DIAMAT

Western philosophy has identified nature with the «realm of necessity»; only by unbinding itself from it could it release itself from the burden of materiality. However, in the twilight of human exclusivity, the denigrated man and dignified nature now have to occupy the same plane of being. Thus, in 1990, reacting to climate change, French thinker Michel Serres declared that for the first time, «global history enters nature; global nature enters history». Earth, understood now in its planetary totality, jeopardised human existence as a species. When we can no longer separate the biological agency of humans from their geological effects, the environment must be accepted as an equal-rights political actor. Finally, after long decades, nature—this structural «Other» of philosophy—becomes the centre of attention, and the old a priori distinction between scientific and ethical values should be abolished.

Both continental and analytic philosophy of the second half of the 20th century were obsessed with the problems of language, consciousness, and subjectivity. But as one philosopher has wittily argued, «It is not language which has a hole in the ozone layer». Behind linguistic idealism and social constructivism, we can hear a call to find more materialist methods, new understandings of matter and materialisation. These new editions of materialism can be arguably divided into two camps. The first tradition, which follows Western-European Marxism, continues to treat nature as a product of the social, where the natural and objective are understood as determined by social relations. But even within this school of thought, we can witness growing attention to previously excluded categories, such as «cheap nature», «dead land», etc. The second approach, which develops a monist and immanent line of philosophy, insists on the nature-history continuum. It emphasises vital, creative, and emergent aspects not only of living, but also inorganic matter.

However, in contrast to Western thought, the Russian and Soviet tradition of philosophy does not need the figure of «return» — over seven decades, it attributed high significance to nature. Despite the fact that this abbreviation «Diamat» is inevitably associated with the orthodoxy of party Marxism, historian Loren Graham argues that the system of dialectical materialism, in terms of its universality and degree of development, has no competitors other than the Aristotelian scheme of natural order or Cartesian mechanical philosophy. In its highest achievements, it was a brave collective attempt to develop systematic knowledge of objective reality in all its diversity, revealing general laws on the different levels of being, but simultaneously avoiding reductionism, determinism, or scholasticism. Appropriating DIAMAT as a title, we do not want to fetishise or mourn the bygone tradition. Rather, we refer to its heuristic potential and wide range of suggested subjects. By doing this, we welcome other traditions of modern Naturphilosophie, epistemology of science, and old and new materialist world views.

Aside from auteur lectures by established philosophers, an important part of the programme will be a kind of “reenactment” of panel discussions that took place in the USSR, where philosophers and natural scientists tried to establish tighter relationships between their fields. The participants will raise such crucial questions, discussed in the framework of DIAMAT: the nature of information, origins of life, the reality of matter, the limits of the species, the application of abstract laws, and the nature/nurture dualism. These disputes will be enacted as if they were happening today—beyond isolationism, ideological pressure, and in the light of recent scientific knowledge and new philosophical optics. Thus, Quentin Meillassoux will shake hands with Vladimir Lenin, while Friedrich Schelling will engage with Timothy Morton.