Consciousness, Culture and Civilization ‘Stem Cell’ (in Commemoration of V.A. Lektorsky’s 90th Anniversary)

Abstract

It is culture and society that make it possible for human consciousness to emerge and develop, yet it is human consciousness that gives an impulse to culture and society and sets their guidelines. This inevitable self-reference makes it impossi­ble to define straight cause-and-effect dependence between consciousness, cul­ture and society. Traditionally, the dialectics of individual and collective con­sciousness was supposed to solve the puzzle. In its stead, it is proposed to understand all the three as the unfolding of the same ‘stem cell’, i.e., the ‘what-and-such’ svyaznost’ (connectivity and linkage) that displays itself at every level of consciousness: perception, speech and thought. The ‘what-and-such’ svyaznost’ cannot be further reduced, because the ‘what’ looses its ‘whatness’ without its ‘such’, and its ‘such’ dissolves when not linked to its ‘what’, and at the same time the ‘what’ and ‘such’ stay always distinct and unmerged. The tech­nology of setting the ‘what-and-such’ linkage varies, accounting for the basic variability of human reason. There is a pressing need to scrutinize the archive of non-European big cultures in order to disclose new, hitherto unknown types of reason. This task had been carried out to a large extent in regard to the substance reason (European big culture) and process reason (Arab-Muslim big culture), where fundamental specificity of worldview, language usage and society are set by the specific type of rationality. The perspective of studying the South-Asian and Far-Eastern types of reason is outlined. The detailed definition of the ‘what-and-such’ as the principle of consciousness, culture and society is proposed.