Page 165 - Contribution To Phenomenology

158 ALGIS MICKUNAS

The modern West is more akin to the pragmatic attitude of traditional
China. If there is a transcending dimension in the modern West, it is
globalizing homogenization and not other-worldliness. In this sense, the
current West would have no direction and would thus be chaotic. Even
if we presume that earlier cultural designs were composed of binary
logic, we cannot regard such structures to be inherent in the contem-
porary modernistic processes. The latter compel current cultures toward
incessant readjustments and crises. Indeed, Gebser suggests that such a
binary logic only constitutes a mythological context dominated by polar
tensions; it cannot be adequate for modern dualisms of reason and
matter, since such dualisms are integrated in a technological magic of
production of both objects and subjects.
Weber is keenly aware of, and totally focused upon, what he regards
as a universalizing spread of the modernistic West. Since this spread
stems from a particular culture, it posts a threat to the identities of other
cultures. This spread could be called a logic of partial universality
claiming to be the sole universal cultural design and rationahty. It is to
be noted that this form of rationality—the instrumental—is not even
identical with the classical rationahty embodied in the concept of theoria.
Yet this universality, according to Weber, might affect social organiza-
tions of other cultures for the worse by imposing a rigid bureaucratic
uniformity which, in its all pervasiveness, becomes culturally anonymous
and inaccessible. For Weber this situation might compel cultural groups,
even in the modern West, to fall prey to new prophets or to aim at a
rebirth of archaic notions.^^ If there is postmodernity in Weber, it must
be a resurgence of traditional symbolic designs. Such resurgence has been
and is attempted around the globe across various efforts to infuse the
globahzing modernity with modes of transcending archaization.
It would be too simplistic to think, with Eisenstadt, that a current
secular modernity could be disrupted by the transcendent. Such efforts,
in various guises of fundamentalism, cannot avoid the globalizing language
of Western modernity. "Among fundamentalist circles in Iran, Egypt, and
elsewhere, a new Islamic poUtical language is emerging, which owes an
unacknowledged debt to the westernizers and secularists of the past

^^ Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 182.