P.P. Gaidenko’s Concept of Types of Rationality in the Context of Modern Problems of the Development of Environmental Consciousness

Abstract

“What is the meaning of a rational relationship to the nature”? This ecologically based and at the same time philosophical question is of particular importance to­day. After all, the future of mankind depends on the answer to it. The trajectories of our reasoning on this topic are determined by how we interpret the concept of “rational” and what characteristics we fill its content with. In the 1990s, in the Russian philosophy of science, it was precisely the concept of “rational­ity” that turned out to be at the forefront of discussion (some philosophers fo­cused on its logical components, others on historical ones). P.P. Gaidenko tried to find her own way. She proposed to look at rationality through the prism of a person’s historically changing attitude to the world as to his immediate, and therefore concrete, environment (“life world”), the sphere of semantic certainty and symbolic comfort. From the point of view of P.P. Gaidenko, the types of sci­entific rationality change historically precisely because a person not only “cog­nizes” the world as something external, opposing him (as an object of consump­tion), he actually creates the surrounding “life” world and himself in it, and, what is especially important, does it conscious, i.e. expresses in the narration (telling, narrative) his attitude towards it. P.P. Gaidenko immerses the con­cept of “rationality” in the history of philosophy in order to show its specific
nature, on the one hand, and to update the phenomenological interpretations
of “rationality” in science, on the other. In this regard, the conceptual analysis of E. Husserl’s ideas, undertaken in Gaidenko’s works, is especially important. Such approach reveals the ecological potential of the very idea of distinction of types of rationality. The author believes that such a turn of the relevant topic is defiantly presented precisely in the epistemological narrative. The article notes that the current task of forming environmental consciousness in society thus ac­quires a theoretical personal dimension.