The Artistic Philosophy. On the Methodology of Research of Artistic Philosophy

Abstract

The article examines the literary methods of reality comprehension in fiction. Philosophizing Russian literature does not produce a rational knowledge in the way and form in which this knowledge is obtained by science, which systematizes knowledge and applies it in practice. Usually, literature reveals unique manifestations of reality, works with them each time in a special way and as a result presents a subjective product, which is unscientific, but nevertheless significant for knowledge. Such literature, which is a specific way of philosophizing and therefore can be called “artistic philosophy,” is not regulated by any objective laws of scientific knowledge. In the words of Alexander Pushkin, “a dramatic writer must be judged by laws that he imposed upon himself.” What is the methodology of philosophizing literature? To answer this question is to turn to the study of ways of creation that were invented and applied by prominent writers-thinkers of the 19^th–20^th centuries. Among these methods, there are literary conjecture, types of author’s intuition, author’s statement as an image, as an idea and as a summing up statement, author’s position, author’s fantasy, author’s formulation of philosophical problems, author’s national color of philosophizing, methods of “pervasive” idea and “pervasive” hero, methods of interpretation and evaluation. Among the abundance of texts of many philosophizing writers in the Russian philosophy of literature, the article takes as examples some works of Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, Andrei Platonov, and Boris Pasternak.