The aesthetic attitude as a particular direction of the value orientation

The difference between the scientific knowledge and the value orientation of human consciousness is not absolute but relative. Even on the high stages of cultural development, in the far-gone "division of labor" between science and morality, politics, and so on, the cognitive and evaluative activity of consciousness is closely interconnected, interacting and intertwining, penetrating one another, and in the early stages of the spiritual development of mankind their relationship has been particularly narrow. But even then, there were fundamental differences between them which would later be revealed in full. These differences are already manifested in the fact that in ancient times the value-oriented human activity was not a little more active, wide and powerful than its theoretical activity: it is enough to recall that when morality, art and religion already played a huge role in the life of society, there was noscience; at that time, objective knowledge existed only in a private form, partly intimately interwoven in practice, partly dissipated in mythology, art, moral norms, and prohibitions. This uneven development of the cognitive-theoretical and value-orientated way of knowing the world is explained by the fact that the first one requires the tearing of the real bonds between the object and the subject, requires that self-abstraction of the subject, that ability to separate the objective from all subjectively, which are inaccessible to human childhood. According to Norbert Wirner, exact scientific knowledge is only possible when "the phenomenon is sharply separated from the observer". And for the initial phase of spiritual development, it is profoundly characteristic that one does not separate from nature and naively and immediately feels its unity with the world - with animals, plants and natural elements. It was on this soil that mythology could and should have developed, and science was formed later, overcoming the naive-fantastic mythology of childlike thinking. Hence, the primitive man, as well as the child, stood halfway from the animal to the civilized person: it had already gone beyond purely instinctive, biological adaptation to the environment, and had risen to the level of the socially-spiritual orientation in the world, but the ability to knows the objective laws of being is yet to come into existence. In the historical process of differentiation and the relative differentiation of the cognitive and value orientations of the human consciousness, aesthetic attitude was established in the last sphere.

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Beauty and all other aesthetic phenomena have come to be seen as values, as properties of objects that exist only for the object. Unlike the cognitive orientation, which aims to reveal properties and regularities inherent in the objects themselves, regardless of their role in the subject's vital activity, aesthetic consciousness fixes those properties that were born in the process of the interaction between the object and the subject. The main category of knowledge - the truth - is the subjective reflection of relationships that are inherent in objects, and beauty is a value relationship between the object and the subject. The truth is subjectively distorted by the objective; the natural science of the world seeks to bring the subjective element to a minimum to clean as much as possible from the subjective. As for beauty, the subjective does not distort the objective, but merges with it, forming a complex material-spiritual phenomenon, and therefore the aesthetic knowledge can not clear the objective from the subjective without ceasing to be aesthetic. "Aesthetic" is the effect that arises from the interaction between nature and man, between material and spiritual, between object and subject, and which can not be reduced to either the purely objective qualities of the material world or the purely subjective human sensation.

When beauty is reduced to a sense of beauty, and aesthetic value to aesthetic appreciation, to the subjective side of the system of objective and subjective value relations is also one-sidedly erroneous, as well as to subdue the wonderful only to the objective side of this system, to the structure of the material carriers of aesthetic values. It is tantamount to identifying man only as biological, material, or merely as a spiritual and social being. Because the "man" is a contradictory unity and interpenetration of the biological and social, the material and the spiritual, as well as the "aesthetic" is the dialectical unity of the objective and the subjective, the material and the spiritual and therefore can not be referred to the ontological status of being, nor of the psychological status of consciousness. The status of the aesthetic is axiological, which means that the wonderful, sublime and so on are values, and their perception is a form of evaluating activity of the human consciousness. Value and evaluation represent the two poles of the unified system of objective and subjective relations; the value characterizes the object in its relation to the subject, and the assessment - the relation of the subject to the object. Value and evaluation form a self-regulating system of direct and feedback, thanks to which a continuous process of revaluation of values ​​is carried out in the history of culture.

Another essential difference between the value orientation of man and the cognitive is that the former is formed in the ordinary consciousness of society and is already in a transformed form embodied in ideology, aesthetic teachings, political doctrines, legal norms, aesthetic concepts, as well as from the "artistic ideology: - the art. Consequently, the primary being of all walks of value orientation has a sociopsychological character, and so the emotional and volitional mechanisms of the human psyche play an essential role here, introducing into our assessments an element of experience, desire, and volitional impulse. As far as the cognitive activity of consciousness is concerned, it rises above the emotions and is cleansed from them, concentrating on the level of intellectual processes - analysis, abstraction, synthesis, etc. Aesthetic attitude is emotional in nature and exists in the ordinary consciousness - in its forms such as aesthetic perception, aesthetic experience, aesthetic assessment, aesthetic taste, aesthetic orientation and practical activity. The aesthetic attitude of man to the world evolves and becomes one of the directions of his value orientation.