The subject and object of cognition, Practice as the Basis and Purpose of Cognition

The world exists for us only as it is given to the knowing subject. The concepts of subject and ob­ject are correlative. The subject is a complex hierarchy, of which the foundation is the entire social whole. In the final analysis, the highest producer of knowledge and wisdom is the entire mankind. Its development has produced smaller communities — the separate peoples.

The subject and his cognitive activity can only be adequately understood in their concrete historical aspect. Scientific knowledge assumes not only the subject's conscious attitude towards the object but also towards himself, towards his activity, i.e. a realization of the conditions, devices, norms and methods of research.

From the standpoint of cognitive activity, the subject does not exist without an object, and the object does not exist without a sub­ject.

The object is seen as the real fragments of being that are subjected to study. The subject mat­ter of research is the concrete aspects at which the questing thought is targeted.

It is a well-known dictum that man as the creator and subject of history creates the necessary conditions and premisses for his his­torical existence. It so appears that the object of socio-historical knowledge is not only cognized but also created by people: before it becomes an object, it must be shaped by them. In social cognition, man deals with the results of his activity and thus with himself as a practically acting being. As a subject of cognition, man finds himself at the same time in the position of its object. Social cognition is in this sense man's social self-consciousness: he discovers for himself and studies his own historically created social essence.

The unity of theory and practice. The principal form of the mani­festation of human life is activity—sensuously objective, practical, and intellectual, theoretical. Man is an active being rather than a passive spectator at the "pageant" of life. He continually influences things around him, lending them forms and properties necessary to satisfy the historically evolved social and personal needs. It is in the transformation of the world that man lends definiteness to his way of life.

Practice is the material, sensuously objective and goal-directed ac­tivity of men intended to master and transform natural and social ob­jects, and constituting the universal basis, the motive force of the de­velopment of human society and knowledge, Practice designates not only, and not so much, the sensuously objective activity of a separate individual as the total activity and experience of the entire mankind in its historical development. Practical activity is social both in its content and in the mode of its realization. Contemporary practice is a result of world history, a result that embodies infinitely varied re­lations between men and nature and among men in the process of material and non-material production. Being the principal mode of man's social existence and the decisive form of his self-assertion in the world, practice acts as a complex integral system incorporating such elements as need, goal, motive, separate actions, movements, acts, the object at which activity is directed, the instruments of achieving the goal, and finally the result of activity. In practice, somebody always does something to create something out of some­thing with the help of something for some purpose.

Social practice forms a dialectical unity with cognitive activity, with theory. It performs three functions in relation to the latter:

1) It is the source and the basis of cognition, its motive force; it provides the necessary factual material for it, subject to generaliza­tion and theoretical processing. It thus feeds cognition as soil feeds trees, and does not let it become divorced from real life.

2) Practice is a mode of application of knowledge, and in this sense it is the goal of cognition. Scientific knowledge has a practical meaning only if it is implemented in life: practice is the arena in which the power of knowledge is applied. The ultimate goal of cog­nition is not knowledge in itself but practical transformation of re­ality to satisfy society's material and non-material needs through harmonizing its relationship with nature.

3) Practice is the crite­rion and measure of the truth of the results of cognition. Only that knowledge which has passed through the purifying fire of practice can lay claims to objective ness, reliability, and truth.

We can thus say that practice is the basis for the formation and development of cognition at all its stages, the source of knowledge and criterion of the truth of the results of the cognitive process.

The main kinds of practice are the material-production activity and social-transforming activity of the masses (the latter includes people's activity in the social, political and cultural spheres of so­ciety's life). Natural-scientific and social experiments are special kinds of scientific practice.

The feedback mechanism permits the implementation of correc­tive influences of theoretical and practical activity on each other, which ensures the role of practice as the criterion of truth.

Inasmuch as practical activity is conscious, the mental, spiritual element is undoubtedly part and parcel of it. The position of isolating the material and practical activity from the intellectual and theoretical one is hostile to dialectical materialism. These kinds of activity form an indissoluble unity. To resort to the dry language of categories, a part is not the whole, and substituting the one for the other is fraught with theoretical-methodological and worldview errors.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14