The New Program of Philosophy

The human and the world. It would seem that the posing of such a question is relevant at all times. However, everything is much more complex. “Human” is not an affirmation, but a question mark. Human? Oh, yeah? Really? Would that be ‘the human’ in essence? In fact? Are you so sure about this?

“Human” has been understood as meaning altogether different things in different times, such as the stage of the ascent of the animal, or as the threshold of the descent of the angel…”Human” sounds strange…Human…

The world. This was also once all clear. But then again, what to say, how to say it…Even the word for world – mir in Russian, Welt in German, monde in French, dunya in Arabic, etc. – in different languages refers us to different things. Nevertheless, such has always meant something integral, universal, all-embracing…

The contemporary French philosopher Marcel Conche wrote that today “the world is no longer a world, but an extravagant ensemble.” This means that the obviousness has been blurred…Clearly, we are dealing not with an integral whole, but a mosaic of fragments out of which a complete picture cannot be shaped – there is always something missing or something clearly superfluous…

The eternal topic of “the human and the world” is now formulated differently as “Human? And the world?”, in which two uncertainties – inner and outer – collide. 

Altogether recently, the labor of assigning the human and the world a clear identity was undertaken by ideologies. The human of communism was something fairly concrete, described, and established, just as the world of historical materialism and dialectical materialism was thoroughly studied and certified, with freedom of choice being placed within an explicitly outlined framework. Other ideologies – religious, national, and democratic – offered different models with differing proportions and structures, but always and everywhere understood “human” and “the world” to be fairly detailed, attentively conceptualized and defined. 

But the time when Western liberalism finally defeated the Soviet camp, when an end was put to the struggle between ideologies, has gone. At first it seemed that the liberal-democratic doctrine of the human and the world had become universal and mandatory on a planetary scale. But something else happened. Left without a global opponent, rival, and adversary, the Western world quickly drowned in its own uncertainty. In the final decades of the “Cold War”, only the geopolitical necessity of ideologically confronting the Marxist USSR and its satellites lent harmony to the bourgeois system. The West was not philosophically ready for victory, it expected a protracted ideological duel, and the rapid disappearance of its enemy caught it by surprise. Being left alone, Western man was confused, taken aback, and drowned by a wave of cognitive hallucinations in which the past and present, the accidental and the paramount, the fundamental and the superficial, male and female, the serious and the sarcastic were irrevocably mixed. 

Today the West is imposing not its system, but its systemlessness, not its obviousness, but its doubt, not its assertion, but its deep internal crisis. 

When we join the global network, we do not receive a new identity and we do not come into contact with a new world. We simply irrevocably surrender to the storage room with a forgotten entry code those remnants of what made us who we were before and that reality in which we lived before. The act of dropping old certitudes and definitions is quite specific: it is a passport to the “new times”, a credit card for complicity in globalism, a mandatory requirement, and all those who reject this “initiation into globalism” automatically end up on blacklists, henceforth deemed agents of the “axis of evil” – after all, they did not catch the “latest news” that the world and the human are dead (following the death of God). 

There is nothing in return. Not that there ever was something. The flickering of flames, of colored fish, half-dressed figures, the foamy opulence of shampoos, and the soft saliva of the ocean…You have been sucked into the ceaseless dreams of post-reality, and your job is only to press the buttons on the remote… 

Whole words and phrases disintegrate into so many brilliant fragments, yet we are only interested in interjections and clauses, witty mooing and successful teasers. A world in which the parodying of the parodist delivers mass enjoyment has no right to be called a world. It is something from another system of things. 

When we recognize in ourselves increasingly blind disagreement with such a state of affairs, we automatically rush to the past, to that time when the world and the human were fixed and well-defined realities. We become fascinated and inspired by everything: churchliness, monarchy, Sovietism, nationalism, and even democracy in its modestly-realistic and initial (industrial) version, where there were still decision and choice, labor and wages, and risks and laws for forming value. But this is not the way out, because if something – even something very good – has disappeared, this means that there is some kind of higher meaning…

If we can stand and straighten up in the flow of the tender, appetizing, rapid nothingness that is lashing at us from all sides, we will understand that something enormous and great, safely hidden in the most distant holes, is sending us – precisely us – new rays. If the human and the world no longer exist, then they are no longer so significant in the final analysis, and things might go out without them…Go out…

I put forth a new program of life: look at what is around us without squinting, without glancing back. The impending doom from which man has tried to escape has overtaken us in the final moment of history. Alright, we’ve learned our lesson.

Something terrible is revealing itself in our bodies, blossoming like a flower, something black…And out of the final horizons of darkness, the trembling petals of external consciousness – suspicions, guesses, and the lightning flashes of the undoubtable – are reaching out to meet our red heart. 

In the heartless, camouflaged cosmos, we must build new dams of life by reaching to grasp the sparks of presence out from underneath the last shells of borrowed insight…

The new program of philosophy consists of persevering forward when there is no path forward and cannot be.

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Originally published in Literaturnaia gazeta [Literary Newspaper] in 2003, republished in the book The Radical Subject and its Double (Moscow: Eurasian Movement, 2009).