Why Culture Matters Leonidas Donskis, Janusz Makuch, Géza Kovács
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No 3(VIII)/2013 Price 19 PLN (w tym 5% VAT) 10 EUR 12 USD 7 GBP ISSN: 2083-7372 quarterly July-September www.neweasterneurope.eu Why Culture Matters Leonidas Donskis, Janusz Makuch, Géza Kovács Katyń: The Baltic States: A Portrait of A Painful 25 Years after the Janusz Case Singing Revolution Korczak Ireneusz Andres Kasekamp Kamiński Jonathan Bousfield Paweł Śpiewak Books & Reviews: Ben Judah, Leslie Woodhead, Anton Ponizovsky, Jerzy Pilch, & József Faragó Is Armenia Jerzy Pomianowski a Strategic Satellite of Russia? On the European Endowment for Ilgar Gurbanov Democracy Also in the issue: Stalin’s Shadows ISSN 2083-7372 A Crisis of Feminity in Ukraine Russian Religious Diplomacy Obama’s Missing Presence Kazakhstan’s Demographic Mess Kraków to miasto książki i prawdziwa potęga wydawnicza. Działa tu ponad 100 wydawców publikujących dosłownie wszystko: od literatury sensacyjnej po wiersze noblistów, od romansu po podręczniki akademickie, od biografii po fantastykę. Książki krakowskich oficyn odnoszą sukcesy na krajowym rynku wydawniczym, otrzymują najważniejsze nagrody literackie, ale przede wszystkim stanowią znakomitą ofertę dla czytelnika, który w bogactwie tytułów i gatunków zawsze znajdzie coś dla siebie. To już druga edycja Wirtualnej Biblioteki. Tym razem proponujemy Ci książki najważniejszych gości tegorocznego Festiwalu Conrada i Targów Książki, a także najgorętsze nowości wydawnicze tej jesieni. Wśród nich z pewnością znajdziesz opowieść idealną dla siebie. A jeśli po przeczytaniu darmowego fragmentu książki nie będziesz w stanie się już od niej oderwać, z łatwością możesz nabyć e-booka klikając w link na końcu zeskanowanego fragmentu. Przy 2. odsłonie naszej akcji testujemy także możliwość pobrania audiobooka. Sprawdź, czy możesz pobrać Twoją ulubioną książkę w formacie dźwiękowym! 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Partnerami akcji są: Instytut Książki oraz wydawnictwa i organizacje: a5, Agora, Bona, Czarne, Dodo Editor, Fundacja Przestrzeń Kobiet, Insignis Media, Karakter, Koobe, Krytyka Polityczna, Lokator, Muza, New Eastern Europe, Noir sur Blanc, Radio Kraków, Sine Qua Non, Skrzat, Stowarzyszenie Pisarzy Polskich, Świat Książki, W.A.B., WAM, Wielka Litera, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Wydawnictwo M, Wydawnictwo Otwarte, Znak, Znak Literanova, Znak Emotikon, a także Publio, Virtualo, Woblink i Koobe. Projekt dofinansowany jest ze środków Ministerstwa Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego z programu Promocja Czytelnictwa. Więcej informacji na stronie http://qr.miastoliteratury.pl The Art of Difficult Dialogue LEONIDAS DONSKIS The art of dialogue is always difficult. The ability to listen and hear is accompanied by a sincere wish to check one’s own premises and to examine one’s own life. An unexamined life is not worth living, while an unlived life is not worth examining. I have recently had the privilege of launching a new book conjointly written with one of the greatest thinkers of our times – Zygmunt Bauman. The book Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity is a high point of my life. Such an opportunity can occur only once in a lifetime. For this, I am immensely grateful to Zygmunt Bauman – a major influence, a great inspiration, and a beloved friend. This book is a dialogue on the possibility of a rediscovery of the sense of belonging as a viable alternative to fragmentation, atomisation, and the resulting loss of sensitivity. It is also a dialogue on the new ethical perspective as the only way out of the trap and multiple threats posed by adiaphorisation of present humanity and its moral imagination. This book of warning also serves as a reminder of the art of life and the life of art, as it is shaped as an epistolary theoretical dialogue between friends. Elaborating on my thoughts, wrapping up, and summing up my hints and questions into a coherent form of discourse, Zygmunt Bauman, in this book, sounds as intimately and friendly as a Renaissance humanist addressing his fellow humanist elsewhere – be this an allusion to Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Thomas More and Peter Giles, or Thomas More and Raphael Hythloday. Such a form allows us to work out a sociological and philosophical dialogue on the sad piece of news contrary to Utopia – namely, that, as I put it in one of my aphorisms penned as a variation on Milan Kundera: globalisation is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different 8 Opinion and Analysis Leonidas Donskis, The Art of Difficult Dialogue from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria, and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity. Dialogue: Always difficult and unpredictable The art of dialogue is always difficult. Dialogue, if properly understood, is an art of listening to and hearing each other, instead of simply exchanging two mutually opposing and exclusive discourses, or even worse, disconnected monologues. It was obvious for Plato that simple truths and truisms do not need a dialogue. It is only when you do not know where you would end up with the trajectory of your own or someone else’s thought that you can engage in a real dialogue. The ability to listen and hear is accompanied by a sincere wish, if not theoretical or even existential urge, to check one’s own premises and to examine one’s own life. An unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates or Plato would have had it. Or an unlived life is not worth examining, as I would add myself. Dialogue does not signify the necessity to prevail over your opponent at whatever cost. Instead, it appears as our capacity to arrest our aggressive and agonistic wish to prevail and dominate at the expense of someone else’s dignity, not to mention the truth itself. Renaissance writers and thinkers knew it so well when they emphasised empathy as a crucial element of the art of dialogue. For how can we understand our opponent without accepting – at least temporarily – his or her premises and vocabulary, and then critically examining and rethinking our own concepts and points of departure? Dialogue appears as an exciting venture and as a difficult art in Thomas More’s Utopia where all references to Plato/Socrates are of little help for the narrator in his attempt to understand the fictitious Portuguese sailor Raphael Hythloday’s incredible story. I can only reiterate this obvious truth: the art of dialogue is always difficult. Was it easy for Martin Luther to address Erasmus of Rotterdam in their famous correspondence on Christianity and its fate in Europe? Was it easy for Erasmus to respond to the rebellious German monk who split the Church on the grounds of his fierce opposition to earthly and political, rather than deeply religious, as Erasmus thought, problems of the Church? Or was it easy for Martin Luther to engage in an intense correspondence with Erasmus’s close friend Thomas More? Is the art of European dialogue a fantasy? Is European culture a fantasy? Is it more or less so than European politics? These are the questions that cross my mind over and over again when I try to think of how to reverse the ongoing tragedy of the European Union – namely, its silent and slow demise, which is a fact of reality, to my dismay. European culture sometimes is dismissed as a fantasy or fiction inasmuch as it is argued that there Leonidas Donskis, The Art of Difficult Dialogue Opinion and Analysis 9 is no such a phenomenon as an all-embracing and all-encompassing European culture. Is this assumption correct? No, it is profoundly wrong, misplaced, and misguided. Only those who are out of touch with the cultural history of Europe can claim Europe to have never been an entity deeply permeated by a unifying and controlling principle, be it the legacy of classical antiquity and Judeo-Christian spiritual trajectories, or be it the value-and-idea system that revolves around liberty and equality, these two heralds and promises of modernity. Pyotr Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters appear as a profound intellectual testimony to this truth. The Russian philosopher wrote with pain that his country never experienced the great dramas of modernity; nor did it have an historic opportunity to be moulded by the greatest historical-cultural epochs of Europe, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Baroque, or the Enlightenment. As Chaadayev argued, Russia had none of these. Therefore, European history did not speak to Russia the language of its great cravings for liberty, emancipation of the human soul, and individual self-fulfilment. For Europe is more than merely an economic and political reality, according to Chaadayev. It is an idea, a religion, a dream, and a trajectory of the soul. In fact, modernity and freedom appear to Russia as something alien, imposed, emulated, or otherwise adopted from without; yet in Europe they became part of the psychology 10 Opinion and Analysis Leonidas Donskis, The Art of Difficult Dialogue and even physiology of human individuals. Europe is inconceivable without a certain modern faith, which has become brother to liberty, instead of a tool of oppression.