War and current challenges to universal ethics (рart 2)

RETURN TO THE TOPIC: War as an ethical challenge

Abstract

The article aims to provide a methodological clarification of the concept of the world from a dual perspective: as a collective realm of human life activities and, at the same time, as the foundation of their particular ethical life. This requires, firstly, a transition from the widespread view of culture as the cultivation of progressive human qualities and the civilizing of human communities to an understanding of culture as a way of life. Secondly, it necessitates a shift in the perception of culture from an "external" anthropological standpoint of the observer and researcher to the position of a person belonging to a specific culture—experiencing culture from within. The author traces these changes through examples from the current discourse on war, linking the concepts of war and culture. Accordingly, the article discusses key definitions of culture (Terry Eagleton, Raymond Geuss), placing particular emphasis on the humanitarian tradition that views culture as a specific whole—a way of life for individual national communities, as initiated by Johann Gottfried Herder. This provides the author with a basis to speak about culture in terms of the world of culture and the multiplicity of cultural worlds. The reference to the concept of existential war—i.e., a war aimed at the destruction of a particular cultural whole—opens a perspective on seeing reality "from within" the being of a person in the world of a specific culture, highlighting the fear for the existence of that whole. In its turn it underscores the need to address the methodology of an existential-ontological understanding of the world of culture, as developed in Heidegger’s Being and Time, for the philosophical comprehension of the world of a particular, especially national, culture. With reference to Charles Taylor's interpretation of the existential nature of human being in the world (Dasein), the article traces the structure of Heidegger's systematization of key historical ideas of the world against the backdrop of his concept of ontological difference—from understanding the world as a totality of all that exists (entities) to raising the question of the existential meaning of the world as the integrity of human being, its "worldliness." As an example of applying existential analytics of human being in the world, the author highlights the reconstruction of Heidegger's ontology within political philosophy (De Sad) as, according to Heidegger himself, a "meta-ontology" for broader tasks of transforming philosophy, particularly ethics. In the conclusion, the author addresses Heidegger's clarification of the existential of worldliness in his Marburg lectures during the period of Being and Time, considering Plato's idea of the good as a potential methodological directive for clarifying the ontological foundations of ethical life in particular cultural worlds.