10

p In accordance with the principles of criticizing the antiMarxist philosophical tendencies established by Lenin in his book Materialism and Empiric-Criticism the author has set himself the following primary methodological objective: to show the idealistic and metaphysical essence of the semantic tendency in contemporary bourgeois aesthetics, over the full range of epistemological questions.

p The very emergence of semantic aesthetics, as well as semantic philosophy as a whole, is largely due to the need of bourgeois ideology for such philosophical theories capable of replacing the traditional schools of objective and subjective idealism, which became defunct at the turn of the century, and proved incapable of answering the questions posed by new scientific cognition. Theories were needed which would be able to serve beneath the banner of science without breaking with idealism-the dominant world-view of contemporary bourgeois society. It was the semantic movement in modern bourgeois philosophy and aesthetics that espoused this mission.’ For all that it parades as science it is basically unscientific. As its methodological point of departure it retained philosophical idealism. Semantic idealism in aesthetics not only failed to resolve the crisis in modern bourgeois philosophy and aesthetics, but actually served to reveal its characteristic features in graphic form.

p In this analysis of the philosophical essence of modern aesthetics in the west we proceed from the principle that subjectivism is the dominant tendency in all contemporary bourgeois schools and directions, including aesthetic ones. This 11 does not mean that objective idealism has lost its significance in modern aesthetics, but that it reveals an increasingly marked tendency towards subjectivism. At the same time western philosophy is characterized by a tendency to deviate from subjectivism, and to function as an objective idealistic metaphysics of neo-realism, of the phenomenology of “ essences”, etc.

p This characterization is fully borne out by an analysis of the semantic trend in modern western aesthetics. The eclectic combination and amalgamation of subjective and objective idealism, of rationalism and biologism, of vulgar materialism and apriorism generates an inner inconsistency and confusion of the aesthetic theories of semantic idealism. This eclecticism of semantic idealism has nothing in common with the great contradictions of the classical forms of idealism, with those contradictions that were often more interesting than the theories themselves. “The contradictory nature of bourgeois philosophical theories,” writes the Soviet scholar B. V. Bogdanov, “acquires a different import with the entry of capitalism into the stage of imperialism. The theories become eclectic, for they cannot afford to ignore the problems made prominent by life itself, by the development of science. But these problems are treated in the spirit of idealism and irrationalism, and a mutual critique of the theories inevitably takes on the character of petty quibbling. Such are the epigonic theories that smack of Machism, and their emergence bears witness to the general decline of the bourgeois worldview" (3, 67).

p The intrinsic connection between idealism and the metaphysical method of thinking found its most graphic manifestation in the epigonic idealistic conceptions of bourgeois aesthetics and philosophy in the age of imperialism. All the philosophical and aesthetic conceptions discussed in this book are, to a greater or lesser extent, metaphysical in essence. At their basis lies a metaphysical, one-sided exaggeration of one of the aspects of art, which makes it possible in principle to treat art as a language or sign and symbol system, and to turn this aspect into the essence of art. As the dominant tendency of these theories, subjectivism is also 12 epistemologically conditioned by the metaphysical absolutization of the linguistic (sign, symbolic) activity of the subject in artistic creation, which is connected either with exclusively psychological factors-with the emotions, the imagination and intuition, or with biological impulses, etc.

p As evidence of the anti-scientific nature of this tendency we can take its inherent agnosticism. Without exception all the aestheticians of the semantic school deny that art provides an adequate reflection of objective reality. Such denial is most outspoken in Cassirer’s neo-Kantian aesthetics, in Croce’s intuitional aesthetics, in conventional analytic aesthetics, etc. In aesthetic conceptions of this sort, it is man, independent of reality, of social experience, who is regarded as the subject, the creator, of art. These conceptions display the’ oppositions, so characteristic of modern western philosophy, between the axiological and epistemological approaches to science, philosophy, religion, morality, art and other spheres of the intellectual life of society. Croce, Cassirer, Whitehead et al. have made efforts, fruitful in themselves, to elicit the specifics of artistic creation in comparison to scientific and philosophical analysis. These efforts are, however, manifested in relativistic negation of artistic truth. Relativism should also be noted as one of the indications of the agnostic essence of the semantic tendency in bourgeois aesthetics.

p The second task of the present book is to show the connection of the semantic trend to the main directions of modern idealistic philosophy. This task has been complicated by the fact that representatives of the most varied directions and schools have been united under the banner of semantic idealism in aesthetics.

p Semantic aesthetics took form as a specific tendency of 20th century aesthetic thought in the mainstream of idealistic semantic philosophy. Semantic philosophy came out with “ideas connected with the various directions of recent philosophy from which semantic philosophy derived its own energy and inspiration" (16, 78). The semantic movement attracted into its orbit to a varying degree the schools of neo-positivism (Russell, Richards, Carnap, Wittgenstein), pragmatism (Peirce, Dewey, Morris), neo-realism (Whitehead), neo-Kantianism 13 and phenomenology (Cassirer, Langer). Some influence from this movement was also felt by the neo-Hegelians (Croce, Collingwood), the existentialists (Heidegger), the neo-thomists (Maritain).

p What exactly is the special nature of this philosophical tendency? To state that the semantic orientation in philosophy is distinguished by “common concern with signs and meanings" (D. Kalish) and with linguistic problems  [13•1  may be quite true, but it does not provide a full answer to this question, for such an interest, albeit displayed to a lesser extent, can be observed in the history of philosophy long before the time of the semanticists. “Its concern,” Marx wrote, “is to distinguish in each system the determinations themselves, the actual crystallisations pervading the whole system...” (13, 506). One such motif in the semantic trend was the fact that it had made “an important, although little-noticed step from the premise that language is also an object of philosophical study, to the premise that it is its only object of study" or at least the “main and most important object of investigation and philosophical analysis" (16, 47-48, 78). On the basis of this theoretical principle attention was paid predominantly to the possibility of using procedures of linguistic analysis in the construction of methods, including a method for investigating philosophy itself.

p The heightened interest of philosophers in language and signs not only as the instrument but also as the object of study was of course not accidental or arbitrary development, but was determined by objective requirements of new advances in science. Soviet philosopher P. V. Kopnin in his article “An Analysis of Language as a Logico-Epistemological Problem" remarks that at the turn of the century essential changes took place in the structure of scientific knowledge, the 14 formation of scientific theories and in the way new scientific results were achieved. The elimination of all sensuousness from the content of scientific research-with the consequence that the concepts of science acquired an extremely abstract character-led to the prominence of that aspect of a scientific theory which would enable the theory to be regarded as a language, a system of signs admitting various interpretations. This created the basis for the extensive use of the logical and mathematical apparatus in different fields of science described by V. I. Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In the course of its development science set logic and mathematics a number of new problems, and in solving them they proceeded from the premise that knowledge is a language, artificially created and formalized. On the basis of this premise they developed a method of analysing knowledge by creating artificial formalized languages (8, 32-33). This, in its turn, served as a stimulus for the formation of new scientific disciplines such as semiotics and systems theory.

p It so happened that amongst the logicians, mathematicians and semioticians who addressed themselves to these concrete problems, as science developed, there were a considerable number of philosophers from various schools of philosophical idealism-Peirce, Russell, Whitehead, Carnap and others. It would be an oversimplification, when discussing the achievements of these scholars in their various fields, to disassociate these achievements from their philosophical beliefs, and to make it appear as though they first made discoveries in particular areas and only afterwards, post factum, subjected them to an idealistic interpretation. And yet, in discussing semantic philosophy as a whole, we can say that its representatives, as so often in the past, made use of new discoveries connected with problems of language and sign systems to substantiate the latest forms of idealism. As an indicative example we can take the works of the American logician and philosopher Charles Peirce, who is considered the founder of semiotics. In his works semiotics formed an organic part of his phenomenological and pragmatic epistemology. Charles Morris, who developed Peirce’s ideas in semiotics and argued from the positions of semantic philosophy for its liberation 15 from “metaphysics”, correctly pointed out that Peirce made use of semiotics to support idealistic metaphysics. (Morris himself, as will be shown below in Ch. 9, did not manage to avoid idealistic “metaphysics”.) The advancement of language, sign and meaning as the central object of philosophical study enabled semanticists, by falsifying philosophical significance of the recent achievements of logic, mathematics and semiotics, to find a new approach to the substantiation of traditional idealistic conceptions. This falsification consisted in an idealistic interpretation of the problems of language, sign and meaning. Whereas the materialists proceeded from the proposition that neither thought nor language formed separate domains on their own-that they were merely the manifestation of real life-the idealistic semanticists divorced language and signs (symbols) from the world of things and the world of ideas, isolating them in an independent domain, an intermedial world. Language and signs (symbols) were turned by semanticists from the vital means of human communication, from instruments and active epistemological means into demiurges of those real worlds which people apprehend and in which they live.

p In his summary of Feuerbach’s Lectures on the Essence oi Religion V. I. Lenin recorded the following view: “If one is not ashamed to allow the sensuous, corporeal world to arise from the thought and will of a spirit, if one is not ashamed to assert that things are not thought of because they exist, but that they exist because they are thought of; then let one also not be ashamed to allow things to arise from the word; then let one also not be ashamed to assert that words exist not because things exist, but that things exist only because words exist" (11, 75-76). The representatives of 20th century semantic idealism showed that they were not ashamed to make precisely such an allowance when they modified the Kantian idea of patterned experience. The semanticists invested not the a priori forms of intuition and reason, but language and signs (symbols) with the function of demiurges.

p There was no lack of idealistic philosophers among the logic semanticists. Many of them were interested in 16 questions of aesthetics, ethics, axiology, etc. as well as of epistemology. “.. .It is to be expected,” writes the American historian of aesthetics Monroe C. Beardsley, “that philosophers working along this line [semantic philosophy) would consider applying their results to the problems of aesthetics" (2, 32). And it is indeed the case that the philosophers who were active in founding semantic philosophy-Peirce, Cassirer, Whitehead, Richards-as well as those who developed their ideas-Morris, Langer et al.-laid the foundations of the semantic philosophy of art and are regarded as the classics of semantic aesthetics. Another of the initial impulses to semantic aesthetics was the linguistic philosophy of art of Benedetto Croce, subsequently developed by the English neo-Hegelian Robin Collingwood. Although these philosophers were not semanticists in their philosophical activity, in aesthetics they professed (with certain differences) the basic principles and methods of the semantic approach to art.

p Soviet philosophers Alexei Bogomolov, Yuri Melvil and Igor Narsky have advanced the view that in modern bourgeois philosophy, alongside fragmentation and differentiation, we can observe the contrary process of integration of philosophical schools. As the authors have shown, this process usually corresponds to the three main tendencies in the development of modern bourgeois philosophy: (1) the neo-positivist (orientation to science and pseudo-science, an essentially subjective-idealistic principle of theoretical knowledge); (2) the irrationalist (irrationalism and intuitivism, the combination of a basic subjective principle of the theory of knowledge with an objective idealism in religiously oriented philosophers) and (3) religious and dogmatic. As an intermediate tendency between them the authors name modern realism, which has frequently attempted to “synthesize” these tendencies, showing a preference first for one, and then the other (12, 346-48). In our opinion, on the basis of an analysis of semantic conceptions it is possible to state that modern bourgeois aesthetics displays a process of integration with respect to these same tendencies. Amongst the idealistic semantic conceptions of art we can also observe both an irrationalist tendency, connected with the reduction of the role of the 17 intellect in art, the biologization of art (Richards), and the absolutization in it of the spontaneous and intuitive (Peirce, Croce, Langer), a religious and dogmatic tendency (Maritain) and an intermediate neo-realist tendency (Whitehead). However, there can be no doubt that a dominant role is played in semantic idealism, both in philosophy and aesthetics, by the neo-positivist tendency with its orientation to science and pseudo-science and its subjective idealistic attitude to theoretical knowledge. This tendency is generally followed, and can be felt not only in the aesthetic theories of Richards, Wittgenstein and the analysts, which developed in the neopositivist mainstream, but also, to a greater or lesser degree, in all the semantic conceptions of art reviewed in the present study.

p The third methodological task of the present study is to show how and to what purpose the semantic tendency in modern aesthetics relates to modern scientific cognition. We take as our point of departure the conviction that a review of western aesthetics should not be limited to its ideological aspect since the growing interest of aestheticians in the data of specialized sciences is a vital concomitant of the intensified ideological functions of modern aesthetics. This can be attributed to a number of circumstances.

p First, to the crisis in the idealistic philosophical aesthetics of the 19th century, with its inherent speculative character and predominance of subjectivism.

p Secondly, to the fact that the imperialist bourgeoisie have, as the Soviet scholar T. Oizerman has put it, “learned from historical experience that an outspoken reactionary approach ... is not ideologically effective”. The needs of the bourgeoisie lead to the “emergence of refined idealistic theories" formally based on scientific data and (verbally) dissociated from speculative idealistic philosophy (15, 15-16).

p Thirdly, to the endeavours of modern science to integrate the investigative activities of different sciences, to the growth of multi-disciplinary research, and the use by the sciences and the humanities, of the methods of other special, natural and technical sciences. “...A powerful current,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “...from natural to social science . . . remains 18 just as powerful, if not more so, in the twentieth century too" (10, 196).

p The present stage in the development of scientific research is characterized by the intensive adoption of the exact methods of research of natural sciences and mathematics by the humanities. The emergence of such new special scientific disciplines as semiotics, information theory, cybernetics, systems structural analysis, based on principles embracing a wide range of phenomena and making possible the elaboration of new approaches to and methods of research, has stimulated scholars to apply these principles and methods in their study of the objects of the humanities. The first of the humanities to give wide application to these principles and strict deductive methods, previously the exclusive domain- of the natural sciences, was linguistics. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure laid the foundations of structural linguistics, subsequently developed in the Prague (N. S. Trubetskoy et al.), Copenhagen (Louis Hjelmslev et al.), American (Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield) schools of structuralism, in the writings of some Soviet linguists and in the works of Noam Chomsky in the USA. Exact methods of research enabled linguistics to attain important theoretical and practical results, and placed it in the forefront of scientific progress. Another humanitarian discipline which used semiotic and structuralist theoretical principles to obtain tangible results was anthropology, guided in this direction above all by the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss.

p Aesthetics, and in particular that component of aesthetics which deals with the theory of art, followed linguistics and anthropology in applying the principles and methods of the exact sciences. A number of attempts have been made by western scholars to apply semiotic, information theory and structuralist principles and methods in the analysis of various forms of art. These principles and methods have been extensively employed in the work of a group of Soviet authors, who constitute an entire movement (we should mention above all the writings of Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vyacheslav Toporov, Yuri Lekomtsev et al.). The Soviet scholars are divided in their opinion of the worth and 19 potential of this direction in the description and interpretation of aesthetic phenomena, above all the phenomena of art, and of the limitations and possibilities of applying exact methods in aesthetic research.

p The present work discusses this tendency in aesthetics characterized by the use of the analytical methods of such disciplines as linguistics, semiotics etc. There are good reasons for the promotion of the method of analysing art peculiar to semantic aesthetics as the criterion for distinguishing it among other trends.  [19•1  If we look at the writings of the actual proponents of semantic aesthetics we will find that they often contain claims of the sort that their aesthetics are not a theory, nor a system of interpretation, but a system of methods of analysing aesthetic objects (Marx Dense).

p Without in any way denying that the semantic tendency in aesthetics is characterized by the desire to employ new exact methods of analysis borrowed from linguistics, semiotics etc., we nevertheless consider it worth pointing out that the view of semantic aesthetics as method and no more contradicts the Marxist principle of the dialectical unity of theory and method. This is also the premise behind the essential principle of Marxist studies in aesthetic history, which holds that 20 in order to reveal the essence of aesthetic theories it is essential first of all to analyse their authors’ philosophical views. The philosophical essence of semantic aesthetics is connected primarily not with the methods but with an idealistic interpretation of the initial premises.  [20•1  The view of semantic aesthetics as pure method is a carry-over from semantic philosophy. It was in this field, semantic philosophy, that the neo-positivists M. Schlick, R. Carnap, L. Wittgenstein and the pragmatist W. James declared that the “revolution in philosophy" brought about by semanticists consisted in the apparent transformation of philosophy from the theory, its previous function, into the method of linguistic analysis, thanks to which it can no longer be considered “metaphysics”, in contrast to all classical philosophy hitherto. The fact that the subversion of metaphysics in semantic philosophy was actually a myth, that notwithstanding its own assertions it was a fully determined idealistic theory, has been convincingly demonstrated in the writings of Marxist philosophers and is accepted by many bourgeois philosophers, including even some who assisted at the birth of this movement (e.g. Bertrand Russell). It should be noted that a view of aesthetics as pure method is also untenable.

p Method cannot serve as the main criterion for the isolation of an aesthetic trend or a tendency in the study of art. This criterion is the way the actual nature of art and the laws to which it is subordinated are interpreted or explained in this trend. In other words, which theory of art it subscribes to, and which theoretical principles it advances. As for the methods and devices of analysis, they are determined by these theoretical premises.  [20•2  Like the majority of the directions and 21 tendencies of modern western aesthetics, semantic aesthetics is mainly concerned with art. It is methodologically important to distinguish two levels of analysis: the material-scientific and the philosophical. At both levels semantic aesthetics is primarily a system of theoretical principles, a particular theory of art, with, of course, corresponding methods and devices of analysis. Method rests on the basic premises of theory, and thus any transference of the methods of other disciplines to art means that theoretical models are also transferred. The application of the methods of semantics, linguistics etc. to the analysis of art presupposes, first, as its primary theoretical concession (implicit or explicit), that art is a semiotic, linguistic, etc. object and, secondly, the construction of semiotic, linguistic, etc. models of art with the help of these methods.

p This approach to the semantic tendency in aesthetics makes it possible to resolve correctly the problem of the classification of the semantic conceptions of art.

p M. Damjanovic identifies the following three directions within semantic aesthetics:

p 1. Special scientific theories, like, for example, aesthetic information theory.

p 2. Doctrines occupying a transitional position between special scientific theories and philosophical theories. These are the “analytic”, the “meta-critical” directions of thought. On the one hand they are connected with a philosophical tendency, and on the other their analysis of aesthetic language is oriented towards the different sciences, and empirical analytical procedures.

p 3. A symbolic philosophy of art, concerned primarily with its epistemological aspects. This direction is characteristic of the work of Morris, Langer and others (6, 80-81).

p In his article “The Semantic Trend in Modern Aesthetics" 22 published two years later Damjanovic terms the above directions respectively semiotic, analytic and symbolic.

p This classification is particularly useful because it is based on the connection between semantic theories of art and philosophy, and not the differences in their procedures of analysis, for the latter have a subordinate character.  [22•1 

p The present critical study has as its object not the material-scientific semantic theories of art, but the philosophical semantic theories (the 3rd group of theories in Damjanovic’s classification). It has already been stated that the semantic philosophy of art came into being as a result of the projection of the main principles and methods of semantic idealism onto aesthetics. The metaphysical method and idealistic principles of semantic idealism conditioned the non-scientific use of exact methods in the semantic philosophy of art.

p We believe that an observance of the following principles will give an application of exact methods in aesthetics that answers the requirements of Marxist-Leninist methodology.

p First, that the applied methods at the present time form a component of the methodology of the natural and social sciences, assisting the convergence of these two areas of study and providing the pre-conditions for a deeper examination of the essence of social processes and the human individuality. Secondly, that the indicated methods “characterize only a certain, limited aspect of the study of real complex objects. The above-indicated methods are not intrinsically philosophical, and have a special character" (9, 92-93). Seen from this point of view, the problems of art as an object of aesthetics closely linked with philosophy cannot be reduced to questions which are entirely soluble by the methods of mathematics, semiotics, systems theory, etc., despite the fact that these latter have a wide range of application. Aesthetics is concerned with problems of art as a whole, with the question of the nature of art, of the most general laws of its 23 development, of the interrelation of the material and spiritual sides of art, of the laws of creative artistic activity, of artistic cognition (reflection), of the assimilation of the outside world etc.

p It cannot be denied that the semiotic, structuralist, etc. methods of analysis represent an important advance in the modern methodology of scientific study. Application of these methods makes it possible for art as the object of study to be represented in the form of different systems (linguistic, of information theory, etc.), or, which comes to the same thing, in the form of different subject-matter of study. This approach leads to a comprehensive analysis. However, it also conceals a certain danger: we lose sight of object as objective entity and are left with only the subject-matter of study, determined by the tasks set by the given problem. This creates the possibility of an arbitrary interpretation of the object of study.

p The semantic philosophy of art, which is based on the methodological principles of semantic idealism (language is the only subject-matter of philosophy!), is characterized by a view of art as language (or another form of symbolism) not from some aspect or other, but as a whole, from the point of view of its essence. The adherents of the semantic philosophy of art proceed from precisely this premise when they employ for their analysis of art the methods of such disciplines as semiotics, linguistics, systems analysis, etc.

p When viewed from the positions of Marxist dialectics this approach reveals an unmistakable metaphysical absolutization of one of the aspects of art. Marxist aestheticians believe that “art admits the possibility of being viewed in the same aspect in which its sign nature functions”, however, as the Soviet scholar Ya. I. Hajikyan aptly emphasizes, “its sign nature does not exhaust its essence" (4, 249-250). The metaphysical absolutization of the sign (linguistic, communicative, etc.) aspect of art contains within itself the epistemological possibility of an idealistic explanation of the essence of art. Art, when interpreted as language (or some other sign system) becomes the idealistic semanticist’s main, if not only, aspect of aesthetic study, language itself (or any other form 24 of symbolism), moreover, being interpreted in the spirit of some particular school of semantic idealism. The contiguity of such disciplines as semiotics or cybernetics to philosophy in principle makes possible a natural and simple transition from them to philosophy, and in particular to the theory of knowledge.

p Furthermore, the majority of philosophers of the semantic direction, and in particular such of its prominent adherents as Peirce, Cassirer, Richards and others, are aware that it is impossible to understand the essence of art if you ignore its aesthetic nature, its connection with beauty, its value aspect, which constitutes the researcher’s closest link with philosophy. The semantic philosophers go on to give the very concept of artistic value an idealistic interpretation. Objective idealist approaches (Peirce, Whitehead, Croce) treat artistic value as an objective, but exclusively spiritual value, while in subjective idealistic theories (Cassirer) the role of the subject in the aesthetic context is absolutized and the objective character of beauty is denied.

p While criticizing the idealistic interpretation of axiology, Marxist scholars (Avner Zis et al.) point at the same time to the necessity to study the axiological aspect of art from scientific, dialectic materialistic methodological positions (7, 101).

p The philosophical interpretation of language, signs and information, when combined with a philosophical interpretation of the artistic value of art, leads to a situation where as a rule semantic aesthetics practically functions as a philosophy oi art. The philosophical interpretation of the semiotic (sign) and axiological (value) aspects of art from the positions of semantic idealism is another principal topic of the critical analysis undertaken in the present work. In this connection the following terminological definitions should be made. Insofar as the term “semantic” in its philosophical aesthetic application is intimately connected with the idealist tradition in the interpretation of signs and symbols, and the term “aesthetics” as a rule designates the philosophical theory of art, it is clearly inadvisable to use the expression “semantic aesthetics" for semantic conceptions of art which employ in their analyses exact methods based on concrete scientific 25 theories. It would perhaps be better to term them “semantic theories of art" with subdivisions into “semiotic”, “ linguistic”, “structural”, etc. The term “semantic aesthetics" should properly be used to designate idealistic semantic aesthetics, and since in the west aesthetics is predominantly the study of art “semantic aesthetics" can be taken to be the “semantic philosophy of art". This term is less ambiguous than others, such as “symbolic philosophy of art”, and, in addition, it at once makes it clear that we are concerned precisely with the philosophy of art (and not with a special scientific theory), and moreover an idealist semantic philosophy.

p Thus, the orientation to science, the use of the methods of linguistics, semiotics, etc. in the semantic philosophy of art can be seen to be a complex and contradictory process. It should be pointed out above all that the reliance on science is fundamentally formal. That is to say, that scientific data, and in particular the research methods of special branches of the sciences, provide not so much a means of attaining scientific truth as a source of new methods, approaches, means of substantiating idealistic conclusions bearing on the crucial problems of aesthetics. This is a graphic illustration of the well-known Marxist belief that idealism is a constant parasitical formation on scientific achievements. At the same time the epistemological mechanism of the birth of idealism revealed by Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks remains the same as before: the single-mindedness, one-sidedness, subjectivism and metaphysical basis of the idealistic analysis distort the nature of the aesthetic fact. The general disposition of ideas and tendencies in contemporary society is such that the ruling classes are concerned to give firm currency to this idealistically distorted interpretation.

p At the same time it must be pointed out that, whereas idealists are not led by their employment of the research methods of the sciences to an essentially new resolution of crucial philosophical and aesthetic problems, the same cannot be said of the way they state their problems (in particular those which concern specific areas of knowledge). “There are no grounds to deny that certain modern bourgeois philosophers occasionally state new problems. . . . Bourgeois 26 philosophers may now and again advance and resolve certain problems which, for a number of reasons, have not yet been examined by Marxist philosophers. To ignore the ideas of bourgeois authors simply because they are put forward by our ideological opponents or because they contain certain errors would be to hold up the development of Marxist philosophy. It is possible-indeed essential-to identify in the flood of pseudo-problems advanced by bourgeois philosophers certain genuine epistemological, methodological, psychological and social problems, even if they are imprecisely stated or erroneously resolved" (12, 362-363). In their article “Leninism and Methodological Questions of the History and Criticism of Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy”, from which the above quotation was taken, A. S. Bogomolov, Yu. K. Melvil, and I. S. Narsky develop Lenin’s views about the ability of bourgeois authors to “make very valuable contributions in the field of factual and specialized investigations”, and the necessity for Marxists to “be able to master and refashion" the discoveries of bourgeois philosophers, and to “be able to lop off their reactionary tendency, to pursue our own line and to combat the whole line of the forces and classes hostile to us".

Proceeding from Lenin’s methodological directions mentioned above, we take as the fourth vital task of the present study the exposition of the class nature of the semantic philosophy of art, diametrically opposed to materialism, and ultimately expressing the class interests of the bourgeoisie. The clearest manifestation of this is in the hostility of semantic aesthetic idealism to progressive realistic art and in the theoretical justification of various forms of modernist art.