18.01.2025, Moscow.
The humanistic project that prioritizes ascension of Man has failed, and most of humanity still does not understand the scale of this collapse, philosopher, political scientist and leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan said on December 27 during the Conversation with a Sage program on the Zvezda radio channel.
Kurginyan recalled that Christianity called Man “the crown of God’s creation” and raised him to an unbelievable height. And later, when society became secularized, people who called themselves atheists replaced faith in God with faith in Man, “so they were not atheists essentially.” The unity of people, people both religious and secular, consisted in faith in Man.
“It [unity] consisted in the fact that it’s still developing in a way, ‘the star of captivating happiness is burning,’ [allusion to the verse “To Chaadaev” by famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, in which he expressed hope for the collapse of Tsarism in Russia and subsequent humanistic development of Russia in line with Modernity – translator’s note] we’re all moving there. Within this was Beethoven’s thesis that ‘the whole life is tragedy, hurrah!’ It’s not like he said ‘alas!’, he said ‘hurrah!’” the philosopher explained.
Kurginyan emphasized that Man can overcome the tragedy of his life and the understanding of his mortality if he feels himself a part of the united humanity, which is driven by the idea of historical orientation and ascension. Such Man, as the philosopher noted, can solve any task, including the task acquiring human immortality.
“‘Man will reach the bright inner porch and become God himself,’ [a quote from the poem by Pyotr Yakubovich, Russian revolutionary, poet and member of Narodnaya Volya – translator’s note] said the revolutionaries. All the centuries of suffering and horrors are only the way there. We are going there,” Kurginyan noted, adding that belief in human development permeated the existence of all people, including ordinary people.
“They thought about how to make ends meet, how to educate their children, how to preserve family ties and how not to miss opportunity to enjoy life a bit within all this. All the same, these all people were living under this law. They understood it,” Essence of Time’s leader noted.
Kurginyan added that everyone in the 20th century lived by this faith in Man and could not imagine any other life. At the same time, he drew attention to the fact that this idea originated in the West and emphasized that in this regard, Russia believed in the West and hoped for it.
“And that in essence is the West. And what is it? The West is the one who invented it. It’s the one who built it. It’s the one who knows it better than anybody else. You have to learn from it, learn and learn. Its mistakes can be corrected somehow. But it [the West] is the one that that corrects its mistakes. Marx is as much a Western scholar as Weber or Hobbes. And so we continue to follow this path,” the political scientist explained the logic in which Russia lived.
Kurginyan noted that then the West abandoned its faith in Man, and the whole humanist project began to crumble. And, as Essence of Time’s leader said, “to my horror, most of humanity still does not understand the scale of this collapse.”
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency