History as a Process of Learning: its Modern Radicalization

Abstract

The aim of this article is to find out the logic of modern sociocultural environment within a historical process (in the context of A. Giddens’, U. Beck’s, P. Sztompka’s and Z. Bauman’s researches). The article deals with a history as a process of permanent learning, and the era of modernity is interpreted as the radicalization of this process. A history of the human community constitutes itself through the constant reproduction and changing of social practices. Each society should be understood as a process, which models of social life are being internalizing, externalizing and changing. So the learning could be described as a fundamental mechanism of social history. The phenomenon of learning means the practice of productive sociocultural creativity. The learning solves the social life problems: it tends to overcome unfeasibility, incoherence and imperfection of social life. Thereby a history as the learning process is directed to increase the human control over the natural and mental environments. Therefore discovering of the modern epoch's specificity as a situation of dynamicity, changeability, plurality, globality of social practices allows to assert that the learning is the engine of social life in contemporaneity. Moreover the life in the era of modernity should be understood as a radical learning. The situation of posttraditionalization and loss of identity requires sociocultural activity so that a society could stably keep the historical course. Such a radical learning, activity could be understood in the modernity as «colonization of the future», in other words as the social trust and the rationalization. Problems of social life in the era of modernity are overcoming by means of the trust and rationalization. In order to ensure control over the natural and the mental environments, an active modern humanity must always deal with the open future. That is to say with the risk and the uncertainty. The ontological security of posttraditional human could be restored only by «colonization of the future», as a necessary condition for further sociocultural construction of reality. In this way contemporary human's understanding of history and the era of modernity is a principal peculiarity of one's social life. It means that the continuity of contemporary social existence is made possible by pointed understanding.