“Aesthetics” derives from “senses”. One could claim that any act of great literary creation has been “ethical” in the sense that it has conveyed ideas melted in and mixed with senses, or to say more exactly, beyond mere intellect or reason it has captured in an image simultaneously ideas and feelings through senses, thus representing the world and human existence in its totality and making its message audible to the widest possible public, including all varieties of the “other”. In other words, it has captured and conveyed significant fragments of life in sensually shaped poetic images, thus avoiding to degenerate into a mere brainwork.
Deprived of the aesthetic aspect, ELC would easily lose its identity, and become a field dominated by “noospheric” ratiocinations, without much if any contact with the “other”.
Among basic “infra-others” of literature, metaphoric image in its unrepeated genuineness has always been the main distinction and at the same time the axiological nucleus of literary works. A metaphor conveys sensuousness by its very nature, as its source is establishing analogy between two or more natural-concrete and sensually perceived objects. Thus, its highest imaginable concentration of metaphors in the work of William Shakespeare or Federico García Lorca is to all likelihood the special feature that makes moral-philosophical conflicts stand forth with an extraordinary expressiveness. In these greatest creators, poetical image never degenerates into an idea of morality forcefully imposed on reality – a feature generally perceived as moralization. On the contrary, a high metaphorical concentration has not at all become anything obsolete or “overcome” in our contemporary poetics. One could claim that original metaphoric imagery has in fact continuously provided the measure for permanent value in any literary creation. In the context of the above mentioned “peripheral” poets of minor nationalities, both Juhan Liiv and Jidi Majia excel by metaphorical intensity of their philosophically orientated poetry.
In all literary creation, a parallel “infra-other”, rivalling metaphor, but definitely less intensive in its effect, has been the application of allegorical or allegorically shaped image. In general, allegory is just the opposite of metaphor: it means a forceful imposition of some idea, and very often of morality in the sense of righteous or correct behavior, in accordance with established norms, to a society or a community. For that reason, allegory was highly popular in the late European Medieval literature, as well as in the Baroque. The 20th-century expressionism provided allegory with novel individual features, but the essence was still the same. The ideas of a creator, more than often echoing some contemporary political-ideological current or trend, were forcefully imposed onto natural reality.
Allegory is thus definitely closer-related to the traditional reason-based “self”, than metaphor. The latter could be viewed as a part of literature’s “infra-other”, representing a strive for natural-biological-generic “otherness”, for freedom and independence, and the individual.
Yet even within the general framework of allegory, the greatest writers of WL have managed to create admirable works expanding allegory’s traditional limits and introducing in its reign powerful metaphorical images. Thus, Baltasar Gracián, being at the same time one of the outstanding European thinkers and a principal aesthetic theorist of the Baroque, wrote a curious allegorical-symbolist novel El criticón (1651-1657), perhaps a forerunner of the modern intellectual-cultural novel. Its allegory, saturated with witty philosophical comparisons and puns, as well as a constant play of intermingling the rational-cultural and the sensual-natural, is by far closer to modern sensibility, ever open to ambiguities, than John Bunyan’s well-known The Pilgrim’s Progress, published some ten years after Gracián’s novel.
In the same fashion, one of the miracles of the Baroque theatre is Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play, El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World). The one-act theatrical genre of auto sacramental strongly limits its expression. The play is exemplarily allegorical – thus a descendent of the late medieval moralité genre, having among its characters, devoid of any individual concreteness, such as World, Author (God), King, Richman, Poor, Beauty, Child and Voice, among others. Yet Calderón managed to bring to the theatre scene indeed the entire world and to reflect in World’s monologues the major stages of the human history, corresponding to Bible’s vision and predicaments, as well as every individual’s existential life limits, from birth to tomb. Calderón’s vision loses its abstractness because it is caught between the limits of any individual human life, with its basic passions and aspirations, nobleness and misery.
The same can be said about the work of many posterior creators, including the Estonian Juhan Liiv, contemporary of early modernism, and the Yi poet Jidi Majia, coeval of postmodernism. Both can be seen as rebels against the dominating social ideology as well as the aesthetic current of their time, with its origin in the Western centers. Both have a strong propensity to a philosophical vision of the world, as the imperative of ideas is powerful in both.