The Confrontation of Ideas of the 19th Century and Us: Philosophical Reflections

Abstract

The subject of the article is the self-determination of Russian philosophy in the context of sociocultural polycentrism and confrontation with the West. The author sees the foundations and principles of addressing this issue in the ideological conflicts and confrontations of the 19th century. This century demonstrated the brilliant “fruits of enlightenment,” including the development of education and science, as well as the belief in the unlimited potential of humanity. However, in the second half of the century, there was a reevaluation and critique of the fundamental principles of modernity, which were established by Hegel and reinterpreted by Marx. It was a crisis of the modernist foundations of man and culture, a crisis that few people were aware of at the time. Nietzsche was one of them. Hegel’s progressivism was fiercely contested by thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, but Nietzsche became a significant figure for those who questioned the validity of concepts like “rationalism”, “scientism”, “progressivism”, etc. The author discusses Nietzsche’s ideas about the movement towards the “superman”, with his right to power and his will to dominate, and his warnings about the total rationalization that, by desacralizing everything around him, makes the subject of agonality the only sacred object in an agonistic culture. This does not mean that the role and significance of scientific knowledge have lost their relevance, but many of Nietzsche’s ideas, particularly about the formation of a “new man” and the renewal of culture, must be critically reevaluated in the context of a new philosophical worldview.