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The question arises here: if true progress (different from its contemporary partial, i.e. illusory representation) — is a forward movement that brings man bask to Eden, — where and how should he proceed in order to be adequately reintegrated? This is, actually, an age-old socio-political question, a quest for an answer to which has led and still leads men to generate a variety of philosophical-political and politico-economic theories. Although this question is, obviously, of prime importance, we focus our attention on the essentially human, ontological aspect of the problem stated in the title, comprehending fully — as will be seen lower down — its indiseverable bond with the above.

But now let us consider another question: why is it that creativity returns men into the «milieu» of harmonious unity with the world, the unity of Adam not only with the tree, but also with the Serpent, the unity of Adam and Eve, a return into a «pre-disintegrated» milieu. An answer to this question is prompted by art, the most full-blooded form of creativity.

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And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MEHE, TEKEI., UPHARSIN

By its very essence, art unobtrusively reconciles us to reality. It equalizes our consciousness with our reality, equalizes each of us and humanity, harmonizes our relations with the world, however cruel this world may look in a work of art. A work of art is a work of an artistic, entirely harmonized world, a world that has an appeasing influence on us. Art actually gives us that enjoyment which Adam parted with forever when he left Paradise. Art is a powerful source of life-giving energy and optimism, understood not in the down-to-earth, everyday, customary sense, neither in the concretely socio-political sense, but in the broadest, «existential» sense. Art is, essentially, a life-inspiring, life-asserting, essentially optimistic force, allowing every one who is drawn into its sphere to overcome the uneasy sense of one's finiteness, to be reconciled with existence. In this measure, art is love which generates that peculiar state when man, however convinced he may be that miracles do not happen, does not venture, nevertheless, to maintain that miracles ca

Owing to what does art succeed in achieving this effect, most essential to our existence?

An instrumentalistic approach would suggest the following answer: art means striking a balance between consciousness and reality through uniting thought and sense (emotion), an idea and an image. This «correct» answer is, however, far from the truth. This answer would have been quite correct if we had agreed to «recall» the very fact which has long and completely been «forgotten» by literally all researchers. The very fact is that «thought» and «feeling» have never been, never are and will never be parallel, independent and separately-existing phenomena. At the same time, they have never been, are not and ca

In fact, if we put in an effort and try to overcome the primordial (initial) conventionality in the problem of «thought» and «feeling (emotion)», then in the light of the meta-principle of the whole-oneness of everything in existence, the truth of the essential oneness of thought and sense (feeling) comes into evidence.

It is not enough by far to speak of their close unity. «Thought» and «feeling» are dissected elements of that single, indissectible, essentially whole principle which we term — for lack of a better word — «Pathos». Thought and feeling make an integral whole, like consciousness and non-consciousness; pathos ca

Thus, the tragedy of the end suggested by consciousness is overcome in creation. Creation is the realm of pathos, the realm of man's organic unity with the Universe, the realm of interpenetration of the human and the non-human, the reciprocal balancing and complete fusion of consciousness and reality. Consequently, pathos is the only instrument of existential optimism, of self-assertion of life and self-assertion in life, and, thus, the only instrument which helps to obtain i

To sum it up, we can say — it is creativity that effects man's unrealized «comeback to himself», i.e. to the state of organic oneness with the world, the comeback of man to Adam, and of Adam himself — to Paradise.

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The Holy One — blessed be He — endows with wisdom only him who has wisdom.

Now, concerning the co

What happened, and happened today, is something most significant.

The steady and uncontrolled escalation of rationalism in all its manifestations, in all directions and at all levels, has become today that «quantitative leap» which changes the structure of existence rapidly. All the complex of such well-known processes as the «massification» of the world, as all-encompassing and all-penetrating peculiarization, the parcelling of the «separate» forces within man, his alienation from the Universe, the alienation of men from one another (moral and spiritual, political, economic and practical alienation), the rationalistic and hideously absurd, in its final results, formalization of human instincts which became an uncontrolled process of perfecting and accumulating means of self-destruction, — all this ponderous and redoubtable conglomerate of phenomena rooted in idolized rationalism hangs like a deadweight on the cogwheel of the very mechanism that serves to balance man's existence with his consciousness. This mechanism seems to be worn out, and the signs of it are multiple. They are, on the one hand, social depression and man's loss of initiative in expectation of the Apocalypse; on the other hand — the turmoil of chaotic spurts in desperate and unceasing efforts to find an outcome by means of all kinds of revolutions (economic, political, moral revolutions, «revolutions of consciousness», racial and class battles, confrontation of the sexes, of age groups, etc.). All this is, maybe, nothing new; but it is clear that the extreme intensification of even the most traditional processes ca