Cosmological Methodological Prism of the Conceptual Demarcation of Culture and Civilization

Abstract

One of the most expressive definitions of philosophy equates it with the field of knowledge about meaningful demarcation of the semantic boundaries of objects, phenomena and trends. In this context, the conceptual distinction between culture and civilization is quite logical, natural, and even irreplaceable. Nevertheless, such a research and interpretive approach acquired fundamental features only at the beginning of the 20th century and mainly within the limits of the German worldview, semantic and axiological hierarchy. The remaining socio-cultural forms of worldview stylistics continued to prefer the symbiotic and synonymous interpretation of social reality’s cultural and civilizational components. The meaningful distinction between culture and civilization has a characteristic feature – a surge of further efforts in this direction is always a consequence of crisis trends in the global world order. In particular, this was the case at the beginning of the 20th century, when the exhaustion of the previous resources of civilizational development and the deepening of contradictions between the main centers of power caused by this factor led to a resolution in the form of the First World War. The second wave of careful attention to the meaningful demarcation of culture and civilization occurred in the 1930s when the tendency of the inability or unwillingness to resolve existing global contradictions led to the situation slipping into the maelstrom of the Second World War. Currently, there is an unequivocal awareness of the inappropriateness of the illusions associated with the global world order formed on the ruins of the Berlin Wall according to the patterns of neoliberalism. The world at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century feels confused about its inability to respond to the challenges of modernity convincingly and promptly. This state of affairs once again objectively and logically actualizes the interest in a meaningful demarcation of culture and civilization since it is precise with these tools that the answers to the crisis status quo and the prospects for overcoming it are connected. An important task for concretizing this research goal is the cosmological prism of the conceptual demarcation of culture and civilization.