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.
## Document 3 of 3 Page 4 the fatherland, religious feeling, a poetic feeling (distinguished not only from literature but also from music and graphic arts), etc. Do these feelings lead to knowledge, albeit not logical-discursive but intuitive, sometimes subconscious, yet nonetheless knowledge? 13. Everything seems to indicate that they do. Indeed, when someone, even a child meets a person for the first time he immediately develops a sympathy or antipathy toward him without any obvious rational reason. This feeling becomes the first (albeit sometimes erroneous) intuitive knowledge (or, if you wish, a ''preknowledge'') about the person, which largely defines our behavior. Sometimes behavior is dictated by a moral feeling and, in justifying the nature of his actions, the person states: ''I cannot explain why but I was unable to act differently.'" This too is not related to a direct logical analysis (for otherwise it could have been explained) of the knowledge of how one should behave in any give situation. 14. At the turn of the century such examples, and they are numerous, enabled some poets to claim that there are truths which cannot be described through prose, i.e., truths which are based not on the formal understanding of logic but on the specific logic of the poetic imagery used in the perception of the world. Consequently, the metaphorical, the nonrational perception of the world, is another necessary source of our knowledge. Furthermore, occasionally such knowledge turns out to be more accurate than the rational-logical one in the area of rational science itself. If we ask what will be the aspect of technology in the future, it happens that the projections of specialists are frequently less accurate than those of writers. Thus, as late as the 1930s, many scientists, including some of the most noted ones, claimed that nuclear power can never be used by man, whereas ``irresponsible'' writers fully accepted it in their works. In his ``The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin,'' A. Tolstoy described a ``death ray'' which, at that time, was absolutely impossible according to the scientists. Today, however, we speak of laser weapons as something obvious. In his novel ``Doroga na Okean'' [Ocean Road] Leonid Leonov described a radar system which did rot exist as yet at that time. How to explain this? In all likelihood, the scientists are excessively attached to science and technology and to their present postulates and axioms and, proceeding on the basis of strictly logical conclusions, are unable to anticipate revolutionary discoveries, whereas the writer, the artist, who is free from such ``prejudices,'' can obviously ``sense'' (or anticipate) better the course of mankind's development. Naturally, this is not a call for proceeding from knowledge to feelings in the areas of science and technology. As we pointed out, the irrational, the emotional component of human knowledge is related, above all, to the moral and poetic factors in human awareness.
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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.