Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 May 1989, is an English translation of an essay by academician Boris Raushenbakh from the Moscow journal Kommunist. The essay argues that people need both rational scientific knowledge and metaphorical, emotional knowledge, and that these connect to morality and religious feeling. It also criticizes crude atheist propaganda and calls for restoring moral principles. The only mention of UFOs is a passing remark that some people turn to belief in flying saucers.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 3 of 3 felt by other representatives of the ''precise'' sciences: to us in frequent cases works on art are ''streams of words'' without any strictly defined rational meaning. Yet the universally known names of their authors unquestionably guaranteed the high quality of such books and it is we who were to be blamed for our failure to understand them. 4. Thus, I came across the fact that, conventionally speaking, we could divide the Russian language into two components: the first uses the logic of rational scientific knowledge and the other the logic of metaphorical thinking. These are not only two components of the language but also two types of viewing the world, the supporters of which find it difficult to understand one another. 5. In order to explain this phenomenon more fully, I believe, we should turn to the currently intensively studied fact of the functional asymmetry of the brain. It turns out that the left hemisphere is responsible essentially for the processes of rational thinking while the right one deals with the metaphorical perception of the world. Apparently the fact that a person could be classified as a 'physicist' or a 'lyricist' also depends on which of the hemispheres dominates in his brain. Naturally, this separation is not absolute. Geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe, for example, were able to achieve outstanding successes in the precise sciences, which require a strictly rational thinking, and in the arts, which demand of the artist particular emotionality and a developed metaphorical way of thinking. As a rule, however, it is one of the types that nonetheless dominates, whether it applies to noted workers in science and culture or ordinary people not possessing any particular talent. 6. The metaphoric perception of the world is older than logical thinking, which developed later (perhaps that is why dreams which originate in the right hemisphere do not amaze man by presenting the most incredible miracles, for the left hemisphere, the 'rational' one, is 'disengaged' during that time). There are two different ways for perceiving and knowing the world, as was pointed out a long time ago. In Homer's 'Iliad,' Hector speaks of the tragic fate awaiting him: 7. '...I firmly tell myself, talking to myself in my mind and my heart that the day will come when sacred Troy will perish...' 8. What matters to us is that Hector speaks both of the mind (based on rational thinking) and the 'heart'' (based on metaphorical foreboding). It is characteristic of latter ancient tradition to separate the 'opinion,' i.e., that which has been obtained through the senses, from the 'knowledge,' which has the mind as its source.
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.