6. L.S. VYGOTSKY ABOUT ART AS KATARSIS

Russian psychologists LS Vygotsky and B.G. Ananyev assigned psychology to the place of the interpreter of all the sciences of man. Vygotsky dealt with the problems of artistic and literary criticism, literary criticism, aesthetics and the psychology of art. According to Vygotsky, feeling and fantasy are essentially the same process, for there is no difference between feeling in art and real feeling. The true effect of the work of verbal art is reduced to catharsis, which Vygotsky defines as “an affect that develops in two opposite directions, which in its final point, as if in a short circuit, finds its destruction” and calls this phenomenon in the book “The Psychology of Art” “a law aesthetic reaction "(Vygotsky LS Psychology of Art. M., 1965, p. 279).
The psychology of art deals with two or even three chapters of theoretical psychology. Every theory of art depends on the point of view established in the doctrine of perception, in the doctrine of feeling and in the doctrine of imagination or fantasy. Art is usually considered in a psychology course, in one of these three chapters, or in all three chapters together. However, the relationship between these three problems is not at all equally important for the psychology of art. It is clear that the psychology of perception plays a somewhat official and subordinate role compared to the other two chapters, because all theorists have already abandoned that naive sensationalism, according to which art is simply the joy of beautiful things. For a long time, the aesthetic reaction, even in its simplest form, was distinguished by theorists from the usual reaction in the perception of pleasant taste, smell or color. The problem of perception is one of the most important problems of the psychology of art, but it is not the central problem, because it depends on the solution we give to other issues that are at the very center of our problem. In art, the act of sensory perception is just beginning, but, of course, the reaction does not end, and therefore the psychology of art has to start not with that chapter, which usually deals with elementary aesthetic experiences, but with the other two problems - feelings and imagination. One can even say directly that a correct understanding of the psychology of art can only be created at the intersection of these two problems, and that all strongly psychological systems trying to explain art, in essence, represent a combination of imagination and feeling in one form or another. It is necessary, however, to say that there are no darker chapters in psychology than these two chapters, and that they have recently been subjected to the greatest processing and the greatest revision, although so far, unfortunately, we do not have any generally accepted and complete systems of teaching about feeling and teaching about fantasy. The situation is even worse in objective psychology, which relatively easily develops the pattern of those forms of behavior that corresponded to volitional processes in the former psychology and partly to intellectual processes, but these two areas remain for the objective psychology almost not developed yet. “The psychology of feeling,” says Titchener, “is still on a large scale the psychology of personal opinion and belief.” Just the same with “imagination”. As says prof. Zenkovsky, “a bad joke has been going on in psychology for a long time. This sphere remains extremely little studied, as well as the field of feeling, and the most problematic and mysterious remains for modern psychology the connection and relation of emotional facts with the field of fantasy. This is partly due to the fact that feelings differ in a number of features, of which Titchener correctly points to the vagueness as the first. It is precisely in this sense that sensation differs from sensation: “Sense does not have the property of clarity. Pleasure and displeasure can be intense and prolonged, but they are never clear. This means if we switch to the language of popular psychology, - that feeling cannot be focused on. The more attention we pay to sensation, the clearer it becomes and the better and clearer we remember it. But we absolutely cannot focus on the feeling; if we try to do this, then pleasure or displeasure immediately disappears and disappears from us, and we find ourselves observing some kind of indifferent sensation or image that we didn’t want to observe at all. If we want to enjoy a concert or a picture, we must carefully consider what we hear or see; but as soon as we try to pay attention to the most pleasure, this last disappears. ”
Thus, on the one hand, for empirical psychology, the feeling was outside the realm of consciousness, because everything that could not be fixed in focus was shifted for empirical psychology to the edges of your field of consciousness. However, a number of psychologists point to another, just opposite to the line of feeling, namely that feeling is always conscious and that unconscious feeling is a contradiction in the definition itself. Thus, Freud, who is perhaps the greatest defender of the unconscious, says: “After all, the essence of feeling is that it is felt, that is, known to consciousness. The possibility of unconsciousness is completely eliminated, therefore, for sensations of sensations and affects. ” True, Freud objects to such an elementary statement and tries to understand whether a statement such as paradoxical and unconscious fear makes sense. And then he finds out that, although psychoanalysis speaks of unconscious affects, however, this unconsciousness of affect differs from the unconsciousness of representation, since only the germ of affect corresponds to unconscious affect as an opportunity that has not received further development. "Strictly speaking ... there are no unconscious affects in the sense in which unconscious representations occur."
The same opinion from the psychologists of art holds Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, which contrasts the sense of thought partly because the feeling cannot be unconscious. He gives a solution that is close to the opinion of James and the opposite of Ribot. It is he who claims that you do not have a memory of feelings. First you need to decide, he says, whether the unconscious feeling is possible, how unconscious thought is quite possible. It seems to me that a negative answer suggests itself. After all, the feeling with its inevitable coloring remains feeling only as long as it is felt, manifested in the consciousness ... In my extreme understanding, the expression "unconscious feeling" is contradiction in adjecto, like black whiteness, etc., and the unconscious sphere there is no feeling in the soul. " Thus, we seem to encounter a contradiction: on the one hand, the feeling of necessity is devoid of conscious clarity, on the other hand, the feeling cannot be unconscious. This contradiction, established in empirical psychology, seems to us very close to reality, but it needs to be transferred to objective psychology and to try to find its true meaning. To do this, we will try to first give an answer in the most general terms to what feeling as a nervous process is, what objective properties we can attribute to this process.
Many authors agree that, from the point of view of nervous mechanisms, the feeling should be attributed to the processes of waste, expenditure or discharge of nervous energy. Prof. Orshansky indicates that in general our psychic energy can be spent in three forms: “Firstly, the motive innervation is in the form of a motor representation or will, which is the highest mental work. The second part of mental energy is spent on internal discharges. The extent to which this distribution has the character of irradiation or the conduct of a psychic wave - this constitutes the lining of the association of ideas. As far as it entails the further release of living psychic energy in other nerve waves, it constitutes the source of the feeling. Finally, thirdly, a part of the living psychic energy is transformed by oppression into a hidden state, into an unconscious ... Therefore, the energy transformed by the oppression into a hidden state is the main condition of logical work. Thus, the three parts of psychic energy, or work, correspond to the three types of nervous work; the feeling corresponds to discharging, the will to the working part of energy, and the intellectual part of energy, especially abstraction, is associated with the suppression or saving of nervous and mental power ... instead of being discharged in higher mental acts, the living psychic energy becomes a reserve.
With this view of feeling, as of energy expenditure, the authors of various directions more or less agree. So Freud also speaks out, saying that affects and feelings correspond to the processes of energy consumption, their final expression is perceived as sensation. “Affectivity is essentially expressed in the motor (secretory, regulating blood circulatory system) energy outflow, leading to a (internal) change in the body itself without regard to the outside world; motorism is expressed in actions whose purpose is a change in the outside world. ”
The same point of view was accepted by many psychologists of art, and in particular Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky. Despite the fact that in his basic ideas he proceeds from the principle of economy of forces as the basic principle of aesthetics, he had to make an exception for feeling. According to him, “our feeling soul, in all fairness, can be compared with the one that says: what has disappeared, then disappeared. On the contrary, a thinking soul is a cart from which nothing can fall. All the luggage there is well placed and hidden in the sphere of the unconscious ... If the feelings experienced by us were preserved and worked in the unconscious sphere, constantly moving into consciousness (as thought does), then our spiritual life would be such a mixture of heaven and hell, that the strongest organization would not withstand this unbroken cohesion of joys, sorrows, resentment, anger, love, envy, jealousy, regrets, pangs, fears, hopes, etc. No, feelings, once experienced and extinct, do not enter the sphere of unconscious and there is no such sphere in the soul of feelings guide. Feelings, as consciously predominantly mental processes, spend rather than save spiritual strength. The life of feeling is the expense of soul?
In order to confirm this thought, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky shows in detail that the law of memory prevails in our thought, and the law of oblivion dominates in our feeling, and takes the brightest and highest manifestations of feeling, namely affects and passions, as the basis for its consideration ... " What affects and passions represent the expenditure of spiritual power cannot be doubted, as well as the fact that if you take the whole set of affects and passions for a certain period of time, then this expense will be huge. Which items in this expenditure can be considered useful and productive is another matter; but there is no doubt that many passions and various affects turn out to be real waste, mental agility, leading to the bankruptcy of the psyche.
So, if we keep in mind, on the one hand. the higher processes of generalizing thought, scientific and philosophical, and on the other - the strongest and brightest affects and passions, then the fundamental opposition and antagonism of two souls - thinking and feeling - will appear distinctly in our mind. And we will make sure that in fact these “two souls” do not get along well with each other and that the human psyche, which is composed of, is a poorly organized, unstable psyche, full of internal contradictions ”.
Indeed, the main question for the psychology of art is how should we look at feeling, does it have an economizing, saving role only as a waste of psychic energy or in saving psychic life? That is why I call this question a central, important feeling for psychology, that depending on one or another decision it is the answer to another central question of psychological aesthetics - about the principle of economy of forces. Since the time of Spencer, we have taken the basis of art to put an explanation based on the law of economy of spiritual forces, in which Spencer and Avenarius saw almost a universal principle of mental work. This principle was borrowed by art historians, and in Russian literature, Veselovsky formulated it more fully, putting forward the famous formula that “the merit of style lies precisely in what would make up as many thoughts as possible in as few words as possible.” The same point of view is supported by the whole Potebnia school, and Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky is even inclined to reduce the whole artistic sense, unlike the aesthetic one, to a sense of economy. The formalists opposed such an opinion, pointing out a number of extremely convincing arguments contradicting this principle. So, Yakubinsky showed that in poetic language there is no law of similarity of smooth sounds, another study showed that poetic language is characterized precisely by a difficultly pronounced concourse of sounds, that the technique of art is the reception of difficulty of perception, its deduction from the usual automatism, who said that he should sound like a stranger. The contradiction that exists between this principle, on the one hand, and between the theory of feeling as an expenditure of spiritual energy, on the other, is completely visible. It actually led to the fact that Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who wanted to keep both these laws in his theory, had to actually divide art into two completely different areas: figurative art and lyrical art. Quite rightly, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky distinguishes the artistic feeling from other general aesthetic feelings, but under this artistic emotion he understands the emotions of thoughts mainly, that is, the emotion of pleasure based on saving of forces. In contrast, he sees the lyrical emotion as an intellectual emotion and fundamentally different from the first. The difference is that the lyrics evoke a real true emotion and, therefore, must be singled out into a special psychological group. But emotion, as we remember, is an expenditure of energy, and therefore how does this theory of lyrical emotion fit in with the principle of economy of power? Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky perfectly correctly separates the lyrical emotion from this or that applied emotion, which this lyricism evokes. Unlike Petrazhitsky, who believes that military music, for example, was created in order to evoke combat emotions in us, and church singing had the task of evoking religious emotions, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskiy indicates that things are a little different; it is absolutely impossible to mix those and other emotions, because if we allow such a shift, then it turns out that, for example, the goal of numerous erotic poems is to arouse sexual feelings, the idea and goal of the “Miserly Knight” is to prove that stinginess is a vice ... and etc. without end.
TEST 6
1. Did L.S. Vygotsky, that feeling and fantasy are a kind of one and the same process?

• No, I did not count
• Yes, I thought
• Believed that when how
• I have not seen anything in common

2. Why LS. Vygotsky believed that the true effect of a work of art comes down to catharsis?

• because I did not realize what a work of art
• because I did not understand what catharsis is
• because I thought that the purpose of art is to cause deep feelings
• because confusing effect with catharsis

3. Who thought that art is just the joy of beautiful things?

• naive greeks
• naive sensationalists
• naive romans
• naive peasants

4. Who wrote this phrase: “The essence of the feeling is that it is felt”?

• A. Adler
• K.G. Jung
• Z. Freud
• Nobody could say such nonsense

5. Why did Aristotle believe that poetic language should sound like a foreigner?

• because he wanted all nations to understand poetry
• because Aristotle translated ancient poetry
• because he sought to understand poetry
• because poetry requires extreme uniqueness