Lytvynov O. . Law as a phenomenon of culture.

The thesis deals with the complex philosophical comprehension of the functioning of law issues in the culture. The possibility of interpreting the culture as a legal category and the law as a category of culture on the basis of the analysis of the process of rationalization of human existence in law is proved. As a result of a general review of the main approaches to the definition of the concept of "culture" and the phenomenological-hermeneutic study of its sense origins and terminological embodiments the author has revealed the metacategorial status of this concept in the contemporary body of knowledge as well as the dialectics of its interrelations with the concept of "civilization". The content of civic responsibility and organizing, regulatory and supervisory functions of culture allow the author to interpret it as a process of rationalization of human existence in law. The obvious counteraction to this process reveals its significant aspects which make it possible to characterize the features of the existence of law in its historical and ontological conditionality rooted in cultural areas of the East and the West. The author considers that the main reason for this counteraction is a more primitive social interaction, which is expressed in different forms of criminalization. It allows him through the concept of "secondary cultures" to implement a critical approach to the societies with imitating attitude to the law. The work shows the decisive meaning of the world of everyday life for the formation of legal awareness and legal culture and the role of traditions and customs of the "closed society" in pressure on the processes of formation of the "open society". A total focus on the philosophy of law of the New Age and personalized understanding of the law mainly as the equal rights of every human being allows the opportunity to show its interpretation as a category of culture and as a tool of social characteristics of different communities. The author determines that a weak component in the rational principles of the functioning of secondary cultures causes a return to simplified forms of existence and interaction, which are typical for the natural state (predatory instincts, saving of vital energy, etc.). Their mimicry through imitation of functional necessity generates various forms of counteraction to rationalization of human life in law as an effective way of interaction. In addition to the well-known form of "corruption" the author offers another ones: "social parasitism", "new forms of slavery", "negative selection", etc. All of them are in a dialectical interrelation, and their presence in Ukraine allows him to give such definition to Ukraine's political system as a "negative-paternalism". On the basis of the history of philosophical and legal thought of the New Age the author has substantiated the notion of "second axial time" as a definition of the period of the dominant values of the idea of human rights and its legal embodiment in legal reality (XVI-XXI centuries.). Examined by the author the world outlook and cultural foundations from the Antiquity to the Reformation have received specific philosophic and legal expression in the works of Western thinkers from Grotius, Hobbes and Spinoza to Kant, Hegel, and representatives of the nineteenth century as a rationalistic explanation of egalitarian ideas. The author presents a number of philosophical and legal concepts of the XX-th century, where the ideas of natural law of the New Age are developed and the dialectics of interrelations between the categories of culture, law and the state is considered for the first time (Spengler, Guins, Posner, Vaishvila). He also investigates the cultural conditionality of their counter-agents (historical school of law in Germany, positivism, etc.) and subsequent concentrated embodiment of such ideas in the totalitarian regimes of the XX-th century. It allows him to cover the processes of transformation of law enforcement agencies in punitive ones against the individual and society as the rule of semantic dominants of secondary cultures in conditions of distortion of legal reality and resistance to the ideas of the legal and social state. In the work the author shows and describes the cultural and creative role of law in making of a legal and social state in the XIX-th and XX-th centuries as a result of the influence of the philosophical and legal thought of rationalistic, humanistic and personalistic orientation. He grounds the key role of law in the substantial content of the category of "culture" as a dialectical development from particular values to universal ones through the solution about classification of cultures on such semantic basis. Reinforcement of the protective function of the law in relation to the individual makes it a unique phenomenon of culture that provides a dialectical unity of culture in its particular and universal understanding.