29.11.2024

Philosopher Alexei Kozyrev Delivered a Lecture on the Sacred and Profane at the IPOS Closing Ceremony

On 29 November, Alexei Kozyrev, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Lomonosov Moscow State University. The event took place on the stage of the 14th century Kaliningrad Cathedral.

Alexei Kozyrev:
Here, too, the gods dwell...” — So Heraclitus , warming himself by the fire, said, inviting strangers to enter his dwelling. A person builds a house not only to protect themselves from the weather and all the hostile things in this world. The house is how one sees the world; like a human being, the house is a kind of “microcosm” reflecting the world order. The house metaphor is a key cultural metaphor. Even the Heavens were conceptualised by man using the categories of home. The Dome of the temple, the house of God. The structure of any dwelling is heterogeneous. If there is order in the house, there are special spaces where a person protects the sacred, placing there icons or ancestral portraits, especially favoured objects. Access there is possible only for good people, welcome guests of this house. Hospitality would be impossible without the House. Gaston Bachelard , a twentieth-century French anthropologist, presents us with the “house from cellar to attic” in his “Poetics of the Imagination”.

Alexei Kozyrev:

Here, too, the gods dwell...” — So Heraclitus , warming himself by the fire, said, inviting strangers to enter his dwelling. A person builds a house not only to protect themselves from the weather and all the hostile things in this world. The house is how one sees the world; like a human being, the house is a kind of “microcosm” reflecting the world order. The house metaphor is a key cultural metaphor. Even the Heavens were conceptualised by man using the categories of home. The Dome of the temple, the house of God. The structure of any dwelling is heterogeneous. If there is order in the house, there are special spaces where a person protects the sacred, placing there icons or ancestral portraits, especially favoured objects. Access there is possible only for good people, welcome guests of this house. Hospitality would be impossible without the House. Gaston Bachelard , a twentieth-century French anthropologist, presents us with the “house from cellar to attic” in his “Poetics of the Imagination”.

As the professor notes, to philosophise about the Home means to search for one’s place in the world, understanding oneself and one’s homeland, “for as Alexey Fyodorovich Losev wrote, bad is the philosophy that can say nothing about the Homeland. Returning home promises us happiness, peace and cosiness. Even if, having returned, we immediately start dreaming of new adventures”.