The article discusses the role of Christian messianism in the process of emanpcipation of man and society. On the one hand, Christian messianism would be nothing without its institutionalization by the Church, on the other hand, the history of Christianity has shown that there have always been stark contradictions between the two institutions of the Church: hierarchy and messianism. In the context of this vocational dilemma of the Church, the author explores the exceptional significance of Christianity as a religion of salvation, of mankind. Thanks to its messianism, Christianity developed a dialectic of history and the end of time, which does not reduce emancipation to its purely immanent and inevitable realization. An example of such a messianic revival is Luther’s Reformation with its two-kingdom doctrine, which opposed the millenarian concept of Christ’s kingdom. In post-Christian European societies, a similar peril could emerge. Following the communist project of collective emancipation and the advent of a perfect society on earth, the Western world is now traversed by another equally immanent emancipatory ideology, but now centered on the individual (evident in movements such as feminism, wokism, and cancel culture). This represents another secular form of millenarianism. The author posits that Christian messianism has the potential to offer a contemporary political philosophy of emancipation. This philosophy acknowledges both individual aspirations (such as individual rights) and collective ones (like social justice and an economy that serves humanity rather than vice versa), but it never treats these aspirations as absolute or ultimate, instead offering an alternative form of emancipation of a spiritual nature. The democratic and liberal individuals are caught in a paradox: they are dominated by the passion for possession, yet simultaneously seek an existence centered on personal dignity. This is where the fundamental emancipatory task of Christian messianism resides.

The article explores collective memory and the public information space in the modern era. The 21^st century is characterized by the development of globalization processes on a global scale and the dominance of digital technologies, which ensure the high speed and accessibility of information dissemination. These changes have led to a significant transformation in mass media and social communication, encompassing television, the press, the Internet, social networks, and other forms of mass interaction that shape the public information space. The social sphere, in all its diverse manifestations, transcends the experience and memories of individuals and small groups. In this context, experience and immediate memories gain significance as communication factors when they are transformed into symbols. Combining the symbolic functions of experience and memory, disseminated information permeates the environment of everyday life, where direct interactions between individuals and collectives occur. The author identifies the formation of a phenomenon that can be termed the “horizon of modernity.” This concept suggests that a variety of perspectives from groups primarily engaged in everyday interactions shape symbolic networks that guide communal behavior and form a context against which direct interactions take place. Modern broadcasting media transform information to meet the demands of mass users and achieve commercial efficiency and political objectives set by the ruling elite. Currently, mass media wield enormous power, gaining the ability to simulate a virtual representation of events that consumers often mistake for reality, thereby overlooking the deception. The author concludes that the illusion of well-being created by mass media poses a risk of distorting both the horizons of modernity and historical memory. Humanity faces the challenge of countering this danger by preserving the deep symbols of world culture.

The article discusses the concept of resistance and its philosophical and linguistic transformation at the turn of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In France, the notion “Resistance” is associated primarily with the opposition of patriotic citizens to Nazism during the occupation of the country by Germany during World War II. This movement became an example of the heroic struggle of the military and partisans who did not accept the defeat of the French army, as well as the spontaneous actions of people of good will who helped the prisoners and victims of Nazism. The leaders of the Resistance refused to submit to the criminal authorities, they were not satisfied with either the position of cooperation with the occupation regime or the passive expectation of its overthrow. At the risk of martyrdom, they sought to fight Nazism without hope of success in their actions. In the post-war years, during the period of the struggle against colonialism, totalitarianism and racism, courageous individuals, at the cost of their own well-being and life, defended the ideals of freedom and democracy, defended the interests of the oppressed and exploited fellow citizens. The concept of resistance in this era acquired the meaning of confronting the forces of evil, selfless self-sacrifice in the name of the eternal values of goodness and justice. In the public mind, the resistance movement appears as an activity inspired by positive ethics and aimed at promoting the social good. At the end of the 20^th century, the concept of resistance gradually loses its conceptual, moral, and constructive content, acquiring an ethically indifferent and sometimes frankly negative, nihilistic, and cynical meaning. Unlimited emancipation, the task of overthrowing traditional everyday morality and outdated norms of life, is declared an absolute value. Hiding behind the slogans of the struggle for freedom, opposition to discrimination, some of the modern social movements contribute to the destruction of public order and the discrediting of ethical values and achievements of world culture, which in turn leads to social indifference and a decrease in the ability to resist destructive socio-political phenomena. The author concludes that modern progressive-minded humanity is faced with the task of educating and consolidating society, exposing political extremism in order to resist destructive forces and uphold the ideals of true democracy and humanism.

The article examines the ethical and socio-political rationales behind France’s decision to sign the armistice with Nazi Germany in June 1940. Subsequent to the defeat, France confronted a binary choice: capitulation or armistice. Capitulation would have entailed responsibility falling on the military; in contrast, in the case of the armistice, it fell on civilian authority. Unlike capitulation, which did not bind civilian governance and remained an exclusively military action, the armistice extended the suspension of hostilities across territories under French sovereignty. In practical terms, capitulation would have allowed France’s legal government to continue the war from other locations, whereas the armistice strictly prohibited such actions. Despite these constraints, France chose the armistice in an attempt to shield its populace from Nazi atrocities. However, this protection ultimately proved illusory. The article contends that the subsequent delegation of full constituent powers to Marshal Pétain deepened societal divisions between collaborationists and members of the Resistance. Contrary to popular belief, General de Gaulle mythologized the Resistance after the war not merely to glorify it but also to alleviate national tensions and position France among the victors of World War II. Reflecting upon the experience of French history, the article concludes on the political and social consequences of decisions regarding war and peace, contingent upon whether political or military leadership assumes the responsibility.

The article analyzes one of the episodes of the theoretical confrontation between “ideology” and metaphysics. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the conception of Maine de Biran, the ancestor of French spiritualism of the 19^th century, emerged in the framework of the school of “ideologists” (idéologues) and gradually constituted in discussions with one of its leading representatives. Destut de Tracy, the author of the term “ideology” (idéologie), rejected the possibility of revealing the essence of things due to the inaccessibility of knowledge about their first reasons. For him, metaphysics is the art of imagination, which has no solid support in experience. The basis of all reliable knowledge, in his opinion, is the science of ideas that is alien to metaphysical dogmatism and focused on the description of phenomena. The early Biran takes a similar position, insisting that man knows the nature of any forces only by their consequences. Later, Biran, starting with distinguishing between active and passive perceptions, comes to confrontation with “ideology.” He highlights the doctrine of will-efforts, not reduced to physiological conditions, in which he sees the basis of the human person. In the late period of Biran’s creative activity, the rejection of anti-metaphysical sensualism leads him to a special form of religious anthropology. In fact, in the local confrontation between “ideology” and metaphysical spiritualism, initial success is on the side of the Biran tradition. But the further development of the history of philosophy suggests that the arguments of both sides, in the new conditions, continued to find their supporters, stimulating the emergence of new concepts. Therefore, the theoretical dispute was not completed at all, it continued at a new developmental stage of European culture, and the opposite approaches were perceived for a long time by many philosophers as having not exhausted all their potential.

Schelling and Proust are two figures in European culture whose thought was aimed at understanding the conditions of the production of a masterpiece as the unity of the infinite and the finite. In this sense they belong to the tradition of transcendental philosophy, which has replaced reality with the products of sensual and intellectual intuition. The transcendental philosophy has emerged as the universal experimentation about regulations of the human existence, which with the abolition of prejudices of a cultural tradition intended to convert forms of affective being and of rational reflection into the reflexes of consciousness and of action, in regulative judgments and values of human experience. The scheme of such human experimental self-knowledge and self-regulation was laid down by the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when Hamlet gives us the image of an internal reflexive experiment, the purpose of which is to develop a will-to-action. This scheme become more complex in the subsequent literary culture, where there emerge the production of sovereign judgment (“tragic age”), the objectification of discharges of moral instinct (sentimentalism), the dynamics of symbolization (romanticism), the forms of affective and reflective consent (classic Russian novel of the 19^th century). With the collapse of humanistic ideals in the catastrophes of the 20^th century, the new modern literature turns into an endless criticism of the natural attitudes of consciousness, which are not adequate, by definition, to the essence of living. Proust frames this criticism as an artistic and intellectual demonstration of his narrator’s projective ontologies on the basis of the author’s pure phenomenological time. À la recherche du temps perdu marks the isolation of the critical intellectual spirit, which is associated with Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, where the singularization of the Jewish God of the word leads to the rejection of the transcendence and of the incarnation.

This article explores the ambiguities of political conservatism in France between 1789 and 1830. The term “conservative” encompasses different and contradictory realities, such as the defense of fundamental natural principles of society, on the one hand, and the desire to maintain the established order, even if it means embracing previously subversive changes, on the other hand. The French Revolution triggered a conservative reaction from both political and intellectual spheres. Counter-revolutionary sentiments were present at all levels of the social hierarchy and encompassed a broad political spectrum, ranging from monarchists to liberals. Edmund Burke’s work influenced French monarchist philosophers, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, who aimed to restore the naturally instituted hierarchy, emphasizing the concept of the sovereignty of God and the authority of natural law. The post-Thermidor government focused on “conservation” of the interests of the owners of national property gained during the Revolution, rather than on the concepts of freedom, equality, and fraternity. The Restoration of the legitimate monarchy in 1814 aimed to reconcile the two opposing sides that had emerged in France after the Revolution. Thus, the Doctrinaires, a group of moderate Royalists including Guizot and Royer-Collard, aimed to overcome the opposition between popular sovereignty and divine right by asserting the sovereignty of reason and justice. Meanwhile, the figures associated with the journal Le Conservateur, including Chateaubriand, Kergorlay, Bonald, and others, emphasized the importance of duties derived from a divine natural order and criticized legal positivism. They were committed both to preserving the “sound doctrines” of legitimacy and the protection of social rights and public peace. The article concludes by discussing the reasons for the failure of reconciliation in French society after the Revolution and Restoration.

Excluding the media’s misuse of the word “philosopher” to describe almost any book writer, aside from novelists and historians, the prevailing perception of “French philosophy” continues to focus on Foucault, Derrida, and the “deconstruction school.” This persistent image, partly due to widespread distortion, nonetheless bears witness to the difficulty that France faces in revising its conceptions of man and human relations to the world, beyond a purely critical approach. The importance of the work of Michel Bastit, who is an active voice in contemporary philosophy, appears then to lie in this effort to restore philosophy as a branch of knowledge, which is the first condition for re-engaging with natural wisdom. In the artcile, I have only given some glimpses of his work and have not discussed the full strength of all his arguments. However, what I have exposed seems sufficient to realize that the main thing Michel Bastit teaches us is that if we want to restore wisdom and establish a respectful relation to nature as well as plainly peaceful and fruitful relations between men in society, the first condition is to turn back to things, both natural and human. The technical manipulation of nature, and even of man himself, is preceded by an intellectual manipulation that leads us to think that, after all, things are nothing. “Things are not things” – this may summarize modern thinking if we are willing to give the proposition the various senses it can endorse. On the contrary, Michel Bastit tells us that things are indispensable, and that in both a practical and a theoretical approach, we cannot do without them. This is true because, at the very root of things, there is always an act, and the act, if one may say so, is the more real part of reality, without which there simply would be no existence.