The Co-relational Community and Technological Culture

Abstract

Culture is the way man understands the whole of being, the way he interprets the universe and constructs his world. Hence, every new way of thinking - i.e., every new culture - requires forms of existence appropriate to it. A crisis, personal, social, or political, is the gap between the expectations of the dominant culture and the patterns of human action in the context of being-together. As the twentieth century draws to its close, a consideration of the premises on which Western culture has been founded for the last millennium and more can no longer be put off. It is imperative that the principles of social existence and the concepts of man’s essence be examined. For a long period there has been a continuous decline in the intensity of interpersonal relationships. The process of atomization in the social sphere has been accompanied by spiritual phenomena, by weakening of the desire to belong, by fear of loss of identity and freedom, by dissolution of bonds of commitment. The main trend today is to exist one by the side of the other, with minimal interrelationships, minimal norms of mutuality, and minimal obligations. This state of affairs grew out of conceptual preferences and has become a ruling aspiration. However, deep within these preferences and aspirations there lurks doubt as to their appropriateness to the structure or the human condition, to the demands of the rising technological culture.

This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August 1983; it gives the main outlines of chapters 5 and 6 of my‘Categories of Social Existence’ (forthcoming in English; Hebrew original, 1984).