“HOLZWEGE”: OR, BACK TO THE SOURCES

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Introduction. General Considerations of the Problem of Truth. Postmodern times have palpably deprived philosophy of its main function: namely, forming the scientific foundation of world outlook. Circumstances are such today that no one was left with the opportunities and hopes to inspire the whole Republic of scholars, the more so - the whole community of people of culture, intellectuals, and even less - all the reading people by any whole and common program. There is no one sole and exclusive goal, there is no single absolute value, there is no such almighty category as the Absolute Idea, Communism or the Kingdom of God - there is only willingly or involuntarily received pluralism. The axiom of postmodernism, which has grown from literary criticism, is rejection of natural sciences’ claims on their natural scientific privilege of owning authentic (objectively true) knowledge, and proclamation of the existence of the tight shield of culture, in particular, language, placed between the subject and the object. The classical ideal of science as a complex set of values, such as objective truth, fundamental solidity, rationality, today has lost ground and passed the position. At the same time in the field of humanities and even social science, there has been rooted an opinion that rich linguistic pragmatics does not allow, in principle, to know things “for themselves” and “an sich”; that there is an impenetrable screen of signs and symbolic forms of culture between subject and object of cognition. The antipode to postmodern paradigm - namely, positivism - is no better for gno-seology. Although science has taken the responsibility for social progress, positivism, in principle, is methodology and not the world general outlook; it is not about human attitude and relationship with the world; it has no interest in human being as such. Or maybe it has. But only as philosophy of science. Hence, the famous problem of possibility of adequate cognition of the essence of being must return to our discussions as the fundamental question of gnoseology: “...ist die nach dem Verhältnis vom Denken und Sein”. There is also a very good English term for this relationship, the reciprocal action between thinking and being: intercourse. In the original wording it is: “Wie verhalten sich unsere Gedanke über die uns umgebende Welt zu dieser Welt selbst?” In processing: is our knowledge able to give us true knowledge of the world? Is it absolutely true Or “at least” relatively true? We presume that reasoning about these subjects is the basic, or main, or prin-ciple syntagma of gnoseology: “Truth does exist, it is one and it is absolute, but at the same time it is not absolute”. Relativity of truth lies in dependence of knowledge on the mode of action of the knowing person. Truth is the central category of gnoseology. One could even say that theory of knowledge is essentially theory of truth and its criteria. Truth is the “heart of hearts”, cor cordium of any theory of cognition. Main Part. Truth in Genuine Philosophical texts. Galen’s testimony about Democritus, the classic if not the ancestor of “existen-tial” materialism (who else could argue that all sensually perceived phenomena, everything except order, displacement, weight, and form, exist only in our senses, while everything else is atoms that are devoid of any sensible quality, - and emptiness?)1, once and for all embodied the basic ontological difficulty of gnoseology about truth, or truthfulness. Do the true and the real coincide - and in Democritus they did coincide! - or probably even conglutinate? But even today we have not resolved this difficulty. And on the ground of this on-to-gnoseological problem, the embarrassment of the second level is based: namely, epistemological one. Are (true) knowledge of reality and judgment about this knowledge compatible or incompatible, albeit in essence? For example, do the following judgments differ: “I feel the smell of violets”, and “is it true that I feel the smell of violets”? Gottlob Frege, for example, believed that nothing is different in them. 1 “By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold; by convention colour; but in reality atoms and void”. The Atomists... Fragments. D16. Sextus Against the Matematicians, VII 135. See also: Diogenes Laertius, IX 72; Galen On Medical Experience 15.7 and On the Elements according to Hippocrates I.2. P. 20 [9]. The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus. Fragments. A text and translation with the commentary by C.C.W. Taylor. http://docslide.us/documents/ccw-taylor-the-atomistsleucippus-and-democritus-fragments-with-translation.html The same way of thinking is typical for contemporary philosophers as well. If we decide that now that this difficulty is lifted, we will encounter the situation described by Bernard Williams which is “the mistake of taking the same facts twice over and then finding the relation between them mysterious”2. Which makes it even sadder: the second statement about violets, despite its modal operator, may not be true but only truthful, or sincere... or false. To avoid the “mystery”, Bertrand Russell created his “theory of types”, where the term “set of all sets” is not applicable, and the utterances of metalanguage such as “truth” and “lie” are excluded from the object language. Alfred Tarski having asserted in his work “Truth and Evidence” that it is possible to formalize any system, admitted the concept of truth to come into logic, but defined it as a mere feasibility of formallogical verification of propositions. In this version, the question of any basic correlation of knowledge and reality external to it certainly does not fit in well. F. Ramsay supported later by A. Ayer developed the deflationary concept of truth, according to which to affirm that the proposition is true means simply to assert the very proposition, and vice versa. “It is true that p” contains nothing but the statement of p. The concept of truth, from this point of view, is in itself redundant. Paul Horwich stated lately that, despite of the “aura of peculiar depth and ob-scurity” that surrounds our concept of truth, the most important trend of the last fifteen (now twenty.-E.T.) years “has been away from traditional approaches, which have taken for granted that truth is some sort of ‘substantive’ property … and towards the development of so-called deflationary theories in which that assumption is rejected”3. The best of all deflationary theories, in his opinion, is minimalism, according to which “our possession of the concept of truth derives from our regarding each proposition as equivalent to the proposition that is true”4. Such coherence and persistence is to be welcomed of course; only, it doesn’t help with the question of the origin of the first true proposition playing the role of a matrix for all others, and the aforementioned problem about compatibility/incompatibility of what we say we know about reality and the judgment about this knowledge including alethic moderators “true” and “false”. Finally, there is another question of the third level concerning the correlation of (ideal) knowledge and (material) reality, taken, so to speak, “from the reverse side” which “side” is semiotics. This is the question of the correlation of the concept and its name, i.e., sign. There are trends of modern philosophizing, in which the “samples captured in memory”, that is, thoughts, ideas, judgments, with their names, language notations, that is, utterings, are indistinguishable. This semiotic difficulty in Western philosophy is overcome relatively easily: the term “proposition”, depending on the context, can mean both. 2 (1972; 143). Quoted from: Bennett, Jonathan. Learning from six philosophers. V. 2. Locke, Berkeley, Hume. Clarendon Press - Oxford. - 2001. - Р. 199. 3 Horwich, Paul. Truth // The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Ed. by Frank Jackson & Michael Smith. Part IV. Philosophy of Language. - Oxford Univ. Press, 2013. P. 454. 4 Ibid. M. Schlick, the leader of the direction of logical syntax (“neo-positivism”), went around such complicated questions of epistemology in his own way: since names refer to concepts and not to real objects, knowledge is a designation (and not reflection, experience or something like that), and then the question of the correspondence of knowledge to objective reality does not arise at all. Designation is conventional; it is purely formal, it is not a causal or other “real” relationship. For the materialistic Soviet philosophy such indifference was unbearable. It was based on doubtless qualitative difference of being and consciousness, but became interested in semiotics only in the late 1960ies of the XX century. Its main attention has long been paid to the divergence of the material and the ideal, that is, the sensible sign and its supersensuous meaning. Without making up an intrigue from the following exposition, we will offer at the very beginning our variants (schemes) of decisions: 1) [concerning ontognoselogical obstacle] truth and reality are dispositional, as being and knowledge about it are dispositionary; 2) [concerning epistemological embarrassment] deflationary theories of truth are either incorrect, since there is a legion of affirmative but not true propositions, or at least they are not applicable to a multitude of cognitive situations outside methodology of science; 3) [concerning semiotic difficulty] sign, in quite a number of cases such as abstract semiotics or formulae of algebra, can coincide with its denotatum and designatum; but it is not the general case. In general, judgment and utterance are easily distinguishable as a form of thought and a linguistic expression of it. General considerations to which gnoseology has come about the laws of cogni-tion are as follows. The physical is grasped by the senses, directly or through the readings of in-struments, and at an intuitive level it is understood as existing (awareness). The metaphysical is delivered by intellectual intuition, reason, and it is accepted with the help of logical proof, so as the question of its real existence can be abstracted from. Such views did not change for a long time; today we consider these wellknown thoughts a truism. Boethius once has summed up the thousand-year history of the development of gnoseology in his Commentary on Porphyry: Individual and general have one subject, but otherwise the general is conceived, otherwise the individual is felt in those things in which they have their being. “These things [genus and species] exist in singulars, but are thought of as universals”.5 A clear and obvious entity is perceived by concrete sensations; the implicit, not obvious essence is acquired by abstract thought. These are the two main stages of cognition, set by the ancient philosophers and without any disagreements accepted by the philosophers of modern times. We do not know the physiology of this transition from the first stage to the second. There is a convincing evidence of such authority in natural science as Soviet Academician P.K. Anokhin. To the accuracy of the ion, he wrote, I explain to my students what exactly physical and chemical processes occur in neurostructures, when a person receives impulse stimuli from the 5 Quoted from: Spade, Paul Vincent. Boethius against Universals: The Arguments in the Second Commentary on Porphyry. i. VI. http://www.pvspade.com/Logic/docs/boethius.pdf outside, feeling with the senses all the corporeality of the world; and then I say: stop! But consciousness is ideal... It can be stated that the basic cognitive relationship which breaks the universe into the material and the ideal is simply the original guild agreement, a convention, a postulate, and then we’ll never be seeking for a solution to a question of the nature of the ideal. However, there a doubtless constant search for that extra-spatial terrain, where this gnoseological by its nature division doesn’t break the single “ontality”. There is an opinion, and it is discussed widely, that the most fashionable today concept of “sense” is a half-feeling, half-thought. It can be recalled that language is also a bilateral entity, a membrane between the objective and the subjective, and with this we can calm down. It can be argued that sensations are also kind of “centaurs”, they are both bodily and incorporeal. It is possible to study the duality of [re]presentations that belong simultaneously to sensuality and thinking - after all, they are already abstracted from the object, - more precisely, they are a connecting bridge between senses and thoughts. But for gnoseology it is quite enough that logic has convincingly answered already the question of how the transition from initial perceptions to [re]presentations, which are the central links of cognition proper, is taking place. The Logos is necessary for the organization of chaos of sensuality. “Erst wenn wir das Eine und Gemeinsame in dem Vielen herausfinde, scheiden, was in den räumlich und zeitlich getrennten Erscheinungen gleich, was in ihnen verschieden ist, wenn wir die Unterschiede abstufen und so den Inhalt derselben ordnen, wird die W a h r n e h m u n g zur wirklichen K e n n t n i s s, kann jedes einzelne in ein schon vorhandenes System von Vorstellungen eingereiht werden, die als Prädicate unserer Wahrnehmungsurtheile jede einzelne Erscheinung in eine feste und bleibende Vorstellung zu verwandeln gestatten”6. Two stages, or two kinds of cognition, sensory and logical, are often supplemented in the history of philosophy with something third: through the exhalation of the intuitive from the sensual; sometimes through the assimilation of intuitive certainty and faith; or, on the contrary, through introducing certain distinctions: the division of mind and reason [Verstand vs Vernunft] with the following specification of the latter; or by adding “experience”, “deed” or “practice” as a third stage of cognition. Of them “intuition” was the most happy applicant for the role. “These two, viz. intuition and demonstration, are the degrees of our knowledge”, such authority in gnoseology as John Locke wrote, and scholastics long before him. “Whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but faith or opinion, but not knowledge, at least in all general truths… There can be nothing more certain than that the idea we receive from an external object is in our minds: this is intuitive knowledge”.7 6 Sigwart, Christoph. Logik. Zweiter Band. Die Methodenlehre. Tübingen, 1878. Ver-lag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung. Einleitung. § 61. S. 10-11. Library of the University of Toronto. 7 Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, B.IV, Ch.II, Of the De-grees of our Knowledge. i. 14. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/ In the beginning of the chapter Locke explains that intuitive knowledge takes place when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas “immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other”. Its characteristics are “having no pains of proving or examining”; the mind perceives the truth “as the eye doth light, only by being directed towards it”8. It must be recalled that the idea of the primacy and certainty of intuitive knowledge was expressed with all punctuality by William Ockham already: by virtue of it one can know whether there is a thing or not, i.e. that it exists, so that if a thing is really there, the mind immediately makes a judgment about what it is and clearly knows what it is. Indeed, intuitive knowledge {notitia intuitiva} of the thing is knowledge by power of which it is possible {potest sciri} to know whether there is a thing - or not {utrum res sit - vel non}, so that if the thing is there {sit}, reason recons the same, and it cognizes its essence immediately {et evidenter cognoscit eam esse}, if there won’t be occasional obstacles9. Sensual intuitive cognition, in Ockham (notitia intuitiva sensitive) is followed by intellectual, intuitive as well (notitia intuitiva intellectiva); however, what is called intellectual knowledge is not yet abstract, according to this philosopher. It is the result of a direct perception of the object and it forms the basis for self-evident existential and attributive judgments. [Awareness and judgment]. And only then follows abstract intellectual knowledge (notitia abstractiva), no more intuitive. This kind of knowledge is not characteristic of the individual; it always is the knowledge of the general. As to Locke - he explained the mechanism of intuition in the following way: first, it is the result “of such truths laid up in the memory as, whenever they occur to the mind, it actually perceives the relation between those ideas”. The ideas, by an immediate view, discover their mutual agreement or disagreement. Secondly, it is of such truths “whereof the mind having been convinced, it retains the memory of the conviction, without the proofs”.10 This is a sort of assurance which exceeds bare belief. It happens with all truths that we learn intuitively. And the roots of this thought are even deeper: in Greek, “σαφής” means both “obvious” and “true”. But in general, the sensual and the rational remain unchangingly established since the time of the ancient classics. Doubt, however, is inherent to man’s nature: is it really so? Is it for certain? Where is truth, the greatest cognitive value located? Questions like that remain unchanged in the unconcealedness of “Dabewuβtsein” - here-and-now-being-consciousness. In ancient Greeks, the physical grasped by the senses becomes or is considered to be mere “opinion”, probabilistic knowledge; the metaphysical acquired by the 8 Locke, John. “An Essay”, B.IV, Ch.II, Of the Degrees of our Knowledge, i. 1. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/ 9 William of Ockham. Selected works / ed. and intr. article by A.V. Apollonov / M .: “IF Editorial URSS Academy of Sciences”, 2002. P. 101. /In Russian/. See also: William of Ockham, From His Summa of Logic, Part I. Copyright © 1995 by Paul Vincent Spade. eBooks@adelaide.edu.au 10 Locke, John. “An Essay,” B.IV, Ch.I, Of Knowledge in General. i. 9. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/ mind appears as true knowledge, the goal of cognitive activity. Philosophers usually give preference to reason, for feeling can easily be mistaken. But what about reason? Is it, unquestionably selected, the only right, righteous path of a philosopher?.. Both in ancient and modern times there were thinkers who answered yes. Frege, for instance, stated that Thought is something extra-sensory, and all sensible things must be excluded from the domain in which the question of truth arises. “Der Gedanke ist etwas Unsinnliches, und alle sinnlich wahrnehmbaren Dinge sind von dem Gebiete dessen auszuschließen, bei dem überhaupt Wahrheit in Frage kommen kann. Wahrheit ist nicht eine Eigenschaft, die einer besonderen Art von Sinneseindrücken entspricht”.11 The first, as in almost everything, were the ancient Greeks. Let us compare the translations of Parmenides’ work “On Nature” and another remarkable “Italian”-Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who belonged, in contrast to the famous Eleat, to the trend of “physis”, that is, to materialism. His main text has the same original title: “On Nature”. Like all ancient philosophers, Empedocles of Agrigentum, the first who of all philosophers of physis tried to solve the famous aporias of Eleatics (and the last of them became the great Democritus), asserted: nothing arises from nothing, nothing is resolved into nothing. For the sake of fairness, in Parmenides, the goddess spoke the same about Being: VΙΙΙ For what kind of origin For it will you look for? In what way and from what source Could it have drawn its increase? I shall not let thee say nor Think that it came from what is not… Β 8,7 οὐδ' ἐκ µὴ ἐόντος ἐάσσω / φάσθαι σ' οὐδὲ νοεῖν· οὐ γὰρ φατὸὸὸὸν οὐδὲ νοητόόόόν / ἔστιν ὅπως οὐκ ἔστι. However, Empedocles holds a different argument: birth of a thing is a mixed formation of “something” that, when destroyed, returns to the eternal four elements, moving back to these roots and dissolving into them. Here we are mainly interested in the almost literal coincidence of the call that both treatises contain, for the philosopher to choose the true path of wisdom and follow the path, cognizing not only the object, - being, but also the ways of its cognition, methods, and without fail using the power of reason. The most famous fragment from Parmenides in an academic translation runs as follows. VΙΙ 4 Nor let habit force thee to cast a wandering eye upon this Devious track, or to turn thither thy resounding ear or thy 11 Frege, Gottlob. Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung. Op. cit., p. 61. See also: http://www.gavagai.de/HHP32.htm#anfang 5 tongue; but do thou judge the subtle refutation of their Discourse uttered by me In Greek: Β 7 …ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδ' ἀφ' ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόηµα µηδέ σ' ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω, νωµᾶν ἄσκοπον ὄµµα καὶ ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουήν καὶ γλῶσσαν, κρῖναι δὲ λόγωι πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον There is another very convincing translation performed by the eminent Russian philosopher A.F. Losev12. VΙΙ But from such a way of seeking, keep your thought away, Let the experienced temper not force you to follow this path, - Dusk eyes and noisy ears to use And language. Discuss with the help of reason the rational argument in the words I pronounced. The same Russian philosopher offers author’s translation for Empedocles’ text: Gods, turn away their madness from language, Show them a pure source from your sacred mouth. Muse, oh white-shouldered maiden, desired by many I pray you, - that what can be ever entrusted to mortals From your goodness granted, send from above, seated in a dignified chariot. Do not let the flowers of glorified honour compel you To be praised by people for words higher than sacred, Sitting ambitiously on the heights of wisdom with pride. But with all possible means you ought to explore the subjects And do not trust more to the eyes than to ears, As well as to the noisy hearing, more than to the clear word. Neither the voice of any limbs (that are serving cognition) believe you, and learn everything only to the grade of clarity.13 Such trust in reason, science, philosophy, unattainable for our muddled time, does honour to the ancient sage; another thing is that both the idealist and the materialist question the evidence of feelings and speech. Today, as in ancient times, there is a need for us philosophers to solve elemen-tary, that is, fundamental, basic questions. If truthfulness and being are not identical, at least because being existed before cognition, the emphasis is shifted to gnoseological formulations based on the disposition of the cognizing and the cognizable. It is not about the existence of being (we believe that it exists!); but is being “given” or “accepted” in the situation of here-and-now-being-consciousness? Is it “accepted” or “taken”? Is it “taken” - or “constructed”? And if it is constructed - then how, in what way? 12 In: Losev A.F. Cultural and historical significance of the ancient skepticism and of Sextus Empiricus activities. Intr. article to: Sextus Empiricus. Works in 2 v. V. I. M .: Mysl, 1976. P. 82. /in Russian/ 13 Ibid., p. 85. 26 Imre Lakatos argued once that even mathematical knowledge is a process of “guesswork” and “refutation” rather than pure construction, and that mathematicians make discoveries in the same way as other scientists. For gnoseology, the easiest answer is: being is accepted - or taken, “opened”. Its origin is not a matter of theory of knowledge, it is a matter of natural science; its design, “invention”, also quite obvious, must mainly interest philosophy of science; but the principle of cognition is in itself recognition of the “acceptance of being”. It is accepted relatively passively, and initially tactile, any materialist will say. Genetically, it is a general sensitivity, where vision does not yet have all the advantages before touch, smell, and so forth. Being is taken already actively, at first “organoleptically”, then logically, and then also experimentally-practically; sometimes even grasped, selected and conquered. What about constructing? This is the highest degree of activity, namely, creativity, in which all the strength of man is manifested, and where knowledge is also fully realized. So, When was being “given”? By whom? And how? Gilles Deleuze, for example, generally rejected the idea of the original “being-given”. Any individualization, he wrote, as well as the preservation of a particular kingdom or species, attests to the narrowness of the limits of the second nature. (Author’s translation). “It is opposed by the idea of the first nature, the bearer of a rigid negation, which stands above the kingdoms and laws [not above, but beneath.-E.T.] liberated even from the need for generation, preservation and individualization: this nature is bottomless, it is beyond all bottom, every ground, it is the original madness, the primordial chaos, composed only of violent, destructive molecules... But this primordial nature cannot just be given: the world of experience is formed solely by the second nature, and negation is given only in partial processes of negation. That is why the original nature is inevitably the object of an idea, and pure negation is insanity, but the insanity of the mind as such... This idea of what is not there, it is an idea of No, or a negation, that is not given and cannot be given in experience, cannot be anything but an object of proof (in the sense of mathematical truths that retain all their significance, even if we sleep, even if they do not exist in nature).”14 The least satisfactory for our existential-materialistic gnoseology is Heidegger’s “the giving of the given”. Let’s stop at it a little more. Es gibt Sein. It is clearly a game of the German language: “being is”, or “there is Being” is translated as es gibt Sein, - lit. “it (something) gives being”. In other languages, there is no, in similar clauses of the formal subject, any es - “it”, that which “gives”, gibt, hands us being. It is done by the third basic form of the notional verb, called Partizip II, participle II, or passive. In English, translation from es gibt Sein - there is being - includes a formal adverb “there”, but the predicate is stands in the 14 Deleuze J. Presentation of Sacher-Masoch (Cold and Cruel) / Venus in furs. - Ad Marginem. M .: Kultura. 1992. - P. 203-204. /In Russian/ 27 personal form of the notional verb: the third person singular. Being exists all by itself and is not “given” by Someone. Heidegger’s famous syntagma “being is not, being is given” is analogous in the second, main part of this conjunction, to the Lenin’s definition of matter: “…which is given to us in sensations, which is copied, ‘photographied’, reflected by our sensations, existing outside of them” - and even to a simple “given” in mathematics and logic, the beginning of all theorems. This sacramental “given” (as well as the already nearly erased “reality”, in fact a synonym for “objective reality” or “material world”) contains a stable, powerful and almost subconscious setting: being is given to us by Someone. Actus essendi. This is exactly what does not suit the materialist who listens to language. In fact, we assume that being is not given. Being just simply exists, it is. It is primary, active and energetic in and for itself. It, for that matter, is not given, but gives, presents itself to the one who was born for knowledge and action. Being is given by itself. And it can be accepted (or not accepted), taken or transfigured, transformed, acquired, con-trived and also created in separate parts and manifestations - by man. By the way, if in Russian and in Latin “action” and “actor” are paranymic to “activities” and even “reality” - this is a nest of related words, - then in Greek “reality” is ενεργεια, energy, and its result is έργον. It does not etymologically imply the one who gives being. Cosmos itself is active and charged with energy, and it yields to the knower, because the Logos and logos are homogeneous, and microcosm is a model of the macrocosm. The like gives birth to the like, the like is known by the like. Another matter is the description of the existential self-feeling of a person who has felt sort of a resonance with being: participation, communion, Heidegger’s “standing in the gleam of being” as a moment of experiencing and finding truth. Subjectively, this Goodness is experienced as a bliss. So does Dasein open to me, feels the lucky one; and I do not need any proofs of being of the Being. Being thus reveals itself; yes, we confirm this intuition, it has such a property, the universal substance has such accidentia, because matter is the subject of all changes. Being is not “given”, it is accepted by man. This existential situation is accompanied by discovery. Let us recall: being in knowledge is primarily 1) visible, 2) seen being. In a more general sense it is a) capable of generating sensations, b) sensually perceived15. Beyond cognition, it exists as a substance together with all its accidents, and in the process of cognition that has started, - as an essence coming outwards in the form of phenomena, even luminous, Schein. Essence is being largely mastered in its multiple phenomena, in contact and in-teraction with them; it is acquired in consciousness as reflection and as activity. Aristotelian ουσία, “ouzia” (more than likely the English word “use” comes from here), it can be recalled, had more connotations than in translation of Boethius, substantia, “substance”, “standing under”. Aristotle “thematized”, as they would say today, the notion that in ancient Greece originally denoted the real price of 15 It concerns not only sensations. It is of interest that in Greek “I read” - αναγιγνώσκω, which is definitely an intellectual act, with the root morpheme γνώσ (ις), “knowledge”, also testifies to cognition with the help of sight. 28 property16 (in English: real estate). Ouzia provides a stable basis for the proposed and taken Being, given and accepted in communication. Well now, how does the essence of being open itself? And how is it created? Outside of knowledge, it does not open, neither it is created in any way, but it is born, it arises, and exists (“lives”) in self-movement and self-development. In cognition it opens when the essence is released to the surface in the form of a phenomenon, and is created by man as έργον, - the result of ενεργεια, occupation, business, matter. In Aristotle himself, “pure essence” is not an isolated object, but a qualitative cer-tainty of a thing. The third in the sequence of Aristotelian categories, quality, reflects the fact of existence of a variety of accitentia of essence, as quantity, place, time, state, relations, actions, etc. After Porphyry’s and especially Boethius’ explanations, the quality in logic became understood as “that which responds to the question ‘which is it?’ and it is in relationship with substance”. But it is more important, and we have already had to point this out, that το ποιον, or ποιοτες, “quality”, correlates paranimously with ποιέω, “I do, I create”, το ποιειν, “action”, and ποιεµα, “creation”. This corresponds to the origin of the Russian term “quality”, ка(к)чество, and to the designation of a set of properties that is received or produced by any activity (of nature, or cognizing mind or working hand, instrument, technical device). Pure essence “is sublimed” from a phenomenon. Essence is acquired in action, the sensually perceived phenomenon gives birth to ideal knowledge, matter gives birth to spirit. By the way, the term denoting the exit of Ouzia outwords - έξ-ουσία - is translated as “opportunity”, “right”, and “freedom”, liberation. Quality is not just a certainty identical with the existing being, although in modern philosophy it is often understood in this way: Hegel’s trace. In fact, in the Greek language quality is denoted by another expressive word, πράξις, practice. “How to deal with this” = “what do with this = what to make of it?” This existential situation is accompanied not simply by finding and obtaining ore or water, but by creating new things. Consciousness in this case is not an image of a thing or a thought, but of mode or manner of action. Being is known in action, that’s right. Going further, it is necessary to emphasize: “which”, “how”, “in what way” are the questions, the answers to which are not simply “related to substance”, but do represent phenomena, Schein of essence in the process of working with the object, or in a cognitive as well as in a communicative situation. This is served by important linguo-gnoseological syntagmas: subordinate clauses of the mode of action. Together with adverbial clauses of manner of action or independently they carry out procedures, depending on the purpose, either of further deepening to Aristotelian “essence of the second order”, or “exhaling” it “to the surface” in the form of a phenomenon. Therefore, referring to the famous Kantian forms that organize sensuality into a phenomenon (“space and time are conditions for the possibility of all things as phenomena”), namely, “moment” and “place”, “when” and “where”, here and now, - it is necessary to add a third one: the mode of action. To Dasien and Dabewußtsein it is necessary to add Sosein, and, accordingly, Sobewußtsein, so-andnow-being-consciousness, the premise of action. 16 …which is offered as a guarantor in commerce. 29 This triplet - moment, place, mode/manner of action - will include both objec-tive and subjective coordinates, in which the primary “capture” grasping the object of thought occurs. Syntagma of the mode of action is always a semantic center of the whole complex sentence, and its aggregate meaning is drawn to it. The essence of entity is obtained in the activity of consciousness, becoming in the state of Dabewußtsein that what we call “truth”. One can also say that truth and essence constitute identity in the indicated co-existence. It is interesting that in the preliminary stage objective knowledge about exist-ence (0) and meta-knowledge (1) about this knowledge of the knowledge of existence (0) are still indistinguishable as ontological and gnoseological in the here-andnow-being-consciousness and the existential judgments of logic, either. This conglutination we formally called onto-gnoseological embarrassment. At the very next step of the cognitive movement, they diverge. The first question for naturalphilosophical ontology, after the “zero” stage, is the question “why” there is a thing, a body. And for epistemology the first after the preliminary question is “how”, by what means is the existence proved of the body (or the “body”) of truth, in what way is it confirmed. So the problem is translated from the worldview sphere into the methodological plane. Actually, the ancient skepticism began in the similar way. Diogenes Laertius, describing the state of the methodological doubt inherent in the first skeptics, interpreted it as follows: “So, we recognize that we see and we know that we think, but how we see and how we think is unknown to us...”17 (italicized by me.-E.T.). The logic of the twentieth century put forward the following standard to the aid of epistemology: “He believes P because he believes R and takes it to be a reason for P”. This reasoning is also important for the discussion of the main gnoseological syntagma. In Heidegger’s famous work “On the Essence of Truth”18 there is a very interest-ing place: the formula “truth is equating intellect to things” meant earlier equating things to the mind of Creator: adaequatio rei ad intellectum (divinum); this was the guarantee for truth as equating of human mind to things, adaequatio intellectus (humani) ad rem (creandam). The medieval argumentative foundation disappeared, and hence the “unfounded” consequence is hung swaying in the air. There is a gradation, or a scale, of what can be considered sufficient grounds for the evidence of proof, according to the law of Leibniz, and the strongest arguments are, of course, physical laws, and after them social laws, and then facts, figures, quotes. In language there is also a lexical difference in the designation of objective, “natural” causes for “belief that P”, and subjective or logical reasons called arguments, or reasons for “belief that P”. Do the judgments “S - P”, and “I believe that S - P” not basically differ from one another, other than epistemic modality of belief? Frege, as already said, gave 17 Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. R.D. Hicks. Cambridge. Har-vard University Press. 1972 (First published 1925). http://data.perseus.org/citations/ urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0004.tlg001.perseus-eng1:9.11 See also: Diogenes of Laertius. On the life, teachings and sayings of the famous philosophers. M .: Mysl, 1979. - P. 393. /in Russian/ 18 Heidegger. On the Essence of Truth // Philosophical Sciences. - 1989. No. 4. /In Russian/ 30 an example: I smell the violets = true, that I smell the violets. One of the main arguments used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics against the metaphysics of Plato can be recalled: in the idea there is nothing that would not be present in the thing. Nothing - except for the “injection” of violets into consciousness. Nothing - except the projection of consciousness outwards (this is Epicurean προλήψις). Frege argued that, attributing the quality of truthfulness to an idea of thought, we add nothing to the thought itself (his example with violets’ aroma). At the same time he, somewhat inconsistently, states a bit later in the same treatise that not to distinguish between grasping thought and recognizing it as true would be a mistake: years of hard research can lie between grasping thought and acknowledging its truth. “Beachtenswert ist es auch, daß der Satz „ich rieche Veilchenduft” doch wohl denselben Inhalt hat wie der Satz „es ist wahr, daß ich Veilchenduft rieche”. So scheint denn dem Gedanken dadurch nichts hinzugefügt zu werden, daß ich ihm die Eigenschaft der Wahrheit beilege. Und doch! ist es nicht ein großer Erfolg, wenn nach langem Schwanken und mühsamen Untersuchungen der Forscher schließlich sagen kann „was ich vermutet habe, ist wahr”?19 All this is put together, grasped in the existential, holistic, distinctive experi-ence of here-and-now-being-consciousness, when-and-if-it-is-already-there: it is the basic tone of all genuine human existence, sine qua non. This creates σύλ- λήψις, i.e. capture, merging, a meeting place of the subjective and objective. It is this encounter in the existential state of Dabewußtsein, and nothing else, is the onto-gnoseological basis for the simultaneous coincidence and disintegration of the moment of absoluteness and the moment of relativity in truth. The first comes from Dasein, the second introduces Das bewuβte [Sein]. This is the birthplace of the basic gnoseological syntagma. Let’s proceed with the discussion. Truth is undoubtedly absolute. In the original sense, truth stands beyond destruction. The modern Greek phi-losopher Stathis Psillos, laureate of the President of the British Society’s Prize in Philosophy of Science, in his book Philosophy of Science from A to Z speaks of this in the following terms: “Whatever else it is, truth does not have an expiry date. Unlike dairy products, truth cannot go off...”20. The eternity of the absolute is the topos of truth. Less than everything can the absolute mean general acceptance. Stathis Psillos: “Hence, truth cannot be equated with acceptance. Nor can it be equated with what communities or individuals agree on, or with what the present evidence licenses”21. Truth as absolute does not depend on the subjective acceptance of it - or rejection, which is also quite possible. Contemporary English philosophers Ophelia Benson 19 Frege, Gottlob. Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung. Op. cit., p. 61. See al-so: http://www.gavagai.de/HHP32.htm#anfang 20 Psillos, Stathis. Philosophy of Science A - Z. Edinburgh Univ. Press. 2007. - P. 247. 21 Ibid., p. 247-248. 31 and Jeremy Stangroom write from the first lines of their book Why Truth Matters?: “It is not new or surprising or puzzling to think that we don’t always love the truth…”22 This is expressed more expansive than the Russian “truth prickles the eye”; but the idea is the same, truth can be un-pleasant and even un-acceptable, but it’s truth. The walking wisdom is that something can be true, although it is not beautiful and because it is not beautiful, not sacred and not good23. Truth as an absolute possesses other properties besides perpetuity, outside the question of its acceptance / non acceptance, in addition to its nature, but still these predicates come to mind most: eternal, permanent, universal, necessary. And what do the dictionaries say? Dictionaries say something unexpected. Etymologically, Absolute does not in itself mean either eternal, or permanent; nor universal, nor necessary. Absolute (ME absolut, fr. L - absolutus; solvere, to loosen, solve, dissolve, fr. sed; se - apart + luere - to release, atone for Gk. luein - to loosen, dissolve, destroy; ab - from, away, off; Gk apo)24. Consider: truth is beyond and over, far from; from what? It is beyond destruction and dissolution, above them. And it is far above all de-cisions. Abandoned from relaxation and release, the Absolute is enigma. Absolute is free (or random!?), therefore, it can be freely interpreted not as necessity, but as a non-necessity, or contingency. Truth is undoubtedly also relative, which is connected with the mobile incom-pleteness of comprehension. To recognize this, it is not at all necessary to be a dialectical materialist. Suffice it to be a Neo-Kantian: “Die Manigfaltigkeit Wahrnehmbaren ist unerschöpflich, und wir können also der Vollständigkeit in dieser Hinsicht nie gewiss werden, weder der Vollständigkeit der Einzelnen Elemente, noch der Vollständigkeit ihrer Combinationen, welche uns die Wahrnehmung in immer weiterer Ausdehnung liefern kann”.25 This is the main argument in favor of the relativity of truth, and it was put for-ward already by skeptics. Interesting is that No less unexpected than the explication of absoluteness, there will be a deciphering of the term “relative”. In Russian translation there is a Greek-Latin root “carry”, φερειν, ferein. And the same root is present in the wellknown Webster dictionary: Relate [L. relatus (pp. of referre - to carry back), fr. Re- + latus, pp. of ferre - to carry - more at TOLERATE, BARE] syn. See JOIN. 22 Benson, Ophelia, Stangroom, Jeremy. Why Truth Matters. - London - NY, Contin-uum, 2007. - P. 1. 23 Weber M. Gesammelte Werke zur Wisseschaftslehre. Tübingen, 1951. S. 583. 24 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. - Springfield, Mass., USA. - P. 3. 25 Sigwart, Christoph. Logik. Zweiter Band. Die Methodenlehre. Tübingen, 1878. Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung. Einleitung. § 61. S. 7. Library of the University of Toronto. 32 The first explication of the notion and the concept under study in Webster runs as follows: Relative - 1: a word referring grammatically to an antecedent. However, there is more in the explication. Absolutely unexpected, in the sense indicated above, the following connotation turns out to be: it is a relation or a link or a necessary dependence. “The Relative” is necessary. Relative - 1: a word referring grammatically to an antecedent; 2: a thing hav-ing a relation to or connection with or necessary dependence upon another thing…26 It is self-evident that from such an angle there is no appreciable difficulty in pointing out the mutual overflow and the mutual penetration of the absolute and the relative. The most widespread gnoseological (and gnostical, and religious-mystical) un-derstanding of absolute truth as a whole universal knowledge of the universality of the universe is explicated today only as a guiding ideal. But it is necessary to remember one more meaning of absoluteness: it is a morphism, quantitativequalitative adequacy of correlated systems, namely, of knowledge and its referent. Adequacy, usually considered a scholastic term, is not always out-fashioned. In rare cases, it appears as an isomorphism, a pairwise one-to-one correspondence of both the paradigmatic elements and the syntagmatic links between them. This sometimes encountered or specially constructed “case” is inherent in some - in fact, few - scientific theories27. Relativity of truth, on its part, depends on both objective and subjective fac-tors. Objective factors that cause relativization of any knowledge were listed by skeptics among the five tropes of Agrippa and ten tropes of Enesydemus. In short, the object is changing, the method of mastering it is also changing, and our understanding is changing accordingly28. Besides, truth belongs to a knowing agent, his/her consciousness; as such, it is subjective. All inaccuracies, weaknesses and costs, all creative impulses and overexposures of consciousness make in essence true knowledge only relative in content. This is primarily the dependence of knowledge on the way people act. In addition, outside these restrictions, physiological possibilities limit “from below” the hypothetically existing absolute knowledge. The absolute knowledge of “what truly is there”, i.e. what actually exists, is relativized “from above” at the expense of man’s imagination and fantasy, constructive activity, and so on. There are also factors, so to speak, objectively subjective, characteristic more for the public, and not for the individual consciousness. These are the accepted picture of the world, the style of thinking, the intellectual “ceiling” of the era itself, the ratio of 26 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. - Springfield, Mass., USA. - P. 723. 27 For example, proposing for the solution of the problem of truth a precise, definite and in this sense absolute number to which the cognitive search tends, deviating and returning, we stipulate its dependence on the number of terms of the series, very large, but still finite (for S = 1000). 28 This was called a “parallax” by a Chinese philosopher Dawei Zhang during the XXIV WCP held in Beijin, in August 2018. 33 reception and transformation of traditional forms of culture, the interpretation of ideas of science, ideological pressing, aesthetic canon, ethical code, language norms, psychological attitudes, etc. As far as I can judge, for the first time in Russian philosophy these and other factors were qualified as a pre-requisite knowledge by L.A. Mikeshina, in theory of knowledge, epistemology and philosophy of science. I could add that it is pre-requisite for scientific knowledge presumably. Finally, it is important that, according to a successful remark by I.S. Narsky, the suggested asymmetry of absolute and relative is also relative! With reference to Lenin’s argument about the limits of absolute necessity and the absolute truthfulness of the gnoseological “relative opposition of matter and consciousness”, I.S. Narsky wrote: “In the ontological correlation of matter and consciousness, there is a moment of absolute..., and in the gnoseological aspect of this correlation there is its own relativity...”29 Of interest is that not all modern thinkers have fallen into relativism, contrary to what the post-non-classical skeptic of the eclectic confused era R. Rorty argues, criticizing the “dogmatism” of Plato and Aristotle. For example, Renford Bambrough, a contemporary British philosopher, demonstrates the true courage of the Enlighteners when he writes: “I still think that philosophy is the pursuit of truth and understanding, and that there is a truth to be known and understood. I also think that all this applies to everything else that deserves the name of enquiry or investigation: the truths of mathematics, physics, history, psychology, theology, morals and criticism are all alike timeless. In so far as apprehension of any of them depends on the acquisition of particular concepts, then those concepts are in principle available to any enquirer at any time. The mastery of them is itself a species of understanding that one man or generation may have and another lack”.30 This will be accepted by any significant thinker who is following the tradi-tions of the noble Enlightenment, and not necessarily a materialist. Criticism of Bambrough concerns several famous names. Let us give the corre-sponding fragment completely. “Collingwood tells us that he and I do not even ask the same questions as our philosophical predecessors. MacIntyre ties moral philosophy to the coat tails of morals and thinks that that makes moral philosophy fickle. Popper and his progeny see the philosopher’s business changing as new questions and answers are posed and offered in science and society. Feyerabend and Kuhn speak of scientific theories as mutually incommensurable; there cannot be permanent scientific truths to be discovered and established because a scientific conflict is between parties whose concepts are different, so that there is no single unambiguous question at issue between them, 29 Narsky I.S To the analysis of the structure of the basic question of philosophy // Philosophical Sciences, No. 6. 1982. - P. 58. 30 Renford Bambrough, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Editor of Phi-losophy. The Shape of Ignorance // Contemporary British Philosophy / Ed. By H.O. Lewis. - Plymouth: 1976. 34 and hence no role for a crucial experiment or observation. In morals and aesthetics and criticism and religion it is easier still to find suggestions that truth is a shifting sand, that nothing counts as how things are, waiting to be discovered or unfolded”. (ibid.) Unlike his opponents, Bambrough believes in the principle of cognition: “And all these truths and understandings are a unified truth and understanding, to which it is not irrational to aspire, even though it may be unintelligible to suppose that it can be reached”. (ibid.) I think, together with this philosopher, that it is not necessary to limit the scope and subject of rational research and inquiries. The ray of intellectual intuition, “intuitus purus”, will always be intentional to the universal truth, “the eternal rose that Dante saw”. Now let us stop somewhat longer on προλήψις, the projection of consciousness outwards, not allowing “the cat to scratch its eyes when it sees the mouse”. As it is believed to be stated in Hume, the idea of existence is either clearly connected with every perception of each subject of thought, or is identical with the very idea of perception (or perception of the object). However, was he really contemplating on perceptions? This is what Hume wrote in the famous “Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral subjects”, generally called just “Treatise”: “The idea of existence, then, is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent. To reflect on any thing simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. That idea, when conjoin’d with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it. Whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form.”31 To “simply” reflect doesn’t necessary mean to perceive, above all. What’s more: Just to reflect, therefore, about the smell of violets and to think that the flower does exist, perhaps, in fact, is the same thing. But “to simply perceive” the smell of violets, to think about the smell of violets, to reflect that you smell the violets, to reflect what you think about the smell of violets and AND to think that your thoughts about the smell of violets are true - are they all the same? Or is the deflationary concept of truth right? 31 Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the ex-perimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Section VI. Of the idea of existence, and of external existence. http://michaeljohnsonphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/5010_Hume_Treatise_Human_Nature.pdf See also: Hume, David. “A Treatise…” // Transl. into Russian by S.I. Tsereteli. Notes by I.S. Narski. Introduction by A.F. Gryaznov // David Hume. Works. In 2 volumes. V. I. - 2 nd ed., Ext. and corrected. - M .: Mysl, 1996. - P. 124. 35 A thought that communicates a feeling may well be false, erroneous, phantas-matic... even if the one who communicates it is sincerely convinced of its truth. Then probably it might be necessary to formulate the proposition under study in the following form: “It is true that I believe that I smell violets”? Is it necessary or not to ascribe to knowledge the property of truth, since there is knowledge and it is knowledge about its object? Attribution is not necessary, but it is not necessary to take it away, since it real-ly does have the property of being true (if any; bracketing is possible, though). Is it necessary or not to ascribe to judgment the property of conveying the au-thor’s conviction in the reality of the object of judgment? Ascribing is not necessary; neither it is necessary to bracket or take it away, since the judgment really does have the property of conveying the author’s conviction (if any). “The House of Truth is Logic” seems an indisputable phraze, because only in logic, beginning with Aristotle himself, is it clearly defined by the examples of assertive judgments. The point of view of G. Frege is close to this: the true [wahr] is only logical; this word in logic (and I think that in gnoseology too. - E.T.) should not be used in the sense of “genuine” [wahrhaftig] or “sincerely truthful” [wahrheitsliebend]; neither should it be mixed up with “really existing”, [wirklich]. However - and this is emblematic - in German the central form of knowledge, namely perception, is called Wahrnehmung, “taking the truth”. The word “awareness” comes closest to German Wahrnehmung. For the single Russian term «восприятие» in honest German there is a dozen correspondences with different shades of meaning: Erfassen - comprehension, capture; Aneignung - appropriation, appropriation; Aufnahme - acceptance, reception; Auffassung - catching, grasp, and the most common, Empfindung, that reflects all that is found with the help of sensory forms of cognition, situationally: Sensation, impression, feeling. Logic explains the work of gnoseology artlessly. If we attribute a predicate to the subject of the judgment, and the corresponding property of its original referent really does exist, the judgment is true, and if this property of the original does not in fact exist, the judgment is false. Conversely, if we point out the absence of the subject of a judgment, and it actually does not exist as an original referent, the judgment is true, and if there is, it is false. The whole difficulty is to find out first whether there is an object of discussion (existence), then what it is (essence) and then to find out what its inherent properties (accidents) are, and whether they are or are not; it is a test on verum, faith, conviction and truth of knowledge. Further, the trend of the future change of things will also become clear in practice. A familiar algorithm! What if we convincingly attribute to the original referent some property that it does not have, and vice versa? Therefore, only ostensive definitions unquestionably relate knowledge and reality, which definitions are, to logic, very indirect. Let’s clarify another important point: (is it) truth of knowledge or truthfulness of judgments, or propositions? What is more correct in characterizing the primary object of gnoseology? Consider , for example, such a dictionary definition (or rather, this division). 36 Truth - quality, state, of being true or accurate or honest or sincere or loyal or accurately shaped or adjusted. [OE trēowth].32 Everything is clear here and everything is upside down. Here, truth is the qual-ity of being truth, the property of the state of “being true”, or punctual, or earnest, candid, etc., i.e. in fact, it is given as an adjective. In this dictionary we face truth as an accident, not substance, although the definiendum is a noun. It would be more logical, on the contrary, to regard the adjective as being applied to the noun: true - quality, state, of being truth; “truth is quality, property, state of being truth”. “True” means, after all, not “truth”, but “truthfulness”, a noun which is a sub-stantiated adjective. For epistemology, logic and methodology of science it is quite acceptable. G. Frege, who considered the task of logic to be the discovery of the laws of truth (and not the discovery of laws of prudence or laws of thinking!), stated that it is in the laws of truthfulness that the meaning of the word “true” [wahr] is revealed. In the linguistic sense, the word “true” is manifested as an adjective. The more so, Frege uses the word Wahrsein for “truthfulness”, containing the root morpheme “Sein”, Being. It sounds stronger and more convincing than the Latin suffix -ness turning the adjective “truthful” to a noun. “Um jedes Mißverständnis auszuschließen und die Grenze zwischen Psycholo-gie und Logik nicht verwischen zu lassen, weise ich der Logik die Aufgabe zu, die Gesetze des Wahrseins zu finden, nicht die des Fürwahrhaltens oder Denkens. In den Gesetzen des Wahrseins wird die Bedeutung des Wortes „wahr” entwickelt… Das Wort „wahr” erscheint sprachlich als Eigenschaftswort”33. Can we still define truth as a certain substance? Or the so-called “pure truth” is not an isolated subject, but a qualitative certainty of knowledge? Presumably, we can. The Greeks spoke quite simply: truth is telos, a body. It is possible to put it this way: truth as a substance (and, likewise, being as a substance) is an idealization, an abstract object. Or it is better to formulate it in the following wording. Truth is an abstraction, some meaningful qualification of knowledge existing in the form of thought, judgment, that is, strictly speaking, truthfulness of knowledge. Of note is that both truth and truthfulness are nouns, but the first is a substance, and the second one is an accident - that of quality. In the role of qualification, it allows mainly qualitative description, in the function of abstraction - an exact, mathematical, quantitative description. Although Hegel believed that quantity is indifferent to being - it is not indif-ferent to cognition. Truthfulness is not an ideal object, a certain essence, but an abstraction of the characteristic property of cognition as a process and consciousness as its result: namely, the property of assimilation to reality. “Representing assimilation”, if we take advantage of the successful expression of Heidegger. 32 Chambers’s 20th Century Dictionary. - London: I965. 33 Frege, Gottlob: Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung. Op. cit., p. 59. See al-so: http://www.gavagai.de/HHP32.htm#anfang. 37 Here we give a supplemented starting definition: truth / truthfulness is an iso-lating abstraction, a certain qualification of the ideal that reflects the essence of the object of cognition encountered, “met”, appropriated by the subject in action, which essence is fixed in linguistic-logical forms representing “morphism”, or internal ordering of the cognizable object. A short digression. The simplest gnoseological classification of concepts in terms of their degree of abstraction includes three lines: abstraction of identification is the first level; the middle one is isolating abstraction; and abstraction of idealization, or abstract object is on the highest level. More detailed typologies rather than given are developed by sciences. Particularly rich is branching classification of the living-beings. For example: my Kitty your Benny that goldfinch lynx airedale terrier goldfinch cat dog bird Further, several more lines may follow: animal in general; living organism; en-tity; substance; matter; being. But in botany, rich in classifications, beginning with K. Linnaeus, and even with Democritus and Aristotle themselves, the number of these lines is even greater: individuals are united into species, species into families, families into detachments, detachments into classes, classes - in types, and those, in turn, in the realm of flora - and fauna, in zoology. From the point of view of semiotics, linguistic-logical forms-words and other signs are the stops on the “floors” of the signification lift. Scrupulous John Locke believed that the abstraction of identification is ob-tained as follows. To shorten the path to its great goal, knowledge, and above all, to give the greatest volume and comprehension to perception, the first thing that the mind does is connect its perceptions into “bundles” and thus dispose them for one or another group (sort, species, genus) so that one could confidently distribute all the knowledge acquired about individual things to the whole this species and thus move in more rapid steps. “This… is the reason why we collect things under comprehensive ideas, with names annexed to them, into genera and species; i.e. into kinds and sorts”.34 The next stage in formation of a concept is the acquisition of an isolating ab-straction. According to Locke: “…the mind having got an idea which it thinks it may have use of either in contemplation or discourse, the first thing it does is to abstract it, and then get a name to it”35. Names are given for the sake of conven-ience; the resulting signs cover a considerable number of objects: “…it is men who, taking occasion from the qualities they find united … range them into sorts, in order to their naming, for the convenience of comprehensive 34 Locke, John. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk.II, Ch.XXXII, “Of True and False Ideas”,. i. 6. See also: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/ 35 Ibid., B.II, Ch.XXXII, Of True and False Ideas,. i. 7. 38 signs; under which individuals, according to their conformity to this or that abstract idea, come to be ranked as under ensigns: so that this is of the blue, that the red regiment; this is a man, that a drill: and in this, I think, consists the whole business of genus and species.”36 It is important that it is in the interval of this abstraction that substantiation of adjectives and other parts of speech occurs, that is, the mental transformation of properties and qualities into substances. Though isolating abstraction is mainly thought of as being an abstracted quali-ty, Locke believed that the essence itself “of which that name is always to be the mark” can be isolated - and this indeed might be the case. The third step is constructing an abstract object. Locke explains this in the fol-lowing way: “…the abstract ideas of mixed modes, being men’s voluntary combinations of such a precise collection of simple ideas, and so the essence of each species being made by men alone, whereof we have no other sensible standard existing anywhere but the name itself, or the definition of that name”.37 Now, which line in the elementary three-step logical-gnoseological classifica-tion does truth / truthfulness occupy? The second, middle one. Truthfulness, as it was said, is an isolating abstraction, similar in the level of logical existence to “beauty”, “courage” or the famous “albedo”, “whiteness”, which served so much the history of logic and epistemology: just recall the famous “Sortes est alb”, “Socrates is white” (light-skinned or pale). Probably, such abstractions grow out of the logical search for a definitive characteristic of the object of thought. Semantically they are close to adjectives, being an operational finding of such a search, responding the question “what kind of?” [-truthful!] and having close relations to substances. Locke: “…the name, blue, notes properly nothing but that mark of distinction that is in a violet, discernible only by our eyes, whatever it consists in”38. As a result, we begin to deal with the property abstracted from things as with a particular concrete object: beauty, whiteness; literacy, humanity... electrical conductivity, malleability, fusibility... truthfulness. In this process of working with properties abstracted by the power of mind from their bearers, among their own attributes, “the most distinctive”, the definitive one, is established. We should not forget that the abstraction has an interval, and within its framework many subspecies are possible. Substantiation of isolating abstractions “true”, “truthful” leads to isolating abstraction “truthfulness”, expressed by a noun. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the German language: the initial lexeme in it is wahr (both the adjective and the adverb), the attachment of the feminine suffix heit to this adjective / adverb directly turns it into a noun Wahrheit. It means truth, and truthfulness, too. 36 Ibid., B.III, Ch. VI, Of the Names of Substances, i. 36. 37 Ibid., B.II, Ch.XXXII, Of True and False Ideas,. i. 12. 38 Ibid., i. 14. 39 The path of the corresponding Russian lexeme to the last goal is longer: true (i.e, genuine, actually existing) - true - truthful - truthfulness - truth [истинный (естенный, т.е. подлинный, действительно существующий) - истинно - истинность - истина]. It is worth noting that the argument relies crucially on the notion of what we might call “higher-order properties”. “We have not only animals, but animalities, and then animalityhoods, and “an-imalityhoodships” (or whatever we want to call them), and so on. The picture here is one of higher-order properties, not just of higher-order predicates. It is a matter of metaphysics, not just of language. Animals each have some real metaphysical feature, an animality, in virtue of which they are animals. These animalities in turn each have another metaphysical feature, an “animalityhood” we called it, in virtue of which they are animalities, and so on. Animalityhood is a real feature of an animality; indeed, it is what makes it an animality. But it is not a feature of an animal, since an animal is not an animality39”. Increasing the degree of abstraction - and in this case, we must agree, the ulti-mate abstraction is a complete separation from the logical bearer of truth, judgment, - gives us an abstract, or ideal, object and the great philosophical category TRUTH expressing this object. And the corresponding Word. An Absolute, equal to Being and Spirit, or equally powerful. Free from imperfections, compulsions and impurities, uncontrollable, self-sufficient, independent of qualification assessments, measurement standards, external reference. “Immobile vortex of being” (Rev. Father Pavel Florensky). Now we must listen to the other part. Not all philosophers would agree with these statements. Among them there was a critic of the dogmatism of the scientists Sextus Empiricus. In the Book First of the Treatise “Against Logicians”, he, at first objectivisti-cally and critically, writes about truthfulness as of something fundamentally different from the truth itself: “...others, and in particular the Stoics, believe that it differs from the true in three ways: substance [ουσία], composition [σΰστασισ] and meaning [δΰναµις]”40. It is impossible not to pay attention, although in this case it distracts us from the basic exposition, to the more than strange translation of the word δΰναµις: not as “movement” but as “meaning”. For me, this remains inexplicable. [Perhaps it was worthwhile, at least from the context, to translate this third concept, which shows the dynamics of truth, for example, as a “way of finding”, a method...] However, we will continue. 1. “It is different in substance, because truth is a body, and the true exists as an incorporeal”. It means that the true is a certain proposition, a statement; “The statement is a verbal expression (λεκτόν), but it is incorporeal”. Analyzing truth in 39 Spade, Paul Vincent. Boethius against Universals: The Arguments in the Second Commentary on Porphyry. http://www.pvspade.com/Logic/docs/boethius.pdf 40 Sextus Empiricus. Against the Logicians. Book I. Works, in 2 v. V. I. М.: Мysl, 1976. /In Russian/. P. 67. 40 the second treatise “Against Physicists”, Sextus himself takes a stoic view of it, as consisting of substance, substratum and meaning. Truth is a body, because it turns out to be knowledge of all that is true. This is, so to speak, the corpus of all true judgments. All knowledge is “the indwelling leader”. And the leading beginning, according to the Stoics, is the body. 2. In composition, “true” is “something that is uniform and simple by nature”. And truth is complex; it is “compiled as an established, systematic knowledge that is a collection of many truths”. 3. The differences in δΰναµις for the “true” and “truth” itself in Sextus’ presentation concern methodology, or the ways of acquiring knowledge. “...They differ from one another in that the true is not always connected with science (because both the mentally retarded, the infant, and the mad sometimes express something true, not having the science of the true), whereas truth is contemplated according to science”41. Such an unreasoning piety before scientific knowledge, the kingdom of truth, on the part of an inveterate relativist does him credit. And maybe, philosophy of science will rejoice that Sextus here has in mind that the right path, the method must lead to truth. Something true expressed by a simpleton, received outside the correct method, is not truth. So, the Skeptics and the Stoics agree that truth differs from the true in sub-stance, composition and meaning. In spite of the clearly expressed position, this opinion did not persuade the au-thor of this work, who remained convinced that the difference between the analyzed concepts consists, as stated above, in the level of abstraction of the substantivized adjective “true” (or truthful) and the abstract object “truth”. Parerga. Additional Considerations about Truth-makers, Truth-bearers and Logical basics. What property should appear in knowledge to consider it true? Let us turn to Plato’s dialogue “Phaedo”. 105 b-c. Socrates: “If you should ask me what, coming into a body, makes it hot, my reply would not be that safe and ignorant one, that it is heat, but our present argument provides a more sophisticated answer, namely, fire, and if you ask me what, on coming into a body, makes it sick, I will not say sickness but fever. Nor, if asked the presence of what in a number makes it odd, I will not say oddness but oneness, and so with other things”42. Ockham had a parallel: not the whiteness is the subject of white, but the body. “... It is said that the body or surface is a subject of whiteness (and fire is a subject of heat) {ignis est subiectum caloris}”43. 41 Op. cit., p. 68. 42 Plato. Phaedo. http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2010-09-15.2713280635/file 43 Ockham, Op. cit., p. 79. 41 For knowledge to become true, it should not be “truth” that springs out in it, but something else... the order of being, for example. The concept of truth must be developed into a theory in the same way as the concept of essence. It is necessary to begin the analysis with the study of the existential characteristics: existence, grasp and distraction, identity and likeness, order, morphism - continuing the substantial investigation of the qualitative features of truth and error and ending with the concentration of gnoseology on the problems of philosophy of science and epistemology, going ahead, onto sociocultural issues of practical philosophy such as ethics and communication. Existential materialism rests on a postulate approved by Father of logic, namely, coincidence of foundations of being and cognition, and therefore it never breaks with logic. Logical expression of this coincidence is the common topos, or terrain, of general and individual judgments. In such kind of judgments subjects and predicates have a total volume: the predicate is “a designation from another part of the same issue that is thought of in the subject”. (N. Lange’s wording). In Ockham, for a statement to be true, it is sufficient that the subject and the predicate mean or replace the same thing; hence Frusta fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora. This is pretty obvious and therefore seems like a truism. What interests us now is a formal coincidence of: 1) indefinite, that is, most relative judgments, 2) definite particular judgments that acquire a greater degree of probability, and 3) particular diverting judgments that win in the move to absolutely exact knowledge. All this is despite the fact that they differ in content; and truth characterizes content, not form of a judgment. There is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the transition, the transfer of rela-tive to absolute by means of Aristotelian logic. This phase transition is syntagmatically fixed in the above-named indefinite, definite particular and particular diverting judgments, which formally constitute three steps in the direction from relative knowledge to absolute one. Judgments of these types coincide in the form of a correctly constructed for-mula “There is an X that has the property A”, כּ Х (А)Х. For example, Some philosophers are reasonable. Some musicians are composers. Some writers are poets. The nomenclature of judgments is as follows: quantitatively, judgments are di-vided into particular and common, or general. Individual judgments remain outside our interests because they are equal in volume to general ones: as it was said, subjects and predicates coincide in them in scope. Particular judgments are definite and indefinite; the difficulty is that they can have one and the same subject, the same predicate, and, of course, the same quantifier, “some”. For example: “Some witnesses gave evidence”44. If it is free from context, the form, one and the same, will not make it possible to differentiate: some - and probably all?.. At least some?.. Only some - while other witnesses did not give those testimonies?.. This is an indefinite particular judgment. Its content, or volume, has a structure denoted by intersecting circles of Euler which means that neither subject, nor predicate is of definite scope. 44 Examples are taken from the textbook “Logic” by V.I. Kirillov and A.A. Starchenko (Moscow: Higher School, 1982), intended for law schools, which explains their specific “criminal” coloring. /in Russian/ 42 Context-related, i.e. meaningful, not formal, conclusion - <only> some <and only these> witnesses gave evidence <and some other witnesses, on the contrary, did not give evidence] - will make it possible to distinguish the definite particular judgment from others. Such a judgment contains knowledge of both the revised data knowledge about the scope of the subject, and the predicate (“non-witnesses”), and can in principle be meaningfully considered as a complex judgment. So, is everything explained just by means of a “small fraction”, the adverb “only”? If you enter it, then all things become clear?.. But the matter is complicated by the existence of particular diverting, or specifying judgments. It is the adverbs “only”, “just”, explicitly applied or implicitly comprised, that distinguish them from others. Here are the examples of all three types of simple propositions indicating indi-vidual, general, and particular diverting judgments. They mean to illustrate the steps from relative to absolute on the primer of specifying the terms denoting predicates which means moving from indefinite knowledge to definite - and P is always the main term in any judgment. “Only N is a witness of an accident”. This is an individual specifying judg-ment; its content, or volume, is denoted by one Euler circle which means in fact two in one: both S and P have the same scope. “All crimes are socially dangerous”. This is a general specifying judgment, and its content, or volume, also has a structure designated by one Euler circle on the same reasons: both S and P have the same scope. Crimes are socially dangerous. What is socially dangerous is a crime. This is an established scheme for all definitions; and this is what distinguishes definitions from all other general affirmative propositions like All men are mortals or All sparrows are birds, or All butterflies are insects, where predicate P is broader than subject S and thus indefinite, or, we can stress, thus relative, i.e. non-specified in frames of such type of judgments. These examples are simple enough. But then there comes an intriguing, ambiguous: “Some witnesses gave evidence”. Let’s take a more transparent example of the same logical structure: “Some cit-ies are capitals of the American states”. This example includes an implicit adverb “only”. And here the form, the same for more than one case, will not help to firmly distinguish the two following ideas: some - and maybe all?.. At least some?.. Only some - while others are not?.. OR <only> some cities are capitals [and some others, on the contrary, are non-capitals of non-American non-states]. Only some cities are capitals of the American states, only these cities, only them, and no others. «<Only> these S are P-s, and only these P-s» is the underpinning idea of particular diverting, or specifying, judgments, distinguishing them from indefinite particular judgments with the same quantifier. In the case of a context-bound conclusion, the scheme of a particular specify-ing judgment will be denoted differently than that of an indefinite particular judgment: namely, by concentric circles. In the center there is a specified, isolated predicate P: “the capitals of the American states”. Its volume is definite, or absolute, in contrast to the predicates of indefinite particular judgments (though also in contrast to the volume of the subject “cities”). And this specification of a predicate making it definite - while predicates of other types of affirmative propositions are all indef- 43 inite - is one of the visualizations of our ideas about truth as an increasingly accurate and clear knowledge approaching the quantitative limit. Another question from the sphere of formal logic is also of interest to gnoseol-ogy discussing the basic syntagma. This is a question of modalities. Even in the two-valued logic, it is possible to transfer to communicant not only the objective “core” of information, a certain conceptual complex, but also to express one’s own, subjective attitude to this information. In other words, it can be evaluated, offered as questionable or immutable, as necessary or contingent, etc. The school definition of modality seems narrow. It is “additional information about the nature of the validity of the judgment or the type of relationship between the subject and the predicate expressed in the judgment in explicit or implicit form”45. In fact, such modal operators as “good” or “bad”, “always” or “sometimes”, “prohibited” or “allowed”, etc. speak not about the validity of judgments, the objective dependence of the predicate on the subject, but it is our, subjective, qualitative assessment of what is happening; it is about our doubt, confidence, determination or accepted axiological system. The well-known “school” classification of modalities includes as the first lines the alethic and epistemic modality. Epistemic has two more subspecies. Alethic modalities express the degree of necessity of the event. They are des-ignated in language by operators “necessary”, “accidental”, “impossible”, “possible”. Dialectics of possibilities (abstract and concrete, formal and real) is not taken into account in elementary logic. However, Aristotle himself wrote that two-valued logic does not work well for the future; for example, the saying “It is necessary that a sea battle take place tomorrow” cannot be reliably estimated either as true or false. The language of politics often uses this ambiguity. Epistemic modalities express the degree of the validity of a judgment; most of-ten, of scientific one. They either agree with our verified knowledge, or with unproven conviction. Modalities of knowledge are indicated by operators “provable”, “undecidable”, “refutable”. This is the sphere of scientific research, doubts, losses and inventions. Modalities of belief, respectively, have operators “presumed”, “doubtful”, “rejected”, “admitted”. More often than we would like, the theory of scientific knowledge resorts to deontological modalities: “obligingly”, “indifferent”, “forbidden” and “allowed”. Of course, all referents of these assessments lie in the field of pragmatics, the sphere of “boundless subjectivism”. Our question, however, is as follows. Why do modalities denoted by the sacra-mental name “alethia”, designate not knowledge but objective actuality, whatever it is called, for example “event”? (R. Scruton, for example, suggests to understand under “reality” such its types and manifestations as fact, situation, reality and state of affairs). Evidently, because truth “somehow” relates to objective actuality. True knowledge is in relationship with all these and other types of reality. And why epistemic modalities marking scientific search, “science on the march”, do not include such an assessment of their attitude to the subject of search? 45 V.I. Kirillov and A.A. Starchenko, op. cit., p. 96. 44 The reason is they denote not reality, but the totality of statements about it. The care of epistemology is the coherence of utterances. That is why there is often a temptation to adopt a deflationary, i.e. logical-methodological theory to explicate the concept of truth, and stop at this. Excessive emphasis on the formal side of logic, generally speaking, is not needed. By the way, Aristotelian logic was called formal by Kant; this is not its self-name. However, we specifically focused on the schematic intermediate stages of clarification of knowledge, and this is the reason for it. Logical steps from inconsistency to certainty and to specific definiteness - that of the predicate - are the steps of knowledge meaningful in content, from the relative to the absolute. Here, not only logic is needed, but also gnoseology. In the theory and practice of cognition, this approach to truth occurs as a coincidence of knowledge with the actual state of affairs. Conclusion. As the ability to know and as a process of cognition, truth was identified in the ancient Greeks, and both the ability and the process were denoted by the same word gnōme. Truth as such was designated by the word “[the] unforgettable”, alethia. There are, therefore, not two (“process and result”), but three main hypostases of truth: 1) cognitive potential force (energy), 2) the very process of acquiring knowledge, i.e. ideal presentation of an object, and 3) the result of this action: a true judgment. Or it may be a larger block of knowledge, together with its sociocultural context. Or it is the corresponding existential state, Heideggerian “standing-in-the-Lichtung”, being-in-knowing. Or it is our “Dabewußtsein”. True, there is knowledge that cannot be adequately confirmed or completely disproved by practical experience, in principle. These are all those judgments, the explicit or hidden background, the subtext, the metamessage of which is the idea of an actual infinity of being. Only theoretical philosophy can help in such cases. So let us forward to truth. In philosophy, nothing viable is left in vain; the time of the next knight tournament comes between those who believe in the existence of absolute truth, and those who reject it or have already rejected it. The author is with those who believe. Let the strongest win.

About the authors

E. A Tajsina

Kazan State Power Engineering University

Email: Emily_Tajsin@inbox.ru
Kazan

References

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