Toward an Ideal Universal Community: Lotman's Revisiting of the Enlightenment and Romanticism

Abstract

In 1988, three years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yurii Lotman wrote an article entitled Clio na rasput'e (Clio at the crossroads). 1 Despite its modest size, this article not only summarizes the most important ideas developed in the course of many decades of research in semiotics and cultural theory, but also contains the seeds for a new systematic understanding of the role of consciousness in history that Lotman bequeathed to a new generation of scholars. Did he envision this new science of history, which he expected to emerge at the end of the twentieth century, as a paradigm shift comparable to the one that occurred in the wake of the French Revolution and the great epistemological crisis at the end of the eighteenth century? What would be the relationship between this new understanding of history and the conception of history as evolution, which has dominated Western intellectual tradition since the Enlightenment? If the centrality of historicism as a paradigm of our self-understanding dates back to the mideighteenth century, to what extent does Lotman's thought contribute to or dissent from the Enlightenment project? I suggest that Lotman s new systematic understanding of history in nuce can be understood as a revisiting of the Enlightenment, with the hope of restoring faith in the meaningfulness of human consciousness and history in an atmosphere of the postmodern demise of systematic thinking and its capitulation to ironic relativism. In this connection, Lotman s biographer B. F Yegorov points out that in the last years of Lotmans life, which coincided with the crisis of Soviet culture and identity and were marked by a pronounced lack of any stable philosophical and ethical ground, the scholar grew more and more impatient with such anti-essentialist movements as