How can we stop the deadly swing of a seesaw with eight billion people and nuclear weapons on planet Earth?
After all, it would seem that two and a half thousand years ago, between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC, that is, during the Axial Age (Achsenzeit)*, when the common history of humanity began, the phenomenon of congeniality came into play. Namely, something congenial in its axial, main result happened in different places on the planet. Congenial means similar in spirit and way of thinking. It was a time of deep reflection, contemplation, and choice of path, when a philosophical and religious worldview replaced a mythological one. And in all directions, a transition to universality started to happen.
However, today, in an era of global crisis, drawing attention to something similar to such historical milestones of the «Axial Age» as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, we see a clear threat to congeniality.
As a result, why did this happen?
One answer to these questions was given in the 1950s by Hannah Arendt in her article «Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?» (Hannah Arendt. Men in Dark Times. Translated from English and German. Moscow: Moscow School of Political Studies, 2002. — p. 97)
«Humanity owes its existence not to the dreams of humanists, not to the reasoning of philosophers, and not even (at least not primarily) to political events, but almost exclusively to the technical development of the Western world.»
You can see that this is indeed the case by looking at the Wikipedia article «Chronology of human inventions.» Despite all the inevitable inaccuracies, it is striking how the number of scientific fundamental discoveries and technological inventions that characterize the modern era has increased dramatically since the 17th century. More than tenfold in three centuries. Historians usually associate the beginning of this era with the discovery of the New World by the Spaniards, the Reformation and the «glorious» English Revolution. Another important factor was the formation of a scientific picture of the world based on Copernicus’ heliocentric system, Galileo’s laws of mechanics, and Newton’s classical mechanics. It was then that the Eurocentric world emerged. And in modern times (1789−1945), the expansion of European civilization began with its intensive development of technology and engineering in other regions of the world.
Looking back on this period of undoubted success and the tragedies of the First and Second World Wars that followed, we can say with confidence that there were far more Europeans who were ready to master the achievements of science and technology than those who thought and already understood that «history had reached a point — in the words of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov — when humanity is no longer allowed to wage war.»
But let’s return to the «chronology.» At the very beginning of the 20th century, there were just over 1.5 billion people on Earth, and as of January 3, 2021, there were already about 7.836 billion. And during this same period, there were about 300 inventions (in the 17th century, there were about 30). That is, in fact, adding up inventors and other people, a millionth of a percent of the total number of all living on the planet. And this millionth of a percent provided not only the corresponding jobs, but also high rates of industrial production growth, huge growth in the urban population, and all this, of course, as a whole could not but affect the biosphere and climate.
Thus, «by uniting the world,» to quote another passage from Arendt’s article, «technology can just as easily destroy it, and it is no coincidence that the means of global communication have developed in parallel with the means of destruction.» (p. 98)
So what is capable of and ready to resist this destruction? Communication? — allowing us to coordinate joint activities. After all, all of the technical and scientific achievements and discoveries mentioned are the fruits of the human mind. In that case, is it even possible to understand why modern humanity has become hostage to Russian military adventurism and American business ventures?
It is possible, if we do not forget that alongside scientific discoveries and technical achievements, there are philosophical inventions that help shift public attention from technological achievements to intellectual achievements.
I am referring to Descartes’ phrase «Cogito ergo sum.»
I remember it stuck in my head when I was in college and wondered for a long time why Descartes began to doubt everything, that is, why he performed the famous procedure of radical doubt. And then I realized that it was to prove that He is the one who thinks about doubt. Believing in this way in the cognitive function of speech, I decided that since thinking is connected with speech.
Or, to put it another way, as philologists say: the formation of thought occurs on the basis of linguistic units and categories.
This can be verified by looking up the meaning of the word cogito in the Latin-Russian dictionary. Which I did at some point, seeing there 7 examples of the use of the word cogito and 22 examples of the word ratio, taken not only from the texts of ancient Roman authors (Julius Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, etc.), but also from authors, including scholars, who wrote their works in Latin later (Spinoza, Newton, Lomonosov).
And I will give another Latin expression, «Vivere est cogitare» (To live is to think. — Cicero. Tusculan Disputations).
The same thing happened with the ancient Greek language and the corresponding words in Russian. Therefore, it is ridiculous to say that Russia is not a European country, for we think and reason in a European way. And we do not write in hieroglyphs.
So how has this been preserved (I mean the ancient Christian heritage relating to the Achsenzeit era) and how is it transmitted, that is, how does it continue to live on?
Of course, thanks in part to the two philosophical words mentioned above: cogito, which is the starting point for proving the existence of reason. This became the basis of Western rationalism.
In this regard, I refer to our conversation with Merab Mamardashvili about «the idea of continuity and philosophical tradition,» which took place at my request to comment on George Orwell’s characterization of his hero in the novel «1984.» (See: Historical and Philosophical Yearbook. 1989. — Moscow, 1989, pp. 263−269)
To quote Orwell: «He [the protagonist] was a lonely spirit, broadcasting a truth that no one would ever hear. But while he speaks it, continuity is preserved in some unknown way. The spiritual heritage of humanity is passed on not because someone heard you, but because you yourself preserved your sanity.»
More than 30 years later, the content of this conversation can be summarized in the following theses.
- «Philosophical inventions» play just as important, if not more important, a role in Western culture today than scientific and technical discoveries and inventions. Our conversation was not a dialogue or an interview, but rather a master class on understanding the relationship to the past and the future.
- Or, in other words, about understanding the present as dynamic eternity. Since the conversation was not about consciousness of something, some kind of experience, but about what Merab calls the experience of consciousness itself in the state of «I am — I think.» That is, to think that I can think it.
- «Not because someone heard you» and «not because you heard someone else before you» — this is evidence of continuity, confirming that you have retained the reason that allows the empirically distant to become close, and the close to be connected with the future. This is where this connection arises: we are alive in the act we are performing now, if we keep alive, and not dead in the text of our predecessors. If Descartes or Kant are alive (the name Proust was not mentioned), if mentally, Merab said during the conversation, I keep Descartes or Kant alive, then I am alive too. Conversely, if I am alive, if I can conceive of something Cartesian-Kantian as a possibility of my own thinking, and not as scholarship, then they are alive too. And this is the infinite duration of conscious life. Its immortality. The immortality of the personality in thought. And the elements of such a prerequisite relationship and connection are love and memory — not as a metaphor, but as a living, obvious reality.
- Performing a logical operation does not yet mean performing an act of thought. It can be a pseudo-act, only similar to thought, imitating it. Only after the spontaneous emergence of such autonomous formations, which are philosophical inventions, does the possibility arise to think Descartes’ «I think.»
- At present, the situation in which we find ourselves is special, it is non-classical. There are periods in history when the threads of continuity are woven mechanically, as people continue to develop ideas based on their content. That is, purely objectively. And there are times, Merab continued in his answers, when it is necessary to abandon content and move to another level, as happened at the beginning of European modernism, which seemed to break with the past, with tradition. In reality, he emphasized, the previous classical task was then solved by non-classical means. The task of «the independence of the human soul» at the forefront of obviousness or common sense, reason (and I would add, about which Orwell wrote, and we talked at the end of perestroika).
- That is why it is so important that the original meaning of philosophy as such does not disappear, with its abstract language creating a space for the thinking mind. Thus a personality capable of thinking independently, making sensible decisions, etc. is recreated.
- Language can be different. In different cultures, it is not only different, but also changes. Although at first glance, what is spoken does not differ from what is thought.
They say that reason and intellect are two stages of thinking, which differ in that reason follows rules, while intellect, capable of seeing essence and interrelationships, establishes or changes them.
That is, Orwellian reason stands guard over humanity, while reason, in the context of today’s ongoing deadly seesaw between the reckless self-confidence of evil and the fragile congeniality of good, seeks to draw attention to the specifics of their polarity. For what purpose?
So as not to forget that over time, reason can lose its rationality. We see this today not only in Russia, where the rule of law has completely supplanted justice, and freedom is suppressed by the state security agencies.
The human in a person manifests itself in communication, which by definition cannot be coercive. This is partly because communication presupposes freedom. Otherwise, there would be no friendship, trust, or love—these unique events in our lives. It is impossible to ban them, just as it is impossible to ban freedom. They exist and will continue to exist because, I repeat, the essence of a person lies in communication, which begins with the search for words to convey sincere feelings. And any search for the right word, even an unconscious one, can already be seen as a kind of invitation to communicate with the Other. This is especially true today, in an era of global crisis, when there is a clear demand for trust and truth, which, being a thought — an indisputable absolute — does not rest on anything, but holds everything else. Thanks to the transcendental, a priori (non-experiential) forms of our sensuality — the form of external sensation (space) and the form of internal sensation (time).
The transcendental is the prism through which we view the world, said Bertrand Russell. It is immanent in human consciousness and cannot be observed, characterizing not so much the surrounding world as our ability to perceive it. And then to know, since space and time, like convertible currency, are transformed into specific numbers, symbols, etc. And thus, knowledge emerges that is no longer obtained through physical experimentation, but rather from life experience — a posteriori, as opposed to the a priori forms of our sensibility.
Human consciousness lives in a tense field, outlined by the ultimate boundaries of meaning, and clarity in it is possible only when we strive to master the language of these meanings, that is, when we understand their abstract nature. Following the imperative: our actions are moral when their motives are universal human norms.
In the era of congeniality of the «axial age» described by Karl Jaspers, the process of evolution of Homo sapiens is coming to an end and the search for overcoming animal instincts is beginning, in the foreseeable future of which philosophy in human history, along with religion, is becoming a form of worldview.
In the philosophical worldview, meanings converge and any dead ends are overcome. If we do not forget that the world with which philosophy deals is the social environment of life and communication, in which, by expanding the boundaries of professions, we now have the chance to bring some clarity to one of the most sought-after languages — civic education — about the fact that history has reached a point where humanity is forbidden to be hostile.