VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

sence of nature is freed from a spell, becomes self-conscious inside the human spirit, and the artist becomes a sage. What is otherwise regarded as a  lyric metaphor only is refined to become objective imagination. This is what Plotinus (205–270) taught – that the inner eye is schooled by beauty and having been cleansed from its vices it beholds archetypes that embody the truth. Looking inside oneself, one can see the archetype, the “inner form or figure” that fits together with outer forms and events like a key and lock; it integrates them in a certain way and gives them meaning. It might become clearer and develop into a mental concept. Such an “organic unity of all moments of knowledge” – an agreement of theory, senses and intuition – is called seeing by the Štúr group. This is the noetic-aesthetic principle that is the “fount of integral science” (Sošková 2005, 133). Compared with western gnoseology, something more is being required here: the outer as well as the inner experience acquired introspectively must fit together to create a theory. But does any introspective knowledge exist at all? As late as the end of the Middle Ages it was still regarded as a matter of course that ideas can be directly observed by themind, and the inspirations of gods, angels, muses or ancestors constitute one source of knowledge. Later, incredible achievements and the power of modern science seemed to confirm the accuracy of the Western concept of knowledge and contributed to its promotion. Introspective practice stopped being cultivated and its former status as knowledge began to be denied. The verb to speculate changed its meaning to fabelize. Yet the Latin speculor originally meant to inspect oneself inwardly, which is not to construct something – but rather to wait for what is going to appear. Needless to say, in such light the Štúr science project must appear hopelessly illusory and utopian, methodologically naive and flawed, outdated and backward, irrational and unscientific – causing embarrassment. This is also how it has been evaluated over the past 150 years. Despite the fact that the Slovak constitution obliges us to base our values on the tradition of Sts. Cyril andMethodius, aswell ason theŠtúr tradition, and the largest Slovak university is named after Comenius – the epistemological project that constitutes the core of their efforts has been abandoned as a “relic of romanticism” or an obsolete medieval way of thought. The main protagonist of Slavonic science, Peter Kellner-Hostinský already seemed to many of his contemporaries and even more to following generations as an “outsider” at the very margins of Slovak philosophical thought (Čepan 1989, 94). A characteristic feature of his is thinking in “overlaps” – from philosophy to arts, from knowledge to action, from mythology to science, from objective cognition to a personal stance – insofar as he could not be classified within any one genre. He sought to defend Slavonic science philosophically, yet it does not sound anymore convincing to contemporary man. A person bred by 20th century culture is unable to conceive of anything specific out of all that. Was the intuition of the Štúr group wrong – or was it, after all, in some way true? Where are the specific results of Slavic science? 54 (18) Emil Páleš

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