At Russia's International Philosophy Congress, scholars argued that the modern West has abandoned humanism and embraced a nihilistic vision of the future, calling instead for the development of sovereign Russian philosophical thought rooted in tradition, history, and a multipolar civilizational perspective.
In reality, we don't fully understand the metaphysics of the modern West. But it does have one. It's just unexpected for us, because in the last 30-40 years, Western philosophical thought has largely broken with the tradition of the Enlightenment, with humanism, with placing man at the center - the very things it used to boast about and which, to some extent, gave it strength in the previous era.
Of course, one can argue about how sincere it was even back then. Double standards are very characteristic of the West: they spoke of progress while creating slavery, they spoke of equality while colonizing other peoples, they spoke of justice while organizing the genocide of entire countries and societies. So double standards are one thing.
But what's interesting is this: over the last 30-40 years (and this was covered in detail at our conference in the "Lomonosov" cluster at Moscow State University across various sections and from several angles), modern Western philosophy has become openly anti-human. It is openly nihilistic, it carries no seductive image of the future whatsoever, and it essentially trades in horror. This is a philosophy that has completely and finally severed its ties with humanism, with sacred values, with tradition. It has immersed itself in this liberated, free, flowing-into-nowhere purely technical time and has completely reinterpreted all the notions it previously operated with.
That's why it was so important at this conference to think about time and the future. Because what we're dealing with is not a glitch in the program - we're dealing with a certain fundamental tendency, embodied, for example, in the philosophy of accelerationism - the acceleration of time. But acceleration toward what ? Acceleration to where ? As soon as you pose these questions, as soon as you place them in an intellectual context and examine Western authors, their theories, object-oriented ontology, their ideas about time, temporality, and history - it becomes truly terrifying.
In essence, many modern Western philosophers consciously view the near-term prospect of the destruction of life on Earth, mutations, nuclear explosions, and man-made catastrophes not as a possibility to be avoided, but as a desirable outcome. It's very hard to imagine, hard to believe that such theories exist. In our section and others, there were presentations, even testimonies from English philosophers themselves.
Richard Sakwa, the British philosopher, spoke about the collapse of progress. He said that no one in the West believes in progress anymore. He had a somewhat naive idea: "Let's reinvent progress, let's return to it." But in reality, we need to delve into progress itself: what kind of ideology was it that has now ended ? It was built on anti-Christianity, on the denial of God, religion, and eternity.
And for us now - especially in the face of the philosophy coming out of Washington, Brussels, Silicon Valley, and Western intellectual centers, which are consciously promoting and developing this - we need to emphasize sovereign thought, sovereign temporality, our Russian history, and our understanding of the future. The future of time. Quite simply, our time and the time of the West are flowing in different directions. We definitely don't need to go where they're not just inviting us, but actively pushing us.
And that is precisely why, it seems to me, our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sent such an important message to the congress of philosophers who had gathered from different countries.
The Chinese, by the way, spoke about their own time, and it was very interesting. On the surface, they are successful in the present and very modern, yet they have a completely different understanding of time. And the best representatives of China - Zhang Weiwei, the famous Professor Jiang, who predicted everything possible: Trump's victory, the war in Iran - they participated. This extremely important group of Chinese intellectuals says: "We also have Chinese time flowing in its own direction. Don't think we're submitting to the West - we know its true worth."
Indian professors from the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute - excellent thinkers, by the way - say that Indian time is not flowing in that direction either. Muslim authors and African researchers (Professor Nyamsi noted that time itself has a different meaning in African languages) emphasize that the West is trying to include us in its time, trying to colonize our consciousness of time and history.
And, of course, every section discussed the question of our Russian time and Russian future: where we should move. It is completely obvious that it is not in the direction the West is pushing us. This was the unanimous opinion of hundreds of people - more than a thousand participated in the congress. We need to go in a different direction: immediately switch the points, immediately get off this train, otherwise catastrophe cannot be avoided. It was a very serious congress. It is rare for two days to be filled with such dense discussions, arguments, and debates.
But already now, as you know, liberals and Westernizers are almost gone - they are rare specimens. The overwhelming majority understand that something needs to be done, that we need to substantiate our own philosophical sovereignty and philosophical independence. We need to build Russian history, Russian Enlightenment (there is, by the way, a presidential decree on historical enlightenment), we need to rely on traditional values, and we need to look not only for tactics but also for strategy. We must determine this path: where we are going, what we Russians consider to be the goal toward which our history is moving as it increasingly obviously diverges from the West.
And it was very important that we had representatives of our servicemen from the zone of the special military operation. Russian philosophers are also participating in the SVO on the line of contact. This is striking, and they were with us. They spoke about how hundreds of thousands of our fighters perceive and make sense of this war we are waging with the West. And this understanding is much deeper than it seems. We tend to think they are heroes who fight purely technically, carrying out orders, but it turns out they think deeply as well.
These hundreds of thousands of people may be the most awakened, most active, and sharpest-thinking representatives of our people. Both ordinary and extraordinary - there are professional philosophers, scientists, humanities scholars, and physicists fighting for us on the front lines. While fighting, they think, and they shared their thoughts at the congress. It was priceless, simply priceless.
It is a rare case when an event received enormous support from the authorities, but perhaps the most important thing is that the authorities genuinely need this. It is needed not only by the philosophers or specialists themselves. It is needed by the President, by his administration, by the government (Vice Prime Minister Chernyshenko spoke), by the Federation Council (the deputy chairman of the Federation Council spoke). Essentially, state power is beginning to realize what should have been realized long ago.
Thank God the time has come: without a deep philosophical analysis of the processes we are dealing with - both in the complex multipolar world and in our own country - it is simply impossible to move forward.
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