Lecture
Classification is widely used in spiders, and it is natural that the most complex and perfect classifications are found here.
A brilliant example of scientific classification is the periodic system of the elements of DI Mendeleev. It fixes the natural relationships between chemical elements and determines the place of each of them in a single table. Summarizing the results of the previous development of the chemistry of elements, this system marked the beginning of a new period in their study. She allowed to make perfectly confirmed predictions about the unknown yet elements.
Universal fame received in the XVIII — XIX centuries. the classification of living creatures of C. Linnaeus, who set the task of descriptive natural science with the arrangement of objects of observation - the elements of animate and inanimate nature - according to clear and concrete signs in a strict order. The classification was to reveal the basic principles that determine the structure of the world, and give a full and deep explanation of nature. “When applying Linnei’s ideas,” wrote V. I. Vernadsky, an outstanding naturalist and historian of science, “immediately a lot of completely unexpected regularities and correlations were discovered, completely new scientific questions arose that did not occur to previous naturalists, there appeared the possibility of scientific research where the "play of nature" or the volitional manifestations of its creative force, which are not subject to strict laws, were supposed to be. That is why the enthusiasm with which the work of the great Swedish naturalist was met was understandable. Linnei's ideas and methods immediately embraced all of natural science, summoned thousands of workers, and in a short time radically changed the whole face of the natural sciences. ”
Linnaeus' leading idea was the juxtaposition of natural and artificial classifications. Artificial classification uses for the ordering of objects irrelevant their signs, up to a link to the initial letters of the names of these objects (alphabetic indexes, nominal catalogs in libraries, etc.). As a basis for the natural classification, essential features are taken, from which many derived properties of the objects being ordered follow. Artificial classification gives very scant and shallow knowledge about their objects; the natural classification leads them to a system containing the most important information about them.
According to Linnaeus and his followers, comprehensive natural classifications are the highest goal of studying nature and the crown of its scientific knowledge.
Now ideas about the role of classifications in the process of knowledge have changed markedly. The juxtaposition of natural and artificial classifications has largely lost its sharpness. Not always the essential can be clearly separated from the unessential, especially in living nature. Objects studied by science are, as a rule, complex systems of intertwined and interdependent properties. To single out the most essential among them, leaving aside all the others, most often it is possible only in abstraction. In addition, the essential in one respect usually turns out to be much less important when it is considered in another respect. And finally, the process of deepening the essence of even a simple object is endless.
All this shows that the role of classification, including natural classification, in the cognition of nature should not be overestimated. Moreover, this value should not be exaggerated in the field of complex and dynamic social objects. The hope of a comprehensive and fundamentally complete classification is a clear utopia, even if it concerns only inanimate nature. Living creatures, which are very complex and are in the process of constant change, are extremely reluctant to even fit into the headings of the proposed limited classifications and do not reckon with human boundaries.
Realizing a certain artificiality of the most natural classifications and noting even some elements of arbitrariness in them, one should not, however, go to the other extreme and diminish the importance of such classifications.
One example from the same biology will show the undeniable benefits of combining animals into one group that seemed to be unrelated.
“Among modern animals,” writes zoologist D. Simpson, “armadillos, anteaters and sloths are not so similar to each other, their way of life and behavior are so different that it would hardly have occurred to anyone without morphological study to combine them into one group It was found that in the spine of these animals there are additional joints, due to which they received the name "xenantra" - "strangely jointed mammals".
After the discovery of unusual joints, a whole series of other similar features of these animals were immediately discovered: the similar structure of the teeth, powerful limbs with well-developed claws and a very large claw on the third finger of the front limb, etc. “Now no one doubts,” Simpson concludes, “that xenantra, despite their considerable diversity, really form a natural group and have a common origin. The question of who exactly was their ancestor and when and where it existed, is associated with great doubts and unresolved mysteries ... ”The careful search for a common ancestor of xenanthr made it possible to detect their supposed relatives in South America and Western Europe.
Thus, the unification of different animals into one group of systematization allowed not only to reveal many other similar features, but also to express certain considerations about their distant ancestor.
Speaking about the problems of classification of another group of living organisms - viruses, the scientists-virologists DG Zatul and S. A. Mamedova write: “Without knowledge of the place, which is the object of research in a series like it, it is difficult for scientists to work. Classification is needed first of all in order to save time, effort and money so that, by revealing the secrets of one virus or by developing measures to combat any viral disease, apply them to other similar viruses and diseases. Frequent discoveries in virology, a booming science, are forcing to revise the laws and properties by which viruses are grouped ... Scientists do not consider any classification of viruses to be the only correct and complete one. Of course, new properties will still be discovered, which will refine and expand the virus table, and maybe even create a new classification. ”
Everything said about the benefits given by the classification of viruses, and its changes with the development of virology is also true for the classifications of other groups of living organisms. This is also true for all classifications developed by science.
Difficulties with classification are most often an objective cause. It is not the lack of insight of the human mind, but the complexity of the world around us, the absence of rigid boundaries and clearly defined classes in it. The general variability of things, their “fluidity” further complicate and blur this picture. That is why far from everything and it is not always possible to classify clearly. Anyone who is constantly focused on holding clear demarcation lines constantly risks being in the artificial world created by him, having little in common with the dynamic, full of shades and transitions of the real world.
It is especially difficult to draw lines in the living world. For example, in abstraction it is easy to distinguish innate, instinctive behavior from behavior acquired as a result of individual study. But how to apply this speculative distinction to real behavior, for example, to bird singing? Detailed and thorough studies of the singing of birds not in artificial laboratory conditions, but in the most natural setting showed a constant interweaving of learned techniques in it with instinctive elements. The bird of each species sings in its own way, as if according to the program laid down in drink from birth. But although the programmed element occupies a very important place in singing, for its full realization it is necessary to learn from other birds, explanations and hints from the outside. The innate program is not only supplemented in the process of the animal's individual life - it unfolds and is realized only thanks to this addition from the outside.
The most difficult object to classify is, without a doubt, man. Types of people, their temperaments, actions, feelings, aspirations, actions, etc. - all this is so subtle and fluid "matter" that attempts to typologize them only in rare cases lead to complete success.
Each person is unique and at the same time has features common to other people. Differing one person from another, we use such concepts as temperament, character, personality. In everyday communication, they have quite a certain meaning and help us to understand ourselves and others. However, there are no strict definitions of these concepts and, accordingly, there is no clear division of people according to temperaments and characters.
The ancient Greeks divided people into choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic. Already in our time, I. P. Pavlov improved this classification and extended it to all higher mammals. In Pavlov choleric corresponds to a strong excitable unbalanced type, and melancholic - weak; the sanguine person is a strong balanced type, and the phlegmatic person is a strong balanced inert type. A strong unbalanced type is prone to rage, a weak one - to fear, for a sanguine person there is a typical predominance of positive emotions, and a phlegmatic person does not detect any violent emotional reactions to the environment at all. “An excitable type in the one hundred highest manifestation,” wrote Pavlov, “is for the most part animals of an aggressive nature, an extreme inhibited type is what is called a cowardly animal.”
Pavlov himself did not overestimate the value of this classification of temperaments and the possibility of applying it to specific people. He spoke, in particular, not only of the four indicated types of temperament, but also of "specially human types of artists and thinkers": in the former, the figurative-specific signaling system prevails, in the latter - the abstract speech-generalized one. In its pure form, none of the types of temperament can probably be found in no one.
Character is a holistic and stable individual store of a person’s psychic life, its type, the “rights” of a person, manifested in certain acts and states of his mental life, as well as in his manners, habits, mental structure and the emotional life characteristic of man. Character is a much more complex concept than temperament. There is therefore nothing strange that in the above descriptive definition of character there is no clue that gives hope that it is possible to classify different characters of people. In everyday life, we call character strong, weak, hard, soft, heavy, bad, persistent, difficult to bear, etc. But all this is far from a classification of characters.
The concept of “personality” is more complicated. As it is usually defined, personality is the core, integrating the beginning, connecting together the various mental processes of the individual and telling his behavior the necessary consistency and stability. Attempts to classify temperaments and characters are controversial, but they exist. There is no classification of personalities at all. The reason is simple: it is not possible to isolate a realistic and at the same time universal classification principle, to find a clear basis for the distribution of all people into groups according to differences in their personal qualities. This does not mean, of course, that we do not divide people in any way according to their basic qualities. There are many incomplete, partial divisions that are not based on a clearly formulated and strictly carried out principle. And they are undoubtedly useful for understanding a person as a person, if, of course, they are not absolutized and not one of them seems to be the only true one.
Here is one of these classifications, talking about the stages of personality maturity. During the life of a person is consistently in front of others in the form of several personalities, very unequal. In any stages, almost always in the structure of personality one can distinguish, as it were, “three I”, three beginnings: mentor-patronizing (“parental”), carelessly mischievous, inquisitive (“childish”) and responsibly-realistic. For various types of personality is characterized by the predominance of one or another principle. At the same time, by themselves, for example, manifestations of "childishness" are not with. [a sign of infantilism. The most essential component of personality maturity is not the absence of manifestations of “childishness”, but a realistic assessment of one’s own strengths, abilities and capabilities, i.e. adequate self-reflection, as well as clear self-control and flexibility of behavior. The overestimation of their strength and abilities, as well as their underestimation, is an indicator of the immaturity of the individual.
This interesting classification is distracted, of course, from the important circumstance that the maturity of the individual is not only psychological, but also its social quality.
There are also many attempts to conduct a psychological classification of individual professional groups of people, but to create opportunities for an exhaustive typology of their characters, aptitudes, preferences, styles of thinking and behavior.
So, in the popular at the beginning of the XX century. the book "Great people" chemist and historian of science V. Ostwald divided all outstanding scientists, depending on which of the poles they are. Each scientist turned out to be either to a greater or lesser degree a “classic” or, to one degree or another, a “romantic”.
D. Krause, who wrote a book about the types of scientists, made all scientists already to the four poles: either a “lonely explorer” or a “teacher”, or an “inventor”, or an “organizer”.
The researchers of science D. Gow and R. Woodworth already had eight poles: a fanatic, pioneer, diagnostician, scholar, technician, esthete, methodologist, independent.
The tendency is obvious to complicate the basis of the division of scientists. It is dictated by the desire to specify the classification and make it more stringent. At the same time, the growing detailing definitely gives the classification a taste of artificiality and artificiality: the more concrete and stricter it becomes, the more difficult it becomes to apply it to real representatives of science. This side of the case was well expressed by the writer D. Danin: “The more detailed the typology becomes, the more painful the“ experimental ”scientists will have to split and upset (forgive the pun) to satisfy the typologists: it turns out that any researcher to several poles at once. In fact, who was Einstein, if not a fanatic, pioneer, diagnostician, esthete and independent at the same time ?! Go and Woodworth would have to crucify him at five of the eight poles. Such a crucifixion, quartering, or bifurcation would be the lot of every scientist worthy of a biography. ”
It is difficult to classify people taken in the unity of their inherent properties. Even individual aspects of a person’s mental life and activity are difficult to classify.
At the beginning of the XIX century. Stendal wrote a treatise “On love”, which was one of the first experiments in European literature specifically-psychological analysis of complex phenomena of the spiritual life of man. There are four kinds of love, this essay says.
“Love-passion” makes us sacrifice all our interests for its sake. “Love-attraction” is “a picture where everything, down to the shadows, should be pink, where nothing unpleasant should creep under any pretext, because it would be a violation of loyalty to custom, good tone, tact, etc. d. ... In drink, there is nothing passionate and unforeseen, and it is often more elegant than true love, because there are a lot of mind in it ... ” “Physical love” - “... no matter how dry and unhappy a person a person is, at sixteen he begins with this.” And finally, “vanity love”, similar to the desire to possess an object that is in fashion, and often does not even bring physical pleasure.
This classification is given in anthologies on psychology, and it is, in fact, insightful and interesting. Does she, however, meet at least one of the requirements that are customarily imposed on division? Hardly. On what grounds are these four kinds of love delimited? Not very clear. Do they exclude each other? Definitely not. Do they exhaust all the varieties of love attraction? Of course not.
In this regard, it is necessary to recall once again that one should not be too picky about the classifications of that which by its very nature resists strict distinctions.
Love is a very complex movement of the human soul. But even outwardly, it would seem, a very simple manifestation of a person's mental life, like laughter, causes significant difficulties when trying to distinguish between its various types. What kind of laughter there are? Ответа на этот вопрос нет, да и не особенно ясно, по каким признакам их вообще можно было бы различить.
Это не удивительно, поскольку даже смех конкретного человека трудно охарактеризовать в каких-то общих терминах, сопоставляющих его со смехом других людей.
Перу А. Ф. Лосева принадлежит интересная биография известного русского философа и оригинального поэта конца XIX в. В. С. Соловьева. В ней, в частности, сделана попытка проанализировать своеобразный смех Соловьева, опираясь на личные впечатления и высказывания людей, близко знавших философа.
«Случалось ему знавать и нужду, — пишет сестра Соловьева, — и он потом, рассказывая о ней, заливался безудержным радостным смехом, потому что у матери было уж очень выразительно скорбное лицо». «Много писали о смехе Вл. Соловьева, — говорит другой, — некоторые находили в этом смехе что-то истерическое, жуткое, надорванное. This is not true. Смех В. С. Соловьева был или здоровый олимпийский хохот неистового младенца, или мефистофелевский смешок хе-хе, или и то и другое вместе». В этом же духе говорит о смехе Соловьева и писатель А. Белый: «Бессильный ребенок, обросший львиными космами, лукавый черт, смущающий беседу своим убийственным смешком: хе-хе...» В другом месте Белый пишет: «Читаются стихи. Если что-нибудь в стихах неудачно, смешно, Владимир Сергеевич разразится своим громовым исступленным «ха-ха-ха», подмывающим сказать нарочно что-нибудь парадоксальное, дикое».
Подводя итог, Лосев пишет: «Смех Вл. Соловьева очень глубок по своему содержанию и еще не нашел для себя подходящего исследователя. Это не смешок Сократа, стремившегося разоблачить самовлюбленных претендентов на знание истины. Это не смех Аристофана или Гоголя, где под ним крылись самые серьезные идеи общественного и морального значения. И это не романтическая ирония Жан-Поля, когда над животными смеется человек, над человеком — ангелы, над ангелами — архангелы и над всем бытием хохочет абсолют, который своим хохотом и создает бытие, и его познает. Ничего сатанинского не было в смехе Вл. Соловьева, и это уж, конечно, не комизм оперетты или смешного водевиля. Но тогда что же это за смех? В своей первой лекции на высших женских курсах Герье Вл. Соловьев определял человека не как существо общественное, но как существо смеющееся».
Интересны термины, употребляемые в этих высказываниях для характеристики конкретного смеха. В большинстве своем они не дают прямого его описания, и только сопоставляют его с какими-то иными, как будто более известными разновидностями смеха. Рассматриваемый смех то уподобляется «здоровому олимпийскому хохоту» или «мефистофелевскому смешку», то противопоставляется «смеху Аристофана», «смешку Сократа», «иронии Жан-Поля» и т.д. Все это, конечно, не квалификационные понятия, а только косвенные, приблизительные описания.
Встречаются такие термины, которые характеризуют, как кажется, именно данный смех. Среди них «радостный», «истерический», «убийственный», «исступленный» и т.п. Но и их нельзя назвать строго квалификационными. Значение их расплывчато, и они опять-таки не столько говорят о том, чем является сам по себе этот смех, сколько сравнивают его с чем-то: состоянием радости, истерики, исступления и т.п.
Все это, конечно, неслучайно, и дело не в недостаточной проницательности тех, кто пытался описать смех. Источник затруднений — в сложности смеха, отражающей сложность и многообразие тех движений души, внешним проявлением которых он является. Именно это имеет, как кажется, в виду Лосев, когда он закапчивает свое описание смеха Соловьева определением человека как «смеющегося существа». Если смех связан с человеческой сущностью, он столь же сложен, как и сама эта сущность. Классификация смеха оказывается в итоге исследованием человека со всеми вытекающими из этого трудностями.
Речь шла только о смехе, но все это относится и к другим проявлениям сложной внутренней жизни человека.
И в заключение этой главы несколько слов об ошибочных истолкованиях классификаций.
В начале 30-х гг. некто Р. Мартиаль опубликовал работу о французской расе. В качестве основания для сравнения групп людей он избрал не видимые признаки (форма черепа, цвет кожи), а показатели генетической структуры, что было в то время новым и перспективным. Обнаружив расхождения у разных популяций в биохимическом составе крови, он вывел «биохимический индекс крови». Этот индекс составлял у французов — 3,2, у немцев — 3,1, у поляков — 1,2, у темнокожих — 0,9. Но затем этот произвольно вычисленный индекс трансформировался в показатель значимости нации и расы, и на этом основании делался вывод: французы превосходят поляков, поляки — темнокожих и т.д. Мартиаль, предлагая французам повышать свой «биохимический индекс», искал пути совершенствования расы.
Так на основе произвольной классификации, опирающейся на субъективно подобранное основание, возникла расистская по своей сути теория. Сама классификация как особый прием упорядочения изучаемых объектов здесь, конечно, ни причем. Все дело в намеренно недобросовестном ее применении и последующем тенденциозном истолковании полученных результатов. Использование строгого метода призвано в этом случае придать некоторую респектабельность явно ненаучной доктрине, подать ее в наукообразном, внушающем доверие виде.
Некоторые социологи отстаивают тезис: «Классификация вещей воспроизводит классификацию людей». Иными словами, все, что человек говорит о группах вещей и их отношениях, является только перефразировкой того, что ему известно о классификациях людей в обществе.
Из этого тезиса прямо вытекает, что человек не способен составить правильное представление об окружающей действительности. Исследуя природу, он, помимо своей воли и желания, переносит на нее те отношения, которые имеются между людьми и их группами в обществе. Процесс познания мира оказывается в итоге непрерывным углублением человека в самого себя и в свои социальные связи.
И сам рассматриваемый тезис, и эти его следствия, без сомнения, ошибочны. Они представляют классификацию не как одно из средств все более полного и адекватного познания действительности, а как непреодолимую преграду на его пути.
Эти два примера показывают, что классификация может использоваться в качестве своеобразной ловушки. Необходимы поэтому осторожность и осмотрительность не только при проведении классификаций, но и при их истолковании.
Comments
To leave a comment
Logics
Terms: Logics