LEGAL VALUES OF POSTMODERN SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Abstract

The article emphasizes that in the globalized world, postmodern social consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, the fundamental factor of which is objective sensibility, and the key tool is the instrumental mind, which generates fragmented thinking. Because of this, legal consciousness as a part of global social consciousness tends to deformalization, because it is fundamentally anti-hierarchical. Globalization, which is associated with informatization, intellectualization of society and intensification of integration processes, took place simultaneously with the formation of postmodern culture and caused changes in all social practices, including legal relations and legal awareness. Changes manifested themselves in atomization, bifurcation, and epistemological uncertainty. Postmodern manipulations of signs, meanings, and images began. Postmodern legal consciousness has devalued the existing norms of law, which is why it began to be based not so much on reason as on feelings and emotions. Under these conditions, the hypothesis of legal norms was leveled, the boundaries of the regulatory effect of legal dispositions were blurred, and the imperative nature of legal sanctions was formalized. In the globalized world, postmodern social consciousness is hybridizing. In this regard, legal consciousness, as a part of global social consciousness, is deconstructed, because it is fundamentally anti-hierarchical and anti-apodictic, due to which modern definitions of law and legal consciousness lose their relevance. Such a feature of the perception of the world in conditions of weakening of values and integrity determines moral and legal relativism, blurring the axiological foundations of legal awareness. Denying any kind of norms, traditions, moral paradigms, postmodern consciousness debunks authorities of any rank, in particular – the political and legal ideals of Modernism, questioning the nature of human existence as "res cogitans", that is, as a thinking reality, rejecting in this way thoughts in truth, and reality in existence. This internal rejection of unambiguity, the struggle with the totality of signs and meanings takes place in the Postmodern era at all levels of existence. In this regard, the most correct understanding of legal consciousness in its relationship with the meaning of the concept of "globalization" will be that which interprets legal consciousness as one of the forms of the existence of law along with legal norms and legal relations.