WORLDVIEW, SCIENCE, AND ART

E. V. BURMAKIN

Art and science serve the cause of man’s cognition of the world. Science, moreover, is increasingly becoming a direct productive force, i.e., it is acquiring decisive significance in the creation of the material and technical base of communism. Art captivates by the depth and truthfulness of its reflection of life, by the force of its ideological pathos, by its high artistic mastery; it actively assists in forming the spiritual countenance of the builder of communism.

These circumstances largely explain the topicality of the problem of the interaction between art and science.

Many philosophers in our country and abroad, noting the distinctive features of the present stage in the development of science, point above all to a synthetic tendency; on the other hand, literary scholars and aestheticians characterize the contemporary period in literature and art as a time of the interpenetration and mutual enrichment of various genres and kinds of art, a time of the development of such specifically synthetic forms of artistic activity as radio and television.

This general tendency, noted by many researchers, could not fail to affect the interrelationship of science and art as two forms of social consciousness.

In addition, today we observe an evident sharpening of ideological clashes that constantly occur in the process of resolving this problem.

Even the circumstances noted here alone are, to some extent, capable of explaining the heightened interest in the question of the relationship between art and science that we observe today.

Disputes over this problem are being conducted both in special books on aesthetics and on the pages of newspapers, in strictly scholarly articles of specialized scientific journals and in mass popular literature.

Quite recently, lecture halls and the pages of newspapers and journals were filled with irreconcilable disputants—“physicists” and “lyricists,” while the journal Molodaya gvardiya for a long time conducted a dispute about “formulas and images.”

All these facts again and again confirm the topicality of the problem posed.

The question of the relationship between art and science has many aspects. It is quite natural that the majority of researchers seek a solution

problems in the main direction—consider the relation between science and art in the gnoseological plane.

We, too, shall be compelled to touch upon gnoseology, but only to touch upon it, because our aim is different. Evidently, the very long existence of this problem already compels us to place on the agenda its worldview significance. That is precisely what we shall discuss. But here, too, only part of the question is taken, only two of its aspects. We shall consider, first, the worldview significance of resolving the question of the mutual influence of science and art and, second, the worldview significance of resolving the question of the subject matter of science and art.

In addition, it proved necessary to point to certain other aspects of the interconnection of science and art that for the time being remain unexamined.

In 1961 the publishing house “Soviet Writer” issued a collection of articles by scholars and writers, Formulas and Images. Although the articles in this collection are devoted chiefly to a special question—the paths of development of scientific-artistic literature—they clearly contain echoes of that dispute between the “physicists” and the “lyricists” which, despite all its artificiality, has not ended even today. And in this book we can easily find attempts at such a comparison of science and art, one that would make it possible to answer the question of which is higher, which is more important and more necessary to man—art or science.

It should be said at once that such a formulation of the question seems to us least fruitful in solving this important problem. It compels one to approach the solution of this problem from a purely quantitative side and gives the broadest scope for all kinds of metaphysical conclusions.

It would be simplest to set aside such a formulation and not touch upon it. But the trouble is that both the notorious dispute between the “physicists” and the “lyricists” and the very latest statements of certain figures of science and art in our country and abroad presuppose precisely this formulation of the question; that is, by force of circumstances, it has become the most widespread in debates on the relation between art and science.

Defenders of the primacy of science most often say that after the Second World War science and people of science took precedence in the entire cultural life of mankind. For example, after the Second World War scientists (Joliot-Curie, then John Bernal), who took the place of Romain Rolland and Gorky, stood at the head of the peace movement.

But can one, on this basis, assert that the influence, the role of art in the contemporary world has diminished? Obviously not.

It is another matter that in different historical epochs art or science, in the creative activity of some of their representatives, achieved especially outstanding results, and then they naturally moved into the foreground of humanity’s struggle in defense of life and culture; whereas in other historical epochs there were no such results.

Another circumstance may deserve far greater attention. The writer D. Danin speaks of it in his article “Thirst for Clarity”¹. D. Danin writes: “Academician L. Landau, at a recent meeting with writers, expressed a thought that amazed everyone: the triumph of the knowing human mind, he said, now consists in the fact that our consciousness has left far behind the possibilities of our imagination, and the minds of physicists today work freely where human imagination is already powerless.”

¹ Formulas and Images. SPb., Moscow, 1961, p. 51.

This statement by the outstanding scientist is often used to confirm the fact that today science and knowledge are in the forefront; they play the decisive role in the process of cognition, far outstripping even the human imagination.

In fact, such a conclusion cannot logically follow from this observation. Otherwise artistic thinking would have to be reduced to imagination, which, of course, is an indispensable qualitative aspect of it. Incidentally, let us note that imagination is also necessary to scientific thinking; it is inherent in human thinking in general. But neither the work of the artist’s consciousness (of the practitioner of art) nor the work of the scientist’s consciousness can be reduced to imagination. Moreover, by the scientist’s own authoritative admission, it today gives way and proves powerless where the “mind of the physicists” works freely.

Consequently, for both the artist and the scientist, imagination alone is insufficient for successful work. And here we arrive at an almost banal conclusion, obvious in itself: besides imagination, knowledge is also needed (understood broadly, not merely as knowledge of the subject of research). And if one agrees that in science there is such a tendency, whereby imagination gives way before knowledge (consciousness), then why not extend it to artistic thinking as well, and say that in contemporary art knowledge (again, in the broad sense) acquires predominant significance over imagination.

It may be noted that if one constantly bears in mind that in the present case knowledge and imagination are not absolutely opposed to one another, that imagination, while always preserving its functions as organizer (organizer of composition, plot, and architectonics as a whole), preserves them also in relation to knowledge (within the framework of one or another work of art), then the existence of such a tendency may be accepted.

And once again it is perfectly clear that everything said above provides not the slightest material for conclusions about the primacy of art or science in the contemporary world.

As for the fact that the tendency noted above really does exist and deserves close attention, many facts attest to it. They were cited, in particular, by the participants in the discussion of the scientific theme in fiction, whose contributions were published in the collection Formulas and Images.

One may refer to at least one example—the article by such a well-known Soviet writer working in the genre of scientific-artistic literature as N. Mikhailov. In his article “Some Considerations” he says: “Science will occupy such an exceptionally important place in human life that art which bypasses it will begin to look primitive.” Explaining this, he writes further: “The point is not only that the search for scientific truth is taking up more and more space and time in human life, but also that human consciousness itself is becoming more scientific!” And, looking into the future, N. Mikhailov concludes: “A unified, integral perception of the world, a harmonious natural disposition, the maximum rapprochement of feeling and thought—formerly characteristic of rare outstanding personalities of the Herzen or Bryusov type—will in time become an ordinary human trait. All this will ensure in the communist future an extraordinary development of the poetry of science. There can be no doubt of this.”

It is hard not to agree with these words.

Thus, the increasing role of knowledge in the process of artistic creation is explained by the demands of life, by the development of man and of his consciousness; it is directly connected also with the development of science.

And there can be no doubt that works of art, along with aesthetic enjoyment, can convey a great amount of useful information, even information of scientific value.

Widely known, for example, is F. Engels’ statement about Balzac’s Human Comedy, from which, in Engels’ words, he learned, even in the sense of economic details, more than from the books of all the specialist historians, economists, and statisticians of that period taken together.

Many such testimonies could be cited. To the possible objection that this concerns only outstanding works, the creations of geniuses, let us refer to just one example from our own time.

It is known that in our country, after the Great October Socialist Revolution, the sketch developed very vigorously and fruitfully in belles lettres. This is one of the notable features of Soviet literature in general.

The practice of Soviet sketch writers provides the richest material testifying to the value of the information that a work of literature is capable of carrying.

It is enough to take as an example the work of Soviet sketch writers who write about the collective-farm village. The sketches of V. Ovechkin, V. Troepolsky, E. Dorosh, V. Tendryakov, S. Zalygin, and many others contain not only all the other functions and qualities of belles lettres, but also perform the functions of social research, helping the Party and the people to see the real processes and conflicts in the contemporary countryside; they analyze how the most important decisions of the Party and the government are being put into practice.

It is no accident that the contemporary sketch is used in scholarship as a source of the most important information.

The very title of E. I. Chernyak’s article “On the Question of Studying the Soviet Sketch as a Historical Source” speaks for itself.

And here is what the author says about the sketches of V. Ovechkin: “Ovechkin’s sketches are works of literature based on personal observations. Will such sketches interest the historian? Of course; in them he will find the richest material on the history of the postwar village”²).

If we leave aside certain incorrect, erroneous positions of the author in defining the specificity of the sketch, then on the whole E. I. Chernyak quite rightly evaluates the sketch as a distinctive, literary social investigation of reality, which can and should be used as a historical source.

The rapprochement of the sketch with the tasks of scientific research, as one of the characteristic tendencies of the present day, is also noted by I. Zolotussky in the article “A Time of Synthesis.” He says: “Balzac called himself a ‘doctor of social medicine.’ I think that this title also suits the sketch writer. He is a doctor in the sense of seriousness, attentiveness, and constancy in grasping phenomena, in comparing them, in making forecasts. He is a researcher, observing life almost with scientific precision and orienting himself in the real state of things”³).

A concrete analysis of the content of the sketches of Soviet writers could only confirm the correctness of such an opinion, which in turn proves the profound cognitive value of works of belles lettres, of works of art.

²) Transactions of the Moscow State Historical-Archival Institute. Vol. 17. Questions of source studies in the history of the USSR, 1963, p. 27.
³) Questions of Literature, 1964, No. 12, p. 19.

Undoubtedly, this phenomenon, explained above all by the demands of life, of human practice, is also closely connected with the influence of science and scientific discoveries on the life of human society, on human consciousness, and on art.

And now a new tendency is already emerging in art, which, it seems to us, the Bulgarian writer Bogomil Nonev has noted very accurately. He writes: “Today the fascination with vast epic canvases, the ponderous novel, opera, and multi-figure composition seems to be beginning to decline.

This is explained, of course, not by a ‘crisis of the novel,’ but rather by the search for a diversity of genre forms, by the striving to reflect more precisely the multifaceted picture of our contemporaneity. Indisputably, the purely poetic element is not infrequently displaced by documentary quality. But this is natural. In recent years there has been increased interest in memoir, publicistic, documentary-historical literature, and in historical-documentary film.

Here is just one example. The biographies of Einstein, by B. G. Kuznetsov, and of Newton, by S. I. Vavilov, were translated into Bulgarian and published in print runs usual for a novel. They were literally snapped up.”¹

Thus art, being capable of carrying information of scientific value in its works, today strives “to reflect more precisely the multifaceted picture of our contemporaneity.” And the development of documentary and memoir genres today, among other reasons, is also explained by the influence of the progress of science.

But any attempt to exaggerate, to absolutize this influence may lead to far-reaching conclusions that have direct worldview significance.

It is no accident that many have justly reproached V. Turbin—the author of the, on the whole, interesting and useful book Comrade Time and Comrade Art. Considering the tasks of art in an epoch of stunning scientific discoveries, V. Turbin comes to the conclusion that the main thing for contemporary art is the creation of the newest methods of investigation, equal to scientific ones.

But such an assertion is capable only of justifying formalism. For it is known that many contemporary bourgeois philosophers, sociologists, and aestheticians have long been trying to explain the spread of abstractionism, formalism, and modernism in general by the influence of scientific and technical discoveries.

The Cubists already declared that, by decomposing and analyzing things, like physicists using X-ray apparatus, they penetrate into their mysteries, into the depths of things.

As M. Rutkevich testifies,² at the XIII International Congress of Philosophy, held in September 1963 in Mexico, similar arguments were also characteristic of contemporary modernists. They, writes M. Rutkevich, assert: “We, and only we, create art corresponding to science and technology... they ‘swear’ by the uncertainty relation, invoke the ‘depths of the cosmos,’ demand that music be mathematized, etc.”³

However, this does not exhaust the worldview significance of the problem; it is clearly manifested in connection with the problem of the criterion of truth or veracity in art.

If materialists, regarding art as secondary in relation to objectively existing reality, recognize the reliability of the reflec—

relation to objectively existing reality, recognize the reliability of the reflection of this reality in art, then idealists, placing art above reality, declare it to be the expression of the objective spirit, of subjective human feelings, of the divine essence, and so on.

Thus, contemporary neo-Thomists proceed from the premise that cognition in art is opposed to scientific cognition, just as sensations are opposed to reason, and that it reflects not the real world itself, but the divine spirit found within it⁴.

The prominent neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain explains this as follows: “The artist or poet discovers in reality spiritual radiations that others cannot discern”⁵.

The American professor Stephen C. Pepper writes: “What is a work of art from the ordinary point of view?” “It is a completed system of perceptions,” “...a cumulative series of discontinuous perceptions... \(P_1 + P_2 + P_3 + \ldots\)”⁶.

In this case, K. Pepper understands by “perception” perception, sensation.

But if this is so, then no objective criterion of truth in art can exist; consequently, it is impossible to speak of the value of the knowledge provided by works of art.

This point of view is characteristic of the majority of bourgeois aestheticians.

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus) even deny the very possibility of posing the problem of a criterion of truth in art.

P. S. Trofimov, in the work Two Conceptions of Art⁷, summing up the results of the Fifth International Congress on Aesthetics in Amsterdam, speaks of three principal points of view among bourgeois aestheticians on the problem of truth in art. First, the true or truthful as the correspondence of a work of art to the artist’s inner feeling, aspiration, or intention (O. Borello, A. Gutscho). Second, the truthful as the expression in art of “true values,” having a purely spiritual foundation, and above all—religion (U. Schöndorfer, H. Pauly). Third, a purely formalistic understanding of truthfulness in art as the correspondence of the individual parts of the elements to the whole in works of painting, sculpture, and the like (F. Husen, V. I. M. Alvelt, K. E. Rosen).

It is not difficult to see that in this question, too, two conceptions of artistic creation are opposed in art: the materialist and the idealist modernist.

Meanwhile, in the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism and in the centuries-long practice of art, this problem has long been resolved in favor of art, in favor of truthful art.

But what is truthful art?

It is authentic art, which has always stood on the side of the people, on the side of the progressive forces of society, which has been guided by the most advanced worldview and has itself contributed to its education and penetration among the masses.

In the section of the Program of the CPSU entitled “Increasing the Educational Role of Literature and Art,” it is stated: “Soviet literature and art, imbued with optimism and life-affirming communist ideas, play a great ideological and educational—

...a formative role, developing in the Soviet person the qualities of a builder of the new world. They are called upon to serve as a source of joy and inspiration for millions of people, “...to serve as a means of their ideological enrichment and moral education”⁸.

As we see, this programmatic statement admits of no other interpretations of the outstanding role of Soviet socialist art in educating the person of communist society. But this outstanding role of art itself is connected with its general possibilities for the truthful reflection of objective reality in its revolutionary development.

Here another question also arises: the role of the artist’s worldview. This question has been, and continues to be, treated quite fully in many works, and therefore in the present article there is no need to dwell on it in any detail.

Let us cite only one of M. Gorky’s fundamental statements. “There is a hummock’s viewpoint and a point of view. These must be distinguished. It is known that hummocks are a feature of a swamp and that they remain in the place of the drained swamps. From the height of a hummock one does not see much. A point of view is something else: it is formed as a result of the writer’s observation, comparison, and study of various phenomena of life. The broader the writer’s social experience, the higher his point of view; the broader his intellectual horizon, the more clearly visible to him are the things with which he comes into contact on earth and what are the interactions of these convergences, these contacts. Scientific socialism has created for us the highest intellectual plateau, from which the past is distinctly visible, and has indicated the direct and only path into the future—the path from the ‘realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’”⁹.

At the same time it is especially important to note the fact that only under the conditions of socialism did the coincidence of the artist’s subjective aims with the objective law-governed character of historical development make possible the unity of worldview and artistic creativity¹⁰.

Thus, there is a manifold and, in its essence, fruitful, positive influence of science on art.

Summarizing what has already been noted in our philosophical literature about the directions of this influence, one may say: the areas bordering between science and art are expanding (science fiction, popular-science literature, the essay, cinema); technical progress has provided powerful means for the dissemination among the masses of works of art (the press, radio, television), which make it possible to influence more deeply the change in the aesthetic tastes of the masses; scientific and technical progress gives art new technical means for the embodiment and reproduction of the artistic image.

However, this influence can also be traced at greater depths. In our view, interesting observations were made in Ya. Bilinkis’s article “The Roads of Cognition”¹¹.

Considering the progress of science and art, the author rightly notes that in both science and art the world, in any of its phenomena, appears more and more consistently as a chain of inseparable interconnections and mutual conditionings.

And this is how the author considers one of the concrete manifestations of this mutually fruitful cooperation between science and art. “Science,” writes Ya. Bilinkis, “by changing conceptions of time, the sensation of it through physicists’ discoveries and technical achievements,

In art, the enrichment and sharpening of the sense of time were nourished above all and most directly by the enormity and rapidity of the socio-historical changes that had matured and taken place. In turn, art helped to apprehend this enormity and rapidity.”

And further: “Today man’s relations with time make themselves known in the most varied artistic conceptions.

Olga Bergholz, for example, in Daytime Stars, shows the capacity suddenly to merge, in a lofty moral impulse, with all time—with the past, the present, and the future at once (so that time, in its extension and ruptures, as it were, no longer remains at all), and thereby to partake inseparably in the common life of all people, in the entire infinity of humanity’s path.

In prose, in poetry, and in drama, in recent years we have increasingly encountered various kinds of intermingling of events, of action in time.”

Finally, it is hard to refrain from quoting the significant lines of this article: “...scientific thought and artistic thought, each unfolding its own possibilities, historically converge, jointly renewing and restructuring our consciousness.

At present it is still difficult even to say how much the study of artistic development in unity with an analysis of the paths of scientific thought can yield, what roads of cognition may open here.”

Yes, that is so. And what has been done by our philosophers and aestheticians is only the beginning, the first steps, an analysis of phenomena, of what lies on the surface. Nor is a more profound analysis of the interrelation between art and science part of our task. Our task is to see the worldview significance of this connection. And it, too, is as manifold as this connection itself is manifold.

M. Rutkevich, in the already mentioned article “Scientific and Technological Progress and Art,” also cites another point of view among bourgeois philosophers, who are inclined to see an insurmountable abyss between art and science.

The views of the Belgian neo-Thomist L. Reymaker are distinguished by the greatest definiteness in this respect. He sees a conflict between the progress of science and “the immutable essence of man,” which he proposes to resolve by uniting science with religion, by subordinating science to religion.

Reymaker excludes science from the sphere of “human essence,” regarding it as something external in relation to it. Morality and art, however, express this essence and therefore are immutable.

To these views one may add statements characteristic of many bourgeois aesthetic, sociological, and philosophical studies, as well as of works of literature, in which it is declared that the development of mathematical thinking desiccates the mind, that technology coarsens man, lowers his capacity to feel nature subtly, and so on.

However, for the aesthetics of contemporary modernism, somewhat different views on the interrelation of art and science are more typical. Summarizing the points of view of bourgeois philosophers, apologists of modernism, which were expressed at the Fifth International Congress of Aesthetics in Amsterdam, they may be reduced to three basic propositions.

1. Contemporary achievements in the field of natural science allegedly cast realism aside as a naïve and completely obsolete method of artistic creation. Moreover, in their opinion, the real object cannot in general serve as a model for the artist, since in essence it is not a real object, but represents only the appearance of certain essences hidden from us. Therefore the reflection of the surrounding

the world around us can no longer be the goal, and photography completely replaces realist painting.

1. Art cannot ignore the great achievements of scientific thought: the theory of relativity, the doctrine of the structure of the atom, the successes of cybernetics, and so on. Therefore the modernists propose a “new realism,” whose task is, relying on the natural sciences, to penetrate into the inner world of molecules and atoms, to show the multidimensionality of space, time, and so forth.

This incomprehensible appendage to natural science is proclaimed “new realism.” Only it, in the opinion of the modernists, having cast aside what is visible in phenomena, is capable of penetrating into the essence of things. “New realism” must recreate, with the aid of purely internal elements not borrowed from the real model, the profound essence independently of its manifestations and of everything visible.

In other words, the formalists strive to reflect the essence of a thing without reflecting the thing itself. The absurdity of these efforts is obvious.

1. The truthful reflection of life is contrasted with an effective-practical purpose of art (in the spirit of pragmatism, only that which is useful is true). Art must above all bring direct benefit to man, serve the cause of adapting him to life, and not concern itself with knowing it—that is the business of science. What is demanded of art is not the truth of life, but only that the exciting element should have an effect on man.

It is not difficult to notice that all the views of bourgeois aestheticians and philosophers cited here, to one degree or another, diminish the role and significance of art in human life and assign to it an unequal place in its interrelation with science. But it is precisely this that contradicts the materialist, dialectical view of the essence of this interrelation.

The Bulgarian philosopher Academician T. D. Pavlov is right when, in his book Information, Reflection, Creativity, he writes: “In essence, just as all forms of decadent art signify the distortion and, ultimately, the negation of art as genuine art, so too all forms of subjective and objective idealist philosophy signify the distortion and, ultimately, the negation of a genuinely scientific formulation and solution of the basic question of philosophy, of the philosophical concept of matter and of the cognition of objectively real things and processes”¹².

Let us cite only a few statements by scientists and figures of art that testify to the high role of art in the formation of scientific thinking, to the influence of art on science, even on the creation of particular scientific theories.

It must be said that here there opens before us a whole sea of thoughts and facts, and even by drawing from it almost at random we can find what interests us.

According to Goethe, art can anticipate scientific knowledge. Art, poetry, contribute to the development of scientific fantasy and imagination, which are absolutely necessary in the creation of generalized scientific concepts. Max Planck wrote: “In the final analysis, a new idea arises in the imagination of its creator, and therefore every investigation, even in the most precise science—mathematics—has an irrational moment connected with the spiritual makeup of the investigator”¹³.

And here is the testimony of two scientists, A. Einstein and L. Infeld: “In physics there appeared a new concept, the most important achievement since

Newton’s: the field. A great scientific imagination was required in order to make clear to oneself that it is not the charges and not the particle, but the field in the space between charges and particles, that is essential for describing physical phenomena”¹⁴.

But imagination is only imagination; for science, logicality and consistency of thought are no less important. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov said that listening to music leads to the appearance of an ability that should be called an architectonic hearing and sense of musical logic... an ability by virtue of which the musician instinctively feels the laws of absolute beauty and the logical connection of sequences, which are made meaningful and illuminated by the course of the melody”¹⁵.

As if summing up these thoughts, Niels Bohr wrote: “The reason why art can enrich us lies in its ability to remind us of harmonies unattainable for systematic analysis. It may be said that literary, pictorial, and musical art forms a sequence of modes of expression... it gives greater freedom to the play of fantasy. In poetry in particular, this aim is achieved by the juxtaposition of words connected with the observer’s changing perception, and in this way the diverse aspects of human knowledge are emotionally united”¹⁶.

One may once again turn to Einstein, to whom contemporary modernists are so fond of turning in an attempt to find a theoretical basis for their formalistic abracadabras.

It is perhaps worth quoting a rather long passage from A. Moszkowski’s book¹⁷.

He wrote, not concealing his surprise: “I will say frankly, I was astonished when I heard that he, the great scientist, finds the source of the highest happiness not at all in science. — Personally,” Einstein declared, “works of art give me a sense of the highest happiness. In them I draw such spiritual bliss as in no other field.

— Professor! — I exclaimed. — Your words amaze me as a true revelation! Not that I had ever doubted your receptivity to art: I have too often seen how the sounds of good music affect you and with what enthusiasm you yourself play the violin. But even in those moments when you, as though renouncing the world, gave yourself wholly to the artistic impression, I said to myself: in Einstein’s life this is only a marvelous arabesque, and I would never have thought that this adornment of life is for you a source of supreme happiness. But perhaps you had in mind not only music?

— At the present moment I was thinking chiefly of poetry.

— Of poetry in general? Or of some particular poet?

— I meant poetry in general. But if you ask who arouses the greatest interest in me now, I shall answer: Dostoevsky! — He repeated this name several times with special emphasis. And in order to cut off at the root any objection, he added: “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientific thinker, more than Gauss.”

(Incidentally, it should be noted that in B. G. Kuznetsov’s book Studies on Einstein¹⁸ the author set himself the aim of answering the questions why Einstein spoke of Dostoevsky: “He gives me more than any

“a thinker greater than Gauss?”; what could Dostoevsky have given to the creator of the theory of relativity?

One may agree or disagree with B. G. Kuznetsov, but this is perhaps one of the very first attempts—and a highly successful one—to penetrate into the very essence (at the level, so to speak, of the interaction of atoms) of the connection between science and art: a concrete analysis of the influence of a concrete work of art on the formation of a scientific idea in a concrete scholar. What B. G. Kuznetsov has done is a vivid confirmation of the fruitfulness of such a path of research into the interconnection of art and science.

And once again one wants to repeat the thought already cited: that at present, apparently, it is even difficult to foresee how much the study of “artistic development in unity with an analysis of the paths of scientific thought” can yield, what roads of knowledge it can open.

Finally, for a more complete rehabilitation of art (which in fact needs none), one may turn to the legacy of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. The works of K. Marx, F. Engels, and V. I. Lenin, on which scientific, progressive aesthetics is based, testify with sufficient clarity to the high role they assigned to art in all spheres of social life, and to the significant place, finally, that art occupied in their own lives, struggle, and scholarly activity.

Consequently, there is no need to speak of any outliving or crisis of art under the pressure of the progress of science. On the contrary, we observe a profound mutual penetration and mutual enrichment of artistic and scientific thinking, which is increasingly becoming a necessary condition for the flourishing of science and the flourishing of art—of realistic art.

And this, too, is one of the objective regularities of our epoch. E. Kh. Stepanyan is quite right when he says: “Without exaggeration one may say that the process of synthesis embraces all aspects of social consciousness. The former separateness and closedness of forms of knowledge, which once replaced their original primitive unity, is receding into the past. A new unity is being formed on a new basis. What is taking place is a synthesis not only of the differentiating branches of science and kinds of art, but also of all forms of knowledge on the basis of the scientific worldview”^22).

Here it is necessary to make one further addition. In many studies, the comparison of art and science as different forms of knowledge often leads authors to conclusions that, once again, diminish the cognitive significance of art and misdirect the understanding of the process of typification.

In V. Ivanov’s very valuable work On the Essence of Socialist Realism there is the following argument: “Sensuous images also make it possible to draw abstract conclusions (the path of knowledge leads from living contemplation to abstract thought and from it to practice). But the scholar lays bare these abstract conclusions, whereas the artist does not; the artist uses the form of concrete representations in order, through their comparison and their system, to prompt the reader himself to certain conclusions, to compel him to think out these conclusions rather than assimilate ready-made ones.”

The single logical imperfection of this argument makes possible a whole series of erroneous interpretations.

In fact, the author may be understood in such a way that if the scholar rises from living contemplation to abstract conclusions, then in a work of art we have only a “comparison”

^22) Collection The Interaction of Forms of Social Consciousness. Moscow State University Press, 1964, pp. 20–21.

“concrete sensory representations.” Nor is it helped by the explanation that the author supposedly has in mind only the circumstance that the artist, unlike the scientist, “does not lay bare” “abstract conclusions.” These conclusions, in Ivanov’s view, must be drawn by the reader himself, while the artist, by juxtaposing concrete representations, “forces him to think through these conclusions.” This means that these “abstract conclusions” are, after all, absent from the work of art. Consequently, we have again arrived at the same proposition: that whereas in science abstract conclusions are drawn, in art cognition stops before reaching them; a work of art can provide only the material necessary for abstract conclusions (a system, a juxtaposition of concrete, sensory representations).

But, first, why deny artistic thinking the right to rise to the second stage of cognition, if at the same time one recognizes that art can provide true knowledge, can be a form of cognition (for the movement from living contemplation to abstract thinking and from it to practice, according to Lenin, is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality); and, second, what then is a typical image?

The point is that the very process of creating a typical image presupposes the work of abstracting thought, abstraction from the concrete, individual person of this shopkeeper. Therefore the typical image is not only a “concrete,” sensory representation, but also the “abstract conclusions” contained within it. A. N. Tolstoy saw this dialectic when he wrote: “At the moment of creation, the processes of generalization and vivification occur simultaneously”^23).

And here is V. G. Belinsky’s explanation: “It is necessary that a person, while being the expression of a whole world of persons, should at the same time be one person, whole, individual. Only under this condition, only through the reconciliation of these opposites, can he be a typical person”^24).

Thus the reader can “think through” these conclusions precisely because they are already present in the concrete image.

We are no longer even speaking of the fact that genuinely scientific and artistic thinking does not stop at the stage of abstract conclusions. It moves further and achieves the fullest knowledge at the stage of the concrete in thought. But this is already a well-known proposition that has no direct bearing on our topic.

Of no less importance for worldview is the question of the object of art and of science. Here, too, there is no single opinion among Soviet researchers.

One may name two clearly opposed points of view. Some (G. Nedoshivin, B. Kublanov, A. Dremov) believe that the object of art, just as of science, is all of reality.

Others (A. Burov, S. Vaiman, G. Abramovich, M. Kagan, V. Vanslova, and others) speak of the existence of a specific object of reflection in art. To be sure, it is understood in different ways: it is either “man,” or “the aesthetic properties of reality,” or “the relation between object and subject,” and so on.

It makes sense to examine these two points of view somewhat more carefully.

If art and science do not differ from each other in the object of reflection, of cognition, then, consequently, the difference between them lies only in the form of reflection, the mode of cognition. But such a formulation of the question contains the possibility of erroneous conclusions, especially harmful for art. For in this case the chief element constituting the specificity

^23) A. N. Tolstoy, Complete Collected Works, vol. 13, p. 292.
^24) V. G. Belinsky, Complete Collected Works, vol. 4, 1903, p. 73.

of art, becomes a form, a complex of formal features that distinguish the reflection of objective reality by art.

In turn, such a conclusion about the decisive, predominant role of form may become the theoretical basis for all sorts of formalist and modernist trends.

There is also another essential shortcoming in such an understanding of the subject of science and art. Is it legitimate to assert that the subject of science is all reality? Is such an understanding not overly expansive? In this case another, no less important, aspect of the question is affected: namely, the boundary is erased between different levels of social consciousness, in particular between ordinary consciousness and scientific-theoretical consciousness. Yet it is well known that scientific-theoretical consciousness developed only at a certain stage in the development of human consciousness; it was called forth by profound causes rooted in material production, in connection with the fact that this production and the whole of human social life posed tasks whose solution became beyond the power of ordinary consciousness, which remains at the empirical stage. It is also well known that today, and in the future, as the boundary between mental and physical labor is erased, these levels of social consciousness will be preserved and will differ from one another. And scientific, theoretical consciousness—science—has no reason to interfere in those areas of reality that are accessible to empirical generalization, to ordinary consciousness; otherwise science will merge with this empirical experience of humanity and will lose its significance, meaning, and role in the life of society.

Finally, the recognition of one and the same subject for science and art also contradicts another general proposition. This question has been sufficiently fully elucidated in our philosophical literature, and its essence is that the various forms of social consciousness (including science and art) differ from one another by the subject they reflect, by the form of reflection, by the social basis of their emergence, and also by their distinctive role in the development of society.

Thus, the second point of view should be recognized as more correct, since it indicates the difference between the subject of reflection of art and that of science.

The adherents of this trend quite rightly find confirmation of their propositions in the works of the classics of Marxism.

One should agree, for example, with the reasoning of S. Vaiman, who, analyzing K. Marx’s polemic with the Young Hegelian Szeliga, unfolded in the pages of The Holy Family, arrives at the following conclusion: “If Szeliga dissolves art in other forms of social consciousness, failing to notice the structural distinctiveness of the objects of artistic reflection, then Marx, both in his analysis of The Mysteries of Paris and in the Critique of Critical Criticism, proceeds from the indisputable fact that art has its own subject, its ‘own territory,’ its own gnoseosphere—an aesthetic reality, understood not dualistically... but consistently monistically—as an aesthetic reality as a moment in the movement of a single corporeal reality. Not a ‘slavish,’ but a ‘rational and natural dependence’ of the master upon this specific subject of art, the consideration of the ‘absolutely necessary and universal’ in it, is regarded by Marx as the most important objective-cognitive precondition for the freedom of artistic creation”^25).

But the difference between the subject of science and the subject of art cannot be understood in such a way that they cognize different objects. The more correct

^25) S. Vaiman. Marxist Aesthetics and the Problems of Realism. “Soviet Writer,” Moscow, 1964, p. 25.

will indicate that the structure of the object of artistic cognition differs in principle from the structure of the object of scientific cognition.

This clarification is especially necessary because any absolutization of the opposition between science and art with respect to the object of reflection also contains the possibility of further incorrect conclusions—idealist in their essence—which may serve as a support for all sorts of aesthetic tendencies of the “art for art’s sake” type.

In this case, what becomes especially important is precisely what is understood by the specific object of art, what real meaning is invested in the notion of a special structure of the object of artistic cognition.

Not having the possibility, within the framework of the present article, to examine consistently the various views on the specificity of the object of art, we shall confine ourselves merely to pointing out the circumstance that a dialectical-materialist solution of this question has fundamental worldview significance; it is absolutely necessary for the correct orientation and assessment of the very complex and diverse phenomena of contemporary art.

The thought cannot provoke objections that, in comparing art and science and in defining the features of this interrelation, we must not limit ourselves to a predominant consideration only of the specificity of the object of art and science, or only of the specific features of the form of reflection in art and science. Only such an approach to the solution of the problem—one that includes the dialectically understood unity of all the elements constituting the specific structure of the object of reflection, the form of cognition, and the specificity of the social basis that gave rise to science and art, and that takes into account their distinctive role in the development of society—can be the only fruitful and scientific one.

We would also like to point to one more important aspect of the comparison of science and art, one that usually remains outside the field of vision of researchers. The point is that this comparison, with apparent unexpectedness but in fact quite naturally, also acquires great methodological significance, in particular for determining the specificity of the genres of the various kinds of art.

Just as the specific structure of the object of science presupposes the specificity of the object of its various branches (kinds), so the specificity of the structure of the object of art makes it possible to speak of the distinctive features of the object of reflection in the various genres of art.

Meanwhile, in our literary studies, for example, when the differences among the genres of belles lettres are established, attention is focused predominantly only on the formal features of the genre.

By way of example, one may turn to such an interesting and fruitfully developing genre as the sketch.

It must be said that precisely here, in defining the genre specificity of the sketch, our literary studies reveal particular disagreements. Perhaps no other genre of belles lettres has been subjected to so many attempts to explain its specificity; no other genre has been the subject of so large a number of different pronouncements, most often containing opposing assertions.

Meanwhile, if one agrees with the thesis that different genres of belles lettres differ from one another not only and not so much by formal features, but also by the object of their artistic investigation, then this may provide a key to understanding the specificity of the genre of the sketch.

If we turn to the practice of Soviet essayists, we shall without difficulty find confirmation of the idea that there exists a specific object of investigation in the essay.

One of the leading Soviet essayists (V. Ovechkin) once wrote that he listened with great emotion to the writer Zakrutkin’s account of the wasteful attitude toward the fish resources of the Sea of Azov. He advised Zakrutkin to speak out on this matter in print with an article or an essay. But, writes V. Ovechkin, “Zakrutkin wrote a novel—not so terribly, as it turned out. You follow more the development of the relations between Vasilii Zubov and Grunya than the depletion of fish in the Sea of Azov. It is as though the author himself did not believe that a question of the national economy, too, is capable of arousing great interest in the reader”^26).

Thus, a “question of the national economy,” which could have resounded in an essay, becoming a special object of investigation, in another genre (in the novel) proved to be dissolved in another object, one more appropriate precisely to the novelistic genre.

One could have cited more such examples, testifying to the fact that not all phenomena of reality fit freely and naturally within the framework of one genre or another.

Consequently, the specificity of the essay genre must be sought above all in the specific object of essayistic investigation, which requires for itself a specific form and mode of reflection.

The comparison of art and science also has another important significance for determining the features of the essay genre. Let us recall what V. G. Belinsky wrote: “They want to see in art a kind of intellectual China, sharply separated by exact boundaries from everything that is not art in the strict sense of the word. And yet these boundary lines exist more presumptively than in reality; at any rate, one cannot point to them with one’s finger, as to the borders of a state on a map. As art approaches one or another of its boundaries, it gradually loses something of its own essence and takes into itself something of the essence of that with which it borders, so that instead of a line of demarcation there appears a region that reconciles both sides”^27).

If to this we add M. Gorky’s words that the essay lies somewhere between research and story, it will become clear: the essay, together with scientific-artistic literature and artistic journalism, is one of the border regions between science and art.

Belinsky’s indication that, as art approaches one boundary or another, it takes “into itself something of the essence of that with which it borders” is very important. This means that the essay, too, takes into itself something of the essence of science. Usually this connection of the essay with scientific research is seen only in the essayist’s use of journalism, of journalistic devices for depicting reality.

But, evidently, this connection is deeper, for the essay takes into itself something of the essence of science. Speaking in the most general terms, here we must see a border zone between the object of scientific investigation and the object of investigation of the essay.

All this has the meaning that, on the one hand, once again emphasizes the fruitfulness of studying the interaction of science and art, and, on the other, points to the depth of this interaction, an interconnection that excludes any absolute opposition of science and art, especially one that diminishes the role or significance of one or the other form of social consciousness. It is not in the opposition of “physics”

^26) “Novyi mir,” 1955, No. 12, p. 136.
^27) V. G. Belinsky, Complete Collected Works, vol. 10, Moscow, 1956, p. 318.

and the “lyricists,” but in their unity, in their mutual enrichment, we must see the principal tendency of the present epoch in the development of art and science.

In a country building communism, which, in the words of K. Marx, “produces man rich and deeply endowed in all his senses and perceptions,”¹⁹ the interaction of advanced science and advanced realistic art promotes their all-round flourishing, which, in turn, corresponds to the urgent tasks of communist construction, the tasks of communist education.

1. B. Nonev. “I Believe in Spring.” Literaturna Gazeta, January 4, 1966. ↩

2. Collection Philosophy and the Contemporary Epoch. Znanie Publishing House, Moscow, 1964. ↩

3. Ibid., p. 60. ↩

4. Here are cited certain propositions from the article by A. F. Yeremeev, “On the Criterion of Truth in Art.” Philosophical Sciences, 1962, No. 6, p. 39. ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. Ibid. ↩

7. P. S. Trofimov. Two Conceptions of Art. Znanie Publishing House, Moscow, 1965. ↩

8. Materials of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, p. 420. ↩

9. M. Gorky, Collected Works, vol. 27, p. 49. ↩

10. This was also noted by S. S. Goldentrikht in the article “Art and Worldview.” In the collection Interaction of Forms of Social Consciousness, Moscow State University Press, 1964, p. 200. ↩

11. Neva, 1965, no. 10, p. 170. ↩

12. T. D. Pavlov, Information, Reflection, Creativity. Sofia, 1965, p. 84. ↩

13. Cited from the brochure by V. S. Eliseeva, Labor, Art, Science. Znanie Publishing House, Moscow, 1964, p. 24. ↩

14. A. Einstein, L. Infeld. The Evolution of Physics. 1948, p. 223. ↩

15. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. Musical Articles and Notes. St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 57–58. ↩

16. Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, p. 111. ↩

17. A. Moszkowski. Albert Einstein (Conversations with Einstein on the Theory of Relativity and the “General System of the World”). Moscow, 1922, p. 162. ↩

18. B. G. Kuznetsov. Studies on Einstein. Nauka Publishers, 1965, p. 119. ↩

19. K. Marx and F. Engels, From the Early Works, p. 594. ↩