Since the end of the twentieth century, the debate around universalism has intensified. Against the claims of universal knowledge made in the name of Christianity, Western rationality, feminism, critiques of racism, scholars have shown that the problems are actually much more complex. Despite the validity of their criticisms, universalism is not only compatible with the approaches that have condemned it, but is largely, in a certain sense, presupposed by them.
Concept
In theology, universalism is the doctrine that all people will eventually be saved. In essence, these are the principles and practices of a liberal Christian denomination founded in the 18th century, originally espousing a belief in universal salvation and now merged with Unitarianism.
In philosophy, universalism is, in fact, the perception of natural phenomena as the same. It is distinguished by the understanding of the truth of statements as independent of the person who asserts them. Universalism is considered as an ethical worldview, which is the opposite of individualism. What is its essence?
According to the principles of universalism, the researcher's personal experience of recognition and foresight is not given any importance. Value is attributed only to the impersonal procedure for recognizing universally valid conclusions, the reproduction of which is possible if the specified conditions are met. Thus, universalism is also a form of thinking that considers the universe (universe) as a whole.
Worldview and ethics
Ethical worldview (worldview) is a holistic image of the surrounding social world. Its formation and change takes place within the framework of the emerging and changing subjective experience. It is a whole system, the functioning and transformation of any component of which is possible only if there is a connection with the rest. The essence of the process of development of this system lies precisely in the change of these connections and its components. The elements of the ethical worldview include:
- categorical structure and implicit ethical theory, the formation of which occurs in the subjective ethical experience;
- ethical reflection;
- emotional attitude;
- ethical picture of the world.
Thinking process
Its content is presented in a historically developed logical framework. The main forms of thinking in which its formation, development took place, and in which itcarried out are concept, judgment and inference.
The concept is a thought, which is a reflection of the general, essential properties, relationships of objects and phenomena. It is also called the pure activity of thinking. Through concepts, not only the general is reflected, but objects and phenomena are also divided, grouped, classified on the basis of existing differences.
A judgment is a form of thought that allows you to affirm or deny the existence of connections between concepts.
Inference is an operation of thinking, during which, when certain premises are compared, a new judgment is formed.
Comprehension in Philosophy
One should distinguish between different types of universalism. This concept has a complex form, due to how it appears in the philosophy of science, defends the idea that thinking about any problem in science always leads to reasoning, and that this reasoning will always seek external limits. There are two forms of this simple and elegant idea of the mind. Some philosophers believe that this submission to the order of reason is a requirement of reason itself. Other scholars disagree that humans are ultimately subject to the order of reason. Following Charles Peirce, they argue that even when people try to think about this order of nature and rationality, they always do so through the community of researchers, so that this convergence of opinions about universally valid scientific laws always retains its ideal aspect. Here Peirce sought to renew the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant andshow its relevance in the philosophy of science.
Pearce also argues that how well people think ultimately depends on the ethics of the scientific community they belong to. Ethics, then, as a critique of the knowledge community, including scientific knowledge, can be justified without the need to lose the appeal of scientific laws as justified and universal.
Criticism
Feminists working in the philosophy of science, such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding, have made important contributions to the critique of universality claims for scientific law from at least two points of view. First and foremost, the knowledge community is corrupt at the deepest level. It adopted an ethic of scientific research that, for the most part, excluded women. Moreover, it has actually adopted notions of instrumental rationality, which do not achieve true objectivity, since they refer to nature from a masculine or patriarchal point of view, in which nature is reduced to something of value only in terms of its use for people.
The analysis made by Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer led them to conclude that rationality does not necessarily lead to the rejection of universality, understood as the limit of the perception of reason.
Discussions
Another major issue in the debate around universalism has been raised in ethics. It is whether it is necessary to rationalize the ethicalreasons into something more than a circular procedure of moral reasoning.
Habermas is known to have argued against his predecessors and even Kant himself, trying to show that the mind can be based on universal principles of communicative action combined with an empirically based notion of evolutionary learning processes. This attempt to rationalize moral reason has been widely criticized by language and communication theorists who have argued that it is impossible to find assumptions in the first place. Moreover, even if they could be found, they would not be strong enough to substantiate a normative theory, to act as a general overarching normative conception of modernity and human moral learning. Habermas adds an empirical dimension to the general and all-encompassing worldview of universalism advocated by Hegel. In fact, Habermas tried to use a general and comprehensive theory to use the position of John Rawls, which justifies universalism through the connection of reason and the comprehensive concept of rationality.
In her work on moral philosophy, Martha Nussbaum tried to defend universalism. This, in turn, was based on her defense of the Aristotelian notion of the moral view of human nature. Her opinion should also be seen as universalism in the sense that she argues that we can know what our nature is and derive from this knowledge a strong commitment to values that are universalizable because they are true to human nature.nature.
In this case, a critique of European modernity other than one form of history or another is crucial to freeing the ideal of universality, and even the ideal of humanity itself, from its consequences in a brutal imperialist history. Universalizable norms, in this sense, carry a certain kind of self-reflexivity in which universality as an ideal must always lead to critical analysis. The danger lies not only in confusing generality with universality, but also in proclaiming a particular form of human being as if it were the last word on who and what we can be. In other words, this notion, as a requirement to cover the scope of protected rights, is always open to the moral competition it defends.
This concept of universality, as an ideal whose meaning can be interpreted in such a way as to suit one's own requirements, should not be confused with relativism. Relativism, which claims that norms, values, and ideals are always cultural, actually includes a strong substantive claim about the nature of moral reality. Its adherents must become the strongest rationalists in order to defend their position. To defend relativism as a material truth about moral reality is certainly necessary in order to turn to the form of universal knowledge. After all, if the claim is that principles are always necessarily cultural, then that claim is one that must defend itself as a universal truth. In our globalized worldremembrance and a commitment to universality require nothing less of us than a commitment to criticism and a corresponding figurative openness to restate the ideal.
