The Pandemic Phenomenon Through the Prism of its Metaphysical, Anthropological and Social Dimensions

Abstract

The article discusses a number of divergent views on the understanding of the pandemic phenomenon, the emergence of which has entailed both a change in people’s habitual perceptions and a transformation of a number of conceptual assumptions, as well as the actualization of new thematic lines in philosophical anthropology. The authors concur that the pandemic mobilizes the symbolic, existential and biological immune systems of the human being. The resultant text has become a fusion of various concepts which have sometimes found an unexpected expression in a series of basic metaphors of culture and which refer to the understanding of life in biology, psychology and cultural studies. Reflections on the pandemic have emphasized new facets of the relationships between the simple and the complex, the close and the distant, the individual and the social, the natural and the cultural, the expected and the unexpected, between what is one’s own and someone else’s, between the other and the different. In this perspective, an opportunity is created for a new attitude to a number of traditional philosophical rubrics, including the themes of “rationality”, “individuality” and “sociality”. The authors assume that such concepts as the living and the inanimate, the human and the animal are positional, i.e. they are conditioned, on the one hand, by objective, natural laws and facts, and on the other hand, are loaded with symbolic content which, in turn, is revealed to be quite heterogeneous and to embrace, in addition to theories, a spectrum of value judgments and cultural norms and traditions. Hence, the authors programme can be described as “cognitive cultural studies” or “cognitive anthropology”. As a result, the present analysis of the biological, socio-historical and cultural-symbolic context of discussions on the nature of COVID-19 has made it possible to distinguish and then re-connect various discourses. What appears to be the article’s most relevant contribution to the social sciences is the authors conception of “symbolic immunology” which makes cautious use of concepts of virology with reference to cultural interactions. Like organisms, cultures are not closed, they interact with their environment, they need injections of the other, and even the alien, which contribute to strengthening the “health” of a culture, rather than to destroying it.