Образ человека будущего, Том 7
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Anatoliy Yermolenko also sees the connection between counterfactual and unreal as an important part of philosophical counterfactuality for understanding of which one should appeal to Kant"s notion of a priori. Yermolenko notes the Karl-Otto Apel"s ideal communication concept [Apel, 2009] rooted in Kantian theory of judgment: "The term "counterfactual" marks out not only a priori, non-empirical nature of the community, but also a type of the complex sentence, used in justification - namely sentence of subjunctive mood in which two sentences linked by the conjunction "as if" (als ob). In this case, it refers to the supposedly existence of the perfect communication" [Yermolenko, 1999: 54]. Unfortunately, this brief Yermolenko"s note actually exhausts his analysis of counterfactuality as a special topic. It remains unclear why counterfactual as unreal might be just interesting for the person, or even pretend to replace the real. Why, for example, people sacrifice their health, material wealth, even life itself for the sake of certain ideals that cannot be seen or felt by touch?
This Apel"s approach and therefore all transcendental pragmatics seems to be wrong in their efforts to reduce the whole palette of possible consolidation on certain subjective reality/ unreality to just one mode, while every language provides much more opportunities to express the extent of unreality that we perceive. Local philologist Valery Okhrimenko indicates as possible modality the gap between the real and the surreal, analyzing verbal means of expression of a reality in Italian: "The main FSV (functional-semantic variants - NB) in realt`a with an integrated feature of "objectification of subjective mode (in terms of negation)" are: 1) the inadequacy of interpreting of a sensory information by the subject of perception; 2) understanding by the subject of false interpretations of emotional response; 3) contradictory between the subject intent and its implementation; 4) estimated asymmetry between subject / object and feature implicated to it with a shift towards the negative" [Okhrimenko, 2013: 130]. Angelika Popovych notes that counterfactuality was initially associated with the effect and function of digression that is splitting of time of telling the stories and the story time. Thus, counterfactuality in language emphasizes simulations using language means: "This model, which conventionally might call mental digression seems very logical to us. According to it, counterfactuality manipulates the modeling of situation that contrasted with reality and this aspect of semantic structure of Pluperfect causes the appropriate function" [Popovych, 2012: 671]. Spanish researcher from the University of Potsdam Luis Vicente, who analyzes "the past counterfactuality in the imperatives of Spanish" found similar linguistic schemes [Vicente,
2015].
Thus, by Pluperfect it can be detected different models of counterfactuality. The above
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quotation from Okhrimenko gives models of subjective distancing from a flow of events through distancing from: inadequate (partially adequate) senses; inadequate (excessive, reduced or even false) emotional perception; inadequacy of action results to the intentions; value discrepancy of the object of perception.
If we turn to Kant"s categorical imperative, his classic interpretation involves discrepancy between intent and result, that is, to receive a guaranteed outcome Kant"s ethics recommends to define clearly own intention. That is, philosophers inclined to interpret Kant"s imperative formally - as the maximum dependence of the result from linearity and persistency in following certain prescribed at the very beginning rules ("maxima"). Then there come links to the categorical imperative when trying to justify Nazi crimes like Eichmann situation, including Hannah Arendt"s opus [Arendt, 2008] and its theoretical development by Marc Halfon [Halfon, 1989]. Only the deeper researchers point out that Kant is not so formalistic, and it is also important to account the intention, that denotes the ultimate goal, which determines the strategy of ethical behavior and its means. This intention should be at least subjectively recognized as a positive value, and hence in moral behavior it is also important its valuable content. For Kant, as for the any believer, the objective ethics could not be contradictory neither with God, nor with good.
However, Kant deliberately rejects any emotional or sensitive side of moral behavior: it could base only on cold reflection. For this he was criticized by Soren Kierkegaard, who proposed transition from reason moralism to higher, namely religious forms of moral sense [Kierkegaard, 1993], as well as more recent authors, including Max Scheler [Scheler, 1994].
In any case, Kant emphasized that for ethical position required distance, he saw it was possible to win by virtue of a priori position, that distancing judgment from a variety of contexts. However, as we see in the case of ethics nobody can break free of values context that, in principle, recognized Kant himself.
Then the question should be put differently. Moral person should distance himself/herself from the contexts, but obviously not all - that is the most surreal thing would be to seek a completely formal, meaningless position. The very Kant"s imperative include values, as we see, it implies certain ethical values, among which, perhaps, according to Max Scheler, decisive place occupied by Christian values, namely Protestant [Scheler, 1994], but may still be other connotations and contexts of imperative - political, legal and others. Thus, in an effort to achieve moral distance from mindless adherence to a flow of events, we should oppose to this flow models of certain behavior that proved supposedly like "a priori". "Like", but not really! As noted Nicklas Luhmann, value opportunism is appropriate only if we protect the selected value against all other values [Luhmann, 2011] - because, really, there could not be non-valuable position in opposing some values: values are always opposed to the counter-value or irrelevant value. Then and there lays, in our opinion, actually a philosophical interest to the concept of counterfactuality that can be called a priori-like selected context. This kind of interpretation of a priori is close to the term "historic a priori", constructed by Michel Foucault [Foucault, 1994]. Thus, taking a counterfactual position, we choose a semantic context of our behavior - sensual, emotional, instrumentally rational, value, etc.
– and give to it absolute value relatively to all other possible contexts - within our strategy to keep the line of certain conduct.
For example, in addition to the mentioned above methods of modeling alternatives it is proper in linguistics to distinguish by analysis of long-past time a counterfactuality of the condition (if, instead of real R happened P...) and a counterfactuality of the consequences (then
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it might happen Q) [Plungian, 2004: 275]. Kant"s categorical imperative based, as everybody tends to see and as he declares himself, on counterfactuality of the condition - that is, if human could not act as being caused only by limited natural factors, so he/she should be endowed with unlimited freedom by God. That is, Kant himself suggests conditions in the name of his imperative - an absolute categorical imperative as unconditional (independent from natural circumstances) he opposes the hypothetical imperative as conditional (provided by circumstances). In fact, for Kant it is also extremely important to fix counterfactuality result (consequence) - strictly ethical adjusted and consistent moral behavior of man as a free being. However, counterfactuality, i.e. in some sense pseudo-reality of this behavior, for Kant is sheer truth that reveals itself not only in the recognition of rather regulatory, than strategic nature of the moral ideal, but in the same regulatory nature of other ideals such as perpetual peace [Kant, 1989].
This case of Kant"s latent value legitimating of moral norm is very important in modern discussion with interpretation of counterfactual judgments in analytic philosophy. Here we meet the classic positivist understanding of norms as existing facts. Typical for analytic philosophy is the reconstruction of positivist logic of counterfactuality as possibility. Such reconstruction we met in the article wrote by local philosopher Anna Lactionova [Laktionova, 2016]. Here the judgments about the future events are formulated from disposition of present knowledge about any possible event. So according to this positivist point of view we should not accept any human discovery, any creation because of their improbability - the sentences about them were simply the consequences of false sentences: "Some conditional judgments are counterfactual, their antecedent is put as false: "If one thing has occurred, some other thing would happen"... We should explain the meaning of counterfactual conditional judgments. These judgments are the statements about events occur in invalid, unreal situations... Counterfactual conditional judgments fix the situation when antecedent (condition) is always false, and meaning of the whole judgment is true" [Laktionova, 2016: 10]. We suppose than more important is the fact that the consequents of the counterfactual conditional judgments are always true: from the false antecedent it could be also the false consequence - and the whole judgment would be true too. That means: the specific of the counterfactual conditional judgment does not lay in its false antecedent.
In what sense could we tell about false of antecedent and further deduction of truth of the whole judgment? From the logic point of view, this deduction is true, but we insist that nobody can take the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional judgments as false from the point of view of human will, i.e. from the point of view of our intention and results of its implementation in our activity and our creations. We should take in consideration Arthur Schopenhauer"s PhD Dissertation "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" [Schopenhauer, 1993], where he differed "four kinds of necessary connection that arise within the context of seeking explanations, and he correspondingly identifies four independent kinds of objects in reference to which explanations can be given: 1) Material things; 2) Abstract concepts; 3) Mathematical and Geometrical constructions; 4) Psychologically-Motivating forces" [Wicks, 2011]. In typical for analytic philosophy vision of reality it has geometrical character that should be explained with logical constructions. All other types of determination - material causation, conceptual connections, and motivation patterns - seems to reduce to logical formulas. For us it is crucial to differ the motivating forces from logical constructions: logic cannot explain and predict the results of impact from motivating forces.
Some issues from this problem could be illustrated by famous William Isaac Thomas
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theorem: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences" [Thomas, 1928]. These consequences are real because men act according to their definition of situation: their belief motivates them and push them to make real things that were unreal before. Reality of mind becomes real materially due to human activity. This is the way of design of future human nature on the basis of future human image.
In analytic philosophy, we also can find theoretical field where the creative force of human activity is conceptualized - the performative acts. John Austin [Austin, 2006] and John R. Searle [Searle, 2010] worked out this concept, but performative acts allows to explain a significance of language in its factual state - not its evolution. Therefore, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy we can find the judgment: "John Austin is considered by many to be the creator of the school of analytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach to law known as "legal positivism"" [Bix, 2014]. Searle investigated the phenomenon of intentionality [Searle, 1983], but his understanding of construction of social reality with help of language [Searle, 1995] was more the elaboration of language as reality of mind, than methodology of real changes as result of changes in mind. At least in one point the theory of performative acts is useful: in its accent on imperative mode of counterfactual judgment.