Čelovek

The article discusses the concept of the third space, which appears in the works of postcolonial researcher Homi Bhabha and geographer Edward Soji, with a primary focus on the former. His arguments do not form a coherent concept, but they allow for new steps in various research areas. First, the idea of a single and homogeneous political nation is problematized. It is rooted in tradition, but does not work well in the situation of postcolonial crisis, when streams of people with their own ideas about history, territorial borders, nation and culture rush to former metropolises. There is a clash of old concepts of class struggle and opposition to colonialism with new trends, including feminism and postcolonialism. The ideas of strong social “things” such as states, nations, classes, which have a single homogeneous space and time, history and borders, are blurred. The issue rests not only on the struggle of grand narratives, but also on small ones, events of utterance, constantly occurring in social life. This becomes the reason for the development and significant adjustment of the theory of social events, previously proposed by the author. In the new version, the theory speaks more about the struggle that really takes place in social life, the conflict of micro-narratives that prevents the formation of a stable community of observers, including those who create a solidary discursive community, narrating about logically connected events that form a fixed pattern of sociality.

The article proposes a hypothesis that work of the symbolist philosopher Vyacheslav I. Ivanov contains an original religious and anthropological concept with which all the themes of his religious and philosophical works are correlated. The author examines the evolution of human understanding in the works of Vyacheslav I. Ivanov, starting with the historical study “The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God” and ending with later texts. The author shows that the first attempts to raise the question of man and formulate a preliminary answer to it are already found in Ivanov’s research on the ancient cult of Dionysus. His further anthropological developments are largely based on his early ideas and do not contradict them. It is shown what role religion plays in the self-determination of the individual. Special attention in the article is paid to one of the most mysterious works of Ivanov — the poem “Chelovek”. The article considers the problem of self-awareness in the context of Russian philosophy of the end of the XIX century. It is shown that the ideas formulated by V. Ivanov in the poem about the essence of human being take into account the context but are not reduced to any of the existing theories. The dialectic of the relationship between I and Thou is considered as the basis of the human self. The article also touches the problem of love and its role in the relationship between the Self and the Other. In addition, the author examines one of the main symbols in Ivanov’s thesaurus — the symbol of the guest — and comes to the conclusion that the task of the symbolist is to turn over the classical modern concept of the subject and shift the emphasis from the Self to the Other.

Dialogue and сhoice are humanity building tools, an optic that allows to talk about freedom as the possibility of сhoice to be non-self-identical, which is reflected in the humanistic dialogue nature. These are values setting the moral continuum, marking its digital disintegration. Their riskogenic nature determines the formation of the horizon of the concept of “axiological risk” through the possibility of delegating one’s own responsibility and diffusion of dialogue. The authors suggest a parallel between the Kantian optics of “space — time” and the optics of “dialogue — choice”. Choice is the inner experience, making us feel temporality with a special acuteness, dialogue is a form of external sensuality, the space of dialogue is a locality where the оther acts as a pledge of partial objectification of the inner world. Considering binary relations of “space as a form of external sensuality — dialogue” and “time as a form of internal sensuality — moral choice”, authors note a possible process of digital destruction of these parallels. The externalization of moral choice during its delegation leads to the annihilation of the highest value — life/death, determined by the acuteness of choice due to its oneness. Virtuality eliminates the randomness that shapes dialogue. The risk of choice delegating articulates the attempt of time elimination, the fear of responsibility, which is removed during the delegation. By denying time (choice), the subject seeks salvation in space (dialogue), which also can no longer be constructed. In this connection, the authors introduce the concept of “the effect of moral immortality”, which means the rejection of the inimitability of an act, and, consequently, the possibility of acting on behalf of the source of morality without being the bearer of the latter — without needing one’s own “face”.

The article considers the phenomenon of digitalization in the context of the fashion system and the logic of consumption. Modern achievements of technological progress are controlled by big capital and subject to the laws of advertising, which leads to the expansion of secondary non-functional systems. Existing in the coordinates of consumption, technology makes timid steps to satisfy the characteristic features of modernity: the desires for speed, acceleration, and differentiation. It formalizes the everyday habits of man and makes them dependent on consumption. The private and the public compete, seducing both the individual consumer and entire institutions with technology, promising the optimization of time and resources. In this way, digital reality manages to absorb and transform all areas of society, from the economy and leisure to the urban environment and human relations. Digital reality becomes total in anthropological dimension, which means that the need for analog and manual production becomes an element of the game of difference and repetition necessary for the existence of a fashion system. Perhaps as long as our fantasies of progress remain within the simple needs of comfort and pleasure, cinema will continue to paint us a bleak picture of the future as punishment for wasted human potential. However, a way out can be found in the public use of technology to call for self-reflection.

The problem of collective and individual subjectivity in bioethics is examined. Although full recognition of the subject in bioethics occurs through a commitment to self-determination already at the beginning of the 20^th century, it cannot be said that the creation of bioethical subjectivity can be considered complete. The purpose of the study is to analyze the opposition between the collective and individual subject in bioethics. To solve this problem, the genesis of the concept of subjectivity in bioethics and its adaptation to modern biomedical technologies are considered. Traditionally in the medicine the subject was appropriated to both physical and intellectual manipulations under the guarantee of the doctor’s virtuous intention. The recognition of the distinction between autonomy and the benevolent intention to restoring health occurs as a result of the increasing importance of subjectivity, which changes the very content of medicine from the virtue of providing assistance and saving human life to the recognition of an active subject who independently determines his own good, using critical thinking and personal experience. The assumption is substantiated that the subjective approach based on autonomy (self-determination) can be considered in two modes — as critical, based on reflection, and trusting, based on following and empathizing with collective values that receive representation in the collective subject, as well as on the distinction between the concepts of autonomy and freedom in bioethics. Collective and individual subjectivities are structurally rather related, through opposites, since they use authentication as a way of procedurally organizing action. The individual subject always retains substantivist autonomy, which allows him to build and reconfigure collective forms of autonomy, using his innate freedom. The stability of collective subjectivity is based on trust and empathy; without these conditions, collective subjectivity disintegrates. The distinction between freedom and autonomy in modern bioethics allows us to describe the subject simultaneously as a collective and individual actor.

The article that precedes the publication of Alexandre Kojève’s text “On creative freedom and the souls’fabrication. Response to Professor N.A. Berdyaev” explores a little-known polemic between a famous interpreter of Hegel and an eminent Russian thinker on the topic of creative freedom, which was triggered by the postwar Soviet campaign to combat the absence of ideas and apolitics in art (“Zdanovism”). The historical context preceding the philosophers’ works (Berdyaev’s article “On Creative Freedom and the Fabrication of Souls” and Kojève’s manuscript “Response to Professor N.A. Berdyaev”) is reconstructed: the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” and the theses of A.A. Zhdanov’s report for Leningrad writers are examined. The leading role of Stalin in the Soviet cultural program after the war is emphasized (in view of Kojève’s Stalinist sympathies, this fact is recognized as particularly important). We reconstruct Berdyaev’s arguments against the practice of Soviet censorship (the unity of freedom and creativity, the incomparability of the human soul with factory production, the primacy of spiritual life, the threat of creative sterility), the origins of which can be found in Berdyaev’s pre-emigrant work. Kojève’s counter-arguments (the primacy of the production basis, the fact that works of art were created in less free epochs of the past, the compatibility of creative originality with social order) are reproduced. It is pointed out that they go back to his early publications in the pro-Soviet journal “Eurasia” (“Philosophy and the Communistic Party”), in which Soviet censorship was justified in the name of a “new culture of the future”. It is noted that the factor explaining Kojève’s harsh reaction to Berdyaev’s text is the fact that it was published at the height of the anti-Soviet campaign in the Western press. It has been argued that the fundamental reason for Kojève’s exasperation is that the polemic with Berdyaev was for Kojeve an episode in his critique of intellectuals (“intelligent animals”) who evade work and struggle through “creativity”. The conclusion argues that the most significant distinction in the positions of Berdyaev and Kojève is the difference in their attitude to creativity (supreme and godlike spiritual activity / sublimated and ahistorical form of “desire for recognition”). It is also hypothesized that Kojève did not publish his text because he feared that publicly expressing a pro-Soviet position in those years could turn into the end of his newly begun political career in France.