In today's society we are increasingly alienated both, from ourselves and from one another. Having given up on life's fundamental questions and age-old wisdoms, we have found it easier to conceal them. As a result, it is a society impervious, if not derisive of high art as well as spiritual values. It is my intention to stress the importance of Aesthetics in today's world and preserve it as a tool for transcending our deep spiritual disorientation.

As art is at one and the same time the reflection and cognition of life, many avenues of inquiry appear for the chosen subject within the philosophical /art historical sphere, such as: what is the relationship of art to philosophy and spirituality; is there such a thing as linear progress in art, or indeed, progress in society? My position is that aesthetic and spiritual contemplation is perhaps the forgotten solution for our life in material existence. Contemplative knowledge may be perceived as real knowledge in the sense that it is ontological by its nature and concerned with a reality that we know instinctively, the Absolute.

Aesthetics can illuminate our life, enabling us to understand what is meant in terms of our own existence. At the same time, aesthetics can make us aware of both, our mortality and an omnipresent Absolute to which we all belong. Art can then reflect, transform and change life. It can show what cannot be said, thus transcending all sciences and enveloping the realm of the spiritual. By art man can conduct various outlooks to perfection, thereby materialising his own human nature. I will therefore argue for art that springs out of spiritual knowledge and wisdom, as per the art of Titian and Kandinsky, both grand representatives of the art in their period.

By linking subjective idealism (Hegel) and the dialectical materialist
reaction to it (Marx), the subtle but crucial role of art in society and man's relation to himself, society and nature can be revealed. Is art neutral, even when it is a modernist art for art's sake work, which has been produced in a particular social environment and for particular reasons? Concurrently, we need a view that brings back the traditional and eternal values of art and at the same time contemplates the essence and potential of the present.

Art can have timeless qualities that transcend any age or circumstances in which they were created, thus serve as an incarnation of the most sublime spiritual principles and interpretations of the universe and man's existence. This is, of course, in line with the classical philosophical belief that the reality we live in is but a mirror of a deeper one that can only be reached through imagination.

If, then, some art is impregnated with eternal qualities that transcend the circumstances in which it was created and is thus usable as an instrument for our spiritual salvation, why has this not happened already? On the contrary, it seems that we have forgotten the need for a well-rounded human being to replace the dehumanised, fragmented creature of today's society. It follows that we have to conduct an investigation of the material conditions in which the selected works of art have been created, whilst situating them within the appropriate philosophical context, which in turn will allow for philosophical and aesthetic ideas to be analysed in the context of our environment.

For thousands of years man's creative will has been linked to his spiritual consciousness. We had to wait until the 19th Century for art to start discarding its links with the past and advocate no other purpose than its own existence - art for art's sake. And in the 20th Century, Post-modernism has worked hard to put into question the validity of traditional aesthetic values. In the 1970's, the purist tendencies from Post - Painterly Abstraction to Minimalism came to be seen as the last stage of Modernism. The art object gave way to the concept of the 'art work'. Modernism was opposed for favouring purity, the artist as original, the artwork as unique and for being historicist and elitist. Conceptualism dominated this non-movement. It attacked the existing ontology and epistemology of art: what was considered as art and art's relation to knowledge. In the 1990's we witnessed a continuation of this, except that now, the barriers between 'high' art and populist, pop culture were gravely weakened. A Post-modern 'work of art' celebrates the death of meaning, reflecting the economic self-seeking mentality of a consumer culture. The 'real', found object of the everyday is more valid than the traditionally aestheticised. We, however, will point out that acknowledging the significance of ready-made objects as 'art' rests not in any aesthetic qualities that may or may not be discovered in them, but crucially, in the aesthetic questions they force one to contemplate.

To serve this purpose, we will use Karl Marx's[1] three laws of dialectics that he postulated with Fredrick Engels: the unity and interpenetration of opposites; quantity transformed into quality; negation of the negation. Our inquiry, therefore, will seek to show the expression of life as a flow of contradictions that come into being, develop, and are negated in order to generate new contradictions. As well as being inherent in all natural and historical phenomena, dialectical processes can be also seen as an eternal struggle between ideology and reality, or rather, thought and activity.

The belief in the non-existence of matter can be primarily contributed to the Enlightenment age and the German philosopher Frederick William Hegel, who posited that the universe is but a spirit. For the German Idealist school of thought Hegel's philosophical theories were the culmination of philosophy. Hegel had resolved the dualism in Western philosophy; the opposition between spirit and matter. According to Hegel, the individual spiritual force is only a localised manifestation of the Absolute spirit that postulates the world of appearance. Spirit can only be aware of itself through the object of its perception, which, in turn, cannot be autonomous from the spirit. Art can thus represent inner spirit contemplating itself. Furthermore, art can adopt the crucial role of being at the same time spirit's object of perception and it's manifestation. What determines the content of the work of art is subjectivity aware of itself. Hegel calls for a work of art that presses on "to the extreme of pure appearance, i.e. to the point where the content does not matter and where the chief interest is the artistic creation of that appearance." (W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics)

For Hegel the absolute Ideal is reason in process. Gradually and dialectically idealism becomes reality. The fact that part of what the world ought to be could be realised in what it is, presented a solution to the problem of the relationship between theory and practice.

Many of Karl Marx's conclusions were the outcome of his reflections on Hegel, particularly Early Writings, which is impregnated with Hegel's seminal ideas. Marx's materialist theories are the inherent dialectical process of Hegel's philosophy, which underlines the importance of Marx the philosopher as opposed to Marx the political revolutionary or social theoretician.

Ultimately rejecting the Hegelian idea of the material world as alienated spirit, Marx used the material world as the cornerstone for the whole structure of existence. Man will only become one with his surroundings by an ongoing dialectical struggle of the absolute idea and the material world, not merely by his thought processes. Hegel had just thought, Marx decided. For Marx and his predecessor Feuerbach, consciousness is rooted in reality. The Ideal is nothing other than the material world reflected by our mind and transformed into thought patterns.

All attempts to completely abolish past art for the creation of something new are doomed. Freedom in expression comes out of a historical process. However, this does not mean that social conditions completely determine the character and the effect of a work of art; it merely shows that they determine it indirectly. For some works of art have the ability to transcend the circumstances of the material conditions in which they are created by subjectively expressing their objective potential, albeit consciously or unconsciously. If this is not so then how is it that some art, for instance, an old Greek sculpture, can still be aesthetically enjoyed and seen as 'perfect' today - in material conditions very different from the ones in which it was created? A Marxist view would not necessarily refute this idealistic premise. Instead it would seek to situate it within the appropriate ontological conditions and ask where, when, why and how did this timeless truth and act of creation come in to being. We will be careful to underline the difference from Marx's thoughts and Soviet Marxists who saw art in a crude, mechanical context, as if the only purpose of a work of art was to record the material conditions in which it was created. For them art is an expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the artist, as well as the cognition of life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. Crucially, the idea of dialectical aesthetics is ignored, thus blinding one to the prospects of objective laws and qualities in certain works of art that transcend any particular culture.

Art affirms and philosophy can envisage a general view of progress and development, but only as a part of a constant movement, (for example styles in art, or dialectics in Hegelian and Marxist philosophy) that requires time for the organic evolutionary process to realise itself. If our thoughts and ideas interrelate to the circumstances from which they arise, they will assume a different form in circumstances that have had satisfied mankind's deepest longings.

Spirit and its manifestation (matter) are but a constant movement, a process objectively aware of itself (the Absolute). Art can substantiate that process.

If this reasoning is correct, we can be justified in holding that art can be the bridge for perhaps the oldest and most important philosophical abyss: The relation of the Absolute to the material existence.

Armando Bayraktari