Universality of Literature: Epistemological Perspective

Abstract

The paper examines the possibility of a literary-scientific foundation for the concept of universality. It establishes that the hermeneutical use of this concept is problematic in several respects: it is vague in defining its fundamental concept (unlimited validity), dismissive in relation to non-canonized texts, implicit with regard to the criteria of its own functioning and particular from the perspective of epistemological meta-reflexion. – In defining the concept of universality, the paper leans on the anthropological findings on the functioning of cognitive systems in conditions of mutual orientation; it seems that one of the fundamental characteristics of human evolution is the aptitude for social optimization of the cognitive system’s excess capacity. In this light, at least two interconnected communication mechanisms to which the status of literariness can be attributed prove to be universal: decontextualization and self-organisation. Their basic function is to ensure flexibility in the interaction with the environment. Various epistemological paradigms deal with this phenomenon and each of them conceptualizes it in accordance with its cognitive bases: the empirical paradigm recognizes it as self-determination, the symbolic paradigm as self-reflexivity and the semiotic paradigm as self-referentiality. – However, the issue of how to solve the problem of the universality of literature on the level of epistemological meta-reflection is a separate question. That is to say that from a historical perspective, the aforementioned findings appear only as one of the particular epistemological alternatives. The paper tries to solve this problem by considering the potential of literary mechanisms to their extreme consequences, and therefore to the transgression of rationality. Only by the realization of the extreme effects of decontextualization and self-organisation can we experience that we are not the origin of our own cognition and that the vacated core can only be filled with what we ourselves are not. This proximity can be found in the collective consciousness and the discursive practices of every culture. Only in this closeness can the sole absolute universality be attained – the one from which the universe arises.