In an article on the language of Zen by D.T. Suzuki writes: “When I discussed the problem of being with a famous German philosopher in the summer of 1952, he asked me how Zen Buddhism would describe existence. I told the following story.

De Shen (790-865) once preached the following sermon:

“If you ask, you make a mistake, and if you don’t ask, you act contrary.” He didn’t say “in spite of what”, but simply said “you act contrary to”. The monk left the ranks and began a ceremonial bow. The mentor wasted no time in hitting him with his staff. The monk said: “I just started bowing to you, why are you beating me, O master?” The mentor replied: “If I had waited until my mouth opened, you never know what could have happened!”

After this I added: this is the kind of language that Zen uses in relation to being. The philosopher smiled and said nothing more...”

The difficulty is not to shy away from the problem. What Suzuki calls language is really language. The Zen monks understood it, and the researcher must also understand it.

This is, however, a very difficult task. Mondo and koans are a kind of absurd literature, deliberately absurd, meaningless, illogical combinations of words. That these absurd messages communicate something is a paradox, for we are accustomed to regard an absurd combination of terms as a sentence without meaning. It is impossible to approach the sign system of Zen without understanding this paradox and without answering a number of questions: what is absurdity? Is it possible to assess the absurdity of a message without context? Can a proposition that is absurd in one context be reasonable in another?

Let's take two statements, the absurdity of which is beyond doubt:

“nonsense on vegetable oil”; "soft-boiled boots".

Both examples of absurdity are combinations of terms. In this they differ from zaumi, which either boils down to alone word (interjection), or is not divided into meaningful words and can be considered as an interjection sound combination. Abstruse (interjection) sound combinations, not correlated with any subject, are traditionally used in the choruses of songs (for example, drulafu-drulafa, yoksel-moksel), in live speech (grunting) and carry a certain semantic load, but this load follows from the rhythm work (speech situation) as a whole, and not from one or another particular connection between isolated elements of the text. In other words, the meaning of the interjection is given purely rhythmically (and not logically). It simply has nothing to do with logic and cannot be regarded from its point of view as something reasonable (logical) or absurd (illogical). Within Zen, an example of zaumi is the favorite exclamation of many teachers, “quatz!” .

This chapter eliminates the problem of confusion. What interests us is the semantic load illogicality. Based on the examples given, we can define it as clearly incorrect, “hurts the eye” combination of terms. Should be distinguished from absurdity description him, a statement of the absurd as a fact. Exclamation of “nonsense!” is not at all absurd if it is classified as real nonsense. In the sentence “nonsense in vegetable oil,” the “nonsense” is not created by the word “nonsense,” but only by its connection with other words. It is absurd to combine nonsense with vegetable oil. It is also absurd to connect “boot” with the state “soft-boiled”, although each term separately is “reasonable”.

From the above examples it is easy to conclude that absurdity is logical error. Real relations between objects are correct relations. Only reasoning can be incorrect and absurd. Obvious absurdity, absurdity reveals the mistake made. The meaning of absurdity is an indication of an error, a departure of the mind from reality. This is approximately how it is in mathematics and some other conventional systems based on the identity of mind and reality.

However, in life things are more complicated. In the broad historical reality, connections not only of words, but also of objects themselves (new, unusual, unconscious) can be absurd. And we can talk about a really absurd situation; it arises in times of transition, when “the world has turned out of its kneecap” (Shakespeare). It arises in everyday life, when people who could not imagine life without each other, at the same time feel that they cannot live together (“It took months, years to separate…” - A.A. Akhmatova). It arises when two logical systems based on irreconcilable postulates collide. In these situations, an absurd combination of terms may indicate confusion in life itself (and not in reasoning) and bring to consciousness not his own error, but the essential qualities of reality. In other words, an absurd message, linking together what is clearly incompatible, hints (although it does not strictly and accurately describe) that life goes beyond our ideas about life. Thus, while remaining literally absurd, absurd at the level of common sense, a judgment can correspond to reality on a deeper level, symbolically describing a real conflict. On the contrary, common sense, which logically correctly connects objects that it clearly distinguishes, in an “absurd situation” skims on the surface, because it is precisely the main, confused thing that it does not distinguish. Therefore, even convinced rationalists, finding themselves in an “absurd situation,” spontaneously switch to the language of paradox, grotesque, and absurdity. Such, for example, are Volgin’s sarcasms in N.G.’s “Prologue.” Chernyshevsky. Describing Russia as a “miserable nation, a nation of slaves,” he logically concludes that engaging in revolutionary activities stupid and right there, contrary to logic, declares that there is no other way Maybe behave (“just as a person buried alive cannot avoid banging his head on the lid of the coffin”). This way of reasoning sharply contradicts the “reasonable egoism” of the heroes of “What is to be done?” . The works of A.I. are also roughly opposed to each other. Herzen, written before and after 1848 (in particular, “Doctor Krupov” and “Aphorism of Titus Leviathansky”).

In some eras, paradoxical, grotesque, absurd or bordering on the absurd combinations turn out to be talented, apt, and logically correct constructions turn out to be fruitless. Suffice it to recall “A Word of Praise for Stupidity”, “Letters of Dark People”, Rabelais. The negrotesque works of Erasmus and Hutten are forgotten. The grotesque pages of Rabelais are read without interest. Thus, an absurd statement does not always indicate an error of reason. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is the luck of the mind, a sign of a living mind that has realized the absurdity of its operating rules, its logic. For logic may be historically or otherwise limited, and reality, in a certain turn, may turn out to be confusing, “absurd.”

It makes sense to give something like a classification of grotesque situations, dividing them into at least two main types.

The confusion of two systems, each of which itself allows for a logical organization (and sometimes has it), but only separately and not together (transitional eras of history, the family on the eve of divorce, etc.).

The confusion of a sphere that allows for logical organization with another, accessible only to holistic thinking (an example of which is analyzed in my work “Rublev’s Trinity and Trinitarian Thinking”).

Strictly speaking, situations of the first type only seem absurd: in fact, they are paradoxical. In other words, they can be understood by formalized thinking if it changes its postulates and creates more subtle operating rules » etc. This conditionally absurd situations that require going beyond the boundaries of a known logical system, and not logic in general. On the contrary, situations of the second type can be called absolutely or truly absurd. They are insoluble within the framework of rigidly organized thinking. Their “logic” can be called “fluid”.

Zen koans and mondo are, as a rule, messages of the second type. But, firstly, this cannot be proven without comparing grotesque messages of different types. Secondly, grotesque messages of the second type never arise in a vacuum, cleared of historical, everyday paradoxes, etc. (i.e. grotesques of the first type). Therefore, it is necessary to consider, at least in general terms, the entire system of “absurd situations” and “absurd statements”.

There is a simplified point of view that refers everything absurd to the sphere of religion and ends the study of absurd messages, on the one hand, and religion, on the other.

In fact, religion, firstly, does not at all shy away from formalized thinking and even acts (in some eras) as a sphere of its primary development - for example, early Buddhism is very rational. It is much more rational than the science of that time (medicine, etc.). Secondly - and this is what interests us within the framework of this chapter - in many examples of sacred absurdity one can reveal a certain profane meaning, see an indication of the purely historical confusion of the transitional era.

Let's look at the example proposed by E. Yakovlev: “I believe because it is absurd.” First of all, let us quote Tertullian in full, introducing in brackets some realities of the era that were clear to contemporaries, but well forgotten. “The Son of God was crucified,” wrote Tertullian. - This is not shameful (for us specifically) because it is shameful (in the eyes of official Rome). And the Son of God died; it is worthy of belief (for us) because it is absurd (in the eyes of philosophers who worship divine emperors). And he rose from the dead: this is indisputable, because it is impossible.”

We have emphasized with our explanations in brackets polemical Tertullian, the logic of the dispute, which forced Pierre Ramet in the 16th century. defend the thesis, also quite absurd: “All of Aristotle’s statements are false” (with the implication: the rest of the statements of scholasticism are also false); the logic of the dispute, which forced Belinsky, several centuries later, to answer the defender of autocracy: “No, no matter what you say, I still won’t agree with you!”

It was ordered, customary, and therefore considered reasonable to honor the emperor. It was unusual and therefore unreasonable to honor the crucified son of a carpenter. On the contrary, Christians considered it unwise to honor Nero and Caracalla and worshiped the author of the Sermon on the Mount. Behind the “reason-absurd” alternative there are sometimes both reasons, each of which, from the point of view of the other, is absurd and absurd. This appears more clearly in a greater thinker than Tertullian, in the ap. Paul: “If anyone among you thinks to be wise in this age, let him be foolish... For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before the Lord” (I Corinthians 3:18-19).

“Where is the sage? where is the scribe? where is the questioner of this century? Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness? (I Corinth. 1:20)

“Look, brethren, who you are who are called: not much of you wise according to the flesh, not many strong, not many noble.

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong things;

And God chose the base things of the world and the things that are despised, and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are...” (I Corinth. 1:26-28).

When the Christian point of view ceased to be unusual, it acquired, over time, the sanction of reason. Thomas Aquinas would never say “I believe, for this is absurd.” On the contrary, the leading (still) theologian of Catholicism believed that reason and faith confirmed each other. But “Minerva’s owl flies out at dusk.” The 13th century, when a certain identity of reason and faith was established, was followed by the 15th. A new behavior began to take shape that did not fit into the framework of medieval Christianity, and this new behavior at first asserted itself in the same way as the behavior of the early Christians once did - contrary to reason. It spontaneously takes shape in Dante’s “Hell” or in the poems of Villon, who very keenly felt the unreasonableness and absurdity of his entire being: “I am dying of thirst near a stream... I am accepted everywhere, expelled from everywhere!” I am not reasonable, not honest, not handsome, I am a thief and a robber, but I am a person, an indivisible atom of being, and that is why I am! - Villon speaks with all his poetry. A hundred years passed before in the same France (Italy of the 15th century lived by a different clock!) the individualism of the New Age was idealized and received, in turn, the sanction of reason, and the reason of the scholastics was written off as an absurdity. Reason and absurdity, therefore, turn out to be not so opposite...

Fundamentally new historical behavior arises spontaneously, emotionally, contrary to the old reason. But the time comes, and a philosophy appears that realizes it. Sophists, Mu'tazilites, scholastics, and enlighteners appeared - and a philosophy emerged that proceeded from new habits as its postulates, and this new philosophy more or less rational. In every era, rationalism has its own special features; the rationalism of Democritus, Thomas Aquinas and Descartes are not identical; nevertheless, they are comparable, they are subject to certain general rules of rationalistic constructions. The difference between the two largely comes down to postulates. For Epicurus and Hobbes, the superiority of individual reason over tradition, sober reason over the experience of ecstasy is obvious; for Thomas Aquinas it is also obvious that the tradition of the historical collective, affirmed in a state of grace (illumination) and enshrined in dogma, is above sober individual reason and the freedom of graceless (unilluminated) thought is possible only within the framework interpretations dogma. The mind of the New Age is turned towards natural sciences and economic development, i.e. in areas that require sober efficiency and complete freedom of rational experiment; the mind of Thomas Aquinas, since it is turned to the earth, notices first of all the problems of public morality.

Every era, every culture, every sphere of human activity has its own pathos, and this pathos can be expressed as a consistent formalized system, tested by experience and practice. Each philosophy has its own rational grain, and this grain can be rationally expressed. The absurd arises only when one postulate collides with another, one system with another.

Medieval rationalism is a generally accepted fact. Being medieval, it preserves the well-known legacy of postulates that were contrary to common sense, common to the entire Middle Ages. But in the methods of processing its material, scholasticism is strictly logical. On the contrary, during the Renaissance, the taste for paradox, grotesque, and absurdity was again revived. There was a formation of a new rationalism, generally more consistent than the rationalism of scholasticism, but the thought of the transitional era was bizarre, unsystematic, essayistic, and much inferior in logic, consistency and methodology to the great scholastics of the 13th century.

It seems difficult to admit that the rationalism of the 17th - 18th centuries. is rooted in paradox, grotesque, absurdity (of the first type, according to our classification). This, however, is no more strange than the fact that “the people who created the modern rule of the bourgeoisie were everything but people of bourgeois narrow-mindedness.” The entire development of reason, if one penetrates into its contradictions, turns out to be inextricably linked with the development of the absurd.

The problem of an absurd message is one of the central problems of the general theory of communication. Absurd messages do not at all merge into one mass, devoid of meaning or having the same meaning in all cases of life. Absurd messages, when viewed in context, are just as meaningful in various ways as reasonable messages. The absurd is not something extraneous to reason. Like all phenomena, different and opposite, reason and absurdity penetrate each other. The development of forms of reason is inseparable from the development of forms of absurdity.

Absurd messages take on new meaning in every fundamentally new system of thought. It is possible to distinguish systems of thought from each other and group them into series, taking as a basis the bundles of possible meanings of alogism (absurdity) characteristic of each system. One can compare the breadth of these bundles, individual values ​​- and, finally, the degree and nature of the illogicality of systems created by the intellect with the degree and nature of the illogicality of objective situations in which the system is applied. (For example, in strictly formalized thinking the beam is reduced to one line, in contextual thinking it unfolds into a fan. These oppositions will be discussed below.)

Within the framework of formalized thinking, absurdity can be defined as a relationship of terms that contradicts the postulates and rules of operations. Such relationships are considered prohibited. However, this does not mean that they are not significant. The word “absurd” appears more often in a geometry textbook than in a novel by Françoise Sagan, and each time we are talking about a description of an absurd situation (in mathematics it is called reductio ad absurdum). Based on the frequency of use of the term “absurd,” Kiselev’s textbook can be classified as absurd literature and analyzed on the same level as the books of Camus, Sartre, and Sagan.

It may be objected that the role of an absurd situation in the development of the plot of a geometry textbook cannot cope with the role in the development of the plot of a novel. However, we do not claim that the term “absurd” in Kiselev’s textbook means the same as in the 8th novel Certain Sourire. We only assert that it means something, that the absurd situation is essential in the development of geometric thought. “Absurdum est” here means a stop, the need to turn back, a dead end. From this point of view, formalized thinking that avoids contradiction is as limited on all sides by absurdities as a railway track is by dead ends. The absurd is the boundary of formalized thinking, without which it cannot function. The absurd is the border guard of reason.

Thought moves according to the rules of a formalized system, like a carriage on rails. Having reached a dead end, the carriage stops. You need to push it back, behind the arrow, turn the arrow and point it to another track. This is how we operate within the framework of geometry. We come across a dead end, retreat, find a new track, move to a new dead end. If we consider movement on rails as pure art, then it is easy, harmonious and beautiful. However, no matter where the car is - in Sevastopol or Vladivostok - it does not leave the right-of-way. And all unattainable for the passenger. To enter the sea, the mountains, or pick a flower, you need to leave the right-of-way, get off the rails, and go off-road.

Trying to pick flowers without leaving the carriage is an absurd idea. To get closer to the flower, you need to build a new track, and you can’t do this without trampling the flower or filling it with rubble. This is so stupid that it is only possible in a dream. However, in reality we do something similar - in the intellectual sphere - every time we try to drive along a formalized track to understanding such terms as “love”, “freedom”, “being”. In these cases, formalized thinking turns out to be completely ridiculous.

You can do without metaphors by introducing the concepts of core and field of meaning. The core of meaning is something that can be determined independently of context. The field of meaning consists of all past, present and future relationships of a word with other words of the language. In formalized thinking, the core is strictly limited, and the field is considered meaningless. The nuclei, surrounded by emptiness, are connected and separated according to strict rules logic, logistics, etc. Logical constructions (schemes, models) make it possible to predict certain phenomena and produce efficient machines. However, there are words whose meaning seems to have no core. If the kernel of the meaning of a “normal” word of a formalized system is equal to one in the limit, and the field is zero, then the kernel of a paradoxical word is equal to zero in the limit, and the field is infinity. Behind the paradoxical word ontologically stands not a fact of reality that is different from other facts, but a hypostasis of reality in which reality appears as a whole; like all material culture in its sign aspect, there is spiritual culture.

Almost paradoxical terms are distinguished by the fact that they cannot be defined in any way. There are, for example, hundreds of definitions of culture, religion, etc. Every attempt at definition captures one aspect and leaves others in the shadows. And since it is impossible to establish which aspect is more important, it is not possible to agree on the unambiguous content of the term. What is convenient for scientists of one school is extremely inconvenient for others. Thus, conventionalism can no more help here than it helped the builders of the Tower of Babel.

Another empirical sign of a paradoxical term can be considered its use as a sign of absolute integrity, as a synonym for the word “God”. Terms such as Tao, nirvana, Great Emptiness, according to the definition, are not definable. “Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.”

In less paradoxical cases, the core and the field of meaning are both significant and can be arbitrarily emphasized. Based on this, philosophers create systems that describe the world either as a system of atoms or as an indivisible unity. Both principles can be formalized, expressed strictly and consistently.

With the atomic approach this is obvious. But it is just as easy to start from the One and declare the multitude an illusion created by the field of the One, the waves of which we take for objects. Fields of terms flowing into each other are postulated as reality, and cores of meanings different from each other are postulated as nothing. (From a certain point of view All Greek philosophers classical era - atomists. Parmenides is also an atomist, only he reduces the world to one atom.)

The experience of two and a half thousand years of the history of philosophy shows that the principle of Parmenides and the principle of Democritus are logically irrefutable and logically incompatible. Strict thinking is forced to deny either one or the other, or itself. In the first two cases, it is absurd in relation to the rejected alternative, which practically cannot be eliminated and, under conditions of intellectual persecution, acquires additional meaning and becomes a sign of an elusive whole (like Lucifer in A. France’s novel “The Revolt of the Angels”). In the third case, it is internally absurd, deceiving itself and others in attempts to tie up loose ends, to pour salt on the tail of the absolute. It doesn’t cost the poet anything to say that God, a symbol of integrity, is “the all-powerful god of details, Jagiello and Jadwig” (B. Pasternak). Logically this is an unacceptable statement.

The limitation of formalized thinking follows from the certainty (and, therefore, limitation) of its initial postulates. A certain postulate (group of postulates) allows us to describe the world in a certain aspect - and only that. The postulate is comparable to the spatial point of view of a physical object. The best vantage point allows you to see half object (for example, a globe or globe). It is impossible to look at the globe from both sides at the same time. It is also impossible to combine the level of identity (postulate of Parmenides) and the level of difference (postulate of Democritus). All non-Parmenidean points of view are placed at the level of differences and, in addition to the fact that they contradict the Parmenidean one, they also contradict each other.

Not only in philosophy, but also in any particular science, there are a number of concepts, each of which is based on facts, constructed in accordance with the general rules of formalized thought and allows one to approach the understanding of new groups of facts (predict them, discover them, explain them, etc. ). But these concepts do not fit into unity, contradict each other, deny each other. Each concept, illuminating facts A, B, C from a favorable point of view, pushes other facts (E, Yu, Z) into the shadows. Each concept opens some facts and closes others, or, in any case, makes approaching them extremely inconvenient. Each concept overcomes specific difficulties in describing the facts it reduces, specific problems that disappear only with the abandonment of the concept itself. It's unavoidable. “An eye that saw all the rays,” said Engels, “precisely for this reason would see absolutely nothing.”

Formalized systems based on postulates a and anti-a, can be generalized in a metasystem, in relation to which they become subsystems, special cases. However, metasystems are systems, and everything that has been said about formalized systems in general can be repeated about them. Individual metasystems are just as incompatible as individual antisystems of a lower order. The idea of ​​an absolute metasystem leads to absurdity, which is prohibited within the framework of formalized thinking. A particular point of view cannot be a universal point of view. Defined in the role of the universal, the core of meaning, identical to the field of meaning, is as paradoxical as the Son, consubstantial with the Father and from eternity abiding in the bosom of the Father.

Thus, the metasystem always gives a particular solution; the boundaries of system incompatibility are transferred from one place to another, but do not disappear or lose their meaning.

Secondly, metasystems are always created retroactively. They do not help create something new, but only save the honor of formalized thinking by adopting its illegitimate children. Conception occurs illegally, breaking the rules. When Lobachevsky decided to create non-Euclidean geometry, he broke the taboo of the absurd and interpreted the absurd as a sign of transition from one formalized system to another (and not as a stop sign).

Einstein did the same when interpreting Michelson's experiment. Under the influence of necessity, which pushed physics beyond the doors of common sense, a new way of thinking was realized and formed into a system, into a unique form of dialectics. You can call her conditionally formalized system of thought. In relation to it, the thinking that dominated in exact sciences before Lobachevsky and Einstein, can be considered as unconditionally formalized.

In unconditionally formalized thinking, the postulates coincide with the habits of common sense. Therefore, they seem unshakable and absurdity - an unconditional sign of stopping, the inconceivability of further movement. An unconditionally formalized thought stops before the absurd, like a hunted wolf before a chain of red flags. Naturalist of the 17th-19th centuries. was unable to distinguish the absurd flag from the fire and reflexively recoiled in front of the red rag. On the contrary, the natural scientist of the 20th century. recognizes the equality of a red rag to fire only as a rule of the game, necessary for the theory to be built internally consistent and suitable as a basis for mathematical calculations. If the facts drive him into a dead end, he discards convention, jumps over the flag of absurdity and turns this or that absurdity into a postulate of a new theory.

The absurd becomes something like an emergency exit for conventionally formalized thinking. Under ordinary circumstances the exit is locked and the movement of thought proceeds through established channels. But in an emergency, all doors are opened and any intellectual experiments beyond common sense are carried out.

Of course, it is not enough to put forward postulates that are absurd from the point of view of common sense in order to build an effective system. In conditions not provided for by common sense, premises that are absurd from the point of view of common sense provide a well-known hope for success. This hope only in a limited number of cases leads to actual success. But those who do not take risks certainly do not win. Anyone who remains with the postulates of the old theory in an absurd situation is dooming himself to failure in advance.

The tactics of experimenting with the absurd led physical sciences to brilliant success. The impression was so strong that Niels Bohr put forward a kind of preliminary condition for evaluating the new hypothesis: is it crazy enough to correctly describe reality?

A unique attempt to legitimize the absurd was Hegel's dialectic. Antinomy, alogism, and contradiction are postulated as a universal and natural connection of terms, not understood by reason. Reason removes contradictions (i.e. preserves and at the same time abolishes them). Speaking in terms of semiotics, Hegel blurs the boundaries of the core of meaning, restores the semantic field, expands the fan of meanings of a word through living language (and the languages ​​of individual sciences, taken “humanitarianly”, in the spirit of philosophical speculation, turning terms into metaphors); and since the fans of meanings overlap each other, since the semantic fields merge into one field, then any obstacle can be flown around the waves of this field. Hence the real power of Hegel’s thought - and the intoxication with the omnipotence of his thought, illusory the hope of overcoming all real life contradictions, describing them as steps on the path to the absolute idea. Hence the philistine connotation of “reconciliation with reality” in orthodox Hegelianism.

One of the conditions that contributed to the formation of Hegel's philosophy was the German language. The German phrase has one strange (from the point of view of the habits of other languages) feature: the verb is introduced into it at first only as a general impulse of action, and we analyze, line by line, the construction, operating with a slightly open or completely open fan of meanings. Only at the end of the phrase do unchangeable parts, prefixes and negation appear. The fan shrinks. But in the next phrase it reveals itself again. Thus, when reading a German text, we are constantly swimming in the unsteady waves of fields of meaning, not knowing which island fate will take us to. Islands appear and disappear again. We barely have time to rest on solid ground - and are forced to set sail again. From the point of view of fidelity to a single fact, this is a very inconvenient, tiring, dangerous life. It is more convenient to describe facts in English. But the German phrase, inconvenient in a separate act of thought, constantly reminds of the general nature of the sign, of the contradictory unity of the core and field of meaning and therefore invites interesting attempts at a scientific-associative, scientific-poetic system that captures (even at the expense of deforming the facts) the spirit of the whole.

Herzen called “The Science of Logic” a “logical poem”. There is some truth in this. Hegel's thought is systematic, but it cannot be called strict. At times she simply plays with categories, breaks out of the predetermined channel, forgets that “the truth of being is the essence,” and rushes “in the flow of the word,” as in the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Suffice it to recall the section on foundation in “The Science of Logic”, some pages in “Phenomenology of Spirit” (about master and slave, about torn consciousness). These pages are remembered for a lifetime, but more like parables than scientifically proven propositions. Success here is inseparable from unique individual talent, from the gift of vision, poetic flair. Practice has shown that in the exact sciences this method is unfruitful. But there are vast “humanitarian” areas in which the terms do not lend themselves to strict formalization. And here Hegel’s dialectic finds its rightful place. This is one of the individual forms of connection between terms that we called above paradoxical (i.e., terms that cannot be defined out of context). In this area, rigorous methods are generally impossible without some additions, each time arising from specific, concrete circumstances.

The contradiction between the fantastic and poetic dialectics of the Hegelian type and conventionally formalized thinking approximately corresponds to the difference between the humanities (or holistic, integral) and the exact (atomic) sciences. Both are science (at least from the point of view of the Russian and German languages). The dialectic of science as a whole can be contrasted with the dialectic of Buddhism (or, to put the question more broadly, the dialectic of philosophical mysticism).

In scientific dialectics, absurdity is a sign of an illogical, illegal transition from the definite to the definite; in Buddhist - a sign of transition from the conditioned to the unconditioned.

Hegelian dialectics goes from concept to anti-concept, from system to anti-system, in order to ultimately build a meta-concept, a meta-system and thus remove the contradiction; True, at the highest level the unity again bifurcates, but this is a contradiction of the highest level. We cannot escape contradiction, but we climb the ladder of progress from lower truths to higher ones. Those who are dissatisfied may note: from absurdity to metaabsurd. But Hegel is characterized by a feeling of satisfaction with movement, ascension: “the truth of being is essence,” “the truth of essence is the concept,” etc. The more complex is thought of as higher. This idea had big influence on the life of Europe and Russia.

From a Buddhist point of view, such progress is meaningless. He remains entirely in the realm of the born, the become, the conditioned. The metasystem allows for some time to escape from contradiction in the realm of conventional knowledge, but temporary success has no value in the face of the eternal. Perhaps the metasystem will allow us to better organize our practical experience, but all this experience must be discarded. Any shifts at the level of differences do not bring us closer to the level of identity. On the contrary, the more we delve into the details, the more we become entangled in them, the stronger the chains of samsara. The accumulation of conventional knowledge (knowledge of particulars) is valuable for thinkers who attribute a known reality to the level of differences; but classical Buddhist thought recognizes only the level of identity as real. Therefore, only knowledge of the level of identity, the unconditioned - prajna - is recognized as true knowledge. Prajna is not a world spirit that can be gradually approached along a ladder of categories; it cannot be approached at all. Movement at the level of particulars does not bring us closer to prajna than running around in a stalled carriage brings us closer to the goal of the journey. Knowledge of particulars and prajna are mutually absurd. The truth of the whole can only be expressed by absurdity at the level of particulars.

Hence Nagarjuna's desire to show the absurdity of all the teachings known to him. Systems are not lined up in a chain, and one system is not interpreted as the truth of another. The truth of every system is emptiness, shunya. There is no need to jump over this emptiness, this abyss, in order to once again find yourself on the solid ground of true teaching. On the contrary, we must throw ourselves into this emptiness, into this abyss of absurdity. For every definite, positively developed teaching is a false teaching. And shunyavada itself - the teaching about emptiness - is not a positive teaching about emptiness, about nothingness, it is not nihilism in the usual understanding of the term. This is the doctrine of the nothingness of all doctrines - including the doctrine of nothingness - in the face of reality, which can be experienced, but cannot be expressed.

From a historical point of view, the condition we have described was experienced by Buddhism approximately between the 2nd century. BC. and IV century. AD This is one moment in the development of Buddhism, but a turning point, a kind of vicissitudes in which the essence of the action was most fully revealed.

Buddhism moves in a curious circle. He begins by discarding the alogisms of traditional mythopoetic language. Where a clear, unambiguous, consistent message is impossible, the Buddha maintains a “noble silence.” The false is discarded without direct reference to the true. Denial has a simple, unambiguous character. Such language, however, causes temptation too much simple understanding; silence easily loses the character of an expressive pause and becomes empty space. The expressed Path takes the place of the unspoken goal.

The Prajnaparamita Sutras try to overcome this danger by giving negation the character of an revealed affirmation, an indication of absolute wholeness, which the Buddha really had in mind, judging by the last words spoken before his death: “What is made up of parts is subject to destruction, work diligently” (Mahaparanibbana Sutta) . But denial, losing its simplicity, becoming denial and affirmation at the same time, becomes an illogical, absurd denial. And the entire language of Buddhism, initially clear and simple, takes on the character of a language of hints, elusive metaphors and gradually becomes illogical and absurd.

The first steps of this evolution were studied by modern Japanese scientists H. Masuda and G. Sasaki. “The meaning of Buddhist negation is not mere negation as such; it has a positive purpose - an indication of the absolute. In other words, the absolute is approached through the logic of negation.” H. Masuda gave convincing examples showing that in the text of the Prajnaparamita Sutras two types of negations can be distinguished and contrasted with each other: elementary and mystical. Sa-saki (in the cited article) showed a gradual increase in the frequency and structural significance of mystical negation (negation-affirmation) with the development of Mahayana ("great vehicle" Buddhism) around the beginning of our era.

In view of the extreme importance of this distinction, we provide a translation of some examples from the article by H. Masoud. An example of a simple denial: “This person does not know and does not see that everything that exists does not have real existence... Such a person is called a fool, a profane, he is like a child. If bodisattvas and mahasattvas taught only this and did not teach prajnaparamita, then they would not have achieved sarvajna.”

An example of an illogical denial: “If bodisattvas and mahasattvas do not see prajnaparamita, cognizing prajnaparamita... then these bodisattvas and mahasattvas achieve sarvajna...”

“Bodisattva and Mahasattva in prajnaparamita existence stand at the stage of not standing on the truth.”

“These denials,” Masuda comments on the second case, “should signify the state of the bodhisattvas in which they have completely overcome attachment to the six paramitas through practice and understanding of these six paramitas.”

In the first case, a person who is not at the level of a known principle expressed in famous words, - just a fool. In the second case, a person who is not at the level of words, who has descended from it, is a sage. In the first case, knowledge of the definite collides with ignorance of the definite. And ignorance of certain things is stupidity, this is the absurd idea of ​​​​an idiot, a half-educated person. The “half-witted” absurdity is placed below certain, formalized knowledge. A well-organized construction of core meanings, when faced with a poorly organized construction, destroys it and destroys it, establishing itself in its place. In the second case, the nuclei of meanings, colliding, destroy each other, annihilate (the bodhisattva in a completely true being stands at the stage of not standing on the truth); a flash of energy momentarily illuminates the semantic field of the “inexpressible”, and it turns out to be expressed. Thus, a three-layer structure of reason and absurdity can be traced:

half-witted absurdity;

formalized knowledge, reason;

superintelligent absurdity.

The path to wisdom is depicted approximately as Goethe depicted the path to mastery: “To write well, you must unlearn grammar.”

Wisdom from this point of view can be defined as an understanding of the cognitive value of illogicality, as going beyond the limitations of formalized knowledge.

Recognition of the legality of illogicalism entailed a certain danger. Infatuation with absurd combinations of terms can lead to a loss of certainty even where it is conceivable and desirable, i.e. when describing stable situations at the level of differences. Therefore, Indian Buddhism of the first centuries of our era introduces “super-reasonable absurdity” with caution, with restrictions, only in a certain place - when the field of absolute meaning is set as a result of careful logical preparation, and far! Beer the possibilities of logical movement of thought are exhausted. It's like an explosion carried out after careful sapper preparation.

Subsequently, the process (if we consider it in a general historical sequence) developed approximately as follows:

1. The frequency of denials, understood as illogical sacred signs, increased.

2. These signs begin to be used without any restrictions - as a leitmotif, rhythmically permeating the context from beginning to end. Rhythmic connections of sentences are strengthened, and logical connections are weakened. The sutra becomes a kind of prose poem with alogism in the role of rhyme (more precisely, in the role of semantic repetition, supported by sound repetitions).

3. Along with illogical negation, other illogicalisms are widely introduced. An unexpected, paradoxical, fantastic combination of terms becomes a stylistic cliche (“Vimalakirti Sutra”). The “incorrectness” of an individual judgment does not allow one to dwell on it; it forces the consciousness seeking the truth to go beyond the limits of the judgment, to turn away from the letter - to the spirit, to the meaning of the whole, to the rhythm of the context. The individual sentence becomes nothing, the context becomes everything.

4. A taste for the holy fool’s language appears, for the use of half-witted, stupid alogism as a metaphor for a super-intelligent sacred sign (“Lankavatara Sutra”).

5. Finally, any textual preparation for sacred absurdity is discarded. If we consider the written monuments of Zen Buddhism as literature, as a body of texts, then what is first striking is their laconicism. The master directly begins with an absurd statement, not prepared either logically or rhythmically. No explanation is given. Instead of comments, the student receives a blow with a stick.

From the sublime seriousness of the Indian canon to the foolishness of Zen, one can thus trace a direct sequence, a single line of development. This development gradually reveals the illogical nature central idea Buddhism, illogicality, first hidden by a figure of silence, and then more and more obvious. With this view, the development of Buddhism is conceived as a change in language while the meaning remains unchanged.

This point of view is one-sided; it ignores the influence of the mythopoetic folklore environment, which acted differently in each place and violated the internal logic of development. Purely chronologically, it forces one to ignore some dates, but in this way one can describe Buddhism as a single whole (including Zen) and get an approach to the problem of Zen alogism - an extremely difficult one and not allowing for an unambiguous solution. To a first approximation, one can interpret the Zen alogism as Buddhist alogism, i.e. illogicality in the “normal” function of the object of meditation.

It can be said that both early and late, Indian and Chinese Buddhism equally strive to lead the follower to a direct individual experience of the unconditioned, the holistic. Only the means of approaching this goal change. The Zen method is a simple collision of terms taken from everyday experience. The collision of any terms that are incompatible at the level of differences pushes towards the level of identity. A koan can be compared to the requirement to come from point A to point B, between which there are no connections on the surface of the ball. The persistent solution of an absurd problem forces one to remember the forgotten path along the radii connecting all the points of the circle in the center of the ball, and thus practically experience the reality of the zero point, to restore the vision of not only the surface of the ball, but also its depth.

It is difficult to get used to the idea that an absurd combination of everyday terms can become an object of meditation. But the cross of Christ was absurd for Tertullian, and this did not stop him from praying. A student of a Zen master, delving into the contemplation of a koan, first looks for some connections between terms that are not connected at the level of differences. The master discards these false decisions and forces one to look at the level of discernment as a whole, as absurd, falling into pieces, empty. He drowns the student until he reaches the bottom, feels in the desert, cleared of all objects, the breath of the spirit of the Whole, and experiences the level of identity of being as something real, sensually reliable. He cuts the umbilical cord connecting the student’s consciousness with things, with facts, and forces him to open his lungs, to breathe in the world as Unity. All this is only technically different from the practice of other mystical schools. The goal and the outcome are the same.

It can be argued that such an understanding does not follow from Zen texts, that it is much more natural to read the collection of koans differently - as a grotesque abstruse devoid of obligatory, solid meaning. This objection, however, misses the mark. Zen is not limited to scripture, to a body of texts. In the communication system of Zen Buddhism, words play supporting role. Collections of koans are a kind of libretto, which in itself does not give an idea of ​​the opera. Or, rather, it gives, but only to those who are able to compose music on their own.

A complete sign system, an “opera,” is created only by the life of a Zen monastery as a whole, and this entire life with all its features must be read as a single context, heard as music performed under the guidance of an experienced conductor (“old teacher,” roshi). In this context, the well-known, in-depth understanding of alogism is given quite strictly.

Zen is eccentric, spontaneous, does not recognize any mandatory rules; zen right requires improvise the form of expression, avoid templates. But behind the freedom of improvisation there is always a set of techniques, commonplaces, the firmness of which is directly proportional to the variability of the cues. Comedy dell'arte artists can come up with witticisms on the fly only because the meaning of the character of Columbine, Harlequin, and the Doctor is firmly established by tradition, and therefore any attack will be met with a resourceful response. On the contrary, “scientific” drama, the characters of which are not folkloric, not given by tradition, requires a stable text. The firmness of the text testifies to a destroyed tradition, the freedom of improvisation testifies to the strength of the tradition, to the understanding of the tradition by each participant in the action, so that all participants stand at the level of the author and are co-authors of the next version. These considerations are significant not only for the history of performing arts, but also for the history of all human communication, including religious.

Holy Scripture, every letter of which is inviolable, speaks of the gap between the author (prophet, saint) and the reader, of a system of words floating somewhere above the real human communication, regulating it less and less. The absence of sacred scripture, on the contrary, can speak of a cultural tradition, the sign system of which is the entire system of communication, of the inseparability of ritual and life, so that life is entirely ritual, and ritual is vital (as among primitive tribes). Zen Buddhism is built on a place that, as a rule, lies outside cultural systems - on a “no man's land” between the fronts of the sacred and the profane. As a rule, this “no man's land” is trampled only by holy fools. But Zen is by no means reduced to foolishness (which exists in the border zones of all religious systems). Zen is a system in itself, a highly organized cultural system, connected diachronically (by origin) and synchronically (by interaction) with other systems.

To a first approximation, Zen can be considered (as we did) as a subsystem of another, larger system - Buddhism, as a bizarre version of some phenomenon known to us. However, a deeper acquaintance with Zen makes us emphasize its original features, not associated with any book tradition. Zen monks are working. When collecting brushwood or tea, they communicate with each other in exactly the same way as any other workers. The spontaneity of Zen, which forces one to discard verbal constructions when trying to experience the inexpressible, in the sphere of work and everyday life becomes the shortest path to the subject, the utmost rationality - and the utmost simplicity and clarity of the word. When such spontaneity, simplicity and clarity are transferred to art, it results in a kind of realism - sometimes with mystical overtones, and sometimes without any overtones. Thus, Zen is at the same time more illogical than the Indian Mahayana - and more logical, more irrational - and more rational. Extremely irrational in texts, it is more rational than any other form of Buddhism in practice, in the entire system of life. This system is not derived either from Buddhism or even from Taoism as an established religious movement. This system adopted some Buddhist traditions and some Taoist traditions and refracted and developed them in its own way, but in itself, as an integral system, it remains a mystery. It can only be solved by turning to the folklore tradition, to the relics of primitive cultures.

Starting a conversation about the language of the absurd, we took the folklore, mythopoetic tradition out of brackets, chose strictly formalized scientific thinking as a frame of reference, and in relation to it we oriented other, less strict systems of thought, to the point of completely denying formalization in Zen texts. This consideration could lead to the illusion that the development of thought, separated from the primitive unity of logical and rhythmic connections, proceeded further as if mythopoetic thinking had disappeared, as if it had lost all significance in the human search for truth. Never really stopped dialogue between mythopoetic and logical-conceptual thinking, between the rhythmic organization of fields of meaning and the rigid organization of cores of meaning. The relative weight and degree of development of each participant in the dialogue changed, but the dialogue was not interrupted, the dialogue is conducted in every integral culture and in every integral consciousness. Only the results of dialogue, recorded in every major era and in every sphere of culture according to special rules, sometimes create the impression that there is nothing in common between a poet and a scientist, or that there is an abyss between a barbarian and a civilized person. Living human consciousness is always internally dialogical, and one can find formalized, mathematical thinking in a poet and contextual thinking, gravitating towards mythopoetic forms, in a scientist. For example, Kepler approached the idea of ​​universal gravitation by comparing the sun with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Kekule structural formula of benzene dreamed about the form of a snake biting its own tail. Einstein said: “Dostoevsky gives me more than any thinker, more than Gauss!” Apparently, the structure of Dostoevsky’s novel echoed the structure of the theory of relativity. Einstein described his thinking as follows: “The elements of thinking are more or less clear images and signs of physical realities. These images and signs seem to be arbitrarily generated and combined by consciousness. There is, naturally, some connection between these elements of thinking and the corresponding logical concepts. The desire to ultimately arrive at a series of logically related concepts serves as the emotional basis of a rather vague game with the above-mentioned elements of thinking. Psychologically, this combination game is an essential aspect of productive thinking. Its meaning is based primarily on some connection between combined images and logical constructions that can be represented using words and thus be able to communicate them to other people” (response to Jacques Hadamard; see: Kuznetsov, p. 99).

Finally, in his speech in the 60s at Rutherford’s anniversary, Acad. P.L. Kapitsa said: “... in science, at a certain stage of the development of new fundamental concepts, erudition is not the main feature that allows a scientist to solve a problem. The main thing here is imagination, concrete thinking and mostly courage. Sharp logical thinking, which is usually characteristic of mathematicians when postulating new principles, is rather a hindrance, since it fetters the imagination.”

Thus, living thinking ( V including scientific) cannot be understood and described within the framework of research alone registration forms, accepted in the science of a certain era. Living thinking can only be understood as dialogical thinking, as overlapping and resonance two models - logical-schematic and poetic-associative (mythopoetic, rhythmic, contextual).

After general characteristics Due to the fluidity of human ideas about the reasonable and the absurd, we began our consideration of individual forms of human thought with the most hostile to illogicalism, the most energetically trying to avoid it. This start is justified, because problem absurdity could be formulated only in the language of reason, and in its essence a strictly defined, defined absurd arose only together with other strictly defined categories, i.e. on the borders of the existing formalized system. Until the concept of the reasonable was determined and solidified, the concept of the absurd was not solidified, just as the idea of ​​the supernatural could not acquire certainty until systematic description natural the course of things; just as religions “not of this world” could only emerge after philosophy, which created a complete idea of ​​the world of this world.

The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Jews had doubts about the meaning of a separate human life, but they didn’t go further than that. The mind, brought up on tribal tradition and by its very structure connected with tradition, could not stand next to tradition and evaluate its sacred peaks according to its own rules. These rules, as universal rules, did not yet exist. There was a standard to measure human life, but there was no standard to measure God. Ecclesiastes declared everything under the sun to be absurd - but not the sun. A life devoid of God is absurd, a vanity of vanities, but not God. The life of Gilgamesh, doomed to death, is absurd, but not the immortal Ut-Napishtim, not the immortal gods.

What the tribe believed did not seem absurd to him. And what was recognized as absurd no longer deserved faith. Even Mohammed, who lived in the 7th century, but in a motionless tribal world, was not aware of the contradiction between reason and faith (as well as the contradiction between morality and law, religion and politics, etc.). Accustomed to the monolithic nature of tribal traditions, he could not even imagine that the human mind could contradict itself, that there were many forms of mind and that his own mind, the mind of Mohammed, was not the universal mind. He had unlimited trust in reason simply because he had never explored its boundaries and could not imagine that reason, freely exploring the world, would also question the word of Allah, which pierced his spirit like lightning.

On the contrary, “I believe, because it is meaningless,” said a highly educated Roman, who went through the school of Aristotelian logic and was ready, with purely philosophical courage, to go to the extreme consequences arising from the premises - “even if the world perished,” as Roman jurists said. His paradoxes reveal a culture whose flesh and blood has become the habit of logically justifying every decision, analyzing, contrasting, tearing artificial gaps between terms - and then, under the pressure of life, jumping over the absurd and moving from extreme rationalism to extreme, formalized, rational irrationalism .

Thus, we began with the historical starting point of the problem of alogism - alogism as a philosophical question and principle. And this starting point determined the further movement of our thought. But now the moment has come when the brackets behind which we have placed the folklore mythopoetic tradition must be opened.

In mythopoetic thinking, un-formed means unsculpted, unformed (or losing shape) with possible meanings of comically ugly and mysteriously ugly, terrifying, stunning and beyond reason. Decay causes laughter if it takes away old rubbish from life. Decay is terrifying; if it consumes, it threatens to consume your life. But these two meanings have not been separated; they are still mixed in ritual holiday games. All shades of absurdity are superimposed on each other and intertwined with each other. In the range of meanings of alogism there is a super-intelligent and half-witted sector, but the strict boundary between them is the work of sophisticated medieval logicians. In the grotesque sign systems of primitive cultures, extremes still grow from the same root, turning into each other, like Shiva and Parvati. Masks of Africa and Oceania are forms of play, dance figures that quickly change their meaning. A shift in mood is enough for the elements of later tragedy and comedy, mystery and diablerie, divine service and clownish carnival to come to the fore in the ritual action. Only gradually the “liturgical” and “carnival” elements are separated from each other and formed into independent sign systems; in primitive and many archaic cultures, these systems still act as hypostases of a single system.

“The double aspect of the perception of the world and human life,” writes M. M. Bakhtin, “existed already at the earliest stages of cultural development. In the folklore of primitive peoples, next to the serious (in organization and tone) cults, there were also laughter cults that ridiculed and dishonored the deity (“ritual laughter”)...

But in the early stages, in the conditions of a pre-class and pre-state social order, the serious and humorous aspects of the deity, the world and man were, apparently, equally sacred ... "

To approach this duality, one difficulty must be overcome. Primitive culture cannot be understood as a body of texts. Primitive culture cannot be reduced to any records or to any completely frozen sign systems. It has its unchanging commonplaces, but the whole is always improvised, created anew. Purely technically, this whole cannot be conveyed in words: the language is still too undeveloped. The image of the whole is a ritual dance, a game. In dance, in movement, in a system of gestures and poses (only by helping himself with words), primitive man creates a picture of the world. If you take away the verbal components from this unity, they are poor and inactive. For example, the primitive myth of the beginning of existence is much less dynamic than later pictures of the divine creative act. Primitive verbal constructions are inexpressive. Primitive verbal constructions can be frozen, learned by heart. But the ritual as a whole is a dance. A dance that, by its very nature, cannot be completely learned by heart, cannot be mechanically hardened. A dance that cannot be analyzed, questioned: why? On what basis? A dance that is danced in ecstasy when the creation becomes the creator and the man trained by tradition becomes the creator of tradition. Typological patterns, the same figures repeated from generation to generation, do not contradict freedom. On the contrary, they provide freedom of improvisation and create a language in which a person can speak. Everywhere, from Bushman dance to commedia dell'arte, traditional figures are a condition for free improvisation. Without these figures, without a ready-made language, a person very rarely achieves greater freedom. Much more often he simply remains mute or constrained, losing himself in attempts to speak out, and in best case scenario creates a language that is gradually being understood fifty years after his death.

A developed mythopoetic consciousness, familiar with philosophy, consciously plays with contradictions, removes oppositions, transforms logical contradiction into poetic material, into a mask of divine dance, into lilamurti (the appearance of a game). But this game became the game of God and ceased to be the game of man. Freedom from the differences established by reason is transferred to heaven. It can only be achieved by an ascetic who has renounced everything earthly. The ecstatic experience of the integrity of being has become incompatible with laughter, freedom from everyday confusion in affairs - incompatible with freedom from frozen sign systems that balance this confusion. Religious verbal constructions have improved so much that it has become impossible for the average person to rise above these constructions and play with them freely. As the idea of ​​integrity was better expressed in words, integrity became transcendental to man, unattainable for him, a poor and illiterate peasant who could not read (and having read, understand) his own sacred scripture. The means of liberation turned into an end, enslaving a person (not to mention the fact that at times it was deliberately used as a means of enslavement).

The great abyss between the sacred and the profane (which swallowed up the small abysses excavated by the ancient mind) was enshrined in the word, in the Holy Scriptures. The removal of the opposition has become impossible without the participation of Holy Scripture, without a special word, accessible only to a few. It was magically transmitted by priests who knew the word to the profane crowd. The crowd could only believe - or not believe. In an act of faith, the layman joined the sphere of freedom. Not believing, he lost her. Independent access to the secret was lost. Adam was expelled from paradise.

This paradise, however, existed. Ecstatic experiences that transported one to the seventh heaven are almost as accessible to primitive man as the ability to dance. The primitive mind was easily drawn into the game. He has not yet reduced the multitude to an abstract unity and has not yet come to a standstill with the question: how does the one turn into the many? At the level of words, there is already a myth about a totem that became bored in solitude and therefore created the world. But this myth is not nearly as significant as it seems to our consciousness, which only takes verbal explanations seriously. The play of being is expressed by the play of masks, and in this dance the kinship of everything with everything is plastically obvious. The most bizarre transitions become possible, visually perceptible, sensually experienced. The world of reason is trampled under the feet of the dancers, like a defeated demon under Nataraja. No combination of terms is perceived as a scandal.

This is not a feature of primitive thinking at all, in all its aspects (as the early Lévy-Bruhl believed) and not a generic feature of Negritude (Senghor), but rather a feature of the primitive festive attitude. The festive worldview (and the mythopoetic thinking that gravitates towards it) transcends the absurdity of play. It is not aware of its step as a leap over an abyss. Where there are no hardened cores of meaning, there are no sharp collisions, no incompatible combinations. It is commonly said that mythopoetic thinking “removes oppositions.” If we consider it on its own, in its own kingdom (and not in dialogue with reason), then first of all we must say something else: it does not create oppositions. What it binds are not hardened trunks (they really can’t be brought together without breaking), but flexible young shoots. In primitive mythopoetic thinking, the cores of meaning simply have not yet formed. The item is named, but it is not defined. The name floats in a field of values ​​that has no boundaries. This field is not fenced off from other fields, and there are no obstacles for an object to change its appearance.

Primitive man does not look for cranberries on a pine tree. The usual, template properties of each object are well known to him. But they did not become an unshakable law for him. He did not make it a dogma that A = A¹ B. He takes into account the template properties of objects, but does not find any higher truth in these templates. And when the work is finished, he happily discards these templates and enters into a completely different, festive worldview.

The vagueness of business thinking and poor development of differences between subjects leads primitive people to numerous mistakes. This is well known. But no matter how wrong primitive people were in countless particular issues, they were right in the main - in their living sense of the whole. They preserved the main condition of culture: the dialogue of mythopoetic, dance, festive - and business, rational thinking (and behavior), the dialogue of everyday life and celebration. Therefore, all tribal cultures are integral cultures, they bear the stamp of spirit, and this spirit of integrity has more than once inspired high civilizations, becoming for them “the norm and an unattainable model.” The pastoral theme of Theocritus, the pre-Islamic primitiveness in the poetry of the caliphate, the taste for “sabi” and “wabi” in Japan are just a few examples of this general phenomenon that was repeated in the 20th century. like interest in children's drawing, to the plastics of Africa and Oceania.

The past belongs specific form primitive dialogue, the balance of ritualized labor with tribal holiday ritual. But some structure of internal dialogue is revived at each new stage of social development. And turning to the primitive sometimes helps restore balance.

Each sphere of dialogue, festive and everyday, in turn, is dialogical. Everyday life is divided into work and rest. The holiday is for reverent contemplation and riotous play. At the origins of the holiday, in primitive cultures, reverent contemplation and riotous play not only do not exclude each other, but positively merge. Reverence and revelry together, in the inseparable unity of the holiday, balance the stultifying influence of everyday life.

Business thinking breaks down the world into objects in order to practically master the objects needed for life. This is necessary, and in its field, business thinking is true. But it is false in relation to the whole, it disfigures the integral human spirit, puts it in a Procrustean bed of rational (dismembering) methods of thought associated with methods of labor and as limited as human labor is limited (stagewise, locally, professionally). Business thinking imposes practically proven techniques on a person, effective in the everyday routine, but helpless when faced with something truly new, helpless when faced with the integrity of life, which is always unexpected. The monologue of business thinking deprives the ability to be creative, to respond unexpectedly to an unexpected challenge. Therefore, even from a purely business point of view, the hunting dance was useful, unchaining the creative powers of hunters, freeing them to look at the subject of labor from a bird's eye view, from the sky, from a state of ecstasy lifting them above the ground.

In such a dance, some plots set by business thinking are preserved, but the grammar of business thinking is swept aside and gives way to mythopoetic rhythm. The usual rational division of the world into objects becomes impossible. The world seems to melt, becomes fluid, turns into a tangle of vortices passing through the human heart, a tangle in which object and subject, external and internal, “I” and “world” are mixed. And this dance of disobjectified vortices is re-objectified in dance masks - good and evil spirits, gods and demons.

Mythopoetic thinking all the time concerns mysterious, inexpressible, mystical. But that doesn't mean it There is mystical thinking. Primitive thinking is mythopoetic, but it is completely unable to isolate the mystical as an independent subject. The pure mysticism of Nagarjuna or Shankara developed only together with a specific language - the language of abstract alogisms, which we considered above. Primitive mythopoetic thinking seems mystical against the background of nineteenth-century rationalism. - the way Levy-Bruhl saw him. Against the background of Sunyavada and Vedanta, it looks completely different - like a kind of fantastic realism. Mythopoetic thinking touches the mysterious, inexpressible only in passing, in movement from one sensory sign to another. It is not supersensible, but only superobjective; not so much mystical as fantastic. The fantastic symbolic system of ritual dance is extremely close to the world of sensory experience. This is a simplified description of the world as a whole. A description that is visible and immediately reliable, like a deck of cards.

Individually, each of the ritual dance masks does not correspond to any specific fact. But as a system, in its entirety, dance masks make it possible to objectify the movement of reality as a Whole, its cosmic rhythm, its division into hypostases (preceding the division into objects). Each mythopoetic system can be considered as a game model of the Whole, the whole and parts becoming a whole, the One becoming many. The difference between primitive mythopoetic models and the later ones created by high art is mainly that primitive mythopoetic thinking (and subsequently religious thinking) for the most part recognizes only one orthodox form of description, while free art provides many of them.

It is also interesting to make a more specific comparison of ritual dance with music (which grew out of it). Do, re, mi, fa, salt, la, si - by themselves they mean nothing. But it is precisely the absence of a private, specific meaning that makes the sounds of the scale such a convenient language for conveying the context of existence, for expressing transitions, overflows of the One, for embodying the feeling of the Whole. If each sound individually, out of context, had been correlated with reality, if “do” had meant a book and “d” had meant a cat, Bach would never have written his fugues.

Mythopoetic language is less “abstract”, less holistic than the language of music; it has a certain objectivity, but this fantastic objectivity of God and the devil must be correctly understood. In free rhythmic movement, the signs “god” and “devil”, without themselves corresponding to any subject, allow us to express something that would otherwise be difficult to describe.

Even in modern life, we cannot do without adjectives that strict atheism would willingly veto, for example, devilish calculation, angelic voice. Language spontaneously recognizes that mythopoetic images are still valuable for understanding the world. Not everything in the world is objective. There is courage not only in the husband. There is a beast outside the beast. And there is something that cannot be localized in any object, but is nonetheless real. This real, inaccessible to the eye, is localized by mythopoetic consciousness in fantastic objects. Mythopoetic consciousness is, of course, a confusion, but not a simple confusion. This is also the thinking of the logically unthinkable, not amenable to strict formalization, in a fantastic play of signs. That is why mythology has always been the “soil and arsenal” of great art... That is why mythology was also the soil from which holistic ethical systems grew.

We prove the truth of business thinking practically by its effectiveness and ability to change nature. The truth of holiday thinking can also be proven by its ability to change person. Each model of the world - business and gaming - is true in itself. But it becomes false if applied inappropriately. A ritual dance or prayer for rain is ineffective or ineffective as a means of direct control over nature. However, strictly business, scientific thinking is also helpless when trying to educate a person, to raise the human spirit. Myth, legend, fairy tale cope with this much better. The rhythm of mythopoetic masks, picking up a person, carrying him along, educates and teaches through play. Moral theory can complement this game, bring it into system, redirect the existing moral consciousness, but no theory can give moral consciousness, give birth, revive it.

This was convincingly demonstrated by the experience of ancient moralists. None of them were able to give aesthetics behavior. All of them were limited to systems of prescriptions. And they were all supplanted by the reformed religious teachings, often repeating the same instructions, but in a different language - the language of myth and legend, through the lips of a character who in itself, directly, clearly, was the embodiment of a moral idea, infecting its rhythm, its beauty and strength.

In the victorious religious systems, the commandments are motivated emotionally, by love for the centuries-old polished aesthetic ideal (Buddha, Krishna, Shiva, Christ), which has absorbed traditions holiday ritual. This is not a series of theorems derived from certain postulates, and not a series of precedents, decrees, etc., based on certain cases, but a flight of inspiration, directly, personally realizing the demands of life as their own and providing an example of integrity, completeness of being , the removal of all oppositions: I and the other, I and society, I and the world. The system of commandments may not be entirely logical, but it is certainly subordinated to a general rhythm, it is poetically organized, colored by the charm of the personality of the legislator. Art the ideal of behavior comes first - as the embodiment spirit commandments, and the “letter” of the commandments plays a secondary role, at the level of a critical article, explaining and breaking down into elements the context of the drama that is true only as a whole. When entering a rhythm very deeply, the letter is not needed at all: the necessary solution is born anew each time.

This is the general nature of sign systems that made it easier for ancient civilizations to overcome the crisis. The crisis itself cannot be described here. It is important to emphasize only one thing: the well-known “remythologization” that is striking during the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Moreover, this transition cannot be explained by the general decline of culture, barbarization, etc. There was absolutely no decline or barbarization in either India or China; and the “remythologization” of the ideological sphere took place everywhere. Periods of “remythologization” stem from the internal rhythm of the development of civilization, and not from some external factors. These periods indicate the need from time to time to equalize the position of the participants in the dialogue - everyday and festive consciousness, business and mythopoetic.

The dialogue between everyday life and holidays in no way coincides with the dialogue between religion and atheism. Even in ancient times, serious, business-like thinking penetrated into the sphere of celebration and separated in it a certain high area worthy of respect from vulgar amusements. It was this part of the festive ritual, recognized as business (and not fun), that gradually emerged as the religion of a civilized society.

In the development of religion, some of the prejudices of primitive consciousness are gradually discarded and some of its confusion is overcome. Rituals to some extent lose their magical character. Instead of affecting nature, main goal religious practice becomes an internal transformation, a mental turning point. The object of the cult ceases to be an intermediary in the transmission material goods, a magical agent of the labor process (or war). A believer, turning to God, wants only Him presence. The religious act takes on the character of pure contemplation of the ideal appearance, a sign of the integrity of being, the inner fullness of life, i.e. approaches the aesthetic experience of a painting or music. These trends are convincingly shown by A. M. Pyatigorsky in a comparative analysis of Vedic hymns and religious lyrics of Tamil bhakti.

Business thinking, penetrating into the structure of the holiday, cleanses its reverent sphere from what is alien to it, entangled in it, just as it separates all objects and qualities from each other - green from blue, elastic from loose, etc. But at the same time it destroys aimless festivity reverence, turns reverence into a methodical, business-like organized act, into work directed towards an otherworldly goal. The triumph of seriousness and efficiency led to the fact that something festive had to establish itself as a matter, a serious matter, the most serious matter in the world, a matter of faith. In Spanish it sounds like "auto da fe". A game, a holiday, liberation from taboos becomes something unworthy in the eyes of an ascetic. Perfect religious life is thought of as a renunciation of desires, as a stern fulfillment of the laws of heaven. And to this business whole life is dedicated. A person becomes a worker assigned to the task of saving his soul.

“The kingdom is not of this world” is understood literally as a corner enclosed by a fence, a monastery. Within the framework of the religions of a civilized society, there is a dialogue between serious, businesslike religious consciousness and mythopoetic, holiday traditions continues with varying success. In Europe, serious wins. The seed of seriousness planted by the Gospels here sprouted much more luxuriantly than other gospel ideas. The Gospels are largely directed against seriousness (which in the Gospel language is called Christ's answers to the Pharisees, his parables, his behavior at the feast and at the wedding are still very close to the spirit of the holiday. But the Inquisition is already a deeply serious matter. And Puritanism, although at first glance it is difficult to put on a par with the Inquisition, was from a certain point of view its continuation - another step towards the triumph of seriousness and action. Actors were flogged in the squares as libertines; Sunday became a realm of sanctimonious boredom; the merry tramps were herded into workhouses. And this whole unbearably rational world of Mr. Dombey only in the 20th century. explodes, and human nature, curled into a ram's horn, unwinds in the gobbledygook of modernity. Against the general background of grotesque and paradox, a religion of a special type is being revived, close to the legend of the juggler of Our Lady and “The Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi” - the religion of G. Chesterton, G. Böll, D. Salinger.

Buddhism, in contrast to Christianity, was caught up in a powerful wave of remythologization. Early Buddhism is the most serious teaching of all New Testament religions. He is trying to completely put an end to the game, to the rampant imagination, to put an end to the mythopoetic dance of signs. The second chapter of the Dhammapada is entirely devoted to seriousness.

“Seriousness is the path to immortality. Frivolity is the path to death. Serious people don't die. The frivolous are like dead men."

These considerations are in good agreement with the last words of the Buddha, preserved in the Pali tradition: “Work diligently...”

It is impossible to think of anything more hostile to the holiday atmosphere, nothing more destructive to the joy of the spirit (and nothing more fruitless - in a sphere in which labor is powerless).

However, this is only the case with the direct meaning of the words:

Appamado amatapadam, pamado takkuno ladam...

The literal meaning of the words proclaimed anathema to the holiday. And in the sound of the verse lived the rhythm of the dance, washing away and carrying away rationalistic constructions.

Poems are far from being an innocent thing, not indifferent to meaning. Poems carry a special rhythm of associative connections, independent of logic. He compresses together in one line the logically alien, breaks the logically connected - and through the lattice of strict connections of the cores of meanings, waves of fields appear, moving according to the old laws of myth. The rhythmic-musical, festive element, driven out the door, penetrates the cracks. The mythopoetic, banished in vocabulary and terminology, wins in the structure of speech, in its traditional, unconsciously acquired and at first glance, poetic meter that does not determine anything. It is no accident that science abandoned verse. Only with the transition to prose did mathematicians cease to be spirit-seers and cease to listen to the music of the spheres.

In the history of Northern Buddhism (Mahayana), rhythm gradually took precedence over logic. The rhythmic structure of speech, the rhythmic structure of thought, colliding with the logic of the Tripitaka, naturally relied on the mythopoetic environment, merged with it, and revealed their identity with it. This is plastically palpable in the Vimalakirti Sutra. The heavenly maiden, an apsara (an undeniably mythopoetic and non-Buddhist character), acts as an ally of the main character of the Vimalakirti Sutra and, together with him, triumphs over the dry wisdom of the Hinayana. Vimalakirti baffles the bodhisattva of wisdom Manjushri, and the heavenly maiden fools Sariputra, a saint from the “shravaka” category, i.e. monks who directly listened to the Buddha (and, in the interpretation of the sutra, remained at the level of words). She rains down a shower of flowers on those gathered, which slide along the body of the bodysattvas, but stick to the shravakas. Sariputra is indignant. “These flowers are free from difference,” the apsara answers him. “But since you yourself are full of differences, they stick to you.” In the end, Sariputra, amazed by the intelligence of his interlocutor, asks her a question in the spirit of K. Ryleev (who asked Pushkin why he didn’t make Aleko at least a blacksmith). It is he who asks why the heavenly maiden will not take on a male form (which, of course, would be more serious than leading a bear or being a woman). “These twelve years I have been looking for the femininity of my appearance,” the maiden answered, “and have not yet fully achieved it. Why should I be transformed?”

In China, Buddhist rationalism found itself in dialogue with a different ethnic substrate and experienced other transformations.

But even in these transformations, something very ancient emerges. Some specific features of Zen can be explained as “remembering” what is well forgotten, preserved only in rudiments, in the “memory of culture”: emphasis on non-verbal communication, alternation of rituals with labor, change of reverent contemplation - outdoor games, sacred laughter.

In order to triumph over everyday life, in order to balance the symbolic world of business with another, no less significant, the holiday needs fantastic images that objectify the molten, ecstatic vision of the world, it needs gods and demons. But when the celebration reaches its peak, gods and demons begin to interfere. They demand too much attention to themselves, they constrain the liberated person, they threaten to replace everyday, business slavery, subordination to necessity, with religious slavery. And then comes ritual laughter, blasphemy of the deity. “What is a buddha? - A piece of dried human shit";

“When the fish is caught, the net is no longer needed.”

Zen mondo and a quote from Zhuangzi quite naturally fall into place - into a mythopoetic context. Zen helps to better understand the primitive obscene language of the deity. The blasphemy of the deity helps to better understand Zen. (And not only Zen. The tendency of many mystics to abuse and blasphemy is well known. G. Böll recalled this in the novel “Through the Eyes of a Clown”). In Zen, however, primitive features acquire a new (in a sense, one might say: modernist) character. In tribal cultures, no matter how grotesque they may be to the observer, there is no sense of their own grotesqueness. Other tribes, with other traditions, are insignificant for tribal consciousness. This is unchrist Not

Hence the obsessive, methodical, in its own way rational recklessness of the Zen language, which is completely absent in primitive cultures. One feels the fear of getting entangled in rational constructs if one gives in to them even for a moment. This absurd manner can just as easily become automated, lose its inner meaning, and turn into a cliche, like any other manner.

No amount of grotesqueness, whimsicality, paradoxicality, or absurdity can protect a mind prone to clichés from cliches. Any combination of ideas can turn into a Poly-Hay rubber thought: “In response to... we, the employees of the Hercules concern, will respond...”

The essence of a stamp is not at all that it contains a well-known logical move. The move may also be illogical. The solution is the habit of responding to any irritation with some standard combination of signs. Moreover, standardization can be both direct and inside out. “He won’t say a word in simplicity, everything is done with a grimace” is also a standard, a standard of brokenness.

Stamped behavior is always logical in its own way (true to the rules of some system) and at the same time illogical (grotesquely inconsistent with life). If the challenge was the “brazen attack of the accountant Kukushkind”, who demanded a raise, and the response was the universal entry into the “Down with Khovanshchina” society, then there is no real connection between the challenge and the response. The logic here is purely fictitious, conditional, illusory, the logic of a cliche: for every challenge, conditionally defined as antisocial, respond with increased activity, conventionally defined as social activity. It is generally accepted that thought and action must be logical - and Polykhaev pretends that he is logical. But once we discard Polykhaev’s conventional division of facts into social and antisocial, the illusory nature of stamped logic is striking (this is the basis for the comedy of the novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov). Only within the framework of Polykhaev’s world is Polykhaev’s logic taken seriously by everyone. In fact, cliched logic can be replaced with cliched alogism; nothing will change from this “in terms of content”, the relationships between people will remain the same.

This operation is performed in Ionesco's anti-plays. People come to visit, drink tea, say goodbye, leave - and at the same time say some words. The words are emphatically unrelated to each other, emphatically absurd, but this does not bother anyone. The average person gets used to repeating irrational combinations of words as easily as rational combinations. In Polykhaev’s world, the words are the same, familiar, supposedly understandable. In Ionesco’s world there are a lot of words, there is no time to digest them, there is not enough time to develop a personal attitude towards them, but the habit of repeating the incomprehensible, without thinking, develops as easily as the habit of repeating the same formulas. In both cases, the signs lose their iconicity and are chewed mechanically, out of habit of chewing something.

The essence of stamped thought is not that it operates with stamps, but that the stamps, templates, and standards with which it operates are not assimilated by it, are not lived in, have not developed into an individual language, but flow from somewhere outside, transforming the personality of thinking into the shadow, into a simple form of existence of ready-made ideas. This is a specific feature of developed, complex civilizations, when a lot of templates are produced and the average person has not yet developed the ability to choose what he needs in the flow of information. The stream carries him like a piece of wood, turning him now with his head, now with his side forward. It is not man who uses the template, but the template who uses man, so that the face of culture ceases to be a human face, expressed with the help of known templates, and becomes the face of a template, expressed with the help of famous people.

We have already said that no culture can do without commonplaces, without canonical signs. But there is no stereotype if there is a living rhythm, if the cards flash in the hands of the magician. And stereotypes appear as if out of the ground, when the rhythm is disrupted, when the use common signs becomes inept, unfree, untalented. Paradoxicality and grotesqueness are good as means of pushing thinking into the context of life, into its specific rhythm. But as soon as the paradox loses its significance in relation to the whole, it becomes a cliche, essentially no different from others - just not understandable to everyone. A stamp is any sign that has lost its iconicity in relation to the whole. An anti-stamp is no better than a direct stamp.

In Zen Buddhism there is always a danger of turning into a paradoxical cliche, into a set of puzzles. Zen combats this danger by cultivating - along with the language of sacred alogisms - an extremely simple everyday language, almost everyday realism in painting, simplicity and spontaneity in action. Zen is equally willing to use mysterious combinations of signs and extremely simple, intelligible symbols. But not every Zen follower becomes a Zen master. And not all masters have the same mastery of their skills. We can only say that Zen is less conducive to the stamp than other systems. Even in the strictly sacred sphere, Zen can hardly be understood in a cliché way. Zen is both a sacred and metasacral system. The language of Zen returns us to the fullness of the festive worldview, in which the sacred is only a hypostasis of festive unity and, in eternal motion, does not have time to form into a closed system, isolated from life. Alogism in Zen has a double meaning. On the one hand, it breaks the rational confidence in the unconditionality of objects and relationships between objects, reveals the world of “the unmade, uncreated, unconditioned.” On the other hand, he breaks this world too.

The nature of the sign that has become the subject of meditation is not indifferent. The half-witted absurdity chosen as an intellectual icon does not allow us to dwell on it, to confuse the sign with the meaning, to “create an idol for ourselves.” Zen brings a smile into meditation (one cannot help but smile when pondering the question of whether a dog has Buddha nature). And a smile saves you from the fanaticism of seriousness.

“Zen and - to a certain extent - Taoism seem to be the only spiritual traditions that feel confident enough to make fun of themselves, or are self-conscious enough. GP.), to laugh not only at your religion, but at the very core of it. In the figures of madmen, Zen artists depict something more than a parody of their “mad” way of life, for if “genius and madness are closely related,” there is a significant parallel between the meaningless muttering of a happy madman and the aimless life of a Zen sage.

In the words of the poem: The wild goose doesn't care to cast off his reflection,
And the water perceives his image without thought...”

A smile makes you look at any religious symbolism (including Buddhist) as a means, a technical device. The religious anti-world turns out to be as conditional as the world of facts. The level of identity turns out to be the same abstraction as the level of difference. Having delved into the essence of things, we return to the source, to appearance: the mountain is mountain. There is a Zen parable: until I studied Buddhism, I thought that a mountain is a mountain. Then, delving deeper into the study of Buddhism, I realized: a mountain is not mountain. But then, having deepened my understanding of Zen even more, I realized: there is a mountain mountain.

At least during some periods of its development, Zen was so open to non-religious interpretations, so freely passed into the integrity of culture, that it is difficult to consider it on a par with other movements of Buddhism. In Zen there is a tendency to revive the “primitive” integrity of the holiday, to the unity of reverent contemplation and free play.

Let us now return to the parable retold by Suzuki: “If you ask, you make a mistake, and if you don’t ask, you act contrary...” This is a fairly standard koan from a group of koans that expressed the idea of ​​​​the difference between an intellectual icon and a logical premise. In this case we are talking about an idea expressed in many other koans (for example: “Without affirming or denying, tell me the truth of Zen!”). Let's try to retell this idea in our own words. In the search for causes, laws, transitions from one thing to another, we lose the things themselves in their immediate completeness. To experience a branch in all its knottyness, one must not connect different states with each other, not say that the branch burned down and only ashes remained, but break the framework of space-time and understand each phenomenon - branch, fire, ashes - in the eternal now as the only and unique, as a direct embodiment of the Great Emptiness, the level of identity, God, or whatever it is called. The way Ma Yuan paints a lonely angler fish, the way Basho puts together his haiku.

The phenomenon does not dissolve in the absolute. The Abyss of the Great Emptiness, when opening, does not swallow the branches of a blossoming plum tree. Immersed in the Great Emptiness, the branch loses only the book dust stuck to it, remains pure in its “suchness,” in its indescribable authenticity (intellectually indescribable, but artistically quite expressible).

To lead to this, Zen masters used the language of double illogicalism. First, space-time connections become confused and turn into absurd connections: the mountain ceases to be a mountain; consciousness falls into the Great Emptiness. But the next step of illogicality is that the mountain becomes a mountain again. The Great Emptiness moves away, becomes the background of the picture, and in the foreground grows an object that has emerged from the void - the Son, consubstantial with the Father and from eternity dwelling in the bowels of the Father. This role of Christ, the role of a mediator between heaven and earth, the absolute and the relative, in Zen contemplation is played by any object freed from the business approach to it, from those traces of classification, inventory, putting into shelves, with which business thinking turns the festive world of poetry into a boring world everyday life.

You can retell the Zen alogism in two quatrains of Pasternak:

Poetry, don’t compromise on breadth.

Keep living precision, precision of secrets.

Don't do dots on the dotted line

And do not count the grains in the measure of bread.

This is the first turn - to the Whole, to the One.

I don't know if it's resolved

The riddle of the afterlife,

But life is like silence

Autumn, detailed.

This is the second turn - to the branch of a blossoming plum. The holistic and at the same time detailed truth is expressed in an infinite number of koans and mondos, as unique as a lilac branch, a butterfly on an elderberry bush, etc. But the main ideas of Zen alogism form one family and also merge into one idea, like Plato’s Truth, Goodness and Beauty, as the main objects of Christian icon painting. And just as the cross is a sufficient symbol of all Christianity, a symbol that appears in religious contemplation as a complete and perfect work that does not require any comment, a Zen koan or mondo should not become a reason for intellectual analysis. Or you understand what you need, then smile. Or if you don’t understand, then give up. You'll understand another time. Keep the image given by the master in your memory, roll it in your thoughts like a ball, but don’t cut it, don’t deform it, keep it whole, like poems connected by a single rhythm, poems that will lose their spirit if you start looking for which of them follows. At some point, the entire poem will be revealed to you, and you will understand it - i.e. you'll survive.

Suzuki explains Zen koans in a rather similar way: “When we see the moon, we know that it is the moon, and that is enough. Those who begin to analyze experience and try

create a theory of knowledge - not followers of Zen"; “Wordfights lead from one complexity to another, they have no end. Perhaps the only one effective method to let a monk... feel the falsity of his conceptual understanding is to hit him..."

A blow with a stick (like a firecracker in Swift's kingdom of Laputa) brings the mind, drowned in abstractions, back to life. This is not corporal punishment, but a conventional sign, a primitive conventional sign, “absurdum est”. Anyone who tried to reduce the Zen system to stick discipline would only show that he did not understand anything.

It is interesting to compare Zen with a thinker like Jiddu Krishnamurti. Simplifying things somewhat, we can assume that they are saying the same thing, just in different ways.

At first glance, the language of Zen is overwhelming in its difficulty. The illogicality in this language is pronounced and emphasized. It is immediately clear that one must master a special sign system, so that without this step one cannot take. But then, if we were not afraid of the first difficulties, the system turns out to be not so irrational. It reveals its own laws; alogism multiplied by alogism behaves like a minus multiplied by a minus, and gives a plus - a return to the objective world. The updated objective world turns out to be a poetic world and is learned in the free play of associations. What we lost turns out not to be sensory reality, but only abstract concepts of reality.

On the contrary, Krishnamurti's language is captivating in its simplicity. He promises to reveal the secret of love, freedom, existence, simply by clearing these familiar words of all unnecessary things, of misunderstandings. You just need to separate action from activity, experience from experience, understand that love is not a feeling or attachment... But the further we go, the more we plunge into the incomprehensible and in the end we discover the traditional alogisms of Indian religious consciousness, only retold by others words.

Krishnamurti convinces when he does not argue with anyone, does not prove anything, but simply conveys his feeling of life, creates a poetic whole, the rhythm of which is more expressive than individual words. But when he tries to convince the first people who come to him, prove they have their own view of the world, this cannot but lead to failures.

Having abandoned traditions, Krishnamurti was left without a language of communication. He says that freedom is the only path to freedom, that the means are the ends, and at the same time (involuntarily, apparently) in conversation he seizes on the means that lead away from his goal, pushing towards a fruitless argument, towards dialogue deaf with deaf. The everyday language of the 20th century intellectual, which he uses, conveys extremely poorly what he wants to convey. Krishnamurti's information is a sense of the Whole, i.e. truth, in his own words, “is not at the level of words”; expressed in words, only words and nothing but words, it easily becomes the subject of fruitless verbal debate.

Both Krishnamurti and the Zen masters are improvisers, but in different ways. Zen is a tradition like commedia dell'arte, with trained artists and trained audiences. Krishnamurti improvises as if nothing like this had ever happened before. Therefore, he spends a lot of time developing and explaining to others the features of his dialogue. And, like all self-taught people, he overestimates the possibilities of his invention, overestimates the importance of his terminological innovations. Ruthless to utopianism in others, he does not notice it in himself.

On the other hand, in comparison with Krishnamurti it is easy to show the limitations of Zen. This is a centuries-old, internally consistent sign system, tradition, skill. But this is not a system completed in words. Zen is an archaic skill, directly unable to transcend the archaic world in which it grew up (and gradually losing contact with the modernized Japanese environment). The popularity of Zen was created by modern researchers who described it ethnographically as closed culture and thus created a translation of Zen into the “standard European” language, the language of the European book. Zen cannot describe itself. Zen texts proper, even after studying Suzuki and Watts, are difficult to understand. It takes a lot of effort to read, or better yet, to solve them. Krishnamurti may be difficult, but can still be understood from his books. Zen as a body of actions (rather than words) is not prepared for modern system telecommunications.

At the same time, Zen has one modernist defect: fear of rhetoric. It is very difficult to translate even a very simple gospel phrase into Zen language: “God is love.” At best, it would sound like this: “In my next birth I would like to be a horse or a donkey and work for the peasants” (words of a medieval Chinese mentor). In Zen, as in all other historical religious movements, only some of the possibilities of primitive mythopoetic language are used and developed. A number of possibilities remain prohibited. Finally, the Zen language does not allow systematic thinking. However, some things can be said better in Zen language than in any other language.

Summing up, I would like to emphasize once again that each sign system has a known, unique interpretation of absurd messages. Mythopoetic thinking (and after it classical art) distinguishes between half-witted and super-intelligent absurdity. Aesthetic embodiments of the idea “soft-boiled boots” are not identical to aesthetic embodiments of the idea “resurrection of the dead.” Although the foolish consciousness confuses up and down, the half-witted and the super-intelligent, this game itself is based on the difference of what is mixed. On the contrary, formalized thinking does not recognize the super-rational meaning of the absurd. Any absurdity is interpreted as half-witted. A game with the absurd is thought of only as a comic game. Therefore, the approach to tragedy is practically closed (although tragedy as a high and serious genre is surrounded by respect). Superintelligent mythologies receive a comic interpretation (Lucian, Voltaire).

Modern conventionally formalized thinking apparently reveals different features, and its influence on culture will be different. Conditionally formalized thinking is internally dialogical. It abandons the pretensions to monologue characteristic of early rationalism. Dialogue with mythical-poetic thinking ceases to be a dispute for destruction. A metalanguage is slowly emerging, within the framework of which mytho-ethical systems are sign systems, like all others (albeit with a special grammar), and become on a par with formalized systems.

Forms of consciousness, having reached full development, are aware of their boundaries and necessity dialogue. Dialogue begins to be understood more broadly than before - not only as a form of struggle for truth, but as a form of truth itself. In the course of the dialogue, formalized thinking is freed from its arrhythmia, and mytho-poetic thinking is freed from mystifications and becomes chain thinking, seeing its natural complement in the formalized. There is an opportunity to supplement logic with rhythm, syllogism with counterpoint of ideas, to restore the unity of logos (words, reason and rhythm).

In logic, absurdity is usually understood as an internally contradictory expression. In such an expression, something is affirmed and denied at the same time, as, say, in the statement “Mermaids exist, and there are no mermaids.”

An expression that is not outwardly contradictory, but from which a contradiction can still be derived, is also considered absurd. For example, in the statement “Ivan the Terrible was the son of childless parents” there is only an affirmation, but no negation and, accordingly, no obvious contradiction. But it is clear that an obvious contradiction follows from this statement: “Some woman is a mother, and she is not a mother.”

The absurd as internally contradictory does not, of course, refer to the meaningless. “The robber was quartered into three unequal halves” - this is, of course, absurd, but not meaningless, but false, since it is internally contradictory.

Logical law contradictions indicates the inadmissibility of simultaneous affirmation and denial. An absurd statement is a direct violation of this law.

The understanding of absurdity as the denial or violation of some established law is widespread in the natural sciences.

According to physics, absurd statements include statements that do not comply with its principles, such as: “The astronauts flew from Jupiter to the Earth in three minutes” and “Sincere prayer overcomes gravity and lifts a person to God.” The following statements are biologically absurd: “Microbes are born from dirt” and “Man appeared on Earth immediately in the form in which he exists now.”

Of course, there is no particular firmness in the use of the word “absurd.” Even in logic, “senseless” and “absurd” are often used as having the same meaning and interchangeably. In ordinary language, something that is internally contradictory, meaningless, and in general everything that is absurdly exaggerated, caricatured, etc. is called absurd.

In logic, evidence is considered by “reduction to absurdity”: if a contradiction is deduced from a certain proposition, then this proposition is false.

There is also an artistic technique - reduction to absurdity, which, however, has only an external resemblance to this evidence.

About American actress Barbra Streisand's nose, one reviewer said: "Her long nose starts at the roots of her hair and ends at the trombone in the orchestra." This is an absurd exaggeration intended for comic effect.

And another example - from army life, interesting not so much in itself as in the commentary on it.

The artillery recruit is not stupid, but has little interest in service. The officer takes him aside and says, “You’re no good for us. I’ll give you good advice: buy yourself a gun and work on your own.”

A common comment on this advice is: “The advice is patent nonsense. You cannot buy a gun, and besides, one person, even with a gun, is not a warrior. However, behind the external meaninglessness there is an obvious and meaningful goal: the officer who gives the artilleryman senseless advice is pretending to be a fool in order to show how stupid the artilleryman himself is behaving.”

This comment shows that in ordinary language a completely meaningful statement can be called “meaningless”.

From the book Philosopher at the Edge of the Universe. SF philosophy, or Hollywood comes to the rescue: philosophical problems in science fiction films by Rowlands Mark

The absurd and the human situation The essential difference between everyday life and philosophy is that in the first, absurd incidents happen from time to time, and the second studies situations of the absurd, which, permeating all human existence, is

From the book Postmodernism [Encyclopedia] author Gritsanov Alexander Alekseevich

ABSURD ABSURD (Latin absurdus - absurd, from ad absurdum - coming from the deaf) is a term of intellectual tradition denoting the absurdity, meaninglessness of a phenomenon or occurrence. (The development of the “philosophy of A.” is primarily associated with Sartre’s existentialism.) The concept of “A.”

From the book Philosophy of Loneliness author Khamitov Nazip Valentinovich

Chapter 6 Love and Absurdity: The Loneliness of Salvador Dali 1Mad Dali was too in love with Gala to love her. Therefore, in his work the infinite dominates over the eternal, and the sublime dominates over the sublime. There is a lot of space in his works, but almost no time at all, because

From the book According to the Laws of Logic author Ivin Alexander Arkhipovich

ABSURD In logic, absurdity is usually understood as an internally contradictory expression. In such an expression something is affirmed and denied at the same time, as, say, in the statement “Mermaids exist, but there are no mermaids.” An expression that is not outwardly

From Spinoza's book author Sokolov Vasily Vasilievich

From the book Today I Saw... author Guzman Delia Steinberg

... absurdity Today I saw the absurd... Of course, in my life I have encountered it more than once, but there are times when some phenomena or events are seen especially clearly. How did I see the absurd? It was like a tight and unnaturally twisted spring, ready to shoot at the first

From book Philosophical Dictionary author Comte-Sponville Andre

Absurd (Absurde) Not the absence of meaning. For example, the word “eclipse” does not mean anything, but there is nothing absurd about it. Conversely, a statement can be absurd only if it means something. Let's use a few traditional examples. "On

From the book World of Images author Meneghetti Antonio

Absurd (Proof by Contrary) (Absurde, Raisonnement Par L’-) Reasoning that proves the truth of a statement by showing the obvious falsity of at least one of the consequences of the opposite statement. To prove that something is "p", they build a hypothesis,

From the author's book

Absurd (Reduction to the Absurd) (Absurde, Reduction A L’-) A kind of negative type of proof by contradiction and at the same time its beginning. Reduction to absurdity proves the falsity of a statement by demonstrating the falsity of at least one of its consequences,

From the author's book

Introduction to the “Absurd” of images as a way to obtain the criterion of reality Imagogy is the conscious and voluntary experience of reading active images that reflect the integrity of individual existence at the conscious and unconscious levels. A dream is

Absurdity is a term denoting the absurdity or meaninglessness of any phenomenon. The etymology of the word “absurd” refers us to the Latin absurdus - dissonant, incongruous, and surdus - deaf. Absurdity in this sense is the absence of a “sounding” meaning.

Probably, the understanding of the absurd should begin not with itself, but with those situations in which it manifests itself. It is simply impossible to comprehend the absurdity directly - which would mean removing the absurdity. Before us are only “traces” left by absurdity on the field of meaning.

We can distinguish two levels of the manifestation of absurdity to consciousness. Metaphysical level and level of everyday life. The antithesis of sacred and profane is also quite applicable here.

When talking about the absurdity or meaninglessness of a phenomenon, we must remember that these definitions describe, rather, what we feel in relation to the phenomenon than the phenomenon itself. It is not the phenomenon that is absurd, it is the co-existence of the phenomenon that is absurd. The absurd always arises at the border. As Camus noted: “In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the absurdity will be the more striking, the greater the difference between the two terms of my comparison. [...] Therefore, I have the right to say that the feeling of the absurd is not born from a simple consideration of a single fact and not from a single impression, but is carved out when comparing the current state of affairs with a certain kind of reality, action - with a world that surpasses it.

At its core, absurdity is discord. It is not reducible to any of the elements of comparison. It arises from their collision.

What properties must a phenomenon have in order to be perceived as absurd or ridiculous? We can distinguish two types of phenomena, the collision with which gives rise to a feeling of absurdity:

1. A meaning that does not fit into the construction of human logic, into the structure of our thinking. In this case, we are dealing with what can be described as an “absurd excess of meaning.”
2. Structure, justmeaningful. In this case, we are faced with the “absurdity of emptiness.” If we agree with the definition that absurdity is the meaninglessness of a phenomenon or occurrence, then we will affirm not only the absence of meaning, but also the presence of a certain object. This is “something” devoid of meaning, and not just “nothing”. It is the inclusion of emptiness in a certain structure that gives rise to absurdity.

Both types of phenomena are agents of the absurd. The first reveals the dazzling radiance of meaning, the second - the blinding gap of emptiness.

The absurd is a certain disproportion between form and content, between the signified and the signifier.

We also find a hint of a similar classification of agents of the absurd in Roland Barthes. He writes: “...a holistic image excludes the emergence of a myth, or at least forces only its integrity itself to be mythologized. [...] This myth is opposite, but symmetrical to the myth of the absurd: in the second case, the form mythologizes “absence,” in the first, excessive completeness.”

From the point of view of metaphysics, the absurd appears either as a meaning superior to man, or as a gaping void.

In connection with the first meaning, it is necessary to recall the famous expression attributed to Tertulian: “Credo quia absurdum est” (I believe because it is absurd). It is obvious that the feeling of absurdity in this case arises in a person from contact with the realm of the Divine. Since the human mind cannot accommodate spiritual reality, the meeting itself is experienced as something absurd.

For Tertulian, the absurd is the manifestation of God to this world. So in the treatise “On the Flesh of Christ” he writes: “It will be clearly unreasonable if we begin to judge God, guided by our common sense, [...] which will be as “stupid” as believing in God who is born, and, moreover, from Virgins, and, moreover, in the flesh, Who is “immersed” in all these disgraces of nature? [...] There are, of course, other “foolish” things that relate to the reproaches and passions of the Lord. Or perhaps they will say that a crucified God is reasonable? [...] The Son of God crucified is not shameful, for it is worthy of shame; and the Son of God died - this is absolutely certain, because it is absurd; and, buried, rose again - this is certain, for it is impossible.”

The sphere of otherness is an area where space and time are distorted. However, the curvature of the space-time continuum is perceived by a person as something absurd, violating the causality of events.

It is noteworthy that the distortion of space and time becomes an artistic device in the fairy tale genre. One hour spent by a hero in another world can be equal to a year in the real world. Painting other world is modeled through the introduction of a different chronotope. This is typical not only for fairy tales. In fact, all medieval literature, imbued with a religious perception of reality, can serve as an example of the existence of a hero in two dimensions. In studies devoted to the chivalric romance, M. M. Bakhtin noted that the chronotope of the chivalric romance is a wonderful world in an adventurous time. Otherness invades the human world, changes the flow of time, the causality of events, up and down, right and left. “A fabulous hyperbolism of time appears, hours stretch out, and days shrink to an instant, and time itself can be bewitched; A specific distortion of time perspectives characteristic of dreams appears. [...] This subjective play with time, this violation of elementary temporal relationships and perspectives, corresponds in the chronotope of the wonderful world to the same subjective game with space, the same violation of elementary spatial relationships and perspectives.”

The sense of absurdity is generated in religious consciousness not only because of a collision with divine reality. The metaphysical reality of evil also becomes an agent of the absurd. However, if the “divine” absurdity shows an excess of meaning, then the absurdity of evil is a semantic collapse.

The most striking image of such absurdity is hell. The Hebrew word "sheol", translated into Russian as hell, means emptiness, ephemerality.

According to Christian teaching, after death, people either go to Heaven and find the truth in its entirety, or, having turned away from God, find themselves in the emptiness of hell and themselves become internally empty.

In hell, instead of a person, there remains only one sin, a grimace without a face (in fact, that’s why in hell there are not faces, but masks). Discussing hell, C. S. Lewis wrote: “That is why hell is difficult to understand because there is almost nothing to understand, in the truest sense of the word. But this also happens on earth: [...] at first you get angry, and you know about it, and you regret it. Then, in one terrible hour, you begin to revel in anger. It's good if you regret again. But a time may come when there is no one to feel sorry for, no one even to revel in. Grumpiness goes on its own, as if it had started.”

It is not only metaphysical reality that can generate a sense of the absurd. The very “abandonment” of a person into this world was interpreted by many thinkers of the twentieth century as something absurd. However, in the absence of a metaphysical perspective, one comes only to the absurdity of emptiness.

Describing the situation in which a person finds himself, A. Camus notes: “He feels a desire to be happy and to comprehend the rationality of life. The absurd is born from the collision of this human demand with the silent unreason of the world. [...]
Irrationality, human nostalgia and the absurdity arising from their meeting - these are the three characters in the drama that must inevitably put an end to all logic of which existence is capable.”

Actually, for Camus it is man who becomes a kind of “other being” in this world. He is in the world, but not of the world, and this is the drama of his existence. “When the world lends itself to explanation, even if it is not very reliable in its arguments, it is native to us. On the contrary, a person feels like a stranger in a universe suddenly freed from our illusions and attempts to shed light on it. And this exile is inescapable, as long as a person is deprived of the memory of a lost homeland or hope of a promised land. The discord between a person and the life around him, between the actor and the scenery, actually gives the feeling of the absurd.”

The feeling of meaninglessness and purposelessness of existence, reflected in the culture of the twentieth century, is associated not only with the loss of metaphysical perspective and secularization. Scientific progress has also contributed to the strengthening of the sense of the absurd. A new form of distortion of space and time has emerged due to the development of technology. Modern man receives information from the most inaccessible places in an extremely short time. Objects that are distant from us in space have become close thanks to new means of communication.

All this, as Marshall McLuhan notes, leads to a feeling of the absurdity of what is happening. He writes: “This modern dilemma western man- the dilemma of a man of action who finds himself isolated from the process of action - is exhaustively embodied by the experience of the theater of the absurd. Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett's characters."

The feeling of the absurd is indeed, first of all, reflected in art. The structure that frames the void is played out in different ways in literary, pictorial, and theatrical forms.

According to Klyuev, the literature of the absurd is characterized by hyperstructure. “The “semantic scandal” caused by an absurd text is balanced - and thereby virtually nullified - by absolute “structural peace”, or “structural comfort”. [...] As for absurd poems, they are distinguished not just by their visual appearance, but by their meticulously organized structure to the point of mania.”

Indeed, in the literature of the absurd one can observe an extravaganza of structures devoid of meaning. However, the absurdity in the field of art is often only a reflection of the absurdity in social formations. Social structures seem to tend to dilute meaning. And the less sense there is in social structure, the more its structure increases.

IN fiction administrative absurdity is often one of the symbols of the absurdity of existence in general. As an illustration, one can recall at least Kafka’s “Castle”. It is noteworthy that the bureaucratic apparatus is most often perceived as almost the main agent of the absurd. But this is true for any situations when a person finds himself in a position of dependence on someone else’s power, becomes an object, and is depersonalized.

F. G. Junger notes: “Where a person is perceived, assumed, affirmed not as a person, but as component, fundamental changes are taking place. A person becomes an arm, a leg, a movement, he becomes a cog, a valve, a switch, he becomes one of the functions of a functioning mechanism. The concept of man is reduced to the concept of function. The insensitivity of the constituent elements is felt in everything: in administrative institutions, in factories, in control centers, in transport and in the language spoken there.”

The mechanism is the apogee of structure, but at the same time it is something extremely absurd, since the mechanism is soulless.

The transformation of a person into a mechanism is the apotheosis of the absurd. The structure has nowhere to develop further; it has absorbed all living things. An absolutely mechanized society is a society that is an absolute absurdity.

From a social point of view, absurdity is a situation in which a person is deprived of the meaning of his existence and loses his human face. In such a situation, human speech also loses its purpose as a means of communication. Words produced in a situation of absurdity are empty and meaningless. These are speech cliches and slogans that have nothing behind them.

Here we can find a lot of examples in the recent Soviet past. But Western society is replete with similar examples. Roland Barthes, in his article “The Pleasure of the Text,” notes: “Incidentally, encratic language (that which arises and spreads under the protection of power) is by its very essence a language of repetition; all official language institutes are machines that constantly chew the same cud; school, sports, advertising, Mass culture, song production, means mass media continuously reproducing the same structure.”

The situation of a person faced with the absurdity of some bureaucratic rules and regulations is intuitively clear to everyone. But this is a situation external to the person himself. The more interesting question is what happens to the bureaucrat? Why does a person become a “carrier” of the absurd?

Obviously, it is appropriate here to recall such a psychological concept as “professional personality deformation.” The social role completely absorbs a person. In the end, only function remains; a kind of mask behind which there is nothing. As noted by R.M. Granovskaya, “bureaucrats pass off form as content, and content as something formal. [...] A bureaucrat who thinks of himself as the embodiment of certain official functions and state interests is deformed, since his “I” does not contain anything other than this.”

Administrative absurdity seeks to subjugate the entire human existence, to regulate not only external, but also internal life. The structure strives to penetrate inside in order to produce from a person its full likeness, to make him the embodiment of the absurd.

However, the hollowing out of meaning is possible not only through bureaucracy. “Mass consumption society” is also a mechanism that generates a sense of the absurd. As Herbert Marcuse has shown, repressive desublimation is a tool for producing a “one-dimensional man” devoid of true meaning of existence.

Gilles Lipovetsky notes that the loss of meaning in modern culture associated with narcissism, self-absorption.

“Just as the public sphere becomes emotionally empty due to an excess of information, the growth of needs and emotions, our “I” loses its guidelines and its integrity due to an excess of attention: the “I” has become vague. Everywhere there is a disappearance of significant reality, there is desubstantialization, the final loss of territory characteristic of postmodernity.”

The resistance to the meaninglessness of life in European culture of the twentieth century is carried out mainly thanks to art, which reveals inauthenticity and emptiness. The theater of the absurd, the literature of the absurd, the painting of the absurd, etc. have a similar ability to “expose.” The struggle against the absurd here lies in the demonstration of empty structures devoid of content.

Ivan Goll writes: “First of all, it is necessary to break down the external form, the rational, conventional, moral order - all the formalized characteristics of our existence. People and things should be shown in the most naked form possible, and to achieve the greatest effect, also through a magnifying glass.” For Gaulle, the mask is such a magnifying glass. Note that the mask itself is also an empty structure. However, in the theater it can be used to radically expose social reality.

“Art, to the extent that it wants to educate, improve, be at all effective, must suppress the ordinary person, frighten him - just as a mask frightens children. [...] Art must turn a person into a child again. And the simplest way to achieve this is “grotesque” - to the extent, however, that it does not cause laughter. The monotony and stupidity of people is so great that they can only be healed by something huge. [...] That is why the new drama will resort to all the technical means that today replace the mask, for example, a phonograph that changes the voice, an illuminated advertisement or a loudspeaker.”

Similar creative intentions can be found in Eugene Ionesco. Eugene Ionesco's theater is a struggle against emptiness, a critique of empty people and empty structures.

“We are talking, first of all, about the petty bourgeoisie on a universal scale, since the petty bourgeoisie is a man of the ideas and slogans he has adopted, a universal conformist: such conformism, of course, is his automatic language, which exposes a person. The text of “The Bald Singer” or a textbook of the English language (or Russian, or Portuguese), composed of ready-made expressions, of the most hackneyed clichés, thereby revealed to me the automatism of language, people’s behavior, “a conversation conducted in order to say nothing,” a conversation conducted , because the person cannot say anything personal, he revealed to me the absence inner life, the mechanism of everyday life, a person immersed in his social environment, no longer distinguishing himself from it. The Smiths, Margaritas no longer know how to speak, because they no longer know how to think, and they do not know how to think because they no longer know how to feel, no longer have passions, they no longer know how to be, they can “become” anyone, anything, because, not existing in reality, they are just others, they are the world of the impersonal. [...] Comic characters are people who don't exist."

Theater and literature of the absurd expose the absurdity in the social sphere. To some extent, they are indicators of the state of society.

The surge in works with absurd themes indicates that society is in a state of anomie. The complete absence of works of absurdity (due to their prohibition) indicates that absurdity in the social sphere has become total.

Bibliography

1. Bart R. Mythologies. // Selected works: Semiotics. Poetics: trans. from fr. / Comp., total. ed. and entry Art. G.K. Kosikova. - M.: Publishing group “Progress”, “Univers”, 1994.
2. Bart R. Pleasure from the text // Selected works: Semiotics. Poetics. M.: 1989
3. Bakhtin M. M. Epic and novel. - St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000.
4. Bergson A. Laughter. Sartre J. - P. Nausea. Novel. Simon K. Roads of Flanders. Novel. / comp. O. Zhdanko, afterword. N. Pakhsaryan and L. Andreeva. - M.: Panorama, 2000. - 608 p.
5. Goll Ivan. Super drama. // As always - about the avant-garde: Anthology of the French theatrical avant-garde / Comp. lane from French, comment. S. Isaeva. - M.: TPF "Soyuzteatr", 1992.
6. Granovskaya R. M. Elements of practical psychology. - 3rd ed., with amendments. and additional - St. Petersburg: Light, 1997.
7. Ionesco Eugene. The tragedy of language. // As always - about the avant-garde: Anthology of the French theatrical avant-garde / Comp. lane from French, commentary S. Isaeva. - M.: TPF "Soyuzteatr", 1992.
8. Camus A. The myth of Sisyphus // Sartre J.-P., Camus A. Two facets of existentialism. - M.: OLMA-PRESS, 2001. - 352 p.
9. Klyuev E. V. The theory of absurd literature. - M.: Publishing house URAO, 2000.
10. Lipovetsky Gilles. The era of emptiness. Essay on modern individualism. - St. Petersburg: “Vladimir Dal”, 2001.
11. Lewis Clive S. Divorce. Klin: Christian Life Foundation / trans. N. Tauberg. - 2003.
12. McLuhan Marshall. Understanding the means of communication: new dimensions of man // Art of Cinema. - 1994. - No. 2. P. 67-74.
13. Pomerantz G. The language of the absurd // Pomerantz G. Exit from trance. M., 1995.
14. Stafetskaya M. Phenomenology of the absurd // Thought expressed. M., 1991
15. Tertulian. On the flesh of Christ // Tertulian. Apology / Tertulian. - M.: AST Publishing House LLC, St. Petersburg: North-West Press, 2004.
16. Junger F. G. Perfection of technology. Car and property. - St. Petersburg: “Vladimir Dal”, 2002.

Draining facts. Some kind of hell in last days established itself in the top LJ.

Now we will remove this garbage!

The set of news is amazing: Ukrainian propaganda, ordered by bots to the top (I wrote about this vmenshov ) There’s not even anything to read. SOUP what's going on there?

Read the entry sharla_tanka about how the editors of LiveJournal famously moderate the top. In the first places you can always see crap about Ukraine and similar posts. Unique and harmless content from bloggers is removed immediately.

My posts with my photos were removed immediately:

The other section, as I understand it, exists so as not to clutter up the top LiveJournal and show the most interesting entries.
But why do I see only Ukrainian posts? About Boeing, about the militias, about Kyiv. Have you finally lost your mind? What kind of manipulation of users' consciousness is this?

The post with our cat was strictly filtered
Moreover, I know the editors have their own blogger who runs a copy-paste section with cats, but for some reason they don’t move it to another, but on the contrary, they encourage their own in every possible way.

Technical support is silent. It’s unclear why he’s not answering - Mr. Silent Director of LiveJournal dimson , ignores all user messages on his blog.

Once I asked Mr. Dronov ( igrick former head of LiveJournal) about the ZHYR column, the answer amazed me:

Now the management apparently has no words at all.

As we can see, the new management is completely incompetent.

Ridiculous, stupid, out of the ordinary, contrary to common sense.

In mathematics and logic, it means that some element does not make any sense within the framework of a given theory or system, and is fundamentally incompatible with it. Although an element that is absurd in a given system may make sense in another.

In everyday life - nonsense, fable, nonsense, nonsense, gilt.

• An expression is considered absurd if it is not outwardly contradictory, but from which a contradiction can still be derived. For example, in the statement “Alexander the Great was the son of childless parents” there is only an affirmation, but no negation and, accordingly, no obvious contradiction. But it is clear that an obvious contradiction follows from this statement: “Some parents have children and at the same time do not have them.”
• The absurd is different from the meaningless: the meaningless is neither true nor false, there is nothing to compare it with in reality in order to decide whether it corresponds to it or not. An absurd statement is meaningful and, due to its contradictory nature, is false. For example, the statement “If it rains, then the tram” is meaningless, but the statement “The apple was cut into three unequal halves” is not meaningless, but absurd. The logical law of contradiction speaks of the inadmissibility of both affirmation and denial.
• An absurd statement is a direct violation of this law. In logic, evidence is considered by reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to the absurd”): if a contradiction is deduced from a certain proposition, then this proposition is false.
• Absurdity must be distinguished from semantically chaotic sentences, for example, the following “the car is telling”, “the window opened high”.
• In ordinary language there is no unambiguity in the understanding of the word “absurd”. An expression that is internally contradictory, meaningless, or anything absurdly exaggerated is also called absurd.
• In Ozhegov’s Dictionary: “absurdity, nonsense.” In the “Dictionary of Foreign Words”: nonsense, absurdity. Empty and meaningless definitions.

• In philosophy and fiction, the epithet “absurd” is sometimes used to characterize a person’s attitude towards the world. Albert Camus defines absurdity as “the impossible.” The absurd is interpreted as something irrational, devoid of any meaning and clear connection with reality. In the philosophy of existentialism, the concept of absurdity means something that does not and cannot find a rational explanation.

• In works of fiction, the reductio ad absurdum method is used by the author to confuse the reader.
• Wolf Schmid calls the thinking of a character prone to a literal reading of metaphors (identifying the signified and the signified) absurd (“Prose as Poetry”). Among the absurdly thinking characters, he names Adriyan Prokhorov, the main character of A. S. Pushkin’s story “The Undertaker.”

• In the case of “reduction to the absurd”, the character with his “correct” and impeccable constructions is introduced by the author into an artistic reality as close as possible to historical reality. A logical dead end, an inconsistency, some kind of snag arises, which cannot be resolved without abandoning the idea. This, according to O. L. Chernoritskaya, is the method of F. M. Dostoevsky and some other writers.

• The plays “The Bald Singer” by E. Ionesco () and “Waiting for Godot” by S. Beckett () marked the birth of the theater of the absurd as a genre or central theme. Absurd drama usually lacks intrigue and clearly defined characters, randomness reigns in it, and the “plot” is built exclusively around the problem of communication. Here we can distinguish several types of absurdity: nihilistic absurdity, which does not contain even minimal information about the worldview and philosophical implications of the text and the game; absurdity as a structural principle of reflection of general chaos, the collapse of language and the lack of a coherent image of humanity; satirical absurdity, used in individual formulations and intrigue and quite realistically describing the world.

see also

• // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: In 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional ones). - St. Petersburg. , 1890-1907.
• Absurdism is a development of the philosophy of existentialism.
• Absurd laws

Literature

Wikimedia Foundation.

2010.:

Synonyms

- (from Latin absurdus, absurd, stupid) absurdity, contradiction. In logic, A. is usually understood as a contradictory expression. In such an expression, something is affirmed and denied at the same time, as, for example, in the statement “Vanity exists and vanity... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia

Absurd- Absurd ♦ Absurde Not the absence of meaning. For example, the word “eclipse” does not mean anything, but there is nothing absurd about it. And vice versa, this or that statement can be absurd only if it means something. Let's use... ... Sponville's Philosophical Dictionary

- (lat. absurditas, from ab from and surdus deaf). Absurdity, nonsense. Dictionary of foreign words included in the Russian language. Chudinov A.N., 1910. ABSURD [lat. absurdus absurd] 1) nonsense, absurdity, nonsense; 2) lit. drama a. one of… … Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

See absurdity... Dictionary of Russian synonyms and similar expressions. under. ed. N. Abramova, M.: Russian Dictionaries, 1999. absurdity absurdity, nonsense, abracadabra, nonsense, nonsense, absurdity, gibberish, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, ... ... Synonym dictionary

absurd- a, m. absurde m. 16th century, Montaigne. Ray 1998. Absurdity, nonsense. Ush. I rewrote the explanation of the word Farce, taken from the Encyclopedia and translated l absurde et l obscène absurd and disorderly; it seems that this will go into a comedy performance. 1787.… … Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language

A concept showing that the world goes beyond our understanding of it; etymologically goes back to the Latin word absurdus dissonant, incongruous, absurd, from surdus deaf, secret, implicit; the most important border... ... Encyclopedia of Cultural Studies

- (from Latin absurdus absurd) nonsense, absurdity... Big encyclopedic Dictionary

- (Latin ad absurdum coming from the deaf) a term of intellectual tradition denoting the absurdity, meaninglessness of a phenomenon or phenomenon. In the history of philosophy, the concept of “A.” began to be used by existentialism as an attributive characteristic... ... The latest philosophical dictionary

ABSURD, absurd, husband. (lat. absurdum). Absurdity, nonsense. Bring it to the point of absurdity. Dictionary Ushakova. D.N. Ushakov. 1935 1940 ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

ABSURD, ah, husband. Absurdity, nonsense. Take the idea to the point of absurdity. Theater (drama) of the absurd is a movement in dramaturgy that depicts the world as chaos and people’s actions as illogical and meaningless. Ozhegov's explanatory dictionary. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949... ... Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary

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