vasyl cherepanyn
http:// vcrc. org.ua
The Politics Of Knowledge OR WHY THE OWL OF MINERVA SHOULD TAKE ITS FLIGHT WITH THE FALLING OF THE DUSK
The questions of reflection, knowledge and critical analysis arise as priorities for contemporary societies, including the Ukrainian one today – especially after the Maidan revolution and during the Russian-Ukrainian war. As a university teacher and cultural activist I am first of all confident in a key principle to which one must remain faithful to – that society has invented the places of knowledge (universities, educational and cultural institutions) as topoi, where it can comprehend and analyze its own foundations. These places in the social structure provide a crucial and extremely important possibility to think, criticize and debate about the grounds that the society itself is based on, tracing and proposing alternatives and different variants of social development. Therefore, knowledge is not a luxury but a responsibility, it is neither a privilege nor a commodity but a tool for social change, a method of rethinking and transforming those a priori substructures that we are built on. Lack of proper reflection and critical analysis leads to a rupture between "theory" and "practice", in which knowledge turns into theoretical hallucinosis and political practice – into vulgar cynicism. Humanities, critical theory and socially engaged knowledge are anti-isolationist in principle, because they enable the manifestation of the universal – that is universitas, the university itself. This position is universal for all specialties or modes of action "doing" something. As Gadamer noticed, the humanities are not the discipline to be studied to be but rather are then those who study them. Studying humanities that is humanitas, the human as such; we study their development is and thus the development of human capabilities, what every one of us can be. 251