Memorial Phenomenon and Crisis of Historical Consciousness of Modernity

Abstract

The article is devoted to the reasons for political and epistemological interest in the problems of history and memory observed both in Western countries and in Russia. As such, the author calls, on the one hand, the heterogenization of modern societies as the reverse side of globalization processes and, on the other – the crisis of historical consciousness of Modernity, expressed in the loss of confidence in progressivism as one of the most important features of the his­torical consciousness of Modernity; in addition, the article notes a significant transformation of the projective nature of human's socio-political and historical worldview in the 19th century. The author holds the idea that the center of ideo­logical controversies in the modern world is no longer the future, which was pre­viously thought as completely subject to human action, but the past, which today is thought as incomplete, open to various interpretations, a system that can change its meaning. Thus, it is the past that turns out to be the moment with which the identification requirements of a social group or community are associ­ated, and as a result, the past is the object of all sorts of ideological and political manipulations. These circumstances determine quite difficult relations between the three modes of our attitude to the past – history, memory and oblivion, the analysis of which requires serious critical efforts on the part of philosophy