Issue #49

Abstract: Once upon a very ancient time, the archaic, myth-making attitude of human consciousness was replaced by the modern model of perception of ourselves and reality that still holds. How and why it happened and how we should treat it is a separate question. The main thing is that the most significant ontological transformation took place — from the world defined by the relation “who-who,” we moved to the world defined by the relation “who-what.” Deprived of communion (religious, mystical) with the former mythical “who’s” inhabiting nature, people rallied with excessive fervor into societies, into “we”-agglomerations, having discovered and found another, similar to themselves, instead of spirits and gods. For thousands of years, they thought of society, the common, communication as the greatest good, as the basis of all possibilities for self-realization of the individual, as a rest for the spirit and an ideal means for the arrangement of life in a dehumanized, alienated world. However, the course of history led mankind to the horrors of the twentieth century, when it became clear that the paradise erected by millennia of thought and culture can easily turn into hell, and society, instead of God, will become an evil idol, the grave and nightmare of the individual. What to do, how to survive this most terrible of all nihilistic crises — this work reflects.