To problem statement

SECULARIZATION has two main components - ideological and pragmatic. The ideological component of secularization consists in the fact that, unlike the old, pre-secular world, which was permeated with religion, a new world is coming, gradually freeing itself from religion as a kind of "obsession" ("disenchantment" of the world, according to Weber). The philosophical basis of secular ideology (secularism) is the idea that the world is essentially completely worldly, immanent, that is, closed to itself. From this point of view, any idea of the transcendent is something premeditated, added and therefore artificial, whereas the reality of the world as such is natural, natural, and in this sense for a person it is simply a given with which he must deal (without any reference to the other beyond). Accordingly, if the world-cosmos does not have any "second floor", any other dimensions that are not given in direct experience (namely, such dimensions are usually indicated by religion), then the world-society should be fundamentally irreligious by nature, that is, its artificiality, "made" should not be it is connected with religious meanings. The main ideological basis of secularization is the idea of the secular as such, that is, of a semantic space that is completely free from the religious - as superfluous.

As a consequence, the pragmatic component of secularization consists in organizing social life in accordance with its immanent, autonomous laws and rules. The world-society is understood in this case as a set of specialized, "professional" areas of life that interact in one social field, but at the same time preserve the same social structure.-

page 52
They have their own internal conformity to the law (which is called functional differentiation). In this picture of an internally differentiated sociocultural whole, there is also a place for religion, which is assigned a special area-along with other areas (say, art or politics). In principle, religion is not banned or even repressed. Religion is localized according to the general law of socio-cultural differentiation, which does not deprive it of the opportunity to interact with other autonomous sectors of life. At the same time, being only one of the sectors of the circle of social life, it turns out to be isolated, that is, enclosed in the framework of its own specifics, and therefore it can no longer penetrate into other sectors in order to impose itself on them as an obligatory dimension of the corresponding life activity. The world-society as a whole is secular, that is, fundamentally irreligious.

It is quite obvious that in the process of secularization, a certain concept or model of religion arises. This is a fundamentally new concept that did not exist and could not exist in pre-secular societies and cultures, where religion is not isolated, that is, not separated from other socio-cultural phenomena, but is diffusely connected with them, so that these other phenomena necessarily have a certain religious dimension. The penetration of religion into all aspects of social and individual life in a pre-secular context hardly needs special justification - this is well known from history 1. On the contrary, this is evidenced by secularization itself, as a process of gradual liberation of various and then practically all subsystems of society from religious guardianship and at the same time separating religion into a strictly defined area of "purely religious" life and activities of individuals and their private communities.

Therefore, we can talk about two "models" of religion - pre-secular and secular, which are mutually exclusive. Historically (in the European cultural context) the replacement of a hundred-

1. Everything that, from the New European secularist point of view, is considered in pre-secular cultures as "non-religious", "profane" (for example, some economic, aesthetic and even political texts that supposedly reflect the existence of special spheres of life, including intellectual activity, "free from religion"), existed within the general framework of religious education. This is why it was somehow included in the "religious".

page 53
the swarm of the model to a new one was accompanied by a struggle: secularism advanced, increasing its onslaught, and religion fiercely resisted - until it was forced to accept the new state of affairs. This "humility" was both pragmatic and ideological, but it was precisely humility, since the new concept of religion imposed on it by secularism, that is, from the outside, could in no way be reconciled with the long religious traditions that were formed and flourished in the pre-secular era. Examples of such" reconciliation "from a religious point of view (say, in the spirit of Bonhoeffer's" irreligious Christianity "or" theology of the death of God", to mention only extreme examples) today should be recognized only as special cases of self-determination of religion in the secular context of the XX century, which in no way cover the entire religious field.

There is, however, an approach that, on the one hand, obscures the problem of incompatibility between the two models of religion, and on the other, can help to clarify it: this is a statement of the general question of the relationship between the religious and the secular.

This is an insidious question. Because if it is put not in concrete historical terms, but in general theoretical terms, then its very statement already explains a lot, since it is assumed a priori that the secular as such has always existed, that the secular has some eternal and universal "essence". The consequence of this is an equally a priori notion that the second term - religious - also denotes a special "entity" that is separate from the secular one and is not positive or opposite to it. As a result, there is a fundamental and universal scheme of culture ("of all times and peoples"), in which two elements of different natures are co-present. These elements can somehow relate to each other and even interact, but at the same time, like water and oil, they do not mix. Thus, in the very formulation of the abstract-theoretical question of the relationship between the secular and the religious, the secular concept of religion, briefly described above, is already embedded.

The second insidiousness is that the truth of this theoretical scheme is usually justified by concrete historical examples from the distant pre-secular past-examples designed to indicate that "ancient man", in addition to the sacred sphere, lived in a profane, "natural"space

page 54
a life that was basically no different from the life of a modern person of the secular era. Here, the secularist logic is as follows: religion / the religious always exists as something identifiable in its quality, as distinct from what is not properly religious; even in pre-modern, pre-secular societies and cultures, for example, one can distinguish between religious and non-religious authority, but if they sometimes combine in one person, it is precisely this compound dissimilar 2.

The problem, however, is that for all their persuasiveness, these kinds of arguments don't prove anything. More precisely, they can prove exactly the opposite, depending on what model of religion is assumed. If this is a secular separation model, then the kissing of the cross by an ancient Russian prince in two different situations will prove the diversity of the religious and secular. If this is a pre-secular, diffuse model of religion, the same example would suggest the opposite: power and politics were then inseparable from religion. In other words, historical examples are not arguments in themselves, but by virtue of interpretation within the general understanding of religion.

At the same time, the above statement of the question (about the theoretical correlation between religious and secular), as well as the examples given that reflect this statement of the question, are quite appropriate and useful, since otherwise it is impossible to deal with the incompatibility of the two models of religion discussed. But you can understand it on one condition: if you keep in mind what is meant by "religious".

According to the secular understanding, religion is one of the areas of art, a specific product of cultural creativity, something fictitious, a "charm" that envelops the life activity of a person and society that is naturally secular in its essence. And if this spell is "lifted", it remains "just being-in-the-world" (In-der-Weltsein). Accordingly, you can retrospectively remove the religious spell, say, from ancient politics - and then there will be "just politics" (in relation to the above example-just feudal fragmentation

2. Examples of such secularist logic: the Pope, the Caliph, the Montenegrin Ruler. Or another example: the same action - kissing the cross by an ancient Russian prince-allegedly had different meanings: actually religious, when the prince kissed the cross after the liturgy, and essentially secular, when it was a political gesture, a sign of reconciliation between the principalities.

page 55
and princely feuds, which should be distinguished from the additional "religious" aspect).

However, you can look at it from the other side. For example, from the point of view of what is called a worldview in a secular context - in relation to ancient actors, both "secular" and "religious". Everyone's worldview at that time was religious (there was no other or was a hidden exception), which means that the source of political power was God, who was transcendent to the world. Therefore, the distinction between secular power and religious (ecclesiastical) power proper was not essential, but hierarchically functional-within the religious understanding of power as such.3
Thus, in the pre - secular era, it is simply impossible to separate the religious from the secular (in this case, in the sphere of power and politics) according to the secular separation model: religion is fundamentally diffuse there-despite the fact that there is an area, so to speak, of the purely religious (for example, worship).

But here a legitimate question arises: if it was "purely religious" at that time, then how can it be distinguished, and to distinguish it means to correlate it with something else that is not purely religious? Otherwise, in a pre-secular culture, we will not be able to distinguish between "religion" at all, and therefore we will not be able to talk about what was allocated to a special area in the process of secularization.

This puts us in a very specific situation. In order to answer the modern question of the relationship between religious and secular, we cannot ignore the modern, i.e. secular, formulation of this question; and at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that the secular formulation, defined by the secular concept of religion, is irrelevant to the pre-secular reality of religion, and therefore distorts religion itself with its centuries-old history. by history. In other words, we have to answer another question: what is religion really; give it an adequate definition.

The problem, however, is that in the pre-secular history of religion (in this case, we are talking about Christianity, since it is in the European-Christian context that the origin of religion is considered to be the same).-

3. This made it possible to build different configurations, but essentially uniform schemes for the relationship of authorities: on the one hand, the power of the pope over the emperor, on the other, for example, the continuum of power in Joseph Volotsky: God-tsar-bishops.

page 56
we will not find a definition of religion that meets the modern, scientific requirements for the definition. After all, to define a phenomenon means to isolate it, to make it an object of knowledge, separating it from other phenomena, and through comparison with other phenomena to reveal its specifics or a special " essence "that differs from the" essences " of other phenomena. For example, to define religion proper, it is necessary to separate it from other sectors of the differentiated social whole - in particular, from politics. But how can we separate pre-secular religion from politics? For example, early Christians were fundamentally law-abiding and at the same time refused to perform certain legally defined state ceremonies - even to the point of martyrdom: there is a clear mix of religious and political. Or another example: later both "commandments" were religious: "Honor God as the King of heaven" and "honor the king as the servant of God on earth." In general, the Christianization of the ancient pagan world belongs simultaneously to the history of religion and politics, to the history of ideas and the history of everyday life.

One can, of course, point to doctrinal dogmas, the church hierarchy, acts of worship, the practice of prayer, and the corresponding psychological experiences (which will reproduce the traditional secular-religious approach to religion) as strictly religious, or "purely religious". But since in the pre-secular era all these religious elements were part of the total life activity of the individual and society, such a separation of individual elements will not be a definition of the object or phenomenon that needs to be defined, but a distortion of the actual role of religion in life and culture. The distortion that occurs when the modern secular model of religion is used as an optical tool in the study and description of religion in the pre-secular era.

There is only one way out of this situation: creating a new concept or model of religion, which, based on the above, will be post-secular. This concept should take into account the real pre-secular history of religion and at the same time contrast with the model of religion that was constructed in the process of secularization, in accordance with its ideological and pragmatic aspects. In other words, a new post-secular model

page 57
religion involves the conceptualization of a pre-secular religion / religious against the background of a polemic with the concept of secular.

The secular approach (religious studies and sociology) to the description and definition of modern religion is based on the idea of a special "religious area", which in turn is also differentiated. In the social space, this area includes voluntary religious association of citizens; in the individual space - religious psychology; in the performative space - religious cult; in the ideological space-religious worldview. That is, the religious is marked as a specific life activity, as a subclass in the class, respectively, of voluntary associations, psychology, performances, and worldviews in general. The religious is added everywhere, because it is understood as redundant in relation to the natural-secular. Together, religion is presented as a complex of these religiomorphic manifestations of individual and social activity with the corresponding infrastructure-a complex that forms one of the social subsystems, or sectors of the socio-cultural whole. This approach is further extended to a pre-secular (or non-secular) culture, in which the religious is interpreted as a specific "vestment" of the naturally secular, which has not yet been freed from religious tutelage.

In a pre-secular culture, on the contrary, what can be called natural-religious corresponds to natural-secular. There, religiosity is a self-evident, "natural" state of the individual and society, and, as a rule, it is only about the truth or falsity of religion, about its universal (Christianity, Islam) or local nature, about one's own religion or someone else's ("paganism" is the religion of" languages", that is, individual religions). tribes and peoples). Therefore, in pre-secular culture-unlike modern secular religious studies - there is no concept of "religion in general", but there is true or false worship of one's own gods or those of others; in this sense, false worship or performance of other people's rituals is not a "religion" at all, but a rejection of religion, a religious betrayal.

Thus, when applied to religion, we are dealing with two completely different ideas about "natural" and what can be added to the natural as a matter of course.

page 58
If we take into account both pre-secular and secular ideas about the religious, we can offer this view of the relationship between the religious and the non-religious (secular): they represent the two poles of individual and social existence. And then "natural" will be the combined life activity of "man and people", which takes place in the ideological and pragmatic field of tension between these two poles of culture - religious and secular.

The religious pole forms the proper religious ("purely religious"), which is easily recognized in almost all cultures. And the opposite secular pole is pragmatically this - worldly, that which is connected with the very process of life and survival; in other words, it is conatus, or "biological" as precultural in the logical sense. Accordingly, if we are talking about culture (in the most general sense), then it is defined, on the one hand, by the religious pole (or quasi - religious, as discussed below), and on the other hand, by the opposite "biological" pole.

And here we need to speak about the intuitive truth that is present in the secular model of religion and culture. By defining a special sector for religion in the circle of individual and social life, the proponents of this model thereby abandoned the absolutization of the secular (secular) as such. Even if this happened for specific historical and pragmatic reasons, the result turned out to be just that. The modern philosophy of the secular was not thought out consistently and completely. The specificity of the religious was not rejected, but, on the contrary, recognized and confirmed - precisely within the framework of the secular concept of religion as something that has its own, separate, own "essence", which nothing can replace. And this truth has not only a pragmatic, but also an ideological dimension, since it is connected with the liberal idea of freedom of choice, including ideological choice, as an inalienable right of the individual.

At the same time, this is, so to speak, a side truth, in a certain sense accidental. Secularism as an ideology (and "philosophy"), of course, implies the complete disappearance of religion, the complete "disenchantment" of the world, the liberation of man and humanity from all kinds of charms, and above all religious ones. And the principle of freedom of religion in this case is connected not with the content of religious choice, but with the pathos of nonviolence, since,

page 59
according to the ideology of modernity, it is possible to know and understand the world as it is known and understood by secularism, that is, in its natural-secular quality, only by "freely" recognizing the natural as natural, accepting the self-sufficiency of the natural as the truth-the truth of the world itself. Violence is simply inappropriate here, because this truth-the truth is revealed as evidence, is a kind of" revelation", later confirmed by experience. And revelation can be violence only in the sense of violence of fact, of the true state of things.

From a logical (semantic) point of view, religion deals with the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man. But secularism, as an ideology that displaces religion from the socio-cultural universe, is concerned not only with removing religious enchantments from culture, but also, as a result, creating a situation in which some other, non-religious, i.e. secular, cultural instances are called upon and even have to deal with the question of the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man. These are the post-theological spheres of knowledge and thought: secular philosophy and secular science (and indirectly - "secular" literature and art in their logical dimension). In other words, by pushing religion into its assigned domain, secularism leaves essentially religious issues at the mercy of non-religious (by definition) areas of the socio-cultural universe.

In this case, secularism acts as a substitute for religion-and thus reveals its quasi-religious dimension. In the new secular reality, secularism turns out to be the opposite pole to the "biological" pole, that is, the logically precultural pole of life, and in this capacity it turns out to be as diffuse as religion in the pre-secular situation: it permeates everything, that is, all sectors of a functionally differentiated socio-cultural whole. In short, it takes over the old functions of religion in a new post-religious culture.

To avoid misunderstandings, it should be repeated: secularist secularism does not destroy religion, does not banish it absolutely, and does not replace it (the exception that confirms the rule is strict secularist regimes of the atheistic type). Moreover, secularism as an ideology and practice (of secularization) not only allows, but also logically presupposes, contact and interchange between sectors of secular culture.

page 60
literature/art and religion or philosophy and religion - not only retrospectively, but also up-to-date. The religious can permeate other cultural areas, but not diffusely, that is, without penetrating them in such a way as to define them logically. These other areas remain autonomous and fundamentally secular. Religion in this case acts only as a "co-questionnaire" and as "old cultural material", and not as a socio-cultural pole.

This is an important corollary. Religion is the pole of culture. But when a quasi - religious secularist instance appears alongside the actual religious instance, the "religious pole" is bifurcated. In a secular culture, the religious function (in the sense of one of its poles) is performed simultaneously by religion as such (which in its "pure" quality arises precisely in this culture), and by secular ideologies/practices (as substitutes for religion in a totally secular world).

Here we come to an important point that needs to be emphasized: paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the "theory and practice" of secularism that sheds light - in a still inertially secular era - on pre-secular religion.

In contrast to the " secular "that is recognized in pre-secular culture and which should be identified with the pole of the"biological"/" pragmatic "conatus, the modern secular functionally replaces the old religion, that is, typologically it is the" religious "pole of culture, that total-diffuse principle, which, even having a "material" expression (worldview and values), acts in culture as an all-pervading logical force that affects the entire field of tension between the poles, the entire socio-cultural universe. This principle is universal, but "disembodied", because it is only a quality conceptually attributed and prescribed to all cultural phenomena, with the exception of "religion proper".

Let us repeat the main thesis: religion / the religious is an obligatory pole of culture as a sphere of artificial, "made" (if viewed from a sociological point of view). This is the pole-in the sense of the "source" of ideas about the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man, which give rise to the corresponding practices, individual and social. Such a pole can be used not only by religions themselves, but also, for example, by ancient philosophies, which also performed religious functions.-

page 61
religious function (and represented a kind of proto-secularist phenomena-if viewed from the point of view of medieval European Christianity). But in any case, as a socio-cultural pole, a "religious place" is indestructible.

Secularism doubles this topos of the religious, but it doubles it asymmetrically, so to speak, because religion itself (with its inherent totality and diffuseness) leaves a limited area of the social subsystem (at best), and assigns to itself a universal, all-defining quasi-religious meaning4.

The quasi-religious (in the sense of the second functional religious pole) "essence" of secularism is particularly evident in the secular understanding of public and private, or public and private. In short, we can say that in this case secularism leads to a paradoxical universalization of the private. In a pre-secular context, the private is linked to the public, just as one side of a coin is linked to the other. In the secular context, the unit of the private is the individual as an "individual", which, although it is necessarily turned towards the public, still retains its fundamental autonomy.5
Here we are again confronted with the concession to religion that secularism makes. If the fundamental value and social primary element is the individual as an autonomous subject of life activity, then the religious topos/pole itself is not repressed in any way: in the space of the individual's "life world", the influence of the religious one is left completely free. But it is left only "on one side of the coin". The other, "public" side of the coin is entirely in the sphere of secular quasi-religion, since the public is "cleansed" from the religious (this is indicated by the term "secular society"), and therefore "public" as a general one is a cumulative effect of the interaction of individual-private units taken in their "external" projection in the world. a fundamentally secular space.

4. And, let's say, theoretically and practically pushed to the limit, the Albanian secularism of the communist era achieved only the displacement of religion into the "social subconscious".

5. Perhaps this is the "man" who, according to Foucault, was invented relatively recently, but is now dead or dying...

page 62
Thus, the universalization of the private as an individual is a way of separating two functionally religious poles: an individual facing away from the public can freely use the actual religious pole of his life, but when he also turns towards the public, he finds himself in a different field of tension between the two poles - "religious" and "secular", and when he turns away from the public, he finds himself in a different field of tension between the two poles - "religious" and "secular". here, secularism is the religious pole.

The instrument of such dilution is "human rights", which include - both historically and in the sense of "nomenclature" - the fundamental right to freedom of religious belief as freedom of individual conscience (the right of a "private" individual to accept and share with others any answers to the question of the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man). In other words, the universalization of the private means the denial of universality to substantive (supra-individual) values and the transfer of universality to instrumental (or procedural) values, which are both individual and universal.

This is a very important point. It is directly related to the qualification of secularism as a quasi-religion-not only in the functional sense, but also in the content sense.

Privatization-in the sense of transferring to the competence of the individual and groups/communities of individuals the sphere of searching and finding answers to typologically religious (or religious - philosophical) questions about the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man (answers that give rise to certain practices)-means the fundamental refusal of secularism from any meaningful answers to such questions. It is precisely this refusal that should indicate (at first glance) the secularism of secularism as a meaningful neutrality (so to speak, an era), that is, that it does not impose any general worldview, but, on the contrary, creates conditions for the existence of different and many worldviews - within the framework of a legitimate individual-private and individual-private one- group creativity/commitment. That is, secularism acts as a fundamentally instrumental ideology, as a universal procedure, the purpose of which is primarily to remove and prevent the conflict of specific worldviews. And this should mean that secularism itself has nothing to do with the worldview as a taco.-

page 63
secondly, secularism is, so to speak, entirely procedural, and therefore its universalism is not content, but rather instrumental universalism.

However, this is not the case. Because the procedure, by definition, involves working with some kind of content, "material"-in fact, this is what it is needed for. A procedure is a formalism, and it is universal precisely in the "formalistic" sense. Meaningful universalism is on a completely different plane from procedural universalism. However, if procedure as such is the only manifestation of universalism, as in the case of modern secularism, then this means the repression of universal contents as such. Insisting on its ideological neutrality, secularism acts as a fundamentally content-free ideology, just like a "toolbox". But this in itself tells us something about secularism, which, as we have seen, actually acts as a functional substitute for religion - as a generator of implicit answers to questions about the existential foundations of the world and man.

The supposed and / or proclaimed instrumentality of secularism is imaginary precisely because it emphasizes its procedural nature in a situation where there is no common content and can no longer be: all worldviews, including religious ones, as well as philosophical ones, are by definition private, private, and have no general cultural significance. But if instrumentality does not have a meaningful"material" referent, instrumentality itself ceases to be such. This means that such a" solitary " or self-sufficient instrumentality must have a hidden, implicit content referent. For the idea of an instrument without material is an absurd idea.

The" material " of secularist instrumentalism, which acts under the guise of neutrality, is a concrete worldview that presupposes certain answers to questions about the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man. And the fact that secularism avoids articulating its worldview forces us to reconstruct this worldview.

Specific secularists may refer to their worldview as "humanism" (in various versions). But secularism as a quasi-religious ideology accumulating the "views" of various specific secularists, as well as various effects

page 64
already a long process of secularization, not identical with the New European "humanistic worldviews" (some of which were not extra -, anti -, or inter-religious).

When we speak of a" secularist worldview", we mean precisely a certain cumulative implicit worldview as the ideological dominant of secular culture as a whole - that is, the culture whose poles are quasi-religious secularism and eternal secular pragmatic conatus. Such a cumulative and at the same time socially dominant worldview is in direct contradiction with the secularist understanding of legitimate private worldviews. Here we are faced with a very important "pain point" of secularism, which simultaneously reveals its quasi-religious nature. In the secularist perspective, "legitimate" worldviews are always private, that is, fundamentally limited in terms of their general/social significance. But the worldview that can be distinguished as the background, as the content-ideological basis of secularism itself , is a typologically religious worldview, so to speak, "conciliar", which has authority not by virtue of "pure logic" or compliance with some formal power-ideological procedures, but precisely by virtue of the realdominance in the general socio-cultural space (which is functionally almost identical to the dominance of religion itself in the conditions of the "old cultural regime").

What is the essence of this hidden secularist worldview, this Deus absconditus of secularism? Its essence is to elevate the self-sufficiency, or immanence, of the world and man to the rank of a typologically religious truth. This is precisely what is associated with: (1) the absolutization of the present being-presence of a person-individual, and, as a logical consequence, (2) the absolutization of the procedurality of this being-presence.

Secularism is a "religion" insofar as it acts in the general/public space as a substitute for religion proper (which is already enclosed in a separate and autonomous area), it answers - directly or indirectly, through different instances representing different sectors of the secular socio - cultural whole-to questions about the ultimate existential foundations of the world and man, and, as a result, the question of the ultimate existence of the as a consequence, it forms and enforces (as a hegemon) individual and social practices corresponding to these answers-from domestic to poly-

page 65
technical specifications. His answer is: there is no "God" except the present existence given to us in sensations, in direct, spontaneous experience. Accordingly, prophecies about this "secular God" can only be recommendations concerning the effective pragmatics of existence in a one - dimensional world-with the use of appropriate tools.

The" religiosity "of secularism - that is, the religious function that it" consciously " (one might even say honestly and responsibly) accepted after the ghettoization of religion as such - consists in giving the present existence of the world and of man, including the human community, an ultimate, one might say quasi - transcendent, that is, metaphysical, logically transcendent meaning.

Here we are confronted with what can be called the philosophical naivete of secularism as an answer to the ultimate religious and philosophical questions. This naivety is connected with the problem of any immanentism, including atheism as an anti-religious ideology: the world as a real sphere of existence has logical boundaries; the boundaries of the world exist because infinity (infinity) it is absent from our present experience; accordingly, borders presuppose a foreignness; therefore, the rejection of the transcendent is a pseudo-solution of the question of the transcendent and immanent. The idea of immanence is possible only in conjunction with the idea of transcendence, and the emphasis on absolute immanence is also a metaphysical position that corresponds to a certain worldview.

A positive secular-scientific "picture of the world" does not remove the problem of the immanent and the transcendent, because this problem itself is "transcendent" to modern science, post-theological and, in a sense, post-philosophical. For philosophy cannot fail to deal with the problem of the transcendent, otherwise it becomes a "modern science". And the concrete psychology of "man and people", in turn, cannot but notice the mortal limit, which, contrary to any "theorems of reason", points to the problem of the being boundary.

Secularism, unlike religion itself, fundamentally distances itself from philosophy and ultimate questions. Here is an important difference between secularism as a quasi-religion and religion as such. Functioning in a modern context created by him as" religion", secularism, due to the fundamental rejection of content ("neutrality") in favor of instrumentalism-

page 66
ma ("pragmatic utility"), at the same time abandons a significant philosophical component. More precisely, as a philosophical component, he takes only social and political philosophy. And this is very significant: secularism works only with social pragmatics, that is, only with those segments of philosophical thought that deal with the immanent, this-worldly, without thematizing or problematizing, in essence, forbidden "religious and philosophical" issues. The conclusion is that secularism as a quasi-religion has fallen into a" religious " trap. By assuming in the modern "secular world" the function previously performed by the old religion, but at the same time logically honestly leaving religion as religion its special place, he himself created the conditions for the future transition to a "post-secular world" - a world in which religion will be ideologically and pragmatically restored to its rights (removed from the ghettoSecularism itself will be the object of critical analysis in terms of its functional and logical pseudo-religiosity. This includes ideological commitment, if not exposing, then at least calling into question the declared neutrality.

It is this logical mistake of secularism as an ideology and practice, secularism that doubled the religious pole when it offered itself as a religious substitute in the project of creating a non-religious future of humanity, that forces us today, after realizing this logical mistake of secularism, to look for a new concept of religion that is adequate to modern religious and social processes in various contexts-both local and international. so it was.

The basis of such a concept, in our opinion, can be the idea proposed here about the polarity of religion. This idea can be summarized as follows.

Sociologically, religion should be understood first of all as a socio-cultural pole; accordingly, the other pole represents a certain anti-religious or non-religious "beginning", which can be called secular. A pole as one of the "principles" that together with the other pole create a field of tension and, as a consequence, some dynamics, is not a "region", "space"or " domain". Therefore, the totality and diffuseness of religion should be understood as a consequence of its polusness: one of the poles of the voltage field acts on the field "totally".

page 67
as a pole, colliding and energetically interacting with the force-impact of the other pole. In other words, the entire field of tension is "permeated" (quite totally and diffusely) by "religious" on the one hand, and "secular" on the other hand as the opposite. What is important is that with this theoretical approach, the "secular" (not in the secularist sense) is not repressed in any way and there is no asymmetry. On the contrary, it turns out to be "eternal secular", since it is a necessary constitutive element of the dynamic structure of the cultural whole. But the "religious" is also not repressed, because the pole cannot be confined in a ghetto. This scheme is suitable for all cultural situations - both pre - and non-secular, as well as secular and post-secular.

The development and specification of the proposed conceptual approach requires further efforts and appropriate articulation.

page 68

Permanent link to this publication: