PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF PERSUASION

G. V. Shcherbakova

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU noted that “the formation among working people of a Marxist-Leninist worldview, of high ideological and political qualities, and of the norms of communist morality remains, and will continue to remain, the central task of the ideological work of Party organizations”¹. The task of forming a scientific worldview among all workers of socialist society was set by the Program of the CPSU in connection with the mature objective necessity of educating the new person of communist society. The result of this has been a growth of interest in Marxist philosophy in questions connected with analyzing the content of the concept of “worldview,” clarifying its essence and specificity, determining the place of worldview in the system of social and individual consciousness, studying the ways of forming a scientific worldview, and so on. The abundance and diversity of the views expressed on these questions make it possible to conclude that the solution of the task of forming a scientific worldview depends to a considerable degree on the theoretical development of particular concrete aspects of the problem. One such aspect is the question of persuasion.

In order to understand the essence of persuasion and to reveal the reason for its active role in the activity of the subject, it is not enough to consider it only from the gnoseological standpoint, for it represents a unity of the subject’s reflection of the object and the subject’s relation to the object and to its reflection in consciousness. The latter—that is, the subject’s relation to the object and to knowledge about it—finds its expression in emotions, aspirations, and evaluations and is determined both by the characteristics of the object and by the characteristics of the subject, and above all by the subject’s needs and interests. Taking into account the importance of the emotional aspect of persuasion, we consider it necessary to devote attention to the mental state accompanying the process of forming persuasions, which is designated by the word “faith.”

Faith is often regarded only as a religious feeling, despite the fact that it is an objective property of the human personality, connected with the social nature of the human being and with the ways by which a person obtains information, which exert a significant influence on the character

of a person’s behavior and on his worldview. A consciously grasped truth may be accompanied by both certainty and uncertainty. Only in union with certainty does knowledge become a conviction and, in this form, objectifying itself, change reality. The latter is possible precisely thanks to the subject’s faith in the transformative capacity of the content of convictions. Thus, as a psychological state, faith is inherent in all people. The differences lie in what and to what degree they believe.

The underdevelopment of the question of the role of human faith in the philosophy of dialectical materialism allows idealism and religion to make quite successful use of this concept in order to affirm their own propositions. Yet F. Engels had already drawn attention to the need to distinguish religious faith from scientific faith. He wrote: “‘Do not believe in order to understand,’ as with Anselm of Canterbury, but ‘understand in order to believe’: the ever-renewed struggle against blind faith” 2).

A historical-philosophical analysis of the problem under consideration has shown that the concept of “faith” is interconnected with the most diverse categories and, above all, not only with knowledge and conviction, but also with such categories as feeling, need, interest, evaluation, goal, will, and action, which express factors directly influencing the formation of scientific convictions. Therefore, considering faith through its interconnection with any single category cannot provide a complete conception of its nature (and such an approach is precisely characteristic of many representatives of non-Marxist philosophy), as a result of which a sufficiently comprehensive, scientifically grounded understanding of faith has not yet been developed; its epistemological essence and social role have not been clarified. This is precisely why the need arises to work out the question of the nature of faith in Marxist literature.

We encounter an attempt to give a definition of faith and to disclose its nature from the standpoint of a systems-structural approach to cognition in the work of G. G. Vdovichenko. This author regards faith as a category of psychology, using it in the same sense as the concept of “conviction.” He makes it dependent on knowledge, goal, will, and action, in connection with which he concludes that faith is constantly in development, since the components influencing it are themselves continuously changing. Recognizing the significance of faith for the subject’s cognition of reality, G. G. Vdovichenko also sees its role in the fact that it is one of the forms of connection between preceding and subsequent systems of knowledge and thereby exerts an influence on the development of science. Moreover, as a definite element of the process of cognition, faith, in G. G. Vdovichenko’s opinion, acts as a form of interdependence between the collective and the individual. Thus, the author notes not only the cognitive and psychological functions of faith, but also its social function, which once again suggests the idea that faith is characteristic of the human intellect (this point of view was expressed by Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, and others). True, all the above-mentioned points did not find sufficiently clear reflection in the definition of faith, which characterizes it as “the capacity to perceive knowledge as true and the emergence of conviction on the basis of resolving a contradiction in the process of cognition between information obtained on the basis of one’s own experience and that acquired on the basis of social cognitive activity” 3). But the merit of this definition is

2) Archive of Marx and Engels, vol. X, p. 300.
3) G. G. Vdovichenko. The Problem of Structure in the Theory of Reflection. Abstract of a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences. Kiev, 1969, p. 30.

that in it faith is disclosed from the standpoint of its capacity to orient cognition toward a true reflection of reality.

The formulation of the concept of “faith” given by A. N. Raevsky and A. V. Antonov looks more definite. Faith, from their point of view, is a “psychic process manifested in the sensory-emotional sphere and fixing in it or in the intellect the results of the process of the individual’s evaluative activity in determining the degree of truth of information coming from the real world”^4). In this understanding, as we see, faith is disclosed from the standpoint of its basis, the form and conditions of its emergence. It becomes clear that it is caused by an informational deficit and is connected with a value-based attitude toward knowledge, since what is at issue is determining the degree of its truth; that faith arises at the level of sensory-emotional reflection of reality; that, in its form of expression, it may be assigned both to the category of emotions and to the category of concepts. (It is better to speak of faith at the level of conceptual reflection of reality as conviction.) But this definition appears incomplete, for it does not mention directly the social determination of faith of which G. G. Vdovichenko speaks. Yet the presence of this moment in the characterization of faith is one of those features that distinguish faith as a conscious psychic phenomenon from all forms of adaptation and reactions inherent in animals.

Nevertheless, the assertion that faith appears at different levels of reflection of reality is of definite interest, for it suggests the idea of the emergence of faith at the unconscious level on some innate basis. Raevsky and Antonov specifically emphasize elsewhere in their work that faith is capable of arising both at the unconscious and at the conscious levels of the subject’s psychic activity^5). They substantiate this assertion by facts found in pedagogical activity and in the practice of psychotherapy, the essence of which comes down to the fact that, alongside the method of persuasion, the method of suggestion is widely used. If the first forms faith at the conscious level, then the second does so predominantly at the unconscious level.

Speaking of faith as a sensory-emotional element of the human psyche, we thereby assign it to the category of phenomena of consciousness that grow out of an attitude, which itself arises on the basis of certain conditioned reflexes to the constant relation between needs and the situation. Representing an integral psycho-physiological state of the subject, an attitude, according to D. N. Uznadze, while not being a conscious psychic moment, influences the content and course of the whole conscious psyche of a person. It expresses the subject’s basic, initial reaction to the influence of the situation in which he has to pose and solve problems. In this connection, Uznadze says, an attitude “as it were anticipates the solution of the problem, as it were includes in advance the direction in which the problem is to be solved”^6). Expressed as readiness of perception, it lies at the basis of conscious psychic states and their manifestations, such as feelings and emotions, will, knowledge, actions, and so forth. In other words, in the attitude as in a certain integrity there are stored in embryo all the possibilities of conscious psychic activity and, in particular,

^4) A. N. Raevsky and A. V. Antonov. Psychological Features of Informational Discussion and Ways of Increasing Its Effectiveness. Kiev, 1967, p. 32.
^5) Ibid., p. 34.
^6) D. N. Uznadze. Psychological Studies. M., 1966, p. 153.

one such as the possibility of believing. Hence, examining faith through its interrelation with an attitude makes understandable the dependence of faith on needs and, above all, on the dominant one among them, as well as on the situation which, by recurring, leads to the emergence of experience and contributes to the appearance of readiness for a certain motivated behavior. Since an attitude manifests itself at the moment when a decision to act is made and when it is recognized, i.e., at the moment when the motive for action arises, it is precisely then that faith, like other conscious mental states, begins to reveal itself and its properties. Apparently, it was this very fact that allowed E. V. Sokolov to define beliefs as “the emotional attitudes of people toward the forces dominant in nature and society (often represented fantastically), toward the past and the future, toward such phenomena of human life as birth, death, the development of personality, and one person’s relation to another”². This point of view is also shared by A. K. Kozyreva. Only she believes that it is not all of faith in its entirety that acts as an attitude, but only that part of it which is determined by information and experience. The same part of it which depends on needs and interests is capable of performing the function of a motive and an impelling stimulus of the subject’s activity³. These assertions about the capacity of faith to be an attitude confirm the idea that faith is born at the unconscious level of the subject’s mental activity and can itself manifest unconsciously.

At the same time, the following must be added to what has been said. When an attitude begins to be realized and expressed in the form of a motive, this form can be no other than linguistic. It is precisely this that distinguishes the mental state of a human being from the mental state of animals. As a consequence, faith, like other conscious mental phenomena, in its developed form must be expressed in language. Otherwise it will not differ from habit or from instincts, with which Hume identified it and which animals also possess. But by assuming a linguistic form of expression, faith thereby begins to lose its initial integrity, acquired in the depths of the attitude, and separates from knowledge, will, and evaluation throughout the entire stage of the development of conviction in the form of opinion. Later, however, it again unites with them into a single whole, but already at the level of conviction, especially scientific conviction, which, having become the subject’s own knowledge, in turn influences the creation of his attitudes and the germination of new faith within them.

The roots both of the conscious forms of the human psyche and of the attitude should be sought in the forms of connection and adaptation developed in the process of the evolution of living organisms. An example of the most stable forms of an organism’s adaptation to its environment is provided by innate programs of behavior, i.e., instincts. But even they are not stereotypes that are repeated identically by all individuals of a species, but a capacity that fluctuates within hereditarily fixed limits for each species. True, the connection between instincts and the situation is still not flexible, which often leads to the absurdity of behavior under changed conditions. Therefore the enormous significance of forms of behavior connected with learning and with individual experience acquired over the course of life becomes clear. Such behavior becomes possible in the presence of individual memory. Since events, in addition to regular recurrence, are characterized by a certain degree of dissimilarity,

since even the presence of memory in an individual does not make him capable of choosing the best path, i.e., of separating the essential features of a phenomenon from the nonessential ones. The entire behavior of such an organism is determined only by its internal state and by the external stimuli present. It differs little from automatic behavior, since it expresses the direct connection between stimulus and reaction. The bearer of such behavior continues to remain a slave of the external environment and does not manifest his own internal activity. Therefore, in the course of evolution, as a result of individual experience, a living organism develops the capacity, as it were, to foresee the results of its behavior, to set goals and the paths for attaining them. Psychologists call this capacity anticipatory reflection. It can already be found in animals, but in human beings it appears in another form. If an animal projects into the future what existed in the past, modifying it little, then a human being, possessing creative imagination, represents the world to himself as changed to some degree. Depending on his needs, he chooses the situation most suitable for himself, fills his behavior with the meaning of attaining a definite goal by a definite path, and thereby transforms his physical activity into psychological activity. It is precisely at this stage in the development of the psyche that attitude appears as a still unconscious mental state that already contains within itself the rudiments of the most diverse conscious states, including faith. The latter gradually develops from a sensory-emotional form to an abstract-ideological one, beginning, at a sufficiently conscious level, to take on the quality and form of conviction. In other words, it changes its degree until its quality changes. Moreover, if at the beginning of its development it moves chiefly under the influence of needs and the situation, then as it approaches the abstract-ideological form, experience and knowledge begin to exert a predominant influence on it.

Being under the predominant influence of the situation, faith, when directed backward, is expressed in the form of certainty, which is directly dependent on memory and on knowledge, i.e., on experience. As A. K. Kozyreva asserts, in certainty conditioned by experience and knowledge, doubt and the possibility that the subject’s needs might influence its formation are excluded by the compelling force of fact and by rational arguments⁴. Ignorance of the latter, i.e., of proofs, leads to the emergence of uncertainty.

As a definite mental state, faith, grounded in experience or rationally, fixes the result of evaluative activity, although this evaluation may not yet be clearly expressed and may even appear not in the form of a judgment, but in the form of perception. That perception contains evaluation only in an embryonic state, as well as an element of knowledge, is stated by B. A. Erunov. In this connection he cites a felicitous statement by Bartlett, the essence of which is as follows: “Perception is the simplest and at the same time the most fundamental of all human cognitive reactions. But it is exceedingly complex. It is internally connected with imagination, values, and the principle of judgment”⁵.

Since perception is one of the first forms of the manifestation of attitude, in the depths of which faith is born, the very directedness

this already testifies to the directedness of faith toward an object as the object of satisfaction of a definite need. Possessing the capacity to contain an evaluation within itself makes faith a pragmatic category which, in the words of G. Klaus, is of great importance for evaluating the reality of words, propositions, and so forth. In this capacity it assumes various forms of expression, which is reflected in its degree. Precisely for this reason, G. Klaus maintains, it can be classified in the following way: faith \(Y_1\) in proposition \(P_1\) is stronger than faith \(Y_2\) in proposition \(P_2\), and so on. “This is explained by the fact,” he writes, “that linguistic habits and the acceptance of judgments as true are ultimately explained by the material and spiritual history of the development of the corresponding individuals, and not by the relation between the corresponding judgment and the individual or group of persons”⁶. Thus, past experience exerts a great influence on the degree of the subject’s certainty and on his behavior in accordance with it. Moreover, this experience is not reducible merely to personal experience, which is always limited, and especially so during the period of personality formation. It includes knowledge obtained through the assimilation and selection of social experience by means of education and upbringing. But the effectiveness of the influence of the latter is sufficiently high only on condition that it coincides with the subject’s actual life experience. As L. P. Bueva rightly observes, “if this is absent or this requirement is violated, then information does not reach people at all, is not ‘selected,’ or is ignored by them”⁷. And this hinders the emergence of certainty, on the basis of which the subject’s activity is constructed and faith directed toward the future is formed.

Being directed forward, toward an object not given to the senses, such faith presupposes a future situation in which the subject intends to act, one that is delimited more or less rigidly, and in which the degree of probability of successful behavior is very high. Therefore the behavior of the possessor of such faith follows from a differentiated attitude and has a volitional character, which is connected with taking into account not only the final goal but, above all, the conditions for attaining it. Such faith is oriented only toward highly probable events and toward decisions whose effectiveness is guaranteed by experience. In addition, it should be noted that this faith begins to depend not so much on needs (their influence does not cease even in the case of the predominant influence of experience and knowledge) as on interests, which express the subject’s selective attitude toward the means of satisfying his needs. This is explained by the fact that needs, being mediated by the social relations in which the subject takes part, expanding and raising his experience, become increasingly objectified, less personal or subjective, and are transformed into a definite interest, which in turn passes into enthusiasm, and so forth.

In the case of the predominant influence of needs, faith falls into dependence on an insufficiency of information concerning not only the situation in which it has arisen, but also that situation—and even, above all, that situation—in which the subject will have to act and which he models in advance. Therefore, when the uncertainty of the future situation is sufficiently great, imagination and fantasy play the main role in the process of the development of faith. The imagined object may be represented quite vividly, figuratively, and sensuously (precisely for this reason Hume called it

faith (“living ideas”), and information about it may even be considered true, despite the fact that no such object exists. As G. Klaus notes, such faith rests on assumptions made in order to fill gaps in knowledge which cannot yet be filled by means of evidence. It helps to obtain a completed system of knowledge on the basis of which the subject’s activity is constructed. Its difference from knowledge consists in the fact that it relies not on logical representations, not on proofs, but on the force of the assertion of a verbal expression, as a result of which it is easily clothed in metaphors⁸. Thus, if certainty exists only on condition of its empirical or rational substantiation and accompanies reliable knowledge or a proposition as part of conviction, then faith may also exist without these conditions, accompanying knowledge as part of an opinion or an assumption as part of conviction, the content of which is alternative and reflects the accidental, the probable. But any faith is expressed in a sensuous-emotional form. If, however, one speaks of faith at the level of scientific concepts, then one may agree with Raevsky and Antonov, who, among its foundations—alongside reason, conviction, and certainty in the existence of deterministic relations, and also alongside the operation of other general laws, obviousness, intuition, suggestion, and authority—also note the logical demonstrability of statements, calling it one of the chief foundations⁹. But, in our view, in this case there clearly occurs a substitution of the concept of “conviction” by the concept of “faith,” which is transformed from a psychological category into an epistemological one. Although it is known that any mental state may be studied from both the psychological and the epistemological side, we nevertheless believe that, for a better understanding of the concept of “conviction,” it is necessary to consider faith as a sensuous-emotional category, as a variety of value attitude and one of the foundations for readiness to act, i.e., only in the psychological aspect.

Returning to what has been said about faith, which depends primarily on needs, it should be noted that faith of this type acquires a tendency toward the generalization of search, when even low-probability signals have a certain significance. In other words, it contributes to the sufficiency of the internal search impulse, without which there can be no independent resolution of life problems and conflicts. The absence of the latter leads to a sharp increase in suggestibility and to the activation of mechanisms of imitative behavior, i.e., once again to the emergence of faith, but now blind and involuntary. Thus, on the one hand, faith influences the development of will, and on the other hand, it itself is dependent on it, for the will, as a “reaction to an obstacle,”¹⁰ additionally provides the energy that helps faith become conscious and enter, in this capacity, into the composition of scientific conviction.

Being dependent on needs, faith is directed by them and, in turn, orients the subject’s activity. But were there no obstacles on its path—for example, in the form of a lack of information—it would hardly be able to exert any influence on the subject’s activity. It would lose its connection with the will, cease to be one of the forms of value attitude, and turn into a direct connection between stimulus and reaction, with which behaviorists in particular try to identify it. Thus, faith, like will, arises—

... arise and positively affect the subject’s activity in the case of an obstacle situation, creating an additional need to choose an optimal solution, to represent it in the form of a model and to evaluate it, to motivate behavior correctly, and to test the solution in practice. All this is precisely what it means that faith manifests itself in the process of reflection and action, whose successful course requires both imagination and logical thinking, first, and, second, a coordinated interaction both of the situation, which supplies new information and corrects activity, and of needs, which determine the choice of precisely these situations and this mode of behavior, and not others.

In this state of affairs, information about the object toward which faith is directed acquires a definite significance and value. Around it there is formed a focus of optimal excitability in the cerebral cortex, which also serves as the psychophysiological basis of faiths that differ in content or in degree. If the short-term existence of such excitation leads to the emergence of situational faith, then its sufficiently prolonged and constant preservation and repetition ends with faith becoming a trait of the personality, entering into its structure and determining the character of the mood, making it optimistic. Such a significance of the signal character of certain information, corresponding to needs and interests, makes understandable the fact that even false information becomes an object of the subject’s faith, while true information remains simply knowledge and is not used by the subject as a means of transforming reality.

Thus, the influence of information on the subject’s behavior depends not only on whether it is true or not, and not so much on the subject’s abilities, as also on whether he is predisposed to regard it as true, i.e., on faith born in the depths of the set. Hence the conclusion suggests itself that only such knowledge can become the subject’s convictions as acquires some personal significance for him in terms of its correspondence to his needs and interests. Since all needs and interests are always socially determined to one degree or another, faith too has a definite social value only depending on their social significance. In this connection, the task of educating needs and interests, and not only the subject’s abilities, also assumes importance. One should agree with A. K. Kozyreva in her assertion that faith, by its origin, by its genetic essence, is social¹¹. We also consider G. Klaus correct in maintaining that faith and the ways it manifests itself are subjective, but are subordinate to objective laws that can be studied¹².

If a situation does not correspond to needs, then faith begins to fade away, or else gives rise to unreal fictions and illusions, as, for example, in religious convictions. We find the key to understanding what has been said, using religious convictions as an example, in the works of the classics of Marxism. In particular, K. Marx, in the works “On the Jewish Question” and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” reveals the essence of such a contradiction. In his words, man, not knowing how and not having the possibility of satisfying the need to find his true essence on earth because of the domination over him of forces hostile to him, because of fear of them and because of his ignorance, turns with faith

toward the sky, reflecting his actual position in an illusory form. As a consequence of this, Marx maintains, religion appears as the direct reflection of the existence of imperfection, the manifestation of worldly limitation. Precisely for this reason, the demand to renounce it, to renounce illusions about one’s condition, must be combined with the demand to renounce a condition that needs illusions. Thus, religious convictions reflect natural and social forces alien to man, alien because they have not yet been known by reason and have not been practically mastered, while the object postulated in these convictions does not exist at all. Nevertheless, man believes in it, represents it to himself in imagination, and even considers it real, sensuously given, and fully attainable. As S. Lem puts it, under such circumstances real actions are used to attain an unreal goal¹³. As for nonreligious faith, dependent on needs which in a given situation cannot be satisfied, it may be said that even illusory faith is sometimes capable of bringing a certain benefit. Leading to failures in external behavior, i.e., being harmful to the subject in a social respect, it can, in a psychological respect, serve as a source of mental equilibrium; and this property of faith, as is well known, is widely used in the practice of psychotherapy. Hobbes pointed to this property of it in his time. Klaus also speaks of it. “Faith,” he writes, “which consciously renounces every rational justification, best serves the mental pacification of the individual, but for scientific investigations it has not the slightest heuristic significance”¹⁴. Its uselessness for cognition is also acknowledged by S. Lem, who proceeds from the fact that all cognition is an increase in acquired information, whereas the result of mystical self-absorption is informationally zero¹⁵.

In connection with what has been said, it may be emphasized that religion has no basis for laying claim to the place occupied by science. If its faith replaces its object—fantastic and illusory—with an objectively existing and entirely real one, then by that very fact religion negates itself, turning simply into an emotional, immediate, not yet sufficiently conscious form of reflecting reality. Having once been a historically necessary and justified form of reflecting the “inverted world,” as a result of which Marx called it “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” “the heart of a heartless world” (emphasis mine.—G. Sh.), religion under the conditions of socialism and communism outlives itself, since it ceases to correspond to needs. Religious faith gives way to scientific faith, which does not doom man to inaction or to an empty expenditure of his forces, but promotes his cognitive, psychological, and social activity. Precisely for this reason, the expansion of the subject’s social ties, along with education and upbringing organized in a definite direction, are the most effective methods of atheist work under the conditions of our society.

The conditioning of faith by the most diverse factors affects its character, which is revealed through the properties of desirability, indifference, immediacy, emotionality, agreement, associativity, noncontradictoriness, attenuation, brevity, analogy, the cumulative property, the property of logical consequence, and

the differential property of force. Indications of many of them we have already encountered in individual philosophers. Taken together, however, these properties are enumerated by the Soviet researchers A. N. Raevsky and A. V. Antonov¹⁶. From their point of view, the essence of these properties consists in the following: first, a person is more inclined to believe in the possibility of something pleasant or useful for him than of something indifferent. In other words, the properties of desirability and indifference reflect the dependence of belief on desires, i.e., on needs and interests. Second, a person more readily believes what he perceives personally and directly, for by nature he is not inclined to doubt his own sensory perceptions. It is precisely for this reason that some philosophers, for example Hume, placed belief on the same level as an immediate impression. Third, belief is influenced by the agreement of authoritative persons; as a result, one may conclude that for it both general significance and authority are very important (Locke, Kant). In addition, it depends on the emotional intensity accompanying a given communication about its subject. In this connection Hobbes and Locke, for the purpose of forming convictions, attached great importance to the vividness of the presentation of the material, and not only to its content. Fourth, the subject’s belief in this or that statement or phenomenon, etc., will increase if they become linked into a single logical system and do not contradict one another. But it fades if its object ceases to manifest itself or else constantly changes its properties and features (Hume). Fifth, when objects of cognition are similar, belief in the known is transferred to the unknown but analogous to it. In exactly the same way it passes from the initial premise of a logical judgment to its conclusion, and with the greater force the shorter the chain of logical proofs and the less the conclusion differs from representations habitual for the given person. And, sixth, the degree of confidence in something, all other conditions being equal, is proportional to the number of facts, etc., that have served as the basis of belief. As Raevsky and Antonov note, this cumulative property is widely used by advertising organizations. But if such belief comes into collision with contradictory facts, then it decreases in proportion to the persuasive force of that fact.

Thus, these properties once again confirm the fact that belief, in its development, is subject to objective regularities, as a result of which it can be explained and studied, in whatever form it may manifest itself. And therefore there are no grounds for comparing it with “revelation” and making it dependent on God or on other supernatural forces.

In addition to what has been said, it is necessary to dwell on one more point that characterizes belief from the pragmatic side. Its essence consists in the fact that if belief, relying chiefly on knowledge and on experience, performs the role merely, as A. K. Kozyreva notes, of “an emotional accompaniment to the experiential and rational criterion of truth,” then belief that is guided above all by needs is distinguished by emotional intensity and is capable of performing the function of “a criterion of certainty”¹⁷, of which Hume, Kant, and others spoke in their time, and which may serve as one of the epistemological roots of religion. The possibility of the existence of such a criterion is conditioned by the following circumstances: in the striving toward the sensuously not given

faith rests on information whose truth cannot always be immediately substantiated: first, in order to determine the nature of one’s activity in relation to objects that are the subject of the satisfaction of the subject’s needs, confidence in the truth or falsity of information about them is necessary; second, for the successful course of people’s social activity—one aspect of which is the cognitive process—the subjects of this activity must be confident in the correctness of its direction. Thus, from the pragmatic side, faith can be not only a stimulus and guide for behavior, fulfilling a communicative function in the process of cognition and human interaction, but also serve as a subjective-psychological criterion of the truth of knowledge, which, of course, must nevertheless be verified by an objective criterion.

The value of faith as a pragmatic category is also discussed by such a philosopher as J. Lewis, who, exposing the untenability of skepticism, counterposes to it the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which, by virtue of its objectivity and partisanship, is capable not only of indicating the paths for transforming society in the interests of all humankind, but also of reviving and sustaining faith both in the power of science and in human capabilities. “Science,” he writes, “places in our hands new means, of unprecedented power, both for determining human goals and for the struggle to realize them. We, and we alone, bear responsibility for establishing and changing, for forming and revising the goals of human progress. In place of the dogma we have discarded about an insuperable ‘sinfulness’ that makes progress impossible, we have placed faith in the capacity of people themselves to transform their social relations and, by common efforts, to achieve the good of humankind. In place of the notion that egoism is an incurable disease, we have placed the conviction that man must understand—and in fact rather quickly comes to the conclusion—that the well-being of the whole of society is a necessary condition for the development of all his abilities. In place of the notion that we are in the grip of illusions of the ‘premature realization’ of a goal, we have placed the assertion of the boundless prospects of infinite progress”^23). Thus Marxism must be interested not only in the scientific content of its judgments, theories, etc., and in the dissemination of its ideas among the masses, but also in sustaining faith in these ideas, in their truth and efficacy; for only by becoming close to the masses, to their interests and needs, do they take possession of them and become a material force. In this sense I. Kon is entirely right in observing that no ideology can exist without faith in its initial values and symbols^24).

Everything said about the value of faith from the pragmatic side allows us to note that the difference among its pragmatic functions is explained by a change in the object of faith—both toward its deepening and broadening, and toward increasing its individual and social value for the subject; by a change in the magnitude of needs and interests and in their quality (in the sense of their development from individual, particular ones in content and orientation to socially significant ones); and by a change in the bearer of faith, which leads to faith, from a psychological category expressing the state of the subject’s individual psyche, becoming a socio-psychological category expressing the state of social—

^23) J. Lewis. Science, Faith and Skepticism. Moscow, 1966, p. 231.
^24) I. Kon. Reflections on the American Intelligentsia. Novy Mir, 1968, No. 1, p. 188.

moral feelings and therefore is already considered from the standpoint of social psychology, of social consciousness, i.e., in a sociological aspect. In other words, the dependence of faith on the most diverse components leads to a change in its qualitative characteristics and in the functions it performs, which in turn makes it, first, a subject of investigation for various sciences and, second, an object of philosophical consideration from the most diverse points of view. In conclusion, we may note that the study of faith at different levels of its development is of interest already because, being a constituent component of conviction, it influences both its other components and conviction as a whole, enabling it to perform a wide variety of roles—such as beliefs, opinions, scientific conviction, and so on—and to fulfill moral, worldview-related, and other functions. It is precisely faith, among other mental states, that creates the possibility for conviction to relate to reality not only as to an object, not contemplatively, but subjectively, practically, actively, purposefully and interestedly.

1. Resolution of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU on the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Pravda, 1971, April 10, p. 4. ↩

2. E. V. Sokolov, “Elements of Social Consciousness,” Philosophical Sciences, no. 1, 1967, p. 48. ↩

3. A. K. Kozyreva, “The Nature of Faith,” Scientific Notes of the Herzen State Pedagogical Institute, “Philosophical Studies,” vol. 365, Leningrad, 1968, p. 170. ↩

4. A. K. Kozyreva. “The Place and Role of Faith in the Process of People’s Cognitive Activity.” 20th Herzen Readings. “Filosofiya,” Leningrad, 1967, p. 68. ↩

5. Cited in: B. A. Erunov. Perception and Opinion. 21st Herzen Readings. “Filosofiya,” Leningrad, 1968. ↩

6. G. Klaus, The Power of the Word. Moscow, 1967, p. 154. ↩

7. L. P. Bueva, The Social Environment and the Consciousness of the Personality. Moscow State University, 1968, p. 216. ↩

8. G. Klaus, The Power of the Word. Moscow, 1967, p. 152. ↩

9. A. N. Raevsky and A. V. Antonov, Psychological Features of Information Service and Ways of Increasing Its Effectiveness. Kiev, 1967, pp. 45–48. ↩

10. P. Simonov, “The Prehistory of the Will,” Science and Life, 1970, No. 7, pp. 21–24. ↩

11. A. K. Kozyreva, “The Fullness of Faith,” Uchen. zap. gos. ped. in-ta im. Gertsena, “Philosophical Studies,” vol. 365, L., 1969, p. 170. ↩

12. G. Klaus, The Power of the Word. Moscow, 1967, p. 155. ↩

13. S. Lem, Summa Technologiae. Moscow, 1968, p. 155. ↩

14. G. Klaus, The Power of the Word. Moscow, 1967, p. 152. ↩

15. S. Lem, Summa Technologiae. Moscow, 1968, p. 157. ↩

16. A. N. Raevsky and A. V. Antonov, Psychological Features of Informational Discussion and Ways of Increasing Its Effectiveness. Kiev, 1967, pp. 51–53. ↩

17. A. K. Kozyreva, “The Place and Role of Belief in the Process of People’s Cognitive Activity,” Twentieth Herzen Readings. Philosophy, Leningrad, 1967, p. 70. ↩