The rational and the irrational in culture

Abstract

The author seeks to characterize the rationalist version of culture. He notes that culture carries huge content. Its content seems limitless. Culture arises due to the fact that the human mind gives the men the opportunity to earn, save, accumulate, process and use information by special, unknown to nature ways. These methods involve creation of special sign systems by which information is encoded and transmitted in society. Culture is above all supernatural. Nature doesn’t have sounding symphonies, poetic lyrical outpourings, landscapes, captured by anonymous brush. Man creates culture leaning on his own consciousness, emotion, will and intuition. It is designed for creation of unknown worlds. Therefore, describing the culture of particular era, we first denominate the achievements of science, philosophy, art.

These settings inspired the philosophy of culture, the special field of philosophical knowledge, emerged in the eighteenth century. According to W. Windelband, any research in psychology, sociology, and historical development gain value only when they are directed to the detection of the main structure, which is inherent in every cultural creativity in the timeless, superempiric entity of mind. According to him, the foundation of any culture must be laid in the deepest subsoil of any reasonable creativity. Philosophy is obliged to treat the natural world (and it, in the opinion of the German philosopher, covers the instinctive and emotional life) according to the law a reasonable will. Therefore, the entire process of human culture presupposes the inclusion of our lives in reasonable connection. So, culture not only appeals to rationality, but constantly links the birth of new creations with the theoretical work of philosophers, scientists, researchers, art.

However, the author argues with the “protective” tendency of the philosophy of culture. It is noted that this understanding of culture under the banner of retention its classical repertoire largely impoverish her. In a culture only the noblest achievements are praised. Those acquisitions of mankind, which are not blessed by philosophical classics, are rejected by it. Doesn’t it look like the deliberate impoverishment of culture, Eurocentric arrogance, distortion of the idea of culture? Just over the past decades the appeal to archaic forms of cultural identity (myth, tradition and carnival) deeply approved the priority of philosophy in understanding the changing forms of cultural existence. Philosophy has expanded the boundaries of culture, its multipartite, has turned to analysis of the underlying fundamentals of human existence, has proved the fruitfulness of the tradition and crystallization of human experience, has proceeded to the analysis of the unconscious.

The author believes that the range of culture is inexhaustible; it is not limited to rationality, reasonableness. Its source is not only of consciousness. Culture covers all. Many of its forms are born by the unconscious layer of the human psyche, intuition, imagination, emotional responsiveness. Of course, the rational kernel is the core of culture. Rational may be regarded as a generic category covering pure logic in classical and modern thinking and even some forms of mystical experience. However, this thesis of unlikely all-encompassing meaning of the concept “rationality” requires the critical consideration.

Culture can’t include only rational content. It was born in those days when first sprouts of reasonableness germinated, when the vague images of understanding of the world emerged, and shaky criteria of the understanding of the surrounding arised. And this experience was not absurd, alien, and of blur mind. It was a resounding breaks of consciousness, deep inspirations. The article raises the question of the source of culture. Is it the revealing work of the mind, seething human passion, devotional immersion, meditative detachment, powerful streams of life, the depths of the unconscious? Modern philosophy has already made the necessary critical calculations with educational illusions. Philosophers increasingly emphasize the limitations of reason and its inability to be a guide of conduct in a situation of universal nonsense. Finally, in postmodernism there is detected the immoderate fascination of the illogicality. But there is no doubt that man is the only creature that can live in absurd situations. The ever-deepening experience of rationalistic cognition of life and a horrible unwillingness of reality to pack up in this experience. An endless stream of creativity which gives birth to destruction. The yearning for beauty which turns into desire of ugliness. Infinity of creation and the limitation of human life. How to save sobriety of thought within these paradoxes?

Many thinkers of antiquity felt the need for analytics of irrational. Aristotle, for example, noticed the intelligence of the man but also wrote about his irrationality. Already at that time it was believed that the mind is not able to express the fullness and richness of spiritual life. Near-reasonable features of human activity often aren’t amenable to logical thinking. However, they are also involved in the creation of culture, and there is no reason to remove them out of the diverse spiritual experience. Is there such an urgency to move the myth beyond the boundaries of culture? But the myth is the crystallization of people’s unconscious lives. Myth is not alien to the logic, although it has special characteristics. Myth is able to bring order to the chaos, transform the lurking and the unclear in the explanatory figurative formulae.

If we analyze the structure of myth, various transformations of conscious and unconscious human effort to understand the world can be detected in it. Not by chance, for example, G. Bataille in his search of criteria of rationality refers to the internal human experience. He keeps in mind certain limit positions, which initially can be clarified only from the inside. Religious-mystical, erotic, creative impulses of man are not subject to objective analysis. But this does not mean that they are inherently irrational, that they belong to the chaotic, disordered thoughts.