16.05.2023, Moscow.
Russia is a much more complex world than a civilization in the classical definition, said philosopher, political scientist, the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan on May 13 on the Right to Know program on the TVC channel.
In order to examine the question of whether Russia is a country-civilization, the philosopher proposed to review the very concept of civilization. He noted that in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, the neo-Hegelian philosopher, came up with the End of History.
After Fukuyama declared his thesis regarding the end of history, Sergey Kurginyan questioned it in his speeches: “If you ask Jews, will they agree with the end of history without the coming of the Messiah; and what about Christians, will they agree to this?” He also posed the following question: “What will happen after the end of history?”
“Essentially, it was a very sinister idea, a purely liberal thought, a liberal democracy way of thinking,” explained the expert.
Later, in the 90s, Samuel Huntington proposed an alternative idea – the idea of a clash of civilizations, explained the political scientist.
“Huntington was a man who revisited the ideas of Toynbee, Danilevsky and those who spoke from their point of view regarding civilizations,” explained Sergey Kurginyan. Huntington declared that what lies ahead is not the end of history, but a clash of civilizations.
“It became clear that the US Republican Party and all conservative circles in the West support Huntington, and liberal circles support Fukuyama,” stressed the analyst.
Huntington relied on a very specific concept of a civilization, the one that was defined by Arnold Toynbee, Nikolai Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, and everyone else, noted Sergey Kurginyan.
“From this point of view, civilization is a mono-cultural or mono-ethnic world, it is a confessional monad: such as the Hindu civilization; or in China, there is the Confucian or Taoist civilization; or the Catholic civilization, and so on,” explained the expert.
“It seems to me that everyone understands that Russia is much more complex than such a civilization,” explained the philosopher. He stressed that if we are talking about a civilization such as the Russian world, then this is something more complex.
“We are a multi-confessional, multi-national country, therefore our world is more complex, which, in a sense, has always modeled humanity in a global sense. And somehow, we learned how to do it, and we have our own terminology – symphony, world of worlds, the Russian world – to describe it,” said Sergey Kurginyan.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
