«Онкология» культуры
Журба Николай Анатольевич,
кандидат философских наук, доцент, заведующий кафедрой философских и гуманитарных дисциплин Института химических технологий Восточноукраинского национального университета им. Владимира Даля, г. Рубежное.
The «Oncology» of Culture
Zhurba Mykola,
Head of the Philosophy and Humanities Department, candidate of philosophical sciences, docent, Ph.D.
Institute of Chemical Technologies of Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University (the town of Rubizhne).
In the proposed article an attempt of integration of difficult cultural transformations to the processes occurring in a human body is made. Probably such reductionism is rather controversial and revolutionary that definitely can cause quite logical criticism, however the used methodological principle allows to clarify some difficult modern cultural phenomena where forms and functions ceased to be a whole.
Keywords: culture, civilization, cancer cell, logic is philosophical reconstruction, unity.
In due time Freud and Nietzsche investigating culture noted things unacceptable at that time: they characterized culture as a mechanism which suppresses a person and turns him into a small screw of society. In our opinion, at that time the above-mentioned authors have already precisely described realities of modern culture.
In the XX century culture ceased to be something exclusively positive in relation to a person, sometimes it is even considered as something hostile in relation to him, his freedom, as something that threatens to his inner world. Today we are observers of the unprecedented phenomenon – the agony of culture "has dispatched" an era of "absolute truth" into non-existence. Today disintegration of values, leveling of spirituality that are lost being dissolved in mass, has given rise to "society of shows", going nowhere, generating similar to it: "copier of culture" continues to work regularly...
Being of a modern man is filled with a set of many cultural influences and interferences. In its turn, culture is a big dynamic living organism which supersensitively reacts to "irritations" arising throughout all history of mankind. It reacts with changes, crises, achievements and defeats, responds with its whole being...
According to I. Rakitov culture of any human society has a "core", a receptacle of a certain culture which provides preservation and transfer of society self-identity. The author compares the nucleus of culture with human DNA which provides high stability and minimum variability [3].
As one can see, a bit biologizing view on the processes occurring in culture, has the right to exist. We will try to consider cultural processes from such angle of view.
Any phenomenon is a component of system of higher order, and in each of the systems there are some certain interrelations, breach of which leads to imbalance in the whole system. Both human culture and human body (consisting of organs which, in their turn consist of a set of cells) are systems too. It is expected that the vital functions of each organ, cells of each subsystem will be directed to the benefit of all organism because it submits to the law of nature – a part serves to the whole. But, unfortunately, it occurs not always exactly like this. Sometimes in a human body there are processes which direct to organism destruction, and therefore on breach of the aforesaid law.
Presently, and it is already statistics, the number of oncological patients s, and this increase is connected with deterioration of ecological state of environment or with prompt development of diagnostic opportunities of modern medicine, or there exist some other reasons – it is still an issue in science.
Researches show that cancer cells are organism’s own cells which served to organism until certain time, carrying out work on ensuring its vital activity. But at a certain point a failure of their program takes place, and they change their behavior, refusing to serve to organs, they propagate uncontrolledly, breaking morphological borders and establishing everywhere their "strong points" – metastases. Cancer cells grow very quickly and propagate much faster and better than healthy cells.
Human is a bridge, a point of connection of the ideological and material world where idea keeps the predominating role. Taking this into account, it becomes clear that any disorder or body diseases (by the way as "diseases" and culture crises) have rather steady parallels with human thinking. If one defines personality as system of relations, from this point cancer is a necrosis of personality, a product of rupture of fundamental relations and connections of the inner and outer world, and their replacement by some superficial and formal similarities. Something similar occurs at gradual transformation of culture into "space of werewolves", "quasiculture" which "seizing from culture its numerous achievements and realities, places them in civilization and gives to these realities absolutely other sense" [2, p. 150]. So, "quasiculture" can be considered, so to speak, as "a precancerous condition" of cultures.
It is necessary to say that the hypothesis of the ideological etiology of cancer is quite ambiguous and, probably, even a bit fantastic from the scientific point of view, and for all that the last data that nuclear of cancer cells, unlike normal, have no electric potential and, respectively, field, which have in fact the same relations are evidenced of its advantage. So the same phenomenon occurs with a cell as a subsystem, as well as with an organism’s big system: it is known that the people sick with oncological diseases "drop out of game", refuse the social relations. So, the cell "refuses" the relations with other subsystems: the high negative charge of cancer cell membrane perform this function which pushes away other cells in order not to create a system with them. The scientists have found out that cancer cells lose their "cilia" (microscopic hairs on the surface of cell membranes) which are called to carry out communication with other cells and environment. So the "world view" of cancer cell is the philosophy of total egoism, and all history of mankind shows that the behavior of an egoist is a self-destruction, and then people around one.
What have these processes in common with cultural processes?
Saraf M. Ya., considering culture as the system the main function of which is the reproduction of person, notes that this process has two components, namely, the reproduction of forms of collective man’s being and the reproduction of forms of its individual being. Since the 60s of the XXth century alienation from the so-called high culture increases rapidly that in turn serves as an underlying reason of formation of postmodernism, that condition of culture when forms of collective and individual being are split up and mix up that is one of the most essential features of culture crisis [5]. The state of contemporary culture can be called as tragic. Reproduction of man (in culture) has already became surrogate – in the majority of cases an individual lags behind that level of culture which has been reached by mankind, filling his "emptiness" (lack of cultural and moral values) with mass culture.
It is necessary to recognize that today the process of alienation of man in all spheres has almost reached "a non-return point", ranging from material production to the social, communicative, spiritual spheres. Probably, person loses gradually "cilia" of soul, called to unite it with others. Whether these processes remind egoistical philosophy and behavior of cancer cell?
It is necessary to say that in the fast expansion of cancer tumor manifests the same thing that occurs at any separation of a form from the content – the released form (in our case cancer cells) "rages" at first, pseudo-life develops impetuously, trying to change entire real organism that eventually kills it. Similar processes can be observed in other spheres of life too. For example, when "a rise" of the economy happens and money (form), separated from commodity filling (content), start to produce other money. But such fake breakthrough ends inevitably with default. In fact, these phenomena are the same, in which the main feature of destructiveness manifests - all destructive is compelled to self-destruct.
There exist rather non-standard point of view and almost seditious presupposition about origin of cancer tumour, namely: cancer is not a disease, but a temporal natural rescue, a protective reaction of nature to an illness, which occur before cancer and consist in systematic alienation of organism’s cells and organs. If there was no cancer, such alienated organs and cells would disintegrate and necrosis would take place. Cancer tumour does not allow to alienated cells to disintegrate and to perish at least at once. Such phenomenon, but on a social level, is fascism. It is also an emergency resonant combiner, which appears in an alienated society.
So, perhaps, cancer is a peculiar regulator? On this occasion it's fair to remember Jean Baudrillard: "Probably, we pay for our own system with the help of AIDS and cancer; we banish its common place virulence in the fatal way .... One can imagine that our society seek to get rid of its disadvantaged, similar to tribes which got rid of population by suicides at the ocean - it was the question of homeopathic dose of suicides, of the suicides of some men, but it allowed to keep homeopathic balance (equilibrium) of the whole tribe"[6].
Within our research it was quite interesting for us to consider and to compare vital activity of two absolutely different cells from the first sight: stem cells and cancer cells. An analysis showed that cancer cell and stem cell have common features: ability to breed unlimitedly and endlessly, “to travel” for long distances, and also to be in another’s microenvironment. These features differ them from all other organism’s cells. But they differ from each other in essence and, so to say, fatally, namely, the purpose of their vital activity: stem cell serves to Whole (organism), "hear" its signals which reflect its will and, the main thing, submit to them, it is a harmonious part of Whole’s program; cancer cell, though harmonious it is a part of Whole, but it ignore its laws openly and selfishly is guided only by its own needs. More and more scientific facts are evidence of presupposition that cancer cell is a changed stem cell. At what stage happens a process of malignant transformation? The direct duty of stem cells is restoration of organism’s destroyed tissues: a strengthened regeneration takes place at place of destruction, and this means that stem cells work with overload, it leads sometimes to a failure in the stem cell, and instead of rescue works for organism’s benefit it begins to rescue itself, transforming into cancer cell, and restoration of organ – into tumour growth, the instrument of revival becomes the instrument of destruction, life turns out on the death threshold. But every danger conceals possibility. But much as it is paradoxical, even cancer cell is able to be a creator. The following scientific experiment was conducted: the nucleus of mouse’s cancer cell was brought into the ovule, whose own nucleus was ablated preliminarily. The beginning of new valuable life became the result – cell-chimera has given life to a healthy mouse’s embryo [1].
Now we return to the processes which happen in culture. Let's apply to the phenomenon of "professional cretinism" which arise a result of process of professionalizing of a way of activity and which can be characterized in the following way: as far as individual acts, and rather free, in particular area, which converges more and more, and it limits valuable consciousness, and person turns out behind it boundaries, loses purposeful sense of activities. It’s a process in which man transforms from purpose of activities into means sooner or later, and it means that man’s professional activity begins to destroy culture and becomes a danger to its existence, because it cease to reproduce man as an integral social and systemic creature, in such conditions culture ceases to reproduce itself as a systemic object. This crisis has already gained features of cancer pandemia. On the other hand, the development of society and culture is impossible without professionalism, but aspiration to preoccupation with technical aspects, unidimensionality, sectoral self-sufficiency lead to the processes described above. M. Saraf calls such development of culture paradoxical, but within our approach it has quite logic explanation, because from the position of human cell’s vital activity – it is a description of the process of regeneration of stem cell into cancer cell.
So, the uninterrupted destruction, balance shift between man’s inner world and his outer activity, between collective and individual being, destroy gradually not only man, but also culture as its social essence. Except alienation from nature, activities and himself, a contemporary man alienate from other persons that, to author’s mind, is even more tragic that everything above-mentioned; because: "If individual doesn’t communicate with other, he comes into contact with himself. He becomes his own antibody, as a result of offensive overthrow of immune process, breach of his own code, destruction of his own protective mechanism" [6]. Consequently, communication turn to Other - it is a thing that doesn’t permit to man to be repeat endlessly, like a spontaneous expansion of cancer cell, thereby destroying himself, "like biological body. . is exposed to risk and metastases, in other words, to risk of occurrence of positive, devouring his own cells... " [6].
How to stop this process? There are various approaches in scientific literature in medicine as well as in the context of philosophical reflection of reconstruction of culture. In our research we wanted to stop on method (logical-philosophical reconstruction), developed by Russian professor V. Moiseev[4], which by the way can be used and be efficient in the first case as well as in the second one. It demonstrates again expediency and availability of our analogy of modern culture and process that occur in human body at cellular level. In our case the very approach gives opportunity to see logical connection in cleared of all existed components view. Therefore, using terminology of the above-mentioned author, we can carry out logical-philosophical reconstruction of modern culture. In order to make it, it is necessary to define existing methodical side of process of logical-philosophical reconstruction: residue of the concentrate of the main conceptual structures. It is known that there are many conceptual, semantic islands in philosophy which it is possible to call concepts (in philosophy a concept is a content of concept, semantic value of a sign (name) which differs from the subject value).
The scientist focuses attention on that it is possible to single out this structural nucleus from the concept and thus it is more logical, to process the concept strictly, thereby to reconstruct this structure. V. Moiseev draws the analogy of this process very neatly, calling it the skeleton of his concept. For visualization we will imagine the structure of human.
Certainly, this method is rather specific: we can watch the structure as much as necessary, its external manifestations, of course but we won't be able to find out, see his skeleton in this way. That’s way we need to carry out the following procedure - to examine a human body with X-rays in order to receive confirmation, the image which will certify intuitive anticipation, real confirmation of existence of a skeleton.
Certainly, today the fact that thanks to X-rays one can "examine" a human body and see fine his skeleton, all existing bones is known, and level of modern medicine allows even to see the structure of an internal organs, and there are devices (for example, the computer tomograph) which give the opportunity to project the received result not in the two-dimensional plane, and to receive the full volume image.
It is known that X-rays are widely applied not only in medicine, but also, for example, in chemistry, biochemistry, material science for identification of structure of substance at nuclear level (X-ray structure analysis), in detection of defects (X-ray defectoscopy) various designs (rails, beams, welding seams, etc.), is used also in equipment, criminalistics, art criticism. X-rays also are used to ensure the safety of citizens, the prevention of acts of terrorism, smugglings (for example, at the airports they apply the X-ray television introscopes, allowing to see subjects which can be dangerous on monitors).
There is one more important point of use of X-rays – X-ray therapy which covers the theory and practice of treatment of tumoral diseases, and also other diseases.
At the beginning of the article we draw an analogy of modern culture with activity of a human body, namely activity of cells. We consider certain analogies of formation of a tumor and an unlimited tendency of growth of culture. As a method of treatment of X-rays – X-ray therapy, as important and necessary concentration on a structural nucleus that allows to suspend this uncontrollable process by return to its structure, by structuration of amorphous structure of modern culture. In our opinion, it is quite representative example of scientific capacity of the stated positions. As we see, the broad successful application in various fields of knowledge, causes expediency of its use and philosophical interpretations to see radiopaque structural nucleus and to consider the principle of "X-rays" as tools of metaphysical thinking and comprehension of modern culture.
References
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Поступила в редакцию 28.06.2013 г.