Universe of Platonic Thought 2025

33rd International Conference “The Universe of Platonic Thought: Platonism and Literary Forms of Philosophy” (Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities, St Petersburg)

Danil Sandakov ; SPbU Institute of philosophy (Saint-Petersburg, Russia), student; SPbU Institute of philosophy (Saint-Petersburg, Russia), Student

Retrofuturism as a strategy for interpreting modernity

Reflections are offered on how standard practices of cultural genesis overcome the concept of time, how, understanding its (time's) flow, people try to create such languages and ways of talking about the world that would help them think about what is happening now, adequately to what is in this world, without falling into metaphysical propositions about the essentialist structure of language, or going into excessive historicism, seeing in past achievements a real analogy to today's days. Reflections on the spirit of modern science fiction, its connection with the post-metaphysical (anti-metaphysical) tradition represented by Heraclitus, Parmenides, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Gadamer are presented; reflections on the connection of science fiction discourse with the idea of political (ideological) human existence are presented, questions about the connection of cultural with social, historiosophical and political discourse.

Keywords: retrofuturism, science fantastic, modern, time, culture

Criticism of the provisions of Criticism of the provisions of formal logic follows from ontology, the first forerunner of which was Heraclitus; many metaphysical philosophers, without raising the question of time at all, or interpreting it, following Plato, as an order, provide space for a worldview according to which the world can be interpreted in accordance with a certain apparatus of thinking contained in us.; at the moment, it is not fundamentally important how exactly: in the form of scholasticism, in the form of generalization of the achievements of natural sciences (classical positivism) or the logical semantics of all possible statements about the existence revealed to us (logical positivism)—the only remarkable thing is that by understanding the order of time (or rather time as an order), we can confidently state which object is given to us, because time, as a kind of design, does not change the status of the object in question relative to itself, because if the idea of a table is the potency of the existence of a table, then all thoughts about this table will be correct even after time has passed, because it concerns only its potency to exist: the ontological status of an object is given to us only if time, as an order, cannot bring chaos to this object or this very object is the order itself, the projection given to us in consciousness, such reflections they lead to metaphysics. An interesting point is Friedrich Nietzsche's consideration that the basic statement of formal logic, that A = A exists only in our minds and that, in fact, in every thing every moment lies its contradiction, its denial and the change of this very thing; according to Heraclitus, you cannot enter the same river twice, because every entry of me It will mean that I did not enter the river, and I did not enter the river. A world where the future does not exist, the present is elusive (according to Heraclitus and Nietzsche), and the past is unreliable (Nietzsche, about the benefits and harms of history for life) simply does not exist, it is a world of eternally exchanging energy and nothing more, nothing can be said about nature, phenomena, phenomena Thinking about an event, we already transfer the event in the category of the past (which is unreliable); how then to think of what is? Nietzsche saw this purpose in art, art is timeless, art is excluded from the process of metaphysical reflection, and I recall a quote from the positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap that a philosopher is a failed musician. Gilles Deleuze rehabilitates philosophy before the face of art, believing that philosophy is the invention of concepts; the playful nature of concept formation makes philosophy related to art, thinking about describing the world through new concepts forces us to turn to new languages, which for Deleuze were the language of madness and the language of cinema. Proceeding from a logic similar to Nietzsche's, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger similarly notes that being belongs to being, that any thinking about being inextricably leads to the transformation of this being into being; just as the proponents of apophatic theology warned against defining God as his particular, that as long as the being of God is something more than what if we can define it, then its definition will be inexhaustible and even insulting to him. However, as long as we speak of being, we express the essence of this being in language, then language refers to the existence of being, just as the existence of the world, in the view of theologians, testified to the existence of God, and the existence of being, said about being, speaks partially about being. Language bears the imprint of being, and as long as we speak to it, we can come into contact with being; then why didn't Heidegger like the language of formal logic? Due to their artificiality, people do not speak in formulas, and the language of formulas does not have a tradition of usage. He contrasts philosophy, which speaks in the language of the artificial, with philosophy, which speaks in the tradition, which he calls poetry; similarly, Heidegger notes that philosophy is closer to poetry than to science. The reference to poetry, where imagination and creativity are opposed to a strict system of formulas, also fits into the anti-metaphysical tradition stemming from the ontology of Heraclitus. As long as the understanding of being is the domain of art and natural language (poetry), then the poetic interpretation of language can lead to an understanding 