Ideas and Ideals

The student’s movement in the 1960s in the Novosibirsk State University (NGU), the longest open legal student’s movement of the Soviet period, is analyzed in this article.  The previous publications on this subject do not present the movement in its entirety, nor properly reflect the nature of the phenomenon. The civil movement in Akademgorodok (the Academytown) and, in particular, at the NGU was a by-product of the famous Siberian experiment. Nowadays, this by-product is quite topical in search for the best strategy of social change. The article reconstructs and analyses the preconditions and factors of the student’s movement, as well as the spectrum and directions of its political activities: self-organization and self-management, club activities, participation in choosing the Rector, protection of student political and academic freedoms, preservation of the autonomy of the university, etc. The conclusions about the nature of the movement are made based on numerous memoirs and available documents.

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.

The article "Russian Universities and the Russian Intelligentsia" was written at the request of Inna Kizhner to work with students. According to Inna, it was in 1996, when she was working with a group of economists. She might be wrong. I remember that year very well: A.I. Fet was in America for a long time and returned to Russia only in December. Apparently, he started writing this article not earlier than in 1997. He wrote about half of the text at once up to the chapter "Russian Universities before the Revolution and the Emergence of the Russian Intelligentsia," and then he gave it up for a few years. At some moment, Inna reminded him of her request. A.I. Fet half-heartedly returned to the writing of his manuscript, having marked in it that it is necessary to insert a certain section from "Instinct." At that time, he was absorbed in the work on the book, but, yielding to Inna’s insistence he wrote the last half, ending it with the words "Russian universities, Russian science and science education will have to be rebuilt. We need to overcome this tragedy quietly. You cannot be angry with these swindlers: they do not know what they do". As such, the article was ready in 2001; then A. I. Fet added the chapter "The Russian Intelligentsia" from "Instinct", prefacing it with a small foreword.

The article analyzes G.D. Gachev’s reflection of philosophical thought genesis in its ethnic and cultural conditionality. The authors believe research experience of G.D. Gachev to be the implementation of methodological directions by Moscow logic study group to update the genesis of knowledge not on the basis of formal logic but content genetic logic. G.D. Gachev considers that the form and content of philosophical thought emerge in the bosom of national culture and preserve its characteristics.

In the article the author considers the tendencies of transformation of human life in the conditions of permanent sociocultural complexity. The social structure becomes more and more complicated, saturated with knowledge and information and a human being at the same time falls apart into functional subsystems – modules. Getting adjusted to the new conditions of sociocultural complexity a person risks to lose his/her ontological status. In the article, using the idea of modularity, the author describes the image of sociocultural complexity and the place of a person in the emerging conditions. The author comes to the conclusion, that a modern person, adapting to sociocultural complexity, turns into a «framework» construction comprised of «modules», deprived of any independent ontological status.

The author considers melancholy and its companions "anguish and fear", which play an important role in the formation of personality. He also examines melancholy as a state of mind, not a diagnosis, which affects the human perception of the world, when a number of opportunities for self-actualization are open before a person. Each historical period has its own emotional ways of expressing feelings in the state of melancholy either by one person or a society as a whole. Also the article analyzes the historical problems of the appearance of melancholy, its symptoms, feelings, which at one time was considered to be a depression, in another time - hopeless despair, anguish, grief, sorrow of mind, in today's world it is considered to be "the twenty-first century plague."

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon "aestheticization of politics". The authors present political aesthetics within the boundaries of "symbolic politics" concept. "Symbolic politics", as a special kind of political communication, fits into the modern context of political life "virtualisation". The aesthetic mode of politics perception is viewed by the authors as socio-cognitive practices that are relevant to modern standards and principles of rationality. The paper studies the discourse of an "information war" in the context of correlative coherence of aesthetic and pragmatic elements of symbolic politics.

The article focuses on the modernism/postmodernism terms definition. The author conceptualizes the two terms in the three theoretical frames. Firstly the dichotomy of modernism/postmodernism is described in the context of artistic practice and aesthetic programs. Secondly the two notions are analyses as the stages of cultural evolution. Thirdly the dyad is comprehended as the two ways of world understanding. The core issue in the differentiation between modernism and postmodernism, in the author’s opinion, is the category of integrity. The article is addressed to philosophers, specialists in cultural studies and aesthetics, cultural scientists and educators.

The article focuses on research of the language of architectural forms. The author considers the language of architecture as the artificial language living under the same laws of syntax and semantics as a natural language. The researcher’s attention is paid to simultaneity of the language of architecture perception as its characteristic feature, in contrast to linearity of natural language, which is perceived sequentially. The author considers the interdependency of the language dynamics of architectural forms and the historical period of their existence as well as social and political structure of the society. It is highlighted, that the language of architecture serves as a tool of a person’s orientation in space and as one of the forms of practical activities organization. Architecture is the art which combines not only decorative and esthetic functions, but primarily the pragmatic one.

The article is devoted to identifying the lessons of national history in the context of the processes of transformation of history education in the XIX-XX and XX-XXI centuries. Their relevance is linked with the development of modern historical culture and the problem of formation of historical consciousness and self-consciousness of youth. The theoretical foundation of the study is the results of a comparative analysis of undertaken investigations on the issue of school history education in the conditions of social transformations. The empirical basis is the results of research performed by the author on the problem of historical consciousness and self-awareness of school youth in 2014-2015. Theoretical and practical importance of identifying the lessons of history is being revealed during the process of reforming and further development of national history education, which is a factor of historical culture and socialization. The author presents the identified trends of the historical culture formation, historical consciousness and self-consciousness of the post-Soviet generation, philosophical, methodological principles of teaching history in schools in accordance with the contents and the condition of historical consciousness and self-consciousness of modern students.