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14Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 4 (2011 4) 512-520
УДК 18
An Aesthetic Experience and Kulture of a Person
Yelena M. Kurolenko*
Siberian Federal University 26 Kirenskogo, Krasnoyarsk, 660074 Russia 1
Received 4.04.2011, received in revised form 11.04.2011, accepted 18.04.2011
An aesthetic experience consists of bright, emotional, and sensually expressive perceptions accompanied by experiences and their expressions. These expressive forms and sides of subjects and the phenomena of reality are accompanied by bright images, experiences and are shown in appearance, psychophysics and motility of an individual, in his aesthetic consciousness and behavior. A person's experience undergo processing, changes, generalizations, shift, hypertrophy or reduction offeatures and details, depending on personal tastes and preferences, age, person's vital aesthetic experience and a physical condition.
The features of an aesthetic experience characteristic are dynamics and its ability to be easily recalled in memory and in a sensual aesthetic and art conscience. Person gains his own aesthetic, cultural and artistic experience, that is received and interpreted individually. It can be realized, classified and analyzed, becoming a base for the further cultural person model cultivation. An aesthetic person's experience becomes a basis for the man further general development. Aesthetic culture can be characterized as an ability to feel one's world connectivity, to factually experience, to express the fullness, profundity and verity of these relations. Aesthetic culture is the measure of human quality and ability integration creating the character base.
Keywords: Experience characteristic. Aesthetic consciousness. Components of aesthetic experience. Object-related essence. Aesthetic culture phenomenon.
Introduction
Life experience of a person includes various ways and models of its accumulation, different channels of receipt, the value dominants differentiating not only the sensual character specificity of concrete experience images, but also the factors of personality significant selectivity. Selection on the basis of a semantic personality context (the previous experience and its estimation, condition, person 's culture and motivational orientations) appears to be
* Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected]
1 © Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved
defining in the aesthetic experience value comprehension.
In a wide sense, all accumulations of a diverse person's activity are presented in the experience. They fill up memory stocks and are distributed in the memory with the certain marking of the near and remote personality semantic contexts. The most significant, important and valuable information of the person's subjective world is available only for the person. These relations are expressed in various forms: from the involuntary,
or acquired movements and gestures, bright emotions to statements, estimations, judgments and developed thoughts.
Creating the internal creativity environment in the context of a perceived information, an aesthetic person's experience becomes a basis for the further general development. The aesthetic imagination enriches, defines, organizes and realizes a sensual-emotional life experience and the cultural one in a person's activity. On the basis of this informative processes and mechanisms develop, favoring the learning process and development of a personality semantic, intelligent way of knowledge assimilation, effective for a long period of time.
The ontological approach defines the following positions of experience characteristics: a matter of any experience of a subject and subject forms as the objective side of the outer world knowledge. In this context it is possible to single out the following components of experience:
1. External (generic) experience. It is situational-objective, sensory perceived properties, characteristics, original generic and individual, material (physical) properties, features, acoustically fixed at the level of sensations, perceptions, conceptions.
2. Internal (subject) experience. It is sensations, perceptions and conceptions, received earlier through the experience or in imagination, which have both universal and individual (based on psycho physiological connections) features.
An aesthetic experience consists of bright, emotional, and sensually expressive perceptions accompanied by experiences and their expressions. These expressive forms and sides of subjects and the phenomena of reality are accompanied by bright images, experiences and are shown in appearance, psychophysics and motility of an individual, in his aesthetic consciousness and behavior. The basic "mental substance", circulating in this process, is a complex subject-
objective figurativeness - aesthetically accented images of sensations, perceptions, conceptions, experiences and imaginations.
As a matter of fact, an aesthetic experience is everything that occurs in a cultural life of a person and affects his feelings, aesthetic consciousness and predilections. These external impressions, processed in the inner world of a person, keep the live force of experiences and at the same time receive durable existence and the ability to raise new creative interpretations, due to the original semantic character. Being preserved in memory traces of figurative experience are always needed in various vital and cultural situations and make up the rich association chains. Thus, the internal experience of a spiritual life becomes a significant value for a person.
Point
Philosophical encyclopedias and dictionaries consider the term "experience" as a practice-based, sensual-empirical reality knowledge. Russian encyclopaedist Dal connects the person's experience with his proficiency, tests and attempts. He singles out such qualities of experience as availability of feelings, materiality, comprehension of new, person's inquisitiveness to everything around him. In pedagogics there is a specific definition of teaching experience as a set of practical knowledge, abilities and professional skill. Russian psychologists believe, that a person's experience includes such an important component as an experience of other people comprehension. (Ananev, Teplov, Asmolov, Stankevich, Polyakova, Pogorelov, Rachmatullina, Kosolapova, Kvasova et al).
Cognition of a person is an essence of a vital activity. In this aspect the human culture (art) is regarded as a concentrated expression. People probably learn themselves "from inside". A man can understand himself as a personality
only when he compares himself with the others through the penetration and empathy. In this case an art became a source of supervision and communication for a person. Each piece of art (in a unique figurative style and talented form) speaks about the people's outer life reflections and their perusal and interpretation experience. The Russian scientists Kagan, Buber, Sheper, Bakhtin, Kuznetsova, Kalita, Konnikova, Nevirko and many others develop the similar ideas. The cultural-aesthetic experience of a developing personality becomes a key not only for the culture and art knowledge, but also to the comprehension of a spiritual life and self-development. These points of view were reflected in many works by modern foreign scientists Duncum, Steenberg, Verene, Welsch, Cooper, John, Brady,Green at al.
The concept "experience of a person" should be regarded from the point of view of such sciences as philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, physiology, pedagogics, and arts. An aesthetic and cultural model became a fundamental position in researches of the theoretical and empirical problems, for example aesthetic education and formation (Kargapoltsev,1999).
According to the objective content an aesthetic experience of a person is distributed in a subject differentiation: in the impressions of the natural and subject environment, of people, according to their original aesthetic look and manifestation (especially in terms of the psychomotor, expressive character), oftheir clothes and aesthetic individual habitat, of their aesthetic estimations, tastes, assessments concerning some art events, cultural phenomena and works of art. The subjective matter of an aesthetic experience concerns an introspection, a person's reflection, an internal spiritual life (from the aesthetic point of view), in the reference to a person himself as well as to the other personalities, individualities, that are aesthetically developed and highly spiritual,
or, on the contrary, aesthetically uncivilized and spiritually poor. The objective-subject aspect of an integrated substance of an aesthetic experience clears up the person's attitude to aesthetic and art objects, i.e. to the variety of transformations from object-subject to subject-object relations (empathy experience, creative animation). The cultural experience is acquired here. Therefore the images of the absolute objects of an aesthetic experience are reconstructed from the external, objective maintenance images into the images of internal psychological, cultural, aesthetic environment. They gain the psychomotor, expressive-semantic features of anthropomorphic, i.e. personal figurative series.
The aesthetic consciousness also performs the main comprehension function of information flow. It is an anthropomorphism, i.e. a way of the most important personal selection. It happens when the so-called "strange" images transform into the "well-known" ones. The aesthetic consciousness distinguishes ideal, standard, canonical, abstract models and expressive, clear expressions, that are convincing in their sensual form and easily recognized. The first group of phenomena demands the high level of art and aesthetic consciousness as well as its reflexion. The second group of the aesthetic and art phenomena-images refer to the model of a "big body", "wide experience" as a universal, mass, corporally-sensual and emotional consciousness (Bakhtin, 2000).
Example
The structure of a person's aesthetic experience includes some blocks of activity experience and impressions of the events differentiated through the various channels -sense organs:
- neutral or purely informative knowledge and images-schemes (i.e. the schemes facilitated by figurativeness);
- realized, rational, personal-valuable, significant, semantic, "live", pulsing, emotionally colored;
- imagined bright pictures, complexes, individual images-imaginations, creative situations;
- partly imagined or realized conceptions on the basis of personal, aesthetic impressions, as well as stereotype patterns (ordinary impressions);
- creative thinking with its inspirations and intuition;
- vague images-imaginations of subconsciousness which are inconsistent and contrast.
All these components of a person aesthetic experience are accumulated during the people's life and creates a sensually-emotional, art-aesthetic and creatively productive basis, a figurative-emotional foundation, that defines the material texture of the sensual-estimated aesthetic consciousness development.
An aesthetic experience of a contact with a subject is quite specific. In the aesthetic experience occurs a phenomenon of a visual contact, rather than an acoustic one, the contact between objects and subjects. It happens when an object "calls for" a person for a communication, sensation and penetration. Russian scientist Toporov connects the notion "to call for" with person's things (utensils). Not emphasizing aesthetic qualities and shape, he singles out the "genetic" correlations i.e. bonds of household things connecting with the human world. For example, a life of household things coincides with a life of a certain individual: their relations are intimate, colored by self-semantic intonation (personal clothes, footwear, dwelling etc.), where each subject has come to the person not accidentally and has gone through his life not only in general, but also in a specific way (Saito, 2007). It is shown in a thing through its original
image, functions, changes, its ageing and partial revival after repair, etc.
Not emphasizing an aesthetic component of the given relations, it is necessary to note, however, the existence of the essential features of shape and functioning of each person's subject, which coincide with their individual, aesthetically "speaking" characteristic.(Bakhtin, 2000) An aesthetic substance can act in the subject of a thing as an expression of internal characteristics. Such an experience of a perception and communication with any object appears to be aesthetic for a subject, though even subconsciously.
Really, addressing to things, a person even unconsciously estimates their qualities, correlating with the subjects, available in his former experience. And then a person defines through his sensations and internal "live" sense, that he likes a thing, moreover, this thing is suitable for him, satisfies the purposes and coincides and corresponds to the previous subjects selection in existing context. (Bakhtin, 2000) Here appears an emotionally-aesthetic reaction (from the point of view of beauty, convenience and benefit), the response to the shape and qualities of a thing as anesthetic subject. A design of any thing, an elite or a mass one, has an aesthetical influence on a person. This phenomenon always contains the elements of something already known and traditional and some new features, some creative transformation of a subject as well. In this sense, an aesthetic experience of perception, communication and application of subjects enriches and creates a creative vision and a constructive thinking of a person. The previous accumulated experience is not only vital, routine and psychological, but it is also corporal, muscular and tactual in particular, that allows to feel space, its borders, the form of objects.
Everything, that is written down in vital annals of a person's spiritual and physical life is constantly reproduced unconsciously, and very
often accompanies the process of estimation of every new object, analyzing of any situation, similar to the one from the previous experience. But it would be a mistaken idea to substitute this aesthetic experience, the arising symptoms of spiritual display for the activity of esthetic and cultural consciousness of a person. These facts show only the degree of the involvement into an aesthetic situation, where a person not only perceives and estimates a developed picture, a subject, a phenomenon, but also acts as co-creator and interpreter in the context of his aesthetic consciousness and everyday, cultural and art experience.
However, it is obvious, that it does not occur automatically and constantly. The dominating motives, requirements, interests of a person play the role of the main ("starting") mechanism of actualization of some substantial, time and contextually-situational experience. The level of individual's culture defines the spiritual, material or mixed forms and shades and prevailing components. All the things mentioned above influence the systems of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes on account of an individual experience. Summing up, the complete self-semantic sensual experience is available (though partly) for the internal work of a person, for the forming of a picture of the world, for the forming of a perspective-retrospective course of life, for the analysis of the further development and self-improvement tendency; for the understanding of life and other people, for the personal aesthetic culture enrichment.
Point
A person gains his own aesthetic, cultural and artistic experience, that is received and interpreted individually. It can be realized, classified and analyzed, becoming a base for the further cultural person model cultivation. It becomes possible with the help of intelligent inclusion of
a figurative image of every new experience in the person's aesthetic consciousness. This new experience is classified as a live integral product, produced by a person's contact with aesthetic objects of a real life, culture and works of art (especially through the aesthetic experiences, perceptions and estimations of a work).
An aesthetic experience of a person concentrates and keeps within its content such components as:
1. Images, types, individualities of people, creations of natural and human world through the person's experience of perception and communication;
2. Socially-psychological models of behaviour and people's relations and self-semantic experience of their estimation;
3. Cultural forms of person's display in all aspects of life;
4. Historical experience of a person;
5. Natural experience: knowledge of the natural world and features of mutual relations;
6. Experience of a person's development and growth (biographic and autobiographic);
7. Processes of self-consciousness as a social individual and a personality;
8. Experience of a person's "occurrence" in culture;
9. Actual aesthetic individual experience;
10. Experience of understanding the value of art through the communication with people;
11. Culture understanding: creations, functions, dialogue;
12. Understanding of an aesthetic experience value in a person's spiritual life.
Actually every process and form of human displays can be transformed into fixed personal semantic images of memory. The most important component of a person's sensual aesthetic and art experience is expressive images. Firstly, it is always a memorizable essence of each object of reality, which is objectively expressed in
external shape. It is natural, characteristic, distinguishing each sort and kind, and also individual external features of the given object or phenomenon. Secondly, it is the outwardly represented state of the given object (its age, activity or passivity, individual condition or mood). Thirdly, it is the perceived impressions. A person's experience undergo processing, changes, generalizations, shift, hypertrophy or reduction of features and details, depending on personal tastes and preferences, age, person's vital aesthetic experience and a physical condition.
Considering "an aesthetic experience", it is necessary to note its connection with "an aesthetic culture" as it arises from an aesthetic experience forming on its basis. The notion of "an aesthetic experience" is more general than «an aesthetic culture» one. An aesthetic experience includes all forms of both object-practical and spiritual human-world interactions. An aesthetic culture is the best, the most significant aesthetic experience for the mankind (mostly the spiritual-practical one). One cannot help accepting the statement of V. Samochvalova the aesthetic individual culture is specific assimilation and accumulation of the experience estimated in the light of the holistic and comprehensive relation, valuable view of the world (Samochvalova, 1996).
Aesthetic culture can be characterized as an ability to feel one's world connectivity, to factually experience, to express the fullness, profundity and verity of these relations. Indeed, aesthetic culture is the measure of human quality and ability integration creating the character base. It is both the complex of value personality vectors in its relations with the world and the guidelines directing the expressive aspects of person activity. It is the ability to decipher and arrange an aesthetic experience, to foresee the prospects of individual development in the world, to define its interaction type.
When the term "an aesthetic culture" was first introduced by F. Shiller, it meant the experience which is shown in person's ability to make use of the experience gradually developing from sensory knowledge to the thinking in images. Thereby, an aesthetic culture is the peak level of an aesthetic experience includes the most significant experience achievements in its integrated system, tends the person's integrity to be supported .
An aesthetic science wasn't concerned enough with the analysis of aesthetic experience and aesthetic culture correlation both for person and society since neither in aesthetics nor in ethics neither in art theory nor in culturology were considered the aesthetic experience responsibility for culture development and level of its humanization.
Aesthetic culture goes through all human culture, its objective reality. An aesthetic value functioning is impossible out of synthesis of its substantive and attributive aspects (Konikov, 1996). Aesthetic culture component is both an attribute and a substance.
Aesthetic culture is a way not only to form and improve the person but also to harmonize the social relations as a relation regulator of person with the world. It fixes the aesthetic direction of all person's activity forms, its experience, reflects the aesthetic culture form of society as a whole (Zamyatin, 2007).
Aesthetic education concerns an aesthetic culture as a special transmission channel of aesthetic reality learning from generation to generation, from society to personal aesthetic experience as a way of forming the aesthetic consciousness and the skills of aesthetic activity. Aesthetic education is realized in all spheres of life activity (family, establishments, material and spiritual life) by all available means for the people: the aesthetic arrangement of subject environment, the art surroundings et al. Scientists
note the great role of creativity in the aesthetic culture development (Luzan, 2009). There is an interdependence of these phenomena. It reflects in person's aesthetic ability developments, such as observance, imagination, creativity.
The universal aesthetic culture is implemented by, for example, aesthetic work content and its product that is shown by the work and its product quality (Saito, 2007).
Conclusion
Therefore features of an aesthetic experience characteristic are dynamism and its ability to be easily recalled in memory and in a sensual aesthetic and art conscience. It is associated with: 1) brightness of impressions which are caused by expressive, sharp, characteristic, aesthetic features of an image of personal experience and a situation of its reception; 2) the personal semantic importance of content and form of the given person's experience; 3) strong emotional reaction of a person (vital, psychological or aesthetic, i.e. experiences of feeling of beauty, tragedy, despair, melancholy or comicalness of a situation with the further estimations and, finally, feeling of harmony); 4) correlation with the previous bright vital, aesthetic or art experience which is close, similar or contrast; 5) an urgent need to communicate with other people about the received impression (experience) and its estimation. The last phenomenon often occurs in relation to received aesthetic and art impressions and is the steady characteristic of cultural activity of a single person or a group of people, communities in an actual dialogue with contemporaries and descendants.
Considering some aspects of aesthetic experience and its relation with an aesthetic culture we can sum up the following ones: Aesthetic experience is the experience of materially practical and spiritual person's activity effected by people and object measures
(surrounding world phenomena), includes the sense experience, emotional ones, conscience, person's estimation of the nature, society and individual world.
An aesthetic culture is formed on the basis of an aesthetic experience. It is a deciphering, selection, arrangement of the most value-significant aesthetic experience for the person considering in the light of integral comprehensive relation. An aesthetic culture is defined as a unity of materially practical and spiritual aspects of the personality life affecting the formation, universal value creation, its spiritual ability formation.
An aesthetic culture can be defined by the following constituents:
Ability of sensual, value world perception, arrangement of subject-object relations with the world;
Complex of human qualities and abilities in forming the inner world and its integrity;
Ability to decipher and organize the aesthetic experience, to foresee the perspective of self-development in the world.
An aesthetic culture is the specific way and the result of nature and society transformation oriented to the ideal of beauty as one of the principal criterion , the way and the result of world humanization and the person himself as well.
An aesthetic culture means the object-related essence in things and phenomena. Individual activity can be possible when he knows himself, his generic organization. An aesthetic person's culture is developed due to the ability of social aesthetic experience assimilation. The system of aesthetic person's relations to the world is defined on the base of obtained experience. The importance of aesthetic culture content is the measure of society spirituality that maintains the emotional humanity experience.
An aesthetic person's culture can be understood as a self-realization, self-development and self-knowledge forms of the person himself not
only as a individual but a representative of human his creativity and specific characteristic of the being as well. It is a level of subject development, aesthetic person's experience.
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Эстетический опыт и культура личности
Е.М. Куроленко
Сибирский федеральный университет Россия 660074, Красноярск, Киренского, 26
Жизненный опыт человека включает различные способы, модели его накопления, разные каналы его поступления, ценностные доминанты, дифференцирующие не только специфику чувственного характера конкретных образов опыта, но и факторы личностно-значимой избирательности. Отбор на основе смыслового аспекта, состояния, культуры личности и ее потребностно-мотивационных ориентаций оказывается определяющим для осмысления ценности эстетического опыта. Культура человека формируется благодаря способности освоения эстетического опыта. На базе полученного опыта складывается система эстетических отношений личности к миру.
Ключевые слова: характеристика опыта, суть познания человека, художественное сознание, компоненты, особенность художественного опыта, феномен эстетической культуры.
