OTIUM Travel
MY ONTOLOGY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE MODERN WORLD ORDER
Foundations of Holistic Thinking
When — from 4:00 PM Friday, March 21st to 9:00 PM Sunday, March 23rd
Where — Berlin, Germany
Lecturer — Andrey Baumeister
Cost — 1,200 EUR (this price includes the lecture and excursion program, museum tickets, coffee breaks, and shared lunches for participants on March 22nd and 23rd. Participants pay for travel, accommodation, and meals the rest of the time themselves).
Preparation — before the workshop, choose an example of one of the proposed world orders and present a short presentation (15 minutes) on its analysis.
Please fill out the registration form for the workshop
ANNOTATION:
The main goal of the workshop is to develop one's own ontology and the foundations of holistic thinking.
During the workshop, we learn to form a personal ontology, to build connections between our ontology and the ontology of the modern world order (the fundamental structure of the modern world).
The thematic focus of the workshop is world orders, their structure, essential properties and influence on the history of civilizations. As well as the role of elites in the formation of world orders.
The workshop combines a classroom lesson and a visit to the museums of the Berlin Museum Island.
The main questions of the workshop:
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What does it mean to have one's own ontology?
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Is it possible to consciously build one's own personal ontology?
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What world do I live in?
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What exists for me, has meaning and sense?
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My being and being as a whole.
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Being-in-the-world and ontological experience.
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Reason and intuition in personal existence.
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Reason, intuition and mystical experience.
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What is mystical experience?
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True and false understanding of mystical experience.
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Mystical experience in the intellectual tradition of the West.
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Personal ontology and the experience of fulfilled existence.
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How do rationality, intuition and mystical experiences combine in your life?
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The space of our life strategies and our mission in the world?
Description of the assignment for the Berlin Workshop (the assignment is done at home and presented at the Berlin meeting in the form of a presentation and a mini-message):
Each of the participants selects an example of one of the proposed world orders before the workshop. At home, they prepare a short presentation message (15 minutes) on the analysis of the selected world order.
It is possible and even desirable to prepare such a presentation within a small group of 2-3 people (then it is important to contact the other or other group members in advance and prepare the presentation before the workshop, in online conference mode). Group preparation forms additional important skills of interaction in a group.
Description of the preliminary preparation of the presentation
It is important to reflect the following points in the presentation:
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A brief description of the leading system (hegemon, imperial or republican power).
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Why did this particular system become a leader in a certain period of historical time? What were the reasons and grounds for its subjectivity?
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How did this system exercise governance and play the role of a world (or regional) leader? What was the hard power (army, foreign policy) and soft power (religion, language, science, economics) of this system?
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Who was at the head of this system (who were its elites, what were the main properties of this elite)?
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In the name of what ideas and values did this leading system rule?
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What caused the weakening and decline of this system?
What is the purpose of this workshop?
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Understanding the foundations, causes and factors of leadership systems of a specific world order.
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Skills in identifying the structure and principles of a leader system, the way it governs, the nature of its elites and the goals of its leadership.
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Skills in recreating the context for understanding and strategically analyzing the subjectivity of a community or a specific system (political, cultural, religious, economic).
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Developing skills in holistic thinking: building your own mini-research, working with sources, presenting the results of your own research.
What to pay attention to when preparing?
When preparing this task, you should not delve too deeply into the topic. It is advisable to rely on the knowledge that the participants of each group already have. We will work on the task in more depth at a live meeting (preliminary in April).
If the group participants will be limited to sources at this stage, for now it is quite enough to enrich themselves with encyclopedic articles, brief introductions and atlases.