Опубликовано в журнале Отечественные записки, номер 6, 2003
This issue of OZ is an eclectic collection of articles
from international and Russian publications of
contemporary and classic works. This issue, just
like our regular end-of-the-year one, is polythematic.
On this occasion, we have switched the
focus from Russia to the world. We present multiaspect
view of the primordial and actual economic,
cultural, and philosophical problems that are
pertinent for people all around the globe. The
themes touched upon are purposes, ways and
means of the university in the postmodern world,
the relationship between Europe and the United
States, American foreign policy, the quality of the
mainstream analytical discourse on this policy, its
alternative interpretations, internal problems of
today’s democracy, the emerging European identity,
existential self-perceptions of the modern man
as opposed to the reality around him, possible
models of global government, etc. Examination of
the Russian themes is confined to the perceptions
of the domestic media market and reforming the
Russian military.
It is impossible to forecast if the international
community at some point is going to come to
form a “world government.” A number of governing
bodies, both regional and global, economic
and ecological, government and non-government,
may be a better alternative, as Robert Wright
points out. Supervising these governing bodies by
the United Nations, which already has authority
over numerous evolving institutions, is yet another
— and not unreasonable — option. Whereas
various scenarios can be envisioned, it is most
likely that the new supernational level of government
will make nation states provincial. This shift
of concentration of the power seems to be conditioned
by distinct thousand-year-old technological
tendencies which do not tend to slow down.
The vaster the body of empirical phenomena
that have been entered into the “hard disk” of the
world, the faster the pace of change in the world.
Almost everything around us gets outdated at an
evergrowing speed, which includes our own experience.
According to Odo Marquard, this makes us
alienated from the world. The German philosopher
diagnoses conditions and malaises of the
modern man and provides necessary prescriptions.
Associate Professor in the Literature
Program at Duke University, Michael Hardt and
Italian philosopher Antonio Negri in their Empire
give an outlook of today’s cultural, economic, and
legal transformations taking place all over the
globe. The new emerging empire is different from
those of the past; it is also not merely a development
of international capitalism.
The war on terrorism which officially started
after 9/11 and building the European community
as a new type of supernational unity are the key
processes that have started the new century and
that will long determine its main tendencies.
Ruslan Khestanov questions whether the crisis of
European-American relations is going to become
a historic schism of Western civilization.
Expert of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Robert Kagan aims to
uncover the deep roots of the strategic discord that
is clouding the today’s relationship between the
USA and Europe. Whereas the current American
policy is determined by the “psychology of
power,” the European one, on the contrary, is
conditioned by the “psychology of weakness.”
According to Kagan, the West could regain its lost
cohesion if Europe started developing its own military
potential and the USA launched a more flexible
approach to solving international riddles,
which would take into account the interests of
their partners.
The belligerent past of all European nations
used to sow the seeds of yet more bloody encounters.
Analyzing this experience of military and ideological
mobilization against each other made the
nations welcome new supernational forms of
international cooperation. The successful history
of building of the European Union convinced
Europeans that renunciation of exercising state
violence requires corresponding limitation of state
sovereignty on the global level. With the decline of
colonialism, former empires received an opportunity
to reflect on the fruit of their imperialism.
They got to learn to look at themselves from the
viewpoint of the “defeated.” From this new perspective,
they reconsidered their own dubious role
of “winners” accountable for the modernization
that they had forced upon peoples while depriving
them of their traditions. According to Jacques
Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, the change of perspective
gives the European nations a chance to
give up their Eurocentrism and give another life to
the Kantean idea of global internal policy.
What is today’s Europe? According to the
Swiss writer, literary critic, and historian of literature
Adolf Muschg, it is a fact that is becoming
such because it is being created as such, and
because people aspire to create it. The “European Federation” is not just a new artifact in the history
of mankind; the phenomenon is a source not
only of inspiration but also of great caution.
Muschg ponders the issue of evolving European
identity. He states that Europe in the process of
self-organization must be as smart as life itself
understood as a constant search for an unsteady
equilibrium.
The war in Iraq almost drove a wedge
between Europeans and Americans. Umberto Eco
in an essay on the appropriateness of the war
argues that Western intellectuals must not allow
the conflict to bring ultimate disunity to the
Western world. Respect for American people, culture,
and tradition as well as sympathy for the pain
caused by the tragedy of 2001 should not ban people’s
critical thinking about politics and government
actions. Eco shares a European intellectual’s
viewpoint of the situation.
Jean Baudrillard wrote his “La Masque de la
Guerre” not long before the start of the military
campaign in Iraq. He thinks that the conflict was
a phantom event programmed to induce the
establishment of the secure world order based on
preventive terror.
Speaking of the common ‘European house,’
Italian philosopher and member of European
Parliament Gianni Vattimo aims to find common
values that would mold Europe on the deep level
of culture. Vattimo finds such values while juxtaposing
Europe and the United States. Europeans
are less religious and trust the state more than the
Americans. Hence the greater disposition of the
former as compared to the latter to the social welfare
state.
Entrepreneurial practices that have been
introduced to American higher education by the
early 1900s became unprecedented in their size
and scope by the end of the century. However
expedient earning their own money in order to
solve various institutional needs may seem to the
universities, a vast body of evidence shows that the
tendency erodes not only subtle values of higher
education but also weakens the foundations of the
democratic society. Derek Curtis Bok, lawyer,
Harvard law Professor, former Dean of Harvard
Law School and Harvard University President
(1971-1991) reveals the mechanism that corrupts
morality and curtails freedom of university officials,
faculty, students, and broader society.
In his University in Ruins, Bill Readings analyzes
the reasons of the pitiful state of the contemporary
Western university as a social institution.
The condition, as Readings discerns, has
grown out of the succession of the three main
concepts underlying the institution: the Kantian
concept of reason, Humboldt’s concept of culture,
and today’s techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence.
Readings testifies that the university has
outlived its raison d’etre defined two centuries ago
as a molding force of national culture, “be it an
ethnic essence or republican will;” it has lost its
immunity against the outer world and become
enmeshed in the global capitalism.
The advent of “tech-science” ruined the
margin that Kant used to demarcate “technical”
and “architectonic” domains of the university
when he was elaborating the general systematic
organization of knowledge that was to become
a model of the university organization. Jacques
Derrida aims to define the rational grounds and
the idea of the university as seen by its alumni. He
calls for a new type of responsibility that implies
commonness of thought at large, not of a philosophical,
humanitarian, or scientific pursuit. This
common thought addresses its questions to the
essence of mind, rational argument, and to the
fundamental and primordial values, i.e., to arkhe.
This thought aims to scrutinize all the consequences
of such questioning. This thought has to
rethink the substance of a community and the substance
of an institution. Another infinite task of
this thought is to bring to light all the contrivances
of the applied and expedient mind that ventures to
entrap and expropriate the most disinterested and
unselfish investigations in order to reinvest them
in all sorts of projects. This is not to say that there
is anything wrong with applied research per se,
and that any expediency should be opposed. What
Derrida is arguing for is the necessity of advances
that would pave the way for the new kinds of
analysis of one’s ultimate goals and, if possible, for
taking one’s own decisions.
While opposing Jose Ortega Y Gasset who
asserted that any research activity must be cast
outside the ivory tower, Herman Heimpel argues
for the Humboldt’s model of the university that
unites teaching and research. Science is not merely
research and free investigation; it is also a tradition.
Any discovery – even if it aims to undermine
the tradition – is in fact a part of that tradition.
Research needs the university not only as a receiver
of its product but also as a nutrient. Not only
does research instruct its university – the university
also instructs the research. Research is revolution
whereas the university is a tradition. These
two tendencies should not be associated with different
types of people; they must not be understood
as a need to expel revolutionaries while
resorting just to teachers who stick to the tradition.
On the contrary, the university is the main,
though not the only, institution of science that
combines in itself analysis and synthesis, revolution
and tradition, conservatism and freedom.
Hence the high-tension university atmosphere
created by the poles of revolution and tradition.
In his The University: An Owner’s Manual,
former Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky gives an
animated and witty account of the work routine of
today’s university administrator.
We publish a speech by Hermann Ludwig
Ferdinand von Helmholtz on his assumption of the
office as a rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm
University in Berlin on October 15 1877. The scientist
praises German universities as compared to
British and French ones. The main merit and distinctive
feature of the German university, according
to Helmholtz, is academic freedom and bringing
together lectures and research by the teaching
staff.
We publish a lecture by Cardinal John Henry
Newman (1801-1890) on Christianity and scientific
knowledge. With rhetorical splendor,
Newman states that the pursuit of truth is an
essential responsibility of the university under the
auspices of which both laymen and clerics must
join their efforts.
Clarence J. Robinson Professor at George
Mason University and former Professor of
Government at Harvard University, Hugh Heclo
argues that although political life in the United
States has become extraordinarily open and democratic,
average Americans become ever more
conspicuously alienated from politics. Heclo supposes
that, in order to draw the “hyperdemocracy”
back under the control of the society, Americans
must do their best to enhance the dialogue
between social strata. This dialogue has to be made
more honest, meaningful, and responsible.
Professor at the University of Maryland and
former editor of the Northern Virginia Sun newspaper,
Herman J. Obermayer pictures the decadence
of the Russian market of daily newspapers. The
reasons for the stagnation, as Obermayer reveals,
are of psychological (enduring Soviet-times prejudices
against advertising, etc.), political, and economic
nature (such as the bondage between most
regional periodicals and their respective regional
administrations). Obermayer notes that the country’s
editors and reporters will go on upholding traditions
of their Soviet predecessors until the standards
of the journalistic education are changed.
Today, graduates of 65 Journalism Departments
that are state-licensed start working without having
any notion of the Western concept of objective
reporting, journalistic ethics, financial independence
of media or their role in monitoring activities
of authorities.
Professor of the Sorbonne and editor of the
Arabica journal, Mohammed Arkoun in his article
“Islam et democratie. Quelle democratie? Quel
Islam?” states that analytical discourse on the
global political situation that was launched by the
events of 9/11 lacks objectivity. While trying to
explain the puzzle, the authors of discourses on
today’s Islam are not really looking for ways of
solving it and stick to ready-to-use images of both
Western and Islamic traditions. The author aims
to discern what is today’s democracy and what is
today’s Islam everybody is talking about.
Expert on Russian defense issues, Roger
McDermott writes on the priorities of President of
the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in reforming
the Russian military. He overviews the symptoms
of the current crisis in the army, such as low
funding, lack of accommodation, the decline of
morale, along with authoritative measures and
rhetoric in the period 1997-2002. The author concludes
that radical military reform is not feasible
without creating a professional army that should
be based on corporate and professional ethics
embedded in the system of military education.