Путешествие как категория философии транспорта

Abstract

This article deals with the challenge of travel as a category of the philosophy of transport in the unity of its ontological, epistemological, social and existential characteristics. Travel has its own ontology: this is a kind of beingness, defined as being-on-the-move. A trip becomes a travel through the reflection of an individual going on the trip. Travel has epistemological potential, it activates the cognitive activity of a person, creates new meanings and value paradigms. Travel is a social value as a means of transforming habitual social roles, destroying stereotypes, educating the ability to dialogue and tolerance towards the Otherness. The travel is not only a cross border process, but rather a transcultural one. The purpose, meaning, and result of a travel may be not just the change of a cultural picture, but of the entire cultural paradigm. Railways, being a purely technical phenomenon, have a well-known metaphysics which determines the existential transformations of the travelers. A railway line going beyond the horizon symbolizes a kind of existential infinity, limitlessness and vagueness. A travel is a kind of act of «communion» to this infiniteness, creates a sense of timelessness, while at the same time maintaining a sense of finitude, a blind end. The railway is a metaphor for a life’s journey, which has original and destination stations, and the train is an allegory of moving along it. A railway station is a metaphysical point of return/no return, separating life, people and actions. The railway and the travelling along it link together the beginning and the end, finitude and infiniteness, certainty and uncertainty, motion and immobility.