Ideas and Ideals

The response to the article by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Consequences for Education, Science and Politics” is not a fully analytical review. It represents the result of certain empathy and it is also an attempt to articulate some thoughts generated by the reflection of modern social reality. The reviewed article was only the trigger for starting this work. Associations and intuitions, which appeared after reading of this article, indicate that the material presented by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov was able to bring the consciousness of a modern man out of the “comfort zone”. This fact suggests that the material presented by these authors has high relevance, which immediately raises the relevance of all its reviews. Despite the fact that the article under consideration is more essayistic than scientific, the object of investigation is narcissistic culture in modern conditions, when, according to P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov, postmodernism serves as a unique medium for its dissemination. The subject – some features of its influence on the human community, including its manifestations in our country. As a set of methods of research or consideration of the problem, we use a combination of general logical methods, the method of historical analogies, elements of a systematic approach, as well as elements of an approach to social phenomena from the perspective of reconstructed archaic consciousness, its principles and its values.

The most general conclusions of reviewing the article by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov are that narcissistic culture is a relatively obsolete (do not mix it with ‘archaic’) variant of pathological social development. It gained new strength in the conditions of technological progress, the emergence (or rather, reproduction) of thinking, which in post-industrial society was defined as postmodern. During the recent political confrontation of social systems, it was used as an ideological weapon. It launched the processes that turned out to be poorly controlled and it can only be resisted from the standpoint of healthy conservatism and the promotion of traditional values.

This paper is a critical response to the article by professors P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Consequences for Education, Science and Politics”. The idea of treating Western post-war culture as narcissistic has been expressed in the United States since the 1970s of the XX century, but it will also be relevant in relation to the post-Soviet culture of Russia. Considering the ambiguity of the cognitive metaphor of Narcissus in relation to the described socio-cultural transformations caused by the possibility of an almost arbitrary interpretation of something as narcissism, the article presents its own interpretation of the foundations of narcissistic culture. Following the idea of opposing a narcissistic culture to a culture of service, modern narcissism is viewed not so much as an individual’s selfishness, but as a loss of an object and opportunity for service. Secularism, understood in the spirit of Charles Taylor as the loss of any higher, transcendent, hierarchical ontological concepts, deprives a person of a higher authority that legitimizes any service to something. This means a horizontal ontology of equivalent objects that do not have the highest value in relation to the individual. Post-traditionalism means impermanence, “fluidity” of any institutionalized forms of sociality and their perception, the dynamics of the emergence and decline of which does not allow the individual to find an object of service. A person remains in conditions of “minimal humanism”, which means that this person, having neither a higher reality that determines it, nor the constancy of social institutions, remains for himself the only possible value, a kind of “narcissist against his will”. We also believe that narcissism is not an external, but an internal factor of social processes that constitutes the motives and interests of the participants in these processes. While agreeing with the thesis about the connection between narcissistic culture and postmodernity, we believe that it is not a “young culture” opposite to mass society. On the contrary, narcissistic culture is the culture of a mass society that has gone further along the path of secularism, post-traditionalism and humanism, just as postmodernity is called late, far-reaching modernity by such sociologists as E. Giddens, U. Beck, Ju. Habermas.

This article continues the discussion of the phenomenon of modern culture published in the paper by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Implications for Education, Science and Politics”. Arguments are presented for those consequences that lead culture to new states and guide thinking to explain the efforts needed to strengthen it in the role of developing us.

The judgments are based on a sense-genetic conception of culture that eliminates the naïve identity between the concepts of ‘cultural’, ‘civilized’, ‘cultivated’, ‘ethical’, ‘aesthetic’, ‘high’ and other assessments of specific properties of human behavior. The method of deriving consequences from judgments is based on the dialectical regularities of the development of living wholes and the products of their activity.

For the sake of continuing the semantic line of the original article, an attempt is made to rely on the phenomena of narcissism disclosed therein to see in them the signs of the future, the approach of which one could rejoice in without demonstrating its quite understandable experiences as an ugly form of the value landscape of modernity. In this sense, the idea, not developed but sown by the authors, that “narcissistic culture” brings to the world high diversity that can serve as a stimulus for the beginning of a new round of human development is supported here. There is a reason for this thought. They point to the approaching of gracious time when anarchic individualism will develop into another form of long-term sustainable coexistence of people under conditions of heterogeneity of values and interests. These conclusions make it possible to outline the contours of the tasks that need to be solved now in order to multiply this grace.

The article examines the influence of the phenomenon of conformism on the formation of an artistic image in the Soviet classical choreographic art on the example of the creative path of the outstanding Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova. The author analyses the phenomenon of conformism in the Soviet artistic sphere and considers the conditions of its origin and development. Using the dialectical method of research, the author makes an attempt to analyze the phenomenon of conformity from a neutral position and determine its role in creating an artistic image. The biographical method of research makes it possible to establish the contribution of a particular conformist artist to the formation of a single art form – Soviet classical choreographic art. The author comes to the conclusion that artists in the course of their creative activity can consciously adhere to the form of conformal behavior as a certain strategy to achieve their creative goals, which can contribute to the creation of masterpieces and the development of art.

The article discusses the methodological problems one faces while working with the feature films in research on Soviet daily urban life. In the cultural anthropology of Soviet society, three methodological concerns should be highlighted. First, feature films are rarely thought of as providing reliable data and play marginal role in anthropological research. Second, the study of Soviet cultural politics in general and feature films in particular, requires bringing diverse disciplines in humanities in a synthesis. Third, the apparent lack of specific methodological guidelines for such analysis can be explained by the ongoing controversies in the theory of cinema and competing approaches to film studies. We found that although in the anthropology of Soviet society feature films are seen as an effective instrument of culture politics, there are but a few cases of studies focusing on feature films. At the same time the expressive potential of cinema and the viewer’s perceptions make films an important source for studying daily city life. On the one hand, the visual imagery of such films contains elements of urban life that are familiar to the viewer and thus provide a context that is understandable and intuitively legible. On the other hand, through the use of various dramatic and cinematographic techniques, certain norms of urban life are established in regard to daily practices, for instance, showcasing desirable images of urban dwellers.  Therefore, analysis of feature films can shed light both on the reality of urban life and on its norms constructed in accordance with the goals of culture politics.  In order to distinguish these two types of representations of urban living, it is necessary to take into account the conventions of the cinematic language evolved in different periods of Soviet history; the key points of culture policy; the actual social and economic opportunities enjoyed by Soviet urban dwellers. Therefore, findings in the field of film studies, culture studies and history of Soviet society provide the necessary context for the analysis of Soviet cinema as an anthropological source. Semiotics and deconstruction are among the main approaches to the study of elements of the cinematic language and mechanisms underlying the construction of ideological messages that these elements convey. In this study, we relied on protocol schemes developed by Helmut Korte as a methodological tool for film analysis.

The article analyzes the characteristic features of the Dutch Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. During this period, a movement of "patriots" appeared in the Republic of the United Provinces, who in their activities paid great attention to the education of the people, as well as to the school reform and children education. Educational societies and social clubs were formed, uniting people of different social background, engaged in the discussion of pressing socio-political issues. Under the influence of the pan-European Enlightenment movement, such authors as Jan Floris Martinet appeared in Holland, who promoted teaching children the natural sciences and humanities not in the form of traditional lectures in the classroom, but in the form of a conversation between a teacher and a student during an excursion or travel. Of particular importance to the Dutch enlighteners was the experience and writings of German philanthropists, who founded new schools in Germany - philanthropinums. A characteristic feature of the Dutch Enlightenment was the emphasis on family education in the formation of modern man. This was reflected, in particular, in the work of the poet Hieronymus van Alphen, as well as in the increased interest in women's education during this period.

The article is devoted to the consideration of some aspects of creativity in the context of its essential and conceptual involvement in the educational process. Creativity is a social, cultural and psychological process, but both in the industrial and in the post-industrial paradigm, the educational system is in a subordinate position. Human development as self-development is always a creative act. It is impossible to force a person to be creative: creativity, self-actualization, responsibility should grow “from below”, and not descend in the form of command directives “from above”. In order for creativity to become the norm of the educational process, it is necessary to organize it in such a way that all its participants can fully realize themselves in it as individuals. The “hidden” level of creativity, included in the considered model “Four-C”, reveals the space of creative goal-setting, activities and behavior that trigger mechanisms for realizing creative potential and the ability to adequate, dynamic, flexible response to emerging problems, overcoming arising difficulties, mobilizing internal resources of a  person. At the same time, the rationality of the creative process, in which a person is able to penetrate, a particular object of his activity is also determined, accepting it in universal, substantial characteristics, disobjectifying, and not simply using it in a purely external way. Systemic creativity seems impossible without a personal component, but personal creativity is reproduced and funded by the system. The educational system forms an organic unity of creative work and creativity. Decay, disequilibrium, uncertainty, loss in new circumstances at the same time generate and actualize creativity as a response to new challenges, as the only possible way to solve permanently emerging new non-trivial problems, since traditional and classic methods do not help much. Thus, the education system, on the one hand, can be a more or less suitable space for realizing the creative potential of a person, and on the other hand, it itself produces a synthesis of personal and systemic creativity.

The article contains a response to the previously published (Ideas and Ideals, 2021, vol. 13, iss. 3, pt. 1, pp. 84–102.) article by P. A. Orekhovsky and V. I. Razumov “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Consequences for Education, Science and Politics”. The author considers that the definition of culture as a narcissistic is an effective metaphor that allows to conceptualize a general tendency that now manifests itself in a number of outwardly disparate phenomena. The ethos of modern culture is the self-centeredness of its representatives, the organization and assessment of reality in relation to this center as a natural attitude. The article suggests some of the possible directions for the development of the concept. The foundations of narcissistic culture go back to the demassification of production and devaluation of objective knowledge in information dynamics. The author traces the connection between the spirit of narcissistic culture and the development of subject-practical knowledge (systematized and didactically formalized experience) as a special epistemic type and a kind of alternative to classical scientific knowledge. The article indicates the problems associated with the parallel functioning of two types of knowledge in the educational system. Another natural consequence of the onset of narcissistic culture is radical formalization of the education system, since demonstration and positioning in this type of culture are more important in comparison with the real content. In this regard, the author notes an increasing gap between the circulation of information in communication flows and the achievement of the knowledge by their participants. The generic sign of knowledge is consistency, which, among other things, involves the establishment of meaningful relationships between areas of knowledge that form both the general and professional picture of the world. Constant transformation of the organizational framework of education, controlled by formal signs, destroys, firstly, these relationships. In addition, the author evaluates pseudo-scientific knowledge as one of the manifestations of narcissistic culture. The traditional foundation of the pseudo-science is an intermediate level of education, which connects a reverence towards science with an inability to assess the content of scientific ideas. This foundation is complemented in a narcissistic culture by a general belief in the justification of any views and the sufficiency of one’s own opinion in any case. At the same time, the narcissistic culture has its own resources for growth, and the author sees the opportunity to use them, including the educational practice.

A response to the article by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Consequences for Education, Science and Politics” is proposed. Agreeing with the theses of this article, the author offers a look at the problems posed from the standpoint of institutional and communication approaches. This approach seems methodologically justified and no less relevant, since the problems posed require a deeper explanation. It is shown that narcissism as a special cultural phenomenon is not only a factor external to the subjects, but is also a factor affecting class and group interests. Narcissistic culture should not be recognized as an object of manipulation, since it decisively affects state institutions, as well as social, economic, political and spiritual spheres. The ability of any cultural phenomenon to orient the state towards a person and his spiritual development is also expressed in the possibility of disorientation. It is proposed to consider narcissistic culture as a result of the influence of the theory of separation of powers introduced into the domestic state-building, which does not always contribute to the preservation of the state’s right to identity, dissimilarity and originality. The choice of such a principle of state development can be explained by the aesthetic ideal and the desire for beauty and perfection. At the same time, ignoring the influence of narcissistic culture on the relations of executive, legislative and judicial functions of state power, it is impossible to determine the state of group and class interests and the ways of further development of the state, security of its citizens. The influence of narcissistic culture on the activities of state institutions and authorities does not contribute to their consolidation and unification to solve current problems and ensure the real public interests of modern society and each of its members. The culture of narcissism, being a complex social phenomenon, has affected almost all spheres of human existence; from the psychological foundations of intimate relationships to the philosophical understanding of the structure of society. Personalization, narcissism, and the experience of inner emptiness are accompanied by depression, cruelty, indifference, lack of mercy and reverence for the world around them. The connection between narcissism and the materialization of thinking, the influence of the philosophy of science and technology on interference in human nature and its habitat is substantiated. The ways of getting out of narcissistic captivity and filling the deficit of a favorable attitude to oneself are proposed. The author concludes that youth, one of the properties of narcissistic culture, is a strong external factor capable of restoring the ability to live objectively here and now.

Abstract

The subject of this article is the concepts, method and cultural theses contained in the article by Orekhovsky P.A., Razumov V.I. “The Onset of Narcissistic Culture: Consequences for Education, Science, Politics”, published in the 13th volume of the journal “Ideas and Ideals” (No. 3, Part 1, 2021). The authors’ arbitrary use of the basic concepts of ‘high’ culture and ‘narcissistic’ culture is shown. The philosophical methodology in the article is basically absent and replaced by a kind of ‘cultural method’, the essence of which is similar to a postmodern game of concepts, where everything is connected with everything and can be explained as the author pleases.

The main statements of the authors are subjected to critical analysis, namely:

1) the criterion of ‘high’ culture is recognition by the majority of humanity;

2) the mass culture of the twentieth century, contrary to the criticism of philosophers, is a high culture;

3) organization of life and leisure in an industrial capitalist society is an example of a rational organization of life;

4) the service of the spiritual production institutions to the people is an ordinary, banal factor of mass culture in general (including Western);

5) in modern culture there has been an ‘epochal shift’ towards social narcissism;

6) individualism in entrepreneurship, the destruction of classical standards of hierarchy and discipline in education, the transformation of politics into a theater with the support of the ‘silent majority’ and the absence of protest moods, the popularity of a healthy lifestyle are signs of an inevitably narcissistic culture;

7) ‘cultural (or social) narcissism’ can be ‘healthy’.

In conclusion, the thesis is substantiated that a more accurate psychoanalytic definition of the social trends of modern culture will not be narcissism, but necrophilia, which manifests itself in the preference of the dead, soulless and mechanistic, orderly - to all living, rampantly growing, disordered and uncontrolled.