Gazing on Life's Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Seifrid
Keyword(s):  
Camera Obscura ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Present Life

Abounding in visual metaphors and situations, Tolstoy's works are permeated with the conviction that it is the nature of truth to be seen. This attitude exemplifies the ocularcentrism that has characterized European thought since the Greeks, though the Tolstoyan corpus also displays some of the tension between ocularcentrism's eastern and western European recensions that obtains in the Russian context. The quintessential visual situation in Tolstoy is emphatically perspectival—despite the attractions of more “Russian” ways of seeing. The scenes constituting that situation work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in an intellectually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a planar visual surface. Ultimately Tolstoy's impulse can be linked with the material nature of books, which foster this very kind of experience when the eye is trained on the page, and this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general.

scholarly journals “The Lord Breathed On The Face Of Underworld”: Maximilian Voloshin and Kabbala

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
K.Yu. Burmistrov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
Written Sources

The acquaintance of Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1877–1932), one of the central figures in the history of Russian culture in the first third of the twentieth century, with the tradition of Western European esotericism, as well as with the concepts of Jewish Kabbalah, is still poorly understood. At the same time, it is known that they played an important role in his worldview and creativity. The article offers an analysis of several topics related to Kabbalah, which had a noticeable impact on the work of Voloshin. Particular attention is paid to the problem of establishing written sources of borrowings and interpretations of Kabbalistic ideas, clarifying concepts, as well as ways of transmitting elements of Kabbalah among European and Russian esotericists. Through the study of various works of Voloshin, his diary entries, drafts and correspondence, the names of esoteric authors who are especially important for the study of this topic have been identified (E.P. Blavatsky, A. Fabre d'Olivet, A. Franck, Eliphas Levi and etc.). Through a thorough analysis of the methods of perception and transmission of the ideas of Kabbalah among European esotericists, it was shown that, strange as it may seem, the result of studying such sources and their interpretation by Voloshin was a fairly accurate and adequate use of Kabbalistic concepts both in theoretical works and in poetry.

The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity?

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-169
Author(s):  
Dragana Grbić
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
South Slavs ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought

This chapter situates the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović in the context of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Serbian Great Migration, which facilitated the dissemination of Western European thought throughout Serbia. Obradović’s travels typified this process. As a young man, he fled from a monastery and spent much of his life traveling through Germany, France, Italy, England and elsewhere in Europe. He paid his way by teaching languages, and when he returned home, he translated European works into the Serbian vernacular. His oeuvre brought the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant to Serbian literature and introduced readers to the works of Fénelon, Rousseau, and Marmontel. Obradović’s writings, particularly his autobiography, not only shaped eighteenth-century Serbian culture, but also influenced South Slavs, Greeks, and Romanians in the Balkans. .

Anthropology of education in the Russian culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Bulgakova
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Anthropology Of Education ◽  
Western European ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
Russian Education

The monograph is devoted to a systemic study of education in the context of Russian culture. We propose an approach corresponding to the postnonclassical type of rationality, to overcome Biologicheskie and sotsiologicheskie extremes in understanding the nature of education. Anthropology of education, according to the author, is a metatheoretic concept, which can be a basis for the systematic study of education. Used methodological principles of synergetics as the basis of innovative models in the sphere of upbringing and education. Investigated in detail the peculiarities of interpretation of Russian education in psychoanalysis and pedagogical anthropology. Composite monograph is structured as a dialogue between representatives of Western European and domestic anthropology of education. Can be useful for anyone who deals with the problems of methodology of the Humanities and problems of creativity in the field of pedagogy. Will also be of interest to philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, pedagogues, historians of Russian philosophy.

Fichte and Schelling

1999 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Roger Hausheer
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought ◽  
The Universe

Intellectual historians have often remarked that German thought from its earliest beginnings is marked by two major features that distinguish it from the greater part of the remainder of Western European thought. These are, first, the tendency to seek some kind of participatory relationship with nature and the universe conceived in quasi-animistic terms, which represents a kind of reversion to a much older, much more primitive way of conceiving the world and man's place in it, and has led to all kinds of mysticism. It is a strain in the history of German thought which has been brought out very clearly by Lévy-Bruhl and others.

Humanity Educating Philosophy

1998 ◽  
pp. 330-335
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon
Keyword(s):  
False Beliefs ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The World ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Knowledge Claims

In what follows, I focus on the partiality and fallibility of each of us as individuals, and explore what that means for us as epistemic agents. When we examine the tradition of Western European thought, we note that most epistemological theories assume individuals can know the answer, and are able to critique what is passed down to others as socially constructed knowledge. Many have made the argument that while humanity can be deceived, one individual can know, and therefore teach the others about their deceptions and false beliefs. I argue that because we are embedded and embodied social beings who do not have transcendental, objective, "God's eye views" of the world in which we live, we need each other to help us be potential knowers able to make knowledge claims. Others help us become aware of our own situatedness and help us develop enlarged views. Rather than thinking that individual philosophers, credentialed experts in their field of study, know more and therefore have knowledge they can teach humanity, I argue that all of us, as members of humanity, have much that we can teach each other. My position is that it is only with the help of others that we are able to know anything.

Turgenev’s universal responsiveness. On the materials of the literary-epistolary anthology In France with Turgenev [S Turgenevym vo Frantsii]

2020 ◽  
pp. 196-230
Author(s):  
G. M. Rebel
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Problem Analysis ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Western European

A review of the literary-epistolary anthology In France with Turgenev [S Turgenevym vo Frantsii], the article undertakes a problem analysis of its content, shedding a new light on Turgenev’s relationship with French authors, the scale of his personality, and the relevance of his cultural mission. Included in the work’s title, the idea of universal responsiveness was introduced to the daily cultural vocabulary by F. Dostoevsky and is viewed here in its relation to the concepts of cosmopolitanism, national identity, and cultural universalism. Turgenev’s universal responsiveness is treated as an opposing phenomenon to Russian messianism, namely, it is considered to combine national uniqueness with the willingness and ability to absorb world culture and become an integral part of it. It was Turgenev who not only succeeded in mediating between Western European and Russian culture, but also embodied pan-European cultural unity. While commonly recognized and repeatedly voiced by French cultural fi   res, this achievement remains little known and appreciated in Russia.

http://www.essaysonconservatism.ru/

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 141-147
Author(s):  
Nikolai A. Shchipkov
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought

A Few Definitions of Term “Culture” in the History of Western European thought: René Descartes, Giambattista Vico, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx

scholarly journals THREE IMAGES OF METAPHYSICS

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (18) ◽  
pp. 31-37
Author(s):  
V.Yu. Bystrov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought

The article describes three attitude of modern philosophy to metaphysics. It considers, firstly, the positivism of O. Comte, where metaphysics is perceived as a hybrid form of thinking, combining a scientific form and archaic mythological content, secondly, classical Marxism, in which metaphysics, as a way of thinking, is opposed to dialectics, and thirdly, philosophy of M. Heidegger, for whom metaphysics is the era of “oblivion of being” in the history of Western European thought. All these relations are negative; however, it does not follow from this that the intellectual culture of metaphysics is not in demand by modern philosophy

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