The art of questioning. Truth and Method

H. G. GADAMER

TRUTH AND METHOD:

FUNDAMENTALS OF PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

Introduction

The phenomenon of understanding and correct interpretation of what is understood is not only a special methodological problem of the spiritual sciences. For a long time, there also existed theological and legal hermeneutics, which was not so much of a scientific and theoretical nature, but rather corresponded to and contributed to the practical actions of a scientifically educated judge or priest. Thus, by its very nature historical origin the problem of hermeneutics goes beyond the framework assumed by the concept of method, as it has developed in modern science. Understanding and interpreting texts is not only a scientific task, but clearly relates to the totality of human experience as a whole. Initially, the hermeneutic phenomenon is not a problem of method at all. We are not talking here about some method of understanding that would make texts an object of scientific knowledge, like all other objects of experience. What we are talking about here, in general, is not primarily about building any system of firmly grounded knowledge that meets the methodological ideal of science - and yet here, too, we are talking about knowledge and truth. When understanding what is handed down to us by historical tradition, one or another text is not simply understood, but certain ideas are developed and certain truths are comprehended. What kind of knowledge is this and what is this truth?

Hermeneutics is not some kind of methodology of the sciences of the spirit, but is an attempt to finally agree on what the sciences of the spirit truly are, in addition to their methodological self-awareness, as well as what connects them with the integrity of our experience of the world. And if we make an understanding of the objects of our reflections, then the goal that we set for ourselves is not at all the doctrine of the art of understanding texts, which is what traditional philological and theological hermeneutics strived for. Such a teaching would not realize that in the face of the truth that speaks to us from the depths of historical tradition, a formally skillful ability to understand and interpret would mean a completely inappropriate claim to superiority. And if it is shown below to what extent any understanding is an accomplishment and to what little extent modern historical consciousness is capable of weakening the traditions in which we live, then all this does not at all seek to give the sciences and life practice itself any prescriptions; all this is trying only to correct false ideas about what they really are.

Philosophical hermeneutics - the philosophical movement of our century

Philosophical hermeneutics includes the philosophical movement of our century, which has overcome the one-sided orientation towards the fact of science, which was self-evident for both neo-Kantianism and positivism of that time. However, hermeneutics takes its corresponding place in the theory of science if it discovers within science, with the help of hermeneutic reflection, the conditions of truth that do not lie in the logic of research, but precede it. In the so-called human sciences it is revealed to some extent - as can be seen from their very designation in English ("moral sciences") - that their subject is something to which the knower himself necessarily belongs.

This aspect can even be attributed to the “correct” sciences. However, a distinction is needed here. If in modern microphysics the observer is not eliminated from the results of measurements, but exists in the very statements about them, then this has a precisely defined meaning that can be formulated in mathematical expressions. If in modern studies of relationships the researcher discovers structures that also determine his own behavior through historical and tribal heredity, then he may learn something about himself, but precisely because he looks at himself through different eyes than from the point of view from the point of view of his “practice” and his self-awareness, if at the same time he does not submit to either the pathos of glorification or the pathos of humiliation of a person. On the contrary, if each historian’s own point of view on his knowledge and values is always visible, then stating this is not a reproach against his scientific character. It remains to be seen whether the historian errs due to the limitations of his point of view, misunderstanding and assessing the tradition, or whether he was able to correctly illuminate the hitherto unobserved due to the advantage of his point of view, which allowed him to discover something analogous to direct modern experience. Here we are in the thick of hermeneutic problems, but this does not mean that there were no methodological means of science with the help of which they tried to resolve the issue of true and untrue, eliminate misconceptions and achieve knowledge. In the "moral" sciences there is no trace of anything else that is not in the "proper" sciences.

This plays a role in empirical social sciences Oh. It is quite obvious that the formulation of the question here is guided by “pre-understanding”. We are talking about the current social system, which has the significance of a historically established, scientifically unprovable norm. It represents not only the subject of experimental scientific rationalization, but also its framework into which methodological work is “inserted.” The study resolves the problem in this case, mostly by taking into account the disturbances in existing social functional relationships or also by explaining by criticizing an ideology that challenges existing dominant relations. It is indisputable that here, too, scientific research leads to a corresponding scientific dominance of the thematized partial interconnection of social life; however, it is equally, of course, undeniable that this study encourages the extrapolation of its data to a complex relationship. The temptation is too great. And no matter how uncertain the factual foundations on the basis of which rational mastery of social life becomes possible, the social sciences are met by the need for faith, which literally captivates them and takes them beyond their boundaries.

We can illustrate this with some classic example given by J. S. Mill of the application of inductive logic to social science, namely meteorology. It is not only true that so far we have not achieved at least great confidence in long-term and extensive weather forecasts using modern data and their processing; but even if we had a perfect mastery of atmospheric phenomena, or, better, - since, in essence, this is not the point - if we had at our disposal an enormously increasing amount of data and their processing, and thereby more accurate prediction - new difficulties would immediately arise. The essence of scientific mastery of the course of events is such that it can serve any purpose. This means that if the problem of creating weather, influencing the weather arose, then the problem of the struggle of social and economic interests would arise, about which, in the current state of forecasting, we have only an insignificant idea, for example, with a random attempt by interested parties to influence weekly forecasts . Translated into the social sciences, the “mastery” of the social course of events necessarily leads to the “consciousness” of social engineers, which desires to be “scientific”, and its social partnership can never be completely rejected. There exists here special difficulty, which follows from the social functions of empirical social sciences: on the one hand, there is a desire to recklessly extrapolate empirical-rational research data to a complex situation - just to achieve generally scientific systematic actions; on the other hand, the pressure of interests confuses the question of who to use as a social partner in science to influence the social process in their spirit.

In fact, the absolutization of the ideal of “science” is a great blindness, which each time again leads to the fact that hermeneutic reflection is generally considered pointless. The narrowing of perspective that follows the thought of method seems difficult for the researcher to understand. He is always already focused on justifying the method of his experience, that is, he turns away from opposite direction reflections. Even if, while defending his consciousness of the method, he actually reflects, he again does not allow his reflection to become a theme of consciousness. Philosophy of science that considers scientific methodology as a theory and not taking part in any formulation of the question, which cannot be characterized as meaningful by the trial and error method, does not realize that by this characteristic it places itself outside of it.

The nature of things is such that a philosophical conversation with the philosophy of science never succeeds. Adorno's debate with Popper, like Habermas's with Albert, makes this very clear. Hermeneutic reflection is viewed most consistently as theological obscurantism in scientific empiricism when it raises “critical rationalism” to the absolute scale of truth.

Fortunately, the correspondence in things may consist in the fact that there is only a single “logic of research”, but this is not all, since the selective point of view, which, in accordance with the circumstances, highlights a certain formulation of the question and raises it to the topic of research itself cannot be derived from the logic of the study. It is noteworthy here that they want to give the theory of science, for the sake of rationalism, to complete irrationalism, and the thematization of such a cognitive-practical point of view through philosophical reflection is considered illegal; after all, a philosophy that does this is reproached precisely because it is protected in its assertions from experience. Proponents of this approach do not understand that they themselves contribute in a more dependent way to isolation from experience, for example from common sense human meaning and life experience. This always happens when scientific understanding partial connections are reinforced by uncritical application, for example when responsibility for policy decisions is assigned to experts. The debate between Popper and Adorno retains something unsatisfactory when analyzing the same thing in Habermas. One can agree with Habermas that hermeneutic pre-understanding is always in play and therefore requires reflexive explanation. But at this point we stand on the other side of “critical rationalism” and therefore cannot consider the complete explanation illusory.

Hermeneutical reflection for the methodology of knowledge

In view of this state of affairs, two points again require clarification: what does hermeneutic reflection mean for the methodology of knowledge and what is the situation with the task of critical thinking in relation to the traditional understanding?

The sharpening of intense attention to truth and method has political meaning. After all, as Descartes himself recognized, it is the particular structure of straightening a bent thing that has to do with the fact that it should be bent in the opposite direction. But what was bent in this case was not so much the methodology of science as the reflexive self-awareness. This conclusion seems to follow quite clearly from the analysis of post-Hegelian historians and from hermeneutics itself. There is a naive understanding when they are afraid, further and further following E. Beggie, that scientific objectivity will be eroded due to hermeneutic reflection. In this, both Appel and Habermas, representatives of, for example, “critical rationalism,” are equally blind. They deny all the claims of our analysis to reflection, and therefore also to the sense of application, which we try to show as the structural moment of all understanding. They are so caught up in the methodologism of scientific theory that they constantly have in mind the rules and their application. They do not recognize that reflection on practice is not a technique.

What we reflect on is the experience of the sciences themselves and the limitations of objectivity that must be considered in them (and not somehow recommended). To recognize the productive meaning of such restrictions, for example in the form of a productive prejudice, seems to be nothing less than a commandment of scientific integrity for which the philosopher vouches. How can one say such things to philosophy, which is aware of this, encouraging it to act uncritically and subjectively in science! This seems as senseless as if, on the contrary, one began, for example, to expect the demands of logical thinking from mathematical logic or to expect the demands of scientific research from the theory of knowledge of critical rationalism, which calls itself “the logic of research.” Theoretical logic, like the philosophy of science, rather satisfies the philosophical requirement for justification and is secondary in relation to scientific practice. For all the differences that exist between the natural sciences and the humanities, the general immanent significance of the critical methodology is, in fact, undeniable. Even the most critical rationalist will not deny that the application of scientific methodology is preceded by determining factors that concern the appropriateness of the choice and the posing of questions in it.

The last reason for the confusion that prevails in this case in the methodological aspect of science seems to us to be the destruction of the concept of practice. In the era of science with its ideal of reliability, this concept became legalized. Since science now sees its goal in the isolated analysis of the causal factors of phenomena - in nature and in society, it deals with practice only as an application of science. But it is a “practice” that does not require any reporting data. Thus, the concept of technology includes the concept of practice, in other words: the competence of the expert has pushed aside political reason.

As we see, hermeneutics plays not only the role in science that is being discussed, but also acts as human self-awareness in the modern era of science. One of the most important lessons that the history of philosophy provides for this urgent problem is the role played in Aristotle's ethics and politics by practice and the knowledge that illuminates and guides it, the practical mind or wisdom, which Aristotle calls phronesis. The sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics has left us the best introduction to this forgotten problem. On this occasion, we refer you to the work - the report “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy”, which is included in the collection “Towards the Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy”, organized by M. Riedel. The great background of the tradition of practical (and political) philosophy, dominant from Aristotle until the beginning of the nineteenth century, if considered philosophically, lies in the dependence of the cognitive contribution that relates to practice.

The concrete particular turns out to be here not only the starting point, but also the moment that always determines the content of the universal.

We know this problem in the form that Kant gave it in the Critique of Judgment. Kant distinguishes the determining faculty of judgment, which subsumes the particular under a given universal, from the reflective faculty of judgment, which especially seeks the universal concept behind the given. Hegel, it seems to me, correctly showed that the separation of these two functions of the faculty of judgment is a pure abstraction and that the faculty of judgment in reality always consists of both. The universal, under which the particular is subsumed, thereby continues to exist in itself. After all, in this way the legal meaning of laws is determined by judicial practice, and the fundamental universality of the norm is determined through the specificity of an individual case. As is known, Aristotle went so far that on this basis he declared even Plato’s idea of the good empty, and in fact, it is quite fair if the latter really should have been thought of as existing in the highest degree of universality.

If we join the tradition of practical philosophy, this will help us isolate ourselves from the technical self-awareness of the scientific concepts of the New Age. But this condition does not exhaust the philosophical intention of our attempt. We do not notice at all that in the hermeneutic conversation we are having, we follow this philosophical intention. The concept of play, which several decades ago was removed from the subjective sphere of the “craving for play” (Schiller), we were forced to turn to the criticism of “aesthetic difference,” includes an ontological problem. Indeed, this concept unites the playful interweaving of appearance and understanding, even the linguistic play of our life experience, as they were presented by Wittgenstein in his metaphysical-critical analysis. As an “ontologization,” language can appear in our formulation of the question, however, only when the question of the prerequisites for the instrumentalization of language remains without attention at all. It is indeed the problem of philosophy that hermeneutic practice puts forward to reveal those ontological implications that lie in the “technical” concept of science, and to achieve theoretical recognition of hermeneutic experience. And here the philosophical conversation should be brought to the fore, its revival, which is necessary not in order to renew Platonism, but rather in order to, by resuming the conversation with Plato, return to what stands behind the recognized concepts of metaphysics and those not further recognized by it consequences. Whitehead's "Interlinear Notes on Plato" may play important role in solving this problem, as Wiel correctly noted (see his introduction to the German edition of Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas). In any case, our intention was to combine the scales philosophical hermeneutics with Platonic dialectics, and not with Hegelian. The third volume of "Little Works" already with its title page shows why it is called "Idea and Language." With all due respect to the modern study of language, it must be said that the technical self-knowledge of modern science obscures its hermeneutical scope and the philosophical tasks that are inherent in it.

Philosophical issues surrounding hermeneutic issues

About scale philosophical questions that surround hermeneutic issues, a good representation is given by the collection “Hermeneutics and Dialectics” (1970), namely by the wide range of articles contained in it. Gradually, philosophical hermeneutics became a constant partner in the conversation, even its own special areas of hermeneutic methodology.

The conversation about hermeneutics extends here primarily to four scientific fields: on legal hermeneutics, theological hermeneutics, literary theory, as well as on the logic of social sciences.

The importance of hermeneutics in the social sciences was critically assessed primarily by J. Habermas.

Also important from this point of view is the issue of Continuum in which Frankfurt critical theory confronts hermeneutics. A good overview of the general situation with this issue in the historical sciences is given by the report given by Karl-Friedrich Gründer at a congress of historians in 1970.

However, let's return to the theory of science. The problem of relevance is not limited to the humanities. What are facts in natural science does not imply all any exact quantities, and those measurement data that answer the question represent confirmation or denial of the hypothesis. In the same way, established experimental data on the measurement of certain quantities are not confirmed as a result of the fact that these measurements are carried out in the most precise manner according to all the rules of art. They receive their confirmation only in the context of research. Thus, all science includes a hermeneutic component. The proposition that an abstractly isolated historical question or fact can yield little is obviously similar for the field of natural science. But this in no way means that the rationality of the method itself is thereby limited, to the extent possible. The scheme of “constructing hypotheses and testing them” persists in any research, and in the historical sciences even within philosophy - and, of course, there is always a danger that the rationality of the method will be taken as a sufficient confirmation of the meaning of what is “known” with its help.

But if the problem of relevance is recognized, then one can hardly dwell on Max Weber’s slogan about the freedom of values. Blind decisionism regarding the latter goal, in defense of which Max Weber openly spoke out, cannot satisfy. Here methodical rationalism ends in crude irrationalism. They add to it the so-called existential philosophy, which fundamentally does not recognize things. The opposite is true. What Jaspers meant by the concept of illumination of existence was, most likely, the last decision to lay the foundation for rational illumination (it was not for nothing that this was considered inseparable from “reason and existence”) - and Heidegger makes a final, even more radical conclusion: to explain the dubiousness of the difference between value and existence. fact and unravel the dogmatic concept of "fact". Meanwhile, in natural science the question of value does not play any role. Due to own works researchers, however, are subject, as already mentioned, to hermeneutically explicable connections. But they do not step beyond the circle of their methodological competence. At most, an analogy appears at one single point: in the question of whether they are really completely independent of the linguistic picture of the world in their scientific problems in which researchers live as researchers - from the linguistic scheme of the world of their native language. But in one sense, here too, hermeneutics is always in play. Even if all the minor nuances specific to the native language are filtered out, the problem of “translating” scientific knowledge into a universally valid language always remains, through which only natural science receives its communicative universality, and thereby its social relevance. But then this does not concern the research as such, and only indicates that it is not “autonomous”, but is located in a social context. This circumstance has implications for all science. Meanwhile, there is absolutely no need to have a desire to reserve special autonomy for the “understanding” sciences, and one cannot help but notice that pre-scientific knowledge plays a much larger role in them. Of course, you can give yourself pleasure, and call everything that is such “unscientific and rationally unverifiable,” etc. But precisely in this way it will be recognized that this is the state of such sciences. Then it is necessary to raise the following objection: pre-scientific knowledge, which is found as a sad remnant of unscientificness in such sciences, is precisely what constitutes originality, and it undoubtedly determines the practical and social life of man to a much greater extent, including the conditions for practicing science in general, than that what could be achieved through rationalization human connections. Is it really possible to want everyone to trust an expert in decisive issues of both public and political, and private and personal life? Indeed, in the specific application of his science, a specialist will use not his science, but his practical reason. And why should a specialist - even if he is an ideal social engineer - have more intelligence than other people?

For this reason, it seems to us a downright betrayal when the hermeneutic sciences are condemned with arrogant ridicule, claiming that they have restored the Aristotelian qualitative picture of the world. We are not talking about the fact that perfect science does not apply quantitative methods everywhere - for example, in morphological disciplines. But let us allow ourselves to refer to the fact that the pre-knowledge that we receive from our linguistic orientation in the world (and this really underlies the so-called “science” of Aristotle) plays a certain role wherever life experience is processed, where linguistic traditions are understood and where social life functions. Such foreknowledge is not, of course, any critical authority in relation to science, and is itself subject to critical comments from science, but it is and remains the leading medium of all understanding. From here a special methodological type of understanding sciences is created. They openly set the task of setting a boundary for the education of professional terminology and, instead of constructing a special language, engage in “general language” means. One can probably add here that the “Logical Propaedeutics” presented by Kamla and Lorenzen, which requires philosophers to methodically “introduce” all legitimate concepts for scientifically confirmed statements, itself goes from the hermeneutic area of presupposed linguistic pre-knowledge to critically purifying word usage. The ideal of such a construction of scientific language, which, without a doubt, in all areas, especially in logic and theory of knowledge, provides important explanations and in the field of philosophy is the education of responsibility for language, no boundaries should be set. What was undertaken in Hegelian logic under the influence main idea about philosophy, which embraces all science, Lorenzen again tries to do in reflection on “research” for its logical justification. This is a logical task, of course, but I would like to argue that the source of knowledge and prescience, which originates in the interpretations of the world settled in speech, retains its regularity even when they want to improve the ideal scientific language, - and this matters precisely for “philosophy”. The historical-conceptual explanation, which is given a place in the book and which is used as far as possible, was put to an end by the reproach of Kaml and Lorenzen that tradition as such cannot make any definite and unambiguous judgment. And really, none. But one can be responsible to this tradition, which means: not inventing a language that corresponds to a new understanding, but using an existing language - this seems to us a natural requirement. For the language of philosophy, it is only feasible when it manages to leave open the path from word to concept and from concept to word on both sides. It seems that for Kamla and Lorenzen, word usage is an instance of their own course of action, which they often take into account. They, of course, do not provide any methodical construction of language through the gradual introduction of concepts. But this is also a “method” that makes it possible to realize the implications lying in terms of concepts, and, as we think, corresponds to the subject of philosophy. After all, the subject of philosophy is not limited to the reflexive elucidation of the method of science. And it does not consist in the formation of a “sum” from the diversity of our knowledge and thereby in rounding out the “worldview” as a whole. Of course, philosophy - like no other science - must deal with our world and life experience in general, but only in the way that life and world experience itself, expressed in language, does.

We are far from asserting that knowledge of this totality is truly solid knowledge, and moreover, it must be subject to ever new and profound criticism. However, one cannot ignore such "knowledge" in which the form always has expression in religious or folk wisdom, in works of art or in philosophical thoughts. Even Hegel’s dialectic - this does not mean a schematization of the method of philosophical proof, but the underlying experience of “playing out concepts that pretend to embrace the whole” in contrast to it” - this dialectic belongs to the forms of self-clarification and intersubjective depiction of our human experience.

We do not consider this reproach merely as the discovery of a deficiency, which can quite often occur. This, it seems to us, rather corresponds to the task of the philosophical language of concepts - to make it clear the value of precise delimitation of concepts from the confusion in the world of linguistic knowledge and thereby make the relationship to the whole alive. This is a positive implication of the “linguistic need” that has been inherent in philosophy from the very beginning. With a balanced conceptual system, in very special moments and under very special circumstances, which we will not find either in Plato or Aristotle, or in Meister Eckhart or Nicholas of Cusa, or in Fichte and Hegel, but perhaps we will find in Thomas Aquinas, Hume and Kant, this poverty of language remains hidden, but even there it is necessarily revealed again only when following the movement of thought. In the Dakseldor report "History of Concepts and the Language of Philosophy". Words that are used in philosophical language and sharpened to conceptual precision constantly imply the moment of “object-speech” meaning and therefore retain something corresponding.

But the interconnection of meaning that sounds in every word of a living language is simultaneously included in the potential meaning of the term. This feature cannot be excluded in any application of general linguistic expressions for concepts. But in the natural sciences this is not required in the formation of concepts, since in them any use of concepts is controlled by the relationship to experience, that is, it obliges us to the ideal of unambiguity and prepares the logical content of statements.

Another thing is philosophy and, in general, those areas where the premises of pre-scientific linguistic knowledge are included in cognition. There, language, in addition to denoting what is given as unambiguously as possible, also has another function: it is “self-given” and brings this self-givenness into communication. In the hermeneutic sciences, linguistic formulation does not simply indicate the content of a subject that can be known in a different way after repeated testing, but also constantly figures out how to make its meaning clear. A special requirement for linguistic expression and the formation of concepts is that at the same time the interconnection of understanding in which the content of an object means something must be noted. The concomitant meaning which the expression has does not thus obscure its clarity (since it ambiguously signifies the general), but enhances it, since the implied connection is achieved in clarity as a whole. This is the whole that is built with the help of words and only in words becomes a given.

This phenomenon is traditionally looked at as a purely stylistic issue and attributed to the field of rhetoric, where persuasion is achieved through the arousal of affects, or modern aesthetic concepts are invented. Then “self-givenness” appears as an aesthetic quality that originates in the metaphorical nature of language. There is no need to add that here lies the moment of cognition. But it seems to us that the opposition between the logical" and the "aesthetic" is dubious where we are talking about a real language, and not about the logical artificial construction of orthography, as it appears to Lorenzen. It seems to us an equally logical task to allow the possibility of interference between all proper linguistic elements, artificial expressions and etc. and in ordinary language. This is a hermeneutical task; in other words, the other pole of the definition of word correspondence.

These considerations lead us to the history of hermeneutics. In trying to present it, the task is essentially to prepare for this and create a background, as a result of which our presentation of the history of hermeneutics revealed a certain one-sidedness.

Language as a horizon of hermeneutic ontology

Modern science, with its methods of mathematical measurement, had, as the example of Bacon shows, to conquer space for its own constructive plans precisely from the prejudices generated by language and the naive teleology of language.

On the other hand, there is a positive significant connection between the factuality of language and a person’s ability to science. This is especially clearly seen in the example of ancient science, whose origins in the linguistic experience of the world constitute its specific difference and its specific weakness. In order to overcome its weakness, its naive anthropocentrism, modern science had to sacrifice its difference, its inclusion in the natural human relationship to the world. This can be very well illustrated by the concept of theory. What is called theory in modern science has, as it seems, almost nothing in common with the contemplative-cognitive position from which the Greeks perceived the world order. Modern theory is a constructive means that allows us to generalize experience and creates the opportunity to master this experience.

As the language itself says, we build theories. This already implies that one theory cancels and that each initially claims only relative significance until something better is found.

The ancient “theory” was not a means in this sense; she herself was the goal, the highest degree of human existence. Nevertheless, there is a close relationship between ancient and modern science. In both cases, the theoretical approach means overcoming the practical-pragmatic interest that considers everything that happens in the council own intentions and goals. Aristotle tells us that theoretical life position could arise only where everything necessary to satisfy simple vital needs. Also modern theoretical science He turns his questions to nature not for the sake of any specific practical goals. Although it is true that the method of posing her questions, her research is aimed at conquering existence and to that extent in itself should be called practical, however, for the consciousness of the individual scientist practical use his knowledge is secondary in the sense that although it follows from this knowledge, it is only retroactively, since the one who knows something is not obliged to know to what what he knows can be applied.

Despite this, with all the correspondences, the difference is already reflected in the meaning of the words theory, theoretical. In modern usage, the theoretical turns out to be an almost privative concept. Something is only theoretical if it does not have the obligatory purpose that determines our actions. And vice versa, the theories developed here are themselves determined by a constructive idea, that is, theoretical knowledge itself is considered from the point of view of conscious mastery of existence: not as a goal, but as a means. Theory in the ancient sense is something completely different. Here the existing order as such is not simply contemplated, but theory means, moreover, the participation of the contemplator in the holistic order of existence itself.

The real basis of this difference between Greek theory and modern science is, in my opinion, different attitude to the linguistic experience of the world. Greek knowledge, as we emphasized above, was so rooted in this experience, so susceptible to the temptations of language, that its struggle with the power of words never led to the creation of the ideal of a pure language of signs, completely overcoming the power of words, as happened in the case of modern science with its focus on mastering what exists.

Like the letter symbolism used by Aristotle in logic, the proportional-relative method of describing motor processes, which he resorted to in physics, is obviously something completely different from the application that mathematics received in the 17th century.

Turning to the origins of science among the Greeks, this should under no circumstances be overlooked.

The days have finally passed when it was possible to use modern scientific methods as a single scale, allowing one to interpret Plato from the point of view of Kant, an idea from the point of view of the law of nature (neo-Kantianism), or to consider the teachings of Democritus as the first, albeit failed attempt at true (mechanical) knowledge of nature .

Already the fundamental overcoming of the point of view of reason in Hegel with the help of the idea of life shows the limits of such an approach. Heidegger, it seems to me, has found in being and time a point of view that allows us to think about the difference between Greek and modern science, as well as what connects them. Having put forward the concept of existence (vorhandenheit) as a certain insufficient mode of being, having recognized the untrue background of classical metaphysics and its completion in the idea of subjectivity of modern times, he discovered the real ontological connection between Greek (theory) and modern science. In the perspective of his temporal interpretation of being, classical metaphysics as a whole turns out to be the ontology of the present, and modern science, without knowing it, is its heir.

Of course, there were other aspects in the Greek theory itself. Theory comprehends not so much the present as the thing itself, which still had the dignity of a thing.

That the experience of a thing has as little in common with the simple establishment of pure presence as with the experience of the so-called empirical sciences, Heidegger himself later emphasized.

The dignity of a thing, like the facticity of language, must thus be freed from prejudice against the ontology of the present, and consequently from the concept of objectivity.

We proceed from the fact that linguistic design of the human experience of the world, it is not the measurement or accounting of what is present that occurs, but the existence itself acquires a voice in the form in which it manifests itself to man as an existing and significant thing. It is in this - and not in the methodological ideal of rational design that dominates modern mathematical science, - the understanding carried out in the sciences of the spirit recognizes itself.

If above we used the concepts of its linguistic nature to characterize the method of effectively realizing historical consciousness, then the reason for this is that the human experience of the world in general has a linguistic character. Just as little (the world) is objectified in this experience, just as little the history of influences is the subject of hermeneutic consciousness.

GADAMER Hans-Georg(1900–2002) – German philosopher, founder of philosophical hermeneutics. Following Heidegger, Gadamer interpreted the phenomenon of understanding not as an instrumental-logical act, but as a way of human existence. Gadamer paid great attention to the study of historical science. According to Gadamer, a historian turning to any historical text always has some “preliminary understanding” (Vorverstandnis) of this text, given to him by the tradition in which he lives and thinks. It can be adjusted in the process of working on the text, but the historian cannot completely free himself from the premises of his thinking: precondition-free thinking does not exist, since being is time, and human experience is finite. To characterize preliminary understanding, Gadamer used the word “prejudice,” which meant something that preceded reasoning and reflection, a certain pre-reflective attitude of consciousness. It is completely impossible to renounce prejudice, but it is possible, as Gadamer said, to bring it into a balanced state - this is the task of the historian. The condition for achieving such a state is the presence of a temporary distance between the researcher and what is being studied.

Publications in Russian: "The relevance of beauty"; "Truth and Method"; "What is truth?"

Hermeneutics is a universal aspect of philosophy, and not just a methodological basis for the so-called spiritual sciences.<...>The phenomenon of understanding not only permeates all human connections with the world. Also in science it has an independent meaning and resists all attempts to turn it into any scientific method. The proposed research is based on this opposition, which asserts itself within the framework of modern science itself, contrary to the universal claims of scientific methodology. Their task is to reveal the experience of truth beyond the realm controlled by scientific method wherever we encounter it, and to question its own justification. Thus, the sciences of the spirit come closer to such methods of comprehension that lie beyond the boundaries of science: with the experience of philosophy, with the experience of art, with the experience of history itself. All these are methods of comprehension in which truth proclaims itself, which is not subject to verification by the methodological means of science.<...>

The way we perceive each other, the way we perceive historical tradition, then, finally, the way we perceive the natural givens of our existence and our world - all this forms a real hermeneutic universe, in which we are not locked, as if within immutable boundaries, but to whom and for whom we are open.<...>

Within the framework of hermeneutic experience, the linguistic form cannot be separated from the content that has come down to us in this form. If every language is a worldview, then it owes this not to the fact that it is a certain type of language (in which capacity the linguist considers it), but to what is said or, accordingly, transmitted in this language.<...>It is by no means the acquisition of a foreign language itself, but its application - be it live communication with foreigners or classes foreign literature– mediates the new position with the “previous vision of the world.” Even when we are completely immersed in a type of spirituality that is alien to us, we do not forget “our own worldview and, moreover, our own idea of language.” Rather, the other world that comes towards us is not just alien to us, but is itself different in relation to us. Not only does he contain his own truth, he also has that truth for us.

The Other World, comprehended here, is precisely not a simple subject of study, a subject in which we “understand”, in which we “know a lot”.<...>

A person living in the world is not just equipped with language as a kind of equipment - but what the world is for a person in general is based on language and is expressed in it. For man, the world is “here” as the world; For no other creature living in the world does the world possess such a here-being. However, this here-being of the world is a linguistic being. This is the real heart of the statement that Humboldt makes in a very different context when he says that languages are worldviews. Humboldt argues here that language has a kind of independent existence in relation to an individual person belonging to a given linguistic community, and that the language in which a person grows up determines at the same time his connection with the world and his attitude towards the world. More important, however, is what underlies this statement, namely that language, for its part, does not have an independent existence in relation to the world, which receives linguistic expression in it (zur Sprache kommt). Not only is the world a world only insofar as it receives linguistic expression, but the true existence of language consists solely in the fact that the world is expressed in it. Thus, the original humanity of language means at the same time the original linguistic character of human existence-in-the-world. If we want to gain the right horizon for understanding the linguistic nature of hermeneutic experience, we must explore the connection that exists between language and the world.

To have peace means to have a relationship with the world. But the attitude towards the world requires such freedom from what we encounter in the world that would allow us to put this encounter before us as it is. This possibility of representation means both the possession of the world and the possession of language. The concept of the world (Welt) thus turns out to be opposite to the concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt), which all creatures living in the world possess.

Of course, the concept of the surrounding world was originally used in relation to the world surrounding a person - and only to him. The surrounding world is the “environment” (“Milieu”) in which a person lives; its significance lies in the influence it has on a person’s character and lifestyle. Man is by no means independent of the special aspect that the world shows him. Consequently, the concept of the surrounding world was originally a social concept, speaking about the dependence of the individual on the social world, that is, a concept related exclusively to man. However, in a broader sense, this concept can be extended to all living things; in this case it summarizes the conditions on which its existence depends. But it is precisely this expansion that shows that man, unlike all other living beings, has a “world,” since these beings do not know the relationship to the world in the human sense, but are, as it were, admitted (eingelassen) into the world around them. Thus, the extension of the concept of the surrounding world to all living things actually changes the very meaning of this concept.

Therefore, we can say this: man’s attitude to the world, in contrast to all other living beings, is characterized precisely by freedom from the surrounding world. This freedom includes the linguistic structure (VerfaBtheit) of the world. One is connected to the other. To resist the onslaught of things encountered in the world, to rise above them, means to have a language and to have peace. The newest philosophical anthropology, starting from Nietzsche, considered the special position of man precisely in this aspect; she showed that the linguistic structure of the world least of all means that a person with his attitude to the world is driven into the world around him schematized by language (M. Scheler, H. Plesner, A. Gehlen). On the contrary, wherever the network of language is a person, this person not only rises or has already risen above the onslaught of the world, but this freedom from the surrounding world is at the same time freedom in relation to the names with which we give things.<...>

What made hermeneutics effective... is that it has no strained relationship with the strict customs of science. No fruitful researcher can doubt in the depths of his soul that although methodological purity is inevitable for science, the mere application of familiar methods to a much lesser degree constitutes the essence of all research than the discovery of new ones - and behind this lies creative fantasy researcher. What has been said has significance not only in the field of the so-called humanities.

In addition, there is hermeneutic reflection, which was established in the work "Truth and Method", everything else is just a play of concepts. It grows everywhere out of the concrete practice of science and exists, as a matter of course, for methodological beliefs, that is, controlled experience and falsifiability. Moreover, since this hermeneutic reflection has been found everywhere within the framework of the philosophy of our century, we must proceed from the fact that I tried to reconcile philosophy with science and, in particular, to fruitfully develop the radical problems of Martin Heidegger, to whom I owe most importantly - a wide region scientific experience, on which I gave only an overview. This, of course, forces one to step over the limited horizon of interests of the scientific-theoretical doctrine of method. But can one reproach the philosophical consciousness for the fact that it does not consider scientific research as an end in itself, but makes a problem, along with the actual philosophical formulation of the question, also the conditions and boundaries of science in its universality? human life? In an era when science is increasingly penetrating social practice, it can carry out its social function in an appropriate manner only when it does not hide its boundaries and the conventions of its field of activity. It is philosophy that must clarify this - in an age when people believe in science to the point of superstition. This is the basis of the fact that the tension of attention to truth and method has an enduring relevance.

Thus, philosophical hermeneutics includes the philosophical movement of our century, which has overcome the one-sided orientation towards the fact of science, which was self-evident for both neo-Kantianism and positivism of that time. However, hermeneutics takes its corresponding place in the theory of science if it discovers within science - with the help of hermeneutic reflection - conditions of truth that do not lie in the logic of research, but precede it. In the so-called human sciences it is revealed to some extent - as can be seen from their very designation in English ("moral sciences") - that their subject is something to which the knower himself necessarily belongs.<...>

In fact, the absolutization of the ideal of “science” is a great blindness, which each time again leads to the fact that hermeneutic reflection is generally considered pointless. The narrowing of perspective that follows the thought of method seems difficult for the researcher to understand. He is always already focused on justifying the method of his experience, that is, he turns away from the opposite direction of reflection. Even if, while defending his consciousness of the method, he actually reflects, he again does not allow his reflection to become a theme of consciousness. The philosophy of science, which regards scientific methodology as a theory and does not take part in any formulation of a question that cannot be characterized as meaningful by trial and error, does not realize that by this characteristic it places itself outside of it.

Fortunately, the consistency in things may consist in the fact that there is only a single “logic of research”, but this is not all, since a selective point of view, which, in accordance with the circumstances, highlights a certain formulation of the question and raises it to the topic of research , itself cannot be obtained from the logic of the study. It is noteworthy here that they want to give the theory of science, for the sake of rationalism, to complete irrationalism, and the thematization of such a cognitive-practical point of view through philosophical reflection is considered illegal; after all, a philosophy that does this is reproached precisely because it is protected in its assertions from experience. Proponents of this approach do not understand that they themselves contribute in a more dependent way to isolation from experience, for example from common human sense and life experience.<...>

The subject of philosophy is not limited to the reflexive elucidation of the method of science. And it does not consist in the formation of a “sum” from the diversity of our knowledge and thereby in rounding out the “worldview” as a whole. Of course, philosophy - like no other science - must deal with our world and life experience as a whole, but only in the same way as life and world experience itself, expressed in language, does. I am far from asserting that knowledge of this totality is truly solid knowledge, and moreover, it must be subjected to ever new and profound criticism. However, one cannot ignore such “knowledge” in which the form always has expression in religious or folk wisdom, in works of art or in philosophical thoughts. Even Hegel’s dialectic - I do not mean a schematization of the method of philosophical proof, but the underlying experience of “playing with concepts that pretend to embrace the whole, in contrast to it” - this dialectic belongs to the forms of self-clarification and intersubjective depiction of our human experience.<...>

My research is often criticized for its imprecise language. I do not regard this reproach as merely revealing a deficiency, which can often occur. This, it seems to me, rather corresponds to the task of the philosophical language of concepts - to make clear the value of precise delimitation of concepts from the confusion in world linguistic knowledge and thereby make the relationship to the whole alive. This is a positive implication of the “linguistic need” that has been inherent in philosophy from the very beginning. With a balanced conceptual system, in very special moments and under very special circumstances, which we will not find either in Plato or Aristotle, or in Meister Eckhart or Nicholas of Cusa, or in Fichte and Hegel, but perhaps we will find in Thomas Aquinas, Hume and Kant, this poverty of language remains hidden, but even there it is necessarily revealed again only when following the movement of thought. I then point to my Düsseldorf report “The History of Concepts and the Language of Philosophy.” Words that are used in philosophical language and sharpened to conceptual precision constantly imply the moment of “object-speech” meaning and therefore retain something inappropriate. But the interconnection of meaning that sounds in every word of a living language is simultaneously included in the potential meaning of the term. This feature cannot be excluded in any application of general linguistic expressions for concepts. But in the natural sciences this is not required in the formation of concepts insofar as in them any use of concepts is controlled by the relationship to experience, that is, it obliges us to the ideal of unambiguity and prepares the logical content of statements.

Another thing is philosophy and, in general, those areas where the premises of pre-scientific linguistic knowledge are included in cognition. There, language, in addition to designating what is given - as unambiguously as possible - also has another function: it is “self-given” and brings this self-givenness into communication. In the hermeneutic sciences, linguistic formulation does not simply indicate the content of a subject that can be known in a different way after repeated testing, but also constantly figures out how to make its meaning clear. A special requirement for linguistic expression and the formation of concepts is that at the same time the interconnection of understanding in which the content of an object means something must be noted. The concomitant meaning which the expression has does not thus obscure its clarity (since it ambiguously signifies the general), but enhances it, since the implied connection is achieved in clarity as a whole. This is the whole that is built with the help of words and only in words becomes a given.

Gadamer H.-G. Truth and Method. Fundamentals of philosophical hermeneutics. M., 1988. S. 39, 41-42, 510-514, 550, 615-619, 627-629.

"THE TRUTH AND THE METHOD: the main features of philosophical hermeneutics" (“Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik”, Tüb., 1960, Russian translation 1988) - the main work H.-G. Gadamer. The book is the result of almost forty years of work by Gadamer as a practicing “hermeneut” - an interpreter of various texts of the philosophical and literary tradition. The title is provocative: the conjunction “and” does not so much connect “truth” with “method” as contrast them to each other. According to Gadamer, the method of knowledge that became established along with the establishment of modern European science is neither unique nor universal. Human knowledge is essentially “non-methodical”; it can only in a few cases be subordinated to a certain method. In addition, science and the scientific-theoretical exploration of reality is only one of man’s relationships to the world. Art has a paradigmatic significance in this regard. Experience carried out in art and through art has no less cognitive potential than experience provided by natural science and “ exact sciences" Gadamer's book is dedicated to revealing the underestimated potential of this experience (the task of the book is essentially set by the work M. Heidegger "The Source of Artistic Creation").

Gadamer's work, in a certain sense, continues the “rehabilitation” of the humanities (the “spiritual sciences” going back to German romanticism), which began in late 1960s. 19th century V. Dilthey . However, Gadamer finds Dilthey’s concept of understanding (as well as his hermeneutics in general) insufficient. The interpretation of understanding proposed by Dilthey seems to Gadamer not free from psychologism. In an effort to emphasize the radicality of his break with Dilthey’s school, Gadamer emphasizes his closeness to Schleiermacher (the priority of “grammatical” interpretation over “psychological”) and to Hegel (the doctrine of “objective spirit”).

The book consists of three sections, which correspond to three dimensions of human existence: “aesthetic”, “historical” and “linguistic”. The purpose of each section is to show the inadmissibility of narrowing the “experience of truth” contained in art, history and language, respectively. In relation to art criticism (and to the aesthetic sphere in general), it can be argued that such a narrowing began with Kant. Although in Kant’s theory the primacy of “beautiful in nature” over “beautiful in art” is still preserved, Kant sees the basis of “beautiful” precisely in the a priori structure of subjectivity. This subsequently led to the predominance of the idea of “genius” over the idea of “taste” and to an increasing departure from the ontological parameters of a work of art towards “creative subjectivity”. Gadamer finds a counterbalance to the subjectivization of the phenomenon of art in the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel’s idea of the “artist” is not what the artist said, but what was expressed in him. Meaning is thus transcendental to the thinking subject. Understanding a work of art, we are dealing with a reality that does not fit into the subjectivity of its creator. In relation to historical science (Section 2 of the book), a similar reduction of the “experience of truth” occurs with the advent of the so-called historicism . The latter removed the “hermeneutical dimension” from the historical sphere: history began to be studied instead of understood. The texts of the past began to be approached “only historically,” i.e. to regard them solely as the product of certain socio-cultural circumstances, as if they were completely irrelevant to those who experience them. In an effort to overcome the limitations of a positivist-oriented historical science, Dilthey proposed a psychological approach to understanding the phenomena of the past: they must not only be explained based on a certain idea of the connection between the general and the particular, but also understood by reproducing the unique subjectivity of another in one’s own subjectivity. However, the hermeneutic problem, i.e. the problem of understanding is thereby not revealed. To understand, it is not enough for the interpreter to move into the “horizon” of the author; it is necessary to “remelt” their horizons. The latter can only happen thanks to something third - something common in which the positions of both can be reconciled. This “third” is language, considered from the point of view of its existential status, i.e. as a special reality within which a person finds himself and which cannot be captured by means of sociological or psychological research.

The third section of the book is devoted to revealing the ontological dimension of linguistic experience. Here Gadamer also appears as a faithful student of Heidegger. In the element of language, a person’s understanding of the world, his self-understanding, and people’s understanding of each other are realized. Language is the basic condition for the possibility of human existence; moreover, language in general is that “being that can be understood.” Being the load-bearing basis of the transmission cultural experience from generation to generation, language provides the possibility of tradition, and dialogue between different cultures is realized through the search for a common language. The pathos of the book lies in demonstrating the ontological rootedness of hermeneutic issues. In subsequent editions of Truth and Method, Gadamer, responding to criticism (E. Betti, J. Habermas, K. O. Apel, E. D. Hirsch, T. Seebom, etc.), clarified its individual theses, but did not refuse from its main idea: hermeneutics is not auxiliary discipline or methodology (even if endowed with the broadest powers), it has a universal character. “Truth and Method” became a programmatic essay philosophical hermeneutics and one of the most frequently cited sources of the existential-phenomenological direction of modern Western philosophy.

Gadamer associates the special role of hermeneutics in modern philosophy with the fact that the latter is not a direct and immediate continuation of the classical philosophical tradition, and is aware of “its distance from classical models.” The development of hermeneutics Gadamer thinks within the framework of “the ontological turn of hermeneutics to the guiding thread of language.” Heidegger also pointed out the connection between hermeneutics and language. Gadamer follows his teacher in many ways, including in the analysis of the categories that he uses in his teaching. Among them, first of all, it is necessary to highlight pre-understanding, tradition, prejudice, horizon of understanding. Pre-understanding is a prerequisite for understanding determined by tradition, therefore it should be one of the conditions for understanding. The totality of prejudices and prejudices determined by tradition constitutes what Gadamer calls the “horizon of understanding.” The central concept that determines everything else here is the concept of prejudice. It is characterized as a prejudgment, that is, “a judgment made before the final verification of all factual determining points.” “Prejudice,” therefore, does not at all mean an incorrect judgment; Its concept contains the possibility of both positive and negative assessment. Gadamer considers tradition connecting history and modernity to be one of the forms of authority. In modernity, elements of tradition are alive, which Gadamer called prejudices. On the one hand, these include some negative phenomena of the past that slow down the progress historical development, and on the other hand, they are the necessary components inherent in the language and in the ways of people’s mental activity that affect their speech-thinking and understanding activity and which, in this regard, must necessarily be taken into account in hermeneutic methods. Since any tradition is inextricably linked with language, expressed in it and, to a certain extent, conditioned by it, the primary subject and source of hermeneutical experience is precisely language as structural element cultural whole.

The main problem, according to Gadamer, is the difficulty of determining the nature of the manifestation in language of the prerequisites for understanding. Since “everything is in language,” how does language preserve the objective and subjective prerequisites for understanding? Language is the world that surrounds man; without language, neither life, nor consciousness, nor history, nor society are possible. We are defined by the language “in which we live.” Language is not only the “house of being” (Heidegger), but also a way of human existence, its essential property. Hence language becomes a condition cognitive activity person. Understanding is considered an integral function of language along with speaking. As a result, understanding turns from a property of cognition into a property of being, and the main task of hermeneutics becomes the clarification of the ontological status of understanding as a moment of human life. In an effort to comprehend the essence of human existence, hermeneutics acts as a kind of philosophical anthropology.

Gadamer X. G. Truth and Method. P. 43.

Structuralism

Structuralism is a direction in the philosophy of the 20th century, like hermeneutics, directly related to the development of humanitarian knowledge. The transition in the 20-50s of a number of humanities from the empirical-descriptive to the abstract-theoretical level required a change in the thinking style of humanities scientists, a change in the very subject of research, and, consequently, the philosophical justification for such changes. Structuralism came out under the slogan of objectivity and scientific rigor in the humanities and was perceived as a philosophical approach corresponding to the era of the scientific and technological revolution.

Structuralism became widespread in France, where in fact it turned out to be the only philosophical alternative to irrationalistic and subjectivist tendencies that deny the very possibility of objective scientific knowledge. Its leading representatives were: ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), cultural historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984), psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and others.

It should be noted that long before the advent of philosophical structuralism, structuralism emerged as a method of scientific research, called the method of structural analysis. Its essence lies in the isolation and study of the structure as a totality " hidden relationships"between the elements of the whole, the identification of which is possible only by the "power of abstraction". In this case, there is a mental abstraction from the substratum (natural, "material"; broader - content) specificity of the elements, only their "relational properties" are taken into account, that is, properties that depend on relationships , which connect some elements with others. For the first time, such a structure was identified in the study of language by the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure (1857-1913). Subsequently, this shift of attention from elements and their substrate properties to the relationships between elements and their “relational properties" was consolidated as the basic principle of structural analysis: “the methodological primacy of relationships over elements in the system.” Another methodological principle was the “primacy of synchrony over diachrony.” Structural analysis involves abstracting from the development of the system, its interactions and changes in different moments time (diachrony), it focuses on the study of the internal mechanisms of a static system, the internal interactions of elements coexisting at the same point in time (synchrony).

Representatives of French philosophical structuralism transferred the method of structural analysis of language to more complex cultural phenomena. The basis for such a transfer is the recognition that language is the foundation of all spiritual life. Therefore, cultural creativity is based on linguistic structures that determine human mental activity. They find their expression not only in spiritual activity, but also in the practical actions of a person, their norms and results. In fact, all products of sociocultural creativity are languages special kind- sign-symbolic systems. Any culture, according to Lévi-Strauss, can be considered as an “ensemble of symbolic systems,” which include, first of all, language, art, religion, and science.

In his works, Lévi-Strauss explored socio-spiritual phenomena characteristic of the life of primitive tribes: marriage rules, calculation of kinship, rituals, forms of religion, etc. Most attention he devoted to the analysis of mythological consciousness. He showed that in the myths of different peoples who never communicated with each other, there are common structures. The same mythological stories and images were reproduced, in his opinion, with literal accuracy in different regions of the world. The reason for this is that the logical structures of mythological consciousness are a kind of reproduction of the fundamental contradictions in the life of primitive society, which goes through the same stages of development on all continents.

Exploring the structures of mythological consciousness, Lévi-Strauss seeks to isolate what would be common to all cultures and therefore would be an expression of the objective mechanisms that determine cultural creativity man, the very functioning of the human intellect, in other words, to reveal the “anatomy of the human mind.” Thus, he tries to overcome psychologism and subjectivism in understanding man and various phenomena cultural life, revealing their objective and rational basis. Lévi-Strauss called his concept “superrationalism,” which seeks to integrate the sensual into the rational, and rationality is recognized as a property of the things themselves.

According to Lévi-Strauss, there is no qualitative difference between the mythological thinking of the distant past and the thinking of modern developed peoples. The logic of mythological thinking, he noted in his work “The Structure of Myths,” differs little from the logic of modern positive thinking; the difference concerns intellectual operations less than the nature of the things on which these operations are performed. Moreover, “savage thinking,” according to Lévi-Strauss, is characterized by a harmony of the sensual and rational, which has been lost by modern civilization. He saw such harmony in the ability of mythological consciousness not just to reflect, but to mediate and resolve the contradictions of human life with the help of “binary oppositions” of thinking and language (raw - cooked, vegetable - animal, etc.).

Lévi-Strauss argues that behind these opposites of language there are hidden real life contradictions, primarily between man and nature, and these contradictions are not simply reflected in mythological thinking in an “encrypted” form, but the repeated rearrangement and interchange of “binary oppositions” removes the original severity of these contradictions, and the human world becomes more harmonious.

R. Barth extended the approach of K. Lévi-Strauss from exotic phenomena to the sociocultural phenomena of modern European society. Because the structural analysis- this is an analysis of the spirit based on its objective embodiments, then in the means of communication, fashion, city structure, etc., Barthes believes, some fundamental “sociology” can be identified. Literature occupies a special place in Barth's research. Language, he believes, is not a simple instrument of content; it actively produces this content. Barthes analyzes the language of literary works of modernism as an analogue social revolution, where the split within the language is inseparable from the social split.

Linguistic material also became the object of analysis in the work of J. Lacan, who sought to return to the “authentic” 3. Freud. Lacan proves that there is a deep connection and similarity between the structures of language and the mechanisms of the unconscious in the human psyche. Reliance on language as a manifestation of the structure of the unconscious, in his opinion, creates the possibility of rational comprehension of the unconscious. On this basis, he not only formulates the tasks of psychoanalytic therapy (correction language disorders as a symptom of healing the sick), but also builds a cultural concept of personality. According to this concept, there is a fundamental dependence of the individual on the people around him (the “other”) as carriers of the symbolic - a set of social norms, regulations, etc. The individual finds them already ready and assimilates them mainly unconsciously. Hence, Lacan’s subject is not the bearer of consciousness and culture, but only their function, the point of intersection of various symbolic structures. The subject itself is nothing, an emptiness filled with cultural content. Lacan called his structuralist concept of personality (structure instead of personality) tragic anti-humanism, dispelling the illusion of man as a free and active being.

A similar attitude is developed by M. Foucault, but based on the history of scientific ideas. In his work “Words and Things. Archeology of the Humanities” (1966), he explores the rules of scientific speech, the system of which predetermines the formation of scientific disciplines. Without knowing it, Foucault wrote, naturalists, economists and grammarians applied the same rules to determine the object of their research, the formation of concepts and theories. He calls these rules episteme. Episteme is the most general rules and prerequisites of knowledge, operating in different areas of cultural life, hidden in the unconscious, constant, invariant foundations and models, according to which cultural formations of a certain era are built.

In general, the unconscious in the concept of structuralism is a hidden mechanism of sign systems that subordinates various impulses, emotions, ideas, memories and other elements of the psyche to structural laws. A person manipulates signs, constructs messages from them, but he does this unconsciously, automatically obeying certain rules. All this allows us to speak, according to structuralists, about the secondary nature of consciousness in relation to unconscious structures in cognitive activity and about the possibility of abandoning the very concept of the subject as the center, the starting point of free conscious activity and as the principle of its explanation. As a result, this should ensure, they believe, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, including knowledge of man, his life and culture.

In contrast to neopositivism, which declares general abstract structures to be only convenient mental constructs (conventions) that help organize experience, structuralists try to substantiate the objectivity and general validity of the results of humanitarian knowledge. As a result, a unique version of Kantianism emerged, which Lévi-Strauss called “Kantianism without a transcendental subject.” If in I. Kant the a priori forms of sensibility and reason (the concepts of “time”, “space”, etc.) are superimposed on the data of sensory intuition coming from outside and thus impart a universal and necessary character scientific knowledge, then among structuralists the role of a priori forms is played by the structures of the unconscious.

The “anti-subject” tendency of structuralism was taken to the extreme by Foucault. In his opinion, the very concept of “man” is a temporary phenomenon in the history of scientific and philosophical knowledge, caused by a specific episteme late XVIII century. This concept is doomed to disappear when this episteme is replaced by another. A person will disappear, just as an image inscribed on the sand of the sea disappears - this is how Foucault ends his book “Words and Things”. Later, Foucault softened his position; he largely revised his philosophical concept, since the inconsistency of the philosophy of structuralism itself became obvious.

Concrete studies of “primary” unconscious intellectual structures have previously led structuralists to contradictions, forcing them to moderate their philosophical claims and speak of their concept only as a certain philosophical hypothesis that can be used as “scaffolding.” In particular, we are talking about the problem of the historical changeability of sign systems, which is recognized by all structuralists. Why are these changes happening? Within the framework of structuralism there is no answer to this question. Therefore, over time, a transformation of the philosophical views of researchers begins: the structural method again turns into one of the scientific methods that does not pretend to global generalizations.

Part one Exposition of the problem of truth as applied to the knowledge of art I. Expansion of the aesthetic dimension into the realm of the transcendental 1. The importance of the humanistic tradition for the humanities a) PROBLEM OF THE METHOD The logical self-awareness of the humanities, which accompanied their actual formation in the 19th century, is completely dominated by the model of the natural sciences. This can be shown by the very consideration of the term “humanitarian science” (Geisteswissenschaft, lit., “science of the spirit”), although it receives its usual meaning only in the plural. The fact that the humanities are understood by analogy with the natural sciences is so obvious that the overtone of idealism inherent in the concept of spirit and the science of spirit recedes before this. The term “humanities” gained currency mainly due to the translator of “Logic” by John Stuart Mill. In his work, Mill consistently attempts to outline the possibilities available to the application of inductive logic to the field of the humanities (“moral sciences”). The translator at this point puts “Geisteswissenschaften.” From the very course of Mill’s reasoning it follows that here we are not talking at all about the recognition of some special logic of the humanities, but, on the contrary, the author seeks to show that the basis of all cognitive sciences is the inductive method, which appears as the only effective one in this area.Thus, Mill remains in line English tradition, which was most expressively formulated by Hume in the introduction to his Treatise 2 . In the moral sciences, it is also necessary to recognize the similarities, regularities, patterns that make individual phenomena and processes predictable. However 44 in the field of natural sciences this goal is not always equally achievable. The reason is rooted solely in the fact that the data on the basis of which similarities could be recognized are not always presented in sufficient quantity. Thus, meteorology works just as methodically as physics, but its initial data is lacunar, and therefore its predictions are inaccurate. The same is true for moral and social phenomena. The application of the inductive method in these areas is free from all metaphysical assumptions and remains completely independent of how exactly the formation of the observed phenomenon is conceived. For example, reasons are not invented here certain manifestations, but simply state regularity. Thus, regardless of whether one believes, for example, in free will or not, in the field of social life, prediction in any case turns out to be possible. Drawing conclusions about phenomena from the presence of patterns does not in any way mean recognizing something like the existence of a relationship, the regularity of which allows for the possibility of prediction. The implementation of free decisions - if they exist - does not interrupt the regularity of the process; U itself belongs to the sphere of generalizations and regularities obtained through induction. This is the ideal of “natural science” about society, which takes on a programmatic character here and to which we owe research successes in many areas; just remember the so-called mass psychology. However, this actually raises the problem that the humanities pose to thinking: their essence cannot be correctly understood if measured by the scale of progressive knowledge of laws. Knowledge of the socio-historical world cannot rise to the level of science through the use of inductive methods of the natural sciences. Whatever the word “science” means here, and no matter how widespread in historical science as a whole the application of more general methods to this or that object of study, historical knowledge nevertheless does not aim to represent specific phenomenon as a case illustrating general rule. The singular does not simply confirm a pattern that, in practical circumstances, allows predictions to be made. On the contrary, the ideal here should be an understanding of the phenomenon itself in its one-time and historical concreteness. At 45 in this case, exposure to an arbitrarily large amount of general knowledge is possible; the goal is not to fix and expand them for a deeper understanding of the general laws of development of people, nations and states, but, on the contrary, to understand what this person, this people, this state is like, what its formation was like, in other words - “how could it turns out that they became like this. What kind of knowledge is this that allows us to understand something as such through understanding the ways of its formation? What is called science here? And even if we admit that the ideal of this kind of knowledge is fundamentally different in type and attitudes from that accepted in the natural sciences, there still remains a temptation to turn in this case, at least privately, to such a characteristic as “inexact sciences.” Even the attempt (as significant as it is fair) to equalize the rights of the humanities and natural sciences, undertaken by Hermann Helmholtz in his famous speech of 1862, no matter how much he emphasized the superiority of the humanities in their universal significance, retained the negativity of their logical characteristics from the point of view methodological ideal of natural sciences3. Helmholtz distinguishes two types of induction: logical and artistic-instinctive. But this means that he distinguishes both ways of thinking at their basis not logically, but psychologically. They both use inductive inference, but the process that precedes inference in the humanities is unconscious inference. Thus, the practice of humanitarian induction is associated with special psychological conditions. It requires a kind of tact, and requires various spiritual qualities, such as a rich memory and recognition of authorities, while the self-conscious inferences of natural scientists, on the contrary, are based entirely on the inclusion of their own consciousness. Even if we admit that the great natural scientist resisted the temptation to make a generally binding norm out of his own way of working, he nevertheless clearly does not have any other logical possibility of characterizing the results of the human sciences other than with the help of the concept of induction familiar to him thanks to Mill's Logic. The fact that the new mechanics, which achieved triumph in Newton’s celestial mechanics, became the actual model for the sciences of the 18th century was still so self-evident for Helmholtz that he did not even ask the question, for example, 46 about what philosophical prerequisites ensured the formation of this new science for the 17th century. Today we know how important the Paris Occamist school was for this. For Helmholtz, the methodological ideal of the natural sciences does not need either a search for historical precedence or theoretical-cognitive restrictions, and therefore he is logically unable to understand the work of humanities scientists in any other way. An urgent task also urgently required a solution: to raise to logical self-knowledge such studies that had reached their full bloom, such as, for example, the studies of the “historical school.” Already in 1843, I. G. Droyzen, the author and discoverer of the history of Hellenism, wrote: “There is probably not a single field of science that is as remote, theoretically justified, limited and dissected as history.” Droysen already needs Kant, who saw in the categorical imperative of history “a living source from which the historical life of mankind flows.” He expects “that a more deeply comprehended concept of history will become that point of gravity where the current empty fluctuations of the humanities can find permanence and opportunities for further progress.”°. The example of the natural sciences, to which Droysen appeals here, is thus understood not meaningfully, in the sense of scientific-theoretical assimilation, but, on the contrary, in the sense that the humanities must find justification as an equally independent group of scientific disciplines. Droysen's "History" is an attempt to solve this problem. Dilthey, whose influence is much stronger natural scientific method and the empiricism of Millev’s logic, nevertheless firmly adheres to the romantic-idealistic traditions in the understanding of humanitarianism. He also experiences a constant feeling of superiority in relation to the English empirical school, since he directly observes the advantages of the historical school in comparison with any natural scientific and natural legal thinking. “Only from Germany can a truly empirical method come, taking the place of preconceived dogmatic empiricism. Mill is dogmatic for lack of historical education" - this is Dilthey's note on a copy of Mill's Logic 6. In fact, all the intense, decades-long work that Dilthey spent on establishing the humanities was " 47 constant confrontation with the logical demands that Mill's famous final chapter places on these sciences. Nevertheless, deep down, Dilthey agrees that the natural sciences are a model for the humanities, even when he tries to defend the methodological independence of the latter. This can be clarified by two pieces of evidence that simultaneously point the way to further observations. In his obituary dedicated to Wilhelm Scherer, Dilthey emphasizes that the spirit of natural science accompanied Scherer in his works, and attempts to explain why Scherer was so strongly influenced by the English empiricists: “He was a modern man, and the world of our ancestors was no longer his homeland his spirit and heart; he was his historical object" 7. This very turn of phrase shows that for Dilthey with scientific knowledge involves a severance of life ties, a departure to a certain distance from own history, allowing you to turn these connections and this history into objects. We can say that both Scherer and Dilthey use inductive! and a comparative method with genuine individual tact and that such tact arises only on the basis of a spiritual culture that maintains a living connection with the world of enlightenment and a romantic belief in individuality. Nevertheless, “in their scientific concept, both of them were guided by the example of natural Sci. Particularly evident here is Dilthey’s attempt to appeal to the independence of the method of the humanities, justifying it by their relationship to their object8. Such an appeal ultimately sounds quite Aristotelian and demonstrates a genuine rejection of the natural scientific model. However, Dilthey traces this independence of humanitarian methods back to the old Baconian thesis “natura parendo vin-citur” (“nature is conquered by submission”) 9, and this deals a sensitive blow to the classical-romantic heritage that Dilthey so sought to master. Thus, even Dilthey, to whom historical education gave advantages in relation to modern neo-Kantianism, in his logical constructions, in essence, did not go far beyond the modest statement proclaimed by Helmholtz. No matter how much Dilthey defends the theoretical-cognitive independence of the humanities, what is called method in modern science is the same everywhere 48 and only manifests itself in the field of natural sciences with the greatest consistency. There is no proper method of the humanities, but perhaps one can follow Helmholtz to ask to what extent the concept of method is used here and whether the style of work in the humanities is not influenced by certain conditions associated with them to a greater extent than inductive logic. Helmholtz correctly noticed this when, wanting to rehabilitate the humanities, he spoke about memory, authority and psychological tact, which in this field of knowledge take the place of conscious inference. What is this tact based on? How does it arise? Is the scientific nature of the humanities contained in it rather than in their methodology? Since the motivation for such questions is created by the humanities, which prevents the introduction of modernity into scientific concepts, they were and remain a strictly philosophical problem. The answer that Helmholtz and his century gave to these questions cannot satisfy us; they followed Kant, orienting the concepts of science and knowledge to the example of the natural sciences and searching for the distinctive features of the humanities in artistic aspects (artistic flair, artistic induction). At the same time, the picture of the work of a scientist in the natural sciences given by Helmholtz turns out to be rather one-sided when he is silent about the “quick lightning of the spirit” (that is, what is called insight) and prefers to find here only “the iron work of self-conscious inference.” He relies on the testimony of J. S. Mill, according to which “the inductive sciences have done more in modern times for progress logical method than all professional philosophers” 10. He recognizes these sciences as examples of the scientific method. However, Helmholtz knows that historical research is predetermined by a completely different type of knowledge than that which serves the study of the laws of nature. He therefore tries to argue that the inductive method, as applied to historical knowledge, is in different conditions than in the study of nature. In this regard, he turns to the distinction between nature and freedom, which lies at the heart of Kantian philosophy. Historical knowledge, in his opinion, is so unique precisely because in its sphere there are not the laws of nature, but voluntary submission to practical 49 Chinese laws, that is, commandments. The world of human freedom is therefore unfamiliar with the absence of exceptions established for the laws of nature. This line of thinking is nevertheless unconvincing. It corresponds neither to Kant's intentions, according to which the inductive investigation of the world of human freedom should be based on his distinction between nature and freedom, nor to his own ideas of inductive logic. Mill was more consistent, methodically bracketing the problem of freedom. But in addition, the inconsistency with which Helmholtz relies on Kant to justify the humanities also brings false fruits, since, according to Helmholtz, the empiricism of these sciences should be regarded in the same way as the empiricism of weather forecasts, namely as a refusal of an active position and an attempt to rely in case of. But in fact, the humanities are far from feeling inferior to the natural sciences. The spiritual followers of German classical philosophy, on the contrary, developed a proud self-awareness that they were the true defenders of humanism. The era of German classicism not only brought a renewal of literature and aesthetic criticism, which were able to overcome the outdated ideals of the Baroque and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but also gave a completely new content to the concept of humanity, this ideal of enlightened reason. Above all, Herder transcended the perfectionism of the Enlightenment with a new ideal of the “education of man” and thereby prepared the ground on which the historical sciences could develop in the 19th century. The concept of education (Bildung), which at that time captured the minds, was probably the greatest thought of the 18th century, and it was it that designated the “element” in which the humanities of the 19th century existed, even if they did not yet know its epistemological justification. b) LEADING HUMANISTIC CONCEPTS a) Education The concept of education helps us most clearly sense how deep the spiritual evolution is, allowing us to still feel like contemporaries 50 Goethe and, on the contrary, forcing the Baroque century to be considered a prehistoric time. Most meaningful concepts and the figures of speech with which we are accustomed to operate took their form precisely in this process, and those who do not want to engage with language, surrendering to the will of its elements, but strive to gain an independent and well-founded understanding of history, find themselves forced to move from one problem to another. area of the history of words and concepts to another. In the following presentation we will try to touch only on the prerequisites for the enormous work task, which confronts researchers here and contributes to the philosophical formulation of the problem. Concepts such as “art”, “history”, “creativity”, “worldview”, “experience”, “genius”, “ external world”, “inner world”, “expression”, “style”, “symbol”, which are taken for granted for us, are fraught with an abyss of historical connotations. If we turn to the concept of education, the importance of which for the humanities has already been emphasized, we find ourselves in a happy position. We have at our disposal a compact study of the history of this word: its origins rooted in medieval mysticism, its further existence in Baroque mysticism, its religiously based spiritualization in Klopstock's Messiah, which captured an entire era, and, finally, its seminal definition by Herder as “raz-stan_i_ya_k.zhadaoshi.” The religion of education in the 19th century retained the deep parameters of this word, and our concept of education comes from here. In relation to our usual meaning of the word “education”, the first important statement is that the older concept of “natural formation” as the formation of external manifestations (structure of body parts, proportional physique) and in general works of nature (for example, “mountain formation”) is already almost completely separated from the new concept. Now “education” is closely connected with the concept of culture and ultimately denotes a specific human way of transformation natural inclinations and opportunities. The final polishing of this concept, stimulated by Herder, ended in the period between Kant and Hegel. Kant does not yet use the word “education” in precisely this meaning and in such a connection. He talks about the “culture” of abilities (or “natural inclinations”), which in this capacity represents the act of freedom of the acting subject. Thus, among the responsibilities 51 in relation to himself, he also calls the duty “not to allow your talent to become covered with rust,” without using the word “education.” Hegel, on the contrary, talks about self-education and education when he raises the same question about duties in relation to to himself, which Kant 13, and Wilhelm von Humboldt fully perceives with his subtle hearing, which constituted his distinctive feature, already the whole difference in the meaning of “culture” and “education”: “... but when we say “education” in our language, we mean something at the same time high and rather internal, namely the type of understanding that harmoniously pours out on perception and character, originating in the experience and feeling of a combined spiritual and sensual aspiration.” Here “education” is no longer equivalent to culture, that is, the development of abilities or talents. Such a change in the meaning of the word “education” rather awakens the old mystical traditions, according to which man bears and nurtures in his soul the image of God, in whose likeness he was created. The Latin equivalent of this word is formatio, and it corresponds to it in other languages, for example in English (in Shaftesbury) form and formation. In German, the word “education” has long been competed with the corresponding derivative concepts forma, for example formation, formation (Formierung, Formation). Since the time of Aristotelianism, the concept of "form" was completely separated by the Renaissance from its technical meaning and was interpreted in a purely dynamic and natural sense. Nevertheless, the victory of the word “education” over “form” seems not accidental, since in “education” (Bildung) the “image” (Bild) is hidden. The concept of form retreats before the mysterious two-sidedness with which the “image” simultaneously includes the meanings of display, cast (Nachbild) and sample (Vorbild). That “education” (like the more modern word “formation”) denotes the result of the process of becoming rather than the process itself corresponds to the widespread transfer of the meaning of becoming to being. Here the transfer is quite legitimate, since the result of education is not represented as a technical intention, but stems from the internal process of formation and education and therefore is constantly in a state of continuation and development. It is no coincidence that the word “education” is identical to the Greek physis. Education, to the same small degree as nature, knows 52 about anything beyond the set goals. (One should be suspicious of the word and the associated concept “goal of education”, behind which a certain secondary “education” is hidden. Education cannot be the goal itself; one cannot strive for it in this capacity, even if only in the reflections of the educator.) This is precisely the superiority of the concept of education in relation to the simple cultivation of existing inclinations, from which it originated. Cultivation of inclinations is the development of something given; here the simple means of achieving the goal are exercise and diligence, which have become a habit. Thus, the educational material of a language textbook is just a means, and not the end itself. Its assimilation serves only the development of language skills. In the process of education, on the contrary, on what and thanks to what someone receives an education must be assimilated entirely. In this regard, education includes everything that it touches, but all this does not enter as a means that loses its functions. On the contrary, in the education received, nothing disappears, but everything is preserved. Education is a truly historical concept, and it is precisely this historical character of “preservation” that must be discussed in order to understand the essence of the humanities. Thus, the very first glance at the history of the word “education” introduces us to the circle of historical concepts that Hegel initially placed in the sphere of “first philosophy.” In practice, Hegel developed the most subtle concept of what education is. We follow him here. 15 He also saw that for philosophy “the conditions of its existence lie in education,” and we will add to this that this is also true of the humanities in general. For the existence of the spirit is essentially connected with the idea of education. Man is distinguished by the fact that he breaks with the immediate and natural; this is required of him by the spiritual, rational side of his being. “Taken from this side, he is not by nature what he should be,” and therefore he needs education. What Hegel called the formal essence of education is based on its universality. Based on the concept of the rise to the universal, Hegel was able to uniformly comprehend what in his time was understood as education. The rise to universality is not limited to theoretical education and generally does not imply only theoretical aspect as opposed to the practical, but embraces the essential 53 definition of human intelligence in general. The general essence of human education is that man makes himself in every respect a spiritual being. One who indulges in particulars is uneducated, for example, one who does not control his blind, disproportionate and irrelevant anger. Hegel shows that such a person initially lacks the ability to abstract: he cannot abstract himself from himself and look at the general by which his particular is proportionately and relatively determined. Education as an ascent to the universal is thus the task of man. It requires sacrificing the common and the special. Negatively, sacrificing characteristics means curbing drives and thereby freedom from their objects and freedom for one’s objectivity. Here the deductions of phenomenological dialectics complement what was introduced in the Propaedeutics. In “Phenomenology of Spirit” Hegel develops the genesis of a truly free “in itself and for itself” self-consciousness and shows that the essence of labor is to create a thing, and not to consume it 1b. The working consciousness again finds itself as an independent consciousness in independent existence, which labor gives to things. Labor is a curbed attraction. As long as it forms objectivity, that is, it acts selflessly and provides a general, working consciousness rises above the immediacy of its being to universality, or, as Hegel put it, while it creates, forms an object, it forms itself. At the same time, he implies the following: to the extent that a person has mastered a “skill”, achieved dexterity in work, he has received his own sense of self. That which, as it seems to him, is denied him in his selfless service, as soon as he is completely subordinate to someone else's mind, becomes his lot as soon as he acquires a work consciousness. And in this capacity, he finds in himself his own mind, and it is absolutely correct to say about work that it forms a person. The self-perceptions of the working consciousness contain all the aspects of what constitutes practical education: the distance from the immediacy of drives, personal needs and private interests, that is, the requirement of universality. In Propaedeutics, Hegel, emphasizing that the essence of practical education lies in the pursuit of the universal, shows that it also appears in moderation, which limits the immensity in satisfying 54 needs and the application of forces to the universal. It is also present in the prudence shown in relation to individual states or activities, in taking into account other things that may still be necessary. But in any vocation there is something from fate, from external necessity, and any vocation requires one to devote oneself to completing tasks that cannot in any way be regarded as the pursuit of personal goals. Practical education means that professional work is carried out entirely and comprehensively. But this also includes overcoming the alien that is in work in relation to a person, that is, the complete transformation by a person of this alien into his own. Thus, to give oneself to the general one in one’s work means at the same time to be able to limit oneself, that is, to make one’s calling entirely one’s own business. And then it is no longer an obstacle for a person. In this Hegelian description of practical education one can see the fundamental definition of the historical spirit: reconciliation with oneself, recognition of oneself in otherness. This definition is finally clarified in the idea of theoretical education, because theoretical activity as such, this is already alienation, namely the desire to “engage in the non-immediate, alien, belonging to recollection, memory and thinking.” So, theoretical education takes us beyond what a person directly knows and comprehends. It consists in learning to give meaning to the other and to find generalized points of view in order to “perceive the objective in its freedom” and without selfish interests. 17 That is why every educational activity leads through the development of theoretical interests, and Hegel justifies the special suitability for education of studying world and language of the ancients. This is due to the fact that such a world is sufficiently distant and alien to us so that the necessary distance that separates it from us can have a positive impact, but it “at the same time contains all the initial moments and threads of returning us to ourselves, but in the form of a truly universal essence of spirit" "8. In these words of the director of the gymnasium in Hegel one can see the typical prejudice of an adherent of classicism, who believes that it is especially easy to find the universal essence of the spirit among the ancients. But the main idea retains its validity: to recognize one’s own in someone else’s, to become accustomed to it - this is the main movement of the spirit, the meaning of which is only in returning to oneself from another existence. IN the rest is all theoretical education, including studying foreign languages and alien worldviews - a simple continuation of the process of education, laid down much earlier. Every separate individual rising from his natural essence into the sphere of the spirit, he finds in the language, customs, and social structure of his people a given substance that he wishes to master, as happens when learning to speak. Thus, this separate individual is constantly on the path of formation, and his naturalness is constantly removed in proportion to the fact that the world into which he grows is formed human language and human customs. Hegel emphasizes: in this world of its own, the people find existence. He produces it in himself and from himself and in the same way establishes what he is in himself. Thus, it is clear that the essence of education is not alienation as such, but a return to oneself, the precondition of which, however, is alienation. At the same time, education should be understood not only as a process that ensures the historical rise of the spirit into the realm of the universal; at the same time it is the element in which an educated person lives. What kind of element is this? This is where the questions that we already addressed to Helmholtz begin. Hegel's answer cannot satisfy us, since for him education takes place as a movement from alienation and assimilation to complete mastery of substance, to separation from all objective entities, which is achievable only in absolute philosophical knowledge. Real education, like the element of spirit, is by no means connected with Hegel’s philosophy of absolute spirit, just as a true understanding of the historicity of consciousness has little connection with his philosophy of world history. It is necessary to understand that for the historical sciences of the spirit, which have moved away from Hegel, the idea of perfect education remains a necessary ideal, since education is precisely the element in which they move. And what more ancient usage calls “perfect education” in the field of bodily phenomena is not so much the last phase of development as a state of maturity that has left behind all development and ensures the harmonious movement of all members. It is in this sense that the humanities assume that the scientific consciousness appears already educated and precisely because of this it has genuine tact, which can neither be learned nor imitated and which can be maintained. 56 holds the formation of judgment in the humanities and their way of knowing. What Helmholtz describes as the working specificity of the humanities, especially what he calls artistic feeling and tact, actually presupposes an element of education, within which a particularly free mobility of the spirit is ensured. Thus, Helmholtz speaks of “the readiness with which the most heterogeneous experience should be implanted in the memory of a historian or philologist” 19. This can be described very superficially from the point of view of that ideal of “the iron work of self-conscious inference” in the light of which the natural scientist thinks of himself. The concept of memory in the sense in which he uses it is not sufficient to explain the components of this work. In fact, this tact or this feeling is misunderstood when it is meant as an incoming mental faculty, served by a tenacious memory and thus achieving knowledge that is not subject to strict control. What provides the possibility of such a function of tact, what helps to acquire it and dispose of it, is not a simple psychological device favorable to humanitarian knowledge. The essence of memory itself cannot be understood correctly without seeing in it anything other than a general inclination or ability. Preservation in memory, forgetting and remembering anew belong to the historical states of man and themselves form part of his history and his education. If someone uses his memory as a simple ability - and all technical methods are an exercise in such use - he still does not attribute it to the sphere of what is most inherent to him. Memory should be formed, because it is not memory in general and for him. Some things are stored in memory, some others are not, some things they want to keep in memory, and some things they want to expel from it. The time has come to free the phenomenon of memory from psychological equation with abilities and understand that it represents an essential feature of the finite historical existence of man. Along with the abilities to store in memory and remember, connected by a certain relationship, the same relationship enters in a certain way, to which due attention has not yet been paid, and the ability to forget, which is not only an outlier and a shortcoming, but also - this was primarily emphasized by F .Nietzsche - a condition for the life of the spirit20. Only through forgetting does the spirit retain the possibility 57 . total renewal, the ability to look at everything with fresh eyes, so that what has been known for a long time is fused with what has been seen anew into a multi-layered unity. “Store in memory” is equally ambiguous. Being a memory (μνήμη), it is connected with recollection (άνάμνησις) 21. But the same is true with regard to the concept of “tact” used by Helmholtz. By tact we mean a certain receptivity and ability to perceive a situation and behavior within it, for which we do not have knowledge based on general principles. Because of this, the concept of tact is inexpressive and inexpressible. You can say something tactfully. But this will always mean that something is being tactfully bypassed and not expressed, and that it is tactless to talk about something that can be bypassed. But "bypass" does not mean to turn away from something; on the contrary, you need to have this something in front of your eyes so that you don’t stumble over it, but walk past it. Thus, tact helps to keep a distance, avoid injury and collisions, too close contact and injury to the intimate sphere of the individual. But the tact that Helmholtz speaks of is not simply identical with this sensory and everyday phenomenon. However, there is an essential commonality here, since the tact operating in the humanities is not limited to a sensual and unconscious nature; rather, it is a way of knowing and a way of being at the same time. The above analysis of the concept of education helps to clarify this. What Helmholtz calls tact includes education and represents both its aesthetic and historical function. One must have a feeling for both the aesthetic and the historical, or develop this feeling, in order to be able to rely on one's tact in humanistic works. And since this tact is not just a natural device, we are rightfully talking about aesthetic or historical consciousness, and not about own feeling, although, obviously, such consciousness correlates with the immediacy of feeling, that is, in individual cases it can certainly produce division and evaluation, although it is not able to give reasons for this. Thus, one who has an aesthetic sense knows how to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, good or bad quality, and one who has a historical sense knows what is possible and what is impossible for a certain era, and has a sense of the otherness of the past in relation to the present. If all this is based on education, then this means With t Ό that it is not a question of experience or position, but a question of the past becoming of being. Neither more accurate observations nor a more thorough study of tradition can help this if the receptivity to the otherness of a work of art or the past is not prepared. This is exactly what we were faced with when, following Hegel, we emphasized such a general distinctive feature of education as his openness to everything else, other, more generalized points of view. Education contains a general sense of proportion and distance in relation to itself, and through it - a rise above oneself to the universal. Consider yourself and your own, as if from a distance. personal goals means viewing them as others do. This universality is certainly not a community of concepts or reason. Based on the general, the specific is determined and nothing is forcibly proven. The general points of view to which an educated person is open do not become for him a rigid standard that is always effective; rather, they are peculiar to him only as possible points of view of other people. To this extent, an educated consciousness in practice actually has rather the character of a feeling, since any sense, for example vision, seems to be general exactly to the extent that it covers its sphere, to the extent that a wide field is open to it, and to the extent that it is capable of making distinctions within what is revealed to it. Educated consciousness is superior to any of the natural senses in that these latter are each limited to a specific sphere, but it also has the ability to act in all directions; it is a general feeling. A general feeling is in fact the formulation of the essence of education, in which one can hear the echo of broad historical connections. Understanding the concept of education, which lies at the heart of Helmholtz's thoughts, takes us back to the distant history of this concept. Let's follow this connection if we want to clear the problem philosophical approach to the humanities from the artificial narrowness imparted to it by the doctrine of the method of the 19th century. The modern concept of science and the subordinate concept of method are insufficient for us. What makes the humanities sciences is more likely to be understood from the traditional concept of education than from the methodological ideas of modern science. This is the humanistic tradition, and we will turn to it. In comparison with the claims of modern science, it takes on a new meaning. Obviously, it would be worthwhile to specifically monitor how 59 During the time of humanism, criticism of “school” science found its audience and how this criticism evolved following the evolution of its opponents. First of all, they were brought back to life here antique motifs. The enthusiasm with which humanists proclaimed the Greek language and the path of erudition was something more than just a passion for antiques. The awakening to life of classical languages brought with it new assessment rhetoric. It opened a front against the “school,” that is, against scholastic science, and served the ideal of human wisdom, which was unattainable within the framework of the “school”; such opposition truly stands at the origins of philosophy. Plato's criticism of the sophists, and even more so, his peculiarly ambivalent attitude towards Isocrates, explains the philosophical problem inherent here. In connection with the new awareness of method in natural science in the 17th century, this ancient problem further increases its critical acuity. In the face of this new science's claims to exclusivity, the question increasingly arises whether the only source of truth may lie in the humanistic concept of education. Indeed, we will see that the humanities of the 19th century, without realizing it, drew their only vital force from the vitality of humanistic thought about education. At the same time, it basically goes without saying that the determining factors here are humanistic studies, and not mathematics, for what could a new teaching about the method of the 17th century mean for the humanities? One has only to read the relevant chapters of the Port-Royal Logic, concerning the laws of reason as applied to historical truth, in order to understand the paucity of what the humanities can draw from this methodological idea. 2 All extracts from it are reduced to mere triviality, to something like the idea that the assessment of an event in all its truth requires attention to the circumstances accompanying it (circonstances). The Jansenists in this way of proof tried to provide methodological guidance for deciding the question to what extent miracles are trustworthy. They thereby sought to contrast uncontrolled faith of the spirit in a miracle, a new method and believed that in this way it would be possible to legitimize the genuine feelings of biblical tradition and church tradition. New science in the service of the ancient church - it is too obvious that this relationship did not promise to be long-lasting, and one can imagine that it should 60 happened when the very premises of Christianity became problematic. The methodological ideal of natural science in its application to the reliability of historical evidence of biblical tradition should have led to completely different results, catastrophic for Christianity. The path from Jansenist miracle criticism to historical biblical criticism is not so far, Spinoza is a good example of this. In the future, we will show that the consistent application of this methodology as the only criterion for determining truth in the humanities in general is equivalent to its self-destruction. &) Sensus communis (common sense) Given this state of affairs, it is not difficult, drawing on the humanistic tradition, to wonder what ways of knowledge the humanities can learn from such a methodology. A valuable starting point for this reasoning is Vico’s work “On the Meaning of the Sciences of Our Time.” 23 Vico’s defense of humanism, as the title itself shows, is mediated by Jesuit pedagogy and, to the same extent as against Descartes, is directed against Jansenism. This pedagogical manifesto of Vico, like his project of a “new science,” is based on old truths. He appeals to common sense, to social feeling and to the humanistic ideal of eloquence, that is, to those points that were already inherent in the ancient concept of wisdom. “Nobility” (ευ λέγειν) in this regard becomes an internally ambiguous formula, and by no means just a rhetorical ideal. It also implies speaking correctly, that is, true, and not just the art of speech, the ability to say something well. Therefore, in ancient times, this ideal, as we know, was proclaimed by both teachers of philosophy and teachers of rhetoric, and yet rhetoric has long been at enmity with philosophy and claimed to convey true life wisdom, in contrast to the idle speculations of the “sophists.” Vico, who himself was a teacher of rhetoric, is therefore in line with the humanistic tradition coming from antiquity. Obviously, this tradition, and especially the positive ambiguity of the rhetorical ideal, legitimized not only by Plato, but also by the anti-rhetorical methodologism of the New Age, is also important for the self-awareness of the humanities. In this regard, Vico already sounds a lot 61 from what interests us. His appeal to common sense, however, conceals another moment of the ancient tradition, in addition to the rhetorical one: the opposition of the “school” scientist and the sage, on which Vico relies, a contrast that had as its prototype the Cynic Socrates and its material basis - the opposition of “Sophia” and “phronesis,” first developed by Aristotle and developed by the Peripatetics to the level of criticism of the theoretical ideal of life, 24 and in the Hellenistic era, which became one of the defining images of the sage, especially after the Greek ideal of education fused with the self-awareness of the leading political stratum of Rome. Roman jurisprudence of later times is also known to develop against the background of legal art and legal practice, which come into contact with the practical ideal of “phronesis” rather than with the theoretical ideal of “philosophy” 25. Since the revival of ancient philosophy and rhetoric, the image of Socrates has finally turned into the antithesis of science, as evidenced by the figure of the amateur, who took a fundamentally new position between the scientist and the sage. 26 The rhetorical tradition of humanism also skillfully appealed to Socrates and to the criticism of dogmatists by skeptics. Thus, Vico criticizes the Stoics for believing in reason as the régula veri (rule of truth), and, on the contrary, praises the ancient academicians, who affirmed only the knowledge of ignorance, and then the academicians of the modern era for being strong in the art of argumentation, which refers to the art of speech. Vico's appeal to common sense, however, takes on a special coloring in line with this humanistic tradition. In the field of science, there is also a clash between the old and the new, and what Vico has in mind is no longer a opposition to the “school,” but a special opposition to contemporary science. The critical science of modern times has its advantages, which he does not dispute, but indicates their limits. The wisdom of the ancients, their desire for prudence (prudentia) and eloquence (eloquentia), according to Vico, did not lose their significance in the face of this new science and its mathematical methods. When applied to problems of education, they turn out to be nothing more than the formation of common sense, nourished not by the true, but by the probable. Here the following is important for us: common sense in this connection clearly means not only that general ability that every person has, but at the same time and the feeling that gives rise to community. Vico 62 believes that the direction of the human will is given not by an abstract community of reason, but by a concrete commonality, the community of a group, people, nation or the entire human race. The development of this general feeling thereby becomes of decisive importance for life. On this general sense of truth and right, which is not fundamentally knowledge, but allows one to find a guiding light, Vico bases the meaning of eloquence and its right to independence. After all, education cannot proceed through critical research. Youth needs images to develop imagination and memory. But this is precisely what the study of sciences in the spirit of recent criticism. Thus, for Vico, the old topic pushes aside Cartesian criticism. Topeka is the art of finding arguments, it serves to develop a sense of conviction that functions instinctively and instantly (ex tempore), and that is why it cannot be replaced by science. These definitions by Vico reveal their apologetic nature. They indirectly recognize the new, truthful concept of science, but at the same time exclusively defend the right to the existence of the probable. In this, Vico, as we have seen, follows an ancient rhetorical tradition dating back to Plato. But what Vico means goes far beyond rhetorical persuasion. In fact, here, as we have already said, there is an Aristotelian opposition between practical and theoretical knowledge, which cannot be reduced to the opposition of the true and the probable. Practical knowledge, “phronesis”, is another type of knowledge 27. This ultimately means that it is aimed at a specific situation. Consequently, it requires taking into account “circumstances” in their infinite variety. This is precisely what stands out in Vico; True, he only draws attention to the fact that this knowledge departs from the rational concept of knowledge. But this is not really the ideal of quietism. Aristotle's opposition also means something other than just the opposition of knowledge based on general principles and knowledge of the specific, something other than just the ability to subsume the individual under the general, which we call “the ability to judge.” Rather, it has a positive ethical motive, which is included in the teaching of the Roman Stoics about common sense. Awareness and sensory overcoming of a specific situation require such subsuming under the general, that is, the goal that is pursued in order to achieve what is right. Trace- 63