Понятие стратагемной истины в традиционной китайской мысли

Abstract

On the basis of early Chinese philosophical texts, the legitimacy of introducing the concept of stratagem truth is demonstrated; it explicates the archaic non-verbal fundamental principle of the correspondence theory of truth that dominates modern Western culture. Such an understanding of truth is the initial intuition for a number of great civilizations of antiquity (for example, ancient Greek and ancient Chinese). The fact is that truth, taken in its original preverbal context, is far from being exhausted exclusively by the semantic relation of a linguistic expression to the extralinguistic reality corresponding to it. Truth has here not an epistemological, but an ontological sense of “authenticity” (in particular, the “authenticity” of some being). Thus, the category of Tao, which occupies a central place in Chinese philosophical thought, indicates, first of all, the true way of being of a particular entity, aimed at revealing the “truth” of this entity. Since such a truth unfolds in time, it comes out only historically, in the course of the interaction of forces that oppose or cooperate with each other. In traditional Chinese society, this rivalry/cooperation is by all means regulated by the corresponding rituals. In the system of such ritualized practices of discovering the truth, truthful speech is not just a simple statement of some fact - after all, it does not so much reveal what has already happened, but it starts the process of putting into practice what was said - the realization of the previously declared truth. As the allegorical story of “Mr. He’s Jade”, which is a classic example of such a dynamic understanding of the statement of truth, shows, such an institution of truth can be a severe test for its founder. It may require the utmost effort from him, and sometimes expose him to serious risks. In addition, success in realizing the declared truth requires considerable ingenuity: due to the lack of a uniform method of “reinforcing words with deeds”, one has to take the risk of experimenting with different behavioral strategies each time. Thus, essentialism, which distinguishes the “classical” for modern Western European thought concept of timeless truth independent of man, is opposed by the ancient procedural-event understanding of truth as a kind of “side effect” of following one or another specific Tao, where the emergence of truth has the ontological status of an occurring event, but not eternally abiding being. In the case of the human Tao, the effect of truth reveals itself in the climactic ‘moment of truth’ - the final point of success or failure of the chosen strategy/stratagem.