Joseph Beuys
“Joseph Beuys is perhaps the most influential German artist after the Second World War, and his influence extends beyond the borders of Germany; we can say that his ideas, works, actions, structures dominated the cultural scene, writes H. Stachelhaus. “He was a large, charming figure; his manner of speaking, proclaiming, and playing a role produced an almost narcotic impression on many of his contemporaries. His idea of an “expanded understanding of art,” culminating in the so-called “social plastic”, caused confusion among many. For them he is best case scenario, was a shaman, at worst a guru and a charlatan...
...The more you study Beuys, the more you discover new sides to his work, and this allows you to delve deeper into it and analyze it. Even during Beuys’s lifetime, there was no shortage of studies of his work, but now it remains only to master it in all its volume and almost boundless diversity. This is extremely difficult work, and every now and then it confuses. Of course, the viewer who decides to carefully tread the often dark and confusing path leading to Beuys needs to stock up on considerable patience, sensitivity and tolerance. “It’s good to describe what you see,” Beuys once said. In this way, you become familiar with what the artist has in mind. It's also good to guess about things. Then something starts to move. Only as a last resort should one resort to such a means as interpretation. Indeed, much of what Beuys did defies rational understanding. Them big role intuition plays for him - he calls it the highest form of “rationality”. We are talking mainly about creating “anti-images” - images of the mysterious, powerful inner world.”
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld on May 12, 1921. Even as a schoolboy, Joseph was interested in natural sciences. After graduating from school, he enters the preparatory department of the Faculty of Medicine, intending to become a pediatrician.
Joseph begins to be interested in serious literature early. He reads Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Hamsun. Among the artists, he singles out Edvard Munch, and among the composers, Eric Satier, Richard Strauss and Wagner attracted his attention. The philosophical works of Soren Kierkegaard, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paracelsus, and Leonardo had a great influence on the choice of his creative path. Beginning in 1941, he became seriously interested in anthroposophical philosophy, which every year becomes more and more at the center of his work.
However, the meeting with the work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck turned out to be decisive for Beuys. Beuys discovered reproductions of Lehmbruck's sculptures in a catalog that he managed to save during another book burning organized by the Nazis in 1938 in the courtyard of the Cleves Gymnasium.
It was Lehmbruck’s sculptures that gave him the idea: “Sculpture... You can do something with sculpture. Everything is a sculpture, this image seemed to shout to me. And I saw a torch in this image, I saw a flame, and I heard: save this flame! It was under the influence of Lehmbruck that he began to study plastic arts. Later, when asked whether any other sculptor could have determined his decision, Beuys invariably answered: “No, because the extraordinary creativity of Wilhelm Lehmbruck touches the very nerve of the concept of plasticity.”
Beuys meant that Lehmbruck expressed something deeply internal in his sculptures. His sculptures, in fact, cannot be perceived visually:
“It can only be perceived by intuition, when completely different sense organs open their gates to a person, and this is, first of all, audible, felt, desired, in other words, categories are discovered in sculpture that have never existed in it before.”
The Second Begins World War. Boyce received a radio operator's specialty in Poznan and at the same time attended lectures on natural sciences at the university there.
In 1943, his dive bomber was shot down over the Crimea. The pilot died, and Boyce jumped out of the car with a parachute and lost consciousness. He was saved by the Tatars wandering there. They brought him into their tent, where they fought for his life for eight days. The Tatars lubricated severe wounds with animal fat and then wrapped them in felt to keep them warm. A German search group arrived in time and took him to a military hospital. Boyce later received several more serious wounds. After treatment, he again went to the front. Beuys ended the war in Holland.
The experience was later reflected in Beuys’s work: fat and felt turned into the main materials of his plastic creativity. The felt hat that Beuys always wears is also the result of his fall in the Crimea. After severe damage to the skull - his hair was burned to the very roots, and his scalp became extremely sensitive - the sculptor was forced to constantly cover his head. He first wore a wool cap and then moved on to a felt hat from London's Stetson.
If Lehmbruck turned out to be Beuys's ideological teacher, then Ewald Mathare from the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts became his real teacher. The novice master learned a lot from Mathare. For example, the ability to convey the most essential in the characteristic forms of animals.
In the late forties and early fifties, Beuys was looking for the possibilities of a different type of plastic. Almost simultaneously in 1952, he created a deeply sincere and at the same time emphatically conventional “Pieta” in the form of a broken relief and “Queen of the Bees”, with its extremely new form plastic expressiveness. At the same time, the first sculpture made of fat appeared, and then a cross appeared, expressing a new artistic experience in Beuys’s work. At the same time, Beuys is primarily interested in the symbolism of the cross, and he understands the cross as a sign of the ideological clash between Christianity and materialism.
In the fifties and sixties, Beuys's work remained known only to a circle of close associates. But that is quickly changing, thanks to growing media interest and Boyce's own special talent for being friendly with reporters. It was impossible not to notice the unusualness of this artist, his rigorism and radicalism, and simply his uniqueness. Beuys became a cultural, political and socio-political factor in the Federal Republic of Germany, and his influence spread throughout the world.
Undoubtedly, this influence was also facilitated by the Fluxus movement, in which Beuys takes an active part. This movement sought to break down the boundaries between art and life, discard the traditional understanding of art and establish a new spiritual unity between artists and the public.
But, having become a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts in 1961, Beuys gradually lost touch with Fluxus. And this is natural - a person like him had to make his way alone, because he was always more defiant than others. With his “social plasticity,” which embodied an “expanded understanding of art,” Beuys raised fine art to new level effectiveness. His work on the image of a person led him to “social plasticity”.
In 1965, at the Shmela Gallery in Düsseldorf, Beuys staged an unusual event called:
“How pictures are explained to a dead hare.” This is how H. Stachelhaus describes this event: “The viewer could only observe this through the window. Beuys was sitting on a chair in the gallery, dousing his head with honey and sticking a real one on it. gold foil. He was holding a dead hare in his hands. After some time, he got up, walked with a hare in his hands through a small gallery hall, bringing it close to the paintings that hung on the wall. It seemed as if he was talking to a dead hare. Then he carried the animal over a withered Christmas tree lying in the middle of the gallery, sat down again with the dead hare in his hands on a chair and began to tap his foot with an iron plate on the sole on the floor. This whole action with the dead hare was filled with indescribable tenderness and great concentration.”
Two iconographically important starting points in the sculptor’s work are honey and a hare. In his creative credo they play the same role as felt, fat, and energy. For him, honey is associated with thinking. If bees produce honey, then man must produce ideas. Beuys juxtaposes both abilities in order, in his words, to “revitalize the deadness of thought.”
The master expresses similar thoughts in such works as “Queen Bee”, “From the Life of Bees”, “Bed of Bees”.
In “Honey Pump in Working Condition,” exhibited at the Documenta 6 exhibition in Kassel (1977), Beuys achieves an unusual transformation of this theme. Thanks to electric motors, the honey moved through a system of plexiglass hoses stretched from the basement to the roof of the Fridericianum museum. According to the artist's intention, this meant a symbol of the cycle of life, flowing energy.
“Beuys transferred this plastic process played out by bees into his artistic philosophy,” writes Stachelhaus. - Accordingly, plastic for him is organically formed from the inside. For him, stone, on the contrary, is identical to sculpture, that is, sculpture. Plastic for him is bone, formed by the passage of fluid and hardened. Everything that later solidifies in the human body, as Beuys explains, originally comes from the liquid process and can be traced back to it. Hence his slogan: “Embryology,” which means the gradual solidification of what was formed on the basis of the universal evolutionary principle of movement.”
As for the significance of the hare in Beuys’s work, it is also emphasized in a whole series of works and actions. There is, for example, "The Hare's Grave" and the inclusion of a dead hare in various productions such as "Chief" (1964), "Eurasia" (1966). At the Documenta 7 exhibition, Beuys shaped a hare from a melted likeness of the crown of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Boyce called himself a hare. This animal is marked for him strong attitude To female, to childbirth. It is important for him that the hare loves to burrow into the ground - he is largely embodied in this earth, which a person can radically realize only with his thought, in contact with matter.
Beuys himself was a plastic artist who was exhibited as an example - so, already his birth was the first exhibition of Joseph Beuys' plastic art; It is not for nothing that in the chronicle of his life and work he compiled, it is written: “1921, Kleve - an exhibition of a wound tied with a tourniquet - a cut umbilical cord.”
Thus, one cannot help but see the anthroposophical significance of “social plasticity”. Beuys himself liked to repeat: everything he did and said served this purpose. Therefore, the sculptor enters into discussions about economics, law, capital, and democracy. He also participates in the Green movement, the Organization for Direct Democracy through Popular Vote, and the Free International University. He created the latter in 1971 as the "Central Authority for the Expanded Understanding of the Arts." And of course, there is a separate process that Beuys conducted in many instances in 1972 regarding his dismissal from his position as a professor. State Academy arts in Dusseldorf. The artist won. But Beuys, along with rejected applicants for training, occupied the secretariat of the academy, demanding the abolition of the “Nunnerus clausus” rule, after which the Minister of Science dismissed him early for violating the established procedure.
Beuys's incredible lifelong activity seems miraculous. He had sore legs, his spleen and one kidney were removed, and his lungs were affected. In 1975, the artist suffered a severe heart attack. In addition, in recent years he was tormented by a rare disease of the lung tissue. “The king sits in the wound,” as he once put it. Beuys was convinced that there was a connection between suffering and creativity that suffering gives a certain spiritual height.
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From the author's bookGOEBBELS, Joseph (Goebbels, Joseph, 1897–1945), Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany20We can do without butter, but, with all our love for peace, we cannot do without weapons. They don't shoot with oil, they shoot from cannons. Speech in Berlin on January 17. 1936 (Allgemeine Zeitung, January 18)? Knowles, p. 34211 Oct. 1936
From the author's bookPILSUDSKI, Josef (Pilsudski, Josef, 1867–1935), in 1919–1922. head ("Chief") of the Polish state, in 1926 carried out an authoritarian coup d'etat
In the Moscow Museum contemporary art The exhibition "Joseph Beuys: A Call for an Alternative" opened. As part of the Year of Germany in Russia, they brought to Moscow, among other things, the most famous works Joseph Beuys, one of the most famous German artists of the 20th century.
By the way, he himself hated being called an “artist,” and it’s easy to understand why: such a definition would not only significantly narrow Beuys’s field of activity, but would also deprive his work of versatility and depth. He was a sculptor, a musician, a philosopher, and a politician.
Felt and more
In almost every hall, a visitor to the exhibition can see exhibits made of felt. The “crown” of felt art is a gray suit hanging separately from its felt “brothers”. The audience whispers, guessing what the author wanted to say with this creation.
The reason for his love for this material is simple: it was he, according to the legend spread by the artist himself, who saved the life of him, a former Luftwaffe pilot, in one of the cold war winters. When Beuys's plane was shot down over the Crimea in 1943, he was saved from death by Tatars who allegedly warmed him young man lamb fat and felt.
The largest, and in the truest sense of the word, exhibits of the exhibition were the famous “Tram Stop” and “The End of the 20th Century”. The latter can be described as follows: huge pieces of basalt symbolize environmental disaster, self-destruction of humanity and dangerous inaction. Historical pessimism should, according to Beuys, teach contemporaries and descendants not only to interact with the world around them without destroying themselves, but also to heal humanity, making it not a victim of progress, but a creator.
" I love America and America loves me"
No less interesting are the video installations exhibited in Moscow. We can say that each of them reveals the artist’s work to the viewer from a new side. The interactive halls of the exhibition are dedicated to Beuys’s favorite country - the USA. The country, which absorbed much of what the artist disliked, was embodied in his work in the image of a coyote. Boyce, having “befriended” a coyote named Little John, made the wild animal part of the famous New York performance “I Love America and She Loves Me,” where the coyote tears rags in Boise. Art theorists saw symbolism not only in the choice of animal, but also in the figure of the author: Beuys became the personification of the Old World, and the coyote - the New.
Context
The “noisiest” hall of the Moscow exposition is called “Coyote III”: video from musical accompaniment takes us to Japan, where in 1984 Joseph Beuys was invited to an exhibition. At the same time, Nam June Paik, a famous American-Korean artist and pioneer of video art, was there. By chance, an unusual duet was formed, the result of which was the performance “Coyote III”. Boyce made sounds reminiscent of the roar of a coyote, and Pike accompanied him on the piano: he played variations on the theme " Moonlight Sonata", then he simply banged the lid.
Boyce in Moscow
“Call for an Alternative” is not the first exhibition of Beuys’s works in Moscow. In 1992, residents and guests of the Russian capital were already lucky enough to enjoy his work, but there was no such excitement as this time. The first significant difference between the current exhibition and the previous show is the number of exhibits. Last time in Moscow they showed only Beuys’s graphics, essentially abandoning the political component of his work.
The Call for an Alternative focuses specifically on politics. Maria, a student at one of the Moscow universities, shares her impressions of the exhibition: “When I saw such a name, I couldn’t help but come here. In connection with all the events that happened in Russia over the past Last year, this exhibition came in very handy. But, unlike most acts of pseudo-modern art, I saw in Beuys’s works an unobtrusive opinion, dressed in artistic forms, from politics to religion.”
The history of modern art often gives us surprises. We have to get to know unusual shapes and bright manifestations. In every era, in every century, creators appeared who amazed with their works. Such people cannot be called an exception, since everyone sees art in their own way. Joseph Beuys was not only a unique artist, but also a rather interesting sculptor.
The beginning of life's journey
The German creator was born in 1921 and became popular after World War II. But before that, a schoolboy from Krefeld was interested in natural sciences and planned to treat children in the future. He entered the preparatory department of the Faculty of Medicine, studied well and wanted to become a pediatrician.
At the same time, the young man became interested in serious literature; he enthusiastically read Goethe, Hamsun, and Novalis. IN fine arts he was attracted by the artist Edvard Munch, and by the composer in music. Now it can be argued that in the future creative destiny Beuys was influenced by the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Leonardo.
Lehmbruck sculptures
In 1938, Joseph Beuys, whose biography was still unknown to anyone, became acquainted with the work of famous sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. This meeting played a decisive role in shaping his views on art.
Beuys realized that sculpture for him was an immense horizon of possibilities, which could become the best manifestation of his self. It was then that he began to engage in plastic surgery. Afterwards, he was asked more than once whether there were other sculptors who were able to influence the work of the young artist? He answered with confidence that only Lehmbruck was an inspiration for him, only in his works did he see something deep.
It is worth saying that Lehmbruck is very difficult to perceive visually. His works can be understood intuitively and spent hours and days looking at them.
The Second World War
Like the rest of the world, the war began unexpectedly for the Germans. Josef trained as a radio operator and also tried not to miss science classes. During the war, fate prepared the artist for difficult trials. While taking part in hostilities, his dive bomber was shot down over the Crimea. Boyce miraculously survived.
After jumping with a parachute, he fainted. But fate prepared him an incredible gift. The Tatars who lived in that area fought for their lives future star art for more than a week. They spent nights over him, healing severe wounds folk remedies. Later she found Boyce and he was transferred to a military hospital.
After rehabilitation, Joseph again had to go to the front, where he was seriously wounded more than once. The war ended for the artist in the Netherlands.
After the war
In May 1945, Boyce was captured by the British, but was released after 3 months. He returned to his parents in Germany, in the suburb of Kleve.
Everything that Beuys managed to survive was reflected in his works. In plastic, he decided to use felt and fat, which the Tatars treated him with, and which he was forced to wear in order to preserve the skin on his head, became a kind of symbol of survival.
A true mentor
After the war, Beuys had to long time undergo rehabilitation not only physical, but also psychological. Teacher Ewald Mathare was able to pull him out of a difficult situation, and the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts became Joseph’s home.
Mathare taught Boyce a lot and was able to instill to a young artist taste and sense of proportion, so Joseph could create accents in sculptural forms perfectly.
Fame
In the early 1950s, few people knew Joseph. But the popularization of his work contributed to the growth of his fame. Journalists began to pay a lot of attention to the new talent. Beuys was made famous by the unusual features of his creativity. The bizarre forms of sculptures, the radicalism in his works and the undeniable uniqueness - all this made the German a famous figure in his homeland. Gradually, his influence in art spread to Europe and the whole world.
Fluxus movement
Another interesting biographical fact was Beuys’s participation in this movement. The ideas of this secret organization were close and understandable to the artist. Those who participated in the Fluxus movement tried to eliminate the boundary between life and art. They promoted a departure from the traditional concept of painting, music and literature. In their opinion, close spiritual contact should have been established between the creator and the public.
Joseph Beuys, whose works were exactly like this, took an active part in the Fluxus movement. But the sculptor had to abandon his ideological views after he, at the age of 40, became a professor at the very academy where Mathare taught him. His new works have been released over high level, and his view of art became radical. The creations of this period are called “social plastic”.
Crucial moment
German artist Joseph Beuys tried to create unusual exhibitions and teach viewers a new approach to understanding art. One of these accents was the appearance of honey and a hare in the work. These images were akin to felt and fat. Honey is a product of the work of bees, just like artistic creations- the result of human activity, therefore many of his works were based on this image: “Queen Bee”, “From the Life of Bees”, etc.
The hare embodied the image of the creator himself. Boyce identified himself with this animal. Moving away from danger, the hare buries itself in the ground, and the artist interpreted this process as the contact of thoughts with matter.
Beuys' activity towards the end of his life was something of a miracle. After all, the man was already very sick, he lived without a spleen and one kidney, suffered from pain in his legs, his lungs were affected. Already in 1975, the creator suffered a heart attack. Like many philosophers, Beuys believed that pain generates spirituality.
In 1986, the German sculptor committed suicide.
Creation
During his life, Joseph Beuys created many works, an artist whose paintings are less known than his sculptures. Strange and unusual works are his paintings “Witches Breathing Fire” and “Hearts of Revolutionaries: Passage of the Future Planet.”
Joseph Beuys is a sculptor who created vivid and memorable images. The installations born of his imagination reflected the past and present of the world and the author himself. For example, the project “Coyote: I love America and America loves me.” This masterpiece was created after a German lived for three days in the same room with a coyote. Josef was brought to this room on a stretcher straight from the airport, and then carried out on a stretcher. Boyce hugged the coyote goodbye. He later explained his actions by saying that he wanted to isolate himself and not see anything in America except the coyote.
Beuys Joseph (artist), Interesting Facts whose life is described in the article, created vivid and memorable works. He is one of the main theorists of postmodernism.
Joseph Beuys is an extraordinary artist. Not everyone understands or perceives it. This genius became a unique phenomenon of the post-war world.
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) on May 12, 1921 in the family of a merchant. He spent his childhood in Kleve near the Dutch border. During World War II he served in the Luftwaffe as a radio operator gunner with the rank of non-commissioned officer. The beginning of his “personal mythology,” where fact is inseparable from fiction, was the date of March 16, 1944, when his Ju-87 plane was shot down over the Crimea near the village of Freifeld, Telmanovsky district (now the village of Znamenka, Krasnogvardeysky district). The frosty “Tatar steppe”, as well as melted fat and felt, with the help of which local residents saved him, preserving his bodily warmth, predetermined the figurative structure of his future works. Joseph Beuys was hospitalized on March 17, 1944 and was treated until April 7 (facial bone fracture). Returning to duty, he also fought in Holland. In 1945 he was captured by the British. In 1947-1951 he studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, where his main mentor was the sculptor E. Mathare. The artist, who received the title of professor at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1961, was fired in 1972 after he, along with rejected applicants, “occupied” its secretariat as a sign of protest. In 1978, a federal court declared the dismissal illegal, but Boyce no longer accepted the professorship, striving to be as independent as possible from the state. In the wake of the left opposition, he published a manifesto on “social sculpture” (1978), expressing in it the anarcho-utopian principle of “direct democracy”, designed to replace existing bureaucratic mechanisms with the sum of free creative expressions of individual citizens and groups. In 1983 he ran for election to the Bundestag (on the Green list), but was defeated. Beuys died in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1986. After the master's death, every modern art museum sought to install one of his art objects in a prominent place as an honorary memorial. The largest and at the same time the most characteristic of these memorials is the Work Block in the Hessian Museum in Darmstadt - a suite of rooms reproducing the atmosphere of Beuys's workshop, full of symbolic preparations - from rolls of pressed felt to petrified sausages.
His work of the late 1940s and 1950s is dominated by “primitive” in style, similar to rock paintings, watercolor and lead pin drawings depicting hares, moose, sheep and other animals. He was engaged in sculpture in the spirit of expressionism of V. Lehmbruck and Mathare, and carried out private orders for tombstones. Experienced the deep influence of R. Steiner's anthroposophy. In the first half of the 1960s, he became one of the founders of Fluxus, a specific type of performance art, most widespread in Germany. A bright speaker and teacher, in his artistic actions he always addressed the audience with imperative propaganda energy, consolidating his iconic image during this period (felt hat, raincoat, fishing vest). For art objects he used shockingly unusual materials such as rendered lard, felt, felt and honey; the archetypal, cross-cutting motif was the “fat corner”, both in monumental and more intimate variations (Chair with fat, 1964, Hesse Museum, Darmstadt) variations. A sense of dead-end alienation was acutely evident in these works. modern man from nature and attempts to enter into it on a magically “shamanic” level.
Joseph Beuys is, first of all, a completely special idea of the very figure of the artist, his role in art and in society. "Lord of Thoughts", teacher, political activist, he took part in the creation of at least two political parties– The German Student Party, which he initiated in 1966, and the Green Party, which appeared in 1980. He is one of the most recognizable characters of modern art along with Picasso, Dali and Warhol, a “pop star” and the creator of a kind of cult of personality. And, of course, “shaman” is a title firmly stuck to Beuys, for which few could argue with him.
“My actions and methods have nothing to do with the transitory and ephemeral. Yes, it is true that they use materials that can be called ugly and poor, but they have nothing to do with emptiness. I often talk about how childhood impressions and experiences can shape the formation of images and the choice of materials, but this is the opposite of emptiness. These are simple, minimal materials, and here we can talk about the connection with minimalism. It is clear that Bob Morris also works with felt, and it is clear that Morris took it from me: in 1964 he was here and worked in my workshop. The concept of minimalism means absolutely nothing to me. Arte povera also has an emptiness that the Italians have only added to.”
"How to explain paintings of the dead hare." Project 1965. Joseph Beuys' three-hour performance was staged at the opening of his first solo exhibition. Spectators looked out the windows as Boyce whispered something to the carcass of a hare. The artist's face was covered with honey and gold foil. For Beuys, the hare was a symbol of rebirth, a conversation with the extra-human world, honey was a metaphor for human thinking, and gold meant wisdom and enlightenment.
"Coyote: I love America and America loves me." Project 1974. Beuys shared a room with a live coyote for three days; he opposed himself to consumer America, turning directly to archaic and natural America, personified by the coyote.
"Honey extractor in the workplace." Project 1977. The device drove honey through plastic hoses.
"7000 Oaks" The most large-scale action took place during the international art exhibition “Documenta” in Kassel (1982): a huge pile of basalt blocks here was gradually dismantled as trees were planted. “He wanted to plant seven thousand oak trees from Kassel, where the Documenta exhibition is taking place, to Russia. Boyce was going to go and visit all the cities along the road and plant an oak tree there, but he didn’t want to plant them himself, but to convince the local residents that it was necessary. There is a lot of documentary evidence left - Beuys started the project, but did not have time to finish it. For example, some two neighbors who didn’t even talk to each other decided to plant this oak tree after talking with Joseph Beuys. This is an amazing project, one of my favorites” - Georg Geno.
I've been thinking for several weeks now about how to explain one important thing without offending anyone (because offense always prevents understanding); on the other hand, they say they carry water to the offended, but it wouldn’t hurt for me to transport the sea right under the windows. This is 300 kilometers, if the closest is the Baltic, but I actually want the Adriatic more. And it’s a lot of work to carry him!
So, okay, you can be offended. I know what to do about it.
The thing is that this whole war around and inside Ukraine is not just a civilizational one, as some of my people say smart friends. It's evolutionary, please excuse me. (This phrase, if you like, should be said out loud, in the voice of the Baby Elephant from the cult cartoon about the Boa Constrictor, the Monkey and 38 Parrots. Because otherwise the reader may attribute pathos and arrogance to the author of the statement, and they will completely distort the meaning.)
Evolution is right now (“now” is not just a Monday of some May conventional year, but at least for the next hundreds of years), before our eyes and with our participation, it is making its next revolution.
What is its main feature? The fact is that a person ceases to be a talking animal. And he becomes closer to high humanistic ideas about himself. For real, in practice, and not at the level of talk.
The simplest example.
In the previous round of evolution, it was normal to offend the weak. It was normal to reject what was foreign. The distribution of gender roles and rigid genitourinary self-identification were also the norm. The territorial instinct, colloquially called patriotism, is the norm. Obedience, reaching the point of the need for coercion, is simply a supernorm, without which you can’t go anywhere. Because zoological pragmatism ordered so, obliging a healthy animal to care about the survival of the species as a whole. And whoever does not care is a worthless individual, even though he is (perhaps) a good Christian. It's worse for him.
And by the way, about Christianity.
Strictly speaking, genuine Christian principles - the same ones from two thousand years ago, not yet distorted by adaptation for the Shirnarmass - seem to me to be the first meaningful and conscious step towards a new evolutionary round. Premature, of course. But the new is always premature, the new always begins in advance, when no one is fucking ready for it. Therefore, any new thing, or rather, the reaction to it and the process of its adoption, is “not peace, but a sword.”
It would be very convenient if everything new started on time, when a certain critical mass of users is ready for it. But here (on this planet, this humanity) there are other methods and technologies. The new comes much in advance, is distorted beyond recognition in the process of assimilation, and then, a very long time (by human standards) later, it suddenly sprouts from the manure into which it seems to have long ago turned. And at this stage it can no longer be stopped (i.e., it can be done in certain areas, but not the entire process as a whole).
Now, as I understand it, this stage has just begun.
So here it is. At the new stage of evolution, offending the weak becomes absolutely unacceptable. Destroy those who are different too. Any minority, even the most annoying one, becomes strategically useful because it brings changes to the whole that the whole, having already solved the pressing problems of material survival, needs for further development. Zoological pragmatism no longer rules. On the contrary, it sucks.
But God, who is love, rules. AND new person, which is an attempt to approach the state of love. How successful any particular attempt is, in fact, does not matter. Intention is important. Vector. Pulse. Rush.
On the one hand, we are all very lucky. In the sense that you can naturally evolve right during your lifetime. To be born a pragmatic animal, to die as a living person. This is a very cool fate. And now it’s not that rare. They don’t even register her as a saint anymore, and rightly so. Because this is not holiness. Just a new round of evolution, it happens.
On the other hand, it is, of course, terribly dark to live right now. Moreover, on the border of civilizations, one of which is crooked, inept, so that at times it’s sickening to watch, but still hobbles towards a new evolutionary round. That is, he tries to include some core values new type. In practice, this often looks terribly ridiculous (because the introduction of new principles is usually carried out by people who have achieved success in an old-style society, selected, successfully socialized representatives of a passing species, for whom these principles are pure theory, and not internal truth). But if you understand what is actually happening in these very European countries that wildly irritate me on many points - dear mother! It doesn't happen that way. Taking off my hat.
If you want to understand something about a particular culture, don’t nitpick about the little things. See how the weak live within its framework. Children, old people, disabled people, unemployed people, any kind of “minorities”. Artists, by the way, are not fashionable, they sell well, but are average in the ward. Students, teenagers. How drug addicts are treated, how seriously ill patients are treated, how foreigners are assimilated. How dangerous it is to be (look) different, a stranger there. The extent to which your personal safety on the street and in government institutions depends on how you are dressed - for example. And speaking of government institutions, what conditions are prisoners in? Is the death penalty acceptable, at least in exceptional cases? And so on.
To date, there is not a single ideal culture ( ideal society), Of course no. Man is generally a rather unsuitable material for creating something ideal; we were not invented for that. And even for the sake of the triumph of a life-giving mistake. What is important is not the final result (and how can the result be final?), but the vector of development. Vector is our everything, because life is movement. And time is given to us in sensations as a series of changes.
I will not say anything new if I note that in post-Soviet culture (and there is no need to talk about some “terrible Russians”, nationality is always remembered out of ignorance, all more or less general qualities large groups people are explained solely by the peculiarities of the culture within which they live) - so, in post-Soviet culture, offending the weak is still the norm. And it even seems like something special civil law, well, at least not constitutional: every victim is obliged to obey the aggressor, but has the right to find another victim and pleasantly while away his leisure time.
It is not surprising that evolving within this culture is life-threatening. But for some (many, actually) it just happens. I really want such people not just to somehow survive and quietly crawl into corners, but to live normally. I don't know how this is possible under the current conditions. This is my biggest pain. And the only consolation is that, firstly, I quite often do not see the most obvious way out. And secondly, I have a tendency to exaggerate dramatically. This cannot be taken away from me.
Well, as for Ukraine. Where it all really started. Yes, because a certain number of conditionally “weak” people, the so-called. “ordinary citizens” made it clear that they would not allow themselves to be offended with impunity. And yet, of course, they didn’t give it.
Revolutions, by the way, quite often have evolutionary reasons. That is, they are started by citizens who not only do not want to live in the old way, but are evolutionarily unacceptable. They begin to fight for themselves. And the collapse of revolutions is due to the fact that then citizens of the old style take matters into their own hands. Simply as the most socially adapted representatives of the majority. And they raise hell.
There is no worse hell than the one that can organize the most ordinary present, which does not want to become the past.
In general, ordinary representatives of a culture whose basic values are based on the characteristics of the current (and right now receding into the past) stage of evolution were infuriated by the story with Ukraine like little else. Because the success of the uprising of the traditionally weak against the traditionally strong in some way crossed out their own lives. And no one will like this. Actually, I also don’t like it at all when the temporary triumph of this very previous stage crosses out my life. In this sense, we are still quite the same.
That’s why many people are now watching Ukraine with such tension. They rejoice at the troubles that have come there. They are counting the dead among the opponents of the new Ukrainian statehood. Well, like, they can kill you because they themselves didn’t want to sit quietly, any fool can understand that. But you can’t defend yourself in any way, we’ll immediately write you down as a villain and you won’t be able to wash yourself off! (This is generally a favorite theme of the outgoing culture of violence: everything is considered an excess of self-defense, only the victim, limited to plaintive groans, preferably placed on sad music, will receive an "A" for behavior.)
That’s why they now believe any lie about Ukraine so readily - to think that behind the successful uprising of the weak against the offenders was some ordinary corrupt political bullshit is not just pleasant, but reassuring. They are waiting for a Ukrainian catastrophe - the worse it is, the better. Let them show it! And let them show us that it is still possible to offend the weak. That there is no rightness above zoological pragmatism. That we are not evolutionary losers, not yesterday, we are the crown of creation, it doesn’t get better, it’s possible not to develop. Wow, what a relief!
It's time to introduce new term"evolutionary envy" Absolutely irrational, allowing you to envy someone who is in trouble. To the one who brought trouble upon himself. And precisely because he did it himself. Without asking mom and dad.
Independence and initiative are also greetings from the future. For us they are just beginning. And by the way, they are actively strangled not only in the post-Soviet space. Because people of the old style are still in power almost everywhere. They will, of course, fall off, but we have to wait.
As a result, we get two news for humanity. Both are good, although few will like the first.
The first news is that now they live on the same planet in principle different types homosapiens. Evolved and, let’s say, not very much. There are much fewer of the former, and they are happy if they live in a society whose culture more or less encourages this. No matter what wild forms this encouragement sometimes takes.
The second news is this: the number of the former is gradually growing at the expense of the latter. Because for some this wonderful process happens within one human life. And in any society. Everyone, as long as he is alive, has a good chance. Just think. Not a damn thing, eh.
And the key, as always, is one: awareness. (Which can be distinguished from thinking the right thoughts by the degree of depth of the process: thinking is always on the surface, in the head, and awareness is somewhere in the center, under layers and layers of inner darkness.) The thing is that in the process of awareness some immortality takes part a part of us that doesn’t need to evolve anywhere. Because she is God from the very beginning. Or something very similar to Him. Sits there, on a shining peak, and waits for us to ask for a hand :)
I don't want to discuss anything. Everything I needed to say was already written. In simple human words. You don't even need to look into a dictionary. Sort of.
P.S.
The last thing in the world I want to do is shepherd peoples. This entry appeared only because for a very long time I had been spinning around in my head as a kind of loud internal argument with all of humanity at once. And it interfered with my work. And this is not the case at all.