The World as a Symbolic Reality. Lecture by Mikhail Blumenkrants

On 23 September 2019, within the framework of the seminar “West and East: Universalism of Culture” of the IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, there was a lecture by the Russian and Ukrainian philologist, editor-in-chief of the almanac Vtoraya Navigatsia Mikhail Blumenkrants

The subject of discussion was the inherent ability of man to civilize the world in the space of symbolic reality. Our usual ideas about reality, about ourselves and about others, what we call our system of values, our tastes and aesthetic preferences, in a word, all that our picture of the world is made up of, we painstakingly put together into symbolic puzzles forms at our disposal. 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 not only to transform the chaos surrounding us into space, but also makes it possible to structure our very personality, transforming and ordering the chaos of our inner world. Thus, in fact, the main civilizational mission of culture is being fulfilled. The main attention in the report was paid to the problem of transformations of symbolic reality in the modern Western world.

The event leader was Leonid Luks, Academic Supervisor at IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue. The event was attended by professor Vladimir Porus.

Video recording of the workshop.