Проективный словарь гуманитарных наук

A neologism sums up the movement of a thought as it traverses the stages of proof, unfolds amid voluminous verbal constructs, and can ultimately find no better embodiment than that single word that immortalizes it – as if signaling that this thought abides in the language itself, and not just in particular texts. The word “idea” (eidos), which Plato elevated to a philosophical category, has now absorbed Plato’s thought for good – and whoever uses this term becomes a Platonist whether s/he wants to or not, even if s/he adheres to anti-Platonic views. Language caters to the most varying worldviews, which are capable of arguing with one another only because they speak a common language. It would be difficult to imagine the thought of Vladimir Solovyov or Mikhail Bakhtin without the verbal constructs they introduced into the Russian humanities: vseedinstvo, “all-unity”; Bogochelovechestvo, “Godmanhood”; sofiologiia, “Sophiology”; mnogogolosie, “multivoicedness” or “polyphony”; uchastnost’, “particity”; khronotop, “chronotope”; vnenakhodimost’, “outsidedness” or “exotopia”; etc.

Some of the terms included in this dictionary, concepts I have introduced in previous publications, are already in use in the humanities or have begun to be so, which attests to their heuristic potential. For instance, the following coinages of mine appear on tens of thousands of Russian– and English-language web-pages:

– metarealizm, “metarealism” (first appearing in a publication of 1983), a literary and artistic movement of the 1970s-90s.

– transkul’tura, “transculture” (1988), a space where various culture meet.

– videokratiia, “videocracy” (1992), the power of visual imagery over the public consciousness.

– khronotsid, “chronocide” (1999), the abolition of temporality in totalitarian as well as postmodern currents of thought.

Also defined in the dictionary are such well-known concepts as “charm,” “creativity”, “fate,” “game,” “love,” “sense,” “silence,” “soulfulness,” “wisdom,” and “word,” – but interpreted anew in the context of contemporary theories of the humanities, or endowed with a terminological status they formerly lacked. Everyone knows that philosophy is the love of wisdom, while psychology is the science of the soul. The word is one of the basic concepts of linguistics, just as love and creativity are of ethics and psychology. But the very disciplines called upon to study these concepts do not in fact pay them much attention. It would be a rare thing to find, in a philosophy or psychology dictionary, entries on wisdom or the soul – the very concepts are considered syncretic and “pre-scholarly.” Although they are constantly used to define many other terms, they themselves implicitly lie outside the bounds of “scholarly” philosophy or psychology. One of the goals of the Predictionary is precisely to articulate these blank spaces in the terminological system of the humanities and to introduce into that system concepts formerly perceived as purely intuitive and belonging to everyday language (“quirk” or “twist” [vyvert]; “depth”; “the interesting” [interesnoe]; “event”; “packaging” or “wrapping” [upakovka], etc.).

Bertrand Russell had occasion to lament that the system of philosophical categories typically features only nouns (“being,” “consciousness,” “idea,” “matter,” etc.), omitting verbs, prefixes, and other auxiliary parts of speech indicating deeper conceptual connections. The Predictionary attempts to fill in this blank and introduce more dynamic and relative concepts expressed by verbs, prepositions, prefixes and other parts of speech and grammatical units (“to eventify,” “in,” “hyper-,” “proto-”, “nega-”, etc.)

The dictionary may be used as a tool for the methodological renovation of the humanities in their current period of relative stagnation, as they risk turning into what the study of dead languages has become for modernity – the sign of a cultural refinement already superfluous in a technocentric age. The dictionary demonstrates that the humanities harbor great creative potential, and that their role is not limited to the study of the past; in fact, they shape the future of humanity, its pathway to self-awareness and self-realization.