Principle of beauty in scientific knowledge: sociocultural version of the gnoseological approach

The article addresses the problem of the genesis of the beauty principle in scientific cognition from the standpoint of the gnoseological approach supplemented by some conceptual generalizations from the fields of social epistemology and sociology of thinking. The relevance of this approach is due to the critical attitude to gnoseology as a general theory and methodology of science on the part of non-classical epistemology, the history of science and scientific theories of the middle range. An external factor that actualizes the current internal scientific situation is the prolongation of integration processes typical for postmodern culture associated with the search for points of contact between science and art. The article shows that despite the addition of the principle of beauty to the heuristic tools of modern exemplary science, there is an unresolved problem of the genetic relationship between aesthetics and science. This connection was best demonstrated in detail by the example of the similarity and difference between mathematics and music initiated in antique culture and reflecting the love of symmetry and harmony inherent in the Greek worldview. On the other hand, the differences in the perception of works of science and art which are obvious to ordinary consciousness required ancient thinkers to introduce concepts and principles that synthesize different aspects of the manifestations of the useful, true, and beautiful. In this connection, the binary mythopoetic cosmos-chaos opposition, which is found in its direct form in archaic and natural-philosophical cosmologies, is proposed as the historically first form that integrates the complex and contradictory content of the beauty principle. The results of the study lead to the conclusion that only natural philosophical models of the cosmos make a fundamental distinction between the “chaos” of opinions about phenomena and the “cosmos” of the true knowledge about their speculative entities. It is this worldview scheme of a single, conceptually ordered, and therefore truly beautiful world that served as an ideal model for classical European science.