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Istina-Truth and Pravda-Truth: Alienating and Assimilating Knowledge
Vladimir I. Zhukovsky3* and Daniil V. Pivovarovb
a Siberian Federal University 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041 Russia b Ural Federal University named after B.N. Yeltsin 51 Lenina, Ekaterinburg, 620083 Russia
Received 11.03.2013, received in revised form 18.03.2013, accepted 25.03.2013
The authors aim to determine the differences between the categories of istina-truth andpravda-truth. It is shown in this article that istina-truth and pravda-truth are differently bound with each other, and contradictions between them are frequent. It is proposed to apply in gnosiology such new concepts, as “alienating cognition" and “assimilating cognition", “epistemic truth" and “existential truth". Technical and natural-science cognition are examples of knowledge with a dominant of the alienating beginning. On the contrary, religious and philosophical cognition - are mainly “assimilating cognition"; they are interfaced not so much with the search of epistemic truth, but, first and foremost, they try to find the ontological truth of life.
Keywords: istina-truth, pravda-truth, alienating cognition, assimilating cognition, epistemic truth, existential truth.
Hegel has somehow told that “istina-truth” I
is a great word and a greater subject; if spirit c
and soul of the person are still healthy, his breast should be raised above when listening to the t
sounds of this word. But what is istina-truth? o
There is no unequivocal answer to this question, i
and the term “istina-truth” is initially multiple- 1
valued. a
Hebrew “Kft j “ (amen; so be it; verily, truly) s
designates: 1) opposite to lie or non-pravda- a
truth; 2) reliability, trust, fidelity. Ancient Greek t
“aXn^eta” (aletheya) is translated as: 1) true; t
2) opened and fair; 3) an original reality; 4) a real N
object, instead of its copy. Latin “verus” means: e
1) true; 2) truthful, and “veritas” - istina-truth. I
© Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved
* Corresponding author E-mail address: art_dec@lan.krasu.ru
Istina-truths are subdivided into necessary and casual, analytical and synthetic.
Plato speaks in his dialogue “Theaetetus”, that it is possible to own some istina-truth, not owning knowledge. Not being cognized, this istina-truth somehow is present in thinking. But knowledge is impossible without Logos, without any reasonable -verbal report. Limited istina-truths should be such istina-truths which are realized and designated by names. According to Plato, the uttered ideas are incomplete and false, and the uppermost truths about life are inexpressible. Nevertheless, it is necessary to think about life, even if it is incomprehensible. According to Descartes, clear istina-truths are from the God;
according to Spinoza, the unconditional istina-truth is how the God sees the world; therefore, the genuine istina-truth is an attribute of full and exact knowledge.
Some philosophers-pragmatists stipulated: “Even if the God actually does not exist, but the person needs the God very much and believes, that the God exists, then the God certainly will appear as a real force”. The utopian function of philosophy justifies itself when the force of people's belief substantiates a utopia, inhaling a life into it. We remember that in Russia, the testing area of utopias, in XX century the communistic ideal took the shape of the Soviet power, gave birth to a rich culture and existed for more than half of a century. So, the concept of utopian illusion is quite compatible to the concept of real feasibility.
Not only the epistemic-true knowledge is capable of being materialized, but subjective-illusory knowledge, which maintenance does not possess objectivity and which is not adequate to the external world, can be materialized as well. Atheists-materialists are inclined to consider religion to be one of the forms of powerless utopian delusion. But is it fair that such embodiments of faith in the Absolute, as cultures of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are claimed to be illusions? I Is the difference between the substantiated ideas of science and religion so great?
Generally speaking, it is not too important, whether the initial idea is adequate or inadequate to laws of the protogenic nature (whether such a portrait, type of furniture, a facade of this house “is realistic”, etc.?). The ability of an idea to be materialized, to find separate real existence to satisfy human needs, to develop society is much more important. Philosophers-pragmatists revealed an enormous role of will and belief in the process of materialization of ideas which were invented by the consciousness: the stronger the will and belief are, the sooner and more
successfully the imagined world becomes the valid world.
Two types of philosophy always compete with each other in the West-European philosophy: theoretical and practical. The first is guided by the concept of istina-truth, and the world of istina-truths rather reminds the transcendent domain of Plato’s ideas, opposite to the sphere of the fluid material phenomena. M. Heidegger named such a type of philosophizing “an eidetic discourse”. On the contrary, the practical philosophy is aimed at concept of the Good (benefit), on human needs and consequently prefers another - an axiological method of analysis.
At the beginning of XX century theoretical philosophy rigidly demanded to release the knowledge, which declares itself as istina-truth, to set it free from any sort of axiological formulations. In its turn, philosophers-axiologists imposed a veto upon building their reasoning as an image and similarity of theoretical scientific knowledge. Unlike theoretical and practical versions of philosophy, the religious discourse, as a rule, aspires to harmonization of istina-truth and the good - in conformity with the standard of kalokagathia of divine essence.
In eastern doctrines (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism) istina-truth is understood as saving knowledge: 1) as the word of the Teacher specifying the true way to rescue; 2) as overcoming of illusion in favor of an original image of reality; З) as a way of restoration of world harmony (for example, through reverence of traditions in Confucianism, laws of Empire in Legalism).
In theistic doctrines istina-truth is defined as conformity of some statement to divine revelation. So, in Judaism and Islam truth is a saving Law, fidelity to precepts of the God, transferred to people through Moses or Mohammad. For Christians istina-truth is not a certain universal
abstraction, but it is the alive and saving person -Jesus Christ - who once uttered: “I am the way, truth and life” (John. l4, б).
Lie is an antipode of istina-truth, pravda-truth and honesty. In formal logic the term “lie” designates “not-true” in the most abstract sense. In philosophical and religious texts a lie and slyness are distinguished from mistakes and errors and are defined as the purposeful distortion of fact of the matter. From the religious point of view, a lie is a sin, a moral harm, a vain attempt to deceive the God. First of all a man who tells a lie harms to himself because he spoils his relations with the God.
A lie can have different scales and degrees of danger, possesses destructive force and causes sharp conflicts between people. Christians consider Devil as “the father of any lie” and as the most unmitigated liar who tempts people and induces to lie those who have weak spirit. Jean Baudrillard regards our modern civilization as a product of total simulation (conscious or not realized); our life is filled with simulacrums - by crafty fakes of lie under istina-truth, disgraces under beauty.
As it is known, in classical philosophy there were three different interpretations of the istina-truth in which istina-truth was understood as coincidence of knowledge with objective reality (in Latin: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus):
• theory of correspondence rests on the principle of conformity of knowledge to a piece of material world (Aristotle writes in “Metaphysics”: “To speak about real, that it does not exist, or about not real, that it exists, means to speak false. And to speak, that real exists and not real does not exist, means to speak true”);
• e ssentialist doctrine leans on a principle of conformity of things to its nonmaterial originals - to transcendent ideas (Plato, etc.) or immanent essences (Hegel);
• c oherence theory of truth is based on a principle of conformity of knowledge to some form of human consciousness:
- to congenital cognitive structures (Descartes);
- to conventions of social groups (Poincare).
- to purposes of persons (James);
- to aprioristic forms of thinking (Kant);
- to self-evidence of intuition (Bergson);
- to sensations (Hume).
Any theory of “conformity” stumbles at a question “conformity to that?”. It cannot express exactly in an obvious form that an object to which the knowledge is presumably being put in is conformity. For example, to what object the statement “My hand hurts” corresponds? In fact the pain is subjective. It is not registered by devices, and an actor is able to simulate it on a stage quite plausibly.
Suhotra Svami explains the specified gnosiological difficulty by the means of an ancient Indian parable about the scapegrace, the ascetic person and homeless dog: each of them sees the same - a woman. However each of them sees her in a different way: as an object of pleasure, a clot of flesh and food. “If the correspondence is istina-true, to whose istina-truth the utterance “Here is the woman” corresponds? <...> the scapegrace, the ascetic and the homeless dog, looking at the evident sample of the woman, will pay attention to different properties, attitudes and aspects of the defined object. Everyone <...> will understand the word “the woman” and its value in a different way.” (Svami, 1998, p. 60-61).
As a rule, scientific and unscientific istina-truths do not reject each other, but act as supplements for each other. D.A. Tsyplakov illustrates this rule by means of the following example. “We see a student running towards a bus-stop following the bus. It is possible to give two answers to the question “why is he running?”:
“because of the contraction of his muscles” and “because he is late to the lecture”. Both of these answers can be istina-true, and they do not contradict and supplement each other. Similarly, religious istina-truths speak about the good, beauty, the moral pravda-truth, and scientific istina-truths describe the world in the practical plan” (Tsyplakov, 2011, p. 71).
Irrationalism in understanding of istina-truth amplifies in philosophy since XX century. Nietzsche connects istina-truth with ideas of eternal returning and reassessment of values. Existentialism contrasts the objective istina-truth and representation about personal istina-truth as an intuitive appearance of original being to some individual. Sartre sees the essence of istina-truth in freedom. J. Maritain and N. Hartmann declare that istina-truth is a special ideal object in structure of transcendental being. Theorists of Postmodernism speak about knowledge as about a process of eternal and unsuccessful “quest” for istina-truth.
Is istina-truth objective really or not? Sometimes this question should be answered with an aphorism: “We tolerantly treat other people’s opinions, as long as we do not have our own opinion”.
According to Heidegger, who continues the antique tradition, in order to find out istina-truth, it is necessary to use pro-duc-tivity, that is to withdraw istina-truth from its hidden place using a technology; and technique itself is a kind of truth-making. The attribute of objectivity is no longer ascribed to istina-truth in non-classical philosophy; istina-truth is identified either with specific conditions of soul (Kierkegaard), or with value (Rickert), or with language interpretation (Gadamer).
The istina-truth and value become more and more closely connected. The concept of value began to affirm in gnosiology in the second half of XIX century. Lotze introduced it to philosophy. He
believed that value occurs exclusively in situations of its significance to a subject, but it is not the product of arbitrary treatment. Value is objective because it is a mutual intersubjective form of volition and human behavior. In postnonclassical philosophy the problem of istina-truth turns to be one of aspects of a game subordinated to those rules, which are randomly chosen by that or other subject (Foucault).
The Russian language marks the ontological attribute in the word “istina-truth” - the existing, original, real. Two sorts of istina-truths are distinguished in the Russian spiritually-academic philosophy of XIX century: the ontological istina-truth (it has objective character and it is stored in the very being) and the logical istina-truth (it is subordinated to ontological truth, and it is subjective and expressed in human judgments about being).
The judgment is considered to be istina-true, when it corresponds to things created by the God. Cognition and life, ontological and logical truths coincide in the God. Divine Reason is considered in orthodox gnosiology to be the main criterion of istina-truth (Tsvyk, 2004 p. 14-30).
In particular, Kudryavtsev-Platonov (18281891) proved, that there are two opposite parts in any cognizable thing - 1) ideal, possessing more true life; 2) phenomenal, caused by accidental modifications. The ideal world is the objective maintenance of istina-truth. Top of hierarchy of ideas - the absolute idea summarizing in all of property of ideal life and possessing the absolute istina-truth. This idea is perfect, and the form of its being is individually-concrete. It is inexhaustible. The God possesses it only, it is not allowed to a human being to learn it completely. According to Kudryavtsev-Platonov, the establishment of istina-truth of a thing is tied with reference of this thing to values-samples: it is necessary to compare the empirical aspect of a thing with
what this thing should be (Kudryavtsev-Platonov, 1893)
It is proved by Kant: in order to learn a thing it is necessary to operate with this thing and our operations change cognizable objects. As a result, a human being learns not that originally exists as primordial nature, but that is recreated by him under schemes of his concepts and creative imagination. According to Hegel, there, where there is mutual reflection of the subject and object, measurement of force of creativity needs a special notion of istina-truth as a measure of conformity real with ideal (that is as a degree of coordination emergent (new quality) with the original-essence). Therefore Hegel often defined istina-truth as harmonization (conformity) of a thing with its notion. So, the constructed house is evaluated as “true” when there is adequacy between this house and previously approved architectural project. It is logical to apply non-classical notion of istina-truth of Plato and Hegel to processes of mastering knowledge. We shall name this notion “existential truth” (in Russian -“Pravda”).
The existential istina-truth is some correspondence between the human existence and a proper ideal of being. The criterion of justification of ideas and ideals of a person is completeness of assimilation of vital space and a degree of satisfaction with this assimilation. It is not necessary to search, with persistence of a naive realist, only epistemic istina-truth in the knowledge displaying the world together with human relationship to the external world [D.V. Pivovarov, 2012].
Knowledge by all means includes individual understanding. To “understand” means: 1) to express cognizable objects in concepts; 2) to imagine these objects with a help of evident models - in forms of secondary sensuality; З) to allocate the comprehended object with the sense contained in a personal semantic context of the
subject. Sense-meaning, which an individual attributes to the cognizable object, either is creatively invented, or taken from already old habitual senses. To understand the physical world in religious sense means to imagine this world as: 1) a product of divine creation; 2) object of Providence; 3) the medium among people and the Absolute.
It is necessary to consider virtual division in spiritual processes of two maintenances of an ideal image-emergent: one ofthem is consciousness, and the second - self-consciousness. Consciousness is not able to distinguish fully, what in emergent was exclusively “mine”, and what was put into it from outside, from «alien being». At least, it demands great existential efforts and theoretical reflections.
Some part of “my-other” (in Russian - “свое-иное”) enters into the maintenance of an image of self-consciousness, while there is «my” in the content of image of consciousness. And in the latter case this addition of “my” is not so harmless, so far as the ideal image of consciousness, being extrapolated through objectification of subjective goals on the external world, is materialized in things and also in processes of artificial nature which significantly differs from protogenic nature.
The classical notion of istina-truth does not measure adequacy of images of consciousness and self-consciousness in their entirety. Is it possible to estimate our subjective experience of assimilation of external world as true or false? Whether the predicate “true” is applied to images of self-consciousness and what are the images of self-consciousness in general - what is a proportion of “picturesqueness” (imitation) and “expressiveness” in such images? I think that there are no unequivocal answers to such questions.
The concept of vital pravda-truth (existential istina-truth)isapplicablenotso muchto designation
of the objective maintenance of natural, social and mental processes (though it assumes partial reproduction of such maintenance in the removed kind), how many it is interfaced to uniqueness of personal experience of internalization of the world - to harmony of individual relationship to objective world. Generally speaking, how many people there are, so many are vital pravda-truths. Collision of mutually exclusive vital pravda-truths can be fine and ugly, tragic and comical, ennobled or low.
Unsurprisingly, philosophy of pragmatism identified istina-truth with the property of idea to give the constructive character to our activity, to lead to practical successes, to bring vital advantage. Philosophers-pragmatists, debunking the claims of Marxists in the possession of the absolute epistemic criterion of truth (the criterion of practice), turned philosophical thinking to a theme of vital pravda-truth. The vital pravda-truth is a syncretic alloy of the removed objective contents (it makes it related with an objective istina-truth) and of subjective-personal moments in worldview (this distinguishes it from epistemic istina-truth). Often similarity is taken for its criterion: to prove pravda-truth means to establish subjectively the similarity between discussed situations and previously estimated circumstances.
When the person, painfully solving his conflict with the world, searches for new milestones of own sense of life - he searches for a new pravda-truth for himself. Having found this pravda-truth, he subjectively accepts it for universal epistemic istina-truth, true for all people, and sometimes is indignant, why others do not accept his vital position. The conflict of different vital pravda-truths (both inside of a person and between people) is always inevitable. There is a close communication between pravda-truth and belief (for example, some people say: “To be faithful to his own pravda-truth”). The
typical vital pravda-truth, the basis for the allocation of which common human moments of outlook serve, is the criterion for comparison and an estimation of diverse vital pravda-truths (Zhukovsky, Pivovarov, 1998)
The thought about any being always contains any subjectively-anthropic component. The intensive thought about being is similar to the fused metal filling of the melting form -becoming anthropomorphic it seizes the subject. The person materializing his ideas and ideals creates a new reality, which to a large extent did not coincide and conflicts with the world of wild nature. Substances of this new world are the alive activity, expanded reproduction and realization of ideas and ideals (Zhukovsky, Pivovarov, 1991, p. 44-84).
The “second nature” comes back spontaneously into a condition of the protogenic nature there, where this alive activity stops. (Certainly, there are not only distinctions, but also a generality between the wild nature and the human world, otherwise they could not coexist and cooperate physically. Laws of a noosphere are primary factors of social totality and of all social concreteness.)
Let’s strengthen the acuteness of the notion of existential istina-truth with the help of one “tricky” example. Let’s admit that we look at clouds and we observe a set of pictures replacing each other. Points, lines and volumes, visible in clouds and taken by themselves, are firstly absolutely senseless - they are some uncertain events. But if only to organize illusory these events in connection with any setting, and they immediately become “facts” for us. These “facts” are selected and developed into a picture of a cloudy reality (images of a sea, mountains, military units, people, animals and so forth). “Facts” vary when we change our setting and shift our attention to other configurations, and another picture of the same part of heavenly
space there appears already. Cloudy pictures are emergents, resulting in the merger of external optics with cognitive stereotypes of a man. Not only consciousness, but also subconsciousness are involved in its production.
If to extrapolate this example on any cognitive process (religious, scientific, technical, art, etc.) the existential istina-truth becomes noticeably commensurable with epistemic istina-truth. Let’s say, this cloud is a real thing, and our contemplation of it just as the cloud is probably true in the epistemic sense. However it is difficult to recognize a set of pictures which we see in clouds as true from epistemic point of view. Nevertheless, it is easy to embody these pictures-illusions into material components of the social world.
Isn’t that the same as in the cases of scientific, technical and any other kind of creativity in general? Some critics may say that a cloud and whimsical freak of imagination is one matter, but quite another matter - science and technics where materialization of ideas, invented or devised by scientists and engineers, is tied with regular experimental verification of knowledge. However, is the difference between a cloud and, say, an object of scientific knowledge so essential?
Instead of the example with clouds we shall try to realize other project. Take a piece of drawing paper, a pencil, a penknife and an elastic band. Begin to grind down the pencil with a knife, arbitrarily drive it over the paper, and graphite dust forms chaotic heterogeneity on your paper. Then chaotically drive on the settled graphite with a sharp end of the other - repeatedly rolled-up - paper. Different scrawl, crossed lines, geometrical configurations are formed on the drawing paper. Turning this drawing paper in different sides, we comprehend the “seen” images and select the most beautiful among them. It is possible to imagine such pictures as
many as necessary, but each spectator “beholds” something his own, personal.
Now it is necessary to fix mentally the liked picture and, keeping it in our memory, to erase all superfluous by means of elastic band. It happens that the result deserves an art exhibition. Materialization of illusions is reached in this case by elimination unnecessary graphs from objectively real uniformity - according to known analogy about a sculptor which eliminates all superfluous from a block of marble and takes the perfect statue from it.
It is asked, whether there was an objectively real original which copy became our picture? Whether it is possible to consider chaos of configurations of a graphite dust (cloud) as the initial original? Or the original is covered in “egoism” of the author of the picture? It is difficult to answer this question.
The cloud or leaf of a drawing paper with graphite graphs is a hint on plenitude of being with an incalculable set of potential opportunities; we create something separate while limiting this plenitude of being. It is hardly possible to check up epistemic validity of the copy of this “something” through our practice or external experience. It is difficult to be kept from a temptation to draw an analogy between a picture in clouds, a statue in a block of marble and the scientific theory about experimental object. Why a row of equally plausible but alternative reviews of the same objective domains always compete among each other in any science? Probably because we see the world as such, what we want to see and understand it, and we understand it, in final analysis, how we are able to operate with it, to act practically with the world.
Classical rationalism started with the firm belief that: 1) the external world is one and continuous; 2) there is only one istina-truth about this world, and all people have the same uniform istina-truth; 3) the scientific istina-truth is
universal and general for all of us; it is necessary, uncontradictory, self-evident. Irrationalism and critical rationalism expose to this opinion its radical doubt. If to believe, that the God is capable of creating any possible world, and a human being is similar to the God, then the world surrounding us is not one and common for all, and people are able to create any original worlds and images-theories of these worlds.
For example, the sphere of fine arts is made by the sum of alternative art worlds and consists of “strange” art istina-truths competing among themselves. Science and technics have skillfully created a set of different new realities which are subordinated to the special independent laws which have been thought up by scientists and engineers. Hence, it is logically true to match against classical principles of uniqueness, universality and uncontradiction of scientific istina-truth the non-classical concept of pluralism of paradoxical scientific istina-truths about the possible worlds.
For instance, L.I. Shestov pulled out against rationalism of classic science absurd istina-truths of faith (say, faith of Christians in the crucified God) - he provided istina-truth with properties of non-self-evidence, paradoxicality, freedom and existential uniqueness.
Considering pluralism of representations about the notion of istina-truth, it is expedient to enter two new terms into the general theory of knowledge: “assimilating cognition” and “alienating cognition” (Pivovarov, 2009, p. 3038)
The term “assimilation” (also “internalization”; in Russian - “освоение”, “усвоение”, etc.) designates the process of receiving new facts or of responding to new situations in conformity with what is already available to consciousness. Internalization is also often associated with learning ideas or skills and making use of it generally. Internalization
is the long-term process of consolidation and embedding one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and values, when it comes to moral behavior.
The opposite of “assimilation” is the term “alienation” (in Russian - “отчуждение”) translates two distinct German terms: “Entfremdung” (“estrangement”) and Entauberung (“externalization”). Both terms originated in Hegel’s philosophy, specifically in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). “Externalization” (also - embodiment, incarnation, manifestation, materialization, objectification, substantiation, etc.) means to put something outside of its original borders. Alienation is often a harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation which sunders things that properly belong together. To be alienated is to be separated from one’s own essence or nature.
However, Hegel talked about alienation not only as the painful loss of oneself, slavery, social disease; and he understood assimilation not only as the exploration of positive growth of maintenances of itself. Being in this regard a consistent dialectic (in opposition to Marx), Hegel singled out the positive and negative points both in alienation and assimilation. In his opinion, there are two types of alienation: slavish and free. Assimilation also can either increase the freedom of the subject, or, on the contrary, enslave it (Pivovarov, 2009, p. 63-72).
Assimilating cognition (gnosis) unites the subject and object so, that cognizable thing becomes subjective and vitally valuable to the learning person. Thus, the object can be not only external (even transcendent) in relation to its subject, but also immanent (sometimes transcendental); therefore it is necessary to allocate in assimilating knowledge, in its turn, its externally-transcendent and immanently-transcendental versions.
Assimilating cognition is emotional, frank and intimate relations of a person to perceived life; it can be characterized as an existential attraction
of the subject to his object in such forms of love, as storge, eros, agape, mania, philio. Assimilating cognition is integrally connected with axiology of hearts, with spiritual fideism and belief; and istina-truth can be found out due to its beauty.
The object is anthropomorphized and cosmounified by the learning subject in the process of assimilating cognition. Anthropomorphism is the identification of human being with non-human “other-being”, description of natural things by means of human properties. I suggest to use the term “cosmounification” to refer to the process of the speculative thinking about all possible universes in exactly the same way as thinking only about one (our) universe; all the other are “standardized” and are seen only through the lens of a single monistic point of view. Absolute reality is anthropomorphized and cosmounified in the process of its religious development.
Philosophers always care about “anthropic paradox”: the world is huge and old, but the mankind has arisen recently on Earth and beholds the world from the tiny observation post. Nevertheless, all properties of the world known to us are shown only through attitudes of Universe to a human back street - no one, except us, observes attributes of the Universe (its size, age, etc.). And though all we well know, that the world existed long before us and it is not dependent on our existence, nevertheless those properties which we attribute to it, come to light only through our touch to this world (Frayn , 2006). The same paradox can be applied also to the theme of God’s being: divine attributes, anyhow, are relative to human existence.
Alienating cognition (єпістєдп, episteme), on the contrary, separates learning and cognizable, transforms the subject into the discharged, passionless and objective observer, and object -into something “absolutely other». Not only external (including transcendent) things but also immanent (sometimes transcendental) things can
be objects of such cognition; therefore alienating cognition can be subdivided into exterior and interior alienating cognition.
Alienating cognition aims to the «objective istina-truth»; it is defined, according to Stagirit, as correspondence among knowledge and objective reality and it is verified by neutral criteria (by external experience and reasonable self-evidence - through any experiment and “figures of logic”). This kind of istina-truth is external istina-truth.
Assimilating cognition is focused on another-on that what in Russian you can designate by the term “pravda-truth” which is bad translatable, for example, into English. International analogue of “pravda” can be “existential truth” - immanent truth. Epistemic istina-truth is one for everybody, it is intersubjective and neutral in axiological sense. On the contrary, the existential istina-truth-aletheia is each person's own; it is soldered to principles of an individual internal life and it has personal and valuable character obviously expressed. It is difficult to verify pravda-truth with a help of criteria of material practice or rational consistency. People prefer to verify pravda-truth by using spiritual criteria - with criterions of faith, conscience and intuition. A.L. Kazin said in one of his speeches: “Pravda-truth is such a beginning which is more likely silent about itself, than speaks about itself. And, in general, it is necessary to treat pravda-truth cautiously. Pravda-truth does not cry out loud that it’s pravda-truth.”.
In S.F. Denisov’s opinion, non-pravda-truth relates in the narrow sense to the choice of nonexistence (with trends towards Thanatos) and with influence of destiny (blind fatal cases). Denisov enumerates among the basic modes of modern non-pravda-truth such forms as callousness, indifference and aestheticism, and he sees the main reason of boredom that people stay in non-pravda-truth though remember the former
pravda-truth. Pravda-truth is a conscience that is a joint message about life in accordance with representations of goods and benevolence. “In a broad sense pravda-truth is a hierarchical system of values on the basis of which the vital tendency of human life is formed. <...> Pravda-truth is, perhaps, the basic determinant of human life, but alongside with this factor destiny has enormous pressure on human activity. Pravda-truth and Destiny - here are two most widespread concepts by means of which people are trying to explain their life“ (Denisov, 2001, p. 49-50).
In Ancient Russia almost all fields of human activity were defined by pravda-truth and non-pravda-truth. “A man could live under “pravda-truth”, because it is the Divine precepts and church rules. Also he can be judged in accordance with it, because “pravda-truth” is the court, as well as court trials and even the fee for appeal of the witness in the court” (Yurganov, 1998, p. 46).
I.S. Peresvetov, the original Russian thinker of XVI century, wrote that pravda-truth is a set of the God’s commandments which have the status of laws both for sovereign, and for its citizens. Being norm of a life, pravda-truth results from a unique divine source - from Bible. The orthodox belief helps people to execute and understand pravda-truth, but spiritual persons have the fullest knowledge of divine precepts (Yurganov, 1998, p. 46).
Istina-truth and Pravda-truth are differently weaved with each other, just as interrelations of objective knowledge with subjective belief are various. Contradictions between them (istina-truth and pravda-truth, belief and knowledge) are frequent. There are: true pravda-truth and false pravda-truth; pravda-lie and non-pravda-truth; rescue lie and murderous pravda-truth. For example, our national fairy tales express the deep truth of life, but contradict truth of facts (a Russian proverb says: “This fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it - it’s a lesson for a good guy!).
Certainly, the named kinds of cognition -assimilating and alienating - are abstractions torn off from each other. In objective reality (in everyone separate cognitive action) they arejointed in this or that proportion, and contradictions between them are possible. Finally assimilating and alienating kinds of cognition grow from the same roots, namely from the process of interaction among “mine” and “alien” - from controversial experience of assimilation and alienation.
Examples of cognition with a dominant of the alienating beginning are technical and natural-science cognition. On the contrary, religious and philosophical cognition are examples of assimilating cognition mainly; they are associated not so much with the search for epistemic istina-truth, as with the search for ontological pravda-truth of life. For this reason religious and philosophical systems continue to render powerful influence on minds of people even then when “rational-scientific criticism» rejects its by means of objective criteria of epistemic istina-truth.
Any of great philosophical doctrines, unlike scientific theories, never becomes outdated, and this fact probably reflects the fundamental difference of wisdom (sapientia) from scientific quality (scientia). “Revelation is a display of the basis of Being in human knowledge” (P. Tillich).
Seeing kalokagathia in the absolute personal Being (i.e. unity of the absolute goodness, truth and beauty in the God), theologians approve, that Being resists alienating cognition, and Being opens to a person internally through the spiritual part of his soul - through his conscience and inner synthesis of his heart, that is through mystical communication of the person with the Absolute. Existentialism is a branch of modern philosophy, aspiring to reunite and counterbalance gnosis and episteme - assimilating and alienating cognition.
Sometimes researchers (in particular in Christianity) prefer to designate religion using
the term “faith”, and in other cases religion is defined as a special “saving knowledge”. Many atheists, confusing pravda-truth and istina-truth, estimate religion as the “blind” and empty belief which does not have its objective analogue in reality, and they oppose religion to the cold educated reasoning. Theologians argue amongst themselves trying to describe human cognition of the Absolute through the faith. For example, pantheists believe that direct faith is sufficient to know the God. Theists demand to add empirical evidences of the Epiphany and logical proofs of being of the God to religious faith.
It is much told by Apostle Paul, Tertullian, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth etc. about an incommensurability of belief and reason. Religious belief is often focused on something
transcendent, physically impossible, wonderful, therefore its istina-truths seem to our reason paradoxical, senseless and even absurd.
The contradiction between absurdity of belief and logicality of understanding is reflected in Kierkegaard’s formula: “to trust, means not to understand”. It is impossible to prove belief, but it is possible to clarify it. As a rule, it is impossible to force someone to believe, - faith can be found only through our free choice; “slave is not the one who prays to God“. If the istina-truth, via its own light, is not able to attract someone’s mind, then external force will not help to do this” (J. Lock). The true belief is spread in heart by the God (R. Niebuhr). At the dawn of Christianity philosophers-Gnostics identified the specificity of assimilating cognition with the term “gnosis”.
References (all in Russian)
1. Denisov S.F. Vital and anthropological senses of Pravda and Non-Pravda [Dziznennie i antropologicheskie smislipravdi i nepravdi]. Omsk, 2001. - 205 p.
2. Frayn M. The human touch: our part in the creation of Universe. Cambridge, Faber, 2006. - 704 p.
3. Kudryavtsev-Platonov. Collected works. Vol. 1. Issue 1 [Sochinenia]. Sergiev Posad, 1893. - 457 p.
4. Pivovarov D.V. Gnosiology of religion [Gnoseologia religii]. Ekaterinburg, 2009, 380 p.
5. Pivovarov D.V. Two conceptions of alienation: religious alienation, Religious Studies, 2 (Moscow, 2009), 63-72.
6. Svami Suhotra. Shadow and Reality [Ten i Realnost]. Moscow, Philosophical Book, 1998. -331p.
7. Tsvyk I.V The Problem of truth in Russian spiritually-academic philosophy of XIX century, Bulletin of the Moscow University, 2, series 7, Philosophy (Moscow, 2004), 14-30.
8. Tsyplakov D.A. Religious and scientific truth: aspects of secularization, Religious studies, 1 (Moscow, 2011), 71.
9. Yurganov A.L. Categories of medieval culture [Kategorii srednevekovoi kulturi], Moscow, 1998. -468 p.
10. Zhukovsky V.I., Pivovarov D.V. Intellectual visualization of essence [Intellektualnaia vizualizatsia sushchnosti]. Krasnoyarsk, 1998. - 223.
11. Zhukovsky V.I., Pivovarov D.V. Visible essence [Zrimaia sushchnost]. Sverdlovsk, 1991, - 284 p.
Истина и правда: познание отчуждающее и осваивающее
В.И. Жуковскийа, Д.В. Пивоваров6
а Сибирский федеральный университет Россия 660041, Красноярск, пр. Свободный, 79 б Уральский федеральный университет
им. Б.Н. Ельцина Россия 620083, Екатеринбург, пр. Ленина, 51
В статье делается попытка определить различия между категориями истины и правды. Показывается, что истина и правда по-разному переплетены друг с другом и между ними нередки противоречия. Авторы вводят в гносеологию такие новые понятия, как «отчуждающее познание» и «осваивающее познание», «эпистемическая истина» и «экзистенциальная истина». Пример познания с доминантой отчуждающего начала - техническое и естественнонаучное познание. Напротив, религиозное и философское познание суть по преимуществу познание осваивающее, сопряженное не столько с поиском эпистемической истины, сколько с постижением онтологической правды жизни.
Ключевые слова: истина, правда, отчуждающее познание, осваивающее познание,
эпистемическая истина, экзистенциальная истина.
