Introduction
Leo Tolstoy was undoubtedly belongs of the most outstanding writers and philosophers of the second half of the XIX – early XX century. The great Russian word artist and thinker became a legend during his lifetime. Tolstoy’s humanity and sincerity as a writer and thinker were combined with the greatest theoretical courage. He considered true only what appeared to him as such as the result of unbiased theoretical analysis and justification. An integral part of Tolstoy’s philosophy is his aesthetic theory. It is organically connected with the socio-political views of the writer, his ethics, his philosophy of religion, and his philosophy of history. It cannot be understood in isolation from his philosophical theory as a whole. Tolstoy first of all tries to define the essence of art. In particular, it expands the content of the concept of art, including here various types of aesthetic activity in general, or aesthetic aspects of various types of human activity. I am sure that Tolstoy is right when he claims that all descriptions of art from the point of view of beauty are simply an expression of the taste of a particular group.
Discussion
A brief review of the theory of beauty and art led Tolstoy to the conclusion that all aesthetic concepts proceed from the identification of the concepts of “beauty” and “art”. Meanwhile, definitions of beauty by no means cover the concept of art. As for the definitions of beauty, they are divided into two groups – objective and subjective. The former see beauty in utility or expediency, or in symmetry, order, proportionality, smoothness, or in harmony of parts. These are materialistic theories. The objective definitions include idealistic theories in which beauty is considered a manifestation of an idea, spirit, will, or God. Tolstoy considers both these definitions, objective and subjective, to be essentially identical. “There is no objective definition of beauty,” he writes, “but the existing definitions, both metaphysical and experimental, are reduced to a subjective definition and, oddly enough, to the fact that art is considered to manifest beauty. Beauty is what one likes without arousing desires.” The main drawback of all aesthetic concepts, according to Tolstoy, is that they, based on beauty, take our enjoyment as a criterion of works of art, i.e. they are subjectivistic.
Art is an activity without which society cannot exist as a living organism. Tolstoy does not imagine a person’s life outside of society. If people were deprived of the opportunity to communicate by experience, thoughts, and feelings, they “would be like a beast.” Communication is an indispensable condition of people’s lives. There is no communication – there is no morality, there is no art, there is no culture, there is no human society itself. The writer attaches crucial importance to the issue of unity of people. It is not surprising that Tolstoy looks at art from the point of view of its social usefulness. Here is his definition of the essence of art. Art can convey a wide variety of feelings, strong and weak, high and low, bad and good.
The question of subjectivity and objectivity of art lies in the field of philosophy of aesthetics, and rests on the reality of universals. The problem of universals has not been solved, and apparently will not be. The same is the case with beauty. Perhaps there is no universal beauty, and it exists only in the eyes of the beholder. It may exist ontologically, but it is unattainable. Perhaps it manifests itself only in practical implementation, as power manifests itself at the moment of the exercise of power. There are a lot of concepts of beauty, a unified theory of aesthetics does not exist today and is not expected.
The well-known music theorist Haslik assures and even tries to prove that music is only an abstract play of pure sounds, hiding nothing behind itself and unable to express anything. According to this, the musician is not called to creative contemplation; and the sounds created by him do not come from the soul and not from the spirit, but from the ear and from hearing. And it is clear that if Hanslick is right, then music is not an art, but an auditory game with physical and mathematical sound combinations – sometimes quietly pleasant, then loudly unpleasant, but devoid of content and meaning. Consequently, the perception of music and other art depends only on how the listener perceives it.
Plato considers art to be only an imitation of the material world, i.e. an inauthentic being. And since he considers the sensually perceived world to be the likeness of ideas, art for him is only an imitation of imitation. Such a contemptuous attitude towards art follows from the basic principles of his system of objective idealism. A certain role is played here by the fact that the heyday of ancient Greek art coincides with the heyday of slave-owning democracy, which Plato hated. Understanding the power of art, the philosopher allowed its existence in an ideal state. But it should serve religion and strengthen the power of the state. His conceptual apparatus is marked by attention to such a category as measure. Plato writes that when the limit comes into identity with the infinite, it becomes a measure, understood as the unity of the limit and the infinite. Despite Plato’s repeated assertions that art should focus on socially significant needs, he has another idea: the measure is dictated by the inner nature of the work itself. The measure, according to Plato, is always finite, it makes the world organic, whole, and visible.
Art can either be an imitation of things — and in this case, it will simply be a doubling of the world, and therefore it will turn out to be unnecessary and even harmful since it turns a person’s interest from the truth to useless activity and empty play. Art can be an imitation of something that does not exist, i.e. to create phantoms — in this case, it will be unconditionally harmful, since it will deliberately mislead the mind. Plato rejects these forms of art, but apart from them, he talks about acceptable, useful forms of art. Art can, avoiding delusion, strive to conform to the truth, guided by the same principles as rational cognition, reducing the whole world to unchangeable, unchangeable, universally recognizable forms and rejecting individuality and originality. In this case, Plato put the canonical and static schemes of Egyptian images above the dynamic and lively art of the Greeks. Plato recognizes that the art of poets can be a source of wisdom, tell the truth about the world, and therefore move in the same direction as philosophy — but with the disadvantage that, unlike the philosopher, the poet does not act consciously, but in a state of inspiration.
Conclusion
Thus, the object, purpose, and content of art, its meaning, and essence are not to achieve the impression of beauty and not in the delivery of pleasure and enjoyment, but in the transmission of various human feelings. If these feelings are transmitted to the reader, the viewer, and the listener, then people are dealing with art. The specificity of art is based on the property of contagiousness, that is, the ability of a person to perceive the feelings of an artist and experience them as his own, this is the peculiarity of it as a special form of human activity.