HISTORY OF ANCIENT AESTHETICS

HIGH CLASSICS

History of Ancient Aesthetics, Volume III

Moscow: "Iskusstvo", 1974

Dedicated to Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi

Introductory remarks

The present book is a continuation of two other books by the same author - "The History of Ancient Aesthetics (Early Classics)" (Moscow, 1963, hereinafter cited as the first volume) and "The History of Ancient Aesthetics (Sophists, Socrates, Plato)" (Moscow, 1969, hereinafter cited as the second volume).

The third and fourth volumes of the History of Ancient Aesthetics complete the exposition of that great period of ancient aesthetics, which we call the period of classics. This period of the classics, as in all subsequent cultures, is characterized by the objectivism of aesthetic constructions, their rigor and simplicity, as well as the subordination of everything subjective to these objective structures. The entire period of classics occupies the centuries in ancient aesthetics from the VI to the IV BC in Greece. As we have shown in the previous volume, the period of the ancient classics falls on early slavery, which replaced the previous communal-clan formation with its primitive collectivism and thereby freed the individual from communal authorities, creating a new association of free owners, the so-called polis. As Marx showed, the basic economic unit here is not yet a slave, but a small free owner, in which there is a small number of slaves in the form of assistants to the master in the process of production. As long as there was an equilibrium of free and slaves, there existed in Greece what we now call the classical period. However, the extremely rapid development of slavery created not only new socio-political structures, but also structures in the field of aesthetic thought.

The first stage of the ancient classics is characterized by a weak, one might say, infantile state of slavery. However, even here, thanks to slave labor, the individual is sufficiently freed to separate mental labor from physical labor (which was precisely not the case in the previous communal-clan formation) and thereby create completely new worldview structures. The undifferentiated collectivism of the closest relatives in the epoch of the communal-clan formation led to the fact that human consciousness transferred communal-clan relations in a generalized form to the whole of nature and to the whole world. The world turned out to be an extremely generalized clan community, from which followed the mythological mode of thinking characteristic of that time. Mythology is nothing but an extremely generalized and universal world clan community, since gods, demons and heroes are such forces of nature that are interpreted as members of a universal clan community based on the collectivism of the closest relatives. It is this mythological thinking that is shattered in the period of slavery, when a large area of the productive forces consists of slaves, that is, people who work in the manner of domestic animals within the immediately given boundaries of the living organism without any application or development of their own mental faculties. The development of the mind turned out to be the privilege of free people. By freeing itself from communal and clan authorities, consciousness thereby tried to free itself from mythology, replacing it with purely intellectual structures that led not to a mythological, but to a natural-philosophical way of thinking. The world now appeared in the form of material elements, still alive and animate, but devoid of anthropomorphic intelligence; Such a reasonable understanding of the cosmos already required its own and specific formulations. This is how pre-Socratic natural philosophical aesthetics was born.

The early classics, therefore, are primarily cosmological, since the living, animated, and sensuously perceived cosmos was then only the ultimate generalization of that living human organism which produced only by virtue of the living forces directly inherent in it, governed by certain laws that did not go beyond itself and were immanently inherent in it. The numbers of the Pythagoreans in the early epoch differ from those guided by the numbers of the material elements, but they are inseparable from them and are often also interpreted by the Pythagoreans quite materially. For this philosopher, the Logos of Heraclitus is inseparable from his main element, the cosmic primordial fire, and is not some kind of supramaterial or supracosmic principle. This principle is in Heraclitus the fire itself, only taken in its structural form. The same must be said about the "roots" of Empedocles, and about the homeomerias of Anaxagoras, and about the atoms of Democritus, and about the aerial thinking of Diogenes of Apollonius.

This equilibrium of the material elements with their structural order was possible only when human consciousness itself was nourished by the same tendencies of equilibrium that existed in the socio-historical field. This equilibrium, however, gradually and on the whole was rapidly destroyed due to the fact that the human consciousness, which had nourished this kind of balanced and harmonious aesthetics, was now under the influence of growing slavery, under the influence of growing slave-owning interests, which in turn grew due to the need to protect the growing polis and provide it with more and more significant vital resources. An aesthetic was born which was based on a much richer development of the individual and on a much more differentiated way of thinking, which sometimes went as far as real subjectivism and anarchism. This phenomenon is characteristic of Greece in the second half of the fifth century B.C., when the so-called sophists appeared, who abruptly broke with the previous cosmology and demanded basic philosophical and aesthetic attention not to the objective cosmos, but to the subjective life of man. In contrast to the previous cosmology, we call this period of ancient aesthetics anthropological. Here we include Socrates, who, although he fought against the sophists, also did not go beyond the interests of man, also did not deal with cosmology, and only demanded (unlike the sophists) the study of more stable structures of human consciousness so that they could resist sophistic anarchism. We also call this period of the Sophists, Socrates, and Socrates' closest disciples, besides Plato, the Middle Classics because of its clearly transitional character, which became necessary for sharpening the problems of consciousness and thought in place of the earlier objective cosmological forms of aesthetic thought, since the problems of subjective human thought came to the fore. We also call this middle stage of the ancient classics reflective or discursive, contrasting it with the intuitive character of the old cosmological aesthetics.

A new and final stage of the classical classics is represented by Plato and Aristotle, who restored the former intuitive cosmological aesthetics and combined it with its reflective development in the Sophists and Socrates. In the socio-historical sense, this kind of aesthetics could no longer be based on the former polis relations, which were characterized by the balance of slave-holders and slaves and the immediate, direct, simple and underdeveloped nature of slave-holding. The old polis had long been striving for one or another universal form, which required great conquests, new territories and a huge influx of slaves necessary for the life support of the polis. However, this large-scale slavery clearly did not fit into the cozy and immediate boundaries of the former miniature polis. Hence both the gradual destruction of the polis system and the desire of many of its activists to restore the former simple and naïve polis are understandable. The classical polis, however, perished, and in its place came the time of extensive military-monarchical organizations, which were realized, first in connection with the Macedonian conquests, and then in connection with the emergence of the Roman Republic and the world empire of Rome. The Greek city-states were now turning into a provincial province, and no attempts to revive this old city-state led to tangible results. The polis now turned out to be only a dream, only a utopia, and its restoration was possible not in a factual and really historical form, but only in the form of an ideological restoration, only in the form of a restoration ideology. Representatives of such restoration aesthetics were Plato and Aristotle. Their aesthetics, in the sense of its content, we therefore call not merely cosmological or anthropological, but objectively idealistic or eidological aesthetics. This kind of aesthetics, due to its sharply expressed, systematic character, should already be called mature, or high classics. For Plato and Aristotle, the main subject of aesthetics is the cosmos not in a direct and immediate form, but in the form of the realization of eternal ideas; and those general ideas that Socrates strove for in his struggle against the Sophists are considered by Plato and Aristotle not simply as general ideas in themselves, but as generalized cosmological, that is, as eternal ideas in their eternal existence. They now became generative models for the cosmos itself, and the cosmos began to be interpreted as the result of this generation. Such a mature or high stage of the ancient classics we call speculative or eidological according to its content, and objective-idealist according to its basic method. This was the end of all the classical antiquity, based on cosmology, now directly and naively given, now speculatively substantiated. Then, after the death of Aristotle, a vast period of ancient aesthetics began, which was a reflection of the incredibly expanded slavery and was thus based on the incredible self-absorption of the human subject (without which it was impossible to conquer, organize and protect the vast military-monarchical organizations that had now become necessary for the preservation of the slaveholding system). This last period of ancient aesthetics we call Hellenism. It covers the entire Hellenistic-Roman era, up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD.