Myth of Science - The Boundaries of Archetypes

The article deals with the problem of self-understanding of a person as a subject of cognition and transformation of the world, responsible for the fate of civilization, raised by Ilya T. Kasavin in his monograph Science - A Humanistic Project. In the conditions of an avalanche-like increase in the rate of changes in the natural and social environment, the question of the historical role of scientific rationality and its commensurability with the ideas of humanism is becoming more acute. Scientific and technical transformation of the world leads to a “future shock” (Alvin Toffler), which is incompatible with scientific objectivity in understanding and assessing what is happening. In a situation where we are permanently in the zone of avalanche-like changes, we have no chance to take the position of an external observer or a post-factum researcher. The existential experience of the “future shock” cannot be an alternative to scientific knowledge, since it does not have positive intersubjective validity. In this context, Kasavin's project of expanding the boundaries of rational comprehension of the ongoing changes by addressing “unscientific” forms of cognition, such as myth and archetypes, is discussed. The concept of the “myth of science” proposed by Kasavin is considered. The myth is interpreted as a total form of life in which practical concreteness and its symbolic expression are fused together. The myth thus understood is neither a delusion nor an irrational experience. On the contrary, it represents the basis of rational thinking, the temporally primary and transcendentally universal way of our historical self-understanding. The appeal to the myth is defined as a paradox. Modern science, which studies movement and change, is unable to incorporate radical ontological and epistemological transformations into its system of concepts. In contrast to this, archetypes, being primary, extremely stable, timeless forms of cognition, make it possible to include global complication and the phenomenon of “future shock” in the body of intersubjective knowledge. This paradox is partly resolved through its amplification. It is shown that science eliminates movement and change, reducing them to the unchanging timeless laws of nature. “Eternal” archetypes, on the contrary, are infinitely tolerant with respect to the movement of time and the dynamics of historical processes.

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