https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8653-0314
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The text, starting from the classic picture taken from Polish literature on the barbaric destruction of higher culture, first shows the contemporary manifestations of an attack on one of the basic values of the human spirit, which is beauty, in this case in the dimension of social life. Then, based on the reflections of philosophers and sociologists on beauty, it discusses what beauty is, whether it is something real, its various dimensions in the life of man and society as a whole. The last part, presenting various meanings of the term social aesthetics, focuses on the aesthetics of social life and shows its connection with truth and good, and its importance for the functioning of societies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The most famous sentence of C. K. Norwid about F. Chopin: ‘A native of Warsaw, a Pole at heart, and a citizen of the world with the talent’. Cf. Fryderyk Chopin (Citationn.d.).
2 The literal translation. In the translation of Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles:
‘With groaning – stories gone deaf:
The Ideal – now brought low on the pavement’.
3 For example, ‘rag’ (tabloid newspaper) in Polish – ‘brukowiec’, also takes its name from cobblestones (bruk). The term in English comes from an old torn cloth.
4 And next follows: Teacher ‘How can you not admire it, Galkiewicz, when I told you a thousand times that you do admire it.’
Galkiewicz ‘Well, I don’t admire it.’
Teacher ‘That’s your private business. Obviously, Galkiewicz, you lack the intelligence. Others admire it.’
Galkiewicz ‘Nobody admires it, I swear. How can anybody admire it when nobody reads it besides us, schoolboys, and only because we’re forced to … ’ (Gombrowicz Citation2000, EPUB 50).
5 ‘In order to apprehend what makes the specificity of aesthetic judgement, Kant ingeniously distinguished “that which pleases” from “that which gratifies”, and, more generally, strove to separate “disinterestedness”, the sole guarantee of the specifically aesthetic quality of contemplation, from “the interest of the senses”, which defines “the agreeable”, and from “the interest of Reason”, which defines “the Good”. By contrast, working-class people, who expect every image to fulfil a function, if only that of a sign, refer, often explicitly, to norms of morality or agreeableness in all their judgements’ (Bourdieu Citation1984, 41).
6 ‘Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and only some faint trace of it upon the dead, though the face yet retains all its fulness and symmetry? Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful, even though the others happen to be more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this is because there is soul there, because there is more of the Idea of The Good, because there is some glow of the light of The Good and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won over to goodness, and in the fullest measure stirred to life’ (Plotinus Citation1917–Citation1930, VI 7,22).
7 From the commentary of Benjamin Jowett. The very words of Plato: ‘Everything that is good is fair, and the fair is not without proportion, and the animal which is to be fair must have due proportion. (…) the highest and greatest symmetries or proportions (…) that between soul and body’ (Plato Citation1892b, 587 [87]).
8 ‘ad rationem pulchri sive decori concurrit et claritas et debita proportio’ (Saint Thomas, II-II, q. 145, a. 2).
9 ‘The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only’ (Saint Thomas, I-II q. 27 a. 1 ad. 3).
10 ‘the notion of a “social aesthetics” can be seen both as a broadening of the traditional subject matter of aesthetics (i.e. individual beliefs about art objects, the cognitive and perceptual processes behind them, and the ontology of art objects that underlie such attitudes) and, emphatically, as a critique of it. (…) the contributors to this book (…) focus on (…) the diverse ways in which institutions or elite social groups may codify their power and prestige through certain aesthetic commitments or aesthetically informed practices, but equally the manner in which social groups and collective projects as well as individual artists can develop or promote aesthetic practices that are intended to counteract prevailing cultural norms, dominant social mores or political discourses, or that may become a locus for enacting alternative social relations’ (Born, Lewis, and Straw Citation2017, 3–4).
11 Social aesthetics ‘it is also a term used beyond the parameters of any distinct art form’ (…), a meaning
that is fundamentally concerned with the relationships of people to people and the framing of this interaction in a manner that creates, recreates, and maintains social values and structures. (…) It is a rediscovery of aesthetics in the everyday, and in this there is an immediate political dimension: social aesthetics can comment on the powerful, additional zones of communication that frame how societies work as both systems seeking stability and as structures of power and control. (Burns-Coleman Citation2013, 4)
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Artur Wysocki
Fr. dr hab. Artur Wysocki, prof. UKSW, is a graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics, the School of Practical Management at the French Institute of Management, the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Warsaw, the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris, the Catholic Institute in Paris, UKSW, where in 2007 he obtained a PhD in sociology. He completed the internship at the University of Durham. In 2019, he obtained the degree of habilitation in the discipline of sociology and was employed as a professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. From 2008 to 2009, he was an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Science at WNHiS UKSW and senior lecturer at the Institute of World Economy at the Warsaw School of Economics, from 2009 to 2013, he was an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology of Social Processes at the Institute of Sociology at UKSW, from 2013 head of the Department of Catholic Social Science at the Department of Sociology of Religion IS UKSW. From 2008 to 2012, he was Chairman of the Faculty Recruitment Committee. From 2013 to 2015, he was Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology. From 2019 to 2020, he was Deputy Dean of the Social and Economic Faculty of UKSW. From 2020, he is the Director of the Institute of Sociological Sciences and the Chairman of the Scientific Discipline of Sociological Sciences at UKSW. His fields of research include sociology of religion (including parish sociology), Catholic social science, social and economic ethics, social ties, sociology of gift, cultural determinants of socio-economic changes in China, sustainable development.