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The structure of social reality and its features in the post-secular era

10.08.2021
33659

Victor Levytskyy

After the tragic events of 9/11, J. Habermas was forced to state the fact of the emergence of a post-secular society in which secular and religious rationalities received equal status. The secular mind can no longer be considered the absolute basis for the interpretation of cultural meanings and is forced to accept the existence of alternative semantic universes. In the article, social reality is understood as an intersubjective system of meanings, which allows us to distinguish three levels of the structure of social reality: empirical, trans-cendent and transcendental. The empirical level is a form of the presence of the external world in sensuality,  the transcendental level captures the semantic appearance of social reality itself, and the trans-cendent  is embodied in its very ontological structure. Such a look at the structure of social reality allows us to highlight the characteristic features of the levels of social reality of a post-secular society, which include the immanence of the ultimate ontological meanings of the trans-cendent level, the conscious construction of meanings at the transcendental level and the absolutization of the significance of sensory experience at the empirical level.

Keywords: social reality, structure, meaning, postsecular society, social practices.

 

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