Reference:
Balagushkin, Yu. E..
Human in the System of Interactions
of the Three Metacultures
// Philosophy and Culture. – 2014. – № 10.
– P. 1519-1520.
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Abstract: This is the afterword to the translation of the article written by an American sociologist and cultural philosopher
Edward Tiryakian ‘Three metacultures of modernity: Cristian, Gnostic, Chthonic’. The author of the afterword
analyzes views of an American scientist on the role of religion in a modern society. He also provides an insight into the
content and problem points of his concept of three metacultures and discusses functional features of religious metacultures
of Christianity, Gnosticism and Paganism, relations of ‘unorthodox’ religious views to the Orthodox Christian
metaculture that caused internal contradictions in the Western civilization and made it susceptible to changes.
The author analyzes philosophical and anthropological aspects of Edward Tiryakian’s concept. According to Edward
Tiryakian, dynamics and variety of different cultures I a modern society should be viewed from the point of view the
cultural-historical, functional-conceptual and structural-analytical approaches. Based on the author of the present
article, the concept of three metacultures offered by Edward Tiryakian has certain limits because it does not take
into account all the variety of religious and cultural movements (in particular, Manichaeism and Hermeticism) and
completely ignores the secular culture with all its natural scientific, social and historical elements. Tiryakian’s analysis
of three metacultures is clearly based on philosophical and anthropological grounds. Accordig to Tiryakian, human is
an element of the socio-cultural structure and actor of the socio-cultural development, this is the peculiarity of his
dual nature when the physical is accompanied with the social. Culturalization has the main meaning for formation
and development of human nature. Accompanied by the process of socialization, culturalization creates the two main
aspects of the secondary, social-historical nature of human, but at the same time it has an essential impact on the
primary, physical nature of human. Under the influence of the socio-cultural environment, particular manifestations
of human physicality appear. An individual identifies himself with a particular metaculture and at the same time gets
involved into contradictory relations between different metacultures.
Keywords: Edward Tiryakian, society of post-modern, metaculture, Christianity, Gnosticism, paganism, unorthodox religious views, human nature, culturalization, identification.
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