Publication Details

Abstract

The contradiction of the social existence of both a petty bourgeois and middle classes at all spurs them to the peculiar flexibility of their thinking. The flexible, undogmatic, relative attitude toward reality and human values, as well as the excelent faculty and ability to adjust to any circumstances, profit by them and survive, ensure them not only their succes, but create about them the image of people experienced by life and perfect dialecticians. However, the risky contradiction of their social existence is not particularly pleasant for them. And therefore, their thinking, in fact, remains on the ground of formal logic — operating with the conjunctions „or — or“, — that in its very negation of contradictions sustains their feeling that their reflection is firm and logical. But when compelled to admit the contradiction of reality or decide between two antipoles and stand for one of them, they become careful, irresolute, opportune, and try, with compromise, to reconcile that irreconciable with the conjunction „both“. Only when their existential concerns are threatened directly, they incline to the principle „either — or“ and that towards their own benefit, status, wealth, life. For own life presents to them as the highest value. And this still point in the relativity of the world and their values determines also the peculiar way of thinking of their „common sense“. In the confrontation with experienced politicians their compromises and oportunism emerge, and in the confrotation with the revolutionary radicalism and ultraradicalism their pseudoradicalism is apparent.