Monday: review of the Russian press (10.04.

Preamble

On April 12, the country, as they said, widely celebrated Cosmonautics Day. The press, in any case, did not ignore this event.

On that day, Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an extremely sad interview with academician and member of the Bureau of the Space Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences Eric Galimov under the depressing title “Russian cosmonautics on a short leash.” From the text of the interview it was clear that Russian space research has practically ceased since 1996, when we failed with the Mars-96 spacecraft.

The reason why they stopped being conducted is so banal that I won’t even mention it. However, in view of its projective importance, I will certainly quote the final statement of the academician: “Countries that master space technology will occupy a leading position in the world.”

On April 15, three days after the highest of the holidays, the newspaper “Vremya MN” published information that “China is ready to send a man into space.” Moreover, he intends to do this already this year, and if nothing significant interferes with his intentions, he will then, along with Russia and the United States, become “the third space power capable of lifting an astronaut into orbit.”

And in the interval between the publication of the mentioned materials in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (dated April 13, 2000), in the “Briefly” column, a message was placed that “Russian head of state Vladimir Putin will hold a meeting of the Shanghai Five during the upcoming Shanghai Five summit in Dushanbe in the second half of May "bilateral meetings" with almost every member of the Five, primarily with Chinese President Jiang Zemin . According to information received by NG from its sources in the Russian Foreign Ministry, during the negotiations “both we and the Chinese can raise any topic that interests us. In principle, there can be no taboo here.”

I must admit, I like this kind of integrity. Because I hope that it will be used to benefit relations between the two largest powers in the world. Moreover, I understand “good” here in a purely rational way - as benefit, benefit, although further I intend to treat it about seemingly completely different matters. We can assume that the “seemingly” here is from the coordinate system in which Vivekananda’s “selflessness is beneficial” is placed .

China about life and death

Old Xiang Yuan said these words
To the wizard who offered to return his years to the number two:
“I know everything about the morning, and about how the rays languish the afternoon,
But now I see something I’ve never seen before, but I suspect it’s a sunset.
I see that there is an even light on everything, that the heat has lifted and the haze has gone away,
That in the clarity of the sky, each branch was drawn by a carver's needle.
I see my face in the mirror, and it is a clearly written sheet,
Where new signs rush to occupy every corner that is still clean.
What a pity to interrupt the work of this tireless scribe!
I don’t take my eyes off his hand, I want to read everything to the end.
Until the end - but where is the end? Everything is just beginning around here!
The cold wind blows over me, I smell it, and it is my friend."

I started with these non-random lines by Paul Claudel (arranged by Averintsev ), because I intend to make a short - by necessity - review of the games that the Chinese played with life and death. And also, I hope, it is no coincidence - if only because Putin , equating him with Stalin and Beria , Yavlin-type liberals almost universally accused of tyrannical habits and cannibalistic habits (now, however, they have something else in common use - “weak president "). Well, a tyrant is precisely the one who manipulates, first of all, human lives.

There is also an important additional overtone here: unlike the 50s with their primacy of ideology, current Russian-Chinese relations will have to be built on the basis of two “e” - economics and ethics. And if success in economic relations will depend most of all on ourselves, then in ethics (i.e. in the relationship itself ) - mainly on knowledge of the partner, what he is like and why he is like that.

So...

The artist and painting theorist, who initially called himself Zhu Ruo-ji , but later, following his own and understandable whims of society, called himself either the Elder from Jingxiang , or the Disciple of the Great Purity , or the Highly Honored Skopts , or even the Bitter Gourd , wrote in his treatise :

In the most ancient times there was no Rule. For the highest simplicity has not yet been divided. Once the supreme simplicity is shared, the rule is established. What is the Rule based on? The rule is based on the Single Trait.

If we understand the Single Line not aesthetically and philosophically, but pictorially, plastically, then it will be a simple line before it breaks. It remains only to see whether it can be carried out without interruption, from Confucius to Mao Zedong .

According to the worldview of the Great Helmsman, all existence strives for progress through development and change, and new things constantly take the place of the old. In its final form, change is equivalent to the destruction of the old. Accordingly, even if humanity perishes, it will not be a tragedy, but just another step in the chain of changes leading to progress. And it will in no way mean a transition into nothing, since being is indestructible and nothing disappears in it.

This is the picture, as they say, at the macro level. At the micro level, the meaning of human existence, according to Mao , is in complete dedication and self-denial, in selfless service to the people. Thus, the main virtue of a perfect servant of the people is selflessness. For the sake of the masses, he should be ready to joyfully give his life.

be the only justification and meaning of human life Mao considered participation in the revolution in its three forms to : class struggle, production struggle, scientific experimentation. And where there is struggle, there are sacrifices, and death is not uncommon. The death of a person is thus justified in the eyes of Mao if his life is given to the people until the last minute. And the last chord. Complete selfless service to the people gives participation in the absolute. This, according to Mao , is the masses. Consequently, serving the masses transfers the individual’s “I” to them and thereby ensures his immortality.

Now let's go back a couple of thousand years ago. treated life and death And let's see how Confucius . Unlike Mao Zedong , he did not have such opportunities to practically experiment with people's lives. And in general, he treated all kinds of scientific and technical experiments with hostility. And although, for obvious reasons, he could not be familiar with the teachings of Buddhism, there may well be a parable attached to it here, which the Chinese of very subsequent generations loved to tell.

And it was like this. During his wanderings on earth, Buddha once saw a peasant who, instead of using a gate or a crane, himself went down into a well and rose up, carrying a bucket of water in his hand. Buddha asked: “Why don’t you make some mechanism to make your work easier?” “Because,” the peasant answered, “that when a person begins to use a machine, his heart also becomes like a machine.”

I think this is precisely one of the reasons why the American military machine so easily carried out devastating bombings in Vietnam, then in Iraq, and then in Yugoslavia. Another reason is that there is no danger of a retaliatory strike on American territory every time. And since the Americans did not experience bombing firsthand at all, they, except, perhaps, Vonnegut , by the way, an ethnic German, do not understand what it is.

Here it would be quite appropriate to recall the last great Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-ming , who believed that we become members of a community because we feel a community of suffering. The absence of such a reaction (that is, when the heart shudders from the sight of torment) indicates a serious defeat of human nature, a kind of moral paralysis. Following Wang Yang-ming , through pain and suffering we are united into one body with other living beings, animals, plants, tiles and stones. And self-education begins with the fact that the path to learning humanity involves suffering and pain.

However, let's return to Confucius . It is no secret that, as often happens, subsequent generations, to put it mildly, somewhat distorted the image of the Great Teacher. The system of wooden rituals and reinforced concrete exams, in which the Chinese Empire became increasingly numb during the last centuries of its existence, would hardly have delighted Kung Tzu - which is what the Chinese themselves call Confucius - into delight. In fact, Albert Schweitzer ’s words that “cognition is knowledge that has turned into experience” apply to him, more than to anyone else. testifies to the same thing The author of a brilliant book about Confucius, Vladimir Malyavin, : “The fusion of teaching and life, conscious will and involuntary experience is the highest level of human improvement according to Confucius.”

himself These are the precepts of Confucius , as Malyavin notes , “as simple as they are difficult to fulfill”:

In the family circle, honor your parents.
Outside the family, honor your elders.
Be honest and merciful with people, love goodness.
If, following these rules, you still have leisure, use it for study.

There is evidence that while still a child, little Kun loved to play funeral rites and even managed to become known as an expert in them. Which, however, does not mean that from childhood he was overwhelmed by the will to die. Being already, so to speak, in the rank of Teacher, to the question of one of the students: “What is death?”, Confucius answered: “Without knowing what life is, is it possible to know death?” In an even more refined form, he expressed the same thought, saying: “He who knows the Tao in the morning can die in the evening.”

Let us remember that Tao is the central concept of the Chinese worldview, translated into Russian either as “path” or “flow”. This duality is not accidental. Because, on the one hand, Tao is an absolutely natural course of things and events, not regulated by anything other than internal expediency. And then it is “flow”. On the other hand, especially for a person who has deviated from the original naturalness, Tao is something that needs to be comprehended, something that needs to be stood on in order not to experience the constant discomfort of inconsistency between desires and their implementation. That is, to nullify all external goal-setting, since for someone who has comprehended Tao, for a “Tao-man,” there is no difference between external and internal. Comprehension of Tao is an instant result of the active cooperation in a person of knowledge, experience and intuition, i.e. intellectual, sensual and supersensible. And in this sense, Tao is understood as “the path.”

You can shift the emphasis a little. And then the Tao-path will be the individual result of a person’s efforts in order to merge with the Tao-flow, i.e. common, universal, universal Tao.

meant So, in order to understand what Confucius when he said that he who knows the Tao in the morning can die in the evening, we should remember something. Namely, about the presence, roughly speaking, of two, as old as the world, fundamental approaches to man.

According to one of them, a person is considered as a means to achieve any goals: it does not matter - material or spiritual; according to the second, the person himself is considered as an end. A typical representative of the first approach was Mao Zedong , who saw in man a tool for achieving the abstract goal he set - communism. And the more abstract the goal, the more free, and therefore the more stringent, conditions for handling the tool it dictates. Here it would be quite appropriate to recall the famous Chinese parable, where the artist is asked who is easier to draw - a tiger or a dragon. “Of course, a dragon,” answered the artist, “because no one has seen it.”

Unlike the builders of communism (although, of course, we should not forget that Mao returned to the Chinese both a full-fledged state and pride in it), the builders of capitalism set real goals for themselves, and therefore their handling of the tool is much more careful. But a person in a capitalist society still remains a means - a means to make money from him. The situation is approximately the same in all institutionalized monotheistic religions - in them man is only a function of God’s will or God’s providence. And even in the mildest monotheistic versions, God seems to let a person temporarily walk on earth, so that later, after death, he can force him to pay in full.

Apparently, this way of relating to humans is inevitable as long as it is necessary to maintain the survival of humanity as a population.

The fact that it is not eternal and, in any case, not the only one, is evidenced by the phenomenon of time and time of people who profess an integral attitude towards man. Thus, they unwittingly turn out to be a kind of nonconformist, by the way, and Malyavin characterizes Confucius as a “conservative nonconformist,” since he sought his ideals in the testaments of antiquity. At the intersection of West and East, the best description of this relationship is contained in Martin Buber's book "I and You."

I intend to talk about all this in more detail when I do what I have been meaning to do for a long time - I will turn to the recently published posthumous collection of works by V.A. Rubin , “Personality and Power in Ancient China.” In it, in particular, the following diary entry of a sinologist is given (dated November 8, 1980): “Finally, I was able to understand the place of the concept of creativity so stubbornly defended by the Chinese. The fact is that in the Western tradition the main creator is God; in China, where "There is no God, it is man. With the help of creativity, man becomes on the same level with Heaven and Earth . " Actually, creativity is the Tao.

Morality

Just as there is no imperative to die having cognized the Tao, so there is no imperative to cognize it. There is probably no imperative to establish good relations with China. Instead, we can continue an active discussion of the question of whether we are Europeans or not, and even put it up for discussion and voting in two parliaments - ours and the euro, and then compare the results.

Even without this, however, it is clear: all the deadlines for the fulfillment of Vladimir Solovyov’s prophecies about the danger from China have passed. Danger regularly came to us from the exact opposite side - precisely from the side with which Solovyov dreamed of entering into an ecumenical church marriage.

And even if we think in terms of whether we are a Christian civilization or not yet, we should not forget that what eventually became Kant’s categorical imperative was formulated by Confucius five centuries before Christ .

I do not currently see any contraindications against rapprochement with China, except for everyday prejudices.

(The head of the Russian state declared Russia’s domestic policy to be normal, taking into account the presence of both left and right. Foreign policy seems to be the same norm for it, taking into account the fact that Russia borders on countries of both the West and the East.)