Aesthetics of Antiquity

Aesthetics is the science of a person's creative attitude to reality. And it is also can be defined as the philosophy of art and beauty. But, of course, aesthetics isn’t just the study of beauty or domain of high art.  So, I think that aesthetics is the study of a certain kind of value, the value of imaging, the value of experience. Let's imagine the situation, you are a big fan of one photographer and think all his works are absolutely wonderful. Every time you look at his photos, you feel this aesthetic pleasure. We don't care how beautiful other people think his works are, since beauty is subjective. But after some time, we got to know that some of his works have a hidden meaning that causes only negative emotions. And all of a sudden, we find out an extremely morally unsavory fact about him. His works didn’t change, but will we see them the same as we saw before? Why do they stop being good to us? This is one of the questions of aesthetics that is related to moral values. And we can use it as evidence that aesthetics is not just the study of beauty. Aesthetics in antiquity didn’t form a distinct branch of philosophy. But nonetheless, ancient philosophers considered art, music, literature and the nature of beauty. Plato and Aristotle were the ones, who set the philosophical agenda for all subsequent discussion. But antique aesthetics were also found in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Homer's aesthetic categories of nature and space are quite original. Space here is inseparable from things. It is everywhere heterogeneous, huge, but finite and structurally organized. Homer hardly knows the time. Homer perfectly perceives the sublime, the beautiful, and the heroic, but for him this is not an aesthetic category. Homer’s poetry more often explains the myth than the myth explains the poetry and natural realities are often the source of poetry (Losev, 2011). The heroic is primarily a property of human behavior, but strictly speaking, it is not limited to ethical issues. The beautiful in Homer's view is closely related to the beauty of man. And this beauty is often bodily, physical and tangible. Beauty is associated with youth and the prime of life. In addition, Homer admires the beauty of individual things, those that are produced or belong to the gods, the weapons of heroes, the formation of warships, and sometimes nature. In the works of Homer, you can find the most important aesthetic terms: “beautiful”, “beauty”, “harmony”, etc. For example, the scene where Athena transforms Odysseus. Homer writes about this: Athena “shed beauty” on Odysseus. When Odysseus was making his ship, the poet says that he connected the boards with “harmonies”. Homer has no distinction between art and craft. Prof. A. F. Losev (2011) also notes about it and we can see that when Homer talks about artistic creation, he almost always understands it as a craft, as physically productive labor.

The first philosophical school in the depths of which the main aesthetic concepts were developed was the Pythagorean school, founded by Pythagoras in the 6th century BC. The Pythagorean School devised another concept important to aesthetics: contemplation. They confronted contemplation with action, opposing the viewing position and the acting position. According to Diogenes Laertius, the Greek philosopher of the 3rd century (1853), the Pythagorean school likened life to a game where some come to participate in games, some do buy and sell, and others keep watching. He regarded the position of continuing spectacles as the noblest, because it was to gain knowledge, not from fame or interest in profits. The concept of contemplation is to see both beauty and truth. Only later does the epistemological contemplation of truth and the aesthetic contemplation of beauty become distinct. It was through Plato’s works that the Pythagorean concept of music left a distinct mark throughout the Greek art theory. Their theories were developed under the banner of proportion, scale, and number on the one hand, and the perfection and purification of the soul on the other. One of the scholars of Pythagorean school said that objects that are similar and related to each other do not need harmony. However, objects that are not the same, irrelevant, and unevenly arranged must be bound together in harmony that sustains them in the universe. The Pythagorean School believed that order and proportion are beautiful and useful, but disorderly and unproportionate is ugly and useless. 

The Pythagoreans pay great attention to the issues of aesthetic education in connection with the consideration of music as a means of influencing a person. The Pythagorean school used medicine to purify the body and music to purify the soul. The Pythagoreans paid attention to a lot of different issues of aesthetic education.  But at the same time, they were most of all interested in music, since it was endowed with the ability to heal both the body and soul of a person, to restore harmony.  The Pythagoreans had dialectical guesses about the basic aesthetic concepts, which were later developed by one of the early ancient Greek thinkers, Heraclitus.  Heraclitus took "eternally living fire" as the fundamental principle of all that exists.  He also shared the concepts of harmony and beauty.  Harmony is the source of beauty on which the cosmos is based. It is the essence of human relations and it is also present in works of art.  The main achievement of Heraclitus is the understanding of the main aesthetic categories from the standpoint of dialectics. 

The next philosopher who also influenced the aesthetic ideas of ancient Greece was Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus of Ephesus is an ancient Greek philosopher. He is the author of a philosophical work that has survived only in fragments (over 100). According to legend, he bequeathed his composition to the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. It was he who developed the materialistic teachings of the Milesian philosophers. Heraclitus also wrote about understanding of beautiful and “beautiful, according to Heraclitus, is, first of all, the world itself - in general, and in its parts, and in its last material principles. The idea that the proportions of the universe could turn out to be alien to beauty, an accidental combination of unconnected parts or elements, seems absurd to Heraclitus” (Asmus, 2016, pp. 31-34). For Heraclitus, space is a kind of work of art, not created, however, “neither by gods nor by people”. Heraclitus, just like the Pythagoreans, believes that the beautiful has an objective basis, but he sees this basis not in numerical relations, as such, but in the qualities of material things, which are modifications of fire. Beauty, in the understanding of Heraclitus, is a relative property. Heraclitus also had his own understanding of the meaning of the word’s “measure”. He believed that despite the similarity with harmony, it is the measure that underlies the cosmos and it exists independently of man. In the life of people, Heraclitus saw many tragic things. Namely, between a person's striving for self-assertion and his inevitable death, i.e., conflict between life and death. But at the same time, the philosopher was not a doomed pessimist and even saw something comical in the life of most people. As an example, he cited a “spiritually sleeping” person, in his opinion, for whom “what they do while awake is hidden, just as they forget what they did in their sleep”.

But in contrast to all these philosophers, Socrates, another ancient Greek philosopher, was not particularly interested in the problems of being. Socrates was most concerned with the study of man, his behavior and morality. The essence of Socrates' aesthetics is that the beautiful itself does not coincide either with beautiful objects, or with those cosmic principles by which these objects are generated. Socrates studied the “pure” idea of ​​beauty. He believed that things can have a beautiful and ugly side. Those objects that seem beautiful to us, in a certain situation, or simply for other people, can be ugly. And even gold, which was considered beautiful, since it could decorate any ugly thing, Socrates did not consider as such, because there are times when, for example, ivory or even a fig-tree ladle is more suitable for any business than gold. It turns out that if any object is only relatively beautiful, then neither a single thing, nor any set of things can contain beauty as such. Socrates believed that the beautiful is equal to the expedient, and maybe even to the good. Since he believed that all human actions pursue a certain goal, the best, the highest result of which is the absolute good. And the aesthetic actions of people are no exception. It seems to me that this idea of ​​Socrates was not in vain that had a great influence on world aesthetics, since he shows that even a beautiful thing can be ugly and vice versa. And when he talks about the beautiful, he means whether this thing is also useful. If an ugly thing benefits a person, then from this side it can be called beautiful. The outer is a beautiful thing; inner - beautiful as such (idea, general meaning of beauty). The goal is as a semantic limit, as the supreme limit of all formations. And harmony external and internal in the idea of ​​beauty is assumed to be expedient.

To sum up, I want to point out that ancient aesthetics significantly influenced on the setting of specific aesthetic goals. And it also initiated two opposing philosophical approaches in the interpretation of these problems: the line of materialism and the line of idealism. I think that this time is especially important because three main categories of aesthetics were formed: mimesis, the definition of beautiful and tragic. 

КАЗАХСКИЙ НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ ИМЕНИ АЛЬ-ФАРАБИ
ФАКУЛЬТЕТ ФИЛОСОФИИ И ПОЛИТОЛОГИИ
КАФЕДРА РЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЯ И КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИИ

СПЕЦИАЛЬНОСТЬ "КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЯ" Студент 3-го курса: Ли А. В.

Руководитель практики: Есболова М.А

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