The dissertation is devoted to the analysis of the social dimension of the phenomenon of understanding. The social dimension refers to the conditionality of our understanding of the world by various factors of a social nature. These are culture, discursive formations, sign systems, language, values, narratives, politics, morality, education, and so on.
Our knowledge of the world and its understanding is not based on the direct grasp of objectively existing natural laws and meanings by consciousness. It is always mediated and conditioned by the social, cultural, and linguistic horizon in which human existence unfolds.
Consideration of the historical and theoretical genesis of the concept of understanding led to the conclusion that at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the philosophical community began to realize the impossibility of direct comprehension and cognition of reality. At the same time, along with the formation of a non-classical cognitive paradigm, the idea of social conditioning of understanding and interpretation of the world develops. The non-classical paradigm of philosophy states that cognition and understanding are always mediated by texts, signs, symbols, and contexts. External reality is not given to a person directly in its objectivity, but only in the semantic constructs of the world developed by cultural tradition, science and society. In the modern discourse of understanding, the fact that the latter is determined by the cultural and historical horizon is a consensus and in fact a key postulate of the philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of understanding. In contrast to the classical paradigm of cognition, which interprets the process of understanding as the capture of objective entities through rational practices and using an effective methodology.
Among the social determinants of understanding, politics and political institutions, such as the state and political power, play an important role. The task of these institutions is not only to implement the rule of communities, but also to create hermeneutical formulas for understanding the world by their citizens. political institutions as a state or nation are primarily ideological models, systems of interpretations of reality, which in turn serve as the basis for understanding for individual members of these communities. An important feature of the political system is its total and forced character in relation to a person. There is not a single sphere of human life that is not related to the sphere of politics, because the state as a political institution takes on the function of the central public will, which encourages its citizens to a certain type of behavior and understanding of individual events and the world as a whole. It is in the state that circumstances are created that relate to our work and leisure, well-being and education, and more broadly, our life and death. Therefore, life in the state is a certain totality of Customs in which we are placed, which means that there is no problem of political neutrality. All our practices, in one way or another, correlate with the sphere of politics.
Another important social factor of understanding is religion, which is a system of symbols, interpretations, and behavioral motivations. An important characteristic of religion is its discursive and symbolic nature, and like every discourse, it has its own model of understanding the world, its own terminology and patterns of behavior. Belonging to a particular religious community or denomination is identical to subordinating one's own understanding of the world to the general model of the universe that prevails in this denomination.
An important feature of religion as a symbolic system is that it is an external source of information. This means that religion as a system is located outside the individual organism, existing in the intersubjective world of common understanding, in which all people are born, in which their Being Project unfolds and which continues to exist even after their death. Symbols, including religious symbols, represent behavioral programs or social patterns. Modern science compares the mechanism of action of religious patterns with the mechanism of functioning of DNA. The sequence of basic elements in a DNA strand forms a coded program (instruction set, recipe) for the synthesis of structurally complex proteins that shape organic functioning. Cultural patterns, such as religion, provide a similar program for institutionalizing the social and psychological processes that shape public behavior.
Thus, understanding does not imply isolation from the social mediation of a person and the world, but on the contrary, its consideration. A person's understanding of the world and their place in it is determined by social factors – cultural traditions, values, discursive formations, narratives, social experience, interpretive models and schemes, as well as the language-speech and symbolic communicative environment.
