ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPONTANEITY AND PURPOSEFULNESS IN THE AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT OF A STUDENT’S PERSONALITY

A. P. BARONAS

(Presented by the scientific seminar of the Department of Scientific Communism)

Aesthetic development of the personality is a complex, contradictory process, encompassing not only education and self-education, but also the spontaneous influence of the external environment.

Undoubtedly, those authors are right who assert that spontaneous formation “always inevitably exists and plays a dominant role in the development of any personality”¹. This applies fully to the aesthetic development of a student’s personality as well.

Spontaneity occupies an especially large place in the development of the student’s personality in contemporary capitalist society. It is conditioned by the fact that, as the classics of Marxism-Leninism repeatedly emphasized, bourgeois society constantly faces an insoluble contradiction: with the possibility of organizing planned, purposeful activity at the level of individual enterprises, and the anarchy and spontaneity in the development of society as a whole².

As applied to the aesthetic development of a student’s personality, this means that a more or less integral system of aesthetic values can exert a purposeful influence on the mass of students within a particular university. But within the framework of society as a whole, such a mass of often opposed systems of values descends upon the individual student that the dominant tendency of the aesthetic development of the personality makes its way only as an accidental result of the interaction of spontaneous and purposeful factors.

If one attempts to represent the general mechanism of the formation of the aesthetic consciousness of the personality under the conditions of capitalism, it is not difficult to arrive at the conclusion that the decisive influence on the aesthetic development of a student’s personality is exerted by those numerous factors that are spontaneous and accidental in relation to the given personality and to its preceding development, and that are perceived by the personality aesthetically, that is, either as something beautiful, sublime, etc., or as something ugly, base, etc.

In this sense, the spontaneous influence on the aesthetic consciousness of the personality of such factors of social being as the social and economic policy of the ruling classes, the war in Vietnam, the problem of hunger in the world, and so on and so forth, depending on the level of aesthetic development—

the development of the student’s personality and his social-class sympathies consolidates, changes, or develops in one direction or another previously existing aesthetic evaluations, notions, and ideals.

Student unrest and revolts in the West show with complete obviousness that the inability of the ruling classes to eliminate the vices of capitalism leads ever more often to a spontaneous negation not only of bourgeois policy in the socio-political sense, but also aesthetically, of bourgeois politics, morality, and all other bourgeois values. In this sense, one of the causes of student unrest is also the emotional, aesthetic negation of capitalism.

Indeed, in almost all student demands one may find, in one of the first places, spontaneous emotional indignation and rejection of the hypocritical and ugly capitalist society which allows millions of people to die of malnutrition and at the same time spends enormous sums on the production of atomic weapons. In addition, the deterioration of the aesthetic conditions of life, study, and everyday existence for an ever larger part of the student body (which is due to the rapid growth in the last decade of the number of students from the middle strata and the exploited classes, the rising cost of higher education, the devaluation of diplomas, etc.) leads to the fact that a negative aesthetic attitude is also spontaneously intensified toward the vices of the bourgeois higher school: toward the restriction of student autonomy and the bureaucratization of the system of university administration, toward the inability of universities to ensure the formation of the creative components of personality, toward the growing indifference on the part of the administration and the faculty of universities to such vital questions for students as the modification of excessively rationalized curricula, the improvement and aestheticization of the conditions of life and everyday existence, and so on.

Under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, both at the level of social being and at the level of individual being, the student’s personality is emotionally and negatively affected by what certain Western scholars call the “suppression of the aesthetic principle” of personality. (In the opinion of the American economist J. Galbraith, by the aesthetic principle one should understand everything that “goes beyond the bounds of mechanized life and does not fit within its framework, all that is unexpected, astonishing, and unusual (in the philosophical sense), which is now being sacrificed to the needs of the technology of consumerism”³.)

It would, of course, be incorrect to suppose that all influences of the external environment that are spontaneous in relation to a given student’s personality must necessarily evoke definite aesthetic reactions and evaluations and, in the final analysis, form definite aesthetic ideals.

The ultimate dependence of aesthetic consciousness on the conditions of aesthetic being also presupposes the relative independence of the formation of consciousness from being. And this means that, under the conditions of contemporary bourgeois society, the personality is also affected by quite a few such opposing factors (material security and poverty, the functioning of progressive art and the flourishing of anti-art, the positive and negative social consequences of the scientific and technological revolution, etc.) which can also form social types wholly or partially integrated into the bourgeois system of aesthetic values.

All this accounts, in our opinion, for the fact that, under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, the spontaneous diversity of influences and

interactions leads to the formation and differentiation within the student milieu of various social types of personality, differing from one another not only in their level of aesthetic development but also, as a rule, in the definite maturity and orientation of political, moral, etc., activity that coincides with it.

Without being able to investigate in detail the question of the levels of aesthetic development of various groups of student youth in the capitalist countries, in the present article we attempt to single out only those social types of the student personality which, in our opinion, at present make up the most representative groups of students that have arisen, first of all, under the influence of spontaneous factors.

The first group. This is the most aesthetically (and most often politically, morally, etc.) undeveloped part of the student body; it is a “non-social,” utilitarian type of personality, formed by the bourgeois way of life⁴.

The second group of student youth in the West is characterized primarily by a passive-consumer attitude toward culture⁵, by aesthetic and therefore to some extent political and moral passivity.

The third group is formed mainly by those student personalities who have become sated with the bourgeois “way of life,” who have felt and are painfully experiencing their alienation in the bourgeois society of “mass consumption,” but who have risen only to the level of spontaneous rejection of aesthetic and other bourgeois values.

And, finally, the fourth, most progressive group of the student body includes those student personalities who have formed their aesthetic culture under the influence of progressive and socialist cultural values, whose growing aesthetic maturity and activity rely ever more often on a Marxist-Leninist worldview.

Even this very simple schematization of the levels of aesthetic development of the main part of the student body in capitalist countries helps one to understand more deeply the essence and results of the purposeful policy of particular class forces toward certain groups of students. For the spontaneity dominant under capitalism in the formation of personality does not preclude a certain, more or less limited, purposeful regulation of the process of aesthetic development of particular types of personality and of society as a whole.

A typical example of an attempt to intensify the purposeful influence of the ruling classes on the aesthetic culture of all youth is the policy of imposing upon students the so-called “youth culture.”

By focusing young people’s attention on their natural striving for novelty, unusualness, external attractiveness, etc., the creators and propagandists of “youth culture” seek to instill, at least in part of student youth, such attributes of aesthetic culture (youth music, dances, manner of behavior, clothing, hairstyle, youth idols, etc.) as would allow the ruling classes of bourgeois society to catch “two hares” at once: to divert part of the student body from serious politics and class struggle to the side—

⁴ E. Glagoleva. The Aesthetics of Anti-Reason. Moscow, 1972, pp. 107–108.

⁵ At the intergovernmental conference on questions of culture (held in August 1970), many ministers of culture of capitalist countries were concerned about the passive-consumer attitude of a significant part of Western youth toward culture. (See: UNESCO Courier, January 1971, pp. 5–24).

the nonworking, and at the same time do business in “youth culture.”

Naturally, with such a goal-orientation of “cultural” policy, the third “hare” of “youth culture”—its content and its more direct positive influence on the aesthetic development of the personality—interests the “fathers” of this “culture” little.

As a result, this goal-orientation of the influence of “youth culture,” limited by the interests of business and politics, gives young people, for the most part, such a surrogate of aesthetic culture as corrupts more than it develops. And what serious formation of the aesthetic culture of the personality can be spoken of if, in essence, all types of “youth art” are permeated with violence, pornography, sex and, at the same time, propagandize a standard type of youth hero by standard methods. (According to the apt observation of one Polish director, the majority of American box-office [youth—A.B.] films consist “of 1 pound of sentiment, 1 pound of fear, 1½ pounds of arms and legs [preferably bare], ½ pound of a mixture of nightclub and cabaret, 3 pounds of a star [1 million dollars per pound], 1 pound of humor, 3 pounds of scenery... 1 ounce of plot”^6).

All these “charms” of Western culture, deliberately stimulating the aesthetic underdevelopment of part of the student youth, do them enormous harm.

That is why criticism of the reactionary essence of “youth culture” has growing theoretical and practical significance (it is no secret that some part of the youth of socialist countries falls under the influence of certain elements of Western “youth culture”).

In recent years, Soviet scholarly and periodical literature, especially Literaturnaya gazeta, has published a large number of interesting articles and materials exposing the untenability of various bourgeois theories about youth and youth culture.

Unfortunately, individual authors resort to a simplified method of refuting bourgeois conceptions, proceeding sometimes from the principle that, in order to expose a bourgeois theory, it is enough to assert the opposite.

It is precisely on this principle that the article by the writer A. Borshchagovsky is partly constructed^7. While, on the whole, he justifiably refutes the absurd assertions of the West German sociologist I. Bodamer that contemporary Western youth are characterized by “a striving toward antidemocratic, antiliberal, totalitarian goals,... that what moves them is not a humane pathos, ...that the embourgeoisified worker (class.—A.B.) will not begin to solidarize with some student...”^8 and so on, A. Borshchagovsky, as it seems to us, nevertheless seriously simplifies for himself the process of refuting bourgeois conceptions of youth and “youth culture.” For, while correctly asserting that there is no youth and no youth culture in the form in which they are represented by bourgeois ideologists of the Bodamer type, he arrives at the essentially incorrect conclusion that there are no general concepts of “youth” or “youth culture.”

^6 See: Vt. Baskakov, “Mass Culture: Mask and Face,” Literaturnaya gazeta, 1972, April 5, p. 8.
^7 A. Borshchagovsky, “The Myth of the Conflict of Generations,” Literaturnaya gazeta, 1972, June 14, p. 15.
^8 I. Bodamer, “Youth Throws Down a Challenge...,” Literaturnaya gazeta, 1972, June 14, p. 15.

In our opinion, the correct solution of this question (and it presupposes a class approach) consists in showing the actual contradictory content of the concepts “youth” and “youth culture,” which reflect a certain reality and bear different semantic and substantive loads in different relations.

Therefore, in asserting that the concept “youth” denotes a socially and class-heterogeneous mass, Marxist scholars do not thereby reject the general concepts of “youth” and “youth culture.”

The Soviet sociologist A. Gorbovsky, substantiating the scientific necessity of using the concept “youth,” correctly points out that “the horizontal ties of youth are often stronger than national, religious, and even social barriers”^9).

This is especially true of capitalist student youth, who are united in a certain respect by a number of objective factors (social disenfranchisement, the “depopulation of factories,” etc.) and subjective factors (the loftiness of ideals, emotional excess, and others).

The theories and conceptions of those bourgeois scholars who, concerned by the crisis phenomena of the spontaneously developing capitalism of today and, to an even greater degree, of its future, are attempting to formulate systems of views that more accurately reflect the mature needs of social development^10), and that are supposed to increase the purposeful positive influence on the formation of the spiritual and aesthetic culture of the personality, deserve still greater attention and serious consideration.

One of the newest such bourgeois theories, claiming the role of guiding the spiritual-aesthetic renewal of capitalism (which may exert a certain influence on student youth, still searching for ideals and values within capitalist society), is the system of views of the American sociologist O. Toffler, set forth by him in the work Future Shock^11).

Correctly noting certain tendencies in the development of capitalism:

a) that in bourgeois society the individual is affected by various value systems that collide with one another (corporations, the family, universities, etc.);

b) that the changes shaking the whole of bourgeois society widen the gap between the individual’s conceptions and actual reality, between the images existing in consciousness and what they are supposed to represent;

c) that as the material needs of people in the society of the future are satisfied, ever more economic energy will be directed toward satisfying their “more refined, diverse, and purely personal needs for beauty..., sensuous pleasures,” and so on^12).

At the same time, Toffler so idealizes and absolutizes the progressive possibilities of the development of capitalist civilization that he does not even “notice” such a vice of capitalism as the standardization of the personality.

As a result, Toffler’s main optimistic conclusion is that superindustrial society will require “not people-twins, as though they had come off the same conveyor belt, but people unlike one another—

^9) A. Gorbovsky. “Toward Active Participation in Life.” UNESCO Courier, April 1969, pp. 28–29.
^10) E. Arab-Ogly. “In a Utopian Anti-World.” Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1972, March 1, p. 15.
^11) O. Toffler. Future Shock. Foreign Literature, 1972, No. 3.
^12) Ibid., pp. 237–241.

of a person, a personality, and not of a robot”¹³⁾, is correct only in part, for as long as capitalism exists, it will need both personalities and robots. At the same time, in revealing the role of the mass media in the emotional-psychological mechanism of the purposeful formation, under the conditions of modern bourgeois society, of the consciousness of the individual and of his culture, Toffler, in our view, very accurately—perhaps without wishing to—shows the poverty of the ideals and values with which the young members of bourgeois society are consciously and semi-consciously compelled to “enrich” themselves.

Taking advantage of the fact, Toffler writes, that people desperately strive to overcome alienation and passionately wish to belong to some whole, “numerous subcultures are implanted into the brains of millions in the form of living images by means of the mass media; their bearers, as a rule, are real people, but magnified many times over” (whether it be the ordinary English girl Twiggy, or the former Miss America and wife of billionaire J. Kennedy, the courageous astronaut John Glenn, or the fascist executioner Eichmann, the schizophrenic shopkeeper Jack Ruby, or the famous philosopher and writer J.-P. Sartre¹⁴⁾).

The strength of the subcults (and, consequently, the growing possibility of their purposeful use in the interests of those in power), Toffler continues, lies in the fact that all “surrogate people” serve us as models of behavior, act out for us various roles and situations, and play upon the most emotionally sensitive aspects of the human psyche (join us and you will become happier, more beautiful, etc.); in the fact that “we perhaps only dimly realize that a change in life style affects the formation of our personality.” For if “a person grows his hair, buys a little volume of Guevara’s writings in a paperback edition, learns to reason about Marcuse, and assimilates a special jargon,” then he inevitably changes his inner (spiritual) world as well¹⁵⁾.

What has already been said shows that the “social strategy” proposed by Toffler has nothing in common with a revolutionary-class transformation of bourgeois society, and in no way removes the spontaneous development of capitalist society as a whole; therefore, contrary to Toffler’s predictions, capitalism cannot create such an environment in which changes would only enrich the human being (aesthetically and spiritually), would “make his life full-blooded”¹⁶⁾.

On the other hand, the “personal tactics” characterized by him, while creating the illusion of the viability, reality, and attractiveness of the ideals of capitalism, attempts to introduce a certain consciousness into the formation of the spiritual culture of the individual. This reveals not only the efficacy of the bourgeois mass media, but also their capacity to introduce a certain purposefulness into the process—still in many respects spontaneous—of “stupefying” the bourgeois personality. Time will show how viable they are.

In addition to openly bourgeois theories and conceptions, various petty-bourgeois theories and systems of values have recently been trying to strengthen their influence on the aesthetic and, in general, spiritual development of student youth—from the most ultra-revolutionary to the most ultra-passive.

¹³⁾ Ibid., p. 240.
¹⁴⁾ Ibid., pp. 234–242.
¹⁵⁾ Ibid., p. 242.
¹⁶⁾ Ibid., p. 243.

Among them, a special place is occupied by the aesthetically and emotionally saturated system of views which, over the past several years, has been propagated by the American philosopher H. Marcuse.

While justly criticizing certain vices of bourgeois society, which under the conditions of the contemporary scientific and technological revolution is increasingly turning man into a “distorted being in one dimension,” Marcuse, appealing directly to the emotional and aesthetic sensitivity of youth, called upon them to rebel (not against capitalism as a social order.—A. B.) “against the oppressive domination of technology, in order once again to discover for themselves flowers and love.”¹⁷

Although students and other social groups of youth in capitalist countries are today distancing themselves ever more from Marcuse’s ideas and recommendations, the corrupting influence of his views on a portion of student youth must not be underestimated. The methods and aims of struggle proposed by Marcuse, as well as the subsequent disillusionment with them, may lead to serious costs in the spiritual and aesthetic development of the personality. All the more so because, as L. Nikitina notes, having to some extent moved away from his old positions (but not from youth), Marcuse is still trying today, with the help of the now materially secure part of youth of the “affluent society,” to create such a “counterculture” as will ultimately serve the purposes of capitalism from within.¹⁸

However, by no means all purposive systems of values are imposed upon youth from outside.

The emergence of the movement of “angry young men,” hippies, and others is evidence that, among a certain part of the student body, systems of views may arise—at first spontaneously and then more or less consciously—which embrace the spiritual and aesthetic spheres of the personality and which, in one form or another, express an attitude toward the values of bourgeois culture and the bourgeois way of life.

The most vivid and viable of them, the hippie movement, is, in our opinion, not so much a political as a moral-aesthetic form of protest against the “values” of the bourgeois world on the part of a segment of the student body that at one time became sated with the values of the bourgeois world, that knows and feels what must be rejected, but has not yet understood what must be affirmed. Hence the painful contradictoriness of hippie views and actions.

Thus, extolling flowers, nature, love, the disinterestedness of actions and relations, and so on, hippies reject bourgeois values; but, refusing active struggle and propagating sex, drugs, and the like, they themselves remain spontaneous bearers of these values.

Thus, assessing as a whole the role and place of purposive bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories and systems of values in the formation of the aesthetic culture of various social groups of students, we are entitled to draw the following conclusion.

The purposive activity of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “educators” of student youth only partially reduces spontaneity in the formation of the student’s personality, and then only chiefly in the sense of fixing the personality within the framework of a definite, spontaneously arisen social type, standardizing it and turning it into a fashion, because, as a rule, they have little interest in the essence and content of the aesthetic [[unclear: continuation cut off]]

¹⁷ See: Marcel Hicter. Dialogue Has Matured. UNESCO Courier, April 1969, p. 25.
¹⁸ L. Nikitina. “Herbert Marcuse ‘Is Rearming…’” Literaturnaya gazeta, 1972, September 20, p. 15.

...of culture. For them, the aesthetic culture of the personality ultimately appears only as a means, a form for achieving more selfish and important political and economic goals. Therefore, to a certain extent, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politicians are indifferent as to what idol or ideal is in fashion today.

The subject which all the previous systems of values of bourgeois society strive by every means to keep student youth away from is aesthetic culture formed on the basis of “democratic and socialist culture”^19 under the influence of the Marxist-Leninist worldview.

However, the growing influence of the ideas of communism, the successes and the ever greater aesthetic attractiveness of socialism, the increased social activity and solidarity of broad strata of working people in defending and strengthening revolutionary gains, the socially revolutionizing consequences of the scientific and technological revolution, and certain other objective factors enable many Communist parties to achieve such influence over the most aesthetically and politically developed part of the student body as ensures their further maturation in aesthetic, political, and other respects.

Moreover, the very fact of the preservation and development in capitalist society of enormous universal human aesthetic values objectively means that the mass of their active bearers and creators is growing, for “the object of art, as well as any other object, creates a public that understands art and is capable of enjoying beauty”^20.

The crisis experienced by nonrealist tendencies in art in the West leads to the fact that student youth increasingly turns away from modernist pseudo-aesthetic values and comes more and more into contact with, and is formed on, the progressive aesthetic values of the past and the present.

In this sense one cannot agree with those authors who, using the statement of K. Marx and F. Engels that under conditions of the antagonistic division of labor “spiritual and material activity, enjoyment and labor... fall to the lot of different individuals”^21, come to the conclusion that the further antagonistic society develops, the more utopian becomes the idea of the all-round and harmonious development of the personality, and that in the epoch of imperialism the “real ground completely disappears”^22 for its realization, because such an interpretation of tendencies in the development of the personality under the conditions of modern capitalism, as applied to the most aesthetically developed and growing part of Communist students, is clearly insufficient.

First, because it denies the Leninist proposition on continuity in the development of cultures (after all, the more developed capitalism and its culture are, the more prerequisites are created for the development of socialist culture, including in the aesthetic respect).

Second, because it does not reflect the complex processes of class struggle and, ultimately, the strengthening in most developed capitalist countries of anti-imperialist and socialist forces.

Thus, on the basis of the objective strengthening of the positions of democracy and socialism, together with the growth in the number of students and a certain proletarianization of higher education in the countries of capitalism, the possibilities of purposeful formation are increasing ever more—

^19 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 24, pp. 120–121.
^20 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, 2nd ed., vol. 12, p. 718.
^21 K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 3, p. 30.
^22 Collection Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics. Moscow, 1966, p. 411.

part of the student body as individuals possessing not only a high aesthetic culture, but also a Marxist-Leninist worldview.

But since, under contemporary conditions of the sharpening of class and ideological struggle, the striving of reactionary and petty-bourgeois forces to subordinate and adapt student youth to their goals within the framework of capitalist society has increased, so too has their striving purposefully to deform aesthetic values, to undermine faith in a bright ideal, to distort, narrow, and limit the aesthetic development of student youth.

Summing up all that has been said above, one may assert that the antagonistic contradictoriness of the spontaneous and purposeful tendencies in the development of capitalism is also traceable in the aesthetic development of student youth.

On the one hand, the spontaneously developing progressive tendencies of capitalism, together with the strengthening of the positions of the Communist parties in the developed capitalist countries, create growing prerequisites for intensifying purposeful influence in the formation of a genuinely aesthetically richly developed student personality.

On the other hand, the reactionary tendencies in the spontaneous development of capitalism, together with the anti-aesthetic, essentially purposeful policy of reactionary bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces, deform, pervert, and limit the aesthetic development of an ever larger part of student youth.

The interaction of all these factors and tendencies of development in real reality leads to the formation, as has already been noted, of various social types of the student personality, situated at different levels of aesthetic development and ever more often taking opposite sides of the barricades in the class struggle.

“Communism,” wrote K. Marx and F. Engels in The German Ideology, “differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all previous relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally arisen premises as the creation of previous human beings, strips them of their natural character and subjects them to the power of the united individuals”²³).

This statement by the classics of Marxism-Leninism has great methodological significance also for the correct understanding of the relation between spontaneity and purposefulness in the spiritual and aesthetic development of the personality under socialism.

On its basis one may assert that developed socialism, in comparison with capitalism, represents an enormous leap from a society of “spontaneity” to a society of “purposefulness.”

Indeed, the liquidation of antagonistic contradictions in our society; the ever greater effacement of the existing differences between town and countryside, between people of mental and physical labor; the victory of a unified Marxist-Leninist worldview; and many other changes in socialist social being and consciousness make socialism aesthetically ever more attractive. All this, together with the successful development and improvement in recent years of the integral system of education of the Soviet people, creates in our country very favorable conditions for intensifying the purposeful formation of a unified socialist type of spiritually, including aesthetically, developed personality.

However, in our opinion, the sharp increase in the role of purposeful activity in socialist society does not provide sufficient—

²³) K. Marx and F. Engels. The German Ideology. Moscow, 1935, p. 60.

grounds for the assertion by some Soviet scholars that, even under contemporary conditions, we can directly plan the spiritual development of the personality.

As the results of research by a number of Soviet scholars show, the spiritual development of the personality is such a complex and contradictory process, encompassing many objective and subjective material and spiritual factors of personality development, that any system of purposive influence on the personality (even education in the broadest sense of the word) is today capable of embracing only a small part of the factors that shape the spiritual and aesthetic culture of the personality⁴.

Turning to a concrete definition of the relationship between spontaneity and purposefulness in the aesthetic development of a student’s personality, we proceed from the following premises established in Soviet literature: 1) students are one of the most “aesthetically” sensitive groups in society; 2) students are the group most prepared, in general educational terms, for all-round aesthetic development; 3) the conditions of students’ study and life as a whole are favorable to their aesthetic development; 4) the majority of students are aesthetically developed to a fairly high degree.

And yet, even in the most general analysis of the question of the aesthetic culture of Soviet students, what strikes the eye is its “stretching out” along the rungs of aesthetic development. Of course, the distance between the highest and lowest levels of aesthetic development of particular groups of students is, on average, considerably smaller than the distance “from the godlike Socrates to a beast-like degenerate,” but the fact of unequal aesthetic development among different groups of students is evident⁵.

In order to obtain a scientifically grounded conception of the general level of aesthetic development of various groups of Soviet students, it is necessary, as it seems to us, in studying them to rely not only—and even not so much—on the student’s subjective attitude toward particular works of art (as is most often done), but rather on a complex of interrelated factors that objectively and subjectively reflect the most important aspects and the level of aesthetic development of the given type of personality.

Such factors, deriving both from Marxist methodological principles and from the structure of the aesthetic consciousness of the personality, are, in our view, first and foremost:

1) the level of development of aesthetic needs, expressing the breadth and activity of the individual’s aesthetic interests;

2) the degree of development of aesthetic abilities, characterizing the depth of the feelings and judgments of taste, as well as the creative potential to create “according to the laws of beauty”;

3) a worldview (theoretical-aesthetic) orientation, reflecting the socio-class positions, scientific views, and aesthetic ideals of the personality.

Moreover, since under the conditions of developed socialism, and especially in the period of the unfolding of communist construction, an ever more integral type of personality—in spiritual, moral, labor, and other respects—becomes predominant, and since the aesthetic development of the personality is a kind of concluding moment of this integrity, insofar as, in our opinion, by the level of aesthetic development one can to a significant extent judge both the moral and the spiritual

of the appearance of this type of personality. But aesthetic development is not merely a “cap” crowning the spiritual, moral, and other aspects of the personality’s appearance; rather, it is an organic element that permeates and, as it were, binds together all the other aspects of the spiritual and moral appearance of the personality. And therefore the level of aesthetic development may be determined to the same extent by the level of spiritual and moral development of this type of personality.

In our opinion, relying on the accumulated theoretical and factual material, it is possible, as a first approximation, to distinguish the following groups, reflecting the different degrees of aesthetic development of the student body.

The first is a small group of students whose aesthetic underdevelopment is pronounced, since by their appearance, behavior, actions, etc., they often destroy everything that is truly beautiful. Their aesthetic needs and abilities are undeveloped or distorted; aesthetic ideals are absent or in many respects opposed to the social ideal. This group consists mainly of people who have socially “sunk to the bottom,” and of student youth who have absorbed only that scum of aesthetic culture which breeds boorishness. All this, as a rule, coincides with spiritual emptiness, moral licentiousness, and a parasitic attitude toward academic work.

The second group may include students characterized by the aesthetic neutrality of their development. As a rule, they do not destroy, but neither do they create the beautiful. They are indifferent to it, just as they are to the repulsive. They have not yet risen above narrow personal interests; they do not go beyond the limits of consumerist ideals, which in many respects are incompatible with the social ideal of our society. It is not hard to imagine that, in its wholeness, this is the type of the petty-bourgeois philistine, who, unfortunately, is still encountered among all social groups of our society.

The need to direct attention first of all to these groups is caused by the fact that the preservation of both their underdevelopment and the spontaneity of their aesthetic development is becoming an increasingly socially undesirable factor for our society.

The singling out of the remaining groups coincides, to some degree, with those stages in the development of the collectivist personality that are substantiated by P. Egides⁵.

Thus the third group may include those students who are already beginning to manifest positive aesthetic activity. But their aesthetic needs and abilities are not fully conscious and are often developed only at the level of ordinary consciousness. Therefore they are characterized by aesthetic “omnivorousness.” Their aesthetic ideal, although in principle directed in the same direction as the social one, is nevertheless weakly developed. This coincides with a certain ideological and moral immaturity and passivity, which, however, does not contradict personal honesty and conscientiousness.

The fourth group is made up of students who strive for conscious aesthetic activity and possess elementarily developed, scientifically grounded aesthetic needs and abilities. They are characterized by a striving not only to consume but also to preserve aesthetic values. Their aesthetic ideal basically coincides with the social one, and their ideological-moral and labor activity becomes increasingly conscious and selfless.

The fifth group of students is characterized by a broad range of deeply conscious and scientifically grounded aesthetic needs and by the creative development of aesthetic abilities. Their aesthetic ideal fully coincides with the social ideal, and their ideological and political maturity, moral purity, and educational-labor activity make them active fighters for social progress.

And finally, the sixth group should include those who achieve a comprehensive and harmonious development of their aesthetic needs and abilities. For them, in the aesthetic ideal, the personal and the social must organically merge. To attain such a level of development “means to attain the level of an ideological personality, the unity of creator and fighter”⁶.

With regard to the aesthetic development of the student’s personality, we consider it necessary to note that “ascent to ever higher stages...” is possible not only through the exhaustion of all the positive potentials and possibilities inherent in the lower stages, but also under the ever-increasing influence of upbringing and, especially, self-education. However, the purposeful transformation of the aesthetic culture of the personality—no matter how broadly we understand upbringing and self-education, and no matter how developed they may be—cannot today become the decisive factor in the aesthetic development of the student’s personality.

On the other hand, given the insufficient development of the system of students’ aesthetic education, the persistence of certain social costs in the development of Soviet society (some negative consequences of urbanization, of the scientific and technological revolution, etc.), certain shortcomings in the living conditions of Soviet students (insufficient amenities in student towns, a shortage of dormitories, etc.), unfavorable conditions of individual existence, a certain intensification of bourgeois propaganda, including the ideas of “youth culture”—all these and many other spontaneous, uncontrolled factors ultimately exert a decisive negative influence on the aesthetic development of the above-mentioned groups of students.

The increased care and attention in recent years toward Soviet students, the improvement of material and housing conditions and of study conditions, the development of amateur artistic activity, creativity, self-government, and so forth—although they do not eliminate spontaneity as a determining factor in the aesthetic development of the personality—nevertheless significantly weaken its negative influence.

1. K. K. Platonov, On the System of Psychology. Moscow, 1972, p. 176. ↩

2. Cf.: F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Moscow, 1957, pp. 257–264. ↩

3. Eskhan Nerakhi, “Youth in Three Dimensions,” UNESCO Courier, April 1969, p. 31. ↩

4. See: G. Ya. Nesterenko, The Problem of Consciousness in Marxist Sociology. Moscow, 1972. A. G. Kharchev, The Formation of Personality. Moscow, 1972. ↩

5. See the collection Personality under Socialism. Moscow, 1968, pp. 90–91. ↩↩

6. Ibid., p. 91. ↩