Publication Details

Abstract

In recent years, the topic of the “crisis of trust” has become increasingly established in public discourse at global and national levels. The study aims to propose holistic understanding of the phenomenon of trust: what is its ontological status, what are its essential elements that constitute it. The authors argue with contemporary philosophers who deal with the issue of trust and draw their own conclusions from it. They understand trust as a cooperative predisposition that has a chiasmic relational character and is a condition and expression of our dependence on the world and at the same time a condition of optimistic openness to it. It is a special structural unity of reliance and vulnerability, understandable only through different perspectives (first- and third-person) and situational contexts. Human beings are never only in one particular trust, but rather in the whole network of trusts that surrounds it. Such a structure as a whole creates a specific atmosphere of co-existence, an atmosphere of trust.