Ideas and Ideals

This article analyzes a number of social and anthropological implications of the sharp increase in the flow of information, which have acquired since the mid-20th century the character of "information explosion". The authors analyze the postmodern concepts by identifying major characteristics of post-industrial society that brings these concepts together with the theories of the information society. The authors substantiate the hypothesis that, on the basis of the convergence of certain postmodern concepts with the theories of the information society there can be conceptual synthesis. The authors show that the informational approach, which is not used explicitly, is present in the works of post-modern artists as the concept of a special type of society, a society living and reproducing itself mostly in virtual reality based on mass production of sign-symbolic artifacts - signs, symbols, values and meanings, aggregated into streams of information. Information flows are the main "building material" and a resource for the construction of symbolic information and communicative space. The authors identified the following characteristics of the society after the "information explosion": there is a change in the content of communication; the symbolic world becomes increasingly unrecognizable for a human being; there is depersonalization of social codes; virtual strata appear; people experience information trauma of consciousness; human existence becomes fragmented; "information schizophrenia" sets in; "intellectual extinction" of mankind syndrome shows up; and then comes "normal anomie".

The article examines the role of a social ideal in history on the example of evolution of the perfect man image. The ideal is understood as a due thing, which allows to assess the present existing nature and to determine the direction of its development. Aspiration to the ideal, which is an essential intention of a person necessary in acquiring ideal traits of a man, is one of the driving forces of history. Every historical period constructs its own image of an ideal person and strives to get closer to it. Ideas about the perfect man have been regularly formed throughout history, this fact proves that there is a permanent innate human sense of dissatisfaction with him/herself (and with the whole world), the lack of self realization, the intention to discover their own inner identity. The first "perfect man" was a beast. In the primitive societies people conquered the “outer” beast, in Antiquity – the “inner” one. There appeared the first identity crisis as a consequence of inadequate self-esteem ("man as the measure of all things"). God was a "perfect man" of the Middle Ages. If a beast turns out to be in the inaccessible past then God is in the eternal unattainable future. So, the second identity crisis comes into existence. A Man becomes an ideal in Modern Times. There appeared a concept of a perfect man (as a real possibility). However, depriving a person of metaphysics leads to the third identity crisis. Nowadays the "perfect man", increasingly, appears to be a machine resembling a "man", devoid of human weaknesses with improved human qualities. The analogy between a human and a machine leads to the fourth identity crisis. "The new perfect man" is a man as a unique result of the development of all human culture, the synthesis of the unique and the universal.

The reforms carried out over the past fifteen years in the RF education system are not related to the discoveries in pedagogy, but to the changes in social orientations, which are imposed by external "Bologna commitments". The forcefully introduced "competence approach" to the planning of education in higher education gave rise to many difficulties, because it was actually incompatible with the Russian educational tradition. The development of "competence" rhetoric at the reporting level had almost no effect on the methodology of teaching in domestic universities, but the goals and ideals of education have radically changed. Now they are formulated not by the society and the state, but by perspective "employers", transnational corporations are usually meant by them. Instead of "comprehensive harmonious development of the personality," the competence approach actually involves preparing a person for the labor market with the subsequent sale of human qualities. Expanding of the buying and selling sphere is the result of the globalization processes, today only state sovereignties can prevent this expansion, and within traditional societies only "family and school" have to stop this expansion. The author considers this gradual transformation of traditional pedagogy into "market pedagogy" from the point of view of modern inter-civilizational confrontation. The triumphant "economic dominant" is not a universal "innovation", but the result of the expansion of Western civilization. The author substantiates the idea that introducing this competence approach, borrowing the goals and ideals from alien cultures hamper the natural development of our national educational system.

This article is dedicated to Bulgarian Bogomils’ ideology research. Bogomilism is one of the most popular and influential Christian heresies, appeared in mediaeval Bulgaria in 10^th century. Ideology, interpreted in terms of Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes as a structured sign-expressed world image, is divided into different levels. There are the Bogomils’ ideas of politics, economy, corporeality and mysticism. Bulgarian heretics’ world-view was based on religious dualism – a concept of existence of opposite fundamentals (spiritual and material in that case), with a human as their battlefield. Negation of everything material, based on religious dualism, thereby is Bogomilism’s world-view basis. The Bogomils’ revolutionary character, noted by some scholars, appeared not only in politics (denial of authorities) – this religious movement tended to a social ideal, that supposed a much deeper changes of society (created by Sathan) and human nature. The process of making of this “new human” presents as a consecutive negation of everything, connecting him with material world: from social position, property and family till his own body.

The article poses for the first time the problem of the existence of democratic and undemocratic variants of the Populist model of the reorganization of Russia. The latter, born three times in different historical epochs on the left flank of the party, can be determined by the self-designation of these forces, under the common name - as a Left-Narodnik variant of the Narodnik model of the socio-political reorganization of Russia. It is known in three of his sub-variants - the maximalist (1904-1906), the Left Socialist (1917) and the MPSR (1919-1922). The democratic Socialist-Revolutionary version of the populist model is known in three sub-variants. The most famous is the so-called. "Chernovsky", "centrist", which became a kind of "Socialist-Revolutionary orthodoxy" and formed the basis of the official doctrine of the PSR. Another sub-variant was born on the right flank of the party and is associated with the names of N.D.Avksentyev, I.I.Fondaminsky, V.V.Rudnev, M.V.Vishnyak, and others. Apparently, we can talk about the formation of one more, more right subvariant, which was forming on the right flank of the party around the newspaper "The Will of the People" (Volya Naroda) and is associated with the names of A.A.Argunov, A.I.Gukovsky, P.A.Sorokin, E.A.Stalinsky. They were ideologically close to E.K.Breško-Breshkovskaya, A.F.Kerensky, B.V.Savinkov, and others. The author believes that, in fact, the democratically oriented part of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party anticipated the ideas and path of the so-called "Swedish socialism," the path of evolutionary reforming of society along the lines of democracy and the social state, a path which was taken by many socialist and social democratic parties in post-war Europe. In Russia, the PSR took this path already in 1917 and it was this program of its transformation that was supported by the majority of the population of Russia at the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Moreover, the Socialist-Revolutionary democratic alternative started to be implemented in the framework of the laws adopted by the Constituent Assembly

This article deals with analyzing traditions from archaic societies to the modern society going through the hard crisis period being full of different risks. Speedy changes over the world are continuing to increase rapidly herewith to multiply risks for speedy achieving favourable future. The growing needs have been aggravating the destruction of harmony between a human and his mental, social and native world. The unbridgeable gap between a man and a tradition has been becoming obvious. The origin of Latin word "traditio" pays attention to education which implements continuity in society developing, and maintains culture. The analysis of examples of forming the traditions in ancient Israel, India and China, in ancient Greek policies and in Rome has revealed the importance of attitude for preserving the values keeping harmony between man’s inner world and society, and providing the balance between privacy and social life. Preserving tradition is carried out in conditions supported by culture which is certain to be the stronghold of any state. A tradition is focused on values and their transference mechanisms, and language is sure to have the priority among them. Language as a means of communication in time and space plays the paramount role keeping universal and professional knowledge for using by humanity. The etymology of loan words pays attention to the cultural and historical conditions of their emergence in a language and emphasizes the successive nature of knowledge. The tradition has been gaining the status of the basis allowing both person and society to get out of crisis.

The article gives quite an unusual view on quite usual things. The author speculates upon different, but utmost important aspects of love. He reflects on love of self, love for another human being, love for the mankind, love for the Motherland, physical love and terrestrial love. But the author doesn’t share his thoughts with the readers on parental love and love of God. The article is full of philosophical comments to literature passages, irony and curious, nontrivial, conclusions. In our opinion, the article will be of great interest to people, who are not indifferent and inclined to reflection and it can be perceived as the additional opportunity to touch eternity.

In the publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev traced two lines of knighthood’s idealization: the embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. In his book “New Religious Consciousness and Society” (1907) he added the third line, which is formed on the basis of the first two and it portrays the knight as an attractive example of overcoming a self-sufficing, depersonalized, godless state. The main theme of the book is the necessity to update Christianity and all parts of public life. Religious revival, according to Berdyaev, can be connected only with the development of a person. In the modern world the false hierarchy of values is dominating: subjective interests, relative willpower of a person forces out the higher unconditional values connected with the universal objective God’s will. The state serves as an expression of subjective human will, a product of the boundless enslaving power of one person over another. N.A. Berdyaev recognizes free theocracy as an ideal, the only morally justified form of the state. He sees an alternative to the modern false theocracy in the system of values of medieval culture - anarchical principles of feudalism and the personal knightly honor. The Russian philosopher correlates the knightly ideal of the Middle Ages with the modern epoch and convinces a reader of the necessity of its actualization. New forms of organization of public life assume a knightly war for the liberation of a person, including the liberation from violence of the state. Speaking about the mutual relationship between the individual and the state, Berdyaev joins the internal polemic with Slavophiles. He formulated his position on this question earlier, in the articles of 1903-1904. Berdyaev rejects the Slavophile idyll of the former Russia. Greatness and individuality of the nation presupposes freedom of a human being, the national spirit manifests itself not in the solution of the state problems, but in creative realization of universal tasks, common to the whole mankind.

The research is devoted to philosophical reflection on the impact of socio-cultural factors on the modern theory of communication development. The source of the observed diversity of the disunity of modern communication research primarily contains in the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon. Multidirectionality of communication studies is also a consequence of the researchers’ aptitude to the influence of certain socio-cultural factors. The article offers the challenge to outline a number of socio-cultural determinants that caused the dynamics of communication studies of the XX – the beginning of the XXI centuries and to clarify the mechanisms, procedures of their influence on the formation of the theory of communication. As a result of linguistic and chronological approach to modern communication research in the article the author traces the genesis of certain intentions of the communicative theory generated by the state of social and cultural backgrounds of the implemented communication studies. There is a revealed number of significant socio-cultural determinants based on the analysis conducted by the author, such as: a high level of internal autonomy of researchers and research dissonance of cultural and linguistic chronotopes. The impact of social and cultural events from the outside (especially in cases when the events affect the deep layers of society) is located in the same row. Actually, the purpose of the article is a factual verification of generally known terms of the socio-cultural determination of modern communication studies. As a result, we plan to designate a number of socio-cultural factors behind a range of the research intentions in the framework of the theory of communication.

The article analyses the origin and development of social topology as well as the reasons for choosing the paths of its further development. Taking into account the directions in mathematical topological thought which are defined as theoretical multiple and algebraic topology, we distinguish two main vectors in devising socio-topological views: the topology of space and the topology of form. The first is based on the works of Kurt Lewin and Pierre Bourdieu and represented as a configuration of units located in social space. The second originates from the works of Rene Tohm, which conceptualize the forms of objects and urge the research in isomorphic processes, figurativeness and equivalence of their models in a social reality context. The authors analyse the methods of applying the topology of space to modern sociological research ranging from visual physical understanding of place to abstract logical representation of the role and meaning of a social object.  They also reveal the reasons why sociologists and social philosophers have mastered and actively made use of space-topology methodology tools. The paper explains the origin of difficulty in realizing the ideas and theoretical methodological capacities of the topology of form in human and social sciences. The authors suggest and prove the conclusion that a one-sided attitude towards topology is non-productive and greatly weakens our sociological understanding, procedures and the results of topological studies of social objects