Vsechelovechnost’ and dialectics. Review on Andrey V. Smirnov’s “Vsechelovecheskoye and obshechelovecheskoye”

Abstract

This review is dedicated to the monograph “Vsechelovecheskoye vs. obshechelovecheskoye” by Andrey V. Smirnov. The review focuses on the analysis of the logic and meaning approach towards different cultures and civilizations. Merits and flaws of the conception are outlined, the relativistic and antiessentialist tendencies of the work are criticized basing on the Losev’s platonic philosophy of culture. Losev’s philosophy of culture respond those questions that constitute unsolvable problem for the relativistic philosophies of culture. Every culture has its eidos, the organizational principle, which binds together national cuisine, language stricter and political tradition, reproducing the same unified matrix. While the cultural content tends to change, eidos, “the principle of organization” is permanent. Russian eurasianists considered cultural structures reproduced in shape of developmental place and in the limits of linguistic area and referred these structures as platonic eidoses. Structuring eidoses into the system (more general eidos) doesn’t eliminate them. Platonism gives an idea of “vsechelovechnosty” (panhumanity), common culture for all mankind as a system of local culture, opposing the idea of “cosmopolite melting pot”. Platonism is dialectical philosophy that states that common panhuman culture is more than a sum of different civilizations, but it is the presence of everything in everything, unity in diversity.