Epistemological Models in Understanding Cultural and Civilizational Specificity

Author Name(s): Victor P. Rimskiy, Galina N. Kalinina, Tamara I. Lipich, Inna M. Nevleva, Vladimir A. Noskov, Sergey V. Reznik
Author Email: rimskiy@bsu.edu.ru

Abstract

The article proposes a methodology for linking the formation-evolutionary, cultural-civilizational, ethnological, and cultural-anthropological models in understanding the changes of complicated sociocultural systems. Ethnic being is the most powerful energy source of individual and collective mythogenesis. In today’s difficult conditions, there is a need to involve cultural and anthropological epistemological models to the socio-humanitarian study, in the centre of which there is a “living person” – a concrete historical individual. This approach opens the possibility of an adequate study of the specifics of the cultural and civilizational development of Russia at all stages of its socio-cultural changes. Dedicated epistemological models allow to adequately study the specifics of the cultural and civilizational development of Russia, updated in line with the next wave of modernization of the country.

The formational evolutionary epistemological model (methodology) is associated, as a rule, with the names of the Marxism classics. And, indeed, we see this methodological, class scheme of knowledge of the mankind history already in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the first representative Marxist publication [1, p. 424-425]. It gets its finished, classical look from V.I. Linin: “As Darwin put an end to the view of species of animals and plants as unrelated, random, “created by God” and unchangeable, and placed biology on a completely scientific basis for the first time, establishing the variability of species and continuity between them, so did Marx putting an end to the view of society as a mechanical aggregate of individuals, allowing all kinds of changes according to the will of the authorities (or, still, by the will of society and the government), arising and changing by chance, and put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the natural economic formation as a combination of these production relations and determining that the development of such formations was a natural historical process for the first time” [2, p. 137, 139].

Lenin’s comparison of Marx with Darwin was meaningless: the style of thinking in the humanities of the XIX century was wholly shaped by the concepts and categories of natural science: “formation” and “revolution”, “social organism” and “political organism”, “social revolution” and “class” – all these concepts were originally used in the sciences of nature, loaded with a specific natural-science sense. The main thing in the formation-evolutionary model was the search for stable social and historical facts, exploring which one could give a scientific explanation to the mankind history, could turn the history into a strict scientific discipline in the nature of science. And until very recent years, this meant nothing more than the transfer of the principles of determinism to historical development, the study of the history of society as a coherent chain of causes and effects, a view of history as a regular, natural process.

The formational evolutionary paradigm did not contradict the cultural and civilizational epistemological schemes and models at all. The classical versions of cultural and civilizational epistemology are represented by the unique work of the Russian thinker N.Ya. Danilevsky “Russia and Europe” [3], as well as directly or indirectly to this book by the ascending works of O. Spengler “The Decline of Europe” [4] and A. Toynbee “Study of History” [5]. N.Ya. Danilevsky made also an attempt to supplement the cultural and civilizational methodology with the ethnological model.

At the turn of the XIX and XX centuries in Europe and Russia, the philosophy and social sciences introduce an ethnological dimension in the comprehension of history, but they use rather vague “metaphysical” terms and concepts: for example, the Russian “people” (“народность”) and “people’s spirit” (“народныйдух”) or German “völkisch” (“Völkerpsychologie”, etc.) and “Deutschtum”, “Zeitgeist”. It was a specific “völkisch discourse” [6]. However, there were also quite scientific works in which not only metaphysical “people’s spirit”, but also “ethnicity” were studied at the same time (including in the Soviet period), as G.G. Shpet pointed out, conceptualizing own “ethnic psychology”, which had more to do with the “social anthropology” and “ethnology”: he directly spoke about this scientific discipline [7, p. 486, 494]. He criticized the substantionalist (essentialist) versions in the understanding of socio-historical, civilizational and ethnic processes long before the domestic and western constructivists. We could put the works of S.M. Shirokogorov [8], who was also a pioneer in the development of the theory of ethnos, in the row with him.

Conclusions

Thus, based on the analysis of the formation-evolutionary, cultural-civilizational, ethnological and cultural-anthropological models in understanding the dynamics of complex socio-cultural systems, we come to the conclusion that there is a need to involve cultural-anthropological epistemological models, in the center of which there is a “living person” – a concrete historical individual – in today’s challenging conditions. This approach opens the possibility of an adequate study of the specifics of cultural and civilizational development of Russia at all stages of its socio-cultural dynamics.

References

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