Sublime in classical aesthetics
The sublime is one of the main (along with the beautiful, tragic, comic) categories of aesthetics, reflecting the totality of natural, social and artistic phenomena, exceptional in their quantitative and qualitative characteristics and acting as a source of deep aesthetic experience - the feelings of the sublime. A category that is the polar opposite to the sublime is the category of the base.
In nature, for example, the boundless expanses of the sky and the sea, the mountains of mountains, majestic rivers and waterfalls, grandiose natural phenomena - a storm, a thunderstorm, aurora borealis, etc., are sublime.
Even more vivid manifestations of V. we find in public life. They are contained in outstanding acts that serve the cause of progress, as individuals (great people, heroes), and entire classes, masses, peoples. They exalt and glorify these accomplishments and feats of a work of art. In the process of artistic development of the sublime a whole series of specific genres of art were formed: an epic, a heroic poem, a heroic tragedy, an ode, a hymn, an oratorio, monumental genres of painting, graphics, sculpture, architecture.
Exclusiveness of sublime phenomena is of two kinds:
- the exclusivity of an external scale that exceeds the usual norm of sense perception, and
- exclusivity is internal, semantic, comprehended intellectually, spiritually, indirectly. There are many phenomena in which these two signs coincide.
Sublime can only be a phenomenon that, for all its exclusivity, power and grandeur, does not pose an immediate threat to the person contemplating it. Otherwise, the conditions of aesthetic perception are destroyed.
The subjective aesthetic experience is sublime - the sense of the sublime - is contradictory. It combines the sensation of exclusivity of the perceived object (various shades of surprise, admiration, rapture, reverence, admiration, even timidity) and the uplifting, mobilization of all the forces and higher spiritual potencies of man.
Criteria and examples of the sublime are of a class nature. However, only the representatives of the most progressive, most progressive and revolutionary forces are genuinely exalted and adequately comprehended. The destiny of those who became a brake on progress, or even a denial of the categories of the sublime (the theory of "de-heroization"), or its distortion and falsification (the assertion of various forms of false greatness, for example, the cult of a pompous individual, towering over "society", etc. ). Now, as in the past, the sublime is the object of an acute ideological struggle.
The essence of the sublime is revealed by new facets when compared to the category of the beautiful. A sign of exclusivity is inherent in beautiful subjects. But by exclusivity here is meant something different than in the case of the sublime, namely the highest degree of harmony and perfection. The beautiful and sublime can unite in the same subject, supplementing and enriching each other.
Sublime manifests itself in the struggle of man with nature and in clashes of opposing social forces. Full of inner tension, the sublime carries the grain of inevitable confrontations, conflicts. It is no accident that the sublime category is closely connected with the aesthetic categories of dramatic and tragic categories. It is in dramatic and tragic situations and conflicts that the true scale of the sublime, the greatness of the human spirit, is clearly revealed.
The sublime category reveals in its inherent content the dialectical unity of aesthetic and ethical principles.
To the sublime, the heroic category directly adjoins. Nevertheless, the complete identification of these two categories is not justified. If the heroic is always sublime, then the opposite is not always true. When, for example, outstanding performance results are achieved without overcoming the resistance of hostile forces, without the greatest sacrifices, then we are sublime, but not heroic.
The sublime is opposed to the ordinary, every day. But this opposition is not absolute. The exceptionality of the internal meaning of an object does not always find an addition to the exclusivity of its external scale. Therefore, the sublime can also find embodiment in appearances outwardly ordinary, everyday, but permeated with high meaning and meaning.
A special, paradoxical and marginal (borderline) view of the sublime is the so-called phenomenon. "Gloomy greatness", which exists in nature (lifeless rocks, desert, "white silence"), and in society (for example, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Goethe's Mephistopheles, etc.). In this modification of the sublime, not only is there no heroic in the true sense of the word, but, on the contrary, we see in its manifestations of evil will. And nevertheless, we can not help but feel the peculiar demonic power of these figures. In such cases, the content of the aesthetic experience is, on the one hand, the astonishment of the uncommonness of subjective qualities (will, perseverance, insight, determination, personal fearlessness, etc.) displayed by such persons, and on the other - the bitterness of the consciousness that these extraordinary human qualities turned out to be subordinate to the principles of moral evil.
Inspiring personality for new feats and accomplishments in the name of progress, the sublime plays a huge role in the life of society.
In different historical periods and at the same time - the thread of continuity between them, as well as the mutual transitions of sublime and related aesthetic categories. Thus, the sublime often surpasses and violates the previously mastered measure of beauty; but it also gives an incentive to achieve a new, even higher measure of beauty and itself serves as a guide to the path to the aesthetic ideal. Uncommon, exceptional in its nature, V. at the same time contains a tendency to turn it into a mass one, to raise the sublime itself to a new level. On the other hand, the sublime, whose content eventually devalued, inevitably turns into something low.