Lev V. Skvortsov. The 21st Century: Intention as the Spiritual Destiny of Civilizational Self-Determination

Abstract

Article from the archive of Lev V. Skvortsov continues the themes developed in his books such as “Culture of Self-Consciousness: Man in Search of the Truth of His Being” (1989), “Civilization Dangers: Philosophical Interpretation” (2018), “Truth of Self-Consciousness: Heterotopia of Meaning” (2020). In the published article, attention is focused on the fate of world civilization in the 21st century, on their historical origins and on the role played in the self-understanding of these civiliza­tions by critical historical events – the Great French Revolution, the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The question of intention comes to the fore: personal, determining the life and death of an individual, and civilizational, direct­ing entire countries and peoples to self-preservation and development or to degra­dation and self-destruction. As in his other works, in this article Leo V. Skvortsov correlates his own vision of the problems under discussion with how the same or similar problems are posed and solved not only in the works of philosophers who reflected on the history of civilizations (Arnold J. Toynbee and others), but also in the works of classical Russian literature, primarily in Leo N. Tolstoy.