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Тези
апрель 2019
Abstract / Full Text

David Zilberman in ‘Orthodox Ethics and the Matter of Communism’ (1977) explained the coherence between Marx’s and Russian Orthodox Christians’ ideas. It is clear that the very essence of communism is collectivism that is the main cultural feature of Russian mentality. It is not surprising that the idea of saving world from “greedy” bankers (individualists, capitalists) grew up and has been blossoming in the modern Russian reality. Vladimir Bibihin in the early 90-th was frightened by his dream about “Orthodox army of the Soviet Union at the Red square” – the dream realized after his death. ‘The Holy Russia’ inspires mobs and separate persons for saving world and frightens businessmen who are afraid of authoritarianism and planned economy terror. But what is the ideology of that political movement, or collective psychos, what is their ‘holiness’?

What are the relations between Matter of Communism and Spirit of Protestantism? We should not build walls. Dialog might help to prevent social disasters. But it is impossible when one side tends to “save” the other one pretending to be the only right. Is Ukraine individualistic or procommunist? What is people’s attitude to the private property and human rights, to Protestantism and Orthodox Moscow Christianity?

The conflict had happened, the war has been going on, but the battle will have been have no end until something special happens in the discourse, both pro-liberal and procommunist, until the changes happen in people (ideas do not exist out of minds and communication). Dichotomy of the administrative Russian totalitarianism and the free market American liberalism veils the hidden linen. That division is implemented on the level of reflexive thought, while the linen – is that of prereflexive, discoursive one. The both mentioned ideologies do not presuppose human dimension, fluidity of Ego, identification of Subject on the level of unconscious.  Protestant idea of individual redemption and the Orthodox idea of the world saving are diverse and are not transparent as they are for each other, if they are accepted in one mode and if the people stay the same. 

But they really do not stay the same, never do. People seek for immortality, as Plato said. They do not exist without that seeking. In that process they are changing their selves, facing the Other, in fact the image of the beloved. The identification with the other (the Other) in its concreteness is worth discovering. That process includes the subjectivity (that also being changed) of the researcher, who is also involved in the process of self-identification. We should discover ourselves in that way to make example for others to do the same.

We may change social space. That may be possible if the change starts from the subjective measurement. Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Lacan is the methodological line we should count on. Simple metaphysics of the moral duty and administrative order are not up to date. We humanitarian have to change our mind register from abstract to concrete. What does it mean? It means that philosophy does not have its subject, that philosophy is not a kind of knowledge, but the methodology. And as the methodology it may interrupt historians’, sociologists’, political scientists’s and our own metaphysics when they (we) get enjoying with their (our) senses (knowledge). We should do that in order to stop escalation of aggression, terror etc.

The fight for the Real in governing proclaimed by Thomas Catlaw, who had accepted Lacan’s explanation of the subjectivity and social being, may be the right way for the Russian messianic idea investigation. Kennet Gergen’s work on the sounding in social science reveals the ethics and onthology of social existence and understanding of the Other. Constructionism is the invitation for the humanitarians to teach public that specific conception, to develop the openness to the Other. Mutual understanding is the most important issue for all of us to avoid terror and the discoursive practices are the most difficult phenomenon even for social thinkers to grasp. Only immanent observation may be the right method to that purpose.

We can hardly tolerate the Real as it is. Russian idea as nothing of the notions we know (the Real of Lacan’s theory), and nothing of the notions common Russians know (who cannot grasp the tragic loneliness of the soul that suffers from the lack of God, or the Real, Being in the sense of Plato’s Tradition. We must fight for the Real in humanities to prevent new Russian (or any other) totalitarianism, we have to plunge into the Tradition (in this case Orthodox one) deeper than Russian popes do. Angst, pain, suffering for the whole world, tragic being – those are the definitions of the Orthodox Christianity – if we look at the Real. In the existential dimension, that is not the essence but the possibility to be Orthodox. The Russian idea is not one of the Holy Russia produced by different propagandists and ideologists, but by thinkers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Bibihin and Olga Sedakova.

Despite of the political experience, religion, education, gender investigations and other sociological appearances, the very point we, Ukrainians, Russians and Americans, have got is the collective memory of the Second World War. It might have similar micro features. We mean the tragedy of the people who came through the hell, the stories they tell and the special destinies of the two other after-war generations. We have the common past from the pain an suffer to construct (the Real in Elem Klimov’s movie, Tarkovsky’s “Ivanov Childhood”) and the common future to admit. Messianism is not an idol but a brave practice of the openness to the Real.

References
  1. Catlaw Thomas J. Performance Anxieties: Shifting Public Administration from the Relevant to the Real // http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2519108
  2. Gergen J. Kenneth. Realities and Soundings in Social Construction. – Harvard Colledge. − 1997
  3. Zilberman David. Orthodox Ethics and the Matter of Communism//Studies in Soviet Thought. – 1977 –№17. –Pp.349-419