Abstract
As a result of many years of discussions about what exactly culturology studies and whether it is a separate science at all, it has become, by and large, the conventional agreement of scientists to consider, following the post-positivist Popper, that there are as many sciences as there are scientists. In a sense, this is convenient, since it allows any available methods to be used for the study of culture with an equal degree of acceptability. The problem is not that they cannot be applied at all, but in their equivalence, lack of causal subordination, hierarchy. It is this position that follows from the impossibility (or unwillingness) to strictly limit the subject of cultural studies because if culturology studies “... any types and forms of human life” (A. Flier), then any method for studying them can be chosen. After Hegel, attempts to comprehend the general laws of the development of culture (and this is the task of culturology as a science) become increasingly rare, and the work of a culturologist is reduced to a phenomenological description of individual cultural phenomena, which are essentially unknowable without their generalization. The substance of culture has dissolved in all the infinite variety of its accidents. Human activities depend on living conditions, but it also creates new conditions, a new “context”, which in turn mediates new forms of activity, and these create a new culture, a new social experience materialized in artifacts, norms of behavior and language and so on ad infinitum. A person constantly creates culture and a new oneself with it, he himself becomes the result of his creation. “The circle of culture”, its development from person to person, i.e. from oneself to oneself, with each circle at an ever-higher level of social progress - conceptually, such a movement can be comprehended only with the help of Hegelian dialectics. Logic reflects the movement of the world in the movement of concepts, thereby becoming a theoretical reflection of scientific thinking. The principle of the dialectical method lies in the identity of thinking and the thinkable, i.e. in that the movement of the scientist's thought coincides with the movement of the development of science. This conclusion does not imply that other methods are inapplicable in cultural studies. On the contrary, the diversity of different approaches to the study of culture is also objectively necessary, as is the objective existence of the diversity of cultural phenomena. But as an individual presupposes the universal, so the manifold presupposes the one. This connection is cognized with the help of Hegelian dialectics, dialectical monism, a universal method for social sciences, including cultural studies; universal, not in the sense of the only one, but in the sense of a single, systemically uniting various particular methods, a kind of logical “compass” that does not allow one to stray from the right direction of movement of any science - movement to truth.