Tiltai

Lithuania has been placed 35th out of 187 countries in the UNO Human Development Report 2014, which measures a Human Social Development Index. This is the best result in the history of the country. According to this indicator, since 2010, Lithuania has joined the club of 49 most developed countries in the planet. Despite the fact, poverty, which expresses the essential consequences of social differentiation, has deeply rooted in the social discourse of Lithuania. To understand the controversy of the official statistics and the reality of life, we can no longer think of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion stereotypically. These social phenomena are taking new shapes in the postmodern existence. Therefore, the article presents a philosophical explanation of the change in the perception of two social categories – time and work, which illustrate a dramatic shift of our social life towards the postmodern existence, based on the works of J. Habermas and Z. Bauman. Social categories of time and work are among the elements of social-existential change, which reflect clear differences of philosophical discourses and social consciousness of modernity and postmodernity from the earlier traditions of philosophical thought development. Today these categories acquire the power to reveal new forms of social inequality.