Time of Kutyrev: The owl of Minerva takes its flight at the last dusk

Vadim M. Maslov
Nation­al Research Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ny Nov­gorod

Time of Kutyrev: The owl of Min­er­va takes its flight at the last dusk

Abstract. The arti­cle con­tin­ues the philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion on the recent sig­nif­i­cant work by Vladimir Kutyrev. In his crit­i­cal analy­sis of it, Vadim Rozin accepts the key points of V. Kutyrev’s book and schol­ar­ship, such as the con­cepts of “being”, “non-being”, “neg­a­tive con­se­quences of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment”, “philo­soph­i­cal dis­course”; still, the con­clu­sions are denied. The under­stand­ing of “being” and “non-being” by V. Kutyrev comes in line with Par­menides’ onto­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery and M. Heidegger’s crit­i­cism of meta­physics. The nov­el­ty of V. Kutyrev’s ideas relates to the sit­u­a­tion in which con­tem­po­rary sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal changes main­tains the pos­si­bil­i­ty of post-human and beyond-human trans­for­ma­tions along with a pos­si­ble ter­mi­na­tion of human his­to­ry. Par­menides’ abstract «being» is trans­form­ing into “oth­er­ness” of post-human­i­ty and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence super­sed­ing human beings. “Neg­a­tive con­se­quences of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment” is a form of tran­si­tion of techno­genic civ­i­liza­tion into a posthu­man exis­tence. Hard­ly any­body is able to know the future – yet, the tran­si­tion from human to posthu­man seems to be get­ting more pro­nounced. Obvi­ous­ly, we have to recon­sid­er all phi­los­o­phy start­ing with Thales for its con­nec­tion to human being or non-being. Clas­si­cal ratio­nal strate­gies of philo­soph­i­cal dis­course should be sup­ple­ment­ed with non-clas­si­cal ones. An essay­is­tic and even artis­tic char­ac­ter of V. Kutyrev’s schol­ar­ship appears a wor­thy exam­ple of such recon­sid­er­a­tion. To my mind, his recent book once again con­firms his sta­tus as a lead­ing philoso­pher in the field of under­stand­ing and solv­ing the cru­cial issue of mod­ern human­i­ty: to be or not to be?

Key­words: being, non-being, techno­genic civ­i­liza­tion, tran­shu­man­ism, post-human, beyond-human, human, phi­los­o­phy, cat­a­stro­phe, post-techno­genic civ­i­liza­tion

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192231

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