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confirms a half-forgotten Platonic category for state-justice, characterized by the old name of power from below taken from Plato’s Republic, namely subsidiarity.

It the border regions of Europe to-day, it might be important to have this in mind, if one is going to understand border people and their relations to the bordering nations. Border areas have, if we rely on the analogy with the Green Belt, a surprising potential as workshops for future international relations.

I want to conclude the discussion of this potential by referring to an interview with a teacher in the border zone. The students had pointed out to him that the communication in Nikel between Norwegians and Russians were opening up, even if they did not speak the same language, and did not understand the language of the person they were communicating with. For them this phenomenon was a great paradox.

The students suggested that the communication was a result of Norwegian and Russians visiting each other, increasing business and trade, after the establishing of the border zone. The surprise for them was that the “non-regulated” and “risky” communication was “democratic” in that it created mutual respect and trust. It was like bringing back the time of the Pomor trade.

The teacher wanted his students to study this development in practice. Basically, the teacher wanted to take research on democracy a step fur-

ther. He wanted to see if the new openness in border zone was productive of a more democratic society. But since the political systems in Nikel and Kirkenes are very different, he got a problem: What kind of social facts should he be looking for. The students asked him back: What kind of social behavior should we be looking for? What kind of social rules and behavior produce democracy?

According to his students, the contact due to the border zone invited its inhabitant to more intensive social contact between Norwegians and Russians. But how could a description of this contact prove anything about democracy? The increased contact was not reflected in any new explicit rules, the more intensified contact only seemed to make the social situation more chaotic. So the students said: Sorry we cannot find any proof of a development of democracy in the zone, only more intense non-regulated and risky social communication.

Then he said to them: You see, the only way a democracy can exist, is as a practice established from below. Democracy cannot be established by rules, torn up from its roots and implanted somewhere else where these roots are not present. Therefore, it is wrong to think of democracy as existing by virtue of rules. It is thriving on something more basic, namely certain events and practices, concretizing freedom and respect ahead of rules.

This point the students understood: To confirm or falsify their teachers

“theory” about democracy, they had to give up the need for social rules as criteria of confirmations, and develop their own observation about a practice that is prior to any application of rules.

They had to look for something dynamic connecting people ahead of rules and institutions.

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The students concluded that the non regulated and risky contact they had observed in the zone, maybe was the heart of every real democracy. “Democracies” who have their legitimation in certain rules only, often are false exportdemocracies, imitating justice, but not based on the concrete interest to develop the citizens’ own form of life, kept afloat as a singular dynamics of subsidiarity.

Since an evaluation of increased potential for democratic freedom in the zone cannot be based upon rules is, democratic development cannot be measured as an imitation of an established normality. A living democracy does not exist by virtue of its rules, but by virtue of the practicing of its rules, which is a totally different social dynamics.

3. The Green Belt inspires a dynamic sense of nature. Also the Stoic thinking about nature is concerned with exposing a dynamic relation between man and nature, not given to domination of man over nature.

The dynamic character of nature in the Green Belt leads us into the Stoic tradition. But the Stoics took the dynamic relation between man and nature much more seriously that modern philosophers in Europe to-day.

Seeing the whole of nature as a dynamic cosmic context was a Stoic vision. The Stoics has provided us with an important sense of nature that in modernity to a large extent is forgotten, They saw man as living his social life as a cosmic creature, but often under social and political conditions that separated man from this living whole.

According to the Stoic philosophers man and his world are not originally separated, but basically a part of a bigger whole, an Unlimited Nature with dynamic borders. This means that we have a third sense of nature to discuss, in addition to the wild nature and the dynamism of a nature free from domination by man.

In the Stoic tradition, nature exhibits a cosmic law organizing the relations between men in nature, and setting up ideals of perfection. Here the natural dynamics of the cosmic context, is seen as the mother of civilizations. It implies that man should listen to nature and even try to live in accordance with nature to understand his own nature.

The Stoic philosophers with their cosmopolitan view of state and society were opposed to the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical tradition. They denied the value of truing to define political man as participant in a geographically small area, a city state, with strong borders.

It is my thesis that the peace philosophy of Immanuel Kant still keeps up the memory of the Stoic vision. And I will argue that this connection gives

Kant’s idea of the perennial peace a distinctive flavor. Though never explicitely admitted by Kant, the Stoic attitude to nature is always there in the background in his “Zum ewigen Frieden”, reminding the reader that culture is always embedded in nature.

In this book the idea of man as a cosmic creature is concentrated in the idea of a visitor. The word “visitor” may come as a surprise. Why does Kant

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represent cosmopolitan rights by speaking only of visitors? But the background for Kant idea of the visitor, is a special version of how the Stoic idea of living in accordance with nature, should be practiced politically.

This visitor implements Kant’s Stoic idea that Man’s attempt to establish future social harmony in their societies, cannot start with the regulation of human life inside the city’s own borders. Instead, it must start with the primacy of Nature. To neglect the primacy of Nature, is actually to neglect the inner cosmos in Man. This microcosm is already at work before any social regulation, and tuned in to Nature. It means that men are communicating with Nature, like birds on a string.

For the Stoics, the knowledge of the balancing of the lives of men can only partly be known and understood by people who are imprisoned by city borders. Such prisoners cannot get to know themselves. As cosmic creatures, however, they know of a different life. In virtue of their inner cosmos, everybody inside the city, is connected with unknown borders and events going on outside the limits of the cities. Due to man’s nature, there is always a second city, better able to realize one’s humanity, that the actual one.

To develop knowledge of these borders, man has to leave the city behind. By transcending the borders of his own city, he may be able to decode the meaning of nature and fight the borders that restricts his freedom. Only then, outside the established limits, will he realize his full potential as a human being.

The life in the local city must therefore be adjusted by the true city of Nature, whose borders also can be given a universal moral justification.

To seek one’s real city, every inhabitant of “first” city will have to cross the borders to another city-state in order to get to know people and discover the sense of the Unlimited – which keeps everybody together in the bigger whole of Cosmos.

The clue to a life under the horizon of the Unlimited lies in the attempt to accept the perception of the unlimited in things, and on this premise to go looking for real contact with other persons. Only by meeting each other in the context of the unlimited can people get to know more about what previously was lost, namely a feeling of a unique cosmic harmony.

This third sense of nature was important in the political philosophy of antiquity, the paradoxical sense of nature as revealing a hidden meaning about man’s destiny, was challenging for the reflection on the harmony of the traditional city-state.

But more important for us, this Stoic sense of “nature” also defines a sense of border that is important for the idea of borderology. In borderology the border zone, or more generally a border area, is regarded as having a form of political and social potential for developing new social and political meanings, challenging the sovereignty of the bordering nations on both sides.

Kant obviously thought so too, and I think our sketch of the Stoic idea of migration from one city-state to another, already reveals the Stoic influence in

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the figure of the Visitor. The visitor is Kant’s name for a visionary figure who is advocating a fight for man’s rights, by inducing individuals to take peaceful action against the modern state.

Kant’s main argument is that the visitors’ right is a new type of human rights: in the sense that every single individual has the right to react against dehumanization coming from the building of walls around national states.

Like the Stoics Kant is calling this human right cosmopolitan. And like the Stoics, such cosmopolitan rights concerns man’s relation to the whole world and can only be discovered and developed by the inhabitants from inside one national state, through their operating as visitors seeing contact with inhabitants from another national state, confronting a sociality articulated by cross border contacts.

The border zone is an example of how history builds up political institutions which are in line with the Stoic view of living in accordance with Nature. From the Kantian point of view, the Stoic sense of nature shows that the border zone between Russia and Norway, can become loaded with a meaning that foreign ministers who are declaring such a zone for opened, are not likely to accept or even understand. But Kant is right, this kind of political meaning is registered by the local population. They feel the urge to become visitors.

4. Based on the analysis of the Stoic position, and its cosmic idea of living in accordance with nature, one may wonder if foreign ministers Sergej Lavrov and Jonas Gahr Støre realized what they were doing – and what kind of feelings they were touching on, when they opened the border zone in 2010.

In contrast to the two foreign ministers, people in the zone could foresee that the new passports would let loose old, neglected and even forbidden feelings of cross border contact in the North. The border zone passport does not only pointing to the future, it is also a reminder of the past, more precisely of the big historic loss of the freedom connected with the Pomor trade.

At the time the border zone was opened, I did some interviews with a number of public figures, among them were some local spokesmen for the ethnic Finnish inhabitants in the area.

My main informant on the Norwegian side, told me that because of the opening of the border zone, the people of Sør-Varanger started to remember promises about important local projects. They would for instance like to ask ministers Lavrov and Gahr Støre when the road into Finland should be completed. One person I interviewed said: “There is still some 50 meters of unbuilt road separating the Finnish and the Norwegian road system. If the 50 meters of unbuilt road is completed, that will make it much more easy to visit our relatives, and also to have business in Finland”.

But the problem with completing the road to Finland, has always been the opinion that this would be to invite an invasion from the big East – not from Finland, but from Russia. Because of this possible threat, the road will perhaps nev-

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er be built. The fifty meter of sump and wood, separating the Norwegian and the Finnish road system is serving as a mental defense wall against a Russian invasion.

Actually the danger of an invasion seems to day to be much greater, since even the first line of defense recently seems to have been moved back from the border, and westwards to the Tromsø area. The flat land of Finnmark, and this includes all the indefensible flat northern land from the Russian and Finnish border, seems to be indefensible from a military point of view.

In spite of the border zone agreement, the Norwegian authorities does not permit the realization of the border region’s full potential for trade and business, said my Norwegian informer. Therefore, the people living in Finnmark are feeling that they are treated secondary citizens. According to the national defense policy, one should think that people living close to the Russian border, constitute a problem, not a resource. People therefore feel they are getting punished for having to live in a no man’s land.

In another part of Northern Norway, in the municipality of Nordreisa to the north of Tromsø, known for a population where many are of Finnish origin, the municipality council wanted to celebrate the 100 year birthday of Finland as an independent nation. They decided to give away one of its mountain tops to Finland. The flat northern land with mountains and lakes which Norway does find worthy of defense might still be worth something seen from the Finnish point of view.

The Finnish celebration of its 100 years of independence called for a gift. The municipality council therefore wanted to give away the top of the local mountain Halti to Finland as a Congratulation for being 100 years old. Because of its height, the top of the Halti is the symbol for the Nordreisa municipality, and its new municipal hall is called Halti, named after the top.

If the top of Halti became a part of Finland, perhaps this would perhaps give a boost to Finnish pride, they thought. The gift might perhaps also be used to strengthen the cultural relations to Finland? It would symbolize Finnish independence and Norwegian brotherhood. The idea of this gift also had a very practical context, related to common national interests in the growing tourist business in the North.

The offer got a positive response in Finland. But in Norwegian papers it was not taken seriously. The positive response needs some explanation: In Finland this potential gift was, because of the geography, something that couldn’t be taken as a joke.

Geographically Norway and Finland are bordering on each other in the Halti area, the two countries are connected to each other by the big and very high Halti mountain. But most of this mountainous area lies in Finland. Geographically, this gift would mean little, since the present border passes close to the very top of Halti. But from the Finnish point of view, the national border to Norway makes the mountain loose its top.

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Seen from the Finnish side, the top of Finland’s biggest and highest mountain lies in Norway – some 40–50 meters away from Finnish soil. If one draws the border only 50 meter to the northwest, the whole southern side of the mountain side would become part of the Finnish landscape. Suddenly, at last the biggest mountain of Finland would have its peak on Finnish, and not on foreign land.

To give the top of Halti to Finland, for the Nordreisa population, would not be much of a loss. Finland would get some square meters high altitude land, but also a big new tourist attraction. Also business in Nordreisa would get something, for many international tourists would come visiting Finland through Norway.

So what happened? The vote from the citizens in the municipality of Nordreisa at last ended in the Norwegian Parliament.

In the Norwegian Parliament “no one was willing to give up a single centimeter of Norwegian sovereignty”. So the top of Halti mountain was not given away as a gift celebrating Finnish independence. It is still Norwegian.

5. My interviews from the border zone reveal an unexpected, but strong Stoic sensibility among ordinary people in the far north of Europe. I will present the main results of my investigation in the form of a conjectural conclusion: Nature is Stoic.

My material indicates that people speak of wild nature and landscapes in nature as providing a vision of a dynamics that breaks up the well-defined borders of their social world, and they find some emotional truth in that. To put it short, I find that the reference to the nature confirms an emotional landscape underlying people’s established and rule-governed relations to each other.

At first, I was puzzled, but now I see such statements as a confirmation that the social world is embedded in a nature not being limited by borders, in a sense that comes close to old Stoic insights.

Now, according to the Platonic and Aristotelian construction of the world, absolutely nothing that exists can be without limits; every x, to exist fully, must have a limit; if x is without limits, x ceases to be. The unlimited in nature simply cannot exist.

Because of the dominance of the Platonic/Aristotelian tradition in Europe, this denial of the unlimited has become main philosophical myth: It is only by means of introducing limits to things that is it possible to distinguish x from other things and explicate what it is. So the unlimited is nowhere to be found.

In Kant’s writing about the perennial peace I find I a recurrence of Stoic ideas. But Kant is not much explicit about it. In his work on the perennial peace, for instance, it is easy to misunderstand his ideas about the “assistance of nature” in producing peace. These statements are often understood as teleological dreams only, even if they are basically Stoic.

I will try to explicate this Stoic sentiment in Kant by dressing up Kant’s figure of the visitor as a person introducing the unlimited into politics. The phi-

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losopher must become a visitor. His aim is to provide confirmation that the national state is embedded in a wider Nature with borders of a different kind.

The Kantian visitor is not primarily a travelling person applying for visa, but a person with a clear perception of his own subjectivity as being dependent upon an unlimited nature. He sees nature as providing man with a new horizon, writing letters of protest against the borders set by the national authorities. Accordingly, the drive and motivation of the Kantian visitor is a drive, not to become a tourist, but to build a second, more just city in a world lacking peace.

The perception of the unlimited has woken him up from the dogmatic slumber of his normal perceptions, and he now sees a new truth in a dynamics in nature, tearing things away from the system of normal perceptions and placing national borders in the middle of the context of the unlimited.

As often as not the visitor is not getting any permission by the national authorities to travel. In his attempts to cross the border, the visitor is stopped short. But the main problem with the visitor’s permission to travel, is that his new vision breaks with the dominant Platonic/Aristotelian intellectual tradition in political philosophy and modern border theory.

The triumph of the Aristotelian/Platonic worldview is illustrated by the order of the modern state, which is organized from the top and ordered by public rules. But it creates tragedies at the borders. Accordingly, the borders of the old Platonic Greek city-states still lurks in the background for the modern rationality, influences our perceptions, drawing bordering lines separating Man and nature.

And worse, the opposition to the visitor in Western history is not only theoretical, but moral. The basic Aristotelian argument against the Stoics is that the Stoic vision lacks the idea of moral self-realization: The Stoic permission of the Unlimited as a possible experience, invites moral chaos.

For an Aristotelian philosopher, to exist as a moral person is to be able to develop your potentialities, in a dynamic development based on clearly defined internal limits. To lack such limits is therefore the same as having no meaningful project for possible future self-realization.

Persons who are not able to realize the potential of their limits, cannot be fully masters of themselves according to the Aristotelian concept. They don’t develop strong limits in their inner constitutions, and are liable to give in to the joint cries from their neighbors outside their own national borders.

6. What is the consequence for man if nature is Stoic? The consequence is that it gives the answer to Kant’s question “What is man?” For Kant man is basically a being who has to cultivate his consciousness of being part of something unlimited, simply in order to keep up his fight to remain human.

My answer refers to feelings that are simple enough to register. The visitor’s reference to the unlimited is based on common emotional experience. This conclusion comes from the material from the interviews in the border zone.

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To present you with this feeling, I will take you out of the seminar room and into the nature outside our lecture rooms. We started our project of borderology many years ago, discussing Kant and Dostoevsky, now it has led us to ask questions about feelings.

Marching out of the seminar, we are setting our feet on the soil which is part of the Green Belt. The landscape we have under our feet is sloping down to the banks of the Pasvik river and our eyes are filled with a view of Russian hills over on the other side. But be careful, here, in this most peaceful place along the Pasvik river, throwing stones over the middle of the river, still costs 800 Euro.

We are sniffing at the not so fresh air, because the wind to-day is carrying some part of the intoxicated Nikel air over the Pasvik river, but we have time for a last reflection.

The beautiful river and the landscape on both sides makes up a zone with a natural water dynamics that in spite of being divided by the border makes the landscape feel unitary and powerful, and as originator of its own time. And you are part of it. You feel embedded in nature, and nature here appears as a meaningful whole, without the limits imposed by national states.

The feeling of being a part of an unlimited nature in this sense, is produced by a mild feeling of being at home in nature, a feeling that nature, more precisely, is unreplaceable for your existence her and now. The feeling that nature as unreplaceable completes your identity in a stunning realization of seeing nature and identity as one.

This feeling goes a long way beyond any experience of just participating in the dynamism of nature, since it connects the actual landscape with a feeling of your basic identity. But it is this feeling that gives the visitor his drive. It produces a sense of being embedded in nature and explains his vision of the infinite and a world community is without limits.

Feelings like this can motivate man for peace by bringing up a feeling of identity that transcends every national border, enlisting you as inhabitant of an endless territorium.

A cosmopolitan right is the right of an individual to set his own individual rights up against the jurisdiction of a whole state. A cosmopolitan right is universal, which means that the right is valid for all individuals and that such rights extends beyond any particular state. But the problem is: How can this cosmopolitan universality be justified? What makes it possible to defend such rights?

It would seem that the universality of the cosmopolitan rights is justified by reference to some basic facts about Man. Everything points in the direction that the experience validating such a universal right is a feeling that man is embedded in Nature. While the moral law in Kant’s moral theory is based on a fact of Reason, the cosmopolitan rights are based on a fact of Nature.

When the question: “What is Man?” comes up in Kant’s philosophy, Kant sides with the Stoics. Now I want to conclude that Man is a being who feels his existence in Nature as unreplaceable.

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It is this common feeling that substantiates Kant’s ideas of the rights of the visitor and his reflections concerning perennial peace.

To repeat: What we see in Kant theory of peace, is a defense of the universality of the cosmopolitan rights by a feeling that nature is unreplaceable.

I am convinced that it is this feeling, more than anything else, which is the reason that Kant calls the peace he is hoping for, for perennial peace. It is the feeling that you are involved in an unlimited nature, and that this experience gives you a passport as a citizen of the world.

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УДК 308

ББК 87.216

В.Р. Цылев

Мурманский арктический государственный университет г. Мурманск, Россия

СИТУАЦИЯ СОЦИАЛЬНОГО ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ ЧЕЛОВЕКА И ПРИРОДЫ КАК ВОЗМОЖНОСТЬ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ СУБЪЕКТНЫХ АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ

ХАРАКТЕРИСТИК ПРИРОДЫ1

Аннотация. В статье представлена современная тенденция к расширению понятия социального взаимодействия, которое распространяется на взаимодействие животных, обладающих нервной системой, между собой и с человеком. Для анализа такого социального действия введена категория «ситуация социального взаимодействия», которая возникает между человеком и представителями природы. Показано, что данная категория может быть использована для научного исследования социального взаимодействия человека с духовными образованиями неживой природы, которые обычно описываются только в мифологическом и религиозном мировоззрении. Объяснение данного феномена дается с позиции мировоззрения органической целостности русских религиозных философов.

Ключевые слова: человек и природа, ситуация социального взаимодействия, субъект социального действия, духовные образования природы, мировоззрение органической целостности.

V.R. Tsylev

Murmansk Arctic State University

Murmansk, Russia

THE SITUATION OF SOCIAL INTERACTION BETWEEN HUMANS AND NATURE AS A POSSIBILITY OF STUDYING SUBJECTIVE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURE

Abstract. The article presents current trends for expanding the concept of social interaction by including in it interactions of animals having nervous systems between themselves and with humans. For analyzing such interactions, the category of ‘situation of social interaction’ between humans and non-humans has been introduced. It is shown that the category can be used in research of social interaction between humans and spiritual creatures of inanimate nature, which are usually discussed only in mythological or religious worldviews. The phenomenon is explained through the organic wholeness worldview of Russian religious philosophers.

1Работа выполнена по проекту № 17-13-51601, поддержанному Правительством Мурманской области и РФФИ в 2017 году по результатам совместного регионального конкурса «Русский Север: история, современность, перспективы».

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