31.01.2025, Aleksandrovskoye.
The bourgeois humanism of modernity was based on the belief in the rational Man, and reason was considered the highest gift, which gave rise to the greatness of the West at that time, political scientist, philosopher, and leader of the Essence of Time Sergey said Kurginyan on December 27 on the Conversation with a Sage program on the Zvezda radio channel.
Such reason was believed united the best of nature and culture. This reason was believed to be capable of building the world, fulfilling either God’s purpose or its own.
“Within this contract about the status of Man and about history, which, moves this man forward and is, as [German philosopher Karl] Marx said, the work of human hands or the work of a providential design in which the Messiah must come,” Kurginyan added. He explained that Man, endowed with free will and continuously developing, was the alpha and omega within history.
In modernity, Man acquired the tools necessary for such movement, including the nation-state, a nation, the principles of law, civil society and political power. “… within all this, Man is the subject of concentrated adoration, everyone adores him: everything is in Man, everything is for Man,” the philosopher noted.
The West invented this society and centricity of Man as its basis, which rejected everything archaic, irrational, non-industrial and peasant for this purpose. Thus Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, recognized that the bourgeoisie had subordinated the village to the domination of the city and had “thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” They hoped that within such society, “stunning, inconceivable results would be achieved, there would be peace worldwide, there would be a Man who would be more and more educated, more and more happy and bring happiness to the world, he would ascend and so on,” Kurginyan explained.
He added that such an era of ascension allowed progress and traditional thinking to coexist. During this period of bourgeois humanism with great cultural accomplishments, the great works of English writers Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, French writers Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac and others appeared in the West. “All of this together drew attention to the West, appealed ‘Look, how great the West!’” Kurginyan emphasized.
With all this, when the actions of Western colonialists took a very harsh character, it was accepted by colonial countries for the sake of borrowing the principles of the “wonderful, awesome, the best system in the world,” he added.
English writer Rudyard Kipling addressed British colonizers, “Take up the White Man’s burden – In patience to abide”. States tried to adopt what the West could teach them in order to build their nation-states. Once the system was adopted, the colonies could free themselves from the metropolis and become independent.
This period was called the era of postcolonialism. The very notion of catching-up modernization meant that countries had long slept in archaism, but when the light of reason reached them, they admired and embraced it, repeating the actions of the West.
This gave rise to the notion of catch-up development, which was produced through authoritarian power, building a bourgeois nation out of disparate tribes with an iron hand.
However, postmodernity has abandoned faith in Man, and the whole humanist project has begun to crumble. It was decided to give up Man and his development. At the same time, the majority of humanity still does not understand the scale of the collapse of the humanist project, Kurginyan emphasized.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
