Levan Ramishvili

Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship. The word “cult” in English is used exclusively, or almost exclusively, in a derivative sense. But here it is used, along with worship, in its primary sense. It means something else than, and something more than, religion. It really means fulfilling the ritual of public sacrifice.

To the memory of Jan Patocka I A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called “dissent” This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity.

Toward the end of World War I, there appeared a book with the ominous title The Decline, or Setting, of the West Spengler understood by the West not what we are in the habit of calling Western Civilization, the civilization that originated in Greece, but a culture which emerged around the year 1000 in Northern Europe; it includes, above all, modern western culture. He predicted then the decline, or setting, of modernity. His book was a powerful document to the crisis of modernity.