Technological Content of Religion: Statement of the Problem
Evgeny NagornovThe subject of this article is the ideological proximity of religion and technology in culture. The author examines the dialectical interaction of the cultural worlds of religion and technology, compares the religious and technological worldviews, explores the typology of religious and technological subjects. Special attention is paid to the representation of the interaction of religion and technology in the European history of ideas, as well as the ontological status of thinking in the cultural practices of religion and technology. A special contribution of the author in the study of the topic is the search for new methodological approaches to the conceptualization of the interaction of religion and technology. On the basis of the dialectical, comparative historical, genealogical, structuralist methods, the study revealed that religion, like technology, in its historical formation is repelled not from thinking, not from the hidden truth of being, but from the activist will of its subjects. That is, they rely not on the revelation of being, but on its doing, on its further transformation. Hence, the main problem of the research lies in the cultural analysis of the mental installations of technological and religious subjects; in the analysis of the status of thinking in their subjective practices; in the consideration of their value attitudes. In addition, the work extended the popular instrumentalist understanding of technology to a separate activist value outlook. The author rejects the quantitative average material measurement of the technology in favor of its qualitative ideological measurement. As a result of the analysis of different methodological approaches and concepts, it is possible to establish a certain ideological proximity between the cultural worlds of religion and technology, as well as between their actors. The main conclusions of the conducted research are: 1) the research gives reasonable examples of historical and culturological comparativistics of the named objects from the European history of ideas and modern philosophy of technology; 2) it reveals the similarity of values of religious and technological subjects, expressed in the rejection of thinking and being, characteristic of the substantialist worldview of antiquity. The novelty of the research lies in expanding the problems of studying religious phenomena, in developing new views on the theory of the origin of religion.