Tradition in Vietnam: reality or a simulacrum?

Philosophy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of traditionalism in the context of human ontological incompleteness. In culture, there are different ways of representing incompleteness, which can be overcome or corrected. In global reality, the crisis of identity and the sense of increased insufficiency relate to the structural change of personality and identity in a dynamic social reality, where virtual way of the human opening to the world plays an increasingly important role, and types of ontic existence multiply. The response to the increased incompleteness is two postsecular vectors of virtualization — a direct departure into virtuality and traditionalism, the impulse of which is a return to the social reality in some form, taken from the past, that would ensure rootedness, namely that into tradition, and a return to religion in inextricable connection with its national carrier. In the light of the concept of ontological incompleteness and based on field research on traditionalism in Vietnam and other countries, the authors explicate traditionalism as the virtualization of reality and manipulative substitution of the ontological with the ontic. The peculiarity of traditionalism as a worldview and ideology is that it represents tradition itself as a value, whereas it is a construct for the preservation and transmission of values. The paper shows that traditionalism is the most radical cultural form of return of the cultural structures of the historical past, which is represented as a spiritual need. However, these structures are outdated, not constructive, and addressing them, instead of overcoming incompleteness, turns man into a self-sufficient structure, which contradicts the fundamental ontological openness of the human being. The authors explain traditionalism in Vietnam and some other countries as the invention of tradition not based on the historical ground, and show how tradition turns into a simulacrum and virtualization of reality.