On the basis of all the preceding arguments and materials, we now have every right to say that Aristotle has, first, the doctrine of disinterested and vitally disinterested aesthetic pleasure, and, secondly, that Aristotle's aesthetics here for the first time acquires a completely independent and specific meaning.

a) Throughout our History of Ancient Aesthetics we have argued that aesthetics was never a special science in antiquity, and that, in particular, the doctrine of beauty did not differ in any essential way from the general doctrine of being. In the present paragraph of our study, we can significantly clarify these theses and, on the basis of Aristotle's materials, give them a somewhat different, more specific characterization.

First of all, even with Aristotle, aesthetics never acquires such an independent significance as to stand out as a separate science and receive an appropriate name, just as he distinguished the "first philosophy", logic, poetics, rhetoric, politics, psychology and biology. In this sense, even for Aristotle, aesthetics is not a special discipline at all. In addition, the materials on the problems of ontological aesthetics that we have cited also confirm the general view of the non-independence of ancient aesthetics in that aesthetic problems are solved here with the help of the same methods by which Aristotle develops a general ontology, or "first philosophy." There is no aesthetic specificity here either. This must be firmly remembered because for us the general thesis about the lack of independence of ancient aesthetics as a science remains, generally speaking, unshakable even after the materials proposed above have been cited and discussed. And yet, in Aristotle, ancient aesthetics fully reached the problems of self-sufficiency, unselfishness, immaterial and purely ideal objectivity, and a transcendental understanding of life and pleasure.

b) In antiquity, no one spoke so clearly as Aristotle about the synthesis of speculation and pleasure, although there are innumerable hints of this in ancient aesthetics. No one, furthermore, than Aristotle, spoke in antiquity about the self-sufficiency of the mind. For Anaxagoras, the mind is only a natural-philosophical principle, and for Plato, the self-sufficiency of the mind passes too quickly into material actuality, so that this mind in Plato is too ontological and lacks the picture of self-sufficiency that we find in Aristotle. Further, every more or less developed aesthetics in the history of this science has always contained elements of living mobility, inner activity, and simple life, as opposed to a dead mechanism. At the same time, this kind of vital understanding of beauty very often turned into utilitarianism and reduced the independent value of beauty. In modern times, Kant's theory of the self-sufficiency of beauty has received for itself a distinct formula, but this formula was achieved in Kant mainly along the paths of subjective idealism. Schelling and Hegel contain many beautiful pages about the self-sufficiency of beauty. But this beauty, constructed in German idealism, is too spiritual and often far removed from real nature and art. As for Aristotle, this philosopher was able to give such a doctrine of self-sufficient beauty, which is fundamentally quite cosmological. Aristotle's mind is immaterial and very far from material effects on matter. Nevertheless, in Aristotle he appears as nothing other than the cosmic prime mover, as the designer of all that exists, of all reality. It has such a self-sufficient significance that it even has its own, namely, intelligible matter. And yet he is the idea of all ideas, and he comprehends absolutely every reality. This teaching of Aristotle about the self-sufficient Mind, therefore, does not in the least contradict its utilitarianism, its productive significance. And he produces the whole world and everything that is contained in the world. This synthesis of self-sufficiency and production is deeper and broader than that of Kant, in whom "unselfishness" excludes all utilitarianism, and "play" and "goal" are consciously devoid of any vital "purposefulness." Only Aristotle was able to give in clear formulas such a doctrine of aesthetic self-sufficiency, of aesthetic unselfishness, and of aesthetic contemplation, which in no way contradicts anything material, of any expediency of life, and of any production. No one like Aristotle teaches in such an intense form about the pure mind. But no one, like Aristotle, understood this mind as production. For Aristotle, the mind is a completely self-sufficient value (timios), which does not need any other values at all for its substantiation. But it is itself the principle of value for all that exists, and everything that exists is beautiful only because of its association with this Mind.

Thus, Aristotle's doctrine of the Mind is the first doctrine in antiquity of self-sufficient aesthetic pleasure. But since here we have antiquity, and not modern times or German idealism, this self-sufficient aesthetic pleasure is at the same time the production principle for everything that exists, including nature, society, and art, and not just one human subject.

§4. Mind, Soul and Cosmos

1. Elements of the doctrine of the cosmic Soul in the doctrine of the Mind.

If we recall what has been said above about the general Platonic triad, and about the necessity of considering Aristotle also from the point of view of this triad (since he is also a Platonist), then after the problem of the One and the Mind, we should now have to speak of the cosmic Soul in Aristotle. As for the cosmos, for Plato and Aristotle it is only the eternal realization of the One, the Mind and the Soul. It is self-evident that in Aristotle the cosmos also turns out to be the best and most beautiful work of art and the embodiment of the most divine beauty. However, Aristotle still has some differences from Plato, which must be mentioned at once.

The fact is that if we avoid individual hints, then Aristotle's doctrine of the cosmic Soul can be said to be absent. On the other hand, however, his Mind is endowed with all those properties which the pure Platonists attributed specifically to the Soul. Aristotle's mind is not only cosmic and supracosmic thinking, not only cosmic and supracosmic speculation, not only self-sufficient contemplation and "thinking thinking." It is no less treated as the "first mover" (to proton cinoyn).

Aristotle writes dozens, if not hundreds, of passages about this. The Cosmic Mind as the prime mover is Aristotle's favorite idea; if he reproaches Plato and the "supporters of ideas" in general, it is only that their kingdom of ideas is too immovable and too isolated from the cosmos and from all the movements that take place in the cosmos. Theoretically, such reproaches of Aristotle are completely impotent and helpless, being based only on those passages in Plato's works where the dialectics of ideas is given in an independent form and where the question of the influence of ideas on the world and of ideas as a principle of motion is not raised. In fact, Plato, as we have often seen above, regards his ideas precisely as the principle of motion, precisely as generative models. Therefore, Aristotle's objections to Plato, correct in themselves, apply only to various doctrines about the isolated existence of ideas, about their complete inactivity, deadness and abstraction, that is, they do not apply to Plato at all. On the other hand, Aristotle himself is by no means guilty of an isolated understanding of the cosmic Mind, and he never tires of saying that this Mind, being itself immobile, moves absolutely everything that exists. In Aristotle, he is the prime mover; and in this thinker he is endowed, in addition to purely mental functions, also with those functions of the Platonic Soul, which in Plato himself was put forward precisely as the principle of universal motion. Thus, the concept of the cosmic Soul is not at all absent in Aristotle, but all its essential functions are transferred to the Mind. And that is why Aristotle has so many arguments about the Mind as the prime mover, and that is why Aristotle's ontological aesthetics, which has its culmination in cosmology, is also full of these arguments about the prime mover, without which the cosmos would not have become for him the most perfect work of art, as it is interpreted by Plato.

2. The basic transcendental argument concerning the prime mover.