Personality in history: modern approaches. Modern man
Systematization and connections
Social philosophy
I decided to move the topic about personality from the philosophical forum. Maybe someone will find the information already collected useful, and I also hope that the topic will find further development at FS.
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Anyone who constantly looks at topics and posts on FF has noticed that more and more often they are filled with terms related to the information war aimed at zombifying people. Behind the scenes they spend a huge amount of money on this, and on a conscious level they began to organize this somewhere immediately after World War 2 with the creation of the institute in Tavistock (which was mentioned by A.B.V. in the topic “Thoughts for the day”). The results are obvious, especially in recent decades with the development of ICT: zombified peoples are completely destroying their once prosperous countries, although the transformations could have been carried out peacefully, but their brains have been blown out! And it is especially painful that Ukraine has succeeded here. And what’s going on at the everyday level: take, for example, the same students who shoot teachers and classmates.How not to turn into a puppet in greedy hands?How to not just preserve yourself, but develop your abilities, become a full-fledged person with an independent worldview?
What qualities should a person have to be a useful person for society? Methods for achieving this level.
This is what I would like to talk about. Surely everyone has thoughts on this matter or something from life experience, why not exchange. Look, maybe we can defeat the world hydra.
There are a lot of developments, but I think for these developments you should turn not to programmers, but to psychologists. For example, to people like Kurpatov, with his Higher School of Methodology)
But don’t forget, we need to determine the qualities that a Personality should have. And one of them is the presencemain (strategic) goalon the implementation of which, as they say, life is invested. Of course, tactical moves are allowed, such as, for example, the Bolsheviks, with the help of the NEP (in fact, capitalism), built socialism, but the goal is always before the eyes of the individual. But the goal doesn't change.
And also, what is inherent in Personality?
gra - As usual, they “start and lose”!
Because already from the first step there is a mistake!
There is a person and there is a society, which means there are personal and there are public goals!
And only when a person can connect the first and second into a single whole, only then does the goal simply becomesocially significant goaland simply the individual becomespersonality!
Choosing a goal is not a banal desire, it is a conscious necessity, it is an actfreedom!
Important clarification!A person who has a socially significant goal has the right to be called a person.Then such a person must be a professional and have the skill to provide society with a quality product. For example, the Bolsheviks were called that"professionalrevolutionaries." They really qualitatively solved the problems that arose. To the point that they radically changed their policies, for example: military communism, in a minute, was replaced by the NEP (they saved socialism with capitalism). They have a lot of such examples, so they not only survived, but won in those turbulent years.
That is, in order to choose a socially significant goal and become a person, an individual must, as they say, mature - acquireadvanced worldview.
And so, we identified two morePersonal qualities - professionalism (skill) and advanced worldview.
Desires are something from physiology, at the level of a reflex. This is a dependent state, it’s not for nothing that there is such a saying: “A slave to desires.”
A conscious need is an order of magnitude higher level of human development. Let's start with the word necessity - this is a stable, essential connection between phenomena, processes, objects of reality, conditioned by the entire previous course of their development. The more extensive and high-quality a person’s knowledge is, the more opportunities he will have for informed choice (there will be plenty to choose from). Neglect of necessity leads to voluntarism (a striking example of this is Khrushchev, who went down in history under the driver - Kukuruznik).
So, having only desires is a slave state. The personality, through conscious necessity, acquires freedom. Hegel said so: “Freedom is a conscious necessity.” That is, -to be free means to know objective laws and make decisions based on and taking into account this knowledge.
You don’t have any “philosophy”, you have only obscurantism in your head and you lie behind every word!
Quite recently they argued that there is no truth, there is only faith! And now the truth has become just an “assumption”?!
I constantly repeat:in order to work “at the level” today, you have to be an atheist, a materialist, a dialectician - this is the required minimum!
As always, you try to turn everything into a joke!
Why is it difficult to communicate on forums? The fact that you are constantly required to “show the structure of the Universe on your fingers,” which is almost impossible!
Selecting from the available options gives "individualpicture of preferences" and says practically nothing about a person as an individual! But what does it say?
The criterion is simple and it would seem that it should be understandable to anyone.Create something new that didn’t exist before and you are a “personality”!
To push the boundaries of our existence, to expand the scope of our capabilities is the goal and not everyone can do it! It’s not for nothing that they say: “Great goals for great people!”
Do we choose our goals or do our goals choose us? Choosing a target is strictlyprivatechoice and here everyone chooses for themselves!
Problems of personality in modern philosophy are, first of all, the question of what place a person occupies in the world, what he actually is and what he can become, what are the limits of his freedom and social responsibility. Philosophers consider personality to be the highest stage of human evolution as a spiritual-physical being. Many movements have appeared in philosophy in which man is placed at the center of the universe.
The definition of personality, the meaning of human existence, the relationship between the individual and society, and finally, the place of man in the natural and social hierarchy were touched upon by many directions and schools of modern philosophy, among them representatives of personalism, existentialism, religious philosophy, cosmism, etc.
Personalism(from Latin persona - personality) - a theistic direction of philosophy that recognizes the individual as the primary creative reality and the highest spiritual value, and the whole world as a manifestation of the creative activity of the supreme personality (God). It was formed at the end of the 19th century. in Russia and the USA, then in the 30s. 20th century in France and other countries. In Russia, the ideas of personalism were developed by N. A. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, and partly by N. O. Lossky and others. The founders of American philosophy were B. Bone and J. Royce; their followers are W. Hawking, M. Calkins, E. Brightman, E. Kent, D. Wright, P. Schilling, R. T. Flewelling, who united around the Personalist magazine, founded in 1920 by Flewelling. French personalists (P. Landberg, M. Nédoncel, G. Madinier, P. Ricoeur and others) grouped, led by E. Mounier and J. Lacroix, around the magazine "Esprit", founded in 1932. Representatives of non-religious personalism were B. Coates (Great Britain), W. Stern (Germany), etc.
What comes to the fore here is not the cognizing subject of classical philosophy, but the human personality in the fullness of its specific manifestations, in its unique individuality. Personality turns into a fundamental ontological category, the main manifestation of being, in which volitional activity and activity are combined with the continuity of existence.
According to personalism, the existence of an individual, woven into a complex network public relations, subject to social changes, excludes the possibility for him to affirm his unique “I”. Personalism distinguishes between the concepts of individual and personality. Man, as part of the race, as part of society, is an individual. Nothing is known about it - a biological or social atom - it is only an elemental part, determined by its relationship with the whole. A person as an individual can assert himself only through free expression of will, through a will that overcomes both the finitude of a person’s life and social barriers, as if from within a person. Thus, at the heart of the teaching of personalism about personality is the thesis of free will. The decision always comes from the individual, presupposes the direction of the will, choice, and moral assessment.<Вся глубина проблемы не в достижении такой организации общества и государства, при которой общество и государство давало бы свободу человеческой личности, а в утверждении свободы человеческой личности от неограниченной власти общества и государства>.
Personalism is a theistic tendency in Western philosophy,
recognizing the personality and its spiritual values as the highest meaning of the earthly
civilization. The concept of ethical personalism was developed by Max Scheler, one of the founders of religious anthropology. For Scheler, the value of the individual was the highest degree in the history of human development. This “Socrates of modern times” can rightfully be considered the creator of a holistic doctrine of man based on Christian experience. The basis of his doctrine, set out in his later works “On the Eternal in Man” (1921) and “On the Place of Man in the Cosmos” (1928), is the need to take into account all layers of personality in their close and organic interaction.
| Max Scheler (1874-1928), philosopher and sociologist, founder of philosophy. anthropology and anthropopol. orientation in sociology, representative of the phenomenological movement. Father is Lutheran, mother is Jewish. Was married three times. Converted to Catholicism as a teenager, ca. 1921 left the church. Studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, philosophy and sociology with Dilthey and G. Simmel, 1895. 1897 - doctorate, 1899 - Jena University, freelance professor. 1900-1906 taught at the University of Jena, met Husserl. 1907-1910 at the University of Munich, participant in phenomenological research. mug. Since 1919, professor of philosophy and sociology in Cologne. At the beginning of 1928 he accepted the department at Frankfurt University. In 1923 in Berlin he met with N. Berdyaev. They agreed on a mutual rejection of Marxism and Nazism. In the period from 1912 to 1923, Scheler laid the foundations of phenomenological sociology, sociology of culture and sociology of knowledge. Views were formed under the influence of the ideas of neo-Kantianism, philosophy of life, phenomenology; Among the philosophers who influenced him are Aiken, Husserl, Nietzsche, E. Hartmann. Kant contrasted formal ethics with the so-called. material ethics of values, which is based on the doctrine of feeling as an intentional (directed) act of comprehending value. He sought to combine the principles of neo-Kantianism and philosophy of life based on Husserl’s phenomenological method. Develops ideas about<социологической сообусловленности>all forms of spiritual acts in which knowledge is acquired, by the social structure of society, and the choice of the very subject of knowledge - by the dominant social interest. A 15-volume collection of his works was published in Germany: Max Scheler. The Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke): 15 Volumes. The International Max-Scheler-Society is actively working to disseminate his ideas. |
In the creative evolution of M. Scheler, if we consider his doctrine of personality, three stages can be roughly distinguished: 1) man in the perspective of God, 2) man in the perspective of the cosmos, 3) man in the perspective of society. At the first, axiological, stage, Scheler builds a hierarchy of fundamental values, which he calls ideal<предметами>. How more people joins the world of spiritual ideals, traditions and values, the more strongly the personal element manifests itself in him. Man and humanity are literally breaking out of the body-spirit element to the harmony of ideal values created by culture. The next period, for which the theme of the “collapse of values” caused by the First World War is most indicative, is characterized by a gradual shift in interest in anthropological issues. Sacred themes seem to fade into the background, giving way to the search for man’s place in the cosmic order. At the third stage, Scheler's theological interests were clearly replaced by natural sciences, and moral and philosophical ones by sociological ones.
Analyzing historical views, Scheler identifies five concepts of man: theistic (Jewish and Christian) interpretation of man; the ancient concept of “homo sapiens,” which is expressed in Anaxagoras, and in Plato and Aristotle, framed in philosophical categories; naturalistic, positivist and pragmatic teachings that interpret man as homo faber (“active man”); the idea of man as a crazy monkey, obsessed with the “spirit”; a view according to which a person and his self-awareness are assessed overly enthusiastically, which is inherent in modern philosophy.
Scheler's task is to reveal the essence of man as something unparalleled in the cosmos and fundamentally different from the animal. According to Scheler, the human spirit differs from all other forms of mental life in its “openness to the world,” its ability to go beyond the limits of attachment to the surrounding world inherent in animals. Because of this, man has the ability to comprehend things, regardless of the state of lust, and to find access to the realm of essences and values. Only by inhibiting all other mental forces and repressing lust is a person able to realize the special position inherent in him.
In the structure of the human psyche, Scheler distinguishes four layers corresponding to the evolutionary stages of organic nature - feelings, impulse, instinct, associative memory and practical intellect (mind). He contrasts them with the spirit, thanks to which man has risen above nature, as a completely different principle. According to Scheler, man is the most amazing creature because, despite his origins from the animal world, he resists it and ultimately creates a world that nature does not know. Scheler calls man a "Protestant of life." Scheler considers “spirit” and “impulse” as two essential attributes of the divine “primary principle of being.” God and man are “comrades-in-arms” in the world-historical process.
Personality, M. Scheler proves, is not at all a subject of reason, not a “Vernunftperson”, but it is also not a subject of rational will. Personality is, first of all, “ens amans” (loving being), and not “ens cogitans” (thinking being) and not even “ens volens” (willing being). Not the mind, but feelings are the most important component of the personality structure. They form a multi-layered, hierarchically organized structure, where the lower floor is occupied by sensuality, and the highest by spirituality. Love, according to Scheler, is an act of ascension, accompanied by an instantaneous insight into the highest value of the object; The specificity of love is that it can only be directed at the individual as a bearer of value, but not at value as such (“The Essence and Forms of Sympathy”, 1923). In his works on the sociology of knowledge ("Forms of Knowledge and Society", 1926), Scheler considered the diversity social norms and assessments as a consequence of the variety of historical conditions that impede or promote the implementation of various “vital,” “spiritual” and religious values.
M. Scheler, being one of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century, built a phenomenological axiology on an ethical foundation. The moral sphere is the kingdom of values that connect the individual with God, and temporary existence with the eternal. Values are arranged in a strictly hierarchical order: values of the sensually perceptible (pleasant - unpleasant); vital values (noble - vile); spiritual values (good - evil, beautiful - ugly, true - false); religious values, or the values of the sacred (holy - profane). He understood personality as the highest spiritual act in which all spiritual acts of human individuality are concentrated.
Only a person - since he is a person - can rise above himself as a living being and, starting from one center, as if on the other side of the space-time world, make everything, including himself, the subject of his knowledge.
M. Scheler is one of the most significant and original figures in European philosophy of the 20th century. In his creative heritage, an important place is occupied by the axiological doctrine of human personality, which stands integral part his philosophical anthropology. Scheler feels the influence of patristics, in particular, Augustine the Blessed and other church fathers, for whom each human person is unique and has an enduring value rooted in God.
Ethical concept personalism, where the value of the individual was represented as the highest axiological level, was formed not only within the framework of German, but also American philosophy. American personalism arose at the end of the 19th century, its founder B. Bone. The principle of an active, strong-willed individual at the end of the 19th century. attracts the attention of US philosophers. The early generation of American personalists (Bone, J. Howieson, Calkins) opposed the absolute idealism widespread in the United States, against the subordination of the individual to the impersonal cosmic order. Subsequently, Brightman and Flewelling developed the position about the “personal world” in its entirety, which is “greater” than the natural world and is the true arena of being. The main representative of French Catholic personalism, E. Mounier, announces Christian teaching about personality as the basis for a revolutionary revolution in the life of mankind, which makes it possible to create a kind of “society of individuals” similar to the Christian community.
According to M. Buber, at the beginning of everything lies attitude. A personality emerges from relationships, is supported by them, and truly lives in them. In the process of discursive interaction, a person comes into contact with the world and is involved in relationships with other people. In discursive interaction, one person addresses another, and discourse becomes a meaningful mediator in which the person is realized. However, according to C. S. Peirce, personality is a system of symbols and meanings. In other words, personality is a symbolically constructed habit that the mind develops over the years. It does not exist in any other form except as a sign. Signs are conditioned by previous methods of cognition and behavior.
The concept of “personality”, central to personalism, is interpreted as a unique, unique subjectivity aimed at creating a social world; the history of mankind appears as a one-sided process of development of a person’s personal beginning, and the person himself, according to their position, achieves the highest bliss in unity with God. The main attention is paid to issues of freedom and moral education. The ethic of American personalism is directly related to social teaching. According to his point of view, the moral self-improvement of citizens leads to a society of personal harmony. Personalists contrast society as a set of historically established forms of joint activity of people with a personal society, where people are united “beyond words and systems.”
They will tell me, and indeed I have been told, that man cannot bear an incomplete god, a god in the making! My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance company for weak, needy people. It already presupposes a powerful, high spirit in a person. Therefore, it is quite understandable that a person only in the course of his development and growing self-knowledge comes to this consciousness of his collaboration, participation in the emergence of “deity.”
For the most part, existentialists and representatives of religious philosophy viewed personality from the perspective of the eternal and temporary. This is what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and later Kant and Hegel did, and in XIX-XX centuries Danish philosopher Siren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Max Scheler (1874-1928), Russian thinkers Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944 ).
The problem of the eternal and the temporary in man was solved in one case within the framework of existentialism, and in the other - religious philosophy. According to the Maitri Upanishads, Brahman - the absolute being - at the same time manifests itself in two opposite aspects - time and eternity. Ignorance lies in seeing only its negative aspect - its temporality. Wrong action, as the Hindus call it, is not living in time, but believing that nothing exists outside of time. Man is destroyed by time and history not because he lives in them, but because he considers them real and, as a result, forgets or underestimates eternity.
Religious existentialism calls a person from the world to God, to self-deepening, which allows him to gain a new, “transcendental” dimension of existence. Self-deepening is at the same time an expansion of the boundaries of the individual Self. Representatives of both directions considered human existence (in French, “existence”) in two perpendicular hyperplanes in eternity and time.
Man in eternity is a carrier eternal values. A man in time is just physical phenomenon: he is born and dies. Existence in time is our existence as citizens of society. In time we eat and sleep, fight for power and raise children, achieve success and suffer defeat. Living in society, we cannot be free from it as social beings. We are all parts of a family, a team, a profession, a class. However, the essence of man lies elsewhere - in human immortality and human freedom.
Our existence is always a tension between the temporary and the eternal. Human behavior lies in two different dimensions, so it is always contradictory. Existence in time can be observed, in eternity only experienced. These are the two planes of human existence that philosophers have considered.
Man is the only creature who is aware of his mortality. In the life of every person, sooner or later there will come a moment when he wonders about the finitude of his individual existence. . The first reaction following the realization of one's mortality may be a feeling of hopelessness and confusion. Overcoming this feeling, a person exists burdened with the knowledge of impending death, which becomes fundamental in the subsequent spiritual development of a person. The presence of such knowledge in a person’s spiritual experience explains the urgency with which he faces the question of the meaning and purpose of life. In this regard, questions often appear on the pages of philosophical literature: does human life have any meaning and value?
If the answer is positive, there are the following points of view: the meaning of life is in harmony with one’s own nature and satisfying needs, in obtaining pleasure and joy, in developing creative abilities and working for the good of society. And finally, one can come across the view that the meaning of life is in existence itself. This diversity of views indicates how contradictory assessments of the purpose of life are.
However, personality problems are related not only to the historical context, but to the present. One way or another, most teachers have to conduct sociological surveys, even the simplest and most easily accessible ones. And here the paradoxes of the respondent’s personality consciousness and the inconsistency of his behavior are clearly visible. These moments were recorded by domestic sociologists. Man is historical as a natural and social being, only thanks to this history becomes truly human.
Shift today anthropocentric worldview comes anthropocosmic, radically changed our ideas about the place and role of man in nature and space. Anthropocentrism denies the existence of any significant progressive changes in mental abilities and in the morality of man during his historical existence. Based on this, anthropocentrism considers hopes for a radical improvement in intelligence and an improvement in the moral nature of man in the future to be unfounded. The science of modern times, on the one hand, debunked man, ceasing to consider him as the central figure of the entire universe, but on the other hand, it greatly raised his importance in the Universe, endowing him with the forces and means necessary to rebuild the surrounding nature, to subjugate it the will and intelligence of the human collective.
Anthropocosmism teaches us to approach human history on the scale of cosmic life. From this point of view, the several hundred thousand years separating modern man from his bestial ancestors is a period of insignificant duration. By the standards of cosmic evolution, modern humanity has not yet emerged from<младенческого возраста>. This is where all the growing pains come from, which often turn into unwise economic decisions and man-made disasters.
From anthropocosmic ideas it follows careful attitude to nature. Man, despite the significant features of the living environment he has created, continues to remain an integral part of the cosmos, completely subordinate to the laws operating in it. Man is not above nature, but within nature. He is organically connected with nature with his entire complex being and acts on it not from the outside, but from the inside. Human activity in the biosphere, considered as a whole, is a powerful endogenous factor, not only because man is inside nature, but also because he has the ability - with the help of reason - to penetrate and interfere with the work of the subtlest internal mechanism of various natural phenomena, introducing changes in them that he desires.
Academician V. I. Vernadsky argued the inevitability of a gradual restructuring of the entire biosphere<в интересах свободно мыслящего человечества как единого целого>, about the inevitability of the transformation of the biosphere into the noosphere, in which the main active force will be the human mind. We are only experiencing the beginning of an era during which the face of the Earth is about to change radically under the influence of this new cosmic force. V.I. Vernadsky considers it possible to spread the noosphere beyond the boundaries of our planet - to more distant parts of outer space.
Modern philosophy raises the question of the relationship between the individual and society in a broad sense. Personalism and existentialism pay especially much attention to personality, for which the problem of personality is central.
For personalism personality is the only absolute reality. But this does not mean a real person, but a certain spiritual substance. By criticizing the view of society as a mechanical unification of separate individuals and correctly linking this view with the principle of egoism, personalists (for example, Mounier) mystify social nature man, interpreting it in a religious spirit.
Existentialism reveals an acute conflict between the individual and modern society, shows the enslavement of the individual by impersonal external forces. Under<существованием>supporters of existentialism understand immanent self-consciousness, spiritual life, separated and opposed to the objective material world. The existence of objective laws of nature and society independent of the consciousness of the individual is rejected. The world exists only in consciousness, and only a person’s subjective interest in an object makes this object exist.
Existentialists argue that the alienated way of being is rooted in human nature itself. The real historical contradiction between personal freedom and the impersonal everyday life () turns into a metaphysical contradiction. Being an individual is an impossible task for most people. To get out of the world<обыденности>, a person needs to change not this world itself, but his consciousness: decide to look death in the eyes; in the face of death, a person always becomes himself, that is, a person.
| Reference Existentialism (from Late Latin exsistentia - existence), or philosophy of existence, an irrationalist direction of modern bourgeois philosophy that arose on the eve of the 1st World War of 1914-18 in Russia (L. Shestov, N.A. Berdyaev), after the 1st World War wars in Germany (M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, M. Buber) and during the 2nd World War 1939-45 in France (J. P. Sartre, G. Marcel, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Camus, S. de Beauvoir). In the 40-50s. E. has become widespread in other European countries; in the 60s also in the USA. Representatives of this trend in Italy are E. Castelli, N. Abbagnano, E. Paci; in Spain, J. Ortega y Gaset was close to him; In the USA, E.'s ideas are popularized by W. Lowry, W. Barrett, and J. Edie. Religious and philosophical movements close to Ethnicism include French personalism (E. Mounier, M. Nédoncel, J. Lacroix) and dialectical theology (C. Barth, P. Tillich, R. Bultmann). Existentialists consider B. Pascal, S. Kierkegaard, M. de Unamuno, F. M. Dostoevsky and F. Nietzsche as their predecessors. E. was influenced by the philosophy of life and phenomenology of E. Husserl. |
Having singled out experience itself as the original and authentic being, existentialism understands it as the subject’s experience of his<бытия-в-мире>. According to Heidegger and Sartre, existence is being directed towards nothingness and aware of its finitude. Therefore, Heidegger’s description of the structure of existence comes down to a description of a number of modes of human existence: care, fear, determination, conscience, etc., which are determined through death and are different ways of contacting nothing, moving towards it, running away from it, etc. Therefore, it is in<пограничной ситуации>(Jaspers), in moments of deepest upheaval, a person begins to see existence as the root of his being. Freedom appears in existentialism as a heavy burden that a person must bear because he is an individual. He can give up his freedom, stop being himself, become<как все>, but only at the cost of abandoning oneself as an individual. According to Camus, in the face of nothingness, which makes human life meaningless and absurd, the breakthrough of one individual to another, true communication between them is impossible. The only way of genuine communication that Camus recognizes is the unity of individuals in rebellion against<абсурдного>peace, against the meaninglessness of human existence. According to Marcel, the prototype of a person’s relationship to existence is a personal relationship with another person, carried out in the face of God.
According to modern philosophers, freedom is a specifically human way of being: “The measure of freedom is included in the concept of man.” The measure of freedom is understood by them as the creative self-embodiment of a person. The individual, as such, has the reality of his freedom, expressed in the freedom of choice from the totality of opportunities provided to him by society. Depriving an individual of communication and the opportunity to choose has a negative impact on personal development. Isolation is a terrible punishment. Even more terrible is the imposition of someone else's will. A person who is completely subordinate to the will of another person is no longer a person. Similarly, one who is devoid of reason or intelligence is not a person. He cannot be held responsible for his actions. Freedom and responsibility are integral attributes of personality.
The main resulting property of personality is worldview. It answers the questions: who am I? How do I see the world? why am I? what is the meaning of my life? Only by developing one or another worldview does a person, through self-determination in life, gain the opportunity to consciously and purposefully act, realizing his essence. To live and act actively, a person must have an idea of the meaning of life, must believe in the meaning of his actions and actions; must have its own more or less clear life task. The meaning of life is a traditional philosophical problem that was posed 2500 years ago.
Man is a living system, representing the unity of the physical and spiritual, natural and social, hereditary and acquired during life. It crystallizes in itself everything that has been accumulated by humanity over the centuries. Historically established norms of law, morality, everyday life, rules of thinking and language, aesthetic tastes, etc. shape human behavior and mind, make an individual a representative of a certain way of life, culture and psychology.
A person’s awareness of himself as such is always mediated by his relationships with other people. Each individual person is a unique individual. And at the same time, it carries within itself a certain generic essence. He acts as a person when he achieves self-awareness, understanding of his social functions, and comprehension as a subject of the historical process.
Personality in the modern world
In October 1932, the first issue of the magazine Esprit (“Esprit” - “Spirit”) was published in Paris, the founder of which was the twenty-seven-year-old French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), a Catholic by religion. The young intelligentsia united around the magazine - philosophers, publicists, writers, literary and art critics of various orientations, concerned about the fate of modern man and civilization, which was experiencing a deep economic, political and spiritual crisis.
The birth of Esprit testified to the emergence of a new movement in the philosophical arena - French personalism, which, together with phenomenology, existentialism and neo-Thomism, was to constitute an entire era in the intellectual life of France in the first half of the 20th century. The central problem of the philosophy of personalism was the question of the universal development of man, of personality, which, in fact, gave the name to this movement (from the Latin persona - personality). The name of Emmanuel Mounier, the founder and leading theorist of French personalism, is firmly among the most influential figures in the philosophy of our century.
E. Mounier is the author of the works “Personalist and Community Revolution” (1935), “From Capitalist Property to Human Property” (1936), “Manifesto of Personalism” (1936), “Personalism and Christianity” (1939), “Treatise on Character” (1946), “Introduction to Existentialism” (1946), “Personalism” (1949, Russian translation - 1992), “Hope of the Desperate” (1953, Russian translation - 1995), etc. In 1961–1963, a four-volume collection was published in Paris works of Mounier (Emmanuel Mounier. Oeuvres), which includes all his main works.
French personalism was created primarily as a variant of left-oriented social Christianity. During the years of its formation, the attention of its supporters focused on the topical events of the first third of the 20th century: the results of the First World War. October Revolution in Russia and socialist revolutions in Germany and Hungary, economic crisis capitalism 1929–1932, the onset of fascism in Germany. In the tense atmosphere of the 30s, the Esprit, led by Mounier, called on believers and atheists to work together on the side of progressive forces, against what threatened humanity and its culture, and above all against fascism. The idea of the existence of people involved in modernity has become dominant in personalist philosophy, calling on man to meaningfully, creatively, humanistically fulfill his mission on Earth.
Mounier and his associates - J. Lacroix, M. Nédoncel, G. Madinier, P. Fresse, P. Ricoeur and others - recognized the equal right to the existence of different worldviews, including atheistic ones. Esprit was created as a magazine that supports pluralism of opinions and assessments, uniting around itself people of different faiths and non-believers with the aim of developing a pan-civilizational worldview. The founder of personalism hoped that his magazine would contribute to the creation of a new generation of people occupying a responsible position in the world, ready to make personal choices and conduct socially significant activities, regardless of their ideological point of view and attitude to religion, professional occupations and class affiliation.
The basis of the entire problematic of personalism in France is the question of the “crisis of man,” which supporters of this movement are trying to comprehend as a consequence of the general crisis of modern civilization. According to F. Dumont, the reason that gave rise to the concept of personalism was “the depravity of history itself.” The founder of “personal philosophy” himself wrote: “Our magazine was founded by a group of young people who realized their responsibility for the poverty that reigns in the world, who decided to destroy the established disorder and build a new society based on the effective primacy of spiritual values.”
Mounier understood the “crisis of man” primarily as a crisis of the individual’s active abilities, caused by his participation in capitalist production, and as a decline in spirituality, which was a consequence of the bourgeois way of life and the de-Christianization of the masses. At the same time, Mounier and his associates were concerned that there was a merger of Christianity with “bourgeois disorder.” In one of the first issues of Esprit, E. Mounier and J. Maritain, later a leading theorist of neo-Thomism, who stood at the origins of personalism in the 30s, announced the intention of the latter’s supporters to separate Christianity from the bourgeois world, “to snatch the Gospel from the hands of the bourgeoisie.” . Theorists of personalism set the task of developing a new concept of Christianity, which could become the spiritual support of people in the transformation of bourgeois civilization on humanistic principles.
In connection with the noted tendencies of French personalism in the first years of the existence of Esprit, there was a threat of its condemnation by the Vatican, which did not recognize such far-reaching “ecumenism” of Mounier and his like-minded people. The dissatisfaction of Rome was caused by the demands of personalist philosophers to separate Christianity from the “established disorder” (capitalism), and the personalist concept of “involvement,” and the “modesty” of the very faith of the supporters of “personal philosophy.”
By creating personalism as a philosophical doctrine, Mounier intended to update the Christian concept of man by assimilating the most influential philosophical anthropological positions in his contemporary world, and above all existentialism and Marxism. Personality philosophers looked for the answer to the question about the qualities and properties of personality from Socrates and Cicero, Descartes and Leibniz, Kant, Pascal, Malebranche, Rousseau, Fichte, Proudhon, Scheler, Bergson, Peguy, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Marx, Lenin .
Mounier associates the origin of the concept of personality with Christianity, which, as he notes, was the first to talk about plurality human souls and called on each of them to internally commune with the divine. “The deepest meaning of human existence consists... in changing the “secret of one’s soul” in order to accept the Kingdom of God into it and realize it on earth.” The idea of the embodiment of the Kingdom of God on Earth became programmatic in the philosophy of French personalism. In this regard, “personal philosophy” is in line with Augustinian anthropology, which Mounier perceived as a call for the “exaltation of earthly life.” Having abandoned the radical opposition between the city of God and the city of the earth, Mounier, following C. Peguy, reinterpreted the relationship between the sacred and the profane as follows: spiritual order is not a metaphysical principle that separates man from his earthly destiny; he is a dynamic force manifesting itself in human society. The city of God and the city of earth are forever intertwined with each other and differ only in their orientation. Thus, in contrast to traditional Christianity, which aimed a person mainly at a contemplative life, Mounier and his associates emphasized active life, giving the idea of the embodiment of divine values on earth a very concrete form.
In search of the essence of man, Mounier turns to the practical side of his life and tries to determine the role of work in his life, using the concept of “involvement.” This reflects a certain influence of Marxism, which was initially perceived by Mounier and his like-minded people through the prism of the views of N. A. Berdyaev. In the first issue of Esprit, Berdyaev published an article “The Truth and Lies of Communism,” which Mounier immediately noted as very informative. The Russian thinker considered the most significant “truths” of communism to be criticism of bourgeois society, its vices and contradictions, debunking the exploitation of man by man, a call for a change in the social order that oppresses the individual, and the desire to give a universal character to people’s thinking and activities.
Despite the strong influence of Berdyaev's ideas, Mounier did not agree with the way the Russian philosopher treated the problem of objectification. Berdyaev did not believe in the possibility of human self-realization in the outside world; for him, the conflict between matter and spirit, immanent and transcendental was absolute, and therefore insoluble: “spirit is a revolutionary principle, matter is a reactionary principle,” “spirit is freedom and revolution, matter is necessity and reaction.” Mounier and his associates understood the interaction of spirit and matter dialectically and saw it as the main condition for the self-realization of man as an individual. In The Personalist and Communal Revolution, Mounier writes about the three main dimensions of personality: vocation, embodiment and association, where the emphasis is on “incarnation in work.”
For Mounier, work is, first of all, creativity, in the process of which a person acts as a legislative, goal-setting being (“work is carried out for the sake of creativity”); By creating this or that product, a person not only expresses himself, but also in a certain way completes itself (“labor is a means of completing a person as a person”) and constitutes his own self (“labor returns the individual to himself”); in work, a person realizes himself not only as a thinking and acting being, but also as a sensual, emotional being (“work is accompanied by joy”); The discipline of work, its specific order and strict certainty organize a person, giving him a sense of confidence and instilling faith in himself. One of the most significant points labor activity, Mounier believes, is the experience of human dedication: a person, creatively realizing himself in work, renounces himself and does this not so much for the sake of the product he produces, but for the sake of another person to whom he devotes his work. Thus, work is the initial condition for truly human communication and an instrument of education: the spirit of camaraderie and love that prevails in the process of joint work is the basis on which a truly human, personal community is created.
While acknowledging the influence of Marxism on the formation of personalist ideas about “involved” existence, Mounier, at the same time, seeks, in his words, to include Marxist humanism in a broader perspective, believing that it ignores the inner life of man, his individual and collective destiny. The main thing that distinguishes the personalist concept of activity from the Marxist one is the attempt to connect work with the holistic self-manifestation of the individual, realizing himself as a subject not only of production activity, but also of moral, aesthetic, religious activity, in the terminology of the personalists - spiritual. As J. Lacroix writes, “to work means to make oneself, to create works means to improve oneself and improve the world,” which is only possible if a person correlates his activity with a divine, transcendental perspective.
This leads to a personalist critique of the ideology of economism, to which, ultimately, supporters of “personal philosophy” include Marxism. Personalist philosophers consider the primacy of economics not a real attitude, but a bourgeois and anti-revolutionary belief. “That is why,” writes Mounier, “we have discarded the illusion of a revolution that would concern only social structures, and we are talking about a personal revolution in the souls of revolutionaries.”
The word “revolution”, which in the 30s was a symbol of the struggle for a “bright future”, receives a unique interpretation in personalism. Mounier is confident that a radical transformation of people's lives is impossible without their common efforts and, above all, without their spiritual revival, without a spiritual revolution. At the same time, he believes that any economic and social changes coming from above and carried out by a small group of people are not able to lead to the destruction of an outdated system; they will certainly end only in the redistribution of wealth. In his opinion, the revolution must be both spiritual and economic: “... the spiritual revolution will be economic or it will not be. The economic revolution will be spiritual or it will not be a revolution.”
The task of transforming labor into a truly human activity was solved by Mounier and his associates in a constant dispute with bourgeois civilization. The founder of personalism criticized capitalist society based on the position of the individual in it: he exposed capitalist production, which turned the individual into its unconscious agent and deprived him of self-development; he emphasized the inhumane essence of capitalist consumption, showing that it is increasingly becoming an unbridled desire for comfort, hindering the spiritual development of the individual and turning him into a bearer of the standards of bourgeois society; finally, Mounier rejected the very type of bourgeois personality, which, in his opinion, was individualistic and had lost the ability for self-improvement.
The soul, the spiritual world of the individual, the personal self of a person is another, along with “involvement,” the dominant theme of French personalism, turning to which its supporters come closer to existentialism (of course, religious, the main representative of which is Gabriel Marcel) and phenomenology. The personal self of a person is for Mounier and personalist philosophers the “primary reality”, the prerequisite and reality of historical creativity. Personality is the center of reorientation of the objective universe, wrote Mounier, meaning by this that the one who has reached the level of personal existence is the subject of the creation of human reality itself. The transformation of reality from non-human to actually human occurs in the inner world of the individual; core spiritual world consciousness is human, but it does not determine personality and personal creativity. Mounier, emphasizing the undoubted importance of the conscious choice of the individual, at the same time asserts that “conscious behavior is only part of the integral Self, and the best of our actions are precisely those of the necessity of which we are least sure”; creativity as overcoming the given “is achieved beyond the boundaries of consciousness and activity.”
In the personalistic concept of the inner world of the individual great importance attached to the problem of the unconscious; It is precisely unconscious activity that ensures a person’s connection with the entire world - subhuman and superhuman - and opens up special connections between the Self and the non-Self. Mounier speaks of the “openness” of a person: he is open to a certain reality, more extensive than the world in which his conscious life takes place, a reality, on the one hand, preceding man, on the other, superior to him. It is the unconscious that allows a person to communicate with this reality: through the unconscious, a person connects with that part of himself that transcends his own consciousness.
Highly appreciating the psychoanalysis of Z. Freud, who, with his concept of the unconscious, reoriented human cognition, expanding the boundaries of his inner world through the introduction of instances of the unconscious and superconscious, Mounier nevertheless criticizes Freudianism as a variant of mechanistic determinism. His particular objection is to Freud's desire to reduce the highest manifestations of the human spirit - morality, art, religion - to modifications of internal drives identical to instinctive unconscious activity, as a result of which human existence is interpreted as “solid animality” and, in fact, personal characteristics are reduced to the impersonal; The leading moment of human existence in psychoanalysis is the “principle of pleasure hidden in the unconscious.”
Mounier’s focus is not on the mechanically operating unconscious, but on the creative unconscious, in the study of which he uses E. Husserl’s idea of intentionality, at the same time subjecting it to both decisive criticism and significant revision. His main objection is directed against a narrow, predominantly rationalistic, understanding of the problem of intentionality - the latter was interpreted by the founder of phenomenology exclusively as an outward focus of consciousness on an object; in the teachings of E. Husserl, Mounier sees only a philosophy of knowledge, where a person is identified with reality, and does not overcome it.
Mounier is also not satisfied with the interpretation of the idea of intentionality by atheistic existentialists (primarily J. P. Sartre), since, as he believes, in existentialism human subjectivity is hermetically closed. And although Sartre rejected any idea of \u200b\u200bthe closedness of consciousness, emphasizing its outward focus, the founder of personalism notes the emptiness of the existentialist concepts of intentionality and transcendence, with the help of which the movement of “purposeless being” is described: in atheistic existentialism, there is nothing outside of man that would exceed his existence in significance and scale. As a result, Mounier believes, both in phenomenology and in existentialism, human existence is the individual’s passionate desire to live at any cost, even at the cost of trampling on those values that give meaning to his existence. Munier shares here the point of view of the Christian existentialists G. Marcel and K. Jaspers, in whose teachings he is attracted by the desire not only to understand a person from himself, but also to connect his inner world with a certain transpersonal, absolute, that is, divine, being.
Trying to describe the concept of divine transcendence, Mounier refers (as in the case of personality) to its fundamental indefinability. Only the following can be stated with complete certainty: the concept of divine transcendence, or God, contains an indication of a certain limit of human capabilities, where, on the one hand, the end of the human world is revealed and everything becomes unthinkable. human ideas and scale, and on the other hand, it is precisely because of this that the human world itself acquires meaning.
According to Mounier, the concept of transcendence characterizes not a person’s consciousness, but his subjectivity, the spiritual world of the individual. The realm of the spirit appears in personalism as that part of subjectivity where human existence is understood from the standpoint of good and evil, good and sin, etc.; the spirit is also the self-consciousness of man. The spirit in personalism is a special sphere of meaning in life of human experience, primary in relation to the subject-specific self-realization of a person, the sphere is “superconscious and supertemporal.” It is natural for the spirit to transcend, and its specific feature is openness not to the external world, but to some higher being. A person comes to comprehend this existence in moments of shock, revelation, which is akin to an act of insight, which, according to Munier, opens the world in its deep reality and connects a person beyond consciousness with the total whole.
It is obvious that in Mounier’s personalism the question of self-awareness of the individual becomes extremely important: since the foundations of human life are rooted in the spiritual world of the individual, correlated with divine transcendence, and there are no other ways of comprehending them other than personal revelation, then it is the individual who bears the responsibility for their detection. As P. Ricoeur writes, the reason that prompts a person to create new values is outside the world, it is transcendental to the world, but in order to make it an effective cause, a person must identify himself with it and thereby give the reason the character of an obligation, and make himself a conductor of new values into the world.
One of the most significant for French personalism is the theme of interhuman communication, which was stated by Mounier in his programmatic work - “Personalist and Communal Revolution”, where the concepts of “personalism” and “human community” were used as identical. And in the book “What is Personalism?” he wrote that the true calling of man is not domination over nature, not the enjoyment of the fullness of life, but the ever-expanding communication of consciousnesses, the achievement of universal mutual understanding among people.
Mounier attributes the sense of human community to the fundamental characteristics of the individual, his primary experience. “The primary experience of a person is the experience of an “other” person”; You, and in him We, precede the personality or, more precisely, accompany the Self throughout its entire life path. Finding inner life, the personality appears aimed at the world and directed toward other individuals; walking along the path of universalization, it connects with them, since the “other” (“others”) not only does not limit it, but determines its existence and ascent. “Personality exists only in its aspiration towards the ‘other’, knows itself only through the ‘other’ and finds itself only in the ‘other’.”
The personalist community, the destiny of which became the goal of “personal philosophy,” must be based on a series of unique acts, which, according to Mounier, have no analogues in the entire universe: the ability of the individual to go beyond his own limits and open up to the “other,” to understand him and in search of mutual agreeing to take his point of view; the ability to take on the fate of the “other”, to share with him his hardships and joys, to be generous without counting on reciprocity, to remain creatively faithful to the “other” throughout life path. Mounier formulates the credo of personal existence as follows: “...I exist to the extent that I exist for the “other,” and ultimately to exist means to love. This is the original truth of personalism." By love he understands not a natural (sexual, family) relationship, but a supernatural relationship, a new form of being: it is given to a person on the other side of his nature, requiring from him the most complete self-realization in freedom. The act of love, according to Mounier, is irrefutable evidence of human existence: “I love - that means I exist, and life is worth living.”
One of the features of the philosophy of French personalism is that its fundamental concepts - personality, transcendence, communication, etc. - are largely defined through artistic creativity. By creating the Esprit magazine, Mounier intended to promote the development of art in order to express through it the main requirements of “personal philosophy”. In his concept, the artist acted as a preacher and guide of personal existence, and works of art were considered a model of truly personal self-realization.
Mounier sees the significance of art primarily in the fact that only he is given the ability to designate the inexpressible essence of divine transcendence. When defining transcendence, the individual resorts to symbolic language, the purpose of which is to reveal the person’s connection with the sacred. According to Mounier, this goal is most fully realized in art, which, as he believes, “reveals to us the world in its deep reality and each individual being in its connection with the universal.” He declares that the highest purpose of art is penetration into the inner abysses of man, into his sovereign world, where the presence of the divine soul is discovered and the proximity of the human and the divine is felt. Mounier associates the special significance of art with the role it plays in ensuring genuine communication between people, which, according to personalist philosophers, is carried out through works of art. Thanks to the perception of works of art, the ethical unity of consciousness receives aesthetic confirmation and justification. At the same time, artistic creativity is recognized as the pinnacle of human activity, activity as such: in it a person acts as a free goal-setting subject, since he does not carry out a predetermined activity, as, for example, happens in work, but creates a new reality, constantly being on the other side of everyday life and striving to connect with the ideal essence of all things; the artist “sees the world in God and strives to realize God in the sublunary world.”
French personalism, the founder of which was Mounier, had a significant influence on the philosophical and social teachings of the 20th century.
Speaking about the significance of French personalism, I would like to note the fact that the personal fate of many of its supporters is an example of a responsible - “involved” - existence. During the occupation of France, a large number of correspondents and senior employees of Esprit fought in the ranks of the Resistance (A. Ullmann, P. E. Touchard, E. Humo, J. M. Soutou, C. Bourdais, etc.); one of the founders of personalism, Colonel of the French army A. Deléage, was killed in the war; P. L. Landsberg and J. Gosse died in fascist concentration camps; F. Gogel, M. Shastin, P. A. Simon passed through the Gestapo dungeons; E. Munier, for health reasons, could not take up arms in the fight against fascism - having spent several months in prison in connection with the conviction and closure of the Esprit magazine, he was forced to hide under an assumed name until the liberation of the country. From the community of thinkers united around Esprit came famous philosophers (E. Mounier, J. Lacroix, P. Ricoeur), psychologists (P. Fresse), economists (F. Peru), filmmakers (A. Bazin, R. Leenhardt) and other prominent representatives of science and culture.
Largely thanks to the activities of personalist philosophers, personal issues have attracted the attention of modern philosophers and sociologists, orienting them to the study of problems of the spiritual world of man. Personalism plays a big role in turning modern thought to issues of the personal content of work and activity in general, human communication and human community as the most pressing problems of our time. The aesthetic concept of “personal philosophy” has gained wide popularity, advocating for the emancipation of a person’s creative potential, for his formation as an aesthetically perfect subject.
The ideas of “personal philosophy” stimulated the reorientation of the official doctrine of Catholicism, which was forced to seek new forms of the presence of the church in the world. Beginning with the 1965 pastoral letter “On the Church in the Modern World,” which deals with ways to implement the dialogue of the church with the world, personalist principles in various versions appear in Vatican documents (the doctrine of the value of earthly life and the active involvement of man in worldly affairs, about the need for the participation of all people in the improvement of social relations, the relationship between the divine and the human, etc.), and the doctrine of man and his personal content becomes one of the central problems of official Catholicism. The principles of Catholic personalism underlie the theology and philosophy of peace of Pope John Paul II, the main problem of which is the unity of the individual and the human community, interpreted from the standpoint of personalism. In the mid-60s, within the framework of Catholic modernism, various theological directions emerged, where the acute problems of our time were comprehended, which began with French personalism. Already in the very names of some “new theologies” themes are reproduced, the discussion of which within the framework of the Catholic worldview began with personalist philosophers from the Esprit group: “theology of revolution”, “theology of work”, “theology of personality”, “theology of love”.
Personalist ideas (along with the ideas of existentialism) to a certain extent played the role of a catalyst in the preparation of the spring events of 1968 in France, some slogans of which literally repeated certain provisions of “personal philosophy”; the most popular of them are about the moral and spiritual revolution, about the integration of the revolutionary struggle and artistic activity, about personal interpersonal communication, etc.
At the end of the 20th century, the philosophical doctrine of French personalism acquired particular relevance thanks to the concept of personality. P. Ricoeur considers this concept more promising than such concepts as consciousness, subject, human self; it is precisely this that stands today as the basis of a global humanistic strategy aimed at upholding and strengthening universal human values.
In recent years, Western philosophy has increasingly discussed the problem of postmodernity - a new understanding of modernity and a new attitude to cultural traditions. In works devoted to this topic, in particular, the idea is expressed that the time has come for philosophical reflection on the issue of expanding human capabilities and cultivating human potential. The picture of the world proposed by the post-modern trend gravitates towards the “originally human” layer of worldview and worldview, and the influence of anthropological philosophical concepts - philosophy of life, phenomenology, existentialism, personalism - is increasing in it. A large place in post-modern research is given to the problems of spiritual fulfillment of human economic and social activity, moderation of his excessively growing needs and orientation towards “economic ethics” and “consumer culture”, which subject to moral correction ideas about the goals, ways, means and methods of economic development, analyzing economic life of society in a global perspective.
The transition to postmodernity presupposes a change in values in culture: from predominantly technical, scientific and economic to philosophical and aesthetic in the broad sense of the word. Post-modernity is declared to be the era of the discovery of the human Self, making a transition from empirical and objectifying interpretations of personality to its interpretation as a “transcendent core” - self-identity, open to change, when the main enzyme of human development and self-development is the deep, immanent concern about one’s soul about one’s own destiny. In post-modern philosophical and social concepts, we are also talking about the formation of a new, “person-centric” ethnic group, where there is equality and equivalence of individuals, social groups, and human communities. The personalist paradigm is gaining strength in connection with both the general rise of legal consciousness and the movement in defense of civil rights of the individual, which is seeking philosophical and ideological justification. Some ideas of “personal philosophy” can be read in projects of alternative movements - communitarian, anti-technocratic, etc.
In the 80s there was a significant revival of the ideas of personalism in France. Along with the traditionally existing (since 1950) “Association of Friends of Emmanuel Mounier” (president P. Fresse), new associations and groups are being created. In the movement “For a New Life”, aimed at finding new forms of human coexistence in the modern world, a significant place belongs to the “section of personalism” (headed by L. Buton), which occupies a leading place in the propaganda of the ideas of Mounier and his associates and has intensified its activities (publication of documents and scientific works: “Personalism as an open construction site”, 1981; “Personality today”, 1987, etc., editing materials on personalism published in movement journals, participation in national symposia, sessions, etc.). The main research topics are “The problem of employment and personal dignity”, “Humanization of the economy”, “The price of life”, “Body, personal life, family”, “Personality and problems of culture, religion”, etc. Since the beginning of 1986, the journal has been published “Poursuivre” (“Poursuivre” - “Continuation”) (directors Bernadette and Bernard Aumont); its purpose is "to continue the exploration of personal and social practices in their connection with the values of personalism that still remain relevant." At the end of 1987, under the leadership of J. Lurol, the group “Relevance of Personalism” was created, which is engaged in research on the following problems: “Enterprise and Community”, “School Education and the Process of Personality Formation”, “Personality and Psychoanalysis”, “Personality and Problems of Bioethics” , “Europe, the media and the role of the individual”, “The emergence of new forms of culture”.
Its supporters explain the need for today's revival of personalism as follows. Etienne Born: “It seems to me, and this is amazing, that all the most serious problems of our time acquire their significance only if they are interpreted from the standpoint of the philosophy of personality.” Jean Letavel: “Today it is necessary to rethink man from the point of view of the requirements that E. Mounier put forward in the 40s.” Gerard Lurol: “The priority of the individual today is greater than ever...”
I. S. Vdovina
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Throughout the history of philosophical science, a number of different theories about man have arisen, the significant differences of which are due to the characteristics of the historical era, as well as the personal qualities and ideological attitudes of the thinkers who lived at the time in question. These concepts are currently generalized and largely studied, but their consideration is not enough to recreate the real image of a person in each era. If previously the image of a person of a certain historical period was built on the basis of the views of thinkers of the past, then modern stage development of philosophical anthropology, the study of a specific person becomes obvious, based on the fact that each cultural and historical era forms a specific image of a person as an individual, which reflects the individuality of that era. Due to the fact that a person is a product of the society, era, culture and type of civilization in which he lives, the reconstruction of the specific features of a person, his image and living conditions, social status, and norms of behavior plays an important role for a holistic understanding of the essence of the human personality. For the first time, researchers in socio-philosophical anthropology, the leading direction of modern anthropological thought, drew attention to the significance of the human problem in various historical eras.
Currently, there is a need to overcome shortcomings in determining the basic characteristics of a person in different eras. Such shortcomings can be explained primarily by the fact that many philosophical researchers did not take into account, when describing the image of man in previous centuries, the following fact: each historical era imposes uniqueness on the development of a particular person, whose individual traits are determined by this cultural-historical era, type of civilization. Socio-philosophical anthropologists consider man as a being that combines the general and the specific, the generic and the specific. Thus, a person is, first of all, a product of an era, society, culture, while pointing out the fact of the preservation of the attributive, so-called generic characteristics of a human being, regardless of what historical era the person belongs to. Each historical and cultural era endows a person with special, unique features inherent only in a given time, therefore, if “you want to judge an individual, then delve into his social position,” way of life, etc.
A person, in relationship with a certain type of society to which he belongs, be it ancient or medieval man, has properties, interests, aspirations that are determined by the specifics of the historical period under consideration. Only by studying the basic characteristics of a person in different historical eras is it possible to form the most complete picture of a real individual. For this reason, deepening knowledge about the characteristic features of a person in various periods of the history of human society, their analysis becomes necessary and obvious at the present stage of development of anthropological thought. This necessity is also explained by the fact that only by thoroughly studying the actually existing person of a particular individual and his inherent qualities; problems that most worry a person in a given era and which he is interested in solving, the social reality surrounding him, his attitude towards it, towards nature and, finally, towards himself - only after a detailed consideration of these issues can we talk about more large-scale philosophical problems with an anthropological orientation. Only on the basis of studying a person as a subject and object of social relations, considering the unity of his attributive, essential and individual personal traits, is it possible to reconstruct the image of a person who once really lived. It is the social reality of the time in question that makes a person unique and determines its distinctive features.
Before we begin the study of ancient man, it should be noted that each historical era has not one, but several images of man; in addition, we must not forget that the individual was constantly changing, therefore there is no man of the primitive era as a single, unchanging being , to the same extent there is no single “ancient man”. For these reasons, in this study we will talk only about the most characteristic properties of the human personality, one way or another present throughout the entire era.
So, the historical conditions of a particular period determine the main features of a person, his way of life, norms and patterns of behavior.
Primitive man is characterized by complete submission to “the hostile and incomprehensible surrounding nature,” which is reflected in the naive religious ideas of the primitive era. The undeveloped production characteristic of this period and, consequently, the extremely rare population over a vast area, placed man in conditions of dependence on nature and the need for survival, in this sense, primitive man was “completely immersed in nature” and was not far removed from the animal world. The guarantee of preserving life in this situation was the unification of people, the creation of tribes. Primitive did not think of himself outside the tribe and did not separate himself from other people. A symbol of the unity of people is also indicated by the fact that the primitives identified themselves with some animal, finding in it certain traits inherent in their tribe. The association of an individual person with an animal also indicates the dissolution of man in nature. Man, in the full sense of the word, fought for existence, achieving through incredible work some kind of security in life. The constant threat to human life from predators and various natural disasters has led to the perception of death as a typical, natural phenomenon. Man of the primitive era, struggling with nature, at the same time learned from it to survive. The man looked closely at everything that surrounded him and it all amazed him. Man in the lower stages of development makes many of the greatest discoveries and often endows them with supernatural properties.
An infinite number of centuries have passed, during which an infinite number of people have been born; they have contributed to the development of the human personality. The degree of this development and the surrounding conditions influenced, in turn, the speed of transition from one historical period to another. The division of labor between agriculture and crafts, the development of shipping and trade, “the struggle for the best lands, the growth of purchase and sale determined the birth and formation of the ancient slave era.” The era of antiquity lasted for more than a thousand years and passed through several different eras. With the passage of time, people changed, their way of life, their psychology changed. Thus, it makes no sense to talk about ancient man as unchanged throughout the millennium. As I. D. Rozhansky notes, “the difference between the man of so-called archaic Greece and the Greece of the developed polis or the Hellenistic man is too great.” Therefore, we will try to describe some of the features of the ancient Greek, especially the Athenian.
The individual at that time did not oppose society as something special and unique, she was part of it and did not realize that she was more than just a part. The personality of a person, that is, his individuality, according to the ideas of the ancient Greeks, is contained in the soul and is determined by it. In the ancient consciousness of the Greek there is still no clear distinction between body and soul. The ancient Greeks understood the harmony of body and soul in a completely different way from the everyday consciousness of modern times, which was due to the peculiarities of ancient culture. To this consciousness, the body seems to be something inspiritual, purely physical, and the psyche - something ideally incorporeal, and they are just as dissimilar from each other that they cannot be mixed. In the everyday consciousness of the Greeks, soul and body were not separated from each other with subsequent clarity; their fusion was syncretic, undivided; the harmony of soul and body was their complete dissolution in each other. A person in the classical period of Greece already distinguishes between his intentions, the motives of his actions and the conditions and results of actions independent of him, however, in the worldview and psychology of ancient Greek man, the conviction that human life is completely dependent on the will of chance still prevails. luck, gods and fate. Moreover, in contrast to Christian predestination, which has a higher meaning, ancient Greek fate is thought of as blind, dark, and powerful. For the Greeks of that era, life is full of secrets, and its clearest driver is the will of the gods. This dependence of man on fate and the gods can be explained by the fact that people were still “completely immersed in nature and it in them.” Man explained inexplicable natural phenomena by the actions of divine forces. The ancient Greeks knew the fear and horror of existence and in order to “be able to live, the Greeks had to create gods.” The man of the ancient era was convinced that there is nothing more beautiful than man, his bodies and gods can only be similar to him.
The way of life of ancient Greek man, his attitude towards nature, society, and himself changed with the beginning of the collapse of ancient syncretism; the first steps of this collapse could be seen in the classical era. The underdevelopment of personality and the narrowness of human connections are gradually becoming a thing of history. The division of labor is growing, society is increasingly fragmented into layers, social and private life is becoming more complicated, the competitiveness of people and their struggle between them is growing. Unlike the ancient warrior, the classical Greek, living in an atmosphere of constant competition, already knows the feeling of loneliness, his experiences have become much more subtle, causing the need to share them with someone else, to find a soul kindred to his own. The centrifugal forces tearing apart society are increasingly growing. And along with this isolation, such relationships between people as love and friendship sharply deepen and become more valuable. But instead of friendship based on common interests comes friendship-comradeship, when like-minded people are called friends, so it did not satisfy the growing need for intimacy. The private life of the individual is made sovereign. In the polis of man, the individual's personality was suppressed by the citizen of the polis. This was the time of greatest political power of Athens.
At the same time, this was the heyday of Athenian culture. The establishment of the principles of the democratic structure of the polis, such as equality before the law, freedom of speech, equal participation in government, had a significant impact on the personality of the Athenian. The positive side of this system was the increased sense of responsibility among ordinary citizens, because any of them could participate in state-important affairs. The Athenian citizen, as such, received certain rights and new legal protection also in the new territory where he was a foreigner. A prerequisite for political success in Athens, as indeed in any other city, was the ability to speak well and convincingly, i.e. possess oratory skills. “The Athenians of this time were characterized by all-round talent, energy, and mobility. One of the most remarkable features of the Athenian character is patriotism, love for their native city.” This feeling was inherent in all Greeks, and it manifested itself especially clearly during the Greco-Persian wars. The spirit of competition played a special role in the life of any Greek. "Fear of shame, fear of appearing stupid or funny in front of fellow citizens were among the most important motives determining the behavior... of a Greek in society"; the other side of this was the desire for primacy, to become the best among many.
Thus, in the classical period, the dominant type of person was the citizen, for whom the interests of the polis were higher than personal ones. In the era of Hellenism (IV-I centuries BC), a person ceased to be a citizen." In the conditions of the huge Hellenistic monarchies, which established the former policies, state life no longer depended on the ordinary person at all. Such a person was forced to withdraw into his private life, focus on purely interpersonal relationships. The socio-political cataclysms of the era confront the individual with the need for self-determination, the choice of his life path, the search for the meaning of life. The world of the Hellenistic person is no longer limited to the framework of the polis.
Historical changes that resulted in formation and destruction Ancient Rome, could not help but make significant changes in human personalities. The absolute power of the father in every family gave rise to the same absolute power in the state. The custom of the ancestors was the main guide of political life, any innovation was perceived, unlike the ancient Greek, with displeasure. "In Rome, first of all, courage, courage, cruelty were valued, that is, all those qualities that are inherent in a warrior man. Rome demanded from a citizen only of military virtues, which were the ideal of all virtues. The hard-heartedness of the Roman character was manifested in all areas of life. This is especially clearly illustrated by the attitude towards slaves. If in Greece, as noted earlier, this attitude can be described as humane, then in Rome the position of slaves. It was extremely difficult. In the first times in Rome, a slave was considered almost a member of the family, but later the power of Rome developed incomprehensible cruelty among the Romans. Historical conditions developed in such a way that the Greek Olympic competitions acquired an immoral character. One of the most favorite forms of entertainment were the so-called gladiatorial shows, where the fate of the gladiator depended on the mood of the audience. The Romans' view of the gods was completely different from the religious views of the Greeks. “Hellene embodied the gods in human images; his gods fought, made peace, got married,” and even lived among mortals. Attitude ancient Roman to their deities is not devoid of a practical utilitarian spirit, that is, prayer to God was a kind of bribe, for which God was obliged to help man.
Comparing the image of a resident of Ancient Rome with an ancient Greek man, it can be noted that the character of the Roman was too cruel, he was distinguished by high superstition, a certain decline in morality, at the same time, he was characterized by such qualities as military valor, patriotism, and courage. Rome and her society, based on military power, held fast in their adherence to traditional obedience to the principles once developed, until the Christian element shook the foundations of the ancient Roman state.
The change of historical eras - the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages - essentially began within the chronological framework of ancient society itself. Symptoms of the beginning of the decomposition of the slave-owning system were feudal elements, the spread of Christianity and, finally, a change in man himself. The spread of Christianity in regions outside the former Roman Empire went in parallel with the processes of their feudalization. Feudal fragmentation gave way to the rise of royal power and, in the end, a feudal form of ideology emerged, the classic expression of which was the idea of class, corporatism. A characteristic feature of the feudal Middle Ages was the inextricable connection between the individual and the community. The whole life of a person was regulated from birth to death. Medieval man was inseparable from his Environment. Each individual had to know his place in society. From the moment of his birth, a person was influenced not only by his parents, but also by the entire extended family. This is followed by a period of apprenticeship; upon becoming an adult, the individual automatically acquired membership in the parish, becoming a vassal or citizen of the free city. This imposed numerous material and spiritual restrictions on a person, but at the same time it gave a certain position in society and a sense of belonging and involvement.
Medieval man therefore rarely felt lonely, since he was an integral part of the environment in which he lived. The social role he played provided for a complete “scenario” of his behavior, leaving little room for initiative and originality." As a result, the person moved in a strictly observed circle of what was permitted and prohibited, outlined by the unwritten norms of corporate ethics. Along with the commonality of a medieval person, he was characterized by a high degree of religiosity and superstition. Truly, there was no place or moment in a person’s life when he felt safe, in dreams and in reality, not only on the road, in the forest, but also in his native village and in his own home. In addition to visible enemies, “invisible enemies” lay in wait for him everywhere. : spirits, demons, etc. No less and even more real danger lurked for humans in everyday forms. social communication. Feudal anarchy and lawlessness created for everyone who was deprived of a castle and weapons a constant threat of becoming a victim of oppression, terror, and death. If we add to this the degree of isolation of the villages, the pristine condition of the roads and, finally, the predominantly oral method of transmitting information, which gave rise to the most incredible inventions, then it is not surprising that “the people of that era were constantly in a state of heightened excitability, which was characteristic of them.” rapid changes of mood, unexpected affects, superstitions." So, in a word, medieval man simultaneously lived not even in a double, but, as it were, in a triple dimension: with pious thoughts - about God, about paradise in another world; imagination and superstition - in the world of witchcraft and practical mind - in the world of harsh feudal reality.
The medieval image of the surrounding world and the human mood determined by it, its features began to collapse back in the 14th century. During the Renaissance, culture and people take on new meaning. The world ceases to be “creature” and becomes “nature”; human work ceases to be service to the Creator, and itself becomes a “creation”; man, previously a servant and slave, becomes a “creator”. The desire for knowledge forces the Renaissance man to turn to the immediate reality of things. The process of individualization of personality put an end to the anonymity so characteristic of the Middle Ages: the Renaissance endowed man with individual traits. From the active person who had developed at that time, the titan of thought, “precise calculation, wisdom, prudence, foresight” were required - in a word, constant self-control. The Renaissance man revealed not only creative, positive forces, but also the darkest sides of his personality. It was a time when a person’s looseness and emotions often developed into frivolity, irrepressible joy coexisted with hysteria, secular interests seriously displaced religious ones, and the study of the liberal arts was a more attractive activity than the study of theology.
All these changes, as well as the “intermediate position of man” in the world, cause a person to have internal contradictions and an ambivalent attitude towards everything. The world of albeit narrow, but stable social connections and human actions was replaced by a world in which traditional foundations were crumbling, old values were mixed with new ones, and which, finally, demanded an individual choice from a person, that is, when in his decisions he was left alone with himself oneself - such was the price of the formula “man is the smith of his own destiny.” Freedom of movement and personal activity deprives a person of the objective point of support that he had in the previous world, and a feeling of abandonment, loneliness and even threat arises. Individualism and self-reliance entailed the risk of the unknown. Hence the enormous role of fortune in the Renaissance mentality. This was the only way available to the consciousness of that era to explain everything that happens in a person’s life beyond the limits of his calculations and will. Man began to relate to his biological constitution and his natural needs completely differently. For example, human beauty, as in Greece, was perceived as equal to divine beauty. In general, the Renaissance man is distinguished by a vivid manifestation of the inconsistency of character: “two forces beat in a person: one tense, painful - the power of a semi-wild barbarian; the other is the subtle, inquisitive power of the soul of a person - the creator.”
The richer and more multifaceted personality of the New Time needs the isolation of others and is already voluntarily seeking solitude, but at the same time, she experiences loneliness more acutely as a consequence of a lack of communication and the inability to express the richness of her experiences. For this era, man is no longer under the gaze of God: man is now autonomous, free to do what he wants, to go wherever he pleases, but he is no longer the crown of creation, having become only one of the parts of the universe. A person in the new conditions of historical reality is deprived of the opportunity to achieve “agreement with himself and cope with his existence, which were previously ensured by the reliability of the old traditional state of the world.” The person is shocked, unsettled, vulnerable to doubts and questions. When this happens in an era of change, the deeper aspects of a human being are awakened. Primitive affects awaken with previously unknown force: fear, violence, greed; Something spontaneous and wild appears in the words and actions of people, and religious forces also come into motion.
A person of Enlightenment is, first of all, a person who is a citizen of the state, a bearer of legal rights and obligations, whose main features include rationality, enterprise, increased individualism, personal independence, faith in science, high life expectancy, etc. In connection with the industrialization of life, the attitude towards nature and on the part of man has changed - the desire to conquer nature has become a priority. This entailed an increase in the individual’s self-awareness, awareness of the finitude of personal existence, and consequently, the individual of the capitalist era began to strive to realize his needs throughout his life. A person is in a hurry not because he wants to, but because he is afraid of not being able to keep up with others. He must constantly prove to others and himself his right to respect. A heightened sense of the irreversibility of time has changed man's view of the problem of life and death. Awareness of the inevitability of death encourages a person to think about the meaning and purpose of life. A person strives to do everything in this one life. Thus, not only has human activity become more complex, but also his inner world has enriched and become more diverse.
In modern times, the consumer nature of society had an alienating effect on a person, which depersonalized him, forcing him to realize the limitations of his strength, acute dissatisfaction with himself and the world around him. That is why man XIX - early. XX centuries experiences an acute lack of stability, warmth and intimacy. Lack of intimate communication and loneliness give rise to a feeling of inner emptiness and meaninglessness of life. Everyday worries about daily bread interfere with the development of higher spiritual needs of people. A process of gradual leveling of personality is developing in society. A person feels replaceable, unnecessary and lonely among people. The reduction of “I” to the material “mine” becomes a necessary condition for the self-affirmation of a person of capitalism, which in turn means the “reification” of a person, the impoverishment of his life activity, the awareness of this fact makes him psychologically unhappy. Simultaneously with these negative phenomena, man began to understand his wide possibilities for establishing himself as a highly developed personality. In conditions of constant competition, the desire to achieve a high social status in society, such a social institution as education began to play an important role for a person.
In general, the so-called human The capitalist era is characterized by inconsistency, changeability, inconstancy, which is due to the time in which he lived.
Human activity in the 20th century has become more global. Man in our century has become the owner of many scientific discoveries and technical means, the use of which has caused environmental problems. An increase in radioactive background, environmental pollution and other factors pose a threat to human life. Having overcome some diseases and vices, the man of the 20th century learned new ones, born of the conditions of modern civilized society. Modern man lives in an era when there is a revaluation of the human measure of rationality; man must be responsible to nature and future generations. New scientific discoveries have threatened the very idea of the uniqueness and uniqueness of the human personality. The process of gradual degradation of personality intensifies at the end of the 20th century. The establishment of a materialistic worldview in the world plays a significant role in this.
As a result of the social and other changes taking place in the world in general, and in Russian society in particular, attention to the individual remains minimal. Modern society is focused not on the individual, but on the masses. This type of person begins to predominate, which is characterized by an orientation towards other people, a lack of stable life goals and ideals, and a desire to adapt one’s behavior so as not to stand out, to be like everyone else. The common features of such a person include uncritical acceptance and adherence to prevailing standards, stereotypes of mass consciousness, lack of individuality, manipulability, conservatism, etc. There are several types of people of a conformist nature inherent in modern consumer civilization: “mass person”, “organizational person”, “ authoritarian personality", "automatically conforming personality" - some of the psychological types studied are more or less close to the type of "one-dimensional person". The spread of the mass, one-dimensional man or “crowd man” in society is primarily due to the phenomenon of personal alienation. A decisive role in strengthening this process is played by such a modern phenomenon as mass culture. “Mass culture, focused primarily on the erosion, erasure, elimination of the personal principle in a person, contributes to the alienation and self-estrangement of the individual.” In the modern world, this type of person dominates, the characteristic features of which are alienation, an uncritical attitude towards existing reality, lack of individuality, conformism, the desire to satisfy material needs, marginality, stereotyped thinking, spiritual degradation, etc.
Thus:
– each historical era develops a certain image of a person, his traits and qualities as a person, therefore the study of a specific person must be based, first of all, on the idea that a person is a product of an era, culture, society;
– the human being of the primitive era is characterized by dependence and dissolution in nature, difficult living conditions, lack of personal freedom, ideas about the future, about morality in the modern sense of the word; constant threat to life, low life expectancy, etc.;
– the ancient personality is characterized by such features as dissolution in the polis, community, the emergence of citizenship, dependence on nature, on belonging to a certain class, syncretic consciousness, a high degree of superstition; an important role is played by the human citizen of the polis, and in Rome - by the human warrior, etc.;
The modern person is characterized by awareness of legal equality, abolition of caste regulations of life, personal independence, increased individualism, rational perception of the world, reification of man, high life expectancy, etc.;
– modern man, in general, is characterized by many features of previous eras, only they are more clearly expressed, but we can also point out the following qualities: high quality of life, the presence of an open society, comprehensiveness and freedom of human development, security of all individual rights and freedoms (in most countries), but at the same time, people are now characterized by loss, fear of environmental and other threats to their existence. A negative factor of modern civilization is the priority of material values over spiritual ones in all spheres of an individual’s life. As a result, consumer orientation, the race for material goods deprives a person of a social-critical dimension, contributes to the alienation of the individual, the development of the process of deindividuation and the transformation of a person into a one-dimensional, mass person, a “crowd person.”
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