Religious - Ethical Values in Kazakh Culture in the Digital Age

Abstract

Public consciousness today oscillates between secular rationalisation, accelerating digital economies, and a renewed desire for spiritual and ethical depth. Mythologemes and symbols mediate religious knowing, they also stabilise ethical horizons when informational noise rises. Building on Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms, where myth and language are foundational cultural expressions, and Martin Heidegger’s view of language as world forming, not merely expressive, this article investigates how religious-ethical values are encoded in Kazakh mythologemes and symbols, and how these values are being reinterpreted in the digital age. Through hermeneutic, cognitive linguistic and cultural semiotic methods, we analyse cosmological metaphors in Khoja Ahmed Yassawi’s Hikmet and Abai Kunanbayev’s Words of Edification. We show that Yassawi’s four elements, earth, water, fire, air, constitute a semiotic system that maps to humility, purity, love, transformation, while Abai’s “full person” reframes these archetypes into modern ethical categories. In dialogue with Jungian psychology on archetypes, Ricoeur’s symbol-thought dialectic, and Baudrillard’s hyperreality, we argue that revitalising mythologemes can ground ethical reflection against the flattening forces of digital simulation. Pedagogical and design implications for digital culture follow.

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