Ideology(Greek ιδεολογία, from Greek ιδεα - prototype, idea; and λογος - word, mind, teaching) - a system of conceptually formulated views and ideas that expresses the interests of various social classes, groups, societies, in which people's attitudes to reality are recognized and evaluated and to each other, as well as either the forms of domination and power existing in society (conservative ideologies) are sanctioned, or their transformations are justified (radical, revolutionary ideologies).
Ideology is not a science (although it may include scientific knowledge): unlike science, ideology is not only knowledge about socio-political life, but also includes an assessment of the trends, processes and various forces of this socio-political life.
The science- a special kind of cognitive activity aimed at obtaining, clarifying and disseminating objective, systematically organized and justified knowledge about nature, society and thinking. The basis of this activity is the collection scientific facts, their constant updating and systematization, critical analysis and, on this basis, the synthesis of new scientific knowledge or generalizations that not only describe the observed natural or social phenomena, but also allow you to build cause-and-effect relationships and, as a result, predict. Those natural science theories and hypotheses that are confirmed by facts or experiments are formulated in the form of laws of nature or society.
Science in a broad sense includes all conditions and components scientific activity:
division and cooperation of scientific work;
scientific institutions, experimental and laboratory equipment;
research methods;
system scientific information;
ñ as well as the total amount of previously accumulated scientific knowledge.
Ideology is no less closely connected with the sciences. Moreover, not only with the social sciences, but also with the natural sciences. More can be said: science has a direct and strong influence to create the very foundations of ideology. It does this by offering a new picture of the world, new methods of cognition, thinking, a new language for describing facts, processes, laws of nature and society, for thinking about them. It also does this by acting as the highest instance of the legitimation of ideologies, since any ideology seeks to justify itself, as well as the social structure that it considers desirable, by appealing to science, to its authority. This last function of science has become especially great importance in the 19th-20th centuries, when faith in the omnipotence of science became universal and beyond doubt.
When one speaks of the interaction between science and ideology, the negative influence of ideology on the activities of scientists, on the process of cognition itself, is usually noted first of all. In confirmation, the textbook examples of the persecution of J. Bruno and G. Galileo, the persecutions that were subjected to in the USSR in the 40-50s are given. of the last century, genetics, cybernetics, the theory of relativity, etc. All this is true. But this is only one aspect of the interaction between ideology and science. If we carefully look at the spiritual life of the last four centuries, we will see that the connection between ideology and science has always been mutual, bilateral: both ideological factors had a direct impact on scientific theories, and scientific achievements scientific theories led to profound changes in ideologies.
For example, Charles Darwin's teaching on the origin and evolution of species bears the imprint of the influence of the works of T. Malthus, primarily his ideas about the struggle for existence going on in society, during which the strongest survive and the weakest are destroyed. The opposite example is provided by Newton's system. According to a number of researchers, its emergence contributed to the justification of the liberal concept of freedoms and human rights, the principle of separation of powers, the idea of freedom of enterprise and competition.
While closely interacting, ideology and science nevertheless do not merge, do not flow into each other. The main difference between science and ideology is usually seen in the fact that science is completely neutral in relation to values and ideals, free from ideological and political preferences. It provides people with knowledge of what is, and does not teach them how they should act, what ideals to strive for, what values to choose.
social functions.
Any ideology seeks to develop a certain understanding of reality, primarily social reality, looking at it through the prism of the interests of a certain social community. Thus, ideologies fulfill the need of people to develop such an attitude to reality that helps a person, a social group to better understand their position, to make their activities effective in terms of the implementation of their personal and group interests. This feature of ideology finds its expression in the fact that the ideological picture of the world is created through special forms of social consciousness - ideals and values.
Values are such definitions of objects and phenomena of the surrounding world, social life, which reveal their positive or negative value for a person, social group, society as a whole. Values such as justice and injustice, equality and inequality in the social sphere, freedom and lack of freedom, totalitarianism and democracy in politics, beauty and ugliness in aesthetics, good and evil, good and bad in the sphere of morality, do not reflect the properties of objects and phenomena inherent in them by themselves. These are the definitions that objects, phenomena receive in the process of social existence. They express social relations, social assessment of natural things and phenomena, events and processes of social life, states of consciousness. Thus, values act as norms that help people navigate social reality, distinguish between what is for them. positive value, and what is negative for them.
Ideals, in essence, do not differ from values, being a kind of the latter. This is a mental image of the purpose of the activity of a collective of people, a social group, united by a common social position and the common tasks arising from it. Moreover, such an image, in which the problems, contradictions, conflicts that people face in real life, appear "withdrawn", overcome. An ideal is a mental construction of the future, a new reality that meets the hopes and aspirations of a particular social community. Ideals mobilize and unite people, stimulate their activity, offering an attractive, inspiring goal, perspective.
Both values and ideals are irreducible to concepts, judgments, positions, principles with which science deals. And at the same time, they are irremovable from the public consciousness. For science is not the only form of assimilation of reality that helps people solve the diverse tasks that confront them - this function is also performed by ideology. It gives an answer to quite specific questions, primarily those related to the social existence of people, the direction and motivation of their social activities. Science does not consider these questions, since they are not solved by the methods that it uses.
48. The concept of "civilization". The main features of the post-industrial stage of the development of civilization
Civilization (from lat. civilis - civil). The modern and most accurate concept of "civilization" is a qualitative specificity (originality of material, spiritual and social life) of a particular group of countries, peoples at a certain stage of development
According to Ferguson, L. G. Morgan, F. Engels and others, civilization is the stage of social development following barbarism. For them, civilization is a stage in the social development of material and spiritual culture, associated with the division of labor, the rationalization of production, consumption and distribution, the formation of civil society; a certain set of material and spiritual values, expressing a certain level historical development given society and individual. There is a so-called post-industrial concept of social development. The basis of social development is 3 socio-economic systems - pre-industrial society, industrial society and post-industrial society. main role in culture of this type civilization is occupied by scientific rationality, the special value of reason and the progress of science and technology based on it are emphasized.
Character traits:
1) rapid change techniques and technologies through the systematic application in the production of scientific knowledge;
2) as a result of the merging of science and production, a scientific and technological revolution took place, which significantly changed the relationship between man and nature, the place of man in the production system;
3) the accelerating renewal of that artificially created by man subject environment, in which his life activity takes place directly. This is accompanied by the increasing dynamics of social ties, their relatively rapid transformation. Sometimes, over the course of one or two generations, there is a change in lifestyle and the formation of a new type of personality.
An important mechanism for "translating" science into the language of ideological problems is philosophy of science - like a sublimation of scientific knowledge itself, its spiritual derivative. The active participation of the philosophy of science in the formation of ideologies has been observed throughout the history of science, starting from its earliest forms. Already in the ideological struggle in ancient Greece, philosophers actively participated, proving the highest rationality of scientific knowledge and scientific method.
Of course, the philosophy of science, like science itself, faithfully serves different ideologies. Neither Engels' Dialectics of Nature nor Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism led, for example, to the legitimation of technocracy. And the spread of scientific rationalism for Lenin was, on the contrary, a prerequisite for the fact that in the future, having mastered the methods of rational thinking, "the cook will be able to manage the state." But we are now interested not in the comparison and evaluation of ideologies, but in the interaction of science and ideology. And here the philosophy of science occupies an important place.
This is evidenced by the simplest but most reliable indicators: the most prominent philosophers of science (Durkheim, Mannheim, Marx, Weber, Habermas) have works containing the word "ideology" or a similar concept in the title. The names of other philosophers of science are often found in combination with the names of major ideologues, such as Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek. During perestroika in the USSR, when it was necessary to drastically change the ideology, one of the prominent philosophers of science, I. T. Frolov, became an adviser to the General Secretary of the CPSU, and then a member of the Politburo of the CPSU and editor-in-chief of Pravda.
Great was the role of Popper's philosophy of science in the formation of an ideology that is extremely important for the modern world neoliberalism and his concepts of power, state, individual and freedom. G. Radnicki, setting out this connection, emphasizes as a postulate that "the ideas of science and some of its foundations, in particular the difference between" Eat" And " Must be", refer to the conditions for the existence of a constitutional liberal state with the division of power". What does this mean in practice? According to Popper's theory, value-free science is a source of objective knowledge, but in the study of each specific problem, it does not guarantee reliability and can be subjected to critical verification, refuted. The very criterion of scientificity in this concept is the “defencelessness” of the result before verification, the ability to find a way to try to refute the result (in principle, there would be no such method if the result were protected by moral values - they are not subject to rational refutation).
It follows that since rational knowledge does not guarantee certainty, no one has the right to decide for others, even by democratic means. Therefore, they say, it is necessary to ensure maximum individual freedom, and although people will make mistakes, they will their errors. Neo-liberals look at this problem in terms of the "paradox" of compulsory social insurance, which is based on the assumption that individual decisions will be less reasonable than a decision made collectively in the form of law. In their opinion, deductions from an individual's income to social insurance funds deprive him of the opportunity to use this money himself - in the way he deems most profitable. Yes, they admit, many will spend this money irrationally and will not save anything for their old age - but this will be a manifestation of their freedom of choice.
Important conclusions also follow in relation to the political order: the state as a mechanism for political choice carried out by citizens in a democratic way is replaced by a state that organizes decision-making on the basis of rational scientific statements, which are subjected to an attempt to refute them. It's about moving to decision-making state, in which there is no place for politics, always saturated with values - it is replaced by science. Naturally, with the transformation of politics into technology, there is no need for the political activity of the masses.
It is assumed that in this way it will be possible to avoid the vices of a democratic state: corruption in order to form a majority, bribed with funds taken from a minority (Swedish democracy since the 60s is considered an example of such a development of events). These philosophers accuse democracy of allowing decision-making through pacts and concessions, with a tendency to become a "neo-feudal" corporate state. In this case, they say, there is a danger of the oppression of the majority or even "totalitarian democracy." G. Radnicki is categorical: "Unless the lesson that can be learned from the concept of refutable science is learned, the social philosophy of freedom will be impossible." But this democracy-rejecting freedom, which appeals to rational decisions to replace politics, leads to the "rational totalitarianism" that many Western philosophers point out as dangerous.
Earlier we mentioned the second important ideological conclusion from Popper's philosophy - the denial of major, revolutionary changes in society. Indeed, decisions, unlike choices, cannot be big (neo-liberals use such aphorisms: “the liberal state is a “minimal” state”, or “the state is a night watchman”). Knowledge grows evolutionarily, no faster than feedback is formed through an attempt to refute and verify. No faster than the increment of knowledge, changes in society should be made.
The significance of the philosophy of science as the ideological basis of the political and economic order is especially evident in those societies where the social group dominated by European rational thinking is in the minority. In this case, the legitimation of order through appealing directly to science is impossible - the majority of the population lives and thinks within the framework of a different culture, science is inaccessible to them. Such was, for example, the situation in the countries of Latin America liberated from colonial dependence in the 19th century. The Brazilian historian of science U. D'Ambrosio writes:
“The search for a legitimizing force in the new countries of America was associated with great difficulties. What was needed was a legitimation of power, alternative to that which came from church structures, but equivalent to it in terms of perception by the people, that is, based on mysticism, which would impress with its symbols, inaccessible to the people. It was a great temptation to present knowledge hierarchically structured almost in the form of the Bible, substantiating with it the new dogmatism necessary as an ideology for the formation of a new society ... Now this unquestioned legitimizing force - God - is being replaced by another system, also unquestioned - positive science» .
Such a philosophy of science, in which the truth of knowledge is not questioned, was positivism. For ideological control over representatives of the traditional cultures of Latin America, positivism was presented as a religion that was not subject to doubt and verification. In Latin America, especially in Brazil, it was met with enthusiasm. “This doctrine proved to be the most suitable for the movement of Republicans seeking modernization. Positivism, elevated to the rank of the Church, provides the justifications necessary for political and industrial modernization,” writes D’Ambrosio and adds:
“Comte's positivism leads to an erroneous idea of science and its ability to provide an absolute explanation. This is especially evident in the social sphere, where it leads to an increasingly closed and ossified dogmatism, turns into a real religion. Positivism offers quick access to explanation and at the same time creates a protective barrier against such models of explanation, which include various cultural foundations that inevitably call into question the political, social and economic order established by the Creoles - fighters for the independence of new countries.
Positivism and the "science-church" became a barrier preventing the interpenetration of European and local cultures, and a means of legitimizing first the dominance of Creoles, and then neo-colonialism. It should be noted, however, that in many Latin American countries Comte's positivism quickly gave way to Spencer's positivism and social Darwinism.
Things were different in countries with a “European” mindset. Here, at first, science directly demonstrated the high reliability and reliability of its results and explanations and created its own authority. But then this authority gained considerable autonomy from concrete results and became in itself a powerful means of persuasion.
History is a factual science in the sense that its essential task is not to discover general principles but rather the establishment of facts. Actually historical theory is a fact-finding theory, a theory that establishes the criteria by which we speak of certain events as having actually taken place. History as a science does not deal with the logic of history, meaning and goals historical process generally. Such general questions form the philosophy or metaphysics of history. The arguments of K. Jaspers, set forth in his book The Origins of History and Its Purpose (1949), undoubtedly refer to the metaphysics of history.
According to K. Jaspers, history has a goal, which is to achieve the unity of mankind. The hidden meaning of history, respectively, is in the gradual realization of this goal in the historical course of time. There are particular examples of unity, such as the unity of human nature, the unity of languages, religions, morality, everyday life, communication, etc., but these, according to K. Jaspers, are only relative units that cannot be absolutized. The true unity of humanity is transcendent: it is the hidden basis of history, inexpressible in concepts and manifesting itself only in allusions and symbols. This idea allows history for us not to fall apart into a series of accidents.
Although the purpose of history is inexpressible in strict definitions, it can be represented in some facts or patterns of history. For K. Jaspers, such a paradigmatic model, throwing light on its structure and hidden meaning, is the axial time - the period of time between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC. e., which was characterized by a spiritual upsurge, capturing at the same time all the centers of civilization that existed at that time. The appearance of Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Confucianism in China, and philosophy in Greece belong to this time. The result of this spiritual upsurge was the emergence of a new person with the ability to reflect, the desire for a practical transformation of the world and for the search for the meaning of his own existence. This is the time when humanity woke up, emerging from a long period of monotonous, almost animal existence.
Axial time is fundamentally significant for K. Jaspers as a single beginning of all known civilizations, as a fact indicating the presence common ground historical process. The task of the philosophy of history, from this point of view, should be to approach an adequate understanding of this basis.
The idea of the unity of mankind, K. Jaspers believes, is woven into our knowledge of history, it is present in all our assessments of the significance of events. The conclusions of the historian, for this reason, cannot be understood only from logical and empirical arguments: they always contain premises arising from general ideas about the meaning of history. Human life itself acquires meaning only through the explicit or implicit perception of the meaning of history. "To what I belong, in the name of what I live - I recognize all this in the mirror of history." Our "now" is more or less meaningful, depending on the degree of its immersion in tradition and accepted meanings. K. Jaspers is convinced that a person, in essence, cannot exist without faith in the meaning of his existence and in transcendental being, which determines the logic of history.
The general idea of K. Jaspers is clear enough. His concept is directed primarily against regional interpretations of history (Spengler O., Toynbee and others), which represent the world process as consisting of the autonomous development of various civilizations. The main task for K. Jaspers is to show that aspects of unity are in fact more significant for real history than the differences that regional theories pay attention to. Obviously, this concept is also directed against the rationalism of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, according to K. Jaspers, is idealism, “thinking that it was revealed to him that there is a God” . K. Jaspers, however, would also like to get away from irrationality, from considering history as a random and meaningless sequence of events. He sees this shortcoming in the picture of history given by M. Weber.
The philosophy of history can be criticized primarily from the point of view of history itself, namely, from the point of view of the reliability of the facts underlying it. Such, quite convincing criticism of K. Jaspers was given by L.N. Gumilyov. We will confine ourselves here to remarks relating to the internal, actually philosophical premises of the concept of K. Jaspers. In this regard, two points are most significant here: the analysis of the spiritual crisis modern era and general principles of the philosophy of history.
The current stage of social development is characterized, according to K. Jaspers, by the achievement of real unity in the sense that nothing significant can happen in the modern world that does not affect everyone. Another his the most important feature is the technical progress that has united mankind in the mode of production and in the means of communication. The development of technology leads to a radical change in the conditions of human existence. The consequence of technological progress is the creation of an artificial habitat, which leads to the suppression of human vitality and to the spiritual degradation of the individual. Our time, according to K. Jaspers, is a time of spiritual crisis, disbelief and the collapse of all traditional guidelines of life. The people in their mass lost their attachment to religion, became disillusioned with their hopes for scientific and technological progress, and, finally, lost faith in man himself, as a creature that always retains such qualities as compassion, conscience, etc. Modern mass man is devastated, the highest ideals have faded in his mind and feelings. We see the disappearance of authentic communication, love and creative energy.
We are, according to K. Jaspers, in a situation of instability, which can be likened to the era of pre-axial (Promethean) time, in which the primary conditions of human existence were created, which prepared the basis for the emergence of culture and for the onset of the period of axial time. It is possible that modern instability and the modern crisis are the threshold of a new axial time based on other principles of life completely unknown to us.
For the further development of mankind, which will undoubtedly go in the direction of strengthening its integration, there are various options. Possible integration in the form of a rigid world order and integration based on consent, on the deepening of spiritual content human life and recognition of the value of different cultures. We can assume in the future a socialist organization of society, but already at the present time several types of socialism are being realized, completely different from the point of view of their relationship to the economy, to the individual and to spiritual values. The path that will actually be chosen depends on thinking people living in the present, and above all on people of art, religious figures and philosophers. The mass does not go anywhere, it does not develop an ideology and, in this sense, its spontaneous movements cannot be a guide for thinkers and politicians. The decisive role must be played by an alliance of genuine people who have the ideology of the future and are able to influence real changes.
This summary The social doctrine of K. Jaspers allows us to conclude that it is not so much a science as an ideology, a rather arbitrary project of the future, close to the Platonic project of a state controlled by philosophers. Philosophy is entrusted with the task of highlighting the ills of society, warning of the inevitability of radical changes and uniting its thinking part to solve problems. historical tasks. K. Jaspers is convinced that in a modern mass, extremely mercantile and unthinking society, a community of genuine people is preserved, a kind of hidden church that can see diseases and warn of dangers. The reasoning of K. Jaspers acquires here the obvious features of social utopia and projecting.
This does not mean that the philosophy of K. Jaspers is devoid of proper philosophical, theoretical foundations. One can single out a fairly clear axiomatics of the Jaspersian system, revealing its methodological foundations. The initial premise of K. Jaspers, embedded in the concept of axial time, is that it is possible to cognize society at the level of images and symbols, without bringing these images to the level of strictly defined concepts. The goal of historical analysis for K. Jaspers is not to identify historical laws, but to clarify the unity of history, expressed "in a visible single image, which is not a law, but constitutes the secret of history" . It is obvious that we have here a certain departure from rationality, connected with the rejection of the universality of the pomological form in the sphere of historical consideration. K. Jaspers puts forward an original and controversial view of the genesis of the general principles of the philosophy of history. He is convinced that the logos of history can only be realized within history, in the direct experience of facts. He speaks of "listening" to the facts, of "feeling" the deep meaning of history, of "touching" the logic of history, which, however, excludes its full rational comprehension. We are dealing here with the central position of the existentialist philosophy of history, which postulates the possibility of approaching the logic of history without using the usual methods of rational analysis, such as induction, analogy and hypothesis. The most important prerequisite social philosophy K. Jaspers is, of course, a teleological consideration of history, its consideration as a process determined by purpose and meaning. The teleological here inevitably turns into the theological, for, as he himself says, "the deepest unity is elevated to an invisible religion, reaches the realm of spirits." K. Jaspers is convinced that history, as an open and always incomplete process, raises us to an understanding of its supra-historical meaning. The historical process is thus represented as an asymptote approaching the ideal defined by transcendence.
Here it is also necessary to point out the provisions already mentioned above relating to the understanding of personality. In his vision of the future, K. Jaspers proceeds from the fact that a person cannot exist without understanding the meaning of existence and without faith in the transcendental foundations of his being. We can talk here about the specific axiomatics of personality in the philosophy of K. Jaspers.
From point of view modern theory knowledge developed within the framework of the general philosophy and philosophy of science, all these attitudes of K. Jaspers must be recognized as completely untenable. Specific images of a process may be important for understanding the process as a whole, but rational methodology recognizes truth only in the form of concepts and laws. The image as a means initial analysis cannot be turned into a special, in itself sufficient approach to understanding historical reality. The arguments of K. Jaspers about the ways of approaching the understanding of the meaning of history are also unconvincing. The idea of comprehending the meaning of history on the basis of the experience of specific events has never been substantiated in any convincing way. K. Jaspers resolutely rejects a priori and speculation in this process. "There is no way around the world, the way goes only through the world, there is no way around history, the way goes only through history. But how do we rise from concrete history to the realization of a presumed supra-historical meaning? Inductive and hypothetical-deductive schemes are obviously unacceptable for K. Jaspers. Postulating the process of transition from living facts to the goal of history, the possibility of comprehending the eternal in the historical, he would like to see in this supra-historical something more than a hypothetical assumption or a simple inductive generalization. The concept of historical existence, which to some extent explains the formulation of the problem, is not sufficiently definite to give its solution.
A rational philosophy of history cannot accept teleology in any sense. Criticizing the disclosure of the logos in the Hegelian philosophy of history, K. Jaspers as a whole implements the Hegelian setting, according to which the world is ruled by Divine Providence. The concept of the unity of mankind only expands the understanding of the purpose of history, taking it beyond the framework of Christian metaphysics, making it universal, acceptable for describing any civilization. Instead of God and the absolute idea, we have here an idea of the unity of mankind, expressing the highest meaning of the historical process. The purpose of history remains transcendent and ahistorical, while acquiring a certain positivity and a more tangible connection with reality. For a rational philosophy of history, the idea of its meaning can only have a conditional meaning, as a characteristic of stable values or broad, gradually realized plans. But such meanings can never be turned into the highest goals of history, elevated to the level of religion and the realm of spirits. All symbols of unity are symbols of a particular time, which inevitably change and disappear in the tide of change. We cannot talk about the true purpose of history, if only because society, as material system by chance: from the cosmic point of view, life, both individual and social, is absolutely meaningless, since all its traces will eventually be erased by incommensurably more powerful processes of the movement of matter and energy in the Universe. The postulation of suprahistorical goals makes sense only if higher forces are assumed that guarantee the physical preservation of mankind.
The personal postulates of K. Jaspers are also doubtful. We have no justification for the fact that the existence and activity of a thinking person are necessarily connected with ideas about the meaning of life or the purpose of history. A person as a thinking being, of course, cannot exist without the norms of thinking, but, as practice shows, he can live without religion and without ideas about the goals of history. Awareness of oneself in the mirror of history is not the essence of a person, but rather a humanistic ideal, which, due to its rarity, cannot be considered a real factor in historical progress. These postulates idealize the essence modern man and historical man in general. They, therefore, also cannot be the basis of rational reasoning about the possible future of mankind.
Does the above mean that the philosophy of K. Jaspers should be assessed as completely unsatisfactory, having no reason to claim a place among the recognized philosophical theories of the 20th century? From the point of view of the rational principles of the philosophy of history and the theory of knowledge, such a conclusion seems inevitable. The above considerations show that the theoretical content of the philosophy of K. Jaspers cannot be overestimated. It must be admitted that logical and methodological reflection is not the strong side of his reasoning.
We can, however, look at the philosophy of K. Jaspers from a different point of view. The weak point of this critique is the pre-established notion of modern or recognized rationality. No one will deny the fact that the basis of modern ideas about theoretical rationality is the recognition of the hypothetical-deductive method as determining the logic of the genesis and substantiation of universal principles. We have the right, however, to ask the following question here: are these requirements adequate to the sphere of philosophical analysis, do we, by accepting these requirements, impose illegal restrictions on the sphere of philosophical thinking and, in particular, on the formation of the principles of the philosophy of history?
In a certain sense, this argument must be recognized as correct. In fact, philosophy has value not only as a theoretically sustained explanatory system, but also as a teaching that stands next to religion, although it differs from the latter in the absence of an established system of dogmas. The philosopher in this case does not create science, but ideology, and focuses primarily not on the rational substantiation of postulates, but rather on the integrity and practical effectiveness of the system as a whole. The philosopher in this case is not a researcher of concepts and theoretical systems, but rather an ideologue, a charismatic thinker who directly affects the consciousness of the masses and points out the necessary assessments and actions. The very result of his activity in this case is not a system. theoretical principles and conclusions, and the system of assessments and attitudes related to topical issues time. In the history of philosophy, we can point to the works of Voltaire, P. Holbach, I.G. Fichte, L.N. Tolstoy, I.A. Ilyin and many other thinkers who were driven by the intention to give society relevant guidelines for life and political behavior. We can thus speak of applied or prophetic philosophizing, which, obviously, goes beyond the improvement of internal theoretical constructions. Naturally, we go beyond the framework of rational methodology here as well. We are here in the sphere of semi-conceptual, predominantly figurative and associative thinking, which is unacceptable from the point of view of scientific (theoretical) methodology. In this area we can justify teleological and theological assumptions. We can take them here as schemes that make it possible to give a primary form to a new, weakly differentiated content.
Many remarks by K. Jaspers show that he was quite clearly aware of the non-classical and applied nature of his philosophizing, his focus rather on direct change in the world than on the creation of theories and principles, his closeness to religion and ideology. He expresses the opinion that philosophy at present ceases to be a matter of only narrow circles or university courses, it acquires a special task - to bind all people on the basis of the principles of philosophical faith. Philosophy, according to his plan, should become influential enough to put up a barrier to utopian ideas that plunge peoples into untold suffering and war. He believes that a true philosopher must be a prophet, able to excite people and induce in them the desire for action.
Understanding existential philosophy as a special kind of actual ideology can apparently clarify for us the concept of historical existence as a special non-rational way of constituting the meaning of history. Existence from this point of view can be understood as the deep spirit of the era, as a stable state of health developed by the perception of events and their ideal reflection in culture. Existence in this sense is not a simple inductive extrapolation of the past to the future, not a hypothesis that has the highest probability in terms of scientific justification of hypotheses, but a mass ideology that is perceived as unconditional and the only possible one. It is at the same time the self-consciousness of the era, fixed in philosophy and literature, and an unconscious faith that influences events. In this case, historical existence acquires the status of a natural correlate of personal existence in the transition to society as a closed integrity.
With this understanding of the philosophy of K. Jaspers, we must significantly change its assessment, given on the basis of a general methodological analysis. We come to the conclusion that this philosophy should be evaluated on a different plane and in essentially different criteria of rationality than traditional philosophical systems. We are beginning to realize the fact that, unlike positivism and pragmatism, existentialism arose not as a development of certain theoretical ideas of classical philosophy, but as a transformation of philosophical thinking as a whole, as an allocation of a special level of philosophizing, which, while maintaining the appearance of rationality, absorbs various , including non-rational methods of argumentation. We come to an understanding of the fact that the orientation towards internal (theoretical) and, accordingly, external (applied) tasks of philosophy implies a significant difference in the methods of reasoning and in the very composition of concepts. The books of K. Jaspers are an excellent example of this kind of prophetic philosophizing, aimed at the direct perception of contemporaries and having not a theoretical, but mainly an ideological load. It is clear that the analysis of this kind of philosophy in terms of general methodology conceptual thinking cannot be decisive.
What has been said, of course, does not remove all critical assessments of the existential method, but only eliminates the undue pressure of general scientific rationality. It is clear that any criticism of existentialism must proceed from an understanding of its special place in the system of philosophical theories. The considerations presented here are an attempt to justify the obvious irrationality of the concepts and thought patterns of K. Jaspers, based on the understanding of his thinking as a kind of applied philosophizing, built on essentially different principles than the systems of traditional, proper theoretical philosophy.
- Jaspers K. The meaning and purpose of history. M., 1991. S. 266.
- There. S. 276.
- There. S. 151.
- Gumilyov L.N. Ethnogenesis and biosphere of the Earth. L., 1990. S. 354.
- Jaspers K. The meaning and purpose of history. M, 1991. S. 114.
- There. S. 269.
- There. S. 271.
- There. S. 280.
Series of programs "Ideological conversations"
Issue #4
The team of the Center for Scientific Political Thought and Ideology takes part in the program
Stepan Sulakshin: So, friends, today we have our fourth entry on a very important cross-cutting topic, namely the topic of ideological conversations. Let me remind you that we took it up because we understand how effective the constitutional ban in Russia on a single country-wide or, in other words, state ideology is effective. It is effective in weakening public administration and its effectiveness. This ban is effective in terms of the quality of the political system, in terms of institutions that consolidate our people into a people, into society, which give this society a qualitative potential in relations with the authorities. A ban that deprives the authorities of strategic guidelines and destroys, in essence, goal-setting, through motivation, through impulse, the movement of the country in its history. Hence, a challenge arises in the expert scientific space that there is an ideology as a social phenomenon, as an object of social creativity and construction, and in a series of samples and examples of social creativity and being, science naturally occupies an important place. Science and ideology are in close contact, penetrate each other, and this interaction sometimes has the character of a conflict. I will give two examples to warm up interest in the topic. An example from already quite distant times, when in the Soviet Union the party leadership took on the responsibility of qualifying new branches of science.
For example, genetics was declared a pseudoscience, a servant of imperialism. Cybernetics was declared with approximately the same terminology not a science, pseudoscience, and, for example, on the fate of two academicians of that time, Nikolai Vavilov and Timofey Lysenko, one can see how this approach not only changed the content, success and social effectiveness of certain branches of science, but changed themselves the fate of people. If Lysenko, who, probably, was a fairly sincere scientist, although he could not help but be an effective administrator, a correlist from science, developed, as time and history showed, false approaches in biology, in the science of agriculture, but received awards, received the title of academician and was favored, was awarded high titles and succeeded, then Nikolai Vavilov, who developed a new, and really breakthrough and absolutely fundamental direction of science - genetics. He ended his life in prison, even though his brother was president of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. And all why? Because he, as a true scientist, whose goal is to know the world, in the second, third and twenty-third place, the goal and obedience of a scientist are related to his social inclusion, but priorities are important. Goal number one is knowledge of the world, but he was accused of the fact that obedience number two, three or then number one, serving the ideological guidelines of the ruling party, was not effectively performed, and the cost was life. This conflict is not so cruel, but it does take place. Try to enter into a discussion with the liberal ideology, which is the basis of modern state building, social development, and higher political practices. The liberal ideology is enshrined in the Russian constitution, where the only highest value is the value of human rights and freedoms. Try to criticize this political ideological dogma with opposition to the doctrines of liberalism in the economy, in state building, in the social sphere, humanitarian spheres: education, science, and so on. In fact, leading all these areas to trivial commercialization, and you will get an instant reaction in return. Will it be a professor, will it be an academician, will it be a professor, an official or a minister: oh, well, you have something ideological here, you have it unscientific, you have it unreasonable. And it becomes completely clear to us that the relevance of the problem of the relationship between ideology and science in the modern world, in the modern Russian world and not only did it not decrease. This challenge exists.
And what is the danger here in the possibility of answering it, we will now try to make out. Let's start as usual with a reminder of our basic vocabulary in order to understand each other. By ideology we mean a collection of values. By values, we mean the characteristics of the subject of human activity that are critical or vital for him for some reason, which motivate a person to act, formatting, shaping his worldview ideas, his intentions. That is, values in this case are not values of comparing qualities for some needs of a person, some objects of his life. Values in this case are not the values of aestheticism and comfortable emotional perceptions of being. Value in this case is a category that is important in the practical daily activities of a person, humanity, motivating him for this activity. Therefore, it is clear that values give rise to goals, both managerial and private in the subjects of human activity, including science. By science we mean human activity on the knowledge and transformation of the world. Let me remind you that here we emphasize and draw attention to the fact that a truncated false inefficient understanding of science as knowledge is too common. Knowledge is just the first stage on the axis of the potential, the cognitive potential of science in the space of these two potentials - cognitive and transformative or recommendatory for the potential of science. In addition to knowledge as the disposition of descriptive facts of the universe in science, an understanding of the world is also formed and achieved, which means the ability to describe the world in images of consciousness using special languages, abstract languages, in the form of a model, in the form of laws that reflect the universe. Both the model and the law are a category that, first of all, makes it possible to predict previously unobserved properties of the object of study, part of the world, and to predict the development of this object, part of the world in time. Then it is a theory, then it is a model, then we have the right to say that we understand something. And let me remind you one more important thing, that misunderstanding, lack of knowledge first as a result of describing the world, then building a model and theory, the lack of this potential allows you to form a transformative potential, a creative potential of only such a small level. And the more knowledge and understanding, the greater the possibilities of transforming the world.
Such a limited curve shows a forbidden area, which cannot be penetrated at the level of existing knowledge and understanding, because the risks will be too great here: the possibility of an accident, damage, loss, failure, and so on. Therefore, the space of human activity in cognition of the world and in its transformation is in fact also the subject of scientific reflection and the subject of scientific creation. Choosing methods, choosing subjects in science so that it reaches its maximum potentials. And here I will remind you that the passage in a research project in progress in some area of material or non-material creation of the human world is called fundamental science. Because the passage along this axis is still at zero transformative potential means that we get the opportunity, having developed applied science and design capabilities, to convert fundamental knowledge into practically significant human capabilities. This is very important, because the misconception is that only knowledge can already be effective, efficient, that theory and fundamental science can not be funded, because it is important that there is a project, it is important that there be applied research, it is important that business paid something. Such a commercial approach, therefore, even now, in such a detached theoretical excursion, we already come across questions and challenges that are associated with value circumstances in scientific activity.
So, science and ideology. What connects them to each other? Is there a place for these very values in science as a form of human activity? There is, but it exists in two qualities, in two orders. First, values as an attribute of scientific activity itself. We have the right to talk about scientific ideology, we have the right to talk about values in science. And now we list them. They are self-significant for this type of activity, its efficiency and effectiveness depend on them. On the other hand, in human practice, ideology is applied in the social process, in political practices, and here, of course, these same values exist, and there is such a chain: the humanities as a generator, interpreter and reflection on the space of values in ideology, ideology as an attribute of human practices. So what are the values of science as such? Well, obviously, the main value is authenticity. For if science gives inaccurate erroneous knowledge or false theory, then we will not get here in any way, we will be helpless in human practice. And now we'll talk about this a little bit. The second is adequacy, the third is relevance, these are close categories, but there are some nuances. The fourth is practical significance. Let's close any of these positions, well, for example, reliability, and science disappears, because if it gives incorrect results, then a person does not need it. Moreover, delusions in terms of knowledge of the world, and does not provide any potential for transforming the world. If science, scientific formulations, tasks and results are inadequate. Let's give an example to make it look more colorful. An example is this: let's set the task of the influence of lunar gravity on the depth of sleep of the employees of our center. This is undoubtedly a scientific task, because everything in the world is interconnected.
Lunar gravity even influences the oceans: ebbs and flows, and it definitely affects some movements of molecules or winds in the city of Moscow and the sleep of employees. It is very interesting to find out at what level it affects. But why? It is quite clear that this statement at first glance is formally scientific: to know a certain connection, a causal relationship in the world. It is counter-scientific, because it is inadequate neither to needs nor expediency in the sense of discovering some cause-and-effect relationships. Another interesting example, which, it would seem, is trivial and obvious, but imagine - a sink, a faucet with water, a siphon, then pipes, then flowing rivers, rivers flow into the ocean. The shell and the ocean, from the point of view of physics, are communicating vessels. Is it true? Is it true. And the task is very exciting, what if we pour a glass of water into the sink? Determine how the sea level will rise. Everyone knows the law: levels must equalize in communicating vessels. The task is very interesting, but we understand that many circumstances make this task inadequate. There is no such task, because there is no concept of level in such spaced coordinates, due to the curvature of the earth's surface, due to the fact that the radius of the Earth itself is different depending on the point on Earth, due to the fact that there are tectonic movements, tides, the scales of which are many orders of magnitude greater than this effect. Due to the fact that the delay lasts in equalizing an infinite time in relation to the processes themselves. We understand that inadequacy destroys scientificity. Although at first glance, it would seem that everything is normal here, correctly laid out. There are quite a lot of such stupid tasks that look like scientific, but are actually inadequate. And if this criterion is applied to real, for example, research or defended dissertations, then you can often see that they are akin to such a formulation of problems.
Relevance. Let's try to close this position, and it becomes clear that the criterion or value of choosing scientific tasks, budgetary or other resource, labor, intellectual, emotional costs can also be seriously questioned, because this is not necessary. Well, for example, today some high-ranking members Russian government set out to colonize the moon. That is, the construction of some stations there, the extraction of Helium-3 there, or something else. And is it necessary? Is it possible? Do the costs correspond to the opportunities and other tasks that are waiting in line due to the limited budgetary funds? Therefore, this thing is also very important in order to give science a value potential that can add both knowledge about the world and benefit to a person when applying it.
And finally, the practical significance once again. Even in the case of such a controversial position about fundamental science according to a theory that is allegedly disconnected from practice, and in this sense applied science is in conflict and opposite to fundamental science, even in this case, the classics and wise scientists have always said that there is nothing more practical than a good theory. From here we see with our own eyes that applied science and the ability to meaningfully, predictably, reliably transform the world always start from the achieved level on the path of the trajectory of fundamental science or the theoretical achievements of science. Therefore, the practical significance of science is an absolutely inseparable thing. In the case of applied, natural sciences, humanities, in the case of fundamental sciences, in the case of the most, it would seem, the most abstract theoretical research. And when young people, young scientists come out to defend their dissertations, they have these positions in their abstracts in the initial part of their dissertations. He is obliged to show everyone that these criteria of scientific character, the values that evaluate the content, effectiveness, usefulness of scientific achievements, they really exist. And in this sense, we have the right to say: the ideology of science as a set of values that form and make science a real science, and do not replace it with a colloquial genre, some empty and low-quality performances. This is a must for true science. Let's go back a little. Reliability. Here, too, exclusively intra-scientific methods as criteria are intertwined in a surprisingly beautiful and interesting way with values as attributes of ideology as a whole. What is the credibility criterion? If I now ask you the most common most understandable criterion of truth?
Experiment
Experiment, yes. Quite right. This representation is widespread. The criterion of truth is practice. Practice is the criterion of theory, right? Or not true? Not true. Try to apply the criterion of practice or experiment to the truth of a theoretical proposition that is so advanced that it is not even possible to imagine the possibility of practice itself. There is no such practice. And it is necessary to answer the question whether a theoretical position in science is true or not true. Try to conduct a practical test of the historical scientific interpretation of some event in the deep past, when it has already taken place, and you cannot repeat it. Try to test by practice today and now the truth of a scientific forecast that concerns the future. This is impossible. Therefore, to determine the truth, that is, the degree of proximity to the objective reality of the universe in our ideas, in our images of consciousness, in our models and theories are very different. Of course, experiment tests the theory, of course, when it is possible. When the subjects of a theoretical description are repeated, it is very good when a person can control them, and not just wait natural phenomena. But if an event, for example, a one-time event, is important. Or even banned as a test nuclear weapons for today. How to check some new theoretical developments, designs of these weapons, in ensuring their reliability, efficiency, and so on?
Modeling or simulation method: computer codes are made, nature is described in the form of a mathematical model, and certain knowledge and model theoretical representations of a person are played on it. This allows you to establish with a certain degree of reliability the true result. scientific research or not? Another criterion is the coincidence of various independent research approaches, the results of these approaches in solving the same problem. Or different research groups, when they come to the same solution of one problem by different methods independently, then this is also a criterion of truth. Of course, this is an indirect criterion of truth, because there is no absolute proof of truth. Just as there is no absolute approximation of human knowledge, human understanding to the infinitely complex reality of the world around us. The most remarkable position in this sense is not only that beauty will save the world, but that beauty belongs to a set of scientific values. Allows also to put forward an indirect criterion of truth. You used to solve problems in schools, and students and young scientists are still solving problems of a mathematical nature. And, remember, when, solving some algebraic example, you get its result? Well, for example, the result is this: And to the power of k plus f(xy) minus f2(a+b), divided by something, here is the sum icon, here is the plus integral, here is the plus ... In short, you don’t have enough pages to write out this result. Some kind of shaggy, ugly, ugly record, but on the other hand, solving the problem, you got this record: Asin (Ot + f) and that's it. The elementary form of a function is a natural reflection of the ideal perfect laws of nature. If the solution is beautiful, minimalistic in its form, display, then this is also one of the criteria for truth.
In other words, the ideology of science lies in the fact that it allows, as the highest value for a person operating with science, to ensure its usefulness through reliability, adequacy and relevance. Try to violate these principles, and instead of science you will get its imitation, you will get surrogates, you will get human helplessness.
On the other hand, the sciences are different. They differ in subject and method. First of all, we will now be interested in the already distinguished division of scientific activity, such as the humanities. If the subject of any science is nature, the world around us, then it is divided into two very exciting parts: ordinary nature and social nature, that is, endowed with reason, consciousness. Hence, the natural sciences appeal to inanimate, unreasonable nature; humanities or social sciences, they appeal to the social nature. What is the difference between humanitarian and social? The social one works with many individuals, their connections, the humanitarian one works with the individual. But, in the end, the difference is in the subject, in that there is some matter here, which is not yet very well known, this is the mind, this is consciousness. But here she is not. And it doesn't matter if there is one individual here or there are many of them, and these separate consciousnesses are connected with each other. This is the fundamental key difference. Social activity, relationships, interactions of people are always, and this is trivial, burdened by interests as a desire to realize their needs. But differences in the conditions of limited resources of these interests lead to conflict. Conflict leads to struggle, struggle leads to the search for methods of waging this struggle, and absolute filters of decency, morality, socialization and the choice of these methods of struggle never work there. Collective platforms are emerging in this struggle. In the choice of platforms for the organization of societies, the construction of states, the construction of civilizations. And the value agenda in social human activity becomes one of the most fundamental.
In the value agenda, in which, according to our approach, there is an ideology, there is a place for true, truthful and deceitful, manipulative methods and positions. And the platforms themselves, which, let's call them like this: a political platform, can be written in parentheses as a social platform, human practices. Since it is formed on the basis of preferred chosen values, since it forms the concepts of the world order, the social world order and interaction in it, a simple question arises: where do these values come from, where do these concepts come from, where do all recommendations for practice come from? Where do they come from, invent methods of fighting for the victory of their preferences, for the victory of their political platforms in elections or in wars? They come from somewhere. Where? Well, of course, from someone's brains. That is, some kind of intellectual activity gives rise to ideas of the human consciousness that something is more valuable and important for him personally or for the community, or for the state system, that in order to win with these platforms it is most correct to formulate such and such slogans, appeals, such construction concepts. This is a creative activity, and, naturally, in society and in the space of science, space humanities there is a function to generate this attribute of a purely ideological space of human activity, social activity, political activity, and science receives such a challenge, receives such a public order, a state order.
And here a lot of contradictions arise, namely: science becomes subordinate to certain interests of man and society, which, of course, reflect certain needs of man and society. And we are obliged here to open for ourselves and see a very important connection here in this lower right corner. This is the quality of these very needs. Find here some number one criterion that will allow you to answer the following questions. What are the needs of a person? Well, obviously they are derived from his nature, it is dualistic, it is a biological-socialized combination. In other words, there is an organism with its biological animal needs, and there is a certain substratum, a certain self-significant content that makes a person a person. Modern science, not speculative, is not yet able to answer, that is, to build a theory and model of what is mind, what is consciousness. There is an assumption, an assumption that this is a special form of matter. There is some empiricism that shows the validity of such an assumption, but that's all for now. We do not have a model of human consciousness. But on the other hand, we are well aware that there is a significant difference between the needs of the biological nature of man and this true categorical human nature. If biological nature requires pleasure as a result of effort, life step, behavior, enjoyment in satisfying the needs of biological existence: it is tasty and pleasant to eat. To take pleasure in the natural purpose of procreation procedures, to take pleasure in a series of interactions of the Darwinian type, the struggle for survival, namely: a sense of superiority, a sense and privilege of power, permissiveness, and the like. We have the right to consider this type of motivation, this type of values stemming from biological needs as base needs, because they pull human nature towards biological nature.
And they, in fact, in the space of truly human purpose are secondary, second-rate, they are not the main determinants. The main determinants are others, irrational from the point of view of biological nature. Therefore, the quality of the need is, as it were, divided. For example, the need to win at any cost. The order to science for the development of weapons, military equipment goes beyond the boundaries of what is permitted: any methods, the most cruel, incredible, which kill a person, maim, which deprive him of the ability to think as he pleases. There is a problem about criterion number one. What in the space of values, the scientific agenda, the formulation of the question for scientific research can set a limiter, can set a criterion for choosing certain goals, certain methods that science is working out. We believe that along this logical chain we come to the main challenge: there is nothing more significant for a person than to be a person. From here follow the criteria for limiting the set of needs and, accordingly, interests in social regulation, and so on. And this is also the agenda of the humanities. As you can see, the subject of humanitarian social science is directly connected with values, with criteria, that is, with what we have defined as ideology. Ideology is the subject of the humanities, it is a mass of challenges, a mass of questions. It is there, in the humanities, that they develop an idea of values or political platforms, but also ideas about the methods for implementing political social practices, for example, methods for developing manipulative mechanisms, methods of "soft power", non-forced, non-military ways to defeat the enemy state, organization of orange revolutions in it, self-destructive, self-degrading processes.
If science is effective in this respect, for example, the American humanities, social and humanitarian, then it allows the world to transform very effectively and powerfully. How? Well, for example, in twenty years to rework Ukraine and turn it from a fraternal, neighboring, history-inseparable country with Russia into its antagonist. They did it. On the other hand, if we recall the saying of Yuri Andropov, one of the leaders of the late USSR, the chairman of the KGB of those times: we do not know the society in which we live. This is a slightly truncated phrase of his, but the point is that a great nuclear power, if modern Russia is here in terms of the development of the humanities, then it is also in terms of the potential for state building, social building, political governance, at this completely miserable level helplessness. And not only to repel external aggressions of a more armed and capable geopolitical adversary who applies the results of scientific research in the humanitarian sphere. It uses finds, informational and cognitive types of weapons in the space of values, replacing, for example, en masse for Russian society the values of being a man and being a spiritual man, the values of consumerism, the values of hedonism and the realization of these most base human needs. They are capable, effective opponents, of using such informational methods of manipulating consciousness as, for example, the distribution of specially made computer games that modify the psychology of a person, his value world from an early age. They set up certain needs either in interstate confrontation or in economic confrontation - sales markets, the cultivation of artificial mass needs, again for the sale of certain products, and the like.
So, the humanities are connected with ideology naturally and directly, due to the fact that its object and subject is a person and a society that has interests directly linked to motivating values, corresponding aggregated practices, corresponding ideology. And the task of the humanities, therefore, is not only to understand these intricacies, but also to generate, design, produce practically significant potentials so that society, a person, political groups, the state as a whole can be effective both in the domestic political process: in struggle for power or the reproduction of fortifications of power and political regimes. So now, as we see, in the conditions of new generations of military tools, information wars, cognitive wars, soft power, smart power, "soft power" to be effective in foreign policy as well. I can absolutely responsibly assert that the development of physics and mathematics of the twentieth century, which gave man nuclear weapons, weapons based on new physical principles, like conventional weapons, but incredibly effective today, is being replaced by a different branch of science, which gives rise to more effective methods of conducting wars, less costly, less monstrous in terms of physical destruction, which is why they are called soft power. And in this regard, our understanding of the function and role of science, in connection with the border with ideology, is very important. Because they acquire the significance of national security potentials, so a few words about the fact that the method of science is also very connected with the problem of ideology, with the problem of values.
Let's review the methods of natural sciences or exact sciences and methods of the humanities. What, as a rule, is used in the humanities, in the humanities or social sciences. Well, let's talk traditionally. The tradition that is very easily interpreted here. Of course, this is a reflection, a primary sensation, a commentary, an interpretation, a description of what is happening in society, what is happening to a person. And endless volumes, endless descriptions are born. They are talented, they are informative, but they are quite helpless in this point of view. The humanist usually has specific type thinking. This thinking is figurative, such a watercolor, when the process of consciousness of this type grasps the subject of research in integrity sensually, intuitively, and this is important. It is important, if only because you need to outline the subject for yourself, to understand what you are going to deal with. But then this type of thinking faces great difficulty, because the construction of a model and theory, the use of a mathematical apparatus, a strict logical apparatus requires its own specifics of thinking, and this is where the traditional, in the Russian case is still tragic, dividing line passes. The humanist is uncomfortable, it is simply difficult for him, no one taught him how to cross the border and continue the development of knowledge of his subject with the help of strict natural scientific and mathematical methods. And, unfortunately, this is where it stops, at this level, at a level that limits its practical effectiveness and significance. A statement is made, and it also refers to the formation of a quasi-scientific ideology that justifies, advocates this weakness - positioning below the border. In the sense that it is said: “Well, what do you mean, a social subject is much, much, much more complicated than natural science, but here there are people, there are a lot of them, they are capricious. In the morning he did not get enough sleep - he will do so, but he wanted Crimea instead of cream, he will do so. It's unpredictable, it's impossible to study." What a kind of twenty-first century agnosticism. But it is very easy to show that the complexity of the subject of science, the complexity of the subject, which is a piece of the universe.
It is possible to formalize and agree what he understands by complexity. By complexity, we mean the number of elements in the complex system under study - times, respectively, their connections there as n-square, for example, or to a different degree, and the probability of implementing the behavior of these elements. The probability of such behavior or this or that. That is, uncertainty in predicting behavior. Here are two indicators that characterize the complexity of the subject. If we take quantitative indicators, then the whole of humanity with its seven billion people, with its whims “from and to” is many orders of magnitude less complicated than this one square centimeter of ordinary atmospheric air, in which there are ten to the nineteenth degree of molecules. Each molecule is formed from several atoms, the atoms contain electron shells and other microparticles. There is the principle of uncertainty, quantum mechanics, non-classical mechanics and the like are already working there. So self-justification, an attempt to advocate that social science is a human science, I quote: "Not a science at all." This is a kind of ideology. That is, people have their own interests in the pursuit of intellectual activity, these interests, the pursuit of intellectual activity in science, what is it? This is getting a degree, well, finally, getting a salary for your professional activities, these are publications, these are discoveries, this is a monograph that you can present, give and be satisfied that you are fulfilling yourself. These interests and these values are motivating, the self-realization of an intellectual figure, they begin to acquire some kind of surrogate false connotation. They give rise to their own such self-justifying quasi-scientific ideology: don’t touch me, don’t bother me with your mathematics, with your theories and models, don’t tell me that you can make a model of the behavior of a group of society, predict it, it’s unpredictable. I can even quote you: “The political process in Russia is such a complex subject that no theory can give even a hint of a true understanding of what can happen there and how it can be predicted.” This is a quote from real professorial speeches, including those who help and serve the Russian government.
Thus, the relevance of the challenge of ideology and science in terms of the humanities, as you can see, is so high that it can turn science into something other than science, deprive it of both types of potential, that is, destroy its self-assignment. This is very sad, very scary.
But let us now turn from the humanities to natural science, to a science such as mathematics. There seems to be no such "cries of Yaroslavna". You take a formula, you solve a system of equations, you make a bomb, or you make a tractor, or you make a camera with a new number of pixels, and so on. What are the ideological dangers there? They exist too. If we remember that very criterion number one, the highest requirement for a person and humanity to be a person, then this requirement is projected onto science, including natural and technical, exact science. Namely, this is a requirement of ethics, a requirement of morality in science. Dr. Mengele in the Nazi camps experimented on people, on children. Exclusively scientific experiments. Japanese militarists and fascists of the Second World War froze prisoners in refrigerators to the state of ice, checking the body's resistance in order to develop recommendations on how a pilot who fell into a cold sea can save his life, what recommendations to make. And they checked whether this pilot was properly frozen by tapping his finger with a stick. When they began to ring like ice, it means that their experiment was going well. These wild, terrifying examples have not gone down in history today. They are multiplying, because each state, providing its advanced positions in terms of defense, or rather defensive offensive, the best minds, the greatest costs are still used to develop new types of weapons. True, there are also paradoxical intricacies - not a lethal weapon, a laser is being invented that will not kill you, but will simply blind you. It's just that you will be blind and will not be able to aim with your machine guns.
There are also funny intricacies when, after exposure, all the soldiers line up with diarrhea in the toilet and are no longer able to fight. But God bless him, this may be a more humane thing. In other words, the challenge of the value filling of scientific activity, it takes place both for the humanities and for the natural exact sciences. It sometimes takes on the character of an individual challenge, an individual personal tragedy. An example from history. Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, an absolutely brilliant physicist, engineer, inventor of the latest technologies and technical solutions of the twentieth century, in response to Stalin's call and order to join the group for the development of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, refused. Why? Because he went to school and worked for many years in Rutherford's laboratory in England, there were many, in the West, his personal friends, in that world his children were born, grew up. And from this position, he could not allow himself the development of those weapons, which, as he understood by virtue of his mind, Stalin, as a politician of high rank and classical rank, who can afford everything, could use against his friends. He refused, fell into disfavor, into repression and worked at his dacha, in his garage, and he invented absolutely outstanding discoveries of generators and radiation candles in crossed electromagnetic fields there. Everyone has probably heard of one of these devices, the magnetron, but there is its forerunner, a device of the same type, called the nigotron. From the name of the village where his dacha "Nikolina Gora" was - Ni-go-tron.
There are a lot of such current challenges in the practice of any serious scientist or scientific group, institute or national institute of science, which is sure to be in the leading countries at the forefront of understanding the world. What is this challenge? We return to it. This is the main value. A person must be a person, in other words, this is called morality, in other words, it is called goodness. A person must definitely understand what is beyond the boundaries of morality and goodness - immorality, dehumanization and evil. This is a challenge, a requirement for the choice of the subject of science, for the choice of the method of science, the goals that science achieves in a particular task. And what is it if not an ideology, as a collection of values, with which we started. Thus, summing up this digression, we can say that science is inextricably linked with ideology as the subject of its research. On the other hand, science as a type of human activity that specific people are engaged in is itself the object of the influence of such a socio-political phenomenon as ideology, which generates special criteria and methods for scientific research proper. Which generates very serious conflicts and threats not only to the quality of scientific research, in terms of reliability, adequacy, reliability, relevance, practical significance, in terms of this most important criterion. Of course, one does not need to be naive romantics and idealists in order to call for such an understanding and allow oneself to assume that this will work this evening or tomorrow morning in all laboratories, in all scientific journals, in all countries, in all committees or ministries of science and education.
Of course not. But this is also one of the challenges, one of the tasks of real social and humanitarian science. Understanding the highest value for a person as a categorical element, a piece of the universe, format everything else in accordance with this number one criterion. If you build a picture of the relationship, interactions between ideology and science in this way, then it is very easy to reflect the ridiculous, helpless, vicious attacks that we have been subjected to and will continue to be subjected to. When we are told, well, what are you talking about your concept of a moral state, about your ideas for humanity that the main conflict is not a lack of resources, as the Roman circle says, but this is a conflict between the biological and truly human nature of a person. The conflict between an attempt to build a club of beneficiaries and the rest of humanity on its servants, and on the way to reduce it by five billion according to Dr. Mengele's prescriptions. It will be quite simple to answer these attacks, because what is told in a very telegraphic and thesis way, in fact, is also an act of cognition, the solution of a certain scientific task entitled "Combination, Interaction of Ideology and Science". The criterion of the truth of what we talked about today, it consists in the many applications of the very criteria that I spoke about: both historical practices that test the reliability of theories put forward by thinkers of the past, put forward today, and modeling, and, in fact, , beauty. Because there is nothing more beautiful in the world of social nature than a real spiritual moral person.
From ancient times, our ancestors spoke about this in their religious paintings, in their commandments, and today we, having already quite diverse, sufficiently developed apparatus, including the exact mathematical sciences, come and prove the same thing. Therefore, understanding, a theoretical model of what is, the interaction of ideology and science, starting with an accurate understanding of the meanings of the categories that we have developed, what is ideology, what is science, what is truth, what is a person, gives us the potential. On a purely pragmatic scientific level, it gives us a bonus and a preference to be as effective as possible, to be as moral as possible in that space of social nature research, state management design, the generation of political platforms, universal platforms, and the development of mankind. Therefore, in fact, from just such a form: oh, you are there, your science is worth nothing, your articles and results are all trash, because you are ideological. It certainly isn't worth a dime in the intellectual sense. This position of evaluation of such an approach is not worth a penny, because it stems from the advocacy of one's helplessness. Look at these kinds of opponents, look at their rhetoric, look at how cleverly and quickly they changed their vocabularies, their subjects and methods from the theory of scientific communism, from the theory of the economics of socialism and the economics of capitalism to modern economics, liberal theories and the like. Here they are. This is the most dangerous thing for them, I don’t know, dust, sprinkle them with this powder, and it will immediately become clear what such positions and such results, and such development plans of our country are worth, which the constitution forbids ideology. In fact, it deprives us of this entire understanding. What will be left then? Chatter will remain, helplessness will remain, and the understanding will remain that in Ukraine, and in our processes within the country, and in Bolotnaya, and in the future of our children, other countries will win, which treat this professionally and scientifically reliably, adequately, actual, I mean practical significance. Thank you and please have your questions.
Ivan Berezina: May I ask you a question about value criteria in science? Can we interpret that adequacy, relevance and practical significance have some kind of internal connection? Well, for example, what is inadequate in one period can become adequate due to the relevance in another period of the development of science or a person, humanity?
Stepan Sulakshin: Yes, of course, of course, this is exactly so, because, well, even in those funny examples with communicating vessels, because the evaluation of the picture and the appeal to the model, to the theory of communicating vessels, it was, in fact, limited by the historical conjectural tasks of mankind and its idea of the world. But no one forbids the variability of both of these positions. New tasks arise for a person, and new boundaries of methods, ideas about the world also arise. Well, for example, in this puzzle about the shell and the ocean. Sometime in the next millennium, a person will have a task at the level of completely different ideas about the fine structure of the world, and there it will not be about the level of water, but about the unity, I don’t know, information patterns, there are already such ideas that the whole the world is not matter, it is information. Although, in a short digression, this is just a play on words. Therefore, you are absolutely right that the dynamics of the interaction of these criteria and the circumstances of scientific activity is not zero. But in the monitored period in our lives, this can be perceived as an unshakable rule.
Nadezhda Pak: It seemed to me, and I would like you to confirm or deny, that in your story there is such a true science, and in the same way there is one true ideology. Everything else is some kind of human operation, connected with some needs, interests of today's conjectural moment. If when you talk about your own ideology, do you always refer to this one true ideology? That's what happened to me after reading your story. Right or wrong?
Stepan Sulakshin: The answer will be a little, it will start a little funny. Any scientist who comes to the board with his presentation is absolutely sure that he is right in any discourse. Otherwise, he has no right to go out and show himself. But at the same time, he is obliged, as a scientist who objectively understands all the challenges of the creative process, to admit that he can make a mistake. He must provoke himself by making provocative assumptions, by contradictory testing the validity of his results, and so on. I would say so and clarify your question terminologically: not the only and true science, but real science, a science that has the right to be called a science, and not some other type of activity, because they are also included here. This is a reflection of the world, here there is a sensual artistic reflection of the world, a description, poetic, fictional, which are also important, because they reflect the world in terms of the primary fixation of images of consciousness about a piece of the surrounding universe. But all in all - this is science. Here is a description, a reflection, but this is all - this is science. Regarding the truth, the exclusivity of ideology, of course not. I emphasized and drew your attention to the fact that ideology is an exclusively relativistic thing. She is interested.
Interests are characteristic, characteristic affiliation of an individual or selected groups. Individuals and groups are always in conflict with each other because the resources they are fighting for are limited. Therefore, it is fundamental and at the level of the law of social life that ideologies are different, they are multiple, they reflect and give rise to conflicts, they are a generator, an energizer of the political process, the struggle for power, interstate contradictions, intercivilizational contradictions, interethnic conflicts and contradictions. And only my claim is this, when I was looking for an absolute eternal ideal criterion, which theoretically, plus infinity, will remove this conflict, remove the multiplicity of these ideologies. Why? Because the lack of resources will someday be a thing of the past. Scientific and technical capabilities will allow a person to provide all his material needs with the proper amount of resources. In the theory of communism, how does this formula sound? To each according to his needs. And this is completely logical, because someday this humanity will provide. Another thing is that new needs may arise, appealing to new resources, which will again be in some deficit, but the cycle will repeat itself. Therefore, the claim and the assertion, I do not deny that it is very ambitious, but in general claims to be the number one position in human self-consciousness, ideology, including science, including the humanities. That a man must be a man. There is nothing more important than this message. And then the angle of view becomes clear, the angle of approach to all ideologies, which today, from the point of view of their carriers, are the most correct, the most true. They are fighting for them not only at rallies, not only in the electoral process, but also with weapons in their hands. In the name of victory, other people are killed. If we have this point of view, then people will reconcile, people will see the nature, essence and foundations of their differences. They will agree, and thus they will somehow become more human, humanized.
Nadezhda Pak: Not a question, but perhaps such a provocation. But maybe for the future, not for now. Could you state your ideology or our ideology in five to seven minutes?
Dmitry Gudkov: I also wanted to add, which is very common in comments to our materials, in which there is such a provocation, that, well, great, you gave an example with terrifying frosts, you tested the limit of a person when he freezes there. Okay, maybe it helped save a lot more lives of Japanese pilots? So this morality that we offer, about which we are talking, is it possible to turn it around? For example, for the sake of science, which will later save a hundred million, kill a million?
Stepan Stepanovich: The questions are essentially independent, I will answer sequentially. Question of Nadezhda Konstantinovna. Try to formulate your own ideology. In a sense, I formulated the macro-ideology, but the question, of course, is not about that. The question of those practically significant proposals that follow from this theory is formatted in a relevant conjectural way for our Russia. An ideology that should permeate our constitution. An ideology that should form a political platform for new parties or a party that unites the people, goes to the polls, wins and equips the country in a different form according to a new blueprint in accordance with the new constitution. And yes, of course, having created this fundamental theory, an approach to ideology as such, we get a position in order to develop in an applied way a new constitution of the country and a political platform, and a large number of life-giving formats, constructs, regulations, laws, formulations, procedures, mechanisms and so on for the life of the whole country. I'm starting, the life order of the whole country is segmented into six major areas. This is internal politics: party, electoral processes, the formation of power, public administration as the implementation of power.
This foreign policy, or rather, the external activities of the country: both political, and diplomatic, and humanitarian, and material exchange, economic and financial, and military-political, and others. This is a humanitarian sphere: science, education, health care, upbringing, propaganda, means mass media, mass information. This is the social sphere: the existence of society, the people as an integral organism, the issues of redistribution. This is a regionalistic theme: the arrangement of a large territory that is heterogeneous in climatic, ethnic, spatial terms, in terms of accessibility, and so on. And, finally, it is the economic and financial space. These pyramids from the highest value number one in the ensemble and set of highest values in each of the listed areas, they are built on the basis of this theory in a clear, transparent, provable form of cause and effect. From the highest values in each of the six areas that I mentioned, a set of challenges is formed that torpedo or prevent these highest values from being realized, a set of goals in the development, management and construction of the country's life infrastructure. Let's multiply. The highest values are a dozen and a half. This is work, this is collectivism, this is love, family, children, this is morality, this is altruism, this is creativity, this is the desire for innovation, this is the desire for the ideal, and a few more. Each highest value gives rise to value goals, about five for one.
We multiply - seventy-five. Each of these values is torpedoed by real-life problems in the amount of also about five, in total we get about four hundred cells in which this connection and connectedness can be traced in an absolute way, in an algorithmic way. What are these cells? This is the formulation of tasks, how to solve in this cell this part of the life maintenance of our country. For example, we take a flat income tax rate, this is a social topic: redistribution by society. Why? Because, from our point of view, it is rigidly connected with criterion number one: a person and humanity must be truly human, which means that it must be cooperative, it must be social, non-individual, illiberal, according to liberalism, individuality is an affiliation not of the human, but of the biological stage , which in the past a person has. There is no need to call us there, to the past, comrade liberals. So cooperativeness, sociality, multiplicity necessarily entails a redistribution of resources and gross added value. Why? Because there will always be differences in the abilities of people: one is stronger - it produces more, the other is weaker, the third is completely sick or disabled. The principle of "Man, be a man": do not gobble up and send this sick disabled person to the Mauthausen stove, but help him, redistribute your product in his favor. An oligarch who has no salary at all, because he has income, he has rent from property, property and looted Soviet state property, give part of your income to another part of the population who do not have this property. This principle has long been implemented in capitalist countries.
The income tax progression there reaches seventy and even ninety per cent during the war years. But our country has a flat income tax rate, so our ideology, which is translated into a new constitution, a political platform, into a specific demand to the legislator, president or government: introduce a progressive income tax rate. Because our society will make it human. This oligarch will not have to lick a hot frying pan in the other world, to repent of his sins.
Nadezhda Pak: So we have twelve highest values here? Then we have six spheres. Here, from motivating values, as you say, at least five... Here, please, show an example.
Stepan Sulakshin: The value goals that are already being formatted as formulas for practical political and social state building are social justice in the tax system. Social justice also requires a scientific approach, this is not chatter, this is a complex category. The ratio of expectations and the psychological state of the individual between what he considers proper in his attitude from society and the state and actually received from them. And the opposite is the expectations of society and the state from the individual in their relation and the ratio of this to what society and the state actually receive. For example, a sacred duty is the protection of their Fatherland for the men of our country. Why did I now make this very complex verbal construction. In order to have an accurate feeling that from such a theoretical rather abstract scheme, we, applying these requirements of scientific character, applying the requirements of accuracy not only of description, but also of modeling, come to very complex highly professional requirements for this political proposal, for state building. That is, to that own practically significant conjectural ideology, which can, for example, be formulated and formed in the form of a manifesto and program of our new party. The truth is that this should be said in a simple and accessible language for people, but today our topic is tied to science. There are a lot of such examples that we have just analyzed.
Let me give you one more, it is very important, and it is very discursive. It is a question that private property is sacred and inviolable. The statement is that there is no private property. Only Robinson Crusoe could have private property on his island, and only until Friday arrived. Man is always in relationship with his own kind. And even if this person has the means of production or finance, which he lends, he is in a relationship with another person. His being, his function is socialized. And from that measure of humanization, socialization of the function of his property or his resources, given in debt, his future will depend. For example, the proletariat, indignant at its injustice, will come and make a social revolution, expropriate the expropriator. And if a smart state and a smart owner, and society, as in our constitution, we are smart people and write a smart constitution, they will write down that entrepreneurship is a type of labor activity, and those fixed assets or financial capital that can create added value in the presence of external labor, regulated in such a way that profit stimulates the owner. But at the same time, it is redistributed through a regulated tax rate in favor of the entire society and the state. And the banker will make a profit not of three hundred and fifty-seven percent as we have now, but of five percent as there, in the West, or three percent, but he will make a profit, he will have an incentive as an engine for the progress of a market economy based on supposedly private property. But then harmony in society, justice and the implementation of criterion number one will be achieved.
Therefore, in each of these areas, if we definitely have a lantern and a searchlight that highlights the essence of the conflict, helping to find a solution to this conflict, either in redistribution, or in access to benefits, or in this very social justice, in the equality of security of human dignity, regardless of race, gender, nationality, place of residence, social status, then we make constructive decisions: article of the constitution number such and such, federal law that unfolds it, government decree, presidential decrees, and so on. All by-laws, they are strung on this vertical in a systematic way and serve the same purpose. On this basis, in fact, our ideology is already built in an applied sense. It is already ready to be presented in the form of a political platform and party program. It is already ready, and not only the constitution as a project is ready, in order to offer it to society at our modern fork in development.
The question that Dmitry asked is fundamental and classical. It is formulated at this level, theoretical: is it possible to realize moral goals in an immoral way. Remember other formulations: does the end justify the means, is there a lie for salvation. To shorten the answer, because, as you already feel, this problem is philosophical, and logical, and practical - it is very difficult. It sounds like this, it is sometimes very difficult to see the dialectic, the relationship between these two categories: the means and the results. Simple examples. To kill a person is immoral, to kill an enemy who is going to kill you, your family, your children. It's already different. To kill the enemy, defending yourself and your Fatherland, that's different. Kill the killer. Kill killer killer killer killer. At an even step it is moral, at an odd step it is already immoral. Lies to the rescue. Lying is not good at all. But to tell a person who has two days left to live, to console him, probably, it will be moral. In other words, human life, the space of these challenges, it is not alphabetical, it is not trivial. It requires rather than an exam in which you can memorize the rules and poke your finger, it requires an understanding of this matter, this nature of challenges, this complexity, a rule, a criterion that you must apply in every difficult situation. Another example. Zhukov is a great commander, and Zhukov is a butcher who sent entire armies and fronts to the meat grinder for slaughter. Challenge of War: Send an army to the death to win the war and protect the whole country. But he sent these hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths. He who? Hero? Is he a moral person? Or is he a butcher, a murderer? This is for your question. And the answers are very different. Including they can be crafty, opportunistic, politicized, dishonest, but they can also be professional. Because if, due to the situation, when hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were sacrificed, to take such and such a city or such and such a bridgehead on Stalin's birthday, then this is difficult to explain even in war conditions. This is again a return to the universal recipe. Possessing the highest criterion in each particular case, one can find this solution. There are no predetermined absolute solutions for all particular concrete cases of life. One must be able to recognize where there is good and where there is evil. More questions?
Dmitry Novikov: I think that this criterion is the highest, it can sometimes come into very serious contradictions with other criteria. But there are other criteria. For example, national security. And now, if a lot of scientists would all together follow the example of Kapitsa, then there is a possibility that the Soviet Union would have been captured by military means much earlier than it collapsed. That is, in addition to criterion number one, there are probably others, and if they are very weighty in the aggregate, then they can somehow conflict with the first?
Stepan Sulakshin: I cannot support this approach, because there is, of course, a hierarchy of criteria. There is the highest absolute criterion number one. There are criteria below. Somewhere right here, for example, there is a really existing criterion for the national security of the country. Well, firstly, this criterion is connected with the eternal and absolute existence of the human mind as a kind of matter. This criterion is a short historical phenomenon. There will be no state, there will be no threats of interstate wars, and so on. The second point, if this criterion is applied to a specific political situation with a specific country and with a specific challenge to national security, you will definitely come to some practically accessible, realizable, realistic, and not idealized and unrealistic, and therefore not useful, result and formula. That's why you added another interpretation of the previous question. Indeed, a conflict, an apparent contradiction. But if there is a hierarchy of significance, there will always be a specific, practically significant, useful and moral result, to the extent possible in a given period of time. This, by the way, gives rise to differences between morality and morality, morality and ethics. In what sense? Morality is an absolute ideal, morality is that contractual practice and formula that society at that moment in time considered achievable for itself as a measure of approaching the ideal. And ethics is just a set of rules of conduct for the implementation of this social contract in morality as an accessible, realizable approximation to the absolute, ideal, criterion number one. I thank you for your question. It allows you to see this complex hierarchy and semantic topology of all life. It is, of course, much more complicated than simply declaring one ideal, but without it it is impossible to understand and build this entire hierarchy. Probably one or two more and we'll be done.
Alexander Gaganov: I have a question. You said that in our thirteenth article of the constitution, obligatory ideology is prohibited. But, as I understand it, this ban can be considered a kind of response to what we had in Soviet times, that is, roughly speaking, a certain ideology is prohibited. But at the same time, is it possible to say that in our state there is an ideology that, let's say, is not openly formulated in some clear postulates. This ideology, despite the fact that the ideology should somehow support common values and be directed to the benefit of society, this ideology works to the detriment of the state and society. Can we talk about it?
Stepan Sulakshin: In my opinion, it is necessary to speak, because you are right. The explanatory format, why such an entry appeared in the ninety-third year in the Russian constitution, is precisely this. There was an allergy, a position on the contrary, the Soviet political system was strange. There was a sixth article Soviet constitution, where the formula was simply amazing: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the core of the political system Soviet Union". Here are lawyers or political scientists, explain what the core is. This cunning opened the field of manipulativeness, and in fact, monopoly and totalitarianism. Therefore, the desire to get away from such restrictions was emotionally and psychologically understandable, but the formula sounded completely accurate not in relation to the communist and Soviet models of ideology, but in relation to any ideology. Because we read this norm: no ideology in Russia can be established as mandatory or state, none. On the other hand, it is multiplicity. The plurality of ideologies in the country is allowed and protected. But this did not at all eliminate the threats and torpedoes to the success of our country from the point of view that a unified state ideology was not only introduced de facto, but it was laid down in the de jure crafty constitution. How?
The thing is not quite obvious. The only highest value, remember, we understood: the highest value, goals, public administration, the real image of the country and the real result. Human rights and freedoms are declared the only highest value. Well, first, rights and freedoms are tautological terms, we restrict ourselves to the term freedom. The only value is human freedom. What it is? Prime Minister Medvedev simply defined this in his speech: the poor cannot be free. In his opinion, freedom is the ability to buy what you want or what you can. This is the main postulate of liberal ideology: the individual comes first, his rights come first. And the constitution does not stipulate his duties and limitations of his rights. This leads to the fact that the ideology works, or rather, the theory that is inseparable from the ideology of liberalism, the theory of social Darwinism. Social relations, in this case in the human community, are built according to the biological principle. They simply forgot about this criterion, it is crossed out, namely: whoever is stronger, who has longer, sharper claws, will win. We look at the result of just two decades of development of our country. Who is the winner? Those who managed to attach to the property; those who are corrupt beyond measure; those who have become rich. And, in practice, Medvedev turned out to be right, according to the laws of the jungle, according to the laws of liberalism, according to the laws of superiority, which both racism, and fascism, and colonialism produced, according to the laws of social Darwinism, our constitution led to what it should have led to. Namely, the minority of the country's citizens won - the rich and involved in another very important comparable resource, the administrative resource. Those who appoint themselves for life; those who set their own salaries and pensions; those who for themselves a lifetime pension in the Federation Council form and the like. Therefore, the ideology of the interests of the minority, the ideology of liberalism and social Darwinism, the ideology of the jungle, the ideology of dehumanization - this is the main state single country-wide ideology that formats the results of its life and the results of its development.
Andrey Novikov: As far as I understand, ideology as a system of values naturally affects science, it can develop it at an active pace, it can slow it down. Today, respectively, if we take America, science is more or less moving forward there, an example with Ukraine was given: they took advantage of the situation, we lost here. The question is, if we introduce an ideology, where is the guarantee that moral ideology will accelerate science and defeat the Western model, because everything is simple there: money, incentives, people are stimulated there, technologies are developed and everything else. And, perhaps, morality, on the contrary, will slow down science? Here I am not very sure.
Stepan Stepanovich: A very precise and sharp challenge in the field of this consideration. It is formulated as follows, not only in science, but more importantly in confrontation, in politics. What is more efficient in today's world? Practices, arsenals, tools, tools that are limited by a moral barrier (you cannot go beyond some norms) or the same arsenals, practices and tools that are not limited, that is, they can be more extensive. Which option is effective? This is a question of the imperfection of today's world, in which, as you remember, the Soviet Union fought for peace all the time. New peace initiatives of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev were proclaimed every Monday, and he developed new types of nuclear weapons, chemical, bacteriological, climatic on new physical principles and so on. But the United States and other geopolitical adversaries did it too. As for the potential of scientific progress, ethical and moral constraints work in approximately the same way, because there is not a single issue of modern scientific research that, first of all, would not be aimed at the problems of the country's defense capability. We jump right in there. In the Soviet Union, every scientist, especially in the technical sciences and natural sciences, signed a paper in which it was written that when any new results were obtained, the Soviet scientist was obliged to correlate them with the possibility of strengthening the country's defense capability. Here a scientist is working, I don’t know, on the shape of a tablespoon, slurping soup, he must think: a soldier in the field, how to bend this spoon in order to solve the issue of the country’s defense capability. This is not a joke, but simply a consequence of the modern structure of the world.
If the other side is touched upon, such as, for example, the area of ethical frontier research in science: human cloning, genetic modification, human prosthetics, mind control capabilities, penetration into the human mind, then those countries that do not impose any restrictions on this, they are able to create new types of weapons, terrifying weapons. Those who say: we will not deal with this, because it is not good, as a result, what position will they end up in? In the position of the victim. Therefore, most often in the real world, the right words are spoken, but “with two dogs” is top secret, it used to be called that, research should be done. I do not know this, because only those who have access to these things know for sure. But from the general principles that we have discovered, this should be the case for today. And the highest responsibility, of course, is that states are able to protect their people, their territory and their values.
So, friends, we are done. I thank you and I hope that everyone who watches this record will forgive us for difficult matters. But, you will agree that someone in our country should understand them, so that later, instead of the constitution, there will be no such crafty false instructions as to dehumanize the country, and turn people into animals, into consumers; how to dissolve our identity, defense capability in Europe, Asia, whatever; how to deprive us of the responsibility and opportunity to provide and design the future of our children. Thank you, good bye.
The interaction of science and ideology is a very big topic. We were distracted from this topic by irrelevant and falsely presented episodes of conflicts, which were given an ideological character: the church against Galileo or Giordano Bruno, Lysenko against geneticists. A whole important genre of history (and mythology) arose - the description of the exploits of the martyrs of science, who became victims of the ideological machine. But even the dramatic episodes of the trial of Galileo or the defeat of Soviet genetics were turned into primitive ideological myths in most popular texts, which did not allow us to draw important lessons from them.
Until now, the most attention has been drawn to the traumatic effect that ideology has on activity. scientist. Everything is clear here, any political regime jealously follows the sphere that “produces knowledge”, and precisely because it has a powerful influence on the ideological foundations of the regime. As science, through the system of education and upbringing, through the mass media, begins to dominate the public consciousness more and more, the word of the scientist acquires an ever greater political significance. And scientists themselves adapt to the dominant ideology in order to provide their ideas with a "protective shell" that makes it easier for the general public to perceive these ideas. I. Prigogine writes:
“There is no doubt that theological arguments (at different times for different countries) made speculative constructions more socially acceptable and credible. References to religious arguments were common in English scholarly writings even into the 19th century. Interestingly, the current revival of interest in mysticism is characterized by the opposite direction of argumentation: in our days, with its authority, science gives weight to mystical statements.
More interesting and less obvious is the impact of ideology not on the behavior of a scientist in society, but on himself. cognitive process : the choice of topics, the formulation of the problem, the recognition or denial of certain theories. Why did Giordano Bruno become a passionate preacher of the Copernican system? A careful reading of his texts shows that Bruno, even before becoming acquainted with this system, was a radical political and religious reformer, who in his ideology was based on the ancient Egyptian cults, the most important of which was the cult of the Sun. The theory of Copernicus, which placed the Sun at the center of the universe, was perceived by him as an absolute truth, giving an irrefutable and scientific justification for his ideological goal. As Mircea Eliade writes, "Copernicus saw his discovery through the eyes of a mathematician, while Bruno perceived it as a hieroglyph of the divine mystery." Bruno's passion owes its power synergy scientific and ideological convictions.
The influence of ideological factors on the creation by Darwin of his theory of the origin of species has been well studied. Having begun his work, he had a long and close contact with the English livestock breeders of the new, capitalist formation, who consciously changed nature in accordance with the requirements of a market economy. The application of political economy to living nature gave rise to a peculiar ideology among breeders with a set of expressive concepts and metaphors. Under the influence of this developed ideology, Darwin even transferred these “unscientific” concepts and metaphors to the evolution of species in the wild, for which he was criticized by his supporters (as many authors have noted, the very language of the On the Origin of Species encourages applying the concepts presented in this work to human society, that is, objectively, they initially carry an ideological load). The concept of "artificial selection" provided the central metaphor for Darwin's evolutionary theory - "natural selection".
Another powerful influence on Darwin was the work of Malthus, an ideological teaching that explained the social ills generated by industrialization in a free enterprise capitalist economy. IN early XIX V. Malthus was one of the most widely read and discussed authors in England and expressed the "style of thinking" of the time. Presenting as a necessary law of society struggle for existence in which the "poor and incapable" are destroyed and the fittest survive, Malthus gave Darwin the second central metaphor for his theory of evolution, the "struggle for existence." The scientific concept applied to wildlife comes from an ideology that justifies the behavior of people in society. And already from biology it returned to ideology, equipped with the label of scientificity.
The influence of ideological factors is clearly visible in the process perception Darwinism in different cultures and societies. The ongoing clashes with Darwinism on religious grounds are widely known. But here is a case not directly related to religion: in Russia, Darwinism was exceptionally quickly, practically without meeting opposition, perceived by both biologists and the broad cultural environment. But the ideological views of this environment in the 60-70s of the XIX century. were incompatible with the Malthusian component of Darwinism. In their comments, Russian scientists warned that this English theory, which is inspired by the political economy concepts of the liberal bourgeoisie. There was an adaptation of Darwinism to the Russian cultural environment (“Darwin without Malthus”), so that the concept of interspecific struggle for existence was supplemented, and sometimes replaced by the theory of interspecific mutual aid.
The main thesis of this "non-Malthusian" branch of Darwinism, associated primarily with the name of P. A. Kropotkin, is that the possibility of survival of living beings increases to the extent that they adapt in a harmonious form to each other and to the environment. P. A. Kropotkin outlined this concept in the book “Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution”, published in London in 1902. In his work “Morals of Anarchism”, he summarizes this idea as follows:
“Mutual assistance, justice, morality - these are the successive stages that we observe in the study of the world of animals and humans. They constitute an organic necessity, which contains its own justification in itself and is confirmed by everything that we see in the animal world ... The feelings of mutual assistance, justice and morality are deeply rooted in a person with all the power of instincts. The first of these instincts - the instinct of Mutual Aid - is the strongest.
Here we see the influence of the ideology dominant in a particular culture on the perception of a major scientific theory. Outlining the concept of Kropotkin's "liberating Darwinism", the Spanish historian of science A. Gutiérrez Martínez notes: "The self-affirmation of the individual was glorified and became a subconscious part cultural heritage West. On the contrary, the idea of mutual assistance was forgotten and rejected.
The influence of the ideological context of society on science is also visible through negative impact- through prohibitions on certain ideas and suppression of interest in certain phenomena. Now, during the crisis of ideologies and, accordingly, the breaking of many scientific ideas, this is especially clearly visible. Laureate Nobel Prize Ilya Prigogine draws attention to this in connection with the phenomena of instability:
“The term ‘instability’ has a strange fate. Introduced into wide use quite recently, it is sometimes used with a barely concealed negative connotation, and, moreover, as a rule, to express content that should be excluded from a truly scientific description of reality. To illustrate this in terms of physics, consider an elementary phenomenon that has apparently been known for at least a thousand years: an ordinary pendulum ...
If the pendulum is placed so that the weight is at the point opposite to its lowest position, then sooner or later it will fall either to the right or to the left, and a very small vibration will be enough to direct its fall in one direction and not in the other. So, the upper (unstable) position of the pendulum has almost never been the focus of attention of researchers, and this despite the fact that since the first works on mechanics, the motion of the pendulum has been studied with special care. We can say that the concept of instability was, in a certain sense, ideologically forbidden ... However, today we can agree: science is, in a sense, an ideology - after all, it is also rooted in culture.
The ideology prevailing at the moment in society has always influenced cognitive activity and through social mechanisms of science (distribution of funds, administrative power, etc.). Attempts to present these phenomena as a specific property of a particular political regime (for example, Soviet power in the USSR) speak at best of ignorance of history or political self-interest.
An integral part of scientific activity is conflict associated with the choice of competing concepts and methods. And the use by scientists of the ideological preferences prevailing in society as a weapon in their intrascientific conflict is a common phenomenon. When a group or school succeeds in skillfully linking public opinion the position of an opponent with an ideology that is unattractive at the moment, victory in the dispute is ensured not only with obvious flaws in the scientific position of this group or school, but even with obvious disagreements with the very ideology that is used as a weapon.
The conflict in Soviet biology in 1930-1940 became widely known, when the group of T. D. Lysenko, using ideological accusations, defeated the scientific community of Soviet geneticists, which has a high international prestige, although their position was more in line with the ideas of dialectical materialism, under the banner of which they were attacked. An attempt a little later to carry out a similar operation in chemistry, accusing the theory of chemical resonance as bourgeois and "Anglo-American" (this was at the height of cold war), had practically no success - the label did not stick.
The widespread representation of Lysenko as an infernal person (regardless of how justified it is) diverts attention from the fact that great scientists acted in similar ways. Here is a quite typical case that took place in the so-called. a democratic society with the participation of worthy people (it is described in detail in). During the 19th century in France, there have been two debates about the spontaneous generation of life. Beginning in 1802, Georges Cuvier struggled with this idea for 30 years. In the end, he managed to link in public opinion the doctrine of his opponent (Joffrey) with the natural philosophy of "enemy Germany" and with the materialism that the French public associated with the terror and chaos of the French Revolution. This decided the outcome of the dispute, Cuvier emerged victorious.
The ideological argumentation was used even more consistently in the 1960s. Pasteur in his debate with Felix Pouchet, who defended the concept of the spontaneous generation of life. Pouchet even specially published a book in 1859, in which a large section was devoted to proving that his concept had nothing in common with materialism and atheism and was consistent with the orthodox principles of religion. He persistently and quite sincerely proved the same thing in his speeches. Nevertheless, Pasteur, who adhered to very conservative ideological and religious views, managed to convince the scientific elite that Pouchet's concept smuggled in materialism and rejected the divine act of Creation. Under the conditions of reaction and conservatism that marked the Second Empire, the Academy of Sciences sided with Pasteur, and the two scientific commissions it appointed showed, to put it mildly, bias in analyzing the experimental results of both opponents.
This debate entered biology textbooks as an example of the brilliant victory of Pasteur's experimental method over speculative reasoning. But things were different. Pasteur used in his experiments closed flasks with boiled yeast extract. After he let air into the flask, microflora appeared in the extract. Pasteur showed that the cause of this was contamination by microorganisms introduced with the air. When conducting an experiment on a glacier in the Alps, with almost sterile air, life did not appear in the bottle. Pouchet used flasks with boiled hay extract, isolated from the air by a mercury lock. Pure oxygen obtained chemically, obviously free of microorganisms, was let into the flask, and life in the extract was born, microflora arose. To repeat the conditions of Pasteur, Pouchet climbed a glacier in the Pyrenees, but the results did not change, life was born. Reproducing Pouchet's experiments, Pasteur failed - his efforts to prevent the "origin of life" were successful only in one case out of ten, but it was these cases that he considered reliable results, and the remaining 90% of the experiments were erroneous. He did not publish these results, although he acknowledged them in one lecture.
The results of Pouchet's experiments received an explanation in 1876, when heat-resistant spores of bacilli were found in a boiled hay extract, which did not die during boiling and began to develop when oxygen was supplied. But at the time of the dispute with Pasteur, they did not know this, and the results had to be interpreted in favor of Pouchet. This was all the more logical since Pouchet's assertion was much less rigid than Pasteur's thesis, which stated that life cannot spontaneously generate itself. never. Of course, Pasteur was fundamentally right, but the bottom line is that he contradicted the experimental data available at that moment, how they could be understood. The outcome of the dispute was decided by external, ideological factors. In 1872, Pasteur stepped up the ideological discrediting of his opponents: given the bitterness of the French over the defeat in the war with Prussia, he began to call the concept of the spontaneous generation of life a "Germanic" theory. And the final touch to this story: when the general cultural and ideological climate in France changed and Pasteur came to terms with the Third Republic, he became much more favorable to the concept of spontaneous generation and in 1883 for the first time admitted that thirty years ago he himself tried to "imitate nature" and create "immediate, essential beginnings of life" in their experiments with asymmetry, magnetism and polarized light.
When talking about the influence of ideology on the research process and the perception of ideas by the scientific community, one must take into account not only the ideology that dominates society as a whole (it, by the way, does not always coincide with the so-called “official” ideology), but also the views characteristic of this particular environment of scientists. Informal or even implicit disapproval on the part of fellow scientists makes it difficult to develop a concept, even if it corresponds to the official ideology or views of influential people. social groups outside of science. So, relatively recently, in the scientific community of the United States, there was a tense controversy around sociobiology- a new discipline that claims to describe the essence of social phenomena by reducing them to the action of biological factors. Many US scientists saw in the very concept of sociobiology a relapse of social Darwinism as a "scientific" ideology that justifies reactionary social practices. A group of the most radical colleagues (the "Boston Critics" united in the "Science for the People" group), along with a deep scientific analysis of the weaknesses and contradictions of sociobiology, organized an intense ideological attack. Regardless of whose position is closer to us, by structure this is no different from ideological attacks on a concept that we later recognize as progressive. Sociobiology founders Wilson and Lumsden wrote at the time:
“To rank opponents in the same group as Rockefeller and Hitler is to demand their expulsion from the university ... This is especially true of Harvard University, where a professor accused of sympathizing with fascism is in the same position as an atheist in a Benedictine monastery » .
The influence of ideology does not deprive the researcher of considerable autonomy. There is no direct connection between the progressive or reactionary character of an ideology and the value of the results of the research it stimulates. Thus, driven by the ideas of the scientific materialism of the Enlightenment, which denied the role of divine providence in the emergence of life, the French naturalist Buffon conducted experiments with the cooling of metal balls of various compositions and sizes and accurately calculated the dates when, according to his concepts, “certain marine animals should have appeared on different planets solar system”(for example, one of these animals is at the pole of the third moon of Jupiter in 13,624 BC). Nothing to do with reality! On the contrary, in an effort to prove the role of the inner divine "impulse", William Harvey made important observations on the process of fertilization and laid the foundation for modern embryology.
There are even cases when it is the results of research stimulated by the ideology that the scientist seeks to refute that are valuable. A staunch creationist and fixist (i.e., one who believes that species are created by God and are immutable), Frederic Cuvier (son of Georges Cuvier) engaged in meticulous observations of primates in order to refute the evolutionary concept. An evolutionist would not make observations of this kind. And the fixist F. Cuvier laid the foundation for modern primatology, which played an important role in establishing the evolutionary doctrine.
Let us consider, however, the reverse branch in the interaction of science and ideology, which scientists try to ignore.
