An Anthropo-Conservative or Philosophy for People (Review of V.A. Kutyrev’s Book "The Owl of Minerva Starts Flying at Dusk")
Kutyrev Vladimir Aleksandrovich is known as a social philosopher, a leftist conservative, a supporter of controlled progress. His papers and books are an event for the Russian intellectual life. The subject of the study is the monograph by Kutyrev, "The Owl of Minerva Starts Flying at Dusk" published in 2018. I offer an extenstive phenomenological analysis of what was said and unsaid by Kutyrev in the same manner as the author himself analyzes the soap bubble of modern anthropoactivity (homo bullo) by removing the casing behind the shell of the civilization bulb of innovationism. Removing and discarding layer by layer, we advance towards the system of human stability. Kutyrev’s philosophy is presented as the reactivization of a narrow path between agnosticism and technocracy, reism and structuralism. The target of his book is, as always, the salvation of Man. The difference in this monograph is in the details. In his previous works he saved us from technology, emptiness, progress. Yet here he saves us from self-apocalypse, an eschatological man-made tragedy. The article provides an overview of the main subjects of the author’s work: the struggle between the natural and the artificial, the open vs. the sustainable society, self-development of technology, the threat of hypermodernism and transhumanism, the problems of biotechnical design of a Post-Man, the prospects for conservative philosophizing, and justification of life. The basis of the monograph consists of the following deep ideas: being is a blessing; self-assertion is the essence of every living being; eternal regression is a solid platform instead of progressivism. The author of the book uses a hermeneutic analysis as a research method and he analyses the apologetics of slow life, thoughtful reading and aesthetics of Ecce homo. The book reflects Heidegger’s primordial understanding as a primer in relation to which Husserl is contrasted as speculative and scholastic. Grassroots of traditional poetry resist abstract logo-centrism, where factuality competes with contingency. Kutyrev takes revenge for Jean Jaurès Jean and Karl Marx, Dostoevsky and Christ, trying to resist the Holocaust of traditional objective reality and the corresponding metaphysical philosophy. Humanity sculpts the image of chaos, not paying attention to the fact that the way of thinking magnetizes the course of action and the fatalism of the body-subject matter becomes closer as more and more papers on speculative-body nigitology come out. Conclusions: 1) if you want to understand Heidegger, read Kutyrev; 2) being is good, 3) eternal regression is a more solid platform instead of reckless progressivism.