and humor reveals some inconsistencies in this phenomenon. Humor - laughter is soft, kind, sympathetic at its core. It gives humanity to the phenomenon, and in relation to friends only humor is possible. An old anecdote from a series of God’s answers to the claims of those who ended up not in heaven after death, but in hell: to the request of the priest of the rural parish, who ended up in hell, instead of a reveler and drunkard, a local bus driver who ended up in paradise, to correct the injustice committed: the answer is everything rightly, because when you read a prayer in the temple, all your flock was asleep, when this drunkard and reveler drove his bus - all its passengers prayed to God!
3. Satire- this is an addition to humor, but it is aimed at phenomena that are negative in nature. Satire expresses an attitude towards a phenomenon that is in principle unacceptable to a person. Satirical laughter is harsh, evil, revealing, and destroying laughter. In art, satire and humor are inextricably linked, one imperceptibly passes into the other - as in the works of Ilf and Petrov, Hoffmann. When it comes to times of crisis and cruelty, the epochs of humor pass away, the times of satire become more acute.
4. Grotesque- comic inconsistency in fantastic form. Gogol's nose leaves the owner. The magnitude of vice, which is considered grotesque. At the heart of the grotesque is the hyperbole of vice and bringing it to a cosmic scale. The grotesque has two sides: the mocking side, the mocking side, and the playful side. Not only horror, but also delight cause the extremes of life.
irony and sarcasm- two more categories of the comic, subjective modifications, denoting a certain type of positions, features of the comic relationship. Irony is a comedy in which the subject is involved, but the meaning is veiled by the subject himself. There are two layers in irony - textual and subtextual. The subtext, as it were, denies the text, forming some contradictory unity with it. Irony also requires intelligence. Irony is a hidden comic, blasphemy under the guise of praise.
Pure comedy, humor, satire, grotesque - this is comic as it grows.
Sarcasm is the opposite of irony. This is an open emotional expression of attitude and indignant pathos, an angry intonation expressing an indignant protest position.
Summing up, it should be noted that the emergence of aesthetic values is deeply natural and necessary, they are internally connected with each other, they form a system that specifies a certain socio-cultural situation. Any aesthetic values are a transformed form of expression of a person and the world of his values. Our whole life is an attempt to create our own world and get satisfaction from its arrangement. But in reality it is multifaceted and is described, among other things, by the aesthetic values of the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the comic.
Beautiful- the situation of harmony of a person with his value world, the zone that is accessible to a person, the zone of freedom and proportionality.
Sublime- a fundamentally different turn of the existential circle - the struggle for new values, the desire to expand oneself spiritually, to assert oneself at a new level. But here a person comes to the verge of not only gaining and growing, but the inevitability of losing value, reducing the human world, and this is already a transition to another aesthetic value:
tragic, expressing the inevitability for a person of the loss of fundamental values, where the victory of life occurs, but in a limited area.
comic- the antipode of the tragic. We freely fight for new values, voluntarily renouncing the life-world. The comic is the great orderly of culture.
There are symbioses on the borders: sublimely beautiful (beautiful, going to infinity), tragicomic - comic in form, tragic in essence, laughter through tears (Don Quixote, Ch. Chaplin's heroes; imperfections of the external order do not coincide with imperfection in essence, a suffering person can be funny too).
These four values describe the cycle of a person in his value being. Aesthetic consciousness, not being rational in nature, preserves the orientation of a person in the essential situations of life, and in this ideological significance of aesthetic values.
Value - a concept that reflects, of course, the positive significance of any material object or phenomenon of the spiritual life of people (unconditional good). AT this concept the rational moment (realization of something as a benefit for a person or society) and the irrational moment (experiencing the meaning of an object or phenomenon as important, significant, striving for it) are connected. Value is for a person everything that has a certain significance for him, personal or social meaning (the significance of a person, the significance of things produced by a person, spiritual phenomena that are significant for a person and society). The quantitative characteristic of this sense is the assessment (significant, valuable, more valuable, less valuable), expressing the significance of something verbally. Evaluation forms a value attitude towards the world and oneself, leads to the value orientations of the individual. A mature personality is usually characterized by stable value orientations. Stable value orientations become norms. They determine the forms of behavior of members of a given society. The value attitude of the individual towards himself and the world is realized in emotions, will, determination, goal-setting, ideal creation. On the basis of human needs and social relations, people's interests arise, which directly determine a person's interest in something. Each person lives in a certain system of values, the objects and phenomena of which are designed to satisfy his needs. In a certain sense, we can say that value expresses the mode of existence of a person. The system of value orientations, which is formed under the influence of values, determines the spiritual structure of the personality and directly affects its development. The philosophical doctrine of values is called axiology. The main spiritual values of society are moral, religious and aesthetic values.
Aesthetic values are the values of the universal in the sphere of freedom. The main aesthetic values are:
- beautiful(reflects the highest aesthetic value, certainly aesthetically positive, significant for all people, symbolizing the perception of those phenomena, objects that humanity has already mastered and which cause only positive aesthetic emotions);
- sublime(reflects the perception of those objects, phenomena that go beyond the ordinary and that have a potential positive aesthetic significance for all people, but which humanity still does not freely own, therefore the emotions of the sublime are both positive and negative);
- tragic(reflects the death and, at the same time, the immortality of the beautiful, the emotion of the tragic combines grief and catharsis - spiritual purification and enlightenment, improving the inner world of the individual, concretization of the tragic - heroic);
- comic(reflects the denial of socially negative phenomena through laughter, the issuance of an aesthetic judgment on these phenomena, the creation of opportunities for aesthetic, spiritual improvement of society and the individual);
Positive aesthetic feelings of the individual (expand the humanistic horizon of a person, make him thinner, more perfect, more humane);
- aesthetic ideal(reflects the synthesis of aesthetic values, a generalized idea of the beautiful of a certain era and, at the same time, universal in the perception of beauty);
- masterpieces of world art, embodying the spiritual ups of the human spirit, human maxims of being;
- aesthetic, artistic creativity(an unconditional aesthetic value expressing the very essence of a person as an active-transforming being, changing the world and himself in the process of changing the world).
It should be noted that aesthetic values and inner world personality, and in public consciousness, and in the course of human history are closely interconnected with moral, religious values, or with an atheistic perception of reality. Their specific historical relationship forms the basis for the worldview of man and society.
Aesthetic values are the values of figurative comprehension of the world in the process of any human activity (primarily in art) based on the laws of beauty and perfection. The term "aesthetics" appeared in scientific use in the middle of the 18th century, although the doctrine of the beautiful, the laws of beauty and perfection is rooted in antiquity. Aesthetic attitude means special kind connection between the subject and the object, when, regardless of external practical interest, a person experiences deep spiritual pleasure from the contemplation of harmony and perfection. Allocate the objective content of aesthetic value and its subjective side, depending on the prevailing ideals of beauty, tastes, artistic styles.
Aesthetic values (like any others) are a synthesis of three basic values: material-objective, psychological, social. The material-objective meaning includes the characteristics of the external properties of things and objects that act as an object of a value relationship. The second meaning characterizes the psychological qualities of a person as a subject of value relations. Social meaning indicates the relationship between people, thanks to which values acquire a universally significant character. The peculiarity of aesthetic values lies in the relation of a person to reality, characteristic of aesthetics. It implies a sensual-spiritual, disinterested perception of reality, which is aimed at comprehending and evaluating the inner essence of real objects.
It would be wrong to believe that the emergence of the concept of "aesthetic value" led to the emergence of a "chasm" between the aesthetic and the ethical. Raising the concept of value to the rank of a philosophical category, Hermann Lotze showed that the highest degree of aesthetic value is inseparable from moral and ethical. The aesthetic value of unity and diversity, consistency and contrast, tension and relaxation, anticipation and surprise, identity and opposition does not lie in itself. And if complexity, tension and relaxation, if surprise and contrast have an aesthetic value, then this value is based on the fact that all these forms of relations and phenomena are necessary elements in the order of the world, which in their interconnection must create the inevitable formal conditions for the comprehensive implementation of good. .
All objects and phenomena of real and conceivable reality can have aesthetic values, although the values themselves do not have either a physical or mental nature. Their essence lies in significance, not facticity. Since aesthetic values are subjective-objective in nature, that is, they indicate their correlation with a person, the presence of aesthetic value in these objects depends on what specific system of socio-historical relations they are included in. Therefore, aesthetic values have shaky boundaries and their content is always socio-historical. Based on the classification of aesthetic values developed by aesthetic science, its main type is the beautiful, which in turn appears in many specific variations (as graceful, grace, good looks, splendor, etc.); another kind of aesthetic value - the sublime - also has a number of variations (majestic, majestic, grandiose, etc.). Like all other positive values, the beautiful and the sublime are dialectically correlated with the corresponding negative values, “anti-values”, with the ugly (ugly) and base.
A special group of aesthetic values are tragic and comic, characterizing the value properties of various dramatic situations in the life of a person and society and figuratively modeled in art.
There is a certain subordination between the categories. For example, the beautiful and the sublime are categories that reflect the aesthetic properties of nature and man, while the tragic and comic are categories that reflect the objective processes of only social life.
Beautiful- the most significant and broadest aesthetic category. The term beautiful sometimes acts as a synonym for aesthetic. It is no coincidence that aesthetics is often defined as the science of beauty. In Russian, beauty is close to the term beautiful. Unlike the beautiful, beauty characterizes objects and phenomena mainly from their external and not always essential side. The beautiful refers to concepts in which the object and phenomena are revealed from the point of view of their essence, the regular connections of their internal structure and properties. The category of the beautiful, however, reflects not only its objective foundations, but also the subjective side, expressed in the nature of the perception of these objective foundations, in relation to them, in their assessment, in this sense they speak of the beautiful as a value, because it is perceived as positive a phenomenon that evokes a whole range of feelings, ranging from calm admiration to stormy delight.
Sublime- one of the main categories of aesthetics, reflecting the totality of natural, social and artistic phenomena, exceptional in their quantitative and qualitative characteristics and thus acting as a source of deep aesthetic experience - a sense of the sublime. The category that is polar opposite to the sublime is the category of the low.
In nature, for example, the boundless expanses of the sky and the sea, the bulk of mountains, majestic rivers and waterfalls, grandiose natural phenomena - a storm, a thunderstorm, aurora borealis, etc. are sublime. We find even more vivid manifestations of V. in public life. They are contained in outstanding deeds that serve the cause of progress, both of individuals (great people, heroes), and of entire classes, masses, peoples. Works of art exalt and glorify these accomplishments and feats. In the process of artistic development of the sublime. a number of specific genres of art were formed: epic, heroic poem, heroic tragedy, ode, anthem, oratorio, monumental genres of painting, graphics, sculpture, architecture, etc.
The exclusivity of sublime phenomena is of two kinds. It could be
The exclusivity of the external scale, surpassing the usual norm of sensory perception, and
Exclusivity is internal, semantic, comprehended intellectually, spiritually, indirectly. There are many phenomena in which both of these features coincide.
The sublime can only be such a phenomenon that, for all its exclusivity, power and grandeur, does not pose an immediate threat to the person contemplating it. Otherwise, the very conditions of aesthetic perception are destroyed.
tragic- one of the main categories of aesthetics, reflecting the presence of deep objective contradictions in the struggle of man with nature, in the clashes of opposing social forces, in the activities and inner world of the individual - contradictions that are catastrophic in their consequences for a person, for the humanistic values protected by him, and therefore exciting in us the most intense spiritual experience - a tragic feeling.
comic(from the Greek komikos - funny) - one of the main aesthetic categories, reflecting life phenomena, characterized by internal inconsistency, a discrepancy between what they are in essence and what they pretend to be. N. G. Chernyshevsky defined this discrepancy as an expression of “emptiness and insignificance, hiding behind appearance and having a claim to content and real meaning.” This may be a discrepancy between the goal and the means, the effort and the result, the possibilities and claims in the actions of people, etc.
