Formation of the aesthetic consciousness

Not all perceptions of color and sound signals can be considered as an aesthetic perception that gives rise to aesthetic feeling and summaries in aesthetic evaluation; far from every delight, pleasure, joy can be qualified as aesthetic delight, aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic joy. For example, there is erotic pleasure, whose nature is purely physiological and which is qualitatively different from aesthetic pleasure; in the same way the delights that we receive from delicious food, fresh air, warmth, movement and rest, pleasant smell and so on, are not aesthetic delights. It is a mistake to identify the aesthetic pleasure with pleasure at all, from which there is only one step to the equation of this state in man and in animals. However, if people's joy and enjoyment are varied in character, structure, and psychological mechanism, that aesthetic perception is therefore specific and one of the most complex types of spiritual satisfaction, then we have the opportunity to compare the pleasures more accurately , received by man, and the pleasures that are available to the animals.

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The selective attitude and positive reaction of the animal to certain visual, auditory and other stimulus actually have direct analogues in the sphere of human pleasures, but not in those we call aesthetic but purely physiological pleasures. Although the latter - for example erotic, gastronomic, olfactory, and other pleasures - have been transformed to a certain extent in the historical process of human development and are therefore not exactly identical to the analogous pleasures of the animal, yet their bio-physiological nature from the corresponding reactions of the animals, made in the process of adapting living organisms to the complex conditions of existence and which are special orientations boundary reflexes that facilitate the vital activity of the body. Even one does not get the ability to aesthetic perception of color and sound at birth; if the baby falls asleep under the sound of a cradled song, this shows that it perceives the sound signals far from aesthetic; it would also be naive to see an aesthetic impulse in reaching the baby for brightly painted and brilliant trinkets - here is only a purely organic bio-physiological reflex; so also the tears and the laughter of the child do not show that it has a natural sense of the tragic or natural sense of humor. The analysis of the child's development shows that the aesthetic attitude towards the surrounding world, the ability to recognize and appreciate the beauty, grace, grandeur, tragedy and comism of the perceived objects, actions and situations are born in the child relatively late.

The feelings of the animal, and the child's experiences, are fully determined by the different vital needs of the child, the process of satisfying (or not satisfying) the instinct to satisfy hunger, etc. It follows that we have no right not only to call the animal's reaction to the sound and color stimuli aesthetic feeling, but also to see any genetic link between the aesthetic attitude of man to the world and these reactions. First, neither the individual nor mankind possesses aesthetic receptivity - the archaeological evidence suggests that there are no aesthetic orientations yet to the upper Paleolithic in the activity of primitive man. Aesthetic consciousness is formed at a relatively high level of human and human development under the influence of social relations and marks a qualitative leap from the level of bio-physiological, purely animal pleasures to the level of the specific human, spiritual joys, the level of the instinctive orientations of the organism in the natural environment to the level of social value orientations. The aesthetic attitude of man to the world was not, from the outset, an independent form of spiritual activity. It was formed in the continuous process of development and improvement of public practice and public consciousness, and initially it was only one of the sides of the most ancient, yet not dissociated type of consciousness, which can be defined most precisely as a syncretic form of human value orientation .

Judging from a variety of data - archeological, ethnographic, artistic, historical-linguistic - this archaic form of public consciousness included in diffuse form elements of moral, religious, aesthetic character that will separate from one another and gain comparatively autonomy significantly later. But initially the syncretic form of value orientation has captured and fixed, in general, the positive and negative significance for the primitive collective of those objects and phenomena of the reality and the actions of the person who played the most essential role in his practical life activity - in the labor process and in the process of social consolidation. Therefore, the initial assessments had a generalized and undefined character and denoted only what is "good" and what is "bad". Concepts that will later acquire a specific meaning - aesthetic, ethical, religious, such as "useful" and "harmful", "good" and "evil", "sacred" in the most strange way of consciousness. Thus, in the myths of the ancient peoples the sun, the light is called "good," and the night, the darkness - "evil"; receive a moral characteristic, and the different fantastic spirits are valued as "useful" and "harmful". But these common diffuse evaluations had an obvious and aesthetic hue: "useful", "good" and "sacred" mean both "beautiful"; but "the evil", "the evil", the hostility of man seemed "ugly". The development of social practice, which has become increasingly complex, diverse and differentiated, can not affect the public's consciousness. The three strands of this process are: first, the cognitive mechanisms of the human psyche have been developed and perfected, gaining greater independence from the value consciousness that ultimately led to the birth of the independent existence of scientific knowledge; secondly, the initial diffusion of the value orientations was overcome in the course of gradual self-determination of the unitary, moral, religious, political, juridical and, ultimately, aesthetic consciousness; thirdly, the inner differentiation affected the latter: it became more and more disintegrated and learned to distinguish such specific aesthetic values ​​as beauty, grace, grace, splendor, grandeur and many others; thus, the historical system of aesthetic values.

The child's consciousness differs from the mind of the primitive man in a number of aspects, but perhaps above all that the child does not have a mythological-religious attitude towards the world. But in the plane we are considering, the process of forming child consciousness completely repeats the norms of the genesis of the consciousness of mankind. And the child initially shares everything he encounters in the world around him, evaluated positively and negatively by him, without any internal differentiation of each of these assessments, and only gradually - in the process of his development and the absorption of the provided his cultural experience, he learns to distinguish "good", "beautiful", "pleasant" and all other variants of values. In this process, aesthetic consciousness is differentiated as a special way of perceiving, experiencing and evaluating the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world.