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p To define the essence of the beautiful is a complex task. In life and art we are confronted with a wide diversity of manifestations of the beautiful bearing no resemblance to each other at all. It is difficult, for instance, to establish the similarities between man’s spiritual beauty and the beauty of a pose that gladdens the eye, between beautiful shapes of a crystal or the leaf of a tree and an artistic masterpiece. These phenomena are drawn from quite different spheres of reality and it is actually most difficult, indeed impossible to pick out any formal characteristics which are common to them all and which would provide criteria for defining them as beautiful.

p It is relatively simple to pick out manifestations of beauty in the real world around us, to name examples and events which are a source of aesthetic delight to us. Yet how difficult it is to answer the question why they are beautiful, what precisely makes them beautiful and what the nature of that beauty is. For this reason Plato, who formulated the first philosophical doctrine of the beautiful in the history of aesthetic thought, was quite correct in insisting that a distinction be drawn between two questions: that we ask first what is beautiful, and then ask wherein lies the beautiful, what is its essence?

p Materialist and idealist aesthetics adopt diametrically opposite stands with regard to the definition of the essence of beauty. In idealist aesthetics the beautiful is something that pertains only to man’s spiritual life, that is rooted in the depths of man’s consciousness and lacks any objective foundation. Materialist aesthetics on the other hand attributes tremendous importance to the subjective element in evaluation of the beautiful; it takes into account and examines fluctuating views of the beautiful, demonstrates their historical origin, yet starts out from the principle that the beautiful is something objective, i.e., accepts that the beautiful is independent of the human consciousness. Despite the great variety of interpretations for the beautiful put forward at different stages in the history of aesthetic thought, in the final analysis these can be divided up into two basic groups—one materialist, the other idealist.

p One of the most important of the ancient teachings concerned with the beautiful was that formulated by the great thinker of classical times Aristotle. It was to be widely accepted and subsequently elaborated upon in the history of aesthetic theories, both those with a materialist foundatipn and also those with an idealist one. Nor has it lost its relevance in the present day. The strong attraction of Aristotle’s conception lies first and foremost in its endeavour to determine the objective features of the beautiful.

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p Aristotle examined the essence of the beautiful in the specific, concretely sensual properties of a phenomenon, of life itself. According to Aristotle and his followers, harmony, proportion, and adherence to certain laws were fundamental to the beautiful.

p “.. .Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either (1) in a very minute creature, since our perception becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity; or (2) in a creature of vast size—one, say, 1,000 miles long—as in that case, instead of the object being seen all at once, the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the beholder.”  [179•* 

p Aristotle’s conception places particular importance on the concept of proportion as a criterion of the aesthetic quality of a phenomenon. It should not be too great or too small, which after all is what is meant by proportion. This led Aristotle to write that the principal manifestations of the beautiful are to be found in order, proportionality and precision.

p Yet it would be wrong to see in this analysis a definition of the essence of beauty from a purely structural angle and reproach its author with confining himself to formal criteria. These reproaches could indeed be directed at certain of Aristotle’s followers, but not at the philosopher himself.

p The crux of the matter is that in Aristotle’s eyes man is the criterion, the measure of the beautiful—man, his measure of things, his possibilities and the nature of his perception of the real world. Here there emerges an organic link between Aristotle’s aesthetics and the development of art in classical society. It was quite natural that the great democratic and essentially human art of ancient Greece, the volume and proportions of which were scaled to man should engender the idea of man as the measure of the beautiful.

p The theory of the beautiful, according to which beauty consists in the nature of the material world and is 180 expressed in objective properties peculiar to concrete objects such as proportion, harmony, symmetry, etc., was essentially a materialist one.

p This concept proved attractive not only for aestheticians but also for artists. It seemed to them that it made possible the establishment of objective criteria for the beautiful, and the formulation of laws and set rules for beauty, the knowledge of which might provide a guideline in artistic creativity.

p It is thus no coincidence that the conceptions of the beautiful which evolved from Aristotle’s aesthetics gained wide recognition in the age of the Renaissance, in the aesthetic notions of the classicists and even those of the eighteenth-century Enlighteners. These conceptions which presented harmony and proportion as the essence of beauty differ, for their authors were attempting to establish the exact proportions and exact measure in which the beautiful might come into its own. The well-known English artist and aesthetician of the eighteenth century William Hogarth in his treatise The Analysis of Beauty even lighted upon a special "line of beauty" which according to him served to express the essence of the beautiful. It was a flowing sinusoidal line, the curves of which were elegant and whose overall contour was pleasing to the eye; such a line, he maintained, characterises the human body, the leaf of a tree and the form of objects fashioned by man, etc.

p In the numerous aesthetic theories formulated in the age of the Renaissance and the modern age the laws of rhythm and symmetry, a harmonious relationship between parts and the whole, unity in diversity have been regarded as laws of the beautiful ordained by Nature herself. Artistic canons and rules for artistic creativity were deduced and elaborated from these theories.

p Theories regarding the beautiful as harmony, measure and proportion took into account the objective properties and phenomena of the real world. This indeed was the secret of their strength and it was precisely this that explains their influence on men’s practical activity, in 181 particular, artistic creativity. On the other hand, their weakness lay in the fact that they regarded properties of external form as constituting the essence of the beautiful.

p Idealist aestheticians rejected the contention that beauty could be reduced to mathematical proportions, or expressed in terms of a corresponding formula. They, in their turn, started out from the principle that beauty cannot be measured or expressed in terms of reason, since its essence lies in its expressiveness: they insisted that however much Renaissance sculptors might have measured classical statues in efforts to formulate a canon for the beautiful human face, this was never achieved for the beauty of the human face lies not in any particular proportions or purely external features of its structure but in its expressiveness, exaltation, the reflection of man’s inner world in the external form.

p This principle concerning the link between beauty and spiritual essence provides the basis for all idealist aesthetic writing concerning the essence of the beautiful. The idealists insist that it is not only in man that exaltation is found, but any phenomenon is only beautiful if it expresses and bears within itself a spiritual element, if manifestations of emotions and feeling, thoughts and ideas are to be found in their outer material form, in their appearance, as directly perceived by man. Further, if the form or whole appearance of an object fail to express any spiritual content, if it does not embody any idea, then there can be no question of beauty. This principle also lies at the basis of recent axiological and semantic conceptions in modern idealist aesthetics. The axiological conception of beauty presents it as a “value” and art as the expression of that “value”. The very idea of “value” here is deduced from man’s spiritual experience and is not correlated with the nature of socio-historical experience and the needs inherent in the latter. The semantic conception of beauty presents it as a property, function or impact of the work of art interpreted as a sign or symbol. The sign or symbol itself is presented as something which, in the final analysis, is derived from man’s spiritual life.

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p The various aesthetic systems do not provide identical answers to the following questions: wherein lies the spiritual essence constituting the beautiful, and how does it manifest itself in outward material forms, in the tangible shell. The objective and subjective aestheticians of the idealist school provide different answers to this question although these differences are not ones of principle.

p The objective idealists (Plato, Schelling and Hegel) based their aesthetic theories as a whole and their view of the beautiful in particular on the philosophical view of the world as the material hypostasis of the spiritual essence objectively existing outside mankind in the form of an Absolute Idea, Vernunft (reason), or God. The beautiful they regarded as something ideal, embodied in external material forms and they only regarded as beautiful those objects in which the genetic significance, essence and features were most fully manifested, in other words those objects, in which the underlying concept or “idea” found the fullest expression.

p Aesthetics of the objective idealist variety puts forward the doctrine of the beautiful as perfection in each genus. A beautiful rose would be a rose unsurpassed of its kind, that which embodied most fully the characteristics and essential features of the Rose as such. A human being would be beautiful provided he adequately embodied the qualities of human kind, Man’s characteristic features and properties.

p These principles of objective idealist aesthetics do incorporate a definite positive element; the objective idealists’ view of perfection as an essential feature of the beautiful lent their conception a rational core. Yet since they regarded perfection itself as no more than an ideal manifestation of the generic essence of phenomena, as merely derived from spiritual principles underlying the universe, this view of perfection had mystical implications far removed from the real essence of the beautiful.

p Subjective idealists also start out from an acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of the beautiful. Yet, unlike 183 the objective idealists, they hold that the spiritual principle is introduced to phenomena of the real world not by the Welt Geist or God, but by man’s own consciousness.

p Quite in keeping with the philosophy of subjective idealism this school of aesthetics asserts that a phenomenon is rendered beautiful by virtue of the fact that man in his mind transfers to real phenomena feelings, emotions and properties from his own inner world. By means of imagination he animates the phenomena of Nature and the real world around him. This projection of human consciousness onto the external world is reflected, according to these aestheticians, in language, and in those analogies drawn between phenomena of Nature and human characteristics which are embodied in man’s language. We refer to the sun as "coming up" and "going down", to the weather as “gloomy”, to streams as “chattering”, etc., attributing, as we do so, human characteristics to phenomena of Nature. From the standpoint of aestheticians of the subjective-idealist school this is the universal pattern or law that underlies and gives rise to beauty. When we transpose joyful, serene emotions to phenomena of the real world, that world is rendered beautiful. As a result subjective idealists regard the beautiful as a strictly subjective category; beauty, in their view, is merely a particular condition of the human mind. The most forthright expression of these views is to be found in Theodor Lipps’ aesthetic theory, according to which the beautiful is the result of the artist’s impregnating the phenomena of the external world with his own feelings.

p While pointing out the fundamental unacceptability of those conceptions of the beautiful advocated by idealist aesthetics, at the same time it is well to bear in mind that despite the misguided general methodological basis of those conceptions, the objective content of the works of art studied by it led to a correct solution for certain problems, in particular enabled it to formulate a number of positive propositions regarding the nature of the beautiful.

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p Among these pride of place should be accorded to the recognition by proponents of objective-idealist aesthetics that the beautiful possesses meaning and content. These aestheticians see beauty to lie not in the form of a phenomenon, but above all in the meaning or inner essence of a phenomenon; beauty is seen not as a strictly formal category, but one vested with content as well. Also worthy of note is the attempt made by this school of aestheticians to link the beauty found in life around us with man’s attitude to the phenomena of that life. Yet these rational elements found in idealist conceptions of the beautiful are rendered unnecessarily mystical and elaborated on a false philosophical foundation.

p The subjectivism of idealist aesthetics is completely alien to the materialist conception of the beautiful. Among the theories of the beautiful which have taken shape since the very dawn of aesthetics, that which comes nearest to our interpretation of the beautiful is the conception elaborated by the Russian revolutionary-democrats, in particular Chernyshevsky. Almost half his famous treatise The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality is devoted to the theory of the beautiful and his critique of idealist theories of the beautiful. He proffered a definition of the beautiful which basically retains its relevance for the present age.

p Chernyshevsky taught that the beautiful is life as it ought to be according to our understanding of it. " Beautiful is that being in which we see life as it should be according to our conceptions; beautiful is the object which expresses life, or reminds us of life.”  [184•*  This proposition points first and foremost to the objective existence of the beautiful. Beauty exists in life itself. The beautiful is life, those phenomena in which we see manifestations of life in all its fullness, in which life has developed naturally, normally, in those perfect forms that are intrinsic to life.

p “The beautiful is life"—this definition is an expression 185 of the core of materialist aesthetics, yet it does not reveal in full measure the essence of beauty. After underlining in his famous definition of beauty the materialist idea of the objective nature of the beautiful, Chernyshevsky goes on to supplement this definition with a no less important subjective consideration. According to his theory not all life is beautiful or life as such, but life as it ought to be according to our understanding of it. Chernyshevsky upheld the understanding of the beautiful as life which corresponds to the human ideal. After overcoming elements of anthropologism, he arrived at the apt conclusion that the aesthetic ideal is shaped by historical and class factors. He rightly started out from the point that the aesthetic ideal is always of a socio-historical character, is always a class ideal, in which are reflected the real needs of social development.

p In Chernyshevsky’s theory of the beautiful objective and subjective factors are blended together as one. This unity shows the objective existence of the beautiful and the socio-historical factors determining man’s perception of that beauty. The beautiful is a category implying evaluation.

p In Nature all that is unhealthy, dead or which contradicts man’s understanding of life destroys beauty and is regarded as ugly. Conversely, everything which corresponds to our conception of life is beautiful.

p In the social sphere we regard as beautiful those phenomena in which we see reflections of our ideas and concepts. In the life of Soviet society the beautiful is always thought of as the real embodiment of the most advanced ideas of the age, of mankind’s age-old dream of a harmonious and perfect ordering of the life of society.

p In art the beauty of a work, to use Chernyshevsky’s words, is determined not always by an artist’s formal craft, but first of all by the veracity with which the real world is reproduced, interpreted and assessed. Life as it ought to be according to our conception of it, is here once again a key consideration when we evaluate the beauty and artistic perfection of a work.

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p The sphere of the beautiful embraces the most diverse aspects of the objective world and men’s activity. Man by his very nature is an artist who aspires to bring beauty into the whole of his life. Man’s endeavour to attain beauty is inherent and lasting, and while not everything created by man is beautiful and certain of his creations constitute ugliness, these serve negatively to express life’s imperfection and arouse a longing for beauty.

p Marx, when expounding this phenomenon drew attention to the fact that man in his labour is fundamentally different from animals engaged in their various tasks reminiscent of work. The animal always creates only to meet the needs of his own species, in accordance with its demands. Indeed a loon would go on sitting on its egg even if that was replaced with a stone. Regardless of the futility of this activity the loon will carry it out, for its activity is geared not so much to the object of the action, as to providing a fulfilment of instinct, to carrying out a “programme” with which it has been equipped by Nature itself and by the experience of past generations. Man, unlike animals always adapts his activity not only to correspond to his own needs but also in accordance with the nature of the object he is working on. He is able to approach any object with an inborn as it were scale of values, to come to terms with its objective potential and properties. This is why, to use Marx’s expression, man creates in accordance with the laws of beauty. On this subject he wrote that the animal shapes matter only in accordance with the measure and need of the species to which it belongs, whereas man is able to produce according to the measures of any species and is everywhere able to apply to an object the appropriate measure; by virtue of this man forms matter by the laws of beauty as well.

p The more complex and significant a phenomenon of life the more deeply it is penetrated by beauty. The higher man raises himself up in his inspired creative efforts, the greater the role played in his activity by the laws of 187 beauty. The more perfect the result of his work, the more beautiful it will be.

p Men’s ideas of the beautiful are shaped by the whole course of social life, by the nature of their way of life, historical conditions, the class structure of society, national traditions, etc.

p The historical nature of the category of the beautiful makes itself felt most clearly of all perhaps in art. Experts in the arts of primitive people have established a clear similarity between the cave drawings of various primitive people and have reached the well-founded conclusion that similar principles of beauty grew up among peoples separated by time and distance but sharing similar conditions of life. The Soviet scientist D. Olderogge in his preface to Victor Ellenberger’s The Tragic End of the Bushmen writes: "The bushmen’s drawings often and with good reason call to mind the cave drawings of Eastern Spain in view of their overall character, style and manner of execution and their content. These drawings date from the mesolithic period and therefore are separated in time from the bushmen’s drawings by thousands of years. The resemblance between these two groups of cave drawings is striking and can only be accounted for by the fact they were executed by peoples living in identical, or at least similar conditions, who had reached more or less the same cultural level.”

p For the ancient Greeks the world was one of harmony and therefore was beautiful. Harmony and beauty for the Greek aestheticians were inseparable. Yet even in the art of the ancient Greeks new principles of beauty can be seen to emerge: their architecture comes to incorporate elements of disharmony into the overall harmony, and the rhythm reveals certain arhythmic touches.

p In the Middle Ages the category of the sublime assumed prime importance, while the beautiful was only of secondary importance and was stripped of all concrete sensual content. The mediaeval interpretation of the essence of the beautiful is reflected, for example, in attire of monks that concealed the contours of the human body. 188 This rejection of the beauty of the human body, of delight in the flowering of life and acknowledgement of only the divine and the celestial, outside human existence, as beautiful typify the prevailing view of the beautiful and are reflected in the ascetic trend of the art of the period.

p The great humanists of the age of the Renaissance rebelled against the theological understanding of beauty, against this debasement of man. "I am a man and count nothing human indifferent to me," these fine words so beloved of Marx serve to express the aesthetic ideal of the age of the Renaissance. Affirmation of real earthly beauty is typical of Renaissance aesthetics, and in the art of that age it is man with all the wealth of his spiritual qualities and physical perfection who emerges as the supreme ideal criterion of the beautiful.

p Aesthetics in the age of Classicism was distinguished by a rational, normative idea of the beautiful. Only that which corresponded to the rationally established norm was regarded as beautiful. Life in its natural form in particular was regarded as the sphere of the ugly; only an artificially created Nature, "clipped and pruned", typical of the gardens of stately homes could rank as beautiful.

p The Romantics’ idea of beauty also differed from that held in the age of the Renaissance, but in a different way: for them what was above all important was the spiritual, ideal aspect of beauty. For the revolutionary romantics however the essence of the beautiful was not divine, but human, of this world.

p In realist art the sphere of the beautiful was expanded considerably. It ceased being confined to any rigid framework or to involve any contrasting of the sublime and the base. This led to a far wider understanding of the world’s aesthetic riches, and realist art rejected once and for all the aristocratic fads and squeamishness in selection of subject matter that had been the hallmark of the past. It examined all the diverse relationships and associations of life. Deliberately focussing attention on the real world, realist artists upheld an ideal of the beautiful which was 189 a full-blooded expression of life captured in its constant movement and fluctuation.

p Socialist realism introduces to artistic creativity noble principles for the furtherance of social progress, the principles of communist commitment. The scientifically substantiated ideas of communism enrich our ideas of the beautiful making the future the criterion of beauty in the present.

p Marxist-Leninist aesthetics provides a scientific analysis of beauty as an aesthetic value. In contrast to subjective idealist aesthetics, which rejects the objective character of aesthetic values, and to objective idealist theories, in which the objective character of aesthetic values is confined to spiritual reality, Marxist-Leninist aesthetics substantiates the objective character of beauty as a value, starting out from the fact that it is determined by sociohistorical experience. The conditions of man’s natural, geographical environment also exert a certain influence on his conception of beauty; for example on architectural styles which have to be adapted to natural conditions and the properties of the terrain and on metaphors which often compare man’s thought to natural phenomena, thus aestheticising them.

p In order that men might recognise beauty, take delight in it and create it, their aesthetic sense and potential need to be fostered. Marx wrote that it was only thanks to socio-historical experience that there emerged the musical ear, the eye perceiving the beauty of form or, in short, such senses as are capable of human enjoyment. As a result man’s eye is capable of apprehending not only the colour or shape of an object but also the beauty of geometrical forms, proportion, symmetry, colour combinations and gradations, the texture and plastic properties of materials, and the human ear of apprehending the harmony and rhythm of sound.

p Selfishness is alien to the aesthetic sense, just as calculating, mercantile considerations. This, however, does not mean that aesthetic delight and admiration of the beautiful constitute some kind of detached contemplation, that 190 has no practical implications or offshoots. In this respect the Marxist-Leninist approach to aesthetics differs fundamentally from the idealist one, particularly as represented in the writings of Kant. In his Critique of Judgement Kant maintained that aesthetic judgement is disinterested and that man’s aesthetic sense is incompatible with any practical useful ends. Kant saw man’s aesthetic sense as "disinterested expediency" and held that as soon as any idea of usefulness is attributed to the aesthetic sense then it starts to disintegrate.  [190•* 

p Man’s aesthetic sense is not of course aimed directly at the attainment of certain crudely utilitarian ends, and when Hegel in his criticism of materialists for pointing out connections between the beautiful and the useful wrote, among other things, that when contemplating a still-life it is not possible to use the fruits depicted or eat them—which of course cannot be denied—his attitude on this subject was a mistaken one, since the connection between the beautiful and the useful is not to be found at such a mundane level.

p Marxist-Leninist aesthetics starts out from the fact that the beautiful and the useful are not incompatible, the beauty of a phenomenon often merges and develops on the basis of its practical significance. From Vitruvius onwards the theory and practice of architecture have started out from the principle that beauty, usefulness and the construction of a building are inseparable. Yet even when no such direct link can be established between the 191 beautiful and the useful, as is the case with architecture, in applied art, design, in men’s work activity, beauty still of necessity retains its practical significance in men’s lives. This finds expression above all in the fact that by uniting the feelings, will and thoughts of people the beautiful exerts a uniquely powerful influence on the formation of social emotions and encourages men to aspire to a social ideal. It stimulates man’s vital strength, enhances his will to live, his physical and mental energy, his urge to play an active part in life around him and enriches his emotions. Marxist aesthetics resolutely rejects the idea of so-called "pure beauty" and an aesthetic sense that is supposedly free of any link with political goals and moral principles. Aesthetics cannot be separated from political issues any more than the aesthetic feeling can be from political, philosophical and ethical ideas. The beautiful cannot be separated from the ethical, nor beauty from goodness. Of course, the sphere of the beautiful is wider than that of goodness, since the category of the beautiful is relevant in connection with all phenomena of the natural world, to which moral criteria are of course not applicable. Yet in social life and in art, aesthetic and ethical considerations are inextricably interwoven.

p Aesthetics of the modernist variety contrasts aesthetic and ethical considerations as opposites. From that point of view immoral phenomena, both people and actions, can be beautiful and constitute aesthetic value. By putting forward the idea that the task of art is to sow seeds of beauty, not goodness, modernist aesthetics in practice proves to be little more than an apologia for immorality in art. In its turn the rejection of the ethical renders the aesthetic-null and void, as is convincingly borne out by decadent art leading to a destruction of the artistic fabric of works of art. Art of that kind produces an anti- aesthetic impression.

The socialist revolution was to play a great historical role in the aesthetic advancement of mankind. After freeing the popular masses from the grip of purely utilitarian needs, it exerted a decisive influence on the 192 awakening and all-round development of the aesthetic sensitivity inherent in man, on the development of his potential and need for delight in beauty. The people’s aspiration towards freedom and beauty is crucial to the proletarian revolution, as Gorky so rightly emphasised. Under socialism the beautiful permeates all spheres of social life and the people’s day-to-day activity. Under socialisni the scope for the operation of the laws of beauty becomes truly limitless.