… by mind-set we
understand the sum total of deep-lying structures of meaning and behavior,
which, while inaccessible in principle on the level of reflection to the
individual or collective consciousness, are nevertheless always implied. These
structures, changing little over a long period of time (in the case of
mind-sets characteristic of a particular age or of nations or religious denominations,
etc., not infrequently for centuries) are quite amorphous and eroded and constitute
a meta-historical foundation for socio-cultural
history. They nurture the process of self-identity of a given form or species
of culture, in general, of any kind of spiritual community during the course of
its growth and development as a unity of value and meaning. This is the sum
total of constants which encompass life attitudes, principles, models of
behavior, emotions and moods and are based on deep-lying (to a large extent pre-reflective) areas of meaning (characteristic
of a given society, its social legacy and cultural tradition), and which, for
this reason, promote the systematic development of a national culture and
history and its growth and formation as a civilization. A sudden rupture and collapse
of a mind-set that has existed for centuries and that has borne in itself the
energy and life force (vitality) of this or that culture, of an entire
civilization, leads such a culture and civilization, apparently, to a serious
and profound crisis, and, in the final analysis, to a breakdown, to national
catastrophe, to its death as a civilization. In any case, no great civilization
(
The
concept of a "mind-set", A. Gurevich correctly asserts, is to a large
extent interchangeable with the concept of "world view", with the
sole difference that a world view is to a significant extent a conscious
notion, set in concrete works of culture, in a specific ideology (compare such
widely circulated concepts as a "scientific world view", a
"religious world view", an "artistic world view", and so
on), while a mind-set is not fixed or defined by the conscious mind. Instead of
being formulated discursively, it is to a much larger extent experienced (with
one's emotions, with one's feelings) and manifests itself (in behavior, in spontaneous
action). As a rule, no ordinary person would know what to say if asked about
his/her world view nor could such a person explain his/her conduct or behavior
or perception of the world. Meanwhile, it is precisely his mind-set which
includes in itself the most general notions, those which change least from
generation to generation: notions of time and space and their
interrelationships, notions of good and evil, notions of freedom and equality,
of law and norm, of work and leisure, of family and sexual relations, of the
course of history and of national distinctiveness, of the interrelationship of
old and new, of life and death, of immortality and God, of the individual and
his relationship to the social body, including the state, society, the
authorities, the collective, the nation.
A
mind-set embodies that which serves as the basis for the conscious and subconscious,
for the logical and rational and the emotional and intuitive, for thought and
behavior, for faith and for a way of life, for the social and the individual, for
the theoretical and the practical, for routine existence and for the
unrepeatable, unique work of art, for the historical and for the contemporary, for
the changeable and the unchanging -- in a particular era, in an ethnic group,
in the nation, in the church, in civil society, in a type of activity, in culture
or civilization. It is precisely the extremely
generalized nature of the content of a given national culture -- a content
that cannot be cast into conceptual or concrete imagistic forms -- which makes
it impossible for the bearers of this culture to either comprehend or
articulate it. Its abstractness can be expressed only in conventional metaphors
or associations or perceived intuitively and providentially (as something sent
down from above, as destiny, as a historical mission, as a gift from God or, in
the case of a crisis, as historical abandonment, as fate, as moral-spiritual
exhaustion, as desertion by God).