A symbol of death in the midst of a flowering life. A medium that knows the world and science is usually youth. She is cheerful and reckless everywhere and everywhere. All the centuries-old student folklore testifies to that.
Students live in the future because they are young and beautiful. Wine and girls are the main themes of their songs, and only somewhere on the periphery of their work flashed ironic tirades about the hard work of assimilating the knowledge that humanity has accumulated. So where did granite, the symbol of inertness and death, appear in their flowering environment? Who called for gnawing granite science?
The truth is different - this symbol is painted by the students ’creativity in ironically reckless tones, but, nevertheless, it earthes and dies what it wants to rejoice and make the whole world happy with its joy.
Socrates and the Ancient Greek Academies
It is believed that the systematic training of young people introduced the unsystematic sage Socrates into the ancient Greek culture. A philosopher from a barrel spoke of this in the sense that Socrates' free mind makes cells in the Academy’s green gardens for young minds. If, in modern terms, he had less authority, then he would have the right to teach. And so the youth will look into his mouth. And young flexible sprouts will turn to stone under the old look of Socrates.
Who called for gnawing at the granite of science, Socrates?
No, this will not happen, Socrates protests, because for me the disciples are not vessels, but torches. I do not fill them, but light them.
And indeed, the Socratic Academy has grown lush gardens of philosophy throughout the ancient world. Nowhere is any inertia. Stoics, sophists, Epicureans, materialists, idealists ... Over the next 2,500 years, so many currents did not arise in philosophy as from the Socratic Academy. So none of the ancient Greek philosophers could call upon the granite of science to nibble.
It seems that until the XVIII century, namely, before the birth of Goethe, world philosophy only picked up the crumbs of wisdom after the feast of the philosophers of the ancient world. The great Aristotle, chosen at random by the finger of St. Constantine among a host of great philosophers, is appointed to be the pillar and cornerstone of church wisdom about a world that is not a religion. Poor Aristotle. He would never have agreed to such a role. His philosophy trembles with life. His philosophy is principles, but not unshakable canons.
Confucius
At the other end of the world, a mid-level official of a great power by the standards of antiquity comprehends life and worldly wisdom.
And in a strange way, the simplest and most obvious truths, systematized by a sage, become a powerful philosophy that embodies, if not all, then much. Maybe this ancient Chinese called for gnawing at the granite of science, meaning, putting in their words something that we don’t quite understand today? No, everything that he wrote a long time ago is understandable today with utmost clarity. No wonder his many sayings became proverbs.
But Confucius argued that man cannot give eternal laws, because he must fulfill the eternal canons. Only going beyond the con does he create laws in order to master the new and let in him the eternal canons. Then human laws die.
This thought echoes Goethe’s thought: “The dead are theories, my friend, are dead, and the tree of life is forever alive.” A stone cannot sprout through blocks of centuries. So only the living will grow.
Dogmatism. Theology and Scholasticism
Why did St. Constantine bring together about five hundred shepherds (shepherds) of Christian flocks (flocks) in the city of Nicaea in 325? And in order to remove all the contradictions from the teachings about Christ and God, because he was going to make Christianity the state religion. He needed the cornerstone for building a mighty empire and they created it for him. And more than 30 Gospels flew into the fires, dozens of revelations, crumbs remained from the teachings of the Gnostics about the knowledge of the world. Even the Gospel of John, the beloved disciple of Christ, entered the Bible only in 415. And his revelation later. There are two worthless chapters left from the revelation of Peter himself.
Tertullian says the construction of the eternal stone of the doctrine of truth has begun. God's laws are strict and the riot of colors inappropriate. And after a couple of centuries, including for these words, he was ranked among the church fathers. He did not give birth to gnawing at the granite of science - phraseologism, because he considered all sciences unnecessary. And another phraseological unit of the other father of the church - I believe, because it is absurd, and completely tore the very concept of "science" out of the life of knowing youth. Scholasticism became a space, and theology with granite walls of a building into which students were introduced into the Middle Ages.
Here it would be necessary to look for the one who called to bite the granite of science first, if the very word "science" were not perceived as a rebellion against the building of faith. When in our time a person reads ancient works on scholasticism and theology, then perplexity does not leave him for two reasons:
- Why did people write a lot of words when it is much shorter and clearer written in the same Bible?
- Why is their work so gloomy, why is there not even a poppy seed of life in them, when it is life that is rampant in the Gospels themselves.
These worthless treatises are similar to modern compilations of many people from philosophy with titles. The writings of the ancient Greek philosophers are understandable and interesting today. Probably, at that time there was a prejudice that the smart should be incomprehensible, although in reality it is just the opposite - only the intelligible is smart.
Overcoming
The Middle Ages ended with a revival. Science ceased to be a battered girl and turned into a princess, who was destined to become a queen in her time. True, for the sake of this, many stepped into the fire. Together with science and art, life has returned to human society. Galileo does not offer his students a bite into the stone of science, but carries it with them to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to conduct the first physical experiment. He thereby laid the living, not dead, foundations of science for the Newtons, Lomonosovs, and Maxwells. Artists and sculptors laid the foundations of optics, not even knowing about her future birth. And they were amazed that for 1,500 years before them they already painted like that, they did it like that already.
Who called for gnawing granite science?
There is no need to go far to answer this question. Those who began to sculpt a new stone system of dogma are Marxists. But science in this phrase is interwoven only because it has already become a queen.
It is impossible to read the works of the founders of the new scholasticism, because nothing is clear. Of these, the same philosophers as from the old women of the ballerina. It was about the fact that something needs to be nibbled, Trotsky said, and thereby gave out what their Marxist-Leninist-Trotsky-Stalinist theory is. An indigestible stone to nibble young. And whether the benefits of life on Earth would be of this did not interest them. And the stone, as it was an emblem of death and inertness, remained this symbol.
Irony
Not only in Belgorod there is a monument to the granite of science. However, it is not so important who called for gnawing the granite of science. The main thing is said vitally and clearly that mankind says goodbye to its terrible past merrily. It is this joy that the ironic numerous monuments of the dead inertia express. They, with their strict contours and artistry, resemble the same famous Malevich creation, known to the whole world, as “The Black Square”.