Aesthetics is a particular field of philosophy and it considers sensual forms to be messages. It has two different approaches based on whether it describes or interprets.
a. descriptive aesthetics: it does not deal with the content of the message, only with its form and the relations between different elements of influence within the whole experience.
b. interpretive (evaluative) aesthetics: in relation to the content of the message, it interprets and evaluates the form of the message and the relation between the meaning and the elements of influence, within the whole experience.
It has three different approaches based on what kind of sensual forms it is ready to accept as ‘message’.
a. art philosophy (analyzes exclusively the intentional self expressions /compositions/)
b. general aesthetics (ready to analyze every man-made sensual form)
c. universal aesthetics (ready to analyze every sensual form, e.g. even the aesthetic examination of natural phenomena)
The questions and answers of aesthetics change significantly with time.
a. descriptive aesthetics: it does not deal with the content of the message, only with its form and the relations between different elements of influence within the whole experience.
b. interpretive (evaluative) aesthetics: in relation to the content of the message, it interprets and evaluates the form of the message and the relation between the meaning and the elements of influence, within the whole experience.
It has three different approaches based on what kind of sensual forms it is ready to accept as ‘message’.
a. art philosophy (analyzes exclusively the intentional self expressions /compositions/)
b. general aesthetics (ready to analyze every man-made sensual form)
c. universal aesthetics (ready to analyze every sensual form, e.g. even the aesthetic examination of natural phenomena)
The questions and answers of aesthetics change significantly with time.
How is order like? What is rule?
The awareness of self expression started with the mimetic mind. The source of all arts was born in mimesis (imitation, repeating). The rhythmic, concerted movements and leg pounding, the dance and the music have probably developed from the joint running of the upright postured man (ca. 689 250 B.C.). The free-standing (independent), anytime repeatable and performable message: the story itself appeared parallel to the development of the mythical mind. It was only this time when the first rules of storytelling and experience-articulation were set (ca. 80 520 B.C.).
Following the volatile rhythms and melodies, pictures also appear and some of them successfully remain until today. The message-sensitive art that sees behind the sensual form is the magical connection between everyone’s sensual world and the initiated ones’ supersensual world. It has control over invisible powers and visible relations with analogies. The culture hero discoursing with the supersensual world and showing the hidden contexts interprets the unperceivable order. Art addresses the entire community, initiates and connects every member of it to the discourse with the supersensual world. Ancient art is not only magical but also collective. The whole of the community is both the creator and the outcome (art and artwork) of the process. The participants mobilize and synchronize their intuitions and meanings in the ecstasy of the joint artistic experience. The completion of the direct and mutual experience of interconnectedness and that of the common essence is the catharsis.
Following the volatile rhythms and melodies, pictures also appear and some of them successfully remain until today. The message-sensitive art that sees behind the sensual form is the magical connection between everyone’s sensual world and the initiated ones’ supersensual world. It has control over invisible powers and visible relations with analogies. The culture hero discoursing with the supersensual world and showing the hidden contexts interprets the unperceivable order. Art addresses the entire community, initiates and connects every member of it to the discourse with the supersensual world. Ancient art is not only magical but also collective. The whole of the community is both the creator and the outcome (art and artwork) of the process. The participants mobilize and synchronize their intuitions and meanings in the ecstasy of the joint artistic experience. The completion of the direct and mutual experience of interconnectedness and that of the common essence is the catharsis.
How is beauty like? Why is beauty beautiful?
(The doctrine is beauty: Callistics)
(The doctrine is beauty: Callistics)
The consolidation of myths and rituals led to the standardization of artworks. This process only became stronger with the manifestation of the alienated power (state) (ca. 2904 B.C.). The power interested in protecting status quo canonizes traditions and develops the first official aesthetics.
The aesthetics of every ancient high culture is inflexible and aims to be the summary of eternity and divine order. The power-emanating, pathetic and power-oriented court culture of the ruling elite and the cheerful and sexuality-oriented culture of everyday people become separate. Power struggle ignites in the realm of the arts, styles, and symbols. Parallel to the generalization of social injustice, art receives a specific role: it starts interpreting social tensions. In accordance with the interests of the ruling groups, court culture attempts to ease tensions and aims to demonstrate harmony and controlled pathos (‘orphic’ arts). In accordance with the interests of the subjugated groups, folk culture attempts to raise tensions and aims to create upstir and arouse uncontrollable pathos (‘magical’ arts). Both approaches are obviously magical, but while the former is a taming, the latter is an infuriating magic. This is most apparent in the ornamental arts, where every colour, form, and element of influence has a particular meaning and a magical power up until the modern age, when the this-wordly and in-between-people communication started dominating all the arts.
In the closed aesthetic order of the ancient societies’ closed world order it was the arts and the music that played a leading role from the ancient times. The ancient language and the proportions of the musical order interconnect artistic rules and the mathematical and geometric foundations of sciences (e.g. Chinese and ancient Greek aesthetics both postulated moral and political importance to permissible and prohibited musical forms). Hindu world view believes the primordial energy of the universe is a sound, a vibration. In other places it is Shiva’s pounding that pulsates in everything or it is the Muses -originating from ‘musica’- that determine what the beautiful form of message is in any field.
The aesthetics of every ancient high culture is inflexible and aims to be the summary of eternity and divine order. The power-emanating, pathetic and power-oriented court culture of the ruling elite and the cheerful and sexuality-oriented culture of everyday people become separate. Power struggle ignites in the realm of the arts, styles, and symbols. Parallel to the generalization of social injustice, art receives a specific role: it starts interpreting social tensions. In accordance with the interests of the ruling groups, court culture attempts to ease tensions and aims to demonstrate harmony and controlled pathos (‘orphic’ arts). In accordance with the interests of the subjugated groups, folk culture attempts to raise tensions and aims to create upstir and arouse uncontrollable pathos (‘magical’ arts). Both approaches are obviously magical, but while the former is a taming, the latter is an infuriating magic. This is most apparent in the ornamental arts, where every colour, form, and element of influence has a particular meaning and a magical power up until the modern age, when the this-wordly and in-between-people communication started dominating all the arts.
In the closed aesthetic order of the ancient societies’ closed world order it was the arts and the music that played a leading role from the ancient times. The ancient language and the proportions of the musical order interconnect artistic rules and the mathematical and geometric foundations of sciences (e.g. Chinese and ancient Greek aesthetics both postulated moral and political importance to permissible and prohibited musical forms). Hindu world view believes the primordial energy of the universe is a sound, a vibration. In other places it is Shiva’s pounding that pulsates in everything or it is the Muses -originating from ‘musica’- that determine what the beautiful form of message is in any field.
| We can call all ethics classical ethics from Antiquity until the Modern Era for the simple fact that they were all searching for the answer to the question: what is beauty? All schools agreed that it was the articulation of the higher, divine order that made sensual form beautiful and they interconnected beauty, good, and trueness in every case. They are all ‘orphic’, which means that the ‘magical’ arts do not create an independent aesthetics throughout all this time and that they stay in the background. From artworks through everyday sensuality to natural phenomena, they all regarded everything as the manifestation of the supersensual divine order and a higher beauty. |  |
One of the most serious conflicts of classical aesthetics is the image-destruction. Sensuality appears in all religious aesthetics and within sensuality, the more or less stronger rejection of image-creation. The ‘image-destructors’ say that sensual form diverts attention from the supersensual essence, lock up ideality in the limited prison of reality and distorts pure essence with misleading resemblances. The destruction of the superstitiously revered images served most of the time both the recollection of the sanctities’ power to the hands of those leaders that possessed the relics and the freeing of the same leaders from a religious interpretation that was cemented in the images. On contrary to this, the image-creators emphasized the pedagogical effectiveness of the images and the particular importance those played in the religious life that was independent from the clergy. Although the leaders were often held back by the distinctiveness of the images, the led ones readily clung onto the presumed accurateness of those. The consequence of image-destruction, however, was most often not the spreading of religious illustrations, and this had a positive influence on the progression of the more realistic fine arts.
Rationalism and Enlightenment, turning towards the wordly power of sensuality, make aesthetics become a scientific research (Gottlieb Baumgarten, 1750). Aesthetes are interested in the intuitive proportion-sense of creative ingenuity that steps beyond the course of history and social order. Their aim is not to promote subjective autocratism, but to support something intrepid and powerful that is based on a higher law which surpasses pitiful rules. According to Kant (1724 – 1804), beauty is simply the manifestation of the unselfish desire for values and truth. Hegel (1770 – 1831) says that the principle of universal logics seeks its more and more refined and individual form of expression throughout the three eras of art history:
a. Preclassical era: Architecture is the dominant art.
(The principle searches its articulation in symbolic forms)
b. Classical era: Sculpture is the dominant art. (Greeks)
(The principle finds its perfect sensual form.)
c. Modern era: Painting, music, and literature are dominant.
(The principle is more and more abstract and less and less articulated in sensual forms)
a. Preclassical era: Architecture is the dominant art.
(The principle searches its articulation in symbolic forms)
b. Classical era: Sculpture is the dominant art. (Greeks)
(The principle finds its perfect sensual form.)
c. Modern era: Painting, music, and literature are dominant.
(The principle is more and more abstract and less and less articulated in sensual forms)
What is credible? Why is credible credible?
(The doctrine of kitsch: lie-doctrine)
(The doctrine of kitsch: lie-doctrine)
The modern era that started with the French Revolution did not live up to its expectations of eliminating inhumanities and injustice. The resistance, unconcern and hypocrisy connected to the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity has brought upon a constant moral crisis. In addition, the unfolding Capitalism has led to consequences oppositional to the original goals, namely it led to alienation. The relation to the continuous great lie and to progression became the measure and essential context of all action and communication. The fundamental problem of modern aesthetics is no longer beauty, but the possibility and forms of equivocation and straight talk. From this point even the disgusting is beautiful provided it is an instrument of truth (genuine criticism), and vice versa, even beauty is unacceptable if it is an instrument of lie. Such new aesthetical situations emerge as kitsch, l’art pour l’art, absurd, and fashion.
The viewpoints of fashion are popularity and power. The viewpoints of absurd are nonsense and illogicalness. The viepoints of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) are silence and turning aside. The viewpoint of kitsch is lie. None of these approaches is concerned about inhumanity, but any of them can be used as a concept in a credible self criticism.
The viewpoints of fashion are popularity and power. The viewpoints of absurd are nonsense and illogicalness. The viepoints of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) are silence and turning aside. The viewpoint of kitsch is lie. None of these approaches is concerned about inhumanity, but any of them can be used as a concept in a credible self criticism.
Kitsch is the comfortable alienation. Man escaping from reality seeks consolation in sensuality as an audience or finds relief in self-satisfaction as a performer. There are three forms of lies:
Absolute kitsch: a. everythig is beautiful, perfect, and idillic
b. everything is horrible, unbearable, and awful
c. everything is irrelevant and funny
Deceitful kitsch: pseudo conflict, pseudo tension, pseudo solution
Relative kitsch: non-self-critical criticism, commonplaces, and egocentric superciliousness
Absolute kitsch: a. everythig is beautiful, perfect, and idillic
b. everything is horrible, unbearable, and awful
c. everything is irrelevant and funny
Deceitful kitsch: pseudo conflict, pseudo tension, pseudo solution
Relative kitsch: non-self-critical criticism, commonplaces, and egocentric superciliousness
The word ‘kitsch’ was first used by Munich academics in 1870 to describe those ‘sketchy’ ‘patchworks’, ‘mishmashes’ and ‘pseudo arts’ that lacked the basic knowledge of artistic methods. The meaning of the word was changed by the middle of the 20th century: since then it indicates the self centred influence-creation that aims to shake as many people as easily and as much as possible, and it is used in the case of hollow and superficial forms of expression that intentionally avoid deeper and more complex problems. It is the intentional commonplace. The ‘sham’. It was born from the shallower mass taste of the industrialized mass society and the profit oriented poor quality mass production that was abusing mass taste. It is closely connected to consumerism. Most languages have not yet got to the stage of recognizing this problem therefore they do not know the concept.
Credibility is difficult to define since credible becomes commonplace and commonplaces could be used credibly. Even the ‘commonplaceness’ of commonplace can be a commonplace. It is no longer clear if a ‘commonplace’ is a plain commonplace or the refusal of the hypocrisy that commonplacely abhors commonplaces, namely the daring self criticism. It is mainly the distancing self irony and tragicomedy that appear to be credible (e.g. Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut).
Credibility is difficult to define since credible becomes commonplace and commonplaces could be used credibly. Even the ‘commonplaceness’ of commonplace can be a commonplace. It is no longer clear if a ‘commonplace’ is a plain commonplace or the refusal of the hypocrisy that commonplacely abhors commonplaces, namely the daring self criticism. It is mainly the distancing self irony and tragicomedy that appear to be credible (e.g. Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut).
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