Crisis Of Thinking Research Articles

K filosofii zbitého myšlení. Dialektika citovatelného gesta podle Waltera Benjamina

In the 1930s, the playwright Bertolt Brecht had a marked impact on Walter Benjamin’s life and thinking. Brecht’s epic theatre inspired Benjamin to write several texts in which the philosopher explores the concept of the “quotable gesture”. This article aims to offer an interpretation of the quotable gesture as a methodological tool for the critique of the modern alienation of tradition and the crisis of thinking. Drawing on selected essays, I analyse the principle of gestural citation as a critical-hermeneutical principle in which common pre-understanding is to be suspended in favour of particular attention towards the phenomenal and to one’s own thinking.

The Diversity of Register of the Other in the Work of Iordan Radichkov

Discovering and communicating with the other ensure a better self-discovery, by understanding the other, the individual understands himself better. In Iordan Radichkov’s work we observe identity and alterity in their pure variants as well as in connection and interaction. In the first case, the ego represents the inflexible human type, cloistered in the patriarchal culture paradigm, expressing the archetype in eternal repetition, venerating a system of values consecrated by millennial experience and continuing to lead a life as his ancestors have led, refusing to notice that the world around is changing. Everything that surpasses this universe is perceived as strange and is ignored, considering that whoever moves away from the roots betrays and loses his integrity. It is believed that modernity, which aspires to plurality and imposes new values, including the mutation from „ego" to „the other", from local to European and universal consciousness, has as a consequence the fracturing of identity and leads to the crisis of thinking and of values. For Radichkov, ramifications of the opposition „identity - alterity" are the relations: „villager - townsman", „peasant - intellectual", „child - adult", „Bulgarian - foreigner" etc. There is an other that can be discovered in oneself, alterity as a product of the interaction between the world of the living and that of the spirits, mediators that feed the belief in the reality of other forms of existence, yet another attempt to humanize the unknown. This is the other ego, the secret/mystical and inexplicable in the human being. At the same time, the Bulgarian writer is convinced that no matter how comfortable the monologic existence is, the individual must overcome it, including through acceptance, communication and collaboration with the other.

Democracy and identity

It might be that the crisis of democracy is crisis of thinking. Modern metaphysics affirms the monologue of the subject with respect to the problem of rationality, as well as in the social realm. It thus affirms liberal egoism. Such metaphysics structures modernity as a monologue. Thus the question arises: how to think the democracy within this monologue? Democracy appears to be a modern project impossible to achieve.