Volume I. EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY AND CRITICISM OF THE BASIC QUESTIONS OF LIFE

Preface

An unknown genius once wrote on the pediment of the Delphic temple: γνωθι σεαυτον ("know thyself"), and the genius later explained to the Greeks the mysterious meaning of this inscription. Socrates was the first to see in it the deepest riddle about man and the first to guess that the solution of this riddle should contain the fullness of human wisdom. He became an ardent preacher of his discovery, speaking of it wherever he could, and to all who would listen to it. From his conversations the Greeks heard that he, the wisest of the Athenians, according to the judgment of the oracle, resolutely rejected the justice of this judgment in regard to himself and considered himself a naked ignoramus; because, according to his deep conviction, until the great riddle about man himself is solved, all science and all knowledge can only serve as an expression of scientific ignorance. But among all other ignorant scholars, Socrates nevertheless stood out sharply in that he fully understood what true wisdom consisted in, and with love strove to achieve it. This was such an outstanding feature in him that he considered it possible to determine his position in Athenian society through it. Unlike all other teachers, who proudly considered themselves true sages (σοφιστης), he appropriated to himself the modest title of a lover of wisdom (φιλοσοφος) and was the first to introduce the word φιλοσοφια with the meaning of a special term.

Socrates thought that the good of man lies in man himself and is precisely man himself in his humanity. If people seek good outside themselves, then they are mistaken, and if they recognize the means of life as its ultimate goal, then they are deceived. The whole world is a complete insignificance in comparison with man, because no treasures of the world can buy that which constitutes the essence of man, cannot buy the living human spirit. If only people would clearly realize this immutable truth, they would certainly try to reveal it in their activities, and in this revelation they would undoubtedly see that what is really valuable in the world is brought into it only by people themselves. The high pleasure of such a consciousness would inevitably compel them to strive for the full and all-round development of that which is peculiar to man according to his humanity, and only that which is true, good, and beautiful is peculiar to him. In the striving for the knowledge and realization of these perfections lies true philosophy, and the real knowledge and realization of them in life constitutes true wisdom.

On the basis of such reflections, philosophy, of course, could in no case depart from the practice of life, because this practice itself served only as a true manifestation of the philosophical spirit. Hence, for the ancient thinker, to be a philosopher and to lead a virtuous life were one and the same thing, and therefore he wanted to know only the philosophy of life and unconditionally rejected any philosophy of any clever words. He so plainly declared this, that the word of a philosopher who does not intend to teach people good and remove them from evil is vain. It is clear that with such an understanding of philosophy, it could not claim the significance of a positive science, because it could not give man any positive knowledge. Its whole task was to explain to man himself, to reveal the meaning of his life and to create a living definition of his activity. By virtue of this task, philosophy naturally revolved more in the sphere of ideals than in the sphere of facts, and therefore was rather the expression of moral consciousness than of scientific consciousness. Completely absorbed in the burning questions of life, many ancient thinkers did not even understand the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and, since they did not find in it a solution to their own problems, they treated them more or less negatively. Even about Socrates there is information that he treated the natural philosophical speculations of his predecessors and contemporaries with obvious disdain. But Socrates still had a special motive for this neglect. In his youth he had listened to many scholars, and they had taught him a great deal, but not at all what he had sought from them, and not at all in such a way that their reasoning could be regarded not as idle chatter, but as an expression of real knowledge. Therefore, it was quite natural for Socrates that he did not find any meaning in ontology, and in relation to Socrates there is nothing surprising that he eliminated ontological questions from the field of human knowledge. His disciples went in this direction much further than their teacher. It is known that the cynical philosophers recognized only ethics as the only science and unconditionally rejected any other science as completely useless for virtue. It is known that the head of the Cyrenaics, Aristippus, treated mathematics with the same contempt, and all on the same ground that it does not tell man about good and evil, and, consequently, does not mean and cannot teach man to be happy.

It goes without saying that such an attitude to the field of scientific knowledge cannot be explained only by the intellectual limitations of ancient thinkers. It is not a matter of limitation at all, but of the soil from which the intellectual interests arose in the point of view under which they developed, and in the purpose by which they were regulated. Philosophical interests arose in the demands of life and, in the development of its ideals, were directed towards the creation of man; while scientific interests are born in the demands of thought and, through the continuous satisfaction of growing curiosity, are directed towards the creation of a scientist. Consequently, the scientist cannot consider man in the relation in which the philosopher would like to look at him, and the philosopher had no motive to consider the world in the relation in which the scientist is interested in it. It was this very impossibility that determined the essential difference between positive science and philosophy, and it was precisely this difference that was expressed by sharp extremes in the judgments of Socrates and his disciples. Freed from extremes, these judgments did not express the view of the school of Socrates alone. They were also largely adhered to by the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Stoics. True, all of them had great respect for scientific pursuits, but only because they considered these studies to be a necessary condition for the very emergence and development of philosophical aspirations. According to Plato's deep consideration, not only can the wise gods not strive to acquire wisdom, because they fully possess it, but even the ignorant cannot take care to acquire wisdom, because they imagine that they have it. Consequently, only educated people can be philosophers, because they alone are capable of unselfishly loving truth, goodness, and beauty, and striving to define these ideas and to develop human life according to their content. If science does not develop such aspirations in man, then it is of no importance, and the learned man, with all the richness of his knowledge, in essence stands no higher than the ignorant. Consequently, the true purpose of scientific education is only to engage in philosophy, and philosophy is the only science that leads man to the acquisition of wisdom.

Thus, for ancient thinkers from the time of Socrates, science and philosophy were essentially different: one gave man knowledge, the other made him a sage. They understood, of course, that man can serve as the subject of comprehensive scientific study, and they knew about the attempts that were made in this direction, and even made such attempts themselves, and yet the solution of the riddle about man was taken outside the boundaries of science and did not identify philosophy with anthropology. Science, on the basis of all its experiments, could only arrive at the establishment of the proposition: παντων χρηματων μετρον ανθρωπος[10] ("man is the measure of all things") – philosophy a priori departed from a different position: παντων χρηματων μετρον θεος ("the measure of all things is God") and came to the conclusion that the good of man does not consist in what man is, but in what what it can be, and real wisdom does not consist in the study of human nature, but in its development according to the ideal of humanity. By the force of this conclusion, Plato defined the process of philosophy as assimilation to God – ομοιωσις τω θεω, and the Pythagoreans indicated the ultimate goal of human development in complete deification after death.

But while philosophy has isolated itself and even sometimes directly avoided the special interests of scientific thought, this thought itself embraced the field of philosophy and introduced into it such a considerable confusion from which philosophers cannot free themselves even to the present day. The greatest exponent of scientific consciousness, who wanted to know everything and posed questions about everything, rejected the Socratic understanding of wisdom and used the term σοφια to designate the ultimate ideal of scientific aspirations – knowledge of the ultimate causes of existence, and therefore the term φιλοσοφια began to express the desire to acquire scientific knowledge, i.e. the process of development of science in general. According to Aristotle's profound consideration, for human knowledge there must be only one general object of study, this is the whole of being in its entirety, and therefore there must also exist only one general science, this is philosophy, which has as its object precisely the whole of being as a single whole. But since the whole of being in its entirety is unknown, which is still subject to investigation and explanation, it is self-evident that the one general primordial science, or philosophy, does not exist in reality as science, but only as the idea of science. When this idea is realized in the process of real investigation and explanation of being, then philosophy will appear as a real science, and until that time it is still necessary to know the unknown content of being. It is precisely in these forms that it is necessary to divide the whole of being into separate parts and to separate from the general primary science separate branches which would cut off the particular spheres of universal being under their jurisdiction and thus, by carrying out philosophy in parts, could occupy the position of particular, special sciences in relation to this ideal primary science. Philosophy, therefore, does not really exist in itself, but only in its parts, which, of course, do not constitute philosophy individually, but in the aggregate are an approximation to it, because they are all its realizations.

If it is true that science and philosophy are completely identical, then it is self-evident that every scientist is at the same time a philosopher. Aristotle thought about it in this way. For him, any striving for knowledge was an expression of philosophy, and therefore he considered mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, psychologists, logists, theologians, and even poets to be philosophers, insofar as they tried to comprehend the phenomena of being. It is true that Aristotle undoubtedly gave preference to thinkers who did not deal with special questions in some particular sphere of being, but with general questions in the whole sphere of being, but this advantage did not in the least destroy the identity of science and philosophy, and philosophy did not in the least acquire the significance of a special science. On the contrary, it was only the realization of the idea of science, science in general, because it had in mind the cognition of the general principles of being. In the nature of its questions, it preceded all the special sciences and was therefore the first philosophy – πρωτη φιλοσοφια, and it came forward with the solution of these questions only after the positive sciences – μετα τα φυσικα.

Thus, in the history of the development of ancient Greek thought, two different types of philosophy were clearly defined. One philosophy fully coincided with science and did not exist apart from science, the other existed next to science and completely independently of it. In the history of philosophy, as a rule, only the philosophy of the first type is taken into account, because this type later proved to be predominant. But this dominance did not come to him immediately. It appeared only in the Middle Ages and only because of a decisive lack of scientific knowledge and a decisive lack of understanding of philosophical aspirations. In the ancient world, however, the powerful influence of Aristotle was only able to make subsequent thinkers read on science the label of philosophy he had inscribed, but not to regard science as the only philosophy. Hence the first confusion in the concept of philosophy, because two completely different fields of thought had to be designated by one and the same name. For example, both the Peripatetics and the Cynics were considered philosophers at the same time, while the former were chiefly scholars, and some of them were even narrow specialists, while the latter spoke and wanted to speak only of the virtuous life – περι του χατ' αρετην ζην – and all science was considered as a useless whim of idle curiosity. It is clear that between the two there was not a simple disagreement in the solution of the same or at least similar questions, but a fundamental difference of opinion in the very understanding of philosophy. They had completely different ideals of wisdom, they lived with different interests and strove for different goals, and there was absolutely nothing in common between them, except for the name of a philosopher. Consequently, this name in the school of Aristotle lost its definite meaning and in itself could not say anything about the subject of the philosopher's studies. But this apparent uncertainty in the understanding of philosophy can easily confuse only us now, while the ancient thinkers of the Socratic trend were not at all confused here; Because they strictly distinguished between science and philosophy even after the Aristotelian understanding of wisdom prevailed over the Socratic one. When, in the schools of the Socratic trend, as well as in the schools of Aristotle, wisdom began to be defined in the sense of knowledge, the love of wisdom was not considered the love of knowledge, but retained its special significance in perfect accord with the understanding of wisdom that was developed in the philosophy of Socrates. It is known, for example, that the Stoic thinkers defined wisdom as knowledge about divine and human things, i.e. as knowledge about the world and man, while they understood love for wisdom in the sense of self-perfection, i.e. in a completely Socratic way. Consequently, they associated wisdom with science, and the love of wisdom with life, and therefore, in fact, they evidently recognized two different ideals of the sage: one was wholly covered by the concept of the learned man, the other by the concept of the perfect man, and only this second ideal was the ideal of the philosopher.

A philosopher and a scientist of the ancient world very rarely lived in good harmony with each other. Most often they were in enmity with each other, because they equally did not want and did not know how to understand and appreciate each other. In the school of Aristotle, precisely by virtue of the identification of science and philosophy, the same attitude to the questions of life arose quite naturally as the Socratic thinkers expressed to questions of knowledge. Aristotle's disciples, following the example of their famous teacher, sought knowledge for its own sake and placed its interests much higher than the interests of life. These latter interests were not only ignored by them, but often completely destroyed in the name of the interests of science. It is known, for example, that the Peripatetic Straton did not want to introduce any unknown quantities in explaining the phenomena of the world and came to atheism. It is also known that the Peripatetic Dietearchus did not want to allow any exceptions in explaining the phenomena of life and came to materialism[20]. These thinkers wanted to live in order to know, while their opponents wanted to live and know in order to live. Therefore, some believed that philosophy is a process of thought, defined as the supreme goal by its attainment of knowledge; others thought that philosophy was a process of life, defined as the supreme goal by its attainment of wisdom. Some, naturally, strove to explain the world and only in it man, as one of the phenomena of the world; others, on the contrary, strove first of all to determine the ultimate truth of man himself, and only in this truth the world as a means to the development of human life and activity. Consequently, some created knowledge, others created human life. And from the point of view of knowledge, Socrates was, of course, only a small child in comparison with our gymnasium students, but he was also a giant, a sage in comparison with our learned giants.

The philosophy of the ancient world had as its task the cognition and realization in the life of people of the ideal truth of man himself. What is man by nature, and what does he have the right to hope for, and what should he desire, and how should he live in order to reveal his humanity in his life? "These were the very questions in the true solution of which true wisdom relied. These very questions really make every person a philosopher. Of course, not every person is able to think deeply about these questions, but practically every person solves them, and everyone recognizes his decisions as completely correct and valuable for himself, and therefore directs his life according to the content of the decisions made. A Greek sophist, for example, could quite sincerely reflect on himself that he was nothing but a sophist – a scientist, and therefore he should take care to transmit his science to as many people as possible, and had an undoubted right to hope for a decent payment for his hard work. If only we assume that every Greek thought in the same way, then there is nothing surprising in the fact that the well-known eccentric philosopher searched for a man there during the day with fire and still did not find him. He saw only men and women, masters and slaves, priests, officials and warriors, scholars, orators and artists; he saw that all this huge mass of anthropoid beings actively lives by certain beliefs, desires and hopes, but determined not by the consciousness of humanity, but by the consciousness of their external position in nature and in the society of people; he saw that the true world of human life that he imagined actually existed only in the form of a puppet theater, and the people in it were not people, but some miserable performers of puppet roles; he saw all this, and now his bitter laughter can still be heard even now by the sensitive ear of the philosopher.