As for art, we can't treat it in isolation, but we should first regard it as a social phenomenon or social thing, a social ideology and a basic superstructure, but it is essentially different from other related social ideologies. Engels once said: "The development of politics, law, philosophy, religion, literature and art is based on economic development. However, they interact and have an impact on the economic base. " Admitting or not acknowledging art is a social ideology and a basic superstructure, which is a prerequisite for correctly understanding the essence of art. Idealism aesthetics fundamentally denies that art is a social ideology reflected by social life through the artist's mind, denies that art comes from real life, and regards art as the product of the artist's personal subjective consciousness. Croce once thought that art is the creation of intuition, the "expression of impression" and "spiritual activity" of artists. Freud believed that art is the expression of human "subconscious" instinct and desire. He thinks that "the essence of painting art is the painter's inner self-expression", and when answering the fundamental question of art philosophy, he also thinks that art is the product of the artist's subjective consciousness, and art is only because of the artist's inner self-expression. In essence, the above statement is completely consistent. Everyone regards artistic creation as a purely subjective activity, which has nothing to do with external objects, and has nothing to do with artists' understanding of external objects from phenomenon to essence and from sensibility to rationality. This view on the essence of art is subjective idealism, which absolutes a certain feature in artistic creation and replaces it with "the essence of art", thus denying the dependence of art on reality and fundamentally reversing the relationship between consciousness and existence.
The old materialist aesthetics acknowledged that art is a reflection of real life, and affirmed that objective existence is primary, and art reflecting objective existence is secondary. For example, Aristotle said that art "is actually imitation". Chernyshevski once said: "Reproducing life is the characteristic of the general character of art, which is its essence." They put the relationship between consciousness and existence on the philosophical basis of art, but only from the aesthetic relationship between art and reality, we don't see that art is a social ideology, nor do we see the internal relationship and essential difference between art and other ideologies, so it is impossible to fully and accurately clarify the essence of art.
Marxist theory that art is a social ideology and a basic superstructure has made epoch-making contributions in the history of aesthetics. When we discuss the essence of art, we can only get the truth by studying it with Marxist standpoint, viewpoint and method. As a superstructure, social ideology has many forms, which reflect and react to the economic base. At the same time, they all have their own particularities, and they all have their own special positions and ways to connect with the economic base. Some of them can directly reflect the economic base and are closer to it, such as politics, law and morality. Others indirectly reflect the economic base, which is "a higher ideology farther away from the material economic base", such as art, philosophy, religion and so on. According to Engels' thoughts in Feuerbach and The End of German Classical Philosophy, advanced ideology is connected with economic base through "intermediate link". Therefore, it can be said that art, a higher social ideology, is different from "intermediate links" such as politics, law and morality, but it is closely related, especially with politics. In the past, the Gang of Four distorted the relationship between art and politics, saying that art should serve counter-revolutionary policies, which was extremely absurd and harmful in theory and practice. However, if we deny the close relationship between art and politics, the statement that "when the * * * production party gains political power, the slogan of literature and art serving politics will gradually emerge as the next unscientific and dangerous slogan" is equally absurd and harmful in theory and practice. A large number of facts in the history of Chinese and foreign art prove that in any class society, progressive and revolutionary art is always determined by rising economic relations through progressive and revolutionary politics, which in turn has a positive impact on its political and even economic foundation; Backward reactionary art is determined by backward economic relations and backward reactionary politics, which in turn serves its political and even economic foundation. This is an inevitable internal relationship between artistic phenomena and politics, and it is also a basic principle that we should pay attention to when investigating the essence of art.
As a higher social ideology, art, philosophy and religion also have some inevitable internal relations and essential differences, and it is these internal relations and essential differences that highlight the essence of art, and art, philosophy and religion always influence each other. As a world outlook, philosophy always plays a guiding role in artistic creation. Today, there are artists who create under the guidance of Marxist world outlook, artists who create under the guidance of Chernyshevski's humanistic world outlook, and artists who create under the guidance of Croce's intuitive world outlook or Sartre's existential world outlook. Even the "subconscious" theory of Freudian psychoanalysis, as a philosophical thought or worldview, is guiding some artists to express "a strange dream" and "a mysterious mixed phantom". There is probably no art that is not guided by a certain world outlook and does not reflect a certain philosophical thought. Religion affects art under certain historical conditions, and art also reflects certain religious concepts, such as Gothic churches in medieval Europe, Buddha statues in Dunhuang during the Northern Wei Dynasty, and so on. Hegel once said: "religion often uses art to make us feel the truth of religion better, or uses images to explain the truth of religion for imagination;" In this case, art actually serves different departments. "These words really reveal some relations between art and religion.
However, art is fundamentally different from philosophy and religion. Their contents and objects are different, and their ways of understanding or reflecting the real world are also different. The way philosophy knows or reflects the world is highly generalized and completely abstract, which is far from the real world, and the content of its understanding requires truth (although it may not be true, such as idealism philosophy is hypocritical). However, although religion's understanding or reflection of the world sometimes has concrete images and appeals to sensibility, it is completely false and untrue, and fundamentally reverses reality. Therefore, "all religions are just reflections in people's minds of the fantasy of external forces that dominate people's daily lives, and in this reflection, human power takes the form of superhuman power." The way and content of understanding or reflecting the artistic world is completely different from that of philosophy and religion. It is these differences that make art an art, not a philosophy or a religion. We believe that the essential characteristics of art are authenticity, image and typicality.
First of all, the cognitive content of art requires truth, and art requires a true reflection of the objective world or social life. In terms of authenticity or fuzziness, art is consistent with philosophy or science, but it is essentially different from religion. All idealistic aesthetics deny or oppose that art truly understands the objective world and reflects real life. Marie Dane, a French Catholic philosopher, said, "To require art to describe reality as its main purpose is to destroy art … If art is a means of understanding, it is much worse than geometry." At present, some young comrades are still keen to spread these subjective idealistic commodities, misinterpreting the essence of art as subjective "self-expression", and at the same time saying that art "does not need to be understood" and "does not need to be as valuable as anything else", fundamentally denying the cognitive function of art and the truth of artistic understanding, denying that art fully reflects social life, and thinking that art can only be called "value" by expressing its abstract "self" that does not exist in reality. This is a confused concept, which actually confuses art and religion (subjective idealism leads to religion). On this issue, Hegel, an objective idealist, seems to see it more clearly than they do: "The form of religious consciousness is an idea, because it absolutely leaves the objectivity of art and turns to the inner life of the subject, which is presented in the form of the subject, so the mind and emotion, that is, the inner subjectivity, become the basic elements." As for some people who want to replace Marxism with Sartre's existentialism, they use the theory that "human nature, meaning and value should be proved and decided by human actions" to correct that "human nature is not an abstract thing inherent in a single person. In reality, it is the theory of the sum of all social relations, not just the problem of artistic thought. Starting from Marxist theory about the relationship between social and economic foundation and superstructure, we realize the cognitive function of art and that art should truly reflect social life or describe real life. Without the actual social life of human beings and the objective world itself, the so-called essential meaning of art is as illusory as religion. We don't deny the self-expression in art. Art is created by people according to their understanding of beauty and its laws in reality, which naturally involves the expression of art. By artistic expression, we mean that artists use material expression tools to convey their understanding of art in real life and their feelings and emotions when they know art. There is of course a "self" here, but this "self" comes from real life and has a rational understanding of the nature of real life.
Secondly, the way to understand or reflect the art world is always concrete, emotional and individual, which is essentially similar to the form of the real world. From the image, art and religion are both different and identical, and the situation is more complicated. Although some Buddha statues in Dunhuang Grottoes have shapes, they are only the materialization of abstract religious concepts, which have historical value but no artistic value; Moreover, some bodhisattva statues or patron saints are quite vivid and have a high artistic level. But this does not equate religion with art, as Feuerbach said? : "For a person who regards Maria as his artistic object, Maria is no longer an object of religion, but an object of art ... Otherwise, he will not have the courage, strength and freedom to release her from her idol of religious feelings and thoughts, separate her from herself, make her leave that very mysterious place, and move any place with clear boundaries to the secular, perceptual and intuitive scope."
Image is an important essential feature of art. Without tangible images, there is no art ... The fundamental difference between art and philosophy or science is that philosophy or science understands or reflects the real world in the form of abstract conceptual thinking and theoretical system; Art, on the other hand, understands or reflects the real world with concrete conceptual thinking in the form of image system. As for scientific illustrations, specimens, models, etc. Although there is an image, it is not an understanding of the world image, but just an abstract understanding map with an image. All conceptual works, although there are many images, are not art in essence, which is why. Recently, a popular saying called "abstract beauty" is probably invented subjectively by the author, because neither China's aesthetics nor western aesthetics have seen such concepts as "abstract beauty" or "abstract beauty". Beauty is not equal to art, but art cannot be without beauty. The essence of beauty is related to the essence of art. If the theory of "abstract beauty" can be established, that is to say, art can be abstract, "without image" or "without expressing the image of a specific objective object". Beauty must be image in essence. Whether it is social beauty, natural beauty or artistic beauty, there can be no beauty without resorting to perceptual images, and any abstraction far from the actual form can not arouse people's aesthetic feeling. Idealists in the history of aesthetics, such as Hegel, also admit that his so-called "idea" must be "perceptual manifestation" to achieve beauty. And all materialistic aestheticians have never given up the image of beauty. The "vivid expression" put forward by Xie He, an aesthetician in the Six Dynasties, is indeed a manifestation of the essence of beauty, but it has nothing to do with "abstract beauty" and is closely related to the concrete image of things. As for calligraphy with lines and structures as the main means of expression, it is not the "base camp of abstract beauty", and its perceptual characteristics are also obvious. Successful calligraphers often draw nutrition from the images in real life, and then show these images or make people think of their artistic twists and turns. Of course, there are many formal factors in calligraphy art. We can admit the beauty of artistic expression and its relative independence, but we can't agree with the fallacy of "abstract beauty".
Typicality is the third and most important essential feature of art, and typicality is one of the core issues of aesthetics. Whether "typicality" and "beauty" are equivalent or not, the essence of beauty (at least the essence of artistic beauty) is always associated with typicality, which is acknowledged by all major aesthetic schools in China and proved by literature. Exploring the typical problems in art can help us further understand the essence and characteristics of art.
Art's understanding or reflection of the world is relatively subjective, on the one hand, it is a perceptual understanding of world phenomena, on the other hand, it is a rational understanding of the nature of the world through understanding, which is the unity of the two. In the whole process of artistic understanding, both are always indispensable. Without the former, the concrete image will be lost (philosophical understanding will eventually abandon the former); Without the latter, the truth of knowledge will be lost (religious knowledge will lack the latter), while the latter is always integrated, summarized, concentrated and perfected on the basis of the former. This artistic way of understanding the world is a typical way of understanding, and the result of understanding is the formation of the concept of beauty, that is, the formation of a typical image. It is different from "aesthetic cognition" or "aesthetic evaluation" in connotation and extension.
The authenticity of art, as far as its objectivity is concerned, is the truth of phenomenon on the one hand, and the truth of essence on the other hand, which is the truth of the unity of phenomenon and essence. Without the former, art is not a concrete and perceptible image; Without the latter, art cannot grasp the essential laws of real life. Only the art that fully shows the essence of things with very prominent phenomena and powerfully reflects the universality of real life with very vivid images is highly real art, which is the typicality of art. Some people try to deny the typicality and regard it only as a feature of realistic creation methods, thus proving their argument that "realism is not the only correct way". This view is completely wrong. Typical is universal in art, whether it is realistic art or romantic art, it is typical in essence. Isn't the representative work of romantic art "Free God guides the people" a typical example? Didn't it fully reflect the essential significance of the French Revolution of July 1830 with a very prominent image of "freedom and reality"? The typicality of art is determined by the inevitability that art reflects real life. Art reflects reality and pursues truth. The truth of artistic image is a typical art, which is the fundamental feature that distinguishes art from philosophy and religion.