Aesthetic as the ratio between reality and ideal

When nature deprived man of the ability to walk on all four legs, it gave him the ideal of the staff! - says Gorky in one place. Indeed, animals do not have and can not have any ideal goals. The instinct created for biological necessity is an absolutely sufficient incentive for all their life activities. And the man, whose being is of a public nature and the whole activity of which he is not conscious and purposeful, needs a new, spiritual urge and regulator of all his actions. Thus, historically, people's ability to create ideals, which in their nature and essence are social, as well as the entire spiritual life of man and mankind, is formed. The ideal is one of the forms of existence of the ideal as a universal spiritual activity of the people. It is a specific mechanism of human consciousness associated with other mechanisms and based on them - imagination, thinking, emotions, will, etc., but with its own functions and its own structure. The ideal arises from the activity of productive imagination and is therefore something fanciful, that is, like a real but different one. The ideal is born as a result of the spiritual reworking of what exists, in the name of creating something non-existent but desirable or necessary - sometimes possible and sometimes impossible, fantastic, fabulous, utopian. Consequently, the ideal has the same degree of concreteness that is inherent in the other fruits of the creative activity of the imagination and which characterizes every concept at all; and the difference between the ideal and all other concepts, all other forms of the imaginary consist precisely in the fact that the ideal is not merely an irreverent, purely spiritual object, but contains a moment of purpose, programming, aspirations for something that does not exist and can not at all to exist, but it should exist in a more complete arrangement of the world. Ideas are born of the deeply frustrating frustration of man by what he has and can, by the pursuit of the better, and by his ability to imagine the better, desired in his imagination. It is clear that this eternal and unceasing dissatisfaction with the achievement, the dream of perfection and the pursuit of something better, superior to what we have, are insatiable and endless. People are not born with the idea of what life should be - this concept is made in their minds according to their real life and the interests, the needs, the desires and the aspirations that give rise to this real life. That is why, in every class of society, a particular ideal is formed which more or less differs from the ideals of other classes. For the same reason, each person's ideal of life differs from the ideals of other people.

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Thus, the contradictory structure of the ideal is revealed: it merges into the one and the common, the actual and the fictional, the existing and the possible, the knowledge of the real and the emergence outside the realm of reality. The ideal connects the person with reality and, at the same time, tears this connection with a call to redesign the existing or escape from the empirical given. That is why he mobilizes the energy of his feelings and will, pointing to the direction of his activity and giving a valuable orientation to this activity. Ideal becomes the main mediator between human (social, not biological) needs and the concrete ways to satisfy them. It is a kind of "trigger mechanism" for the purposeful actions of the public. At the same time, the ideal serves as a criterion for assessing everything that surrounds the person in the world and falls into the orbit of his practical social interests. The non-existent but desirable is a criterion for assessing the existing one. The real compares with the ideal and is measured by the measure of the ideal: whether it corresponds to these ideals or not? Does it help or hinder their implementation? Is he hostile to them or does he favor them? This comparison of reality with the ideal that people do in their day-to-day communication with the surrounding world, lies at the heart of the aesthetic knowledge of reality. It arises when, when perceiving a real object directly, one puts this object in a certain connection with the ideal. From what this relationship is, the specific aesthetic assessment of the subject-recognition of it as beautiful, dishonest, sublime, low will depend on it; tragic or comical; without matching the ideal, the real world has no aesthetic value. It remains a real, material world in which all physical, chemical and biological laws operate. It is perceived sensitively by the animal and the human being, used by them and is being reorganized practically, but in the very nature's being there is no aesthetic grain. Nature flashes with aesthetic light only when its spiritual perception of man forms an "electric circuit", uniting nature with the social ideals of the people. Breaking down this "chain," and nature quenches aesthetically, preserving all its material reality, but losing its aesthetic significance. It remains objectively existing, it can be useful and enjoyable to the human being, but it will not be either wonderful, disgraceful or exalted. Holders of aesthetic values continue to exist, but they are deprived of all aesthetic significance.

Ultimately, the high degree of organization and coherence of the form taken for itself is nothing aesthetic and is simply one of the objective laws of material existence, subject to all other natural laws of scientific knowledge. These form properties acquire aesthetic value precisely because they enter into the ideal ideas of people, they are fixed in them, they are modeled in the ideal as a supreme goal, to which one should strive always and in everything. The concrete understanding of the laws and principles of this organization can change historically, modify the national and class, vary individually, but the organization as such, the consistency, the harmony remain a constant magnitude, an invariant in the human ideals. In any case, it is aesthetically appreciated that one perceives a glimpse of the universal human ideal of structural integrity and systemic completeness. The ideals of people are formed, live and function in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, and therefore represent not as ideological as a sociopsychological phenomenon. Aesthetic attitude is the perception and assessment of the world through the prism of the ideal psychological structure, which acts only in this case without the need for the mediation of the logical operations of reason, intuitively.