The founders of the Baden school of neo-Kantians are natural knowledge. Neo-Kantianism is a direction in German philosophy of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries

"Back to Kant!" - it was under this slogan that a new movement was formed. It was called neo-Kantianism. This term usually refers to the philosophical movement of the early twentieth century. Neo-Kantianism prepared fertile ground for the development of phenomenology, influenced the formation of the concept of ethical socialism, and helped to separate the natural and human sciences. Neo-Kantianism is a whole system consisting of many schools that were founded by Kant's followers.

Neo-Kantianism. Start

As already mentioned, neo-Kantianism dates back to the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement first arose in Germany, the homeland of the eminent philosopher. The main goal of this movement is to revive Kant's key ideas and methodological guidelines in new historical conditions. Otto Liebman was the first to announce this idea. He suggested that Kant's ideas could be transformed to suit the surrounding reality, which at that time was undergoing significant changes. The main ideas were described in the work “Kant and the Epigones”.

Neo-Kantians criticized the dominance of positivist methodology and materialist metaphysics. The main program of this movement was the revival of transcendental idealism, which would emphasize the constructive functions of the knowing mind.

Neo-Kantianism is a wide-ranging movement that consists of three main directions:

1. "Physiological". Representatives: F. Lange and G. Helmholtz.
2. Marburg school. Representatives: G. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer.
3. Baden school. Representatives: V. Windelband, E. Lask, G. Rickert.

The problem of overestimation

New research in the field of psychology and physiology has made it possible to consider from a different perspective the nature and essence of sensory, rational knowledge. This led to a revision of the methodological foundations of natural science and became the reason for criticism of materialism. Accordingly, neo-Kantianism had to reassess the essence of metaphysics and develop a new methodology for cognition of the “science of spirit.”

The main object of criticism of the new philosophical trend was Immanuel Kant’s teaching about “things in themselves.” Neo-Kantianism considered the “thing in itself” as the “ultimate concept of experience.” Neo-Kantianism insisted that the object of knowledge is created by human ideas, and not vice versa.

Initially, representatives of neo-Kantianism defended the idea that in the process of cognition a person perceives the world not as it really is, and this is due to psychophysiological research. Later, the emphasis shifted to the study of cognitive processes from the point of view of logical-conceptual analysis. At this moment, schools of neo-Kantianism began to form, which examined Kant’s philosophical doctrines from different angles.

Marburg school

Hermann Cohen is considered the founder of this trend. In addition to him, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and Hans Vaihinger contributed to the development of neo-Kantianism. Also influenced by the ideas of Magbu neo-Kantianism were N. Hartmany, R. Korner, E. Husserl, I. Lapshin, E. Bernstein and L. Brunswik.

Trying to revive Kant's ideas in a new historical formation, representatives of neo-Kantianism started from real processes that took place in the natural sciences. Against this background, new objects and tasks arose for study. At this time, many laws of Newtonian-Galilean mechanics were declared invalid, and, accordingly, philosophical and methodological guidelines turned out to be ineffective. During the period of the XIX-XX centuries. There were several innovations in the scientific field that had a great influence on the development of neo-Kantianism:

1. Until the mid-19th century, it was generally accepted that the universe was based on Newton’s laws of mechanics, time flows uniformly from past to future, and space is based on the ambushes of Euclidean geometry. A new look at things was opened by Gauss's treatise, which talks about surfaces of revolution of constant negative curvature. The non-Euclidean geometries of Bolya, Riemann and Lobachevsky are considered consistent and true theories. New views on time and its relationship with space were formed; Einstein’s theory of relativity played a decisive role in this issue, which insisted that time and space are interconnected.
2. Physicists began to rely on the conceptual and mathematical apparatus in the process of planning research, and not on instrumental and technical concepts that only conveniently described and explained experiments. Now the experiment was planned mathematically and only then carried out in practice.
3. Previously, it was believed that new knowledge multiplies old knowledge, that is, it is simply added to the general information bank. A cumulative belief system reigned. The introduction of new physical theories caused the collapse of this system. What previously seemed true has now been relegated to the realm of primary, incomplete research.
4. As a result of the experiments, it became clear that a person does not simply passively reflect the world around him, but actively and purposefully shapes objects of perception. That is, a person always brings something of his subjectivity into the process of perceiving the world around him. Later, this idea turned into a whole “philosophy of symbolic forms” among the Neo-Kantians.

All these scientific changes required serious philosophical reflection. The neo-Kantians of the Marburg School did not stand aside: they offered their own view of the emerging reality, based on the knowledge gleaned from Kant’s books. The key thesis of the representatives of this movement said that all scientific discoveries and research activities testify to the active constructive role of human thought.

The human mind is not a reflection of the world, but is capable of creating it. He brings order to an incoherent and chaotic existence. Only thanks to the creative power of the mind, the world around us did not turn into a dark and silent oblivion. Reason gives logic and meaning to things. Hermann Cohen wrote that thinking itself is capable of giving rise to being. Based on this, we can talk about two fundamental points in philosophy:

• Fundamental anti-substantialism. Philosophers tried to abandon the search for the fundamental principles of existence, which were obtained by the method of mechanical abstraction. The neo-Kantians of the Magbur school believed that the only logical basis of scientific positions and things is a functional connection. Such functional connections bring into the world a subject who is trying to understand this world and has the ability to judge and criticize.
• Anti-metaphysical attitude. This statement calls for stopping the creation of different universal pictures of the world, and better studying the logic and methodology of science.

Correcting Kant

And yet, taking the theoretical basis from Kant’s books, representatives of the Marburg School subject his teachings to serious adjustments. They believed that Kant's trouble was in the absolutization of established scientific theory. Being a child of his time, the philosopher took classical Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry seriously. He classified algebra among the a priori forms of sensory intuition, and mechanics into the category of reason. Neo-Kantians considered this approach to be fundamentally wrong.

From Kant's critique of practical reason, all realistic elements are consistently extracted and, first of all, the concept of the “thing in itself.” The Marburgers believed that the subject of science appears only through the act of logical thinking. In principle, there cannot be any objects that can exist on their own; there is only objectivity created by acts of rational thinking.

E. Cassirer said that people do not learn objects, but objectively. The neo-Kantian view of science identifies the object of scientific knowledge with the subject; scientists have completely abandoned any opposition of one to the other. Representatives of the new direction of Kantianism believed that all mathematical dependencies, the concept of electromagnetic waves, the periodic table, social laws are a synthetic product of the activity of the human mind, with which an individual organizes reality, and not the objective characteristics of things. P. Natorp argued that it is not thinking that should be consistent with the subject, but vice versa.

Also, neo-Kantians of the Marburg school criticize the judgmental powers of Kant's idea of ​​time and space. He considered them forms of sensuality, and representatives of the new philosophical movement - forms of thinking.

On the other hand, the Marburgers must be given their due in the conditions of the scientific crisis, when scientists doubted the constructive and projective abilities of the human mind. With the spread of positivism and mechanistic materialism, philosophers managed to defend the position of philosophical reason in science.

Right

The Marburgers are also right that all important theoretical concepts and scientific idealizations will always be and have been the fruits of the work of the scientist's mind, and are not derived from human life experience. Of course, there are concepts that cannot be found in reality, for example, the “ideal black body” or “mathematical point”. But other physical and mathematical processes are completely explicable and understandable thanks to theoretical constructs that can make any experimental knowledge possible.

Another idea of ​​the neo-Kantians emphasized the extremely important role of logical and theoretical criteria of truth in the process of cognition. This mainly concerned mathematical theories, which are the armchair creation of a theorist and become the basis for promising technical and practical inventions. Further more: today computer technology is based on logical models created in the 20s of the last century. In the same way, the rocket engine was thought out long before the first rocket flew into the sky.

Also true is the idea of ​​the neo-Kantians that the history of science cannot be understood outside the internal logic of the development of scientific ideas and problems. Here we cannot even talk about direct socio-cultural determination.

In general, the philosophical worldview of neo-Kantians is characterized by a categorical rejection of any variety of philosophical rationalism from the books of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to the works of Bergson and Heidegger.

Ethical doctrine

The Marburgers advocated rationalism. Even their ethical doctrine was completely imbued with rationalism. They believe that even ethical ideas have a functional-logical and constructively ordered nature. These ideas take the form of a so-called social ideal, in accordance with which people must construct their social existence.

Freedom, which is regulated by a social ideal, is the formula of the neo-Kantian vision of the historical process and social relations. Another feature of the Marburg movement is scientism. That is, they believed that science is the highest form of manifestation of human spiritual culture.

Flaws

Neo-Kantianism is a philosophical movement that reinterprets the ideas of Kant. Despite the logical validity of the Marburg concept, it had significant shortcomings.

Firstly, by refusing to study classical epistemological problems about the connection between knowledge and being, philosophers doomed themselves to abstract methodology and a one-sided consideration of reality. There reigns idealistic arbitrariness, in which the scientific mind plays “ping-pong of concepts” with itself. By excluding irrationalism, the Marburgers themselves provoked irrationalistic voluntarism. If experience and facts are not so significant, then the mind is “allowed to do everything.”

Secondly, the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school could not abandon the ideas about God and Logos; this made the teaching very controversial, given the tendency of the neo-Kantians to rationalize everything.

Baden school

Magbur thinkers gravitated towards mathematics, Baden neo-Kantianism was oriented towards the humanities. associated with the names of W. Windelband and G. Rickert.

Gravitating towards the humanities, representatives of this movement emphasized a specific method of historical knowledge. This method depends on the type of thinking, which is divided into nomothetic and ideographic. Nomothetic thinking is used mainly in natural science and is characterized by a focus on searching for patterns of reality. Ideographic thinking, in turn, is aimed at studying historical facts that occurred in specific reality.

These types of thinking could be applied to study the same subject. For example, if you study nature, the nomothetic method will give a taxonomy of living nature, and the idiographic method will describe specific evolutionary processes. Subsequently, the differences between these two methods were brought to the point of mutual exclusion, and the idiographic method began to be considered a priority. And since history is created within the framework of the existence of culture, the central issue that the Baden school developed was the study of the theory of values, that is, axiology.

Problems of the doctrine of values

Axiology in philosophy is a discipline that explores values ​​as the meaning-forming foundations of human existence that guide and motivate a person. This science studies the characteristics of the surrounding world, its values, ways of knowing and the specifics of value judgments.

Axiology in philosophy is a discipline that has gained its independence through philosophical research. In general, they were connected by the following events:

1. I. Kant revised the rationale for ethics and determined the need for a clear distinction between what should be and what is.
2. In post-Hegelian philosophy, the concept of being was divided into “actualized real” and “desired ought”.
3. Philosophers recognized the need to limit the intellectualist claims of philosophy and science.
4. The inevitability of the evaluative moment from cognition was revealed.
5. The values ​​of Christian civilization were questioned, mainly the books of Schopenhauer, the works of Nietzsche, Dilthey and Kierkegaard.

Meanings and values ​​of neo-Kantianism

The philosophy and teachings of Kant, together with a new worldview, made it possible to come to the following conclusions: some objects have value for a person, while others do not, so people notice them or do not notice them. In this philosophical direction, values ​​were meanings that are above being, but are not directly related to an object or subject. Here the sphere of the theoretical is contrasted with the real and develops into the “world of theoretical values.” The theory of knowledge begins to be understood as a “criticism of practical reason,” that is, a science that studies meanings, addresses values, and not reality.

Rickert talked about such an example as intrinsic value. It is considered unique and one of a kind, but this uniqueness does not arise within the diamond as an object (in this matter, it is characterized by such qualities as hardness or brilliance). And it is not even the subjective vision of one person who can define it as useful or beautiful. Uniqueness is a value that unites all objective and subjective meanings, forming what in life is called the “Diamond Kohinoor”. Rickert, in his main work “The Boundaries of Natural Scientific Concept Formation,” said that the highest task of philosophy is to determine the relationship of values ​​to reality.

Neo-Kantianism in Russia

Russian neo-Kantians include those thinkers who were united by the journal Logos (1910). These include S. Gessen, A. Stepun, B. Yakovenok, B. Fokht, V. Seseman. The neo-Kantian movement during this period was formed on the principles of strict science, so it was not easy for it to pave the way for itself in conservative irrational-religious Russian philosophizing.

And yet, the ideas of neo-Kantianism were accepted by S. Bulgakov, N. Berdyaev, M. Tugan-Baranovsky, as well as some composers, poets and writers.

Representatives of Russian neo-Kantianism gravitated toward the Baden or Magbur schools, and therefore in their works they simply supported the ideas of these directions.

Free thinkers

In addition to the two schools, the ideas of neo-Kantianism were supported by free thinkers such as Johann Fichte or Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky. Let some of them not even suspect that their work would influence the formation of a new movement.

In Fichte's philosophy, two main periods are distinguished: in the first, he supported the ideas of subjective idealism, and in the second, he switched to the side of objectivism. Johann Gottlieb Fichte supported Kant's ideas and became famous thanks to him. He believed that philosophy should be the queen of all sciences, “practical reason” should be based on the ideas of “theoretical”, and the problems of duty, morality and freedom became basic in his research. Many of the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte influenced the scientists who stood at the origins of the founding of the neo-Kantian movement.

A similar story happened with the Russian thinker Alexander Danilevsky. He was the first to substantiate the definition of historical methodology as a special branch of scientific and historical knowledge. In the sphere of neo-Kantian methodology, Lappo-Danilevsky raised questions of historical knowledge, which remain relevant today. These include the principles of historical knowledge, evaluation criteria, the specifics of historical facts, cognitive goals, etc.

Over time, neo-Kantianism was replaced by new philosophical, sociological and cultural theories. However, neo-Kantianism was not discarded as an outdated doctrine. To some extent, it was on the basis of neo-Kantianism that many concepts grew that absorbed the ideological developments of this philosophical trend.

§ 3. Neo-Kantianism

Neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement took shape in Germany at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. It has become widespread in Austria, France, Russia and other countries.

Most neo-Kantians deny Kant’s “thing in itself” and do not allow the possibility of knowledge going beyond the phenomena of consciousness. They see the task of philosophy primarily in developing the methodological and logical foundations of scientific knowledge from the standpoint of idealism, which is much more frank and consistent than Machism.

In terms of its political orientation, neo-Kantianism is a motley movement that expressed the interests of various layers of the bourgeoisie, from the liberal ones, who pursued a policy of concessions and reforms, to the extreme right. But in general it is pointed against Marxism and its task is to provide a theoretical refutation of Marxist teaching.

The origin of neo-Kantianism dates back to the 60s. In 1865, O. Liebman, in his book “Kant and the Epigones,” defended the slogan “back to Kant,” which quickly became the theoretical banner of the entire movement. In the same year, F. A. Lange, in his book “The Labor Question,” formulated a “social order” for the new movement: to prove “that the labor question, and with it the social question in general, can be resolved without revolutions.” Subsequently, a number of schools formed within neo-Kantianism, of which the most important and influential were the Marburg and Baden (Freiburg) schools.

Marburg school. The founder of the first school was Herman Cohen(1842–1918). The same school included Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Vorländer, Rudolf Stammler and others. Just like the positivists, the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school argue that knowledge of the world is a matter only of specific, “positive” sciences. They reject philosophy in the sense of the doctrine of the world as “metaphysics.” They recognize only the process of scientific knowledge as the subject of philosophy. As the neo-Kantian Riehl wrote, “philosophy in its new critical meaning is the science of science, of knowledge itself”.

Neo-Kantians dismiss the fundamental philosophical question as “an unfortunate legacy of the Middle Ages.” They try to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge outside of relation to objective reality, within the limits of only the “spontaneous” activity of consciousness. V.I. Lenin pointed out that in reality the neo-Kantians “cleaned up Kant under Hume,” interpreting Kant’s teachings in the spirit of more consistent agnosticism and subjective idealism. This is expressed, firstly, in the rejection of the materialistic element in Kant’s teaching, in the recognition of the objective existence of the “thing in itself.” Neo-Kantians transfer the “thing in itself” into consciousness, transform it from a source of sensations and ideas external to consciousness into a “ultimate concept” that sets the ideal boundary of the logical activity of thinking. Secondly, if Kant tried to solve the problem of the relationship between the sensory and rational stages of knowledge, then the neo-Kantians reject sensation as an independent source of knowledge. They preserve and absolutize only Kant’s teaching about the logical activity of thinking, declaring it the only source and content of knowledge. “We start with thinking. Thinking should have no source other than itself.”

Neo-Kantians separate concepts from the reality they reflect and depict them as products of spontaneously developing thinking activity. Therefore, neo-Kantians argue that the object of knowledge is not given, but given, that it does not exist independently of science, but is created by it as a kind of logical construction. The main idea of ​​the neo-Kantians is that knowledge is the logical construction, or construction, of an object, carried out according to the laws and rules of thinking itself. We can only know what we ourselves create in the process of thinking. From this point of view, truth is not the correspondence of a concept (or judgment) to an object, but, on the contrary, the correspondence of an object to those ideal schemes that are established by thinking.

The epistemological roots of such a concept consist in inflating the active role of thinking, its ability to develop logical categories, in the absolutization of the formal side of scientific knowledge, in reducing science to its logical form.

Neo-Kantians, in essence, identify the existence of a thing with its knowledge; they replace nature with a scientific picture of the world, objective reality with its image in thought. From here follows a subjective idealistic interpretation of the most important concepts of natural science, which are declared to be “the free creation of the human spirit.” Thus, the atom, according to Cassirer, “does not denote a solid physical fact, but only a logical requirement,” and the concept of matter “reduces to ideal concepts created and tested by mathematics.”

Taking into account the fact of the endless development of knowledge and its approach to absolute truth, neo-Kantians, in contrast to Kant’s teaching about a completed logical table of categories, declare that the process of creating its categories by thinking proceeds continuously, that constructing the object of knowledge is an endless task that always faces us, to which we must always strive to solve, but which can never be finally resolved.

However, recognition of the relativity and incompleteness of knowledge while denying the objectivity of the object of knowledge leads to extreme relativism. Science, which has no objective content and is occupied only with the reconstruction of categories, essentially turns into a phantasmagoria of concepts, and its real subject, nature, as Natorp says, has “the meaning of only a hypothesis, to put it sharply - a fiction of completion.”

The principle of obligation is also placed by the neo-Kantians as the basis of their socio-ethical teaching, which is directed directly against the theory of scientific socialism. The essence of the neo-Kantian theory of “ethical socialism,” which was later taken up by the revisionists, consists in the emasculation of the revolutionary, materialist content of scientific socialism and its replacement with reformism and idealism. Neo-Kantians oppose the idea of ​​​​the destruction of the exploiting classes with the reformist concept of class solidarity and cooperation; They replace the revolutionary principle of class struggle as the path to the conquest of socialism with the idea of ​​the moral renewal of humanity as a precondition for the implementation of socialism. Neo-Kantians argue that socialism is not an objective result of natural social development, but an ethical ideal, an obligation that we can be guided by, realizing that this ideal is fundamentally impossible to fully realize. This is where Bernstein’s notorious revisionist thesis follows: “Movement is everything, but the final goal is nothing.”

Baden school. In contrast to the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, representatives of the Baden school waged a more direct and open struggle against scientific socialism: the bourgeois essence of their teaching appears without pseudo-socialist phrases.

For representatives of the Baden school Wilhelm Windelband(1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert(1863–1936) philosophy largely comes down to scientific methodology, to the analysis of the logical structure of knowledge. The Marburgers tried to give an idealistic development of the logical foundations of natural science;

The central problem put forward by the Baden school is the creation of a methodology for historical science. They come to the conclusion that there is no pattern in history and that therefore historical science should be limited to only describing individual events, without claiming to discover laws. To substantiate this idea, Windelband and Rickert establish a fundamental distinction between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of culture,” based on the formal opposition of the methods used, in their opinion, by these sciences.

Like all neo-Kantians, Rickert sees in science only a formal system of concepts created by thinking. He does not deny that the source of their formation is sensory reality, but he does not consider it an objective reality. “The existence of all reality must be considered as existence in consciousness.” To avoid the solipsism that inevitably follows from such a view, Rickert declares that consciousness, which contains being, does not belong to the individual empirical subject, but to a “supra-individual epistemological subject” cleared of all psychological characteristics. Since, however, this epistemological subject is in fact nothing more than an abstraction of empirical consciousness, its introduction does not change the subjective-idealistic nature of Rickert’s concept.

Absolutizing the individual characteristics inherent in each phenomenon, neo-Kantians claim that “all reality is an individual visual representation.” From the fact of the infinite versatility and inexhaustibility of each individual phenomenon and all of reality as a whole, Rickert makes the unlawful conclusion that conceptual knowledge cannot be a reflection of reality, that it is only a simplification and transformation of the material of ideas.

Rickert metaphysically breaks the general and the separate; he asserts that “reality for us lies in the particular and individual and in no case can it be built from general elements.” This also leads to agnosticism in Rickert’s assessment of natural science.

Natural sciences and cultural sciences. According to Rickert, the natural sciences use a “generalizing” method, which consists in the formation of general concepts and the formulation of laws. But general concepts contain nothing individual, and individual phenomena of reality contain nothing common. Therefore, the laws of science have no objective meaning. From the point of view of neo-Kantians, natural science does not provide knowledge of reality, but leads away from it; it deals not with the real world, but with the world of abstractions, with systems of concepts created by itself. We can “move from irrational reality,” writes Rickert, “to rational concepts, but the return to qualitatively individual reality is forever closed to us.” Thus, agnosticism and denial of the cognitive significance of science, a tendency towards irrationalism in understanding the world around us - these are the results of Rickert’s analysis of the methodology of the natural sciences.

Rickert believes that, in contrast to natural science, historical sciences are interested in individual events in their unique originality. “Whoever talks about “history” at all always thinks about a single individual flow of things...”

Rickert argues that the natural sciences and the cultural sciences differ not in their subject matter, but only in their method. Natural science, using the “generalizing” method, transforms individual phenomena into a system of natural scientific laws. History, using the “individualizing” method, describes individual historical events. This is how Rickert approaches the central point of the teaching of the neo-Kantians - the denial of the objective laws of social life. Repeating the reactionary statements of Schopenhauer, Rickert, like Windelband, declares that “the concept of historical development and the concept of law are mutually exclusive”, that “the concept of “historical law” is a “contradictio in adjecto”.

The whole line of reasoning of these neo-Kantians is flawed, and the arbitrary division of sciences depending on the methods used by the sciences does not stand up to criticism. First of all, it is not true that natural science deals only with the general, and history with the individual. Since objective reality itself in all its manifestations represents the unity of the general and the individual, the science that cognizes it comprehends the general in the individual and the individual through the general. Not only a number of sciences (geology, paleontology, cosmogony of the solar system, etc.) study specific phenomena and processes that are unique in their individual course, but also any branch of natural science, by establishing general laws, makes it possible with their help to cognize specific, individual phenomena and practically influence them.

In turn, history can only be considered a science (as opposed to the chronicle) when it reveals the internal connection of historical events, objective laws governing the actions of entire classes. Rickert's denial of the objective nature of the laws of history, accepted by many bourgeois historians, is directed against the teachings of Marxism about the development of society as a natural historical process, necessarily leading to the replacement of the capitalist system with a socialist one.

According to Rickert, historical science cannot formulate the laws of historical development; it is limited to describing only individual events. Historical knowledge achieved through the individualizing method does not reflect the nature of historical phenomena, for individuality, which can be comprehended by us, is also “not reality, but only a product of our understanding of reality...”. The agnosticism, so clearly expressed in Rickert’s interpretation of the natural sciences, no less underlies his understanding of historical science.

“Philosophy of Values” as an apology for bourgeois society. According to Windelband and Rickert, a natural scientist, when creating natural scientific concepts, can be guided only by the formal principle of generalization. The historian, engaged in the description of individual events, must have, in addition to the formal principle - individualization - an additional principle that gives him the opportunity to isolate from the infinite variety of facts that essential thing that can have the meaning of a historical event. Neo-Kantians declare this selection principle to be the attribution of events to cultural values. The phenomenon that can be attributed to cultural values ​​becomes a historical event. Neo-Kantians distinguish between logical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious values. But they do not give a clear answer to the question of what values ​​are. They say that values ​​are eternal and unchanging and “form a completely independent kingdom lying beyond subject and object.”

The doctrine of values ​​is an attempt to avoid solipsism, remaining in the position of subjective idealism. Value is portrayed by neo-Kantians as something independent of the subject, but its independence does not consist in the fact that it exists outside of individual consciousness, but only in the fact that it has obligatory significance for any individual consciousness. Philosophy now turns out to be not only the logic of scientific knowledge, but also the doctrine of values. In terms of its social significance, the philosophy of values ​​is a sophisticated apologetics of capitalism. According to neo-Kantians, culture, to which they reduce all social life, presupposes a set of objects, or goods, in which eternal values ​​are realized. Such goods turn out to be the “goods” of bourgeois society, its culture and, above all, the bourgeois state. This, further, is economy, or capitalist economy, bourgeois law and art; finally, it is a church that embodies the “highest value,” for “God is the absolute value to which everything relates.” It is very symptomatic that during the years of the fascist dictatorship in Germany, the “philosophy of values” was used by Rickert to justify fascism, and in particular to “justify” racism.

At the end of the 19th century, neo-Kantianism was the most influential of all idealist movements, which tried to either outright reject Marxism or disintegrate it from within. Therefore, Engels had to begin the fight against neo-Kantianism. But the decisive credit for exposing this reactionary trend belongs to Lenin. The struggle of V. I. Lenin, as well as G. V. Plekhanov and other Marxists against neo-Kantianism and the neo-Kantian revision of Marxism is an important page in the history of Marxist philosophy.

Neo-Kantianism, which had a great influence on the development of bourgeois philosophical and social thought not only in Germany, but also outside it, already in the second decade of the 20th century. began to decompose and after the First World War lost its independent significance.

VINDELBAND(Windelband) Wilhelm (1848-1915) - German philosopher, one of the classics of historical and philosophical science, founder and prominent representative of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. He taught philosophy at Leipzig (1870-1876), Zurich (1876), Freiburg (1877-1882), Strasbourg (1882-1903), Heidelberg (1903-1915) universities. Main works: “History of Ancient Philosophy” (1888), “History of New Philosophy” (in two volumes, 1878-1880), “On Free Will” (1904), “Philosophy in German Spiritual Life of the 19th Century” (1909), etc. The name of V. is associated primarily with the emergence of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism, which, along with other directions of this movement (the Marburg school, etc.), proclaimed the slogan “Back to Kant,” thereby laying the foundation for one of the main trends in Western European philosophy of the last third 19th - early 20th centuries The range of problems

considered by the philosophers of this school is extremely great. Nevertheless, the dominant vector of its development can be considered attempts at a transcendental substantiation of philosophy. In contrast to the Marburg version of neo-Kantianism, which was oriented by chapters. arr. in search of logical foundations of the so-called. exact sciences and associated with the names of Cohen and Natorp, the Badeners, led by V., emphasized the role of culture and concentrated their efforts in justifying the conditions and possibilities of historical knowledge. V.'s merit is an attempt to give new light and resolution to the main problems of philosophy, and, above all, the problem of its subject. In the article “What is philosophy?”, published in the collection “Preludes. Philosophical Articles and Speeches” (1903) and the book “History of New Philosophy,” V. specifically examines this question, devoting a lengthy historical and philosophical excursion to its clarification. V. shows that in Ancient Greece the concept of philosophy was understood as the entire body of knowledge. However, in the process of developing this knowledge itself, independent sciences begin to emerge from philosophy, as a result of which all reality gradually turns out to be dismantled by these disciplines. In this case, what remains of the old comprehensive science, what area of ​​reality remains to its share? Rejecting the traditional idea of ​​philosophy as a science about the most general laws of this reality, V. pointed to a fundamentally different path and a new subject, determined by the very course of cultural development. The cultural problem lays the foundation for a movement whose slogan was “the revaluation of all values,” which means that philosophy can continue to exist, according to V., only as a doctrine of “universally valid values.” Philosophy, according to V., “will no longer interfere in the work of individual sciences... it is not so ambitious as to strive for knowledge of what they have already learned and does not find pleasure in compilation, in the most general "The conclusions of individual sciences seem to interweave the most general constructions. It has its own area and its own task in those universally significant values ​​that form the general plan of all functions of culture and the basis of any individual implementation of values." Following the spirit of Kant's distinction between theoretical and practical reason, V. contrasts philosophy as a purely normative teaching based on value judgments and knowledge of what is due, with experimental sciences based on theoretical judgments and empirical data about reality (as being). V.’s values ​​themselves are very close in their meaning to Kant’s a priori forms or norms that have transcendental

tal character and being transtemporal, ahistorical and generally valid principles that guide and, thus, distinguish human activity from the processes occurring in nature. Values ​​(truth, goodness, beauty, holiness) are what are used to construct both the objective world of scientific knowledge and culture, and with their help one can think correctly. However, they do not exist as certain independent objects and arise not when they are comprehended, but when their meaning is interpreted, therefore they “mean”. Subjectively, they are recognized as an unconditional obligation, experienced with apodictic obviousness. V. proclaims the problem of separation between the world of existence (nature) and the world of ought (values) as an insoluble problem of philosophy, a “sacred mystery”, because the latter, in his opinion, is not able to find some universal way of knowing both worlds. This task is partially solved by religion, which unites these opposites in one God, however, it cannot completely overcome this fundamental duality, because cannot explain why, next to values, there are objects that are indifferent to them. The dualism of reality and value becomes, according to V., a necessary condition for human activity, the purpose of which is to embody the latter. The problem of method, or, more precisely, the problem of the specificity of the method of historical science, which is the process of awareness and embodiment of transcendental values, also occupied a large place in V.’s work. V. considered the difference in method to be decisive in distinguishing between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of the spirit” (in Dilthey’s terminology). If the method of natural science is aimed mainly at identifying general laws, then in historical knowledge the emphasis is on describing exclusively individual phenomena. The first method was called "nomothetic" by V., the second - "idiographic". In principle, the same subject can be studied by both methods, but in the nomothetic sciences the law-making method has priority; the secrets of historical existence, distinguished by its individual uniqueness, singularity, are understandable through the idiographic method, because general laws are in principle incommensurable with a single concrete existence. There is always something here that is in principle inexpressible in general terms and is recognized by man as “individual freedom”; hence the irreducibility of these two methods to any common basis. The contribution of V. is significant. into historical and philosophical science. His “History of Ancient Philosophy” and “History of New Philosophy” still retain their

value due to the originality and productivity of the methodological principles of historical and philosophical knowledge expressed in them, as well as due to the extensive historical material they contain; they not only expanded the understanding of the historical and philosophical process, but also contributed to the understanding of the modern cultural state of society. (See also Baden school of neo-Kantianism.)

T.G. Rumyantseva

WIENER Norbert (1894-1964) - mathematician, founder of cybernetics (USA)

WIENER(Wiener) Norbert (1894-1964) - mathematician, founder of cybernetics (USA). The most important works: “Behavior, Purposefulness and Teleology” (1947, co-authored with A. Rosenbluth and J. Bigelow); “Cybernetics, or control and communication in animals and machines” (1948, had a decisive influence on the development of world science); "Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society" (1950); "My attitude to cybernetics. Its past and future" (1958); "Joint Stock Company God and Golem" (1963, Russian translation "The Creator and the Robot"). Autobiographical books: "Former child prodigy. My childhood and youth" (1953) and "I am a mathematician" (1956). Novel "The Tempter" (1963). National Medal of Science for distinguished service in mathematics, engineering, and the biological sciences (the highest honor for U.S. scientists, 1963). V. was born into the family of an immigrant Leo V., a Jewish native of Bialystok (Russia), who abandoned traditional Judaism, a follower of the teachings and translator of the works of Leo Tolstoy into English, a professor of modern languages ​​at the University of Missouri, a professor of Slavic languages ​​at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). According to the oral tradition of the V. family, their family went back to the Jewish scientist and theologian Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), physician to Sultan Salah ad-din of Egypt. V.'s early education was supervised by his father according to his own program. At the age of 7, V. read Darwin and Dante, at 11 he graduated from high school; He received his higher mathematical education and his first bachelor of arts degree at Tufte College (1908). Then V. studied at graduate school at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy with J. Santayana and Royce, Master of Arts (1912). Doctor of Philosophy (in mathematical logic) from Harvard University (1913). In 1913-1915, with the support of Harvard University, he continued his education at Cambridge (England) and Göttingen (Germany) universities. At Cambridge University, V. studied number theory with J.H. Hardy and mathematical logic with Russell, who “...instilled in me the very reasonable idea that a person intending to specialize in

mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, could know something from mathematics itself..." (V.). At the University of Göttingen, V. was a student of a philosophy course with Husserl and a mathematics course with Hilbert. In connection with the First World War, he returned to USA (1915), where he completed his education at Columbia University (New York), after which he became an assistant at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Teacher of mathematics and mathematical logic at a number of US universities (1915-1917). Journalist (1917-1919). Lecturer Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1919 until his death, full professor of mathematics at MIT from 1932. V.'s early work was in the field of foundations of mathematics.The work of the late 1920s relates to the field of theoretical physics: the theory of relativity and quantum theory. V. achieved his greatest results as a mathematician in probability theory (stationary random processes) and analysis (potential theory, harmonic and almost periodic functions, Tauberian theorems, series and Fourier transforms). In the field of probability theory, V. almost completely studied an important class of stationary random processes (later named after him), and built (independently from the works of A.N. Kolmogorov) by the 1940s the theories of interpolation, extrapolation, filtering of stationary random processes, and Brownian motion. In 1942, V. approached the general statistical theory of information: the results were published in the monograph “Interpolation, extrapolation and smoothing of stationary time series” (1949), later published under the title “Time Series”. Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society in 1935-1936. He maintained intensive personal contacts with world-famous scientists J. Hadamard, M. Fréchet, J. Bernal, N. Bohr, M. Born, J. Haldane and others. As a visiting professor, V. lectured at Tsinghua University (Beijing, 1936- 1937). V. considered his time working in China to be an important stage, the beginning of the maturity of a world-class scientist: “My labors began to bear fruit - I managed not only to publish a number of significant independent works, but also to develop a certain concept that could no longer be ignored in science.” The development of this concept led directly to the creation of cybernetics. Back in the early 1930s, V. became close to A. Rosenbluth, a member of the laboratory of physiology of W. B. Cannon from Harvard Medical School, the organizer of a methodological seminar that brought together representatives of various sciences. This made it easier for V. to become acquainted with the problems of biology and medicine and strengthened him in the idea of ​​the necessary

the importance of a broad synthetic approach to contemporary science. The use of the latest technical means during the Second World War confronted the warring parties with the need to solve serious technical problems (mainly in the field of air defense, communications, cryptology, etc.). The main attention was paid to solving problems of automatic control, automatic communication, electrical networks and computer technology. V., as an outstanding mathematician, was involved in work in this area, which resulted in the beginning of the study of deep analogies between the processes occurring in living organisms and in electronic (electrical) systems, an impetus for the emergence of cybernetics. In 1945-1947, V. wrote the book “Cybernetics”, working at the National Cardiological Institute of Mexico (Mexico City) with A. Rosenbluth, co-author of cybernetics - the science of managing, receiving, transmitting and transforming information in systems of any nature (technical, biological, social, economic, administrative, etc.). V., who in his research was close to the traditions of the old schools of scientific universalism G. Leibniz and J. Buffon, paid serious attention to the problems of methodology and philosophy of science, striving for the broadest synthesis of individual scientific disciplines. Mathematics (his basic specialization) for V. was unified and closely connected with natural science, and therefore he opposed its sharp division into pure and applied, since: “... the highest purpose of mathematics is precisely to find hidden order in the chaos that surrounds us...Nature, in the broad sense of the word, can and should serve not only as a source of problems solved in my research, but also to suggest an apparatus suitable for solving them..." ("I am a mathematician "). V. outlined his philosophical views in the books “Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society” and “Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.” Philosophically, V. was very close to the ideas of the Copenhagen School physicists M. Born and N. Bohr, who declared independence from “professional metaphysicians” in their special “realistic” worldview outside of idealism and materialism. Considering that “... the dominance of matter characterizes a certain stage of physics of the 19th century to a much greater extent than modernity. Now “materialism” is just something like a loose synonym for “mechanism.” Essentially, the entire dispute between mechanists and vitalists can be put into the archive of poorly formulated questions. .." ("Cybernetics"), V. at the same time writes that idealism "...dissolves all things in the mind..." ("Former child prodigy

kind"). V. was also significantly influenced by positivism. Based on the ideas of the Copenhagen School, V. tried to connect cybernetics with statistical mechanics in the stochastic (probabilistic) concept of the Universe. At the same time, according to V. himself, his rapprochement with existentialism was influenced by the pessimistic his interpretation of the concept of "randomness". In the book ("I am a mathematician") V. writes: "... We are swimming upstream, fighting a huge stream of disorganization, which, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, tends to reduce everything to heat death - universal balance and sameness. What Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs called heat death in their physics work found its counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who argued that we live in a world of chaotic morality. In this world, our first duty is to create arbitrary islands of order and system...” (V.’s desire to compare the teachings of Bergson and Freud with the methods of statistical physics is known). However, heat death is still thought of by V. here as a limiting state , achievable only in eternity, therefore, in the future, fluctuations of ordering are probable: “...In a world where entropy as a whole tends to increase, there are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy, and the presence of these islands makes it possible for some of us to prove the existence of progress. .." ("Cybernetics and Society"). The mechanism of the emergence of areas of entropy reduction "...consists in the natural selection of stable forms...here physics directly turns into cybernetics..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). According to V. , “... ultimately striving for the most probable, the stochastic Universe does not know a single predetermined path, and this allows order to fight chaos for a time... Man influences the course of events in his favor, extinguishing entropy with negative entropy extracted from the environment - information... Knowledge is a part of life, moreover, its very essence. To live effectively means to live with the correct information..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). With all this, the gains of knowledge are still temporary. V. never "... imagined logic, knowledge and all mental activity as a complete closed picture; I could understand these phenomena as the process by which a person organizes his life in such a way that it proceeds in accordance with the external environment. The battle for knowledge is important, not victory. Behind every victory, i.e. everything that reaches its climax is immediately followed by the twilight of the gods, in which the very concept of victory dissolves at the very moment when

it will be achieved..." (“I am a mathematician”). V. called W. J. Gibbs (USA) the founder of stochastic natural science, considering himself a continuator of his direction. In general, V.’s views can be interpreted as casualistic with the influence of relativism and agnosticism. According to V., the limitations of human capabilities for cognition of the stochastic Universe are due to the stochastic nature of the connections between man and his environment, since in “... the probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and judgments relating to a certain real Universe as a whole , and instead we pose questions, the answers to which can be found in the assumption of a huge number of similar worlds..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). As for probabilities, their very existence for V. is nothing more than a hypothesis, due to the fact that “...no amount of purely objective and individual observation can show that probability is a valid idea. In other words, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established using induction. Inductive logic, Baconian logic, is something we can act upon rather than something we can prove...” (“Cybernetics and Society”). V.’s social ideals were as follows: in favor of society, based on “...human values, different from buying and selling...”, for “... healthy democracy and brotherhood of peoples...”, V. pinned his hopes on “... the level of public consciousness...” , on "...the germination of seeds of good...", oscillated between a negative attitude towards the contemporary society of capitalism and an orientation towards "... the social responsibility of business circles..." ("Cybernetics and Society"). Roman V. " The Tempter" is a variant reading of the story of Faust and Mephistopheles, in which the hero of the novel, a talented scientist, becomes a victim of the self-interest of businessmen. In religious matters, V. considered himself "... a skeptic, standing outside of religion..." ("Former Prodigy") In the book “The Creator and the Robot,” V., drawing an analogy between God and a cyberneticist, treats God as an ultimate concept (such as infinity in mathematics). V., considering the culture of the West to be morally and intellectually weakening, pinned his hopes on the culture of the East. V. wrote that “... the superiority of European culture over the great culture of the East is only a temporary episode in the history of mankind...”. V. even proposed to J. Nehru a plan for the development of Indian industry through cybernetic automatic factories in order to avoid, as he wrote, ". ..devastating proletarianization..." (“I am a mathematician”). (See Cybernetics.)

C.B. Silkov

VIRTUALISTICS (lat. virtus - imaginary, imaginary) is a complex scientific discipline that studies the problems of virtuality and virtual reality.

VIRTUALISTICS (Latin virtus - imaginary, imaginary) is a complex scientific discipline that studies the problems of virtuality and virtual reality. As an independent discipline, V. was formed and developed in the 1980-1990s. Modern V. includes philosophical, scientific, and practical sections. Powerful impulses for the creation of virtual reality were the rapid development of information technology and the Internet, as well as the creation of various devices that ensure people interact with virtual reality (3D glasses, 3D helmets, etc.). To date, a uniform understanding of the subject of V. has not been achieved. In general, V. covers the problems of the origin of virtual reality, its interaction with objective and subjective realities, as well as the nature of virtual reality and its influence on the practical activities of people. V. includes many concepts and hypotheses related primarily to the nature of virtual reality and the process of its formation. Nowadays, V. problems are being actively developed in different countries of the world. In Russia, the leading organization studying the problems of V. is the Center for Virtualistics of the Institute of Humanity of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In contrast to the foreign philosophical tradition, which focuses primarily on the problem of communication "man - machine", modeling a new type of reality using computer technology, etc., the traditional Russian school of V. pays special attention to the development of a philosophical concept of understanding, analysis and evaluation of the phenomenon of virtual reality. In the Russian school of virtual reality, it is customary to distinguish four main characteristics of virtual reality: 1) generation (virtual reality is created by the activity of some other reality); 2) relevance (virtual reality exists only in reality, it has its own time, space and laws of existence); 3) interactivity (virtual reality can interact with all other realities, including the one that generates it, as independent of each other) and 4) autonomy. According to the concept of the head of the Center of the V. Institute of Man of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Psychology N.A. Nosov, a person exists at one of the possible levels of mental realities, in relation to which all other potentially existing realities have the status of virtual. Since the 1990s, concepts that firmly connect biology exclusively with the integration of man and machine, with the emergence of a fundamentally different type of information space and communication (the Internet) and with attempts to model

of new types of realities. (See also Virtual reality.)

A.E. Ivanov

VIRTUAL REALITY, virtual, virtuality (English virtual reality from virtual - actual, virtue - virtue, dignity; cf. lat. virtus - potential, possible, valor, energy, strength, as well as imaginary, imaginary; lat. realis - real, valid, existing)

VIRTUAL REALITY, virtual, virtuality(English virtual reality from virtual - actual, virtue - virtue, dignity; cf. lat. virtus - potential, possible, valor, energy, strength, as well as imaginary, imaginary; lat. realis - real, real, existing) - I ). In scholasticism, a concept that acquires a categorical status in the course of rethinking the Platonic and Aristotelian paradigms: the presence of a certain connection (through virtus) between realities belonging to different levels in their own hierarchy was recorded. The category of “virtuality” was also actively developed in the context of resolving other fundamental problems of medieval philosophy: the constitution of complex things from simple ones, the energetic component of an act of action, the relationship between the potential and the actual. Thomas Aquinas, through the category of “virtuality,” comprehended the situation of coexistence (in the hierarchy of realities) of the thinking soul, the animal soul and the plant soul: “In view of this, it should be recognized that in man there is no other substantial form other than the substantial soul alone, and that the latter, as long as she virtually contains a sensual soul and a vegetative soul, equally contains forms of a lower order and performs independently and alone all those functions that in other things are performed by less perfect forms." (The assumption that a certain reality is capable of generating another reality, patterns existence of which will not be reducible to similar characteristics of the generating reality, was put forward by the Byzantine theologian in the 4th century Basil the Great. - Compare the remark of the English scientist D. Denett (1993): “The mind is a pattern obtained by the mind. This is quite tautological, but it is not vicious and not paradoxical.") Later, Nikolai Kuzansky in his work “On the Vision of God” solved the problems of virtuality and actuality of existence and energy in the following way: “So great is the sweetness with which you, Lord, feed my soul, that it strives with all its might to help itself the experience of this world and the beautiful analogies inspired by You. And so, knowing that You are the power, or the beginning, from where everything comes, and Your face is that power and the beginning, from where all faces take everything that they are, I look at the large and tall walnut tree standing in front of me and try to see it Start. I see with my bodily eyes how huge, spreading, green it is.

new, burdened with branches, leaves and nuts. Then with my intelligent eye I see that the same tree was in its seed not in the same way as I am looking at it now, but virtually: I draw attention to the wondrous power of that seed, in which this tree and all its nuts were entirely contained, and all the power of the nut seed, and in the power of the seeds all the nut trees. And I understand that this force cannot unfold entirely in any time measured by the celestial movement, but that it is still limited, because it has a field of action only within the species of walnut trees, that is, although in the seed I see a tree, yet it is the beginning of the tree is still limited in its strength. Then I begin to consider the seed power of all trees of various species, not limited to any particular species, and in these seeds I also see virtual the presence of every conceivable tree. However, if I want to see the absolute power of all forces, the force-origin that gives strength to all seeds, then I will have to go beyond the limits of every known and conceivable seed force and penetrate into that ignorance where there are no longer any signs of either the strength or strength of the seed ; there, in the darkness, I will find incredible strength, which no conceivable force can even come close to equaling. In it is the beginning that gives existence to every force, both seminal and non-seminal. This absolute and all-surpassing power gives every seminal force the ability virtually to enfold the tree within itself along with everything that is required for the existence of the sensory tree and that follows from the existence of the tree; that is, it contains the beginning and the cause, which carries within itself, condensed and absolutely as a cause, everything that it gives to its effect. In this way I see that the absolute power is the face, or prototype, of every face, of all trees, and of every tree; the walnut tree resides in it not as its limited seed power, but as the cause and creator of this seed power... Therefore, the tree in you, my God, is you yourself, my God, and in you is the truth and prototype of its existence ; in the same way, the seed of the tree in you is the truth and the prototype of itself, that is, the prototype of both the tree and the seed. You are the truth and the prototype...You, my God, are the absolute power and therefore the nature of all natures." At the same time, the postulation of the dyad "divine or ultimate reality - substantial reality, passive, existing in its own space-time" excluded the possibility of conceiving some kind of "hierarchy" realities: an object pair can only be thought of in the context of the “binarism” of “juxtaposed” components and, due to the extreme nature of the latter, is in a state of internal antagonism. The formation of a monistic “scientific picture of the world”, which replaced divine laws with “laws of nature”, means

It was the postulation of one reality - "natural" - while maintaining the general cosmic status of virtus as a special, all-pervading force. (This circumstance was, in particular, the basis for discussions about the relationship between science and religion, science and mysticism, about the nature and horizons of the magical.) II). postclassical science - "VR" - a concept by which a set of objects of the next (in relation to the underlying reality that generates them) level is designated. These objects are ontologically equal in rights with the “constant" reality that generates them and are autonomous; at the same time, their existence is completely conditioned by the permanent process of their reproduction by the generating reality - upon completion of this process, the objects of V.R. disappear. The category of “virtuality” is introduced through the opposition of substantiality and potentiality: a virtual object exists, although not substantially, but really; and at the same time - not potentially, but actual. V.R. are “an under-emerging event, an under-born being” (S.S. Khoruzhy). In modern philosophical literature, an approach based on the recognition of the polyontic nature of reality and carrying out the reconstruction of the nature of V.R. in such a context has received the name “virtualistics” (N.A. Nosov, S.S. Khoruzhy). According to a common point of view, the philosophical and psychological concept of V.R. it is legitimate to base it on the following theoretical premises: 1) the concept of an object of scientific research must be supplemented with the concept of reality as the environment for the existence of many heterogeneous and different-quality objects; 2) V.R. constitute relationships between heterogeneous objects located at different hierarchical levels of interaction and generation of objects - V.R. always generated by some initial (constant) reality; V.R. refers to constant reality as an independent and autonomous reality, existing only within the time frame of its process / V.R. - A.G., D.G., A.I., I.K./ generating and maintaining its existence. Object V.R. always relevant and real, V.R. is capable of generating a different V.R. next level. To work with the concept of V.R. it is necessary to abandon mono-ontic thinking (postulating the existence of only one reality) and introduce a polyontic unlimited paradigm (recognition of the plurality of worlds and intermediate realities), which will allow the construction of theories of developing and unique objects, without reducing them to linear determinism. At the same time, the “primary” V.R. capable of generating V.R. the next level, becoming a “constant reality” in relation to it - and so on “ad infinitum”: restrictions on the number of levels

There cannot theoretically be a hierarchy of realities. The limit in this case can only be determined by the limitations of the psychophysiological nature of man as “the point of convergence of all existential horizons” (S.S. Khoruzhy). Issues V.R. in the status of a self-aware philosophical trend, it is constituted within the framework of post-non-classical philosophy of the 1980-1990s as a problem of the nature of reality, as an awareness of the problematic nature and uncertainty of the latter, as a comprehension of both the possible and the impossible as real. Thus, Baudrillard, operating with the concept of “hyperreality,” showed that the accuracy and perfection of the technical reproduction of an object, its symbolic representation constructs a different object - a simulacrum, in which there is more reality than in the “real” itself, which is redundant in its detail. Simulacra as components of V.R., according to Baudrillard, are too visible, too truthful, too close and accessible. Hyperreality, according to Baudrillard, absorbs, absorbs, abolishes reality. Social theorist M. Poster, comparing the phenomenon of V.R. with the “real time” effect in the sphere of modern telecommunications (games, teleconferences, etc.), notes that reality is being problematized, the validity, exclusivity and conventional evidence of “ordinary” time, space and identity are being questioned. The poster captures the constitution of a simulation culture with its inherent plurality of realities. Information superhighways and V.R. have not yet become general cultural practices, but have enormous potential for the generation of other cultural identities and models of subjectivity - even for the creation of a postmodern subject. Unlike the autonomous and rational subject of modernity, this subject is unstable, popular and diffuse. It is generated and exists only in an interactive environment. In the postmodern model of subjectivity, such distinctions as “sender - recipient”, “producer - consumer”, “manager - managed” lose their relevance. For the analysis of V.R. and the culture it generates, modernist categories of socio-philosophical analysis turn out to be insufficient. Acquiring the concept of "VR" philosophical status was determined by the understanding of the relationship between the three obvious spaces of human existence: the imaginable world, the visible world and the objective (external) world. In modern philosophy, especially the last 10-15 years of the 20th century, V.R. is considered: a) as a conceptualization of the revolutionary level of development of technology and technology, allowing us to discover and create new dimensions of culture and society, and

also simultaneously giving rise to new acute problems that require critical thinking; b) as a development of the idea of ​​​​the plurality of worlds (possible worlds), the initial uncertainty and relativity of the “real” world. III). A technically constructed interactive environment for generating and operating objects similar to real or imaginary ones using computer tools, based on their three-dimensional graphical representation, simulation of their physical properties (volume, movement, etc.), simulation of their ability to influence and independent presence in space. V.R. also involves the creation by means of special computer equipment (special helmet, suit, etc.) of the effect (separately, outside of “ordinary” reality) of a person’s presence in this object environment (sense of space, sensations, etc.), accompanied by a feeling of unity with computer. (Cf. “virtual activity” in Bergson, “virtual theater” in A. Artaud, “virtual abilities” in A. N. Leontiev. A significant change in the content and increase in the scope of the concept of VR was carried out by J. Lanier, the founder and owner of the company , which mastered the production of personal computers that had the ability to create interactive stereoscopic images.) The term “virtual” is used both in computer technology (virtual memory) and in other areas: quantum physics (virtual particles), in control theory (virtual office, virtual management ), in psychology (virtual abilities, virtual states), etc. The original "philosophy of V.R." (this is its important and fundamental feature) was initially proposed not by professional philosophers, but by computer engineers, public figures, writers, and journalists. The first ideas of V.R. took shape in a variety of discourses. Concept and practice of V.R. have quite diverse contexts of origin and development: in the American youth counterculture, the computer industry, literature (science fiction), military developments, space exploration, art and design. It is generally accepted that the idea of ​​V.R. as "cyberspace" - "cyberspace" - first appeared in the famous techno-utopian science fiction novel "Neuromancer" by W. Gibson, where cyberspace is depicted as a collective hallucination of millions of people, which they experience simultaneously in different geographical locations, connected through a computer network to each other and immersed in the world of graphically represented data from any computer. However, Gibson considered his novel not a prediction of the future, but a criticism of the present. Ki-

WINDELBAND Wilhelm (1848-1915)

German philosopher, head of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. In his works on the history of philosophy ("History of Ancient Philosophy", 1888; "History of New Philosophy", 1880) he examined the philosophical teachings of the past from Kantian positions.

Windelband's doctrine of the division of sciences had a significant influence on philosophy, sociology and historiography.

Windelband proposed to base the classification of sciences on the difference between sciences not by subject, but by method. The question, Windelband argued, is not so much in understanding the subject of historical knowledge and in delimiting it from the subject of the natural sciences, but in establishing the logical and formal-methodological features of historical knowledge. Windelband refuses to divide knowledge into the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit. The principle of division should be “the formal nature of the cognitive goals of the sciences.” Some sciences look for general laws, others - individual facts; some of them are sciences about laws, others are sciences about events. The former teach what always takes place, the latter teach what once was. Windelband calls the first type of thinking "NOMOTHETIC"(legislative). Windelband calls the type of thinking opposed to “nomothetic” (law-setting) "IDIOGRAPHIC" (describing something special). The same object can serve as the object of both nomothetic and idiographic research at the same time. The reason for this possibility is that the opposition between the unchangeable (general) and the once occurring is in a certain sense relative. Thus, the science of limited nature as a taxonomy is a nomothetic science, but as a history of development it is idiographic. So, Windelband establishes the difference between two main methods of scientific knowledge and two directions, types of thinking - nomothetic and idiographic. This difference between nomothetic and idiographic types of thinking determines the difference between natural science and history. In the case of natural science, thinking strives to move from establishing the particular to understanding the general connection; in the case of history, it stops at clarifying the particular, the special. Windelband believes that the idiographic historical method was neglected for a long time. In his opinion, neglect of everything except the general and generic is a feature of Greek thinking that passed from the Eleatics to Plato, who saw both true being and true knowledge only in everything general. In modern times, the mouthpiece of this opinion was Schopenhauer, who denied history the significance of a true science precisely on the grounds that it deals only with the particular and never reaches the general. Windelband considers this view of the idiographic method to be a centuries-old misconception. In contrast, Windelband emphasizes that “every human interest and every assessment, everything that has meaning for a person, relates to the individual and disposable.” If this is true in relation to individual human life, then it “is even more applicable to the entire historical process: it has value only if it is one-time.” Windelband believes that holistic knowledge, which forms the common goal of all types of scientific work, should equally include both methods: nomothetic and idiographic. Both of these moments of human knowledge - nomothetic and idiographic - cannot be reduced to one common source. No subsuming under general laws can reveal the final foundations of a single phenomenon given in time. Therefore, in everything historical and individual, Windelband concludes, there remains for us a share of the inexplicable - something inexpressible, indefinable. In accordance with this, Windelband’s famous speech on the relationship of history to natural science ends with a discussion of the causelessness of freedom: the last and deepest essence of personality, according to Windelband, resists analysis through general categories, and this elusive element “manifests itself in our consciousness as a feeling of the causelessness of our being, i.e. e. individual freedom." Windelband's speech "History and Natural Science" outlined a new look at historical knowledge in sketch form.

RICKERT Heinrich (1863-1936)- German philosopher, one of the founders of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. Philosophy, according to Rickert, is the science of values, which form “a completely independent kingdom lying beyond subject and object.”

Rickert's principles of classification of sciences are extremely close to Windelband's principles, but much more thoroughly developed. Like Windelband, Rickert reduces the difference between sciences to the difference in their methods and believes that there are two main methods. Any scientific concept can have the task of either cognition of the general, identical, repeating features of the phenomenon being studied, or, on the contrary, cognition of its particular, individual, one-time and unique features. In the first case we are dealing with natural science, in the second with history. The natural scientific concept is aimed at the general, the historical - at the individual. Rickert calls the method of natural science "GENERALIZING"(generalizing) If the method of natural science is generalizing, then the method of history is INDIVIDUALIZING.

The purpose of natural science is to clarify general laws, i.e. the discovery of constantly repeating, endlessly reproducible permanent connections and relationships. The purpose of history is to depict or characterize “what happens” as a one-time, individual event, which, due to its original originality, excludes the possibility of being subsumed under the concept of “general law.” No matter how far the possibility of simultaneous application of both methods - generalizing and individualizing - to a single reality extends, they are logically diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. If history uses concepts of the general as elements of its judgments, if, further, natural science has to deal with individual objects, then this circumstance, according to Rickert, cannot eliminate or weaken the fact of the primordial opposition of the natural scientific and historical types of knowledge. The logical opposition of both methods is the greatest that can exist in the field of science. A scientific concept, as Rickert argues, can never be a copy or reflection of an object. In any concept of any science, only certain aspects or properties of an object are reproduced, abstracted or selected, drawn from its actual content in accordance with the point of view that guides this science and in which its characteristic cognitive interest is reflected. The reality of an object, according to Rickert, cannot be reproduced in a concept, since it is inexhaustible. Science overcomes the “extensive” and “intensive” diversity of the empirical reality it cognizes not by the fact that it “reflects” it, but by the fact that it “simplify” this diversity. From the infinitely rich content of the objective world, science introduces into its concepts not all of its elements, but only those that turn out to be SIGNIFICANT. Developing this view, Rickert comes to the conviction that the main opposition between natural science and history is the opposition of two tasks and two principles of selection, the separation of the essential from the inessential.

History, from Rickert's point of view, is characterized by an image or narration of one-time, once-occurring and unique events, and natural science is characterized by the establishment of general principles of what always exists. At the same time, Rickert emphasizes that in order “to clearly express the required difference, I will have to separate in the concept what is in fact closely connected with each other... I will have to completely abstract from those numerous threads that connect each other both groups of sciences..." The following statements are characteristic of Rickert: "The fundamental logical opposition that we have discovered can also be characterized as the opposition between a science that deals with concepts and a science that deals with reality." “Reality for us lies in the special and individual, and in no case can it be built from general elements.” Although formally Rickert recognizes the equality of natural science and history as two equally possible and necessary logical ways of forming concepts, in the context of ontology Rickert gives clear preference STORIES. One of the essential tasks of Rickert's methodology is to prove the idea that natural science is not knowledge of reality. Seeking only the general, it cannot, by its nature, leave the circle of abstractions, because the subject of its research - the general - has no real existence, arising only as a result of logical abstraction. It is absolutely impossible to understand the meaning of Rickert's philosophy without realizing that the entire Rickertian logic of history is based on epistemological criticism of natural science. It is not for nothing that Rickert’s main work is called “The Boundaries of the Natural Science Formation of Concepts.” In his criticism of natural science, the Kantian Rickert, in our opinion, echoes irrationalism. At the same time, Rickert’s peculiarity is that his anti-rationalist criticism of knowledge is most harshly carried out in relation to the natural sciences. Rickert emphasizes the epistemological boundaries of natural science, its supposed inadequacy, its distance from true reality. In contrast to this type of knowledge, Rickert puts forward history as a science in which the subject of knowledge and the method of knowledge most closely correspond to each other. History, according to Rickert, is possible as a science due to the fact that, along with nature, there is CULTURE as a special object or a special sphere of experience. To characterize cultural objects, determine their specificity in comparison with natural objects, Rickert introduces a concept that is the most important in his philosophy of culture, in the philosophy of history and the logic of historical sciences. It is this concept that provides the principle by which the historian separates the “essential” from the “unimportant.” This concept "VALUE" - the most important concept of Rickert's philosophy. Only thanks to this concept, Rickert assures, does it become possible to distinguish cultural processes from natural phenomena. Only this concept provides the principle with the help of which the historian, from the inexhaustible variety of individual elements of reality, forms a whole and separates the “essential” from the “unimportant.” Value, according to Rickert, is “the meaning that lies above all being,” the world “consists of realities and values.” As you can see, the category of “values” not only complements the category of being, but also the sphere of “values” in Rickert’s work is opposed to the sphere of “being”, and in such a way that the opposition between them in principle cannot be destroyed or at least softened. True value, as Rickert understands it, is a self-sufficient value, “completely independent of any relation to being, and especially to the subject to which it addresses.” According to Rickert, value cannot be said to “exist,” but value nevertheless belongs to “something” and not to “nothing.” True value, according to Rickert, is a self-sufficient value, “completely independent of any relation to being, and especially to the subject to which it addresses.” According to Rickert, the world “consists of reality and values.” Values ​​belong neither to the realm of objects nor to the realm of subjects. They “form a completely independent kingdom, lying beyond subject and object.” According to Rickert, the highest task of philosophy is determined by the relationship of values ​​to reality. The “true world problem” of philosophy lies precisely “in the contradiction of both of these kingdoms”: the kingdom of existing reality and the kingdom of non-existent values, but nevertheless having universally binding significance for the subject. Rickert believes that this contradiction “is much broader than the contradiction between object and subject. Subjects, together with objects, constitute one part of the world of reality. They are opposed by another part - values. The world problem is the problem of the mutual relationship of both of these parts and their possible unity. According to Rickert, all problems existence “necessarily concerns only parts of reality and therefore constitutes the subjects of special sciences,” while for philosophy “there is no longer a single purely existential problem left.” There is a fundamental difference between philosophy and special knowledge, due to the fact that philosophy faces the task of knowing the world as a whole The world whole, according to Rickert, can never be the task of special sciences. The whole of reality is fundamentally inaccessible to our experience and can never be given to us. And from here it follows, Rickert concludes, that the concept of the whole of reality “is no longer a pure concept of reality, but that it combines reality with value.” Philosophy as a science begins where the sphere of pure reality ends, and where problems of “value” come to the fore. The main antithesis for Rickert - “reality” and “value” - ultimately goes back to the ethical antithesis, to the opposition of what is and what should be. Here it is important to make a significant addition to the already studied provisions of Rickert’s methodology. Attribution to value, according to Rickert, is a condition not only of historical knowledge. In any theoretical knowledge we are also talking about the attitude to value. All cognition, by its nature, turns out to be fundamentally “practical.” So, the prototype of the dualism of being and value is rooted in Rickert in the conflict of ethical consciousness - in opposition to what is and what should be. The ethical basis of Rickert's philosophy undoubtedly goes back to the ethical idealism of Kant and Fichte, to their doctrine of the “primacy” of practical reason. In Rickert's concept, the highest place in the hierarchy of values ​​belongs to religion. “Only religion,” says Rickert, “supports and strengthens life in the present and future, giving it a value that its own partial power is unable to give it.”

The main figures of the Freiburg (Baden) school of neo-Kantianism were the influential philosophers W. Wildenband and G. Rickert. Wilhelm Windelband (1848 - 1915) studied historical sciences in Jena, where he was influenced by K. Fischer and G. Lotze. In 1870 he defended his candidate's dissertation on the topic "The Doctrine of Chance", and in 1873 in Leipzig - a doctoral dissertation on the problem of reliability in knowledge. In 1876 he was a professor in Zurich, and from 1877 at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, in Baden. From 1882 to 1903, Windelband was a professor in Strasbourg, and after 1903 he inherited the Cuno Fischer chair in Heidelberg. Windelband's main works: the famous two-volume "History of New Philosophy" (1878-1880), where he first carried out an interpretation of Kant's teachings specific to Freiburg neo-Kantianism; "Preludes: (speeches and articles)" (1883); "Essays on the Doctrine of Negative Judgment" (1884), "Textbook of the History of Philosophy" (1892), "History and Natural Science" (1894), "On the System of Categories" (1900), "Plato" (1900), "On Free Will" (1904).

Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) spent his student years in Berlin during the Bismarck era, then in Zurich, where he listened to lectures by R. Avenarius, and in Strasbourg. In 1888, in Freiburg, he defended his candidate's dissertation "The Doctrine of Definition" (supervised by V. Windelband), and in 1882 - his doctoral dissertation "The Subject of Knowledge." He soon became a professor at the University of Freiburg, gaining fame as a brilliant teacher. From 1916 he was a professor in Heidelberg. Rickert's main works: "The Boundaries of Natural Science Concept Formation" (1892), "Sciences of Nature and Sciences of Culture" 0899), "On the System of Values" (1912), "Philosophy of Life" (1920), "Kant as a Philosopher of Modern Culture" (1924), “Predicate Logic and the Problem of Ontology” (1930), “Basic Problems of Philosophical Methodology, Ontology, Anthropology” (1934). Windelband and Rickert are thinkers whose ideas differ in many ways; at the same time, the views of each of them evolved. Thus, Rickert gradually moved away from neo-Kantianism. But in the Freiburg period, as a result of the collaboration of Windelband and Rickert, a Kantian-oriented position was formed, which, however, differed markedly from Marburg neo-Kantianism.

Thus, in contrast to the Marburgers, who focused on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the Freiburgers built their concept, especially focusing on the “Critique of Judgment.” At the same time, they interpreted Kant’s work not only and not even so much as a work on aesthetics, but as a holistic and more successful presentation of Kant’s teaching as such than in other works. The Freiburgers emphasized that it was in this presentation that Kant’s concept most influenced the further development of German philosophy and literature. In their interpretation of Kant, Windelband and Rickert, like the Marburgers, sought a critical rethinking of Kantianism. Windelband ended the preface to the first edition of the Preludes with the words: “To understand Kant means to go beyond the limits of his philosophy.” Another distinctive feature of Freiburg neo-Kantianism in comparison with the Marburg version is the following: if the Marburgers built philosophy on the models of mathematics and mathematical natural science, then Windelband, a student of the historian Kuno Fischer, was more oriented towards a complex of humanities scientific disciplines, primarily the sciences of the historical cycle. Accordingly, the central concepts for the Freiburg interpretation were not the concepts of “logic” and “number”, but the concepts of “significance” (Gelten), borrowed by Windelband from his teacher Lotze, and “value”. Freiburg neo-Kantianism is largely a doctrine of values; philosophy is interpreted as a critical doctrine of values. Like the Marburgers, the Neo-Kantians from Freiburg paid tribute to the scientism of their time, highly appreciating the philosophical significance of the problem of the scientific method. They did not shy away from studying methodological problems of natural science and mathematics, although, as can be seen from the works of Windelband and Rickert, they did this most of all for the purpose of comparing and distinguishing the methods of scientific disciplines according to the cognitive type of certain sciences.

In his speech on “History and Natural Science,” delivered on May 1, 1894, when he took office as professor at the University of Strasbourg, Windelband spoke out against the traditional division of scientific disciplines into the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences, which was based on the distinction of their subject areas. Meanwhile, sciences should be classified in accordance not with the subject, but with a method specific to each type of science, as well as their specific cognitive goals. From this point of view, there are, according to Windelband, two main types of sciences. The first type includes those who search for general laws, and, accordingly, the dominant type of knowledge and method in them is called “nomothetic” (fundamental). The second type includes sciences that describe specific and unique events. The type of cognition and method in them is idiographic (i.e., capturing the individual, the special). The distinction made, according to Windelband, cannot be identified with the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit. For natural science, depending on the field of research and interest, can use one or the other method: thus, systematic natural science is “nomothetic”, and historical sciences about nature are “idiographic”. Nomothetic and idiographic methods are considered in principle equal. However, Windelband, speaking out against the scientistic passion for searching for general and universal patterns, especially emphasizes the high importance of individualizing description, without which, in particular, the historical sciences could not exist: after all, in history, the founder of the Freiburg school reminds, all events are unique, inimitable; their reduction to general laws unjustifiably coarsens and eliminates the specificity of historical events.

G. Rickert sought to clarify and further develop the methodological distinctions proposed by his teacher W. Windelband. Rickert moved even further away from the substantive premises of the classification of sciences. The point is that he reasoned that nature, as a separate and special subject for the sciences, as a “guardian” of certain general laws, does not exist - just as an objectively special “subject of history” does not exist. (By the way, Rickert rejected the term “science of spirit” because of associations with the Hegelian concept of spirit, preferring the concept of “science of culture”) Both methods do not have, therefore, purely objective determination, but are determined by the turn of the research interest of people whom in one case the interest is in the general and repeating, and in the other in the individual and unique.

In a number of his works, G. Rickert seeks to provide an epistemological and worldview basis for these methodological considerations. He builds a theory of knowledge, the main elements of which are the following ideas: 1) refutation of any possible concept of reflection (arguments: knowledge never reflects and is unable to reflect, i.e. accurately reproduce the endless, inexhaustible reality; knowledge is always coarsening, simplification, abstraction, schematization); 2) approval of the principle of expedient selection, to which cognition is subject (arguments: according to interests, goals, turns of attention, reality is “dissected,” modified, formalized); 3) reducing the essence of knowledge to thinking, since it is true; 4) denial that psychology can become a discipline that allows one to resolve the problems of the theory of knowledge (like the Marburgers, Rickert is a supporter of anti-psychologism, a critic of psychologism); 5) constructing a concept of the subject of knowledge as a “requirement”, “an obligation”, moreover, a “transcendental obligation”, i.e. independent of all being; 6) the assumption that when we speak of truth we must mean “meaning” (Bedeutung); the latter is neither an act of thinking, nor mental being in general; 7) the transformation of the theory of knowledge into a science about theoretical values, about meanings, about what exists not in reality, but only logically, and in this capacity “precedes all sciences, their existing or recognized actual material.”

Thus, Rickert's theory of knowledge develops into a doctrine of values. The sphere of the theoretical is contrasted with the real and is understood “as the world of theoretical values.” Accordingly, Rickert interprets the theory of knowledge as a “criticism of reason,” i.e. a science that does not deal with being, but raises the question of meaning; it turns not to reality, but to values. Rickert's concept is therefore based not only on distinction, but also on the opposition of values ​​and being, existing. There are two kingdoms - reality and the world of values, which does not have the status of actual existence, although it is no less obligatory and significant for a person than the world. existence. According to Rickert, the question of the confrontation and unity of two “worlds” from ancient times to the present day forms a fundamental problem and riddle for philosophy, for all culture. Let us consider in some more detail the problem of the difference between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of culture,” as Rickert poses and solves it. First of all, the philosopher defines the concept of “nature” in the Kantian way: it does not mean the corporeal or physical world; this means the “logical concept of nature”, i.e. the existence of things, insofar as it is determined by general laws. Accordingly, the subject of the cultural sciences, the concept of “history” is “the concept of a single occurrence in all its specificity and individuality, which forms the opposite of the concept of general law.” Thus, the “material opposition” of nature and culture is expressed through the “formal opposition” of natural scientific and historical methods.

Products of nature are what grow freely from the earth. Nature itself exists independently of values. Rickert calls “valuable parts of reality” goods - to distinguish them from values ​​in the proper sense, which do not represent (natural) reality. About values, according to Rickert, one cannot say that they exist or do not exist, but only that they mean or do not have significance. Culture is defined by Rickert as “a set of objects associated with generally valid values” and cherished for the sake of these values. In correlation with values, the specificity of the method of the cultural sciences becomes more clear. It has already been said that Rickert considers their method to be “individualizing”: the sciences of culture, as historical sciences, “want to expound reality, which is never general, but always individual, from the point of view of its individuality...” Therefore, only historical disciplines are the sciences of genuine reality, while natural science always generalizes, and therefore coarsens and distorts the uniquely individual phenomena of the real world.

However, Rickert makes important clarifications here. History as a science does not at all address every individual fact or event. “Out of the vast mass of individual, i.e., heterogeneous objects, the historian first focuses his attention only on those that, in their individual characteristics, either themselves embody cultural values, or stand in some relation to them.” Of course, this raises the problem of the historian’s objectivity. Rickert does not believe that its solution is possible thanks to certain theoretical calls and methodological requirements. At the same time, we can hope to overcome subjectivism in historical research, in the “historical formation of concepts,” if we distinguish between: 1) subjective assessment (expressing praise or blame) and 2) attribution to values, or the objective process of discovering in history itself what is generally valid or claims to be universal validity of values. So, in history as a science, subsuming under general concepts is also practiced. However, unlike natural science, in historical disciplines it is not only possible, but also necessary not to lose - in the case of generalizations, “attribution to values” - the unique individuality of historical facts, events, and actions.