Ideas and Ideals

Today the world lives in a unique historical situation. There are transformations of earthly space and time on the way of collecting numerous tempo worlds of ethnic groups and cultures. The global crisis and environmental catastrophic risks are relentlessly forcing people to unite to solve common problems. Thoughtless attitude to the biosphere, waste of the planet's resources, pollution of the environment are menacing symptoms of the threat of self-destruction of mankind. Only the unification of peoples and an unshakable sense of geosolidarity can resist. The support in the confrontation between technologization and aggressive geopolitics is seen in traditionalism, in the spiritual origins of the traditions of different peoples. The study of non-Western philosophies, attempts to penetrate cultures with different ethnic codes form multiple new trends in the world intellectual space of philosophy. For epistemology, the dialogue of cultures has given rise to a number of methodological problems. What can be the criteria for comparative studies if incommensurable conceptual systems and different worldviews are compared? Science, focused on the knowledge of the external world, relies on intelligence or "embodied consciousness." The empirical mind as an analyzer of feelings in the Indian tradition is not considered independent. The article discusses correlations in the methodological strategies of spiritual thought in the Indian and Old Russian traditions, as well as correlations with the methodologies of non-classical science. The author shows that any abilities in hierarchical ontologies with extreme levels can be thought of only as a part of the whole. Integrity at the ultimate ontological level potentially contains the qualities of subsequent differentiation (emanates). The concept of the mind as dependent is characteristic of spiritual practices, which can be seen in the texts of the Explanatory Palaia and texts of Indian teachings. Comparative analysis of the problem of the nature of intelligence is of interest in connection with discussions on artificial intelligence. An obstacle to the perception of holistic methodologies is the dualistic language in the European tradition (opposition of matter and consciousness, matter and spirit, brain and consciousness). The criteria for the commensurability of different cultural-semiotic systems are developed in the course of the dialogue of cultures.

On the basis of early Chinese philosophical texts, the legitimacy of introducing the concept of stratagem truth is demonstrated; it explicates the archaic non-verbal fundamental principle of the correspondence theory of truth that dominates modern Western culture. Such an understanding of truth is the initial intuition for a number of great civilizations of antiquity (for example, ancient Greek and ancient Chinese). The fact is that truth, taken in its original preverbal context, is far from being exhausted exclusively by the semantic relation of a linguistic expression to the extralinguistic reality corresponding to it. Truth has here not an epistemological, but an ontological sense of “authenticity” (in particular, the “authenticity” of some being).

Thus, the category of Tao, which occupies a central place in Chinese philosophical thought, indicates, first of all, the true way of being of a particular entity, aimed at revealing the “truth” of this entity. Since such a truth unfolds in time, it comes out only historically, in the course of the interaction of forces that oppose or cooperate with each other. In traditional Chinese society, this rivalry/cooperation is by all means regulated by the corresponding rituals. In the system of such ritualized practices of discovering the truth, truthful speech is not just a simple statement of some fact - after all, it does not so much reveal what has already happened, but it starts the process of putting into practice what was said - the realization of the previously declared truth.

As the allegorical story of “Mr. He’s Jade”, which is a classic example of such a dynamic understanding of the statement of truth, shows, such an institution of truth can be a severe test for its founder. It may require the utmost effort from him, and sometimes expose him to serious risks. In addition, success in realizing the declared truth requires considerable ingenuity: due to the lack of a uniform method of “reinforcing words with deeds”, one has to take the risk of experimenting with different behavioral strategies each time.

Thus, essentialism, which distinguishes the “classical” for modern Western European thought concept of timeless truth independent of man, is opposed by the ancient procedural-event understanding of truth as a kind of “side effect” of following one or another specific Tao, where the emergence of truth has the ontological status of an occurring event, but not eternally abiding being. In the case of the human Tao, the effect of truth reveals itself in the climactic ‘moment of truth’ - the final point of success or failure of the chosen strategy/stratagem.

The article examines the main features of the epistemic culture of Ancient China and designates its place in the modern theory of knowledge. The author shows a close connection between the method of cognition and the holistic worldview expressed by the proto-categorical conceptual constructions yin - yang 阴阳 (two fundamental opposites), san cai 三才 (heaven - man - earth) and wu xing 五行 (five forces: water - fire - wood - metal - soil). The interrelation between the strategy of cognition and the general socio-cultural paradigm can be most clearly traced on the example of the phenomenon of traditional Chinese medicine.

The treatise “Huangdi Neijing” “The Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor” («黄帝内经»), the earliest surviving text on ancient Chinese medicine, is used as the primary source. The content of this treatise is the origin of all medical theories and practices that exist in China.

Referring to the text “Huangdi Neijing”, the author demonstrates the influence of basic classifications on the theoretical and methodological foundation of traditional Chinese medicine. The binary classification, represented by the interaction and interdependence of the two opposites yin and yang, is the basis of the main principle of treatment in Chinese medical practice; the treatment with the opposite. The trinary classification, the unity of heaven, earth and man is reflected in the idea of the three levels of the human body (upper, middle and lower). The quinary classification expands the field of interaction of the binary conceptual construction, involving the five internal organs wu zang 五脏, functioning within the framework of the general processes of mutual overcoming of xiang ke 相克 and mutual generation of xiang sheng 生生.

Additionally, the article attempts to answer the question concerning the reason for the popularity of natural medicine in the modern world, and to identify the prospect of its use.

The article deals with the problems and principles of reconstruction of certain concepts of philosophy and cultural narratives. The reason was the discussion of N. Kanaeva's report at the Institute of Philosophy, read at a seminar on the geography of rationality. Analyzing V. Bibikhin's work "Wittgenstein: Change of Aspect", the author poses the problem of correctly (to avoid contradictions and reach an understandable logic of text interpretation) reading the narratives of a foreign culture or even the narratives of one's own culture, but belonging to a different direction of thought. Such a reading, he claims, presupposes special optics, a hermeneutic concept and a cultural-historical reconstruction. To introduce and clarify what can be understood by such concepts (optics, concept and reconstruction), an analysis of two cases is proposed: semiotic schemes and G. Oldenberg's study of the Buddha's teachings. The schemes are discussed on the basis of the works of Plato ("Feast" and "Timaeus"). The author shows that Plato in "The Feast" constructs schemes for solving problem situations and specifying ideal objects, and in "Timaeus" he discusses the nature of schemes. In turn, Oldenberg reconstructs the prehistory of Buddhism and the basic ideas proposed by the Buddha. A feature of its reconstruction is an appeal to the culture of Ancient India, an analysis of the ancient Hindu consciousness and mentality, a discussion of the features of Buddhist discourse. The author concludes that if the ideas about Buddhism outlined by Oldenberg are used for the purpose of understanding Buddhist narratives, then these ideas as optics can be summed up under the notion of a hermeneutic concept. This concept is structured in such a way that it clearly takes into account the peculiarities of the Hindu culture and mentality, as different from the European ones.

Ability of knowledge and thinking operations, such as abstraction, comparison syllogisms and so on, are of course common to all peoples. Nevertheless,
when referring to this or that specifi c cultural material, the problem of the existence of separate epistemic cultures arises. Contemporary research on epistemological diversity relies primarily on methods of analytic epistemology and focuses on identifying examples of ‘cross-linguistic divergence’ at the semantic level. The concepts of ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ often become the object of research. However, there are suffi cient grounds for identifying and studying epistemic cultures also in terms of other parameters. This article is focused upon highlighting these parameters by referring to examples of the history of the Japanese spiritual tradition associated with Buddhist and Confucian teachings. In particular, the author
examines the Buddhist doctrines of two truths and the identity of absolute being and the phenomenal world, as well as the neo-Confucian principle of the
unity of knowledge and action from the point of view of their infl uence on the epistemological attitudes of Japanese culture. The undertaken analytic excursion allows, using the example of Japan, to show that each culture has its own set of assumptions underlying the cognitive strategy, certain preferences, more or less trust in relation to one or another form of acquiring knowledge, e.g., sensoryempirical, rational, intuitive forms, as well as ideas about the goals of cognition, differently perceived in diverse cultural and historical contexts. 

The article continues the polemics on the problems of interaction of philosophical cultures in the era of globalization, which was started at the meetings of the Round Table "Geography of Rationality". The author gives answers to critical questions, explains the methodology and principles of her work with Indian philosophical texts. A short research of the meta-term "cognitive subject" is an example of her methods. The analysis of cognitive subject aimed to justify the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in Indian epistemic culture, the cornerstones of Western epistemic culture, since Modern times. The justification was carried out by comparing the generalized model of the cognitive subject, abstracted from the writings of empiricists and rationalists of the XVII–XVIII centuries, with the generalized models of the cognitive subject, reconstructed on the basis of authoritative writings of three variants of Indian epistemological teachings: Advaita Vedānta, Jainism and Buddhism. From the author's point of view, the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in India leads to the non-classical problem of pluralism of epistemic cultures, and the exploration of the meta-term "cognitive subject" allows us to find, on the one hand, intersections in the contents of epistemologies in Indian philosophy and Western metaphysics of Modern times, and on the other, their incompatible contents, which are specific manifestations of pluralism of epistemic cultures. For her reconstruction of the cognitive subject models the author takes the principle of "double perspective" in combination with the methods of hermeneutical and logical analysis of philosophical terms. The principle determinates the consideration of the theoretical object from two sides: European and Indian. Having appeared in the Western epistemic culture, these methods effectively work to objectify the results of socio-humanitarian research, thanks to which they are becoming increasingly widespread among non-Western cross-cultural philosophers. When the author applies the method of logical analysis to justify the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in India, she is guided by the rules of logical semantics and the principles of semiotics.  The compared terms, Western and Indian, are considered as signs with their own meanings and senses. The senses are understood as sets of predicates important for solving the author’s task. The author of the article, taking into account the experience of famous philosophers, negatively assesses the possibility of solving the problem of unambiguously correct translation.

The article is devoted to the problem of polysemy in the Chinese language as one of the ways to expand the meanings of the written text. Polysemy as an integral part of any language is also widespread in Chinese. Characters become ambiguous under the influence of cultural, social, historical factors, due to metaphorical and metonymic transfer, etc. The situation with ambiguity in the Chinese language is further aggravated by the fact that the meaning of a syllable (written by a certain character) can be expanded not only due to the acquisition of new vocabulary meanings, but also new grammatical forms, since almost any syllable in the Chinese language can become both a noun, a verb, an adjective, a particle, etc. Chinese philologists were engaged in the interpretation of various meanings of hieroglyphs as far back as the pre-Qing era, this work does not stop to this day. The second part of the article provides an example of the polysemy of the character 道dào in modern dictionaries as a result of the expansion of the original meanings indicated in the etymological dictionaries of Sho Wen Jie Zi and Zi Yuan. The third part of the article provides concrete examples of the use of polysemic words by native speakers of the Chinese language in order to create nonlinear multidimensional texts. Examples of such texts are selected from ancient poems as well as from the couplets of duilian, such folklore phenomena as riddles, anecdotes, as well as examples of the creativity of modern Internet users (memes). Thus, the article shows that this technique is historically rooted in the written culture of China, which means that when reading texts in Chinese, it is necessary to consider not only historical, cultural, etc. realities and connotations, but also all derivative senses of words used in the text to identify additional senses in the text.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the subject’s place in the proto-categorical language constructions of Ancient China. Fundamental conceptual schemas called basic classifications refer to such constructs. The key schemes include binary, ternary and quinary classifications, which defined the main features and further development of the entire Chinese mentality and civilization.

The main methodological technique used in conducting historical and philosophical research is the reliance on text primary sources. The most important and most reliable source of knowledge about the philosophical views of such a remote historical period (we are talking about the Zhou era, approximately 1045 – 221 BC) is the “Book of Changes” or “I-Ching”(易经). Structural analysis is used to identify the elements and numeral schemes in the considered figure of the subject.

According to the language picture of the world, reconstructed on the basis of texts from ancient Chinese sources, the position of the subject appears to be initially embedded in the worldview paradigm of archaic China. The main characteristics of a man that reveal themselves in the studied constructions of proto-categorical thinking are centrality and emptiness. These properties appear to be the most essential for understanding the role assigned to the man in the deployed model of the universe.

A dual image is formed from the predicates of the subject revealed as a result of the research. Man, from the point of view of the ancient Chinese, occupying a Central position in the vertical of the “three fundamental forces” of the San Cai (Earth-Man-Sky) and possessing, due to its dominant position, the features that are crucial for the successful knowledge of natural laws, appears to be devoid of his own, personal content. The initial emptiness of the subject of knowledge, which is its essential property, entails the absence of its individual content. The author makes a conclusion about the conditionally human position of the individual in the universe. Man turns out to be derived from natural, cosmic principles that form, according to the proto-categorical representations of Ancient China, not only the foundations of the world order, but also the principles of world relations.

The article proposes to consider the concept of nonlinearity as a metaphor performing the function of acquiring new knowledge, using this concept as a tool in the strategy for reading, understanding and interpreting texts, regardless of their national, language or temporary affiliation. The current situation of uncertainty and unexpected changes that affect all walks of life form challenges that make us look at the future of mankind in a new way. The questions, set today, inevitably make you wonder if today’s events are so unique. Has mankind previously encountered something similar? Namely: were there in the history such situations, the era, in which people had to react to the fact that “overnight”, by historical standards, rebuild and change radically their life, break the habitual foundations of society, revise them on a global scale? Similar events to the contemporary ones were observed in the first century after the discovery of America, in which epidemics were one of the “actors”, causing irreparable damage to the indigenous people of the New World and practically destroyed it. This process was reflected in the texts of the chronicles, as it was understood by contemporaries, both winners and losers. Is it possible to learn from this experience and how to project this knowledge onto a new possible reality? The author considers texts, fragments from chronicles of the XVI century, which describe epidemics that erupted in New Spain at the height of the conquest and the first decades after it. The purpose of the article is to show the relationship of processes between the predicted end of globalization nowadays and the technogenic civilization transformations. Various aspects of this relationship identified through the application of non-linearity metaphors allow us to reconstruct and interpret the historical reality as a complex continuous process. This, in its turn, gives an opportunity to formulate and set new tasks for research in various areas of knowledge.

This article aims to clarify two traditions of understanding time, namely the rationalistic, which includes the scientific (in the West, going back to the ‘Physics’ of Aristotle) and philosophical (going back in the West to Augustine), and mystical (the most methodically sustained is the Yogic tradition of Classical India and Sufism). The article contains several sections:

Introduction raises the problem of time and sets the subject boundaries.

The main part is comprised of the following sections: 

1. Time as found in objects: a brief summary of the rational scientific and quasi scientific trend of time interpretation from Aristotle’s Physics to Reichenbach’s “Philosophy of Time and Space”.  The physical one-sidedness of the consideration of time is completely immersed in the object domain.

2. Time as associated with the ontological subject: essential points of purely philosophical understanding of time beginning with St. Augustine via Kant up to Heidegger. This philosophical approach is no less one-sided, and comprehends time almost exclusively as a subjective phenomenon (memory, contemplation, desire, one’s own nature etc.)
Both trends lack any discrimination between the initial indication of the phenomenon of time (the answer to the question ‘what is time as a phenomenon?’) and the interpretation of the meaning of this phenomenon (the answer to the question ‘how to understand the phenomenon of time?’).

3. Interpretations of the time phenomenon are implicitly based on the everyday mode of awareness. The problem of time is one of the most difficult problems to comprehend. The main thesis of the article is that the pra-phenomenon of time is revealed to consciousness from the necessarily occurring switching and comparison between two processes: orientation in the external world and attention to cogitation, i.e., between the external and internal. This duality coincides with the duality that is realized in the elementary unit of rational thought - judgment, the subject of which is recognized as belonging to the external world, and the predicate – to the internal. Separately, it is planned to consider the understanding of time in the mystical tradition. We will focus on two ways of understanding time - the rationalistic (philosophical), represented by the teachings of Kant, and the mystical, represented by the Sufis and Yogis (with an indication of the fundamental difference between them). Note that these two methods are not opposed by us, although in a sense they exclude each other.

4. Lapse of time and the notion of a mode of awareness. The ordinary mode of awareness called  vikṣipta  ‘dispersed’ in Yoga philosophy is characterized by a fundamental dualism of inner and outer worlds’ events. Both are processes and the non predicative comparison of their pace constitutes the ordinary experience of the lapse of time. This mode is the most habitual one and the very mode within which it is possible to speak and compose texts, however it is not unique. There exist other possibilities.

5. One-pointed awareness mode and the atemporal process. Voluntarily achieved one-pointedness has no distinction between the outer and inner world and is therefore ‘out of’ or ‘above’ time. It is well known in mystical literature (exemplified by the text by eminent Sufi author, Niffari). In European rational philosophy this position was explained by Hegel, but not in his ‘Philosophy of Nature”, usually associated with the concept of time, it was in the ‘Science of Logic’ (in the timeless unfolding of absolute knowledge).

The Conclusion presents a summary. The crucial point which enables a thinker to overcome the traditional scientific and philosophical one-sidedness of the conceptualization of time is the notion of a mode of awareness and comprehension of the fundamental duality of outer world processes and cogitations’ succession. A non-ordinary awareness mode is methodologically elaborated in Yoga philosophy, witnessed in mystical Sufi texts, and finally, grasped in Hegel’s concept of a speculative proposition.