Philosophy of farming

Philosophy of farming. The problem of economic philosophy for modern religious consciousness. The world is like an economy. I do not intend in these lines to justify the topic of this study, because I believe that it speaks sufficiently for itself and does not need any special justification. It is not for the author, of course, to judge to what extent he managed to cope with his theme, and the imperfections of its execution are quite clear to me. There is only one thing I do not doubt - the enormous significance of the problem itself, which, I am convinced, should belong, if not today, then tomorrow in philosophy. Understanding the world as an object of labor and economic influence is her next task, to which economism, criticism, pragmatism, and mysticism equally lead. And I attach incomparably more importance to its production itself than to the given experience of its resolution. In the development of philosophical thought, the formulation of problems and their awareness generally plays a primary role, from here an impetus is given to philosophical creativity, its motives are determined. For the author, this work also has a very special meaning, because it sums up the internal result of an entire period of life, colored by economic materialism, and it is a debt of the author’s philosophical conscience in relation to his own past. The fact of farming has always aroused philosophical “surprise” in me, and the problem of the philosophy of farming – about man in nature and about nature in man – has essentially never left my spiritual horizon, only turning in different directions 1 . For me, the initial attempt to philosophically comprehend this fact was the theory of economic materialism with various critical amendments. And although this theory very soon ceased to satisfy the consciousness, just as the ideas of childhood cease to satisfy it, however, those questions to which it answers in its own way retained all their power. And one cannot simply turn away from the problem of economic materialism in the name of abstract “idealism” (as those who “return to Kant” or “unite” Kant with Marx do), because such “idealism” does not contain absolutely any answer to this problem, but leaves it completely out of consideration. The problem of economy is taken in this study in a threefold formulation: scientific-empirical, transcendental-critical and metaphysical. And this way of considering it is not at all explained by the whim of the author - it is suggested by the very essence of the matter. For what in the empirical field constitutes the subject of “experience” poses problems for science, and what is considered from the side of cognitive forms is the construction of a “transcendental subject” - its existential roots go back to the metaphysical earth. And this hierarchy of problems itself revealed itself to me as the research progressed as it deepened. At first, in an effort to comprehend the fact of economics, it was most natural to turn to the science of economics (political economy), which builds a special area of ​​scientific “experience” from the phenomena of economic reality. However, she remains deaf and blind to everything that goes beyond this experience. She singles out only one definite aspect of the economic problem. She is right, of course, within the limits of her special tasks, but it would be the greatest myopia, equating the whole with the parts, to limit the theory of economics to its phenomenology alone. Beyond these limits, the study of the issue, by the force of things, already falls into the general philosophical area. To find the boundaries of phenomenology, discovering the logical schematism of science, is the task of critical philosophy, “critical idealism,” which plays an irreplaceable role in this, liberating one from the hypnosis of scientific empiricism, and those who once experienced its liberating effect will forever remain grateful to critical idealism for this, even if they do not agree to accept the critical Beatrice as the “beautiful lady” of philosophy. But before the problem of economics, critical idealism essentially turns out to be helpless: here the purely theoretical, schematizing character of critical philosophy, with its incapacity for realism, is revealed most clearly. Therefore, critical idealism decisively refers to metaphysics - to ontology and natural philosophy, where the problem of economic philosophy is ultimately transferred. Thus, in this case, the very connection between philosophy and science that is postulated theoretically is realized, and, it seems to me, this can benefit both sides. Social science undoubtedly needs a fertilizing connection with philosophy in order to cope with the internal self-destruction that is overtaking it, because the general crisis of scientific consciousness that has quietly crept up here should be especially devastating. Philosophy, coming face to face with such a vital problem, is to that extent freed from that scholastic formalism in which “criticism” increasingly entangles it. The problem of economic philosophy also acquires a special urgency for modern religious consciousness. In an era of decline in dogmatic self-awareness, when religion most often comes down to ethics, only colored by pietistic “experiences,” it is especially important to put forward the ontological and cosmological side of Christianity, which is partly revealed in the philosophy of economics. But this is completely impossible with the help of the current cantizing and metaphysically devastated theology; for this it is necessary to turn to the religious ontology, cosmology and anthropology of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa and other ancient teachers of the Church. These teachings currently lie in dogmatics as philosophically dead capital, but more often they are outright rejected, and on the ruins of Christian religious materialism 2 philosophical and economic materialism is erected on one side and idealistic phenomenalism on the other. The objectives of this study include an attempt to translate some of these teachings into the language of modern philosophical thinking and thereby discover how the truths of religious materialism are distorted and obscured in both materialism and idealism. In this volume, only part of the entire outlined plan has been completed, namely: the general foundations of the economic process, its ontology, are considered here. The second part of 3 will remain the problem of justification of the economy - its axiology and eschatology, in particular, the problem of the relationship between flesh and spirit (ethics of economy) and the meaning of history and culture should be explored here. However, the basis for these teachings is partly laid in the present part, which, within the limits of its problem, can be considered as a complete, independent whole. As a parting word for this book, as an expression of its pathos and aspiration, may we be allowed to recall the prophetic words of F. M. Dostoevsky: “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God! Love animals, love plants, love everything. You will love every thing, and you will comprehend the mystery of God in things” (“The Brothers Karamazov”, from the teachings of Elder Zosima). “What do you think the Mother of God is? – Great Mother, hope of the human race. “So, the Mother of God is the great mother of the damp earth, and great joy lies in this for a person” (“Demons,” words of the old woman in the story of Lame Leg). Moscow. January 18, 1912 Chapter 1. The problem of economic philosophy In the life and worldview of modern humanity, one of the most outstanding features is what can be called the economism of our era. So-called economic materialism gives only the sharpest expression of this feature, and, no matter how controversial its doctrine may seem to us, no matter how shaky its philosophical and scientific, metaphysical and empirical foundations may seem, due to its significance it is something more than just a scientific doctrine that collapses when its inconsistency is revealed. In a certain sense, economic materialism is even indestructible, to the extent that it expresses some immediate reality of experience or a historical feeling that seeks theoretical expression in scientific or philosophical doctrine. This latter may be extremely unsuccessful in its execution, but the mood that created it is not eliminated. That special and irresistible truth of life, which has been revealed and intimately felt with such serious and bitter sincerity by our modernity, makes economic materialism, in a certain sense, irrefutable. It cannot simply be rejected and refuted, like any scientific theory. It must be understood and interpreted - not only in its obvious errors and weaknesses, but also in the prophetic content that shines through it. It should not be rejected, but internally surpassed, explained in its limitations as a philosophical “abstract principle”, in which one side of the truth is presented as the whole truth. In a word, the problem of economic materialism should be studied not only in its current formulation, in which it bears too obvious features of the accidental circumstances of its historical emergence and the spiritual individualities of its creators. For an impartial thinker, it is obvious that, in addition to this crude and unsuccessful form, the theory of economic materialism could be developed and is much more complete, distinct, more modern, and in general can be improved in this regard. Abstracting from any possible form of it, it is clear that, in essence, economic materialism remains as a problem that inevitably confronts the philosophizing mind of our time, with its economism so sharply expressed. Our time understands, feels, experiences the world as an economy, and the power of humanity as wealth, mainly in the economic sense of the word. In contrast to the voluntary or forced asceticism of the Franciscan-Buddhist eras of history, which despised wealth and denied its power over man, our era loves wealth - not money, but precisely wealth - and believes in wealth, believes even more than in the human person. This is not only Mammonism, selfish and base (it has existed at all times, and still exists today), no, it is economism. Life is a process, first of all, an economic one; such is the axiom of modern economism, which has received the most extreme and even arrogant expression in economic materialism. This latter is therefore characterized by such ideological vitality, which is also supported by the sharpness of ideological radicalism, attractive even in its naivety and spontaneity. And this is the secret of the peculiar charm of economic materialism, thanks to which it so hypnotizes modern minds. And I will say even more: not to experience this charm at all, not to feel its hypnosis (even if never completely surrendering to it) - this means to have some kind of defect in historical well-being, to be internally alien to modernity, either by remaining above it (which is generally available only to a few) or by artificially fencing ourselves off from life (this is why we are so little impressed and, to tell the truth, inspires so little sympathy for the inexperienced in life armchair “idealism”) 4. Economic materialism, or, let’s put it more briefly, economism, although theoretically not shared by the majority of representatives of economic science, perhaps because it has become the party dogma of social democracy and scandalizes many with its ideological radicalism, is in fact the dominant worldview among representatives of political economy. They practically add, for lack of anything better, political economy, in which, in general, the growth of special research, scientific practice, did not correspond at all to the growth of philosophical consciousness and reflection. Political economy proceeds in its scientific work either from empirical generalizations and observations of a limited and special nature, or, insofar as it goes back to more general points of view, it consciously or unconsciously falls into the mainstream of economism, moreover, in its naive-dogmatic form. There is a close, inextricable connection between political economy and economism as a worldview. In fact, economic materialism is the dominant philosophy of political economy. In practice, economists are Marxists, even if they hate Marxism. The limited horizons of economic thought, which is revealed in this case, is expressed not so much in the predominance of the philosophy of economism (although this is quite symptomatic), but in its naive dogmatism. The situation is as if the dogmas of economism are the only possible and self-evident philosophy of economics in general. The task of philosophical criticism, therefore, first of all, is to smash this naive dogmatism and, by calling it into question, make it the subject of special philosophical study. Political economy cannot at all be reproached for the fact that it has such philosophical premises on which it relies, accepting them as apodictic truths or axioms. Any scientific knowledge is partial and fragmentary, and therefore it is never constructed without such prerequisites of an axiomatic nature. It is attached to them as to an anchor cast in the boundless sea of ​​discursive knowledge, in the infinity of possible problems and objects of science. Any special research is conducted not ab ovο 5, but, so to speak, from the middle, therefore, for the very possibility of its existence, it presupposes a whole series of such conditionally or unconditionally axiomatic premises; in other words, it is always dogmatically conditioned. This is generally the inevitable dogmatism of our scientific thinking, and no “criticism” can free us from it, although it is too easily forgotten when the result of such dogmatically conditioned knowledge is presented as knowledge quand même 6, as absolute truth. Only that scientific research can be recognized as “critical”, the dogmatic conditionality of which is understood and taken into account when determining the specific weight or theoretical value of its provisions. Therefore, the science of economics, or political economy, is also a dogmatically determined branch of human knowledge. It is conditioned both in its empirical part (here this conditionality is comparatively and more consciously understood, for example, the connection of political economy with technology), and in terms of its general philosophical premises. This or that philosophy of economics, which establishes the prerequisites of political economy, is by no means created within itself, is not the result of scientific research, as is sometimes thought, but is introduced into science a priori, although it then predetermines this or that nature of its conclusions. Economic materialism (and in statistics, radical Queteletism) had the courage to isolate these premises into an independent philosophical system and thereby, in a way, gave away the secret of political economy, which used its provisions, but silently, secretly, in its naivety, considering them the fruit of its own scientific work. Meanwhile, economic materialism, having highlighted and dogmatized what was only implied by scientific practice, thereby made these prerequisites an independent problem, which ultimately contributed to the awakening of criticism in this area. The science of economics is now suffering, although this is not yet clear to everyone, a severe philosophical crisis: abandoning conscious economic materialism, it remains deprived of any philosophical foundations, without which it turns into a sum of empirical knowledge and observations that hardly even deserves the name of science. Therefore, the problem of economic philosophy, or, better to say, the totality of these problems, acquires not only general philosophical, but also special economic interest. What seems self-evident to practice often poses the most difficult problems to the philosophizing mind. Such, for example, is the whole theory of knowledge, which examines, in essence, the self-evident forms of knowledge and rightly sees here the most difficult and complex problems of philosophy. Thanks to this deceptive self-evidence, positions of this kind begin to be considered either completely unshakable and apodictic, so that their denial is considered impossible due to its inconceivability or obvious absurdity, or, which is especially common in special sciences, these premises begin to be considered proven and established precisely in this very science; the result is a unique and very characteristic dogmatism of the special sciences of our time, with its far-reaching scientific specialization. And to free yourself from it, you need the effort of philosophical analysis. We must doubt what is not customary and indecent to even doubt; we must look with the naive eyes of a stranger or a savage, for whom starched collars and white cuffs, which we take for granted, seem strange, and who asks about their real purpose. The situation is almost the same with political economy. And she considers as given and self-evident propositions too much that she received at her very birth and therefore is accustomed to consider as organic her attribute, her unchangeable baggage. If one reads a current treatise of political economy, giving vent to philosophical doubt, one can see how deeply this dogmatism of premises penetrates into its constructions and in what blissful ignorance of this it remains. The science of economics is one of the most conditioned and philosophically least independent disciplines, but at the same time, in terms of the actual role and vital influence that belongs to it in our century, it claims to be an imperative legislator of thought, wants to become philosophically decreeing, to extend influence far beyond its borders. And, to the extent that she succeeds, this expresses the general economism of our era as the main feature of its historical worldview. Political economy with its economism especially needs philosophical revision and deepening of its foundations, in refreshing them with philosophical doubt. The philosophical study of the general preconditions of economic activity and economic thinking in general is the direct task of the philosophy of economics, which explores, therefore, the philosophical a priori of both political economy and the general economic worldview. But, of course, its own problem goes much further and deeper than the mere service of political economy requires. The philosophy of economics is part of general philosophy, constitutes its essential part, and is not just an illegitimate child of political economy. What can economic philosophy be as a philosophical teaching? The definition of the problem of economic philosophy is essentially connected with an understanding of the general tasks of philosophy, and in the latter there is now complete disagreement. At the same time, we can say that in the answer to this basic, although seemingly only preliminary, question “what is philosophy?” Usually its most recent conclusions are hidden and the central nerve of the philosophical system is exposed. Let's take any of the philosophical trends of the past and present and make sure that they all differ, first of all, in their understanding of this initial question. Obviously, there is nothing indisputable here, and it is not resolved within the philosophical system by one or another argument of a special nature. On the contrary, this question is outlined even outside the boundaries of the philosophical system, which is constructed as an answer to a question already posed in advance. What does philosophy want to be, what is the interest on which it “orients itself,” what does it have before itself as the final guiding and immediate given? This predetermines the philosophical system. In our formulation of the problem this central nerve of the philosophical system is deliberately exposed. For many of the modern representatives of philosophy, this very combination of concepts - the philosophy of economics - represents something unacceptable or shocking, and not only because of the unusualness of this phrase, but primarily because philosophy is definitely and openly given a private predicate, while for them there cannot be a philosophy of anything at all, and only philosophy in general, self-sufficient, independent, “pure” is possible. True, the modern ear has already begun to get used to such phrases as, for example, the philosophy of culture, art, law (even the “philosophy of money”, launched by the skeptical impressionist of philosophy Simmel), but they are not always used with proper philosophical consciousness and “critical self-accountability” and, in any case, still await philosophical interpretation. On the other hand, it is true that it was the greatest representatives of absolute, independent philosophy, such as, for example, Fichte and Hegel, who developed the philosophy of law, culture, history, but for them these were only certain departments and particular applications of a general and independent philosophical system that did not have independent existence. To build a philosophical system as a philosophy of economics or anything in general, that is, based on this or that given and in relation to it, and for them would be a humiliation of philosophy and a betrayal of it. The dogma of the independence of philosophy, in the sense of its self-closedness and self-sufficiency and in this sense of its absoluteness, stood beyond doubt for them - such is Hegel’s majestic system in its Luciferian pride, such is the first system of Fichte (“Science” of 1794). We deny such independence and self-closedness of the philosophy of the pseudo-absolute spirit, which generates from itself both pure nothingness and pure everything, and thereby equates it with the Creator, who created the world out of nothing. One always philosophizes about something, having this something in front of oneself as an immediate and not subject to establishment given, or, to use a common expression, philosophy is always oriented towards something given outside of it and “pre-found” for it. This predetermines the more general and fundamental question of the relationship of philosophy to life, which, naturally, never disappears from the field of philosophical consciousness, but becomes especially acute in eras of painful, one-sided intellectualism, as, for example, in post-Kantian absolute idealism or, more recently, in neo-Kantian rationalism 7 . Life is more important and immediate than any philosophical reflection about it or its self-reflection. Life is indeterminable to the end, although it is infinitely definable; it gives content to our judgments, but itself is never exhausted by them. She fills all the curves of our existence, and in particular, thinking, she is the mother’s womb, an unexplored source, immeasurable depth. She is everything, but at the same time she is also nothing, for she cannot be confined to something and be exhausted by it. It is timeless and spaceless, because although it is expressed in spatial and temporal phenomena, it is never exhausted in them, but justifies them. Life does not exist in space and time, but spatiality and temporality are the forms of manifestation of life. Life cannot be reduced to anything simpler than itself, although it itself poured out from the Source of life, the God of the living, but not the dead. It is the first principle against which philosophizing self-consciousness rests as its limit. It cannot be deduced from any reasons and in this sense it is wonderful, it is freedom reigning over necessity. In relation to life, all aspects of existence turn out to be only partial definitions; will, thinking, instinct, consciousness, subconscious spheres, even being itself is a connection, and the predicate of existence has meaning only in relation to existence - life, which posits its individual occurrences or states as private determinations. There is no being in abstracto, but only concrete being for itself, self-positing life. And this wonderful source of life is fragmented in individual consciousnesses, preserving everywhere its common identity and its single nature. Life is not unraveled by the mind, but only the experienced mystery of world existence, that primordial light in which both consciousness and discrimination are born. In this boundless ocean, philosophy casts its anchor, searching in it for that point to which the Archimedes lever of a philosophical system, weighing the entire universe on its scales, can only be applied; it necessarily needs a fulcrum outside itself, in such an immediate givenness that can no longer be eliminated from reflection without destroying the very possibility of philosophizing. Creation from nothing is not given to man either in the field of philosophy or in other matters. Depending on where and how this anchor of philosophy is cast, or on what most amazes or “surprises” (θαυμάζει) with the philosophical surprise of the thinker, or on what philosophy is guided by, its content is largely predetermined; so one could write the history of philosophical systems as a history of various philosophical orientations. Life is that maternal womb in which all its manifestations are born: the drowsy night consciousness, full of endless possibilities and dreams, and the daytime, separate consciousness that gives rise to philosophical thought and scientific knowledge - both Apollo and Dionysus. It is extremely important not to lose sight of the fact that thought is born from life and that in this sense, philosophical reflection is the self-reflection of life, in other words, the logical beginning, the logos of life, stands out from that concrete and indecomposable whole in which the beginning, logically impenetrable, alien, transcendental to thought, alogical, is inseparably and unmergedly united with the logical beginning. Life, as a concrete unity of the alogical and logical, of course, remains super-logical, does not fit into any logical definition that deals only with its facets and patterns, and not with its living tissue, but this does not make it antilogical or logically indifferent. It gives birth to thought, it thinks and has its own self-awareness, it reflects on itself. The logical principle has its own boundaries, which it cannot cross, but within these limits it inseparably dominates. The illogical is insoluble in the logical and impenetrable to it, but at the same time it is itself bound by the logical. Logical and illogical conjugation are correlative. So light presupposes darkness constantly overcome by it (“και το φως εν τη σκοτία̨ φαίνει - and the light shines in the darkness.” John I, 5), and joy continually overcomes sadness (Schelling), so the warmth of love is generated by fire that has softened and lost its painful burning sensation (J. Boehme). Only with this view does the fact of the conceivability and knowability of existence become clear, the possibility of philosophy, science, even simple common sense, in general, any thinking that rises above instinct with its automatism, is explained. Thought is born in life and from life; it is its necessary hypostasis. Therefore, it is not outside life, not transcendental, but immanent to it, however, not in the sense of modern immanentism, which equates being with (logical) consciousness and on this basis equates the logical and the existent, and therefore denies the alogical root of being. In the history of philosophy, two mutually opposite directions have clearly emerged, based on this dual nature of life. One of them considers the logical beginning of being to be the exhaustive beginning; for him, being is a self-developing thought, thinking about itself, generating itself and closing itself in a philosophical system; this is intellectualism. The second direction reveals the other side of the dilemma and proclaims the priority of the alogical over the logical, instinct over reason, the unconscious over the conscious; this is anti-intellectualism, alogism brought to the point of antilogism 8 . Intellectualism is an extremely powerful trend in the new European philosophy, one might even say its hereditary disease, which appeared in its founder Descartes with his ultra-intellectualistic Cogito ergo sum. Despite all the vagueness, polysemy and ambiguity of this position as it was developed by Descartes himself, 9 history has interpreted it in the most intellectualistic sense, that being, that is, in the end, both life and personality (sum) need rational justification and can actually receive it from philosophy. At the same time, the latter is torn away from its roots and inevitably falls into delusions of grandeur, plunging into a world of dreams and ghosts, sometimes majestic and fascinating, but mostly lifeless. In other words, the era of dreaming idealism opens, for which cogitare = esse = vivere 10 are the “Copernican” pretensions of an armchair know-it-all. This disease is still being overcome by European philosophy to this day. With further development in intellectualism, two trends were identified: absolute idealism with its inevitable panlogism proclaims the limitless universality of the logical principle, thinking that achieves self-consciousness, and therefore full being in philosophy (why philosophy turns out to be higher than life, is its goal and fruit), and critical rationalism, in which metaphysical panlogism gives way to “scientific idealism”, and the former role of world reason is given to formal schemes of scientific knowledge. The boldest representatives of intellectualism in the metaphysics of modern times are, of course, Fichte in his first system 11 Ich-philosophie (developed in “Grundlage der gesammter Wissenschaftslehre” and “Grundriss der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre”, 1794, as well as two “Einleitung in die Wissehschaftslehre”, 1797), and especially Hegel, reaching the extreme limit of intellectualism. The general significance of Hegel in this sense is known, but a detailed elucidation of his system from this point of view is beyond the scope of this work 12. Scientific rationalism, another type of modern intellectualism, is represented in scientific positivism, but it finds quite conscious and “critical” expression in neo-Kantian idealism with its pan-categorialism and pan-methodism, in modern “scientific teachings” or the so-called. scientific philosophy. This feature is characteristic to a greater or lesser extent of all neo-Kantianism with its most influential ramifications, but it received its most complete and radical expression in the teachings of the so-called. The “Marburg School” with Cohen at its head, this Hegel of scientific rationalism 13. Here philosophy openly and decisively “focuses” on science, and above all on mathematics, and the concepts of special sciences with their abstract categories receive the meaning of the highest, the only genuine, thoroughly rational, scientific mind or “thinking generated” from the meonic nothingness of reality. Science is the essence of reality, and philosophy, as a system of categories, as the self-consciousness of the scientific mind, is the essence of science. Any illogical given is eliminated, and the irrational is admitted only as a possibility of problems, as “ewige Aufgabe” 15, that is, it is also placed in the system of categories and thus rationalized. The real founder of the modern philosophy of intellectualism is, of course. Kant. Both of its directions - panlogism, pancategorialism, Hegelianism, and Cohenianism - are genetically connected with Kant. However, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Fichte of the second period associated themselves with him; this already shows that Kant’s creations contain various possibilities, but at the same time lack sufficient certainty in themselves (thanks to the ambiguity of the doctrine of the role of “Empfindung” 16 in the theory of knowledge and the ambiguity of the doctrine of Ding an sich 17 in metaphysics). The opposite pole of intellectualism, but at the same time its own creation, is modern anti-intellectualism, which expresses a reaction to intellectualism and for that alone cannot be considered its overcoming. A distinctive feature of this direction is skepticism towards the independence of the logical principle. It stems from the tendency to consider reason only as an instrument of life, guided by a blind, illogical, even almost anti-logical instinct. The mind here acquires the meaning of a mere instrument, valuable only because of its usefulness. Reason, as the principle of the logical, is thereby deprived of not only the autonomous sovereignty of self-generating thinking attributed to it in intellectualism, but it is considered as a product, as a means. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel sought to understand the history of reason in its self-awareness and self-disclosure, but for them this task concerns only the development, not the genesis of reason, and has nothing in common with the current desire of anti-intellectualism to explain the very origin of reason, because it does not at all affect the rights of reason and its primordial nature, on the contrary, it necessarily presupposes them. Anti-intellectualism proceeds from the silent or directly expressed, although not fully realized, position that reason occurred in time, therefore, there could have been a time when it did not exist. In this case, we should go further and admit that there might not have been any reason at all, and life might have remained blind and instinctive. We do not find this even in Schopenhauer, the philosopher of blind will, who comes closest to anti-intellectualism - and with him, reason necessarily arises along with the beginning of the world process: the world as will is necessarily also an idea. Reducing reason to evolutionary contingency (not in the sense, of course, of empirical causelessness, but in the sense of the absence of ideal necessity for it), this irrationalism, combined with instrumentalism, undoubtedly degrades reason and calls into question the very possibility of knowledge, i.e., in particular, oneself. He suffers from self-destructive and self-destructive skepticism - the fate of any radical skepticism that makes any positive statements. Under the banner of anti-intellectualism, very diverse thinkers of varying degrees of philosophical consciousness and for various philosophical motives are currently united: Darwinists in epistemology - this can include, on the one hand, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Simmel, and on the other - economic materialists, and partly general philosophical materialists (hylozoists like Haeckel), - then Bergson and his followers, highlighting the importance of instinct, and, finally, modern pragmatists. For some, this is a banner of rebellion against Kant and neo-Kantianism and a breakthrough to metaphysics and religion (Bergson and some pragmatists), for others, “pre-Kantians after Kant,” on the contrary, this is a means to protect themselves from all metaphysics and religion and finally establish themselves in the zoological title of the anthropoid ape, and at the same time appropriate to themselves the throne of the superman. However, reason cannot be desecrated by reason, and la raison toujours finira par la raison 18. The main and irremovable defect of anti-intellectualism, which, however, claims to be a philosophy, that is, a logical system, is the impossibility on its basis of explaining its own possibility and its own claims 19 . Here the classic example of a self-contradictory judgment revolving in a logical circle is inevitably repeated: one Cretan said that all Cretans are liars, therefore, as a Cretan, he himself lied, and his own statement contradicts the truth; however, in this case it turns out that he told the truth and that the Cretans are indeed liars, but then he also lied, etc. Антиинтеллектуализм справедливо и с большой силой подчеркивает границы интеллектуалистического рационализма. Жизнь шире и глубже рационального сознания, и самое это сознание имеет свою историю, ибо под ним и за ним стоят «сублиминальные», подсознательные или предсознательные сферы. Хотя дневное я, рассудочно-дискурсивное, есть наиболее острое выражение или симптом жизни, но оно вырастает из глубины и имеет корни, погруженные в темноту ночного дремлющего я, вообще личность неизмеримо глубже и шире своего сознания в каждый данный момент. Life in nature does not immediately come to consciousness, but goes a long way towards it. Эту истину, ранее всякого дарвинизма и эволюционизма, особенно живо чувствовал «историк разума» Шеллинг. Если ограничиться лишь коррективом к извращениям притязательного схоластического рационализма, то отсюда еще не получится антиинтеллектуализма, который и состоит именно в разрыве необходимой, изначальной и идеальной связи логического и алогического и погружает светоч разума в темную стихию алогического. By this he actually pronounces a verdict on himself as a philosophical teaching. In it, only its basic mood is dear, rebellion against deadening rationalism, but “one cannot live by rebellion alone” (Dostoevsky) and in philosophy, for here rebellion is the same slavery, only in reverse, spiritual captivity in the clutches of rationalism, and not at all overcoming it. So, life is a concrete, indecomposable unity of the logical and the alogical; only from this position does the fact of knowledge - both philosophy and science - become clear, and even in our self-consciousness we find this same living synthesis of the logical and the alogical. Life is not antilogical, not alien to logos, logos is the connection of things, which necessarily has a transsubjective 20 or objective meaning - this is the axiom that is always presupposed by thinking and underlies our logical self-awareness. But at the same time, thought is necessarily correlative to the illogical principle, constantly reflected from it (as the I in Fichte’s system presupposes for its identification the continuous impulses of the non-I), it has a substrate outside itself, in other words, life is not covered by thought and thinking is not yet being, although everything that exists can be thought. The conceivability of everything that exists, but at the same time its foreignness of thought, its illogicality, characterize the general relationship between thinking (both scientific and philosophical) and its object. The entire reality of life is ideally real in all its bends, it is illogical and logical. In itself, this synthesis is obviously something superlogical, unthinkable, like a wall against which logical thought rests, finding its boundary in it. And in every act of thought, this living and mysterious synthesis of two foreign, but, however, by no means contradictory principles takes place: the logical and the illogical. Logical thinking, abstracted from the concrete unity of the logical and alogical, is based on the possibility of reflection, the reproduction of reality as an ideal series or, more precisely, ideal series of logical concepts, symbols or schemes of vital, concrete unities. This construction of ideal series of reality in concepts, this symbolism of logic or “algebra of thinking” (in Couture’s words) in itself does not go beyond the limits of life and to that extent is also a concrete act of life, from which the smell of life, the taste of “psychologism” cannot be eliminated by any epistemological disinfection. (In general, the “purity” that attracts modern epistemologists is the alienness of any “psychologism,” i.e. alienation from life, which is superlogical and not exhausted by logical thinking, is, of course, unattainable, and this very desire is a product of morbid intellectualism, which equates thinking and being.) But in relation to concrete ideal-real reality, this ideal, only logical reflection of it represents, as it were, the isolation of one logical principle, and, considered only in the light of it, in this world of logical abstraction, life seems to be exhausted to the bottom by thinking, and for this from a limited and conventional point of view, thinking is indeed equal to being. Next to the concrete world, an abstract, logically transparent world is created, and a light building is erected on a dark and impenetrable foundation. This self-awareness of logos as the beginning of being is the discovery of its ideal power and light. Ideal reality, built by logical thinking, is logical and rational through and through, there should be no dark, unlit corners and crannies in it, it is all accessible to logical criticism, guilty of “critical self-accountability.” Everything in it is connected and continuous (Continuität is the basic law of thinking, which Cohen so insists on) and there should be no place for hiatus and jumps. This is the nature of thought, revealed on the basis of an analysis of its activity in its ideal image, in the science of logic and in the analysis of knowledge - epistemology. Thought is self-legitimate in its development, in its dialectics, in its tasks and problems, it is held together by a system of categories that are necessarily connected with each other - and to that extent, even pancategoricalism is right (the monstrous lie of which begins only when it attaches ontological significance to its epistemological statements and, therefore, interprets them in the sense of intellectualistic metaphysics). Но не надо никогда забывать, что мышление, основанное на отвлечении от жизни, есть порождение рефлектирующей деятельности разума, саморефлексия жизни. Мышление оперирует суждениями и понятиями, представляющими собою как бы сгустки мысли, оседающие ее кристаллы, которые потом подставляются на место целостной, сверхлогической жизни. Эти-то логические символы и символы символов, понятия и категории, и суть те колонны, на которые опираются висячие и ажурные мосты научной и философской мысли и за которые зацепляется идеалистическая фата-моргана. Но они все-таки не могут считаться висящими в воздухе, ибо врастают своим массивом в землю. Concepts still remain symbols or diagrams of life reality. They are given by it, and they also give problems for thought. В современном интеллектуализме слишком привыкли играть понятием заданности, которое нередко совершенно заступает в нем место данности. But something is given only by what is given earlier or at the same time, and one cannot only be given without giving anything at all, just as an equation consisting of only unknowns is unsolvable. The given, which serves as the starting point for this or that mental construction, in its immediacy does not admit of proof; it has apodictic self-certainty and compulsion for thought, and must be accepted as a factual, self-evident axiom that is vitally verified. But, of course, the very act of reflection, focusing attention on one or another manifestation of life, is a matter of freedom (as it was deeply felt in Fichte’s system) and creativity of life. This arbitrary concentration of attention on one or another point in life or a “fact” of it is what we call orientation on it. For example, the so-called “scientific philosophy” is in reality a philosophy of science, “oriented” on the fact of scientific knowledge (as is clearly revealed in Cohen’s system); “epistemology” is in the same sense a philosophy of thinking and knowledge. General philosophy (metaphysics of existence) has before itself being (life) as a unity in its most general and abstract definitions, in its universal coherence and conditionality (Plotinus, Hegel). One can, of course, call only this last type of philosophizing philosophy, thereby removing from the field of philosophy all other, more specific topics or motives of philosophical systems. However, this distinction will be only terminological. Essentially, philosophy remains multi-motivated and has different themes or orientations. Based on it, one can think through a more or less extensive range of problems in order to return to the starting point. These indications of life, in the end, are that “Empfindung”, which lies like an indissoluble burden at the bottom of Kant’s Erfahrung, this is that “external push” (äussere Anstoss), which remained insurmountable for Fichte’s idealistic system. This is the “otherness of the spirit” that Hegel was forced to introduce into his system. This; finally, that μη όν (and not ουκ όν), which is by no means nothing, but only uncertainty, in the doctrine of reiner Ursprung by G. Cohen. With its touches, life enters the boundaries of the logical, becomes immanent to the knowing consciousness, while remaining at the same time transcendental for it in its concrete, superlogical unity. This is that Ding an sich, which, as the general basis of thought and knowledge, although transcendental for him, seeps even into tightly caulked idealistic systems. Life is not transcendental for a living being in his total life experience, but it is transcendental for him as a cognizer, a reflector, a thinker. Life is Ding an sich in its immediate mystical depth of experience, while “appearance” is what it comes to the surface of thinking and knowledge, as ripples, foam, and various reflections appear on its surface above the bottomless depth. The idea of ​​a concrete synthesis of the illogical and logical in the superlogical unity of life is deeply embedded in the Christian teaching about the trinity of God and the creation of the world with a word from the “invisible and empty” earth. In modern philosophy it develops with one or another variant in a number of philosophical systems; This includes Schelling, especially the last period, Schopenhauer and Hartmann (who defended this idea with particular energy both against Hegelianism and against materialism), Vl. S. Solovyova and Prince. S. N. Trubetskoy 21. From different sides and different thinkers came to a similar solution to the question of the nature of thought. It lies in the nature of thought that it is not independent, but is “oriented”, there is a thought about something, and this is something that, in a certain sense, is determined arbitrarily; reflection is an act of freedom. But just as from each point of a sphere paths can be laid throughout this entire sphere, and just as one and the same point can be encountered on the path of an infinite number of curves or straight lines, so, fundamentally speaking, each orientation, with the proper depth of its development, can contain the key to all kinds of problems, and therefore, conceals within itself the possibility of their corresponding resolution. It goes without saying that not all orientations are practically convenient and accessible to a thinking being, who in this regard is subject to spatial and temporal, personal and historical limitations; therefore, in practice we have to talk not about all possible orientations, but only about a few, the most practical and therefore natural (just as geometers do not deal with all theoretically possible geometries, but only with those that contribute to the understanding of our three-dimensional space, i.e. mainly with Euclidean). However, fundamental boundaries cannot be established here due to the unity and coherence of life and the law of continuity of thinking: everything is in everything and everything can be found in everything. But precisely because there is no single, “royal” way of thought; on the contrary, with the multiplicity of initial orientations, it is necessary to recognize the multiplicity of ways of thought, and therefore the objective “significance” of various constructions. In other words, there cannot be a single philosophical system, which Hegel believed in along with other idealists, confusing abstraction with universality and taking the system of the greatest abstraction for the system of the greatest universality 22 . To see reality in such an aspect in which everything is reasonable and necessary and there is no accident, to find everything in everything in a single coherent whole, to immediately feel the entire dialectic of world existence - this means looking at the world with the Divine eye, surpassing discursive thinking, jumping out of time. This would indeed be concrete idealism, the thinking of reality, which Hegel claimed. Discursive thinking finds everything in everything only by moving from one to another, going from particular to particular, and only in this very transition finding the general. Therefore, discursive thinking - philosophy, and especially science - is plural in its nature, the only truth for it is Ding an sich, transcendent for knowledge as a given, but immanent as an attraction, as the ideal of knowledge (Kant’s “idea”). Therefore, philosophical systems can rightfully differentiate among themselves depending on their initial orientation, or, in other words, regarding the same object, with equal fidelity to truth as the ideal of knowledge, it is possible, based on different points of orientation, to build different systems, scientific and philosophical, just as the same mountain can be measured and photographed from different sides and points, with different lighting, and all these projections, with the same object, although there will be different, but not contradictory. Difference is not yet a contradiction, or at least it may not be, so we do not legitimize the possibilities of contradictory systems. Different points of view can, to a certain extent, peacefully coexist, while contradictory ones are mutually excluded from each other (this idea is the basis of the history of philosophy in Hegel and his successors, among other things, in Prince S. N. Trubetskoy). At the same time, it is difficult to refrain from likening philosophical creativity to artistic creativity, for a philosophical system is also a kind of work of art, “poetry of concepts”, it has its own internal necessity and logical pattern, just as in a work of art there is a necessary coherence and harmony in the relation of parts to the whole, although not logically provable, but self-evident for the “artistic mind”. However, at the same time, creative freedom in planning the composition and artistic tact in choosing the initial orientation are preserved; this is where philosophical and artistic talent is most manifested. The point of view developed here, which necessarily follows from our general understanding of the relationship between philosophy and life, has nothing to do with skepticism, which undermines any possibility of objective knowledge, but it is, undoubtedly, aesthetic relativism in philosophy, which fundamentally allows for a plurality of philosophical paths and turns philosophy into philosophies, as well as science into sciences. The progress of philosophy and science is based not on the unity of the path (which we by no means observe in the history of thought), but on the unity of the function of philosophizing and cognition, as self-reflection of life, united and continuous. Faith in absolute systems has been undermined, I believe, forever - by the insane claims of absolute idealism in Hegel, by the efforts of modern criticism with its subtle and corrupting relativism, and, finally, by the progress of scientific knowledge with its multiplicity and complexity. The need for a system, for architectonics, is too deeply embedded in the mind to be freed from it; not only every philosophical doctrine, but also science strives to build itself into a closed system of concepts and make ends meet; however, in building such a system, the current thinker (unless he falls into delusions of grandeur or naive dogmatism) does not claim to give a single, absolute philosophy. The well-being of modern individualism, which seeks to manifest itself in the individualization of philosophical creativity, finds satisfaction in this. According to this understanding of the nature of philosophy, the meaning of the history of philosophy is determined. The latter acquires the significance not only of the history of the “discovery of thoughts about the absolute,” in which Hegel rightly saw it, 23 but also of a review of the various motives of philosophical creativity or, what is the same, its initial orientations. However, we believe that these definitions practically coincide with each other, for the discovery of new thoughts about the absolute is accomplished through the discovery of new ways of thinking about it. The Absolute, of course, is one; it reveals many faces to those who approach it in different ways. What has been said fundamentally justifies the task of this study. With our understanding of philosophy, the fundamental objections to the attempt to build a philosophical system “oriented” on the economy as a fact of life generally lose force. This task, of course, cannot be understood in the spirit of absolute claims inherited from the Enlightenment and from Hegel - absolute idealism or economic materialism; economic philosophy does not want to be an absolute system, containing in its pure form all philosophical truth, possessing a key that unlocks all locks. Our statement of the problem claims less: it only says that, starting from this side of life, one can approach a general philosophy of life and at the same time see some new aspects in it, in other words, that a philosophical system can also be built as a philosophy of economics. In principle, one can object as little to the possibility of a philosophy of economics as one can object to the science of economics, at least without falling into skepticism regarding knowledge at all. But where, in this case, is the dividing line between philosophy and science? How do they differ from each other? First of all, it is obvious that it is not an object of study, for this object is generally one, it is life in its self-reflection, and, moreover, only in such individual aspects of it that can be made equally the subject of both scientific research and philosophical consideration. The difference between philosophy and science lies not in their object, but in cognitive interest, in the way of approaching the object, in their problems. They differ both in what they see in their object and in what they ask about it. Science is always special, such is its nature. Scientific study is an isolating, deliberately one-sided approach to a subject. Science cuts out pieces of reality for itself and studies them as if it were all of reality. Science fragments life, decomposing reality into separate parts, from which it then puts together its mechanism, and it gives a diagram of this mechanism in a system of concepts in its teachings. What is adjacent or goes beyond the boundaries of a given science is either completely indifferent to it, or exists only insofar as it breaks into its special research. 24 On the contrary, philosophy is little inclined to the detail that distinguishes science so much. She is interested in what science is least interested in - the connection of these phenomena with the general and the whole, the place in life that a given corner of it occupies. She considers the world and its individual aspects as a whole, in the light of the structure of this whole. One can, perhaps, put it this way: philosophy seeks to understand the meaning of life and the significance of phenomena individually studied by science. Therefore, what is contiguous and beyond for science, what it silently assumes as its prerequisites, is precisely the range of problems of philosophy. Thus, political economy and the philosophy of economics have before their eyes the same fact of human economy, but one considers it in its general or global significance, while the other subjects this fact to a detailed analysis; the former faces the question: what?, the latter: how? Philosophical reflection is always aimed at the whole of life, scientific reflection - at its particulars. Therefore, it turns out that the concepts of philosophy, compared with scientific ones, although they are larger in volume, are inevitably poorer in content, they are general, more abstract in accordance with their purpose of being an instrument of knowledge in solving problems that are more extensive than scientific ones. Philosophy can therefore be defined as the doctrine of life in its entirety or in its most general definitions (the definition of the tasks of metaphysics by Prince S. N. Trubetskoy as the science of existence in its general definitions comes close to this understanding) 25 . It seems, however, a relatively minor terminological question: whether philosophy should be called a science, or whether it is better to reserve this name only for the special sciences. In a formal sense, one can, of course, call philosophy science as a system of concepts, methodically constructed, as is generally done in science, but the difference between the cognitive interests of philosophy and science still remains unmarked in this terminological identification. Therefore, it seems to us more correct not to identify, but to contrast philosophy and science as two different directions of our thinking and knowledge. IV. Criticism and dogmatism It is currently impossible to touch upon philosophical issues without paying at least a minimal tribute to the “theory of knowledge” and without making a curtsey to the Chinese dragon of “criticism”, now flaunting on the portal of the philosophical academy. Criticism or dogmatism? "That's the question." In our opinion, neither one nor the other. First of all, real philosophical criticism and “criticism” are not only not identical, but often differ to a significant extent from each other. “Criticism” can suffer - and we think that in modern scholasticism it really does suffer, from dogmatism no less than inveterate dogmatists, and among the “critics” who declare themselves critical philosophers, now, as always, there are many called, but few chosen. The most demanding and influential critical constructions of our time (the so-called. Freiburg and Marburg schools: the teleological idealism of Windelband and Rickert and the logic of pure knowledge of Cohen and Natorp) suffer in reality from undisguised dogmatism in their fundamental principles: in one of them, the shaky and unstable apparatus of modern scientific thinking is without further discussion turned into the absolute foundation of philosophy, in the other, an imaginary obligation in knowledge with the help of a series of sophistical conclusions turned into a ghostly “object of knowledge.” And besides, each of these directions, of course, only considers itself to express the true precepts of Kantian criticism. Of course, consistency and self-accountability of thought, strict logic and possible clarity of concepts, the completeness of their coinage, in a word, critical self-control are desirable for everyone, and who would refuse to be a critical philosopher in this sense, and who does not consider himself one these days! 26 Truly critical philosophers were, undoubtedly, all the creative minds in philosophy who brought clarity to one or another of its areas, putting forward a new philosophical problem, and it is naive to think that philosophical criticism did not exist before Kant. Yes, this does not directly correspond to historical truth. At the same time, there is no special “secret of the inventor”, the knowledge of which alone can teach philosophical criticism. The current “criticism” is simply a school trend, based on a terribly exaggerated assessment of Kant and his (alleged) “Copernican philosophical work.” In neo-Kantian criticism, this “alchemy of knowledge” of our days, 27 we see the philosophical disease of our time, perhaps the pre-dawn twilight of philosophy. The dispute between “dogmatism” and “criticism” in the current setting comes down to the question of establishing a normal relationship between the practice of knowledge, which is characterized by immediacy, immersion in the object of knowledge 28 with the indistinguishability in it of subject and object, or the form and matter of knowledge, a priori and a posteriori, and criticism, which expresses reflection on a given act of knowledge and is in relation to it the second potency, as Fichte put it 29 . A critical study of knowledge is always a second floor, erected on a given foundation, a reflection on an already accomplished fact of knowledge. As Fichte says about his “Wissenschaftlehre” and how this can be applied to the whole “Erkenntnisslehre”, “kein einziger ihrer Gedanken, Sätze, Aussprüche, ist einer des wirklichen Lebens, noch passend in das wirkliche Leben. Es sind eigentlich nur Gedanken von Gedanken, die man hat, oder haben sollte, Sätze von Sätzen... Aussprüche von Aussprüchen" 30 . Every act of knowledge, as an act of life, in this sense is necessarily dogmatic, that is, it is distinguished by spontaneity, self-absorption, self-sufficiency, alien to reflection. Of course, even the “Critique of Pure Reason” was the same and not different, as it arose in the mind of its author, before it, as a finished product, became a touchstone for sharpening the teeth of critical mice. Thought, knowledge is creativity, and creativity is immediate, creative plans and ideas are born in the mind, and are not fabricated in a critical retort like a homunculus. Therefore, there cannot be such a critical leadership that would really teach how to use the instrument of knowledge, because criticism comes only post factum 31, it is a reflection on the already accomplished fact of knowledge. Therefore, criticism cannot be learned, and professional “criticism” is an empty pretense. Thinking and knowledge cannot be substantiated or justified by criticism, for it itself is a fact that exists before any criticism and does not depend on it. Criticism is engaged in the analysis and ascertainment of the givens of knowledge, but is not its legislator. Here it is timely to recall the word of Hegel, born from an immediate sense of philosophical power, one might say, from the very depths of self-consciousness of thought. “The main point of view of critical philosophy is that, before moving on to the knowledge of God, the essence of things, etc., it is necessary to first examine the ability of knowledge itself, whether it is suitable for these tasks; one must first study the instrument before undertaking the work to be done by means of it; if it is not suitable, then all the work will be wasted. This idea seemed so acceptable that it aroused great surprise and sympathy and diverted knowledge from interest in objects and from studying them to itself, to the formal. If, however, we are not deceived by words, then it is easy to see that other tools can only be examined and evaluated in the performance of the work for which they are intended. But the study of knowledge cannot be accomplished otherwise than by knowledge; With this so-called tool, exploring it means nothing more than knowing. But to want to know before knowing is as absurd (ungereimt) as the wise rule of one scholastic - learn to swim before you throw yourself into the water" 32 . There is no movement, said the bearded sage, The other fell silent and began to walk in front of him... Criticism, which would like to be consistent and leave nothing without critical reflection, moves in a circle and is like a snake wanting to catch its own tail. For, critically examining immediate, “dogmatic,” unreflected knowledge, knowledge, so to speak, of the first potency, and thereby raising it to the second, it, in doing this, reproduces in a new cognitive act the same first potency, cognizes directly, unreflectively, immersing itself in the object of its knowledge. Speaking in modern language, it sins with the mortal sin of “psychologism”, and therefore criticism of criticism turns out to be necessary, i.e. knowledge of the third potency, and this, in turn, requires knowledge of the fourth, fifth, ... n, n+1 ... potency. In other words, it turns out regressus in infinitum 33 34 - bad infinity where a finite value is needed in the answer, which indicates the error of the problem. Knowledge is rational by nature; it is, or at least strives to become, an organism of concepts and judgments. In relation to the alogical-logical fullness of life, it is abstract and mediated, but at the same time, as a living activity, it is immediate, “dogmatic,” and this vital dogmatism of knowledge cannot be dissolved by any criticism; on the contrary, it should be recognized that it precisely creates the possibility of criticism and is silently implied by it. Consequently, dogmatism and criticism are correlative and conjugate, and not opposite and not hostile. Knowledge in its practice, in its origin from the depths of life, is immediate, naive, dogmatic; knowledge that thinks about itself, tests itself, compares itself with itself, is critical. This is how the problem of criticism of knowledge appears to us. With what has been said, we do not at all deny the problems of the theory of knowledge and do not belittle its importance as a scientific or philosophical discipline; we only reject its significance as a legislator of knowledge that necessarily precedes it. The theory of knowledge is left with tasks of two kinds: scientific and philosophical, or, if you like, metaphysical. The scientific task comes down to the analysis of knowledge from its general forms or the criticism of knowledge in the proper sense of the word. The philosophical task is to explain the fact of knowledge, the philosophical interpretation of its vital meaning. In the Critique of Pure Reason and in the modern theory of knowledge, these two tasks are often confused or insufficiently separated, no matter how different they are, and this is done deliberately in accordance with the spirit of Kant’s entire system. The philosophy of knowledge in general and the philosophy of science in particular are necessary and very important departments of philosophy, although they have a completely different meaning than the one they are now given in “scientific philosophy” V. Preliminary determination of the holding “Life lives” in the present world only in the fight against death. The “organic” world, the kingdom of life in its various forms, is surrounded by the hostile elements of death, dead mechanism, and oppressive necessity. Under the “heavy cover of gray skies,” under this leaden sky on a poisoned, plague-ridden land, life seems like some kind of accident, some kind of allowance, the condescension of death. Surrounded by the ring of death, constantly threatened by the open mouth of non-existence, life timidly and sparingly huddles in the corners of the universe, only at the cost of terrible efforts to escape from final extermination. For it can be, if not completely exterminated, then constantly exterminated, becoming the prey of the non-existence that lies in wait for it from all sides and under all guises. She is not separated from him by an impenetrable wall that would make these encroachments impossible. It is imperfect in itself, because it is fragile, temporary, mortal. The compatibility of life with death, the living with the inanimate, the thing, is one of the greatest paradoxes of reality and an eternal mystery for thought. There is only life, and everything that exists exists only in the light of life. Things, so-called. dead nature, that is, everything in which there are apparently no signs of life, is only a minus of life, its negative coefficient, but outside of this, although negative, nevertheless expressed in terms of life. Definitions they turn into ghosts, disappear. They are noticeable only in the light of life, just as objects stand out from the meonic darkness of non-existence (potential existence) with the rising of the sun, and with the onset of night darkness they again plunge into non-existence. Even death exists only thanks to life and in the light of it, death is non-life, the negation of life is its only definition, it is only a shadow of life, and outside life it is nothing, it does not exist - “God did not create death” (Prem. I, 13), it does not have its own power of being. It cannot be said that absolute nothingness (ουκ όν, in contrast to the positive, albeit indefinite μη όν) exists; it drags out a conditional existence as a shadow of being or its mirror image, requiring some genuine being for its ghostly existence. Nevertheless, the struggle of life and death, light and shadow, living and material, permeates our entire life, making it imperfect, limited, non-absolute. If the struggle of life and death is so irreconcilable on the surface of world existence, then this is possible only because it goes on inside being, in the very heart of the world, capable of supporting only mortal life, that is, life, although absolute, timeless in its metaphysical character, is, in complete contradiction to this nature, temporary, non-absolute in actual existence. Metaphysically, the death of the living is not only unnatural, but unnatural, contradictory, and therefore logically unthinkable: we cannot think through this concept due to the law of contradiction, and yet empirically it has become a law of nature, the most general and profound. This contradiction is a mystery for thought. We are so accustomed to death, to the very idea of ​​mortal life, that we are no longer amazed by this contradiction, which, however, is much deeper and more radical than in such combinations as: hot ice, cold heat, black whiteness, etc. Nevertheless - no matter how you interpret it - there is now only mortal life in the world, and this is such a general definition of it that death itself becomes an attribute and sign of life - only the living can die. Consequently, life is established in the kingdom of death, surrounding it on all sides and penetrating through all its pores. Therefore, it can only be a continuous struggle with death; it is not taken for nothing, without folding one’s hands, but in the continuous tension of struggle. The struggle for life against the forces of death is the most general definition of existence, struggle for life 35 in the sense not only biological, but ontological. Death, crowding life, leads it to mutual self-destruction: the Darwinian struggle for existence! Death uses the lives of some as an instrument for the death of others; the very victory of life at one point becomes at the same time the victory of death at another. The struggle for life is experienced as captivity in necessity, in the dead mechanism of nature, in the “empty and vain elements” of the world, which all threaten one thing: death. There is a threat from cold, and heat, and fog, and rain, and drought, and a hurricane, and a river, and a sea, everything is hostile, and everything is threatening. Blind necessity, unreflected spontaneity, dead mechanism, iron fate - these are the guises under which the spirit of nothingness appears here, the “prince of this world,” Death. In nature lies a dead mask of thingness, foreignness, impenetrability for humans, and only selected mystical seers know what in reality Not what you think, nature, Not a cast, not a soulless face, It has a soul, it has freedom, It has love, it has language. But this is revealed to them only in moments of poetic insight; in everyday life, and for them, that world of things exists, a dead desert under a leaden sky, where destruction and death lurk at every step. A living being feels like a slave of necessity, of mechanism. Life is the beginning of freedom and organism, that is, free expediency, as opposed to mechanism with its iron necessity. The struggle of the teleological principle with the mechanical, of freedom with necessity, of the organism with mechanism is the struggle of life and death. The organism defeats the mechanism, but this does not abolish it as causality. The law of the organism is causality through freedom (Causalität durch die Freiheit) by Schelling, aseism (a-se-ism). We can say that the entire world and historical process stems from the contradiction between mechanism, or thingness, and organism, or life, and from the desire of nature to overcome the mechanism in itself as the beginning of necessity, in order to be transformed into an organism as the beginning of cosmic freedom, the triumph of life, panzoism. Directly this captivity of existence with the prince of this world, with the spirit of non-existence, death, is expressed in man’s fatal dependence on the satisfaction of his lower, animal, or so-called material needs, without which life is destroyed. The struggle for life is therefore, first of all, a struggle for food, and this brings man closer to the entire animal world. To the extent that this affinity exists, the entire human economy can be regarded as a special case of the biological struggle for existence. So, every living creature, as well as man, has to defend its existence, to defend life from death. But this defensive attitude, of course, does not exhaust the struggle for life; at the first opportunity it becomes offensive from defensive, striving to affirm and expand life, to tame the hostile elements of nature and to subordinate its forces to its goals. The territories of freedom and necessity are constantly changing one at the expense of the other, life-freedom strives to expand its conquests and encircle itself with an ever wider radius. This struggle for the expansion of life and freedom at the expense of necessity, in which life transforms the conquered pieces of the mechanism into members of the body and melts the cold metal of thinghood in the fire of life, takes different forms, it is waged with primitive tools and fully armed with knowledge, but its content remains the same: the defense of life and its expansion by transforming the mechanism into an organism, overcoming the dead mechanism with life-giving forces and in this sense - the creativity of life, both activities - defensive and offensive - protection and expansion of life are inextricably linked; they are different aspects of the same process. No matter how successful this struggle may be, it, in any case, cannot be stopped at will; it is not voluntary, but forced. The struggle for life with the hostile forces of nature in order to protect, strengthen and expand, in an effort to master them, tame them, become their master is what - in the broadest and most preliminary sense of the word - can be called economy. Economy in this sense is characteristic of all living things, not only the human, but also the animal world: why not talk about the economy of bees, ants, or the economic meaning and content of the animal struggle for existence? However, in the precise sense of the word, economic activity is characteristic only of man, and it includes, as subordinate and private aspects, elements of the economy of the animal world. In the future, the differences between the economy of humans and animals will become clearer. So, economy is the struggle of humanity with the elemental forces of nature in order to protect and expand life, to conquer and humanize nature, to transform it into a potential human organism. The content of the economic process can therefore also be expressed this way: it expresses the desire to transform dead matter, acting with mechanical necessity, into a living body, with its organic expediency, therefore, in the limit, this goal can be defined as the transformation of the entire cosmic mechanism into a potential or actual organism, into overcoming necessity with freedom, mechanism with the organism, causality with expediency, as the humanization of nature. The task of economics is established precisely by this disintegration of being, the contradiction and mutual limitation of freedom and necessity, life and death: if absolute, immortal life reigned in the world (and, therefore, the universe would be a universal organism), if there was no place in it for a dead mechanism with the threat of death, then the only form of causality would be causality through freedom, or teleological; in the same way, in the case of the complete destruction of life, in which the kingdom of the dead mechanism would have no boundaries, everything would find itself in the dark night of non-existence, not illuminated in this darkness by the light of life and freedom. The present state of being, as a struggle between life and death, as a struggle between freedom and necessity, already thereby reveals its incomplete, transitional nature, its unstable balance, which strives to become stable in this process. The economy is an expression of the struggle between these two metaphysical principles - life and death, freedom and necessity, mechanism and organism. In its progress, it is a victory of the organizing forces of life over the disorganizing forces of death and its deeds, but over death itself in its metaphysical being? The economy is a struggle against the deadly forces of the prince of this world, but is it capable of raising a rebellion against this prince himself? Is the economy capable of driving death out of the world and, through victory over it, overcoming what constitutes its own condition? Or, on the contrary, not to heal the hearts of the world, poisoned by death, by economic means, and only by a new creative act of the Divine, by the power of the One who “trampled death by death”, “will the last enemy - death be destroyed”? We pose this ultimate question here only as a logical limit; its discussion relates to the eschatology of the economy (in the next part of this work). But if farming is a form of struggle between life and death and an instrument of self-affirming life, then with the same reason we can say that farming is a function of death, caused by the need for self-defense of life. In its most basic motive, it is unfree activity, this motive is the fear of death, characteristic of all living things. No matter how far a person goes in his economic progress, he, while remaining a master, cannot remove the handcuffs of a slave guilty of death. By defining economy as an actual, defensive-offensive relationship between man and nature, we are expanding its boundaries, obviously wider than they are established in political economy, which is guided by the goals and possibilities of special study 36 . The sign that establishes economic activity is the presence of effort, labor directed towards a specific goal. Farming is a labor activity. Labor, and forced labor at that, distinguishes the economy. In this sense, the economy can be defined as the labor struggle for life and its expansion; labor is the basis of life, considered from an economic point of view. Life arises naturally at birth, that is, without the conscious application of labor, it is given for free, but in the economy its maintenance is already paid for by labor, it becomes labor. Labor is the value by which goods that support life are acquired. This truth, as a dark premonition, underlies the so-called. labor theories of value in political economy. "Alle wirtschaftliche Güter sind Arbeitsprodukte" 37 . This Rodbertus formula, which perfectly reflects the general worldview of political economy, remains true and meaningful beyond its borders. In political economy, precisely in the “theory of value”, it is given an overly narrow, materialistic and mercantile interpretation; it bears the stamp of economic materialism, as well as deliberate one-sidedness due to scientific specialization. Already from its very inception - in mercantilism, among the physiocrats, among Hell. Smith and other representatives of the classical school, and finally, in socialism, political economy seeks to more accurately define the concept of “productive,” i.e., economic labor, in order to use it to distinguish the area of ​​its special research, which otherwise would threaten to expand limitlessly and should include the entire science of culture. In political economy, this deliberate narrowness of its concepts leads to one-sidedness and crudeness of conclusions; for the philosophy of economics, this deliberate narrowing of horizons would be not only unnecessary, but also directly harmful. The economy essentially includes human labor in all its applications, from the laborer to Kant, from the plowman to the astrologer. The hallmark of an economy is labor reproduction or the conquest of life’s goods, material or spiritual, as opposed to their free receipt. This is the intense activity of human life, in fulfillment of God’s word: in the sweat of your brow, bring your bread, and, moreover, all bread, that is, not only material food, but also spiritual: in the sweat of your brow, by economic labor, not only economic products are produced, but the entire culture is created. The world as an economy is the world as an object of labor, and to that extent also as a product of labor. The stamp of economy is laid precisely by labor, in this the labor theory of value is right, political economy is right, which correctly senses the universal, cosmic significance of labor, although it does not know how to properly express it and fully comprehend it. Shall we define labor? We know of attempts to define labor in political economy, but they pursue special goals, referring primarily to the theory of value, and are unsuccessful even from the point of view of the latter; in addition, they cannot satisfy us due to their materialism. Labor is the expenditure of neuromuscular energy - this is, for example, Marx’s definition, which is very widespread and influential. But, not to mention the fact that this sign is not easy to establish for mental labor, it is not difficult to see that in general, labor is only expressed and revealed in this expenditure of force. Labor in its internal, volitional basis, as a feeling of effort directed outward, defies any definition, although it is known to everyone from experience and introspection, as relevance, as effective will, as an active way out of oneself. The ability to work is one of the properties of a living being; the fire and sharpness of life are found in it. Only he lives a full life who is capable of work and really works. The labor beginning of life is relative and to a certain extent opposite to the natural or free one. The economy, as labor reproduction and expansion of life, is opposed to nature, as the totality of the “natural” forces of life and its growth that are free (for humans). It is not by an economic act that a person is born, develops in the womb and grows after birth, strengthening in his physical and spiritual strength, realizing the strength of the spirit within himself. It is not by economy that all sorts of processes take place in nature, and it is not by economy that this universe was created. On the contrary, only its presence determines both the subjective and objective possibility of farming, the ability to work, and the possibility of work. The economy in this sense is only included in the life of the universe, it is a moment of its growth. But at the same time, this is a necessary moment, included in the plan of the universe as an actual manifestation of life that has achieved self-awareness and acuteness. Culture, i.e. labor or economically caused or realized growth of life, presupposes nature (in the sense of its uncultural or, more precisely, extra- and pre-cultural, pre-economic state) as its basis. Nature, without labor, without a working culture, cannot reveal all its powers, at least in man, and emerge from a half-asleep existence, but, on the other hand, culture has no other creative powers other than those already inherent in nature. And “caring” (that is, with all the efforts of culture) we cannot add even an elbow to our height, according to the word of the Savior. Nature is therefore the natural basis of culture, the material for economic influence; outside of it, economy is just as unthinkable and impossible, just as concrete experience is impossible outside of life. Chapter 2. Natural philosophical foundations of economic theory I. Idealism and natural philosophy Every economic act represents some objective action, the actual emergence of a person from himself into the outside world and action in it. It is some action in the world of things and on things: whether it is the work of a farmer, an industrial worker, a mechanic, an engineer, a scientific researcher, or whether it is the work of organizing a factory with a machine division of labor or of trade with its speculation, the economy consists, in any case, of actions on things, or objective actions. Im Anfang war die That 38, says economic practice, and it is not in vain that Marx, at the center of the doctrine of economic materialism, puts forward “Praxis” 39, that is, exactly what we call here objective action. The entire economy is an objective activity that obviously presupposes some objective reality. It is the constant influence of the owner, the subject of the economy (for now it makes no difference here, individual or collective) on things (nature or matter, no matter how it is further philosophically constructed), i.e., on the object of the economy. And every economic act carries out a certain fusion of subject and object, the introduction of the subject into the object, the subjectification of the object, or the exit of the subject from himself into the world of things, into the object, i.e. objectification of the subject. In this sense, economy, abstracting from any given form or content, no matter how different they may be, is a subjective-objective activity, an actual unity of subject and object. The subject acts according to goals, he is guided only by expediency, the object, nature, the world of things, is determined by mechanical regularity, the iron connection of causes and effects. In every economic act, within its limits, teleology and mechanism merge until complete mutual penetration: without ceasing to be a mechanism, nature, within this act, becomes anthropomorphic, just as in the organs of our body the mechanism does not contradict, but is combined with functional expediency. Thus, the content of an economic act can be defined in this sense as the fusion or partial identification of the mechanism of nature with human teleology, the transformation of the mechanism of causes into a mechanism of goals, into a goal-mechanism; this is usually called the conquest of nature 40. All kinds of economic acts are something so familiar and ordinary to us that they seem natural and, like everything that is considered such, do not raise any special questions about themselves. Therefore, some effort of philosophical abstraction is required in order to see that this supposedly self-evident thing appears to us as a dark mystery and poses a complex and difficult philosophical problem. Centuries of scientific experience passed before Kant posed his “Copernican” question: how is this very experience possible, what are the conditions and prerequisites for objective knowledge, its a priori? And the same centuries of economic life had to pass before philosophy consciously began to pose the question: how is economics possible, what are the conditions and prerequisites for objective action, its a priori? Of course, economy is a fact of reality, just as experience in the Kantian sense is the same fact. But here the question is not about a fact, but about the principle of this fact, about its necessary assumptions, both positive and negative. The task of philosophical analysis is to highlight these assumptions and consider the foundations on which they necessarily rest. This task, therefore, is primarily critical-analytical; in this sense, it represents a complete analogy with the task of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Secondly, it is metaphysical, to the extent that the premises of the economy are examined not only from the formal side, but also in terms of its positive content. The true founder of the philosophy of economics is, however, not Kant, the philosopher of subjective idealism, passive contemplation, but Schelling, the philosopher of nature and objective reality. Kant’s philosophy, by its very theme, could not be and was not a philosophy of action, which a philosophy of economics must necessarily be; it was exclusively a philosophy of quietistic contemplation, a calm theoretical separation of subject and object, in which the object is only reflected in the subject and the question is only about the conditions for the possibility of this mirror reflection. The Kantian subject is inactive, he only contemplates, therefore this teaching is completely armchair philosophy 41. And even in Kant’s practical philosophy, in the “Critique of Practical Reason,” which, thanks to its postulates, occupies such a central place in Kant’s teaching and is so important for discovering the true motives of his system, namely religious-metaphysical and religious-ethical (so straightforwardly eliminated from it by many current neo-Kantians), we are not talking about the action itself, but only about the norms of objective, i.e., the correct behavior of the subject, about the ethics of action, but not about his practice. Therefore, “practical” reason in reality remains no less theoretical, abstract, and subjective than theoretical. And here the glass barrier separating the Kantian subject from the object, that is, from nature and the world, remains intact, and this subject retains its contemplative-mirror nature. Since Kant's philosophy is a philosophy of contemplation, and not action, the subject and object here are only opposed to each other, and the activity of the mind consists only of filling transcendental schemes of knowledge. Therefore, there is neither objective reality nor nature as a reality that exists as the basis for its speculative construction by an epistemological subject. Kantian matter, to establish the a priori definition of which he put so much effort into, can only be constructed and theoretically contemplated, but not felt, it is a mirror image of the subject, it relates to real nature, like the apples drawn by Apelles, which only stupid birds tried to peck, to real apples, or like ideal thalers to real ones (in the famous example of Kant). It is only a priori, and not a posteriori, because in order to establish the a posteriori tangibility of nature, to experience the cognitive a priori in action, the subject must step down from the throne of contemplation and get mixed up in the crowd, like Faust, when, leaving his office, he places himself among the people, in activity. Otherwise, while remaining in his unification, he will remain in the dark whether the cities and gardens that appear before him are reality, and not Fata Morgana. He cannot dispel the dreams of solipsism. He needs to make some leap to reality, to perform an action in which something new will be revealed to him both about himself and about the object he is contemplating. For, according to Schelling’s beautiful comparison, “spirit is an eternal island, which cannot be reached from matter through any detours without a jump” 42, and such a jump for the knowing Kantian subject (= spirit) to the object (= matter) can only be action. That is why Kant’s philosophy, despite its primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, is in the deepest sense of the word anti-pragmatic 43 . Its reality is only drawn, subjective, the world and nature are projected, as they appear to the extra-life, extra-natural and extra-worldly, although not supernatural, contemplating them, only a transcendental, but not a transcendental subject. Recognizing the primacy of subjective will over subjective reason, or practical reason over theoretical, does not at all mark Kant’s exit to objective reality, which he still does not have; only the cognitive conditions of this objectivity are present, which, however, may or may not exist. Kant himself recognized this impossibility of establishing the objectivity of our experience in one subject, and hence arose in him the need to seek support outside the vicious circle of subjectivism. He found this point of support in the subject only outside the mind, precisely in the will, calling it metaphorically practical reason, although he can hardly seriously deceive this innocent terminological masquerade. The radical rationalism of subjectivism led to no less radical voluntarism, i.e. irrationalism. The basic principles that hold the entire system together - the doctrine of real being or Ding an sich, of freedom and necessity, of the human spirit - are hidden here, in the philosophical underground. Kant's system is crumbling from within, and one cannot help but see its own fate in this. Kant's philosophical tragedy lies in the fact that although he was inspired by the pathos of objectivity, reality and sought liberation from subjectivism and solipsism, in which he rightly felt the haze inspired by the spirit of non-existence, he went towards this goal in a purely speculative, contemplative way. For this purpose, he killed living reality, turning it into a representation, into a diagram, before he began to study it in its vital concreteness. He sought life in death and the scent of fields in the stale air of his office. But what Kant achieved largely beyond his knowledge and desire—subjective idealism under the guise of the philosophy of reality—became a battle cry for Fichte, who in this regard fully agreed with Kant, who revealed the secret of Kantianism. I mean, of course, Fichte's first system, his Ich-philosophie 44. Moreover, what is said in Kant in the indicative mood is expressed in Fichte in the imperative mood. Subjective idealism turns into absolute, epistemology into undisguised, militant metaphysics, and Fichte is no longer afraid of solipsism, illusionism, or acosmism, to which his doctrine of the world as non-self necessarily leads. In his system, the world acquires the meaning of only the boundaries of the I, it is posited as a non-I, and in this sense there is a creative creation of the I. If the Kantian transcendental subject calmly dreams and passively reflects the phantoms of being in his mirror, then the Fichtean self, although obeying some unconscious impulse, an “external push” (äussere Anstoss), throws onto the screen of consciousness, along with a sheaf of light, various states of being, itself creating the world. And since man in reality cannot create, then, thanks to this claim, he turns everything that exists only into an illusion, into his dream, and sprinkles the living with dead water. Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört Die schöne Welt Mit mächtiger Faust; Sie stürzt, zerfällt! Ein Halbgott hat sie zerschlagen. (“Faust”, erster Theil. 1253–1258.) 45 Radical subjectivism and illusionism - this is the result of Fichte’s philosophy of action, as based not on the relationship between subject and object, but only on the self-position of the subject, “the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason,” however, realized only in the sphere of the subject. Absolute action (absolute Thathandlung) as the position of the non-self in the self as the boundary of the latter equates the human self with the Divine Self, for which there is no difference between desire and action, thought and being, which can truly posit the non-self as its other, not being limited to it, but owning it. In Fichte's philosophy, the image of God in man - the formal infinity and universality of our self - is directly equated to its Proto-Image - a pathetic megalomania, a reductio ad absurdum 46 of subjective idealism, which is repeated today, only without the pathos and inspiration characteristic of Fichte, by the current "immanents". Fichte's system, even more than Kant's, claims to be a philosophy of action - it relies on the self-generation of the epistemological self on the action of the active self. However, the effectiveness of the I remains purely idealistic; it cannot receive trans-subjective meaning, come out of itself, touch the real non-I or super-I. Even more tightly than in Kant, the subject remains here confined under a glass cap with the air pumped out, and in this airless space he dreams of objective existence - but alas! zero measurement. Between the subject and the object, a seemingly invisible but impenetrable glass wall, a whole system of mirrors, had been erected. It was necessary to break this glass wall with a blow of a powerful hand and only in this way break through to objective reality. This great philosophical act was accomplished by Schelling already in his first system, especially in his natural philosophy. From the stuffy Kantian-Fichtean idealism, where the world and nature turned into mere schemes of reason, Schelling, in his own words, “broke through into the open, free field of objective science” and won “freedom and vitality of thinking” 47. In the person of Schelling, death is once again defeated by life in the philosophical consciousness. He achieved this victory with the help of two deep and vital ideas: the identity of subject and object and the understanding of nature as a living, developing organism. In the history of philosophy there are few ideas that posterity would treat so ungratefully as Schelling’s natural philosophy, which, however, is based on the mystical natural philosophy of J. Boehme and Fr. Baader. We do not mean the details of its implementation, which, of course, are in connection with the natural science of his time (although at that time they also fertilized the latter) and which now can and should be worked out completely anew, but its very idea, its problem, its, so to speak, task. Although not absolutely new in the history of philosophy, let us remember the doctrine of the world soul in ancient times: in Plato and Plotinus, then in the fathers of the church: St. Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudodionysius, St. Maximus the Confessor, further by I. Scotus Erigena, - the philosophical idea of ​​nature and the problem of natural philosophy were lost to such an extent in all new Western philosophy, starting with Descartes 48 (Spinoza occupies a special place here with his mechanistic pantheism: Natura sive Deus), that at present it is absent from it, one might say, completely. It drags out a dark and unknown existence only in various teachings of materialism of a hylozoistic hue (Haeckel!), which are truly the Nemesis of new philosophy for its murder of nature: if in it in the name of the rights of the spirit - and not even the spirit, but only the epistemological subject - nature is killed, then here in the name of dead nature the spirit is killed, declared an epiphenomenon of combinations of atoms. Separation and hostile opposition between nature and spirit turns out to be deadly for both sides. Schelling rejected this very opposition and began to regard nature as an unconscious spirit, and spirit as a self-realized nature. Nature for the intellect is only an object of contemplation, an object that exists in the subject and for the subject. But does nature exist outside the subject and, so to speak, before the subject? And the subject itself, doesn’t it exist in nature? How does nature enter the subject or how does he find it not only outside, but also inside himself? Or, summarizing all these questions, let us ask ourselves: how is nature possible? With that splitting of subject and object, in which being is directly equated with consciousness, i.e., determined only in the subject, these questions are completely insoluble. It is necessary to deepen the concept of experience and expand the concept of being, including not only the data of consciousness, but also what stands beyond it as the unconscious or extraconscious and which, in relation to consciousness, can be called, together with Schelling, “depotentiated consciousness.” This expansion of being beyond the limits of immanent consciousness, the inclusion of itself in the composition of being as its product, the recognition of the existence of a whole world beyond the limits of consciousness meant a whole philosophical revolution, accomplished precisely by Schelling. An approach to it was already made by Fichte, who was forced to admit that there is a certain purposeful activity, an unconscious or pre-conscious intellect: namely, the conscious activity of the self is preceded by a number of its necessary and unconscious self-positions, which, however, belong to the number of conditions of consciousness and knowledge. This teaching already outlined a possible path for further development, which Fichte himself did not follow, but Schelling 49 did. (Schopenhauer and later Hartmann develop this same motive in their philosophical activities, but they stand apart in the world philosophical tradition.) The answer to the question about the relationship between subject and object or, which in a certain sense is the same thing, about the possibility of nature outside of us, us in nature and nature in us, was Schelling’s main philosophical doctrine of identity, the identity of subject and object, spirit and nature. “Nature must be visible spirit, and spirit must be invisible nature. Thus, here, in the absolute identity of the spirit in us and nature outside of us, the problem of how nature outside of us is possible must be resolved.”50 The Universe appears, in the light of the philosophy of identity, as a ladder of steps or “potencies,” as an evolutionary development, the general content of which is the revelation of the spirit. “Dead and unconscious products of nature are only failed attempts by nature to reflect on itself, and all so-called dead nature in general is an immature intellect, therefore already in its phenomena, while unconsciously, its intellectual character is visible. Nature achieves the highest goal - to completely become an object for itself - only in the highest and final reflection, which is nothing other than man, or, more generally, what we call reason, in which nature returns to itself and in which it becomes obvious that nature is originally identical with what is recognized in us as intellectual and conscious. Nature is therefore presented as a series of stages of development, or, in the language of modern biology, evolutionary transformism. That healthy grain that exists in Darwinism and evolutionism in general, long before Darwin, we find in Schelling, but not as a controversial biological hypothesis, but as a necessary metaphysical postulate 52 . “Philosophy must accept (annehmen) that there is a gradation of stages of life in nature” 53. “The general world process rests on the progressive, although constantly contested, victory of the subjective over the objective” 54. The philosophy of identity thus fills up the impenetrable gap formed between subject and object in critical philosophy, recognizing their original identity as stages of development of the same principle of life, subject-object, which in this development only breaks down into two poles - subject and object. This very distinction - subject and object, ideal and real - is relative, it is created in the process of self-development and self-determination of nature. In the Absolute (no matter what signs it is defined by) there is no this difference; for it, acts of consciousness are at the same time objects, the opposition between the subjective and the objective is extinguished in their original identity, and the universe is the self-discovery of the Absolute, in which nature and spirit, object and subject, are identical from eternity. Self-contemplation of the Absolute is revealed to us as the development of the world. The first, as a prototype and primary source, is natura naturans 55, while the second is natura naturata 56, as a necessary generation of the first. Here the path is already outlined for the further deepening of the philosophy of identity, which we have in the second period of Schelling’s activity, where it grows into a grandiose religious-philosophical system. But here we must focus only on this basic natural philosophical idea of ​​Schelling, as it is justified by his general philosophy of identity in his natural philosophical writings and in the System of Transcendental Idealism. The idea of ​​the philosophy of identity outwardly approaches what is currently called “monism,” and most often this name means materialism of the more or less hylozoistic shade that it now usually takes (for example, in Haeckel). Without considering it necessary to criticize dogmatic materialism here and once again reveal all its helplessness in the face of problems of consciousness, cognition and will, we will only say that the peculiar greatness of Schelling’s philosophical act lies, by the way, precisely in the positive philosophical overcoming of materialism. Materialism is based on the fact of a mechanism of nature independent of us, which has a coercive character in relation to us; on the contrary, idealism denies nature, since it is reduced to a simple representation 57 . Therefore, materialism is, as it were, an inevitable shadow of idealism, its complement: insofar as the latter is the philosophy of the subject, the former is the philosophy of the object. Neither one nor the other type of monistic philosophy, nor the immanent-idealist one, which crosses out the object for the sake of the subject, nor the materialist one, which destroys the subject in the name of the object, can explain the living unity of subject and object. Materialism and idealism are reconciled in a higher identity, in the unity of developing life. “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” - Schelling seems to be saying to materialism. “Touch Me, for the spirit has no flesh and bones,” it is said in the direction of skeptical idealism. Schelling expressed one of the most fundamental truths of Christianity in the philosophical language of his time. For Christianity is equally far from materialism and from subjective idealism; it removes the opposition between flesh and spirit in its teaching about man as an embodied spirit, the living unity of both. Christianity in this sense is also a philosophy of identity (although in ethics it is dualistic). Neither Platonism, nor Neoplatonism, which considered the body as a case for the soul or a prison for it, nor the latest idealism, which turns the flesh into a subjective idea, knows the unity of spirit and flesh that Christianity teaches. This is also the basis for the doctrine of the possibility of the deification of the flesh, accomplished by the incarnation of God. And this last did not happen for appearances only or outwardly, but quite realistically and finally. The flesh that Christ took upon Himself He preserves forever, with it He ascended and with it He will come again - such is the teaching of the Church. Therefore, death, which breaks and temporarily breaks the union of spirit and flesh, is something metaphysically unnatural, violating the nature of man as an embodied spirit. This highest unity, possessing the qualities of a universal (transcendental) subject, a universal spirit and a universal object, the maternal womb of all creation, 58 Schelling, following the example of the ancients, sometimes designates this natura naturans by the name “world soul”. Of course, Schelling relies on the mystical teaching of J. Boehme and the “theosophy” of Fr. Baader. So, in the unity of the world soul, the universal subject-object, self-revealing in the process of life, the real connection between subject and object, established in every act of consciousness and will, finds its explanation. Individuals are involved in this unity. It gives the key to understanding the laws of nature and its knowability. Kant explained the regularity of nature as cognitive a priori; according to his teaching, regularity is introduced into nature by reason. Subsequently, Hegel, developing Kant’s thought into a metaphysical system, tried to construct the laws of nature a priori as a matter of the universal, supernatural and not needing empirics, but positing it as a moment of its development of reason. However, this idealistic understanding of natural science, which focuses all attention on the formal-logical, “transcendental” side of the laws of nature, is powerless to assign the proper place to its specific content, the actual diversity of natural phenomena covered by this law. For idealism they exist not as such, in their living, concrete reality, but only in their schematic abstraction, only as material for logical processing, just as for a geometer there is no real variety of bodies, but only their figures. Schelling posed this problem differently. From the point of view of the philosophy of identity, the very opposition of a priori and a posteriori, subject and object, is removed and loses its sharpness. “Precisely because all our knowledge initially has an entirely empirical character, it is all entirely a priori... In fact, since I produces everything from myself, knowledge... has an a priori character. However, since we are not conscious of this activity of the I, there is nothing a priori in us, but everything exists a posteriori.” In the same sense, “nature is a priori, that is, everything individual in it is determined in advance by the whole or the idea of ​​nature in general” 59 . We have confirmation of this apriorism of nature in experiment. “Every experiment is a question to nature, which she is forced to answer. But every question contains a hidden judgment a priori, every experiment that is really an experiment contains a prediction” 60. The history of nature is the history of consciousness, and the preliminary stages of its development are preserved in it; this is the “transcendental memory of the mind” in which it reproduces its stages, that is, it cognizes nature. “Plato’s idea that all philosophy is recollection is correct in this sense; all philosophizing is a recollection of the state when we were identical with nature” 61. Later, Schelling calls nature the first or old testament and says that “we have a revelation more ancient than any written revelation: it is nature, which contains within itself prototypes that have not yet been interpreted by any man” 62 . With this universal coherence and “a priori” nature in mind, Schelling notes that “nature is infinite in every product, and in each lies the seed of the universe” 63 . So, nature and intellect are the essence of two poles of a single existence. Nature is an unconscious mind, it embodies blind expediency 64 , and it amazes precisely because it acts as a mechanism, but, at the same time, with complete expediency 65 . Based on the general principles of the philosophy of identity, Schelling resolves (in the most systematic form in the “System of Transcendental Idealism”) a question that did not even fit into the system of subjective idealism with all its varieties: how is objective action possible? How does desire become transformative of objects? The task of “transcendental philosophy” (in Schelling’s sense of the word) is to show how the intellect comes to an objective being that is consistent with it (while the task of natural philosophy was to show the opposite - how nature comes to the intellect and becomes conscious). The coordination of representations with objects can be twofold: representations can relate to objects as their copies (ideal doublings) or their samples (projects, models), the former arise in us involuntarily, with necessity, the latter arbitrarily and freely. All theoretical knowledge is based on the possibility of the former, and free, practical activity is based on the possibility of the latter. For transcendental philosophy, this poses a general question that connects theoretical and practical philosophy: how can the intellect be at the same time both copying and giving examples? “How does the objective change through the medium of the ideally represented (bloss gedachtes), so that it is completely consistent with the representation”? This question, completely insoluble for purely subjective (idealism) or purely objective (dogmatic materialism) philosophy, is easily resolved on the basis of the idea of ​​the original identity of subject and object, intellect and nature. “How anything from freedom can pass into the objective world would be completely incomprehensible if this world is something existing in itself (an sich Bestehendes), and it would be incomprehensible even under the assumptions of a pre-established harmony, which, in turn, would be possible only through the mediation of a third, the general modifications of which are the intellect and the objective world... The question, therefore, is precisely this: how can anything be determined in me through free activity, to what extent am I unfree, to what extent am I a contemplative? The proposition that my free activity contains causality means: I contemplate it as having causality. The I that acts is different from the I that contemplates, yet both must be identical in relation to the object; that which is posited as active in the object must also be posited in the intuiting; the acting I must determine the I intuiting. For I know that this I is the active one only from its identity with that which contemplates the action, which is conscious of the action. The acting (apparently) does not know, it only acts, is only an object, only the contemplating knows and therefore is precisely the subject; How does identity come into play here? It is precisely in the object that the same is posited as in the subject, and in the subject the same as in the object?” 66. “It would be impossible to understand how it would be possible to realize our goals in the external world if the world, before it becomes the object of conscious action, already by virtue of the initial identity of unconscious activity with conscious activity, did not have a receptivity for such action. But although all conscious activity is purposeful, such a coincidence of conscious and unconscious activity can only be shown in a product that is purposeful without being purposefully produced. Nature should be such a product” 67 . Blind intellect, unconscious will, acting with unerring purposefulness in nature, reaches consciousness in aesthetic activity, the distinctive feature of which is the combination of the unconscious creativity of a genius with consciousness. All of nature is such an unconscious, but living work of art, “the objective world is only the original, still unconscious poetry of the spirit,” which becomes conscious in art. Art reveals the secret of the world, the identity of the ideal and the real. Therefore, Schelling calls art “the general organ of philosophy.” Artistic activity is creative in nature, it is free, but at the same time subject to coercion (“pati Deum” 68, he recalls the expression of the ancients about inspiration). “Only a genius is such a conscious-unconscious creator in art, who therefore has the same significance for aesthetics as I do for philosophy” 69. It resolves the basic contradiction (of consciousness and unconsciousness), which “otherwise cannot be resolved by absolutely anything.” “Therefore, art is an eternal and true organon and at the same time a document of philosophy, constantly and ever again confirming what philosophy cannot express in external form, namely depicting the unconscious in activity and creativity and its original identity with the conscious” 70. These fruitful ideas of Schelling, only outlined here and developed in his writings (however, not with the same completeness), although they captivated and blinded his contemporaries, however, they turned out to be forgotten and unused in the history of philosophy and still remain dead capital. The dominant neo-Kantianism, with its formal idealism having lost its taste for Schelling’s ontologism and again being far from the objective reality to which he “broke through” with such effort, is least inclined to understand the meaning of these ideas. It was noticed and conditionally assessed in modern philosophy (except for K. Fischer, who studied Schelling with his usual conscientiousness and dedicated the sixth volume of his “History of Philosophy” to him) only by the philosopher of the unconscious, but, of course, not by Schopenhauer with his blinding narcissism, which did not allow him to see the closeness of some of his basic metaphysical ideas to Schelling, but by Ed. f. Hartmann, undoubtedly the greatest of the German thinkers of the second half of the 19th century 71, with his followers 72. But they take only one side of Schelling’s teaching, namely his doctrine of unconscious purposiveness, blind intellect. Only Russian philosophical literature can indicate the fruitful and further creative development of Schelling’s natural philosophical ideas; this is precisely in the philosophical system of V. S. Solovyov, so congenial to Schelling. The proximity of the latter to Schelling, especially the so-called second period 73, is extremely great, more than has been stated so far (although this proximity does not at all have the nature of direct borrowing, but only a very large influence that fertilizes Solovyov’s own work). In “Readings on God-Humanity” the doctrine of the world soul and nature, which generally plays such a central role in Solovyov’s philosophy, is directly adjacent to Schelling (both the first and second periods). We do not present here the corresponding teachings of Solovyov due to the fact that acquaintance with him is available to everyone 74. The philosophy of economics, as a philosophy of objective action, must necessarily be a conscious continuation of the philosophical, namely “natural philosophical” work of Schelling. Of course, it must be alien to any Schellingian dogmatism; it takes Schelling’s basic idea as the theme and task for modern philosophy. It is impossible not to see, however, that it is Schelling, with his philosophy of identity, who lays the foundations for the philosophy of economics, although it must be added that he himself not only did not explore this aspect of his own problem in its specific originality and significance, but, obviously, was not even aware of it. The problem of economic philosophy has emerged with such force in the life and consciousness of recent decades, so brightly colored by “economic materialism.” By the way, based on what has been said so far, it is clear that the problem of “economic materialism,” or the influence of the economy, and in it nature, on man and, in turn, man on the economy, and in it on nature, is primarily a natural philosophical problem, and it is only through a philosophical misunderstanding that the school of Marx takes the idealistic intellectualist Hegel as its godfather, not noticing that for its purposes the natural philosopher Schelling is incomparably more suitable. However, this will be discussed later. And now, after this brief and preliminary orientation in the history of modern philosophy, let us turn to the study of our own problem. How is farming possible? What are its a priori assumptions or preconditions? What is the philosophical meaning and significance of basic economic functions? Chapter 3. The importance of basic economic functions Economic life comes down to metabolism, to a certain circulation or alternation of inhalation and exhalation. In the language of political economy, inhalation corresponds to production, and exhalation corresponds to consumption. The economic cycle is made up of these two acts, production and consumption, these are the essence of the main functions of the economy. Therefore, the general question is how is farming possible? breaks down into two more specific questions, namely: how is production possible and how is consumption possible? Every living organism, as a body, as organized matter, is in an inextricable connection with the entire universe as its part, for the universe is a system of forces, mutually connected and mutually penetrating one another, and it is impossible to move a grain of sand, to destroy even one atom without the entire universe moving - in one form or another. Whether we think of the universe as a system of forces or energies, dynamically, or consider it as being in a state of unstable equilibrium, statically, all the same, by virtue of this continuous connectedness of all its parts, it is one for us. The assumption of several universes would necessarily include their interaction, that is, it would only expand the concept of the universe, turning it into a system of several worlds that form the unity of the cosmos, or it would introduce the contradictory concept of two (or more) systems of forces that exist side by side, but for some reason are completely isolated from one another, mutually impenetrable. Such impenetrability, such cosmological pluralism could be allowed only for qualitatively different worlds, representing different metaphysical stages of existence, such as, for example, the spiritual world and our world, “heaven and earth,” or the afterlife of man in relation to the earthly. The unity of the universe has an axiomatic character for all world science; it justifies the continuity of the causal connection that penetrates it and establishes the physical communism of existence. The fact that I am now moving a pen over paper and making a new arrangement of atoms of ink, paper, pen steel, etc., thinking in principle, is the same cosmic event as astronomical or geological catastrophes, for it changes the physical picture of the world in the same way, although with less force (however, even this cannot be said, because there is no commensurability of these events) as these catastrophes. Now, when I am sitting at this table, I am experiencing all the infinite complexity of the positive and negative influences of cosmic forces, and not only the sun millions of kilometers away from us, but also all the world’s suns visible and invisible to us. A cosmic change, elusive to me due to the reasons for its occurrence, can cause such a state of the atmosphere, such heat, which turns out to be capable of mowing down the life dear to me or making my own existence impossible: There is a certain cosmological karma of existence. The unity of the universe, the physical communism of being, means that physically everything finds itself or is in everything, every atom of the universe is connected with the entire universe, or, if we equate the universe to an organism, then we can say that it is part of the world body 75. It is impossible to stop only at the recognition of this physical communism of being, for the universe is characterized not only by the universal correlativeness, continuity and coherence of the world of physical matter, but also by a certain relationship between living or organized matter and inanimate or dead matter, or, in other words, between organic bodies and inanimate matter. A line runs through the entire universe, dividing it into two kingdoms: living and non-living. Let science become exhausted in attempts to somehow step over or erase this line and, not finding it, sometimes begin to reject it completely. It still exists, if not theoretically, then in fact, just as there are living and nonliving things. And the general relationship between both areas is characterized by the fact that the kingdom of life constantly makes an attack on the kingdom of lifelessness, with its warm tentacles it captures and carries away cold, lifeless substances and turns them into living tissue, organizes dead matter into a living body. But on the contrary, it is not strong enough to consolidate this transformation forever; life is not able to warm up dead matter with its warmth so much that it never cools down. The time comes, and bodies - in parts or in whole - again turn into dead matter, into the original metaphysical “earth”, regarding which it is said to man, and in his person, of course, to all living things: “Thou art earth, and unto earth shall thou go forth” (Gen. III, 19). The dam separating the waters of life and death turns out to be not impenetrable: they constantly leak and mix with each other. This communism of life and death, this mysterious identity of living and dead, the mortality of all life, but also, apparently, the vitality of everything inanimate, belongs to the most basic foundations of our earthly existence, on which the possibility of an economic relationship with the world rests. Life is death, and death is life, so says the formula of this identity. In an expanded and more precise form, it should be expressed as follows: life passes into a fundamentally new or transcendental state of lifelessness, death, and the inanimate, dead, is elevated to a different, higher, also transcendental state of life for it. This very identity, constantly unfolding before us in an innumerable number of potencies and acts, is an experienced fact, self-evident for everyone. But the philosophical interpretation of this fact confronts consciousness with an insoluble riddle of life and death: how can one think of this identity and this transcensus 76? And what is more authentic, what is more primordial, what is more substantial: life or death, the living or the dead principle? Is life only an epiphenomenon of death, beautiful patterns on it, a mirage caused by the play of physical forces? But then the very feeling of life, its self-awareness (which long precedes the self-awareness of the personal self) becomes an incomprehensible miracle, to which there is no scientific or logical path, and all that remains is to jump over the abyss, as dogmatic materialists do. Or the opposite is true; there is no death, but there is only life, sometimes fading and, as it were, completely disappearing, but remaining in potency, being only as if in a swoon, and the universe is only the development of the endless potentialities of life, a ladder of its steps? This monism of life, panzoism, as opposed to the monism of death or the pantanatism of materialists, following the ancient thinkers (Plato and especially Plotinus), Boehme and Baader, Schelling and Vl. Solovyov, we consider a metaphysical hypothesis, the only one capable of leading out of the difficulty, and materialists, falling into pantheistic hylozoism, animating nature, attributing to it expediency, even aesthetics, deifying it (like Haeckel), in essence already abandon pantanatism and approach panzoism. Matter organized by life is already a body; the body is a collection of organs through which life takes possession of dead matter. Through the body, thanks to the coherence of the universe, life in its various manifestations is introduced into the whole cosmos. The cosmos is in this sense the potential body of a living being, an organism in potentia. This potentiality may, of course, not turn into actuality at all, or it may turn into it in parts. It exists in a double sense. Firstly, every living body is an organization of matter, not only of a given amount of matter, as it appears statically, but of matter in general, for dynamically there is one matter, prima materia, and this matter (“mother of life”, Μητηρ ζωης, Platonic meon), as a system of forces, is united and continuous. The life-giving principle that takes possession of this matter, so to speak, forms in it knots of life that are not isolated, but dynamically connected, like a system of forces that are in a certain relationship with each other; These are not separate and isolated spheres of life, but life in general, only in its various manifestations. At countless points and centers, life organizes matter; the active, masculine principle fertilizes the receptive, feminine principle, the lifeless Maeon. The Eros of life will be born from Poros and Penia, wealth and poverty, activity and passivity. Idea-forms, entelechies, are embodied in formless passive matter and form monads. Outside of this design, matter is on the very edge of non-existence, understood in the sense of metaphysical non-existence (ουκ όν), being in a state of half-being, unrealized being, as pure potency (μη όν). Secondly, in addition to this general and abstract unity of life and matter, the active and passive principle, there is also a specific universality of life. It is given not only in logical consciousness, which ideally contains the universe, but also in the possible expansion of the sensuality of a living being, for which there are fundamentally no boundaries, or, more precisely, they coincide only with the boundaries of the universe. The organs of our body are like doors and windows to the entire universe, and everything that enters us through these windows and these doors becomes the object of our “feeling”, and, becoming tangible for us, in a certain sense, is already our body. Everything that comes out of the meonic-dark region of half-being and is illuminated by life becomes, as it were, the periphery of our body: everything that we see under a microscope and through a telescope - the microscopic world, removed from us by the depth of space, and the heavenly bodies, removed from us by its breadth - everything accessible to our knowledge and one way or another affecting our sensuality and through that entering the illuminated field of life, all this, i.e. e. potentially the entire universe is capable of becoming our body, becoming its external peripheral extension. Therefore, in the limit, the entire universe, which, as a world of extra-vital, meonic, existence only in itself, but not for itself, appears to us under the cover of a mechanism and under the mask of lifeless matter, after removing this cover and removing this mask, it is, or rather, can become an organism. In this sense, one should understand Schelling’s profound expression that “the universe for the intellect (according to our deduction, for life) is only a cruder and more separate organ of self-consciousness, just as the individual organism is its more subtle and immediate organ,” and that “an organism is, in general, nothing more than a reduced (zusammengezogenes) image of the universe” 77. In this sense, the often repeated idea that with each person the universe is born and dies receives a new interpretation. This means, among other things, that the universe is generally a field of view of life, which illuminates with its light the meonic darkness, the potentiality of material existence. This expression must therefore be understood much more literally than is intended. It requires limitation only on the one hand that, thanks to the multiplicity of forms and centers of life, it cannot be completely defeated by death, which destroys only these individual centers, therefore the universe cannot completely die, that is, plunge into the emptiness and formlessness of meonic half-being, in which nothing happens and no events occur. So, Life and Matter (Meon) oppose each other as two polar principles, attracting and conditioning each other, but at the same time mutually repelling. Life necessarily needs a basis, a substrate, an inert principle that would be overcome and activated by its sharpness, just as light presupposes darkness, warmth presupposes cold, and joy presupposes sadness in order to overcome. The absolute organism of the universe, the final victory of Life over Maeon, after which the cover of life would forever be thrown over it and thus death would be finally banished, and the absolute mechanism of Maeon, “the invisible and empty earth” to the creative verb of Being (I, 1), these are the two metaphysical limits, the two poles of world existence. In the current world era, stability has not been achieved in either one or another form - neither in the direction of Chaos, Emptiness and Mechanism, nor in the direction of Organism, immortal Life, Completeness. There is a duel between Life and Death... However, such a struggle is possible between principles, although different, even opposite, but still related to each other. More precisely, it should be said that this is a struggle not of two principles, but of two states of the same universe, and this struggle itself is only a symptom of a painful state of being, albeit a disease of growth: the power of non-existence, the element of the maeonic, has rebelled and isolated itself from the power of Life, to which, however, it can be subjugated. That is why it is only possible that this constantly and continuously occurring partial resurrection or revitalization of dead matter is possible, as if bringing it to life, although after some time it again falls into the same swoon. The possibility of struggle between the animate and the inanimate is determined by their essential identity when they differ as states. This original identity of living and nonliving is expressed in nutrition and the associated growth and reproduction of life. Nutrition in a broad sense can be understood as the most general metabolism between a living organism and its environment, so this includes not only food itself, but also breathing, the influence of the atmosphere, light, electricity, chemistry and other forces of nature on our body, to the extent that it results in life-giving metabolism. Nutrition, understood even more broadly, includes not only metabolism in the indicated sense, but also all of our “sensibility” (in the Kantian sense), i.e., the ability to be affected by the external world, to receive impressions or irritations of the senses from it. We eat the world, we partake of the flesh of the world not only with our lips or digestive organs, not only with our lungs and skin in the process of breathing, but also in the process of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and general muscular sense. The world enters us through all the windows and doors of our senses and, entering, is perceived and assimilated by us. In its totality, this consumption of the world, existential communication with it, the communism of existence, justifies all our life processes. Life itself in this sense is the ability to consume the world, to join it, and death is going beyond the boundaries of this world, the loss of the ability to communicate with it, and, finally, resurrection is a return to the world with the restoration of this ability, at least to an infinitely expanded degree. In order not to complicate the issue by distinguishing particular forms of nutrition (I am aware that I am using this term in an unusual sense for physiology, but it quite accurately conveys the required shade of thought, namely about the maintenance of a living organism by an inanimate environment), let us focus on nutrition in the narrow sense, i.e., food. What does it mean to eat? We are not free to choose food; in it we can taste not only life, but also death; the struggle for life and death or the struggle for existence throughout the animal world is concentrated in food. Life is impossible without food, we are not given the opportunity to feed through the atmosphere, bony death stands behind us and drives us in search of food. What is food? For a natural scientist, the question of food is, of course, a complex problem of the physiological functions of our body; the study of nutrition is a chapter of physiology. However, whatever the physiological organs of nutrition, biological science by no means eliminates or resolves the more general, metaphysical question about the meaning of food. How does matter alien to my body become my flesh and enter my body? Or we can pose the same question in reverse form: how does my flesh, a living body, turn into dead matter, entirely after death, and in parts continuously throughout my life in the form of excrement, falling hair, nails, fumes, etc.? Here we have before us the most striking manifestation of that cosmic communism discussed above. In food, the boundary between living and nonliving is truly removed. Food is natural communion, communion with the flesh of the world. When I take food, I eat the matter of the world in general, 78 I partake of the flesh of the world and thereby really, by the very deed I find the world in myself, and myself in the world, I become a part of it. I directly eat this bread. But dynamically, due to the indicated unity and coherence of the cosmos, under the guise of this bread I eat the flesh of the whole world in general. For in the history of this bread, like every particle of matter, lies the history of the entire universe. In order for it to grow and obtain its present form, the combined action of the entire world mechanism in its past and present is necessary. And not only this bread, but also every particle of our food (and every atom of the air we inhale) is fundamentally the flesh of the world in general. And only as world beings, children of this very world, are we able to partake of its flesh, support our life with it, are able to eat. Food in this sense is a revelation of our essential, metaphysical unity with the world. Creatures transcendental to this world, extramundane, would be incapable of food, and therefore incapable of direct, direct influence on this world; in order to gain this ability, they would have to first incarnate (or “materialize,” as spirits from beyond the grave allegedly do in spiritualistic séances). For the world of spirits, light or dark, as well as for souls who have departed from our world and are in the afterlife, our world remains transcendental; for action in it and on it they are deprived of a point of support in this world. It remains for them an abstract idea, and not a reality, just like the afterlife for us. And for God, who honored this world with freedom and autonomy and therefore created it as an existing, extra-divine being outside Himself, it is possible to influence it only by external, transcendental compulsion, like Deus ex machina, or a new creation. In order to act from within, as an intraworldly and regenerating force, God had to be incarnated into the world. “And the Word became flesh.” God the Word performs transcensus, from extra-mundane existence He joins the world existence (“and with man’s life”), so that, raising it to Himself, thereby saving the world. If food is communion of the flesh of the world, regardless of its form and quantity, then partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ under the guise of bread and wine is communion of the flesh of the Son of God, the deified world’s flesh, which can also only be thought of dynamically. And just as food supports mortal life, so the Eucharistic meal is an introduction to immortal life, in which death is finally defeated and the deathly impenetrability of matter is overcome. It is immanent to our world, like its deified flesh, but it is also transcendental to its present state. By the incarnation of God, a new, spiritual flesh was created - the world's flesh was elevated to a higher, immortal potency, and the anticipation of its future transformation is palpable in the sacrament. In this sense, we can say that the sacred food of the Eucharist, the “medicine of immortality” (φάρμακον της άθανασίας), is food, but potentized, it nourishes immortal life, separated from the present by the threshold of death and resurrection. “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me and I in him...he who eats Me will live through Me” (John VI, 56–57). Just as when we eat the flesh of the world, we take into ourselves the world with its mortal life, and those who eat this food die, so those who eat the “bread that came down from heaven” take into themselves its life-giving power. “And I will raise him up on the last day” (John VI, 54), Christ gives them the promise. In this sense, we can say that the greatest Christian sacrament is preceded by such a basic act of life as eating, or communion with the flesh of the world; the anticipation of this sacrament, the desire to receive grace-filled, healing communion in the natural communion of the flesh of the world explains the origin of pagan natural sacraments, for example, the Greek mysteries 79. So, the possibility of consumption is fundamentally based on the metaphysical communism of the universe, on the original identity of all things, thanks to which metabolism and their circulation are possible, and first of all presupposes the unity of living and nonliving, the universality of life. Only because the entire universe is a living body is it possible for life to arise, feed and reproduce. Of course, this statement cannot be understood as a position of scientific natural science, because it contradicts its basic facts and foundations. Natural science proceeds – and in its own way quite rightly – from the distinction between living and non-living things, and not from identification. For him, the line separating organic and inorganic, living and dead, remains unshakable, and this determines the firmness of his position. However, the statement presented here does not in any way invade the competence of natural science; it goes, so to speak, on top of these particular truths of natural science. It follows from a worldview that is perfectly reconciled with all the fragmentations and splits of nature in natural science. Natural science, in all the complex composition of its disciplines, in the interests of study and the very possibility of it, splits nature, creates a mass of individual preparations from a single whole and poses a great many problems regarding them. The elements of nature, established by natural science, have extremely different properties and are almost intransigible from one to another. The whole of nature in its immediacy disappears without a trace, nature dies in natural science. She is like a corpse whose muscles and nerves are studied in the anatomical theater. And just as after a separate study of all the organs of a corpse by adding them back, it is not possible to assemble even a dead, and not just a living body, so natural science, which exists only in separate branches - for there is no natural science as a whole - is not able to synthetically put together a world from its disparate elements. It remains scattered and dead. The ideal of natural science, of course, is to overcome this isolation of study, the theoretical murder of nature, thanks to which only the corpse of nature is studied. If such an overcoming were accomplished, the isolating activity of individual natural science disciplines would thereby be defeated and the entire relativity of these differences would be shown, which does not destroy the original unity or identity of nature. But what is only the ideal of natural science, to which its current state not only does not correspond, but even directly contradicts, still remains indisputable, as an a priori, metaphysical assumption of any scientific experience. But this same original identity or unity of nature receives visual and, one might say, apodictic confirmation in the fact of consumption, in which the distinction between living and dead, animate and inanimate is removed. In it, nature has evidence of the possibility of universal animation. Consequently, with all the difference and originality of the elements of nature, forms of matter and its states, with full recognition of the principium individuationis et differentiae 80, nature is one, and this unity shines through in the main function of the economy - consumption. Obviously, all the differences in the products of natura naturata, which for an isolating natural science further seem to be indecomposable, intransiable, do not actually reach the bottom of being, are not given in natura naturans, are only states of nature, or, more precisely, its products, but do not bind the creative forces of natura naturans, which rises above each of its individual products, and at the same time unites them with its unity and self-identity. So, the competence of natural science and its teachings remains in no way affected by the stated position about the unity or identity of nature, but, on the other hand, no objections from anatomical natural science can refute this general natural philosophical thesis, which is only a philosophical expression of the basic and elementary facts of life, which have the character of immediate givenness and therefore claim apodictic persuasiveness (after all, based on Mathematics and epistemology are based on similar facts or data of an axiomatic nature). We can say that consumption not only testifies to the identity of nature, but it is this identity itself, manifested in action, identity in actu. So in the life of my body, I attribute all its changes, both normal and pathological, to the activity of one and the same self-identical force or energy - my bodily organism, in which all these so different, sometimes contradictory and even seemingly mutually exclusive phenomena arise, develop and disappear, and, however, the unity and self-identity of the force of the organism, its entelechy, remains in full force, as natura naturans in relation to natura naturata. And what we observe in the model, in the organism, this “contracted universe”, then in the relations between the living and the nonliving we observe in the life of the entire universe, natura naturans, which we cannot deny only because, producing everything and therefore not being itself a product, it cannot be opened and studied either under an anatomical knife or under a microscope (as, however, it does not lend itself to such anatomical study, suitable only for natura naturata, for the statics of the universe, everything that concerns the living force of organisms, natura naturans, the dynamics of life). Between the ideal of knowledge of living nature, a single natura naturans, and natural science, the totality of sciences about its products, natura naturata, there must be - and by the force of things there is - a rapprochement, along with analytical activity there is a synthesizing one. Experienced natural science itself leads to the establishment of the unity of nature in its special research. The second floor above it, although in the form of a light and unstable structure, is built on by natural philosophy. The ideal here is a fusion of natural philosophy with natural science, in which speculative natural philosophy would cover natural science, and the latter would directly lead to philosophy 81. Now let us turn to the second of those two particular questions into which our general question breaks down: how is economy possible? The question before us now is: how is production possible? Production is such an active influence of a subject on an object, or a person on nature, in which the economic subject imprints, implements his idea in the object of his economic influence, and objectifies his goals. Therefore, production is, first of all, a system of objective actions, the subjective here is objectified, the line between subject and object is removed, the subject actually emerges from himself into the object. The product of economics is a subject-object, something in which the difference between subject and object is extinguished, it is an object of nature, the world of objects, not-I, but at the same time completely imbued with human teleology, embodying a subjective goal, realizing a model or idea previously projected in the subject. From this side, the product of any completed production act is similar to a work of art, which is characterized by the mutual penetration of matter and form or idea. The difference between economy and art relates to their tasks, to their metaphysical nature, but in this formal moment, in the subject-objectivity of their products, they are similar. Both here and here, the covering of alienation from a person or from a subject, objectivity or thingness, which lies on it, is partially removed from the world, and ideas and goals are introduced into things and begin to shine through in them; the mechanism gives way to teleology, more precisely, it is inextricably and even indistinguishably identified with it. So, what do we have in production as an objective action? First of all, the exit of the subject into the object and, moreover, not illusory, but real, part of the objective, universal “experience” 82. Kant raised the question of how objective knowledge and experience are possible, but only in the sense of a passive, mirror image of reality. Schelling already asked the question how the contemplating, knowing, Kantian I can contemplate itself as an active, Fichtean self, or how the identity of the knowing and the acting I is possible. Our problem represents a modification and some specification of the general problem of Schelling, who himself poses it (in the “System of Transcendental Idealism”) nevertheless primarily epistemologically, although he himself also gives the opportunity for a natural-philosophical, ontological formulation. The problem here is how is transsubjective action, action on an object, which we have in production, possible? Without a doubt, it is stated and taken into account in its own way epistemologically, but it necessarily translates us into ontology. This transition will be resisted, perhaps, only by the most desperate solipsism and acosmism, which, however, also represents only a special, skeptical ontology, and for it the task still remains of how to explain the appearance, even in a dreaming consciousness, of the idea of ​​objective action in contrast to subjective ideas. It should be pointed out that production does not fit at all into the contemplative concept of Kantian experience: although it is shaped by an epistemological subject or categories of reason, it is not at all provided for; the case is even excluded in advance when the subject, leaving his epistemological observatory, himself turns out to be an agent in the cosmic flow. The Kantian subject could only register such a case, observing it from the outside in his experience, he would equate human actions to a moving spit (according to Kant’s famous comparison), placing them under the category of causality and considering them only as mechanically lawful objects of experience, “appearance”, but only everything. That is why Kantian philosophy, with its calm armchair solipsism, remains so inaccessible to the question of the real existence or non-existence of the external world, because for pure contemplation it makes no difference whether this world is painted or made of papier-mâché, as long as it gives the same picture of experience, whether it has speaking statues of Condillac or living people in front of it. He does not need to feel these objects or knock on this reality. Only for the philosophy of objective action, that is, for the philosophy of economics, does the question of the vital reality of the external world receive all its urgency and irreducibility, for it presupposes an exit into this objective reality. As Schelling so beautifully says, “Only in action does the world become objective for ourselves. We act freely, and the world exists independently of us - both of these provisions must be synthetically connected” 83. The world appears for us only as the object of our action. The field that we see in a dream and in reality may not differ from one another in terms of visual impression, and however, the difference between them is that one can only be contemplated by a passive, drowsy consciousness, while the second can be the subject of the influence of a waking, active, living consciousness. A ghost or apparition can be pierced in all sorts of directions, like the shadow of Hamlet's father, leaving only one feeling - emptiness, nothingness, deception. The world of inconspicuous, real reality is recognized by us as an object of our influence and, together, as a force of counteraction, resistance, that is, as an object of economy. The effective exit of our I into the area of ​​not-I and, conversely, the pressure of this not-I on the I, the whole practice of interaction between I and not-I, establish the reality of the external world and fill the empty and cold area of ​​the Not-I with force, warmth, bodies, transform the mirage of the Not-I into nature, and at the same time place the I itself in nature, organically merging I and not-I into a single universe. This active, economic attitude towards the world is the vital justification for that “naive realism”, which constitutes the universal natural epistemology of humanity before any philosophical reflection, which is practically preserved, despite any destructive, skeptical conclusions of philosophical solipsism. Of course, not a single critical philosopher has been able to instill in humanity real doubt about the existence of nature or one’s own body as an organ of the self in nature, and this is due to the direct economic relationship to the world, the constant exit from the self into the non-self. Economy, as a constant modeling or projection of reality, and together with the objectification of one’s ideas, is a real bridge from self to non-self, from subject to object, their living and immediate unity, which no longer needs to be proven; on the contrary, it itself should, as the most direct indication of our economic experience, form the basis of further constructions. The relationship between self and non-self is the relationship between two worlds or two energies that are in constant interaction. And only in the light of the economic relationship to the world can the very function of knowledge, the nature of pure reason, the theoretical self, be correctly understood. That pure reason, or epistemological, i.e. an abstractly theorizing subject, for whom the problem first of all becomes the very existence of reality and who is exhausted in endless doubts about this, simply does not exist in immediate life. The entire epistemological or theoretical formulation of the question of the relationship of the subject to the object was invented in the office and is the product of logical fantasy, a kind of pangeometry; this epistemology does not mean a person, but a myth; it is utopian in the most evil sense of the word, as a denial of reality. If important truths are established in it, then only insofar as it changes its own position, moving to realism. This isolation of theoretical reason is fully consistent with the isolation of practical reason, which, however, is understood only in an ethical and not an economic sense. In reality, neither one nor the other exists in their separateness; there is only a living unity of theoretical and practical reason. Meanwhile, there are, as it were, two “tables” for them, and in each a special “case” is being conducted: “the case of theoretical reason” and “the case of practical reason.” And then what turns out to be insoluble in the table of theoretical reason is simply sent to the table of practical reason, and in this table that which could not be certified in the first is verified. This is the main feature of the neo-Kantian scholasticism of our days, generated by Kant with his “Copernican act,” which consists of killing the living, active self and cutting his corpse into two parts - with the purpose of then putting together a living body from the two dead halves. Pure reason for Kant belongs not to the living self, embodied in the body, but through the body vitally connected with the entire universe, but to the anatomical preparation of cognitive forms, a skeleton composed of bones and tendons. Practical reason does not know at all what theoretical reason is doing; it is theoretically deaf and blind, but that is precisely why it cannot be practical reason. So, the economic relationship of a person to the world, theoretical-practical, projective-active, ideal-real, subject-objective, is of paramount both epistemological and general philosophical significance. Philosophy should not proceed from a false idea of ​​an epistemological, completely fictitious subject, but from the only idea given to us in experience of an economic, active subject. The entire further philosophical orientation, the nature of the problems arising from this, will be completely different, and a whole series of false problems and illusory difficulties of subjective idealism will disappear by themselves. So, it is not the world or experience that is given to us in the I or is a representation of our I, it is not the object that is posited in the subject, as subjective idealism teaches, 84 and it is not the subject that is the creation of the object, as dogmatic materialism teaches, affirming something completely irrational, unthinkable and, in the most absurd sense, miraculous, but the subject is given to us only in interaction with the object, subject-object: I am in the world or in nature, and nature is in me. Therefore, the I itself is not complete, unchangeable, given, abstract, as in subjective idealism, but continuously growing, developing, living. This changing relationship between subject and object, the development of the self in nature, is life, that is, growth, movement, not static, but dynamic. This living, active, economic self should be the initial concept of philosophy. Modern pragmatism comes extremely close to this idea, since it is not combined with skeptical relativism, and especially the philosophy of Bergson 85. Analyzing the economy as production, we again came to the same philosophical idea - the necessary identity of subject and object, I and non-I, consciousness and nature, which are actually identified in the economy. Only on this assumption is the possibility of production justified. Indeed, the possibility of objective action, the active exit of the I into the non-I, or the expansion of the region of the I into the non-I, becomes understandable only if there is a certain homogeneity between them, if they are, so to speak, on the same metaphysical plane. It is impossible to move even one atom in this world except by being in this same world and having a fulcrum in it. It is impossible to explain their interaction under the assumption of alienness between I and non-I. We therefore come to the conclusion about the metaphysical homogeneity of I and non-I, or the unity of the economic logos in them, which is expressed in the practical compliance of nature, its receptivity in relation to the tasks and projects of the I. The same economic logos, which in nature acts as a blind organizing force, and in the animal world manifests itself semi-consciously as instinct, only in man receives consciousness, thanks to which idea and matter, which only existed together in nature, receive separate existence in subject and object. In the subject-object, nature sees itself, is aware of itself, influences itself, creates itself. The blind, spontaneous or instinctive labor of nature becomes the conscious labor of man. So, the living connection between subject and object, the bridge that brings me into the world of realities and inextricably connects it with this world, is labor - human actuality, objectifying outwardly and thereby objectifying this world for us. Thanks to work, there can be neither only-subject, as subjective idealism accepts, nor only-object, as materialism accepts, but there is their living unity, subject-object, and only when considering it in one way or another through methodological abstraction, a subject or object is distinguished from it. This polarity of being, its bifurcation, is extinguished only in the Absolute, which is both subject and object for itself. Therefore, for him, the exit of the subject into the object is excluded by the very concept, and subject-objectivity is posited in a single, identical, timeless act: the mystery of the Holy Trinity and intra-Trinity life! Labor, which occupies so much space in the teachings of political economy, thus receives paramount importance in epistemology, although the latter never properly took it into account, did not “orient itself” on the fact of labor, living energy, inextricably welding subject and object, although this would mean being guided by the most immediate given. On the contrary, political economy, although from its very origins did not part with the principle of labor, but, due to the low degree of philosophical consciousness and the limitations of its spiritual horizons, it did not know how to use this principle, what place to give it. And it was given a place that was completely inconsistent with the philosophical meaning of this principle. First of all, political economy is fundamentally represented by Hell. Smith, in fact, represented by the majority of her representatives, narrowed the concept of labor to “productive” labor, expressed in material goods. Consequently, all attention was focused only on one, objective, side of labor, on its periphery, and its significance as a bridge between subject and object, along which the subject generally enters the object and implements its ideas, projects or models in it, was left unattended and unexamined. Here, technology (in the broadest sense) is already tacitly assumed as the ability to design or model, and political economy, as a historical science, focusing its attention on the concrete and changing, dwells much more readily on the history of technology than on its general fundamental problem, which remains the same both with respect to the Watt machine or the most complex modern machine, and with respect to a primitive hammer or stone ax, namely: how is it possible for a subject to work in an object, how is modeling and design possible, How is an objective action or a whole system of such actions, i.e. technology, possible? Scientific technology also passes over this issue, concentrating entirely on the development of detailed applied problems. But if political economy, by virtue of its “economic materialism,” knows labor only in its products, in the object, and views it in the subject, then a similar mistake is repeated at the opposite pole - in Kant’s subjective idealism. The Kantian, and even more neo-Kantian subject is idle, he is absolutely passive and devoid of any labor energy. Therefore, he is also deprived of a healthy self-awareness of his subjectivity, the reality of the I, which is why he can, together with Hume, challenge the existence of personality, reducing it to a “bundle of ideas” or, together with Kant, reducing it only to the formal unity of consciousness (“unity of transcendental apperception”). Hence the fatal and hopeless determinism of this philosophy, as an expression of the complete passivity of the subject, the lack of relevance, initiative, and aseism in him. In front of such a subject, or, more precisely, in himself, in his consciousness, a theatrical performance takes place, life unfolds, of which he is only a spectator, watching from his chair, without participating in anything. And this very contemplation is given as if by itself, without requiring the expenditure of energy and labor. But such idleness, such giftlessness does not exist in knowledge; it is invented or “postulated” 86. Cognition, as a volitional activity, also requires energy, tension, labor, and this labor character should also free one from the feeling of the mirroriness of the self and the illusory nature of the world, just like the economy. In this sense, cognition is a labor, economic activity that overcomes the division of subject and object and leads to their interpenetration. One cannot doubt the reality of the I when it reveals itself as actual energy, or when, to use Leibniz’s expression, it realizes itself as a monad. And just as every project in an economic act already contains a model of the future product, so in the process of cognition there is already a model of future knowledge or its project in the form of a question, anxiety, search: without questions there are no answers, and all our knowledge is nature’s answers to the requests of our spirit. All knowledge is economic modeling in posed questions of future answers. The object of labor influence here is the external world, but not in the spatial or topographical sense, but in the ideal sense: what is now outside consciousness or under consciousness, but can be illuminated by it, added to its wealth, is an object of knowledge, full of the same limitless possibilities as the external world as an economic object. In this sense, knowledge is an economic activity, the exit of the subject I into the not-I (more precisely, into the not-yet-I), and in every cognitive act the original identity of I and not-I, subject and object is realized. What was in a dormant, potential state as the unconscious, as the possibility of knowledge, is actualized in consciousness. The ego is enriched not from itself as consciousness, or as a subject, but from itself as the unconscious, or as an object, otherwise it is impossible to understand the cognitive process as a constant relationship between subject and object. The subject peels off the skin of unconsciousness, breaks through to its object through a labor process that is exactly the same or quite similar to what we have in the production of material goods. We can say that farming is a process of knowledge that has become sensory-tactile, brought out, and cognition is the same process, but in an ideal, non-sensory form. Both here and here the opposition of subject and object is overcome in its own way, in both processes the same metaphysical basis is revealed, namely the identity of subject and object, and life is revealed as a constant revelation, deepening and discovery of this identity along with the overcoming of this polarity. And the path of this overcoming, which is also the path of life, is work. Any conscious, deliberate overcoming of the opposition between subject and object in the ideal or sensory sphere is a labor action. Only instinctive, pre-conscious, or unconsciously purposeful, completely objective action is given freely (for example, the work of our heart), or, conversely, higher contemplation, artistic or religious revelation, in which I myself surrender to the object, merging with it, losing myself, plunging into the fullness of what is experienced. Of course, both of these areas of labor activity, ideal and sensory, manifesting themselves in the world of ideal images and materialized ideas, differ so sharply from each other only in their extreme manifestations, while reality is a gradual mixture of both areas. In any case, neither cognition, nor the production of ideal products, nor the economy, or the production of material products, such as labor processes in which the expenditure of forces is carried out, by their immediate nature allow for serious and sincere doubt about the existence of both subject and object, as well as their interaction or mutual permeability for each other, i.e., reality and causal connection. This establishes the point of view that in “critical” philosophy is arrogantly designated as “naive realism”, but in fact it is life or, more precisely, economic realism. Labor as the basis of epistemology therefore removes the problem of the existence of the external world (as well as the alien self) as an idealistic fabrication, a phantom of abstract thought. The importance of labor, not fully appreciated in epistemology, has found some appreciation in political economy. But it appears here, in accordance with the special nature of economic science, conditional and limited. Namely, in the doctrine of the production of material goods, labor is usually placed among the “factors of production,” with land and capital appearing next to it. However, this classification, although it may have a special meaning, is completely devoid of general philosophical meaning. Much more interesting in this regard is the assessment of labor, which is expressed in the so-called “labor” theories of value. Here, labor is not placed only along with other factors of production; on the contrary, it is assigned exceptional importance as the basis of the value of goods. However, we would seek in vain here for philosophical deepening or interpretation of this idea. It is understood extremely narrowly, only in application to the explanation of the price mechanism, to the doctrine of the exchange value of goods. Thanks to this, the very concept of labor is narrowed in political economy to the Smithian definition of production labor, that is, labor expressed only in material products. For example, Marx defines values ​​as clots or crystals of labor, and labor as a waste of human energy, and the latter, with crude and naive materialism, is defined by him as a waste of nerves, muscles, bones, and physiological energy. But - one can object to such a narrow understanding of labor - after all, the labor theory of value itself is also a labor and in this sense an economic product, because its development and assimilation also presupposes the expenditure of intellectual labor or, in Marx’s language, the expenditure of nervous and brain energy. And moreover, both the labor theory of value and the theories constructed to overthrow it and deny the universal significance of the labor principle are equally products of labor, in exactly the same way as material goods, and differ in quality, usefulness and suitability just as much as they do. But with all the narrowness of understanding, one cannot deny the value of the labor theory of the general philosophical significance that it put forward with absolutely exceptional force the importance of the labor principle, so insufficiently appreciated in philosophy. It reflected, although not sufficiently conscious, the sense of human relevance, the labor or economic nature of life. In this sense, the grain of truth that is contained in labor theories of value remains viable, although in a different interpretation than was given to it by its creators, who clothed this grain in a completely covering husk. The main idea of ​​the theory of exchange value can be interpreted as follows. The big premise: labor is the highest principle of economic life, establishing it; minor premise: this role of labor should correspondingly manifest itself in the phenomenology of economic life, on the surface of its phenomena; conclusion: therefore, the exchange proportions, or values ​​of goods, are determined by the amount of labor spent on their production. It is obvious, however, that its creators, in an effort to exalt labor (partly for reasons of socialist man-theism), completely obscure their idea, give it a petty, ugly expression, which turns out to be indefensible even in a specifically scientific sense. The prices of goods, even as admitted by the creators of the labor theory of value (Ricardo, Rodbertus and Marx), do not correspond to labor values; they are assigned the honorable role of an ideal, theoretical measure of values ​​- they obviously did not consider it possible to completely deprive labor of this meaning. But in reality, to assess the importance of labor in an economy as its basis, it is completely unimportant and, perhaps, even uninteresting, in what relation market prices stand to labor values. Prices may never correspond to labor values ​​(the latter, however, do not allow even theoretical calculation except through logical leaps and unsolvable equations with many unknowns), and yet the significance of labor as the basis of the economy will remain in full force. If the major premise of the labor theory of value is true, and even the small one is true to some extent, then the conclusion from them that the labor theory of value draws is completely inconsistent with either the major or the minor premise, because it transfers the issue from a fundamental height to mercantile practice, to the market. If the labor theory of value, at least in a strict form, has long been undefensible even in political economy, then its philosophical idea, or rather, the premonition expressed in it, is extremely valuable and, freed from its inappropriate and ugly form, can receive further development. And in this, political economy was ahead of philosophy. From the previous one it became clear that the question of how production is possible is equivalent to the question of how economic labor is possible. If we designate the totality of all possible ways of human influence on nature for certain, predetermined purposes as technology, then the question that interests us can be formulated as follows: how is technology possible? What characterizes the technical relationship of the subject to the object, man to nature? The possibility of technology obviously presupposes the fundamental accessibility of nature to human influence, its receptivity to human purposes. Due to the universal coherence of nature, the unity of the cosmos, we have to talk about the accessibility or obedience of nature to man in general. Although man remains immeasurably far from mastering nature, the path to it is open to him. Nature is a passive, receptive, feminine principle, man is active, masculine, conscious. Thus, nature, with blind intellect or instinct dominating it, only in man realizes itself and becomes sighted. Nature becomes humanized, it is able to become the peripheral body of a person, submitting to his consciousness and realizing himself in it. In this sense, man is the center of the universe, he gives names to animals and, of course, plants and minerals, the logos of the world recognizes himself in him, and this potential mastery of the world (once lost) is partially and gradually realized in the economic process. Thus, we again come to the central idea of ​​Schelling’s natural philosophy about the identity of subject and object, or, what is the same, about the identity of nature, as the unconscious creativity of the spirit and as its conscious reproduction. Only this identity, this deepest intimate affinity of nature and spirit, makes possible both consumption and production, in general economy as a subjective-objective process, identity in actu. Schelling calls the history of nature the history of self-consciousness; it ends with the emergence of consciousness. But, having reached this threshold through the struggle of unconscious and blind, although expedient, for still reasonable, forces, nature seems to outgrow itself. Unconscious growth is replenished, and partly replaced by conscious reproduction, the gift and instinctive becomes conscious and labor, the “natural” is replaced by the “artificial,” i.e., economically conscious. Nature, having achieved self-awareness and the ability to work on oneself in man, enters a new era of its existence. Economic labor is already, as it were, a new force of nature, a new world-forming, cosmogonic factor, fundamentally different from all other forces of nature. The era of economics is an equally characteristic and definite era in the history of the earth, and through it in the history of the cosmos, that from this point of view the entire cosmogony can be divided into two periods: instinctive, pre-conscious or pre-economic - before the appearance of man, and conscious, economic - after his appearance. Of course, we do not say this in the sense of modern evolutionism, but we mean the identification of living forces originally invested in the universe by the Creator. The world in its assembled, complete form with Adam-humanity at the center was created by the Creator, and what develops in time and constitutes the content of history only reproduces the internal connection and correlation of the elements of the world, broken by the Fall. One can also say that in a person, natura naturans is aware of itself, which lies at the basis of natura naturata, but is closed and, as it were, crushed by it. Man, slowly and gradually freeing himself from the slavery of things, the products of natura naturata, removes the dead cover from nature and recognizes the forces that create it. He understands that nature as a product is only a product of natura naturans, although distorted by the evil dominion of the “prince of this world,” to whom, however, natura naturans itself, the immaculate soul of the world, remains inaccessible. And naturata natura, our present earth and sky, which are the imperfect product of natura naturans, “will pass away with noise,” will be recreated, a new earth and sky, new flesh will appear, but first of all this heavy, leaden cover of materiality and lifeless fossilization must be removed from the world. Here we enter, however, into the eschatology of the economy, which remains beyond our consideration for now. In the economy, in the conscious reproduction of nature, one can see a certain prototype, a preliminary to that liberation of natura naturans from the shackles of the present natura naturata, about which the Apostle says that “all creation obeyed the vanity of corruption, not according to its own will, but according to the will of him who obeyed it,” fallen man, the soul of the world, and that “all creation groans and longs for its liberation” from the captivity of materiality, from the heavy stupor, in the slumber of which she dreams of her liberation. Chapter 4. About the transcendental subject of the economy I. Man and humanity What is called an economy, in the empirical sense, is expressed in a multitude of fragmented economic acts performed by individuals over time and space, 87 just as knowledge (science) exists only in the form of separate cognitive acts, scientific experiments, and special research. In the generic concept of economy (as well as knowledge, science), we certainly rise above these particular fragmented acts and consider them as manifestations of some single function, possessing a certain coherence, a unity of a different kind than just their algebraic sum. Dynamically, they appear to us as partial, fragmentary manifestations of some unified activity, subordinated in development to their own special norms. And these norms cannot be established purely inductively, by examining each individual economic or cognitive act in its specificity. They can only be established a priori, from an analysis of the universally applicable or transcendental conditions of knowledge or, in our case, economy. This transcendental analysis of the economy, of course, starts from, and at the same time rests on, economic experience. Such a general and a priori assumption of economy - as well as knowledge - seems to be the generic or, what is the same, historical character of this activity. Although empirically, it is directly expressed in myriads of isolated acts, but dynamically it is a single and coherent activity, which has as its subject not the individual, but the race, and unfolds in time, that is, in history. We would not have seen in economics (and science) its most essential content; we would not have seen the economy itself behind individual economic acts (and science behind scientific specialties) if we had not paid sufficient attention to the whole, which goes beyond the boundaries of these individual acts. Decomposing atomization in this case would do a disservice; it would block access to the analysis that interests us, for, of course, the economy is not only logically, but actually, historically, the prius of individual acts of the economy (and science is the sciences). The economy must already exist in its fundamentals so that these individual acts are possible, and not vice versa: they are not components, not fractions, but parts of an organic whole, which is greater than the simple sum of its parts, and only this determines their meaning. Each economic act only in the economy, in a certain organic environment, receives its specific meaning, just as this or that substance introduced into a living organism has a meaning here that is significantly new compared to what it has in inorganic nature; it is determined not only by itself, but also by the organism, which reacts in one way or another to its properties. And just as an organism is not, of course, only a mechanical sum of all the substances that comprise it, so economy (and, again, knowledge) is an organic, synthesizing activity that exists, as it were, on top of its individual manifestations, which, entering this circle, receive their qualitative certainty in it. Although economy (or science) directly exists at any given moment in those who actually develop this energy, it does not merge with them and is not exhausted by them. On the contrary, they enter and leave the economy, but it itself, as a function, as a single activity, existed before them, and will exist after them. This characterizes farming as not an individual process, but a tribal and historical one. Animals do not know the economy in the indicated sense; only one person knows it. Only he is not only an individual being, but also a generic one, that is, historical. The entire animal world knows, of course, consumption; production here most often comes down to the capture and extermination of other species in the struggle for life, and the tools of production are replaced by teeth and claws. If we can talk about labor here, it is only in the sense of the difficulty of struggle. True, almost all animals have to expend labor on making homes, and some species know regular economic labor, such as beavers, ants, and bees. Although the work of bees or ants, or their economy, has a generic, social character, this association has very narrow boundaries. They are determined by the needs of the economic organism, which reproduces without any change from generation to generation and remains completely alien to history. In essence, the community of bees or ants does not go beyond a given hive or anthill and does not even extend to the bee or ant species as a whole, which exists only for the natural scientist. Therefore, the social economy of animals and insects differs qualitatively, and not quantitatively, from the human community, which, although it takes as its starting point the forms that are natural and common to the entire animal world (the family), further expands without any restrictions and is capable of sooner or later embracing the entire human race. This animal husbandry, if we can talk about it, is an unchanging, instinctive reproduction of the same process in the absence of any progress, and political economy, as a historical science, would have nothing to do in the face of this immobility. The human economy is a process of socio-historical development, and political economy teaches this as a self-evident truth. This means that it is not only a collective process (as in animals), but also a qualitatively social one. It exists only as a social entity—sociality is its natural property. Every individual who enters a household takes up his own place in it, as if prepared for him. And therefore, individual efforts and personal actions here receive social, trans-subjective meaning 88. Just as according to the teachings of Aristotle 89, the state as a whole exists before its parts, so the economy as a socially-purposed organism exists before its carriers. The human economy develops not only extensively, but also intensively, so that in each given link of the historical chain, if not the entire previous process, then some part of it is integrated; the present grows out of the past, absorbing it into itself, organically assimilating it, just as biogenesis is briefly repeated in embryonic development; but at the same time, the new species, this integral of the previous historical series, also contains something qualitatively new in comparison with everything that preceded it, and this is the historical development in nature and in human history. The possibility of history, historical processes, and including economy (and knowledge), is based on this ability for new creativity, going beyond simple reproduction or repetition of the old. All history in this sense is something individual, as opposed to the typical 90. If we understand regularity in the sense of uniformity, typicality, in the sense that, for example, sociology understands it, then we must directly say that history is not regular, although this does not mean that the law of causality does not operate in it 91 . Economy is a social process developing in history - this position, as stating elementary, self-evident facts, has the character of apodictic certainty. The history of economic life studies the specific forms that the socio-historical organization of the economy takes; it arranges the changing systems of the economy (natural, exchange, national, world) as successive stages of one process, depicting them as the actualization of the potentialities existing in it. This process is not completed, it does not proceed in a straight line, but along a curve, a broken, spiral line, it begins at once from different points, often breaks off, and sometimes regresses. In a word, the whimsical fabric of history, “whose deity is arbitrary,” reveals only the nature of the process, its potential, but does not give it in its finished form (for the latter would mean the internal end of history). Before any communism or socialism, which consciously strives for the socialization of production, the economy is already socialized by the very essence of the matter, for in reality the economy is not conducted by individuals, but through individuals - historical humanity. The true and, moreover, the only transcendental subject of economics, the personification of pure economics, or the very function of economic management, is not man, but humanity. The economy would be impossible and incomprehensible without the assumption that there is such a transcendental carrier of the economic function, introducing unity and coherence into the disparate acts of the economy, organizing them. Without the assumption of such a subject, all these individual economic acts would crumble as if unconnected and would not be integrated into the whole, remaining only in their isolation. Of course, they will object to this that the economy consists of individual economic acts due to the mechanism of causes, the regularity of which is revealed by political economy. But, one can answer this, by itself nothing comes together at all, and the mechanical explanation of any goal mechanism, which, undoubtedly, is economics, while dwelling on the question of how, completely leaves the question of what unaffected. And if historians and economists usually do not ask this question at all in their research, so much the worse for them, it means that because of the details they do not see the whole. Here they can be recommended to return at least to Aristotle with his profound teaching about the logical priority of the whole over parts and goals over mechanism. The economy in general, existing before individual economic “phenomena” (of course, in the sense of logical and not chronological priority) and constituting for them, as it were, a priori, naturally should attract independent attention, although this question is beyond the threshold of empirical research or economic science, it is a problem of the philosophy of economy. In this regard, the transcendental problem of economics is a complete analogy with the transcendental problem of knowledge in general: is there a transcendental subject of knowledge, a bearer of the function of knowledge in general, justifying individual acts of knowledge and integrating them? The transcendental nature of knowledge can currently be considered more or less clarified; on the contrary, elucidation of the transcendental nature of economy has not yet begun. In essence, the question here is the same, namely: what can be said about the transcendental subject, which determines both knowledge and economy and to which the integrating activity of knowledge or economy, knowledge and economy as energy can and should be attributed? Does knowledge and economy exist not only in an empirical or static sense, but also in a dynamic sense, as power, as energy? One of the main sins of Kant and all neo-Kantianism is his epistemological individualism or atomism 92. The transcendental subject of knowledge, the epistemological self, is an individual, however, sterilized, purified as far as possible from all “psychologism,” that is, from all empirical concreteness, and transformed into a hypostatized abstraction. The epistemological subject, which in neo-Kantianism constitutes the center around which the world revolves (which is what Kant’s notorious “Copernicanism” consists of), is something that does not exist either in experienced reality, for it is concrete and psychological, i.e., in the epistemological sense, it is not “pure,” nor outside this experience, beyond its limits, in the transcendental, for entry here is fundamentally forbidden. Therefore, the epistemological individual here is simply a methodological fiction, a method (as Cohenianism proclaimed) and nothing more, while knowledge remains devoid of a genuine subject, its real bearer. Kant's criticism destroys much more than he himself wanted to destroy; it subjectivizes not only the object of knowledge, turning it into a representation, into the content of consciousness, but also its subject, placing it somewhere in the intermediate region between the empirical and the transcendental, in the middle between yes and no. On this nail driven into the air, it is impossible to hang even a feather, and not just the universe that “Copernicus” Kant wants to attach to it 93. The transcendental subject of knowledge does not reconcile with the multiplicity of epistemological subjects as completely separate, mutually impenetrable units, which would represent, as it were, independent epistemological worlds. Such subjects would turn out to be transcendental one relative to the other, and this would make objective, i.e., universal knowledge completely impossible, and its universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit) is the central idea of ​​Kant’s epistemology. But this idea precisely does not fit into Kant’s transcendental philosophy. She turns out to be too big a fly for her, tearing apart the thin epistemological web. Objective, generally valid knowledge is possible and understandable only under the assumption that the universal transcendental subject of knowledge is not only an epistemological idea or method, but has existence in itself. Here, with internal necessity, epistemology leads us to metaphysics, to the establishment of ontological assumptions about the possibility of knowledge. The transcendental subject of knowledge is a function of knowledge, which is carried out through the medium of individual individuals, with separate centers of consciousness, but which is super-individual in its tasks, and in its meaning, and in its possibility. Personalities are only the eyes, ears, hands, organs of a single subject of knowledge, to whom all the power of knowledge, energy, depth and all the fruits of knowledge belong. It substantiates knowledge not only in the infinite diversity and diversity of content, but also in the unity of form: generally binding norms, logical laws, transcendental forms of sensibility and cognitive categories. It is he who relates the infinite variety of experience to a single space, locates it in a sequence of moments of a single time, and connects it with a continuous causal connection. All those features that Kant identifies as a priori of knowledge belong to this transcendental subject, do not exist somewhere between being and non-being, between experience and the thing in itself, but are the self-positions of this subject, accepted by it in the process of knowledge, as rightly indicated by Fichte. If the a priori of knowledge should be attributed to it, then it should also include its a posteriori, that is, the entire infinite content of knowledge, reduced to unity only under the assumption of these a priori forms. Either individual acts of knowledge are absolutely torn, isolated, they are transcendental areas for each other - then there is no single knowledge at all, and tradition, the progress of knowledge becomes impossible, or these acts of knowledge exist in a single knower as his activity, as his energy. Consequently, there is a subject who embodies a form of knowledge, but at the same time can know everything that humanity knows in parts, has the positive power of knowledge that is revealed in the process. The unity of the subject of knowledge from the a priori side necessarily leads to the extension of this unity to it a posteriori, although for disparate human consciousnesses this unity is only formal and potential, as an opportunity to assimilate knowledge in general. But this possibility is limited not by internal obstacles, but only by the external limitations of human life, energy, health, and in principle it is not impossible for one person of a brilliant mind and colossal capacity to work to contain all knowledge. And the ideal of the development of knowledge and pedagogical art is, after all, for one subject to contain all knowledge, that is, to empirically realize what we postulate only for the transcendental subject. Theoretically, such an organization of knowledge is permissible in which it becomes accessible to human consciousness. The latter is limited in fact, but potentially it is unlimited, unlimited, it is capable of containing any content and going beyond any given content. By its thirst for knowledge, by its natural task, it is capable of embracing everything. Each consciousness contains absolute claims that are natural only for the transcendental subject. Universal knowledge, although not actualized, is given as an aspiration, as a thirst, or given. So, there is a subject of knowledge that justifies its unity both from the formal side, epistemologically, and in content, scientifically. Knowledge is truly unified and truly integrated in this subject. In individual acts of cognition of individual subjects, it is only actualized, from potentiality it passes into reality, it is revealed and, further, in the development of knowledge it is organized, its fragmentation is overcome by the desire for unity. One knows, many know. This one, this transcendental subject of knowledge, is no longer the human individual, but the totality of humanity. The soul of the world, the Divine Sophia, the Pleroma, Natura Naturans - under different names and under different guises he appears in the history of thought. In the new German philosophy, the doctrine of a single transcendental subject of knowledge is substantiated only by Schelling in his philosophy of identity. This doctrine, which occupied a prominent place in the teachings of Plato and then Plotinus, familiar to the Stoics, received absolutely exceptional significance in Christian philosophy, namely in the doctrine of the Logos and the first and second Adam, in the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, as well as the Western thinker I. Sk. Erigene, in the mystical revelations of J. Boehme, perceived by Fr. Baader, in modern times it has somehow come to the fore in Russian philosophy, so that, to a certain extent, it constitutes its distinctive feature. In particular, in the philosophical system of Vl. Solovyov's doctrine of the World Soul or of humanity as the Divine Sophia occupies a central place. The same concept forms the basis of the epistemology of the book. S. N. Trubetskoy 94 and more or less shared by the ideological continuity associated with them by modern Russian philosophers. Man perceives as the eye of the World Soul, to what extent he has within himself a ray from this pleroma of the Divine Sophia. Only the “sunshine” of his eyes (according to the famous expression of Plotinus - Goethe) allows him to see the sun. But he learns in history, in the empiric world, in the world of a disorganized, chaotic cosmos that is only organized in parts. Therefore, in his empirical form, he is only a fragment of himself, which, moreover, closes his highest nature with this fragmentation, although through him it is revealed. Outside this source of light there is impenetrable darkness, there is no knowledge, not even initial discrimination. Of course, a dim night light weakly reminds us of sunlight, and yet it is the same light of the same nature, which comes from the same light source, pours out from the same sun. Everything that we have said so far about knowledge and the transcendental subject of knowledge must be applied accordingly to both the economy and its transcendental subject. Knowledge itself (as we will talk about this below) is, in a certain sense, an economic activity, since it is labor. In practice, it inextricably merges with economics due to the pragmatic nature of knowledge. The economy does not exist without knowledge, knowledge is the projective, modeling side in the economy; at the same time, knowledge cannot do without economy; it exists only with it and in it, not in the sense of material, monetary dependence, but the unity of both activities. A person does not take a single step in knowledge without making it in practical life. Economy is knowledge in action, and knowledge is economy in idea. The synthesizing function, which connects individual acts of management into economy, individual acts of knowledge into science, individual acts of human individuals into history, is basically the same. As a dynamic process, economy, knowledge, and history presuppose the unity of a transcendental subject. The a priori study of knowledge, economy, history necessarily leads us to the establishment of their common transcendental subject, which justifies the general possibility of knowledge, economy, history. We emphasize that these are not different subjects, but one: the transcendental subject of knowledge, economy, and history is, obviously, the same subject that grounds these processes and objectifies them, transforming the subjective into transsubjective, synthesizing the fragmentation, discursivity of economy, knowledge, history into some living unity. What can be said about this subject? What is its characteristic that can be made on the basis of this synthesizing function of it, through which unity is introduced into diversity and coherence into multiplicity? What can be said about this World Soul - Humanity (for, obviously, this subject is the World Soul, to the extent that it reveals itself in this synthesizing function)? In order for an economy to be possible, its universal transcendental subject, the world master or demiurge, must itself belong to this natural world, be really involved or immanent in it. Participation in the world, as explained above, is a condition for the possibility of economic activity. But nature as a product, as natura naturata, is a mechanism of forces, although interconnected, but not conscious of their unifying center. Therefore, from the outside, nature is a mechanism of forces, but in its depths, potentially, it is a living organism. A living organizing force appears in it only in the struggle with a lifeless mechanism, with the heavy guise of natural necessity, a blind and insensitive mechanism. Natura naturata is a picture of the struggle between life and death, the cosmic “economy”. Therefore, to the extent that this natura naturata can be recreated by its own, labor, cosmogonic process, and must throw off this heavy cover of the mechanism with its own strength, then the world demiurge himself must be “guilty of the vanity of decay” that weighs on all creation. He, like Hercules, must be in captivity of natural necessity - a bright hero, a demigod, must cleanse the Augean stables. He himself must become a link in the chain of necessity, a part of this mechanism, a thing. In order to conceive this intention - in the depths of nature to raise a rebellion against itself, to wage a slow but persistent and irreconcilable struggle against it, like Prometheus with a willful despotic world ruler, like Siegfried with the dark forces of the world's fate that fetters people and gods, the demiurge himself must be above this natura naturata, deadened, mechanized, unconscious nature, he must carry within you the bright fire of life, lit not in this world. In nature it must be supernatural. He must have the keys to the secrets of nature and have the ability to comprehend it. He must be a living prototype of the resurrection of nature and an agent of its resurrection. He must be the “redeemer of nature” (Schelling), atoning in his work for his own sin of the original corruption of nature. He must be a mediator between natura naturans as an organism of living ideas-forces and natura naturata, its frozen and therefore distorted reflection, between the kingdom of triumphant life and its lethargic sleep, fainting, in all respects similar to death and differing from it not in its manifestations, but only in the metaphysical basis, which remains free from death and is not subject to the metaphysical emptiness of non-existence. The spirit of non-existence places its mirror of mirages on the lips of dead nature, and no moist evaporation from the breath of life remains on it. He multiplies these deathly reflections in his mirror of nothingness, he finds for his emptiness these images taken from life, his kingdom is filled with them, death comes to life, because it reflects life in itself, although it is in fainting. The kingdom of non-existence receives a positive definition, becomes a mechanism, ουκ όν'y manages to turn into μη όν. And the shadow of death, its ghosts, fill the world, and the line between truly existing and meon is erased. And this was so until the new Hercules penetrated into this kingdom of shadows and illuminated the twilight of death and the darkness of non-existence with the light of His Resurrection. But wake up! With an ailing soul, do not bow to fate, defenseless, unarmed, call Death to a mortal battle. And on the gloomy threshold, In the host of weeping shadows, the Enchanted gods Recognize you, Orpheus! The waves of the all-victorious song shook the vault of Hades, And the lord of death gives away pale Eurydice. (Vl. Solovyov. Three feats) The demiurge in the economic process organizes nature, transforming its mechanism back into an organism, resolving its dead products into the living forces that gave birth to them; he makes nature, which has become only an object, again a subject-object, restores in consciousness the lost and forgotten unity of natura naturans and natura naturata, and thereby turns the world into a work of art, in which from each product its idea shines, and the whole world as a whole becomes a cosmos, like a defeated, pacified and internally enlightened chaos. Therefore, the victory of economy is expressed in the cosmic victory of beauty. Hence the prophetic meaning of art as a prototype: “Beauty will save the world.” And just as the soul-monad, according to the profound teaching of Plotinus, creates a body for itself and, as an organizing force, penetrates all the functions of the body, guides it, but does not merge with it, reigns over it, becomes immanent to it, but at the same time remains transcendental to it, so humanity is the soul of the world, at least in its purpose and in its potentiality. However, it also belongs to this world itself, and the very process of farming is determined by this cosmic disease, the gap between natura naturans and natura naturata. Therefore, the goal of the economy, its limit, is to overcome this disease, to restore the unity of natura naturans and natura naturata, the supernatural nature of nature. Man, being a part of nature, to some extent its product, carries in his consciousness the image of an ideal unity; the self-awareness of all nature is potentially embedded in him. In this self-consciousness, the World Soul, the ideal center of the world, directly manifests itself in him, and in this sense, as we have already said, nature is humanoid. Each human person potentially carries within himself the entire universe, being involved in natura naturans, the creative soul of the natural world, and natura naturata, present nature. This fundamentally justifies the economy as a single process in which a common task is resolved and the common cause of all mankind is created 95 . In the diverse acts of the economy, essentially a single activity is carried out, the subject of the economy influences its object, the interaction of natura naturans and natura naturata takes place. It is synthesized from individual acts as a process that is not only extensive, but also intensive, and it is synthesized in one object as labor, economic mastery of it (in the language of political economy this is called the “development of productive forces”). The One World Soul, natura naturans, strives to master nature or the world, natura naturata, to make it transparent, so that natura naturata completely identifies itself in natura naturans. This is the ultimate goal, already lying beyond the boundaries of history, and therefore not contained in it, the path to which is economy. And from this side it turns out to be akin to knowledge: knowledge is one as a process and one in its goal, but this goal leads beyond its limits, because with its achievement the very concept of truth as an object of discursive knowledge is destroyed. Truth is not an object of knowledge, for all knowable truths are multiple and conditional according to the discursivity of knowledge. Truth is a state of being, such a position of the World Soul in the world in which it occupies its central place not only in consciousness, but also in being, in which objective thinking, thinking of being and being of thinking are carried out. The separation and opposition of thinking and being, real and ideal, are overcome, knowledge as the separation of subject and object, with their alienation, and as a result the problematic nature of the object for the subject, is abolished, along with multiple discursive truths. The path of knowledge leads to the abolition of knowledge; all its particular truths will be drowned in the direct experience of the Truth, being in the Truth. The truths of knowledge presuppose a single Truth as an existing thing, and this is the only basis for the unity of the path of knowledge 96 . The path of knowledge and the path of economy are one, and their limit is also the same: the organization of the world as Truth and as Life. A single subject of the economy, the World Soul, manifests itself in experience, acts in history as a quantitatively indefinite multiplicity of separate, independent centers - individual human consciousnesses and wills. Unity is realized only in multiplicity; organic coherence, with the seeming absence of internal connection, is expressed only by external sequence in time and causality. The mirror is broken into many fragments, each of which reflects the world in its own way. It seems that there is no humanity as an ideal unity, as a world soul, but there are only people, a mechanical collection of individuals, outwardly united in a clan, a nation, a state. The organic connection between people, which testifies to the unity of humanity, is only a connection of births: humanity is, as it were, a huge family, a union of fathers and children 97 (although the unity of origin of the entire human race from common ancestors cannot be verified by science). The connection of the seed, biological unity, is a highly important fact, not so much in its immediate biological significance (no matter how great it may be), but in its symbolic meaning: in it the metaphysical unity of humanity receives empirical expression, outside of which the entire history of mankind falls apart, becomes mysterious and incomprehensible. What does gender mean in a physiological and spiritual sense? This word is usually used as self-explanatory and even as if it were explaining something, just like another word used to characterize the force that supports the race, namely heredity. By explaining and establishing individual facts of heredity, natural scientists consider their task exhausted, and the problem solved when philosophically it is only posed in its full breadth: what kind of mysterious power is this, truly the magic of nature, its ability to uniformity in the plural? Here natural science comes close to metaphysics, specifically to natural philosophy, which must raise the question of the genus in all its philosophical breadth: only the recognition of ideal generic prototypes, ideas realized in nature, makes the genus understandable and provides the key to resolving its problem. Individuals are copies or specimens, the genus is their idea, pre-existing in the Divine Sophia, an ideal model for reproduction. Die Rose, welche hier dein äussres Auge sient, Die hat von Ewigkeit in Gott also geblüht 98 . (That rose that you see here with your bodily eye has been blooming before the Creator from eternity.) Es ist kein Vor, noch Nach: was morgen soll geschehn Hat Gott von Ewigkeit schon wesentlich gesehn. (There is no After, there is no Before: what will happen tomorrow, God has seen in its essence from eternity.) And not only the intelligible rose blooms in the thought of God, exists pre-eternally in it, but the whole world is, as it were, an artistic reproduction of pre-eternal ideas (κόσμος νοητός) 99, which in their totality form an ideal organism. Divine Sophia, that Wisdom who was before God at the creation of the world and whose joy is “with the sons of men.” This Wisdom speaks of itself (book of Proverbs of Solomon, chapter VIII, 22–31): "22. The Lord had me as the beginning of His path, before His creatures, from time immemorial; 23. From eternity I have been anointed, from the beginning, before the existence of the earth. 24. I was born when there were no deeps yet, when there were no springs abundant with water. 25. I was born before the mountains were built, before the hills, 26. When He had not yet created either the earth, or the fields, or the initial grains of dust of the universe. 27. When He prepared heaven, I was there. When He drew a circular line across the face of the abyss, 28. When I affirmed the clouds above, when I strengthened the sources of the deep, 29. When he gave the sea a charter so that the waters would not exceed its boundaries, when he laid the foundations of the earth: 30. Then I was an artist with Him (variance 100: like a little child), and I was a joy every day, rejoicing in His presence all the time, 31. I rejoiced in His earthly circle, and my joy (was) with the sons of men.” We read about the same wisdom of God in the (non-canonical) book of the Wisdom of Solomon (IX, 9): “With You is wisdom, which knows Your works and was present when You created the world, and knows what is pleasing in Your sight and what is right according to Your commandments” 101. The world of ideas, discovered for philosophy by Plato’s speculation, contains a sufficient metaphysical basis for the generic nature of life in general and human life in particular, with its power of heredity, which, through biological means, carries out the tasks of ideas-forces, Aristotelian entelechies. Natura naturans consists of these entelechies, which are in relation to each other in organic subordination, connected by a hierarchical structure. This hierarchy of entelechies is crowned by man, who serves as a living connection connecting both worlds - the one above and below, natura naturans and natura naturata. Man exists only as a species or genus. Should we think about this nominalistically or realistically, is “man” only a concept obtained by logical abstraction from individual people, only their common name, referring to their similar characteristics, or does man as an essence exist before individuals, is their ontological, and therefore logical prius, the common basis of being of these individuals, who are only the dynamic centers of self-discovery of this basis? What exists first: human nature or individual man, the whole primordial Adam or the Adamites? It seems to us that only by recognizing a single humanity, the forefather (in the metaphysical sense) Adam, is it possible to understand the characteristic combination of the individual and the universal in personality. What makes an individual a human being is not at all his individual beginning, which forms only a special dynamic center, a way of demonstrating universal humanity, but precisely this latter, with all the boundless possibilities inherent in it. Yes, humanity is one, although many-sided. This is not a sentimental phrase, but an expression of an ontological relationship. Each individual joins all of humanity, participates in human flesh and blood, and the feeling of this unity has found and continues to find diverse expression in religious teachings and philosophical theories. Dass du nicht Menschen liebst, das thust du recht und wohl, Die Menschheit ist's, die man im Menschen lieben soll 102 . (You do not love a person, and you are right in that: in a person we must love humanity.) Humanity as potential, as the depth of possibilities, intensive and not extensive, connects people to an immeasurably greater extent than individuation separates them. Every person joins this unity or basis, representing a certain universe, no matter how long he lives, how much or little he manages to experience in his empirical life, what corner of the world kaleidoscope opens up to him. The very fact that a given person lived implies not only a temporary, empirically limited form of his existence, but also his timeless belonging to the existence of the whole, humanity, which is not fragmented, not divided into parts, but only moves from potentiality to actuality to varying degrees and with varying intensity. Therefore it is fair that Ein Kind, das auf der Welt nur eine Stunde bleibt, Das wird so alt, als man Methusalem beschreibt 103 . (A child who has spent only one hour in this world is already an old man in life, gray-haired Methuselah.) And all that depth, all that abyss, about which the same mystical poet-thinker speaks: Der Abgrund meines Geist's ruft immer mit Geschrei Den Abgrund Gottes an: sag, welcher tiefer sei 104 . (My abyss calls to the abyss of the Divinity of my soul: tell me, am I deeper or are you?) This is the primordial, metaphysical unity of humanity, this humanity is a positive spiritual force operating in the world, its unifying principle. Mensch, alles liebet dich, um dich ist's sehr gedrange: Es laufet alls zu dir, dass es zu Gott gelange 105. (Everything loves you, man, everything is eager to come to you, And everything runs to you to come to the Lord.) That is why the primordial and universal man Adam turned out to be capable of a general falling away from God along with the “creation”, to “original”, i.e. metaphysical, - not only empirical, but ontological - sin, which then spreads as a corruption of nature or a hereditary disease to all people. But this is precisely why humanity can be healed, made healthy in its nature, capable of conceiving the Church within itself as a new unifying and healing center, becoming the body of Christ, and therefore Christ as a Person could take into Himself and recreate human nature as such, become in this sense a new Adam, introducing people to His Flesh and Blood. Of course, this unity should not be understood statically or mechanically, but only dynamically, and it is this dynamic unity of the human race that is revealed in history, in knowledge, in economics. Pan-humanity, as the fullness of human powers, represents a unity not of emptiness, but of a coordinated and united multiplicity. Individuality, as an isolating force, as a special ray in the radiance of Sophia’s “smart light,” does not contradict the idea of ​​the whole, which gives room for the free development of its parts. Each individual, with that unique, original self or his own special idea, which we have learned to value so highly in our individualistic age, in his own way refracts and perceives the same world and the same human nature as his basis. It is not limited, but is supplemented by other individuals. In the harmony of individuals, in their free love and active unity lies a special source of bliss for the individual. To drown in the super-individual, to find oneself in other individuals, to love and be mutually loved, to reflect oneself in each other, to turn individuals into centers of love and not of isolation, to see in every newly born person the possibility of new love - this means to realize the ideal that was given to humanity from eternity and was expressed in the words of Christ: “that they may all be one: as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee” (John XVII, 21). This ideal substantiates the unity of humanity as a dynamic sum of individuals who overcome their isolation in love and hold it only as a basis for overcoming. But if this is so in the ideal order, then in a temporary, broken, discursive existence, humanity is realized in the isolated life of individuals who have their own separate destiny. Their unity is expressed in the objective unity of history and economics, in the commonality of their work. But at the same time, not only centripetal, but also centrifugal forces develop, not only individualism, but also egoism. The self casts its heavy veil over the whole life, turning it into a vale of sadness and sighing, leaving the stamp of deep melancholy, longing, and unsatisfied aspirations. This has its roots in the world's fall, which is the basis of the entire historical process. Humanity empirically exists only as a succession of generations coming into life and leaving the historical arena. Individual, group, class, national struggle rages between them, homo homini lupus est 106, the law of the struggle for existence becomes a general rule not only in the animal world, but also in the human world. “Men-brothers” exercise their brotherhood like Cain and the Cainites, and the earth is stained with brotherly blood. The unity of the human race, which, of course, still remains and cannot be destroyed by anything, because it is beyond historical reach, is subjectively expressed in the constant desire of humanity to realize love, solidarity, in search of a social ideal, in the desire to find a normal structure of society, in the social ideals of all times and peoples. What appears in consciousness as a postulate of obligation is inherent in the metaphysical realm as being. The world and humanity in it, having been displaced from their foundations, again strive to return to them. Social ideals formulate for historical reality what is in metaphysical reality. We have hitherto defined the content of the economy as a dispute between life and death, as the restoration of the connection between natura naturans and natura naturata, or the resolution of petrified and lifeless products of nature into the forces that produce them, as the organization of nature. Through farming, nature recognizes itself in man 107. Economy is the creative activity of man over nature; possessing the forces of nature, he creates from them what he wants. He creates, as it were, his own new world, new goods, new knowledge, new feelings, new beauty - he creates culture, as the common formula of our days says. Next to the “natural” world, an artificial world is being created, the creation of man, and this world of new forces and new values ​​increases from generation to generation, so that in our generation, especially strongly captured by this creative impulse, all boundaries are lost in defining the possible. “The world is plastic”, it can be recreated, and even in different ways. Our children will live under different conditions than we do, and we don’t even dare to think about grandchildren. Everything has become fluid, as if the petrified, frozen products of natura naturata had melted or are melting one after another before our eyes, resolving into forces, into natura naturans, from which different natura naturata can be obtained at will. We live under the impression of the growing power of the economy, which opens up boundless prospects for the “creativity of culture.” And in order to treat this undoubtedly grandiose and majestic fact with philosophical consciousness, which stands like the riddle of the Sphinx before the modern Oedipus, either as an ominous sign or as a prophetic omen, we must first of all answer ourselves: what is this human “creativity” of culture and economy, how and with what power does man create here? Is this the beginning of humanity’s coming of age, its entry into its rights over nature, which it once lost? Does this have cosmic significance, marking the beginning of a new era in the history of the universe? Or are these “miracles of the Antichrist”, signs to seduce the faithful, a conjuring deception, the theft from God of His creation with the power contained in it, in order to seduce wretched humanity with this stolen energy? Or, finally, is all this created by a person who, by the will of absolute chance, emerging from blind material existence, by the will of the same chance has achieved such a nervous organization that now he finds in his mother - matter, also new possibilities, now performs the work of self-creation, develops from himself a new species, a superman? Of these assumptions, the last one, a purely materialistic view, does not deserve philosophical discussion, due to its obvious helplessness and inconsistency, despite all its prevalence to this day. It poses a number of new mysteries as an explanation and puts the absolute and omnipotent Chance at the basis of everything, that is, a principle that does not explain anything, but only closes the lack of explanation. How could a person arise by himself, from the dead mechanism of nature, how can inert and blind matter surrender to his creative plans, give him its mysteries and secrets, and how can he further outgrow himself - all these are questions to which there is no and cannot be an answer. We are dealing here with clearly mythological thinking, with a return to its naive naturalism, with the difference - and not in favor of the newest materialism - that in the old mythology there were still living forces at work, which explained life, and now the same problem is solved through the mediation of only dead agents: Uranus and Neptune, Gaia or Cybele, the Great Mother, giving birth to the children of the earth, in philosophical terms there is in any case more a satisfactory hypothesis for explaining the universe than an absolute case that creates developing life from dead matter, from a bag with atoms jumping in it, as the mythology of materialistic hylozoism teaches. But let's leave the dead to bury their dead. So, what is the source of human creativity in the economy, in culture, in science, and in art, what is its secret? Creativity requires two conditions for its existence: the presence of, firstly, a plan, freedom of will and, secondly, power, freedom of execution. We will not dwell on the first condition for now, intending to explore this issue below. However, it goes without saying that creativity without freedom is a contradictio in adjecto 108, for unfree creativity is not creativity, but a mechanism, the work of a machine. Any creativity requires work, effort, will, tension, relevance, and all this is what expresses self-indulgence, freedom, a-se-ism. In order to want, obviously, you need a personality; this is a prerequisite for personalism. In order to create, you must not only want, but also be able, you must set yourself a feasible task, otherwise creativity will turn out to be either impossible or incomplete. Here we come to the center of the problem that interests us about the nature of economic creativity. It is obvious that man does not have omnipotence, the ability to create whatever he wants out of nothing. In this sense, a person cannot create at all, being himself a creature. If he can create, then not from nothing, but from an already created (or pre-existing, according to pantheists) world. In it he can imprint his ideas, embody his images. In it he can find answers to his questions, question him with experiments and give him his specific directives (what all technology boils down to). And from the totality of all this, a new world of culture is formed, created on the farm. Where do these images, these ideas-models come from in a person? But isn’t this the same question as the one from where the creative idea that torments him is born in the artist, visible with mental eyes or heard with spiritual ears, an image revealed to his “intelligent” being, which seeks embodiment in word, in sound, in marble? Why does a scientist have anxiety about these problems, without which science cannot exist, and which, moreover, must be solvable, otherwise they would not be problems, i.e. imperatives and postulates of scientific creativity? Where do those plans for action that make up an economy come from? Where do the ideas for the technology that is then implemented on the farm come from? After all, nature reveals its “secrets” only to those who seek them, who know where to look for “discoveries and inventions,” so that if a person did not have this instinct in searching, nature would remain impenetrable to him, would not be stripped of its veils. If Kant posed the question: how is experience possible from the side of its a priori forms, then another question is no less appropriate: how is this same experience possible from the side of its content? For epistemological formalism, which reduces the self to the function of the unity of transcendental consciousness, this question is completely insoluble and even impossible. The subject here is attributed only a ghostly existence in a transcendental function, but at the same time, from his subjectivity he “generates” all experience, like a magician pulling endless ribbons or burning tow out of his mouth (and only in the very background is some mysterious X, an irrational external push). Nothingness creating everything from nothing—this is the content of transcendental idealism as an ontological doctrine. This same question is resolved differently from the point of view of the above-developed doctrine of the transcendental subject of the economy - the World Soul. Humanity is and timelessly remains the unifying center of the world, in its eternal harmony, the beauty of the God-created cosmos. The world, plunged into process, in space and time, in history, no longer reflects this pre-eternal harmony, this “good and evil” being, drawn towards its center - intelligible Humanity; rather, it even closes it with its fragmentation and disharmony. But he cannot, metaphysically cannot, completely break away from it, for here lie the roots of the empirical world; natura naturata with its deathly mask is still the creation of natura naturans, and although in actu it is isolated from it, it always retains in potentia its connection with it. Therefore, the transcendental subject of economics in its empirical expression, i.e., historical humanity, and in it every personality, is ontologically involved in Sophia, and the mountainous Sophia hovers over the lower world, shining through in it as reason, as beauty, as... economy and culture. Between the world as cosmos and the empirical world, between humanity and Sophia, there is a living communication that can be likened to the nutrition of a plant from its roots. Sophia, taking upon herself the cosmic action of the Logos, participating in His influence, transmits these divine powers to our world, enlightening it, raising it from chaos to space. Nature is humanoid, it cognizes and finds itself in man, but man finds himself in Sophia and through her he perceives and reflects into nature the intelligent rays of the divine Logos, through him and in him nature becomes sophia. This is the metaphysical hierarchy. This also answers the question about the nature of human creativity. Human creativity - in knowledge, in economics, in culture, in art - is Sophia. It is metaphysically substantiated by man’s real involvement in the Divine Sophia, which conducts the divine forces of the Logos into the world and in relation to nature as a product of the meaningful natura naturans. A person can cognize nature and influence it, “conquer” it, be its “king” only because he carries within himself, albeit in an undeveloped form, potentially, a compendium of all nature, its entire metaphysical inventory, and, to the extent of its development, actualization, he masters nature. Knowledge is recollection, as Plato taught about it - not in the theosophical sense: not the recollection of what happened in previous lives, in a series of reincarnations, but in the metaphysical sense. It is the revelation of what is metaphysically given, 109 in this sense it is not creativity out of nothing, but only re-creation, reproduction of the given, which has become given, and this re-creation becomes creativity only insofar as it is free and labor reproduction. Human creativity therefore does not contain anything metaphysically new; it only reproduces and recreates from existing, already created elements and according to newly found, recreated, but also pre-given samples. Creativity in the proper sense, the creation of a metaphysically new thing, is not given to man as a created being and belongs only to the Creator. The creature exists and acts in the created world; it is not absolute and therefore metaphysically not original. Man is free - and therefore original - only in the direction of his powers, in the way he uses his nature, but he has this very nature, the basis of his self, as given, as created. Human creativity creates not an “image” that is given, but a “likeness” that is given, reproducing in a free, labor, historical process that which exists from eternity as an ideal prototype. And the rebellion of the creature against the Creator, the deviation of Satanism, metaphysically boils down to an attempt to erase precisely this difference, to become “like the gods,” to have everything of one’s own. But, defining himself in this way, Satan becomes not only a metaphysical thief and impostor, for he ascribes to himself what was given to him by the Creator, but also becomes the spirit of non-existence and death, for he places the center of his existence consciously outside the Creator, in the region of metaphysical non-existence, “in total darkness,” beyond the edge of existence, in the realm of pure illusoryness and subjectivity. And this ghostliness, this metaphysical shadow, only cast by being, even in a rebellious state, still eking out a parasitic existence (“a hanger-on,” as Dostoevsky put it), he brings to being, produces chiaroscuro. Thus assigning some reality to illusoryness, therefore, again stealing being, he becomes the “prince of this world,” that is, the cut-off state of the cosmos, until the final separation of light and darkness is accomplished and the shadow existence is exposed in its illusory nature. This is the creature’s claim to creativity in the absolute sense; this is Satanism. Human creativity-recreation has nothing to do with this, but it can also be darkened by the spirit of Satanism, lose consciousness of its true nature and lead to human Satanism, to the Antichrist. But this is discussed in the eschatology of the economy 110. So, the economy is Sophian in its metaphysical basis. It is possible only thanks to man’s participation in both worlds, in Sophia and in empiricism, in natura naturans and in natura naturata. Man is, on the one hand, potential everything, the potential center of the anthropocosmos, although not yet realized, but realizable, and on the other hand, he is a product of this world, this empiricism. For him - potentially - all of nature is transparent and removes its burial shrouds, but at the same time, he himself is wrapped in them, shackled in a heavy cosmic slumber. The economy is sophistic in its foundation, but not in the products, not in the empirical shell of the economic process, with its mistakes, deviations, and failures. The economy is conducted by historical humanity in its empirical limitations, and therefore not all of its actions reflect the light of sophia. However, it cannot remain completely outside it, either due to the energies that humanity develops in the labor process, or due to its tasks, which can be conventionally designated as the victory of culture over nature, or the humanization of nature 111. In this sense, nature in its fundamentals is already nata, created, but it is still recreated - it is natura, and, to the extent that this recreation is accomplished through culture, we can say that culture recreates nature - this removes the usual opposition between nature and culture. The metaphysical foundations of this process place a certain limit on it. Man cannot multiply the creative forces of nature, extend his influence to natura naturans, the source of living forces. This means that a person cannot create a new life through economic means, that is, through labor. In this inability to create life lies the absolute limit for man as a creature. Life is given in the world; it is not reducible to its elements and cannot be explained from them. She came from the extra-worldly Source of Life, the God of the Living, who knows no envy and creates life 112. It was created by the creative word of God, the outpouring of divine love: Nicht du bist, der du lebst, denn das Geschöpf ist Tod, Das Leben, das in dir dich leben macht, ist Gott 113 . (It is not you who live, not you: everything created is death, And life in you is the life-giving God.) Life is therefore created not by farming, not by labor, but only by birth, that is, by the transfer and implementation of the originally inherent life-creative power. We are given the power to expand life, to revive nature, perhaps, in the opinion of the most daring thinkers, to resurrect extinct life, but we are absolutely not given the power to create life, just like neither a microscopic booger nor a homunculus in a retort. Therefore, the economy is a function of life, already created and existing. This divine fire, kindled by creative love, is the basis for all natura naturata. And under the guise of impassive matter, the divine fire burns everywhere... The task of the cosmic and historical process is that this fire penetrates, warms, and illuminates all creation, all nature. But man does not need to worry about creating this fire itself, for this would be tantamount to a ridiculous and empty claim - to give birth to himself. The creation of the world in its foundations has already been completed, “God has rested from His works,” the world is defined in its sophia, in its potential elements, which are given to man in his historical work as an unchangeable basis. But even the very idea is false—creatures creating new life, as if it were necessary and possible, as if the Source of Life had left at least something worthy of existence unwatered by It. It is also impossible to create life because all being is already life, there is nothing inanimate at all, and only a severe nightmare has imposed this numbness, this dead mask on being. There is death in the world; Yes, everything that is born dies, but is this death a true and final death, and not just a new birth or a break and postponement of life? After all, about this, while the world stands on the foundations approved by the Creator, the last word cannot even be said. Moreover, death mows down the harvest of life, but not life itself. The individual dies, the species remains. This is not, of course, immortality or victory over death, as naturalists want to assure us of this, but it testifies to the weakness of death, its conditionality: its strength is not enough to prevent the emergence of life on earth, although it is so difficult, subject to so many dangers, or to completely interrupt the life that has begun. Death becomes only a function of life. Death is a condition of a process, of historical development, into which, due to its relativity and temporality, life is inevitably involved. But it is death that breaks this fragile form. The content of human economic activity is not the creativity of life, but its protection, the recreation of the living and the attack on the dead. It can be assumed in the extreme that everything will come to life as a result of economic labor and life will be restored in all its power, however, this can also be assumed not in the sense that; if it had been created by man, but only recreated by him. As N.F. Fedorov taught 114, although this world is not yet the best of all possible worlds, it can and should become so, because it is potentially the best. It is obvious that when discussing this issue, the main difference and opposition between two religions inevitably appears: man-theism, for which man is not a creature, but is a creator, and Christianity, for which man is a creature, but, as the son of God, receives the task of re-creation and management in the creations of his Father. Here we come up against the basic religious self-determination - towards God or against God, which is a matter of freedom and does not allow any justification 115. The concept of the sophistic nature of the economy requires further clarification. If we establish the Sophia nature of the economy as an internal driving force, as its basis, then the question arises about the nature of this connection between Sophia and the economy. Why does our empirical reality remain alien to sophia and provide passive or even active resistance to its influences? The irrationality of being, and therefore its anti-sophia, is a dominant fact of life, while sophia is reduced only to a postulate realized in the process. Where can one look for an explanation for this state of the world, what hypothesis (of course, not scientific, but metaphysical) makes it understandable? The world, which in its empirical reality is only potentially sophic, is actually chaotic, in its timeless existence there is Sophia herself, shining with the divine light of the Logos, without which “nothing could have happened” (John I, 3). The world is removed from Sophia not in essence, but in condition. Although he “lies in evil,” although the law of life is struggle and disharmony, even in this state he retains his coherence, Sophia’s rays, reflections of unearthly light, shine through him. The chaotic element is connected into world unity, clothed with light, life ignited in it, and in the end the bearer of Sophia appeared - man, although in his individual and self-being he was torn out of his Sophia unity, but not torn away from his Sophia root. The state of the world of chaocosmos, in the stage of struggle between chaotic and organizing forces, is understandable only as a violation of the original unity of Sophia, a displacement of being from its metaphysical center, the consequence of which was the disease of being, its metaphysical decentralization; thanks to the latter, it is plunged into the process of formation, temporality, inconsistency, contradictions, evolution, economy 116. The empirical world is separated from the sophitic world in its timeless radiance, in its complete and absolute harmony, in which everything finds itself in everything, and this all finds itself in God, by a timeless metaphysical act, which in religion is called original sin, the fall of Adam, and with it all creation, “subjugated to vanity.” This idea not only follows from the direct evidence of religious experience, but also represents a necessary postulate of speculation, as shown with incomparable genius by Schelling in his work “Philosophical Investigations on the Essence of Human Freedom,” as well as other works of the second period, and then independently developed by Vl. Solovyov (in “Readings on God-Humanity”, also in other works). The basis of the world process lies in freedom, as the basis of peace, as the essence of the image of God given by the Creator to creation. Sophia, pre-eternal humanity, as the soul of the world, containing everything within herself, is the unifying center of the world, only insofar as she herself renounces her selfhood and places her center in God. But she is free to shift this center, she is free to want from herself, to discover the self that constitutes the dark basis of her being, her blind and chaotic will to live (which is the only one Schopenhauer knows). This primitive chaos, first will or primary matter, representing the formless desire for life, is thrown over the robe of sophia, but it carries it only as a cover. In this primordial self lies the basis of personality with its freedom, but here is also the root of self-will 117. For the philosophy of economics, the “metaphysical fall” is a hypothesis, the acceptance of which sheds light on its main problems, since it explains the world process and the historical process within it. Of course, this “event” did not take place in time, and it would be in vain that we would look for its traces in the annals of history or paleontological excavations, where traces of prehistoric man are now sought 118 . There is only one trace, one fact, silently but eloquently testifying to the fact that it could only be a consequence: this living monument of what happened before time itself is a world and historical process with all its features. If scientists follow the traces of the eruption, volcanic rocks and so on. conclude about the existence of a volcano and generally ascend from effects to causes, then all nature, all history, all the inconsistency of human consciousness, with its antinomianisms, testify that they were the result of a metaphysical catastrophe. So, just as Plato distinguishes between the Celestial Aphrodite and the Aphrodite of the Common People, so also the Celestial Sophia, timeless, and the empirical Sophia, or metaphysical and historical humanity 119, and the living connection between them, which Plato knew only as Eros, attraction, we, Christians, know as Christ, the incarnate Logos, whose body is the Church, the Heavenly Sophia. But the Logos acted in the world even before His incarnation, or, as Schelling beautifully puts it, Christ acts in history even before His incarnation, although not as Christ. The universal connection of the world, the gradual emergence of life in its various forms before man, the first steps of man towards history - in all this, Divine Providence, as a saving fate, acts in the world process. And this same logos of things, the universal connection of the world, also grounds the economy, raising the world in it and through it to the highest cosmogonic level. God releases the “good” world He created with humanity, which embraces this freedom in its spiritual consciousness. The world in the person of humanity must freely, from itself, in the world process, through the separation of good and evil and the experience of good and evil, self-determine in its “activated self,” for, in Schelling’s prophetic expression, “nothing in the universe can remain ambiguous” 120. He must realize himself in his freedom, immersing himself in this selfhood 121, and through that into the sharpness of life 122. But life, immersed in selfhood, retains its divine basis and remains sophistic in its powers, although self-willed in its use. Sophia shines in the world as the pristine purity and beauty of the universe, in the charm of a child and in the wondrous charm of a swaying flower, in the beauty of the starry sky and the flaming sunrise (in the rays of which the young man Vl. Solovyov saw her in the Sahara Desert - see in the poem “Three Dates”). And these rays of sophia in nature precisely constitute the attractiveness of the “natural” state, which in reality is higher-natural, supernatural in relation to the current state of the creature. Here, instead of unity, multiplicity appears, instead of internal coherence, externality appears, with external connection in space and Sequence in time. What serves as a connection here, space and time, also separates. The world, Sophia’s body, is covered by a heavy cover of mechanism, the law of universal causality, as a universal form of connection between existence. The world is turning into a deadened natura naturata, the products of which are connected by this external mechanical connection. Everything becomes an object, impenetrable, alien to the subject. The original spontaneity, intuitiveness of contemplation, the identity of knowledge and consciousness, the subject-objectivity of being in Sophia are lost and replaced by the separation of subject and object with the inevitable discursiveness and abstractness (theoreticality) of knowledge. “Pure reason”, ratio, emerges as a set of forms in which the subject is correlated with the object. Ratio, scientific or theoretical reason, arises from the ruins of sophia, reflecting the Logos. Now this Logos hides in ontology, remains only the internal and hidden connection of things, which ratio seeks in the darkness of the night with its lantern (moreover, in the philosophy of rationalism, this night lantern, the light of which, of course, still comes from the sun as a source of light, is directly equated with the sun). By becoming a kingdom of objects, the world becomes material. The inert weight of material existence with its lifelessness descends on him. If life is preserved in it, it is only because the seeds of life sown by the Creator are indestructible, and the metaphysical revolution affected only the state, but not the composition of the world, it could only plunge it into a state of deadness, fainting, but not kill the seeds of life 123. But life remains possible only in the corners of the world, where it is endured by the deadening elements of the “prince of this world.” It is maintained only in a constant, vigilant struggle against death and exists, as it were, only with its permission. The organizing force of life is not great enough to save its works from destruction. Death is not an internal necessity for the organism as such 124, “God did not create death.” Of course, with a given metaphysical state of being, death is inevitable and constitutes a necessary act of life, a step towards its final revival and perpetuation (we will talk about the metaphysics of death in the section on the eschatology of the economy), but this necessity is created as a result of the general illness of being, being its most terrible manifestation, and yet death is the “last enemy.” Instead of solidarity, the unity of world life, its particularity appears. The struggle for existence ignites in the world, and it is the law of life not only in the animal world, but also in the human world. Life is squeezed by a soulless world, and at first its fire barely smolders under the ashes. The actuality of life, the consciousness capable of containing everything, is squeezed and limited almost to a bestial state. The path “from barbarism to civilization,” human history, is a struggle to expand the consciousness of life, although not to its entire boundless breadth. And, expanding life within himself, a person pours it out outside himself, revitalizing nature; awakening dormant forces within himself, he awakens them in nature. Being one with nature, a person can resurrect frozen and seemingly dead forces within himself only by resurrecting nature, transforming matter into his body, tearing it away from the petrified skeleton natura naturata and warming it with his fire. The world of dead and inert matter is resolved into the world of energies, behind which living forces are hidden. The shrouds are gradually falling from the three-day-old and already stinking Lazarus, who is waiting for the commanding word: Lazarus, get out! The protection and expansion of life, and therefore its partial resurrection, constitute the content of human economic activity. It is the active reaction of the life-giving principle against the deadly one. This is Sophia’s work on the restoration of the universe, which she leads through the medium of historical humanity, and she also establishes a super-subjective teleology of the historical process. The world, like Sophia, having fallen into a state of untruth and therefore mortality, must again come to the mind of Truth, and the method of this bringing is labor, or farming. If the self in a person can be extricated and defeated only by his labor on himself or by religious feat, then the self in nature is conquered by economic labor, in the historical process. Therefore, the final goal of the economy is beyond its boundaries, it is only the path of the world to the realized Sophia, the transition from the untrue state of the world to the true one, the labor restoration of the world. But just as the goal of economics is super-economic (and the goal of history is super-historical), so the origin of economic labor lies beyond the boundaries of history and economics in the present sense. This latter is hierarchically and cosmologically preceded by another economy, another labor, free, disinterested, loving, in which economy merges with artistic creativity. Art has preserved this prototype of economic labor 125. Before his fall, man, being the natural ruler of the world as a conductor of sophia, a living instrument of the Divine Sophia, is introduced by God into the “Garden of Eden” (into which, of course, the entire universe should have been transformed through his agency) and he is entrusted with “cultivating it and preserving it” (Gen. II, 15). All beasts, livestock and birds of the air are also brought to man, so that he can give them names, of course, in accordance with the nature of each species (Gen. II, 19-20). The beginning of economic action and management (“science”), work on a real and ideal object, thus refers to the “paradise” state, i.e. to the very metaphysical essence of man’s intact relationship with the world, when man is not yet subject to the fear of death, for he has access to the tree of life, and does not know the threat of hunger: therefore, only in the name of love for God’s creation should he here carry out this work of cognition and action. In this sense, we can speak of “paradise farming” as man’s selfless, loving labor on nature to cognize and improve it, to reveal its sophistry. But after the Fall of man, which religiously corresponds to the metaphysical catastrophe of the entire cosmos, the meaning of the economy and its motives change. A heavy cover of economic need falls on economic activity and closes its fundamental purpose; the goal of the economy becomes the struggle for life, and its natural ideology is economic materialism. It becomes the fulfillment of God’s judgment over sinful humanity: “By the sweat of your face you will eat your bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken” (Gen. III, 19). Sophia rules history as Providence, as its objective law, as the law of progress (which positive sociologists try so unsuccessfully to empirically substantiate). Only in the sophistic nature of history lies the guarantee that something will come out of it and that it will give some general result, that an integral of these infinitely differentiable series is possible. The fact that history is not an eternal cycle or a monotonous mechanism or, finally, absolute chaos that cannot be coordinated in any way - that history in general is as a single process pursuing the solution of a single creative task, only the metaphysical idea of ​​its sophic nature, with all the metaphysical assumptions associated with it, can confirm us. History is organized from an ahistorical and transcendental center, earthly Sophia grows only because her mother Heavenly Sophia exists, through her creative forces, her leadership. And if the development of the economy, instead of being a simple bellum omnium contra omnes 126, an animal struggle for existence, leads to the conquest of nature by the collective humanity, then this happens thanks to this superpersonal force, called by Hegel “the cunning of reason”, and here designated as the sophistry of the economy. The sophistic nature of nature also substantiates the objective-logical connection of things, its regularity, which is established in the sciences (cf. next chapter). We have already explained that Truth is not a subject of discursive, theoretical knowledge based on the duality of subject and object and on the disintegration of being, accompanied by the isolation of its elements. Truth lies on the other side of knowledge. That is why it is inexpressible in terms of discursive knowledge, and the holy and godly men who ascended like St. could not tell anything about it in a language accessible to us. Paul, to the “third heaven” and those who heard there “unspeakable verbs, which a man should not fly to speak.” Ineffability and, as a result, mystery, like a cloud, surrounds the Truth, but those who are honored to become the organ of its revelation become involved in it. It is not known in the sciences, but reveals itself inexplicably in the language of discursive thinking and, in this sense, in a miraculous, intuitive way. This revelation has different forms: religious - in the form of myths and symbols, philosophical - in the form of brilliant intuitions of philosophical geniuses, artistic - in works of art, in which (according to Schelling's definition) the infinite shines through in the final; it finally reveals itself in the recesses of personal religious life. Anyone who has experienced the indescribable at least once in their life knows about it, but for someone who has not experienced it, it is impossible to talk about it. Only one path leads directly and directly to the Truth - religious feat, the acceptance of Him who said about Himself: “I am the way, the truth and the life,” and whoever participates in life in Him already participates in life in the Truth. He becomes a living member of the Divine Sophia, the Body of Christ. His Church, and what for the world in its present untrue state is only an ideal or an ultimate concept, for him is felt as an immediate reality, which this world has for us. He becomes transparent in his sophia, reveals himself as Sophia - that sun that shines and warms us, remaining invisible to us, comes out for him from behind the cover of clouds and stands openly in the middle of the sky. The lives of the saints are filled with these visions of Truth. But they are not unknown to the extra-Christian world in the person of thinkers and ascetics who were distinguished by their particularly intense religious contemplation (the light of Plotinus, the “demon” of Socrates, the experience of Buddhist monks, Brahmins, etc.). Of course, in a religious sense, there is a whole gulf between the experiences of the sophistry of the world among people in church and non-church life, for example, between the experience of Christian asceticism and Indian yogism. But we are interested now not so much in this difference as in stating the very fact that the world even now remains permeable in its sophistry, although to varying degrees and in different ways. However, further study of this issue takes us into the philosophy of revelation, which is not now the subject of our study. I. Plurality of scientific titles Truth is not a direct subject of theoretical knowledge. The One Truth is alien to discursive knowledge, it is transcendental for it, and therefore constitutes, to put it in Kantian terms, only the “ideal” of knowledge. Since Truth remains beyond history, it is not the goal that is directly given in it, but movement, and history is drawn out into an endless series of discourse in the field of knowledge and action. Truth as such does not fit into any of these particular goals, so there is practically no single truth; there are only the truths of individual sciences and particular historical goals. Both knowledge and history are equally “bad infinity”, which has no natural end, as Kant rightly states and especially neo-Kantianism, this modern form of the philosophy of bad infinity. This brings us directly to the question of the nature of science. In the nature of scientific knowledge there is one basic and irremovable antinomy: all scientific knowledge can only exist in the assumption of Truth, but at the same time it itself fragments this single Truth into many private, special truths, either incompatible with each other, or, most often, simply not having any relationship with each other, mutually alien, like many wires stretched over the roofs of a big city, in all directions and with different purposes. The picture of the network of these wires serving the city, both those already installed and those being carried out (together with those that are about to be installed or even possible in the future), is an accurate depiction of the mutual relationship of different sciences. The latter, although considered only parts of a single science, however, due to the need for division of labor and specialization, actually lead a completely independent and separate existence. The possibility of such a far-reaching specialization of knowledge and the resulting conventionality and relativity of scientific positions due to their special nature is a problem that requires philosophical clarification. Otherwise, there is too wide an opportunity for the attacks of the most reckless skepticism, asking in the face of this endless series of special truths: “What is Truth?” and in the face of a long series of sciences: “what is Science?” Justification of science is one of the most important problems of philosophical science. It is too easy and even tempting to reject (even in Bazarov’s style) Science for the sake of sciences and Truth for the sake of truths. When they try to weaken this doubt by referring to a single ideal of knowledge, to which science supposedly strives, or by a timidly expressed hope for the final synthesis of scientific knowledge, this is only a response of faith, in this case inappropriate, moreover, it is contradicted by the actual course of scientific development, which reveals not a unification, but a further fragmentation of knowledge. There was a time when they hoped to at least partially overcome this fragmentation of scientific knowledge by classifying sciences, placing them on a ladder of ascent from simple to complex and thus integrating them into a series. The famous classification of sciences by Comte (as well as Spencer) was built on this principle, with a belief, naive for our time, in a single scientific worldview, in a scientific synthesis or synthesis of sciences. Sciences that are simpler in object are depicted here as premisses for more complex sciences, so that the entire body of sciences appears as a coherent chain of syllogisms. Comte's classification of sciences is based on the correct observation that data from one science can be used in another. We have the most obvious case of this in mathematics: mathematics as a method, as a set of developed and simplified formulas, is applicable wherever number and measure can be applied, where phenomena can be schematized as quantities, although, however, only insofar as this is possible. The question of the limits of the mathematical method in science, in general so complex and difficult, will not occupy us here in full. But in no way can we recognize as correct the idea that the degree of applicability of mathematics in general determines, so to speak, the degree of scientificity, so that it is possible to construct an a priori scheme of sciences on the principle of their relationship to mathematics, as Cohen is now trying to do (although he is not completely successful in this, because along with the mathematizing “logic of pure knowledge” there is also a group of sciences governed by the “ethics of pure will”, and, in addition, aesthetic disciplines). But no matter how great the degree of mathematization of individual sciences or their mutual interconnectedness in general, it is undeniable that it does not represent a correct hierarchical ladder of ascent from simple to complex or circles described, albeit with different radii, but from one common center. Rather, it can be likened to many circles described from different centers and different radii and therefore intersecting each other incorrectly - in a word, it is not a concentration, but a labyrinth. The scheme of the sciences was presented to Comte as follows: I... a, II... a + b, III (a + b) + c, IV (a + b + c) + d, V... (a + b + c + d) + e, etc., while the actual relationship of the sciences is expressed by various combinations of whole and fractional quantities, which, although they have - however, not all of them - parts common to each other, but to varying degrees and in different combinations: I. a + 1/2b + 1/3c +... + f. II. 1/4a + b + 2/3c + ... + e. III. 1/2b + c + ... + g + 1/3e, etc. In a word, although there is indeed some coherence, mutual dependence and even conditionality in the development of science, it does not have that natural hierarchy that would make it possible to bring all sciences under a clear, consistently developed scheme or classification. On the contrary, since science has stood on its own feet and realized its strengths, it has been developing and, moreover, with extraordinary energy - in a direction diametrically opposed to unity, namely towards specialization. Science is becoming more powerful, but at the same time and in connection with this, it is becoming more specialized and fragmented. One gets the impression that science can indeed exist independently of the Truth, making do only with its utilitarian, pragmatic criteria. And from here there is only one step to skeptical relativism, for which truth is only utility. This step has been taken in modern pragmatism. In this regard, it represents an important symptom of the scientific self-awareness of our era - the conscious relativity of scientific knowledge. It fundamentally affirms the qualitative difference between the one Truth in its royal grandeur and numerous particular provisions that are established in individual sciences and also call themselves truths, obviously seeing in themselves its different aspects. Meanwhile, their relativity and utilitarianism (at least in the most sublime sense), their qualitative alienness to the Truth is becoming more and more clearly revealed simultaneously with the improvement of scientific methods, with a deepening into the logic of science. At the same time, the instrumental nature of scientific truths, their conditionality and dependence on a known task is increasingly revealed, and scientific theories acquire the meaning of only working hypotheses. This relativity of scientific truths began to stand out so clearly that, on the one hand, cries began to be heard about the bankruptcy of science, and on the other, about its pragmatism. Science, indeed, does not deal directly with Truth, is alien to it, and the skepticism of pragmatism is right in this. Scientific knowledge is not and cannot be summarized in any synthesis; growing specialization is the law of the development of science. The synthesis of sciences into Science - not philosophical, but precisely scientific - is a utopia; Science itself cannot escape from empiricism, in which everything is multiplicity. After all, we must not forget that sciences themselves create objects for themselves, establish their own problems, and determine methods. Therefore, there cannot be a single scientific picture of the world, or a synthetic scientific worldview. Each science gives its own picture of the world, establishes its own reality, which can be close, but can also be completely far from the reality of another science. Each science creates its own cosmos, striving to develop a complete system of scientific concepts. Each science has its own style and stylizes reality in its own way, so that “every fact can be generalized in an infinite number of ways” 127. Stylization is characteristic not only of art, but also of science, as a logical art, creativity from concepts. Therefore, pictures of the world in the light of mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, chemistry, physics, biology, anthropology, history, economics, philology, etc. will be different. They can connect, strung like beads on a thread, but without forming a single whole, or this happens only partially and at separate points. The stylization of science is, at the same time, its conscious bias and deliberate one-sidedness in relation to the world: for a geometer there is only a known spatial body, but it makes no difference whether this is a human body, a clockwork doll or a mannequin, and for a mechanic there is a force, whether it be human, horse or steam, for a statistician there is a counting unit, it makes no difference whether by it a criminal or a saint, an idiot or a genius, etc. The picture of the world that science gives, which in reality exists only in the form of individual sciences, is always conditional. It can be used for a specific purpose or orientation, but none of them can claim to adequately reflect the specifics of life and cannot therefore seriously force one to look at the world only through their glasses. Sciences are united among themselves not by their content (which is possible only to a limited extent and only in certain cases), but by their formal side, their methodism, formal logical methods of forming concepts. Therefore, modern attempts at “scientific philosophy,” or science-oriented philosophy, follow the path of panmethodism 128 unity of sciences, but they no longer set the ideal of a universal synthesis of scientific teachings. However, the sciences are united in the unity of their (transcendental) subject - man as universal humanity, and their substrate - a single all-pervading and all-creating Life, by which they are generated from their depths, from a mysterious and immeasurable depth. This vital, not logical, but superlogical unity of the sciences in the science creator himself and in the maternal womb of life overcomes their mutual impenetrability and fragmentation. Extra-scientific and, in a certain sense, super-scientific reality differs from scientific, “categorically” formed reality not only in its amorphism, but also in its completeness and depth, spontaneity or “naivety” of experience. Which reality is more valid: scientific or extra-scientific? Does science in “pure logic” establish being, reality, reality, or are these just logical shadows, which necessarily presuppose the presence of objects casting them? Is reality a “differential” (according to Cohen’s invention), i.e., a logical-mathematical concept, or is reality “given,” albeit in its raw form? Or, more specifically, what is more valid: my impression of music and colors or the corresponding mathematical formulas of sound and light waves? Only direct experience is truly vital; only naive realism is true. Life is always naive, just as all integrity and spontaneity are naive. Scientific, conventional, reflected reality always has meaning only in a certain sense, in a certain respect. Even if science managed to understand the entire universe as a mechanism moving with the regularity of a clock, even if for science with its conventional orienting constructions such a construction turned out to be the most convenient, life in its royal spontaneity would be threatened by this just as little as a landscape does not become less colorful and beautiful because it is subjected to topographic surveys in all possible directions and depicted on different plans. And the “student” of Adrian Sixtus (in Bourget’s novel “Le Disciple”) was in vain so frightened by the formulas of his teacher that he lost faith in life and put the authenticity of scientific reality above life: he could calmly dwell on the thought that if his teacher was right, then it was some kind of lower, conditional, limited rightness, and was by no means able to scoop up the sea with a sieve. Recognition of the relativity of scientific positions and their conditionality, their anthropomorphism, is one of the most remarkable facts of modern scientific and philosophical consciousness. This is not the relativity of all knowledge that was preached by the positivism of O. Comte, for it was positivism that had a naive dogmatic faith in science, the latter being for him a loudly denied absolute: Sie tranken heimlich den Wein Und predigten öffentlich Wasser 129 . For Comte (partly now for Cohen), scientific reality is true reality, science is higher than life, because it is its quintessence, it reveals the laws of life, immutable, eternal, iron: knowledge is the discovery of these laws, their discovery in the true sense of the word. Positive scientific teaching for our time is broken, first of all, by the successes of science itself, which practically showed all the approximateness and conventionality of what seemed to be the most unshakable scientific truths, thereby receiving the meaning of only working hypotheses. The course of development of natural science over the past decades (to characterize it in detail is beyond our competence) eloquently testifies to this; this impression is expressed by the most sensitive scientific minds of our time (for example, Poincaré). But, along with the practice of science, the development of criticism has also done a lot for this, especially in the newest directions of neo-Kantianism, which claim to be “scientific philosophy” and actually develop scientific teaching. In first place in importance here we must put G. Cohen and P. Natorp (“Marburg School”), this also includes, to a certain extent, the methodological works of Rickert, Windelband, Lask, Husserl and others. All of them expanded and deepened the track laid by Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason”, which Cohen quite rightly characterizes as a criticism of pure science 130, i.e. scientific teaching. In “scientific philosophy,” which found its most consistent and radical expression in Cohen, the importance of apriorism in science is persistently emphasized, the disclosure of which is the work of transcendental philosophy, which builds a system of philosophy from these a priori schemes. But it was impossible to demonstrate with greater conviction the relativity and conditionality of scientific truths, the relativism of science in general, than is done with this apotheosis of pure science. All transcendental idealism, starting with Kant and ending with Rickert and Cohen, reveals the truth that science is built by man and that the formal idealistic a priori penetrates its depth, permeates its entire thickness. It is enough to compare two ideas about science: the naive-dogmatic one in positivism, according to which science is only revealed in man, he is its receiver or mirror for reflecting the laws of nature, and the idealistic one, which proclaimed through the mouth of Kant that “der Verstand schöpft seine Gesetze (a priori) nicht aus der Natur, sondern schreibt sie dieser vor” 131 (Prolegomena, 102), and now proclaiming through the mouth of Cohen that “being is the being of thinking” and “thinking, as the thinking of being, is the thinking of knowledge” (Logik der reinen Erkenntniss, 14). In the first case, the complete passivity of the cognizing subject is established, surrendering to the object and only reflecting it; in the second, this passivity is already attributed to the object generated by the cognizing subject. The idealistic analysis of knowledge in general and individual sciences in particular, critical science in general, regardless of its conclusions of a general philosophical nature (“transcendentalism”), had a huge positive significance for the destruction of scientific dogmatism, which has its philosophical expression in positivism. The criticism of scientific reason showed with complete clarity not only that sciences are built, but also how they are built. Thanks to this, the problem of justifying science arose. From an autocratic legislator of knowledge, she became a subordinate, submitting to the court of epistemology and logic. But this precisely emphasizes the instrumental, indicative, conditional nature of the concepts of each individual science and creates the possibility of a skeptical or at least critical attitude towards them, and in this meaning, idealism, with all its philosophical absolutism, comes close to pragmatism. This affinity between idealism and pragmatism as forms of relativism in science, although arising from different philosophical premises, is somewhat masked by the external hostility of these currents, and, however, it represents a striking fact of modern philosophical self-awareness. The father of scientific pragmatism is therefore none other than Kant, 132 and its most prominent representatives at the present time are Cohen, Natorp and Rickert, who here give a hand to Bergson 133 and the American pragmatists. The theory of the formation of natural scientific and historical concepts, built by Rickert as a methodological teaching, has a completely pragmatic character and is only externally connected with his epistemological teleologism. Many of the judgments about the “method of the exact sciences” that Natorp makes in his study “Über die Methode der exacten Naturwissenschaften” and which represent the application of Cohen’s ideas can receive a completely pragmatic interpretation in the spirit of the radical scientific pragmatism of Poincare 134 . Idealism, if we ignore its epistemological absolutism or transcendentalism, insofar as it turns to actual science, does the same thing with pragmatism, namely, it humanizes knowledge, emphasizes the importance of the formally subjective factor of scientific knowledge (although it itself considers it non-human, or higher than human, it is most afraid of “impurity” and renounces “psychologism”). Anthropologism in science is the general result of epistemological idealism and positivistic pragmatism. The problem of science is reduced to a riddle about man, science studies becomes a department of philosophical anthropology. Man is a science-creator, a being capable of science. What does this ability imply, what prerequisites are associated with it? II. Economic nature of science A man stands in an economic pose in relation to nature, with a working tool in one hand, with a flaming torch of knowledge in the other. He must fight for his life, that is, run the household. Science will also be born in this struggle; it is its instrument and product. It reflects the world as it is seen by a prudent owner, and it is known how different the eyes of a practical owner and a dreamy contemplator, artist or philosopher look at the world. The owner, with his head bowed and his back bent at work, is presented with a completely different perspective than one looking at the world from the heights of speculation or artistic contemplation. Collecting and gluing together the scattered universe from separate pieces, an economic mosaic, creates the bizarre and capricious development of science that we observe. The well-known image of Plato (in “Politeia”) - a cave with prisoners imprisoned in it, observing only the shadows of things and forming an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthings by their shadows - can also be applied to characterize the economic-scientific attitude to the world. Science, with its instrumentality and pragmatism, is obviously connected both with the location of the prisoners in the cave and their relationship to the source of light. One has only to change this situation a little - the entire orientation must change, with all its problems and methods, just as it would change if a person suddenly became a creature flying in the air or living in the water, or assumed microscopic dimensions, or became a creature of two dimensions, etc. And vice versa, all relative, conditional orientation is abolished, all science born in the kingdom of shadows and penumbra becomes unnecessary, once the cave is illuminated directly light, and our eyes would be able to bear it. Science bears the stamp of its origin. One can not only talk, together with pragmatism, about the practical, utilitarian nature of knowledge, but also - much more definitely - one should talk about the economic nature of knowledge, since life is a non-stop economic process that takes place in the intensity of labor. Economic materialism was given the opportunity to feel this important truth, although it resisted rather than contributed to its revelation thanks to its crude philosophical shell. The teachings of Avenarius and Mach on the economic nature of mental acts and on the principle of conservation of forces (Kraftersparung) inherent in scientific thinking 135 also belong to this order of ideas. Science is a social labor process aimed at producing ideal values ​​- knowledge that, for various reasons, is necessary or useful for humans. As a labor process, it is a branch of general human economic activity aimed at maintaining, protecting and expanding life, and at the same time its organic part. No economy is carried out purely mechanically, without any plan and expediency - the elements of a cognitive-scientific attitude towards the world as an object of economy cannot be eliminated from it, and in this sense, science has never remained and does not remain completely alien to man. There is a huge quantitative difference between the meager knowledge of the master-practitioner and scientific experience due to the difference in methods, breadth, and orderliness of experience, but there is no qualitative, fundamental difference. However, at a certain stage of development, differentiation of the economy occurs, and the production of ideal, cognitive values, standing out from the single labor process of life, leads a separate, independent, although by no means self-sufficient existence. The labor spent on science pursues two main goals: the expansion of experience, or the accumulation of knowledge (what can be likened to the successive, from generation to generation, creation of material wealth and material culture: roads, cities, convenient for cultivating land, factories, factories, etc.), and their ordering, scientific generalization of them in concepts or patterns (what can be likened to the accumulation of capital, capitalization of labor products, for the purposes of production). Both have the most direct and immediate relation to the economy. Science is, first of all, a correctly, consistently conducted study of “facts”, their discovery and establishment - there is specialized attention and systematic observation. After all, the largest part of the discoveries of science relates precisely to the discovery of new facts, i.e., the expansion and deepening of the world that appears to the naked eye and ordinary consciousness. Science calls forth the scientific cosmos from the darkness of the meon, awakens the dormant meonic being to life and, therefore, generally expands the possibilities of life, its universality and flight. Just as a miner with his pickaxe carves new ores out of rocks, so a scientist calls out of the darkness a new being, which he does not create, but reveals, as if freeing it to life. This work is carried out according to a specific, strict plan, using instruments and experiments that refine and sharpen our senses, according to established rules (methods), as if by one collective worker; Scientific cooperation is an example of cooperation in general. Thanks to this, individual sciences turn out to be like storehouses of life experience, in which the transcendental subject of science, humanity, in contrast to individual, empirically determined and limited individuals, receives tactile existence, from super-experienced it becomes almost empirical. As a treasury of knowledge, science is a kind of capacitor of life experience. Science is not limited to the accumulation of knowledge, but always strives to organize and generalize it in scientific hypotheses. The tool of science is a concept that symbolizes an indefinite number of homogeneous phenomena and compresses them into patterns; scientific thinking uses concepts, and scientific theories are composed of them. Scientific concepts, correctly, that is, purposefully created, already represent a condenser not only of life experience in general, but also of scientific experience. Scientific theories, striving to connect concepts with each other and present them in a simple formula of regularity, are, in turn, capacitors for these capacitors and, therefore, condense life experience to an even greater extent. Therefore, in science, the principle of economy of effort actually finds application and the desire to achieve a goal with the least cost prevails - the basic principle of economic activity; science is economic in its structure. The economic nature of science is also revealed in its vital roots. Just as in the production of economic goods in the narrow sense of the word, labor is spent on the production of consumer values ​​that have utility, that is, capable of satisfying essential or non-essential, real or imagined, but in any case real life needs, so in science the production of ideal goods, the work of research, is aimed at satisfying the needs presented by life. A person has a limited amount of labor and cannot waste it aimlessly or uneconomically; play, that is, the expenditure of effort without any purpose, finding justification only in itself, is an exception, and pure jeu d'esprit 136 has no place in science. Both in the economy and in science, labor is expended to satisfy an existing or emerging need. Science is the answer to the question of life that precedes science. Practical motives or vital interests, imperatively focusing attention on a certain aspect of life, call into existence the corresponding science 137. The history of science does not at all testify to the consistent logical development of the sciences, as it would follow from their theoretical relationship; on the contrary, the impulses of life and practical needs caused the development of different branches of knowledge in different eras. This can be seen with particular clarity in the development of natural and technological as well as social sciences in the 19th century. Before our eyes, almost every question in life evokes scientific development, creates science for itself. True, in the development of science it also happened that in the search for one thing they found another, just as Columbus, in search of a circular route to India, found America. Experiencing the influence of vital interests, science itself has a powerful influence on life. It does not remain outside of life and, therefore, is in living interaction with everything that exists. In any case, sciences arise on the basis of a certain selection; only certain topics are taken from the endless sea of ​​Possible experience. Science formulates questions of life that arise from a certain interest in its own convenient, technically feasible way, but it still does not betray this interest, just as all kinds of medical disciplines serve only one vital task - maintaining human health. Thus, already in its origin, science receives a certain flavor of economics. There is no need, of course, to overly coarse this position, which is true when applied to science in general or a given group of sciences, but not always applicable to its various departments and disciplines, which are, however, necessary in the scientific life of the whole. Science also has its own logic of development, which, with internal necessity, gives rise to certain scientific constructions, sometimes of a completely theoretical nature. However, if you look at the matter more broadly, you can be convinced of the presence of practical motives in the origin of such constructions. There is just no need to overly coarse this idea, which is what economic materialism is especially guilty of: recognizing the economic nature of science does not at all mean explaining it entirely by economic motives in the narrow sense of the word. True, a significant part of the sciences, considered as a whole, in their practical application is of an economic and technological nature. This can be said about natural science, both mathematical (hence, including pure mathematics here) and descriptive-experimental: technology, agriculture, medicine, transport - all this is in direct connection with the economy. This must be said no less about the social sciences, which are completely practical in nature. Here, even the most paradoxical statements of economic materialism about the connection between the development of technical and social sciences and the capitalist economy are not always an exaggeration. Science and technology (not in the narrow, but in the broadest sense of the word) are in the closest connection with each other. However, although the connection between science and technology or the technological nature of science seems to be one of the most important properties of scientific knowledge, which the philosophy of science should take into account, this should not be extended to all science and directly equate science and technology aimed at solving economic problems. Science serves not only economic needs, and man does not live on bread alone. There may be other interests of a practical nature, although these are also questions of life orientation, the development of rules of internal and external behavior, and they are also resolved in science. This includes different departments of humanities - history in all its ramifications, philology, philosophy. In a certain sense, this can even include art, as labor, successively, from generation to generation, spent in the service of beauty. Although the expenditure of labor here also introduces an element of economics, and although science and art do not break away from the roots of life with its practical interests, the ideal, spiritual nature of these needs does not allow them to be classified as knowledge of a technical, and in this sense, applied, economic nature. The composition of the sciences reflects the needs of a person who creates sciences in accordance with his needs, both practical and economic, and ideal. Only one thing is impossible: that a science could appear and exist that would not serve any need, neither practical nor ideal, and which would therefore be of no interest to anyone and unnecessary. Sciences are born from life, but, generated by it, they develop according to their own laws and lead an independent existence. Science is an attribute of man, his tool, which he creates for certain tasks. Science is anthropological through and through, and to the extent that labor relevance and economic activity are the main nerve of human history, then science is also economic, or pragmatic. To understand science, one must turn to understanding man. It is not science that explains man in himself, but man that explains science in himself. Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophical anthropology. According to its dual objective-logical and pragmatic nature, science must be verified by two kinds of criteria, assessed not only from the point of view of the logical correctness of its conclusions, their consistency, expediency, economy of thought, grace, harmony, but also from the point of view of its practical, approximate suitability. In other words, the criterion of science is dual, and therefore the nature of a scientific error or delusion is dual. Scientific truth is not only logical, but also economic. This idea can be explained even by the example of mathematics, which is now sometimes considered as the logic of science and, in any case, is considered the citadel of pure science. And yet, deep research by one of the greatest mathematical thinkers of our time reveals in a form accessible to everyone the economic nature of even mathematical thinking. Namely, discussing the question of non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky and Riemann), which, although built on different axioms than Euclidean, from the logical side represents a no less consistent construction, Poincaré comes to the following conclusion, generally characteristic of modern scientific thinking and at the same time so far from the inert formalistic absolutism of Cohen: geometric axioms, the difference of which explains the multiplicity of possible geometries, are “conditional provisions; when choosing between all possible conditions, we are guided by experimental facts, but the choice itself remains free,” so that “the axioms of geometry are nothing more than disguised definitions. If we now turn to the question whether Euclidean geometry is true, we find that it makes no sense. This would be like asking whether the metric system is correct in comparison with ancient measures, or whether Cartesian coordinates are more correct than polar ones? One geometry cannot be more true than another; it may be more convenient 138 and experience decides that. Pragmatism here penetrates into the very heart of scientific thinking - into mathematics. And the enormous importance of the mathematical method in general in science is also based on considerations of practical convenience - reducing quality to quantity and using measure and counting wherever and as far as possible. However, beyond these limits, the application of mathematics becomes useless and even harmful, turning into a caricature. A typical example is Bentham's moral arithmetic, which attempts to apply numbers to ethics. I am afraid that in modern “logistics” we have an example of how mathematics should not be used in logic. Similar examples can be found in political economy, where there is an attempt to create something like a higher calculation of human needs, utilities, and assessments. A pragmatic criterion must be applied to such constructions with all mercilessness: despite all the harmony, logical consistency, and perhaps even the wit of these constructions, they are useless, because they have no guiding value, and therefore must be recognized as scientific errors. So, the problems of science, which predetermine its objects and patterns, arise from the need for orientation given the given position of a person in the world, while scientific theories and hypotheses have an auxiliary value and are likened to those scaffoldings and walkways that become unnecessary after a path has been passed or a building has been built. The sciences, due to their economic nature, have their raison d'être in utility, and not in Truth. They are, in this sense, instruments of the struggle for existence; they are a sure wave of the hand, a well-aimed blow, a sharp glance; in them the transcendental scientific and economic subject sees, hears, and touches the world as the object of his economy. And yet, radical pragmatism with its skepticism, which sees utility as the only criterion of truth, is deeply wrong. He cannot explain logical consciousness, that compulsion of conclusions from given premises, which is certainly characteristic of science and constitutes its logical foundation. Scientific propositions, whatever their origin, undeniably have the quality of logical validity, which alone creates scientific credibility and establishes their “significance.” An objective-logical connection, a logic of ideas, necessarily based on the logic of things, permeating both being and consciousness, both subject and object, which therefore presupposes a certain identity of thinking and being - this is what gives science its scientific character and protects its provisions from arbitrary subjectivity and self-will 139 . Science is free and pragmatic in establishing its object and its problems, it is free to ask about the specific gravity of atoms, and about the number of jackdaws on crosses, to count the stars in the sky or to penetrate into the depths of the earth, this is its business, but with a certain task, with given elements of the problem, the objective logic of things already operates, some iron necessity, commanding to come to one or another conclusion, unless one violates the evidence and proclaim that 2 × 2 = stearic candle. And this logic is no longer pragmatic, not economic; on the contrary, it is pure and, as such, it justifies the possibility of science, and to that extent even of economics itself. It is an ideal structure of knowledge, but at the same time it is a transsubjective connection of things. Reality is logical, it is coherent, and this connection is identical with logical thinking, it is revealed and given over to it. The identity of subject and object, which we established above as an a priori of economics, is also revealed here from the side of its objective-logical form. This connection is not something constant in its forms and manifestations. It is multiple and diverse. Hence the possibility of establishing it under different forms, different methods, on different objects is clear. Hence the multiplicity of sciences and the possibility of scientific progress, i.e., wider and deeper penetration into this connection. This connection is universal, for it is the connection of everything with everything. In science it receives the form of a universal causal connection that binds together the world mechanism 140 . Without this connection there would be neither identity nor distinction. But there is this connection. There is a Logos of the world, and according to its power there is a logic of things, a logic of sciences, and a logic of actions: everything is in an all-pervading connection. For the world in its positive basis is not Chaos, but Sophia. Science is sophistic - this is the answer that can be given to skeptical pragmatism and dogmatic positivism. She is alien to the Truth, for she is a child of this world, which is in a state of untruth, but she is also a child of Sophia, the organizing force leading this world to the Truth, and therefore the stamp of truth lies on her. Truths are in process, in formation. Like Plato's Eros, the son of Poros and Penia, of wealth and poverty, of the absolute organism and mechanical disorganization, she belongs to both worlds. It is limited, relative, instrumental, but at the same time, as it progressively develops, more and more new veils are falling away, covering the Truth from our eyes, the Truth shines through it, albeit like a mirror in fortune telling. So, formally, the truth of scientific propositions is protected by logic, which has both ideal and real meaning due to the original identity of subject and object, due to the fact that in their essence the subjective and objective are only conscious or unconscious manifestations of one process, the discovery of one principle that lies above the distinction between subject and object, the opposition of the conscious and the unconscious. In terms of content, the truth of science is justified by its sophia; it is possible thanks to the organizing power of Sophia. In it, Sophia takes over the world. We can say that science expresses the awakening of world self-consciousness, and its morbid mortis gradually disappears from the world. Therefore, real, real progress is being made in the development of science. Thanks to this unity of its function, it is only possible to say that there is a single science - not as a single knowledge, but as a single activity. Here science merges with the general economic process and enters into it as a factor. Science is a tool for revitalizing the world, victory and self-affirmation of life. Its positive result is that the world is inert, dead, impenetrable, increasingly losing these features and giving way to impending life. Outside of the assumption of an objective logical connection of things, the original sophistry of the world and the derivative sophistry of science, the fact of science, the fact of economics, and history itself become a completely incomprehensible miracle, some kind of hocus-pocus, or indeed some kind of revelation of secrets from “nature.” But this cannot be thought through without falling into an obvious contradiction or gross mythologizing, without turning the dead and crumbly aggregate of “nature,” as it appears in a mechanical worldview, into a living being, at least into that goddess in green clothes and with moist eyes, which Turgenev describes in his prose poem “Nature.” IV. Epistemology and praxeology Scientific knowledge is effective 141 or, in other words, it is technical. The possibility of technology, or the transformation of knowledge into action, a leap from contemplation to reality, shows that scientific knowledge, the logical connection of concepts, has a transsubjective nature, ensuring the technical suitability of knowledge. In other words, technology is logical or logic is technical. Mathematics has “cognitive value” not only because it represents a fascinating game of logical imagination, but also because technology can rely on it, and differential calculus turns out to be useful in the construction of a railway bridge. In science, not only logical models of reality are built, but also projects for influencing it are created, and it is this connection between design and modeling, knowledge and action that requires philosophical interpretation. A pure theory of knowledge is not enough, it is even impossible; a theory of action based on knowledge is needed, not epistemology, but praxeology. The problem of pragmatism only begins where its representatives consider it solved. The problem of science in its praxeological understanding does not at all fit into the formulation that Kant gave it with his purely contemplative, indeed only theoretical, inactive reason. Kant's knowledge is only modeling, but not design, verified by life. Cohen rightly notes 142 that Kant deals with nature as an object of science (Natur als Wissenschaft). Meanwhile, nature must first be understood as an economic object (Natur als Wirtschaft). The reality of nature is not felt in its mirror image in Kant’s epistemology, which is why the problem of the reality of the external world and the alien self, as already shown above 143, takes on such a fatal, hopeless character for him. For theoretical reason, the world also has only a theoretical existence; it, so to speak, is projected on a plane as a series of diagrams and drawings. They may or may not be true from the point of view of their logical coherence, but it is completely unknown whether they have a transsubjective, vital meaning. Already by the initial formulation of his problem, Kant cut off his path to real reality and doomed himself to Sisyphean work, to a constant pursuit of the ever-escaping ghost of reality; Kant’s concept of appearance, formed by a priori forms of knowledge, does not take into account the possibility of action at all, otherwise it would have to be revised anew in the spirit of realism, and this would inevitably entail a revision of the entire doctrine of the forms of knowledge, of appearance and the thing in itself correlative to it. About the theoretically constructed world, Kant could rightfully say that “reason prescribes laws to nature,” but only regarding this nature it should be added that perhaps it does not exist, like the ideal three thalers in Kant’s famous example, the existence of which does not at all follow from their concept. And if one can be convinced of the real, and not just the ideal, existence of three thalers only by feeling the pocket, so we are convinced of the real existence of a theoretically constructed nature only by touching it, i.e., going beyond the theoretical concept. “You need to get out of it in order to give it a sign of existence,” as Kant himself puts it 144. Only practice and technology convinces us that science does not erect a world of phantasmagoria, but in a certain way is correlated with reality. Therefore, a bridge built on mathematical calculation in some way guarantees higher analysis for us. But for Kant, within the framework of his epistemology, there is absolutely no means of distinguishing between the real and ideal three thalers, 145 because theoretically, in their content as “concepts,” they are identical, Kant himself admits this, but they differ only in “position,” a predicate of being. For theoretical reason there is no reality other than the logical, and this was fully agreed upon by Cohen for Kant, and in this radicalism of thought one cannot help but see the merits of the “Marburg School”, in which reality is openly replaced by science. This view represents the last word of armchair, “scientific” idealism. Kant constantly oscillates between idealism 146, to which the logic of his philosophy pushes him, but from which he fights off with all his might (in the person of Berkeley), and realism. His living sense of reality forced him to hold on to realism, but for him there is no basis in Kant’s doctrine of appearance, and this hesitation (reflected already in the difference between the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason) creates a source of ambiguity in Kant’s system and ultimately leaves open the main question for him: “Wie ist Natur selbst möglich?” 147 (Prolegomena, § 36). To trace these fluctuations and show the hopeless duality in Kant's understanding of nature 148 would be an interesting task, leading to the very center of Kant's thought and revealing the imaginary nature of his Copernicanism. Only Schelling, with his “breakthrough to reality,” managed to break the web of Kantian epistemology and pave the way to the philosophy of economic realism, which does not break or separate the unity of cognition and action, nature as science and nature as economy. So, epistemology is guided by the fact of theoretical knowledge (or “science”) and tries to find a path to reality from it, to break through the networks of idealism. But theoretical knowledge, within which epistemology remains, is idealistic in its very essence; it deals with algebraic signs, and not with numerical, concrete quantities. However, in reality, knowledge does not exist as purely theoretical - it is an abstraction, it exists only in the concrete unity of action as its moment, it enters into the labor process of life, into the economy. The latter is also a fact, no less unshakable than knowledge, but more general, and therefore logically prior to knowledge. A theory of knowledge focused on the fact of economics, i.e., not only theory, but also technology, will have a completely different form than an abstract theoretical one. Only on the basis of economic realism, the vital authenticity of the objects of labor, is subjective idealism overcome, and knowledge becomes transsubjective thinking. And to break the concrete unity of the moments of theory and practice, knowledge and action in order to subsequently again compose and glue together from its parts, from theoretical and practical reason, the whole of life, means going the wrong way, creating unnecessary difficulties and insoluble problems for yourself. We do not deny by this the problems of the theory of knowledge, but their current abstract formulation. In scientific knowledge there exists, as has been established beyond doubt by epistemological analysis, a certain apriorism and schematism, which is thrown like a net over direct life experience. The epistemological, Kantian subject is the mind of a scientist dissecting experience. These a priori forms of knowledge in their originality constitute the subject of the theory of scientific knowledge or, as is now more often expressed, pure logic. But it is not the highest and final court, before the tribunal of which all issues are resolved. On the contrary, science itself needs justification or philosophical explanation, and therefore the science of science, the philosophical science of science, arises. The latter is often turned, however, directly into philosophy (Cohen, Husserl) and presented as a “system of philosophy.” This is what characterizes the philosophy of transcendentalism. Science is a function of life, it is born in the labor process, and the nature of all labor is economic, with the goal of protecting or expanding life. Life never remains at rest; it is in a state of continuous tension, urgency, struggle. Life, in this sense, is a continuous economic process. It is an activity in which moments of contemplation and theoretical knowledge exist only as moments of action. The economic attitude towards the world includes both a necessary means and a theoretical orientation in it, i.e. science. Science is born out of practical need and develops under the same impulse. This pragmatism of science, its economic nature, is established by the position that the subject occupies in relation to the object in the process of scientific knowledge. The economy is determined by the alienation and mutual impenetrability of subject and object, living and non-living being. The subject economically penetrates into the object, bringing it closer to himself, going out of himself into it, assimilating it to himself, making it transparent and permeable for himself. But in order for such an act of conquest by the subject of an object, the victory of life, to take place, whether in a separate act or in the whole economic-historical process, it is necessary that the object previously resisted in all its alienation, impenetrability, objectivity, in all its multiplicity and chaos. When preparing to make a jump or lower the working arm, the subject prepares himself like a tiger before a hunting leap, and freezes for a moment in this position. Even if it is a brief moment, it is essential and irreducible in the whole process: it is part of it and is understandable only as a part, but at the same time it also has a certain completeness in itself or integrity. In this preparatory pose of life, all attention is transferred to the object, the subject seems to completely disappear, hide, only the object being studied remains. This is pure science, a scientific attitude towards the world. Therefore, scientificity is only a pose of life, its moment. Therefore, she cannot and should not legislate over life, being its servant. Scientia est ancilla vitae 149. Scientific creativity is immeasurable already in life, for this latter is a living, continuously realized subject-objectivity, subject and object in their polarity and in their living unity, expressed not in scientific knowledge, but in economic action. Science is only objective. Objectivity, impersonality is considered the dignity of science, and it must, indeed, be impersonal (subjectless, extra-subjective) and objective, in it the subject temporarily, of course, leaves himself and posits himself in the object, remains in the object, so that it is as if only a pure object remains. From this position or from that window through which science looks at the world, the subject with his direct, living relationship to the object, with the rays of life flowing from him, is completely invisible. Thus, we would search in vain for the high mountain that dominates the landscape and constitutes all its beauty, being on the top of this very mountain. The landscape, which is ghostly for us, is not visible from here, although this does not mean at all that it cannot be seen at all. With a scientific approach to the world, from the arena of struggling life, it turns into a world of objects interconnected by a mechanical connection with their regularity. No matter what science directs its lantern at, all the living colors fade from it, faces become dead, as during a solar eclipse, and nature turns into a dead desert with an anatomical theater. Life runs because there is nowhere for it to fit in this kingdom of shadows, subjectless objects, materialized abstractions, and life itself is viewed here only as an object, that is, as a mechanism, or a machine. To understand life scientifically means to interpret it mechanically, it means to transform organisms into machines: l'homme-machine 150 - this was not said in vain, in the rapture of scientificity by the philosopher of the Enlightenment, that is, scientificity transformed into philosophy. Everything that bears the stamp of a subject and has signs of life is incompatible with a scientific, purely objective attitude towards the world. Science deliberately commits murder of the world and nature, it studies the corpse of nature, it is the anatomy and mechanics of nature, such is its biology, physiology, and psychology. Science casts a network of mechanism over the whole world, imperceptible as the threads of a spider's web for a fly. Scientific and mechanical worldview are synonymous. The scientific attitude towards the world is the attitude towards the world as a mechanism. Within these borders, the kingdom of science is impregnable and does not allow any intrusions. The only question is whether this kingdom is global, whether there is not enough territory outside it and around it so that it can be surrounded and taken captive. The object is plural by its nature and its multiplicity presses and oppresses consciousness, which needs diverse orientations in this multiplicity. Science cuts out pieces of reality from a living organism in order to then navigate through them, establishing a mechanical pattern in them. And then from these cut out pieces she puts back, of course, already dead nature. Nature as an entire organism, έν και παν, is not given alive into the hands of science, and nature-killing occurs at the very threshold of science, still outside its realm. Therefore, the representatives of science themselves no longer have any consciousness of what happened, and with naive dogmatism, they equate reality in the form in which it is accessible to science to reality in general; in other words, scientific methodology is given ontological significance. In this way, a prejudice is created and strengthened, as if the scientific attitude to reality is the deepest and most genuine, and the deliberate limitations of science are completely forgotten. All scientific positivism is such a naive philosophy of a pure object, cognizable (it is unknown by whom and how) in science. What positivism does naively and dogmatically, in criticism, especially in its newest form, in “scientific philosophy,” is done with critical sophistication. The philosophy of “pure experience” and “pure knowledge” is the philosophy of non-subjective experience or that pure objectivity that is characteristic of science. Reality as a pure object necessarily becomes a world of things interconnected in relation to mechanical causality. The recognition of nature as a mechanism, permeated by a single causal relationship (of course, never fully cognized, but postulated a priori), is, in a certain sense, the methodological foundation of science, an economic approach to nature in order to learn its “secrets” and “secrets” (Bacon). This, to parody Hegel's famous expression about List der Vernunft 151, is an economic trick (List der Wirtschaft) 152, which life half-consciously, half-instinctively performs, freezing in a contemplative pose, before rushing into the object with all its subjectivity. From the attitude towards nature as a mechanism follows the basic belief or prejudice of science, which is fully adopted by scientific philosophy, namely, that the given presence of world elements does not undergo change or increase. Based on this law of conservation of world elements, all changes in the world should be understood only as the result of the mechanical interaction of these elements, and any new creativity, enrichment of the world, its growth are excluded in advance (hence the fundamental denial of miracles, i.e., violations of the current laws of nature established with the presence of these elements of nature - the well-known fear of miracles in science). Science claims, at least ideally, to compile a comprehensive inventory of world existence 153 . Hence the claims of science to the unlimited ability of foresight, and the world can be depicted, in the words of Dubois-Reymond 154, “by one huge system of differential equations, by one mathematical formula.” The same idea, even when applied to human actions, is expressed by Kant; it underlies sociological determinism; it is expressed in the most radical form by Laplace and later by Huxley 155 . And, presenting the world as such a mechanism, science further fragments it into atoms (in the broadest sense of the word), tears the whole into pieces, using, as Bergson wittily put it, the cinematic method 156, and therefore destroys the unity, integrity, and continuity of the life of nature. The relationship of science to nature is not direct and disinterested, but artificial and pragmatic. Science is of a volitional, active origin, it is not penetration into an object as it is (which, however, is impossible, because a pure object, a thing, is an abstraction, an object exists only for the subject), but an economic orientation in it, preparation for action.. The indicative mood of science is always preceded by the desirable and will be followed by the imperative mood. So, science “is a conventional attitude towards nature as a pure object and, therefore, as a mechanism. Scientific thinking and a mechanical worldview, or scientific determinism, are one and the same thing. Science only exists as a system of determinism, world mechanics, which was dreamed of by Kant, Laplace and others. It is obvious that the philosophical question of freedom and necessity remains completely outside the scientific consciousness. Scientific orientation is so narrow, special and pragmatic that for it all the questions that arise beyond its threshold do not exist, in particular the definition of the subject in its relation to the object, the will in its relation to action. This does not exist for her in the same way that for a geometer who studies bodies as figures and volumes, their qualitative difference does not exist: for her the marble statue and the model with which it is sculptured are completely identical. For all its endless richness and complexity in content, science is unusually simple, elementary and poor in its mission. Its only commandment is: know the world as a mechanism, act as if it were only a mechanism, fully cognizable. But there is no point in asking her about how true the commandment itself is. VI. About the “scientific worldview” This conventionally pragmatic mechanical worldview of science is often given an ontological interpretation, according to which the world is not only scientifically cognized as a mechanism, allowing for a mechanical orientation within itself, but is also a mechanism, and on the basis of this mechanism all existence is interpreted. The cognizing, economically oriented subject is imperceptibly escorted out the door and replaced by an extra-worldly, contemplative, inactive scientific mind, to which the contemplation of this mechanism is attributed. This is the only way to obtain that pure object, which is not correlated with any subject and therefore embodies a pure mechanism. Then the world is considered as a collection of things, and the cognizing mind, as a collection of their schemes, as a passive schematism of the world. Everything is knowable, everything is material, everything is mechanical, everything is objective - this is the catechism of the metaphysics of scientific rationalism. This scientific rationalism, this mechanical worldview is such a typical disease of new philosophy that it requires not only refutation, but also interpretation. Like economic materialism, as an idea it is stronger and more powerful than its individual expressions. After all, scientific rationalism can now say about itself: “My name is legion, for we are many.” After all, the entire current of thought (and not only thought, but also, what is much more important, life), bearing the name “enlightenment,” in its diverse manifestations paves the way for scientific rationalism. Locke and Hume, Bacon and Mill, Kant and the neo-Kantians, Moleschott and Haeckel, the majority of scientists - all are conscious or unconscious, active or passive, militant or peaceful carriers of scientific rationalism. It constitutes the spiritual atmosphere of our time, we breathe it, imperceptibly for ourselves, in it the sense of mystery and depth of existence disappears, mysticism and religion fade away. With flat mockery, Mephistopheles, the spirit of scientific rationalism, presents a table of logarithms with the words: eritis sicut dei scientes bonum et malum 157, and maliciously watches how God's world is ground in this mill. Of course, such a significant and influential current of spiritual life cannot have roots only in theoretical error; it must have a deep basis in the disease of existence, in its fragmentation, in which we must see the beginning of discursive knowledge, that is, science and scientific philosophy. Regarding its flourishing in our era, we, together with Marxism, will say that the roots of modern rationalism are in the economy, in the intense economic life of the era (it is not without reason that some economists, for example, Sombart 158, consider rationalism to be a distinctive feature of modern capitalist industrialism). Kant and Watt, Cohen and Siemens are children of the same economic era - capitalism. Our century is characterized by a terrible tension of economic energy, equally expressed in the development of science and in the economic conquest of space. This tension is expressed in extreme immersion of the subject into the object and is accompanied by some displacement of the center of consciousness. Before being subjugated, the object temporarily subjugates its conqueror. At the same time, the successes of the economy are not yet so tangible as to evoke a feeling of victory over the object, its dissolution in the subject. The hypnotizing influence of the object being overcome, the tension of muscles and will during this overcoming is natural and was reflected in the historical consciousness of modern humanity by the successes of scientific rationalism. The high value of the tool of science has prompted the extension of its competence further than it extends, and has caused an attempt to open locks with this key for which it is completely unsuitable. From this was born the unfortunate product of the age of rationalism - the idea of ​​“scientific philosophy,” i.e., the resolution of superscientific and extrascientific questions by science. But, although science turns the world into a lifeless mechanism, it itself is a product of life, a form of self-determination of the subject in the object. The mechanism itself, which for a mechanical worldview seems to be a universal ontological principle, is only a conditional self-determination of the subject. The mechanism is a boundary for the subject, the absence of an organism, but what is limited is more than what limits it, and life is not posited, but only limited by the mechanism. The mechanism itself is not a positive concept, but a negative one; it states the absence of life, that is, life (the subject) here senses its boundary, but not in order to recognize it and stop before it, but in order to cross it 159 . The tentacles of life, stretching forward and meeting dead edges in front of them, are looking for a way out or a detour. For us, life remains an immediate given, possessing a positive attribute of being, and the concept of mechanism, thingness, negative in relation to it, is formed only by this negation of its positive attribute, is its shadow, and without this negative definition it would disappear completely as a pure minus, as nothing. Therefore, mechanical causation is determined by the negation of life; it is the negation of will, organic causality. And for this reason alone, the mechanism not only cannot explain life, but itself must be explained from its correlation with it. The merit of Bergson's philosophical profundity was to show (especially in “Creative Evolution”) the originality of life and its conditionality of scientific rationalism and mechanism. That is why, generally speaking, the attitude towards nature as a mechanism is, first of all, a “cunning of the economy”, a tactical technique of the advancing life, the hidden and genuine desire of which is to conquer, to dissolve in itself everything inanimate, everything mechanical, and the ultimate goal of the economy, or its natural limit, is to make the universe an all-organism of all humanity 160 . The mechanism in the body serves only as a means to its ends; there is a how, not a what. What is unconscious is also unfree, mechanical; what is conscious, deliberate, expedient, is also organic, although the mechanism of means may remain the same in both cases. That is why, by discovering this or that pattern of causes and effects, this or that mechanism in nature, life strives to master it, to include it in its organism, and therefore the expanding knowledge of nature as a mechanism is only a preparation for mastering it as an organism. An organism is a recognized and conscious mechanism; a mechanism is a nature that is not yet organized, although it has the potential to be organized. The scientific picture of the world, the world as an object and, therefore, as a mechanism, is only an instant photograph, just as a photograph of a wave at the moment of its highest rise is possible. But it is clear that just as this position of the wave is understandable only in connection with the previous and subsequent moments in the life of the wave, but is completely incomprehensible from itself, so the scientific picture of the world as a pure mechanism expresses the moment of contemplation before action, the greatest polarity of subject and object, their opposition, followed by fusion, identification, to which every economic act is reduced. The mechanism of nature revealed by science, the knowledge of its laws, opens up the possibility of organizing, economic activity. If the mechanism, as the boundary of life and the organism, is experienced as a pressing, nightmarish force of dead necessity, then, on the other hand, it is actively recognized as the possibility of the organism, the conquest of life, the victory of the conscious over the unconscious in nature. For, as has been said many times, man does not create out of nothing, but only recreates and transforms; man must have before him a mechanism as a material for his action, as a fulcrum for his activity; “Something for which there can be no place at all in nature must be completely impossible” 161. The connectedness of the moments of cognition and action, the significance of science in the economy as a means of economic orientation is closed to us due to the fact that the function of the economy, like the function of knowledge, as a whole is carried out only by a transcendental subject, historical humanity as a whole (or at least in large groups), while immediate life is given to us only in individual limitations. And this latter bears the curse of involuntary fragmentation; it is an infinitesimal fraction, an atom of the whole process. That is why individual human individuals primarily carry out first one side or the other of the economic process, some in its cognitive, contemplative side, others in the active side. It is natural, therefore, that the class of scientists, due to the complexity of their profession, the difficulty of their task, having separated themselves into a closed workshop, has adopted a particularly armchair, contemplative attitude towards life, corresponding to the idea of ​​scientific law; For people of activity, on the contrary, the world seems plastic and changeable. Therefore, the nightmare of the mechanical worldview does not actually belong to the very idea of ​​​​the universal connection of all things, cognizable in laws or, more precisely, in the laws of various sciences, for this connection does not contain anything oppressive for the heart - it stems from the feeling of oppression of life, the alienation of nature from us with its deathly impenetrable face and with indifference or hostility towards man. The world as a kingdom of death, at war with life, is what frightens us away from the mechanism of nature, this corpse of nature, casting its deathly shadow over our lives. Science orients us in this kingdom of death, and therefore it itself acquires something deadening in itself. Behind this mechanism Death lurks and threatens. Only insofar as the world is the kingdom of Death, is it a mechanism. But, since he is the arena of the struggle between Life and Death, he is the future organism. And we are slaves of this mechanism, since we are slaves of Death, these are different expressions of the same content. But the dead does not recognize itself as dead, and the pure mechanism is not aware of its mechanicalness. Only in the living can the horror of death appear. Mechanism and organism, necessity and freedom, life and death, mutually limiting themselves, at the same time condition each other and justify each other through their division, mixing, struggle, the necessity of litigation, the existence of a process, which, unless it is endless, must lead to one result, already marking the end of this process: to the complete triumph of death or life. But can non-existence triumph - that which does not exist and that exists only as a shadow? There is only life, and what is mistaken for death and a lifeless mechanism is damage, a break in life, its fainting, accompanied by the fainting of nature. And the mechanism that science understands, this crust of being, is only the stamp of the fainting of life in nature - deathly pallor, insensibility, but not death. Her son and stepson, slave and master, ruler and worker, master, work tirelessly to revive nature. He tries to warm the dead creature with the warmth of his life. He is not able to retain this life even in himself as an individual, preserving it only in the race and experiencing the power of his enemy - Death. And this is the tragic nature of the struggle: a gap is constantly formed between the subject and the object, death with its scythe cuts off this connection, but it is restored again. Science cannot understand itself, provide an explanation of its own nature, without crossing the line of determinism and a mechanical worldview and without entering into metaphysical problems. Let everything be a mechanism, as science assumes and claims, but science itself, as knowledge, as contemplation of this mechanism, as its self-awareness, what is it? How did it appear as if it were an appendage to this mechanism, its ideal reproduction or mirror image? Who and how ideally reproduces this mechanism 162? If we say that the mechanism, i.e., pure objectivity, therefore, complete unconsciousness, reproduces itself, causes its own self-consciousness, then this means either expressing a very bold absurdity, mercilessly mocking the law of contradiction, in one spirit attributing to the object self-consciousness, i.e., subjectivity, or simply abandoning the original point of view and moving to a new, as yet unexplored one. It is enough, therefore, just to raise the question of the self-awareness of science itself, as the hypnosis of the mechanical worldview weakens the spell of this nightmare. After all, it is impossible to imagine science as a mirror, completely passive reflection of the world mechanism. Firstly, such mirroring would still be incomprehensible in its existence, the world of pure mechanism, remaining it and only it, would not have any knowledge and consciousness about itself, like a dead body, for it is a mechanism only for the organism, just as death exists only in life, for life and thanks to life. But, in addition, this idea of ​​​​the specularity and absolute passivity of knowledge as a reflection of the world does not correspond to reality at all, for knowledge itself is activity, and only its products then acquire a frozen, objective character: science is created by labor, it is a function of life. Therefore, the relationship between a mechanism and its reflection in consciousness, or science, obviously cannot be thought of as a mechanism, but takes it beyond its limits, breaks its framework. Knowledge, in particular, systematized scientific knowledge, as an activity, never has a purely objective nature, but always has an object in front of it, is a constantly realized identity of subject and object, moving from the potential to the actual, to the revealed connection of things, the logos of the world. When I study the starry sky, the telescopic picture of the world, or the world of infinitesimals, its microscopic region, with the connections of existence, “patterns” established here, I, plunging into an infinite object, do not always keep in mind that this is my picture of the world, it is drawn in me, the living potential of the world. In a certain sense, for this it is necessary to recognize that I and the starry sky or the microscopic world are one, capable of merging and identifying. Every act of knowledge is such a partial identification of subject and object, their unity revealed and felt, just as the answer to a question is the unity of question and answer. Only on this identity of subject and object, as explained above, can both knowledge and economy be fundamentally justified. And in this sense, I find the starry sky within myself, otherwise I would not see it above me. All knowledge is in this sense self-consciousness. The roots of science are in Sophia, in the ideal identity and self-awareness of the world, in its ideal organism. The mirror theory of science turns a blind eye to that prophetic and creative, to that anamnesis that actually occurs in science, contrary to its mechanical worldview, as in any living activity, therefore based on the universal identity and universal connection of things. After all, reason (ratio), which only states the schemes of things, describes them and in its activity comes closest to mirror passivity, is sterile. He does not give birth to scientific ideas, he only uses those already born, registers them, checks them, he is an accountant of thought, but not its creator. In reality, creative thoughts, new ideas in science are not obtained from the accounting activity of the mind; they are born, ascend into consciousness from the depths of preconscious identity, Sophia. They overshadow their creators, in the same way as inspiration overshadows an artist, they themselves are the fruit of some inspiration, eros, and not accounting art, and only after being born they fall into the hands of their strict nanny and demanding obstetrician. The scientific mind, due to its sterility, cannot give birth to science; science, like everything living and creative, is born and created in an extra-scientific, super-scientific way, and scientific genius, like any other, is the ability of clairvoyance above the rational given or deeper than it. But in science, an accurate inventory of the world is maintained, as it opens up to the superscientific, creative, sophic consciousness, science is the protocols of the emerging sophicity of the world, to the extent that the subject, having made its exit into the object, realizing its identity with it, returns from actuality again to potentiality and therefore projects the connection of things on the screen of the object as a mechanism. Science brings the light of discrimination and regularity into the dark chaos of inert matter, the mixture of cosmic forces and elements. It ideally organizes the world as an object and permeates the chaos of phenomena with the light of ideas, universal and reasonable laws 163. Science is the economy of reason in nature, the labor restoration of the ideal cosmos as an organism of ideas or ideal patterns that harmoniously combine cosmic forces or form the primary matter and primary energy, the “foremother” of being. In the labor and economic process, science penetrates through the crust and thickness of the chao-cosmos to the ideal cosmos, the cosmos-Sophia. The world then truly appears as a unity, but not in the Canto-Laplacian sense. This unity will be expressed not by the abstract formula of world determinism, but by the organism of ideas, while mechanical unity only reflects it in an overturned and distorted image. This is the ideal limit of scientific knowledge. Chapter 6. Economy as a synthesis of freedom and necessity The cognizing subject (“epistemological”), abstract and lifeless, finds before him an object, or an object of knowledge, and all his activity in relation to this object is exhausted by the function of knowledge, its ideal assimilation in science, which is only one of the activities of a living, concrete subject - man. The same subject, as an active and economic one, not only contemplates an object in front of him, but also feels it outside himself, in alienation from himself. He experiences the object not only as a problem of knowledge (or his ideal boundary), but also as the boundary of his power, of his very being, and therefore strives to push this boundary, to warm the cold and alien object with his subjectivity, to introduce it to his life, to assimilate it in one way or another. And just as the bifurcation and opposition of subject and object justify discursive knowledge, scientific experience, so the bifurcation and opposition of them in action, in life, justify the process between subject and object, i.e., economy. To the extent that an object in an economy is felt as a limit to the power of the subject, to the extent that it expresses necessity and lack of freedom for the subject; to the extent that this boundary is constantly pushed back and removed by the subject, to the extent that his freedom is realized in this. Freedom in the economy has as its object necessity, that is, its opposite. In action, in economics, the synthetic unity of these two principles is realized, which, taken separately, exclude each other. Similarly, the inert and shapeless mass of stone or marble is the material for the implementation of a sculptural or architectural plan, for the embodiment of ideal forms. So the light of knowledge and consciousness lights up in the darkness of ignorance and in the darkness of unconsciousness, overcoming them. And in a similar way, necessity constitutes the constant substrate of freedom, its foundation, allowing freedom to triumph over itself. The question of the synthesis of freedom and necessity as the basis and essence of the economic process, as its foundation, and together with its task, needs clarification. First of all, what is freedom, how to understand it? To correctly pose this question, it is necessary to completely eliminate the false interpretation of it, in which the whole question is considered only in relation to scientific determinism, to the idea of ​​a mechanical, causal law. When the question is posed in this way, he is given a quick trial, but not a right one; it is the concept of freedom that, without much discussion, is thrown overboard as “unscientific”, and, of course, quite rightly. Freedom, indeed, is an unscientific, extra-scientific, if you will, super-scientific (although not anti-scientific) concept, and, falling into the snares of science, it breaks them and slips out of them, because they are absolutely not intended for such a catch. We know that science is the knowledge of nature as a mechanism, in its pure objectivity, such is its general basis and such is its task. It is obvious that this methodological premise, and the science based on it, will be contradicted by any assumption of a break in the mechanism, or limitation of the sphere of its dominance. Therefore, freedom has no place in science, and this is recognized equally by scientific dogmatists and critics. Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, carefully caulked all the cracks of the edifice of science (“experience”) and examined it from top to bottom to make sure that freedom could not penetrate here. However, even without such a study one could have no doubt that in nature, considered as a pure object of knowledge, therefore, as something external to the subject, as a mechanism, there is absolutely no principle so essentially connected with the subject as freedom. However, it is a mistake to draw from this the usual conclusion for determinists, which today serves as the basis of a “scientific worldview”, that is, it does not follow the methodologically conventional foundation of experience, scientific knowledge of phenomena, and does not attach ontological, metaphysical significance (cf. previous chapter). Freedom in this understanding is only non-determinism (or even anti-determinism) and has no positive definition. Its concept is exhausted by the denial of causality, in other words, it is equated with causelessness, absolute occasionalism, dominion sa majesté le hasard 164. And many objections to free will are based on proof of the motivation of any volitional act, while mental causation is equated without further reflection to a natural mechanism 165, and, as such, is not at all reconciled with the recognition of freedom, understood as absolute causelessness. Corresponding examples are also adapted to this understanding, which demonstrate the absurdity of the concept of free will, such as the famous example of Buridan’s donkey, dying of hunger between two haystacks in the powerlessness to make a free, i.e. unmotivated choice, to prefer one of them. Even Kant sinned against the philosophical concept of freedom, allowing such a closedness of experience, the mechanism of phenomena, in which all subjectively free actions could be calculated in advance using the mathematical formula of the world. He equated the feeling of freedom of human action with the self-awareness of a spinning spit, if it had this self-consciousness (and the whole point of this comparison is in its absurdity and contradictoriness: a spit that recognizes its own rotation as its own is no longer a spit). However, the greater credit should be given to Kant for his doctrine of intelligible freedom (so highly valued by Schopenhauer). According to Kant's well-known prejudice about the impossibility of metaphysics, this undoubtedly metaphysical doctrine is expounded by him in the Critique of Practical Reason. A negative understanding of freedom as non-determinism, causelessness or absolute occasionalism places it outside the world, in the extra-worldly emptiness of non-existence, and in such an interpretation, of course, it is easy for supporters of determinism to cope with it. Meanwhile, freedom is not only a negative, but also a positive concept. Freedom is not uncausality, but self-causality, the ability to act from oneself (a se, hence the dissonant but convenient expression aseism), to begin causality from oneself, to refract the causal relationship in one’s own way and thereby violate the principle of the universal mechanism. Freedom is a special type of causality, the ability to cause in the precise sense of the word. Therefore, the problem of freedom and necessity does not belong to the phenomenal-empirical world and can be correctly posed only outside the boundaries of scientific determinism. Causality has a dual character: it can be causality through freedom and through mechanism, therefore in fact being a combination of freedom and necessity 166. Freedom, or the ability to self-causality, aseism, constitutes a necessary attribute of living beings, while necessity is a mechanism, a lifeless principle. Therefore, empirical causality is only a mask behind which can hide a living face or a numb and in some parts temporarily dead body of the world. The opposition of freedom and necessity from this point of view is the opposition of life and death, living and lifeless. All living things are self-causal (which has direct expression in the ability to spontaneous movements and in the general purposiveness of life), and in this sense, all living things are free. But life itself, and therefore freedom, is a whole rock of gradations. All living things are spontaneous, but real freedom belongs only to the spirit, therefore, to those living beings who are spirit-bearing, that is, to man (the world of disembodied spirits remains outside our field of vision). The ability to self-causality is the will (therefore freedom and free will are synonymous, for the quality of freedom as self-causality belongs only to the will), but the will reaches its full expression only with full self-awareness. Only the individual has fully conscious freedom. Only for the I does the opposition between I and non-I arise for the first time as the boundary of I, freedom and necessity exist not only as a fact, but also enter consciousness. Freedom crowns the personality as a living unity of will and rational consciousness (which are dissected and opposed in Kant’s system). As I, as individuals, we are aware of our freedom, selfhood is freedom, as it is most powerfully expressed in Fichte’s system. And before this direct, living self-evidence of freedom in our consciousness, the assurances of determinism 167 are powerless. The positive expression of freedom lies in individual originality, which determines the self-causality of a given person: in the world chain of mechanical causality, links of an absolutely individual nature are included, thanks to which at given points world causation is refracted in a new way. Here is a causa non aequat effectum 168, and for this aseism there is no mechanical explanation in the past of the universe, but there is something completely new in it. Causality through freedom, conditioned by the self-determination of the individual, is unsearchable and transcendental to mechanical causality, although in its manifestations it enters into the general chain of world causality. Therefore, it is impossible to understand the world only as a mechanism, as representatives of radical determinism (Laplace, partly Kant, etc.) do; it must be understood not only as a machine, but also as a living being. Fibers of freedom are woven into the fabric of world necessity, and they destroy its integrity and continuity. Therefore, reality is not a mechanism (which expresses only one side of being), but history, that is, something, although coherent, is also individual, although similar in its individual parts, but absolutely not repeated in anything. And it is causality through freedom that makes it such. However, mechanical determinism turns out to be unsatisfactory even from the point of view of the law of causality: polysemy of causes is possible, in other words, a given effect can be equally produced by different combinations of causes, and therefore it is impossible to reconstruct an ascending causal series based on it 169 . There is no determinism in the Kant-Laplace sense even within the causally determined world, because even here there is room for different possibilities 170 . However, these shades, already within the limits of determinism, its, so to speak, degree, having enormous methodological significance, do not affect the general opposition of freedom and necessity. In his personality, in his sense of self, a person carries the consciousness of his freedom, individual aseism, his qualitative certainty. This combination of qualitative certainty and, as it were, the givenness of one’s own self, thanks to which it turns, to a certain extent, into an object for oneself (for everyone knows oneself from experience), with the immediate consciousness of one’s self-identity, for which I am one’s own act, leads us to the very depths of being, to that funnel through which the roots of the temporal go into the transtemporal, the eternal. I, as an individual, as the basis of my aseism, am something given to a temporary, developing self, reflecting all the fluctuations of world existence. This timeless, given self determines the temporal self, directly intertwined in the causal chain. This empirical self turns out to be, as it were, derivative, dependent in relation to this primitive self (Kant called it intelligible). Therefore, determinists do not hesitate to include this in the category of mechanical causes, ad majorem scientiae gloriam 171, as an innate character (biological teachings about heredity also help here, and in general the translation of this issue into the language of materialistic naturalism). However, this enrollment would not encounter obstacles only if we did not have an unshakable consciousness that our self is our own act and therefore we are responsible for it. We are like this because we want to be like this. True, our substantial self, grounding and thereby, as it were, limiting the empirical self, takes it out of a state of uncertainty and forces it to self-determination. However, all the time we have the feeling that it is not someone from the outside, but we are limiting ourselves - a fate of our own self is created. This fatalism of the freedom of the self, the feeling of freedom as a necessity (the basis of tragedy), can be understood as self-evidence of the nature of our self, which is truly a matter of our free self-determination: the creation of us as free beings as such and not others was not without our consent, the creation was at the same time our self-creation. God, as a perfect and absolute Person, as Freedom itself, out of His love, wanted to honor man in His image, that is, with freedom, and therefore freedom is included in the plan of the universe as its basis. The act of creation therefore necessarily includes the freedom of self-determination of man; here the creative act of Divine omnipotence is combined with the free acceptance and assimilation of this act on the part of the creature. Freedom as aceism is an irreducible moment of creation 172. This unity of creatureliness and self-creation, divine power and human aseism, of course, is inexplicable and inexplicable for the discursive mind, which thinks only according to the schemes of causality. It is clear that this act, which lies at the basis of our entire self-consciousness, cannot at the same time become its subject. But it must be postulated by reason, because our consciousness rests on it as its basis and our immediate feeling tells us about it. The roots of consciousness, that from which its light will be born, remain forever outside this consciousness, immersed in darkness, but the very connection with its basis is experienced by consciousness, which is why the existence of the basis can be established, albeit indirectly. The roots of our empirical personality, developing in time, are laid in timeless being, in that creative and at the same time self-creative act by which we are called to being and to time. We do not enter the world as a tabula rasa 173 neither in the metaphysical nor in the empirical sense, no, we enter it as qualitatively defined individuals. If this self-determination is not final and leaves room for temporary, empirical self-creation, then the roots of being still remain in the realm of the timeless and transcendental. Man exists not by his own power, but by the will of God; not only the origin, but also the continuing existence of creatures is a continuous creative act 174. “Everyone expects You to give them their food in due time. You give it to them, they accept it; You open Your hand - they are satisfied with good; if you hide your face, they are troubled; you take away their spirit - they die and return to their dust; You send Your spirit, they are created, and You renew the face of the earth” (Ps. III, 28-30). Man is a creation in the sense that he realizes within himself God’s thought about him. As a qualitatively defined personality, he embodies a creative idea, has within himself a known ideal task, and exists from eternity as a representation of God. Our ideal images (guardian angels present in every person) exist from eternity in the spiritual world, and we realize in ourselves through our lives their likeness, and through this - by virtue of our freedom - we become like them or move away from them. These ideas about us are given, and, as given, they constitute the beginning of a metaphysical necessity in us, as our basis and nature. We did not determine it ourselves, but God designed and willed us as such, calling us out of non-existence. We are creatures, like all creation, like animals and plants. Only God is a self-created being, exists by His power, has His foundation in Himself, but the foundation of our existence in its qualitative certainty is not in us, but in God. But God realizes His thought about us at the beginning of freedom. Calling qualitatively defined souls to life, creating these souls, He allowed them to take part in the creation of themselves, being determined by a free act in their individually qualified existence. The implementation of an idea based on freedom allows for different possibilities or modes. As elements of the Divine fullness, the intelligible world (κόσμος νοητός), all human ideas-individuals, qualitatively defined and therefore different from each other, are attached to their eternal identity in the synthetic unity of the Divine Sophia. They are equal or equivalent to each other, just as different equivalents are equal, as different points on a circle are equivalent, although they all have qualitative certainty due to their position in the circle. The act of freedom and self-creativity introduces qualitative differences into them not only in purpose, but also in existence, for in it individuals perceive and embody their idea, their ideal task in their own way, differentiate their ideal being modally, so to speak, according to the intensity of the implementation of the idea: “star differs from star in glory.” Therefore, people will be born different, because their souls are different, created beings, but free already in the act of birth (of course, this must be understood here in the sense of not a temporal succession, but an ontological relationship). The essence of this act of freedom is inexplicable, because it is causeless, and to explain - in the language of discursive thought - means to reduce it to causes, to previous links in the phenomenal chain; here this chain is just beginning and we are dealing with the absolute self-causality of the will 175. The doctrine of the ideal pre-existence of man in God, like Sophia, and of his creation on the basis of freedom is laid down in the deepest foundations of Christian philosophy. But it makes its way already in the ancient world - in Plato (in whom, however, it is not sufficiently distinguished from the teaching about the reincarnation of souls, about metempsychosis, which has nothing in common with it) and, with complete philosophical clarity, in Plotinus. In Christian speculation, it receives clear expression in the works of Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, in I. Sk. Erigene, in the mystical theology of Jacob Boehme and Fr. Baader; modern philosophy owes the discovery of this idea most of all to the profundity of Schelling (extensive quotations from his treatise on freedom, given in the footnote, characterize his point of view), and Vl. joins him here. Soloviev. It is curious that Kant, despite all his rationalism, comes close to this same teaching in his doctrine of intelligible free will, which Schopenhauer so highly values ​​and emphasizes. Finding no place for freedom in the scientific determinism of one’s “experience.” Kant places it in the noumenal region of “things in themselves” and teaches that empirical character is determined by a free, timeless, super-experiential, intelligible act, and is a matter of “intelligible” freedom. In connection with this stands another equally profound and significant teaching of Kant, namely, “radical evil” in human nature, as an act of his freedom. II. Freedom and Necessity So, the “intelligible” nature of the individual is freedom. The person realizes the divine theme of his existence on the basis of freedom. Here we will not explore the various possibilities inherent in this freedom and revealed in history, with its basic antinomianism, with the confrontation of two aspirations, for this already relates to the eschatology of the economy. For now, it is enough to establish the meaning of freedom as self-causality, or as an independent type of causality, namely, causality through freedom. In the bifurcation of the world into subject and object, which underlies knowledge and economy, the subject, as a bearer of freedom, is a qualified, specific energy, and the general relationship of subject-object in each particular case is determined in its own way, depending on the properties of this particular subject. Here is the source of inevitable “subjectivism” (or, as is now usually expressed, “psychologism”) in the subject, that smell of individuality that modern epistemologists are trying with all their might to exterminate. Every self, as free by nature, is individual, concrete, and unique. And if clarity as a sign of personality and freedom are identical, then we can say that the subject is a representative of the beginning of concrete clarity, but not the abstract and universal I - for I does not lend itself to abstraction and does not allow itself to be taken out of brackets. I exists not as a generic, but as an individual, specific one. The universality of the self, their real unity and homogeneity, the merging of individuals into humanity, is based not on their imaginary abstract, generic identity, but on their real participation in a single whole, of which they are individual aspects. And they come together not through this principium individuationis, the beginning of isolation and mutual impenetrability, not through this naked self with an inevitable tendency towards solipsism (in this sense, Leibniz’s expression about monads that they have no windows can be applied to me), but through their common basis, common content. I, as an isolating principle, is conquered not in the subject, not in the self, but in the object, in the basis, where the subject, without losing its qualitative certainty, ceases to feel itself as a boundary, as isolation, but, on the contrary, experiences itself as universality through communion with a single essence - the Divine Sophia, ideal humanity. The evil fire of selfishness goes out, engulfed in the flame of world love. Concrete clarity is not only consciousness, but also will and energy. The nature of freedom is not passive, but actual, effective. Freedom wants to be power; it has no limitations in itself; the property of will is infinity. She is absolute thirst, she wants everything and therefore goes beyond any given limit. And this nature of freedom is the same both in the absolute and in the relative, created being. The Creator honored the crown of His creation, to the extent that it rose in man to spirituality, that is, to personality. In its own way of unlimited existence. As bearers of freedom, people are gods, beings potentially destined for deification, capable of pouring into the ocean of Divine existence, and only the like and the same nature can merge and unite. Therefore, nature is united with God only in man and through man as a natural-supernatural being. And without the presence in the world of this form of deity, the human personality, the very incarnation of God, this most intimate union of the Creator with creation, and together with the deification of the world, would have been impossible, for only through freedom could the Divine Logos enter nature and become Jesus Christ, the God-man and God in nature. Outside of this path, without this bridge, only the possibility of external mechanical-magical influence on nature would remain; only Divine power would be revealed, capable of creating and re-creating the world, but not that divine love that is revealed in self-abasement, in condescension to created nature, in the incarnation of God in man, and through him into the natural world. Created nature would not have been able to accept and contain the Incontainable One in its manger if the freedom of this nature had not previously said: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to Thy word” and thus opened its womb for the incarnation of God. From the side of the formal infinity of his consciousness and his freedom, man is divine, he wants to be everything to everything. But his freedom, as active energy, as power, has no relation whatsoever to this self-consciousness, with its absolute striving, this mysterious, hieratic potential, which is both memory and prophecy. Having the ability to want infinitely much, each individual person can want infinitely little. The limit of freedom as power is necessity. The object, as an expression of necessity, is hostile to the subject, the bearer of freedom, and an otherness alien to it. But thanks to the existence of this boundary, freedom is recognized in its originality; only in its opposition to necessity does it become conscious and reflective, entering into open struggle with it. This polarization of freedom and necessity does not exist only where their opposition and mutual limitation do not exist. It does not exist in all inanimate nature, and only in a vague form does it appear in living beings, in “groaning and tormented creatures.” It cannot exist in the Absolute either. The freedom of the Absolute has no boundaries and therefore coincides with absolute necessity: God wants only what he can, and can do everything he wants or what he can want. Wanting and becoming merge here in one act, the freedom of wanting already carries within itself a sufficient basis and necessity for its implementation, and both merge and mutually cover to such an extent that they become absolutely indistinguishable and cease to exist in their separateness and opposition. The concept of divine freedom and omnipotence, obviously, does not at all allow for that purely negative interpretation that is given to the concept of freedom in scientific determinism, as absolute occasionalism and self-will of causelessness. There is nothing more opposite to Divine omnipotence than this occasionalism of self-will, according to which God can will absolutely everything that a created limited mind can invent for his will. All sorts of pitiful and extravagant ideas associated with our depravity and limitation obviously cannot constitute the object of divine will, for this very idea: to attribute relative and limited desires to the Absolute and Unlimited Being, to equate the whole with fractions, contains an obvious contradiction, and this task disintegrates from internal inconsistency before it can be posed. And, however, this impossibility in the eyes of some clever people is interpreted as a limitation of the omnipotence of God: it turns out that God is not omnipotent, because He cannot want evil, vulgarity, stupidity, in general, everything that the idle heads of these questioners can invent. Divine freedom is diametrically opposed to occasionalism, this inverted determinism; it is at the same time the most absolute necessity. God wants only one thing that is consistent with His nature; His wisdom, His goodness and His love, which justify the need for His self-revelation in the universe. Divine freedom is not a negative, but a positive concept; God can want only one thing - Good, and be only one thing - Love. And if God is Love, then He cannot will that which is not love or is not completely love. He wants the maximum and in the form of maximum perfection. The omnipotence of God cannot be understood in such a way as to attribute to it the whims of a willful despotic being; but it means that, as the Creator of everything, He has no limit to His power in all of this, except for the one He sets for Himself with His Love, leaving room in creation for the freedom of the creature, limiting itself with it, voluntarily self-deprecating, in the name of free love 176. Therefore, absolute free will is a holy will, and the highest freedom consists in submission to some holy necessity (Schelling). But if at the center of being necessity is covered by freedom, then at its periphery their relationship turns out to be completely different. To the extent that created being is affirmed as private, special, peripheral, decentralized, it feels its freedom limited and more ideal than real. An inevitable conflict between freedom and necessity arises in created consciousness, and the concept of history is established by the presence of this conflict. Freedom turns out to be bound and limited by necessity. The subject here is opposed to the object and, moreover, not only ideally, theoretically, but also realistically, vitally. The subject lives in an object that does not take into account his will, his freedom. This object is for him a deaf and blind force of necessity, moira, fate, and, moreover, the fate not of divine Will, but of mechanical necessity, dead and inert matter, about which one can neither be angry nor complain. At the same time, the subject is immersed in this object, freedom is closely fused with necessity, so much so that they can only be distinguished in philosophical analysis. The concrete subject himself not only resists necessity, but accepts it within himself. As an empirical personality, he is created to a certain extent by this same object, that is, by necessity, and to that extent he does not belong to himself, is not his own creation (like Fichte’s self), for in himself, in his self-consciousness, he accepted and contained and constantly accepts and accommodates the object as necessity. The empirical self becomes a form in which it is recognized as its own, as obvious, that which is given to me by necessity, received from the environment. Personality, as a living synthesis of subject and object, therefore represents a completely indivisible conglomerate of freedom and necessity, I and not-I. Moreover, both of these principles are not in a state of balance and rest, but in constant fluctuation, in movement, in struggle, and in this interaction, I and not-I, is the content of life: I lives not only in myself and by myself, but in the world and by the world. Only God has everything in Himself and nothing outside Himself, therefore the object does not exist for Him, more precisely, it is covered by its absolute identity with the subject, it eternally exists in a single cognitive-volitional act, in which the existence of the world is grounded. In creation, in this created world, subjects, the centers of consciousness of the world, inevitably find in themselves an object, a non-self, existing outside the subject as a necessity. On this basis, stating the power of necessity over a subject conscious of his freedom, it is easy to draw a conclusion about the illusory nature, about the non-existence of this freedom, and to declare the personality entirely a product of necessity. This is what all deterministic teachings do, denying freedom in the sense of aseism and considering personality as a reflex or the sum of various causes and influences, as a special mechanism. In these teachings, the subject is explained by the object, while in reality, on the contrary, the object is posited by the subject, and in the subject (insofar as Fichte was right) we are directly given clarity and freedom, a living sense of force, 177 and only in relation to it is the inanimate and inert object determined. Identity is completely inexplicable deterministically, from an absolute object, other than by a dogmatic and unprovable assertion that the consciousness of the self is an epiphenomenon of material processes or a secretion of the brain (the formula is naive and crude, but frank). In deterministic theories, all the originality of the problem of the relationship between freedom and necessity is destroyed by eliminating an entire half of it. The problem lies precisely in how to understand this unity of freedom and necessity, clarity and non-statement. Outside of this unity, life is unthinkable, and only if you cross it out and consider everything as inanimate and mechanical, can you defend the correctness of the determinists, but with this fantastic fiction there will be, first of all, no place for them themselves with their science, with their knowledge, with their statements and volitional aspirations. The question, it seems to us, can be resolved this way. Concrete clarity is not a passively contemplative, but an actual, active principle, a qualified will. Therefore, it accepts the non-self not like an empty room with open windows and open doors, and not like a blank sheet of paper on which all sorts of writing can be inscribed in any way, it refracts the incoming non-self in its own way. Therefore, the same non-self in different selves is reflected and refracted differently and, of course, in a unique way: this reflection is not only numerically different, but also qualitatively not identical. We can say that if there are no identical selves, then there are no identical not-selves, in other words, a specific not-self is individual, just like I am. The non-self becomes the arena for the exercise of the freedom of the self, its object or possibility. It reveals the qualitative certainty of the self, its aseism. That is why we know ourselves only through life experience. Freedom is inseparable from the self, it cannot be lost by a living person, for it is the very essence of the self, its very nature (as was shown to Fichte). And all those definitions that I receive are necessarily the essence of his volitional, personal self-definitions. However, opponents of freedom object, everything happens according to motives and, therefore, with psychological compulsion or necessity, and man is a product of his environment, I am a product of not-me. This statement is both true and false. It is indisputable that every empirical personality, as a subject in an object, is a product of the environment, since the influence of an object that lies outside us and our will is manifested in it and on it. No matter how we think about this dependence, the specific filling of the subject with the object, the world, determines the content of the subject, not only his passive receptivity, but also the activity of his mind, the work of feeling, the tension of will. And insofar as this or that set of impressions or a piece of the world falls to the lot of a given subject, to that extent it predetermines his lot in life. Of course, here there remains a further question whether this predestination, this confinement of a given personality to a given environment does not also allow for a metaphysical explanation - namely, whether it is possible to assume some correspondence between the free self-determination or self-consciousness of the personality in timelessness and its empirical destiny in temporary life. For whom the world seems to have an internal, supra-temporal coherence, for whom the connection of things is not exhausted by mechanical causality, it is necessary to metaphysically postulate this connection and this correspondence. Man, as an intelligible timeless being, by an act of his freedom determines himself to his empirical existence, and the spirit chooses and creates for itself a physical and historical body. And first of all, of course, the connection between fathers and children, the power of heredity, can in no way be considered a fact that has only empirical foundations, explained only by the mechanical linkage of causes and effects, but is necessarily rooted in the intelligible world. However, no matter how plausible this connection may be, no matter how probable it may seem that man, as an intelligible being, is the cause of himself as an empirical being, this mutual correspondence, in essence, remains only a metaphysical postulate; the immediate disclosure of this connection is impossible, for it takes us into the realm of the transcendental. Therefore, it would be very unfavorable for the philosophical defense of freedom against militant determinism if it could rely only on this more or less problematic postulate. But freedom gives much more direct evidence of itself, which no one can weaken. This is its self-evidence in our self-awareness. Determinism could be right only if our self were not living, but dead, and this assumption contains a contradictio in adjecto, for self-ness is life. I perceives the world not as an empty place, but as a concrete, qualitatively defined subject. And all decisions, no matter how forcefully they are imposed from the outside by the object, it accepts as its decisions, as its self-determinations, and they are, indeed, such, for in them its qualitative certainty, its aseism, is manifested. There are no two completely identical decisions or actions, even if external circumstances are similar. Actions and decisions are always causally determined or motivated, this is a fact, but this is not mechanical, but psychological causality, which is established with the participation of the subject’s free decision. Science with its theories of mechanical determinism does not penetrate at all into this laboratory of the will, where decisions are made, where they are created. The embryology of actions, volitional self-determinations remains completely outside the field of scientific observation, which knows only pure objectivity, remains outside the boundaries of experience. Only decisions made enter into experience, just as thoughts that are only born and already formed emerge into consciousness, as if flashing out of the darkness or rising outward from an opaque depth. All decisions already made are indeed motivated, that is, they are causally justified, but they will be born from the depths of freedom. Therefore, free will itself remains transcendental, inaccessible to scientific experience, which knows only events, already accomplished facts. In a volitional act, in a decision made under the pressure of an object, but subjectively, an act of unity of subject-object is accomplished, their identification, which is what life in general is, and it does not lend itself to rationalistic definition. This is a synthetic unity of freedom and necessity - not freedom and not necessity, but their living synthesis, which is given by life. Further, this fact can no longer be rationalized and decomposed. What happens in it is something completely unique; it cannot be expressed in terms of freedom alone or necessity alone. But this unity of subject and object, freedom and necessity in the life act can receive different intensities and forms, which express the general range of life, its impulse and power. Freedom is expressed in creativity, different from the dead mechanism of things, and to that extent participates in the creation of the world, or rather, the transformation of the world. It is, of course, not omnipotence, the ability to create from nothing, it is limited, but at the same time this limitation of it does not at all reduce it to just a special type of mechanical causality. Where there is life and freedom, there is a place for new creativity, causal automatism is already excluded, which follows from a definite and unchangeable structure of the world mechanism, running like a wound clock. Every personality, no matter how weak it may be, is something absolutely new in the world, a new element in nature. Each person is, in a sense, the artist of his own life, drawing strength and inspiration from himself. Therefore, dead determinism, based on the assumption of a limited number of causal elements and their combinations, has no place in history. Therefore, as we already know, there cannot be a theory of history a priori, that is, constructed on the basis of a certain number of causal elements. History is created in the same way as individual life is created. And since all creativity is conditioned by exertion of will and labor, we can say that creativity and freedom are most clearly imprinted in the ability to work. The ability to work consciously, systematically, creatively belongs to free beings, that is, only to humans. A machine only transforms force, an animal works most often under compulsion and without a goal or obeys instinct, only a person works quite consciously, and human labor is a completely special, incomparable force of nature. The work of mankind, considered as a coherent whole, is human history. How is human history possible? What are its a priori preconditions? As we already know (Chapter IV), the “deduction of the concept of history” (in Schelling’s words) requires the presence of a transcendental subject of history, or the unity of the human race, making one history, synthesizing its work in it and having the ability for continuity, or tradition. Freedom is not fragmented, decentralized, completely illegal and therefore wasted energy; on the contrary, it must be introduced into the solid shores of necessity in order to serve the revelation of a single plan. History must “represent a combination of freedom and necessity and is possible only on the basis of such a connection” 178. Freedom is the general basis of the creative process, while necessity determines the framework of this process and, to that extent, predetermines freedom and directs its path. Both for an individual person and for historical humanity, necessity exists as a law of his own life. This predetermination has an ontological character; it is, as it were, an analytical revelation through freedom of what is contained only in the embryo, but which already exists in potency. The world soul, before its pre-mundane Fall and after it, with all its, albeit disorganized, potentialities - this is the true pattern of history, in which everything in the world is timeless, and therefore all the historical destinies of mankind are predetermined. For God, man with the hidden possibilities and forces of history is completely transparent, and it is thanks to this that the outcome of history is guaranteed to correspond to the divine plan. Freedom extends only to the course of the historical process, but not to its outcome. The providence of God, leading man through necessity, is therefore the highest law of history 179. Only with this recognition of the historical world order, the supra-historical pattern of history, can we talk about the meaning of history and its tasks, build a philosophy of history and eschatology, and the Apocalypse becomes possible, a revelation not only about the past, but also about the future, “which must soon happen” (Apocalypse I, 1). And yet this metaphysical determinism does not abolish, but, on the contrary, presupposes freedom as the basis of history. History is imprinted with spirit, that is, with freedom. The spirit of history, the spirit of the times, is not a figurative expression, but a genuine reality. In its depths, history is created by the spirit and in the spirit, for only causality through freedom determines the uniqueness of history. Moreover, the stamp of creativity and freedom lies equally on all its sides. It is impossible to single out any particular aspect of history as a pure mechanism and attribute automatism to it. Due to the unity and coherence of life, such a separation of individual aspects of history cannot even exist (otherwise only in abstraction), although it seems that in some aspects of life a person is freer than in others. But freedom cannot exist more or less: either it exists or it doesn’t—either mechanism and automatism, or living creativity, and one cannot even ask about the amount of freedom and necessity in each particular case or about the proportion in which they are mixed. Therefore, economics - both in the broad and narrow political-economic sense - is also creativity, a synthesis of freedom and necessity. If necessity appears here clearly, as an iron law weighing on life, then freedom, man’s creative attitude to work, with the presence of different possibilities in it, albeit within this iron ring, is also irreducible from the concept of economy. The widespread idea that the economy is a realm of mere necessity, a realm of mechanical law, arose mainly due to the influence of political economy with its conditional stylization of economic reality (for this see Chapter VIII). We must emphasize with particular energy the truth to which, with its scientific maturity, political economy also comes: the economy, considered as creativity, is also a psychological phenomenon, or, to put it even more specifically, the economy is a phenomenon of spiritual life to the same extent as all other aspects of human activity and labor. The spirit of economy (for example, the “spirit of capitalism”, about which much is now written, and, moreover, by such outstanding representatives of economic science as Sombart and Max Weber) is, again, not a fiction, not an image, but a historical reality. Every economic era has its own spirit and, in turn, is the product of this spirit, each economic era has its own special type of “economic man”, generated by the spirit of the economy, and declaring it a “reflex” of given economic relations is possible only with the logical fetishism into which political economy involuntarily falls when it considers the economy, the development of productive forces, various economic organizations through the prism of abstract categories, outside of their historical concreteness. In this sense, political economy needs an infusion of real realism, which necessarily includes both “causality through freedom” and historical psychologism, which is able to notice the spiritual atmosphere of a given era. Understanding the economy as a phenomenon of spiritual life opens the eyes to the psychology of economic eras and the significance of changing economic worldviews. He also puts forward an extremely important problem not only of a scientific, but also of a practical nature - namely, about the importance of the individual in the economy 180. Understanding economy as creativity, which gives room to freedom, also leads to problems of ethics of economy and its eschatology; it is only this that makes these problems possible, the study of which remains to be explored in further parts of this work. IV. Freedom as power, necessity as weakness Freedom and necessity are synthesized in creativity, but, to the extent that they are recognized in their polarity, they are opposed as conjugate and at the same time repulsive members of the antinomy. Life is antinomic, but thought cannot stand antinomies, stumbles over them, feels in them a limit for itself that it does not have to overcome, but only state. Life cannot be completely rationalized, and in the antinomies of reason lies the limit to human rationalism. Transcende te ipsum, surpass yourself, or humble yourself and admit the limitations and weakness of reason before the mystery of life, this is what the conscious antinomianism of thinking says to discursive self-consciousness. Therefore, rational antinomy or logical impossibility is by no means always a vital impossibility, and antinomies, being logically impenetrable to discursive reason, can have paramount practical significance, being resolved into movement, into “bad infinity,” into the desire for a obviously unattainable “ideal.” Such a turn in the idea of ​​antinomies was already indicated by Kant, who tried in this way to remove the poisonous tooth of theoretical doubt, and among Kant’s antinomies there is also the antinomy of freedom and necessity that interests us, which everyone finds in his immediate consciousness and as the opposite of the limitless power of his will and the weakness of his action. Freedom and necessity mutually reflect on each other precisely by their antinomic conjugacy and characterize human existence in temporality, in discourse. One can be above or below this opposition, which is removed only with the abolition of this discourse and with the cessation of the entire temporal process. In the Divine, for whom freedom coincides with necessity and everything is covered by a single act of will, there is, strictly speaking, neither freedom nor necessity in our human sense. The opposite pole is located beyond life, in pure corpsehood, in undivided objectivity. The consciousness of freedom ignites in the soul only through the feeling of its limitations, just as for self-knowledge of the self in Fichte’s system, a detour through the non-self is required, by which only it achieves full consciousness of its self-ness. Freedom strives to cross any given boundary set by necessity, for the absoluteness and limitlessness of striving is its nature, this is the very fire of life that kindled the “wheel of being” (τροχòς της γενέσεως) of the ancients. And overcoming this border - not ideally, but realistically, not in a claim, but in reality - is accomplished in the labor, economic implementation of the subject in the object. In this sense, necessity is an indefinitely expanding basis of freedom. In the economic sphere, on the side of the object there is natural “poverty”, dependence on the blind and hostile elements of nature, on the side of the subject there is the growth of “wealth”, “development of productive forces”. Wealth is power, plus on the side of the subject, poverty is weakness, plus on the side of the object. An object in the economic sense is for the subject a concrete real non-I, of course, not freely posited by the act of I, but forcibly imposed on him, not self-restraint, but limitation. The subject, the owner, strives to ensure that the world, the object of the economy, becomes transparent to the subject, surrenders to his will, from a mechanism becomes an organism, which is an ideal image of balance, the neutralization of freedom and necessity: by extending my hand, I perform a mechanically determined act, but I do not recognize it as such, in my consciousness this movement is free, but at the same time a real, objective action, and our body in this sense is of great fundamental importance, because in it it is objectively reconciled the antinomy of freedom and necessity, albeit in a limited area. For us, our body is a subjectified object or objectified subjectivity (albeit located, however, in an unstable balance, which is easily disturbed by illness, death, and in general the comparative independence of the body from the spirit). Man strives to achieve economic freedom, to power over nature alienated from him, to economic power or “wealth.” He tries either to spell this nature with the spell of magic, to subjugate it to magic, witchcraft, or through science he strives to conquer it. No matter how different ancient magic and the science that replaced it are in their methods and general premises, they are identical in this task. In both cases, man strives to achieve power over nature, and what magic gave him with its occult methods of penetrating into the “elementals” of nature, the same is given by exact science, using number and measure instead of spells, mathematizing natural science, and through it nature itself. Both magic and science are alike in these endeavors. And the ancient magicians in this sense are the scientists of their time, and, conversely, now scientists master the magic of science. Economic freedom, overcoming an object as a mechanism alien to life, is a power based on knowledge. Adam could only give names to all animals because he intuitively knew them and had within himself a cryptogram of all creation. Knowledge is self-knowledge and self-awareness of the world in man. Here it is appropriate to apply the well-known formula of German idealism, so unsuccessfully picked up in Marxism, namely, that freedom is a recognized necessity. Freedom and necessity and their polar separation are removed only where power corresponds to will, and this occurs only to the extent that economic power increases. This economic freedom or power obviously does not concern the very content of desire. A person can want different things: in his desire he can be both higher and lower than himself, serve God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, he exercises his spiritual freedom in this. But as an embodied spirit, therefore, inextricably linked with the world and possessing the ability to act in it, it also needs economic freedom or power and is capable of having it. In the limit, a person can want everything and be able to do everything: he can be the likeness of God and participate in the “cultivation of Eden,” and he can corrupt the earth, becoming only “flesh,” like pre-Flood humanity, or become an instrument of the devil in his man-god and world-god detachment from God. Power is only a means for freedom and an instrument of freedom. But this freedom itself can neither be reduced nor increased by anyone or anything: it is always characteristic of man, as the image of God in him. “You were created neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, O man! For you yourself must, according to your will and to your honor, be your own artist and architect and create yourself from the material peculiar to you. You are free to descend to the lowest level of animality. But you can also rise to the higher realms of the divine. You can be whatever you want! 181 "These are the words the inspired Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola admonishes the new man in his speech “On the Dignity of Man.” Chapter 7. The limits of social determinism I. Social Science Style The understanding of life as a constantly occurring synthesis of freedom and necessity, like creativity or history, collides with the sociological determinism that is so widespread these days, for which human life appears to be a mechanism of cause and effect, and history is viewed as a region of the exclusive dominance of unchanging laws. Its progress is similar to a clockwork wound in advance, and on this basis, scientific predictions of the future, “forecasts” based on the calculation of causes and effects, are possible (if not in fact, then in principle); sociology is thus equated with imperfect or unfinished astronomy or, more broadly, with “mathematical natural science” in general. This sociologism, generated by the scientific thought of the 19th century, received its most radical expression in two influential movements of social philosophy: in Comtism and Marxism 182, and in the field of statistics - in radical queletism. The problem of freedom and necessity 183, creativity and mechanism, in social science is currently posed extremely acutely, and it is necessary to unravel it one way or another. For us, this question is resolved in favor of freedom and creativity, therefore, against sociological determinism, already on the basis of the above-developed judgments about the nature of science, but special considerations about social science should be added to them. Social science, like any science in general, is rooted in practical need, in the need for orientation for the purpose of practical action. If there are areas of scientific knowledge where its pragmatic roots lie, one might say, on the surface, then social science and, in particular, the entire group of economic sciences undoubtedly belong to them. The need for social action generated by the socio-economic development of the 19th century necessarily led to the development of the social sciences observed today. The instrumental, indicative, technical nature of these sciences is so obvious that many even have a natural doubt whether a branch of knowledge in which the interests of practice and issues of social behavior so clearly outweigh and absorb the interests of scientific theory can be considered a science. Moreover, the very soil of scientific research here is so shaky that it can only tolerate temporary, easily erected, but also constantly demolished buildings; Social science has to this day remain in a defensive position, defending its very right to exist as a science (this is where, perhaps, these hasty attempts to put sociology on a natural scientific basis and thereby calm both one’s own and others’ doubts regarding its scientific existence will be born). However, whatever the current state of social science, in its pragmatism, perhaps only more frank than other sciences, it does not differ from them; it is the youngest daughter of its mother and has inherited both strengths and weaknesses from her. In order to assert its right to exist against the skeptics, social science, in addition to its practical suitability or usefulness, must also establish its own, sufficiently defined subject of study and have appropriate methods. Does social science have such a subject, or, better yet, does it know how to find and establish it, and does it have the appropriate methods to do so? In our opinion, this question should be answered in the affirmative: yes, social science has its own subject of research - this is social life in its originality and originality. In many cases, the birth of a new science is directly related to the discovery of its object, which is inaccessible to ordinary observation and requires either special conditions (for example, laboratory experimentation) or special instruments that refine and sharpen our senses, such as a microscope, a telescope, and measuring instruments. A similar discovery of a special object of social science - the social environment or the social body - was the establishment of the fact that there is a special supra-individual or super-individual environment that refracts rays in its own way, having its own special nature and pattern. The amazement and even stupor that gripped Quetelet (and earlier Süssmilch) after his discovery of the statistical uniformities of social life, which have since been diligently developed in various manifestations, have not yet completely passed 184. Political economy encountered a similar super-individual environment - the element of capitalism, bending the lives of individuals in its own way - even earlier. For a whole century, social telescopes, microscopes, and measuring instruments have been aimed at the social body, and numerous social laboratories have worked and are working on its study in universities, scientific institutes, statistical institutions, etc. And it would be unnecessary labor at the present time to prove that the social body exists, has a certain structure and fabric, and if it was not noticed before, it was only for the same reason that the microscopic world was unknown before the invention of the microscope. There is a social coherence of human actions, the knowledge of which is not exhausted by their individual study or mechanical summation. There is something similar to a social organism (no matter how much this comparison has been abused, it also has a certain validity), and although this social body does not lend itself to the perception of the organs of our immediate senses and hides from them as if in the fourth dimension, it can be felt there with a scientific instrument, and the intangibility of this social body in itself is by no means an argument against its existence. Science is now accustomed to dealing with the invisible and intangible, although, at the same time, completely empirical world. Likewise, the social organism is not at all some kind of intelligible, meta-empirical or metaphysical connection of humanity, but has a completely empirical, scientifically comprehended existence. Its study constitutes the subject of social science in its ramifications. Social science does not take human life in its immediate concrete form, as it is summed up from individual actions, volitional and creative acts of individual individuals, it is completely abstracted from these individuals and their individual existence and examines only what is characteristic of the aggregate of individuals as a whole. Everything individual is extinguished, dies even beyond the threshold of social science, and the echoes of immediate life do not reach there; from there, as if from under a hood, the air is pumped out in advance. The individual exists there not as the creator of life and not as a microcosm, but only as a sociological atom or cell. For example, for a statistician, he is only a unit that receives characteristics from the totality of which it is a part, and it is alternately a potential subject of crime, marriage, mortality, fertility, etc., etc. d.; further, for an economist he is either an “economic man” or a member of a given class, for a “sociologist” he is a member of a given social group, in a word, he is dealt with in social science mercilessly and unceremoniously. She sees in him only a cell of a social body, just as a mathematician recognizes in him only a geometric body, a mathematical quantity. Every science stylizes reality in its own way, and all scientific concepts are products of such deliberate and conscious stylization, and the prototype of scientificity here is indeed the mathematical stylization of reality, with its transformation into the world of geometric bodies and mathematical quantities. A science that is critically constructed and conscious of its nature must certainly know this style or (according to Kant’s expression) the “constitutive” feature of its subject. She definitely asks and answers just as definitely. And just as mathematical formulas “give only what is put into them” 185, so sciences answer only their own questions, are valid only within the limits of their competence, and the source of constant misunderstandings is the insufficient delimitation of areas of competence, accompanied by going beyond its limits. Only with precise and clear observance of the competence of each science is their multiplicity, inextricably linked with their conscious one-sidedness, possible. On the contrary, when the conclusions of special sciences are applied beyond their conventional significance, when they are accepted as unconditional truths about things and life, a whole series of nightmares of a pseudoscientific worldview are generated that hang like a thick cloud over modernity. And one of these nightmares, which Carlyle tried so ardently, although without the necessary logical clarity, to dispel in his literary activity, is social determinism as a special case of mechanical fatalism 186. A special triumph of social science was and is seen, so to speak, in the experimental proof of the lack of freedom of the human will, its mechanical determinism, which likens man to all other things of the external world. The idea of ​​a person as a mechanical automaton, set in motion by the springs of social and any other laws (this modern adaptation of the statue of Condillac and l'homme-machine of La Mettrie), apparently finds the greatest support from social science. In this sense, as is known, the data of Quetelet’s moral statistics in the well-known history of Böckle’s civilization were also interpreted. In general, Marxism with its fatalism of class psychology stands in approximately the same position. The greatest credibility in this regard is, of course, not the controversial - sometimes probable, sometimes fantastic - statements of sociology or political economy, but statistical data with the annual “budget” it establishes for crime, suicide, marriage, even absent-mindedness (the number of letters left without an address). The role of a magic wand here is played by the “law of large numbers”, which in its scientific mathematical basis is also inaccessible to non-mathematicians. Fortunately, we have in our literature a scientific work in which, with mathematical competence and complete clarity, the misunderstanding associated with the “law of large numbers” and leading to the false opinion that statistical law has anything to do with the problem of personality and freedom or lack of free will is dispelled. I mean the insightful study of A. A. Chuprov, “Essays on the Theory of Statistics,” St. Petersburg, 1909, to which I refer the reader interested in this issue. Based on an analysis of data from the theory of probability and a logical study of the problems of social science, A. A. Chuprov establishes that statistics deals with aggregates as a special, independent phenomenon, on the contrary, with “neither probability nor the law of large numbers deals with a single case” (203), and therefore “statistical correctness says nothing at all about the mechanism of will” (270). “The most unlimited freedom is perfectly reconciled with the fact of the stability of the numbers of moral statistics” (273). The same statistical pattern, expressed by the average frequency, can arise from completely different individual events. “By mixing into one mass for the purposes of statistical research the blackest villains with the purest angelic souls, we will get exactly the same statistical picture of stable crime, as if all the persons in question were ordinary, gray people” (278). “Objective probability, which the law of large numbers and statistics deals with, by its very essence has no relation to a single case. It characterizes the connection between “general” causes and their various effects” (339). Leaving aside the features of the studied A.A. Chuprov's statistical method for studying aggregates - this method obviously has a huge future not only in the social sciences, but also in many other areas of knowledge - we emphasize here the main conclusion of this study: the statements of statistics belong to a completely different plane than the one in which we meet the concrete and individual. Is there in nature that average type that expresses this pattern of the totality, with which statistics operates? Is there a subject with average depravity, average marriage rate, average birth rate, average absent-mindedness? Or perhaps this average expresses a law of nature, acting with the inevitability of a physical or compulsory legal law? Obviously not. In my concrete existence, I can be part of any statistical average, I can appear as a unit for “categorical calculation” in any category, remaining myself and not at all approaching all the many different average types. My individuality and this statistical fiction, which is now so readily depicted visually with the help of various figures and cartograms, are on different logical levels and do not touch each other. And this statistical average expresses just as little the pattern of my individual behavior as my weight and height indicate my character. Does this mean that statistics are engaged in “mind games” or clever unnecessary things? Doesn't mean anything. Statistical observations retain their full significance within the limits of a given, definite formulation of the question. The average mortality rate therefore has a serious and, moreover, quite practical application in life insurance, just like the average fire rate in fire insurance, or the average crime rate in prison studies and criminal policy. In general, averages play a huge role in practical life, and “the stability of statistical numbers, their ability to fluctuate from year to year only within certain, limited limits, is an empirically established fact... this is one of the fundamental, although little noticeable, foundations of modern culture” (Chuprov, 249). This stability, which has an explanation in low mobility, which is practically equal to the almost unchanged general conditions of life, does not represent anything mysterious and is a consequence of unchanging or little-changing causes influencing here. “The stability of a statistical number is not a law that determines the course of events, but the result of a confluence of diverse circumstances” 187. But these statistical averages, characterizing general living conditions, should by no means receive individual application. Their meaning is completely indicative and is valid only within limited limits and for a given practical purpose, and therefore to draw any metaphysical conclusions on the issue of free will from here is a colossal misunderstanding, scientific and philosophical, generated by “the unfortunate thought of connecting the fact of statistical regularity with the problem of determinism” (Chuprov, XXXIII). Logical similarities with the method of statistical averages are represented by the so-called sociological generalizations, which tend to logically compress a large number of individual facts in the aggregate, then expressed by relatively simple formulas or “laws.” Although the scientific and practical value of the “laws” hitherto exhibited and now exhibited by sociology is most likely capable of casting doubt on the very existence of this science, nevertheless, considered from the formally logical side, these “laws” (for example, the “law of three states” in Comte, evolution in Spencer, the development of capitalism in Marx) represent a similar type of abstraction, applicable only to the characteristics of aggregates and suitable only for certain purposes and within certain limits, as well as statistical averages. They can express some resultant individual facts, but in no way predetermine these very facts. And the basic concepts of sociology have such a super-individual character in their very logical structure. Let us take for example the concept of class, so beloved in Marxist sociology. What is a class? Is it created by a simple summation of individual psychologies, with each individual expressing the essence of his class in its main properties? But it is hardly possible to defend such an understanding of class, in which the part is equated to the whole, and the individual to the collective, because in essence this would mean nothing more than to believe in the reality of the average statistical subject and, without further discussion, equate him to specific individuals. Obviously, only such an understanding of class remains possible, according to which it is an abstraction, also a kind of average, expressing a pattern for a given aggregate. Class is determined by class interest, that is, by external position in production and the behavior that flows from it. Consequently, class psychology as an individual, strictly speaking, does not exist, and if in Marxism there is constantly confusion or even identification of one and the other, and the sociological point of view is confused with the psychological, ethical and even metaphysical, this is the fruit of the general philosophical obscurity and lack of development of Marxism (cf. Chapter IX). The concept of class is a scheme of social relations, and only a scheme that may be suitable in its field and for its purpose, but loses all meaning and becomes a caricature of itself outside its boundaries. We have a typical example of a misunderstanding regarding the concept of class in the oft-repeated statement that never before in history has an entire class renounced its “interests,” and only individuals can “de-class” (although, of course, even a single case of violation of a natural law is fundamentally enough to overthrow it). Others, objecting to this, try, on the contrary, to find a case when a class behaved contrary to class interests and abandoned them. However, neither supporters nor opponents of this opinion are properly aware of the real meaning of the concepts: class and class interest. Does this interest exist as an a priori, objective norm from which one can deviate or not deviate? What does this affirmation and this denial mean? After all, a class with all its attributes: class interest, class behavior, only exists in the sense of some average resultant of the behavior of individuals considered as a social “totality.” Its concept is not a priori or normative, but a posteriori and empirical, it represents a logical scheme of a certain scientific style, which is characterized by the compression of multiple phenomena into unity, into a “totality”, and expresses a certain probable expectation (of course, ceteris paribus 188) of precisely this and not other behavior. It is quite similar to ordinary statistical expectation, although, of course, it has a much lower degree of accuracy. Therefore, the predetermined class behavior in question simply does not exist, “class interest” in this application of this concept is a logical fetish and at the same time a fiction, and the statement that interests us is simply devoid of any content. It is only true that the behavior of individuals can be considered both as an individual and as social (class, professional, national, state, universal). But to pass off these schemes obtained a posteriori, these empirical generalizations as a theoretically established law operating with “natural”, inevitable necessity, means falling into a logical misunderstanding. – How often does a person become a slave to his own created fetishes 189! Along with the statistical and sociological stylization of reality, in which individual phenomena are compressed together, social science, especially in its special branches, such as political economy, widely uses another method of compressing phenomena and stylizing reality, namely abstracting and isolating study - a conscious and deliberate simplification, and therefore methodological distortion of reality, which science, generally speaking, is not at all afraid of. Every science simplifies reality, putting schematic concepts in place of concreteness with its unexplored complexity and uncertainty. However, this schematism can have different degrees, and with a high degree of abstraction it can lead to obvious fictions (as, for example, in law). By simplifying reality, we make it accessible to logical overcoming through concepts (Rickert). Abstract (or “theoretical”) political economy widely uses, for example, the method of deduction from certain simple provisions that play the role of axioms, but in reality represent such methodological fictions or schemes. With a consistent logical construction (which in itself contains, of course, the possibility of independent errors), some clarification of the meaning of a given “factor” subject to abstract study is achieved. Thanks to this isolating method, only those unique “laws” that political economy knows can be established (cf. Chapter VIII). One cannot object in principle to this method of abstraction and isolation as such. Even if political economy invents non-existent people who do not have a spine, as Ruskin is indignant, it is not a problem if it itself knows and remembers this, and if only on the basis of its conclusions it claims to express its judgments specifically about the spine. Let it be: even the uglier, the better: why does mathematics disfigure reality, creating lines and figures that do not exist anywhere in a pure form, turning the world into geometric bodies, because this logical arbitrariness creates its power within the limits of mathematical judgment wherever and to the extent it penetrates. And for a political economist or sociologist there is no reason not to follow here the mathematician’s technique, which is typical for science in general. Only one thing is necessary: ​​to remember the specific weight of such conclusions and not to exceed their competence. For a certain orientation in the phenomena of life, in a certain respect, even the fiction of “economic man”, developed by political economy, is important, but if you look at life and history through its prism, you get, of course, an ugly and downright wrong idea. The matter then looks as if science, at first only conditionally, methodologically, is abstracted from the existence of the spine in man, and ends up completely beginning to deny it. Drawing the boundary of what is permitted for abstraction in its application is a matter of scientific or, one might even say, scientific-aesthetic tact. II. Sociology and historicism So, the method of abstraction and logical isolation, conscious simplification and stylization of social reality characterizes the way of action of the social sciences. All social sciences are special - there are no special sciences at all, and, in particular, not special, but general social science - “sociology” is more a dream than reality, or various semi-scientific fakes and surrogates are presented as it. Each special science examines social life, obviously, in its own way, from different sides, draws its own special curve on the globe of knowledge, although it may intersect, but does not merge with others. Social sciences are multiple, like science in general, and therefore the patterns they establish are also multiple. But this means that each of them, while expressing some aspect of social life, does not reach its depth, does not exhaust social reality. Each social science, focusing its attention on one side, discards everything else as unimportant for it, but, of course, from the point of view of the fullness of life there is no such distinction and what is unimportant in one respect may turn out to be very significant in another. The living whole of social life does not fall under the scalpel of scientific analysis, just as living nature eludes science, and therefore any claim on the part of social science to exhaust social life to its depth, to scientifically predetermine its course, its “creative evolution,” must be rejected as illegal. Those guiding instructions regarding certain aspects of life that social science gives and which for their field have the character of some predictions, are very approximate, although their practical significance is sometimes enormous 190 . Therefore, by the way, the claims of “scientific” socialism to scientifically predetermine social life and even human history in general, to find the “law of social development” must be rejected as completely uncritical self-exaggeration: ne sutor ultra crepidam 191. But more on that below. The possibility of such an illusion that social science can indeed predetermine social life is based on one tacit premise that establishes the difference between history and sociology. This is precisely the assumption ceteris paribus: these patterns are valid only on the condition that in a given complex of phenomena and causes nothing new occurs that makes the previously established pattern insufficient and unsuitable. Types and laws, static and dynamic, noticeable uniformities in space and time, are based only on the assumption that social science has the main inventory of active social forces, throwing out only the “unimportant”, and that reality is within certain limits monotonous and repeating, and in this sense is natural. The idea of ​​“social physics” or the “natural scientific” method of the social sciences is connected precisely with this methodological premise, and, forgetting about it, sociology falls into unlawful pretension. The laws of social science are not “discovered” by it in nature or in social reality, but they are methodologically introduced here by sociological reason, they are the fundamental principles of sociological knowledge. And Kant’s words that our reason is the legislator of nature, itself puts its lawfulness into it, which is true regarding science in general, and is especially clearly confirmed by the example of social science; through it, a priori, a network of mechanism, immutability and uniformity is thrown over social life, and it acquires in knowledge only that which can be caught in this network. But one cannot take the net itself as a catch and triumphantly shake it as a scientific discovery or a conquest of science, while in reality it is only a tool, a method, and not a result or result. Therefore, social determinism is not a conclusion of social science, but its methodological premise, which determines its very existence. It is natural, therefore, that freedom and creativity find themselves outside the field of vision of social science, and therefore are often completely rejected by its representatives, hypnotized by their own methodology. Human freedom, as creativity, introduces something completely new and individual into social life, which violates the uniformity and general typicality of social life postulated by sociology. In reality, both this uniformity and this typicality is only a fiction that does not correspond at all to concrete reality, so in this sense social science is based on fiction, although, however, in this too it does not differ from other sciences, which also adhere to their methodological conventions. Social reality is not at all the mechanism that sociology knows, but the living creation of history, which is completely swept aside by sociology. Sociology and history logically repel each other, because for sociology there is no history, and for history there is no sociology. However, at the same time, history studies the same social life, albeit one that has already passed or is still ongoing, which sociology also studies. Historical science, turning entirely to the completed past, which is already a completed, ready-made product, does not know freedom and interprets everything according to the law of causality, perceives it in the light of determinism. However, this interpretation, insofar as it means a one-time, non-repeating past in all its originality, still differs from the sociological understanding of history, which even in the past sees predominantly uniform and typical, rather than individual and historical, and therefore the sociological study of history and the so-called. “historical pragmatism,” which establishes a specific causal chain of individual events, are methodologically deeply different from each other. The concrete creativity of life, in which living causality operates, that is, causality through freedom, therefore turns out to be inaccessible to the sociological method, slips out of its network. Here lies the uncrossable boundary of sociology. Therefore, the idea of ​​a “historical law”, a historical prediction 192 is the fruit of a deep misunderstanding, a confusion of different concepts. In practical terms, for the sake of special orientation, it is permissible to equate history with a social mechanism: just as the earth’s surface at short distances can be equated to a horizontal plane without significant damage, so individual deviations can be discarded as insignificant, but it is obvious that such a judgment can only be applied today in relation to tomorrow, but is no longer acceptable in relation to the day after tomorrow. Sociological orientation is valid only within the limits of a given state of affairs, as long as it remains “essentially” unchanged. Living causality, or causality through freedom, is not at all a force that only deviates events from their natural path, from the average or resultant, and which therefore should be classified among the “random causes,” as Quetelet believed, 193 like some “illegal comet in the circle of calculated luminaries.” The contrast between freedom and necessity is not at all captured by the opposition of necessary causes (i.e., corresponding to a given pattern) and random causes (not corresponding to it). Firstly, “random causes” is a contradictory expression and has only a conditional meaning; there are no random causes, all causes are equally necessary. Secondly, the number of random causes in this conventional sense, i.e., going beyond the limits of the pattern established in a given special science and, so to speak, waking up through its too wide sieve, would include not just “free will,” but also a whole series of other, not at all free, but purely mechanical causes. The contrast between freedom and necessity refers not to the classification of different categories of causes, according to their relation to a given pattern, but to the very method of causing, in one case mechanical, causality through necessity, and in the other creative, causality through freedom. And living causality (i.e., through freedom) can be revealed in exactly the same way both in natural (from the point of view of a given science) phenomena and in irregular or random ones. As explained above, human freedom has very little in common with absolute occasionalism or indeterminism: acting within certain frameworks (or terms), it is determined by them, although it is never determined mechanically, passively, machine-like, and therefore is always combined with an individual or creative coefficient, which may be higher or lower, but is never completely absent. Since human will and activity mature and develop not in airless space, but under certain conditions, their reflection can be found in the products of free will and creativity, in human actions studied by social science. But in no way can it be said that only “accidental” causes or individual deviations from these average terms are associated with freedom, while the rest are associated with necessity: as actions they are all equally free, and as products they are equally determined. But if social science rests on a fiction, namely on a deliberately incorrect assumption about the non-individuality of the individual, the typicality and regularity of that which, by its very essence, denies this typicality and regularity, then its very existence becomes problematic. In fact, how is social science possible given that its principles are obviously hypothetical? with such a clearly expressed pragmatism of all its constructions, with the multiplicity of its objects and patterns? This question can only be answered in this sense; that social science exists on the same basis as other sciences. Its raison d'être is its practical usefulness. Social science as a science about aggregates of all kinds, about society as a whole or about a super-individual organism, arose in an era when influences that have aggregates as their object - social, economic and others - received particularly wide application and gave rise to special branches of knowledge about aggregates. But, of course, this practical need would not be capable of creating science on its own if there were no grounds for this in the nature of knowledge itself and in its relation to being. The roots of science are laid in the sophistry of creation, i.e. in the fact that the objective, or transsubjective, connection of things is a logical connection, accessible to knowledge and is known under the form of the law of causality. Discursive knowledge, moving from object to object, is always conditioned by its tasks, it is not absolute and plural by its very nature, however, the real connection of things is recognized in it, and this connection serves as the objective basis of scientific knowledge, it alone can guarantee that in science reality is actually cognized, albeit in a prismatic refraction (“like a mirror in fortune-telling”), and that it has the quality of truth, although it is alien to the Truth. The problem of social science, like any special science, is only in how it is possible to achieve, if not Truth, then a reflection of it - truth, based on individual, private, isolated points of view, through methodological convention? How can the methodologism of science, this pride and strength of it, not at the same time be a complete and final obstacle to the knowledge of existence? Another way to express this same question is this: how do the obviously fictitious methodological assumptions of the sciences not prevent the fact that science can withstand practical testing and prove to be technical, i.e., actually suitable for orientation in reality? When applied to social science, the question is posed as follows: how is politics, this applied social mechanics, possible, since it is based on social science, or theoretical social mechanics? However, as in other cases, the practice of life testifies in favor of this possibility and confirms it. Of course, the orientation that social science gives differs in the nature of the subject from the physical sciences: it is more approximate, uncertain, and leaves a lot of room for art and intuition. But this does not change the overall problem. The ontological roots of social science, like any science, are in the universal coherence of being, which can be felt at different points and in all possible directions. Everything is in everything and everything is connected to everything; this general ontological foundation of the sciences remains valid for social science. III. The problem of social policy Science in general expresses a contemplative moment in human action, social science is also a moment of social action, and is an instrument of social technology or, what is the same, social policy. We already know that science is technical, and technology is scientific, action presupposes contemplation, and contemplation enters into action. Social policy is the nerve of social science; it holds the keys to all its buildings. Of course, social science cannot impart to social policy a greater degree of scientificity than what it itself possesses, but it conveys it to it in full. The possible scientific nature of social policy is not destroyed by the fact that in it, as in any activity guided by practical interests, a share of subjectivism inevitably participates. It was explained above that any activity, including social activity, such as creativity, is a synthesis of freedom and necessity. In the case under consideration, freedom is expressed precisely in this subjectivism, the volitional aspiration of social activity at the moment of evaluation, and necessity is expressed in its scientific conditioning on the part of means. Of course, the determinism that many people imagine is no greater in social policy than in any living activity; Therefore, if by scientificity we mean its complete determinism, then it should be said that scientific social policy does not exist, just as scientific action does not exist at all, for science is the opposite of action, inaction, frozen contemplation. On the contrary, if scientificity is understood as the use of data from scientific experience in justifying a plan of action, then social policy can be scientific and, in fact, often is so 194 . What kind of activity corresponds to social policy, for what art is it a technique? As is clear from the previous presentation, social policy has its own special area and its own object: it is an action on the aggregate, on the social body. The area of ​​such action is ever expanding - in the state, socio-economic, and general cultural spheres, the growing socialization of life and the consciousness of this socialization, the socialism of life and the sociologism of consciousness are continuously expanding and strengthening the competence of social policy. This creates an ever-increasing mechanization of life, a predominance of abstraction and a decrease in concreteness in human relationships. Social policy replaces love, which is possible only in relation to the individual, but not to the totality - be it a “party”, or a “class”, or “humanity” - with “ideology” (it is not for nothing that in our century there appears a contrast between love for one’s neighbor, living and concrete, and love for the distant 195, so to speak, sociological), the warmth of personal relationships is supplanted by social-utilitarian rationalism, the spontaneity of feeling - by the notorious “principledness,” so that the successes of socialism and the growth of social solidarity are not necessarily accompanied by an increase in love or even sympathy and a decrease in hostility between people. Rather, one can even think the opposite: socialism can be a matter of simple calculation and profit, “interest”, and not love, and in itself, in any case, it does not yet speak of an increase in love among people. Social policy is a mechanic that can be set in motion by various motives: that is why it turns out to be possible that in the image of V. S. Solovyov, the Antichrist, the extreme embodiment of evil and selfishness in man, turns out to be the finalizer of socialism, for socialism in itself does not require love at all, although from here it is impossible to draw the opposite conclusion, namely, that love is incompatible with socialism. Of course, socialism of love is also possible (how else can one define the activities of people like Morrison, C. Kingsley and other “Christian socialists” of England in the 50s of the 19th century?), but, generally speaking, social policy, as an area of scientific rationalism and sociological mechanization of human relations, is far from direct feeling (therefore it is not at all surprising that such luminaries of socialist politics as Lassalle and especially Marx are distinguished by such dryness and even harshness character and least of all resemble in their appearance “philanthropists”, friends of humanity). The predominance of politics in people's lives is inevitably accompanied by a depletion of spontaneity, rationalization and mechanization of life. Although social policy is generally capable of being scientific, this does not mean at all that from these scientific premises only one system of policy necessarily follows, and it is precisely this that is the only scientific one. On the contrary, different, but at the same time with the same degree of scientifically sound, directions for social policy can follow from the same scientific data, in other words, different uses can be made from a given scientific instrument. It is only through a misunderstanding of the nature of science and the limits of social determinism that the widespread idea that only one scientific social policy is possible gains strength. Radical determinism also underlies so-called “scientific socialism.” Above we have already briefly touched on this doctrine in connection with the question of the limits of social prediction, but this misunderstanding, so rooted in wide circles, requires closer consideration. In what sense can socialism “is science” consider itself scientific 196, and in what sense is this phrase a contradictory absurdity – a round square, fried ice – or is it likened to such concepts, for example, as scientific painting, scientific music, scientific valor?.. The possible degree of “scientificness” for socialism and socialist policy, speaking in principle and in the abstract, is exactly the same, no more and no less, as for any other social policy, in the sense that it can take into account scientific data and rely on them in its plans (and can, of course, and vice versa, go against them). Socialist policy, like any other, remains an art (τέχνη), “technology,” but, like any technology, it can be based on science: we already know that science justifies technology, and technology, in turn, “guarantees” science. Social policy as a type of technology, due to its effective nature, is guided by the will: it sets the ideals of politics 197, while science only consults on means, not goals. Politics takes on a socialist hue not because science requires it, but because these individuals or social groups want socialism, they see in it - rightly or wrongly - a panacea for all socio-economic evils, they want it before any science and in addition to it, not at all because of its scientific nature, but because of its desirability. The illusion of “scientific socialism” with which Marx and Engels blinded themselves and their gullible followers consists precisely in the fact that science can serve not only as a support for socialist politics, providing some support for socialist hopes, but also as the basis of the very will to socialism. However, even if we recognize the inevitability of this development as scientifically pre-established (which, of course, is in itself completely impossible), then the will to this development will not necessarily be born from this recognition 198 . The basis of socialism lies, undoubtedly, the will to it and faith in it, which has a peculiar religious connotation 199, and this retains all its force, of course, in relation to Marx and Engels 200. When they say that science favors socialism or even predetermines its advent, this can have a double meaning. Firstly, this may mean that certain features of modern economic development, or its “trends”, if mentally continued, lead to socialism: the fact of some natural and necessary, although, however, greatly exaggerated, concentration of capitalist industry (but not agriculture!) may be a scientific point of support for socialist politics. It can be used by a social politician for certain purposes, by analogy with how the practice of fire insurance uses fire statistics data, i.e., as a means of scientific orientation. Such practical socialism can only be partial (Stücksocialismus), for it everything is “in motion, and not in the final goal” (Bernstein). Secondly, the doctrine of the scientific nature of socialism can also be associated with the idea that science substantiates the advent of an earthly paradise, an ideal state of life for individuals and society, bringing with it the resolution of all vital issues and denoting a “leap from necessity to freedom” (from Vorgeschichte in Geschichte 201). In this sense, socialism, of course, has as much in common with science as the pictures of Mohammed’s paradise. But even much more modest predictions can be attributed to social science only with major reservations: the “development trends” established by science that are favorable to socialism” have very little in common with the “laws of natural science” for which Marx takes them. These are only “empirical laws”, scientific generalizations that express only the resultant of a given state of affairs and say nothing about the immutability of this state of affairs, and, consequently, of these tendencies themselves. They have a completely different logical nature than, for example, the laws of mechanics or mathematical natural science; they capture the general pattern for a given “totality” only in consequences, and not in producing causes, and therefore their “significance” is very limited. However, within the outlined limits, social policy not only can, but should strive to be scientific. She should shun arbitrary fantasy, quixoticism or “utopianism,” as well as the doctrinaire nature of imaginary scientificity; she must soberly listen to the voice of life, and science helps her in this. True science here is synonymous with life realism. Chapter 8. Phenomenology of the economy I. The Problem of Political Economy Economy as a process between the collective humanity and nature, sophistic in its foundations and having cosmological meaning and significance, of course, does not fit into the isolated consciousness of individual economic figures in their practical life. As much as their attention is focused on the particular and special, the general remains alien to it. And just as individual cognitive acts, from which the phenomenology of knowledge is composed, have in mind only their given content, and not the general nature of knowledge as a process between man and the world, so individual economies, or private economic acts, economic phenomena, have as their subject only certain specific economic goals, but not the general nature of the economy and its ultimate tasks. The economy as a single act of a transcendental economic subject is fragmented into phenomena and has its own phenomenology; its foundations can only be understood in the light of economic philosophy, but in each of its given moments it can form the subject of independent scientific research, although, of course, only from isolated, special points of view. Economy in its phenomenology, that is, in its immediate empirical reality, exists for us as a voluntarily or involuntarily accepted necessity that is imposed on us from the outside. We experience it as the oppression of need, as the constraint of life exposed to constant danger. Therefore, economic activity has the character of a struggle for life, and, in particular, for a given, certain standard of living. Although economy as creativity is a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in our immediate sense of well-being, economic need approaches us as a direct restriction of freedom, as a heavy necessity, from which one cannot escape without leaving life, as a kind of fate weighing down on life, as a curse upon it, spoken back in the Garden of Eden. Of course, as creativity, labor is not a curse or bondage; on the contrary, it is an expression of man’s high destiny, the image of God in man. But the nature of labor, like all temporary and discursive life, has an antinomic character, and labor by the sweat of the brow as an economic necessity is the seal of slavery to the elements, expulsion from paradise, loss of harmonious coexistence with creation. Of course, this forced labor does not destroy human freedom, for even the consciousness of bondage and slavery is accessible only to a being free by nature, who knows, remembers and values ​​his freedom; in general, freedom and necessity, as mutually reflective concepts, presuppose and condition each other, as already indicated above. We are not aware of what is always inherent in us - our freedom, although it constitutes the condition of both our feeling of dependence on necessity and our economic activity itself, just as sunlight, without entering into the colors of individual objects as a specific color, nevertheless determines them all. But that which constantly limits freedom and threatens our life is most clearly highlighted by our consciousness and poses tasks to our will. Economic necessity also has this nature, from which no person is exempted by nature, although it can be paralyzed temporarily and partially by social conditions. Need, need, poverty and the corresponding concepts of economic good, utility (use value), wealth are therefore the natural terms in which the economy, its questions and answers revolve. Need and need ask, human labor and the usefulness of goods answer. The fact that economic work is never isolated and individual does not require proof. Man, as a species being, carries within himself the rich heritage of the economic labor of previous humanity and works, feeling the influence of modern humanity in his work, and if the transcendental subject of the economy is the entire collective humanity, then the empirical person knows only a social economy, no matter what forms it takes. True, he is not aware of the transcendental community of labor and his participation in a single subject of the economy; on the contrary, any given social form of economy seems to him to be imposed from the outside, a constraining and coercive necessity on his will. He must take it into account to the same extent as natural necessity. Therefore, economic necessity is always, to a greater or lesser extent, a socio-economic necessity; man stands before nature as a member of human society, but at the same time, his fellow humans are not his voluntary allies (although they can become them), but co-slaves in labor and rivals in sharing the benefits achieved by this labor. These goods, whatever they may be, whatever needs they satisfy, are the creation of human labor, “values,” and form “wealth.” The economy is stimulated by the desire to increase wealth and overcome poverty. Moreover, although this wealth and poverty are socially conditioned, they at the same time represent a fact of individual life. The essence of the economic process as a whole and its transcendental foundations are almost impenetrably obscured by this universal competition in the pursuit of enrichment, competition that fragments a single and integral process into separate fractional particles. But it is precisely on this fact - wealth (and, accordingly, poverty) as a personal property, albeit socially conditioned, a personal desire for enrichment and competition on this basis of individuals, groups, classes and peoples - that political economy, the scientific phenomenology of economics, is oriented, and this initial orientation determines the range of its problems and its style. So-called mercantilism, this cradle of scientific political economy, its first “school”, as a frank apology for personal greed, “economic man”, as a preaching of mercantilism, with naive simplicity exposes the central nerve of political economy, reveals the fact on which it is guided. Further “schools” in political economy, with their differences, somewhat obscure the unity of this initial orientation and its immutability: the physiocrats and Hell. Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, free traders and protectionists, liberals and socialists - they all only differ in their teachings, but not in this problem itself. Political economy is the science of the people's wealth, since it becomes personal property, or, conversely, of the personal economic lot of everyone, since it depends on the social conditions of the economy. In characterizing the scientific style of political economy, we have to take into account the vagueness and uncertainty of its actual boundaries, as well as the immensity of its raw material, observations of various aspects of the economy in its past and present, which are now being produced in economic science, and a significant share of scientific energy is devoted to collecting and organizing this material. In order to capture the essential features of economic science, one involuntarily has to stylize it, to take political economy not so much in what it currently is, but in what it wants to be - in its ultimate tasks. The first obstacle that has to be overcome is the uncertainty of its most basic concept - wealth, which, for all its vitality, is characterized by amorphousness and vagueness, usually characteristic of the most vital concepts. It is known that the concept of wealth and the related concepts of productive and unproductive labor, productive forces, production are defined differently in different “schools” of political economy: from the narrow mercantilism of the first economists and the no less narrow economic materialism of the physiocrats, Smith and socialists, to a broader understanding by List and representatives of the historical school, and, finally, to complete uncertainty by J. Ruskin. Wealth is money, and its source is trade, wealth is the products of agricultural labor, and its source is agriculture, wealth is the material products of all labor, and its source is the labor of an industrial or agricultural worker 202, wealth is everything that pleases and beautifies life, that is useful and pleasant - all these and similar definitions have been tried by political economy, alternately focusing its attention on one side or the other of this concept. It is, of course, equally possible to settle on any of these definitions, although it will be equally arbitrary. The choice is dictated by the practical motives of the study and, in particular, is indicated by historical conditions: it is clear to us why the mercantilists considered money to be wealth, the physiocrats - agricultural products, the free traders - industry, the socialists - material goods in general, and Ruskin - human life, and each is right, from his own conditional, indicative point of view, and each definition is suitable for this purpose. But it is equally difficult to assign the definition of wealth to any one, even the most important and obvious attribute, at least to “material” needs, primarily because it is impossible to draw a clear line differentiating material and ideal needs. Even, for example, food or clothing, these seemingly most material needs, nevertheless turn out to be connected with ideal ones, because they also reflect the general spiritual or cultural level of a person. And, conversely, literature, art, science, ideal goods, can serve as a means to satisfy material needs. What about the lighting? and the means of communication? or should electricity in a restaurant be attributed to material needs, and in a science classroom or school – spiritual needs? Or does the post office, when it brings a book and a letter, serve spiritual needs, and when it brings a price list and a trade dispatch, then it serves material needs? or a telephone, if it serves a factory, is it material, but a monastery is spiritual? Man is an embodied spirit and spiritualized flesh, a spiritual-material being, and therefore in his life there cannot be an exact line between the material and the spiritual, everything has both sides, therefore, everything would be subject to the science of economics from this point of view. However, such a formulation of the question can only be accepted by the philosophy of economics, but it would be completely unsuitable and fruitless for the science of economics, which must necessarily specialize its tasks. And it is impossible even to take labor, which really is the basis of economic activity, as a criterion of wealth, because this definition turns out to be completely vague. Labor is the condition of all human activity, equally the philosophizing of Kant and the plowing of the farmer, while for political economy it is necessary to draw a clear line between them, if not in essence, then at least due to the needs of scientific pragmatism and specialization. Obviously, it remains to come to the conclusion that the concept of wealth and all concepts associated with it and stemming from it are arbitrarily, pragmatically established in accordance with the direction of scientific attention and do not allow for logical completeness and closure, and do not need it. But this uncertainty and, so to speak, mobility of the concept of wealth and poverty gives political economy the necessary flexibility and adaptability to historically changing tasks, supports in it to the required extent empiricism and historicism, which is necessary for it as a science about the historical, about what changes over time. The object of political economy, although distinguished by the vagueness of its logical boundaries, is practically, however, quite undoubted and can be scientifically defined, so to speak, from one perspective or another, and each time a corresponding logical profile is obtained. II. Scientific style of political economy The scientific style of political economy is determined by the sociologism that it seeks to introduce into the understanding of specific life or historical phenomena. In its final tasks, in the desire to establish the laws of economic life, political economy (even if of a historical direction) is a sociological science, bringing with it as a priori certain methodological prerequisites, and above all characteristic sociological determinism (cf. previous chapter). Thanks to this determinism, it crosses out individuality and puts in its place groups and classes, “aggregates”, in which the individual is completely covered by the typical, therefore freedom and creativity are eliminated and only a continuous social pattern is seen everywhere. This is how political economy as a science is constructed, and this is how economic life is stylized in its depiction. Political (or social) economy is not at all interested in the phenomena of individual economic life as such; it understands and interprets them only in connection with other phenomena, as social aggregates. The basic concepts developed by political economy cannot even be applied to an individual phenomenon; they are simply not suitable for it, because they lead beyond its limits. The individual exists for political economy only as an average instance of its social type: for example, a given worker, Ivan Sidorov, exists here as a member of the proletariat class. Or, in another sense, the individual exists here only as a fractional part of some aggregate that forms one whole: for example, a given producer represents a particle of the “market”, purchasing and selling power. This whole exists (logically) before its parts, it is not composed of them, but is decomposed into these parts, giving them a place in itself. This unique and as yet unexamined logical nature of the basic concepts of political economy, by means of which multiplicity is compressed into unity in such a way that only certain aspects of phenomena are abstracted, has an analogue in the method of statistical aggregates, but at the same time differs significantly from them; These features must be taken into account if one wishes to understand the scientific style of political economy. The most basic concepts of political economy, those analyzes of which it is most dear and proud, for example, the concept of capital and capitalism, have precisely this character of aggregates existing in many phenomena taken together, but in none of them separately. It is obvious that neither a capitalist, nor a proletarian, nor a member of the economic class can be a single individual considered as such, and at the same time it is obvious that these definitions are reflected on him from these aggregates, alternately pointing their colored glasses and painting him now in one color, now in another. Therefore, we can say that the magnifying glass of political economy sees both more and less than the naked eye, it notices what is not at all accessible to it, but does not see what is accessible, it ignores everything connected with individuality, but takes into account what goes beyond its limits and forms class and group phenomena. If we stand exclusively from the point of view of the individual, then we can say that in reality there are no aggregates at all, they are only conjectures of idle imagination: there is no capitalism, no capitalists or proletarians, but there are only specific subjects, living people with names, surnames, biographies. And, conversely, according to the method of aggregates there is no place for biography or even individual dates, just as from a certain height individual houses merge into streets that form neighborhoods and the general type of the city. Of course, starting from the individual, with an exhaustive study (practically, however, completely inaccessible to a person), one can come to the social and group, actually including them in an exhaustive study of reality, but from group study there is no direct path to the individual, but there can only be a leap. Therefore, in practice, the individual and the social are, as it were, different worlds, just as the scientific study of reality in general, despite the universal coherence it postulates, divides reality into separate worlds that do not communicate with each other. The interest in aggregates, in the study of the mass, the typical, the average in political economy sufficiently explains the predominant importance that statistical observations have here. Statistics, not as an independent science, but as a method of mass observation and “categorical calculation”, naturally became an auxiliary branch of political economy, which therefore often falls - however, it is not alone - into the superstition of numbers, looking for in them what cannot be found in them. And yet, for its task - the study of social relations and groups, and therefore, first of all, their establishment - political economy simply could not do without statistics or it would be terribly constrained in its research, limiting itself to one “deductive” sucking out of itself provisions that, due to their little content, are reduced to banalities or abstractions (which is what a significant part of the so-called “theoretical” political economy is). Other methods of “categorical” description of reality are of the same importance as statistics for political economy: historical research, social questionnaires. And here it finds the material on the basis of which it establishes its “aggregates” and the type of their development, or “laws.” By the method of aggregates, statistical or otherwise, everything individual is, of course, extinguished; instead, class masks, social schemes and blueprints appear. The phenomena of exchange, production, distribution, consumption, of course, are directly related to individual human actions and states, but, however, as far as they are studied by political economy, the latter, remaining true to itself, considers only types and aggregates. She considers these individual manifestations in an abstract medium, takes them from a perspective in which individual figures merge into general, typical and monotonous ones. The entire “deductive” political economy is based precisely on the idea of ​​such a typical or average course of action, in relation to which deviations are considered random and irregular. Such a stylized collective type (reminiscent of the image that is obtained as a result of sequential photographing on the same photographic plate of a number of people) is the notorious “economic man”, this is an important instrumental concept of political economy, which can be rejected with indignation like Ruskin and Carlyle, seeing in it a slander of reality, but can be calmly applied to the extent of its practical suitability, firmly, however, keeping in mind the instrumental and conventional the nature of scientific concepts in general and this one in particular. Of course, any idea of ​​the typical does not correspond to reality, in which everything is individual and nothing is repeated, it is pars pro toto 203, it takes one side, only more or less similar in many phenomena, calmly discarding this “more or less” and everything else, and thus obtains a logical distillate, “an economic phenomenon in its pure form.” This fundamental principle of political economy, that the phenomena of economic life have a quality of repetition or typicality, is a general methodological precondition for economic laws. At the same time, it is obvious that this position excludes in advance not only everything individual, but also everything new and historical: in this political-economic world, as before in the sociological world, nothing happens, no events take place, only some kind of economic perpetuum mobile rotates. It is assumed that the entire inventory of economic reality and causality has already been taken into account, and outside of it nothing can happen or move from this point. True, the “laws” of political economy fundamentally deal not only with statics, but also with the dynamics of phenomena, not only with their existence, but also with their sequence. However, it is not difficult to see that this dynamics has the same static and analytical character as statics: in it, already given and existing possibilities are only revealed and realized, therefore the possibility of new, i.e., not provided for by this pattern, causes are fundamentally excluded. Therefore, it too proceeds from the idea of ​​an exhaustive inventory of reality or implies the premise ceteris paribus. Typical in this regard is Marx’s “forecast” regarding the development of capitalism towards socialism (already characterized in the previous chapter): it is entirely based on the premise ceteris paribus and represents a mental continuation of only one of the “trends,” i.e., a generalization of certain aspects of modern reality 204 . And the general “trends in economic development” established by both statistics and political economy are constructed according to the same type. Nothing new, or the negation of the historical and individual, is therefore the fighting slogan of political economy, this eldest daughter of sociology, to the same extent as its mother. The use of economic concepts and laws is somewhat different when applied not to the present and future, which are still being created, but to the past, already completed. Here they are ready-made diagrams with the help of which historical reality is generalized. Within certain limits, one cannot, of course, deny the scientific convenience of using ready-made theoretical schemes. For example, such schematic concepts as natural economy or capitalism are now widely used in the study of the economic history of countries and eras, which in themselves, perhaps, would not have led to these diagrams at all. The past is illuminated here by the reflector of the scientific concepts of the present, however, we always consider the past through the glasses of modernity. But it is obvious that although such a stylization of history in the taste of modern political economy represents considerable convenience for the purposes of orientation and economy of thought, achieved by using ready-made symbolism of concepts, this schematization and modernization, in which many see the very quintessence of science, sometimes obscures from us historical reality in its colorful individuality. This dressing up of the Greeks and Romans, Babylonians and Egyptians as capitalists and proletarians of the new time, which is increasingly becoming fashionable, has not only conveniences; but also dangerous negative aspects, so that perhaps someday we will have to cleanse historical science of these chaff of modernization. And even to the extent that these scientific formulas and diagrams can lay claim to scientific validity, they must be distinguished by a high degree of abstraction and schematism, due to which they provide such scientific service. These are the first dotted lines drawn on an as yet unfilled map. We have an example of such a modernizing schematization, with its positive and negative sides, in the historical schemes of Bucher (formerly Rodbertus) and the opposite schemes of Ed. Meyer and even more so Pelman (who goes the furthest in this modernization of antiquity). So, political economy, as a branch of sociology, only has access to the statics of society, and not its dynamics, and this static study, although it makes room for understanding the development and maturation of what is existing or already given, does not leave it for the new creation of history. From this feature stems the ignoring of the individual in political economy and the deterministic denial of human freedom, its typical sociological determinism. Political economy does not approach man from the side of his freely creative attitude to life, but studies him only in his oppression, takes him in a state of necessary defense. Therefore, instead of the individual as the performer of all events, constituting the living source of everything new in history, he puts in place an economic automaton, discovered by Bentham and strongly reminiscent of today's vending machines: if you throw a coin into such a machine, it will throw out a piece of candy or a piece of soap, but that's all. All constructions of economic man, personal or collective, are based on the idea of ​​an economic automaton; hence the necessary and fatal fatalism of political economy for it, the flip side of its methodological determinism. Again, here too it remains right for certain of its goals and, within certain limits, can be satisfied with the automaton instead of the individual. However, if one forgets about the conditionally pragmatic, methodological nature of these economic categories, then one falls into economism, which is so widespread these days, with its accompanying fatalism, which gives rise to one of the most terrible nightmares of our time. Economic need in itself is sufficiently nightmarish that it is necessary to add to this nightmare of reality the nightmare of theoretical imagination and proclaim the immutability and inevitability of the “laws of economic development” or the fate of “class psychology” and economic egoism. If all this were true, then history would not have witnessed any feats or even impulses of good, and there would not even have been that very economic development in which all the newest preachers of economic Islam firmly believe. They are wrong in asserting that there really is some kind of iron law, equal and inevitable for everyone. However, it is true that there are certain frameworks for activity that are compulsory for everyone, but at the same time establish a field for personal creativity, leaving room for manifestations of freedom. But as soon as political economy turns its face to concrete historical reality and makes an attempt to understand it not only as a mechanism, but as creativity, then the significance of the individual as a creative principle not only of history, but of economics becomes clear 205 . Although so far we have characterized political economy as a sociological or “nomographic” discipline, however, due to the indicated uncertainty of its logical outlines, we can state the presence of purely descriptive elements or the study of the historical, “idiographic” in it. Consistent and exclusive sociologism cannot be fully sustained by any science, and therefore no science represents this logical type in its pure form. In the life of science there is a constant ascent and descent, a transition from the concrete to the abstract, to generalized concepts or “laws”, and then a new, reverse orientation in reality, with the help of science. The pragmatism of science is that nomographic elements, although they represent the most important part, or the logical center of science, are not, however, an end in themselves; they are needed only as a means of orientation, and are valuable because they are useful. And for political economy, the value of its “laws,” which it can establish, like any science, in any quantity and in different directions, also depends on their suitability for practical purposes. Maybe there will be “laws”, especially in the area of ​​the so-called. “theoretical” political economy, which have the sad purpose of showing off in a scientific museum for amateurs, like double flowers grown in a logical greenhouse. Theoretically, there are no boundaries for this logical construction; they are set only by life’s tasks and the pragmatism of science. Political economy has dealt a lot with theories of value - undoubtedly, much more than it should - but has not yet included in this consideration of a problem that is really significant for it, namely the theory of value of economic theories, in which the criterion of utility (of course, along with the criterion of logical significance) should play an important role. Political economy was born under the sign of mercantilism, that is, from very practical motives, from the need to understand the complexity of the economic mechanism. It is a child of capitalism and, in turn, is the science of capitalism, providing the basis for correct economic behavior. In political economy, practical problems are solved openly or covertly, and theory here is a means for practice, and therefore should indeed be directly or indirectly suitable for it, but not represent a clever uselessness, a logical toy. Of course, this suitability cannot always be expressed in direct practical benefit. Is it useful from this point of view, for example, the general theory of capitalist economy, which studies the “totality” of individual farms with a rather large degree of abstraction? I think so, although no direct practical application of it can be made: this theory gives a general picture of everything that happens in modern economic life and establishes its type. Although it is abstract and highly constructive, like any theory, it is still largely empirical, does not break away from experience, it is a short formula for an indefinitely vast number of facts. But is it possible to recognize the same usefulness of different theories of value, profit, capital, with their endless bickering that fills the so-called. theoretical political economy? I think that no, no matter how some of them may be from a logical-aesthetic point of view (which is precisely what captivates and deceives here) harmonious, witty and elegant, for they are almost no longer empirical, although they are created in relation to empirical facts; they do not provide guidance in these facts and do not even set themselves this task, but explore some depth beneath them, pose tasks of a meta-empirical, but at the same time not yet metaphysical nature and therefore are the fruit of a logical misunderstanding 206 . The possibility of abstract theorizing in science in general and in political economy in particular has no boundaries, and therefore it must certainly be under the control of conscious critical pragmatism, asking: cui prodest 207? After all, such ascents from facts to theory are also possible, which cannot be followed by a reverse descent. Theory is a product of sediments of scientific thought, a crystal of science, and therefore no science can do without theory, but the bridge connecting both banks should never be removed, and nomography still remains a means for idiography, or, in other words, theory for practice, which is always concrete, historical. The opposite pole of uncontrolled theorizing is the indiscriminate accumulation of empirical material, the usefulness of which for science remains problematic, the false empiricism of the pseudo-historical school. Anything that contains “facts,” especially in the Kabbalistic form of a statistical table, is now accepted as science. Meanwhile, the supreme rule for science is the economy of thinking, and therefore of scientific means: nothing superfluous and useless, such is the requirement of logical aesthetics. Every science, as explained above, certainly asks about something, and this question determines the attention of the researcher, therefore, predetermines to a certain extent the “facts” and the selection of these facts and already contains in the kernel the very answer - a scientific theory. Collecting facts is unknown for what purpose, without a guiding goal, this scientific sport thereby remains outside of science. For sciences are constructed, and scientific laws are established by reason, and they are not found, like old rags, in garbage heaps - therefore, there is no more science in the facts than is put there by the scientific mind. The history of political economy and its current state provide abundant examples of extremes of both types, and excessive abstraction of theories, and unprincipled collection of facts, especially widespread in modern historicism. The line of healthy scientific empiricism runs in the middle between both extremes and is ultimately determined by the scientific tact of the researcher. Political economy, like social science in general, represents the unity of economic theory and economic policy. Theory helps to navigate issues of a practical nature and gives guidelines or general premises, but at the same time, due to its abstract nature, it never gives instructions in a specific, final form, so that one can directly substitute digital quantities into its formula, perform the required actions, and the solution will be ready. On the contrary, these indications of science are always given in a general and vague form, which necessarily presupposes the participation of intuition, creativity, or even simple intelligence. Therefore, economic policy by nature is an art, albeit a scientific art. Political economy does not tell us in definitive form whether a treaty with Germany should or should not be concluded, or what form of workers' insurance should be preferred, or whether a given strike is useful. Any scientific judgment regarding a specific fact or issue is a peculiar combination of general and individual concepts, nomographic and idiographic, but in matters of economic policy this connection, due to the complexity of the object of judgment - economic life, and the low, due to this, degree of scientificity of political economy, seems especially confusing. What leads from the general to the particular is not a gradual transition, but a logical leap, and it can be made in different directions. That is why it is so difficult for scientists to agree among themselves both in assessing facts and in drawing practical conclusions from them, which sometimes arouses suspicion about science itself, as if science knows some special secret in approaching facts. Therefore, when it is necessary to speak out on a matter relating to aggregates; political economy experiences difficulties due to its abstractness, although no more than any other science, but if we are dealing not with an aggregate, but with an individual phenomenon, then these difficulties double and become so great that in certain cases they make any scientific judgment directly impossible. What can we say, for example, based on research about crises in general and this crisis in particular, about whether manufacturer N will go bankrupt or get rich? Will this industry gain or lose? Isn’t it clear that political economy must answer this manufacturer that he, as N, does not exist for it at all, because for it there is only the class of manufacturers in general, but not individual Ns. In many cases, such abstract judgments are extremely devalued and turn into commonplaces. Usually in such cases, the premises of science are supplemented by judgments of practical reason or common sense, which, flavored with data from scientific analysis, are sometimes accepted as the conclusions of science. One cannot be surprised if, in view of this state of affairs, more rigorous scientific minds, brought up on natural science with its moderate and calm, and therefore less noticeable pragmatism, at least in comparison with that which not only reigns, but is downright rampant in political economy, allow themselves to doubt its scientific nature, its very right to scientific existence, and for more philosophical minds this forces us to once again repeat the cooling question of skepticism: what is science? The study of the logical structure of political economy for proper completeness would require special deepening and detail, which we do not claim here, however, limiting ourselves to only these few comments necessary to clarify the general points of view of the philosophy of economics as applied to its phenomenology. Chapter 9. Economic materialism as a philosophy of economy I. Economic materialism as philosophy and science It is very easy to criticize so-called economic materialism, revealing all its undeveloped, incomplete, ugly one-sidedness. He has too many vulnerable sides that are open to criticism. Among philosophers he evokes only disdain for his crude dogmatism and naive materialism, and because of this depravity of his philosophical form they do not want to think about the essence of his problem. For the educated public, “sympathizing with everything that is high and beautiful” and valuing aesthetic culture above all, economic materialism smells too strongly of workers’ sweat and factory smoke; to them it seems like barbarism, which is incapable of understanding “cultural values,” and with a face of smug disgust, it turns away, rejecting it without internal attention to it. Finally, the vast regiments of his socialist supporters, who have made it a dogma of the proletarian catechism, are also little capable of raising his scientific and philosophical prestige. And in general it may seem that the philosophical researcher of our days has absolutely nothing to do with economic materialism, just like, for example, with the materialism of Vogt and Moleschott, and should be left alone. Nevertheless, we believe that we have no right to such disdain for it until we have seriously taken into account the problem of economic materialism. The vital significance of the problem of economic materialism is completely incommensurate with the incompleteness and imperfection of its philosophical form, which is comparatively accidental and insignificant for it and is not destroyed by the unacceptability of its philosophical premises. And neither neglect nor disgust can diminish or destroy the significance of this problem, which continues to attract the attention of fresh minds not hypnotized by criticism or aestheticism. Economic materialism, as indeed any teaching that poses a significant and vital problem, is not enough to simply be rejected by turning away from it in impotence or lack of interest in it; it must be overcome, and it can only be overcome in a positive way, recognizing its truth, understanding its motive, but at the same time rejecting its limitations and perversions. Economic materialism speaks of a stern honesty of life; it devotes its attention to the meaning of need, the concern for a piece of daily bread, which weighs on the majority of humanity. However, not only for these ethical traits, but also for his philosophical significance, he must take his definite place in the history of philosophy, which belongs to him alone 208. It is the first attempt at the philosophy of economics, in it, for the first time, its problem was consciously posed; a new motive was sounded in the history of thought, inspired, of course, not by armchair speculation, but by life impressions of reality. And this vitality of his motive testifies, from our point of view, to the philosophical authenticity and non-invention of the main theme of economic materialism. However, recently he also had a completely unexpected benefit performance. Namely, the assessment of the philosophical significance of economic materialism is currently being raised in connection with the successes of the philosophy of pragmatism, which in a certain sense is approaching it. The relationship between them can be expressed in such a way that economic materialism represents one of the varieties of pragmatism, it is, as it were, a special case of it; it could therefore be called economic pragmatism. And this influential, albeit shallow, philosophical teaching of our days emphasizes from a new perspective the significance and vitality of the main motive of economic materialism 209 . Economic materialism as a philosophical doctrine orients philosophy on the fact of economy. Moreover, for him this is not just one of the possible philosophical orientations, which admits others nearby, it is generally the only possible orientation, the philosophy of economics is the real truth (although in everyday life economic materialism does not have such expressions), it is the philosophy of κατ' εξοχήν 210, an absolute philosophical system that comprehends the mystery of being and reveals it in scientific doctrine. Here one can hear an echo of Hegel with the latter’s claim to the absoluteness of his system, and therefore to its uniqueness. Having lost many of the strengths of Hegelianism, economic materialism retained this pretentiousness, its absolutism. Together with Hegelianism, he also shares the extreme intellectualism that distinguishes the latter: despite the irrational nature of the main factor of history, namely the development of productive forces, which occurs with blind mechanical necessity, economic materialism, however, has no doubt that this irrational reality, always confused by all kinds of illusory ideologies, receives its adequate and, moreover, completely rational expression in it, no longer allowing any dark, non-rationalizable remainder or basis and not leaving room for no secrets. The mystery of life has been completely revealed by economic materialism. Compared with the intellectualism of Hegelianism, for which thinking is equal to being, everything rational is real, and everything real is rational, this intellectualism, which instead of panlogism affirms pan-alogism, universal blindness and irrationality, turns out, of course, to be burdened with a contradiction that Hegel did not know. Economic materialism shares this feature, however, with all materialism, both pre-Hegelian and post-Hegelian. Economic materialism in its meaning is a philosophy of history of a metaphysical or at least meta-empirical nature, so to speak, a historical ontology. This is not hindered by the fact that, following the spirit of the time with its reaction to idealism, under the strong influence of the materialistically colored positivism of Feuerbach, the creators of economic materialism declared war on all metaphysics and saw in it its overthrow. They believed that it revealed the material roots of all metaphysics and thereby exposed its illusory-ideological character. In reality, however, economic materialism is, like materialism in general, only a naive or dogmatic metaphysics, without, however, being aware of its own nature. The history of philosophy is full of examples of this kind of unconscious metaphysics. Economic materialism poses itself a problem, undoubtedly of a metaphysical nature, exactly the same one that Hegel solves in his consciously metaphysical philosophy of history. The famous “standing upside down” (auf den Kopf stellen) of Hegel, which Marx ascribes to himself, concerns only the content of the doctrine; it is the role of the universal spirit that is attributed to the economic basis, but not its problem, which remains exactly the same. Marxism in this regard is really Hegelianism reincarnated (of course, only in the philosophy of history). It is enough to delve more closely into the essence of Hegel's philosophy of history to be convinced of how great this affinity and this influence are. The first question that Hegel poses in the philosophy of history is this: what is the meaning of world history, what happens in it or what comes out of it? In accordance with the general content of his philosophy, according to which the universal spirit comes into self-consciousness only by realizing itself through freedom, Hegel answers: “world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom.” This idea, even this formula, is borrowed from him (of course, in a purely external way) by Marx and Engels, who talk about “the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” and the latter is identified by them with the socialist “state of the future.” With all the denial of historical teleology and with all the desire to stay on the mechanical (“natural science”, i.e. purely causal) understanding of history, its general concept here also turns out to be immanent-teleological: history is not played out in vain, but leads to a specific, internally logical goal. The second question that Hegel poses in his philosophy of history is this: how does the course of history take place, by what means is its goal achieved? According to Hegel, the material of history is human interests, individual needs, all kinds of egoistic motives, as well as movements of passions that create historical figures. These private motives, of course, do not coincide at all with the tasks of history, and people are not aware of them, only among great people their private goals “contain a substantial element that constitutes the will of the world spirit.” But this latter takes advantage of human aspirations and interests in its species; without realizing it, people carry out its aspirations, and this is the “cunning of the mind” (List der Vernunft), forcing people to fulfill its intentions without knowing it. This is an objective, supra-empirical, metaphysical law of history. Economic materialism assimilates this idea in the following way. He also argues that history is a play of passions and interests, which together forms the struggle of economic classes. There is a pattern in history that goes beyond the private goals of individuals or groups, and this pattern is determined by the development of productive forces, which goes through its stages, similar to the phases of self-consciousness of the universal spirit. And here there is a “cunning” at work, not just of reason, but of the economic basis. Marx, who concentrated all his attention on the difference between his teaching and Hegel’s in content, unnoticed for himself, accepted from it without criticism that which is much more important than the content, the metaphysical formulation of the problem, completely in the spirit of Hegelian ontologism, and in this he again does not differ from all post-Hegelian materialism, which also “turned Hegelian idealism on its head” and gave only a new answer to its problems. As a philosophy of history, economic materialism is not an empirical, scientifically positive theory of historical development, but it is an ontology, this is its most important philosophical feature. As ontological metaphysics, it shares a common fate with all ontological systems: spiritualistic, materialistic, idealistic, it doesn’t matter. Before the court of consistent positivism or neo-Kantian criticism, it is equally impermissible and “unscientific”, like the philosophy of Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Solovyov, Hartmann, etc. etc., because he asks about what cannot be asked with the hope of receiving a scientific answer, namely about what stands behind historical phenomena, constituting their meta-empirical, metaphysical basis. The problem of economic materialism is essentially this: what lies behind the apparent diversity and diversity of historical phenomena? What is the single pattern that connects the intricate multiplicity of immediate, immediate causes and justifies them? This is not only the metaphysics of history in general, but also a certain, namely monistic type: from Hegel it inherited this monism, in combination with the dialectical “method” (although Hegelian dialectics is naively accepted here as ordinary evolutionism, no matter how little it has in common with it), which is why it sometimes calls itself “dialectical materialism.” And the central doctrine of economic materialism about “base and superstructure” answers precisely this ontological problem. According to this teaching, the entire historical life of humanity in its external and internal, political and social, cultural and spiritual manifestations is only a superstructure over the economic basis, therefore, it does not have an independent metaphysical existence, it is only a “reflex,” that is, it turns out to be ontologically conditioned in exactly the same sense in which all the empirical events of history in Hegel are conditioned by the victorious march of the universal spirit, going through different phases of its development. With this statement, neither Marx nor Hegel at all deny the phenomenal existence of everything that they do not recognize as independently existing in the ontological sense, or that is only a reflex. Everything that is a “superstructure” - the state, and law, and religion, and morality - all this is not declared non-existent in economic materialism; on the contrary, for Marx, all the empirical diversity of history exists just as for everyone, and the direct causal connection of historical events reveals a picture of the multiplicity of causes, the intricacy of events, which cannot be put into any monistic scheme. Empirical history has its own “pragmatism” of events, which is established by historical science. The causality of the “economic basis” exists only “in letzter Instanz” 211 and does not lie on the surface at all. This can only be translated into philosophical language in this way: it has a metaphysical, not an empirical meaning, it does not directly connect phenomena, but stands behind the phenomena as their noumenal basis. The relation of the base to the superstructure is the same as the relation of Ding an sich and phenomena in Kant's system or, even more specifically, in Schopenhauer's system: the economic basis is the noumenon of stories, underlying all its phenomena and generating them, and the relationship that exists between the noumenon and phenomena, the intelligible and empirical world, of course, cannot be equated with the empirical causality of history; If we characterize this relationship with the concept of causality, then we should add that ontological causality lies very deep and therefore should not be looked for on the surface. And here we can have a completely different picture of causality, multiple, variegated, not revealing, but rather covering, the single true, noumenal causality, operating “in letzter Instanz.” To know it, you need to be able to look into the depths, inside the mechanism, and only after it is known - not in a scientific-empirical, but speculative or intuitive way - this Ding an sich, its invisible spirit will be felt in empirical reality, and the latter will become understandable in its inner meaning. This is how systems of metaphysics of history are generally constructed, for example, by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Hartmann, Vladimir Solovyov, or, earlier, by Blessed. Augustine, Bossuet, Herder. The theory of economic materialism, or at least one aspect of it, which, in our opinion, is the most significant and characteristic, receives the same meaning. However, due to the lack of philosophical clarity in the formulation and dissection of the problem in the theory of economic materialism, even in Marx and Engels (not to mention their followers), one can notice several different orders of thought that do not reconcile well with each other, but constantly intersect. First of all, this includes the imaginary scientific nature of economic materialism, which he so boasts of, which he so diligently emphasizes in the chaotic idea of ​​scientific socialism, or socialism as a science. Economic materialism as a science, therefore, as a set of generalizations regarding the actual course of history, reducing it mainly to economic development, is something completely different from it as metaphysics, and the confusion of scientific and metaphysical theory that occurs here leads to completely insurmountable difficulties, and above all of a methodological nature. If economic materialism wants to be a theory of historical development, a scientific interpretation of facts or their “generalization,” then it is obvious that this kind of theory, of any content, is not presented a priori, ante facta, but can only be defended post facta. It is obtained as a result of scientific research and, moreover, is valid only within its limits. It retains the character of “incomplete guidance”, donec corrigetur 212, and therefore can always be refuted by new facts. Speaking fundamentally, even one fact that contradicts it is enough for this, just as it is enough to overthrow any of even the most firmly established empirical “laws” of natural science, even the law of gravity. Obviously, such a law can never claim such a universal significance a priori, which economic materialism began to claim from the very beginning, and even before research, on credit. You cannot, while proclaiming your scientific character, at the same time trample on its elementary requirements. The universality and pretentiousness of economic materialism can be understood and, in a certain sense, justified only if we see in it the metaphysics of history, for, as stated above, metaphysical provisions are not based on scientific-empirical foundations and even explain empirics in their own way. But to defend the rights and claims of metaphysics under the banner of experimental science means to at least fall into a misunderstanding. At this point, Marx really puts Hegel upside down and, moreover, does it much more radically than when replacing the universal spirit with an economic basis in the metaphysics of history. Such a transformation of economic materialism into a scientific-empirical theory, into science, inevitably had to lead to its reduction in comparison with the original plan. Transposed in this tone, he loses the majestic spirit of Hegel, and the not at all majestic spirit of Jerome infuses him. Bentham with his moral arithmetic, together with the mercantile spirit of classical political economy. In economic materialism, the spirit of Hegel fights with the alien spirit of Bentham and Ricardo, and the actual victory remains with the latter. But this leads economic materialism to philosophical disintegration, because you cannot simultaneously be on two planes, trying to combine incompatible features. Economic materialism in Benthamism is vulgarized and takes on sharp, angular and often caricatured forms. It degenerates into the desire to explain everything out of greed and to see one economic basis in the greatest movements of history: the history of the Reformation turns into the history of pig breeding and land ownership of the 16th century, and the history of early Christianity into the history of slavery, latifundia and the proletariat in the Roman Empire, etc. Bentham taught that a person is guided in his activities exclusively by considerations of profit and benefit, at least in the broadest sense, and in them he saw the criterion of morality. He was further convinced that human motives are amenable to precise calculation, and understood sociology as moral arithmetic. In it, utilitarianism, with no less enthusiasm than in economic materialism, imagined finding a universal interpretation of all human affairs. Bentham's idea of ​​interest as the main engine of human psychology was translated into its own language by free trade political economy with Ricardo at its head. The fiction of the “economic man”, a Benthamite in the field of economics, appeared, and since political economy viewed life only through the glasses of its special scientific interest, forgetting or ignoring everything else, it sometimes gave the impression that for it the economic man was a man in general, or that by nature he was only an economic egoist 213 . Economic materialism, like social Benthamism, extended this same idea, without subjecting it to critical examination, from individuals to social groups and began to talk not about personal, but about class interest. History, which Bentham saw as a struggle between the interests of individuals, began to be seen by Marx as a struggle of classes, and the idea of ​​class struggle appeared as an explanation of the historical process. From this dogmatically accepted premise follows a methodological rule: to look for the underlying basis for every historical phenomenon in the class struggle and in the economic basis and not to rest until it is discovered in one way or another. And since, given the elasticity and often the scarcity of historical material, you can almost always see in it what you are convinced of in advance - the historical kitchen in this regard is much more lenient than a natural science laboratory - then we have a whole range of economic interpretations of various phenomena of history: law, religion, science, literature, art. The old fetters of Hegel’s metaphysics, loudly rejected, are intact even now, and the presence of quasi-scientific, but in reality metaphysical a priori economic materialism with its “dialectical method” (this monstrous misunderstanding) introduces tendentiousness into scientific research, from which both open, conscious metaphysics and real, consistent scientific empiricism are free. But, of course, in addition to economic materialism, as a monistic metaphysics of history, with its social Benthamism, which demands to reduce everything to economic interests and, for the sake of exposing the latter, carries out a kind of economic investigation on history, there is also a truly scientific direction in historiography, which most willingly dwells on the economic side of history. This historical economism does not claim any a priori monistic philosophy of history. He is interested in the economic side of history simply for the reasons of historical realism, in view of the undeniable vital importance that the economy has, but the desire for methodological monism, for drawing history at any cost onto the Procrustean bed of economic interests remains alien to him. On the contrary, he easily puts up with - or at least should put up with - empirical pluralism, with the recognition of the multiplicity of historical causes or factors and their diverse interactions. The economic trend in history, although often confused with economic materialism, is in reality completely alien to it, for it remains entirely in the area of ​​“historical pragmatism” and does not lay claim to any philosophy of history. And it is in this direction, due to its scientific impartiality, that valuable scientific research is being carried out, revealing the real significance of the economy in historical development and moving economic history forward. So, economic materialism is the metaphysics of history, which, not realizing its real character, considers itself a science, but does not become entirely either one or the other. This duality of his contains a contradiction that corrodes him. But in this respect, his fate is generally instructive for any “theory of the historical process.” To the extent that it is truly scientific, that is, empirical, it reflects the state of research in a given era and is not authorized to lay claim to statements of more general significance. Any general statement clearly goes beyond the limits of strict empiricism and must be raised to assumptions of a more general nature established by philosophy. In other words, every general doctrine of historical philosophy is already a metaphysics of history - no matter whether it is presented by Hegel or Comte, Marx or Herder, Bossuet or Lassalle. And we must look at this with open eyes 214. II. The contradictions of economic materialism The main idea of ​​economic materialism is that the economy plays a decisive role in history and in life, or that all culture has an economic nature and bears its imprint. He understands the world as an economy. Taken in essence and freed from caricature and distortion, this thought is deep and significant, and therefore it is capable of further development and deepening. Economic materialism expresses the feeling of the bondage of existence in captivity of the elements, in the shackles of economic necessity; it reflects the tragedy of mortal life, and therefore doomed to a constant struggle with death. It is characterized by that special and severe honesty of pessimism, which is not afraid of the bitter truth, although, however, both the creators themselves and the current followers of economic materialism are not sufficiently aware of the entire pessimism of their doctrine (however, the source of their optimistic mood lies not so much in the truths of economic materialism, but in the belief in its surmountability in history through the “leap from necessity into freedom”, in other words, in socialist eschatology, only mechanically connected with this doctrine). The economy, that is, labor protection and expansion of life, the labor creativity of life, is the common destiny of humanity, the economic, that is, labor, attitude towards the world is its original and most general self-determination. Man does not create anything anew that does not already exist in nature in a latent or potential form, but he reveals these forces of life and realizes its possibilities only through labor, and this labor, directed equally both to the outside world and to himself, spent on the production of both material goods and spiritual values, creates that which, in contrast to nature, i.e., the original, given and free, is called culture. Culture is carved out of nature only through the labor of mankind, and in this sense we can say, together with economic materialism, that all culture is economy. Economic labor, or the cultural creativity of humanity, is generated and supported by the need of life for self-defense and self-expansion. It is natural that it exhibits growth, has its own gradations, and at each given stage of development it is characterized by a general social coherence or social organization, as is quite rightly noted in economic materialism. Determining the general foundations of the economic process is a matter of economic philosophy with its unique problems, while establishing the coherence and mutual dependence of different manifestations of economic labor or, what is the same, different aspects of culture is a matter of empirical science, concrete history, and to present a theory here a priori, except in the form of meaningless generalities, is impossible for the same reasons why history in general cannot be established a priori. From the necessity and universality of the economic relationship to the world comes a whole series of prerequisites, both of which are called upon to be revealed by the philosophy of economics. However, having come across such an important topic here, economic materialism goes astray and moves on to a completely different order of thought. Its misfortune lies in the fact that, instead of putting the problem of economy with all its prerequisites in the center of attention and giving an independent philosophical analysis of it, economic materialism takes the concept of economy ready-made from a special science, namely from political economy. Marx the political economist here paralyzes Marx the philosopher, and this should be said even more about his followers. But that conventional, scientific-pragmatic concept of economy, economic labor, productive forces, which political economy has at its disposal, may be sufficient for its special purposes, but it has significance only within the limits of this special formulation of the question, which takes into account only well-defined tasks, but, of course, does not take the question in its philosophical breadth. For if philosophical research is interested in the connection of the phenomena being studied with the whole, then special scientific research is deliberately one-sided in nature and bears traces of scientific pragmatism. Political economy can satisfy itself with such an idea of ​​labor as we find, for example, in Hell. Smith, Ricardo, Rodbertus or Marx (cf. previous chapter). Economic labor here is labor aimed at producing only material goods, or exchange values ​​(which is why the philosophy of economics is without any further ado called economic materialism, although in reality it is not necessarily materialism, since farming itself is as much a material as a spiritual process). At the same time, political economy may not at all ask the general question of how labor is possible (just as every special science does not ask how knowledge is possible at all) or what is the relationship of man to nature, what general possibilities are outlined by them. Political economy remains alien to philosophical anthropology and even more distant from any natural philosophy - nature, without further considerations, is considered in it as a workshop or storeroom for raw materials, in a word, only as an opportunity for economic labor. She considers this labor to be the main, even practically the only factor of production that is significant from the point of view of the human economy: hence Smith’s definition of wealth as annual labor, hence the extraordinary vitality of a priori accepted “labor” theories of value, labor, capital, profit. Political economy argues here as conventionally and pragmatically as the farmer who connects his harvest only with the fact of his sowing, although it is obvious how insufficient this idea is for understanding the entire process of plant growth. Economic materialism takes the economy in a political-economic sense and thereby really dooms it to hopeless materialism. His task in this case inevitably turns out not to be the study of the economic side of life as a problem, the philosophy of economics, but to draw up evidence per fas et nefas 215 regarding the dependence of all life and all culture on economy in the political-economic sense, and economic science for the philosophy of history naturally receives here the same meaning as logic in Hegel’s philosophy, i.e. ontology 216. The concepts of forms of production, which with “dialectical” necessity replace each other at a certain stage of the “development of productive forces,” were obviously worked out on the workbench of political economy for its needs, but now it turns out to be necessary to attach to them the entire spiritual history of mankind, cutting it into pieces in accordance with these political-economic schemes. But, of course, political economy in reality does not at all belong to the significance of historical ontology, it is only a special science, like any other, and this attempt to transform it into ontology inevitably leads to a number of stretches, distortions, and violence against the facts. This illegal use of the concepts of political economy as exhaustive categories of economic philosophy completely closes the logical horizons for economic materialism. He remains logically constrained by them, seeing ready-made and exhaustive categories in front of him where problems should still exist. This condemns him to logical immaturity and remains “undeveloped and unfinished” (unfertig und nicht ausgedacht), as Stammler characterized him 217 . But he meant only the undeveloped critical form, the epistemological side, while our judgment concerns the essence itself. Thanks to the use of unsuitable means, namely specifically scientific concepts, to resolve the problems of economic philosophy, economic materialism passes by real problems without noticing them; but creates for himself a whole series of fictitious, incorrectly posed and hopeless to solve problems, trying to depict the world as it is, but at the same time looking at it through colored glasses. This is the origin of all kinds of experiments in the economic interpretation of history. Economic materialism in this sense is nothing more than a philosophical delusion of grandeur that developed from political economy, which elevated itself to the rank of historical ontology. And here Hegel was truly turned upside down: for him logic had such ontological significance, but not as a special science, as we know now, but as a doctrine of the general forms of thinking and being, while with Marx political economy received this significance simply as a special science. Economic materialism wants to be a philosophy of history, a “materialist understanding of history” (materialistische Geschichtsauffassung); meanwhile, in its logical structure it represents a sociological doctrine, and not a historical one. He strives, according to Marx’s thought, to transform social science, including history, into natural science, that is, to establish uniform, unchangeable laws of social life, according to which everything that happens in history can be predetermined. These laws should be equally suitable for diagnosis and prognosis; By attacking the “law of development” of society, one can scientifically predetermine its future, and therefore an advanced country shows the path of future development for a backward one. By “natural science” here we obviously mean such an examination of events in which they are taken only from the side of their similarity, their commonality among themselves, or typicality, and not from the side of their individual uniqueness, which imposes the stamp of historicism on them. But the concepts of historical and sociological repel each other and exclude each other. Using sociological means, one can illuminate known aspects of history, approach its understanding of what is repeatable or typical in it, but to comprehend a specific history it is necessary to descend to the very bottom of the individual-historical, unrepeatable. But then it is necessary to either completely abandon or, at least, introduce significant changes and restrictions into the idea of ​​“natural scientific laws”, which constitutes the logical pathos of economic materialism, which constantly fluctuates between understanding sociology as history, and history as sociology. And this is especially clearly reflected in the themes and tasks that he sets for himself: in some cases, there is a materialistic interpretation of almost a specific historical phenomenon - not only the Christian religion or medieval chivalry, but also the poetry of Shakespeare or Pushkin, while in others such nonsense is decisively condemned by the very supporters of economic materialism, and either the sociological or the metaphysical “letzter Instanz” comes to the fore, in which the “economic” bashfully hides factor." Since, according to its original meaning, economic materialism is a philosophy of history, a purely metaphysical doctrine of a universal historical law, then, turning into a scientific doctrine, it retains this logical feature, but replaces the metaphysical law with a sociological one, that is, also metahistorical. But in both his understandings, while remaining alien to genuine concrete history, he nevertheless wants to explain it and make scientific predictions about it. Thanks to this, in the history of the development of economic materialism, such a number of ambiguities and contradictions have accumulated that it is now not even possible to accurately recognize what the true logical face of economic materialism is - it turns out to be a chameleon, constantly changing its logical coloring depending on circumstances. The sociologism of economic materialism is nowhere more clearly revealed than in the fact that it ascribes to itself the ability of scientific prediction, which constitutes its central eschatological nerve - it is thanks to this that it becomes the historical philosophy of socialism. But what does this forecast refer to, what is its area of ​​competence? Is this only an expression of a sociological trend of development, established, firstly, ceteris paribus, under the assumption of the immutability of the basic elements of development (which, of course, we never have in history), and secondly, only for a given, precisely defined area of ​​​​relations, for a given social “totality”, in the way that statistics establish their forecasts? Or, on the contrary, are we talking about the future life of humanity, that is, about future history, as is undoubtedly the case in socialism, which “scientifically” predicts heaven on earth and thereby inspires and ignites enthusiasm in hearts? Neither one nor the other or both. From the tendency of concentration of capital, which is valid only for a certain social “totality” and loses all significance beyond its borders, you cannot carve out a scientific “earthly paradise”, and, of course, no scientific conclusion can be drawn regarding the leap into the kingdom of freedom and the onset of the socialist elysium; it is obtained, obviously, only due to the excess of scientific competence, but at the same time, the indicated sociological basis still gives it a certain scientific character, or, more precisely, that shade of scientific character that, say, statistical and other mass predictions have. Indeed, scientific elements are dissolved here in utopian ones, but the utopian ones are clothed in the mask of scientific ones; a complete mixture is obtained. In connection with this, there is still a contradiction that corrodes economic materialism: on the one hand, it is a radical sociological determinism, looking at everything through the prism of an inexorable, iron necessity, on the other hand, it is no less radical pragmatism, a philosophy of action, which cannot but be indeterministic to a certain extent, for which “the world is plastic” and there is nothing ultimately predetermined, inexorable, inevitable. Economic materialism remains helpless before the antinomy of freedom and necessity that it carries within itself; like a certain Faust, he has two souls, tearing in opposite directions. This difficulty has long been noted in the literature 218 . As a consistent sociologism, economic materialism completely ignores the individual, equating it to a zero value, quantité negligeable. For him, personalities are not even Condillac statues, but clockwork dolls, tugging at the string of economic interests. Obviously, with this concept there is no place for freedom, creativity, or any kind of human pragmatism; mechanism reigns over everything. But at the same time, economic materialism itself was born from pragmatism; it is only a means of orientation for the purposes of social action. And this action, we are further assured, in its expediency will break the power of the mechanism and force it to obey itself. But where is this freedom and what is it? Where should she go, where should she fit in this desert of omnipotent necessity? After all, the victory of freedom over necessity presupposes as its condition the presence of their antinomy, their struggle, and, consequently, the simultaneous existence and a certain compatibility of freedom and necessity; but in economic materialism there is no place for freedom at all. Man, as he is depicted here, turns out to be below the antinomy of freedom and necessity, he is an object of necessity, like a stone, like any physical object, and therefore, in the light of this view, the possibility of fighting with necessity and defeating it is completely incomprehensible. This contradiction stands bare in economic materialism and, as we noted earlier, it either alternates or directly combines contradictory versions. According to one of them, the wheel of history can neither be stopped nor turned back, or once labor has begun cannot stop, according to the other, it turns out to be possible to soften the pangs of childbirth (but to what extent?) and you can even defeat necessity by recognizing it... “Freedom is a recognized necessity,” economic materialism trustingly repeats after Hegel, not noticing how alien and insidious this imaginary ally is to it. But knowledge itself is also an action performed with the participation of the will, and the basis of knowledge is an act of freedom. Knowledge is the ideal overcoming of blind necessity, and behind it comes the real. Therefore, the formula about freedom as a recognized necessity is thoroughly pragmatic, it makes such a hole in the stronghold of determinism that defense becomes impossible for it, it must capitulate. The same instability of economic materialism in the question of necessity explains the uncertainty of its ethical teaching. On the one hand, economic materialism is alien to any ethics, both because it denies the authenticity or at least the independence of everything non-economic, and because ethics cannot be combined with consistent determinism, and all attempts at such a connection are contradictory. Ethics and freedom, i.e. indeterminism, in which the place of decision-making will, i.e. free will, is inextricably linked. On the other hand, it is an indisputable fact that in reality economic materialism in its socialist interpretation is thoroughly ethical, and, in particular, one cannot help but notice the enormous ethical temperament of Marx himself. Socialism, at least in one aspect, is entirely the ethics of economics, the doctrine of economic duty, which, of course, addresses human will, i.e., its freedom. Economic materialism hardly even makes an attempt to get out of these contradictions, practically uniting what is philosophically incompatible. The most vulnerable point in this area, however, is not ethics, but the epistemology of economic materialism. Although the latter remains alien to it and even completely rejects it (already in Engels’ Anti-Dühring, and even more so in modern literature), epistemology does not allow itself to be rejected so easily, it does not let go of its tenacious claws, demanding “critical self-accountability.” Economic materialism needs nothing less than to explain the possibility of itself. How is such self-reflection, such self-awareness, one might say, the self-revelation of nature, possible, which we have in the theory of economic materialism, if the world is only a mechanism, and man is completely subject to economic laws, and everything that he does, whatever he thinks, even if it seems to him to have an independent existence or meaning, “in the end” is only a superstructure or ideology, therefore, even some kind of self-deception, an illusion? How can clay know what the potter is doing to it, or how can a machine have consciousness of its own mechanism? Doesn't this already mean rising above him, that is, no longer being just a machine? But in this case, the doctrine proclaiming the principle of universal machinism is obviously incorrect, because it itself is super-machine, and therefore it itself makes a hole in universal machinism. Apparently, a cloud of such doubt came over the creators of economic materialism, and then they tried to brush it aside, making attempts to explain the self-consciousness of economic materialism: according to their teaching, at a certain stage of economic development, namely at the stage of commodity capitalist production, eyes are opened to universal economic dependence and thus the ideological understanding of history is eliminated. Let it be so, but by reasoning in this way, we place economic materialism no higher than all the other ideologies it rejected and despised: it, like these latter, is equally necessary for its time, and also represents an ideological reflex of a certain economic formation. That's all. But its truth or untruth is by no means established by this; everything is equally necessary in its place and at its time, idealism as well as materialism, and they are indistinguishable from each other in relation to their truth or falsity from the point of view of completely consistent determinism. But you can, of course, go even further and look at the very doctrine of determinism as well as a product of necessity, a reflex of history - and so on endlessly. Here we get bogged down in a quagmire of skepticism, from which we alternately free one leg and then the other, but we cannot pull them both out at once; we can neither affirm the truth of this theory nor completely reject it. In any case, one thing is clear: economic materialism as a theory that claims scientific truth is inexplicable within the limits of economic materialism itself; it is unable to theoretically demonstrate its possibility, much less its necessity, and must bow helplessly to skepticism. And if he does not do this, it is because, in addition to the economic basis, he is actually based on faith in the human genius, of course, not of all people, but of certain chosen ones canonized by the socialist church. In scientific research, Karl Marx is actually placed by economic materialists outside the sphere of influence of economic materialism, and, in essence, he places himself outside of it; he remains extraterritorial for him. Only at the cost of the philosophical canonization of Marx, which removes him from world necessity, can the truth of economic materialism be affirmed. This transforms him from a scientific theory, which he himself wants to be, into a revelation, the organ of which are the chosen ones - his prophets. We characterized above economic materialism as the most demanding rationalism, at the same time united with the metaphysics of the irrational. Now this characteristic must be complemented by the just established feature: this rationalism of it is based not on the reason diffused in the world - the world, as a mechanism, is unreasonable - but exclusively on the genius of an individual person or persons, prophetic clairvoyants in the midst of this absolute darkness. With such a radical cult of heroes, in which they are, in essence, endowed with the attribute of deity, the capacity for higher, supernatural knowledge, this theory unexpectedly ends, just as it began, and this despite the fact that everything individual was expelled in it, and attention was focused only on the masses and their movements. Faith in authority is the epistemology of economic materialism, its logical basis. This is what the logical structure of economic materialism looks like upon closer examination. It is obvious that with a certain degree of philosophical consciousness, even if you want to, you cannot stay on it, because it is burdened with contradictions that, once they are recognized, require overcoming, and is replete with such ambiguities that necessarily need to be eliminated. We can say that economic materialism as a philosophical system has not existed and does not exist until now. But this does not destroy its significance in the history of thought. As already indicated, it is the first experiment in the philosophy of economics; in it a new and, it seems to us, ore-bearing vein comes to the surface. A bright idea is expressed, a unique problem is posed, a new philosophical anxiety is awakened. Marx's role here resembles that of Malthus in relation to the question of population. Almost nothing remains of the teachings of Malthus himself, and yet the problem of population is forever associated with his name, because he was destined to introduce it into universal consciousness; Likewise, the problem of economic philosophy, which was first posed in economic materialism, will, of course, turn out to be more durable than this latter. But, in addition to this philosophical value, in economic materialism there remains a special vital truth, not theoretical, but practical, moral. It is not always noticeable to abstract theorizing and inaccessible to its cold arrogance, which economic materialism itself calls “bourgeois” in its own language. Under the guise of cold rationalism and theoretical rigidity, it hides man’s sadness about himself, the melancholy of the “king of nature” in captivity of the elements of this very nature, indifferent, even hostile. In this mournful teaching the economic tragedy of human life found expression, and in its pessimism there is deep sincerity and truthfulness. A curse hangs over man, says economic materialism, for what if not a curse is this captivity of rational beings in a dead, unreflective nature alien to us, this eternal danger of hunger, poverty and death. And this curse of dependence on nature gives rise to a new, even worse curse, the economic slavery of man to man, eternal enmity between people over wealth. Such is the melancholy that is heard in economic materialism, and such is the truth expressed in its scientific hieroglyph. This is the truth that is expressed on the very first pages of the book of the existence of the human race as the word of God’s wrath and God’s judgment over those who have sinned by man and all creation: “Cursed is the earth for your sake; you will eat from it in sorrow all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it will produce for you... by the sweat of your brow you will eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken” (Gen. III, 17-19). Wed. in general “From Marxism to Idealism”, 1903; introduction to "A Brief Essay on Political Economy", 1906; “Two Cities”, 1911; “Nature in the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov" (collection "Paths") and other articles, as well as courses of lectures on the history of economic philosophy. I use here, as applied to Christian ontology, the well-known expression of Vl. Solovyova. Instead of the second part of “Philosophy of Economics”, the work “Non-Evening Light” was written - see later in the same volume. For it is impossible to consider as better than economic materialism that eclectic, philosophically unprincipled mixture of ethics (lately already Kantian) and economic materialism, which we have, for example, in the “historical-ethical direction in political economy.” Despite the protective measures on the part of ethics, in fact, the representatives of this school with their veiled economic materialism (the school of Schmoller, Brentano, Bucher, all the major modern economists in Germany) contributed to the establishment of economism more than the most militant Marxists. For, in essence, it was they who applied the principles that the Marxists simply preached. From the egg (lat.), from the very beginning. This question came forward with particular force in Rickert’s teleological criticism, also in Lask: see his “Fichtés Idealismus und die Geschichte”, 1907 and especially “Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre”, 1910. I am aware that the terminology I have chosen is inconvenient and has a certain flavor of psychologism. However, other oppositions that suggest themselves as a replacement for it, such as: rationalism - anti-rationalism, logicism - antilogism, are also not free from possible misunderstandings. It seems to me unnecessary to introduce neologisms for this purpose. Descartes' position Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I exist (Latin)] suffers from fundamental ambiguity. In its direct meaning, it can be understood as the claim of the most unbridled rationalism, according to which being is established and justified by thinking, and therefore thinking is prior to being, is its prius [primary (Latin)]. We have such a Kantized Cartesianism in modern neo-Kantianism, especially in Cohen in his “Logik der reinen Erkenmniss”, in which being is given a place - and far from the first - only in a number of categories, and any illogical or superlogical given is eliminated (in the doctrine of reiner Ursprung [pure source (German)]). This is the direct and clearest meaning of Descartes' position. However, he himself not only did not stay on it, but with a number of further interpretations he obscured its radical character (just as Kant, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, obscured the radicalism of his ideas in comparison with the first edition). Therefore, in Descartes himself one can find another interpretation of his thesis, transforming it from a syllogism into an identical theory and depriving it of its raison d'être [reasonable basis (French)]: cogito ergo sum in this sense means: sum cogitans ergo sum [I exist thinking, therefore I exist (Latin)], or, even more briefly, sum ergo sum [I exist, therefore I exist (Latin)], i.e. a formula, already reminiscent of Fichte's Ich bin Ich [I am I (German)]. (See Descartes' explanations on this matter in his responses to objections to the Discours sur la méthode. Quoted by Lyubimov in his appendices to the translation of Descartes: "Discourse on Method" with a detailed presentation of Descartes' teachings. St. Petersburg, 1885, pp. 145-146.) Finally, in the "Principles of Philosophy" (L. 1. § 9) Descartes gives a third interpretation of his thesis, depriving it of any certainty: “By the word think I mean everything that happens in us in such a way that we are aware of it directly in ourselves. Therefore, not only to understand, to want, to imagine means to think, but to feel also means to think” (Quoted in Lyubimov, 133–134, cf. in general his “Explanations for the fourth part of the “Discourse on the Method”,” p. 122–160.) In such an interpretation, Descartes’ thesis is deprived of its ideological sharpness, and therefore loses its historical significance. Think = be = live (lat.). In Fichte's philosophical work, only the first period, until about 1800, is characterized by the predominance of intellectualism, making him the predecessor of Hegel, but later he becomes close to Jacobi, and in some ways to Schelling and Schopenhauer. (E. Lask also notes these periods in his monograph. Fichtés Idealismus und die Geschichte. Tübingen u Leipzig, 1902, pp. 71–72, etc., especially 157–164.) But even in the first period, Fichte’s philosophy can be turned into absolute idealism, therefore, into a completely intellectualistic system, only by one-sided interpretation. The main idea of ​​Fichte’s “Teaching of Science” is that the basis of knowledge lies in the self as an act, an act of freedom and self-creativity. The law of identity, which holds knowledge together and is grounded in the self-identity of the self, is itself grounded therefore not in knowledge, but beyond it. Knowledge or thinking, no matter how “pure” it may be, cannot hang itself in the air by throwing a rope into the sky for this - self-generating, self-closed thinking, equally of Hegel and Cohen, is equally far from this idealistic pragmatism, which reveals the inevitable hiatus [gaping (Lat.)] of philosophy. “In order for the real life of the I to become possible, a special impetus to the I through the non-I is also needed,” which determines the very existence of the I, or rather, bringing it into motion or into action, for “its existence consists in action.” “Scientific learning is therefore realistic.” “Alles ist seiner Idealität nach abhängig vom Ich, in Ansehung der Realität aber ist das Ich selbst abhängig” [Everything is, from the side of its ideality, dependent on the I; from the side of reality, the I itself turns out to be dependent (German).] (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre 1794, Werke, B. I, 279–280). “There is no death, no lifeless matter, but everywhere there is life, spirit, intellect: the kingdom of spirits, nothing else. On the contrary, all knowledge, if only it is knowledge, is being.” “Matter is necessarily spiritual, spirit is necessarily material. There is no matter without life and soul, there is no life without matter” (Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801, pp. 35, 100). “Die Ichheit ist es, die Subject-Objectivität, und sonst durchaus nichts; das Setzen des Subjectiven und seines Objectiven des Bewusstseins und seines Bewussten als Eins; und schlechthin nichts weiter ausser dieser Identität” [Identity is subject-object and nothing more, the affirmation of the subjective and its objective consciousness and what is recognized by it as one; and absolutely nothing more than this identity (German).] (II, 362–363). The primacy of life is proclaimed in “Sonnenklarer Bericht über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten philosophie” 1801. Here Wissenschaftslehre as “thoughts about thoughts” or “science” is opposed to real life and the claim attributed to it to be “Lebensweisheit”, “Weltweisheit” [life wisdom, worldly wisdom (German)], which other systems are accused of, is rejected. In the last period of Fichte’s philosophizing, in the “popular philosophical works,” this philosophical pragmatism becomes completely decisive. However, when constructing his system, Fichte went further than he should have towards intellectualism and idealism and was understood precisely in the latter sense. Most of all, Fichte is guilty of destroying nature, turning it only into not-I and into “äussere Anstoss [external push (German)] for the I, and thereby leaving the entire reality of life to the share of the I.” As a result, the latter receives the attributes of a deity, the limited, created I turns into the world, absolute I, for which nature is really only its self-positing, not-I. The philosophy of human god leads to acosmism and illusionism. But in the second period, the idea of ​​the primacy of faith over knowledge and life over consciousness sounds more and more decisively and completely displaces the painful subjectivism of the first period. The following statement sounds, for example, completely Schelling-like: “This is the true meaning of transcendental idealism: all being is knowledge. The basis of the universe is not soullessness (Ungeist), not the opposite of spirit (Widergeist), whose union with spirit could not be understood, but spirit itself” (Darstellung der Wissenchaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801, p. 35). Wed. characterization of Hegelian panlogism and clarification of its one-sidedness and insufficiency even as intellectualism (with a different, however, terminology) from the book. S. N. Trubetskoy in his “Foundations of Idealism”, collected. cit., vol. II, 180–196. « Wir fangen mit dem Denken an. Das Denken darf keinen Ursprung haben ausserhalb seiner selbst... Das reine Denken in sich selbst und ausschliesslich muss die Lehre vom Denken, die Lehre von der Erkennmiss werden. Als solche Lehre vom Denken, welche an sich Lehre von der Erkenntniss ist, suchen wir die Logik aufzubauen” [We begin with thinking. Thinking cannot have any other source other than itself... Pure thinking wholly and exclusively in itself must become a doctrine of thinking, a doctrine of knowledge. We are trying to build logic as a doctrine of thinking, which is in itself a doctrine of knowledge (German).] (Hermann Cohen. Logik der reinen Erkenntniss, 1902, S. 12). “Das Denken der Logik ist das Denken der Wissenschaft... Die Frage des Zusammenhangs der Wissenschaften ist die Frage des Zusammenhangs ihrer Methoden” [Logical thinking is scientific thinking... The question of the relationship of the sciences is the question of the relationship of their methods (German).] (ibid., 17. Italics by the author). Cohen also develops this program of “scientific philosophy” in the spirit of radical idealism in his earlier works, especially see Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2-te Ausg., and Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte 1883. Cf. a clear formulation of the ideas of the “Marburg School” by R. Natorp. Philosophie, ihr Problem und ihre Probleme, 1911. - It is interesting to compare with this the general point of view of Hegel, as expressed in the famous preface to the Phänomenologie des Geistes, colored by a pointed polemic with Schelling. Here we read: “Die wahre Gestalt, in welcher Wahrheit existirt, kann allein das wissenschaftliche System derselben sein. Daran mitzuarbeiten, dass die Philosophie der Form der Wissenschaft näher komme, – dem Ziele, ihren Namen der Liebe zum Wissen ablegen zu können und wirkliches Wiesen zu sein ist es, was ich mir vorgesetzt. Die innere Nothwendigkeit, dass das Wissen Wissenschart sey, liegt in seiner Nature... die Erhebung der Philosophie zur Wissenschaft an der Zeit ist... die wahre Gestalt der Wahrheit in die Wissenschaftlichkeit gesetzt wird...” [The true form in which truth exists can only be its scientific system. My intention was to promote the approach of philosophy to the form of science - to that goal, having achieved which it could abandon its name of love of knowledge and be real knowledge. The internal necessity for knowledge to be science lies in its nature... The time has come for the elevation of philosophy to the rank of science... the true form of truth is seen in scientificity (German, trans. G. G. Shpet).] (Hegel's Werke, B. II, 2 Aufl., S. 6). The rapprochement of Hegelianism and Cohenianism (from a different, however, point of view) was made by B.V. Yakovenko in an article about Cohen in the magazine “Logos” No. 1. Reason will always end with reason (French). Below (in the last chapter) we will encounter this feature when analyzing economic materialism. I use the expression Johannes Volkelt. (Erfahmng und Denken, 1886). Vl. S. Solovyov in his first epistemology, book. S. N. Trubetskoy in various works, most systematically in “Foundations of Idealism” (Collected works, vol. II). Against this understanding of Hegelianism, an objection can be made that according to Hegel, it is reality that should be the content of philosophy: “ihr (der Philosophie) Inhalt die Wirklichkeit ist” [Its (philosophy’s) content is reality (German).] (Hegel’s Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Erster Theil. Die Logik, § 6). However, one has only to understand how Hegel understands reality, for whom only “was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich” [what is rational is real (German)] (Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts), and “eine zufällige Existenz wird nicht den emphatischen Namen eines Wirklichen verdienen; – das Zufällige ist eine Existenz, die keinen grössern Werth als den eines Möglichen hat, die so gut nicht seyn kann, als sie ist” [random existence does not deserve the loud name of real; the contingent is an existence that has no greater value than the possible, which could equally be and could not be (German).] (Die Logik, § 6). “Reality” in Hegel’s sense is the opposite of the immediate concreteness of life; it has an ideal-metaphysical character. “Die Geschichte der Philosophie ist die Geschichte der Entdeckung der Gedanken über das Absolute, das ihr Gegenstand ist” [The history of philosophy is the history of the discovery of thoughts about the absolute, which constitutes its subject (German).] (Preface to the 2nd ed. Encyclopädie, 1-er Theil. Die Logik. Hegel's Werke, 2-te Aufl., 6-er Band, S. XX). Wed. This is discussed below in the chapter on the nature of science. Book S. N. Trubetskoy defines metaphysics (coinciding with our concept of general philosophy) as “a critical science of existence or a systematic ideology of existence” (“Foundations of Idealism,” collected works, vol. II, 202). To this definition, essentially, we have to add only one, but very important caveat: this systematic ideology can be constructed differently depending on different initial orientations. This is completely similar to what is observed now in the bickering about who rightfully belongs to the “logos”, and, of course, each side considers itself to be the true organ of the divine Logos, and its opponent – ​​a usurper. Fortunately, neither Λόγος has yet issued a monopoly patent on itself to any of the “logosists,” nor has ratio yet bestowed the lifelong title of a critically thinking person on any of the rationalists. Melchior Palagyi expression. (Die Logik auf dem Scheidewege. Berlin, 1903). The first part of this work contains a sharp critique of Kant's epistemology and the method of abstraction and dissection as applied to the living and indivisible unity of knowledge. Fichte, in his second period, shows with particular clarity this immediacy of life, which distinguishes cognition, and the mediation of reflection, its secondary nature and derivativeness. See, for example, Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie, S. W., B. II, 338 ff. “Der Philosoph, als solcher, ist nicht der ganze vollständige Mensch, sondern im Zustände der Abstraktion, und es ist unmöglich, dass jemand nur Philosoph sey” [The philosopher as such is not a complete independent person, especially when in a state of abstraction; it is impossible for anyone to be only a philosopher (German).] (Rückerinnerungen, Antworten, Fragen. Sämmtl. Werke, V, 348). Ibid., 369: “There is not a single thought, position, statement of hers from real life or corresponding to real life. These are actually thoughts about thoughts that have or should have, statements about statements... statements about statements.” Hegel. Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Umriss, 1-er Th. § 10. Cf. J. Volkelt. Erfahrung und Denken, 24 pp. Herman Lotze also points out the inevitability of a logical circle when resolving an epistemological problem. Logik. 2-te Aufl., 1880, 491 ff. Wed. about him Volkelt, 1. p., 26. Lotze ironically compares the criticism of knowledge with sharpening knives, which becomes “boring if there is nothing to cut,” and “tuning instruments before a concert” (H. Lotze, Metaphysik. 2-te Aufl., 1884, 15–16). Wed. about this H. Cohen. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. 2-te Aufl., 1885, 582. Endless retreat (lat.). This argument regarding regressus in infinitum regarding its “forms of forms” tries to weaken in its own way E. Lask. Die Logik der Philosophie und Kategorienlehre, 1910, pp. 90, 112. Economy, as it is usually understood in political economy, is the planned activity of man aimed at satisfying his material needs. This definition fully fits into what we have made, characterizing the economy from the point of view of the economic entity. Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow. Zur Beleuchtung der socialen Frage. Theil I, 2-te Aufl., Hrsg. von M. Wirth. Berlin, 1899, S. 104: “All economic goods are products of labor.” In the beginning was the Cause (German). In Marx’s theses on Feuerbach of 1845, remarkable for the allusions it contains to the newest theory of pragmatism, appended by Engels to his pamphlet “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie,” we read: “l. Der Hauptmangel alles bisherigen Materialismus ist, dass der Gegenstand, die Wirklichkeit, Sinnlichkeit, nur unter der Form des Objects oder der Anschauung gefasst wird; nicht aber als menschliche sinnliche Thätigkeit, Praxis, nicht subjectiv. Daher geschah es, dass die thätige Seite, im Gegensatz zum Materialismus, vom Idealismus entwickeit wurde – aber nur abstrakt, da der Idealismus natürlich die wirkliche, sinnliche Thätigkeit als solche nicht kennt... 2. Die Frage, ob dem menschlichen Denken gegenständliche Wahrheit zukomme, ist keine Frage der Theorie, sondern eine praktische Frage. In der Praxis muss der Mensch die Wahrheit, d. h. die Wirklichkeit und Macht, die Diesseitigkeit seines Denkens beweisen. Der Streit über die Wirklichkeit oder Nichtwirklichkeit eines Denkens, das sich von der Praxis isolirt, ist eine rein scholastische Frage... 11. Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verandern.” [The main drawback of all previous materialism - including Feuerbach's - is that the object, reality, sensibility is taken only in the form of an object, or in the form of contemplation, and not as human sensory activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contrast to materialism, was developed by idealism, but only abstractly, since idealism, of course, does not know real, sensory activity as such... 2. The question of whether human thinking has objective truth is not a theoretical question at all, but a practical question. In practice, a person must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking. The debate about the reality or invalidity of thinking, isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question... 11. Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, but the point is to change it (German).] In these theses, although with great conciseness, the problem of the philosophy of economics is definitely posed. Mechanism in the sense of causality arising from the nature of things and their properties is by no means eliminated by the idea of ​​expediency. The latter does not at all mean causelessness or, more precisely, unnaturalness, in which the properties of things are destroyed. A mechanism, in contrast to expediency, is only its alienness to human goals or the actual inaccessibility of its goals to man. In general, a mechanism is only a method of action, its how, and not its what. He may work with real or apparent aimlessness or in direct opposition to human goals, but this does not mean that his very idea is contrary to purposefulness. On the contrary, it can be considered as a concept coordinated with the concept of a goal: every goal needs a mechanism of means, so that the mechanism enters into the implementation of the goal. Moreover, just as the goals can be different, the degree of coordination of the mechanism of causes is also different. We can go further and say that the concept of an absolute mechanism, independent of any expediency, is even unthinkable; in reality, we always think teleologically, and consciously or unconsciously we substitute certain goals for nature, and even on the basis of them we interpret its mechanism. In this sense, all natural science is teleological - Darwin's struggle for existence, the doctrine of the origin of species, etc. All political economy is teleological (unconsciously) even in its most objective directions (for example, in economic materialism). On the question of goals in farming cf. extensive research by R. Stolzmann. Der Zweck in der Volkswirtschaft. Die Volkswirtschaft als socialethisches Zweckgebilde. Berlin, 1909. Engels (and with him, probably, Marx) in “Anti-Dühring” objects to Kantian subjective idealism by citing the fact of technology. (Cf. also Marx’s above-quoted theses on Feuerbach.) Just as much as this reference seems victorious and destructive to orthodox, uncritical Marxists, in the Kantian environment it is customary to treat this argument with disdain, as philosophical naivety. In reality, neither one nor the other is wrong. Of course, the reference to technology, just like to any other fact of our experience, does not at all refute Kant’s assertion that every demonstration of experience presupposes what is known a priori, the presence of forms of knowledge in which only it can be recognized. In this sense, the fact of technology is fundamentally no different from any other fact - an eclipse of the moon, the movement of celestial bodies, etc. As a fact of knowledge, technology does not follow Kant with his teaching about the forms of knowledge, about the epistemological subject. But as a fact of action, technology really does not fit into Kant’s cognitive and only contemplative schemes, because for its understanding it requires a different nature of schemes, which Kant did not have at all. But such fundamental significance, attributed by Engels to technology, obviously, in view of the amazingness of its successes, belongs to every objective action, every economic act - to the most complex machine no more than to the expedient blow of a simple ax. Kant, of course, is not refuted by the fact of economy or technology, but at the same time he does not explain them philosophically in his purely contemplative, theoretical position. It’s just that his scheme does not accommodate the formulation of this question. System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Schelling's Ausgewählte Werke, II, 103). This does not contradict the fact that Kant at the same time turns out to be the father of scientific pragmatism in his theory of scientific knowledge or in the critique of pure reason. Wed. Ch. VI. Wed. on Fichte above, note 7. Oh, the abyss of suffering and the sea of ​​melancholy! A wonderful building, broken into pieces. You shook Him with a hail of curses. Grieve over the loss of the Lost beginnings. But cope with sadness, Rise up, demigod! Reduction to the absurd (lat.). Here are these wonderful words of Schelling, spoken by him from the department of the University of Munich (quoted in K. Fischer, History of New Philosophy, vol. VII, pp. 329–330): “When I first took part in philosophical activity almost 30 years ago, then a system of philosophy dominated in this area, powerful in itself, internally highly vital, but far from all reality. Who could have believed at that time that an unknown teacher, still a youth in years, would master such a powerful system of philosophy, which, despite its empty abstraction, was still closely aligned with many favorite trends? However, this happened, of course, not thanks to his merits or special merits, but thanks to the nature of things, thanks to the power of the irresistible reality contained in all things, and he will never forget the gratitude and joyful appreciation expressed to him at that time by the best representatives of the mental life of the people, although in our time few already know from what obstacles and fetters philosophy had to be freed then, since at that time it was necessary to achieve a breakthrough into the open free field of objective science, now accessible to all, and to win the freedom and vitality of thought, the result of which all now enjoy.” Doesn't the current state of affairs in philosophy also resemble this era before Schelling's speech? The only exception in this regard is the philosophical system of Vl. Solovyova. The teachings of classical antiquity, the Eastern Fathers of the Church and Western mystics (especially Boehme and Baader) received here a new philosophical expression in the doctrine of the soul of the world or the Eternal Feminine, which occupies a central place in the philosophical system, as well as in the poetry of Solovyov. Wed. My essay is about this: “Nature in Solovyov’s philosophy”, Vopr. Phil. and psych., 1910, V, as well as in the collection “Paths” about Vladimir Solovyov. Moscow, 1911. Wed. and other articles in this collection. Wed. K. Fischer. East. new phil., vol. V and vol. VI, 339 (Russian translation). Ideen zur Philosophie der Natur (Ausgew. Werke, I, 152). System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Ausgew. Werke, II, 14–15). In the preface to the first edition of “Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der Höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus,” published in 1798, the 23-year-old Schelling writes: “At least a step would be taken towards an explanation (of organization and life) if it could be shown that the sequence (Stufenfolge) of all organic beings was formed through the gradual development of the same organization. The fact that our experience has not told us about the transformation of nature, about the transition from one form to another, is not evidence against the possibility of this; for, its defender might object to this, the changes to which organic nature, as well as inorganic, is subject, can occur in ever lengthening periods of time, for which small periods cannot serve as a measurement and which are so great that we have not yet learned from experience of such a case” (A. W., I, 445). Even the most inveterate Darwinist could borrow these arguments in defense of transformism from Schelling. Ideen zur Philosophie der Natur, A. W., I, 142. Philosophie der Kunst, A. W., III, 519. Created nature (lat.). Wed. my essay “Nature in the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov" in the collection "Paths" about Vl. Solovyov. In Plato's Timaeus, matter, which represents a well-known analogy with nature in Schelling, is characteristically designated, among other things, as “mother” or “nurse” (μητήρ, τδθίνη), and also as an entity devoid of form, but capable of perceiving all sorts of things (έκμαγειου): Tim. XVIII, 49 A, 50 E, 51 A. Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines System der Naturphilosophie, A. W., I, 691. Die allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Prozesses, A. W., I, 815. Philosophical studies on the essence of human freedom, 74. Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines System der Naturphilosophie. A. W., I, 703. In the note to this place we read: “A traveler in Italy makes the observation that on the great Roman obelisk the whole history of the world can be demonstrated, also on every product of nature. Each mineral body is an excerpt from the history of the earth. But what is land? Its history is woven into the history of all nature, thus, starting from the fossil through all inorganic and organic nature to the history of the universe, a chain stretches.” This idea is partly characteristic of Leibniz’s Monadology: “65. ...each part of matter is not only capable of infinite divisibility, as the ancients believed, but, in addition, is actually (actually) subdivided without end, each part into parts, each of which has its own motion; otherwise it would not be possible for every part of matter to be able to express the entire universe. 66. From here we see that in the smallest part of matter there exists a whole world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies.” (G.V. Leibniz. Selected philosophical works. Proceedings of the Moscow Psychological Society, issue IV. Moscow, 1908, pp. 356–357). “The uniqueness of nature rests precisely on the fact that in its mechanism, although it itself is nothing more than a blind mechanism, it is still expedient. With the elimination of mechanism, nature itself is eliminated. All the fascination that surrounds, for example, organic nature... is based on the contradiction that this nature, although a product of the blind forces of nature, is nevertheless completely and thoroughly expedient” (System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 282). As Schelling says in one of his later and most profound works (Die Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus, A. W., III, 517–518), “the genesis of all nature rests exclusively on the predominance that, gradually increasing, is established for the subject relative to the object until the point when the object finally becomes a subject in human consciousness. What is posited outside consciousness is essentially the same thing that is posited in consciousness. All of nature forms one continuous (zusammenhängende) line, which in one direction leads to a preponderance of objectivity, on the other side to a decisive preponderance of the subjective over the objective, not so that at the last point the object is completely exterminated and destroyed, on the contrary, it always remains fundamentally even completely transformed into subjectivity, but only in such a way that the objective passes into a hidden state relative to the subjective, becomes, as it were, latent, just as in In a transparent body, thanks to this state, dark matter does not disappear, but turns into clarity" (Die Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus, A. W., III, 517–518). System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 237–238. Fall into the hands of God (lat.). Ibid., 301–302. Schelling continues further: “Art is the highest phenomenon for philosophy precisely because it seems to reveal to him the Holy of Holies, where in eternal and original unity in a single flame burns that which is separate in nature and history and that must eternally diverge in life and activity, as well as in thinking. Views of nature, artificially created by philosophers, appear originally and naturally in art. Nature is a poem written in mysterious, wonderful characters. However, if the riddle could be revealed, we would see in it the Odyssey of the spirit, which, miraculously deceived, seeking itself, flees from itself. In fact, the meaning of the world is visible through its sensory shell only like the meaning of words through their sounds, like the land of fantasy that makes up the charm of our desires, through a translucent fog. This majestic picture is obtained, as it were, due to the fact that the invisible barrier separating the ideal and the real world is removed, and only through this hole do these images and countries of the fantastic world, which only imperfectly shine through the real one, fully emerge.” Wed. Ed. v. Hartmann, Schelling's philosophies System. Leipzig, 1897. Wed. although Drews's preface to the new edition of Schelling's selected works in three volumes: Scbelling's Ausgewählte Werke. B.I. This closeness comes out most clearly when comparing, for example, a treatise like Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus with the youthful works of Solovyov. Wed. our essay “Nature in the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov" in the collection "Paths" about Vl. Solovyov. The truth of this philosophical position, which, in a certain sense, is an a priori of cosmology, is in no way contradicted by scientific practice, which, due to its pragmatic nature, for reasons of expediency, actually establishes an indefinite set of causalities corresponding to the multiplicity of science itself. In this sense, one should understand, for example, the words of Cournot, which reflected this idea of ​​scientific pragmatism: “No one will seriously accept that, by stamping his foot, he can influence the movement of a ship sailing on the waters of the opposite hemisphere, or shake the system of satellites of Jupiter; the influence, in any case, would be so insignificant that it would not be revealed in any action perceptible to us, and we have absolutely the right not to take it into account. It does not seem impossible that an event occurring in China or Japan will affect what is about to happen in Paris or London; but in general, undoubtedly, the way in which the Parisian man in the street spends his day does not in any way depend on what happens in some Chinese city where Europeans have never penetrated. These are, as it were, two small worlds, each of which has its own chain of causes and effects, and these chains develop simultaneously, without intertwining and without exerting any noticeable influence on each other” (Cournot. Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances etc. I, [Paris, 1851,] 51–52. Quoted from A. A. Chuprov. Essays on the theory of statistics, [St. Petersburg, 1909,] 100). For science, there are not two such worlds, but n, an indefinite number, this follows from its properties (cf. below the chapter “On the nature of science”), but this practice of science does not undermine, but rather even presupposes the philosophical idea of ​​​​the unity of the universe, and therefore the continuity of causality. System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 164–166. One involuntarily recalls here the formula of Paracelsus: “Isesst du ein Stäck Brot, so geniesst du darin Himmel und Erde und alle Sterne” [If you eat a piece of bread, you taste in it heaven and earth and all the luminaries (German)]. (Quoted in I. Claassen. Einführung in Jacob Böhmés Ausgewählte Werke, I. L.) The communism of being, which removes the line between man and the world, is one of the main ideas of the greatest mystic of Germany, Jacob Böhme, as well as his follower in the 19th century, Franz F. Baader. “Das menschliche Corpus (we read from Boehme) ist ein Auszug aus dem Wesen aller Wesen, sonst könnte es nicht ein Gleichniss oder ein Bild Gottes genannt” [The human body is the quintessence of the essence of all entities, otherwise it would not be possible to call it the image and likeness of God (German).] (Claassen's Auswahl aus J. Böhme, II, 160). Man in this sense is not only a microcosm, but also a “micro-theos”. Baader has the same thought: “Jedem Organismus als Mikrokosmos sind mehr oder minder vollständig alle Gestirne und Elemente eingebildet, d. h. jener ist und wirkt nachbildlich alles, was der Makrokosmos ist und wirkt" [To each organism, as a microcosm, with one degree or another of completeness, all the luminaries and all the elements correspond, so that it is what it is and acts according to what is and how the macrocosm acts (German).] (Baader's Werke, 15, 591, Claassen's Auswahl, II, 62). "Was man gewöhnlich das Verzehren oder Verdauen der Speise nennt, ist als ein Moment des universalen nährenden, einverleibenden oder leibsetzenden Prozesses, welchem der gleichfalls universale leibverzehrende Prozess gegenüberstent" [What is usually called the absorption and digestion of food, itself, as a certain moment of assimilation, represents only a moment of the universal body-creating or body-laying process, which, in turn, is opposed by the universal body-absorbing process (German).] (Baader, I, 159, Claassen, 2, 63). The book speaks well about this. S. Trubetskoy in “Metaphysics in Ancient Greece”. By communing with the mysteries (through grain seed and wine), “the Greek performed the sacraments of naturalism: he directly communed with the productive forces of nature, he believed directly in the gods of bread and wine and thought to live and be reborn by their inner power... Christianity does not absorb the pagan mysteries: in its idea it transubstantiates them as everything immediate and natural” (123-124). On the Greek mysteries, see E. Rohde. Psyche. 3-te Aufl., 1903, Ι, 279 fr. The principle of separation and difference (lat.). As Schelling says: “The highest improvement of natural science would consist in the complete spiritualization of all the laws of nature into the laws of thinking and contemplation. Phenomena (material) must completely disappear, and only laws (formal) remain. Therefore, it is observed that the more regularity is revealed in nature, the more the shell disappears, the phenomena themselves become more spiritual and, finally, completely disappear. The perfect theory of nature would be one in which all nature would be resolved into intellect” (Ibid., 14). The prince speaks rightly. S. N. Trubetskoy: “The subject comes out of himself metaphysically, in a universal way, in every act of his life, in every relationship. No empiricism can contradict this” (Metaphysics in Ancient Greece, collected works, III, 15, italics). System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 241. The most insightful of the idealists, Schopenhauer, adds to the definition that the world is a representation: and will. But his will and idea are completely alien, mutually repelling and non-penetrating principles, the will remains blind, and the idea is illusory, which is why the practical conclusion from Schopenguaer’s philosophy turns out to be quietism with the ideal of nirvana. The thoughts expressed here were thought out and sketched by me even before I became acquainted with Bergson’s philosophy and are in connection with problems alien to Bergson. But this does not reduce their closeness to some aspects of Bergson's worldview. Fichte already senses the falsity of Kantianism precisely in the passivity of consciousness and instead of the I, which passively contemplates, he puts the active I. However, he also deals with an abstract, and therefore lifeless, subject who posits the non-I only as his boundary, but does not live a common life with him. This is “the world in a pocket format,” as Schelling venomously but rightly put it, the world as a subject of epistemological exercises for the self. Therefore, Fichte's Thathandlung remains an idealistic pose of an abstract subject, and is not a living Thätigkeit. The principle of labor as a living connection between subject and object that substantiates the objectivity of the world remains alien to Fichte's concept, just as deeply as Kant's. That is why Fichte’s “absolute That” “does not benefit at all” and does not in the least lead us out of the fence of solipsism, from the enchanted chamber of subjectivism, in which I can dream, contemplate, stand in front of the mirror in the pose of an active self, but remains imprisoned behind seven locks from the world, like Lyudmila in the Chernomor castle. In the “popular philosophy” of the last period (“The Purpose of Man,” 1800, “The Main Features of the Modern Epoch,” 1804–1805, “On the Purpose of the Scientist,” 1811) Fichte sets out a theory of historical development, which includes the philosophy of economics, but it has no connection with his first system, to which he left the deepest mark in the history of philosophy. However, from his early period, a small speech in 1794 stands out. “Über die Würde des Menschen” (Sämtl. Werke, I, 412–416) is a classic monument to idealistic man-theism. Here ideas of a completely Schellingian nature are outlined. Man “awakens nature” (463), is able to obtain from it “a more perfect creation”, “commands rough matter to organize itself according to his ideal” (ib.), all matter must receive “the stamp of his influence” (415). This speech ends with the statement that “all individuals are contained in one great unity of pure spirit” (world soul?). Wed. Chapter VIII: “Phenomenology of Economy”. Schelling says: “History exists only for those beings who have an ideal before them, which is never realized by the individual, but only by the race. For this it is necessary that each successive individual enters exactly where the previous one ends, and thus there is continuity between successive individuals and, if what is to be realized in the progress of history is something possible only through reason and freedom, tradition and continuity (Überlieferung) becomes possible” (Schelling. System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 263). Aristotle. Politics, trans. S. A. Zhebeleva, Moscow, 1911, p. 8 (I, 2, 11–12): “The nature of the state comes before the nature of the family and the individual: it is necessary that the whole precede its part. Destroy a living being as a whole, and it will have neither arms nor legs, only their name will remain, just as we say “stone hand”... So, obviously, the state by its nature precedes the individual.” Schelling goes on to say: “...everything that occurs according to a certain mechanism, or has its own theory a priori, is not an object of history. Theory and history are completely opposite. Man has a history only because what he will do cannot be calculated by history. In this sense, arbitrariness is the deity of history (Die Willkür ist Göttin der Geschichte)” (Syst. d. transz. Ideal., A. W., 263). These words of Schelling express the main idea that Rickert develops in his work “Über die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begrittsbildung” [1896; rus. trans.: St. Petersburg, 1903]. Schelling says further: “... everything that happens according to a certain mechanism, or has its own theory a priori, is not an object of history. Theory and history are completely opposite. Man has a history only because what he will do cannot be calculated by history. In this sense, arbitrariness is the deity of history (Die Willkür ist Göttin der Geschichte)” (Syst. d. transz. Ideal., A. W., 263). These words of Schelling express the main idea that Rickert develops in his work “Über die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begrittsbildung” [1896; rus. transl.: St. Petersburg, 1903]. This difference between causality and regularity is well clarified in the cited methodological treatise by Rickert, however, in the development of Schelling’s thought (cf. previous note). N. O. Lossky rightly points out this. Introduction to Philosophy. Part 1. Introduction to the theory of knowledge. St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 164, 198–199. Kant here reflects in philosophical consciousness the main sin of Protestantism, its anti-church individualism, which scatters humanity, the one body of Christ, into atoms. Kant was given birth to by Luther and other reformers when they contrasted personal will and personal consciousness with the church and rejected the reality of the supra-individual unity of humanity. The mystical rupture committed in the religious depths of existence has given and continues to bear fruit in consciousness and in activity, in philosophy and in culture. Another root of neo-Kantianism is, undoubtedly, Judaism, or more precisely, Jewish modernism, which in its religious and dogmatic foundations is so close to modern Protestantism (“Jesuanism”). Extremely typical in this regard is Cohen's recent speech (at the V Congress of Free Christianity in Berlin in 1910), in which the central nerve of his philosophizing is exposed: H. Cohen. Die Bedeutung des Judentums für den religiösen Fortschritt (Protokoll der Verhandlungen, 2-ter Band, Berlin, 1911). In the field of ethics, a comparison between Protestantism (namely Puritanism) and Judaism was made by Sombart: Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 1911. Wed. our essay on his philosophy: “Two Cities,” volume II. [M., 1911.] In this sense, N. F. Fedorov designates his teaching as “the philosophy of the common cause.” Wed. Chapter Five: “The Nature of Science.” This idea is central to the teachings of N. Φ. Fedorov. Angelus Silesius. Cherubinische Wandersmann, (Quoted from the editor N. Brunnbofer. Eine Auswahl. Bern, 1910, S. 11.) All translations of the couplets of the Angel of Silesius, at my request, were made by G. A. Rachinsky, to whom I offer my sincere gratitude. See Die Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments, hrsg. von E. Kautsch, 3-te Aufl., Tübingen, 1910, II, 262, Note e. For us, this discrepancy does not matter in this case. Here we read more about wisdom Man is a wolf to man (lat.). In this sense, man is, according to Schelling, “the redeemer of nature, the goal of all the prototypes contained in it. The Word fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark, prophetic (not yet fully spoken) word. Hence those hints that cannot be explained in itself and can only be explained by man. Hence the universal finality of causes, which is also understandable only from this point of view” (Schelling. Philosophical studies on the essence of human freedom. [St. Petersburg, 1908,] p. 70). Contradiction in definition (lat.). Schelling calls knowledge recollection, as we know, in another sense, namely in the sense of the conscious reproduction in us of the unconscious activity of nature outside of us. There is no contradiction here between Schelling and Plato, since this unconscious activity also affects the recollection of what exists pre-eternally, which was therefore already given in nature, but has not yet been realized. Nature is in this sense a book of revelation, in which are written the primordial ideas that form the subject of recollection. See "Economy and Theurgy" in the work "Non-Evening Light" in this volume. “Natural” is often contrasted with “artificial”, and preference is given to one or the other. Where Sophia directly shines through, where the original perfection of creation is still preserved, there this “natural” is placed above everything artificial: what from the world of the artificial, imperfect and non-absolute can be compared, for example, with the absolute, perfect charm of a flower swaying in the sun! However, where “natural” expresses the current state of nature, alienated from its prototype, there it receives exactly the opposite meaning: after all, barbarism, poverty, plague, cholera are natural, and finally, what is more natural than death itself, which, however, is the limit of unnaturalness in another sense of the word. In the first sense, naturalness means the greatest sophistry, in the second sense, the greatest distance from it. “God did not create death and does not rejoice in the destruction of the living, for He created everything for existence and everything in the world is salvific, and there is no harmful poison, there is no kingdom of hell on earth... God created man for incorruptibility and made him an image of His eternal existence; but through the envy of the devil death entered the world, and those who belong to his work experience it” (Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, I, 13–14, II, 23). Angelus Silesius. Cherubinischer Wandersmann, I. with "Philosophy of the Common Cause", vol. I. Cf. V. A. Kozhevnikov. N. F. Fedorov, part I. [M., 1908.] Wed. my “Two Cities”, preface. This is how Schelling depicts the origin of the world and historical process: “Man contains all the power of the dark principle, and he also contains all the power of light. It contains both centers; and the extreme depth of the abyss, and the highest limit of heaven... Since man arises from a foundation (created), he contains within himself a principle relatively independent of God; but since this principle is transformed into light (without ceasing to be fundamentally dark), then something higher also rises in man - namely, the spirit. For the eternal spirit brings unity into nature by uttering the word. The spoken (real) word exists only in the unity of light and darkness (vowels and consonants). Both of these principles exist, however, in all things, but not in perfect harmony, due to the imperfection of what arose from the basis. Only in man does the word, not yet fully revealed and imperfect in other things, achieve the fullness of its expression. In the spoken word the spirit is revealed, that is, God as an existing actu. Being the living identity of both principles, the soul is spirit, and spirit is in God. But if the identity of both principles were as inseparable in the spirit of man as in God, there would be no difference between man and God, that is, God would not reveal himself as spirit. Therefore, the unity that is inseparable in God must be separate in man - this is the possibility of good and evil... The principle rooted in the foundation of nature, by which man is separated from God, is selfhood in man; but the unity of this self with the ideal principles transforms it into spirit. Selfhood as such is spirit, that is, man is spirit, as a special (separate from God) being imbued with selfhood; This is precisely the essence of personality. But, being a spirit, the self thereby rises from the state of creation to super-creation; it is the will contemplating itself in perfect freedom - it is no longer an instrument of the universal will creating in nature, but above all nature and outside of it. Rising in nature above the unity of light and darkness, the spirit is above light. Therefore, being a spirit, the self is free from both of these principles... Due to the fact that it has within itself a spirit that rules over light and darkness, the self can - if this spirit is not the spirit of eternal love - be separated from the light, or, in other words, self-will can strive to be in itself, as a private will, what it is only in identity with the universal will: what it is only insofar as it remains in the center, it wants to be in the periphery or as a created thing. So, thanks to this, in the will of man there arises a separation of the self that has become spiritual from the light, that is, a gap between the principles inseparable in God. The will, emerging from its supernaturality in order to make itself as a general will at the same time a particular and created will, strives to change the relationship of principles, to place a foundation over the cause, to use the spirit it has received only for the focus, outside the latter and against the creature; as a result of this, disorder arises in the will itself and outside it. The will of man is the connection of universal forces; while she herself remains in her unity with the universal will, these forces also remain in divine measure and balance. But as soon as self-will breaks away from the center as its intended place, the connection of forces is broken; instead of it, only private will rules, no longer having the power, like the original will, to unite these forces under its own power and therefore inevitably striving to form from the forces separated from one another, from the rebellious army of desires and desires (each separate force is a special desire, a special lust) its own separate life; the creation of such a life is possible insofar as even in evil the first connection of forces, the basis of nature, still exists. But since this life cannot be a true, authentic life, which could exist only with the original relationship of principles, then a special, but false life arises, a life of lies, the lot of anxiety and death. It would be more accurate to compare this life with a disease... Every disease that engulfs the universe is the result of an uprising of the hidden forces of the base: it arises when the irritable principle, which should have remained in the silence of the depths as the most intimate internal connection of forces, is activated by itself, that is, when the excited archaea leaves its calm home in the center and enters the environment of the circle... The disease of the individual also arises only because that which has freedom or life only to remain as a whole, strives to exist for itself " (Schelling. Philosophical studies on the essence of human freedom, pp. 31–33). The comparison of the world process with a disease belongs to Baader. Sofia has many aspects, of which we focus on only one, namely the cosmic one. This is very important to keep in mind in order not to fall into the grossest misunderstanding and not take the cosmic aspect of Sophia as the only one. But in view of the fact that we are here only interested in the problem of economy and clarification of its Sophia basis, we consider ourselves entitled not to dwell on the question of Sophia in its other multifaceted aspects; Wed. about this in St. P. A. Florensky. The Pillar and Ground of Truth. M.: “The Path”, 1912 (chapter about Sofia). Religion knows this event as the fall of Adam in paradise. However, not to mention the numerous allegorical interpretations of this narrative, it is necessary to remember that the time before the Fall is ontologically different than after it, when, in fact, our discursive time begins. This question - about the relationship between the metaphysical fall of the soul of the world and the fall of the first man - is one of the most difficult for religious-metaphysical speculation (it remained obscure in both Schelling and Vl. Solovyov). For our reasoning, this issue does not have independent and decisive significance, and therefore we prefer to leave it aside. “Man, although born in time, was created as the beginning of creation (as its focus). The act by which his life is determined in time is not itself in time, but belongs to eternity: it precedes life not in time, but throughout all time and, as an act eternal in nature, is not covered by time” (Schelling, op. cit., 48). “An activated self is essential to the thrill of life; without it there would be nothing but death, the slumber of good; for where there is no struggle, there is no life. Thus, the basis only wants the awakening of life, and not evil in itself and directly... Good itself without an effective self is ineffective good” (Schelling, op. cit., 60). Schelling owns the following profound saying about freedom as the basis of world history, which, according to the fair conclusion of K. Fischer (Hist. New Phil., VI, 806), “contains pure truth”: “Why is all development so slow in general? Why, even in the ordinary course of things, as soon as the goal seems close, more and more new intermediate terms appear again, postponing the solution of the problem for an indefinite time? There is only one answer to this: from time immemorial the world has been designed so that everything is done in the highest degree voluntarily. Nothing should be introduced solely by force. In the end, everything must arise from the opposing forces themselves, which for this very reason must have their own will until the moment of final exhaustion. The changes that must take place in these opposing forces must arise from within them, and not from the outside, not through violence, they must follow in such a way that the opposing forces are gradually forced to voluntarily surrender... In the consistency and gradualness of overcoming, a certain law is revealed, Providence is revealed, which also reigns over this movement.” “The true future can only be the common product of destructive and preserving forces. That is why the true future is capable of being created not by weak minds, which first of all obey every gospel of modern times, but only by strong characters who also firmly hold on to the past” (Philosophie der Offenbarung, XIII, 262–263, 283. Quoted in K. Fischer, I. p.). This idea forms the basis of Renouvier’s metaphysical cosmology, which represents the development of Leibniz’s monadology and was outlined by him in his treatise “Le personnalisme”. Paris, 1903. “The fact that the life of all organic beings ends in decay cannot at all be considered an original necessity; the connection of the forces that form life, by its nature, could equally be indestructible, and if there is anything destined to be a perpetuum mobile [perpetual motion machine (lat.).], it is obviously a creature that makes up for the deficiencies that arise in it with its own forces" (Schelling. Philosophical Studies on Human Freedom, 41). The same idea is expressed by modern natural science, at least in some of its representatives (Mechnikov). From this point is built the doctrine of the mutual relationship between economy and art, about the economic side of art and the artistic side of economy. Art is the goal and limit of economy; economy must return to its original image, turn into art. War of all against all (lat.). Poincare. Science and hypothesis. [M., 1904,] 161. “The question of the connection of sciences is the question of the connection of their methods” (N. Cohen. Die Logik der reinen Erkenntniss, [Berlin, 1902, S.] 17). They drink wine without witnesses, In "Kants Theorie der Erfahrung", 2-te Ausg. [Berlin, 1885] and “Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalen” [Berlin, 1882]. Reason does not draw its laws (a priori) from nature, but prescribes them to it (German). The main idea of ​​Fichte’s “Science” (already in 1794, and in a later era to an even greater extent) is the primacy of the practical self over the theoretical, which establishes, to a certain extent, the principle of scientific pragmatism with the denial of a single pre-established course of scientific development. Fichte speaks, on the one hand, of “die Subordination der Theorie unter das Praktische.. alle theoretischen Gesetze auf praktische... sich gründen” [subordination of theory to practical... all theoretical laws are based on practical ones (German)], and, on the other hand, this results in “die, absolute Freiheit der Reflexion und Abstraktion auch in der theoretischen Rücksicht... Der Fatalismus wird von Grund auch zerstört, der sich darauf gründet, dass unser Handeln und Wollen von dem Systeme unserer Vorstellungen abhängig sey, indem hier gezeigt wird, dass hinwiederum das System unserer Vorstellungen von unserem Triebe und unserem Willen abhängt” [Absolute freedom of reflection and abstraction also in theoretical terms... The fatalism that is based on the conviction that our action and emotion depends on the system of our ideas is destroyed to the core; for here it is established that, on the contrary, the system of our ideas depends on our impulse and our will (German).] (J. G. Fichte. Grundlage der gesammien Wissenschaftslehre, 1794, § 8, II. Sämmtl. Werke, I, 294-295). In Bergson we read: “All knowledge in the proper sense of the word is oriented in a certain direction or obtained from a certain point of view. True, our interest is often complex. And therefore we often consistently orient our knowledge of the same subject in several directions and diversify points of view on it” (“Introduction to Metaphysics,” in the appendix to the Russian translation of “Time and Freedom of Will.” M., 1911, p. 214). For example, the idea that such the most abstract generalizations of natural science, such as the principle of conservation of energy, are purely formal constructions, without which physics simply could not be built, and that their truth is established, therefore, by their cognitive usefulness, is a completely pragmatic idea. The “economic” nature of the methods of scientific thought is fully recognized by the defender of “pure logic” Husserl, who says: “All artificial methods have the character of methods of economy of thinking. They historically and individually follow from well-known natural processes of economy of thought” (Husserl. Logical Investigations, trans. S. Frank. [SPb., 1909, vol. 1,] p. 172, cf. also p. 176). In this sense, the subject of any science is determined through “reference to value.” All science is vital, practical and therefore “historical”. Therefore, we recognize Rickert’s ingenious classification of sciences into historical and natural sciences as completely missing the mark. Abstracting and individualizing methods as moments are present in every science, and their clear logical distinction is the indisputable merit of Rickert. But dividing them and, on the basis of this division, deducing a classification of sciences does not make sense and does not lead to anything. For Rickert himself, this is interesting because it opens up prospects for his teleological criticism with the concept of “culture” (the mask of pragmatism), but in understanding the nature of science this distinction is more confusing than clarifying. We repeat, every science is generated by interest and constituted through “reference to value” (which Rickert considers only a feature of the historical sciences), but every science uses concepts of both a natural science and a historical nature (in Rickert’s sense). Henri Poincaré. Science and hypothesis, trans. from fr. Bachinsky and Solovyov. Moscow, 1904, pp. 60–61, 83–84. In the establishment of this objective logical connection, in the defense of pure logic, which is revealed in human thinking, lies the merit of that current in modern logic, which is represented by Husserl: “Since no science is possible without explanation from reasons, therefore, without theories, pure logic in the most general way embraces the ideal conditions of the possibility of science in general” (Cit. cit., p. 222). “The law of causality is a universal objective truth and represents an unshakable guarantee for the objectivity of our knowledge and for the limitless area of ​​what we can comprehend” (L. M. Lopatin. Positive tasks of philosophy. Part 2, M., 1891, p. 231). “Not only our immediate knowledge, but all human knowledge in general finds its ultimate concept in action. The most abstract of these ideas - the concept of being - has as its content the thought of effectiveness in its most generalized form and yet in the fullness of its logical moments" (Lopatin. Positive tasks of philosophy. Part 2, p. 231). A distinctive feature of critical idealism according to Cohen is that “for it, things do not exist except in thoughts and from thoughts,” and it does not rely on sensory consciousness in general, but “on a science in which all things are given and accessible to philosophical questions; the stars are not given in the sky, but in the science of astronomy, we designate such objects as data, which we distinguish from the generation and processing of thinking as grounded in sensibility. Sensuality does not lie in the eye, but in the raisons de l'astronomie" (Cohen. Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte, 127). Cohen's idealism reaches its greatest tension in Die Logik der reinen Erkenntniss. Wed. Ch. III, dept. II, pp. 121–129. “Sein ist offenbar kein reales Prädicat, d. i. ein Begriff von irgend etwas, was zu dem Begriffe eines Dinges hinzukommen könne. Es ist bloss (?!) die Position (?) eines Dinges oder gewisser Bestimmungen an sich selbst. Im logischen Gebrauche ist es lediglich die Copula eines Urtheils... Und so erhält das Wirkliche nichts mehr als das bloss Mögliche. Hundert wirkliche Thaler enthalten nicht das Mindeste mehr als hundert mögliche. Aber in meinem. Vermögenszustände ist mehr bei hundert wirklichen Thaler, als bei dem blossen Begriffe derselben (d. i. ihrer Möglichkeit). Denn der Gegenstand ist bei der Wirklichkeit nicht bloss in meinem Begriffe analytisch enthalten, sondern kommt zu reinem Begriffe (der eine Bestimmung meines Zustandes ist) synthetisch (?) hinzu, ohne dass durch dieses Sein ausserhalb meinem Begriffe diese gedachten hundert Thaler selbst im Mindesten vermehrt werden... Unser Begriff von einem Gegenstande mag also enthalten, was und wie viel er wolle, so müssen wir doch aus ihm herausgehen (?), um diesem die Existenz zu enheilen (?).” [It is clear that being is not a real predicate, in other words, it is not a concept of something that could be added to the concept of a thing. It is only (?!) the positing (?) of a thing or some determinations in itself. In logical application it is only a connective in a judgment... Thus, the actual contains no more than only the possible. One hundred real talers do not contain one iota more than a hundred possible talers... But my property is greater in the presence of a hundred real talers than in the mere concept of them (i.e., their possibility). Indeed, in the case of reality, the object is not only analytically contained in my concept, but is also added synthetically (?) to my concept (which serves as a definition of my state), without in the least increasing these conceivable hundred talers by this being outside my concept... So, no matter what and no matter how much our concept of the object contains, we in any case must go beyond its limits (?) in order to attribute existence to the object (?) (German).] Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, hrsg. von Kehrbach, pp. 472–474, passim. This reasoning is very characteristic of the general theoretical character of Kant’s philosophy, for which concepts constitute something original and immediate, to which the accident of existence is only added and from which one must “come out” in order to achieve being: armchair philosophy that mistook itself for Copernicanism! “Kant’s theory of knowledge does not substantiate the reality of the transsubjective world: as a phenomenon, the external world, according to his theory, is only a set of necessary representations of the knowing subject” (N. Lossky. Introduction to Philosophy, I, 207). Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 208–209 (Kehrbach). How is nature itself possible? (German) Kant repeatedly returns to the question of how it is possible to know the laws of nature with the help of a priori categories of reason, or how it is possible to achieve reality through the prism of subjectivity, but his answers to this question are always dark, vague, and ambiguous. See especially Kritik d. reinen Vern. (Kehrbach) 135, 154–156, 208–209, 222, 313–314, 318, 402–403, 443–444, etc. Let us cite two or three of his judgments on this issue as a sample. In Supplement III to the Critique of Pure Reason we read: “Categories are concepts that prescribe to phenomena, and together to nature as the totality of all phenomena (natura materialiter spectata [nature considered from the material side (lat.)]), laws a priori, and now the question is: since they are not derived from nature and do not take it as their model (for they would otherwise be only empirical), how can we understand that nature must be guided (sich richten) by them, that is, how can they a priori determine nature without being taken from it? Here is the solution to this riddle. How the laws of phenomena in nature generally agree with reason and its form a priori, i.e. its ability to connect the diverse in general is no more strange than the way that phenomena themselves can agree with the form of sensory perception a priori. For laws do not exist in phenomena, but only in relation to the subject to whom these phenomena correspond (inhäriren), insofar as he has intellect, and they do not exist as phenomena in themselves, but only in relation to a being that has sensibility. Things in themselves would necessarily be characterized by their regularity even outside the mind cognizing it. But phenomena are only ideas about things that are unknowable in that they are in themselves. As simple (blosse) representations, they stand under no other law of connection than that prescribed by the connecting power... All natural phenomena, according to their connection, stand under categories on which nature (considered simply as nature in general) depends as on the original basis of its necessary regularity (as natura formaliter spectata [nature considered from the formal side (lat.)]). A greater number (mehrere) of laws than those on which nature in general is based, as the regularity of phenomena in space and time, lacks the pure ability of the understanding to prescribe laws to phenomena a priori by categories alone. The special laws concerning empirically determined phenomena cannot be completely deduced from here, although they themselves all depend on them (stehen unter ihnen). Experience must also be added in order to know them at all; but experience in general and what can be known as its object are taught exclusively by these laws a priori” (Kehrbach, 680–681). Isn’t it obvious that this riddle remains completely unsolved here, if the difficulty is seen precisely in the question of reality, the transsubjectivity of knowledge, the connection between natura materialiter and formaliter spectata. Kant is only repeating his definitions here once again, clearly showing how the problem of technology and economics does not fit into them. The same thing happens in the Prolegomena, where, due to the greater brevity and clarity of the presentation, the main difficulty of Kant’s apriorism appears, perhaps, even more clearly, especially in § 36 “Wie ist die Natur möglich?” “How is nature possible in a material sense?.. Based on the properties of our sensibility, by which it is affected in its own way by objects that are in themselves unknown to it (?) and differ (?) from these phenomena” (the contradiction here piles up on contradiction: although objects are unknown, it is known about them that they affect sensibility and that they differ from phenomena). “The possibility of experience in general is also a general law of nature, and the principles of the former are the laws of the latter. For we know nature only as the totality of phenomena, representations in us (hence, only contemplatively, theoretically) and therefore cannot perceive the law of their connection otherwise than according to the rules of their connection in us” (100–101, according to Schulz). “The supreme legislation of nature must lie in ourselves, that is, in our mind” (101). Kant no longer poses the delicate question here: will he be able to distinguish, on the basis of this reason, ideal thalers from real ones and real nature from illusory ones? Is there a “way out” or a transition from one to the other? Cohen also notes this difficulty in Kant and tries to eliminate it: Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, 2 Ausg. [Berlin, 1885,] 311–314. Science is the servant of life (lat.). Household trick (German). “Like ordinary knowledge, science looks at things from the point of view of their repetition. If the whole is not repeatable, she tries to decompose it into elements or aspects that would be approximately a reproduction of the past” (A. Bergson. Creative Evolution, trans. M. Bulgakov, p. 32). “The essence of mechanical explanations is that they recognize that it is possible to calculate the future and the past as functions of the present and that in this way everything is assumed to be given. According to this hypothesis, some superhuman mind capable of making the necessary calculations could immediately survey the entire past, present and future” (ibid., 38). Quoted in Bergson, op. op., 39. Laplace says: “If any mind knew at a certain moment all the forces acting in nature and the mutual relations of the objects that compose it, and if the mind were strong enough to subject these data to analysis, then it would embrace in one and the same formula the movements of the largest forces of nature and the universe and the movements of the lightest atom: nothing would remain unknown to it, and the future, like the past, would be revealed before its eyes” (Laplace. Introduction á la théorie analytique des probabilités. Cited in Bergson, op. 39). Huxley expressed the same idea in a more specific form: “If the position of evolution is correct, that the whole world, animate and inanimate, represents the result of interaction according to certain laws of forces belonging to the molecules of which the original world nebula consisted, then it is equally true that the present world was already potentially contained in cosmic gas, so that a sufficiently broad mind, knowing the characteristics of the molecules of this gas, could predict, for example, the state of the British fauna in 1868 year, with the same accuracy as we predict what will happen to the vapor of breath on a cold winter day” (cited in the same place). “Modern science, like ancient science, uses the cinematic method. It cannot act otherwise, because all science is subject to this law. Indeed, the essence of science is its manipulation of signs or symbols with which it replaces the objects themselves” (Bergson, ibid., 282–283). “Our intellect clearly represents only immobility” (133). “We feel free only among separate, motionless, dead things. The intellect is characterized by a natural lack of understanding of life” (141). You will be like Gods, knowing good and evil (lat.). Sombart. Modern Capitalism, Vol. I-II, in various places, also in "Juden und das Wirtschafteleben", 1911. Schelling speaks well about this: “What is this mechanism with which you frighten yourself like a ghost? Is a mechanism something that exists in itself (für sich), and is it not itself rather just the negative side (das Negative) of the organism? Shouldn't the organism come before the mechanism, the positive before the negative? If, in general, the negative presupposes the positive, and not vice versa, we repeat the first, then our philosophy cannot proceed from the mechanism, as negative, but must proceed from the organism, as positive, and therefore the first cannot be explained from the second, since it itself is rather explained by the first” (Von der Weltseele, A. W., Ι, 444). “An organism does not exist where there is no mechanism, but, on the contrary, where there is no organism, there is a mechanism” (445). In his earliest, still Fichtean-tinged, philosophical work, “Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie,” completely in the spirit of his later natural philosophy, the 20-year-old Schelling says: “The ultimate goal of the “I” is to make the laws of freedom laws of nature, and the laws of nature laws of freedom; reproduce nature in the “I”, and “I” in nature (A.W., I, 501). “The highest calling of man is to reproduce the unity of goals in the world as a mechanism, and to make the mechanism a unity of goals” (ib., 94). Schelling. System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 245. Fichte notes this well: “By assuming a continuous universality (Gültigkeit) of the mechanism of causes and effects, they directly contradict themselves; what they say and what they do are in conflict. It is by pre-establishing the mechanism that they rise above it; their thinking about him is something that lies outside him. A mechanism cannot understand itself precisely because it is a mechanism. Only a free consciousness can understand itself” (J. G. Fichte. Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre. Sämtl. Werke, I, 1, 510). As Schelling says: “The highest improvement of natural science would consist in the complete spiritualization (Vergeistigung) of all the laws of nature (before their transformation) into laws of thought and contemplation. Phenomena (material) must completely disappear, and only laws (formal) must remain. Therefore, it is observed that the more regularity is discovered in nature, the more the shell disappears, the phenomena themselves become more spiritual and, finally, completely disappear... A perfect theory of nature would be one in which all nature would be resolved into intellect” (Syst. d. tr. Id., A. W., II, 14). His Majesty the case (French). Schopenhauer laid the philosophical foundation for this view in his treatise “On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason.” In metaphysics, this dualism is removed, because the basis of the world, and therefore the world mechanism, is freedom, but in its given state it is expressed in this duality. The question of free will has similarities with another “damned question” of philosophy - about the reality of the external world (cf. previous chapter). No matter how this issue is resolved in school systems, “naive realism” as a fact of living, immediate consciousness remains irremovable and, at the very least, requires philosophical interpretation. Also, the belief in free will, its direct experience, is characteristic of us, regardless of any theoretical teaching about it and, at least as a fact, requires explanation. The cause does not correspond to the effect (lat.). This idea, which is supported by Poincaré and some mathematicians who rely on the theory of probability, is thoroughly explained in Russian literature in the study by A. A. Chuprov, “Essays on the Theory of Statistics.” “Nature delights only in the greatest wealth of forms and (in the words of the great poet) even in the dead spaces of decay, arbitrariness is amused. The single law of gravity, to which even the most mysterious phenomena of the sky are ultimately reduced, not only allows, but even causes the fact that the world's bodies interfere with each other in their movement and that therefore, in the most perfect order of the sky, apparently the greatest disorder reigns. Thus, nature has defined a vast space, fenced in by eternal and unchangeable laws, broadly enough so that within it the human spirit can enjoy the appearance of lawlessness” (Schelling. Von der Weltseele, A. W., I, 448). To the greater glory of science (lat.). Even in the creation of the pre-human world, let the creative not directly produce finished products, but only awaken the creative forces of nature: “let the earth produce greenery,” “let water produce reptiles,” “let the earth produce living souls.” “Even the very continuation of existence (of creatures) is only a constantly renewed act of creation, in which an individual being is created not as some indefinite general being, but precisely as a given, definite, separate being, distinguished by given, and not by any other thoughts, aspirations and actions, being” (Schelling, op. cit., 10). Here we present Schelling's thoughtful judgments on this topic. “From the nature of God, everything follows with absolute necessity, and everything that is possible due to this nature must therefore also be real, and what is not real must also be morally impossible... all the arguments against recognizing the unity of possibility and reality in God are based on a completely formal concept of possibility, according to which everything that does not contradict itself is possible; An example is the well-known objection that, recognizing the unity of possibility and reality, we must recognize all meaningful novels as stories about actual events... If such an empty possibility is enough for freedom, then we can agree that formally, that is, if we abstract from the divine essence, infinitely much was and is possible even now. However, this would mean basing divine freedom on a concept that is internally false and possible only in our reason, and not in God, in whom abstraction from His essence or His perfection is unthinkable... In the divine mind itself, as the primordial wisdom in which God ideally or originally realizes Himself, there is only one possible world, just as there is only one God” (Schelling. Philosophical Studies on the Essence of Human Freedom. 58–59). “Kraftgefühl ist das Prinzip des Lebens, ist der Übergang vom Tode zum Leben” [The feeling of strength is the principle of all life, is the transition from death to life (German).] (Fichte. Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, B. I, 296). Schelling. System des transzendentalen Idealismus, A. W., II, 276. The concept of history from this side was formulated so well by Schelling that we can only reproduce his definitions here: “Neither an absolutely lawless series of events nor an absolutely lawful one deserves the name of history; From here it is clear: a) that the progressiveness assumed in history does not allow for such a series of laws in which free activity is limited to a certain, always returning change of actions; b) that in general everything that happens according to a certain mechanism or has its own theory a priori is not an object of history. Theory and history are completely opposite... (Cf. above, p. 138, note 1); c) that the name of history is just as little worthy of the absolutely lawless, or a series of events without purpose or intention, and that only freedom and the Necessity of unification or the gradual realization of an ideal that is never completely lost by a whole series of beings constitute the essential content of history” (263–264). Schelling (Inquiry into Freedom, 58–59), arguing with Leibniz, argues that God has no choice between different worlds and possibilities, acting with absolute necessity, which is identical for God with absolute freedom. But human freedom and, therefore, the multiplicity of causes or the difference in ways to achieve the same result (as Poincaré speaks about) is already included in this plan in advance. Wed. in our book “Two Cities” there is an essay “National Economy and Religious Personality”, as well as other articles. Wed. also our lithographed course on the history of economic worldviews (preparing for publication). Giovanni Pico della Miranaola. Oratio de hominis dignitate. (Quoted from the German edition: Ausgewählte Schriften, 1905, Diederichs). “Man (we read here) is the connecting link of all nature and, as it were, an essence composed of all its juices. Therefore, whoever knows himself, knows everything in himself.” Of course, we also find social determinism in other thinkers; it is enough to recall, for example, R. Owen (cf. our essay about him: “The Social Philosophy of R. Owen,” Issues of Phil. and Psych., 1911, II); in general, it is widely diffused in the spiritual atmosphere of our time. The question of freedom and necessity came forward with all its force for the writer of these lines at the time of his greatest enthusiasm for Marxism and made the first hole in him. Wed. my articles in connection with Stammler’s epistemological idealism and polemics with Struve: “On the regularity of social phenomena” and “Freedom and the necessity of human actions” in the collection “From Marxism to Idealism”, 1903. Quetelet speaks enthusiastically about “social physiology”: “This great body exists by virtue of the principles of self-preservation, like everything that has come from the hands of the Creator; he has his own physiology, like the last of the organic beings. Having risen to the highest rung of the ladder, we everywhere find laws as strong, as immutable, as the laws governing the celestial bodies; we enter the realm of physical phenomena in which the free will of man finally disappears, giving way to the dominance of God's creation. These laws, existing outside of time, outside of human whims, constitute as a whole a special science, which I consider it most fitting to call social physics” (Lettres sur la théorie des probabilités, p. 263, quoted by Adolphe Quetelet. The social system and the laws that govern it. St. Petersburg, 1866, 240–241). Bertrand. Calcul des probabilités, XXXVI, op. from A. A. Chuprov, cit. cit., 154. Pearson in his “Grammar of Science” characteristically calls the mechanism “logical shorthand,” which, of course, is different in each science. Wed. our “Two Cities,” vol. I, essay “On Social Moralism (T. Carlyle).” Lexis Abhandlungen, 227. Cited. at Chuprov, 379. All other things being equal (lat.). One could also understand class interest as a norm of behavior, as a rule of morality: behave not individualistically, but socially, in accordance with the class ideal, as Lassalle taught, for example, and this is, in essence, the ethics of social democracy. However, the statement discussed in the text has a completely different meaning; it concerns not ought, but being. What A. A. Chuprov says about the vital importance of the stability of statistical numbers is applicable in general to sociological averages: “Faith in the limited fluctuation of statistical numbers underlies any calculation in the field of social life... This constancy underlies any estimate in the private and public economy. It constitutes the conditio sine qua non [an indispensable condition (Latin)] of the entire modern economic system, which rests on a broad division of labor and on the exchange of products produced not for oneself and not to order, but for an indefinite market. If the numbers in which the summed needs of individuals are expressed were subject to bizarre fluctuations that knew no bounds from year to year, the mechanism of the national economy could not hold up (A. A. Chuprov, op. cit., 249–250). Judge no higher than the boot (lat.). The question of the possibility of historical prediction, which is so acute in Marxism and in scientific socialism in general, has always been very troubling for me, and one of the main holes in Marxism was punched for me precisely by its perceived impossibility. Wed. “Capitalism and Agriculture” [St. Petersburg], 1900, vol. II, pp. 457–458: “Marx considered it possible to measure and predetermine the future by the past and present, while each era brings new facts and new forces of historical development - the creativity of history does not become impoverished. Therefore, any forecast about the future based on data from the present is inevitably erroneous. The strict scientist here takes on the role of prophet or soothsayer, leaving the solid ground of facts. Therefore, when it comes to predictions for the future, we prefer honest ignoramus [we don’t know (Latin)] to social witchcraft and quackery. The veil of the future is impenetrable. Our present sun illuminates only the present, casting an indirect reflection on the past. This is enough for us, for our life, for the evils of our day and its interests. But we vainly fix our eyes on the horizon, beyond which our setting sun descends, lighting there a new dawn for the coming unknown day.” To these words, written 12 years ago, I now have a lot to add, but I can’t take anything away. “Should free will be denied in man? I think not. I only think that the activity of this free will lies within too narrow limits and plays the role of a random cause in social phenomena. From this it follows that if you do not pay attention to individuals, but look at things from a general point of view, then the actions of all random causes must be paralyzed and mutually destroy each other, so that only the true reasons by virtue of which society exists and holds together will remain predominant. The wisdom of the Supreme Being has set limits to our moral properties as well as to our physical ones; He did not want man to encroach on His eternal laws” (Quetelet, op. cit., 71). In Russian “subjective” sociology there was a correct feeling that a certain subjectivism - not knowledge, but will - has an influence in the construction of a social ideal. However, she mistakenly attributed this subjectivism to scientific research, that is, exactly where it should be expelled, unless we want to devalue scientific work. Here is the confession of a “sociological” person: “I could never understand (Ivan Karamazov says to Alyosha) how one can love one’s neighbors: It is precisely one’s neighbors, in my opinion, that is impossible to love, but perhaps only those who are distant... To love a person, one must hide, and as soon as he shows his face, love is lost...” (Φ. M. Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, book V, chapter IV: "Riot") The desire for “scientific” socialism is only one of the manifestations—and, moreover, chronologically the earliest—of our era’s general desire for “scientificness,” this mania for scientificity: along with scientific socialism, we have scientific philosophy, scientific ethics, even scientific religion (in modern Protestantism); what is still missing is only scientific art. Therefore, if it is appropriate to talk about the laws of social policy, then only in the sense of the laws of will, as is done, for example, by the “Marburg School”: Stammler, Cohen, Natorp. In a similar way, the scientifically established need for the development of capitalism in Russia did not give rise to the will to capitalism in Russian Marxists; on the contrary, their will was directed beyond its borders, to that socialist system that could supposedly come only after “the peasant is boiled down in a factory cauldron.” I pointed out this many times in my books: “From Marxism to Idealism.” St. Petersburg, 1903, and “Two Cities (Research on the nature of social ideals).” Publishing house "Path". Moscow, 1911. Two volumes. This can even be seen in the history of the literary development of Marxism: the question of socialism was resolved by Marx in a positive sense since 1844, and the system of “scientific socialism” is already quite definitely in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, anticipating all the most important scientific ideas of “Capital”, while Marx’s in-depth scientific studies in the field of political economy, even according to his own statement, relate only to the London era, to the 50s and 60s. From prehistory to history (German). However, the materialist definition of wealth as a collection of material products, or sensually tangible objects that can be seen or touched with hands, does not correspond to the modern state of production: neither the electrical industry, nor the chemical industry, nor the transport industry, nor the telegraph, nor the telephone, etc. do not fit into Smith’s definition - even material goods have become dematerialized. Part instead of the whole (lat.). “However, knowledge of the height of the numbers and the fact of their greater or lesser stability over at least an indefinitely long period of time is not enough to make calculations for the future.” “The stability of a statistical number is not a law that determines the course of events, but the result of a confluence of diverse circumstances (Lexis)” (A. A. Chuprov, op. cit., 379). Wed. my essay “National Economy and Religious Personality” in the collection “Two Cities”, vol. I. Moscow, 1911. Wed. also Max Weber's major studies on Protestantism and the "spirit of capitalism" (the main conclusions of which are given in the cited article) and the latest study by Sambart: Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 1911. However, in fact, even in these quasi-theoretical disputes, motives of a practical nature were mixed in, connected with these theories only by weak ties of historical associations (for example, this is the quasi-socialist character of the labor theory of value, the quasi-anti-socialist character of non-labor theories). This kind of connection between theories and practice, false pragmatism, is nothing more than scientific bias, and of the worst kind. The understanding of the scientific value of economic theories presented in the text was expressed by me back in the book “From Marxism to Idealism”, 1903 (see essay: “Problems of Political Economy”) and is the fruit not only of methodological reflections, but also of direct personal experience - long-term studies in economic theory: the theory is most controversial and confusing where in reality there is no problem or it is unsatisfactorily formulated and not fully understood. Vladimir Solovyov, with his philosophical universality, no matter how alien he was to economism in general, nevertheless sensed the truth of life and appreciated the peculiar motive of economic materialism, although he expressed this in a slightly mocking form in the article “The Idea of ​​the Superman” (Collected works, vol. VIII, p. 310 seq.): “Every idea in itself is only a mental window. Through the window of mental materialism we see one back, or, as the French say, lower courtyard (La basse cour) of history and modernity.” In these good-natured, mocking words, we find, however, such recognition of the special truth of economic materialism, its peculiar philosophical motive, which is not found among idealistic philosophers. But, of course, Solovyov was also mistaken in believing that the “idea” of economic materialism is “directed only at the current and present” (ibid.), but not at the future; here he could learn a lot from the thinker N., who influenced him so much. Φ. Fedorov, whose worldview undoubtedly includes some philosophical elements common to economic materialism (cf. my “Two Cities,” vol. II). The rapprochement between pragmatism and economic materialism, which emerges from a comparison of the foundations of both teachings, appears with particular clarity in Marx’s famous theses on Feuerbach, published by Engels in the appendix in the pamphlet: Fr. Engels. "L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie.” See above, pp. 49–50, note. Until further correction (lat.). Hell. Smith isolated the sympathetic or altruistic side of man from the egoistic or economic side. He subjected the first to a separate study in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the second in The Wealth of Nations. His successors completely forgot about this division (of course, also very controversial) and, with the help of Bentham, turned the methodological premise of the “Wealth of Nations” into a general doctrine of man. Wed. our essay “The Main Problems of the Theory of Progress” in “Problems of Idealism” and in the collection “From Marxism to Idealism.” St. Petersburg, 1903 By hook or by crook (lat.). A typical example of such an application of political-economic concepts as a key that opens the doors to all the locks of history, we have in Marx’s famous judgment on the relationship of economy to religion and on Christianity as the religion of commodity production. “For a society of commodity producers, whose social production relation consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, that is, as values, and in this material form they relate their private works one to another as identical human labor - for such a society Christianity with its cult of the abstract man, especially Christianity in its bourgeois form - Protestantism, deism, etc., represents the most suitable religion" ("Capital", vol. I, trans. under ed. P. Struve, p. 41). In this paradox, Marx gives a caricature of himself, although, unfortunately, his followers not only did not notice this unintentional caricature, but began to strengthen it even more. R. Stammler. Recht und Wirtschaft nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung. 1896. Of great importance here is the famous study by Stammler: “Recht und Wirtschaft nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung.” Cp. about him: S. Bulgakov. "From Marxism to Idealism." 1903, P. Struve. "On various topics." 1903