Page 159 - Contribution To Phenomenology

152 ALOIS MICKUNAS

A critique of Weber is offered by Eisenstadt.^ He argues that Weber's
thesis is inadequate to encompass the complex cultural designs because
this thesis is basically sociological and fails to establish an all encompass-
ing theoretical format for the study of all cultures. For him, the latter
are processes that relieve continuously the tension between the transcen-
dent and the mundane regions. In this sense, he also operates with a
binary structure. Cultures exhibit various solutions to this tension: a
contemplation of an (other-worldly) transcendence that is characteristic
of Hinduism and Buddhism; mundane ethical action, apparent in Con-
fucianism and secularism; and the nexus between transcending and this-
worldly action. Thus in Islam there is a strong separation of military and
political practice from an ordered transcending orientation. Islam can
accept modernization in military and other practical spheres. A different
form of this nexus can be found in medieval Europe and early modernity,
present in the interconnection of two salvations: the Faustian and the
Promethean or the this-worldly and the other-worldly salvations.
Cultural symbolisms are invested with a power to transform a social
order. Yet the extent to which such a transformation occurs depends on
the direction taken by a social order, framed by the tension between the
transcending and the secular domains. Thus the social order may move
toward the transcending and contemplative, or to the this-worldly, toward
their separation, or their nexus. Regarded socially, such moves depend
on successive, symboUc separation of peripheral from central activities,
and vertical hierchization of social strata. Given this symboUc arrange-
ment there appear various possible alliances that can modify a culture
to yield a solution of this tension: socially, elites can form alliances
among themselves, e.g., the poUtical and the religious; religious elites
may ally with some segments of a gullible population, and ruhng elites
can join the bureaucratic technocracy, etc. How would these alhances
address modernization's problematic, primarily with respect to the tension
between the transcending and the worldly? Modernizations do not seem
to offer anything that is transcending. Indeed, the latter might appear as
postmodern factors in modernity and ethnic archaizations in nationalism.
The most complex articulation of cultural symbolic designs of
awareness is offered by Gebser.' Among historical and current cultures.

^ S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative
Study of Civilizations (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 322f.
^ Jean Gebser The Everpresent Origin, translated by N. Barstad and A. Mickunas