Философия/2.Социальная философия

Д.филос.н. Иванкина Л.И.

Национальный исследовательский Томский политехнический университет, Россия

EDUCATION IS A CATALYST OF THE DIALOG BETWEEN CULTURES

In the contemporary multi-polar world the dialog of cultures is a formation of new cultural systems build up on the principle of “rhizome”, unity, nonviolent synthesis of diverse traditions and approaches. At the same time, it should be taken into account that spatial and temporal worlds that belong to diverse cultures are difficult to synthesize or undergo a cultural co-evolution. There is a certain measure that stipulates the general evolution rate. In case this rate was achieved within the interacted cultures, there is a hope to create the whole and its new organization. It is important to find out this rate that will provide, virtually, the whole as a dialogical unity of different cultures.

From the authors’ point of view, the way out from this situation is given by the life itself. The case is that the important principle of the integrated and co-evolution processes is the principle of the mutual subsidiarity which is realized on the general “area”. The term area used in social theories allows placing emphasis on penetrating dynamic attributes of social reality, i.e. “processual image” and regarding the society as an “area image” or a constantly lasting, infinite flow of events. A. Toynbee confirms the development of this idea noting that the study of human relations in dynamics is more realistic and fruitful than any attempt to study them in the imaginary calm state. Actually, any dialog may be fruitful in solving any problem only when the argumentation of the two opposite positions is changed with the advent of the third factor or area.

The third factor, common for the two opposite cultures such as cultures of West or East, is a wider and deeper context of the globalizing world within which traditional patterns and imperatives of interacting cultures are interpreting and re-interpreting. Moreover, the presence of this factor is determined by cross-cultural processes initiated by the economic globalization, the traits of culture are being preserved. A new sphere of culture – transculture – is ideally a continuation of the classic dialogue at the new level developed beyond the borders of the existing national, gender and professional cultures. The idea of transculture reflects synergy, virtuality, uncertainty of the contemporary world and constitutes a diversity and universality as a property of a free person, his/her virtual belonging to many other cultures.

Transculture overcomes restraint of national cultures, their traditions, linguistic and value determinations and expands the area of cross-cultural creativity. In these terms, the transculture is opposite to the multi-culture problem and a tendency of the growing specialization of different culture loci. Not going into details of transculture, we agree with the opinion of E. Berry and M. Epstein, the authors of Transcultural experiments: Russian and American models of creative communication (New-York, 1999) that it can not be identified with the global culture which disseminates similar models over the mankind. Widening borders of ethnic, linguistic, professional and other identities, transculture creates new identities in the area of obscurity and interference challenging metaphysics of originality and discontinuity that characterize nations, races and other deep-seated sociocultural formations.

Education acts as a specific enzymatic composition, a catalyst of processes in creation of the unity of the culture diversity. Applying to education we assume that a claim for modernity is a claim for the right to be in the future. Applying to education we reflect on a cultural universe in the movement of those possible trends of the development of human culture that are actually being born stating the area ‘outside the determination’ in relation to all the existing cultures and the human right to live on or beyond the borders of his/her ‘native’ culture. The area ‘outside the determination’ does not mean the absence because culture gains the existence in the structure of a personality.

At present, education has changed its borders, and the society as a whole becomes educational. It means that all cultural and social environments are covered with the educational process becoming open and acting as a communication between different cultures and orienting towards the vision of social reality which is being formed, moved, changed and is processual and technological. According to V. Tzymburski, marginality and inter-civilization are the chance of advancement which has been often successfully used by different nations. We also share the philosopher H. Marcuse’s opinion who binds the initial meaning of civilization with the movement to integration and restraining of destructive forces. Civilized modernization taking place in the global society encourages us to make a deeper insight in reorganizations of national systems of education in order to notice and understand the objective rule of transfer to open education as a more adequate form of cross-cultural development of society. As long as education includes the potential of different mentalities and patterns and another cultural experience, it introduces a new discourse in everyday life allowing looking at not only in its own culture but also at the other one from the point of view of the integrated approach which implies their connection and involvement in each other.

Understanding of another culture is realized in three ways: ‘inside culture’ as an immersion in the semantic structure of another culture’s texts and tracing the logics of its evolution; ‘above culture’ as a reconstruction of the semantic structure from ‘beyond’, form its own or some other culture; ‘cross-culture’ as tracing of bonds between semantic structures of cultural texts including ‘its own’ and ‘different’ ones. Obviously, the first two approaches are the utmost expressions of the third one. All these approaches describe the interaction between the semantic structures of cultural texts which acts as a basic procedure for understanding cultures. That is why in considering a mechanism of appearance of intelligent knowledge and understanding of another culture, the idea of collision of semantic structures and their mutual dialogical consolidation is very important. This is just the idea of the classical dialog of cultures alongside with which there exists another cultural form whose central part is not a culture in general but a personality as a native representative of the definite culture. At the turn of different cultures there appear elements of ‘proto-culture’ (M. Epstein) as transculture to understand particular, to overcome insularity. The symbol of appearance of ‘proto’ is the exit to the level of metalanguage, i.e. the universal self-consciousness of a personality.

All cultures are identical in terms that no one can be realized without a definite potential of creative innovations of an individual who possess the potential of openness. Thus, mastering of culture is possible only through the cultivation of person’s creativity. The process of knowledge acquirement and formation of a personality has a comparative nature. So, the sphere of educational experience is more accessible for creativity and borrowing the ideas from different sociocultural systems. Here education is the process of mixing and diffusion of diverse historical traditions, values, imaginations, preferences, peculiarities of perception and other mental components that is fixing by the order of transformations of axiological triad: mentality – education – mentality.

Ways of catching effects of civilized synergy under conditions of spontaneously forming world order are tracing of emerged and recombined competencies within the areas of the intensive growth of thought-and-activity and their schematization in humanitarian axio- and psycho-experiences of cultures. Mastering of spontaneous new competencies of thought-and-activity and spontaneous human potentials occurs in the autopoiesis experience. In the course of time, human potentiality changes, and ability is constantly increasing. In different sectors of vital activity a demand for a new type of employment is forming. The search for new forms of it and their social development is directly connected with the search of new kinds of competencies that means approaching to such a phase of the ontologically thinkable individualization in which the spontaneity begins to be apprehended as motivational provision, subjectivity, person-reflected individualism.

A person is self-actualized as an assignment and potentiality in the everyday life or life experiences. Commonness as a directly given reality includes target energy, and the human being acts as a being-opportunity, it runs ahead because it must exceed its present state leaving the scope of the available as a certain ‘still not’. Reality of the everyday world acts, on the one hand, as the experience world of an active person, world of the common sense, common imaginations, common activity provided in well-known and usual life situations, and, on the other, it acts as challenges for a person who faces new problems which were absent in his experience before. A great number of problems of survival and changes of intellect arises, and the diversity of ties between people and the world expands its civilized space. A combination of contradictory and complementary tendencies connected, on the one hand, with the necessity of stabilization, strengthening and transfer of experience accumulated by generations, and on the other, with a possibility to change an individual and the society as a whole, has laid in education a potential source for current and future changes.

Education can be identified with synergetic nonequilibrium when a new structure is born in a society through education. And education transfers itself to a higher condition from the viewpoint of the structural complication accomplishing the synergetic effect of the new level order birth. E. Knyazeva and S. Kurdumov have stated that during the process of education a qualitative reconstruction of attractors takes place that stipulate qualitative reconstruction of personal structures, and a person becomes different.

The inferiority complex arising as a reaction to insufficiency of resources a person possesses serves as the impetus to the development of a dynamic structure of a person who starts to rapidly develop itself in the ‘mode of intensification’ in order to achieve aims and solve problems under conditions new to him/her. The way of self-rejuvenation is the state of chaos connected with spontaneously emerged unplanned structures of new knowledge and properties. As a result of creativity, new parameters of person’s behavior order appear as a complex non-linear system when to do something means to constantly change him or herself and find out ways of further development. This allows considering the individual educational experience as a process of sociocultural fluctuations, continuing search for variants of being in everyday life that provides a possibility to definitely response to changes of the environment. This functional characteristic and place of education in the development of a person and the society define education as a bifurcational factor within the mechanism of the civilized evolution.

The bifurcational approach to understanding of the nature of education allows considering it as a transitive potentiality of the process of immanent openness oriented towards generation of new structures, properties, information. In a sustainable movement of the transfer to one condition to another between which there is no a clear border (understand-do not understand; know-do not know; etc.) and one is presented in another, thus stabilizing the civilized search for everyday experiences in the cultural component, transitiveness of the educational process is being displayed.

Transitive potentiality of education is defined as a ratio of correlation and intertransfer from possibility to the process of changing which connects the universal formation, evolution and change of the human being itself with teaching, upbringing and self-development. A metaphor which shows the content of the given concept is the image of transformation of a butterfly (from caterpillar to chrysalis and then to butterfly). Transitive potentiality means the unity of ‘this and other’ and in the field of education is a potential actuality, essential property of education which characterizes it as a permanent, continued change of the inner social-cognitive and individual-personal status of a personality by means of acquiring knowledge and skills. The principle of transitive potentiality does not include contraposition of active and passive bases, internal or external; cause and effect, but it includes actualization of nearness and environments where the person is really interweaved with (transfer from one to another). Transitivity regarded as a transfer of properties from one to another, their interconnection, bifunction (this and that) is displayed in education by the fact that knowledge acquirement, development of skills, training and strengthening of all this fosters a person to demonstrate his/her potential which results in activity oriented towards the establishment of novelty.

The principle of duality of structures and objects allows understanding the real functionality of education. The process of their change is expressed in realization and merging of potencies. Their interaction leads simultaneously both to reproduction and renewal of structural properties and standards of subjects. Substance of antipode synthesis – bifunctional combinations – is not a fight of antipodes but mere a step to a birth, beginning of the third substance which supplements the two others. Specific configurations of person’s activity which serve as ascension steps to meta-empiric practical aim, the highest spiritual state achieve strength and stability in educational experiences in case of junction of different level energies of the human being organization. One of the key properties of education as an anthropogenic factor is that that it is neither purely intellectual nor emotional one, but it always has some ‘thought sensible complex’ in which thinkable, emotional and sensible-perceptive components are tightly conjunct, i.e. ‘anthropologic full size’.

Being the internal process of the development of human abilities education can not come to its end. It is the continuing self-increasing process of transitive transformation of human potential. Education as the process of becoming another one, it is not only a translation of knowledge but also a sensation of individual existential of the person that is supported by the history of civilized modernizations of educational experiences connected with the search for resources of person who is able to live and act within new conditions. That is why the system of educational activity must be oriented towards the human formation who is able to a deliberate self-development, who is the subject of the nature, society, his/her own development, who creatively masters value orientations which are his/her activity and behavior basis. Even ancient thinkers stated that being educated will become the instinctive need alike to feed the body. The more clear and fuller the world united with the individual is the more probably the individual can become of its own. This understanding actualized the demand for education not only in the capacity of the environment which nurtures a personality but also potential included in the system of regenerating existence of a personality.

The process of creation and functioning of the contemporary context of education should be defined by the initial system of senses and meanings of education in the life of a person and the society. Today the model of education ‘shaped, created, formed’ is substituted by the model which ‘reveals and opens up’ the human essence, when the destination of the educational system becomes the forward and conditioned forming and formation of culture examples but not just their reproduction.