What is the birthplace of aesthetic thought in Western antiquity

Ancient Greece is considered to be an important birthplace of ancient Western aesthetic thought.

Modern Western aesthetics has been influenced by ancient Greek culture in many ways. Such as ancient Greek mythology, sculpture, literature, oratory, philosophy architecture and so on. And in and produced the earliest human thinking about beauty (in Greek philosophy), which is the emergence of fine art itself.

Overview of Greek culture and the germ of aesthetic thought

Overview of Greek culture

Greek aesthetic thought, as far as there are historical records can be relied upon, originated in the sixth century B.C.E., and flourished in the fifth century B.C.E. to the fourth century B.C.E., i.e., the era of Plato and Aristotle, which is closely linked with the economic foundation of Greek society and the general cultural situation.

Ancient Western culture originated along the Mediterranean coast, especially in the islands along the Aegean Sea in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the Greek Peninsula (Balkans). This is a multi-ethnic region, in the third millennium to the second millennium BC, there has been a great migration of peoples, in southern Greece to develop a classical culture of the peoples of the Aegean islands and from the northern part of the peninsula. They brought with them their original system of slavery, and in the course of their wars of aggression and colonial expansion they continued to turn prisoners of war into slaves for animal husbandry and other forms of production. In the fifth century B.C., for example, Athens, the cultural center, had a population of about 400,000, of which slaves accounted for about 250,000, and some of the remaining 150,000 were free people, with slave owners accounting for only a minority.

Early Greek production was mainly agricultural. As a result of the exploitation of slaves by the slave owners and the plundering of the freedmen, property became increasingly divided, and the development of agriculture tended to become more and more land-concentrated, thus creating a kind of landed aristocracy. By about the sixth century B.C., the era of the origins of the aesthetics we are going to study, the basis of the Greek economy began to undergo radical changes. As a result of frequent wars (the longest lasting of which were the Persian Wars, caused by the expansion of Athenian power into Asia Minor and the conflict of interests with Persia), the development of transportation, handicrafts, and commerce, there was a gradual shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial and commercial economy in city-states with seaports such as Athens. This brought about a change in the balance of class power: the original aristocratic slave owners who operated in agriculture were declining, and the new industrial and commercial slave owners were rising. This new class represented the progressive forces of the time and competed with the landowning aristocracy for power, which led to the formation of two major political parties - the Democratic Party and the Aristocratic Party. The so-called "democracy" was only a "limited democracy", i.e. democracy within the slave-owning class. Around the fifth century B.C., the power of these two parties was not balanced among the Greek city-states. In the case of the two most powerful city-states, Sparta and Athens, Sparta still depended mainly on agriculture, so the aristocratic party was dominant, while Athens depended mainly on the more profitable industry and commerce, so the democratic party was dominant. Most of the Greek city-states (generally very small, with only a few tens of thousands of people) surrounded Sparta and Athens, forming two opposing camps, the aristocratic party and the democratic party, and the struggles were often very sharp, resulting in endless internal wars. Greek writers and thinkers were also politically inclined in these two different ways, and among the aesthetic thinkers we shall examine, the greater part belonged to the aristocratic party, with the possible exception of Democritus.

The culture of ancient Greece that has come down to us is primarily that of the slaveholders. They depended on slave labor, so they had the "freedom" to engage in cultural activities. The origins of Greek culture are very early. Greek people in the primitive commune and clan society stage, there has been a rich and complete set of myths. This was "the form of nature and society itself, which had already been worked out in an unconscious artistic way through the fancies of the people", and it was "not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also its soil". (1)

A large part of this Greek mythology is preserved in the Homeric epics. Homer's epics had been orally circulated among the people from the ninth century B.C., and were written in a definitive form only in the sixth century B.C. Homer's epics were the main textbooks of the general people in ancient times, and were widely circulated, and therefore y influential. Secondly, Greek mythology was also partly preserved in the theater. Greek drama, especially tragedy, reached its peak around the fifth century B.C., with representative writers Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (the three great tragedians) and Aristophanes (the comedian). Theatrical performances were an important part of the annual festivals of the gods and civic festivals in Athens. To go to the theater was to be educated; it was a religious and political task for the citizens of Athens. So literature and art were far more important in Greek life than they were for the next two thousand years. Moreover, around the fifth century B.C., the Greek arts of music, architecture, painting, and sculpture flourished, especially sculpture, which grew to a peak that Europe never caught up with later. Therefore, the theory of Greek aesthetics was based on a rich literary and artistic practice.

Aesthetics was a branch of philosophy in the West from the beginning. Greek literature and art reached its golden age in Athens around the fifth century B.C., the so-called Pericles era. But it was also in this era that Greek culture changed from the rule of traditional thought to free criticism, and from the age of literature to the age of philosophy. Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians, often consulted philosophers and sharply criticized the real social problems in his works, and the comedian Aristophanes also revealed the spirit of free criticism from time to time in his works. From then on, philosophy became more and more dominant, and a series of outstanding philosophers, such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, appeared one after another. . There were three main reasons for the transition from the Age of Letters to the Age of Philosophy. The first reason was that with the development of production, the study of natural sciences flourished, which led to the study of philosophy. The second was the change in the contrast of class forces (the rise of democratic forces) caused by the development of industry and commerce. The new industrial and commercial slave owners competed for power with the landowning aristocracy. This "democratic movement" led to a culture of critical debate. Knowledge and the ability to debate became a necessity for those who fought for power, and thus the school of sophistry emerged. The sophists were mostly on the side of the democrats, representing the progressive forces of scholarship, and it was they who fanned the flames of criticism and debate. The change of the object of Greek thought from natural phenomena to social problems is also largely due to them. Thirdly, as Greece came into increasingly frequent contact with the peoples of Phoenicia, Persia, and Egypt in trade and war, foreign cultural ideas also served to stimulate philosophical thought in Greece.

Philosophers were bound to pay attention to literary and artistic problems since they had to pay attention to social problems. Literary development itself also requires theoretical generalization, it is inevitable to pay attention to the problem of aesthetics. Greek aesthetic thought originated in the Pythagorean school, Heraclitus, Democritus and Socrates, and flourished in Plato and Aristotle, is now divided into the following.

The Pythagorean school

The Pythagorean school flourished in the sixth century B.C. They were mathematicians, astronomers and physicists, and the main object of Greek philosophy at that time was still the natural phenomena, and the Pythagorean school, as well as Heraclitus a little later, mainly looked at the problem of beauty from the point of view of natural science. In the natural sciences the philosophers of that time had a general attempt to find out the unifying principle or element in the midst of the multitude of phenomena in nature. The Pythagoreans, most of whom were mathematicians, believed that the most basic element of all things was number, and that the principle of number ruled all phenomena in the universe. To absolutize a property of things (number) in this way, as if it were something that existed independently of everything else, was the germ of objective idealism. This basic view also influenced the Pythagorean school's view of beauty.

They believed that beauty is harmony. They first studied the harmony of musical rhythm from the viewpoints of mathematics and acoustics, and found that the qualitative differences in sound (such as length, height, and weight) were determined by the quantitative differences in the articulators. For example, if the sounding body (such as a string) is long, the sound will be long, if the vibration speed is fast, the sound will be high, if the vibration speed is slow, the sound will be low. Therefore, the basic principle of music is the relationship between quantity, and the harmony of musical rhythm is composed of different tones of high and low, long and short, light and heavy, according to a certain number of proportions. This school of scholars expressed the founders of the different intervals in numerical proportions, for example, the eighth interval is 1:2, the fourth is 3:4, and the fifth is 2:3.

From the study of quantitative relations in music, the Pythagorean school found a dialectical principle, which was reproduced by a disciple of the school, Polycrates, in his Treatise on the Laws of Statutes:

The Pythagorean school said that the harmony of music was based on quantitative relations, and that the Pythagoreans were not the same as the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean school said (and Plato tended to adopt the words of this school) that music is the harmonious unity of opposites, leading from multiplicity to unity, and from incongruity to harmony.

This is the earliest germ of Greek dialectical thought, and the earliest germ of the principle of "neatness in change" in literary thought.

The Pythagorean school extended the principle of harmony in music to other arts, such as architecture and sculpture, in order to find out what kind of quantitative proportions would produce beautiful effects, and came up with some empirical norms. Some of these norms are recorded by Polykleit in the aforementioned Treatise on Statutes. For example, the "golden section" (the most beautiful line is a rectangle whose length is in proportion to its width), which had a long-lasting influence in Europe, was developed by this school. They also sometimes considered the rounded sphere to be the most beautiful. This form-oriented discussion was the germ of formalism in later aesthetics.

This school of scholars also applied the principles of number and harmony to the study of astronomy, thus forming the so-called "music of the heavens" or "harmony of the universe" concept, that all the stars in the sky in accordance with a certain orbit movement, but also produces a kind of harmonious music. The Soviet historian of aesthetics, Asmussen Asmus, a Soviet historian of aesthetics, commented on this concept in the preface to Ancient Thinkers on Art, saying, "The concept of musical harmony was originally the result of the study of only one field of art, but the Pythagorean school extended it to the whole universe. ...... Thus, even astronomy, that is, cosmology, had an aesthetic character in the opinion of this school. therefore even astronomy, i.e. cosmology, had in the opinion of this school an aesthetic character". They regarded the heavenly bodies as spherical and considered them to be the most beautiful forms. It may be noted here that the Pythagorean school regarded the whole of nature as an object of aesthetics and did not confine itself to art.

The Pythagoreans also noted the influence of art on man. They put forward two views with "mystical colors, one is the "small universe" (human) similar to the "big universe" view (similar to the Chinese Taoist "small circumference" view). "They believe that the human body is like a celestial body.) They believe that the human body is like a celestial body, governed by the principles of number and harmony. People have inner harmony, encounter the outer harmony, "the same voice", so happy to fit. This is why people can love beauty and appreciate art. Another view is that the inner harmony of the human body can be influenced by the outer harmony. They applied this concept to medicine and came to a conclusion similar to the Yin-Yang and Five Elements theory in Chinese medicine. Not only in the physical aspect, but also in the psychological aspect, the inner harmony can be influenced by the outer harmony. They divided music styles into two kinds, different music styles can cause corresponding moods in the listener and cause changes in character, for example, the listener's character is soft, just the music can make his mood from soft to hard. Art can change people's temperament and character, so the role of education.

The Pythagorean school of objective idealism with mysticism and formalism of aesthetic thought on Plato, Plotin's neo-Platonism, and the Renaissance era dedicated to the study of formal skills of artists, have had a profound impact.

Three Heraclitus

The greatest representative of the simple materialist and dialectical viewpoint in early Western philosophy was Heraclitus (around 530-470 BC). Only a few fragments of his important work On Nature now survive, and not much of it deals directly with aesthetics. He was influenced by the Pythagorean school, but abandoned the idealistic and mystical overtones of that school. The direction of materialism was clearly taken. In his search for a unifying principle in the multiplicity of natural phenomena, he considered fire to be the most fundamental of the four elements of earth, water, wind, and fire, as the Greeks called them. All natural things are in a continuous process of transformation from earth to water to wind to fire (ascent) and from fire to wind to water to earth (descent). In this way he affirms the material basis of the world and the dialectical process of transformation and development.

In terms of dialectical view, Heraclitus also believed that "nature tends towards difference and opposition. Harmonization arises from the opposition of differences and not from similarities", "the union is formed by the complete and incomplete, the same and different, harmonized and uncoordinated factors". This view, though close to that of the Pythagorean school, is a great step forward from it. While the Pythagorean school focused on the harmony of opposites, Heraclitus focused on the struggle of opposites. He says it clearly, "Differences meet, and from different elements the most beautiful harmony arises, and everything arises from the struggle." Focusing on harmony means focusing on equilibrium and stasis, and focusing on struggle means focusing on change and development, so the Pythagorean school absolutized and fixed quantitative relations, while Heraclitus emphasized the constant change and renewal of the world. He believed that everything is in flux, like flowing water, the former water is no longer the latter, and no one can step into the same river twice. Although this is a general philosophical point of view, it is of great significance for aesthetics, and believing Heraclitus' view, beauty cannot be something absolutely eternal. Heraclitus said, "More than a man, the most beautiful monkey is still ugly." This is one of the shortest and most graphic illustrations of the relativity of the standard of beauty.

Four Democritus

Democritus (around 460-370 BC) was an important representative of ancient materialistic thought and the founder of atomism. According to ancient biographies, he wrote Rhythm and Harmony, On Music, On the Beauty of Poetry, On Painting, and a series of other works on aesthetics, but unfortunately all of them have been lost. Some of his broken and fragmentary writings are mostly about the issue of inspiration. He believed that "Homer, because he was born with the talent of God, created rich and colorful great poems"; "Without a fire of the heart, without a kind of crazy inspiration, one cannot become a great poet". This was the popular view in ancient Greece, so that in mythology every art had a patron god. But the inspiration claim does not fit with Democritus' philosophical views, and it is suspected that the information circulated is not very reliable.

Ancient music theorist Philodemus quoted Democritus in On Music, saying that he thought "music is the youngest of the arts" because "it does not arise from necessity, but from the luxury of being in the process of development" (some translate as "residual power"). There are two points worth noting here, first, he began to look at the origin of art from the perspective of social development; second, this view of his more or less contains the germ of the "residual power theory" of Schiller and Spencer in modern times, according to which, when a person meets the immediate needs of life and has the remaining power, he carries out free artistic activities and creates more or less ultra-utilitarian works of beauty.

But the more important contribution of Democritus was his atomism and epistemology. According to his atomism, the surface of an object secretes fine particles of liquid, which affect the human senses through the air, and only then do people get an "image" of the object. This is perceptual awareness. Sense perception is still hazy, but in order to reach a correct understanding, one must go through reason. Here he affirmed the principle of the first nature of matter and the second nature of consciousness, and also pointed out the correct relationship between perceptual and rational understanding. This laid the epistemological foundation of materialism for aesthetics.

V Socrates

Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) had a profound influence on Western philosophy, but left no single work behind. The main document on his aesthetic views is the Memoirs of his disciple Csenaphon, who marked a great shift in Greek aesthetic thought. Whereas the Pythagorean school and Heraclitus and others had looked at aesthetics primarily from the point of view of the natural sciences, seeking natural-scientific explanations for beauty, Socrates looked at aesthetics primarily from the point of view of the social sciences, seeking social-scientific explanations for beauty. From the information in the Memoirs, Volume III, Chapter VIII, he links beauty with utility, and beauty must be useful, and the measure of beauty is utility; if it is useful, it is beautiful, and if it is harmful, it is ugly. From utility, Socrates sees the relativity of beauty. The word "relative" means that it is dependent on utility and is treated as such, for example, "a shield is beautiful from the point of view of defense, a spear from the point of view of the agility and strength of the shot". From this we can see that the same thing that is beautiful for one utility (e.g., defense) is not beautiful for another (e.g., offense). So whether something is beautiful or ugly depends on its utility. Whether the utility is good or bad depends, in turn, on the position of the user. Thus beauty cannot be said to be entirely in the thing itself, independent of the person. Commenting on this Socratic view, Asmus says something very pithy:

Beauty is not an absolute attribute of things, not the kind of attribute that belongs to a thing alone, and is dependent neither on its use nor on its relation to other things. Beauty cannot be divorced from purposefulness, i.e., from the relation in which a thing stands when it appears to be valuable, or from the suitability of a thing for the realization of the end which man desires it to attain. In this sense, the concepts of "beauty" and "goodness" are united; and it is in this sense that Socrates consistently articulates the relativity of beauty.

Preface to "Ancient Thinkers on the Arts"

In addition, Socrates' views on the creation of art are noteworthy. In his early years he followed his father in the profession of a stonemason, and learned to carve as a stonemason, and so had an intimate experience of the creative activity of art. He accepted the then prevailing creed that "art imitates nature," but he rejected the understanding of "imitation" as "plagiarism. From the Memoirs, Volume III, Chapter 10, recorded his two conversations with the artists of the time, he advocated that painters should not only depict the details of the appearance of the statue, but should "show the life", "show the state of mind", so that people see and feel "like a living"; he also said that art should not be a slave to copy nature, but should be in the natural form of some elements, to constitute a very beautiful whole. Therefore, he believed that the artist carved out the figure before the more beautiful than the original true figure.

Sixth Conclusion

In early Greece, aesthetics was an integral part of natural philosophy. The first concern of the early thinkers was the objective real basis of beauty. The Pythagorean school saw beauty as harmony seen in quantitative proportions, and harmony as arising from the unity of opposites. From the point of view of quantitative proportions, they identified a number of formal elements of beauty, such as completeness (the round sphere is the most beautiful), symmetry of proportions ("golden section" is the most beautiful), rhythm and so on. The concept of number is absolutized, as if beauty were only in form. Heraclitus took the dialectical view one step further, focusing on the struggle of opposites, thus showing the process of development and the relativity of beauty. Democritus proposed a materialistic atomism and an epistemology that united perceptual and rational understanding.

Socrates was the key to the transformation of aesthetic thought in early Greece; he shifted the center of attention from nature to society, and aesthetics was transformed into an integral part of the social sciences. From the social point of view, he pointed out that the criterion for evaluating beauty lies in its utility to man; according to the criterion of utility, he saw the relativity of beauty. From then on, beauty and goodness were closely connected, and aesthetics was closely connected with ethics and political science. The question of the social utility of literature and art also came to the forefront. He had a deeper understanding of the Greek view that "art imitates nature" than in the past, and saw the idealization of art.

In short, there was a fairly good foundation before Plato and Aristotle. The main problems of aesthetics were largely clarified: that is, the real basis of literature and art and the social utility of literature and art. It was these two main problems that Plato and Aristotle were trying to solve.

Note:

(1) Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. II, p. I.13.

References:

Zhu Guangqian, A History of Western Aesthetics