Abstract
Why Does Bergson Understand Religion From the Perspective of Mysticism?
In his book Bergson makes first of all the distinction between closed societies, with a static religion, and open ...societies with the dynamic religion. In fact those dynamic religions are the world religions, and they are understood from the perspective of mysticism. Bergson does not accept the opposition between a mystical and a technical worldview. To the contrary, they are related to each other, especially in Christianity, by the virtue of charity. Charity, and therefore technics, is the practical dimension of mysticism. From the perspective of the mystical experience, an intuition of unity with the totality, Bergson tries to rethink the proof of the existence of God, the immortality of man and the theodicy. Modern man, as a technical man represents a special phase in the history of the evolution of nature and its divine 'elan vital'. It is a phenomenon in which nature shows a new dimension of itself. Because the technical dimension enlarges man's capacity of transcendence of the sense of given reality, it creates new possibilities for mystical experience. Modern man needs this mysticism because only mysticism can be the soul within the body of the technical world created by man.
Japan, Russia, and Turkey are major examples of countries with different ethnic, religious, and cultural background that embarked on the path of modernization without having been colonized by a ...Western country. In all three cases, national consciousness has played a significant role in this context. The project of Modernity is obviously of European origin, but is it essentially European? Does modernization imply loss of a country's cultural or national identity? If so, what is the "fate" of the modernization process in these cases? The presence of the idea and reality of civil society can be considered a real marker of Modernity in this respect, because it presupposes the development of liberalism, individualism and human rights. But are these compatible with nationalism and with the idea of a national religion? These questions are the more pressing, as Japan is considered part of the Western world in many respects, and Russia and Turkey are defining their relation to the European Union in different ways. An investigation of these three countries, set off against more general reflections, sheds light on the possibilities or limitations of modernization n a non-European context.
In this article we try to show how revolutionary the idea of sovereignty was and is in the Islamic world, preceding all nationalism. Sovereignty marks the very transition from empire to the central ...state that the nation state presupposes. Sovereignty made its entrance in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. It functioned in the centralization policy of the sultan, who needed this central position to realize a top down process of modernization. This policy took apart the Empire's traditional system of checks and balances. Thus, the nation state does not conserve traditional culture, but is the result and producer of cultural change, in fact, of a process of modernization that involves language and religion (the marks of the nation state). This does not imply that all nation states are homogenized by a globalizing process of modernization. A civil society based on individual freedom and the application of human rights and democracy makes a real difference in the world of nation states. Those ideas prevent the return of empire in the disguise of globalization. In Europe, these liberal ideas mark the limits of sovereignty and precede the emergence of nationalism; in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world, sovereignty and nationalism are used for a top-down process of modernization sometimes at odds with those liberal ideas. The implementation of these ideas in an specific cultural context is necessary and is at the same time a guarantee against cultural isomorphism. Adapted from the source document.
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