Category of mentality has additional heuristic capabilities as compared to traditional categories of the mental life. Firstly, it serves as an integral characteristic of the uniqueness of the man’s mental world, and secondly, gives an understanding of the specific type of perception of the world by the subject, thirdly, it explains the distinct way of subject’s activity – his behavior, communication, performance. Because the mentality determines the mode of activity of a social group or an individual; the human activity orientation and it’s specificity, so the mentality can be interpreted as a core for the group and personal culture, also as a strategic cultural program of the subject. One of the basic clashes of society has the form of a contradiction between the mentality, containing new cultural forms, and the social relations. In the course of the individual cultural creativity development as a response to the multiple challenges of history, new mental characteristics are generated in the mentality of the intellectual elite representatives. They represent innovative programs of human being activity – performance, behavior, communication. The new mental characteristics spread in society and become components of group mentalities. This accrued contradiction between the mass mentality and the old social relations generates a constructive tension; negotiation the tension through the reproductive activity of subjects can establish the more progressive social relations. Old elements of mentality, in turn, inherent social inertia and conservatism. They can obstruct the new social relations establishment. Therefore, mentality has the contradictory nature, embodying the dual opposition of tradition and innovation. In the same time mentality is a social progress stimulating factor, and a factor that holds back excessively large and excessively rapid social changes. There is a difference between the mentality of the creators of innovative cultural meanings and the mentality of the masses. In the mentality of the creators that make up the intelligent elite of the society, the innovational component is more intense than the traditional. In the mentality of the masses is vice versa - the traditional component dominates over the innovational. There are many driving motives of the society development: changes in a way of material production, in the culture in general and in education in particular, in engineering, in science. But the most significant force, apparently, displays the changes in mentality that generate new forms of reproductive activity of the subject in the economic, political, social and mental spheres.
mentality, culture, history challenges, socio-cultural tension, constructive tension, mentality functions, innovation and tradition
Категория менталитета, или ментальности, в советском обществознании не фигурировала. Познавательные и регулирующие функции духовного мира коллективного и индивидуального субъекта описывались и объяснялись посредством категорий общественного, группового, индивидуального, массового сознания, субъективной реальности, идеального, общественного настроения, общественной психологии, мировоззрения, идеологии. В сравнении с ними понятие менталитета обладает дополнительными эвристическими потенциями. Во-первых, оно служит интегральной характеристикой уникальности духовного мира человека, во-вторых, обеспечивает понимание особого способа восприятия субъектом мира и, в-третьих, дает объяснение специфического типа его активности — поведения, общения, деятельности.
Менталитет мы определяем как «возникшую на основе генотипа под влиянием природной и социальной среды и в результате собственного духовного творчества субъекта систему качественных и количественных социально-психологических особенностей человека или социальной общности; эта система детерминирует специфический характер восприятия мира, эмоционального реагирования, речи, поведения, деятельности, самоидентификации субъекта, обеспечивает единство и преемственность существования социальной общности, а также стимулирует социальный прогресс посредством продуцирования культурных новаций» [9, с. 24]. Учитывая эвристические возможности категории менталитета, некоторыми авторами менталистика справедливо рассматривается в качестве самостоятельного направления социальной науки [2]. Наиболее важным, но вместе с тем и наименее разработанным вопросом в менталистике и теории социокультурной динамики является вопрос о способах функционирования менталитета и его роли в социально-исторических процессах. Предложенный в статье вариант представляет собой социокультурную гипотезу функционирования менталитета. И как любая гипотеза она должна служить объектом критического рассмотрения.
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