ЭПИСТЕМИЧЕСКИЙ НИГИЛИЗМ И ЭКЗИСТЕНЦИАЛЬНЫЙ РОМАНТИЗМ: ЗНАНИЕ В ЦИФРОВУЮ ЭПОХУ

Эпистемология и философия науки. 2026. Т. 63. № 2. С. 21–32.

Очеретяный К. А.

The digital today constitutes an environment of affects: it touches, enchants, captivates, incites, and frightens. What it does not do, however, is provide knowledge; rather, it takes knowledge away. Previously, the subject of cognition was the human being, though cognition itself was largely grounded in institutions, social contacts, performative rituals, and the activity of human-scale and non-human-scale collectives. Today, however, when generative AI is prone to hallucinations, when AI models are trained on content produced by other AIs - thereby accumulating errors and generating model collapse - and when algorithmic feeds and AI assistants make epistemic decisions on behalf of users by determining what is “important” or “true”, the machines of technocapitalism rupture the “contract” between human and non-human agents and monopolize the right to meaning. The fundamental stratum of reality upon which social consensus depends - namely, the experience of everyday life - becomes dubious and alien. Hence, in the context of a crisis of meaning, the right to presence assumes renewed urgency. Indeed, knowledge and science, in their foundational dimensions, are not merely a matter of institutions but rather of the ultimate aspirations of the human being - aspirations that are pre-predicative and existential in character. To this sphere belong the mystery of life, reverence before it, fate, aura - in short, the entire incomputable remainder: that ontological correlate which can be counterposed to the fatalism of algorithms and to epistemic nihilism. I seek to demonstrate that, in the era of intelligent machines, the epistemic rupture may be overcome, or at least mitigated, through a stance that may be termed existential romanticism - one in which knowledge is conceived not solely as resource, prediction, and possession, but also as event, risk, and a breakthrough toward the improbable.

Keywords: аффект, нигилизм, медиареальность, визуальная метафора