Honoured rector! Dear guests!
The greatest gift to any scholar is when his or her ideas live on. When they inspire every new generation and when they are proven again and again to be relevant for understanding the world around us.
In that respect, I believe Juri Lotman would be very happy today. Not just because of this conference or the number of articles and books that have been published recently. But for seeing the buzzing semiosphere of the modern world where the new ways of communication illustrate many of his ideas about cultural mechanisms.
Although he crafted his ideas out of studies on literature and history, we see that they have a deep relevance to our world today – they can be very successfully applied to the modern digital culture from memes to video games, and they have inspired new ways of thinking about global problems, for example biodiversity loss or our relationship with artificial intelligence.
Once you are familiar with Lotman’s ideas about communication as translation and the resulting processes of cultural change, you cannot help but to see everything in the world from this angle. There is a clear lesson there for small countries such as Estonia. It says that we are valuable – our heritage and way of seeing the world adds something very precious to the global culture. On the other hand, it says that we must remain open and innovate. The translation between our culture and other cultures of the world is the process that creates new unique meanings and makes us all richer. Only by constantly changing are we able to remain who we are. This is what Lotman teaches us.
Lotman’s works also tell us what might happen if this process was to stop, if a society became engulfed by fears about their identity. In his essays about semiotics of fear, he described societies that have become a closed circle of terror and fear and who live with the ghosts that they have created themselves. This, unfortunately, is not just a historical description but an image we witness in today’s world, with the most tragic consequences.
But Lotman’s semiotics is a theory of hope, as professor Indrek Ibrus wrote last week in Sirp. Similarly, I believe that the world shall have hope when we all strive towards the human ideal of Juri Lotman. A human, for Lotman, is made by its sense of responsibility and sense of shame, by its conscience, readiness to make sacrifices and by participation in the cultural tradition. He radiated inner depth himself and considered it to be utmost important to guide young people towards independent intellectual pursuits.
Dear friends! I am grateful to universities in Tartu and Tallinn for preserving and developing Lotman’s legacy. I am glad to see a vibrant community that now extends well beyond Tartu and Moscow. All of this gives me the confidence to say that a great chapter for understanding our cultural world was seeded here by Juri Lotman and his colleagues. A chapter that is not going to be buried in libraries or small university offices but a chapter that is sure to gain relevance beyond academia and that provides good guidance for us all, even for presidents.
Thank You!
