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p Enough about Feuerbach’s materialism, however. What is important for us here is chiefly that Chernyshevsky regarded his teacher as a materialist and that The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality is an interesting attempt, unique in its kind, to base aesthetics on the materialist philosophy of Feuerbach. In order to understand this attempt properly, we must examine yet another aspect of Feuerbach’s philosophy.

p According to Feuerbach, the object in its true sense is conveyed, as we know, only by sensation: "sensation or reality is the same as truth". Speculative philosophy scorned the “sensual”, i.e., the evidence of our sense organs, assuming that ideas of objects based on sensual experience alone did not correspond to the true nature of the objects and needed to be tested by means of “pure” thought. Feuerbach was bound to revolt against such an attitude to the “sensual”. He argued that if our ideas of objects were based on our sensual experience, they would correspond fully to their true nature. But our imagination often distorts our ideas, which is why they contradict sensual experience. The task of philosophy and science in general is to rid our ideas and the concepts based on them of the imaginary element and make them accord with sensual experience. "At first people see things not as they are in fact, but as they seem to be,” he said; "people see not the things, but what they think about the things, they ascribe their own essence to them, they do not distinguish between the object and their own idea of it.” The same takes place in the sphere of thought. People are more willing to study abstract concepts than real objects, and since abstract concepts are the same objects translated into the language of thought, people are more interested in the translation than in the original. It is only very recently that mankind has begun to return to the undistorted, objective contemplation of the sensual, i.e., of real objects.  [240•*  In returning to this contemplation which predominated in Ancient Greece, mankind is, so to say, "returning to itself, because people who deal only with fabrications and abstractions, can themselves be only fantastic and 241 abstract, not real beings. The extent to which a person is real depends’on the extent to which the subject he studies is real".  [241•* 

p But if man’s essence is “sensation”, reality, and not fabrication or abstraction, all extolling of fabrication and abstraction over reality is not only wrong, but downright harmful. And if the task of science in general is to rehabilitate reality, this rehabilitation is also the task of aesthetics as a branch of science. This conclusion, which fellows inevitably from Feuerbach’s philosophical teaching, lay at the basis of all Chernyshevsky’s discussions of art.

p The idealist aestheticians said that the source of art is man’s striving to free the beautiful that exists in reality from the defects that prevent it from satisfying man fully. Chernyshevsky, however, maintains, on the contrary, that the beautiful in reality is always superior to the beautiful in art. In support of this idea he analyses in detail all the "reproaches levelled at the beautiful in reality" by Vischer, who was at that time perhaps the most eminent representative of idealist aesthetics in Germany. These reproaches seem to him to be groundless. In his opinion, the beautiful as it exists in living reality either has none of the defects that the idealists wish to see in it, or has them only to a slight extent. And works of art are not free of them either. All the defects of the beautiful that exists in reality assume far greater proportions in works of art. Chernyshevsky examines each art separately and tries to show that none of them can compete with living reality in the beauty of its works. Because such competition is impossible he concludes that the source of art could never be the striving to free the beautiful from the defects which are allegedly inherent in it in reality and prevent people from enjoying it. The relation of art to reality is that of the engraving to the painting. The engraving cannot be better than the painting, but there is only one painting, whereas the engraving is sold all over the world in a multitude of copies and is enjoyed by people who will probably never have the chance to see the painting. Works of art are a substitute for the beautiful in reality; they introduce a beautiful phenomenon to those who have never seen it; they arouse and revive the memory of it in people who have seen it.

p The purpose of art is to reproduce the beautiful that exists in reality. But we already know that, in Ghernyshevsky’s opinion, the sphere of art is far broader than the sphere of the beautiful in the strict sense of the word. It follows, therefore, that the task of art is to reproduce all the phenomena of life that for some reason or another are of interest to people. "By real life,” Chernyshevsky adds, "we do not mean only man’s relation to 242 the objects and beings of the objective world, of course, but also the inner life (of man); man sometimes lives by dreams—dreams then have for him (to a certain extent and for a certain time) the importance of something objective; even more often man lives in the world of his feeling; these states, if they are of interest, are also reproduced by art.” This is a most important addition, about which we shall have much to say later; we therefore request the reader to pay great attention to it.

p Many works of art not only reproduce life, but also explain it to us, which is why they serve us as textbooks of life. According to Ghernyshevsky, "this applies especially to poetry, which is not able to embrace all details and, therefore, obliged to leave very many trifles out of its pictures, it concentrates our attention on a few retained features; if the important features are retained, as they should be, it is easier for the inexperienced eye to survey the essence of the object".

p Finally, Ghernyshevsky ascribes to art, and to poetry in particular, a third purpose, that of "pronouncing judgment on the phenomena that are reproduced”. If an artist is a thinking person, he cannot fail to judge that which he has reproduced, and his judgment is bound to affect his works. We believe, however, that this third purpose of art merges with the second: an artist cannot pass judgment on the phenomena of life without at the same time telling us how he understands them, i.e., without explaining them to us in his own way. It goes without saying that if an artist set himself the task of rehabilitating reality, he would have to explain the true meaning of life every time he believed that people were forgetting it for the sake of "the dreams of the imagination”. There is no need to add also that such an artist would enjoy Ghernyshevsky’s wholehearted approval.

Thus we see that his negative attitude to the theory of art for art’s sake was indissolubly linked with the whole system of his philosophical views.