О возвышенном (великом) в эстетике Н. Г. Чернышевского

Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Философия и конфликтология. 2024. Т. 40. № 1. С. 56–67.

Morozov D.

In the contemporary scholarly discourse, aesthetic views of Nickolay G. Chernyshevsky
(1828–1889) usually are observed only in the framework of the analysis of his thesis “the
beautiful is life”. According to the author’s view, this approach does not fully reconstruct the
main senses of the aesthetic system of the thinker, that is why the arthor of the current article
reconsiders them from the perspective of the sublime (great), the original understanding
of which is given by the Russian thinker. Our key points of discrepancy with the previous
aesthetic ‘prevailing’ׄ systems and the specific Chernyshevsky’s improvements are explicitly
shown. The thesis about the levelling of the role of imagination ability is interpreted as a core
characteristic of his aesthetics. The author resolves two historical and philosophical issues:
which of the previous aesthetic systems were criticized by Chernyshevsky? On which tradition
does the thinker based his theory? Giving answers to these particular questions, the author
criticizes the Chernyshevsky’s argumentation, submitting a thesis that his original definition
of the sublime (great) has only a formal similarity with the Kantian definition. By coming
down the role of imagination to the reproduction Chernyshevsky necessarily comes to the notion
of ‘great’, which is based on comparison with the nearby objects (phenomena) but not on
the clash of the cognitive abilities of a human, the infinite with the finite.

Keywords: возвышенное, воображение, эстетика, Kant, Чернышевский, aesthetics, imagination, Chernyshevsky, great, sublime, Фишер, И. Кант

Publication based on the results of: Russia and Europe in the 19th Century: Intellectual Interactions in the Socio-Political Context (2024)