Page 157 - Contribution To Phenomenology

150 ALGIS MICKUNAS

exhausted, it switches to the other and thus redynamizes the cultural
process.
It is peculiar that Sorokin would regard the latter process to be
normal, while other cultural designs as abnormal. The distinct features of
other cultures are modes of deviation from the dynamics of the West. It
seems that Sorokin overstates his case by accepting a modern awareness
of the West as the standard. Even the classical Greeks maintained a very
close intertwining between these two modes of awareness. This can as
well be said of various Medieval periods. Thus it is apparent that some
Oriental and Mid-Eastern modes of awareness are similar to some of the
Western modes. An important question is which among these modifica-
tions would yield frameworks for processes in search of national identities
and their abihty to incorporate the modernizing trends?
While Sorokin seems to be restricted to a mode of awareness most
appropriate to Western modernity, he leaves a basic issue concerning
awareness unattended. What is it in the Western consciousness that
prompts the shifts from one to another mode of symbolic design, and
what is there elsewhere that would prevent such oscillations? The
problem is one of the constitution of crises. And this problem must point
to a possibility that if the Western culture is more dynamic, then it might
be that it has no means to absorb crises and may thus be led to a loss
of its own distinctness. Whether such a loss may appear with moderniza-
tion is a question still to be addressed.
Another researcher who follows a binary, although somewhat more
elaborate structure of symbolic design, is Dumont. He claims that
complex cultures are distinguished by their dominant ideologies, composed
of a network of symbols that legitimate the relationship of an individual
to society in a hierarchical pattern.^ For him, the traditions in which the
individual is subject to a society are normal; the modern type in which
the individual is prior to, and is the origin of culture, is abnormal. The
reason for this claim is pragmatic: normalcy belongs to the type which
is best suited in preserving continuity and stability. As a result, an all-
encompassing ideology, which subordinates all power, must be at the top
of the hierarchy, while the lower, the praxis level, must keep power and
ideology separate. This separation varies: it may appear with a distinction
between priest and ruler, e.g., in India, or church and state, e.g., already

^ Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modem Ideology in Anthropological
Perspective (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).