The Nineties are still debated in Russia. For some it is a ‘holy time’, for others — a cursed decade. Either way, it was a time of great food for thought. The breaking down of some institutions and the establishment of others, confusion in thoughts and deeds, a huge (and still undigested) Western influence on concepts and ways of expressing them, new occasions for the manifestation of human weakness and meanness — always provided in abundance by revolutions…. The inadequacy of everything ‘Soviet’ in the field of thought was obvious even before 1991. But no less unsatisfactory was the animal, if not predatory, worldview imposed in Russia under the new ‘liberal’ government. There was much for the thinking observer to ponder.

It should be noted that thought was somehow particularly opposed to the first post-Soviet era. ‘It’s all your thoughts,’ the author heard in those years. — A thought is appropriate in a commentary on a situation, in a situation of commentary, and only that; why does our reader need so many thoughts?’ Leaving aside the clumsy jargon, unable to express the simplest notion without words of vague meaning and foreign root, which cannot be called anything but parasites, we must admit: the liberated Russia did not like thoughts, and even now lives only by reflexes. Only these, I note in parentheses, can explain the current universal desire to return to the times of the late ‘new order’.

However, it is not only the political and cultural order of the 1990s that has brought these essays to life. Along with it, I would call the so-called ‘only-right’, i. e. ‘scientific’ worldview of our days — in Russia inherited from the Soviet ‘new order’, in the West having somewhat different, but also leftist roots. This mechanistic worldview can be called simplified, emasculated Cartesianism, Cartesianism without Spirit. In practical application, it threatens the complete loss of the ability to understand and interpret man.

However, there are plenty of pretentious (and bursting at the seams) ‘only-right’, ‘scientific’, worldviews in our time. However, in times when accepted truths are disintegrating and the old gods do not protect — there is an inevitable desire to build a new understanding of things from the beginning, from the ground up. A new philosophical understanding of things cannot, must not, at its beginning, treat of ‘first and last things”, build systems. The thinker first of all has access to the nearest things: his soul, passion, creativity, destiny.  Such a construction cannot be consistent, cannot be coherent. Someday a new worldview will emerge on its basis, perhaps a more coherent one. The old maps of reality turned out to be inaccurate; the ones accepted nowadays are no better. Therefore, it is necessary at least to sketch the outlines of the coasts as they appear to the thinking observer. Experience will show how true this map is.

2023

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