Anatoly Akhutin

I ventured to think during the war. I wrote several blogs on the topic "War and Intelligence". Everything seems out of place here. War requires action (participation, protection, assistance), and thought wants concentration in peace. I am not engaged in scientific research, I just think about what I can, what I have, and what I carry with me, without referring to sources and reference books. I'm thinking about this very: how does the event of the war relate to the ability — and maybe even the duty — to think. I wrote two posts. They consider intelligence (intellectus) as a kind of responsibility. All knowledge, awareness, concepts, sciences, discursive practices, etc. — are secondary. They make sense in the primary context of responsibility. All intellectual pursuits have meaning and meaning as aspects of the answer to the question that constitutes a human being as human. This is being-in-question.

The article proposes to view Maidan as a historic event that generated widely influential new meanings. The authors interpret Maidan not only as a political phenomenon, but as an event that rehabilitated the idea of human dignity and solidarity, and demonstrated the possibility of creating a new community where people come together not because they share a common past, but because they choose a common future—it provided people the occasion to make free choices concerning their futures. At the same time, Maidan raised the question of European identity once again. The European idea is that of an incomplete, free individual in search of himself; European culture is Maidan—the space in which people of different cultures communicate. European culture does not create a specific identity and puts any identity into question. The European idea and patriotic idea are the internal contradictions of Maidan.

The purpose of the present article is not an excursion into the history of philosophy. It is not a story of the adventures of Immanuel Kant on Russian soil, and even less does it pretend to expound systematically the perception of Kantian philosophy by Russian metaphysics. The author's interest is strictly philosophical. Russian religious thought, insofar as it has an appetite for philosophizing, consciously enters into the life of classical European philosophy, into that living communication of minds by which truth is sustained, moved, and nourished among people and nations.2 A clarification of its personal relations with the central figures of this philosophical drama will help us to understand the strictly philosophical significance of Russian metaphysics more accurately than even sometimes the most dedicated description of it in itself succeeds in doing