Nikolay Danilevsky about the role of influence in the formation of cultural and historical types

Abstract

The article examines Danilevsky’s approach to the analysis of the role of influences on the formation and changes of cultural-historical types. Several contradictions in Danilevsky’s consideration of the phenomenon of influences are underlined. They were caused by an insufficiently clarified analysis of the correlation between the universal and the concrete historical, and by some monotheistic and typological aspects in the analysis of historical development. Danilevsky clearly underestimates the significance of the interaction between successive and synchronously developing cultures, which leads to a diminution of world-historical trends in the development of mankind. The article stresses a polemical character of a number of provisions of Danilevsky’s concepts. The urgent significance of the philosopher’s conclusions about the need to protect national cultural values is emphasized, which is especially important in the context of modern globalization processes. Additionally, some key risks of philosophical tendencies of Russian thought are pointed out in regard to the dream of world hegemony, or towards autocratic otherness. These dangers arise largely from the lack of practical and theoretical differences in the use of unprocessed European concepts, and therefore Russian history can often be viewed as a sequence of attraction to and repulsion from the West. The article also stresses that the “Russian idea” (which can be seen, in Solovyov’s understanding, from a religious standpoint as the one brought by the Russian people to the Last Judgment of the World as a unique contribution to universal human consciousness) is not a “dream” of world hegemony or the autocratic otherness”, according to which all good is always “one’s own”, and all evil is “somebody else’s”, but it is some antinomic perception of universal salvation, which was also noted by Dostoevsky, Florensky, Bulgakov, and others.

Keywords:

influence, cultural-historical type, cultural form, the universal, the national, continuity, progress, Europe, Russia