The Aesthetic as a Field and Object of Cultural Metamorphoses

The article addresses the problem of the socio-cultural reality of the aesthetic as field and result/object of metamorphosis, something that has not been much developed in aesthetics. The paper is of the aesthetic-culturological nature: it joints the culturological vision of metamorphosis as a general phenomenon of culture - a special kind of cultural change, transformation, development of cultural phenomena in some of the most important aspects of its world). The author establishes the ontological foundations of cultural systematics - taking into account the specificity of metamorphoses of aesthetic attitude (mastering metamorphoses: regularities of materia and information, peculiarities of culture as a way of being of people, peculiarities of modern culture. Based on the general understanding of metamorphosis as a spontaneous, “self-moving” and apparently “natural” process of qualitative transformations, and of the aesthetic as universal, sensual-emotional in form and spiritual-valuable in content, the metamorphosis of the aesthetic (focusing on the present-day aesthetic) is analysed in the main systemic aspects of culture. The author highlights and summarizes the following metamorphoses: genetic (generating) ones (transformed forms of culture); ontological (metamorphoses of modes and chronotopes of existence); structural (metamorphoses of relations, orders, wholes); functional (metamorphoses of activities and activity effects, their subject and semantic results); phenomenal (“phenotypic”) metamorphoses (metamorphoses of the qualitative state, including appearance, sensuousness (form and texture), subject and semantic content of specific cultural objects). The integrating way of seeing all these types of metamorphosis is the metaphorical concept of proteism, which represents the total systemic spread, diversity and endless mutability of the contents and forms of expression, existence and functioning of the aesthetic in modern social culture.