The beautiful and the ugly in man

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When talking about the beauty of man, we mean, above all, such a structure of his body, a spiritual world, and a behavior that reveals the "measure of a given species", that is, human measure. But it is sufficient to limit the description of this objective basis of human beauty and thus reduce the aesthetic value to the structure of its material bearer, and the problem of human beauty will be a biological problem, since it is precisely biology that characterizes the species' humans, unlike the features of all other animal species. And biology can not explain the secret of man's beauty because there is no uniform aesthetic norm in this respect. Thus, traits that are intrinsic to the beauty of the representatives of one race become signs of annoyance in another - for example, the color of the skin. In Christian mythology, the angels are pale and the devils black; but when African artists have to portray devils, they are ... white. Accordingly, all the peculiarities of the plastic structure of the face - the width of the cheekbones, the incision of the eyes, the thickness of the lips, the shape of the nose - are aesthetically assessed by the people of each race differently and there is no common standard of human beauty. Moreover, the beauty of man can also acquire national variations. "Every nation has its own ideal for man." Man's beauty proves to be relative and his specific manifestations always have certain national, racial, and class attributes. The dependence of human beauty on social ideals is revealed particularly clearly in the analysis of its historical variability. The art, which in every age has created artistic models of human beauty, provides an extremely rich material for such analysis.

Paleolithic Sculpture image source

The earliest models are the so-called "Paleolithic Venus". In these images, the real proportions of the human body are demonstratingly deformed. Deformation has a definite meaning: the author has hypertrophied the secondary sexual traits here. The huge stomach, the broad thighs, and the big bust symbolized that woman's vital function, which in the era of the matriarchal appeared the main, ideal vocation - the function of continuation of the genus, the birth of children, the creation of life. Thus, biological law, becoming the bearer of human ideals, has acquired aesthetic sense, aesthetic value. The change of the ideal changed the image of the beauty of man. The transition to patriarchy, the emergence of new social relations and new moral-religious views lead to a radical aesthetic reconsideration of the world and man. The stone idols and masks that are being created in this age, as well as the peculiar plumage of the body and face of the living people or the ornamental ornament that distorted their natural shapes, strange hairstyles and ornaments-all seem to us to be a sign of savagery, but the members of the generic society in all of this contained true beauty because the fantasmagoria, the deformation, the transformation of the real image of man aims to bring it into line with the idea of ​​the beyond, mystical, ideal world of spirits. The brighter the image of the real human image of the spiritual-mystic, the sacred, the more beautiful it must have seemed to its companions. Therefore, conferring the beauty of man here is nothing more than spiritualizing, sanctifying the real, incorporating the real to the ideal.

But even in that age, not all aspects of the social ideal were religiously mystical. For example, the necklace of the teeth or nails of a primitive hunter initially symbolized bravery, the string of metallic bracelets were a symbol of wealth, and this initially purely practical practical meaning of the objects gradually gained aesthetic significance. The mechanism of this transformation consisted of the fact that the hunter's skill and later his wealth were the most essential elements of the public ideal: as a result, the things that this ideal embodied in the form of the form became wonderful, acquired the ability to decorate man , integrating it with the ideal.The art of slave society gives us a rich and rich material to further study the history of human beauty. How dramatic the heroes of ancient Eastern culture differ from the characters of ancient Greek sculpture. In one case the norm of beauty was above the life abstraction, the fossiliness of the fixed form, the strict symmetry of the frontal composition, in the other living dynamics of the movement, which unfolds freely and casually in the three-dimensional space. In one case, the life is stammering and being thrown out of the flow of time, the other is alive, and the stone comes to life and seems to be moving and breathing. These differences are due to the fact that the slave robbery of the ancient East and the robbold democracy of the Hellenes have created different ideals. By virtue of the ideological bind of the Pharaoh cult and the cult of the afterlife, which defined the socio-religious ideal of ancient Egypt, man was considered to be marvelous only to the extent that all living, individual, transient could be dissolved in eternal, incorruptible, caste. And in the Greek polis, the nature of social relations made the public ideal democratic and filled humanity with mythology itself. That is why the beauty is revealed to the Greeks in the harmonious balance of the divine and the living, the universal and the individual, the physical and the spiritual.

It was sufficient for the ancient world to fall under the pressure of feudalism, and the beauty of man was once again most radically rethought under the influence of the mystical ideal of Christianity. The ancient Greeks admired the man's bodily beauty and how the relentless majesty of his soul is expressed in his harmonious and calm physical appearance, and Christian asceticism proclaims all bodily for sinful, low and ugly; as a result, the beauty of man begins to be determined by the ability of his spirit to free himself from the bodily body and to strive for the hereafter. The language concepts of human beauty have been declared erroneous, and their denial has led to the immediate destruction of the monuments of ancient art. The level of our thinking and the philosophical and methodology allow us to deeper and thinner, dialectically and not metaphysically reflect the historical changes in aesthetic views of people. No age has reached the absolute aesthetic truth, because there is no and absolutely absolute beauty that exists regardless of the social ideal. By comparing the real world with its ideals, each era finds the beauty of what corresponds to these ideals, and on this basis re-evaluates the aesthetic values. That's why the beautiful is always historically relative, historically changing.

But whether in modern chaos still looking for beauty? Do we have our own ideals?