AUC Philosophica et Historica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosophica et Historica) is a multidisciplinary academic journal focused on the humanities with more than 50 years of tradition.
The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, and EBSCO.
AUC PHILOSOPHICA ET HISTORICA, Vol 1992 No 2 (1992), 85–105
Moderní společnost a ekologický problém: solidarita a konflikt
[Modern Society and the Problem of Ecology: Solidarity and Conflict]
Oleg Suša
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24647055.2018.109
published online: 15. 01. 2018
abstract
The study is concerned with problems of the growth of ecological danger in modern society and its social consequences in the form of solidarity and conflict in the communication of two competing aspects: technical and ethical, institutional and evaluative. Sociology stands before the task of investigating the interaction of society and nature and of ecological problems as a social product of power-oriented, technological, economical and socio-cultural processes. In the first part some important culturally-historical connections of a dual conception of environment are analysed on the basis of a dualization of society and culture on one and nature on the other side. First of all there is shown the problematic side of the modern-day understanding of inter-action of human society with natural environment as regulated by technological-economical power structures and the deficient of ecological ethics in modern industrial society. The analysis of deeper socio-cultural context of a modem power pattern of a morally neutralized relation to natural environment is aimed at showing the context of the civilizing process of modernization and rationalization and a mechanistic concept of nature, society and man: that is the ambivalency of the rationalization of nature and society and its cumulative unintentional consequences. The need, possibilities and problems of the development of an alternative normatively „ocial control“ of the inter-action of the society and nature is pointed out, and the surpassing of the so far existing power metaphor of this inter-action in the context of a unification of the dual environment within a co-evolutionary expanded concept of membership in eco-systems. In its second part the study is concerned with the investigation of the phenomenon of environmentalism as an ideological and social movement in the context of modern ecological discourse of today, effecting pressures both toward solidarity and conflict in the solution and discussion of problems of confrontation of interests, needs and values of the society and the state and quality of natural environment: a discourse of fear of ecological risks influences solidarity and conflict in the reproduction of a strain between the values and institutions, legality and legitimity. The current growing significance of ecological problems in social, political and cultural context becomes an important argument in favour of a deeper and more intense sociological investigation.
