Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology 900436997X, 9789004369979

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Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 349

Contemporary Russian Philosophy Editor Mikhail Sergeev, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (USA) International Editorial Board Anatoly Akhutin, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kiev; Alexander Chumakov, Vice-President of Russian Philosophical Society, Moscow; Mikhail Epstein, Emory University, Atlanta; Boris Groys, New York University and The European Graduate School / egs, Saas Fee; Vladimir Kantor, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Ruslan Loshakov, Uppsala University; Natalya Shelkovaya, Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, Sieverodonetsk; Igor Smirnov, University of Konstanz; Karen Swassjan, Forum für Geisteswissenschaft, Basel; Vladimir Zelinsky, Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Brescia The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs

Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century An Anthology Edited by

Mikhail Sergeev, Alexander Chumakov and Mary Theis With a Foreword by

Alyssa DeBlasio

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: FREEDOM, image 651190168 from shutterstock.com, used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sergeev, Mikhail (Mikhail I͡U.), editor. | Chumakov, Alexander Nikolaevich, editor. | Theis, Mary Elizabeth, 1950- editor. | DeBlasio, Alyssa, writer of foreword. Title: Russian philosophy in the twenty-first century : an anthology / edited by Mikhail Sergeev, Alexander Chumakov, and Mary Theis ; with a foreword by Alyssa DeBlasio. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2021] | Series: Value inquiry book series, 0929-8436 ; volume 349 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology provides the English-speaking world with access to post-Soviet philosophic thought in Russia for the first time. The Anthology presents the fundamental range of contemporary philosophic problems in the works of prominent Russian thinkers. In contrast to the “single-mindedness” of Soviet-era philosophers and the bias toward Orthodox Christianity of émigré philosophers, it offers to its readers the authors’ plurality of different positions in widely diverse texts. Here one finds strictly academic philosophic works and those in an applied, pragmatic format-secular and religious-that are dedicated to complex social and political matters, to pressing cultural topics or insights into international terrorism, as well as to contemporary science and global challenges”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028859 | ISBN 9789004369979 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004432543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Russian--21st century. Classification: LCC B4280 .R87 2021 | DDC 197--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028859 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-36997-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43254-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Foreword: Russian Philosophy as Anthology IX From the Editors XV Anatolii Akhutin 1 Homo Europaeus 4 Anatolii Akhutin Alexander Chumakov 29 Historical and Philosophical Aspects of Global Studies in the Modern Scientific System 32 Alexander Chumakov David Dubrovskii 50 Solving the Mind-Body Problem: Thomas Nagel’s Article, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” Revisited 51 David Dubrovskii Mikhail Epstein 74 From Analysis to Synthesis: Conceiving a Transformative Metaphysics for the Twenty-First Century 77 Mikhail Epstein Valentina Fedotova 101 Terrorism: An Attempt at Conceptualization 103 Valentina Fedotova Fedor Girenok 125 On Culture’s Turn to Nonconceptual Thinking 126 Fedor Girenok Aleksei Griakalov 135 Philosophy of the Event and Hermeneutics of Memory: Evidence of Assertion 136 Aleksei Griakalov

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Contents

Boris Groys 152 Becoming Cosmic 155 Boris Groys Pavel Gurevich 167 The Theme of Man in Russian Philosophy 169 Pavel Gurevich Sergey Horujy 189 Synergic Anthropology: Foundations, Goals, Results 192 Sergey Horujy Vladimir Kantor 209 The Problem of Posthumous Existence from Plato to Dostoyevsky: “Bobok,” a Short Story by Dostoyevsky 211 Vladimir Kantor Igor Kliamkin 227 Demilitarization as a Historical and Cultural Issue 229 Igor Kliamkin Vladimir Kutyrev 246 Philosophy for and by Humans 248 Vladimir Kutyrev Boris Markov 265 The Image of the “Other”: Xenophobia and Xenophilia 267 Boris Markov Vadim Mezhuev 288 Russia in Search of Its Civilizational Identity 289 Vadim Mezhuev Alexander Nikiforov 309 The Value of Science 311 Alexander Nikiforov Valery Podoroga 321 What Does One Really Mean by Asking: “What Is Philosophy?” 323 Valery Podoroga

Contents

Nikolai Rozov 332 The Cyclical Dynamics in Russian History 335 Nikolai Rozov Mikhail Sergeev 356 The Enlightenment Project: Reflections on the National Identity of US Americans 358 Mikhail Sergeev Natalya Shelkovaia 368 Friedrich Nietzsche on the Way of Recurrence to Oneself 370 Natalya Shelkovaia Karen Swassjan 391 Theologia Heterodoxa 392 Karen Swassjan Index 403

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Foreword: Russian Philosophy as Anthology What is Russian philosophy? This is a question as old as Russian philosophy itself, and one that enjoys particular relevance among Russia’s philosophers in the twenty-first century. In attempting to define this term, we encounter four main problems. First, we run up against a semantic quandary because Russian philosophers do not all live in Russia, do not all identify as “Russian,” and were not necessarily even trained as philosophers in the formal sense of the term. Second, we encounter a problem of language, given that Russian philosophers do not all write in Russian. Succeeding waves of politically motivated emigration from Russian and Soviet space in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries relocated Russian-speaking philosophers across the globe, where they adapted to their new global identities by writing in multiples languages. Third there is the challenge posed by the idiosyncratic genre norms of Russian philosophy, which has its own set of conventions and includes a variety of genres, ranging from traditional academic papers to “philosophical reflection.” Finally, we must recognize the significant ideological component to this debate, in which the category of “Russian philosophy” has been galvanized for religious and nationalistic purposes as a way to carve out strategically what is “essentially Russian” and what is not. When we employ the term “Russian philosophy,” in other words, we are not referring to any single discipline, national tradition, or geographical location; instead, we are referring to a historical network of intersections that cut across boundaries of style, genre, discipline, identity, and language. Russian philosophy, in other words, does not describe a philosophical tradition, so much as it describes a philosophical problem. Philosophers in Russia have been asking the question “What is Russian philosophy?” since at least the early nineteenth century, as the practice of philosophical historiography—the meta-history of philosophy—was developing in the Russian Empire. From its beginning, this historiographical work has sought to define what Russian philosophy is—to identify its roots, its place in the present moment, and to chart out the trajectory of its future development. Writing in the decades following the 1825 Decembrist revolt when philosophy departments were closed in the Russian Empire out of fear they would stoke revolutionary sentiments, Archimandrite Gavriil (Vasilii Voskresenskii) argued that the distinguishing features of Russian philosophy should align with the three pillars of Tsar Nicholas i’s empire: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. At the same time, and perhaps for this reason, philosophical reflection in

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nineteenth-century Russia was expressed in a multitude of genres, ranging from journalistic writing to memoir (Aleksandr Herzen), and from reflections on literature and culture (Vissarion Belinskii and Dmitrii Pisarev) to literary works themselves (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy). As the nineteenth century drew to a close, philosophy as an academic discipline began to enjoy a period of rapid development. Russian-speaking philosophers, trained in Germany and seeped in the fervor of Neo-Kantianism, began returning to the Russian Empire and committed themselves to establishing institutional structures including societies, journals, and departments dedicated to developing philosophical inquiry. Specifically, they sought to connect Russian philosophical thought to discussions happening elsewhere in Europe, arguing as philosopher Ernest Radlov put it in 1889 for the virtues of critical reflection and transnational engagement. Gustav Shpet famously asserted in his unfinished fifteen-volume epic history of Russian philosophy from 1922 that philosophy can never be national in its pure form: philosophers can pose questions in ways that are rooted in their respective national traditions, but any true answers to philosophical questions are always universal in nature. Evgenii Bobrov, a dedicated Leibnizian writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, likewise stated in his six-volume history of Russian philosophy that only structured, critical inquiry in the discipline of the history of philosophy can provide objective answers, especially where controversial topics are concerned. In the mid twentieth century, scholarship on the history of Russian philosophy moved its focus away from the universality of Russia’s philosophical pursuits and toward its role in the Soviet project. In the face of ideological restrictions and methodological dogmatism, many philosophers in this period turned inward, embracing the identification of Russian philosophy’s “distinguishing features” as among their primary tasks. Within the borders of the Soviet Union, this work often took the form of identifying the distinguishing features of Russia’s national philosophy, with the particular goal of galvanizing Russian scholarship in the “struggle against the bourgeois worldview.” The process of ideologizing and streamlining philosophy, whether in the form of academic purges or restrictions on publishing, in many ways carved out an attractive niche for the study of the history of Russian philosophy. In other words, Russian philosophy was seen as a relatively “safe” topic of study and remained a “semiautonomous discipline,” as Evert van der Zweerde has described, so long as philosophers adhered, even if only ceremoniously, to the prevailing theoretical and ideological Marxist-Leninist requirements of the day.1 Anatolii ­Galaktionov 1 Evert van der Zweerde, “Recent Developments in Soviet Historiography of Philosophy,” Studies in Soviet Thought 39 (1), 1990: 68.

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and Petr Nikandrov, two leading historians of Russian philosophy during the Soviet period, did just that. Alongside undertaking Marxist analyses of Russia’s philosophical past, in their History of Russian Philosophy (Istoriia russkoi filosofii, 1961) they argue that to understand Russian philosophy we must look to the importance of the social and natural sciences, as well as the “vivid expression of distinguishing characteristics of national thought.”2This particular question— the question of the relationship between Russian philosophy and science—is taken up in the present anthology in several contributions, including David Dubrovskii’s “Solving the Mind-Body Problem” and Aleksander Nikiforov’s “The Value of Science.” At the same time, in exile abroad, historians and philosophers practiced what they frequently referred to as “historiosophy”—the process of “constantly addressing the question of the meaning of history, the end of history, etc.,” as Vasilii Zenkovskii put it.3 Nikolai Berdiaev, in turn, wrote that “original Russian thought is born as historiosophical thought,” and thus elevated historiosophy as superior to other historical modes.4 The period of Russian philosophy abroad began in 1922, following Lenin’s expulsion of Russia’s greatest philosophers, journalists, and intellectuals from Petrograd on two steamships, whose voyages have conjointly come to be known as the Philosophy Steamer. This period of Russian émigré philosophy is generally accepted as having ended with the deaths in 1965 of the philosopher and historian of philosophy Nikolai Losskii and of Fiodor Stepun. The two dominating themes of the émigré period in Russian philosophy were, without a doubt, religion and history. In the present anthology, the first theme is taken up by Nikolai Rozov in “The Cyclical Dynamics in Russian History”; the second theme is addressed by Karen Swassjan in “Theologia Heterodoxa,” a play on philosophical form in three movements. The growing messianic urgency in the mid-twentieth century to have a ­historiosophy—a theory of history that is somehow particularly suited to the Russian context—was not just an extended response to Romanticism, but a result of the lived reality of Russia’s philosophers, both those in exile abroad and those who remained employed by the Soviet academies. In the words of Abdusalam Guseinov and Vladislav Lekstorskii, “it was effectively Russian philosophy itself which was in exile: it survived in the countries of Europe, but as a fragment of the old Russia, as a pale manifestation of its arrested dreams.”5 2 Anatolii Galaktionov and Petr Nikandrov, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (Izdatel’stvo sotsial’noekonomicheskoi literatury, 1961), 75. 3 Vasilii Zenkovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (Leningrad: Ego, 1991), 22. 4 Nikolai Berdiaev, O russkoi filosofii (Ekaterinburg, 1991), 5. 5 Abdusalam Guseinov and Vladislav Lektorskii, “Philosophy in Russia: History and Present State,” Diogenes 56 (3), 2009: 6.

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And while the events of 1917 indeed changed the way philosophy would be practiced in Russia for at least the next century, the urge to define Russian philosophy—the historiosophical drive in Russian philosophical thought— has remained constant from the early nineteenth century through the postSoviet period. In one of the most well-respected histories of Russian thought, published by Vasilii Zenkovskii between 1948 and 1950 while living in exile in Paris, the author argued that Russian thought is generally characterized by its anthropocentrism, its religious—but not theocentric or cosmocentric—­ character, and its concern above all with the question of the individual and human purpose in history. We find all three of these topics present in articles included in this anthology: in Pavel Gurevich’s “The Theme of Man in Russian Philosophy,” Vladimir Kutyrev’s “Philosophy for and by Humans,” and Boris Groys’ “Becoming Cosmic.” The question of Russia’s philosophical relationship with the West, and also its relationship to the East, has likewise been a contentious question in Russian thought for the past two centuries. For Zenkovskii, as for the academic philosophers of the early twentieth century, Russia’s points of contact with the Western world were crucial for understanding Russian philosophy, including its religious tradition. In his 1922 work Russian Thinkers and Europe (Russkie mysliteli i Evropa), he wrote that Russians should neither turn away from the West, nor should they entirely accept it. In the present anthology, we see the question of Russian philosophy’s relationship to both the East and West addressed in Boris Markov’s “The Image of ‘the Other’: Xenophobia and Xenophilia,” Vadim Mezhuev’s “Russia in Search of Its Civilizational Identity,” and Mikhail Sergeev’s “The Enlightenment Project: Reflections on the National Identity of US Americans.” In the 1990s and 2000s, efforts to define Russian philosophy both proliferated and became prolific. This boom of philosophical historiography in these decades took two main forms: the publication of texts mostly in the tradition of Russian religious philosophy that were suppressed during the Soviet period and the appearance of dozens of new histories of Russian philosophy, whose authors offered individualized interpretations of Russia’s philosophical legacy in accordance with the new freedoms of the era. On the one hand, the writing of such histories is in line with the need for new textbooks and new courses on the history of Russian philosophy in the post-communist era. On the other hand, this cacophony of “new interpretations” contributed to a growing ­disillusionment with the discipline of Russian philosophy in the 2000s, earning it harsh criticism from both inside and outside the discipline. As Petr Sapronov laments, “Oh how one longs … to be convinced that Russia too gave birth to her

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own Platos.”6 As a result, the question of Russia versus the West became even more acute in the post-Soviet period. “Who in the West would take this kind of philosophy seriously?,” Valerii Podoroga remarked of Russian religious philosophy and its manner of presentation in the contemporary period.7 In the present volume, the acute question of the function of the philosopher in the twentyfirst century is taken up by Podoroga in “What Does One Really Mean by Asking ‘What is Philosophy?’” and by Mikhail Epstein in “From Analysis to Synthesis: Conceiving a Transformative Metaphysics for the Twenty-first Century.” There is one more thing we cannot fail to consider, when retracing the history of Russian philosophy. It has become commonplace to criticize the scholarship of Soviet-era philosophers for their adherence to the disciplinary norms of Marxist-Leninism—in other words, to say that there was no philosophy in the Soviet period, but only ideology and that there were no philosophers, but only ideologues. This is far from true, as countless scholars have already shown. Moreover, there is at least one place where Soviet philosophers excelled where others failed, that is in addressing the diversity and multiethnicity of philosophy in the Russian tradition, in particular in the way that Soviet philosophers engaged in the philosophical histories not just of Russia but of the Soviet republics. In the present period, the study of the diversity of origins that began in the Soviet academies is met with a host of other forms of pluralism—diversity of methods, of form, and of approach. Take for instance the biography of one of the contributors to this volume, Sergei Horujy, a scholar in Eastern Orthodox spirituality and culture who is also an expert in religious philosophy and philosophical anthropology, a theoretical physicist with a doctorate in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University, a mathematician, a specialist in James Joyce’s work, and the translator of Joyce’s Ulysses into Russian. This kind of plurality is entirely typical within the context of Russian philosophy, and rare, if not impossible, in many other philosophical contexts. What you are about to read is an anthology—a collection of authors, from different places and writing in different genres, and on topics that at first glance appear to have little in common with one another. In all the ways that an anthology is incohesive by its very nature, it is also especially suited to capture the diversity of Russian thought, not only because it highlights Russian philosophers’ historical interest in the short form, but also because the ­problems that we face when turning our attention to the topic of “Russian ­philosophy” 6 Petr Sapronov, Russkaia filosofiia. Opyt tipologicheskoi kharakteristiki (SPb: Tserkov’ i kul’tura, 2000), 17. 7 Valerii Podoroga, “Menia nazyvaiut podorozhnikom,” Vzgliad, 2007, www.vz.ru/culture/2007/3/25/74192.html.

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are all present in the anthology. An anthology does not seek to present any one definitive approach, or any single voice, but rather to place competing voices side-by-side, whereby their proximity creates moments of dialectical synergy among authors, genres, and texts. Similarly, in line with the multiple forms of Russian philosophy is the inclusion in this anthology of autobiographical narratives before each article. Among the earliest texts in the historiography of Russian philosophical thought was the publication between 1819 and 1823 of four-volume collections of speeches by Moscow University professors, ranging from its founding in 1755 through the early 1820s; each lecture, in turn, was supplemented with biographical sketches of the included authors. To this day, autobiography plays an important role in Russian philosophical thought, especially in the genre of “philosophical witness,” where philosophers reflect on their experiences of having been present at important philosophical moments or personally acquainted with leading philosophical thinkers. In this anthology, as in much of Russian philosophy, the most profound insights about the discipline are not found in scholarly analysis, but in unexpected places, such as moments of discord and plurality, frustrated forms of discourse, and the merging of scholarship and autobiographical reflection. This productive multiplicity is well suited not only to the form of the anthology, but also for understanding this feature of Russian philosophical thought and the lasting insight it offers into that very persistent question, “What is Russian philosophy?” Alyssa DeBlasio Works Cited Berdiaev, Nikolai. O russkoi filosofii. Ekaterinburg, 1991. Galaktionov, Anatolii and Petr Nikandrov, Istoriia russkoi filosofii. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi. literatury, 1961. Guseinov, Abdusalam and Vladislav Lektorskii, “Philosophy in Russia: History and Present State,” Diogenes 56 (3), 2009. Podoroga, Valerii. “Menia nazyvaiut podorozhnikom,” Vzgliad, 2007, www.vz.ru/ culture/2007/3/25/74192.html. Sapronov, Petr. Russkaia filosofiia. Opyt tipologicheskoi kharakteristiki. Tserkov’ i kul’tura, 2000. Van der Zweerde, Evert. “Recent Developments in Soviet Historiography of Philosophy,” Studies in Soviet Thought 39 (1), 1990, 39. Zenkovskii, Vasilii. Istoriia russkoi filosofii. Ego, 1991.

From the Editors This Anthology provides the English-speaking world access to post-Soviet philosophic thought in Russia for the first time. We believe readers will find contemporary Russian philosophy interesting for a number of reasons. First, it addresses local, regional and global aspects of the most pressing issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Readers will find themselves facing the vastness of contemporary Russian philosophy that is of importance not just to Russia, but to the whole world. Second, it represents the best traditions of Russian philosophy that, historically, has always been closely tied to Western philosophy and has had a certain influence upon it. Third is the fact that the history of the Russian philosophy is not only a chronicle of spiritual quests, borrowed ideas and those of indigenous original thinkers; it is also a record of the dramatic events endured by Russia over the last couple of centuries. Indeed, having experienced a series of great trials, tribulations and watershed moments in Russian history, Russian philosophy reflects the social and political collisions and transformations of Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In the early stages of its development, Russian philosophy encountered fun­ damental problems; for example, in 1850, Prince Platon A. Shirinskii-­Shikhmatov, Public Education Minister of the Russian Empire, suggested removing philosophy from the list of disciplines taught in universities, maintaining that “the good of philosophy is yet to be proven whereas it is perfectly capable of causing the harm.” Ultimately, the teaching of philosophy, most notably that of Western European philosophy, was discontinued, since this discipline was considered the source of sedition and free thinking. Following the termination of philosophy departments, philosophic discussions moved to the sphere of publicist writings and literary works. However, the authorities retained a thoroughly hostile attitude towards philosophy— the discipline capable of inspiring free thought. Consequently, when after the new 1863 University Statute the departments of philosophy started coming back to life, the focus remained on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Early in the 1900s, Russian philosophy rode the wave of intensifying social and political activity toward its renaissance. A lot of philosophic organizations, groups and assemblies sprang to life, and the professional practice of philosophy became popular and even fashionable. In the early 1920s, philosophy entered a new period of bans and persecution. Almost immediately after seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks aggressively set about establishing the ideological and intellectual supremacy of

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their regime. The fight for political domination being mostly over by 1922, their single-minded ideological campaign to get rid of “extraneous elements” began. Perceived as the rival of Marxism, philosophy appeared to take the brunt of the onslaught. Instigated by Lenin, thus began the exodus of intellectuals: ideologically unwelcome humanitarians were driven out of Russia. This tragic page in the history of Russian philosophy was named the Philosophy Steamer, since, along with other immigrants, a lot of outstanding Russian philosophers were shipped out on board two German steamers: the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen on September 29 and November 12 of 1922, respectively. The outcasts included such brilliant contemporary philosophers as Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Semion L. Frank, Ivan A. Ilyin, Evgenii N. Trubetskoi, Boris P. Vysheslavtsev, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Fiodor A. Stepun, Sergei N. Bulgakov, Nikolai O. Losskii, Lev P. Karsavin, Ivan I. Lapshin, Aleksandr A. Kiesewetter, Mikhail A. Osorgin and others. These emigrants represented the forefront in their field, the blossom of Russian philosophy. Focusing mainly on religious matters, they gave birth to a unique twentieth-century spiritual culture, the phenomenon now known as Russian religious philosophy. Materialism of the Marxist and Leninist variety set down firm roots in Soviet Russia and was perceived as the “true” and “scientific” philosophy, whereas idealism was dubbed a “throwback” “bourgeois” philosophy. But Russian thought took yet another sharp turn after the decline of the USSR, when philosophic pluralism prevailed once again, and Marxism became just one of many philosophic trends. When the Iron Curtain fell, a certain group of Russian philosophers moved abroad in a wave of voluntary emigration. Even though Russian philosophers having relocated all over the world do not represent any integral or even common philosophic trend, one still can attribute them to yet another constellation of cross-border Russian philosophy—a modern one. When selecting the contributors to this collection, the compilers of this Anthology considered all these philosophers who now live and work in Russia and abroad. Indeed, not every thinker deserving our attention appears in this Anthology. We, however, never intended to present all of contemporary Russian philosophy in a single book. Our first concern has been to present the fundamental range of contemporary philosophic problems in the works of famous Russian philosophers. Consequently, in contrast to the “single-mindedness” of Sovietera philosophers and the bias toward Orthodox Christianity of emigrant philosophers, this Anthology offers to its readers a plurality of positions different from each other and widely diverse texts by undoubtedly quite exceptional authors. Here you will find strictly academic philosophic works and those in an applied, pragmatic format—secular and religious—dedicated to severe social

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and political problems, to pressing cultural topics or insights into international terrorism, as well as to contemporary science and global problems. Given the many systems for transliterating Russian, we have chosen the one adopted by the Library of Congress, which has many of the same characters that are in the one used by the US Board on Geographic Names. However, for the sake of the general audience that may also use this anthology, diacritics and ligatures that are commonly found in works for Slavic studies have been avoided. Here also the overarching character ties for Romanizing ц as in ts is absent, and palatalizing vowels, such as я and ю do not appear over ia and iu because these are generally sometimes omitted possibly due to their selfevident nature. Similarly, й as in the ending ий is rendered not by iy nor by ij, but by ii, to simplify what appears odd to English readers in order not to complicate pronunciation for them. Тhe Russian sounds for the palatalizing e and the hard э both remain e. Finally, it seems unnecessary to represent in English the hard sign ъ in transliteration; but the soft sign ь must still be conveyed by an apostrophe because in some words its absence would change the meaning. This system prevails except (1) in quoted material where naturally the spelling in the original is retained, (2) in transliterating names that have become part of common usage, such as Tolstoy or Nicholas II as per listings in Merriam Webster dictionaries, and (3) in the case of a contributor’s preference for the spelling of his or her own name. Capitalization of Romanized titles observes the conventions in Cyrillic although the English translations of these titles follow the conventions of that language; therefore, readers should take note of which titles are in italics to determine whether the cited work has been published in English, Russian, Ukrainian or another language. Generally, the authors’ preferences have been respected for different translations of a philosophical term, such as Superman versus Overman for Nietzsche’s enlightened superior human being. The Index’s cross-referencing system should mitigate any confusion here. English equivalents, when they exist, are provided for Russian philosophical terms, or the terms are given sufficient contextualization to clarify them. Some terms, however, are not translated from other languages to maintain the integrity of the concepts, as for instance, in the case of Dasein. These remain open invitations to the wonderful world of classical and postclassical philosophy. For one of the editors of this anthology, Mary Theis, who has specialized primarily in Russian and French literature and not in philosophy per se, the editing of this philosophical project has taken her on an amazing journey into the minds of more than twenty contemporary Russian thinkers. For s­ pecialists

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and generally anyone who wants to understand better what continues to inspire Russian thought, it would be wise to add this book to their reading list. While preparing to publish this Anthology, we were actively and fruitfully engaged with the authors to whom we are deeply grateful for their responsiveness and creative participation. Much to our regret, Pavel Gurevich, Vadim Mezhuev, Valery Podoroga, and Sergey Horujy passed away before this work could be completed. We hope that the texts they provided for this Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology will further contribute to richly deserved fond memories of these honorable men. Finally, we give heartfelt thanks to the editors and the staff at Brill, whose support and high professional standards have made it possible to realize the production of this book. Mikhail Sergeev Alexander Chumakov Mary Theis

Anatolii Akhutin Born on September 11, 1940 in Leningrad, Anatolii Valerianovich Akhutin lived in Moscow from 1945 to 2014 and since 2014 has been living in Kiev. Akhutin graduated from the Chemistry Department of Moscow State University (msu) and then did postgraduate studies in the field of physical chemistry within the same department. In 1965 he defended a thesis for the degree of Candidate of Chemical Sciences. Until 1988 he worked at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology (ihst) of the ussr Academy of Sciences. In 1988 together with a group of colleagues, he moved to its Institute of Philosophy, where he worked until 1991. From 1991 to 2013, he was employed as a leading research worker at the Russian State University for the Humanities (rsuh) in the creative group Dialogue of Cultures under the leadership of Vladimir S. Bibler, and after that as a leading research worker at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (iash) of rsuh, and finally, as an Associate Professor in its Department of Philosophy. In 2014 Akhutin together with his wife emigrated to Kyiv (Ukraine). Now he is an Associate Member of the European Humanities Research Center University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.” From very early in his years as a student, Akhutin was engaged in philosophy, first on his own, then in seminars at the Department of Physics at msu, at the Institute of Philosophy of the ussr Academy of Sciences, and in various home circles. In 1967 he became a member of and a participant in the Dialogue of Cultures, which was Bibler`s home seminar for a long time. In 1991 this group became an independent unit of the rsuh Department of Philosophy, uniting philosophers, psychologists, historians and cultural scientists who conducted research on their common program. While working in ihst, Akhutin`s research dealt with the philosophical history of science. In History of the Principles of Physical Experiment. From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Istoriia printsipov fizicheskogo eksperimenta. Ot Antichnosti do xvii veka) (Nauka, 1976), he presents a comparative study of the forms of thought experimentations—understood not only as an element of experimental sciences of modern time, but also of theoretical thought in general. His book, The Concept of “Nature” in Antiquity and in Modern Time (Poniatie “priroda” v Antichnosti i v Novoe vremia), (Nauka, 1988) shows the fundamental—logical and ontological—difference between the ancient Greek concept of physis—the thing in the essence of its being—and

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the new European concept of nature, the subject of natural science research. Both books were reprinted together as Experiment and Nature (Eksperiment i priroda) (Nauka, 2012). In the following years Akhutin`s research has focused on problems of the philosophy of culture—philosophy being understood in the spirit of the concept of dialogue of cultures. From 1991 to 1996, Akhutin taught two courses in the Department of the Theory and History of Culture of msu’s Department of Philosophy: Logical Introduction to Philosophy (Aristotle`s ii Analytics) and Reading Theaetetus; since 1996 in the rsuh Philosophy Department, he has been teaching Introduction to Philosophy, Reading Theaetetus, Reading Parmenides, Philosophy of Culture, Logical Introduction to Philosophy (Aristotle`s ii Analytics), The University Idea as a Philosophical Problem, and Philosophy as Logic In addition to articles in various editions, Akhutin has authored two fundamental monographs. The first is the texts that make up the book, Pivotal Times. Articles and Sketches (Povorotnye vremena. Stat’i i nabroski) (Nauka, 2005). These are attempts to comprehend the philosophical meaning of pivotal times on the epochal borders of European culture: between the Greek myth and the logos; between the ancient and medieval world; between the “old” and the “new” in the era of the Copernican revolution, and finally ­between the former and the present—the modern and the postmodern. His The Antique Principles of Philosophy (Antichnye nachala filosofii) (Nauka, 2007) is an original study of the philosophies of Pythagoras, Parmenides and Heraclitus, that considers ancient philosophy as a holistic culture of philosophical thought, joined by certain basic principles: the answers to the questions, “What does it mean truly to be?” and “What does it mean truly to comprehend?” are mutually determined and constitute the ontological basis of truth. Ancient philosophy reveals and questions the answers, that is, the basic principles, defining the structure of the Greek image of thought (logos) and correspondingly its image of the world (cosmos). By questioning its own basic principles, the “antique (special) principles of (general) philosophy,” ancient Greek philosophy seems to open for universal worldwide discussion these historical and culturally specific responses. In addition, Akhutin prepared for the publication and extensively commented on Lev Shestov’s works in 2 volumes (L. Shestov. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh) (Nauka, 1993), and on Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (L. Shestov. Kirkegard i ekzistentsial’naia filosofiia) (Progress/ Gnosis, 1992).

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Currently Akhutin is working on two monographs, summarizing his years of experience teaching two courses: Philosophy as Logic and Homo Europaeus, or the Philosophical Essence of European Culture. Anatolii Akhutin’s article, “Homo Europaeus,” which appears in this anthology, was published in Russian in an international anthropological journal, Fonar’ Diogena: Chelovek v raznoobrazii praktik (Diogenes’ Lantern: A Human Being in a Variety of Practices), no. 2 (2016), 271–308.

Homo Europaeus Anatolii Akhutin 1

In Memoriam of Modern Man

As the nineteenth century came to a close, in a letter to Wilhelm Dilthey, Count Yorck von Wartenburg wrote the now famous following sentence: “‘Modern Man,’ that is to say, man as he has been since the time of the Renaissance, is now ready to be buried.”1 He left open the question regarding who it was that would bury him, just as he left open the question of whether this would be some kind of New Man or some Superman or, indeed, not a man or person at all. Since that time “man” and “humanism,” not only “modern man,” have been given more than several funerals, whether you call him Homo Fidens, Homo Faber, Homo Ludens or the more familiar terms Homo Sapiens, Homo Humanus and Homo Subjectus. In 1938 Martin Heidegger was prepared to bury not only “modern” man, but also “Western” man with all his original historical beginnings: “What is taking place now is the end of the history of the great beginning of Western man. In this beginning man was called or destined to be the guardian of being, but straight away he betrayed this calling of his by a claim to represent being in its narrow-minded, dominating “un-being” (in seinem machenschaftliche Unwesen).”2 In this connection, “the twilight of the West” as a whole had already previously been declared, although the contours of this 1 “Der ‘moderne Mensch,’ d.h. der Mensch seit der Renaissance, ist fertig zu Begraben werden,” Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1887– 1897. Letter of 21.08.1889 [Correspondence between Wilhelm Dilthey and Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1887–1897] (Halle, [Saale], 1923) 83. 2 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 95 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2014), 96. The curious thing is that, through Heidegger’s use of the word “machenschaftliche,” in his depiction the face of “Western man” assumes some Jewish features. There is a drawing to the end of the history of the struggle of this person with being, and this “warrior with being” submits to overcoming. “And it is possible, in this ‘struggle’ deprived of any goal, in this struggle which, therefore, can only be a caricature of a ‘struggle,’ the victor will be a great groundlessness, unconnected to anything, but placing everything in its own service (Jewishness). Authentic victory, the victory of history over that which is deprived of history, will be sustained only there, where the uprooted excludes itself [from history] in as far as it does not dare to attain being [bytie], but only takes “the existent” [sushchee] into account and considers its calculations real or valid.” [Ibid.] It is, also, not difficult to set Marx’s “bourgeoisie” alongside this image of the person involved in calculating manipulations.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004432543_003

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“West” were not clearly delineated. The funeral of twentieth-century humanity has been postponed and changed in perspective, it may be said, and on a really unprecedented, unheard-of scale. However, the paradox in all of this is that no contributory invasion of barbarians has been observed. It is neither Huns, nor Vandals, nor even radical Islamists who are destroying European cities or wiping out massive swathes of the population; instead we have Europeans themselves, inspired by the ideas of European thinkers and with the help of weapons invented by European science and produced by European technology. World wars, revolutions from the Left and revolutions from the Right—these are all the doings of utterly “modern man,” that is to say, of humanity as formed within European culture over the past 300 years or, according to other scales of reckoning, over the past 2,500 years of European history. It is “moderne Mensch” himself who has destroyed and buried “modern man.”3 He really has formed himself in this manner, applying the modernizing process to himself, always outrunning himself to be ever a step ahead of where he is. To use Georg Hegel’s terminology: he has been “sublating” himself in his own progressive development. The motor of the modern age is negation: the truth of being does not reside in an attained result, but in a new principle for attainment, in a new acting subject for whom “the attained” has become the past, “objectified” material, matter that is subject to reworking by a new spirit. This new level of attainment includes the subject of the preceding means of attainment and understanding—“the phenomenon of spirit.” In his notion of the “Overman” Friedrich Nietzsche merely provided a pathetically romanticized version of Hegel’s objective “spirit,” shrouding it in an obscure life will. It is Hegel’s being in a finite spirit, an immanent and permanent negative self-transcendence. In the twentieth century according to Boris Pasternak, a new person has again already outrun us by the “carriage” of his project: we who long ago ­became “modern” apparently have been surpassed by a still newer person. The 3 This, too, was prophesied. The logic of “class war,”, according to Marx, would lead to the situation where growing capitalist production would itself create its own demise in the form of the proletariat created by it, that is, the proletariat who would “expropriate the expropriators.” It is worth understanding this “proprium”—pro-per-ty—not in political economic terms, but as pertaining to “ordinary life” and to recall the Greek term for it—ούσια—as we are faced with the opening up of another front in the struggle for the “creature” that is man. Heidegger cast “the metaphysical object” as his grave-digger, transforming the world into a uniform world of unifying calculations, of technical manipulations (Machenschaft), planning and becoming only reworked material. The ultimate degree of expropriation deprives man of his very last vestige of private property—that is. of his very own self.

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old has passed so that now everything is new. But, judging by everything, it is new in a different way. Now the new person has “removed” the old, not preserving it as some “abstract moment,” but eliminating it as a “class,” as a “race” or, indeed, as a category of any kind. Now the manner of denying the old world is not dialectical. It is denied not by means of repentantly changing its own mind. It is denied by a liquidation of the other. The positivity of Hegelian negation, that is, of the logic of “modernization” is present or inherent in the objective spirit of science and technology inasmuch as it is conceived as the logic of immanent development. The new dialectic is negative in a different and more decisive way. Its negation is a nonsynthesized contradiction or disagreement, setting things and human beings free to contradict the concept destined to sublate it and to defend its being outside the concept.4 The self-assured, dialectical connection of historical development gives way to a rupture. It is not an orderly negation removing what had preceded it, nor a natural and historical transition from “bud” to “flower,” but destruction to the very foundation and creation of humanity, something completely new, with its own entire world of “what is new.” The only thing that differs is the treatment or analysis of these positive foundations. In them was found the particular being of man, which was discerned in the “changed forms” of the preceding culture: various types of “the species of man,” subject to liberation or continuous fighting. The borders and thresholds of dialectical transitions proved to be barricades set up by revolutionaries, marked by trenches along military frontlines and the barbed wire surrounding concentration camps. The historical backbone of European history had been broken. More than once it had already been noted that the worldwide scope of twentiethcentury war was not powered just by the drive for more “living space” (Lebensraum); present here also were the purpose, pathos and energy of an anthropological revolution, which was no less worldwide and radical than all-out war. “Living space” was demarcated by the frontlines of wars for “the new man,” the frontlines of “final and decisive battles,” the frontlines of great constructions and revolutionary transformations.5 Revolutions unfolded in the form of wars 4 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966), 160: “That which is negated negatively maintains the ‘force of negation’ until it has passed.” (“Negierte ist negativ, bis es verging”). 5 “The century [The twentieth—A.A.] put the question ‘What is this century?’ and answers it.” “This is our last and decisive battle.” Alain Badiou, The Century (Vek), (Moscow, 2016) 52. His very battle has been fought on two fronts: in a revolution from the right and in a revolution from the left, the latter of which is more familiar to us, in Russia. For the revolution from the right, see Hans Freyer’s Revolution from the Right (Revoliutsiia sprava) (Moscow, 2009); a detailed overview of this ideology can be found in two articles in Conservative Revolution: An Apologia for Domination (Konservativnaia revoliutsiia: Apologiia gospodstva) by A ­ leksandr

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not only with “interventionists,” not only with the class enemies who emerge in civil wars, but, far more, with an internal enemy, even with the enemy within oneself. The enemy was “the old man,” wherever and whoever he was.

Mikhailovskii. For the first article see http://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=17389; for the second article, bearing the same title, see http://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=17429. One of the ideologues of the last century singing the praises of a “conservative revolution” during the 1930s was Ernest Jünger. According to him it was the “soldier” and “the worker” who each embodied the “new man,” overcoming “the old” in a revolutionary way and providing man’s new inner “Gestalt.” In Jünger’s account, this was the worker of a totally mobilized world, a world in which any distinction between the work of military technology and the military organization of production was done away with. See Jünger’s work, Krieg und Krieger (Berlin, 1930). In it his article “Total Mobilization” was published for the first time. See also Jünger’s Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg, 1932). Both of these works appear in Aleksandr V. Mikhailovskii’s Russian translation, Ernst Jünger, Rabochii. Gospodstvo i Geshtal’t (St. Petersburg, 2000). That revolution—according to whose scheme man places himself simultaneously within the rational order of technology and within the irrational spirit of the people—is called “conservative,” but within the scheme of the futurist “revolution from the left” a similar revolutionary transformation of man was envisaged, to be achieved through a reworking of the old and the new. In the case of both these types of revolution, the “old” man of the “old” world was referred to by the category “the bourgeoisie.” The “warrior-worker” (constructor-transformer)—this was the anthropological idea underpinning the new communist man. The poet Vladimir Maiakovskii wrote: “I am the disposer of sewage and the water-­ carrier, mobilized by the revolution and destined for these kinds of work.” [“Ia, assenizator/ i vodovoz,/ revoliutsiei mobilizovannyi i prizvannyi.”] “I feel myself to be a Soviet factory producing happiness.” [“Ia,/ sebia/ sovetskim chuvstvuiu/ zavodom/ vyrabatyvaiushchim schast’e.”] In the 1920s Aleksandr A. Bogdanov, one of the active participants in the Bolshevik revolution, completed the third and final volume of a work he entitled Tectology or General Organizational Science (Tektologiia, ili Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka), with the first volume appearing as early as 1912 and Volume 3 in 1928. The person is understood here as being a constructor and an organizer. (As time would eventually show, this was a rather more accurate definition of the new “Gestalt” than the term “worker” was; now the total mobilization operating in the cyberworld requires a “person-organizer”). A person-organizer and a person-manager (cybernetos) not only presupposes an organized human mass [to work on], but also constructs himself as a self-organizer. Nikolai Bukharin and Anatolii Lunacharskii worked out a scheme for “industrial man,” for Scientifically Organized Man (noch in its Russian abbreviation) and for “perfected Communist man” (uskomchel in its Russian abbreviation). In 1926 Aleksandr Bogdanov created an Institute for the Transfer of Blood, with the goal of finding a means for the production of “mixed” blood, including general and young elements. In 1920 Nikolai K. Koltsov, a major biologist and geneticist, formed a Russian Eugenics Society, with its own paper, seven volumes (25 issues) of which were published between 1922 and 1930. It was envisaged that the newly created person would have the blood of an international proletariat flowing through their veins, not the racially pure blood of their native soil. In a word, the project of “changing humans at the very deepest level” was not at all an idea that emerged only with China’s cultural revolution of the 1960s and into the 1970s. It was simply a continuation of the burial of the “moderne Mensch” and the embryo of the new person subjected to experiments in eugenics.

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The paradox in all this, putting it mildly, is that in this militaristic and i­ ndustrial-scale mobilization and organization, humanity turns everything, including itself, into the material of its own revolutionary transformations. It turns out that the entire world becomes obsolete: not only has collective man become so, including the philistine bourgeoisie and the inert peasantry, but first and most importantly of all, you, yourself. Revolution—whether it be in the spirit of Ernest Jünger or Leon Trotsky6—must be permanent. Man can become “Overman” only in that way, uninterruptedly reproducing itself by efforts toward self-mastery according to varying terminology, splitting up into such categories as “matter” and “constructor” or “organizer,” or “vital warrior.”7 Only now, I repeat, this self-mastery occurs not as development, but as the “eternal return” of self-conquest, a starting out from the very beginning: a definitive refusal of “the old,” a creation of the new from the very beginning. This is the radical nature of the new, which is not at all a reaction to something; it demands a return to the archaic first element of a beginning when, as the old cosmogonies put it, “there was yet nothing at all.” The person or creature who could call himself “new” was the one who carried within himself his own selfdenial, his self-refutation, a positive potentiality that, from the outset, was “other.” Here appears a radical paradox: in this very splitting into “creator”’ (from the beginning) and “created”—out of nothing or out of matter—man himself emerges. His “matter” is not the passive material of variously understood “progressive” development—be it in upbringing or inculturation; his “spirit” is not one force—be it divine or related to species—which produces and transforms him—be it a spiritual or vital force. Matter itself is spiritual; other subjects are 6 Having read Leon Trotsky’s Memoirs (My Life, published in German in 1929), Jünger wrote the following in 1938, when reissuing his novel, The Risking Heart: “Not only world war, but also world revolution declares themselves ‘at the beginning of the twentieth century.’ At their foundation both [of] these events are one, are two sides of one and the same phenomenon, in many ways one breaking out in the other, and, in many respects, each conditioned by the other. Trotsky’s book unintentionally shows us that Marxism has not grown to match up to that task—not due to a lack of logical consistency, but due to an absence in it of deep and creative life forces. To liberate it and to place it at the service of a great task which is worthy of faith and of witness based on a good conscience—such is the secret meaning of the political struggle into which we have been drawn these last ten years and the end of which it is still impossible to foresee.” Ernst Jünger, The Risking Heart (Riskuiushchee serdtse) (St Petersburg, 2010) 64. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Overman is the idea of man being man, not the setting of one’s hopes on newly appeared heroes. This is a person projecting himself as a project, this is a Will to Power (Wille zur Wille). The Overman’s cultural inheritance includes Goethe’s Stirb und werde.

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concealed in it, other potentialities or possibilities of being. Prior to the splitting of society into “leaders” and “the led,” that is how the self-awareness of humanity is splintered. Who is he then, and what role does he have in this paradoxical—and extremely dangerous—process of self-referral: an author creating himself or matter organized by someone or by something? From where does the author draw his authorial intention, and how is the business of being a person conceived? With whom does he engage in his conflicts? What actually takes place when the author encounters within himself not the passive resistance of inert matter, but instead another authorial intention, that of another author? By means of what kind of “poiesis” is the author of “auto-­ poiesis” created? Maybe no “author” at all is involved. Some say, even this very figure of speech has itself become obsolete. Maybe it is some kind of “structure,” some impersonal “mentality,” some unseen systemic socio-, psycho-, physiological, semiotic, discursive “practice”—always already forming its own “persons,” endowing them with an authorial self-awareness, that includes, among other elements, the notion of being “a substantial subject.” Then, in that case, the funeral of “contemporary man,” that is, of the New Time’s man-as-subject extends more broadly, announcing itself as the death of such a figure as “person” of any kind.8 No, of course we will rush to clarify that here it is a case not of the “person” dying, but of “the person-as-subject,”9 8 In the chapter entitled “The Anthropological Dream” and at the very end of the book, Words and Things, The Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Michel Foucault writes: “In our day it is possible to think only in that empty space where man is no longer present. This emptiness does not represent some lack, and it does not require us to fill some void. This is just some unfolding of space in which it will at last become possible again to begin thinking…. For everyone who wants to talk about the person, about his dominance, his kingdom and his liberation; for all those who still wish to pose questions regarding what man is in essence; for those who, in their quest for truth want to have man as a starting point, and, on the contrary, for those who bring all knowledge down to the truths of man himself; for those who do not agree to formalization without anthropologization and mythologization without de-mystification; for those in general who do not wish to think without a thought for what man himself thinks—in the case of all these absurd and foolish forms of reflection it is only possible to counteract them with philosophical laughter or, in other words, with silent laughter.” “The person, as the archaeology of our thought reveals without difficulty, is an invention of the recent past. And its end may not be far off. If these dispositions are to disappear just as they at some time appeared; if some kind of event, the possibility of which we can only have a presentiment, while not yet knowing its appearance, nor knowing what is hidden in it, destroys these dispositions just as the soil (the ground) of classical thought was destroyed at the close of the eighteenth century—then, one can guarantee, humankind will disappear, just as a face drawn in the sand of a beach disappears” (pp. 362–63 and 404 of the Russian-language edition, Slova i veshchi. Arkheologiia gumanitarnykh nauk). 9 When the death of certain significant figures is announced—whether it be the death of God, of man, of the author or, even, the death of history—it is always worth asking this: In what

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o­ ntologically constructed by Descartes, along with the foundational basis for the modern scientific and technological world. In the course of time, this “subject” has assumed a dominating position of power, not political, but metaphysical power. This is a self-awareness particular to and inherent in him, which turns everything which falls under the gaze of his objective thought—­ cogitation—into an object. This subject, then, applies this theoretical removal or alienation to its own relationship to the world, to history and, indeed, to his very own self. To understand nature, human society, culture, the connection between historical events, his own “psychic” being and even the very way that understanding understands, how and by what means—all this means and entails depriving “that which is understood” of its own form and subject-ness and presenting it in a world of anonymous forces. Like Bertrand Russell’s figure of the barber, who “shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves,” the ego cogitans understands those, and only those, who do not understand themselves. The question is: “Does the barber shave himself?” Conceived objectively, the world already arranges itself in providing an instance, not entering this world, being theoretically removed, but having the functions of observing, overseeing and technically managing. All that is known objectively is, by the same token, prepared in advance to become an instrument, a piece of equipment, in the hands of the knowing subject, of that ego which slips away from knowledge of itself. “A person can do only as much as he knows about.” In this proposition advanced by Francis Bacon one can usefully hear on the one hand the following implicit meaning: “All that a person knows, he knows as an object, as something amenable to becoming a piece of equipment, a means for his practice, the technical application of power, regardless of whether he knows nature, humankind and culture; he himself is the possessor of instruments or equipment, the power of which grows, remains anonymous and unknown in the field of his own objective knowledge.” Correspondingly, on the other hand, for that very same knowing subject, he himself—a person—as the subject of theoretical knowledge, such as biology, physiology, anthropology and sociology—proves to be a certain kind of “matter.” This matter, moreover, has a twofold aspect, passive and active: as passive matter, it is subject to rational c­ onstruction and control

sense have they died and in what does their significance consist? With reference to God, are we speaking of the demise of the God of, say, German Pietism? In the case of the death of man, are we speaking of man as the Cartesian subject? In the case of the author, are we speaking of the author as the chief protagonist of novels in the series, The Lives of Remarkable People? As for the death of history, how do we mean or want to speak of its death?

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or direction—as an object of medical, p ­ sychotherapeutic, social and colonial practices; whereas as active, “materially vital” matter and as an irrational force, it is subconsciousness, will, a mechanism of desires…. A paradoxical schizophrenia arises here: indeed, the mind of the abstract Cartesian t­ heoretician— as exemplified by political economists, biologists, ethnographers, psychologists and doctors—constructs theories about man (that is, about himself). These are mechanistic theories having to do with rational control or ordering. At the very same time this theoretician constructs theories transmuting into myths, that can be described as “bio-Dionysian.” These have to do with forces that are able and ready to carry away their Cartesian inventors. This internally divided, paradoxical person-“subject” “has died.” Conceived by Descartes and Hegel, this New European subject has been capable of construing the world as a world of scientific and technical mastery, having managed to reconstrue human history as the history of its own progressive becoming and self-awareness, but at the same time having allowed forces freely to emerge, forces deprived of their own “subject-ness”—that is, Cartesian rationality. More accurately, this meaning of person, this historical way or method of being a person has radically placed itself in question. Of course, science and technology and the whole culture defined by them have not only not disappeared, but, on the contrary, continue to pursue their own course, successfully and on a hitherto unheard-of scale. At the technical level, it would seem that man can do everything. He has all the principles of creation in his hands, as is attested by nuclear physics with the principles of cosmogenesis, by genetics with the principles of anthropogenesis, and by political technology with “the mechanisms of culture.” What is at issue is not the strength of this empire, but the metaphysical power of the emperor. Together with the discovery of the limits of this power, that is to say, the limits of its metaphysical meaning—beyond the limits of the empire of “objective spirit” with its underground “deaf-dumb demons”—a new horizon of thought is opening up, a horizon worth considering. The point, of course, is what is being sketched out beyond those limits. What is put in question is not a certain historical “case” known as “European man,” but the specific historical meaning of the being of man in the sense of man as such—in the all-general sense in which European philosophy treats and construes him. The attention charged with this task is directed beyond the limits of this specificity, to where these meanings are formed, and these limits are created. Put another way, if this question is to a serious extent philosophically radical, it should be more attentively ­considered at the level of the primacy of the first cause: it is not a matter of a new definition of man, but, rather, a matter of pinpointing where and how an ­ontological self-definition of man is produced, if it can indeed be produced.

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The  First Source is found somewhere and somehow beyond the world and ­beyond humanity. I repeat, it is there, “where nothing has yet been,” where there are no foundations—neither humanitas for humanity, nor “racionalitas for reasoning minds”…. nor “substantial subjects,” nor “tribal” man, nor “natures,” nor “volitions,” nor “basic instincts,” in the element of possible beginnings before the beginning, in whose presence “even the gods tremble.” This arrangement is similar to an imagined event of anthropogenesis—a suspension, a braking process, the switching off of all instincts, habits, life desires that disconnects with what is possible and decisive. Truly, it is a “fear of God” which is all the more threatening or ominous inasmuch as there is no God upon whom one could rely. When New European Man took a look backward, he saw the whole of history and above all, European history as his own history, the history “of the great restoration of the sciences,” the history of his own becoming in self-knowledge. Looking back to the twentieth century, he noticed the stops and interruptions, the returns to a beginning, and the multiplicity of possible others: one had the morphology of Spenglerian cultures, monads and souls; Michel Foucault’s archaeology of epochal epi-systems; ethnic and historical “mentalities”; various semiotic worlds; and varied pragmatics of linguistic games. It was not a case of empirical observation, because the observant attention was itself undergoing change. According to the old metaphysical habit, way or approach, the objectively thinking subject sees in the discovered multiplicity of “subjects” the defeat of pure reason: this subject sees relativism, pragmatism—hence, its own death. But it is also possible to see something else here: the symptoms of radically evaluating again the self or reconstruing man’s way of thinking and being. The philosophical radicality of the event becomes clearer if we allow or recognize the source of a generally significant meaning residing in particular “souls,” “mentalities,” “epi-systems” and “games”—all seen as various figures of “the possible.” In their pared-down particularities, as described by researchers, they are, nevertheless, all still subject to the single freely knowing reason of the historian, the specialist in ethnic culture, the semiotician, the archaeologist of knowledge, that is already prepared to construct a general theory of culture accessible to a comparative morphologist or a theoretician of “spiritual practices.” But what if these “ethne,” “traditions” and “practices” come to elude the power of the comparatist scholar who seeks to integrate them all? What if the observed differences seriously expose the ontological autonomy, not the capriciousness of mental mythology, but the self-sufficient architectonics of pure reason? This is surely not a matter of political correctness, but, rather, it is a philosophical paradox. If philosophy allows such an ontological variety, then

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its “principles” touch on their own kind of element of origins, prior even to first principles. The issue is not that of explaining the a priori intention of man in the world, be he natural or divine; rather, the issue is that of the very possibility of such intentions, of the presence of this possibility—this “matter” which is ontologically outside meaning—within the makeup of the factual world of culture. Here “modern” (European) man is experiencing a metaphysical death that is even more fatal than a “modernist” death. In the postmodern view, historical hyper-narratives—the histories of secular cities or sacral histories, the histories of nations, European or universal history, the stages of the unfolding of the world spirit or the history of different styles that tell of the adventures of the many-sided, but actually single, “spirit”—all these fanciful stories, whether they be about spirit or about nature, have been completed, and this literary form has been entirely exhausted. Now there is a final and decisive reckoning as far as these eras of European history are concerned, hitherto fitted in various harmonious arrangements within the song of the great “Odyssey” of the European spirit. Whether it be an end, a summation, the return to a beginning or a worldwide mixing of “languages,” the reckoning has been drawn up in such epic works as St John Perse’s Anabasis, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence and James Joyce’s Ulysses. There are particular “voices of silence” which have exerted a great impact: they include such epic writings as the reflections of Anaxagoras on the notion of the “all in all,” primeval terror, and his glossalalia, about which Giambattista Vico has written and to which Finnegan’s Wake and Velimir Khlebnikov’s Trans-Sense [Zaum’] are returning. There is the notion of a primeval swamp that Walter Benjamin discerned in Franz Kafka. There are Beckett’s final words before adopting his silence and Andrei Platonov’s first thoughts expressed by his very first words. Thereafter, it would seem, man and truth are lost; man no longer finds any names, but instead wanders among a variety of “post-this-or-that,” of “not-this-nor-that” or “post-not-the-Word.” Whether or not modern man is dead and buried, with all his cultures and his adventures in the world of ideas, he has charged himself with the task of philosophical radicality. 2

The World in Crisis: Humanity on Trial

So, who is it who has died, the human being-subject of the modern era, the person of the West or the metaphysical fiction that is the “person”? For now, at least, let us note one thing: the question about this person is being put by the

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very same person whose being is in question; the person of European culture is questioning precisely that which culturally shapes him as a European. From the beginning of the last century there has been talk of a crisis being experienced by this culture as a whole and in its different spheres. A passionate and powerful capacity to “go right to the foundations” of everything, “to the very roots and the heart of a thing” carries within it the danger of causing a fundamental trembling of the ground. It seems that in unleashing the elementary forces connected with the earth and within man himself, a person has mastery over them and acquires previously untold power, but this very power can be turned against him. With the culmination of World War ii and the very first explosions of atomic bombs, it has become “clear and obvious” that the might which humans possess carries the threat of destroying the elementary foundations of humanity’s very existence on earth, not only its conceptually existential foundations, but even simply its material ones. Humanity’s technological might has proved to be omnipotently destructive. Or, to put this another way, the entire “human” project—together with all the millennia of human history—has become contingent upon the possibility of an apocalypse created by our own hands.10 But the issue, here, is not only in the scale and the unlimited possibilities of the many-sided industry of annihilation. The person as the very material for research, as the “patient”—or object—by the very same token proves to be in the hands of another person, be it a doctor, psychotherapist or politician—is also the subject. In the case of knowledge, the other side of the coin is power. This is Foucault’s theme. In sum, all this testifies to there being not merely a chance coming together of circumstances, but a fundamental crisis, the source of which is concentrated in Homo Europaeus. The difficulty of the crisis consists in this, that the very constitutive laws which have hitherto allowed one to apply judgments, take decisions and evaluate successes and failures are now themselves being put on trial. An a priori system of coordinates is affected: this is a metaphysical network which in a specific way catches primary meanings and primary elements of the world and thought responding to it. Or, put another way, the question or 10

See Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York, 1948), 1–11 [Izbrannoe; Potriasenie osnovanii, (Moscow, 2015), 140–45]. In 1957 Karl Jaspers published Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: Politische Bewußtsein in unserer Zeit (Munich, 1957), where he writes: “All of history is a transition. But today the transition in which we find ourselves is total. It is a transition either to the destruction of humankind or to a process in which man will transform himself… We live in an age of transition between preceding history, which was the history of warfare and a future which brings either total destruction or general peace.” (95).

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matter becomes a seriously philosophical one. The issue, here, is not limited to an event occurring solely in the realm of self-consciousness. What is at stake in all this is the very being, the existence of the person and humanity in the mode or manifestation known as “European culture.”11 In May 1935 Edmund Husserl gave a series of lectures in Vienna under the title “The Crisis of European Man and Philosophy.” These lectures came to form the heart of his subsequently published book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1938). His line of argument focused on the forgetting and the essential calling back to mind of the principles which “cause”—compose, form, constitute—European culture in all its history as a world, that create its “spiritual Gestalt,” which, in a historically connected, cohesive way, make the cultivated being that is man. The principles which it is necessary to recall in Platonic fashion were found by Husserl to be located almost in the same place where Plato had found them, this is to say, in ideas. The attention paid to the ideal primacy of first principles was awoken in ancient Greece, where this thinking was called philosophy. The radical question, the question about roots, about “first principles and causes,” this is a question of “first philosophy,” which, since the time of the Greeks, in one way or another defines and connects the epochs of Europe’s historical existence.12 A radical metaphysical reflexivity with roots or anchors being in the sphere of the ­ideal—this is what constitutes the entelecheia of European culture. But, by the same token, in its history European culture reveals human existence in general as the existence of a being or creature that by its very core nature—and not simply due to circumstances—is a thinking creature, one that is charged with a burden of concern regarding itself, the world and existence.13 Its “idea” is 11

12

13

In 1931, Karl Jaspers defined the concept of “historical situation” as an epochal challenge to humankind which each time newly requires of it reflective attention to the new situation of things and a capacity responsibly to transform itself. See Karl Jaspers, Der geistigen Situation der Zeit (Berlin / Leipzig, 1932). [In Russian translation: Smysl i naznachenie istorii, (Moscow, 1991), 288–418]. As Heidegger reminds us in his 1955 paper “Was ist das—die Philosophie?,” “the word φιλοσοφια tells us that philosophy is something which the existential being of the Greeks defined initially, and not only that, for φιλοσοφια also defines the most treasured core feature of our western European history” (Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 11, 9). Almost literally repeating Hegel’s idea, Husserl says the following: “To bring latent reason to self-knowledge of its own possibilities and to make clear the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility—such is the sole path for the actual realization of metaphysics or universal philosophy. Only after this is it possible to decide the question: ‘With the emergence of Greek philosophy, has European man acquired a certain goal, that is, the aspiration to be human, starting from philosophical reason and to be this alone?’…. Or is this goal a real historical illusion unexpectedly acquired by some nation or other that coexists with other nations within a set of specific historical events? Or, on the contrary, is

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i­nfinite and therefore also has a historical dimension. Husserl inscribes his own transcendental phenomenology into the tradition of prima philosophia. It is understood that philosophy is prima philosophia only when it is universal, when it is occupied not with particular principles of a certain particular world, but with principles of human existence as such. If there is a first philosophy at the heart or foundation of the person of European culture, if his being is extracted from first principles and is constructed upon them, then this person must necessarily understand his own—European—being as universally significant. Let other cultures possess particular original and independent mentalities; but European culture is the culture of general—and pure— reason. In essence mentalities are partial, private self-enclosed modifications of reason—not some kind of “rational faculty,” but the very means of being human by means of the working of self-consciousness, a self-understanding of itself in the world. To enter the European world, to become Europeanized means first to give an account of the foundations of one’s own self-­particularity, second, to open oneself up and become included in the general work of selfconsciousness, and in its turn, third, not to waste, expend or lose one’s own self-particularity in an abstract generality, but, on the contrary, to take it to that level of self-consciousness where one can reveal its possible generality and broad significance. But this means opening up to others and to become included in a philosophising existence. European culture is the culture of ultimate self-consciousness. It is a way of being which requires the unceasing work of reflective self-definition. Therefore, Husserl affirms, if we, Europeans, understand ourselves correctly, then our task is always only to become Europeanized, that is to say, to adhere to “an ineradicable will towards spiritual self-preservation.” Husserl adds: “The task is to become Europeanized,” not “Indianized.”14

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entelechia, first apparent in the Greek nation, in its essence already contained within humankind as a whole? Inasmuch as man, by his very essence, is a rational animal (animal rationale), so, accordingly, humankind also, once all humankind is a rational humankind, is rational, independently of whether it is latently oriented towards reason or openly and clearly oriented towards entelechia, which understands itself, becomes open for itself and consciously directs human becoming. In such a case philosophy and knowledge would be a historical movement of the opening or revelation of universal reason, which is particular or inherent to humankind as such.” “All other human groups understand themselves as something only by comparison with us… In their ceaseless striving for spiritual self-preservation, their motivating idea becomes greater and greater Europeanization, whereas we, if we understand ourselves correctly, never tend towards, for example, ‘Indianization.’” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy, as cited in In Kul’turologiia. xx. Antologiia. Edited and compiled by Svetlana Ia. Levit. Iurist, 1995, 302.

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But these very processes of “Indianization,” “Islamization” and, in a word, “Orientalization,” occurred in precisely the same intellectual circles—and at the very same time—in which Husserl’s lectures were heard. It was precisely philosophical reflection’s claim to universality—that is, extrapolation from that to the universality of the spirit of “European humanity”—according to Husserl—which was being questioned from the viewpoint of another, completely different, and non-philosophical, tradition. Foundations are originary or decisively foundational when their foundational aspect—that, is, their primacy or a priori status—is not, in its turn, subsumed by any other or further foundation. A foundation is not subject to further foundation or grounding if it is situated in such a location from which we, persons, can receive communications, but to which our thought has no access. Being is communicated as “not the same” as thought. A foundation can be communicated to people, but it cannot be subordinated to them. Communication presupposes not communication at the level of thought, but, rather, attention paid to tradition and also practical participation. In philosophy Socratic thought is concerned precisely with the foundation of first bases, with research into, and with the testing of, the primacy of first principles, with discourse about what endows being with the indisputable force of being. It is clear that thought, understood as the foundation of its own foundations is a paradoxical phenomenon, but the testing of the foundational nature of foundations, of traditions given by revelation and preserved, is dangerous. For providing foundations with a foundation, that thought not only already simply discards their a priori nature, but also wilfully abolish their sacral inviolability. There is a direct correspondence between the philosophical phrase or term “Homo Europaeus” and a tradition of undeviating reflective self-distancing and teleological openness to the possible, to the non-given, unexpected future. Precisely, according to Husserl, such a tradition giving coherence to the spiritual existence of European man is the one being resisted and fought against by those people who find their being in a tradition understood as something given from eternity: the unconsciousness of myth, the collective, esoteric knowledge, and revelation. I am speaking not about some kind of specific tradition, but about an understanding of a way of being. The principles of the former involve an event of self-beginning, while the principles of the latter involve or include a decisive event of turning to, or initiation into, the beginningless. A further task is practically to inscribe oneself into a way of existence, whose forms are not a priori, but, rather, “primordial,” contained in the mysteries of ritual, in myth, conveyed in a sacral esoteric tradition and formulated in dogmatic affirmations. Whether we simply limit ourselves to considering what is

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called “the West” or whether we also include the fragmented “East” as well, in either case the cultural history of “European humanity” is a history of internal struggle or opposition, within Homo Europaeus’s self-consciousness, between two “directions” or tendencies, both of which one could call decisive: on the one hand, the tendency of the person drawn to rapid, active and clear-cut decisions and, on the other hand, the tendency of the person drawn to reflective, seemingly passive and sometimes lengthy decision-making. Meanwhile, at the trial of the world crisis that unfolded at the beginning of the twentieth century, the person of tradition stood up against Socratic man in the same way that the person of “the East” stood up against the person of “the West.” Ten years before the appearance of Husserl’s Crisis there had been the publication of René Guénon’s book The Crisis of the Modern World.15 ­According to Guénon, a leading proponent of “neo-traditionalism,” overcoming the crisis 15

René Guénon (Abd al-Wāhid Yahyá) graduated from a Catholic college, and he acquired all his knowledge about “tradition” and “the East” from occult societies in Paris which he frequented. In 1912 he adopted Islam and was inscribed into a Sufi order. In Paris, between 1924 and 1928, he gave lectures in philosophy. As evident in The East and the West, his book of 1924, “the East,” to which Guénon juxtaposed the West, was located in the same place which Hélène Blavatskii conceived as her “Tibet,” where Gurdjieff had his “fourth path” and where a multitude of other “Easts” were opened up in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the “tradition” valued by this “neo-traditionalism” within European culture was considerably more ancient. It is possible to note how each time that a new, epochal “spirit of the times” in the historical life of Europe was affirmed, this was not on the basis of its newness, but, on the contrary, by reference to a treasured ancient time of some newly revealed and deciphered esoteric teachings. In that way Neo-Platonists had read their way into Homer’s mythology, and the teachers of Alexandria saw in Plato some kind of Moses who spoke Greek. The Old Testament was read as an allegorical prophecy of the New Testament. Also, the spirit of “the new” is no exception. Giordano Bruno was cast as a “hermetic Magus”; Francis Bacon was seen as establishing not a new science, but, rather, “a great re-establishment of the sciences,” while the idea of founding the Royal Society in Britain was apparently born in Rosicrucian circles, and it was no chance matter or accident that the “invisible” Rosicrucian brotherhood of “New Atlantis” was located on a path that led from Peru to China and Japan. The Occult milieu within which new-European rationalism arose has been extensively researched in the works of Frances Yeats. See, for example, her study Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and her The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Judging by its overall framework, Guénon found the material for his own “secret doctrine” not so much in the Vedanta as among the Florentine Neo-Platonists of the fifteenth century (See Mark Sedgwick, Against the Current of the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. (Naperekor sovremennomu miru. Traditsionalizm i tainaia intellektual’naia istoriia xx veka.) Moscow, 2014). Marsilio Ficino translated “The ‘Hermetic Corpus’” from Greek in 1453. Ficino refers to Lactantius and Augustine, who were convinced that the author, Hermes Trismegistus, predated Plato, Pythagoras and Orpheus by a considerably long period and was almost a contemporary of Moses.

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requires not a philosophical, but a mystical recollection—a recollection of the primary “wisdom,” “Sophia,” which is infinitely more ancient than any taught and rationally annihilating philosophy. Speaking from the standpoint of “impartial and objective truth,” Guénon introduces us to a teaching of “Hindu doctrine” according to which the world crisis forcing us to think about “the end of the world” is simply the final stage of a cycle known as the Kali Yuga. A centuries-long period of darkness and ignorance will eventually pass, and then the horizon will be lit up by a “true, traditional, supra-rational and nonhuman wisdom.” In so far as there are many religious traditions of that kind, the task will be to discern behind them the features of the original one, general and “integral tradition,” the authentic philosophia perennis, that is, the “eternal philosophy.” Thus, the “European spirit”—understood as philosophia prima, as radical self-reflection, as the uninterrupted work of critical self-consciousness, which digs down to the foundations and the roots, undermining itself and requiring it to provide an answer about itself—subjects itself to questioning by another spirituality, another philosophia perennis, whose beginnings and ends are concealed in the beginningless and the infinite. The revelations of this wisdom are, in essence, the revelations of what is sacred. But here is the point: neither the sages of Benares, nor Tibetan lamas, nor Algerian Sufis are the ones posing this whole question. Rather, it is Europeans themselves. As a question, as a refutation, as one idea struggling against another idea, “traditionalism” all becomes included as part of the wanderings of European self-awareness. From the very beginning resistance has itself belonged to European thought as such. We will find it in Plato’s Socratic philosopher and his “soundless conversation with himself”; in the practical side of Plato—in the politician, the creator of “the city”; in the dispute between Athens and Jerusalem, and in that between Byzantium and Rome; between the Judaic and Aristotelian elements in Maimonides…. Other relevant teachings or belief systems, here, include “original identities,” “Native Soil” types of ideas about “the souls of nations” and neo-traditionalism itself—as also with a notion affirming the “universal and integral man” of Frantz Fanon and a movement associated with Léopold Sédar Senghor called “négritude” affirming African traditions, as well as a cluster of ideas developed by Russian émigrés about the phenomenon of “Eurasianism.” The history of European philosophy is not a collection of metaphysical systems and teachings about “the world and humankind,” pretentious and dubious in equal measure and mutually refuting one another. It is the history of a single and immanent discussion of philosophical thought; of a dialogue ­concealed within the depths of metaphysical monological systems, the history

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of a dispute about constructing that which, in those systems, is “meta,” a dispute about the genealogy and logical meaning of primacy—the a priori ­nature—of first principles and causes. In this dispute we ought to include the very contentiousness of philosophy itself—that directed solely toward ­wisdom—on the part of sacred Sophia, which requires obedient mastery mediated by the sacrifice or surrender of questioning autonomous thought. This is a process of understanding, conversion, dedication, “drawing in” the person in the entirety of their being, not only at the level of thought, for in philosophical tradition, thought is far from simply being the “rational” capacity of a certain “animal”: it actually defines this “animal” in all the living fullness of its being. The dispute of which I am writing is not a dispute between thought and supra-thought, but an existential struggle between ontological dispute and ontological indisputableness. Any kind of “fundamentalism,” conditionally speaking, almost metaphorically, puts the basic issue of existence in question, and this ontologically splits open in the objective reality of a human being. This splitting open is called thought. Here is the danger: if absence of controversy leads to controversy, it enters the life of philosophising self-awareness, but sacral non-controversiality does not require controversy; primordial wisdom is esoteric, and its “theory” requires practical dedication and transformation of the self, not abstract cogitation. Cogitation, it seems, has nothing with which to oppose the kind of spiritual practice that takes hold of a person in their entirety. Here, in this border or marginal territory, the question is put not theoretically, but practically. With “Western civilization” being presented as unspiritual, devoid of ideas, only rationalistic, scientific, technical and consumerist, the very existence of Homo Europaeus—as a matter of life and death—is put in question on a practical level. If we are putting in question the person created by European culture, it is not just on the basis of some idle theoretical curiosity.16 This person’s very existence is in question, and it is only this that makes our question a serious philosophical one. 16

In a reduced or emasculated journalistic idiom, this question sounds more or less like this (here, in a text taken from the deeper reaches of the Internet): “The average European is a person subject to hedonistic consumerism, a ready victim in wars of the spirit. … In the eyes of other, non-European nations, Europe looks like a refuge for godless, short-sighted hedonists who cannot see further than the end of their own nose. It is obvious that only death awaits such a kind of Europe. Therefore, Europe’s formal values have no prospect in the world. ‘What do they have then?,’ ask the non-European ‘primitive’ nations. ‘Clean toilets. That’s all.’ They have international law and intercontinental rockets. But for the sake of what do these people actually live? In essence, their life is entirely meaningless. And the ‘primitive’ non-Europeans really do judge this matter wisely. They know that

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The person of European culture has today been put in question. His very existence is in question and under threat. We perceive and understand this as the pressing issue of the day, and it is specifically a philosophical one. It is, indeed and in particular, a question about the very heart and existence of philosophy itself. In this critical situation one can observe that philosophy does not just amount to constructions of the abstract mind, but it takes the form of a guarded analytical attention paid to “the position of things” which presents us with a task. Philosophical abstraction is directed not to “eternal truths” (istinam) but to a meaning—bearing concentration of time: that is, to a metaphysical—metachronic—meaning of the “physical”—historical (ist­ ­ oricheskogo) event: “What is happening?” 3

The Person Put in Question

The attempt to create a political and economic entity, Europe, out of nation states situated on the territory called “Europe” has forced us to reflect on what it is, besides political unions and bureaucratic structures, which has bound and continues to bind Europeans as Europeans. How has Europe been “created”?17 Can one speak, in general, about some kind of European culture as we speak, for example, about Japanese culture or ancient Greek culture? Following Husserl and many others, can one find a Europe that is a single and enduring idea? Correspondingly, does Homo Europaeus exist? Is this being’s existence in question, as I am saying, and under threat? Or is not this being a fiction from the very outset? The position of things which makes this question so critically vital is described as the globalization of the life of the world. The world becomes “whole” not only because the means of communication, the information, financial and energy networks combine to make it one organism; now all this multiple, various and many-faceted world is the sole possible context and horizon for philosophically grounded meaning of any kind whatsoever, for making sense of things. We are undergoing another Copernican revolution. Eurocentrism is giving way to global centrism. It is not worth attributing this Eurocentrism to the world domination of “Western” science and technology, nor to the colonial notion of “the white man’s burden” and other ideological prejudices and

17

such a way of existence is doomed. Even just because it is fraught with a global technogenic catastrophe.” Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton U P, 1993).

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t­ emplates. Furthermore, the point is not only that the person of European culture is contained within the very viewpoint of his own awareness and within the categories of his own thinking. This very culture itself is conducive to the changeability of forms and categorical structures for receiving thought. In its mental outlook it is not closed in, but from the outset it is open to the other, to the possible, to that which has hitherto received no attention, or that which has been forgotten or unforeseen or not anticipated. This very openness is cultivated by philosophy when it does not lose itself in metaphysical myths and instructive stories, but, rather, is occupied with explaining “the general and the possible,” which, according to Aristotle, are also the concern of poetry. Philosophy articulates a concern and sense of responsibility, on the part of European culture, not with its own, but with what is true, with what is the case for us all, not with what it “originally” seems in a certain community, closed off within a monad of its own language, its own tradition, its own categories. Enduring Eurocentrism apparently resides here: it is not in high self-esteem, but in contesting opinions—and particular “original” mentalities—from the viewpoint of general applicability and truth, going out beyond the limits of the merely imagined and apparent. Methods of thinking, of being aware, and, correspondingly, of being, can be as particular, as exotic and unfathomable as you please, but precisely their impenetrability arouses doubt: they are concealed not from “us,” indeed, but from themselves. Now, in this global city that the world has become, out in the open, on its market square, these monads—which look suspect to one another—are obliged to explain themselves, to reveal themselves, to prove themselves and become fully apparent not only to others, but also to themselves. It is not “Western civilization,” but the “Copernican” viewpoint of a global world that makes monadic souls anxious, leading the consciousness of the inhabitants of cultural planets to self-consciousness. To start with, self-consciousness bristles up with a sense of high self-esteem, but actually the deed has been done: a window has been opened, “an abyss has been opened, an abyss full of stars.” From this perspective the European “planet,” too, has been put in question, with all its own philosophical generalities. The problem is not whether its rational methods are suitable, but how much the generality of its truths is actually “general” and applicable. Plato’s question about qualities “in or as ­themselves”—be they beauty or bravery or the good—require a distillation and “working through” by various perspectives. In order to answer his question, it was necessary, in nineteenth-century Europe, to consider not only the viewpoints of Plato’s own fellow citizens, but also those found in the entire history of European culture, as was done, for example, by Hegel. Today the

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answer to this question requires going out into the “square” of the multilingual world, the world of various mentalities, whose “opinions” are also, moreover, imprinted in the self-contained monads of diverse particular traditions and confessions. Here we also find the “monad” of Europe of the period of the Enlightenment, that is, a secularized society of independently thinking people who are open to public discussion. There in that crossroads, the “spirit” of Europe becomes, as it were, bifurcated: on one hand, it gets involved in a worldwide philosophical dispute of unprecedented scale concerning truth and God, and first principles and eschatological ends; on the other hand, with its enlightened and civilized soul, it is prepared to open itself up widely to multicultural tolerance, as if the fate of all human history were not at all put in question. It is not difficult to notice that the world of European culture itself represents a “world of worlds.” The world in real terms was “imperial” from the very beginning—from the time of the Eurasian empire of Alexander of Macedonia through to Great Britain’s empire. Now after the emergence of nation states and the fall of world empires, it inhabits a spiritual “empire” of culture. Its beginnings, the very elements of this culture have included, once and for all time, Hellenic antiquity, Hellenized ­Judaeo-Christianity, a “West” made up of Arab, Muslim and Roman elements, and an “East” made up of Syrian, Byzantine and Slavic elements, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Co-society is open. I am speaking neither about a historical legacy, nor about stages of growth, but, rather, about the elementary formation of cultural tissue, consisting in figures and events in the internal communication of ontologically varied means to bring about the cultivation of people in their humanity. Multi-ethnic, multilingual, denominationally split up, and secular—including cultures of various epochs, but nevertheless being co-present in any element of cultural awareness—such is the world of modern European culture,18 understood as a form of the cultivation of humankind in its generally significant humanity. Of course, the issue, here, is that of a possible culture: wherever and whenever it has occasion to manifest its own energy. Answering the question “What is man?” as cultivated by a culture ordered in this way, it is possible that we will approach an understanding of what man belonging to a global world is—αντρώπος κοσμοπολίτης, Homo mundi.

18

See Anatolii Akhutin’s book, Europe: Forum of the World (Evropa—Forum mira )(Kyiv, 2014), for greater detail on this subject.

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Julia Kristeva writes in her paper, “Homo Europaeus, Multilinguisme pour une nouvelle identité. Existe-t-il une culture européenne?”:19 That toleration which involves a zero degree of questioning does not amount to a magnanimous acceptance of others. It invites others to place themselves in question, to introduce a culture of questioning and dialogue into encounters which problematize all their participants. When the matter at hand is existentially decisive self-definition, the point is not speech, but action. One can agree on civilized neighborliness, but actually each idea which lies at the basis of a particular culture amounts to an idea about man as such, man in general. That is, it contains a decisive question regarding another idea. The event of contemporaneity, that is, the event (sobytie) of the co-being (so-bytie) of various human cultures, makes public and brings forward onto the stage, into a general forum, to the public square, not instances of mental particularity, but generally significant ideas about man as man. Therefore, these ideas radically problematize one another and, by that same token, problematize themselves. But precisely in such a culture of self-­ questioning, self-alienation and dis-identification from one’s own identity one arrives, according to Kristeva, at the cultivation of a person of European culture having various languages and ways of thinking. Such is its many-faceted cultural Gestalt, its way of being, and correspondingly such is its role in the modern world. “In answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ the optimum European response will obviously not be assured self-definition, but, rather, a passion for questioning.”20 There is no European humanism or rationalism of any kind; there is no “natural” gnoseology nor any “natural” epistemologies, but there is a ceaseless questioning regarding what it means to be or to become human, what it means to think, regarding what is justice or beauty…. The person of European culture turns toward others not with some particular kind of “rationalism” or other that is discovered by them, but with a question about the meaning of thinking. Another “person” can meet with him only if he himself has fallen into the ambit of this question. The same goes for other “classical” questions: “In what does our ‘good’ consist?” “How do we go beyond our own opinions in thinking about being?” “What takes place when revelation occurs, which opens up the s­ acred?” “How does one define that beginning point from which invisible things ­become 19

A recording of Julia Kristeva’s paper can be accessed at https://www.kristeva.fr/homoeuropaeus.html. 20 Ibid.

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visible and definable?” “What is it that is produced in the productions made by man?” “In what ways are worlds and gods revealed in the human person’s ability to receive, imagine and understand?” European humanism affirms the dignity of humankind not in some kind of definiteness that it has, but in all its possibilities, in the work of “makingsense-of-itself,” which it does through the activities of asking, defining and redefining. This is the fertile question about man and humankind. Diogenes’s lamp shines right into the being of the person of European culture. He always finds himself, when turned anew toward the darkness of the searching process. I shall try to offer this definition: Homo Europeaus—homo quaerens se ipsum— is the person asking about himself, searching for himself, as always still possible, a person put in question. Correspondingly, he puts the very questions in question, such as: “Who am I, the person putting questions?” “How is the question constructed, and how is an answer possible?” “Who, here, are ‘the others’?” “What is other—being, the world, gods?” From all this comes its other definition. Being has been in question from the very beginning. It is being that includes the beginning of being, which, put in another way, includes a denial of the given or of the being-before-being—a denial, a refusal, an opening and a drawing of non-being into the business of being. Being in question is penetrated with the techniques of a comprehensive self-distancing, not only intellectually—in logically reflexive theory and in radical philosophical questioning—but also aesthetically, ethically and politically. With them, connected corresponding reflections emerge. Hannah Arendt noticed this particular feature in the political being of European culture. Apart from the reproduction of the life of man as an animal ­rationale—a creature that is able to obtain the means for its own existence— and apart from reproducing its own world as Homo Faber—a creature which itself creates the material conditions of its own existence—and, I add, apart from the reproduction of its own culture as tradition—the condition of finding meaning, the sources of which are hidden or obscure—apart from all these general conditions of human existence, from the time of the Greeks, there has existed the sphere of politics in a very broad sense. The form of man’s existence as a political animal, ζώον πολιτικόν—he is indeed a ζώον λόγον ἔχον—is a public acceptance or taking on—of decisions regarding being, regarding the good that is non-private or domestic, but general. It is understandable that in Greece, the first people to be considered as “sages” were also politicians—­lawgivers, orators and sophists. It is understandable why philosophy emerged precisely in this milieu, why it entered into dispute with the “politicians” and why it conceived of itself as “a higher politics.”

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It is only by virtue of being a “political animal” that man is not a “what,” but a “who”: the former of these is complexly conditioned and sociologically knowable, while the latter is a “who” from the outset, not amenable to any “knowingwhat.” From this derives the situation that the very essence of man is seen in its fundamental originality. Arendt affirms the following: To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (…) they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action (…) This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself.21 The creation referred to as “person” is not the beginning of something which, once created, is present in its being, which develops, lasts and departs. Rather, it is the beginning of a being which itself possesses the capacity to begin: It is the beginning of a beginning or of beginning itself. We take this definition in order to describe that mode of human life through which the person of European culture is present and can be present in the modern world: Homo Europaeus—homo initians se ispum. Here the existence of this European mode or culture of human being—a culture of questioning from the very outset, of beginning from the very ­beginning—that is to say, radical philosophizing—is itself put in question. Questioning man is himself put in question: the culture of Socratic (wise, scholarly) non-knowing, the culture of faith as a divine task, cultural vigilance in doubt as regards methods, the culture of foundational initiative… This selfquestioning being is now placed in question vis-à-vis practical being, on two fronts: the pragmatically “Western,” scientific and technological, positively methodological viewpoint, and the pragmatically “Eastern,” traditional and cultic perspective, where the place of responsible initiative is replaced by fatefully decisive initiation. Just as, in his own time, Socrates was summoned to court, so this person of European culture, this person of radical philosophical questioning is summoned to court. Threatening questions are put to such persons, the intended meaning of which they, like Socrates, must work out and formulate for themselves: 21

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Second ed. (Chicago/London, 1958), 177.

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1.

They need to determine what this self-questioning being as being is, in terms of a practice for self-realization; 2. They need an answer to such questions as: “Can one speak in general about Homo Europaeus?” “What do the internal multilingualism and multiculturalism of European culture signify?” “Is this unity not illusory?” “How can the “spirit” of one single culture and the person nourished by that culture accommodate together paganism, Judaeo-Christianity and the dogmatically and practically divided secularity of the modern era?” 3. What can secular questioning use in order to counteract or oppose the fundamental spirituality of age-long traditions? 4. What is “Eurocentrism” in the context of Europe’s relationship to a global world, and of what kind of Europe is its “centrism”? In future further development of this subject, I plan to show how the self-­ questioning concentration or essence of European man is defined in various ages. Naturally, I will turn, first of all, to that very sphere in which that kind of questioning was revealed, made sense of and articulated—that is, to philosophy. The subject will be treated historically, but the meaning of its unfolding consists in listening to and understanding the formulations that are examined, formulations belonging to various times and various philosophies and, therefore, having various meanings, but all expressing aspects of one meaning-­ oriented questioning—and one can even say—doubting stance with regard to human existence as such. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966. Akhutin, Anatolii. Europe: Forum of the World (Evropa—Forum mira). Kyiv, 2014. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1958. Arendt, Hannah. Vita activa ili o deiatel’noi zhizni. St. Petersburg, 2000. Badiou, Alain. The Century (Vek), Moscow, 2016. Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350. Princeton up, 1993. Bogdanov, Aleksandr A. Tectology: General Organizational Science. 2 vols. (Tektologiia: Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka v dvukh knigakh). Rev. ed. Ekonomika, 1989. (Originally published in 3 vols. in 1928.). Freyer, Hans. Revolution from the Right (Revoliutsiia sprava). Moscow, 2009. Foucault, Michel. Words and Things. The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Slova i veshchi. Arkheologiia gumanitarnykh nauk). St. Petersburg, 1994.

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Guénon, René (Abd al-Wāhid Yahyá). East and West. Sophia Perennis, (paper) 2001; cloth 2004. (English trans.) (Originally published in French in 1924.) Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 95. Frankfurt-am-Main, 2014. Heidegger, Martin. “Was ist das—die Philosophie?” Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 11. Frankfurtam-Main, 2014. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy. In Kul’turologiia. xx. Antologiia. Edited and compiled by Svetlana Ia. Levit. Iurist, 1995. Jaspers, Karl. Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: Politische Bewusstsein in unserer Zeit. Munich, 1957. Jaspers, Karl. Der geistigen Situation der Zeit. (Smysl i naznachenie istorii) Berlin/ Leipzig, 1932/Moscow, 1991. Jünger, Ernst. Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt. Hamburg, 1932. Jünger, Ernst. The Risking Heart (Riskuiushchee serdtse). St. Petersburg, 2010. (Originally published in German in 1938.). Jünger, Ernst. “Total Mobilization.” Krieg und Krieger. Berlin, 1930. Kristeva, Julia. “Homo Europaeus, Multilinguisme pour une nouvelle identité. Existe-til une culture européenne?” 2013. https://www.kristeva.fr/homo-europaeus.htlm. “Letter of August 21, 1889.” Correspondence between Wilhelm Dilthey and Count Paul von Wartenburg, 1887–1897. Halle (Saale), 83. Mikhailovskii, Aleksandr. Conservative Revolution: An Apologia for Domination (Konservativnaia revoliutsiia: Apologiia gospodstva). http://www.apn.ru/index.php?new sid=17389. Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Current of the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Naperekor sovremennomu miru. Traditsionalizm i tainaia intellektual’naia istoriia xx veka). Moscow, 2014. Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. New York, 1948. Trotsky, Leon. My Life (Memoiren). N.p., 1929. Yeats, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Dzhordano Bruno i germeticheskaia traditsiia). Moscow, 2000. Yeats, Frances. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Rozenkreitserskoe prosvvetlenie). Moscow, 1999.

Alexander Chumakov Chumakov Alexander Nikolaevich was born on October 1, 1950 in a village within the North Astrakhan region in the large family of a collective farmerfisherman. In 1955 the family moved to the town of Khadyzhensk, Krasnodar region. After graduating from an eight-year school, he entered the Khadyzhensk Oil College. From 1968 to 1970 he served in Czechoslovakia. Upon his return from the army, he graduated from college (1972), worked in the oil industry, then drilled wells for three years at nuclear test sites in Semipalatinsk and Novaia Zemlia, directly participating in underground tests of nuclear weapons. He was awarded the title of “Striker of the Ninth Five-Year Plan.” Then he became interested in drawing, began to write poetry, and played the guitar. In 1975 he entered the Philosophy Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University. He graduated from the University with honors and received a Karl Marx scholarship in 1981. That same year he entered postgraduate study while teaching philosophy and logic in the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute. After defending his thesis on “Methodological aspects of the study of global problems of our time” (1984) he became the scientific Secretary of the Section of Social Sciences in the Board of the All-Union Society “Znanie” (“Knowledge”). In 1987 he was elected as General Secretary of the Philosophical Society of the ussr and started to work at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the ussr. In 1991 he defended his doctoral thesis in philosophy on the “Socio-Philosophical Aspects of Global Problems.” Since 1991 he has been constantly re-elected as the First Vice-President of the Russian Philosophical Society. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of the Professors of Philosophy (AIPPh). He has earned many diplomas and awards for achievements in scientific and educational activities and has won the International Gusi Peace Prize (2015). He was a head of the Department of Philosophy at the Academy of Public Service under the President of the Russian Federation (2000–2001), at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation (2009– 2017). Currently he is Professor of the Faculty of Global Processes of Lomonosov Moscow State University, head of the group of “Global Studies” at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy Sciences, and a member of the Presidium of the Russian Ecological Academy.

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Chumakov is constantly giving reports and lecturing in Russia and abroad. He is known as a philosopher, a theorist and organizer of science, and an expert in the field of social philosophy, philosophy and methodology of global research, scientific and technological progress, and problems from the interaction between nature and society. He was one of the main initiators and organizers of all seven Russian Philosophical congresses: 1997 (St. Petersburg); 1999 (Yekaterinburg); 2002 (Rostovon-Don); 2005 (Moscow); 2009 (Novosibirsk); 2012 (Nizhny Novgorod); and 2015 (Ufa). He was a participant of the xi World Sociological Congress (Delhi, 1986) and also a participant, guest speaker, and head of sections and round tables at the last seven World Philosophical Congresses: xviii (Brighton, 1988), xix (Moscow, 1993), xx (Boston, 1998), xxi (Istanbul, 2003), xxii (Seoul, 2008), xxiii (Athens, 2013) and xxiv (Beijing, 2018). At the xxi World Philosophical Congress in 2003, he organized the “Philosophy Steamer,” which was specially chartered to deliver 150 Russian ­philosophers from Novorossiisk to Istanbul. It became a hotel for them on the water and attracted considerable attention from foreign participants at the Congress. Then there was the symbolic return of the “Philosophy Steamer” to Russia. After the end of the xxii Congress in 2008 (Seoul) he organized a philosophical and educational campaign: 83 Russian and foreign philosophers who arrived in Vladivostok from South Korea by ferry held lectures and creative meetings as they rode from Vladivostok to Moscow on a specially insured “Philosophical Train,” with stops in major Russian cities. Chumakov is the founder and editor-in-chief of two journals, Age of Globalization (2007) and Bulletin of the Russian Philosophical Society (1997), and he is the executive editor and a member of the editorial boards of a series of books, textbooks, periodicals, domestic and foreign journals. He initiated GLOBAL STUDIES, and is co-editor and author of articles of fundamental international works on global studies in Russian and English: Encyclopedia (Moscow, 2003); Encyclopedic dictionary (Moscow/St. Petersburg/New York, 2006); Encyclopedic reference book (Moscow, 2012, 2016); Global Studies Encyclopedia (­Moscow, 2003); Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary (Amsterdam/New York, 2014); and the Global Studies Directory. People, Organizations, Publications (Leiden/ Boston, 2017). Based on the best achievements of domestic and foreign global studies, he attempted to build a general theory of globalization, considering it initially as an objective historical process unfolding in the cultural and civilizational space, permeated by the confrontation of different forces and interests. In his works he formulates and substantiates the view of global studies as a special

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sphere of scientific, philosophical and cultural studies aimed at theoretical and practical solutions of the global contradictions of our time. The author identifies a range of basic categories and formulates the fundamental ­provisions that make up the philosophical basis of global studies as a specific branch of interdisciplinary knowledge. He argues that the focus of global research should shift to the humanitarian sphere and, in particular, to the global world order, axiology, environmental education and the formation of global consciousness. Chumakov has published more than 650 scientific papers, including a trilogy on the theory of globalization, as well as other monographs and educational literature, including some in foreign languages.

Historical and Philosophical Aspects of Global Studies in the Modern Scientific System Alexander Chumakov 1

The Background of the New Research Area

Global Studies can be defined as an interdisciplinary area of scientific studies focusing on the essence, the cause and tendencies of globalization, and the analysis of its positive and negative impacts. As an independent scholarly field and a sphere of public policy, Global Studies started to take shape in the late 1960s when various sciences faced the need to solve systemic problems on a global scale. These problems first manifested themselves in the “society-nature system” [relationship between society and nature], but their list soon grew longer, and they were summarized as “contemporary global problems” and became the original focus of the academic community. The term “Global Studies” (or “globalistics”), albeit one could come across it in specialist literature back then, still had quite a way to go before coming into common use. The term made a comeback only in the second half of the 1990s after the collapse of the socialist system when scholars seriously turned to studying the processes of globalization. By that time, they had collated considerable theoretical and factual evidence in the sphere of global processes and phenomena, and terms, such as “globalization,” “Global Studies,” “global problems,” “global world,” and “antiglobalism,” became widely used not only in academic literature but also in the mass media, political argot and in everyday language. It all added up to prerequisites and conditions for the shaping of a novel discipline—Global Studies (or globalistics), which, however, is still ambiguous. 2

Global Studies: Judgments and Interpretation

The trouble is that although Global Studies per se and the essence of its key terms do not seem to pose any problem for fundamental understanding, scholars still frequently differ in interpretation of the contents of the studies and the meaning of its key terms. For example, some consider Global Studies to be an

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academic discipline,1 others tend to see it as a sphere of social practices,2 and some would deem it to be an interdisciplinary (supra-disciplinary) sphere of scholarly knowledge,3 while there are those who appear downright opposed to recognizing its right to exist.4 No less heated discussions go on about globalization—the key topic of Global Studies. The product of technology-related types of social development, it entails a vast variety of consequences. It is being construed as the cause of global problems; then, on the contrary, as their direct effect. In doing so, some would stick to the idea that globalization is an objective process and that Global Studies provides insights into this process and its consequences, whereas others tend to see globalization as the result of actions taken by certain countries, social and economic structures or political forces on a global stage. However, these most diverse opinions regarding the very construction of Global Studies and its key notions should not come as a big surprise, as this is a brand-new sphere of scholarly knowledge that is actively evolving. Therefore, these differences are not academic games with semantics; they are instead a uniform and quite specific interdisciplinary lingua franca in the making. With this in mind, one should reasonably point out that the term “Global Studies” first emerged on the strong wave of discourse and numerous publications dedicated to the perils of global problems that became apparent in the early 1970s after the first published reports of the Club of Rome. Originally, a couple decades before the first talks of “globalization,” the phenomenon that now is the centerpiece of Global Studies referred to the sphere of scholarly knowledge that only dealt with the study of global problems. This kind of situation is quite understandable, as the effect of any particular cause is often seen sooner than the cause itself. The terms, “anti-globalism” and “alter-globalism,” came to the Global Studies much later—at the turn of the twentieth century.

1 See: Marat A. Cheshkov, Globalistika kak nauchnoe znanie. Ocherki teorii i kategorial’nogo aparata (Мoscow, 2005); Khalil A. Barlybaev, Obshchaia teoriia globalizatsii i ustoichivogo razvitiia (Мoscow, 2003). 2 See: Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (Profile, 1999); I.A. Vasilenko, Politicheskaia globalistika: Uchebnoe posobie dlia vuzov (Logos, 2000); Aleksandr S. Panarin, Iskushenie globalizmom (eksmo P, 2002). 3 See: Robertson, Roland and Kathleen E. White, eds., Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology (Routledge, 2003); Alexander N. Chumakov, Filosofia globalizatsii. Izbrannye stat’i. 2nd rev. and expanded edition (Moscow up, 2015). 4 Anastasiya V. Mitrofanova, Global’naia Alternativa? V poiskakh novykh form demokratii dlia Rossii i Zapada. (Nauchnaia Kniga, 2000).

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All these terms must be properly organized, because the status, categories, principles and approaches of Global Studies represent a matter of principle. Otherwise one cannot begin even to hope to understand contemporary tendencies worldwide or to make a stand against global threats.5 Going back to the essence of key categories and their mutual dependence, we should point out the following: globalization is a natural and historical process that has been going on for centuries; global problems are the expected result of said process; anti- and alter-globalism mean protest moods and movements in connection with globalization; whereas Global Studies represents the sphere of theory and practice focusing on globalization and global problems arising out of it, as well as the consequences of global changes in various areas of social life. 3

Globalization as the Key Topic of Global Studies

Originally having grown out of the study of global problems—that is the analysis of the effects, when the term “globalization” simply did not exist—Global Studies baffles some contemporary scholars as to what preceded what and what came out of what. Therefore, we should turn to the term “globalization.” As a rule, it is used to characterize the integration and disintegration processes on a global scale in economics, politics, culture and human-caused environmental changes— global in form and essentially affecting the interests of the global community. Meanwhile, there are two extreme ways of constructing both the phenomenon of globalization and the history of its occurrence. The first is construing the global nature of social ties and relationships in such a way that one endeavors to see them go as far back as primeval society. Adepts of this point of view tend to apply the term “global” even to the early stages of human development.6 The other extreme comes from a much too narrow construction of globalization in which contemporary processes of social development are studied from the perspective of any particular sphere of social life, most commonly 5 This is still a topical problem despite a solution reached to some extent in preparing and publishing the extensive reference book, Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary, edited by Alexander N. Chumakov, Ivan I. Mazour and William C. Gay, foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2014). 6 This point of view is most consistently upheld in national Global Studies by A.P. Nazaretian (see: A.P. Nazaretian, Civilization Crises in the Context of Universal History (Synergetics—­ Psychology and Forecasting) Mir, 2004).

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that of economics, as has Valentina Fedotova, who maintains: “Incorrect construction of globalization comes through one’s failure to comprehend it as one quite specific economic process…”.7 This disregards the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary globalization, and the latter is studied out of context of its genesis and fundamental causes, that is, without due regard for the history and trends of establishment of international structures and transnational ties. This kind of approach often ties globalization with the events of the twentieth century, if not its last decades, and it is seen to evolve in waves rather than in a progressive and incremental manner. In addition, globalization is often seen as a deliberately started and controlled process, a thoroughly orchestrated policy pursued by some obscure entity. Some would go so far as to regard globalization as a subjective reality, someone’s wicked design pursued to benefit a certain community, transnational corporations or individual states. These extreme concepts of globalization fail to cover the entire spectrum of views on this matter, and their diversity is attributed to the complex nature of the problem, as well as to insufficient study of this topic. And this is exactly the source of certain negative consequences, promoting misunderstanding between people, hindering interdisciplinary interaction, building serious obstacles on the path toward understanding the true causes of globalization and the global challenges it entails. This is the cause of misunderstandings and numerous conflicts as the world in many ways is becoming increasingly united, integrated and interdependent while sufficiently effective tools capable of regulating social relations on a global scale in the modern context are non-existent.8 Apparently, one can hardly expect to handle the aforementioned problems with any degree of success without in-depth studies and sufficiently clear understanding of the essence of globalization processes. The time has come to make up one’s mind about the status of Global Studies, which has already accrued extensive materials and evolved considerably to be represented by a variety of schools, research trends, associations, creative teams, and scientific communities. The complexity of the subject of inquiry and inevitable interdisciplinarity are thoroughly detrimental to delimitation of the subject of our focus, as it often merges with futurology, cultural studies, philosophy, and other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical knowledge

7 Valentina. G. Fedotova, “Edinstvo i mnogoobrazie kul’tur v usloviiakh globalizatsiii,” Voprosy Filosofii, no. 9 (2011), 46. 8 See: Igor K. Pantin, “Globalizatsiia i sud’by tsivilizatsii,” Chelovek. Nauka. Tsivilizatsiia. K semidesiatiletiiu akademika Viacheslav. S. Stepina. (М, 2004); Alexander N. Chumakov. “Global’nyi mir: Problema upravleniia,” Vek globalizatsii, no. 2 (2010), 6.

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­ rovided by Global Studies often requires specific decision-making, which exp pands the boundaries of the subject. 4

The Objective Basis for Global Studies

For better understanding the problem at hand, we should trace the conceptualization and establishment of the concept of a global world. As we have already mentioned, Global Studies began when Soviet and foreign literature first referred to “global problems of the modern age.” In the context of our discourse this fact is of fundamental importance, as present-day opinions about globalization are in weak or even nonexistent correlation with global problems and with the time about forty years ago when they became the subject of systemic study. Consequently, Global Studies is often correlated only or mostly with the study of globalization processes, dubbing it, at best, an infant science that is barely a decade and a half old, thereby squeezing its history into the period when scholars focused on it. It should be noted, however, even though the scholars of 1960s focused on the effects (global problems) rather than on the processes of globalization, the integrative sphere of interdisciplinary research started to take shape in the science, focusing on theoretical study and practical responses to fundamentally new dangers to humankind as a whole. Back then it became apparent that, along with the differentiation of academic knowledge, a phenomenon accompanying the science for ages, one would also definitely need the integration of theoretical and practical skills applicable to the study of new phenomena in all their immensity, integrity and complexity of interrelationship, both within global problems and in their relationships with the study of economics, sociology and political science. Therefore, Global Studies first emerged as a fundamentally new research area with processes of integration at its forefront, and a sphere of social practices covering international policies, economics, laws and even ideology. In a way, Global Studies came as a response to the challenges of the modern age, when environmental problems hit developed countries first, then spilled over into other states as a result of the growing imbalance between human beings and the environment. The discovery of unprecedented environmental pollution was followed by the ominous trend of uncontrolled overpopulation of the planet and the limits of exhaustible resources, not to mention the arms race whipping up into a frenzy that threatened the upward tendency and the very existence of civilization. The imbalance between society and nature reached its maximum, while the extent of fragmentation and division of the human

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race in the face of global problems is now apparent not only to professionals but also to the general public. 5

The Academic Background of the New Research Area

It should be noted that certain tendencies changing in the evolving cohesive world had become the focuses of scholars and philosophers a bit earlier than they became apparent to the public. First attempts to understand these nascent global tendencies and the fundamental, universal problems they caused were made by Thomas Malthus with his ideas of biotic population control, by Immanuel Kant reasoning about everlasting peace, and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck reflecting on the role of human beings. Evidently, the universalist ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set forth in the Communist Manifesto and in a number of other pieces should be mentioned in this context as well. Initiated by these two authors in 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association reflected the long-felt need for the consolidation of various political and professional actors on a global scale, and de facto heralded the rise of numerous international organizations, which multiplied ever since worldwide and are now an integral part of the global community. A crucial role in understanding global tendencies when they were not yet that obvious was played by the theoretical works of Oswald Spengler, Edouard Le Roy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadskii, Aleksandr Chizhevskii, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Arnold Toynbee, Karl Jaspers, Bertrand Russel, John Somerville, and others.9 These thinkers were primarily focusing on brand new tendencies that had disrupted the natural balance of nature and social systems, and they attempted to explain them on the basis of the knowledge accrued at their time. Their works and thoughts about “the size of the population of the Earth,” “everlasting peace,” “proletarian unity worldwide,” “universal divine-­ humanity,” “noosphere,” “global government,” “nuclear omnicide,” and other issues conditioned philosophical and academic minds as well as those of the broad public to understand that humanity is an integral whole that is inextricably intertwined with its natural habitat—biosphere, geographical environment and space, and to know that it is doomed to pursue one common fate and to bear joint liability for the future of this planet. For example, working on the concept of noosphere, Vladimir I. Vernadskii as early as in 1930s recognized the profound unprecedented changes to the 9 Global Studies Directory. People, Organizations, Publications, edited by Alexander N. Chumakov, Ilya V. Ilyin and Ivan I. Mazour (Editions Brill / Rodopi, 2017).

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Earth brought on by human activities, and he warned about the inevitable death of every living creature on Earth unless society chose to evolve in a reasonable manner that is consistent with the laws of the nature. In his essay “Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon” (“Nauchnaia mysl’ kak planetarnoe iavlenie”), he pointed out: “For the first time ever, human beings understood that as inhabitants of a planet they can—must—think and act in a new way—not just as separate individuals, families, ethnicities, states or alliances, but in a global way as well.”10 Similarly, Jaspers first used the term global as early as in 1948 as it is still used today to express his deepest concerns about the day when this planet becomes much too small for humanity and its resources become much too scanty. With the clear picture of this kind of future in mind, he wrote, “Our historically new situation, for the first time being of ultimate importance, represents the real unity of people on the Earth. Technical abilities of modern means of communication made our planet a single whole that is entirely available to the human being, as the planet itself ‘shrank’ to” be “smaller than the Roman Empire back in the days.”11 Pointing out the truly global nature of World War ii, he came to a conclusion of fundamental importance: “From this very moment does world history start as a history of a single whole… Now the world on the whole becomes the problem and the task… The world closed [in] on itself. The globe has become indivisible… All essential problems have become global problems, and every situation is now the situation involving the whole [of] humankind.”12 Reading these lines, one cannot help but agree that despite its fairly recent history, Global Studies evolved from the foundation that had been laid much earlier by the works of individual scholars. Just as the processes of globalization that came to the forefront and sharply grew stronger in the second half of the twentieth century, so did the mutual dependence of various countries and peoples; these determined a new level of understanding of the present topic. More new international structures and organizations were established, quite a few of which happened to focus on understanding global problems and their causes, including the Institute of Future Problems (in Vienna in 1965), the International Fund “Humanity in 2000” (in the Netherlands in 1965), and the World Future Society, which was organized in 1966 in Washington, among others. The number of similar organizations kept growing over time. However, true interest in global problems appeared

10 Vladimir I. Vernadskii, Filosofskiie mysli naturalista (Nauka, 1988), 35. 11 Karl Jaspers, Smysl i naznachenie istorii (Мoscow, 1991), 141. 12 Ibid.

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after the first reports of the Club of Rome, which was established in 1968.13 Its research projects “The Limits to Growth” (1972), “Humankind at the Turning Point” (1974), “rio—Reshaping the International Order” (1974), “Beyond the Age of Waste” (1976), and others became renowned worldwide in no time at all, evolving into a theoretical basis for modern Global Studies. Not only did they fulfill the necessary heuristic and methodological function of shaping a fundamentally new branch of interdisciplinary knowledge, but they also played a significant enlightening role. Therefore, it would be safe to say that Global Studies as a special sphere of academic research and an integral visualization of the world generally shaped up by the late 1980s, evolving thereafter through comprehension of globalization processes that remained back then out of sight for scholars and professionals working in this sphere. The collapse of the socialist system and its consequences rearranged forces in the international arena. This was a major impulse that turned academic and public thought from the study of the effects to the analysis of the true causes of the processes of globalization. That “second wave” or “second wind” of interest in Global Studies all happened only in the second half of the 1990s as the world mostly recovered from fundamental changes and proceeded to making sense of the new situation. One should also point out that this prior experience has mostly been ignored by many contemporary researchers who have joined Global Studies during this second wave of interest primarily because the decade-long gap between the two “waves” was accompanied by outdated principles and concepts often now seen as rudiments of the past that are not worthy of serious consideration. Consequently, a lot of publications have appeared whose authors build their ideas on the assumption that Global Studies is only starting to evolve and fail to consider prior experience seriously. Nevertheless, way before the birth of the term globalization, sufficiently clear notions had formed about the tendencies in global economic ties to come as those of an integrated global system and about the problems it raises. The nature and genesis of global problems had been identified, the criteria for singling them out and the approaches toward their systematization had been defined. These outlined the profound correlation of natural and public processes, as well as the contradictions arising out of them, caused by the social, economic, political, ideological, scientific and technical consequences. Over the first two decades of its development, Global Studies made one major accomplishment: the formation and elaboration of the language of 13 See: Global Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Ivan I. Mazour, Alexander N. Chumakov, and William C. Gay, (TsNPP “Dialog”/ Raduga Publishers, 2003), 76–77.

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i­nterdisciplinary communication that proved to be acceptable for a number of sciences, along with the development and elaboration of key notions and categories, such as global problem, environmental crisis, green production, explosive population growth, nuclear winter, global dependence, world community, new ways of thinking, new humanism, and others. Ultimately, it greatly affected people’s mindset, making them realize much more than ever thought previously that a human being is dependent on nature, its terrestrial and space environment, as well as on developing relations and the arrangement of forces worldwide. Around the same time, awareness of the interdependency of all spheres of social life worldwide had been growing steadily; for example, it became obvious that states which exclusively defend their national interests and promote their sovereignty in conditions of globalization cause fundamentally new contradictions in international relations. It was also established that the occurrence and marked aggravation of global problems in the second half of the twentieth century were not the results of someone’s miscalculation, error or deliberate strategy of social and economic development. Neither were these the whims of history or consequences of natural anomalies. Global changes and panhuman problems caused by them have been the result of the centuriesold quantitative and qualitative transformations both in social development and in the “society-nature” system. Their roots go back deep into the history of modern civilization that gave birth to the extensive crisis of industrial society and technocratic culture in general. This development resulted in the explosive growth of population and economic globalization, but it also led to the degradation of the environment that brought human degradation as well. Human behavior, ideas and ways of thinking appeared to be unable to adapt and match in a timely manner the pace of rapid changes. Research results of the very first Global Studies attributed the rapid development of social and economic processes to human beings and their purposeful transformational efforts, multiplied by the steady flow of scientific and engineering achievements. Consequently, there are no unexplored places left on Earth; neither are there pure lands, water bodies and air space unaffected, directly or indirectly, by human activity. These are now all grounds to call our planet “a common home” or a “world-sized village,” to describe the processes and problems common for every human as global, and to name the sphere of academic knowledge about all of the above, Global Studies.14

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Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary. Edited by Alexander N. Chumakov, Ivan I. Mazour and William C. Gay, Foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev (Editions Rodopi B.V, 2014), 223–26.

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Global Studies: Trends of Development

Speaking about various spheres of social life affecting the interests of people, Global Studies appears to be closely tied with politics, ideology, psychology and laws. In this aspect, one may reasonably talk about the diverse trends and schools of Global Studies which have revealed themselves clearly enough in the early stages of its formation when the confrontation of two ideologically hostile social and economic systems predetermined its evolution in two directions: one called “Western Global Studies” and the other, “Soviet Global Studies.” Over the last decade, ideological confrontation gave way to economic, cultural, religious and national discrepancies, fragmenting the world into a number of big regions—the subject of international relations of a kind. Meanwhile, cultural and civilizational differences of countries and peoples came to the forefront, thereby predetermining somewhat different approaches to understanding modern global processes, such as Western, Eurasian, Oriental, Islamic, and others. Taking into account that any classification is conventional to some extent, we should point out some approaches and directions typical of modern Global Studies, wherein we would distinguish foreign and Russian components for better clarity. Non-Russian Global Studies initially split into two directions: the technocratic one that would greatly exaggerate the positive impact of science and engineering on social life, and the “techno-pessimistic” one that involves blaming scientific and technological progress, international capital and transnational companies for the negative impact of globalization.15 Eventually, both trends came closer to each other, however each adjusting in a different manner under the influence of varying estimates of the prospects for world market development, so the aforementioned split is now quite conventional. Russian Global Studies had to evolve during the Soviet era under strong ideological pressure, so a moderately optimistic attitude prevailed. However, from the very beginning there appeared to be several trends, which, quite conventionally, can be distinguished as follows:16 – the philosophical–methodological trend, which studies philosophical principles, nature and the genesis of global processes, and analyzes the most 15

See: Vadim V. Zagladin and Ivan T. Frolov, Global’nye problemy sovremennosti: nauchnyi i sotsial’nyi aspekty (Мoscow, 1981); Global Studies. International Encyclopedic Dictionary, edited by Ivan I. Mazour and Alexander N. Chumakov (Dialog/Elima/Piter, 2006), 875–78. 16 See: Global Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Ivan I. Mazour, Alexander Chumakov, and William C. Gay (TsNPP “Dialog”/ Raduga Publishers, 2003), 210–14.

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i­ mportant socio-political and economic transformations vital for successful solution of global problems and the underlying processes; – the socio-natural trend, which covers a wide range of problems, where environmental issues, and the supply of raw materials and of energy, water, land and other resources represent the focuses of concerns and worries. Representatives of the natural, technical and social sciences, politicians, production workers and public people work in close contact to study this trend. They concentrate their efforts on elaborating principles and optimizing methods of interaction between society and nature, to make industry more environmentally friendly and to promote the rational management of nature; – the cultural trend, which focuses on the problems of globalization arising in the sphere of scientific and technological progress, population, healthcare, culture, laws, education and other fields of social life. Attention to political, social, legal, ideological, cultural and civilizational aspects of globalization has grown considerably in Russia and abroad recently, expanding the boundaries of Global Studies and massively affecting the nature of the problems it handles. The spheres of material production and spiritual activity, environment and lifestyle, culture and politics—are all within the orbit of Global Studies which, consequently, shall be defined as a grand total of scientific, philosophical, cultural and applied research, including the findings thereof, as well as practical steps taken for their implementation in economic, social and political spheres—both on the level of an individual state and on an international scale. 7

Global Studies as the Sphere of Interdisciplinary Knowledge

To avoid improper analogies and methodological confusion, one should emphatically point out that Global Studies shall not be construed as some separate or specific academic discipline, one that frequently emerges usually during the differentiation of academic knowledge or at the junction of adjacent disciplines. Global Studies is born out of the opposite phenomenon— integration processes that are typical for contemporary science and represent a sphere of research and cognition where diverse academic disciplines and philosophies, mostly in close conjunction but each from the standpoint of its subject matter, analyze every aspect of globalization and suggest a variety of solutions to global problems, considering them individually from each other and as a whole system. This has an important effect. One may raise the issue of the subject, object, method, goal, and conceptual apparatus, of Global Studies as some researchers

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tend to suggest. One should keep in mind, however, that the answers to these questions in the context of Global Studies lie on a different plane compared to any other field of science. Specifically, the subject cannot be identified without any ambiguity, even though one might simplify things by claiming that it is about the integrity of the world, humanity as a whole or the biosphere where human beings are the key element. The conceptual apparatus of Global Studies will be consistent philosophically and methodologically only so far as it will remain vague and spread over specific sciences related to the relevant studies. As regards the methods or goals of Global Studies, in addition to defining basic approaches, one will have to make a list of the specific sciences and their contribution to the study of the relevant problems, and to get an insight into how Global Studies operates in philosophy, culture studies, politics and ideology, thereby rendering the mission virtually impossible.17 Another important feature that distinguishes Global Studies from other academic disciplines is that understanding global tendencies and fundamental solutions of the problems arising from them would require not only theoretical studies but also their appropriate and efficient practical application. Global Studies thereby objectively plays an integrative role in the spheres of science and practice, making a lot of scholars, politicians and public activists adjust their worldviews to look at the modern world in a new way and to realize their involvement in the common fate of humanity. It makes one think harder about globalization and the problems it causes. It leaves no choice to humanity other than to overcome divisions and discrepancies and to move towards unity, preserving whenever possible the authentic cultures, age-old traditions and fundamental values of each individual nation and people. However, this kind of unity and concerted performance may only come out of adequate understanding of processes and events happening in the modern world, with Global Studies generating and formulating all pertinent knowledge, where the immediate goals and long-term prospects are considered as inextricably linked. 8

Philosophy and Its Role and Place in Global Studies

The very first mentions and warnings about the danger of global problems drove people to science and made scholars think hard about the solutions. However, specific disciplines are trapped within too narrow boundaries to 17

Alexander N. Chumakov, Globalizatsiia. Kontury tselostnogo mira: monografiia, 3-е izd., pererab. i dop. (Prospekt, 2017), 50–63.

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d­ iscern any individual problem: the object of study is in the context of other global problems. Therefore, regardless of the tasks handled by any specific discipline, what one would always need is philosophical insight into processes and related phenomena, that is, to see the entire situation, including the findings obtained in the end. Moreover, there comes a stage in the development of any individual science when it requires philosophical insight into the subject of its study. Without going beyond the boundaries of any specific discipline, without a broad, integral vision of the subject matter and the problems facing humankind, one that is based on the latest achievements in other academic spheres, there will be no fundamental discoveries, no advancement of science at all. Interdisciplinary unity is of ultimate importance where a philosophic solution to problems and a philosophy that facilitates interaction between the wide range of sciences are needed. One can hardly say, of course, that philosophy inevitably and directly affects political and other decisions, although this moment should not be ruled out either. After all, its key function is to shape worldview and thereby, indirectly, influence the process of practical decision-making. Its purpose is not to study directly naturalistic or technical aspects of globalization and the global problems it causes but rather to provide the worldview and methodological, cultural and ethical basis for appropriate solutions offered by other sciences. Relying on the accomplishments of specific disciplines in this sphere, philosophical study disregards minor aspects and treats globalization as an objective historical process that entails the battle of interests, while seeing global problems as the expected result of such processes. In other words, the philosophic approach implies consideration of global problems in their unity, entirety and affinity from the point of view of their public significance and social background. This kind of study implies getting insight into the essence of global problems, as identification of their true nature and genesis defines in many ways their further solution—scientific and practical.18 To sum up, in addition to the timeless philosophical questions of existence, consciousness and the meaning of life, as well as other matters constantly discussed by philosophers, the modern age has suggested a fundamentally new topic that previously never existed: the fate of humanity and preservation of life on Earth.

18

Alexander Chumakov, The Globalized World from the Philosophical Point of View (Chinese Edition), (Book Jungle, 2018).

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Applied Aspects of Global Studies

The near and the remote future of humanity largely depends on theoretical cognition of its rapidly changing reality, and adequate assessment and prioritizing of practical activities. With this in mind, it is important to point out that, according to modern Global Studies, the biggest danger to the global community does not come from globalization per se but rather from its effects, primarily from the global problems it causes. Essentially, globalization represents the objective process. There are positives and negatives, the same as in the case of scientific and technological advancement which can be used both to the benefit and to the detriment of humanity. But with global problems it is totally different. They have been somehow overlooked recently; with all these talks and debates about globalization, nobody gives them the attention they truly deserve. Meanwhile, they have not grown less acute and dangerous since the first reports to the Club of Rome, even with the debates at the highest theoretical level of Global Studies in Russia and abroad. It should be noted, however, that humanity has always had and will be having problems. The essence and the nature of these problems change along with quantitative and qualitative changes in the society.19 In other words, as our species grew up, the nature of its problems changed as well. For example, in its infancy, humanity was fragmented, so it had to deal with local, individual problems. Later on, as the scope of social activities expanded, regional problems came into existence. Now that humanity has become global, its problems by default have become global as well, making social tensions more complex and intense, in attempts to get on top of individual, local and regional problems. It means that one cannot reasonably expect to sort them out once and for all. They have no ultimate solution, and they cannot be removed or eliminated from social life, no matter what some researchers, politicians and public figures keep saying. “To overcome global problems,” “liquidate global threats” or “eliminate the risk of dangerous diseases, technological disasters and social conflicts”—such statements propose not only unrealistic tasks but as objectives they are formulated in a profoundly wrong way, setting one’s vision of the situation accordingly and promoting an equally incorrect program of action. Ultimately, this kind of misconception may not prove to be so harmless, as it is most unlikely to yield any positive outcomes, resulting instead in an irrational application of 19

Ernst von Weizsaecker and Anders Wijkman, Come On! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (Springer, 2018).

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resources, a waste of time, frustration and loss of faith. In other words, this kind of approach sets out to solve a problem which cannot be solved at all, considering the manner in which it is formulated. Globalization cannot be stopped or reversed, and global problems cannot be resolved once and for all: once they come, they will keep coming, and one will have to keep sorting them out. One has to resign and live with it, being aware that the loss of focus on global processes and problems, and an inability to perceive global risks properly and to respond adequately may spell big trouble if not a catastrophe. This is a qualitatively new reality for modern humanity. That is why it is vital to apply one’s creativity and the resources of the world community to the maximum, so that globalization brings mostly the good to the people, while minimizing its inevitable negative effects and threats to life on Earth. 10

The Future of Global Studies

The solution to this problem entails getting theoretical insight into global processes, so Global Studies is expected to keep the focus on this task for at least the next few decades. Therefore, one may reasonably expect the “formation of scientific studies” known as “globalization” to be depleted substantially within fifteen to twenty years, when intellectual and emotional fatigue from all these talks will set in. Intellectuals involved in Global Studies will shift their focus toward the world order and the search for practical steps toward building a truly new world order. This is quite consistent with the notion that Global Studies objectively plays to the benefit of integration, making a lot of scholars, politicians, public actors and the wider public itself see the world in a brand-new way, prompting them to realize that they are part of the whole world. That is why the transition from understanding global problems toward understanding globalization processes will gradually evolve to focus on how to shape a new world order in a whole, interdependent world so as to make the latter safe and stable at last.20 However, this task must first be properly formulated, as it is inextricably tied to another—even more complex task—that of humanity’s forming the new “ethos of a global world.” Henceforth, Global Studies will inevitably lead to understanding the nature and the essence of human beings as the main cause of problems and ­hardship— the notion addressed by numerous philosophers and by virtually every great 20

Alexander N. Chumakov and William C. Gay, editors, Between Past Orthodoxies and the Future of Globalization: Contemporary Philosophical Problems (Brill-Rodopi, 2016).

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humanitarian from the ancient times to our days. According to Nikolai Berdiaev, philosophers kept returning to the idea that solving the human mystery means to solve the mystery of existence. Know thyself and thereby thou shalt know the world. Every effort to cognize the world from the outside, without going deep into […] human nature yielded only superficial knowledge of the substance. If you proceed from the human being and onward, you will never find the essence, for the solution lies in the human being itself.21 Numerous examples from the history of humankind show that, at least from the time when Protagoras uttered his famous “Man is the measure of all things,” man has always been and will always remain that same measure. Regardless of the time, culture and religious persuasion, man will be the ultimate focus, the starting point and even the manipulated one. According to Boris Iudin, “Advancement of science and technology over the last few decades made it possible to manipulate the beginning of human life, turning the natural beginning into something deliberately organized, re-constructed.”22 After all, human nature is exactly what one needs to focus on in the search for the roots, the main reason for the occurrence and the growth of global discord, for according to Manifest of the Club of Budapest: “culture and society change rapidly, whereas genes do so more slowly: not more than 0.5% of genetic abilities may change in a human being over a century. Therefore, most of our genes go back to the Stone Age or to an even earlier period; they could help us survive in prehistoric jungles, but not in the thickets of civilization.”23 From now on, the human mind appears to be the main tool capable of solving this discord, for thinking and the inherent ability of human beings to create are not a genetic but rather a cultural trait that only humans possess. Therefore, they have no other choice but to build systematically, to shape persistently new ways of thinking, and to change their ways of living and relevant strategy and tactics. Scholars and professionals claim that evolution in the years to come will depend upon the survival of the wiser rather than the stronger. This is exactly why one should consider the nature and the essence of a human being as the main topic that by the middle of twenty-first century will become mainstream in Global Studies and the source of major problems and risks for our species. 21 22 23

Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Smysl tvorchestva, (Moscow, 1989), 293. Boris G. Iudin, “Chelovek segodnia i zavtra: mezhdu prirodoi i konstrusktsiei,” Chelovek. Nauka. Tsivilizatsiia. K semidesiatiletiiu akademika V.S. Stepina (Мoscow, 2004), 426. Ervin Laszlo, Macroshift. Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World, foreword by Arthur C. Clarke (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002), 199–200.

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Works Cited Barlybaev, Khalil A. Obshchaia teoria globalizatsii i ustoichivogo razvitiia. Moscow, 2003. Berdiaev, Nikolai A. Smysl tvorchestva. Мoscow, 1989. Cheshkov, Marat A. Globalistika kak nauchnoe zhanie. Ocherki teorii i kategorial’nogo apparata. Мoscow, 2005. Chumakov, Alexander N. “Global’nyi mir: Problema upravleniia,” Vek globalizatsii, no. 2 (2010). Chumakov, Alexander N. Globalizatsiia. Kontury tselostnogo mira: 3-e. pererab. i dop. Prospect, 2017. Chumakov, Alexander N. The Globalized World from the Philosophical Point of View (Chinese edition). Book Jungle, 2018. Chumakov, Alexander N. Philosophy of Globalization. Selected Articles. 2nd rev. and expanded edition. Moscow up, 2015. Chumakov, Alexander N. and William C. Gay (editors.), Between Past Orthodoxies and the Future of Globalization: Contemporary Philosophical Problems. Brill-Rodopi, 2016. Ervin, Laszlo. Macroshift. Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Berrett-Koehler, 2002. Fedotova, Valentina G. “Edinstvo i mnogoobrazie kul’tur v usloviiakh globalizatsii.” Voprosy filosofii, no. 9 (2011): 45–53. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. Profile, 1999. Global Studies Directory. People, Organizations, Publications. Edited by Alexander N. Chumakov, Ilya V. Ilyin and Ivan I. Mazour. Editions Brill / Rodopi, 2017. Global Studies Encyclopedia. Edited by Ivan I. Mazour, Alexander N. Chumakov, and William C. Gay. TsNPP Dialog/Raduga, 2003. Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary. Edited by Alexander N. Chumakov, Ivan I. Mazour and William C. Gay. Foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev. Editions Rodopi B.V., 2014. Global Studies. International Encyclopedic Dictionary. Edited by Ivan I. Mazour and Alexander N. Chumakov. Dialog/Elima/Piter, 2006. Iudin, Boris G. “Chelovek segodnia i zavtra: mezhdu prirodoi i konstruktsiei.” Chelovek. Nauka.Tsivilizatsiia. K semidesiatiletiiu akademika V.S. Stepina. Мoscow, 2004. Jaspers, Кarl. Smysl i naznachenie istorii. Мoscow, 1991. Mitrofanova, Anastasiya V. Global’naia al.’ternativa? V poiskakh novykh form demokratii dlia Rossii i Zapada. Nauchnaia Kniga, 2000. Nazaretian, A.P. Tsivilizatsionnye krizisy v kontekste Universal’noi istorii (Sinergetika— psikhologiia prognozirovanie). Mir, 2004.

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Panarin, Aleksandr S. Iskushenie globalizmom. eksmo Press, 2002. Pantin, Igor K. “Globalizatsiia i sud’by tsivilizatsii.” Chelovek. Nauka. Tsivilizatsiia. K semidesiatiletiiu akademika V.S. Stepina. Мoscow, 2004. Robertson, Roland and Kathleen E. White, editors. Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology. Routledge, 2003. Vasilenko, Irina A. Politicheskaia globalistika: Uchebnoe posobie dlia vuzov. Logos, 2000. Vernadskii, Vladimir I. Filosofskie mysli naturalista. Nauka, 1988. Weizsaecker, Ernst von and Anders Wijkman. Come On! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet. Springer, 2018. Zagladin, Vadim V. and Ivan T. Frolov. Global’nye problemy sovremennosti: nauchnyi i sotsial’nyi aspekty. Мoscow, 1981.

David Dubrovskii Born in 1929, David I. Dubrovsky, is a Doctor of Philosophy. He is also the chief researcher of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a professor in the Philosophy Department at Moscow State University. And cochairman of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the methodology of artificial intelligence and cognitive research Beginning in 1943 he participated in the Great Patriotic War (World War ii) and served on the third Belorussian Front. Dubrovskii graduated from the Philosophy Department of Kiev State University in 1952 and worked until 1957 as a middle school teacher in the city of Donetsk, and then at the Donetsk Medical Institute in the Department of Philosophy. In 1962 he defended his thesis on “Analysis-synthesis as a general form of the reflective activity of the brain,” and in 1968 he completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Philosophical Analysis of the Psychophysiological Problem.” From 1970 to 1986 Dubrovskii worked as a professor in the Philosophy Department of Moscow State University and as a department head of the journal Philosophical Sciences (Filosofskie nauki). From 1986 to the present, Dubrovskii has worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of seven books and more than 200 publications on the methodology of science, the problem of consciousness, theoretical issues of psychophysiology, artificial intelligence and convergent technologies. The theory proposed by the author in this article, was systematically developed in the monograph The Problem of “Consciousness and the Brain” (Kanon+, 2015), pp. 208. The article first appeared in Russian in the journal Questions of Philosophy (Voprosy filosofii), no. 10, 2002.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004432543_006

Solving the Mind-Body Problem: Thomas Nagel’s Article, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” Revisited David Dubrovskii I The mind-body, brain-consciousness problem was the subject of intensive consideration in Western philosophy during the entire second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, hundreds of monographs and anthologies, along with thousands of articles were dedicated to it. It has been the idée fixe of all post-positivistic thought, inasmuch as this attempted to surmount the extremist gnoseology of Logical Positivism and to rehabilitate ontological problematics and the “metaphysical” foundations of science. Since 1970 I have carefully followed the extensive discourse among practically all leading Western philosophers of scientific bent on the correlation between the mental and the physical, consciousness and the brain. The vast majority of them have attempted to substantiate a materialist solution to the given problem, either in the form of physicalist reductionism (so-called “scientific materialism” with its theories identifying the mental with the physical) or assuming a functionalist position (substantiating the identification of mental phenomena with determined functionalist relationships within a complicated system). The only Western philosophers maintaining a different position from them were Karl Popper and Eric Polten along with those who took a frankly dualistic position. I offered an analysis of this discussion in a series of articles published in the journal, Philosophical Sciences (Filosofskie nauki) during the 1970s and in my book, Information, Consciousness and the Brain (Informatsiia, soznanie, mozg; henceforth ism) (part 1, Chaps. 1 and 2, 13–97). It appears to me that no serious conceptual innovation has been offered in Western philosophical writings since, despite animated discourse on the subject and the undiminished significance of the problem [ism 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25]. Evidence is to be found in “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem” by the important mind/body theoretician Thomas Nagel.1 This article presents a

1 Voprosy filosofii, 2001, no. 8.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004432543_007

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r­ emarkable view of its author’s essential position and his analysis of the present situation; it also suggests the means toward the resolution of the mindbody problem. It should be noted that Nagel uses the term “mind” to include all the various realizable phenomena of subjective reality, from the experience of pain and the taste of a cigar to acts of abstract cognition, and that he frequently interchanges terms such as mental, phenomenological, subjective, consciousness and even “first person point of view.” Although these terms are by no means synonymous, it is clear that he uses them to express the general and distinctive facets of all kinds of subjective reality. Nagel definitely holds that “Consciousness should be recognized as a conceptually irreducible aspect of reality” (101–02) and appears equally averse to physicalist reductionism, that is, the “theory of the identity of the mental and the physical,” as to functionalist reductionism, maintaining that the mental cannot logically be induced from the functional, since a conceivably complex system might control all functional characteristics of a human; but being entirely devoid of “interior,” of subjective reality, such a person would amount to nothing more than a so-called “zombie.” This matter, however, requires special attention, so it will be discussed at a later point. Having rejected reductionist solutions to the problem, Nagel states that a necessary, rather than contingent connection exists between the mental and the physical that is, the physiological. The principal task that a theoretician faces, therefore, is proving its presence, and the author minutely analyses the difficulties in finding this link and solving this problem. These difficulties are familiar, and they have been repeatedly discussed in literature devoted to the mind and body, to consciousness and the brain. In a nutshell, they concern the following two issues: A. Spatial qualities of physical phenomena may not be ascribed to mental phenomena, although physical phenomena, including neurophysiological processes occurring in the brain, certainly possess them. How then is it possible to speak of a connection between them—let alone a necessary one? This creates, in the words of Nagel, a situation in which the necessary link is “inconceivable,” “unimaginable.” Furthermore, the description of such transient events as the taste of a cigar and the description of certain brain processes which, one can only suppose, must nec­ essarily be connected with this experience, are at such odds that understanding the nature of this link is greatly hampered. According to Nagel, this is the location of an “explanatory gap” (105). A new means of understanding is indispensable in order to bridge the gap, and this must be capable of logically unifying such different forms of description. Such

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a thing, however, is not available, and the perspectives of its creation remain vague at best. B. Inasmuch as mental phenomena are not in their essence physical it is impossible to accord them either spatial qualities or mass and energy. These two questions thus arise: how can the physical/physiological exert influence on the mental, causing it to change? Conversely how can the mental cause change in the physical/physiological or corporeal? Interaction of this kind is empirically evident, for example in the case of my wish or intention to pick up an object resulting in the movement of my arm and hand. Nagel writes: “We have good grounds for believing that the mental supervenes on the physical—i.e., there is no mental difference without a physical difference. But pure, unexplained supervenience is not a solution, but a sign that there is something fundamental we don’t know. We cannot regard pure supervenience as the end of the story because that would require the physical to necessitate the mental without there being any answer to the question how it does so. But there must be a ‘how,’ and our task is to understand it.” (106–07). Such are the fundamental difficulties, if abstracted from what we shall term associated background difficulties, which are in their own right also of considerable theoretical interest. These include, for example, the methodological difficulties bearing upon differentiation and the description of subjective phenomena; the correlation of their description in the third person and in the first person, as in I experience pain; and such issues as the conceptual connections and differences between the physical and the physiological, and the psychological and subjective reality. Due to the limitations of space, this exposition of Nagel’s account of the actual state of affairs must be limited to grappling with the aforementioned highly complex theoretical difficulties involved in suggesting how to solve the mind-body (brain-consciousness) problem and then to my relevant critical considerations and long-held conception, that is capable of realizing Nagel’s project.

II

Nagel’s attitude to the mind-body problem is deeply pessimistic and still prevalent among Western philosophers after half a century’s struggle with it. In his opinion, “no one has a plausible answer to the mind-body problem,” and research has come to an impasse. Between consciousness and brain processes

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there is a link that “remains resistant to understanding” (101). Reductionist ­attempts to solve the problem are unsound, but serious anti-reductionist attempts have not been attempted. “We do not at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective and physical features both could be essential aspects of a single entity or process” (105). At the same time, Nagel expresses certainty that a solution to this irksome mind-body problem is attainable and calls for a redoubling of effort in the attempt to find a new and alternative concept that explains and solves the problem. It is true that the proposed project is of a highly general nature and does not breach the long tradition of considering this problem within the boundaries of traditional analytical philosophy. Not surprisingly, Nagel’s severely critical relationship to reductionism, does not preclude excursions into territory dependent on physicalist paradigms (more on this later). Nonetheless, Nagel’s goals, the broad theoretical requirements they posit, and the conceptual results that they require, are, to my mind, stringent and laudable. He writes: “My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed” (102). This bears, above all, on our concept “mind,” which requires extension so that it is one of the conditions capable of affording an “expansionist” approach. “Our problem is that there is no room for a necessary connection with physiology in the space of possible development defined by the concept of mind. But that does not rule out the possibility of a successor concept of mind which will both preserve the essential features of the original and be open to the discovery of such connections” (106). “Without such an expanded concept of the mental there is no prospect of overcoming the explanatory gap” (106). He considers that beyond its manifest aspects—including the reflection of behavioural or functional acts—the concept of “mind’s” latent content should be able to express the required necessary connection between the mental and physiological processes. Such an expansion of the concept’s content is to be understood by analogy with such expanded concepts as typify the results of scientific thinking. In the case of the concept “water,” manifest characteristics are to be supplemented with such latent qualities as chemical composition. This train of thought suggested itself to the author in similar form in his previous works—including one that appeared thirty years ago, when he was still trying to preserve the general basis of physicalism and defended a version of so-called “Theoretical Materialism,” according to which the identification of phenomena in consciousness with brain processes is only possible in the sense of “theoretical reductivism,” that is, by means of reducing the object, via some observable standard, to a

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quantified theoretical entity, such as can be described by scientific theory. For example, water is identified with H2O, the temperature of gas not signifying anything except the kinetic energy of a given quantity of molecules.2 Incidentally, such a train of thought approaches the viewpoint of the eliminative materialists, who consider that all “mental terminology,” inasmuch as this is terminology from ordinary life, should be eliminated from the development of science and replaced by precise scientific terms. It is worth recalling that Paul Feyerabend held such a position,3 and that in those days the now postmodernist and ultra-pragmatist Richard Rorty also numbered among the ultra-materialists. Rorty was a proponent of the most radical version of eliminative materialism that he called “forms of disappearing.” In his “In Defence of Eliminative Materialism,” he maintained that insofar as that which we term sensation proves to be nothing other than brain processes, the term “sensation” loses meaning and becomes superfluous. Mental terms should disappear: “the materialist predicts that the language of neurology will conquer” (230). Nagel, of course, rejects such utopian promises. To him the expansion of the concept of “mind” is only conceivable with its manifest content. “If we can do this without denying the phenomenology or reducing it to something else, we will be on the first step toward an expansionist but still non-dualist response to the mind-body problem.” He, however, concludes that “this is so far pure fantasy” (“Conceiving” 106). It is indeed hard to imagine how such an expansion might be carried out. The desired inclusion of neurological equivalents into the very concept of “mind” is inconceivable. Were this possible, then the problem would have been solved, or, rather, would never have existed. Although this part of Nagel’s project is not sufficiently founded, interesting consideration is given to the correlation of descriptions of the phenomenological and the physiological (“Conceiving” 110–11). Considering the problem’s difficulties and theoretical possibilities, Nagel further modified his project and leaned toward not expanding the “successor concept” of “mind” but regarding it as some other kind of concept, of an essentially different nature, capable of unifying the phenomenological and the physiological. 2 For more on his theoretical materialism, see Thomas Nagel’s “Physicalism” in Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity. (New York/Chicago, 1969) and “Armstrong on the Mind” in Philosophical Review, 79 (July 1970). 3 For more on materialism and the mind-body problem see Paul Feyerabend’s “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem” in Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity (New York/ Chicago, 1969).

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In this, he formulated the most significant part of his project, a part with which I concur entirely. He writes: “The right point of view would be one which, contrary to present conceptual possibilities, included both subjectivity and spatio-temporal structure from the outset, all its descriptions implying both these things at once, so that it would describe inner states and their functional relations to behaviour and one another from the phenomenological inside and the physiological outside simultaneously—not in parallel… The difficulty is that such a viewpoint cannot be constructed by the mere conjunction of the mental and the physical. It has to be something genuinely new, otherwise it will not possess the necessary unity. Truly necessary connection could be revealed only by a new theoretical construction, realist in intention, contextually defined as part of a theory that explained both the familiarly observable phenomenological and the physiological characteristics of these inner events” (“Conceiving” 111–12. The emphasis is mine.). Nagel’s final pronouncement reads: “The conjecture is essentially this: that even though no transparent and direct explanatory connection is possible between the physiological and the phenomenological, but only an empirically established extensional correlation, we may hope and ought to try as part a scientific theory of mind to form a third conception that does directly entail both the mental and the physical, and through which their actual necessary connection with one another can therefore become transparent to us. [My emphasis.] Such a conception will have to be created; we won’t just find it lying around. All the great reductive successes in the history of science have depended on theoretical concepts, not natural ones—concepts whose whole justification is that they permit us to replace brute correlations with reductive explanations. At present such a solution to the mind-body problem is literally unimaginable, but it may not be impossible” (“Conceiving” 112). Although I support the fundamental aims proposed in Nagel’s project, I reject his assertion that there are no “conceptual possibilities,” that such a solution is at present “inconceivable,” and that it is necessary to create a “third conception.” I am convinced that we have long held the necessary conceptual possibilities and indices, and that we already possess the coveted “third conception.” In order to realize this, it is necessary to take into account the changes in the paradigm structure of scientific knowledge during the last fifty years. It is necessary to at last rid oneself of physicalist spectacles and to overcome the hypnotic effect of physicalist paradigms that narrow the horizon of theoretical possibilities applicable to the mind-body problem. Let us recall the rigid form of the paradigm as the general philosophical and methodological attitude concomitant with logical positivism. Carl Hempel states that “in principle all branches of science have the same nature; they are

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branches of one solitary science, namely physics.”4 For this reason, all really scientific explanation should be grounded in physical explanation. This goes for all explanations of consciousness and of the mental. The mind-body problem, which logical positivists had long counted among the number of pseudo-problems, was rehabilitated by post-positivists, but the majority of the latter continued to occupy the position of radical physicalists. Any quality and ability of a human, including his consciousness, as David Armstrong stated, can “be reduced to nothing but physical qualities.”5 The paradigm of physicalism in natural science was the product of the industrial era. Since approximately the middle of last century, in conjunction with the development of cybernetics, information theory, systemic and structural research, the rapid development of mass communication technology, marking the onset of the changeover to the post-industrial information society, the physicalist paradigm has begun to reveal its inadequacy. Functionalism delivered it a serious blow: its earlier representatives—Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and David Lewis—asserting that functional qualities are not reducible to the physical. Drawing on mathematical results from Alan Turing’s famous “Turing machine,” they showed that physical explanations are not universal, inasmuch as the functional organization of a system logically differs from its chemico-physical description.6 It became apparent that the idea of unifying all scientific knowledge on the common ground of physics became increasingly untenable. Physics was incapable of explaining a new class of objects—selforganizing systems, such as biological, socio-biological, economic and other systems. Conformity in the functioning of self-organizing systems cannot, of course, confound conformity to physics, but research on this represents a particular type of cognitive task depending on conceptual means that in their essence function irrespective of the explanatory means and methods at the disposal of physics. Here we are dealing with information processes and code control. Insofar as information and code control are unambiguously not connected with the determined physical qualities of the self-organizing system, a purely functional description will suffice for its ends. In my own work, this forms the ­fundamental principle, to wit, the principle of informational invariance relative to the physical qualities of its bearer: one and the same piece of information 4 Carl Hempel, “The Logical Analysis of Psychology” in Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1949) 382. 5 David Malet Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (Leningrad, 1968) 37. 6 Hilary Putnam, “The Mental Life of Some Machines” in Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity. (New York, Chicago, 1969) 281.

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may be embodied and transferred by various kinds of bearer, the physical qualities of which might be at variance with one another. This engenders the basis of a particular type of causality—informational causality: function, in this case, is not determined by pure physical factors in particular, such as quantities of mass or energy, but by the given information under the conditions of the code links which form the given self-organizing system. All this bears witness to the untenable nature of the physicalist paradigm, to the necessity of observing measures appropriate to the theoretical carcass of physical knowledge and using analysis of information processes, especially with regard to the mind-body problem.7 We have entered the information age, of unprecedented rapid change and development in computer technology with concomitant types and means of scientific knowledge. The tasks of researching information processes, self-­ organizing systems and deciphering code links and functional relationships have moved to the foreground. Solutions to deciphering the genetic code and genome of man and other fundamental matters have been found. These enrich not only empirical, but also theoretical means of specific types of scientific research. Science has started in earnest to study information processes within the brain and to decipher the neurodynamic codes of mental phenomena—a task comparable to that of deciphering the genetic code! It is rather surprising that these inspiring results, these means and theoretical possibilities, seemingly touching upon the surface of these very matters, remain “unremarked upon,” in work concerning the mind-body/brain-consciousness problem. The awkward fact remains that the questions whose solution Nagel considers at present “inconceivable” actually have simple and clear answers.

III

Indeed, Nagel’s statements should read as follows: We do “at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective and physical features could both be essential aspects of a single entity or process” (“Conceiving” 105). We have had a “third conception that does directly entail both the mental and the physical for a long time already, and through which their actual necessary

7 For more detail on methodological dead ends entailed by the physicalist paradigm in research into the mind-body problem see Ch. 2 in David Dubrovskii, Information, consciousness, brain (Informatsia, soznanie, mozg) (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1980).

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connection with one another can therefore become transparent to us” (“Conceiving” 112). This third conception is that of information.8 Here I define information as that which is generally accepted in the scientific community (given that its empirical refutation is inconceivable, and that it meets my and Nagel’s shared aims). 1. Information is necessarily embodied in its physical bearer; it does not exist outside certain physical objects and processes. 2. One and the same piece of information ( for the given type of self-­organizing system) can be embodied (and transferred) by bearers of physically different physical natures. I call this the principle of informational invariance (henceforth—pi) relative to the physical (chemical, substrate, spatial and temporal) quantities of its bearer. 3. Information may obey a regulatory factor, that is a cause of given change within a self-organizing system inasmuch as this serves the concept of the self-organizing system and is indispensable in delineating its scope. This is relevant to biological, biosocial, technical and social systems, among others. From these three irrefutable initial premises three important deductions can be made: a. One and the same piece of information can be encoded and transcoded in various forms; b. Information only exists in its given encoded form, as represented by its bearer; and c. Control is derived from code links which display given forms of correspondence between the qualities of the information bearer in their concrete spatiotemporal determination and their “meaning” for self-organizing systems, that is to say, information proper, in cases where control is determined not by the physical qualities of the bearer itself, but indeed by information. Let us examine these deductions more precisely. Information no more exists outside of its bearer than it does outside and beyond its given encoded form, or, in short, outside its code. Deciphering code or “decoding,” represents 8 For an analysis of existing concepts of information, see my following works: Psychological Phenomena and the Brain (Psikhicheskie iavleniia i mozg), (Nauka, 1971); “Informational Approach to the Problem ‘Consciousness and the Brain’” (“Informatsionnyi podkhod k probleme ‘soznanie i mozg,’”) Philosophical Questions (Voprosy filosofii, 1976), no. 11; Information, Consciousness and the Brain (Informatsiia, soznanie, mozg, Vysshaia shkola, 1980); and The Problem of the Ideal (Problema ideal’nogo) (Mysl’, 1983, Ch.4). Additional general and specific discussion of this can be found in B.B. Kadomtsev, Dynamics and Information (Dinamika i informatsiia) (Moscow, 1999); V.I. Korogodin and V.L. Korogodina, Information as the Foundation of Life (Informatsia kak osnova zhizni), Dubna, 2000; and I.V. Melik-Gaikazian, Information Processes and Reality (Informatsionnye protsessy i real’nost’), Moscow, 1998.

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the translation of an “incomprehensible” into a “comprehensible” conceptual coding. This signifies that there are two types of codes. The first, immediately “comprehensible” to the system (subsystem) it addresses, does not require a special decoding operation. I call this a “natural” code. The second kind, for which decoding is required, I call an “extraneous” code. Decoding, therefore, amounts to nothing else than a translation, and it is particularly important to underline this point: it is the conversion of “extraneous” code into “natural” code. If the information is “comprehensible” to the system, namely, that it is represented in the form of a “natural” code, then this signifies that it obeys or is able to obey system factors coherent with its integral functionality and control factors: maintenance and development of self-­ organization as well as the realization of its aims. In a complex self-organizing system, (the elements and subsystems of which are themselves self-organizing systems—such as an organism and its cells,) control is formed on the basis of a chain of code links—coming into existence via phylogenesis or ontogenesis—the codes themselves being of the “natural” order. With these three initial premises and their short elucidation, the next step involves the recognition of the legitimate definition of the “mental” within the quality of information. It is important to define more closely mental, mind, subjective, phenomenological, consciousness, and other terminology applied by Nagel, because, as noted earlier, they are by no means equivalent. All of them, however, denote to a greater or lesser extent the unique qualities of psychic phenomena that are the essence of the individual’s subjective experience. The concept of the psychic proves broader, incorporating the realm of the unconscious and such analytical features of personality as temperament, character and so forth. For this reason, it seems better to use the term “subjective reality” (or phenomenon of subjective reality) to signify present, recognizable experience, which, however, might equally be substituted for the term “phenomenon of consciousness.” It is natural to maintain that every phenomenon of subjective reality or every phenomenon of consciousness is information, since it is intentional and reflects some sort of “content,” its knowledge having significance and being capable of serving one aim or another. Information is necessarily included in the material bearer. In the given case this bearer is a particular neurological process. (According to contemporary scientific opinion, this process would be called particular brain neurodynamic systems.) This, in principle, answers the question of the necessary connection between the “mental” and the “physical”: consciousness and brain processes.

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To elucidate the particularities of this necessary connection, for the sake of brevity henceforth the term A will designate phenomena of subjective reality, and the term X the cerebral neurodynamic bearers of such information. The connection between A and X proves to be not causal but functional and represents itself a complicated code link. The latter term expresses the given relation of “representation” of the information in the concrete bearer (within its organization and physical entity) for the self-organizing system X is a specific code of A, outside of which A does not exist. A and X are simultaneous phenomena that evince the functional rather than causal nature of the necessary connection between themselves. This shows that the necessary connection between them is, so to speak, mono-causal, consequences of one and the same cause. Therefore, I object to Nagel’s conception of functionalism as an inadequate solution to the mind-body problem. His main argument is based on the idea, canonized in Western philosophy, of the “logical possibility of the zombie,” a being that would be entirely void of consciousness, although in its functions identical to the sum of human organic brain and body functions. The weakness of this argument lies in its unwarranted reduction of the concept of function to physiological and behavioural acts: for reasons unknown he excludes “mental functions.” This makes the logical possibility of the “zombie” seem plausible. However, even if the concept of function is reduced so as to be of such narrow application, reasonable doubt remains as to the logical possibility of the “zombie,” since it is absolutely unclear if a description of physiological functions is sufficient and proper to identify humans and such hypothetical beings. If there is identical equivalence, in itself hard to imagine, then there are strong logical grounds to suspect that such a creature would also be possessed of consciousness. Keeping in mind that Nagel includes consciousness (“the mental”) in the category of function, in regard to his thesis of functionalism, such a state of affairs is possible if we conceive of “a conscious subject with an inner life just like ours that behaves and looks just like a human being but has electronic circuitry instead of brains” (“Conceiving” 108). It paraphrases, and to an extent emotionalizes, the famous thesis of isofunctionalism of systems: the possibility of reproducing one and the same function on different physical and chemical substrata. In the case in point, this follows from the principle of invariance of information (pi) in relation to the physical qualities of its bearer. Such a conceptual directive not only stimulates an increase in perspectives of technological advancement, such as the development in information technology, but it also significantly heralds the creation of prosthetic elements and organs in medical practice. Furthermore, it promises development in nonbiological

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forms of human evolution and changes in the very fabric of civilization. It makes thinkable the existence of other intelligent beings with completely different substratal foundations and organization. It must be noted that the concept of functionalism, as an alternative to radical physicalism, proves to be a broad one, encompassing as it does the spheres of inanimate nature, technology, biological and biosocial systems, and human society in its poly-dynamic structures. In the realm of the mindbody problem and in terms of its basic tenets, it proves to be entirely compatible with the information approach. It permits a deeper elucidation of the essence of the functional connection, and of specific code links, and thereby clarifies the nature (1) of subjective reality as a specific type of informational process; and (2) of the particular “representing” a specific type of the information itself for a highly developed self-organizing system and its relations to other types of information processes and different means of “representing” information. A, as a given “content,” i.e. information, as represented by the cerebral code X, may, without change of “content,” be transcoded into different kinds of codes, for example, by means of complex graphic signs or sequences of sounds, and so on. Such codes are capable of independent existence outside of individuals and independent of them. However, the quality of subjective reality is excluded here. This quality is only necessarily connected with specific types of brain code. It is also connected with motor activity, the expression of the eyes, and other behavioral expressive code in addition to vocal codes. But only the neurodynamic cerebral code of the X kind is of fundamental importance to it. Under the proposed theoretical position, the sacramental question of the spatial characteristics and the localization of phenomena of subjective reality has a definite meaning. Like information, phenomena of subjective reality are located in code, that is, in a given neurodynamic system that possesses concrete spatiotemporal qualities. Equally, one and the same piece of information may be embodied in different codes and consequently have varied spatial accommodations. It can also be transported from one space to another or replicated and simultaneously occupy separate spaces. Information as “content” is not affected by this state of affairs. The last point is also of relevance to phenomena of subjective reality. The same one may be affirmed about the meaning or content of the outlined words. Is it permissible to ascribe length and width, and so on to “meaning” or “sense”? Here there are two conceptual systems without a clear logical connection between them. One of the two is subject to classical physical nature; the other to

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human knowledge. To connect them requires an intermediate categorical link, which is precisely the concept of information. Meanwhile, the location of information becomes absolutely essential when diagnosing a code entity, that is, an information bearer, whose essence is not in its physical, substratal structural qualities but in its functional meaning, in its representational raison d’être. This is equally true when decoding or understanding the information trapped in a code object. If we wish to “appropriate” and make this information “accessible” to our brains, then we must find at least one concrete space in which it resides—a concrete, code entity outside us or a concrete person whose brain codes embody the information that interests us. Received higher initial theoretical premises offer substantiated answers to other key questions associated with attempts to solve the mind-body problem. How Can We Explain That the Objectively Extant Neurodynamical Codes in the Human Brain Afford the Experience of Subjective Reality? How, for example, is it possible that I should experience the image of the tree I am seeing when it does not objectively exist within my brain. Let us leave to one side such implausible answers to this question as certain scholars would have us believe that, at the time of perception, a chemical copy or other such duplication of the image is called into being within the brain. Incidentally, many serious writers consider it necessary to presume the presence within the brain of a special decoding device which translates code into image. However, their presumption engenders additional difficulties, such as cannot be negotiated without the infamous homunculus. Their principal feature is that it is impossible to rid code information of images that represent information about external matters. But what is to be done if these are abstract ideas rather than certain features of perception? What if, for instance, the idea of the infinite presently occupying my thoughts is among them? How, is it necessary to decode the neurodynamic brain codes of this thought? Could it be that decoding amounts to nothing but transcoding into “natural” code? Information represented in “natural” code is immediately “comprehensible” to a self-organizing system, that in this case in point, is the cerebral ego system, the “I.” (More detailed commentary about this will follow.) Pulse-frequency code at the exit of the eye’s retina is immediately “comprehensible” to those brain structures to which it addresses itself. The meaning of the word, derevo (tree) is immediately comprehensible to a human that knows Russian. Analysis of the physical and structural qualities of this code is not 1

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r­ equired. Deciphering is required to deal with “extraneous” code, but this only amounts to transforming via transcoding into “natural” code. Once the means of this transformation has been found and assigned, the “extraneous” code ­becomes “natural” to the self-organizing system, a step which marks an act of control. The code organization of an information bearer never “resembles” its “contents” as constituted by the information it embodies. What does the organization of constituent letter elements and all the graphic components of the word “tree” have in common with its “contents,” that is, information about an external tree object? Nothing in the slightest. One-to-one correspondence between information and its “structure,” the organization of its code, is of an absolutely different nature, having, as a rule, nothing in common with the relationship between copy and semblance.9 All the above also has bearing on the correspondence between phenomena of subjective reality and its cerebral code bearer. It is senseless to search here for the aforementioned copies and semblances. However, we are inclined to accept such ideas, rooted as they are in centuries of physicalisttype thinking that entirely excludes alternative explanations. Such recidivism is found in the work of Nagel, who writes: “But we cannot see how a detailed account of what is going on in the brain could exhaustively explain the taste of a cigar—not even if we could see how it explained all the physical effects of such an experience. So long as this explanatory gap remains, the identification of the states remains problematic” (“Conceiving” 105), where Nagel describes as indispensable “some view or representation of the squishy brain, which in light of our understanding we will be able to see as tasting chocolate. While that is at the moment inconceivable, I think that it is what we would have to have to grasp what must be the truth about these matters” (102). Actually, there is no “explanatory gap” in the sense of revelations about semblances (those that one might “see”), but only explanations as to code links between given information such as the taste of cigars or chocolate or other sensations and its bearer, namely cerebral neurodynamic equivalents. “Identification” will not remain “problematic” if the necessary connection between them is established and it is taken that they cannot be divided into spatial or temporal sense. This identification, as Nagel himself concedes, does not mean reduction of one to the other.

9 Due to the limitations on space, such specific themes as reflection of one object in another, the relationships between homomorphism and isomorphism and the means of codifying information may not be discussed here.

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Here both crucial and fascinating questions arise: how is information represented, “given” to a self-organizing system, and how is the code bearer of this information represented to it? “Natural” code is, in its own physical qualities and organization, so to speak, transparent to the self-organizing system: the elements which make up its qualities are not heterogeneous; they enter in the capacity of integers, immediately accessing the information embodied in it in the case of “external” “­natural” code (as per familiar words of a native language.) They are also transparent inasmuch as code bearers and their organization are absolutely un-­ reflected at a conscious or at any psychic level when “internal” “natural” codes are involved. It must be stressed that both “natural” and “extraneous” codes may be both external and internal to a given self-organizing system. This then stipulates individual tasks associated with their decoding and transcoding. I distinguish between two individual decoding tasks: the “direct,” that is, when there is a code object and an explanation of the information it contains is required as is the case for “extraneous” code; and “inverse,” when certain information is supplied, and it is necessary to establish bearer and code organization. The latter involves “natural” code, which as a rule proves to be more difficult than those involving their counterpart.10 Brain codes of the X type are internal “natural” code. Information A, embodied within it, is directly received by the individual in the form of phenomena of subjective reality: sensory images, thought, and so on. Furthermore, despite its presence, the structure of the cerebral neurodynamic code—and even its very presence—is a matter entirely concealed from each of us. We are given information as if in “pure” form: we do not feel these processes occurring in our brains and do not reflect upon them at a psychic level. When an individual reflects on something, he or she operates with information given to him in “pure” form. Such reception of “pure” information and the ability to manipulate it represent a cardinal fact of our psychic organization. But the incontestable fact that we experience the image or think without knowing what is occurring at the same time in our brains begs the question as to why our organism is constructed in this manner rather than in some other; moreover, the answer should provide a more profound answer to the first question about how information is given to the self-organizing system.

10

For further details see David Dubrovskii’s Interpretating Codes (Methodological Aspects of the Problem) “Rasshifrovka kodov (Metodologicheskie aspekty problemy),” Voprosy filosofii (1976), no. 12.

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Why, in the Phenomena of Subjective Reality, Does an Individual Receive Information about Reflected Objects and the Phenomenon of Acts of Reflexive Consciousness but in the Complete Absence of Any Information Relating to the Bearer of Brain Codes? The short answer to this question is under pi. Just as one and the same piece of information can exist in various codes, the reflection of concrete qualities of an information bearer in most cases proves to be inessential material. In order to function efficiently, a self-organizing system needs information such as provides reliable information about external objects and situations, the most probable changes in means and methods of interaction with it, and about the current state of its own system functions and changes. Irrespective of the concrete qualities of a bearer, which may differ, the measure by which the character of behavioral acts is determined by semantic and pragmatic informational parameters, is the degree to which the manner of reflection of a cerebral information bearer during the course of evolution and anthropogenesis did not develop. The means of information reception, however, was developed by this same coefficient: its range broadened, and the means of information manipulation and application for control and self-development improved. In the process of anthropogenesis, when compared with the psyche of animals, consciousness arises as a quite new quality that naturally is linked with the origin and new code form of storage, with transformation and transmission of information, primarily in language. Indeed, this new quality can be defined in this context as the ability to manipulate such information with which it is possible to reproduce boundlessly information about information. This creates that “duality” of reflection through the prism of modality “I” and “not I” that characterizes consciousness, and with this duality the capacity for abstract thought, creativity, contemplation of self, self-determination and will. This type of information manipulation is the prerequisite of such boundless freedom of activity in the sphere of subjective reality including daydreams, meditation, hopes, fantasies and existential reflection which constitutes not only the basis of higher values and sense in thought, but also of the barren pondering of the internal world of the self and equally that of monstrosities, madness, chimera and suicide. I shall risk the assertion that the orientation of development conditional to pi has led to such levels of a condition in human civilization that there is an extreme deficit in self-knowledge and reasoned self-transformation which threatens contemporary civilization’s very existence. This developmental orientation created and perpetuated from the very onset an ever-worsening state of what I call fundamental asymmetry in cognition and transformational 2

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­functions. Indeed, it is evident in the following: despite the necessary dependence of cognition and transformation of the external world on standards of self-cognition and self-transformation by man himself during the course of ­history—long-since recognized by philosophers—the vector of self-cognition and self-transformation has proven extremely limited and of negligible result. It is this that has led to the ecological crisis, among other global problems, and it is this that nourishes a chronic situation in which the human knows not what he does and turns his hand against himself, incapable of bridling himself and his energies. From century to century the irritating sententiousness continues about the weakness of the will and how, if a man might keep himself in order, he might keep the world in order. However, to control oneself effectively, it is imperative that a new goal of code links be created within one’s own organism and its nervous system, one that would not only provide for the worthy project of self-transformation, but also enough energy for its realization. At present, science cannot instruct us how. This kind of goal is partially reached only by gifted individuals operating intuitively. Nonetheless we do not lose hope. Important steps, such as the deciphering of the human genetic code, the genome, really have been made in this direction. With the deciphering of the brain codes of psychic phenomena and the study of code organizations of volition along with the methods of optimizing them the gradual discovery of practical solutions to the mind-body problem has begun. Irrespective of the possible and unforeseeable negative aspects of such scientific achievements, it is they that will be able to give the key to this problem. It is admissible to presume the possibility of essentially transforming our subjective realities in its sense content and intentional aspects by means of cognition and transformation of its code organization. It is theoretically admissible to conceive of other types of subjective reality as opposed to those which are inherent in animals and those which characterise humans. One of those theoretically conceivable variants may consist of an extra-terrestrial type of subjective reality capable of directly giving to a self-organizing system not only information about the objects represented in it, together with information about information as is characteristic of people, but also about information that is internal to the bearer of information (about the organization of code, the mechanisms of its functioning providing the subjective experience of the given information). It is plausible that such a type of subjective reality would be linked to a type of social self-regulation different from that on Earth, for the capacity to immediately reflect upon the internal information bearer and influence it would amount to a qualitatively higher capacity for self-reflection and self-control in the individual, and thus a higher degree of self-perfection.

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This would entail the transformation of evaluative and reasoning s­ tructures with qualitatively higher creative activity, producing existential values, to an extent which at present is inconceivable to us. Questions bearing on activity in phenomena of subjective reality merit more detailed consideration. 3 How Are Phenomena of Subjective Reality (A), to Which It Is Impossible to Ascribe Physical Qualities, Capable of Obeying the Causation of Corporal Change? In the general outline of this question lies the answer: phenomena of subjective reality influence physical processes, governing them in the form of informational processes. We are concerned here with the aforementioned informational causation, or, more precisely, with an aspect of it we will call psychic causality. pi determines and distinguishes this form of causality from physical causality due to the fact that it is code in nature. A chain of code transformations realizes psychic causation, and its result is determined consistent with values and operative characteristics of information A embodied in brain code X. If A is the intention to complete some comparatively simple action, such as wishing to pick up the pencil and doing so, then the chain of code transformations is built, as a rule required, on the hierarchical system and can be seen as a properly developed in phylogenesis and ontogenesis, that is sequential and parallel turning-on of code programmes for the movement of hands and arms and of the concomitant physical changes along with code programmes that provide energy for all of this complex of changes. Naturally, that which we call acts of volition require a more exact description. Beyond the general features explaining “the mechanism” by which phenomena of subjective reality have an influence on corporal processes, I would, however, like to discuss briefly one allied question. How Is the “Influence” of One Phenomenon of Subjective Reality on Another to Be Explained Such As When One of Them Calls Forth Directed Change in Another or One Thought Attracts Another? That one thought is capable of summoning or begetting another appears to be an omnipresent fact of our experience. A scientific description of this, however, is subject to greater difficulties due to the incomplete nature of differentiation/discretisation methods for the continuum of subjective reality, which actually take into account within its dynamics the multifaceted nature of its “content.” For this reason, when speaking about individual phenomenon of subjective reality, and most particularly when the subject is the influence of one such phenomenon upon another, then it is necessary to stop at a point 4

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where a sign indicating the possibility of dividing it and differentiating it from another can be found. This is a very difficult task. But let us assume that it is possible to make such a distinction.11 We designate to one the name A1 and to another that of A2, such that if A1 summons A2, this is equivalent to the code transformation X1 to X2. This also has the status of informational (psychic) causality. The internal “mechanism” that engenders A2 from A1 is not in principle different to cases in which subjective phenomena induce determined physical change. The only difference is in the contours of code transformation, in that subsystem where the changes take place. In cases where one thought attracts another, the most likely paths of code transformation are of type X, the “paths of motion” acquired from cultural norms. These logical, moral and other norms determine schemes of actions at an internal level; these most likely “paths” of significant change in the sphere of subjective reality are particularly conspicuous in the example of logical norms that strictly confine such “paths of motion” to the discursive level of thought processes. However, each and every separate phenomenon of subjective reality is subject to a given unique “I” and bears its stamp—each is a moment of integral subjective reality existing only in a concrete and unrepeatable personal form. This integrity, determining our “I,” represented within the brain ego system which makes up a high level of brain self-organization and in whose sphere code structures of the X type function. In other words, the direction of transformation of a given type is conditional on the unique nature of this ego-­ system. And that is why it appears in this regard among reflections that are not predetermined and depend on personal characteristics and such parameters as the individual will. Central to the mind/body problem, therefore, is the traditional question of free will. How Can the Phenomenon of the Freedom of the Will and Its Compatibility with Determined Brain Processes Be Explained? There is neither the possibility nor the necessity to immerse oneself in a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of the free will here. For our purposes it suffices to concede that in some cases people act subjectively or in external practice by strength of will and of their own volition: in some cases, they make choices on their own initiative. These activities cannot be equally determined by external factors yet also by creative capacities that presuppose capabilities inalienable from personality responsible for action. 5

11

For more on this subject see my article, « Informatsionnyi podkhod k probleme ‘soznanie i mozg’ » (Voprosy filosofii, 1976, no. 11).

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It is hardly possible to deny that at least in some cases, a man can direct the development of his thoughts, can operate by means of his will intentional vectors or some other phenomena of his own subjective reality, although in the composition of subjective reality there is a class of phenomena which is either absolutely beyond the control of volition or else yields to it only with the greatest difficulty. But the admission allows, albeit partially, some capacity of “I” to operate its own phenomena of subjective reality, which is information in its “pure” form. This signifies the following: A. If I am capable of manipulating certain phenomena of my own subjective reality of my own free will, i.e. of transforming A1 into A2, and so on, as was previously seen, then this is the equivalent of being able to manipulate their codes X1, X2, and so on which represent in themselves certain cerebral neurodynamic systems. Consequently, and though it may appear strange at a first glance, I can by means of the will manipulate and control certain classes of my own cerebral neurodynamic systems. Moreover, this signifies that I am able not only to activate and deactivate certain sequences, but also to determine the orientation of code transformations within these or other boundaries, and finally, to create new code patterns of the X type, which are unprecedented varieties of my own neurodynamic system. It is impossible to deny that man creates original thoughts and unique artistic forms with his creative energies. These new formations have in the sphere of one’s subjective reality their own necessary code embodiment in the cerebral neurodynamic system. But subjective reality, as an integral entity has the uninterrupted historical chain of new formation by means of the creator which thus or otherwise constitutes our “I.” B. Inasmuch as the ability to create new formations in the sphere of subjective reality corresponds to the ability to engender new formations at certain cerebral neurodynamic levels—code organizations of the X type, then this allows for the continuous possibility of broadening the diapason of possibilities of self-organization, self-perfection and creativity. Furthermore, this relates, of course, to both the steering of psychic and bodily processes and the psychosomatic contours of self-regulation. There is no doubt that when an individual of so-called strong will overcomes pain or slows down cardiac rhythm as in the case of a yogi that this person is forming such cerebral neurodynamic patterns. Such a chain of code transformations trailblazes a new effective path and “captures” vegetative and other involuntary levels of regulation as are usually closed to transformational conscious control. C. The capacity to form one’s own cerebral neurodynamics may be interpreted only in the sense that neurodynamic systems of the X type,

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c­ onsidered in their actual and dispositional interrelationship, prove self-­ organizing, representing in the brain of the human individual the personal level of brain self-organization (the level of cerebral self-­regulation of egosystems). In other words, the conscious “I,” with all its gnostical, evaluative and volitional aspects, is represented within the functional cerebral neurodynamic system (type X) as a self-organizing system. Consequently, an act of the free will, such as in the case of making choices, and equally in the matter of generating sufficient interior strength to attain a worthy goal, is an act of self-determination. This thesis supersedes that of the incompatibility of the free will and determinism, but the latter is to be understood not only as external, but also as internal determinism which provides programs of self-regulating systems. Indeed, such types of informational causality express an act of self-determinism, which leaves no space vacant for a mischievous homunculus. Given such an approach, it is possible to plot perspectives governing research of cerebral organization which represent our ego system, i.e. the code embodiment of the individual integrity of human subjective reality. The methodological key here is the principle of self-organization, which has already been sufficiently approved by contemporary science. This principle affords access to functional unity of self-reflection and self-control, and it shapes the concrete sense of the concept of self-determination. I leave scrutiny of the ontological aspects of the mind-body problem to one side for the moment, since the framework of this article accords it no room. It is, of course, an important part of the given problem which for the greater part is of scientific, rather than philosophical nature, and needs to be considered in a proper light, for its solution requires practical methods. I would, however, like to stress the fact that an exposition of informational conception correlates well with a materialistic worldview and obeys to a fixed extent its fundaments, such as in showing that the mind (the mental or psychic) is to be numbered among the functional qualities or as the prominent neurophysiologist Roger Sperry would say “the emergent properties” of highly organized material systems.12 The development of this quality distinctly tracks the path of biological evolution, which makes it obey the most significant of our arguments. Furthermore, interpreting phenomena of consciousness as forms of information reduces the degree of their originality to the ranks of other phenomena of objective reality and increases their proximity with them. This in turn suggests that the assertion of Nagel and

12

“Perspectives of the Mental Revolution and the Rise of a New Scientific Worldview” (Brain and Reason, edited by D.I. Dubrovskii, Nauka, 1994). No page number given.

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of many of his Western colleagues about the presence of “an explanatory gap” is false. Works Cited Armstrong, David M. A Materialist Theory of Mind. London, 1968. Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford up, 1996. Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Little-Brown, 1991. Dubrovskii, David I. Informatsiia, soznanie, mozg. Vysshaia shkola, 1980. Dubrovskii, David I. “Informatsionnyi podkhod k probleme ‘soznanie i mozg.’” Voprosy filosofii, 1976, no. 11. Dubrovskii, David I. “Mozg i psikhika.” Voprosy filosofii, 1968, no. 8. Dubrovskii, David I. Problema ideal’nogo. Gl. 4, Mysl’, 1983. Dubrovskii, David I. “Psikhika i mozg: rezul’taty i perspektivy issledovanii.” Psikhologicheckii zhurnal, 1990, no. 6. Dubrovskii, David I. “Psikhicheskie iavleniia i mozg.” Nauka, 1971. Dubrovskii, David I. “Rasshifrovka kodov (Metodologicheskie aspeckty problem).” Voprosy filosofii, 1979, no. 12. Feyerabend, Paul K. “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem.” Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind- Body Identity, NY/Chicago, 1969. Hempel, Carl G. “The Logical Analysis of Psychology.” Readings in Philosophical Analysis, NY, 1949. Kadomtsev, Boris B. Dinamika i informatsiia. Moscow, 1999. Korogodin, Vladimir I. and V.L. Korogodina. Informatsiia kak osnova zhizni. Dubna, 2000. Lewis, David. “Reduction of Mind.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell, 1994. Melik-Gaikazian, Irina V. Informatzionnye protsessy i real’nost’. Moskva, 1998. Nagel, Thomas. “Armstrong on the Mind.” Philosophical Review, vol. 79. (July), 1970. Nagel, Thomas. “Physicalism.” Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity. NY/Chicago, 1969. Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, vol. 83 (Oct.), 1974. Nagel, Thomas. “Myslimost’ nevozmozhnogo i problema dukha i tela.” Voprosy filosofii, 2001, no. 8. Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford up, 1994. Priest, Stephen. Teorii soznaniia. Moscow, 2000. Putnam, Hilary. “The Mental Life of Some Machines.” Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity. NY/Chicago, 1969.

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Rorty, Richard. “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” Materialism and the MindBody Problem, London, 1971. Sperry, R.U. “Perspektivy mentalistskoi revoliutsii i vozniknovenie novogo nauchnogo mirovozzreniia.” Mozg i razum, Pod red. David I. Dubrovskii, Nauka, 1994.

Mikhail Epstein Mikhail N. Epstein (Mikhail Naumovich Epshtein) is a Russian–American philosopher, cultural and literary scholar and essayist. He is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (USA). Born in Moscow in 1950, he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University in 1972 and has been a member of the Writers’ Union since 1978. He is the founder and head of several Moscow intellectual associations: The Club of Esseists (1982–1988), “Image and Thought” (1986–1989), and Laboratory of Contemporary Culture (1988–1989). He moved from the ussr to the USA in 1990. In 1990–1991, he was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington, D.C. He has been teaching at Emory University since 1991. From 2012 to 2015, he served as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). Epstein’s research interests include new directions in the humanities and methods of intellectual creativity; contemporary philosophy and theology, in particular the philosophy of culture and language; the poetics and history of Russian literature; postmodernism; the semiotics of everyday life, and the evolution of language. The general direction of Epstein’s work is the creation of multiple alternatives to the predominant theoretical models and sign systems. He explores and brings to systematic expression various forms of the thinkable and conceivable: potential philosophical systems and religious and artistic movements; new words, terms, and concepts; and new disciplines and approaches in the humanities. The most complete embodiment of this method is in his books: A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture (Russian edition 2001, English 2019); The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), From Knowledge to Creativity: How the Humanities Can Change the World (St. Petersburg, 2016). Briefly, possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its possibilities, of what it may be as opposed to what it actually is. A world consisting only of actualities would be devoid of meaning and significance. Possibilist thinking is both critical and constructive. It generates many concepts, ideas, propositions, rules, and disciplines as alternatives to existing ones—those considered established, obvious, and rational. A possibility never comes alone, but only in the form of

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doubling and multiplying possibilities. They clash, but do not exclude one another. A possibility that excludes all others is a mere necessity. The most representative work of Epstein’s philosophical and philological methodology is his A Projective Dictionary of the Humanities (Moscow: nlo, 2017). It introduces 440 concepts coined by the author that encompass general issues of the humanities, the philosophy of being and knowledge, society and technology, ethics, aesthetics, religious studies, culturology, literary studies, linguistics, and a number of emerging disciplines. The dictionary is heuristic in that it demonstrates various methods of forming new ideas, theories and research areas. The dictionary as a whole is of a systematic nature, but this is a particular sort of centrifugal system, one that presupposes the articulation of multiple concepts that cannot be reduced to a single compact scheme or broadest-possible primary concept. A centrifugal system like this, with concepts spinning off into various subject fields, differs from the better-known centripetal systems exemplified by Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The centrifugal type of thinking does not subject all the material of culture and history to an overall initial principle, but to the contrary, spawns an “expanding universe” of manifold intellectual practices and discourses that keep spreading further and further away from each other in the space of potential readings and texts. This open system relies on the reader to be a co-thinker and co-creator. Epstein has authored 35 books and more than 800 articles and essays, some of which have been translated into 24 languages. He was the first scholar to shape a theory of Russian postmodernism, to affirm its place in global postmodernity, and to analyze the movements of metarealism, conceptualism, presentalism, “arrière-garde” and “new sentimentality” in such books as After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (U of Massachusetts P, 1995) and Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with A. Genis and S. Vladiv-Glover; Berghahn Books, 1999, 2016). He authored pioneering studies of late–Soviet and post–Soviet philosophy and religion, including a classification and analysis of eight schools of thought. He introduced the concepts of “transculture” and “transculturalism” (the practical branch of Russian culturology) and “minimal religion” as the transition from atheism to post–atheist spirituality—both ideas adopted by Western scholars—in such books as Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry, Palgrave–­ Macmillan, 1999); Religion after Atheism: New Possibilities for Theology (in Russian, ast–press, 2013); and The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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Epstein created internet projects and initiatives, web sites such as “InteLnet” (since 1995), “The Book of Books” (since 1998), “The Gift of A Word: The Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language” (since 2000), “The Fan of Futures: The Techno-Humanistic Messenger” (2000–2003). He is the founder and head of the Expert Council of “Word of the Year” and “Neologism of the Year” (since 2007), as well as active participant in various social networks and blogs, including Facebook, Snob and LiveJournal. Epstein is а recipient of Andrei Bely Award (St. Petersburg, 1991), the prize of the London Institute of Social Inventions for intellectual creativity (1995), as well as the International Essay competition award (Berlin-Weimar, 1999), Liberty Prize (New York, 2000), and the journals Zvezda (2000) and Znanie-sila (2011) awards. Many of his English and Russian publications can be accessed online. The most complete bibliography of his works and chronology of his scholarly activity is in Homo Scriptor Festschrift in Honor of M.N. Epshtein (Moscow: nlo, 2020). Mikhail Epstein’s essay, “Ot analiza k sintezu. O prizvanii filosofii v xxi veke” (From Analysis to Synthesis: On the Calling of Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century), which appears in this anthology, was published in Russian in the journal, Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), no. 7 (2019), 52–63.

From Analysis to Synthesis: Conceiving a Transformative Metaphysics for the Twenty-First Century Mikhail Epstein 1 Part i: How to Move from Analysis to Synthesis1 1.1 Is Analysis a Goal in Itself? It is well known that in philosophy, especially of the English-speaking world, the analytical approach has been predominant for about a century. Critical analysis is directed mostly at the logical structure of language as well as at concepts, definitions and propositions. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, states: “One purpose that has run through all that I have said, has been the justification of analysis, i.e., the justification of logical atomism, of the view that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built.”2 Robert Ammerman clarifies this assessment: “To analyze, we may say roughly, is to take apart in order to gain a better understanding of what is being analyzed… The philosopher … is interested in analyzing linguistic or conceptual units. He is concerned, in general, with coming to understand the structure of language by a careful study of its elements and their interrelations. We will use the word ‘analysis’ (or ‘analytic philosophy’), then, to refer to any philosophy which places its greatest emphasis upon the study of language and its complexities.”3 What would be, then, the place of the synthetic approach in contemporary philosophy? In fact, it is practically never discussed or even mentioned, though analysis and synthesis are known to be correlative procedures. The one-sided development of analysis at the expense of synthesis is a huge loss for philosophy, which has therefore been divested of much of its creative, constructive potential.

1 I am grateful to John Michael Corrigan, an Associate Professor of American Literature and Digital Humanities at National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan, for his help in editing this article. 2 The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. Cited in Robert Ammerman, ed., Classics of Analytic Philosophy. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1965), 26. 3 Robert Ammerman. A Short History of Analytic Philosophy, in Robert Ammerman, ed., Classics of Analytic Philosophy. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1965), 2.

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Bertrand Russell suggested that philosophical analysis should conclude with a synthesis: “The business of philosophy, as I conceive it, is essentially that of logical analysis, followed by logical synthesis.”4 But analytic philosophy, as a rule, does not reach the point of synthesis, stopping at the stage of disintegration of the whole and ignoring the task of its re-creation from the parts. The analysis divides judgments into subjects and predicates, syllogisms into premises and conclusions, sentences into words and then morpheme—and the thinker then examines the primary units, the logical atoms of these constructions. This is an important, but preliminary stage of philosophical work, which then must proceed to the synthesis of new concepts and judgments that are different from those initially given and are formed only by the constructive recombination of their elements. Alexander of Aphrodisias, the authoritative commentator on Aristotle’s Analytics, indirectly foresaw the possibility of Synthetics when he wrote: “For analysis is the converse of synthesis. Synthesis is the road from the principles to those things that derive from the principles, and analysis is the return from the end to the principles…”5 In other words, synthesis is a progressive vector in the being of things, towards their goal, while analysis is a regress to the primary elements of which things are composed. Sometimes a synthesis is understood only as an inverse procedure in relation to analysis: by dividing a concept or a judgment into elements, we then derive the same original concept out of them to demonstrate the correctness of the analysis, to prove that the concept is composed of the same elements to which it was divided. But this is a very limited, reductionist understanding of synthesis as just a test or proof of analysis. Such a synthesis does not produce anything new, but only returns to the known, to that original given, from which the analysis departed. Meanwhile, the task of philosophical synthesis, as I understand it, is the creation of new concepts, terms, ideas, judgments, principles, and also more comprehensive conceptual unities: theories, disciplines, attitudes, and worldviews. Philosophical synthesis requires analysis, but it does not come down to it, to the original concept, but creates the possibility of new, alternative concepts. If the analysis, according to Russell, leads from the known to the unknown, the

4 Bertrand Russell, Logical Atomism (1924) // Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 341. 5 Alexander of Aphrodisias. Commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, §1.2.1. Cited in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/s1.html#Alexander.

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synthesis leads from the existing to the not yet existing. Synthesis is an act of thinking that becomes an event of being. Immanuel Kant’s division of judgments into analytical and synthetical is fraught with a criticism of analytical philosophy, which overuses analytical judgments and thereby pushes philosophy to tautologism, i.e. turns thinking into a chain of clarifying, but equivalent, synonymous variations like: “all bodies are extended,” “gold is yellow,” or “‘do not kill’ means ‘I condemn murder.’” Kant’s criticism is worth reading in full: Analytical judgments express nothing in the predicate but what has been already actually thought in the concept of the subject, though not so distinctly or with the same (full) consciousness. When I say: “All bodies are extended,” I have not amplified in the least my concept of body, but have only analyzed it, as extension was really thought to belong to that concept before the judgment was made, though it was not expressed. This judgment is therefore analytical.6 Synthetical judgments, on the contrary, amplify the concept and add something which is not already contained in it. Synthesis is not a repetition of the analysis in reverse order, from elements to the whole, but it is the formation of a new whole through the rearrangement of the initial elements, which constitutes the very act of thought. Even if we narrow the subject of philosophy to language, then the measure of intellectual productivity would be to expand the existing language, synthesize new words and concepts, lexical and conceptual fields, introduce new grammatical rules, and increase the scope of the spoken and, therefore, of the potentially thinkable and doable. 1.2 Problematization as a Transition from Analysis to Synthesis Why is the transition from analysis to synthesis logically so difficult that analytical philosophy rarely grows into a synthetic one? The point is that synthesis is not a direct continuation of analysis, but a turning point of thinking that is now moving in the opposite direction, from parts to the whole. A key role in this turn is played by a logical operation that can be called problematization. Each element, deduced from the original concept, is problematized as one in the row of the possible elements that can replace it. It is a way to defamiliarize common sense that is so prone to tautologies. By problematizing the a­ nalytically 6 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics https://books.google.com/books? id=WAw3DAAAQBA J&pg=PA785&lpg=PA785&dq.

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isolated elements and replacing one of them with another element, we get a different concept (judgment, rule) that expands the domain of the thinkable. We can understand the limitations of analytical judgement very clearly by considering a well-known example proposed by Kant: “All bachelors are unmarried.” The very concept of a bachelor is formed by a combination of these two elements: “man” and “unmarried.” If we just reconnect them, we get back to the original concept: an unmarried man is a bachelor. Synthesis without problematization does not add anything to the analysis, but only confirms its validity. Such is the tautological interchange between analysis and synthesis, if they are not mediated by problematization. But let us expand the possibilities of such an analytical judgment by asking: in what sense is a man “unmarried”? Is he unmarried in fact—or out of principle, because he is opposed to marriage and does not want to be bound by marriage? Or perhaps there are certain physical or social conditions that prevent him from marriage? Then it would be more appropriate to use another participle: unmarriable. The lexical system of language requires a new unit: “unmarriable”—the one who does not marry out of principle, because he is unable or unwilling to marry, essentially “unpaired,” “incompatible,” not designed for family life. This is the simplest example of a synthesis produced on the basis of analysis, when one of its elements, “unmarried,” is problematized and supplemented by the alternative term “unmarriable.” It turns out that the word “bachelor” can have two different meanings, i.e. point to the two different human types. The analytical judgment that “all bachelors are unmarried” now can be supplemented with a synthetic one: “some bachelors are unmarriable.” For example, the tragicomic element of Dostoevsky’s Idiot consists in the fact that two beautiful women compete for Myshkin, wanting to marry him, while he is in principle unmarriable, which he himself states at the beginning of the novel. This is the simplest example: the transition to the synthesis of new judgments through the analysis and problematization of trivial judgments. Similarly, another element of this analytical judgment can be subject to problematization: “man.” What if it is a homosexual, or transgender, or nonbinary subject? Can we say that the absence of a permanent or legally registered partner makes them bachelors? Are the very terms “married” or “unmarried” applicable to them? Such problematization opens a new space for synthetic thinking which is now in growing demand due to ethical, psychological, legal, and political concerns about gender issues. As we see in this example, synthetic operations that arise on the basis of even a trivial analytic proposition are far from trivial and help to enrich the language of thinking. But they are triggered only by problematization, and this

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is the main stumbling block in the transition from philosophical analysis to synthesis. Analysis, brought to the smallest logical atoms, turns out to be intellectually trivial, if these atoms are devoid of movement, “vibrations” and their positions in the logical structure are fixed and irreplaceable. The problem of analytical philosophy is that it is insufficiently problematic; it does not question those elements that are obtained from the analysis of a judgment. This problem can only be solved by the problematization of analysis itself as a philosophical method, offering an alternative to it and showing that problematization itself forms the crucial moment in the transition from analysis to synthesis. Examples of Philosophical Synthesis: Concept, Judgment, Rule, Discipline Now I will provide several examples of such a triple operation: from analysis— through problematization—to synthesis. I will consider synthesis on four rising levels of thinking: concept, judgment, rule, discipline. 1. Synthesis of the concept: infinition. Analytical philosophy likes to use clear definitions, and “definition” is one of its main terms. From the analytical point of view, the definition consists of definable and defining (definiendum and definiens), between which the relation of semantic equivalence is established. But what if this equivalence cannot be established within a definition? Are all concepts definable? Can the definition itself include a moment of self-­ criticism, i.e. point to the indeterminateness of this concept? By problematizing this “definition,” we come to a new, alternative notion— the infinition. This term is a blend of two words, definition and infinity originating from one Latin root finis, the end, the limit: Definition is the definition of what is definable. Infinition is the definition of what is undefinable. Infinition is an infinitely deferred definition that demonstrates the multiplicity of possible definitions and simultaneously the inadequacy of each of them and the impossibility of a complete definition as such. Infinition is an incomplete and unfinalizable definition, an infinite process of defining something that cannot be fully or precisely defined, an endless list of possible definitions. The term infinition is an example of a linguistic synthesis based on the analysis of the concept of definition: a. The starting point, thesis: definition is a concise description or explanation of the meaning of a word, term, or concept. b. Analytical dissection, or logical bifurcation: a word or a concept can be definable or indefinable, i.e. not capable of being precisely described. c. Synthesis: infinition is a definition of something that is indefinable. 1.3

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Certain fluid concepts in their emergent state are subject to infinition—­infinite dispersal of their meaning—rather than to definition. We can find many examples of infinition in philosophy and religious thought. They abound in the writings of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and other Taoist thinkers; in the treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and apophatic theology; and in the works of Jacques Derrida and other followers of deconstruction. For example, Lao Tse never gives a definition of Tao, but only multiple infinitions: “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name” (The Tao Te Ching, Ch. 1, 1–2). Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite offers infinitions of the Cause of Everything: “We therefore maintain that the universal and transcendent Cause of all things is neither without being nor without life, nor without reason or intelligence; nor is it a body, nor has it form or shape, quality, quantity or weight” (Mystical Theology, Ch. 4). Jacques Derrida never defines his method of deconstruction, but only infines it: “What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!” (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”). The most foundational concepts of any philosophical system, such as God, Being, Absolute, Spirit, Beauty, or Love, are not definable within these systems. Each discipline has its own primary concepts, such as wisdom in philosophy, soul or mind in psychology, and word in linguistics, which are subject to infinitions. In fact, any system of thinking has at its basis certain concepts that cannot be defined within its framework but are used to define other concepts derived from them. This is an example of a philosophical synthesis: on the basis of the existing concept of definition, by analyzing and problematizing, i.e. critically examining its elements, the notion of infinition is constructed. 2. Synthesis of judgments. Every act of analysis contains the possibility and condition of a new synthesis. Where there is a possibility of breaking a judgment into elements, there also exists a possibility of new judgments, a new combination of elements and, therefore, a new domain of thought and speech. For instance, the judgment “stupidity is a vice” can be treated analytically, in the spirit of George Moore, i.e. as equivalent to such judgments as “I have a negative attitude towards stupidity,” or “Stupidity evokes negative emotions in me.” The synthetic approach to this judgment, however, positions it as a potential foundation for other, alternative and more informative, “wondrous” judgments (cf. Aristotle’s idea expressed in Metaphysics about philosophy born out of wonderment). Let us create a possible sequence of questions and alternative judgments regarding the statement “Stupidity is a vice.” Is stupidity always a vice, or can it be considered, in certain cases, a virtue? If intelligence can be exercised for a

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sophisticated justification of a vice, then can innocence serve as a justification of stupidity? If stupidity is sometimes used as a means to a virtuous goal, can it then itself be considered a virtue? Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, a prominent Russian satiric writer of the nineteenth century, coined a remarkable moral term that has come into general usage in Russian: “blagoglupost’” (blago + ­glupost’, meaning “virtuous + stupidity”), which can be conveyed by the English neologism “virtupidity.” “Virtupidity” is well-intentioned stupidity, highsounding nonsense, or pompous triviality. Let us take our interrogation to the next level. If stupidity, even only in an ironic sense, can be a virtue, can baseness or meanness be virtuous, as well? Can we speak about “well-intentioned meanness”? Can we speak not only of “virtupidity,” but also “benemalence” (from Latin bene, meaning “well” and malus, meaning “bad”; cf. “benevolence” and “malice”) as “well-intentioned meanness”? “Benemalence” appears at first sight to be a dubious oxymoron. Lack of intelligence can go hand-in-hand with good intentions, but can the same be said about the malicious and perverse intentions? Can one betray, rape, and blaspheme while having good intentions? The answer is “yes,” as evidenced by the examples ranging from the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to the exemplary pioneer Pavlik Morozov, a Soviet official hero who became notorious for denouncing and betraying his father. Thus, as a trivial subject of analysis, the judgment “stupidity is a vice” can set up grounds for a synthesis of non-trivial, thought-provoking judgments and new word formations, such as “virtupidity” and “benemalence.” Language synthesis can be formally operationalized by the symbol ÷ as the sign of logical bifurcation, i.e. an alternative emerging from the analysis of the aforementioned judgment. The elements of the judgment which precede the sign ÷ are viewed as variables, whereas their alternatives or variations that follow are the new judgments: Stupidity is a vice (a trivial judgment). Problematization: Stupidity can be ÷ a vice (but may not be). Stupidity can be ÷ a virtue (under certain circumstances). Synthesis: One of the conditions of virtue is a good intention. Stupidity can be the product of good intentions: “Virtupidity.” Meanness can be the product of good intentions: “Benemalence.” Every element of any judgment can be questioned and substituted by another one, generating a new judgment. For instance, if the elements a, b, and c can be

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isolated in a judgment as a result of analysis, their synthesis generates the combinations acb, bca, cba, and bac, i.e. a new thought, a mental object yet to be cognized, requiring interpretation, and a new act of analysis to be followed by a new synthesis. Gottfried Leibniz considered the art of synthesis to be more important than that of analysis. For him, synthesis is defined as the algebra of qualities, or combinatorics which deals with forms of objects or formulas of the Universe, i.e. the quality in general, for these formulas are the result of the combination of the initial elements a, b, c, etc., and this science is different from algebra, which manipulates formulas as they apply to the quantity.7 3. Synthesis of the ethical postulate: a diamond rule. Another example is synthesis on a larger scale: not one concept or judgment, but an ethical rule, or a postulate, or a maxim. I shall proceed from the golden rule of morality, which was independently formulated by Confucius, the Jewish sage Hillel, and Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). To find a proper way to treat others, you should put yourself in the place of someone else. An analysis of this commandment leads to the separation of the ethical subject and object, “the self” and “the other,” but the relationship between them is presumed to be completely reversible. How X wants Y to do to him, let X do to Y. But X and Y are different persons with dissimilar abilities and dissimilar needs. Therefore, it is permissible to synthesize a different rule: let everyone use their greatest abilities to fulfill the greatest needs of other people. Do what others need most and what no one can do better than you. If you are a violinist by your gift and calling, then playing the violin rather than chopping wood is the fulfillment of your moral duty, contrary to what the unenlightened masses or totalitarian regimes presume, willingly using the golden rule for levelling people. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, forced to emigrate and to do mechanical labor, remarked in her diary: “I am not a parasite, because I work and I want nothing else but to work: but my own work, not somebody else’s.” In this case, this is to compose one’s own verses, not to translate those composed by others. Thus, I propose a postulate that does not annul the golden rule, but rather sets a diamond of an individual gift in its “golden frame”: Do that good to others that nobody can do better than you. From this perspective, the best action is 7 Gottfried W. Leibniz, “On Universal Synthesis and Analysis, or the Art of Discovery and Judgment,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L.E. Loemker, The New Synthese Historical Library (Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy) vol 2. (Dordrecht: Springer, 1989), 234.

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that which corresponds to the needs of the largest number and the capacities of the smallest number of people. The first criterion is the “golden” universality of a moral act, while the second criterion focuses on its “diamond-like” uniqueness. By questioning one of the elements of the golden rule (reversibility of the subject and the object), we get another, diamond one, as an answer. 4. Synthesis of a discipline. Horrorology. “Civilization studies” or “cultural studies”—an academically established discipline taught at many ­universities— explores various aspects of civilization: from history to science, from art to technology. Over the past decades, especially since the terrorist attacks of 2001 in New York, civilization revealed a property that previously was not so obvious: its growing fragility. I do not mean military forces and weapons that had always been designed for destruction; rather, I refer to the hidden self-­ destructive potential of civilization itself. The more complex our urban constructions and communication systems are, the more fragile and vulnerable civilization becomes. Goethe anticipated this bitter irony of civilization in the second part of Faust. Faust believes that he creates a dam and pushes the sea away from the shores to build a city for the free people, whereas Mephistopheles, who allegedly is carrying out this cherished plan of Faust, has something completely different in mind: to drive as many people as possible to the seashore for their eventual absorption by the sea. This hidden Mephistophelian irony can be seen in all the noble endeavors of Faust; similarly, the same self-destructive irony can be perceived in all daring endeavors of civilization. Therefore, the study of civilization must be problematized—and supplemented with a discipline that examines its own subversive, shadow side. I conditionally call this discipline “horrorology,” а rather dissonant term, as it describes the potential horror that is hidden in the allegedly most peaceful and prosperous creations of civilization: from architecture and aviation to medicine and computing. The higher the skyscrapers, the more powerful the ­aircraft—the easier it is to send these latter against the former and by mutual collision destroy both. As the terrorist act of September 11, 2001 showed, no special weapon against civilization is needed; civilization provides a range of weapons that can be used against itself. In fact, any artefact can become a weapon—for example, prescription drugs that can be deadly and addictive, or a computer program that is easy to reprogram so as to create chaos in communication systems. So many forms of the most advanced technologies can put humanity at risk that practically any of them deserves its own horrological study. For instance, the Internet, with myriad viruses spreading throughout computer networks, or artificial intelligence is capable of mentally subordinating and eventually destroying its human creators.

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If the fear of pollution—civilization’s threat to nature—haunted the second half of the twentieth century, then the twenty-first century may fall prey to the horror: the threats of civilization to itself. Ecology, as the primary concern of humanity, is succeeded by horrology that explores civilization as a system of traps and self-exploding devices, and humankind as a hostage of its own creations. Horrology as a discipline is the reverse of all other disciplines that study civilization. It is a negative science of civilization: hence nega–technology, nega–architecture, nega-sociology, nega-politics, and nega-aesthetics as branches of horrology. Everything studied by other disciplines as positive attributes and structural properties of civilization, horrology studies as the grounds of its self-destruction. This is an example of the synthesis of a new discipline from those elements of which the study of civilization is made. Through the analysis of civilization, we can problematize those “reversible” elements that can easily turn every creative act into a destructive one. 2 Part ii: How a Philosophy of Synthesis Can Transform the World Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried out during infinite ages in the art of world-making. David Hume

2.1 Synthesis as Transformation The philosophy of synthesis includes at least three levels: objective, systematic and transformative. The first level is a synthesis of new mental objects, of those conceptual (logical, semantic, linguistic) elements from which a new term, concept, rule, or discipline is composed (as described in Part 1). The second is metasynthesis, a shift from concrete, targeted interventions and innovations, such as a new concept or discipline, to a systematic construction of alternative pictures of the world, to the synthesis of a whole system of new methods and disciplines. This level is considered in a number of my works, to which, due to the length limitations of this article, I simply refer the reader.8 The third level 8 See Mikhail Epstein, A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture, trans. from Russian by Vern W. McGee and Marina Eskina (Boston, Leiden et al.: Brill Academic / Rodopi [Value Inquiry Book Series], 2019), 365 pp.; Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative

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is transformative: moving beyond the limits of philosophical thinking as such towards its synthesis with those practices—technical, cultural, artistic, ­communicative—that determine the life of society. 1. To form new concepts (terms, rules, disciplines); 2. to systematize the methods of their generation; 3. and to direct them toward the transformation of certain spheres of being: such is the threefold task of the philosophy of synthesis, the sequence of its steps. Philosophy must determine for itself those methods of action that are specific to it, in contrast to science and technology, politics and art. What is the practical benefit of philosophical synthesis for contemporary technocentric society? Is philosophy doomed to be enclosed in the academic sphere of research and teaching? Or, while remaining faithful to its tradition and its vocation, but using a synthetic methodology, can it powerfully influence the path of social development, as the driving force of civilization, which it was at the time of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel? In this second section, I will discuss the vocation of philosophy in the twenty-first century, the ways of its engagement with social and intellectual movements and advanced sciences and technologies. The direction that philosophy clearly took after the Kant’s “Copernican” revolution was the strengthening of practical reason, with the aim of active transformation of the world. This was expressed in the famous eleventh thesis of Karl Marx: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (“Theses on Feuerbach”). The thesis calls directly for the transition of philosophy from theory to practice, but a frightening asymmetry is hidden in Marx’s formulation: “in various ways” refers only to “interpret,” but not to “change.” Changing the world uniformly, according to only one plan, means exposing it to the risk of devastating consequences, as the totalitarian outcomes of Marxism in the twentieth century make abundantly clear. The philosophy of the twenty-first century, learning the sad lesson of transformism reduced to militant uniformism, should be prepared to follow the call to “change,” only adding to it “in various ways.” That is, acting pluralistically, increasing rather than reducing diversity, moving in different directions through the multiplicity of alternative philosophical practices.

­ umanities: A Manifesto, trans and ed. by Igor Kliukanov (New York and London: BloomsH bury Academic, 2012.) 318 p.; Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans with introd. by A. Miller–Pogacar (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995). 392 pp.

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Problematization of the Existing World and Projections of Its Alternatives Philosophy is distinct from other fields of inquiry by its focus on the most fundamental truths about the world as such, in its entirety, as a generic unit of thinking. Arthur Schopenhauer exclaimed: “The world, the world, asses! this is the problem of philosophy, the world and nothing else!”9 Furthermore, metaphysics is commonly defined as the most general branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and structure of the world as a whole. Of all philosophical disciplines (including epistemology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics), metaphysics appears to be the least practical as it addresses the broadest questions regarding “being as such” or “the first causes of things.” Thus, metaphysics can serve as a useful testing ground for the examination of the practical applications of philosophy. If metaphysics can be used as an engineering tool and a site for practical construction, then philosophy in principle has the potential to change the world which it studies. What are then these entities that we call worlds, and can we use this term in the plural? A world is everything that exists within one set of laws and is united by the interaction of its parts according to these laws. A most graphic specimen of a world as a single unit would be Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Middle–Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien or any sufficiently developed, immersive computer game. In this way, the first task that the creators of computer games should solve is a metaphysical one: what are the initial parameters of the virtual world in which the action takes place, how many dimensions are there, how does time flow and space unfold, how many actions, steps, blows are permitted to the gamers according to the conditions of their life, and what is considered a condition of death? If the foundational unit of metaphysical thinking is a world as whole, metaphysics was traditionally set apart from more specific, positivistic disciplines discussing particular aspects of the world. In order to be positive and practical, a discipline has to compare various manifestations of generic laws and properties: for example, various substances and elements (chemistry), organisms (biology), or languages (linguistics). Metaphysics, however, has had at its disposal only one world—the one in which we live. Respectively, philosophers debated over what constitutes the beginning or the first principle of this world. Is it composed of water or fire (Thales or Heraclitus)? Which is preeminent—a universal or an individual (Realism or Nominalism)? Is the world ideal or material in its foundations (Hegel or Marx)? These philosophies—however brilliantly 2.2

9 A note of Schopenhauer from his manuscript. Quoted in W. Schirmacher, “Schopenhauers Wirkung: Ein Philosoph wird neu gelesen,” Prisma 2, (1989), 25.

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espoused and internally coherent—all remained speculative in that they simply extracted various qualities from the same single world and hypostasized them into general principles, while the world itself remained unchanged. Now, with the assumption of a multiplicity of worlds in contemporary physics and with the proliferation of simulated worlds in digital technologies, we can look at the range of possible applications of metaphysics differently. Jon Turney identifies three types of computerized worlds: (1) mirror worlds that are ultra-detailed models of actual worlds, such as Google Earth; (2) augmented realities where information comes through artificial devices, such as glasses or wired contact lenses; (3) immersive virtual environments, or fully realized virtual worlds, where you can send your computer-controlled avatar. As information technology progresses from mirror worlds to immersive worlds, which encompass self-contained universes in them, metaphysics will get a better ground for the realization of its world-forming visions.10 Any computer game, any virtual world contains the properties of “worldness,” which forms a specific subject and concern of metaphysics. Moreover, the scale of such “little worlds” is growing rapidly, from the most primitive action game to Second Life, the design-your-own-avatar online world launched in 2003, and five years later populated by fifteen million people from one hundred countries, who can participate in individual and group activities, creating and trading items of virtual property. This territory has its own houses, businesses, laws, monetary units (lindens that can be exchanged for real dollars). The gross domestic product of Second Life in 2015 alone reached half a billion dollars (more than in some real countries). This is not just about a new transcontinental and transnational territory, but an alternative universe that potentially has its own ontology and logic, its own laws of space and time, chance and fate, its own metaphysical matrix, which is laid at the basis of its technical construction and software. Whenever we are talking about the whole world, philosophical categories inevitably come into its description, because their specific content is precisely the worldness of the world. With that in mind, why not turn our thoughts to the next possible stage, when virtual technology will be able to produce something like Tlön, a world from Jorge Luis Borges’ story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? In order to describe this world in its worldness, which is based in thought only, Borges has to resort to philosophical arguments and refer to thinkers of the past:

10

Jon Turney, The Rough Guide to the Future (London: Rough Guides, 2010), 306–07.

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Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation, nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language—religion, letters, metaphysics— all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. … [T]he men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand [this] juxtaposition (1983, pp. 8–9). We can see how the philosophical ideas of Hume, Berkeley, and Spinoza turn out to be indispensable when considering what would make one world, Tlön, so different from our familiar Earth. This example shows how certain metaphysical assumptions, idealistic in this case, are incorporated in the construction of possible worlds and thus may have a direct impact on the technologies that produce these worlds. Inventors of computer games must first of all set metaphysical parameters for the world in which action will take place. To that end, the following questions must be addressed: how many dimensions does the world contain? What is the nature of time and space in it, and do they constitute one indivisible continuum? What are the relationships between subject and object, and cause and effect? How many moves or hits is each avatar allowed? And what constitutes the conditions for each avatar’s death or disappearance from the game? But in order to synthesize a new world, not just in fiction or in a computer game, we have to analyze and to problematize the existing world, to question its foundations and major parameters. Does a world need to be made of physical substances or can it be composed of actions and events and thus described by verbs more adequately than by nouns? Does a living entity need to be mortal or is there a mechanism in its genetic and informational setup that can provide for its practical immortality? Is the capacity to think and produce ideas inexorably linked to the brain or are there other potential vehicles of intelligence? It is difficult to problematize the entire world, the only form of life and the only biological mind that for millennia were uniquely given and known to us. But this is precisely what contemporary science is attempting to do: to problematize the existing world and its most fundamental laws. And this is precisely what contemporary technology strives to do: to synthesize new forms of life and intelligence on the basis of their deep analysis and problematization.

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New Relationships of Philosophy and Technology: Collaboration in World-Making What is thus brought to light is a new relationship between philosophy and the advanced technologies that I call onto-technologies, because they change the foundations of being and the way in which we experience it. In the past, technology was preoccupied with material particulars, while taking care of concrete human needs, such as food, shelter, and transportation. Philosophy, in its turn, was preoccupied with big ideas, the first principles, essences, and universals. Technology used to be utilitarian, while philosophy was speculative. Today, technology and philosophy are moving ever closer towards each other: the power of technology is extended to the fundamental properties of the universe, while philosophy becomes increasingly active in its ability to define and change these properties. Technologies of the late twentieth and especially the early twenty-first centuries are no longer applied tools, but fundamental technologies making transformative advances into the micro- and macro-worlds, including the structure of the brain and dna. Such advances make it possible for us to penetrate into the very foundations of being, potentially changing its original parameters or setting up parameters for new kinds of being. Onto-­ technology has the power to create a new spatio-temporal continuum, a new sensory environment and modes of its perception (like in the virtual cocoon), along with new kinds of organisms and new forms of intelligence. Nano-­ technologies provide the means for the production of any object of desirable qualities and proportions from the elementary particles of matter. Humans are becoming increasingly skilful and successful in the art of world-making. As a result, technology is now moving not away from, but towards, metaphysics; this way, the two of them are meeting at the very core of being, where the principles traditionally studied by philosophy can be changed by technology. A new synthesis of philosophy and technology is taking the form of technosophia: a technically armed philosophy or philosophically oriented technology. Technosophia establishes the first principles not only in theoretical thought, but also in practical action through alternative forms of matter, life, and mind. With recent breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, genetics, and computer technologies, worldness as the primary interest of metaphysics is now expanded into a multiverse in its multiple forms and alternative branches. With the advent of the multiverse, metaphysics ceases to be a discipline that speculates about the foundations of one world. Instead, it becomes a practical discipline of constructing worlds with various properties, laws, and universals. Analytic philosophy, which is committed only to the analysis of texts, splitting them into increasingly thin, hair-like notions, is not ready for the solution and even the formulation of such technosophical problems. On the contrary, 2.3

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the philosophy of synthesis can become an integral part of the synthetic methodology of science, as outlined by Christopher Langton, the founder of synthetic biology as the theory and practice of artificial life: “Part of what artificial life is all about, and part of the broader scheme that I just call synthetic biology in general, is probing beyond, pushing beyond the envelope of what occurred naturally.”11 John Horgan argues, moreover, that at the limits of contemporary science, such a synthetic methodology offers new horizons and possibilities: Science had obviously made enormous progress by breaking things up into pieces and studying those pieces. But that methodology provided only limited understanding of higher-level phenomena, which were created to a large extent through historical accidents. One could transcend those limitations, however, through a synthetic methodology, in which the basic components of existence were put together in new ways in computers to explore what might have happened or could have happened.12 New digital technologies stimulate the development of new methodologies that look not so much for the units of analysis at their boundaries—“atoms” in its field, so to speak—as for such methods of synthesizing them that would broaden the very field of the phenomena under study. Similarly, “synthetic metaphysics” is capable of synthesizing worlds possessing various sets of laws and universals. This perspective involves high-level programming that will model diverse relationships between determinism and indeterminism, or regularity and chance, and other world-building categories. It is possible to construct existentialist and essentialist, materialist and idealist worlds, those of “to be” and “to have,” and worlds with various numbers of spatial dimensions and with the flow of time in reverse. We can imagine and potentially implement various virtual realities, for example, the Thalesian and Heraclitean worlds, or the Spinozian and Hegelian worlds. These “watery,” “fiery,” pantheist or panlogical worlds have their own metaphysical truth and value. Why should we exclude one for the sake of another and reduce the scale and wealth of worldness to one single world? Using the synthetic “metaworld” matrix, we will be able not only to experiment with the properties of existing metaphysical systems, but also to construct and test new ones. Along with Kantian, Nietzschean, Whiteheadian, and 11 12

John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight of the Scientific Age, new ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 199. John Horgan, 200.

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Heideggerian worlds, the worlds of yet undescribed qualities could be synthesized experimentally by the modification and combination of diverse parameters. This will transform the entire area of metaphysics into an experimental and constructive branch of knowledge, a humanistic technology that will explore the conditions of various worlds in comparative perspective. The MetaWorld, as a program, will be regulated by knobs/categories, such as “causality,” “chance,” “event,” “action,” “dialogue,” “matter,” “objectivity,” “perception,” and “selfness”—all of which could be adjusted to different levels of intensity. Rather than the escapism so leveled at those who engage in virtual worlds, one positive “side effect” of such a program would be that by experimenting through the avatars with conditions of numerous worlds, users will develop their better self-awareness and understanding of the real world in which they live. In fact, in the construction of a virtual world, programmers, engineers, and web designers are all invited to follow in the footsteps of the philosopher, who, as a demiurge of this particular world, formulates its foundational laws to be subsequently enacted technologically into material reality by other specialists. If a philosopher withdraws from this foundational act of thinking “world-wise,” then a computer specialist, a software engineer, a game designer and entertainer will inadvertently take upon themselves the role of a philosopher, because a world, even within a primitive game, cannot exist without a certain metaphysics as a system of laws and universals. However, web wizards or game designers certainly are not philosophers; that is why the worlds produced in their workshops are metaphysically so plain and trivial. Those who are genuine philosophers by vocation and education must fill this huge professional niche formed by the accelerated processes of world-making across so many disciplines and occupations. Some university departments of computing and informational technologies already collaborate with history departments in producing games with historical content, for example, games set in the Elizabethan era or World War ii. One can foresee philosophy departments following this example and engaging in strategic decisions about the nature of virtual worlds in the making. Simulated worlds increasingly become intrinsically philosophical as information technologies become more advanced and broaden the scope of their application from material details to the worldness of the world. Syntheticism—the theory and practice of constructing new worlds and ­beings—promises to become a direction in philosophy that appears to be more potent and congruous with the advanced technologies of today than any other philosophical “-ism” of the past. Syntheticism is a philosophy of emerging worlds that, based on certain metaphysical matrices, can be implemented by using new information technologies, nanotechnologies, bio-technologies and

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neuro-technologies. A turn from analysis to synthesis is exigent for philosophy if it does not want to turn completely into the scholastic history of philosophy and still aspires to be relevant in the future/for the future. 2.4 A New Vocation for Philosophy Previously, when there was only one world at our disposal, philosophy had to stay a speculative, abstract science. With the development of computer technology and the physical and mathematical arguments for the multiverse, the possibility of practical construction of other worlds opens up, and philosophy for the first time in history finds its practical destination and becomes a supertechnology for the first day of creation. In this light, technological progress prepares a new role for the philosopher as a metaphysical engineer or a world designer. In the past, the philosopher pronounced the last word about the world, consummating it in thought. For instance, G.W.F. Hegel was fond of repeating the maxim that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”13 In the world of tomorrow, the philosopher will more closely resemble a skylark or even a rooster, proclaiming the dawn of a new creative day. The twenty-first century introduces, at least potentially, alternative varieties of life and intelligence, such as the enhancement of brain capacity with the help of artificial devices and the exploration of holes and tunnels in a space and time continuum. Philosophy, therefore, is no longer mere speculation about the first principles, but an experiment in the conceptual production of multiple worlds—be it the creation of a computer game or a parallel universe with the quality of worldness. The features of the new stage in the movement of thought are clarified by comparison with those results of world-historical development that are reflected in Hegel’s system of absolute idealism. According to Hegel, philosophy completes the works of the absolute idea of self-development and self-­ knowledge through the worlds of nature and history: The present standpoint of philosophy is that the Idea is known in its necessity; the sides of its diremption, Nature and Spirit, are each of them recognized as representing the totality of the Idea […] The ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality […] To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. 13

G.W.F Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1967), 13.

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This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of spirit during almost twenty-five centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself […]14 Now, two hundred years after this exhaustive statement, it becomes clear that the history of philosophy is far from consummation. It was only the prehistory of philosophy, its speculative, interpretive stage, whereas now philosophy can enter a truly transformative stage when it opens perspectives on inexhaustible potentials of thinking in the creation of new worlds. Therefore, we can rephrase Hegel in the following way: The current stage of philosophy reveals its potential to transcend the limits of nature and history. The goal and aspiration of philosophy is to go beyond reality and to conceive new forms of being even before scientists, engineers and other practitioners of positive disciplines can engage in them… The “world spirit” has tested itself in the cognition of reality as it is and has entered the realm of the conceivable-thinkable-possible. Each form of future finds in philosophy its preliminary way of understanding and projection. Philosophy becomes the starting point of experimental work on the radical renewal of being and the creative design of new worlds. This idea is the result of the efforts of the spirit to become objective for itself, to know itself as the beginning of the existing world—in order to lay the foundations for previously non-existent worlds. From multiple interpretations of one world, philosophy moves on to multiple initiations of different worlds. Philosophy is not at the end, but at the beginning of those forms of matter and being that do not fit into reality and reveal their energy and potentiality in constructive excess, in the embryos of new existences. Just as an engineer is a producer of mechanisms; an artist of paintings, and a politician of institutions and laws; so too is a philosopher a producer of worlds. His professional duty is the expansion of worldness, the creation of universals that enhance the universe into multiverse. He is called upon to know, in the Hegelian sense, the rational in the real, not in order to “justify” reality as it is, but to find the super-real in reason itself and call upon it to create new kinds of being.

14

G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Section Three: Recent German Philosophy E. Final Result. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/ hpfinal.htm.

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The twentieth century was an age of grandiose physical experiments, but the twenty-first century promises to become a laboratory of even more largescale metaphysical experiments related to free will, the role of chance, the problem of possible worlds, and the paradoxes of twins, doubles, and clones. Physical experiments turn metaphysical when the conditions are ripe for radical technological transformations, like the synthesis of substances and objects with desired properties at the nanolevel or modifications of the genome and creation of new types of organisms. For example, cloning is not just biological or genetic experience; it is an experiment on the relation of human personality to the body, on the identity or difference of individuals in case of genetic identity. Michio Kaku, for example, sees the issue of our doubles, or clones in the parallel quantum worlds, as one of the great ethical and metaphysical concerns: “Are we responsible for our clone’s actions? In a quantum universe, we would have an infinite number of quantum clones. Since some of our quantum clones might perform acts of evil, are we then responsible for them? Does our soul suffer for the transgressions of our quantum clones?”15 Similar problems may emerge with our digital avatars or the new power of the brain-computer interface. For instance, am I responsible for the actions of an individual who is genetically identical to myself? Or, with the creation of wireless links between human brains and external electronics, how can my uncontrollable thoughts impact the surrounding world? If my brain is enhanced by the prostheses that transmit the energy of neural signals directly to mighty factory-like machines, this enormously increases my responsibility for the contents of my thinking as compared with the time when it was impenetrably constrained within the cranium. Therefore, one cannot agree with the pessimistic assertions of Richard Rorty that the opinions of philosophers on how consciousness relates to the brain or what place values occupy in the world of facts, or how determinism and free will can be reconciled, are not of interest to most modern intellectuals. The result was, in Richard Rorty’s judgment, the cultural marginalization of philosophy, which is why the profession has become largely irrelevant to wider public discourse: This consensus among the intellectuals has moved philosophy to the margins of culture. Such controversies as those between Russell and Bergson, Heidegger and Cassirer, Carnap and Quine, Ayer and Austin, Habermas and Gadamer, and Fodor and Davidson, have had no r­ esonance 15

Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 353.

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outside the borders of philosophy departments. Philosophers’ explanations of how the mind is related to the brain, or of how there can be a place of value in a world of fact, or of how free will and mechanism can be reconciled, do not intrigue most contemporary intellectuals. These problems, preserved in amber as the textbook “problems of philosophy,” still capture the imagination of some bright students. But no one would claim that discussion of them is central to intellectual life. Solving these very problems was all-important for contemporaries of Spinoza, but when today’s philosophy professors insist that they are “perennial,” or that they remain “fundamental,” nobody listens. Most intellectuals of our day brush aside claims that our social practices require philosophical foundations with the same impatience as when similar claims are made for religion.16 This is a tragic situation for philosophy: the more precise it attempts to be (partly by using analytic instruments), the more irrelevant it becomes. The point is not that the list of socially “irrelevant” discussions is fraught with the names of analytic philosophers. Even more deeply metaphysically grounded thinkers, like Bergson and Heidegger, if read through analytic lenses, lose their relevance. The very status of philosophy as the inquiry of the most fundamental truths about the existing world is faltering. Who cares! New worlds proliferate around us and appear to be almost as feasible as this one, and by far more interesting, imaginative and intriguing. Let physics and economy study the existing world on empirical grounds. Yet philosophy—especially metaphysics— is called to something more ambitious: to become the experimental ground for the production of other worlds, universes and universals. The opinion of philosophers on the nature of brain may be not as relevant as that of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons, but the properly philosophical question about “how the mind is related to the brain” is now more relevant than ever before because its solution, or rather the variety of solutions, will have a direct impact on the future of human mind and brain relations and thus, it bears on our own fate. Society is not interested in philosophical speculations on what is and how it is because this information can be obtained from more reliable scientific sources. Society is interested in philosophy inasmuch as it can offer bright visions and models of possible, contingent, necessary, inspiring, challenging worlds, in various formats: cinematic, digital, virtual, physical, ­cosmological, 16

Richard Rorty, “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude,” Lecture at University of Pécs in Hungary, 3 May 2004, https://books.google.com/books?id=k0Jqf7i ItdoC&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq.

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mathematical, biological, ecological, genetic, cognitive, psychic, linguistic, and aesthetic formats. Our contemporaries, including intellectuals, do not want from philosophy more meticulous research but rather more grand-scale inspiration. They want to experience how it feels to live in a world with numerous dimensions, with higher or lower degree of physical and social determinism. They want to experience what it is like to be a bat or an overman, a tree or a star. They want to expand the worldness of their experience, the scale of their feelings, thoughts, words and actions. Philosophy enters the epoch of extended modalities: not only what is, but what might be, what needs to be, what is desirable and what is thinkable.17 Thus, philosophical problems now acquire even more practical meaning than ever before, precisely because of the tremendous expansion of the capabilities of science and technology, leading to the formulation of more daring, unorthodox metaphysical schemes, or rather opportunities. No wonder Albert Einstein, in his “Remarks on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge” noted: “The present difficulties of his science force the physicist to come to grips with philosophical problems to a greater degree than was the case with earlier generations.”18 Ironically, it is the physicist, Einstein, who criticizes the philosopher, Russell, for the latter’s, inherited from Hume, “fateful ‘fear of metaphysics’ […] which has come to be a malady of contemporary empiricist philosophizing.”19 It is fair to substitute here “empiricist” for “analytic” as Russell was a more quintessential representative of analytic philosophy than of empiricism. Precisely because physics, cosmology, biology, computer science, and cognitive science reach the foundations and boundaries of the existing universe, these sciences are inherently growing more philosophical. If academic philosophers, including representatives of the analytic tradition, intently avoid these “grand, too grand” issues, out of “fear of metaphysics,” then scientists such as David Bohm, Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, John Barrow, Paul Davis, Frank Tipler, Ray Kurzweil, Francis Collins, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, Lee Smolin, Andrei Linde and many others will take the initiative. As a

17

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These multiple modalities of philosophical thinking, in the past, in the present and in the future, are broadly discussed in my book: Mikhail Epstein, A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture, trans. from Russian by Vern W. McGee and Marina Eskina (Boston, Leiden et al.: Brill Academic/ Rodopi [Value Inquiry Book Series], 2012). Albert Einstein, “Remarks on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge”in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russel , ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Open Court Publishing,1944), 280, https:// www.academia.edu/38132327/Albert_Einstein_-_Remarks_on_Bertrand_Russell_s_ Theory_of_Knowledge. Einstein, 289.

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result, questions themselves do not cease to be deeply philosophical, similar to those over which Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel were struggling. Philosophical questions persist and are even sharpened and enhanced, but in the absence of interest from professional philosophers, they are transferred to the jurisdiction of physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and cybernetics, who effectively turn out to be more genuine heirs of great metaphysical traditions than employees of the departments of analytic philosophy. In conclusion, the foundational principles of existence, formerly considered predetermined and unchangeable, today are problematized by science and transformed by technology into metaphysically challenging models of new worldwide realities. With this transformative turn, not a single aspect of the philosophical heritage will be lost or neglected in this new technosophical field. All knowledge proceeding from past systems and schools of thought can be reemployed in the problematization of the existing world and conceptual design of alternative worlds. Metaphysics applied to the art of world-making is just one example of how philosophy can find a new vocation in the age of advanced technologies. Ontology and epistemology, logic, ethics and aesthetics, philosophy of science and language—all philosophical disciplines are also quite potent to provide models for world-scale transformative actions. If philosophy wants to return to the center of intellectual life, it should not only become a philosophy of synthesis, but also itself form a synthesis with the most advanced technical, informational, biogenetic practices of the twenty-first century. Works Cited Ammerman, Robert, ed. Classics of Analytic Philosophy. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1965. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 1983. Einstein, Albert. “Remarks on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge.” In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp. Open Court Publishing (1944), https://www.academia.edu/38132327/Albert_Einstein_-_Remarks_on_Bertra nd_Russell _s_Theory_ of_Knowledge. Epstein, Mikhail. A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture. Translated from Russian by Vern W. McGee and Marina Eskina. Boston, Leiden et al.: Brill Academic/Rodopi [Value Inquiry Book Series], 2019. Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. Translated and edited by Igor Klyukanov. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.

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Epstein, Mikhail. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Translated with an introduction by A. Miller–Pogacar. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford up, 1967. Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Section Three: Recent German Philosophy E. Final Result, 1805–6, trans. E S Haldane, 1892–6. https://www.marxists .org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpfinal.htm. Horgan, John. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. New ed., New York: Basic Books, 2015. Kaku, M. Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, trans. Paul Carus, 1902, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm#__RefHeading___ Toc3101. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Papers and Letters. The New Synthese Historical Library (Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy), vol 2. Ed. by Loemker, L.E. Dordrecht: Springer, 1989. Rorty, Richard. “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude,” Lecture at the University of Pécs in Hungary, 3 May 2004, https://books.google.com/ books?id=k0Jqf7iItdoC& pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq. Russell, Bertrand. Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956. Schirmacher W., “Schopenhauers Wirkung: Ein Philosoph wird neu gelesen,” Prisma 2, 1989. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/ s1.html# Alexander. Turney, Jon. The Rough Guide to the Future. London: Rough Guides, 2010.

Valentina Fedotova Valentina G. Fedotova is a Doctor of Philosophy, professor, and Chief Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ras). She was born in the city of Penza, rich with literary traditions, high-tech productions and scientific research. In the 1960s, Penza was called “the mother of Russian cybernetics” as it was the place where the first Soviet computers “Ural,” were produced. Upon graduation from the polytechnic institute there, she was accepted into the postgraduate program of the Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University. After finishing this program, Fedotova taught philosophy in the Department of Philosophy of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Two years later she transferred to work at the Institute of Philosophy of the ras, where she defended her doctoral thesis “Sociocultural Determination in Social Cognition” and in 2015 received this institute’s highest award—the silver medal for her “contribution to the development of philosophy.” Between 2003 and 2015, she was the head of the sector for social philosophy in the ras Institute of Philosophy, and currently as its chief researcher, Fedotova chairs its dissertation committee. She has participated in international philosophical congresses and conferences and authored twelve monographs and more than two hundred and fifty articles; her articles were published in scholarly journals of China, Singapore, the United States, United Kingdom, and Vietnam. The main concepts and subjects of her research, which have produced award-winning publications, have been the three great transformations of global capitalism: Global Capitalism: Three Great Transformations. Socio-­ philosophical Analysis of the Relationship between Economy and Society (Global’nyi capitalizm: Tri velikie transformatzii. Sotsial’no-filosofskii analiz vzaimootnoshenii ekonomiki i obshchestva), a monograph co-authored with V.A. Kolpakov and N.N. Fedotova (Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 2008); the role of culture in the history and theory of modernization processes in nonwestern Europe—Modernization of the “Other” Europe (Modernizatsiia “drugoi” Evropy [Moscow: IPhRAS, 1997]), and Modernization and Culture (Modernizatsiia i kul’tura [Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2016]); the practical and spiritual exploitation of reality—The Practical and Spiritual Actualization of Reality (Prakticheskaia i dukhovnaia aktualizatsiia real’nosti [Moscow: Nauka, 1991]); the concept of a “good society” and its application in Russia and in the West—(The Good Society (Khoroshee obshchestvo), [Moscow, Progress-Traditsiia, 2005]); and the problems of interrelations of anarchy and order, as well as

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academic and post-academic science as a social problem—The Interrelation of Academic and Post-Academic Science (Sootnosheniie akademicheskoi i postakademicheskoi nauki kak sotsial’naia problema [Moscow: IPhRAS, 2015]). The monograph Global Capitalism: Three Great Transformations won first place in 2009 at the best book competition of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as first place in the competition of the Russian Association of Political Science, having been nominated “For the contribution of social philosophy to the development of political theory.” Valentina Fedotova’s article, “Terrorism: Popytka kontseptualizatsii” (Terrorism: An Attempt at Conceptualization), which appears in this anthology, was published in Russian in the journal, Pro et Contra, no. 4 (2002), 196–209.

Terrorism: An Attempt at Conceptualization Valentina Fedotova Terrorism, one of the side effects of globalization, has created new threats and a feeling of daily risk with the globalization of local tragedies. It has impeded communications, fostered suspicions, and marginalized and made obsolete the problem of identity, in a context of constant fear underscoring the perception of a less-than-natural state of society and the inability of a single person to influence the situation. This new phenomenon has nothing in common with past terrorism, with which Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is familiar. Terrorism began long before it occurred in the West on the tragic day of September 11, 2001, when suicide pilots hijacked planes and crashed into the buildings of the World Trade Center in New York, resulting in the deaths of 3,000 people, the destruction of this outstanding architectural structure and a previously unfamiliar feeling of insecurity in the United States. Terrorism manifested itself through horrible acts in Russia, the United States and other countries before that, but 9–11 is notable for having highlighted the fact that everyone is vulnerable—even the richest and most powerful country in the world. This has made terrorism a significant and menacing symptom of the twentyfirst century. 1

The Main Differences between the Old and New Terrorism

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. Throughout Russia’s history, it played a part in revolutionary struggle in which the concept of “bombism,”—a form of terrorism that uses explosives—had a notable place, especially in the nineteenth century. To many revolutionaries, killing the Tzar seemed like the only thing that would stir Russia up. The Decembrists plotted an act of terrorism.1 Members of Narodnaia Volia carried it out.2 Vera N. Figner recited Aleksandr K. 1 Individual Political Terrorism in Russia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Individual’nyi politicheskii terror v Rossii, xix–xx v.), edited by Boris Iu. Ivanov and Arsenii V. Roginskii, (Memorial, 1996). 2 Grigorii S. Kan, Narodnaia “volia.” Ideology and Leaders (Narodnaia “volia.” Ideologiia i lidery) (Probel, 1997).

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Soloviev’s speech to enable her to kill the Tzar. This speech includes all the elements defining the terrorism of that time: I will forfeit my place as [a] county’s scribe and go to Saint Petersburg to kill Emperor Alexander ii. Living in the village is useless. We will be unable to do anything in it until a ground-shaking event occurs in Russia. Killing the Emperor will be such event: it will stir up the whole country. The discontent that manifests [itself] today [in the] dull grumbling of the people, will spark a flame in the areas where it is felt most intensely, and then [it] will spread everywhere. We need only a push to make everything rise.3 It is notable that they conspire to assassinate a specific and very important person who is responsible for the entirety of the country’s internal policy. Yet the goal is not that death itself; it is the social explosion that would follow and provoke a revolution. This feature of a terrorist act—the mediation of its end goal—has served as one reason that terrorism is viewed as a method of using violence against people who, in the role of political actors or agents of authority, obstruct the achievement of a group’s or nation’s goals.4 The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) considered terrorism society’s means of “self-defense” “against the arbitrariness of the authorities.”5 In Russia, there has always been a deep connection between terrorism and anarchism. In his reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s thesis that only things without history can be defined, the American researcher of terrorism Walter Laqueur argued that there is no need to say that terrorism has a very long history;6 nevertheless, it does not have a mono-semantic definition: at every stage in every country there must appear specific definitions of terrorism that suit its diversity. For instance, Oleg V. Budnitskii considers anarchic terrorism “an independent type of struggle that is based on 3 Vera N. Figner, Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia) (excerpt) in G.S. Kan, Narodnaia “volia.” Ideologiia i lidery (Probel, 1997), 162. 4 See: Oleg V. Budnitskii, Terrorism in Russian Liberation Movement. Ideology, Ethics, Psychology (Second half of the xix–early xx century) (Terrorizm v Rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii) (rosspen, 2000), 5–10. See also: L.G. Praisman, Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Guards and Provocateurs (Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory) (rosspen, 2001). 5 Viktor M. Chernov’s words quoted by Oleg V. Budnitskii in Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement, 135. 6 Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism, Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (Oxford U P, 1999), 6.

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­ rinciples different from that of political terrorism. In its core lies the idea of p ‘propaganda through action’.”7 However, if we compare this statement to the aforementioned speech by Soloviev, we can see that members of Narodnaia Volia also saw terror as “propaganda through action”: they grew desperate after trying unsuccessfully to enact change in Russia through peaceful work in rural areas. Therefore, a minimalist definition of old terrorism may sound like this: an individual or a group applying violence against adverse political actors in order to convince the masses of the possibility of successful struggle and to stimulate their protest. In the 1970s Western Europe was struck by a wave of terror that grew from anarchism, revolutionary movements, and national extremism. Laqueur provides a definition of terrorism formulated in 1990 and used by American ­counter-terrorist agencies: “Terrorism is the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”8 As it stands, the essence is the same—“propaganda through action.” However, terrorism today basically appears as new terrorism, and pondering this topic leads to different, yet not mutually exclusive, characteristics of the “novelty” of modern terrorism. The West has accumulated a large mass of literature concerning the problem of terrorism in the twenty-first century,9 but conceptual development of the problem has not been carried out and may be even perceived as inappropriate. The weight of human, material and moral damage was too high: the “Ground Zero” site at the foundation of the now non-existent World Trade Center in New York stood gaping, so abstract reasoning that would contain not only the element of explanation, but also understanding, would almost certainly be seen as a manifestation of indifference. As one American professor once declared, looking for definitions or proposing theories about terrorism would be pointless because terrorists are criminals who must be eliminated just as terrorism is a crime that must be fought. Both our citizens and our scholars understand this outlook. However, without the analysis of the reasons for and

7 Budnitskii, 219. 8 Laqueur, 5. 9 Exempli gratia: The Age of Terror. America and the World after September 11, edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda (Basic Books, 2001); A Just Response. The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy, and September 11, 2001, edited by K. vanden Heuvel (Nation Books, 2002); Charles Derber, People before Profit. The New Globalization in the Age of Terror. Big Money and Economic Crisis (Pikador, 2002); Implicating Empire. Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, edited by Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney (Basic Books, 2003).

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essence of terrorism, its new features, and its connection to a m ­ ultitude of changes that occur in the world, the fight against terrorism is also impossible. Large volumes of Western literature devoted to the problem of terrorism of the 1970s also lack conceptualization for different reasons: back then, terrorism seemed a random act of malicious will, political extremism, or anarchy that could easily be dealt with through police methods. The most characteristic conceptual definition of terrorism was then provided by Laqueur.10 But in his aforementioned book, published before the event of 9–11, he declared that twenty-first-century terrorism is something new:11 it is less multifaced but technologically equipped and thus results in massive casualties and destruction. Scholarly literature in Russia exhibits a slightly delayed theoretical reaction to this menacing phenomenon. However, several articles mention something that cannot be said about nineteenth-century terrorism or that of the 1970s. So, in an array of articles in Filosofskie nauki, a journal on philosophical sciences, Vadim M. Rozin opines that terrorism today has adapted the technocratic approach. Vladimir V. Nikitaev argues that it is a form of revenge, carried out by the lagging part of the world toward the successful one, due to the finality of the lag and the inability to “catch up” with the modern West. Gennadii G. Kopylov considers terrorism to be the consequence of realizing that the unity of humanity and its “essential sameness” are unattainable.12 These points of view are not mutually exclusive, but they hardly define new terrorism as a whole. Terrorism is frequently defined as an attempt to put pressure on a foreign or domestic government by utilizing the ability of television to broadcast clearly to the whole world the horrors of using violence against a peaceful population. Without television, especially without live broadcasts of terrorist acts, terrorists cannot count on the ability of their victims, their relatives and parts of the population to make demands on their government that align with those of the terrorists. In fact, terrorism is violence applied by a group of people toward a government as a political subject, mediated by violence or threat of violence against peaceful citizens. It is a form of political message, an ultimatum. The conference, Euro-Atlantic Community—the Community of Values held in Soloniki (December 2002) provides another definition: terrorism is the activity of a non-governmental 10 Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Little, Brown, 1977). 11 Laqueur, The New Terrorism. 12 Vadim M. Rozin, Terrorism as an Expressive Symptom of the Crisis of our Civilization? (“Terrorizm kak vyrazitel’nyi simptom krizisa nashei tsivilizatsii?”) Philosophical Sciences (Filosofskie nauki) no. 1 (2002), 126–35; Vladimir V. Nikitaev, Terrophania (“Terrorfania”) Filosofskie nauki, no.1 (2002), 135–40; Gennadii G. Kopylov, Are Human Beings (Really) Human? (“Liudi li liudi?”) Filosofskie nauki, no.1 (2002), 141–44.

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a­ ctor which damages nongovernmental organizations to damage the government. Terrorists wage war with the government through waging war with the population, while having no chance of becoming a governmental actor. Therefore, the essence of terrorism as “propaganda through action,” as an ultimatum, is retained, but the target it attacks has changed. It is no longer the politically responsible individual, but the peaceful populace. Technological opportunities for the attacks have also changed: from knives, shots, dynamite, and airplane attacks, to biological, chemical and—potentially—nuclear weapons. All this makes new terrorism a global threat. This generally common opinion was first formulated by Laqueur in The New Terror. Obviously, “old” terrorism did not disappear: it frequently goes side by side with the new one. This analysis of the contemporary outlook on terrorism easily reveals the aforementioned moral barriers to its conceptualization; political reasons for this include the fear of losing the image of an enemy, and consequently, the resolve to fight it. A significant barrier to understanding the essence of terrorism is so-called political correctness. While its existence is completely justified, in modern conditions it acts as a prohibition of public discussion of the most pressing problems, which contradicts the main principle of democracy: open debate. This useful principle, it seems, may have exceeded the predesigned limits of its application in removing the opportunity for discussing the most painful problems. Looking back, one might see that if such phenomena as deviant behavior, crime, anarchy, chaos, protest movements, and revolutions were not theoretically defined or at least conceptualized, we would not be able to differentiate between them or understand them, and we would not have the cognitive tools for the analysis. The cognitive experience of previous eras does not supply the necessary approaches for that. As Zygmunt Bauman noted, the encounters with the unclear, untransparent, and unexpected were in no way a trait of modernity. Novel was the helplessness of ancient and medieval methods, which helped rather to avoid the pressing psychological and pragmatic consequences of human destiny and perspective, than to overcome them.13 It may be that moral and political “prohibitions” to analyze terrorism have the same goal—to avoid, psychologically and cognitively the unforeseen and horrible consequences of terrorism and the realization that it is a feature of the new era. Nevertheless, it is worth outlining a number of approaches that conceptualize the problem of terrorism, assess their compatibility, offer an interpretation 13

Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and Clarity: The Story of a Failed Romance,” (“Moderniti I iasnost’: istoriianeudachogo romana”), The Individualized Society (Individualizirovannoe obshchestvo), trans. Vladislav L. Inozemtsev (Logos, 2005/Moscow, 2002).

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and define the conditions under which terrorism, an apparently essential factor of the twenty-first century, can be weakened. 2

Theoretical Resources for Explaining the Reasons and Essence of Terrorism

Reflections on terrorism can be generally divided into three groups: sociological, civilizational and socio-psychological. All marginal explanations fit into one of the three types. As such, I consider the aforementioned point of view by Rozin to be sociological; by Nikitaev, sociopsychological; and by Kopylov, civilizational. Let us review these three approaches, as well as a fourth one, that I propose—a political science approach. 2.1 The Sociological Approach The sociological approach is based on the identification of sources for aggression, such as underdevelopment and poverty. Not only are these eternal companions of inequality of development not removed by the globalization, they are facilitated by it.14 Globalization makes a positive impact on the economic growth of developed countries, but it also frequently worsens the conditions of periphery zones. Why is this gap attributed to the consequences of globalization, despite the fact that the UN report clearly states that it was widening during the period prior to globalization? Firstly, the numbers highlight the acceleration of the pace of this increasing disparity between the developed and underdeveloped, the rich and poor countries at the beginning of globalization. Secondly, informationally, economically and technologically developed countries gain unquestionable advantages through globalization. Thirdly, the changes that occur in the West are so massive that the catching-up model of modernization is now unreliable: it is harder to overcome the lag, and nigh on impossible to catch up with the West. The outlook on modernization is also changing. Explanations of terrorism that rely on the concept of poverty are frequently challenged. The counterargument is that many terrorist leaders are educated and wealthy bourgeois. Does this make the issue of poverty less relevant in regard to the topic of terrorism? Poverty is not always connected to terrorism, but in the ideology of terror it plays the central role, along with humiliation, lack of 14

“Globalization with a Human Face undp Report 1999,” The Global Transformation Reader. An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew (Polity, 2000), 341–47.

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education, alienation, marginalization, and a lack of global identity accompanied by the elimination of a local one. Given advanced technological equipment, the acquisition of an identity, that had been eliminated, may take ugly and twisted forms, some of which lead to terrorism. In particular, new technologies severe traditional ties, as they create new lifestyles. It happens not only in the West with its technological revolution and in post-communist countries with their social revolutions, but also in the East. Manuel Castells provides an example of such artificial identity by referencing the Japanese terrorist organization “Aum Shinriky”: it may be viewed as a symptom of a crisis of existing samples of identity coupled with a desperate need to build a new collective i, which would significantly mix spirituality, cutting-edge technology (chemistry, biology, lasers), global business connections and the culture of the millennial end of history—­ especially in the younger, well-educated generation.15 Globalization implies the exchange of goods, capital and individuals. The world is divided into countries with a high standard of living and value of labor, and those with a low standard of living, low value of labor and limited legal mobility of individuals; otherwise, the dispossessed from all over the world would rush to the West. However, trafficking from poor to rich countries is on the rise: more individuals, especially women and children that are frequently sexually exploited are being illegally sold. Social contrasts turn terrorism into a weapon of protest. It is evident that the absence of opportunity to resolve this problem legally may be one of the sources of terrorism. Reactions to this are different, sometimes extreme: from demands for development, currently being blocked by the Western policy of globalization for developing countries, to traditionalist opposition to modernization which does not provide visible results. 2.2 The Civilizational Approach The confrontation due to the “diversity gap” [cultural distance] is even more suitable for describing the civilizational discord between the North and the South. It is not necessary to repeat the polemics regarding the concept of Samuel Huntington, who, ignoring political correctness, defined the lines of civilizational chasms as a feature of new conflicts following the Cold War. Terrorism indeed exhibits the traits of a struggle between civilizations. President George Bush asked, “Why do they hate us?” and provided the answer himself: “Because they hate our freedom.” This resembles the aforementioned speech made by Lord Litton in India in 1878, when he informed the 15

Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Informatsionnaia epokha. Ekonomika, obshchestvo i kul’tura), (gu vshe, 2000).

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Hindus of Britain’s high mission to bring to India the idea of the freedom and dignity of each individual through a free press. Bush’s “formula” for terrorists seems no less cryptic. Political correctness, as noted above, forbids the discussion of this issue in the United States. Only two “heretics”—Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky—attempted to answer Bush’s question without sparing America, but that did not invoke public sympathy—and it could not, given the circumstances. In Vidal’s book, which was published in Russia before it was published in America—the author illustrates how the arrogance of the United States toward other nations, hegemonism, triumphalism, light applications of military and police operations, faith in its political and moral superiority—make people like Timothy McVeigh, who was behind the Oklahoma City explosion, commit acts of terror: only through these means could he hope both to get the opportunity to explain—through the media—the reasons for his disdain for America and to convince Islamic terrorists to switch to means available to them.16 For a lot of people in the United States, the essential issue of terrorism is polarizing; in a pluralistic country, it creates “us” and “them”—two opposite poles that coexist. Hence, Huntington faced opposition not only from the proponents of cosmopolitism and globalization, but also from those who viewed terrorism as barbarianism in battle with civilization. Barbarianism certainly occurs, but it is a parasite on cultures that allow terrorism. 2.3 The Socio-psychological Approach The classic sociopsychological work by Eric Hoffer, titled The True Believer17 (1961) is famous for its in-depth analysis of mass psychology and the particular traits of the “true believer” type—a deeply convicted and destructive person. Among these traits are the true believer’s calls for mass movement based on a desire for change, a desire for substitutes, and for internal volatility of the masses. Misfortune and poverty, unrestricted egoism and ambition, doctrines, fanaticism, and struggle for leadership—all play important roles. Such individuals or groups evolve from words to action, to useful mass movements. In his two books Laqueur views as the primary roots of terrorism fanaticism, the response to state terror and human nature, which does not change even when technology rapidly develops. He also talks in detail about so-called state 16 17

Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. (Pochemu nas nenavidiat? Vechnaia voina radi vechnogo mira) (ast, 2003). Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. (Perennial Library, 1989).

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terrorism, which, to my mind, only makes the issue more confusing. I would rather agree with Oleg Budnitskii, who considers the term “terrorism” inapplicable to a government’s actions even when the government utilizes terror ­because this methodological exercise avoids confusing the two different phenomena. Another author, Dmitrii V. Ol’shanskii, proposes a simpler chain: ­“radicalism—extremism—fanaticism—terrorism” to explain the evolution of the subject leaning toward the escalation of violence and responding to violence with violence.18 Unmet expectations and a rapid change of identity, which does not let us understand when the Ukrainians changed their attitude toward Russia, or when Bosnians started identifying as Muslims—all play an important role in forming the terrorist’s mindset. Nevertheless, the widespread understanding of terrorism—acts of fanatics blinded by hatred—cannot be accepted as a whole. In his work Anatolii I. Utkin cites the letter of one of the suicide pilots, written shortly before the World Trade Center attack. Serene in tone, it contains an appeal toward Muslims and the rationalization of the terrorist’s choice as an expression of his religious duty and search for justice. Utkin also mentions the diary of a Japanese kamikaze pilot who attacked an American plane and crashed into the sea without exploding. He is grateful that the flight was delayed by one day so that he would be able to see the sky one more time and then carry out his duty.19 In the citation from McVeigh in Vidal’s book we likewise see McVeigh not as a fanatic, nor as an angry or a mentally ill person. His sanity has been confirmed by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who concluded that McVeigh was just a person who desired to give his all to a cause. In his letters he appears more similar to Martin Luther—just as does the Israeli student Agal Ashimr, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. McVeigh avenges the horrors that Arab populations witnessed during the Gulf War, trying to show these horrors to U.S. citizens so that they could influence their government. McVeigh’s rationalization was not presented to them through the media, and his death was a message of a different kind—the one about the danger posed by these animals, the terrorists. Monism, rather than fanaticism, appears to better characterize terrorists: “They [extremists, terrorists—V.F.] ignore or suppress the complexity [of events—V.F] and struggle to identify or accept any ambiguity, reducing the evaluation of social institutes to ‘single fixed standards’ … such as 18 19

Dmitrii V. Ol’shanskii, Psychology of Terror (Psikhologiia terrora) (Delovaia kniga, 2002). Anatolii I. Utkin, The Only Superpower (Edinstvennaia sverkhderzhava) (Moscow, 2003), 349, 363.

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black and white, true and false. Their romantic appeal to the outsiders or surrounding participants is typically conditioned by their seeming adherence to the mentality of their proponents, which, among other things, is characterized by elimination of the difference between private and public interests….”20 It appears that the most adequate psychological evaluation of terrorism should be based on understanding that terrorists come from traditional societies or share a traditional mindset, which, even if they live in other societies, measure rationality not by the merit of goal achievement, but by unyielding connection to its values.21 Terrorism is a crime, and punishment must follow. But if we want only to avoid the problem, then we should simplify the situation and turn terrorists into undoubted villains, consumed by ignoble motives. It is hard to define the motivation of a terrorist. It can simultaneously be political, religious and psychological. Those who attacked the United States hated it for its triumphalism, for enforcing the status quo despite the fact that radical Islamists are not content with their status and place in the global economy, for not understanding that they are different, for the alienation, for the soft power. In this hatred, the truth and the lies were mixed, and out of them the solidarity of the Islamic world and its marginalized members was forged. Hatred was combined with rational actions—long-term planning, preparations, calculations. It is unlikely that these psychological findings can be convincing or allow us to understand terrorism better, but they are essential for disarming the terrorists and rendering them harmless. 2.4 The Political Science Approach The aforementioned approaches contain a multitude of characteristics and preexisting conditions for terrorism that cannot be discarded: poverty that struck entire regions, the unevenness of globalization, the weakness of civilization, human nature, and the psychology of fanatics. But why is terrorism the reaction to all these? Why is it that terrorism marks the twenty-first century, as many works state, despite the fact that there were many occurrences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Is there any integral trait of terrorism that would separate the conditions in which it thrives from its essence, that would point not only to the general signs and reasons of a terrorist act, but also to specific ones? It seems appropriate to note here the parallel with defining the

20 21

Political Extremism and Rationality, edited by Albert Breton, Gianluigi G. Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, and Ronald Wintrobe (Cambridge up, 2002), 148. Albert Breton et al., eds., 148.

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conditions for a revolution and its essence. A class gap, like a civilizational gap, is accompanied by the economic inequality that fosters revolutions and, likewise, terrorism. But both revolutions and terrorism may or may not occur in conditions of economic inequality and cultural differences between civilizations. Poverty is also the reason for revolutions. But a revolution may or may not take place in impoverished conditions. Terrorism is similar to a social protest or revolutionary movement that takes place under conditions of the death of classes and depolitization. As such terrorism feeds on social causes. But these “revolutions” generally do not make claims to power. Their goal is to disturb the hated enemy, make it vulnerable, horrified, create conditions in which this enemy might understand the problems of those who start desperate fights. At the same time terrorism resembles a new type of war that does not always fall in line with the government’s policy. It is a war of nonpolitical agents which happens without declaration, with goals that are far-off and unattainable through this particular type of war. Among its roots are social and civilizational factors.22 At the same time, terrorism is an international crime—technologically equipped and politically motivated. Terrorists act as political actors, although their actions are not directly aimed at their own or a foreign state, but instead, at a peaceful population. The primary source of terrorist crimes springs primarily from psychological dispositions: hatred, envy, greed. This is the type of criminality that accompanies the destruction of traditionalist societies that do not successfully modernize. In the given features of terrorism, the presented sociological, civilizational and psychological approaches interact; however, the quintessential trait of terrorism in this interaction has not been found. Social protest, cultural conflict and psychological anger, when confined in one phenomenon, increase the number of threats in the world, make them unpredictable, just like natural cataclysms—and transform the perception of social reality into something quasi-natural. Those who define terrorism as revanchism and the last battle of traditionalism do not consider it a political action, because in traditional societies, life and politics—in the modern sense of the term—are not interconnected. However, there is an alternative explanation. First of all, terrorism acts as a way for the weak to combat the political power of the state with which they cannot clash directly. As noted in the

22

See: Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War. Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Little, Brown, 1993).

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a­ forementioned work on political extremism, it is a reaction to the asymmetry in the redistribution of political rent.23 I argue that the integral trait of terrorism is political in nature. As Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf once noted, “Bin Laden gave a project to his students, the one that justified terrorism and provided financial resources. The main motivation of the Islamists is not religion; it is politics,” according to Utkin.24 This view is mainly conditioned by the fact that terrorists pursue political goals. For Bin Laden it was building the Islamic caliphate; for others it is creating their own state, having autonomy, achieving a certain status in the international system, or entering the international globalized arena, where developed countries have firmly established their leadership. Sri-Lankan, Basque, Irish and other terrorist organizations differ from radical Islamic terrorist organizations perhaps in the greater localization of their activities: having more tangible and realistically attainable goals, they are less archaic. The latter’s call to give one’s life in return for support of one’s family and eternal bliss after death is understandable to the umma, but in other cases, the force of this summons appears weaker. Apart from that, the political nature of terrorist acts of the twenty-first century can be explained by a definition of politics that does not exclusively focus on the specific activity of a government. This kind of methodology has been introduced by the German political theorist, Carl Schmitt. He argued that the specifics of this type of activity may be determined by identifying the main issue that politics is supposed to resolve. Schmitt identifies this issue in a manner similar to that used for the aesthetical, the ethical, and the economical. Aesthetics resolves the issue of the beautiful and the ugly; ethics, the issue of good and evil; and economics, the useful and the useless, the profitable and unprofitable. Specifically political is the dichotomy to which all political actions and motives can be traced: the dichotomy of a friend and a foe.25 Despite the fact that Schmitt’s work dates back to 1927, he like no one else managed to define the essence of the political and provide commentary applicable to current events, and he described an example of a politically motivated terrorist act similar to that of the World Trade Center attack. The real division into groups of friends and foes is so strong and definitive that non-political opposition, at the moment when it provokes such grouping, overwhelms all previous criteria and motives—“purely” religious, “purely” economical, “purely”

23 24 25

Albert Breton et al., Political Extremism and Rationality, cover. Utkin, 345. Carl Schmitt, “The Concept of the Political,” Questions of Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1 (1992), 40.

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c­ ultural—and becomes subject to completely new conditions and conclusions of a political situation.26 Having described the political, Schmitt discarded neither the meaning of the government as the main agent of politics nor the connection between what in his view is considered political and the government’s actions. He merely explained the reasons for this status quo: the political does not automatically stem from one’s attitude toward the authorities, to the government; on the contrary, it is the government that acquires weight and authority due to its political nature, its ability to maintain unity among friends, including internal unity, and to organize resistance against foes. The government is the main political actor, but this concept of the political allows the existence of others. I will attempt to explain why the conditions that may lead to a revolution, war or mass protest today lead to terrorism. The aforementioned Schmitt has also analogously clarified depolitization: if the distinction between friend and foe disappears, political life as a whole disappears too.27 The end of the twentieth century has brought a sharp realization of the fact that all its tragedies and tensions, revolutions and wars are the consequences of the domination of politics, never-ending polarization both of the international system and of the internal affairs of states—polarization into friends and foes. The possibility of a less confrontational future was sought in transparency, dialogue, and democratization. No one has thought yet that the clash of civilizations or of lifestyles could become a less painful process. Hatred toward politics in general or toward attempts to find a perfect political system has prevailed. Neoliberalism brought out this claim, and by appealing to the free market, it took part in depolitization, using its slogans to safeguard its own policy and ideology. Two processes of depolitization faced off at the same time: one in the West and the other in Russia. In the West, recent decades have been characterized by the growing prominence of the idea that international transparency would be the guarantor of peace and invulnerability. The countries that were isolated either due to circumstances or by choice—even when the isolation boosted internal growth—were painted as especially dangerous. The fall of communism has been interpreted both in the East and the West as a sign of decreasing confrontation and a precursor of peace. The avalanche-like global spread of democracy also supported the hope for peace. One of the scholars, Yves Meny, outlined the development of democracy: 26 27

Schmitt, 46. Schmitt, 53.

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in 1790, there were two or three questionably democratic systems; in 1920, there were ten incomplete, imperfect, fragile democracies; in 1950, a number of countries could declare their aspirations to being democracies but under the condition that the quality of these democracies did not permit them to number among the “genuine” democracies; in 1999, the term “democracy” became so omnipresent, that only a few countries rejected the forms and rituals of the Western model. It all happened as if there were no alternatives.28 The formula that “democratic countries do not declare wars against each other” was interpreted broadly and applied to the countries that were, in fact, far from the developed Western democracies, but the rhetoric of politicians was full of appeals to democracy. Stimulating globalization and the spread of democracy was the belief that as closed-off bastions were destroyed, openness and transparency in international relations would expand, and peace would prevail, and Western countries would then turn out to be invulnerable. Until November 11, 2001, the West had no idea of what external challenges it would face. Several months prior to the attack, Meny wrote that the lack of alternatives for the Western political model removed external threats [that is, external to the West—V.F.], but strengthened the internal ones.29 The term “terrorism” is remarkably absent from works by most futurologists, political scientists, and sociologists. But now it is clear that politicians—including a steadfast proponent of transparency, President Bill Clinton—were worried because of the vulnerability that grew with transparency. Many other US politicians were worried about that too. At the same time, Clinton’s belief in the power of transparency, coupled with the shared belief in the positive nature of depolitization and in the ability to speak on behalf of humanity, was winning. Depolitization was connected to the relative weakening of the Westphalian system of nation states, to the appearance of charity organizations and other non-governmental political actors (ngos), to the wider authority of civil society, to the “death of class,” to the end or fragmentation of ideologies, to a more vivid structure of society, to the removal of the masses constantly present in the twentieth-century historical arena,30 to the imagology of the television, where a politician appeared before the nation not as a representative of a project or a program, but as a ­charismatic 28 29 30

Yves Meny, Five (Hypo)theses on Democracy and its Future—In: The Global Third Way Debate, edited by Anthony Giddens (Polity, 2001), 259. Schmitt, 63. See: Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class (Thousand Oaks/Sage, 1996).

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persona, who, in the context of political and cultural pluralism, reduced the polarizing division into friends and foes, and consequently, it seems, the tensions of the twentieth century. In Russia, the effort made by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to implement policies on behalf of “the whole world” seemed premature at best, as it did not prevent the appearance of an increasing number of “foes,” wars and conflicts across the territories of the former ussr and the weakening of the pursuit of national political interests in the world. A noble aspiration to legitimize international politics morally turned out to be practically ineffective, and during President Boris Yeltsin’s time, made way for complete cynicism inside the country, complete adherence to external demands (partially as a form of admitting the immorality of a multitude of episodes from the previous era’s international policy and even this policy as a whole) and misunderstanding of external political interests of Russia. The fall of communism made globalization possible and coincided with it as it began in the early 1990s. It eliminated the zones that were previously inaccessible to capital, goods and information, and it aided the triumph of liberalism and free trade on a global scale. Russia switched from moral and valuecentered legitimization of the transparency championed by Gorbachev, to the ideas of Western politicians who saw globalization as a means to cement the status-quo, a path that Russia then also pursued as it had something to lose. It should be noted that scholars were more skeptical in regard to aspirations connected to globalization. They pointed to the inseparability of the global and local (Roland Robertson); to new and equally dire problems of the ­global future (Takashi Inoguchi); the possible conflicts between civilizations (Samuel Huntington); the nonlinear nature of development and possible alterations to its direction (Immanuel Wallerstein); to globalization potentially being the beginning of a new process of social transformations, whose implementation in an expected form may not be guaranteed (Martin Albrow); to its unevenness and complicated consequences, such as widening the gap between the rich and the poor, developed and developing countries, and discriminatory stratification of nations (UN reports); to a variety of globalizations (Peter Berger, Huntington); to the transformation of society into a quasi-natural reality (Ulrich Beck, Boris Kapustin); to a dangerous loss of social identity and fragmentation as a result of a policy of multiculturalism that goes beyond just acknowledging and appreciating the variety of cultures toward their particularization (Karl-Otto Apel, Zygmunt Bauman); to unforeseeable consequences of the emergence of new political actors, who may be illegitimate (Jan Pakulsik, Malcolm Waters); to the necessity of rational interaction between the increasingly influential civil society and the government, which has to be

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strengthened “above and below the market” (Anthony Giddens), and to the dangers of humanitarian interventions (Daniel Warner). Special attention was devoted to the issue of depolitization of developed societies and governments in the context of globalization. Beck held that the absence of politics in the context of globalization is a revolution that has many negative consequences.31 Carl Boggs was concerned about the increasing corporativity of the authorities.32 However, the danger of integration of all these factors into one common precursor for terrorism has not yet been addressed. The experience of how “definitive victory” turns to defeat is well-known. Such is the experience of the ussr, where the absence of political opposition at a certain point led society to total denial of the past; politization from below allowed Yeltsin to take power and consequently, resulted in the fall of the country. In Turkey, where leftist movements were suppressed and opposition met harsh reaction, Islam embraced all types of protest, became political and turned into political opposition. Chechen criminal experience and terrorism were politicized under the disguise of separatism. The attack on the World Trade Center revealed religious groups who declared those responsible for globalization their enemy; this immediately singled them out of the diverse mob of anti-globalists, who fought the phenomenon, but not those who could be blamed for it. As this situation shows, it was the conflicts of the twentieth century that occupied the minds of the politicians, who hoped that globalization would help them overcome the conflicts—much like military officers are occupied with visions of past wars. The weakening of the global international system as the main and legitimate actor of international relations, the absence of global political structures and, consequently, the absence of opportunity to solve ongoing conflicts through political means—all lead to illegitimate political solutions and actions. Terrorism appears to be a form of archaic politization, where a primitively simplistic “friend or foe” system of coordinates is stripped from any and all state or diplomatic elements, which calls for an ancient vengeance instinct (partially connected to blood or clan-based vengeance) and leads to attacks on the population, to the end of influencing the governments, through citizens and media, in order to 31

32

Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Chto takoe globalizatsiia?) (Progress-Traditsiia, 2001), 209–11; Beck, Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity (Obshchestvo riska. Na puti k drugomu modernu) (Progress-Traditsiia, 2000), 278–347; Beck, The Reinvention of Politics. Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Polity, 1999) 132–60; Beck and Elisabeth BeckGernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences (Thousand Oaks/Sage, 2002). Carl Boggs, The End of Politics. Corporate Power and the Decline of Public Sphere (Guilford, 2000).

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achieve rational political goals. Without discarding previous definitions of ­terrorism, we attempt to enrich them by adding the characteristic that appears integral: a form of archaic politization. Why did this particular form come to be? A motive of vengeance and self-proclamation, triumphalism borrowed from the West, and readiness to sacrifice one’s life for archaic politization are the main factors. These factors are undoubtedly psychological, but not only in the context of individual psychology, but also as a collective archetype of an archaic image of politics. This image stems from the deep layers of traditional societies that are being destroyed—primarily, by money, material and technological temptations. However, despite this archaic buffer and metaphysical goals of proselytizing radical Islam, that include the creation of an Islamic caliphate, terrorists also had practical goals: to provoke dissent among the umma which would lead to the fall of pro-Western regimes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Rhetorical retaliation by President George W. Bush was inadequate in the minds of the terrorists, but it too appealed to the archaic layers of American political consciousness. Bush’s practical goal was to keep these regimes from falling, forestall these attempts by destroying the training camps of antiAmerican-minded terrorists in Afghanistan, as well as to gain control over the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf.33 The twentieth century was the age of the masses, the age of revolutions and wars. The first phase of globalization occurred in 1895–1914, with England as its leader. English free trade fostered the exchange of ideas, goods and individual mobility.34 However, this round of globalization was stopped by several systemic oppositions: nationalism, communism, and fascism. German nationalism and World War i cut this process short, communists severed ties with it, and fascists put an end to the possibility of its swift restoration. Therefore, those movements did define the image of the twentieth century. The new wave of globalization, which started in the 1990s, was accompanied by anti-globalist non-systemic and anti-systemic movements. Depolitization of the global world and the reduction of the government’s role as a main political actor brought forth a new specific and illegitimate political actor. One may like or dislike Schmitt, doubt the spotlessness of his own biography or be sure of it, but one cannot remain unsurprised by the precision of his forecast: 33 34

See: Utkin, The Only Superpower; Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars. The New Landscape of Global Conflict. (Owl Books, 2002.). See: Anatolii I. Utkin, Globalization: The Process and Comprehension (Globalizatsiia: protsess i osmyslenie) (Logos, 2001).

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…the world is not being depoliticized and does not shift towards the state of pure morality, pure law … or pure economy. If some nation fears the difficulties and dangers of political existence, there will always be another nation that will take these troubles upon itself by assuming the responsibility of “protecting the former from external foes” and through that assuming political superiority. …Only those who stand on shaky ground assume that [an] unarmed nation has friends and friends only, and only [the] delusional might think that the foe will be moved by a lack of resistance.35 Therefore, the belief of the West in its own power and, hence, in the absence of “external threats,” much like Russia’s belief that politics should be replaced with morals, resulted in an immediate appearance of forces of adversity. Furthermore, as members of traditional societies, where politics has not assumed the form of civil parliamentary, democratic and legal forms, these people produced its archaic variant, the one of vengeance. Wendt writes, a politically existing nation is not in any way free to avoid this fateful distinction [of friends and foes—V.F.]. If a portion of this nation declares that it has no more foes, then, as per the state of affairs, it sides with the enemy, but the distinction of friends and foes has not been eliminated. If citizens of a state claim they personally do not have any foes, this claim stands irrelevant to the issue in question, as a private individual has no political enemies by definition … it would be delusional to believe that one separate nation could declare peace with the whole world, or, through complete surrender of arms, eliminate the distinction of friend and foe.36 An important factor in the appearance of the illegitimate archaic political actor on the international arena is the increasing anarchy of the international system and the forming of anarchic order in post-communist countries in the 1990s. As shown in the second section of this chapter, the signs of anarchy are the absence of a central power, weakness of international institutes and lack of common collective values and outlooks.37 In Yeltsin’s Russia, there were also specifically Russian signs of anarchism: cooperation and mutual assistance 35 36 37

Shmitt, 53. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization vol. 46, no. 2 (1992), 391–425. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy,” 391–425.

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(virtually the exact words of Piotr Kropotkin), as well as the discrepancy between the masses and the alien culture of the intelligentsia (as called out, moreover, another classic of Russian anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin ).38 Anarchy is an unstable order that is constantly interrupted here or there. Alexander Wendt argues that anarchy may be based upon three structures or roles: foe, rival, friend. Each of these can be aligned with Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian understandings of society, respectively. Although in reality those might be realized simultaneously, Wendt views them as perfect models of international relations,39 which are, one might note, important for the topic of this work. It is clear that the extreme example of Hobbesian reality with its main figure, the foe, is a natural state, entailing the war of all against all and uninterrupted disruption of the status-quo. The Lockean construct of interaction between civil society and the government was formulated as a part of the Westphalian system based on competition between states, which does not exclude war. Kant attempts to construct a model of eternal peace. In this model, the “other” becomes a friend. While we remain far from the “eternal peace” and fear the war of a Lockean world, we cannot afford to lose sight of the danger of a Hobbesian war of all against all, which may be ignited in the context of archaic politization. The losses we have suffered due to terrorism are now of lesser scope than the losses of war, but technologically equipped terrorism is capable of launching a strike whose losses could be comparable to that from war, for example, if nuclear weapons were utilized. Given these concerns, which anti-terrorist measures can be put forward? One option, declaring war against terrorism, harbors a series of dangers because it turns terrorism into a legitimate political opponent. It betrays the definition of conflict as a contradiction between statutory and, in terms of identity, similar40 entities as, for instance, conflicts between nations, classes, or countries. It acknowledges the illegitimate political adversary, a bearer of archaic culture. A dialogue with such an adversary would hardly be productive because it would be carried out “according to different systems of logic.” The 9/11 terrorist attack partially stalled globalization: the illegitimate archaic force of terrorism was confronted by the will of such actors as governments and a community of countries. Anti-terrorism was legitimized. The countries have also turned to industrial protectionism. Globalization was

38 39 40

Valentina G. Fedotova, Anarchy and Order (Anarkhiia I poriadok) (Editorial urss, 2000). Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics. (Cambridge up, 1999), 246–312. See: Ralf Darendorf, “Elements of Theory of Social Conflict,” Sociological Studies no. 5 (1994), 142–47.

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paused to reduce the scope of vulnerability, but it can never be eliminated completely. Terrorism becomes a means to an end, and transparency—a source of various threats and risks. Undoubtedly, the root of the problem lies in the fundamental precursors: unjust globalization, unevenness of development, contradictions between civilizations, psychological trauma. There is no universal recipe. Paraphrasing the late classic of American political science, John Rawls, I believe that we need to accept this and to understand justice as honesty. As a cognitive task we should change the requirements of political correctness, lift the moral and political bans and stop avoiding the study of the most painful issues. Science should be depoliticized to study the conflicts linked to the depolitization of the primary political actor—the state and the system of states—-to acquire true knowledge to the fullest extent possible. Terrorism became a satellite of globalization, its bastard child, which, paradoxically, turned its efforts into undermining globalization. In turn, globalization gave birth to terrorism as a global threat and at the same time received a crippling blow from it. A sense of danger and risk became constant and everpresent, especially in the United States, which had not previously experienced a threat like this. A “risk society” became reality. The horrors of life witnessed in previous centuries outnumber the horrors of today. The twentieth century was utterly tragic and full of danger: war, revolution, dictatorship, repressions and genocide against entire nations became trademarks for the century. The fears of the twenty-first century grew not because of the scope of the losses, but because of the appearance of new dangers, threats and challenges that all of humanity now faces, because of the globalization of risk and also because of the constantly emerging new and dangerous situations that produce unforeseen consequences and make the results of any human actions completely unpredictable. Works Cited Aronowitz, Stanley and Heather Gautney, eds. Implicating Empire. Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order. Basic Books, 2003. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Clarity: The Story of a Failed Romance (“Moderniti i iasnost’: istoriia neudachogo romana”). The Individualized Society (Individualizirovannoe obshchestvo) by Zygmunt Bauman. Translated from Russian under the direction of Vladislav L. Inozemtsev. Logos, 2005/Moscow, 2002. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics. Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Polity, 1999.

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Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity (Obshchestvo riska. Na puti k drugomu modernu). Progress-Traditsiia, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? (Chto takoe globalizatsia?). Progress-Traditsiia, 2001. Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. Thousand Oaks/Sage, 2002. Boggs, Carl. The End of Politics. Corporate Power and the Decline of Public Sphere. Guilford, 2000. Breton, Albert Gianluigi G. Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, and Ronald Wintrobe, eds. Political Extremism and Rationality. Cambridge up, 2002. Budnitskii, Oleg V. Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement: Ideology, Ethics, Psychology. Second Half of the Nineteenth—Early Twentieth Century (Terrorizm v Rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii). rosspen, 2000. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Informatsionnaia epokha. Ekonomika, obshchestvo i kul’tura). guvshe, 2000. Darendorf, Ralf. “Elements of the Theory of Social Conflict.” Sociological Studies, no. 5 (1994), 142–47. Derber, Charles. People before Profit. The New Globalization in the Age of Terror. Big Money and Economic Crisis. Pikador, 2002. Fedotova, Valentina G. Anarchy and Order. Editorial urss, 2000. Held, David and Anthony McGrew, eds. The Global Transformation Reader. An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Polity, 2000. Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Perennial Library, 1989. Ivanov, Boris Iu. and Arsenii B. Roginskii, eds. Individual Political Terrorism in Russia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Individual’nyi politicheskii terror v Rossii. xix–xx v.). Memorial, 1996. Kan, Grigorii S. Narodnaia “volia.” Ideology and Leaders (Narodnaia “volia.” Ideologiia i lidery). Probel, 1997. Klare, Michael T. Resource Wars. The New Landscape of Global Conflict. Owl Books, 2002. Kopylov, Gennadii G. Are Human Beings (Really) Human? (“Liudi li liudi?”). Filosofskie nauki, no. 1 (2002): 141–44. Laqueur, Walter. The New Terrorism, Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. Oxford up, 1999. Laqueur, Walter. Terrorism. Little, Brown, 1977. Meny, Yves. Five (Hypo)theses on Democracy and its Future. In The Global Third Way Debate. Edited by Anthony Giddens. Polity, 2001. Nikitaev, Vladimir V. “Terrofaniia.” Filosofskie nauki, no. 1 (2002): 135–40. Ol’shanskii, Dmitrii V. Psychology of Terror (Psikhologiia terrora). Delovaia kniga, 2002.

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Pakulski, Ian and Malcolm Waters. The Death of Class. Thousand Oaks/Sage, 1996. Praisman, Leonid G. Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Guards and Provocateurs (Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory). rosspen, 2001. Rozin, Vadim M. Terrorism as an Expressive Symptom of the Crisis of our Civilization? (“Terrorizm kak vyrazitel’nyi simptom krizisa nashei tsivilizatsii?”). Philosophical Sciences (Filosofskie nauki), no.1 (2002): 126–35. Schmitt, Carl. “The Concept of the Political.” Questions of Sociology 1, no. 1 (1992). Talbott, Strobe and Nayan Chanda, eds. The Age of Terror. America and the World after September 11. Basic Books, 2001. Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War. Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century Little, Brown, 1993. Utkin, Anatolii I. Globalization: The Process and Comprehension (Globalizatsiia: protsess i osmyslenie). Logos, 2001. Utkin, Anatolii I. The Only Superpower (Edinstvennaia sverkhderzhava). Algoritm, 2003. Vanden Heuvel, Katrina, ed. A Just Response. The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy, and September 11, 2001. Nation Books, 2002. Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (Pochemu nas nenavidiat? Vechaia voina radi vechnogo mira). ast, 2003. Wendt, Alexander. “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 391–425 Wendt, Alexander. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge up, 1999.

Fedor Girenok I was born in Siberia, on the Altai in March 1948 in the family of a railway ­specialist. From childhood, trains were passing through my place from east to west and from west to east. And though I was sorry to part with a small river named Chistiunka, I wanted to go somewhere, too. And I went to the town of Aleisk to study. Here, under the guidance of my history teacher Ivan Petrovich Belousov i read Karl Marx’s Capital, and also graduated from a secondary school. After school I worked at a plant as a milling machine operator, then served in the navy, worked as a stoker in Chukotka, and studied German. In 1976, I graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, having defended a thesis, on Russian Cosmism. In 1986 I met the academician Nikita N. Moiseev, who became the editor of my book Ekologia. Tsivilizatsiia. Noosfera [Ecology. Civilization. Noosphere]. In this book I tell how in the twentieth century an empty space was discovered in nature where man should have been, and how Russian Cosmism attempted to return man to nature. In 1988, I defended a doctoral dissertation on this topic, and in 1991, I became a professor. In 1994, in my book Stalemate Metaphysics (Metafizika pata) I abandoned conceptual thinking and began to assemble verbal clips of consciousness. In Pathology of the Russian Mind (Patologiia russkogo uma 1998) I tried to look at Russian philosophy from a new perspective and found that the line delineating the path of Russian thought became associated with the names of Iurii Samarin, Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leontiev, Vasilii Rozanov and the Oberiutes, whereas Vladimir Soloviev’s sophiology turned out to be on the periphery. In the 2000s, in the books Absurd and Speech (Absurd i rech), ­Autography of Language and Consciousness, (Autografia iazyka i soznaniia), Figures and Folds (Figury i skladki), and The Pleasure of Thinking Differently (Udovol’stvie myslit’ inache), I came to the conclusion that modern philosophy is not ontology, nor phenomenology, but anthropology. I believe that an answer to the question what being is depends on the answer to the question “What is man?.” The fundamental principle of philosophy, to my mind, has become the idea of the duality of human existence. Man is rational to the extent that he does not calculate but dreams. Hallucination, in my view, is man’s self-revealing essence; hence consciousness does not exist for cognition, but for man’s action on himself. Consciousness and intellect are unrelated. I live in Moscow and since 1994 have been working at Lomonosov Moscow State University.

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On Culture’s Turn to Nonconceptual Thinking Fedor Girenok Contemporary philosophy becomes less and less disposed to academism in its reasoning. This is not because it has been pressed aside by intellectual writers, but because, trying to escape from scholastic problems of cognition, it has begun to cultivate poetry and art that tell man more than science can tell him. Now becoming fashionable, the neurosciences try to deal not only with the brain but also with consciousness. They wish to return to Aristotle, believing that Cartesianism, transcendentalism and phenomenology are too sophisticated, garrulous and vacant. The scientific world knows two major strategies attempting finally to elucidate to the public the question of what consciousness is. These are the American and European projects. The American project is ready to put a nanomachine on each neuron to record impulses; the European one wishes to make a working computer model of consciousness, replacing neurons by microprocessors. Believing that man is always born an artist, philosophy goes a different way, one that can be seen in a set of practices used by man, where consciousness is not needed. For example, consciousness is not needed for playing chess, for making a hand axe, for learning competencies at schools and universities. It is not needed to receive the Nobel prize. Consciousness is needed so that we can blush with shame and make hallucinations explode. Consciousness is nothing other than an exploded hallucination, a synthesis of the real and the imagined. Consciousness is needed so that a shape, line, color or word can make man suffer or put him into a state of ecstasy. Friedrich Nietzsche formulated this idea differently. He held that nature, which makes no leaps, nevertheless, makes her only leap—one that results in the appearance of the artist, philosopher and saint; the beginning for man in general. All other humans are but preparation for this man. The consciousness of an artist has two faculties: representation and imagination. These faculties are indicated by rock art. Consciousness reveals itself in gesture, in embarrassment, in the affect of self-action. Consciousness is not needed for calculations, nor for the exercise of language or knowledge. Consciousness is needed not for cognition, but for the practice of self-restraint. In order to know anything, we must already know. But what happens when our already-comprehension is replaced by the Internet, and we mistrust out sensations, if they are not expressed in words?

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What happens to consciousness, if it, like a mirror, breaks into fragments and loses touch with the symbol? Will it be able to convey to us the quality of wholeness? Or what if we do not need it, and we, like animals, are attached to life, and the silence of loneliness seems unbearable to us? When we lose touch with the already-comprehension, then clip consciousness emerges. The word “сlipping” just means cutting out sections of a newspaper dealing with a certain topic. A clip is as simple as a still-life painting. It is a scrap, a part that does not refer to the whole, but simultaneously requires dreams or fantasies, which fill the place of the absent whole. I introduced the notion of “clip consciousness” in Stalemate Metaphysics (Metafizika pata, 1994), where I intended to find verbal pictures that replace notions. Here I will try to look at clip consciousness with the help of thousands of eyes. 1

From Notion to Clip

Shall we write today as we did in the twentieth century? No, I think that we should not. There was a longing for gigantomania then. Philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, were writing huge volumes, in which they moved with the speed of a horse-drawn carriage, peeping into all nooks of thought, telling about everything they saw or could have seen, alluding to stories of other writers. Shall we read as we did in the twentieth century? Again, I think not. Here is an example why we should not: A three-year-old girl asks to be read the tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” The tale begins. She stops the reading and asks to be read straight away the scene where hunters appear. The child attentively listens to the final episode of the tale several times in succession. We wonder, how does the child think? In my view, the girl has clip thinking. Why? Because the cutting planes of her thinking have turned the tale into a series of episodes, of which she has chosen one—the main, most interesting and the most incomprehensible one, namely: the appearance of the grandmother and granddaughter, safe and sound, from the wolf’s belly after they were eaten by the wolf. The girl is not interested in the moralizing aspect of the tale. Adults are the ones who believe that the tale should teach a child not to talk to strangers. Adults have conceptual thinking. The child is fascinated by the alogism of the tale, the absurdity of the event that happened. In situations of the absurd, or those which amount to the same thing, situations when any sequence of signs becomes misleading, such as occur at high speeds of communication. Logic lies. It is good for conveyance of thoughts, for exposition, but not for composition. The birth of thought lies outside logic.

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Consciousness that derives logic from an event is conceptual. Consciousness that derives the absurdity of being is clip-associated. This difference permits taking a new look at consciousness from the side of the Self. 2

The Self

The human self is understood as something which no one else in the world has: the realm of internal determination, determination of oneself in one’s relationship to the world. The condition of selfhood is cessation of external determination and transformation of the impossible in the natural environment into a unique possibility of existence. This possibility is associated with liberation from prohibition to respond to the imagined, to respond to that which does not exist in reality, but exists as a daydream, as a reverie, as the signified without a signifier. The closedness of the self is the opposite of the openness of communication, which is organized around a signifier without the signified, that is, the “I.” Therefore, the self by its very nature is uncommunicative, and communication in each point of its space does not belong to the self. That is, either an individual is himself, and then he has problems with communication, or he is in communication, and then he has problems with his self. 3 Consciousness Consciousness is a faculty: the self that can move in its organization either toward the “I,” or from it. Prior to the “I” consciousness does not display itself and exists outside of presentation to oneself. There is no mirror in which it could see itself; therefore, consciousness exists in the realm of the unseen by man from the outside. This consciousness is dark. It exists as a self-affecting self. Dark consciousness simply is as a dream, a mood, an emotional cry. But for language, this is is inaccessible because belonging to the plane of the imagined, it is not counted up from the “I.” The reference point is possible after the words “I am.” Language begins there filling the void following “I am.” At the point of the intersection of language and consciousness there appears linguistic consciousness, the “speaking I.” The movement of consciousness, departing from the fact of the existence of the “I,” reveals everything except for itself, for in this movement it is a movement in the first person. The “I” can express through itself any object from an infinite set of objects. This infinity contains everything except for “I” itself. But

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this everything is the “Not-I.” They all are objects. This movement of consciousness from the “I” to that which is not I was called object consciousness. If consciousness is object-focused, it is not fragmentary. Edmund Husserl was a consistent advocate of this point of view. But if it is fragmentary, it is not object focused. Science has left non-object-focused consciousness outside its interest. But art liked it and started hunting for it. 4 Scraps Everybody knows what a scrap quilt is. Our grandmothers were skilled in patchwork. They were also good at making floor coverings. But now we have come to know that our consciousness, too, can be sewn from scraps. We learned this fact not from scientists, however, but from artists. Not science but art reveals before our eyes the clipping aspect of consciousness. It is in science that the use of the standard patterns of consciousness has proven to be most controversial. Appropriation, pastiche, palimpsest have revealed in science its “other,” its bent for camouflaged borrowings and overt plagiarism. Now even PhD students know that dissertations and books have no conceptual character. They are sewn together, like a quilt, from scraps of phrases, from patches of somebody else’s ideas, from fragments that are called open citations, references, allusions, hidden citations, retelling, and criticism. Even irony has nowadays become a way to appropriate that which belongs to the sphere of somebody else’s mind. 5 School School teachers were the first to raise the alarm. They have found that their students were not ready to read large texts or listen to long speeches. Teachers blamed schoolchildren for undeveloped conceptual thinking, for their inability to generalize, to tie two ends together, for their unwillingness to read books, their inability to concentrate. What is the cause of this state of things? Poor memory? Certainly, memory needs training. But what for? To remember a long text? Would it not be better to break it up into fragments? Teachers see the cause in the spread of the Internet and screen culture in general. They believe that it is clip consciousness that is to blame: it cannot analyze and is inclined to view digests, extract pieces of information from different sources. But on the Internet even adults behave like children. They feel uninhibited and anonymous, as if they had found themselves in a big crowd and dissolved in it,

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without being responsible for anything. In social networks, it is easy to lose one’s sense of reality and return to one’s childhood. Indeed, in educational institutions two realities have clashed: book reality and screen reality, the arising and the dying out, that of schoolchildren and that of teachers. A student looks at a teacher as at a screen character and expects him or her to be able to pack a thought into an image. An image is not a sign or a word. It does not refer to another image. A sign is always two signs. A sign refers to another sign, a word—to another word. Schoolchildren do not know yet that nobody is supposed to think at school. At school one is supposed to speak. Later they will understand that school teaches. Therefore, conceptual thinking for them is like racing in an obstacle course: it has many difficulties but not much sense. At school, war has begun between generations: schoolchildren orient themselves to clip consciousness, whereas teachers train them to think conceptually. Teachers are used to talking a lot, tiresomely and about everything. Schoolchildren want them to speak briefly, as on camera, and to the point, believing that a classroom is a place for cognitive entertainment as well. A lecturer should be given not 90 minutes, but 10 minutes for exposition of his own or somebody else’s ideas. The remaining time should be spent on discussion. A schoolteacher has a simple concept of intelligence: to be intelligent means to be obedient. A student understands that it is not he who needs intelligence but his teacher. Pedagogues invented intelligence so that they could more easily control teenagers. For a student, to think means to think quickly. Quick thinking is hampered by details. Therefore, details should be left aside. And the teacher thinks that children are not ready to make weighty decisions. On the contrary, a student is inclined to believe that the teacher cannot pack a thought into a picture. A schoolchild needs an aphorism, a slogan, and not a set of language clichés. In a museum, looking at Picasso paintings, I can see simultaneously the foreground and the background of the depicted object. In a shop, I ask to cut a sausage into pieces. The cutting plane of a knife turns the product into many fragments of a once monolithic piece. At school, a curriculum is prepared. The cutting plane in the eyes of the head of curriculum turns monotonous time into a multitude of unconnected lessons. A student at school, like a tv viewer before a tv set, changes one lesson for another. The change of lessons causes an illusion of a huge speed of motion, the same as in a tv viewer before a tv set, except that a school student has a curriculum, and a viewer has a remote control. A student is asked to make a synopsis of a book. A synopsis is an assembly of ideas exposed in the book. The book requires slow reading; the computer insists on fast browsing. The student, like a bus passenger, can simultaneously

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listen to music, read a book and communicate in social networks. Those who poorly understand somebody else’s thoughts, can invent their own, because somebody else’s thoughts are, as a rule, of a linguistic character. The main thing that has disappeared from colleges and schools is the idea. So, without an idea, without a myth, school is not school, and college is not college; it is but a place of stay for idle layabouts. 6

The Idea

An idea is a socially acceptable paranoia that might be expressed in a linear order of words. But all these words, like the designs in the Nazca desert, until recently should have been drawn with a single line. This line should not be interrupted, because, interrupted, it would create a rupture in the order, a gap in being, where chaos could settle down. And chaos is like the Brownian movement of atoms, like series and flows of the multiple, connected by nothing and formed at the place of the singular (single). Therefore, logos forbids willfully jumping from one line onto another, rushing between different lines; for the outcome of these rushes will be the existence not of something but nothing. Philosophy entrusted standing guard over the linear sequence to the categories of harmony and substance. However, substance serves language, not consciousness. Language is linear; consciousness is multiple. Language says: all things in succession, all in good time; but consciousness says: I don’t want to wait, I want to see everything right away. Sergei Eisenstein even invented a kind of “spherical book,” where hypertextual references between one part and another were reciprocal. Julio Cortázar devised “hopscotch,” Jorge Borges created “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and Milorad Pavić imagined his Dictionary of the Khazars. Finally, Ludwig Wittgenstein, leaving out his analytic philosophy, began talking about the “visual room.” Sometimes, seeing is not easier than reading. Peter Greenway says that people have not yet learned to see, that seeing is more difficult than thinking. Now the idea should visualize and adapt itself to a series of the multiple. A clip impels consciousness not to think over thoughts but to assembly them: to be not a thinker, but a director of thoughts. Consciousness needs visualization. It is tired of abstract thinking practiced by market traders and office managers. Any thinking needs time and concentration on one single thing. One cannot think and speak. When one speaks, he does not think; and if one thinks, he speaks poorly. Correct speech is a sign of the absence of thought, that is, an indication that the speech has not been preceded by thinking.

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7 Immanence At the moment, when consciousness ceases to be what it is, it conceals its truth. Neither psychologists, nor linguists can speak the language of its truth, for they objectify consciousness, making it alien to itself. Consciousness perishes in the world of any objectifications, first of all, object-related and linguistic ones. Therefore, we have to grasp consciousness in the depth of its immanence, at the moment when it is at home. We need live consciousness, not alienated from itself in language and, consequently, in knowledge. It is at home in small children and, probably, in mad persons. 8 Self-Affectation To blush from confusion means to be at home, in the depth of the immanence of one’s consciousness. In self-affectation, consciousness is present with reference to itself, and this presence cannot be obtained by any external means. Everyone knows that if you violate a prohibition, a taboo, it will lie heavily on your conscience. An individual can die of self-punishment. At best he might have a nervous breakdown, a mental disorder; and a physically healthy individual can become deaf or blind. The outcomes of the work of consciousness can be physically observed as, for instance, a paralyzed arm or leg, or as a quite real burn. When the body begins to respond not to an external cause but to a phantom, then my body appears, which I experience as distinct from another body, which I only observe. 9 Time Any thinking requires time and concentration on one single thing. One cannot think and speak at the same time. Clip consciousness asks us: do you want to think? You are welcome, think, but to think means to think quickly. Do you want to understand? All right. But to understand means to understand quickly, and not to dance hermeneutic ceremonial dances. Everything that impedes quick thinking and quick decision-making should be ignored. Clip consciousness is assembly. It does not generalize; it fabricates. Quickness of thought is impeded by a clodhopper—language. Clip thinking tries to avoid meeting up with language to minimize its presence. Therefore, the first sign of clip thinking is linguistic minimalism. Instantaneous grasping of the point occurs in an image or a visual pattern. Clip consciousness is not interested in relating one judgment to another, but in a visual image of thought in general.

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Another sign of clip thinking is addressing the imagination, not experience. Experience closes the possibility of relationship with a priori resources of thinking. It is imagination that employs these resources. Visual thinking actualizes them. The specificity of clip consciousness is that it cannot be conceived as a flow. It ceases to flow anywhere. It is beyond time. It is a series of exploding hallucinations, bursting bubbles of subjectivity conditioned by the tightening limits of the anthropological in man. The human is now technically set—something that does not imagine and is located outside self-affectation. Communication has eaten the self. Man has ceased to recognize himself. 10

The World as the Visual Room

Clip consciousness does not think but visualizes the world. It makes the invisible in the world visible. Where one thinks, there certainly one does not exist, and where one exists, there one does not think. On the contrary, one visualizes where one exists, and one exists when visualization is possible. Clip consciousness works on the principle of a mirror reflection in the visual room. Two ways to involve consciousness in social ontology are possible. In one case, thinking is possible. In the other—visualization. In the first case, the viewpoint is attached to the subject. In the second, vision belongs to no one: it is attached to no “I.” The viewpoint exists as a sliver of wood thrown into a brook, without being interested in the being of the brook. There is no time in the visual room. Therefore, all perceptions are simultaneous and perceive themselves. The perception of the “I” is “I.” If consciousness avoids the world and is directed at the “I,” then in the mirror room it looks for itself and does not recognize itself. When we see ourselves in a mirror, we know that we are before the mirror, and not in the mirror. In the mirror room there are an infinite number of self-reflections, and we are not in focus, not in the center. We do not recognize ourselves; we do not know where we stand before the mirror. Everything is reflection. Had we recognized ourselves in a certain center, then we would have become what Husserl called the transcendental ego. 11

The Logos of Nature

Nature forbids man to identify being and thinking about being. It is against Parmenides and against Heidegger. Daydreaming matter should lose daydreams, that is, the ontological, so that only the ontic remains. “Being is not identical with thought,”—all the living and nonliving tell us. Life is not logical, but absurd. For there to be no absurd, the dreams of matter should be blocked.

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And only in this case evolution and selection will be possible. If being is equal to understanding of being, evolution is impossible. And man is impossible. For man is a deviation from identity. How shall we call the one who does not distinguish being from thinking about being? A mad person. And Parmenides was probably the first to understand this. What will happen to an individual if eating a banana and thinking about eating is the same for him? He will die. He will be culled by evolution. Therefore, it is important for man to learn to combine the imagined and the real. While consciousness is a set of images stuck together into one emotionally colored picture, clip consciousness is an assembly of pictures-illusions that we show to ourselves. But we show them to ourselves not because we want to satisfy our need for hallucinations, but because we know much more than we can express. 12

Clip Consciousness and Apriorism

Human consciousness cannot be obtained out of experience. Experience has everything except for an awareness of experience. A priori structures permit man to enhance his knowledge without an appeal to experience. And since experience usually names that which is fixed in language, the pre-experience structures of consciousness will have a nonlinguistic character. A priori structures of consciousness manifest themselves first of all in artistic experience. In rock painting, in a picture depicting a wounded bison from the Lascaux cave, we can see points-traces, although no points exist by themselves. The very reality of representation is nothing other than an objectified illusion of an artist, whose place has not been determined in this reality. The irrelevance of an artist, his plasticity has made possible his freedom from references to anything else in the world, except for himself. Clip consciousness tries to construct its view from inside man’s self-station without leaning on apriorism. Apriorism expands knowledge without expanding experience. Clip consciousness expands experience without expanding knowledge. It compresses the temporal sequence into the one-moment diversity.

Aleksei Griakalov Aleksei A. Griakalov, PhD, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophical Anthropology and History of Philosophy of the Institute of Philosophy of Man, the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg; Assistant Director of research at the Institute of Philosophy of Man; Professor at the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory; and head of the research and education center “Philosophy of Modernity and Strategies of Humanitarian Expertise.” He is researching the esthetics and methodology of Slavic structuralism and has authored more than two hundred publications on modern philosophy, esthetics, the philosophy of literature, and the history of Russian philosophy in addition to several novels, novellas and a collection of poetry. His monographs include Structuralism in Esthetics (Strukturalizm v estetike) (Leningrad, 1978); Esthesis and Logos (Estezis i logos) (New York, 2002); Writing and the Event (Pis’mo i sobytie) (St. Petersbug, 2004); Vasilii Rozanov (St. Petersburg, 2017). Griakalov has contributed to several collective monographs: The Power of Simple Things (Sila prostykh veshchei) (St. Petersburg, 2013); Uncertainty as a Challenge. The Media. Anthropology. Esthetics (Neopredelennost’ kak vyzov. Media. Antropologiia. Estetika) (2013); and Creativity and Subjectivity (Tvorchestvo i subektivnost’) (St. Petersburg, 2016), and a number of his works have been translated into Chinese, English, and Serbian. A member of the Union of Russian Writers, Griakalov has written stories, novellas, and novels: The Wounded Angel (Ranenyi angel) and The Foundling in the Tobacco, or the Happy Khokhol (Naidenysh v tabake, ili Schastlivyi khokhol). His collected prose includes: The Last Saint (Poslednii sviatoi) ­(Voronezh, 2002), The Rueful Creature of the Outskirts (Pechal’naia tvar’ okrainy) (St. Petersburg, 2013), and Nobody Rules Here (Zdes’ nikto ne pravit) (St. Petersburg, 2016). He has also published a collection of poems, Clad in Light (Odetye v svet) (St. Petersburg, 2018).

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Philosophy of the Event and Hermeneutics of Memory: Evidence of Assertion Aleksei Griakalov The theme of the event is open to a vast diversity of interpretations, from Martin Heidegger’s Dasein to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “philosophy of the act” to Gilles Deleuze’s “pure events” as pre-individual impersonal singularities to Alain Badiou’s co-possible character of understanding procedures—“unity of the moments of truth”—to Alfred Whitehead’s scientific concept of “unity and integrity.” This theme is the arena for a variety of intermingling approaches to be formulated. Here, we can speak of a certain twist in modern philosophy: a turn toward the Event. In the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant idea was that of time and temporality—the “chrono-logic.” In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century, its place was taken by topo-logic: the themes of structuring, space and position (place, topos, landscape, boundary). The esthetic topography of the event takes over.1 Modernity appears as a certain kind of product where sensual-corporal intuitions correlate with reflection and the history of mentality, as shown by Frank Ankersmit. In its own way, modernity answers the early Hegelian call to create a consolidating idea of beauty in the Platonic sense of the word, while preserving the essence of the esthetic: “the equal development of all forces, of what is peculiar to each and of what is common to all.” Moreover, modernity itself was shaped by a certain mythology of the form. The esthetic is seen as the foundation of “rational mythology,” which is a conditio sine qua non of consciousness and reflection. Today, however, “modernity as a product” appears to be past its heyday, as if the past was being “framed,” even though the ideas, sentiments, memory and imagination of modernity were still active on the threshold of the new millennium. The event appears at the intersection of the common and the peculiar as a certain kind of “singularity.” What Jean Baudrillard calls “after the orgy” can be taken in different ways, depending on the place: identity is perceived in

1 Aleksei A. Griakalov, Esthetic Subjectivity of the Event of Discovery (“Esteticheskaia subectivnost’: sobytiia obreteniia”) einai: Filosofiia Religiia. Kul’tura. 7, no. 2 (14) (2018). https:// einai.ru/ru/archives/1902.

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topographical terms constructively defined by “mental maps.” We have every reason to speak of a topo-graphical and topo-logical exhaustion of reflection, which corresponds with the philosophy of the event. Cultural and historical benchmarks—“cells of the space structure”—change: space may seem to be even more exposed than time: “losers weepers, finders keepers.” Designated places are fiercely competitive: they may come into conflict with each other or make pacts. They compete for habitat: places deprived of any arrangement turn time into “Postmodern Terrorism”: the meaningless timelessness of all-destroying terror. The certainties of existence have been blown apart by the intense impulse of representations, the gaps being filled in the words of Peter Sloterdijk by “diffusive cynicism.” What this means is that the consciousness of modernity can be defined by a new ethos in relation to the event, which is crucial for the value dimension of reflection and existence. What we have here, then, is a paradoxical thought experience: what the turn of consciousness “around the event” ultimately reveals is not the original given of absolute meaning but rather another event that occurs here and now. Likewise, the esthetic experience that feeds into our understanding of an event is as unique as it is regular: according to Victor Zhirmunskii, chaos shows through the logical structure as a rational construct. The event evades the net of interpretations; it eludes any attempt to grasp it, be it a structure of denotation or “classical” ontology. Faced with an esthetic experience, reflection appears to be constantly adjusting its own standpoints. As stated by Jacques Derrida, where there is an experience, there is a reference to something else: a trace or a text. And for a trace to leave a trace, it has to be put into the space of thought, “spacification.” Therefore, reflection appears to be topologically connected to our experience of an event. Interacting “metaphors of place” create a certain kind of “topological metaphysics.” In this respect, the theme of the event correlates with the theme of hermeneutics of Russia: transcendental or hermeneutic experience does not seem to be applicable to Russia per se, nor does it seem possible to “bring” Russia to match the standards of the linear experience of rationality in the classical sense of the term. To take a somewhat more radical approach, Russia exploring hermeneutics would, at the same time, mean hermeneutics exploring Russia. That would imply speech, logos, meaning, history, and sociality exploring Russia and gaining more significance there; at the same time, it would imply their depreciation in the Western world, both in philosophical and practical dimensions. However, the philosophical image of “Russia” is associated with areas of hermeneutic failure—areas of the non-textualized in the text, while Russia

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itself—in literature as well as in philosophical and para-philosophical ­experience—persistently interprets itself as being “atextual” or even “antitextual.”2 It may be the zones of divergence that drive the popularity of the broadly defined post-structuralist project in Russia—a trend whose esthetic and metaphysical roots lie in Russian formalism.3 This idea, further developed in Slavic structuralism, can be viewed as a significant independent theme in the esthetics of the event,4 the key point being the event-oriented interpretation of meaning, artistic work and creativity in general. Fundamental ontology, where the event is equally important, also addresses temporal and real dimensions. Consciousness is “woven” into the language, which is never just the language of the speaker but the language of things as they speak to us. The language, in the philosophical perspective, is a meeting point between academic research and human experiences of life. Even gaps in speech, forced silence, or lost words make a difference in communication.5 It is the category of the event on which Hans-Georg Gadamer based his approach to historicity: there is no progress in philosophy, nor is there any in art; but in both cases, it is important to “become involved.” An event is as much a meeting point for the past and the future as it is a common ground for the real and the symbolic, resulting in what we call the sublime, the limit, the unique poetic word, “standing on the borderline,” existential authenticity. Since an event is more than just interaction or the act of communication, a question arises concerning the underlying prototype, and it is poetic language that answers it. In poetry, according to Paul Celan, reality is never an already established thing or a given but rather something that is to be called into question. It is in a poem that reality establishes, manifests, presents itself for the first time. It is safe to say that in a certain event, being is “highlighted” as part of a flow, total predication, fluidity and becoming, where “discrete” language entities 2 In his Slovo i sobytie, Vladimir V. Bibikhin asks: “Now that everything has been converted into text, is it still possible to get back to the word as an event?” (Moscow, 2001, 93) [in Russian]. 3 “Formalism—unbeknownst to itself, perhaps—was able to state what the whole nineteenth century failed to acknowledge: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’” (V.V. Bibikhin, 93). See also: Aleksei A. Griakalov, Esthesis and Logos (New York: The Edwin Mellen P, 2002); Aage A. ­Hansen-Löve, Russian Formalism (Мoscow, 2001); Jan M. Broekman, Strukturalismus: Moskau, Prag, Paris (Freiburg, 1971). 4 Aleksei A. Griakalov, Writing and the Event (Pis’mo i sobytie) (St. Petersburg, 2004). 5 Paul Colilli expressed a similar idea in his Agamben and the Signature of Astrology: Spheres of Potentiality: “Wordlessness and unexpressedness are not necessarily non-signification, as they could constitute, for example, rhetorical or communicative strategies employed to render a meaning.” (Lexington Books, 2015), 95. [Note provided by the translator of this chapter, Elena A. Krasovskaia.]

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seem to be dissolved in continuity. Consequently, repetition as an intensifying factor is of utmost importance in poetic language: a kind of “eternal recurrence,” statement, trace. The energy of production of meaning is a throbbing pulse in what is known as the “space in-between” (das Zwischen). The personal is necessarily related to the nonpersonal and superpersonal as transcendental. Poetic language introduces us to the event of understanding in such a way that the body and meaning mutually re-define each other in the existential act of vision, which suggests the theme of actualizing the world while transcending concrete historicity.6 The emerging meanings can then exist independently alongside others while retaining their status in terms of mythological and anthropological suggestibility. Creation and the corresponding perception-­ deciphering of meanings contribute to the conjugation between the certain and the uncertain—attractive etymological “magic.” Repetition in the event does not imply going around in circles but rather creating an intensity of establishing meaning and existence. Here, the “hermeneutic focus” shifts from a certain uttering to an event of poetic language or, to be more precise, to the world expressed and presented by poetic language: consciousness is driven to the very special state of seeing. In events, the energy of the real is combined with the actual definitive statement, undermining any certainty that may have existed there. Thus, the question of truth in art generates the question of being of truth in the world: poetry never states anything— it only establishes the speaking. It speaks to keep the world from falling apart. That state of “not meaning or wanting to say anything,” as noted by Derrida, has far-reaching implications: art is forever alienating itself from itself, always changing the ways of its self-presentaton: it escapes, yet leaves a trace, with every trace pointing at the possibility of interfering with real life. It was largely the experience of working with poetic language that was the driving force behind the philosophy of the event in the context of Slavic structuralism. Jan Mukarovsky notably argued that structure and tradition were directly related. Only an experience within an event—a generic experience—can trigger hermeneutics of memory. At the same time, Henri Bergson’s ideas suggest that the event of obtaining occurs at the moment of transition from temporality to 6 According to V.V. Bibikhin, “The event of events—the event of the world, the event of man— precedes the very possibility of any evidence: it is something that took place long before we were there to witness it. We always take it as a given. It makes little difference whether we believe it to have been God’s will, an accident or the product of our own dreams—in any case, our interpretation does little more than attempt to trace the event that happened long before man could witness and register it. Philosophy seeks to recall the original event. This—not repetition—is what we mean by saying that all philosophers speak of the same thing.” (Slovo i sobytie, 19.) [in Russian].

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a certain kind of continuity. Here, emotions are the key evidence of perception of an event, word or image; as representations of feelings, they define subjectivity. Dancing, theatre and creating theatrical utopias, for example, topologically correspond to ideological constructs—the creation of imaginary worlds as evidence of assertion (svidetel’stvo utverzhdeniia). Here, the esthetic may come together with organic life energy and be subject to utopian ideology.7 When contemplating the nature of Russian consciousness, Sigmund Freud saw it as suffering from fundamental ambiguity and alternately presenting itself either as a sinner or a repenter; he defined it as a compromise with one’s conscience—an essentially Russian characteristic.8 Apparently, what we have here is the topology-based definition typical of psychoanalysis. Freud also assumed that Dostoevsky had foregone the “path of apostolic service” open to any writer by definition, and—instead of being the teacher and liberator of men—had chosen to join the “jailers.” That, concluded Freud, was exactly where the writer’s neurosis manifested itself. To counter that, we need to consider the following. In the context of an event, “neurotic projectivism” appears as a principal “estranged attitude” or, if you will, a kind of evidence verging on violence. It might seem that “objectivity” is a function of the analyst being completely disinterested in the experience. The one who initiates a discourse around a neurotic case positions himself— supposedly—out of reach for the neurosis (an alienated viewpoint): in psychoanalysis, monitoring is an essential part of therapy because a patient’s decision to resort to therapeutic treatment is seen as evidence of their desire to be freed from neurotic symptoms. To that end, however, it is necessary to rekindle the conflict that originally caused them and to resolve it in the way the subject (patient) could not have done. In this situation, the other is essential as the focal point of the subject’s libido as well as the counteracting force. Thus, with the help of therapeutic treatment (evidence), the conflict between neurotic forces may rise to the highest psychic level and follow the course of normal mental conflicts. Interpretations gravitating towards psychoanalysis mostly suggest the researcher assume an estranged viewpoint—some kind of alienated evidence. It should be noted that such a stance is marked by the existential challenge of 7 See also: “The ‘taming’ of dance, reducing it to ‘trained dancing’ in the Soviet period seems to be the fate of any esthetic utopia. Dance fell into disgrace due to the association with the ideas—already vague—of the Silver Age: ‘ecstasy,’ ‘sobornost,’ ‘mysticism.’” (“Pl’aska i ekstaz v Rossii ot Serebrianogo veka do kontsa 1920-kh godov”); Irina Sirotkina, Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv. Podkhody k kul’turnoi istorii emotsii, ed. Ian [ Jan] Plamper, Shamma Shakhadat [Schamma Schahadat], and Mark Eli [Marc Elie]. (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 2001), 301–302. 8 Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky i ottseubiistvo” Sigmund Freud Ia i ono. Trudy raznykh let. 2 (Tbilisi, 1991), 408.

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search. What is more, the mindset framed by being exiled is inherent in the Judeo-Christian cultural archetype, and often defines the perceived image and “place” of the philosopher. Julia Kristeva refers to migrant writers as some special sort of creatures—a breed of linguistic diplomats, born intermediaries, Eternal Jews of Being acting in the best interest of the nomadic people. For a migrant—nomad, stranger, marginal—horizons are vast, due to the spatially actualized position of radical alienation. At the same time, a migrant’s evidence is always inherently contradictory: it is necessarily defined by unrealized desires connected with their life back home. In the corresponding tradition, linguistic implications of being in exile can be interpreted as castration—the state of a severed part of a whole. At the same time, an utterance that stems from a certain mode of thinking becomes a kind of incantation. Claude LéviStrauss pointed out the fundamental similarity between the figure of the shaman and that of the psychoanalyst. Considering the semiology of Slavic structuralism, we should add that the intangible essence of language as a systematically structured complex model is related to subjectivity that escapes conceptual definition: it can be defined neither in concept nor in meaning. According to David Macey, the principal driving force behind reflection of the unconscious is the energy of the unfolding concept—an idea that stems from interpretations of Georg Hegel’s philosophy. The origin of such an approach is quite clear: it was “none other than Kojève” from whom a whole generation of intellectuals including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Pierre Klossowski borrowed the habit of thematizing the cunning nature of mind, the struggle for pure recognition, the beautiful soul, the unhappy consciousness, the desire for desire. None other than Alexandre Kojève, David Macey rightfully pointed out, instilled in their minds the idea of death as the absolute master and the propensity to meditate on Being-towards-death, that having happened before their discovery of Martin Heidegger. At this point, we should mention another trace left by Russian literature in the philosophy of the event and hermeneutics of memory: images and ideas generated by Leo Tolstoy found reflection in Heidegger’s Being and Time. The Hungarian philologist Zoltán Hajnády, in his study of the relationship between Tolstoy’s and Heidegger’s ideas, presented the hermeneutic experience of comparing the beliefs of the Russian writer and those of the German philosopher.9 The idea itself was suggested by a footnote in §51 of Heidegger’s opus—Being-towards-death and the mundaneness of existence (Das Sein zum Tode und die Alltäglichkeit des Daseins). Hajnády recognizes that Heidegger’s 9 Zoltan Hajnády, “Lev Tolstoy i Martin Heidegger: filosofsko-poeticheskii opyt sravnitel’nogo izucheniia” Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (2009).

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philosophy was significantly influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas, yet, he argues, there are principal differences. What distinguishes Tolstoy’s concepts of life and death from those of Heidegger is the fact that even when Tolstoy writes about death, his thought is always centered around life: “All thoughts about death are only important in life.” The ethos of life always conquers the pathos of death, as far as Tolstoy is concerned. When the Russian author seeks to express in philosophical terms his ideas concerning the key ontological issues, he writes the essay On Life, not on death. His wisdom is, therefore, reflections on life rather than on death. Like Heidegger, Tolstoy passes a death sentence upon the inauthentic existence of man. Confronted with death, man views Being in the prospect of death (nothingness), and this is where all trifles of day-to-day routine life—everydayness—subside, giving way to the most profound fundamentals of Being. Both Tolstoy and Heidegger hold that only in the face of death the true face of Being is revealed. In the face of death, man turns away from the world of things to address his inner self. Although Tolstoy’s poetic analysis, concludes Hajnády, goes as deep into the mystery of Being as Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, there are important conceptual differences. Exploring the theme of boredom—man finds himself stricken with the fear of emptiness, which ultimately translates into “serenity,” or “repose” (Gelassenheit); the German philosopher seeks to demonstrate the birth of philosophy from the Nothingness of boredom. Therefore, relying, among others, on Rüdiger Safranski, we can assume that Heidegger’s primary concern lies with “Being-towardsdeath” (Sein zum Tode). Not only is it important that in the face of death life acquires meaning that decisively outstrips the triteness of day-to-day ­existence—the prerequisite of understanding; one has to “make it through the night” in order to achieve clarity of understanding: “In Being-towards-death, Dasein comports itself towards itself (zu ihm selbst) as a distinctive ­potentiality-for-Being.”10 (“Im Sein zum Tode verhält sich das Dasein zu ihm selbst als einem ausgezeichneten Seinkönnen.”)11 The brief footnote to Tolstoy’s story, The Death of Ivan Il’ich, in Being and Time draws attention to the radical breakdown of conscience at the moment of Being-towards-the-end: “In his story ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch’ Leo Tolstoi has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having ‘someone die.’”12 (“L.N. Tolstoi hat in seiner Erzählung ‘Der Tod des Ivan Iljtsch’ das Phänomen der Erschütterung

10 11 12

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962), 296. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. 17th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 252. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 298.

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und des Zusammenbruchs dieses ‘man stirbt’ dargestellt.”)13 The German word Zusammenbruch essentially means collapse, crumbling, breakdown, and the verb form hat dargestellt refers to presentation rather than depiction: it is not secondary to the event but (re)presents the essential—the phenomenon—in a unique way. Only life is worth a thought and a word: “This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one another, the ‘neighbours’ often still keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern.”14 To sum up, we can assume that Heidegger’s foremost concern is ­philosophy—thought, whereas Tolstoy, apart from pondering life and death, cares primarily about the final statement and evidence Heidegger seeks to inspire the “decisive moment”: man has to learn how to think of Being in a responsible and fearless way. Tolstoy, on the other hand, strives to overcome the very fear of death. To be—in the Being where no thought makes a difference anymore. Only love does. If anything, it can help overcome fear. We should never doubt the very possibility of evidence—the unifying desire to testify to the previously unknown—a breakthrough to the unspeakable, unusual, concealed and hidden. That kind of evidence, according to Kojève, is only possible because “man can say ‘I.’” Understanding now requires peace and solitude: the discourses of desire and reflection intertwine in the event of meeting. The subjectivity of memory is formed at the “places” of intersection. It is important to note that these entities, or events, are essentially nonsynthetic; they evoke the themes of “the man of the people,” “the people and the intelligentsia,” “the soul of the people,” “the Russian character”—which are key to understanding subjectivity. Faced with such issues, reflection finds itself sailing the uncharted waters of something which is beyond reflection, if you will. However, it is this “non-reflexible” aspect of subjectivity that thought has to address the most: this something calls for it—it yearns to be designated. Here, thought finds itself struggling to follow its habitual reflexive path. But if this is the case with the philosophical tradition, it is even more so with acknowledging the spontaneity of subjectivity. We ask, then: what hermeneutic thinker can handle it, given the fact that this spontaneity defies clear definition and challenges reflection? The issue appears to be transcendental and, thus, cannot be resolved in the context of 13 14

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 254. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 297.

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either group theory or the “sociology of personality.” Freud, as we have already seen, does not see Dostoevsky’s works as a contribution toward the long-­ awaited liberation of man, but rather as one toward further enjailment of man. Hence, we can assume that psychoanalysis rejects the essential spiritual component of subjectivity. In this respect, we must mention a fundamental constituent of Russian philosophical thought that is crucial to understanding subjectivity. While Vasilii Rozanov points at the existential inauthenticity of temporal existence, later authors increasingly emphasize the theme of extra-temporality. Andrei Platonov, for example, brings together utopia and dystopia in the concept of metautopia. At the same time, the “Eurasianists” thematize “co-localization” and “developmental space.”15 It is the topological characteristics of existence that have to do with the unconscious. Lev Shestov emphasizes that it was Russia that first produced the concept of “the Underground Man”: “The first gift that Europe gratefully accepted from Russia was Dostoevsky’s “psychology,” that is to say, the Underground Man and all his varieties.”16 The Underground Man in essence is not anachronistic: he is timeless. Pertaining to the theme of the event, the following question arises: is there any space where the “philosophical soul” enjoys the similarity and relatedness of different interpretations? Is there a space beyond all distinctions—where generic synthesis would bring all the parts together in the due-timely thought, which Alain Badiou calls the new “generic truth”? To answer this question, it is essential to understand the economics of thought not just in the more or less “legitimized” topoi where reflection can ignore the everydayness and thus maintain its claryfying presence, but in what Giorgio Agamben has called the “stato di eccezione”: the exceptional or extraordinary norm. In this case, the “stating strategies” of reflection are directly related to the actual self-awareness of the individual. Moreover, the intersection between the historical evidence—however it may be interpreted—and that which can be defined as “truth” appears to be productive for the hermeneutics of the event. Just to think of it, it is the “fragments” of life that are most active, such as certain social institutions including banks, authorities, and the media. As for the institution of philosophy and philosophers, we need to refer back to the initial question about the corresponding institutional grounds: the whole

15 16

Piotr Savitskii set forth this idea: the image of Eurasia as a natural “developmental space” (mestorazvitie) for the host of ethnic groups residing in its vast expanses. [Note provided by the translator of this chapter, Elena A. Krasovskaia.] Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nietzsche (Filosofiia tragedii) (St Petersburg, 1903), 21.

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has either been torn into parts or is under constant threat of being “dis-formed” and “dis-banded.”17 That said, we must add that the concept of “developmental space” (mestorazvitie) suggests some kind of disposition: thought always has a context. Although none of the “places” where philosophy is active holds a monopoly, thought exists within certain topoi. Thus, Russian cosmism that has been widely discussed to the present day, is attractive as an eidos, utopic as a project, and constructive as an ultimate effort—event—of thought.18 Moreover, the “event of thinking” corresponds to certain existential hopes and expectations: the idea of resurrection, for example, stems from the ever-present desire to recover generic propinquity, which is actualized, inter alia, in modern transhumanism. On the whole, the state of reflection on the event is characterized by the common attraction of its background: its uncertainty. And it is important to view this background not just from the epistemological angle; we should approach this uncertainty as the driving force behind viable strategies of interpretation. The event releases the essential visible component which is radically different from any real emptiness, pure insufficiency, and the desert of things. The uncertain is the energy of the event. Such is the scuro in Rembrandt’s paintings. In the classical tradition, both uncertainty itself and the need to counter it are quite obvious. More than that, there is a clear way of ideation that is designed to oppose uncertainty. In this context, it appears as one of the many features of troubled existence in the disordered world: There is no lucidity, no beauty, no crystal clarity. In Being, not a thing is crisp and clear… How inhumane life is; how inhumanely unclear it is. Where is the beginning and the end? Where is the midpoint of Being? …Living amidst intrinsic indetermination, intrinsic in-differentiation, indifference of life, its eternal stereotypicality, uniformity, monotony, boring unexpressedness, expressionlessness of life—with all its depth and diversity. …I was confused.19 17 18 19

See: Petar Bojanić, “Chto takoe ili kto takie ‘My’? Heidegger i rekonstruktsiia poniatiia ‘narod’ (Volk).” Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (2016). Aleksei Griakalov, “Russkii kosmizm v prostranstve interpretatsii: obraz—proekt—­ sobytie,” edited by K. Ichin, Filosofiia cosmizma i russkaia kul’tura (Belgrad, 2004). Aleksei Losev, “Teatral,” Losev, A.F. Zhizn‘. Povesti. Rasskazy. Pis’ma (St Petersburg, 1993) 298–99. [Translated by Elena A. Krasovskaia].

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Yet, there was a pre-defined answer to this: clarity, beauty and cosmic certainty do exist, however difficult it may be to attain them in cognition and existence. As defined in terms of classical thought, the uncertain signifies a gap between cosmos and existence. It is, thus, the realm of destruction, displacement, lack of harmony: existential defeat. In contrast to this, modern philosophy of the event suggests a different approach: uncertainty cannot be interpreted through anything else, be it cosmos, concept or values. At least one thing is clear: not only does uncertainty “take the place” of certainty; rather, the uncertain is decisively and inexorably opposed to any certainty, thus making the latter radically insufficient. At the same time, we must also bear in mind the extreme heterogeneity of the modern world, where the classical points of reflection and knowledge tend to be displaced. Paradoxically, the obvious facticity of the certain, which no longer seems satisfactory for either existence or thought, now turns out to be unclear and, thus, incapable of producing experiences and meanings: it is the obvious that appears insufficient. In this interpretation, uncertainty is no longer viewed alongside other characteristics. Instead, its own existential and epistemological value is revealed. Hence, the following question arises: what existence and what strategy of thought is uncertainty meant to manifest and uphold? Uncertainty is related to the idea of limits—in culture, corporeality, language, esthetic experience and the very “being-in-place” or disposition of thought. Despite the unpredictability of the event, it is characterized by a certain designated disposition as its essential feature. On the one hand, the loss of vital gestures means weakened existential energy; on the other, when life seems devoid of profound understanding, it insistently suggests the necessity to restore the natural order of existence. Therefore, life devoid of vital gestures inevitably finds itself entrapped by symbolic structures. Agamben refers to Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra as “the ballet of a humankind that has lost its gestures.” Even long before Agamben, Vladimir Soloviev maintained that Friedrich Nietzsche had created a super-philologist rather than a superman. To make up for this loss, a significant effort to recover the forsaken gestures was made in the age of Art Nouveau: Isadora Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev in dancing, Marcel Proust in literature, the outstanding poetry of Jugendstil from Giovanni Pascoli to Rainer Maria Rilke, and, last but not least, the silent film—all that outlines the “magic circle” whereby humankind made the last attempt to appeal to that which was escaping its grasp for good. In this context, reflection on the uncertain capable of producing gesture—Pavel Filonov’s painting, Vasilii Rozanov’s writing or Varlam Shalamov’s heart-rending account of life in labor camps—represents an attempt to find a way out of the situation where the vital energy of existence is growing thin. Eventually, this

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can be regarded as a possible transgression of what is known as “postmodern relativism.” To start with, it is important to demonstrate the effect of uncertainty, seeking out something that its various manifestations have in common—yet something that cannot be reduced to already existing interpretations. Next, we need to interpret uncertainty as something that defies description in terms of empirical facticity. Only when subjected to reflection, can uncertainty—­ retroactively—become part of the existential space of substance, chaos or absurdity. Our next question concerns the topos of uncertainty: is it localized in one “displacement point”—transition, fracture, transgression, seam—or can it refer to a reflexive or existential stand as a whole? Subjectivity is more than just a “go-between” the certain and the uncertain; it is the immediate habitat of the event and the realm of reflection on it. Note that it was the “loss of the subject”—the displacement, dispersedness, de-­ centration—that drove the actualization of the uncertain. However, none other than the subject can register uncertainty as such. Here, as always, as Kant put it, reflection “happens in time.” Can uncertainty be considered a constant in our life—something that is present at any given time? Can it ever be defined in epistemological terms? Besides, in the context of faith, rebellion or resistance, uncertainty cannot be psychologized or anthropocentric. Understanding of religious experience, language, violence or terror requires an ontological gesture. This suggests the question of the ontological gesture as an event of reflection capable of dealing with the uncertain. The uncertainty extends beyond reflection on the uncertain: it cannot be reduced to the way we think of it. It is not within our power to control an uncertain contingency; we can only imagine it and attempt to explain it afterward. However, chance may well be included in reflection: it becomes a conceptually important manifestation of pre-reflexive energy of existence. Chance is as much a prerequisite of a work of art as it is of fate. Chance, mind that, must not be taken as a kind of romantic “playing with reality”; instead, it appears to be a point where the “system of the certain” fails: it is “the absolute tragedy, the absurdity of Being.” Thus, the present is undermined: any attempt to measure what goes on around us against our past experience or our idea of the future is futile. Chance always takes place in a concrete locale, yet at the same time, it defies any ordered explanation, as it is a sign of the uncertain. Only chance can reveal—however partly—the true face of an individual, class, society, culture, and even a genius. Is the uncertain “sublated” by the subsequent certain? Or should it be understood as a kind of hiatus, void, or facticity?

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To what extent does “the inner spirit of the event,” to quote Georg Hegel’s words, require the uncertain? The initial perspective constitutive of the event has to do with communities. Today, academic philosophy is, indeed, sustained mainly at the “institutional” level. The opposition between continental and analytic philosophy, for example, is reminiscent of the increasingly outdated but still existing antithesis between the East and the West. Due attention should be paid in this connection to the relevant political component of the paradigm constituting a certain symbolic space. It is war-enmity that calls into question the validity of reflection, actualizing uncertainty and the extraordinary norm. The interpretation of the experience of war shows the phenomenological pattern in constituting the event: the discussion of military-political confrontation and the analysis of geopolitical reasons are gradually being replaced by the intent to understand war as a historical and existential phenomenon. In The Hour of Decision, Oswald Spengler expressed with utmost certainty in 1933 the idea that “the history of humankind is the history of world wars.”20 However, the further away we turn from immediate action, the more the ethical dimension comes to the fore. Within that, war is regarded in the broad context of the sacral as well as human history.21 In other words, every war is an integral part of the moral experience of humankind. Consequently, it is important not only to seek out the historical causes of conflicts but also to understand war as radical opposition to peaceful life. Conflicting positions meet on the battlefield of the historical memory of humankind: “The human world is constituted by the system of denaturalized entities (‘de-naturates’)— man-made ‘memory machines’ that sustain the anxiety of the previous day.”22 As it is well known, borrowing the enemy’s designs of innovative weapons is a fundamental factor in any military action.23 Today, it is especially the case with informational weapons: this can be seen as confrontation in the field of historical memory. The “heroic spirit of war” as Ernst Jünger called it, goes on: total mobilization marks the past and present. Moreover, it extends to the future even after all military action has ceased. Associates and allies can be found

20 21 22 23

Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Gody reshenii) (Moscow, 2006), 23. Vadim Parsamov, Bibleiskii narrativ voiny. 1812–1814. Istoriia i povestvovanie (Moscow, 2006), 100–01. Nikolai A. Griakalov, ed., Figury Terrora (St Petersburg: St Petersburg State U, 2006), 15. [Translated by Elena A. Krasovskaia]. Sergei Nefedov, Vojna i obshestvo. Faktornyj analiz istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow, 2008), 31.

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even in the enemy ranks: opposing parties seek to manipulate the historical truth to their own advantage. This is especially the case with hybrid warfare, which—notably—employs information warfare where the event is a mass media product. Although there are many possible ways of explaining enmity within humankind, they can all be reduced to three key hermeneutics of war, each of which interprets the event of war in its own way. According to the first one, war is deeply ingrained in human nature. A possible way to counter this primal unbridled passion suggests shifting the focus from war to peaceful life—­ education, religion, tolerance, cross-cultural communication. The second interpretation has to do with the nature of nation states, different ethnic and social groups, and thirst for power. In this case a viable alternative to war-oriented societies implies introducing industrial and communicative institutions, humanist ecology and what Jürgen Habermas has termed ethics of the humankind. The third account of war is focused on the intrinsic fragmentation and multiplicity of the modern world with no supreme authority that could be trusted with establishing the norms of ethical behavior and existence or performing the function of the referee and settler of conflicts. In this regard, it is essential to create a stable event of thought capable of establishing and asserting meaning in the long run. Today, historical memory is increasingly perceptive of the human factor in war. In his account of collective memory, Patrick Hutton regards it as a foundation of collective mentalities, an essential ingredient in understanding existential experience. The phenomenon of war should be regarded in the context of the hermeneutics of history and philosophy of the event. Such an experience can never find exhaustive expression. The experience of war, siege or concentration camps defies “words from the outside,” which are powerless to capture the images, faces, the very corporeality of the past events, the actual facticity of war, the uniqueness of gesture. Overwhelmingly, postwar generations perceive war through the mirror of popular actors’ faces they see on the screen, through iconic words and received images. It seems as if time casts war into oblivion, translating it into the realm of the explainable. Thus, the actual experience of the event of war “dissolves” in the symbolic. Reminiscences of war can be referred to as essentially post-traumatic experiences. There is an oft-quoted saying that nobody ever comes back from war alive. The experience of war extends beyond wartime—it steals surreptitiously into the subsequent peaceful days and nights. Such experience tends to lurk in the dark as if to ensure the possibility of creating a new event in new surroundings. Remarkably, the most difficult question here is the question of the present.

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Today’s actualities are obvious: the shattering and distortion of traditions, alienation, isolation of different generations, the absence of rationally established unifying principles, corruption of political and national elites, ethnocentrism, the tendency toward “rewriting” history. Under these circumstances, philosophy must commit itself to the task of developing a consistent geopolitical explanation of war and the corresponding existential experience. And, however implausible eternal peace may be (Kant), it is necessary to create patterns of consciousness that would reduce the probability of war to a bare minimum. This task is especially important now that a common “global” space for the military presence of the strongest nations and centers of power is being established. It is clear, therefore, that if memory and tradition are annihilated or cast aside, the threat of war grows. The meaning of history is not just rational; more importantly, it is existential. In the events of memory, the esthetic and the political correlate with the understanding of man in wartime and peacetime; thus, subjectivity of the event is produced.24 This kind of experience of thinking history is preserved in cultural memory. The goal of philosophy and the philosophy of history is, therefore, to oppose the production of war by means of constantly appealing to the values of life. Translated by Elena A. Krasovskaia Works Cited Bibikhin, V.V. Slovo i sobytie. Moscow, 2001. Bojanić, Petar. “Chto takoe ili kto takie ‘My’? Heidegger i rekonstruktsiia pon’atiia ‘narod’ (Volk).” Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (2016). Broekman, Jan M. Strukturalismus: Moskau, Prag, Paris. Freiburg/ München, 1971. Colilli, Paul. Agamben and the Signature of Astrology: Spheres of Potentiality. Lexington Books, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. “Dostoevsky i ottseubiistvo.” Sigmund Freud. Ia i ono. Trudy raznykh let. 2. Tbilisi, 1991. Griakalov, Aleksei A. Esthesis and Logos. New York: The Edwin Mellen P, 2002. Griakalov, Aleksei A. Esthetic Subjectivity of the Event of Discovery (“Esteticheskaia subectivnost’: sobytiia obreteniia”). einai: Filosofiia. Religiia. Kul’tura. 7, no. 2 (14) (2018). https://einai.ru/ru/archives/1902. 24

Aleksei A. Griakalov, “Esteticheskoe i politicheskoe v kontekste post-sovremennosti: topos HOMO AESTHETICUS” Voprosy filosofii, no.1 (2013), 54–56.

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Griakalov, Aleksei A. “Russkii kosmizm v prostranstve interpretatsii: obraz—proekt— sobytie.” Edited by K. Ichin. Filosofiia cosmizma i russkaia kul’tura (Belgrad, 2004). Griakalov, Aleksei A. Writing and the Event (Pis’mo i sobytie). St. Petersburg, 2004. Griakalov, Nikolai A. ed. Figury Terrora. St Petersburg State U, 2006. Hajnády, Zoltan. “Lev Tolstoy i Martin Heidegger: filosofsko-poeticheskii opyt sravnitel’nogo izucheniia.” Voprosy literatury, no. 5 (2009). Hansen-Löve, Aage A. Russian Formalism. Мoscow, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 17th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993. Losev, Aleksei. “Teatral.” Losev, A.F. Zhizn‘. Povesti. Rasskazy. Pis’ma. St Petersburg, 1993. Nefedov, Sergei A. Vojna i obshestvo. Faktornyj analiz istoricheskogo protsessa. Moscow, 2008. Parsamov, Vadim. Bibleiskii narrativ voiny. 1812–1814. Istoriia i povestvovanie. Moscow, 2006. Shestov, Lev. Dostoevsky i Nietzsche (Filosofiia tragedii). St Petersburg, 1903. Sirotkina, Irina. “Pl’aska i ekstaz v Rossii ot Serebryanogo veka do kontsa 1920-kh godov.” Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv. Podkhody k kul’turnoi istorii emotsii. Edited by J. Plamper, S. and Eli Shakhadad. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (2001). Spengler, Oswald. The Hour of Decision (Gody reshenii). Moscow, 2006 [Originally published in 1933 with the title, Jahre der Entscheidung].

Boris Groys Born in 1947, Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist and an internationally renowned expert on the Russian avant-garde and ­Soviet-era art and literature. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School (egs). His work engages radically different traditions from French poststructuralism to modern Russian philosophy, yet it is firmly situated at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. Theoretically, Groys’s work is influenced by Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin and other modern and postmodern philosophers and theoreticians. Born in the former German Democratic Republic, Groys grew up in the Soviet Union and studied philosophy, mathematics, and logic at Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University). While a student, he immersed himself in the unofficial cultural scenes taking place in Leningrad and Moscow and coined the term “Moscow conceptualism.” The term first appeared in his 1979 essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” published in the art magazine A-IA. He published widely in a number of samizdat magazines, including 37 and Chasy. Between 1976 and 1981, Groys held the position of Research Fellow in the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics at Moscow State University. At the end of this fellowship, he left the Soviet Union and moved to the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1992, Groys earned his doctorate in philosophy from the Universität Münster, where he also served as an assistant professor in philosophy from 1988– 1994. During this time, he also was a visiting professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and then had an appointment the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Southern California. From 1994 to 2009, Groys was Professor of Art History, Philosophy, and Media Theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, where he remains a senior research fellow. In 2001, he was the Director of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and from 2003 to 2004, he spearheaded the research program Post-Communist Condition, at the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany. He assumed the position of Global Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University in 2005, and in 2009 he became a full Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies there. Groys is also a senior Fellow at the International Center for Cultural Studies and Media Theory at the Bauhaus Universität (Weimar) and is a m ­ ember of the

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Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (aica). He has been a senior scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art (London) and a fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk, Vienna), Harvard University Art Museum and the University of Pittsburg. In the Anglo-American world, Groys is best known as the author of The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), and for introducing the West to Russian postmodernist writers and artists. His contributions stretch across the fields of philosophy, politics, history, and art theory and criticism. Within aesthetics, his major works include Vanishing Point Moscow (1994) and The Art of Installation (1996). His philosophical works include A Philosopher’s Diary (1989), The Invention of Russia (1995), and Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012). More recently, he has also published Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media (2000), Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment (2006), and The Communist Postscript (2010). In addition to these works, other significant works in art, history, and philosophy include: History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (2010), Going Public (2010), Art Power (2008), The Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990 (2008), Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Period (2004), and Apotropikon (1991). His Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual and Immortality (dvd, 2008) is a trilogy of video-text syntheses, wherein he reads the composed text superimposed onto a collage of footage fragments taken from movies and film documentations. As a prominent contemporary art theorist and critic, Boris Groys has also curated a number of notable exhibitions, including: Fluchtpunkt Moskau at Ludwig Forum (1994, Aachen, Germany), Dream Factory Communism at the Schirn Gallery (2003–2004, Frankfurt, Germany), Privatizations at the kw Institute of Contemporary Art (2004, Berlin, Germany), Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990 at the Kunsthalle Schirn (2008–2009 Frankfurt, Germany; Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain), Medium Religion with Peter Weibel at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2009, Karlsruhe, Germany), Andrei Monastyrski for the Russian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011, Venice, Italy) and After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, at bak Utrecht (2012, Netherlands). Groys’s work in aesthetics and his co-mingling of ideas through aesthetics, however, have brought him the most recognition, for it is there he has made his most significant contributions. Proposing and underscoring the involvement of the Russian avant-garde in the Bolshevik movement as well as in the early stages of the Bolshevik State, he explores the implications of this relationship. One of his fundamental theses is that like their political counterparts these

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artists tried to outpace the developments of modernity, so they too attempted to skip the steps supposed to be necessary and constitutive of historical progress. ––Srdjan Cvjeticanin

Becoming Cosmic Boris Groys After the October Revolution many Russian thinkers, writers and artists believed to be confronted with an historical opportunity to undertake a radically new beginning, to turn history in a new direction. Among them were the representatives of the Biocosmists-Immortalists—a small political party that had its roots in Russian anarchism. In their first manifest (from 1922) they wrote: “We take the essential and real right of man to be the right to exist (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and the freedom to move in cosmic space (and not the supposed rights announced when the bourgeois revolution was declared in 1789).”1 Aleksandr Sviatogor, one of the leading Biocosmist theoreticians, took immortality to be at once the goal and the prerequisite for a future communist society, since true social solidarity could only reign among immortals: death separates people; private property cannot truly be eliminated if every human being owns a private piece of time. In eternity, conflicts between individual and society will be eliminated because time will be collectivized. At the same time immortality is the highest goal for every individual. For that reason, the individual will always remain faithful to society if this society makes immortality its own goal. The communist society of immortals will also be an “interplanetary,” cosmic society, that is, it will occupy the entire space of the cosmos. These ideas were not so new to Russian philosophical thinking. They were already formulated by Nikolai Fedorov at the end of nineteenth century—some time before the October Revolution. Fedorov called for the resurrection of all the generations that ever lived on Earth—and also saw the society of the future as the cosmic society of immortals. Sviatogor tried to distinguish himself from Fedorov by characterizing him as old-fashioned, even archaic. Even so, the family resemblance between Fedorov and the Biocosmists is all too obvious. They belong to the same tradition of Russian Cosmism that originated before the Revolution but had a substantial development after it and influenced many writers and artists of the Russian avant-garde. At first glance, Russian Cosmism seems to be a strange, even exotic phenomenon. But, in fact, it belongs to the mainstream of Modern thought. This

1 “Kreatorii Rossiiskikh i Moskovskikh Anarchistov-Biokosmistov,” Deklarativnaia rezolyutsiia, Biokosmist 1 (1922): pp. 1–3.

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thought was primarily a reaction to the technological progress that defined the life of mankind during recent centuries. The ideology of this progress taught us that whatever we produce very soon becomes obsolete—and, therefore, forgotten and destroyed. We are in the world and relevant for the world only insofar as we are alive. Modern thought is a vitalistic thought. At least since Marx and Nietzsche this thought has basically only one topic: life. However, if life connects us to the world, we also have consciousness, and consciousness disconnects us from the world because it tells us that we will die. That is what Nietzsche has diagnosed as a source of modern nihilism. This figure is, of course, not new. One finds it already in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. Already there we can read that man is nothingness and can only destroy. However, Hegel understands destruction as partial and dialectical: the activity of destruction is always incomplete, every revolution can be only partial; at the end one always takes a step back from complete destruction: every revolution ends in a compromise with the past. That is why Nietzsche requires that man should be overcome—and become a “Superman” (Übermensch). A Superman does not fear death and, thus, does not stop the revolution. He makes no compromises with the past. He rejects the past in its totality. History is no longer a Hegelian procession of particular epochs. Instead, history becomes broken in two parts—before the revolution of Supermen and after it. Such a radical break of history into two parts follows, of course, a certain religious model: Thus, the first coming of Christ divides history into two parts—­ before this coming and after it. And the second part can be ended only with the second coming of Christ—the return to the pre-Christian tradition is impossible. The analogy between Christ and the Nietzschean Superman was seen by some commentators early enough. One of them was Vladimir Soloviev—an influential Russian thinker at the end of the nineteenth century who explicitly wrote about Christ as the model for a Nietzschean Superman.2 Nietzsche was very influential in Russia at that time. Many Russian commentators on Nietzsche called him the most Russian of all the Western authors. The influence of Nietzsche on Russian Futurism was especially strong. I will not go here into details, but it is obvious that the philosophical roots of the Russian avant-garde were not Marxist but, rather, Nietzschean and anarchistic. The Russian avantgarde artists did not believe in the laws of history, historical reason and the historical inevitability of revolution and Communism. They saw revolutionary potential not in the development of material forces but in nothingness, in death that can stop and even reverse the movement of technological progress. Thus, 2 Vladimir Soloviev, “Ideia Sverkhcheloveka,” Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9 St. Petersburg, ­Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, p. 272 ff.

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Kazimir Malevich organized in 1913 the exhibition 0.10 presenting 10 artists who went through the point zero of art, through the death of art. Here art already has become immortal because it is post-mortal. Now, what was the position of the Russian Cosmists in this field defined by the tension between Marxism, which required mankind to believe in the progress of productive forces and submit to its logic, and the anarchistic avant-garde who wanted to mobilize the forces of death, negation, destruction, and nothingness to break this logic in the name of a new post-mortal, super-human beginning? The majority of the Russian Cosmists were a part of the same anarchistic political movement from which the majority of Russian avant-garde artists came. They also saw the actual source of revolutionary energy in the relationship of man to death. But their attitude toward the past was different. The artistic avant-garde wanted a radical break with the past and erasure of all the material traces of the past (like traditional art and architecture, museums and libraries etc.). But the destruction of the material heritage of the past does not mean erasure of its traces in the souls of individuals and collectives. The subject that rejects the past still remains the product of this past. This means that to be able to overcome man and history, one has to get the power not only over the future but also over the past. The real rejection of the past does not mean its destruction; it means its re-construction. Lev Shestov, an influential Russian philosopher at the beginning of the twentieth century, believed that true power is precisely power over the past: changing it to create an alternative past. In his writings Shestov argued time and again that this power must be divine.3 By the way, he was also an anarchist and a prominent member of the group of the so-called mystical anarchists. To get control over the future one has to get control over oneself. But it is well known that we can know only what we have made. The naturally produced man cannot know and control himself. Only an artificially, technologically produced man is transparent unto himself. In other words, to become able to control the future one has to become the origin of oneself, and to become the origin of oneself one should reconstruct all his or her ancestors. The resurrection, reconstruction, reenactment of the historical past is the precondition for power over the present and the future. History is repeated but repeated in a way that it ceases to be a mere chain of accidental events that goes from nowhere to nowhere. In other words, history ceases to be a process and becomes a project. This idea of a repetition of the past is, actually, not so new; it was already formulated and developed by Hegel. Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit describes history as moving toward a point at which it can be grasped in its 3 Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, Simon and Shuster, 1968, p. 127ff.

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entirety by an individual. At the end of Phenomenology Hegel describes a famous scene: the spirits of all the historical epochs come to his room and fill it. The philosopher becomes able to see the whole of history: for a moment all the past becomes present, and his mind coincides with the divine mind. However, a moment later the philosopher slips into the routine of everyday life. After the whole history of negation and liberation, Hegel says, the philosopher remains subjected to the power of death of the absolute master. The philosopher thinks as an immortal God but lives as a mortal human being. The Hegelian model of rewriting the past influenced the Cosmist project. But being materialists and vitalists, the Cosmists could not accept any more the break between thinking and living. To think as God, one has to live as God: that means one has to become immortal. The requirement of corporeal immortality is a direct consequence of Hegelian historicism. However, the project of corporeal immortality makes Hegelian historicism futuristic. The future of mankind becomes a repetition, reproduction, and reenactment of the past. The human being ceases to be natural and becomes a machine—a machine that operates by repetition and reproduction. Traditionally, humans were placed between God (or gods) and animals. Their souls connected them to gods; their bodies connected them to animals. Therefore, their souls were thought to be immortal, their bodies, mortal. However, in the twentieth century the place of man changed. Located between animals and machines, the soul then seemed to be mortal—a place of finite and mortal cultural identity. On the contrary, the soulless machine began to be perceived as immortal because it could be repaired and maintained during a potentially infinite period of time. Not accidentally, soulless bodies—vampires and zombies—filled the modern and contemporary cultural imagination. Andy Warhol, famously, proclaimed his desire to become a machine. Earlier, the body had to die for a soul to become immortal in God. Now the soul has to die for a body to become immortal through technology. However, there is a problem with technology. Technology is able to keep things and machines forever, but it does not give such a promise. On the contrary, technological progress permanently makes all technical things obsolete and replaces them with different, new things. Technology does not love individual machines, unlike God, who loves individual souls and wants their immortality. Therefore, to obtain immortality in the secular universe one has to teach technology to love individual human bodies. This is precisely what the Russian Cosmists attempted to do. Russian Cosmism actually got its start with the “Philosophy of the Common Task”4 that Nikolai Fedorov developed in the late nineteenth century. It may 4 Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, What is Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task, Honeyglen Publishing/L’Age d’Homme, 1990.

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have met with little public attention during his lifetime, but it had illustrious readers like Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev who were fascinated and influenced by Fedorov’s project. After the philosopher’s death in 1903 his work gained ever increasing currency, although it remained limited to a Russian readership. The project of the common task, in summary, consists in the creation of the technological, social and political conditions under which it would become possible to resurrect by technological means all the people who lived in the historical past. Here Fedorov was reacting to an internal contradiction in the theories of progress that dominated the nineteenth century. Namely, future generations were supposed to enjoy the happy Utopian future only at the price of cynical acceptance of an outrageous historical injustice: the exclusion of all previous generations from the realm of this future Utopia. Progress thus functioned as an exploitation of the dead in favor of the living and as an exploitation of those alive today in favor of those who will live later. But is it possible to think of technology in terms that are different from the terms of historical progress, that is from orientation toward the future? Fedorov believed that a technology directed toward the past is possible— and, actually, already exists. It is art technology and, especially, technology used by art museums. The museum does not punish the obsoleteness of the individual museum items by their removal and destruction. Thus, the museum is fundamentally at odds with progress: the museum loves its items and promises to keep them potentially forever. Progress consists in replacing old things with new things. However, for Fedorov progress is not dictated by the inner dynamic of the technological development itself. According to Fedorov technology produces new tools either for war or for fashion. Both are connected to the reproduction of mankind by organic means (fashion is used by women to attract men, and war serves men to conquer women). In other words, technology takes the form of progress only because it remains subjected to organic, animal life and its needs. Technological production serves the biological reproduction of mankind. Thus, when technology will be turned around and used not to serve the production of new generations but the resurrection of previous generations, progress will be stopped. Already Soloviev in his Meaning of Love5 states that true love excludes the desire of having children: true, human love is instead desire for the immortality of the beloved body. So, progress is dictated by the rest of animality in man. Here man still sees himself not as an emancipated, autonomous individual but merely as a representative of the human species. And, thus, man is ready to accept death as a precondition for the reproduction of this species. The truly emancipated individual experiences the self rather as an artwork that should be protected from decay and annihilation. Accordingly, true 5 Vladimir Soloviev, The Meaning of Love, Lindisfarne Books, 1985.

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technology is the technology of sustainability. Thus, museum technology cares for individual things, makes them last, makes them immortal. The Christian immortality of the soul is replaced here by the immortality of things or bodies in the museum. And divine grace is replaced by curatorial decisions and the technology of museum preservation. All of the people living and all the people who have ever lived must rise from the dead as artworks and be preserved in museums. Technology as a whole must become the technology of art, and the state must become the museum of its population. Just as the museum’s administration is responsible not only for the general holdings of the museum’s collection but also for the intact state of every given work of art, making certain that the individual artworks are subjected to conservation and restoration when they threaten to decay, the state should bear responsibility for the continued life of every individual person. The state can no longer permit itself to allow individuals to die privately or the dead to rest peacefully in their graves. Death’s limits must be overcome by the state. Modern biopower must become total. This totality is achieved by equating art and politics, life and technology, state and museum. The overcoming of the boundaries between life and art is here not a matter of introducing art into life but is, rather, a radical museumification of life. By unifying living space and museum space, biopower extends itself into infinity: it becomes the organized technology of eternal life. Such total biopower is, of course, no longer “democratic”: no one expects the artworks that are preserved in a museum collection to elect democratically the museum curator who will care for them. As soon as human beings become radically modern—that is, as soon as they are understood as bodies among other bodies, things among other things—they have to accept that state-organized technology will treat them accordingly. This acceptance, however, has a crucial precondition: the explicit goal for a new power must be eternal life here on earth for everyone. Only then can the state cease to be a partial, limited biopower of the sort described by Michel Foucault and become a total biopower. The path the Biocosmists followed from radical anarchism to acceptance of Soviet power as one (possible) authority of a total biopower is characteristic for many other fellow travelers of the October Revolution as well. Thus, in the 1920s, Valerian Muraviev converted from being a fierce opponent of the Bolshevist revolution to its advocate the moment he discovered in Soviet power a promise of “mastery over the time,” that is, of the artificial production of eternity. He too saw art as a model for politics—as the only technology that could overcome time. He too called for a departure from purely “symbolic” art in favour of using art to make all of society and indeed the entire cosmos into an object of human design. Far more radically than most of the other authors of

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his time, Muraviev was prepared to view human beings as works of art. He understood resurrection as following logically from the process of copying even earlier than Benjamin Muraviev’s observation that there could be no ­difference between the “original human being” and his or her copy under the conditions of technological reproducibility.6 Valerian Muraviev thus sought to purify the concept of the human being of metaphysical and religious remnants that were still clung to by Fedorov and the Biocosmists. For Muraviev a human being was simply a specific combination of particular chemical elements— just like every other thing in the world. For that reason, Muraviev hoped to eliminate gender differences in the future and create a nongendered, purely artificial method for producing human beings. The human beings of the future would thus have no guilt with respect to their dead ancestors: they would owe their existence to the same technologically organized state that would guarantee the duration of their existence, their immortality. This can be seen as the last step in the secularization of Christianity, for it remains only partial if it merely negates, censors and prohibits the hopes, desires and demands for life that religion articulates. It is not enough to say that there is no immortality and to prohibit people from seeking immortality. Rather, one should show how immortality could be reached by secular means. Russian Cosmists inherited and radicalized the Marxist shift from divine grace to secular technology. However, there is one essential difference between the traditional Marxist project and the Cosmist project. Marxism does not raise the problem of immortality: the Communist “paradise on Earth” that is supposed to be achieved through the combination of revolutionary struggle and creative work is understood as a realization of harmony between man and nature—a harmony that secures human happiness in the framework of “human nature” to which belongs also the inevitability of “natural death.” On the contrary, Cosmism denies death the status of being natural death, for Cosmists death is always artificial because it can be technologically prevented. However, artificial immortality is a fragile immortality. It is not ontologically given (like in the case of God or gods) but merely technologically secured. But how can it be secured? The answer is obvious: only when all cosmic space is put under technological control. That is the point where the Cosmism of the Cosmists gets its central role. The Cosmos is understood here not as given, not as the Cosmos of Greek antiquity that resists the powers of Chaos. Rather, cosmic space is interpreted as a huge factory, a field of operations whose goal is to secure life space for current and resurrected generations. 6 Valerian Muraviev, “Kultur als Beherrschung der Zeit.” Die Neue Menschheit (Hrsg. von Boris Groys und Michael Hagemeister), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2005, pp. 425–56.

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The dependence of mankind on cosmic events that are uncontrollable and even unknown is the source of specifically modern anxiety: cosmic anxiety, the anxiety of being a part of the cosmos but not able to control it. Not accidentally our contemporary mass culture is so much obsessed with visions of asteroids coming from black cosmic space and destroying the Earth. But this anxiety has also more subtle forms. As an example, one can cite the theory of the “accursed share” that was developed by Georges Bataille.7 According to this theory, the Sun always sends more energy to the Earth than the Earth, including the organisms living on its surface, can absorb. After all the efforts to use this energy for the production of goods and raising the living standard of the population, there also remains a non-absorbed, non-used rest of the solar energy. This rest of energy is necessarily destructive. It can be spent only through violence and war, or at least, through ecstatic festivals and sexual orgies that channel and absorb this remaining energy through less dangerous activities. Thus, human culture and politics also become determined by cosmic energies—forever shifting between order and disorder. Bataille’s solar myth reminds one strongly of the interpretation of the world history as defined by the activity of the Sun, an interpretation that was formulated by Russian historian and biologist Alexandr Chizhevskii in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period. Chizhevskii’s ideas spread also to the West, especially to France and the United States, and some of his texts were published in French and English, so his ideas could have reached Bataille.8 However, the main text written by Chizhevskii in which his theory is extensively formulated and proved by empirical data was published only relatively recently in Russian.9 Chizhevskii collected a huge amount of empirical data—from Roman and early Chinese sources up to the 1930s—to show the close correlation between the periods of higher activity of the Sun and mass revolutionary movements. It is, of course, the Russian Revolution in 1917 that gave the decisive impulse to his research. Chizhevskii asked: why under similar social, economic and political constellations, in some cases masses become mobilized and revolutionized, but in other cases they remain passive and indifferent. The answer that he offers is this: to be able to start a revolutionary movement, human beings should be mobilized not only on the level of the spirit but also on the level of the body. The human spirit can be mobilized through an ideology, but, according to Chizhevskii, the 7 Georges Bataille, Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Zone Books, 1988. 8 For example, Aleksandr Chizhevskii, Les épidémies et les perturbations électromagnétiques, Hippocrate, 1938. 9 Aleksandr Chizhevskii, Zemlia v ob’iatiakh solntsa /The Earth in the Embrace of the Sun (1931)/ in Chizhevskii, Kosmicheskii pul’s zhizni, Moscow 1995.

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degree of mobilization of the human body, like that of all organisms living on the Earth, is dependent on the cycles of solar activity. He collected an incredible amount of astronomical and historical data to show the correlation between the activity of the Sun and the activity of revolutionary movements. As he has shown, the greatest revolutions coincided with the greatest activity of the Sun; and the historical process is characterized by a succession of active and passive periods corresponding to eleven-year cycles of solar activity—the highest degree of activity following a twenty-two-year cycle. But it seems to me that for our time the most interesting part of his results concerns the relationship between the activity of the Sun and English parliamentary elections. These results show that the influence of the Sun dictates not only the choice between revolution and status quo but also between leftwing and rightwing politics in the framework of regular parliamentary processes. Thus, Chizhevskii shows that for the period between 1830 and 1924 the summary activity of Sun during the rule of liberal governments was 155.6% higher than it was during the rule of conservative governments. Conservative governments never had power when the number of sunspots was over 93. The moments of change in solar activity were almost precisely correlated to those of changes in England’s governments. At the end of his text Chizhevskii suggests that the knowledge of the correlation between the activity of the Sun and the political activity of the masses can prepare the political classes for the seemingly unexpected changes in the public mood. During the financial crisis of 2009 one specialist remembered the so-called Kondratiev waves. Nikolai Kondratiev, a student of Chizhevskii, applied his theory to economic cycles and predicted all of them including the 2009 crisis.10 On the political level one is reminded of the years 1968, 1989 and, again, 2010–11. Here it is interesting to mention that the present time is the time of the weakest solar activity of this and the twentieth century—a period of political indifference and passivity of the masses. However, the political effects of the higher numbers of sunspots are often ambiguous. Chizhevskii specifically warns that the growth of solar activity can lead not only to the adoption of a progressive agenda by the masses but also to the rise of irrational and reactionary populist movements. One possibility to react to this cyclic activity of the Sun is to embrace it. In fact, there are only two different ways of reacting to the battle between C ­ osmos and Chaos: the ecstatic embracing of Chaos or an attempt to put the Cosmos under control and secure its victory over Chaos. Many writers and artists of the Russian avant-garde invoked the coming of Chaos—most famously the 10

See Vincent Barnett, Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development, Macmillan, London, 1998.

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authors of the mystery-opera “Victory over the Sun”11 to whose writing and staging the most prominent members of the Russian avant-garde movement of the time contributed: Kazimir Malevich, Velimir Khlebnikov, Nikolai Fedorov, Alexei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin. The opera celebrated the extinction of the sun and descent of Cosmos into Chaos—symbolized by the black square that for first time was painted by Malevich as a part of the scenography for the opera. The Russian Cosmists wanted to liberate mankind from the cyclical processes caused by the struggle between Chaos and Order. In their eyes, only technological control over the Cosmos in its entirety could protect the fragile immortality of resurrected generations. Here Cosmism does not mean something like inner identification of the individual soul with the universal Cosmic Soul—a Romantic project partially inspired by the Indian spiritual tradition that was revived by theosophical and anthroposophical schools that were also very influential in Russia at the end of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries. Russian Cosmism was not spiritual and Romantic but, rather, materialist and constructivist. In this sense it was very compatible with the constructivist avant-garde of the 1920s and also with the Marxist project of building a radically new society. These biopolitical projects of Russian Cosmism may seem to be utopian, but at the same time, as so often happens in such cases, they stimulated the development of purely scientific and technological programs. One of the most spectacular and influential of them was the rocket research that Konstantin Tsiolkovskii conducted with the goal of transporting our resurrected ancestors to other planets: this became the starting point of later Soviet space travel. Tsiolkovskii, himself a follower of Cosmic Biopolitics, wanted to fulfil in practice Fedorov’s call for the “patrification of the heavens” (that is, the transformation of the planets into habitable places for our resurrected fathers). His many writings were, apart from strictly technical problems, devoted to the social organization of the universe. Tsiolkovskii still believed strongly in human creativity, even though in the best biopolitical tradition he saw human beings as mere bodies, things that as such by definition could not be creative. Most of his texts are devoted to solving this philosophical problem that was central to his thought. Tsiolkovskii’s solution consisted in seeing the human brain as merely a specific and purely material part of the universe. Hence all of the processes that take place in the human brain are ultimately processes that have their origin in the whole universe; so the will of an individual human being is at the 11

Victory over the Sun, Ed. Patricia Railing, translator Evgenii Steiner. London: Artists.Bookworks, 2009. 2 vols.

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same time the will of the universe. Human creativity is an expression of the creativity of the universe. If the human brain is a part of Cosmos and transmits Cosmic energies, then human beings become Cosmic. Natural selection must of course decide whose brain best expresses the will of the universe. In this respect Tsiolkovskii was relatively skeptical about the chances of the human race to win this competition. He believed that “higher beings” have the right and even the duty to destroy “lower beings,” just as gardeners do when they tend their gardens; and he did not preclude the possibility that humans are lower beings among the beings populating Cosmic space.12 Another fascinating biopolitical experiment, although not as influential, was the Institute for Blood Transfusion that Alexandr Bogdanov founded and directed in the 1920s. Bogdanov had been a close ally of Lenin when they were young and a cofounder of the intellectual and political movement within the Russian Social Democratic Party that led to Bolshevism. Later, however, he increasingly distanced himself from contemporary politics and was sharply criticized by Lenin for his favorable view of Ernst Mach and his positivist philosophy. After the revolution Bogdanov directed the famous Proletkul’t in which he promoted the “non-professional” writing and art produced by ordinary workers. Later Bogdanov became enthusiastic about experiments with blood transfusion, which he hoped would slow the aging process, if not stop it completely. Blood transfusions from younger generations to older ones were supposed to rejuvenate the elderly and establish a solidarity and balance among the generations that Bogdanov considered essential to establishing a just socialist society. As it happened Bogdanov died from such a blood transfusion.13 To conclude this article on Russian Cosmism, one must inevitably confront the question: can one imagine the emergence of a society of immortal humans that would be able to control all Cosmic space and would be willing to resurrect all previous generations? In Soloviev’s aforementioned Meaning of Love the author rejects Fedorov’s project because he does not believe that society can love its individual members to such a degree that it would be ready to invest systematic work in their resurrection.14 Fedorov himself like, later, the Biocosmists-Immortalists argued in a tradition of enlightened egoism: they believed that individuals would be ready to invest their energy in building the society of the immortals if they could be convinced that such a society would guarantee their own immortality. However, such a conviction is, as we know, 12 13 14

Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, “ Volia Vselennoi,” Genii sredi liudei (Moscow, 2002), pp. 224–31, p. 227. Alexandr Bogdanov, God raboty instituta perelivaniia krovi, 1926–1927 (Moscow, 1927), p. 33. Meaning of Love, p. 95f.

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always shaky. I prefer to answer this question as Plato did about the possible emergence of the ideal, philosophical state he described in his famous Politeia. There Plato writes that such a state is logically possible—even if empirically improbable. The same can be said about the Cosmist project. Indeed, like Plato, the Biocosmists-Immortalists did not make any assumptions that would be illogical or unscientific. The arguments against their project could be only psychological, but not logical. Thus, one can say that the realization of this project is not probable but also not impossible. Works Cited Barnett, Vincent. Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development. Macmillan, 1998. Bataille, Georges. Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. vol. 1. Zone Books, 1988. Bogdanov, Aleksandr. God, raboty instituta perelivaniia krovi, 1926–1927. Moscow 1927. Chizhevskii, Aleksandr. The Earth in the Embrace of the Sun [1931] (Zemlia v ob’iatiiakh Solnstsa) In Kosmicheskii pul’s zhizni by Aleksandr Chizhevskii. Moscow, 1995. Chizhevskii, Aleksandr. Les Épidémies et les perturbations électromagnétiques. Hippocrate, 1938. Fedorov, Nikolai Fedorovich. What is Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. Honeyglen Publishing/L’Age d’Homme, 1990. “Kreatorii Rossiiskikh i Moskovskikh Anarchistov-Biokosmistov.” Deklarativnaia rezoliutsiia, Biokosmost I. 1922, pp. 1–3. Muraviev, Valerian. “Kultur als Beherrschung der Zeit.” Die Neue Menschheit. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister, 2005. pp. 425–56. Shestov, Lev. Athens and Jerusalem. Simon and Shuster, 1968. Soloviev, Vladimir. “Ideia Sverkhcheloveka.” Sobraniie Sochinenii. vol.9. Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1966. Soloviev, Vladimir. The Meaning of Love. Lindisfarne Books, 1985. Tsiolkovskii, Konstantin. “Volia Vselennoi.” In Genii sredi liudei. Moscow 1927. pp. 224–31. Victory over the Sun. 2 vols. Edited by Patricia Railing. Translated by Evgenii Steiner. Artists. Bookworks, 2009.

Pavel Gurevich I was born in 1933 in the city of Ulan-Ude of Buriatia. My father was a smith. During World War ii he was a platoon commander and was killed in October 1944. In 1950 I entered the Faculty of History and Philology at Urals State University. Upon graduation I returned to Buriatia. From 1955 to 1961 I worked at the newspaper, Pravda, as a copy editor, then as Head of the Information Department and a member of the editorial board of the newspaper. From 1961 to 1962 I was the Editor in Chief of the Literary Department of the Buriat Committee for Radio and Television Broadcasting. From 1962 to 1965 I was a post-graduate student at the Faculty of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University, where I defended a dissertation and received a PhD (Candidate of Science) in history. From 1966 to 1970 I headed a department at the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the ussr. Since 1970 I have been working in the Academy of Sciences of the ussr. I defended a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in philology and in 1990 became a professor. From 1984 to 2013 I was head of a department at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ras) and defended a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in philosophy. Currently I am the chief research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of ras. Under my supervision, more than thirty scholars prepared their dissertations for Candidate and Doctor of Science degrees. I have served as a member of two dissertation committees and as editor in chief of a number of journals serving Russian experts. The main field of my philosophical work is philosophical anthropology. I have investigated such problems as the modes of human existence; the facets of human beings; human subjectivity; the fragmentation and the integrity of a human being; and the comparative analysis of classical and nonclassical anthropology. I was a scientific editor of many published works on classical philosophy, including among others, books by Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Martin Buber, William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Karl Jaspers, and Wilhelm Reich. As a compiler and editor-in-chief I prepared a number of anthologies on general philosophical problems, philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of culture. I have authored over fifteen scientific monographs, among them: “Man of the Future: Myths and Reality” (“Chelovek budushchego: mify i realnost’” 1979), “Social Mythology” (“Sotsialnaia mifologiia” 1983), “The Philosophy of Culture”

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(“Filosofiia kultury,” 1995), “The Problem of Human Integrity” (“Problema tselostnosti” 2004), “The Transformation of Values as an Emergency” (“Preobrazhenie tsennostei kak chrezvychainaia situatsiia” 2007), “The Psychoanalysis of Personality” (“Psikhoanaliz lichnosti,” 2011), and “A Philosophical Interpretation of Man” (“Filosofskoe tolkovanie cheloveka,” 2013). I have also coauthored “The Demarcations and Tendencies of Modern Philosophical Anthropology” (“Razmezhevaniia i tendentsii sovremennoi filosofskoi antropologii” 2015), “Identity as a Social and Anthropological Phenomenon” (“Identichnost’ kak sotsialnyi i antropologicheskii fenomen” 2015), “The Facets of Being Human” (“Grani chelovecheskogo bytiia” 2016) and others. In my works, I present philosophical anthropology as an autonomous field of philosophical knowledge, philosophical direction and specific method of comprehension of the world, and I substantiate the idea of the anthropological turn in philosophy. I was awarded the Catherine the Great Medal for Service to Science and Enlightenment for my contribution to the development of education in Russia and a medal “For Contribution to the Development of Philosophy.”. I am a member of the Russian Academy of Natural History, the Academy of Humanities Research, the Academy of Pedagogic and Social Sciences, and a number of other Russian public academies

The Theme of Man in Russian Philosophy Pavel Gurevich 1

Sources of the Anthropological Theme

The theme of man has been of key importance at all stages in the development of Russian philosophy. What is man? Can he be considered a unique being on Earth? Why, as distinct from other natural beings, is he endowed with comprehension? What is human nature? What determines the sovereignty of his spirit? What constitutes the drama of human relationships and human existence? Such questions in various formulations are found in philosophical texts of different periods. In the works of Byzantine thinkers, philosophical and, in particular, anthropological themes merged with theological ones. Attitudes to Greek philosophers could be varied and respectful as in Pselos or Pletho, who were inspired by Plato and the Neoplatonists; disdainful as found, for example, in Symeon the New Theologian; and utilitarian, as in the taxonomists of Christian beliefs, who since the times of Leontios of Byzantium and John Damascene took a liking to Aristotle. Nevertheless, for most Byzantine authors, interpretations of the Holy Scripture were more important/weighty than interpretations of any philosophical text, and “definitions” of ecumenical councils were more significant than any, even most serious philosophical definitions. As Vasilii V. Bychkov stated, “The theme of man as the crown of creation, according to the Scripture, ranks among the most important themes in Christian philosophy, and early Christian apologists paid much attention to it… Without studying the problem of man almost all main aspects of Christian culture, including aesthetics and artistic culture, will remain unclear.”1 Among many other philosophical problems, reflection about man and the Russian Enlightenment occupies probably the leading place. As compared with earlier Russian thought, the enlighteners—Aleksandr N. Radishchev, Ivan P. Pnin, Aleksandr P. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr F. Bestuzhev, Vasilii V. Popugaev— ask themselves many new questions, trying to find answers to them. What is the essence of man? What is his nature? What is man as a citizen and member of society? 1 Vasilii V. Bychkov, Byzantine Aesthetics. An Historical Perspective (Vizantiiskaia estetika. Istoricheskii rakurs), (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2017), 21.

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Naturally, the Russian Enlightenment inherited the subject matter of the European Enlightenment, but its interpretation and development were perfectly original in the context of that unique historical situation that took shape in Russian society of that time. Paying primary attention to the philosophical comprehension of man, the Russian enlighteners endeavored to determine his place in nature and his purpose in society. For them, man is part of nature, and its better part at that—its highest creation. Everything that nature created for man was but a prelude, a preparation to the solemn act of creating a human being. The enlighteners believed that the grandeur of human beings, their difference from other beings born in nature lies in reason. Endowed with reason, they are capable of creative work, thus ensuring the progress of humanity. It is reason that permits them to use natural laws in their own interests. Regarding man as a social being, the enlighteners pay attention to the fact that he has two inherent elements—the sensible and the reasonable. These two elements, differing in their nature, often contradict one another; unwillingly, man falls under the influence of one of them. The Russian enlighteners strive for the ideal in all respects: they have an intrinsic desire to combine the senses and reason in a harmonious unity. Such organic unification of the sensible and the reasonable, they believe, prevents a human person from deviations in his spiritual development and from moral degradation. A Russian writer, poet and philosopher Aleksandr Radishchev—de facto chief of the Saint Petersburg customs house and member of the Council on Legislation during the reign of Aleksandr i—became famous due to his major work, A Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, anonymously published in June 1790. In it, he condemned serfdom and at the same time glorified man: “Thus, striving after perfection, growing in perfection seems to be a sign of a thinking being, and here is his bliss; but no one can draw the limits of this striving towards perfection, whatever limited, since the higher man ascends in knowledge, the vaster horizons open to him.”2 2

The Silver Age

Philosophical-anthropological thought in nineteenth-century Russia demonstrates the extreme diversity of approaches to the problem of man:

2 Aleksandr N. Radishchev, On man, his mortality and immortality, in Man. Thinkers of the Past about His Life, Mortality and Immortality. Ancient World—Enlightenment (“O cheloveke, o ego smertnosti i bessmertii,” in Chelovek. Mysliteli proshlogo i nastoiashchego o ego zhizni, smerti i bessmertii. Drevnii mir—epokha Prosveshcheniia) (Politizdat, 1991), 395.

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At the turn of the twentieth century souls came to the world that were more sophisticated and refined than their cultural predecessors, possessing harmony and integrity, maybe, a greater creative strength, but as though isolating themselves from the “ultimate” questions of being. The Silver Age both reflected-comprehended and verbalized the new experience of a new soul. This newness is not the novelty of organic metamorphoses, but a renewal akin to a catastrophe. The revolutions of 1917 were preceded by revolutions in minds and hearts—the revolution of ideas, the religious-philosophical revolution.…3 Spiritual orientations and dominant trends in worldview were changing throughout the century. But the theme of man remained invariable, and it served as the basis for most diverse theoretical interests. Russian philosophy went through Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s, Slavophilism and Westernism (zapadnichestvo) in the 1840s and 1850s, and the ardent nihilism and materialism of the 1860s. In the 1870s, Vladimir S. Soloviev began his advocacy of universal all-unity and integral knowledge. The development of social thought in the second half of the century was associated with Populism (narodnichestvo). With all the incompatibility of these premises, philosophers pursued one goal—to show man ways to organize his life, based on comprehension of human nature. The spectrum of proposed programs was indeed inexhaustible. Evolution was in many respects determined by movement from Metropolitan Ilarion to Skovoroda—the phenomena of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Soloviev—inspired by a Russian’s moral-sensitive attitude to life and to oneself and ensuing quest for spiritual self-improvement, for social protest against the established social order, for nihilism, rebellion and revolutionary manifestoes. Whatever the theme—Orthodox consciousness, the Russian idea, social transformation, comprehension of being—Russian thinkers first of all tried to reveal the phenomenon of man. They believed that without comprehending the essence of a human being, it would be impossible to advance to discussion of other issues. Such a personalistic disposition was absent in European philosophy. A marked difference between Russian and Western philosophy was also manifest in its religious coloration. Different worldviews and social doctrines invariably defined themselves in correlation with Orthodox speculation, traditional in Russia. For that reason, the center of attention was never man as a

3 Natalia Bonetskaia, The Spirit of the Silver Age. A Phenomenology of the Time (Dukh Serebrianogo veka. Fenomenologiia epokhi) (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2017), 5.

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natural being but always the individual’s inexhaustible spiritual experience, his or her essence and that of the people, the collective. The rationalistic tradition was generally very strong in European philosophy, especially in the nineteenth century. Attention was predominantly paid to the problems of consciousness, freedom, and intellectual comprehension of reality. These problems were losing their speculative character in Russian philosophy: they were regarded in the context of life, not just for pure knowledge. The truth about man was interpreted not as a result of cognitive efforts, but as a result of a cognitive, spiritually intense experience. The point was not to represent certain universal knowledge of man in a finalized form. Unsurprisingly, spiritual comprehension was aimed at guiding human beings, helping them develop spiritually in life. Reflections about man, his life, death and immortality were understood by everyone in Russia not as just an intellectual movement, but rather as an immediate experience of human existence. Truth was not to be proven, as in West European philosophy by constructing a comprehensive system of categories. It was opened, discovered, presented, and actualized in contemporary life. Therefore, truth is a result of speculation, not of reasoning. Knowing the truth means living in it. Hence ethical pathos runs through Russian philosophy. Morality is defined as an absolutely autonomous sphere of human subjectivity, independent of theoretical reflection. It advances the imperatives of the meaning of life. Knowledge thus becomes dependent on ethics. One of the spiritualizing truths of the ideas of Ivan V. Kireevskii is that truth is not given to a morally flawed individual. So Russian philosophy is directed at the problems of social practice, “looking for truth and the meaning of life.” The ethical orientation of Russian philosophy—“How should one live?”— focuses on concrete social and spiritual practice, the tendency to verify the reliability and appropriateness of ethical theory and its principles by historical experience and the fate of people. This constantly led to reflecting upon the specific moral principles that determine the destiny of humankind. One of these principles, ascesis, distinguishes the spiritual life of Russia. The essential specificity of Russian reflection aspires to the ascetic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy. Through Greek ecclesiastical authors the notion of ascesis came to Christianity and began to mean a selfless devotion to Christ and a spiritual life with suppression of bodily needs, except for vital ones. The ultimate goal of Christian ascesis is holiness, man’s union with God, the deification of human nature, likening of man to Jesus Christ. This is the path of endless self-perfection. Throughout the whole nineteenth century, the Church fathers’ ascetic tradition preserved the foci of holiness and high selfless devotion. It was the

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century of saints Seraphim of Sarov and John of Kronstadt, who at first were folk legends, and then so respected in Russia that the Orthodox church called them “Russian wonderworkers.” It was also the century of the recently canonized great ascetic authors St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and Theophan the Recluse and of the elders of the Optina Pustyn hermitage—Leonid, Makari and Ambrose. At different periods of time the Kireevskiis, the Aksakovs, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and many others addressed these elders for support and spiritual advice. Within the framework of Slavophilism, another version of anthropological thinking was taking shape. Kireevskii and Aleksei Khomiakov, the fathers of this movement, tried to create an original Russian philosophy. It was supposed to reproduce the holy fathers’ tradition in terms of contemporary education. The purpose of the spirit was the ideal for these thinkers and the main concept in Kireevskii’s philosophical anthropology. He believed that no great thinker could attain truth, if his mind acted in isolation from other aspects of the spirit, that is, if an individual had no internal integrity. Khomiakov’s attention was focused on the problem of sobornost’, in other words, the universality of the human person. The Slavophiles interpreted sobornost’ as the deepest and most intimate need of every individual who strives to take in all human experience. But it is possible to wholly acquire it only in communication with the Church. The idea of the all-universal broadness of the human person was shared by the Westernizers, who in fact did not disagree with the Slavophiles in understanding the essence of man. They came, however, to quite different social conclusions, thinking about the place then of Russia in world history. The Westernizers, like the Slavophiles, consciously remained within Christian anthropology but suggested acquiring integrity on the path to assimilating all-human experience. For example, Piotr Chaadaev accepted as the foundation of anthropology the general Christian doctrine of the weakening of human nature by original sin. Arguing with Immanuel Kant, he held that the light of moral law shines on us from a remote and unknown area and as a good Christian, did not doubt that an unknown force guides humankind to its destiny. The quietist, moral ideal of the Romantics, Slavophiles and Westernizers in the middle of the century was gradually replaced by programs of social activism. This had a number of consequences for the development of philosophical anthropology, the first of which was the beginning of an infatuation with sciences containing natural scientific knowledge about human beings. Religious understanding of the mystery of man gave way to a new generation, one with nihilists and revolutionaries, and scientific experimentation and theoretical discourse. Entering anthropology also at that time were sociocentric motives, that young intellectuals viewed as their duty and the meaning of life. This however,

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provoked Аleksandr Herzen’s criticism. In his opinion, submission of a person to society, people, mankind or an idea, that is, to all forms of social service that were most esteemed in Russia, would only be a continuation of human sacrifices in their civilized form. In a sense, Herzen is the father of Russian materialism and positivism with their orientation to natural sciences, aspiring to explain human beings essentially as just parts of nature. But this sad position is the polar opposite of the notion that a human being is a moral person in full possession of knowledge and moral responsibility. Even with the best of intentions a human being cannot be deduced from the world of nature, nor from the world of history: a human being should be accepted as an irrefutable entity. Herzen, laying foundations for anthropological thinking, renounced the religious view of the world, rejected Western civilization, lost confidence in the rational nature of history, and declared a vote of no confidence in Hegelian panlogism. In the minds of the new generation of revolutionaries not only nature, but also culture turned out to oppose the moral person. A Russian intellectual had no absolute values left except for moral maxims. The same stance was inherited by the populists called Narodniki, who consciously rejected Christian religious understanding of life. The spirit of positivism reigning in Europe and spreading to Russia fascinated them. Their original judgments were due to their confidence in science, criticism and even skepticism. But the positivist orientation of the mind inadvertently delineated the limits of ethics, too. For Piotr Lavrov, a human person is a “unity of being and ideal,” who creates ideals and acts on the basis of these ideals. History, therefore, turns out to be a sphere where moral absolutes are realized. But transcendent, absolute being is said to be nonexistent. As a result, “critical consciousness,” and “critically thinking individuals” become the most valuable product of individual and social development. As is widely known, Nikolai Mikhailovskii contraposed a specifically Russian understanding of “truth” (pravda) and European “truth” (istina). For Mikhailovskii a person becomes the “measure of all things”: there is no absolute truth; only that of an individual. 3

The Problem of Personality

When Russian philosophy began to assimilate the experience of comprehending man accumulated by Russian and Western thought, the word, ­“personality,” did not exist in Russian. An idea gradually took shape in the social consciousness of people that it was possible to single out individuals who possess a higher degree of the human. Shakespeare’s Hamlet articulated this idea in the

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words about his father: “He was a man, take him for all in all.” But were the already widely accepted definitions of an “individual” and “individuality” insufficient? An individual, however, is a naturalistic, biological and only partly sociological category. Meanwhile, a human being is not only an individual. As an individual, man is not universal: he is devoid of universal content. Comparing two different individuals, we can hardly indicate their perfect uniqueness that singles them out from others. Thus, the word “individuality” was fixed in social consciousness to express the idea of significant characteristics of a particular human being. The word “person” in English carried the same connotation. David Hume, however, started thinking about how to define some “principle of union” that could attribute this word to certain representatives of humankind. In accordance with the established cognitive principle of classical philosophical thought he looked for qualities that could correlate with the stable and identical content of this kind of people. In other words, a certain substance should be presented to society that would be a reliable orientation for expressing the idea of a “person.”4 Philosophers of that time were convinced that thinking corresponds to reality and that the task of researchers was to express the idea of man’s self-­identity. Meanwhile, in English the word “personality” appeared. But the words “person” and “personality” were not identical. The theoretical question can be formulated as follows: in which cases can we think that this individual is not only unique, original, but also possesses a certain wholeness, integrity. He can correspond to the word “personality” only in the case of being complete. In another variant, this individual can present socially and culturally called-for masks that are most needed at the moment: various “personae” that poorly correlate with one another. “Personality” is not a set of masks, whose number might be overwhelming by definition. Not incidentally, Thomas Hobbes distinguishes between a “natural” and an “artificial person.” The first quality belongs to an individual person whose words and actions are considered as his own. The second characterizes a person whose words and actions “represent” another person.5 In both cases, we talk about masks or social roles. While a “natural” person is the author of his role, an artificial person undertakes another person’s roles. But it is not easy to detect these contradictions in an individual 4 David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature…, in Hume D. Works: in 2 vols, vol. 1 (“Traktat o chelovecheskoi prirode…,” in IUm, D. Sochinenie v 2 t., Tom 1) (Mysl, 1996), 299. 5 See: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, in Hobbes Т. Works: in 2 vols. Vol. 2 (“Leviafan, ili Materiia, forma i vlast’ gosudarstva tserkovnogo i grazhdanskogo,” in Gobbs, T. Sochinenie v 2 t., Tom 2.) (Mysl, 1991), 124.

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person. A bearer of some social role or another can behave differently. People and society transfer their right to speak on their behalf to one actor, that is, a sovereign. This condition is fixed in the contract. These masks can be changed: a sovereign can become an author. As for members of society, they have to play the roles of actors implementing the will of the sovereign. But in fact, it is not as simple as that. In order to be the author of a role, an individual has to possess this quality at least potentially. He also has to be aware of this ability as something feasible and even inevitable. Actually, this individual will have to play the role of the author. But since we speak of masks, both of them are artificial, not organic. In fact, we speak of such a phenomenon as a “persona.” The point is that a subject as “personality” has to be in command of both these masks. In one case, an individual reveals his “I”; in the other, on the contrary, the individual reveals another one—that of an Other person. Thus, philosophical literature establishes one of the significant qualities of “personality”—the degree of socialization of a particular human being. Inside social relationships an individual cannot be only himself: he needs certain lability or the ability to meet social demands. John Locke’s question about personal identity receives a paradoxical answer: the “I” is not equal to itself because this “I-by-itself” simply does not exist. This refers equally to both a “natural” and an “artificial” person. So, the word “personality” appeared in Western Europe not earlier than in the seventeenth century. Nikolai Karamzin is credited with having introduced the Russian word for “personality”—“lichnost’.” In Russian it is etymologically related to “face” and “image.” But this replacement can hardly be characterized as a mere search for a synonym. Having established the term “personality,” Karamzin combined various images of a social man into a semantic unity. He believed that an individual is capable of communication as well as intellectual and moral betterment. The word “individual” initially delineated a human being by his dependence, destiny, and derivativeness. The existence of corpuscles of humankind bothered people whose lives were inseparable from their family, community, denomination, or corporation and whose spirituality required an absolute point of reference. Existing as an individual was obvious, but also frighteningly obvious! From seemingly psychic atomicity, thought persistently turned to the idea that a particular human being would be authentic only in so far as he would be on the same level and even eventually blend with the substantial origin of the world. In this respect, only a live Cosmos or God is truly and uniquely individual. “Personality” means being the arbiter of one’s own destiny, one’s life. A human being can become a person, if he or she has this goal. Who can be characterized as a “personality”? An individual who is unique, socialized, spiritually developed, and responsible for his actions. According to this logic, in a human

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community there are persons and nonpersons, that is people who do not correspond to this notion. Many authors believe that each human being can be called a person. There are no nonpersons. But then the opposition between the notions “individual,” “individuality,” and “personality” makes no sense. The American science-fiction writer Robert Sheckley used the word combination “minimum man,” for a set of elementary qualities permitting an individual to call himself a human. Apparently, we can also speak of a “maximum man.” According to Karamzin, therefore, human beings can be characterized as having personality, if they are spiritually richer than an individual or individuality. An individual, even if he is unique and has special spiritual qualities, cannot always be called a person. He becomes one if he has a spiritual nature and has been socialized. But researchers have assumed another position, too. Personality is not a human being but only his inherent mental instance. To be more precise, a particular human being might have certain personal qualities but not be a personality in the full sense of the word. We can retrace how social philosophy moved from word to word to designate this special human gift. Having discerned unique traits in an individual, philosophers began to speak of such a man as having individuality. By introducing the autonomous word “personality,” Karamzin confirmed the supreme instance in man, the possibility of his being a man of the highest quality. Among the outstanding figures of the Silver Age—philosophers, writers, poets—Lev Shestov deserves special mention. Shestov was a “groundless,” strange and incomprehensible thinker. All his life he insisted that one can discover reality only by faith, although he did not belong to any confession. He was one of the few who at the dawn of the century were aware of the whole vulnerability and insecurity of human existence and the illusory character of natural, social or public laws. A notable role in the interpretation of personality belongs to Mikhail Gershenzon. He characterized man as a receptacle of unbridled and unknown forces: Since time immemorial, not yet being aware of his deeds, man gropingly found two ways, two techniques to curb his will. For there are only two ways indeed. One can strive either to integrally transform the willfulness of the spirit into regularity, elemental chaos into harmony—a religious way in a broad sense of the word; or one can curb his will partially, taking note of particular lines of its manifestation and bringing each particular line into a certain channel, limits; it means to curb it by reason, regulations, laws—a rational way.6 6 Mikhail Gershenzon, Crisis of Modern Culture, in Selected works. The Triple Image of Perfection (“Krizis sovremennoi kultury,”in Mikhail Gershenzon. Izbrannoe. Troistvennyi obraz sovershenstva) (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2016), 7.

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Basic Anthropological Ideas of the Twentieth Century

Have the anthropological ideas of Russian philosophy received European recognition? Two philosophers that permit answering this question positively deserve mention here. 4.1 Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev The legacy of Berdiaev, in my opinion, is characterized by liturgical orderliness: various “inconsistencies” in his reasoning in many respects reflect the desire to render a relative symmetry to particular facets of his philosophical position. That would suffice for an overview of his thinking. In this sense, the Russian thinker, is no more contradictory than, say, Martin Buber or Gabriel Marcel. To look for final answers to the tormenting questions of the past century in his works would be an exercise in futility. Berdiaev’s vocation was anthropology and the philosophy of history (istoriosofiia). As a thinker he advocated a radical renewal of philosophical anthropology. His main positions were associated with the philosophy of existence. But undoubtedly, he introduced many unexpected and original ideas in the philosophical comprehension of man. Neither Max Scheler, nor Мartin Buber, nor Gabriel Marcel possesses such a diversity of anthropological themes, as Berdiaev does. He ponders over human nature and the essence of man, freedom and slavery, integrity and the fragmentation of human beings, over various facets of human existence and existential issues, good and evil, sanctity and sinfulness, being and nonbeing, man without being, the implicit anthropologism of any ontology, Dostoyevsky’s “whirlwind anthropology,” microcosm and macrocosm, individuality and personality, the fate of history and eschatology, the correlation between the immanent and the transcendent, and many other themes. In his interpretation of man, Berdiaev appears to have the scope of European thinkers. Paul Tillich, one Western author who evaluated him, wrote: Recent Existentialists, especially Heidegger and Sartre, have put nonbeing in the center of their ontological thought; and Berdiaev, a follower of both Dionysius and Böhme, has developed an ontology of nonbeing which accounts for “meonic freedom” in God and man. These philosophical ways of using the concept of nonbeing can be viewed against the background of the religious experience of the transitoriness of everything created and the power of the “demonic” in the human soul and history.7 7 Paul Tillich, Selected works. Theology of Culture (Izbrannoe. Teologiia kultury), editor-­in-chief and afterword by S.V. Lezov (Iurist, 1995), 28.

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None of the prominent European thinkers considered Berdiaev to be “secondary,” an expounder of Western revelations. He was on an equal footing with such philosophers as Buber, Marcel, the personalist Emmanuel Mounier, and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, one of the founders of the so-called dialectical theology. And it is high time for Russian scholarship to acknowledge this fact, since Europeans have long ago appreciated this. In France, the Russian philosopher was respected by Аlbert Camus as well as by Marcel and Mounier. Many scientific honors were bestowed upon him in the West. In 1947, he became a doctor honoris causa of Cambridge University, and he was nominated for the Nobel prize. The European authority of Berdiaev is beyond doubt. Many Catholic intellectuals, among them François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, supported the work of the Russian philosopher. We know that Marcel highly praised the works of Nikolai Berdiaev, who was a regular guest at his philosophical meetings. Berdiaev remarked: Gabriel Marcel’s philosophical gatherings were the only philosophical meetings in Paris that had a long-lasting success. Many people came to these gatherings that took place in a private house, not only Frenchmen, but also foreigners—Germans, Russians, Spanish. Many young philosophers came. It was probably the only place in France, where the problems of phenomenology and existential philosophy were discussed. The names of Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers could be continuously heard. French culture did not close itself off. Many fine and nuanced thoughts were expressed… Marcel himself was considered to be an existential philosopher. He knew German philosophy better than other Frenchmen… Their own metaphysical thought lacked courage; the German one was stronger.8 In the West, Berdiaev was the best-known Russian thinker, simultaneously being accepted as a live embodiment of Russian spirituality and as a brilliant herald of the tragic world. He was called the “Russian Hegel of the twentieth century,” “one of the greatest philosophers and prophets of our time,” “one of [the] universal men of our epoch,” a “great thinker, whose work was a connecting link between East and West, between different Christian denominations,

8 Nikolai А. Berdiaev, Self-Knowledge (Samopoznanie), in Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia (1990): 262–63.

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Christians and non-Christians, between nations, past and future, philosophy and theology.”9 In 1946, two years before his death, Berdiaev wrote bitterly: “I’m well-known in Europe and America, even in Asia and Australia, translated into many languages, much written about. There is only one country where I’m almost ­unknown—it is my homeland. It is one of the indicators of the broken tradition of Russian culture.”10 Marcel believed that Berdiaev’s works had a great influence upon him: In general, [that] Marcel’s letters show that the influence on him of the Russian thinker, who was fifteen years older and was known in Europe, is doubtless. And it is not only the authority of Berdiaev’s personality and power of his books, but [it is] also innate [the] closeness of his spirit and frame of mind to the world of thought of the French philosopher. So, Marcel’s late admission that Berdyaev had definitively influenced him, although this influence is not easy to define contentually is quite justified (in conversations with Pierre Boutang).11 Berdiaev radically reexamines Marcel’s idea of being. Marcel considered being as a main characteristic of man’s presence in the world. He interpreted it as a certain horizon, to which man aspires, trying to acquire his beingness. This notion is opposed to “having” as a sign of the non-genuineness of human existence. Berdiaev does not regard being as the present nor as the future. It had already existed but was lost. Man has lost access to being. “It is impossible to come to being, one can only proceed from it,”12 Berdiaev wrote. In his attempt to justify freedom with the help of “nothing,” Berdiaev turned to the doctrine of German mystics, especially that of Jacob Boehme, about the Nothing—the Ungrund, or the “abyss,” which is the origin of being of God himself. According

9 10 11

12

Renata A. Galtseva, “Nikolai Berdiav,” in To portraits of Russian thinkers by Galtseva and Irina Rodnianskaia, (K portretam russkikh myslitelei) (Petroglif; the Patriarch’s residence in the Church of St. Tatiana in msu, 2012), 219. Nikolai A. Berdiaev. Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Philosophic Autobiography (Samopoznanie. Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii) (Paris: ymca P, 1949), 364. Vladimir P. Vizgin, Commentary on G. Marcel’s Correspondence with N.А. Berdiaev in On Courage in Metaphysics (“Primechaniia k perepiske G. Marcela s N.A. Berdiaevym,” in O smelosti v metafizike by Marcel Gabriel), compiled, edited, and translated from French by Vladimir P. Vizgin (Nauka, 2013), 317. Nikolai A. Berdiaev, On the Destiny of Man: Collected Works (O naznachenii cheloveka), introd. by P.P. Gaidenko, commentary by R.K. Medvedeva (Respublika, 1993).

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to Boehme, in the foundation of the divine being lies an unconscious, irrational “nature”—the potentiality of God, preceding his actual being. Thus, a hymn to freedom appears in the works of Berdiaev: The philosophy of freedom begins with a free act before which there is not, nor can there be, existence, being. If we were to begin with being as the basis, and recognize this primacy of being over freedom, then everything, including freedom, is determined by being. But a determined freedom is not freedom at all. Another type of philosophy however is possible, which asserts the primacy of freedom, of the creative act over being.13 4.2 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin “There are phenomena in the history of culture,” points out Natalia Bonetskaia, that seem to be ill-suited for their time: they keep in the background, unclaimed, but the time comes, and they take possession of human minds. Such is the legacy of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975). The creative part of his life occurred during the Soviet period, but he was “discovered” and gained recognition only in the 1960s, when an evident disintegration of the previously seemingly unshakeable Soviet mentality began.14 For Europe among the series of philosophers’ “booms” that happened in the period from 1960 through the 1980s, Bakhtin’s works were astounding revelations. His works are studied as a special humanitarian discipline, and congresses are devoted to him in many countries. Considered a thinker of the third millennium, Bakhtin influenced the advent of post-modernist philosophy. Bonetskaia writes: It is transparently clear to me, why beginning with the 1970s it is Bakhtin who is preferred by Western intellectuals among Russian philosophers, not even Berdiaev, to say nothing of Florenskii. Bakhtin described the Russian today, but it was exactly the yesterday of cultural Europe and the United States. I have in mind Bakhtin’s model of society (a socium): its 13 Berdiaev, O naznachenii cheloveka, 9. 14 Nataliia K. Bonetskaia, Bakhtin through the Eyes of a Metaphysician (Bakhtin glazami metafizika) (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2016), 7.

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atom is a solitary, responsible-to-no-one-knows-whom “I,” taking part by virtue of an inescapable existential mysterious—need, in a deeply engaged dialogue with another “I,” an endless dialogue, theoretically incomplete.15 Western authors acknowledge Bakhtin as a thinker, who is on a par with Martin Buber. I have pursued a more profound difference in my paper, the second centennial paper devoted to the “Bakhtin-Buber” theme in Caryl Emerson’s The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin: “Of the two thinkers, Buber observes a more ‘traditional understanding of dialogue as emotional connections among people’ (with good reason does Bakhtin, in his essay on the chronotope, refer to Buber [next] to [the] Romantic Schelling and the phenomenologist Max Scheler).”16 In one series of Bakhtin’s original categories with concrete philosophical meanings—“outsideness,” “non-alibi in being,” “dialogue,” and “polyphony,”— the concept of “Other” plays a key role. The point is not to minimize the worldview meaning of other basic, not less significant words that help Bakhtin to express his world perception. It is quite clear that the aforementioned concepts are interrelated and express Bakhtin’s philosophy in their intertwinement. And still, what concept can serve as a source? What permits the development of a subsequent hierarchy of conceptual categories? It might seem easier to follow Bakhtin himself. His work written in the 1920s entitled “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” contains a cluster of key words: “event,” “eventfulness,” “action,” and “non-alibi in being.” These concepts, had they in their time come into the conceptual system of European thinking, could have had an exceptional influence on it. This is pointed out, in particular, by E. Iu. Soloviev: Such comparative analysis of М. Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and М.М. Bakhtin’s “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” is not my objective here. I will only remark that the author of “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” is much closer to methodological innovations of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics than the creator of “fundamental ontology,” to which it refers as its nearest precursor. And had “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” seen the light in the 1920s (and not in 1986, as was the case), that might

15 Bonetskaia, Bakhtin through the Eyes of a Metaphysician (Bakhtin glazami metafizika) (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2016), 5–6. 16 Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton up, 2000), 229.

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have probably resulted in the development of the whole hermeneutic movement in Western Europe as early as in the prewar period.17 As we can see, Bakhtin’s work, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, recreates a panorama of the worldview searches at the beginning of the last century. The author attempts outlining the ideological and moral situation of the time, to designate his place there, and to situate himself in relation to declared spiritual demarcations. It is this prerequisite that gives rise, in our view, to an illusion of a certain closeness of Bakhtin’s position to the philosophy of life grasping the eternal flow of self-evolution of being in diverse embodiments of the multifaceted will. Bakhtin himself points to all that is valuable for him, contained in this philosophical direction, and though he clearly enough surmounts the limits of the philosophy of life, an impression still might persist that there is no significant rupture with this tradition: the poetics of “live life,” permeated by cross“hailing,” only acquires a more comprehensive interpretation. Is the tradition interrupted, if a blind and undetermined will is replaced by a morally responsible act? In fact, Bakhtin’s philosophy, demonstrating a keen interest in archetypical manifestations of life in all its particularity and infinity, immediately distances itself from the philosophical direction that makes this life featureless, depersonalized. His man is not dissolved in the flow of life but, on the contrary, makes a start on philosophical reflection. That is why Bakhtin’s range of works can first of all be defined as philosophical anthropology. The world of hails is the world of human relationships. Bakhtin enters into a polemic with the philosophical tradition in its logicalepistemological form, that of classical German philosophy, and intuitivist form, found in existentialism, philosophy of life, or personalism. In philosophy, as it has been established for centuries, there are the notions of “man,” “I,” “object,” “world,” but to a certain extent there has been no notion of the “Other” in a more specific sense as a sovereign entity, as an irreplaceable and significantfor-me person. Even medieval intuition, embodied in the concept of “alter ego,” does not express the idea of an absolute equivalence between “I” and “You.” It is the conceptual interpretation of the notion of “other” that allows Bakhtin to analyze the whole European philosophical tradition from Plato and the idea of the “first philosophy” to new worldview trends of the twentieth 17

E. Iu Soloviev, The Fateful Historiosophy of M. Heidegger, in The Past Interprets Us (Sud’bicheskaia istoriosofiia M. Heideggera, in Proshloe tolkuet nas) by E. Iu Soloviev (Politizdat, 1991), http://scepsis.net/library/id_2661.html (29.11.2017).

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century. Addressing particular authors and new conceptual approaches, he continuously verifies the strength of his initial stance. Underlining the positive sides of specific philosophical directions, Bakhtin reveals the insufficiency of reflection and world perception in general, which is adjacent to traditional monologism. In Bakhtin’s later writings, structuralism is mentioned often enough. The philosopher’s reasoning is concrete and nontrivial, especially if compared with traditional criticism of structuralism as a movement that neglects the diachronic profile of reality. Pointing to the formalization and depersonalization that are characteristic of structuralism, Bakhtin shows that all relationships within this approach to worldview have a logical (in the broad sense of the word) character. In structuralism, there is only one subject—the subject of the researcher. Revealing the foundations of structuralist thinking, Bakhtin notes the polarity of his own position: “I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them.”18 Not less consistent and deep is Bakhtin’s mergence into another tradition that opposes panlogism, cultivating the intuitivist types of world perception (philosophy of life, existentialism, personalism), it is also far from dialogue and polyphonism, though causes for deviation here are absolutely different. Bakhtin names various thinkers—Аrthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, who represent, although to varying degrees, the philosophy of life. He also directly addresses existentialism and phenomenology. In Bakhtin’s legacy, we can find a great number of hidden polemics that are not always indicative of a specific opponent. But, following his thought, it would not be difficult to restore the contours of these delineations. The Other as a self-sufficient reality is alien to, for example, intuitive self-­ absorption of a personified will, as it is interpreted, say, by the philosophy of life. In all varieties of this direction “life” is perceived as an absolute, infinite, dynamic fundamental principle of the world. It is multi-faceted and changeable in its evolvement and engenders an innumerable diversity of the environment. It cannot be grasped with the help of emotions or reason. The only means for its comprehension is intuitive empathy. It might seem that the cult of intuitive empathy contains a grain of the dialogic world perception. For instance, in Schopenhauer, contrary to the earlier tradition, cognizing consciousness that previously expressed the specificity and integrity of man, goes to the background. The uniqueness of man is not in reason but in will. Penetration into the innermost depths of human subjectivity

18

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Aesthetics of Verbal Creation (Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva) (Iskusstvo, 1979), 424.

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presupposes the rudiments of participatory thinking. The philosophy of life could, to all appearances, have come to the idea of polyphonism. But advocating the multifacedness and omnipresence of will, this philosophy actually departed from the Other. Bakhtin shows that the philosophy of life in the last analysis shared the same illusion as theoretical reason had. Reading Bakhtin, it is difficult to get rid of the impression that he polemicizes directly with Schopenhauer. The Russian philosopher ponders over the problem: what will happen to an individual person, who deliberately isolates himself? Will he manage to embody the ideal of total solitude? Or despite what Schopenhauer has said, is it a coherent construction of one’s own individual world that inevitably engenders a dialogue? Bakhtin wrote that man would never find completeness in himself alone. No, he does not mean that every man depends on some other: it is not the formula of sociality. This idea is a discovery… It contains first of all a clue to human being as such. It is fragile, intricate, easily deformable. To preserve oneself, to perceive the interpellation of being, one should take in the excited voices of others. Human beings are fragile, but their perseverance depends on spiritual and mental responsiveness. To hear the voice! Remote, probably inaudible. But so needed by me personally, as a word of another equal consciousness. To enter the world of another human universe. To feel a stranger’s voice as a special view of the world and of himself, of another man’s being. But the point is not only that man will not find the whole fullness solely in himself. He in principle will not be able, contrary to Schopenhauer, remain with himself alone. Bakhtin points out that man does not become lonely. He concentrates on himself and directs the whole strength of his own mind on himself, but man experiences his loneliness as a burden, so he seeks communication with others; therefore, he is not self-sufficient. That is why Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology begins with the Other, and not with the “I.” One can understand the personal richness of an individual being only revealing in him or her the potential of this communicativeness. The philosophy of life, and later on existentialism and personalism, rejecting impersonal reason, proclaiming in man an entire self-sufficient world, irreducible to a theoretical one, manifestly opposes this subjectivity to the Heideggerian “Man,” to the hostile world of the “Other.” Certainly, the positions of Bakhtin and of existentialists have much in common. In particular, they agree that man cannot be regarded as a thing. But a difference in principle can be found in the essence of the very problem of the Other as approached by him and this philosophical tradition. This becomes clear by comparing the views of Bakhtin with those of JeanPaul Sartre. Both in their anthropology see various human images. An individual cannot avoid contact, touch with the “Other.” Sartre’s two modes of

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human existence are associated with “I” as a self-sufficient subject, and the third mode relating an individual to the other follows the pattern of a monologue. The “other-for-me” is purely Bakhtin’s; Sartre has no such concept. The French philosopher sees the essence of human reality in the specific character of human subjectivity, which in the last analysis he reduces to consciousness. But Sartre understands the problems of consciousness not as epistemological and related to knowledge. On the contrary, he interprets them as psychologically practical, in his terminology—existential. Freedom as arbitrariness, according to Sartre, underlies human subjectivity; it is identified with consciousness and human existence in general. Interpersonal relations, Sartre believed, are fundamentally conflictual. It is especially evident in his analysis of the third kind of human reality—“beingfor-others.” The subjectivity of an autonomous isolated self-consciousness, as Sartre contends, displays its object-ness as soon as an individual person appears in the sphere of another consciousness. For Another Self, a person, his sovereignty, uniqueness are only components of some abstraction symbolizing the world, the universe. An individual wants the “Other” to recognize the fact of his freedom. Therefore, the “fundamental project” of human existence consists in attaining the fullness of “being-in-­ itself,” not losing at the same time the free subjectivity of “being-for-itself.” This task, according to Sartre, is eventually unrealizable. As we can see, the position of the French philosopher is diametrically opposed to Bakhtin’s. Sartre sees man’s original deficiency exactly in the existence of the other. Man perceives that the regard of the “other” is acting within his own being as an objectification, materialization, hardening and alienation of his own possibilities. Bakhtin, on the contrary, sees the life-giving impulse of a self-constructing personality exactly in the “other.” Thus, the existentialists profess immersion in oneself, Bakhtin—in the “Other.” But is not Bakhtin’s purpose fraught with the destruction of subjectivity, with a touch of socio-centrism or, using Buber’s notion, “collectivism”? Where are the limits of “inclusion” in the “other”? Does not the resolution of egocentrism lead to the loss of oneself? Is it not after all easier, more logical to construct philosophical anthropology on what Bakhtin calls “I-for-myself”? In Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin particularly emphasizes this question. He recreates the whole architechtonics, which certainly presuppose one’s own developed subjectivity, the world of various social hails. Getting absorbed in another “individuality,” man does not for a moment lose himself completely, his only place outside the “other.” The “I” ceases to be unique, if it loses itself in the “other.” This is, according to Bakhtin, impoverishment. Philosophical anthropology cannot be created by affirming the status of the “I” without the “other.” Only due to my participation can the function of everyone be understood… Only from inside of my responsible

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action can I find a way into the unity of being. Bakhtin’s discovery is not in that he glorified communication. We can name other thinkers, say, Goethe or Buber, Jaspers or Husserl, who pondered over the participatory attitude. Bakhtin understood dialogue as universal communication, as a sovereign principle of not only culture but also of human existence. Bakhtin radically reviewed the problem of the “I-you” and “I–others” relations. Dialogue, in his view, is not just a means of acquiring truth, a mode of advantageous human existence. It turns out to be the only way of recognizing being, touching it. In dialogue, the position of each participant expands to beingness. This logical coherence of Bakhtin’s philosophy, which by its very structure cannot be oriented to revealing the ideal modes of human behavior, adds, we can suppose, a very broad socio-historical, socio-cultural background to his ­reflection. It is not only impressive excursions into Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance or Enlightenment. The world of culture he recreated directs us to various time periods, demonstrating particular turns of history, its fierce prophecies and life-constructing pathos. Russian hermeneutics naturally joins the general pathway of European hermeneutics. Bakhtin’s concept of the “Other” is adjacent to the Christian tradition. Retaining its specificity, the general conceptual content of this notion did not change throughout the creative evolution of the philosopher, but it deepened and became more and more diversified. Departing from different philosophical traditions, interpreting different epochs, the elemental force of speech practice, and the poetics of genres, this Russian philosopher attached a key and universal meaning to the notion of the “Other.” Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Aesthetics of Verbal Creation [Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva]. Iskusstvo, 1979. Berdiaev, Nikolai A. On the Destiny of Man: Collected Works [O naznachenii cheloveka]. Introd. by P.P. Gaidenko. Commentary by R.K. Medvedeva, Respublika, 1993. Berdiaev, Nikolai A. Self-Knowledge [Samopoznanie]. Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1990. Berdiaev, Nilolai A. Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Philosophical Autobiography [Samopoznanie. Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii ]. Paris: ymca P, 1949. Bonetskaia, Nataliia. Bakhtin through the Eyes of a Metaphysician (Bakhtin glazami metafizika). Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2016. Bonetskaia, Nataliia. The Spirit of the Silver Age. A Phenomenology of the Epoch [Dukh Serebrianogo veka. (Fenomenologiia epokhi)]. Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2017.

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Bychkov, Vasilii V. Byzantine Aesthetics. An Historical Perspective [Vizantiiskaia estetika. Istoricheskii rakurs]. Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2017. Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton up, 2000. Galtseva, Renata A. “Nikolai Berdiaev.” In To Portraits of Russian Thinkers [K portretam russkikh myslitelei ] by Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnianskaia. Petroglif/Patriarch’s Residence in the Church of St. Tatiana/Moscow State U, 2012. Gershenzon, Mikhail. Crisis of Modern Culture. In Selected Works. The Triple Image of Perfection [“Krizis sovremennoi kultury.” Izbrannoe. Troistvennyi obraz sovershenstva]. Center for Humanitarian Initiative, 2016. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil in Hobbes T. Works: in 2 Volumes. vol. 2. [“Leviafan, ili Materiia, forma i vlast’ gosudarstva tserkovnogo i grazhdanskogo.” In Gobbs T. Sochineniia v 2 t. Tom 2]. Mysl, 1991. Hume, David. Treatise on Human Nature… In Hume D. Works: in 2 Volumes, vol.1 [“Traktat o chelovecheskoi prirode…,” IUm, D.Sochineniia v 2 t. Tom 1] . Mysl, 1996. Radishchev, Aleksandr N. On Man, His Mortality and Immortality Man. In Thinkers of the Past and Present about His Life, Death and Immortality. Ancient world—­ Enlightenment [“O cheloveke, o ego smertnosti i bessmertii.” In Chelovek. Mysliteli proshlogo i nastoiashchego o ego zhizni, smerti i bessmertii. Drevnii mir—epokha Prosveshcheniia]. Politizdat, 1991. Soloviev, E. Iu. The Fateful Historiosophy of M. Heidegger. In The Past Interprets Us [“Sud’bicheskaia istoriosofiia M. Heideggera.” In Proshloe tolkuet nas]. Politizdat, 1991. url: http://scepsis.net/library/id_2661.html (29.11.2017). Tillich, Paul. Selected Works. Theology of Culture [Izbrannoe. Teologiia kultury]. Editor in chief and afterward by S.V. Liezov, Iurist, 1995. Vizgin, Vladimir P. Commentary on G. Marcel’s Correspondence with N.A. Berdiaev In On Courage in Metaphysics [“Primechaniia k perepiske G. Marcela s N.A. Berdiaevym.” In O smelosti v metafizike by Marcel Gabriel]. Comp. ed. and trans. from French by Vladimir P. Vizin, Nauka, 2013.

Sergey Horujy Born in 1941, Sergey Horujy is a scholar in Eastern Orthodox spirituality and culture, an expert in religious philosophy and philosophical anthropology as well as a theoretical physicist, a mathematician, a specialist in James Joyce’s work, and the translator of Joyce’s novel Ulysses into Russian. A graduate of the Department of Physics of Moscow State University, Horujy earned a PhD (Candidate of Science) degree and Doctor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1967 and 1976. Currently he is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the director of the Institute of Synergic Anthropology, and Honorary Professor of unesco as the Chair of Comparative Studies of Spiritual Traditions. While developing rigorous methods of relativistic quantum theory as a theoretical physicist and mathematician, Horujy simultaneously began working in the area of philosophy and religious thought. His first publication in this discipline came out in 1967. This was an entry in the fourth of the five-volume set of the Philosophical Encyclopedia (Filosofskaia entsiklopediia), edited by the Academician Fyodor V. Konstantinov. Since then he has continued to work in this area; however, with the exception of a few short articles, he was unable to publish much of his work during the Communist years. His texts represented the Christian worldview, which was unacceptable to the atheist regime. He rejected the official Soviet line. Maintaining that under totalitarianism, philosophy was not a field of creative work, he considered it part of the dominating repressive mechanism that perverted the true nature of philosophy. Horujy’s research, though influenced primarily by Martin Heidegger and other classics of European metaphysics, always focused on Christian thought; his principal interests lay initially in Western mysticism and Russian religious philosophy. Having a critical attitude toward the general level and discourse of Russian philosophy, Horujy believes, nevertheless, that Eastern Christianity possesses its own authentic type of spirituality and worldview and that analysis of this type is an important philosophical issue. Until the mid-1970s, he tried to disclose the philosophical potential of the Eastern Christian tradition, by studying the philosophical process in Russia and the metaphysics of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance, particularly of Pavel A. Florenskii and Lev P. Karsavin. Then a new stage of his work was triggered by his study of the “theology of energies” developed by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. Late Byzantine theology helped him a lot to outline the main principles of

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Eastern Orthodox discourse and to understand that its core, its specific experiential and energetic nature, is more adequately presented not in Russian religious philosophy, but in the ancient Eastern Orthodox mystical and ascetic tradition, known as “hesychasm.” The thorough study of hesychasm in all its aspects became the central subject of Horujy’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. Hesychast practice is an anthropological strategy used by people to transform the set of all their somatic, psychological and intellectual energies. The study of this practice in Horujy’s works has taken the form of an interdisciplinary program that is based on philosophical and hermeneutical analysis and also includes theological, psychological and linguistic problems. Hesychast experience suggests that philosophy might be developed as a “discourse of energy,” in which energy or “being-action” is the generating principle of the whole conceptual system. Adequate treatment of this experience turns out to be impossible on the basis of the usual Aristotelian notion of energy; it demands a different notion, characterized by a different, less rigid connection between energy and essence: under certain conditions, energy may be independent of essence, “de-essentialized.” Comparative analysis of the full range of spiritual practices has revealed the universal nature of hesychast experience as a general anthropological paradigm or strategy called the “paradigm of spiritual practice.” In the next stage, it describes one kind of the “extreme phenomena” of human experience, in which the fundamental predicates of the human mode of being start to change. This logic leads one to anthropological discourse centered on these “extreme phenomena” or “extreme anthropological manifestations.” The basic concept in this discourse is the full set of extreme anthropological manifestations, called the “Anthropological Border.” The theory developed along these lines has been given the name “synergic anthropology,” from the Byzantine theological notion of “synergy,” which means harmony and collaboration of human and Divine energy. Detailed analysis of the Anthropological Border has shown that it consists of three parts or topics: spiritual practices; patterns of the unconscious, such as neuroses, phobias, psychoses and so on, studied in psychoanalysis; and virtual practices. Various combinations of these three principal kinds of extreme anthropological manifestations are possible too. This description of the Anthropological Border is a starting point for a new anthropological model that takes into account both ancient and modern forms of human experience. It develops a non-Cartesian and non-Aristotelian vision of man, constituted in his extreme manifestations, by unlocking or opening himself to contact and communication with his Other. Such anthropological unlocking is shown to be a universal paradigm of the human constitution so that

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human beings can be defined in terms of their being in certain ways unlocked in relation to the Anthropological Border. In 2005, Horujy founded the Institute of Synergic Anthropology (isa), where concentrated work in synergic anthropology (sga) is now actively elaborating its implications. He has presented sga in books and articles and lectured in many academic centres around the world, including universities in Beijing, Belgrade, Chicago, Florence, Hong-Kong, and San Paulo. Many scholars in Russia and other countries have studied sga, and dissertations devoted to it have been defended in Italy, China, Poland, and Russia. The library of texts on sga and information on the current activity in this field is available on the isa website: www.synergia-isa.ru.

Synergic Anthropology: Foundations, Goals, Results Sergey Horujy 1

Philosophical Localization

Historically, the conceptual configuration of synergic anthropology (sga) is not very simple; therefore, its place in present-day humanistic knowledge must be presented first. On the most general level, sga develops a certain conception of the human being. This means on the one hand that it belongs to “anthropology,” but on the other hand that it does not belong to any existing types of anthropology: not to concrete schools like structural or cultural anthropology nor to philosophical anthropology. Its program implies advancing to a new arrangement of the entire complex of humanistic knowledge endowed with a new configuration of disciplinary discourses, new methodology and epistemology. In this advancement the relationship with philosophy is of special importance since problems of general epistemology as well as the organization and methodology of humanistic knowledge belong indisputably to philosophy. This relationship will be shaped gradually in the course of the creation of the project, but it is worth pointing out its basic principles in advance. The philosophical positions of sga represent a specific coincidentia oppositorum that combines two opposing directions or vectors. One of its vectors corresponds to the leading trend of modern philosophizing: the deterritorialization of philosophy. Basically this means that fundamental issues of philosophizing over the notorious “eternal questions” about God and being, about man and world in their relation to God and being, on the nature of the existent as such, and so on looks as if pushed aside or even rejected flatly, but in reality these questions are thematized by some implicit ways and means. As Alain Badiou puts it, various roundabout strategies are invented and the work takes place on the territory of other, adjoining disciplines and discourses; but the results of this work lead one gradually to some new comprehension of properly philosophical matters and to a new configuration and marking of philosophical territory. It is not difficult to discover such roundabout strategies used by the majority of leading modern thinkers, and their popularity has weighty reasons, the main ones being leaving classical metaphysics, the exhaustion of resources and the rejection of the foundations of the European philosophical tradition.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004432543_021

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The crisis of the classical tradition is the most important initial factor impacting the situation of philosophy today. Besides the trend of the deterritorialization, this crisis has given rise to another tendency kindred to that trend: the tendency toward deontologization. Friedrich Nietzsche has expressed it in a brilliant form: the persistent and normative dominance of principles of God, being, the transcension and the transcendent in classical discourse after all unavoidably generated doubts and skepticism and then the repulsive impulse and active protest. The pendulum swayed in the opposite direction, and throughout the twentieth century philosophy went from the steadfast superseding of the discourse of the transcendent and the shift to the prevalence of the immanent perspective of philosophizing, to ignoring or openly rejecting the ontological difference—the difference between being and present being, the existent. I call this tendency or trend deontologization, with the reservation regarding the conditional character of this term in so far as refusing discourse of the transcendent generally speaking does not mean the same as refusing ontology per se, but only the transition to some other interpretation of ontology. The deterritorialization and the deontologization share not only common roots but also many common features, and they are closely connected and intertwined. On the one hand, the work on the territory of adjoining discourses— if only they are not purely religious discourses, which are usually not in the orbit of the deterritorialization—easily predisposes one to the immanent perspective, to positivism, in its broad sense as a natural philosophy of any positive science. On the other hand, immanentist and deontologized philosophizing departs almost inevitably for the territory of some adjoining discourses, which the experiences of analytic philosophy and poststructuralist philosophy clearly demonstrated—the most striking example of this being perhaps Gilles Deleuze. Thus, deterritorialization and deontologization are mutually connected. Predisposing mutually to each other, they represent jointly the key feature of modern philosophizing so that one can consider them as two different aspects of the united leading trend of modern thought. As for sga, it takes this trend into account and develops its own version of it. However, a different response emphasized by Martin Heidegger to the crisis of modern philosophy is possible. He called it “the other beginning.” Heidegger’s thought is thoroughly permeated by his firmest conviction in the indissoluble link between man and being. Being is considered as a principle which is actually different from present being, the existent: the ontological difference is the unshakeable core of Heidegger’s philosophy. What is important is that this difference is conceived in accordance, not with the usual model of two distanced “ontological horizons,” but with a new ontological paradigm of

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the “fold” (Zwiefalt), a dynamical formation that is actualized when the existent steps out into the clearing (Lichtung) of being. According to Heidegger, the experience of man’s tie with being was acquired initially in Greek antiquity, an exceptional epoch when being was directly open to man. This tie was supported with varying but always lesser success later when phenomena like the forgetting of being and the concealment of being were prevalent. However, under no circumstances could the tie be lost completely because it shapes the constitution of human beings. Logically or “ontologically,” deontologization is a strategy certainly unfit for philosophizing because it is inadequate for man’s status and situation. If we see the forgetting of being deepening and the concealment of being thickening, we should not interpret this as humans’ having chosen some alternative ways of existence and strategies of self-realization in which man does not actualize his tie with being and considers as empty fictions this tie and the notion of being as different from the existent. Nevertheless, these phenomena mean growing risks for human existence, the loss of ways for authentic self-realization by humans, and danger for the actualization of man’s constitution. Basically, there is only one way to overcome the risk and danger: the other beginning, which in this context can be called reontologization or ontological reloading. It is essentially the re-acquisition of the access to that openness of being which was accessible to man in its first, Greek beginning, which remains forever the ineluctable model. Surely, Heidegger does not detail the other beginning in which the stepping-out of man into the clearing of being is actualized again, but still it is characterized in many aspects; for example, its relation to technological progress and the ecological situation is elucidated. One can agree that the Heideggerian conception of the other beginning provides the sufficient starting point or foundation for the modern strategy of reontologization, which is an alternative to the dominating trends in philosophy of deterritorialization and deontologization. One unconditional supporter of this conception was Vladimir Bibikhin, the most important Russian philosopher at the end of the twentieth century. Its destiny is similar to some extent to that of Neoplatonism: it did not generate some steady tradition or school reproducing itself, but many of its elements are actively used and are of considerable influence. Reontologization is the second of the two leading vectors of sga. In what follows we show that its key paradigm, the paradigm of synergy, can be interpreted as the ontological unlocking of man and also as a certain representation of the ontological difference conceived according to Heidegger, as the fold shaped by being and the existent in their dynamical and energetic relationship. This means that in developing the analytics of synergy, SGA is proceeding in line with reontologization. Thus, it combines two opposite philosophical

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positions made possible because sga’s generating principle, anthropological unlocking, is extremely general. 2

“The Smallest Rescued Bit”

Having localized synergic anthropology in a modern philosophical context, let us proceed to its schematic description. Its “generating principle,” the aforementioned principle or paradigm of the anthropological unlocking, was not postulated a priori but obtained as the result of a detailed study of anthropological experience. The starting line for this study, as discussed, was the end of the classical philosophical tradition. This fact implied the end of the classical anthropology of Aristotle-Descartes-Kant and all of its framework based on the three fundamental concepts: subject, essence, substance. In this situation anthropological reflection could not rely on its old discourse and conceptual fund anymore; actually, the only strategy open for it is the one expressed by the famous motto by Edmund Husserl: Zu den Sachen selbst! “To turn to things as they are” means directly addressing reality, experiential reality, the world of experience. Evidently, in our case the motto dictates our addressing anthropological experience. The next question is: how? Addressing the mind to experience means describing experience, but there are many different kinds of description. First of all, plain empirical description is possible: this amounts to simply registering the contents of experience. Clearly, however, this is not adequate to the task of understanding anthropological reality, nor does it correspond to Husserl’s motto, which in no way means plain empiricism. Phenomenological description follows a different logic, one that is directed exactly to comprehension. Such logic corresponds to our plans, and we are going to use it. First of all, this logic dictates initially restricting the field of the description. Some kind or block of experience is chosen which allows for interpretation or, in other words, is epistemologically transparent: a certain “pure experience” is chosen or looked for in the totality of all experience under study. With respect to this totality, the “pure experience” is nothing but the starting base or the “smallest rescued bit,” to use Husserl’s expression: for comprehension, the description must start with this bit and then proceed to other fields of experience aiming eventually to embrace the totality. The choice of the starting base is an important act since it determines, to some extent, the methodology and epistemology of the developed conception. This choice must meet one more condition in addition to that of “epistemological transparency.” The advancement of the description to all the totality of anthropological experience is not

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possible from any arbitrary starting base. This base may turn out to be too narrow or too specialized; the possibility of far-going advancement demands that it be sufficiently representative and multidimensional. As a result, a certain strategy takes shape: the first step of anthropological reflection must represent the choice of the starting block of anthropological experience, and this choice must meet two conditions, epistemological transparency and anthropological representativeness. They are of mutually opposite character: the first condition which demands the purity of experience makes one restrict the base, whereas the second one demanding that anthropological reality be sufficiently represented makes one enlarge the base. Moreover, it is impossible in the beginning of the study to formulate these conditions concretely and precisely, and it is impossible to find out in advance whether some concrete block of experience meets the conditions. This all means that the strategy of the “smallest rescued bit” is based on intuition to a considerable extent and includes immanent intellectual risks. History provides striking examples of this. The formula “smallest rescued bit” emerges in Husserl’s description of Descartes’ cognitive act in which the statement cogito ergo sum is deduced. Here the strategy is realized brilliantly: the starting base is extremely small; its sufficient representativeness for all sphere of cognitive experience is evident in no way; but advancing from this base, Descartes confidently develops an integral cognitive paradigm that becomes the foundation of a new European epistemology. Another successful example is provided by Husserl himself. He also follows the strategy of the smallest rescued bit, and in his global phenomenological project the experience of arithmetical and geometrical thinking is used as the starting base of pure experience. But these examples are distant from our situation. In them the totality of experience in consideration is not the totality of anthropological experience, and anthropological experience is not thematized as a special kind of experience. For this reason the principle of anthropological representativeness is absent in them while the principle of epistemological transparency is treated in Husserl’s case partially and in Descartes’ case entirely in the prism of the classical metaphysics that Descartes was creating. However, one can also find some recent examples close to us. The conception of practices of the Self developed by Michel Foucault in his last period, from 1980 to 1984, represents a large-scale project of nonclassical anthropology, which in our point of view also follows the strategy of the smallest rescued bit. The subject field of Foucault’s conception is the totality of anthropological experience, and Foucault singles out a certain basic kind of this experience: anthropological practices of the Self involving all levels of the organization of the human being in which man performs self-transformation for some predetermined goal. But

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this is a very large class of practices, whose starting base of “pure experience” is assigned to a certain subclass, namely, the practices of the Self cultivated in late Greco-Roman antiquity, primarily in late Stoicism. This unfinished project, which selects practices of the Roman Stoics as the “rescued bit” and then advances from anthropological paradigms found in these practices to a general conception of man, is logically and methodologically close to sga. Some properties of the emerging image of man are also close to it. Mention should also be made of structural anthropology, which recently was the dominating anthropological school. Claude Lévi-Strauss carried out careful field studies of certain areas of anthropological experience aiming to discover predominantly binary oppositions and other universal structures that govern the work of consciousness and social life. He selected the experience of primitive tribes and archaic consciousness for his area of study, whose motifs had much in common with the phenomenological strategy. Although primitive experience is not qualified as “pure experience,” it is much more “poor” and “simple” than the “complex” experience of modern consciousness and society; but it can be reduced to elementary structures, and thus meets the condition of epistemological transparency. Thus, methodological principles of structural anthropology are also akin to those of the strategy of the rescued bit. But this strategy includes one more condition, that of anthropological representativeness. The problem this poses is that some crucially important levels and structures of consciousness—not to be described here—have not yet taken shape in the experience of primitive mentality. The principal missing element is the absence of the separation, distancing and distinguishing between the experience of the transcendent and the unconscious. In Heidegger’s terms, it is the absence of the experience of the “stepping-out into the clearing of being”; in terms of sga, it is the absence of the separation between the ontological and ontic modes of the unlocking of the human being. If these two basic modes of constitutive anthropological experience are merged together, then this experience cannot be full-dimensional anthropological experience, and if it is used as the starting base, such a base is unfit for the phenomenological description of the totality of anthropological experience. This look at structural anthropology helps one understand the choice of the starting base made in sga. We single out one noteworthy anthropological phenomenon in which the experience of the transcendent and the unconscious are precisely separated; moreover, special efforts are being devoted to achieving the purity of the experience, that is, the transparency of its methodological formation and reflection. This is the phenomenon of spiritual practices created by world religions. The set of them is very small, and each of them elaborated its canon, the organon of its experience—in the authentic Aristotelian

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sense—creating it during several centuries. Analyzing them we conclude that the spiritual practices of world religions are nothing but schools of pure anthropological experience. This conclusion is of importance for anthropology. It points out a new line for anthropological studies which should be compared to structural anthropology: we see that it is not only the experience of primitive societies but also the experience of spiritual practice that can serve as the starting base for a full-scale anthropological conception. I think that more and more studies devoted, not to some narrow and special questions, but to general and principal problems of anthropology will be made along this line. As for sga, here the starting experiential base is provided by the experience of one particular spiritual practice, Eastern-Christian hesychasm. The epistemological transparency is present here because the special distinction of hesychast practice is the presence of a rigorous method, well-developed articulation and scrupulous reflection of the experience. The presence of anthropological representativeness is not evident in advance, however. One argument in favor of it is that spiritual practice is ontological and holistic: it includes the experience of the transcendent as well as the experience of all levels of the organization of the human being. But the real accomplishment of this condition can be established only a posteriori in the course of the realization of the project. 3

Hesychasm in the Prism of Anthropological Reflection

Synergic anthropology presents the complete reconstruction of hesychast anthropology as shown in my book, Toward a Phenomenology of Ascesis (K fenomenologii askezy [Izdatel’stvo Gumanitarnoi Literatury, 1998]). Continuing the parallels with structural anthropology, these studies of Hesychast anthropology are correlative methodologically to the Amazonian field studies of Lévi-Strauss: in both a certain “rescued bit” is processed. Here starting with the exposition of the subject, we present only principal points of this reconstruction. Hesychasm is the ascetical and mystical practice of Eastern Christianity that emerged in the earliest period of Christian monasticism, in the fourth century, as the practice of the Desert fathers of Coptic Egypt and Palestine. By the fourteenth century, over a thousand years it achieved its complete and mature form in Byzantium. Already in the Middle Ages it spread over all Orthodox countries, and then in spite of crises and breaks, it has continued its activity up to the present. As a historical and anthropological phenomenon, hesychasm and every other spiritual practice represents the dyad combining

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individual practice and collective tradition—the community which works out, preserves and transmits the refined art of the practice, the canon of the exact reproduction of its experience. This combination of the individual and collective dimensions has its analogy in biological systems, in populations of living organisms. Each specimen in the population conducts its individual existence in pursuit of a definite goal, also quite individual: the realization of the genetic program in each of its cells. However, in order to achieve this goal, the specimen must be in the environment of the population. Integration into this environment, into the community of specimens, is prerequisite for the successful existence of any single specimen; the individual specimen and the community are two inseparable elements of the phenomenon of population. In addition, according to the so-called biogenetic law, the development of a specimen, the ontogenesis, and the development of all the population, the philogenesis, are structurally similar in that they repeat each other, going through the same principal stages. We notice that the ascetical community or (what is the same) spiritual tradition also possesses these structural features of populations. Each adept of the practice, the hesychast, passes his personal way of practice transforming himself to a certain higher state, but the passing of the way is possible only on the basis of the tradition, in the environment of the ascetical community. What is more, it turns out that a certain analogue of the biogenetic law holds. The way of the practice—sui generis hesychast ontogenesis—has the structure of a ladder which ascends from the initial event, the entry to the way of practice, the Spiritual Gate, to the final step of the way in which all man’s energies achieve the ontological transcension called the deification or theosis, but the fullness of the deification remains unachievable in empiric existence. All this Way, from the Spiritual Gate to the theosis, is structured into three big parts or blocks. In the first block ascetical efforts are still directed predominantly to a secular way of life which the adept wants to reject. The principal elements of this block are conversion, repentance and the struggle with passions. The conversion and repentance should secure the decisive breaking off of all ties with the old secular mode of man’s consciousness and existence. To this end hesychasm cultivates specific practices of repentance which use extreme psychological means and states: sharp self-condemnation, self-torture, compunction and other negative emotions, weeping and tears, sometimes hard physical ordeals… All these means perform the “synergetic” function of effecting imbalance in the consciousness of hesychasts; as a result, all habitually balanced regimes are removed from their consciousness, and they become capable of radically rearranging and changing the structure and dynamics of the activities of their consciousness. As for struggle with passions or an “invisible battle,” this

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way should overcome the steadiest features of the secular mode of consciousness: stable cyclic configurations of its energies in which it is concentrated entirely on some worldly emotion or goal and hence cannot advance to the goal of the practice. Hesychasm analyzes and classifies the passions and elaborates many sophisticated techniques for their eradication. On these steps of the Hesychast Ladder, the practice has something in common with antique practices, above all, those of Stoicism, as well as with modern psychology and psychotherapy, but at the same time it is considerably different from them. After having overcome their passions, hesychasts enter the central part of the practice, where the vector of their efforts changes its direction “from below to above”: from concentration on a worldly way of life to the task of the encounter with another mode of being. Here the adepts following this practice must realize actual advancement in the ontological dimension, which means that ascension by its steps must have some actual ontological contents; and it is evident that all usual anthropological practices do not have such properties. For this reason, any spiritual practice includes the key element, the creation of a so-called “ontological mover,” that is the anthropological mechanism that makes possible the change of man’s ontological situation, his relationship with a different horizon of being. In hesychast practice, ascent to this horizon is communion with God, the Divine Personal Being. The main mode is prayer. Thus, the ontological mover created in this practice represents the union of two activities, prayer and attention. In this union, attention performs an auxiliary function: in hesychast terms, it is the guard of the prayer that is removing all obstacles to the prayer and all intrusions into its process. Due to this guard, the prayer can become incessant prayer that steadily gets stronger and deeper. It embraces the human being entirely and concentrates enormous energy directed exclusively to the Person of God, that is to the encounter, communion and union with Christ. At the peak of this intense aspiration to God in which man maximally opens or unlocks himself toward God, his communion with God in prayer becomes the actual encounter of human and divine energies. (In nonconfessional discourse one can say that man registers the action in him of some energies whose source is beyond not only his physical being but also, according to certain criteria, his horizon of being.) Directing all the totality of his energies to Christ man achieves their encounter, coordination and collaboration with His energies. This is the central event of spiritual practice called synergy in hesychasm. The achievement of synergy is the first and most important result of the creation of the ontological mover. This is a cardinal landmark in the way of the practice, and after it the practice enters its higher and last block. This block has the crucial distinction that its steps are performed predominantly not by human energies but by other energies: those, with which the

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adept reached the encounter and collaboration in synergy: the adept’s consciousness and all his being have been engaged; nevertheless, the adept perceives that these energies do not belong to him but to an outside source, which is “beyond-there” in the strongest, ontological sense. For this reason, in man’s perception these higher steps of his self-transformation are taken, to an everlarger extent, apart from his efforts, “on their own,” spontaneously. Here new forms of prayer, new abilities and possibilities of man emerge. The human being becomes spontaneously more and more richly structured, articulated and differentiated; in the discourse of the theory of systems, this corresponds to dynamics of self-organization. These dynamics are realized not by human energies but by ontologically different energies of the “source-beyond-there,” and due to this it achieves results that are not accessible to human energies: the actual ontological change, the change of fundamental predicates of man’s mode of being. In other words, due to synergy at higher steps of the practice, fundamental changes of the human being begin which represent the actual approach to the final goal, the deification. There is a vast body of evidence showing that such changes begin in the sphere of perceptions: new perceptive abilities emerge which are called “intellectual senses” in hesychasm. They are actual manifestations of a new ontological predicate, the unlockedness of the human being toward a different horizon of being. But the fullness of the ontological transcension, the deification as such, is not realizable in man’s empiric existence. This is the structure of the Way of hesychast practice in its principal stages. As said above, this personal way of a hesychast is structurally correlative to the “philogenesis” or the historical way of all hesychast tradition. The formation of this tradition continued au vol d’oiseau for about a thousand straight years, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. This process also splits up into three big stages, whose principal tasks are directly connected with the three blocks of hesychast practice. At the stage of the early hesychasm, that is, the ascesis of the Desert fathers from the fourth to the sixth centures, the tradition is shaped as a community that breaks its ties with the society and states its opposition to it. As a consequence, it concentrates on problems of the rejection of the worldly way of life and overcoming passions and other patterns of consciousness inherent in this life: these tasks correspond exactly to the initial block of the practice. Then comes the stage of so-called Sinaite Hesychasm from the seventh to the tenth centuries, when the main centers of the tradition were the monastery of St. Catherine on the Sinai and other monasteries in the Sinai area. At this stage hesychast practice is shaped and apprehended as an integral spiritual process, and its first systematic description appears: the famous “Ladder of Paradise” by St. John the Sinaite. The experience of ascension to

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deification is elaborated and reflected upon, and the crucial role of joining together prayer and attention is discovered. Thus the discovery of the ontological mover takes place, the task of the central block of the practice. Finally, the late-Byzantine hesychasm of the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries with the hesychast disputes and theology of divine energies by St. Gregory Palamas represents the concluding stage of the formation of the tradition. Here the higher steps of the practice are put to the forefront. The experience of these steps was called the contemplation of the Light of Tabor by the hesychasts, and it represented basically the experience of the formation of the intellectual senses that is the actual approaches to the ontological transcension of the human being. Thus we establish the structural similarity and coincidence in the contents of the historical stages of the development of hesychasm and stages through which the individual practice of every hesychast goes. This means that the spiritual tradition historically represents an analogue of the population of living organisms and is sui generis spiritual organism or a meta-organic system. Proceeding from the exposition to the analysis, we must identify principal features of the hesychast vision of man which are valuable for nonclassical anthropology. Evidently, the main feature is that the “hesychast man” shapes his constitution, his personality and identity in hesychast practice, which realizes the actual ontological transformation of the human being. The transformation is performed by divine energies while man’s mission is to open or unlock himself toward these energies and achieve synergy with them. Synergy is the joint economy of two energies of different source and nature, and it is important that in our anthropological perspective it must be conceived not in the Platonic ontological paradigm of two separated horizons or modes of being but in the Heideggerian paradigm of dynamical doubling or “fold.” In this synergy-­as-fold a person shapes his constitution, unlocking himself toward a different mode of being or, more correctly, toward being as such, that manifests itself as one of energies in the fold, thus realizing his ontological unlocking. As distinct from classical anthropology, in which man shapes his constitution actualizing his universal essence, here we have another principle of constitution which does not rely upon the essence of man and does not assume its existence at all. Thus, we conclude that it is the main anthropological principle present in hesychast practice: the principle or paradigm of the constitution of the human being in the ontological unlocking. In the paradigm of the unlocking we discover the way to nonclassical anthropology. Besides the generative principle we also need the discourse for how to signify anthropological reality and to produce anthropological concepts. Classical anthropology was heuristically perfect in this respect: the same fundamental concept of essence determined both the constitution of man and

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anthropological discourse, which was also essentialist, that is, based on the logics of essences. But hesychast anthropology can also be provided with its own discourse which is not essentialist and is based on the unlocking of man. Key notions of hesychasm, synergy and theosis, are both of energetic nature: synergy is the encounter and collaboration of human and divine energies, while theosis is the complete union of these energies. It means that hesychast practice as the ascension to synergy and theosis has nothing but human energies as its subject. The work of the hesychast is the successive transformation by him of all the totality of his energies, and each step of the practice can be considered as a certain type or configuration of this totality. Thus, the hesychast discourse on man is discourse on his energies which does not deal with abstract essentialist categories. It could be said that hesychast anthropology develops in the discourse of energy, which is radically different from the discourse of essence; but some proviso is needed here. The problem is that there is no correct notion of “human energy.” This anthropological notion cannot be conceived as a simple derivative or particular case of the metaphysical and ontological category of energy presented by Aristotle and Neoplatonic philsophers; equally, neither does it correspond to the notion of energy in physics. In ascetics human energies are not connected with metaphysics. Instead, they are used as a large working concept of practical anthropology that signifies any actions or manifestations of man both in his outer and inner reality, and these manifestations may not achieve their expression in acts and deeds, but may remain on the level of “sprouts of acts,” “energies of consciousness,” thoughts (logismoi), urgings, or inner movements. For the sake of the demarcation with the metaphysical category I use the term “anthropological manifestations.” Thus, one can say that hesychast anthropology develops the discourse of anthropological manifestations which is a variety of the discourse of energy and represents the alternative to essentialist discourse. One more feature of hesychast experience should be noted. We saw in synergy a certain unlocking of the human being, but this conclusion must be made more precise. The unlocking is one of the most general modalities of the human being. We all practice it permanently in various forms; for instance, in any perceptive act man unlocks himself toward sensual reality. But the unlocking in synergy is constitutive: the constitution of man as such, structures of his personality and identity are formed by it. This property is closely connected with the fact that the unlocking is here realized in extreme experience, in which man reaches the borders of the horizon of his consciousness and existence meeting something (or Somebody, as in Christian experience) that does not belong to this horizon, and hence is the Other to man. The unlocking in synergy is the unlocking toward a different mode of being and, therefore, is

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obviously extreme experience. Thus hesychast practice is one of the forms of extreme anthropological experience, and the paradigm of the human constitution inherent in this practice is the constitution in extreme anthropological manifestations realizing the ontological unlocking. The connection of man’s constitution with extreme experience today is one of the leading threads in philosophy, one that is attempting to understand recent anthropological practices. For this reason the extreme character of hesychast experience is important for our task of further advancement from the “rescued bit” of hesychasm. 4

Anthropological Unlocking as Universal Paradigm of the Human Constitution

This description of hesychast experience ascertains its epistemological transparency. Next, we test its anthropological representativeness: is it possible to advance from this “rescued bit” to the comprehension of other kinds of anthropological experience and eventually all its totality? First of all, hesychast anthropology opens the way to general anthropology of spiritual practices. Its foundations are presented in my texts. These ancient practices representing sui generis schools of pure anthropological experience are of importance for the comprehension of the phenomenon of man. The reconstruction of their anthropology is a complicated task because they belong to Eastern culture, where mentality and spirituality developed specific discourses radically different conceptually from European thinking. Nevertheless, advancing from the hesychast starting base we can clearly see their basic principles and structures. Each of the spiritual practices possesses some universal structural elements common to all of them, and these elements include the basic paradigm that we found in hesychasm, the paradigm of man’s constitution in the ontological unlocking, although ontology is conceived in Eastern mentality in a radically different way. As a consequence, the nonclassical “anthropology of the unlocking” based on this paradigm can serve as the basis of the phenomenological description of all spiritual practices. Then we proceed to the experience of modern man. We said already that this experience makes us reject classical anthropology; in other words, it is nonclassical experience — the important point that it has in common with ancient spiritual practices! We also see that man described by classical anthropology is not man as such, in the totality of his experience, but only a particular anthropological formation which corresponds to some restricted part in the totality of anthropological experience located between old nonclassical formations and recent formations which are also nonclassical. Old ­pre-classical

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formations, as was shown, can be described on the basis of the paradigm of anthropological unlocking; and the logics of the advancement from the hesychast starting base dictates the working hypothesis: Might modern postclassical anthropological formations also correspond to this paradigm? Might the constitution of postclassical man also be shaped in his unlocking of self, though possibly this might no longer be the same ontological unlocking? Anthropological practices dominating in the postclassical period confirm this hypothesis. On the one hand, these practices are very far from the spiritual practices and goals of ontological unlocking; on the other hand, in rejecting ontological experience, they do not reject extreme experience intensely cultivating many forms that are different from those of ontological unlocking. Consequently, the anthropology of postclassical man is also an anthropology of the unlocking; it describes the shaping of man’s constitution in practices of the non-ontological unlocking. The developing crisis of classical metaphysics and anthropology increased in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when what later came to be called the experience of madness in a generalized sense became more and more important for Western man. As a result of complex studies combining clinical practice, theoretical intuitions and the making of concepts, Freud identified the nature of this experience on the basis of the unconscious, a concept that was his fundamental contribution to both psychology and anthropology. As it often happens with discoverers, Freud absolutized his concept, convinced that it represented the only and all-embracing principle of the constitution of consciousness and the human being; but in these global claims of Freud and later Lacan, psychoanalysis slipped from science into ideology. In our context, the experience of man’s consciousness and behavior under the aegis of the unconscious can be interpreted as a new kind of the unlocking: indeed, in order to act under the aegis of the unconscious man must open or unlock himself toward its influence. The unconscious does not constitute any ontological horizon of its own; hence the unlocking towards it is not ontological but “ontic,” it is the unlocking in the existent. However, at the same time the unconscious is by definition beyond the horizon of consciousness; hence the unlocking toward it is extreme experience. And last but not least, patterns of consciousness and behavior induced from the unconscious form the constitution of the human being. This means that the unconscious determines a certain paradigm of the human constitution: the constitution in the ontic unlocking. Besides the unlocking toward the unconscious, the ontic unlocking has other representations. Heidegger shows that the Nietzschean Superman, like the Freudian unconscious, is also not different ontologically from present being. Hence it follows that the ascension to the Superman, which is the core

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of ­Nietzsche’s anthropology, can be considered as the ontic unlocking. This means that the domain, or topic of the ontic extreme experience includes at least two sub-domains occupied by the “Freudian Human” and the “Nietzschean Human.” As for the Ontic Topic as a whole, sga describes it as based on the concept of the “ontic gap,” which in a sense is the opposite of Heidegger’s concept of the ontological clearing. The ontic gap is a place or locus of the Ontic Other, a zone in the existent that is inaccessible to man’s experience. Such a zone emerges necessarily when the ontological difference is eliminated, and the effect of its presence can be described in two ways: as the constitutive influence of a certain source of energy that is ontically but not ontologically beyond the horizon of consciousness, or as the constitutive change of the topology of space of anthropological manifestations. Such description of ontic extreme experience follows again the strategy of advancing from some “rescued bit,” that is now the experience of patterns of the unconscious conceptualized by Freud and Lacan. Topologically described ontic constitutions are similar epistemologically and methodologically to the topological anthropology of Deleuze-Guattari. The human constituted by the unconscious and other sub-formations of the Ontic Human dominate during most of the twentieth century. These sub-­ formations also include the anthropological experience of totalitarianism in both Nazi and Soviet versions. We should also mention specially the very important role of artistic practices in the experience of the Ontic Human. This formation has close ties or even elective affinity with the culture of modernism, which always stated its closest connection to the sphere of the unconscious, and some of its schools, such as surrealism, declared the expression of the impulses of the unconscious as their main goal. Postclassical man shows his continuing inclination to extreme experience, testing all his borders and limits. It looks as if man who rejected ontological extreme experience—in the course of secularization—is now looking for a substitute and cannot find anything: he is trying all known kinds of extreme experience and inventing new ones. After the ontic extreme experience toward the end of the twentieth century, virtual practices, a new large class of extreme practices has become dominant. Their main type is entering computer virtual reality and inhabiting various cyberspaces, but their entire set is truly boundless since virtual phenomena are just under-actualized actual phenomena; hence, any actual anthropological practice has many virtualizations, virtual doubles or correlates. sga interprets virtual practices as representing one more paradigm of the human constitution in the unlocking: since virtual reality is different from the actual one, entering it is extreme experience. It is important that this paradigm exhausts the existing ways of the unlocking in extreme experience because such unlocking respectively has three,

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and only three options: unlocking toward a different mode of being, unlocking in the existent and unlocking in virtual reality. As a result, sga describes the human beings as pluralistic existents that constitute themselves in three different ways, respectively as the Ontological Human, the Ontic Human, and the Virtual Human. Thus, we have completed outlining the contours of the anthropology of the unlocking. Progressing from the hesychast starting base, the paradigm of the ontological unlocking inherent in hesychast practice, we have reached the desired point: its extension as the universal paradigm of the human constitution. Having a set of representations which determine different anthropological formations, modes of subjectivity and personal structures, this paradigm becomes the core of a radically nonclassical conception of man, one that is pluralistic and devoid of the principles of subject and essence. By virtue of these properties, theoretically it is valid for all totality of anthropological experience. 5

To the Science of Human Sciences

In classical methodology the creation of a “theory” of some domain of reality is followed by the development of “practical applications” of this theory to concrete phenomena. Such problems are present in synergic anthropology too, but they do not determine the principal vector of its further development. Our nonclassical conception was born in the process of conceptual and methodological generalization. That process, however, is not yet finished: the conception has the potential of further extension and generalization, but at this stage it goes beyond the borders of anthropology as it is usually understood. There begins a sui generis anthropological expansion into adjoining disciplines and discourses. Working as the instrument of this expansion, the anthropology of the unlocking acquires a new organization and new status in the system of knowledge. The first step in the expansion is the inclusion into the orbit of sga the domain where the anthropological and the social overlap, that is the interface of the anthropological and the social. It is the domain where the most important phenomena and processes take place because these determine the prospects of man and society. Our basic concept for the study of this domain is the anthropological trend: a concept of the double nature, anthropological and social. We show that the interface can be described as an ensemble of trends realizing complex anthropo-social dynamics determined by anthropological factors. Analysis of today’s trends of virtualization, trends directed to the posthuman and other dominating trends leads to the conclusion that in their sum they amount to a powerful “Exit trend,” which corresponds to the “scenario of

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euthanasia,” the voluntary and painless leaving or exit of man. This dominating scenario is directly connected with the aforementioned superseding of the Ontological Human. However, the post-secular trend that sprang up not long ago, one that again allots a certain place to the ontological unlocking, can, generally speaking, change this scenario and contribute to the preservation of the existence of man. After this “colonization of the interface” the anthropological expansion has to reformulate all basic humanistic discourses. This means ­essentially  their ­anthropologization, the disclosure of their implicit anthropological roots while methodologically demanding—to use Wilhelm von Humboldt’s m ­ etaphor— their “remelting,” the modulation into different hermeneutics and epistemology. Such anthropologization is not something new for modern humanistic knowledge: tendencies to it as well as its rudiments appeared in the twentieth century in most humanistic disciplines, and most of all, in history. As for sga itself, at this stage it acquires a new and special position in the system of humanistic knowledge: getting into the subject field of each humanistic discourse, it becomes the common integrating basis for them all. Eo ipso, it appears as a kind of meta-discourse for this complex, in other words, as the core of a new episteme for humanistic knowledge. Here a notion of Søren Kierkegaard is very fitting: anthropology has been raised, it is now no longer the “science of man” or “human science”: it is the science of human sciences. To my mind, this raising of anthropology is imminent and inevitable. sga is one of the possible strategies of this raising, which has noticeably already advanced further. For instance, the problem of the anthropologization was studied and to some extent solved in principal disciplinary fields. First of all, the anthropological dimension of historical process was reconstructed: like Foucault, we also trace the “history of the subject,” noticing that at any historical moment some anthropological formation is dominant and reconstructing the sequence of changing dominant formations. For the set of discourses describing social reality, anthropologization was basically performed in the course of the “colonization of the interface.” Now the work of the anthropologization continues involving more and more new disciplines. Recent developments here include anthropologizing studies in economic theory and in the theory of law. It was found, in particular, that the pluralistic vision of a human being in sga can be used to replace the old classical conception of the subject in the theory of law. Summing up, we can already say that the plan of turning anthropology into a new episteme is sufficiently realistic.

Vladimir Kantor Born in 1945, Vladimir Karlovich Kantor1 is a Doctor of Philosophy and Ordinary Professor in the School of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities and the Head of the International Research Laboratory for Russian-European Intellectual Dialogue—both with the National Research University Higher School of Economics (hse). He is the leading specialist on the history of Russian intellectual thought and a member of the Union of Russian Writers. Kantor is one of the founders and publishers of the famous series “From the History of Russian Philosophical Thought.” He himself published volumes of works by Konstantin Kavelin, Aleksandr Herzen, Semion Frank, Fiodor Stepun, and Peter Struve. Kantor was the initiator of the publication in German of the eight-volume collected works of Frank. In 2012, he also published rare previously unpublished archival memoirs and personal correspondence of Stepun, edited with A. Stepuna, Struve, and Yuri Lotman. His colleagues affirm that Kantor’s articles and monographs are a treasured fund of Russian intellectual thought created to preserve and multiply the spiritual heritage of Russia. It was he who returned to modern academic science the concept of “Russian European,” giving it a canonical definition. Two dissertations on Kantor’s scientific works were defended in Belgium, one in Germany, and one in Ukraine. Reviews of his works (approximately 135 titles), were published in Argentina, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and the United States. Kantor is the author of twenty-four monographs (three in German, one in Italian and one in Serbian), sixteen books of prose, more than seven hundred articles on the history of Russian philosophy, culture and mentality. His works were translated into Czech, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Serbian. The European, published once every forty years (January 2005) by the Paris magazine, Le nouvel observateur (hors serie) (2005), considers him one of the 25 greatest modern thinkers—the only one from Russia—and “the legitimate successor of F.M. Dostoyevsky and V.S. Soloviev.” He won the Golden Tower Award of hse twice (in 2009 and 2013) for achievements in science.

1 This biographical sketch, along with the following article, was prepared under the auspices of the Basic Research Program at the Higher School of Economics (hse) of the National Research University and was subsidized by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5–100.”

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His more recent publications include: Depicting, Understanding, or Sententia sensa: Philosophy in a Literary Text. TsGI Print, 2017 (in the series, Russian Propylaea); “Felled Tree of Life.” The Fate of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2016) (in the series Russian Propylaea); Russian Classics, or Genesis of Russia. 2nd ed. rev. (Center for Humanitarian Initiatives, 2014) (in the series Russian Propylaea); Love for the Twin. Myth and Reality of Russian Culture. Essays., 2013 (in the series Current Cultural Studies); and “Crash of Idols,” or Overcoming Temptations (The Formation of Philosophical Space in Russia). rosspen, 2011 (in the series Russian Propylaea).

The Problem of Posthumous Existence from Plato to Dostoyevsky: “Bobok,” a Short Story by Dostoyevsky Vladimir Kantor “Bobok” Dostoyevsky’s short story—with an almost surrealistic title—gives us in a concentrated form an idea of how the author understood death and life in Russia, in a religious-philosophical sense, not the ordinary one. His analysis, however, must be placed in a distinct literary-philosophical context. Death is a constant in all of history and a constant source of human fear. As a rule, religion has calmed people, promising life in the other world. Indeed, life was promised, but the shadows Odysseus encountered in Hades understood that they would be there forever, and that genuine life was left behind somewhere far away. Even the suffering people in Dante’s hell understood that they were on the other side of life. Dante, because of his dislike for the Pope, put him in that other world, that is, sent him to hell. European culture reflected on the theme of death, relying upon the tenets of Christian faith. But it firmly drew the line between life and death. Life is what a person desires. Death pushes a person into the unknown. Christ, of course, promised eternal life in the next world to those who believed in him. Yet those who have risen to the level of reflection have been tormented by terrible suspense. It seems that Dante depicted everything; he was viewed as a person who had seen hell. And it is no coincidence that Prince Hamlet dreaded these dreams that await every person on the other side of being. He was afraid of what was there. Actually, he followed Plato, the only difference being that he had a Christian (Dante’s) understanding of the other world. To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

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That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life. In Phaedo, Plato said that a true philosopher seeks death, since it frees the mind of bodily gravity: True philosophers make dying their profession, and that to them of all men death is least alarming. Look at it in this way. If they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the body, and long to have their souls independent of it, when this happens would it not be entirely unreasonable to be frightened and distressed? Would they not naturally be glad to set out for the place where there is a prospect of attaining the object of their lifelong desire—which is wisdom—and of escaping from an unwelcome association? (19) Shakespeare passed by this statement, and so did Tolstoy, who lived through his “Arzamas horror” as if it were the horror of bodily death. He said he “was actually seeing, feeling the approach of death, and along with it” “felt that death ought not to exist”: “My entire being was conscious of the necessity of the right to live, and at the same time of the inevitability of dying” (Tolstoy 47). But Tolstoy’s animal-mystical fear of death was probably peculiar among the Russian classics. His passion for carnal life was so strong that he did not even have time to think of the afterlife, in particular, of what the reckoning would be. Although he called his favorite character Platon Karataev, he was not going to dispense with the flesh for the sake of thought. Apparently, while still quite young in 1823, solely Pushkin, an absolute genius of Russian culture, examined fully Plato’s thought. Indeed, that is not surprising given that he was a student at the Lyceum: Hope sweet breathing baby, When I believed that once a soul Having escaped from decay, he carries away thoughts forever, And memory, and love in the depths are endless,— I swear I would have left this world long ago: I would have crushed life, an ugly idol,

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And flew into the country of freedom, delight, To a country where there is no death, where there is no prejudice, Where thought alone floats in heavenly purity … But in vain indulge in a deceptive dream; My mind persists, despises hope … Nothingness awaits me beyond the grave … Like, nothing! Neither thought nor first love! I’m scared!… This is a very serious confrontation. Unlike Plato, Pushkin does not believe that thought will survive after death “in heavenly purity.” He makes an alarming and, in general, not only anti-Platonist but also anti-Christian note: “Nothing awaits me beyond the coffin….” Strictly speaking, Hamlet’s monologue is a reflection on Dante’s Hell. Pushkin is in doubt. He seemed to convey this doubt to the great writer, Dostoyevsky, who endlessly repeated that Pushkin was the highest and best that Russian culture had created. It was Herzen who first noticed that Dostoyevsky was the Russian Dante, saying that the portrayal of the bath in The House of the Dead is utterly Dantean. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Dante’s popularity in Russian culture was rather high. I wrote about this as well as about Stepan Chevyrev, Pavel Miliukov, and others in my book, The Conflict of Ideas in Russian Literature, 1840 to 1870 (Bor’ba idei v russkoi literature 40–70 godov xix veka), published in 1988. In my view, Gogol constructed his Dead Souls as a tripartite poem—following the paradigmatic exemplar of the Divine Comedy; yet, only the first part—“Hell”—was a success. “The second volume, the supposed ‘Purgatory,’ already showed the author that, staying within the real material provided by actuality, it is impossible to realize his plan” (Kantor 217). In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoyevsky solved eternal problems drawing upon plots that were very relevant at the time, placing them in the context of “final questions.” However, like Dostoyevsky’s Writer’s Diary, the Divine Comedy, especially, “Hell” and “Purgatory,” was also concerned with pressing issues. In the Comedy, images of contemporaries, evildoers, corrupt priests, unfortunate lovers, and the like are immersed in eternity. But let’s not forget that according to Dante, it is not just eternity; it is the afterlife. In Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov, when talking to Raskolnikov, reveals his view on the other world, on what awaits a person there: a bath with spiders. In Brothers Karamazov, this topic is endless; it appears most vividly in the talk with the devil: the axe—which, in some sense, is a Russian weapon of revenge—turns out to be a satellite of Earth. There is no doubt that this is already on the level of Dante’s view of the kind of punishment that awaits every Russian person in the other world. Dostoyevsky was

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also compared with Dante by Oswald Spengler and other Western thinkers. But, as is generally agreed, a comparison is never perfect: it gives a reference point, but it never gives an understanding of a new entity in its entirety. The problem of what will be there constantly perplexed Dostoyevsky. That is the topic of one of the most unusual short stories in world literature— “Bobok” (1873). In his most recent book, Igor Evlampiev wrote: “‘Bobok’ can be viewed as speculation about one possible form of a person’s existence in that respect which is opened up to us by the ‘highest idea’ of immortality, one that astounds with its hopelessness and that looks even more horrible than Svidrigailov’s frightening representation of eternity as a bath with spiders” (449). In my view, however, the situation is more complicated than the metaphysical problem of the other-worldly being of a person. The plot of the short story is introduced by the author in A Writer’s Diary, which may be viewed as a set of unpretentious notes by a journalist who has not been very successful in literature but does not blame himself for his literary misfortunes. Rather, he blames the moral situation in Russia, where people have lost the criterion necessary to distinguish between the elevated and the dirt in words: “Nowadays humor and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit” (“Bobok” 507). “I am thinking of making a collection of the bons mots of Voltaire but am afraid it may seem a little flat to our people. Voltaire’s no good now; nowadays we want a cudgel, not Voltaire. We knock each other’s last teeth out nowadays” (“Bobok” 508). Correspondingly, God has been lost as well—but I will address this subject later. The character understands that it is not his world: “Something strange is happening to me. My character is changing and my head aches. I am beginning to see and hear strange things, not voices exactly, but as though someone beside me were muttering, ‘bobok, bobok, bobok!’”(509). And with a strange, almost sacrilegious play on the concepts of “spirit” and “spirituality,” the storyteller pronounces in a rather casual way a phrase that is almost impossible for an orthodox person. Thus, almost in a journalistic way Dostoyevsky decisively introduces the main word, which, at the end of the story, will turn into a symbol: “What’s the meaning of this bobok? I must divert my mind” (509). But the entertainment of the former resident of the House of the Dead is also special. “There were fifteen hearses, with palls varying in expensiveness; there were actually two catafalques. One was a general’s and one some lady’s. There were many mourners, a great deal of feigned mourning and a great deal of open gaiety. The clergy have nothing to complain of; it brings them a good income. But the smell, the smell. I should not like to be one of the clergymen here” (509–10; The italics are mine.). The storyteller finishes with an anticlerical

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a­ ttack almost worthy of Voltaire. The reader must understand that the author is a person who is intellectually free. It is cold. “I looked into the graves—and it was horrible: water and such water! Absolutely green, and … but there, why talk of it! The gravedigger was bailing it out every minute” (510). Because of that, it feels really chilly; it’s October. But there is a perfectly human way out, and a very Russian one, too. Accompanied by the seers-off, he goes to the restaurant to get warm: “Close by was an almshouse, and a little further off there was a restaurant. It was not a bad little restaurant: there was lunch and everything. There were lots of the mourners here. I noticed a great deal of gaiety and genuine heartiness. I had something to eat and drink” (510). Dostoyevsky is ambiguous, as usual: It is unclear whether it was the alcohol that inspired the following or it actually happened. “The only thing I don’t understand is why I stayed at the cemetery; I sat on a tombstone and sank into appropriate reflections” (511). Then miracles begin to happen: I suppose I sat there a long time—too long a time, in fact; I must have lain down on a long stone which was of the shape of a marble coffin. And how it happened I don’t know, but I began to hear things of all sorts being said. At first, I did not pay attention to it, but treated it with contempt. But the conversation went on. I heard muffled sounds as though the speakers’ mouths were covered with a pillow, and at the same time they were distinct and very near. I came to myself, sat up and began listening attentively. “Your Excellency, it’s utterly impossible. You led hearts, I return your lead, and here you play the seven of diamonds. You ought to have given me a hint about diamonds.” (511–12) And then a scary situation suddenly becomes apparent. The dead, while still being the dead, continue to live some strange life, which is indeed as sinful as the life they lived on earth: There are still ranks, there is still servility to rank, and, depending on one’s rank, one still gets respect and a chance to obtain sexual favors. The storyteller is astonished as to how there can be talk of voluptuousness in graves. But there is indeed this talk: What conceited words! And it was queer and unexpected. One was such a ponderous, dignified voice, the other softly suave; I should not have believed it if I had not heard it myself. I had not been to the requiem dinner, I believe. And yet how could they be playing preference here

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and what general was this? That the sounds came from under the tombstones of that there could be no doubt. I bent down and read on the tomb: “Here lies the body of Major-General Pervoyedov … a cavalier of such and such orders.” Hm! “Passed away in August of this year … fifty-seven. … Rest, beloved ashes, till the joyful dawn!” Hm, dash it, it really is a general! There was no monument on the grave from which the obsequious voice came, there was only a tombstone. He must have been a fresh arrival. (512) But all earthly passions are with them: But what happened next was such a Bedlam that I could not keep it all in my memory. For a great many woke up at once; an official—a civil counselor—woke up and began discussing at once the project of a new sub-committee in a government department and of the probable transfer of various functionaries in connection with the sub-committee—which very greatly interested the general. I must confess I learnt a great deal that was new myself, so much so that I marveled at the channels by which one may sometimes in the metropolis learn government news. Then an engineer half woke up, but for a long time muttered absolute nonsense, so that our friends left off worrying him and let him lie till he was ready. At last the distinguished lady who had been buried in the morning under the catafalque showed symptoms of the reanimation of the tomb. Lebeziatnikov (for the obsequious lower court counselor whom I detested and who lay beside General Pervoyedov was called, it appears, Lebeziatnikov) became much excited, and surprised that they were all waking up so soon this time. I must own I was surprised too; though some of those who woke had been buried for three days, as, for instance, a very young girl of sixteen who kept giggling … giggling in a horrible and predatory way. (517) Is it even possible to be voluptuous when being dead? But I want to remind that, among great thinkers and writers, only Dostoyevsky visited the House of the Dead—a place similar to the other world but where people continued to live animal lives, pursuing all the vices of the real world. Although long, this quote from Notes from the House of the Dead is absolutely necessary: Then begins an orgy of drinking, eating, and music. With such means at his disposal he even softens the hearts of the inferior prison officials. The debauch sometime lasts several days. All the vodka he has prepared is

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soon drunk, of course; then the prodigal resorts to other publicans who are on the look-out for him, and he drinks until he has spent every farthing. However carefully the convicts guard their drunken fellow, he is sometimes seen by a higher official, by the major or the officer on duty. He is taken to the guard-house, stripped of his money if he has it on him and finally flogged. He shakes himself, goes back into the prison, and a few days later takes up his trade in vodka again. Some of the festive ­characters—the rich ones, of course—have dreams of the fair sex, too; for a big bribe to the guard escorting them, they sometimes can be taken in secret to someplace in the town instead of to work. There in some outof-the way little house at the farthest end of town, there is a feast on a huge scale and really large sums of money are squandered. Even a convict is not despised if he has money. A guard is picked out beforehand who knows his way about. Such guards are usually future candidates for prison themselves. But anything can be done for money, and such expeditions almost always remain a secret. (Dostoevsky 73) That is this strange life in death—temporary death that was not experienced in Russia solely by Dostoyevsky; yet he was the only one to make it an object of artistic reflection. But Russian folklore speaks of it as well. In the Russian fairy tale, Propp identifies “the phenomenon of temporary death”—and notes: “the forms of this death vary considerably, but what is important for us now is the very fact of that, not the forms.” He refuses to explain this fact, noting that at this stage, it is sufficient to identify it: “We can only establish the fact without trying to explain it. The fact is that to this dying and resurrection, people attributed the acquisition of magical properties” (185). Yet, what Dostoyevsky describes in the novella “Bobok” is also life in death that will sometime turn into genuine death. But it should be underlined that we are not talking of the folkloric living dead or ghouls; rather, we are talking about the dead that, while staying in graves, continue their existence. The author could see something like this only in the House of the Dead. It seems that Andrei Bely was the only one to compare these two katorgaand cemetery-related observations by Dostoyevsky: What is the reason to publish all this filth that does not have a jot of the artistic? The only point is to frighten, offend, disrupt everything that is sacred. For Dostoyevsky, “Bobok” is, in a sense, the shooting at the communion service, and the play with the words “spirit” and “spirituality” is the vilification of the Holy Spirit. If it is possible to punish an author for

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what he reveals to the public, then “Bobok,” just one “Bobok,” could match Dostoyevsky’s katorga: Yes, Dostoyevsky is a katorga prisoner because he wrote “Bobok.” (Bely 154) But it should be understood that Dostoyevsky’s personal experience, his brilliant personal discovery was made in the context of Russia’s worldview between 1830 and 1870. It should not be forgotten that in 1836, Piotr Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter” was published. It specifies the place where it was written—Necropolis. In 1842 Dead Souls was published by Dostoyevsky’s favorite Russian prose writer—Gogol. In “Bobok,” there is a hint at a connection with Gogol; Vladimir Tunimanov and other commentators believe that it can be found in the first lines of the short story, where it is said that some artist portrayed him as “someone who was close to being insane” and added a few warts: “I believe that the artist who painted me did so not for the sake of literature, but for the sake of two symmetrical warts on my forehead, a natural phenomenon, he would say. They have no ideas, so now they are out for phenomena. And didn’t he succeed in getting my warts in his portrait—to the life. That is what they call realism” (“Bobok” 508). Tumaninov believes there is resonance here with the last phrase from “Diary of a Madman”: “And do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a bump under his nose?” The warts resonate with this strange bump. The ugliness of the face and bumps reminds, of course, of Socrates, the ugliest of philosophers; moreover, the novella features the philosopher Platon Nikolaevich, speculating on Plato’s and Socrates’s topics—those of life and death: Platon Nikolaevich is our home-grown philosopher. He explains all this by the simplest fact, namely, that when we were living on the surface, we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but only in consciousness. I don’t know how to express it, but life goes on, as it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in consciousness and goes on for two or three months … sometimes even for half a year … There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite senseless of course, about some bobok, “Bobok bobok,” but you see that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him. (521) Russia wanted to feel itself in the context of world culture, gaining selfawareness during the centuries starting with Peter the Great. And now having gained it, Russia perceives itself as submerged in the gloom of death. “Here,

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one can move or breathe only if a tsar’s permission or order has been given. Because of that, it is so murky and depressed here, and dead silence kills all life. It seems that a shadow of death hangs all over this part of the globe” (Custine 74). In Dante’s case, the dead live in hell. The geography and topography of hell is described in Dante’s Comedy rather thoroughly. On earth, thought Dante, there were the living, the worst might already be suffering in hell, undergoing punishment, but in Russia, Dostoyevsky saw, at a cemetery, a new kind of being: those who were alive and dead at the same time. For them, it was not a punishment. It is terrifying to say it—for them, it was a way of life. “That … he-he … Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy. It’s apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so to speak, moral—he-he! It’s the stench of the soul, he says, that in these two or three months it may have time to recover itself … and this is, so to speak, the last mercy… Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic ravings very excusable in his position…” “Enough; all the rest of it, I am sure, is nonsense. The great thing is that we have two or three months more of life and then—bobok! I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame.” “‘Ah, let us cast aside all shame, let us!’ many voices could be heard saying; and strange to say, several new voices were audible, which must have belonged to others newly awakened. The engineer, now fully awake, boomed out his agreement with peculiar delight. The girl Katiche giggled gleefully.” (“Bobok” 522) And where life lost its highest meaning, a human specimen plunges into debauchery and casts aside the notion of shame. The topic of the shame of Dostoyevsky’s characters and their losing it is splendidly developed in Deborah Martinsen’s book, Surprised by Shame. Given the context of this concept, the “Bobok” characters’ shouting that one should not feel ashamed reveals a terrifying moment. People cannot shout out such things, and neither can animals, for animals know no shame. And Dostoyevsky’s characters know it but want to get rid of it. The words “ashamed,” “shameless,” “let’s not be ashamed of anything,” and so on literally pervade the author’s texts. Vladimir Soloviev, a thinker who influenced Dostoyevsky, believed that it was shame that distinguished humans from animals. In The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy about the connection between shame and the problem of the sexual, he wrote:

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There exists one feeling which serves no social purpose, is utterly absent in the highest animals, but is clearly manifested in the lowest of the human races. In virtue of this feeling the most savage and undeveloped man is ashamed of, that is recognizes as wrong and conceals a physiological act which not only satisfies his own desire and need, but is, moreover, useful and necessary for the preservation of the species. Directly connected with this is the reluctance to remain in primitive nakedness; it induces savages to invent clothes even when the climate and the simplicity of life make them quite unnecessary. (50–51) What is in this short story? What did the great author want to tell? Whereas according to Plato, “Those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death” (11), Platon Nikolaevich distinguished between the notion of death that exists “there” and the one that exists here, and that seems posthumous but is, in fact, life that continues in this death. There is virtually no transition from life to death. The sepulchral, verbal debauchery accentuates this situation. I once wrote that only in the other world is there no shame—neither in heaven, where there is nothing to feel ashamed of, nor in hell, where shame is forgotten and cast aside, like it is forgotten and cast aside in Dostoyevsky’s “Bobok.” While a human is alive, it is impossible for him not to feel ashamed of himself or somebody else; that is what sharpens his perception of the world and makes him a human. But, in the process of analyzing “Bobok,” I understood that either it was not hell or it was hell according to Swedenborg, where sinners were rejoicing. But it is not the other world here yet. Then what is it? Or, alternatively, it should be acknowledged that hell is possible wherever there is a human being. The House of the Dead, however, provided the experience of life outside life, life in death. It is the topic of the living dead that is raised in the first novel of his “Pentalogy”—in the novel Crime and Punishment. There are not few of them there; I do not even speak of those who walk on the verge of life and death, like Katerina Ivanovna, or those who go into death, like the drowned woman who, being right before Raskolnikov’s eyes, threw herself into a dirty Petersburg ditch, and other constantly dying minor characters like Lieutenant Potanchikov. Worth mentioning is the reaction of Dmitrii Pisarev, a keen admirer of literature when not polemically at war. One of the first readers who was able to see the text, he believed that the character Marmeladov exemplifies the living dead:

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And with this clear understanding of his utter worthlessness, with this indelible, bright, and burning memory about the events of the fateful night, he, nevertheless, rushes to a watering hole, having stolen from his wife her hard-earned money, boozes for five days, ruins all of the remaining hopes of his family, and, in addition to all his feats, having squandered in watering holes everything that could be squandered, comes to his daughter, who lives according to the yellow ticket, to beg her—in order to buy the last half of a shtoff of vodka—for a modicum of the money that she gets from seekers of cheap and easy love and that constitute the only stable bit of a help for the consumptive woman and the three of her always hungry kids. Clearly, Marmeladov is a corpse feeling and understanding his degeneration; he is a corpse watching, with inexpressibly painful attention, all the phases of that horrible process by which any similarity of this corpse with a live person capable of feeling, thinking, and acting is destroyed. This painful attention constitutes the last remainder of a human image; looking at this last remainder, Raskolnikov can understand that Marmeladov has not always been the kind of corpse that he sees sitting in a watering hole and drinking a half of the shtoff bought with Sonya’s money. (330; the italics are mine) That is the result of the author’s understanding of Russian life. What is the historical context of Dostoyevsky’s life? Herzen called the reign of Nicholas i, which created this state of life in death, the “plague stretch.” “Human traces will disappear, swept away by the police,” he wrote of that time, “and future generations will often stand in perplexity before the smoothly beaten wasteland, searching for the lost ways of thought” (35). At the end of 1847, when thunder burst over literature and art, Professor Aleksandr Nikitenko, feeling depressed because of his surroundings, wrote in his diary: “The vitality of our society manifests itself in a rather weak way: We are now spiritually closer to death than we should be, and, therefore, the prospect of physical death evokes less natural horror in us” (308). Young authors, thinkers, and poets stepping into life felt worse than others. Their life experience did not involve any empathy for the state’s trying to promote liberal European development in Russia. Their activity aimed at enlightening the country was banned right away. Recall, for instance, the death penalty given to the Petrashevtsy and the sentence given to Dostoyevsky: “execution by firing squad” for reading aloud a letter written by one litterateur (Belinskii) to another one (Gogol). Exile, prison (katorga), and military service (soldatchina)— that is what was in store for many. Surely, not all of them died; yet their e­ xistence

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was fragile and precarious. Russia, seen through their eyes, resembles “a poor cemetery” (Herzen) and the inhabitants of this world are all “dead souls” (Gogol). To Chaadaev it was a city of the dead (Necropolis); Nikitenko called it the “Sandwich Islands”—that is, a place people of the nineteenth century thought humans were eaten: individuals who made any attempt to think or had any virtuous intention, however modest, were condemned and sentenced to banishment and death. In 1854 Timofei Granovskii wrote to Herzen, who was then abroad: “One must bear a lot of faith and love in oneself to retain any hope for the future of the strongest and sturdiest of the Slavic peoples. Our sailors and soldiers die gloriously in the Crimea; but no one knows how to live here” (448). In the same year (1854), the ex-prisoner Dostoyevsky conceived his Notes from the House of the Dead! When portraying all the social classes present in the vast Russian land that were behind katorga walls, he exclaimed: “And how much youth lay uselessly buried within those walls, what mighty powers were wasted here in vain!” (351). That is a cemetery indeed! In this “poor cemetery,” it is quite possible that people can remain in a semi-conscious state and only whisper “bobok.” Life has degenerated, but it has not become death. However, this cemetery is not poor; on the contrary, it is rather grand, for it is the whole country. It is this terrifying degeneration of the human soul that Dostoyevsky described in his most terrifying short story. It is more terrifying than hell. Moreover, the inhabitants of the graves parody Nikolai Chernyshevskii, who formulaically tried to oppose the horror of death with the beauty of life, consisting in “the rational principles.” “No, no, no, Klinevich, I was ashamed, up there I still felt ashamed, but here I terribly, terribly long to be ashamed of nothing!” “As I understand, Klinevich,” rumbled the engineer, “you suggest ­arranging our life here, so to speak, on new and rational principles.” (“Bobok” 522) The radicals believed that the rational principles would eliminate shame. That is what beauty is. Dostoyevsky is almost in agreement with this, for the ideal of Madonna and the ideal of Sodom are combined in beauty. That is life—or so it seems. But having already seen this life, he answered that beauty was a terrible thing—God and the devil were fighting in it. Chernyshevskii pronounced his formula before experiencing katorga. But Dostoyevsky after the House of the Dead, understood that the image of Russia would be one similar to it: “the Gulag Archipelago.” As Aleksandra Toichkina writes:

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It is important to him (Dostoyevsky) that his Notes … be viewed neither as a testimony of an eyewitness concerning his life at katorga nor as an essay about the mores and condition of prisons—but rather as a deeply artistic work about people’s fates, about man’s nature and his or her life courses, about Russia and the Russian people (here, the notion of the Russian people covers different ethnicities). It is no coincidence that at the center of the Dead House metaphor, there is the notion of a house, a living place, and the epithet “dead” refers to the quality of life in this house, the state of those who live in this house (The italics are Kantor’s.). The topos of a house turns out to be central for the image of hell in Dostoyevsk’s Notes…. (56) We should not forget, however, that traditionally, in Russian culture, especially in the Slavophile system of symbols, the topos of a house was equivalent to the topos of Russia. According to Dostoyevsky, the strongest, most active, and most capable people of leading Russia—for he had not met anywhere people stronger than them—are Russia’s gold reserve and, strictly speaking, Russia’s energy. For a country is not defined by a depersonalized mass of people incapable of action, but by action takers: Potemkins, Menshikovs, Stolypins, authors, thinkers, and artists and—those buried in jail (ostrog). “After all, one must tell the whole truth; those men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people. But there mighty energies were vainly wasted, wasted abnormally, unjustly, hopelessly” (House 351). Surprisingly, in 1918, the images of this scary short story surfaced in Semion Frank’s great article, “De Profundis.” It was a moment of complete disintegration of the country, and Dostoyevsky’s scary images turned out to be very relevant. The article “De Profundis” was written in the same year (1918), after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. At the very beginning of the article, Frank pointed out that all the intellectual parties had been brought down by soldiers and sailors, that is, by the armed people; they had been buried, figuratively speaking. It was impossible to hear their voices; only mumbling sobs could be heard. The people were ready to kill the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and even the Bolsheviks; the mob (ochlos) was triumphant—as if they were at a wake for a relative they disliked. The topic of the dead arises again; but here, the dead seem like ghouls rather than those who demand justice. Frank communicated this idea with amazing accuracy, having recalled the great short story “Bobok” by Dostoyevsky, in which the character hears the vile voices coming from graves. Once again, we encounter the dead, but they are not triumphant and benevolent; rather, they are petty and vile. Frank writes:

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One recalls the horrible, perverted fantasy of the greatest of the Russian prophets—Dostoyevsky. Before the dead in their graves fall silent forever, they live yet awhile, as in half sleep with snatches and glimmers of their former feelings, passions, and vices. The dead, who are almost completely decomposed, from time to time mutter a meaningless “bobok”—the only vestige of their former speech and thought. All the present-day, petty, often nightmarish, and absurd events of our life; all the senseless bustle of these “Sovdeps” [Soviets] and “Excoms” [excommunists] that at times bear fruitless verbiage, and at times bear only the fruit of blood and destruction; all of these chaotic scraps of speeches, thoughts, and actions, these vestiges of a once powerful Russian state and culture, after the furious dance of revolutionary specters, like the last, dying sparks after a witches’ sabbath—are these not all the same kind of “bobok”? And if we, suffocating and dying amidst this gloom in our grave, in our anxieties and hopes continue by inertia of thought to mutter about the “testaments of the revolution,” about “Bolsheviks,” and “Mensheviks,” and about the “Constituent Assembly”; if we convulsively cling to pitiful remnants of old ideas, concepts, and ideals, which are dying away in our consciousness; and in the gloom of death take this fruitless and inactive fluttering of feelings, desires, and words for political life—then this too is the same “bobok” of the decomposing dead. (478–79) Dostoyevsky did not like and was afraid of brigands, with whom he had to live for several years. But he doubtless recognized their power. And yet, in this strange pseudo-life, there was something unreal—as if one lived and did not live at the same time. Therefore, for the author, the way out of the situation of half-life and half-death was resurrection: “Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead….” (House 352) But freedom is also understood by the katorga prisoner as life after death: “I may mention here parenthetically that our dreams and our divorce from reality made us think of freedom as somehow freer than real freedom, that is, than it actually is” (House 350). And such a notion of freedom reflected involuntarily that of the outlaws of Pugachev’s rebellion, for their notion of freedom was out of historical context. “Bobok” is a continuation of The House of the Dead, though told differently. Is the life of bodies possible after death? The well-known Medieval Dioptra depicts the talk between the body and the soul. But in Dostoyevsky’s short story, the souls are so polluted and dirtied that they cannot separate t­ hemselves

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from the body, cannot engage in dialogue with it, and must keep living their bodily life even after death. This is a special kind of immortality that only a great sinner could realize. Dostoyevsky, who considered himself a great sinner, wanted to write a novel about it. Strictly speaking, as mentioned several times, all of his texts are variations on the topic of “the great sinner.” And the short story “Bobok” offers yet another variation. A dead person’s body that does not allow the soul to be free drags it down into its stench. The body cannot separate itself from the soul. That is the overcoming of Plato’s forms by sinners. bobok is a symbol of human existence in Russia. I am not aware of a symbol that is more terrifying than this one. Works Cited Bely, Andrei. “Tragediia tvorchestva.” O Dostoevskom. Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo v russkoi mysli 1881–1931 gg. Kniga, 1990. pp. 142–63. “Bobok. [From Somebody’s Diary].” The Short Stories of Dostoevsky. Translated by Constance Garnett. Edited and with an introduction by William Phillips. Dial P, 1946. Custine, Astolphe. Nikolaevskaia Rossiia. Politizdat, 1990. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead. Translated by Constance Garnett. Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons. Dell, 1967. Evlampiev, Igor I. Filosofiia cheloveka v tvorchestve F. Dostoevskogo (ot rannykh proizvedennii k Brat’iam Karamazovym). rxga, 2012. Frank, Semion L. “De profundis.” Vekhi. Iz glubiny. Pravda, 1991. pp. 478–79. Gertsen, Aleksandr. Gertsen A.N. Sochinenia v 30-ti tomakh. T. 9. an sssr, 1956. Granovskii, Timofei N. Granovskii i ego perepiska. T. 2. Tovarishchestvo tipografii A.I. Mamontova, 1897. Kantor, Vladimir K. “Sred’ bur’ grazhdanskikh i trevogi.” Bor’ba idei v russkoj literature 40–70 godov xix veka. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988. Martinsen, Deborah A. Surprised by Shame. Dostoyevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure. Ohio State UP, 2003. Nikitenko, Aleksandr V. Nikitenko A.V. Dnevnik. t 1. GIKhL, 1955. Pisarev, Dmitrii I. “Bor’ba za zhizn’.” Pisarev, D.I. Sochinenia v 4-kh tomakh, t. 4. GIKhL, 1956. pp. 316–69. Plato. Phaedo. Platon. Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, t 2. Mysl’, 1993. pp. 7–80. Propp, Vladimir Ia. Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skaski. Labirint, 1998. Soloviev, V.S. Soloviev, V.S. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, t. 8. Tovarishchestvo “Prosveshchenie,” 1911–1913.

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Toichkina, Aleksandra V. “Obraz ada v Zapiskakh iz Mertovogo doma. K teme Dostoevskii i Dante.” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura. Al’manakh, no. 29. Serebrianyi vek, 2012, pp. 52–66. Tolstoy, Lev N. “Zapiski sumashedshego.” Tolstoi L.N. Sobranie sochinennii v 22 tomakh, t. 12. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982. pp. 43–53.

Igor Kliamkin Born in 1941, Igor Kliamkin (PhD) studied at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University and completed his extended doctorate (Doctor of Science) in philosophy there. In Soviet times, he worked for the Komsomol Truth (Komsomol’skaia Pravda) newspaper and other periodicals. During perestroika he was a fellow of the Institute for International Economic and Political Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Democratic Russia (Demokraticheskaia Rossiia). He became widely known then due to his articles published in the fat journal, New World (Novyi Mir), and other periodicals. In the 1990s he worked for the Public Opinion Foundation. Today, he is President of the Liberal Mission Foundation. He published more than 400 scholarly and journalistic works in France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, the United States, and other countries. He has worked as a visiting researcher at universities and research centers in France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Kliamkin’s fields of scholarly interest are Russian history, the postcommunist transformation of Russian society within the context of Russian and global history, especially in comparison with the postcommunist transitions of Central and Eastern European countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine. In his works, he combines a theoretical approach with empirical research into the evolution of societal structure and socio-cultural changes. His numerous articles on this topic have been published in Political Studies (Politicheskie issledovaniia) and other journals, and in a joint monograph with Lev Timofeev, Shady Russia (Tenevaia Rossiia, 2000), which has been translated into French and Polish. In his works, Kliamkin analyzes the processes taking place in post-Soviet Russia, both in their uniqueness and in their similarity with the dynamics of all post-Soviet countries except for the Baltic States. He considers post-Soviet space to be a special type of social system that differs significantly from the Soviet one, among other things, by the virtue of its increased resistance to transformation into a social system based on democracy and the rule of law. The uniqueness of postcommunist Russia, according to Kliamkin, is that it is heir both to the Russian and the totalitarian Soviet military empires, its post-Soviet transition being thus both post imperial and post totalitarian. The essence of this complex transit, he argues, can better be understood using his concept of Russian history as a cyclical alternation of militarization and demilitarization

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of state and society. He has outlined this concept in a number of articles and in his book with Aleksandr Akhiezer and Igor’ Iakovenko The History of Russia: The End or New Beginning? (Istoriia Rossii: konets ili novoe nachalo? 3rd ed., 2013). In recent years, he has added clarity and details to his concept drawing on the evidence representing reforms in Ukraine and Russian-Ukrainian relations. His new findings have been presented in a number of articles and in the book, Which Road Leads to Law? (Kakaia doroga vedet k pravu? 2018). Along with his own scholarly and journalistic work, Kliamkin as the President of the Liberal Mission Foundation organizes public discussions of the issues of interest to him and invites researchers from fields of the humanities and different ideological orientations. The discussions in these proceedings, which are accompanied by Igor Kliamkin’s prefaces, are presented in several collections of essays that he has edited, including Westerners and Nationalists: Is Dialogue Possible? (Zapadniki i natsionalisty: vozmozhen li dialog? 2003), The Russian Government Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo vchera, segodnia, zavtra, 2007), Where is the Culture Crisis Leading? (Kuda vedet krizis kul’tury? 2011), History and Historical Awareness (Istoriia and istoricheskoe soznanie, 2012), and Law and Power (Pravo i vlast’, 2013).

Demilitarization as a Historical and Cultural Issue Igor Kliamkin Post-Soviet Russia is going through a deep socio-cultural crisis whose peculiar nature I think can only be understood in the context of Russian history. Russia’s present is its unfinished as well as its finished past. This past is finished because the old ways of solving the nation’s problems are now historically and culturally exhausted. And yet it remains unfinished, because Russian society has not yet been able to develop or borrow new ways. This is the essence of its current crisis. What is this historical heritage that can neither be of use now nor easily abandoned because nothing exists to replace it? 1

Force, Faith and Law in Russian History

Ever since the end of the Mongolian Yoke, statehood and, therefore, the culture of Muscovy were formed and reproduced as a state and a culture of the militaristic type.1 This feature was observed by old Russian historians: Vasilii Kliuchevskii noted that the Muscovite state was characterized by a “combatoriented system,”2 while Nikolai Alekseev wrote that it was built on the model of “a big army, based on hard corvée-like service.”3 Similar descriptions can be found in Sergei Soloviev and Pavel Miliukov. It is easy to see that historians meant militarization not only as spending most of the resources for military purposes, but also as a specific way the state was organized and its specific relations with the population. This militarization applied not only to wartime but also to peacetime, which could not but 1 For different manifestations of this type during different periods of Russian history, see: Aleksandr Akhiezer, Igor’ Kliamkin, and Igor’ Iakovenko, The History of Russia: The End or New Beginning? (Istoriia Rossii: konets ili novoe nachalo? 3rd ed.) (Moscow 2013). See also Igor Kliamkin, Postmilitaristic Government in The Russian Government Today, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (“Postmilitaristskoe gosudarstvo” in Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo: vchera, segodnia, zavtra) (Moscow 2007). 2 Vasilii Kliuchevskii, The Course of Russian History (Kurs russkoi istorii) (Moscow 1937), part 2, 424. 3 Nikolai Alekseev, The Russian People and the Government (Russkii narod i gosudarstvo) (Moscow 2000), 73.

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blur the borders between war and peace in people’s minds, and consequently it could not but affect the type of culture taking shape in Muscovy. In Cultural Studies, some researchers believe that the essence of this culture type is best conveyed by the notion of a “split,” that is between the personal and the antipersonal principles as well as between a pre-state culture and the state one.4 Speaking in these terms, we can say that the militarization of everyday life is a way of existence of a culture in a split. Such organization of the state meant that, of the three basic factors consolidating it—force, faith, and law—force was the fundamental and systembuilding one, while the other two were subordinated and adapted to it. Thus, the Orthodox faith that was borrowed from the Byzantine Empire was corrected, taking into account that the Byzantine Empire itself could not resist the onslaught of the Ottomans. Since this faith, true as it was, failed to save the Byzantine Empire, Muscovite ideologists supplemented it with a higher spiritual authority—the truth, which tested the adherents of the faith for sincerity. Indeed, compliance with this truth could legitimately be enforced by the use of force.5 In fact, it was a quest for a cultural synthesis of Ottoman sultanism— non-Christian, but victorious—with Orthodox Christianity. Ivan the Terrible became the political personification of this synthesis: his repressive practices confirmed the autocratic principle of governance in Muscovy, which meant the supremacy of force over both faith and law. Its supremacy over faith was most evident in the killing of Metropolitan Filip whose “unrighteousness” was manifested in protesting against the arbitrary use of force by the oprichniki, who were members of the administrative elite. Its supremacy over law manifested in the oprichnina, this elite and the land assigned to it. It is telling that the Boyar Duma, which had been given legislative powers by the code of laws (Sudebnik) of 1550, did not formally sanction the establishment of the oprichnina until the Tsar’s intimidating selective execution of several Duma members with the support of the people of Muscovy. The latter fact shows that the Tsar’s truth had also deep popular roots, a topic that I will discuss below.

4 See Aleksandr Akhiezer, Russia: Critique of Historical Experience (Rossiia: Kritika istoricheskogo opyta) (Novosibirsk 1997). 5 For a more detailed account of how Muscovite rulers and ideologists interpreted the notions of faith and truth, see The Russian People and Government (Russkii narod i gosudarstvo), 54–59; Leonid Liuks, The Third Rome? The Third Reich? The Third Path? Historical Essays on Russia, Germany and the West (Tretii Rim? Tretii reikh? Tretii put’? Istoricheskie ocherki o Rossii, Germanii i Zapade) (Moscow 2002), 12–18; and Andrei Iurganov, Categories of Russian Medieval Culture (Kategorii russkoi srednevekovoi kul’tury) (Moscow 1998), 77–85.

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Peter the Great, who adapted the militaristic state to modern conditions, pushed the old Muscovite faith and truth to the periphery of his ideology, while turning law, which he monopolized and widely used, into a sort of military command. The militaristic system he succeeded in creating was designed exclusively for warfare and legitimized by military victories. Like the old Muscovite ideologists, Peter referred to the sad example of the Byzantine Empire, but he believed that the reason for its fall was not that its faith was too weak but that the Greeks paid too much attention to it. The essential lesson to be learned from the fate of the Second Rome as Peter understood it was that the Byzantine Empire fell because it failed to create a militarized state. Therefore, Peter emphasized, “we must not get weak militarily, lest we encounter the same fate as the Greek monarchy.”6 The militarization of life that peaked under Peter could not but yield to demilitarization in the post-Petrine period. The overstrain demanded from the elites and the people during big wars could not be perpetuated, for life in military barracks cannot become normal life. That is why tendencies to demilitarize manifested immediately upon Peter’s death and continued, though not without setbacks, until the end of the autocratic Russian monarchy’s lifecycle. The most important milestones on this way to demilitarization included Peter iii’s Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility, Catherine the Great’s Charter to the Nobility and Charter to the Towns, the abolition of serfdom by Alexander ii and the October Manifesto of 1905 that for the first time put law above autocracy and opened the way to representative government. This dismantlement of the system of militaristic power took almost two centuries. It ended, as is well known, in the collapse of the Russian state, for it was not accompanied by the accumulation of sufficient economic, political and, most importantly, cultural prerequisites for the state and society to acquire a new, nonmilitaristic foundation. The cultural Europeanization of the Russian noble elite promoted by Peter the Great’s descendants to the point of freeing the noblemen from compulsory military or civil service went a long way to undermine the paradigm of serving the Tsar and the state that was embedded in the militarized lifestyle of the Petrine era. Europeanization emancipated itself from the autocracy that initiated it and started a life of its own in Russian culture, leading eventually, as a political result, to the Decembrists’ uprising of 1825. The defeat of the latter generated the asocial type of “superfluous man” and showed that the Europeanized Russian nobility lacked the resources necessary to complete 6 For a more detailed account, see Aleksandr Grushkin, Journalism of the Petrine Period (Publitsistika petrovskoi epokhi), http://feb-web.ru/feb/irl/il0/il3/il320752.htm?cmd=p.

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the Europeanization of Russia. It was opposed by a conservative culture that prevailed in the overwhelming majority of Russia’s lower class and in certain circles of the noble class, which were epitomized by Famusov, Skalozub, and other characters from Aleksandr Griboyedov’s play Woe from Wit. This might not have been obvious in 1825, but in the early twentieth century elite Europeanism and the archaic attitude of the lower class clashed in an intransigent conflict in the State Duma, the first Russian parliament. To see the inevitability of this conflict, it is enough to take a look at the collection of Russian proverbs and sayings. They reflect a culture that both copies the official culture and acts as an alternative to it. At the same time, the popular consciousness does not distinguish between the militaristic and the demilitarizing versions of the official culture, probably because by the time Vladimir Dahl compiled this collection of proverbs and sayings, demilitarization had not yet reached the peasant majority of Russia’s population. The fact that the noblemen were freed from compulsory service, while serfdom remained, seemed to peasants to be a violation of the unwritten principle on which postMongolian Muscovite statehood was built because peasants served noblemen only insofar as noblemen served the Tsar.7 However, Russian proverbs and sayings clearly reflect the hostile attitude of the population toward the nobility, but not only to it. This attitude applied to the boyars, an estate that had already descended from the historical stage, and to officials, judges and priests as well. It applied to all state institutions, including the army, which, judging by the folk sayings, was perceived by the people not as a symbol of power and military victories, but as a symbol of the hardships of life. Everything that concerned the state was perceived as an embodiment of a foreign and alien force that violated faith and law,8 or in other words, the very truth whose name was used to sanctify the creation of post-Mongolian Muscovite statehood: “the Sacred Russian land is big, but a place for the truth is nowhere to be found.” But this popular truth did not act as an alternative to a hostile state force; that truth acted in accordance to its otherness. If the word mentality is appropriate here, it was not a mentality of participation in the dominant force, but one of its rejection in anticipation of a different force, the one that would correspond to the “Sacred Russian land.” That mindset was also one of temporary residence in an occupied territory in a vague anticipation of a better future. 7 See Sergei Platonov, Complete Course of Lectures on Russian History (Polnyi kurs lektsii po russkoi istorii) (Rostov-na-Donu 1999), 470. 8 See Pavel Soldatov, The Russian National Code of Law in History and Historical Awareness (“Russkii narodnyi sudebnik” in Istoriia i istoricheskoe soznaniie) (Moscow 2012), 440–77.

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Until the arrival of that better future, everything would be profane, nothing would be serious, nothing would be certain, everything would be possible, and anything could go. Emelian Pugachev, a famous impostor, clearly demonstrated what this folk truth looked like in practice. He promised to destroy all the noblemen who settled between the Tsar and the people, to turn all his subjects into Cossacks, and to rebuild the Russian state on the model of a Cossack army. This was more or less the popular idea of the proper course of events: an alternative militarization was to replace the demilitarization of the nobility conducted by Catherine the Great to the detriment of the people. Later on, it turned out that this idea of the Proper Course of Events cannot be forced out of the culture even by a more profound demilitarization, be it the emancipation of serfs or even the limitation of autocracy by parliamentary representation accompanied by the granting of political rights to the population. Like in the time of the Decembrists, this idea of the Proper Course of Events had no points of contact with the ideals of the Russian Europeanists. But after the Tsar’s self-limitation, it lost contact with him as well. His sacred status was undermined by this self-limitation, which deprived him of the opportunity to preserve the proverbial image of the “Thunderstorm Tsar,” who could potentially oppose his divine and righteous power to the power of his unrighteous servants. The popular idea of the Proper Course of Events, which for a long time was associated with the Tsar, lost this association. Henceforth, the question was who would be able to appropriate this idea. As we know, it was the Bolsheviks, who eventually succeeded in this. The Bolsheviks’ victory was perhaps the most convincing evidence that by the beginning of the twentieth century force still was the main state-constituting factor in the popular culture and the fundament of this culture itself. This was the demilitarization trap that Russian statehood found itself in. The tragedy of the situation was best grasped by Leo Tolstoy, who called to neutralize force by “not using violence to resist evil.” It is not by chance, I think, that it was Russia that came to be the homeland of Tolstoyanism. However, the culture could not accept the ultimate, absolute moral basis that Tolstoy came up with as a way out of the deadlock. A request for an ultimate basis did exist in Russian culture: it existed not among the high class to which Tolstoy addressed his idea, but among the common folks. Moreover, it was a request for a different kind of ultimate foundation, one associated with force, not with moral and religious opposition to it. Such a request could be silenced not by appeals to faith, upon which Tolstoy relied, nor by appeals to legal order, of whose possibilities Tolstoy was as skeptical as he was of those afforded by force.

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If it had been otherwise, the Bolsheviks would not have been able to do with faith and legal order as they had done. They would not have been able to legitimize their power for more than seven decades by appealing to the October 1917 coup d’état. Communist ideology could only work to the extent that it relied on force and on the militaristic principle underlying the state and society. And it is not by chance that Stalin took as his historical allies the key figures of the first militarization cycle, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, rather than those autocratic rulers who personified post-Petrine demilitarization. These were blackballed as reactionaries. Soviet militarization of the way of life, which began with the policy of “war communism” and peaked in the Stalinist era, was unprecedented in its depth and inclusiveness, even for Russia. Never before in its history had Russia been so overtly likened to a “besieged fortress” surrounded by external enemies who, relying on their agents inside the country, allegedly wanted to bring back the “cursed past” with its “landlords and capitalists” and so on. To put it another way, there had never been such a clear likening of peace-time and war-time everyday life, including in the official language. The word “victory” acquired a universal significance in Soviet official language. It was extended to any successes and achievements, both real and imitated. An extremely broad meaning was given also to such words as “fight,” “battle,” “combat,” and “assault,” not to mention “struggle”: they could refer to the collectivization of agricultural facilities, to harvesting works, to the accelerated construction of a new plant, and to the promotion of socialist realism in arts. Along with “struggle,” perhaps the most pervasive word in communist vocabulary was “front”: work front, industrial front, agricultural front, ideological front, cultural front, housekeeping front—whatever. And there was the glorification of work as a new way to stimulate it. It included awards, such as orders and medals that equated the achievements in work to a military feat: “A medal for war and a medal for work are made of the same metal,” a Soviet poem said. The ruling party itself was militarized: in all its charters it called itself a militant organization, its members were called “soldiers of the party,” who were supposed to serve its cause “devotedly,” that is, without any conditions and contract. The atmosphere of total secrecy, fitting this “besieged fortress” life, was pervasive. I dwell on these well-known phenomena in such detail only because up to now they have never been considered in the context of culture. That omission renders the emergence and consolidation of the Soviet state and Soviet society inexplicable. This state and this society could have emerged only because the people were hostile to all the institutions of the former “unjust” state and to all the social groups with which it was associated. The power of those groups was

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perceived as a temporary one that would have to disappear in the same way as the power of the Mongol occupants once disappeared. There was a vague demand for these groups’ forcible removal, and this request was granted in the course of Soviet alternative militarization, whose implementation found a sufficient number of supporters in the popular milieu. But even this total militarization, like Peter’s, turned out to be temporary and transitory, followed by another demilitarization after Stalin’s death. Very quickly it became clear that there was nothing to replace the uncontrolled force and the fear it instilled, of which the Soviet elite and the entire population of the ussr had gotten tired. It turned out that neither faith—the communist ideology—nor the “socialist legal order,” that was intended to serve this faith, were able to protect the state and society from decay. After the exhausted Communist faith was abandoned and the Soviet state disintegrated, it became clear that the new Russian state that emerged from its ruins had difficulty finding an alternative to force as a means to consolidate and develop the nation. Russian culture as it existed historically once again lacked the resources to generate such an alternative. Entering the cycle of post-Stalinist demilitarization, in which the country is still living now, meant an unprecedented problem for Russia. It turned out to be a cultural crisis so deep that a way out of it is hard to see. This demilitarization problem permanently accompanying Russia’s history is a key to understanding the post-Soviet evolution of the country. Over and over again, Russia fails to supplement demilitarization with the establishment of the rule of law. The reason it fails is that its inherited culture does not offer any support for this. Petrine and post-Petrine Europeanization, which brought Modernity to Russia, probably could not create the prerequisites for this support, nor did the pre-Petrine evolution of the country, which was significantly different from the European one. 2

A Special Way to Modernity

At the end of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer, continuing the intellectual tradition of Auguste Comte, pointed to the difference between two types of social organization—the “militant” and the “industrial”—and, respectively, two types of cooperation—“compulsory” and “voluntary.” “The typical structure of the one, he wrote, we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfill commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing, and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors,

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who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization, if they do not like it.”9 Spencer also notes that the voluntary contractual type of social organization did not always exist. It is a product of European Modernity. If we translate this into the language of today’s discussions in Cultural Studies, we can say that Spencer sees militarization not as a certain genetic cultural property of certain civilizations, but as a historical stage which all—or almost all—of them pass through in their development. I realize that such a course of thought is close to the stadial approach to the study of history and that it increases optimism about the future of Russia. For if all nations go through the stage of militarization and then leave it at different points in time and at a different pace, then sooner or later Russia will do so, too. This may happen, but the stadial approach itself proves nothing of the kind. For, after leaving the stage of forced militaristic social organization, a nation may or may not make it to a voluntary contractual one, or it may end up in a stage of irreversible decay and destruction. This was the case with some of the countries that had an impact on Russia: unlike the West, they failed to break through to Modernity. However, Russia was able to respond to the challenges of that time. It did respond using its potential while remaining within the boundaries of the militaristic type of state and society organization. In other words, it created its own modernity, similar in some ways to the European one, but significantly different from it in the most important points. What is the reason for such differences between nations’ historic paths and fates? Not the least of all possible explanations should be looked for in the ways of militarization and in the cultural prerequisites these respective ways create for nations’ further development or, conversely, in the barriers to its path. This is the fundamental difference between Russia and Europe. Medieval European feudalism was, of course, one of the models of militaristic organization of the state and society. The multilevel feudal hierarchy, built upon the conditional possession of land in exchange for service, was a military hierarchy, at the top of which was the king and at the foot of which was a peasant serf, who served all the levels of this hierarchy. The peculiarity of this hierarchy was that all relations within it were based on legal principles, with vassals having not only duties to their suzerains but also certain rights. This was a militaristic model that included a contractual component, which also provided for a judicial procedure of conflict resolution. Or, to put it another way, this was a militaristic model that was capable of qualitative cultural transformation. 9 Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State (London 1902), 12 f.

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Nothing of the kind existed in post-Mongolian Muscovy. Indeed, there existed conditional land ownership, that is, the nobles were endowed with land in exchange for serving their sovereign, but that was the end of the similarity. Neither the feudal hierarchy of suzerains and vassals, nor the contractual legal relations and chivalrous morals inherent in it existed in Muscovy. Instead, what the Bolsheviks later called “unconditional serving” was introduced in the ussr right from the start—a kind of serving that was not subject to any norms or rules, in which commands did not leave room for the independent role of the rule of law. In reality, this meant the formation of a culture of general serfdom to the grand dukes and tsars of Muscovy: in the official language, it began to take hold under Ivan iii,10 whom some historians tend to consider for some reason the standard representative of Russian Europeanism. It is clear that the institutions of feudal representation of estates could not emerge under such circumstances either. But the reasons for this were not only inside the country. In Europe, by the time of the liberation of Muscovy from the Mongols, feudalism had already become a thing of the past. It was being superseded by monarchical absolutism accompanied by centralization. The political and cultural nature of the emerging Russian autocratic state had very little in common with this absolutism. Autocracy was solidified by increasing militarization, whereas the strengthening of European absolutism meant demilitarization of society. The introduction of firearms in the fifteenth century increased dramatically the role of the infantry in the army, which undermined the military significance of the feudal cavalry. The dependence of monarchs on their barons— knights who claimed a political role—became a thing of the past. European armies were now mercenary ones paid by the government. They separated from society. Both the feudal lords, who were losing their military function and whose local power was increasingly limited by the increasing royal bureaucracy, moved to the capitals so as to seek the monarchs’ services. But kings did not claim the property of the feudal lords: barons could remain landowners without military service. The tradition of the legal contract established in the feudal era did not completely disappear from culture, and continuity was preserved. In post-Mongolian Muscovy, the development took a different path: an estate of “serving nobility” was established: along with the old boyar elite, these noblemen were obliged to perform military service for life. And since the land that the grand dukes and tsars of Muscovy gave to these nobles in payment 10

See Andrei Iurganov, The Sources of Despotism in Knowledge is Power (“U istokov despotizma” in Znaniie—sila) 9 (1989).

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for their service had to be cultivated, peasants had to be turned to serfs. What was already becoming the past in Western Europe was the present and the future in Muscovy. Furthermore, the militarization completed by Peter i forced noblemen to be present in their respective military units permanently and not only during hostilities. He also turned part of the serfs into lifelong soldiers, thus creating a regular army. This was an alternative Russian “special way” of adapting to modernity to the European model; the choice of this Sonderweg was conditioned, among other things, by the simple consideration that, unlike the European monarchs, Russian autocrats had no money to pay a mercenary army. Attempts to establish one were undertaken only in the seventeenth century—without calling into question the noblemen’s obligation of military service. There are two ways to increase public wealth: by forcefully seizing other countries’ resources or by stimulating productive activities through commerce. The two types of social organization that Herbert Spencer wrote about correspond to these two ways. At the end of the fifteenth century, as Muscovy was emancipating from Mongolian custody, a type of social organization and culture began to take shape in Europe that was the opposite of the militaristic one. The free urban environment that had evolved as a result of cities’ long struggle against feudal barons contributed to the emergence of professional merchants, who achieved the right to trade their goods at prices that were not prescribed but voluntarily agreed on between sellers and buyers.11 Institutions emerged that served such activities, namely, systems for the legal protection of contracts, property rights and insurance of risks, the system of banking that used promissory notes, and so on.12 The existence of such institutions contributed to the emergence of a new morality, authorized by religion; these presupposed trust between business partners who were not kin to one another.13 It is this urban way of life that the emergent absolutism fell back on in its struggle against feudal barons: cities grew richer and became the most important source of tax revenues, weakening the financial dependence of monarchs on feudal lords and their military services, the nature of which no longer met the challenges of the time. As we know, there were merchants in Muscovy, too. But they did not create and could not create a socio-cultural way of life of their own. The Marquis de 11 12 13

Nathan Rozenberg, L. E. Birdtsell, How the West Became Rich. The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (Kak Zapad stal bogatym. Ekonomicheskoe preobrazovanie industrial’nogo mira) (Novosibirsk 1995), 83–85. Kak Zapad stal bogatym, 122–29. Kak Zapad stal bogatym, 130–32.

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Custine, who visited Russia in the nineteenth century under Nicholas i, noted, firstly, that they were so few in number that they carried no weight in government.14 A few decades later, as the first joint-stock companies were established in Russia, Russian merchants showed no willingness to join them, preferring traditional family business instead.15 Business trust between people who were not related to each other did not appear in Russia even centuries after it became part of legal and moral norms in European culture. In Russia, unlike Europe, merchantry (kupechestvo) did not originate from the self-governing urban environment. Such an environment would have been foreign and anti-systemic for the emerging militarist state, and, therefore, it was suppressed wherever it had existed during the previous era, as evidenced by the fate of Novgorod. Russian merchants acted independently in terms of their business activities only to the extent that this was compatible with complete dependence on the sovereign. The aforementioned European legal institutions and commerce technologies were out of the question in Muscovy. It is true, the position of merchants changed in the era of post-Petrine demilitarization. It became more stable and secure, but in fact that was loose-leash walking at best. Anyway, the merchantry in Russia never became such a source of increase in the country’s wealth as it did in the West. Nor did the merchants become a social and cultural actor capable of proposing and implementing alternatives either to the Russian type of militarization or the Russian type of demilitarization. Despite their charitable activities on a large scale,16 their social status remained low in comparison with that of the nobility and civil servants, and so did the prestige of their trade.17 Nor did they have any points of contact with the popular culture shared by the peasant majority of the population. On the eve of the first State Duma election, Russian businessmen established several political parties, but this attempt to gain agency completely failed. 14 15 16 17

Marquis de Custine, Letters from Russia (London 1991), 239. The History of Entrepreneurship in Russia (Istoriia predprinimatel’stva v Rossii) vol. 2. (Moscow 2000), 228–31. Iosif M. Kulisher, The History of the Russian National Economy (Istoriia russkogo narodnogo khoziaistva) (Cheliabinsk 2004), 123. See Pavel.A. Buryshkin, Mercantile Moscow (Moskva kupecheskaia) (Moscow 1990). For a more detailed account, see Boris Mironov, The Social History of Russia of the Imperial Period From the Eighteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Genesis of the Individual, the Democratic Family, Civil Society and State Functioning in Accordance with Constitutional Law (Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (xviii-nachalo xx vv.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva), vol. 2. (St. Petersburg 2000), 317 f., 324.

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Nevertheless, within the limits of the goals set by the country’s rulers, the Russian way of militarizing the state and society cannot be regarded as unsuccessful. Unlike, say, the Mongol and the Byzantine empires, Russia did break into modernity, and in contrast to the Ottoman Empire, which also managed to enter it, Russia got a toehold in it for good. It pioneered two unprecedented and militaristic technological modernizations, the Petrine and the Stalinist, and the second of these resulted in the acquisition of superpower status. This was possible because in the cultural code of the majority of the Russian population, force dominated over faith and law. In this respect, the Bolsheviks’ new Muscovy did not differ much from that of the Rurikids. But it is also true that after entering the cycle of post-Stalin demilitarization, the Soviet superpower collapsed, becoming the first continental empire to collapse in peacetime. Today we see how post-Soviet statehood has gotten stuck in this cycle, just as pre-Soviet statehood once got stuck in its own demilitarization cycle. Back then, it was the Bolsheviks, who brought Russia out of this state and into a new militarization. Today, the country seems to be facing a problem that it has never previously faced. 3

A Crisis of Development or a Crisis of Decline?

Why are Russia’s demilitarizations accompanied by crisis phenomena leading to the disintegration of the state? I think the reason is that they reveal a chronic disease of Russian statehood. The disease is that this state in all its historical forms is not so much an expression of a common interest that consolidates the interests of individuals and groups, but rather one that compensates for the underdevelopment of this concept of common interest in the culture. How could this concept have evolved in post-Petrine Russia? Given the openly hostile attitude of the population toward state institutions and the elites associated with them, which is testified to by Russian proverbs and sayings, and given the fact that the peasant majority lived a secluded life in local rural worlds, the concept of common interest simply had no chance. Hence, the deeper the demilitarization, the more social and cultural disintegration it generated and was felt in society. The intransigence and poor planning in verbal battles today are very similar to discussions in Russia after the abolition of serfdom and other reforms of Alexander ii. Just as almost all political and intellectual elites consolidated during the Second Chechen War, the Five Day War against Georgia, and then in approving Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the elites of the Alexander ii era consolidated in support of the Russian-Turkish war in the Balkans that was seen as

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the only way out of a situation perceived as spiritual degradation. Dostoyevsky wrote, “We also need this war for ourselves; we rise up not only for our ‘brother Slavs’ who have been suffering at the hands of the Turks but for our own salvation as well: war will clear the air we breathe and in which we have been suffocating, helplessly decaying within our narrow spiritual horizons.”18 But the consolidating effect of war—even a victorious one—during a demilitarization cycle can only be temporary, as shown by the war in the Balkans in the distant past as well as by the wars in Chechnya and in Georgia that took place before our eyes, by the annexation of Crimea, and by the military actions in Donbas and Syria. Sustainable consolidation of the state and society—one that would imply the military type of social organization being transformed into an economic or “industrial” one, to use Spencer’s terminology, cannot be ensured in this way. For economic consolidation, which is voluntary and contractual, can only take place if a non-military concept of common interest and the corresponding value matrix exist in the nation’s culture. If a culture does not have such a matrix, it finds itself in a crisis. The state seeks to overcome this deadlock by an alternative militarization, that is the forceful suppression of all those who are associated with its statehood. In the early twentieth century, the political embodiment of such a response was the paramilitary Bolshevik party seizing power in Russia. This party, in turn, was destined to undergo a demilitarization of its own. As a result, the military concept of common interest was once again eroded, and the population began to atomize rapidly, turning into a mechanical totality of individuals and families who were motivated only by their private consumer interests. A peculiar historical and cultural type of person—a “private” person in a land without private property—emerged in Russia that was industrialized and urbanized by the Bolsheviks. It quickly became dominant in the elites as well as in the population at large, but it lacked any motivation for technological modernization, needed by the ussr as it faced an increasing gap between its own development and that of developed countries. The communist system had nothing by way of a response to this challenge, so the Soviet leadership was forced to initiate “perestroika,” whose essence, according to the plan, was to release the energy of the “private” person from the constraints of a totally nationalized economy and thus to reintroduce this private person to the notion of common interest. In fact, this meant admitting that it was impossible to provide the necessary modernization by force, and that it was impossible to use the Petrine-Stalinist method of modernizing 18

Kenneth A. Lantz, A Writer’s Diary by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Northwestern U P, 1993–1994), 930.

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Russia. But the refusal to use force brought down the Soviet empire. This exposed the lack of self-sufficiency of Soviet identity and the communist faith, which was barely rooted in Russian culture. It also exposed the weakness of the order-making potential of “socialist legality.” It turned out that the Soviet “private” person, who had been freed from the dictates of state power, was not willing to become a voluntary bearer of common interest. This notwithstanding, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian reformers of the 1990s too placed a bet on this Soviet private person, giving him the right to property. But only a few were able to exercise this right. Those were people who, never claiming to be acting as agents of common interest, sought to privatize not just state property but also the very state which was supposed to function as such an agent. That was the cultural product of the decay of Soviet mentality; on its ruins had grown the post-Soviet quasi-society that was not consolidated either by force, or by faith, or by law. Nor was this quasi-society consolidated by the First Chechen War, which ended in failure, nor by a new “national idea,” which was never invented. Such quasi-social organization could not but cause a mass demand for “order,” the image of which the authorities began to compose from the shards of traditional militaristic culture actualized anew by the invasion of Chechen militants in Dagestan and by the bomb attacks on apartment blocks in Moscow and other cities of Russia. The Second Chechen War, which was more successful than the first, consolidated the majority of the population around the new president, Vladimir Putin, allowing him to personify the idea of forceful order, appealing to the inertia of the militaristic tradition. Initially he asserted and supported this image by flying military jets, visiting battleships and submarines—each time wearing the appropriate uniforms—and by using rhetoric calling for “raising-Russia-fromits-knees.” He has been supporting this image with loud annual celebrations of victory over Nazism and by recent declarations of Russia’s military might. But all this could resonate with the public only as long as there was an ample influx of petrodollars making it possible for the government to keep in touch with atomized private interests. This does not lead the country out of its quasi-social organization that manifests itself in weak productive motivation and in a lack of an innovation-friendly environment. Instead, this policy contributes to conservation of this quasi-social organization, a product of post-Stalinist demilitarization that has been and is still being carried out in the absence of a plan designed to transform the crumbling military social organization into a voluntary contractual one. I describe this social organization as a “quasi” one because under it, the notion of common interest does not take shape; instead it is increasingly blurred. Accordingly, as long as this quasi-social organization is conserved in Russia, the nation’s modernization cannot be but a “quasi” one.

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Thus, the post-Stalinist demilitarization that turned out to be a source of unsolvable problems for late Soviet leaders remains the same for post-Soviet ones as well. The reason is not only the unprecedented selfishness of these rulers and the elite groups they rely on—both seeking to serve the common interest residually. The ruling groups feel quite comfortable stuck in an incomplete demilitarization, and this also has roots in culture. Both the elite and the grassroots culture outlived the demand for a militaristic alternative to dead-end demilitarization. Such an alternative was fostered back in the day by the cultural activities of almost the entire old Russian intelligentsia, that used to disparage private “bourgeois” interest from the standpoint of Orthodox sobornost’ or revolutionary heroism.19 But this pathos dried up already in the Soviet era, partly because it was assimilated by official communist propaganda. It does not look as though it has been revived now: public calls for sacrifice do sound sometimes, but they do not return to the intelligentsia’s mentality, let alone to the mindset of the masses. All of this testifies to the fundamental novelty of the current situation in the context of Russia’s entire history. It is this novelty that makes it possible for us to understand the militaristic cultural foundations of the Russian state and social system, since the essence of things reveals itself only when they end. To understand what was wrong with Russia, we need to break through a dense veil of myths by means of which this culture concealed its foundations. Furthermore, it concealed the weakness of its own consolidating potential in peacetime and compensated for it by cultivating a constant premonition of war and by the cult of military victories and war-winning heroes. In other words, what this culture concealed and compensated for was its own alienness to the culture of the voluntary contractual type of social organization, and to the ideas of organic innovation as well as to the intrinsic value of human life and welfare. It still opposes the discovery of these foundations, which is manifested in continuing to uphold Stalinist myths concerning Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Peter i, and Stalin himself. But in the absence of a demand for new militarization, such rudimentary myths are just a reaction of a “private” person’s historical memory to the crisis of the state and society. To the lack of a new, non-military concept of common interest as a changeable resultant of individual and group interests, people react by nostalgically recalling the old military incarnations of common interest. It is similar to the nostalgia people feel for Soviet congregative living facilities even if they do not want to return to communal apartments. That, too, was a reaction to the discomfort of 19

Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik, The History of Russian Social Thought (Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli) 3 vols. (Moscow 1997).

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post-militarist atomization and to the beginning of a shadow commercialization of interpersonal relations. Summing up, the crisis Russia is going through now is a crisis of cultural foundations of the militaristic type of state. The possibilities of their renewal are exhausted, and the foundations for alternative state and society types have not yet been created. Russia has gotten stuck in a state of demilitarization that can be maintained by an artificial combination of force, faith, and simulated legality that allows the rulers to monopolize power, but it cannot be transformed into the rule of law. The present crisis is not one of development, but one of systemic decline. It is being covered by the authorities’ rhetoric of modernization, which, by inertia, takes the form either of a battle-cry, such as “Russia, go ahead!” or of the Soviet-style mobilizing idea of a breakthrough to technological and economic records. But the culture that was responsive to such war cries has already faded away. Today it no longer responds to them; instead it lives out its days recalling the glorious militaristic past as a reaction to the erosion of the image of the future within itself. A way out of this crisis can only be a way to a new systemic quality, a legal one. And I am not sure if such a modernist quality is achievable in the postmodern era, especially in a multicultural and multi-confessional country. I do not know what territorial boundaries such a project would require for implementation, nor what the price of implementation would be. But international experience shows that the longer the current quasi-social organization lasts, the higher the price of transition will be. Moreover, experience of Russian history and its demilitarization cycles testify to the fact that there can be no sustainable state between the command-based social organization and the lawbased one. Works Cited Akhiezer, Aleksandr. Russia: Critique of Historical Experience (Rossiia: Kritika istoricheskogo opyta). Novosibirsk, 1997. Akhiezer, Aleksandr, Igor’ Kliamkin and Igor’ Iakovenko. The History of Russia: The End or New Beginning (Istoriia Rossii: konets ili novoe nachalo?) 3rd ed. Moscow, 2013. Alekseev, Nikolai. The Russian People and Government (Russkii narod i gosudarstvo). Moscow, 2000. Buryshkin, Pavel. Mercantile Moscow (Moskva kupecheskaia). Moscow, 1990. Custine, Marquis Astolphe de. Letters from Russia. Penguin Books, 1991.

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Grushkin, Aleksandr. Journalism of the Petrine Period (Publitsistika petrovskoi epokhi), 1941. http://feb-web.ru/feb/irl/il0/il3/il320752.htm?cmd=p. A History of Entrepreneurship in Russia (Istoriia predprinimatel’stva v Rossii), vol. 2. Moscow, 2000. Iurganov, Andrei. Categories of Russian Medieval Culture (Kategorii russkoi srednevekovoi kul’tury). Moscow, 1998. Iurganov, Andrei. The Sources of Despotism in Knowledge is Power (“U istokov despotizma” in Znaniie—sila) 9 (1989). Ivanov-Razumnik, Razumnik. History of Russian Social Thought (Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli). 3 vols. Moscow, 1997. Kliamkin, Igor. Postmilitaristic Government in The Russian Government Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (“Postmilitaristskoe gosudarstvo” in Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo: vchera, segodnia, zavtra). Moscow, 2007. Kliuchevskii, Vasilii. The Trajectory of Russian History (Kurs russkoi istorii), part 2. Moscow, 1937. Kulisher, Iosif. The History of the Russian National Economy (Istoriia russkogo narodnogo khoziaistva). Cheliabinsk, 2004. Lantz, Kenneth A. A Writer’s Diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Northwestern UP, 1993–1994. Liuks, Leonid. The Third Rome? The Third Reich? The Third Path? Historical Essays on Russia, Germany and the West (Tretii Rim? Tretii reikh? Tretii put’? Istoricheskie ocherki o Rossii, Germanii i Zapade). Moscow, 2002. Mironov, Boris. The Social History of Russia of the Imperial Period From the Eighteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Genesis of the Individual, the Democratic Family, Civil Society and State Functioning in Accordance with Constitutional Law (Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (xviii-nachalo xx vv.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva). vol. 2. St Petersburg, 2000. Platonov, Sergei. Complete Course of Lectures on Russian History (Polnyi kurs lektsii po russkoi istorii). Rostov-na-Donu, 1999. Rozenberg, Nathan and L. Birdtsell. How the West Became Rich. The Economic Transformation of The Industrial World (Kak Zapad stal bogatym. Ekonomicheskoe preobrazovanie industrial’nogo mira). Novosibirsk, 1995. Soldatov, Pavel. The Russian National Code of Law in History and Historical Awareness (Russkii narodnyi sudebnik in Istoriia i istoricheskoe soznaniie). Moscow, 2012. Spencer, Herbert. The Man versus the State. London, 1902.

Vladimir Kutyrev Born in the region of Nizhny Novgorod in 1943, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kutyrev graduated in 1970 from Moscow State University. He is a Professor and Doctor of Science in philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was “The Interaction of General Scientific Methods in Social Cognition.” Working now at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod, Kutyrev has authored 18 monographs and more than 450 articles. In his works Kutyrev has developed the idea that the common cause of the modern civilizational crisis is the emergence of “posthuman reality” on Earth. In micro-, mega-, nano-, and virtual worlds, a person acts, but cannot live as an integral being. In the conditions of the Great Technological Revolution—the transmodern Era—the objective reality of a human being becomes Tradition. Such is the underlying cause of our ecological and anthropological crises, which are developing into the self-apocalypse of humanity. Technologism, globalism and intellectocratism—the contents of this selfdestructing process—erase human individuality. Their philosophical foundation is transcendental phenomenology and cognitivism. Hopes for immortality express abiotic tendencies in the development of humankind. In fact, it is evolving and has entered the stage of Degeneration—the twilight of the sexes— love—and Mortido—death drive—consuming oneself. In evidence of this is the cultivation of ideas about the genetic-technical “improvement” of the genus Homo in line with transhomonism, and then transnomonism, in which is manifest the folly of the “technical unconscious” seizing people. To preserve a traditional person as Homo vitae conscience sapiens, it is necessary to see the limits of the information-digital (re)construction of the world. Philosophers must be interpreters and navigators in the interaction of human and other worlds. Kutyrev’s works show the danger of reckless exploration of the cosmos and the excessively senseless computerization of life. They reveal the illusory nature of hopes for the noosphere and immortality, and the (anti) anthropological consequences of the transformation of spirit into mind, consciousness into thinking, and personality into the intelagent. In the coordinates of the history of thought, Kutyrev positions himself as a Goethean, Marxist and Heideggerian; in the Russian tradition, he is a follower of Konstantin Leontiev and Aleksei Losev. The positive program of his thought involves an orientation toward polyontism, substantial phenomenology, dynamic conservatism and archeo-avant-garde, estology and acmeology. Kutyrev

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is an anthropo-conservative, an exponent of “philosophy (for) people,” “philosophy with a human face”—a realistic, environmental and humanistic direction of modern thought. Despite currently prevailing post-human tendencies, people living today have no choice but to be optimistic, so most of Kutyrev’s theoretical speeches end with the emblematic call to action: “So, let’s carry on…”. Vladimir Kutyrev’s essay, “Filosofiia (dlia) liudei” (Philosophy for and by Humans), which appears in this anthology, was published in Russia in the journal, Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), no. 9 (2012), 86–97.

Philosophy for and by Humans Vladimir Kutyrev 1

Dynamic Conservatism and Archaeo-vanguard Consciousness1

Esto: There is nothing eternal in the world except the world itself. But this eternal world exists in dealing with temporality, the constantly appearing and disappearing of all its things and states. Any “something,” that is, everything, experiences the tension of two opposite energies: being itself (equal identity), when A = A, and being other (different), when A = B = C = …, that is, the transformation into something new, which, in turn, undergoes the same pressure between the up-hold-ing and an-nihil-ating poles. In the consciousness and actions of people, the first pole is represented by a conservative ideology, which is radically understood to be making efforts to hold things in their timeless inflexibility—extracted out of time: that is always other. The second pole follows the ideology of novationism, radically understood to mean striving to destroy the identity of things, their extraction out of selfsufficient being. Any specific thing or event exists if and as it copes with this ongoing pressure grounding its efforts in the real past and the as yet unknown basis of the future. The goal of a human as an “Intelligent Something” is to engage in what is going on, depending on the state of this or that pole. In traditional epochs, when the norm was to try to conserve; “conscientiously aware” people strove to separate from the standard, launching processes of renewal. Progress—the movement to something better, the peak of the being—was understood to embody the meaning of existence. Progress accompanied the birth and life of the Early Modern Period, the Age of Enlightenment, that is, Modernity, which can also truly be called “The Age of Progress.” The present, pregnant with this orientation toward the future, completed its term, and Progress was born. In spite of some periodic revolutionary bursts and “bounces,” the new in that epoch, resisting the present, sublated the existing, but did not destroy it. A genuinely new cultural value, according to Dmitrii Likhachev’s ontological understanding of the new, appears

1 This research was conducted with the financial assistance of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research under the scientific project №18-011-00335.

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in the old cultural environment. The new being new only in comparison with the old one, is as a child in comparison with the child’s parents. The new is just new.2 With this interpretation, progress coincides with “sustainable development” presupposing the conservation of the evolving system. Thus, in the case of a person, a human being changes throughout life, but within its genotype. In the case of a certain culture, it changes within the boundaries of its universals, in other words—its traditions. If the system is “objective reality” as a whole, then that is the frame containing all the ontologies of various “life worlds.” In contrast with Modernity, postmodern technological society is post progressive. This is an epoch of turning progress into progressivism, even transgression, when the new no longer correlates with the “existing” old, nor the future—with the past or the present. Ceasing to be re-newal, it rejects the existing as such, ripping off its connection with it. It turns into permanent innovationism, “continuous revolution,” when the new serves not to develop the system, but to deny it absolutely for the sake of synergistically self-organizing constructs, being invented and contrived “out of nothing.” Criticizing, the ideology of progress, which was often identified with progressivism, Nikolai Berdiaev specifically touched on this in his “Study on Progress”: “idolization of the future through the past and present” is “first of all absolutely false, unjustified either in terms of science or philosophy or morality.”3 He wrote this (fore)seeing the epoch of turning Modernity into Postmodernity, when the new became a value unto itself, not new for the sake of Something (for a human, the world or a system), but for something New per se. When, in contrast to Modernity, there is no present in postmodern self-ness: coming from the future, it has ended its “term,” and as for past reality, its history, there is none at all. There remains only retro-alternativism, making any “projected” past and “memory discourse” possible. The vector of history is replaced by the vector of futurology, only with the sign reversed. This is a “trans” paradigm, stepping over “human time” with a philosophy of (post)humans and the reformatting of their human consciousness by forces alien to them. Turning progress into transgress, that is when humans as subjects of processes turn into their factor and material, does not give them a chance to survive. In case progress turned into a phase of human deconstruction first as a subject, and then as an individual, we consider it a regression, degeneration. Human philosophy should seek the grounds to continue the existence of humanity, considering changed circumstances. It now seems expedient at the 2 Dmitrii S. Likhachev, Russian Notes (Zametki o russkom) (Moscow, 1984), 55. 3 Nikolai A. Berdiaev The Meaning of History (Smysl istorii) (Moscow. 1990), 145.

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worldview level that the concept of “traditional” progress as development with the preservation of that which is steadily evolving—can now be defined as dynamic conservatism. The steady progress of dynamic conservatism is the process of continuous movement and changes, directed “inside” and not “outside,” to conserve the equilibrium of the system. Like tightrope walkers, who move forward only by constantly adjusting their bodies in different directions with the aim of surviving due to these “alterations,” so humanity should standardize all changes and inventions according to its need to survive. Dynamic conservatism, or conservative dynamics, is a natural condition of the continued existence of any form unless and until it turns into something else, having been replaced by a philosophy of accelerating formation, whose basic idea is formless chaos as its end result. “For chaos,” said Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, “not only the absence of certainties is typical, but also the speed of their appearance and disappearance.”4 “Speed kills. Do not exceed the speed limit.” This warning on the billboards of the highway patrol may refer to all our civilization, but it does not heed it. Will it help that God has started to write out catastrophic fines? And so, it is continuously moving matter = reality = absolute idea = eternal returning = being—that is the single line of dynamic conservatism; or it is the ideology of appearance out of nothing = never-ending formation = potentialism = constructivism = temporariness—the other, a single line of universal movement as aimless transgress. The former leaves us room to be, whereas the latter floods and dissolves it. According to dynamic conservatism, the world has always been and is for the sake of existence, its separate “systems” being unique and irreplaceable. Any existing thing, according to Baruch Spinoza, strives to preserve its current form. A stone should remain a stone, a tiger should remain a tiger, and humans, accordingly, human, if they are in their right mind. Our being exists to strengthen and perfect our identity. Thus, if not suicidal, individual human beings act; thus, if not transhumanists (foreign/ists), human beings should act according to their inherited nature. It all depends on how aware humans are about their course of action and how much they are able when necessary to row against the tide, without being dragged under by it. In the epoch of Degeneration that is transmodernism, when through a human, technologies start self-developing technology, the

4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) (Moscow, 2009), 57 (in Russian).

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main reflexive abilities of people should be aimed at rowing and steering against the tide. Nevertheless, we will move somewhere forward, as individuals advance toward transformation into another being, but head as much as possible, in the opposite direction. If progress is unstoppable and death unavoidable, then there is no need to speed them both up. In cases of trans(pro)gress, humanity should conscientiously concentrate its sensible efforts on “steering” any one or both of them. The hardest part is to make the philosophy of dynamic conservatism clear to professional scientists, technocrats and philosophers of science as they are the bearers of this technological oceanic flow(od)—its optimally propitious material. This task is almost impossible. Nevertheless, advocating this conservative dynamic philosophy, one should row in any case. In addition to one’s own resources, one should still believe in and rely on the water: if it is deep, there are many different currents. Martin Heidegger, who is well known as the penetrating analyst of the source of refusing origins, appealed “to a return to the origins.” This is the ecological policy of restoring and rehabilitating the “reality that is slipping away” and all kinds of reinforcing the remaining foundations of its development (constants, genome, basis, traditions). Conservative-ecological approaches are not less necessary than nature to cultivate forms of social and religious life and other aspects of culture. Many people, especially liberal technocrats and techno-socialists are scared of it, the prospect of a “conservative revolution” is especially dangerous for them. Transhumanism in its programs declares itself to be its sworn enemy. The reason is that conservatives proclaim values, securing the continuation of life and strengthening its roots. And, on the contrary, progressivists are not scared by the cultivation of values that, not out of a lack of wealth, bring about not only spiritually but also demographically the end of the advanced part of civilization. The values of death, mortido, do not scare them for some reason; people have accepted them, praising them as the universal standard of the whole world, including the export of weapons. This perversion demonstrates the deepest, tragic involution of transgressive consciousness. The fault of conservative philosophy from the perspective of transgress is that it is directed to conserve the existing and is suspicious of the new. This is true, but it would be foolish to ignore everything new, retreating into blind defensive positions and total denial. In advanced technological science, the existing may yet find its justification and prove its necessity and right to exist. Technological science is novational, but not determinative, and not at all fatalistic. “Everything” is possible in it, all forms and projects. The ideas of bifurcation, pluralism, multiculturalism, communication, nonlinearity of processes,

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plurality of the worlds and reality levels, leave room for conservatism and give it a theoretical perspective, which, if based on them, may be considered as neoconservatism, that is, archaeo-vanguard philosophy. Archaeo-vanguard consciousness is not afraid of the new but evaluates it from the viewpoint of human perspectives. It is natural, as there are loads of novations, and their turning into in-novations happens for random, immediate political or economic reasons. The freedom of the scientific and technical mind can satisfy no one who is seeking to be sensible. If it is passed in an axiological and sensible way, the fight for the “present” of humans and their world stops being faith and desire: it becomes rooted in knowledge. Being against reducing the organic to the technical, the alive to the un-dead, and reasoning to calculation, neoconservative archaeo-vanguard consciousness is new in its own way: “forever new.” All that is necessary, talented and human is always new and at the same time old. A steady society, dynamic conservatism, and archaeo-vanguardism are the names for the three philosophical pillars of humanity’s survival as Homo vitae consapiens. 2

Acmeology and Estology

Resistance to transgress and transhumanism on the part of all the reck(st)less scientific “trans” ideology replaces the nature of things with the principle of going “over” from one to another. This crazy and feckless resistance is based upon nonprogressive understanding of being, which became marginal after the Modern period, but considering changes in current circumstances, humanity’s survival requires making it the center of life again. This means that instead of aimless and endless development, we must recognize the purpose in itself of each singularity, speaking in the modern vernacular. Just as the world as a whole exists in order to exist, so every singularity has an “aim in itself,” which consists of the most full realization of its own nature and its potential, of reaching its “acme”: thus acmeology might be the required doctrine of steadiness of the existing within its development. This requires preliminarily deconstructing postmodern ideas of the world and extracting, from beneath dominating forms the senses that have been overwhelmed by them, as in Jacques Derrida’s works. Pro(trans)gress has gone so far as to introduce a standard refusal to accept any essence things have— previously known as their nature, first replacing it, in reference to human beings, with the concept of identity, and then denying it altogether. The “identity

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critique” is spreading, clearing the field and “dissolving” human beings in the virtual world, transforming them from being individuals into “multi-viduals,” into conceptual characters. This is in the context of informationism. Spreading among geneticists in biotechnologies—not among the followers of John Locke, Lysenkoism and feminism—is the denial of the value of human features dependent on heredity. The place is being prepared for biotechnical manipulations of human features and “lego-construction” of monsters with any other (!) features.5 However, there is no point in touching upon the foreign-transhumanistic line again. Here we completely agree with Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama about the post-human future, but we do not agree that this future will belong to us. We agree with a certain pope, who after someone suggested changing the symbol of the Christian faith answered: “Either we will remain as we are, or we will not exist.” You do not need to lie at least to yourself about a state toward which everything (t)ends. If humans do not resist this movement, do not try to direct it, but develop other, more rewarding variants of the future. We understand acmeology not just as the mature state of personality, performing highly rated activity, but as focusing on exposing and eliminating all unique properties of this or that singularity. From the psychology of the individual, this concept is being transferred to generic humans and—more ­broadly—to the world as a whole. It is included in the paradigm for the worldview of neo-conservatism as the ideology of survival for the human race in the technogenic epoch. In support of this, in order to free the reader from the growing impression that the author is a high-handed provincial philosopher from provincial Russia, we will refer to the world’s authority: Any race is perfect as it is. The human race is perfect, and it resists any further perfection. It is bad but perfect: taken in its uniqueness, it is incredible. Of course, there is a problem: insisting on the races being perfect, we risk falling into creationism, according to which everything appears through the will of God, it is unchangeable, and so on. There is a real danger of returning to a mythological perception of things; however, the orientation to historical and mental evolutionism is not less dangerous…

5 See Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Picador, 2003) for an analysis of genetic engineering with detailed descriptions of the positions of libertarians and conservatives.

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It is necessary to keep the unique voice of each detail, each fragment, each race and to free them by the same from the oppression of their ultimate destiny!6 The world, especially a human being, is not fated to anything, even including, to the great regret of the technocrats, “(re)construction” and progress. Although, religious people, for example, live not for themselves, but “for God,” they strive to perfect themselves to save their souls, without turning into material for development. The ideal of all religions, in one way or another, is not movement forward; it is movement upward, spiritual transformation, resurrection, reincarnation, but not moving toward replacing humans with something else. Attempts to interpret the dwellers of celestial worlds, especially angels, as “real virtual creatures” and to promise a similar state to future people show to what pathological extent technicalization of the modern consciousness has reached.7 Human philosophy must withstand the temptation to make a heaven on Earth. In it will live only the dead. Neo-conservative acmeological consciousness concerns itself with earthly humans, without sublimating them to a new “computer heaven.” Here it coincides with canonic Christian ideas about humans in Western civilization, as in Eastern religions, and esoteric teachings about them—in addition to those in actually all traditional cultures. The Epoch of the Renaissance, humanism, and Marxist humanism considered their main aim the formation of many-sided, harmonious humans, who seek unlimited perfection in the continuum of their body and soul. On the whole, it was a failure, with insignificant short-term success within the conditions of state socialism. This shows what huge reserves humans alive today have for further development. It is truly nonsense to be afraid of the fact that generically genuine human beings are a “dead end” of progress, and that humans cannot be improved without “genetic design.” This idea is unconsciously or intentionally cultivated by some of the carriers of its “gene of death.” I saw this sign on the T-shirt of a young man riding the underground: “We have no alternative than to be perfect.” This could be one of the slogans of acmeological philosophy. But the sense of such expressions presupposes their being theoretically worked out. The context of aesthetic consciousness is the closest to acmeology if it is not narrowly defined as the usual doctrine of beauty, but ontologically. Within 6 Jean Baudrillard, Passwords (Mots de passe. D’un fragment l’autre), (Ekaterinburg. 2006), 100 (in Russian). 7 Refer to e.g.: Nikolai A. Nosov, J. Bohme’s Psychology of Angels (“Psichologiia angelov po J. Bohme”), Human Being (Chelovek), no. 6 (1994) P. 88–95 (in Russian).

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postmodern philosophy the idea of the aesthetic turn, the appearance of a special “metaphysical aesthetics” or “aestheticization of metaphysics” is spoken about more and more urgently. One can agree with this, taking into account, however, the duplicitous nature of this turn. On the one hand, it displays the irresponsible, playful attitude of trans(post)modernism to reality, its principal anti-ethical stand. This line is still the same, the self-denying one of humanity: cultivating the “game of mind,” without foreseeing the consequences. A sample model of this approach is found in computer games. On the other hand, if human beings are blamed as annoying factors everywhere, and the main task of technologies is to clear them out of everything—even from education and medicine, then why and where in the near future will they be needed? From the point of view of effectiveness and rationality, toward which, according to Jean Baudrillard, the “prosperous society of degrading individuals” is pointed, the subjects included in it become superfluous. Aesthetic ontology, in contrast to the ordinary and rational one, explains the foundations for humanity’s right of being “useless” in the totally technified society: use(less), “by right” of the existence of any forms and singularities as they are. Changing the orientation to events, aestheticism suggests evaluating them not from the point of effectiveness, but from the point of “such-ness,” the quality of a “gift,” like being in general. We are once again convinced of Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophetic rightness that the world and a human being can only be explained and have sense as an esthetic phenomenon. Emphasizing the selfvalue of any form of being, aestheticizing the vital activities of humans in a metaphysical sense leaves for them a niche in the face of the threat of their completion by all types of machines; however, the fact remains: “A cat does not stop catching mice even after a mousetrap has been invented.” But it needs to get such an opportunity, building an adequate world model, first through ideas, and then in theory, and finally, if it is lucky, and it makes an effort, it will be able practically to live in it. Ontologic aestheticism accepts this model, and in this case, we can speak of the appearance of aesthetic ontology or “estology.” Estology is a doctrine in which the general philosophical sense of aesthetics, its transformation into fundamental metaphysical ontology combined with acmeology, is expressed. Acmeology is a part of estology, its highest level. Together they are the ground and sample of perfect being of each thing, overcoming the absurd perpetuum mobile of useless rational evolutionism. Est(acme)ology is a part of dynamic archaeo-vanguard conservatism. Interacting with it, the playful anti-ethical and irresponsible understanding of aestheticism, cultivated in the consumer society, can be neutralized—certainly, in case of the further conceptual development and introduction of schools of the aforementioned worldview, and also, of course, if the cat continues catching

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mice. Dynamic conservatism, archaeo-vanguardism, acmeology and estology are the four walls of a philosophical house, in which those thinking they are humans can fight for survival even when trapped by zombies, humanoids and transhumans. To stay on the ground, this house needs solid foundation. 3

Coevolution and Polyontism

It takes much time to build this house: to begin with, it even makes sense to invite tenders of the projects for it. However, the main thing here is not to make a mistake. The most trustworthy theoretical model of Being—in scientific ­reduction––matter, the Universe, since the second half of the twentieth century has been universal evolutionism, whose methodological kernel is synergetics. All the natural sciences are based on it, from micro- and astrophysics to chemistry and biosemiotics. In it we have seen, the attribute of being does not change or “move.” It is development. All other possible states are deprived of an independent status and look like a variation of the formation, whose origin has been admitted to be nothing, chaos, emptiness and also self-organization, arrangement of … time itself : time precedes being, wrote Ilia Prigozhin on Moscow State University’s wall of honored guests. As for the being-genetic aspect of universal evolutionism, it is absolute novationism or Self-organization, a creative act directed by someone, aimed at, for example, in the evolutionism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “the omega point”—in fact, God—or the living God of religious people (without the coding character), Supreme Intelligence (the god of rationalists), or simply evil infinity. In any case, the development starts or finishes either in any fixed subject, which is eternal, or is in the chaos of infinity. However, infinity, being aimless, makes any turns, transformations or returns possible. This invalidates unidirectional “scientific development.” That does not exist. The idea—not a reductionist’s one—of development is anti-scientific as it is. It is not surprising that in physics there continue to exist other models of the Universe: stationary, pulsing, “imploding,” “matrix” and so forth. Each of them has its own theoretical and empirical explanation, arguments for and against, and they often seem to have the same impact. We are not to judge which of the physicists is right. However, philosophy cannot work without being connected to a bigger theory. When it is found, it is important to remember that science is based on our lifeworld, especially its social and cultural aspect. And besides, that technoscience influences it. The final argument in the choice is the interests of humanity. From this point of view, under current conditions evolutionism cannot be a philosophy for humans or their survival. Universal evolutionism is the

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most general expression of the ideology of linear progress, but when for society it crosses the line and extends to the world as a whole, the result is that all the forms of the existing are thought of as a precondition of some other form, that is accepted as the highest or over time—the ultimate or last form. The reason for this universalization is the rapid growth of the role of the artificial in our reality, through whose lens everything is evaluated. The artificial is invented, projected, “created”; the rest of the world is also invented including its past and present. There is no place in the artificial world for a born-mortal human or anything natural, nor for one that has been extremely well-conceived and not processed because human beings and nature are not the last and highest states of being. The last and the highest ones are modern technological achievements, on which humans are working to “improve and make perfect.” Universal evolutionism is the basis of foreign-ism and transhumanism, aimless novational-technological transgress, that is carrying away the human race with it. The philosophy of conserving any existing thing must arise from the idea that being in general lacks any supreme goal, that it is reality, whose separate parts—singularities, “systems,” and levels interact with one another. This is the idea of coevolution. As the attribute of being, it allows the simultaneous diversity of its forms and conditions. In contrast to the ideology of convergence and progressivism, where one system is denied by another, coevolution means their mutual development within some interacting whole. They are part(prison) ners. This dynamic is internally dispersed substantively, and it is the originally heterogenic state of the universally coevolving whole. Its components are connected with each other not by substance, but only by the unity of this or that function, their place in the structure/network of existence. There is no outer environment for it. It is transformed into a means of interaction of the included components. Such an approach allows taking into account the specifics of the simultaneous (co)existence and support of the selves of the natural and artificial, of the living and dead, of a human and of other beings. Coevolution is a neo-conservative “model” or “scheme” of the Universe, accepting the self-value of all its forms of being, in accordance with their essential nature. Coevolution is a model of “communicative ontology.” It is certainly philosophical and theoretical, but not more than many other models proposed by physicists and supported by mathematical calculation. These calculations usually lead to some substantial and sensible idea, or conception of worldview. There is no outer aim for the communicating coevolving world: it is contained “in itself.” The same goes for the individual worlds, directed to the Other, which, in turn, works for their being-ness. It means that we can refer to vzaimo-so(vo)kupno-deistvii—the joint collective interaction of its separate worlds of life

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and worlds of mind—without their reduction to only any one of them. Foremost is not permitting the replacement of a human’s qualitative reality with the informational and computer one, of humanism with transhumanism, and of experience of Being with its technogenic modeling. In numerous discussions about the nature of the existing and the Universe, the idea of coevolution as ontological communication breaks with its prevailing “Aristotelean,” hierarchical theory of only one world: it is based on the conceptual model of the plurality of worlds. It is polyontic and multiversalist. The expert in this issue, Vladimir Vizgin, showed that this is the school of atomism of Nicholas of Cuza, Giordano Bruno, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Retelling Bruno’s principal idea, he stated that “nature does not only connect things,” it “also carefully separates them, and it means that separation, plurality and diversity are valuable as they are, for the real unity is alive only thanks to non-unified diversity.”8 This line of thought was marginal in the history of ideas and served as one of the reasons Bruno was burnt at the stake. However, our thoughts apparently must move in this direction because of the crisis caused by postmodern denial of the world and humans in it. To be more precise, we need to search for a way out of the current suicidal situation. If “the return to Plato” is impossible, then the escape must come through another human-saving paradigm of modeling reality: creating a “positive post-modernism.” The completion of this task in some form was worked out by its “last Mohicans,” the more aptly expressed “after-postmodernists.” One of their leaders, Jean-Luc Nancy, instead of (after) postmodern experiments in the deconstruction of metaphysics, started reconstructing it anew, connecting it with the idea of the plurality of worlds. Nancy states in his project’s original thesis, that existence exists in plural, singularly plural. Therefore, the formal fundamental requirement might be as follows: even an assumption that being is just singular cannot be put forward. Its singleness is plural in its own being. It means not only that being-with-each-other cannot be understood through the proposition about united being, but also that on the contrary, it is united being—being as it is, absolute being, or ens realissimum—that must be understood concerning being-with-each-other.9 8 Vladimir P. Vizgin, The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds (Ideia mnozhestvennosti mirov) (Moscow, 1988), 183 (in Russian). 9 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Être singulier pluriel), (Minsk. 2004), 95. (The italics are Nancy’s.) The same motives are found in Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Deleuze) (Moscow, 2004) (in Russian).

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Agreeing with such an approach, we cannot rely on it completely, that is, proceeding only from being. The nature of postmodernism is that the polyontism in it is reduced to “digital ontology,” virtualistics, and that mathema and its “empty sets” are declared the truth of being. Nancy’s project in its further development, strikingly reminds one of a mold, that is molding the interaction of agents (Plurality), with the universal communicative-informational Network (The Unity). The followers of postmodernism cannot free themselves from captivity in informativeness and cognitivism, for it is already difficult for them to imagine that there is something beyond language, knowledge, text, outside of their grammati(logi)cal spider web. How scary it is to tear oneself away from the ever more numerous screens and simulacra surrounding us more and more tightly, threatening to immure us in an artificial world. We think that the idea of communication of many worlds must be developed in a being-physical and anthropological plan, in the vein of substance-communicative ontology and sensible value-based approach, but not (only) through cognitive modeling. As for each particular world, it is oriented to an opportunity of interaction and dialog with it, proceeding as Mikhail Bakhtin, the ideologist of universal dialogism, has written that “nothing final has happened in the world yet, the last word of the world has not been said, the world is open and free, everything is ahead and will always be ahead.”10 The concept of communicative polyontism is Unity in plurality, Co-being, but in terms of the interactions and nature of the worlds that they contain, questions remain open for discussion at different levels of knowledge. One question concerns the endlessly relevant or potential pluralities; or when endless plurality is understood as potential, and unity as relevant, set by the subject, for example, in postulating “life worlds” in phenomenology. Other questions concern the interaction of unity and plurality through the principle of continuity, holography—all-in-one, one-in-all; or about models of the synergistic existence of worlds “unmerged and undivided,” like the Trinity, though not limited by the basic minimum of binary logics, being “unmerged and undivided” in the plurality of worlds. Other such scientific and theoretical models also exist, especially at the level of the quantum world, In this discussion, it does not follow that philosophy should pretend in any way to be a qualified expert, for philosophy reflects in an evaluating and estimating manner on the principles and general movement of thought, the so-called Zeitgeist. What we try to do is this, giving preference to the polyontic paradigm as the most adequate starting point for reasoning: the right of a “­ traditional” human to survive. 10

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo) 4th ed. (Moscow, 1979), 193.

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As for the question of Genesis, [we hold] that it corresponds not to ­creationism as the appearance out of nothing, but to the principle of the phenomenological manifestation of the endlessly eternal. A hope-giving, co-­evolutionalcommunicative-polyontic-aesthetic edition of the Book of Genesis would say: “In the beginning was Everything, and Everything was with God, and Everything was God.” 4

Phenomenological Understanding of Philosophy

“The theory is gray, my friend, but the tree of life is green forever,” said Goethe’s Faust. Phenomenologically reinterpreting philosophy, [we know that] it did not occur to him that the tree of life could wither as people started digging under its roots, as the hog under the oak tree in a famous fable, cutting its branches and picking its leaves. The image of a human sawing off the bough on which he or she is sitting is usually associated with nature. It is some kind of emblematic metaphor for humanity’s ecological reck(st)lessness. Now it is time to use it as an expression of the general attitude of human beings to their own being, the symbol of the degradation of their life. As we see the world around and feel who is capable and in their right mind, our corporal, inner natures experience (sup)pressure not less than our outer one; spirituality and culture are being displaced by technologies; direct, even sexual, relationships to one another, by virtual communication, and so on. Globally, the consumer civilization is in love with death—in everything lifeless, unnatural, and pathological. Its avant-garde is hopelessly in love with it—whatever the destiny of those left behind. Paralleling humanity’s success in transforming the natural into the artificial, metaphysics, developed in the same direction, brought forth post/transmodern philosophy, its trans(de)formation into (de)constructivism, nonreflexive grammatology and cognitivism. This is a unified process of Evolution, the peak of which was the break, bifurcation for the further evolution of technics and (d)evolution of a human. It is sufficient to remember Martin Heidegger’s statement: “The atomic bomb exploded in the works of Parmenides,” and the attitude deeply connected with it is that ontology now can only be phenomenology, but not transcendental phenomenology, which had become the highest point in the flight of human thinking away from “naturalism,” that is, all that is natural and living—not with the great speculative-­ philosophical foresight of this informational-communicative epoch. The ideal of “strict science” of the early Edmund Husserl, the forerunner of all “scientific philosophers” and mathematicians, dreaming of their transition to meaningless formal thinking, from logos to mathesis is fulfilled in the form of the

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“Computational Universe.” This is the ideal of artificial intelligence and cognitivism, on the basis of which appears the world of the Other. Human philosophy can exist and should expand in spite of it. And it should not be transcendental, cognitive-scientific, but realistic phenomenology, which for greater consistency, without discussing the differences, we will call phenomenological realism. Transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological realism are united in that they are both born from the image of the world as “a thing-for-us.” They both refuse to separate the reality of subjects and objects, divide it into the essence and phenomenon, and at some point, into the truth and lie. This is a general principle, distinguishing any phenomenological thought from a metaphysical one. But the “major question” of philosophy arises. What is the existing? Is it a Priori Consciousness, in which being is represented as its state—“intentionality,” directionality—or substantial Being, in which consciousness represents a state—the “glimpse of being”? This opposition, as it is known, was described by Husserl, who having refused to consider Heidegger as a follower, characterized the self-declared phenomenologists, Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, as his “antipodes.” In fact, neither Heidegger with his Dasein, nor Scheler with his Ordo amouri—the order of feelings and passions—nor Hartmann with his levels of being, and even Husserl himself with his “lifeworld” cannot be called transcendentalists. They are realists, but still phenomenological ones, not separating subject-ness and consciousness from reality, but in some way integrating them into it. They are immanentists, but objective ones, not limiting human nature to itself, but in some way integrating it into the nature of the world. This immanentism separates phenomenological realism from an epistemological one and materialism, including their advanced version—the dialectical-historical one. It does not belong to “human philosophy” in our opinion, not because of joining miserable anti-Marxist views, but because it is scientific and progressive; therefore, as the ideology of modernism it does not make an effort to preserve human identity and a suitable environment for human beings. The transcendentalist and constructivist philosophy of science, demonstrating the formation of informational and artificial reality, is also not concerned with that. Human philosophy should explain the world, where humans can live. This is the philosophy of a sphere of being for humanity, although knowing and verifying that our world is not the only one in the Universe: the philosophy of our realization of possible worlds is philosophy of phenomenological substantionalism! Reductionism was a splendid way to deny being. It is a principle of fighting against everything, all that a cognizant human has ever seen, heard, or taken in with his senses. All of this was called “minor properties,” that is, simulacrum,

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illusion. After the discovery of a microworld, even major properties became illusionary: configuration, size, weight and other objective ones. “Solid state physics” changed its name for “physics of condensed conditions,” because “in fact,” there are no things or states anymore. There are only flows of energy and their power: “strings,” “wave functions,” and “neutron creation.” Or “space has only curls and twists.” Our whole microworld and humans themselves are simulacrum and maya. They make theories, expressing their illusions on their own illusiveness. However, the microworld, strings, waves and space are still too existential. “In fact,” there is nothing except time. And time is a non-being in space: the principle of disappearance, an-nihil-ation. Nothing exists. There is = there is not. This is a suicidal paradox of the systematic reductionist attitude toward the world: the deadly truth of science as a manifestation of the apocalypse in learning. Toward a similar end, science “broke through” from the other non-physical end of a theoretical tunnel, through computer science and work in ai, directly relying on quantitative and digital methods. Being the conceptual expression of the information revolution, postmodernism, as its predecessor—transcendentalism, argued not by accident against not only sensuousness (onto-phono-phallocentrism), but also logo(s)centrism, advocating logo-tomy. Logos, sensible thinking, consciousness and living language are called “the minor properties,” illusion. Being feelings, they deceive us. The truth is allegedly given to us by omnipotent mathematical, computational thinking that is not conditioned by any references external to it. In its further development this cognitive, “nonsense(ible) thinking” is automatized, turning into post-anthropologic Artificial Intelligence (ai), which, operating without reflection, becomes a new reality, created by zombies. So, following the progress of science we, instead of our world, get 1 (one), and in a better case—nothing (0, emptiness), from which machine and technical thinking, leave behind used up humans—first their feeling bodies and then their conscious heads, like the discarded stages of a rocket. ai creates and constructs the “computing Universe.” For phenomenology it is important in principle to distinguish worlds of life and “science.” Physicists do not do that, and philosophers of science do not help them because they are not phenomenological thinkers. So, there appears, at first sight, a trend close to humanism, the trend toward the “anthropic principle,” which says that if our universe had other parameters, there would be no humans. It is certainly true. Nevertheless, there is a conclusion that everything existing was created for and adjusted to humans, not vice versa—not for a ­nano-particle in an unimaginable infinity of light and dark matter. A part explains the whole; the cause produces the effect. Infinity turns out to have (have had) an aim. A reason for such an odd inference, in comparison to which the

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idea of the creation of the world by the desire of humanity’s grandfather, God, is the highest point of common sense: this is not separating the world of phenomena from the world of scientific objects. The world of phenomena is the (life-) world of humanity, being mutually created, including subject and object and based on Umwelt as an environment of possible human’s habitation.11 It is really conditioned by the subject. In the case of the anthropic principle­—by a human. But then it is value-based anthropocentrism. And value-based anthropocentrism is humanism. Polyontical, substantial-­phenomenological and axiological understanding of being gives humanism not pseudo-scientific but a worldview rooted-in-life sense. On the one hand, the simplified idea of definitive dependence of a human on the environment is canceled, but on the other hand, it does not allow him arbitrarily to construct objective space worlds, analogously to computer games in virtual reality. Calling all the living—this is a slogan of the program of conservative, archaeo­vanguard, polyontical, geocentrical, estological, acmeological, substantial-­ phenomenological, realistic, axiological, humanist philosophy before the fact of the aggression of technically reborn forms of consciousness. It is an appeal to humaneness, which any Homo vitae sapiens, even a transhumanist, functionarist or intellagent, has. This is truly the existential philosophy—of people and for people. It is close to the goals of great religions, calling not for physically transforming human beings, but for spiritually and morally uplifting them. It coincides with perennial philosophy and may be a prerequisite for the eternal existence of humanity. This is our philosophy of how to resist the self-apocalypse of humanity! Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Deleuze). Moscow, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo). Moscow, 1979. Baudrillard, Jean. Passwords (Mots de passe. D’un fragment l’autre). Ekaterinburg, 2006. 11

The concept of the unity of an organism and its environment, their functional circle, creating Umwelt, first entered the history of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century due to Jakob von Uexkull, a zoo-biologist. In German philosophy, Max Scheler, the “late” Edmund Husserl and others developed a similar idea concerning a human, but they reduced it to Lebenswelt, specifically in existential philosophy. Generally speaking, the scientific idea of the functional circle of an organism and its environment is supported by the recognition of the special systems of autopoiesis proposed by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.

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Berdiaev, Nikolai A. The Meaning of History (Smysl istorii). Moscow, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? (What Is Philosophy?). Moscow: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2009. Fukuyama, Yoshihiro Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Repr. Picador, 2003. Likhachev, Dmitrii S. Russian Notes (Zametki o russkom). Moscow, 1984. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural (Être singulier pluriel). Minsk, 2004. Nosov, Nikolai A.J. Bohme’s Psychology of Angels (“Psichologiia angelov po J. Bohme”) in Human Being (Chelovek), no. 6 (1994): 88–95. Vizgin, Vladimir P. The Idea of a Purality of Worlds (Ideia mnozhestvennosti mirov). Moscow, 1988.

Boris Markov Born on July 1, 1946, Boris Vasilievich Markov studied philosophy from 1966 to 1971 at Leningrad State University (currently, St. Petersburg State University). From 1971 to 1974, he completed his graduate studies and defended his thesis for the Candidate of Science degree in philosophy; in 1986, he completed his doctoral dissertation. He has worked at St. Petersburg State University since 1974: first, in the capacity of an Instructor, then as an Associate Professor. Since 1989, Markov has held the position of a Full Professor. From 1989 to 1994, he chaired the Department of Ontology and Epistemology, and from 1994 to 2014 he served as the Head of the Department of Philosophical Anthropology. At present, he is a Professor at the Institute for Philosophy. In his thesis, Markov discussed the issue of the verification of scientific hypotheses, and he dealt with the problem of substantiating theoretical knowledge in his doctoral dissertation. In the 1990s, he undertook the study of the analytics of emotional consciousness, a decision that conditioned “the anthropological turn” in the evolution of his research. The singularity of his doctrine, which was being formulated in the conditions of “the death of Man,” i.e. the inflation of the traditional image of the human, consisted in the analytics of conventional routine life; in the account of the impact that social and cultural spaces have on the burgeoning of human qualities. In the footsteps of “the media turn,” Markov initiated research on the visual and other, non-­intelligible, practices of human education. Owing to his prior experience in the field of language analysis, in his book The Signs of Being (Znaki bytiia) (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2002), Markov shed light onto the cultural and educational potential of books and reading, proving that the latter not only enlighten, but also condition, shape, and normalize our passions and desires. In his other work, Signs and People (Znaki i liudi) (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2011), he investigated music and other anthropo-techniques. Markov wrote numerous extended forewords and introductions to the works of such renowned thinkers as Jűrgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, and Theodor W. Adorno. However, he did not confine himself to the historical-philosophical approach but strove to discover the potential of diverse theories in conditions of modernity. The monograph Man, State, and God in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chelovek, gosudarstvo i Bog v filosofii F. Nitsshe) (St. Petersburg, 2005) is an example of his approach. Recently, Markov developed an interest in the problems of political philosophy

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(Politicheskaia antropologiia) (St. Petersburg: Piter, 2017). What distinguishes his study is the juxtaposition of the doctrines of Russian and Western authors. In contrast to both imperialist and postimperial ideas, he proposes the concept of neighborliness, hospitality as a form of peaceful competition between people and nations. His achievements and services have been acknowledged and recognized by honorary degrees and titles, including “Honorary Worker of Higher Education”; “Distinguished Academic of the Russian Federation”; and “Professor Emeritus at St. Petersburg State University.” He has published more than 400 research academic papers, including ten individual monographs; and he has authored six textbooks.

The Image of the “Other”: Xenophobia and Xenophilia Boris Markov These days, the forms of protests that used to be undertaken at the end of the twentieth century appear to be mere games.1 A fictitious game is a conceit, a contrivance which has nothing to do with reality; it is not exposed to an alien will, tyranny, or pressure exerted by the powers that be. Such games are grounded in the assumption that there is neither real nor imaginary or virtual power affecting people; that there is nothing to fear. If we endeavor to define the spirit of our age, the most appropriate word would be extremism, which in its essence, amounts to creating a situation wherein existence itself becomes unfeasible and inconceivable. Despite the assertion of Jean-Paul Sartre claiming that never had he been freer than under the German occupation, it goes without saying that in extreme situations people behave worse than beasts. Such nothingness and nonexistence are the foundation for the artefacts that simulate the existential choice. Against this background, one can discern the mechanisms defining the nascence of stress and poststress conditions characterizing the workings of the minds of people who find themselves in a critical extreme situation. Generally, it is under these very circumstances that the image of the “other” is generated, while in extreme situations the image of the foe is revivified. There is nothing more natural, it would appear, than differentiating between friend and foe, a neighbor and a stranger. Morality commends us to “love thy enemy.” However, when the distinctions evaporate, a state of uncertainty and ambiguity arises, and one may also witness the escalation of violence. Hidden beneath the pretense of humanist discourse, all the empty talk about multiculturalism and the rhetoric of tolerance, there is an upsurge of nationalism, xenophobia, violence, and terrorism. Hence, one faces another extremity—the thesis postulating the war of civilizations. It goes without saying, when situations of force majeure ensue, one has to solve all the issues “manually,” as it were; and then everything depends on the effective measures 1 The publication was prepared with the support of the grant of Russian Foundation for basic research №19-011-00779.

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on the part of the military and law enforcement. Nonetheless, long-term cultural policy entails also the detection and prevention of manifestations of xenophobia. For the sound and legitimate choice of the former, philosophical analytical research should address the previously established concepts of the “other,” “the stranger,” and “the enemy.” The discernment of the historical context of their genesis contributes to modernizing the image of the “other” which will fit in with the realities of our times. 1

The Problem of the Other

As the wellness society—the society of prosperity—advances, people become more and more sensitive toward various forms of compulsion. In the process of being liberated from repressiveness, society starts to treat various anomalies and types of otherness in a more tolerant fashion. It starts to resemble a gigantic resort of sorts, within which tolerance reigns, while dangerous aliens rage without. However, the walls separating those compartments appear to be both insurmountable and too fragile. Countries of the first world are attempting to aid their backward neighbors, while those, seeing all too well the way of life worth living, fail to build a liberal society of universal well-being. All that is left for them is a miserable life in refugee camps or migration. The image of the Other, the alien, is viewed as a phenomenon which is formed in the mind naturally, or as a construct specifically created for sustaining the identity and unity of any given community. These others are foreigners, adherents of different faiths, migrants, that is, people who have come from other places or who differ in their visage, tongue, manners, and customs. In critical situations, the fear of the Other generates the image of the enemy. Arguably, it comes in handy for the reclamation of society’s solidarity and accord; however, this same fear easily spirals out of control, becomes usurped by the ideology of nationalism and employed for political purposes and agendas. There are several angles to the category of an enemy: firstly, an individual or a party—a social group—inflicting harm; secondly, a symbol of hostility; thirdly, a mechanism for the identification of a subject; and finally, an unconscious shift and transfer concealing the deficiency of the promised goods and benefits on the part of the authorities. Particularly popular is the psychoanalytical interpretation of the image of the enemy viewed as the manifestation of a group phantasm. This “phantom foe” does not signal the onslaught of war; but it is generated by the center as a symbolic marker and is sent into the periphery to justify—in the eyes of common citizens—the cruel measures undertaken by the former. In this scenario, the enemy is considered a peculiar incarnation of

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the Devil himself. At times, a whole country is called “The Evil Empire.” No doubt, this is not law; this is Inquisition. The old antinomy “friend vs. foe,” which was shaped in times of the wars for resources and territories, underwent certain changes in the epoch of mass media. José Ortega y Gasset used to speculate about the dissociation and disconnect of individuals inhabiting a mass society. That which does not belong to the virtual space is deemed hostile. Jean Baudrillard defined social reality as integration via elimination of the Other. Hence, the image of the foe becomes exceptionally fuzzy, ambiguous, yet no less precarious than during the times when the adversary was doomed to either slavery or extermination. New forms of life reveal new aspects of the category the “Other.” That is precisely why it is essential to research the history of fear: what did people previously fear, and what terrifies us these days? Could it be that the source of such fears is, in all actuality, the dread of a war of everybody against everybody and his brother, the sense of revenge, the yearning for retaliation? How real are these fears? Alternatively, are they merely phantasms, which tend to substitute or oust something? It would seem that the time of wars has passed; why is it then that these fears are recurrent? Carl Schmitt claims that people fight not for bread, but for the sake of an idea; the war would be undeniably lost without the latter. It goes without saying that destitution and deprivation do not promote peace; however, one has to consider what preoccupies people’s minds as well. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the era of tolerance discourse was ushered in. The matter of the Other took center stage, and everybody started talking about dialogue—viewed as a form of acknowledgement and recognition. Hermeneutics and Communication theory spiritually took the lead of modernity. Simultaneously, leftist critique—having lost its primary object, namely, the totalitarian state—initiated a search for minor forms of violence, having detected multiple manifestations of the latter in families, schools, and in the working place. Against this background, the human rights movement took shape. Marxist women on university campuses organized feminist movements and declared a war on male dominance. The movement for the rights of convicts and the campaign against the use of psychiatry for political purposes discerned new zones of violence fit for criticism—those that formerly were believed to be natural and indispensable. Gaining momentum today, the animal rights movement poses both legal and philosophical challenges. Are animals, in truth, the absolute owners and possessors of themselves? What are the criteria differentiating a human being from an animal? Is it the intellect or the ability to feel pain? During the Enlightenment, it was widely acknowledged that individuals were capable of superseding their egotism in order to peacefully coexist by

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virtue of a social contract based on rational common sense. However, our contemporaries no longer believe that such a treaty was signed with them. Consequently, those philosophers who contributed significantly to discrediting u ­ niversalism have been compelled to search for some other, noncognitive, foundations of it. The philosophical resolution of the problem of the Other differs from trite commonplace proclamations about those others who are fleeing territories struck by calamities and disasters. It searches for more profound reasons, such as the emergence of force majeure extreme hazardous situations in the aliens’ countries of origin and the turmoil and confusion in societies where they arrive. Animosity toward the Other is largely instigated by the fear of chaos wherein everybody starts to be terrified of everybody. Pondering sacrificial rituals, René Girard concludes that these ceremonies have served as a way to get out of crises.2 Naturally, these days we cannot abide by such a horrific way to reinstate the unity of humanity. So today considerable efforts are needed that are aimed at developing the economy and democratizing society. Demonization of evil is generated by the need to imagine what interferes with the actualization of happiness. It appears irrefutable that the obstacles on the path to happiness engender the search for a scapegoat, that is, a victim. Hans Blumenberg posited that this was no mere rhetoric. He believed that in critical situations micro-myths and micro-religions emerge, created to justify to people of conscience protesting the evil doings of the powers that be.3 It should be admitted though that such measures do not immediately lead to the recuperation of human conscience, of the mind of the people who live with the dormant feeling of revenge even in the post-stress phase of history and, thus, they remain the fuel for the outbursts of collective violence. When total fear and suspicion reign, there will always be those willing to utilize such sensibilities for their own gain. That is why research on the psycho-history of society appears to be an essential mission of the social sciences. Philosophical anthropology that accumulates various aspects of knowledge about humanity and that studies the traditions, norms and rituals that prevent traditional societies from collapsing, at this point ought to pay special attention to the arsenal of anthropo-techniques which help to overpower the fear of the Other. The “Other” has become the focus of multiple empirical studies. A considerable bulk of work has been performed by sociologists and specialists in the

2 René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Nasilie i sviashchennoe) (Moscow: nlo, 2010), 114. 3 Hans Blumenberg and Carl Sсhmitt, Briefwechsel. 1971–1978 (Frankfurt аm Main, 2007), 167.

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field of interethnic communication.4 The acquired results call for a serious analysis; they are not to be directly translated to regulations, decrees and sanctions, which are implemented on the grounds of some natural dispositions and precepts. Policies and laws defining and specifying the rights of Others differ considerably in different cultures. They are essentially perceived by society at large as self-evident. In reality, they tend to be complex psycho-political constructs. Consequently, it is imperative to come up with a realistic plausible image of the Other that is neither a phantom nor a romantic conceit—one that lives and works in a contemporary multicultural and multinational society. This other person then already comprehends the target language and shares common beliefs and values and cannot become a complete sceptic or a terrorist, if of course not cornered, for example, pressed into living as representatives of the nation state do. Generally speaking, migrants are people who were brought up in traditional communities and have human qualities that could arguably help to override and supersede the crises associated with ultramodernity. 2

The Nature, History, and Notion of Violence

Nothing, ostensibly, can be as appalling as manifestations of violence. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely these days, despite all hopes of the humanists to the contrary—braced up by their faith in the progress of civilization—that we face the most crude and vulgar forms of aggression and extremism in altogether polarized spheres of private and public life. One cannot help but arrive at the conclusion of the depravity of humanity, of the ineradicability of evil. Such Manichaean sensibilities are substantiated by facts that are daily and even hourly overwhelming newsfeeds. Just as the insulted and the humiliated who took pilgrimages to the temple where their hearts went out to Christ and his passions, made peace with their misfortunes and forgave those who trespassed against them, today, we, when perusing the headlines, find consolation in the idea that things could be significantly worse than they are now. Admittedly, in the course of civilization, people gradually have become more and more sensitive and delicate, hence, more vulnerable. Historians unanimously emphasize the barbaric uncivilized ways that our ancestors took for granted. An enlightened landowner did not shun brute physical force and manhandling when it came to his servants. Husbands systematically abused 4 See Teun A. van Dijk, Language. Cognition. Communication (Iazyk. Poznanie. Kommunikatsiia) (Progress, 1989), 190–227.

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their wives; parents flogged their offspring. Today corporeal punishments are viewed as physical abuse and a form of violence; nevertheless, we cannot pretend that the era of fraternity and universal friendship has arrived. Accordingly, when pondering the consequences of violence and nonviolence, there always ensues ambiguity. 1. On the one hand, violence is regarded as unacceptable, while on the other hand, it is considered inevitable and even indispensable if the name of the game is lofty ideals and the achievement of best results. There seems to be some diabolical dialectic of Good and Evil; one manifests as the background of the other. It comes as no surprise that Sartre formulated his suspicion in the following fashion: the loftier the sentiments and ideas (seemingly), the more imbued they are with evil. 2. Moreover, it is believed that violence is applied in extreme situations, but tolerance reigns under normal circumstances in ordinary peaceful life; but in a society of general well-being and prosperity, there emerge such excesses which even amid the most savage tribes were never known to occur. Where traditional societies practiced violence, our modern world indulges in loathing. Reluctantly, one has to admit the veracity of the English version of exoneration of evil: vices promote progress. Without spiraling into the state of denial as per aggression most likely inherent in human nature, it is imperative to ponder the limits of “acceptable” violence. How is it even possible that amid prosperity, in a normal wealthy society extremism blossoms—despite all the rhetoric regarding human rights, tolerance, and humanism? It would appear that violence has become invisible, as it were; that its physical manifestations have transfigured. Hence, the questions arise: what forms of violence do we face today? How do we perceive the pressure of the social order? What norms of public and private behavior trigger our disguised protest? The fact of the matter is that we cannot directly and openly express our objections. Ordinarily, they are rejected on some deep-seated subconscious level. In the framework of Critical theory, the latter is explicated as a type of conformism; psychoanalysts add masochism to patience; to that, we may add ressentiment: people adapt, but concurrently, they accumulate frustration, which transmutes into hatred. Thus, we may assume that in critical extreme situations offensive forms of violence flourish, whereas in the conditions of peaceful existence there increasingly amasses the energy of hate. Since people are forced to live in the state of conflict, there only remains one thing to consider: what is preferable— violence or animosity. However, such reasoning foreshadows and a priori dooms the unfavorable outcome; it is best we avoided these antinomies, to

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begin with. One should not let oneself be cornered. But if the circumstances force us to choose, we ought to choose the lesser of two evils. Anthropologists and ethnographers posit that physical violence is, firstly, a way to alleviate pressure and relieve tension; secondly, it is a way to purge communal hatred. It is precisely for the sake of its prevention that our ancestors invented sacrificial rituals, first and foremost. The victim absorbs—akin to a sponge—the collective fear infesting the whole society, wherein everyone fears everyone, and thus, purges it clean. One could admit that not only did our ancestors not fear violence, but, on the contrary, cultivated, fomented and fanned it, the matter being not the unconscious drives and complexes, as Sigmund Freud postulated, but the resolution of the identity issue. We are trying to come up with our own answer. Returning to archaic models seems an unimaginable cruelty. Earlier, the images of the Other and the enemy were being constructed so that against their background we could define our own identity; these days, conversely, everybody is preaching about tolerance and multiculturalism. Still, one cannot ignore that the dilution of the Other in the crucible of a megalopolis also leads to the loss of individual identity. Hence, there ensues a spontaneous reaction that acquires the form of the escalation of the fear of the Other. It has gone so far that, as per Carl Schmitt, quite literally, the politicians have turned—yet again—to differentiating between friends and foes. This is a bad way of identification, resorted to by volatile politicians. Having awoken the spirit of the people, having inspired them with the idea of the nation, the elite victimizes the former; makes people the victim of extremism. That is why, while acknowledging the transparency of various conflicts, it is essential to predict the outcome—and not to escalate it, without proper cause. We must be equally cautious when talking about hate. Arguably, its negative energy, somehow, might be used for positive agendas, but moral appeals alone will not suffice. To avoid conflicts, we have to discuss them openly: this eventually will result in the establishment of institutions providing the peaceful coexistence of people who happen to have various levels of consumption, education, and culture. 3

Violence and Law

The natural law concedes to the application of force when the latter is applied for a just cause. In positive law, violence as a means to any ends is inadmissible. It cannot be measured by a criterion of justice which is applied to goals. Violence as a principle is subject to moral condemnation; however, it is best if we assess it by means of lawfulness criteria which are applied for the assessment

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of means. Just cause calls for just lawful means. The law monopolizes justice preventing the individual from resorting to violence. The problem with this approach is that positive law is blind when it comes to the unconditionality of goals; the natural law is sightless regarding the legality of means, respectively. The theory of positive law denounces violence irrespective of the specific cases and nature of its application. However, there is a difference between a historically accepted and an unsanctioned violence. Let us face it, there are no distinct criteria to distinguish between inexorable and unjustifiable violence— from the perspective of just and unjust aims. When it comes to positive law, only legally justifiable goals are accepted, those that can be reached by lawful means. Natural goals conflict with legal ones if they are reached through means which undermine law and order. In that case, the dichotomy “lawful vs. unlawful” overrides the opposition “just vs. unjust.” Leo Tolstoy rejected violence both for the attainment of natural and legal goals. But if we understand law as the basis for order that is indispensable for peaceful existence, then for its preservation even violence is permissible. Challenging Tolstoy, Ivan Il’in claimed that justice was powerless and ineffective, and that evil could be overpowered only by means of brute force.5 One cannot but notice the ambiguity of law, which has—as its cornerstone—constitutive and law-sustaining violence. Can we bridge differences and eliminate contradictions without resorting to violence? One cannot but recall the concepts of Christian forgiveness and redemption, and their interpretations by Georg Hegel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Additionally, apart from the consciousness principle, one could recall the quite pronounced feeling of shame in primitive societies or a code of honor upheld in societies with a developed class system. Nonviolent resolution of conflicts cannot rely upon legal agreements since the failure to fulfill them leads to violence just the same. Without violence, the law ceases to exist. Nonviolent relations between people are rooted not in the concept of rights, but in the ethics of the heart. Affection, peaceful disposition, tolerance, civility—those are the foundations of nonviolence. They are actualized by specific techniques, namely conversation, dialogue, and other forms of agreement. There is no place for hostility in the Garden of Eden, hence, no place for politics. The community of Paradise is a place where the faithful and the loving dwell—where, finally, moral imperatives are realized. But even after the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain, the feud did not end in a fatal fashion. People, groups, and communities that have had to admit defeat still have to go on living somehow. Frequently, in this post-stress phase, 5 Ivan A. Il’in, On Resistance to Evil. Pro et contra (O soprotivlenii zlu. Pro et contra) (St. Petersburg: PKhGI, 2004), 759–60.

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revenge and the yearning for retaliation grow. This way, the circle of violence only expands. That is precisely why it is so indispensable to understand how societies historically have overcome such sensibilities. How did societies turn back to normal? How are the wounds of animosity healed? The answer to these questions lies in the domain of psycho-history. The awareness of the victorious is manifested through joy. But how are the defeated to live? Naturally, one can admit defeat quite stoically by acknowledging their adversary’s power and by paying tribute to their foes. But more often than not, people just continue to hold grudges and malice and live in the constant expectation of a reckoning. If a person is accumulating strength, making plans, is actually doing something in order to gain freedom—that means that he is capable of realizing his potential. The final fall is ressentiment in the form of masochism: such persons enjoy suffering and humiliation; they await help from above—that is aid on their behalf from a higher power who will restore the balance and bring back justice, perceived as retribution. This boosts the hope that the tyrants themselves will be inevitably victimized. When evaluating this position, we need to emphasize that it is an illusion; furthermore, it is not acceptable to find vengeful enjoyment in the sufferings of others. Within traditional communities, warm interpersonal relationships have predominated. Despite conflicts, people continued living side by side; they found ways to make peace with neighbors and kinsfolk. The idea of a neighborhood is hardly exhausted by tolerance and noninterference in each other’s affairs. A neighborhood is created by verbal, visual, gustatory, olfactory and other bodily interactions. Consequently, it makes sense to pay special attention to the analytics of artificial containers, inside which people tend to exist. Traditional societies did not cultivate individuality—identity, as we know it. We ought to take solidarity allegedly evolving in the Russian traditional community or German moral community with a grain of salt. Within their confines, there was no place for a unique personal identity. A person was brought up as a member of a certain clan, kin. One should also treat quite critically those repetitive stories about the degradation of the traditional home and hearth, about the loss of the tradition of cooperative labor and shared meals, about the intrinsic loneliness of people residing in the isolated flats—cubicles of residential districts, “sleeper” neighborhoods in modern megapolises. History, in the words of Georg W.F. Hegel, “is not the soil in which happiness grows.” Equally naïve is the Utopia of a state with a human face. More often than not, it is precisely this childish faith that underlies our estimations of modernity. We have to admit, once and for all, that the social milieu surrounding us does not resemble an incubator, nursery or any sort of “artificial mother,” but is, in all actuality, an intricate product of various technologies. We should not so

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much condemn them as try to live in accord with them. People must adapt to the artificial social reality—which in many ways is inhuman—the same way they accommodate nature. And even though modern society founded on formal relationships binds people more tightly and solidly than old rituals did, the old—or better yet, childish—faith in the warmth of human connection still prevails. Despite the aggravating ressentiment and direct, undisguised violence, people should sustain the atmosphere of love and trust. This is the true wealth. The loss of Homeland, home itself, one’s face, music, speech and other immune systems turn into the loss, the deprivation of identity and the escalation of uncertainty and fear. These are the issues that ought to be at the heart of Big-League politics. 4

Hospitality and the Rights of the Other

Hospitality is more of an ideal than reality. That is why xenosophia is a philosopher’s lot. Unfortunately, we live in the world where the commandment “Love thy neighbor” is no longer effective. The dream of an ideal commune founded on friendship is a tribute to philhellenism. The globalized world has become too crowded and cramped; nonrecognition reigns in it. Uncertain fear of the Other grows, and that means that our close-knit world is virtually infested with racism much more than it used to be. Obviously, the “others” do not pose a mortal threat, but markets, information and other goods are guarded against them. The enemy that frightens the most is the enemy we cannot do anything about, for his methods of violence overcome our ability to defend ourselves. In the era of colonization, when morning papers were gaudy with the pictures portraying the gory feasts of savages, Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlighted the astonishing hospitality and unselfishness of aboriginal peoples. Immanuel Kant has posited that sociability is an anthropological constant. In his Metaphysics of Morals, he tends to differentiate between the community of friends and that of merchants.6 The latter is exterritorial. As an alternative, Kant offers the right to hospitality as a means of promoting global peace.7 Postmodern French thinkers Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida used to search for the alternative to market exchange in the rite of gift bestowal. The attempt to explain amiability and neighborliness as the first ethos of humanity does not correspond to the traditional comprehension of the Other, perceived as a ­military 6 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Customs/Manners. Works in Six Volumes (Metafizika nravov. Sochineniia v 6-ti t.) 4, part 2. (Mysl’, 1965), 107. 7 Immanuel Kant, To Eternal Peace (K vechnomu miru. Sochineniia v 6-ti t.) 6 (Mysl’, 1966) 276.

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trophy and, consequently, converted into a slave. Hegel tended to link the syncretism of hospitality with the immaturity of legal awareness. Both free gift and the coercive tax appear to be the equivalents of powerlessness. And only on the basis of exchange, human relations become orderly, and the concept of humaneness arises, which can be applied to others. Historically, the law of the people has been suppressed and forced out by that of the state. Exchanging gifts gradually gives way to the relations of exchange; hospitality is replaced by the Code of the Other. The rights of the Other protect trade, and owing to that, the “others” can perform certain functions within another group. In the latter case, they remain on the periphery, and depending on the impression of either danger or safety, they may be perceived as either good or evil. Perceptions vary: the center of the group may recognize the Other as a symbol of integration, whereas the periphery might view him or her as a sign of threat. The Other is a stigma of sorts; a cypher which is decoded as a victim or an enemy—depending on the level of the external threat. The Other, the alien, is rightless and disempowered if he or she belongs to a community whose rights are not recognized. Take, for instance, the Jews who, more often than not, were not guests, but aliens. In the merchant state, Jews-­ moneylenders were an essential segment of the market. In Venice, a special ghetto was established for them, and they were all accounted for in a police state. It is not at all surprising that their language lacked a proper word for the concept of guest. The latter was designated as either an alien, the “other”, or an exile, an outcast. In the course of civilization, the people’s common law, which partly incorporated the rights of the guest, got divided into private and public law. Monopolization of law by the state involved one significant amendment: neither a person, nor a group could claim the law of hospitality for their own if they happened to be foreigners, that is, if they did not belong to the given legal community. Human rights are addressed not only at subjects who sometimes have fewer rights than the privileged others, but they also call for mercy for the rightless, powerless others. Basically, the right of the Other amounts to the possibility of the provision of shelter. Unlike the tenets of old rites of hospitality, which demanded that any wayfaring stranger be welcomed regardless of the lands whence he arrived, an alien is always by default a citizen of another state, a foreigner whose rights always demonstrate the combination of rights and rightlessness. Certainly, one can argue there is a progress of sorts when it comes to the rights of the Other who does not happen to be a guest but can invoke the right to equality in the face of the law of the country where they reside. A foreigner is considered an alien if he or she does not know and does not accept the tongue and the customs of the country in which they are staying.

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Simultaneously, an alien is somebody whom nobody knows. If the invited guest normally does not pose much psychical pressure, since anybody can find oneself in the position of a guest, then the Other is nobody’s guest, but one who is always an object of suspicion and, thus, a source of phantasms. HansDieter Bahr in his Sprache des Gastes scrutinized the problem of the rights of the Other and came to the conclusion that there were none, and there could be none.8 From the perspective of territorial and state law, the Other or a foreigner has no rights to public property. He is only valuable as the owner of goods and money. 5

Immunity against the Other

In accordance with the doctrine of multiculturalism, Europe and America happen to be the crucible of ethne and nations. In reality, though, some among these ethnic groups melt away, and the children of the newcomers become ­Europeans, whereas others, conversely, establish enclaves that tend to form communities within a society, sometimes criminal, as is the case with the ­Sicilian—or any other—mafia. Various theories exist to explain the outbreaks of xenophobia. Liberal theorists view as the outcome of political propaganda that creates the image of the enemy as ordered by the ruling elite that which on the common conventional level is manifested as the influx of newcomers, is experienced by laypeople as fear and hostility, and is expressed in the form of protests, conflicts, and even pogroms. Conservative anthropologists, on the ­contrary, believe that the formation of the image of the Other facilitates the consolidation of the society infested by inner violence. Politics ought not to be immoral. But if morality is employed in a cynical fashion, it corrupts politics, degrading and debasing it to the level of bestiality. Cultural policy must not transform into the “war of civilizations,” which will most likely imply the “Anything goes” war between Europe and anti-Europe; a war not for the economy, democracy and human rights, but for world domination. Each nation, all people, not only Europeans, dream of conquering the world; of “going global.” It is crucial for that dream not to actualize via military actions. Many call for radical measures when contemplating the surge of “aliens.” It goes without saying that one cannot silently observe how the core nation is undergoing degradation, but the philosopher’s job is to boost its ambitions and promote the education of the national elite in order to not incite pogrom-mongers. 8 Hans-Dieter Bahr, Sprache des Gastes (Leipzig, 1994), 387.

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For humanists, this hatred of the alien, the outbreaks of which do not cease even now, is a wound that will not heal. They feel guilty and consider universal penance to be the best remedy against hate. Experiencing a guilt complex facilitates tolerance, but it weakens societies which are already overridden with strangers. First, they start to play by their own rules; then, they start fighting for autonomy, and ultimately, they begin dominating the entire settled area and prevail. If we ponder the issue resorting to facts and not surrendering to xenophobia, we have to admit that what actually distinguishes an empire from the isolated closed nation state is the fact that the former employs the services and labor of the annexed provinces. In response to the criticism of cultural imperialism, one may indicate several vectors of cultural interaction. Consider, for instance, the Hellenization of both Christianity and Judaism. The health of a culture is defined by strong immunity against the Other/ alien and, concurrently, by the ability to absorb useful external factors. Naturally, this model should be employed in Culture Studies with certain precautions, but one should not ignore the concept of immunity. The breakthrough finding of Ilia Mechnikov is compelling precisely because antibodies perform the function of defense, protection. The safety of an organism depends not only on impenetrable boundaries but on internal resistance, resilience. Organisms, including cultural ones, are open systems; the alien, the external tends on the one hand to be dangerous for them, and on the other, quite beneficial for their inner growth. Take, for instance, those living behind the Iron Curtain, which somewhat resembles a disease-screening and preventive center, sanitized from the viruses of the Other. But its residents forfeit their immunity and become unprotected, vulnerable if the walls collapse. On the border, customs officers differentiate between dangerous and harmless items; the internal police keep track of the dissenters. In this case, foreigners “smuggle” what happens inside their heads—the whole cluster of ideas and concepts that they have been embracing and assimilating since childhood. Equally harmful, dissatisfaction with the regime may be born both deep within the society and also fueled from outside. The deficiency of endogenous immunity is manifested in people beholding themselves through the eyes of the Other. It would be improper to draw the direct analogy between the representatives of other cultures and antibodies or cancerous cells. Organisms live and function in an environment; first and foremost, from without they take sustenance that they consume, absorb, digest and excrete. For this, there exist specific connective canals and tracts, as well as membranes and filters of various kinds. Being aware of the relative nature and conventionality of both organicist and functionalistic metaphors, in practice, one ought to build fruitful relations between public organisms as well, considering not only the war principle,

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but also that of cooperation. One may recall neighborly relations as a form of cooperative collaborative existence—which goes way back—as an alternative to contemporary outbreaks of xenophobia. Quite regretfully, the world is caving in on us, and we are forced to live according to the English proverb: “Good fences make good neighbors.” That is why it is so essential to reanimate the art of peaceful neighborly coexistence and also to boost new social technologies for its support. 6

Victim Peoples and Messiah Peoples

Political agendas do not exhaust what determines human relationships. That explains why there exist other concepts for the description of states, including among others the ethnopolitical and geopolitical. In this regard, many refer to the concept of the opposition of East and West. In those debates regarding the relations of Europe and Russia two alternative vectors have been established. Slavophiles vouched for the uniqueness of Russia and criticized liberalism; Westernizers, conversely, deemed the European way the most promising and advantageous. However, there were, in truth, those imbued with skepticism. The renowned Russian philosopher Piotr Chaadaev wrote in his “First Philosophical Letter” (1836) that we, Russians, “are neither of the West nor the East, and we have not the traditions of either.”9 The Slavophile orientation found manifestation in the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, whose ideologists claimed that Russia and Europe represented alternate civilizations. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his turn, theorized that disregarding Slavophile ideas and, concurrently, leaving the issue of the fate of Eastern Christianity unresolved (nb—the core of the Eastern question) would amount to destroying and annihilating all of Russia.10 Dostoyevsky believed that the national idea constituted the spiritual strength of the nation and the state. Being a culturologist, he wrote about the unity of Europe and Russia, but also being an Orthodox geopolitician he was convinced that Europe, having chosen capitalism, had sold out Christ and was desperately in need of aid found in Orthodox Russia. Vladimir Soloviev was apt to bridge the gap between Russian Orthodoxy and Catholic Western Christianity. In his view, the Russian people undertook the mission of serving other peoples. Max Scheler, however, did not subscribe to this point of view, being convinced that in the event of the denunciation of 9 10

Piotr Ia. Chaadaev, Works (Sochineniia) (Pravda, 1989), 18. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Complete Works in 30 Volumes (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh) 26 (Nauka, 1972–1990), 30.

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friendship, Russians harbored grudges and vengeful thoughts.11 In this respect, one should not forget that any messianic idea has two faces. The classical example would be Old Testament messianism, proclaiming the Jews as the Chosen people. This new Slavophile form of messianism—presented by Aleksei Khomiakov—is also grounded in faith in Russia as the only Savior of all other peoples. The Orthodox replaces the Universal, and the Russian substitutes for the Orthodox. Sergei Bulgakov, fearing the ease with which messianism transformed into nationalism, proposed the concept of “national asceticism,” which implied the obligation to contain the faith in the Chosen-by-God nation and to cultivate instead the sense of responsibility. Russia must give birth to the Christian religion that would be “of the people,” folk, public formally, and universal in essence. Evgenii Trubetskoi believed that the “true Christ unites around himself in universal thoughts and universal spirit all peoples.”12 Where Nikolai Berdiaev indicated the antinomy in religious, national, cultural, state (imperial) messianism, Trubetskoi posited that national pride and the willingness to serve other peoples were quite compatible. He beheld the way out of the cul-de-sac of messianism in missionism, which was ordained by Christ as the imperative to teach and baptize all the peoples. He proposed to find such forms of unity which would allow for the existence of the singular. It would not do to perceive the Russian merely as an authentic form of the universal. When such ambitions are dethroned, despair inevitable follows, just like Chaadaev predicted. In the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, there came into being a novel philosophical trend of Russian thought known as Eurasianism. The movement’s thesis proclaiming the unique destiny and path intended for Russia, concurrently denounced Pan-Slavism. Their tenets were substantiated by the act of the foundation of the Soviet Union, which reestablished the geographical frontiers of the Russian Empire. The ussr was a cultural synthesis, a union wherein Slavic, Aryan (Norman) and Mongolian (Turkic) elements finally found unity. One could accept the views of Eurasians or contradict them. It appears undeniable, though, that the peculiar nature of Russia ought to be described along the vector “Europe—Russia—Asia.” The seventies and the eighties of the last century witnessed the burgeoning of the conception of “New Eurasianism,”13 introduced by Lev Gumilev. The 11 12 13

Max Scheler, Nation and Worldview. Collected Works (Nation und Weltanschauung in Gesammelte Werke) 6 (Bern, 1963), 115–221. Evgenii N. Trubetskoi, Old and New National Messianism. Selected Works (Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianism. Izbrannoe) (Moscow, 1995), 309. Lev N. Gumiliev, Ethnogeny and the Biosphere of the Earth (Etnogenez i biosfera Zemli) (Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1989), 496 P.

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foundation stone for his doctrine was the geopolitical position of Russia. Allegedly, the “Oceanic power” of England and the USA clashes with the “Continental power” of Russia, Germany and China as the expression of perpetual planetary strife between the sea and the steppe (the plains). The steppes and forests defined the economic systems and the way of life typical of hunters and nomads. This is the basis for the ethnolinguistic common core of the Slavic, Finno-Ugric and Turanian cultures. The roots of the origination of Russia’s cultural and national specificity can be traced back to the times of the opposition between the civilizations of dry land and the sea, the cultures of the forests and the steppe. In the age of globalization, the discussions of the “sea people” and “the steppe people” appear to be outdated. But most certainly, these distinctions remain in the language, in the cultural memory of the nation, even if not directly in the consciousness of the people inhabiting the land. The attitude of the West toward the East has long been colonial, on the one hand, and identifying, on the other. The Orient is perceived as a rival to the West, as the “Other” which—due to its contrasting nature—can help to identify oneself, one’s own essence. Edward Said writes on the matter: “My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-­Enlightenment period.”14 The image of the Orient imposed by Oriental Studies has largely defined the self-awareness of its denizens, and this consequence has been far worse than colonization itself. When pondering the progress of Europe in terms of the reclamation and exploration of the East and West, Jan Patočka claimed that European expansion did not cause changes in the European way of life. Even the Enlightenment and the subsequent secularization resulted in the restructuring of prior ideas, institutions, methods of production, state and political organization; it also led to the adaptation of the latter to the new world order, to the new economy gradually obtaining a global—planetary—scope, and to the permeation of Europeans into new spaces that necessitated innovative prerequisites for knowledge and faith.15 Jacques Derrida, who has always defended the marginal and the heretical, struggled to incorporate Patočka’s ideas into his new project ­concerning the vision of Europe, wherein Judeo-Christian tradition played an e­ ssential 14 15

Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the East (Orientalizm. Zapadnye kontseptsii Vostoka) (Russkii mir, 2016), 10. Jan Patočhka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Ereticheskie esse o filosofii istorii) (Minsk: Logvinov, 2008), 107.

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part.16 In opposition to the metaphors of the “peak,” “top,” “head,” and “capital,” which were employed for the representation of the idea of Europe, Dmitrii Likhachev—following in the footsteps of Russian “geographists”—­reflected on the lowland landscape of Russia, the landscape of the plains, and on the moderation and docility of the Russian temper. Having said that, it appears that the European identity should be interpreted in different terms than identity and homogeneity, which are imposed globally from the next center of hegemony.17 While colonizing and exploiting the “Other,” Europe does not impose civilization in a mechanistic way in order to even out, flatten the political and cultural climate. One ought to remember that Europe and Russia developed precisely because of their perceptiveness and the inclusion of the “Other.” 7

Tourism as a Form of Intercultural Communication

While liberally oriented thinkers look for unity in the form of public debates, which imply the free expression of ideas, argumentation and critical r­ eflection, conservatives tend to appeal to the spirit of the nation, people, which was formed on the basis of the common soil. But if one considers how communication actually functions in the contemporary globalized world, it will become obvious that it has little to do with models discussed in the domain of philosophy. “Networks,” “spheres,” “capillaries” and other metaphors defining modernity indicate new channels of communication. The circulation of ­commodities, money, and information ties people into a global community. In an identical fashion, there emerge forms of cultural exchange. One of those is tourism. Previously, a tourist was associated with someone, a lover of the great outdoors, who would go hiking, biking, driving, or canoeing, during their vacation; on weekends, he or she would go out into the country to stay in a tent. Today, a tourist is an ultramodern phenomenon, an attribute of the society of entertainment. People go abroad not to learn something, partake of something new, but merely to entertain themselves. Unlike a traveler, a tourist does not perform any scientific or research activity. He is not ready to tolerate discomfort and adapt to the new environment. Hence, the service sector has unified and used local exotic flavors to spice up its offerings. It is vital not to become too exotic, for that will drive tourists away. From this follows the first law of 16 17

Jacques Derrida, Das andere Кар. Die vertragte Demokratie. Zwei Essay zu Europa. (Frankfurt am Main, 1992). See Alexander N. Chumakov, Globalization: Contours of the Integral World (Globalizatsiia: kontury tselostnogo mira) 2nd rev. ed. (Prospekt, 2015).

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t­ ourism—three-star hotels, European cuisine, and comfort. Those who would argue that this is a positive phenomenon—for it would civilize the local place—do forget about the toll it takes on traditional cultures. Boris Groys claims that tourism is a machine that transforms the temporal into the monumental. An alien city is represented as a model of an eternal city.18 A tourist trip is a journey into another temporal dimension. The goal of tourism is sightseeing, tourist attractions, watching monuments. Plainly put, tourism is the fabrication of monuments. Owing to this historically changing phenomenon, routine places acquire the status of monuments. A city is divided into two parts—one is anachronic, atemporal; the other is transient, ephemeral, historical. The genesis is actualized not in space, but in time. A monument is situated in the city but is not subject to change; it is not altered through catastrophes, although the holy space is not separated from other spaces by any boundaries. The difference between being a monument and not a monument, for example, between St. Isaac’s Cathedral (Isaakievskii Sobor) and the Ladozhskii railway station does not consist in their being located in alternate places, but in diverse temporal continua. It is relatively easy to learn who built the station as well as the date of its construction and what changes it underwent. Conversely, the Cathedral is recognized as a monument, that is not subject to historical change and that does not depend on belief in the mindset of the architect. The Cathedral is a monument precisely because it belongs to an epoch different from ours. We do not have access to it—even if we visit the Cathedral in question. Something entirely different is monumental—something alien, not accessible on the temporal axis, and hence, unchangeable in space. It can be destroyed, but it cannot be changed. Hence, there arise problems connected with the restoration of churches and other holy places and shrines. As tourism expands, monumentalization accelerates. That is why we can dub our times an explosion of eternity, a museum era, being more precise, the era of the museumification of cities. Not merely monuments are museumified, but any other attractions that tend to inspire. Tourists replicate their inspirations through snapshots, post them online, share with friends, send them to contests and, thus, they museumify them too. The sacralization of the city by denizens themselves is achieved in a different manner—one that is as ancient as cities themselves. Even ancient Romans protested against attempts at reconstructing the Eternal City. But what do people lament, in the first place? More often than not they weep for their own lives, which they wish to commemorate. It is apparent that the monumental 18

Boris Groys, Die Stadt auf Durchreise. Perspektiven metropolitaner Kultur (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 70.

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arises out of the ordinary and the banal: the museum collections grow out of routine objects and artefacts. Everything depends on the outlook: what is banal and routine for the citizen, might easily become memorable and monumental for the newcomer, the tourist. The monumental and the routine have no real substance; their differentiation results from and is specified by the rules of the game entitled “Citizens” and “Tourists,” respectively. A tourist looks at things from the perspective of the eternal; a citizen—from the locus of the transient, the earthly. Some trading company building, some business structure, for example, the “Passazh” or the “Eliseevskii” store may become a tourist location too, like St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Tourists are not susceptible to the stories of local tour guides regarding the reconstruction of the building, for these do not correlate with their focus on the monumental. While tour guides narrate about the restoration of the building’s true authentic façade, the tourists are bored to death, for they have left the transient for the eternal and are disinclined to listen about history. Another story altogether is a photo of a tourist—with a monument in the background. Such memorabilia are perused with joy; and pride is taken in showing them off. These are the documents signifying the existence of the sempiternal and, hence, their own immortality. If I happen to take a snapshot of myself with the pyramids or the Athenian Acropolis in the foreground, I thus immortalize myself in a way. This resembles the icon painting of the medieval times, where the saints were depicted against the background of the celestial Divine abode. Traveling and tourism are two differing forms of intercultural communication. The self-aggrandizement of the Enlightenment was revealed in the right to see, not being seen and inspected, being a subject, not an object of introspection. Formerly, if movement and the drifting of strangers were restricted, these days, excursions are being held in the Louvre and the Kremlin alike. For the comfort of the shamans who earn their living off tourists, one could argue that having been transformed into a monument, European culture has also stopped being a means of forming the cultural identity of Europeans themselves. Europe is ceasing to be the crucible, the melting pot of diverse cultures and is turning progressively into a museum. In the past, a city was assessed vertically, as something transcendental and universal—as opposed to nature; today, however, due to tourism, it exists in a horizontal dimension, as a monument amongst other monuments. To turn a city into a museum equals condemning its citizens to serving tourists. This is a game for those who travel often and who are capable of re-museumification. Regrettably, judging by the accounts of managers, tv divas, sportsmen, and the like sauntering around the globe, these foreign travels do not enlighten them; on the contrary, they dumb them down considerably.

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This is not the fault of the people who are devoid of the historical collective memory. The tourism industry erases the unique akin to the way a steamroller evens out the asphalt road; it replaces the encounter with the unusual world by the set of predictable standard services. Having said that, it would be wrong to consider tourism the spawn of capitalism and thus, throw it back in the lap of the market economy. The thirst for a change of place, another sky— as the search for the distant, remote, the unexplored, as the quest for another, a partner—appears to be a universal anthropological constant, which in its many forms and manifestations promotes the peaceful interaction and coexistence of people and the dialogue of cultures. Works Cited Bahr, Hans-Dieter. Sprache des Gastes. Leipzig, 1994. Blumenberg, Hans and Carl Sсhmitt. Briefwechsel. 1971–1978. Fr. аm Mein, 2007. Chaadaev, Piotr Ia. Works (Sochineniia). Pravda, 1989. Chumakov, Alexander N. Globalization: Contours of the Integral World. (Globalizatsiia: kontury tselostnogo mira) 2nd rev. ed. Prospeckt, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. Das andere Kap. Die vertragte Demokratie. Zwei Essay zu Europa. Frankfurt am Main, 1992. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Complete Collected Works in Thirty Volumes (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh) 26. Nauka, 1972–1990. Girard, René. Resurrection from the Underground: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Nasilie i sviashchennoe). nlo, 2010. Groys, Boris. Die Stadt auf Durchreise. Perspektiven metropolitaner Kultur. Frankfurt am Main, 2000. Gumiliev, Lev N. Ethnogeny and the Biosphere of the Earth (Etnogenez i biosfera Zemli). Izdatel’svo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1989. Il’in, Ivan A. On Resistance to Evil. Pro and Contra. (O soprovitlenii zlu. Pro et contra). RKhGI, 2004. Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Customs/Manners (Metafizika nravov). Works in Six Volumes. 4, part 2. Mysl’, 1965. Kant, Immanuel. To Eternal Peace. (K vechnomu miru) Works in Six Volumes. 6. Mysl’, 1966. Patochka, Ia. Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History (Ereticheskie esse o filosofii istorii). Minsk: Logvinov, 2008. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the East (Orientalizm. Zapadnye kontseptsii Vostoka). Russkii mir, 2016. Scheler, Max. Nation und Weltanschauung in Gesammelte Werke, 6, 1963.

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Trubetskoi, Evgenii N. Old and New National Messianism. Selected Works (Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianism. Izbrannoe). Moscow, 1995. Van Dijk, Teun A. Language. Cognition. Communication. (Iazyk. Poznanie. Kommunikatsiia). Progress, 1989.

Vadim Mezhuev Vadim Mikhailovich Mezhuev (1933–2019) studied in the Philosophical Department at Moscow State University (msu), from 1951 to 1956. His diploma thesis, “Hegel’s Criticism of Formal Logic,” was supervised by Professor Valentin Asmus and published in the journal Problems of Philosophy (Voprosy filosofii) in 1957. Upon graduation, he worked as an editor at msu’s Publishing House, then at the journal Philosophical Sciences (Filosofskie nauki). From 1962 to 1964, he completed his postgraduate studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the ussr. From 1964 to 2018, Mezhuev worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences and became the Chief Researcher there. In 1971, he defended his thesis “Marxist Historicism and the Problem of Culture,” and in 1984, his doctoral thesis, “The Theory of Culture in Historical Materialism.” His monograph, Culture and History (Kul’tura i istoriia) (Politizdat, 1977), was published in Russian and then translated into eleven languages. His research interests are the philosophical problems of culture, the civilizational and cultural identity of Russia, the prospects for its modernization, the Russia-West relationship, and Marxism in contemporary Russia and the modern world. Mezhuev published over 200 articles in scholarly journals and monographs, including these coauthored works—History of Cultural Studies (Istoriia kul’turologii, 2006) and The Idea of Culture. Essays on the Philosophy of Culture (Ideia kul’tury, 2006)—and his monographs: Between the Past and the Future. Selected Social and Philosophical Essays (Mezhdu proshlym i budushchim) (if ran, 1996), From a Philosophy of Life to a Philosophy of Culture (Ot filosofii zhizni k filosofii kul’tury, 2001), The Philosophy of Culture: The Era of the Classics (Filosofiia kul’tury: epokha klassiki, 2003), Marx against Marxism. Articles on the Unpopular Topic (Marks protiv marksisma, 2007), and History, Civilization, Culture. The Experience of Philosophical Understanding (Istoriia, tsivilizatsiia, kul’tura, 2012).

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Russia in Search of Its Civilizational Identity Vadim Mezhuev Writings highlighting Russia as a special civilization started to appear r­ elatively recently and have clearly been influenced by the changes taking place in the country. Chosen in the 1990s, the strategy of modernizing Russia after the Western model, which was called “incorporation into modern civilization,” made many critics of the reforms question the extent to which the strategy considered the specifics of Russia’s situation. The rejection of these reforms prompted them to extend the so-called “civilizational approach” to Russia and present it as a special civilization. This view was apparently well grounded. The clear failure of the reforms supposedly carried out according to Western academic recipes suggested that not everything in this body of science worked on Russian soil. Russia, it seemed, could not be fitted into this Procrustean bed designed according to the standards of Western societies, as Russia did not lend itself fully to the application and analysis accepted in the West. Something was left under the radar that undermined all assumptions and expectations. Many offer a simple explanation for Russia’s impenetrability to Western intellectual discourse: Russia is not an organic part of the West, where this discourse emerged and took shape. Just like Russia, which sometimes struggles to understand the West—not to mention being a part of it—the West also finds it difficult to understand Russia and to frame it in rational terms—a seemingly typical situation when different civilizations meet. In fact, not everything is as simple as it might seem at first glance. It is also difficult to portray Russia as a completely distinct and fully established civilization that is different from the West in every aspect, although such attempts have been made today by many writers on the subject. Some attribute this difference to its Orthodox roots, while others to its East Slavic or even Eurasian civilizational influences—depending on which attribute is taken as foundational: confessional, ethno-cultural or geopolitical. But can any of these attributes and all of them taken together provide enough grounds to refer to it as a distinct civilization? If this had been the case, Russia’s attitudes toward the West would have been much easier to frame, and not perceived as one of the most painful problems in Russian history.

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In their minds, Russians have always held a Slavophile attitude, that they have a distinct and unique identity while also viewing themselves when compared to the West as a backward underdeveloped nation. The views of Westernizers versus those of Slavophiles are a cross-cutting theme in the history of Russian social thought. This conflict would not have emerged at all had Russia not already been a European country, had it been entirely outside the Western world. To compare oneself with Europe, even if such a comparison favors the latter, one needs in a sense to feel like one already belongs to Europe, to realize one’s closeness to it. Many non-European countries, which are also modernizing, do not emphasize as a national problem their difference from Europe and do not feel any inferiority to it. In contrast, our Westernizers have always perceived Russia not as Europe’s neighbour but as a relative, even a poor relation, delayed in its development. The clash of these basic Russian themes—unique identity and backwardness— ­suggests that the question of Russia’s civilizational identity remains open, has no clear-cut solution, and provokes mutually exclusive opinions. It is as if different Russias coexist within our space and clash with one another, with little in common between them. We either cherish our past, or we condemn it. Some reject everything Western, whereas for others the very concept of “patriotism” is a swear word. Moreover, all these people with opposing views see one another as Russia’s sworn enemy. Contrary to the opinion that Russia has already established itself as a distinct civilization, is the position that it is still looking for its civilizational identity. This search is far from over, as seen from the endless debate over where Russia belongs. Is it part of the West or something different from it? The lack of a definitive answer that would be acceptable to all is evidenced by the persistent re-emergence in the consciousness of the Russian public of interest in the “Russian idea,” a topic that will be discussed in greater detail below. While the West perceives itself as an established civilization, Russia only sees itself as a variously interpreted idea, which, of course, exists more in the mind than in reality. This thinking becomes more prominent where reality has not yet taken final shape or has not settled within the clear-cut boundaries of a civilizational profile. And in its current state, Russia once again feels the need to find its civilizational identity, rather than being an example of a country that has already defined it. In the history of Russian thought, the term, “civilization,” usually has not been applied to Russia. Russian history has primarily been presented as the history of the state or the culture; however, neither has anything like Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England or François Guizot’s Essays on the History of France (Essais sur l’histoire de France). The very concept of

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“civilization” was transplanted to Russia from Europe back in the 1830s. It was a long time before the word “culture” took root too. This apparently can be explained by the fact that French was widely used among the educated circles of Russian society. Fyodor Tiutchev and Alexander Herzen used the term “civilization,” to mean “civil activism,” although they did not use the term “culture.” Amvrosii Metlynskii (1814–1870) is considered the first to write about the theory of civilization in Russia: his ma thesis, “On the Essence of Civilization and the Meaning of Its Elements,” presented at Kharkiv University in 1839, was influenced by the French historian François Guizot.1 In 1883, Ivan Aksakov’s Civilization and the Christian Ideal (Tsivilizatsiia i khristianskii ideal) was published. While Russian Westernizers used the term “civilization” to denote European ways and institutions, lacking in Russia, Slavophiles spoke strongly against the very concept of civilization as applied to Russia. They were more comfortable with the term “enlightenment”; moreover, they used it in its religious connotation, meaning “light” and “sanctity.” In his article titled “On the Opinion of the Russian Bulletin (Russkii Vestnik) about Philosophical Studies, Popular Origins, and their Relation to Civilization,” Iurii Samarin wrote: “We have long been trying in earnest to comprehend the exact meaning of the term ‘civilization,’ which just recently became a hot word in Russia, so often cited and almost driving out of use the word ‘enlightenment.’”2 Samarin himself explained the word’s popularity by the adoption of the European-centric model of historical development. Both Westernizers and Slavophiles believed that civilization was synonymous with Europe, not Russia. More applicable to Russia was the term “enlightenment,” or “culture” in a later interpretation. This was also the case in nineteenth-century Germany, where those terms were long used to denote the difference between Germany on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other. Today civilizations are commonly understood as fairly stable and strongly generalized social and historical entities with clearly defined boundaries and distinctions in social and spiritual life. According to Samuel P. Huntington, civilization can be defined as the “highest cultural grouping of people and the

1 See the use of the concepts, “culture” and “civilization” in nineteenth-century Russian philosophical language in The Discovery of the Culture Idea. The Experience of Russian Cultural Studies of the Mid-Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Otkrytie idei kultury. Opyt russkoi kulturologii serediny xix i nachala хх vekov) by Iulii Asoian and Aleksei Malafeev (2001). 2 Iurii Samarin, “On the Opinion of the Russian Bulletin (Russkii Vestnik) about Philosophical Studies, Popular Origins, and their Relation to Civilization,” Selected Works (O mnenii Russkogo Vestnika po povodu filosofskikh isledovanii, narodnykh istokov i ikh otnosheniia k tsivilizatsii) (Moscow, 1996), 542.

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broadest level of cultural identity.”3 Civilizations differ from one another in a number of significant attributes. He stated: The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy … They (these differences—the author) will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.4 Although this definition is somewhat controversial in that it equates civilization and culture, this is a generally typical position of the entire British-US academic and historical tradition. It highlights that the type of religious belief is a differentiator among civilizations, to the extent that a culture has not diverged from that belief. Every great civilization has its own pantheon of gods or one God and has been built around a shared religious cult. The barrier between different religions is virtually insurmountable: one can convert to a different religion, but these beliefs cannot be merged into a single religious system. In its own way, each faith is universal, absolute and self-sufficient. Religion appears to be the last boundary between different civilizations. Echoing most British, US and French historians, Huntington based his theory of civilization on two key tenets. The first, he argues, is that no universal civilization exists, one that is common to all humanity. According to him, “a distinction exists between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural.”5 While the eighteenth-century French philosophers contrasted the concept of civilization, as settled, urban, and literate society, to the state of “barbarism,” a tradition emerged almost at the same time to refer to civilizations in the plural. “This meant the ‘renunciation of a civilization defined as an ideal, or rather as the ideal’ and a shift away from the assumption there was a single standard for what was civilized, ‘confined,’ in Braudel’s phrase, ‘to a few privileged peoples or groups, humanity’s ‘elite.’ Instead there were many civilizations, each of which was civilized in its own way.”6 As his second tenet, he states that every civilization is a cultural entity. This is recognized everywhere outside Germany, where civilization and culture 3 4 5 6

Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Political Studies, 1, (1994) 34. Huntington, 34. Huntington, 47. Huntington, 47.

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have always been contrasted and even opposed. “Nineteenth-century German thinkers drew a sharp distinction between civilization, which involved mechanics, technology, and material factors, and culture, which involved values, ideals, and the higher intellectual artistic, moral qualities of a society. This distinction has persisted in German thought but has not been accepted elsewhere.”7 Huntington, naturally, left out Russia, where, however, such a distinction was also seen as fundamental to its historical self-identification, a topic that will be discussed below. The US scholar does not just promote the idea of the plurality of civilizations, which he sees as empirically obvious, but he specifically emphasizes that civilization and culture are identical and puts religion as the foremost part of this identity: “The major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions…”8 Hence, the more widely spread typology of civilizations refers to Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Western and Eastern Orthodox Christian civilizations. Arnold Toynbee classified these five civilizations as the last, third generation of civilizations surviving to our time. Toynbee also predicted that in the future these civilizations may experience conflict,9 for instance, a nuclear war that threatens humanity with annihilation—an idea echoed by Huntington. Irrespective of whether this prediction will come true, he sees the fault lines between civilizations as insurmountable. What is the place of Russia in this setup? Toynbee classified it as an “Eastern Orthodox civilization,” rooted in Byzantine civilization. However, the existence of Russia as a special civilization can also be challenged. Orthodoxy definitely lies at the root of its spirituality and culture; however, Russia is not the only Orthodox country. And can autocracy and totalitarianism be seen as civilization, although there have been attempts to align them with Orthodoxy? Toynbee, for instance, saw the origins of totalitarianism in Orthodox Byzantium from which Russia inherited it: according to Toynbee, totalitarianism is “Russia’s Byzantine heritage.”10 For many foreign and Russian historians, on the contrary, autocracy and totalitarianism were not the effect of civilization but that of persistent barbarism and evidence of the country’s historical backwardness and insufficient level of civilization. Equating civilization with religion is in itself not always justified, especially when this principle is applied in the West itself. Christianity has indeed become the dominant religion in the West, but it has not been the only driver of 7 8 9 10

Huntington, 48. Huntington, 49. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History (Moscow, 1991), 129–34. Toynbee, 105–14.

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Western civilization: the other source was Greek and Roman antiquity, from which the very concept of “civilization” was actually borrowed. Medieval Europe, where the Catholic Church had power over worldly rulers, could still be considered a Christian civilization, but can the same be said about the contemporary West, which has been undergoing secularization? Is religion really its only differentiating feature from other civilizations? The civilization that has emerged here gives rise to a different historical typology, dividing history into traditional and modern, preindustrial (agrarian), industrial and post-­industrial societies. From the Eastern perspective, civilization indeed looks like a certain plurality, whereas from the Western perspective, it is seen as a series of successive stages of historical development: the idea of such plurality was born in the West, but it was a result of its having discovered the East. Although Oswald Spengler argued that world history existed only in the minds of Europeans, from the Western perspective, world history is not just a space filled with different civilizations but humanity’s progress toward increasingly greater integration. The West has always seen itself as the final stage of this evolution, a universal civilization, capable of spreading across the entire world and integrating all of its parts and regions. It perceives universalism as opposed to localism as its own inevitable destiny. This perception is not just a result of an inflated ego. The West is universal not because of its religiosity, for it is counterbalanced by other religions, but because of its academic and legal rationality, that is, its reasonableness, which does not require any religious sanction to exist. Science and law—these are the West’s real contributions to global development, and they cannot be dismissed by any civilization. Having created modern science as well as secular systems based on formal and legal frameworks, the West started to see them as the only way for humanity to integrate on a global scale. It was the West that emphasized the universal dynamics of the evolution of civilizations, which went beyond the coexistence of different civilizations and would culminate in a certain single project of global order which it itself embodied. Are there any other options for development? How justified is the very concept of a “universal civilization”? According to Huntington, this idea dominating the West is pushing the world toward a clash of civilizations that can only be avoided if the West abandons its claim to universality. However, the big question is whether the West is capable of such repudiation: Would this not mean giving up its own identity, since it was in the West that a framework of links and relationships emerged capable of spreading throughout the world? According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the author of the world-systems theory of capitalism, capitalism cannot be anything else, having already in the sixteenth century emerged as a global economic system—a

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world economy: “Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division of labor but multiple polities and cultures) are obverse and reverse sides of the same coin. One does not cause the other. We are merely defining the same indivisible phenomenon by different characteristics.”11 Even when recognizing the unique nature of Western culture, what can be said about its economy? In the world-economy system, countries and peoples are divided not along the lines of culture or religion, but along the lines drawn by belonging to the prosperous core or the poor periphery. Culture also plays a role here, hampering or stimulating economic growth, but it cannot in itself serve as a dividing line between the rich and poor regions of the world. However, culture changes how the overall dynamics of the evolution of civilizations are viewed. Civilization indeed emerges as the opposite of barbarism and is a framework which overcomes and eliminates the legacy of barbarian times. Given that multiple cradles of civilization emerged at different times and at different l­ ocations, civilization in its initial phase comprises a certain set, a variety of civilizations materially different from one another. Old civilizations give way to new civilizations, with some of the former surviving to this day. However, at all times the existence of such plurality not only shows that there are different ways to emerge from barbarism, but also that this is an unfinished, ongoing process. This is evidenced by the fate of many civilizations that perished either due to clashes between one another or to the onslaught of barbarian tribes and peoples. As previously noted, currently existing civilizations are also not immune from such clashes. This will apparently be the case until a civilization reaches a point of certain universality and becomes a single and common civilization to most peoples. Only then would it be capable of ultimately defeating barbarism with its distinctive feature of giving absolute priority to differences—­things that divide people and pit them against one another. Indeed, the idea of such a transition first emerged in the West and is a Western idea, sometimes referred to as the “Roman idea.” Starting with the period of the “First Rome,” the West embodied it in practice, although in different ways and by different means at various historical stages. The West always saw as its mission ending the barbarism of the past and showing the world the only possible form of its integration. This was the case until the phase of its industrial (capitalist) development when it developed features that led to talk of a “new barbarism.” The initial opposition between civilization and barbarism gave way to other oppositions, no less acute and dangerous. These can generally be formulated as an opposition between civilization and Nature on the 11

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (U of California P, 2011), 25.

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one hand, and between civilization and culture on the other. The conflict that pitted civilization against Nature and culture and led to environmental and spiritual crises has delineated the limits of growth for this civilization and showed its inappropriateness as the global model of the future world order. It is in this context that Russia has to make its choice. Identifying the direction of historical evolution that would be acceptable to it has always been of paramount importance. Expecting imminent future change, the educated Russian public lived the entire nineteenth century with anxiety or hope as it looked to the future. This perspective clearly prevailed as they sought answers to the question of Russia’s future in the past and in the present. This interest is a clear sign that Russia perceived itself not as a developed, established civilization but only as an emerging civilization, with its outline and profile vaguely visible in the spiritual quests of the country’s thinkers and artists. These quests captured not the real state of Russia but the expectations of what lay ahead of it, the desired historical path, sometimes showing subjective bias. Whether these expectations will be realized is yet to be seen, but only they can be used to judge what Russia wanted for itself and what it saw as its historical mission. These expectations and hopes were generally summarized in what came to be known as the “Russian idea.” The question of the Russian idea is above all an academic subject. It occupies an important place in the history of Russian philosophical and socio-­ political thought, having been debated throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with varied results. Once researchers were allowed to study the entire body of Russian philosophy, they have shown renewed interest in this subject. Initially, previously published texts were reprinted, and later contemporary authors wrote a number of monographs. In any event, no one now doubts that this topic should be researched in the context of history and philosophy. It is a different matter when the same question is raised in the context of modern Russia. In this form, it gives rise to different attitudes. For instance, Dmitrii Likhachov once warned that thinking of a national idea as a panacea for all problems is foolish and very dangerous. This view was shared by some other cultural figures who typically belonged to the liberal democratic camp. The Russian idea for them is almost synonymous with Russian nationalism, which pits Russia against other Western peoples. But there is another perspective: both individuals and nations need a supreme idea to exist. Voiced by Dostoevsky, this view was shared by many Russian thinkers and authors who are beyond suspicion of narrowly understood nationalism. So, who is right here? The “Russian idea” is often interpreted as a national idea. However, in what sense can it be seen as a national idea? This idea should not be confused with

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a national interest, which plays an important role in the political practice of any state, in particular in interstate relations. Every state has its own national interests, the protection of which dominates politics in the modern world. Russia is not an exception here. There is no arguing that it has its own national interests. Even the strongest opponents of nationalism would admit it. While it is difficult to draw a line between an idea and an interest within the boundaries of a single nation, this difference becomes evident when a nation is viewed as part of a wider community—a civilization. While nations belonging to the same civilization have different national interests, they express their affiliation to it through a common idea—awareness by every nation of their own civilizational identity. The essence of this idea is open to debate, but it definitely exists in the consciousness of every people and in that of other people belonging to the same civilization. It would be impossible for instance to pinpoint the national idea of the French, British, Swedish, or Dutch citizens, but every one of them knows that they are also Europeans. Konstantin Leontiev in his time stated with surprise that the more national independence European nations get, the more they look alike. In this sense, Europe is not a mechanistic conglomerate of countries and peoples with their national interests but a certain civilizational grouping, the essence of which is represented in its idea. In this sense an idea is more universal than an interest. An interest is something everyone wants for themselves, while an idea is something they see as important and necessary to others, and ultimately to everyone. Just like every human being, people have their own interest, but not everyone has an idea that can be communicated to others. For Europe, ancient Romans became such people. The “Roman idea” that they generated became the source of the Western civilization. Russia has also sought such an idea. Following the victory over Napoleon, when Russia was drawn into the thick of European politics, the intellectual part of Russian society started reflecting on the links and differences between Russia and Europe. It was then that discussions of the “Russian idea” commenced. Claiming that Russia was a country of the future, Vissarion Belinskii said, determining what idea Russia should project is complicated and perhaps impossible given that Russia’s European history only began with Peter the Great. Mikhail Lifshitz interpreted this insight as an indication of this great Russian literary critic’s confidence in a great future for Russia, saying that other people with different views shared that conviction but expressed it in different ways. The question of the future was addressed intuitively, not through scholarly calculations or rational predictions. The intuitive perception of the idea of Russia is ultimately known only by the Creator; according to Fyodor Tiutchev, it can only be grasped on the level of “faith,” rather than by “understanding.”

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Mostly philosophers were writing about the “Russian idea.” Even in framing that question they were driven not by the desire to draw a line between Russia and Europe, but by the intention to establish the degree of the cultural affinity between them. For some reason, they were primarily looking at Europe, not any other part of the world. This interest cannot be explained by the dissimilarity between Russia and Europe, for other parts of the world are equally dissimilar to it. There are many countries—even those that are embarking on the journey of modernization—that do not care much about how they compare to Europe, and whether they are similar or dissimilar to it. For Russia, however, this question is somehow a central one: it has always judged itself using Europe as a benchmark and comparing itself to Europe. However, to do so, a country needs to feel like it already belongs to Europe in a certain sense. The search for the “Russian idea” was actually born out of the need to find an answer to the question of what Russia was to Europe—a daughter, a sister, or a more distant relative. There is no clarity on this answer even now. Many in Russia deny this kinship, while others have directly opposite views. While the former argue that Europe and Russia have nothing to say to each other and that they both go their different, distinct ways, the latter feel that Russia is not whole without Europe, just like Europe is not whole without Russia. It is clear without any comparisons that in many of its features Russia is different from other European countries and peoples. One could enumerate those differences ad infinitum: they were no secret either to Russians or to foreigners who came to Russia or observed it from the outside. The first such difference, both in terms of time and importance, is Orthodoxy, which Russia inherited from Byzantium. That alone separated it from the religious cultures of Catholics and Protestants. Both in its theological and dogmatic aspects as well as in worship practices, Orthodoxy immediately made Muscovy an externally and internally self-contained spiritual world that had no need of special relationships with the Western world of the Roman Catholic Church. Such relationships were not only discouraged; they were frowned upon in some way, replaced with accusations of departure from the true Christian faith. The fact that all Christian denominations are in effect branches of a single religious tradition based on a shared religious truth, albeit interpreted differently, was dismissed even if recognized, and was not seen as an argument for their rapprochement, reconciliation and unity. The clergy and laity were vehemently opposed to even the slightest attempts at departing from the traditional Orthodox canon of religious rites, as, for instance, the entire history of religious dissent by the Russian Old Believers demonstrated. In any event, the Russian Orthodox Church was not the most appropriate platform for a dialogue with

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Europe, although religious topics in this dialogue would become dominant over time. The Russian tsars proved to be more open to Europe. Peter the Great was indeed the first to see Europe as a source of new ideas in industry and military affairs, public administration, education and academic science. The history of Russia’s modernization commenced under Peter the Great, and to a certain extent that process can also be called the history of its Europeanization. Much in that history is explained by the Russian state’s interests, which ultimately lay in a somewhat different sphere than those of the Church. In its policies, the state could not be guided by religious intolerance toward everything coming from Europe, which by that time had already completed its stage of political and cultural secularization. The empire built by Peter the Great, with its capital in Saint Petersburg, was a step toward Europeanization, covering if not the entire country, then at least its top layer—the Russian government and its immediate circle comprising the nobility. As an empire, the Russian state evolved into a partial, although in many ways a superfluous, replica of the enlightened absolutism of European monarchies. Under Catherine the Great, the Russian government’s flirtations with the ideas of the French Enlightenment reached its highest point, to be terminated for good toward the end of her rule, triggered by the horrifying images of Pugachev’s Rebellion and the French Revolution. Still the seeds of European freethinking and love of freedom were already planted in Russian soil and quickly sprang up, leading to the emergence of the so-called Westernizers among the educated class of the Russian nobility from Aleksandr Radishchev to Piotr Chaadaev and Aleksander Herzen. It was they who shouldered the mission of denouncing and criticizing Russian ways from the standpoint of the ideas of the Enlightenment. The key attribute the Westernizers denied to Russia was its right to be considered a modern nation. For them, England or France—just like the United States today—were the benchmarks of modernity. However, Europe was also not unanimous in its assessment of its own level of modernity. Opposing the Enlighteners, whose ideas formed the basis of that modernity, were the Romanticists, or the early Slavophiles, seen as their Russian counterparts: Aleksei Khomiakov, the Kireyevskii brothers, Iurii Samarin, and others. With their emergence, the Europe-centered dialogue between the Enlighteners and Romanticists on the attitudes toward modernity became the internal Russian dialogue, in a way expanding across the entire Christian world. In any event, the dialogue between the Westernizers and Slavophiles was an organic part of a pan-European dialogue. Significantly, that dialogue became possible because educated Russians started to recognize not only the things that differentiated Russia from Europe

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but also certain common traits. Those attitudes were typical not only of Westernizers but also of early Slavophiles, who like the Romanticists rejected not Europe altogether, but only the Europe that was dear to the Enlighteners. The Slavophiles countered the “modern project” promoted by the Enlighteners with their own project to organize earthly life, which can be called the “Russian modern project”: the societal ideal it promoted became known as the “Russian idea.” In that form it was meant not only for Russia but also for all of Europe, with a universal origin to be shared by all humanity. In terms of its universality, even if constrained by the boundaries of the Christian world, it was not inferior to the Enlighteners’ project. The argument between the Slavophiles and Westernizers was indeed a debate over the nature of that universality which could form the basis of a future civilization not just for Russia but for the entire world. In that debate, Slavophiles were no less “Europeans” than Westernizers, albeit in their own style: the journal that Ivan Kireevskii started was even titled The European.12 The early Slavophiles—unlike later Slavophiles—were not so nationally limited as they were generally thought to be. While emphasizing Russia’s uniqueness, they did not reject its commonality with Europe, although they saw that commonality differently than did the Westernizers. For Westernizers, this commonality was “reason,” while Slavophiles saw it in “spirit,” understood as the “Holy Spirit.” Westernizers sought commonalities in science and law, whereas Slavophiles looked to religion. According to the Slavophiles, even if Russia had close ties to Europe, then those were to be sought in the origins of its religious faith, in the spirit of Christianity. Reason or spirit? Which of the two origins is more universal? In Europe, those origins were represented by the Enlighteners and Romanticists, and in Russia by the Westernizers and Slavophiles. Although the Westernizers claimed the title of “Russian Europeans,” Slavophile thinkers were equally educated 12

Alexandre Koyré recalls that tellingly titled journal was launched by Ivan Kireevskii. As this French philosopher of Russian origin wrote, the early Slavophiles “already spoke not about contrasting Russian barbarism and European civilization but about establishing links between Russian civilization and Western civilization. In fact, weren’t they steeped in European civilization, didn’t they feel at home when visiting Europe? Weren’t they Europeans themselves? They saw their mission, their historical objective not in transplanting the Western civilization to Russia but in building and shaping a new civilization destined to take its rightful place among Western nations, enriching humanity’s shared treasure trove with new values—a new civilization which as a successor of European civilization was to carry on the torch that was passed to it. From the very start, they saw the problem of Russian civilization as the problem of global civilization.” (La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du xixe siècle) (Moscow, 2003), 47–48.

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a­ ccording to European standards, although they saw things through a Christian mystical lens rather than the prism of a rational Enlightenment perspective. In The Eternal and the Transient in the Teaching of the Russian Slavophiles (“Vechnoe i prekhodiashchee v uchenii russkikh slavianofilov”), Georges (Georgii) Florovskii emphasized exactly this universal dimension of their teaching: “Their ideal was effectively beyond historical boundaries and was related to the eternal truth of human nature, God and his grace. It was essentially a universal ideal, transcending all racial and national distinctions across all chronological periods.”13 In its initial form, the “Russian idea” did not contain any nationalism or promote any separation of Russia from Europe, its isolationism. In fact, it linked Russia’s greatness to its overcoming its own national egotism for the benefit of bringing together and saving all Christian peoples. This is the point of the famous definition of a “nation’s idea” given by Vladimir Soloviev, according to which a nation is not what “it thinks of itself across time periods but what God thinks of it across eternity.”14 Having already established itself as a powerful nation-state, Russia needed no idea. Therefore, the “Russian idea” would not be a reflection of the existing reality but Russia’s religious and moral objective: to be guided not only by its own national interest but also by those moral standards and principles that are common to all the Christian world and constitute the essence of Christianity. It is Russia’s realization of its responsibility to God, of the need for it to be a Christian, not just a nation state. Nikolai Berdiaev also spoke in the same vein about his “Russian Idea.” This was not what Russia empirically became but what God intended Russia to be: the image of its people. There are many things in Russia’s empirical history that are abject and cause indignation, but there is also a spiritual Russia, and it should be asked about its true nature. Certainly, it might seem a strange idea to judge a country on its idea, not on its real history; however, a philosopher is interested not in a scholarly explanation of how things were and how they are now, for this is left to historians and social scientists; a philosopher is interested in how the country sees itself in its spiritual quest. Time will show whether that quest was justified or not. According to Florovskii, Slavophiles saw the opposition between Russia and Europe not as ethnic, racial or national incompatibility but as the antithesis 13 14

Georges Florovskii, The Eternal and the Transient in the Teaching of the Russian Slavophiles in From the Past of Russian Thought (“Vechnoe i prekhodiashchee v uchenii russkikh slavianofilov” in Iz proshlogo russkoi mysli) (Moscow, 1998), 42. Vladimir Soloviev, Works in Two Volumes (Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh) 1 (Moscow, 1991), 187.

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between “coercive government and creative freedom” and, on a deeper plane, the antithesis between “reason and love.” “Slavophiles were not the authors of that traditionally linked pair—it formed the basis of, for instance, Guizot’s philosophy of history. However, only Russian thinkers succeeded in mapping these opposing twin concepts over the entire history of the Western world, across all areas of its cultural evolution, and they were the first to arrive at ultimate conclusions and practical insights from this relationship.”15 The essence of this antithesis lies in varied approaches to a problem that caused an internal division within the European world, becoming the source of an immensely profound conflict. As is known, this world was divided into Roman and German parts. Its Roman origin put the authority of secular and Church power over everything, whereas its German origin emphasized the free self-­realization of the human spirit—the former promoting rational organization of all social life within the framework of “universal laws” and the latter advocating unfettered individual freedom. The difference in attitudes between Enlighteners and Romanticists can be easily traced back to these two origins. This conflict makes a Westerner persistently oscillate between the law and personal freedom, shifting back and forth from the coercive power of the state to anarchy or revolution. “The realm of reason offers no escape from this range of conflicts.”16 In trying to merge order and freedom on purely rational grounds through reason alone, to cast these origins as notional in nature, abstract logical ideas, Europe has ultimately failed to reconcile them in its real life. In such a setup one always has to sacrifice either order or freedom. Slavophiles offered a different superior—in their view—solution to that problem, one based on the spiritual experience of Christianity. Florovskii wrote, And so the West was rejected not because its population was ethnically distant or alien to Russia in terms of its culture but because of the lies and internal impotence of the origins underlying its existence. Moreover, it was rejected not as something evil in itself but as a completed stage of global historical ascent into the “rays of eternal truth” … And from underneath the obsolete Western thought subject to destruction a new but yet again universal, rather than just national, tablet of the Slavic world emerged.17

15 16 17

Florovskii, 37. Florovskii, 39. Florovskii, 39.

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The argument between the Slavophiles and Westernizers was therefore a debate over the principles to guide not only Russia but also all of Europe. Both sides tried to argue their own case. For Slavophiles, freedom was no less important a value than it was to Westernizers, although they interpreted this concept mostly in religious terms. The principles of “formal reason” were not adequate, in their opinion, to help achieve true freedom—a position that does not imply the negation of everything European. The culture of Europe does not entirely boil down to the traditional rationalism of classical antiquity: it also contains a spiritual tradition that goes back to the first Christians. It is this tradition that should be invoked in the first place when considering how the earthly world should be organized, that is, looking for an actionable, practical solution, rather than a theoretical one. In short, the early Slavophiles and the Westernizers valued Europe for different reasons, each group having their own version of Europe. The argument between them was about whose version should be taken as a model and example. But what message did Russia want to convey to Europe through its idea? It was obvious that it was different from Europe. What Russia wanted was to urge Europe to protect jointly the spiritual—Christian—origins of European culture from the spiritually impoverishing, homogenizing force of the rationally thinking civilization that was spreading across the European continent. It was not that they were against European science, education, civil rights and liberties, for no one among them spoke in defence of extreme manifestations of autocracy or serfdom; but they did not view those institutions as capable in themselves of serving as the foundations of the social order, of elevating human life to its true calling. Moreover, these foundations were to be found not in Russia’s “distinctive origins” and ways but in the “spirit” of Christianity that was typical of Europe as a whole.18 Actually, a dialog between Russia and Europe was really a discussion of what should guide a nation if it wants to live not just by reason, but by conscience, and to combine the law and order in its social life with Christianity’s moral commandments. Europe was inspired by the “Roman idea” of a universal civilization, the idea that could be traced back to the First Rome—one that was 18 See Vladimir Soloviev. Works in Two Volumes, Vol. 1: 434: “Slavophiles were well aware and keenly felt the common root evil of Russian ways that underpinned both the violent practices of slavery, bureaucratic wrongs, and many other things—the very evil of universal disempowerment due to a rather vague idea of human honor and dignity. They had to counter and did counter that evil with the principle of human rights and the unconditional ethical value of a self-reliant individual—the concept which was in essence both Christian and universal, but traditionally associated mostly with Western Europe and not linked to any uniquely ‘Russian origins.’”

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capable of uniting the world’s peoples within a “common legal framework” with its rights and obligation being equally applied to everyone. The “Russian idea” proposed using the principles of Christian ethics as the foundations of human community. The social ideal contained in it replicated the initial forms of a Christian “spiritual commune” linking all members with the bonds of fraternal love, rather than the civil institutions of ancient Greek democracy. The “Russian idea” was based on the early Christian notion that everyone is responsible in the moral, not legal sense, not only for oneself but also for others. Such an idea does not allow a human to be happy in a world that is still so full of misery and suffering. While a Christian seeks to save their own soul, in Russian Orthodox Christianity, no one is saved unless all are saved. Saving one’s own life is impossible if everyone goes alone and seeks salvation only for oneself. The ethics of Orthodoxy are built not simply on the idea of fairness but on love and mercy to all the “insulted and humiliated,” because the principle of fairness, “to every man according to his works” exists in hell too. In this sense, the “Russian idea” was a continuation of the “Roman idea,” although interpreted from a particular perspective. Both ideas are in effect different versions of one and the same topic of a universal way of organizing human life, although they offer different interpretations of its proposed underlying origin. While the “Roman idea” emphasized the formal legal framework of civil and private life, the “Russian idea” referred to sobornost’, the spiritual unity of people within the lap of the Christian Church, with everyone being personally responsible for the fate of all the others. Unlike the formal legal idea of the West, the “Russian idea” aims at spiritual salvation and moral elevation. It puts heart above formal reason, righteousness above truth, compassion over fairness, sobornost’ over civil society, spiritual selfless devotion over the pragmatism of private life. It is opposed to utilitarian ethics with its principle of private benefit, to individual and national egotism that sacrifices the interests of others to one’s own interests. Underpinning this universality is not abstract, impersonal reason with its formal prescriptions but transcending heavenly wisdom, which is self-revealed to a human through personal experience of religious faith. Starting with Russia and Europe by Nikolai Danilevskii, the later Slavophiles would reject not just a bourgeois Europe, but Europe in its entirety as a cultural and historical archetype alien to Russia. This was the assessment Soloviev gave to the book, seeing it as a manifestation of the “degeneration of Slavophilism,” which did not initially deny the existence of spiritual kinship between Russia and Europe. What was the reason for this shift? Berdiaev explains it by the direct impacts of Western nationalism and Russia’s response to it. In his view, Russian nationalism was a peculiar continuation of Russia’s

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­ uropeanization—a c­ onservative Westernism on the Russian soil. What BerdiE aev argued was that nationalism in Russia, although alien to it in spirit, was a reflection of the European mindset with its commitment to all things national. While there is some truth to this explanation, it does not present the whole truth. In the eyes of any European, a national identity does not negate all those common features that describe Europe as a whole. Any people living in Europe, be they French, German, Italian or Swedish citizens, know that they are also Europeans and belong to a certain spiritual grouping bringing together all European peoples. In contrast to such an interpretation of national identity, Danilevskii promoted the idea of not just the national distinctiveness of Slavic culture within a cultural and historical archetype shared with Europe but the idea of this culture’s being absolutely alien to that archetype. And this is a purely Russian, rather than European, nationalism. Unlike European nationalism, it puts Russia on a level of religious veneration and turns love for the country, natural to any Russian, almost into a mystical feeling.19 However, while Danilevskii still recognized the “universal nature” of the Slavic type of culture, his followers, for instance, Nikolai Strakhov, denied that there was anything universal in Slavdom, insisting that every people had their own value system. They argued there was nothing in common between peoples, who all exist by themselves.20

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See Semion Frank, Russian Worldview (Russkoe mirovozzrenie) 1996, where Frank called Russian nationalism a “mystical national narcissism.” In his letter to Georges Fedotov, Frank wrote: “Russian nationalism differs from the natural nationalism of European peoples exactly in that it is full of pretentious religious exaltation and is particularly damaging because of that. Slavophilism is in this context an organic and apparently incurable moral disease of the Russian spirit (particularly aggravated by emigration). Notably, in his efforts to counter that national narcissism, Vladimir Soloviev did not have a single follower. All who were otherwise influenced by him, be it Bulgakov, or Berdiaev, or Blok, swerved to the comfortable path of narcissism. For Berdiaev, it really proved his undoing…” (99). In that same book, Frank reacted to an example of such aversion to everything European, which appeared in a paper in the newly published journal Logos. Responding to Vladimir Ern’s attempt to bring into question the value of all modern age European philosophy by opposing it to Russian religious philosophy as a model of truly philosophical thought, Frank commented: “We have not heretofore seen such sweeping, excessive national arrogance in philosophy” (104). Concluding his debate with Ern, he wrote: “It is of course regrettable when young Russian philosophers worship every word Rickert or Cohen wrote and do not read Vladimir Soloviev or Lev Lopatin or overlook their significance in philosophy. However, it is perhaps even more regrettable to see that kind [of] nationalistic arrogance that knows no measure or perspective in its assessment of national philosophy and insolently tramples on the eternal values of European thought” (112).

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Florovskii called this evolution of the initially inclusive, universal origin underpinning Slavophile teaching into an exclusively national origin relating to one people only, the Russians—the “philosophical ‘fall’ of Slavophilism.” As a result of this evolution, the Russian people went from being people just like others to being a “superior people,” the first among others, the only carriers of divine wisdom and truth: They looked for some higher meaning in every trivia, in every distinctive feature of the Russian way of life, and hence inevitably idealized the old times because they were the old times and Russian ways because they were Russian. Based on the assumption that Slavdom and Russia were destined to bring to life a certain universal ideal and perhaps be the first to do so among other peoples, they concluded that this ideal was a Slavic ideal and embodied exactly the Slavic spirit itself. They went further to argue that the history of Slavdom was, therefore, down to the smallest detail, the embodiment of some superior norm. It gave ample room for people to be lured into all sorts of messianism and posed the threat of people forgetting that value is created only when an idea is brought to life, and [of] falling into veneration of a “notional” unique identity.21 Florovskii’s paper clearly identifies that fundamental shift in Slavophile teaching, which took place during the 1860s and 1870s. One might call it the “degeneration” or “fall” of Slavophilism, but basically it was about its transitioning from a universal—above all ethical—perspective on Russia’s development to perpetuating the country’s nationally isolated existence. The ethical was supplanted with the ethnical. Florovskii himself called that shift a transition from “ethical nationalism” to an “anthropological” one: the latter invoked an idea, while the former relied on a fact—something superficial to specific phenomena. Distinctions are really more clearly visible than similarities. The idealism of the former fell under the positivist drive of the latter. However, this is how the history of the most recent age of Russian nationalism started: it was characterised by Russia’s full rejection of not just European civilization but also its culture. A nationalism that rejects supranational unity is ethnocentrism. It places its own ways above foreign ways and clearly prioritizes distinctions over universal features. The absolutization of individualism in history today is widely seen as the only correct way to view the historical world. For instance, the theory of “local civilizations” has already squeezed out all historical constructs that are 21

Florovskii, 43.

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based on the recognition of the common, integral nature of historical process. This contrasting of local and universal provides a breeding ground for extreme manifestations of nationalism. The ethnocentrism of nationalists resembles the Eurocentrism of Westernizers in that they both invalidate the perspective of other identities. These mutually exclusive views have become the two extremes on Russia’s journey toward civilizational self-determination. It looks like the distinction between Russia and the West—we can talk only of backwardness here—should be sought not in some unique civilization, but in its culture. Russia’s historical uniqueness and its unique identity are most clearly evident precisely in its culture, which many tend to identify with civilization. Russian culture thus became the soul of Russia, defining its completely unique identity, its distinct profile. While lacking in our view any particular civilizational talent, the Russian national genius manifested itself most vividly and distinctly through cultural creativity. Russians see civilization as no benefit at all if it is devoid of the inspiring power of culture. Civilization is the “body” of culture, while culture is the “soul” of civilization. A body without a soul and spirit is as lifeless as a soul without a body. Closing the gap between civilization and culture formed the basis of the “Russian idea.” The fact that this idea has not become a reality yet does not mean it can be dismissed altogether. What can constitute Russia’s civilizational choice in the context of this idea? Already in the prerevolutionary period it was based on understanding the development of Western civilization, whose direction was clearly visible by that time. While initially it emerged in overcoming the opposition between civilization and barbarism, at a later stage Western civilization developed in strong opposition to Nature and culture. While in the context of the former opposition, Russia apparently has no other choice but to follow the path taken by the West: Russia here is no exception to the general rule. As regards the latter oppositions of Western civilization with Nature or with culture it has to seek ways to eliminate them or at least alleviate their intensity and urgency—either together with the West or separately. This search is far from over, but it is exactly this quest that has defined the unique nature of the “Russian idea.” This idea is opposed to Western-style civilizational universalism, not as its antipode, but as a peculiar variety combining the social as well as spiritual and ethical aspirations of a human being. Works Cited Asoian, Iulii and Aleksei Malafeev. The Discovery of the Culture Idea. The Experience of Russian Cultural Studies of the Mid-Nineteenth- to the Early Twentieth ­Centuries

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(Otkrytie idei kultury. Opyt russkoi kulturologii serediny xix i nachala хх vekov). Moscow, 2001. Berdiaev, Nikolai. The Soul of Russia in The Russian Idea (Dusha Rossii in Russkaia ideia). Moscow, 1992. Florovskii, Georges. From the Past of Russian Thought (Iz proshlogo russkoi mysli). Moscow, 1998. Frank, Semion. Russian Worldview (Russkoe mirovozzrenie). St. Petersburg, 1996. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Political Studies, 1 (1994). Koyré, Alexandre. Philosophy and the National Problem in Russia at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du xixe siècle). Moscow, 2003. Samarin, Iurii. Selected Works (Izbrannye proizvedeniia). Moscow, 1996. Soloviev, Vladimir. Works in Two Volumes (Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh) 1. Moscow, 1989. Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. A Study of History. Moscow, 1991.

Alexander Nikiforov Alexander Leonidovich Nikiforov was born in 1940. In 1957, after finishing high school, he worked as a metalworker at a plant. Between 1959 and 1962, he served in the Soviet army. From 1962 to 1967, Nikiforov was a student at the Department of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University (msu) and worked as a stoker at a psychiatric hospital. In 1967, he was employed as a secretary and typist in the Logic Department of the Institute of Philosophy, in the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1970, he defended a candidate’s dissertation in logic, and in 1982, he defended a doctor’s dissertation in philosophy. In the field of logic, Nikiforov developed an original proof system based on Gottlob Frege’s graphic notation. Having shifted to the problems of the philosophy of science, for a long period of time, he remained under the influence of logical positivism of Karl Popper, and Thomas Kuhn. He explored the problems that arose within their conceptions, including among others the relation between sensual perception and language, comparison and choice among competing theories, the definition of likelihood, and the theoretical bias behind scientific facts. Nikiforov proposed an original interpretation of the notion of a scientific fact as a fusion of sensual perception, linguistic expression and tool. He developed a theory of understanding as interpretation—­ascribing meanings to linguistic expressions. In 1986, he presented his ideas in a series of talks at New York University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In recent years, in line with the thought of Oswald Spengler, he has discussed an approaching disaster for European civilization. Nikiforov taught courses in logic and philosophy in the Department of Philosophy of msu, the Linguistic University, the Moscow City Pedagogical University, the Moscow Regional Pedagogical University, and Bauman Technical University. For a long time, he has been a member of the Board of Experts at the Higher Attestation Committee (vak). Nikiforov considers the following books as his main scholarly works: From Formal Logic to the History of Science (Ot formal’noi logiki k istorii nauki) (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); Book on Logic (Kniga po logike) (Moscow, 1995); The Nature of Philosophy (Priroda filosofii) (Moscow, 2001); The Philosophy of Science: History and Theory (Filosofiia nauki: istoriia i teoriia) (Moscow, 2010); and The Structure and Meaning of the Lifeworld of a Man (Structura i smysl zhiznennogo mira cheloveka) (Moscow, 2012).

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Nikiforov is the translator of a number of books from English and German. He translated the works of members of the Vienna Circle, Alfred Tarski, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Georg von Wright, Jaakko Hintikka, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, three books by Paul Feyerabend, a book by Arthur Danto and many others. In 2016, his translation of William Whewell’s Philosophy of Inductive Sciences (1847) was published.

The Value of Science Alexander Nikiforov The Value of Science by the splendid French mathematician Henri Poincare begins with the following words: “The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them.”1 The development and advancement of true knowledge about the world are the main goals of scientific knowledge. This particular standpoint used to be the principle for nineteenth-century science and philosophy. Elena Mamchur also expressed well the following approach: Science is a very special cultural component, mainly aimed at gaining objective true knowledge about the world. It is assumed that science has at its disposal all the necessary means and methods to acquire true knowledge, along with reliable criteria to test its correspondence to reality. Herewith, it is recognized that impartiality, absence of bias and freedom from value paradigms of any kind are necessary prerequisites of proper operation of science within the realm of culture.2 Thus, science is a sphere of human activity whose main purpose, in Thomas Kuhn’s opinion, is the acquisition of true, sound and objective knowledge about the world in line with solving theoretical epistemic “puzzles.” According to this model, the scientist is unbiased in her or his search for truth. The truth serves here as the supreme value. Surprisingly enough, this concept of science, which had the leading role in the philosophy of science for over a century, is erroneous, as it marginally grasps only one side of scientific activity, wrenching it out of its extensive social context and simultaneously putting the scientist in a nonexistent ivory tower. By taking a closer retrospective look at the history of the natural sciences in the Modern Age, we can easily discover that there was no such a thing as “pure science” engaged exclusively in the search for truth, the advancement of the

1 Henri Poincare, The Value of Science (O nauke) (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007/Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 11. 2 Elena Mamchur, Scientific Images in Modern Culture (Obrazy nauki v sovremennoi cul’ture) (Moscow, 2008), 3.

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degree of probability or solutions to solve “puzzles.” The contemporary divisions of research into basic and applied categories are sufficiently artificial and has not been acknowledged by many members of the scientific community. Of course, in science, as in any complicated collective activity, there exists a division of labor and, undoubtedly there always were researchers who were exclusively occupied with cognitive tasks and the search for truth. It is precisely this aspect of scholarly knowledge, in my view, that philosophers of science focused on and analyzed for quite some time. As a result, they constructed a helpful, but limited view of science—featuring only one of its facets. If one looks at science as a social institution that fulfills a specific social task, it becomes clear that the search for truth appears to be a secondary, intermediate goal of the development of new technology intended to satisfy public needs. The search for truth is only instrumental to that end. Traditionally, it is recognized that the rise of modern science dates back to the seventeenth century, but the need for scientific research and a base for its development were prepared a century prior to that. Columbus, who reached the shore of America, Vasco da Gama, who found the way to India; and Magellan, who was the first to circumnavigate the Earth, discovered the world for Europeans. Their discoveries had a huge impact on social and economic relations. The very first consequence of the Age of Exploration was the Era of colonial seizures of territory. As a result, gold flooded Europe, trade flourished (and piracy) in the most important European countries. English and French corsairs not seldom being in government service attacked Spanish and Portuguese ships, plundered the coastal cities of the West Indies and in this manner effected the “re-distribution” of stolen indigenous valuables. Trade companies developed this animated activity: in the north, there was the Hanseatic league of German cities; in the south of Europe, there were unions of merchants in Venice, Genova and Florence. Trade together with colonial gold led to the extensive development of manufactures, leaving craft guilds behind although the former still operated manually, simply replacing physical labor with machines. New technological mills appeared in metallurgy, machine-building, woodworking, papermaking, cloth, powder and other productions.3

3 Aleksandr Bogoliubov and Ashot Grigorian, Classic Mechanics and Technology xvii–xix Centuries (“Classicheskaia mekhanika i tekhnika xvii–xix vv”) Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv) (Moscow, 1979), 69.

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New roads, canals and grandiose architectural complexes were built, in concert with further advancement of mechanisms, such as clocks and compasses. This rapid upsurge of business enterprise, industrial and trade activities, paired with ceaseless feudal wars gave momentum to scientific research, uppermost in the field of mechanics. The peak of scientific development of the seventeenth century is associated with the name of Isaac Newton, who created a theory, which had absorbed multiple achievements of his predecessors. The relation between Newtonian mechanics and the practical needs of his time was profoundly analyzed by the Russian philosopher Boris Gessen at the end of the 1920s. Striving to comprehend the outcomes of Newton’s scientific activity as a result of a certain era, Gessen gave consideration to the overall level and the specifics of economy, technology and physics of the time, when the main ideas of classic mechanics were put forward. Analyzing such structural components of society as industry, transportation and military production, Gessen establishes the existence in society of the demand for the development of science and technology in particular. The development of transportation, of mining, of construction made especially pressing problems of the development of simple machines, statistics and dynamics. Comparing the contemporary scientific problems of Newton’s time and the content of his foundational Philosophiae Naturalis, Gessen proved that “the subject matter of physics was basically defined by economic and engineering tasks, which were brought up in turn by the rising bourgeoisie.”4 The formation and development of science were closely related to rising production forces: “Step by step, together with [the] flourishing of [the] bourgeoisie, went the blossoming of science. For industrial development, the bourgeoisie needed a science that would explore the properties of material bodies and the form of the phenomenon of the power of nature.”5 Consequently, a broad-minded take on the history of science proves that originally scientific activity had been addressing social technological problems; in other words, it had always been “technoscience.” However, the first hundred years of the Modern Age were dedicated to the development of concepts and the introduction of ideal objects, which became the foci of philosophers and historians of science, shifting the spotlight from the social and pragmatic matters of scientific development. But this organizing took place in close connection with workshop practice, and the solving of applied technological tasks. 4 Boris Gessen, Socioeconomic Roots of the Newtonian Mechanics (Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie korni mekhaniki N’iutona) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 28. 5 Gessen, Roots, 31.

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Scientific knowledge from the very beginning was regarded as a means of perfecting technology. This can clearly be seen in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, who was both a scientist and an engineer. Back then this pairing of interests was quite typical: in no way was this an exception. The relationship between scientific research and technology is determined by the very nature of modern science. The experimental method is one of the characteristic features of the Modern Age. However, we should remember that experiment itself has an active effect on the object of research aligned with creating artificial conditions, in which the object is being positioned for the sake of discovering its new previously unseen hidden qualities. The impact placed on the object itself and its environment require new means and devices. These make experimental science extremely sensitive to technology with its means of impact, control, and measurements. The whole history of science shows how the invention of more precise and sophisticated tools gave an impetus to an increase of knowledge, and how it gradually grew into creating forms of technology, widely used in everyday social life. When the creators of classic thermodynamics came up with the idea of irreversibility, the experimental proof was inseparable from the study of heat engine cycles. When the founders of classic electrodynamics (starting from Faraday to Maxwell and Lorenz) gradually introduced the nonmechanic, in its objective sense, understanding of fields, the experimental check of the results was related to work with transformers, generators, engines, and later on electric vibrators and resonators that have been used in used in radio equipment.6 Therefore, the most important method of scientific research served as the mediator between science and technology. Finally, the development of modern science was closely related to the rise of capitalist industrial production. Obviously, the symbiosis of technoscience and capitalism resulted in a civilization, that the Russian philosopher Viacheslav Stiopin dubbed “technogenuous.” Thus, science in the Modern Age was developed in tandem with solving practical issues; and as its main method, experimentation was based upon technical tools. Capitalism encouraged and stimulated scientific development, for it afforded prospects of multiplying revenues in the process. All the aforementioned arguments lead to my first 6 Boris Kuznetsov, The Value of Science and the Issue of its Impact on Civilization (“Tsennost’ nauki i problema ee vozdeistviia na tsivilizatsiiu”) Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv) (Moscow, 1979), 18–19.

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thesis: science in the Modern Age has never had as its main goal the search for truth, inspired by curiosity; on the contrary, from the very beginning it took the form of technoscience. Many philosophers of science perceived the search for true unbiased knowledge as the main objective of scholarly pursuit. Nevertheless, it was always considered an interim, subsidiary aim, leaving a place for the following overarching goal of scientific activity: the main social function of science was the creation of new technologies. Trying to answer the question of what science is, we can say that science is the method of creation and advancement of technologies based on true knowledge. Without a doubt there is a division of labor in science: theorists and experimentalists, specialists of applied and fundamental research, but science as a social institute should solve technological issues faced by society. So, what exactly has science given to humanity in the last four hundred years of its development? You can easily find many enthusiastic and detailed answers to this question in numerous works of “troubadours” singing the praises of scientific and technological progress. To express all the social consequences of progress, we could say in short that technoscience itself has created an artificial environment for the life and work of modern humans. Among the most important changes the first revolutionary transformations occur in the sphere of human labor. The labor of peasants and craftsmen turned into that of agricultural and industrial workers. Agriculture itself turned into a field of industrial production. Brisk growth in the productivity of the workforce led to the drawdown of the rural population. In the last decades of the twentieth century the number of industrial workers was also reduced and replaced by the introduction of new technologies. So-called “physical labor” disappears together with extensive strata of the population, that had been in this kind of work for centuries. The second of the major changes is the development of the means of transportation. A sailing ship, a horse or a camel—those were the main means of transportation for a long time. Their capabilities defined the size of the globe as well as the time spent on covering distances between peoples and countries. At the end the eighteenth century, during the time of Aleksandr Radishchev, a trip from Moscow to Saint Petersburg was considered a whole “journey.” The inventions of the steamboat, railway, cars and planes drastically shortened travelling time. The globe “shrank.” For centuries people stayed in the same place their whole lives because a simple trip to a nearest town—not to mention travel abroad—required a lot of time and effort, whereas today one can get to any European country, as well as to the United States in a matter of hours. Another major achievement, which could be considered an even more important one, is the development of the means of communication. For c­ enturies

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people could communicate only within their closest environment. The invention of the postal system significantly extended the geographical range of communication. Later, newspapers, the telegraph, radios, telephones, tv, and finally, cell phones and the Internet made it possible for people to communicate, collaborate and work together all across the globe, despite being divided by thousands of kilometers. The last, but not the least transformation is due to the development of medicine. Humanity has overcome epidemics of plague, cholera, and smallpox, which used to devastate whole countries. Average life expectancy has doubled: the elderly can have bright active lives. Modern city dwellers of so-called “civilized” countries live in environments, created for them by technoscience: their homes are apartments in multistory buildings, which are equipped with a gas or electric stove, a fridge, a washing machine and a dishwasher, central heating, cold and hot water, and a restroom. They use a car to move around and buy food at a supermarket, and they can enjoy exotic fruits year-round. These and many other advancements of life are possible because of technoscience. They have made labor easier, living more comfortable and life itself healthier and longer. Nevertheless, people are not as excited about progress as they used to be. Why is that? To get a broader view of progress, we ask: What is technology? Technology is a complex of artificial means that modify the environment. This modification is executed to satisfy human needs. The needs are usually divided into biological and social or material and spiritual. To save a biological life, one has to get food, find shelter, clothing, and organize living in order to raise children. Exactly for these reasons people transform their surroundings. Technologies drastically improve and extend material and practical activities, allowing people to raise their share of material wealth derived from nature in order to serve their biological needs. Another question is what has science done to satisfy the spiritual needs of human beings and how has it provided for their moral growth? Without a doubt science has changed our perception of the world: the observable ancient cosmos was replaced with the infinite universe with millions of galaxies, stars, planets and black holes. We are more aware of our surroundings than people four hundred years ago: the globe has been explored and thoroughly described; shuttles provide us with information about the Moon, Mars, and Venus; we know the structure of the atom and are close to discovery of terminate particles of matter; legends and stories about the past have been replaced with scientific historical knowledge; new discoveries in biology have given us a lot of new knowledge about the human body. Science has given us knowledge about the world and equipped us with means to modify it and satisfy our biological needs. At the same time, it seems

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that it has not given us enough for humanity’s moral and spiritual development; nor has it even tried to answer the most important question of human existence: what is the quintessential core of being “human”? For what does a human live or is supposed to live? What is the meaning of existence of one particular human being and humanity in general? What is death, love, happiness? These and other questions related to understanding human beings as special and different from the rest of the living world, have not been answered by technoscience, not just because of its own nature, but because it is reluctant to give any answers to these questions. Moreover, technoscience is highly oriented to satisfy biological physical needs and inclined to see a human as simply a biological organism in no way different from other animal organisms. It has been persistently fighting with mythological, religious, and philosophical understanding as they have provided a higher perception of human nature, one that aims for perfection. The first true achievement of technoscience was a radical change of the worldview: For it is precisely in cosmology that the theocentrism of the Middle Ages was most fully expressed. The hierarchical structure of the universe was clearly embodied in Ptolemaic-Aristotelean geocentrism, that was correspondingly reshaped in the spirit of Christian dogma. In medieval cosmology the lower elementary world consists of four elements, which are subject to birth, change and destruction. It is in opposition to the higher elevated, eternal, celestial order, which consists of everlasting, imperishable, incorruptible matter, where everything is eternal and unchangeable and where celestial bodies move along perfect circular orbits, precisely by virtue of their “unearthly” nature. They are set in motion by a motionless motive force, identified with the Christian God in Medieval Scholastics. In this pattern the higher spiritual beginning is juxtaposed to the lower material one. Geocentrism for the most part simultaneiously corresponded to theocentism and anthropocentrism: the static Earth was the center of the created world, thereby guaranteeing the central position as well of divinely created human beings. The opposition of the “earth” and “sky” acquired not so much a physical as a moral and religious sense… The scale of moral and religious values corresponds with the physical structure of the world. Herewith, the physical structure of the cosmos is only an external embodiment of its sacred essence.7

7 Aleksandr Gorfunkel’, Renaissance Premises for Classical Mechanics in Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (“Renessansnye predposylki vozniknoveniia klassicheckoi mekhaniki” in Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv) (Moscow, 1979), 37.

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In the modern scientific picture, a human being is relegated to the level of an animal—an insignificant microbe, who clings to the clay sphere of the Earth, senselessly dashing into the world space. If the Ancient and Medieval cosmologies elevated humans and appealed to their perfection, modern scientific cosmology puts them in a miserable position facing an infinite universe. Now, the second thesis is: science has given us knowledge about the world and equipped us with technical tools for its transformation. However, it does not disclose anything about what is essentially “human” in any human being, nor has it contributed enough to the spiritual growth of humanity. Perhaps this is not the right place to discuss the question of what is at the core of being “human” and what makes a human different from the rest of the animal world. There is only one feature, which can distinguish a human from an animal. This is reason. However, as multiple ethological research studies have shown, many highly organized animals possess elements of reason, and the ability to calculate, draw conclusions, and construct proofs we have already handed over to machines. Consequently, it is not the ability to reason that defines a human being. Then, what could it be? We might assume that the main difference between humans and animals comes from the fact that human behavior is ruled by something different than biological instincts. Professor Iurii M. Boroday suggested that humans started separating themselves from the animal world when moral taboos that limited animal instincts first appeared. For instance, all the people with no exception should follow two main postulates, which had shaped the constitutive core of primal-patrimonial society. These two taboos were aimed at suppressing instinctive sexual impulsion and aggression inside community. Both of the imperatives that are now considered “innate” (“self-evident”) decree: (1) do not kill your siblings—father or brothers; (2) do not have sexual intercourse with your mother and her children—sisters.8 These moral taboos are the source of human ethics—the one thing, which makes a “featherless bipedal animal” a human being. Nowadays, we have walked a long road and moved far away from the original taboos with initial limitations put only on blood relatives. Today the actual sphere of moral norms includes all people independently of their skin color, religious beliefs, social status, and so on. Why do moral taboos have ­indisputable 8 Iurii Boroday, Erotica. Death. Taboo (Erotika. Smert’. Tabu.) (Moscow, 1996), 98–99.

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nature? They do because they incorporate values much greater than that of a separate human individual: the values of family, tribe, humanity, cosmos or God. The main idea of morality is that there is something greater than an individual—her or his needs, wellbeing, or even life. People have to suppress their egotistical biological instincts for service to this High Purpose. This has always been the subject of discussion for many great teachers of humanity, who tried to inspire people with high moral standards and to elevate humans above the animal world. Moral philosophers usually name the founders of world religions among them: Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad. Sometimes they add philosophers like Socrates, Epicurus, and Immanuel Kant to the list. We can also extend the list by naming some great writers and poets, who have tried to deepen our connection with the spiritual world of human beings, providing them with role models: Dante and Petrarch, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe and Tolstoy and many others. To the list of teachers, one could also add the creators of great architectural and sculptural works and paintings, composers and musicians, who have contributed to the development of musical tastes and cultivated admiration for beauty. To sum up, all the ambassadors of culture, invested in the development of the spiritual world of humanity could be without a doubt called teachers of the human spirit. In conclusion, science in the Modern Age has contributed greatly to satisfying human biological needs. Science has equipped people with technologies for conquering and transforming nature, made humans independent of distances and other limitations. Still it has not done enough to elevate humans above the animal world. We could say that it has made people stronger, faster, less vulnerable, than any other creature, but it never attempted to change their animal nature. According to some sales reports, over 5 billion people on Earth use mobile phones and the Internet. So what? Has that made people more humane? Works Cited Bogoliubov, Aleksandr and Ashot Grigorian. Classical Mechanics and Technology xvii–xix Centuries (“Classicheskaia mekhanika i tekhnika xvii–xix vv”). Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv). Moscow, 1979. Boroday, Iurii. Erotica. Death. Taboo. (Erotika. Smert’. Tabu.). Moscow, 1996. Gessen, Boris. Socioeconomic Roots of Newtonian Mechanics (Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie korni mekhaniki N’iutona). Moscow-Leningrad, 1933.

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Gorfunkel’, Aleksandr. Renaissance Premises for Classical Mechanics in Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (“Renessansnye predposylki vozniknoveniia klassicheckoi mekhaniki” in Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv). Moscow, 1979. Kuznetsov, Boris. The Value of Science and the Issue of its Impact on Civilization in Mechanics and Civilization xvii–xix Centuries (“Tsennost’ nauki i problema ee vozdeistviia na tsivilizatsiiu” in Mekhanika i tsivilizatsia xvii–xix vv). Moscow, 1979. Mamchur, Elena. Images of Science in Modern Culture (Obrazy nauki v sovremennoi cul’ture). Moscow, 2008. Poincare, Henri. The Value of Science (O nauke). New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007/ Moscow: Nauka, 1983.

Valery Podoroga Born in 1946, Valery A. Podoroga, a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor, is one of the top-ranking scientists of the Institute of Philosophy with the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1970, he graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Moscow State University. In 1974, he finished his graduate studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the ussr Academy of Sciences and commenced working in the same establishment. In 1991, he became the Head of the Laboratory of Postclassical Philosophy Studies. Literature, Arts and Politics. From 1999 to the present he has been the Head of the Analytical Anthropology Sector at the Institute of Philosophy with the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy with the Russian Academy of Sciences. Widely recognized in the philosophic community, he has produced most outstanding works in Philosophical Anthropology. Essentially, the core idea of philosophical (analytical) anthropology is to perceive itself, not as a discipline that synthesizes diverse knowledge about human beings on the basis of hermeneutical, dialectical, or some other universal methodology, but rather as a combination of research methods with a corpus of analytical tools, interrelated in a variety of ways and operated on the basis of specifics of the very existence of the subject of study. In his latest articles and studies dedicated to literature, pictorial art and research, the author is particularly focusing on the development of conceptual tools in the context of analytical anthropology. Over the last decade, the author worked on “The Embodiment,” “S.M. Eisenstein and the Avant-garde,” “Violence in Art,” “Mimesis. Analytical Anthropology of Literature,” and “Auto-Bio-Graphy. Life Story in Psychoanalytical Perspective.” Podoroga has authored 15 books and over 300 academic papers, the most notable of which are: Mimesis. Materials on Analytical Anthropology of Literature. Vols. 1–2 (“Kulturnaia Revolutsiia,” 2006, 2011); Political Apology (Higher School of Economics, 2010); Landcape Metaphysics, rev. ed. (Canon-Plus, 2013); Kairos, the Critical Moment. Piece of Contemporary Art on the March. (Grundrissе, 2013); A Matter of Thing. Experiments in Analytical Anthropology (Grundrisse, 2016); Anthropograms. Experience in Self Criticism. Discussion Attached. St.-Petersburg, ed. (European University, 2017); Aftertime. Oswięcim and gulag: To Think is the Absolute Evil (“Ripol-Classic” repr., 2017); Second Screen. S.М. Eisenstein and Cinematograph of Violence. Vol. 1. (The S.P. Breus Foundation., 2017).

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[ The Vasilii. Kandinsky Award]; and Nature Morte. N.V. Gogol—Architecture of Works and Literature, Book 1, (“Ripol-Classic,” 2018). Some of his works have been translated in Austria, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the period from 1990 to the 2000s, Valery Podoroga gave lectures and reports in foreign universities: at the Summer School of Humanitarian Studies in Dubrovnik in 1990; at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1990 and 1992; at Duke University in North Carolina in 1990 and 1994; at the University of Strasbourg in France in 1994; and at Leipzig University in Germany in 1996. He was a Visiting Professor for the Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina during 1994–1995; for the Open Society Branch in Vilnius, Lithuania during 1999–2001; and at the European Humanitarian University in Minsk, Belarus from 2001 to 2003. Renowned Western philosophers and scholars presented their reports at the seminar on behalf of the Analytical Anthropology Sector of the Institute of Philosophy with the Russian Academy of Sciences: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Michel Serres (France); Giorgio Agamben, Аntonio Negri, and Gianni Vattimo (Italy); Susan Buck-Morss, Мichael Hardt, Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, and David Ruccio (United States) among others. From 2014 to 2018, he gave lecture courses on the Analytical Anthropology of Power. Models in the Department of Philosophy of the Russian State University for the Humanities.

What Does One Really Mean by Asking: “What Is Philosophy?” Valery Podoroga The question “What is philosophy?” or “What does one really mean by asking this question?”1 may seem contrived. However, it would also seem quite strange, if one lets the very inquiry go unnoticed without due scrutiny. A lot of philosophers of global renown have answered this question. Yet not a single one of them referred to Philosophy per se: each, according to Merab Mamardashvili, would essentially address the issue of “What is my philosophy?” or, slightly modified, “How do I perceive philosophy.” This is the kind of question that “philosophy professors” would seek the answer to in the twilight of their life. When asked, “What have you dedicated your life to?” they would readily answer—“Philosophy.” “But what is philosophy?” That would set one’s mind thinking, recalling, reporting or giving an overview of one’s path as a philosopher. Curiously enough, one would hardly recall being asked “What is Biology?,” or Physics, or even History or Philology. Because there is always that answer learned way back in high school: these are special forms of scholastic attainments, each involving a specific field of study, tools, objects, line of thought and argot. As a discipline, Philosophy is extraterritorial and re-creates itself, every time introducing a whole set of modern concepts so as to establish a foothold and purpose in society. Can one really give an answer to this question without offering a new philosophical model, or creating one here and now? There are many philosophies, but none would appear to qualify as a universal model. A lot of “-isms” define our philosophical choice: Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and other classic philosophy models have been studied, transposed and interpreted by historians of philosophy. However, there is no such thing as an “exemplary” philosophy, not anymore. No great philosophic system has been created for over a century, and nobody is even thinking about it, except for the neophytes dazzled by their own shining insanity. What this means is the time of a classical philosophy model has passed. We do not inherit ­philosophy as an eternal tool of cognition. To think actually means the ability to see why the 1 This discussion was published in a limited edition of Philosophical Journal [Filosofskii zhurnal] by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science in 2009.

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erstwhile cognition model is remarkably useless today or just “useful somehow”? This is part of contemporary philosophic work. Therefore, when asking “What is Philosophy?,” we need to add today, or, rather, “What is Philosophy now?” The present tense is easily detected in the very structure of the question, because what (the original inquiring element) refers not to the clearly defined or “abridged” method-wise philosophic area where one may find an answer to the question, but rather to the dormant existence of philosophy itself as a certain mental event within a culture. Perhaps, the very fact that it simply exists, as a strong reflex or a habit, is sufficient to legitimize it. Indeed, is this not the kind of question that, once asked, moves the inquiry into historicity? Are we not getting rid of philosophy itself whenever we start talking about it out of our historical existence, thereby making it contained and finite? As soon as one gets used to the concept that philosophy does exist as is, regardless of any clearly outlined habitat, that is exactly when it really exists. Therefore, in a single question there is some kind of duplicity in the inquiring intent, for the original assumption is that philosophy exists. And the question is asked with a concealed intent: if it is, or does exist, then what is it? Or what is it, when it is there? One may say the question itself implies supremacy of existence (event) over the essence (or what-ness). Then again, how does one answer the question “What is philosophy?” if it is not there? After all, the essence is by default bound by the method. Therefore, no matter how one defines philosophy, the definition implies academic specialization, disciplinary boundaries and other various scholastic attainments and ability to know philosophy. Philosophies multiply method-wise (phenomenological, linguistic, hermeneutical, existential, etc.). If we say that philosophy exists, we imply there is philosophizing as well. The answer to the question, “What is Philosophy?” I think, lies outside the plane of philosophy itself or philosophizing. This question may, in fact, lie on various standby horizons of expectations, but it opens up just one horizon of expectation at a time, which then shuts down as soon as the answer is found. The next horizon comes afterward. I would single out several such horizons: historical (time, age, period), historiographical (event); genealogical (origin and place); disciplinary (institution, occupation, mission); affective (passion); and, finally, metaphysical (inquiry as a principle of cognition). And only the last question/inquiry is philosophical per se, and every time it is formulated, it changes the “ultimate” meaning, as its criterion does not lie outside but rather inside the very experience of philosophizing. This is the only instance when the status of the question may vary, as the answer can be found in the manner

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of inquiry itself. On the contrary, other horizons of expectations imply that the answers shall be definite and without any ambiguity. I will proceed on the basis of what I call Supremacy of the Object (the External). What purpose does that serve? First of all, we could slip out of the method trap. For every time I proceed on the assumption “cogito,” I immediately evolve into some kind of a methodological homunculus—a “Popperian,” a “Heideggerian,” a “Nietzschean,” a “Husserlian” or a “Freudian.” I cannot begin to think without somebody else already thinking for me … how to think spontaneously, without any method—that is the question? Therefore, I would rather proceed with the analysis, taking some devious path from the exterior to the interior, and thus avoid the temptation of trusting the givenness of a thinking Subject. I

The Historiographical Horizon: The History and Time of an Event

Here we should introduce a historical dimensionality of philosophic experience: such chronological boundaries as the age, the time and the period. The time of thought is the time of event that we need just to be able to handle the historical being of philosophy, that is, it indicates that any particular thought occurred to Plato or Descartes within a specific historical time span. The fact of the thought—Plato or Socrates lived at that time or another, lived in that place or another, did one thing or the other,—is one side of the coin that is a chronological representation in itself, whereas materialization of the thought is defined by a totally different lifespan and represents a projection that is out of time where the thought from long ago would come back to us in the present. However, going back to the ancient thought experience, one would expose oneself to a real trial, given that philosophers often activate thought events out of their seemingly eternal sleep and bring them back to life. One also needs to control the event-related time of thought, sticking not to dead chronology but rather to the boundaries of each specific event. Historiographical inquiry keeps philosophy in tight boundaries while opening up its essential dimension that is defined by the concept of event. Historiography of philosophical experience means a description of some event that is tantamount to the birth of something “new,” such as fire with Heraclitus, idea with Plato, cogito with Descartes, durée with Bergson, intentionality with Husserl, and Dasein with Heidegger. These are the milestones of philosophic work where the power of thought shapes the philosophy itself as an Event.

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The Genealogical Horizon: Origin and Place

Inquiry, or inquiry about place, that supports the genealogical approach is the issue of the origin of philosophical experience stated in any particular philosophical system. One should particularly note, for example, the development of romantic experience in German philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, step-by-step uncovering the cultural and cognitive experience of Greece. What may come to mind is Georg Hegel and the Greeks, Friedrich Hölderlin and the Greeks, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Greeks, Martin Heidegger and the Greeks. The whole of German philosophy replicates itself, one way or another, while resorting to a new way of understanding its own origins, transposing its “ideal Motherland” into the Ancient Greek way of thinking. By proving its European affiliation, German cultural tradition endeavored to make its entrée into global thinking. Redoubling the myth, the late hymns of Hölderlin beautified the Greek Motherland. The antique logos was of ultimate philosophic value for Aleksei Losev and his disciples. Antique, classical mythology embellished the psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. Affiliation with the ideal motherland of European thought then would link the chain of traditions and connect it to the present. The mental landscape of philosophy is a stage whose set is changing all the time, such that philosophy all the time finds itself on a different stage. There are several key philosophical landscapes, such as the Greek polis (marketplace, gymnasium, academy, feast/symposium), the desert (trials and transformation, meeting the sacred), and others. Philosophic speculation includes elements of geomantics. Some European sophists find their promised land to be a “landscape” or a stage—a place that is neither here, nor there, or a place that is nowhere—in a “desert” or “mountains” as a substitute for “no one’s place”: for Søren Kierkegaard this is Mount Moriah or the Biblical desert; for Nietzsche, it is the Engadin in the Swiss Alps; for Heidegger it is Schwarzwald, Germany; for Andrei Bely it is Kojori in eastern Georgia; and for Socrates it is atopic thought in his topos—atopos. III

The Disciplinary Horizon: Specialization and Freedom

Our Institute of Philosophy with the Russian Academy of Sciences has become our common home and place of official presence in our capacity as ­philosophers—a place that is a proof of one’s status, rank, position, labor and professional guarantees. We no longer distinguish the principal format of the institute and the experience of collective (group) creativity from the occupation legitimized by the government, as this kind of format stays v­ irtually

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­ nchanged. In a way, this institute has become “domesticated” and the creative u functions have become daily routine; the value of individual efforts, the products of labor and recognition evolved into second-rate factors, giving way to the promotion of equality and quantitative standards applicable to the meeting of production targets. Of course, this should not be construed as an invisible college that ceased to exist. However, it is no longer as strong as it used to be. The sphere of intellectual competition contracted and ceased to be a necessity. Here we do not touch upon the global history of the philosophical institution itself. Naturally enough, as ideological traditions go obsolete, philosophy finds itself exposed to freedom it had not really anticipated, so it protects itself against such freedom by splitting into specializations, thus giving birth to a great number of small but quite academic groups of philosophers based on a variety of philosophizing traditions. Philosophic work goes on, and its first stages, requiring tremendous efforts from translators in order to at least partially restore the lost library of European philosophers, proved to be exceedingly productive and promising. Today the library being for the most part restored, the work proceeded to a new stage—the study of the ideal treasure trove of West European and national academic thinking, a dual archive and museum. However, this work cannot go on outside the present and without involvement, as our “post-modernity” offers new relationships resulting from changing cultural experience and an emerging new map of philosophical frontlines. Where does the mistrust come from? Philosophy is often seen not as a blend of “live” ideas but rather as a matter of semantics, some packaged or compacted philosophical knowledge. This all had an impact on the archiving of the global philosophical heritage. What one knows about Kant today by far exceeds any ability to understand this knowledge. One cannot reasonably qualify as a Kantian but can easily claim to be a Kant scholar, who carries special knowledge categorized as the “history of philosophy,” where “history” supersedes “philosophizing.” What kind of a philosopher can one be, if one is not Kant? From the point of view of a modern historian of philosophy, anyone who tries to say something or to philosophize is a pretender. Philosophic specialization is closely tied with a dogmatic cult of scientificity, a strange cult wherein power and politics merge under the guise of philosophy. I mean, specialization is more politics than the outcome of development of philosophic knowledge—the politics of knowledge. For almost half a century, philosophy has been considered, maybe even unwittingly, as some kind of an annex. Does philosophy need to imitate whatever it takes in—science, art, logic, history or geography—all in order to survive? Cultural studies scholars are known to ask from time to time: What do

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­ hilosophers really do? It is just cultural studies! Now that humanitarian discip plines are free to some extent, “professionals” are trying, retrospectively, to take possession of the entire philosophical foundation that is based on the national and European philosophic traditions, making it their own methodological resource. It looks like some form of amnesia. They claim that philosophy needs to be banished to a place where it evolves into some code of dogmas out of a theological treatise, thereby finishing it off for good… And they seem to be content with the kind of philosophy they already have. IV

The Horizon of Affectivity: Passion toward Cognition

Sometimes we talk about philosophy as if it were the object of our passion or even the feeling, we all know as love and not only love for wisdom. That is why affectivity is an ambiguous concept: on the one hand, philosophy in itself is passion, often referred to as “diagnosis”; the one who philosophizes, thinks deeply, falls into a hole of sorts, meditating isolated in a cell or on a mountain top—in short, one who behaves like a man possessed. But how does one avoid all that if philosophy really demands love? Philosophy is remarkably individualistic. All those whom we read and try to study are not the thought of ­collectives—they are Kants, Hegels, Spinozas and Heideggers. Individualization of the experience of thought and its deeply personal nature create the background for admiration, feeding the flame of creativity and love. Philosophy is a matter of personal passion rather than a common public one. Was not Socrates driven by love of wisdom? When a person tries to argue with an opponent about the supremacy of truth over opinion, this kind of supremacy is the more convincing if that person has invested more passion in the search for truth. Love does not even ask for more. The concept of philosophy gets overblown so much that it boils down to free philosophizing, which is equivalent to passion: the love for wisdom. Philosophizing wisdom today often finds inspiration in Oriental wisdom: finding strength in Zen practices, Hesychast meditation or the Orthodox ascetic code. Does one need to distinguish wisdom from philosophy? It is clear: philosophy has no children, no youths, no adults, no men or women and recognizes only the neutral gender. However, an old man is a wise man, the cult of wisdom and the institute of the elders are inherent in Oriental thought practices. And, finally, the narcissistic core of Eurocentric philosophical doctrine comes from the experience of ideal passions, that is exclusively the kind of passion that would promote cognition: “wonder” and “admiration.”

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The Metaphysical Horizon or the Policy of Philosophy

The last step, philosophy returning to itself, poses the question: can one return metaphysically to a foundation based on opposites, such as with the more historical in the existence of philosophy? To think like a philosopher, one needs to know the starting point, the cause, the point in time, the goal in mind and the method to apply. Observe, control and re-check. Strange as it is, metaphysical inquiry ultimately merges with policy, policy not as in a collective ideological event, not an order to follow, but rather as an individual cause, a return to metaphysics through freedom of choice that is interpreted as a political choice. Looking back on a period from the late nineteenth century to the transition into the twenty-first, we might be able to single out at least three cycles, each differing in length and, most importantly, virtually never converging: Cycle 1 (1890–1922) marks the beginning of institutionalization and cultural recognition of philosophic knowledge, reflected in poetry, literature and art, followed by evolvement in the Russian religious and philosophic renaissance; Cycle 2 (1922–1985) comprises the first successful formation of the traditions of Soviet philosophy and total completion of the cycle between the late 1920s and mid1980s; and Cycle 3 (1985–1993–2006) entailing transition-restoration-­conclusion, witnesses the rise and fall of a totalitarian state—a period starting around the 1990s and continuing today with radical revision of the philosophic and ideological heritage. Cycle 3 involves the search for a way out of complex, often tragic-to-comic event-driven space representing this post-totalitarian society. A new tradition is taking shape amidst chaotic and converging features: it still requires a clearly defined direction. In Cycle 1 and Cycle 2, we are able to establish the boundaries of philosophic work in culture, but in Cycle 3 nothing is guaranteed at all. All we have is a task to tackle, one for which philosophy shall serve as a methodological basis supporting total re-evaluation of values including the values that mixed together in post-totalitarian ideologies of the 1990s. The kind of philosophy that took shape in the Soviet era combined remonstrative and apolitical features. Unable to devise conditions for autonomous participation in politics, it remained a part of a dogmatic ideology that used philosophy to shape common knowledge and the Soviet worldview. Philosophy has definitely turned into a maidservant of the powers that be with consequences to match. The service, however, proved to be quite ambiguous, as it went along with other philosophic strategies taking shape that came into the picture after perestroika. The political component does not exist, not because someone is prohibited from being a politician or participating in a free political action, but because the philosophy itself denies its dependence on the political

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component and perceives power in a very peculiar manner. Therefore, the position of philosophy (as a shop-specific knowledge) sometimes is decisive for understanding politics on the whole. Philosophy would perceive politics, especially the totalitarian or dogmatic variety, as a misleading practice that must be abandoned at all costs so as to hold true to the knowledge and to hope for other opportunities to manifest themselves. In other words, philosophy as it now stands at the exit of the blind alley of totalitarianism that it endured over the last twenty years, has never before faced the priority of experience. Borrowing the experience from other established philosophical systems and ideologies, it proved to be unable to recognize its own experience in a new environment: the real drama today of the Soviet philosophic tradition, to which I myself am partly affiliated, is a shortage of its own experience of thought. Philosophic thought relinquished the experience that should have been the essence of newly emerging post-Soviet thought. Indeed, there were opportunities to recognize the priority of one’s own experience and put it to good use, but this somehow never happened. Philosophy was trapped in a closed elitist community of intellectuals whose way of thinking was conditioned significantly every day by traumatic events due to ideological terror. However, in Soviet culture, where philosophizing proved to be a feeble apolitical skill, there remained a tradition of desperate opposition to power, which was passed on time and again in literature, not only in the underground press but also in literature as a whole, including forbidden or forgotten literature. Russian and Soviet literature has always been the keeper of this unique original experience that would be passed from literary history, block to block, in a variety of narrative programs. Preserved by literature, this experience could not be explicated in philosophical terms, since philosophy has not been that special, critically reflexive tool needed by society and vital for shaping a coherent worldview. Moreover, the national philosophic tradition for quite a while was considered some quasi-narrative part of “great Russian literature” or even some literary appendix. The literature-centrist society in which we all still live does not know any philosophy and would not even seek it, being content with continually sharing experience in the form of an unprecedented variety of big and small narratives. For example, in starting a debate about Heidegger’s heritage, that is the “Nazi past,” we immediately open up a broader scope of critical problems pertinent to an entirely different topic: how can there be any European culture after Oswięcim? Theodore Adorno asked. This has been a topic of bitter debate all over Europe for more than the last two decades. However, does not after Oswięcim call forth other memories, as, for example, after gulag? Nobody has ever asked that question. And there may be an explanation why it has never been asked that way. On the one hand, there is this one nation, the Nazi r­ egime,

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killing off some other nations; on the other hand, there is this one nation with Stalin’s regime that is killing itself. So, can whatever follows this after be interpreted in the spirit of this original displacement, as if some part of the nation, driven by fear and loyalty, stripped the other part of the nation of the right to exist only because this other part dared to resist the fear plaguing the former? In fact, of all the literature that we can use to understand better the past—the after gulag—in its entirety, including The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the stories by Varlam Shalamov, is the literature of witnessing whose multiple volumes could be attached to files for Judgment Day. Who, however, is going to be the judge, who will be the defendant anyway and who will this testimony be delivered to? Who is going to accept it? Who will use it as the grounds for judgment if the film “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann shows how the past is getting entwined in a series of random testimonies—which cannot be anything but random—that do not negate each other but rather describe the past as the Impossible, not as something terrible or hideous, but as something that could not have happened? The Gulag testimony is not really testimony at all. About what is there to testify? The mass murders and suffering of a nation that has fallen victim to itself? Where are the executioners? Who are they? Where do we find the Last Assize? The questions—Who is being judged, and who is judging?—set up the cruelest contradiction, one that rejects the last testimony for which justice does not exist. To conclude, a few weeks ago I had a conversation with a leftist Italian philosopher who hoping to God that we first sort out this Oswięcim mess, asked why do we need the Gulag? The Gulag, it appears, is to be the problem of Russia alone as the outcome of its specific “non-western” ways of modernizing, a phenomenon that appears to have a quite reasonable explanation, whereas Oswięcim is something historically inexplicable as it is beyond any comprehension. The Gulag, moreover, represents the defeat of leftist ideas, the defeat of socialism and “the great Utopia.” Philosophy would not dare to claim any leading role in the national culture as long as it proved to be unable to make sense of, digest and conceptualize this most radical experience.

Nikolai Rozov Born in Novosibirsk in 1958, Nikolai Sergeevich Rozov is a specialist in the philosophy of history, the theory of values, the philosophy of education, social epistemology, macrosociology, and political science. In 1983, he graduated from the Psychology Department of Moscow State University (msu). For three years he worked as a practical sociologist. In 1987 he began working at Novosibirsk State University. In 1989 he completed his graduate studies at the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences and defended his thesis in philosophy for the degree of Candidate of Science: “Methodological Analysis of Modeling of Sociocultural Processes” at Tomsk State University. In 1993 at Moscow State University (msu), for his Doctor of Science degree Rozov defended his thesis: “The Value Foundations of Humanitarian Education in the Modern World.” In 1995 he completed an internship under the supervision of Immanuel Wallerstein at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at Binghamton University (suny in Binghamton, New York). In 1998 Rozov received the title of full professor. Since 2002 he works as a principal researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Law, the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also the head of the Department for Social Philosophy and Political Sciences in Novosibirsk State University. Rozov translated two books by Randall Collins—Sociology of Philosophies: The Global Theory of Intellectual Change (in collaboration with Julia Wertheim, Novosibirsk, 2002) and Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (Moscow, 2015). He has authored more than 330 scholarly works, including nine books. In his book, The Structure of Civilization and the Trends of World Development (Struktura tsivilizatsii i tendentsii mirovogo razvitiia) (Novosibirsk, 1992), while using the ideas of Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber, and Spartak Nikanorov, he developed the foundations of social cultural studies and elaborated the basic conceptual apparatus for research. The concept of a mega-tendency, in contrast to the vague “megatrends” of John Naisbitt, is defined as a complex of positive feedbacks between trends in different spheres of sociohistorical reality. Three mega-tendencies of world development are as follows: – “Assimilation”—the inertia of techno-economic growth and total Westernization. Later this mega-tendency acquired the generally accepted name “globalization.”

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– “Isolation”—local containment of growth and general political, cultural alienation. Later this became known as regionalization, nationalism, religious and cultural fundamentalism. – “Multipolarity”—techno-economic reorientation and global partnership. This is a speculative mega-tendency, close to the ideas of humanistic, “green,” anti-globalization, but non-isolationist movements. His book, Values in a Problematic World: Philosophical Foundations and Social Applications of Constructive Axiology (Tsennosti v problemnom mire: filosofskie osnovaniia i sotsial’nye prilozheniia konstruktivnoi aksiologii) (Novosibirsk, 1998), has shown that values must be the basis of a new form of worldview: with regard to each other, they are discrete, rationally expressed normative foundations of human consciousness and behavior. The book has put forth valid grounds for values based on the notion of the variety of groups and their value systems, that recognize their rights to realize their own values and postulated generalizations: recognizing a right for yourself, acknowledge it for others. His book, Philosophy and Theory of History: Book One. Prolegomena (Filosofiia i teoriia istorii: Kniga 1. Prolegomeny) (Moscow, 2002; 2nd ed. 2019), develops an approach which resists both the analytic philosophy of history—analysis of the language, logic and structure of already existing historical texts—and the speculative philosophy of history, which tries to deduce judgments about history from a priori principles. The second book of this series, The Causes, Dynamics and Meaning of Revolutions (Prichiny, dinamika i smysl revoliutsii) (Moscow, 2018), describes and analyzes the role of various types of revolutions and revolutionary waves in the context of a humanistic version of the meaning of world history in five autonomous processes of modernization. Particular attention is paid to the causes of crisis and revolutionary situations, the laws of state collapse, the mechanisms of conflict dynamics, the relationship of macro-, meso-, and microprocesses in revolutionary periods. The principles and criteria of legitimacy of post-revolutionary regimes are substantiated. In his book, Historical Macrosociology: Methodology and Methods (Istoricheskaia makrosotsiologiia: metodologiia i metody) (Novosibirsk, 2009), Rozov analyzes the development and the main pressing problems of epistemology of social cognition. The foundations, main directions, methods and models of historical macrosociology are presented. Logical and conceptual means of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of causality in historical dynamics are described and linked in detail. The method of theoretical history is deployed in nine main stages and hundreds of specific research procedures. The book, Track and Pass: Macrosociological Foundations of Russia’s Strategies in the Twenty-first Century (Koleia i pereval: makrosotsiologicheskie osnovaniia strategii Rossii v 21-m veke) (Moscow, 2011), presents an attempt to

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i­ dentify the nature of “Russian power,” to reveal the internal generative mechanism of the cycles of Russian history, and to show its dynamic connection with the national mentality. The book, Ideas and Intellectuals in the Stream of History (Idei i intellektualy v potoke istorii) (Novosibirsk, 2016; 2nd ed. Moscow, 2018), includes essays with a wide thematic diversity: Platonism and sociologism in the ontology of scientific knowledge, the role of ideas in socio-historical development, the mechanisms of evolution of intellectual institutions, the reasons for the stagnation of philosophy and the history of attempts to “cancel philosophy,” a philosophical analysis of the dream phenomenon, the drama of the relationship between philosophy and politics in Russian history, the role of intellectuals in periods of reaction and difficulties of ethical choice, accusations and justifications of geopolitics as a science.

The Cyclical Dynamics in Russian History Nikolai Rozov 1

Cyclical Dynamics in Russia: Is It a Disease or a Country’s Fundamental Nature?

One of the main sacred things for every country is its national history. In this respect Russian history is characterized by ultra-dramatic endeavors and conflicts because of considerably longstanding, opposing assessments of past events: the period of Peter the Great and the Soviet era—especially Stalin’s rule, “Perestroika” and the period after it. These days Russia is ill. To follow a medical metaphor, national “health” is full realization of national potential, sustainable growth and development of a society without failures, inhibitions, unjustified national suffering and massive number of victims. The “disease” itself, as a basis of destructive transformations, is a mysterious inner driver that systematically generates these painful phenomena. Medical terminology is used here partly as an analogy to clarify this approach to the cyclical dynamics in Russia, which is based upon a philosophic attitude: repeating events are caused by a general hidden reason. In order essentially to change these events the reason should be identified and properly modified. This medical metaphor proves to be rather suitable because medicine since the time of Hippocrates, when it had been gemmated from philosophy, has acted precisely in this way. Is a country’s persistently repeating characteristic—a special cycle dynamics in this case—an “incidental disease” or its inner nature? Here social theory aspires to be the philosophy of history. This question can be solved neither on an abstract scholastic level nor on a purely empirical one. My position is that Russian cycles and revolving coercive “Russian power” are the result of a serious “national illness” which is not, however, the fatal essence of Russia. Consider as support for this position the following points. For the case of “essence,” the coercive relations and institutions would always reproduce anywhere in Russia. Moreover, inhabitants of Russia— Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Belarusians and others—as carriers of this “essence”—when moving to another country, supposedly would build up their

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accustomed institutions and practices there with systematic restrictions on rights, freedoms, redistribution of property, and so forth. Both conclusions turn out to be absolutely false. There have been a great number of precedents of self-organization based upon horizontal links and trust—starting with the communities of Old Believers, then those of the gentry and local people, to the merchant guilds and current civil movements and initiatives. It is true that in the Soviet period everything that was not part of the totalitarian hierarchy was purposefully destroyed, for instance, all selforganized communities, such as Tolstoyans, original independent agricultural cooperatives, Esperantists, self-organized writer unions, literary societies and others. Independent trade unions are still nearly strangled. All this only emphasizes the very notorious nature of “Russian power,” but it does not tell about the country and its people. Outside of the mafia, Russians who have emigrated almost never try to reconstruct the enforced relations and institutions that restrict rights, freedoms and property. Russian immigrants quickly adjust and integrate into the social environment wherever they live. In Great Britain, Spain, Thailand or the USA, they do it no worse than others. Were the authoritarian coercive power the very essence of Russia, the country would gradually have found more or less stable conditions acceptable for the main social groups. But for the past four hundred years, it has not happened so far. The thirty-year-long reign of Nicholas i (1825–1855) and almost twenty years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule (1964–1982) can be called rare exceptions, but in both cases ideological and social tension was increasing in society; moreover, latent processes of degradation in the first case resulted in a crucial defeat in the Crimea War and subsequent significant Great reforms, and in the second case, it led to failure in the Afghan War, economic and governmental crises, Perestroika, and the collapse of this superpower. What is it at the very heart of Russia that for ages has not led to any acceptable stability? All this proves that “the disease” is not at all the essence of Russia. The rise and destruction of coercive institutions and practices are typical of “Russian power,” as well as of criminal communities in Russia. This underlines the deep connection between these structures. Given that we are interested in the phenomenology of Russian cycles, we start not with pointing out repetitions and analogies because that has been done many times by various authors, but with distinguishing the main variables whose values cyclically vary in Russian history.

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Long Cycles and State Success

The cyclically changing variable is easily reconstructed in long-cycle models of mobilization1 and in the revolutions of the service class.2 This variable, state success, aggregates: – the level of geopolitical power and prestige, – the level of military victories/defeats and territorial acquisitions/losses, – the level of the legitimacy of the political regime, – the level of social–political stability/tension, and – the level of economic and emotional comfort of powerful groups: their satisfaction with material and social conditions. It should be mentioned that high parametrical values of state success do not mean public contentment and welfare. During the epochs of Peter the Great, Catherine ii, Alexander i, Nicholas i, and of Stalin, peasant serfs and later collective farmers did not live peacefully and happily, but the coercive order was strong enough that it remained stable: the rare riots were severely and effectively suffocated such that they only strengthened the legitimacy of power. “The first revolution of the service class” in the middle of the sixteenth century is famous for its military reform, for having introduced the mode of military recruiting by ancestry (po otechestvu) for the children of the boyars and nobles and recruiting for service not by ancestry (po priboru) as Marksman troops were levied from the lower classes. This “revolution from above” starts the “Groznyi cycle” from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century, whose geopolitical successes include bringing under control and capturing Novgorod, Volga lands, Ukraine, and part of Siberia. “The second revolution of the service class” is famous for a number of Peter the Great’s governmental reforms that produced a service class of unified gentry and a regulated military and bureaucratic hierarchy due to the Table of Ranks. The long Petrine cycle lasting from the eighteenth century to the 1910s was marked by a rise in military industry, education, science, and the annexation of Baltic states, Finland, the Crimea, the Caucasus, Poland, Middle Asia, Manchuria, the Far East and Alaska. 1 Roman Vishnevsky, Modernization Cycles in Russian History (Modernizatsionnye Tsikly v Istorii Rossii), Theses of the Fifth Kondratiev Scientific Conference (Moscow: International Fund of Nikolai Kondratiev, 1997). 2 Richard Hellie, “The Structure of Russian Imperial History,” History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History 44, no. 4 (2005).

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“The third revolution of the service class” is Stalin’s “sharp turn” to complete nationalization of the economy and social life, which was made possible by the massive centralized party. The long “Stalin cycle” (1927–1985) included the compulsory mobilization of resources by means of collectivization and industrialization, the triumph of 1945, getting control over Central Europe, the capture of Sakhalin and the Southern Kuril islands, support of pro-communist regimes in distant parts of the planet, obtaining the status of a world superpower, and strong scientific, military technical and space programs. 3

Short Cycles and Levels of Freedom

The cyclically changing variable in the short cycle models of reform and counterreforms3 is freedom as a measure of individual and property security, as well as participation in state management. The integral parameter aggregates: – the level of factual independence of individuals, safety from illegal coercion and violence; – the level of private, civil and political freedoms, human rights; – the level of property security, freedom for entrepreneurship; – the level of participation: the possibility for people to take part in the management of society; – the level of constitutionalism: the subordination of ruling elites to law.4 For the last two hundred years the main peaks of “Liberalization” have been the following: early reforms of Alexander i (1801–1811), the Great Reforms of Alexander ii (1859–1874), the October Manifesto (1905) and further establishment of Parliamentarism (1905–1917), the February Revolution and the policy of the Provisional Government (February-July 1917), the New Economic Policy (nep) (1922–1927), the “Thaw” (1956–1968), Perestroika and in part the postPerestroika period (1987–1998). 3 Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy (U of California P, 1981); Vladimir Pantin and Vladimir Lapkin, Waves of Political Modernization in Russian History: A Hypothesis for Discussion (“Volny politicheskoi modernizatsii v istorii Rossii. K obsuzhdeniiu gipotezy”) Problemy i suzhdeniia 2 (1998). 4 There is an overlap between different parameters here, both traditionally applied to a liberal regime (freedom from coercion, security of property) and to democracy (degree of participation, constitutionalism). Globally in practice, they not infrequently diverge; ideologically they even oppose each other and serve as slogans in the struggle against various political forces. However, in the history of Russia with a rare exception liberalization and ­democratization—and their consequent obstruction—made a single process. Thus, the integral variable “freedom” is taken here as a cognitive tool; nevertheless, it is possible to ­distinguish them if necessary.

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The Cyclical Dynamics in Russian History 1945

state success

Great Reforms of Alexander II

Alexander I freedom

Perestroika state success

October 1905 Thaw 1956–64

nep

1854 Pavel I 1812 Nikolai I

Reaction of Alexander III Military Communism

New Termidor? freedom 2003

Brezhnev’s neostalinism 1991

Stalirism 1943

1918

Figure 1

Dynamics of “Freedom” and levels of “State success” for the last two hundred years in Russia. The lower looping line is a fluctuation of reforms and counter-reforms according to Vladimir Lapkin and Vladimir Pantin’s Waves of Political Modernization in Russian History: A Hypothesis for Discussion (“Volny politicheskoi modernizatsii v istorii Rossii”). Problemy i suzhdeniia, no. 2. (1998). The upper line presents changes in the level of “State success”: geopolitical power prestige and domestic stability, power and regime legitimacy.

The main periods of “authoritarian roll-backs” are the repressions and persecution by the following regimes: the late reactionary counter-reforms of Alexander i’s and Nikolai i’s reigns (1815–1854), the reaction during Alexander iii’s reign (1881–1894), Military communism (1919–1922), Stalin’s regime (1927–1953), the “neo-Stalinism” of Brezhnev since 1968, the establishment of “the vertical of power,” “controlled (sovereign) democracy,” “the consolidated state” since 2000, especially, in 2003–2005, the reaction of 2012–2013 and the turn to overt aggression and the slide down to totalitarianism since Spring 2014. Using as the general system the idea that cycles of different length usually coexist with and overlap each other, the analysis in Figure 1 shows both long and short cycles in Russian history. 4

The Space of Historical Dynamics

Let us consider social and political changes in Russian political history simultaneously in two dimensions: the long cycles model of modernization and the short cycles model of reforms and counter-reforms.

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Freedom — strong protection of individual rights and property

Dependence — Serdom, repressions, property expropriation

State failure — crises, territory losses, domestic rebels, revolutions, state breakdowns Figure 2

Two-dimensional space for visualization of social and political dynamics in Russian history

The first dimension—the X axis in the Cartesian system—is for State success; the second one—the Y axis—is for Freedom as security for individuals and property (Figure 2). Tracing the trajectory of Russian society within this two-dimensional model, starting from the beginning of seventeenth century to the present, has allowed the inclusion into analysis of some unfulfilled political projects, such as the constitutional amendments of the Decembrists, and has verified the extreme “widening” of dynamics from triumphs up to failures and riots, from liberal beliefs, projects, and reforms up to revolutionary and state terror, repressions and totalitarianism. In spite of all this swaying, the general picture does not seem to be chaotic; on the contrary, it appears highly stereotypical and repetitive. Phase 1  “Successful mobilization.” State rise and common emotional enthusiasm, a considerable increase in service class, conquests, growth of power. Domestic opposition and resentment are suppressed. Territorial expansion is successful, but it is always limited. Usually this period is followed by Phase 2. Phase 2  “Stability-stagnation-degradation.” It can be either relatively calm, even with some development of institutions or turbulent with moral degradation of elites and decay of the regime. Usually this leads to Phase 3. Phase 3 “Social and political crisis.” Major uprisings, riots and rebels, peasants’ and civil wars, the most dangerous and deepest i­ nterventions.

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The Cyclical Dynamics in Russian History Successful mobilization

Unfreedom

Authoritarian roll-back

State success

Stability: Stagnation/degradation, partial institutional development

Freedom

Social and political crisis Liberalization State failure State breakdown

Figure 3

Main phases and transfers in the cyclical dynamics of Russian history. The contour of shaded blocks and arrows shows the ring-shaped dynamics of the most frequent transfers. The contour between “Liberalization,” “State breakdown” and “Successful mobilization” shows the pendulum dynamics.

“The Crisis” frequently leads to a bifurcation point, to divergence between phases 4 and 5. Phase 4 “Liberalization” can be carried out either from “above” or “below,” but, as a rule, it does not lead to any essential success in Russia. Usually it goes either back to Phase 3 “The Crisis,” or it leads to Phase 5. Phase 5 “Authoritarian roll-back” leads either out of “the Crisis” back to “Stability-Stagnation,” or to “Successful mobilization,” but under some circumstances it accelerates “the Crisis” and slides down to Phase 6. Phase 6 “State breakdown” can be treated as the highest degree of “the Crisis” and its destructive tendencies. When statehood restores a new power, it is usually rather weak, so it is more or less liberal and based upon a wide range of actors. But then a new “Authoritarian roll-back” happens and leads to an ordinary coercive order. This sequence of stages can be presented in our parametrical space (Figure 3). The ring-shaped dynamics consists of three central phases: “Stability” (more often as “Stagnation”), “The Crisis” and “Authoritarian roll-back.” They happen to be the most frequent and often lead to one another forming the same sequence: stagnation→crisis→roll-back→stagnation and so on.

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On the one hand, “Institutional development”—the elaboration of legal codes, establishment of rights and freedoms, the growth of representative institutions, and the holding of elections—took place in Russia several times; on the other hand, it was usually combined with characteristics of either “Mobilization,” for instance, the Petrine epoch, or “Stagnation,” the epoch of Nicholas i, that appeared more often, wider and stronger. The general structure of phases and ring-shaped dynamics also indicates the domination of “Stagnation” because slipping down to “The Crisis” is the constant (determined) transfer. If “Institutional development” dominated, the effect would be different. Failures at the international level discredit the ruling group and often strengthen Western-oriented and/or liberal tendencies. This time some projects of liberal reforms are promoted. Sometimes they are put into practice or rejected; this depends on the power balance in the ruling elite. “The Liberalization” (“Let us try the European way!”) starts in a situation of challenge and usually does not lead to positive changes; instead it leads to the decay of social stability: growth of social differentiation and tension, dissatisfaction of the governmental class, attempts at separatism. Apparently, the main reason is relaxation of authoritarian control that previously had played not only a repressive but also a functional and organizing role. This control established some limits of social exploitation, and these limits usually are removed during “The Liberalization.” Overall disappointment in reforms accompanied by the discrediting of the Western-oriented liberal branch leads to a return of conservative political forces and to a new “Authoritarian roll-back” with slogans about restoring order, tightening the screws, and so forth. Here the mechanism is complicated by bifurcation. This depends on the ability of the roll-back leaders to involve the governmental class and masses in the direction the political system is moving: 1. A new cycle of mobilization and modernization leading to growth of geopolitical power, to triumph at the international level, to domestic legitimacy and to a period of relative social stability (transfer to “Successful mobilization,”) 2. Reaction and repressions: “Authoritarian roll-back,” 3. Violent confrontation: risk of civil war and “State breakdown.” Carefully comparing events in Russian history, on the one hand, has shown the absence of a fixed repetitive sequence of phases; significant differences in some manifestations in terms of duration, depth and other characteristics; and variability of transitions from one phase into another. On the other hand, it has shown on regular occasions some patterns: crisis→liberalization→roll-back, crisis→roll-back→mobilization→stagnation and so on. Persistent occurrence of

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the same phases and patterns in the historical dynamics of Russia proves the presence and action of the same deep social mechanism. Look at the obvious feature of the phenomenological model (fig. 36.3). An upper-right quadrant—the combination of high state success and high level of freedom—constantly remains empty except for the slight presence of “Institutional and civil development” that has mainly given place in Russian history to dominating “Stagnation.” At the height of its power the Russian political regime does not even try to liberalize. Attempts have taken place only in times of challenges and crises, although these attempts usually fail. The periods of crises and instability as a result of fluctuations lead to authoritarian roll-backs and new periods of stagnation, sometimes through the increase of successful—and usually coercive—mobilization. 5

Why Do Liberal Responses Not Lead to Success?

Liberal reforms were blocked in the periods, 1805–1811, 1874–1881, 1906–11, 1927–1929, 1968–1971 and 2003–2005. The generalized conditions of these periods resulted in the following: – Whenever liberal reforms began, the main structure providing the functioning of Russian society as a whole—territorial control, regulation of resource flows and taxation, system of dues and duties for citizens, and the formation of worldviews—depended upon coercion directly implemented or supported by the authoritarian state. – When coercive relations weakened and previous functioning regimes failed, social and economic differentiation increased sharply. All these processes upset deprived people and discredited reforms. The Russian nobility as a basis of bureaucracy in the beginning of the nineteenth century was displeased by the liberal reforms of Alexander i and Mikhail Speranskii (1801– 1805). Both peasants and landed gentry were displeased by the Emancipation reform of 1861. nep (1921–1928) led to failures of food provision to the cities. The reforms of Egor Gaidar at the beginning of the 1990s led to overall poverty, great differences in incomes and widespread nostalgia for Soviet times. – When coercive relations weakened, rebellions and separatist movements appeared on the outskirts of the country: wars in the Caucasus (1810– 1830s); Polish rebellions in the nineteenth-century; riots of the Mujahidin in Central Asia (1920–1930s), the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the “Prague Spring” in 1968, the “velvet revolutions” in Central Europe and

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clashes in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius in the late 1980s to early in the 1990s. The decrease of geopolitical prestige and need for a military and political mobilization discredited both the liberalizing authorities and liberal reforms themselves. – Because it was the state that implemented reforms, politicians and local officials did not find it reasonable to have contact with people and make any concessions that could reveal the weakness of the state. Liberal reforms were met by people—especially the intelligentsia—with great hope that later failed and made the conflict even more strained, as was the case with the Decembrists, Russian populists (narodniki), terrorists (narodovoltsy), dissidents in the late Soviet epoch, and today with the democratic and patriotic opposition. – Sometimes domestic politics involved a war. Every victory ended liberal reforms. The campaigns against Napoleon (1812–1814) and against Turkey (1877–1878) and the armed suppression of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 and the Second Chechen War (1999–2000) should be mentioned here. On the contrary, defeats of Russia initiated reforms or operated as new impulses for them: defeat in the Crimean War resulted in the Emancipation of the serfs, failures and losses in the World War i led to the February Revolution, failures and losses in the Afghan War resulted in Perestroika. The reason is the same: military and geopolitical success in Russia is associated with approval of the authoritarian state and mobilization regime. Consequently, military and geopolitical failure discredits both. 6

Resource Centralization, Rent-Seeking, and Violence

Since Ivan the Terrible the hypertrophy of centralized accumulation and resource allocation is typical in Russia. Redundant centralization of the resources is directly connected with providing loyalty among the layers in numerous governmental hierarchies: the military, police, and territorial ones. An unintended result of the hypertrophy of centralization is that most of the territories, communities and residents become recipients of rent who regularly receive their assigned resources and benefits according to their taken positions but under weak bonds with the efficiency of their own work.5 The amount of resources allocated to different governmental agencies corresponds with the

5 Simon Kordonsky, Social Class Structure of Post-Soviet Russia (Moscow: Pubic Opinion Foundation, 2008).

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status of an agency and corresponding service class. That is why an invariant political and economic feature of the Russian mentality is rent seeking. This attitude is realized in the preferred strategies of the masses for planning their life: taking a position within state power or close to it and moving within a carrier ladder with a secure rent. In socio-engineering strategies for establishing governmental institutions, agencies and public organizations, the main principle is neither social demand nor efficiency and competitiveness, but a steady income. It is most desirable that this income be provided by the state budget or by any fund financed by informal state coercion, for example relief funds for veterans of the secret service. Every estate or social class, every governmental agency and institution as organized parts of such estates strive and contend for state resources—rent. As far as previously accumulated resources in the budget and public funds are redistributed, this interaction always is a zero-sum game: if one estate wins the other loses. Such conflicts are not always solved peacefully by “administrative bargaining.” There is a vigorous battle to define resource invaders as enemies.6 Sporadically such conflicts grow into open violence. Kirill Rogov uses the relationship between rent and violence to explain recent social and political shifts. Banning violence in politics—refusing to break up rallies, demonstrations, marches, and pickets along with not thrashing their participants, neither arresting opposition leaders nor engaging in political repression sharply—extends the circle of rent seekers, since they, being unafraid of violence tend to cooperate and openly demand “justice”: receiving that portion of rent of which they consider themselves deprived. Moreover, substantial costs are required to maintain the political positions (rights to redistribute the rent): media expenses, political parties, support of election campaigns, etc. If state violence in politics—especially the mechanism of repressions—is possible then it sharply reduces number of rent seekers. At the same time that rent bonuses for the privileged recipients increase, the cost of propaganda decreases for elites because costs are absorbed by the state.7 Thus, on the one hand, violence is the last argument in the struggle against class groups for distributing resources and rent; on the other hand, state violence is an effective way to retain privileges for insiders, who happen to be a relatively narrow group of recipients benefiting from large rents. State power provides this function through fear and suppression of protest attempts coming from outsiders, that is, those who are the recipients of a small rent. 6 Kordonsky, 116–17. 7 Kirill Rogov, Ethics, Violence, and Rent. Speech at the Second Khodorkovskii Scientific Lectures. February 2008, http://www.polit.ru/dossie/2008/03/26/values.html.

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Specifics of Russian Economics and Resource Interactions

Vulnerability and non-legitimacy of private property together with legitimacy of redistribution is a well-known feature which is reproduced in Russia again and again. It is based on the previous practices of distribution of the estates, on regular land redistribution in agricultural communities, on officials’ capture of the best lands and forests—oprichnye zemli, “belonging to the Cabinet of His Emperor’s Majesty,” “of special destination,” “of federal importance” and so forth—and on Soviet campaigns of nationalization and “collectivization.” Old mental archetypes preserved in proverbs, such as “Land belongs to God and to nobody else,” and “Righteous labor will never help you earn stone chambers,” along with rapid enrichment of favorites and the bankruptcy of those who fall into disgrace—all this prevents turning property, especially large private property with large producing assets, into something stable, immutable, marked by traditions and lasting through generations. Proximity to authorities is a key factor of economic success. In Russia for many reasons the strategy of acquiring personal preferences from the Power has always been and still is the most effective one of all the economic and development strategies: renovation of technologies, improvement of the quality of production, reduction of costs and prices, diversification, and massification. This is connected with the usual hypertrophy of governmental functions and, correspondingly, the reallocation of resources—getting beneficial state orders, in the absence of protection against tyranny of the local officials—the ease of getting the monopolistic position in a local market for “their own”— and with almost complete dependence on trials, where conflicts are solved under the control of the authorities—and so on. Detachment of owners from national and state interests. Owners or any other resource holders, such as owners of a large factory in the Russian empire, Soviet economic executives, today’s “oligarchs” or top corporate managers, for obvious reasons are mainly preoccupied with their own relationship with authorities, protecting their own positions, finding ways of handing down their own status and capitals to descendants. It is impossible for national solidarity to appear on this basis. Orders from above to support any initiatives in national defense, transport or energy sector, as well as in medicine, education, and improvement of territories are treated only as extra taxes. Separateness of commerce from morality. Profit and commerce itself are roughly separated from any moral values in the Russian consciousness. “Duty,” “service,” “honor,” and “dignity” are closely related to either service for the benefit of the state or to some abstract ideals like the “Arts,” “Science,” “Education,” “Creativity,” and so on, but not at all to market competition, to fair salaries of employees or to the reduction of costs.

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“A merchant’s word of honor” is a half-forgotten antiquity. In fact, honor and trust have a place in modern business, but as a rule only among “their own,” that is their close circle (blizhnii krug). Fast changing personal connections with public and bureaucratic authorities contribute more to flexibility and opportunism, whereas influential business communities generating strict moral standards do not appear at all or lose in competition within a system based on the personal preferences of authorities. Success of isolated thrusts and failure of mass practices. State power in Russia, using the archetypes of “service” and “duty” and possibility for the enforced mobilization of gigantic resources including human ones, is capable of massive achievements and thrusts. Among other major initiatives, these include: new military forces, a fleet, plants in the Urals under Peter the Great, success in organizing and supporting the military sphere and major military battles under Catherine ii, the construction of railways—especially, the Trans-Siberian one—industrialization in the 1930s, rehabilitation of the heavy military in 1950s, a great victory over Hitler’s Germany, power and space programs, the construction of canals, hydro-electro and atomic stations, and cities north of the Arctic Circle. At the same time, in the fields of agriculture, light and food industry, in automotive, instrument engineering and other sectors of mass production, the Russian economy has been permanently left behind. Most likely, the aforementioned reasons explain this paradox. It can be tested by pointing out sectors with the least intensity for these features: the sector where private property is most protected, where proximity to power is less significant for commercial success, where competition is more significant, the struggle for consumers; for instance, in modern Russia, such sectors are trade nets and cellular operators. There precisely the steady growth of quality, new services, and technical innovations can be observed. The basic political and economic cycle in Russia consists of a change in the rapid coercive state mobilization of resources and their gradual privatization by elites. Elites always and everywhere try to accumulate personal and family resources and acquire inalienable property. The most effective Russian way to do it entails privatizing the accessible part of state resources; it does not result from the product of creativity, qualification, entrepreneurship or competitive production. It can be achieved by weakening or even destroying structures of enforcement, control and deterrence and adhering to the well-known principle: “I obtain what I watch over.” According to the aforementioned specifically Russian method, property remains neither legitimate enough nor protected, the owners’ morals are poor, with alienation from national interests that gradually leads to various dysfunctions, “market failures” and crises, such that new or old authorities try to

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prevail sooner or later. That’s why the authorities implement coercive mobilization of resources down to expropriation: the “Authoritarian roll-back” phase. Further on the resource cycle is then repeated. 8

A Model with Switching Strategies of Actors

There are some models of interior social mechanism that generate Russian cycles. The simplest one is focused on control and resource strategies and explains the ring-shaped dynamics: Stagnation→Crisis→Authoritarian rollback→ Stagnation. In this model only two actors interact. They both have their own limited set of strategies or activity direction. Let the first actor be tentatively called the Ruler; the second one, the Elite. Further complicating this model is that it is possible to divide the Elite into the bureaucracy and holders of key resources. In every period the Ruler carries out only one of two strategies: an awesome coercion entailing firm control of the Elite’s behavior, with sanctions, disgrace, and “purges” and protective conservatism, the weakening and atrophy of this control, which is marked by calling on the Elite only to be loyal in order to conserve the political status quo. The Elite carries out either one of two other strategies or both at every period of time: service to the State, to the Ruler and deforcement, the illegal privatization of state resources. The proportion of activity for each strategy changes depending on the Ruler’s strategy: awesome coercion from the Ruler leads to service of the Elite, whereas the Ruler’s protective conservatism switches on the Elite’s deforcement. Let us examine the reasons the Ruler changes strategies. Every strategy leads to its own consequences. Deterrent coercion after some period of time, perhaps only one generation, results in an increase of tension and approaches the limit of the Elite’s discontent—the last being connected with excessive tension, psychological exhaustion, weariness from being terrified, loss of loyalty and so forth. When the limit of discontent is reached, it switches on the strategy of a previous or new Ruler from awesome coercion to protective conservatism.8 This strategy is not meant to stop the service strategy of the Elite, but it simultaneously 8 In Russian history this switch actually happens either after the Ruler’s retirement or death when he is the main source of discontent as in the cases of Ivan the Terrible, Anna Ioanovna, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, or plots and revolts: these respectively got rid of Anna Leopoldovna with Osterman, Peter iii, Pavel i, and Nikita Khrushchev.

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adds their strategy of resource deforcement. The proportion of the last Elite’s strategy increases and almost substitutes the service strategy over time, one or two generations. When the Elite’s strategy of resource deforcement dominates, it leads to the limit of resource imbalance9 and to three main effects: 1. severe deficiency of state resources—public funds, budget, recruits— geopolitical defeats, the state’s incapacity to collect taxes, to support the apparatus of coercion for guaranteeing domestic order; 2. severe resource deprivation for the most part of the population: poverty, hunger, increase in tension, protest moods; 3. overproduction of the Elite and increase of its appetites, escalation of conflicts between its parts and emergence of a counter-Elite. When the limit of resource imbalance is reached, this always leads to a social and political crisis. This crisis terminates the strategy of the Ruler’s protective conservatism and rapidly weakens or even terminates the Elite’s service, thus worsening the crisis, so it is either stopped by the Ruler, or it leads to an overthrow. The Elite’s deforcement can continue, but if the Elite splits, the strategies of protective conservatism and service become weakened or terminate, the resource imbalance increases, and the crisis deepens. It happens to be hard or practically impossible to retain, so the existing or new Elite becomes more and more anxious and needs protecting and ordering. It is ready to serve a new Ruler and endure an awesome coercion from the Ruler, especially because at the beginning it is directed against rebels and losing political groups. It is postulated that a way out of the crisis within this conceptual framework, of course only happens under the condition when the couple—an existing or new Ruler and the Elite—follows the corresponding strategies: the Ruler begins the awesome coercion, and the Elite starts service, restoring the resource balance: the state and people get their necessary parts of resources. Then the cycle moves up to the next limit of the Elite’s discontent. These dynamics are presented in the following scheme (Figure 4). 9

Trends of the Stages in Ring-Shaped Dynamics

According to the aforementioned model of switching strategies, the main trends that characterize each stage are considered as cumulative effects of 9 Nikolai Rozov, The Track and the Crossing: The Macro-sociological Foundations for Strategies of Russia in the Twenty-first Century (Koleia i pereval: Makrosotsiologicheskie osnovaniia strategii Rossii v 21-m veke) (Moscow: rosspen, 2011), Ch. 6.

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The Phase «Authoritarian roll-back»:

 The Ruler’s strategy — awesome coercion  The Elite’s strategy — honest service The total trend and result — coercion leads to the limit of the Elite’s discontent and switching the Ruler’s strategy to protective conservatism

The Phase «Stagnation»:

 The Ruler’s strategy — protective conservatism  The Elite’s strategy : service and resource deforcement, the former is steadily driven out and the latter dominates over time; The total trend and result — reaching the limit of the resource imbalance and the beginning of the Crisis

The Phase «Crisis»:

 Termination of protective conservatism of the Ruler, his probable replacement;  Split of the Elite, its partial or complete renovation; The total trend and result — Continuation of the Crisis up to the victory and the alliance of a couple (usually a new one) of a Ruler with awesome coercion and an Elite with service

Figure 4 4

Model of phase transfers in ring-shaped dynamics for two actors with switching strategies

changing strategies and practices used by actors. Why do strategies replace changing strategies and practices used in by the actors. Why do of strategies replace each other? Some remarkable changes worldviews actors occur in each other? Some remarkable changes in the worldviews of actors occur in their image of the situation, or in interests and purposes; and some structural their image of the situation, or in interests and purposes; and some structural factors change in access to resources, in relations between actors, and in exterfactors change in access to resources, in relations between actors, and in external dangers. nalTrends dangers. forming each phase are the results of intentional and unintentional Trends forming each phase are the results unintentional effects of actors’ responses to challenges madeofinintentional a previousand phase. effects of actors’ responsesthat to challenges in acycles previous We can now conclude the track ofmade Russian hasphase. the following inWe can now conclude that the track of Russian cycles has the following intrinsic nature: in disunity and crisis practically all parties tend to choose a coertrinsic nature: in disunity and crisis practically all parties tend to choose a coercive, authoritarian mode of politics as the only possible way for consolidating and cive, authoritarian mode only possible way for consolidating and restoring social order. It isofapolitics result as of the mental, institutional specifics which also restoring social order. It is a result of mental, institutional specifics which also had been created and supported by similar previous choices. Then, when the had beendecreases, created and by of similar previous choices.and Then, whensolithe coercion allsupported other factors keeping responsibility national coercion factors of keeping responsibility and national darity do decreases, not occur toallbeother strong enough—a situation that results in social,soliaddarity do not occur to be strong enough—a situation that results in social, ministrative, and moral degradation, an increase in disunity, conflicts, andad-a ministrative, and moral degradation, increase disunity, conflicts, final crisis. These changes themselvesan support theinsame mental specificsand anda final crisis. These changes themselves support the same mental specifics and strengthen the inner cultural archetypes. That is why the cycles are repeated strengthen the inner cultural archetypes. That is why the cycles are repeated again and again. As for the historical track, it becomes deeper and deeper. again and again. As for the historical track, it becomes deeper and deeper. 10 10

Cyclical Dynamics in Post-Soviet Russia Cyclical Dynamics in Post-Soviet Russia

The theoretical interpretation of Boris Yeltsin’s and Vladimir Putin’s periods The theoretical interpretation Yeltsin’sofand Vladimir Putin’s periods requires an additional analysis of in Boris the context Russian cycles, because the requires an additional analysis in the context of Russian cycles, because the

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social-political sphere was greatly complicated by multilayer processes. Here only a primary draft of the main structure is presented. Undoubtedly, “the liberalization from above” was the main trend of Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” that ended in the false start of an authoritarian roll-back in August 1991 by the State Committee on the State of Emergency (Gosudarstvennyi komitet po chrezvychainomu polozheniiu, GKChP) and the following collapse of the communist regime and the ussr. The weakening Russian state in the 1990s led to an inability to defend life and property, to collect taxes and to pay pensions. Liberalization with new symbols and institutions—“the market,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “open society,” elections, and parliamentarism, among others—encountered the stereotypes of mass political consciousness and the behavior of ruling elites that had survived. In brief, this political tradition rejects the possibility of giving and taking supreme power as the result of elections. It is also presupposed that a ruler should “clean the field,” that is removing all probable or even possible rivals, even by means of violence and fakery. These patterns of political behavior could be seen in the bitter conflict and shooting of the parliament—the Supreme Soviet—in October 1993, in the constitutional fixation of the super-presidency, in the Presidential team’s reaction toward the victory of Zhirinovsky’s party at the December Duma elections in 1993, in using administrative resources and the unfairness of the presidential elections in 1996 (when there was a real danger of the victory of the Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov), and in the appointment by Boris Yeltsin of Putin as his “successor.” Thus, the 1990s in Russia witnessed, on the one hand, a conflictual formation of a new state with declared freedom and democracy; on the other hand, the Supreme power took obvious steps toward authoritarianism as situational reactions to perceived threats. During the first years under Putin this ambiguity was maintained: rather progressive reforms were done to help small business, but soon “federal districts” and centralized financial policy repressed regional independence. New power began to suppress freedom of speech: the old ntv was attacked, and governmental channels and the central press were harshly subordinated. Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s arrest in autumn 2003 marked the real beginning of the “Authoritarian roll-back.” The motion toward liberal democracy, although intermittent and inconsequent, stopped. It should be mentioned that since that time, the implicit beginning of the phase “Stagnation/decay” occurred: this has been manifested in the subordination of the courts, gradual reduction of the independence of the judiciary, the unprecedented growth of corruption, and the development of the state racket from coercive agencies. In economics before the crisis of 2008–2009 and then before 2014, the stagnation was covert because of the “golden rain” of petrodollars. In summer 2014

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a rapid motion toward the phase “Crisis” began following Western sanctions and the decrease in oil prices. The victory of the first Maidan in Ukraine in autumn 2004 became a great embarrassment and frustration for a ruling group in Russia. The imperialist approach emerged in Russian foreign policy. The war with Georgia in August 2008 was of great importance for further foreign policy decisions: a military victory and the conciliatory reaction of the West toward declaring the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which had been Georgian ethnic provinces, positively rewarded imperialist intentions. At the same time the Russian army, that had not appeared to be strong enough, got a stimulus for further massive training: German military instructors did it on a commercial basis. Hence in spring 2014 the “Special Operation Forces” appeared in the Crimea and proved themselves to be “the polite people.” In winter 2012, some fraudulent “liberal” concessions—relief for the registration of political parties and a return to elections of regional Governors— were made. These were a response to a mini “Crisis”: a series of street protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg against the “castling”—Putin’s and Medvedev’s exchange of the Prime minister’s and President’s positions—as well as against falsifications in the Duma elections. The violent suppression of protests on May 6, 2012 in Bolotnaia Square, that ended in trials having factual repressions against dozens of participants, meant the second wave of the “Authoritarian roll-back” in the long rule of Putin, the first wave having been in 2003–2005. The “Elite’s nationalization” became an important part of this second wave. This was attempted to force the bureaucracy and business to declare and return their foreign assets to Russia. In terms of the model of switching strategies in Figure 4, the Ruler tries to change the strategy of protective conservatism into the strategy of awesome coercion to make the Elite switch its strategy from deforcement to service. Alas, given the increasing outflow of capital, this attempt was not successful. This makes it possible to claim that expectations on the part of the ruling group and Kremlin ideologists—journalists from the newspaper Izvestiia and leading political programs of the main state tv channels—for some new “Successful mobilization” in the near future will also be futile. The annexation of Crimea with hopes for a “Russian Spring” and for the subsequent detachment from Ukraine of “Novorossia”—the southeastern regions of Ukraine along the whole perimeter from Kharkov to Odessa— pretends to be the phase of “Successful mobilization,” that would amount to a triumph for the Empire. The attempt failed, though the accession of the Crimea enhanced the legitimacy of Putin’s regime’s inside the country.

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Leading Western states and most of the world community reacted differently to the aggressive imperial policy of the Kremlin than it did in case of the war against Georgia in 2008. So, as far as post-Soviet Russia greatly depends on credits in the external markets and on imported goods, the sanctions become more and more damaging, and the exchange rate of the ruble falls considerably more: this signals movement to the phase, “Crisis.” 11

The Problem of Overcoming Painful Cycles

Suppose in some approximation we could recognize the painful knots—the “syndromes” of the mechanism that generates Russian cycles. Cutting those knots would be a hopeless plan because the historical experience of previous cuttings—the reforms of Peter the Great, Bolshevism, Stalin’s “great turn,” Perestroika—shows that elites and political regimes change one another, but these “knots”—syndromes of historical disease—remain and generate the cycles again. To treat the disease of historical cycles, it is not enough to reveal them and to discredit and “deconstruct” the discussed corresponding cultural and psychological stereotypes. According to the aforementioned paradigm, the human psyche, consciousness and behavior are formed by interiorized social structures.10 It means that only an essential shift in relations between the state and the people and in very basic social structures, including the position and role of Russia in geo-economics, geopolitics, and geo-culture can free the country from the track of painful cycles. Moreover, Russia’s self-image is strongly associated with definite sacral symbols, such as its Greatness, Truth-Justice, Order, and Russia’s extraordinary mission in human history. An attempt to renounce them can result in either cynical nihilism or a protest roll-back to revanchism. It is impossible for the state with such a massive historical inheritance to switch to the new logic of historical development “in a single bound.” New repetitions in the same track of cycles are likely to happen. However, the paradigm of historical dynamics excludes fatalism. There is a chance for the state to escape from the track, and the discontinuation of “political stability” gives just that chance.

10

Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action (Stanford up, 1998); Randall Collins, Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (Stanford up, 1999).

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An Approaching Crisis: Probable Dynamics and Variants of Results

When forecasting the course and the character of the expected phase “Crisis,” the following basic conditions should be taken into account: – Since the first Ukrainian Maidan in 2004, the ruling group has prepared for suppressing street protests: that is why so impressive “Interior Forces,” Special Police Forces and other ones numbering about 200,000 to 250,000 are well equipped, armed and ready for violent repressions; – The real “non-systemic” opposition (outside of the Duma) which has left after the repressions between 2012 and 2014 is inconsistent and weak, split and deprived of public support, especially in Russian provinces; – Massive anti-Western and anti-liberal propaganda is rather effective: it coincides with public disappointment with Yeltsin’s “democracy” in the 1990s, as well as half-forgotten imperial complexes, the mentality of “rent-seeking,” prejudices against all politics as “dirty business”; – As a result, the majority of Russians who suffer from economic problems and are dissatisfied with the regime and authorities looks for a solution not in liberal reforms, trustworthy courts, secure property and political competence, but in the ability of a “powerful Tsar”—either an old or a new one— to “bring Order,” to repress oligarchs, to increase salaries all over the state, to freeze prices or even to bring socialism back; – The minority of Russia’s socially and politically advanced middle-class— businessmen, freelancers, some reporters, scientists, university professors, doctors, and engineers in large cities—do not have any experience with consolidation and united political action; so, they either passively wait for changes or think over plans to emigrate. Thus, the patterns of cyclical dynamics and the obvious acceleration of destructive processes will inevitably result in the phase “Crisis,” but we should not expect a fast, peaceful and favorable—democratic and liberal—solution of this crisis. The combination of all the aforementioned circumstances will lead to gradual deepening of the crisis, a number of protests with aggressive suppression, temporary periods of “frost,” and new waves of protest. The strength of the regime will be unraveled, not by mass protests, but by events of another type: disunity of the elites, the appearance of a new counterelite that cannot be suppressed, a decrease of loyalty and obedience of the coercive apparatus. Just after the self-blocking of police and army, protests usually become wider. These can result in a successful revolution. That is the pattern of the “velvet revolutions” in Central Europe, “color revolutions,” and successful revolutions during the period of the “Arab Spring.” The signs of these processes have not been seen yet. In the foreseeable multi-stage and dramatic path of the future social and political crisis in Russia,

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different leaders and slogans will appear and disappear, and various opposing groups will develop, unite and disunite. It is impossible to predict these dynamics. Only the main ideological ingredients should be pointed out. Something principally new will hardly replace those that have already appeared. These ideas—symbols, values and principles— include Russian nationalism, Communism’s restoration, imperialist ideas, left social democracy, and “European choice”: liberalism and an open law-based society. None of these trends will absolutely predominate. In the crisis dynamics of Russia’s political future one can expect the continuation of ideological and political fighting between pointed trends and coalitions. Only in the case when this fight leaves street protests and violence, political repression and criminal prosecution, that is, when politics takes the form of election campaigns and Parliamentary debates, will it be reasonable to speak about some favorable solution for the crisis, about the reconstruction of Russia’s national identity on a democratic basis, and about beginning to break away from the track of Russia’s cyclical dynamics. Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action. Stanford up, 1998. Collins, Randall. Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford up, 1999. Hellie, Richard. “The Structure of Russian Imperial History.” History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History 44, no. 4 (2005). Kordonsky, Simon. Social Class Structure of Post-Soviet Russia. Мoscow: Public Opinion Foundation, 2008. Pantin, Vladimir and Vladimir Lapkin. Waves of Political Modernization in Russian History: a Hypothesis for Discussion (“Volny politicheskoi modernizatsii v istorii Rossii. K obsuzhdeniiu gipotezy”). Problemy i suzhdeniia, no. 2. (1998). Rogov, Kirill. Ethics, Violence, and Rent. Speech at the Second Khodorkovskii Scientific Lectures February. 2008. (Moral’, nasilie i renta. Vystuplenie na 2-kh Khodorkovskikh chteniiakh fevral’. 2008). http://www.polit.ru/dossie/2008/03/26/values.html. Rozov, Nikolai. Track and Pass: Macrosociological Foundations of Russia’s Strategiess in the Twenty-first Century. (Koleia i pereval: Makrosotsiologicheskie osnovaniia strategii Rossii v 21-m veke). rosspen, 2011. Vishnevsky, Roman. Modernization Cycles in Russian History (Modernizatsionnye Tsikly v Istorii Rossii). Theses of the Fifth Kondratiev Scientific Conference. Moscow: International Fund of Nikolai Kondratiev, 1997. (In Russ.). Yanov, Alexander. The Origins of Autocracy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.

Mikhail Sergeev Mikhail Iurievich Sergeev was born in 1960 in Moscow, ussr. In 1982 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international journalism from the Institute of International Relations at Moscow State Institute (University). He worked as a correspondent for the international department of the weekly Interlocultor (Sobesednik), as an editor at the State tv and Radio Foundation (Gosteleradiofond), and as a literary adviser and manager at the Moscow theater-studio Arlekin. In 1990, Sergeev arrived in the United States to pursue graduate studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1993 he was awarded a master’s degree in the history of religions; and having defended with distinction his doctoral dissertation on Russian sophiology, he earned a PhD in the philosophy of religion from Temple in 1997. Sergeev taught at several universities and colleges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His offerings comprise more than twenty different courses in Western civilization, religious studies, the history of philosophy, and modern art, including specialized classes, such as Religion, Art, and the Apocalypse, Holy War, and the Afterlife. He now works as a professor of religion and philosophy at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where in 2010 he received The President’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition, he co-chairs and serves on the faculty of the Department of Religion, Philosophy, and Theology at The Wilmette Institute as well as on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia. Sergeev organized thirty-seven and participated in more than fifty panels and round-tables in regional, national and international conferences, including the World Congress of Philosophy in 1998 held in Boston, ma. He delivered presentations on Russian philosophy and Orthodox theology at scholarly conferences in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Princeton, and Washington. He is the editor of the book series, “Contemporary Russian Philosophy” at Brill in the Netherlands and is the founding editor of the Global Faith Book Series with M-Graphics Publishing in Boston. Sergeev was also the co-editor of Symposion. A Journal of Russian Thought (2007–2012) and the founding editor of the journal Studies in Bahá’í Philosophy (2012–2015). He is a member of the editorial boards of nine scholarly journals in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, including the journals, Philosophical Thought (Filosofskaia mysl’) and Philosophy and Culture (Filosofiia i cul’tura) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

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The author of more than two hundred scholarly, journalistic and creative works, Sergeev published and presented them in Canada, Europe—the Czech Republic, Greece, the Netherlands, and Poland—Russia, and the United States. Some of his articles were translated into Polish, and his books were reviewed in Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and the United States. He has authored and edited ten books, including the monograph, Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Bahá’í Faith, (Brill, 2015) and his latest, Russia Abroad: The Anthology of Contemporary Philosophical Thought (M-Graphics, 2019). In 2017 at the International Festival “Visit to Muses,” in Greece, he was awarded the Nodar Dzhin Literary Prize for the best work in philosophy: Grand Prix in the category “journalism/scholarship.” In his philosophical writings, Sergeev develops a theory of religious cycles. According to this theory world religions pass through six general phases in their development—early or formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical and post-critical. During their evolution, religions also undergo two types of crises—structural and systemic. The structural crisis of religion undermines the authority of its Sacred Tradition, whereas the systemic crisis does the same but with respect to the Sacred Writings of the religious system. He views the age of the European Enlightenment as the beginning of the systemic crisis of Christianity, that grew into a total crisis of religious consciousness in the twentieth century. Website: https://uarts.digication.com/msergeev.

The Enlightenment Project: Reflections on the National Identity of US Americans Mikhail Sergeev The problem of national identity, the search for an all-Russian national idea, has been the focus of philosophical discussions in Russia since the nineteenthcentury dispute between the Westernizers and Slavophiles. This controversy quieted down during the Soviet period, but it gained a second wind after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Whereas pre-revolutionary Russian philosophers compared Russia to Europe, their post-Soviet counterparts compare themselves with the US. In both cases, however, Russian thought has reacted to the cultural experience of the West, trying to understand more deeply the driving force behind it. The US today, from my perspective most clearly manifests the spirit of Western civilization that has evolved over the past two centuries. This perspective of the “American idea” has been formed on the basis of lengthy study of the culture of the United States and my personal experience. My friends in the US often say—sometimes seriously, and at other times ironically—that the American dream means a house with two cars, and children entering college, that simply put, are made possible by economic prosperity and a democratic political system. I respond that people have always sought to be solvent and independent. The difference between the US and the rest of the world is qualitative, not substantive. In the Soviet Union, the symbol of social success was not a house with two cars, but an apartment, a car, and a country cottage (dacha). Besides, human aspirations have no limits. This observation brings to mind a joke about a “new Russian,” who, when asked what he thought about the Hermitage, replied: “Well, it’s beautiful and clean … but quite modest.” To my further inquiries, US Americans offered other versions of the American dream. “America,” they said, “is a country of emigrants, a cross section of all humanity. A real American is an African American, an American Jew, a Russian American, and so on.” In other words, American self-consciousness is supranational, and, no matter how frighteningly familiar this sounds to the Soviet ear, Americans created a radically new community—the American people. Incidentally, it was a Reform Jewish rabbi who insisted on the dual nature of American self-identification. Naturally, this approach was especially familiar to him, since Reform Judaism aims at reconciling the religious and civil identities of the Jewish people living in other national or pluralistic states.

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Emigration often entails a special state of consciousness, a distinct rejection of native culture, which cannot accommodate what the emigrant brings to it with his or her life. Whether internal or external, free or involuntary, emigration can be a rebellion against established norms and orders. Migrants are like youths who rebel against their parents, fighting for the right to their own voice. “And so is America,” my colleagues in the US passionately have told me, “Ours is a country of emigrants, a country of eternal youth and freedom from tradition, which is open to anything new and seeks its place in the world.” Another friend of mine suggested that the substance of the American dream is in constant movement to the West. “America is a dynamic country,” he said, “and its people are obsessed with a desire for change. We are constantly on the move and rushing to the new and unknown.” My own experience in the US convinced me of the truth of his words when I discovered one curious feature of the American school system. In the Moscow school that I attended, the composition of classes was formed once and for all, so that when you entered the first grade, you got to know boys and girls with whom you would be studying for the next ten years. That time spent together in school made us very close to each other and formed strong friendships. In the Philadelphia school where my son went to study, everything was the other way around. Starting with the junior grades, not only teachers but also the composition of classes was changed every year. As a result, classmates were not able to forge deep friendships, but became only superficial acquaintances. Instead, they developed the ability to adapt easily to a new group of people. This upbringing lays one of the foundations of the American character that can make a painful impression on a Russian person. You could share an apartment with an American for a year but never learn anything about him or her as a person. Americans keep each other at a distance: no one here will invade another’s personal space, but one never knows for sure whether others really want anything to do with you. This lifestyle allows Americans to lead a dynamic lifestyle and adapt swiftly to life changes, such as moving to another job or to a different state. Discussions about national identity in the US are by no means rare in this country. As the American sociologist Robert Bellah noted in his presentation to the plenary session of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco in November 1997, “to ask whether there is a common culture in America, has become part of this common culture.”1 In his speech entitled “Is There 1 Robert N. Bellah, “Is There a Common American Culture?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 66, no. 3, (Fall 1998), 613.

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A Common American Culture?” Bellah emphasized that its “main element … is what Americans themselves dubbed utilitarian individualism.”2 He traces its origins to Protestantism, which shaped America, for, as he has observed, “[a]n initial impetus to the development of modern ideas about human rights was given by the radical sects of the Protestant Reformation, especially the Quakers and Baptists [who professed] freedom of conscience in matters of religious beliefs.”3 Along with an attempt to explain common American culture from the standpoint of the Protestant religion, there is another possibility, connected not so much with the Reformation as with the subsequent Enlightenment. After all, as Bellah himself also said in his speech, the adoption of the “First Amendment to the Constitution, [legalizing freedom of speech and religion] depended on the union of such enlightened deists as Jefferson and Madison, and sectarians, mostly Baptists.”4 In Russian culture, at least until recently, the ideals of the European Enlightenment were associated with the famous French Revolution of 1792. It is possible that such an interpretation was characteristic of those traditional Russians who looked up to Europe. In any case, Russian philosophers of the Silver Age did not include America in their historiosophic schemes. Nikolai Berdiaev, for instance, in many of his works analyzed the ideology of the Enlightenment and its connection with the French Revolution, but he did not draw any parallels with the American Revolution of 1776. In one of his articles he even argues that America derives its existence from other sources than Europe. In reality, however, the US and Europe today are spiritual twins, evolving from one set of ideas formulated by the European Enlightenment. Montesquieu’s notion about the separation of powers and Locke’s thoughts on human rights and religious tolerance laid the foundation for American statehood. Furthermore, the historical priority here must be given to the US, since the American Revolution occurred before the French Revolution, and Americans established the first Enlightenment-type state in human history. The French Revolution, which proclaimed the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, was a social revolution that aimed at transforming the established social order. In the nineteenth century, a wave of social revolutions swept across Europe in response to the French Revolution, and in the twentieth it crashed through the border with Russia and led to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the eventual creation of the Soviet Union. The American Revolution, unlike the French one, was primarily about national liberation, not social 2 Bellah, 616. 3 Bellah, 617–18. 4 Bellah, 619.

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reform. In the nineteenth century, it resonated in the growth of the national liberation movements in Europe and Latin America, which in the twentieth century led to the collapse of the colonial system. Thus, in Europe the ideas of the Enlightenment were part of cultural heritage whose radical transformation was possible precisely because of the Enlightenment itself, whereas in the US these ideas served as the very foundation of its national identity. Unlike Europe, this country, freed from the ballast of cultural traditions, was formed on the principles of “pure” Enlightenment. There arises, however, a question that has been at the center of philosophical discussions in the West for two centuries now: what is the nature of the Enlightenment itself? After all, the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, like any historical epoch, is complex, heterogeneous and open to a variety of interpretations. The number of those interpretations increases even further if one considers all the different aspects of the Enlightenment—­ religious, philosophical, socio-political, economic, and so on. Discussion here does not attempt to offer a comprehensive perspective; it focuses rather on one side of the problem: What is the Enlightenment in terms of religious consciousness? To answer this question, in my previous works, I have developed the theory of religious cycles. According to my hypothesis, a religion as a social system is characterized by two main components: its sacred scriptures and a sacred tradition. In the process of its emergence, formation and development, religious systems pass through a series of stages, each of them suggesting a certain correlation between the holy texts and the tradition of their legitimate interpretations. Based on the history of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, I have distinguished six common phases or stages of development in the complete cycle for a spiritual tradition: the formative, the orthodox, the classical, the reformist, the critical, and the post-critical (Figure 1). Christianity serves here as an example to explain what each of these stages mean. The initial stage of a religious system involves the formation of the canon of sacred texts. In Christianity, this process took four centuries and culminated in the canonization of the books of the New and Old Testaments. The second stage of the evolution of Christianity is represented by Orthodoxy. Unlike the original early Church, Christian Orthodoxy already adhered to a certain ecclesiastical tradition or system of interpretations of Biblical texts, which were worked out during the first seven ecumenical councils. In contrast to Orthodoxy that has frozen the Christian sacred tradition, Catholicism, which serves as the classical phase of Christianity, expands and modifies it. Protestantism, being a reformist trend in Christianity, breaks with the prevailing forms of interpretation altogether and goes back to the roots of the Holy Scriptures. As a

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Classical phase

Reformist phase

Orthodox phase

Post-critical phase Critical phase

Formative phase

Systemic crisis of mother-religion and reform Figure 1

Structural crisis and reform

Structural crisis and reform

Systemic crisis

Model of religious cycle Note: from Mikhail Sergeev, Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Bahá’í Faith (Brill, 2015), 193

result, the Reformists establish their own tradition, that has cleared away the layers of previous interpretations. The emergence of the Catholic and Protestant confessions of the Christian faith represents two characteristic examples of the structural crises of religion, as a result of which religious systems usually fall into several branches that are united by common Holy Writings, but separated by various interpretations of it. In fact, none of the three main divisions of Christianity, while differing in matters of interpretation, question the authority of the Bible, the basic text of the Christian faith. In contrast to a structural crisis of religion that challenges existing interpretations but never questions the Sacred Scriptures, a systemic crisis of a religious system, signaling the beginning of the critical stage of its development, is characterized by the challenge it poses to the very foundation of the system itself, namely, its holy writings. Unlike the case of structural difficulties, a systemic crisis cannot be resolved by the appearance of new sects or denominations within the already established religion, but only through the birth of new religious movements with their own sacred texts. The European Enlightenment initiated such a deep-seated crisis for the Christian religion. In fact, what did such opposing Enlightenment thinkers as Julien de La Mettrie and Voltaire have in common in their approach to religion? La Mettrie denied the existence of God, whereas Voltaire still believed in God although he ridiculed the religious establishment of his time. In their criticism of religious consciousness, however, they both questioned the authority of the Bible as Holy Scripture. The Enlightenment knocked the Bible off of its sacred pedestal for various reasons.

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Although not rejecting the idea of revelation as a special type of knowledge unavailable to mere mortals but entrusted to prophets, some thinkers of this movement doubted the authenticity of Biblical texts and their correspondence to Divine intentions and origin. In The Critical History of the Old Testament (1678), Richard Simon, a priest and one of the founders of Biblical criticism pointed out that, like any historical document, the Bible must be subjected to critical scrutiny. Having reconsidered some traditional views of the problems of authorship and the historical authenticity of the Bible, he himself believed that such an analysis should and could be constructive. Other thinkers of the Enlightenment questioned not only the authority of the Scriptures but also the idea of revelation itself. Instead of revelation, which was declared superfluous, they preached the “natural” religion of the mind, that is understandable and accessible to any person. Such a religion, relying on the light of reason, as the deists have argued, will end religious strife forever and bring peace to the human race. Finally, there were philosophes who went even further and rejected the very existence of God. For them the Bible irreversibly lost the status of Scripture. They denied not only the idea of revelation but also the existence of the Divine source and authority that empowered its writing. For those thinkers, the Bible was not a book that could save souls; it was an instrument of control that would permit one group to have power over the others. Whatever their reasons for their various positions, Enlightenment thinkers, nevertheless, did challenge the authority of the Bible, and the end result of their efforts was still the same. Unlike scientific hypotheses that can be checked by the experiments of other researchers, religious doctrines deal with the spiritual world that is beyond our sense perception and, therefore, can neither be definitively proven or disproven. Consequently, religious beliefs (or lack thereof) were to be subject to the personal choice of citizens who commit to them without coercion from the state. In other words, religion was transferred from the public to the private sphere of the individual’s life. At the social level this new paradigm found expression in the formal separation of the Church from the institutions of state power. Of course, the separation of religion from the state has brought considerable and lasting public benefit. Independent and liberated from subordination to political authorities, religion grew spiritually stronger and purer. Its role in the moral life of people drastically increased. The lack of financial support from the state also gave a powerful impulse to religious thought, which was sharpened by the competition among various theological teachings. Finally, the rejection of the use of force in spiritual matters contributed to greater religious tolerance in society. But the key or main existential consequence of the separation of church and state, it seems, was that henceforth the spiritual

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Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses

The Early Church

Modernity

ad

4th c.

Jesus Christ

Emperor Constantine

11th c. Split between Orthodox and Catholicism

16th c.

18th c.

Martin Luther

Voltaire

Figure 2 Religious cycle of Christianity Note: from Sergeev, 195

path individuals followed was not determined by the society in which they were born; it was a matter of personal search and choice. In my opinion, this principle most accurately expresses the ideological foundation of the Enlightenment that initiated the systemic crisis of Christianity. It is precisely this axiom of personal responsibility for religious (and any other) choice that has become the spiritual core of modern Western democracies, and above all the US as the first Enlightenment-type republican government. On this essential foundation, political democracy and capitalist economy provide the sufficient conditions needed for the most rational organization of society. This way of perceiving American self-identity has had several effects. First, having served as the foundation of American culture, the Enlightenment reflects the systemic crisis not only of Western confessions, but of Christian religion in general, and in later centuries—of religious consciousness itself. This total crisis of religion clearly manifested itself in the reaction of Orthodox Russia to the Enlightenment, which led to the collapse of the Tsarist Empire and the creation of the Soviet Union, a unique atheistic state, which rallied together the nations that professed three of the world religions—Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Traditional religions, including Christianity, have reacted to the Enlightenment in two ways. With Protestantism, religion acts as an ally of the Enlightenment and fully adapts to a society built on its principles by adopting and promoting the basic principle of the separation of church and state. Theological doctrines in this situation are reinterpreted in the spirit of ecumenism and

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interreligious dialogue. Such a path is open to all confessions and denominations: the religious renewal of Buddhism in Japan, Catholicism in America, and the tradition of Orthodox thought originating with Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) provide solid evidence of that. But if religion does not accept the ideology of the Enlightenment, then it usually heads toward fundamentalism. The most striking example of the revival of religion is the evolution of Islam, which has produced ultra-religious regimes in Iran, Iraq, and other parts of the world. In Russia, the fundamentalist tendencies were expressed in the doctrines of the late Slavophiles—­ Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) and Nikolai Danilevskii (1822–1885). Generally speaking, extreme forms of religious revivalism can evolve in any faith, which is evidenced, for example, by the strengthening of fundamentalist trends in American Protestantism in the 1970s and 1980s. No matter how traditional Christian denominations react to the ideology of the Enlightenment, they will not be able, however, either to ignore or surpass it completely. This happens for the simple reason that, being an expression of the systemic crisis of Christianity, the Enlightenment itself is an integral part of this religion. The integrity of Christianity, like that of any other religious system, is maintained by the immutability of its sacred writings, which are both put into question and criticized by the Enlightenment. Therefore, in order to overcome the postulates of the Enlightenment, Christians have to alter their scriptural texts, which would be tantamount to undermining the integrity and destroying the foundation of their own religion. That, of course, would be highly unlikely. From the perspective of the evolution of religious consciousness, the systemic crisis of a religion is usually resolved by the appearance of alternative religious movements that offer to their followers a set of new holy writings. By analogy, the ideology of the Enlightenment could be overcome by the rise of new religious systems that are separate from Christianity with their own scriptural texts. From world history we know that the formation and establishment of a new religion take at least several centuries and depend on many factors, including the socio-political organization of society in which the young faith ripens. Therefore, the ideology of the Enlightenment, with its principle of separation of church and state and its focus on religious tolerance, not only reflects the systemic crisis of Christianity, but also creates ideal conditions for overcoming it. Paradoxically, only the Enlightenment itself can save humanity from secular Enlightenment. And in the traditional Russian dispute between Westernizers and Slavophiles support must be given to Westernizers. Russia would certainly have achieved a lot more, had Aleksandr Herzen been destined for the role of a Russian Jefferson instead of a London émigré. However,

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unlike radical Westernizers who believe that there are no higher ideals than those offered by the ideology of the Enlightenment, I regard this era as transitional, just like any other in the history of humankind. If we look at the Enlightenment as the systemic crisis of Christianity, which prepares the way for new forms of religious consciousness, it would be difficult not to succumb to the temptation of comparing the US today to that of Ancient Rome. Early nineteenth-century Russian philosophers of the Silver Age often drew parallels between turn-of-the-century Europe and Imperial Rome in the period of its decline. However, it would be more accurate to compare Europe with Ancient Greece and its role in shaping the culture of the ancient world, whereas the US, with its technological and military might and continuing cultural dependence on Europe, should really remind its citizens of Rome in the prime of its power and influence. Like Rome after the Punic Wars, the US after two world wars has become one of the world’s greatest powers. Its victory in the Cold War with the Soviet Union made it the sole leader in the world arena. Of course, the symptoms of cultural decline also manifest themselves in the US—at times stronger and at other times feebler. However, unlike the Soviet Union, which failed to cope with the dissenters of the 1960s and allowed the empire to weaken, the US did not let itself be devoured by the explosion of the youth counter-culture of the same decade. Having developed the ability to pursue positive changes, it ultimately put down the youth riots by absorbing the counter-culture into the establishment. In the 1990s, the US faced other social problems: poverty, racism, the disintegration of family values, the spread of aids, the low level of public schooling and skyrocketing prices for medicine. At the same time, the spirit of “political correctness” became de rigueur and took over American society. Universities introduced educational quotas for “affirmative action” programs. AfricanAmericans and other microcultural groups aspired to encountering “their roots”—a cultural mood that is very reminiscent of Russian Slavophilism. For Afro-Americans though these origins differ significantly from those of the Slavophiles: they do not go back to Christ and the Fathers of the Church, but to magical rites and African tribal religions. Moreover, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, postmodernism became a popular cultural movement in the United States that has claimed the status of an ideology, one that has overcome the postulates of classical Enlightenment with its cult of reason and science. Postmodernists are replacing the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human rationality with their own thesis of equality, one that proposes the relativity of all types of human cognition and practice, which they declare to be “language games” that are irreducible to each other. Such philosophy nurtures the activity of microcultural groups,

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a­ dvocating for their rights and equality. It follows that if everything is relative and has the right to exist, then why should European cultural tradition be thought to be more progressive than, for example, Polynesian culture, or the monogamous family better than polygamous one? To the credit of postmodernism, however, it should be noted that this emphasis on the all-difference and equal rights for all does not reflect the complexity and richness of this cultural phenomenon, which has many positive features, including uncompromising criticism of any form of totalitarian consciousness. Nevertheless, in my view, postmodernism by no means supersedes modernity, as it does not offer any new absolute or scripture. On the contrary, it pushes even further the horizon of the Enlightenment, returning to religion, but no longer as an absolute, but as one of the possible linguistic alternatives, including African totemism, ancient pagan religions, the eco-feminist cult of Mother Earth, and fascination with other expressions of spiritual quests. In addition to political, economic and ideological pressure on society, the US is experiencing considerable difficulties in the international arena. After the collapse of the global communist system, Islam became its main ideological rival. If we draw parallels between Europe and Ancient Greece, and compare the United States to Imperial Rome, then the threat of the Muslim jihad may remind us of the militant Jews at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in ad 70. And yet, no matter how enticing those historical analogies may appear, they should not overshadow the uniqueness of each epoch—ancient and modern. The Age of Enlightenment, embodied most vividly by the US today, is one of a kind as well. Unprecedented in human history, it represents the systemic crisis of Christianity. In its religious manifestation, the American identity, therefore, reflects the idea of personal responsibility for spiritual choice. Being the foundation of its national existence, it makes the US what it is—a dynamic country of free people, open to new trends and beginnings. This country of emigrants, who have come from all over the world, represents the best that people have accumulated over the millennia of their history. It embodies the youth of humankind and their readiness to start from scratch—a brilliant starting point for the upcoming spiritual upsurge. Works Cited Bellah, Robert N. “Is There a Common American Culture?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 3 (Fall 1998). Sergeev, Mikhail. Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Bahá’í Faith. Brill, 2015.

Natalya Shelkovaia Natalya Valerievna Shelkovaia was born on May 11, 1953 in the city of Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka Region in the family of a military officer. In 1958, due to demobilization, the family moved to Kharkov. Having entered the Kharkov Institute of Radio Electronics at the Faculty of Radio Equipment Design in 1971 and graduated with honors in 1977, Shelkovaia worked as an engineer of the Department of Modeling Thermal and Mechanical Processes at the Institute for Mechanical Engineering Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian ssr from 1977 to 1981. In 1980 she entered the Correspondence Department of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Taras Shevchenko Kiev State University and graduated with honors in 1986. From 1981 to 1987 she worked as an assistant in the Department of Ethics, Aesthetics and Scientific Atheism of the Vladimir I. Lenin Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. After three years of postgraduate studies in the Philosophy Department of Maxim Gorky Kharkov State University from 1987 to 1990, she successfully defended the first non-Marxist thesis on spirituality in the ussr, “Spirituality as an Intention of Personal Being,” which earned her the degree of Candidate of Science in philosophy. From 1990 to 2015, Shelkovaia worked at the H.S. Skovoroda Kharkov National Pedagogical University in the Department of Cultural Studies and after its dissolution in the Department of Political Science, Sociology and Cultural Studies as a lecturer, senior lecturer and associate professor. From 2017 to 2018 she taught the special course “Fundamentals of Christian Ethics” in Kharkov Lyceum No. 89 and was a supervisor of high school students who wrote research papers for the competition of the Minor Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since 2018, she has been working as an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Information Activities of the Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University. From 2015 to 2018, at the Kharkov Art Museum and the Kharkov regional art gallery “Art Slobozhanshchina” Shelkovaia gave a set of lectures on “Religions of the World” and “Symbolism of Sacred Texts,” which are available on YouTube. Her current research interests include comparative religious studies, the philosophy and psychology of religion, religious ethics, religious and philosophical anthropology, Russian religious philosophy, social philosophy and psychology. Her scholarly research is focused on the essence and t­ ransformations

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of the spiritual world of the individual and the spiritual life of society in modern technological civilization, which are forming a new type of person, HighTech homo. In the field of philosophical anthropology, her scholarly interest is focused on the problems of spirituality and cordocentrism (the philosophy of the heart), which are central to Russian religious thought. In the field of religion, it is the study of the deep spiritual unity of all religions and the mystical directions of religions. Shelkovaia is the author of “Introduction to Religious Studies” (2007), coauthor of “Russia Abroad: An Anthology of Contemporary Philosophical Thought” (Boston, 2018) and textbooks for universities, “Religions of the World” (2000), in addition to more than 140 scholarly papers published in Belarus, Moldova, Japan, Russia, the United States, and Ukraine. Her articles include: “Luther—Buddha of the West” (2003), “Mystical Life” (2004), “Cultures of the West and East: A Paradigm Shift” (2012), “From homo sacralis to Hi-Tech homo” (2013), “Frierdich Nietzsche on the Way Back to Oneself” (2015), “Erotology of Nikolai Berdiaev” (2015), “Spirituality in Circumstances of Auschwitz” (2016), “Meetings with V. Rozanov. Thoughts on Sex. Sex and Androgynism” (2017), “East and West: The Culture of Heart and the Culture of Mind” (2017), “Religion and Spirituality” (in collaboration with Mikhail Sergeev, 2017), “Meetings with V. Rozanov. The Essence of Christianity” (2017). Since 2016, Shelkovaia has been a member of the editorial board of the Brill book series, “Contemporary Russian Philosophy,” and a member of the International Center for the Study of Russian Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University. A shorter version of Natalya Shelkovaia’s essay, “Fridrikh Nitszshe o puti vozvrashcheniia k sebe” (Friedrich Nietzsche on the Way of Recurrence to Oneself), which appears in this anthology, was published in Russian in the journal, Filosofskie nauki (Philosophical Sciences), no. 10 (2015), 78–93.

Friedrich Nietzche on the Way of Recurrence to Oneself Natalya Shelkovaia 1

Instead of a Preface1

In a very difficult period of my life, short thoughts and aphorisms about the nature of a person and the world began to come to my mind. At first, I wrote them down on sheets of paper, then I got a big notebook, which eventually grew into a big book. While composing this “Diary of Thoughts” at some point the name “The Way of Recurrence to Oneself” occurred to me. Later, when I read works by the mystics, I noticed that “recurrence to oneself” was the goal of a mystical spiritual action. And more recently, carefully reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s works and working on them, I noticed again that for Nietzsche “recurrence to oneself” has been the aim of spiritual practice: “Lonely one, you go the way to yourself!”2 Only “recurring” to oneself can one be considered, according to Nietzsche, a super-human, a new person. Although, based on the idea of eternal recurrence, rooted in antiquity and reanimated by Nietzsche, the new person is only a regenerated, primordial one. And what is interesting: those works about Nietzsche, which seemed the most appealing and close to me in spirit, were, rather, not studies of his work, not “works about Nietzsche,” but “co-thinking, co-feeling with Nietzsche.” This implies similarity between their authors’ “vital world” (Lebenswelt) and that of Nietzsche. I saw this in Lev Shestov’s article, “The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche,”3 in Andrei Bely’s article “Friedrich Nietzsche,”4 in the article by Vladimir N. Mironov “The Philosophy of History 1 This article was published in an abridged form in the journal Philosophical sciences, no. 10 (2015). The full text is published here for the first time. Unless otherwise noted, all italicized words in quotations are mine. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None (Cambridge up, 2006), 47. 3 Lev Shestov, The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and of F. Nietzsche in Questions of Philosophy (“Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i F. Nietzsche”), Voprosy filosofii, no. 7 (1990): 59–128. 4 Andrei Bely, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian Religious Philosophy: Translations, Research, Essay of the “Silver Age” Philosophers in 2 vols. (Friedrich Nietzsche i

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of Friedrich Nietzsche”5 and in the article by Igor I. Evlampiev “‘This Worldly’ Religiosity of F. Dostoyevsky and F. Nietzsche.”6 Moreover, some authors, for example, Karen Swassjan, are literally in love with the German immoralist.7 This is not surprising: the more you plunge into the “world of Nietzsche,” become saturated with the atmosphere of joy and love of life, the more you are filled with a special energy of Light and Good such that you want to dance and sing along with Zarathustra, to soar in the free flight of his eagle and to relate wisely to life, like his snake. One cannot help falling in love with the philosophy of Nietzsche, as one cannot help falling in love with the teaching of Christ. “Stop!”—you will say. Nietzsche and Christ? Immortalist Nietzsche—the singer of Light and Good? Yes… 2

Christ and Christianity, Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

One of the most ancient problems which appeared, perhaps, with the emergence of language has been the interpretation of what was said, and later written. The age-old hermeneutic circle—understanding-interpretationunderstanding—bit and bites itself, like a snake its tail, and is often very painful. And the more extraordinary the speaking and writing personality is, the more complex the understanding and interpretation of what has been said and written. As for Jesus Christ and the Spiritual Teachers of humankind and Nietzsche and other geniuses, to understand and interpret what Christ said (He himself wrote nothing!) and what Nietzsche wrote can only be one who is “on the same vertical level” with them, at their “height”—one who is also a Spiritual Teacher or a genius himself. Those who are below their spiritual level inevitably distort their teachings. Sensing these distortions, Nietzsche, at the beginning of his work Beyond Good and Evil, draws the attention of readers to

russkaia religioznaia filosofiia: Perevody, issledovaniia, esse filosofov “Serebrianogo veka”), 1 (Alkiona, 1996), 59–86. 5 Vladimir N. Mironov, The Philosophy of History of Friedrich Nietzsche in Questions of Philosophy (“Filosofiia istorii Friedricha Nietzsche,” Voprosy filosofii), no. 11 (2005): 163–75. 6 Igor I. Evlampiev, “This Worldly” Religiosity of F. Dostoyevsky and F. Nietzsche (On the Question of the Religious Content of Nonclassical Philosophy) in Questions of Philosophy (“‘Posiustoronniaia’ religioznost’ F. Dostoevskogo i F. Nietzsche” (K voprosu o religioznom soderzhanii neklassicheskoi filosofii,” Voprosy filosofii), no. 7 (2013): 121–32. 7 Karen A. Swassjan, “Friedrich Nietzsche: Martyr of the Knowledge” (“Friedrich Nietzsche: muchenik poznaniia”), F. Nietzsche Works: in 2 vols., 1 (Mysl, 1990), 5–46.

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the fact that his vision of reality is an esoteric vision of an en-light-ened person, unlike the exoteric vision of ordinary people; “the exoteric sees things up from below—while the esoteric sees them down from above”!8 I fully share the view of Vladimir N. Mironov that the genius of Nietzsche, coupled with his illness, suffering, and piercing loneliness, allowed him to “radically go beyond the boundaries of our own human space and look at us all from an absolutely unprecedented side.”9 Christ and Nietzsche speak in parables. Both often repeat that their listeners do not understand and will understand only later. Writing about Christ, Nietzsche said, “For this anti-realist, speech is made possible precisely by not taking words literally,” and adds “Jesus could be called a ‘free spirit,’ using the phrase somewhat loosely—he does not care for solid things: the word kills, everything solid kills. The concept, the experience of ‘life’ as only he knew it, repelled every type of word, formula, law, faith, or dogma. He spoke only about what was inside him most deeply: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ are his words for the innermost, he saw everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, as having value only as a sign, a parable.”10 (The italics are Nietzsche’s.) But the same can be said about Nietzsche himself! He called the subtitle of his Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. For this and other of his works are “books for free minds” that is for those who are freed from the cells of invented stereotypes, for “convictions are prisons,”11 and for those who perhaps do not even exist. The philosopher realized that he belongs not to modernity, not given to society, but, like all geniuses and enlightened ones, he came to this world to carry a message about the future of humankind, in order to shine on humanity with a Light—the Light of Joy and Love for life, not one fashioned out of people’s “kindness” and compassionate weeping. He said, “My day won’t come until the day after tomorrow. Some people are born posthumously,”12 people who have “New eyes for the most distant things.”13 And it is to such people that Nietzsche belongs. Such people, Andrei Bely profoundly remarked, usually appear in a 8 9 10 11 12 13

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Cambridge up, 2002), 31. Mironov, “Filosofiia istorii Friedricha Nietzsche,” 164. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ. A Curse on Christianity,” Friedrich Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (Cambridge up, 2005), 29–30. Nietzsche, “Curse,” 53. Nietzsche, “Curse,” 3. Nietzsche, 3.

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crisis, the most tragic periods of human development: “Individual persons of the coming race, prematurely born during the domination of a doomed race, are children abandoned from the future into the realm of the elderly.”14 One of these “children,” not understood by “old people,” was Friedrich Nietzsche, who like Christ, was eager to “raise a child—a new soul, from which the body of the super-human would be woven.”15 Yes, Christ and Nietzsche were not understood by their contemporaries, and they realized this. Christ understood that no matter how much He cast pearls before “swine,” they would still trample them with their feet and tear Him to pieces. He understood. Knew. But He could not help throwing His “pearls.” And Nietzsche knew, saying “I am not the mouth for these ears.”16 He knew that “they” [those who are able to hear and understand it] “are still asleep, these higher people, while I am awake; these are not my true followers. I’m not waiting for them here on their mountains.”17 Yes, he understood this, but, as Christ and Martin Luther, on that stood and could not otherwise. And he wrote for everyone and… for no one… For he loved these people, “I love mankind. I love you thoroughly. nowhere now is there a soul that could be more loving,” Nietzsche spoke through the mouth of Zarathustra.18 Both Christ and Nietzsche could not do otherwise, for they came to this world as teachers and… sowers. And they sowed the seeds of spirituality and wisdom, so that these seeds of wisdom, even after their death, would grow into the Tree of Life. To give the world a chance to ascend this Tree of Life, if only after their death, they uprooted, sometimes quite aggressively, the Trees of Death: Christ overturns the benches in the temple converted by the Pharisees into a market; Nietzsche takes up arms and “smashes” the false pharisaical morality that sings of the wretchedness of spirit and body, weakness, suffering, compassion—that by no means leads to the destruction of suffering—and ostentatious kindness, that often masks evil and deceit. Nietzsche is accused of cruelty and immorality. But this is not so. Constantly glorifying courage, Nietzsche is not a cruel, but a manly person, openly looking at a real world, not created by a person or by idealist philosophers. It is not Nietzsche who is cruel, but the society in which he lived, and one that alas, unfortunately has not become kinder and more humane today. And what

14 Bely, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” 61. 15 Bely, 66. 16 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 9. 17 Belyi. “Friedrich Nietzsche,” 70. 18 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 4, 33, 180.

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about life? It is beyond a person’s imagined morality, beyond good and evil: “life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.”19 “There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena.”20 Why do most people not see this? Because they are not able, like Nietzsche, to rise above worldly vanity, and they do not even suspect that in addition to the exoteric, physical perception of being, there is also the esoteric, spiritual that Nietzsche possessed. Christ and Nietzsche scourge the social foundations, but love life. Christ fasted only once—forty days in the desert before starting to preach and to teach of agape love, concentrating and preparing to fulfill His great mission: to be the Teacher of humankind. Christ did not fast anymore. In response to the accusations of the Pharisees that all Jews fast, but He did not, Jesus replied, “It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth—this defiles a person” (Mt. 15: 11). And in his Sermon on the Mount— the quintessence of Christianity—Christ calls: “Rejoice and be glad!” (Mt. 5: 12). Later, addressed by Him, the Apostle Paul summarizes this call: “Rejoice always!” (1 Thess. 5: 16). And what does Christ do at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee? He turns water into wine. What for? So that people continue to have fun and do not stop the marriage feast. Moreover, He seems to bless, creating a wine that was better than what they had been drinking. And He sees this world as a marriage feast, in which one should enjoy life, everything that God gives to us. It is not for nothing that, in His response to the accusations by the Pharisees of not observing the fast, He answers: “Can the wedding guests mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?” (Mt. 9:15). Let that joy, the joy of the marriage feast of life, continue always. Is not Nietzsche writing about the same thing? It is Nietzsche, who proclaims himself a follower of Dionysus, the patron of orgiastic fun and “the marriage feast of life,” and who has composed The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra as hymns of joy, hymns of life, hymns to a person who knows how to rejoice and dance with God. Zarathustra-Nietzsche calls, “You higher men, your worst part is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance— dance over and past yourselves! So learn to laugh over and past yourselves! I pronounced laughter holy; you higher men, learn—to laugh!” (Italics are Nietzsche’s.)21 Only a very strong person can live like that, for to dance with God, to laugh with God, to rejoice in life with all the fibers of his nature is ­possible only for a super-human. Only a super-man is able to rise above all the 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge U P, 1996), 6. 20 Nietzsche, Beyond, 64. 21 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 240.

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adversities of life, over all misfortunes, and become what he was originally created—a godlike being, who, in the cycle of eternal recurrence, could experience “recurrence to oneselves,” being in harmony with life and God and, as a consequence, with Light and Joy. Christ and Nietzsche lived as they taught and taught how they lived. Both rose above all the vicissitudes of life, rejoiced and… resurrected! Betrayed, sold and crucified by those closest to Him—His pupils—and suffering physically and mentally, Christ calls upon God with the last of his strength before dying: “Father! Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Lk. 23: 34). He not only forgives and prays for those who betrayed Him, sold and crucified Him, but He also explains to God why they should be forgiven: for they, like small children, do not understand what they are doing… And Nietzsche, suffering incredibly from illness, abandoned by all his friends, infinitely lonely, writes Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science—his manifesto of the “religion of joy,” the hymn of joy overcoming suffering, the hymn of life that overcomes death. Mironov writes that “Nietzsche loved life unquestionably,” that is “a powerful and militant life, one that opposes not death, but a squalid, miserable life.”22 What did Christ’s followers make of His teaching? According to the Christian Church, Christ came into the world because He must by excruciating torment and death atone for sins, the first being the original sin of Adam and Eve. Thus, Jesus came to die in torment for the sake of people (death without torture of the Church would not suit!). And this is the focus of the Christian Church: it stops here. Christ is crucified… He died as a martyr brought to the altar of God, as a sacrifice… “the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty!”23 (He died as a sacrifice in pagan religions, against which the Christian Church stands!) Hence there is the cult of the cross and crosses depicting the crucified Christ (in fact, fetishism and worship of… a corpse!), the cult of suffering and of great martyrs for faith in Christ, seeing displays of spirituality in asceticism, the cult of the crucifixion, that is the cult of suffering and death. This is what Nietzsche accentuates! Here Christ appears as a sacrifice to God for humanity’s sins. And the main thing for believers is to repent their sins and endure suffering, as did their Christ. It is the religion of the “crucified Christ,” the religion of people who are weak in spirit, unable to resurrect, being “crucified” by life, and unable to enjoy life. Yes, according to an analysis of the texts of Gospels (although Christ Himself wrote nothing, Christ’s disciples wrote what they understood, how they

22 23

Mironov. “Filosofiia istorii Friedricha Nietzsche,” 164. Nietzsche, “Curse,” 37.

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­understood and how they remembered-perceived!) it really follows that Christ came to this world and suffered His martyrdom to atone for the sins of humanity, and, first of all, the original sin of Adam and Eve. But what is the essence of original sin, which Christ had to redeem? (Why does not the Christian Church emphasize this?) Egoism. And what is egoism? A person thinking only of himself. But he does not even know how to love himself, for to think about love and to love is not the same thing. The head thinks, the heart loves. That is, Christ came to save us from egoism—to teach us to love. He did not come as a Sacrifice, but as a Spiritual Teacher. Hence the cult of resurrection, for love conquers death, the cult of life, the cult of joy; for resurrection, as victory over death, is a great joy. Here the main thing for believers is to learn how to love and enjoy life in all its manifestations. It is the religion of the “risen Christ,” the religion of people who are strong in spirit, capable of resurrecting again and again, no matter how life “crucifies” them, able to enjoy life. And this is… Nietzsche’s religion!!! Nietzsche’s Zarathustra teaches: “Ever since there have been humans, the human being has enjoyed himself too little: That alone, my brothers, is our original sin! And if we learn to enjoy ourselves better, then we forget best how to hurt others and plot hurt for them.”24 Into what then did they turn the teaching of Nietzsche? Traditionally, many have considered Nietzsche an atheist, referencing his statements about Christianity and the fact that he calls himself an anti-Christian. But does this mean that Nietzsche rejected God? Reading his works, we see the opposite: he is looking for God, and his heart is mourning, seeing the absence of true faith in God. The Church, in particular, the Christian Church, went from a spiritual organization based on the principle of conciliarity—the spiritual unity of people, promoting self-discovery of individuality in a person—to a social institution that manipulates the consciousness of believers who heed the word of their shepherd more than the Word of God, which ceased to be even heard by them. Hence, The Antichrist, the title of his paper, refers not to Nietzsche himself, but to the Church, which elevated itself instead of Christ and thus became, in effect, the Antichrist.25 “God is dead,” says Nietzsche, but does this mean that He is dead for Nietzsche, or is it the fixation on His death for the masses? Karen Swassjan notes that Nietzsche himself admits that “as a child” he “saw God in all His glory.”26

24 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 68. 25 See Evlampiev, “‘Posiustoronniaia’ religioznost’ F. Dostoevskogo i F. Nietzsche,” 121–32. 26 Karen A. Swassjan, Notes. Antichrist (“Primechaniia. Antihrist,”) F. Nietzsche. Works: in 2 vols., vol. 2 (Mysl’, 1990), 800.

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And the Son of Man came into the world to bear the Word of God, to bring God’s Word to the world, but the people do not need the Word of God, (the Good News of God that is “The Gospel”) for the word of the Church, the word of priests, is dearer to them. And those who on Sunday only threw palm branches under Christ’s feet as He entered Jerusalem, shouting: “Hosanna27 to David’s son!” five days later (a mere five days!) demanded the crucifixion of the Savior. Here, evidently is the phenomenon of religious fanaticism, characteristic of the crowd with a herd consciousness, that Nietzsche so ardently opposed. “Even the word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding,” he wrote bitterly: there was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “evangel” died on the cross. What was called “evangel” after that became the opposite of what he had lived: [a bearer of bad tidings]… It is false to the point of absurdity to think that Christians are characterized by their “beliefs,” like belief in salvation through Christ: only the practice of Christianity is really Christian, living like the man who died on the cross…28 That is, in essence, Christ and His Good News, the Gospel, crucified by the people, the priests who continue to crucify Him until now, for “Life in Christ” (like Christ) is replaced by “talk of Christ” and Christian (?) rites; moreover, Christian love is deformed by this pseudo-Christianity with hatred and aggression for everything that does not fit into the framework of the teachings of their Christian faith. In place of God came the confession; as a “replacement” for Christ Himself, the cleric became, in fact, the Antichrist, and declared his teaching the one for a “true Christian.” Deeply pained, Nietzsche wrote about this, as did the Russian genius, Dostoyevsky in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” and Vladimir Soloviev in the “Tale of the Antichrist.” Reflecting on the nature of God’s murder, Nietzsche penned these piercing lines: Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, “I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!” Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you! We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire 27 28

Word of praise glorifying God. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Curse,” 35.

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­ orizon? God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! h The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives…” Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. “I come too early,” he then said; “my time is not yet.”29 Perhaps Nietzsche came too early, for even today he remains misunderstood, slandered, tabooed? People did not understand the person with a lantern and continue to live in a world without God. Modern religions are often only a “game of religion.” A cyborgization of man in modern technogenic civilization, and the introduction of identification numbers, depersonalizing and dehumanizing person—is this not the unfolding of that process of “killing life” after the “murder” of God, that Nietzsche so painfully perceived and described? But the cry of his soul was not heard. His warnings were transformed either into the subject of a “bead game” among intellectuals, or into the “program of action” of Adolf Hitler and other dictators, to whom the spiritual meaning of Nietzsche’s search is inaccessible because they lacked spirituality. Here the aforementioned problem of understanding and interpretation is revealed. Understanding is possible only when the initial positions and aims of the individuals in the relationship are similar. For although a human being is a combination of the biological, the social and the spiritual, the character of their values and perception of the world is often one-dimensional. Priority is given to the material, the social or the spiritual. Correspondingly, it is possible to sort people into three types: the material when material values are the most important; social when social values are dominant; and spiritual when spiritual values are made the priority. Adequate understanding is possible with like-minded personalities, that is, a spiritual person is able to understand only the spiritual; a social person, the social; and a materially oriented person, only the material. In this case, the higher type of personality is able to understand the lower, but not vice versa. Moreover, the lower type is not only incapable of understanding the higher, but also seeks to reduce the higher to the lowest level in any way possible: this is manifested in various forms from humiliation, hatred, and anger, up to aspiration to destroy the higher. Jesus Christ warned of just this situation in His Sermon on the Mount: “Do not give sacred things to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turning, they tear you to pieces” (Mt. 7: 6). 29

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge U P, 2001), p. 120.

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History contains many examples of the “tearing away” of outstanding, spiritual personalities. This is Jesus Christ Himself; this is the “uprooting” of Russian spirituality by Soviet revolutionaries, and among the examples of numerous outstanding personalities, the personality and teaching of Nietzsche occupy a special place. Yes, Hitler and most of humanity, including our country, “tore” away Nietzsche. What could Hitler find in Nietzsche’s philosophy? Only what he was able to understand and what strengthened his narcissistic and necrophiliac traits of character: the will to power—the violence of the strong over the weak, the crowd, the herd, and, associated with it, the anthem to war. It should be specially noted that any system based on a dominant ideology, including the national socialist system, presupposes a change in philosophical theories, that they exploit to combat a political opponent. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between political interpretations and the essential meanings of doctrines, whether Nietzscheanism or Marxism. The most common destructive method of politically distorting philosophical teachings is to reduce them to quotations or slogans that are easily understood and assimilated by the popular masses who think marching in step and are only capable of counting up to two: one’s own [in-group] and enemies [out-group], arias and no arias, the Reds and the Whites and so forth. As for Nietzsche, the very aphoristic manner of presenting his philosophy contributed to its reduction to slogans, such as the “morality of gentlemen and slaves,” the “coming superman,” the “blond beast,” and others. Those who interpret Nietzsche’s super-human as someone who has supposedly no prohibitions and regulations are those who crave fame and power, and social and biological goods. Nietzsche himself saw in man not a ruler, not a dictator over the life and death of others, but a person, who has realized: “There is a master morality and a slave morality; you sometimes find them sharply juxtaposed—inside the same person even, within a single soul.”30 This person is squeezing out of himself, slavish morality, “the morality of herd animals,”and is capable of preserving the self, its “I.” A self-cultivating person, the superhuman creates a moral based not on fear, obedience and submission but on free self-determination and thus emerges from the standard framework. Weaponized by Hitler, the idea of inequality of people that Nietzsche meant in terms of their spiritual personality was concerned not with social but with spiritual equality, like herding. Hence, he was passionate about moving away from herd mentality toward the uniqueness of people so that in the future they would advance across “a thousand bridges and paths,” and not be marched in 30 Nietzsche, Beyond, 153–54.

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slender columns under common slogans. “This is the age of the masses,” the philosopher stated bitterly: “they lie prostrate in front of anything massive.”31 Are we not observing this in the modern world of mass culture? Are not studies of twentieth-century philosophers—the “The Revolt of the Masses” by Ortega y Gasset and “The Age of the Crowd” by Serge Moscovici—devoted to this process of dehumanization and depersonalization? In addition to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hitler and the Nazis took most of the ideas from Nietzsche’s book The Will to Power, but, as Swassjan has emphasized, Nietzsche did not write such a book: it was fabricated by his sister, whom the philosopher called “a vengeful anti-Semitic fool.”32 Nietzsche had a sharply negative attitude toward the will to power in the social aspect. He called out: Just look at these superfluous [men]!! They’re always sick. They want power and first of all the crowbar of power, much money—these impotent, impoverished ones! Watch them scramble, these swift monkeys! Mad all of them seem to me, and scrambling monkeys and overly aroused.33 As for the idea of nationalism, Slavophobia and anti-Semitism, allegedly drawn from Nietzsche, they are a crude political falsification that does not have any serious basis. It is known that Nietzsche was against nationalism, always spoke positively about the Slavs, especially about Russians, considered Jews the strongest, the most tenacious, the cleanest race of the present population of Europe, and he saw the cause of unjust persecutions and attacks on Jews to be envy of their minds and higher intelligence; moreover, he stated that “it might be practical and appropriate to throw the anti-Semitic hooligans out … .”34 Thus, Nietzsche’s work does not resemble what Hitler and the Nazis “found” in him. Anticipating the continuing tragedy of his life and the deformation and distortion of his teaching, after his death, Nietzsche wrote: “I also dislike the latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who nowadays roll their Christian-Aryan-Philistine eyes and try to stir up the bovine elements in the population through a misuse, which exhausts all patience, of the cheapest means of agitating, the moralistic attitude.”35

31 Nietzsche, Beyond, 132. 32 Swassjan, Friedrich Nietzsche: muchenik, 39. 33 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 35–36. 34 Neitzsche, Beyond, 142. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge U P, 2007), 117.

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Eternal Recurrence—Recurrence to Oneself

Who was this misunderstood genius and what is the profound meaning of his teaching? Nietzsche’s genius, as is known, was discovered very early, and in 1868, at the age of 24, without defending his doctoral thesis, he became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. But in 1873, at the age of 29, he had the first symptoms of his illness, which forced him in 1879, at 35, to leave teaching. There is an interesting parallel here with the life path of Siddhārtha Gautama Shakyamuni, who at the age of 29 left his home in search of an answer to the question: why do people suffer; at 35 he became an enlightened Buddha, discovering the Four Truths about the causes of human suffering and ways to get rid of them. Nietzsche suffered terribly from excruciating headaches, but… as noted by Swassjan, in 1882 the crisis, as Nietzsche himself wrote in a letter to Georg Brandes, “was overcome … the disease brought me the greatest benefit.”36 What benefit did it bring? It seems that he talked about the disease as an initiation, which led to the transformation of his mind and psyche, and enlightenment. As a rule, spiritual centers open at the age of thirty. Note that at the age of 30, Christ began preaching and teaching; Gautama left his home at 29; and Nietzsche’s health was deteriorating at age 29. Drawing attention to this pivotal time in a person’s life, he began Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the doctrine of mystical Way of recurrence to himself—with the words: “When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains.”37 A mountain symbolizes of a person’s union with God. Around 1882 Nietzsche’s inner world abruptly began to change. “It’s difficult to say that he had a ‘revelation,’” notes Alexei M. Rutkevich; “it is known only that since that time in Nietzsche’s teaching, the ideas of the ‘will to power’, ‘eternal recurrence’ and ‘super-human’ come together. The development of his own philosophical teaching begins.”38 It was during this period (after enlightenment?) he writes his best works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887), in which, in essence, Nietzsche sets out his mystical teaching about the causes of human suffering and ways to get rid of them. 36 Swassjan, Friedrich Nietzsche: muchenik, 6–7. 37 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 3. 38 Alexei M. Rutkevich, Notes. Friedrich Nietzsche. Anti-Christian in Twilight of the Gods (“Primechaniia. F. Nietzsche. Antihristianin,” in Sumerki bogov) (Politizdat, 1989), 346 (in Russian).

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The way to get rid of suffering is, according to Nietzsche, the way to recurrence to yourself, to the godlike, primordial with the soul of a child: this is the desire of the eternal recurrence. The eternal recurrence, often mentioned by Nietzsche, is nothing more than the idea of the life cycle: birth-life-death-resurrection-rebirth… Moreover, the idea of the second, spiritual birth of man through initiation is the experience of martyrdom and resurrection. “In order for the creator himself to be the child who is newly born,” Nietzsche writes, “he must also want to be the birth-giver and the pain of giving birth,”39 that is, to endure the throes of initiation. But the same process takes place in Taoist psychotechnics of identifying the adept with the pregnant woman, and then with the child being born by this woman, moreover, by their coincidence. In this case, this is the experience of “the unity or even the identity of the great Tao-Path of the universe (mother) and the perfect adept (child), the identity of the subjective (“I” adept) and the objective— the universe as a body of Tao.”40 It is impossible not to pay attention to the role of disease in the transformation of the psyche of Nietzsche. Some researchers, for example, Rudiger Safranskii41 and Vadim I. Menzhulin,42 compare Nietzsche’s disease with shamanic disease, preliminary initiation—initiation into shamanism, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—with a fictitious assistant—a shaman-mentor who initiated him, like Carl G. Jung’s fictional Philemon—an assistant to achieve his “highest state.” Nietzsche himself notes the positive role of his illness, deepening his worldview and transforming his consciousness: And as for illness are we not almost tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit Only great pain, Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths.43 (A typical description of initiation!)

39 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 66. 40 Evgenii A. Torchinov, Religions of the World: Experience of Transcendence: States and Psychotechnique (Religii mira: Opyt zapredelnogo: Psihotehnika i transpersonalnye sostoianiia). (Tsentr “Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie,” 1998), 163 (in Russian). 41 Rudiger Safranskii, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (W.W. Norton, 2003). 42 Vadim I. Menzhulin, Philosophy, Biography and Psychoanalysis: The Case of Nietzsche. Part 2. “Patient” in Philosophical Thought (Fіlosofіia, bіografіia i psihoanalіz: vipadok Nietzsche. Chast’ 2. “Patsіent,” Filosofs’ka dumka) no. 6 (2009): 112–20 (in Ukrainian). 43 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 6.

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The life of Nietzsche, the life of Christ, is nothing else than the Path to resurrection, enlightenment, spiritual birth through torment, which is in fact, initiation. Analyzing the mystical essence of Nietzsche’s teaching, Bely writes: In essence, the path to which Nietzsche calls us is “the eternal path” that we forgot: the way in which Christ walked, the path that the Raj yogis of India went on and on. Nietzsche came to the highest mystical consciousness, that painted him “the image of the New Person.”44 Throughout his life, Nietzsche experiences “three transformations of the spirit” described by him in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “incarnation” in a camel, which drags on itself the whole load of human culture; in a lion who fights for the right to be free and create his own values; and in a child,45 “to create new values in innocence and oblivion, in an endless sacred game.”46 Nietzsche describes the process of spiritual birth in this way: One! Oh mankind, pray! Two! What does deep midnight have to say? Three! “From sleep, from sleep – Four! From deepest dream I made my way – Five! The world is deep, Six! And deeper than the grasp of day. Seven! Deep is its pain –, Eight! Joy–deeper still than misery: Nine! Pain says: refrain! Ten! 44 Bely, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” 86. 45 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 16–17. 46 Rutkevich, “Antihristianin,” 346.

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Yet all joy wants eternity –, Eleven! – wants deep, wants deep eternity! Twelve!”47 (It is remarkable that Zarathustra appeals to people twelve times, as twelve is the number of absolute perfection). A person is born twice: physically and spiritually. The first birth is experienced by all people; the second—only by the elected ones, belonging to the Spiritual Teachers. These are the prophets, saints, the enlightened ones and some geniuses like Nietzsche. “The physical person” lives “in a dream.” Life is a dream, and only by dying, do we wake up and see reality. This idea has been expressed by philosophers and sages from antiquity to the present day. Life as a dream, as immersion in the material world and its problems, tearing up contradictions, is full of suffering and sorrow that absorb a person so much that joy barely breaks through a thin ray of light into our lives. And even, finally, having made our way into our life, joy in its path immediately meets grief, which whispers, and sometimes yells at it: “Disappear right now!” And the person again goes through life with a drooping head… When a person wakes up from sleep immersed in the material, artificial dichotomy of the world (in Buddhism—reaches the state of Buddha—who is enlightened, awakened), when his eyes open to meet this beautiful world, in which there is no sharp line between the conscious and unconscious, imaginative and logical, rational and emotional, his soul is filled with joy. His artificially “split consciousness” and “rationalized psyche” are transformed into a holistic, integral, syncretic worldview and thinking, the worldview of a pro-luminous person who has recurred to himself. Then the “‘man and world’ separated”—in the words of Nietzsche, “by the sublime presumptuousness of the little word ‘and’!”48—are joined together and become “manworld.” This worldview is called theosis in Christianity, nirvana in Buddhism, and moksha in Hinduism. Names and religions are different; the essence is one. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche himself writes about this, while characterizing Christ: “Among Indians he would have used Samkhya concepts, among the Chinese the concepts of Lao-tse—and never known the difference.49 For the deep essence of all religions is one and, according to the wise remark of Grigory S. Pomerants, “the depth of 47 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 183–84. 48 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 204. 49 Nietzsche, “Curse,” 29.

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each great religion is closer to the depth of another religion than to its own surface.”50 Why did the main prophet of Nietzsche’s new worldview have the name Zarathustra? It seems to me that there is an analogy between Zoroastrianism and its “sublation” (aufheben); Zoroastrianism’s main idea, the struggle between good and evil, was adopted by Christianity. Overcoming this struggle would come through Zarathustra’s enlightenment, which rose above the dichotomy of the world, by disgust toward the evil invented by people. “Nausea retreats from these higher men—well then! They’re pouring out their hearts, good hours are returning to them, they celebrate and ruminate— they’re becoming grateful.”51 An aversion to the world and people is replaced by lighting up with gratitude to people, the world, to God, for they are able to feel the beauty of this world and feel the state of the holiday in their soul. Writing about this rebirth, Nietzsche said, that a person is reborn, wakes up, becomes a “child,” with a clear view of the world. “His eyes are pure, and no disgust is visible around his mouth. Does he not stride like a dancer? Zarathustra is transformed, Zarathustra has become a child, an awakened one is Zarathustra.”52 A person is reborn and realizes, like Nietzsche, that “It dawned on me”53 and… recurrence to itself. In his father’s house—the House of Love and Joy, the House of Eternity. “I overcame myself, my suffering self, I carried my own ashes to the mountain, I invented a brighter flame for myself and behold!” said Nietzsche of his transformation.54 A person transcends himself, for “the human is something that must be overcome,”55 this person surpasses himself pathetic, frail, suffering, “crawling on the ground.” A person “burns” his former self, for “You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame: how could you become new if you did not first become ashes!”56 This person becomes a “bird”—a phoenix bird, resurrecting from the ashes again and again—able to rise above the bustle of vanities of this perishable world, and Nietzsche said, “this bird built its nest in my house,” so “I love and caress it.”57

50

G.S. Pomerants, Decaying Tower of Babel (“Raspadaiuschaiasia Vavilonskaia bashnia”), Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), no. 3 (2001): 33. 51 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 253. 52 Zarathustra, 4. 53 Zarathustra,14. 54 Zarathustra, 20. 55 Zarathustra, 158. 56 Zarathustra, 47. 57 Zarathustra, 25.

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“The soul of the elevated one becomes gay,”58 and he realizes that “Life is a well of joy.”59 Then the person meets with eternity and exclaims: “For I love you, oh eternity!”60 Nietzsche dreamed of such a person; it was these people he called the higher people who learned to enjoy life and discovered that “joy wants eternity,”61 for “god dances through me.”62 We should pay attention to Nietzsche’s constant emphasis on the connection between the state of joyful perception of the world and dance, which assumes a sacred character: “God dances in me.” In mystical psychotechnics in achieving a state of trance, in which the mystic communicates with God, music and dance play a special role. It is through music and dance that the shaman enters the trance; it is through music and dance that the priests of an agricultural cult prepare for the bloody day and reach ecstasy; whirling in dance, dervishes reach the state of divine intoxication, ecstasy, trance and enlightenment, the symbol of which in Sufism is wine. Moreover, in this state there is a “merging” of the mystic and God: mystics forget about their “self,” having completely “submerged” themselves in “Godself.” Thus, the famous Sufi mentor and martyr Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, in a state of ecstatic connection with God, exclaimed: “Ana-l-Hakk!” (I am the Absolute Truth!).63 Is not this what we see in the person of NietzscheZarathustra, who often proclaims himself a supreme being, in fact, God? This state of merging with God fills and overfills the soul with joy and love for all that exists and leads to an irresistible desire to “embrace” the whole world, to bring itself into the world. A person wants “to bestow and to distribute until the wise among human beings have once again enjoyed their folly.”64 This person wants to transform people without compassion for them, and to teach people to rejoice because “all great love is above even all its pitying, for it still wants to create the beloved!”65 Create a “world of joy,” “a world of rejoicers and great rejoicers” instead of “a world of sufferers and great martyrs.” Nietzsche exclaims, “I want to teach them what is today understood by so few, least of all

58 59 60 61 62 63

Zarathustra, 58. Zarathustra, 74. Zarathustra, 185, 186, 187. Zarathustra, 263. Zarathustra, 29. Annemarie Schimmel, The World of Islamic Mysticism (Mir islamskogo mistitsizma) (Aletheia/Enigma, 1999), 59. 64 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 3. 65 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 69.

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by these preachers of compassion (Mitleiden): to share not pain, but joy (Mitfreude)!”66 The modern person is “dead,” for he “killed God,” but according to the law of the cyclical development of life he will be born again, already a super-human, and his God will not be the God of the suffering, beggars and squalid, but the God of joy, wealth, might, “the God that dances.” In order for a new person to be born, a “man of old and wretched” must die and must be “pushed” to it. And a new man and a new God will rise again. Nietzsche prophesies not only about the new person, but also about the new religion—person and God “beyond good and evil” and “on this side of joy and the flowering of life”! You have to die to be resurrected. “God is dead,” Christianity as the religion of the crucified Christ “killed” God, but “God is risen!” Nietzsche, in essence, revives true Christianity—the religion of the risen Christ, the one Who said: “Rejoice and be merry!” (Mt. 5: 12). Be able to rejoice. This does not need to be taught to children. But adults need to learn this. Become like children!—Christ and Nietzsche taught that “everyone should laugh as children do.”67 Live not in the “world of good and evil” invented by you, but in the world of flowers, birds, trees, animals, rivers, seas and lakes. “Go outside to the roses and bees and swarms of doves! Especially to the song birds [sic], so that you can learn to sing from them!”68— Nietzsche teaches and continues: The kingdom of heaven belongs to the children; the faith expressed here is not a hard-won faith,—it is here, it has been from the start, it is, as it were, an infantilism that has receded into spirituality. A faith like this does not get angry, does not lay blame, does not defend itself It does not prove itself with miracles, rewards, or promises, certainly not “through scriptures”: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself either—it lives, it resists formulas.69 Nietzsche, this insane child, dreamed: “Together we learned everything; together we learned to climb up to ourselves by climbing over ourselves, and to smile cloudlessly:—smile down cloudlessly from bright eyes and from a distance of miles, when beneath us pressure and purpose and guilt steam like 66 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 193. 67 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 64. 68 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 177. 69 Nietzsche, “Curse,” 29.

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rain.”70 He called us to fly to the Sun, Sky, God: “The only thing my will wants is to fly, to fly into you!”71 The Call of Christ. The Call of Nietzsche. Did people hear their call? Did they follow Christ and Nietzsche-Zarathustra into the “world of love and joy,” free from vengeance-violence, from self-interest, into the world of creative donation? Unfortunately, no... 4

Instead of an Afterword

Dostoevsky’s insanity, Nietzsche’s insanity… Does this type of insanity not represent the codes of superior knowledge? Michel Foucault suggested that Nietzsche’s madness is not just madness, but a super-encrypted message, which we cannot yet unravel. Foucault believed that Nietzsche was undergoing an “experience of insanity,” which was meaningfully approaching “absolute knowledge.”72 Perhaps this “absolute knowledge” was nothing other than the knowledge of the enlightened, (buddha, vuddha [Sanskrit]—enlightened, awakened). According to Mironov, Nietzsche’s insanity brings us the news of a superhuman mental paradigm. The superman is the one who overcame resentful, evaluative, subjective, dialectically antithetical thinking. Those who understand their own kind without logging, not dismembering the world, but interacting with it holistically and directly. The one who broke through on the other side of all binary oppositions.73 But is that not a description of the worldview of a primordial, integral, undivided person, a person who has made the path of returning to himself? Being, in fact, special “textual psychotechnique,” Nietzsche’s “initiation texts” overturn consciousness and transform the psyche. This is pointed out by Mironov: In fact, he is subjecting us to the ritual of initiation, in which our ultimate self-actualization, the ultimate immersion in our selfhood, is realized. And then we suddenly discover inside ourselves some new creature that

70 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 131. 71 Zarathustra, 131. 72 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 1 (Gallimard/Quarto, 2001), 597–99. 73 Mironov, “Filosofiiia istorii Friedricha Nietzsche,” 172–73.

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persistently breaks the old shell, forcing us to be ourselves as much as possible.”74 Initiation leads a person to “pecking” out from the shell of the stereotypes of his “Ego” and social generally accepted norms and clichés, to spiritual birthing of the “new creature,” the creature-bird, the Creator-Man who has overcome the human creature; it leads to a human being rejoicing and “cloudlessly smiling,” having overcome suffering and crying—a Person dancing with God. Nietzsche’s work is devoted to this, and this is what I tried to show throughout my pages in my article. Did Nietzsche succeed in this? Did this succeed for me? Whether or not this succeeded depends on the reader, his interpretation, his comprehension and vision. Works Cited Bely, Andrei. “Friedrich Nietzsche.” Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian Religious Philosophy: Translations, Research, Essay of the “Silver Age” Philosophers. 2 vols. (Friedrich Nietzsche i russkaia religioznaia filosofiia: Perevody, issledovanii, esse filosofov “Serebrianogo veka”). 1: 59–86. Alkiona, 1996. (in Russian). Evlampiev, Igor I. “This-Worldly” Religiosity of F. Dostoyevsky and F. Nietzsche (On the Question of the Religious Content of Nonclassical Philosophy) “‘Posiustoronniaia’ religioznost’ F. Dostoevskogo i F. Nietzsche.” (K voprosu o religioznom soderzhanii neklassicheskoi filosofii). Voprosy filosofii, no. 7 (2013): 121–32. (in Russian). Menzhulin, Vadim І. Philosophy, Biography and Psychoanalysis: The Case of Nietzsche. Pt. 2. “Patient” in Philosophical Thought (Fіlosofіia, bіografіia ta psihoanalіz: vipadok Nietzsche. Chast 2. “Patsіent.” Filosofs’ka dumka), no. 6 (2009): 112–20. (in Ukrainian). Mironov V.N. Philosophy of History of Friedrich Nietzsche in Questions of Philosophy (“Filosofiia istorii Friedricha Nietzsche.” Voprosy filosofii), no. 11 (2005): 163–75. (in Russian). Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Anti-Christ. A Curse on Christianity.” In Friedrich Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. 1–68. Cambridge up, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge up, 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Cambridge up, 2001. 74

Mironov, 169–70.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge up, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits. Cambridge up, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. Cambridge up, 2006. Pomerants, G.S. Decaying Tower of Babel in Herald of Europe (“Raspadaiuschaiasia Vavilonskaia bashnia” Vestnik Evropy), no. 3 (2001). (in Russian). Rutkevich, Alexei M. Notes. Friedrich Nietzsche. Anti-Christian in Twilight of the Gods (“Primechaniia. F. Nietzsche. Antihristianin.” In Sumerki bogov). 345–60. Politizdat, 1989. (in Russian). Schimmel, Annemarie. The World of Islamic Mysticism (Mir islamskogo mistitsizma). Aletheia/Enigma, 1999. (in Russian). Shestov L. The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and of F. Nietzsche in Questions of Philosophy (“Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i F. Nitshe.” Voprosy filosofii), no. 7, (1990): 59–128. (in Russian). Swassjan, Karen A. Friedrich Nietzsche: Martyr of the Knowledge. (“Friedrich Nietzsche: muchenik poznaniia”) Vol. 1 of Nietzsche F. Works. 2 vols. 5–46. Mysl’, 1990. (in Russian). Swassjan, Karen A. Notes. Antichrist. (“Primechaniia. Antihrist”). Vol. 2 of Nietzsche F. Works. 2 vols. 799–805. Mysl’, 1990. (in Russian). Torchinov, Evgenii A. Religions of the World: Experience of Transcendence. States and Psychotechnique (Religii mira: Opyt zapredelnogo: Psihotehnika i transpersonalnye sostoianiia). Tsentr “Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie,” 1998. (in Russian).

Karen Swassjan Born in 1948 in Yerevan, Armenia, Karen A. Swassjan majored in philosophy as well as English and French philology. He did his doctoral dissertation on Henri Bergson and then taught philosophy, aesthetics and cultural history at the State University of Yerevan. A publisher and a translator into Russian, he translated Oswald Spengler’s The Decline Of The West and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets To Orpheus. Swassjan was the first to complete a post-revolutionary Russian translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, Furthermore, he has authored numerous books about philosophy and anthroposophy, literature, cultural history and the history of science. His books, A History of European Science and Goethe’s Philosophical Worldview, as well as his studies on Nietzsche, Spengler, Edmund Husserl and Ernst Cassirer are regarded as milestones in European literary circles. Also highly regarded are his publications in German-speaking countries: his thematically anthroposophist books like On the Road To Damascus. The Spiritual Situation between East and West; The Ultimate Communion of Mankind: A Celebration of Rudolf Steiner’s Book, The Philosophy of Freedom (Man’s Last Supper); Nietzsche or the Attempt to become God; The Decline of a Westerner: Oswald Spengler’s Requiem on Europe; Destiny is Named Goethe, as well as his most recent publications of Anthroposophist Orthopedagogy; The History of Philosophy in Karmic Perspective. An Obituary on Thinking from Plato to Stirner; Rudolf Steiner. The One Who Came from the Future among others. In 1994–95 Karen Swassjan was honored to receive the acclaimed Alexander von Humboldt Award for outstanding achievements as a scholar and author. In 1997 he joined the faculty at the State University Innsbruck, lecturing on philosophy and on comparative and Slavic studies. In 2009 he received the first prize for his essay on philosophy from the Institute for Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Karen Swassjan resides in Basle, Switzerland as an independent author and a lecturer with the “Forum für Geisteswissenschaft.” Karen Swassjan’s essay, “Theologia Heterodoxa,” which appears in this anthology, has been compiled from several chapters in his book, Ocherk filosofii v samoizlozhenii (An Essay in Self-Presentation), (Moscow: Institut obshchegumanitarnykh issledovanii, 2015).

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Theologia Heterodoxa Karen Swassjan

I

One does not need to be a theologian to realize that the world is God’s creation. But one does need to be a theologian not to realize how much God owes his existence to theologians. We speak here about ontology itself, and not about so-called ontological proofs. God is not proved but is spoken about for the very reason that He is not to be spoken about. He is probably the most unverifiable among all existing concepts: a sign with a missing and, therefore, permanently re-invented denotation. Meanwhile, it is a blatant symptom of absolute religious insanity, when pious intellectuals in a drunken stupor venture “to drink up the Sea” not only explaining to the Creator who and what He is, but also making Him obey the rules of their own protocol. Old, hackneyed questions regarding the range of God’s omnipotence and omniscience are accompanied by amusing comments of utter nonsense, such as a. He is capable of accomplishing anything, even the impossible. b. He is incapable of being evil, conceited, stupid, mean, faulty, deceitful, etc. These trains of thought expose the hyperbolical egotism of those intellectuals, who try to incarcerate the concept of World into their own procrustean catechesis. Curiously enough, they would at times betray themselves speaking too directly and unequivocally, as for example did Johannes Baptist Katschthaler, the Archbishop of Salzburg in his pastoral epistle of February 2, 1905:1 “Who on earth, for heaven’s sake, is as powerful as a Catholic priest? Angels? Holy Mother of God? Not only is a Catholic priest empowered to reveal Christ on the altar, lock him up in the depository only to let him out again for parishioners to eat His flesh and drink His blood, but he can even make a bloodless sacrifice offering the humanized Son of God to the dead and the living. Hereby, Christ the single-born Son of God the Father, the creator of Heaven and Earth, the pillar of the Universe has to obey the will of a Catholic priest.” The monopoly of a Catholic priest could in all likelihood be challenged by an Orthodox priest, should he be able to betray himself speaking too directly. Protestantism was probably the fairest of them all. It started from

1 Translation of citation in Hinweise zum Text, Apokalypse und Priesterwirken by Rudolf Steiner (ga 346: 335f.).

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L­ utheran abolition of Catholic dealers, who had been in charge of regulating the relations between Heaven and Earth, and ­eventually led to self-abolition in the twentieth century. The last farewell protest of Protestantism was a protest against religion itself, which in 1921 Friedrich G ­ ogarten, a Lutheran theologian and freethinking priest, described as follows:2 “Of all human vanities, the one that is usually called religion is most hideous. It is puffed up with conceit, because religion tries to derive infinite from finite, using the implements of finite and is willing to bridge the gap between Creator and creature with the forces of the latter.”3 Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, with unshakable consistency went as far as to finalize this diagnosis to the exclusion of any second opinion, writing nine thousand pages of his Church Dogmatics to prove the thesis that “it is only God who can speak about God.”4 The worst thing was not the fact of speaking itself, but the unwillingness or inability to think through the spoken properly. Theologians had a prudent instinct to keep as far away from thought as possible. This was how they brought upon themselves the “inglorious bastards” in the Age of Enlightenment: the smerdiakovs5—those, who would stop being shy to expose the bygone infallibility of others and would even venture to demonstrate their own righteousness. In his La bible enfin expliquée (1777) Voltaire would mock exegetes’ arrogant obscurantism, completely overlooking the fact that he belonged to the same league:6 “There is nothing supernatural or incredible about woman’s conversation with a snake; this is not a miracle, nor is it an allegory. We might soon come across a speaking donkey, and we should not be surprised that snakes that are more intelligent than donkeys are able to engage in much more sophisticated conversations.” This was a belated reflex of 2 Friedrich Gogarten, Die religiöse Entscheidung (Jena 1921), 19. 3 It would be interesting to counterpose this view of a marginal protestant to the standpoint of a marginal Catholic, Charles Baudelaire: “Even if there were no God, religion would continue to remain sacred and divine.” Œuvres complètes 1 (Pléiade 1961), 649. 4 This is the wording Karl Barth uses to prove his point: “One cannot speak about God because He is neither natural, nor spiritual entity. If we speak about Him, then we don’t speak about Him at all. It is not in our power to do what we want to do here, or to achieve what we want to achieve. Such is the iron law pressing over each and every church annunciation. To say that this is taking place in helpless infirmity is to put things too mildly. It is not infirmity, but death. It is not difficult, but impossible. It is not something imperfect that is taking place here, but concurrent with the measure of volition, nothing is taking place at all” Kirchliche Dogmatik, ii, 2, (Zürich 1947), 839. 5 Smerdiakov was the name of a bastard brother in Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyesky (Trans.). 6 La bible enfin expliquée in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 5 (Paris 1825), 19.

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Parisian salons, when the biblical snake, surrounded by much more e­ xperienced women, began to take revenge against learned donkeys, who were dishonoring it. Bizarre as it sounds, it was the Devil who became the weakest link of the God of theism, his Achillean heel per se. One could hardly think about ­something more preposterous. God is unable to function neither without the Devil, nor with him. This is because without the Devil He would have to take responsibility for evil, whereas with the Devil, He is all-around good, but powerless. The Devil invented as God’s alibi became incontrovertible evidence against him. Having blamed all the monstrous costs and failures of Creation upon God, it would not even occur to them that they were making the Creator shoot himself into the foot! This very much resembles sancta simplicitas of a certain neurobiologist, who once made a stunning confession that there would be no problems with a comprehensive research of the brain, were it not for the presence of the mind. Theologians alluding to the holy scriptures say that God is everything. He is EVERYTHING in EVERYTHING. They categorically refuse to think a step further and make a face-saving attempt to define in more concrete terms what one might happen to discover in the portmanteau notion of everything both directly and figuratively. To illustrate it in more imaginative terms, the following question could be posed: would theologians be able to test the resistance of religious faith and church dogmatism against the background of soccer? Should we follow such a train of thought another knockout question could be asked: Who is behind scoring, or, rather failing to score the goals? It would take a very creative theologian endowed with a sharp sense of humor to picture the Creator as the avatar of a footballer, and not just a good one, but also, more importantly, a bad one… To avoid tasteless deliberation, one can short-circuit it as follows: God is EVERYTHING in EVERYTHING, except for football. One can make it even worse, more disgusting and mean: God is everything in everything, except for torture, violence, killing, debility and the rest of all known pathologies… Yet, in that case, such a formula would have to be seriously censored by a corresponding amendment: God is everything good alone in everything good alone, time and again twinkling and glimpsing in the ocean of evil. He does not have a clue as to what calamitous dead ends He had been trapped into by his “fathers” (“fathers” of the Father!), when they had confined Him to be “everything in everything” locking Him up in the Luciferic quarantine of kindness, purity and piety! To crown it all, kindness, purity and piety turned out to be dependent variables in common conjunctive factors of different epochs and peoples. The Achillean heel of the God of theologians is that He is overburdened with his own Creation. Why would they bother to create wolves in addition to

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lambs, if they do not have enough courage to take responsibility for the wolves? Was their only goal to inspire lambs to hold on to their love and simultaneously encourage wolves to retain their appetite? A Catholic priest and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthazar would say: “Carry my love like lambs do among wolves.” They had to wait until it would finally occur to the theological Devil to resort to a linguistic turn and stop being called Devil. Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). The Devil would prosper enough, after he was persuaded that he is not a Devil at all, but a humanist, a philanthropist, a Soros who arranges for the hangover of poor simpletons helping them to get rid of the euphoria of divine sentiments. In the bedlam of senseless discourses and constructivisms, it is he who determines what’s good and what’s evil. It is good to nail one’s own scrotum to a cobblestone on Red Square in Moscow.7 It is evil not to admire it. It is good when a matrimonial bed is shared by two males. It is evil to consider it unnatural. The key to the harrowing success of the Devil is that he is able to create an impression that there’s only one Devil. Yet, there are two of them. The first one (heavenly!) takes advantage of the assumption, which certain simpletons have made about God, who is unable to take responsibility for everything, and who tries to hide His monstrous failures behind His inscrutability. He simply reshapes himself to fit into the frame of this assumption, delegating His own diabolical functions and options to his earthly accomplice. After this, Creation looks to be an exact replica of a Hollywood scenario with God playing the role of a courageous sheriff and the Devil featured as an ordinary son of a bitch… Once again, what is everything? The answer is: the world, the world creation; in fact, it is a polygon where the Creator is testing His abilities. He is testing His ability to be body and, as body—to be soul. In plainer words: He is testing the ability to exist nonorganically as a stone, organically as a plant, to be sentient as an animal, and, last but not least, the ability to be conscious and aware of everything mentioned above as a human. This is because only by becoming what He has already been since the beginning of time, He will recognize the limits of his omnipotence and omniscience. To reach that goal (world’s selfrealization) He is splitting His primal unity of physical and spiritual, body as spirit and spirit as body, into separate realms, physical and spiritual. In this very moment of separation, He would end up with two Devils, as there are really two of them: the one that is spirit only (the God of metaphysicians) and the one that is flesh only (the Matter of physicists). He reveals both these projections of evil in the picture of Creation and as inalienable part of it, because without them (the two Devils in Him) He would be confined to eternal rest, 7 Here we speak about Piotr Pavlenskii, an artist representing Actionism.

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locking himself up in a self-made hospice. Yet, the Creator cognizes himself not by proofreading his own final drafts or watching an exhibition of His achievements, but in the infinite number of wastes and refuse. Who, if not God himself (the real one), is imprinted in the wastes and refuse he discarded in the painful process of creating himself within his own lowly nature, with creaturely freedom not only to become a genius or a saint, but also a beast! The moment when creatureliness in a coughing frenzy starts to identify itself with “everything” is the moment of the Creator’s inconsolable despair. He appears to be stuck in the obstructions of His own will seeking for a reliable way to commit suicide in Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. When Creation reached its full age, it threatened to become a horror and a torture chamber for the Creator, had He not mobilized and offered, along with offering both Devils, the very best in Him, His beloved Son, FOR CHRIST IS WHAT IS BEST IN THE FATHER. II Death is older than life, and wherever life is born, it is born from death and by the mercy of death. This is what Rudolf Steiner said in his lecture in Kassel on July 6, 1909:8 “Death is the Father.” From the Father (death) we are born (ex Deo nascimus). It is not a onetime action on the day and the moment of birth, but a process that is taking place every day and every moment with each and every new breath. Creation is the permanent death of the Creator, and if we are given the grace to live, it is only because He is dying every moment. (Rainer Maria Rilke once spoke about a strange power turning us, the living, into the surviving.9)… Our life is His death. Hence, our death is His life. In this is the deeper meaning of the words that we die into Eternal Life (in Christo morimur). The theology of Creation is the theology of Salvation. However, there are absolutely no grounds to presume that this refers to our salvation, as Christian narcissists would indulge themselves for centuries. We can have a thoughtful and serious discussion about “us” only after we have learned who “we” really are. We would have to learn that there is no “us” in the direct, figurative and any other sense. Only having learned and realized that, we eventually get a chance and mercy “to be.” There are different ways to learn and realize it. One can do it, for example, by means of the following analogy: What makes the difference between heroes of a literary masterpiece and those 8 From Lecture xiii of the Cycle, “Das Johannes-Evangelium im Verhältnis zu den drei anderen Evangelien besonders zu dem Lukas-Evangelium” (ga 112), 243. 9 “seltsame Kraft, die uns aus Lebenden zu Überlebenden macht.”

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of a cheap yellow-back? Obviously, it is a real master, who creates the former, while nameless imposters would author the latter. A Master is one who creates his heroes in such a way that they would not have a shadow of a doubt that it is they who live, while they live only inasmuch and as long as the master is creating them. Literary masterpieces are samples of absolute illusionism. Should anyone try to alert any of six hundred or eight hundred characters of War and Peace that they have been invented and created by Tolstoy, it would sound like gibberish to them. But allowing their (our) fantasy to get the better of us, we could once come up with the following thought: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”10 It might be the very moment of realization that they (we) are in sleep and dreaming, which would become the moment of AWAKENING to reality! Such reality would include each and every one of “them” in the full list of dramatis personae, from Napoleon to servant Lavrushka, and each and every one of “us,” the very BODY of GOD, experimenting upon ourselves in the context of CREATION to find out about the limits of its omnipotence and omniscience, and in the final stage of anthropogenesis, aspiring to become SOUL. In this sense only are “we” the crown of creation with physical and chemical reactions within the ephemeral reactor of the body, which discover not only the ability to live, but also to feel, suffer, think, and not only to think, but to err, get confused or misled. We would reckon that this is still “we,” whereas, now and forever, this is still our God and Creator, who is creating us in every second of His existence to find out who He is and what He can do as well as what kind of a God and Creator He would make, and whether He was not able to deceive or be deceived?! To deceive and be deceived, God needs to become Satan, His own enemy, who inspires “us” to think that “we” are the hub of the universe and “on our own.” The result of such inspiration turns out to be the gift of human Ego, piercing through the body like a sting and making it prone to disease and death. Disease and death are nothing but defensive reactions of the body to the Luciferic bedlam bubbling in it before it has reached the age of puberty. It is this very bedlam and lawlessness that are being discarded as wastes to get reformatted in the upcoming chain of deaths and rebirths. Hence, if immortality and eternity are really in store for “us,” this is not because “we” are so significant and dreadfully important, but because the Creator would again and again test himself, recapitulating His BODY in rough drafts and sketches reconciled and unified within the notion of destiny. The Savior, perceived like that, is not “our” Savior, because the rough drafts and sketches, which is what “we” are, are not subject to salvation, but to a non-stop detoxification and utilization (recycling) in a painful process of distillment to create the final draft. It could only be a 10 Shakespeare, The Tempest iv, 1.

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pumped up, vertiginous egotism camouflaged as faith and righteousness that would count on salvation and immortalization of industrial wastes. The Savior (Son) is the Savior of the Father and Creator, who, dying within us every moment and being born through us again risks losing His raison d’être in us—in our rapidly progressing dementia and insanity. Once again to be adequate, theology should and could be reformatted into the theology of Creation, which is taking place in the present and is created as present-in-the-making. The Creator is ceaselessly creating His own body— from tiny specks of dust and grass to nervous system and brain, seeking to awaken it eventually to accept mind and soul. The Bible describes this moment of reaching full age as the fall of man or lapse from virtue. The fall of man, which Schiller described as “the happiest and greatest event in the history of mankind,”11 is a high school graduation certificate with a following repetition of the natural history of Creation through the second cycle of consciousness and soul. Satan’s interference, both Devils working in tandem, was needed for body to reveal itself as soul. Satan is the outcome of the Creator’s decision to potentiate bio- and anthropogenesis into psycho- and pneumatogenesis. In other words, Satan is nothing other than our Ego (satanic in all senses) gifted from above, which imagined itself to be the master of body (Father), using it to get rid of his own deficiencies and inferiorities and ordaining it either in a monastic cell, or—post hoc ergo propter hoc—in a brothel, and the other way around. Ego, God as Satan, is therefore, a part of a force, striving for good, but doing evil. This is grasped properly by a religious instinct—no matter which, Christian or Buddhist—on a restless quest to get rid of satanic I (ego) and drive it into oblivion. Yet, the evil I can be coped with, not by destroying but by transforming it. The mystery of transforming Satan (I) into “not I, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:20) bears the name of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the SOUL itself.

III

The history of Christianity is adequately understood when it is pictured as the Garden of Gethsemane and perceived as an ongoing two-millennia-long dream. It is a history of somnolent and missed raison d’être: a dream about awakening, in which its sleeping is permanently awakened, completely unaware that it happens within a dream. But this is nothing but a true history of somnolent thought, a monstrous dissonance between the feeling that managed to climb 11

From a public lecture in Jena in 1790: “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde” Historische Schriften in Sämtliche Werke, 4 (München 1958), 769.

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to Golgotha, and the thought marinated in Platonism. Christians have always been good at feeling their God, but absolutely failed to attain Him in thought. No wonder, Christianity was a success in feeling: in heroic deeds, prayers, tears and humility. The fifth column inside it was formed by Greek-Judaist-Arab thought: interweaving letters in the lace of Philosopher’s writings, turned around from right to left. St Augustine, an incurable Platonist, petrified in a Christian euphoria of feeling, with his head steel pressed against over-heavenly topoi, managed to succeed in converting the Christian God into Platonism, whereupon trading places between the towering worldviews, theism and atheism, became unavoidable and inevitable. When in his Dornach lectures of 1920 on the philosophy of Thomas12 Rudolf Steiner remembered his testament: “How to make thinking Christian,” it was perceived as a double shock. The first shock was that he “remembered” and alluded to it; the second referred to the very content of his last wish. Was it not scandalous, when the greatest Christian philosopher called for converting thought into Christianity. Doing that at the end of Christianity’s thirteenth century allows us to conclude that thought before that time had been anything but Christian! After all, do they not speak about Christian music or pictorial arts, but never about Christian physics or mathematics? It was faith that was Christian, whereas knowledge, diabolical by definition, could not be anything but pre-Christian and, in later times, anti-Christian. Nietzsche’s stunning formula: Christianity is Platonism for people captured the very essence of what had happened—there was no longer a need to master the science of ideas in thought: it was sufficient to drag it to the field of feeling and irrigate it shedding tears in abundance. Nobody demonstrated the reductio ad absurdum of religious feeling with a greater, more horrifying force than Dostoyevsky in the chapter entitled “Rebellion” of his The Brothers Karamazov. This astral tempest around the teardrop of a child with the following rejection of the world and return of “the ticket to heaven” is an apotheosis of senselessness. Being stuck head over heels in feelings and perceiving the world through feelings, one must truly be a Saint, a flagellant or an idiot to continue glorifying God instead of inciting the dogs of atheism to hunt Him down. We have reached the end of the road of what a pure and honest Christian can attain through the power of feeling, facing a choice of either becoming petrified in bliss and saintliness or opting to return the ticket to God. It is no accident that a Frenchman and Catholic young contemporary of Dostoyevsky, Léon Bloy was distraught with such feeling and said that “Christianity, if anything is left of it at all, is nothing but an escalation of stupidity and meanness. In our day, Jesus Christ is not even being sold, but is traded off for 12

ga 74, p. 71.

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nothing.”13 Bloy made a desperate attempt to comprehend God in thought. His remark regarding Joseph de Maistre’s view that Napoleon, along with all the misfortunes he had brought about, was God’s punishment for the French Revolution, testifies to that: “He failed to see and recognize that God does not take revenge against us. He has simply forsaken us.”14 This is a formula of eidetically reduced despair, with Catholic adequacy bumping up against an impenetrable vault. Dostoyevsky hits his head against the same vault, but the force of impact is always partially absorbed by his Elders.15 The character of Elders in Dostoyevsky’s writings and, since his time, in all Russian religious philosophy, is an existential, personified analogue of the ontological argument, argumentum ad hominem sanctum, which is the last and, in practical terms, the only argument in favor of the Creator. Dostoyevsky’s criminals and villains are so attractive because they are his own replicas: apparitions of Elders are lurking behind each and every of them, and everyone is going through godly sufferings. In fact, they are the Russian, cut-throat version replicating Bloy’s characters. He simply moved them from the aura of Parisian brothels to local Russian pubs screaming out through them the monstrosity of his own despair, never stopping to cast glances at Orthodox monasteries and sketes. Both of them are terrified with the omnipotence of evil, which one of them refuses to comprehend, while the other does not comprehend at all. Misplaced optics of perception is another thing they have in common. Such striking coincidences are not accidental at all. God’s resignation, his self-dismissal through Bloy and his simultaneous departure in Dostoyevsky’s “Legend…”, what is it, if not pure devilry, when one Devil (Lucifer, pretending to be Christ) passes the authority to the other one (Ahriman, pretending to be Lucifer) to make Lacrimae Christi tarter and spicier! Dostoyevsky sensed and reproduced it miraculously at the end of the “Legend”: the old man, having spoken out in earnest and with heavenly wisdom, shows the silent prisoner the door, and the latter— the Logos who did not utter a word!—kisses the old man on the lips and RETIRES. Dieu se retire in Bloy’s wording …. as if it is possible to neutralize the burden of knockout arguments with a soap opera kiss and—still go away! Where would such a God, full of lofty feelings, but feeble in thought be going to? A hospice, a monastery or a sanatorium? Would He indulge himself with a retirement package and peace? Or, maybe, He would go to church to light a candle and pray to Himself? In this self-destructing absurdity the finish line and the limits of Christianity are exposed, because an honest, sentient 13 14 15

Léon Bloy, Le Désespéré (Paris 1913), p. 233. Léon Bloy, Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne (Paris, 1921), p. 148. From “Elders,” Chapter v of Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The elder Zosima is Aliosha Karamazov’s mentor. (Trans.)

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Christian, cannot behold another God than the one who got lost in His own Creation and who can only reveal himself in the image of a silent Divinity, retiring or completely gone. Bloy elaborates: “God is no more, at least He is no more in Europe. Maybe somewhere, in the deserts of Asia or among worshippers in Polynesian islands He still exists. Tatars, cannibals […] still worship Some-one, don’t they?”16 The problem is in senselessness, in the failure to think through the fact that even leaving, He cannot disappear for an utterly simple reason of having nowhere to go and vanish into. And where in the universe could Everything in Everything lose itself! Could He hide in Hartmann’s unconscious, secretly cherishing a hope that the philosopher who understands Him would help Him to find an honorable way to commit suicide. Yet, that would also prove to be an illusion. After Hartmann’s noble unconscious had been reformatted into Freud’s unconscious, the Creator of Heaven and Earth was left with no choice but to re-subordinate himself: He would no longer be patronized by priests, but by psychiatrists. Presumably, this would be a lesser evil. Translated by Ruben Shugarian Works Cited Barth, Karl. Kirchliche Dogmatik, 2, no. 2. Zürich 1947. Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. 1, Pléiade, 1961. Bloy, Léon. Le Désespéré. Paris 1913. Bloy, Léon. Le Fils de Louis xvi. Paris 1926. Bloy, Léon. Méditations d’un Solitaire en 1916. Paris 1917. Bloy, Léon. Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne. Paris 1921. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. “Chapter VI”. In: The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, v. 14, Leningrad, 1976. Gogarten, Friedrich. Die religiöse Entscheidung. Jena, 1921. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sämtliche Werke, 2. Insel-Verlag, 1956. Schiller, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke, 4. München 1958. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest IV, 1. In: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Selfridge & Co., Ltd., London. Steiner, Rudolf. Apokalypse und Priesterwirken. ga 346. Steiner, Rudolf. Das Johannes-Evangelium im Verhältnis zu den drei anderen Evangelien besonders zu dem Lukas Evangelium. ga 112. Steiner, Rudolf. The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. ga 74. Voltaire. La bible enfin expliquée. In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, 5, Paris 1825. 16

Léon Bloy, Méditations d’un Solitaire en 1916 (Paris 1917), p. 131.

Index abiotic tendencies and aspirations (for immortality) 246 abyss (Ungrund) 180 acmeology 252 as highest level of estology 255 Actionism 395n Adorno, Theodor 6n4 aesthetic ontology human rights in technified society 255 Agamben, Giorgio 144, 146 Age of Globalization 30 aggression, overt 339 Akhiezer, Aleksandr 228, 229n1 See Kliamkin, Igor’ Akhutin, Anatolii 1–3, 23n Aksakov, Ivan 291 Albrow, Martin 117 Aleksandr i 170, 338, 339, 339f Aleksandr ii, Great Reforms of 338, 339f Aleksandr iii 339, 339f Alekseev, Nikolai 229 Alexander of Aphrodisias 78 alienation, radical 141 already-comprehension 126 alter-globalism 32, 34 alternatives, creation of 74, 78 American national identity desire for change and movement 359 dream, compared with Russian 358 dual nature of emigrant 358 eternal youth, freedom from tradition 358 foundation in European Enlightenment 360 socialization for adaptability 359 American Revolution, resonance in world prior to/distinct from social revolutions 360 Ammerman, Robert 77 analytic philosophy 77 analytical anthropology 321, 322 anarchy 121 anarchy and order 101 Anaxagoras, concepts of all in all, glossolalia, primeval terror 13

Ankersmit, Frank modernity as product 136 anthropogenesis 11, 66 anthroposophy 391 anthropo-techniques against fear of Other 270 atmosphere of love and trust 276 Christian forgiveness/redemption 274 dialogue and ethics of the heart 274 institutions for peace 273 migrants from traditional communities 271 myths of solidarity 275 See Markov, Boris See violence anti-globalism 32, 34 antiquity, Greek and Roman civilizations 294 Apel, Karl-Otto fragmentation (of social identity) 117 particularization (of cultures) 117 archeo-avant-garde consciousness 248 Arendt, Hannah 25, 26 Aristotle 22 Analytics 78 Armstrong, David 55n2, 57 Aronowitz, Stanley 105n9 arrière garde 75 Art Nouveau, age of 146 ascetic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy selflessness, suppressed bodily needs 172–173 wonderworkers and Optina Oustyn elders 173 Asmus, Valentin 288 Asoian, Iulii 291n1 atheism 399 atomism, logical 77, 78n4 school of 258 Augustine (Saint) 18n, 399 awesome coercion 348, 348n, 352 See dynamics, cyclical: sequence of ring-shaped dynamics; See dynamics, cyclical: Yeltsin-Putin period

404 Bacon, Francis 10, 18n Badiou, Alain 6n5, 192, 258n9 generic truth (due-timely thought) 144 Bahr, Hans-Dieter 278 Bakhtin, Mikhail comparisons with Buber, Martin 182 Sartre, Jean-Paul 185–186 Schopenhauer, Arthur 184–185 dialogue, the Other, polyphony, world of hails 182–183 philosophy of the act 136 role of intuitive empathy 184 special branch of the humanities 181 universal dialogism 259 Bakunin, Mikhail 121 Balthazar, Hans Urs von 395 Barry, B. See Apel, Karl-Otto Barth, Karl 179, 393, 393n4 Bataille, Georges 141 concepts of (accursed share, solar myth) 162 Baudelaire, Charles 393n3 Baudrillard, Jean 136–137, 276 mental maps of identity 137 preservation of unique voices 254 superfluity of degraded humans 255 Bauman, Zygmunt 107 See Apel, Karl-Otto Beck, Ulrich lack of politics in globalization 118 transformation into quasi-natural reality 117 Beckett, Samuel, final words of 13 being 4n2 coevolution, as attribute of 257 non-being 25 Belinskii, Vissarion xiv, 221 Russia, as country of future 297 Bellah, Robert 359 American common culture 360 Bely, Andrei 217–218, 370, 372, 383 Berdiaev, Nikolai A. x, xv, 179–181, 369 antinomy in messianism 281 Enlightenment and French Revolution 360 human essence and nature 47 opposition to idolization of future

Index new as value unto itself 249 new for the sake of something 249 spiritual quest, as opposed to empirical state 301 stature broken tradition (unknown at home) 180 path of late Slavophile national narcissism 305n primacy of freedom 181 renewal of philosophical anthropology 178 Russian Hegel’s nomination for Nobel Prize 179 Russian spirituality’s tie with other Christians 179 See Marcel, Gabriel See Tillich, Paul Berger, Peter variety of globalizations 117 Bergson, Henri 139, 391 Berkeley, George 90 Bibikhin, Vladimir 138n2, 138n3, 139n, 194 Bibler, Vladimir S. Dialogue of Cultures 1 Bin Laden, Osama 114 Biocosmists-Immortalists, manifest of 155 bio-Dionysian 11 biopower 160 Birtsell, L. 238n11–13 Blavatskii, Hélène 18n Blok, Aleksandr 305 Bloy, Léon 399, 400–401 Blumenberg, Hans “Bobok” 211, 214–225 continuation of The House of the Dead 224 decay within narrow spiritual horizons 241 great sinner, theme of 225 parody of Nikolai Chernyshevskii 222 symbol of life in Russia 225 See also Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Bobrov, Evgenii xiv Boehm, Jacob 180, 254n7 Bogdanov, Aleksandr A. 7n1, 165 Boggs, Carl corporativity of authorities 118 Bolshevik 223

Index Bolshevik Revolution 360 Bolshevism 165 involvement of avant-garde 153 Bonetskaia, Natalia 181 Borges, Jorge Luis 89 “The Garden of Forking Paths” 131 Boroday, Iurii M. 318 Braudel, Fernand 292 Broekman, Jan M. 138n3 Brezhnev, Leonid, neo-Stalinism of 339, 339f economic crises and collapse 336 loss of Afghan War 336 See Perestroika Bruno, Giordano 18n Buber, Martin 178 Buckle, Thomas 290 Budnitskii, Oleg v. 104, 104n4, 105n7, 111 Bukharin, Nikolai 7n Bulgakov, Sergei 281, 305n Buryshkin, Pavel A. 239n17 Bush, George 109, 119 Bychkov, Vasilii v. 168 Cartesianism 126 Cassirer, Ernst 391 Castells, Manuel 109 castling, mini Crisis of (protests) 352 causality informational (psychic) 58, 68, 69 Celan, Paul 138 centrism Eurocentrism and global 21, 27 Chaadaev, Piotr 173, 280, 281 “First Philosophical Letter” 218, 222 Chanda, Nayan 105n9 Chechen wars First, failure in 242 Second, consolidating image of Putin 242 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai 222 See “Bobok” Chizhevskii, Aleksandr 37 162n9, 163 correlation of solar activity reactionary populist movements 163 revolutionary movements 162 Chomsky, Noam 110 Christ 211 See God

405 Chumakov, Alexander xii, 29–31, 34n5 civilization insurmountable fault lines 293 third generation and typology of 293 use of term and culture 291, 293 Western universal 294 destiny as opposed to localism 294 opposition to nature and culture 296 science and law, contributions of 294 clean the field, expectation to 351 Clinton, Bill 116 clip 127 assemblage required 131 clip consciousness 127 a priori resources of thinking 133–134 beyond time 133 compression into one-moment diversity 134 fabrication and linguistic minimalism of 132 closedness of self 128 Club of Rome 33, 39 research projects of as basis for Global Studies 39 code entity of code as information bearer 63 extraneous 60, 64, 65 link, between phenomena 62, 64 natural (comprehensible) transparent 60, 63, 64 transparent to self-organizing system 65 neurodynamic, cerebral 58, 65 bearers of info 61 new goal for creation of 67 subjective reality 61 coevolution, polyontic as model of communicative ontology 257 joint collective interaction of separate worlds 257–258 multiversalist 258 cognition and transformational functions, asymmetry of 66 Colilli, Paul 138n5 Comte, Auguste 235 concepts, primary 82 conceptualism 75 conceptual thinking 127

406 connection, necessary mental to physiological processes consciousness and brain processes 54, 60 See mind-body problem consciousness I and not I 128–129 live versus alienated 132 consolidated state (since 2000) 339 constructive axiology 333 contemporaneity 24 cordocentrism 369 Corrigan, John Michael 77n Cortázar, Julio hopscotch 131 Cosmism, Russian 125, 155 as eidos, event of thought, as project 144 attitude toward death re-construction of the past 157 constructivist and materialistic nature 165 reaction to technological progress 156 teaching technology to love humans 158 cosmogenesis 11 cosmos 2 co-society, of East and West 23 Creation as death of Creator (theology of Salvation) 396 as dream (Garden of Gethsemane) 398 as Mystery of Golgotha 398 Satan as ego 398 Crimea, annexation of as enhancement of legitimacy 352 Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy 16n14 of the Modern World 18 See European history culturology, Russian 75 Custine, Marquis de 238–239 Cuza, Nicholas of 258 cybernetics, Russian 101 cycles in development of religions 361 crises (structural and systemic challenges) 357, 361–362, 362f Enlightenment, influence of denial of established religions (Voltaire) 362

Index denial of God (Julien de La Mettrie) 362 questioning authority of Bible 362 stages early, orthodox, classical, reformist 357, 361–362, 362f critical, post-critical 357, 361–362, 362f Danilevskii, Nikolai 125, 304–305, 365 Dante 211, 213, 214 Divine Comedy 213, 219 Dasein 136 DeBlasio, Alyssa xiii decoding 59, 60 deconstruction 82 deforcement 352 dependence on ruler’s strategy 348–349 effects 349 See dynamics, cyclical: sequence of ring-shaped dynamics; Yeltsin-Putin period deism 363 Deleuze, Gilles 193, 206, 258n9 absence of certainties 250 pure events 136 speed of appearance/disappearance 250 demilitarization, theme of in Russia 229 collapse in peacetime, first imperial 240 collapse of Russian state 231 cultural disintegration 240 exhaustion of old solutions, historical and cultural 229 loss of sacred status 233 post-Stalin decay (not sustaining force and fear) 235 See Peter the Great: post-Petrine demilitarization, underdevelopment of common interest in Russia democracy, controlled (sovereign) 339 denial of the past as definitive victory turned to defeat 118 deontologization 193 adjoining discourses and shift to immanent perspective 193 See hesychast practice depolitization in Russia and West 115–116 See terrorism: political science approach

407

Index Derber, Charles 105n9 Derrida, Jacques 82, 252, 276, 282 specification 137 Descartes, René 10, 11 Cogito 325 dichotomies of friend and foe, good and evil, useful and useless 114 See terrorism Dilthey, Wilhelm 4 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor xiv, 211, 274, 371 Brothers Karamazov 399 Crime and Punishment 213, 220–221 death penalty 221 Notes from House of the Dead 216–217, 220, 222 life in death 217 Freudian psychoanalysis of author/works enjailment (rejection of spirituality as essential) 144 suffering as fundamental ambiguity 140, 400 supreme idea for nation’s existence 296 Writer’s Diary 213, 214 See “Bobok” See “the Underground Man” dread of war of all against all 267 dualism 51 duality of human existence 125 non-dualist 55 Dubrovskii, David xv, 50, 58n7, 59n, 65n, 69n Duma (first Russian parliament) 232 victory of Zhirinovskii’s party (December 1993) 351 dynamic conservatism 248–250, 251–252 being without supreme goal 257 replacement by accelerating formation 250 dynamics, Russian cyclical 335 mobilization and revolutions of service class 337 context of sacral symbols of extraordinary mission 353 deepening approaching crisis conditions, factors and consequences of unraveling 354–355 failures of liberalization

dependence on prestige 343–44 refusal to liberalize at peaks 343 freedom and participation as short cycle variables 338n4 aggregated components 338 authoritarian roll-backs 339 peaks of liberalization 338 hypertrophy of centralized resources rent-seeking 344–345 violent suppression 345 overcoming syndrome’s painful knots 353 six phases of 340–41 model of phase transfers 350f sequence of ring-shaped dynamics 341f, 348–350 visualization of socio-political dynamics 340f variable of state success in long cycles aggregated components 337 (Groznyi cycle; Petrine cycle; Stalin cycle) 337–338 waves of political modernization dynamics of freedom and levels of state success 339f Yeltsin-Putin period, application in 350–353 See awesome coercion; stagnation/ decay phase leading to crisis ego cogitans 10 Einstein, Albert 98 criticism of Russell 98 spherical book 131 Eli, Mark 140n7 Eliot, T.S. 13 See European history: final reckoning; voices of silence 13 enemy categories and creation of “phantom foe” 268–269 Engels, Friedrich worldwide proletarian unity 37 Enlightenment, Russian 170 atheistic state from multi-denominations 364 collapse of Tsarist Empire 364 invariance of goal (based on human nature)

408 Enlightenment, Russian (cont.) organization of human life 171 organic unification of reasonable prevention of moral degradation 167 Orthodox reaction to religious crisis 364 Enlightenment Project 358 ecumenism and interreligious dialogue 364–365 reinterpretation of theological doctrines 364 rejection of Enlightenment 365 See fundamentalism Epstein, Mikhail 74–76 centrifugal dictionary 75 function of philosopher in 21st century xvii internet projects of and bibliography 76 philosophy of the possible 86n, 98n17 See Hegel, Georg: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences See also postmodernism, paradoxes of, transformative humanities Ern, Vladimir 305n20 Ervin, Laszlo 47n23 esthetic 136 estology (aesthetic ontology) 255 Eurasianism 19, 281 denunciation of Pan-Slavism 281 topological characteristics of existence co-localization and developmental space 144 Europe, for Russia denial of modern status to Russia 299 Orthodoxy and delayed secularization 298–299 Russian modern project for Christianity 300 source for Enlightenment, industrial/ military expertise 299 European culture entelecheia of 15, 16n3 epochal borders of 2 Eurocentrism 21, 22 See Akhutin, Anatolii; Husserl, Edmund European history failure to reconcile parts

Index German free self-realization of human spirit 302 Roman authority (secular and Church) 302 voices of silence and final reckoning of 13 Europeanization, steps to 16 Europeanization of Russian nobility 231–232 Decembrists’ uprising of 1825 “superfluous man” 231 insufficient resources for country 231 Russian nationalism as final stage of 305 European philosophy history of as dialogue of metaphysical systems 19 event as intersection of common and peculiar 136 orientation for interpretation of artistic work and creativity 138 philosophical interpretations of 136 singularity 136 See also uncertainty Evlampiev, Igor 214, 371 existent 4n2 existential defeat 146 existential philosophy 2 extra-temporality 144 extremism 267 factors consolidating Russia state force and spiritual authority of “truth” 239 sought synthesis of sultanism and Orthodox Christianity subordinate role of faith and law 239 See Ivan the Terrible fanaticism 111 Fanon, Frantz 19 fear, history of dread of war of all against all 269 fighting for an idea 269 revenge and retaliation as motivations 269 February Revolution 338 Fedorov, Nikolai 155, 158 art technology 159

409

Index Fedotov, Georges 305n Fedotova, N.N. 101 Fedotova, Valentina 35, 101, 102, 103 feminism 253 Feyerabend, Paul 55, 55n3 Ficino, Marsilio 18n Figner, Vera 103 Filonov, Pavel 146 first principles and causes 15, 17 First Source 12 question of inviolability 17 Florenskii, Pavel A. 189 Florovskii, Georges (Georgii) 301 philosophical fall of Slavophilism perpetuation of Russian isolation 306 Western origins completed ascent 302 internal impotence of 302 Fodor, Jerry 57 Fold (Zwiefalt), ontological paradigm of 194 lessening of tie to being lost ways to authentic self-realization 194 reontologization (ontological reloading) 194 formalism, Russian 138 Foucault, Michel 9n8, 12, 14, 160 project of nonclassical anthropology 196 practices of the Self in late Stoicism 196–197 super-encryption of Nietzschean message 388 free will 69 Frank, Semion 209, 305nn19–20 “De Profundis” reference to “Bobok” 223 See “Bobok” Frege, Gottlob 309 Freud, Sigmund 140, 144, 206 ambiguity of Russian consciousness 140 unconscious, absolutized concept of 205 view on Dostoyevsky 140, 144 See Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Freyer, Hans 6n5 Fukuyama, Yoshihiro Francis 253 post-human future 253n functionalism 57, 61 as alternative to radical physicalism 62 zombie 52

fundamentalism of late Slavophiles and others 365 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 138 Galaktionov, Anatolii xv gap, explanatory 52, 54, 72 Gautama, Siddhārtha Shakyamuni and Nietzsche 381 Gautney, Heather 105n9 Gavriil (Archimandrite), Vasilii Voskresenskii xiii Gay, William C. 34n5 Genis, A. 75 geomantics 326 Georgia, war in 2008, 352 German Pietism 10n9 Gershenzon, Mikhail curbing willfulness of the spirit 177 Gessen, Boris 313 physics, as response to needs of bourgeoisie 313 Giddens, Anthony rational interaction of society and government 117–118 Girard, René 270 Girenok, Fedor 125, 126 globalism 32 components of 246 globalistics, comeback of in late 1990s 32 globalization 30, 32, 34 approaches, mistaken extreme historical 32 narrow disciplinary 32 orchestrated development/wicked design 34–35 aspirations, skepticism toward 117 cause of global problems 33 coincidence with fall of communism 117 consequences of insufficient study 35 effects of 33 growing nonrecognition of 276 historical roots of 36 integration processes 42 of theoretical and practical skills 36 lingua franca in the making 33 modern challenges of arms race and fragmentation 36 imbalance, pollution 36 racism in overcrowded world 276

410 globalization (cont.) phases, first (1895–1914) and second (1990s-) of 119 roots of terrorism in contradictions and uneven development 122 in trauma 122 See terrorism: political science approach global capitalism, three great transformations of 101, 102 global conflicts, sources of 32 global problems 32, 45 continuous sorting out 46 global studies 32–33, 34, 42 foci of 31 fundamental resources of in English and Russian 30 historical background nineteenth-century 37 second wave after interest gap 39 key notions, development of global interdependency 40 slow adaptation 40 opposition to 33 perceptions of singular discipline and interdisciplinary knowledge  33 practical application and role of philosophy in 43 insight for individual sciences 44 shaping worldview 44 Soviet/Russian cultural trends 41–42 Western: technocratic, development trends 41 See globalistics 32 gnoseology 50 God Christ as best in Him 396 Devils 395 everything in everything 394 fixation on Christ’s death 376 in feeling, discourse, thought 392, 399 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 8n6, 391 Gogarten, Friedrich 393 Gogol, Nikolai 221, 222 Dead Souls 213, 218

Index good society, concept of in Russia and in West 101 Google Earth (mirror) 89 See worlds, parameters: simulated, proliferation of Gorbachev, Mikhail 34n5, 117, 351 Granovskii, Timofei 222 Great Technological Revolution of postmodern society anti-anthropological consequences ecological crisis 246 self-apocalypse (erasure of individuality) 246 foundations cognitivism 246 transcendental phenomenology 246 objective reality of Tradition as opposed to innovationism 246 progressivism, isolation noncorrelation with future 249 rejection of past See abiotic tendencies/aspirations for immortality Greenway, Peter 131 Griakalov, Aleksei 135, 136, 138n3 Griboyedov, Aleksandr 232 Woe from Wit, exemplar of conservatism 232 Groys, Boris xvi, 152–154 curator of exhibitions 153 influences 152 monumentalization 284 See postmodernism, Russian: introduction to the West Grushkin, Aleksandr 231n Guattari, Félix 206, 250 Guénon, René 18, 18n Guizot, François 290, 291 Gulag Archipelago 222 Gumiliev, Lev N. 281 Gurevich, Pavel S. xii, xvi, 167–168 Guseinov, Abdusalem xv Gusi Peace Prize 29 Hajnády, Zoltan 141 Hallaj, Husayn ib Mansur al 386 hallucination, as man’s self-revealing essence 125

Index happiness, effects of thwarted actualization exploitation of dormant revenge and fear demonization, search for scapegoat 270 Hartmann, Eduard von 396, 401 Hartmann, Nicolai levels of being 261 Hegel, Georg 15n13, 141, 157, 274, 288 absolute idealism of 88, 94 dialectical nature of destruction 156 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences centripetal nature of 75 methodology (scrutiny thru European history) 22 objective spirit 5, 95 person-subject, internally divided 11 syncretism of hospitality humaneness based on exchange 277 immature legal awareness (powerlessness) 277 uncertainty and event 148 See Epstein: centrifugal dictionary Heidegger, Martin 4n2, 15n12, 189 Being (different from the existent) 193–194 Being-towards-death 141–142 Dasein 136, 261, 325 foremost concern of (and Tolstoy’s) 143 loss of transcendental phenomenology 261 origins, return to 251 relationship of being and the existent in fold 194, 205 unbeing and end of history 4–5 See ontic unlocking Hempel, Carl 56 Heraclitus 88 notion of fire 325 hermeneutics, failure of in philosophical image of Russia 137 antitextual and atextual 138, 138n2 Hermetic Tradition 18n Herzen, Aleksandr xiv, 174, 209, 222 alternative historical role of 365 civilization, as term used for civil activism 291 father of Russian materialism and positivism 174

411 on Nicholas i 221 orientation to natural sciences 174 rejection of religion and Western civilization 174 hesychasm 190, 198 hesychast ontogenesis dyad (individual practice and collective tradition) 199 first step of ladder (initial event effecting imbalance) rejection of secular life 199–200 second (entry to practice, Spiritual Gate via ontological mover) prayer with focused attention on communion with God 200 third (theosis) via synergy with other energies 200 full deification impossible in empiric existence 199 hesychast practice Anthropological Border three parts patterns of unconscious 190 practices, spiritual and virtual  190 anthropological unlocking 190 historical blocks, parallels with development 201–202 ascesis of Desert Fathers (4th-6th centuries) Sinaite Heschasm (7th-10th centuries) disputes of St. Gregory Palamas (13th-14th centuries) paradigm of spiritual practice (extreme experience) 190 philosophy as a discourse of energy (being-action) de-essentialized energy 190 reasons for modern strategies 192 synergic anthropology, theory and two vectors of 190, 192 deterritorialization and deontologization 193 See deontologization See hesychast ontogenesis Higher School of Economics (hse) of National Research University 209, 209n High-Tech homo 369

412 historical macrosociology 333 historiography of philosophical experience chronological representation distinct from materialization of thought 325 history of science, philosophical See Akhutin, Anatolii Hitler, Adolf, misperception/ misappropriation of Nietzsche political distortion of spiritual teachings 378, 380 morality of master, slave 379 Hobbes, Thomas, notions of artificial and natural persons 175 Hoffer, Eric 110 Homer 18n Homo Europaeus 3, 4, 26, 27 controversial thinking versus sacral non-controversial 20 ontological dispute with its indisputableness 20 source of fundamental crisis 14 Homo mundi 23 Horgan, John 92 horizon, disciplinary archiving global philosophical knowledge 327 scientificity 327 horizon of affectivity (love for wisdom/search for truth) 328 Horujy, Sergei xvii, 189–191 hostility of the Russian people to otherness of Russian State as residence in occupied territory 232 toward Russian army, nobility, officials, judges, priests 232 house, as topos of Russia 223 Hume, David 90, 175 Huntington, Samuel 109 civilization 291–292 as identical to culture 293 components of differences 292 conflicts of civilizations 117 contrast with barbarism 292 variety of globalizations 117 Husserl, Edmund 15–16, 15n13, 16n14, 195, 391 cognitive act of Descartes described  196 Computational Universe 261

Index ego, transcendental 133 European culture, Eurocentrism and universality of 17 intentionality 325 lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 261, 263n See Scheler, Max Hutton, Patrick collective inexhaustible memory of war 149 Iakovenko, Igor’ 228, 229n1 See Kliamkin, Igor’ idea, adaptation to visual multiplicity 131 identity, Russian civilizational attributions of difference confessional, ethno-cultural, geopolitical 289 differentiation, incomplete/failure of reforms 289 clash of themes (backwardness and uniqueness) 290 See search for all-Russian national identity 358 illness, Russian national 335 Il’in, Ivan A. 274 immanent development, logic of 6 immanentism 261 immortality, artificial, fragility of 161–162 independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia conciliatory reaction of the West 352 individualism, absolutization of 306 See Russian idea See Slavophiles individuality (person) 175 information about information 66 concepts of 59 transformation/transmission of 66 initiative, responsible versus fatefully decisive initiation 26 Inoguchi, Takashi 117 new dire problems of global future 117 See global problems instability of authoritarian coercive power 336 Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (iash) 1

Index Institute for History of Science and Technology (ihst) 1 Institute for the Transfer of Blood (Blood Transfusion) 7n, 165 Institute of Future Problems 38 Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the ussr 29, 288, 321 Institute of Philosophy of ras 50, 101–102, 167, 189, 288, 321, 391 integration/disintegration, global scale of 34 intellectual associations (in Moscow) 74 International Association of Professors of Philosophy (aipph) 29 International Fund “Humanity in 2000” 38 isofunctionalism 61 Iudin, Boris 47 Iurganov, Andrei 230n5 Ivan the Terrible as historical ally of Stalin 234 as personification of synthesis supremacy of force over faith and law 230 Ivan iii 237 Jaspers, Karl 14n, 15n11, 37 concepts of indivisibility, unity, single world history 38 Joyce, James xvii See European history: final reckoning 13 judgments, synthetic versus analytical 79 judicial blindness natural goals (legality of means) 274 positive law (unconditionality of goals) 274 Jung, Carl G. 382 Jünger, Ernest 7n, 8, 8n6, 148 Kadomtsev, B.B. 59n Kaku, Michio 96 Kali Yuga 19 Kant, Immanuel 37, 79, 276 anthropological constancy of sociability 276 Copernican revolution 87 everlasting global peace 37 right to hospitality to promote peace 276

413 Kantor, Vladimir founder/publisher “From the History of Russian Philosophical Thought” 209 successor of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev 209 See “Bobok” Kapustin, Boris social transformation into quasi-natural reality 117 Karamzin, Nikolai 176, 177 See lichnost’; personality Karsavin, Lev P. 189 Katschthaler, (Archbishop) Johannes Baptist 392 Kavelin, Konstantin 209 Khlebnikov, Velimir 13 Khodorkovksii, Mikhail, arrest of 351 See dynamics, cyclical: Yeltsin-Putin period; stagnation/decay phase leading to crisis Khomiakov, Aleksei 173, 281 Kierkegaard, Søren 2 raising of anthropology (to “human science”) 208 Kireevskii, Ivan V. 172–173, 300n Kliamkin, Igor’ 227–229, 229n1 alternating Russian militarization and demilitarization 227 path to rule of law 228 uniqueness of post imperial/post totalitarian Russia 227 See Akhiezer, Aleksandr and Iakovenko, Igor’ (coauthors) See also Liberal Mission Foundation Kliuchevskii, Vasilii 229 Klossowski, Pierre 141 Kojève, Alexandre 143 Being-towards-death 141 Kolpakov, V.A. 101 Koltsov, Nikolai 7n Kondratiev, Nikolai sun activity and economy/elections 163 Konstantinov, Fyodor v. 189 Kopylov, Gennadii G. 106, 108 Korogodin, V.I. 59n Korogodina, V.L. 59n Koyré, Alexandre 300n Krasovskaia, Elena A. 144 Kristeva, Julia 24, 141

414 Kroeber, Alfred 332 Kropotkin, Piotr 121 Kuhn, Thomas 309, 311 Kutyrev, Vladimir xvi 246, 247, 248 See philosophy for humans Lacan, Jacques 141, 205, 206 Lactantius 18n Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 37 Langton, Christopher 92 language, meeting points of academic research and experience, of past and future 138 Lapkin, Vladimir 339f Laqueur, Walter 104, 106, 107 Lavrov, Piotr nonexistence of transcendent absolute being 174 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 84, 258 combinatorics (of qualities) 84 Leibnizian xiv Lekstorskii, Vladislav xv Leontiev, Konstantin 125, 297, 365 Lenin, Vladimir i. x Le Roy, Eduoard 37 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 141 structural anthropology, missing principal of 197 Lewis, David 57 Liberal Mission Foundation President Igor’ Kliamkin 228 lichnost’ 176 See personality Lifshitz, Mikhail 297 Likhachev, Dmitrii 248, 283, 296 Liuks, Leonid 230n5 See Kliamkin, Igor’ Locke, John 176, 360, 253 human rights and religious tolerance 360 logic, chrono- and topo-logic 136 Logos 2 Lopatin Lev 309n20 Losskii, Nikolai x, xv Lotman, Yuri 209 Luther, Martin 369 Lunacharskii, Anatolii 7n Lysenkoism 253

Index Macey, David 141 Mach, Ernst, positivist philosophy of 165 Maiakovskii, Vladimir 7n1 Maidan victory 352 Maistre, Joseph de view of Napoleon 400 Majour, Ivan 37n, 39 Malafeev, Aleksei 291n1 Malevich, Kazimir exhibition 0.10/zero point of art 157 Malraux, André 13 Malthus, Thomas growth of population 37 See European culture: final reckoning 13 Mamchur, Elena 311 man anthropological theme of 167 irrefutable entity 174 organized scientifically (noch) 7n perfected Communist (uskomchel) 7n personalistic disposition and priority 171 Western 4 See Enlightenment, Russian See moderne Mensch Manifest of the Club of Budapest 47 Marcel, Gabriel 178–180 view of Nikolai Berdiaev 179 being versus having 180 Markov, Boris xvi, 266–267 analytics of emotional consciousness 265 historical philosophical approach of 265 See Friedrich, Nietzsche Martinsen, Deborah 219 shame in Dostoyevsky’s works 219 Marxism 8n6, 161 Marxist-Leninism, norms of xvii Marx, Karl 4n2, 5n, 37, 88, 125, 156 eleventh thesis 87 worldwide proletarian unity 37 materialism eliminative 55 historical 288 theoretical 54 Matiushin, Mikhail 164 Maturana, Humberto autopoiesis, special systems of 263n Mazour, Ivan i. 34n5

Index McVeigh, Timothy 110–111 Mechnikov, Ilia 279 mega-tendency 332 assimilation (globalization) 332 isolation (fundamentalism, nationalism, regionalization) 333 multipolarity 333 Melik-Gaikazian, I.V. 59n Meny, Yves 115–116 Menzhulin, Vadim 382 merchant class, Russian lack of trust among non-kin merchants 238 low political clout of kupechestvo 238 suppression by tsar 239 metaphysical engineer, philosophers as 94 metaphysical horizon of philosophy cycles 1 1890–1922 institutionalization/ cultural recognition 329 2 1922–1985 formation of traditions of Soviet philosophy 329 3 1985–1993–2006 transition-restorationconclusion 329 exiting blind alley of totalitarianism engaging with priority of experience 330 total reevaluation of values 329 loss of leading role for philosophy 331 cultural debate after Oświęcim (horrific killing of other nations) 331 no debate post gulag, problem of Russia’s special modernization (nation killing itself) 331 merging with policy and political choice 329 philosophy as appendix to literature 330 metaphysics aestheticization of 255 as a practical discipline 91 fear of Einstein, criticism of Russell 98 problematization of existing world 88 transformative 77 wonderment in Aristotle’s 82 metarealism 75 metaworld

415 matrix 92 philosophers as demiurges in construction collaboration with historians 93 Metlynskii, Amvrosii 291 Metropolitan Filip, killing of supremacy of force (oprichniki) over faith and law 230 Mezhuev, Vadim M. xii, xvi, 288 Russia as not fully established civilization 289 See Russian idea Mikhailovskii, Aleksandr 6–7n5, 174 militarization in peace and at war 229 all-inclusiveness in Stalin’s war communism besieged fortress life, total secrecy of 234 Bolshevik appropriation of Proper Course of Events 233 comparing demilitarization of monarchical absolutism European feudal lords’ property without service 237 culture in split 230 marginalization of truth and faith 231 success of Petrine and Stalinist modernizations acquisition of superpower status  240 See post-Soviet militarization military communism 339, 339f Miliukov, Pavel 229 “mind,” Nagel’s use of 52 mind-body problem 51, 58, 58n7 minimal religion 75 necessary connection 52 Mironov, Vladimir N. 370–71, 388 Nietzche’s initiation ritual 388–89 Mironov, Boris 239n17 missionism 281 modernity mythology of form 136 modernization in Russia, special way of permanent military service for noblemen no funds for mercenaries 238 peasants’ service (serf farmers/permanent soldiers) 238 Moiseev, Nikita 125

416 Mongolian Yoke reproduction in combat-oriented system in Russia 229 monism elimination of difference of private and public 112 suppression of complexity 111 unyielding connection to values 112 monologism, versus dialogic relations 184 See Bakhtin: dialogue Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat) separation of powers 360 Moore, George 82 morality, as autonomous sphere of human subjectivity 172 Moscow conceptualism 152 Moses 18n Mounier, Emmanuel 179 Mukarovsky, Jan direct relationship of structure and tradition 139 Muraviev, Benjamin 161 Muraviev, Valerian artificial future humans without gender metaphysical/religious elements 161 cosmos as object of human design 160 immortality through secular means 161 museumification of life 160 Musharraf, Pervez 114 Nagel, Thomas 51–56, 55n2, 58, 64–65, 72 Naisbitt, John 332 Nancy, Jean-Luc 258, 258n9 plurality of worlds 258 Narodniki 174 natural religion superfluous nature of revelation 363 See deism See separation of Church and State Nazaretian, A.P. 34n6 négritude 19 neighborliness/hospitality, as peaceful competition 266 Neoplatonism 194 Neo-Platonists 18n neo-traditionalism 18 Newton, Isaac works as response to practical needs 313 New Economic Policy (nep) 338, 339f

Index New Eurasianism 281 new sentimentality 75 Nicholas i (tsar) Great reforms due to latent degradation, loss in Crimean War 336 pillars of empire, alignment with xiii Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 8n7, 104, 126, 391 aestheticizing metaphysically human activities 255 Christianity, as Platonism for Christians 399 consciousness as source of nihilism 156 deontologization 193 influence on Russian Futurism 156 loss of gestures 146 message about future of humankind 372 on herd consciousness versus uniqueness 377, 379 on killing God 37 recurrence to oneself 370–389 description of spiritual rebirth 384 manworld/moksha/nirvana way to get rid of suffering 382 transformations in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 383 view of man, state, and God 265 See Nietzsche’s teachings, falsification of Nietzsche’s teachings, falsification of anti-Semitism of sister (The Will to Power) 380 nationalism and Slavophobia of Nazis 380 nihilists 173 Nikandrov, Petr xv Nikanorov, Spartak 332 Nikiforov, Aleksandr xv interpretation of scientific fact 309 Nikitaev, Vladimir v. 106, 108 Nikitenko, Aleksandr 221–22 nominalism 88 nonconceptual thinking 126 noosphere 125 illusory nature of 246 Nosov, Nikolai 254n technicalization of modern consciousness 254

Index novationism 248 Novorossia, detachment of unsuccessful mobilization 352 Oberiutes 125 October (1905) Manifesto 338, 339f Ol’shanskii, Dmitrii 111 ontic gap 206 ontic unlocking connection to surrealism and experience of totalitarianism 206 locus of Ontic Other 205 sub-domains of ontic humans 205–206 ontology ontological problematics 51 ontological unlocking 208 onto-technology 91 movement toward metaphysics and world-making 91 oprichnina 230 tsar’s truth (sanctioned by Duma/given popular support) 230 Orientalism 282 “Orientalization” 17 Orpheus 18n Other, image of 267, 268 absence of rights of the Other 278 creation in extremity 26 functions of 268 measures of cultural strength 279 necessity of modernizing image 268 pretense of humanist discourse 267 role of interethnic communication 271 threat to periphery/integrating symbol for center 277 Overman 5, 8, 8n7, 98 See Superman 4 Pakulski, Jan illegitimate political actors 117 Palamas, (Saint) Gregory theology of energies 189 panlogism, Hegelian 174 Pan-Slavism 280 Pantin, Vladimir 339f parliamentarism 338 Pasternak, Boris 5 Patočka, Jan 282 Pavić, Milorad

417 Dictionary of the Khazars 131 Perestroika 241, 338, 336, 339f, 351 Pavlenskii, Piotr 395n Perse, Saint John 13 See European history: final reckoning 13 persona 176 personality (lichnost’) 175–176 inherent mental stance 177 See also Karamzin, Nikolai person-as-subject 9 person-manager, self-constructing 7n person-organizer, self-organizing 7n Peter the Great 218, 231 as historical ally of Stalin 234 post-Petrine demilitarization abolition of serfdom (Alexander ii) 231 charters (Catherine the Great) 231 See Pugachev, Emelian manifesto freeing the nobility (Peter iii) 231 October Manifesto of 1905 231 See militarization: success of Petrine modernization Pfamper, Ian [Jan] 140n7 phenomena, psychic 60 phenomenon of consciousness 60, 66, 71 of subjective reality 60, 66, 68–69 in code 62 phenomenological realism world as “a thing for us” 261 phenomenological substantialism 261 phenomenology 126 transcendental 16 philosophia perennis 19 philosophical anthropology 167, 168, 321 Philosophical Congress (Russian, World) 30 philosophical historiography xiii boom of xvi disillusionment, post-Soviet xvi historiosophy xv philosophical radicality 13, 26 Philosophical Society of the ussr 29 Philosophical Train 30 philosophical witness in autobiography xviii philosophy absence of universal model

418 philosophy (cont.) out-of-date classical philosophy 323 as “a higher politics” 25 European history of as dialog of metaphysical systems 19 genealogical horizon (Greek roots) 326 historical importance of Russian philosophy ix imperial hostility ix, x, xiii renaissance in early 1900s ix rival of Bolshevik ideology ix, x Russian religious philosophy in emigration x philosophy for humans anthropic principle 262, 263 four walls of philosophical house 256 resisting humanity’s self-apocalypse 263 technological displacement of spirituality and culture 260 See acmeology; archeo-avant-garde consciousness; dynamic conservatism See also estology; polyontism; substantial phenomenology philosophy in 21st century in intellectual/social movements 87 in sciences and technology 87 in techno-philosophical fields 99 return to intellectual center 99 thinkable, expansion of 98 Philosophy of the Common Task 158, 159 Philosophy Steamer x, xv, 30 See Chumakov, Alexander philosophy with a human face 247 physicalism 54, 55n2, 56 paradigm of 57, 58n7 radical 62 pi, principle of informational invariance deductions and premises 57–59 Pisarev, Dmitrii xiv, 220 places, competitive nature of 137 Plato xvii, 18n, 211–13, 218 Idea(s) 15, 183, 325 creator of “the city” (Politeia) 19, 166 death, philosophical preparation for 220 distillation in European history’s views 22

Index Platonism 334 Platonov, Andrei first thoughts/words of 13 metautopia 144 Platonov, Sergei 232n7 Podoroga, Valerii function of philosopher in 21st century xvi philosophical anthropology, methods and analytical tools of 321 See also Epstein, Mikhail poetry, roles of 139 Poincare, Henri 311 polarization in international system and internal affairs decreasing democratization, dialogue, transparency 115 less cultural pluralism 117 See terrorism: political approach political correctness 366 politization archaic form, reasons for 119 from below 118 See terrorism Polten, Eric 51 polyontism 256 communicative 259 starting point for reasoning 259 postmodern virtualistics 259 Pomerants, Grigory S. 384–385 Popper, Karl 51, 309 positivism, logical 50, 56, 309 possibilism (multiplying possibilities), necessity of 74 postmodernism 74, 75 captivity in informativeness and cognitivism 259 introduction to the West of Russian postmodernism 153 paradoxes of 87n “positive post-modernism” with plurality of worlds 258 status as ideology in the us 366 postmodern relativism equality in 366 criticism of totalitarian consciousness 367 relativity in 366

419

Index transgression of 147 types of human cognition and practice, equality and relativity in 366 Postmodern Terrorism 137 post-Perestroika (1987–1998) 338 post-positivism 57 post-Soviet decay (in quasi-society) lacking consolidation by force, faith and law 242 new national idea, failure of emergence 242 privatization of the state (role of petrodollars) 242 See Chechen wars post-Soviet militarization, concealed alien nature of to innovation, value of human life, free social organization 243 See militarization Poststructuralism French 152 Russian project zones of divergence 138 practices, spiritual of world religions schools of pure anthropological experience 198 Praisman, L.G. 104n4 presentalism 75 Prigozhin, Ilia 256 prima philosophia, universality in 16 problematization, as transition to synthesis 79 defamiliarization in 79 enrichment of language of thinking 80 of existing world 88 progress, as meaning of existence 248 Proletkul’t 165 Propp, Vladimir 217 phenomenon of temporary death 217 See Dostoyevsky: life in death Protagoras 47 protective conservatism 348–349, 348n See dynamics, cyclical: sequence of ring-shaped dynamics; Yeltsin-Putin period Provisional Government 338 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 82

Pugachev, Emelian 233 Cossack army 233 pure experience, phenomenological description of advancing to all anthropological experience 195 epistemological transparency of 195 method’s use of smallest rescued bit Pushkin, Alexander 212–213 Putin, Vladimir 242, 351 authoritarian roll-backs of 2003–2005 and of 2012 culminating in nationalization of Elite 352 See militarization; post-Soviet decay; post-Soviet militarization Putnam, Hilary 57 Pythagoras 18 Radishchev, Aleksandr 170 Radlov, Ernest xiv ras (Russian Academy of Sciences) 50, 101–102, 167, 189, 288, 321, 391 rationalism, new-European 18n Rawls, John 122 reaction of 2012–2013 339 Realism 88 reality actualization of 101 book versus screen/image versus sign 130 in poetry 138 reductionism converse approach to synthesis 78 functionalist 52 physicalist 51, 52 See scientific materialism reflection, duality of 66 religion as a social system sacred scripture and sacred traditions 361 retro-alternativism 249 revolution, anthropological 6 revolution, conservative 7n revolution from the left 6–7n5 Revolution from the Right 6n5 rights movements 269 Rilke, Rainer Maria 396, 396n9

420 Robertson, Roland inseparability of global and local 117 Rogov, Kirill 345 Rorty, Richard 55, 96 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques aboriginal hospitality and unselfishness 276 Rozanov,Vasilii 144, 369 gesture-production of the uncertain 146 inauthenticity of temporal existence 144 Rozin, Vadim M. 106, 108 Rozov, Nikolai xv, 332–34 Russell, Bertrand 10, 37, 77, 78 Theory of Knowledge 98 Russian Ecological Academy 29 Russian economics, specifics of 346–348 Russian ethnocentrism 306 extremes of Russian journey to self-determination 307 rejection of European civilization and culture 306 theory of local civilizations opposition to integral historical process 306–307 See Russian idea See Slavophiles Russian Eugenics Society 7n Russian European 209, 237 Russian idea, as prerequisite for development 296 apprehension through intuition 297 bridging gap for civilization and culture 307 Christian ethics all responsible for all 304 as foundation for human community 304 exclusion of isolationism and nationalism 301 synonym for Russian nationalism 296 Russian formalism 138 Russian Philosophical Congress 30 Russian Philosophical Society 29 Russian philosophy anthropocentrism of xvi cross-border, modern nature of ix diversity of thinkers xvii

Index ethical focus for how to live 172 ideological component of xiv idiosyncratic genre norms of xiii, xiv Neo-Kantian fervor xiv quest for truth and meaning of life 172 relationship to science xv requirements of Marxist-Leninism xiv ruptures with Western European philosophy ix, x universality xiv See Markov, Boris; Mezhuev, Vadim; Sergeev, Mikhail Russian power, deep connections of coercive institutions and criminal communities 336 Russian Social Democratic Party 165 Russian systemic decline and cost of stagnation erosion of image of future 244 exhaustion of possibilities for renewal 244 Rutkevich, Alexei M. 381 sacrificial rituals, role of 270 Safranski, Rüdiger 142, 382 Said, Edward 282 Saltykov-Shchredrin, Mikhail satirical alternative judgment 83 Samarin, Iurii 125, 291 Sapronov, Petr xvi Sartre, Jean-Paul 127, 267 Savitskii, Piotr 144n15 Scheler, Max 178, 280 Lebenswelt 263n order of feelings and passions 261 Schiller, Friedrich 398 Schmitt, Carl 114, 115, 119, 269, 273 Schopenhauer, Arthur 88 science artificial divisions into basic and applied 312 dependence of experiments on tool invention 314 ignoring spiritual elevation of humans 319 nondisclosure of essential human nature 318 objectivity of science and technology 5 search for truth, as secondary goal of 311

Index social problem of 101–102 technogenuous role of capitalism 314 See technoscience science of human sciences 208 See Kierkegaard, Søren scientific materialism 51 Scott, J. new illegitimate political actors 117 scraps, as appropriation 129 search for all-Russian national identity 358 comparisons of Russia by philosophers pre-revolutionary with Europe 358 post-Soviet with the us 358 Sedgwick, Mark 18n Self 128 self-affectation 132 self-cognition 67 self-determination 71 self-organized non-Soviet communities, destruction of 336 self-particularity 16 self-transformation 67 Senghor, Léopold Sédar affirmation of African traditions 19 separation of Church and state institutions increase of competition in theological teaching 363 increase in religious tolerance 363 independence of religion from state stronger and purer 363 overcoming systemic crisis of Christianity 365 religion as a personal choice 364 spiritual core of modern Western democracy 364 sufficient and most rational social basis 364 See American national identity Sergeev, Mikhail xii, xvi, 356–357, 358, 369 Shakespeare, William 212, 397 Shakhadat, Shamma 140n7 Shalamov, Varlam 146 Sheckley, Robert 177 minimum man 177 Shelkovaia, Natalya 368–70 causes of human suffering per Nietzsche 381 co-feeling with Nietzsche’s vital world 370

421 comparison of Christ and Nietzsche 372–384 Christ as model for Superman 156 Christ as Savior from egoism 376 Nietzsche’s experience of joy 376 enlightenment for Buddhists and Sufis 381 ecstatic divine connection (Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj) 386 experience of Gautama, Siddhārta Shakyamuni 381 Nietzsche’s vision down from above 372 See Nietzsche: recurrence to oneself Shestov, Lev 2, 144, 370 awareness of illusory character of natural, social and public laws 177 vulnerability of human existence 177 creation of alternative past (history as project) 157 See “Underground Man” See also existential philosophy Shpet, Gustav xiv Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, Prince Platon A. ix Sirotkina, Irina 140n7 Simon, Richard, as founder of Biblical criticism 363 simultaneity and spatio-temporal structure 56 See mind-body problem Skovoroda (quest for spiritual self-improvement) manifestoes, nihilism, rebellions 171 Sirotkina, Irina 140n7 Slavic structuralism 138 Slavophiles 280, 300, 358 completion of global historical ascent 302 Russian reaction to Western nationalism 304 Western failure to reconcile conflict of parts German free self-realization of human spirit 302 Roman authority of secular and Church power 302 See search for all-Russian national identity

422 Slavophilism 173 Slavophile messianism national asceticism 281 Russia as savior of Orthodoxy 281 universality of spirit (all human experience) 173, 300 Westernizers’ emphasis on acquisition of integrity 173 universality (based on reason) 300 Sloterdijk, Peter, concepts of (lost certainties, diffusive cynicism) 137 smerdiakovs 353, 353n5 sobornost’ 173, 304 socialist realism 234 Socialist Revolutionaries 104, 223 society-nature system 32 Socrates 218 “soundless conversation” 19 Soloviev, Aleksandr K. 103 Soloviev, E. Iu. 182 Soloviev, Sergei 229 Soloviev, Vladimir 156, 159, 303n, 305nn19–20 efforts to counter national narcissism 305 integral knowledge 171 shame and problem of the sexual 219–220 sophiology 125 “Tale of the Antichrist” 377 universal all-unity 171 view of gap (Orthodoxy and Western Christianity) 280 Somerville, John 37 Sophia 20 sophiology 125, 356 Soviet historiography xivn Soviet identity, insufficiencies of common interest and roots in culture 242 faith in communism and “socialist legality” 242 Soviet Union as cultural synthesis 281 space in-between (das Zwischen) 139 Special Operations Forces 352 German training 352 Spencer, Herbert 235–236 industrial, voluntary social organization as product of European Modernity 235

Index militant, compulsory social organization lawless post-Mongolian unconditional service 237 transformative potential of European feudalism 236 Spengler, Oswald/Spenglerian 12, 37, 148, 309, 391 war as human history 148 Sperry, Roger 71 Spinoza, Baruch 250 stagnation/decay phase leading to crisis covert corruption due to petrodollars state racket from coercive agencies 351 subordination of courts 351 Western sanctions/decrease in oil prices 352 Stalin, regime of 339 Stalinism 339f Steiner, Rudolf 391, 396, 399 Stepun, Fiodor A. x, xv, 209 Stepuna, A. 209 Stiopin, Viacheslav 314 Stirnir, Max 391 Strakhov, Nikolai 305 structuralism in esthetics 135 Slavic 135, 138, 139 Struve, Peter 209 subjectivity, spontaneity of 143 subject-ness, deprivation of 11 super-human, regenerated 370, 373 Superman 4, 156 as ontic unlocking 205–206 as super-philologist 146 beyond boundaries of human space 372 holy laughter of Nietzsche 374 contrast with Church’s cult of death 375 militant, not miserable 375 Nietzsche’s super-philologist 146 uncompromising nature, radical historical break 156 See Overman Supremacy of the Object 325 sustainable development boundaries in conservation of evolving system

Index human being (genotype) 249 cultural universals (tradition) 249 Sviatogor, Aleksandr 155 Svidrigailov 213, 214 See Biocosmists-Immortalists Swassjan, Karen xv, 371, 376, 391–392 disease, as Nietzsche’s “greatest benefit” 381 Swedenborg 220 synergy 203 synergic anthropology 203 forms of extreme experience 203–204 unlocking anthropological expansion (social overlap) 207–208 in existent and in virtual reality 206 toward other mode of being 206 See synthesis: third (transformative level) See ontic unlocking See ontology: ontological unlocking synthesis (synthetic approach to philosophy) 77, 78 as event of being 79 as transformations, levels of first (synthesis) new mental objects (logical, semantic, linguistic) 86 second (metasynthesis) 86 third (transformative) practices beyond philosophy (in social life) 87 See synergic anthropology: unlocking infinition, steps of 81 of discipline (horrorology) fragility of more complex civilization 85 grounds of self-destruction 86 of ethical postulates (diamond rule)  84 of judgments 82 synthetic biology, metaphysics, methodology 92 syntheticism 93 systems, self-organizing 57, 70–71 taboos separating humans from animals expansion beyond blood relatives for ethics 319

423 suppression of egotistical instincts, imperative of 319 Talbott, Strobe 105n9 Tao 82 Tao-Path 382 technology, political technoscience, changes drawdown of labor/shift to industry 315 humans merely as biological organisms 317–318 modifications of environment 316 more comfortable and longer life 316 more knowledge about globe and cosmos 315 technosophia 91 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 37 Omega point 256 terrorism, as archaic politization 118–119 approaches to 108–112 civilizational 109–110 political science 112–122 sociological 108–109 sociopsychological 110–112 See also monism as satellite side effect of globalization 103 finding unity of humanity unobtainable 106 mediation of its goal 104 new global vulnerability  103, 122 revenge for finality of developmental lag 106, 122 ultimatum against peaceful citizens 106 barriers beyond political correctness to conceptualization feared loss of enemy’s image 107 prohibition in new era 107 causes of illegitimate political solutions and actions anarchic order in post-communist countries 120 weakened international system 118 legitimation of anti-terrorism, responses to 121 old terrorism, minimalist 105 as intimidation against government and people 105 bombism 103

424 terrorism, as archaic politization (cont.) connection in Russia with anarchism 104 Decembrists and Narodnaia Volia 103 propaganda through action 105 technology, role in massive destruction 106 Thales 88 Thaw (1956–1968) 338 theism 394 theological themes, dominance of in Byzantine times 169 theology, apophatic 82 theory of modernization culture’s role (in Other Europe) 101 theosis 203 Tillich, Paul 14n view of Nikolai Berdiaev 178 Timofeev, Lev 227 Tiuchev, Fiodor civilization as term for civil activism 291 Toichkina, Aleksandra 222–223 tolerance discourse 269 Tolstoy, Lev xiv, 141, 370 The Death of Ivan Il’ich 142 overcoming fear of death 143 rejection of violence 274 Tolstoyanism, as opposition to force 233 totalitarianism persistent barbarism 293 Russia’s Byzantine heritage 293 slide down to (since Spring 2014) 339 tourism entertainment society, part of 283 form of intercultural communication 283 monumentalization and museumification of cities toll upon traditional cultures 284 universal anthropological constant promotion of dialogue and peaceful coexistence 286 Toynbee, Arnold 37, 293, 332 Trotsky, Leon 8, 8n6 traditionalism 19 transcendentalism 126 transculturalism 75 transculture 75

Index transformative humanities 86–87n transgress in deconstruction of humans 249 devaluation of human features based on heredity dissolving individuals into virtual multi-viduals 253 refusing to accept essence in humans replacing human essence with identity 252 transhominism 246 transhumanism 145, 251 transmodernism 250 transnominism 246 transitions, postcommunist in Central and Eastern Europe 227 See Kliamkin, Igor’ trans paradigm 249 travel as a form of intercultural communication 285 See tourism Trismegistus, Hermes 18n Trubetskoi, Evgenii 281 truth eternal (istina) 21 European versus Russian pravda 174 lacking in morally flawed people 172 ontological basis in Ancient philosophy 2 product of speculation/living it, not reasoning 172 universal 22 See oprichnina: tsar’s truth Tse, Lao 82 Tsiolkovskii, Konstantin 37 participation in cosmic competition 165 patrification of the heavens 164 Tunimanov, Vladimir 218 Turney, Jon 89 Tzu,Chuang 82 Tzu, Lao 82 Uexkull, Jakob von unity of organism and environment (Umwelt) 263 un-being (Unwesen) 4 See West, twilight of 4 uncertainty, replacing and opposing background of events 145

Index gap between cosmos and existence 146 restoring natural order of existence 146 role of chance 147 See Art Nouveau, age of underdevelopment of common interest in Russia hostility to state institutions and compensation for 240–241 non-military prerequisites for economic consolidation 241 secluded rural worlds 240 Underground Man timeless nature of 144 topological significance of 144 unfolding, energy of 141 difference of synergic from classical anthropology 202 paradigm of Heidegger for dynamical doubling 202 United Nations, reports responding to globalization discriminatory stratification and uneven development 117 Union of Russian Writers 135, 209 universal evolutionism basis in synergetics 256 rapid growth of artificial 257 University Statute of 1863 ix utilitarian individualism 360 roots in freedom of conscience and Enlightenment 360 Utkin, Anatolii i. 111 Vanden Heuvel, Katrina 105n9 Van der Zweerde, Evert xiv Varela, Francisco autopoiesis, special systems of 263n Vernadskii, Vladimir noosphere 37 recognition of global way 38 Vico, Giambattista 13 “Victory over the Sun” Chaos over Cosmos 163–164 participation of Russian avant-garde  164 Vidal, Gore 110, 111 views on social roles and structure

425 foe (Hobbesian), friend (Kantian), rival (Lockean) 121 violence in peacetime 272 acceptable level and lawfulness criteria of 272–273 accumulated frustration of conformism and loathing 272 enjoying others’ suffering 275 masochism/resentiment (waiting for retribution) 275 ambiguity of law and growth of revenge (post-stress phase) 274 rejection of violence 274 resolution of fear in identity issues  273 vision, existential act of poetic language  139 repetition as eternal reoccurrence 139 Vizgin, Vladimir P. 258 Vladiv-Glover, S. 75 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 215, 393 Von Humboldt, Wilhelm “remelting” 208 Von Wartenburg, Count Yorck 4 vulnerability of transparency 122 Wallerstein, Immanuel 294–295, 332 alterations to and nonlinear development 117 Walter, Benjamin primeval swamp in Franz Kafka 13 war, hermeneutics of (word-defying experience) human nature, fragmented world, thirst for power 149 Warner, D. dangers of humanitarian intervention 118 Waters, Malcolm new potentially illegitimate political actors 117 Wendt, Alexander 120, 121 Westernizers 280, 358 See search for all-Russian national identity Whitehead, Alfred concepts of unity and integrity 136 “white man’s burden” 21

426 Wittgenstein, Ludwig visual room 131 World Future Society 38 worldness 89, 92, 98 expansion into multiverse  95 worlds, parameters of first principles, ideal or material foundations 88 preeminence of individual or universal 88 simulated, proliferation of augmented realities 89 immersive virtual environments 89

Index See Google Earth Writers’ Union 74 xenophilia and xenophobia 267 function of the Other 278 long-term cultural policy 268 Yeats, Frances 18n Yeltsin, Boris 118, 120, 351 Zenkovskii, Vasilii xv, xvi Zhirmunskii, Victor 137 Ziuganov, Gennadii 351 “Znanie” (All-Union Society) 29 zombies 262