Soviet Aesthetics of the 1960s in Defense of Humanitarian Values

The article analyses the main directions of theoretical and methodological inquiry pursued by Soviet aestheticians in the 1960s and assesses their contribution to the development of domestic aesthetics. It examines the key debates between positions that construed the aesthetic as having an objective social and epistemological nature and those of axiological aesthetics. The content of Yu.B. Borev’s views is revealed concerning the historical dynamics of value-laden perception of aesthetic categories and the system of oppositions in figurative thinking. The principles of a systemic methodology in the aesthetics of the 1960s are identified. The author performs a critical analysis of the contradictions within a number of positions of the axiological aesthetics of the 1960s, in particular, the underestimation of the sensuous nature of the aesthetic. It is noted that the broadened understanding of the humanitarian content of the aesthetic and of art prepared the cultural-studies phase in the development of aesthetics at the end of the 20th century and continues to serve as a reference point in defending the fundamental premises of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in contemporary debates about the nature of the aesthetic

Aesthetic experience · Everyday Aesthetics · Literal and figurative language · Perception · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies