The Specificity of the Substantiation of Social Phenomena in Fyodor Stepun's Philosophy of Culture

This article analyzes the specificity of the formation of social phenomena in Fyodor Stepun's philosophy of culture. The philosopher of the Russian Abroad developed an interpretation of culture as a sociocultural process, in which each person contributes to the development of culture. This concept of society was achieved in the axiology of the Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism by Wilhelm Win-delband and Heinrich Rickert. The axiological method allows one to understand reality as the opposition of an a priori value and a historical fact. Culture is an improvement of the realization of values, in the process of which all social communications are forming. Religion plays the role of a tool for the interaction of eternal values and historical development. Every person, by addressing transcendent reality, justifies freedom in his or her own life. The concept of norms in Windelband's philosophy is an expression of the super-experienced connection of a multitude of people, which allows one to focus on the meaning of eternal values. And religion allows each person to actualize the norm as a personal motive. Following Windelband, Stepun defines the functionality of religion in the constitution of society as a tool to justify the significance of a moral trajectory in the defining of the functionality of social phenomena. The concept of sobornost ("togetherness", "symphony") is most consistent with the task of substantiating the regulations of the life of an individual person, understood as part of a soci-ocultural phenomenon per se. People correlate their own lives with cultural development through sobornost, a tool for constant optimization of aspirations and interests, updating the assessment of their own lives and the lives of others. The justification of social phenomena as a result of the correlation of the ideas of European philosophy and Russian religious and philosophical thought made by Stepun is based on the controversy, which was formed in the intellectual environment of the Russian Abroad and which is expressed in the opposition of Western methodological individualism and the idea of sobor-nost from the Russian philosophical tradition. Stepun's solution hows the fundamental feasibility of the correlation of ideas proposed in European socio-philosophical constructions with conceptions of Russian religious philosophy.

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