Ideas and Ideals

The article investigates the characteristics of socio-cultural manifestations of theoretical knowledge about socialization. The author identifies these manifestations with the theoretical images, which have three attributes. First, theoretical images are the results of (re-)construction of theoretical discourse which appropriately represents the main traits of reality. Second, the mentioned images correspond with the types of scientific and philosophic rationality, i. e. classical, non-classical, post-nonclassical rationality. Third, theoretical images rely on different versions of normative, interpretative or normative-interpretative methodological perspectives. The author argues that the listed attributes should be given a high priority while studying knowledge about socialization as phenomena of socio-cultural reality.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called "people of culture" in two areas of Eurasia - Europe and East Asia. They appear as a product of cultural exchange between the "South" (the Mediterranean, China proper) and the "North", inhabited by people of a different mentality and economy. We are talking about a different perception of the so-called ancient culture, that is, the configuration of culture that developed in antiquity and became paradigmatic for the whole metaregion ("Christian World", East Asian Civilization Zone). As examples of such people are taken the largest figures of medieval culture I. S. Eriugena, who left a deep trace in scholasticism, and a member of the imperial clan Yēlǜ in the nomadic Chitan Empire Liao (907-1125) Tuǜ. People with unconventional looks on culture and complex destiny, they demonstrated a peculiar attitude to southern culture not as a form and means of education, but as a complex of ideas and recipes for building a new political and cultural reality.

The philosophy of N. Berdyaev is a restless movement of thought in the space with three conceptual coordinates. The person, creativity, freedom in their unity constitute the universe of Spirit, define the dynamics, the existential orientation of genuine philosophical thinking. The philosophical thought creatively confirms the being of a free person by means of the ideal man’s image formation: the ideal man is opposed to the evil kingdom of necessity, oversteps the limits and overcomes the empirical world. According to Berdyaev, the ethical quintessence of the European culture is three images of the ideal man – the sage, the saint and the knight. This article traces the sources of the knight ideal’s interpretation in the texts of the Russian thinker. The romantic idea of knighthood as “an eternal task of human spirit” demanded overcoming of early Slavophiles’ conceptualizations of knighthood, but Berdyaev valued these authors very highly for their aspiration to holistic understanding of Spirit’s life, to the harmony between the internal and the external. In his publications of 1904-1907 N. Berdyaev outlines two lines of knighthood’s idealization as an embodiment of medieval mystical Christianity’s depth and the noble human type. The first line is connected with the discussion about “new religious consciousness”, D.S. Merezhkovsky's idea about metaphysical primordiality and a religious equivalence of "spirit" and "flesh". The second line is determined by Berdyaev’s treatment of K.N. Leontyev's heritage where the historical knighthood represents itself as an alternative of the bourgeois commonness and mediocrity, vulgarity and philistinism.

The article is devoted to the anniversary of the birth (370 years ago) and the date of death (300 years ago) of the outstanding German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, jurist, historian, linguist, and diplomat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz undertake a creative synthesis of science, philosophy and theology, producing a unique philosophical system. The foundation of this system is constituted by the doctrine of preestablished harmony. In all areas in which he worked, Leibniz made great discoveries. It inherited the gift of synthesizing the disparate views of different thinkers on the basis of the original methodological principle based on the universality and rigor of philosophical arguments in their logical sequence. Leibnitz is also a great theologian and originator of the profound ethical system. Ethical optimism of Leibniz's teleology has Christian religious worldview as its basis.

The article analyzes the stylistic and linguistic features of the so-called “Brezhnev’s diaries”. Within the framework of the “linguistic turn in the history” methodology, it attempts to identify the relationship between the specificity of Brezhnev’s writing and his personality. The authors pay special attention to the verification of the Brezhnev’s records genre which is defined as a "log book". The article analyzes the nature of the records in comparison with Brezhnev’s speaking. Brezhnev was known as a skillful, spontaneous storyteller, he had a quick reaction, a multiple choice of epithets – features, alien to the standardized, public-political vocabulary of Soviet newspapers and public speeches of party and state leaders. It was the other way round with written speech. It was totally different. There was no place for jokes and improvisation. Even in his personal diaries he used the standardized, stilted language, which he used to speak working as a party leader, commissar. The authors come to the conclusion that Brezhnev acquired the “Soviet newspeak”, which actually became his second nature. The absence of any signs of deliberate design of the text in Brezhnev’s personal records indicates that the text is really a reflection of the personality of the General Secretary.  

The history of Koreans living in CIS countries shows the unity of regular processes of transformation of their culture in different periods of residence in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and today the CIS. The author distinguishes three main stages of the history of CIS Koreans, in accordance with the main areas of their residence in different historical periods. The current stage is characterized by the final formation of the Eurasian community of Koreans, scattered all over the CIS space. At the same time they preserve the unified cultural markers, as well as common historical memory. Eurasian identity implies prevalence of supranational factor over the national one in ethno-cultural identity. In the case with the CIS Koreans the national factor isn’t the cornerstone of their life activities, that is reflected, for example, in their position not to insist on the forming of national regions or creating other territories on the national basis. The article deals with the process of transforming the culture of CIS Koreans, the impact of important historical events on the loss of elements of their traditional culture. Today, in the context of the Eurasian reintegration processes in the post-Soviet space the developing a new concept of a supranational identity is becoming urgent. This concept would be able to fully reflect the current processes. CIS Koreans are an example of the formation of the Eurasian identity.

The article proves the thesis that the philosophy of company is one of the forms of existence of practical philosophy. The author considers the existing ways to formulate the philosophy of company and to define the main components in its composition, with examples from the practice of operating companies. The article argues the thesis about the existence of philosophical knowledge at different levels, determines the place of practical philosophy in the system of philosophical knowledge and reveals its main characteristics. It is shown that practical philosophy performs the basic function of philosophy and can exist as an individual philosophy, a philosophy of the collective subject and macro-groups. The fundamental needs of person and society, which necessitate the existence of practical philosophy, are identified; and the philosophy of company is described as the way to meet these needs at the level of the collective subject. The author concludes that the form and content of the company's philosophy as a whole exactly correspond to the format of the practical philosophy. On the basis of general philosophical ideas about the nature and methods of the philosophical knowledge (recourse to the ultimate ground of being, systematization, unity of different topics, appeal to the due) recommendations to the construction of the company's philosophy are offered.

The work of Alan Garner (b. 1934), one of the most significant contemporary English writers, consistently ranks the local myth of the writer's birthplace, Alderley Edge in Cheshire East. The evolution of the plot development can be seen well in the trilogy that began in 1960 (translated into Russian novel "The Magic Stone Brezingamena" and "Moon on the eve Gomrata") and completed in 2012 (untranslated novel «Boneland»). The story follows the adventures of a brother and sister who settled on a farm Alderley Edge. At an early stage story is built like a fairy tale, with contrasting humanized space truss wild woods and the hollow hill. Borrowing characters, motifs and themes of the epic tales leads to fragmentation and imposition of functions of heroes guarding different places. Chief among them, the magician fron the traditional fairy tale, Cadellin works within the boundaries of the Arthurian myth, protecting the cave with a sleeping king, the role of guardians of other places assigned to other heroes. In searching for the future integrity the author refuses to use ready-made fairy tale and epic models. In the final part of the trilogy keeper of the place becomes an "ancestral character" whose existence lasts until there is a race. The leading method of constructing the plot becomes a parallelism of events that occur with the personifications of the ancestral hero. Writer refuses to opposite locales (humanized and wild, positive and negative, and so on) and eras (ancient and modern, old and new magic, etc.), fusing them together and saying peculiar to primeval consciousness syncretism of perception, the only correct view of the world. Ancestral hero, shaman, guardian and creator of the myth controls all habitats, making all living space cultured at its mythological development. Bearing structures of the local myth becomes a kind of continuity, mastering the same place over successive eras.

The article aims to identify the details of the internal structure of the Russian civilization in the aggregate of its constituent elements: the East Slavic, the Finno-Ugric, the Turkic-Mongol, etc. We correlated the analysis of provisions of the civilizational and geopolitical concepts with the specific character of historical experience of the development of Russia as a local civilization. The author highlights three stages of understanding the ethnic diversity role in the development of the Russian civilization: 1) Pre-Eurasian (1703-1907), 2) Eurasian (1907-1968), 3) Post-Eurasian, or contemporary. The article reveals the structural-genetic role of ethnic diversity in the development of the Russian civilization. The development of civilizational processes is connected to the qualitative complication of civilizational self-organization mechanisms. It implies transition from civilizational symbiosis to synthesis, which is accompanied by strengthening economic ties among ethnic groups, and transformation of less developed economies into more developed ones (preserving mixed economy). We propose the model of civilizational synthesis in which the ethnoses are "structural elements", stable interethnic interactions are "connections", and civilization itself is "substance". Two stages of genesis of the Russian civilization are highlighted: 1) Slavic-Finno-Ugric symbiosis under the political dominant of the eastern Slavs (pre- and early- civilizational stage, VIII-XV centuries); 2) Synthesis of two compounds, Eastern-European (Slavic-Finno-Ugric) and Turkic-Mongol (nomadic) under demographic, political, and cultural domination of Russians (XVI-XX centuries).

The author considers spatial forms of everyday culture of Siberian merchants. The aim of the article is to show the possibility of applying research tools of environmental approach in cultural studies. The article is based on the materials of investigations of the Russian urbanists, historians of architecture and design, art and cultural studies, as well as photographs, which preserved the image of Siberian trade arcades. The author analyzes the shopping passages in Siberia from the point of view of urban interior categories. Passages vertically stood out from the surrounding buildings of commercial organizations. They dominated other buildings in size and architectural design. The formation of the visual image of the passage as a special space contributed to the architecture of the building, and the angular accents of the main entrance, and substantive design of urban parterre. The interior method was used to create the atmosphere of homelike place. The size of the windows corresponded to the size of the flight of the building, that created the image of arcades. Different signs in the form of labels, names and emblems of small shops shaped the perception of a definite business establishment in its integrity. Thus, shopping arcades of Siberian merchants in the context of cultural studies are treated not just as a professional space, but also as an open space for buyers, their everyday interactions in the structure of everyday routine of the Siberian merchants, where there was space for a merchant city, merchant's house etc.