Situations of the Canons

Abstract

This introduction has been written much later than all the other texts in the first “Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics” journal issue on canons. When the articles in the first issue were produced, key academic discussions in Russia were, for example, concerned with the interdisciplinarity, or the author's position in the text. The borders between science and research were the most dangerous borders on these discussions. Now, in March 2022, Russian academics are concerned with different boundaries; dozens of academic events are canceled every day, scientists are disconnected from their fields and from each other, and these disconnections are not yet fully processed and reflected. Given this, we can hardly imagine in what context and how this journal issue will be read.

The meanings and intellectual values of the topic has changed for us, while we have been working on this issue. We planned to start this introductory article by referring to Mayana Nasybullova's artwork REMOVAL. It is a video in which Mayana makes a perfect sculpture of a woman's body and then tries to relate it to her own body. She struggles to tape a hulk of plaster over her bare legs and arms. The plaster barely holds. It looks like armour that is out of her height. Mayana tries to walk with this wreckage of canonical sculpture on the road. She is in pain, but she keeps moving. It seemed to us that the canon is often perceived, including in academic circles, in this way. As something that has form, connected to us tightly, but difficult to incorporate into its movements.

The articles in the issue describe as an opportunity to refer to something that was before us, but which has a direct connection to what is happening. In this status, the canon adds to the meaningfulness of modernity. The canons have survived a lot, they have developed in different ways, and we can look at them as a possible armour - they are still not easy to relate to, but they can protect. And they contain and enable own sense beoynd any external conditions.

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The concept of canon itself is rarely used in relation to the sciences. In many ways, the notion of the classical/ classic is more accurate for many reasons. In the 2000s and 2010s, this has been the subject of several collective monographs written by colleagues at IGITI, Irina Savelyeva and Andrey Poletaev. The authors separate the canon and classic for several reasons. Classics is the foundation of the discipline, it is something that has a clear role for science and is amenable to study. The classics are what is studied in classrooms, they are necessary for examinations, understanding of history and the basics of the discipline. The canon rather acts as a model and at the same time a list of sacred foundations. Science is secular, the canon refers to religion.

One could say that such a reference discredits the role of the canon as part of academic life. But what is a weakness of the concept of the canon in academia turns out to be its strength for understanding how knowledge is produced. The canon is not only a model and a list of predecessors, but it is also a literary canon that may (or may not) exist in order for knowledge and texts to establish continuity^[2]. Canon is challenged during a series of transformations, but still exist in particular historical circumstances. Canon is a tool and basis. It is rooted in the past, necessarily actualised in the different versions of present. It preserves the essential and questions it at the same time. Finally, the canon is important for collective intellectual life. It works as a reference to invisible interlocutors or friends from the past.

This issue brings together texts that address the canon in precisely this sense - not by trying to replace the "classics" with this notion, but by addressing the different kinds of coherent knowledge that often emerge on the periphery of the institutional sciences. The methods of studying the canon are not strictly historical and philosophical, they paradoxically exist without the canon. This became a problem for us as editors: we either had to initially offer some notion with a definite methodological apparatus, or leave the issue on canon non-canonical.We chose the second option, as it allows the texts to be closer to their objects of study, without setting an initial and general distance. But this is a weak solution - we hope that the texts in this issue will serve more as a starting point for the next canonical study.

The texts are devoted to different subjects: the history of concepts, intellectual movements, the introduction of new political an intellectual problems, educational programs. They are united by the fact that the canon is not situated by chance, it establishes and changes both due to internal and external reasons. In such a way of understanding the canonit is neither the prerogative of the humanities or social sciences. Canon appears as a concept that shuttles from humanities to social sciences and vice versa. We hope that such a way allows to recognize different ways of understanding the causality and role of processes and actors.

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Two lines of tension are embedded in the structure of the issue. The key one is the formality of the canon, its existence in institutions and outside them, in different ways of acting in intellectual worlds. In the content of the issue we move from the less formal ways in which the canon exists to the more formal ones. The issue begins with the vicissitudes of terms and concepts and ends with the fate of university science. In between there are stories of changes, of the formations and inventions of canons.

The second line of tension is the question of what is, in fact, a canon. The canon is not only a text, a concept or a figure, it is also a kind of relationship between those for whom it operates - authors and texts of the present and the past, readers, critics. This particular kind of relationship does not just exist ephemerally, but is framed in certain ways as something that exists in words and texts.

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The issue opens with an article by Fyodor Gaida on the concept of “sobornost’”. In its history with 1840s - 50s, very different subjects are intertwined: free unity, collegiality, conciliar governance, collectivism, public and national unity. The concept of sobornost turns out to be not universal and cannot include all of these meanings. The canonical understanding of sobornost’ can refer either to the origin of the concept, or to its history. The author insists on the importance of historical, dynamic understanding.

The following text is about the vicissitudes of (viszantism) Byzantium, Dmitry Biryukov, refers to the history of the concept between scientific, ideological and historiosophical contexts. Differences in the interpretations of "Byzantism" are explained, not exclusively, by the role of Greek heritage and Byzantine modernity in the rise of Western thought, and progressive logic of a significant (predominant) part of historiosophical/historiographical traditions.

The research by Nadezhda Vinyukova offers a critical analysis of the concept of intelligentsia, from the religious to the secular and critical meanings. Text questions the secular nature of the foundations of criticism as a central concept for intelligentsia. This article works both with a social group and with the term that signifies and manifests it.

A similar problem is at the center of Alexander Markov's research's of Samizdat movement. The movement had shaped own the canon of religious thinkers, including him those who can confirm their intellectual and political position. Although the text raises questions rather than offers a methodological path, it is worth following it in the study of the canons of informal movements (although partially formalized after in universities later).

The establishment of a canon is not only a performed by intellectual movements, and this can be understood in the article by Bogdan Gal. He considers the police canon that originated as a result of the emergence of a new institution (police) in the Russian Empire. The research is comprehensive: it starts with institutions and their intellectual design, and finishes with fiction and public reaction.

Daria Drozdova's article also places the canon in an institutional context. She examines the textbooks on philosophy and questions exactly turns out to be philosophy in them. The key distinction in textbooks is the distinction of Modern. It provokes a struggle on what is he key foundation for philosophy and the question of method. The analysis emphasises that it is based both on the point of view of main representatives and the narrative. The canon here turns out to be both a question of content and a method for intellectual action.

For study of the later period, the classicization of Sergei Veselovsky in Soviet universities, demonstrate how the canon works as a redundant concept. Temurmalik Kholmatov insists on the concept of classics as the base for this case and probably it is more appropriate for the twentieth century as a whole. This allows you to see the canon and the classics as two different approaches and understand the difference between them.

The section closes with the article by Andrey Teslya on dedicated to how the texts and biographies of those who shape the understanding of Russian history struggle for establishing the canon. In the research of Pokrovsky and Plekhanov, we see that the role of the state turns out to be not only an object participating in the formation of the canon, but also active subject. This makes the canon an issue on a larger scale. We see in this text how being a basic can be problematic, how it can (or not) be separated from the texts and become a matter of fate of the intellectual worlds.

The second research section includes two articles written by Timur Shchukin and Evgeny Miroshnichenko. Both of them are devoted to the problems of the philosophy of language, and specifically to the reception of the linguistic philosophy of Alexander Potebnia in the works of Alexey Losev and consideration of the so-called "abstruse language" in its relationship with the theories of Pavel Florensky, W. von Humboldt and Alexander Potebnia.

The issue continues with a panel discussion around the article by Alexander Mikhailovsky on Heidegger's concept of truth. The discussants are Anatoly Akhutin, Petr Kusliy and Alexander Antonovsky. In the final speech, Mikhailovsky sums up the discussion and outlines different perspectives for research. A discussion's starting point became Heidegger's thought itself. However, the discussants focus their texts on the issues of the temporality of truth, its concealment or frankness, the philosopher's responsibility to himself and time.

In the traditional for our journal section of translations, we publish a commented translation of the first chapter of the sixth book of Jean Bodin's famous treatise "Six Books on the Commonwealth" made by Gulnara Bayazitova and her colleagues. The relationship of our academic community with Bodin's treatise is reminiscent of a too-long prelude that does not develop into a somewhat more interesting one. Researchers approach Bodin's treatise either in front or behind, translating one paragraph here, then a whole chapter there, without passing to a complete translation. We can only hope that this will be a matter of the relatively near future.

The issue ends with a block of reviews, where the reader will meet with the texts of N. Afanasov, A. Safronov and A. Teslya.

Polina Kolozaridi and Andrey Teslya