3. Legal Consciousness

The concept of legal consciousness.. Legal consciousness is the form of social consciousness which expresses the knowledge and evaluation of the normative regulations—accepted in a given society-as juridical laws — of the socioeconomic activities of various subjects of law (the individual, the enterprise, the work collective, the organ­ization, the official). Legal consciousness occupies, as it were, an in­termediate position between political and moral consciousness: as distinct from political consciousness, it deals above all with individ­ual-personality categories. As distinct from moral norms, the concepts of what is proper and just are conceived in legal consciousness as elevated to the level of state law whose violation entails legal sanctions.

Juridical law determines the measure of the individual's social freedom, it acts as the boundary of that freedom which receives offi­cial state protection owing to legislative recognition. The measure of the individual's freedom determined by the state is conditioned by the mode of production accepted in society, and has socio-class na­ture. At the same time law regulates the normative obligatory elements of social activity, which is the reverse side of the measure of social freedom.

Any juridical law is therefore historical, appearing at first as a theoretical ideal and then being consolidated as law in keeping with the socio-historical causes that engendered it. Society's legal con­sciousness is therefore also historical; it functions as knowledge of and judgement passed on developing legislation.

4. Moral Consciousness

The concepts of moral consciousness and ethics. Moral conscious­ness is the principal axiological form of social consciousness reflect­ing generally accepted normative statutes and evaluations of human activity. As distinct from political consciousness, which reflects the principles of interrelations among social groups, and from legal consciousness, in which the individual plays a much greater part yet is considered in his relation to society as a suprapersonal gener­alized social force, moral consciousness reflects the relations be­tween individuals and those positions from which a person evaluates his own self.

The norms of moral consciousness evolve as a historically definite result of people's united will, forming, a system of well-tested rules and judgements, social requirements and social opi­nion, i.e. a system of social norms which regulate interpersonal communication and behavior of people to ensure the unity of personal and collective interests.

Being a manifestation of man's social essence, morality is a fun­damental feature which determines the image of man as such. It is, consequently, man's generic trait without which society's being is impossible. Moral consciousness is in this sense a necessary factor of socio-historical progress. Morality serves as a means of man­kind's elevation; it is probably the most important of the forces that mould man.

Just as in other forms of social consciousness, modern science generally distinguishes between the two levels in moral conscious­ness, everyday practical and theoretical. The everyday practical level reflects the real morals and manners of society, the widespread norms and judgements supported by the socioeconomic structure of society. The theoretical level formulates the ideal anticipated by so­ciety, the sphere of abstract obligation which, for obvious historical reasons, has never coincided with actual reality. The ideal theoreti­cal level of moral consciousness is termed ethics.

As distinct from the everyday level of moral consciousness, ethics is a system of views, close to philosophy, which does not simply reflect the existing conditions and actual norms of behavior or appeal to traditions and customs but critically evalu­ates the existing state of things and finds in it the first shoots of the anticipated ideal, promoting its realization in further social practice.

5. Aesthetic consciousness.

Aesthetic consciousness occupies a special position in the second group of forms of social consciousness. It constitutes the spiritual foundation that ensures the harmonious unity of and deep interconnection be­tween various manifestations of the spiritual life of man and of so­ciety as a whole.

It is necessary to clearly distinguish between the two largely coin­ciding but not identical concepts — aesthetic consciousness in general and art as the highest but partial manifestation of that conscious­ness. Aesthetic consciousness is found in each human act, whether it be scientific thought or sensuous contemplation, production activity or the sphere of everyday life. A person makes aesthetic judgements on every act of his self-expression, every objective phenomenon confronting him —in a word, everything that is brought into the sphere of his experience. As for art, it is a professional sphere of ac- tivity, in which aesthetic consciousness is no longer an attendant ele­ment but the primary goal.

The aesthetic is the immediately given sensuous expressiveness of the other object’s inner life embodying the process of objectification of the human essence and humanization of the natural world, an expressiveness that is perceived and emotionally experienced by man as a vital value.

The aesthetic relation to reality inevitably becomes an object of independent cultivation. Art is a special kind of human activity in which aesthetic, embodied in the artistic, is content and mode and goal.

6. Religious Consciousness.

Religion is not an ac­cidental branch of cultural evolution but a naturally evolved and his­torically, socially and psychologically conditioned form of the realiz­ation by people of the surrounding reality and of themselves. It is a complex aggregate concept incorporating a certain mythology, a system of dogmas, cultic and ritual actions, socialized religious in­stitutions, forms of relationships between believers and religious or­ganizations, and many other issues. In each religion, all these issues have a very specific semantic content, a history of emergence and further development different from all the others, and a specific col­oring set against various ethnic, national, class and individual back­grounds. The study of these semantic and organizational features in the emergence and functioning of religions and their historical var­ieties forms the subject matter of a special science, which also deals with specific philosophical problems of theology.

Religious con­ sciousness is seen as one of the forms of social consciousness. The fact is thus underlined that the existence of religious views corre­ sponds to people's objective spiritual needs. Until they are fully sat­ isfied by other forms of social consciousness (which would be ideal in terms of social order), religion will remain a source of ethical values for certain strata of society, a source of psychological conso­ lation and support, and a guarantee of justice that will triumph in the future. But the objectiveness of the needs themselves does not , yet signify the truth of the religious means of satisfying them.

In its generalized sense, religious consciousness is thus intended to meet the need of man for a system of absolute and unquestion­able moral values which have to be adhered to. It seeks to attach meaning to the individual human existence and to guarantee the inevitable triumph of justice. At the same time religion satisfies these needs in an illusory manner, and in fact absolves man from conscious responsibility for the surrounding reality, promoting, in principle, a passive contemplative attitude to life.

'To overcome religious consciousness, it is not enough to mo­bilize the efforts of scientists in the cause of enlightenment; still less effective are the dry rational slogans of atheism; moral or aesthetic education is not enough either; above all, the material and econ­omic causes must disappear which divide and oppose people to one another, producing insoluble moral conflicts.

8. The Philosophy of culture.

The concept of culture (fr. L. cultura "tilling") \ is basically connected with something that is done well —not only what is done but also how and what for. Doing is a mode of master­ing the world. Culture is a kind of magic crystal that focuses all being. It is the creative principle of the life of the individual and of society as a whole; it is not just an ability taken to the point of art but a morally sanctioned goal.

An ensemble of materiel and non-material values and of methods of creating them, and the ability to use them for the advancement of mankind and to transmit them from generation to generation, con­stitute culture. The starting point and the source of the development of culture is human labor, the forms of its realization, and its re­sults.

Material culture includes, above all, the means of production and the objects of labor drawn into the circle of social being. It is an indication of man's practical mastery over nature. Non-material culture incorporates science and the extent to which science is ap­plied in production and everyday life; the state of education, en­lightenment, health services, art; the moral norms of the behavior of the members of society; and the level of people's needs and in­terests.

Culture and civilization. As distinct from the 18th and 19th cen­turies, when culture and civilization were mostly regarded as sy­nonymous, characteristic of 20th-century philosophy of culture is gradual separation of these two concepts, of which the former con­tinues to symbolize all the positive elements in this previously indi­visible area while the latter is mostly used with neutral or downright negative overtones.

Civilization as material culture and mastery over the forces of na­ture undoubtedly carries a powerful charge of technological pro­gress and promotes material affluence. The beneficial effect of the spreading of technological inventions is too obvious to need proof. At the same time technology and material affluence do not in them­selves signify cultural and spiritual efflorescence, they cannot be re­garded as absolutely moral or absolutely immoral: they are, in fact, neutral. The cultural value of technological achievements depends on the axiological context in which they are used, and this context may include, say, irrigation of formerly barren areas but also devel­opment of advanced weapons of mass destruction.

For this reason, the concept of civilization is mostly associated with the development of technology which is inherently neutral in relation to culture and may be used for all sorts of purposes, while the concept of culture is on the contrary seen as intimately linked with that of spiritual-intellectual progress. Civilization is a world of material objects outside man transformed by man, while culture is man's inner property, an estimate of his spiritual development, of his oppression or freedom, complete dependence on the surround­ing social world or spiritual autonomy. The attitude of some West­ern philosophers to civilization is flatly negative. The view of civi­lization as the "agony of culture" was formulated by Oswald Spengler, and it has only grown stronger since his time. The negative qualities usually ascribed to civilization are a tendency towards standardization of thinking, an inclination to treat generally ac­cepted truths as absolutely correct, and a tendency to play down the independence and originality of individual thinking, which are seen as socially dangerous. From this standpoint, culture moulds the per­fect personality, while civilization, the ideal law-abiding member of society content with the benefits offered him. Civilization is more and more often regarded as a synonym of urbanization, lack of liv­ing space, the tyranny of machines, and a source of the dehumaniza- tion of the world. Indeed, man may have penetrated deeply into the mysteries of being, but his own spiritual and intellectual world still largely remains a mystery. By themselves, civilization and science cannot ensure spiritual progress: what is needed here is culture as an aggregate spiritual-intellectual structure comprizing the entire spectrum of intellectual, moral and aesthetic achievements of man­kind, which are not passive attributes of material being but an active and independent stratum in the objective historical process.

In order to better understand the entire complexity of the phenomenon of culture and its interconnections with material civilization one must go deep into the hidden mechanisms of culture in order to realize, even in a very small degree, one's dependence on its objective force. Culture has often been subjectively perceived as a tool of progress entirely in our power, whereas objectively we have been hostage to its laws. It is no accident that the 20th century is characterized by a powerful development of culturology, the science of the forms and types of culture, of those mechanisms which under­lie the interaction of culture, society and personality.

The culture of a society is its aggregate collective property. In class societies, it includes those essential differences which, owing to differences in social being, arise in the self-consciousness of every class. At the same time there is a fund of cultural values which not only all the members of a given society may have in common but also other societies outwardly entirely different in their structure, if they had parallels in their historical-cultural development.

The greatest value of cultural phenomena lies not so much in the community of their inner structure as in the unique content of these structures in each variety of culture. Here we have come to the cen­tral problem of the philosophy of culture - cultural typology.

The problem of the typology of cultures. It should be pointed out at once that science today does not have a complete classification of cultures, let alone their exhaustive typology. There are several dif­ferent approaches to this problem, each of which has its own goals.

The first classification reckons mostly with differences between major cultural entities, such as Western and Eastern cultures taken as a whole. An indication of the tendency towards a synthesis between Western and Eastern cultures is the crossing of the two branches and the resultant new cultural varieties (numerous Buddhist communities in Europe and America).

The differences between European and Oriental cultures go back to remote antiquity. Of all the antithetic features distinguishing them that have been pointed out by culturologists, let us stress such basic elements as the attitude, first, to the human personality, sec­ond, to the possibilities of reason, and third, to socio-political activ­ity. As distinct from Christian Europe, which deified the absolute personality of the Creator, and thus of man as the Creator's like­ness, oriental religions are mostly based on the idea of falsity of the individual forms of spiritual life. The East cultivated the idea of re­jection of the personal self in favor of the impersonal absolute. There is also a difference in the attitude to the possibilities of rea­son. On the whole, Europe has moved towards rational and prag­matic knowledge, seeing it as the highest value, whereas the East places rational knowledge lower than introspective and intuitive one, and therefore has a greater range of devices for meditation and autosuggestion at its disposal. Finally, as distinct from the European emphasis on social action, the traditional Orient has preached the doctrine of refraining from action; in accordance with this doctrine, the existing state of affairs in earthly life, however bad it may be, is retribution for past sins apportioned by the absolute, and man must not therefore strive for social transformation.

Even this brief outline indicates not only the basic differences be­tween the two cultural traditions but also the bridges or points at which they have been brought closer together in the 20th century. Thus on the issue of the attitude towards man, some trends in Euro­pean philosophy critical of bourgeois individualism are inclined to­wards antipersonalism uncharacteristic of Christian culture, subor­dinating the idea of self-valuable personality to the idea of deper­sonalized society, on the Confucian model. On the other hand, in­terest for individual-personal forms of being is gradually growing in the countries of Oriental culture. On the issue of the potential of ra­tional knowledge, Europe today takes into account the achieve­ments of Oriental meditative psychology, while the East, in its turn, ceases to ignore the natural sciences, without falling into the ex­tremes of scientism, of course. On the issue of social activity, one cannot fail to notice the role played in the East by the idea of active involvement in life, as indicated by the scope of political struggle in these countries. It should also be noted, though, that the Oriental doctrine of refraining from action has partly penetrated European culture as well, especially those strata of the liberal intellectuals which have been disappointed by the failure of partial political re­forms and have become engrossed in inner existential experiences of the individual human soul.

Apart from this classification of cultures, there are smaller subdi­visions, including the concept of subculture, which reflects the spe­cifics of a certain stratum in a single society (e.g., the youth subcul­ture).

Of special interest here is the problem of national cultures. Their specificity is largely connected with the territorial, climatic, and eth­nic situation of a given people, with its system of values that has been historically evolved and handed down from generation to generation. The preservation of the national originality of cultures is one of the most painful problems of the 20th century. The first de­cades of this century were dominated by the ideas of rapid consoli­dation of nations into a single cultural group, whereas the recent years are characterized by a rehabilitation of national self-con­sciousness confronting the tendency towards unification. However important the formation of global planetary thinking may be for the solution of such universal problems as the strengthening of peace and restoration of the ecological balance, this universal conscious­ness must not be built at the expense of cultural diversity. The greater and richer the range of cultural traditions, the richer the spiritual life of mankind as a whole.

Of great significance for the classification of various cultural communities is the question of the value of these cultures in relation to one another and determination of the stage of their historical de­velopment.

All types of unitary cultural development are fraught with nega­tive consequences for, despite the growing process of internationali­zation, the desire for national and cultural separateness, far from weakening, is increasing. In view of this, political thought cannot avoid being modified by the cultural specificity of the soil on which it is planted. This must not be seen as its defectiveness but, on the contrary, as a sign of its universality since, despite differences in cul­tural contexts, each specifically national version of its implementa­tion retains its fundamental propositions.

It should be noted in conclusion that in reality culture exists as a historically established system which has its material forms, its sym­bols, traditions, ideals, orientations, axiological reference points and, finally, a mode of thought and life—the central force and the living soul of culture. In this sense, the being of culture becomes supraindividual, although it exists at the same time as the individ­ual's deeply personal experience. The subject of culture is mankind, nation, social group and the individual. The material forms of the being of culture are the fruits of the people's creative activity, the masterpieces of men of genius and talent. Taken by themselves, though; the material and sign-symbolic forms of the being of culture are only relatively independent: outside man and his creative activ­ity, they are dead.

There was a time when cultures were closed. In the course of their multidimensional development they become more and more open to all kinds of influences: they interact, and life works out flex­ible mechanisms of this interaction, which facilitates the general growth of culture. Right before our eyes, the process unfolds of the formation of civilization of the whole mankind retaining at the same time the individuality of each culture. Despite the uniqueness of the finest fabric of each given culture, whose threads always go back to remote antiquity, different types of culture are in principle com­parable, and a dialogue between them leading to mutual under­standing is not only possible but actually realized both in remote past and nowadays. I believe that further progress of mankind will be achieved through growing rational mutual enrichment of cul­tures. This beneficent synthesis, aspiring towards humanistic ideals, the principles of social justice, the individual's harmonious develop­ment, new thinking, and a consistent scientific worldview, is appar­ently necessary. World culture will only reap benefits from it as it accelerates its ascendance along the path of progress, without de­priving local cultures of the unique intensity of their own colors.