In every aspect of your being. Philosophical meaning of the problem of being (three aspects of the problem of being)
In colloquial language, the term "being" has three main meanings. Being means an objective reality that exists independently of our consciousness. The word "being" is used to generalize the conditions of the material life of people and society. Finally, being is a synonym for another word - "existence". To be means to exist.
In philosophy and some other sciences, the concept of being is also multi-valued and represents an important worldview problem. The understanding of being is historically connected with one or another orientation of a person, social communities regarding the inner and outer world of people's lives. Depending on the choice, which may be based on science, religious faith, mysticism, fantasy, practical life, and being is determined. Philosophy as a science considers the problem of being the basis of the theory of a general and specific type of worldview, the main part of metaphilosophy.
In a broad problematic aspect, the concept of "being" covers everything that exists, that is, that is present. The category of being is extremely broad in scope and diverse in content. Existence is related to non-existence - to that which is not, and also to that which cannot be at all.
More specifically, being means the entire existing material world. Sometimes the material world is interpreted as an objective reality, that is, existing independently of a person and his consciousness. There is some inaccuracy in this explanation. It consists in the fact that the term "objective" does not cover in this case everything that exists independently of man. Outside and independently of our consciousness, there are many forms of the ideal. Thus, the use value of a commodity, the beauty of nature, goodness as a manifestation of the morality of society are intangible. The consciousness of one person as a subjective reality for him in relation to the consciousness of another person also exists objectively. It is independent of the consciousness of the second individual.
The objectivity of the material one way or another can be substantiated experimentally, empirically. For example, there is no special need to prove the existence of nature, the cosmos, independent of man and his consciousness. It is already more difficult to justify the independence of the physical existence of a person, his body from consciousness. The judgment that a person is a particle, an element of the natural world, and therefore an objective reality, is an inferential, logical knowledge. It requires additional argumentation in relation to the psychophysical and spiritual characteristics of a person.
Justifying the existence of an objectively ideal is more difficult. Various experiments and experiences can only indirectly prove or disprove something. The argumentation of the objectively ideal is carried out mainly logically and worldview. And often based on faith. So, G. Hegel logically proved the existence of an absolute idea (absolute spirit). God in religious philosophy and theology is also justified logically or simply taken for granted.
Therefore, the existence of the objective world embraces, on the one hand, everything material, existing outside and independently of man and his consciousness, and, on the other hand, everything ideal, also existing outside and independently of man. The very understanding of the objective is connected with a person as a subject with consciousness, that is, with the subjective.
The objective material world is nature, the universe, space. It is difficult to generalize an objective ideal world in some other extremely general terms. It is as diverse as the material world, but in many respects it still depends on the subjectivity of a person, on his ability to fantasize, foresee, anticipate, and assume. Often the ideal image of consciousness is alienated from a person and begins to exist, as it were, objectively, independently. For example, the thinkers of the past are long gone as physical representatives of the human race, but their ideas have been preserved, they are used by modern humanity.
Solving their problems, many sciences turn to the problem of being. Some of them specifically study being, its features, structure, forms. Thus, fundamental physics and chemistry are the basic sciences, on the basis of which the natural-science picture of the world (being) is formed. Mathematics develops and substantiates its model of being. Biology develops the concept of being alive. Philosophy basically solves the problem of being in a worldview, supplementing this explanation with the knowledge of natural, technical and social sciences. It consists in the fact that being is argued using certain value, epistemological and other orientations of the philosopher, should not be accepted as the only possible or correct one, but only as a starting point, as a position.
The main philosophical problems of being include: the definition of being; substantiation of its types and forms; the problem of the uniqueness and unity of being; the ratio of eternity and indestructibility of being as a whole and finiteness, the annihilation of its specific elements; the ratio of the unity and integrity of being with the diversity and relative independence of the content elements; the problem of the independence of being from man and the objective involvement of man in being, etc. An important philosophical problem is the relationship between possible (potential) and real (actual) being.
The fundamental problem of philosophy is traditionally considered the ratio of material and ideal (non-material) being. In the philosophy of Marxism, this problem was designated as the main question of philosophy. It was formulated as a question about the relation of thinking to being, the spirit to nature. In this context, life was understood as the material world.
The ratio of material and ideal, nature and spirit is considered in two main positions. The first position (or the first side of the main question of philosophy) clarifies the primacy of the material or ideal. The second position (or the second side of the main question of philosophy) consists in arguing man's ability to cognize being.
Depending on the priority of one or another beginning in the first position, philosophers and philosophical schools divided into materialists and idealists, materialistic and idealistic schools. It is believed that the line (tradition) of materialism originates from ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who most consistently and fully defended the primacy of the material. He suggested that the atom is the basis of everything - an indivisible, non-developing, impenetrable material particle. From various combinations of atoms, Democritus believed, and all objects consist. Consciousness (soul) is secondary to the material.
The "line" (tradition) of objective idealism was founded, as recognized by many philosophers, by the ancient Greek thinker Plato. He put forward a position about the idea as a special entity, independent of the thing. Not human consciousness, but ideas precede all material objects. The idea, according to Plato, is outside the consciousness of man and things, the existing beginning of everything.
Materialism and idealism, originating in ancient Greece, exist today. Aggravated relations between representatives of these opposite directions in the explanation of the beginnings of being did not always exist. Historically, due to various political, ideological and other circumstances, they acquired a conflict character. For example, in the European Middle Ages, in the struggle between supporters of Marxist philosophy and its opponents in the second half of the 19th - first half of the 20th centuries. Arguments in favor of materialism or idealism often acquired an ideological character. The consequence of this kind of discussion was a retreat into abstract scholastic and speculative reasoning. Mutual enmity was escalated, the persecution of persons who did not share the established point of view was undertaken.
From the second half of XIX century and until the 80s of the XX century, ideological in solving the main question of philosophy was expressed in the absolutization of the class approach to the analysis of social processes. Marxism extended the class approach to the explanation of the extremely broad problems of being. It was believed, for example, that only the working masses and their supporters were the bearers of the materialistic, that is, the scientific worldview. The bourgeoisie, landlords and feudal lords are entirely idealists and are not capable of forming a scientific worldview.
Today, the opposition between materialistic and idealistic positions in philosophy has become less obvious and conflicting. The solution to the problem of the primacy of this or that beginning of being is ideological and methodological. Strictly scientifically, using experiment, the achievements of natural and other sciences, it is impossible to prove or disprove the primacy of material or ideal being. For example, the judgment that the cosmos has always existed and, therefore, is primary in relation to any forms of the ideal, is ideological. It can be substantiated only formally and logically, but not experimentally, or accepted without any proof, on faith. This judgment gives rise to a number of other philosophical questions; if the cosmos has always existed, then how can this be? If the cosmos is unlimited, then how should this be understood by man? How to explain the infinity of the cosmos in relation to the finiteness of its specific elements and states. It is also possible to answer such questions only ideologically. Therefore, it is hardly possible to assert that the materialistic approach is correct or even scientific in relation to the incorrect idealistic approach. The opposite argument is also untenable.
Materialism and idealism are two variants of the ideological explanation of being. They are complemented by dualism - another option, when the material and the ideal are recognized as existing simultaneously. It also represents an ideological position regarding the "hierarchy" of material and ideal being. Philosophy, explaining the relationship between the material and the ideal in different ways, does not form scientific, strictly demonstrative and substantiated knowledge. This is an ideological explanation, the measure of the truth of which will be refined and replenished throughout the life of mankind as "eternal truth". But in general, it is also impossible to dismiss the problem of being as scientifically unsolvable. It continues to arouse interest, encourages new discoveries in specific areas of life.
As you can see, many philosophical problems of being are not strictly scientific, but theoretical and ideological in nature. One or another of their decisions is difficult to evaluate as “right” or “wrong”. Solutions express the worldview choice, determine the type of worldview, its ultimate general orientation. A philosopher or just a person has a natural right to dwell on one or another version of the explanation of being, which suits them more, meets the corresponding worldview ideals and needs.
The understanding of being is also connected with its verbal expression. Often being is denoted by the word "world" or "everything that exists." In modern colloquial Russian, there are 13 basic meanings of the word "peace" and several dozen phrases. Several meanings pertain to the explanation of being. The expression: "The world is, was and will be" is an eternally correct judgment, but has a number of accents. Firstly, the world is the totality of all forms of material in the earth and outer space (Universe, space). Secondly, the world means a part of the Universe, a planet. Thirdly, the word "world" characterizes the globe, the Earth, everything that exists on the Earth. Fourthly, the term "world" is used to differentiate the whole, the system: the inorganic and organic world, the world of plants and the world of animals, the world of man, as well as the world of ideas, spiritual world etc.
Being, like the whole existing world, has these accents. They basically reflect different approaches to the material world. But being, as noted, includes everything that exists. Therefore, the category of being covers both the material and the ideal (spiritual) world. In connection with this understanding of being in philosophy, the problem of the unity of the world (being) is quite relevant.
The expression "being of the world" can be understood as a tautology, as the use of synonymous words. Since being is the material and ideal world, then being and the world are synonyms. But the following must be added to this. Being as everything that exists is correlated with the world in a grammatical context. The world is all that is, and being indicates that it exists, functions. Therefore, the phrase "being of the world" grammatically expresses a simple declarative sentence - the existence of the world. Or: the world exists, it exists, it exists. In this sense, being has, as it were, a subordinate meaning in relation to the world. But this is the formal side of the relationship between the concepts of "being" and "world".
It is important to emphasize that the understanding of being, that is, "the existence of everything that exists" does not allow us to clarify the substantial basis of being. The statement that the world exists does not clarify what it consists of, what “material” it consists of. The definition of the substantiality of being makes it possible to find the basis of its unity. The existence of the world (that is, being) cannot serve as such a basis, since there is both the material and the ideal, which are substantially opposite, incompatible. The material world consists of matter and physical fields. The ideal world consists of ideas, non-material phenomena. The ideal in particular cases acts as its property in relation to the material. For example, consciousness is a property of the human brain and the person himself. But everything - both material and ideal - exists, but it is impossible to unite them, since the ideal in relation to the material is nothing.
A more correct methodological approach to understanding the unity of the world (being) is the application of the concept of "unity" only to the material world. The world is one in that it is material. In other words, only the material world is united in being, since it has substrativity. The unity of the ideal world is already problematic because the objectively ideal world is incompatible with the subjectively ideal (spiritual) world of man. One can, for example, consider that being, and ideal-objective being in particular, are one in God. In many religions, God is regarded as the Absolute Truth, Absolute Good and Absolute Beauty, as the Creator, Creator. But to explain such an understanding of God as the unity of the objectively ideal and all being can be again only ideologically or on the basis of faith. In addition, in various philosophical systems there is great diversity in the understanding of God, as well as the objectively ideal.
As you can see, the explanation of the uniqueness and unity of the world as being can be different. In any case, it is ideological. But it is important to emphasize that the assertion of the real uniqueness of the material world and its unity in materiality is much closer to the sciences that explain specific types and forms of being. It has more methodological persuasiveness than religious, mystical, objective-idealistic and other justification of the unity of being.
Consideration of the problem of being makes it possible to single out the elements of its content, the relationship of coordination and subordination between them. First of all, being includes two types: material and ideal (non-material) being. As noted, these are not always “equal” and correlated elements. In various worldview decisions, their coordination and subordination is considered very variably.
The structure of material existence can be represented by the unity of three elements: microcosm, macrocosm and megaworld. The microworld is the world of "elementary" particles, atoms, molecules. The macroworld includes fairly large material objects. The Earth, the population of the Earth, the elements of the culture of society are the phenomena of the macrocosm. Megaworld characterizes space objects.
The structure of material existence is also constituted by the unity of its specific forms (subspecies), which differ significantly from each other: the existence of nature, the existence of man, the existence of society.
The existence of nature represents the existence of inanimate and living nature. It obeys physical, chemical, geological, biological and other laws. The being of nature is the Universe, the cosmos, the habitat of mankind. The presence of the Sun and the solar system, one of the planets of which is the Earth with its biosphere and other features, formed a set of conditions that made possible the existence of living things, life. The representatives of the living are man, animal and plant world.
Space is still little explored. Many of its processes and states are incomprehensible to people, but they have a systemic effect on earthly life, on the functioning of the Earth as a planet. The nature of the Earth has been studied in more detail. Mankind actively uses natural conditions and resources for its life activity. Sometimes nature management takes on predatory, barbaric forms, stimulating the emergence and aggravation of environmental problems.
The existence of a person represents the life cycle of each individual, as well as the existence of a person as a living species in relation to the life of plants and animals. The nature of man indicates his inseparability from natural nature, the cosmos. Even ancient thinkers formulated the position: man is a microcosm, the cosmos in miniature. It has all the basic signs and processes typical of nature. It cannot exist outside the nature of the Earth. Moving into space, a person must reproduce or maintain the conditions of earthly life in the main indicators: air, water, food, temperature, etc. In this regard, a person acts as a link between natural (first) nature and artificial (second) nature created by people themselves, their culture.
Human existence is carried out not only in the natural world, but also in society. The social existence of man distinguishes him from the existence of other living species. In society, a person socializes, that is, acquires economic, political, legal, moral, spiritual and other qualities. Thanks to them, he carries out communication, behavior and activity, participates in the reproduction, distribution and consumption of material and spiritual goods. Possessing consciousness and worldview, social qualities, a person becomes a personality. He comprehends the world and himself purposefully, expediently, actively and creatively manifests himself, satisfies needs and interests.
Thus, human being is an inseparable unity of the biological, mental and social. The actual life of each individual represents the functioning and manifestation of his body, nervous activity and social qualities, spirituality. The unity of the physical and mental, bodily and spiritual, biological and social being of a person is unique, it is not observed in any other objects and phenomena of being.
The life of society represents the joint life of people who have a certain organization - social institutions, material and spiritual benefits, as well as norms and principles, a system of social (public) relations. In society, as a separate part of natural being, not only universal, but also general sociological laws, as well as laws of a more specific nature, operate. In society, progressive and regressive development is quite clearly manifested.
The main factor in the progressive advance of society and the way of life of the subjects is human activity. The activity approach to the knowledge of the historical process makes it possible to find the main motives and driving forces of social development, to determine the role and place of various subjects in the creation and use of goods, in the transformation of life itself.
The existence of society is also carried out in the way of culture: in the process of emergence, development and change of socio-historical formations, stages, periods and epochs; in the approval of signs and processes of civilized development. An important feature of social life is the system of social relations. They act as relations of communication, relations of behavior and relations of activity. Social relations are extremely diverse. The main types of relations in society are ecological, economic, social, political, legal, moral, artistic and aesthetic, relations of freedom of conscience, information, scientific, family and others.
Unlike the existence of nature, the existence of man and society is carried out on the basis of goal-setting, expediency, social activity, creativity, foresight, although spontaneous, self-fulfilling processes without the participation of consciousness also take place. The meaningfulness of the existence of man and society is associated with individual and social consciousness.
The being of consciousness is a subjective-ideal form of being. The consciousness of an individual as a special element of his psyche and a property of the brain (higher nervous activity) is ideal. It manifests itself through objectification and deobjectification. The ideal images arising in consciousness on the basis of knowledge of the material world constitute the process of deobjectification of consciousness. The embodiment in practice of ideal images means the objectification or objectification of consciousness. Thanks to consciousness, an individual can carry out conscious, that is, sensually reproduced in consciousness and understood mental and practical activity, manage himself, other people, processes, and perform other actions. With the help of consciousness, a choice is made, goals are set and tasks are defined, plans are outlined, means and methods for their implementation are selected. The possession of consciousness gives a person the ability to carry out constructive and creative activities, to create a "second nature" as the main element of culture.
The consciousness of social groups and communities is generally denoted by the terms "social consciousness" or "consciousness of society". With all the conventions of this designation, it allows us to correlate the public consciousness with the individual consciousness, to identify common features and differences. Social consciousness manifests itself as a collective-spiritual property of social communities, which does not have a material carrier of the social brain. Consciousness as a property of the human brain is always individual. But people find some common ideas, knowledge, ideals, jointly develop various plans, and carry out specific actions based on them. What is common in the minds of many people, expressed with varying degrees of completeness and depth, forms the social consciousness.
The existence of individual and social consciousness is also carried out through the functioning of its main content - worldview. The existence of a worldview is associated with the formation and implementation of a picture of the world, as well as the positions of the subject in relation to himself, other people, and the surrounding reality.
The picture of the world as the information basis of the worldview has historically changed and is constantly updated. The primitive-ordinary perception of being, which existed at the dawn of mankind, was supplemented by religious-mythological and abstract-logical elements. Gradually, theoretical knowledge acquired dominance, and in them - scientific knowledge. The modern picture of the world includes the natural-science, scientific-technical and social-humanitarian components, as well as the corresponding everyday knowledge and beliefs. Religious-philosophical and secular-scientific elements coexist in it. It is burdened with understanding of global, regional and national-state problems.
Thus, being in philosophical understanding represents everything that exists, known or unknown to man. Man himself is an element of being, possessing an important feature - consciousness (soul). The structure of being is characterized by the ratio of material and ideal being, potential and actual being, being of nature, man and society. The material world can be structurally represented by the unity of micro-, macro-, and mega-worlds. The problem of being is one of the most important philosophical and methodological problems of the theory of the universal. The theory of being has received a special name - ontology.
The correlation and interaction of matter and consciousness act as a concretization of being, its main types - material and ideal being. Man in the process of his life exists, first of all, as a material and physical being, establishes and implements diverse connections with the outside world. The material world is the sphere and conditions of human life. Therefore, knowledge about the material world is necessary for every individual.
But people build their lives consciously. They set goals and define tasks, comprehend themselves and others, the material world, choose the appropriate way and means to achieve ideals, creatively solve many other problems based on consciousness. Despite the fact that the problem of consciousness is one of the most difficult in philosophy and other sciences, much is already known about its nature and functioning. Knowledge about consciousness, cognition, worldview, spirituality helps a person to find new ways and means of self-improvement. The categories "material world" (or "matter") and "consciousness" are the ultimate foundations of being. Limiting in the sense that it is difficult to find broader concepts that characterize being. The concept of "objective being" can also be understood as extremely broad, but it still exists in relation to consciousness. Whether it exists outside of a person and his consciousness - this question can be answered positively only using certain assumptions. And no one doubts that there is a material world and a person with his consciousness. The recognition of the material world as autonomous and self-sufficient is the basis of materialism. Idealism substantiates objectively ideal (transcendental) being in order to show the emergence of the sensible world from it.
Understanding matter (the material world) underlies the scientific explanation of reality, the development of specific sciences. The structure and regularities of the functioning of the material world are primarily devoted to modern concepts of natural science. The first ideas about the material world are contained in almost all ancient philosophical views. In ancient Indian philosophy, there was a term "prakriti", meaning "matter", "nature", other more specific concepts to reflect the material. In ancient Chinese philosophy, the following terms were used: "material chaos", "yin" - heavy and dark material particles of the feminine principle, "yang" - light and light material particles of the masculine principle.
In ancient Greek philosophy, many concepts that express the fundamental substantiality of the material have received a detailed explanation: space, thing, earth, water, air, fire, atom, apeiron, etc.
Subsequently, as the problem of material existence became actual, many thinkers turned to it. In modern philosophy, the problem of matter is somewhat muted. It is considered in connection with common problem being, and in more detail - natural sciences.
The concepts of "matter", "material world", "cosmos", "nature", "objective material being" can conditionally be considered identical. Although, for example, the concept of "space" does not always include the material existence of man and society. Until the middle of the 19th century, mechanistic views of matter dominated. Its attributes were considered: divisibility to an atom, the presence of mechanical motion, independence from the properties of space, inertia, etc. Only substance was recognized as a substrate (material) of matter. Here is how, for example, D.I. Mendeleev: “Substance or matter,” he wrote, “is something that, filling space, has weight, that is, represents a mass ...”*. Subsequently, with the accumulation of knowledge about nature, physical fields were included in the understanding of matter, as well as material substrates, which exist as substances under certain conditions, and as elements of physical fields under other conditions. So far, modern natural science has not been able to detect other types of material.
Matter is the totality of things and physical fields, as well as other formations that have a substrate, the material of which they are composed. Matter or the material world is a kind of being that correlates with separate (non-material) being. This is the ontological understanding of matter.
Matter is also a philosophical category that denotes (covers) everything that exists, having a material or energy substrate. The concept of matter in terms of its volume extends to all material, really existing objects, regardless of whether they are known to man or not. In terms of content, the concept of matter captures the most important, essential (attributive) properties and features characteristic of the material. These attributes of matter include: substrativity; infinity, indestructibility and indestructibility of the total material; finiteness, emergence (creativity) and annihilation of concrete material objects; traffic; space; time; reflection, etc. Philosophical category matter and its characteristics reveals the epistemological aspect of understanding the material world, the extent to which mankind has studied the surrounding real world.
The most accurate definition of matter, containing ontological and epistemological aspects, was given by V.I. Lenin. “Matter,” he wrote, “is a philosophical category for designating an objective reality that is given to a person in his sensations, which is copied, photographed, displayed by our sensations, existing independently of them”*. It should be noted that the term "objective reality" in the definition means matter that exists really and independently of a person. It was noted above that outside of a person and independently of his consciousness, the ideal can also exist. At the same time, the human body does not exist objectively in everything, that is, independently of it and its consciousness. The dependence of the human body on itself is very significant in terms of regulation, motivation, maintenance of normal functioning and other parameters. This is the uniqueness of human being as a unity of physical and mental, material and spiritual.
The structure of matter can be represented on various grounds. Depending on the main modes of existence, the following are distinguished: inanimate nature in the unity of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, macrobodies, star systems, galaxies and metagalaxies of matter and antimatter, as well as physical fields; wildlife as the totality of the existence of protein bodies, living cells, organisms, populations, biocenosis and the biosphere, as well as nerve cells, nerve nodes, nervous systems that form the basis for the existence of plants and animals; a person in the unity of the physical and mental, material and bodily; society as an isolated part of nature and as a combination of individuals, material culture and practical activities of subjects, material and physical relations and institutions.
Depending on the natural-science classification of the material world, the material world is distinguished in it: physical vacuum, plasma, physical field, substance. Substance exists as a microcosm (10-14 - 10-8 cm), a macrocosm (10-8 cm - 3.1016 km) and a megaworld (endless space). Scientific knowledge about the structure of the material world is constantly being developed and refined. The forms or modes of existence of matter denote those general characteristics that are inherent in the various conditions of its organization and change. They are more deeply and fully studied by specific sciences.
The forms (methods) of the existence and movement of matter are: physical (the world of atoms and quarks, elementary particles), chemical (the world of molecules of inanimate and living nature, cellular structure); biological (living organisms and populations), social (life activity of people in society based on labor activity, language and consciousness).
In the evolution of the Earth's biosphere as the highest stage of development of the macroworld and in the megaworld, three forms of existence of matter are specially distinguished: ecological (biosphere), geological (planets) and space (star systems, galaxies, the Universe) forms of motion. On the threshold of the 21st century, science has come close to explaining the emergence of matter not on the basis of myths, beliefs or logical speculation, but using the available accurate knowledge of synergetics, space physics and other sciences. There is a concept according to which matter arose from the state of instability of a non-equilibrium system - quantum vacuum. Quantum vacuum is treated as if it were a form of matter capable, under certain conditions, of leading to the emergence of material particles from it. It differs from "nothing" in that it has universal constants as an analogue of unity. Undoubtedly, there are many assumptions and assumptions in this understanding of the quantum vacuum, but there are enough accurate data.
The process of the emergence of matter is represented by the following stages. The quantum vacuum performs spontaneous fluctuations (appearance of unobservable, intermediate, appearing and immediately disappearing particles). But such particles "have time" to interact, causing transformations of quanta. In this case, a quantum is understood as an indivisible portion of some quantity (energy, particles, etc.). Due to this fluctuation, the quantum vacuum becomes observable, reveals itself, and can also accidentally come into a state of special excitation. Then there may come (and in the case of the emergence of matter has come) the moment of the critical state of vacuum - the point of bufurcation. This is a turning point in the development of the cosmic vacuum. It characterizes the decay of unstable (fluctuating) particles into matter (permanent particles) and radiation. This leads to the appearance of such characteristics of matter as space and time. As a result of this process, stable particles with a constant mass are formed, and their "life" begins - being in the space-time continuum. Entropy as a measure of the disorganization of a system (spontaneously fluctuating quantum vacuum) gives way to information - a measure of an organized (stable) system. With all the shortcomings of this concept, it is more preferable than myths about the emergence of the material or religious dogma. But it is important to emphasize that each person is free to choose one or another point of view on the emergence of matter. This problem is still ideological, not experimental-scientific.
Thus, matter characterizes the material-energy substantiality of being, in contrast to the ideal (non-material) being. Matter has its own characteristics and regularities. The concept of matter (material) is an extremely broad generalization and correlates with the understanding of the ideal. An important variety of the ideal is human consciousness.
Man, like higher animals, has a psyche - the ability to interact with the environment by processing information in the brain and developing behavior patterns. This is a special form of signaling interaction. In the process of mental reflection, internal dynamic properties, states, phenomena and relationships arise that orient higher animals and humans in the surrounding world and in the sphere of their own needs, activity patterns.
The mental states of a person are, along with the external environment, the most important motivational factor. They determine the direction and content of activity to meet the needs and interests of the individual. The essential difference between the human psyche and the psyche of higher animals is the presence of consciousness. Consciousness as a special element of the psyche is possessed only by man. Unconscious, instinctive-reflex mental reflection is inherent in both animals and humans.
Consciousness represents a qualitatively different form and method of mental reflection by a person of the surrounding world and himself, a new motivation for behavior and activity. It represents such a property of the human brain and the person himself, which is ideal. It cannot be weighed, measured, carried out any other operations possible in relation to material objects. The human brain is a highly organized formation and carrier of consciousness. It has many properties. But the ability and uniqueness of the property, which received the name of consciousness, lies in the fact that with its help a person can carry out conscious thinking and practical activities, self-control and management.
Human consciousness has not yet been studied enough. The main difficulty lies in the fact that it is studied indirectly, through manifestations in thinking, communication, behavior and activity, as well as on the basis of knowledge of the human brain itself, its higher nervous activity. It is very difficult to study the ideal, that which cannot be perceived by hearing, sight, or other senses. But it is clear that with the help of consciousness, a person received the ability to realize and understand the perceived information, to use it in social practice.
The essence of consciousness consists in the presence of a number of properties that make up the quality of a given phenomenon and make it possible to distinguish it from other elements of the psyche. The essential properties of consciousness include: ideality, goal-setting, expediency, conscious (controlled, managed, understood) activity, creativity, planning, foresight, etc. Together they express (mean) the essence of consciousness.
The process of the emergence of human consciousness, its essence and content can be fully disclosed on the basis of several approaches. The historical approach makes it possible to find out that consciousness is the result (one of the results) of the complication of the material world, the emergence of man in society as a result of labor activity, verbal communication and the joint way of life of people. In this aspect, consciousness is genetically secondary in relation to a person and his brain.
The epistemological approach reveals the subjectivity of consciousness. It is a subjective image of the objective world, which is formed and exists in the human brain as its property. Consciousness represents a qualitatively different form of reflection by a person of himself and the surrounding world in comparison with psychically unconscious reflection and other, lower forms of reflection - biological, chemical and physical. In the epistemological aspect, consciousness is absolutely opposite to the material world, since it is ideal. In other aspects, consciousness cannot be opposed to the material, it cannot exist outside of a person and his mental activity. The epistemological characteristic of consciousness also consists in the ability of a person with the help of consciousness to meaningfully cognize being and fix the results of cognition in mental forms: sensations, perceptions, ideas, concepts, judgments, conclusions, etc.
The functional approach draws attention to the fact that consciousness is a function of a normally functioning human brain and the person himself. This approach emphasizes the idea that consciousness is an essential property of the human brain, since the function and means the manifestation of one or more essential properties of a material object. The functionality of consciousness emphasizes its dependence on the physical and mental health of the brain and the person himself. With pathological processes in the brain and general physical activity of a person, the normal functioning of consciousness is disturbed and may completely disappear.
The social approach allows us to determine the specifics of the manifestation of human consciousness in social relations. Such properties of consciousness as goal-setting, expediency, active creative reflection, foresight, self-control, understanding, management, etc. come to the fore. With the help of consciousness, humanity forms optimal relationships with nature, created a “second nature” - the leading element of culture, manages social development. On the basis of consciousness, each individual carries out the process of socialization - a meaningful "entry" into the system of social life and the acquisition of social qualities (properties). Human consciousness internally and spiritually determines the motives and content of the self-manifestation of the individual in society, the realization of her abilities and opportunities.
Many approaches to the explanation of consciousness point to its complexity and richness, to the desire of people to more deeply and on a larger scale to know such a unique property of a person. An important place in the characterization of consciousness is also occupied by its structure.
The structure of consciousness expresses the presence in its content of relatively independent elements and the ways of their coordination with each other. Depending on the main states of consciousness, knowledge, volitional and emotional-sensory states, value attitudes and orientations are distinguished in it. Knowledge is a form of thinking, the content of which is "transferred" information about the objects of knowledge. Knowledge can be true, delusions and lies. The measure of subjectivity from true knowledge to knowledge-delusions and false knowledge increases, while objectivity decreases.
Emotions and feelings exist in consciousness as conscious short-term and long-term states that express a person's attitude towards himself and towards other people, towards the world around him. It is important to distinguish between the material and physical processes in the human body as the functioning of the sense organs and their reflection in the entire psyche, especially in its conscious part. The first processes are material, the second - ideal, an element of the structure of consciousness. For a person, both situational emotional states and longer-term feelings are important. Moreover, feeling and its consolidation in consciousness are carried out at two levels: physical feelings (hunger, cold, pressure, etc.) and social feelings (dignity, honor, patriotism, love, etc.).
Volitional states characterize the ability of a person, passing through consciousness, to concentrate his strength and knowledge in solving any problems, to overcome obstacles and adverse events, keeping the body in tension and special care for a long time. Volitional states that arise in a person's mind can accompany the processes of a person's satisfaction of his material, physical and spiritual needs, as well as communication, behavior, and various activities. The will, as a phenomenon of the entire human psyche, cannot be completely reduced either to consciousness or to action. This is a complex property of a person, consisting in the choice of the goal of activity and the internal efforts necessary to achieve the goal. Will has more to do with duty (“I must”) than with desires (“I want”).
Depending on the levels of consciousness, two elements are distinguished in its structure: images of consciousness that arise and exist on the basis of sensory reflection and images of theoretical, abstract-logical knowledge. Both elements are interconnected. The initial, primary level is sensual images of consciousness. They are formed in the direct interaction of a person with the lives of other people, the world around them. Abstract-logical images of consciousness reflect the qualitative, essential, natural in cognizable objects, in objects and processes of life. They are based on sensual images, but deepen and improve them, and through them they are manifested in practice. Two levels in the structure of consciousness correspond to the main stages of human cognitive activity.
Abstract-logical thinking includes two important forms: rational (static, formal) and rational thinking. At the level of reason, images of consciousness expressed in concepts, judgments and other forms logical thinking, function according to a certain and given scheme, template or standard. Reasonable consciousness and thinking express a higher level of rational knowledge, which is characterized by creativity, self-reflection, non-standard thinking, dialectics.
According to the direction of the manifestation of consciousness, two of its sides are distinguished: consciousness directed outward, towards other people and nature; consciousness directed inside the subject or self-consciousness. The outer side of the consciousness of the subjects is more open and ordered, enriched faster on the basis of communication and activity. The inner side of consciousness is more personal, individual, closed and less ordered, since the only connoisseur and controller is the individual himself, the social community.
Depending on the carriers of consciousness, it structurally exists as the consciousness of an individual, social group, stratum and class, ethnic and other community, the consciousness of the whole society. The differentiation of consciousness according to carriers is diverse, since a variety of subjects live and act in society, representing not only individuals, but also social institutions. This structure of consciousness emphasizes the varying degree of its sociality. Most often, the consciousness of the individual and the consciousness of society, or individual and social consciousness, are considered and correlated with each other.
The consciousness of a person in colloquial language, as well as in theology and religious philosophy, correlates with the soul of a person. In everyday speech, consciousness and soul are often identified by their ideality and "belonging" to a person. The religious understanding of the soul is different. The soul, from this point of view, is one of the components of a person, mysteriously connected with the human body and spirit. If the spirit is differentiated into human and divine (absolute, world), then the soul of a person, as it is believed, is capable of forming the spirit of a person with the help of which he can enter into communion with God.
Human consciousness "reveals" itself in mental and practical activity, in other forms of social activity of people. This "discovery" is the existence, the functioning of consciousness. The main functions of consciousness are: adequate reflection; cognitive; accumulative (accumulation of knowledge); purposeful (teleological); creative and transformative; function of planning and foresight; axiological, managerial, etc. The functions of consciousness are a manifestation of one or more of its essential properties. Through functioning, consciousness is objectified and deobjectified, that is, it is embodied in specific actions of people, in objects and processes, or exists in ideal images as non-material units of the content of consciousness.
The categories of "consciousness" and "matter" are extremely broad concepts, and the phenomena they reflect are the foundations of being. A person can comprehend being from a variety of positions. But through the ratio of human consciousness and material being, it is most understandable and adequate to explain being itself as a whole, its two varieties - material and ideal being, as well as the main forms: the being of nature, man and society. The correlation of matter and consciousness is one of the main philosophical and ideological problems, which cannot be known in everything by specific sciences or explained by their methods and means. Each person himself has the right to choose one or another version of understanding the problem of consciousness and matter as a worldview postulate or creed, to follow it in theory and in practice.
People in the most distant past, on the basis of simple but constant observations, came to the conclusion that the world around them and they themselves are changing. In the changes, new states, properties, processes, transitions of some objects to others were distinguished. Such changes, in contrast to periodically repeating changes without any visible new moments, are called development.
The problem of development in philosophy is considered in connection with the characteristics of the signs and dynamics of the existence of being. Change, movement, development reveal the essential aspects of the material and the ideal. Substance and physical fields undergo changes, they are characterized by new states and processes, understood by man as development. Our thoughts are also developing, consciousness itself and worldview as areas of the spiritual-ideal. But the understanding of development in philosophy and other sciences is very diverse. Let us consider the main approaches and points of view that explain development.
The first thinkers sought to delimit the development of other changes because of their importance for man, to designate the doctrine of development with a special term. In ancient Greek philosophy, the concept of "dialectic" arose. Diogenes Laertes singled out, for example, three parts of philosophy: physics, ethics and dialectics. He wrote that some philosophers are called physicists because they study nature. Others are ethical because of their fascination with reasoning about human rights. And still others are called dialecticians for the intricacies of their speeches*. The interpretation of dialectics by Diogenes Laertes only implicitly pointed to the doctrine of development. Intricacies, developed logical thinking made it possible to formulate and substantiate new ideas, principles, and win discussions.
In fact, in the philosophy of ancient Greece, there were already several meanings of dialectics:
Dialectics as a methodical refutation of the enemy's theses (Zeno of Elea);
Dialectics as an end in itself of refutation in sophistry and eristics (the art of arguing);
Dialectic as "dia" and "log" is the unity of refutation and maieutics (from Socrates) - the final phase of the dialogue (dispute) in the spirit of irony, when the arguing "freed himself from illusions, errors and helps the" soul "find the truth;
Dialectics - meta-empirical conclusion (general conclusion from experience) (according to Plato);
Dialectics is the analytics and logic of the possible, similar to dialectical syllogism (inference) (according to Aristotle);
Dialectics is a part of logic in relation to its other part - rhetoric (Stoics, etc.).
As can be seen, the doctrine of universal connections and the development of being was not formed immediately. At first, more attention was paid to the connections and development of people's thinking, to achieving their adequacy to the real material world, relations in society.
In modern philosophy, being is comprehended not only in terms of its essence, content, structure, attributive properties, types and methods. It is also studied from the point of view of identifying those connections that are characteristic of being as a whole, for its specific types and forms. In other words, the doctrine of universal connections and the development of being is the most important element of the theory of the universal. It is believed, for example, that the philosophy of being (ontology) includes: the concept (definition) of being; correlation of spirit and matter; self-organization and consistency; determinism and development.
Ontology, in turn, correlates with other elements of the theory of the universal: with the philosophy of philosophy (metaphilosophy) and the theory (philosophy) of knowledge - epistemology.
In various philosophical systems and schools, the doctrine of the connections and development of being is called differently or does not have a special name. But most often it is denoted by the term "dialectics". The doctrine of connections and development was historically formed from the recognition of the variability of everything (being). For example, Heraclitus believed that the same thing is alive and dead, awake and sleeping, young and old, because the first disappears in the second, and the second in the first. He also believed that we enter the same river and do not enter. We exist and we do not exist.
In the philosophy of the 20th century, the concept of "dialectics" is used in three main meanings:
1. Dialectics - a set of objective laws and processes operating in the world in the course of its movement and development - objective dialectics. Part of what is known in this aspect is systematized in philosophical doctrine (theory), which is called dialectics.
2. Dialectics is the interconnection and development of images in human thinking. This process is studied by the dialectic of thinking or logic.
3. Dialectics is one of the universal methods of cognition, which is used not so much to obtain specific knowledge, but to determine approaches to the study of being.
Dialectics does not study any change and not any connections, but only universal, universal, characteristic of all being, and attention is paid not so much to the change or movement itself, but to one of the varieties - development.
Dialectics in philosophy is the doctrine of universal connections and the development of being: nature, society and human thinking; being material and non-material (spiritual). This teaching is not uniform in general. There is an internal and external inconsistency in the very functioning of dialectics, which led to its historical and modern alternativeness. But dialectics has a stable content: the unity of categories, laws and principles.
The alternativeness of dialectics lies in the existence of various approaches to explaining development or denying the very possibility of being to development. It can be considered in three main aspects. Firstly, there are different teachings in the very theory of dialectics, due to fundamentally incompatible approaches to cognition and the variability of being. Secondly, doctrines that are relatively independent in relation to dialectics have been formed, which also represent its alternatives. Thirdly, dialectics as a theory and method of cognition has an opposite doctrine in epistemology.
The first aspect includes the existence in the theory of dialectics of two teachings: idealistic and materialistic dialectics. In their interaction and opposition lies the internal alternativeness of dialectics. Idealistic dialectics is oriented towards the substantiation of the primacy of the development of ideas and concepts. Its foundations were laid by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and other thinkers. Materialist dialectics argues for the primacy of the development of material existence, reflected by concepts, laws and principles. Starting positions materialistic understanding developments were developed by Heraclitus, Zeno of Elea, Lucretius, Marx, Engels, Lenin and others.
Idealistic and materialistic dialectics explain the development of being. In this case, basically the same concepts, laws and principles are used. The essential difference lies in the search for the initial foundations, the beginnings of the explanation of development. Supporters of idealistic dialectics defend the primacy of the development of the spiritual, non-material. Proponents of materialistic dialectics adhere to opposite initial foundations: first of all, the objective, material world develops, and then our consciousness and its content.
The second aspect of the alternativeness of dialectics includes the teachings that have arisen outside of dialectics and constitute its "opposition". These are anti-dialectical concepts of being: "tragic dialectics", "metaphysics of life", "existential dialectics", "negative dialectics", "antinomic dialectics", mystical rationalism, dialectical theology, etc.
The external alternative to dialectics both as a doctrine of development and as a method of cognition is metaphysics. It represents a cumulative doctrine of connections and development, of the methods and forms of cognition, explaining them in a fundamentally different way than dialectics. Supporters of metaphysics defend the independence of the elements of being in relation to their interdependence, recognize the importance external relations, not internal; the source of development is considered to be an external impetus, and not the internal inconsistency of being; the nature of development consists in evolution or catastrophism, but not in the unity of gradual, quantitative and spasmodic, qualitative as in dialectics. The supporters of metaphysics see the direction of development either in progress, or in regression, or in “moving in a circle”, denying the interaction of these tendencies and the development of being, as it were, “in a spiral”.
In the third aspect, metaphysics is opposite to dialectics as a method of cognition. It focuses on the knowledge of being in its separate connections and rest, on the study of individual objects, not systems, it appeals to irrationality. An alternative to dialectics as a method of cognition is agnosticism. He opposes dialectics in that he focuses not on the fundamental cognizability of being in its connections and development, but on relativism, skepticism, irrationalism, and mysticism.
Thus, the understanding of the connections and development of being is diverse and diverse. Dialectics is the most complete and rich in content doctrine that explains development.
Dialectics (idealistic and materialistic) is a system of principles, laws and categories. A principle is the basic, starting position of any theory, science, as well as a belief in something, a norm or rule of behavior **. A principle in philosophy is the basis from which one must proceed and which must be guided in knowledge and practical activity.
The principles of dialectics are universal scientific propositions about the progressive changes of being interconnected in their elements, which are of initial importance for mental and practical activity.
They are formulated on the basis of categories and laws of dialectics. There are two main principles of dialectics:
The principle of universal communication;
development principle.
There are other principles of dialectics: the principle of determinism; the principle of inconsistency; the principle of quantitative and qualitative development of being; the principle of succession; the principle of necessity. They are formulated on the basis of specific dialectical laws, knowledge of the essential aspects and signs of ongoing changes in being, in the course of a more specific characterization of the connections of being.
The principle of connection expresses (covers) the whole variety of connections of being and is formulated in the judgment: in being (the world) everything is interconnected.
Communication is a philosophical category that reflects all forms, types and types of correlation, interdependence, interdependence, mutual influence and interaction of objects and phenomena of the material world, logical images of consciousness (thinking). The principle also points to the fact that connections are not introduced into being from somewhere outside. They are inherent in being itself, its types and forms. The main role is played by internal connections, as they determine the integrity of specific objects and systems of being, their unity. Understanding dialectical connections makes it possible to determine a regular connection, a law. Law in philosophy is an essential, internal, necessary, stable and recurring connection of being.
The connections of being characterize the position of rest and movement, statics and dynamics, structure and development. Development is such a movement of being that has a certain direction, irreversibility, mechanism. It leads to a change in quality, to a transformation. The principle of development reflects (covers) progressive - from the past through the present to the future - the change of being, the emergence of the new and the withering away of the old, through the transition from the less perfect to the more perfect. Development is characterized by the presence of sources, driving forces (determinants) and mechanism, continuity, direction and other features. They are concretized in the laws and categories of dialectics.
The laws of dialectics are conditionally divided into basic and non-basic. The basic laws are revealed through several categories of dialectics. Non-basic laws are expressed, as a rule, by paired categories of dialectics: cause and effect (the law of cause-and-effect dependence), necessity and chance (the law of the mutual transition of the necessary and the accidental), etc.
Basic laws of dialectics. The law of unity and struggle of opposites reveals the sources and driving forces of any development. The main categories of law: dialectical identity, contradiction, insignificant differences, essential differences, opposition, struggle of opposites.
At all stages of the emergence and resolution of contradictions, a “struggle” of opposites is carried out: first, as interaction at the levels of dialectical identity, insignificant and essential differences, then - the struggle of essential sides and opposite entities. In public life, a special regulation of the manifestation of the law is necessary in order to prevent the aggravation of contradictions to social conflicts, revolutions and wars.
The law of mutual transition of quantitative and qualitative changes expresses the mechanism of any development based on the interaction of quantity, quality and measure. Basic concepts of the law: quantity, quality, measure, leap. The law leads either to the destruction of the old quality, or to such a modification of it, which is characterized by a "merging" of opposites. In the social sphere, it is important to state in what forms and by what means the leap is carried out when one quality is replaced by another, the old by the new. Preference is reserved for evolutionary social leaps.
The law of negation of negation reveals the continuity and direction of development through the irreversible replacement of the old by the new. Main categories of law: dialectical negation, continuity, direction. The law characterizes the spiral development, indicates that in the new, not only the positive, but also the negative is preserved from the old. The emerging new is not always "consonant" with the progress, interests and ideals of people. In relation to society, the law reveals the unity of progressive, regressive and directionless development with a certain historical dominant, which makes it possible to single out a specific direction of the historical process.
The categories of dialectics are the basic concepts that reveal the essential, main features and processes of the development of being. These are the initial forms of logical thinking, when its object is development.
There are many categories of dialectics. Such concepts as “change”, “movement”, “development”, “connection”, “law”, as well as the categories of laws of dialectics have already been considered. But in the study of dialectics, the so-called "paired" categories are specially considered. They are correlative, characterize development from different angles and are the basis for the formation of other laws of dialectics.
The categories of dialectics are classified on various grounds. Depending on the manifestation in the types of being, categories of development can be distinguished that characterize the material and ideal (spiritual) world. Based on the existence of spheres (forms) of being, categories of development of nature, man and society are distinguished. It is possible to group the categories of dialectics, revealing the natural, essential and accidental, external, superficial in development.
In the doctrine of development itself, categories are grouped depending on the fact that they reveal the manifestation of principles, basic and non-basic laws. The categories characterizing the principles and basic laws of dialectics were mentioned above. The non-basic laws of dialectics reveal “paired” categories: essence and phenomenon, content and form, necessity and chance, possibility and reality, etc.
They reveal the process of development more broadly and deeply than the basic laws. It should be emphasized that all categories of dialectics have specifics depending on what types and forms of being they reflect. If the categories that explain the connections and development of the material world have an objective content and a subjective form (method) of expression, then the categories that explain the ideal objective being are subjective both in content and in form. Such concepts, for example, as "god", "angel", "world mind", "absolute idea", "world spirit" and others are not experimentally verified and substantiated.
They are substantiated in a logical way, through a system of formal logical proofs and rebuttals. Many of them are accepted on the basis of faith. Therefore, they have a "zero" volume, since the material phenomena that they reflect do not really exist.
The categories of dialectics act as a kind of steps in a person's cognition and transformation of the surrounding reality and himself, since each of them contains the sum of essential knowledge about the object of cognition. Mastery of these categories increases the possibilities of people in concrete creative activity.
The categories of dialectics, as strongholds and steps, make it possible to form a worldview, improve the methodological basis of economic, legal and other knowledge, and their application in practice.
Thus, there are quite a lot of teachings about the connection and development of being. One of them is dialectics, representing the unity of principles, laws and categories. Dialectics plays an important ideological, methodological, cognitive and value-oriented role for a person and society.
List of sources used
1. Kokhanovsky V.P. Fundamentals of philosophical science / Kokhanovsky V.P. - Rostov n / D., 2006
2. Alekseev P.V. Philosophy / Alekseev P.V., Panin A.V. 3rd ed., revised. and additional - M.: TK Velby, Prospekt, 2005. - 608 p.
3. Demidov, A.B. Philosophy and methodology of science: a course of lectures / A.B. Demidov., 2009 - 102 p.
4. Kalmykov V.N. Philosophy: Tutorial/ V.N. Kalmykov - Minsk: Vysh. school, 2008. - 431 p.
5. Kaverin B.I., Demidov I.V. Philosophy: Textbook. / Under. ed. Doctor of Philological Sciences, Prof. B.I. Kaverina - M.: Jurisprudence, 2001. - 272 p.
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Introduction
3. Being: the unity of the world
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
being philosophy existential culture
Philosophical concepts are often extremely abstract. In other words, they carry some speculative content. Here, for example, is the concept of "being". It comes from the word "to be" (to be present, to be present) and denotes an infinite reality - everything that surrounds us, regardless of specific objects. Everything that is rooted in life - rivers, deserts, mountains, space, culture - can be called "being". So, being is a philosophical category, which means, first of all, existence in the world. Being opposed to our consciousness. Plato, perhaps the first in European philosophy, thought about the question: what is primary? The thinker's answer was unequivocal: consciousness is primary, it gave birth to the world. Even Socrates argued that knowledge is recollection. At first, a certain truth, a world of ideas, reigned in the world. Initially, there were some visual images, spiritual abstractions. Then they turned into things, objects. Before the “sea” appeared, there already existed a certain image of the sea, its “idea”.
Many philosophers objected to Plato: no, matter, objects first appeared. What the world is made of can be called the philosophical concept of "matter". The concrete, natural-science concept of matter is changing, being transformed. At first they thought: everything that makes up the Universe consists of atoms. Then it turned out that there are much smaller particles. However, whatever the world from the point of view of physicists, philosophers designate the reality of the world with one word "matter". So, what was in the beginning - matter or consciousness? This is the basic question of philosophy. In general, the concept of "the fundamental question of philosophy" was introduced into European thought by Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Analyzing history Western philosophy, he drew attention to the following fact: thinkers, regardless of what they studied - nature, society, culture, man - took as a basis something initial, which, in their opinion, can be called primary. Those philosophers who recognized matter as the starting point were called materialists, those who proceeded from the idea - idealists. “Philosophers,” wrote F. Engels, “divided into two large camps according to how they answered this question. Those who claimed that the spirit existed before nature ... - made up the idealistic camp. Those who considered nature to be the main principle joined the various schools of materialism.
1. The concept of "being": philosophical meaning
"Being" is one of the central concepts of philosophy throughout its history. Ordinary thinking perceives the terms "to be", "to exist", "to be in cash" as synonyms. But philosophy, using the natural language term "to be", gave it a categorical status, i.e. moved from the question of the existence of the world "here" and "now" to the question of the eternal and universal guarantees of such an existence. The solution of such questions presupposes the ability to think, abstracting from specific objects, their signs and properties.
The introduction of any philosophical category cannot be regarded as the result of the game of the mind of this or that thinker. All the great philosophers have introduced new categories to designate and at the same time solve some real problem. The world itself is not puzzled by problems; thoughts about some difficulties. For example, nature does not reflect on its own elements and cataclysms: they become problems for man. But people in the course of their life activity create their own problems, both personal and general, concerning the entire human race.
2. Existential origins of the problem of being
What human problems does the category “being” describe and explain? The comfort of human existence presupposes reliance on some simple and natural prerequisites that are self-explanatory and do not require special justifications. Among such universal prerequisites, the very first one is people's confidence that with all the visible changes taking place in nature and the world as a whole, there are some guarantees of its preservation as a stable whole. The history of mankind demonstrates the eternal desire of people to find such pillars of their existence that would block in their everyday consciousness the horror associated with thoughts about the possibility of every minute death of the world. And every time when doubts about the strength of such supports began, the usual givens real life became the subject of special reflection, moving from the rank of something taken for granted to the rank of problems of finding new establishments - supports.
So, in the pre-philosophical, mythological period of life, the Greeks saw the guarantees of the stability of the world as a whole in the traditional religion associated with the gods of Olympus. But the first philosophers began to destroy the connection of the individual with legends, tradition, calling into question the absoluteness of the traditions themselves and faith in Olympus. Philosophy plunged the ancient Greek into an abyss of doubt about the possibility of seeing the Olympian gods as a guarantor of world stability, thereby destroying the foundations and norms of a traditional calm life. The world and the universe no longer seemed as solid and reliably existing as before: everything became shaky, unreliable, uncertain. The ancient Greeks lost their vital support. The modern Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset noted that the anxiety and fear experienced by people who had lost the support of life, the reliable world of traditions, faith in the gods, were undoubtedly terrible, especially since in ancient times fear was the most powerful experience. In this situation, it was necessary to search for new solid and reliable foundations for people's lives. They needed faith in a new force. Philosophy began the search for new foundations for the world and man, introduced the problem of being, gave this term, taken from the Greek colloquial language, a categorical meaning.
3. Being: the unity of the world
3.1 Antiquity: the search for "real" principles
Greek philosophy, having destroyed the connection of the individual with legends, tradition, essentially made a world-historical revolution: it discovered the citizen of the world, offering other, non-traditional, ultimate foundations for the stability of the unity of the world. These foundations united the consciousness of all people on the basis of the cosmic, universal, and not local generic mythological traditions.
Even in the VI century. BC. philosophers Milesian school Anaximander and Anaximenes for the first time began to criticize the mythological picture of the world and instead of the gods of Olympus, they proposed elements and luminaries as the foundations of the world and the cosmos, which arose from a single pra-substance, which itself was thought of as the highest and absolute "deity". Another representative of this school - Thales - also dealt a crushing blow to the national protective views of the Greeks, declaring that the ultimate foundation of everything that exists is water - this is something that has nothing to do with the family and tradition, because it is not about specific water, but about water in general, which cannot be "own" or "foreign".
Destroying all sorts of national-protective cultural traditions, the first philosophers rushed in search of a single impersonal beginning of everything that exists in the world, while abandoning the traditional views on the beginning associated with the gods of Olympus. In the course of these searches, the myth, the main worldview of the Greeks, was being destroyed. Hegel, assessing the contribution of Thales to the development of philosophy, noted that in the position that water is the root cause of everything, "the wild, infinitely colorful Homeric fantasy is calmed down, the mutual incoherence of countless origins is put to rest", which is typical for myth. (Speaking of "Homer's fantasy", Hegel had in mind the Greek poet Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who lived in the 8th century BC). The "water" of Thales, acting as a universal essence, is something formless, not like the specific sensation that people get when they see real water. Thales presented "water" as the beginning of beginnings, as something "purely general", but at the same time remaining special (Hegel).
The first philosophers saw the guarantor of the existence of any thing in the world in that it was considered as a moment of unity, which could be water, air, fire, apeiron, etc. That is, the nature of unity was not essential: the main thing is that this unity be stable and outside the competence of the Olympic gods. The rebellion against the divine will of Olympus was caused by the realization of its unpredictability. Any unpredictability is terrible, because it does not guarantee a strong and stable existence of the world. After all, the gods of Olympus behaved like people on earth: they quarreled, took revenge, seduced, flattered, resorted to insidious methods to achieve their goals, etc. Their anger and love were capricious and it was very difficult to predict their actions. Water, air, apeiron, earth, atoms, due to their impersonality, gave rise to the world of things and processes out of necessity, excluding the dominance of chance, arbitrariness, unpredictability.
It should be noted that although the philosophers of the Milesian school proposed as the ultimate foundations of the world something that had "naturalness", "substantiality", they laid the foundations for the logical definition of principles. In their constructions there is naive logic, or, as Hegel wrote, natural logic. The logical here is not yet thought as such, but a universal (in this sense, logical) way of explaining the nature of things. Philosophers, realizing the search for stability and unity of the world, offered its universal and ultimate foundations, which are given not so much to the senses as to the mind. They tried to penetrate into the true world, which was given only to the eyes of the mind. Philosophizing about the first principles is the evidence of the mind about a different reality, not identical to the one in which a particular person lives. It is no coincidence that the philosopher Democritus (5th century BC), according to legend, gouged out his own eyes so that the sensory-figurative perception of the surrounding world would not prevent the mind from “seeing” the true world. It can be said that all the first philosophers were, as it were, in a state of varying degrees of self-blindness: physical eyes were given concrete water, air, fire, etc., and they recognized as the fundamental principles, as it were, the ideas of these earthly elements.
Let us once again pay attention to the fact that philosophers asked and solved the question of the origins and primary causes not for the sake of the existence of the world in itself, but for the sake of man, for the sake of overcoming his fear of the infinite diversity of the changing world. They deduced this infinite and therefore incomprehensible diversity of the world from one source and thus calmed this diversity, curbed it in thought.
Appeal to a single foundation of the world and nature is the beginning of cosmopolitanism: philosophy, looking for a universal single principle, equalized all traditions and all cultures, cutting the “umbilical cord” of the connection between the individual and the genus. The opportunity began to take shape to consider the history of people as universal, and not locally national.
3.2 Being as "pure" thought: the beginning of ontology
It has already been noted above that ancient philosophers rushed in search of a single, but one that is given not to feeling, but to the mind (thought). Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school (4th-5th centuries BC), advanced the furthest in this direction, declaring thought as such, absolute thought, to be the ultimate foundation of the world and the cosmos. Subsequently, philosophers will call it "pure", meaning the content of thought that is not connected with the empirical, sensory experience of people. Parmenides, as it were, informed people about his discovery of a new force, the force of Absolute thought, which keeps the world from tipping over into chaos and non-existence, provides stability and reliability, gives a person the confidence that everything will necessarily obey the order established in another world. Necessity Parmenides called Divinity, Truth, providence, fate, eternal and indestructible, that which really exists. “Everything out of necessity” meant that the course of things wound up in the universe cannot suddenly, by chance, change: the day will always come to replace the night, the sun will not suddenly go out, people will not all suddenly die out for an unknown reason, etc. Others In other words, Parmenides postulated the presence behind things of an objective-sensory world of some other world, which plays the role of a guarantor of the stability and sustainability of everything that is on earth and in heaven. And this meant that people had no reason to despair caused by the collapse of the stable old traditional world.
How does Parmenides himself characterize being? Being is what really is, what is the true world, which is behind the world of object-sensible. Being is thought, it is one and unchangeable, absolutely and self-identical, it has no division within itself into subject and object; it is all possible fullness of perfection, among which in the first place is Truth, Good, Good, Light. Defining being as truly existing, Parmenides taught that it did not arise, is indestructible, unique, motionless, endless in time. It does not need anything, it is devoid of sensual qualities, and therefore it can be comprehended only by thought, by the mind.
In order to facilitate the understanding of what being is for people who are not experienced in the art of thinking thought, i.e. philosophize, Parmenides draws a sensual image of being: being is a ball, a sphere that has no spatial boundaries. Comparing being with a sphere, the philosopher used the belief that had developed in antiquity that the sphere is the most perfect and most beautiful form among other spatial-geometric forms.
In asserting that being is thought, he had in mind not the subjective thought of man, but the Logos, the cosmic Mind. Logos is not only a word, but also the universal foundation of things, which is directly revealed to a person in his thought. In other words, it is not a person who discovers the Truth of being, but, on the contrary, the Truth of being is revealed to a person directly. Hence the quite definite interpretation of human thinking by Parmenides: it receives knowledge in direct contact with Reason, which is being. Therefore, one should not overestimate logical proof as the power of the human mind, because it has its source in being - a thought that exceeds any logical action of a person. It is no coincidence that when Parmenides resorted to logical reasoning in his reasoning, he emphasized that the words he speaks do not belong to him personally, but to the goddess. Thus, a person, as it were, was called to humble the pride of his mind before the highest power of the Truth, which is the need. Parmenides' intuition of being instilled in people a sense of dependence on the Deity, located outside the everyday world, and at the same time gave them a sense of protection from subjective arbitrariness in thoughts and actions.
3.3 Antique opponents of the problem of being
Parmenides' intuition of being was criticized in antiquity because of the conclusions that follow from it about the need to remember that the human mind is not self-sufficient. Thus, the sophists (for example, Protagoras, V-IV centuries BC) tried to shift the focus of philosophizing from being to man, who, from their point of view, is the measure of all things, the place where the existence of anything is discovered. Socrates (5th century BC) also did not agree with the belittling of subjective reason, with the role of man to be a direct and non-reflective medium of Divine truth. He believed that between the latter and a person there is a distance that can only be overcome with the help of one's own thinking, which has its own norms and rules of logical reasoning.
The Cynics (5th-4th centuries BC) refused to recognize the problem of being because it forces a person to measure his life with the Truth, the Good, the Good. Calling on people to rely only on themselves in all their deeds and thoughts, they considered the motto “without a community, without a home, without a fatherland” to be the norm of life.
3.4 The theme of being in the fate of European culture
And yet, the philosophical version of being proposed by Parmenides was accepted by European culture, which indicates that people have an existential need for guarantees of their existence. Philosopher of the 20th century M. Heidegger, who devoted more than forty years to this problem, believed that the question of being, as it was posed in antiquity by Parmenides and Heraclitus, sealed the fate of the Western world. What is the meaning of this statement? The West accepted the idea of the existence of another world beyond the limits of the things of the visible world, where everything is: Good, Light, Goodness, Truth, and for many centuries practiced the art of comprehending otherness with thought, trained its ability to work in a space where there are no sensual images and ideas. European culture, like no other, has mastered to perfection the ability to think in the space of pure thought. In the future, this ability was successfully used in science by scientists in the construction of scientific theories.
Further, if we agree that there is a true being, then one should recognize the earthly existence as not genuine, and therefore in need of improvement, alteration in accordance with the ideals of the true world. Hence the craving of the West for various kinds of social utopias.
Summarizing all the above, we can draw the following conclusions. Firstly, Parmenides did not invent the problem of being, he did not invent it, relying only on his subjective mystical and esoteric intuitions: it was born as a response to real life (existential) questions, reflecting certain requests and needs of people of that era. He only formulated it in the language of philosophy and tried to find its solution in philosophical ways. Secondly, the question of being and its solution influenced the ideological and value attitudes of the Western world. Thirdly, it is impossible to identify Parmenidean being (Absolute, Good, Good, etc.) with the Christian God, Being is an impersonal, transcendent Absolute, which the ancient Greek could not refer to with the personal pronoun “You”. He did not pray to being, did not look for ways to be its image and likeness; it was enough for him to be sure that being, as an absolute thought, is a guarantee that the world will necessarily exist in some kind of unity and constancy. Fourthly, the Parmenidean doctrine of being opened up the possibility of metaphysics (from the Greek meta - after and physika - the physical world) - that special European philosophy that tried to find the first principles, causes and principles of all being in an ideal, spiritual sphere that exists objectively, those. outside and independently of man and mankind. It is no coincidence that Hegel highly valued Parmenides, calling him the founder of philosophy.
Metaphysics - literally: "what is after physics", i.e. that which is beyond the physical world; the term was introduced by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of the commentators on Aristotle, to name that part of his teaching, the content of which went beyond the cognition of the world of things, processes, and states around us. In the future, metaphysics acquired the additional meaning of ontology (from the Greek ontos - being and logos - concept) - a special philosophical doctrine of being as such, outside and independently of any kind of logical-epistemological and methodological issues.
3.5 New time: rejection of ontology and subjectivization of being
The problem of being, discovered in antiquity, has undergone changes in the philosophy of modern times. R. Descartes formulated the concept according to which man as a being capable of saying "I think, therefore I exist" is the only condition for the possibility of the existence of the world. But not the world in general, but the world that he can understand, act in it, realize his goals. Descartes made thought a being, but unlike Parmenides, he declared man to be the creator of thought. Being has become subjective, human-sized, determined by human abilities to perceive it and act in it. M. Heidegger wrote: “Being of being has become subjectivity”, “Now the horizon no longer glows by itself. Now he is only the “point of view” of a person who, moreover, creates it himself. The former understanding of being as an absolute and genuine, perfect and unchanging guarantor of everything that happens in the world was not in demand in idealistic philosophy New time. Man, his consciousness and thinking began to be regarded as something truly primary, as something that really exists. This position in philosophy is called idealism.
Let us give examples of the subjective understanding of being in different philosophical systems. I. Kant made life dependent on human cognitive activity; the philosophy of life identifies being with human life and the needs of its growth; the philosophy of values considers the latter to be the ultimate foundation of human existence; empirio-criticism considers being as a kind of human sensations; existentialism directly declares that man, and he alone, is the true and ultimate being: the question of being is the question of its meaning, and the meaning is always set by the man himself.
Mankind was still concerned about the question of the ultimate foundations of the world, but now philosophy was looking for these foundations in man himself, in the forms of his existence. Kantianism, positivism, the philosophy of life abandoned ontology - the doctrine of the ultimate foundations, levels and principles of the structure of the world and the cosmos, including human existence as a moment of this universe. The rejection of the theme of being in its classical sense is a tendency of subjective idealism - a philosophy that recognizes consciousness, thinking, feelings of a person as the root cause.
3.6 Identification of being with physical nature
Subjective idealism absolutized human consciousness, and therefore did not claim the problem of being. It has lost its relevance for materialism - a philosophy that recognizes the primacy of the material world and the secondary nature of consciousness, human thinking. Starting with the philosophical materialism of the XVII-XVIII centuries. being is identified with nature, with the world of sensually perceived things and phenomena. If in ancient philosophy the problem of being was intended to substantiate the existence of the sensible world, then in materialism being is identified with the existence of this world. All the characteristics of being that Parmenides attributed to him are transferred to nature. Postulated, i.e. it is asserted without any justification that nature does not need any guarantees of its existence, for it is itself an eternal guarantor of the existence of itself, that it exists objectively (outside and independently of man). But if being has always been associated with eternity, then three-dimensional space and linearly homogeneous time were recognized as the forms of existence of nature.
The main provisions of the so-understood being were further developed in dialectical materialism. F. Engels attributed the predicate "being" to what is in the field of vision of a person. As for the understanding of being as the Absolute, Logos, God, etc., in his opinion, it "is generally an open question from the border where our field of vision ends." In other words, it makes no sense to talk about being if it cannot be perceived with the help of human senses and their amplifiers - devices of various kinds. Recognized only such being, which had spatio-temporal characteristics. Absolute (divine) being is eternity outside of time and space, but, as Engels argued, being "outside of time is the same greatest nonsense as being outside of space." According to M. Heidegger, Marx did not deal with the problem of being, the subject of his attention was nature (natural and artificial, created by man).
Conclusion
The history of philosophy is in a certain sense the story of the confrontation between materialism and idealism, or, in other words, how different philosophers understand the relationship between being and consciousness. From the point of view of supporters of materialism, matter, i.e. the basis of the entire infinite set of objects and systems existing in the world is primary, therefore the materialistic view of the world is fair. Consciousness, inherent only to man, reflects the surrounding reality.
Materialists affirm: the ideas of ancient Indian philosophy about the primacy of the spirit; the explanations of Socrates and Plato that the world of ideas arose first, and then the world of matter, the world of things; Schopenhauer's thought that some kind of will gave birth to the whole world in which we live, are delusions. According to materialistic teaching, the phantom, illusory worlds that can be called maya, all kinds of visions, are not primary, but secondary reality; the foundation of the world is material.
Being is a philosophical category that denotes a reality that exists objectively, i.e. regardless of human consciousness. Remember: close your eyes and the world will disappear. In fact, of course, he remains. If there were no people who perceive the world, cognize, evaluate it, it would still exist on its own as a kind of reality. In this sense, being is primary and determines our consciousness. What is the world, so it appears in our thoughts, in the process of cognition.
Along with the materialistic currents in philosophy, there have always been many idealistic currents. If a philosopher claims that at first a certain idea, a world mind, a universal will appeared in the world, and from them all the diversity of the real world was born, then this means that we are dealing with an idealistic point of view on the main issue of philosophy. Sometimes people ask: is it possible to finally solve it, i.e. does the development of science allow us to recognize primary matter or, conversely, consciousness?
Any philosophical question therefore it is considered philosophical because it is eternal. No matter how much science proves that the world is originally material, philosophers will still appear who admit that it is originally spiritual. That is why they are philosophers, to raise eternal questions. And if this main one were ever solved, it would lose its philosophical status. Scientists would study it more thoroughly. Philosophers, on the other hand, would turn to other eternal problematic, unsolvable questions, so that it would be possible to build assumptions at the level of certain knowledge, put forward radical ideas that liberate thought.
Bibliography
1. Alekseev P.V., Panin A.V. Philosophy: Textbook. Second edition, revised and enlarged. M.: "Prospect", 2002.
2. Bobrov V.V. Introduction to Philosophy: Textbook. Moscow, Novosibirsk: INFRA-M, Siberian agreement, 2000.
3. Gurevich P.S. Fundamentals of Philosophy: Textbook, manual. M.: Gardariki, 2002. 438 p.
4. Kanke V.A. Philosophy. Historical and systematic course: Textbook of the day of universities. Moscow: Logos Publishing Corporation, VLADOS Humanitarian Publishing Center, Nauka International Academic Publishing Company, 2001.
5. Leshkevich T.G. Philosophy. Introductory course. Ed. 2nd. additional M., 1998.
6. Spirkin A.G. Philosophy: Textbook. M.: Gardarika, 2003.
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Keywords
HUMAN BEING / VALUES / PERSONALITY / SPIRITUAL CULTURE / SOCIETY OF MASS CONSUMPTION/ IDEOLOGY / BEING OF A HUMAN BEING / VALUES / PERSONALITY / SPIRITUAL CULTURE / SOCIETY OF MASS CONSUMPTION / IDEOLOGYannotation scientific article on philosophy, ethics, religious studies, author of scientific work - Konstantinov Dmitry Vladimirovich, Kholomeev Alexey Gennadievich
Three aspects of human nature (biological, social and spiritual) necessary for its existence are considered. It is shown that the phenomena that make up the sphere of the spiritual are human-creating values that are not reduced to biological or social and cannot be an object of possession. Therefore, the values of total possession propagated by mass culture can become destructive for a person.
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The axiological aspects of the being of a human being: human-creating and human-destroying values
Understanding the question of the being as a question of the basis that allow to be, the authors consider the being of a human being as an objective basis or a necessary condition of human existence. Philosophers from different schools of thought try to find such a basis in biological, social or spiritual aspects of human life. If to consider a human being from the biological point of view, the similarity between humans and animals is nevertheless much larger than the difference. Besides, it is obvious that human life cannot be reduced only to the activity of a human body, although without it life is impossible. In turn, the social milieu, in which the individual exists, also does not play a crucial role in their formation as a human in every sense of the word. consequent, bases that allow a human being to be should be looked for in the spiritual. The spiritual is something self-based, it appears in a human being neither from nature nor from society. It is possible to attribute to the spiritual the spheres of conscience, thought, empathy, good and other similar phenomena playing the role of human-creating values . The spiritual being of a human being is inseparably connected with the spiritual culture of society. Artifacts (texts) of spiritual culture first of all are intended to help humans to keep themselves in the spiritual space. At that, in the empirical reality, a human cannot be always good, honest, fair, etc. It would be equivalent to transcending a human to a superhuman (divine) state. However, a human can be truly alive only through the aspiration to the superhuman. The personality is born in such an aspiration. Personality is something that forces humans to seek the order in their life on their own basis. At the same time spiritual culture is very vulnerable and susceptible to all changes, including negative. In particular, the spiritual formation of personality now endures a decisive influence of the mass culture which is based on the ideology of total possession. If any ideology occupies the entire space of human life, this life does not leave place for human-creating values , because they are shielded by ideological schemes. These schemes present a human with ready values which are given as the only true guidance. Values of the society of mass consumption often play the role of such guidance today. It is they that can be destructive for a human because they shield the true spiritual values which cannot be the object of possession and consumption.
The text of the scientific work on the topic "Axiological aspects of human existence: human-creating and human-destroying values"
Bulletin of Tomskoy state university. 2015. No. 390. S. 54-59. B0! 10.17223/15617793/390/10
UDC ::316.752
D.V. Konstantinov, A.G. Kholomeev
AXIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN BEING: HUMAN-CREATING AND HUMAN-DESTROYING VALUES
Three aspects of human nature (biological, social and spiritual) necessary for its existence are considered. It is shown that the phenomena that make up the sphere of the spiritual are human-creating values that are not reduced to biological or social and cannot be an object of possession. Therefore, the values of total possession propagated by mass culture can become destructive for a person. Key words: human existence; values; personality; spiritual culture; mass consumer society; ideology.
Introduction
M.K. Mamardashvili, characterizing modern European philosophy, emphasizes that it, by and large, is an attempt "in a new situation of reason to give a person new means that allow him to live in a new world, such means that are not given in traditional philosophy" . Without going into details, we note that the “new situation of the mind” here should be understood as the attitude that has developed in modern culture, thanks to which the life of a person in the world really becomes problematic, since the person himself becomes problematic. We will try to reveal the reasons for such problematicness through an appeal to the axiological aspects of human existence.
human being
In this article, we are talking about values based on the ontology of a person. The concept of being and, in particular, the being of a person in philosophy is not unambiguous1, and therefore we will try to clarify our own position first. For this, it is appropriate to refer to the works of M. Heidegger. Heidegger considers being as "that which determines being as being, that in view of which being, no matter how it is comprehended, is always already understood" . In turn, this interpretation, according to Heidegger, goes back to the philosophy of Heraclitus. Commenting on the phrase of Heraclitus “one (is) everything”, Heidegger emphasizes: “Speaking more strictly, Being is being. At the same time, "is" is a transitive verb and means "collected". Being collects beings as beings ”(our italics. - D.K., A.Kh.). Proceeding from such an understanding of being, we speak of the being of a person as an objective basis or a necessary condition for the existence of a person. Thus, human existence is what allows a person to be a person at the first step, to collect the human in himself, and at a possible second step - to realize himself as a person, to look at himself as if from a third person, or from the outside.
So, there is a phenomenon of human states in the world, and the question of how such states are possible will be an ontological question. Thus, the question posed implies that the existence of man as man needs a certain foundation. Next, we will consider three aspects of the essence of human
Lovec, who are trying to imagine what the basis is, as a rule, giving priority to one side. These aspects will be biological, social and spiritual in man. Let's take a closer look at each of them.
Hardly anyone will try to challenge the fact that the human body at the physiological level functions according to biological laws. By nature, a person is endowed with a certain set of sensory organs, has a certain life expectancy, etc. All these naturally given features that distinguish a person from any other living being, M. K. Mamardashvili, M. K. Petrov and other authors denote by the term " human dimension ”(for more on this, see:). In general, we can say that the concept of "human dimension" characterizes the limitations that inevitably arise when we consider a person in the discourse of biology. Indeed, man is finite: he is born and dies; he has just such (and not another) body, there are certain vital biological needs; his sense organs are arranged in a specific way, etc. This, in turn, means that a person can do something (see, perceive, understand, etc.), but cannot do something in principle. I.S. Alekseev, to illustrate this, carries out a peculiar thought experiment: “Let's imagine a hypothetical "non-geocentric" subject (not a person!), whose object characteristics ... are significantly different from the corresponding characteristics of a person. While a person has a height of about 102 cm and lives for about 102 years, let our hypothetical subject have a body size of the order of, say, 10100 cm and a lifetime of about 10100 years, respectively.<...>So, it seems to us quite obvious that in the world of objects-things of such a subject there will be neither our atoms, nor mountains, nor even planets and stars, because they simply cannot figure in his "non-geocentric" practical activity, acting as its invariants (recall that, according to modern data, the age solar system does not exceed 1010 years, and the size of the Metagalaxy is about 1026 cm). On the other hand, his external world will contain such (objective in relation to him) objects-things with which we cannot (due to our objective nature) deal with in our practical activity and which therefore "do not exist for us" . Indeed, the hypothetical "non-
geocentric” subject of cognition by I. S. Alekseev is incommensurable with such parameters of the world around us as the age of the solar system and the size of the Metagalaxy. But in the same way, man is incommensurable with them. Therefore, in the words of T. Nagel, it is quite possible to believe that there are facts that cannot be represented or comprehended by people, even if humanity as a species lived forever - simply because our structure does not allow us to operate with the necessary for this concept."
Can we assume, based on what was said earlier, that biology is capable of revealing the specifics of the human phenomenon? It seems that the answer here will be negative. Despite the fact that a person is a very specific and even unique creature, similarities between humans and animals from the point of view of biology are still much more than differences. As rightly pointed out by N.M. Careful, the natural needs of a person are "manifestations of that instinct of life that are characteristic of man, as well as the entire genus of the animal world." In other words, to understand the specifics of a person, considering him at the biological level is not enough. That is why we can agree with M. Heidegger, who says the following: “If physiology and physiological chemistry are able to study a person in the natural scientific plan as an organism, then this is by no means proof that in such an “organic”, that is, in a scientifically explained body, rests the human being. This is no more successful than the opinion that the essence of natural phenomena lies in atomic energy. Indeed, human life in the broad sense of the word is not limited to the activity of the human body, even if it is impossible without it.
If the foundations of the human cannot be found in the biological, then perhaps they should be sought in the social? Indeed, such attempts have been repeatedly made in the history of philosophical thought (and are still being made). At the same time, sociality is most often interpreted in a broader sense as something inextricably linked with culture (see, for example:). In a narrower sense of the word, the term "social" implies the existence of certain supra-individual structures, social institutions. One of the functions of social institutions is the function of socialization, the inclusion of a person in the system of social relations. Socialization allows a person to successfully identify himself in society and interact with other people in it.
It is worth clarifying that the social environment in which an individual was born and raised does not necessarily play a decisive role in his development as a person in the full sense of the word. However, it is obvious that outside the society of a full-fledged person, i.e. personality cannot be formed (examples of feral people demonstrate this very clearly). But at the same time, in society, there is often a suppression of the personal principle in a person - that principle, which we just associate with spirituality. Thus, the person
constantly coming face to face with the interests of other people, sometimes he is forced to overcome pressure from society, trying to maintain his inner "I".
In addition to the biological and social aspects, there is a certain special dimension in a person, which we have designated by the term "spirituality". It should be noted that it is extremely difficult to talk about the spiritual in a person, as well as to give any exhaustive and satisfactory definition of spirituality. Therefore, we will not give such definitions, nor will we try to create our own. Instead, let's try to identify a number of phenomena that constitute, in our opinion, the sphere of the spiritual. These include conscience, thought, empathy, kindness, etc. We argue that all such phenomena are autonomous enough to separate them into a separate sphere (the sphere of the spiritual), contrary to the common tradition of reducing the spiritual or to the natural (sociobiology)2, or social 3. In other words, among the possible approaches to the so-called problem of psycho-physiological dualism (it seems that such a name is not entirely successful, if we distinguish between the psyche and consciousness), anti-reductionist positions are closer to us4. We will try to explain the reasons for this in more detail below.
First, we note that being is objective, that is, does not depend on man. The set of sense organs that he possesses does not depend on a person, a person does not choose the society in which he is born, but the moment of awakening does not depend on a person (on his desire or unwillingness, upbringing, social status, etc.) such as love or conscience. This is a kind of aspiration that suddenly appears from nowhere and which a person is no longer able to cancel (but, however, it can be screened). Even the event of understanding (thought) is not completely subject to the will and desire of a person - no one can say when a person will understand something (and whether he will understand at all), despite all his possible attempts to achieve understanding and clarity.
Secondly, a person always looks at the world only through the prism of his spiritual (mental) states, since he cannot leave the limits of his consciousness. Nothing can be given to a person, bypassing his consciousness. T. Nagel notes that, to be completely honest, it is impossible to assert with certainty even the presence of consciousness in another person, since “the only internal experience really available to us is our own”. In other words, the act of interaction between man and the world is further an indecomposable act. The division into subject and object is an abstraction that is convenient for a scientist, but not for a philosopher. The philosopher must be aware that such a division is possible as a purely theoretical construction after the proportionality between man and the world has taken place, expressed in the fact that we are already irrevocably in the world and can look at it with our human eyes and understand it in a human way. Therefore, it seems not entirely correct to look for the cause of a person’s spiritual states only in external conditions.
influences, natural or social. This is true, if only because the very concept of the external turns out to be problematic.
The spiritual being of a person is inextricably linked with the spiritual culture of society, which includes primarily (but not only) science, art, philosophy, etc.5 Artifacts (texts) of spiritual culture, in addition to possible utilitarian significance, are primarily intended to help a person collect yourself as a person. In other words, a person, in order to stay in the spiritual sphere, needs, according to the definition of M.K. Mamardashvili, in "amplifiers or amplifying attachments to our mental, mental and other capabilities" . But even with the presence of such amplifiers, a fully assembled person in empirical reality never happens. Complete concentration would be tantamount to going beyond the human to a superhuman (divine) state. However, a person can be truly alive only in striving for the superhuman. That is why a person is always a possible person, this, in the words of V.D. Gubin, is “a metaphor for himself”. True culture, in turn, should be oriented towards a possible person, which in fact means that a person has the opportunity to be a person. We can say that under the true culture, we follow M.K. Mamardashvili, we understand one that is capable of supporting “a system of detachments from specific meanings and contents, creating a space for realization and a chance for a thought that began at moment A to be a thought at the next moment B. Or the human state that began at moment A, at moment B could be a human state. True, Mamardashvili himself calls such a supporting system civilization, but we prefer to call it culture, distinguishing, following I. Kant, culture and civilization.
So, in order to remain human, a person must constantly be in the creative process, each time rethinking and creating himself anew. It is in this process that personality emerges. Personal - this is what makes a person strive to streamline his life on his own grounds. So, for example, a personal act of observing the law (breaking the law is the destruction of order in society, and at the same time in the soul of the one who violated the law) does not imply following the tradition (everyone observes, including me) and not the fear of punishment, but some kind of inner conviction that the law you just have to follow. In this case, a person does not argue that the law is actually unfair (we note that, being outside the space of the law, it is pointless to talk about its fairness or injustice), does not try to find excuses and loopholes in order not to comply with it. He observes the law because it is the law, and only through the observance of the law is it possible for lawfulness to exist in society. The personal, therefore, is related to the foundations of culture (culture is impossible without the personal), but at the same time, it does not derive from cultural contents.
sya. It is important to understand that culture does not guarantee the human (the First and Second World Wars showed this), although it itself appears in the aspiration to the human. Moreover, culture can degenerate, lose its human-creating significance, although at first glance this may not be so noticeable if civilization is preserved as the outer shell of cultural phenomena.
Thus, questioning about the being of a person is actually the task of searching for those grounds that allow a person to be. Philosophers of various schools and trends are trying to find these foundations in the biological, social or spiritual aspects of human life. We, in turn, give priority here to the spiritual principle in man, which is not reducible to biological or social. Moreover, such irreducibility often leads to conflicts and contradictions. In this context, in our opinion, the conflict between the social and the spiritual is especially important, since it is society, being in continuous dynamics, that is able to violate and rebuild the value framework of the individual, to replace human-creating values with human-destroying ones. As a result, a “situation of uncertainty” (the term of M. K. Mamardashvili) may arise, in which a person can no longer be a person. As M. K. Mamardashvili himself notes, a person in such a situation turns into a zombie, and his life into an absurd existence. Next, we will try to explain this in more detail.
Human values
Before characterizing human-creating and human-destroying values, we need to reveal the very concept of value. It is very difficult to give a precise definition of value. At first glance, values are purely subjective. We do not deny that values are always connected in one way or another with social environment in which the individual is located, they are formed by society. But at the same time, a specific set of values of a particular person is always subjective. This is pointed out, for example, by L.V. Baeva: “Values are an ideal phenomenon, a feature of which, unlike material objects, is belonging to subjective perception and consciousness. When we say that some objects or relations have value for us, this does not mean that they are of the same value for other individuals. In addition, values are not frozen, they interact with each other, transform, being in constant dynamics. Thus, a person, forming the value basis of his life, constantly overcomes the path from the particular to the general and vice versa. It transforms the values of society, giving them its own meaning. The very same social environment in relation to the individual has a relatively random character. It can dominate him or, on the contrary, give the necessary freedom and space for living thought.
Despite this, we argue that those human-creating values that allow a person to collect himself in the space of the personal are objective. The subjectivity of value here is excluded by the fact that in fact such values constitute the ultimate (ontological) foundations of the human. Such are the previously mentioned phenomena that form the sphere of the spiritual existence of man. The problem of such values for a philosopher, according to M.K. Mamardashvili, - “... this is not a problem of a person's belief in ideals, higher values. It ... is about something else - about the participation of a person with his effort in real life, different from ours, in the real life of some ontological abstractions of the order or the so-called higher, or perfect, objects. As such a "perfect object" one can take, for example, conscience. Obviously, in empirical reality it is impossible to meet a person with an absolutely clear conscience. However, each empirically recorded act of an act of conscience assumes that conscience already exists, and is all at once in this act. After all, conscience cannot exist to some greater or lesser degree; it either exists in its entirety, or it does not exist at all. Moreover, the situation when there is a conscience is not the result of a generalization of any previous experience of a person, conscience is not set in the form of an ideal. Even if you try to set the ideal of conscience, then no real action will necessarily follow from the knowledge of this ideal. In addition, ideals can be different, but conscience is one - it cannot be said that every person has some kind of conscience of his own. Similarly, goodness is one - one not in content, but in the fact of its presence in the world. Any empirical act of virtue is possible (whatever it may be expressed in) because good already exists. In this sense, conscience, goodness, etc. phenomena are objective, i.e. are not created by man and are not the result of his reflection or theoretical generalizations. A person can only try by his own effort to preserve in himself the state of being in conscience, goodness, etc.
We have said before that the self-creative effort of man must be supported by culture. However, spiritual culture is very vulnerable and susceptible to all changes, including negative ones. It is very easy to break it and give it a different direction. This seems to us relevant for the present time, when the process of the spiritual formation of the individual is experiencing a decisive influence on the part of mass culture, which is built on the ideology of all-possession. Any ideology is a necessary moment of social life, it is designed to unite people. However, problems arise when ideology seeks to occupy all space human life. In this case, there is no place left for human-creating values in a person's life, since they are shielded by ideological schemes6. These schemes present a person with ready-made values, presented as the only true guidelines. Today, the values of a mass consumer society are most often used as such guidelines. Just they can
be destructive for a person, since they screen those genuine spiritual values that cannot be an object of possession and consumption - one cannot have a thought or conscience like owning a thing (for more details, see). The specific mechanisms of such screening may look different (we will consider some of them below), but they all lead to the fact that a person eventually risks turning into an impersonal creature, obsessed with only one desire - to have and consume. Here we see the replacement of the model of existence "to be" by "to have", according to E. Fromm.
One of the blocking spiritual mechanisms is the elevation of the possession of biologically or socially given goods to the rank of absolute value. Satisfaction of biological needs is necessary for the life of the human body. On the one hand, it unites a person with an animal. On the other hand, a person in the process of personal development is constantly trying to overcome his animal essence. This is a certain paradox and, in our opinion, one of the problems of modern society. Popular culture presents sexuality, cult human body as values expressing the ideal modern man(although corporality is already more of a social phenomenon than a biological one). As a result, a person often ceases to be perceived as a person, he becomes simply an object of sexual consumption, a thing.
In turn, social values are also undergoing a number of changes. The dynamic development of science and technology, the growth of well-being gave people the opportunity to massively engage in all spheres of public life, whether it be politics or sports, art or education. On the one hand, this trend allowed almost every person to touch the sacred, to see what was available only to the elite. On the other hand, this was the reason for the emergence of such phenomena as the "average" person and the mass. The mass production of goods, both necessary and completely unnecessary for life, led society to a new path of development - the path of consumption. The danger of such a path is that a person as a person is not perceived by society, now he is evaluated by the amount of material goods that he can afford. It is this indicator that becomes one of the key when it comes to the social status of an individual. In pursuit of a higher position in society, a person is depersonalized, reduced only to consumption imposed from outside by the social environment. Indeed, the pace of development of society is so great that a person does not even have time to think about what he needs in life - economists and marketers decide for him.
Mass culture has also reassessed the spiritual values of a person, encroaching on the inner world of the individual. Now they are directly trying to make the spiritual an object of consumption, which actually leads to its rebirth into another scheme that shields the human. So, for example, the true significance of education (especially higher education) lies in
developing the ability to create and retain, as far as possible, a space of concentration, i.e. the space in which living human states are possible (events of thought, conscience, etc.). However, in modern conditions, education is gradually ceasing to fulfill this function. Having become accessible to many, education has become a kind of conveyor of knowledge, acting as a commodity. Each person can have the set of knowledge that he wants. People consume knowledge that can be bought anytime, anywhere. In this regard, E. Fromm rightly notes: “Students focused on “possession”, listening to lectures, perceive words, catch logical connections and general meaning; they try to make as detailed notes as possible so that they can then memorize the notes and pass the exam. But they do not think about the content, about their attitude to this material, it does not become part of the student's own thoughts.
Conclusion
It should be noted that a person is not something given and guaranteed, a person is a speed
more a process than a result. In this process of constant becoming, a person needs that ultimate (ontological) foundation that gives him the opportunity to be. It is pointless to look for such a foundation only in the biological or social sphere, it necessarily implies the presence in a person’s life of those spiritual values that allow the human not to be destroyed. However, it is precisely these values that must be supported by true culture that in modern society often turn out to be shielded by all sorts of ideological schemes. In particular, society today is trying to universally introduce the ideology of consumption, affecting all spheres of human life. It is very difficult for a person in such a situation to distinguish real human-creating values from false and often destructive values of all-possession, since the latter are presented as necessary for life. That is why man today is in potential danger of being broken by mass culture and losing his humanity.
NOTES
1 To verify this, it is enough to refer, for example, to the corresponding article in the New Philosophical Encyclopedia.
2 For sociobiology, see for example: .
3 See, for example: . Although E.K. Vagimov speaks here of three dimensions of human existence - biological, mental (identifying it with the spiritual) and social - in fact, he puts an equal sign between the mental and the social. Personality, in his opinion, is the result of socialization.
4 An overview of possible conceptual approaches to the problem of psychophysiological dualism is given by K. Ludwig.
5 The division of culture into material and spiritual seems to be rather arbitrary, given that any object created by man bears the imprint of the inner world of its creator. Therefore, further we will use the term "culture", assuming that we are talking about the spiritual aspect of culture.
6 An example of the operation of such schemes is given by F.M. Dostoevsky in The Idiot. Prince Myshkin, during his first visit to the family of General Epanchin, tells about a woman named Marie, whom public opinion considered unworthy, who had sinned. This did not allow others to see her need and suffering - the ideological scheme blocked the human-creating mechanism of compassion. And only children, who are not yet so deeply involved in social relations, relatively easily managed to overcome the influence of ideology in themselves and see a person in an unfortunate person. For the rest, including even Marie herself, the opportunity to see this was closed.
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The article was presented by the scientific editorial board "Philosophy, sociology, political science" October 02, 2014
THE AXIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE BEING OF A HUMAN BEING: HUMAN-CREATING AND HUMAN-DESTROYING VALUES
Tomsk State University Journal, 2015, 390, pp. 54-59. DOI 10.17223/15617793/390/10
Konstantinov Dmitrii V., Kholomeev Alexei G. Siberian State University of Physical Culture and Sports (Omsk, Russian Federation). Email: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Keywords: being of a human being; values; personality; spiritual culture; society of mass consumption; ideology.
Understanding the question of the being as a question of the basis that allow to be, the authors consider the being of a human being as an objective basis or a necessary condition of human existence. Philosophers from different schools of thought try to find such a basis in biological, social or spiritual aspects of human life. If to consider a human being from the biological point of view, the similarity between humans and animals is nevertheless much larger than the difference. Besides, it is obvious that human life cannot be reduced only to the activity of a human body, although without it life is impossible. In turn, the social milieu, in which the individual exists, also does not play a crucial role in their formation as a human in every sense of the word. consequent, bases that allow a human being to be should be looked for in the spiritual. The spiritual is something self-based, it appears in a human being neither from nature nor from society. It is possible to attribute to the spiritual the spheres of conscience, thought, empathy, good and other similar phenomena playing the role of human-creating values. The spiritual being of a human being is inseparably connected with the spiritual culture of society. Artifacts (texts) of spiritual culture first of all are intended to help humans to keep themselves in the spiritual space. At that, in the empirical reality, a human cannot be always good, honest, fair, etc. It would be equivalent to transcending a human to a superhuman (divine) state. However, a human can be truly alive only through the aspiration to the superhuman. The personality is born in such an aspiration. Personality is something that forces humans to seek the order in their life on their own basis. At the same time spiritual culture is very vulnerable and susceptible to all changes, including negative. In particular, the spiritual formation of personality now endures a decisive influence of the mass culture which is based on the ideology of total possession. If any ideology occupies the entire space of human life, this life does not leave place for human-creating values, because they are shielded by ideological schemes. These schemes present a human with ready values which are given as the only true guidance. Values of the society of mass consumption often play the role of such guidance today. It is they that can be destructive for a human because they shield the true spiritual values which cannot be the object of possession and consumption.
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Moral aspect human being
A.N. Lukin
The problem of the relationship between good and evil is one of the most difficult in philosophy. The type of worldview of an individual and culture as a whole depends on its solution. Wherein, morality acts as a generic difference of a person - it is a form of consciousness and practical behavior based on respect for other people. Moral aspect can be distinguished in any kind of human activity - it is an assessment of how the results of this activity will contribute to or hinder the good of others and all of humanity. Good and evil are the most general concepts of moral consciousness, categories of ethics that characterize positive and negative moral values. Good - it is something useful, good, contributing to the harmonization of human relations, the development of people, their achievement of spiritual and physical perfection. Good involves overcoming one's selfish aspirations for the benefit of others. Goodness is based on the freedom of the individual, who performs actions that are consciously correlated with the highest values, with the ideal. An animal whose behavior is determined by innate instincts does not face the problem of moral choice. Genetic programs contribute to its survival.
In the process of moral choice, a person correlates his inner world, his subjectivity with the real world. This is possible only in the act of thinking. By making a choice in favor of good or evil, a person in a certain way fits himself into the world around him. And since morality is based on "autonomy human spirit"(K. Marx), a person is free in this self-determination. He creates his own destiny.
Morality makes it possible for people to come out of themselves, out of their separateness; it is an impulse that connects a person with the eternal, the whole. It manifests itself in thoughts and actions, in the ecstasy of unity. Only man has the great ability to experience a moral sense. If people do not nourish culture with their moral inspiration, it will wither and perish.
The formation of morality cannot be carried out without faith, without the difficult to describe phenomenon of conscience - the "call" (M. Heidegger), which is in me and, at the same time, outside of me.
In the history of philosophy, the ontological status of good and evil is interpreted in different ways. In Manichaeism, these principles are of the same order and are in constant combat. According to the views of Augustine, V. Solovyov and many other thinkers, the real world principle is the divine Good as absolute Being, or God. Then evil is the result of erroneous or vicious decisions of a person who is free in his choice. If good is absolute in the fulfillment of perfection, then evil is always relative. The third version of the correlation of these principles is found in L. Shestov, N. Berdyaev and others, who argued that the opposition between good and evil is mediated by something else (God, "the highest value"). Then, in elucidating the nature of goodness, it is vain to look for its existential basis. The nature of the Good is not ontological, but axiological. The logic of value reasoning can be the same for someone who is convinced that basic values are given to a person in revelation, and for someone who believes that values have an "earthly" (social and anthropological) origin.
In a broad sense, good means, "firstly, a value representation that expresses the positive value of something in relation to a certain standard, and secondly, this standard itself." The standard as an ideal is set by cultural tradition; it belongs to the highest level of the hierarchy of spiritual values. In the absence of the ideal of goodness, it is pointless to look for its manifestation in people's behavior. In order to preserve morality as one of its generic qualities, mankind for thousands of years placed the ideal of Good beyond the limits of the changing world. Having received the status of a transcendent quality, it rose in the cultural cosmos to the highest limit, appearing to the human mind in the form of an integral property of the Logos (Parmenides), the central category in the world of eidos (Plato), an attribute of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, etc. It is impossible to avoid lowering the status of Good, moving it to the changeable finite world of natural human existence. But the atheistic tradition had to do this. The upper limit of "disenchanted culture" (M. Weber) is incommensurably lower than the transcendent Absolute. Accordingly, the perception of the biblical commandments by an atheist will be less profound than by a believer. Because the Christian will deal with sacred values that belong to the unchanging perfect world. Strives for this ideal religious man. This is the meaning of his existence. Getting closer to divine perfection is the main goal in the hierarchy of life aspirations. For an atheist, the ideal of goodness will be rationally justified by its social significance, rootedness in cultural tradition, etc. At the same time, one’s own moral perfection becomes not so much the goal of life as a necessary condition for personal socialization, overcoming isolation, disunity and alienation, achieving mutual understanding, moral equality and humanity in human relations. morality human consciousness socialization
If good ceases to occupy the top of the pyramid of human values, then an opportunity opens up for the rise of evil. I. Kant argues that self-love, which is present in each of us, from a potential real evil becomes only when it occupies a dominant place in the hierarchy of spiritual values, replacing the moral ideal there. This is evident from the statement of the German thinker: "A man (even the best) is angry only because he perverts the order of motives when he perceives them in his maxims: he perceives in them the moral law along with self-love. But when he finds out that one is next to the other cannot exist, but that one must be subject to the other as its highest condition - he makes the impulses of self-love and its inclinations a condition for the fulfillment of the moral law, while the latter should rather be perceived as the highest condition for satisfying the former in the general maxim of arbitrariness, and as his only motive.
If the intersection of the natural and divine principles as the lower and upper limits of being is possible in man, then this is impossible in relation to moral limits. The high status of the middle is not allowed here. Before us is a dichotomy that cannot be replaced by trichotomy (S. Bulgakov) or monodualism (S. Frank). In the dichotomy, the gap between the poles is absolute, since evil is rigidly and unambiguously opposed to good. The upper moral limit is such an ideal state of a person, when all thoughts and actions of a person are oriented towards the multiplication of goodness in the world. Accordingly, the lower moral limit presupposes the intention of a person's consciousness only to multiply evil and actions corresponding to this goal.
Using the term "limit", we mean a certain line beyond which the transition is practically impossible. Actually, even to reach such a state and constantly stay in it is also impossible. However, the presence of moral limits suggests that a person is morally improving, carrying out a moral ascent. In an effort to live according to conscience, a person forms a moral ideal, in accordance with which he transforms himself. But this is a long process during which a person is in a state of "between" (M. Buber).
Evil is man-made and has existed throughout human history. Therefore, it is a natural phenomenon of social life. But still, what does the presence of a lower moral limit of human existence mean? After all, this, in fact, is a justification for the existence in the world of unbridled passions, extreme hedonism, selfishness, evil in its purest form. It turns out that the radiant height of good should be set off by the yawning abyss of evil, because "it is groundless and fruitless to decide the question of evil, without real evil in the experience." If, however, the lower moral limit of culture is destroyed, then there will be no upper limit. A person must push off from the lower limit in order to rush upward. Is it necessary first to be fed up with base feelings, passions, pleasures, in order to fully experience all the advantages of the virtues against this background? Then doesn't it come out that we should, to some extent, be grateful to the fascists, terrorists and other forces of evil, which indirectly contribute to the preservation of mercy, compassion, empathy?
The problem of the expediency of preserving evil as a necessary lower limit of human existence has worried philosophers at all times. AT religious tradition this problem is reduced to theodicy (GW Leibniz) - the desire to reconcile the idea of "good" and "fair" divine control of the world with the presence of world evil. The simplest form of theodicy is an indication that justice will be restored outside the earthly world. Everyone will get what they deserve, whether it is a causal relationship between merit and bad deeds of a previous life and the circumstances of a subsequent birth in Brahminism and Buddhism, or retribution beyond the grave in Christianity and Islam. Another form of theodicy is an indication that the freedom of the angels and people created by God, for its fullness, includes the possibility of choosing in favor of evil. Then God is not responsible for the evil generated by angels and people. The third form of theodicy (Plotinus, G. Leibniz) proceeds from the fact that the particular shortcomings of the universe, planned by God, enhance the perfection of the whole.
In the atheistic tradition, evil can be presented as a rudiment inherited from the animal past, as something biological in nature, rooted in the depths of the human psyche, aimed at ensuring self-preservation, at winning the fierce competition of natural selection. Evil must be overcome to ensure the existence of collective unity. To fight evil, society can be personified in the form of God or ideology (E. Durkheim).
A separate facet of the problem under consideration is the question of the expediency of having personal vices to overcome them in the process of moral ascent. Probably, there is no need, and therefore no justification of evil as the antipode of good in the individual practice of the individual, since a person can meet and overcome it internally by turning to the masterpieces of art and the experience of human history. In the process of inculturation, a person appropriates the experience of great predecessors, masters the limits of culture and becomes ready for being, oriented towards the upper limit of morality. It turns out that with proper upbringing and training, there is no need to identify an individual with evil in one's own spiritual practice in order to overcome it.
The important thing is that evil and good do not exist by themselves. In the surrounding nature, outside the human world, there is neither one nor the other. So, it is impossible to call either good or evil a storm or a downpour. Similarly, there is no moral aspect in the behavior of animals, which is due to innate instincts. But it is precisely "the human soul-spiritual world - this is the true location of good and evil." In order for culture not to lose its hierarchy and disequilibrium, its bearers must have not so much external as internal experience of fighting evil on the side of good. This invaluable experience can be acquired in the process of inculturation, through familiarization with the cultural heritage. If we accept this thesis, then we should recognize the highest responsibility of art, the media, the entire system of education for ensuring the possibility of a person being in society without sliding to the lowest moral limit of human existence. At the same time, a person must be ready, if necessary, to resist the evil emanating from other people. We can and should talk about its suppression. Russian thinkers (I. Ilyin, N. Berdyaev, P. Sorokin, S. Frank and others) find the justification for rigidity and consistency in the fight against evil precisely in the hierarchy of spiritual culture, because "good and evil are not equivalent and not equal in their living bearers and servants. Moral regulation is built only on the hierarchy of spiritual values (as, indeed, any other social regulation). It is from these moral positions that I. Ilyin criticizes L. Tolstoy for his idea of "not resisting evil by violence." who stops villainy, a "rapist" can only be from blindness or from hypocrisy; to condemn "equally" the execution of a villain and the murder of a righteous martyr is possible only out of hypocrisy or blindness. Only for a hypocrite or a blind man are George the Victorious and the dragon slaughtered by him; only a hypocrite or a blind man, at the sight of this feat, can "maintain neutrality" and appeal to "humanity", protecting himself and waiting.
In the presence of an upper moral limit, rooted in the transcendent, the individual is guided by a ready-made moral ideal, which is of an absolute sacred nature. In secular morality, the status of a moral ideal is not supported by the authority of the Absolute. Consequently, it is more subject to change, suggests the possibility of a different interpretation, comparison with others, and may even be subjectively more significant values.
The problem of confrontation between good and evil is present in every cultural tradition, in every social system, in all historical epochs. Art, philosophy, religion and other forms of social consciousness consider it as one of the central ones. This makes us assume that good and evil are not accidental companions of human existence. Then the question of understanding the functions of the moral limits of human existence should be raised.
Good, perceived as the highest and absolute value in culture, was seen as an attribute of the eternal, unchanging Logos, transcendence. This is the ideal of order, justice, stability. The subject, striving for the ideal of Good, subordinates himself to common goals, coordinates his actions with other elements of society, and becomes extremely functional. But if all people strictly adhere to moral precepts, then we will eventually get a stationary system in which no changes will occur. This is no longer becoming, but the final completion. Representatives of synergetics call such a system an evolutionary dead end.
Evil as the antipode of good is an extreme manifestation of selfishness in a person, ignoring common goals, depriving people of the right to a happy and dignified life, destroying order, justice, causing suffering to others.. This is the source of increasing entropy, chaos within the system. Guided by evil thoughts, an individual for the sake of selfish goals questions the possibility of the development of similar beings and poses a threat to social life itself. A person who is in the power of evil is dysfunctional in relation to society. In this case, the social system, when approaching the lower moral limit, with the moral degradation of the masses, will certainly self-destruct. Evil does not have the ability to create. It brings destruction with it.
In objective reality, there is no society built solely on moral principles, just as there cannot be a society devoid of morality. Each social system contains a certain measure of morality, but carriers of immoral values constantly appear in it. Therefore, we can consider society as a complexly organized dissipative system, which contains a measure of order and localized chaos. In the same era, in the same society, the greatest ascetics and carriers of evil coexist. The fight against dysfunctional elements, the constant displacement of entropy beyond the boundaries of society is an eternal source of community development. In this case, the idea of achieving complete justice is a simulacrum, that value-goal, without which development is impossible, but this goal is completely unattainable. And if it were realized, then it would just mean the appearance of a stationary system, "the end of history." Even in religious texts of a high order, such ideal types are presented only as a divine project, which can be implemented only after the Apocalypse, after the "end" of this world.
The individual must have a hierarchical system of spiritual values, only after that we can talk about his moral choice. There can be no choice without the presence of formed moral limits. But if the lower limit can be easily mastered under the influence of unconscious drives, then the upper limit is a complex construct of culture, the result of the spiritual ascent of many generations of people. The upper limit is mastered by a person only in a certain cultural environment in the process of long-term purposeful education. The transfer of moral experience to a new generation of citizens is a functional duty healthy society, a condition for maintaining its stability and further development. As S. Frank noted, “following the divine commandments is a difficult job that requires courage and perseverance from a person, revealing to us new world- the sphere of the spiritual foundations of life.
It is quite obvious that all reforms make sense only when they are based on a solid foundation of spiritual traditions. At the same time, it is important to understand which elements in spiritual culture should not be withdrawn under any circumstances.
It is impossible to destroy the highest moral limit of culture without seriously endangering the entire social system.
Thus, the moral limits of culture are sharply opposed to each other. Even if evil is the eternal companion of mankind, the fight against it is a condition for the successful functioning of society. The fight against evil can be carried out only if the upper limit of moral culture is formed and its high status is maintained. The individual must appropriate the hierarchy of spiritual values in the process of his socialization and inculturation. In the moral life of a person there can be no high status of the middle. A person should strive to rise as high as possible to the upper limit of morality. The difference between good and evil must remain absolute. The eradication of evil in human existence is an eternal goal. It is a simulacrum (that is, it cannot be finally reached). But the very process of its implementation is a condition for the successful functioning of the social system. The intention of the consciousness of the masses to triumph of good and overcome evil forms a new social reality, if not in an ideal unattainable version, but in a form that can ensure the relative stability of society.
Literature
- 1. Philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. M. : Gardariki, 2004. S. 244.
- 2. Kant, I. Religion within the limits of reason alone. SPb. : Ed. IN AND. Yakovenko, 1908. S. 35-36.
- 3. Ilyin, I.A. The path to clarity. M. : Respublika, 1993.S. 7.
The beginnings of science appeared in ancient China and ancient India. Almost all natural sciences have come out of mythology. Before astronomy was born, there was astrology, the object of study of which was the position of the stars. Ancient astrologers deified the planets and celestial bodies. Already in the days of Babylonian astrology, some patterns were discovered in the movement of stars, which later entered astronomy.
Not all practical knowledge can be called science. Magic, witchcraft - a set of ideas and rituals, which are based on the belief in the possibility of influencing people, objects and phenomena of the surrounding world in a supernatural way. The whole system of magic does not consist of positive precepts alone. It tells not only what to do, but also what not to do. The totality of positive prescriptions is witchcraft, the totality of negative prescriptions is taboo. The savage is sure that if he does so and so, and in accordance with one of these laws, some consequences will inevitably occur. Magic provides a person with a set of ready-made ritual acts and standard beliefs, formalized by a certain practical and mental technique.
Real science, even in its rudimentary forms in which it finds its expression in primitive knowledge primitive people, is based on the everyday and universal experience of human life, on those victories that man wins over nature in the struggle for his existence and security, on observation, the results of which are rationalized. Magic, on the other hand, is based on the specific experience of special emotional states in which a person observes not nature, but himself, in which the truth is not comprehended by reason, but is revealed in the play of feelings that embrace a person. Science stands on the conviction of the universal validity of experience, practical effort, and reason; magic, on the other hand, is based on the belief that human hope may not come true, desire may not come true.
In the theory of knowledge, the central place is given to logic, in the theory of magic - the association of ideas under the influence of desires. Studies show that rational and magical knowledge belong to different cultural traditions, to different social conditions and types of activity, and these differences were clearly recognized by people of primitive societies. Rational knowledge is not available to the uninitiated, magical knowledge is included in the area of the sacred, mastering it requires initiation into the mysteries of the rite and the fulfillment of taboos.
What are the cultural and historical foundations of the processes that erase the methodological differences between science and pseudoscience and deprive scientific and technological progress of its cultural significance? Here, in conditions of crisis, the contours of such a culture may appear, in which objectivity and rationality are not forming elements at all.
Can science do without pseudoscience? Opinions vary. Some believe that just as flowers grow from rubbish, so truth is born from quasi-genuine opinions. Without the naive common sense inherent in philosophical mass creativity, neither Hegel nor Heidegger are born. But there is another argument. If it is possible to draw a demarcation between science and pseudoscience, then why do we need red herrings, false tunics, swindled pseudoscientists? It is necessary to clearly define those criteria that are inherent in science and scientific knowledge. B. I. Pruzhinin writes that "the situational readiness of the mind to cross its own boundaries actualizes in modern European culture completely different cultural and social structures than those that once gave rise to science and which have made and are making the scientific mind necessary for a person of this culture".
BI Pruzhinin does not act as a persecutor of pseudoscience. He tries to understand its epistemological foundations and even raises the question of what kind of culture can be in which science and pseudoscience become indistinguishable. We remember the fascination with the position of P. Feyerabend, who to a certain extent dumbfounded the philosophical community, arguing that the opposition between astrology and respectable science rests on more than dubious epistemological grounds. But how to designate the real border between them? The self-elimination of philosophy from the field of formation of the methodological consciousness of science turns into a blurring of the subject boundaries between the philosophy of science, the social history of science, social psychology, cognitive sociology of science, etc. Post-positivism-oriented studies of science are losing the status of the philosophical and methodological consciousness of science as a cultural phenomenon.
Knowledge, in essence, i.e. precisely as knowledge, it is a reflection of an objective, independent of knowledge, reality. Meanwhile, indeed today in scientific studies of the phenomenon of knowledge (psychological, cognitive and even special methodological) such concepts as "implicit knowledge", "unconscious knowledge" are often used. We are talking about the functioning of knowledge or even outside of reflection, i.e. outside the conscious distinction between knowledge and reality, or in the context of weakened variants of the reflexive consciousness of this distinction.
It is clear that the path to knowledge is not direct, automatically set, easily fitting into obvious cause-and-effect relationships. Any piece of knowledge implies a "fringe" of more or less explicit and implicit, more or less conscious or generally unconscious assumptions, assumptions, certainties. But one should not, on this basis, weaken essential characteristics knowledge.
Science was not born all at once. The beginnings of science appeared in ancient China and India. Almost all natural sciences, as already noted, have passed through a mythological stage. With the idea of general regularities in nature, we already meet in Babylonian astrology, which discovered a number of regularities in the movement of heavenly bodies. Mathematical language was combined in it with purely mythological concepts.
According to E. Cassirer, science is the last step in the mental development of man; it can be called the highest and most specific achievement of human culture. This latest and most refined product could appear only under special conditions.
Even the very concept of science in this specific sense, Cassirer notes, has existed only since the time of the great ancient Greek thinkers - the Pythagoreans and the atomists, Plato and Aristotle. But even this concept in the following centuries became vague and was forgotten. During the Renaissance, it was rediscovered and restored to its rights. And after this new discovery, the triumph of science seemed more complete and certain. No other power modern world cannot, notes Cassirer, compare with the power of scientific thought. And it continues to be the last chapter in the history of mankind and the most important subject of human philosophy. Aspects of the existence of science are the generation of new knowledge, a social institution, a special sphere of culture.
