A.P. Ogurtsov on the humanitarian and anthropological turn

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Ogurtsov connects the humanitarian turn in philosophy, first of all, with the works of V. Diltey and M. Bakhin, and refers the anthropological turn to the middle of the twentieth century. Sergey Smirnov points out two points that Ogurtsov considers characteristic of the anthropological turn in philosophy. "The first moment. This is “a turn to a new philosophical justification of the humanities and social sciences, in which there was <...> an appeal to the problems of man in all his breadth” ^{[8, p. 259]}. The second moment. This is a turn that means a radical change in the “methodological equipment of the humanities and social sciences”, a radical restructuring by philosophy itself of its object and means of reflexive analysis. Philosophy itself has changed, becoming philosophical anthropology" ^{[8, p. 26]}.

            The concept outlined in the work "Images of education. Western philosophy. The twentieth century", I would attribute it to Ogurtsov's understanding of the humanitarian-anthropological turn. Ogurtsov connects this turn not only with the implementation of humanitarian and anthropological approaches, but also with the interpretation of philosophy as a kind of generalized, reflexive pedagogy (a view also coming from Dilthey). "The fruit and goal of every true philosophy," Dilthey noted, "is pedagogy, in a broad sense, the doctrine of human education" (quoted in ^{[3, p. 83]}).

"The publication of Dilthey's manuscripts, especially the Critique of Historical Reason and the Main Lines of the System of Pedagogy," Ogurtsov writes, "significantly transforms the image of Dilthey." He is no longer perceived only as the "founder of the humanities", Dilthey is trying to rebuild "the whole philosophy, where the sciences of the spirit occupy their specific place… He hopes to understand life without resorting to transcendental assumptions, to understand it from itself... The relationship of experience, expression and understanding is the problem that occupies Dilthey in later works… Historicity is the characteristic that Dilthey uses to describe the inner essence of a person. This means that the process of human unfolding is never completed... Dilthey does not allow any supra-temporal, transcendental subject in historical changes as a carrier of events and a guarantor of the truth of knowledge…This significant shift in the formulation of problems is associated with the transition from epistemology to hermeneutics, from psychologism expressed in the rejection of analytical, dissecting psychology to the construction of a new descriptive psychology, to ontological hermeneutics, which puts forward life and fundamentally new ways of comprehending it as its central link.… Experience is put by Dilthey in place of the facts of consciousness. Experience is correlated with the world and in understanding we comprehend it as reality... we are talking about a circular movement, a hermeneutic circle in experiencing various abilities and functions of the soul... Dilthey, in contrast to the causal-mechanical ideal, puts forward a new ideal of understanding the soul-spiritual, proceeding from its integrity, expediency and development... "Connection with the living, the whole"... Dilthey has always emphasized the irrational depth and incomprehensibility of life in rational categories," he writes, "must be constantly preserved in the course of training"... Dilthey always emphasized the irrational depth and incomprehensibility of life in rational categories… As he himself said about himself, "we are skeptical about the machinery of systems." And at the same time, he retained the desire to build an integral philosophical system" ^{[3, p. 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85-86, 89, 96]}.    

I think almost all the statements here need to be explained: why life, and not nature or being, what does the integrity of life mean, how to distinguish it, is it possible to experience and understand without realizing what historicity Dilthey has in mind, how to study objectively if we abandon the transcendental Kantian subject, etc.? Yes, Dilthey is perceived by us as the founder of the humanities, not a new philosophy. Nevertheless, Ogurtsov is right: the humanitarian turn initiated by Diltem required justification and a change of ontology, built historically mainly for natural science. This ontology, indeed, required "a supra-temporal, transcendental subject as the bearer of events and the guarantor of the truth of knowledge." Let us recall, for example, Descartes, who argued that when we achieve a clear understanding of a subject, God himself speaks through us (that's the transcendental subject).

"For every time," Descartes writes, "when I keep my will so much within the limits of my knowledge that it makes its judgments only about things presented to it clearly and distinctly by reason, I am not able to make a mistake; after all, every clear and distinct concept is undoubtedly something and, therefore, cannot to come from non-existence, but it is necessary to have God as its creator, and God, being perfect, cannot be the cause of any delusion" ^{[2, p. 380]}.

However, in addition to studying objects of the first nature (motion, heat, electromagnetic phenomena, etc.), a person studies phenomena that he attributed to the sciences of the "spirit" (man himself, art, history, culture, etc.) at the end of the XIX century. The successes of natural science led philosophers and scientists to believe that these, later called "humanitarian", phenomena also obey the laws of the first nature and therefore they need to be studied by the same methods. But by the middle of the XIX century it became clear that mathematization and the rigorous experiment on Galileo in this field of knowledge either do not work or lead to such an oversimplification of humanitarian phenomena that only horns and legs remain of them.

In contrast to the natural scientific methods of cognition, the sciences of the spirit create their own specific methods – interpretation, interpretation, understanding, criticism, analysis of specific works ("individuals"), etc. At the same time, the researchers found important features of humanitarian cognition: the multiplicity of interpretation (interpretation) of the same phenomenon, the dependence of interpretation on the position and values of the researcher, the semiotic and communicative nature of facts (texts and narratives), the reflexive nature of humanitarian cognition and others (see more ^{[5, pp. 127-135]}).    

"My thinking," observes Goethe, who formulated an alternative image of nature as a living whole to natural science, "is not separated from objects, the elements of objects of contemplation enter into it and are imbued with it in the innermost way, so that my contemplation itself is thinking, and thinking is contemplation" ^{[10, p. 31]}.    

"If we understand," writes Bakhtin, "the text is broad, like any related sign complex, then art criticism deals with texts. Thoughts about thoughts, experiences of experiences, words about words, texts about texts. This is the main difference between our (humanitarian) disciplines and natural (about nature)…The sciences of the spirit. The spirit cannot be given as a thing (a direct object of natural science), but only in symbolic expression, realization in texts…Each text (as an utterance) is something individual, unique and inimitable, and this is the whole point of it ... it (in its free core) does not allow either causal explanation or scientific foresight…The question arises whether science can deal with such absolutely unique individuals ... whether they do not go beyond the scope of generalizing scientific knowledge. Of course, it can" ^{[1, pp. 281, 283, 285, 287]}.

It is quite obvious that the natural science understanding of nature cannot be taken as the "ultimate ontology" for humanitarian cognition. The ultimate ontology, for example, the idea of Plato's ideas, or the nature of F.It allows us to comprehend the ideal objects created in philosophy and science, and is understood as the main existing reality. Another ontology was required. Several variants of the ultimate ontology for humanitarian cognition have been proposed. Dilthey proposed to take such concepts as "life", "history", "understanding", "expression", "experience" to characterize the ultimate ontology. The ultimate ontology here is "life" and "history", and "understanding", "expression", "experience" set the anthropological reality. According to Dilthey, when we create or interpret a particular narrative, firstly, this is life at a certain historical moment, and secondly, the individual expresses, understands, experiences.

An important feature of all these concepts is the double modality. On the one hand, history (respectively, life, understanding, expression, experience) is "singular", that is, it does not change according to some law, but due to random circumstances. ("In philosophy, the word "singularity", derived from the Latin "singulus" – "single, singular", denotes the uniqueness, uniqueness of something – beings, events, phenomena. Most of all, modern French philosophers – in particular, Gilles Deleuze - have thought about this concept. He interpreted the singularity as an event generating meaning and having a point character. “These are turning points and points of bends; bottlenecks, nodes, vestibules and centers; points of melting, condensation and boiling; points of tears and laughter, illness and health, hope and despondency, points of sensitivity.” But at the same time, while remaining a specific point, the event is inevitably connected with other events. Therefore, a point is at the same time a line expressing all variants of modification of this point and its interrelations with the whole world" ^[9]).

On the other hand, life is changing and quite lawfully, under the influence of the mechanisms of culture, language, economy, human relationships, technology, etc.  

But why is Dilthey pedaling the holistic methodology so much, constantly emphasizing the need to maintain the integrity of life? "This integral psychic relationship," he notes, "is inexpressible in concepts and is the only relationship of reality, a real entity that we can imagine at all and which represents a scheme of comprehension of any other living and real whole" ^{[3, p. 94]}. It looks like a spell. You can understand this by thinking through the features of humanitarian knowledge. Here is one example.

"Reading Pushkin's letters one day, I caught myself thinking that I absolutely do not understand either the actions or statements of the great poet, especially in relation to women, carousing and card games. At the same time, I could not ignore my misunderstanding, the importance of Pushkin was too great in my soul, following Marina Tsvetaeva, I could well say –My Pushkin". I could not live with such an understanding, or rather misunderstanding, and dismiss the problem that had arisen. Reading further letters, I noted with some satisfaction that a similar problem was bothering Peter Chaadaev. Isn't it amazing: Chaadaev writes that Pushkin “prevents him from going forward”, the question is, what does Pushkin have to do with it, go ahead if you want. But that's the thing - if Pushkin is mine, in me, a part of my self, then I can't dismiss it if I don't understand or disapprove of his actions.

   As a result, I had to start a difficult job. Recalling the advice of Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote that “foreign consciousnesses cannot be contemplated, analyzed, defined as objects, as things – you can only communicate with them dialogically, thinking about them means talking to them, otherwise they immediately turn to us with their object side” ^{[1, p. 116]}, I gave the voice to Pushkin himself to answer my perplexities. To do this, I looked for answers to my questions in his letters, tried to get into Pushkin's position, to see the world through his eyes, myself and with the help of Yu. Lotman reconstructed his time, customs, customs, etc., etc. For example, I realized that Pushkin was a romantic, that the card game in his time had a completely different meaning than in ours (it was a form of overcoming unfreedom), that Pushkin's attitude to women was partly due to the fact that he was a landowner that Pushkin was greatly influenced by his friends who did not agree with his lifestyle, and finally, Alexander Sergeevich himself was increasingly aware of the discrepancy between his lifestyle and the role of the national poet of Russia.

Relying on all this, that is, the image of Pushkin that I constructed (in epistemology, it is an ideal object), I was able to show that at the turn of the 30s, a spiritual revolution was taking place with Pushkin. He is reconsidering his life, abandoning his former values, and taking on a number of tasks aimed at serving Russia. I analyzed Pushkin's actions and tried to understand their motives, in short, I did everything so that Pushkin really became mine, so that Pushkin, as Chaadaev wrote, allowed me to go my own way so that I could live together with Pushkin" ^{[5, pp. 108-135]}.

Let us now pose the following question: how did I delineate the boundaries of Pushkin's life and my life during the period of humanitarian knowledge discussed here? The integrity of this life was due to a number of factors: the problem I faced, the narratives of Pushkin's research available to me, the texts of his letters and statements, the methodology of humanitarian cognition, and this methodology was included in the process of relations with Pushkin (I gave him a voice, he answered, I reflected on Pushkin's answers, and this affected on my attitude to the great poet). It is clear that in another humanitarian study, these factors will change, therefore, the integrity of life will also change. It turns out that the integrity of life, over which Dilthey struggled, is not independent of the researcher, his personality and life, it is constituted in the very process of humanitarian cognition, partly as a singular, partly a natural phenomenon.

"If this is the case, we have to agree with Dilthey, who opposed the humanitarian and natural science approaches. And then Ogurtsov is right, emphasizing that "the shift in the formulation of problems is associated with the transition from epistemology to hermeneutics, from psychologism expressed in the rejection of analytical, dissecting psychology to the construction of a new descriptive psychology, to ontological hermeneutics, which puts forward life and fundamentally new ways of comprehending it as its central link" ^{[3; 4]}. However, the following question arises: can such knowledge, conditioned by the resolution of a certain life situation, included in this process, be considered scientific? A similar question was posed by Bakhtin, asking whether the knowledge of unique statements of a person is a science; as is known, he answered this in the affirmative. And I consider such humanitarian knowledge scientific, moreover, in my opinion, only such knowledge, conditioned and included in life, is humanitarian. It is scientific because ideal objects are built here, facts are explained, scientific explanation and justification are conducted. And humanitarian because it is the inclusion in life, the need to respond to its impulses and challenges, that force the researcher to carry out his values while studying and enter into a relationship with the phenomenon being studied. 

            Let's pay attention to one more point. Studying the life of Pushkin, I am forced to analyze all the main realities indicated by Dilthey – the historical life of the epoch, culture, texts, contexts, personality (Pushkin), her motives and aspirations, actions and much more ^{[3, p. 108-127]}. Life, culture and works, Dilthey emphasized, must be taken and explained (comprehended) together with the individual, in the context of history and modernity, and finally, together with himself (the humanitarian, Dilthey wrote, discovers in his object of study "something that is in the cognizing subject itself", quoted by ^{[5, pp. 62-63]}). It may seem to someone that combining such different approaches and realities in one cognitive process is impossible and cannot lead to success. Naturally, I do not agree with this, on the contrary, I see the effectiveness of the Delta approach. As for the impossibility and heterogeneity of contents and methods, the history of science shows how often yesterday's impossibility is overcome and gradually becomes the norm of scientific work.

            It was Dilthey who laid the foundations for the humanitarian philosophy of education. Ogurtsov summarizes the following features of the humanitarian philosophy of education.

            - "activity-based interpretation of the reality of education, that is, its interpretation as a system of meaningful acts and inter-intentional interactions;

            - fixing the connection of education with the actions of participants in the educational process, as well as with their intentions, motives, intentions;

            - historical approach to the "reality" and to the "practice" of education;

            - emphasis on the methods of understanding, initially interpreted purely psychologically (as implantation, empathy, autobiographical introspection in V. Dilthey), and then increasingly intersubjectively and objectively-spiritually (sociologically in the concepts of communicative acts, phenomenologically in post-war philosophy);

            - the rejection in the twentieth century of the derivation of the philosophy of education from certain higher principles and postulates;

            - orientation to comprehending the meaning of the practice of education, which the participants of pedagogical communication themselves have in mind;

            - orientation to the interpretation of explicit and latent semantic structures that are represented in the speech and didactic practice of education, in acts of dialogue and in normative official and unofficial documents and educational institutions;

            - rejection of both theoretical and practical rationing of educational activities, which often comes to a direct rejection of the very possibility of constructing a theory in the philosophy of education;

            - the undoubted merit of the humanitarian philosophy of education is the identification of a variety of pedagogical practices and the transformation of understanding procedures depending on the interpreted educational practice (dialo–speech, didactic-methodical, interpretation of written fixed texts, etc.);

            - a clear methodological and conceptual orientation to the humanistic philosophy of education, emphasizing the importance of cultural values and educational ideals for the construction of pedagogical theory and the organization of pedagogical practice;

            - understanding the processes of education as a pedagogical attitude" ^{[3, pp. 212-213]}.

            In pedagogical anthropology, this methodology and principles are applied to the analysis of a person who is considered as "in need of upbringing and education", as a historical being (pedagogical anthropology is "historical in two ways: firstly, the topic being developed has a specific historicity and, secondly, the researcher of anthropological problems proceeds from historically determined perspectives"), as a person who is fundamentally open to the world. Like the whole direction of the humanitarian philosophy of education, pedagogical anthropology and pedagogical knowledge are pluralistic" ^{[3, pp. 372, 373; 7, pp. 100-103]}.

            Ogurtsov and Platonov believe that currently there is a convergence of natural science and humanitarian approaches and their convergence brings a revolution in modern science closer. "It is true," they write, "that the natural sciences, especially in their classical scientist interpretation, still largely do not fit in with the humanities, but the assumption of anti–scientism about the fundamental incommensurability of these approaches, their closeness to each other is incorrect <...> In general, their opposition has evolved in the direction of convergence, the formation of intermediary links between these poles of philosophical thinking, so that initially opposing options are gradually transformed by building bridges to each other. This kind of convergence was the result not only of changes in the socio-cultural and political environment, but also in the internal logic of each of the directions. In the course of these changes, empirical-analytical concepts gradually incorporate into their systems a range of anthropological problems (the subject of knowledge, the subject of activity, etc.) and, accordingly, the data of the humanities, from which they were previously distracted. Anthropologism moves from extreme individualism to the interpretation of man, which is permeated with the ideas of communication and intersubjectivism. The convergence of these extremes means approaching the solution, apparently, of the most fundamental problems of modern philosophy" ^{[3, pp. 109, 132]}.

            In my opinion, everything is not so clear. As methodological programs, these approaches are based on opposite ideas, so their convergence is hardly possible. But as expressing the real structures of scientific activity and thinking, they can be considered as additional. For example, the thinking of Z. Freud can be considered from the point of view of both approaches. On the one hand, he considered the psyche as a complex natural mechanism that can be described using physicalist concepts (libido energy, forces, repression, conflicts, etc.), on the other hand, analyzing dreams, typos, humor, creativity, some mental illnesses, Freud thinks humanely, for example, interprets dreams as a text in need in the transcript ^{[6, pp. 162-175]}. In the question of the convergence of these approaches, much depends on the structure of social life. So far, we see rather a divergence of humanitarian and technical cultures. In order for the opposite trend to arise, another type of civilization is probably needed, in which the Baconian concept of mastering nature would give way to another concept – coexistence with the nature of the Earth, preserving it.    

It is not difficult to notice that, characterizing the humanitarian philosophy of education, Ogurtsov followed the humanitarian-anthropological turn considered by himself, this is both an illustration and a concretization of this turn. The interesting fate of Dilthey's proposals and works. On the one hand, they had a huge impact, contributing to the formation of a humanitarian approach along with a natural science approach and thinking. On the other hand, the significance of Dilthey's works is still insufficiently understood, so this study by Alexander Pavlovich is very important.   

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