“The World as a Symbolic Reality” Lecture by Mikhail Blumenkrants

Abstract:
The subject of the discussion is our inherent ability to construct the world within symbolic reality. Our usual ideas about reality, ourselves and others, all what we call our system of values, our tastes and aesthetic preferences are gathered into symbolic puzzles. We create reality in the same way that reality creates us. Symbolic forms are optics through which our consciousness focuses on the surrounding world. This optics allows us both to transform the chaos surrounding us into the cosmos and structure our personality, transforming and arranging the chaos of our inner world. This way, in fact, the main civilizational mission of culture is being completed.
The main attention in the report is paid to the problem of transformations of symbolic reality in the modern Western world. 

Mikhail A. Blumenkrants is a Russian and Ukrainian philologist, historian of culture and philosophy, literary critic, editor-in-chief of the "Vtoraya Navigatsia" anthology.

Venue: HSE building at 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya, Building 1, Room 508.
The working language is Russian. Everyone is welcome.
To order a pass to the HSE building, please send an application with your name to adoronina@hse.ru by 6:00 p.m., September 19, 2019.