Philosophical and historical studies always have a certain practical orientation. Comprehending the past, we strive to understand the present, to determine the development trends of modern society.
In this sense, solving the question of the correlation of Western and Eastern cultures of civilizations, and also Russia's place in this dialogue, acquires special importance and relevance to us. This problem has often been raised before in the work of philosophers and sociologists.
Now it began to be discussed not only in specialized literature, articles, but also in weekly and daily journal and newspaper materials, in political discussions, etc. In 1992, the journal «Voprosy filosofii» held a «round table» on the theme of «Russia and the West : Interaction of Cultures», at which leading Russian scholars: philosophers, historians, philologists, country experts, etc.
Using the materials of that discussion, as well as the significant material of domestic and world thought preceding it, I will try to answer the questions posed.
In this context, the West and the East are considered not as a geographical, but as a geosocial and cultural concept. One of the participants of the “round table” V. S. Stepin noted that he understands the term “West” as a special type of civilizational and cultural development that took shape in Europe around the 15th century.
Civilization of this type could be called technogenic. Its characteristic features are a rapid change in engineering and technology, thanks to the systematic application of scientific knowledge in the production. The consequence of this application is scientific, and then scientific and technological revolution, changing the relationship of man to nature and his place in the production system.
As technological civilization develops, an accelerating renewal of the subject environment artificially created by man takes place in which his vital activity takes place. In turn, this is accompanied by the growing dynamics of social ties, their relatively rapid transformation. Sometimes, during the life of one or two generations, a change in lifestyle and the formation of a new type of personality occur.
The prerequisites of Western culture were laid back in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The main milestones of her prehistory were the following: the experience of the democracy of the ancient polis, the establishment of various philosophical systems and the first examples of theoretical science within the framework of its culture, and then the Christian tradition formed in the European Middle Ages with its idea of human personality, the concept of morality, and the understanding of the human mind as created, in the image of God.
And therefore capable of rational comprehension of the meaning of being. The synthesis of these two traditions in the Renaissance was one of the sources of the values of technological civilization. During the Enlightenment, the formation of worldview attitudes was completed, which determined the subsequent development of anthropogenic civilization. In the system of these attitudes, the special value of the progress of science and technology was formed, as well as the conviction of the fundamental possibility of rational organization of social relations. In social terms, Western civilization is identified with the era of the formation and development of capitalism and the formation of civil society and legal domination. In the technological plan, with an industrial and post-industrial society.
Philosophers and sociologists consider the worldview, social and technological aspects of culture as a whole, showing their inextricable unity and interaction. In philosophy, the Western type is opposed to the eastern type, called the “traditional society.”
Geopolitically, the East is associated with the cultures of Ancient India and China, Babylon, Ancient Egypt, nationally state formations of the Muslim world. These cultures were distinctive and, at the same time, were characterized by some common features: they were focused, first of all, on the reproduction of existing social structures, stabilization of the established way of life. reigning often over the course of many centuries.
Traditional patterns of behavior, accumulating the experience of ancestors, were considered as the highest value. Types of activity, their means and goals changed very slowly, for centuries reproduced as stable stereotypes. In the spiritual sphere, religious and mythological ideas and canonized types of thinking prevailed, scientific rationality was opposed by a moral-volitional attitude toward contemplation, serenity, an intuitively mystical fusion with being.
Therefore, the eastern perception of the world is not characterized by the division of the world into “one and the other” or “all about everything.” Hence, the denial of the individualist Cesky start and focus on collectivism. Avtonomiya, freedom and dignity of the human person alien to the spirit of oriental culture.
In the eastern worldview systems, man is absolutely not free; he is predetermined either by cosmic law or by God.