Gnostic side of the artistic content

Since in the art (as in science) internal content is nothing more than a reflection of the subject of knowledge, the nature of that content is dictated by the nature of that subject. The object of science is the objective reality, even when the subject of scientific knowledge is man , science must present the social activity, the mind, the psychology of the subject as objective, as objective as the being of nature itself. Thus, the content of science becomes the objective truth. Another is the situation in art. Knowing the relationship between the object and the subject, art acquires a dual cognitive orientation: on the one hand, it reveals the attitude of the object to the subject; knows the being as a value, on the other - reveals the subject's attitude towards the object, knows the system of assessment of being, which is formed in the consciousness of society, class, social group and breaks into the artist's mind. Hence, the content of the art includes dual knowledge - knowledge of the world and self-knowledge of the artist.

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Deeply mistaken is the widespread idea that the cognitive power of art manifests itself only in the understanding of the life outside the artist, and his attitude towards this life enters art as a "self-expression," devoid of any cognitive meaning and even opposed to the cognitive orientation of art. Indeed, the "self-expression" of the artist is self-knowledge, but not an automatic fixation of a spontaneous stream of sensations. Even in the simplest case - for example, when the painter creates a scene of nature - the psychological mechanism of the creative act combines the analysis of the depicted object with the self-analysis of the artist, with the deep "understanding" of what he feels, how he feels and why it feels so, not otherwise. The more obvious is the presence and necessity of such an analytic only inculcation of the artist in the creation of a novel, symphony or spectacle. Cognitive processing is always subject to art and what is depicted and what is expressed. Therefore, the cognitive information included in the content of the art is different from the objective truth as the content of scientific knowledge: in the content of the art, objective truth is contradictively associated with the "subjective truth". This is precisely the "subjective truth" and not merely the "printing of subjectivity", because the transformation of self-expression into self-knowledge is nothing more than overcoming the chance, the ambiguity, the chaotic nature of the artist's feelings and experiences, the artist's ability to "Orient" in the "flow" of its consciousness and to differentiate, separate, raise the essential, important, psychologically true. It is only thanks to this that people can find in the individual uniqueness of the artist's soul life something common, socially representative, inherent to them, and not only to the "self-appearing" individual. The spiritual peace of the other person is of interest to me if this person is close to me, dear, beloved; and when it comes to a perfectly unknown or long-dead person, his feelings, experiences and reflections can attract my attention only to the extent that they contain something psychologically substantial, sustainable, deep, true. In this case, the most intimate human documents - private letters, diaries, memoirs - acquire true artistic value. But if the writer chooses for his narrative the form of letters or diary, as did Gogol, Dostoevsky and others, he consciously makes us aware of the subjectively true life of the authors of these papers that interest and excite us, though very well we know that such people have never existed in the world.
It is precisely this merging of the objective and subjective truth in the content of art Belinski calls "poetic truth" and sees in it the main difference between the content of art and the content of science and the main condition for the artistic work of art.

It is not about summing up the objective truth and the subjective truth that allows them to dissociate themselves and the individual existence of each of them. The poetic content of art is not objectively-true scientific content, supplemented by subjective, psychological stigma. The poetic truth is a complete and qualitative kind of phenomenon. It is an objective and subjective truth. the fruit of a deep knowledge of the value relationship between the subject and the subject that characterizes the very subject of art. At the same time, with all the indivisibility of knowledge and self-knowledge in art, these two layers of artistic content may be in different proportions. This is evidenced by the existence of two parallel arts - arts that depict the world, and arts that do not portray it. These two paths of artistic transformation of the world are possible and necessary precisely because the value relationship between the object and the subject allows a dual approach to its knowledge and modeling: an axiological system "object-subject" can be revealed on the part of the object and on the part of subject. In one case, the object of knowledge is the objective reality, reflected in the spiritual world of the artist (literature and acting art, painting and sculpture) and in the other - the spiritual world of man, which reflects and appreciates the objective reality (music, dance, architecture) .

In the history of aesthetic thought, the first genus of art was often referred to as "objective," or "pictorial", and the second as "subjective" or "expressive". These definitions are not very successful, because in all types of art, the inseparable connection between the subject and the subject is recreated, so imagination is impossible in art without expressiveness. These two types of artistic creation could rather be called "epic" and "lyrical" by analogy with the traditional definition of the main literary genera, because in the first case the artist's self-knowledge "conceals" behind the knowledge of the objective reality and " dissolves "in its image, and in the second, on the contrary, self-knowledge is embodied directly in the image of the art, and the knowledge of the outside world is a mediated moment of the artistic content, its second plan, the background or the subtext . The analogous duality of the ways of artistic transformation of life is also found in the comparison of different artistic directions - for example, realism and romanticism, classicism and baroque, impressionism and expressionism, as well as the comparison of different individual styles. These two structures have many specific variations and modifications and they are able to interact directly in the complex structure of synthetic art in such genre forms as the novel-confession or the lyrical film-confession. However, in any case, the specific relationship between knowledge and self-knowledge is always connected in art, because this relationship is conditioned by the structure of the very subject of artistic knowledge. It also dictates the art-specific method of knowledge-a concrete-image that differs from the abstract method of knowledge inherent in science.