Čelovek
Founded in 1990, an academic journal Chelovek (The Human Being) publishes the results of scholarly studies in social, humanitarian, and scientific aspects of human existence in close connection with philosophical understanding of the human being, ultimately related to the question, ‘What is the human being?’ The journal is open to various theoretical traditions and addresses the broad multidisciplinary readership. The journal also publishes discussions, conferences overviews, critical essays, and book reviews.
Media Registration certificate: No. 018780 dated 11.05.1999
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Vol 36, No 4 (2025)
Scientific research
Post-Agrarianism and De-Urbanization: A New Look at the Non-Urban Perspective (History, Models, Theoretical Approaches)
Abstract
The article deals with the philosophical and cultural origins of “anti-urbanism” (Theocritus, Virgilius, Rousseau, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy), characterised with the aid of using the choice to create a set of values primarily based totally at the consciousness-cleaning effect of nature and rural labor. It is proven how in present day society, typically in Russia, the metropolis more and more demonstrates the tendency of centrifugal migration and the go out of city citizens to the so-called “small territories” and lengthy distances from the megapolis. At the identical time, the territories, typically withinside the Near North of Russia and withinside the Non-Black Soil Region, having in large part misplaced their former dominant agricultural purpose, are beginning up new horizons of post-agrarianism primarily based totally on new kinds of modern type labor (typically online), ecologization and recreation. Behind those data and tendencies opens a probable destiny prospect of a brand-new hypostasis of urbanization dialectically transitioning into its opposite.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):7-35
7-35
The Cultural Foundations of Sustainable Urban Development
Abstract
The modern city realizes two multidirectional trends of development: the desire for unification and segmentation, on the one hand, and the intension for diversity and integrity, on the other. This article explores urban culture as the basis for the development of the second trend; it clarifies the role of the culture of people living in the city as a condition for further urban development. The article considers several dimensions of the unity of space and time in the city and on this basis introduces the concept of «cultural chronotope of the city». It is shown that urban culture exists in two dimensions: objectively existing unity of space and time of the city, embodied in buildings, structures and other elements of the urban environment, accumulates in diachronic and synchronous aspects the culture of this place; and the effective culture of the city dwellers themselves, manifested through cultural practices, expressed and realized ideas, meanings implied in the everyday actions of the city dwellers and their subjective assessments of the quality of the urban environment. A conscious integration of cultural and chronotopic dimensions into the strategic planning of the city is proposed. The results of the study provide important recommendations for implementing sustainable, culturally sensitive urban development strategies and provide valuable insights for urban planners and policy makers.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):36-57
36-57
Social practices
Urban-Related Identity — How to Measure It?
Abstract
Identification with the city not only supports the psychological well-being of the resident, but also becomes a resource for the development of the city, because committed citizens are more motivated to preserve and protect their city. Meanwhile, there are few ways to measure this phenomenon, and the available ones have limitations or have not been tested on the Russian-speaking population. This article is devoted to the validation of one of the most frequently mentioned methods in environmental psychology — the Urban-Related Identity Scale developed by M. Lalli and translated in Russian by A. Miklyaeva and P. Rumyantseva. The sample consisted of 242 people aged 18-70 years (Mage=35.50 years, SDage=14.29 years; 59.5% women) living permanently in Russian cities and large towns. It was revealed that the original five-factor structure of the scale is not reproduced in Russia; instead, three components of urban identity were identified: External value, Belonging to a city and Goal setting. The modified version of Urban-Related Identity Scale obtained in this research has high structural and construct validity and reliability. The intensity of manifestations of urban identity is positively related to a person’s age, duration of residence, his or her tourist experience, and size of the city, but negatively related to the desire to leave the city.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):58-73
58-73
City Imaginary Boundaries
Abstract
The problem of city perception through imagined boundaries is analyzed. The city is considered as а space, that a person imagines and experiences thorough a continuum of meanings, formed by a set of ideas about urban space and time. This study focuses on urban imaginary boundaries that are formed based on urban imaginary functioning patterns. The author draws on the scientific statements of B. Anderson, who identified the collective imaginary concept, E. Soja, who demonstrated that a city is represented as both real and imagine by a person, and A. Lefebvre, who suggested that a person experience the city on the base of the imaginary. Urban imaginary boundaries are the semantic facets that symbolically encode what the city and the non-city is based on citizens’ ideas. In the article two vectors of urban imaginary boundaries’ structuring are revealed: 1) through identifications codes, setting the distinction “one’s own” and “others”, including through belonging to the urban space, and providing an imaginary belonging for people, who are unfamiliar with each other, to citizens and to the city; 2) through the urban imaginary’s temporal aspect, revealed in the culture city memory categories that define the structure of collective ideas about a city through images of the city’s past. To the non-city, which is outside the imaginary boundaries, the author refers to all those urban space objects and practices that are not symbolically and mentally related to citizens’ urban ideas.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):74-91
74-91
Why Do Humans Need Time: Changing Temporal Boundaries in the Context of Labor Fragmentation
Abstract
In the modern world of late capitalism and global change, humanity has faced numerous challenges: consumerist culture, the benefits of the Welfare State, radical shifts in labor practices, the weakening of social guarantees of labor and the rise of remote work. Despite these changes, including the rejection of traditional labor models, euphoric promises from labor theorists, and experiments with universal basic income, work remains a central pillar of our existence. However, the longstanding emphasis on labor now faces increasing tension due to temporal pressures both within the labor process and among workers themselves. This article seeks to systematize the consequences of labor process reorganization and its temporal transformations under late capitalism. Drawing upon methodologies developed by contemporary social theorists like J. Wajсman, H. Rosa, and J. Crary, we analyze how the evolving labor paradigm shapes modern lifestyles and societal structures. Our findings reveal an intensifying fragmentation of labor, novel organizational configurations, the “escape” of labor (as a type of its territorial, country-based reassembly) and persistent shortages of time tied to the economic, sociocultural and psychological dynamics of late-capitalist society.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):92-108
92-108
Symbols. Values. Ideals
The Union of Philosophy and Literature As an Essence Constant of Russian Spiritual Culture
Abstract
The article examines the union of Russian philosophy with artistic creativity as the genetic code of Russian spiritual culture, which determined its national characteristics and semantic vector of development. The author shows that following in spiritual creativity both the arguments of reason, which operates with concepts, and the arguments of creative contemplation, which perceives the world in artistic images, created a common semantic space for thinking about the divine and human, righteous and sinful, life and death, freedom and necessity, good and evil. The result was the “harmony of mind and heart” that defined the metaphysics of philosophical concepts and literary classics. In this context, the author turns to the historically formed forms of interrelation between philosophical and artistic creativity, focusing on those dimensions of each that confirm their complementary unity and indicate that, when separated from each other, they do not provide an adequate picture of the world and a person’s understanding of their relationship to it. In the article, the aspirations of Russian culture to combine philosophy with an imaginative and artistic perception of reality are considered as an expression of a person’s natural ability to perceive it in harmony with all types of creativity, which insures the life of society from the harsh dictates of “rationality”. These ideas determined the key issues of the author’s research: 1) complementarity of artistic, figurative and philosophical perception of the world as a problem of Russian philosophy; 2) union of philosophical reflection and literature as a genotype of Russian spiritual culture; 3) “impressionism of thought” in philosophical poetry. Addressing these issues allowed the author to reveal the historiosophical meaning of the problem he stated.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):109-123
109-123
The Collisions of Russian and American Anarchism at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Abstract
The article explores the collisions between Russian and American anarchism in the early 20th century through the example of the “Russian Americans”: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, as well as Piotr Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, who had a great influence on them. The article focuses on imagology and the principle of mirror representation of some stereotypes in Russian and American culture. The author analyzes how American anarchists overcame the stereotypes of Russia as an exclusively slave “prison of peoples” and America as an exclusively free and democratic country. In contrast to the stereotype of Russia as America’s “dark twin”, common in the journalism of both countries, they defended the opposite view of revolutionary Russia as a model of true freedom in comparison to slave capitalist America. The article discusses the peculiar “anarchist” status of L.N. Tolstoy, who, despite his proximity to this current, cannot be classified as a member of it because of his typically Christian, nonresistant and subjectivist position. The article introduces the anarchist journal “Mother Earth” and examines the article “America and Russia”, attributed to Tolstoy by the American press.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):124-147
124-147
Times. Morals. Characters
Jouissance: The Role of Repetition and Avoidance Strategies
Abstract
The article discusses S. Freud’s views on the cause of the obsession syndrome, which the author of the article interprets through the concept of repetition. While Freud sees in neurosis an inability to achieve pleasure through a series of repetitions in the early part of his work, in a later period the obsessive-compulsive syndrome he associates with the urge to die. For his part, J. Lacan considers the attraction to death as a place of pleasure inextricably linked to the register of the Real. And then repetition is a way to avoid the Real. According to Lacan’s theory, a neurotic subject to obsessive-state syndrome tends to endless repetitions, wishing to find and rediscover a lost object. But all it can achieve is the repetition of ersatz objects, which are in fact pacifiers, negatives of a real, authentic object. Thus, it can be assumed that at repetition the emptiness itself multiplies — negativity, which hide behind objects — erzatsa. This void is interestingly placed inside the subject, leading to melancholy and depression. By agreeing that repetition is the production of emptiness, one can imagine a repetition of events whose negativity has tangible consequences in social reality. At the public level, this is manifested in the formation of spaces of insciency, as written by A. Yurchak, or in the general depression after the revolutionary states, as written by A. Magun. According to K. Yuhannison, the state of depression manifests itself either in the fact that the subject goes into himself or, conversely, in the fact that the subject starts to waste himself. The author of the article asks whether it is possible to achieve pleasure by avoiding these two extremes. For this he considers the possibility of releasing pleasure, having, as opposed to pleasure, an active beginning, from a destructive context, which is characteristic of the death urge.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):148-163
148-163
The Space of the Soviet Person: City in the Context of Identity Formation
Abstract
The article addresses the study of human formation by means of the urban environment in the context of the implementation of ideological and utopian projects. In the context of radical social transformations, one of the key tasks is to find architectural solutions that contribute to the formation of a new social consciousness. Based on the analysis of Soviet archival documents (resolutions and decisions of congresses, conferences and plenums of the Central Committee) in the field of urban planning policy, the features of the socio-political context were identified, which made it possible to interpret the urban environment as an important tool for the implementation and integration of socialist values into everyday human life. Special attention was paid to the study of architectural and urban planning practices of the post-revolutionary years, which explicitly reflected ideological attitudes. The article deals with examples typical of the first half of the twentieth century. architectural forms and practices of life creation: communal houses, consumer service enterprises, cultural and leisure centers, etc. Using this material, the author identifies the features of architectural and social thinking in the projects of Soviet architects, which reveal the features of biopolitical mechanisms and the formation of a disciplinary space. The identification of the basic principles that formed the basis of the design of the Soviet city demonstrates architectural models as an opportunity to design an ideal space that acts as a mechanism for the political and cultural construction of a personality. This allows us to trace the connection between ideological attitudes and everyday human practices mediated by the urban environment. The analysis of Soviet urban planning projects and practices aimed at changing people allows us to better understand the urban environment as a management technology and a space for the formation of human consciousness.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):164-178
164-178
Contemporary Practical Anthropology: Philosophy in Practice — Eating (In) Theory
Abstract
The article considers the project of empirical philosophy, presented by Annmarie Mol in her last book Eating in theory and the specificity of her conceptualization of human. Preliminarily a short overview of evolution of applied philosophy and similar projects within actor-network theory (Latour’s experimental and empirical metaphysics and John Law’s empirical ontology) is briefly outlined. The author spots out the features of Annmarie Mol’s philosophical thinking. Then author considers of an example of such type philosophizing — reconceptualization of human image using food studies. Mol builds her model of human by revising four aspects: being, knowing, doing, relating. Human beings appear as the being embodied subject with semipermeable boundaries. Knowing is understood as an interaction process, during which both subject and object can be transformed. As a result, we do not just get new knowledge about the world, but also transform it. Conceptualization of doing goes beyond voluntary action and natural process opposition and is produced in terms of task. Relation is considered to be a complicated intertwining of human and non-human actors. Human is understood not as highlighted from the world figure, but as an entity among other entities, being, knowing and doing in the world and relating with absolutely Otherness, included in nets of different (f)actors. In the last part author reviews reactions to the Mol’s theory and offers a critic note on empirical philosophy.
Čelovek. 2025;36(4):179-191
179-191