Конечно, нельзя забывать, что у чудесного есть свои степени и оттенки и оно требует не бездумного восхищения, но способности трезво понимать и ценить каждое отдельное чудо на шкале вероятного-невероятного, объяснимого-необъяснимого.

Мы все больше убеждаемся в том, что наука и религия призваны совместно создавать как можно более интересное, захватывающее повествование о мироздании в целом, включая духовную жизнь, возможные вселенные, жизнь после смерти. В этой «авантюре разума» религия и наука сопутствуют друг другу: религия предъявляет прозрения, догадки, откровения, тогда как наука, даже выдвигая самые «безумные идеи», кропотливо работает над поиском доказательств, чтобы сделать невероятное – несомненным. Таким образом, сообща они могут охватить все мироздание в соотнесенности его тайн и ключей, загадок и разгадок, чудес и очевидностей.

✓ Бессмертие, Вера, Возможное, Интересное, Ничто, Событие, Творчество, Удивление

Summary

Summary

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

This book is devoted to the main concepts that shape our mentality: life and death, love and fate, soul and body, power and play, wisdom and conscience, future and eternity… These universal elements of conceptualization underlie such cognitive processes as inference, memory, learning, decision-making, and goal-setting. Primary concepts – which are concise in expression, but extremely capacious in meaning – have power over the public consciousness and form the sign code of culture. The minimal sign construct, a single word, encompasses the maximum of mental content; the greatest is manifested in the least. With these concepts, we express our understanding of the world – but they themselves, by virtue of their breadth and depth, are the most difficult to understand or explicate. As alluded to in the epigraph, they seem self-explanatory, and precisely for this reason, they elude definition.

As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This book is intended for anyone who wants to master the language of concepts in order to more fully comprehend their own existence. Primary concepts are ancient, universal thought-formations. They could perhaps be called “arche-concepts,” by analogy with Jungian archetypes; but unlike the latter, primary concepts belong to the sphere of the collective consciousness rather than the unconscious. They are anthropological universals – primary elements of human experience, diversely refracted through national languages and cultures. The universality of these concepts, however, is not of an abstract nature, as in the case of such metaphysical or logical categories as “essence,” “quantity,” “quality,” “identity,” “difference,” “unity,” “multitude,” etc. Primary concepts are more concrete in meaning, and evolve not as a result of logical analysis, but as the most vital, profoundly meaningful elements of the human experience. At the same time, primary concepts differ from such scientific notions as “quantum,” “galaxy,” “gene,” or “organism,” many of which are international terms derived from Greek or Latin. By contrast, primary concepts are most often derived from native roots, since they belong to the consciousness of an entire people. Unlike scientific terms, which are reducible to one rigorous meaning, they stand out as polysemic, and enjoy the broadest use in various styles, from colloquial to academic. The smallest units of intellectial energy, they designate the ultimate values and purposes of existence.