3. PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF ART IN EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Psychological theories of art have a clear and tangible advantage over any metaphysical theories: they are not at all obliged to give a general theory of the beautiful; they are limited to much narrower limits, since they relate only to the fact of the beautiful and are occupied only by the descriptive character of the fact itself. The first task of psychological analysis is to determine the class of phenomena to which our experience of beauty belongs. And this is not a difficult problem. No one denies that art gives the highest pleasure, perhaps even the longest and most intense pleasure available to human nature. As soon as we confine ourselves to this psychological approach, the mystery of art, therefore, seems to be revealed: there is nothing less mysterious than pleasure and suffering. It would be absurd to call into question these well-known phenomena — phenomena not only of human life, but of life in general. If somewhere we find "this point of support" (Archimedes), a fixed and stationary place to stop, it is in art. If we connect our aesthetic experience here, then we will not have any ambiguities regarding the nature of beauty and art.
Its absolute simplicity speaks in favor of such a solution. On the other hand, however, all these theories of aesthetic hedonism have certain qualitative flaws. They begin with the statement of a simple, undoubted, obvious fact, but the next steps immediately lead away from the goal and lead to a dead end. Delight is the immediate reality of our experience. But when we make it a psychological principle, its meaning becomes hazy, or at least ambivalent. The term covers so wide a field that it covers the most diverse and diverse phenomena. It is tempting, of course, to introduce such a broad term to include a wide variety of referents. However, if you succumb to this temptation, you will face the danger of losing sight of important and significant differences. Systems of ethical and aesthetic hedonism have always been prone to forgetting these specific differences. Kant emphasized this in his characteristic commentary in The Critique of Practical Reason. If the definition of our will, he reasons, is based on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure that we associate with one reason or another, then we are completely indifferent to what kind of representation affects us. For his choice, only how strong and lasting this pleasure matters is, whether it is easy to achieve and whether it can be repeated often. “To those who need money for expenses, it doesn’t matter whether their matter, gold, is mined from the depths of the mountains, or river sand, so long as its price is the same everywhere; in the same way, no one person, when it comes only to the pleasures of life, asks whether these are representations - of reason or feelings, but he is interested only in the extent and pleasure he can receive from them for the longest possible time. ” If pleasure is a common denominator, then only the degree and not the kind of pleasure really matters - all pleasures, whatever they are, are on the same level, their psychological and biological source can be traced.
In modern thought, the theory of aesthetic hedonism found the clearest expression in the philosophy of Santayana, according to whose views, beauty is pleasure, regarded as the quality of things: it is “objective pleasure”. But this is a departure from the question. How, in fact, is pleasure — the most subjective state of mind — generally objectified? Science, Santayana said, “is the answer to the need for information; we demand all truth from science and nothing but truth. Art is the answer to the need for entertainment ... and the truth is included in it only to the extent that it contributes to these goals. ” However, if this were the goal of art, we should have argued that art in its highest manifestations cannot achieve this real goal. The “need for entertainment” can be satisfied by other means much better and cheaper. It is unthinkable to believe that great artists worked in the name of this goal, that Michelangelo built the Cathedral of St. Peter, that Dante or Milton wrote their poems for fun. They would undoubtedly have subscribed to the aphorism of Aristotle: "But respectable diligence and work for entertainment seem silly and too childish." If art is pleasure, then pleasure is not from things, but from forms. The enjoyment of forms is completely different from the enjoyment of things or sensual impressions. Forms cannot simply be imprinted in the minds: they must be produced in order to feel their beauty. This is the usual way of thinking of all ancient and modern systems of hedonism in aesthetics: they offer us a psychological theory of aesthetic pleasure, which is in no way able to take into account the fundamental fact of aesthetic creativity. In aesthetic life is given the experience of radical transformation.
Pleasure itself is no longer just a feeling, an affect, it becomes a function. Just as the artistic eye is not just an eye that reacts to or reproduces sensual impressions. His activity is not limited to receiving or registering impressions from external things or combining these impressions in a new and arbitrary way. A great artist or musician is not characterized by sensitivity to color or sound, but by his ability to extract the dynamic life of forms from this static material. Only in this sense can we assume that the pleasure received from art can be objectified. The definition of beauty as “objectified pleasure” contains, therefore, the whole problem in a minimized form. Objectification is always a constructive process. The physical world - the world of stable permanent things and qualities - is not just a bundle of sense data, just as the world of art is not a bundle of feelings and emotions. The first depends on the acts of theoretical objectification — objectification in terms of concepts or scientific constructs; the second is from the formative acts of another type - acts of contemplation.
Other modern theories, which protest against any attempt to identify art and pleasure, are vulnerable to the same objection as the theories of aesthetic hedonism. They try to explain the work of art, associating it with other well-known phenomena. These phenomena, however, are located on a completely different level: they are passive, not active states of mind. There are some analogies between these two classes, but we cannot derive them from the same metaphysical or psychological source. It is the struggle against the rational and intellectualistic theories of art - a common feature and the main motive of these theories. French classicism turned a work of art into something like an arithmetic problem, like a rule problem. The reaction against this concept was necessary and beneficial. However, the first romantic critics - especially the German romantics - immediately fell into another extreme. They declared the abstract intellectualism of the enlighteners a parody of art. It is impossible to understand a work of art, subjecting it to logical rules. Poetics textbook cannot teach to write beautiful poems. For art flows from other, much deeper sources. To discover these sources, we must first of all abandon our usual standards, immerse ourselves in the secrets of our unconscious life. The artist should pursue his goal somnambulically, without any interference or control from the conscious activity. To wake him is to deprive him of his strength. "The beginning of all poetry," said Friedrich Schlegel, "is the rejection of the laws and methods of rationally organized reason and a new immersion in the delightful confusion of fantasies, the initial chaos of human nature." Art is a waking dream in which we voluntarily plunge. A trace of the same romantic concept carries modern metaphysical systems. Bergson created the theory of beauty, intended to serve as the last and decisive proof of the loyalty of his general metaphysical principles. From his point of view, there is no better illustration of the fundamental duality, the incompatibility of intuition with the mind, than a work of art. What we call rational or scientific truth is superficial and conditional. Art is an escape from such a world crushed and squeezed by conventions of the world. It reverses us - to the true sources of reality. If reality is “creative evolution”, then it is in the creative nature of art that the obviousness and the fundamental manifestation of the creative nature of life must be sought. At first it seems that this should manifest itself in a truly dynamic and energetic philosophy of beauty. But Bergson's intuition is not a truly active principle. This is a kind of receptivity, not spontaneity. Aesthetic intuition, moreover, is always described by Bergson as a passive ability, not an active form. “... The goal of art,” wrote Bergson, “is to put to sleep the active or, rather, capable of resisting forces of our personality, and this plunges us into a state of perfect susceptibility in which we are aware of the thought we are suggesting and we share the expressed feeling. When perceiving art, we are exposed - in a weakened form, in a refined and to some extent spiritualized version - to those techniques that are commonly used in instilling a hypnotic state ... The sense of beauty is not specific ... The feeling we experience becomes aesthetic in its properties, provided that it is inspired, but not caused ... In the sequence of aesthetic feelings there are different phases, as in the state of hypnosis ... ". Our experience of beauty, however, does not have such a hypnotic character. With the help of hypnosis, one can induce a person to some actions or impose a particular feeling on him. But beauty in its original and specific sense cannot be imprinted in our spirit in this way. To feel it, you need to interact with the artist. It is necessary not only to share the feelings of the artist, but to penetrate into his creative activity. If the artist were to induce active personal powers into a dream, he would paralyze our sense of beauty. Understanding of beauty, knowledge of the dynamics of forms cannot be conveyed in this way. After all, beauty depends simultaneously on a special kind of feeling and on the act of judgment and contemplation.
One of the greatest merits of Shaftesbury before the theory of art was to emphasize this position. In his Moralists, he gave an impressive sketch of the experience of beauty — an experience that he regarded as a specific privilege of human nature. “... You will not deny the beauty of the meadows or the beauty of the flowers growing around on this green lawn. And yet, no matter how good these creations of nature are - sparkling herbs or silvery mosses, blooming thyme, wild rose or honeysuckle - their charm does not attract neighboring herds, doesn’t admire the doe or its young, which plucks young shoots and does not inspire joy in grazing cattle The source of joy for them lies not in the appearance of these objects, but in something hidden behind the outer shell. They are attracted to taste, they are led by hunger ... Appearance can not have a significant impact, if it does not cause reflections, a certain judgment, if it is not studied, but acts only as a random indication or a hint that puts the mind to sleep and satisfies sensuality. ... If animals are not able to achieve the beautiful and enjoy it, since they are only animals that have the ability to comprehend only a little, then it follows that man cannot understand the beautiful in the same way and enjoy it with the same perception . And that beautiful, which a person enjoys, belongs to the highest category, and his mind and common sense take an active part. ” The praise that Shaftesbury brings to reason and common sense is very far from enlightenment intellectualism. His “rhapsody”, an enthusiastic song of beauty and the infinite creative power of nature, is a completely new feature of the intellectual history of the 18th century. In this regard, he was one of the first representatives of romanticism. But the romanticism of Shaftesbury was of a platonic type. His theory of aesthetic forms was a Platonic concept, and therefore he argued and protested against the sensationalism of the English empiricists.
The objection raised against Bergson’s metaphysics is also valid for Nietzsche’s psychological theory. In one of his first writings, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche refuted the concepts of the great classicists of the 18th century. In Greek art, we find no Winkelmann ideal at all. We are searching in vain for Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides for "noble simplicity and calm majesty." The greatness of the Greek tragedy lies in the depth and extreme tension of strong emotions. The Greek tragedy is the fruit of the cult of Dionysus; her power was orgiastic. But the orgy alone could not produce Greek drama. The power of Dionysus was balanced by the power of Apollo. This fundamental polarity is the essence of every great work of art. The great art of all times arose from the interpenetration of two opposing forces - the orgiastic impulse and dreamy contemplation. This is exactly the contrast that arises between the state of dreams and the state of intoxication. Both of these states release all sorts of artistic powers within us, but the forces that unlock each of these states are different. Greza gives us the power of insight, associativity, poetry; intoxication gives strength wide gesture, passion, song and dance. Even in this theory of the psychological origin of art, one of its essential features has disappeared. After all, artistic inspiration is not intoxication, but artistic imagination is not a dream or a hallucination. Each piece of art has a deep structural unity. We cannot explain this unity, reducing it to two different states, which, like the state of dreams and the state of intoxication, are completely scattered and upset. Amorphous elements cannot be combined into a structured whole.
TEST 3
1. Can psychological theories of art give a general theory of the beautiful?
? can
? this is their eternal whim
are required
? not required
2. What is the first task of psychological analysis?
? uncover the meaning of suffering
? show that art is a great pleasure
? to define the class of phenomena to which our experience of beauty belongs
? connect aesthetic experience
3. Why did Kant think that it doesn’t matter to him who needs money for spending, where did the money come from?
? because he is greedy
? because there is no difference between ethical and aesthetic hedonism
? because money is needed immediately
? because money is always needed
4. Who thought beauty was pleasure?
? George Santayana
? Peter I
? Exupery
? Marquis de Sade
5. Who claimed it was silly to work for fun?
? Mephistopheles
? Aristotle
? Martin luther
? Apostle Paul