Traditionalism and ontological incompleteness of the human being

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of traditionalism in the context of human ontological incompleteness. The concept of ontological incompleteness represents man as an ontologically open structure. The authors describe three ways of the human opening to the world: ontological (spiritual, carried out by spiritual practices of traditional religions), ontic (social), and virtual. 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 the 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 post-secular vectors of virtualization - a direct departure into virtuality and traditionalism, the impulse of which is a return to social reality in some form taken from the past that would promise rootedness, namely, 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 of traditionalism in Russia 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. It is shown that traditionalism is the most radical cultural form of the return of the cultural content of the historical past, which is represented to be a spiritual need. However, these forms are outdated, not constructive, and addressing them instead of overcoming incompleteness turns man into a self-sufficient structure, which contradicts the fundamental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.