EVALUATION OF HETEROGENEOUS SOCIO-CULTURAL PHENOMENA AS CULTUROLOGICAL PROBLEM

The paradigm of cultural relativism appeared as an alternative of evolutionism in culturology in the middle of the 20 century. Cultural relativism admits that any culture has a right to be unique. But must this position be accepted without any exceptions or does it have some limits? For instance, what about such odious (in our view) elements of certain cultures as cannibalism and totalitarianism? Today it is a widespread tendency in philosophy to contrapose rationalism (declaring it the epistemological and ideological incarnation of authority and unification) and the pluralistic approach to personalities and local cultures. This position is typical for post-structuralism; and the foremost target for such accusations is classical rationalistic philosophy. On the other hand, ruthless criticism regarding post-structuralism and postmodernism is no less (and even more) widespread today; and it frequently comes along with the denial of tolerance per se on the plea of defending traditional, panhuman or supreme values. But is it really true that rationalism, scientific and philosophical objectivism are opposed to pluralism and cultural relativism? And is it really true that irrationalistic voluntarism is equal to the latter? Is it possible to find some objective approaches to evaluating heterogeneous cultural phenomena? Or all we can expect in this sphere is subjective preferences or appellations to some systems of beliefs and directives, which cannot be rationally grounded? Essentially, this is a question on the possibility of objective evaluation of values and norms since they express the phenomena of cultural diversity. Radical adherents of non-cognitivism usually extend it to a rather broad and dissimilar aggregate of phenomena - from immediate personal affects to state legal norms, from aesthetical preferences to ethical principles. Logic-semantic analysis of the categories value, norm and evaluation in this article allows concluding that, although the phenomenon of values has non-cognitive nature per se, objective evaluation of heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomena is possible, because the category human welfare, though relative in its concrete value realizations, can serve as the objective criterion for such evaluation from the viewpoint of humanism.

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