Socio-anthropological aspect of K.N. Leontiev’s concept

Philosophy

Abstract

Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev was a philosopher of a particular mentality. Aesthetics was the dominant of his work. Love for life, for the world of the beautiful was Leontiev’s fundamental intuition. For the philosopher, the aesthetical criterion was an all-embracing base for assessment of the being. However, the pure aesthetics of nature is not given much attention in his works. Unlike Vladimir Solovyov, Leontiev does not have a single special work devoted to the beauty of nature. In his fiction works, the descriptions of nature occupy relatively small space. Partly it can be explained by Leontiev’s maximalism and also by his love for antitheses. He does not want to write a lot about the subject which it is impossible, in his opinion, to say something new about. Sometimes the images of nature in Leontiev’s fiction works are symbols of the social being, of his heroes’ inner world. Remarkably, a number of Leontiev’s works begin with landscape descriptions. The philosopher evidently prefers dynamically revealing images of the beautiful. In general, this world is impossible for him without the struggle of opposites. The antihumanism of means aimed at supporting the blossoming of the being is «counterbalanced» in Leontiev’s aesthetics by the acceptance of their necessity for maintaining the natural variety of the forms and colors of the world. Thus, the socioanthropological aspects have a special place in Leontiev’s works. They predominate over the aesthetics of nature. The latter is associated with the former. Both are conceived by the philosopher in the context of the cosmic whole. Leontiev writes a lot about the sensory beauty of the world but not about God’s beauty perceived by intellect. He particularly appreciates bright and complicated phenomena of the being.