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Hasan GULIYEV Doctor of Philosophy; he heads a department at the Institute of Philosophy and Political-Legal Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. He is member of the editorial boards of several international scholarly publications with five fundamental works and over 50 articles to his name.

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ON THE METHODOLOGY FOR IDENTIFYING AN ARCHETYPICAL CAUCASUS

ABSTRACT

In order to identify the archetypical Caucasus, we must first formulate our ideas about the region’s integrity. The author opposes those who assert without good reason that the Caucasus is an integral region. This, says he, has not yet been confirmed by any scientifically substantiated arguments, even though some of the Caucasians’ mental traits are most likely universal in nature. He says in particular that the typical Caucasian lifestyle presupposes the indifferent attitude of the people toward uncertainty. After investigating the problem with the help of the latest philosophical methodologies, he concludes that to finally settle the question of whether there is a particular archetype of the Caucasus, we should study the mental specifics of each of the Caucasian nations separately to be able to make correlative and multilateral comparisons.

The end of the Soviet Union opened a new page in the Caucasus’ recent history, which has been dominated by cultural and geopolitical factors as invariant parameters of the original Caucasian paradigm. It emerged and is surviving thanks to the region’s geographical location, which made it part of all the civilizational and religious processes and, in turn, played an important role in creating a heterogeneous sociocultural Caucasian expanse. By the very fact of its existence, the latter has provoked a quest for an archetypically homogeneous Caucasus.

Its landscape and the two intertwining processes it gave rise to created a traditional idea of the Caucasus. The multidimensional landscape helped to create an ethnic and cultural patchwork, on the one hand, while this same factor created a “force field” that attracted all the civilizational and cultural flows, on the other. As a result, the Caucasus became a very special cultural expanse best described as heterogeneous and multidimensional.

It is for this reason that efforts to identify and describe the core of what can be called a “whole and homogeneous Caucasus” and its archetypical features have never lost their urgency. Most authors begin by registering the local diversity as a very special phenomenon to be used a priori as a background for ideas about an integral Caucasus. This is done, for example, by K. Gajiev who, when writing about the Caucasian cultural and historical entity, the most typical feature of which is a multitude of interconnected and sometimes contradictory (conflicting) subcultures, says: “This has ensured the domination of elements of conflict, centrifugation, and disintegration over elements of consensus and integration” within the Caucasian culture.¹

At this stage I shall refrain from analyzing whether the term “Caucasian unity” belongs to the Caucasian studies’ conceptual apparatus at all. I shall limit myself to saying that the academic community was only too willing to accept the idea of the Caucasus as a region overburdened with negative terms (conflict, centrifugal, and disintegration trends). More likely than not, the region is taken as a synonym for crisis. Velichko, a prominent expert in Caucasian studies, described it, together with certain other regions, as “knowing no peace respites.”

Caucasian studies normally operate with illusory ideas invoked to describe the archetypical specificity of the Caucasian mentality. This created a picture of unique diversity (a “horn of plenty” of sorts) in the minds of the traditional Caucasian dwellers. We can go as far as saying that these ideas contribute to a special algorithm (paradigm) of Caucasian existence cursed by “excessiveness.” Nearly all typical Caucasian dwellers are victims of the myth about the “excessiveness complex” being part of the typical Caucasian fate. This is also part of their subconscious in an implicated archetypical form that forces them to think about the “genuinely Caucasian nature” as a manifestation of excessiveness; they demonstrate this excessiveness by producing myths—their mentality is omnivorous when it comes to illusions; they are excessively egocentric. Outside the Caucasus, complacency, a typical feature, is seen as Caucasian chauvinism. This is amply confirmed by the local people’s conviction that their culture is absolutely unique; this gives rise to the illusion that there is an integral Caucasian civilization.

The “excessiveness complex” is closely associated with the paradox of Caucasian self-awareness that “overlaps” two polar trends—the obvious domination of disintegration and diversion and the belief that a whole Caucasus does exist. Meanwhile, in real life these two trends are not equally meaningful. Belief in an integral Caucasus belongs to the category of illusions and cannot be placed alongside “expanding” reality: the former appeared during fragmentation of the Caucasian ethnic space into numerous self-identifying populations.

Permanent disintegration goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of excessive tribal relations that provoke absolutely real contradictions and conflicts. An excess of clan relations leads to the emergence of new “self-identification” forms. In this way, the region turns into a “collapsing” space with constantly emerging risk zones. They, in turn, make it hard to establish order in Caucasian existence within the paradigm of unity, while this paradigm (methodology) is badly needed to realize a strategy for identifying an archetypical Caucasus as a whole and integral phenomenon. In fact, the absence of such a paradigm is responsible for the ongoing vagueness when it comes to grasping the immanent essence of an authentic Caucasus: some scholars look at it as something “whole and integral,” while others prefer to describe it as an illusion.

It should be said that most experts in Caucasian studies normally prefer to ignore methodology when trying to justify their viewpoints—they limit themselves to unsubstantiated axiomatic statements. This is what Zurab Zhvania has to say in this respect: “Caucasian unity is not merely a political conception. The Caucasus is a variegated and yet homogenous world, a phenomenon which took many centuries or even millennia to acquire its final shape. There are definite authentic social and cultural institutions in it… This suggests that there is the phenomenon of a single Caucasian civilization created by the Caucasian peoples. They are united by shared values and common mentality, despite the religious and ethnic diversity.”²

This leaves no room for academic discussion: all the main points have been so well defined that the illusion is created of a problem completely and finally resolved. In fact, “Caucasian wholeness” is not discussed—it is imposed on the reader.

This is typical of other supporters of the idea of an integral Caucasus. Here is an example from V. Asatiani: “We, the Caucasian peoples, form one historical and geopolitical entity. Our psychophysical image, the so-called Caucasian nature, our physical appearance, temperament, and moral ideals make us kindred peoples.”³

Being aware of the incorrect nature of an axiomatic approach to the problem of wholeness, some members of the academic community, however, try to move away from this methodology by engaging themselves in creating and developing purely scientific procedures. They believe that on the strength of certain criteria, the Caucasus can be regarded as a very specific sociocultural phenomenon that calls for the concepts “unified culture and unified cultural space” and “homogeneous and heterogeneous cultures” to be used in order to adequately comprehend its integral nature. These concepts lead to new ideas of “whole” and “integral” that describe the specifics of the Caucasian “heterogeneous cultural expanse.” After analyzing in detail the pros and cons of the defenders of the idea of Caucasian wholeness, Nino Chikovani concluded: “The idea of Caucasian unity (or unity of one of its regions) is an ideal the Caucasian nations want to achieve. However, even the most superficial knowledge of the history of the past ten centuries shows there is no unity or harmony of interests. …The idea about the Caucasus as a political or cultural entity belongs to the sphere of illusions rather than to historical or contemporary reality.”⁴

I agree with the above: a correct scholarly analysis of cognizant Caucasian history gives no grounds for using the semantically close terms “whole, integral, and indivisible” to adequately describe the Caucasus’ real state. The idea of an integral Caucasus cannot emerge from the clearly observable: more likely than not, it is postulated as theoretic fiction to satisfy personal ambitions. It has nothing to do with the real Caucasus, yet it is part and parcel of the popular illusions with which Caucasian studies are brimming. It should be said that the authors of the “whole Caucasus” conception tend to ignore the ideas of systemic approach. For this reason they are unable to create a productive methodology that helps to identify the archetypical Caucasus: it is the systems theory that provided an all-round analysis of the criterion of wholeness and that introduced a wide spectrum of tools to be used to analyze whole phenomena.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who created the general systems theory, looked at it as a “general science of wholeness,” thus indicating that the idea of wholeness should not be applied to individual objects of study. In fact, it is hard to imagine that a systems analysis can be carried out without all-round investigation of the problem of wholeness. In fact, the concepts “wholeness” and “system” are semantically close in the general systems theory; if described as systemic, an object can be considered as whole, and, vice versa, the object’s wholeness presupposes its belonging to a class of systems. This is what A. Bahm writes about: “The system presupposes unity and wholeness of a certain type; it is thanks to them that its parts are interconnected.”⁵

In other words, the systems theory recognizes the importance of an all-round analysis of the wholeness phenomenon by emphasizing the importance of creating special study procedures to be applied to an object that the study context places in a class of whole systems. When analyzing in detail the range of problems vitally important for the systems theory, V. Sadovskiy drew attention to the paradox of wholeness: “Any given system can be described as a certain wholeness only if the task of dividing the system, in its wholeness, into parts has been performed, and the task of dividing the system, in its wholeness, into parts can only be performed if the task of describing the system as a wholeness has been carried out.”⁶ It should be added here that this paradox in its virtual form was present in the dialectical part/whole antinomy, on which Friedrich Schelling commented in his time: “Since the idea of a whole can be demonstrated only through its parts and, on the other hand, individual parts can exists thanks to the idea of a whole, we are confronted with a contradiction.”⁷

The above suggests that to justify the use of the “whole and integral” as applied to the problem range of Caucasian studies, we should first investigate the phenomenon of “Caucasian-ism” within the systems theory, the effort that requires certain procedures: the object should be described as systemic and divided, in its “wholeness,” into its systemic parts; as belonging to any of the systemic types and therefore wholeness, etc. This alone will identify the object’s (the Caucasus) systemic status and, by the same token, its wholeness—otherwise we will run up against contradictions and paradoxes.

Karl Popper also pointed this out when he wrote that he criticized the holistic criterion of wholeness by demonstrating that even the holists’ favorite examples of “not whole,” such as “merely a heap of rocks,” did not fit this criterion (the whole is much greater than the simple sum of its parts). He insisted that by saying this he did not deny the existence of wholes, but merely objected to the very superficial nature of the majority of holistic theories.⁸ This argument can be used against those who present the multi-dimensional and heterogeneous “heap of Caucasian ethnoses” as irrefutable evidence of a “whole integral Caucasus.”

Researchers, however, are guided by the non-systemic methodology, which does not allow them to distinguish between “merely a heap of rocks” and an aesthetically whole phenomenon. Indeed, under certain conditions created by the study context or creative design even a “mere heap of rocks” can be presented as a whole object (in cases of aesthetic compositions using rocks such as the Buddhist dry rock garden or similar European conceptions). For this reason, while operating with concepts that belong to the “integral, unity, wholeness, indivisibility” semantic series as applied to efforts to understand the archetypical Caucasus, we should bear in mind at least some of the principles of systems analysis. This is important since contemporary Caucasian studies insist that the “whole Caucasus” subject is topical and important for dealing with serious scholarly issues.⁹

In recent years, Caucasian studies have manifested an interest in the typical features of the mentalities of the Caucasian nations as the foundation on which a single mentality for all of them can be based. No wonder, all the inconsistencies and delusions that existed in this sphere (such as the illusions about integrity and wholeness) might negatively affect the efforts to adequately interpret the Caucasian mentality. Most works dealing with the problem appeal, directly or indirectly, to the idea of Caucasian wholeness. Here is what A. Dashdamirov has to say on this score: mentality of “each of the Caucasian peoples is open to pluralistic alien influences, each of them has imbibed common cultural features, social and moral values rooted in hoary antiquity.”¹⁰

The above contains an easily discernable invariant ideological content (leitmotif), which presupposes a certain unified Caucasian culture localized by the author in the archaic, pre-historic past. By force of his imagination and being urged by the study context or creative design, he may create a Caucasian world of his own. We can say that he has admitted there are certain common invariant features of the archaic “proto- or great-culture of the Caucasus” present in folded, archetypical forms in the mentalities of the contemporary Caucasian peoples. In other words, the author’s opinion can be transformed into a much clearer statement that concentrates on mastering the immanent features of the Caucasian great-culture: mentality of “each of the Caucasian peoples has imbibed common cultural features rooted in hoary antiquity.” This clearly says that we should look for an archetypical Caucasus, but before we begin, we should visit the sphere of holographic methodology, which we might find useful.

The holographic methodology (world outlook) includes a synthesis of Pribram’s holographic brain theory and the memory mechanisms, as well as David Bohm’s ideas about the hierarchy of the levels of reality and the unity of implicative and explicative matrices of order. Their synthesis makes it possible to create a radically new picture of the world in which the human brain looks like a hologram, that is, a folded holographic Universe.¹¹

This approach interprets conscience (brain) as a storage place of objective reality in its implicative form; in turn, the material Universe is seen as a certain system analogous to Leibnitz’s monad or the anthropic theory. This is the nature of the deep-rooted connection among all things in the holographic Universe. An idea about holography introduces certain cognitive novelties into our ideas of the world born from our more profound understanding of the dialectics of the part and the whole as well as reality’s problematic nature. We should bear in mind, first of all, that the holographic object betrays its wholeness in a very specific way, being immune to the normal procedure of division into parts: any attempt to divide the hologram merely represents it all in all as a certain invariant entity.

To grasp the specific features of the hologram vitally important for our understanding of certain aspects of the archetypical Caucasus let us turn to Karl Pribram, who formulated the holographic brain hypothesis in the first place. He says that images are restored when ideas about them in the form of systems with distributed information are activated in a special way. Thinking as an objective brain process includes a holographic component. Holograms play the role of a catalyst for the thinking process; while remaining unchanged they nevertheless interfere with the process and facilitate it… Thought, after all, is an instrument used to reduce uncertainty with the help of distributed holographic memory, that is, the desire to acquire the necessary information.¹²

Unwilling to remain limited to an analysis of the general features of holographic thinking, Pribram offers an understanding of the hologram’s specific nature by describing it as a “specter” or a phantom image. This makes it possible to use the concept as a mechanism or a method of associational information storage. The hologram has another important feature: information about every point of the object is spread across the hologram, which makes information immune to destruction—any of the hologram’s parts, no matter how small, contains information about the whole object and can therefore restore it.¹³ In other words, the holographic object behaves within the “part as a whole” principle.

It should be said here that Ernst Cassirer pointed out that this principle became important when it was necessary to comprehend the specific features of symbolic (archaic totem) thinking. He stressed that the principle of equivalence of the part to the whole—pars pro toto (part instead of whole)—was heuristic. This means that any of the parts contains the whole and plays a very important role in comprehending the specific features of archaic thinking.¹⁴

The above suggests the presence of features shared by such seemingly unrelated phenomena as “totem,” “archetype,” and “hologram.” Indeed, both Freud and Jung looked at the archetype as “archaic remnants or primary samples of antiquity.”¹⁵ When analyzed, the specific features of holographic methodology turn out to be ideologically close to psychoanalysis. This promotes their mutual conceptual enrichment and extends the methodological cognitive potential.

The holographic approach also supplies a new (“ambivalent”) idea of reality; it introduced into scholarly circulation at least two cross-sections, or levels, of reality—“illusory and real.” David Bohm resolved the problem of duality in the following way: “Our tangible everyday reality is, in fact, merely an illusion, like a hologram. There is a deeper level of being under it—that boundless and primeval level of reality. It gives birth to all objects of which the illusion of our physical world is part.” David Bohm described the deeper level as an implicative (“folded”) order, while our own level of being is described as an explicative, or unfolded, order. It is said that the manifestations of all forms in the Universe are caused by never-ending alternation between the folding and unfolding orders.¹⁶

The Pribram hypothesis presents the hologram as a “specter” of the object, or its phantom image, thus adding special importance to the problems of reality within the holographic approach. Jung’s psychoanalysis stressed that reality is multi-dimensional; the identification of two levels of consciousness led to the idea of special psychic “filters” invoked to perceive various phenomenological aspects of reality. When discussing symbols of the subconscious, which are the archetypes, Jung pointed out that it was very important to formulate criteria that would place an object among “illusory” or “real” ones. In some cases, psychic processes and the phenomena of the subconscious played the role of a criterion used to register the type of reality; in other cases, this role was played by categorical and experimental scientific procedures. Jung believed that the “psychic reality” concept could be used as an important component of understanding true reality. He proceeded from the conviction that “nothing can be described as probable or improbable; what we call an illusion is real for the psyche. For this reason we cannot believe that psychic reality can be likened to conscious reality.”¹⁷

It is interesting to note that the holographic and psycho-analytical approaches to the problem of reality show their cognitive kinship; this gives impetus for expanding the mind’s horizons. Jung openly emphasized that the use of two ideas—“illusory and real (physical)” reality—was fruitful. The holographic methodology, likewise, recognizes that it is important to identify the parallels between the archetypes of the subconscious and the implicative micro-structures of the holographic brain. This brings the holographic approach up to the heuristic level of its relations with Jung’s theory—the methodological kinship thus becomes obvious.¹⁸

Before returning to an analysis of the “archetypical protoculture” of the Caucasus, I would like to present the most general features of the holographic and psychoanalytical approaches in an ambivalent propositional form to make it easier to understand the most important features of the investigated phenomenon. When writing about the cognitive content of his holographic hypothesis, Karl Pribram pointed out that different languages offer different descriptions of objects and that in this respect a holographic description has certain methodological advantages when it comes to grasping the essence of certain phenomena. Our knowledge of the holographic conception and of Jung’s archetypical theory has given us new verbal tools and cognitive means for creating an adequate description of the Caucasus’ archetypical nature. We have at least two language systems or two cognitive paradigms able to supply us with complementarity (Niels Bohr’s conception) ideas that would greatly extend our knowledge about the real Caucasus and correct the illusory ideas about it.

Let us resume our quest for the “archetypical great-culture of the Caucasus” that, as the cognitive filters of holography and psychoanalysis have demonstrated, is localized in the depths of the subconscious in the form of a folded phenomenon, an archetypical hologram. Since according to the holographic hypothesis, “the past acts in the present in the form of an implicative order,” and since our subconscious may contain the Universe in its folded form, our memory can contain our past and the past of mankind … the problem is unfolding the implicative phenomena into an explicative order.¹⁹

The holographic approach, coupled with the theory of archetypes, is being eased by the task of extending our understanding of the archetypical Caucasus, the diversity of the Caucasian ethnoses being its explicative manifestation. All explicative holograms (ethnoses) play the role of specters, or phantom images, of the implicatively folded original (the archetypical Caucasus). According to the pars pro toto principle, the hologram-specters contain (folded and stored in the subconscious) complete information about the Caucasian culture that in prehistoric times collapsed into hologram phenomena—heterogeneous ethnic diversity.

The contemporary Caucasian peoples are hologram-representatives; they resulted from the collapse of the archetypical Caucasus as the original object. For some unknown reason, information about the prehistoric culture had been inserted into the resultant implicative structures that later were pushed into the depths of the subconscious. From this it follows that in order to restore an adequate image of the archetypical Caucasus, we need new ways to identify and recover information from the depths of the subconscious of the contemporary Caucasian dwellers.

To achieve this we should, first of all, identify the mentalities of the Caucasian nations and use them to create a table of their similar and specific features. At a later stage, we should compare the results and identify information about the common features of the Caucasian great-culture (Caucasian mentality). To create an image of a whole Caucasus, we should painstakingly restore the mentalities of the Caucasian peoples, not an easy task per se and made even harder by the Caucasian “complexes and illusions,” as well as by the mentalities’ multi-dimensional nature.

The road each nation must hoe to master its mentality will inevitably be complicated by cognitive and, strange as it may seem, mental difficulties fraught with real threats. Jung was aware of this when he likened the physics of elementary particles to psychoanalysis: like the splitting of micro-objects, the process of grasping the essence of an archetype may cause a spontaneous outburst of very specific destructive energy.

In our case that would be the “implicative psychic energy” which so far remains folded in the archetypes. In the process of grasping their essence, we might open a Pandora’s box with true information about each of the nations detrimental to their well-being. The explicitly “realized” inhabitants of the Caucasus are not inclined, by force of their traditional culture, to accept certain novelties and “revelations” that scientific societies are prepared to accept. The local Caucasian people prefer a strategy that offers an illusory present and keeps them in а state of uncertainty about their past and future. It seems that the people of Caucasian origin have very specific mentalities that require an absolute minimum of rational (scientific) overcoming of uncertainty. Their life strategy presupposes illusion-producing rituals of all sorts, with which they coexist in a harmonious way. This calls for a special algorithm of adaptation to uncertainty.

This strategy might become a serious obstacle for the local people if they want to overcome uncertainty, an immanent essence of the archetypes of the subconscious. This reveals a certain connection between the local people’s indifference to uncertainty and their excessive love of illusions. It seems that the shortcomings of mastering uncertainty were compensated for by excessive utilization of illusions. In this respect, the Caucasian peoples are obviously not part of the community of nations, the life strategy of which is covered by the formula “it is better to study uncertainty related to important problems than to be absolutely sure of trivial facts.”²⁰

The popular rituals of hospitality with toasts brimming with illusions to suit every taste are a fairly specific indicator of the Caucasian attitude toward illusions and uncertainty. Imagination wavers under the burden of illusory toasts to the extent that reality looks like an illusion stripped of uncertainty. This typical feature can be explained by the fact that the local peoples are fond of Nirvana forms of existence, when all uncertainty and the “horrors of history” are pushed, even for a short time, from their lives and minds into the depths of the subconscious. Feasts and toasts, their favorite pastime, betray their archetypical desire to plunge into the sterile atmosphere of illusions: this alone can protect their traditional lifestyle from the horrors of history and the pressure of uncertainty.

Since the typical Caucasian lifestyle presupposes an indifferent attitude toward uncertainty (able to block the effort of learning the truth), it creates a special feeling akin to an “illness”—a neurosis that does not encourage rational cognition. Quite often it takes the form of mystical fear, which plunges the Caucasian dwellers into an atmosphere of illusions and guards them against the neuroses of uncertainty. On the whole, the typical strategy of coexisting with uncertainty does not encourage scholarly culture of an adequate level or cognitive competence. This may further interfere with the efforts of each of the Caucasian peoples to master the immanent nature of their mentality.

The synergetic ideas about the ties between chaos and uncertainty may help understand the role of the uncertainty factor in creating the very specific features of the Caucasian life strategy. The fundamentally novel approach to chaos has recognized its special role in any system’s self-organization—its adaptation to a new order in the course of which the old order collapses into a bifurcational chaotic state incessantly producing new uncertainty. This fills the transition period with new neuroses, hopes, and illusions.

The synergetic concepts help us to describe the Caucasians’ contemporary chaotic existence, in which the local people show their indifference to uncertainty, as a specific state of the quest that moves them toward a new paradigm of self-organization clearly dominated by the components of a chaotic and illusory existence. It seems that this self-contained life strategy explains the inventiveness demonstrated by Caucasian dwellers when certain implicative innovations born in alien cultures (for instance science, democracy, and the market) are unfolded into and realized in such explicative realities, which make obvious their love of illusions and their indifference to chaos and uncertainty.

Since the axiological set of the typical Caucasian life strategy is full of mainly illusory phenomena, this affects the quest behavior and thus minimizes the chance of stumbling across effective constructive components suitable for building up a paradigm of Caucasian integration. The Caucasian lifestyle is aimed at accumulating illusory phenomena and does not encourage the efforts of comprehending the uncertainty with the aim of transforming them into stable components of new self-organization based on genuine integration.

This strategy is best described by the formula “it is much better to ignore uncertainty and be satisfied with illusions than to discover frightening truths about ourselves and our culture.” In their strategy the Caucasians are intuitively more consistent than the Western rationalists. They are justifiably convinced that if anything has been pushed into the subconscious it should remain there. Their treatment of uncertainty and illusions make their lifestyle very specific; it also sheds light on the specifics of their mentality.

G. Hofstede described the dependence between the life strategies of nations (cultures) and their treatment of uncertainty in his ethnometric model. He included this dependence among five important criteria of “cultural dimensions” that determine societies’ specific features and allow him to classify national cultures. There is an “uncertainty rejection” factor that makes it possible to identify societies with strong or weak rejection of uncertainty.²¹ According to this model, the Caucasian societies (cultures) belong to the class of traditional paternalist societies with weak rejection of uncertainty. People are prepared to adapt themselves to uncertainty and “ignore” its negative impact on their lives. This strategy allows the Caucasian nations to adapt themselves without much trouble to the unexpected demands of cultural globalization—they are never bothered by the problems which other nations normally associate with uncertainty and the threats of post-globalization existence. The Caucasian peoples are eager to master the illusory surprises of “McDonald-ization.”

By way of summary, we should pay attention to contemporary realities. The Caucasian nations continue living—or try to do so—along the lines of an “expanding Universe.” They are resolved to radically transform their sociocultural expanse affected by disintegration, the original impulse of which was provided by the prehistoric collapse of the implicative order into explicative hologram diversity.

We may even suppose that the diversity of the Caucasian great-culture and its collapse genetically predetermined the appearance of a multitude of highly original ethnic cultures with virtual sub-cultures susceptible to further fragmentation and separation, disintegrating and divergent development, reproduction of contradictions and conflicts, etc. It is this super-dynamic situation that makes the scrutinized phenomena and our ideas relative. This makes it harder for the Caucasian nations to identify their mentalities. The specifics of the contemporary Caucasian culture allow us to talk about the need and advisability of including the idea of a multi-dimensional and multi-layered mentality into the conceptual apparatus. Kurt Hübner introduced it into scholarly circulation to achieve an adequate understanding of the specific features of European identity.²²

We can safely say that the identification by each Caucasian nation of the immanent essence of its mentality as an indispensable condition for creating a common matrix demands that the multi-dimensional nature of each mentality be taken into account. For example, a preliminary analysis of the specific features of the Azeri mentality shows that the kharalysan (where are you from?) archetype played an important role in organizing the traditional life-style in Azerbaijan as well as influenced thinking, social behavior, etc.²³

The energy of this archetype stirs up and activates ideas about communal origins in the minds of typical Azeris; it strongly influences their social behavior at critical moments. The archetype plays a very important mentality-forming role, which allows us to look at it as the key sub-system of mentality. This makes it possible to identify at least two aspects in the structure of mentality: the communal (clan) and ethnic–trans-communal (national). A similar structure can be observed in the Chechens’ traditional life (teyp and ethnic). The presence of sub-ethnic (communal) components in the social lifestyle is typical of most Caucasian nations.

Since it is vitally important for each of the Caucasian peoples to identify their mentality as a necessary preliminary condition for identifying the archetypical Caucasus, we should pay particular attention to the trans-ethnic level of organization of the contemporary Caucasian peoples’ mentality—a very specific, so far illusory identificatory index of “all persons of Caucasian nationality.” It is precisely this trans-ethnic aspect of mentality of our contemporaries in the Caucasus that may lead to certain associative ideas about the implicative great-culture of the archaic Caucasians. It probably unfolded into explicative ethnic diversity during the primary collapse to be later pushed into the depths of the subconscious by cultural transformation waves. This common Caucasian trans-ethnic mentality will probably emerge under the impact of transformation impulses created by globalization flows if only the contemporary Caucasian nations manage to curb the disintegration processes and harmoniously localize themselves in the emerging mega-society.

In this way, resolving the problem of identifying a “whole (archetypical) Caucasus” and restoring the Caucasians’ mentality has made pertinent the subject of looking for the three levels of its organization—communal, ethnic, and transnational—without which no complete and adequate idea of Caucasian wholeness is possible, at least in its sociocultural dimension.

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¹K.S. Gajiev, Geopolitika Kavkaza, Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia Publishers, Moscow, 2001, p. 41. _{Back to text}
²N. Chikovani, “A United Caucasus: Reality Rooted in the Past or High-Flown Political Illusions?” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 5 (35), 2005, p. 48. _{Back to text}
³Ibidem. _{Back to text}
⁴Ibid., p. 54. _{Back to text}
⁵Quoted from: V.N. Sadovskiy, “Paradoksy sistemnogo myshlenia,” in: Sistemnye issledovania. Ezhegodnik, 1972, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 134. _{Back to text}
⁶Ibid., p. 136. _{Back to text}
⁷F. Schelling, Sistema transtsendental’nogo idealizma, Moscow, 1936, p. 388. _{Back to text}
⁸See: K. Popper, Logika i rost nauchnogo znania, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1983, p. 500. _{Back to text}
⁹See: E. Khoshtaria-Brosse, “The Caucasian Political Tangle: Past and Present,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 5 (11), 2001, pp. 65-70. _{Back to text}
¹⁰A. Dashdamirov, “Ideological Contradictions of Ethnic Policies in the Caucasus,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 5 (11), 2001, pp. 48-49. _{Back to text}
¹¹See: M. Talbot, Golograficheskaia vselennaia, Sophia Publishers, Moscow, 2004, p. 9. _{Back to text}
¹²See: K. Pribram, Iazyki mozga, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, p. 174. _{Back to text}
¹³Ibid., p. 170. _{Back to text}
¹⁴See: E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2, London, 1952, pp. 49-50. _{Back to text}
¹⁵K.G. Jung, Arkhetip i simvol, Moscow, 1991, pp. 64-65. _{Back to text}
¹⁶See: M. Talbot, op. cit., pp. 60-61. _{Back to text}
¹⁷Quoted from: R. Moakanin, Psikhologia Iunga i buddizm, Panglos Kolo (Katarsis series), Moscow, St. Petersburg, 2004, p. 79 (English edition: M. Radmila, Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism, Wisdom Publication, 1986). _{Back to text}
¹⁸See: M. Talbot, op. cit., pp. 74-75. _{Back to text}
¹⁹Ibid., p. 229. _{Back to text}
²⁰Ibid., p. 349. _{Back to text}
²¹G. Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations (Software of the Mind), Harper Collins Publishers, 1994. _{Back to text}
²²See: K. Hübner, Natsia ot zabvenia k vozrozhdeniu, Kanon+ Publishers, Moscow, 2001, pp. 381-395. _{Back to text}
²³See: H. Guliyev, Arkhetipichnye Azeri: liki mentaliteta, Eni nesil Publishers, Baku, 2000. _{Back to text}