PROCEEDINGS
OF THE TOMSK POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
NAMED AFTER S. M. KIROV

Volume 291　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　1974

WORLDVIEW, SCIENCE AND ART

E. V. BURMAKIN

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU on the Role of Worldview, Science and Art in Solving the Tasks of Communist Construction

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union developed a broad, scientifically substantiated program of communist construction in our country. The historic decisions of the congress concern all aspects of the life of Soviet society; they recorded one of the most remarkable features of the development of our country: that during the years of Soviet power a new historical community of people has arisen among us—the Soviet people. This provision reflects an important law-governed pattern of social development: the objective course of the history of society is such that, inseparably connected with the socialist and communist transformation of the world, this transformation itself inevitably leads to the formation of such a person and such a society as will be capable of accomplishing the tasks of building communism, and will be worthy of communism.

Turning to the materials of the congress, one can see that a characteristic feature of the present period in the development of our country is the many-sided manifestation of the influence of the scientific and technological revolution. The scientific and technological revolution changes not only social production, developing its productive forces and revealing reserves; it changes a person’s way of life, the conditions of his labor and life, changes his relations with the surrounding world, including nature, and alters his consciousness and worldview positions.

Only under socialism is the fullest unfolding of all the positive consequences of the scientific and technological revolution possible; precisely under socialism it promises undeniable benefits to man. But the most important condition for this is the further development of science, scientific research, and scientific creativity. Therefore the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU paid such close attention to the problems of the further improvement of our scientific and educational institutions, to improving the activity of scientific collectives, and to the problems of the development of science.

The Resolution of the congress states: “The congress emphasizes that one of the factors in the successful solution of the tasks of communist construction is the development of Soviet science. While deploying scientific research on a broad front, it is necessary to concentrate the efforts of scientists on solving the most important problems, to strengthen the connection of science with the practice of communist construction, and to accelerate the application of its achievements in the national economy”¹).

¹) The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Stenographic Report. Vol. 2, Moscow, Politizdat, 1971, p. 236.

The general line of the Party on this question is expressed with utmost clarity and precision in the report of Comrade L. I. Brezhnev, who said: “Before us, comrades, stands a task of historic importance: organically to unite the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system, and more broadly to develop the forms, proper to socialism, of linking science with production”²).

The principal difference between the operation of social laws and the laws operating in nature consists in the fact that in society objective laws manifest themselves only through the activity of people, only in inseparable connection with the socio-productive practice of man. Therefore the measure of human freedom becomes the degree of mastery of the laws of social development, the degree of ability consciously to apply them in various spheres. The difference between the socialist socio-economic formation and all preceding ones consists in the fact that, already at the very moment of its emergence (in the process of the socialist revolution), it presupposes the conscious participation in the revolutionary struggle and in socialist construction of the broadest masses of working people, who are guided in this activity by knowledge of the laws of social development, with which Marxist science arms the working people. Socialism cannot function normally without the scientific organization of social production, without the scientific management of all aspects of social life. Thus, from the very nature of the socialist system there follows the enduring role of science in its life.

The conscious use of the achievements of science and of the laws of social development presupposes the improvement of the system of public education and an all-round raising of the general cultural and spiritual level of the working masses. The basis for raising the cultural level of every person is the mastery of a scientific, Marxist-Leninist worldview. In the report of Comrade L. I. Brezhnev it is said: “The core of all the Party’s ideological and educational work is the formation among the broadest masses of working people of a communist worldview, their education in the ideas of Marxism-Leninism”³). Philosophy has a special role here. Philosophy appears at once both as a general theory, depicting the dialectical-materialist picture of the world in its most universal features, and as a method of cognition and practical approach, of changing the world in which man lives. In it the essence of the Marxist-Leninist worldview is expressed. Therefore the development and successes of philosophical science, just like the successes of Soviet science as a whole, are inseparable from the tasks of forming a scientific worldview. In his address at the XXIV Congress, the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, M. V. Keldysh, justly noted: “In developing a worldview, science opens up new perspectives”⁴). Hence, if worldview performs in scientific knowledge the role of a general methodology, then science, as it develops, itself enriches worldview, changes and deepens our conceptions of the world and the regularities of its development, while an improved, enriched, and refined method of scientific cognition opens new perspectives before science and practice. Therefore here nothing can be crossed out, discarded, neglected; everything is interconnected and mutually conditioned. The successful union of the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution

²) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 82.
³) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 108.
⁴) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 267.

with the advantages of socialism requires mastery of the scientific worldview, which truly is a guiding beacon both in science and in human life in general. The Twenty-Fourth Congress directs the party and the entire Soviet public toward the need to use all paths and means for the propaganda of the scientific worldview, all means that contribute to its strengthening both in the public and in the individual consciousness of the working people of Soviet society.

It is precisely from these positions, above all, that the social role of literature and art in our country is assessed. The high appraisal of Soviet art and literature that was voiced at the congress also determines their equally high and responsible tasks. L. I. Brezhnev formulated the most important law of the development of the spiritual culture of socialist society: “As our society advances along the path of communist construction, the role of literature and art in shaping the worldview of the Soviet person, his moral convictions, and spiritual culture increases”^5).

The appraisal of the role and place of literature and art in the life of the Soviet country was voiced not only in the report and in such writers’ speeches as those of M. A. Sholokhov and A. B. Chakovsky, but also in many speeches by delegates, among which the speeches of representatives of the working class were heard in particular.

All this makes it possible to say that the congress deeply and comprehensively analyzed the state and level of development of socialist art and, proceeding from this analysis, defined the tasks of its development. Along with unquestionable successes in our art, as the congress noted, there are also shortcomings, especially those connected with the quality of the works being created. It has long been known that no correct idea, even the very best, embedded in a work, will reach a person’s mind and heart if the work of art as a whole proves weak, inexpressive, or hastily created.

In this connection, the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU especially emphasized the significant role of literary criticism, which is called upon to foster the development of everything best and most valuable that is created by Soviet writers, to notice and support talented youth in good time, and to evaluate weak and erroneous works strictly and objectively.

At the center of Soviet art’s attention remains the human being—the worker, the builder of communism. Here there is no need for our artists to invent or fantasize anything; it is necessary to be guided strictly and consistently by the method of socialist realism. This is precisely what the congress delegate, the brigade leader of fitters at the First State Bearing Plant, A. V. Viktorov, spoke about. He said: “Today we appeal to writers, to figures of theater and cinema, that they should portray more vividly the beauty and heroism of the Soviet working class, create the image of our contemporary, an ideologically convinced fighter of the party. Take these heroes from our life!”^6).

Everything that has been said makes it possible to understand why, in the area of social policy, as Comrade L. I. Brezhnev noted in his concluding speech, the most important line is “the line toward raising the communist consciousness of all working people, toward the all-round development of science and culture, toward the spiritual flourishing of the Soviet person, toward the consolidation of that moral and political atmosphere in the country in which people breathe easily, work well, and live calmly”^7).

^5) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 112.
^6) Ibid., vol. 1, p. 467.
^7) Ibid., vol. 2, p. 216.

The analysis of the tasks and condition of Soviet art and literature given at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU formed the basis for the work of the Fifth All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which met from June 29 to July 3, 1971. In the work of the writers’ congress, an important feature of the contemporary level of literary development was also noted—the growth of its worldview role, the strengthening of the connection between literature and science in affirming a scientific worldview and in the cognition of the world and of man.

The congress of Soviet writers convincingly demonstrated the principled worldview unity of our multinational literature, the convinced fidelity of the writers of the Land of Soviets to the ideals of communism. (The author of the present work was a delegate to the Fifth All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers; therefore some conclusions were drawn by him not only on the basis of an analysis of the congress materials, but also on the basis of personal impressions and observations.)

If one were to formulate briefly the leading, central idea of the congress’s work, it is expressed with the greatest completeness in the following words of the Resolution: “Soviet writers clearly understand that, as our society advances along the path of building communism, the role of literature and art is steadily increasing. This obliges us to raise our work to a new, still higher level, always unswervingly guided by the principles of socialist realism—Leninist partisanship, closeness to the people, and militant offensiveness in the struggle against alien ideology.”

This idea literally permeated the entire work of the congress from beginning to end. Opening the congress, the elder Soviet poet Nikolai Tikhonov said that the question of the ideological and artistic quality of our works, of writers’ labor as such, and of the force of revolutionary ideology stood with particular sharpness on the agenda of the writers’ congress.

It is noteworthy that in the report, when analyzing certain negative circumstances that contribute to the appearance of weak, gray, and even mistaken works, alongside such factors as a writer’s lack of demandingness toward himself and a writer’s superficial, approximate knowledge of the life of the people, special emphasis was placed on the significance of worldview for the correct orientation of talent. This is entirely natural, since it is precisely the artist’s worldview that determines his social positions and the artistic method by which he is guided in his creative work. It is all the more important to understand this under the conditions of today’s acute ideological struggle, when art and literature find themselves at its center and become means of political struggle. At the writers’ congress it was rightly noted that in the period after the Fourth All-Union Congress bourgeois propaganda made desperate attempts to achieve the isolation of Soviet culture and to hinder the spread of its influence in the world. They tried to achieve this by two main means: first, to organize an international boycott of Soviet literature and, second, to create within our country a certain literary “opposition.” As is known, both attempts failed and did not bring the desired results to their organizers. Therefore today yet another direction of literary-political struggle is being brought to the fore—the sphere of theory. Our opponents are moving toward the direct falsification of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics in order to undermine confidence in it and achieve their aims. What main paths are being used here?

First. Renegades of the E. Fischer type are trying to dissolve Marxism-Leninism in a multiplicity of philosophical and aesthetic doctrines, proclaiming ideological pluralism. Calls do not cease ...

toward the notorious convergence, toward a synthesis of Marxist aesthetics with existentialism, calls to discard the Leninist principle of Communist Party-mindedness, and refusal to recognize the scientific value of Lenin’s theory of reflection (Roger Garaudy).

Second. The denial of the international character of Leninism.

Third. The attempt to present Leninism as the doctrine of a narrow group, in essence to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism.

In this case, the responsible and great tasks of our aesthetic and literary theory become clear: to uphold, defend, and further develop its Marxist-Leninist foundations and principles; to generalize the experience of the art of socialist realism. It is necessary to see and trace the methodological unity of Soviet literature, which some people from time to time try to destroy when, for example, they begin to reason about the existence, alongside socialist realism, of socialist romanticism.

The great historical merit of Soviet literature consists in the fact that it has shown the world a new character—the character of the Soviet person, the person of socialist society. From the works of Soviet writers it is quite possible to reconstruct the history of our society, the formation of a new historical community of people—the Soviet people. At the same time, Soviet literature itself contributed to the emergence of this new historical community, since more than one generation of Soviet people was educated on the images and artistic types of our multinational literature.

These great goals—of knowledge and education—acquire especially urgent significance in our epoch of the transition from socialism to communism.

This makes it possible to see the meaning and significance of the problem posed in the present work: the interrelation of worldview, science, and art. Worldview lies at the foundation of the methodology of scientific and artistic creation. Worldview positions largely predetermine the success or failure of the creative searches of artists and scholars, while science changes, transforms, deepens our worldview notions, enriches them. Art, too, ultimately achieves this—above all the art of socialist realism. And finally, art and science, by their joint efforts, help the broad masses of working people—who by their labor are transforming the world—to master a scientific worldview. This is all the more true and comprehensible if one takes into account that worldview presupposes an organic unity of knowledge and convictions. However, the interrelations of science and art in the contemporary world are so complex that the very consideration of certain laws governing them acquires great worldview significance and may form the basis of particular methodological principles of scientific and artistic creation.

The present work does not claim to provide an exhaustive, broad, and profound study of the problem named; its task is only to outline certain methodological principles of an approach to it.

Worldview and Creativity as a Need

In 1971 the journal Novyi mir published two extraordinarily interesting articles by well-known Soviet scholars: P. Simonov’s “Sparking Contacts” (on certain general problems of brain physiology, psychology, and ethics) and V. Efroimson’s “The Genealogy of Altruism” (ethics from the standpoint of human evolutionary genetics). The latter was supplied with an extensive commentary article by the president of the All-Union

of the N. I. Vavilov Society of Geneticists and Breeders, Academician B. Astaurov.

It is thought that these publications not only testify to the notable successes of our physiologists and geneticists¹, but also introduce certain clarifications and additions into existing ideas about the origin and essence of human consciousness, of human “spirituality.”

In the opinion of Professor P. Simonov, the results obtained in research make it possible, in the study of man, to renounce “the traditional, rigid, cyberneticized determinism that turns the personality into a passively reflecting automaton”². The works of a number of scholars also confirm with particular force the immutability of the Marxist-Leninist principle of historicism as the most important condition both for fruitful scientific knowledge in general and for the study of the origin of a number of human psychological qualities in particular.

Defining the meaning and significance of the work already carried out, P. Simonov writes: “It would be absurd to hope that all the motives determining human actions can be found in the sphere of the instincts of higher vertebrate animals. We regard as the chief achievement of ethology (the science of animal behavior in their natural environment) and of the physiology of the higher nervous activity of animals the discovery of needs that are fundamentally nonhomeostatic—one might even say antihomeostatic—for novelty (exploratory behavior), for overcoming obstacles (the ‘reflex of freedom’), for the restructuring of a historically formed hierarchy, for reactions to signals of the state of other individuals to the detriment of one’s own safety (the biological rudiments of ‘altruism’)”³.

Since P. Simonov, in opposing the principle of the “homeostat-pendulum,” considers the process of the formation of needs, let us turn to his article. As his starting points the author chose the fundamental statements of the classics of Marxism, in particular the following: “People have grown accustomed to explaining their actions from their thinking, instead of explaining them from their needs (which, in doing so, are of course reflected in the head, become conscious)…”⁴. “No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of some need of his and for the sake of the organ of this need”⁵.

We shall not go on, following P. Simonov, to consider needs as the determining cause of human actions, explaining the goal-directedness of people’s behavior. Let us turn at once to the conclusions of interest for this section. Numerous experiments on animals (not only on higher animals), conducted by Soviet and foreign scientists, indicate that the need for an outlet, for a disturbance of homeostasis (“equilibrium with the surrounding environment,” “comfort”), proves to be no less strong than the striving for homeostasis; they considerably broaden ideas about the exploratory behavior of animals. What, then, does this provide for understanding certain sources of human behavior and human needs at the physiological level?

“Unlike animals, the need for novelty in man, acquiring the features of a socially determined need for knowledge, can be satisfied in two ways. First, the search for the new, which

objectively already exists but is not yet known to the subject. The second way of satisfying “informational hunger” is such an arrangement of previously received impressions that makes it possible actively to introduce novelty into a combination of long-known elements—that is, creativity. These two paths are closely connected with one another... At the same time, each of these two modes of cognition has its own distinctive features; each of them is represented in its own way in scientific and artistic creativity.”¹³

Thus, creativity, as one aspect of the need for cognition, itself proves to be a powerful need, with biological prerequisites that are expressed in the exploratory behavior of animals, in their need for novelty.

To confirm the soundness of P. Simonov’s conclusions, one may refer to V. Efrimson’s profoundly optimistic article and to the commentary on it by Academician B. Astaurov. And here we find that, in the biological phase of human evolution, those responsible for the rapid progress of the specific traits of humanity (social instincts, rationality, socially useful capacities for labor, social ethics and morality) were “natural group selection,” “hereditary factors of humanity” that determine mental and creative abilities, altruistic behavior, and so forth.¹⁴

A peculiar exchange between the two articles mentioned becomes very clearly apparent. On the basis of a large body of experimental material, P. Simonov traces the emergence of altruism, of a distinctive mechanism of sympathy, at the prehuman stage. But sympathy—the capacity to respond to the pain, joy, anxiety, and so on of one’s fellows—lies, as P. Simonov rightly notes, at the foundation of art. He confirms this with the testimonies of Halldór Laxness and Konstantin Simonov. Hundreds of such testimonies can be cited from the history of art: this is indeed one of the most fundamental features of genuine art.

Alexander Tvardovsky has a poem, astonishing in its emotional effect on the reader, in which, it seems, one more shade of this fundamental feature of art—of poetry—is caught. This poem does not lend itself to prose paraphrase; it must be quoted in full.

I know it is no fault of mine
That others did not return
From the war,
That they—some older, some
younger—
Remained there, and that is not what this is about,
That I could, yet could not,
preserve them,—
It is not about that, but still, still,
still...

Here what is captured is not only the capacity to respond to the pain of one’s fellows, but also the ensuing sense of one’s own responsibility for the grief and death of other people, a feeling of lofty, truly human conscience, which may be regarded as an essential need of the artist’s spiritual life, one of the sources of creativity.

¹³ Novyi mir, 1971, No. 9, pp. 199–200.
¹⁴ Novyi mir, 1971, No. 10, p. 224.

Thus is born the generosity of art. Let us cite just one piece of evidence in confirmation of this thought. In the poem “Treasures,” dedicated to Margarita Aliger, the Soviet poet Leonid Pervomaisky says:

Evidently, generosity is inherent
in poets.
Devoted to song with all our soul,
We, bestowing, are happy thereby;
The richer we are,
the more generous we are.

Thus, we again find confirmation of the proposition that creativity, not only in its global sense, at the level of the universal, but also in its local manifestations (the level of the particular), when a distinction is established between scientific and artistic creativity, has a deep foundation in human needs that have been worked out in the process of evolution.

All that has been said compels us to treat with attention and a certain confidence one of P. Simonov’s main conclusions: “If we share Marx and Engels’ thesis on needs as the leading forces of behavior, we find ourselves faced with the necessity of substantially changing our ideas about the mechanism by which the surrounding environment influences personality. The concrete social environment does not so much form personality in the sense of mechanically introducing certain traits into it, as it selects those properties of personality that represent the greatest value precisely for the given social group.”⁶

There is no doubt that this assertion, from the point of view of the genesis of certain traits characterizing personality, is entirely just, and it should not exclude the fact that the surrounding social environment is capable not only of selecting certain properties of personality, thereby consolidating what already exists, but also of being the source, the cause of the emergence of certain properties of the given personality.

This is confirmed by P. Simonov’s subsequent considerations, in particular those connected with defining the place and role of the self-education of the personality, the need for which arises as a result of the influence of the surrounding social environment, as a response to the demands it presents to the personality.

The undoubted originality of P. Simonov’s position allows him to see new facets of such a major problem as the formation of worldview, the choice of a worldview position. He writes: “The choice of a worldview position is the result not so much of a rational acquaintance with various points of view as the result of self-education.”⁷ This is especially noticeable in the example of those people who, belonging by birth, origin, and upbringing to some definite social group, subsequently break with it and move over to the positions of a class that is often opposed to it in its interests, sometimes even becoming leaders or ideologists of this class.

But here we already enter that more traditional sphere in which it is natural to consider creativity as a social need. Therefore it should be noted that, with all possible further clarifications concerning a number of propositions of the articles discussed here, we can confidently believe that the successes of modern natural science (genetics, the physiology of higher nervous activity) make it possible to discover an astonishingly firm connection between the social and the purely biological nature of human needs—

passions. There is no doubt that this provides a distinctive additional material supporting the high and active role of needs, these “motive forces of human behavior,” in the life and functioning of each individual personality and of human society as a whole.

There is likewise no doubt that, nevertheless, the specificity of human needs is determined by the specificity precisely of human existence—the social nature of human activity and, above all, social labor. Social-production practice has determined all the basic qualitative characteristics and features of human consciousness and behavior.

Human needs are “both the precondition and the result not only of people’s labor activity proper, but also of cognitive processes. It is precisely for this reason that they appear as those states of the personality by means of which the regulation of behavior is carried out, the direction of a person’s thinking, feelings, and will is determined”⁸. It is here that it becomes apparent that a worldview is a quite natural need. From the very moment when a person becomes aware of his separation from nature, he develops a need to elaborate the most general conceptions of the world in which he lives, of his own place in it, of the meaning of his activity and of the destinies of humanity. In its developed form, a worldview becomes the totality of a person’s scientific, socio-political, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic principles and views, convictions and ideals.

But one would like to see also the deeper roots that gave rise to the need for a worldview.

In A. M. Korshunov’s interesting work The Theory of Reflection and Creativity⁹, the unity of reflection and creativity is demonstrated. Moreover, the author speaks of their real unity, and not of the unity of two functions of the process of thinking and cognition. The logic of the author’s reasoning is as follows: creativity is reflection, and reflection, insofar as it includes and presupposes activity, is creative; consequently, every active reflection carried out by a person or by society constitutes creativity.

This, of course, is only a very meager schema, reflecting the essence of A. M. Korshunov’s point of view, but in his book it acquires flesh and blood, being confirmed by numerous facts and studies of the process of reflection. It is difficult not to agree with it.

But in that case we receive no less right to assert that worldview is, in essence, creativity. In fact, this follows as a necessary consequence already from the indisputable fact that worldview is reflection, that is, the result of the repeated reflection of the numerous and diverse phenomena and objects of the objective world. At the same time, this also conditions the activity of worldview. But not only this. Worldview is not just any reflection of any things and relations. Worldview is a generalized system of conceptions about the world. Consequently, the process of forming and elaborating a worldview presupposes the active work of human thinking in selecting such products of reflection as make it possible to derive the most general conceptions of the world and of its regularities. But how else is one to characterize this process, if not as a creative process?

The elaboration of a worldview is not a self-sufficient process developing in a void; it has definite foundations, sources, and

When we assert that the need for a worldview was reinforced by the necessity for human beings to become aware of their unity with nature and of their relative independence, we find that the process of such awareness did not take place speculatively, but was carried out through labor, science, and art—that is, through those spheres of human activity that are creative.

Thus we obtain a new important premise: worldview is creativity. Combining it with the one already available—creativity is a need—we again arrive at the previously formulated conclusion: worldview is a need.

Being a need, worldview is therefore one of the sources of various forms of activity both of the individual person and of various social groups and society as a whole. It is truly a guide, the spiritual mentor of the individual, the class, the party, the country, and humanity.

At the same time, it is precisely worldview that becomes a source, an impelling principle in scientific and artistic creation. In fact, worldview is not simply an aggregate of knowledge and conceptions of the world derived by rational thought; this knowledge becomes a worldview when it forms a person’s sociopolitical, moral, and aesthetic positions, becomes his inner convictions. Thus there arises the need to defend one’s convictions, to prove their legitimacy and truth, and the need to “infect” other people with the principles of one’s conviction, since it seems to us that genuine human happiness can be achieved only along those paths along which our worldview and our convictions lead us.

This is, by its nature, a profoundly altruistic striving, i.e., one of human needs. This need can be realized in scientific and artistic creation.

Thus we encounter an entire cluster of interconnected, interdependent, and mutually determining needs, the result of whose interaction becomes an inexhaustible source for worldview, science, and art, determining their necessity and inevitability in the life of humanity.

It remains to add that under the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution the role and significance of these three factors of human creative activity are constantly increasing, which will be the subject of proof in the subsequent exposition. But even now certain arguments should be adduced that confirm this proposition.

There is no doubt that the constructive, i.e., genuinely creative role of worldview, science, and art is revealed with the greatest fullness and force in a society building communism. Socialist society, while providing the greatest opportunities for revealing the positive consequences of the scientific and technological revolution, at the same time engenders, as an urgent need, the all-round development of the personality. The point is that the most important condition for creating the material and technical basis of communism is not only the stimulation of people’s labor efforts; this basis itself can bring certain, desired results only on condition that the general education and culture of working people are raised. In analyzing the main factors in the development of the personality at the present stage of socialist society, I. I. Kravchenko and V. S. Markov^19^ are entirely correct, alongside the objective conditions of personality development and the change in the worker’s place in production determined by the growth of his cultur—

^19^ Voprosy filosofii, 1971, No. 9.

of the scientific-technical level, is described as follows: “The formation and development of a complex of new ideological and moral motives of labor activity, bearing a creative character and characterized in general as a communist attitude toward labor, expressing a new type of responsibility in which competence and creativity, the self-expression of the personality (the realization of its abilities), and the subordination of all socially significant aspects of behavior to the protection of social interests are combined ever more organically”²⁰).

This means that the unity of worldview (conscious conviction) and creativity is determined by the practical tasks posed by the present stage in the development of socialist society.

The satisfaction of this need, the actual realization of this unity, and the strengthening of its influence on the spiritual makeup of the builder of communist society are the most important condition for achieving that universality of the communist individual about which K. Marx and F. Engels wrote, noting that his life “embraces a broad range of varied activity and different kinds of practical relation to the world and is, therefore, a many-sided life; in such an individual, thinking bears the same character of universality as every other manifestation of his life”²¹).

Here we have come close to another group of questions connected with determining the role and character of the interaction of worldview, science, and art in the modern epoch, characterized above all by the fact that it is an epoch of transition from capitalism to communism.

Worldview, Creativity, and Everyday Consciousness

What determines the necessity of posing this group of questions?

First of all, by the fact that both worldview and creativity (with the exception of the genuinely scientific) can be realized at two levels of social consciousness and, consequently, prove to be closely interconnected with everyday consciousness.

Indeed, a worldview may be not only scientific, theoretically grounded, but also everyday, spontaneous, naïve.

Furthermore, folk artistic creativity enters into everyday consciousness as its most important component; despite all its difference from professional creativity, it is undoubtedly creativity and, moreover, is capable of exerting a noticeable influence on the professional artist.

And, finally, science arose and grew out of that part of everyday consciousness in which empirical experience and knowledge had been accumulated and generalized for centuries; and today complex, dialectical interrelations exist between the scientific-theoretical level of knowledge and its empirical stage, the consideration of which is absolutely necessary.

This is one group of factors determining the significance of posing the present question. Another is connected with those qualitative, fundamental changes in everyday consciousness in the modern epoch which occur under the influence of scientific and artistic creativity and are linked with changes in the worldview positions of large masses of people.

It is also necessary to take into account a third circumstance, reflecting that side of the interaction of developed scientific and artistic creativity in which the role and place of intuition is revealed and, at the same time, certain new aspects of the significance of common sense are discovered

²⁰) Ibid., p. 31.
²¹) K. Marx and F. Engels, Works (2nd ed.), vol. 3, p. 252.

(of common sense) in the creation and choice of a worldview position.

In defining everyday consciousness, one should agree with the point of view of V. Kelle and M. Kovalzon, who regard it as “the consciousness of the mass of people, arising in the process of their daily, routine practice... Unlike ideology and science, the latter does not rise to a theoretical understanding of reality and is confined within the bounds of empirical experience; it is fixed in traditions, mores, customs” ²²).

Here the most important features of everyday consciousness and its difference from scientific consciousness are indeed captured. But, taking into account the contemporary level and conditions of interaction between the scientific and everyday levels of consciousness, certain additions and clarifications should be made.

As V. A. Lektorsky rightly noted, the value of knowledge and the degree of its objectivity depend on the extent to which the possibility of various “perspectives” of the object is revealed, i.e., the extent to which knowledge grasps not only the “actual form” of the object, but also its possible “projections” in other situations. Then it is established that “if, at the stage of everyday cognition, the linking of various ‘projections’ of an object into a single structure is usually carried out by means of a simple conjunction ‘and’ (the given object A is not only B, but it can be B₁ in situation C₁, B₂ in situation C₂... and so on), then in science this is accomplished, as a rule, by revealing a certain internal mechanism (essence), the interaction of which with external conditions is expressed in the form of one or another ‘projection.’ By the degree to which this internal mechanism is revealed, so-called ‘phenomenological’ scientific theories are distinguished from structural ones; moreover, contemporary science gives clear preference to the latter over the former” ²³).

This reasoning undoubtedly brings to the fore the problem of the interaction of everyday and scientific consciousness and cognition.

The following observation concerns the fact that today, evidently more than ever, there is manifested a fact testifying to the absence of an impassable boundary between everyday and scientific-theoretical consciousness. Today it is clear that there are no people possessing only scientific consciousness, who, so to speak, do not descend to the everyday level, just as there are no bearers of only everyday consciousness. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon should be considered the process of convergence of these levels of social consciousness under the conditions of our epoch, when the scientific worldview is becoming the property of an ever greater number of people, when the scientific and technological revolution has brought about serious changes in the relations between human beings and the objective world and has changed their consciousness.

T. I. Oizerman justly noted that the principal tendencies in the development of everyday consciousness under the influence of socio-economic and scientific-technological progress “are the displacement from everyday consciousness of irrational notions and other groundless beliefs; a rapprochement between everyday consciousness and scientific consciousness (which, however, will never lead to the erasure of the essential difference between them); and the activation of everyday consciousness, which, becoming ever more rational, moral, discerning, aesthetically demanding, independent, and critical, no longer merely adapts to existing conditions, but participates in the creative activity of human beings transforming the world” ²⁴).

²²) V. Kelle, M. Kovalzon. Forms of Social Consciousness. Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1959, pp. 23–24.
²³) “Problems of Philosophy,” 1967, No. 4, p. 50.
²⁴) Ibid., p. 130.

Such are the features of the development of everyday consciousness in our epoch, especially under the conditions of socialism.

But here I would like to state one extremely important proposition. However large the mass of people in whom qualitative changes have taken place in their everyday conceptions, bringing their consciousness closer to scientific, philosophical consciousness (and this is facilitated by modern production, which has raised the requirements placed on the worker; by the system of general education, by belles-lettres, by the means of mass communication, etc.), nevertheless there still remain many people who, for one reason or another, have not mastered the foundations of scientific knowledge or who retain, as the leading aspects of their conscious activity, everyday conceptions. This is the cause of contradictions and conflictual clashes among different people when the matter concerns, in particular, the spiritual values of the human being—something that is so precisely recorded in many works of contemporary socialist art.

Essential differences between scientific-theoretical and everyday consciousness cannot disappear even under the conditions of a developed communist society, which is connected above all with the difference between the objects reflected by these two levels of social consciousness. Consequently, everyday consciousness will nevertheless remain everyday consciousness, retaining that contradictoriness of its own which scientific-theoretical consciousness overcomes.

T. I. Oizerman, in the article already cited, writes: “Everyday consciousness is a two-faced Janus, one face of which is turned toward the real, this-worldly world, and the other toward the non-existent, otherworldly one. It would be a mistake to identify everyday consciousness with common sense (sound judgment), although it is beyond doubt that sound reasoning constitutes its most essential, vitally important content. An equally serious mistake would be to deny the contradictoriness, the duality of everyday consciousness”¹⁰.

Does not everything that has been said allow us to conclude that in the contemporary epoch, within the structure of everyday consciousness, one should distinguish its own levels (or sublevels, bearing in mind that everyday consciousness is itself a level of social consciousness)? It seems that there are serious grounds for this. In that case, common sense—the part of everyday consciousness that is “turned toward the real” world and that has come closest to scientific consciousness, having undergone qualitative changes—could be assigned to the upper story (sublevel) of everyday consciousness. The lower sublevel would be made up of those aspects of everyday consciousness in which conservative notions, illusions, philistinism (“the mug of the petty bourgeois”), and so forth are retained.

What is the meaning of such an understanding of the structure of everyday consciousness? Such an approach may to some extent become a methodological key to understanding a number of phenomena characteristic of the consciousness of modern man, and also to the study of the laws of contemporary everyday consciousness and, finally, to the investigation of the interconnection between everyday consciousness and scientific-theoretical consciousness. For clarity, let us pose the following question: in what way and to what extent do the achievements of contemporary science (above all the achievements of a number of fields of natural science and philosophy) become the possession of the broad masses of working people? Let us exclude from this those cases in which the ordinary worker, by virtue of the specifics of his profession, possesses certain specialized knowledge at the level of scientific-theoretical knowledge. As for the paths by which scientific knowledge goes to the masses, they have already been named (including

popular-science publications, radio, television, etc.). The question remains of the extent to which working people master scientific conceptions. It would be absurd to suppose that any person who has acquired some scientific information and is even capable of conveying it to others—say, about the theory of relativity, about cosmological models of the universe, about the successes of molecular biology or nuclear physics—thereby raises his knowledge to the scientific-theoretical level. Moreover, the process of differentiation of knowledge has reached such a degree that not every time are representatives of one and the same science, specializing in its different fields, able to understand one another.

Consequently, any one of us, not being a specialist in some particular science, can assimilate its propositions only at the level of ordinary consciousness (of course, this does not mean that if the task is to become precisely a specialist in this science, one cannot become one because one is engaged in another science).

It is here that the distinction between the sublevels of ordinary consciousness becomes important, since it is clear that the assimilation of scientific knowledge takes place on the upper story (sublevel) of ordinary consciousness. Since these sublevels possess relative independence, this explains how, in the consciousness of a modern person, entirely scientific conceptions can combine with outright mysticism, anti-scientific errors and illusions; it explains the contradictoriness characteristic of ordinary consciousness.

There are also other concrete problems that confirm the correctness of the supposition advanced.

Let us try to see this in that group of questions which are connected with understanding the role of common sense (sound reason) in worldview, in scientific and artistic creativity.

Leaving aside the history of this question, let us note only that only Marxist-Leninist philosophy proved capable of revealing the essence and significance of sound reason in cognition. Its role is manifested in the fact that sound reason makes it possible to see, and to separate from a rational view of the world, various superstitions and prejudices, to distinguish what is accidental, conditioned by fashion, from what is truly valuable and enduring, etc. And although sound reason, like ordinary consciousness as a whole, may be used by opposing philosophical trends, it is nevertheless objectively closer to the materialist conception. It is no accident that V. I. Lenin criticized those representatives of idealism who invoked the “naive realism” of ordinary consciousness in order to substantiate their conceptions opposed to materialism.

We have assigned common sense (sound reason) to the upper sublevel of ordinary consciousness, i.e., to that part of it which is especially sharply influenced by scientific-theoretical knowledge. This is very important to understand under the conditions of contemporary ideological struggle, when our ideological opponents try to distort people’s common sense, to bring to the fore irrational motives of human consciousness. It is noteworthy that very often representatives of contemporary idealism, in their efforts to overcome the constraining bounds of common sense, go so far that they find themselves at the very lowest stages of ordinary consciousness. Speaking of existentialism, T. I. Oizerman observed: “It is paradoxical that a philosophy which declares itself an uncompromising opponent of everything ordinary is, because of its extreme limitedness, incapable of getting out of the sucking mire of bourgeois ordinariness.”¹¹ But in that case it turns out that

sometimes a single effort of common sense is enough to see the untenability of one or another idealist conception of contemporary fashionable trends in the sphere of art and general worldview-mania. All the more so because the common sense of modern man receives such powerful reinforcement from scientific-theoretical consciousness. In the novel The Newlyweds by the contemporary French writer Jean-Louis Curtis, the main character is an ordinary rank-and-file employee, whom one would not suspect of being the bearer of some scientific-theoretical consciousness or of standing on the positions of a communist worldview. Nevertheless, his common sense helps him excellently to understand the worthlessness, futility, and emptiness of the aesthetic tastes of the people around him, for whom the main thing is not to fall behind fashion. In the name of fashion they successively declare themselves ardent admirers now of Stendhal, now of Camus, now of contemporary representatives of the absurd. Here are the reflections of the novel’s hero: “One of the most current evaluations is roughly this: ‘It is difficult to read, even rather boring; one has to force one’s way through the text, but it is worth it’—an evaluation at which Stendhal, who considered boredom an infallible indicator of a work’s lack of talent, would have had a good laugh. It goes without saying that all of them regarded clarity as synonymous with superficiality, and, conversely, ornateness and obscurity of style as evidence of depth of thought. In a word, a herd of seals greedily snapping at the bait of contemporary stupidity”¹².

This reasoning of the hero of the French novel was worth citing also because, at times, we too, representatives of socialist society, distrusting our own common sense, accept as genuine values in art things that by no means deserve this, yielding to the whims of fashion.

It is no less important to check oneself against common sense in the process of creation, especially artistic creation. Goethe, as is well known, spoke unambiguously about this. Common sense is capable of saving the artist from being carried away by artificial “piling up of details and embellishments,” of which M. Gorky spoke more than once, and from blindly following models of a “fashionable style.”

Common sense is, after all, also life experience, which dictates restraint in the manifestation of one’s own feelings, a demanding selection of words and means of artistic expressiveness; it is the calm wisdom of the master, who has no need to resort to extravagant, labored devices in order to achieve the goal he has set himself, to express the full depth of his thoughts and feelings.

Is this not what Alexander Tvardovsky’s poem is about?

Having known the heat of such labor,
When the hours pass more swiftly,
When you forget where you are, what you are,
And who, and what your name is;
When the whole world is, as it were, anew,
And life is dear unto death,—
From the sweet tears that are ready
At least restrain yourself.
The years bind more strictly,
Do not regret the former flashes,
It is no joke to be younger than oneself,
It is harder to be more mature than oneself.

As the great poet testifies, common sense can become a kind of organizer, a guide of inspiration; it is evidence of the artist’s maturity.

A new aspect of the interrelation between common sense and creativity is manifested in the role played by intuition in science and art.

Contemporary researchers of human creative activity have already noted that the most important factor in the psyche of a creator, of a talent, is productive intuition. Obviously, this is most clearly seen in the example of artistic creation. Thus E. S. Gromov writes: “Artistic creation is characterized by a very distinctive interaction of intuitive and discursive factors. In the final analysis, the poet needs logic no less than the mathematician does. But artistic intuition at times seems to absorb discursive cognition, becoming, if one may put it this way, the form of its existence. This happens especially often in musical creation, as well as in lyric poetry”^28).

Intuition is no less necessary in scientific creation, although its role here is more veiled and does not appear in the final results^29).

What, then, is the connection between intuition and common sense? As M. Bunge rightly notes, in contemporary scientific literature intuition is most often understood as rapid perception, imagination, abbreviated argumentation, and sound judgment. In this case M. Bunge understands common sense as judgment based on everyday knowledge, not relying on special knowledge and methods, or limited to the stages already traversed by scientific knowledge.

Sound judgment, phronesis (practical wisdom), takes its rightful place also when intuition performs the role of evaluation; we then speak of a sense of principle or of insight. In this case common sense helps quickly and correctly to assess the importance and significance of a problem, the plausibility of a theory, the applicability and reliability of a method, or the usefulness of an action.

Since intuition is a distinctive and complex synthesis of sensory and rational thinking, and reflects the dialectic of mediated and immediate in cognition, on this basis two kinds of intuition are distinguished: sensory intuition (immediate knowledge obtained with the help of the sense organs) and intellectual intuition (“the direct grasp of truth, not derived by means of proof from other truths”).

It would be a mistake to imagine the matter in such a way that sensory intuition is entirely the property of ordinary consciousness, while intellectual intuition can exist only at the level of scientific-theoretical consciousness.

Let us consider in more detail some conclusions from M. Bunge’s interesting work. Here is a clarification of his understanding of intuition: “In the language in which we speak about science, ‘intuition’ denotes kinds of perception (rapid identification, clear understanding, and the ability to interpret), imagination (the capacity for representation, the art of comparison, and creative imagination), inference (accelerated inference), synthesizing (a generalizing point of view), understanding (common sense), and evaluation (phronesis)”^30).

As we see, M. Bunge proceeds practically from the unity of these two kinds of intuition, considering that in science, too, intellectual intuition by no means excludes sensory intuition. To confirm this, one more quotation: “That reason and experience are insufficient for scientific work—

^28) E. S. Gromov. Artistic Creation. Moscow, Politizdat, 1970, p. 73.
^29) V. F. Asmus. The Problem of Intuition in Philosophy and Mathematics. “Mysl,” 1963; M. Bunge. Intuition and Science. Moscow, “Progress,” 1967.
^30) M. Bunge. Intuition and Science. Moscow, “Progress,” 1967, p. 123.

that, it has often been noted. Thus, Claude Bernard, one of the founders of experimental medicine, said that the experimental method rests on three pillars: “feeling” (or emotion), reason, and experience. He added that “feeling” always holds the initiative and gives rise to an “a priori idea (-hypothesis), or intuition”^31).

How, then, do matters stand with ordinary consciousness? That sensory intuition has a place at the level of ordinary consciousness is not in doubt for anyone. But, as we have seen, intellectual intuition includes, as its most important moment, common sense (understanding, phronesis), i.e., an inseparable part of ordinary consciousness.

M. Bunge upholds an interesting point of view in defining the role of intuition as imagination in scientific and artistic creativity. He believes that scientific work requires incomparably more imagination than the creativity of an artist. In his view, Einstein’s photon hypothesis, Oparin’s hypothesis, or the creation by Mauchly and Eckert of the electronic computer required more imagination than Michelangelo’s “David,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”

M. Bunge writes: “Creative imagination in science is richer than in art, because it has to go beyond the limits of sensory experience and common sense; it is more precise than in art, because it has to overcome itself and must strive to be true. Scientific research is not simply (Poetry), but has a tendency to become (Truth)”^32). We shall not polemicize with M. Bunge over the degree of intensity of imagination in art and in science, but let us note his thought that, unlike artistic creativity, creative imagination in science goes “beyond the limits of sensory experience and common sense.” In principle, this is undoubtedly so. But can this proposition be understood to mean that artistic creativity does not go beyond these limits (of sensory experience and common sense)? If M. Bunge’s statement gives grounds for such a conclusion, then it at least needs qualification.

The point is that common sense can be not only an aid in creativity, but also its ardent opponent. Creativity has to overcome common sense as an established, habitual conception, from whose standpoint new ideas may seem paradoxical and even absurd. There is no doubt that without this overcoming of the inertia of common sense, neither classical mechanics, nor field theory, nor evolutionary theory, nor scientific materialism and a consistent materialist worldview could have been created.

The inhibiting functions of common sense manifest themselves not only in the process of creative work, but are also substantially reflected in the creator’s own evaluation of the results achieved. One can find many examples of this in the history of science^33).

Having formulated the basic propositions of the theory of heat engines, Carnot believed that this was confirmation of the existence of caloric. Maxwell, in accordance with established conceptions, regarded the ether as the carrier of electrical and magnetic phenomena when expounding the theory of magnetism. Schrödinger incorrectly interpreted the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, although he himself had obtained it. Einstein, too, more than once arrived at erroneous conclusions from the correct premises of his own theory.

^31) Ibid., p. 125.
^32) Ibid., p. 131.
^33) See: A. D. Aleksandrov, “Truth and Error,” Voprosy filosofii, 1967, No. 4.

No less harm can be done by common sense to artistic creation, where it becomes hostile to creative imagination, to fantasy. In this case common sense does not accept conventionality, allegoricalness, the transformation of real facts by fantasy. It is no accident, therefore, that world literature has, in its own way, branded and exposed the complacency and sententiousness of bourgeois common sense.

All this compels us to think seriously about the possibilities of intuition. Here is M. Bunge’s conclusion, with which one would like to agree: “In short, there can be hardly any doubt that intuition of various kinds is encountered in scientific research, despite the fact that it is absent from science as a set of propositions. The scientist, while valuing intellectual intuition for its ability to prompt reflection, knows that it can be dangerous: first, because intellectual intuition has no demonstrative force; second, because intuition is, to a certain extent, ordinary common sense, and it is conservative; third, because intuition is never sufficiently precise”¹³.

And, finally, can one forget the fact that there exists an intuitionist philosophy? Can one ignore the circumstance that such representatives of it as Dilthey, Bergson, Husserl, in one way or another contributed to the formation of fascist ideology, and that the philosophy of intuitionism favored anti-intellectualism and various pseudosciences?

Everything that has been said is quite sufficient to draw a conclusion about the contradictory essence and contradictory functions of both common sense and intuition. But this is a reflection of the contradictoriness of ordinary consciousness, to which intuition as a whole, and common sense as its most important moment, undoubtedly belong.

In this case, precisely these phenomena of consciousness evidently express, with the greatest fullness, the characteristic features of the interaction between the ordinary and the scientific-theoretical levels of social consciousness in the modern epoch.

Now let us return once again to the possible conclusion that artistic creation, unlike scientific creation, does not go beyond the limits of common sense and sensory experience, beyond the limits of ordinary consciousness. As has already been said, artistic thinking, no less than scientific thinking, must overcome common sense in the name of its own existence and of the possibility of applying the diverse forms of artistic expressiveness.

The most important feature of scientific-theoretical consciousness is that it does not stop at the surface of phenomena, but penetrates into their essence, fixing knowledge in the forms of abstract thinking. However, the artistic image too is a reflection not only of the external manifestations, but also of the essence of what it depicts; it too presupposes the efficacy of abstracting thought, which makes it possible to create typical characters and to see typical circumstances.

Consequently, artistic creation necessarily breaks through the framework of ordinary consciousness, rising to the next stage of cognition and thinking. To which one? To the next level of consciousness—the scientific-theoretical. Can one say that artistic thinking corresponds to and is identical with scientific-theoretical thinking, that there is no difference between them (if one excludes the form of manifestation)?

This conclusion seems logical in many studies of the special features of artistic thinking.

Let us refer only to the work of E. S. Gromov¹⁴, all the more since it offers direct recommendations to the contemporary artist. On the whole, this is a valuable, profound study. The author is right when he says that contemporary progress in science and technology cannot be ignored by the artist; that today the relations between artist and science have become much more complicated, above all because science itself has become more complex and has penetrated into domains that require considerable efforts of thought and specialized knowledge in order to understand the essence of investigations and discoveries. Consequently, the contemporary artist must master knowledge—including knowledge of the natural sciences—in order to be on the level of the age. E. S. Gromov rightly ridicules the disdainful attitude of part of the artistic intelligentsia toward the natural sciences, their dilettantism, superficiality, and so on. But then he is plainly carried away. E. S. Gromov believes that reading the journal Science and Life is far too little for the contemporary artist; it cannot “replace primary sources”¹⁵; that the artist must “get into” the mysteries of cybernetics and genetics, bionics and physics”¹⁶.

Well, if the question is one of creating a special (say, popular-science) work on the problems of one science or another, then all this is natural. Besides, a person ignorant of some modern science is hardly likely to undertake to write about it, to construct a conflict or plot in connection with its problems.

But what if we are speaking in general about the contemporary realist artist? Must he, too, necessarily “get into” the mysteries of specialized scientific knowledge, master this knowledge with utmost depth from primary sources? After all, reading primary sources in the natural sciences already presupposes the possession of specialized knowledge, since without it one is unlikely to make sense of works connected with the interpretation of relativity theory or quantum mechanics, bionics and cybernetics, molecular biology and physics. Such study from primary sources, such “getting into” the mysteries of the sciences, means only one thing: one must become a specialist in that science, learn to understand and think within it at the level of scientific-theoretical consciousness.

It is doubtful that this is necessary. It is no accident, after all, that E. S. Gromov is forced to admit that interviews and questionnaires gave a negative answer to such a formulation of the question. Moreover, the questionnaire cited by the author contained an innocent interpretation of his point of view. It simply asked what importance was attached to philosophical knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, socio-political knowledge (information about events), natural-scientific knowledge, and technical knowledge. The lowest score (3.2) was assigned to the last factor. Of 150 people, seven rated the importance of natural-scientific and technical knowledge negatively, twenty-eight gave it a “2,” fifty-three a “3,” forty-eight a “4,” and only fourteen a “5.”¹⁷

It seems that this is entirely natural. An artist who is not engaged in popularizing scientific knowledge need not at all be a specialist in the field of modern natural science—especially since, if artistic creation has become a person’s chief occupation, he simply cannot become a specialist in various fields of the natural sciences

“(and E. S. Gromov mentions cybernetics, genetics, bionics, and physics), there would not be enough life for that.

Consequently, in the field of the natural sciences the modern artist in most cases is necessarily unable to reach the level of scientific-theoretical knowledge and therefore remains within the bounds of everyday consciousness.

And if we now turn to the proposition stated above—that within everyday consciousness one should distinguish sublevels—then we again find a path toward explaining and understanding the problem posed. The upper sublevel of everyday consciousness, the one most subject to change and development, the one that has most fully reflected the influence of modern science, leads to the fact that modern everyday consciousness is “not quite as everyday as it was a hundred years ago.” It should only be added that this upper story of everyday consciousness evidently includes not only common sense. Here an attempt was made to prove that intellectual intuition also belongs to this sublevel of everyday consciousness. But, apparently, still other important elements correspond to this story: those that are “turned toward the real world,” and in their synthesis they allow a person to assimilate scientific knowledge (say, within the limits of clear knowledge), a materialist worldview (though without necessarily becoming a scholar-philosopher), to understand, grasp, and reflect in creative work the most important regularities of the material world, and to be guided by knowledge of them in practical activity. And is it not precisely this upper story of everyday consciousness that comes into action when an artist, creating a work of art, reflects a changed conception of the world, one fully consistent with the changed scientific conception, although he is by no means a specialist in the field of, say, modern physics?

This, of course, does not mean that artistic creativity is wholly immersed in everyday consciousness and belongs entirely to this level. No. Artistic creativity is a special kind of spiritual activity, of thinking, a special kind of reflection, one that does not belong as a whole to any single level of social consciousness, but reflects the features of both. And in the present case we are not speaking about artistic creativity in general, but only about how the modern artist can become acquainted with the achievements of science, to what degree he masters specialized knowledge (having in mind natural-scientific knowledge).

Then once again an obvious exaggeration is revealed in E. S. Gromov’s recommendations. It is the result of a whole series of inaccuracies in contemporary conceptions of the subject matter of science and art.

Art—to Science, Science—to Art

Since the once-noisy dispute between the “physicists” and the “lyricists,” passions have noticeably subsided. Most of the disputants have come to the sensible conclusion that in the modern world it is extremely amusing to decide the question of which should be preferred—art or science. The modern world requires such efforts from the knowing human being that it is extremely impractical to renounce any one mode of knowing the manifold world. And if to this we add the necessity of knowing and educating the human being himself, then the complete groundlessness of opposing art to science will become clear.

Consequently, the main attention today must be concentrated on revealing the essence of the real interrelation between art and science, which can not only disclose new, important worldview aspects of this phenomenon, but also indicate new paths of knowledge.

However, unfortunately, even today one has to encounter a failure to understand the essence of the interconnection between art and science and, stemming from this, an obvious rejection by some scholars of art as a form of cognition of the world, and by some artists of the positive role of science. Here, again and again, there is revealed a confusion, a failure to distinguish the special subjects of scientific and artistic creativity, an erroneous idea of the role of worldview in both, an underestimation of the present state and functioning of everyday consciousness, and so on.

“Literaturnaya gazeta”¹⁸ addressed an interesting questionnaire to a number of well-known scholars of the world, in which, in particular, two such questions were included: “9. Are literature and art capable of exerting a definite influence on the development of scientific and technical thought? 10. Does it not seem to you that the successes of the natural sciences give rise, among some scholars, to a certain neglect of literature and art? If so, how should this be opposed?”

Since the choice of addressees should be considered very successful and representative (meeting the requirements of representativeness), an analysis of the answers makes it possible, to a certain extent, to judge the typical attitude of representatives of science toward the questions posed and, consequently, toward the problem that interests us.

The answers to these questions could be divided into three main groups, which, in terms of the number of representatives, tend to decrease from the first group to the third.

The first group should include the answers of those scholars who undoubtedly perceive the influence of literature and art on scientific and technical progress and therefore do not agree with the neglectful attitude toward art on the part of a number of scholars. It is noteworthy that this group consists, for the most part, above all of Soviet scholars. Does this circumstance not testify to the fact that Soviet scholars, naturally, most often experience the influence of socialist art, which reflects the positions of a genuinely scientific, communist worldview?

Since scholars’ understanding of the ways and essence of art’s influence on science is of considerable interest, let us cite several characteristic answers.

Academician V. Engelhardt believes that “artistic creativity and scientific and technical thought can mutually fertilize one another... The striving for beauty, which lies at the basis of artistic creativity, manifests itself also in science... Of course, different people have different predilections, but it is even difficult for me to recall among my colleagues people devoid of interest in art.”

Here is the opinion of Academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences P. Zdrodovsky: “Clearly, the great A. Einstein was right in his assertion that intuition and fantasy, which are not limited by anything, contribute to the progress of science to a greater degree than knowledge, which is always limited. If this is so, then a scientist must have a sufficiently broad outlook, which literature provides for him. The shell of a snail, it seems to me, is not the dwelling of a true scientist, a person of creativity.”

Finally, the thoughts of the scientist-cosmonaut K. Feoktistov: “Good literature awakens fantasy. One cannot live in an ascetic, dried-up atmosphere and invent something new. Art helps one to live a full life. Energy is stirred not only by the science with which you are occupied, but by something adjacent to it, or even entirely opposite.”

The second group of answers belongs to scholars who, while in principle allowing for the possibility of art’s influence on science, speak of it with a certain caution and try to define the limits of this influence.

Examples here may be the answers of Academician V. Ambartsumian, who believes that such influence is possible, but immediately observes: “Unfortunately, in literature and art there are no, or very few, works that show how difficult science is.” He refers to James Watson’s book about “men of science,” The Double Helix, in which precisely the reflection of the real difficulties of scientific research is absent. This book allows him to express the supposition as to “what, to put it mildly, inaccuracies professional writers sometimes permit themselves.”

It seems that, for all the justice of the academician’s concrete remarks, here there is already a glimpse of a fairly typical misconception concerning the subject and tasks of art. It is the misconception that compels one, in one artistic work or another connected with science, to catch above all inaccuracies relating to the depiction or communication of certain special phenomena and facts. It was from precisely such positions that remarks were once made about the film Nine Days of One Year. Yet its problem, its pathos, by no means come down to whether or not Gusev could have been irradiated in modern installations at the contemporary level of technological development (including safety technology). Such skepticism can seriously undermine trust in the film, which it undoubtedly deserves and which so vividly revealed, for the broadest masses, the world of science; showed the genuine everyday (not seasoned with the notorious “romanticism”) heroism of people of science, their devotion to their work, their purposefulness—something that may be envied and should be emulated—and which is the main thing for this work of cinema.

And the following remark by V. Ambartsumian makes one think about the same thing. He says: “As for me personally, I have always bowed before great works of literature and art. In my opinion, it is perfectly natural to admire people who can do what you yourself cannot—compose good music, write good poems. I cannot do this.”

The desire to define the limits of the influence and of the very interaction of science and art is heard in the answer of the Bulgarian scholar Professor Ch. Dragoichev. But perhaps this position is reflected most clearly in the answer of Academician V. Ginzburg: “On the whole, I think that literature and art exert no direct influence on the development of scientific and technical thought. It is another matter that literature and art influence a significant portion of scientists, and thereby also the development of science.”

It is not difficult to notice that the second group of answers is also still quite representative (within the limits of those surveyed).

The third group consists of scholars who either did not answer the two questions posed at all (which to a greater degree makes one suspect their negative attitude toward the proposed problem; among them is Professor Gerald Holton of Harvard University, USA) or openly doubted the very possibility of fruitful cooperation between art and science.

Here one should include the answer of Cambridge University professor Francis Crick: “I want to formulate this question differently: does the progress of scientific and technical thought influence the development of literature? As far as I know, in the West such influ-

...is very insignificant: people who engage in literature and art understand nothing in science and even take a hostile attitude toward it, since their mode of thinking is far removed from the scientific. If a scientist like me comes into contact with literature or art, he feels that he is in an entirely different cultural environment... I believe that scientists do not treat literature and art with disdain; it is simply that they cannot find in contemporary literature anything that would be close to them.”

This answer is doubly remarkable. It is not only an illustration of a rather characteristic point of view among scientists of the capitalist world, but also evidence that art guided by an inconsistent scientific worldview, one that does not coincide in its basic features with the method of socialist realism, proves useless for contemporary scientific creativity, incapable of exerting any substantial influence upon it.

Thus, for the problem posed here, what becomes essential above all are the answers of the first group and the principled recognition of the possibility of art’s influence on science, voiced in the answers of the second group.

It is not difficult to notice something else as well. If one compares the answers of the second group with the concretization of ideas about the possible influence of art on science contained in the first group, they turn out to be very similar.

B. M. Kedrov distinguishes three levels of science, three “climates” of its development¹⁹. The highest level constitutes “the logically generalized and completely depersonalized result, sum, outcome of all human scientific cognition, embodied in a system of scientific truths that have undergone practical verification.”

If this upper level of science is compared with the answers cited from the first and second groups, it will become clear that, when speaking of the possibility of art’s influence on science, the scientists did not have this level of science in mind. One can in principle agree with this, provided one nevertheless adds that the comprehension of the “generalized outcome” of scientific cognition, its assimilation by the broad masses, by the worldview, is also accomplished with the aid of literature and art and, consequently, contributes to the alteration and refinement of particular worldview positions, thereby preparing the ground for the further advance of scientific knowledge, and thus, after all, influencing science here as well.

Obviously, the concrete, direct influence of art on science occurs on other, lower levels. If B. M. Kedrov assigns the upper level to the “global climate” of science, then the next one after it constitutes the “local climate.” Its meaning consists in the fact that science “is developed not by faceless beings, but by living people who are under the influence of the whole sum of social and personal interests, in an atmosphere of struggle—sometimes very acute—between opposing worldviews, of the clash of the most varied, often irreconcilable opinions, and so on.”

And, finally, there exists the “microclimate” of science, which is revealed if one takes the following into account: “Science is made by individual people, by scientists, and outside their activity there is no science and no history of it. But each scientist is a distinct individuality, as a rule with a very distinctive character, with sharply expressed and unrepeatable personal traits by which one can distinguish, for example, Einstein from Planck, Landau from Kurchatov, Pauli from Schrödinger, Rutherford

from Pauli, etc. Thus, it becomes clear that the influence of art on science should be discerned on these two levels, reflecting the “local climate” (the particular) and the “microclimate” (the individual).

Apparently, this conclusion very substantially concretizes the problem of the interrelation of science and art, and indicates paths for research. This conclusion also makes it possible to understand more deeply certain acknowledgments by scientists concerning the influence of works of art upon them. As an example let us cite N. Bohr’s thought: “The reason why art can enrich us lies in its ability to remind us of harmonies inaccessible to systematic analysis. One may say that literary, visual, and musical art form a sequence of modes of expression... they allow greater freedom to the play of fantasy. In particular, in poetry this goal is achieved by juxtaposing words connected with the observer’s changing perception, and thereby the diverse aspects of human knowledge are emotionally united” 41).

Obviously, here the issue is the “microclimate” of scientific creativity, and very profound aspects of the connection between artistic and scientific creativity are being grasped.

If we recall A. Einstein’s widely known admission that Dostoevsky gives him more than any thinker, more than Gauss, then it may be noted that in this admission there is something essential also for the other level of science, for its “local climate.”

If we were to set ourselves the task of collecting the numerous acknowledgments by scientists concerning the influence of art on their scientific activity, we would obtain a boundless sea of thoughts and facts. This is not our task. Although it does make sense to say that in the problem posed, the special role of art manifests itself in its influence on the formation of the scientist’s personality. This is extraordinarily relevant for the contemporary period in the development of science.

In B. M. Kedrov’s article already cited it is said: “The influence of the scientist’s personality, as an individual factor, on the development of science continues to remain enormous even under the conditions of contemporary ‘big’ science, with its inherent collectivism and the complex character of scientific research” 42).

Other researchers note the same thing. In the article “Science and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist” 43) V. I. Tolstykh writes: “Strength and weakness of character, the moral qualities of the personality in science are just as essential as in politics. In the article ‘In Memory of Marie Curie’ A. Einstein wrote: ‘The moral qualities of an outstanding personality are perhaps of greater significance for a given generation and for the entire course of history than purely intellectual achievements. The latter depend on greatness of character to a much greater degree than is usually thought’ 43a).”

But is it possible to find such an intellectual personality, such a modern scientist, upon whom literature and art have not exerted an influence in the process of the formation of character and the development of a worldview? Most likely, such people simply do not exist. And this by no means excludes those cases when one or another scientist, and often a very well-known one, treats certain kinds

41) N. Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, p. 111.
42) Voprosy filosofii, 1971, No. 9, p. 89.
43) Voprosy filosofii, 1967, No. 4, p. 85.
43a) A. Einstein. Physics and Reality. Moscow, “Nauka,” 1965, p. 116.

art (according to the testimony of D. Landau’s comrades and pupils, he could not stand opera and, on principle, did not go to the opera theater).

But there are also other, very substantial areas of interaction between science and art, testifying to the great depth of their connection.

According to Goethe, art can anticipate scientific knowledge and discoveries. Moreover, this is not only a matter of the fact that almost all the discoveries and achievements of modern scientific and technical progress existed, at least in the form of fantasy, in many works and utterances of outstanding artists and thinkers of the past. There are also more astonishing phenomena.

There is evidence showing that Empedocles already “anticipated” Newton’s ideas about universal gravitation. And is not the most striking work of ancient architecture—the Parthenon, whose colonnade is an admirable fact of aesthetic penetration into, and comprehension of, mathematical and technical (tectonic) regularities—evidence of the depth of artistic cognition of the world? The influence of Dostoevsky’s works on the creation of the theory of relativity speaks of this same depth.

An artist need not necessarily rise to the level of scientific-theoretical knowledge in the natural and technical branches of science; his vision of the world, artistic thinking itself, make it possible to grasp very significant regularities of the material world.

This by no means leads to the substitution of the subject matter of art for that of science, although the process of their rapprochement is very noticeable in the contemporary epoch. At the same time, it is precisely in our epoch that the true content of art, which cannot be ignored by science and by the scientific worldview, is most clearly revealed.

This, in particular, is discussed in V. I. Mildon’s very distinctive and interesting article “The Experience of the World in Imaginative Literature”²⁰. One cannot agree with all the author’s categorical judgments (although it is precisely his categoricalness that constitutes the special charm of all his reflections), especially in that part where V. I. Mildon speaks of the impossibility of penetrating into the world of a writer’s soul through his work; nevertheless, the article contains many entirely just thoughts and judgments.

The change in human conceptions of the world, which have come ever closer to scientific, materialist ones, was accomplished not only by the force of scientific consciousness but, to no lesser degree, by artistic consciousness as well. V. I. Mildon’s reasoning is highly original: “If the ancient world surpassed us in ideality, drawing from its surroundings far more ideas than we are capable of doing, then we surpass it, apparently, in sensitivity, in the diversity and richness of experiences. But precisely because of this we are in danger of becoming carried away by experiences without fully understanding, and without being interested in, what their source is. However ideal antiquity may seem, the basis of its ideas was the immediate, real world. With us, by contrast, the strongest stimulus often proves to be the ideal world, the world brought to life by consciousness and technology; and no small strength is required in order to understand this, to return us to an understanding of real being independent of us. Such a saving force is, in particular, imaginative literature. It impels us to experience everything external as our own and does not allow ideality to fetter the free and living

the essence of man. For him, thereby, one of the possibilities of “touching” the world and feeling himself to be a part of it is preserved”^45).

Such a long excerpt from the article was needed in order to give an idea of one of the very interesting contemporary views on the role and purpose of literature; one need only grasp the peculiarities of the author’s style and thinking in order to understand it. Of course, one may disagree with something, even within the limits of what has been quoted, but the main idea of literature as a force overcoming the ideal world of our representations, connecting it with the objective world, is indisputable. And after all, this is one shade of a materialist worldview. That what is at issue is precisely this—the materialist comprehension, by literature, of the interaction of subject and object—is also evident from the following propositions of the article: “Everything external, other, becomes internal, one’s own, for a person when it has been experienced and realized. This feeling of unity, coming to replace faith, is aroused by literature”^46). We, in fact, have the right to say that imaginative literature carried within itself the thought and feeling of the universal, dialectical interconnection of all phenomena of the material world, thereby nourishing and reinforcing scientific thought. “More and more often science today comes to the idea of the unity of the world and strives toward a radical overcoming of the ‘rupture’ that it itself once created, whereas poetry proceeds from this unity. Remarkable scientific discoveries explain in their own language what we experience in the soul and what poetry constantly speaks of”^47).

And, following the author of the article, in order to confirm and conclude this thought, let us cite the beautiful lines of Pushkin:

...My ears he touched,
And they were filled with noise and ringing,
And I heard the heavens’ trembling,
And the flight of angels in the heights,
And the underwater course of sea beasts,
And the sprouting of the vine in the valley.

All that has been said makes it possible, to some degree, to understand with what and how artistic creativity can endow scientific thinking, what a scientist may draw—and indeed does draw—from art, why we may say that art and literature were a fruitful source of ideas for Copernicus and Newton, Lomonosov and Pavlov, Einstein and Bohr.

Of course, this is only a statement, not an investigation of an objectively existing interconnection; it is only an indication of possible paths of knowledge, not movement along them.

The interconnection and interaction of art and science have a profound gnoseological foundation, which explains the regularity and fruitfulness of this relation.

Aesthetic activity synthesizes within itself abstract and concrete thinking; it reflects the peculiarities of two levels of social consciousness. Therefore it is mistaken to oppose science and art only by the form in which they reflect objective reality (the abstract concept and the sensuously concrete artistic image). Artistic creativity is not reducible merely to sensuous reflection, just as scientific cognition incorporates sensuous reflection and even a visual image, for sensuous reflection is an inalienable part of the scientific methods of cognition; it is a most important—

^45) Ibid., pp. 117–118.
^46) Ibid., p. 119.
^47) Ibid., p. 121.

component of all observation and is necessary in model representations²¹. A. M. Korshunov rightly writes: “... scientific cognition does not entirely exclude sensory-visual images ... visual images are used not only in art, but also in science”²².

And we may once again repeat the conclusion that the decisive and essential distinction between art and science is determined by their special objects of reflection. But since, as L. S. Vygotsky very accurately observed, in reality “thought is not expressed in the word, but is accomplished in the word”²³, the manner of the “accomplishment” of thought in the word in artistic creativity may suggest something about the “accomplishment” of thought in science. Is this not where the source lies of the influence of Dostoevsky’s creativity (his accomplishment of thought) on the creativity of the creator of the theory of relativity?

Worldview—to Science and Art

In conclusion, without repeating what has already been said, I would like to single out the most important points in the interrelation of worldview with science and art.

Karl Marx, in the “Introduction” to the economic manuscripts of 1857–1858, considers scientific and artistic thinking as different forms of the human “appropriation” of the objective world²⁴. For Marx, the artistic appropriation of the world in literature and art, the theoretical appropriation in science, as well as its appropriation in the process of practice, are internally interconnected forms of activity of social man, serving one and the same goal—the cognition and alteration, for genuinely human purposes, of objective reality.

These profound thoughts of the founder of scientific communism contain the meaning of the research undertaken in recent times into the interrelation and interaction of various forms of the “appropriation” of reality.

But Marx’s thought helps us understand how these forms of cognition and transformation of the world are connected with general worldview positions. This becomes especially clear if we take into account the fact that any forms of human cognition and activity are social, societal in character. “... The ultimate cause of the formation of a cognitive image is not simply the action of the object upon the sense organs, but the interaction of the subject with the object. Such interaction proceeds in definite socially developed relations and forms of activity... The forms of activity through which the subject relates to the object always appear as socially formed. Therefore the relation of every individual to the surrounding world is social in its very essence”²⁵. Consequently, every cognition of the world presupposes that the cognizing subject already occupies definite social, public, worldview positions.

This conclusion may also be approached from another side. As is known, the idea of an “ivory tower,” in which one can hide from the struggle of classes and parties and find an entirely “objective position”

in attitudes toward the world, are characteristic not only of art, but also of science. Many bourgeois scholars fall into this peculiar scientific decadence, championing “science for science’s sake.” But thereby they reveal one of the universal traits of the bourgeois worldview, which has quite clearly and fully absorbed the contradictoriness and inadequacy of the specifically bourgeois outlook. Meanwhile, science cannot isolate itself from society, from social reality, from one or another worldview position. “Being profoundly social, scientific creativity is not carried out outside time and space. The emergence of scientific tasks and problems, the attitude toward them, the style of their development, the results, the ways in which scientific achievements are used, and the practical effect of this use—all this depends to a great extent on the given economic, political, and ideological situation, and in many respects is determined by it”^53).

It is no accident that here thoughts about the social nature of human creative activity are repeated so insistently, and that the social nature of the worldview positions of both the scientist and the artist is emphasized. The point is that, while today it is difficult to object to the role of worldview as an accumulation of the method of cognition, objections to the influence of the social convictions of the scientist or artist are voiced today with no less force than during the lifetime of the founders of Marxism-Leninism.

Meanwhile, although a worldview is formed not only in the process of assimilating the social sciences, but also in the process of assimilating the natural sciences, philosophy, and practical activity, nevertheless within its structure a special role belongs to those conceptions that are directly connected with determining man’s place in the world, man’s place in society and in nature, and his relation to them. This is why no science, in the final analysis, can disregard social knowledge, and no scientist can ignore this knowledge. This applies to all sciences, including philosophy, including even what would seem to be the most specialized branches of scientific knowledge. “The experience of knowing people’s social life is necessary for revealing the content of the nature of cognition, in particular its relation to the object reflected. Moreover, in essence not a single category of dialectical materialism, including such categories as space and time, the finite and the infinite, and so on, can develop and be enriched with new content, and thereby be a form of thinking, without taking into account the experience of knowing the history and theory of modern society and the being of man within it”^54).

Thus, worldview, including social knowledge as one of its most important elements, determines scientific creativity in such a way that it proves to be inseparably connected with definite class and ideological positions and, to one degree or another, contributes to the strengthening of one or another worldview and, consequently, of the social milieu that gave rise to it.

At the beginning of the present work, the words of the president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were cited concerning the role of worldview in the development of science, words that emphasize the practical significance of the connection between a scientific, consistent worldview and scientific creativity, since in the resolutions of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU it is said that “one of the main factors in the successful solution of the tasks of communist construction is the development of Soviet science”^55). What has just been said makes it possible to see and determine—

^53) Lenin’s Theory of Reflection and Modernity. Sofia, “Science and Art,” 1969, pp. 612–613.
^54) Ibid., pp. 482–483.
^55) Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Stenographic Report, p. 236.

...the practical sense of the attempt undertaken in this work to consider certain aspects of the interaction between art and science primarily from the standpoint of their connection with worldview. The meaning of the present work will become clearer if one says that a more general aim is also intended—the determination of the place of science and art in worldview, the role of science and art in the formation of a scientific worldview, which is inseparable from understanding the role of worldview in scientific and artistic creativity.

Of course, these are such broad themes that it is difficult to claim to disclose them fully. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the very concept of worldview today is one of the debated problems; rejecting the traditional understanding of worldview as a view of the world as a whole, many Soviet philosophers have placed a new problem on the agenda. Without going into its substance (this would lead us into an entirely different area), let us try to establish in worldview the most essential aspects, which on the whole do not provoke objections from anyone.

Friedrich Engels remarked in Anti-Dühring that this polemic had, in general, turned into an exposition of the dialectical method and of the communist worldview. In that case, the communist worldview includes the analysis of theoretical natural science, the principles of scientific socialism, political economy, and the philosophical method.

With all possible clarifications and reservations, the integrality and synthetic character of worldview, from the standpoint of the knowledge included in it, are obvious—this is the most important point in the understanding of worldview by the classics of Marxism-Leninism; it is, consequently, the basic methodological principle in the study of worldview. Obviously, the assertion that this knowledge within worldview is necessary in order to develop an understanding of the world in which man lives, an understanding of the place, role, and meaning of one’s own existence, also cannot provoke objections. Here another side (equally indisputable) of worldview is revealed—it is not only understanding, but also “an emotional evaluation by man of the meaning of his activity and of the destinies of humanity”²⁶. The connection between knowledge and emotional evaluation in worldview is so strong an alloy, so natural and inseparable a unity, that it is precisely worldview that gives a special “sensitivity” in scientific and social practice. “It was precisely an advanced worldview that gave the social conscience of noble thinkers and revolutionaries an astonishing sensitivity, so sharply intensified their understanding of reality. It was precisely this that inspired them to an unceasing search and intense reflection on social riddles”²⁷.

It is obvious that the emotional evaluations present in worldview are a measure of the strength of the individual’s conviction—the most important condition of practical and theoretical activity—just as worldview itself proves to be a measure of the value of the individual himself.

Thus, what knowledge do science and art supply to worldview, how is this knowledge obtained, what place does it occupy in the system of worldview, how does one or another worldview perceive it, and finally, is the objectively existing interaction of science and art a matter of indifference or not for worldview itself? These are far from exhaustive—

a full list of those most important questions which might become the subject of investigation. Naturally, not all of them could be considered.

This is the first circle of comments that had to be made in conclusion.

The second part of the comments is connected with what philosophers and aestheticians have been saying since Hegel’s time, namely: the subject matter of art includes the creator himself, and therefore his life experience, ideals, feelings, and understanding of reality, his worldview. This one observation is enough to understand the complete untenability of contemporary bourgeois aesthetics, which seeks to oppose worldview to artistic creation proper. Unfortunately, such an opposition has at times also occurred in the works of Soviet aestheticians, especially when the discussion concerned such complex phenomena as the work of L. Tolstoy or F. Dostoevsky.

Meanwhile, as is clear from Lenin’s brilliant works on Tolstoy, the issue should not be a contradiction between artistic talent, artistic method, and worldview, but the contradictory character of the worldview itself of these and other outstanding artists and thinkers of the past. Contemporary philosophical science has accumulated a sufficient number of facts and observations allowing us to say that within an individual worldview, between its separate parts and elements, there may be very substantial contradictions. In our view, this is connected with the fact that worldview encompasses both levels (the sublevel of everyday consciousness); consequently, it can be not only strictly scientific or entirely everyday, spontaneous; it is capable of combining and retaining within itself both scientific notions (both on the upper sublevel of everyday consciousness and at the level of scientific-theoretical consciousness) and irrational, anti-scientific, religious, philistine notions, and so forth. A worldview may be consistent, integral, internally harmonious, or it may be contradictory and inconsistent. It is precisely this circumstance that is reflected in the work of many outstanding artists, who, alongside progressive ideas, carried in their creative work, in their works, reactionary and confused ideas.

As the history of world art proves, the most severe and profound crisis experienced by artists has always been a worldview crisis, before which the torments connected with the search for the form of artistic expression of thoughts and feelings most satisfying to them receded, since a worldview crisis means the loss of the basic creative reference points, goals, and meaning of creative work. The method of socialist realism ensures the greatest unity, an organic connection with worldview, and therefore allows the artist to create most freely, in accordance with his ideals, freeing the creator from the torments of spiritual crisis. But, on the other hand, the method of socialist realism makes especially strict demands for clarity and maturity of worldview positions, for the development and formation of talent depend on this. This has already been discussed in connection with the work of the Fifth All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers.

Further, as is known, art and literature themselves are a constituent part of the social worldview. Moreover, their special role in worldview is connected with the content of aesthetic feeling.

Even V. G. Belinsky, assessing the role and significance of aesthetic feeling, wrote that without it “there is no genius, no talent, no intellect—there remains only vulgar ‘common sense,’ necessary for domestic every—

the course of life, for the petty calculations of egoism... The aesthetic sense is the basis of goodness, the basis of morality”⁵⁸⁾.

V. I. Lenin saw the enormous power of art in the unity of artistic truth and emotional effectiveness. But in the very nature of emotions lies their distinctive feature: they evaluate, they determine a person’s attitude toward particular phenomena; in other words, arising in the artist under the influence of life’s phenomena and correlating with them, emotions become carriers, expressers of definite ideological positions. Consequently, if by means of art, in L. Tolstoy’s words, people “transmit feelings to one another,” then at the same time they transmit ideological evaluations of particular aspects and phenomena of life. If we add to this that the artist’s will, fantasy, imagination, and emotions are determined by his worldview, then it becomes clear how great and irreplaceable is the significance of art in the formation of a worldview.

Here there is a very complex and inseparable unity. On the one hand, the artist’s worldview determines his vision of the world, his choices and evaluations, and therefore a work of art affirms definite worldview positions; on the other hand, life itself, observed and depicted by the artist, forms his worldview, and, if before us is an honest, unprejudiced investigator of the objective world, then he must spontaneously approach and even arrive at the most correct, scientific worldview positions.

Then a new circle of interaction between art and worldview begins, since the scientific worldview accepts the knowledge and emotional-aesthetic evaluations of the investigated aspects of life obtained by such an artist, and thereby strengthens its positions in people’s consciousness, finds new paths of dissemination and penetration into consciousness.

But, understanding the life that forms the artist’s worldview broadly enough, we must include and take into account in it scientific practice, science, just as, obviously, the practice of art. Consequently, in naming the factors that influence the formation of a scientist’s worldview, one cannot omit art, just as, in relation to an artist, it is impossible to forget the influence on him of the development of science. This latter, in the modern world, has become one of the central problems of aesthetics, on which reactionary ideas of bourgeois philosophy rather actively parasitize.

It is known that Zola tried to see a direct connection between the development of the natural sciences and literature. He believed that the principles of naturalism formulated by him most fully reflected the demands that should be made of realism from the standpoint of the achievements of scientific knowledge. But modern bourgeois aestheticians have gone considerably further. So-called “new realism” tends to see in art a kind of appendage of natural science; it strives to solve tasks that fall within the competence of science, bypassing, distracting itself from real models; it intends to know the essence of phenomena, believing that the old realism can quite well be replaced by photography.

With the progress of science attempts are also made to link demands of various kinds to exclude from art every “personal element,” everything human. It is not hard to understand that such a demand is connected with the disfigurement of the role and character of emotions in artistic creation. They are completely displaced by rational construction. But however rationally grounded these constructions may be, having lost only one thing—the emotional-

⁵⁸⁾ V. G. Belinsky, Complete Collected Works, vol. 2, Moscow, USSR Academy of Sciences, 1953, p. 47.

aesthetic perception of the world, they, in essence, destroy the special subject of art, which ceases to be itself.

But, having lost its subject, which can be known only with the help of emotional-aesthetic evaluations, art begins to issue distorted information or information that has no serious significance or value whatsoever. Naturally, the scientific worldview rejects this information, does not perceive it, and compensates for the lack of information through other forms of cognition, above all science.

Is it not by this, first and foremost, that one should explain the manifestly disdainful attitude of a number of bourgeois scholars toward art? After all, they much more often encounter various modernist productions, which demonstrate what can happen to art if it loses its own subject, if it is guided by a distorted worldview.

But all these phenomena are quite satisfactory to the bourgeois propaganda of contemporary anti-communists and various kinds of renegades. Recently Fischer’s confused speeches have again been heard. As A. Dymshits rightly wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the renegade Fischer opposes the artist’s heeding the demands of society. He asserts: “Art owes nothing to anyone. Art can do everything.” From these positions he glorifies the absurdist tendencies in the work of Samuel Beckett. Fischer is especially concerned with the struggle against reflection in art, against the realistic reflection of reality. A. Dymshits cites Fischer’s typical arguments: “Poetry is the quadrature of the circle, it is the number ‘pi,’ extending into infinity. No interpreter is capable of tracing the path of poetry into infinity, and any interpretation—structural, religious, philosophical, psychological, sociological, historical-comparative—proves insufficient” 59).

As can be seen, what is voiced here is not only the assertion that it is impossible to know the basic laws of art, but also the denial of these very laws themselves; here is proclaimed that notorious “freedom” of art from everything social, public, genuinely human, which may turn into a tragedy for the honest artist, since in reality such “freedom” means liberation from the positions of a scientific worldview and a transition to the positions of an illusory worldview and, in the final analysis, to the positions of the most reactionary classes. All this once again underscores the need to continue research into the role and significance of worldview in the artist’s work, as well as the role and place of art and literature in worldview.

This fully corresponds to the tasks set by the XXIV Congress of the CPSU. In the Resolution of the Congress of the Communist Party it is written: “The Congress notes the growing role of literature and art in creating the spiritual wealth of socialist society. The Soviet people are interested in the creation of works in which reality would be truthfully reflected and the ideas of communism affirmed with great artistic power” 60).

From the enduring, decisive role of worldview in artistic and scientific creativity, from the role played within worldview by science and art, there inevitably follows the conclusion that precisely worldview is a manifestation of the essence of the unity, the interconnection of sci-

59) Literaturnaya Gazeta, No. 45, 1971, November 3.
60) “XXIV Congress of the CPSU.” Stenographic Report, p. 236.

science and art as different forms of “awareness of existing practice.” I would like the present work to have found evidence for this thought.

Enough has already been said here, and more than once, about the role and significance of science and art in the building of communism. However, as a final, concluding thought, I would like to cite the words of V. I. Lenin, which speak more eloquently than many others about how important it is, both in theory and in practice, to do everything necessary for the fruitful development of socialist art: “Art belongs to the people. It must sink its deepest roots into the very thick of the broad working masses. It must be understood by these masses and loved by them. It must unite the feeling, thought, and will of these masses and elevate them. It must awaken artists among them and develop them”²⁸.

1. See also on this: Advances in Physiological Sciences, 1970, vol. 1, no. 2. ↩

2. Novyi mir, 1971, no. 9, p. 205. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 20, p. 493. ↩

5. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 3, p. 245. ↩

6. Novy Mir, 1971, No. 9, p. 204. ↩

7. Ibid. ↩

8. Philosophical Encyclopedia, vol. 4, p. 328. ↩

9. A. M. Korshunov. The Theory of Reflection and Creativity. Moscow, Politizdat, 1971. ↩

10. Ibid., p. 120. ↩

11. Ibid., p. 129. ↩

12. Novyi mir, 1971, No. 9, p. 129. ↩

13. M. Bunge, Intuition and Science, Moscow, “Progress,” 1967, p. 141. ↩

14. E. S. Gromov, Artistic Creativity. Moscow, Politizdat, 1970. ↩

15. Ibid., p. 248. ↩

16. Ibid., p. 249. ↩

17. Ibid., p. 248. ↩

18. “Literaturnaya gazeta,” 1971, November 3 and 17, December 8. Hereafter all quotations will be given according to these issues without additional references. ↩

19. Voprosy filosofii, 1971, no. 9, pp. 86–89. ↩

20. Voprosy filosofii, 1971, No. 9. ↩

21. See: A. V. Slavin. The Visual Image in the Structure of Cognition. Moscow, Politizdat, 1971. ↩

22. A. M. Korshunov. Theory of Reflection and Creativity. Moscow, Politizdat, 1971, p. 133. ↩

23. L. S. Vygotsky. Selected Psychological Investigations. Moscow, 1956, p. 323. ↩

24. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, 2nd ed., vol. 12, p. 728. ↩

25. A. M. Korshunov. Theory of Reflection and Creativity. Moscow, 1971, pp. 54–55. ↩

26. Philosophical Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 454. ↩

27. Ibid., p. 455. ↩

28. V. I. Lenin on Literature and Art. Gospolitizdat, 1960, p. 662. ↩