EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

V. I. ROTNITSKY

The question of the relationship between art and science has been raised many times, and it may seem that posing it is now of only purely academic interest. Without even saying that such a possibility would suit us as well, it is necessary to emphasize that the relationship between art and science is a problem, i.e., a question that still has to be resolved both theoretically and in terms of the practical conclusions that follow from it. Chiefly—for art. The grandiose practical application of modern science has made everyone—often involuntarily—its zealous supporters, including even Jesuits. But this is not so with art. The question of the relationship between art and science is often resolved not in favor of the former. Art still needs the defense of its right to life both against its enemies (who prove the impossibility of art, which for some reason continues to exist despite all proofs of its impossibility) and against its friends; moreover, the latter seems to us even more important.

In this sense one cannot pass over, without critical attention, the conception of one of art’s friends, V. Turbin, if only because, as numerous newspaper and journal articles show, he has like-minded adherents and followers, and also because his conception finds an echo in the declarations of certain representatives of artistic practice.

V. Turbin’s boldly written book Comrade Time and Comrade Art appeared in 1961, in the “epoch” of the onslaught of the “physicists” upon the “lyricists”; in it the author undertook a courageous defense of the “lyricists.” But if modern science acts upon V. Turbin, since he himself is in a certain sense a “physicist,” then his defense of art is an appeal to his comrades-in-arms—the “physicists”—to treat the defeated “enemy,” art, humanely.

V. Turbin’s book has already been criticized, but the difficulty of such criticism lies in the fact that, as V. Turbin writes of himself: “I am not an art historian. Not a theoretician. I am simply a journalist, a publicist. A literary critic. And my fantasies (emphasis mine.—Vl. R.) will not resemble an academic study”¹; that is, in the fact that he makes use predominantly of arguments ad hominem, and this is the most difficult thing—“criticism of arguments that appeal to feelings.”

¹ V. Turbin. Comrade Time and Comrade Art. “Iskusstvo,” Moscow, 1961, p. 24.

The “mechanism” of V. Turbin’s errors consists in the fact that, responding to genuine demands of art, noting its authentic features and moments of its interrelations with science, he exaggerates and absolutizes these features and moments; and this, in the words of V. I. Lenin, is precisely the gnoseology of idealism.

V. Turbin writes: “... despite the fact that, armed with a weighty cudgel, the hairy giant, wholly satisfied with the simple invention (the cudgel) of his talented ancestor, angrily looked askance at them, suspecting them of laziness and even, probably, of secret sympathies for ‘art for art’s sake,’ the first artists continued fearlessly to draw little copies of the moon and the sun. Forward, forward rushed awakened thought. Many years passed—centuries crept by. And one day the knock of the first wheel flowed into the businesslike noise of the slowly awakening world. There was, then, both utility and purpose in the crooked circles and ugly curly rings scratched by people who stubbornly preferred their idle exercises to hunting mammoths and fishing”²).

In drawing these primitive little circles, while others are engaged in hunting mammoths and fishing, V. Turbin incidentally commits at least two theoretical errors: 1) assuming that every primitive drawing is already essentially art, and precisely therefore 2) he asserts that art begins solely as cognition, and not as a means of expressing aesthetic emotions.

And thereafter only a certain inertia of thought is needed—and an incorrect conclusion is inevitable. V. Turbin writes: “From that time on, artists became faithful assistants to the geniuses of science and technology; they went hand in hand with them, in certain common areas of methodology even entirely and consistently outstripping them. They could not fail to outstrip them: to draw circles after the invention of the wheel would have been truly idle amusement...”³).

Thus, art is harnessed to the chariot of science, and in such a way that, “...speaking of the ‘predscientific’ character of art, I am speaking not of its temporal priority, but of its gnoseological priority in relation to technology and science,” writes V. Turbin on p. 13, and after these lines of his own he asks: “Is it not clear?”—and, piling up one paragraph of similar arguments upon another and accompanying each with the refrain “is it not clear?”, he finally exhausts himself in the abstractions and asks: “Is it clearer now?!”

Not very. But everything will become clear when we reach the conclusion at which V. Turbin arrives. Here is that conclusion: “Artistic forms of thought precede scientific ones”⁴) (emphasis mine.—Vl. R.).

Thus, art is essentially a form of cognition, preceding science, the experimental laboratory of science. The history of art, the evolution of its subject, the shifting of its attention from one environment to another is the logic and history of cognition. Art, by virtue of its inherent specificity, goes first—discovers new environments, objects, achieves in cognition a certain result concerning them—and moves on, leaving further work to science, and “brings” knowledge of the object, the environment, to the possibility of its practical application. But if this is so, then art cannot have a past which, being pre-cognition, must be removed, overcome by cognition proper—by science; consequently, art has a right to life only in its final link, and that only because and only so long as science has not yet caught up with it; that is, art is a lizard leaving its tail in the hands of science, but

²) Ibid., pp. 12–13.
³) Ibid., p. 13.
⁴) Ibid., p. 21.

each time, after shedding yet another outgrown tail, successfully running away from science by one step.

However, V. Turbin knows that there is the Venus de Milo and other masterpieces of the art of the past that enjoy worldwide recognition and bear the seal of immortality. Where, then, lies the magic of their immortality? In the fact, says V. Turbin, that “art is the youth of human knowledge,” and its masterpieces—these tails that, in his view, are rejected by science—are “eternal monuments to this youth.” Not very theoretical, but impressive.

It is interesting, however, how long the pursuit of art by science will continue. Will science manage to overtake it? Or, on the contrary, is art destined to remain unattainable, to be one step ahead of science?

Let us listen to V. Turbin. With what did cognition of the world begin? With its “self-evidence,” its objecthood. Everything began with art; then science came, but by the time of its arrival art had discovered a new, unknown milieu—dark and mysterious psychology (what is meant, as V. Turbin thinks, is that art has already finished with the object-world—its traditional object of depiction). Science begins to rationalize psychology, but this should not greatly frighten art: V. Turbin has found for it a new, unexplored milieu—thought itself. Incidentally, for this future art it will not be necessary to sacrifice its pictorial forms: these forms will simply have to learn to depict “inner movement by means of external movement”; that is precisely why V. Turbin places the chief hopes of the art of the future in ... the cinema! “We cannot know what cybernetic art will look like. But its subject will be the artistic analysis of the very process of thinking. It will depict thought, its logic. It will depict creativity. In unrepeatable images it will imitate the very course of our thought. And there can be no doubt that this will be an art lyrical in the highest degree; an art which, in its intimacy, surpasses both music and cinema.”¹

Now it becomes quite obvious that the “defense” of art has been undertaken by a “physicist” who not only humanely grants life to his “enemy,” but is even prepared to make him his armor-bearer...

And art and science are more than merely forms of social consciousness; but the basis of their similarity and difference lies within them as forms of social consciousness.

There is a widespread point of view according to which art and science—because they are different forms of social consciousness—differ from one another above all in form. It is assumed that this difference consists in the distinction between the artistic image (art) and the concept (science). Such thoughts would be natural only in the mouth of I. Kant, according to whom there exist “pure,” contentless forms as a receptacle of future concrete content, in relation to which these a priori forms manifest themselves as an active, creative force. Yet the authors of such statements are Marxists; but, standing on the positions of Marxism, it is more logical to assume the opposite—namely, that the difference between forms of social consciousness in form is a consequence of their difference in object, that is, in content. As for the artistic image, it is a unity of form and content. And, finally, is the concept only the form of science?

It is supposed that the specificity of the artistic image lies in its concreteness, and from this assumption two conclusions are drawn. The first of them—

consists in the fact that, by virtue of its concreteness, art is called upon to master the concrete object-world surrounding man, which is apprehended by the organs of human sense; science, by contrast, abstracts from the objecthood of the world in favor of the world of its essences.

Such an assertion means identifying art with ordinary consciousness; and ordinary consciousness does indeed master the concrete object-world in all the richness of its individual manifestations. There is no reason to agree with reducing art to the level of ordinary consciousness, which sets itself no aesthetic goals.

And the second conclusion, according to which the concreteness of art, which apprehends the essence of the object-world through the individual, sensuously given form of it, is opposed to the abstractness of science, for which the object is not a multiplicity of concrete properties but only the bearer of an essence. But why, in that case, not oppose to the concreteness of art the abstractness… of practice! In practice we “abstract” from the entire aggregate of properties and qualities of objects, using or acting upon only some of them, those needed by us in the given concrete case; one may say that real objects are “drawn into” our practice not as concrete ones (as the aggregate and unity of their multiplicity), but as “abstract” ones, that is, as a certain limited unity of properties and qualities; that is, in each of these cases “abstractness” (as, incidentally, also “concreteness”) manifests itself each time in its own way, but this circumstance itself already indicates that the distinction between art and science should be sought above all not here…

Recently—in connection with the formation of a new branch of knowledge, so-called metascience, or the science of science—a great many books and articles have appeared in which various definitions of science are given.

The definitions of science offered by Marxist authors are clearly divided into two directions.

Representatives of the first of these—and they are a minority: Glezer-man, Kolman, Korneev, and others—define science as a complex social phenomenon, as a unity of three elements: science appears, first, as a form of social consciousness, as a system of knowledge about the world; second, as a definite type of the social division of labor, as scientific activity connected with an entire system of relations among scientists and scientific institutions; and, third, from the side of the practical application of the conclusions of science, from the side of its social role.

The representatives of this direction criticize the representatives of the second direction—Gabrielyan, Karpov, Rachkov, and others—on the grounds that in the definitions of science offered by the latter, science allegedly appears only as a form of social consciousness, and this, they say, in turn leads to a limited view of the history of science only as the development of ideas, without sufficient attention to the social soil.

But as regards, for example, Rachkov, he by no means reduces science to one of its three elements, to a system of knowledge about the world—he merely criticizes the representatives of the first direction for committing a methodological error: they dissolve science in these three elements and fail to single out the main, determining one among them, which, in Rachkov’s opinion, is the theoretical aspect of science, that is, science as a form of social consciousness, as a system of knowledge about the world. And one cannot but agree with Rachkov’s opinion.

Indeed, man was set apart from the animal world by his labor: the creation and alteration of natural objects in accordance with his human needs. But in order purposefully to change the world, man must, first, become aware of (know) his human needs.

and, secondly, to know the world, to know the “mechanism” of its innumerably diverse manifestations; however, this “mechanism” is hidden behind the external manifestations of objects and, consequently, is not grasped by the human senses, that is, it is not disclosed to man’s direct action upon nature. “If the form of appearance and the essence of things directly coincided,” wrote K. Marx, “then all science would be superfluous”². Thus, from practical, productive needs science is born, with all its complex world.

From this proposition two extremely important conclusions follow: 1) science is above all a form of social consciousness, a system of knowledge about the world, and 2) the object of science is the objective world, but not from the side of its empirical manifestations, the cognition of which constitutes the task of ordinary consciousness, but from the side of its essences, of the universal, of laws.

A law is objective, but it is not an element of the object’s materiality; and this means that science must abstract itself from the materiality of the object in order to grasp this universal, and that for science the object itself is not the real object, that is, the object with all the diversity of its material features, but the essence, the ideal object, that is, only the bearer of a certain universal law.

Consequently, if the universal does not exist in itself as a separate object and therefore lies beyond the reach of man’s senses, then, first, this universal can be caught, reflected only in a concept, which is deprived of visual immediacy and of resemblance to an object (that is, the concept is the ideal being of the ontological universal; it is not only the form but also the content of science), and, secondly, ideal science is incompatible with feelings, with emotions.

Is this not what V. I. Lenin says: “In the theoretical idea (in the sphere of theory) the subjective concept (cognition?), as universal and in itself devoid of determinacy, is opposed to the objective world”³.

Thus, man’s theoretical relation to the world, science, is such a relation in which man acts not as an empirical subject but as a brain; a relation in which there takes place not the interaction of an empirical subject (man) with the empirical world (for its result, as of any interaction in general, would inevitably be a change in both of the counterparties participating in the interaction, one of which is man), but a relation in which the world merely gives information about its properties, without changing man (more precisely, only man’s brain changes, but precisely for this reason mental work is not felt by man).

That is why, when man makes the interaction of the world and man the object of scientific investigation, he must bifurcate himself by consciousness (by the brain), go beyond the limits of his own human experiences, if he wants to obtain an objective scientific result; and if he cannot do this, then other people do it, for whom he himself becomes the object of scientific observation, investigation, of the interaction of the world and man!

Emotions accompany—they cannot fail to accompany—real science (scientific creativity and the perception of scientific results); they either promote or hinder scientific creativity and the assimilation of the results of science, but as such they are not science, not the essence of science.

Art is a form of the aesthetic relation of man to reality—this is acknowledged even by the “natural scientists.”

Between the “natural scientists” and the “social scientists” there has been a long discussion on the question of the very essence of the aesthetic. Moreover, in criticizing the “social scientists,” the “natural scientist” Professor I. Astakhov, for example, entitles one chapter of his monograph as follows: “The Materialist and Subjective-Idealist Understanding of the Beautiful,” where by the “subjective-idealist” understanding, of course, is meant the understanding of the nature of the aesthetic by the “social scientists.” But such an assertion by I. Astakhov is almost devoid of scientific foundation; it is rather a traditional affixing of “labels.” As for his own “materialism,” this materialism, as the “social scientist” L. Stolovich rightly notes, is metaphysical materialism.

The center of the discussion is formed by the differing commentary, by representatives of these opposed tendencies, on K. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, chiefly on his “appropriated, humanized nature.” The “natural scientists” understand this “appropriated nature” only as nature appropriated practically, transformed by human labor, while accusing the “social scientists” of an expansive interpretation that includes in “appropriated nature” also its appropriation by human reason and senses. But whoever studies written sources without, for whatever reason, omitting words and lines can read in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of nature appropriated theoretically as well; moreover, the concept of “theoretical appropriation” stands in K. Marx’s text before “practical appropriation.” When some of the “natural scientists” do not close their eyes to this latter circumstance, they write in their commentaries about the “works of the young Marx.” But the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts do not need a discount for K. Marx’s youth. K. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are materialism, and indeed dialectical materialism; and the Hegelian and Feuerbachian terminology used by K. Marx changes nothing. It is another matter that the text of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts was not prepared by K. Marx for publication, but this circumstance obliges us not to cling to words; and, in particular, from the fact that K. Marx writes of “theoretically appropriated nature” before “practically appropriated” nature, one should not draw the conclusion that, for K. Marx, theoretically appropriated nature historically and epistemologically precedes its practical appropriation by man.

But the “natural scientists” can, after all, abstract from the manuscript work of the young Marx and set forth their own Marxist understanding of the problem raised. And as soon as they begin to do this, it turns out that they interpret consciousness merely as a passive reflection of the “objective world”; yet this is precisely metaphysical materialism. What, however, is to be done if the “natural scientists,” for example I. Astakhov, besides their own point of view (and, it must be said, an extreme one), see only the extreme of subjective idealism, which regards the consciousness of the subject as the demiurge of reality? But between this extreme, into which the “social scientists” do indeed not infrequently fall, and K. Marx’s thought on the activity of consciousness, as well as V. I. Lenin’s thought that consciousness not only reflects the objective world but also creates it, there is a distance equal to that between subjective idealism and dialectical materialism.

From these different epistemological foundations follows the difference in the understanding of the nature of the aesthetic by the “natural scientists” and the “social scientists.”

The essence of the “naturalist” conception comes down to the following: the beautiful, like all other aesthetic properties, is objective, that is, the aesthetic is included among the other, physical and other, properties of the object; in this lies the difference between the “naturalists” and Hegel, who understood the objectivity of the beautiful as the presence in the material object of the idea of the beautiful; the “naturalists,” by contrast, reduce the beautiful to the physical nature of the object.

The “naturalist” I. Astakhov argues that if one changes the natural, physical, and other properties of an object (for example, break off the branches of a birch, cut its trunk with a knife), then the object will also change aesthetically (the mutilated birch will cease to be beautiful); this, they say, means that the beautiful (the aesthetic) is contained in the very nature of the object.

But this means only that the aesthetic is connected with the nature of the object, but is not exhausted by it. In fact, one can change some single property of an object without changing the others; one can abstract from the whole variety of an object’s properties, singling out only one, because in this unity of the object’s properties each separate property of it exists objectively as a specific property. Try to perform a similar operation with the aesthetic “property” of an object, to single out this property by abstracting from all the other properties. It will not work! But why not? After all, the aesthetic “property” is objectively among the other properties! “But the aesthetic ‘property’ is specific,” the “naturalist” I. Astakhov would say to this, “it is dissolved in the physical and other properties of the object...” But this is already mysticism: a property dissolved in other properties, sensuously perceived by a person, and differentiated as a specific property!

The “socialist” S. Goldentrikht, trying to avoid absurdity, says that the matter lies not at all in certain natural properties of the object, but only in the significance of the object for man, thereby falling into the other extreme, which I. Astakhov, with some success, criticizes, presenting the theory of the “socialists” as subjective idealism.

However, the “socialists” are nevertheless closer to the truth; on the whole they cope with the understanding of the problem: the social significance for man of the natural properties of the object forms the aesthetic, which, as M. Kagan rightly suggests, is better called not a “property” but a “phenomenon.”

The methodological principle for solving this problem must be the requirement that social productive practice be made the basis of the argument. “Labor created man,” wrote F. Engels. If the animal adapts to nature by instincts, that is, passively, appropriating its ready-made products, then man transforms nature through labor, “humanizes” it, changes it in accordance with his needs; “appropriated, humanized nature” is, above all and chiefly, nature transformed by labor.

Social productive practice gives rise to the need for knowledge of the world—science arises. Here two points are especially interesting: 1) science is opposed to practice; science discovers—it does not create, but discovers!—the objective universal, which is not “disclosed” to direct practical action upon nature; 2) science, born of the needs of production, existing for the sake of using its achievements in production, and developing on the basis of production, is itself therefore a definite form of the social division of labor. By virtue of these two circumstances, science is a form of the appropriation of nature, for it is precisely through science that nature “reveals” the possibilities and prospects of its transformation by man. Consequently,

“mastered, humanized nature” is also theoretically mastered nature.

In each of his relations to nature, man participates as a totality, as the unity of all his properties and characteristics. But, on the other hand, in each separate relation to nature man appears predominantly as the bearer of one or several of his properties, and not of all his properties to the same degree. In the labor process man appears above all as a social producer; in science, as a theorist.

And, finally, in relation to the world man also manifests himself as an empirical subject, that is, as an emotional, experiencing human being. To say that emotions have enormous significance in human life (as, incidentally, in the life of higher animals as well) would in no way be an exaggeration.

What, then, is emotion? In our view, a satisfactory definition of emotion in its natural-scientific aspect is given by A. P. Simonov in his very valuable, from the scientific point of view, article “On the Role of Emotions in the Adaptive Behavior of Living Systems”: “...emotion is a compensatory mechanism that makes up for a deficit of information necessary for the attainment of a goal (the satisfaction of a need). We use the term ‘information’ throughout with regard to its substantive value. In this sense, an increase in the quantity of information means an increase in the probability of attaining the goal thanks to the receipt of a given sum of data. It may be objected to us that the accumulation of data necessary for attaining one or another goal takes place in the process of cognition. But, speaking of emotion, we have in mind not an increment of data (it arises in the process of search, the driving force of which is a need intensified by emotional tension), but precisely compensation, substitution, an emergency mechanism that is activated at a given stage of cognition, with a given degree of being informed about the possible ways of satisfying the need that has arisen”^8).

Thus, emotion is “...compensation, an emergency mechanism activated at a given stage of cognition, with a given degree of being informed about possible ways of satisfying the need that has arisen.” An exceptionally important point is stated here: 1) the specificity of emotion, 2) its special role in the adaptive behavior of man, and 3) the determinate connection between the emotional and the rational.

Not identical with a bodily need, the emotion of an animal is nevertheless directed toward the satisfaction of only this same bodily need, which is constant and at the same time elementary and incomplete. In man, however, by virtue of his social, and above all laboring, nature, bodily—more precisely, material—need itself, satisfied through the entire most complex system of society, is transformed into an abstract need.

As a consequence, the world of human emotions is complex, profound, and elevated; emotion becomes a means and form of mastering the world: emotion itself is transformed into an abstract, social—properly human—need to experience the degree of humanization of the world; this is aesthetic emotion, this is the need to see the world as beautiful.

The majority of authors who cite K. Marx’s thought on man’s ability to create according to the measure of the object as the ability to create according to the laws of beauty fail to take into account that here it is not only the “measure of the object” that is meant, but also—

^8) Journal Voprosy psikhologii, 1965, no. 4, p. 77.

the commensuration of two measures, the relation of the “measure of man” to the “measure of the thing,” ontologically manifested in emotion, in a definite human experience of the “measure of the thing.”

Thus, the aesthetic appears as the unity of the property (measure) of the object and, correspondingly, of the social, human significance of this object—that is, of the human aesthetic ideal. However, M. Kagan and others are wrong in deriving the aesthetic directly, immediately, from the ideal, for the aesthetic ideal itself arises on the basis of aesthetic feeling.

It follows from this that both the concrete world of objects and the world of abstract phenomena may become the object of an aesthetic relation.

From this, too, follows the entire specificity of art as a form of man’s aesthetic relation to reality.

The subject of art is the emotional and spiritual world of man, the world of his feelings and experiences.

Such formulations always arouse suspicion; in opponents the critical “instinct” begins to “go off,” and the specters of Freud, Joyce, and the existentialists appear. This is understandable, since old traditions—including the worst of them—are tenacious; such a methodological tradition is also alive: if Freud, the existentialists, and others assert something, then Marxists, allegedly, must deny this “something”; if Freud, the existentialists, and others recognize emotion as the content of art, then Marxists, allegedly, must seek this content in something else. A vulgar, formalistic tradition.

The matter is not Freud’s and the existentialists’ assertion of the emotional nature of art. The question must be posed differently, more substantially and more deeply: how do Freud and the existentialists understand emotion itself? Precisely here—and only in this case—will the real opposition between the Freudian and the Marxist conceptions be revealed.

Freudianism is subjective idealism, agnosticism; it proceeds from the self-sufficient specificity of emotions, from their primacy in relation to the objective world—that is, Freudianism turns everything upside down: emotion turns out to be the creator of the surrounding world; and this means that the single objective world loses all its objective properties common to it as a single world, and is broken up into an innumerable multitude of individual worlds, incommensurable in their specificity, existing only in the fantasy of unrepeatably specific individuals; such emotion is deprived of its objective content.

The illusion of the specific primacy of emotion in relation to the objective world, and the recognition of such emotion as the subject of art, compels Freudians and existentialists to maintain that art is in no degree a reflection of the objective world, still less an adequate reflection; and, consequently, art does not connect man with the world, but separates them; and if that is so, then art itself loses any generally significant objective—real—content, and becomes a contentless play of individual fantasy. In stating the purely bourgeois character of such a conception of art, the majority of our aestheticians fail to take into account that such false art is an expression of a real aesthetic relation to the world—the relation of a snob, an individualist, a philistine, or a hopelessly unhappy person.

Quite another matter is the Marxist conception, according to which emotions are a moment of man’s adaptive behavior toward the world, of his equilibrium with the world, which is a necessary condition for man’s very existence in the world. Labor, theory, experience are three moments

of such equilibrium and, consequently, of a real, true reflection of the actual properties of the objective world. And this means the object-relatedness, the objectivity of the content of all human emotions.

It is precisely such emotion that constitutes the subject matter, the content of art. And this means that art as a means of man’s relation to the objective world is also a reflection, a cognition of this great objective world.

The “naturalists,” however, are wrong in essence when they reduce art merely to cognition. This point of view of theirs is a consequence of a metaphysical, one-sided conception of the aesthetic as only objective, based on the absolutization of a concrete-historical aesthetic ideal, whereby the historicity, the humanity of aesthetic ideals evaporates. Hence the illusion is created that, since the aesthetic is only objective, the task of art is the reflection, cognition of objective (!) aesthetic properties of the world, dissolved, in the opinion, for example, of I. Astakhov, in all its other non-aesthetic properties. Yet it is not clear why I. Astakhov stops short of the conclusion that, according to this theory, the best art ought to become... the science of the aesthetic!

Further. Since, first, man’s aesthetic emotion has an object; since, second, the object of man’s aesthetic relation may be both the material sensuous world and the world of abstract essences (for example, thought); since, third, the aesthetic relation is an ontological relation, a relation of two measures—the “measure of man,” the empirical subject, the personality, and the “measure of the thing” (whether this thing is a concrete object or an abstract object)—and is an expression of the measure of the “humanity” of the thing, then the primary basis of art must be, and is, the artistic image. And this means that the artistic image is not only the form of art, but the essence of the unity of content and form.

And finally. Since the “measure of man” in art is an abstracted measure of man and since the “measure of the thing” in art is an abstracted measure of the thing, the artistic image itself is an abstraction, regardless of whether it is an analogue of the sensuously concrete object-world or whether it possesses no external pictoriality.

Conclusions. Art and science as forms of social consciousness differ above all in their subject matter, in their content: if the subject matter of science is the objective world in its essentiality, generality, then the subject matter of art is man’s emotional-spiritual world. The difference between art and science is, further, the difference between the concept (science) and the artistic image (art), both in the sense that the concept is the content of science and the artistic image the content of art, and from the side from which the concept is the form of science and the artistic image the form of art.

Here is the basis of all the other differences and similarities between art and science; here is the basis of their manifold interrelations.

1. Ibid., p. 176. ↩

2. K. Marx. Capital. Vol. III, Gospolitizdat, 1950, p. 830. ↩

3. V. I. Lenin. Works, vol. 38, p. 204. ↩