Narrative in Scientific Knowledge: N.I. Zhinkin’s Cinematographic Method

Abstract

The intellectual heritage of the Russian philosopher and psychologist N.I. Zhinkin, turns out to be strikingly consonant with modern scientific research, in which scientists and philosophers are trying to identify the origins of possible syntheses and correlations in a wide variety of interdisciplinary interactions. The structure of modern science is changing, new forms of teamwork of scientists (collabo­rations) are being formed, requiring not only new methodological strategies in the study of applied problems, but also taking into account the scientific inter­ests of the participants. Interdisciplinary interactions do not develop on their own, but require mutual intellectual and existential efforts. And this means that the ways of expressing knowledge for each other must be adjusted. Thus, a form comes into the scientific consciousness, which was previously practically not taken into account in the communication of natural scientists: narrative. Under these conditions, Zhinkin’s unique historical experience acquires special signifi­cance, to which science and art, phenomenology and psychology, life and knowl­edge are connected in a special way. The unifying principle in this experience of Zhinkin was, paradoxically, the cinema, in which the scientist saw the key to expanding cognitive aspirations and enriching the cognitive abilities of a per­son. Cinematography is not just a new art form, but it is a special technical form of the embodiment of the age-old aspirations of a person who is trying to express (repeat, reproduce) life in motion, to make “the former present”. Zhinkin (fol­lowing his teacher G.G. Shpet) substantiates this idea of art as a special kind of cognition in the report Issues on Building a Scientific and Artistic Script, which was discussed on November 19, 1945 at the Moscow House of Cinema at the Section of the Scientific and Educational Film.