Nature and essential characteristics of classical rationality

Abstract

The 20th century began under the sign of deconstruction of the classical comprehension of substantiality of history, culture and mind. It turned out that each culture has its unique worldview universals and a conclusion has been made that there is a principal difference between classical and modern cultural worlds, and in the rationalities characteristic to them. In the article, based on V. Stepin’s conception of scientific rationality, the essential characteristics of the classical mind, which possess heuristic potentials when comparing pre-modern and modern rationality, are explicated. In particular, the ontologism of the pre-modern mind has been distinguished and substantiated based on historical and philosophical material — rootedness in being, only partially related to man; its hierarchy is the dependence of cognitive possibilities on the ontological level of the entities opening to the mind; and the transcendence is the fundamental incomprehensibility of the bases and “guarantors” of the mind and the world for the mind itself. Within the framework of the classical mind, archetypical principles of Western rationality were formulated as such, some of which, after the secularization of medieval culture, became the principle of organizing secular social reality, which ultimately led to the emergence of a new social reality, later called Modernism.