Outsiders under Empire: Fusion Philosophy and the Barbarian’s Path from Scourge to Sculptor

Abstract

#speakforPeace

This article reproduces in full the keynote speech given at “V.N. Karazin” Kharkiv National University, School of Foreign Languages, for the 17th International Conference “Methodological and Psychological Issues of Teaching Foreign Languages: Reaching for School and University Integration” (25 April 2025, Kharkiv, Ukraine)

1. Chaos and Synthesis. History makes it plain: at the turning of eras, when civilisations collide and empires fall, Barbarians assert their presence—undeniable, no longer tenable to ignore. Rising from the periphery, once unheard and unseen, they surface amidst upheaval with such force they reshape the world itself, marking the boundary between what was and what is to come.

Today, this pattern of volatile junctures takes on fresh significance and urgency. We find ourselves at what is arguably the most consequential threshold yet: the dawn of the digital and AI age. Propelled by the most powerful technological revolution ever recorded, unprecedented in its speed and scale. Boundaries of space and time blur. Real-time global communication, vast networks of video, data, and algorithmic flows unsettle the coherence of inherited structures—of knowledge, identity, and authority—by forces we are only beginning to understand. In this climate of uncertainty and extraordinary possibility, new centres of power emerge while older categories lose their hold.

Like the Barbarians of history. Who arrived not merely to disrupt but to reconfigure, and ultimately to reconcile. And just as in earlier times of civilisation, we are compelled to reorient, engage in new terms and develop modes of understanding equal to the intensity of the present. What we seek, therefore, is not a fixed doctrine but a mode of thinking; not consolation but a sense of orientation; one that acknowledges the rift rather than denying it, and works with contradictions toward reconciliation, instead of suppression.

2. Sparks Between Shadows: The Dialectics of Fusion Thought. It is on this ground Fusion Philosophy takes shape—a framework I am developing in response to these dynamics. A philosophy, in short, for the antinomies of our age, and a hermeneutic practice invested in making sense of contradictions. It seeks understanding through dialectics—not to suppress but to overcome and sublate them into pathways toward goodness, beauty, and freedom—unfoldings of God, the Absolute.

3. Case study. Herder’s Barbarian. A Tale of History’s Unlikely Agents: Destruction, Transition, Reconciliation. To illustrate this, I turn to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s concept of Barbarian—a model uniquely suited to the concerns of Fusion thought. In Herder’s writings, the barbarian appears in three distinct forms, I’ll call them the scourge who destroys, the wanderer who unsettles, and the sculptor who transforms. These figures are not just historical archetypes. They express philosophical structures—forms inherent within the evolution of human understanding. Instances of the dialectics between order and disruption, tradition and renewal, loss and possibility. Herder’s barbarian becomes thus a symbolic agent of transformation, surfacing when old forms collapse and new ones have to take shape. Through this lens, a triad of disruption, transition, and reconciliation is uncovered—a model for both historical analysis and conceptual renewal.

4. Conclusions. Beyond Binary – Thinking in the Afterglow of Contradiction. Drawing from Herder’s theories on barbarisms, this case study highlights how Fusion Philosophy offers an interpretive and heuristic approach, not as a rigid system but as a means of encountering and synthesising. It recognises that thought, like history, progresses not in straight lines but through fusion and emergent forms. From Herder’s barbarians to the disruptive forces of today’s geopolitical map, this paper explores how thinking can evolve beyond mere oppositions towards an understanding that is both fluid and generative so as to seek sense amidst intellectual fragmentation, technological revolution and post-truth menaces.

J.G. von Herder set in motion a dialectics that extends far beyond its eighteenth-century origins among the Sturm und Drang literary and philosophical movement, exposing faults and untapped beneficial possibilities that surface whenever the world undergoes a fundamental reconfiguration—just as it’s doing now.