I.I. BLAUBERG
In recent decades, in France and other countries of both the West and the East, interest in the concept of Henri Bergson, a thinker who a century ago was the most striking figure on the philosophical stage of France and the whole world, has revived again. Such a re-actualization, associated with the awareness of the modern significance of many of Bergson's ideas, including ideas about time, freedom, evolution, etc., found expression in the interest in Bergson's activities as a teacher.
Without going into these special problems here, we note that Bergson's pedagogical activity played a very important role in his life from the very beginning of Bergson's philosophical career. He devoted many years to this work, from the moment when, after graduating from the Higher Normal School in Paris, he went to the provinces, where he worked first in the city of Angers, and then in Clermont-Ferrand. He taught for a total of 34 years (1881 - 1914), and almost half of this time - in lyceums, i.e. in the system of secondary education. Therefore, he was directly affected by the discussions that took place in France during these years and were devoted to the need for reforms in the field of education. The essence of the problem was the revision of the undergraduate program, i.e. in some restructuring of the secondary education system. Here is a brief historical background. At the end of the XIV century. in France, the word “baccalaureat” began to refer to an exam in which the subject had to state and defend his theses in Latin. Having established lyceums in 1808, Napoleon I transformed it into an examination in the subjects included in the lyceum program, where rhetoric and philosophy were studied in the last two classes, respectively.
Traditionally, in the French system of secondary education, focused mainly on the humanities, much attention was paid to the study of ancient languages, writings of Greek and Latin authors. But in the 19th century, the situation gradually began to change: the natural sciences, due to their increased development during this period, gained more and more weight, and modern “living” languages somewhat pressed the ancient ones. In 1891, along with the traditional course of study, which lasted 7 years and ended with an examination for a bachelor's degree in literature (es lettres), a similar course was introduced with a natural science bias. This course also ended with an examination for a bachelor's degree (es sciences), was a year shorter and gave the right to enter only the natural faculties of universities. By the reform of 1902, both of these courses were equalized in terms of time, and both types of examination received the same strength; thus, the new, more specialized system of education was officially equated with the old, traditional one4. The main mouthpiece of innovation was the Sorbonne, but many French intellectuals, including Bergson, did not approve of new trends, which served as a constant cause for discussion.
Against this background, Bergson's teaching activity unfolded, and this situation should be borne in mind when reading as many of his public speaking, and - sometimes - the main works: in some of them, as we will show, polemical notes clearly sound. Already in his first speeches at traditional celebrations in lyceums, where the best students were awarded, Bergson formulated ideas about what education should be like, about its tasks and social role. These ideas, which grew out of the philosopher's own theoretical position, from reflections on the problems of consciousness, its integrity and its various levels, on the freedom of the individual, were honed and refined in pedagogical practice. In speeches addressed to students and teachers, they were expressed in a clear, sometimes aphoristic form.
The undoubted attitudes in cognition, the development of which Bergson considered one of the main criteria for the effectiveness of education, were for him the priority of the whole in relation to the part, the advantage of a holistic view of the world. Already in his first speech on specialization, he urged young listeners not to turn into narrow specialists, to be interested in many things, to tirelessly broaden their horizons in order to be already widely educated by the time professional interests take over and force them to focus on special knowledge. Bergson saw this as a guarantee of future creative discoveries: “The existence of special sciences, between which one must choose, is a grave necessity. We must accept the fact that we will know little - if we do not want to know nothing. But it would be good not to put up with it for as long as possible. Each of us would have to start, as all mankind did, with a noble and naive desire to know everything. Erudition, a variety of interests, from which a variety of skills grow, the development of abilities in different areas of activity - this, according to Bergson, lays the foundation on which the ability to take a different look at some problem is built, to offer an unexpected solution, - after all, this often gives impetus to discoveries.
The diversity of interests and acquired knowledge creates the necessary general background, context, expands the very field of vision, and vice versa, the rejection of a holistic view dooms science to sterility, sharply narrowing its horizons: “... if you do not first glance at the whole, if you immediately go to the parts and you will consider only them, perhaps you will see very well; but you won't know what you're looking at." But if a person, having mastered this vision of the whole, then goes deeper into the study of a particular area, then the knowledge and skills acquired by him in this territory will also help in mastering other material: he will acquire the ability to pose new problems, offer other than before , research methods.
Of course, Bergson emphasized in another speech, a person always has some preferences, his thinking is not universal, “but this is the miracle of miracles: the more at ease our intellect feels in a certain territory (of course, if it is not too small), the more free it is for him on everyone else. This is how nature arranged everything: between the most remote intellectual spheres, she laid underground communications and connected the most diverse orders of things, as if by invisible threads, with wonderful laws of analogy ... A person who has comprehended the depths of his art, his science or profession is also able to quite easily other areas"7. Such, as we would now say, is the dialectic (Bergson himself very rarely and, as a rule, used the word in a different sense) of the general and the special in the assimilation of knowledge.
Another quality necessary, according to Bergson, for every person is common sense. This idea, of course, is not at all new, but in order to correctly understand what Bergson means, it is necessary to clarify what meaning he gives to this concept. In French, there are two terms translated into Russian as "common sense": "sens commun" and "bon sens". Bergson interprets the first of them rather as "ordinary reason", "general opinion"; in contrast, “bon sens” means for him a higher ability8, close to intuition and allowing him to make direct contact with reality, to achieve harmony in relations with himself and the people around him. Common sense, which knows how to "follow the curves of reality itself" (this is one of the expressions that Bergson often used to characterize intuition), connects life and matter, intellect and will, thought and action. Bergson understood “bon sens” as a social feeling that underlies human coexistence, coexistence, as a common source of action and thought, as an internal energy of the intellect, which does not allow it to stop halfway, encouraging it to move on all the time. Inertia, routine, intellectual inertia, laziness - all these, according to Bergson, are the worst enemies of human thinking.
In his speech “Common Sense and Classical Education”, he clearly articulated his understanding: “…common sense requires a constant readiness to act, to be on the alert, to apply again and again to new situations. He is not afraid of anything as much as a completely finished idea - maybe a mature fruit of the spirit, but a fruit taken from a tree and soon dried up ... Common sense is the embodiment of work. According to him, every problem is new and worthy of effort. It demands that we sacrifice, however difficult it may be at times, our established opinions and ready-made solutions. Here it is, keyword, very common in Bergson's work: effort. Constant effort, the desire to rise above oneself, to go higher and further, he believed, is an indispensable condition for self-realization for a person. Let's remember B. Pasternak: "Do not let your soul be lazy ...". This idea of the need for inner work sounds like a refrain in the work of Bergson, who was completely unjustly blamed in his time for the fact that his concept of intuition meant a call for the rejection of the intellect. He never said anything of the kind, and the meaning of his well-known opposition of intuition and intellect lies in a completely different thing - in the distinction (primarily for a methodological purpose) of the intuitive and discursive functions of human thinking.
A mental, spiritual effort is self-overcoming, allowing a person to surpass himself and, moreover, to some extent surpass human nature itself. This theme is one of the most important in all of Bergson's philosophy. Man, “as nature created him”, exists in a rather narrow framework, due to his biological characteristics and the nature of his evolutionary development and determined, in turn, the forms of its perception and cognition, its characteristic type of sociality. But, as Bergson wrote in Creative Evolution, development could take a different path and lead to a different humanity, more “intuitive”, more perfect and closer to reality, and not fenced off from it by the needs of practice and social life. This idea of a different humanity is the background of many of Bergson's works, a kind of ideal, unattainable, like any ideal, but outlining the direction in which one should go. Although a person cannot completely break out of the framework determined by nature, he is able to move them apart, expand them. And this just requires him to constantly work on himself, moving towards new horizons. That is why Bergson tirelessly urged his students to train the will, which, as he believed, is a true source of intellectual energy, to learn to concentrate attention, to make an effort, since these are the qualities that distinguish a true creator from mediocrity. The philosopher himself, by the way, was a model of such qualities and worked hard, sparing no effort, all his life, even when illness and age severely limited his physical capabilities.
If Bergson's concept of intuition refers to the concept of sympathy in Plotinus, and even further back in time to the ancient doctrine of cosmic sympathy, then the concept of common sense in Bergson is clearly consonant with the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean. Common sense as a social feeling is the golden mean between two extremes: attempts to interpret society in a deterministic way, revealing the operation of inevitable laws in it and not taking into account the creative power of freedom, and ideas of utopian dreamers who do not see that human freedom is always limited by human conditions. nature and social life. The task of common sense as an instrument of social regulation and a tool for the progress of society is to constantly carry out a kind of "adjustment", harmonization of individual aspirations and public interests. Therefore, Bergson considered the education of common sense one of the main tasks of education and dedicated a special speech to it. He especially emphasized the connection of common sense with classical education. Bergson himself received just such an education, which assumed a good knowledge of ancient languages and related literature, and subsequently did not tire of emphasizing the benefits of this knowledge. It was from reading the classics, especially the ancient authors, he argued, that the most valuable moral and philosophical lessons could be learned. ancient philosophy played essential role in the theoretical development of Bergson himself. He learned a lot from Heraclitus and the Stoics, became the heir to the ideas of Neoplatonism, rethinking them and applying them to new material; the very ancient theme of measure, harmony was one of the main ones for him.
Bergson considered classical education to be the best school for thought, for the development of creative abilities. Even in his early works, he formulated the concept of language, to which he often returned later. He argued that the language associated with the needs of practice and social life, necessary for a person to communicate with his kind, inevitably distorts, “freezes” the deep stream of consciousness, replaces the continuous with discontinuous, living, changeable, becoming - ready, unchanged, become. The contradiction between the discontinuous and the continuous, the becoming and the becoming, cannot be fully resolved as long as man is a social being. But this does not mean that efforts to overcome the contradiction are futile: on the contrary, one must constantly strive to mitigate it. “One of the main obstacles to the freedom of the spirit is the ideas that are delivered to us in finished form through language, which we, as it were, absorb from environment. They are never assimilated by our being: unable to participate in the spiritual life, these truly dead ideas persist in their firmness and immobility. To remove, or at least try to overcome this barrier, classical education can help, in which Bergson sees, first of all, “an attempt to break the ice of words and discover under it the free flow of thought. By training you ... in translating ideas from one language to another, it will teach you how to crystallize them into various systems; thus they will be separated from any one verbal form, and this will force you to think, independently of words, the ideas themselves. … And, besides, who can compare with the ancient Greeks in their efforts to give the word a fluidity of thought? But all great writers, in whatever language they write, can render the same assistance to the intellect; for if we see things only conditionally, through our habits and symbols, then they tend to convey their inherent direct vision of the real.
That is why it is so important, Bergson believed, to study the humanities, especially literature, in lyceums. By the latter, he understood all classical literature, including artistic, historical and philosophical works. It is literature that teaches to apply the skills acquired through the study of the natural sciences - the ability to think accurately, to analyze - in the field of human knowledge: “Philosophers, historians or poets, all the creators of imperishable creations had no other goal than to depict a person - thinking, feeling and acting ... The lessons of literature are the lessons in the highest degree practical: they best teach us to understand the people around us, evaluate them, find out whether it is worth winning their favor and how this can be achieved. And among writers, the most worthy of study are those who have never sacrificed an idea for the sake of a phrase, and who rather strive to present us with a true picture of life than to arouse our admiration: therefore they are called classics. Among the classics themselves, we prefer those writers who, neglecting external details, observed the person himself and depicted him most accurately, diligently and realistically: the writers of antiquity.
Fluidity, flexibility, plasticity - all these qualities that real literature is famous for must, according to Bergson, be inherent in language so that it, if not completely, but at least to some extent, conveys, for all its discreteness, richness and continuity of thinking. And flexibility and plasticity are combined for him in a more general concept, which he also spoke about in one of the speeches at the lyceum dedicated to politeness. This concept - grace (grace), which has a long history and an interesting fate in the history of philosophy14. Grace is a polysemantic word denoting not only grace in the usual sense, but also “favor”, “mercy”, “grace”. Speaking about politeness and its different meanings, Bergson distinguished it from purely external observance of the rules of decency and compared it with grace: politeness in one of its manifestations is spiritual plasticity, grace of the spirit. “Like grace,” he wrote, “politeness evokes in us the idea of infinite flexibility; like grace, it tells us that this flexibility is within our control, that we can count on it. [It requires] tact, subtlety, and above all, respect for oneself and one's neighbor.
But there is also politeness of a higher order - politeness of the heart, which implies love for one's neighbor, mercy, the ability to empathize, sympathy. It is based on kindness, which, coupled with the flexibility and deep knowledge of the human soul, thereby acquires the efficiency necessary for life in society. Bergson makes a reservation here: one cannot say that such kindness is assimilated in the process of education; it's more of a natural gift. But a person is constantly developing, and life experience, received, among other things, at a young age, teaches him a lot, including generosity, goodwill, sympathy. Such an ability to listen to others, to try, even in discussions, to understand their views, to curb intolerance in oneself, which is our “natural instinct”, is precisely what is instilled in classical education, in which a large place is given to humanitarian, including philosophical, culture. It allows, according to Bergson, to develop all the abilities of thinking, to give it the flexibility necessary both for scientific research and for life in society, knowing people, communicating with their own kind. For true understanding, it is not enough to accumulate knowledge, the ability to reason. The flexibility of thinking brought up by classical education is expressed in the perfect adaptation of the mind to the object being studied, in the perfect tuning of attention, concentration, concentration.
NOTES
3 At the beginning of the 20th century, the Pomegranate Encyclopedic Dictionary provided the following information: “Bachelor (medieval Latin baccalauleus, French bachelier, English bachelor), the word ... was put into use in the 13th century. at the University of Paris to designate a person who received the lowest degree and who had the right to lecture, but was not yet admitted to the corporation of doctors and masters as an independent member. Now this name has been preserved in the old English universities and in France, where the degree of B. corresponds approximately to our matriculation certificate (Bachelier es lettres) or certificate of graduation from a real school (B. es sciences) ”(V. 4. 7e ed. S. 450 451).
4 See more about this: MosseBastide R.M. Bergson educateur. Paris, 1955.P. 151156.
5 Bergson A. Specialization // Bergson A. Favorites: Consciousness and life. M.: ROSSPEN, 2010. S. 226.
6 Ibid. S. 227.
7 Bergson A. On the intellect // Bergson A. Favorites: Consciousness and life. P. 267. It should be taken into account that in this speech, as in a number of other works of the early period, the term "intelligence" is still understood by Bergson more widely than later, when he essentially identified it with discursive reason.
8 In this regard, he continues the French classical tradition, for example, Descartes, who brought together common sense, sanity with wisdom (see: Descartes R. Rules for the guidance of the mind // Descartes R. Works in 2 vols. Vol. 1. M .: Thought, 1989, p. 78). But if for Descartes sanity is “the ability to reason correctly and distinguish truth from error” (Descartes R. Reasoning about the method // Descartes R. Soch. in 2 vols. T. 1. P. 250), then Bergson has “bon sens” occupies a middle position between intuition and intellect, combining the qualities of both of them. This problem is discussed in detail in the above-mentioned book by R.M. Mosse Bastide.
9 Bergson A. Common sense and classical education // Bergson A. Favorites: Consciousness and life. S. 247.
10 See about this: Bergson A. Creative evolution. Moscow: KanonPress; Kuchkovo field, 1998. S. 261.
11 Bergson A. Common sense and classical education. S. 250.
12 Ibid. pp. 251 252.
13 Bergson A. Politeness // Bergson A. Favorites: Consciousness and life. pp. 236 237.
14 On the connection of Bergson's interpretation of grace with the ideas of his predecessor, the French spiritualist of the 19th century. F. Ravesson, who, in turn, relied on Plotinus, see: Ado 77. Plotinus, or Simplicity of View. M.: Grekolatinskiy cabinet Yu.A. Shichalina, 1991. S. 51 53.
15 Bergson A. Politeness. S. 234.
To be continued, see: On common sense and civic education as the main tasks of education: Bergson's ideas - analitikaru.ru
PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES 3/2011
Biography
Henri Bergson (fr. Henri Bergson; October 18, 1859, Paris - January 4, 1941, ibid.) - French philosopher, representative of intuitionism and the philosophy of life. Professor of the College de France (1900-1914), member of the French Academy (1914). Winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and enlivening ideas, and the excellent skill with which they were presented."
Born in the family of pianist and composer Michal Bergson (Polish Michał Bergson), later a professor at the Geneva Conservatory, and the daughter of an English doctor Katherine Levinson. On his father's side, he is descended from Polish Jews, and on his mother's side, from Irish and English Jews. After his birth, the family lived in London, where he mastered English language. They returned to Paris when he was eight years old.
In 1868-1878 he studied at the Lycée Fontaine (the modern name is the Lycée Condorcet). He also received a Jewish religious education. However, at the age of 14, he began to become disillusioned with religion and by the age of sixteen had lost his faith. According to Hude, this happened after Bergson's acquaintance with the theory of evolution. He graduated from the Higher Normal School, where he studied in 1878-1881.
After that he taught at lyceums, at the Higher Normal School and the Rollin College. In 1889 he defended two dissertations - "An experiment on the immediate data of consciousness" and "The idea of a place in Aristotle" (in Latin).
Doctor of Philosophy (1889), professor (1898), member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (1901). In 1900 he received a chair at the College de France, left him due to ill health.
Bergson led a quiet and calm professorial life, concentrating on his work. He gave courses of lectures in the USA, England, Spain. President of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (1914).
In 1911, a group of anti-Semitic nationalists launched a persecution of him as a Jew; Bergson preferred not to respond to such antics.
In 1917-18. served on diplomatic missions in Spain and the United States. Since 1922, he served as president of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations.
In the late 1920s due to illness, he gradually concentrated entirely on scientific work. After the capitulation of France in 1940, Bergson returned all his orders and awards and, having rejected the proposal of the authorities to remove him from the anti-Jewish edicts, being sick and weak, he stood in a queue for many hours to register as a Jew. He died in German-occupied Paris from pneumonia.
Doctrine
Bergson affirms life as a genuine and original reality, which, being in a certain integrity, differs from matter and spirit. Matter and spirit, taken by themselves, are the products of its decay. The basic concepts by which the philosopher defines the essence of "life" are "duration", "creative evolution" and "life impulse". Life cannot be grasped by the intellect. The intellect is able to create "abstract" and "general" concepts, it is the activity of the mind, and it is possible to reproduce reality in all organicity and universality only by recreating it. This can only be done by intuition, which, being a direct experience of the object, "is introduced into its intimate essence."
A holistic comprehension of reality can be "emotional-intuitive". In addition, science always has practical utility in mind, and this, according to Bergson, is a one-sided vision. Intuition directs attention to the "primary given" - one's own consciousness, mental life. Only self-observation is subject to the continuous variability of states, "duration", and, consequently, life itself. Based on these prerequisites, the doctrine of the evolution of the organic world, drawn by a "life impulse", a stream of "creative tension", is built. A person is at the very edge of creative evolution, and the ability to realize all its inner power is the lot of the elect, a kind of “divine gift”. This explains the elitism of culture. In human existence, Bergson distinguishes two "floors", two types of sociality and morality: "closed" and "open". "Closed" morality serves the requirements of the social instinct, when the individual is sacrificed to the collective. In the conditions of "open" morality, the manifestation of individuality, the creation of moral, religious and aesthetic values becomes a priority.
Key to his philosophy is the concept of time. Bergson distinguishes between physical, measurable time and the pure time of the life stream. The latter we experience directly. Developed the theory of memory.
The Catholic Church included his writings in the Index of Forbidden Books, but he himself leaned towards Catholicism, however, remaining Jewish. His philosophy was very popular in pre-revolutionary Russia.
In literature
Bergson is mentioned several times in Françoise Sagan's story Hello Sadness.
In the autobiographical work of the Catholic theologian E. Gilson "Philosopher and Theology" several chapters are devoted to Henri Bergson, telling about the origins of his views and their consequences. Despite the fact that in some places there is criticism, the content is apologetic in nature.
Bergson is also mentioned in Jack London's The Little Lady of the Big House:
Try, Aaron, try to find in Bergson a more clear judgment about music than in his "Philosophy of Laughter", which, as you know, is also not clear. Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Beach also mentions Henri Bergson and his "Matter and Memory" teachings. Henry Miller's novel The Tropic of Capricorn mentions Henri Bergson and his work Creative Evolution (translated by I. Zaslavskaya Creative Development). In the novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, Bergson is mentioned as one of those who left the deepest imprint on the soul of the narrator. Mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned in a dialogue between Maury and Anthony.
Bergsonianism is mentioned in Yuri Olesha's story "The Cherry Pit".
Main works
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889
Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire), 1896
Laughter (Le Rire), 1900
Introduction to metaphysics (Introduction a la metaphysique), 1903
Bibliography in Russian
Bergson, A. Collected Works, vols. 1-5. - St. Petersburg, 1913-14.
Bergson, A. Collected works, vol. 1. - M., 1992.
Bergson, A. Laughter. - M., 1992.
Bergson, A. Two sources of morality and religion. - M., 1994
Bergson, A. Common sense and classical education // Questions of Philosophy. - 1990. - No. 1. - S. 163-168.
Bergson, A. Creative evolution. - M., 2006
Literature about A. Bergson|
Blauberg I. I. Anri Bergson. - M.: Progress-Tradition, 2003. - 672 p. - ISBN 5-89826-148-6
Blauberg I. I. Socio-ethical doctrine of A. Bergson and its modern interpreters // Problems of Philosophy. - 1979. - No. 10. S. 130-137.
Bobynin BN Philosophy of Bergson // Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. - 1911. - Prince. 108, 109.
Lossky N. O. Intuitive Philosophy of Bergson. - Pg.: Uchitel, 1922. - 109 p.
Svasyan K. A. Aesthetic essence of Bergson's intuitive philosophy. - Yerevan: AN ArSSR, 1978.
Hodge N. Bergson and Russian Formalism // Almanac "Apollo". Bulletin No. 1. From the history of the Russian avant-garde of the century. - SPb., 1997. S. 64-67.
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SPb. 1999 Parsons T. On the structure of social action M. 2000 Prigogine I. A new union of science and culture //Courier - 1998 - № 6 Prigozhin I., Stengers I. Order out of chaos. Polanyi M. Personal knowledge. -M., 1985. Popper K. Logic and the growth of scientific knowledge. -M., 1983. Rickert G. Natural sciences and cultural sciences. M., 1998. Ricoeur P. Conflict of interpretations. Essays on hermeneutics. -M. 1995. Ricoeur P. Time and story. In 3 volumes Moscow-St. Petersburg 2000 volume 1. Rickert G. On the system of values // Rickert G. Science of nature and science of culture. -M., 1998. Rickert G. Values of life and cultural values // Ekn. Almanac of new and old culture. M., 1995 Sartre J.-P. Existentialism is humanism // Twilight of the gods. Moscow: Politizdat, 1989. Skripnik A.P., Stolyarov A.A. Free will // Ethics: Encyclopedic Dictionary. Sorokin PA Man, civilization, society M., 1992 Sociology of social space / Per. from French; total ed. and after. N. A. Shmatko. - Moscow: Institute of Experimental Sociology; SPb.: Aleteyya, 2005. In 2 volumes. Sorokin P. Crime and punishment, feat and reward. A sociological study on the basic forms of social behavior and morality. SPb. 1999. Stepin V.S. Scientific knowledge and values of technogenic civilization // Questions of Philosophy. 1989. No. 10. Stepin V.S. Philosophical anthropology and philosophy of science. M., 1992. Philosophical encyclopedia in 5 volumes. -M., 1960 - 1970. Frank S.L. Reality and man. - M., 1997. Foucault M. Archeology of knowledge. - Kyiv, 1996. Fedotova N.N. Globalization as a factor in the formation of a new paradigm in sociology, 2001. Frankl V. Man in search of meaning. M., 1990 Freud Z. Psychology of the unconscious M., 1990 Fromm E. To have or to be? M., 1990 Fromm E. Anatomy of human destructiveness Fukuyama F. Trust. Social virtues and wealth creation. post-capitalist society. New industrial wave in the West. M., 1998 S.101-123. Fukuyama Social consequences of biotechnological innovations. - "Nature", 2008, No. 2) Fukuyama F. Big gap. Fukuyama F. Posthuman future Fuko M. Words and things. Archeology of the Humanities. M. 1993 Foucault M. Supervise and punish. The birth of the prison M., 1990. Fink E. The main phenomena of human existence // Human problems in Western philosophy. Moscow: Progress. - 1988. - pp. 357-403 Horuzhy S.S. The Problem of the Posthuman or Transforsative Anthropology through the Eyes of Synergistic Anthropology, Philosophical Sciences, 2008, No. 2 Fukuyama F. The End of History? // Questions of Philosophy. 1990 № 3 Habermas J. Theory of communicative action // Language in culture St. Petersburg 1999 Heidegger M. Prolegomena to the history of the concepts of time. Tomsk 1998 Hartwood J. "Chronos" and "Topos" of culture. SPb., 2001 Huizinga J. Homo ludens. In the shadow of tomorrow M., 1992 Horkheimer M., Adorno T. Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. M.-SPb. , 1997 Jung K. Archetype and symbol. M., 1992 Jung K. G. Man and his symbols. M., 1997 Jung K. On the psychology of Eastern meditation // Jung K. On the psychology of Eastern religions and philosophies. -M., 1994. Jaspers K. The meaning and purpose of history. -M., 1991.
Annotated course content
Topic 1. The subject and objectives of the course in the context of the modern educational paradigm. Problems of education and socialization of the individual in the context modern culture. Education as a process of formation and preservation of cultural identity. Education concept. The crisis of the natural and human sciences and the search for new paradigms. Humanistic crisis and the problem of humanization of education. The goals of education. The ratio of humanitarian, social and natural science knowledge. Mass culture and the problem of personality formation. Existential dimension of being. Anthropological crisis and its place among global problems. Existentialist concept of human existence. Social solidarity and social anomie (destruction of the system of social norms and values). Humanistic crisis and the problem of humanization of education. Culture shock and moral crisis as a permanent state modern society. The problem of cultural identity in terms of intergenerational shift. Literature Gadamer G.. The relevance of Aristotle. Durkheim E. Suicide: a sociological study Zakharov I.V. Lyakhovich V.S. The mission of the university in European culture. M., 1994 Stepin V.S. Philosophical anthropology and philosophy of science. M., 1992. Fromm E. To have or to be? M., 1990 Fromm E. Anatomy of human destructiveness Topic 2. The concept of humanitarian knowledge. Classification of sciences. Correlation of humanitarian and natural sciences, humanitarian and social knowledge. Social and human sciences. The problem of separation of social and human sciences (by subject, by method, by subject and method at the same time, by research programs). Methods of social and human sciences. Extra-scientific knowledge. Interaction of social sciences, humanities and non-scientific knowledge in the examinations of social projects and programs. The specificity of the object and subject of social and humanitarian knowledge. Similarities and differences between the sciences of nature and the sciences of society: modern interpretations of the problem. Features of society and man, his communications and spiritual life as objects of knowledge: diversity, uniqueness, uniqueness, chance, variability. Convergence of natural-science and social-humanitarian knowledge in non-classical science, evolution and mechanisms of interaction. Humanization and humanitarization of modern natural science. Possibility of application of mathematics and computer modeling in social sciences and humanities. Literature Rickert G. Natural sciences and cultural sciences. M., 1998. Ricoeur P. Conflict of interpretations. Essays on hermeneutics. -M. 1995. Rickert G. Values of life and cultural values // Ekn. Almanac of new and old culture. M., 1995 Topic 3 . Methodological paradigms of humanitarian knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. naturalism and positivism. . Naturalism in art and positivism in science. Is man an animal or a machine? Naturalism, hedonism, Freudianism. Considering man as a purely natural being and machine of pleasure. Vulgar materialism. socialist realism. Naturalism in the social sciences. Social Darwinism, behaviorism. Problems of humanitarian knowledge in logical positivism. Science, accuracy, objectivism, elimination of emotions and everything subjective. Problems of verification and the emergence of postpositivism. Positivism in social cognition. The concept of social facts. Instrumental reason of natural science knowledge and its limitations in humanitarian knowledge. The emergence of the philosophy of life as a protest against instrumental reason and the positivist paradigm. Human existence as a creative process, flow, becoming. Life as a category of sciences about society and culture. Socio-cultural and humanitarian content of the concept of life (A. Bergson, V. Dilthey, philosophical anthropology). Models of self-organization of human subjectivity, "techniques of life". Changing the concept of life and death in the postmodern. Time, becoming, temporality as the central categories of the philosophy of life (Dilthey, Nietzsche, Spengler, A. Bergson). Existentialism and its discovery of the subject. What is the connection between an aesthetic attitude to life and despair? (Kierkegaard). Faith and knowledge, certainty and doubt, rootedness of faith as a "form of life" (L. Wittgenstein) in pre-conceptual structures. "Philosophical faith" as faith thinking person(K. Jaspers). Literature Dilthey V. Categories of life // Questions of Philosophy. 1995. No. 10. Dilthey V. Types of worldview and their discovery in metaphysical systems. // Culturology. XX century. Anthology. M., 1996 Rickert G. On the system of values // Rickert G. Science of nature and science of culture. -M., 1998. Rickert G. Values of life and cultural values // Ekn. Almanac of new and old culture. M., 1995 Stepin V.S. Philosophical anthropology and philosophy of science. M., 1992. Philosophical encyclopedia in 5 volumes. -M., 1960 - 1970. History of mentalities. Historical anthropology. M., 1996 Kuznetsov V.G., Kuznetsova I.D., Mironov V.V., Momdzhyan K.Kh. Philosophy. The doctrine of being, knowledge and values of human existence. Textbook. -M., 1999. 4. Structuralism. Levi-Strauss on collective representations and their structure. Linguistic structures and kinship structures. Structural analysis of myths. V. Propp: morphology of a fairy tale. Methodological program M. Foucault Humanitarian knowledge, knowledge about a person as a manifestation of the will to power, which is confirmed by the analysis of the disciplinary state as a new type of social structure and the result of modernization (rationalization). The concept of power-knowledge as an element of a disciplinary state. disciplinary institutions. basic principles of organization of disciplinary space and time. Panopticon Bentham and its omnipresence. Prison as a paradigm of all modern social institutions. Supervisory society as opposed to the traditional spectacle society. The development of the humanities as phenomena of a disciplinary state, contributing to the strengthening of its power. The concept of the humanitarian space of culture. Modern processes of differentiation and integration of sciences. Development of self-developing "synergistic" systems and new strategies for scientific research. The role of nonlinear dynamics and synergetics in the development of modern ideas about historically developing systems. Global evolutionism as a synthesis of evolutionary and systemic approaches. Rapprochement of the ideals of natural science and social and humanitarian. Literature Avtonomova NS Philosophical problems of structural analysis in the humanities. M., 1977 Propp V.Jung K. Archetype and symbol Foucault M. Words and things. Archeology of the Humanities. M. 1993 Foucault M. Supervise and punish. The birth of the prison M., 1990. Topic 5. Overcoming positivism and naturalism in humanitarian knowledge and the emergence of new paradigms. Neo-Kantianism (Rikkert, Windelband). The sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit. The development of the humanities is changing the picture of the world. The image of man and his place in the world are specified. The problem of objectivity in humanitarian and historical knowledge. Historical facts and their interpretations. Personalism and philosophical anthropology. Phenomenology and hermeneutics. (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer). Phenomenology as a methodological program of the twentieth century. The concept of "phenomenon", the problem of reduction and the transcendental subject, phenomenology as ontology and method. Innovations of the "second generation" of the phenomenological school - the procedural nature of the phenomenon (M. Heidegger. G. Shpet) and the question of the necessity and possibility of transcendental reduction; the emergence of the problem of language and culture within the framework of phenomenology. The problem of synthesis of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Literature Dilthey V. Categories of life // Questions of Philosophy. 1995. No. 10. Dilthey V. Types of worldview and their discovery in metaphysical systems. // Culturology. XX century. Anthology. M., 1996 History of mentalities. Historical anthropology. M., 1996 Kuznetsov V.G., Kuznetsova I.D., Mironov V.V., Momdzhyan K.Kh. Philosophy. The doctrine of being, knowledge and values of human existence. Textbook. -M., 1999. Topic 6. Existentialism and psychoanalysis Existentialist critique of modernity. Existentialism about the specifics of human existence. The concepts of existence and transcendence. .Being as temporality. Existentialist understanding of true being as freedom. Free will and responsibility. Freedom and Necessity. Necessity "external" and "internal". The main characteristics of a deliberate action, according to Aristotle. Augustine on the measure of human freedom. Freedom and salvation. Free will (will). Transcendence of freedom. The problem of negative and positive freedom. AND ABOUT. Lossky on formal (negative) and material (positive) freedom. "Freedom from" and "freedom for". Freedom as civil autonomy, civil liberties, political rights. Autonomy: a) insubordination, i.e. freedom from paternalistic guardianship; b) acting on the basis of legitimate norms and principles; c) the opportunity to influence the formation of these norms and principles. Freedom of the spirit. The problem of "sublimation of freedom" from arbitrariness to creativity (N. Hartman, B.P. Vysheslavtsev, S.A. Levitsky). Responsibility. Natural and contractual liability. Responsibility as a calling and as a duty. M. Weber on "ethics of responsibility" and "ethics of conviction". The problem of man in psychoanalysis. Destructive nature and the problem of love modern man. Existential needs of culture. Literature Augustine. On Grace and Divine Will // Guseinov A.A., Irrlitz G. A Brief History of Ethics. pp. 532-557. Berdyaev N.A. On the appointment of a person // Decree, ed. pp. 31-54 Lossky I.O. Free will // Lossky I.O. Favorites. M.: Pravda, 1991. Skripnik A.P., Stolyarov A.A. Free will // Ethics: Encyclopedic Dictionary. Levitsky S.A. The tragedy of freedom (II) // Levitsky S.A. Tragedy of freedom. M: Canon, 1995. S. 129-216 Sartre J.-P. Existentialism is humanism // Twilight of the gods. Moscow: Politizdat, 1989.Apresyan R.G. Freedom // Ethics: Encyclopedic Dictionary. Fromm E. Psychoanalysis and ethics. Fromm E. Anatomy of human destructiveness
Art Movement: Arts and Humanities (1)
DocumentSemiotics as a field of scientific research and academic discipline. The structure of modern semiotic knowledge: biosemiotics, linguistic semiotics, abstract semiotics, semiotics of culture.
Skibitskaya Lyudmila Vasilievna Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Theory and History of Russian Literature Reader on Slavic mythology > teaching aid
Teaching aid6. The intended purpose is the systematization of theoretical information, the assimilation of practical skills in working with scientific historical-archaeological and folklore-mythological sources.
The program of the discipline History of Arts for the direction 040200. 68 "Sociology" for the preparation of a master for the master's program "Modern methods and technologies in the study of social problems of society"
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The program of entrance examinations for persons entering the field of study 030600 History Master's program Domestic History (History of Russia)
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Isakov, Doctor of Law, Professor. M., Gu-vshe. 2010. 220 s
DocumentCollection of materials for students of the master's program " public law» for 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic year. Author-compiler: V.B. Isakov, Doctor of Law, Professor.
Scientific knowledge and common sense
In the information society, the problem of interaction with a special type of knowledge that is produced by ordinary consciousness arises. It is "recorded" in natural everyday language, usually stored in the form of common expressions and clichés, conclusions are made in the form of short chains with simplified logic. This knowledge is systematized and improved within the framework of common sense, a more developed and strict part of everyday consciousness.
Generalizing experience and fixing it in traditional judgments, common sense is conservative. It is not set up to come up with brilliant, original solutions, but it does guard against the worst solutions. This conservatism and prudence is blamed on common sense.
Indeed, common sense can suppress the spirit of innovation, it respects history too much. Whitehead compares the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks from this angle. In the culture of Egypt, there was a very great reverence for history and a very developed common sense. According to Whitehead, it was precisely because of this that "they failed to generalize their knowledge of geometry, and therefore they missed the chance to become the founders of modern civilization. An excess of common sense has its drawbacks. The Greeks with their vague generalizations always remained children, which turned out to be very useful for modern world. Panic fear of error means death to progress, and the love of truth is its guarantee.
The Renaissance, taking this "Greek" type of thinking as an ideal (as opposed to the "Egyptian"), belittled the significance of conservative consciousness and common sense. Renaissance intellectuals were the first to proclaim the value of uncertainty and rejected the "censorship" of experience and tradition. M.L. Andreev wrote: “Humanists equally naturally showed themselves as republicans and monarchists, defended political freedom and condemned it, took the side of republican Florence and absolutist Milan. They, having returned the ideal of Roman civil virtue to the pedestal, did not even think of imitating their favorite ancient heroes in their loyalty idea, homeland, duty."
However, it is easy to see that within the framework of common sense, the largest body of knowledge that is used by mankind is extracted, systematized and distributed. This array enters into continuous interaction with other arrays of knowledge and overlaps with them. At the same time, there is also a synergistic, cooperative effect and conflicts.
The knowledge generated by common sense is in a complex relationship with scientific knowledge. In real life, people do not have time to make complex multi-step inferences on most issues. They use common sense. It is an instrument of rational consciousness, which, however, operates differently than scientific rationality. It serves as the main support for logical reasoning and inference.
But from the moment scientific revolution among highly educated people, common sense began to be valued low, much lower than the methods of theoretical knowledge developed in science. When discussing the cognitive structure of the "knowledge society", common sense is usually not mentioned at all. In fact, we are talking about an intellectual tool, no less important than scientific thinking. Moreover, scientific knowledge itself becomes a socially significant force only in the presence of mass support for common sense.
Theoretical scientific knowledge can lead to a brilliant, best solution, but often leads to a complete failure if, due to lack of funds (information, time, etc.), a person has attracted a theory that is unsuitable for this case. Therefore, in reality, both arrays of knowledge and both ways to extract it complement each other. And when scientific thinking began to crowd and belittle common sense, philosophers of various directions came to its defense (for example, such as A. Bergson and A. Gramsci).
Here are some of Bergson's remarks. He spoke to the students, winners of the university competition, in 895: “Daily life requires from each of us decisions as clear as quick. just as dependent on him as he was on us. However, usually he does not recognize any hesitation or delay; you need to make a decision, understanding the whole and not considering all the details. Then we appeal to common sense to eliminate doubts and So, it is possible that common sense in practical life is the same as genius in the sciences and art...
Approaching instinct with speed of decisions and immediacy of nature, common sense opposes it with a variety of methods, flexibility of form and the jealous surveillance that it establishes over us, saving us from intellectual automatism. He is similar to science in his search for the real and in his persistence in striving not to deviate from the facts, but differs from it in the kind of truth he seeks; for it is not directed towards universal truth, like science, but towards the truth of today...
I see in common sense the internal energy of the intellect, which constantly overcomes itself, eliminating ready-made ideas and making room for new ones, and follows reality with unflagging attention. I also see in him an intellectual light from moral burning, fidelity to ideas formed by a sense of justice, finally, a spirit straightened by character ... Look how he solves great philosophical problems, and you will see that his solution is socially useful, it clarifies the formulation of the essence of the issue and conducive to action. It seems that in the speculative realm, common sense appeals to the will, and in the practical realm, to reason.
Gramsci also praised common sense, classifying it as a variety of rational thought. He wrote in the Prison Notebooks: "What exactly is the value of what is commonly called "ordinary consciousness" or "common sense"? Not only in the fact that ordinary consciousness, even without openly recognizing it, uses the principle of causality, but also in a fact much more limited in its meaning - in the fact that ordinary consciousness in a number of judgments establishes a clear, simple and accessible reason, not allowing any metaphysical, pseudo-profound, pseudo-scientific, etc. tricks and wisdom to divert itself from the path. " Ordinary consciousness" could not help but be praised in the 17th and 18th centuries, when people began to rebel against the principle of authority represented by the Bible and Aristotle; in fact, people discovered that in the "ordinary consciousness" there is a certain dose of "experimentalism" and direct, even if even empirical and limited observation of reality. This is still seen as the value of ordinary consciousness, although the situation has changed and the real value of today's "ordinary consciousness" has significantly decreased.
Gramsci separates common sense from ordinary consciousness (everyday sense) as more rationalized and analytical knowledge. Speaking about their relationship with philosophy, he even places common sense on the same side of the barricade as philosophy: "Philosophy is criticism and overcoming of religion and worldly sense, and in this respect it coincides with "common sense", which is opposed to worldly sense."
Significant for our topic and Gramsci's reasoning about the role of politics as a special knowledge in the integration of common sense into the system of knowledge of modern society. About these thoughts, scattered in the Prison Notebooks, K.M. Dolgov writes in the preface to the two-volume edition of Gramsci's selected texts: "Philosophy, unlike religion and ordinary consciousness, is a higher-order spiritual structure, and as such it inevitably confronts them and seeks to overcome them... One cannot separate philosophy from politics, as one cannot separate the philosophy of the masses from the philosophy of the intelligentsia. Moreover, it is politics that connects the philosophy of common sense with the "higher" philosophy, ensuring the relationship between the people and the intelligentsia.
And yet, the dominant line about the scientific part of the culture of the New Age was the treatment of common sense not just as a simplified way of knowing, but also as a source of false knowledge. As he writes. Bauman, "for Spinoza, the only knowledge worthy of this name is solid, absolute knowledge ... Spinoza divided ideas into clear categories (leaving no room for the "average case") - those that form knowledge, and false ones. The latter were unconditionally denied any value, and they were characterized purely negatively - through the absence of knowledge.
According to Bauman, the leading philosophers and thinkers of the formative era modern science were unanimous in this opinion. He writes: "The duty of philosophy, which Kant undertook to establish, was, on the contrary, to 'destroy the illusions that originate in false concepts, no matter how cherished hopes and valuable expectations may be destroyed by their explanation.' In such a philosophy, 'opinions are completely inadmissible.' Judgments admitted to the philosophical tribunal of reason are necessary and carry within them "strict and absolute universality", i.e. they do not allow any competition and do not leave aside anything that may require authoritative recognition ...
Descartes would readily agree with this: "A person who aims to develop his knowledge above the ordinary level should be ashamed of using as a reason for doubt the forms of speech invented by the common people" (Second Meditation). Both intuition and deduction, systematically deployed by the philosopher, “are the most solid paths of knowledge, and the mind should not allow others. Everything else should be rejected as fraught with errors and dangers ... We reject all such purely probable knowledge and make it a rule for ourselves to trust only that which is well known and cannot be questioned" (Rules for Guiding the Mind)...
All this together outlines what Richard Rorty called "fundamental philosophy," accusing Kant, Descartes, and Locke of jointly imposing this model on the next two centuries of philosophical history.
In the new social science, which was formed in the paradigm of the Scientific Revolution, common sense was denied as an antipode to the rational consciousness of an ideal individual, as a product of local conditions that predetermine the group identity of a particular "community". The rationalism of the Scientific Revolution followed the ideal of universalism and saw in the characteristics of local cultures a filter that separates common sense from reliable knowledge.
J. Gray wrote about this conflict of universalism with common sense: "The forerunner of the modern liberal intellectual tradition is Thomas Hobbes, who ... based his concept of political obligations on the idea of individual rational choice, which animated all subsequent liberalism, whether it was legal in its theory of morality Hobbes was also the originator of the modern tradition - dating back to the sophists - in which the locally shaped historical identity of individuals is considered artificial and superficial, and only the pre-social nature of man is authentic. the rationalist and universalist tradition of liberal political philosophy, like the rest of the Enlightenment project, ran aground, confronted by the reefs of value pluralism, which asserts that values embodied in different ways of life and human identity, and even within the same way of life and identities may be rationally incommensurable".
Following science and philosophy, an equally discriminatory attitude towards everyday consciousness and common sense was taken by sociology, which from the very first steps realized itself precisely as the sociology of the knowledge society. In this role, she joined science as an important tool in the system of domination.
Bauman continues: "The philosophical and politico-state versions of the modernist project found their equivalents in two aspects of sociological practice. First, sociology undertook the critique of common sense. effectively identify deviations, unacceptable forms of behavior and everything that, from a systemic point of view, acted as a manifestation of social disorder.
In her first case, she offered herself to the public as an arbitrator in a fight between various forms understanding of human problems, as a provider of knowledge regarding the "true springs" of human behavior and destiny and, therefore, as a leader on the path to true freedom and rational existence with the use of adequate means and efficiency of action. In the second case, she offered to those in power at any level her services as a planner of conditions that would ensure predictable, standardized human behavior. Dispersing and neutralizing the consequences of individual freedom, it placed the laws of rationality it revealed at the service of a social order based on power.
In cognitive terms, social science as a philosophy of society and social science as an instrument of power coincided in their rejection of common sense as grassroots mass knowledge "about oneself". Bauman emphasizes this coincidence: "Both functions of the "modernist" social science, for their common goal, had a fight against ambivalence - with a consciousness that scandalously does not recognize reason, a consciousness that cannot be recognized as the vaunted human ability to know the truth, with knowledge that cannot be recognized as the right to claim that it grasps, exhausts, and possesses the object as "true" knowledge promises. In other words, their tasks were the same in terms of condemning, denying, and delegitimizing everything "purely experiential" - spontaneous, self-made, autonomous manifestations of human consciousness and self-consciousness. They led inexorably to the denial of the human ability to achieve adequate knowledge of oneself (or rather, they qualified all knowledge of oneself, by virtue of the very fact that it is knowledge of oneself, as inadequate). treat their flock as a bunch of sinners, modernist Social sciencies should have treated their subjects as ignorant."
If at the first stage of the institutionalization of science, its ideologists emphasized the general availability of scientific knowledge, then as the prestige and social status of scientists grew, completely opposite statements began to be made. So, Herschel wrote at the beginning: "Science is the knowledge of all, located in such an order and according to such a method that make this knowledge accessible to everyone." In his later works, on the contrary, he emphasizes that common sense does not coincide with scientific knowledge, and scientific thinking requires the abandonment of many common-sense thinking habits.
Based on these ideas of modernity, Marx (German ideology) took a sharply negative position in relation to common sense. In the system of social consciousness, his ordinary consciousness definitely appears as false. In the programmatic work of Marx, written jointly with Engels, it is said: “People have always created false ideas about themselves, about what they are or what they should be. According to their ideas about God, about what is a model man, etc. they built their relationships. The offspring of their head began to dominate them. They, the creators, bowed before their creations. Let us free them from illusions, ideas, dogmas, from imaginary beings under whose yoke they languish. Let us raise rebellion against this dominance of thought."
Thus, Marx's program in general epistemology is declared as "an uprising against the dominance of thoughts" generated by everyday consciousness. This program proceeds from the postulate that the ordinary consciousness of people is completely determined by the material conditions of their life, so that the knowledge accumulated before the advent of science was passive, had only an "appearance of independence" and was deliberately false: "Social structure and the state constantly arise from the life process of certain individuals - not such as they may appear in one's own or another's imagination, but such as they are in reality.
According to Marx's ideas, knowledge generated within the framework of common sense did not have the ability to develop - it only followed material existence as its reflection. Thus, the very status of common sense as belonging to a system of knowledge was actually denied. The ideas of common sense allegedly could not change under the influence of their own development as knowledge, through the analysis of cause-and-effect relationships, the application of measure and logic. It is very important for us that this attitude was accepted in Soviet Marxist epistemology.
On the contrary, among the left intelligentsia, close to the Narodniks and the Left Cadets (including those who accepted the October Revolution), common sense was recognized as a source of knowledge, which was one of the roots of modern science. Vernadsky wrote in 888: “The mass of the people has a certain ability to develop certain knowledge, to understand phenomena - it, as a whole and alive, has its own strong and wonderful poetry, its own laws, customs and its own knowledge ... I realize that in the people masses unconsciously work is going on, thanks to which something new is being worked out, which will lead to unknown, unknown results ... This work achieves known social knowledge, expressed in other laws, other customs, in other ideals ... I see how from work of individuals, constantly relying on and proceeding from what the masses have known, a huge, overwhelming edifice of science has been developed ... But in this work, scientific is a form of the same mass work, only more one-sided and therefore less strong, less effective.
However, since the 1960s in Soviet social science, the attitude to common sense began to prevail, following the attitudes of Western ideologists of positive science, and Marx. So, M.K. Mamardashvili writes as an established fact "that socially emerged ideas, representations, illusions, etc. can be eliminated not so much by ideological criticism (so to speak, by replacing them with knowledge), but, first of all, by the practical experience of changed real activity, the experience of classes and social movements, changing social systems of relations and structures".
From this attitude follows the need for "ideological representatives" ("special ideological class"), who explain to people what they are. Since "knowledge is power", this estate receives real power to decide the fate of the masses.
M.K. Mamardashvili emphasizes that even a rationalized, but not "empowered" consciousness of a person does not have the ability to "clearly recognize his position" and his connection with reality. He writes: “This connection with reality can become the object of a special scientific analysis, as it became, for example, in Marx’s critique of the “German ideology”, but in the most rationalized consciousness it does not appear. consciousness of one’s actual position, the ability to see the content that is present in it, but not recognized.Therefore, in the analysis of transformed forms that have erased the traces of their origin, Marx proceeds from what seems to be self-active and independent, to the restoration of real consciousness in objects ... As Marx constantly shows, the main dependence and "point of growth" of rationalized indirect formations in culture is that it is the transformed consciousness, spontaneously generated by the social structure, that is developed - already a posteriori and specially - by the ideological representatives of the class ruling under this structure. the material and spiritual horizon of a special ideological estate, which creates the official, and thus the ideology of the class that dominates society.
Bauman writes about this attitude: "In political practice, it paved the way for the disregard of public opinion and desires as mere manifestations of "false consciousness", ignoring all points of view outside the established hierarchy of power ... Marx's focus on "true consciousness" as an abyss that needs to be filled in order to build a bridge to a decent society, tended to turn the proletariat into the raw material of politics, to be collected and processed with the help of the Party. Its leadership is thus justified by its theory and consciousness."
This attitude of Marx manifested itself primarily in his anthropological model of the proletarian himself, the cultural-historical type of worker under capitalism. Marx writes: "Man (the worker) feels free to act only when he performs his animal functions - when eating, drinking, in sexual intercourse, at best while still in his dwelling, decorating himself, etc. - but in his in human functions he feels himself to be only an animal, that which belongs to the animal becomes the lot of man, and the human becomes that which belongs to the animal.
True, eating, drinking, sexual intercourse, etc. are also truly human functions. But in the abstraction that separates them from the circle of other human activities and turns them into the last and only final goals, they have an animal character.
It is amazing how in Soviet social science they could accept the assertion that the very indefinite phenomenon of "alienation of labor" turns a person into an animal! How can this be? Where did Marx actually see such "animals"? How, then, could it be expected that it was the proletariat that would become the class capable of fulfilling the mission of the liberation of mankind?
Relying on these provisions, the "ideological representatives" of the Historical Mathematics during perestroika began to reject in principle rational arguments emanating from people's everyday experience. The authors of the canonical textbook of historical materialism V.Zh. Kelle and M.Ya. Kovalzon wrote: "Superficial, common sense statements have considerable attractive power, because they create the appearance of correspondence of immediate reality to the real interests of today's practice. Scientific truths are always paradoxical, if they are approached with the yardstick of everyday experience. The so-called "rational arguments" are especially dangerous. emanating from such experience, say, attempts to justify the economic use of Lake Baikal, the turning of the northern rivers to the south, the construction of huge irrigation systems, etc."
At the same time, it was impossible to say a word about the absurdity of their arguments: from what paradoxical scientific truths does it follow that "economic use of Lake Baikal" or "construction of huge irrigation systems" is unacceptable? After all, this is just stupidity!
In the spirit of this intolerance of the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, modern social science was also formed. According to Baumann, Durkheim demanded that "the brain of a sociologist be tuned in the same way as the brain of a physicist, chemist or physiologist when they plunge into the as yet unexplored realm of science. When he penetrates the social world, he must be aware that he is penetrating into the unknown. He must feel that before him are facts, the laws of which are as unknown as the laws of life before biology developed. This is clearly a very strong statement, since human society, unlike plants or minerals, is not "unknown", people have a huge store of knowledge about themselves and their actions.
Bauman writes: "Durkheim's revelations really say a lot: that in order to ensure the scientific character of sociological practice, non-professional opinions should be denied authority (and in fact, non-professionals should be denied access to the truth, ordinary members of society - the ability to form an adequate perception of oneself and one's circumstances).Durkheim's rules of the sociological method affirm, first of all, the supremacy of the professional in relation to the nonprofessional, to his interpretation of reality, and the right of the professional to correct, expel from the courtroom or simply cancel unprofessional judgments. These rules are included in the rhetoric of power, in policy of legislative reason".
These are the attitudes towards the common sense of the "knowledge society" of modernity. But they were also accepted by the heralds of postmodernism and critics of scientific rationalism from a different standpoint. For them, common sense was the bearer of stable worldview positions ("truths"), accepted collectively and formalized by tradition. This was incompatible with the idea of the uncertainty of being, the situational nature of its assessments.
The existentialist philosopher L. Shestov in his work "The Apotheosis of Groundlessness" directly states that "a person is free to change his "worldview" as often as boots or gloves." He is a principled supporter of the "production of uncertainty" and therefore an opponent: "In everything, at every step, on occasion and without any case, the most accepted judgments should be thoroughly and unfoundedly ridiculed and paradoxes expressed. And then we'll see."
He demands liberation from all sorts of "dogmas", from established everyday ("anonymous") notions. For Shestov, the combination of knowledge and understanding that common sense seeks is unacceptable, he considers these categories incompatible: “The desire to understand people, life and the world prevents us from knowing all this. For to know and understand are two concepts that not only have not the same, but directly opposite meaning, although they are often used as equivalent, almost as synonyms.We believe that we understood some new phenomenon when we included it in the connection of others, previously "known. And since all our mental aspirations come down to understanding the world, we refuse to learn a lot that does not fit on the plane of the modern worldview ... Therefore, let's stop being upset by the disagreements of our judgments and wish that in the future there would be as many of them as possible. There is no truth - it remains to be assumed that it is in changeable human tastes.
In times of crisis, when dogmas and stereotypes are collapsing, the norms of strictly logical thinking are being undermined, and social consciousness is becoming chaotic, common sense, with its conservatism and simple unambiguous concepts, begins to play an extremely important stabilizing role. It becomes one of the main lines of defense against the advancing groundlessness.
We are experiencing such a period now in Russia.
Bibliography
1. Andreev M.L. Renaissance Culture // History of World Culture. Western heritage. M., 2008, p.9.
2. Bauman A. Philosophy and postmodern sociology // Questions of Philosophy, 2009, No. 1.
3. Bergson A. Common sense and classical education // Questions of Philosophy. 2000, no. 2.
4. Gramsci A. Prison notebooks, part I. M., 2009, p.48.
5. Dolgov KM. Politics and culture // Antonio Gramsci. Art and Politics. M., 2009.
6. Whitehead A.N. Selected Works in Philosophy. M., 2000. p.50.
Along with the massive development of literacy and an extensive system of education, the knowledge of common sense is increasingly replenished at the expense of elements of scientific knowledge. It is not by chance that we emphasize that the proposed typology scheme various kinds knowledge is conditional. In reality, it is unlikely that any of us could immediately, clearly and with complete certainty separate in the total volume of his thesaurus ...
To put them in a madhouse, and in the kingdom officially introduce the permanent position of a child who periodically proclaims the truth. It remains to be added that the analysis carried out reveals the socio-cultural competence of the intelligentsia and thus belongs rather to the sphere of social psychology and cultural studies. Actually sociological would be the answer to the question: what are the spheres of reality and why the carriers ...
Adjacent to traditional knowledge is a special type of knowledge that is developed ordinary consciousness. It is “recorded” in natural everyday language, usually stored in the form of common expressions and clichés, conclusions are made in the form of short chains with simplified logic. This knowledge is systematized and improved within the framework of common sense more developed and strict part of everyday consciousness.
Generalizing experience and fixing it in traditional judgments, common sense is conservative. It is not tuned to develop brilliant, original solutions, but reliably protects against the worst solutions. This conservatism and prudence are blamed on common sense.
Indeed, common sense can suppress the spirit of innovation, it is too respects history. Whitehead compares the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks from this angle of view. In the culture of Egypt, there was a very great reverence for history and a very developed common sense. According to Whitehead, it was precisely because of this that “they failed to generalize their geometric knowledge, and therefore they missed the chance to become the founders of modern civilization. Too much common sense has its drawbacks. The Greeks, with their vague generalizations, have always remained children, which turned out to be very useful for the modern world. The panic fear of error means death to progress, and the love of truth is its guarantee.
The Renaissance, taking this "Greek" type of thinking as an ideal (as opposed to the "Egyptian"), belittled the significance of conservative consciousness and common sense. Renaissance intellectuals were the first to proclaim the value uncertainty and rejected the "censorship" of experience and tradition.
However, it is easy to see that within the framework of common sense, the largest body of knowledge that is used by mankind is extracted, systematized and distributed. This array enters into continuous interaction with other arrays of knowledge and overlaps with them. At the same time, both a synergistic, cooperative effect and conflicts are observed.
The knowledge generated by common sense is in a complex relationship with scientific knowledge. In real life, people do not have time to make complex multi-step inferences on most issues. They enjoy common sense. It is an instrument of rational consciousness, which, however, operates differently than scientific rationality. It serves as the main support for logical reasoning and inference.
But from the moment of the Scientific Revolution, among highly educated people, common sense began to be valued low - much lower than the methods of theoretical knowledge developed in science. When discussing the cognitive structure of the “knowledge society”, common sense is usually not mentioned at all. In fact, we are talking about an intellectual tool, no less important than scientific thinking. Moreover, scientific knowledge itself becomes a socially significant force only in the presence of mass support for common sense.
Theoretical scientific knowledge can lead to a brilliant, best solution, but often leads to a complete failure - if, due to lack of funds (information, time, etc.), a person attracted an unsuitable for this case theory. Therefore, in reality, both arrays of knowledge and both ways to extract it complement each other. And when scientific thinking began to crowd and belittle common sense, philosophers of various directions came out in its defense (for example, such as A. Bergson and A. Gramsci).
And yet, the dominant line in the scientific part of the culture of modern times was the treatment of common sense not only as a simplified way of knowing, but also as a source of false knowledge. As Z. Bauman writes, “for Spinoza, the only knowledge worthy of this name is solid, absolute knowledge ... Spinoza divided ideas into clear categories (leaving no room for the “average case”) - those that form knowledge and false ones. The latter were unconditionally denied any value, and they were characterized purely negatively - through the absence of knowledge.
According to Bauman, the leading philosophers and thinkers of the era of the formation of modern science were unanimous in this opinion. He writes, relying on the reasoning of Descartes: “The duty of philosophy, which Kant undertook to establish, was to “destroy the illusions that originate in false concepts, no matter how cherished hopes and valuable expectations may be destroyed by their explanation.” In such a philosophy, "opinions are completely unacceptable" ... Descartes would readily agree with this: "A person who aims to develop his knowledge above the ordinary level should be ashamed of using as a reason for doubt the forms of speech invented by the common people."
Both intuition and deduction, systematically developed by the philosopher, “are the most solid paths of knowledge, and the mind should not allow others. Everything else must be rejected as fraught with errors and dangers ... We reject all such purely probable knowledge and make it a rule to trust only what is completely known and cannot be questioned "...
All of this together outlines what Richard Rorty called "fundamental philosophy," accusing Kant, Descartes, and Locke of jointly imposing this model on the next two centuries of philosophical history.
In the new social science, which was formed in the paradigm of the Scientific Revolution, common sense was denied as antipode rational consciousness of the ideal individual, as a product of local conditions that predetermine the group identity of a particular "community". The rationalism of the Scientific Revolution followed the ideal of universalism and saw in the characteristics of local cultures a filter that separates common sense from reliable knowledge.
Bauman continues: “First, sociology has taken over the critique of common sense. Secondly, she undertook the construction of schemes of social life, in relation to which it would be possible to effectively identify deviations, unacceptable forms of behavior and everything that, from a systemic point of view, acted as a manifestation of social disorder.
In cognitive terms, social science, as a philosophy of society, and social science, as an instrument of power, coincided in their rejection of common sense as grassroots mass knowledge “about oneself”.
“Their tasks,” wrote Bauman, “coincided in terms of condemning, denying and delegitimizing everything “purely experienced” - spontaneous, self-made, autonomous manifestations of human consciousness and self-consciousness. They inevitably led to the denial of the human ability to achieve adequate knowledge of oneself (or rather, they qualified all knowledge of oneself, by virtue of the very fact that it is knowledge of oneself, as inadequate). Just as the Church had to treat her flock as a bunch of sinners, the modernist social sciences had to treat their subjects as ignorant."
If at the first stage of the institutionalization of science, its ideologists focused on public accessibility scientific knowledge, then as the prestige and social status of scientists grew, completely opposite statements began to be made. So, John Herschel wrote at the beginning: “Science is knowledge everyone arranged in such an order and according to such a method as to make this knowledge accessible to everyone. In his later writings, on the contrary, he emphasizes that common sense is not the same as scientific knowledge, and that scientific thinking requires the abandonment of many of the thinking habits of common sense.
Based on these ideas of modernity, Marx took a sharply negative position in relation to common sense. In the system of social consciousness, ordinary consciousness in him definitely appears as false. In the programmatic work of Marx, written jointly with Engels (The German Ideology), it is said: “People have always created false ideas for themselves about themselves, about what they are or what they should be. According to their ideas about God, what is the model of a person, etc., they built their relationship. The offspring of their head began to dominate them. They, the creators, bowed before their creations. Let us free them from illusions, ideas, dogmas, from imaginary beings under whose yoke they languish. Let us rise in revolt against this dominion of thought."
Thus, Marx's program is declared as "an uprising against the dominance of thoughts" generated by ordinary consciousness. According to Marx's ideas, knowledge generated within the framework of common sense did not have the ability to develop - it only followed material existence as its reflection. In fact, the very status of common sense as belonging to a system of knowledge was denied. The ideas of common sense allegedly could not change under the influence of their own development as knowledge, through the analysis of cause-and-effect relationships, the application of measure and logic.
These modern attitudes towards common sense were also adopted by the forerunners of postmodernism. For them, common sense was the bearer of stable worldview positions (“truths”), collectively accepted and formalized by tradition. This was incompatible with the idea of the uncertainty of being, the situational nature of its assessments. The existentialist philosopher L. Shestov in his work “The Apotheosis of Groundlessness” directly states that “a person is free to change his “worldview” as often as shoes or gloves.” For him, the combination of knowledge and understanding which common sense seeks, he considers these categories to be incompatible. He is a fundamental supporter of the “production of uncertainty” and therefore an opponent of accepted judgments: “In everything, at every step, on occasion and without any case, the most accepted judgments should be ridiculed and paradoxes should be expressed fundamentally and unreasonably. And there you will see.”
On the contrary, among the left intelligentsia, close to the Narodniks and the Left Cadets, common sense was recognized as a source of knowledge, which was one of the roots of modern science. V.I. Vernadsky wrote in 1888: “The mass of the people has a certain ability to develop certain knowledge, to understand phenomena - it, as a whole and alive, has its own strong and wonderful poetry, its laws, customs and its knowledge ... This work achieves a well-known social knowledge, expressed in other laws, other customs, in other ideals ... I see how, from the work of individuals, constantly relying on and proceeding from what is known by the masses, a huge, overwhelming edifice of science has been developed.
In the early stages of the Soviet system, social science, still largely "spontaneous", relied heavily on common sense and traditional knowledge. However, since the 1960s, in Soviet social science, an attitude towards common sense began to prevail, following the attitudes of Western ideologists of positive science and Marx.
M.K. Mamardashvili emphasizes that even a rationalized, but not “empowered”, human consciousness does not have the ability to “clearly recognize its position” and its connection with reality. He writes: “As Marx constantly shows, the main dependence and “growth point” of rationalized indirect formations in culture lies in the fact that it is precisely the transformed consciousness, spontaneously generated by the social structure, that is being developed - already a posteriori and specifically - ideological representatives of the ruling class under this structure. It is the mental material and spiritual horizon of a special ideological class, which creates the official and thus the class ideology that dominates society.
In practice, this attitude reinforced the disdain for public opinion as merely a manifestation of "false consciousness." Relying on these provisions, the "ideological representatives" of the Historical Mathematics during perestroika began to fundamentally reject rational arguments based on people's everyday experience. The authors of the canonical textbook of historical materialism V.Zh. Kelle and M.Ya. Kovalzon wrote: “Surface statements based on common sense have considerable attractive power, because they create the appearance of conformity with immediate reality, the real interests of today's practice. Scientific truths are always paradoxical if they are approached with the yardstick of everyday experience. Particularly dangerous are the so-called "rational arguments" emanating from such experience, for example, attempts to justify the economic use of Lake Baikal, the turning of the northern rivers to the south, the construction of huge irrigation systems, etc.
At the same time, it was impossible to say a word about the absurdity of their arguments: from what paradoxical scientific truths does it follow that “the economic use of Lake Baikal” or “the construction of huge irrigation systems” is unacceptable? After all, this is just stupidity! Yes, and all these big projects were born precisely in research institutes (primarily in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), and they were philosophically substantiated by professors of historical materialism.
As a result, all points of view that were developed outside the established hierarchy of power were ignored - more or less defiantly. After the elimination of Soviet social norms, this disregard became not only demonstrative, but also deliberately arrogant.
In times of crisis, when dogmas and stereotypes are collapsing, the norms of strictly logical thinking are being undermined, and social consciousness is becoming chaotic, common sense, with its conservatism and simple unambiguous concepts, begins to play an extremely important stabilizing role. It becomes one of the main lines of defense against the advancing groundlessness.
We are experiencing such a period now in Russia.
artistic knowledge
Let's talk very briefly about knowledge, systematized and "recorded" in artistic images. It acts on the spiritual world of a person in a plane that connects the imagination, the emotional sphere and rational thinking.
At the end of the Middle Ages, artistic knowledge was connected with the emerging science by deep ties. In the Middle Ages, the number of mathematical sciences at universities, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, included music. The lute was "both the favorite instrument of singers and the instrument of scientists, meeting the requirements of precise mathematical calculations, with the help of which the nature of musical sound was comprehended." The measure for evaluating the calculations was aesthetic category - the beauty of melodic harmonies. Theoretical conclusions were drawn from combinations of sounds.
Fruitful for the discovery of the scientific method was a dispute about the structure of music, in which the father of Galileo Galilei, musician and composer Vincenzo Galilei, took an active part. In the second half of the 14th century, Nicholas Oresme's treatise "On the commensurability and incommensurability of the movements of the sky" was published. In it, the author put the problem in the form of a dream, in which he asks Apollo to resolve his doubts. Apollo instructed the Muses and Sciences to express their views. The question was fundamental - the author put the following words into the mouth of Hermes: "Knowing music is nothing more than knowing the order of all things."
Arithmetic believed that all movements of the sky commensurate, Geometry objected. The author of the treatise belonged to a trend that defended the opinion that the irrational proportion "is expelled from the movements of the sky, producing melodic harmonies." The theorists of the new trend believed that Geometry was right, so that the presence of irrational proportions in sounds (dissonance) gives music a special brightness and beauty.
This treatise initiated a dispute that lasted a century and a half and during which many methodologically important ideas for science were expressed. This dispute, in which Galileo was involved through his father, is believed by historians to have significantly influenced his development as a methodologist. It is important for us that music, which has become an important part of culture and social life, turned out to be closely connected with scientific thinking and the scientific type of discussion of calculations and conclusions. So scientific knowledge became part of culture.
An absolutely necessary element of the entire system of knowledge is knowledge, accumulated since ancient times in a special branch of "spiritual production" - literature. In principle, from the very birth of systematized knowledge and reflection on it (philosophy), a literary text has been a way of fixing and transmitting this knowledge, and the creation of such a text is an important stage. cognitive process. This side of literary creativity has not lost its significance in modern science.
Thus, historians of science note a deep connection literary Dostoevsky method with methodology Sciences, and postclassical. Einstein wrote: "Dostoevsky gives me more than any other thinker, more than Gauss." Artistic models of Dostoevsky were rationalistic, their cross-cutting theme was the contradictory development of thought. The model building method was experimental. He placed his characters in an environment of critical experiment (experimentum crucis). Historians say that Dostoevsky carried out a synthesis of scientific and artistic methods. Moreover, Dostoevsky's artistic experimental models have quite scientific rigor, so that I.P. Pavlov said: "His word, his feelings are a fact." Indeed, the words and sensations deposited in literature are an important part of reality society, and the creation of this reality is associated with the generation and movement of special knowledge.
In Dostoevsky this synthesis is expressed in an unusually bright, "model" way, but it is also present in the work of many other writers and poets, in many variations. It can even be said that already in the late Middle Ages this synthesis became a necessary quality artwork which was the cultural prerequisite for the emergence in the 16th century of what we call the modern scientific method.
Methodology thought experiment was, one might say, developed in the course of the formation of literature generated by printing. This literature led to the emergence of a new type of reading as dialogue reader with the text, and in the process of this dialogue, the imagination built the space of a thought experiment.
Einstein said about this: “Imagination is more important than knowledge, because knowledge is limited, while imagination embraces everything in the world, stimulates progress ... Strictly speaking, imagination is a real factor in scientific research.”
Imagination plays a major role in the artistic perception of the world. But at the same time, it is also a human ability necessary for mental comprehension of reality. In the mind, we operate with those images of reality that our imagination produces for us. Already Aristotle wrote that when the mind is aware of a thing, it must build it in the imagination. Based on these "images of things" we develop our line of behavior. Thus, a significant part of the stock of knowledge, on the basis of which a person acts, was created with the participation of the imagination and recorded in artistic images.
The magic of painting is based on the fact that we see the landscape depicted in the picture, not the way we would see it in nature. We know that the painting is just a real canvas, some paints on it and a wooden frame. This is a device that helps us create a different, imaginary world, more beautiful than the real one. The world imagined with the help of a picture can be complicated - in itself there can be both a picture and a mirror. A milestone in the formation of modern Western civilization with its separation of subject and object was Velasquez's painting "Las Meninas": on it, the artist who paints the picture is reflected in the mirror.
The concept of “picture of the world”, which is very important for rational knowledge, arose thanks to the painting of the Renaissance. Then perspective was invented, and for the first time man saw the world as picture, as if being outside of it. This feeling contributed to an important ideological shift - the separation of Man and Nature as subject and object.
On the path of combining knowledge and artistic image, an invention occupies a very special place. cards- an important milestone in the development of culture. The map, as a way of "folding" and connecting heterogeneous information, has not only enormous, almost mystical efficiency. It has a property that has not yet been fully explained - "to enter into a dialogue" with a person. A map is a tool of creativity, just like a picture of a talented artist, which the viewer “thinks up”, supplements with his knowledge and feeling, becoming a co-author of the artist. It mobilizes layers of implicit knowledge of the person working with it.
At the same time, the card mobilizes the subconscious. Like a cloudy and cracked magic mirror, the card reveals more and more new features of the image as a person peers into it. After all, a map is not a reflection of visible reality, such as, for example, an aerial photograph. This is a visual expression representation about reality, reworked according to one theory or another.
A huge array of knowledge is written in images dramaturgy. The theater stage has a magical power - it's like a window into an imaginary world. Therefore, the theater occupies a completely exceptional place in its impact on consciousness. We can say that the theater stands at the origins of modern European civilization, it was a tool for "transforming a tribe into society." Unlike a schizophrenic, a normal person is aware that the images of his imagination are not reality. That is why they acquire a special deep meaning for a person - they seem to reveal the essence of things and events. These images are "more real" than facts, they are super-reality. When a person gets used to them, insight can happen to him - it seems to him that he penetrates the essence of things. If the insight turns out to be collective, a strong mass impulse arises, comparable in strength to or exceeding the action of rational knowledge.
In his doctrine of the theater, Aristotle argues that the purifying action of tragedy occurs precisely in the imagination - through the interaction of the effects of fear and compassion. To achieve these effects, it is necessary that the world created in front of the viewer be conditional (artistic), suprareal. If it were completely similar to reality, in the limit - it would merge with the scenes of suffering that people have to see in everyday life, then the effect would be limited to ordinary feelings of concrete fear or compassion.
In the theatre, as in a still picture, the imaginary world can be complicated. Thus, the theater becomes a laboratory for thought experiments. Hamlet, manipulating the imagination, forced the mother and Claudius to open up by asking the actors to play a play depicting regicide - and the audience saw this double theater in sixteenth-century England. So these viewers became modern Europeans.
In the “information society”, new technological means have arisen that make it possible to reach millions of people at the same time under the intense influence of the performance. Organizations have also emerged that are capable of staging political spectacles that were previously unimaginable in scale - both in the form of mass actions and spectacles, and in the form of bloody provocations. New types of art have appeared that have a strong effect on the psyche (for example, performance, transformation of a piece of everyday reality into a performance),
All this together meant a transition to a new era - postmodern, with completely new, unusual ethical and aesthetic norms, new concepts of social consciousness. Postmodernism is a radical rejection of the norms of the Enlightenment, of classical logic, of rationalism and the concept of rationality in general. This is a style in which "everything is permitted", "the apotheosis of groundlessness". There is no concept of truth here, but only judgments constructing any set of realities.
We are talking about an important shift in culture, about the conscious erasure of the line between life and the spectacle, about giving life itself the features of a carnival, conventionality and unsteadiness. Today these culturological discoveries are being made into social technology. This transition is superimposed on a wider background antimodern- negation of the norms of rational consciousness, the norms of the Enlightenment. These are permanent discontinuities. Actions with a huge "brute force", which you do not expect. Cultural shock is created by artistic means, which is effectively used in politics, based on scientific knowledge about society in this anomalous state. One can recall the tank shooting of the House of Soviets in 1993 or the attack on skyscrapers in New York in 2001.
One of those who laid the foundations of a new social science, including artistic imagination in the system of knowledge, was Gramsci. No wonder his name is called on a par with the names of M. Bakhtin in cultural studies, M. Foucault and other innovators - in philosophy. Gramsci is one of the first philosophers who felt the new scientific picture of the world and transferred its main spirit to the science of society.
In Russian social science, the ideological power of artistic images was not correctly assessed (more precisely, the social scientists themselves thought like artists and did not notice the problem). Russia became a reading country, and already from the middle of the 19th century a deep contradiction arose - a Russian person read a literary book as the text of Revelation. It was a crisis of modernization reflected in culture - people believed book and took artistic models of reality for reliable knowledge.
Artistic perception is so strong and vivid that it often separates from rational thinking, and sometimes suppresses common sense. Let us recall the bitter assumption of V.V. Rozanova: “Order No. 1, which turned the eleven-million-strong Russian army into dust and rubbish with eleven lines, would not have had an effect on it and would not even be understood by it at all if all Russian literature had not been preparing for it for 3/4 centuries ... Actually, no doubt that Russia was killed by literature.
And how the perception of Russian history was distorted by literature already in the 20th century! After reading "Mumu" at school, schoolchildren create in their imagination a terrible and total image of serfdom. It would be necessary to give a little reference in the same textbook: after all, the number of serfs among the peasants in Russia only for a short time reached half, and already in 1830 it was only 37%. The right to sell peasants without land was given to the landlords only in 1767 and abolished already in 1802. For the most part, we thought that the landowners were selling peasants right and left, and even tried to separate husband and wife. But these were exceptional cases!
Social science did not make adjustments to the messages of fiction, did not even think about this duty. Here, too, there is an important difference from Western social science. Well, some Stendhal portrayed a stupid officer - it won’t occur to the French because of this to hate the officers and the army. And the Russian reader from the conditional world of artistic images will snatch Skalozub and transfer him to the ground, replacing him with a real officer. And if he reads "After the Ball", he will hate all the colonels.
V.V. Rozanov reproached Russian literature for irresponsibility. But the writers of the 19th century did not yet know the explosive power of the word in Russian culture. Let us recall the preparations for the war in Chechnya in 1994. How then they promoted Pristavkin with his story. She was required to believe - after all, he saw the world with his children's eyes, because he himself saw a tear of a Chechen child! How quickly they made a film based on it - it was necessary to educate Dudayev. When Chechnya was already being bombed, Pristavkin boasted in the Western press: “Dudaev watched my film“ A Golden Cloud Spent the Night ”sitting alone in the hall, and tears flowed down his cheeks.” Pristavkin - soldier cold war, he wrote not childhood memories, but created a false image from half-truth, which the reader has repeatedly supplemented with his imagination. The goal was: from a tear of a child - through a tear of Dudaev - to the bloody tears of entire nations.
We could be convinced that the models of social phenomena presented in artistic images make up a very large part of the argumentation and reasoning in social science. Dostoevsky's novel "Demons", Bunin's book "Cursed Days", Orwell's or M. Bulgakov's fiction during perestroika were given by ideologists directly as scientific works, setting out well-established truths.
The experience of the last thirty years obliges us to reliably, in an engineering way, build artistic knowledge into the system of sociodynamics of all types of knowledge necessary both for understanding and for influencing social processes.
Implicit knowledge
Although science from the very beginning declared its absolutely rational nature and the complete formalizability of all its statements (i.e., the ability to express them unambiguously and clearly), any person more or less familiar with scientific practice knows that this is a myth. This is true for all sciences and for social science. Rational and formalized knowledge is only the visible part of the iceberg of those "cultural resources" used by the scientist. Intuition, beliefs, metaphors and art play a huge role in his work, equally important both in the thought process and in the procedures of experiment or observation.
The genius of organic synthesis R.B. Woodward planned paradoxical ways to obtain incredibly complex compounds, so that a rational explanation of his schemes was only later, after the successful completion of the work. Emil Fischer inexplicably managed to crystallize (and, therefore, purify) such compounds of carbohydrates that "did not want" to crystallize in any other laboratory in the world, so there were legends among chemists about the magical properties of Fisher's beard, which served as the seed of crystallization.
The great Russian scientist M.S. Tsvet, the creator of chromatography (one of the most important methods of modern chemistry and biology), manufactured chromatographic columns, the effectiveness of which is still difficult to achieve today, although strong theoretical and calculation methods have been developed over 100 years of development of chromatography. He "felt" how the substances move along the column, "knew" what was happening in it. His methodological formulations were strikingly correct, but he failed to expound everything. Half a century later, a German chemist and historian of science wrote: "Possessing a creative imagination, Tsvet 40 years ago created a strikingly clear idea of the basic processes on which modern chromatography is based."
The attempts of a number of laboratories to reproduce the successful development of a carbon dioxide laser are described. It turned out that the scientists who created the working installation could not accurately describe their actions in publications or even explain to their colleagues. Exact copies of their setup didn't work. Only in the course of long personal contacts was it possible to convey the implicit, informal knowledge. Any researcher-practitioner faced it.
An important source of implicit and even non-formalizable knowledge in science is "muscle thinking" developed by many scientists - the ability to feel itself as an object of study. Thus, Einstein said that he was trying to "feel" how a ray of light felt, penetrating space. Only then, on the basis of these muscular sensations, he was looking for a way to formalize the system in physical terms (this phenomenon, which is not uncommon in any creative work, is called “first I find, then I search”). This type of knowledge, which cannot be rigorously expounded, is poorly understood; however, many scientists emphasize its great importance. Most often, they only talk about it to their close friends.
In one essay on the history of science (A. Koestler) it is said: “There is a popular notion according to which scientists come to a discovery by thinking in strict, rational, precise terms. Numerous testimonies indicate that nothing of the kind is happening. To give one example: In 1945 in America, Jacques Hadamard organized a nationwide survey of eminent mathematicians about their methods of work. The results showed that all of them, with the exception of two, do not think in either verbal terms or algebraic symbols, but refer to a visual, vague, vague image.
Einstein was among those who answered the questionnaire thus: "The words of language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in the mechanism of thought, which relies on more or less clear visual images and some muscle-type images. It seems to me that you call full consciousness, there is a limited case, which can never be completely completed, that consciousness is a narrow phenomenon.
To designate and comprehend phenomena, scientists “at home”, in their laboratory, use non-strict terminology from non-scientific practice, concepts based on common sense. From this follows the possibility of differences in the opinions of scientists belonging to different groups.
A special type of implicit knowledge can be considered that set of "not quite scientific" ideas and beliefs, which some historians and philosophers of science call scientific ideology. This type of science-related knowledge is not irrational, but it is not entirely rational-scientific either. It is usually recognized precisely as a scientific ideology only in hindsight, and at first it seems to be a poorly formalized scientific concept (a typical example of a scientific ideology is atomism, which subsequently gave rise to a number of rigorous scientific directions). As they say, the main thing in scientific ideology is not that it openly expresses, but that it hush up.
What happens when a scientist has to act as an expert on a problem, the stock of "explicit" knowledge about which is insufficient? He not only can, but is obliged to use all the supply available to him. implicit knowledge. But since this knowledge is not formalizable, the course of his reasoning cannot be subjected to rational independent control. Strictly speaking, these arguments do not meet the criteria of scientific character, according to which the research should be carried out in such a way as to make it possible to reproduce it by other scientists independent of the author.
This is one of the contradictions inherent in creative activity. The essay already cited says: “According to the testimony of those original thinkers who took it upon themselves to look after their methods of work, verbalized thinking and consciousness as a whole play only a subordinate role in the short, decisive phase of the creative act as such. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on the spontaneity of intuition and hunches of unconscious origin, which they find it difficult to explain, shows us that the role of strictly rational and verbal processes in scientific discovery has been widely overestimated since the Enlightenment. There is always a fairly significant element of the irrational in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready to recognize it), but in the exact sciences too.
The scientist, who, when faced with a difficult problem, retreats from precise verbalized thinking to a vague image, seemed to follow Woodworth's advice: "We must often try not to speak in order to think clearly." Language can become a barrier between the thinker and reality: creativity often begins when language ends, that is, when its subject recedes to the pre-verbal level of mental activity.
In social science, it is often necessary to consciously preserve in a state of implicit knowledge that could well be made explicit and formalized. It was noted that the existence of society is in principle impossible without the presence of certain zones of uncertainty - spaces of ignorance. The intrusion of science into these zones is fraught with a sharp violation of the equilibria established in the social order.
Related to this, for example, is concern about the beginning of the introduction of the technique of early determination of the sex of the unborn child, which in some cultures leads to a noticeable decrease in the number of newborn girls (according to the latest data, this is becoming a threatening problem for China).
Here is an eloquent illustration given by the sociologist J. Ezrai: “An interesting example of a political taboo in the field of demographic statistics is Lebanon, whose political system is based on a delicate balance between the Christian and Muslim population. Here, the census has been postponed for decades, since the publication with scientific certainty of an image of social reality that is incompatible with the fiction of a balance between religious sects could have devastating consequences for the political system.
The tragic experience of Lebanon shows that this unwillingness to know was by no means absurd. What results did even a short-term attempt to implement an insane doctrine full publicity("transparency"), which we saw in our country in the late 80s of the XX century.
Application
Here are some of Henri Bergson's remarks on common sense. In 1895, he spoke to the students - winners of the university competition:
“Daily life requires each of us to make decisions that are as clear as they are quick. Every significant act completes a long chain of arguments and conditions, and then reveals itself in its consequences, placing us in the same dependence on it as it was on us. However, usually he does not recognize any hesitation or delay; you need to make a decision, understanding the whole and not taking into account all the details. It is then that we appeal to common sense in order to eliminate doubts and overcome the barrier. So, it is possible that common sense in practical life is the same as genius in the sciences and art ...
Approaching instinct with speed of decisions and immediacy of nature, common sense opposes it with a variety of methods, flexibility of form and the jealous surveillance that it establishes over us, saving us from intellectual automatism. He is similar to science in his search for the real and in his persistence in striving not to deviate from the facts, but differs from it in the kind of truth he seeks; for it is directed not towards universal truth, like science, but towards the truth of today...
I see in common sense the internal energy of the intellect, which constantly overcomes itself, eliminating ready-made ideas and making room for new ones, and follows reality with unflagging attention. I also see in him an intellectual light from moral burning, loyalty to it, formed by a sense of justice, finally, a spirit straightened by character ... Look at how he solves great philosophical problems, and you will see that his solution is socially useful, it clarifies the formulation of the essence of the issue and favors action , it seems that in the speculative field, common sense appeals to the will, in the practical - to reason.
A. Bergson. Common sense and classical education. - "Questions of Philosophy". 1990. No. 1.
Antonio Gramsci considered common sense to be a kind of rational thinking. He wrote in the Prison Notebooks:
“What exactly is the value of what is commonly called ordinary consciousness” or “common sense”? Not only in the fact that ordinary consciousness, even if it does not openly admit it, uses the principle of causality, but also in a much more limited in its meaning fact - in the fact that in a series of judgments the ordinary consciousness establishes a clear, simple and accessible reason, not allowing any metaphysical, pseudo-profound, pseudo-scientific, etc. tricks and wisdom to divert itself from the path. and the 18th centuries, when people began to rebel against the principle of authority represented by the Bible and Aristotle, in fact, people discovered that in "ordinary consciousness" there is a certain dose of "experimentalism" and direct, even if empirical and limited, observation of reality. and still continue to see the value of ordinary consciousness, although the situation has changed and the real value of today's "ordinary consciousness" has significantly decreased.
A. Gramsci. Prison notebooks. Part I. M.: Publishing house of political literature. 1991, p. 48.
Lev Shestov demands liberation from all sorts of "dogmas", from established everyday ("anonymous") notions. For him, the combination of knowledge and understanding that common sense seeks is unacceptable, he considers these categories incompatible:
"Pursuit understand people, life and the world interferes with us to know all this. For know And understand- two concepts that have not only unequal, but directly opposite meanings, although they are often used as equivalent, almost as synonyms. We believe that we have understood some new phenomenon when we include it in the connection of others previously known. And since all our mental aspirations come down to understanding the world, we refuse to learn a lot that does not fit on the plane of the modern worldview ... Therefore, let's stop being upset by the disagreements of our judgments and wish that in the future there were as many as possible. There is no truth - it remains to be assumed that it is in changeable human tastes.
L. Shestov. Apotheosis of groundlessness. Experience of adogmatic thinking. - L .: Publishing house of the Leningrad University, 1991. S. 174.