Ideas and Ideals

The article explores the question of how the ideas about the source of cre­ativity were been changing among European thinkers. In the classical period in Ancient Greece the idea prevailed, coming from Homer, Hesiod and Pindar, that poets derive the content and form of poetic works from Muses, who give them the opportunity to create at their will. At the same time, a common place was the idea that poets do not always bring the truth to the world. Plato, analyzing the work of poets, speaks of two sources – pleasure and inspiration, but only the gods choose when the poet speaks on their behalf. He also clarified the con­tent of poetry by relating it to the different Muses. Aristotle moves away from an external source, placing the source of creativity in the creator of the work, who obtains special abilities, and Aristotle calls imitation (mimesis) the main mode ofcreativity. Yet at the same time he takes imitation as not limited by visible real­ity, since the poet speaks of what could have happened, not of what actually has happened. Christian thinkers, from apologists to scholastics and mystics, agree that God is the source of creativity. But their views differ considerably in the de­tails. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas works we find a peculiar synthesisof the Aristotelian concept of mimesis and Plato’s breakthrough to the divine. The Renaissance desacralization of the world ultimately leads to an exclusively rational conception of association, which allows us to explain the emergence ofthe new only as the creation of wrong associations. Kant, turning to the theme of genius, finds himself in a difficult situation between two positions: on the one hand, he cannot accept the traditional idea of divine inspiration, on the other hand, the purely empirical idea of association built on tabula rasa material. He had to fi nd some third way. He finds it in the a priori given principle of the ability to think the particular as subordinate to the general, which manifests itself in two aspects – as determining and as reflective. The poet has an idea of some goal and some indeterminate idea of the material and, guided by his genius and not lim­ited by any rules, freely expresses aesthetic ideas.

The article presents the experience of methodological and cultural-historical reconstruction of one of the main works of I. Kant “Critique of Pure Reason”. The author outlines the problems associated with difficulties in understandingthis work: what is the general idea of “Critique of Pure Reason”, how to under­stand reason, different sources of knowledge, things in themselves, and fi nally, a combination of rational and sacred arguments. The author shows that Kant relies on the pictures of reality of Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa, rethinking them, and also analyzes the works of Galileo, which made it possible to make a conviction in the priority of a priori ideas. A hypothesis is formulated about how Kant understood the mind: culturally, following the Enlightenment. The main strategies of thought are outlined, with the help of which Kant creates “Critique of Pure Reason”, while his ideas are compared with the views of Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa. These include: rethinking transcendental ideas (not similarities and mathematics like those of Nicholas of Cusa), but thinking through the con­ditions of conceivability, reflection of the foundations of knowledge (this is the critique of reason); the introduction of schematisms of thinking, as explaining the connection between a priori ideas and intuitions; a special interpretation ofmind and reason, allowing them to include rules, categories and ideas; projection of the rethought ways of thinking of philosophers onto the mind (for example, Kant transfers to the mind the ability to build a system of scientifi c knowledge,which he borrowed from E.B. de Condillac); elucidation of the conditions ofconceivability, they allowed Kant to find the mind as a whole and to find out the condition of contemplation and action of the mind (according to Kant, these are “self-consciousness” or the idea of the “synthetic unity of apperception”).