Transformation of university as a liminal phenomenon: on the ways of human's searching for the self

Abstract

The article presents the analysis of the university phenomenon as the liminal realm taking into account it’s multidimensional mode as for social and cultural life as for human personality becoming. Investigation is aimed at interpretation of university as an area of multiple transition processes primarily concerning the individual status, self-consciousness and self-realisation that is individually-aimed and deeply-rooted experience. When analysing the experience issue the Foucauldian studies are used. There are also proposed certain ways of university and experience concepts comprehension considering them as the liminal forms: a) university as a liminal phenomenon of the Middle Ages (as a limit) in the context of individual life deep transformation, b) university in current transitive situation when it ought to ensure the sufficient means whatever for obtaining of certain professional skills or for formation of personality aimed at lifelong learning and self-cultivation, c) an experience as something human one comes out of changed as a crucial fundamental condition for human to be the self (including limit-experience), d) university as a mode of individual experience (including online-experience) within which self-university on the basis of inner personality limit is initiated. As human becomes the only meaningful boundary and the only achievable limit for oneself, in this liminal, transitional area everyone initiates one’s own university, a self-university within oneself, and it becomes a crucial fundamental condition for human to be the self, to occur actually, to be fulfilled. As in the Middle Ages university admits the ones with any social status, any nationality; university is the way of obtaining knowledge and truth including the personal truth about the oneself creating the special dimension of life which actually generates the one’s own existential position. These functions are still relevant especially if we take into account that university today is aimed at ensuring of lifelong learning and self-cultivation. It deals closely with the personal searching for truth and with living according to this truth.