Relative and absolute in the aesthetic sphere

If beauty is only a sense of the isolated, "absolute" individual, any taste criterion disappears, every taste of taste gets the same right of existence as any other ("everyone has their own taste"), and therefore we can not speak of good and bad taste, of developed and undeveloped taste, of normal and perverse taste. Naturally equally equitable in their historical relativity are the tastes of all ages, because here too is missing any criterion for their comparative assessment. Personality is not an abstract contradiction of society but an individual bearer of social content. It penetrates different paths in its consciousness, and with varying degrees of obviousness it influences the nature of its activity. The person can not escape the full power of the social "field of attraction," in which he grows up, becomes spiritually and acts in practice.

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From this point of view, the aesthetic direction of the personality values follows that the conductor of social determination here is precisely the ideal. In the ideal, the personality makes its own, inherently psychological knowledge, one or another social activity program, adapting it to its individuality and breaking it through the uniqueness of its unique self. Whether or not a person realizes the dependence of his or her aesthetic thoughts on his or her social, national, class, and so on. The individual, group, historical relativity of taste is dialectically combined with the moment of absoluteness. There are rules of taste that precisely give people a criterion for grading the taste of one person or another. These norms are formed in the aesthetic consciousness of society, the nation, the class in a given age and serve as a kind of "measure" of the individual tastes of the people. Therefore, the dialectic of the relative and the absolute manifests here as a dialectic of the individual and social. But from the point of view of the entire world history of culture, the socio-historical norms of the taste are quite different, because they are constantly changing, and in the same age are different in different nations and classes. Where does the moment of absolute exist then? It is contained in what is commonly called the universal.

The different types and norms of aesthetic consciousness formed in the history of culture are unequal in their relativity as well as the individual tastes, because they contain to varying degrees the moment of the absolute, the universal human.