Stanislaw LEM. The Voice Of The Lord (№ 303012)

The history of human knowledge is a series that has infinity in the limit, and philosophy is trying to reach this limit with one leap, a short circuit, which gives confidence in perfect and unshakable knowledge. Meanwhile, science moves at a small pace, like a turtle, or even seems to stomp on the spot, but in the end gets to the last frontiers, to the final border of the mind, drawn by philosophers, and, noticing any border posts, calmly goes yourself further. Well, how could philosophers not fall into despair? One of the forms of such despair was positivism with its very specific aggressiveness: he posed as a faithful ally of science, being, in essence, its liquidator. All that was corroding and undermining philosophy, destroying great discoveries, was to be subjected to an approximate punishment - and positivism, this imaginary champion of science, was not slow to convict it, stating that science really could not reveal anything, because it was only abbreviated record of experience. Positivism attempted to saddle science, forcing it to admit its powerlessness in everything related to the field of transcendence (which, however, it did not succeed). The history of philosophy is the history of successive digressions. At first she strove to discover the absolute categories of the universe, then the absolute categories of the mind, and in the meantime, with the accumulation of knowledge, her helplessness was more and more clearly seen. After all, every philosopher involuntarily declared himself the most absolute example of the human race and even of all possible intelligent beings. On the contrary, science is precisely the transcendence of experience, crushing yesterday's categories of thinking; absolute space and time fell yesterday, today the supposedly eternal opposite between analytic and synthetic judgments, between predestination and chance, collapses. But for some reason, none of the philosophers had the idea that it is not too prudent to derive from the rules of our own thinking laws that are valid for all people and all of humanity - from the Aeolite to the era of the fading of the suns. I will express myself more sharply: to substitute oneself in conclusions as the sought-for universal human norm means to act irresponsibly. The desire to understand "everything", which is referred to at the same time, has only psychological value. Therefore, philosophy speaks much more about people's hopes, fears, drives, rather than the secrets of the universe that is completely indifferent to us, which only for one day seems to be a kingdom of eternal and unchanging laws. Even if we know such laws that no progress canceled, we cannot distinguish them from those that will be replaced by others. Therefore, in philosophers, I saw only people driven by curiosity, and not heralds of truth. Did they formulate theses on categorical imperatives or on the attitude of thinking to perception, and they began to honestly question the countless representatives of the human race? But no - they asked themselves and only themselves, over and over again crowned their own person, passing it off as an example of a reasonable person. It was this that angered me and prevented me from reading even the most profound philosophical works: before I could open the book, I came across things that were obvious to the author, but not to me; from that moment he turned to himself, referred to himself, which meant that he lost the right to make judgments that were true for me and even more so for all the other two-legs. inhabiting our planet.