"Философское" - читать интересную книгу автора (Джин Нодар)

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So, in the process of life-creation man «obtains» a sense of non-finiteness, an insuperable sense of optimism: in the process of creation, he equalizes his consciousness with his existence; this is where the so-called balancing set of consciousness steps in. This process of reciprocal equalization of the mind and life is, first of all, unconscious, natural, automatic. The second and the principal facet of the truth is that in the same process man comes back to the status he has lost forever, to the initial situation which was described in the biblical Eden scene. In other words, man «regains» the slate of harmonious unity with the world and overcomes the situation of homo-centrism, so detrimental to him. Man reintegrates himself. The radical essential aim of this fundamentally never-completed process is — too achieve happiness.

Thus, creativity is a return to that past «in Eden» which, unconsciously and covertly, lives on in the memory of mankind. We should add here that this past «in Eden» does not at all require recognition as a real historical fact; it is only known that it is «realized» at the level of an image translated into the pact from the future, into reality from a dream. That is why we determine the act of present-day man achieving «an Eden» status as a comeback, while creativity is regarded by us as the means of man's achieving this status.

At the same time, creativity means creation: not only a means of comeback as we understand it, but also actual creation, creation of everything that is termed progress, movement forward, everything that puts more space between humanity and the «pre-human border». In this lies the dialectical nature of creativity — to lead forward and, simultaneously, to bring back, to return. This is why we cannot but conclude that the comeback is achieved, in this case, by moving forward, in the form of inevitably moving away from the initial point, from any point on which our gaze is fixed now; that is why it is always a comeback to a new place, or, to put it more acceptably, to a new coil; we mean not only a new coil in the history of society as such, as a whole, but also a new coil in the «history» of an individual, a concrete personality.

The question arises here: if true progress (different from its contemporary partial, i.e. illusory representation) — is a forward movement that brings man bask to Eden, — where and how should he proceed in order to be adequately reintegrated? This is, actually, an age-old socio-political question, a quest for an answer to which has led and still leads men to generate a variety of philosophical-political and politico-economic theories. Although this question is, obviously, of prime importance, we focus our attention on the essentially human, ontological aspect of the problem stated in the title, comprehending fully — as will be seen lower down — its indiseverable bond with the above.

But now let us consider another question: why is it that creativity returns men into the «milieu» of harmonious unity with the world, the unity of Adam not only with the tree, but also with the Serpent, the unity of Adam and Eve, a return into a «pre-disintegrated» milieu. An answer to this question is prompted by art, the most full-blooded form of creativity.