Ideas and Ideals

This article is a continuation of the article "Russian Universities and the Russian Intelligentsia" Part 1, published in this journal, №3, 2016. The author discusses the problem of the Russian intelligentsia formation and the role, which the Russian university community played in the process. He also demonstrated the origins of the "groundlessness", which has always distinguished the Russian intelligentsia, and analyzed the reasons for its invariable opposition to any authority. The author proves the thesis that the revolutionaries of all stripes represented a semi-intelligentsia: instead of thick books, these people read the brochures, and they replaced the philosophy with the party ideology. Semi-intelligentsia played a leading role in all French Revolutions, and later in the Russian one. The article analyzes the destiny of Russian universities during the years of Soviet power. The years of "stagnation" meant already the agony of Russian universities, which had lost all the impulses to scientific activities. The experimenters were without instruments, theorists were without books ─ they were isolated from the world; they were under a bureaucratic ban. The author gives a brilliant analysis of the role and significance of the Russian intelligentsia in the Russian and world history. In his opinion, the main distinctive characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia was unselfishness. In the West, “freedom” and “equality” meant protecting group and class interests; in Russia, however, these words were understood as “brotherhood” with all oppressed people without any self-interest.

The subject of this issue is a question on a substance of every being, its specific features and conditions of its cognition and existence. This is an attempt to systematize Aristotle's point of view about this problem, presented in different fragments of his treatises "Physics", "Metaphysics", "Categories", "On the Soul". Aristotle pointed out the fallacy of identifying the substance and any beings. He explained, that not any being can be considered as a substance, though sometimes it's rather difficult to distinguish them. Aristotle offered different classifications of kinds of substance and examined their main features and conditions of their being. Two approaches about comprehension of substances are compared in this article. Socrates and Plato’s position is based on the principle of the direct speculative comprehension. Aristotle offered the system of categories as the universal way for description and cognition of the essence of any substance. To be means to be as a definite "what" in a completeness of its "whatness". Everything can exist only as a definite something. Instead, a problem of possibility of changes and movement of substances is discussed in a comparison of positions of Aristotle and Plato. After all we can see the being of substances not to be a simple static presence of empty pure forms, no having any material substratum. They presented a unity of the intention to achieve its entelecheia and achievement of one, i.e. a unity of the goal, process and result.

"The book is dedicated to the memory of an outstanding Russian philosopher Aleksandr Pavlovich Ogurtsov (1936 - 2014); his friends, colleagues and students, with whom he felt free to live and think, contributed to this book. Philosophy for A. P. Ogurtsov was the ultimate method of the relationship between a man and the world, themes meanings of this attitude to the world, society, and culture, to himself and to the Other. He paid special attention to the Philosophy of Science, which, as his friends say, did not even slightly resemble the positivist universal taxonomy which has been rediscovered anew today and students, undergraduates and graduate students are forced to study it. The main idea was the sense of a "mainland layer", the historical position of any fundamental scientific knowledge, which manifests itself in logic, and it might be open to the philosopher and closed to the classifier. The way of A. P. Ogurtsov’s thoughts was the way of his life ─ it is not by chance that many of his articles are devoted to his being a philosopher. "

Representatives of the Russian Neo-Eurasianism, trying to root this intellectual tradition, turned to the identification and analysis of the Eurasian motives in the Russian classical literature of XIX century. This research assumes the presence of the structural components in literary texts that correspond to the Eurasian vision of Russia as the "Middle World" in the East-West dichotomy. The author of the article, using the method of structural analysis, reveals the presence of such components in Nikolai Chernyshevsky novel "What Is to Be Done?" One of them is represented in the structural core of the novel in the form of clear anthropological oppositions using two narrative functions: appearance and character (temperament) of the heroes. Another component is Rakhmetov, one of the main characters of the novel. The author comes to the conclusion that Rakhmetov is the first image of a Eurasian in Russian literature. At the same time, the ideology of this image, imposed to the reader by the author, appears to be inconsistent with the art material used for its construction.This is due to the fact that Chernyshevsky himself was not a Eurasian, he was a typical Westerner, who believed that oriental components in Russian culture hinder the development of Russia and they have to be suppressed.

The paper analyzes issues of how regional studies and allied disciplines react upon each other, and what are the main objectives and principles of economic zoning and classifying regions of various sizes accepted in economic science. From the economic point of view, regions are classified mostly proceeding from the purposes of management and analytics. The paper discusses the reasons of economic imperialism, i.e. invasion of economists into the adjacent fields of science. The major feature of an economic approach in historical - economic studies and regional ones is application of economic models, quantitative methods, and their own definitions. The paper presents a brief analysis of the studies concerning Siberia and its regions made by the Institute of Economics and Industrial Engineering of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science in the Soviet and post-Soviet time. Siberia has been an object of cross-disciplinary research at least for two hundred years. The paper also compares the key ideas and approaches of the recent Siberia case-studies carried out by specialists of various sciences. The concept of megaregion from the point of view of economical science is discussed, and the corresponding directions of further research of Siberia are set.

In the interview Professor S. D. Valentey talks about the importance and perpetual exigency of Marxism as a major scientific direction. He also speaks about the loss of our Marxist school and the related to this loss issues in economic science and economic education. The author analyzes the problems of thrifty production, the new quality of economic growth, sociology of population. He also points out the importance of the conducted studies in this field during the Soviet period and characterizes the specifics of Russian capitalism. The interview also touches upon the issue of the pseudo-education and purchase of diplomas. Professor highlights the necessity of a new generation of economists coming to office, free from neo-liberal and other clichés. S. D. Valentey argues that economic science cannot be based on the reading of books and journal articles only, though it is also very important, without it there is no science. Economics is based on field studies. The task today is a field research of the specific real economy, real economic processes.

The article considers the problem of citizen participation in the political process associated with social communication difficulties. An individual is moving away from the social system, due to the obtained negative experiences after the confrontation with the latent component of political participation. The author analyzes the historical characteristics of the personal identity and public opinion ratio. He also highlights the relationship of political participation and family traditions. State pressure on the individual consciousness turns into a hidden form of social loneliness. The more radical a political doctrine is the more negative attitude to social loneliness it demonstrates. Enforcement of social lifestyle, active participation in mutual social activities form settled fear before the State, a group, possessing the right to coercion, the world view regulation, and to the invasion of privacy. Political changes transform the kinds of social participation, values and meanings of social activities. Social distance may be considered as a potential prerequisite of a conflict between an individual and a society. We can speak about a new phenomenon, hidden social loneliness, i.e. a gap between intrinsic beliefs and demonstrated behavior. The feeling of hidden social loneliness transforms a person into an ostentatious performer; it makes a person feel forced publicity. A political system in some cases can hinder the development of social communication.

The article is devoted to the problem of an alliance of a man and a machine. We find this motive in the texts by such theorists as Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Manuel DeLanda and others. To clarify the idea of machine enslavement and the modeled way of emancipation by constituting the transindividual collectives or technical exodus, we appeal to Robert M. Pirsig’s novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” which content appears to be close to the mentioned theorists’ ideas. Pirsig, as well as James Graham Ballard, the author of a brilliant novel "Crash," where an original model of perverse machine sexuality was presented, denies a suspicious glance at the techniques and rethinks the relationship between a man and a machine. In this sense, his work can refer to anti-Heideggerian trend. Gilbert Simondon is a bright representative of this trend in philosophy. The ideas of the authors, whose concepts are considered in this paper, urge us to take into account a relatively simple idea: not the technical objects are a source of human alienation at all; a lot depends on the approach to the car.

The round table participants discussed a number of interrelated questions: how can we evaluate the relationship between the Church and society in Russia at the present stage? What is causing the obstacles for the dialogue between the Church and other social groups in modern Russia? Is there a possibility for such a dialogue in modern Russian society? What is the actual and possible role of intelligentsia in the formation of a neutral space for such a dialogue? The participants discussed different aspects of the problem: the history of the church and society relations, the problems of these relations at the present stage, the role of the church in the life of modern Russian society, the problem of the dialogue between the Church and atheists. The participants also discussed the burning problems of the Church's participation in the formation and education of youth, issues of influence of the church on the processes of cultural development, the acute problems of the fight between the Orthodox church and religious extremism, the danger of which influence, especially on young people, is often underestimated. In the final analysis, there is a multi-dimensional picture of the relationship between the institution of the Church and civil society represented by different social groups.

The reciprocity between religion and culture is the key theme of the book by I. N. Morozova "Religion and Culture: the Cognitions of Acceptance and Reciprocity". In modern socio-humanitarian discourse there is an urgent need in elucidation of the logical-conceptual, thematic and content subject areas, where theology and a secular worldview can be the participants of the dialogue (keeping the distinction in their original spiritually-aimed orientations). The ideals and values of classical culture form one of the foundations for Christianity and secular culture. The origins of tensions are in the relations between religious and secular components in modern Russian education, the eclecticism of their combination. The author also introduces into the scientific circulation the original texts of foreign scientists-naturalists, who are speculating on cultural dimensions of the sacred; famous sociologists; religious scholars (S. Kaufman, H. Casanova, L. Woodhead, etc.), and theologians. The author considers post-secular culture at the stage of its denial of the rhetoric of confrontation with religion. The author collected and summarized the significant scientific and publicistic material, revealing the uncertain picture of the Russian society ̓ s searching for the necessary consensus in the relationship of religion and culture after Perestroika.