Classic subjective constructs of reality and socio-cultural process
The article discusses the features of a modern type of philosophical and sociological mentality, the basis of which is still dominant in the social sciences by the spirit of positivism and criticism. Through the revision of theories from the past, modern scholars continue to analyze them within the framework of a natural-scientific ideological approach, which results in an attempt to audit the positivist paradigm in order to justify its applicability in today’s reality. Thus, any socio-philosophical problems that studies or regards sociology are still considered superficially, as if from the outside. Secularism imposed by the West and the spread of non-religious humanism led to the emergence of an entirely new type of thinking, based on the human belief in itself and clearly expressed skepticism in relation to the existence of higher meaning. The purpose of this article is to describe the key intentions of our age, which is developing in light of the above transformation of sociological and philosophical knowledge, as well as to analyze how a person of the postmodern era designs contemporary reality under the influence of such changes. The main problem of sociological knowledge has always been the impossibility of studying the object of knowledge without complete alienation from it, or, on the contrary, the impossibility of going beyond the researcher’s subjectivity. As a result sociology was given the status of the science that can only offer a description of the essence of human existence which is fragmentary, unfinished, and often based solely on an individual philosophical view of reality. “The theories of progress” advanced by sociology today continue to describe the social development in isolation from the axiological assessment of the nature of social change, denying the ability of the individual of self-reflection and the experience of transforming the foundations of existence.