Experience of an Insight into the Interrelation between the Cold and Civilisation Based on the "Wissenschaftslehre" by I. G. Fichte and on Ideas of Russian Anthropologists
The article examines the possibility of understanding the cold as an indispensable attribute of civilisation, and a factor of its development. At the same time, it criticizes the dominating perception of the cold as a source of suffering and the North as a primitive backward place. Based on the method of “Wissenschaftslehre” (“science of knowledge”) by I. G. Fichte, the authors generate the idea of the collective super-consciousness of Northern residents. The paper gives the characteristics of this super-consciousness. It demonstrates that it expresses the content of freedom that has specific meanings in the spiritual lives of the nomadic peoples living under severe Arctic conditions. The cold introduces a special meaning of human freedom and impacts the development of local civilisations. Based on the positive attitude to the cold, the Arctic circumpolar civilisation was formed. A study of ethno-pedagogy and the use of the cold in the culture of peoples long-established in the frigid zone of the Earth allows for a definition of five principles of resilience in extreme cold that determines the freedom of human spirit. On the basis of some Russian anthropologists’ ideas the authors conclude that the cold is one of the conditions of civilisation being possible in the genetic sense (the emergence of civilisation would not be possible without the cold), and in the content sense (the cold in a modified form is found in modern civilisation in a variety of its manifestations). But more important is the following: the cold factor will allow humankind to come to a deeper self-awareness, and hence - to the formation of a more rational social order, corresponding to the dignity of every person and of humankind as a whole, i.e., a more ecophile society.