The book is a dictionary, but not words, but concepts - the fundamental concepts of Russian culture, such as "World" (around us), "Mental world" (in our minds) and their components - concepts "Word", "Faith", “Love”, “Joy”, “Knowledge”, “Science”, “Number, Count”, “Fear, Longing”, “Sin, Fornication”, “Ours - Strangers”, etc.
These concepts, concepts are the values of Russian culture and Russian culture in general, they belong to everyone and to no one separately. To use them, you need to know them - at least through a dictionary compiled by someone. Likewise, we try, for example, to learn English with the help of a dictionary that is allowed to have an author. For the user, this is more of an inconvenience, but there is no other way.
On the other hand, some concepts will reveal in this case, perhaps, new sides - our everyday morality, presented through the Chekhov code; Kolchak - as a polar explorer of the scale of Nansen; Russian vodka, improved by Mendeleev, - in its connection with the laws of the universe according to Newton; Pinocchio is like an eternal boyish beginning of the world.
CULTURE.
In modern Russian, the word culture has two main meanings: 1. The totality of the achievements of people in all spheres of life, considered not separately, but jointly, - in production, social and spiritual, 2. A high level of these achievements corresponding to modern requirements, the same, what a culturedness. A characteristic feature of Russian life is that the two meanings are closely related, therefore, in ordinary word use, combinations with the genitive case are more common - Culture of speech; The culture of everyday life; Trade culture; The culture of sex, etc. Therefore, the component “achievement; high level ”and the word culture itself is accompanied by an internal assessment, always quite high, positive.
This phenomenon is noted, albeit to a lesser extent, in the use of the corresponding words in other European languages. So, in the French language, where this concept is associated mainly with the word civilization, "civilization" (whereas culture, "culture" is considered not actually French, but a transfer of the German meaning of the word Kultur), even philosophical dictionaries note its "pronounced positively evaluative character ”(Lalande, 142). See further Civilization.
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This book will be produced according to your order using Print-on-Demand technology. The book is a dictionary, but not words, but concepts - the fundamental concepts of Russian culture, such as `World` (around us),` Mental world` (in our minds) and their components - concepts `Word`,` Faith`, `Love`,` Joy`, `Knowledge`,` Science`, `Number, Account`,` Fear, Longing`, `Sin, Fornication`,` Ours - Aliens`, etc. These concepts, concepts are values Russian culture and Russian culture in general, they belong to everyone and to no one separately. To use them, you need to know them - at least through a dictionary compiled by someone. Likewise, we try, for example, to learn the English language, with the help of a dictionary, which is allowed to have an author. For the user, this is more of an inconvenience, but there is no other way. But some concepts will reveal in this case, perhaps, new sides - our everyday morality, presented through the Chekhov code; Kolchak - as a polar explorer of the scale of Nansen; Russian vodka, improved by Mendeleev, - in its connection with the laws of the universe according to Newton; Pinocchio - as an eternal boyish beginning of the world ... Publisher: "Languages of Slavic Cultures" (1997)
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| Stepanov Yu.S. | This book will be produced according to your order using Print-on-Demand technology. The book is a dictionary, but not words, but concepts - the fundamental concepts of Russian culture ... - Languages of Slavic cultures, - | 1997 | 1252 | paper book | |
| Stepanov Yu.S. | Constants: a dictionary of Russian culture | - (format: 70x100 / 16, 992 pages) | 2004 | 533 | paper book |
| Yu. S. Stepanov | Constants. Dictionary of Russian culture. Research experience | This is the first experience in your literature of systematizing such cultural values that are embedded in concepts and concepts. First of all, those of them that are constantly present - "constants" are described ... - Languages of Slavic Culture, e-book | 1997 | 350 | eBook |
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- (p. 20.07.1930) special. in the region. cultural studies, theory and philosophy. language; dr filol. Sciences, prof. Graduated from Philology. ft MGU (1953), Ph.D. in the department of general and comparative history. linguistics of the same f that (1956). He continued his education in Paris (1957 1958): ... ... Big biographical encyclopedia
Concept- - one of the most popular and least unambiguously defined terms of the modern. linguistics. It is primarily associated with the anthropocentric paradigm of linguistics and cognitively pragmatic methodology and is used along with such key ... ... Stylistic Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Russian Language
- (Greek nous, pneuma; Latin spiritus, mens; German Geist; French esprit; English mind, spirit) 1. The highest human ability, which allows him to become a subject of meaning, personal self-determination, meaningful transformation of reality; ... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia
Religious and aesthetic consciousness- double-oriented spiritual activity, consisting in the predisposition of religious consciousness to operate with aesthetic criteria and in the counter readiness of aesthetic consciousness to be guided by value-normative guidelines ... Aesthetics. encyclopedic Dictionary
ALL THE WIDE- 1. to spill out, open up, spread out In its entirety, in full measure, infinitely, as long as the glance suffices. This refers to fragments of natural, less often urban landscape (L): river, sea, steppe, avenue, etc. This is said with approval. speech ... ...
This term has other meanings, see Concept. A concept in philology is the content side of a verbal sign, behind which there is a concept related to the mental, spiritual or material sphere of human existence, ... ... Wikipedia
Wikipedia has articles about other people with this surname, see Stepanov. Yuri Sergeevich Stepanov Date of birth: July 20, 1930 (1930 07 20) Place of birth: Moscow, RSFSR, USSR Date of death ... Wikipedia
Discourse in intercultural communication- With the development of psycholinguistics, pragmatics and communication theory, the study of language as a system independent of reality has replaced the study of language and speech, which reflect reality and create discourse. By incorporating speech / text ... ... Psychology of communication. encyclopedic Dictionary
AS TWICE TWO- 1. AS TWO / WAIT TWO FOUR / RE clearly Obviously, indisputable. It means that the state of affairs, the essence of what is happening (P) appear to be unambiguous, undoubted to a person, a group of persons (X). Speaks with approval. informal. ✦ P clear X y as twice two. ... ... Phraseological dictionary of the Russian language
truth and truth- TRUTH AND TRUTH concepts used to characterize our beliefs. If truth characterizes beliefs in their relation to reality, then truth characterizes them in relation to moral values. European peoples do not ... ... Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
This term has other meanings, see Philistinism (meanings). This article or section describes the situation in relation to only one region. You can help Wikipedia by adding information for other countries and regions ... Wikipedia
1. Constants of culture
Appendix I. Concept
Related concepts
Culture
Concept
Linguistic words
Conceptosphere
Image of the world
National picture of the world
Language picture of the world
Mentality
Associative-verbal networks
Meaning and meaning
Axiology
In the definition of Acad. Yu. S. Stepanov, the content of culture, including Russian, can be reflected by the constants that form it, the fundamental cultural concepts that belong to everyone and to no one separately. In Russian culture, these constants include, in particular, Peace, Faith, Will, Truth, Love, Soul, etc. Through them, culture enters the mental world of man, just as man, for his part, enters culture.
The constants of a national culture may coincide in name with the constants of another national culture, but differ in the meanings put into them. Their content is determined not in the scientific-conceptual, but in the everyday-conceptual dimension in connection with the ideas prevailing in culture. It is impossible to know in advance whether these ideas are reliable in the objective sense, but it is possible to assert their unconditional reliability as a given collective consciousness.
□ The culture constant is set by analogy with the concept as a model for representing knowledge about some fragment of the image of the world.
□ The set of constants defines a set of rules for operating with knowledge about culture.
□ Like concepts, culture constants are determined not from the perspective of objective special scientific knowledge, but in connection with the ideas prevailing in culture.
□ Culture constants are not subject to validation.
□ Constants of different national cultures may be the same in name, but differ at the same time in the meanings put into them.
□ The content of a concept as a culture constant can be determined only by attested contexts of use, including on the National Corpus of the Russian language.
□ Structurally, the concept contains some more or less stable program, deployed with varying degrees of completeness in all its possible implementations, which can be judged by the stable associative connections between words.
Example I. Let's take Russian as an example. bachelor. Along with the universally significant signs ‘man’, ‘adult’, ‘unmarried’, reflected in the dictionary interpretation, Russian-speaking informants define the sought concept in expressions of the form the house is not cleaned,dirty socks, cannot cook, maybe only scrambled eggs and so on. Moreover, according to the general opinion, these values are codified and as such should be taken into account on a par with taxonomic characters. It is no coincidence, when analyzing the statement The wife was on a business trip,and he lived as a bachelor, Y.D. Apresyan defines a bachelor by the properties of ‘disorder of life’, ‘lack of home comfort’ in the paraphrasing of the species [lived] without complicating your life with the device of everyday life,not caring about home comfort and order, but maybe participating in fun friendly meetings - words, So , how is it common for bachelors to live in society?.
The situation is different in the American picture of the world. According to the observations of J. Lakoff, eng. bachelor "bachelor" is defined mainly by the characteristics of ‘handsome’, ‘reveler’, ‘promiscuous sex’ in the definitions of the species handsome man, extremely caring about his appearance and strolling through night bars in search of love adventures.
Example II. As another example, let's take the following statement from a Pomeranian hunter and fisherman: Not only does a small child know how to handle an oar, a woman, a woman herself - why would a person seem to be worse? - and the one that the beluga, that the nerpa - dashing in the sea. Feel free to put the steering wheel in her paw and go to bed, she won't give it out: she won't be overwhelmed and won't show you a single tear... (S. V. Maksimov). As a whole contradictory, the assessment is set by the evaluative predicates of a person worse, dashing in the sea, will not give out, etc. in relation to the yielding conjunction ( why would ... and that ...), which allows, if not suppress, then at least compensate for a generally negative assessment with some particular advantages. Moreover, to understand why in the judgment about the wives and daughters of the Pomors such, and not some other properties are selected, why Rus. the woman is characterized in the overall assessment negatively (the person is worse : Wed ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________), in private - positively (dashing in the sea, will not give out ...) and why a positive assessment is given, finally, in comparison with marine animals (that beluga, that nerpa) can only be referred to the cultural norms established in the axiological system of the Pomors.
The interpreter of the relation baba → / - / (in the context of "a man is worse") is, obviously, the opinion: compared to a man, a woman is weak; the interpreter of the relationship baba → / + / (in the context of "she will not give out: she will not work and will not show you a single tear") - the woman is hardy and patient, you can rely on her in a difficult situation; The interpreter of the transposition baba → beluga, baba → seal is such a very significant circumstance that there is no other class of auxiliary creatures to designate brave rowers in the speech everyday life of the Pomors, except perhaps only large fish of the sturgeon family or pinniped mammals from the seal family.
This is how the specific features of the interpretation of Rus are revealed. baba (meaning "wife", "woman") in the understanding of the Pomor hunters and fishermen.
Questions and tasks
What are the similarities and differences between the concept and the culture constant?
Define the nationally specific features of the Rus. family, love, faith, will, happiness, freedom.
Having established the "typical associations", build an associative-verbal network rus. husband, wife, children, school, university, dormitory according to the stimulus → reaction model (S → R).
Comment on
The constants of culture belong to everyone and to no one individually.
The constants of culture are stable and constant.
Like the concept, the constant of culture is a “lump of meaning” in the consciousness of a person - that in the form of which culture enters the mental world of a person (Yu. S. Stepanov).
The concept is "determined", the concept is "experienced". It includes not only logical signs, but also components of scientific, psychological, avant-garde artistic, emotional and everyday phenomena and situations (Yu. S. Stepanov).
Culture is a set of concepts and relationships between them, which are expressed in various ranks (primarily in the so-called evolutionary semiotic ranks), as well as paradigms, styles, isogloss, ranks, constants (Yu. S. Stepanov).
From an epistemological point of view, a concept is akin to a concept, because it evolves along with cognition and is set, like a concept, as reflected knowledge about an object.
Establish the structure of the concept from a fragment from the book. Yu.S. Stepanov. Constants: Dictionary of Russian Culture (Moscow: Languages of Slavic Cultures, 2007).
Everyone knows that in recent decades, until very recently in the life of the current active population of Russia, February 23 was an annual "holiday for men", and March 8 was a "holiday for women." On the first of these days, all men, regardless of their profession and age, were the subject of celebration - at home, in enterprises, in schools from the first to the last grade and even in kindergartens, boys received congratulations and small gifts from girls. On the second of these days, men and boys do exactly the same to women and girls. This fact of cultural life forms a concept. In this case, we also have a "double concept", consisting of two related ideas about two holidays. In this fact of cultural life there is still some structure - the two holidays are symmetrical, opposed and arranged according to the calendar in close proximity to one another. (In addition, by a strange but remarkable coincidence, February 23, according to the old style, falls on March 8 of the new style, that is, in a sense, both dates are the same date.) Let's designate the described state of affairs as “the state of affairs I ".
It is equally well known that these two holidays are different in origin and in no way related to each other. February 23 was celebrated (and in the life of the older generation is still such) as the "Day of the Soviet Army", that is, a holiday of the military, or, as they say in modern Russian life, the military. March 8 was celebrated (and for a certain part of the older generation is still celebrated as "International Women's Day", that is, the day of the struggle of "all progressive humanity" (and not only women themselves and not only men for the sake of women) for the equality of women with men, for the emancipation of women.In this capacity, both holidays do not correlate with each other and, moreover, are not "symmetrical" ("state of affairs 2").
Finally, historians and some of the simply educated people know (and more about February 23 than about March 8) the historical facts of the distant past, which later led to the establishment of these memorable days. On February 23, 1918, the then-newly organized regular army of the Soviet state - the Red Army - won a major victory over the troops of Germany near Narva and Pskov (the First World War was still going on). This event is associated with the name of L. D. Trotsky (a fact that Soviet propaganda later tried not to remember), who was then People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. March 8 was designated as a holiday on the initiative of Clara Zetkin (1857‒1933), an active member of the international women's and communist movement; ("State of affairs 3").
It is quite obvious that all three states of affairs - (1), (2), (3) are reflected in the “concert on February 23 and March 8” existing in our minds. But they are reflected in different ways, with varying degrees of relevance, as different components of this concert. Component (1) is the most relevant, in fact, it is the main feature of the content of the concept of "holiday". Component (2) still participates in the concept of "holiday", but not so vividly, not so hotly, forming it as an additional, not active, passive feature. Component (3) is no longer recognized in everyday life, but is the “internal form” of this concept (pp. 42-43).
Russian associative dictionary - http://www.tesaurus.ru/dict/dict.php
Russian associative dictionary. In 2 volumes / Yu. N. Karaulov et al. M .: AST-Astrel, 2002 - http://tesaurus.ru/dict/dict.php
Vorkachev S.G. Happiness as a linguocultural concept. M .: Gnosis, 2004. - http://lincon.narod.ru/happ_comps.htm
Karasik V.I. and others. Another mentality. M .: Gnosis, 2005. - http://www.twirpx.com/search/
Appendix I. Concept
N. Yu. Shvedova: The concept is the content side of the word mark<…>, behind which there is a concept (that is, an idea that fixes the essential "intelligible" properties of realities and phenomena, as well as the relationship between them), belonging to the mental, spiritual or vital material sphere of human existence, developed and consolidated by the social experience of the people, having in his life has historical roots, socially and subjectively comprehended and - through the stage of such comprehension - correlated with other concepts that are closely related to him or, in many cases, opposed to him (Russian ideographic dictionary / edited by N. Yu. Shvedova. M .: 2004 . Pp. 29–30).
Approx. Among the fundamental points of the definition, we note, in particular:
Conceptualization of the reality around us is projected, first of all, onto the language, and concepts are associated mainly with linguistic signs: “A concept is the content side of a verbal sign”;
Concepts are in relation to agreement or disagreement: “... concept<…>, correlated with other concepts that are closely related to it or, in many cases, opposed to it. "
When asked whether this definition can be applied to any word and the concept behind it, the answer is negative:
Unlike a concept, the content of a concept is determined relative to other concepts within the boundaries of a certain “world”: “... the concept does not exist in“ free floating ”- the idea behind the concept is necessarily contained within the boundaries of a certain“ world ”<…>and, from this point of view, it is not a simple generalization of ideas about any subject, about any reality ”(Shvedova 2004: 30);
The concept is deeper and more complex than any possible concept: “The very opposition of the terms“ concept ”and“ concept ”suggests that the concept is deeper and more complex than any possible concept. This complexity is determined by the fact that the very field of existence of concepts as phenomena of the mental, conceptual sphere, as well as its own characteristics and qualities associated with this field, are limited by the very nature of this phenomenon ”(Shvedova 2004: 30);
the concept is the result of the conceptualization of the world: “The concept is the direct result of the conceptualization of the world, that is, of its mental vision and comprehension, and in this it differs from the concept as a logically formed idea of a class of objects, phenomena” (Shvedova 2004: 30–31).A) The structure of the concept and its reality
a. Concept in modern logic and linguistics
In the concept, as it is studied in logic and philosophy, distinguish volume- the class of objects that fits the given concept, and content- a set of general and essential features of a concept corresponding to this class. In mathematical logic (especially in its most widespread version, also adopted in this Dictionary - in the system of G. Frege and A. Church), the term concept called only content concepts; thus the term concept meaning... While the term meaning becomes synonymous with the term the scope of the concept. Simply put - meaning words are the object or those objects to which this word is correct, in accordance with the norms of this language is applicable, and concept this is the meaning of the word. In cultural science, the term concept it is used - when they abstract from the cultural content, and speak only about the structure - in general, the same as in mathematical logic. The structure of the content of a word is also understood in modern linguistics.
Let's give an example. In Russian the word rooster has "meaning" and "meaning". Its "meaning" is all birds of a certain appearance (which corresponds to their zoological characteristics): a walking (not flying) bird, a male, with a red comb on his head and spurs on his legs. The meaning is otherwise called "denotatum". The "meaning" of the word rooster there will be something different (although, of course, in accordance with the "meaning"): a) poultry, b) male chickens, c) a bird that sings in a certain way and marks the time of day with its singing, d) a bird named after its special singing : rooster from the verb sing[the same connection exists in the Lithuanian language, closely related to the Slavic languages: gaidỹs “rooster”, gaidà “melody, melody”, giesmẽ “solemn song (in the old days: ritual singing)”, giedóti “solemnly sing” (for example, a hymn) and “To sing” (about a rooster)]; e) a prophetic bird, with which many beliefs and rituals are associated.
“Sense is the way people come to a name,” - these are the words of a famous logician and mathematician. Gottloba Frege(1848-1925), with which he summarized the relationship between meaning and name in relation to mathematical logic, is also true for culture. But in cultural studies, such an understanding of meaning also includes the history of the concept, as if subjected to "compression", compressed and synthesized. This is the dominant line in the structure of the concept viewed from a cultural point of view.
B) The question of the method as a question of the content and reality of concepts
Since the concept has a "layered" structure and different layers are the result, the "sediment" of the cultural life of different eras, then from the very beginning it should be assumed that the method of study will turn out to be not one, but a combination of several different methods (or, one might say, "techniques" , - but this difference in words is not essential). We will see below that this is indeed the case. Let's start with the “third” layer, the least relevant, the most distant in history, because it was in relation to it that the question of the method was first posed.
1) "Literal meaning", or "internal form", or the etymology of the concept and cultural phenomenon
For the first time in its entirety, the question of the method as a question of the content of concepts (although the term "concept" has not yet been used) arose in the 1840s. in connection with the study of the life and antiquities of the Russian people on the monuments of ancient literature and law. In the same years, Russian ethnography was laid, which was originally associated with the creation in 1845 of the Russian Geographical Society. According to the just remark of A. N. Pypin, “in addition to the fact that very important material of factual data was collected, the new science acquired moral and social significance when, for example, Buslaev's studies for the first time explained in folk poetry not only its archaeological antiquity, but also its deep moral feeling "(Ist. Rus. lit., IV, 1899, p. 593; it is worth noting that in this connection Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev(1818-1897) received in 1859 an invitation to read to the heir to the throne Nikolai Alexandrovich the course "History of Russian Literature, in the sense that it serves as an expression of the spiritual interests of the people"; the course was delivered. Nikolai Alexandrovich (1843-1865) - the eldest son of the Emperor. Alexander II, died young; his brother ascended the throne - like Alexander III).
The question of the method was clearly raised for the first time - not only in Russian, but also on a European scale. Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin(1818-1885). He began his work in this direction with the study "A Look at the Legal Life of Ancient Rus" (1846, first published in the journal "Sovremennik", 1847, Book 1; below cited from: Collected works of KD Kavelin T. I. Monographs on Russian history St. Petersburg, 1897). First, here Kavelin draws attention to the superficial, directly observable features of the Russian way of life, to - we would say - literal meaning relations between people: Russian peasants call the landowner and every boss father, yourself - his children, junior seniors - uncles, aunts, grandmothers; peers, people of the same generation - brothers, sisters, etc. Consequently, he concludes, “the Russian Slavs originally had one purely family, related way of life, the Russian-Slavic tribe was formed in ancient times exclusively by one way of birth. This is consistent with the first historical news ”(p. 10, 11). Later KD Kavelin expanded his approach to all kinds of customs and rituals. “The very interpretations,” he wrote, “which the people give to these customs, rituals and beliefs, often no longer correspond to reality. At first, they were not a symbol, but a very definite concept or living action. The time comes when those natural and everyday conditions change under which this concept was formed or this mode of action was established; then the previous idea becomes a consecrated tradition, a belief, and the course of action becomes a rite. Their original meaning is often completely lost when conditions change, people continue to adhere to them, honor them, but no longer understand. He gradually attaches importance to these ancient monuments, consistent with his new way of life. This is how the difference between the original meaning of the fact and its interpretation by the people is formed "(quoted from: New enz. Sl. Brockhaus - Efron, vol. 20, stb. 270). Hence the requirement of the method, which Kavelin formulates: when studying folk rituals, beliefs, customs, look for them direct, direct, literal meaning- this is what linguists later called internal form(words, custom, ritual). Kavelin explains his position with an example: “Do matchmakers come, according to our wedding ceremonies, with a staff and talk with the bride’s parents as if they’re strangers who have never heard of them, although they live yard-by-yard? Believe that these are now symbolic actions were once living facts of daily life; whether the bride is crying at will, whether the wedding song expresses her fear of going to a strange, unfamiliar side - these symbols were also in the old days a living reality ”(stb. 271). This “was done by Kavelin,” says Maxim Maksimovich Kovalevsky, himself an outstanding historian of law, in an article about him, “at a time when not only in Russia, but also in the West, it was barely conceived, for example, in the writings of the brothers Grimm about German legal antiquities or in treatises devoted to the study of the Edda and the Nibelungen, the history of folk beliefs, legends and tales ”(New enz. sl. Brockhaus - Efron, v. 20, stb. 271).
In the field of method, K.D. Kavelin had a great predecessor (about which Kavelin probably did not know) - the ancient Greek historian Thucydides(460-396 BC). Modern researchers write about him, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, as follows: “The greatest merit of Thucydides as a historian is to attract documentary sources (texts of treaties, official decrees and other documents) in his work, to establish chronology ... an ingenious method of reconstructing the past by means of a reverse conclusion on the basis of rudiments ("cultural remnants") ”. This method consists in the fact that, based on the remnants of various institutions that have survived in the life of society, to deduce what they were and how they acted in those times when they were completely necessary. (Stratanovsky GA Thucydides and his "History" // Thucydides. History. M .: Ladomir - Science, 1993, pp. 428-429 [Series "Literary monuments"]).
Thucydides' genius in this matter is, perhaps, also in something else - in the fact that he invited historians to conclude about spiritual the meaning of something in the past by material the remnants of this "something" in the present. This is how he applies his method in practice (History, 1, 5) - we are talking about the strange custom of the Greeks to address those who sailed on ships with the question: "Are you not robbers?" “Since ancient times, when the sea trade became more lively, both the Greeks and the barbarians on the coast and on the islands turned to sea robbery. Such enterprises were headed by people who were not deprived of funds, who were looking for both their own benefits and food for the poor. They attacked villages unprotected by walls and plundered them, thus obtaining most of the means of living, and such an occupation was not at all considered shameful, but on the contrary, even a glorious deed. This is indicated by the customs of some mainland inhabitants (they still have an honorable dexterity in such an occupation), as well as the ancient poets, who always ask visiting sailors the same question - are they not robbers, as well as those who are asked , should not consider this occupation shameful, and those who ask, it does not cause censure ... ".
As for the "ancient poets", commentators point, for example, to two passages from the "Odyssey" where this custom is mentioned. In both cases (3, 71 f. And 9, 252 f.), The question is asked in the same form (in the translation of V.A. Zhukovsky, which we bring here to 9, 252, it is given somewhat differently):
Wanderers, who are you? Where did the water road come from?
What's your business? Or wander around idle everywhere,
Back and forth across the seas, like free earners, rushing,
Playing your life and adventuring troubles to the peoples?
But in the first case, this question is asked by the elder Nestor, and in the second, in the same form (in the original) - by the Cyclops Polyphemus! This means that before us is no longer a simple form, but stable formula, in itself has already become a new custom of "questioning". Thus, the "rule of Thucydides", just like the "rule of Kavelin", applies to the relics preserved in the language.
We have already seen above that "literal meaning" can be present both in those cultural phenomena that are contained in words or associated with words, and in those that are not verbally indicated in any way. An example of the first is the holiday "March 8", where the literal meaning is that it is the 8th of March that is celebrated, and not any other day of the year. Conceptually, as “international day for the struggle for women's equality” or simply as “women's day”, the same holiday could be timed to coincide with any day. An example of the second, not verbally designated phenomena, is the custom of accepting matchmakers as complete strangers. Consequently, our expression "literal sense" is a scientific term applied to those cases where there is no "letter" or sound of the word at all. This term means the same as "inner form" - a term that came from the study of the language, but applicable to all cultural phenomena (for example, to the symbolism of a temple building).
The term "inner form" is considered an invention Wilhelm von Humboldt(1787-1835), however, Humboldt has only general philosophical reasoning about form, in particular about the form of language, which can hardly be applied in practice to research. General considerations of Humboldt tried to concretize Gustav Gustavovich Shpet(1879-1940) (book "The internal form of the word", M., 1927). The most clear and "working" definition was given by (1835-1891). Potebnya defines the internal form of a word as "the way in which the existing word represents the previous word from which the given is derived." Thus, the definition of Potebnya applies only to words and, moreover, to words derived. But thanks to such a narrowing, it is clear and can serve as a starting point for further generalizations to non-verbal phenomena.
So, in the derivative word "inner form" is the idea of the producing word: nuclear scientist- "a person (this is indicated by the suffix -clerk) related to the atom "; snowdrop- is “an object (this is indicated by the suffix -Nick) under snow or protruding from under snow "; breakfast(for-morning-ak) - this is “some business, the next immediately in the morning " etc. Representations like these are "self-explanatory" from the meanings of words and suffixes.
In non-derivative words, or in words that seem to be non-derivative at the present time, everything is exactly the same, with the only difference that the "inner form" of modern speakers of the given language is already incomprehensible or no form at all is visible. In such cases, the "internal form" is discovered only by the researcher in the form etymology the words. So, for example, English, breakfast ("breakfast") and French. déjeuner ("breakfast") literally means "refusal to fast, breaking the fast": break "break" + fast "fasting, no eating"; dé negated. particle prefix + jeune "fasting, not eating." Thus, these English and French words, meaning the first morning meal, breakfast, have the inner form of the word "fasting, fasting, a ban on eating" and "denial, the end of this ban", and are associated with the ancient ritual ban on eating at night , before dawn.
Here again the important question already raised by us arises: are "internal forms" or "literal meanings" really significant? The question arises all the more since, as we ourselves said, in many cases the "internal forms" are not realized by modern speakers at all and are restored, and even then not always, only by researchers in the form of etymology. But, let us emphasize again: - the answer to this question comes from the method, - see below.
2) "Passive", "historical" layer of the concept
The methodological technique, which we can now call "Kavelin's method", has been fully developed in our time. He is followed, for example, by such an outstanding researcher of the Russian fairy tale as Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp(1895-1970): “The fairy tale must be compared with the social institutions of the past and in them one should look for its roots ... So, for example, we see that the fairy tale contains different forms of marriage than it is now. The hero is looking for a bride in the distance, not at home. It is possible that the phenomena of exogamy are reflected here: obviously, for some reason, the bride cannot be taken from her environment. Therefore, the forms of marriage in a fairy tale must be considered and the system must be found, that stage or phase of social development at which these forms actually existed "(Historical roots of a fairy tale. Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningrad. Univ., 1986, p. . 22). This situation is indeed found by ethnographers in the tribal system, in the phenomena of exogamy, i.e. "Marriage outside" - outside of a kind, in a different kind; in the prohibition of marriage between men and women of the same kind.
With the help of techniques similar to the "Kavelin method", by the beginning of the XX century. errors in understanding the legal issues of the structure of the Russian land community, the "world" (see below Peace [community]): “Investigating customary peasant law, that is, the really existing order of relations between peasants, they try to explain not this order, but the orthodoxy peasantry ... "; “Therefore, the valid rules are often excluded from the composition of the law, on the basis of which conflicts over the law are resolved ... That is, do not distinguish sanctions customary law in the eyes of the peasants from the real reasons for their formation "(Russia. Encyclopedia. Ed. Brockhaus - Efron, St. Petersburg, 1898, p. 547).
Almost literally in the same way, this position is now formulated in modern Western ethnography, or ethnology, or cultural anthropology (all these are different names for the same science, adopted in different countries). “We must,” writes the French ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss(born in 1908), - to imagine social structures primarily as objects that do not depend on how they are perceived by people (although people control their very existence), and they can be just as different from ideas about them as physical reality differs from our sensory impressions of her and from the hypotheses we create about her ”(Structural Anthropology // Transl. from French M .: Nauka. Ed. Ed. Eastern Literature, 1985, p. 108); “History summarizes data related to the conscious manifestations of social life, and ethnology - to its subconscious foundations” (ibid., P. 25). (The word "control" here is perhaps imprecise and even vague: such "objects" exist, as it were, "through people", thanks to their actions performed for a completely different purpose than the purpose of managing these objects; people do not control the existence of such objects and do not can change them, with the exception of such rare cases as reforms or revolutions.The most typical example of the relationship between people and such objects is language: everyone knows how attempts to control natural language end, reform it, or even influence it as a system as a whole. Rather, the point of view of E. Durkheim, see below point 3.)
Thus, further here the tasks of an ethnologist, historian and researcher of spiritual culture in our understanding diverge in three different directions. How exactly the paths of the ethnologist and the historian differ is clear from what has been said above. But let's summarize this difference in relation to our topic - concepts.
a. Ethnologist explores the deep layer that exists in the modern state of culture in a latent form, unconscious by people (cf. K. Levi-Strauss above). The researcher of spiritual culture in this part follows the ethnologist and uses his method, with the main method of the latter - the "Kavelin method". Close to this, somewhere in this "junction" of two sciences - ethnology and history (using a completely different terminology), the greatest Russian scholar of our century, Acad. Victor Vladimirovich Vinogradov(1894 / 95-1969): "To reveal the patterns of development of the all-Russian dictionary in connection with the ideological development of Russian society" ("Abstracts of scientific research. Works for 1944. Literature and language department." M.-L .: Publishing house Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1945, p. 6).
b. Historian explores the “historical” layer of the concept and, accordingly, acts with the historical method. An excellent example of such work is the study Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky(1841-1911) "Terminology of Russian history", repeatedly quoted later.
Of course, it cannot be said that the concepts "ethnological method", "historical method" are completely and for all researchers unambiguously defined. For V.Ya. Propp, in relation to his field of research - a fairy tale and mainly a fairy tale - this is a "formal method". For K. Levy-Strauss, and his field is much wider - this is the mythology and culture of "primitive societies" in general, and he began to work in it much later - this is the "structural method". For L.N. Gumilyov, this is something else, and so on. What is the "historical method" is also defined by different scientists in different ways, depending on what they understand by their subject - "history". And this last question is so confused that we can only confine ourselves here to what all non-specialists intuitively, approximately, but more or less the same, understand by "history."
In general, in order to at least realize the complexity of the issue, we recall the work, wonderful, but not indisputable, of the English specialist in the philosophy of history R.J. Collingwood(1889-1943) "The Idea of History" (translated from English. M .: Nauka, 1980). From Collingwood's extensive survey of what was meant by "history", including hundreds of examples of different opinions from Hesiod to the present, given by Collingwood, let us single out only one understanding close to our topic (Collingwood joins it) - Hegel's understanding of history. According to Hegel, “all history is the history of thought. To the extent that human actions are mere events, the historian cannot understand them; strictly speaking, he cannot even establish that they happened. They are cognizable for him only as an external expression of thoughts. (We will see something similar immediately below, in our material, when we come to the "synonymization" of words and things in the history of culture. - Yu.S.) ... And here Hegel, of course, is right. The correct formulation of the problem by the historian is not about finding out what people have done, but about understanding what they thought ”(Collingwood, op. Cit., Pp. 11-12).
v. Criticism of the classical "historical" method in works Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov(1912-1992). This criticism must necessarily be taken into account in such a work as ours, and it must necessarily supplement the above notion of history. We will restrict ourselves here to one of the many and equally important works of L.N. Gumilyov - his last book “From Russia to Russia. Essays on Ethnic History ”(Moscow: Ekopros, 1992). In the conclusion of this book LN Gumilev writes: “We traced the logic of the main events in the ethnic history of Russia and Russia. It is easy to see that the presentation of this logic is not at all like the story of social history. The ethnic history of any country, that is, the history of the peoples inhabiting it, cannot be viewed in the same way as we consider economic relations, political collisions, the history of culture and thought. The history of Russia, presented in the ethnic aspect, is no exception: it cannot be represented as a linear process going from Rurik to Gorbachev. The events of the ethnogenesis of the peoples of our Fatherland constitute the historical outline of the life of at least two different superethnoses. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the history of Ancient Kievan Rus (from the 9th to the 13th century, including the history of Novgorod before its fall in the 15th century) and the history of Moscow Russia (from the 13th century to the present day) ”(p. 292).
What is the fundamental difference between the approach of “classical historians” and that of Gumilyov himself? In his words: “Historians, naturally, deal with cultural phenomena in the broadest sense of the word - monuments of very different properties. This is where the possibility of the substitution of concepts is hidden: human creations are directly identified with those who gave birth to them, and the continuity of the cultural tradition is directly transferred to the ethnic tradition ”(p. 297). Above, Gumilyov has already said that the ethnic history of Kievan Rus is up to the 13th century, and the ethnic history of Muscovite Rus is from the 13th century. they are two different stories with a gap between them.
What should a cultural historian do, according to Gumilyov? - “Indeed, if we mean culture, that is, everything created by people, then we can agree with the thesis of continuity in half. But as long as we are talking about entogenesis, then this thesis is generally inapplicable to it. Unlike the cultural tradition, the ethnic tradition is not the continuity of dead forms created by man, but the unity of the behavior of living people, supported by their passionarity. As for the stereotypes of people's behavior in Kievan Rus and in the Moscow state, they, as we have seen, differed quite significantly ”(p. 296).
In general, we accept the point of view of L.N. Gumilyov. The history of cultural concepts that make up the subject of our book is built as a succession of concepts, and this is because the concepts themselves consist of successive layers; continuity lies in concepts. Of course, the historian of concepts also records gaps in continuity when, according to his material, they occur. But in such cases, we still have the story of one concept, albeit marked by gaps. This is the case in most of the concepts we have considered.
However, although rare, there are other cases, such as the concept "Faith". We must state (based mainly on the data of etymology) that the initial path of development of this concept in the proto-Indo-European civilization, associated with the ritual action "to give your heart (or other organ, such as liver) to God", was abandoned, as they were abandoned - in the material world - some ancient caravan routes, and the concept of "Faith" from a certain point, even before the emergence of Christianity, began to develop on a different basis - on the awareness of "contractual principles, contractual trust" between the two parties.
Different aspects of culture can be marked in different ways by such breaks, and even any one of its aspects. Thus, the Russian language: with regard to grammar, the majority of researchers assess the modern Russian language as a different, at least a different system, language than the language of Old Russian, the language of Kievan Rus; meanwhile, with regard to the lexical composition, vocabulary and meanings of words, and therefore concepts, there is no gap between them (for more details, see. Language ).
But, of course, the situation is different in the main subject of the history of ethnogenesis, or history in the aspect of ethnogenesis, which was created by L.N. Gumilev. Indeed, complete continuity cannot be established in behavioral stereotypes, belonging to two different ethnic histories. Therefore, let's say a concept like "Russian character" turns out to be a difficult subject for the historian of culture at the present time (and the reader should not expect much on this issue from the present Dictionary). (See, however, Motherland .)
3) The newest, most relevant and active concept layer. Cultural historian in the face of this fact
Above (starting with the Preface), we have repeatedly emphasized that the subject of the science of culture in general and this Dictionary in particular is not the concept of how they mentally exist in individual minds (and where in particular cases one or another of them may be absent altogether - let us compare e.g. concept "Civilization, Civilized Society" and the mentality of modern adolescents in Russia), and concepts as a kind of collective property of Russian spiritual life and the entire Russian, Russian society. Therefore, it is necessary to define concepts from this, namely, social, side.
Concept of collective consciousness as a special social phenomenon, not reducible either to individual consciousness or to the sum of individual consciousnesses, was first introduced into science by a French researcher, whom we readily recognize as the founder of scientific sociology, Emile Durkheim(1858-1917). Having devoted his first work (1893) to the problem of the division of social labor, already in the second work (1895), Durkheim came to the urgent need to investigate the method of the new science. The work is called "The rules of the sociological method" ("Les règles de la méthode sociologique"; in Russian translation - "Method of sociology", further cited in Russian translation from: E. Durkheim. On the division of social labor. Method of sociology . M .: Nauka, 1991).
There is, - writes Durkheim, - “a category of facts that differ in very specific properties; it consists of ways of thinking, acting and feeling, which are outside the individual and endowed with a coercive force, as a result of which they are imposed on him. Therefore, they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, since they consist of ideas and actions, or with psychic phenomena that exist only in the individual consciousness and through its medium. They constitute, therefore, a new species, and they must be given a name. social "(p. 413). Durkheim gives examples that are also important for our topic.
“When I act as a brother, spouse or citizen, when I fulfill my obligations, I am fulfilling the duties established outside of me and my actions by law and custom. Even when they agree with my own feelings and when I recognize their reality in my soul, the latter still remains objective, since I did not create them myself, but assimilated them through education.
Likewise, the believer, at his birth, finds ready the beliefs and practices of his religion; if they existed before him, then it means that they exist outside of him. The system of signs that I use to express my thoughts, the monetary system I use to pay off my debts, the instruments of credit that serve me in my commercial relations, the customs observed in my profession, etc. - they all function regardless of the use that I make of them. Let them take one by one all the members of the society, and all that has been said can be repeated about each of them. Consequently, these ways of thinking, acting and feeling have the remarkable property that they exist outside of individual consciousness.
These types of behavior or thinking are not only outside the individual, but also endowed with a coercive force, as a result of which they are imposed on him regardless of his desire ”(p. 412).
In the preface to the 2nd edition of his book, E. Durkheim responded to critical comments on the first edition. Two points are especially important for our topic, they directly apply to the concepts that are discussed in our Dictionary.
Collective consciousnesses are like “things”.“The proposition that, says Durkheim, social facts should be regarded as things, the proposition that lies at the very foundation of our method, has been the most objectionable. The fact that we liken the reality of the social world to the realities of the external world found it paradoxical and outrageous. This means to be deeply mistaken about the meaning and significance of this assimilation, the purpose of which is not to reduce the higher forms of being to the level of lower forms, but, on the contrary, to demand for the first a level of reality, at least equal to that which everyone recognizes as the second. We are not really saying that social facts are material things; these are things of the same rank as material things, albeit in their own way.
What is a thing really? A thing is opposed to an idea as something that is cognized from the outside, that that is cognized from within. A thing is any object of knowledge, which in itself is impenetrable to the mind; this is all about which we cannot formulate an adequate concept for ourselves by a simple method of mental analysis; this is all that the mind can understand only on condition of going beyond itself, through observations and experiments, successively moving from the most external and directly accessible signs to less visible and deeper ones ”(p. 394-395).
The difference between the conscious (conscious) and unconscious layers in collective consciousnesses or representations. This position is also important because it is a common point where the method of sociology, as it is formulated by Durkheim, and the method of ethnology, as it is understood, for example, by K. Levi-Strauss, and how it goes back to the "method of Kavelin" coincide. Indeed, Durkheim says: “Even when it comes to simply our private actions, we have a very poor idea of the relatively simple motives that govern us. We consider ourselves selfless while acting as selfish; we are sure that we submit to hatred when we yield to love, to reason when we are prisoners of senseless prejudices, etc. How can we more clearly distinguish between the much more complex reasons on which the actions of the group depend? ”; “It is necessary that, penetrating into the social world, the sociologist should realize that he is entering the unknown. He needs to feel that he is in the presence of facts, the laws of which are unknown, just as the laws of life were unknown before the creation of biology. He needs to be ready to make discoveries that will amaze him, confuse him ”(p. 396).
After Durkheim's beautiful words, there is little to add. You just need to summarize, so - we summarize.
The method of a cultural historian, at least as far as the concepts of culture are concerned, differs from the methods of an ethnologist, historian, sociologist; the historian of culture, in particular the historian of the concepts of culture, combines all three, using them, respectively, in three different layers of the content of cultural concepts.
To this it is only necessary to add that the cultural historian should strive to show not only collective performances, as a reality of society, but also hypotheses made about this reality the most prominent members of society. The attribute "the most outstanding member of society" is not a subjective assessment here, it simply means a member of society, thinker or writer, recognized by society itself as such.
Since, however, hypotheses also become material, it is natural that the very descriptions of "spiritual values" - concepts, as they are given in this book, are also, to a certain extent, hypotheses. But one should not exaggerate their hypotheticalness. Using the word "hypothesis" here, we want to emphasize not some particularly large measure of their "hypotheticalness", "author's subjectivity", etc. This measure, in any case, is no more than in other humanitarian studies; for example, all etymologies of words in linguistics are hypotheses, all descriptions of "collective representations" in sociology are hypotheses, precisely because they are not given in direct observation, and so on. We only want to emphasize the special nature, the special nature of the relationship between the descriptions of concepts - to reality: they describe reality, but a special kind of reality - mental. And in any case, they have at least one very solid foundation - the literal meaning of custom, idea, belief, term, word. Every time this is the starting point for the further development of the concept in mental reality itself, in the really existing collective consciousness, and in the development of the researcher's hypothesis, which he builds on this matter.
This implies, by the way, one compositional requirement, which also applies to the definition of a cultural concept, as it is given in the Dictionary, and to the construction of the text of the Dictionary entry itself - this is a requirement genetic sequence. Defining each concept is a process similar to definition of a concept in logic. But there is a very important difference between the one and the other. The definition of the concept, as we outlined above, is made up of historically different layers, different both in the time of formation, and in origin, and in semantics, and therefore the way of summing them up in the definition is, by the very essence of the matter, genetic; the concept always gets a genetic definition.
Let us now consider some important phenomena in the field of concepts that go beyond individual concepts or even groups of concepts - what we call in rows.
C) Evolutionary semiotic series of concepts(this section is a continuation of the corresponding section. Culture )
If the concept, as we said above, is made up of layers of different times of origin, then it is natural to represent its evolution in the form of a certain sequence, or a series, the links of which are the stages of the concept, or, in other words, a given concept in different eras. Between these links, it is worth placing them sufficiently consistently, a special relationship of continuity of form and content is immediately revealed, thanks to which something from the old stage of the concept becomes a sign in its new stage. For this reason, such relations should be associated with the principle of a sign, or, more precisely, with the principle of organizing sign systems. Since the study of sign systems is most often called semiotics, we called this arrangement of concepts in rows evolutionary semiotic series. Let's consider several examples of such series, given by different scientists (sometimes in discussion with each other). The first place, of course, on the very essence of the matter should be given to the representatives of the evolutionary school - by the way, they alone used the concept of "evolutionary series" (others considered actually the same phenomena, without calling them that).
a. Tylor's evolutionary ranks occupy the first place here, of course. The concept itself (without a corresponding term, our term) was introduced back in the 70s. last century - see about him in detail in Art. Culture ... It is also the starting point for the study of the evolution of concepts. But here we will consider its consequences and its derivatives in science itself, lining up in a single row what the authors of its individual links did not consider and did not even notice in this capacity.
b. The so-called "functional semantics" N.Ya.Marr
Observations similar to those made by E.B. Taylor on the series of things and spiritual concepts were carried out in Russia (then the USSR) by Acad. Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr(1864-1934) over parallel rows of things and their names, i.e. natural language words. Thus, N.Ya. Marr managed to identify some specific pattern, which we can now call it semiotic, but which N.Ya.Marr himself called "functional semantics".
The essence of this pattern is that the meanings of words - names change depending on the transition of a name from one object (or action) to another object, replacing the first item in the same or similar function. Marr found, for example, that with the advent of a new animal on the farm, title that animal, whose function was assumed by a new one: thus, according to Marr, the name of a deer was transferred to a horse (in different languages); the name of the acorn was transferred to bread, since the acorn as a food product was replaced by bread, etc. (Marr N.Ya. Means of transportation, tools of self-defense and production in prehistory. To linking linguistics with the history of material culture // Marr N.Ya. Selected works. T. III. Language and society. L, 1934, p. 123 and see also the article "The origin of the terms" book "and" letter "- ibid., p. 219 et seq.). Observations of N.Ya.Marr - in general terms - are confirmed by archaeological data and data on rituals. So, in the Pazyryk mound in Altai, ritually buried remains of horses in deer masks were found (see about this in Art. Culture , ibid. ill.). In some linguistic details, these provisions of N.Ya. Marr caused criticism of linguists and should be corrected. (Two specific examples of N. Ya. Marr are analyzed in detail below in paragraph "e"; the transition "stone" => "ax" in Art. Craft , the transition "acorn" => "bread" in st. Bread .)
The presence of some ambiguities in N.Ya.Marr's concept was felt already in his time, immediately after his publications, although the nature of these ambiguities and ambiguities became clear only now and we have elucidated here. However, immediately, in opposition to N.Ya. Marr's concept, an alternative concept arose, about which a few words should be said.
v. The existence of a concept in a latent form, in an "image" - the concept of O. M. Freidenberg(1890-1955)
“Completely agreeing with Marr in the practical results of his linguistic analysis, - wrote this researcher, - I would like to emphasize that I see here not a "transition of values by function", but a fundamental, general law for the entire system of semantization, which shows that each meaning has a different, special form of existence, completely different from this , and that these different states pass into each other, live in a latent form or appear, losing their meaning "(Freidenberg OM Myth and Literature of Antiquity. M .: Nauka, 1978, p. 46).
The researcher explained her thought with an example: “slave” appears before the emergence of the social institution of slavery: “Yes, the concept exists before the fact it defines, and not by virtue of an alternative - either first a fact, and then a concept about it, or first a concept and then a fact, but because both the fact itself and the concept of this fact always arise from species dissimilar to themselves, different in relation to themselves (we see how Marr's assertion about naming within one evolutionary series is replaced by the directly opposite - the essence of naming is in transition, in jumping from one row to another. Yu.S.). Thus, the image of a "slave" in relation to the concept of "slave" is progenetic, pre-conceptual. The concept of "slave" was created in an image that had nothing in common with this concept, and it was in this image that it was created, an image that does not logically link the essence of a social phenomenon, a slave, with the word that determines this essence. So the concept of "slave" exists even before slaves appear historically. How does it exist? In the form of a "slave". The phenomenon, when it does not exist, lives in a different form or a different meaning; the hidden appears, the manifest takes the form of the hidden. This large law of semantization (in another aspect - shaping) far outstrips the small empirical facts of individual development, stage changes, and other types of apparent evolution. His discovery has been the soul of my work since my student days. Marr called this law "naming by functional features" and was understood by Marr as "the transition of the meanings of words by function in production." According to Marr, first, the genetic value was created by the production need; then it was passed through the function. For example, acorns were the first food; when cereals and bread appeared, they, performing the function of an acorn, began to be called acorns in many languages. Marr and I have the same facts, but their theoretical basis is different. Marr has a linear transition of linguistic meanings according to the production function of the named object. I have a denial that the primitive consciousness could understand the production function: the object was named metaphorically, without any relation to its real function in production ”(ibid., Pp. 45-46).
Although O.M. Freidenberg herself insistently emphasizes that in her dispute with N.Ya.Marr she is talking about "the same facts", but in reality this is not quite the case. It is true that the immediate subject of the dispute was the same facts (for example, "acorn" => "cereal, bread"). But this is only a small group of facts belonging, so to speak, to both concepts at the same time. In reality, however, Marr's concept refers to the subject area “production”, while Freudenberg's concept refers to the subject area “nonproduction phenomena”. And in these - different - areas, both concepts are true at the same time (see below Bread ).
(K.K. Zhol in 1990 drew attention to the fact that the concept of O.M. Freidenberg is akin to the concept of L.S. Berg in the field of biology, according to which the appearance of an animal organ precedes its work, i.e. functions, and even need for it (L.S. Berg "Nomogenesis", 1922) If this is so, then both the concepts, Freudenberg and Berg, can be put in direct connection with semiotic theories - with the doctrine of Jacob von Uexkühl about the "goal", about the teleological organization of the external and internal world of the animal: the external world, for example, such and such a type of plant as an object of nutrition for the animal, is in the world of the animal consequence the internal plan of his organism, - see more about this further: Stepanov Yu.S. Semiotics. Moscow: Nauka, 1971; and here in st. Reason and purpose; Evolution .
Let us now consider two concepts that, in a logical sequence, should be considered - as we see it now - as a development, with some criticism, of Freudenberg's ideas, although in actual history the authors of these concepts did not initially link their views with those of Freudenberg, and hardly at all knew about them.
G. Rows as random associations. Naming as a random choice of a distinctive feature, according to B.A. Serebrennikov
The first position of Acad. B. A. Serebrennikova(1915-1989) in his concept of naming, which is very close to the idea of O. M. Freidenberg: “Without going into controversy over the thesis about the mandatory verbal nature of human thinking (which Serebrennikov rejects. - Yu.S.), we will try to substantiate our main thesis: experience creates an invariant generalized image of an object, which usually precedes its name "(Nomination and the problem of choice // in the book: Language nomination. General questions. M .: Nauka, 1977, p. 148) ...
The most common way of nomination, the same author notes further, is the use of a ready-made sound complex, i.e. any existing word or onomatopoeic complex, meaning one of the features inherent in a new, called object. Thus, we emphasize, in the concept of Serebrennikov we are talking about "non-production" series, and the existence of "production" series and functional semantics (which was the main one in Marr's concept) B. A. Serebrennikov, who was in sharp opposition to the teachings of N. Ya. Marra doesn't seem to notice at all.
Further, B.A. Serebrennikov formulates his main thesis: “Most often, the choice of a feature as the basis of a name does not depend on any external conditions and is the result of purely random associations"(Ibid., P. 155). Such a sign, according to Serebrennikov, being signified by means of a sound complex, itself becomes a conventional sign of a new, called object, its identification mark.
We will consider in more detail the examples of B.A. Serebrennikov below, but for now we will immediately state our concept.
etc. Criticism and synthesis of previous concepts in the concept of "conceptualized area (sphere)"
As already noted above, the approach of B.A. Serebrennikov not only did not take into account and critically did not overcome, but simply did not notice the concept of N.Ya. Marr related to the concept of functional semantics. This should be done in a new, synthesizing concept correlated with the original theoretical concept of evolutionary semiotic series. In addition, Serebrennikov's concept requires criticism on one special point, namely, about accidents naming by attribute.
Let's give our example first - naming "human". In Indo-European languages, human designations fall into two distinctly separable layers. One, apparently historically newest (although quite ancient), is the Proto-Slavic * čеlovẽкъ, which does not have a generally recognized etymology. But, according to the most reliable etymology, it is a compounding; its first part, from I.-E. * kel- means "clan, tribe, clan", cf. lit. kẽlis "knee, generation, genus", Rus. servants- 1. “Population of the feudal patrimony of Ancient Rus; 2. Domestic servant (as a collective) ”, and its second part, -vẽk, is related to lit. vaikas - "child"; those. all this complex word means "a child (of our," kind ") of the clan, tribe" (see. Human, Personality ) .
The second layer, the most ancient (since it is represented in many IE languages), includes the names of a person, formed from a root with the meaning "earth": lat. homo with humus - "earth, surface layer of the earth - soil, humus"; Dr. Irl. duine at dū, p. case don - "earth"; lit. žmogùs with žemé - "land" (with a guttural suffix, the same as in the word, with a different root, * mogio - "man, man, husband", compare Russian husband). Thus, all these names in different, variable forms mean the same thing - "earthy, earthly", which is the designation of a person. From the point of view of form, all these words go back to the same Indo-European root, also represented in Greek. χθών "earth, soil" - * gz hem- // * gz hom- (P. Chantraine. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des mots. Paris ^ Klincksieck. T. IV-2, 1980, p. 1259; for the first consonant, we leave here the notation of the author of this dictionary, although he has other designations). It is obvious that all these different forms are included in one and only opposition "earthly" - "heavenly", i.e. "Earthly" (man) is opposed to "heavenly" (god). The ancient Greek language retained this opposition in its expanded form, so in the Iliad (24, 220): epichthónioi ánthrōpoi (έπιχθόνιοι άνθοωποι) "terrestrial (or: above-earth) people" versus "heavenly (or: above-heavenly) gods", epouránioi theol (έπουσάνιοι θεοί). (Why the gods are interpreted as "above-heavenly" beings, that is, those who are not just above, in the sky, but above the sky, is explained in connection with the ideas of the ancients about the structure of the world: the heavens had "layers" or "spheres"; the ancient Greek the gods dwelt over the sphere that formed the "sky" proper - "uranos"; see further in v. Peace ).
Thus, of course, there is no need to talk about the "accidental" naming of a person. After all variations the names run here within the framework of the same fundamental opposition "man" - "god" (see below Human, Personality ).
Let us now look at the examples of BA Serebrennikov from the point of view of the relationship clarified here - “the randomness of a feature” with “non-randomness, the fundamental nature of the main category or opposition”. We will see that this relationship persists in other cases as well.
Concept "have": example of Serebrennikov - German. haben is akin to Latin. sarere "to grab" (that is, the semantic development seems to be accidental); But the connection between the concepts of “to have” and “to have” can be traced in many languages with very different initial roots, that is, with - it would seem - "random" primary signs of the name: rus. have and imat; litas. turěti “to have” and tvérti “to grab”, etc., and in Latin itself, the verb meaning “to grab” is also related to the verb “to have”; in other words, “to have” is the result of “grabbing”. (See some details in Art. Will [want].)
Concept "Early morning": example of Serebrennikov - German. Morgen is a "morning" cognate of the Litas. mérkti "close the eyes" and "dim the light" (Serebrennikov wrongly indicated a different meaning); while dumb. früh is associated with the Indo-European root * pro - forward; but - our addition is the root represented in it. Morgen and in litas. mérkti quite obviously means not only "adding light", i.e. "Dawn, morning", but also "diminishing light", while the root * pro- in the same way means being in front of a person's face, and behind, behind his back (see more details in Art. Time ); thus, despite the apparent randomness and diversity of signs, in fact, here we are again faced with the same fundamental opposition "beginning" and "end", and, moreover, with a changing order of these terms (see more about rus. Start and end, end, in st. Law ): “Position in front of the eyes” and “position behind the back”, “beginning of the day” and “twilight” (this is a Russian word from the same root as German Morgen, Lithuanian mérkti), “future and past” - in the final the account is the same opposition.
So, the sign of the primary name (as well as the subsequent transfer of the name, that is, the name of the secondary name) seems to be accidental only with an incorrectly chosen point of view - namely, if disparate cases are considered outside the semantic series to which they belong. On the contrary, within the limits of its semantic series, if it is correctly determined by the researcher, the naming signs do not appear at all as accidental. Or, more precisely, the scatter in the choice of features can be quite large, but never, apparently, goes beyond the boundaries of a certain semantic series; in another row there will be another, possibly equally "scattered" set of selected features, but again, it does not violate the boundaries of this row. The freedom to choose a feature ("randomness") is thus limited. But by doing so the nature of the pattern it is not the end result itself that acquires the name, but the series within which the name is performed. The number belongs not only to the language, but to the sphere of culture, and the pattern of naming from the sphere of language is transferred to the sphere of culture, connected, in particular, with the language. Such a sphere, more precisely, each such sphere (ie "row"), we will call "Conceptualized area (sphere)".
Here the course of our reasoning is of necessity bifurcated, a “fork” of reasoning arises (we often have to deal with this circumstance in this Dictionary, as well as in other articles). In this case, we can first go further along the path of the topic "On the non-randomness of naming in the concepts of culture", and then along the second branch of the "fork" - along the path of the phenomenon of the "conceptualized area", or vice versa - first along the second path, and then along first, it does not change the essence of the matter. We nevertheless, for reasons of convenience for the reader, choose the first path for composition.
D) Concept names: non-randomness of naming in culture
The nonrandomness of naming in culture is the main thesis that we intend to carry out - already as a generalized statement, as a principle - in this part of the article. Meanwhile, the opposite statement is also known (F. de Saussure): about the absolute arbitrariness of the name, i.e. about the randomness of naming, also formulated as a principle. Nevertheless, our article is not at all polemical: it opposes not two opinions, but two different scientific paradigms, to which, in particular, the named positions belong.
Let us recall how the Swiss linguist formulates his position Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913), with the subtitle "The first principle: the arbitrariness of the sign": "The connection connecting the signifier with the signified is arbitrary, or, in other words, since by the sign we mean the whole arising from the association of the signifier and the signified, we can say more simply: language sign is arbitrary... Thus, the idea of “sister” is not connected with the change of sounds s-ö-r (sœur), which serves as its “signifier” in French by any internal relationship; it could be expressed by any other combination of sounds; this can be proved by the differences between languages and the very fact of the existence of different languages: the signified "bull" is expressed with the meaning b-ó-f (fr. bœuf) on one side of the linguistic border and oks (German Ochs) on the other side " / Translated from French AM Sukhotin. M .: OGIZ. SOTSEKGIZ, 1933, p. 79).
Then the author continues: “The word arbitrary also raises a note. It should not be understood in the sense that the signifier depends on the free choice of the speaking subject ..; we want to say that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrarily in relation to the signified, with which it does not really have any natural connection ”(ibid., pp. 79-80).
The position put forward by F. de Saussure served as one of the cornerstones of not only the structural theory of language, but also the emerging structuralism as a whole - the new (then) paradigm of the humanities. However, this linguistic statement itself, as is known, gave rise to a huge debate that stretched out over several decades. In the course of it, it was thoroughly, if not shaken, then at least clarified. An important stage in this process was the work of E. Benveniste "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign" (1939; see translation and our commentary in the book: Benveniste E. General Linguistics. M., 1974). Having shown the inner "two-part, two-part" of this position of de Saussure, Benveniste refuted one part and left the other in force. He concluded his article as follows: “Consequently, the inherent randomness of language manifests itself in the name as a sound symbol of reality and affects the relationship of this symbol to reality (this is one 'part', - Benveniste preserves it. - Yu.S.). But the primary element of the system - the sign - contains the signifier and the signified (this is another "part". - Yu.S.), the relationship between which should be recognized necessary"(Decree, op., Pp. 95-96).
Let us now turn our main attention to the first "part" - to naming as the relation of a linguistic sign to reality and see to what extent this relation can be interpreted as "accidental." Since this is about the relationship between "name" and "thing", we need to go beyond purely linguistic theory and consider language in the context of culture - which is one of the foundations of the new paradigm.
Let's return to the example of F. de Saussure. The French word bœuf "bull" directly goes back to lat. bovem (Vin. case of the word bos "bull"), in turn continuing the I.-e. * g ụ ōụ-s, which served as a generic designation for a cattle, without distinction of the sex of the animal, i.e. "Bull" and "cow" are indifferent. Therefore, in Latin, the word bos appears both as a masculine word and as a feminine word.
However, as the linguistic facts indisputably testify, the designation system for domestic animals in Indo-European culture was three-member. In addition to the generic name (such as, for example, the one above), there was also a paired designation of two different sexes of the corresponding animal - "male-producer" and "female". These paired names were, as a rule, the names of not only clearly opposed genders - masculine and feminine, but also the names of various roots. Thus, the name of the “bull-producer” was derived from the IE. root * ụeg ụ -, ug ụ - (in another notation * weg w -, ug w -) with the meaning "moisten, moisten"; hence the Gothic * auhsa - husband. R. "Bull", originally "producer bull", Skt. uksā "bull", Tocharian Bokso "bull; generally a male of a large horned animal ”and the one that interests us. Ochse "bull" (Saussure gives this word in the example above in its colloquial form, without the ending -e). All of the above words are derivatives with determinatives. -s- and -n-... Taking into account the alternation of determinatives -n - // - r-, then lat. uxor - "woman, wife" as a designation of letters. "Wetted individual" (W. Lehmann. A Gothic etymological dictionary. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986, A 229).
Exactly the same three-membered device is found in the designation of "pig": a generic term, reflected, for example, in Latin as sus husband. and wives. R. or as a porcus husband. R., subordinate two private - uerres husband. R. "Producer boar" and porca wives. R. or porcus femina letters. "Female pig, sow" (this three-membered design is preserved in French: le porc - "pig" is a generic term, le verrat - "sire-boar", la truie - "sow" - the last of porcus troianus). The root contained in the designation of "sire-boar", uerres, and here, as in the fragment "bull - cow", means "fertilizing moisture" - Indo-European * ụer-os, "ụer-s-. It is also represented in Greek hersẽ - "beneficial dew, fertilizing rain" - as you know, Zeus, for example, often appeared in the form of such rain to his mistresses; in another sense, this Greek word means "young cattle - lambs, etc."
This semantic convergence of two originally different roots, * er-os, "ụer-s-, is an example of a" conceptualized area ", a concept that we introduced above. However, some authors consider these two roots to be initially identical, i.e. the same root with different morphological "determinants".
Thus, in the final analysis, the French and German designations for "bull" are not only not "arbitrary" and not "accidental", but, moreover, they are in a sense identical: both go back to the stable cultural reality of Indo-European culture - to the idea of pets as a kind of three-member organization. You can even say that this performance is one of constants of Indo-European culture.
But what prevented F. de Saussure from making the same observation and abandoning his thesis about the arbitrariness and randomness of the linguistic sign in relation to the thing designated? (Or, at least, to abandon an example that poorly confirms this thesis?) Certainly not the absence of etymological data (although the data we used above are the result of the latest research).
This was hindered, it was "blocked" by another provision of his theory, closely related to the first - the prohibition to involve historical data, the requirement of strict synchronicity, or "synchronicity." Of course, these two provisions at the same time support each other. De Saussure's concept, as, as A. Meillet aptly put it from his review of de Saussure's book, and the language itself in Saussure's view, is "a system, ù tout se tient, where everything holds on to each other." This is one of the defining features of the Saussurian paradigm.
F. de Saussure's concept is built in a sense in the same way as "well made play", "well made play" on the scenes of his era - recall the French playwrights Sardou ("Tusca") or Scribe ("Adrienne Lecouvreur") - a genre of such loved by some and so hated by others (for example, by Bernard Shaw).
But we live in a different era and think in a different paradigm. And we have other material at our disposal. Evolutionary series of various kinds - this is the main material that contradicts the position of F. de Saussure. Let's continue their consideration.
Synonymization of "words" and "things" in spiritual culture. Further development of the concept of "conceptualized area (sphere)"
Synonyms are words that are similar in meaning or in meaning (concept). But above we have already noticed such cases when a thing - to the extent that thing may have a "meaning" - in this sense, it approaches any word. Let us now consider this phenomenon in more detail.
Let's start with a detailed example (it was previously given in the joint works of the author of these lines and S.G. Proskurin). In some Indo-European languages, there is a close semantic connection, "concatenation of meanings", between the concepts of "tree" and "middle". First of all, it is noted in the root and.-e. * medh-, which gives, on the one hand (for example, in the Baltic languages), words meaning “tree” or “forest” - lit. mẽdis "tree", Latvian. mežs "forest", but on the other hand, for example, in Russian. - border"Middle, border between two plots of land" and the very preposition of Russian. between(praslav. * medι-).
How can this semantic link be explained?
First, it cannot be explained by a "random" choice of a feature or by a "random", "individual" development of a given and.-e. root. The fact is that exactly the same connection is presented in another I.-e. root * u (e) idh- “to divide by two”, as well as in a combination of two roots in one stem - * ui- “between, separate from” + * tero - suffix of the comparative degree of adjectives and paired objects (cf. Lat. al -ter "one of two, the other"). This is evidenced, on the one hand, by the Irl. fid "tree", OE, widu, wudu, modern English, wood "forest", and on the other hand, lit. vidùs "medium", and, in addition, lexemes, where both meanings are directly combined: lit. viduõlis “a tree with a dry middle, but still alive, green”, Old Norse. viđ, viđr “separately, opposite (about objects)” and viđr “tree - border” or “forest separating settlements” (Jóhannesson A. Isländisches etymologisches Worterbuch. Bern: Francke, 1956, S. 168).
But, on the other hand, this semantic connection cannot be explained by some general, universal semantic regularity, in accordance with which the concepts of "tree" and "middle" should always and inevitably be associated, like, for example, as, according to the laws discovered by MM Pokrovsky always and inevitably associate the concepts of "vessel" and "contents of the vessel" (a spoonful of oil);"Border of space, line" and "all given area of space" (circle of cheese, circle of people), etc. This connection is far from universal, since it is not observed not only among the peoples of the non-Indo-European group of languages, but also among other Indo-European peoples outside the indicated area.
Of course, as soon as this phenomenon was discovered in the etymology of words, the opinion was expressed (back in the 1920s by the Lithuanian linguist K. Buga) that this connection of concepts is explained by the special division of the land among some peoples - the allotments were divided by a tree or a line. And this is undoubtedly the case. However, this explanation is valid only for the everyday sphere of life. The latest observations have shown that the noted phenomenon is widespread mainly in those areas of Indo-European culture, where the cult of the tree and the mythological motive, the mythologeme of the "world tree" are attested. "" Is a symbol of the middle of the world: a huge tree growing in the middle of the world connects the "lower world" (the underworld), the "middle world" (the world of people) and the "upper world" (the world of the gods; however, the existence of this motive among the Slavs among some researchers have doubts).
Therefore, on the basis of such observations, in addition to the concept of "conceptualized area", our concept introduces an important concept of "synonymization", which has two different meanings, related to each other: 1) synonymization of different roots of words, 2) synonymization of "words" and "things" ...
Synonymization in the first sense means the convergence of two differently rooted words (or, in terms of etymology, two different roots), which are not related to each other in origin, but become synonyms within a given conceptualized area. This phenomenon turns out to be the fact that opposes the position of N.Ya. Marr about the crossing of words and, ultimately, about the crossing of languages in general.
Indeed, according to Marr, the fact of synonymization, i.e. the convergence of the semantic, the convergence of semes or the meanings of words in general, is recognized. But Marr supplements this proposition, which is fully consistent with the facts, with another proposition - about the inevitable convergence of the roots of words and words as a whole, which supposedly accompanies any semantic convergence. In addition, Marr understands convergence very broadly and vaguely - as the convergence of words both in function (functional semantics) and due to contacts between tribes and ethnic groups ("crossing"). An example of the latter is the well-known Marr explanation of the Komi-Zyryan name of the land - muzem, which supposedly comes from the addition of the original name of the land in the Komi - mu and the name of the earth earth or root land from the Russians who had contact with the Komi. The presence of two synonyms ends, according to Marr, by their combination, "crossing", in one word(or in one root). Hence, the analysis - Marr calls it a "paleontological analysis" of language and speech - must reveal such combined multiethnic elements.
Marr pushes this principle to the limit, trying to find absolutely finite elements belonging to four ancient tribes, for which each of these elements, according to Marr, served as a self-name. Thus, the four tribes - four elements: "sal", preserved in the name "Sarmat", "ber" - in the name "i-ber" (Iberia), "ion" - in the name "ion-yane" (Ionia, region in Ancient Greece), "Rosh" - "Et-Rusk" (Marr N.Ya. Language // Language and History: Sat first. L., 1936, p. 21). This is the notorious "four-element analysis" by N.Ya.Marr.
However, the very phenomenon of "synonymization" in its basis was noted by N. Ya. Marr correctly and should be preserved, but limited. Let us cite as an example the reasoning of N.Ya. Marr himself just in a limited area - one functional series (or, in our terminology, one conceptualized area). We are talking about the origin of the ancient Greek word άρμα, άρματα “carriage; war chariot ".
In etymological studies, it is currently associated with the root and.-e. * ar- “to connect, fasten”, cf. gr. άραρίσκω, lat. arma "tool, weapon", etc. However, not everything in this etymology is convincing, in particular the presence of "thick aspiration", the correspondence to which is not found in the original root and related words. It is assumed that this "aspiration", / h /, according to the laws of the structure of the Greek word, was transferred to the initial syllable from / s /, which was in the suffix: * ar-smo> * har-ma (Ernout-Meillet, s.v. armus). The interpretation of Marr, in any case, is no more problematic: he connects this word with the name of the tribe sarmatian, harmat and with a certain draft animal, namely a horse. "From the Greek texts it is clear that this type of cart was associated with a" horse ", Homer has a two-wheeled war chariot, carried by a pair of horses, and, more curiously, the word was used by the Greeks, as it were, out of poetic imagery, just instead of the harness of an animal -" horses ": άρματος τροφεύς (Plato, Leg. VIII, 834 b), in Euripides άρματα τρέφειν (literally," to feed the carts. " Yu.S.) "to keep horses for chariot racing", but actually this is the performance of a subconscious experience ("relic". - Yu.S.) in the speech that harma, actually harmat, originally meant an animal, it was later - "horses", initially - "deer". ... The question arises: do we have an independent crossing in the term with its common noun, will it be a "cart", or even more so paleontologically assimilated (that is, appropriated. - Yu.S.) to him the meanings of "horses", originally "deer", or is it a complete reproduction of a ready-made tribal name, "Sarmatian", ethnonymically used directly, of course, in prehistoric times - before the appearance of the Greeks, in all the above meanings from a totem animal, depending on by epochs - "deer", "horse", up to "cart", first wheelless - "sleigh", and then two-wheeled - "chariot" (Marr N.Ya. Means of transportation, self-defense and production tools in prehistory [To link linguistics with the history of material culture] // Marr N.Ya. Language and society. Selected work. T. III. M.-L., 1934, pp. 143-144).
The expression "feed the carts" is, of course, an elementary metonymy instead of "feed the horses that are harnessed to chariot carts", and on the basis of this turn it is hardly possible to draw any far-reaching conclusions (this is just an example of N. Ya. .Marra with specific linguistic facts). But the very connection between the cart as a material fact, as an invention, and the horse was correctly felt by Marr. Modern research shows that the invention of the war chariot was associated with the acquisition of a new powerful draft means - a horse, which replaced the old slow draft means - a bull, an ox. A bull's, or bull's, team corresponds to a completely different technical device of what "stretches" - the cart itself (see: Kozhin P.M. To the problem of the origin of wheeled transport // Ancient Anatolia. M .: Nauka, Ed. East. lit., 1985).
(For the sake of completeness, note that the discussion about the origin of the name of the Sarmatian people, unfortunately, without taking into account N.Ya.Marr's hypothesis, continues. O.N. Trubachev establishes a parallel between sarmatian and Croat, considering that both names of peoples go back to the same Indo-Iranian proto-form with alternations - * sar-ma (n) t - // * har-va (n) t - "feminine, abounding in women" with an archaic, relict denoting a woman by the root sar - // har-. These names could be the names of peoples with "many women", ie, probably, the number of women is greater than the number of men, or, perhaps, simply designations of peoples with the power of women, i.e. matriarchy, against the background of the surrounding tribes with a system of patriarchy. O.N. Trubachev also drew attention to the fact that both names are associated with the Azov area, where the myth of the Amazons, female warriors, was localized. - See: Etymol. dictionary of glories, languages. M .: Science. Issue 8, 1981, p. 151. Other hypotheses in the same place and in the book: Ageeva R.A. Countries and peoples: the origin of the names. Moscow: Nauka, 1990, p. 33, and also here in vv. Rus, Russia ... )
So now we have enough material to determine general concept of "conceptualized domain" in language and culture. By it we mean a sphere of culture where words, things, mythologemes and rituals are united in one general representation (cultural concept) (of course, in each particular case, the entire set of these entities listed above should not be present).
Within a separate “conceptualized domain,” word and ritual object, word and mythologeme, etc. can be semantically combined in a special way - acting as a substitute or symbolizer for one another. This process of conceptualization in the field of culture we call "Synonymization of things and words"(So synonymized"Tree" and "middle").
“Conceptualized areas”, synonymization in this sense, become one of the important principles of grouping words and “things” in new ideas about culture - along with groupings according to the principles of “fields”, “rows”, “thematic groups”, etc. It is in such phenomena, which belong simultaneously to language and culture, that the deep motivation of naming is revealed - nonrandomness naming conventions. Language compels, or, better to say, does not coerce, but gently and beneficially guides people in naming, adding the named to the deepest layers of culture.
And - is there something more to be seen behind this than just nonrandomness? Some kind of expediency and purpose? Some kind of teleology?
We will leave these questions for the future. But here is a more relevant conclusion from the above: in culture, not only words, but also material objects can carry spiritual meaning; there is no sharp, impassable border between spiritual and material culture. Further, we will consider the series of concepts and the series of "things" as parallel, on the same grounds: in culture there are neither purely spiritual concepts, nor purely material things, each cultural phenomenon has these two sides (see also Culture ).
F) Concepts can "hover" over conceptualized areas, expressed both in word and in an image or material object
The property noted in this subtitle follows as a consequence of the observations made above. Naturally, materially this "floating" is expressed in the fact that the concept is in some context - or text - of any nature. They can be a pictorial motive, a legend or a myth (at least verbally, it was retold in countless different variations), etc.
This provision, by the way, imposes new requirements on the work of the etymologist: the basis of etymology is not the comparison of paradigms and individual lexemes (words), but the text: the true and true etymology is always in the text.
The distant foundations for such a modern understanding of the conceptualized field and text were outlined in the works of E. Benvenista 1950s There are two voler verbs in French - voler "to fly" and voler "to steal." "The coexistence of these two verbs should not, however, cause a linguist to want to combine them in an unlikely unity" (Benveniste E. General linguistics. M .: Progress, p. 333). The verb meaning "to fly" is included in an extensive semantic field (series) - voleter "to flutter", s "envoler" to fly away ", volatile" volatile ", volaille" poultry ", etc., while the verb in the meaning “To steal” gives only one derivative - voleur “thief.” This restriction alone suggests that voler “to steal” goes back to some special use of the first verb - “to fly.” A condition for such use would be a context where the first verb , “To fly,” could be used in a transitional construction. Such a context is indeed found in the language - and at the same time in the ritual - of falconry: 1e faucon vole la perdrix letters. "The falcon flies a partridge", i.e. "The falcon (flies and catches) a partridge." Thus, we would say now, we have before us a context, a text, a ritual, a conceptualized area where the concepts of "fly" and "grab, abduct" are combined, synonymized, and the corresponding token, voler, splits two - voler "fly" and voler "steal, steal".
Let us now show with one example what a conceptualized area can be in the proper (narrow) sense of this term, i.e. in the nonproduction sphere and outside the evolutionary semiotic series. We mean the reconstruction, made by NN Kazansky, of the text of the poem of the ancient Greek poet Stesichor (c. 600 BC) "The Fall of Troy". For a long time, only 9 words were known from this poem. In 1967, significant, but scattered fragments of the poem were discovered on badly damaged papyrus. N.N. Kazansky (like some researchers before him) used a sculptural image of the same plot on the bas-relief of the so-called Ilion table, where there is an indication that the image corresponds to the poem of Stesichor (see: Kazansky N.N. , 1990, p. 19). The reconstruction was successful.
But what is the plot, reconstructed, on the one hand, on the basis of a written text, and on the other, on the basis of a sculptural image? Obviously, it is nothing more than a sequence of some images, or representations, or episodes, embodied not exclusively in linguistic form, but in two forms - linguistic and pictorial. Thus, the very sequence of performances, episodes, etc. (whatever you call these components of the sequence) there is a stable set of some concepts, or micromotive, - a separate small conceptualized sphere.
In this sense, we also use the term “conceptualized area”.
Let us now return, however, to the basic form of concepts, the linguistic one, by the way, to the phrase and, above all, to the name.
G) Two important types of concepts are “framework concepts” and “concepts with a dense core”. Linguistic form of concepts
The distinction between these two types is not a priori, but follows from our observations (although, as we will see later, it also has some a priori grounds). In order not to cite a lot of material here again, we ask the reader to refer to the articles Civilization and Intelligentsia. Both of these concepts are examples of the "frame type". Each of them has some basic, actual feature (or some small set of such features - this difference is not essential here), which, in fact, constitutes the main content of the concept. In the case of "Civilization" - this is "a certain favorable in all respects (what exactly - you can further define) the state of society." In the case of the "intelligentsia" - it is "a social group that declares itself as the bearer of the social consciousness of the whole society."
The emergence of the concept as a "collective unconscious" or "collective representation" - in the examples given, this is the content that is described in quotation marks - the result of the spontaneous, organic development of society and humanity as a whole. In these examples, this content constitutes the "frame". But then these concepts, in fact - their "frame", can be "tried on", "superimposed" on this or that social phenomenon, in these cases - on this or that society (and others are excluded), on this or that social group (moreover others are also excluded). Here we are dealing with another process, which can hardly be called "organic" or spontaneous. This is a process of social assessment, bringing under the norm, under the norm, a process associated with the conscious activity of social forces and even with their struggle.
Here further gradation, or classification, is possible, since the two examples given are already different. In the case of "Civilization", no one, it seems, no social group is specifically fighting to associate this concept with one or another certain country in the world and exclude the rest (however, some attempts in this regard were made by the ideologists of "communist civilization" as a higher civilization - see in the decree.Art.). In the case of the "Intelligentsia", some social forces try to "pull" this concept onto some social groups or classes, while others try to "pull" it from these groups or even even declare the concept itself "non-existent" (see decree.Art.). But this difference does not determine the different essence of the matter in these two concepts, but only their importance for society - their different social ranks. From this point of view, the concept of "Intelligentsia" should receive, of course, a higher rank in modern Russian spiritual life than the concept of "Civilization".
Of course, they can say that not only the concepts that we called "framework" are distinguished by this feature, that many, and maybe all, spiritual concepts have some ideal content (which, in fact, constitutes the concept itself), which can be " try on ”to various specific social or personal phenomena. At the same time, such phenomena are "subsumed" under the concept, or, on the contrary, such a submission fails. So, we say, for example, that “this (some specific something) is Love", But" this (other something) is not Love". In the same way, one can speak of certain phenomena as "Faith", while some others can be excluded from summarizing this concept as "superstition", and so on. etc. However, there is a significant difference between these concepts and the concepts of the first group, “framework”. The second, i.e. "Love", "Faith", etc. are culturally significant in their integrity, in their entire composition of features, and the abstraction of one of them as a “frame” of a concept, although possible, is only an artificial logical procedure. In the first case, on the contrary, the “frame” is the main content of the concept by virtue of which the concept is culturally and socially significant, - the highest point of its development.
This difference between the two types is thus - we emphasize once again - the result of empirical observations (they are demonstrated further in the articles of this Dictionary). But this difference can be put in parallel with some philosophical considerations about the division of concepts into two groups - a priori concepts and a posteriori (experimental or empirical) concepts.
For the first time in a clear form, this difference in European philosophy of modern times arose, apparently, in the discussion between Leibniz and Locke, in fact - in the thesis of Leibniz against Locke. Leibniz(1646-1716) in his essay "New experiments on human understanding" (here cited from the edition: Leibniz. Works. M .: Mysl, vol. 2, 1983, p. 49) wrote: "This leads to another question , namely, to the question of whether all truths depend on experience, i.e. from induction and examples, or there are truths resting on a different basis. Indeed, if some phenomena can be foreseen before any experience in relation to them, then it is clear that we are bringing something here from ourselves. Although feelings are necessary for all our actual knowledge, they are not sufficient to convey them to us in full, since feelings always give only examples, i.e. private or individual truths ”(p. 49).
Further, this difference was directly perceived and developed by Kant (without reference to Leibniz): “The concept is either empirical or clean; a pure concept, since it has its origin exclusively in reason (and not in a pure image of sensuality), is called notio. The concept, consisting of notiones and going beyond the limits of possible experience, is idea, or the concept of reason. For those accustomed to this distinction, it is unbearable when the idea of red is called an idea. In fact, this representation is not even a notio (conceptual concept) "(Kant. Critique of pure reason. Section II. Transcendental dialectics. Book I. On the concepts of pure reason; Section 1 // Kant. Works in 6 volumes. M .: Mysl, vol. 3, 1984, p. 354). Here Kant expresses the "pure concept" in the German term der reine Begriff or in the Latin notio, the latter goes back etymologically to the word nota "note, mark" and thus represents the lowest level among pure concepts, and the highest is the "idea", which Kant otherwise calls "transcendental ". From this point of view, the “pure, or a priori” concepts include the concepts of “uniqueness”, “plurality”, etc., as well as “number” (see Art. In this Dictionary). The "empirical, or a posteriori" concepts include the concepts of "vertebrate (animal)", "cat", "dog", "pleasure", "love", etc.
It is interesting that some researchers (eg RJCollingwood) also refer to the concept of "Civilization" as "transcendental", and we refer to the concept of "Love" as "empirical". Thus, these results of factual research coincide with the Kantian philosophical distinction.
Along the way, - we will note only in the form of a note, - what has been said here allows us to pose the question about the form of a concept, or concept. Leibniz (in a decree, op.) Believed that what later, according to Kant, began to be called "pure concepts", can be expressed not only in the form of a single word - a term, but also in the form of a proposition, utterance or sentence. Leibniz used Greek in this second sense. a term that goes back to the Stoic school is prólēpsis (πρόληψις). But most researchers have since believed that own form concept, or concept, is a word-term, while a proposition, or utterance, is its improper form, some equivalent (more or less) transformation. The last form, proposition, or utterance, is rather the proper form of the "idea." Thus, “concept” and “idea” are different formations of thought — also in our Dictionary.
The originally formulated, one might say "beautifully formulated", the difference between an idea, a concept, a word belongs O. Sergiy Bulgakov in the work "Philosophy of the Name" (written in the 1930-1949s, published in 1953 in Paris: YMCA-Press). Like Leibniz, Bulgakov - rightly - believes that there is a difference between those mental categories that can be expressed both in the form of a word and in the form of a proposition, and the rest. Bulgakov calls the first “ideas” as opposed to “concepts”: “An idea cannot be expressed about many things because it is abstract, and therefore, as a concept, it can be applied to everything that is included in its scope. The latter is only a special case, the realization of what is given in the predicate, as such. But this property of an idea is not associated with abstractness or volume (see the volume of a concept in opposition to its features and meaning at the beginning of our article - Yu.S.), but with a predicate that always and essentially contains an idea. And that very noun (gram.), Which has just been concrete as a subject, a subject, turning into a predicate, an idea, takes on the character of universality: for example, Wolf. Ideas are not abstract or concrete (such are concepts, logical preparations of ideas), they are always volumeless, pure meanings ”(p. 74).
Perhaps, one must agree with this: concepts, like Bulgakov's "ideas", also, apparently, should be regarded as volumeless (as opposed to concepts), pure meanings.
But the other position of S. Bulgakov is hardly accurate. In any case, if an idea has many forms, including a predicative one, a statement, a proposition, then a concept has one main form - a word or phrase equal to a word - a name. The stroke thrown by Bulgakov fits well on this idea of ours: “Ideas are the essence verbal images being, names - their implementation"(P. 60).
H) Another important type is concepts about a person. A special manifestation of time in the evolutionary series of concepts
Let's start again with one example. About half of the 15th century, - writes V.O.Klyuchevsky(Course of Russian history. Part 2. // Klyuchevsky V.O. Works in 8 volumes, etc. Moscow: State publishing house polit, lit., 1957, p. 25-27), worked in the monastery founded by him, the monk Paphnutiy Borovsky, "one of the most original and strong characters that are known in ancient Russia"; his colorful stories, recorded by the audience, have come down to us. By the way, Paphnutii told how in 1427 there was a great pestilence in Russia, they died of a "pimple sore", perhaps it was a plague. Then one nun died, but she did not die, but when she recovered, she told whom she saw in heaven and who in hell, and the listeners found that this corresponded to the life of these people, that it was true. In paradise, she saw Prince Ivan Danilovich Kalita, who always carried a bag with money in his belt, from which he generously served the poor. “Once a beggar approaches the prince and receives alms from him; comes up another time, and the prince gives him another charity; the beggar did not quit and came up a third time; then the prince could not bear it and, giving him the third alms, with his heart said: "Take, take, the unfulfilled zenki!" "You yourself are unfulfilled zenki," objected the beggar, "and here you reign, and you want to reign in the next world." This is a subtle praise in a rude form: the beggar wanted to say that the prince is trying to earn the kingdom of heaven by charity, by love of poverty. " “I also saw a nun in hell of the Lithuanian king Vitovt in the form of a big man, to whom a terrible black murin (devil) put red-hot pieces of gold into his mouth with ticks, saying:“ Eat, damn you! ”. The good-natured humor, continues Klyuchevsky, with which these stories are imbued, does not allow doubting their folk origin. Do not be confused by the chronology of the story, do not dwell on the fact that in 1427 the nun, even in hell, could not meet Vitovt, who died in 1430. National memory has its own chronology and pragmatics, its own concept of historical phenomena. Folk legend, forgetting chronology, opposed the Lithuanian king, the enemy of Russia and Orthodoxy, Ivan Danilovich Kalita, a friend of the younger, impoverished brethren, whose great-grandson Vasily Dmitrievich restrained the pressure of this formidable king on Orthodox Russia. The popular thought vividly perceived this closeness of the two powers, princely and ecclesiastical, and brought the participation of feeling into the legendary development of the images of their bearers "(emphasized in the text by me. - Yu.S.).
What, Klyuchevsky notes here, “people's memory has its own chronology,” is essentially a property of all concepts. In all concepts, ideas that have arisen at different times, in different epochs are added, summed up, - historical time, "chronology" does not play a role at all. Only associations are important, the addition of ideas that are in harmony with each other (in concepts - "semantic features"). In the images of people this circumstance, the inconsistency with real chronology, only appears clearly, becomes especially noticeable due to the fact that the people themselves are chronologically "precisely dated." People live in real, historical time, ideas - in mental time or, perhaps, outside of time in general (see below Be, Exist; Time; Mental worlds ).
I) About the boundaries of cognition of concepts
These boundaries were revealed both "from above" - in the sphere of abstract definitions, and "from below" - in the sphere of individual experience.
Let's start from the top. The idea that can frighten the bourgeois and the layman is that a native speaker, in principle, cannot know the meanings of the words of his language. Of course, the understanding of this aphorism (and in reality it goes back to one Platonic idea) depends on understanding - far from banal - the words "meaning" and "know", which will be discussed further. But first, let us confirm with documents that this idea really exists.
"If any natural language, for example English, consists in part of syntax and semantics, then, according to the theory of syntax and semantics of Montague, English is such that no native speaker of English can know English" (Hall-Party Barbara. Grammar Montague, mental representations and reality / Translated from English // Semiotics. Compiled by Yu.S. Stepanov. M .: Progress, 1983, p. 285). Some may say that this can happen with the English language, but not with Russian and not in Russia! However, we are discussing the problem in general terms, and "Montague grammar" is just one of the best theoretical descriptions applicable to any language.
A distant premonition of this idea was already in the discovery of the "relativity of meaning" - the discovery of the concept of "significance" (valeur), made by the above-mentioned Swiss linguist F. de Saussure. If “meaning” (as we said at the beginning of this article) is an indication by a word of an object or class of objects, then “significance” is not a direct indication of an object or class, but the relative meaning of a word - a part of the semantic field allocated to it, depending on the distribution of values between the words in this field. For example, value Russian word green is as defined, for example, in the Dictionary ed. D.N. Ushakova, "the colors of greenery, grass, foliage." The relevance same words green there will be something different - “part of the spectrum, delimited by parts assigned to the words yellow and blue". Even with a careful analysis of the concept of "significance" (at one time such an analysis was not done), one could foresee that with an increase in the group of words that determine the significance of a particular word, the speaker may not be able to know the whole group, and, consequently, he will not know the meanings of every single word.
The further development of this concept in linguistics and logic went exactly along the path of expanding the groups (sets, ensembles) of units that define the concept of significance and significance of each individual unit. The logically defined concept of significance came to be called "intensional". Intensional is another term, a synonym for what we called at the beginning of this article meaning(for further along this line, see Art. Language ).
But why is this idea “Platonic”? This is answered by the concluding lines of the mentioned article by B. Hall-Party: “So, we came to the conclusion that the intensions of lexical units are not mental entities and they are not fixed by the properties of the psyche of native speakers. ... Intentionals themselves, as functions from possible worlds to objects of various kinds, are abstract objects that can exist independently of people, like numbers "(p. 296). - But this is the Platonic idea (see below Number, Account ).
Let us now look at the border that runs "from below". We have already seen, using the example of the Russian concepts "February 23" and "March 8", that the richness of associations (the number of features, the content of the concept) is the greater, the narrower the circle of people using this concept in all its "layers": the most limited content is in in general Russian usage, it is simply a "men's holiday" and "a women's holiday"; more saturated associations among the military, even richer - among the military of the older generation, but the circle of such people is much narrower than the previous one, etc. - until we reach the collective-group, further family and, finally, intimate-personal circle of associations ... This can no longer be described in a dictionary, and sometimes it cannot be described and in general, in principle, it is indescribable.
Let us consider, so far only preliminary and only as an example, the concept of "Faith" (see more fully in Art. faith ). We mean faith in the religious realm.
"Faith"- the concept is unique, therefore, although here we could go the routine way and start by determining the "occurrence" of a word (its distribution), we will save ourselves and the reader from this and start right away with the categories. Some concept researchers (and some authors of explanatory dictionaries) bring the concept of "Faith" into the category of "religion". So, for example, in the French dictionary "Petit Larousse" ("Little Larousse"): "Faith (la foi) - confidence in the fulfillment of obligations; loyalty to obligations; conviction in the truths of religion "(this is generally the way typical for Western Christianity - to define "faith" through the dogmas of religion). But here the category is hardly defined correctly: strictly speaking, "Religion" is not a category for the concept of "Faith". Let us compare two questions addressed to an individual, to an individual: "What is your religion?" and "What is your faith?" The answer to them will be different, and the first question is unlikely to be given a meaningful answer at all: “my faith” is understood by every person; on the contrary, "religion" is a concept from the concept of a researcher or theologian.
“Faith” is more successfully defined in SI Ozhegov's dictionary: “1. Conviction, confidence in the room or something. Belief in victory; Faith in people. 1. Conviction in the existence of God. 3. The same as religion. " Here "Faith" is not subsumed under the category of "Religion" and is not subsumed under any category at all, because "conviction" is not a category, but a designation of an inner feeling. This is the concept of "Faith": it is the inner state of a person, of each individual person.
How can this state be described? No way. Here is the limit of scientific knowledge and description of the concept. And this point of view exactly coincides with the position of Orthodox theology about apophatism - the rejection of verbal definitions.“Apophatism teaches us to see in the dogmas of the Church, first of all, their negative meaning, as the prohibition of our thought to follow our natural paths and form concepts that would replace spiritual realities "(Losskiy V.N. Essay on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church. // Losskiy V.N. Essay on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church. Dogmatic theology. M., 1991, p. 35; Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky, 1903-1958, Russian theologian and philosopher in exile, the son of the famous Russian philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky, the author of the best treatises on the system of Orthodox theology that compiled the named book.)
One might think that this is the case only in this unique case, i.e. only in the "Faith" concept. But no, the concept of "Faith" is only the most indicative case, precisely because it has been comprehensively examined in different systems - logical, theological, philosophical (see below Faith; Duality in this Dictionary). We find exactly the same limit in all spiritual concepts, whether we take Cosiness; Love; Truth and True and whatever else, everywhere we can bring our description only to a certain line, behind which lies a certain spiritual reality, which not described, but only experienced.
Here is the limit of description in general, and of this Dictionary in particular.