The existence of multiple definitions of culture, says its diversity and multiplicity.
Each of the multiplicity of cultures has its own unique face. A meeting with various facial expressions of cultures is a discovery of many cultures, in which the question of the value and sense appears. The study of the issue makes it possible to research the ‘face’ of the culture on the theoretical level. So what should be called by value and by sense?
I will discuss these concepts in the content of the master’s thesis in the content of philosophy, culture and dialogue of cultures.
Referring to the history of Modern philosophy, we consider two ideas (theory) on this issue. The first idea is represented by the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism (Rickert 1998), where the value is “logical concept, allowing to distinguish one culture from another one, but at the same time expressing something in common that unites all the representatives of each of them” (Mezhuev 2013).
The second theory is based on the hermeneutical process of understanding of the culture, where the concept of culture is a spirit (Dilthey 2002). In this theory, the objects are the spiritual generation, which is not perceived by logical operations, but by psychological empathy in them, thereby generation has not only value - just something that is meaningful for a person, but also has a sensible character.
Briefly having considered the two procedures of understanding of cultural – logical and hermeneutical – it found that the value and sense are in the different conceptual ranks and assigning the definitions to these concepts depends on the procedure of understanding of culture.
In this issue of differentiation of the concepts, it is a presented interesting idea about value and sense by Mezhuev (2013). The author writes: “Values do not have a particular author, often they are inherited from generation to generation in the permanent form, while
each generation has a new outlook on his or her life in a modern way. I will express this idea can in another way: there is eternal value, but there is no eternal sense. In a sense there is the sense of the presence of time of the changed life, what is called historicity. I can share some of the values coming from the past with others, but I can not live with the same sense as my ancestors” (Mezhuev 2013, p.132).
It is noted that the sense creates a particular pattern of its existence in a culture that is static and independent of time, in the process of understanding the statement, regarding the logical procedure of understanding of culture. However, the value gets to a certain dependence on the time, it is created promptly and is relevant to the period in which it was generated. For instance, speaking about the values of Norwegian or Russian culture it might be taken into account the presented time. But the senses, created with cultures, are comprehended in the real time.
The disability to live with the same sense as the ancestors have is based on the fact that the nature of sense is generation by somebody. Namely, the generation of sense is the primary evidence of its belonging to a culture and defining a feature of the culture. Sense, laid by an ancestor in childhood, can be stored up to a certain time. But in the end, one or the other sense will still fall under the influence of time, and will be generated in the new formulation, rethought, and will be ‘one’s own’, ‘alive’, staying in real life. I agreed with M. Bakhtin (1986) that such ability of culture as the generation of new sense is a creative process.
Following Bakhtin, in this study, it is used such procedure of the understanding of sense as the procedure of a creative hermeneutics. Hence, the sense is considered as a concept. According to Bakhtin’s (1986) idea, the sense demands only its consideration in the context of anthropology. The man consists of senses. The sense is a man. The sense is a man.
Here it can be represented an image-painting, there is a man with values and senses around him. Also, we can say a sense is a life. For example, in the Russian culture, it is used a proverb: to lay down one’s life. That means one man can give one’s life for one’s country, for other’s life, for anything that is considered a sense by the man. This sense of anything is identical as a sense of life. The understanding of value and sense begins with a man. If it is compared a value with a sense, it is also significant that the group of people make a value, individuality makes sense. Studying the sense and value, a man leans on oneself and follows from inside guessing for an understanding of it. Perhaps this is because the full of sense is a man. The man tends to make sense of everything when he or she faces a challenge, a problem situation. A search of a sense of this or that event sometimes turns into the sense as itself that
is considered to be understood intuitively through the symbol. The sense is individual (vide supra).
Between the challenge and sense, there can be a mediator. The mediator as a symbol of the phenomenon that is according to Peirce (1931–1935; 1893-1913; 1867–1893) mediates between the feelings and reaction. If we are talking about the cultures and its features, the challenge, for example, in the dialogical situation may be any differences within cultures that the representative of one culture faces. These differences provoke the feelings and then it is a reaction to them. And in this case, the difference may occur as a mediator. After that, there may be a guessing formulation of sense content of the culture that a representative of any culture may put in it if he or she tries to understand the other culture in the dialogue.
The mediator may be any fact that is a part of the logical sequence: feelings-mediator-reaction.
In this research, we try to represent the smile as a symbol that is used by all representatives of different cultures.