Pastoral Criticism, Structural Collaboration: The Role of Ecclesial Power Structures in Modernization and Economic Individualization

This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.

Politics of Manufacturing Consent in a Post-Truth Society

This article critically examines how human life today is faced with issues of dishonesty and deception. Using the concept of post-truth in analyzing and understanding the context of change in a global society under neo-liberalism, it focuses on the way powerful people, groups, political parties, and media now take recourse to strategies such as falsification, manipulation, or deception to influence and control the human mind. Those involved in doing this use nostalgic narratives, idealize a fictional past and generate conspiracy theories to create false consciousness and thereby colonize the life world. Such colonization not only promotes social pathologies but also limits the democratic, secular, and plural spirits of multicultural nations like India. The article ends by arguing that there are limits to such politics and the best alternative to the conundrum is the assertion of human subjectivity and agency, and alternative media can play a major role in this endeavor.

Conatus and Dasein: The Problem of an Existential Theory of Motivation

In the article I articulate an interpretation of the findingness (Befindlichkeit) of Dasein in Heidegger as a specific existential drive, basing it on an interpretation of his concept of existence, drawing from his earlier lectures before Being and Time, and relying on the clarification of the existential meaning of relation. Following a related interpretation of understanding and care, I offer some considerations pertaining to the problem of authentic motivation and its possible practical application. Initially, I offer an interpretation of existence as it relates to the meaning of being, understanding the relata in this ultimate sense as two aspects of speech. In this, I understand the meaning of being as a groundless call or address. Building on that, I propose a motivational understanding of findingness as the necessary drive of Dasein toward its self-interpretation as it relates to the enigmatic call of being. I supplement this view with an interpretation of existential understanding as a coequal aspect of the groundless freedom of that relation of Dasein to itself. Finally, I offer an interpretation of authenticity, in line with the aforementioned explicated understanding of existence and the corresponding meaning of the authentic motivational findingness of Dasein. In conclusion, I raise a question of how such authentic motivation could be practically understood in the perspective of life-world interactions.

Narrating Memory: Weighing up the Testimony

Memory is the ability to store, maintain and recall information and experiences. Although predominantly an individual attribute, memory coincides with the life-world, with consciousness and with the ability to define reality – all of which are shared with others. When analysing narratives the sociologist needs to situate individual memory within its broader context. The article follows the argument that individuals acquire their memories within a broader social context. They also recall and localise their memories within a broader social context. This article interprets a remarkable testimony: the story of a former political prisoner who circumcised a large number of young fellow inmates in the notorious prison on Robben Island, South Africa, during the period of Nelson Mandela‟s incarceration. The article relates the narrative in question to the life-world of the narrator and to his experiences whilst serving his 18-year prison sentence. It reflects on the epistemological questions regarding memories. Memory as recollection, as reconstruction of events and information, and as process of re-membering come under the spotlight. Narratives that are often repeated start taking on a life of their own – particularly in the case of trauma memories. When analysing these narratives, the sociologist needs to distinguish between objective markers and subjective interpretation. Memory does not constitute pure recall by the individual. The article illustrates the effect of intersubjective and collective factors on the process of remembering. It calls for a reflexive process to identify, re-interpret and unpack the process of remembering.

Judaism, Enlightenment, and Ideology

The co-existence of Enlightenment and ideology has long vexed Jews in modernity. They have both loved and been leary of Enlightenment reason and its attending scientific and political institutions. Jews have also held a complex relationship to ideological forms that exist alongside Enlightenment reason and which have both lured and victimized them alike. Still, what accounts for this historical proximity between Enlightenment and ideology? and how does this relationship factor into the emergence of modern anti-Semitism? Can Jewish communities participate in contemporary societies committed to scientific developments and deliberative democracies and neither be targeted by totalizing systems of thought that eliminate Judaism’s difference nor fall prey to the power and seduction of ideological forces that compete with the Jewish life-world? This article argues that Hegel’s discussion of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit as a social practice of critical common sensism provides an immanent critique of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s analysis of the absolutism of the Enlightenment that can bolster Jewish communal and philosophical hope in the commensurability between Judaism and the contemporary expressions of Enlightenment reason, even if it does not fully eradicate the challenges presented by ideology for Jewish communities and thinkers.

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE LIFE WORLD IN THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

The article examines the transformation of the image of the life world, reflected in the problematics and value system of significant works of literature for children of the Soviet and post-Soviet period (on the example of Ukrainian and Russian literature). It is shown that literature for children quite clearly reflects the cultural and social environment, which allows the text to be dated to within a decade, but the best works go beyond their immediate context, which allows them to function in fundamentally new social conditions. The study of books that have an enduring popularity even after the country and society where they were created, have ceased to be, demonstrate remarkable vitality. Studying of the complex of ideas and values that underlie these texts can be helpful for better understanding of the axiological constants that can survive political, social and ideological transformations. Other important theme is the transformation of the reception of a text, were some layers of meaning can be actualized, and some – ignored, whether consciously or subconsciously. The study of selective reception of the text according to the dominant cultural paradigm can also have culturological value. Soviet literature for children cannot be evaluated only as a product of a conservative totalitarian society. It was constantly transformed, which led to the fact that the date of writing the text can almost always be set to the nearest decade. The study of these differences helps to see more clearly the trends of cultural change on a civilizational and global scale. Another aspect is the understanding of Ukrainian literature for children, which was formed within the general Soviet paradigm, although it has always had its own uniqueness. With the disintegration of the Union, and especially with the political events of recent years, Ukrainian literature has clearly separated from Russian in terms of both topics and guidelines. It is worth tracing which tendencies are common to both literatures, which are global, and which are peculiar only to our culture. It is also worth researching the comparison of modern Ukrainian literature with other cultural traditions, both to learn from the experience and to assert the uniqueness of their own art and their own world of life.

Constructivist approach in pedagogical science

The article examines the problems of constructivist understanding of education, the innovations, opportunities and limitations that the constructivist model of the pedagogical process offers. The aim of the work was to analyze the constructivist model of education and those innovations and prospects for understanding the modern educational process that the constructivist approach brings. Constructivism changes the view of teachers and other scientists and practitioners in their view of what is happening in the relations of people in education. Due to its controversial nature, the development of the ideas of constructivism in the context of the development of educational ideologies and technologies leads to the reconceptualization of the traditional model of education, and the constructionist model of education itself can and should become the object of systematic methodological, theoretical, empirical and applied research. Any of the educational approaches available now can be disclosed as an example of a constructivist model of education, the leading features of which are the dialogic nature of education, the focus on understanding the inner and outer world in dialogue with significant other people, the consideration of such a dialogue as a process of building a person's own life world and himself, as a creative "rediscovery" of the basic truths of human existence, as the adoption of socially and personally significant decisions in a situation of educational, professional, life choice.

Keeping the personality in the information societies

The purpose of the paper is to define how the sociopolitical thought of J. Habermas – his theory of communicative action and the concept of deliberative democracy – guarantees the protection and keeping of an independent human personality in modern information societies. In order to solve this problem, the author seeks to determine what is meant by a “personality”. Analyzing this issue, the author distinguishes two different understandings of a personality among J. Habermas’s works: philosophical-personalistic and public-sociological. When integrating these understandings, the author gives an original socio-philosophical definition of a personality, in which the personality retains both individualistic and social traits. It is especially emphasized that for the affirmation of the personality and his/her development, an equal, subject-subject dialogue with Others is necessary. The paper reveals that the development of personality, first of all, is interrelated with the maintenance of a cultural, normative and valuable “life-world”, which is violated by the mechanisms of systematic technocratic regulation in modern times, in a society. The principles of this regulation are justified in a system-functional approach. The advantages of J. Habermas’s approach, capable of ensuring the development of a genuine normative essence of personality, are determined

Гендерная роль и феноменологический статус мужчины (антиномия идентичности и аутентичности)

The article is devoted to antinomy in gender plan of a man and phenomenological aspect of all that relates to embodiment of the Yang in a language. Contrasting the “real man” concept with the phenomenon of real men, cognitive nature of identity law and phenomenological essence of authenticity principle are revealed. Negative (unmanifested) essence and atomicity of a person’s life world and principle of awareness attributed to it are postulated.