After her first thunderously successful book, The Twilight of “Saigon,” whose modest circulation was bought up entirely at its presentation, Yulia Valieva began to develop a new, even grander plan: under one academic cover, a collection of names, fates and voices of representatives of the so-called second culture, those not included in primary bases of historical and cultural research material. Although it would be too early to consider the work on the Sound Archive project fully complete today, its first two releases allow us to speak of an accomplished fact.

     Since the appearance of the first Faces of St. Petersburg Poetry: 1950-90s. Autobiographies. Authors’ Readings, published in 2011, enough time has passed that the volume, including audio recordings of authors, has become a prized rarity in many parts of the world. Less than a week after the presentation of the second volume, On the History of Unofficial Culture and the Contemporary Russian Diaspora: 1950-90s, fortune granted us an opportunity to meet with the project’s author, compiler and editor-in-chief, Yulia Valieva, to talk about what paths led her plans to take shape and proceed.

The Russian diaspora — how central is this topic to your strategy, if a strategy exists? Do you have your own strategy regarding the line of “unofficial culture and the contemporary Russian diaspora” that you are currently working on?

At first I studied the Oberiuts. My theme was the Oberiuts. Then it gradually grew — through Twilight of “Saigon” and so on — into the study of the unofficial culture of the fifties through the eighties. And the majority of participants in an unofficial culture turned out to be somehow connected with foreign countries. Involuntarily, it turned out that the space expanded and shifted abroad.

This line evolved naturally: someone from the seventies generation ended up in England, someone in Australia, someone in America… I must say that when I got to Boston, it was very difficult for me to find Russian-speaking poets. For a long time I tried to find, say, Naum Korzhavin, who lived nearby, in Boston. I only succeeded after the third month — despite the fact that he is in the Harvard collection, which has many holdings from him. In this case, no one knows who lives next to them! It really surprised me. I thought that it should be the other way around: such a somewhat limited space, willy-nilly, ought to have brought people together, created something unified. That turned out to be not quite the case.

That is, something originally unified appeared to have disintegrated?

Since I was already studying a certain aspect of the first wave of the Russian diaspora — Vladislav Khodasevich and others — I had my own idea of how it developed in the twenties, at the beginning of the thirties. But that mainly concerned Europe. Closer contacts, journals that brought together all participants. And in America, I couldn’t immediately figure out how everything worked. For me, the space required complete rediscovery.

Did you go there looking for a specific range of names?

At first, I was exclusively interested in archival materials related to the Russian diaspora, materials preserved there from the first wave of emigration. I went to study in the archives on a Fulbright grant — in the Harvard University library and in the Hoover Archive in California. But it turned out to be less easy to turn to the modern diaspora.

But was that also your errand?

Yes, of course. I wanted to make recordings for the St. Petersburg archive, because the intention was namely to collect a sound archive — first of St. Petersburg poetry, of all those poets who willingly or unwillingly ended up abroad.

From whom and by what criteria was this circle determined for you? What were your criteria for specific names? It all started with the first wave — and then?..

Since I had to deal with the informal culture of the seventies, I knew about home salons and circles, including philosophical circles, collections, that existed in Leningrad in the sixties and seventies, and even earlier. One of these circles was at Vadim Kreidenkov’s — Vadim Kreid’s. There were also the Ivanov brothers — Konstantin and Mikhail Ivanov. All this was interconnected. And in America, I wanted to find those who were involved in these circles. Ask them questions, take notes… So I knew some names in advance and wanted to get in touch with these people. Especially from the seventies. However, from the point of view of research, I felt closer to the formalists, who had no concept of there being poets of a first rank or second rank. For me, the completeness of all kinds of individual styles, literary schools and groups was important. Therefore, I wanted to collect as complete information as possible about, among other things, Russian poets in America. Of course, I hardly met with everyone, only with those whom I managed to get to know during my stay.

How does the study of informal culture relate to this task? Do representatives of these circles equate to the entire unofficial culture?

Do you mean in poetry? If we consider the history of the development of unofficial culture in general in Leningrad-Moscow circles, there’s the Lianozovo group in Moscow, the philological school in Leningrad. That is still the fifties. But from the philological school — Lev Losev, who ended up in America, Vladimir Uflyand, Mikhail Eremin, Mikhail Krasilnikov — that is a separate circle. The Lianozovo team is another circle. Those are poets and artists. The fifties were a time of a powerful combination of poetry and approaches to poetry, including through the visual. A synthesis. I began with that and then moved on chronologically.

Did you have a sense of relevance, acuity?

I am a very subjective person. It is difficult for me to make any generalizations.

And if it’s just personal, subjective for you?

Since at first I was engaged in theories of meaning — relative to the Oberiuts and in general the theory of meaning as such: not just any text, but texts with a semantic breakdown — I was least interested in the biographical layer. A biography, as I saw it, was the least interesting for me when studying a text, when studying a particular author. But then I changed radically, paradoxically. I realized that it would be very difficult to study a certain era, especially the layer of unofficial culture — which was not revealed in published texts, in biographies, and so on. There was initially no factual material. A researcher would read certain meanings into it. In Russia, studies on the literature of unofficial culture began to appear, whose authors understood neither the mechanisms nor the figures, did not know any of the literary circles and had virtually no information. And without that foundation, it’s simply impossible to proceed. Therefore, it’s necessary to collect an oral, one might say, history in which eyewitnesses speak. But it shouldn’t be skewed. Material about Saigon, about Saigon times — that’s a whole network, diverging in all directions. A gigantic context. And here it is impossible to imagine only one kind of positive point of view. You always need to consider many personal stories, destinies that add up together. But each fate comprises not only a family, how a person was brought up, his exclusively subjective experiences. Subjective experiences were also yielded by the context, including the Soviet one, which it’s impossible to do without. Therefore, the context itself with its multiple meanings, even if absolutely primitive, should be revealed through the direct evidence of eyewitnesses. That was a very important motivation for me.

Is it possible to evaluate the final work with the material as a kind of collection of raw materials for further development?

The fact is that the archive itself can be expanded, of course.

Is that work you would like to do?

Well, actually, I’m doing it. I myself was the initiator. That is, no one’s giving me any such task.

How do you manage to identify a certain active line, if it can be put like that?.. Because there is so much material… And so many systems of evaluation!..

Of course. Even about one event. For example, an important story for the seventies. On one of the anniversaries of the Decembrist uprising, going out onto Senate Square with poetry. This was important for a whole circle of poets — the circle of Julia Voznesenskaya. There were Elena Pudovkina, Boris Kupriyanov, Cheygin, and other poets. Going out onto Senate Square and reading poetry. Everything turned into a very hard to organize event, with arrests, with a police dragnet, that is, with a whole mythological shell. I interviewed many of the participants in this event. Of course, accounts diverged: who came, who participated, how the event took place, and even what was on the poster made by two dissident artists who went to the square and because of which everyone was arrested as a result and the event acquired such a political context. So even the inscription on the poster itself also varied from story to story. Therefore, it was important in this case to publish all these stories, despite the repetitions and so on. Otherwise, only one of the points of view would be heard, and everything would be tucked away under it. It was important to present different voices. No way around that. Only by the collision of different voices, in such cases, can any objectivity be observed.

Yulia Valieva at the presentation of her book On the History of Unofficial Culture and the Contemporary Russian Diaspora (Photo: J. Manteith)

Have you included your own commentary?

No. In Twilight of “Saigon,” I specifically refrained from comments. This was especially important for such characters as Victor Kolesnikov, “Wheel,” from Saigon. Many people know him. I recorded his story about how he grew up with his brother in Sortirovochny, how they played in the sandbox with the medals that his mother had received for wartime service. A rather heroic story: how he grew up, how his health problems started… Really a big story. And then he ended up in the “Daring Club” at the Palace of Pioneers, where he went to steal something — there are a lot of shiny things in the Anichkov Palace. Just went in to steal something. But!.. Someone spotted him and asked where he was going. He randomly saw a sign, “‘Daring Club,” and said he had come there to register. So he was spared, and somehow it turned out that he was in a circle of poets, many of whom later became unofficial poets. It is unclear who later dragged whom into Saigon, because he was in the center of Saigon, and the poets were around him. Later he represented himself as a fighter pilot, or said he could repair boots or acquire books. It is very difficult to comment on such figures. In general, about fate… How can there be commentary about fate?

Would it be right to say that what you create has its own distinct literary value?

It’s hard for me to talk about literary value here. For me, the value is that the author is presented as such, that his voice sounds. Firstly, through his autobiography. An autobiography is a selection of milestones for you. They can be on different levels: external boundaries, encounters with some text, experiences, etc. Maybe exclusively internal milestones. People choose for themselves. And then the text itself, the voice — a unity of the author’s self. It seems to me that this is very important — when the author is represented through himself, in the fullness of his own authorial self.

Is there a feeling that these “unofficial” authors remain in some ways voiceless, with undeveloped aspirations?

I don’t know if I’ve understood your question correctly, but take the generation of, say, the seventies. Now, it’s said that a dividing line was 1991, when censorship was abolished and everyone could start publishing. But there was a very strange effect. Not everyone was able to realize themselves afterward. For example, the poet Elena Pudovkina, whose only published book was released in Australia, which she reached on a cargo ship. She sailed for six and a half months, stopping at all possible ports. And there in Australia, during the first wave of emigration, a religious society had developed. At its own expense, it published this one little book by Elena Pudovkina. And from the nineties to the present, no more of her books have been published. That is, when the era associated with economic opportunities began, far from everyone managed to make use of them, oddly enough. Many, on the contrary, went down the drain, because the values they — Krivulin’s circle — lived in the seventies, in the nineties were destroyed. That’s the paradox.

What attracted you to the Oberiuts?

Most of all I have studied Alexander Vvedensky; I did a dissertation on Alexander Vvedensky. The thing is, since childhood, I’ve felt concerned by the question of the randomness of textual elements. Many have this problem with Pushkin. That is, it happens that there is a choice between Pushkin and Lermontov. Not everyone chooses Pushkin; some prefer Lermontov. There’s a dilemma… I couldn’t accept Pushkin because of his, as it seemed to me, random rhyming, which rounds off the narrative and for me destroys the whole secret of poetry and its mechanisms.

So it all started with the question of what, in fact, is the random element that does not give meaning to a text but kills it? This interest grew into a study of which text is meaningless or, conversely, meaningful. After all, Vvedensky called himself an authority of nonsense — his pseudonym was “The Authority of Nonsense.” His text has an extremely interesting structure, but what is the text’s meaning? In the twenties there were different concepts of the meaning of a text. Units held the greatest interest. What is the main thing in a text: words, sentences, paragraphs? Or is the whole text one single meaning? Where do you find it? In the twenties, even a little earlier, in the tens, the concept of “phoneme” was discovered — seemingly a linguistic concept. Some writers decided that the phoneme is a unit of meaning. And they began to write phonemic poems. Alexander Tufanov wrote the book “Toward Transrationality (Zaum), or a study of consonant phonemes. ” He decided he had discovered a new principle for creating text — a text understandable for all peoples. Consisting of only phonemes. Phonemic music is clear to everyone. An avant-gardist, he felt driven to create his own crazy concept and, to do this, study all consonant phonemes of the most ancient languages of the world. He deemed these to be Chinese and English, and derived a very beautiful classification. If there are seven colors of the rainbow, seven tones in music, then you can also classify consonant phonemes from the moment of the first coalescence of the Earth. According to his concept, the initial sound controls the word. If we compare, in Chinese and English, all the words that begin with the sound “b”, this is the first link in our mental understanding of movement. All “b” words are associated with the idea of movement. He wrote whole cycles of phonemic poems.

These atoms of meaning that writers were looking for then are like blood groups: invisible, and suddenly established; something disconnecting, something unifying. Everything seems alike, yet everything is different. These units of meaning later gave rise to the Oberiuts, among others. Everything was complicated for them by an attempt to identify the existing causal relationships in the world. This was partly due to a Buddhist perspective. On the other hand, a Gnostic perspective. Through interest in why a text becomes meaningless, is not understood or not accepted, does not elicit an emotional response. Each person has different criteria.

At the time, I conducted an experiment with high school students. It was interesting that students in a system of formal norms — of literary language and so on — felt that for them the Vvedensky poem I read them was a banal text. The criterion of meaninglessness for them was the criterion of banality. You can’t say that Vvedensky is banal. But for them he was. For each person, the text is meaningless in a different way.

Did you have a feeling of liberation from cliches when you discovered the Oberiuts?

Well, of course! It was just that when I was a schoolgirl, the Oberiuts were not yet published widely, and they circulated in samizdat. I well remember a samizdat Kharms, this thick. It served as an ottoman, that is, was sat on — just in case suddenly someone came who shouldn’t see it.

Was this a liberation from an ideological burden?

I don’t think there was a connection with ideology.

That is, on the contrary — in that these works were nominally useless?

I can’t say I looked at these texts from that angle. Back then, of course, with no experience in reading absurd texts, when you came across a new text that you had not previously encountered, each was full of its own kind of holes. I had a friend, an artist who worked as a sentry in the Russian Museum — he sat and guarded. And at that time everyone was reading Kharms. And he opened Kharms and said: “How can you read this! Everything is immoral here.” Later, as a philologist, I realized that everything verges on the ridiculous and terrible in the Oberiuts and Kharms, and this initial emotion of the text is difficult to isolate. Not everyone can understand it in texts that unfold at a junction of opposites: things that aren’t accepted, that violate taboos, and so on.

Is your perception of this literature changing?

To the extent that I approach this literature as a researcher. When studying Vvedensky, the question for me was precisely about the meaning, so when I discovered for myself how that works, I calmed down about it. And then other points began to interest me.

Now that your field of study of modern literature has expanded, how do you imagine the place of such literature among other things, in the body of literature as a whole, say?

If we’re talking about the Oberiuts, they gave a very powerful impetus. But how did it happen? After all, the first adult publications of Kharms and Vvedensky took place in 1967, one text was published. And before that, during their lifetimes, they had published only two poems. And that’s it. Therefore, how could the generation of the fifties get acquainted with their texts? That really interested me. Kharms died in a prison psychiatric hospital. That was in 1942, January. Vvedensky died at about the same time, en route after an evacuation from Kharkov. That left only the Oberiut Igor Bakhterev, who lived to the age of ninety-six. Then there was Yakov Druskin, a friend and ally of Kharms and Vvedensky, who remained alive. He was the one who retrieved a suitcase with Kharms’ papers from Mayakovskaya — from Nadezhdinskaya — street during the blockade. Yakov Semenovich kept this suitcase and opened it only later. And after all, during the fifties era, nobody knew this except a very narrow circle of people. The texts had not yet been published, had not been transferred to an archive. There was a group of people who read them to each other. Such an archaic way of transmitting information, in fact, worked then because the texts were transmitted to writers who themselves could not be published. So there was a convergence of completely closed systems, and this astounded me: neither Kharms nor Vvedensky had been published yet, and the young poets of the so-called second culture themselves had no outlet. But this meeting took place, and it gave a powerful impetus. Well, of course, an important system of synthesis had an impact: in the fifties and sixties, the Silver Age heritage was just opening up. And for the poets of the seventies, the legacy of acmeism and symbolism was extremely important. This made for a very interesting combination: the Oberiuts on the one hand — and the poetry of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, in no way connected with the poetry of the Oberiuts. This led to outpourings in completely new directions.

Like a torch now being passed to a new generation?

Well, that sounds overly pathos-ridden. Of course, that’s one way of putting it, but some other way would probably fit better.

Well, let’s say, there was a transmission of one of the possible lines, one of the approaches to literature.

Yes, one of the lines comes from the Oberiuts. This line resulted in there now being directions like sound poetry, visual poetry, but the connection is only indirect. The Oberiuts are more directly connected with transrational poetry, with absurdist poetry from the fifties; it’s connected with the direction of concrete poetry. The line of the Oberiuts has been preserved, but not in its pure form, because everyone took something different from them. Many emphasize that the Oberiuts were just playing a game and focus only on this, believing that the successors of the Oberiuts are the Moscow conceptualists, say. But that isn’t true. Yes, Kharms, say, has a game. Vvedensky makes completely different poetic moves that cannot be reduced only to play.

Can it be considered a coincidence that schools of a fairly experimental bent arose precisely in St. Petersburg, with its classical foundations?

I think this, of course, is more than a coincidence.

Are you going to continue your work in the direction you have so successfully begun?

I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything!..

The Editors are inviting authors who contribute to AB as specialists to answer a series of questions about the future of the cultural fields they are professionally associated with. Instead of guessing, we consider it important to learn their opinions directly.

Part of the resulting responses have been selected for publication. In this issue we begin to acquaint readers with these professionals’ opinions on the future of culture.

While preparing the magazine  for publication, we have moderated discussions among non-specialist readers about the responses chosen for print, and also offer the most striking, perhaps debatable, fragments of these discussions for contemplation. Perhaps this will inspire a wish to voice other points of view.

The Editors thank all the specialists who have responded to the invitation to share their thoughts on the future, as well as all the non-specialists who have shown themselves far from indifferent to issues obviously critical for everyone.

 

PHILOSOPHY

ART

SCIENCE

 

CONTINUED IN AB №26, “NON-RETURN”

 

— PHILOSOPHY —

1. What do you envision as the future of philosophy, its direction and path of development?
However paradoxical this might seem, I believe philosophy has no past or future; the history of philosophy is not the past, but is its own source and basis, and, in this sense, is philosophy itself. Philosophy always occurs in the present; it is a practice that, according to Hegel, awakens man from sleep, gives him vigor. So it’s much more accurate to speak about directions, the ways philosophy is developing now, today (Nietzsche even wrote about the eternal today). These directions are determined by the emergence of the modern world, which, in contrast to the world’s classical forms, identified by Dilthey, Jaspers, Scheler, reflects the information-based, digital nature of the current civilization. Being technocratic and technocentric, modern Ι-civilization (in the sense of both information and egocentricity) requires careful philosophical attention, adequate to the situation of the time. Of course, the means of philosophizing will be different, perhaps radically so, from those found in customary, historical, traditional philosophizing — but, firstly, the circle of fundamental questions currently considered by philosophy will not change, or else philosophy will cease to be philosophy, and, secondly, Louis Althusser has wittily noted that after Lenin, to philosophize means to engage in politics. In other words, the non-classical tradition has in mind no longer a theoretical, contemplative way of philosophizing, but a practical one. Philosophy, therefore, is the theory of politics.
2. What values, in your opinion, ought to have a central place in philosophy?
The central place in philosophy will of course belong to the same values that have always been its concern. These are human life, freedom, morality, duty, responsibility, God, and so on. The preservation of philosophy’s mindfulness toward these values means preserving philosophy as such in its form and content. Will the circle of its attention include some other, new values, fundamentally different from traditional ones? It’s hard to tell. Today, philosophy is dominated by the values that emerged in the Enlightenment, and for the past three hundred years their range has remained relatively unchanged (namely their range, not the scope of the theories applied to them).
3. What is or ought to be the decisive criteria for the development of philosophical thought?
The decisive factor in the development of philosophical thought is (and always has been) a constant reflection on its own foundations; always having modern answers to a range of fundamental issues relating to the ultimate grounds of existence. And, of course, the personal courage and principled honesty of the philosopher, scholar, researcher.
4. What might you define as its primary goal, its ultimate purpose? Its guiding principle?
I think the most important task of philosophy, its guiding principle, is the constant intellectual and spiritual articulation of modernity.
5. What might you propose as constituting a possible (desirable) difference between the philosophy of the future and the philosophy of the present?
As I said, philosophy always belongs to the present, and in this sense it’s either self-identical, or we are not dealing with philosophy. It’s a different matter that the methods of philosophizing may vary, but the variance ends there: the range of things that philosophy focuses on remains more or less identical.
6. What aspects and layers of personal and intellectual experience could and should be fundamental for the development of philosophy?
First of all, the philosopher’s clear and distinct understanding of belonging to and inheriting a huge reservoir of cultural and linguistic traditions. The experience of philosophy is the experience of philosophizing, or the history of philosophy is philosophy itself, according to Heidegger. If we consciously or unconsciously refuse involvement in the world-historical experience of the development of thought, which means simply paying close attention to its basic problems, to the ultimate grounds of being, we thereby marginalize the discourse of philosophy.
What do you see as the main obstacles to philosophy’s development?
A totalitarian, lawless state and rigid ideological censorship. The very foundation of philosophy as a relevant articulation of the present, of constant intense modernity, is the freedom and responsibility of philosophizing.
Do you view philosophy as a branch of nominally professional activity?
Philosophy is undoubtedly a practice that requires training and professionalism to engage in it — just like a sport. Non-professional philosophers, just like non-professional athletes, who take up tasks whose performance requires professionalism, risk injury and forcing themselves into permanent retirement. But physical education, care of the self physically — and spiritually? No one’s a stranger to that. Philosophizing, personal hygiene of thought, healthy discussion about the world, the orientation in being, rich spiritual life, moral principles in judgment — all of that is of course the business of all people without exception.
Do you see it as possible for a unified concept or school of philosophy to exist for everyone?
It’s impossible, because such a school would become either a church or an ideology. Philosophy is only philosophy when there’s dialogue, which means detachment in conversation, awareness of one’s distance. If that’s lacking — and it’s absent in both ideological and church settings — the phenomenon of philosophy is impossible.
Do you consider it necessary for schools and movements to interact?
Of course. This is one of the essential conditions for the existence of philosophy as a phenomenon. This interaction is always present in two aspects: on the one hand, the antagonism or symphony of different schools influence each other like the principle of Shadow Cabinet in the British Parliament, and on the other — like old man Hegel, who in his first lecture on the history of philosophy warned his students that those who would refute them were already standing behind them — and within a decade, Kierkegaard and Marx appeared.
How could the interaction of philosophy with other categories of culture — science, the arts, literature — manifest itself?
As a philosophical reflection on them, namely through aesthetics, the philosophy of culture, cultural studies, and the philosophy of science. Through the appearance of a brilliant stylists like Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre (who was, however, a bad philosopher), or such universal minds as Jaspers and Foucault.
How might you picture an ideal culture?
Culture is a choice.
What might you name as culture’s central element, its proper model?
I consider the central and essential element of culture to be a conscious thirst for spiritual or intellectual labor.
What does the word “culture” mean overall, from your individual perspective?
The same thing it means in Latin: “cultivation, development.” Culture is a world-historical basis for care of the self.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
(1)
– Doesn’t the author’s definition of our civilization as “information-based,” “digital,” merely indicate the character of the technical media, without considering the content, the object of thought? Doesn’t a civilization oriented toward the level of media appear groundless, frivolous, fickle, dangerously relativistic? Even if the range of themes examined by philosophy doesn’t change, the shift in emphasis in such a civilization in itself constitutes a fundamental change. How can philosophy make do without contemplation? Isn’t freedom of immersion in the richness of inner life the basis of human sanctity, which the political world ought to serve? Might “care of the self” mean losing the chance to overcome the self? Might this lead to a certain narrowness — fear of losing the known for the sake of the unverified or even unadvantageous?
(2)
— Doesn’t the author see the fundamental break with the values of the Enlightenment, say, in existential philosophy, as more than just a theory? Or, for instance, the Romantic movement’s attempts to reckon with the irrational?
— The weakness of the Enlightenment lay in its break with the philosophical values of its predecessors. This resulted in a false view of philosophical truths as no longer eternal but historical, that is, relative. This differs from the definition of philosophy given by the author in item 1.
— “[H]uman life, freedom, morality, duty, responsibility, God” seem to have long since been pushed aside by philosophy into utilitarian and subordinate roles (as in the theory of politics, for example), where it sanctions considering them values only very conditionally and in small doses. This seems to be modern philosophy’s form of good manners.
(3)
— The author’s promotion of a necessity for “always having modern answers” is somewhat perplexing. Where does this come from? Does new mean better? When we’re directly confronted by “fundamental issues relating to the ultimate grounds of existence,” we’re still more likely to find answers in the Bible or Plato.
(4)
— Where does this modernity come from, with which the philosopher purportedly ought to deal? What is its authority based on? Doesn’t it construe philosophy as dependent on application to a flat flow of givens, of data?
(6)
— Why isn’t the “relevant articulation of modernity” possible without belonging to and following tradition? Tradition is only one Implemented vector among many that are possible. Why can’t philosophers start thinking BEFORE any tradition and in this way lay the foundations of a new tradition?
— If marginalizing the discourse of philosophy gives a chance of reaching the essence of things, why not marginalize?
(8)
— Where, in the author’s opinion, is the line between “ideological censorship” and the “responsibility of philosophizing?” Especially given the ideologized consciousness of the philosopher?
(10)
— Isn’t there a danger of the professional philosopher becoming so estranged from “unhygienic” life that his philosophy will cease to relate to life at all?
— Since when has philosophy equated itself to a sport? How does it rank competitiveness? “Higher, faster, stronger”?
(11)
— The internal dynamics of a single school of thought can be quite healthy and productive. Recall Hinduism, which developed internally over centuries and remains active to this day. Outside of churches there are also more than enough philosophers who lack the ability to think.
(12)
— Can refuting the eternal qualify as philosophy?
(13-14)
— An impression of philosophy’s dependency, namely as a referential reflex, and not as purified will. A cultural choice prone to random accidents, manipulation, indiscriminacy? This seems like sophistry (see Socrates’ reproaches of the Sophists).
(16)
— Kierkegaard would find this formulation of culture nauseating — in reality, it encourages provincialism and complacency.
— Isn’t there another option for the formation of a philosopher and the development of philosophy? People can live differently from what contemporary civilization prescribes, while knowing themselves to be living correctly. People’s lives and actions can speak for themselves. For example, Henry David Thoreau would not have had broad global influence as a philosopher without his quite revolutionary activity — building a house by a pond as a central element in his own philosophical practice.
— The author’s responses are more like a kind of memory of philosophy, a measure of this memory’s operational efficiency, than like philosophy itself.

— ART —

Dear Editors of AB!
As a professional historian and theorist of art, I find the future of art unimaginable.
BB
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
— It’s hard not agree that trying to look into the future is a largely thankless and risky task, and yet without at least some schematic idea of the future, it would be impossible to assess the pluses and minuses of the past and especially of the present.
— Given that this author-specialist has no ideas about the future of art, does this mean he also has no preferences about it?

— ART —

The future of art is the eternal struggle between realism, the realist school of perceiving the world, and the search for all sorts of new forms of communicating feelings through paintings, drawings and sculpture. Literature, music and culture will also continue along this road. No special oracular powers are needed to anticipate this course of human intellectual and creative activity. For example: the birth of photography, cinema and television. In a historically short period of time these visual discoveries affected the artist’s relatively peaceful traditional place in the studio in front of a canvas or sketching alone, one on one with the beauty of nature. If new techniques hadn’t appeared and integrally fused with art, the planet would never have known Picasso or Kandinsky or Malevich. And technology changes incessantly. Meanwhile, the “people with brushes in their hands” have to take part in the struggle “imposed” on them, competing with more relevant means of touching modern audiences, who are more and more immersed in a network of global computerization.
One of the most famous painters of our time, a teacher, came once during classes to a parallel session in a room packed with computer hardware, where he saw the students literally glued to their screens. In no time at all, the students performed miracles, “easy as catching a fish in a pond,” creating drawings that brilliantly conveyed all the anatomical features of nature. The professor was speechless. How many years, how much work, how many hardships it had cost him to master the skill and deep knowledge of anatomy, perspective, laws of composition… — starting from the very basics of grasping one of the most complex manifestations of humanity. Is it possible to make young people today go through the same harsh school of art?
From year to year, this question will grow increasingly acute and unsolvable — this, however, makes our lives truly interesting. As the Romantic poet George Byron wrote: “…a small drop of ink,/Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces/That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” Yes, the writer’s ordinary quill will always gain the upper hand over the mechanical words of the most perfect machine that will ever be invented. And its invented will come — technological progress is unstoppable!
Art can never make progress. It must pace around for centuries in the same spot, deciding its only problem: how to convey universal human feelings with material resources — with a brush, a pen, or a sculptor’s stecca… Confirmation of this abounds in the museums of the world. They are the story of human emotions and experiences. Have we progressed far from Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”?
At the heart of all the arts will always be the apprehension of personality. And this can be done most profoundly only by realistic means. Attempts at abstract solutions lead only to create a crossword puzzle of confusion.
It’s quite obvious what direction art will take in entering the next centuries. This in no way precludes searches for new styles — all that really matters is that civilization refrains from senseless self-destruction.
The specific questions asked by the editors demand specific answers, serious conversation, not facile replies. I’ve tried to respond in general terms to this wonderful, intelligent magazine’s invitation.
— Leonid Kozlov
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
— Exactly what does the author call realism? Historically, the world of art never had a single school of realism. If, for example, we simply replace the term “realism” with the concept of “recognizability” might it be even more obvious how richness and diversity can be mined from this vein of the arts?
The advantage of our time is that we have the opportunity to see the value of fine art from any era — of cave paintings or medieval art no less than the art of the Renaissance. Each era’s art provides fine examples of generalization, offering different approaches to perceiving and understanding the outer and inner world. Every conscientious work of art gives its own version of “realistic” perception, its own redistribution of accents. Progress in art really is impossible. It seems misguided to apply a scientific model of progress to art. If art is a matter of life experience, the historical dimension means nothing in terms of qualitative comparisons, and only the moral scale is relevant. The wise gaze of an artist of any era is always timely.
The author speaks of “the artist’s relatively peaceful…place…in front of a canvas” — in the past. But can the professional life of artists who have been ready to sacrifice themselves for their art and whom we know as classics, be considered even relatively “peaceful”? How peaceful did Van Gogh feel in front of a canvas? True artists always had to find his own way to exit the social networks of their time in order to create. Perhaps the serious artists of the future will have to escape new forms of temptation in addition to the old, but the general dynamic will stay the same: they will have to cultivate their own perception instead of entrusting the work of thought and emotion to the level of mass culture and to new technologies oriented on this level.
By the way, despite all the vaunted progress of modernity, the quality of supplies for artists has declined greatly over time. While the infrastructure to produce reproductions has grown, material cultural fails to provide for the creation of new high-quality originals.
— If the planet had never known “Picasso or Kandinsky or Malevich,” associated with the appearance of new technology, maybe it would have had the chance to know someone better?
— Agreed, art remains art and deserves a future only as long as it deals with “apprehension of personality”; in this sense, the standard of personality and the standard of art go hand and hand and serve as indicators for each other. Is art losing its own face as it increasingly turns away from human person in favor of stock images?

— SCIENCE —

1. What do you envision as the future of science, its direction and path of development?
To understand what science will look like in, say, sixty years, the best approach is to mentally travel back to 1950 and think about which of today’s achievements could be expected then. As I see it, not very many. Perhaps it would be possible to predict the distribution of television and launches of rockets into near-earth orbit. But it would hardly have been possible to foresee personal computers connected by the Internet, or the revolution in genetics and the ensuing advances in medicine, agriculture and other fields. No one could have predicted the emergence of nanotechnology. Even the simpler technologies used in cell phones were hardly predictable. All these qualitative changes over the past sixty years have led to the globalization of the world and to deep social, demographic and political shifts.
Therefore, whatever changes in science can be foreseen are only of a qualitative character.
In the 1950s, the explosive (i.e. exponential) development of science had already begun. It had begun to change from an occupation for a small number of university professors into a massive area of intellectual activity. I think that the growth in the number of participants in science and its exponential development, which we are currently witnessing, will continue for some time to come. But no exponential growth can be infinite. It must give way to a certain saturation, to more moderate growth. This is the fate of any single distinct field of research: from birth to maturity and then to old age. Then there are different forms of technology, but these too reach their points of saturation. For instance, the internal combustion engine went virtually unchanged from 1950 until the beginning of computerization (in the 1990s), which came from a very different direction.
A mature science yields to new fields, which travel the same path: birth, breakthrough to maturity, saturation.
Physics, say, has clearly passed its phase of adolescence and maturity, but biology hasn’t yet. Computer science and related technologies are approaching an age of maturity.
Therefore, in the near future we can expect further rapid advances in biology, genetics and medicine, and in the social aspects of computer technology. Perhaps we finally learn how to combat viruses and deranged cells. Amazing materials will be designed, including on a cellular level. It is possible that people will be able to construct new living complex organisms, although ethically that is certainly a minefield …
Will there be breakthroughs in other areas? I don’t know, but the chances that there will be are far from small. What kind? I don’t think anyone can really say. A few details might include the probable death of paper book and newspaper publishing, as well as of internal combustion engines in cars. All production in the U.S. will shift into the intellectual sphere: that is, commercial goods will be created with the head, not the hands. Large cities in the United States will die faster than in Europe. The stratification between makers of intellectual products and the rest of the population will deepen. The political and military consequences of globalization will be quite unexpected. This is a very serious challenge to all of civilization, much more serious than any of the challenges of the first decade of the 21st century. So Francis Fukuyama was wrong. History hasn’t ended. Civilization will have to fight to survive.
Everything I wrote above is reasonable with one caveat: if civilization triumphs over barbarism. Today that outcome can’t be taken for granted.
2. What values, in your opinion, ought to have a central place in science?
I don’t think science has any other values apart from humanist ones.
3. What is or ought to be the decisive criteria for the development of scientific thought?
Science describes nature and society. Any theory must be tested for validity. For this, the theory’s consequences must be consistent with what we already observe in living or inanimate nature, and predictions must undergo testing. This is the main criterion. When the opportunity to test predictions disappears or is pushed back into the indefinite future, science becomes a religion.
It would be a mistake to think that this applies only to the natural sciences. In the social sciences there are also experiments. Take, for example, the two Germanys and the two Koreas. Any theory of social development must explain why socialism is so ineffective and, moreover, beyond a certain point automatically leads to dictatorship and the supremacy of government over citizens.
4. What might you define as its primary goal, its ultimate purpose? Its guiding principle?
Science isn’t homogeneous. Fundamental science, i.e. the one that doesn’t bring immediate benefits, is driven by human curiosity. Since ancient times, observing whatever is unfamiliar, people have asked themselves the question: “How does that work?” Gradually fundamental science has grown, and with it a class of professionals for whom “Oh, I wonder how that works?” forms their lives’ main occupation.
In this sense, fundamental science has no purpose or guiding principle (or at least not in the short term). Modern fundamental science is very expensive, and essentially only rich countries can afford it. Fundamental science, by definition, moves along an unexplored path; turns along the way are largely determined by the people involved — leaders in fields — and random discoveries. Of course, with technical capabilities also growing, our eyes are being opened to previously unseen phenomena. Namely this is where we see the most significant, “unprincipled,” breakthroughs occurring.
Applied science is engaged in tasks that should lead to immediate progress. Here the principle is that the more useful a task is for humankind, the higher the priority. The natural course of things is that some results of fundamental science gradually make their way into applied science. This happened with quantum mechanics, when people eventually created, for example, lasers; with the special theory of relativity, which is incorporated in GPS; nuclear physics, which was a field of intellectual activity, and then gave rise to the atomic bomb and nuclear power; and thus came the founding of the Internet, which has completely transformed modern civilization.
And one more point. Since the solution of fundamental problems involves the engagement of enormous intellectual resources, often practical applications arise by chance in the course of fundamental research. The most striking example, the World Wide Web, was invented at CERN by Behrens-Lee to address a specific technical problem at CERN.
And this “unprincipled” example of social scientific breakthrough is far from the only one. When a large number of smart people gather in one place for a long time, there’s a great likelihood of new breakthroughs.
5. What might you propose as constituting a possible (desirable) difference between the science of the future and the science of the present?
I think the relative role of science will grow as society grows wealthier.
New breakthroughs will come at a higher cost and will demand growth in the scientific community. Really, this is already happening before our eyes. In the science of the future I would like to see fewer charlatans, with scientific ethics growing higher and wider. This is important now, but it will be absolutely imperative soon as people learn to routinely manipulate enormous and compact energy sources, genetic material, etc.
As the club of “wealthy” countries grows, the geography of science will inevitably expand. Big science will start including countries with no tradition of scientific ethics in the sense in which these ethics have evolved over centuries in western Europe. It’s incredibly important that these traditions be instilled such countries from the outside.
6. What aspects and layers of personal and intellectual experience could and should be fundamental for the development of science?
I don’t know about life experience, but intellectual experience in itself is science. Isn’t that true?
7. What might you consider relevant for this process? Nonessential (superfluous)?
8. What do you see as the main obstacles to science’s development?
9. Would you anticipate that the new — ideal — science would stay connected with tradition?
Nothing perfect exists in this world. Only in fairy tales. The new science will undoubtedly grow on the foundations of the old, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity would hardly have appeared without Newtonian gravity. If we understand the methodology of scientific research, based on experimental or observational data, and scientific ethics, to be tradition, then this tradition will certainly be woven into the fabric of the new science, whatever that means.
10. Do you view science as a branch of nominally professional activity?
Yes.
11. Do you see it as possible for a unified concept or school of science to exist for everyone?
No. There should continue to be competing schools.
12. Do you consider it necessary for schools and movements to interact?
Yes.
13. How could the interaction of science with other categories of culture — philosophy, the arts, literature — manifest itself?
As I see it, this interaction has a purely aesthetic character, through separate individuals participating in the scientific process.
Yet one might add that neuroscience is gradually coming closer to understanding the human perception of art. In time, it may begin to affect the arts and the humanities in general. But this remains highly questionable.
14. How might you picture an ideal culture?
As I wrote above, nothing is ever perfect. Nature and human society are too complex for that. All I can say is that culture should be diverse, complex and rich, so to speak, living in a rich stratum with millions of interwoven relationships. At the same time, I disagree with the principle of multiculturalism. Mozart’s music is much more complex and saturated than “tom tom tom” on the tom-tom. And thus it makes an incomparably greater contribution to human culture. The same can be said of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or Hokusai’s prints, or the novels of, say, Tolstoy and Faulkner.
Naturally, tom-tom fans are free to listen to that…
15. What might you name as culture’s central element, its proper model?
Any reliable knowledge, whether about nature or humankind or society, is an element of culture. The interaction of people in society, the very structure of society, is also an element of culture. Which elements are central? Those elements, I think, which reflect the absolute value of human life and individual freedom. Plus, the obvious “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” etc.
What it is collectively called “modern civilization.”
16. What does the word “culture” mean overall, from your individual perspective?
See the answer to question 15, above.
— Mikhail Shifman
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
(1)
— It would be interesting to clarify to what extent there were really no guesses about the nature of modern scientific breakthroughs. Science fiction always expressed age-old human desires: to be strong, to move farther and faster, to communicate at a distance… Some of these aspirations have come true, but seemingly in an extremely small and narrow way. Apple trees aren’t blooming on Mars, astronauts aren’t lighting up and smoking before takeoff… Maybe that’s the whole problem??
— Isn’t it ironic that modern science is concerned with creating new complex living organisms, while accelerating the extinction of many existing species? With manipulating genetic material against a backdrop of parallel poisoning of the environment?
— “If civilization triumphs over barbarism.” An important aspect of the Internet is its effectiveness as an instrument of mass political and commercial monitoring and manipulation. From the standpoint of those who wish to profit from the Internet (as well as from television and mass communications in general) a person is no longer a person, but a set of reflexes. The Internet is a gigantic tool for the enslavement of humankind, for the subordination of each human being’s personal life to principles of mass. This corrupting mental pressure fuels the rise of barbarism within civilization itself. The very same technical accoutrements of the “civilized world” cultivate people’s inner barbarians, simply of a new type.
— About the “probable death of paper book and newspaper publishing.” What is this confidence based on? For example, vinyl records are now experiencing a dramatic revival: their production has resumed, prices have risen, there are new record companies specializing in vinyl, high-end music magazines carry ads for newly manufactured record players…Might the burial of books be premature? Today’s bestsellers are barely printed before millions have lined up to buy them. It’s more likely that transitional forms will disappear — as happened with tape recorders and VCRs…
— It isn’t clear to whom the author is speaking when referring to “makers of intellectual products” and to the “rest of the population.” And what would the promised stratification between the one and other actually mean?
— What is meant in saying that “civilization will have to fight to survive”? What are the parameters of the civilization which the author is concerned about? Who is permitted to enter it?
— The mind, the intellect, are not only the head, not only the brain, but the whole person; everything that is incorporated in the person and operates on various levels. Thought and sensory experiences are inseparable. Only their totality in the course of everyday experience constitutes what is commonly called intelligence. A science which envisions a future separation of “heads” from “hands” can hardly inspire confidence.
— From a professional’s hands, science gets a future without even a speck of a future! One might believe that everything simply moves “from birth to maturity and then to old age” (just like the Soviet system), if, fortunately, the lessons of history didn’t show that the most stubborn notions can be overturned in a moment, from a direction which no one expected — least of all, it seems, the experts.
— A science which immediately and directly influences the course of public life, which causes “social scientific breakthroughs,” no longer creates an impression of science, but of something completely different. Isn’t it time to find different, new expressions for modern science, just as for modern art?
(3)
— “When the opportunity to test predictions disappears or is pushed back into the indefinite future, science becomes a religion.” The character of the responses in fact shows that science has already become a religion for the elite, to which the author, one might surmise, belongs, and at the same time for the “rest of the population” which the author would willingly acknowledge as civilized. Is there really any room left for another religion, for one not based on measurable things?
— Even given the scientific development of “rich countries” (rich in what way?) property owners still find it profitable to inflate prices and keep people in a position of struggling for survival (which includes paying to keep up with technology). Isn’t science’s growing dependence on funding leading (or has already led) to its main purpose being simply to circulate money?
(4)
— About applied science: how are “useful tasks” determined? What decides their usefulness?
(5)
— In what way are scientific ethics different from ethics as such? When science relies on its own ethics, doesn’t this mean the loss of the integrity of the ethics developed through centuries of human experience? As a result, the civilized world is losing its very capacity to understand what horrors are perpetrated under the guise of “scientific” ethics — in war, for example, or at home, simply in the cheapening of the soul.
(15)
— Has the author ever thought about the fact that “any reliable knowledge” can come into conflict with the “absolute value of human life and individual freedom,” which sometimes prefers not to know, or to know in an unverified way? This is where “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness” show their ambiguity. Isn’t culture shaped much more by how any knowledge (or lack of knowledge) is applied? There are countless historical examples of this.

The event we wish to describe can in no way be called ordinary or typical. As a phenomenon, it more likely ranks with the incredible. The following surveys the first international theological and philosophical colloquium — dedicated to the integration of philosophy and theology — organized by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, an institute affiliated with the prestigious Graduate Theological Union of the University of California at Berkeley. Most of the colloquium’s program was hosted by St. Albert’s Priory, situated in a quiet enclave near a highway running along one edge of the city.

The colloquium takes its title from a quote: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The question’s author isn’t specified, although his identity is surely no secret for most present. Nominally, the colloquium is open to everyone, but the limited number of spots determines the audience’s overall level, with participants primarily either serious professionals, often of international repute, or interested graduate students.

Although the provocative words of Tertullian, an outstanding thinker of early Christianity, were originally meant rhetorically — he believed Jerusalem’s wellspring of faith and Athens’ school of reason could share nothing in common — the question in fact remains open. Philosophy’s role in the cultivation of minds has retained its significance for Christian thought over the course of centuries, despite the influence of particular eras and claims against it. By the thirteenth century, when the fruits of ancient culture began to reemerge among the baggage of European civilization, work on a worthy bond between theology and philosophy was already well under way.

Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas, the most prominent figures in framing this process, happened to belong to the Dominican Order. Thomas’ fundamental work Summa Theologica was and remains among the most important pillars of Christian thought — in both its content and its precedent of applying philosophical thought in the light of faith, which offers a way to go beyond the bounds of logic. The direction indicated by Thomas, and thus called Thomism, remains requisite for the formation of Catholic theologians. As a keystone of medieval Scholastic philosophy, Thomism has been repeatedly subjected to serious criticism, to the point of complete rejection by secular philosophy after the Renaissance. Yet Thomas’ intellectual feat has won the admiration even of his opponents, while others have found him an inimitable paragon. He remains an authority for a wide range of contemporary scholars and philosophers.

At St. Albert’s Priory, sets of Thomas’ works are part of the everyday background. He is studied at the Dominican School and constantly referenced at the colloquium — more often, it seems, than Scripture, and this is fine and shows good form. His works are voluminous and complex, although surprisingly accessible. Many of those present are thoroughly fluent in them and readily quote them from memory.

Thomism is not a closed, stifling system. The contemporary theologians featured at the colloquium view any philosophy much as Thomas approaches Aristotle in the Summa: as if recognizing that any manifestation of rational human thought can elicit something of value, and hoping on the other hand to infuse philosophy with content from outside the field of its standard application. As the theologians themselves put it, their privilege is a view from above — a means to elevate, adjust, from the outside, and expand the legacy of philosophical thought, thus enriching and revitalizing the course of its development.

Accustomed to gathering as a community several times a day to observe the liturgical hours, the monks never waver in this regime during the colloquium, holding regular services in the monastery’s elegant Tudor-style basilica, which also serves as a forum for almost all the plenary sessions.

Asked how he feels about the colloquium, one of the monks replies: “It doesn’t get any better than this!” Indeed, lovers of theology and philosophy seem to be in an earthly paradise. Experts are gathered here not only from all over the United States, but also from the best European universities, even from the Vatican. The Order’s current leader, its Master General, Frenchman Fr. Bruno Cadoré, also honoring the colloquium with his presence, delivers an address comprising his answer to the headlining question. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has philosophy to do with theology? Everything! Using the gift of reason to seek an explanation, to search for truth. … In a state of crisis, when we have lost the ability to situate ourselves in the perspective of a time which holds any promise, theologians call on philosophers to think together.”

Addressing the prior of the Western Dominican Province in an official letter made public before the colloquium’s opening, the Master General’s assistant Fr. Michael Mascari distills the event’s ideological essence: “In a time when specialization increasingly threatens to isolate one field from another, deliberate efforts to promote interdisciplinary study are more welcome than ever. This is especially true of philosophy and theology, the two disciplines closest to the heart of our mission as Dominicans.”

During the days of the colloquium, the predominance of white Dominican robes among any group gathered in conversation comes to appear commonplace. It also ceases to amaze that one can hear a monk talking about anything at all — for instance, his drive here, spent singing along to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. “If you have questions,” says the Dominican School’s Regent of Studies, Fr. Brian Kromholtz, pointing toward his brothers in the Order, “just ask anyone who’s dressed like that.”

One Dominican who answers our questions between lectures is Laurent Sorber, a professor of mathematics and logic at the University of Leuven (Belgium). Asked whether he believes not only that theology needs philosophy, but that philosophy needs theology, and what might constitute that need, Sorber offers the following answer: “Philosophy needs ontological grounding. If it is not constructed in relation to something that exists, philosophy remains an abstraction. I choose a theological approach to the philosophy of mathematics, for example, because I prefer to base my thoughts on what namely theology recognizes as existing. This approach may help in avoiding unnecessary errors.”

Kromholtz, trying to define the Order’s unique character, begins with a reference to the Benedictine motto “Ora et Labora,” “Prayer and work,” which, he said, is relevant for any monastic order. “We Dominicans are different in that we regard intellectual work as work. Some might say the Jesuits like to write, and the Dominicans like to read. We appreciate the role of contemplation, but we prefer contemplation with an object. We believe in the light of the intellect and in striving after the ideal — that it is possible to make the world more ideal, and that we may endeavor to embody ideal minds. We believe in supporting revelation-based understanding with intellectual understanding. One kind of understanding can buttress the other.”

“How do these forms of activity — spiritual and intellectual — interrelate?”

“We can never set our faith aside for even a second during study, even with totally dry work like tracking down a footnote. Faith decides everything. Even if we’re studying nominally secular philosophy. We would not want to pursue secular philosophy without divine guidance. We acknowledge God as unknowable, and thus try to know and appreciate Him through His creation — each of us in our own way.”

Kromholtz explains that the personality of the Order’s founder, St. Dominic, still shapes the Order’s identity. “He didn’t shy away from participation in secular matters, and nor do we.”

With many of the colloquium’s participants and guests due to leave for the airport early in the morning and unable to be at Sunday Mass, where the Bishop of Oakland and the Auxiliary Bishop of Boston are to preside, an anticipatory vigil service is held for any wishing to attend. In the small third-floor chapel room where young monastic priest John Thomas Mellein extends his welcome, among those gathered is also the Master General of the Order, Fr. Bruno, his delicate restraint and swarthy complexion reminiscent of an Indian ascetic’s.

The sermon’s theme includes the image of intertwining roots of corn, which form a dense subterranean layer that helps protect against weeds and retain moisture even during a drought. “If any of us at this gathering feels a sense of flagging in our institutional settings, may this opportunity for us to join at the roots yield the nourishment for carrying out our regular duties.” In the common prayer “for those who choose academic paths,” the heartfelt voice of the Dominican Order can be heard — in solidarity with civilization as a whole.

The next colloquium of philosophy and theology in Berkeley is scheduled to be held three years after the first.

 

 

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Schedule of Events

 

Wednesday

Evening

7:00 pm – Welcome & orientation

7:15 pm – Msgr. Robert Sokolowski: “The Theology of Disclosure”; response: Fr. Richard Schenk, OP

 

Thursday

Morning

7:00 am – Matins & Lauds

7:45 am – Mass

9:00 am – Prof. Linda Zagzebski: “Omnisubjectivity: Why It Is a Divine Attribute”; response: Fr. Bernhard Blankenhorn, OP

10:30 am – Break

11:00 am – Breakout sessions (60 min)

Noon – Lunch

Afternoon

1:30 pm – Prof. Edward Feser: “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature”; response: Fr. Simon Gaine, OP

3:00 pm – Break

3:30 pm – Breakout Sessions (90 min)

5:15 pm – Vespers

5:30 pm – Travel to DSPT, Berkeley

Evening

6:00 pm – Casual Dinner

7:00 pm – Address by Fr. Bruno Cadoré, OP, Master of the Order of Preachers (at DSPT)

7:30 pm – Fr. Michael Dodds, OP: “Of all the gin joints…’ Causality, Science, Chance, and God”; response: Prof. Steven Long (at DSPT)

 

Friday

Morning

7:00 am – Matins & Lauds

7:45 am – Mass

9:00 am – Prof. John Searle: “The Future of Philosophy”; response: Fr. Michael Dodds, OP

10:30 am – Break

11:00 am – Breakout sessions (60 min)

Noon – Lunch

Afternoon

1:30 pm – Fr. Michał Paluch, OP: “Analogical Synthesis: An Impossible Project?”; response: Prof. Matthew Levering

3:00 pm – Break

3:30 pm – Breakout Sessions (90 min)

5:15 pm – Vespers

Evening

7:30 pm – Breakout Sessions (90 min)

 

Saturday

Morning

7:00 am – Matins & Lauds

7:45 am – Mass

9:00 am – Prof. Fred Freddoso: “The Vindication of St. Thomas: Thomism and Contemporary Analytic Philosophy”; response: Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP

10:30 am – Break

11:00 am – Breakout sessions (60 min)

Noon – Lunch

Afternoon

1:15 pm – Breakout Sessions (90 min)

2:45 pm – Break

3:00 pm – Prof. John O’Callaghan: “Can We Prove the Existence of God? A Problem About Names”; response: Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP

4:30 pm – Closing remarks (concluding by 5:00 pm)

5:15 pm – Vespers

Evening

5:30 pm – Social

 

Sunday

Morning

8:30 am – Matins & Lauds

9:30 am – Mass with the Most Reverend Michael Barber, Bishop of Oakland, and the Most Reverend Arthur Kennedy, Auxiliary Bishop of Boston

–End of Colloquium –

Afternoon (for Dominican Friars)

2:30 pm – Discussion

4:15 pm – Vespers

 

AT PRESENTATIONS AND ON THE SIDELINES

Plus a third layer, not included in the archives, with digressions and insertions

 

“Problems exist only in time, that is, when we meet an issue incompletely. …

Time is the interval between idea and action. …

Time is the interval between the observer and the observed.”

— Krishnamurti, “Freedom From the Known”

 

Use of private photographic or recording equipment is prohibited during the colloquium. From a certain point of view, this can be considered an advantage. On the knees of many of those present are open notepads or notebooks. We try to sit close to the altar, which today serves as a stage for the speakers. This gives more light, and a chance to try to capture unfolding events with the aid of a pencil — evidence yielded by pencils and pens remains unrestricted.

The hosts are the white monks. The swaying of their robes creates additional lighting effects. The chapel’s interior is also entirely white, with a marble floor. offset by the dark wood of the benches and structural beams. Business-like, level-headed monks with long strings of triple rosaries hanging from the left side of their waists. At each crossing of the threshold of the nave, obligatory bows toward the altar. The Dominicans have intelligent, serious faces, and they ask the speakers difficult questions.

After a short monastic greeting to the audience, the podium is cleared for the first presenter.

 

Plenary presentations (**) include a pair of speakers: one who explicates the theme from a given angle, and another, equally qualified, who offers his analysis of the initial presenter’s standpoint in light of his own perspective.

Breakout sessions (*) take place in small monastery classrooms, crowded with attendees, in a relaxed atmosphere conducive to exchanging opinions.

 

Richard Schenk and Robert Sokolowski

Richard Schenk and Robert Sokolowski

PRESENTATIONS FEATURED IN THE RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE VERSION OF “BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM”:

** “The Theology of Disclosure” — Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, OJ (professor of philosophy, Catholic University of America); response: Fr. Richard Schenk, OP (philosopher and theologian, former president of the University of Eichstätt, Germany)

* “Narrative and Suffering: the Problem of Standpoint” — Jill Hernandez (professor of philosophy, University of Texas)

* “A Theology of Logic: Re-Naming the Animals” — Caleb G. Brown (graduate student, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology)

** “‘Of all the gin joints…’ Causality, Science, Chance, and God” — Fr. Michael Dodds, OP (professor of philosophy and theology, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology); response: Prof. Steven Long (professor of theology, Ave Maria University, USA)

* “Philosophy within the Limits of Religion Alone: Henri de Lubac on Final Causality” — Christopher M. Cullen, SJ (professor of philosophy, Fordham University, USA)

* “Wittgenstein: Transcendence, Seeing and Hope” — Fr. David Goodill, OP (professor of philosophy and theology, Blackfriars, Oxford)

** “The Future of Philosophy” — John Searle (professor of philosophy, University of California, Berkeley); response: Fr. Michael Dodds, OP

[+ Digression with insertion: On the Path to Kabbalah through the Masonic Lodge +]

** “Can We Prove the Existence of God? A Problem About Names” — Prof. John O’Callaghan (permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, professor of philosophy); response: Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP (professor of theology, Fribourg University, Switzerland)

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