Again to the Question of the Specifics of Humanitarian Knowledge in the Light of the Issues of Comparative Civilizational Studies

Abstract

The author of the article aims to reveal the content of M. M. Bakhtin's statements about the specificity of the humanities in the light of the problems of comparative civilizational analysis in the context of modern cognitive research. The focus is on Bakhtin's idea that in the humanities the criterion is not the accuracy of cognition, but the depth of penetration. Acording to the author, the sense in which Bakhtin uses the term “depth” is the basis on which a man's process of creating his world unfolds. And this basis is nothing other than dialogical communication, which is treated as an analogue of the life process in the “world of people”. According to the author, the content of this communication is a polylogue of three paradigms of universal (heritage of archaic, the first “axial time” according to K. Jaspers and the second “axial time” - the era of modernization according to Sh. Eisenstadt and others) and local dimensions of any human existence at all levels ranging from the individual to civilization. Revealing the meaning of the second component of Bakhtin's original metaphor, the author emphasizes that we are talking about “penetration” into the spiritual space of the “Other”, i.e. another participant of the dialogue. In this case the depth of penetration into the “other” human reality presupposes the maximum possible completeness of coverage of this reality. Therefore, the criterion of the depth of penetration into the “Other” is the degree of coverage of all the basic dimensions (levels) of its structure. The author analyzes this structure, highlighting its main components.