THE INTERESTING: PHILOSOPHICAL THEMATIZATION THROUGH A MASK AND A PUPPET
Authors: MARKOV ALEXANDER V. , SHTAYN OKSANA A. 
Published: February 2025

The interesting has rarely become a subject of special philosophical study, due to the belonging of the concept to the domains of economics, epistemology and aesthetics simultaneously. The Kantian perspective implied that interest was a violent interiorization of experience, working with sensitivity and irritability, so the beautiful was isolated from interest, and the sublime was even opposed to it. But in philosophy after Kant a different conception of interest appears, not in connection with sensitivity, but with the medium of that sensitivity. Interest is above all energy, the finding of a thing in action, but the initial point of entry into this energy was not specified. It was possible to speak of the stability of interest as a special status of the body, or of the change of interest as a certain economy of things, but no general theory of the interesting was established. The status of the interesting has not been fully clarified, as shown by the contradictions in the thematization of the interesting in special articles by Arthur Schopenhauer and Jakob Golosovker. The most convincing attempt to explain interest was made by Lev Vygotsky, combining the critique of voluntarism in German transcendentalism and the critique of entailment in psychoanalysis. But Vygotsky’s approach is restricted to social psychology and is not compatible with Kant’s authentic formulation of the problems. We propose to understand the interesting as an effect of social practices interpreted through the mask and the puppet. The puppet is the self-identity of the thing, revealing its artificiality and intendedness. The mask is a rupture of this identity, a constant engagement with social processes and acts of social cognition. Although both principles, masks and puppets, are related to mimesis, the puppet belongs to the realm of creationist representations, the creation of a social and individual world out of nothing, while the mask belongs to the realm of mythological and theatrical representations, and constitutes a code of social reflection up to the present day. A close reading of Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Jakob Golosovker’s works on the interesting showed that the motif of the mask and the puppet is present in these works, but implicitly. The very idea of an artificial body was not brought to a conclusion; the focus was on the mechanisms of decision-making, but not on the mechanisms of generating any object as artificial. This showed an acceptance of the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason, which does not have in mind bodily experience as the experience of generating singular situations. But the mask and the puppet were thus interpreted as singularities. Thus Schopenhauer speaks of the singular face of phenomena, in which all our social masks become indistinguishable, but denotes itself only by the moment of artificiality of those first conclusions we draw about the contemplated. Golosovker identifies the mask with the procedures of knowing and reading, in this sense maskedness is integral to interest, whereas with the doll begins the fragmentation of the cognition of the social world into episodes and characters. In this way, both the puppet and the mask appear not as objects of dedicated philosophical analysis, but as effects of the transition from the fasinating contemplation of nature or a work of art to conclusions about the actual ordering of social life. The mask and the puppet are sustained by the act of initial disappointment, which is then replaced by reflection and theoretical conclusions that narrow the concept of the interesting and do not permit the formulation of a consistent theory of it. We insist that the entrance to the interesting is the acceptance of one’s mask as originally given, as a social experience that one has, according to Lev Vygotsky’s conclusions, at all stages of personal development. The concept of autocommunication is also involved as a justification of such an attitude to one’s givenness, which allows one to take into account both the rules of cognition and the social framework of cognition in the actions of other people. This study shows the productivity of aesthetic studies of the puppet and mask for understanding interest as a necessary moment of individual and social cognition.