Aesthetic reflection and the ontology of the symbolic

Abstract

The article deals with the problematic relations between the sphere of symbolic constructions of being and the reflection of the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness. The article examines the role and significance of symbolic constructions that acquire ontological characteristics in cognition and socialization. The author describes on forward the ontological logic of the symbolic, which logic has a significant impact on the social ontology and understanding of being in general. This is especially significant for modernity, where the aesthetic attitude to life, which is always connected with sensual experience and cognition, is actively involved in manifestations of affective social sensibility. Against this background, the symbolic undergoes ontologization, which manifests itself in the text-centrism of today — positioned in a set of texts, today’s reality seen as a global work of art, where the effects of production and output are simultaneously actualized.

In the realm of social ontology this ultimately means that the act of exercising power is always a kind of performance.

The aesthetics of textuality seems to prescribe the order of social relations to the object and human dimension — it sets the actual course of understanding. The symbolic creates representations of objectness, which resides between the symbolic “by itself” and its actions in the field of pragmatics (‘theatricality’) — a new extensive object of sociality is created. The energy of this constriction also creates a new relationship with the being of the symbolic ‘in itself’ — with the way it is reproduced and with the projections that arise in social relations. The article highlights the significance of Russian scholars’ humanities research and the fruitfulness of methodological ideas of Slavic structuralists, who deeply researched the correlation of works-objects in their autonomous structure with social relations and epistemological strategies of humanities.