Первопонятия. Ключи к культурному коду - Михаил Наумович Эпштейн

сопутствуют друг другу: религия предъявляет прозрения, догадки, откровения, тогда как наука, даже выдвигая самые «безумные идеи», кропотливо работает над поиском доказательств, чтобы сделать невероятное – несомненным. Таким образом, сообща они могут охватить все мироздание в соотнесенности его тайн и ключей, загадок и разгадок, чудес и очевидностей.

✓ Бессмертие, Вера, Возможное, Интересное, Ничто, Событие, Творчество, Удивление

Summary

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

St. Augustine

This book is devoted to the main concepts that shape our mentality: life and death, love and fate, soul and body, power and play, wisdom and conscience, future and eternity… These universal elements of conceptualization underlie such cognitive processes as inference, memory, learning, decision-making, and goal-setting. Primary concepts – which are concise in expression, but extremely capacious in meaning – have power over the public consciousness and form the sign code of culture. The minimal sign construct, a single word, encompasses the maximum of mental content; the greatest is manifested in the least. With these concepts, we express our understanding of the world – but they themselves, by virtue of their breadth and depth, are the most difficult to understand or explicate. As alluded to in the epigraph, they seem self-explanatory, and precisely for this reason, they elude definition.

As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This book is intended for anyone who wants to master the language of concepts in order to more fully comprehend their own existence. Primary concepts are ancient, universal thought-formations. They could perhaps be called “arche-concepts,” by analogy with Jungian archetypes; but unlike the latter, primary concepts belong to the sphere of the collective consciousness rather than the unconscious. They are anthropological universals – primary elements of human experience, diversely refracted through national languages and cultures. The universality of these concepts, however, is not of an abstract nature, as in the case of such metaphysical or logical categories as “essence,” “quantity,” “quality,” “identity,” “difference,” “unity,” “multitude,” etc. Primary concepts are more concrete in meaning, and evolve not as a result of logical analysis, but as the most vital, profoundly meaningful elements of the human experience. At the same time, primary concepts differ from such scientific notions as “quantum,” “galaxy,” “gene,” or “organism,” many of which are international terms derived from Greek or Latin. By contrast, primary concepts are most often derived from native roots, since they belong to the consciousness of an entire people. Unlike scientific terms, which are reducible to one rigorous meaning, they stand out as polysemic, and enjoy the broadest use in various styles, from colloquial to academic. The smallest units of intellectial energy, they designate the ultimate values and purposes of existence.

Such is the task of this book: to explore the capacious significance of these primary concepts, the meanings they derive from their linguistic origin and acquire in the context of modern culture. The book contains a systematic description of sixty concepts that cover the main aspects of human life: from phenomena of nature and society to subjective moods and emotions. The concepts are thematically organized around several major themes: Life, Reality, the Human, Feeling, Mind, Power, and Creativity.

1. Life

Life

Fate

Event

The New

Future

Age

Death

Immortality

Eternity

2. Reality

Reality

The Possible

Miracle

Depth

Shell

The Small

Thing

House

Void

Nothing

3. The Human

The Human

Soul

Conscience

Faith

Guilt

Body

Purity

Lightness

Charm

Vulgarity

The Uncanny

4. Feeling

Feeling

Love

Desire

Jealousy

Mood

Sadness

Longing

Resentment

Surprise

Tenderness

5. Mind

Mind

Insanity

Consciousness

Thinking

Wisdom

6. Power

Power

People

Intelligentsia

Motherland

7. Creativity

Creativity

Genius

The Interesting

The Poetic

Play

Image

Word

Silence

Writing

Reading

Book

Each concept is presented as a point of departure for different cultural trends, philosophical views, and critical interpretations. Arranged in alphabetical order throughout the book, the concepts are cross-referenced at the end of each entry with related concepts (see → sign).

This book follows the pattern of such well-known anthologies of concepts as Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). However, this book is not intended to outline a particular theme or worldview (whether a mystical philosophy or politics of culture), but rather to frame the issue itself of concepts as instruments of intellectual creativity. What problems and riddles do they pose to our thought-process, what explosive paradoxes do they encompass, and what theories and hypotheses evolve from them?

The author is the well-known Russian-American cultural scholar, critical thinker, and linguist Mikhail N. Epstein, professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (Atlanta, US). This book is the result of his many years of multidisciplinary work on issues of language and thought. His other books include A Constructive Dictionary of the Humanities, From Knowledge to Creativity, Poetry and Superpoetry, Postmodernism in Russia, The Phoenix of Philosophy, Ideas against Ideocracy, and a number of monographs and articles translated into twenty-four languages.

Примечания

1

Характерно признание одного из самых разносторонних российских ученых XX в. Н. Н. Моисеева, специалиста в области математики, теории управления, динамики биосферы, философии естествознания: «О том, что такое жизнь, написано множество работ, но ни в одной из них нет достаточно полного определения этого феномена. <…> Я тоже не могу дать определение феномена жизни, и, как мне кажется, его удовлетворительного и достаточно полного определения просто не существует. Но в то же время мы всегда можем отличить живое от неживого». Моисеев Н. «Жизнь» – еще одно «первопонятие» //