Thinking and art: the conjugation of anthropological practices

The scientific discourse of modern post-non-classical psychology is characterized by overcoming monodisciplinary language in describing the multidimensional phenomenology of human existence and those practices through which a person constitutes his subjectivity and reproduces a meaningful, human way of life. Such anthropological practices include thinking and art, which make it possible to continuously complete and transform the picture of the world (both at the level of the individual and at the level of social consciousness). A work of art, from the position of the author of the work, is not only a means of aesthetic transformation of reality, but also a symbolic expression of life itself, concentrated and aesthetically loaded with the thought of her. Reflecting on the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of a work of art, a person receives unique opportunities: to reveal the meaning of non-obvious sign-symbolic correspondences between the events of his own life and their artistic equivalents; productively rethink the individual way of being, overcome the inertia of everyday rationality. The article reveals and receives theoretical justification for the functional connection, phenomenological proximity, and mutual reversibility of thinking and art. In both practices, a certain unity of affect and intellect, concept and metaphor, fantasy and common sense is revealed. Thinking is an internal moment of any artistic creation, but it, in turn, receives an intentional impulse from the same noetic, motivational sources as art. The similarity of the dynamics of mental search (especially its first phases) with the dynamics of the artistic act is shown, as well as the inclusion of specific emotional states in both processes. An integral link between the mental and artistic act is imagination, the main function of which here is to defamiliarize things and undermine established ways of constructing meaning. The author, using the example of the relationship between the central and implicit parts of scientific theory, reveals the phenomenology of the “breakthrough” of human creative thought beyond the boundaries of routine mental activity. This effect is a consequence of the repeated collision of established methods of conceptualization with fantasy anomalies that the imagination produces, thereby opening up an alternative search for eidetic and symbolic solutions.

thinking, thought, mental search, art, artistic act, imagination, meaning