OCR
HRVOJE VOLNER Croatia and Slavonia was Croatian (from 1861), but the language of trade as the most important economic activity (including during the interwar period) was German and Hungarian.‘ The language of modernization is alanguage oftechnology and science. Itis about the need to accept the reality that contradicts the illusion of immediate consciousness. It is about education in terms of mass technical education in order to plan the implementation of new technologies in the production process, but also the ability of the workforce to adopt new knowledge. Science is the product of the action of rational categories, which extend to the technologies of creating knowledge (the microscope, the telescope, scientific procedures and so on), and has its birthplace in the human mind. How other than through learning could we understand that things that get our attention arise from the possibility of our conceptual cognition, that the image we have about the world is never final. Hence the weakness of the untrained mind towards ideological abuse; it is a gnoseological constant and it needs to be absorbed.’ A nation (a mental concept about which we have no rational knowledge, as well as of God) hypostatizes into a being by itself, which identifies its subjects that differentiate themselves and those who are like them from those who do not belong to the collective that is defined by a nation. A nation is a metaphysical foundation of absolute identity; according to some thinkers it usually works in a way that the always particulate entity is put in place of the greatest generality. In doing so, of course, one should take into account the fact that metaphysics does not deal with beings and entities as such, but it deals with concepts. Absolutization of concepts derives from the principles of abstraction, the exclusion of the important from the unimportant. This can help establish a hierarchy of concepts, but also a hierarchy of beings to which these terms refer. While science considers these forms of classification inappropriate in modern forms of research, they play an important role in the sphere of social reality.’ In the social everyday life, they “acquire real life that would be reflected in its perverted forms as real power.” It is about “almost exclusively ethnic-national and religious (only sometimes racial, and often cultural) dimensions of individual and group identity. Basically, Eric J. Hobsbawn: Nacije i nacionalizam, Zagreb, Novi liber, 1993, 47; Stanci¢c: Hrvatska nacija i nacionalizam, 25-29. On the relationship between technology and the workforce see Nicolas Snowden: What really caused the Great Recession? Rhyme and repetition in a theme from 1930s, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 39, 2015, 1250-1252. http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/ accessed 19 October, 2016; Helmuth Plessner: Zakasnjela nacija (O politickoj zavodljivosti gradanskog duha), Zagreb, Naprijed, 1997, 125-138. 8 Veljak: Metafizicki temelji politika identiteta, 59-62. Veljak: Metafizicki temelji politika identiteta, 63. * 138 ¢