The “Third Eye” of Culture

Abstract

There are many definitions of culture, which largely complement one another. I will proceed from the one that E.V. Il’enkov proposed (1991) (I am paraphrasing and will be so bold as to add a little bit, while keeping the meaning intact). Culture is that which people create for one another, and hence unifies them in space and time. That which has a meaning for them, making them care about one another, even if they not only are unacquainted, but do not have an inkling of one another’s existence. People who use a spoon, fork, and knife and can no longer take in food any differently are a “single circle” of people, even if they are infinitely different from one another. I once had an amusing situation in Japan. I sat down at a computer with the Japanese version of Word and boldly clicked through the menu, in which everything was in hieroglyphics. My Japanese colleagues joked: “How well you know Japanese!” Word, after all, is also a kind of variety of the “Esperanto of culture.”... As well as the Internet, and even to some degree